Ask An Atheist

By now, most of you have seen the video of the son of two women, speaking in Iowa. But did you hear about the guy who spoke after him?

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Now Pat Robertson is no stranger to saying really offensive and insensitive things. If the Guinness people had a recognized world record for the number of genuinely stupid and prejudiced things one person could speak into a camera or make in a written statement, then the host of the 700 Club would be a hard man to beat.

After all, this is the man who credited the Haitian Earthquake to a pact with Satan.

He’s the man who said that he wanted to nuke State Department headquarters.

He’s the man who threatened Disney World’s annual “Gay Days” with divine retribution.

He’s the man who claimed that Scotland was a “dark land” overrun by homosexuals.

He’s the man who described feminism as “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

And finally, this is the man who “totally concurred” when Jerry Falwell blamed the attacks of September 11th on “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America.”

So, what has he done this time? Well, watch for yourself. After one of his Christian Broadcasting Network correspondents interviewed former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice about her favorite Thanksgiving dish, Robertson asks the interviewer if Mac and Cheese was “a black thing”

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The Ask an Atheist crew will be doing some volunteer holiday giftwrapping this year, so if you’re in the area we’d love to have you drop by!

Were going to be at the Barnes & Noble in Tukwila, WA, wrapping shoppers’ books for the holidays and accepting donations that help keep our little show on the air! This is your chance to have Christmas presents wrapped for you by folks that Pat Robertson will tell you want to destroy all that is good and holy.

So, stop by the Southcenter Barnes & Noble, buy a few books and gifts and we’ll beautify them with colored paper and tape! Perfect for whatever holiday you celebrate, be it Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Saturnalia or even the Wookiee’s Life Day!

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Hey folks!

I’ve been working on a new podcast delivery system for Ask an Atheist! But this time, rather than trying to push untested code onto the Ask an Atheist servers, I’ve created a very short-term side podcast called “Exasperated!”

I’ve had a couple posts up for a few weeks, but I thought I’d let the kind folks on our website know that we’re spending the next three days posting a conversation Becky, Mike and myself had about some terribly geeky things.

If you’re interested in listening to the producers of this show talk about things other than atheism for a while, head on over to this post and start listening!   It’ll help the show, and it may even be interesting!

In this week’s look at the funny, the scary and just plain weird passages in humanity’s holy texts, we look at the Bible’s poor grasp of simple facts.

Often, people excuse the Bible for saying things that its authors’ contemporaries could not have possibly known, given their limited Iron Age knowledge. This week, we look at not just one, but two passages that the authors had little excuse to get dead wrong. Even in the days of yore.

Deuteronomy 14:11-18, New International Version:

¹¹ You may eat any clean bird. ¹² But these you may not eat: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, ¹³ the red kite, the black kite, any kind of falcon, ¹⁴ any kind of raven, ¹⁵ the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, ¹⁶ the little owl, the great owl, the white owl, ¹⁷ the desert owl, the osprey, the cormorant, ¹⁸ the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.

Where to start…. Well, first of all rabbit don’t chew cud. That is to say, they don’t regurgitate food out of their stomach and re-chew it as cows do. It boggles the mind that a people who live in greater proximity to animals and work with them on a daily basis could ever get this one wrong.

The funniest thing that keeps popping into my mind is the image of a fundamentalist who can’t handle reality not playing along with his beliefs to the degrees that he forces a rabbit to chew cud via the Heimlich Maneuver. “Eat it! EAT IT!”

And you don’t have to think look hard to realize that a bat isn’t a bird. It’s got fur, not feathers. Its wings don’t look anything like the wings of a bird. Now I don’t expect a group of merchants and shepherds of thousands of years ago using the Linnaean classification system, but c’mon!

My brain hurts.

If you have a passage of holy scripture that you find funny, scary or just plain weird, send it our way. Whether it’s from the Bible, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, or even Dianetics, click on the big, red, shiny button at the top of the page and we may even read it on the show!