More & more I detect a visceral dislike in your writing & linking concerning subjects that touch upon Christianity & Religion. In fact, your tone has a dismissive underlying contempt to it. As a more recent reader, I’m not sure if you’ve ever posted about your views or experience with Christianity/Church/Religion etc. I’d be interested in knowing your thoughts to get a bead on why I detect the hostility.

The thing I do find interesting in most cases of Christian bias is a lack of knowledge and understanding concerning the belief itself. I’ll grant anyone that the major factions (Protestants & Catholics) have definitely polluted the waters with their own self serving dogma, but that doesn’t invalidate the gift of Christ and His Word. My point being that Jesus clearly warned us that the churches would be full of those people that are Christian in name only. They use the church as a power base to influence and control others for various reasons that have Nothing to do with accepting God’s gift of salvation. There are no other belief systems I’m aware of that actually warn their followers over & over again to be on alert for those that are just concerned with their own agenda versus serving Christ within their midst.

Love your articles about police power & abuse. Keep up the great work. You might find it amusing, as I did,what an ex-LEO had to say to me a few months ago. I was tasked with overhauling the church I belong to’s safety & security procedures. I sought out the advice of many experts including one who has an excellent record of innovation in putting these comprehensive plans together.

One of my conclusions was that responsible men within the congregation should be armed in a concealed manner in case the day ever came that an unprovoked violent situation arose. Many of the other churches I spoke with were already doing this. The security consultant was giving us a walk through with the church leadership when I asked him his thoughts on doing this. His response was absolutely not! So my follow up was what should we do if a gunmen enters the sanctuary and starts unloading. The answer was for the congregation to exit in an orderly manner. I almost laughed out loud. I had visions of people trampling each other to death to get out the door.

However his answer didn’t surprise me. Although it had been about 15 years since his last post, he at one time was a LEO. It appears the mentality of cops, including ex-ones, is to always have an unarmed citizenry.

You can take the cop out of law enforcement, but you can’t take the law enforcement mentality out of the ex-cop…

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20000111

Sound like the devil himself.

Apologies, I did not mention that argument had not been made on this particular venue. However, where I am from, that argument is made time and time again.

In regards to the article and the streets in the town, it does make me wonder what the speed limit is in the area in question. If it’s 25 mph, I have no trouble abiding by the speed limit on my bike. If it’s more, I question whether the roads were made to accommodate speeds that high.

I’m not so sure that’s the case with cyclists who do it.

I don’t know about the rest of the clergy, but it seems pretty clear from the article that Pastor Phelps, who forced the apology, knew the pregnancy was the result of a rape.

At the age of 14, Anderson was hired as a babysitter for the Willis family. She says the first assault occurred at her home when her parents were away.

“He said he wanted to talk to me about something so I let him in the house,” she told police. “He locked the door behind him and pushed me over to the couch. I had a dress on and he pulled it off. I pushed my hands against his shoulders and said ‘No,’ but he didn’t stop.”

A year later, Willis allegedly assaulted her during a driving lesson behind a local business when he asked Anderson to “switch seats,” according to her statement. He pulled her into the back and “raped” her, she said.

When her mother contacted Phelps, he insisted on the public apology, according to Anderson. At the same time the church congregation also heard a confession from Willis for being unfaithful to his wife.

At the time, Phelps said Willis was “99 percent to blame” and Anderson held “1 percent” of the responsibility.

Phelps insisted they were separate cases as each confessed at separate sides of the auditorium, but eventually some church members connected the dots.

Matt Barnhart, 41 and a father of four, says he witnessed the confession just six months after he joined the church, and it bothered him for years.

“Pastor Phelps was a statesman, an excellent speaker,” said Barnhart. “I was always impressed by him and thought the world of him. But all that changed after that. I lost respect for him.”

Both you and the headline writer in the article about the 15 y/o pregnant girl are both a bit dishonest in your headline. The young woman in question was not forced to apologize “for getting raped”. She was forced to apologize for getting pregnant that was a result of the alleged rape. The article quickly explains that those forcing her to apologize (other than the Deacon that committed the rape) were unaware of the circumstance surrounding the origins of the pregnancy.

Now, I’ll grant that the punishment of forcing a young pregnant woman to announce her alleged sins in a public forum like that is of questionable benefit but characterizing the events as she was forced to apologize for being raped is at best an inaccurate simplification or at worst a deliberate attempt to spin the issue in the worst imaginable way.

I follow your blog for clear-headed analysis. Unfortunately here you sound like the spin generating talking heads you rail against.

They see the faults of the cyclists, and rightfully so, but pretend that they and all other drivers are perfect.

CRN

/My favorite is when a car passes a group of us riding on some barren country road while we are legally riding two abreast and shouts “share the road!”

What I can’t even begin to fathom is why you’d want to detain and punish people who wanted no part of you? It’d be one thing if these groups/individuals wanted to remain in the country and somehow undermine the government. But most of these people just want to get the fuck out and never go back and have nothing to do with it.

Is it pure megalomania? Fear of what they’ll expose? I’m genuinely dumbfounded.

“So, you hate it here, eh? Well, we’ll give you something to hate!”

EH-

The problem, at least thus far, is that brown dissenters are immediately branded terrorist and white dissenters, no matter how terroristic their actions, are still just dissenters. Brown Muslim folks who decry America are denounced as terrorists and often treated as such, even within the legal system. Meanwhile, murderers like Joe Stack are actually quietly celebrated by some as freedom fighters. While this is admittedly an extreme fringe, it is still official policy for both our government and our media to equate brown folks with terrorism and white folks with everything but.

You are right though that the powers that be still seek to criminalize or otherwise prevent any form of opposition to America, its government, and its policies. Sigh…

Smug asshole bicyclists or nannyist town councillors: who pisses me off most?

Tough call.

“Sure, North Korea could have actually selected an elite group of propaganda-loving supporters to represent their country as spectators, but the last time they did that, the group of mini-skirted cheerleaders who attended a tournament in South Korea broke their promise not to reveal to their countrymen what they saw below the DMZ. They reportedly ended up in concentration camps.”

No hollywood horror movie could ever imagine this type of terror. I’ve read that the North Korean Soccer Team is basically locked in their hotel with guards posted and travel on a bus with curtains drawn over the windows. The fact that this really happens somewhere on this planet scares the shit out of me.

It just gets easier and easier to justify my atheism and disdain for all organized religion.

This is always trouble.