www.freethoughtperspective.net

A. J. MATTILL, Jr.

On the first of his three missionary journeys, the Apostle Paul went to Paphos, the capital of the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea. The governor of Cyprus, Sergius Paulus, a non-Jew, was a very intelligent and sensible wise man with an inquiring mind ever searching for truth. Of course he wanted to hear God’s message, and so he sent for the Apostle Paul.

Now enters a certain Jew named Elymas. Elymas practiced witchcraft and was a false prophet. Elymas was the private wizard of the governor. Elymsas knew that he would lose his job as court magician if the governor became a Christian. Therefore Elymas interfered with Paul’s work in order to keep the governor from having faith in the Lord.

In this tense situation, the Apostle Paul was filled with the Holy Spirit and with fire, fury, and holy indignation. Paul looked Elymas straight in the eye and shouted, “You son of the Devil! You’re a crook, a fake, a liar, a quack, and the enemy of everything that is good and right. You’re full of deceit, unscrupulousness, and villainy. When will you ever stop speaking against the true ways of the Lord? The Lord is going to punish you by making you stone-blind for a time. He’ll make you so blind you won’t even be able to see the sun.” 

Immediately Elymas’ eyes were covered by a dark mist and he groped around trying to find someone to lead him by the hand. When the governor saw how pathetic the blind Elymas was, the governor was struck with amazement and put his faith in the Lord, for the governor was favorably impressed by Paul’s teaching about the Lord and by Paul’s miraculous powers, all of which convinced the governor that Christianity is superior to magic and is supported by God. The miracle of Elymas’ sudden blindness opened the eyes of the governor and made a believer out of him!—My paraphrase of Acts 13:6-12.

What are we to make of Paul’s encounter with Elymas? First of all, we note Paul’s unusually harsh condemnation of Elymas: “You son of the Devil! You’re a crook, a fake, a liar, a quack, and the enemy of everything that is good and right. You’r full of deceit, unscrupulousness, and villianly.” Today Paul no doubt would have called Elymas a bastard or a son of a bitch. Be that as it may, Paul was a consummate curser like his Lord, Jesus. Jesus condemned to hell those who refused to turn to God (Matthew 11:20-24; Luke 10:13-15). He cursed the scribes and Pharisees as blind fools, hypocrites, show-offs, and snakes fit for hell (Matthew 23:13-36). Jesus knew that to be called a dog was the supreme insult, yet he called people dogs (Matthew 7:6; 15:26; Mark 7:27).

Second, to sensitive readers Paul’s action of blinding Elymas, even with temporary blindness, is unjustifiably inhumane. A person’s eyesight is too precious for an over-zealous missionary to tamper with. Loss of vision for only a few days would be frightening. Think of how Elymas must have felt when he “found himself in a thick fog, and everything went black” (Acts 13:11, Good As New Translation). We’re not told how long Elymas was stone-blind, or even whether or not he ever saw again. What an outcry there would be today if a modern Bible-thumper were to blind a person who refuses to repent and accept Jesus as Lord. Paul’s “shock and awe” policy anticipated the current strategy of the United States of physically and psychologically crushing the enemy, Iraq. Yet Paul, without  batting an eye, wrote that, “love is patient, tender-hearted, and doesn’t bully” (1 Corinthians 13:4-5, Good As New Translation). Elymas should have reciprocated and called Paul a few derogatory names. 

Dr. Ludmil Chotkowski, 2002, New England Novelty Books, 1143 Chamberlain Highway, Kensington, CT 06037, ISBN 978-0965785525, 202 pp, ppb, $14.95,

REVIEWED BY

WILLIAM HARWOOD

Ludmil Chotkowski has written a book that blows chiropractic out of the water. Yet the overwhelming majority of Amazon reviews were unfavorable, for the good reason that the word “chiropractic” in the title guaranteed that the only persons likely to look it up were True Believers. Believers in chiropractic, homeopathy, naturopathy, psychoanalysis, and other medical quackery, like believers in hypotism and alien abductions, tend to be unteachable. And persons who belittle accurate evaluations of nonsense tend to be nonsense practitioners who are simply defending their bread and butter. I would expect the same responses from tealeaf readers about a book denouncing tealeaf reading as a fraud. 

