Some random linkage. Most other bloggers I read do this occasional post of links they haven’t and aren’t likely to get around to riffing on, and rather then let them keep nagging me to post about them until they get old and broken and die I reckon I’ll just start doing it too…

• Pat Robertson Dubs Episcopal Church an ‘Apostate’ Church, Tells Viewer to ‘Destroy’ Friend’s Buddha Statue.
  What do Pat Robertson and the Buddha statue destroying Taliban have in common?   Did you really have to ask?
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• Gay rights’ surprise weapon: Morality. I have been on about this for decades, literally. Back in the 1990s, before I started blogging, when USENET was all there was, I kept engaging the bigots on the unmoderated alt.politics.homosexuality on moral issues and it was so unsurprising and disheartening how they’d figure the moral arguments against homosexuality were their trump cards because no one ever bothered engaging them directly on it.

  There is nothing innately wrong with homosexual relationships. There is no science that says otherwise, there is no moral argument that makes that case, there are only arguments from supposed religious authority, junk science and outright lying.   Mostly, from Paul Cameron to Mark Regnerus the moral case is based on outright lying.   Listen…when you have to lie constantly to make your moral case, that should tell you something about your moral case
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• In the battle between morality and faith, morality is winning.   “Obviously, as an atheist, I can’t see this as a bad thing. I appreciate that liberal Christians like Rachel and Jamelle find spiritual solace in having faith, but by and large, the historical purpose of religion is not to comfort but to control.” Well…yes and no. I am an atheist myself (coming out to myself as atheist a couple years ago felt a lot like coming out to myself as gay…something I keep wanting to write about but the words just haven’t gelled yet), and it has always looked to me that religion isn’t so much for control as it is all too often used by tyrants to control.

  What I see in this is people, mostly but not always young people, leaving a lot of greedy possessive cults and going on their own journeys. That’s a good thing. Hopefully they will find their way to a place that genuinely speaks to their heart. Just as they are. Something that never fails to cheer me whenever I see it is the rainbow Christian fish. It tells me that people are holding on to their inner sense of self, their spirituality, despite the relentless efforts of spiritual dictators to snuff it out within them, so they can fill the void left behind. Regardless of my own path in life, there will probably always be that Baptist part of me in there cheering that private personal journey on. We are all strolling on Newton’s beach, now and then picking up and appreciating that prettier seashell then ordinary.
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• I Don’t Care Who Financed Prof. Regnerus.   I think he should. “I see this scenario all too often in our opponents: A scientist makes an objective study of gays and lesbians and announces favorable results. Our opponents seize on that as proof that the scientist is a pro-homosexual activist, and therefore fatally tainted with bias.” But there’s a difference between seeing a conflict of interest in a study’s conclusions and seeing one in who paid for the study.   It’s like saying we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about tobacco industry funded studies of lung cancer, or oil industry funded studies on global warming and fracking.

  But there’s more to it then even this. It’s about integrity and who is trustworthy and who is not. When you see data and facts that consistently, reliably, inevitably turn out to be laughingly bogus coming consistently from of a particular source, it isn’t anything like an ad hominem attack to point out that these people simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth.   It’s just…well…telling the truth.
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• Scandinavia And The World – Metal. Some days the little rocker boy in me comes roaring out, and listening to the radio I feel a bit like Denmark here…a little rocker boy trapped between a world of metal and glitter.
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• Kathryn Schulz thinks Frost is much, much darker than anyone suspects… Well she’s wrong. Or maybe not. Haven’t you ever wandered out into a winter forest, in the snow, in the night, just stood there and breathed in the silence before continuing on your way?   That’s not Nietzsche’s abyss. The forest, the earth, is alive, not even really sleeping. Our lives are so short, and time is not what we think it is. In the quiet winter darkness you can almost sense the scale of it. A little bit. This rhythm of growing season and winter hibernation has been going on for ages. The darkness and silence is the beat between one breath and the next in a story that is very very old. It’s not scary, it’s sublime. Better then any man made cathedral. You are not getting out of these woods, but why would you want to? The woods are in you and you are the woods.