religion

Magic underwear, magical thinking

Okay, so you guys know I’m a Canadian bear, but I still like to keep an eye on Mitt Romney and other nutty characters with grandiose visions of themselves in government. You don’t want to mess with magic underpants, especially when they exhibit skid marks. Speaking in Virginia yesterday, Romney revealed just such a brown stain when he said that students should get “as much education as they can afford.”

This while Romney:

  • supports cuts to grant money for education
  • supports undoing student loan reforms
  • takes heavy campaign donations from profiteering colleges
  • advises students to simply borrow money from their parents, “shop around” for education, or join the military if they can’t pay for college

Here’s another suggestion—one that might warm Romney’s cockles:

Get a free education from a creationist college.

Yes! If you’re willing to hunker down for some oxymoronic tutelage, you too can emerge from your years of schooling with something almost like a degree. In what, you ask? Well, read on:

How about Christian Ethics? (Note that these differ from non-Christian ethics, which endorse rape, pillage, murder, etc.)

How about Mind Manipulation? Learn the dangers of exposing yourself to outside information such as science. Manipulators are everywhere! Says the online brochure from Trinity Graduate School of Theology:

“Methods of desensitization are used in repeated exposure of immorality through television programs and commercials. Repeated lies are being told to convince Christians that those things that are right are now to be perceive as wrong and what is wrong should be accepted, by shifting values.”

I didn’t want to be a dick and edit the typos. This is, after all, a site of higher learning, so who am I to correct it? But doesn’t the program sound appealing? Wouldn’t you like to learn how to navigate through hazardous modern temptations?

And, for those returning to school after having families, there’s Parenting. Here’s a snippet from the curriculum:

“The internet is another source that teaches pornography, teaching of the suicide, drug addicts’ etc. parents could ask computer specialists who could help to hide sites on the internet not to be viewed by children or avoid them from being downloaded.”

I love that this college is savvy about porn (and really, what religious nutjob isn’t?). Too bad the college can’t seem to hire an editor…but that would cost money, and then it probably couldn’t afford to give away free education.

Now, this is all very well, but what if you want to study science? Creationist schools have that covered. AiG, for example, “teaches that ‘facts’ don’t speak for themselves, but must be interpreted…the Bible offers the best explanation of the world’s geology, anthropology, and astronomy.” Thus, the Grand Canyon’s many strata do not represent long time periods but rather extremely (!) accelerated periods of celestially assisted erosion. Likewise, a satisfactory wealth of transitional fossils will never be found, even while evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins wave them in the faces of creationists who insist they do not exist (“la, la, la, I can’t hear you!”).  And finally, the astronomy section’s large FAQ section explains why the earth is indeed truly the “spiritual center of the universe.”

Sounds good to me. Creationist colleges everywhere offer great deals ranging from free to cheap. Even those that charge a bundle are a bargain compared to most mainstream colleges. Sure, you’ll get spat out without a chance of competing against Ivy Leaguers in the work force. But at least you won’t go to hell.*

*Hell might very well be a place on earth. On this, Day Five of the Involuntary Dry-Out, I begin to understand it a little.

Cheers, Oreo!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Who knew so many intolerant, barely literate A-holes would crawl out from under their rocks in response to the special Oreo that appeared on Facebook last night?

Buddy, I think your ass is safe, so let it hang out.

Taking into consideration the Pride Week Oreo’s presumably mega-caloric six layers of yummy hydrogenated filling, you have to know it hit the trailer park where it lives. Picture (former) Oreo devotees stocking up on massive bulk packages of (non-gay!) Oreos at Costco and Walmart with their butt-cracks hanging vilely out of sweatpants barely able to contain their (heterosexual) Oreo-eating girth.

Yes, when Oreo published a fanciful picture of a rainbow-filled cookie, homophobes went berserk, posting a barrage of hateful comments and inciting their gay-hating Lord to punish confectioners with the audacity to “support” gay America and the so-called gay agenda.

The Oreo Facebook campaign evidently hurt these people. It commandeered a product that probably constituted a sizeable percentage of their shopping budget with its yummy, gooey, chocolatey, icing-sugary delightfulness and turned it into a sick, Satanic, and deviant snack. Poor teabaggers!