I wrote about seventy reviews of books about contrary-to-fact belief systems such as religion, the paranormal, humanoid extraterrestrials, alternative medicine, recovered memory, multiple personality, and hypnotism, before I realized that posting scholarly conclusions to an unrefereed website was an open invitation to be abused by unteachable jackasses whom Amazon was willing to treat as my equals. When the negative ratings became overwhelming, because the only persons who looked up books about superstition tended to be the superstitious, I deleted all but a handful. The only time a significant majority of commentators agreed with my conclusions about a nonsense belief was when I praised books denouncing Scientology as a confidence swindle.

Let me recommend a book titled Believing Bullshit, by Stephen Law. It describes the “eight key strategies” used by believers in BS to defend their claims. The one most relevant to chiropractic and other medical quackery is, “but it works.”  So do sugar pills.    

Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney, 2011, Simon & Shuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020, ISBN 978-1-4391-7619-1, 565 pp, hc, $35.00, reviewed by

WILLIAM HARWOOD

The least intelligent president America is ever likely to have, George W. Bush, somehow managed to graduate from Yale University. The most criminally evil vice president America is ever likely to have, Richard B. Cheney, flunked out of Yale. Bush went on to become a puppet president, with Cheney and Karl Rove as the Geppettos pulling his strings. As a result of that unholy alliance, America was transformed from the most trusted nation on earth into the most hated. It therefore makes sense that Cheney would eventually publish a memoir in which he confessed the war crimes for which hundreds of thousands of Americans still hope to see him strapped to a gurney with a needle in his arm, and apologized for them. In fact, far from apologizing for his crimes against the Geneva Convention, the American people, and the human race, Cheney boasts about them and claims that he would do the same things again. The man is pond slime, and his daughter’s endorsement of his subhuman mindset confirms the proof that she had already given the world that she is pond slime.

Neither Bush nor Cheney played any role in provoking the atrocity of 9/11/2001. The madman responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center proclaimed a war against America before Bush was even nominated for president, and the reasons for his hatred of a large portion of the human race existed only in his own mind. That he was not caught and punished until the Bush administration was out of office raises questions about that administration’s efficiency, but not its intentions. The war crimes perpetrated at Guantanamo stemmed from the inability of Bush or Cheney to grasp that information obtained under torture was invariably what the torturers wanted to hear, not what the person providing the information really believed.

I plowed through 363 pages of Cheney’s self-hagiography before finding anything on which to comment. That is not a criticism, simply an acknowledgment of my own priorities. I searched the first 523 pages of Hillary Clinton’s Living History, and similarly found nothing on which I wished to express an opinion. Only a minority of Cheney’s readers is likely to be interested in anything other than his attempt to explain and justify his actions as vice president, and I am not part of that minority. It is on those actions that history will judge him, and I seriously doubt that the verdict will be flattering. Joseph McCarthy’s status as the most morally-depraved aberration American politics has ever produced, hitherto unchallenged, is now gone forever.

In his chapter misleadingly titled “Liberating Iraq,” Cheney commences his serious attempt to rewrite history. While acknowledging (p.369) that “some of the intelligence we received was wrong,” he continues to deny that the intelligence used to delude Congress into legalizing Bush’s war of personal glorification was intentionally manipulated to support the Big Lie that Saddam posed an ongoing threat to America’s security. He alleges that, “there was no place more likely to be a nexus between terrorism and WMD capacity than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. With the benefit of hindsight … that assessment holds true.” In fact that assessment has been totally falsified, as Cheney cannot be unaware. Osama bin Laden was as hostile to Saddam as he was to America. And the reality that Saddam had no WMDs or plans to obtain them was among the intelligence reports that Bush and Cheney suppressed when they had Powell and Rice lie to Congress. But what is a little thing like truth to a Manchurian Candidate like Cheney?

