Dr. Oz, Please, Keep Me Out Of The Workplace (I'm Just Not Religious Enough)

When people are weird at work, but can't see they're being weird, how do you reason with them? I've been dealing with this question, offline and on, for years:

What’s noteworthy here isn’t that everything said in the meeting is negative...but that, from the top down, the entire company takes it for granted its employees are in mourning over the results of the election. The subtext of all of this is clearly that the wrong person won and everyone is right to be anxious and upset. Google turns out to be exactly the narrow, progressive club that former engineer James Damore said they were last year.

It’s a bit difficult to see how a company which is such a partisan monoculture could possibly take care not to abuse its power to step on the people (about half of the country) who it thinks are wrong and possibly even dangerous. The tone of this meeting is that of mourning but the underlying stance is adversarial. Is it really possible this doesn’t have any real-world outcomes in Google’s work?

You can't get any peace. You're more likely to find Pat Robertson and a Christian prophetess are both making demands of the same hurricane, in a single week, than that. Which is a pretty remarkable occurrence for a pretty remarkable power. 

But not as remarkable as celebrities thinking they get credibility back by talking to disgraced physicians. I don't know how that supposedly works. It doesn't add up. None of this stuff adds up now, except for the part where you look down and think:

I Thought It Looked Familiar

How Slavery Made the Modern World

Slavery was the flywheel on which America’s market revolution turned—not just in the United States, but in all of the Americas.

Many in the United States were outraged by the remarks of conservative evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, who,...went on TV and gave his viewing audience a little history lesson: the Haitians had been “under the heel of the French” but they “got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’”

A supremely callous example of right-wing idiocy? Absolutely. Yet in his own kooky way, Robertson was also onto something,..

Pat Robertson: I May Be Old But What Is Transgender?

A New Pat Robertson Doc's Findings (In Three Words)

"Fraudulent and deceptive"

I'm Not "In The Red" Or "Out Of The Red" (I Read A Lot)

Matthew McConaughey Takes an Alternative Approach to Medicine in the ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ Trailer

Former Scientologist Anette Iren Johansen 'auditioned' to be Tom Cruise's wife before he married Katie Holmes

"Carlson's conclusion, then, rests on all of the following highly dubious premises: that she accurately characterizes the purpose of the measures to which she refers as being 'to restrict voting rights,' that those measures are 'almost as pernicious' as impossible-to-pass literacy tests that were administered only to blacks, that voter fraud is either nonexistent or so rare as to be a trivial concern, and that space aliens have flown over Kansas."

  "They met at a course offered by the Landmark Forum, an organization that has been described as cultlike."

Pat Robertson: Gay people will cut you and give you AIDS with special rings

When the Popular Youth Pastor Gets Arrested Again

It's All God's Doing - Until It Ain't (Then It's You & Satan)

What did John Lennon say? "All I want is some truth"? Well, with these morons, that's asking too much, so we get fed a steady diet of harmful religious and "spiritual" gobbledegook instead. 

 That, my friends, is "God's Plan" and the con men are sticking to it,...

 

After: "I Won't Get Into Great Detail About Elections,..."

Awww. Don't you know “I believe in God and God is going to make sure Mr. Romney wins” can just-as-easily be construed as “I believe in God and God is going to make sure believers look like idiots”?

No? That never occurred to you? Wow: 

 I thought of it immediately,...

 

Atheists And Evangelicals (Got Nothing For IOU)

"The Rev Pat Robertson, infamous American televangelist, sees the hand of God in the earthquake, wreaking terrible retribution for a 1791 pact that the Haitians made with the Devil, to help to rid them of their French masters. 1791? Ah, but don’t forget 'I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me'.

Needless to say, milder-mannered faith-heads fell over themselves to disown Robertson, just as they disowned those other pastors, evangelists, missionaries and mullahs at the time of the earlier disasters.

What hypocrisy. Loathsome as Robertson’s views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. The agonised theodiceans who see suffering as an intractable 'mystery', or who see God in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding into Haiti, or (most nauseating of all) who claim to see God 'suffering on the cross' in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, those faux-anguished hypocrites are denying the centrepiece of their own theology. It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian here.

Where was God in Noah’s flood? He was systematically drowning the entire world, animal as well as human, as punishment for 'sin'. Where was God when Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed with fire and brimstone? He was deliberately barbecuing the citizenry, lock, stock and barrel, as punishment for 'sin'.

'Oh but that’s the Old Testament. No one believes those stories literally any more. The New Testament is all about love.' Dear modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated, gentle Christian, you cannot be serious. Your entire religion is founded on an obsession with 'sin', with punishment and with atonement. Where do you find the effrontery to condemn Pat Robertson, you who have signed up to the odious doctrine that the central purpose of Jesus’s incarnation was to have himself tortured as a scapegoat for the 'sins' of all mankind, past, present and future, beginning with the 'sin' of Adam, who (as any modern theologian well knows) never even existed?

Yes, I know you hate the word 'scapegoat' (with good reason, because it is a barbaric idea) but what other word would you use? The only respect in which 'scapegoat' falls short as a perfect epitome of Christian theology is that the Christian atonement is even more unpleasant. The goat of Jewish tradition was merely driven into the wilderness with its cargo of symbolic sin. Jesus was supposedly tortured and executed to atone for sins that, any rational person might protest, he had it in his power simply to forgive, without the agony. Among all the ideas ever to occur to a nasty human mind (Paul’s of course), the Christian 'atonement' would win a prize for pointless futility as well as moral depravity."

-- Richard Dawkins, who doesn't appear to have had a first beer before he got to rollin' (or, maybe, he missed a chance to get on the m-i-c) - to make the same point I've made before elsewhere - but with the fire and brimstone (and over-the-top hilarity) that seem to be a requirement of The Times.

Why The Acceptance Of Reality Is Dangerous