Sunday, October 02, 2005

Church and State: united in mendacity

In the October 17 issue of The Nation, Clive Stafford Smith writes about the hunger strike among prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. What hunger strike, you ask? Yeah, that’s the point. You can’t protest what you don’t know about.

“In 2002 there was a ripple of concern at the number of Guantánamo detainees trying to take their own lives,” writes Smith. “The military then announced that suicide attempts had radically declined. It took a foreign journalist to expose the truth: The very word “suicide” had been replaced by the authorities with the term Manipulative Self-Injurious Behavior (SIB) - and there were still plenty of SIBs. The military was lying by semantics.”

To read the complete story, please click here:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051017/smith

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Who amongst us can resist a good religion joke?
(It’s Sunday, for chrissake)

I found this one at http://livingonless.journalspace.com:

Jesus came upon a small crowd who had surrounded a young woman they believed to be an adulteress. They were preparing to stone her to death. To calm the situation, Jesus said: “Whoever is without sin among you, let them cast the first stone.”

Suddenly, an old lady at the back of the crowd picked up a huge rock and lobbed it at the young woman, scoring a direct hit on her head. The unfortunate young lady collapsed dead on the spot.

Jesus looked over towards the old lady and said: “Do you know, Mother, sometimes you really piss me off.”

Insert laugh track here:

Here’s one I made up:

Q. Why didn’t the Romans like Jesus?

A. He thought he was God’s gift to the world.

Another one:

We always hear how Jesus saves, Jesus saves, Jesus saves. Goddamn, he must have some bank account by now.

Anyone else got something blasphemous to share?

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Of course, the biggest religion joke/farce of them all is when despicable humans hide behind their faith (sic) in order to carry out atrocities or spread hate, e.g. William Bennett...who recently said:

“I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”

Should we abort the meat-eaters to save the cows?
Abort the SUV-drivers to save the environment?
Abort the abortion doctor killers to save abortion?

Oops, sorry...that would be morally reprehensible. Forget I said anything.


I’m outta here…

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Posted on 10/02 at 07:16 AM
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