According to Cheney (p.373), “We would remove Saddam Hussein, eliminate the threat he posed, and establish a representative government.” The irony of the Bush administration imposing democracy in Iraq while systematically abolishing it in the USA is obviously lost on Bush’s co-conspirator. (Let us not forget that a Republican supreme court overthrew the Constitution in order to appoint Bush president in 2000 in full awareness that he had lost the election.) I do, however, agree that, “were the Israeli-Palestinian crisis solved tomorrow, the terrorists would simply find another rationale for their continuing jihad.”

I searched through Cheney’s index for “waterboarding” or “torture.” They were not there. But I found what I wanted under “enhanced interrogation.” It is now abundantly clear that no intelligence gleaned by waterboarding proved useful in any way. Yet Cheney continues to pretend (p. 521) that it did. Is he an unmitigated liar, or is he seriously demented? The answer most people will deduce from this book is that he is both.

Cheney reports (p.494) that his position as president of the Senate “pretty much boiled down to casting tie votes… My ability to cast those votes gave Americans the Bush tax cuts that they still enjoy as I write.” Does he really not see that as a confession that he was a culpable agent in destroying the American economy and generating a deficit unparalleled in American history—after Bill Clinton had left his successor a surplus? 

Cheney praises convicted perjurer and obstructionist Scooter Libby, and upbraids Bush for refusing to pardon him. That comes as no surprise, since Libby’s crimes were perpetrated at Cheney’s orders. He praises Donald Rumsfeld, one of four persons, including Bush, Cheney and Karl Rove, Barack Obama is for some inexplicable reason protecting from prosecution for war crimes. And he reports that he three times suggested to Bush that he be removed from the Republican ticket for the election of 2004, but Bush chose to retain him for reasons Cheney views narcissistically. To this day it apparently has not occurred to him that Bush junior retained Cheney as his running mate for the same reason Bush senior retained Quayle in 1992—as an absolute guarantee that no Congress would ever impeach him at the cost of putting such a VP in the White House.

One of Cheney’s daughters is gay. Democratic opponents cited that reality as evidence of Cheney’s hypocrisy, or something worse, in advocating laws depriving America’s thirty million gays of legal equality. Cheney interprets the Democrats’ action in accordance with the depraved opportunism he sees in the mirror.

Concerning his recovery from his fifth heart attack in 2010, Cheney writes (p.525) that he “couldn’t dismiss the possibility that more than the skill of doctors, the luck of the draw, or my own will had pulled me through. I do know that my cause was pleaded in some earnest prayers.” Were those prayers directed at the same imaginary Sky Führer who steadfastly ignores the more than a million prayers each day asking for world peace? Perhaps the deity whose regular and repeated homicides and other atrocities are chronicled in its official biography, “the Bible,” saw Cheney as “one of us”? At least his low-key confession of superstitious ignorance is less offensive to America’s 110 million nontheists than the “my god can lick your god” boasts currently coming from the Republican aspirants to be the White House’s first self-confessed resident theocrat.

Steve Martin once said, “If you can’t think of anything nice to say about someone, you’re probably talking about the Ayatollah.” Today he could as accurately say, “You’re probably talking about Dick Cheney.”

WILLIAM HARWOOD

Christian sects tend to regard the capricious rules in what they call the Old Testament as superseded. While they accept the declaration of Leviticus that the victimless recreation practiced by homosexuals is forbidden by their deity, they reject the same book’s prohibition of eating pork, lobster or cheeseburgers, or wearing a cotton-and-polyester shirt. They argue that their junior god, Jesus, changed the law, so that only those taboos Jesus endorsed are still valid. Their rejection of Leviticus’s death penalty for homosexuality stems from their dogma that Jesus abolished capital punishment. But while they reject the status of the Old Testament as unchangeable divine law, they accept it as a revelation whose portrayal of its paramount deity is totally accurate. It follows that, if the OT god was intrinsically evil when the OT was composed, then he must be intrinsically evil today.