Of course, they’re probably mad about the rainbow itself being appropriated in the first place. The rainbow, according to the Bible, represents God’s promise to never again send mass flooding. Which of course He never has. Oh wait, heathens don’t count.

Thankfully a “boycott” hasn’t manifested in any meaningful size. You need numbers to stage an effective boycott, and these haters—despite their confidence that they will make a financial dent in Nabisco—constitute a small island of fucktards in a changing sea.

Fact is, an Oreo with that much stuff in it could probably give you a heart attack. But it’s still a beautiful thing.

Cheers, Oreo! You didn’t need those hatin’ riffraff anyway (they’re not numerous—just rabidly vocal, if not plain rabid). Toasting you with a delicious Oreo martini.

Bottoms up!

Spare the rod…and spare the mindlessness too

My Fellow Inebriates,

Where parenting issues arise at LBHQ, my place is on the sidelines. Being a mere bear and not a biological child means I don’t quite represent the same hope for tomorrow that Misses P and V do in our parents’ eyes. (Would they even rescue me if the house caught fire? OMG! I don’t know.) Not to mention the disappointment of my drinking—my parents aren’t investing too much parenting in yours truly.

But the bio-kids pose all the typical dilemmas that parents encounter. How to build their confidence…how to instill life skills…how to engender empathy…how to provide guidance and discipline? Even if my parents are total screw-ups in myriad ways, they are genuinely anxious about raising the girls properly.

So we all read Unhappy Mommy’s thought-provoking article I don’t spank, and you shouldn’t!

Child abuse at LBHQ 😉

Even though spanking is a non-issue at LBHQ, where the only physical punishment that occurs is administered by children to a certain bear, we live in a demographic that reads Proverbs (although perhaps not Deuteronomy’s more choice bits)—i.e., spare the rod, spoil the child. While you don’t see parents whacking their kids at the playground too often, you frequently hear earnest conversations in which one parent defends to another the place of spanking in the God-fearing dad or mum’s parental toolkit. And even more often you hear these parents threatening their kids with a spanking.

At LBHQ there are no “spanking offenses” on the books. The kids do not live in fear of a hiding. They don’t quake fearfully in remembrance of past spankings. They only even know the word “spank” because it gets used teasingly (and they may have overheard the term “spank the monkey”).

Determined to be nekkid

This is not to say they’ve never received a swat on the bum. My mum recalls (guiltily) the day P refused to have her crappy diaper changed, kicking and screaming her resistance even as excrement leaked from her pants to the floor. She escaped the change mat while still covered in crap and darted across the room, flinging the feces off her body on the way to her clean bedsheets—at which point Mum seized her and gave her bum a smack. She hadn’t managed to persuade P to cooperate, and her frustration got the better of her. This happens to plenty of parents. But parents like mine don’t feel good about it. They rehash the scene for days after, wondering how they could have defused the situation without resorting to physical means.

It’s one thing to lose your cool and feel terrible afterwards. It’s another thing to make a calculated choice to hit your child because you believe a higher authority endorses the action as a disciplinary method.

Checking the stereo out: not a spanking offense but, rather, the early days of supervised audiophilia

Unhappy Mommy does a much better job than I can do outlining the arguments against spanking, going so far as to provide citations to support her position. She writes a balanced, nonjudgmental, and thoughtful piece on the subject. Is it ever a hot-button topic! The comments rolled in, and one commenter particularly caught my attention; she was so inanely self-righteous that I decided to rebut each of her points one by one. I know, I come across as a total asshole, but it bothered me so much that someone could mindlessly take a verse from Proverbs as license to hit a child. Whether you’re an atheist, an agnostic, or a believer, it should be obvious that much of the bible shouldn’t be taken literally (child sacrifice in Judges 11:30-39 for example, or God-sent bears mauling children in 2 Kings 2:23-24). And if some of it shouldn’t be taken literally, why should any of it be taken literally—especially as it applies to modern-day parenting?

I don’t think it’s disrespectful to anyone’s faith to say that as a society we should be able to devise good guidelines about child rearing that consider the optimal well-being of children and utilize any and all science at hand to steer us in the right direction. We are all learning and making mistakes every day—but the biggest mistake is to turn our brains off and dumbly accept one cherry-picked piece of scripture as an edifice on which to base our parental discipline.

Thump! That was me falling off the soapbox. Tomorrow we’ll be back to the usual drunkenness and debauchery. Promise.