Or, Cindy Jacobs says god kills birds and fish to punish human homosexuality.
I wonder what she thinks god does to punish those flamingos, salmon and other gay animals.
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The Article In Question
“Do athesists care less?” This was the title of a “From the Editors” article in the May 10th, 2010 edition of Maclean’s magazine, which you can now read online.
(The morning I wrote and published this, there was not yet a copy available to read online. However a copy did get published that afternoon, and so I have removed my own summary of its contents and linked to it directly.)
The Mammoth-sized Problem with the Article
In a nutshell, it is incredibly sloppy: inaccurate, and arguably quite biased.
Before I go into detail, let me include the caveats. Since we are not told specifically which editors are responsible for the article – and there is actually quite the list of executive, managing, associate, at large and assistant editors listed in the about column next to the article, whom very likely can’t all be involved – all I can do is correct and chastise “the editors” in general. In addition, I am not a journalist, just a private citizen, with my own biases and likely far less formal education than any of the editors of Maclean’s. But I can also read the survey results from Statistics Canada and reveal just what “the editors” left out of their little diatribe. I can even point you to where you can download and read them for yourself, in their entirety.
We are not given the name of the survey, but it is possible to search the Statistics Canada website and see if we can’t find the one the editors refer to. When you search their database for “charitable giving”, one of the results that turns up is “Caring Canadians, Involved Canadians: Highlights from the Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating“. The details page for this survey says this was released in June 8, 2009 (the actual survey was conducted back in 2007). If you are interested, it is possible to actually purchase from Stats Can the actual results, but I am content with trusting and quoting from the free highlights document provided by this government agency.
I will now quote the relevant parts of the 94 page PDF document, with references, so you can check to see that I am not, like I charge Maclean’s article, taking anything out of context. While I will try to be as concise as possible – I think statistics can make just about anyone’s eyes glaze over – but at the same time avoid chopping out so much that the meaning is affected. View full article »
A pastor in Arizona has been in the news because he not only hopes and prays that the current US President will die, he instructs his parishoners to pray for this as well.
We’re supposed to feel okay about this because he wants god to strike him down, not man. Apparently he has completely missed that whole concept that Jesus talked of, where what’s in your heart versus your actions is irrelevant – wrong is wrong.
What struck me, though was something else this fellow said (starting at 1:45 in the video),
…there are a lot of people that God hates and that we should hate, but see, I didn’t write that, it’s in the Bible.
Which is an implied admission that what he thinks and says is abhorrent, but it’s okay, because it’s really god that’s being the ass, and is commanding him to be. He’s just doing his job.