Consider the following passage from Deuteronomy, chapter 7:

“When Yahweh your gods [dual-sex, generic plural] has settled you in the land you’re about to occupy, and driven out many infidels before you … you’re to cut them down and exterminate them. You’re to make no compromise with them  or show them any mercy … You’re going to exterminate them in a massive genocide until they are eliminated.” (1) Jews see that passage as justification for the Likud Party’s continuing annexation of Palestinian land never recognized by the United Nations as part of Israel. Christians tend to ignore it in the hope that it will go away. I have yet to encounter a godworshipper of any stripe willing to concede that his Sky Führer was once a  capricious, partisan, mass-murdering psychopath, but is much nicer now. But either the OT is a product of the human imagination, or its protagonist was and is exactly that.

Consider also Genesis chapter 3:

“Yahweh informed Eve, ‘I’m going to intensify your pain in childbirth. You will give birth to your children in agony. Your man is going to exercise authority over you’ … He informed Adam, ‘Wrestling food from the ground is going to exhaust you, every day of your life.’” Even if the crime of Adam and Eve had been far more serious than worshipping the Mother Goddess by eating the pomegranate that was her sacramental vulva,  the imposed punishment is bound to strike the morally evolved as disproportionately severe—even if it had only been inflicted on the perpetrators. But the author of the fable was trying to justify Yahweh’s infliction of such unspeakable sadism on all humans. Not only did Yahweh inflict such monstrous atrocities on Adam and Eve; he did the same to all of their descendants. Hitler executed descendants of persons guilty of the crime of choosing to be Jewish. Can identical behavior be evil when Hitler did it but not evil when a god does it? Godworshippers think it can.

Genesis chapter 6: “The time came when humans had begun to proliferate upon the surface of the land … Yahweh then said, ‘Humankind must not retain forever the breath that is mine, since he is mere protoplasm. Henceforth his life is to be limited.’ Yahweh saw that the disobedience of humankind was great in the land, and that he was continually plotting disobedience in his heart [thoughtcrime] … So Yahweh said,’I'll destroy the humans that I created from the surface of the land … for I regret that I ever made them.’” Whether one sees the offence for which Yahweh murdered the entire human race, except for  one family of his pets, as thoughtcrime, or the failure to grant blind, unquestioning obedience to an unelected dictator  (as Syrians are currently refusing to obey their unelected dictator), it makes the genocide of Hitler and Stalin pale into insignificance. And believers hail such a homicidal maniac as a loving father figure? The filicidal King Herod was a more loving father.

It was the deity of the OT who perpetrated such atrocities. But the New Testament god is no nicer. Matthew 10:29 reports, “Aren’t two sparrows sold for one coin? Yet not one of them can fall to the ground except through your father.”  The gospel author thus affirms that the reason 250,00 humans die every day is that the Christian sky father executes them.

The god of the Jews murders every human being ever born for the crime of being descended from disobedient ancestors. But having exterminated a human, it cannot punish him further. So when capital punishment strikes it as inadequate, it magnifies its punishment by the means reported in Exodus 20:5, “I Yahweh your gods, jealous Allah, will make the descendants of the third and forth generation of those who despise me, victims of the same crimes committed by their ancestors.”

The god of the Christians is subject to no similar limitation. According to Jesus (Mark 9:47-49), the god’s imagined enemies are going to be posthumously “tossed into Gehenna, where their maggot never dies and the fire is never extinguished. For Everyone is going to be pickled with fire,” That sadistic torture in an underworld Auschwitz is described as “eternal” (Matthew 25:41). And to guarantee that there will be no shortage of victims to barbecue with flamethrowers, Jesus explained to his followers (Mark 4:10-12) that, while he preached to them in plain language, “to those who are on the outside, all things are to be told in fables, so that in seeing they may see but not perceive, and in  hearing they may hear but not understand, in case they convert and obtain forgiveness.” That speech alone shows Jesus to have been a sadistic psychopath. But there is more. He is depicted in Luke 16:1-9 as preaching a fable whose moral can be summarized, “Swindle those who can no longer be of use to you, and use the stolen money to bribe those who are in a position to do you good.” Reminder: While historians view Jesus as a mortal who may or may not have been a real person from history, Christians see him as the incarnation of their god.

