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September 10, 2005

Saturday reading - Prayer, P0rn and Walmart

Michele at ASV has a very gracious and common-sense post addressed to her fellow atheists/agnostics who are giving themselves wedgies over the President's declaration of a National Day of Prayer. My advice to the members of the Church of the Easily Offended? Get.Over.It.Already.

Jeff Harrell's x-rated fundraiser is still on roll. He's raised over $300 and heck, the weekend has only started!

Jeff Goldstein easily fisks an unbelievably stupid Huffington Post entry whining about how Walmart just hasn't done enough for Katrina victims.

... what is so remarkably imbecilic about this piece of anti-corporatist agit prop is that it literally belittles an American company for providing 1.6 million jobs, for giving over $20 in direct relief aid (a figure that doesn’t include the $34 million in displaced worker stipends, the $4 million collected from the public in Wal-Mart stores, use of Wal-Mart facilities and its distribution fleet (the best in the world), the manpower hours (both paid and volunteer) involved in aiding the relief efforts, their policy of pre-staging for disaster relief (which insures an instant response), the 150 computers donated to shelters, nor the free products available to those in the hardest hit areas). ...

But when Sean Penn brings a camera crew and a personal photographer down to LA to film himself rowing his little boat in the floodwaters—which provides him the platform for yet another anti-Bush screed—we’re to consider him heroic?

Sigh. Just another flailing from the usual members of the Reality Based Community™ who see even natural disasters are part of the Vast Rightwing/Xtain/Zionist/Haliburton Conspiracy to get rid of the poor (yet another tolerant and diverse Leftwing site that fully allows other voices to be heard ... ahem).

Posted by Darleen at September 10, 2005 11:44 AM

Comments

Who is giving themselves a wedgie? I wrote a couple one-line snarky posts about it. That was all I intended to do until seeing Michele's post, at which time I explained why I disagreed. Should I not have done so? Is this another case of your hope that those atheists will just stay silent?

Also, still waiting for your thoughts on how you and/or the nation would react to a President who used his office to announce that there was no god.

Posted by: andy at September 10, 2005 03:37 PM

To think that a bunch of self-obsessed know-it-alls would refrain from standing between the American people and an expression of faith and hope? Yeah, I guess that's pretty unreasonable.

The error atheists make again and again is in assuming that people of faith give a damn what they think.

Posted by: Jeff Harrell at September 10, 2005 04:34 PM

Jeff - thank you for making clear exactly what I've been saying about the religious right. Good to know that the "big tent" of the right is a load of crap.

Posted by: andy at September 10, 2005 06:12 PM

If you're accusing me of wanting to exclude self-obsessed blowhards who think they have all the answers and see people of faith as ignorant savages who need to be enlightened, then yeah, guilty as charged.

The tent is big. It's not that big.

Posted by: Jeff Harrell at September 11, 2005 09:29 AM

As opposed to people of faith who see atheists as misguided and lost?

That's different precisely how?

I don't know any atheists who claim to have all the answers. They just don't think that making up answers is the most rational course.

Posted by: andy at September 11, 2005 11:14 AM

It's different because people of faith think atheists are wrong while atheists think people of faith are idiots.

If you can't see the difference there, I don't think I can help you.

Posted by: Jeff Harrell at September 11, 2005 12:21 PM

Idiots? No.

Irrational? Yes.

They're not even remotely the same thing.

Posted by: andy at September 11, 2005 02:00 PM