Posted by JC on March 5th, 2011
My good friend Max Cryer drew this to my attention. I thought you might like it too. And, by the way, if you want to spend an interesting, entertaining and infuriating hour or so, check out Hitchens’ confrontations with that bullying moron from Fox News, Sean Hannity.
Posted by JC on September 25th, 2010
New Zealand’s Next Top Model is my trash-telly fix of the week. I’m addicted. Will Danielle get to scare model agencies in New York? Will someone punch out Dakota’s lights? Will spending so much time with the twins give everyone diabetes?
Last night the leggy ingénues got to model a new line of underwear - in St. Matthew’s in the City.
Although the Church and I parted company decades ago, it made me distinctly uncomfortable. And if I was uncomfortable I can only imagine what religious viewers were feeling. A couple of the girls, who are professed Christians, must have seen their wee souls heading straight for purgatory.
It’s not the first time St. Matthew’s has set out to shock. A few months ago a couple of tongue-in-cheek billboards created a nation-wide fuss and upset someone so much they were defaced. So I can’t help thinking that hiring out the church for a bevy of teenagers to strut their stuff up and down the aisle in nothing but a few wisps of lace might have been pushing the envelope a tad too far.
Am I being a prude, or was this completely inappropriate?
Posted by BE on April 5th, 2010
Regular visitors to this site will know that I am a huge fan of Herald columnist Tapu Misa. Misa combines fierce intelligence with a profoundly compassionate view of her fellow man and woman and provides a welcome antidote to the mindless bigotry of the broadsheet’s other god-bothering columnists. (She would not approve of those last ten words.)
Some time ago Misa found God. These are my words, not hers, but they convey the general idea that she went from being a non-believer – atheist, agnostic, secularist, whatever - to being a committed Christian.
Her columns have not suffered as a result. I rarely find much to disagree with in them. On moral issues atheist and believer often find common ground. But her Easter Monday column, appropriately headlined Religion Undergoing Startling Resurrection, leaves me scratching my head. In it she takes a poll-driven approach to defend her thesis that ‘Globally, religion is winning and secularism is losing’. It’s a competition apparently and, other than in the West, a lot more people are coming to support our team than support your team. Ya boo sucks! Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by BE on March 8th, 2010
Posted by BE on February 23rd, 2010
NZ Bus has bowed to blackmail and changed its mind about allowing the slogan there’s probably no god – now stop worrying and enjoy your life to appear on the sides of its buses.
As a commercial operator, the company is entitled to make that decision. It no doubt reasoned that disgruntled theists would stop travelling on its buses and might well start a campaign to encourage others to do the same.
The god-botherers must believe that their creed is pretty weak if they see something as innocuous and understated as this particular slogan as representing a threat. Most atheists would say there is almost certainly no God, conceding only that it isn’t possible to prove the case one way or the other. The non-existence of God comes as near as possible to being a fact, since there is absolutely no empirical evidence to support a claim to the contrary. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by BE on October 29th, 2009
Photo: Stuff.co.nz
The most charitable interpretation of Protocols and Requirements Between Spiritual Father & His Spiritual Sons, Brian Tamaki’s latest encyclical to his followers in Destiny Church, would be that he is insane. Certainly there are a number of manias that would seem to describe his mental state, egomania and megalomania being the most obvious. To those one might add the delusion of being God’s chosen emissary in Aotearoa and an incipient, if not yet full-blown messianic complex which seems to be leading Mr Tamaki to the inevitable conclusion that he is not merely an emissary of the divine, but divine himself.
The interpretation is ‘charitable’ because the insane cannot be held responsible for their beliefs or actions.
The less charitable interpretation would be that Mr Tamaki is a charlatan, in the tradition of many such religious charlatans, particularly in the United States. His opulent lifestyle, when compared to the relative poverty of most of his followers, provides the most compelling argument in favour of this explanation. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by BE on April 23rd, 2009
Watch almost any television news bulletin and you’ll hear someone praying for something to happen, or not happen. The background to their prayers is normally a real or potential tragedy of some sort.
Individuals pray for themselves or those close to them to be cured of life-threatening illnesses. The relatives of people who have gone missing pray for them to be found and returned home safely. Families pray that the names of loved ones will not appear on the lists of those killed in plane crashes. Churchgoers pray for the victims of natural disasters. World leaders pray for peace. Read the rest of this entry »