The god of the Moslems is equally reprehensible. Only a statistically insignificant number of Moslems , and not all Christians, buy into the Big Lie that, despite their unrelated origins, the Christian “God” and the Moslem “Allah” are the same deity under interchangeable names. But even those Christians who believe that Christians and Moslems adhere to the same Sky Führer reject the Koran’s pretence to be a divinely inspired revelation from their god. Passages from the Koran that portray Allah as morally depraved will only convince such people that it was Mohammad, not Allah/God, who was an evil madman. Nonetheless, the point that the Moslem deity is every bit as evil as its Christian counterpoint is worth making. Consider:

“Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other …. Good women are obedient…. As for those from whom you fear disobedience … beat them” (4:34). “Allah misleads whom he will, and guides to the right path whom he pleases” (6:39). “You are forbidden to take in marriage married women, except captives whom you own as slaves” (4:24). “Slay the pagans wherever you find them. Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. When you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads.” (2)

The Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible and the Moslem Koran present dissimilar philosophies. But the one point on which they present identical portraits is that their paramount deities are as evil as Hitler, as insane as Caligula, and as subhuman as the Marquis de Sade.

(1) All translations are from the Prostestant Bible Correctly Translated, World Audience, 2010.

(2) Islam Unveiled, Robert Spencer, pp.1, 18, 29. 

STEPHEN VAN ECK

My siblings and I are providing home care for a terminally ill father. Yesterday a Fundamentalist neighbor, who has admitteddly been very good to my elderly parents, asked my brother if he and his pastor could drop by and visit my father (a Catholic). I would have politely told him that my Dad has a pastor who has visited him, and who probably would do so again. But my brother, out of appreciation for the man’s kindness, said yes. Big mistake.

The pastor and the neighbor taxed this poor enfeebled old man for twenty minutes with a typical Fundamentalist “soul winning” spiel. The way they assumed that a regular churchgoer was unfamiliar with Christianity, that someone who thought he was a Christian could yet not be, was profoundly insulting. So was the arrogant implication that the Catholic Church is not good enough, as if their hoedown denomination was so superior.

Rather than make a scene I had shut myself away in an upstairs room until they left. But at that point we did not suspect what would soon ensue. This episode underscores the profound disgust I have for aggressive Fundamentalism. And my siblings feel that way all the more.

So when I could get time away from my hospice duties, I went online to spread my disgust with Evangelical vultures. I put it out to them, is this sort of behavior acceptable? I got few responses but what I got back was an unqualified yes. They seemed utterly oblivious to the insult, annoyance, and the crass opportunism represented by the above incident. Their laser-like focus on proselytism obscured any other consideration.

Why are they like this? We know they’re raised to be aggressive, but there’s more to it than that. Their odd belief that someone could think they’re a Christian but still not be, stems from their obsessive emphasis on the “Born Again” experience. They seem to think that unless one goes through it, the hocus pocus doesn’t work. But this emphasis is making way too much of a figure of speech! And what it’s actually doing is mimicking the experience of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus; and in so doing recreates the personality and values of Paul in each “reborn” individual. (In a similar way, Muslims absorb the likes and dislikes of Muhammad.)  Paul, essentially the creator of Christianity, is really what the religion is all about.

But back to the vultures circling people’s deathbeads. Although it’s long been popular in Fundamentalist circles to repeat apocryphal tales of deathbed conversions of famous skeptics, including Tomas Paine, in fact he brusquely sent a minister away. Doing the same thing is the ONLY thing I’ll have to look forward to when my time comes. A final slap in the face for a mentality that deserves it.