Don’t cast yourself as a martyr here; be fair. You got into hot water in that thread because your mouth was writing checks your ass couldn’t cash. For those unfamiliar with that thread, scroll down a few posts to where Czarcasm calls Mockingbird/Hastur’s bluff and Hastur starts backpedaling like it’s the last leg of the Tour de France.
RexDart, I appreciate your apology, but I’m afraid I still have to add my two cents. You see, of the three Wiccans I know well, all three are above average in intelligence. One of them is our own agentfroot. At least one of the other two went from Fundamentalist Christians to hard atheist (of the “How can anyone believe that junk?!” ilk); the other’s his wife. He’s a reasonably prosperous science fiction writer; his wife was a music teacher. The woman who got them into Wicca was a Presbyterian minister with a doctorate in theology, and recently retired from a rather successful career as a psychotherapist. Fast food workers, they ain’t!
You distinguished doing magic from prayer. To their minds, the rituals they do are the exact same thing, with the same feeling and intent as the praying they did back in their Christian days. I’m a devout Christian myself, but I’ve been in rituals with them, and I have to agree. I know it looks silly and ridiculous, and Lord (or Goddess) knows there are what my friends call “fluffy bunny” pagans just as there are saccharine style “Jesus loves you” Christians. It’s just that I tend to avoid both! ::shudder::
Getting back to the OP, it was horrifying. I may be a Christian, but I am still appalled by people using a travesty of any religion to justify their actions. I know things are desparate there. I hope I never have to find out what it’s like to be faced with mouths I can’t feed or a disease I can’t cure. There are massive problems over there, and there’s not a blamed thing I can do about them, and I have no idea what anyone can do. Come to think of it, is it any wonder prayer is comforting? It’s the last resort of the hopeless.
Oh, if the tone sounds familiar, but the username doesn’t, I used to be cjhoworth.
CJ
To avoid hi-jacking this thread more, I opened a new thread about this.
It isn’t, which probably makes it a good thing that I never said anything like that. You however seem to have finally grasped the point that on average men and women are equally promiscuous.
I just love the double standard that allows you to say that minor promiscuity in a large number of men is culpable, but rampant and completely unfettered promiscuity on the part of smaller number of women is not in any way unacceptable or contributing to the spread of AIDS.
But at least you have made your position clear. Thank you.
[quote]
How is it impossible for a large group men to sleep with a relatively small subset of promiscuous women who then transmit this disease to even more men?[/uote]
Just to highlight the double standad, there are of course a number of women engaging in activity that transmits the disease to huge numbers of men. but that sort of behaviour is apparently acceptable and not in any way spreading the disease.:rolleyes:
I Started This thread To Protest The Fact That Superstion/Religion Makes People Into Assholes. You Hijackers Are All Proving It. Fuck You. :mad:
You are all using your beliefs to justify abusing your fellow Dopers. You ‘jackers forgot the kids entirely. And you forgot your own compassion. Fuck you. Fuck you for turning these kids’ suffering into a shoddy little game for your amusement! :mad:
I didn’t make the list? Proof positive I’m not in the Clique! 
Bosda, you may have started this thread, but that doesn’t make you the arbiter of post content. Moreover, your point “That Superstion/Religion Makes People Into Assholes” is not a fact, but an opinion, one that is being vigorously debated in the so-called hijacks. While religion can provide the justification for the wickedness you describe in the OP, it is not religion per se that is the cause, but selfishness.
[list=1]
[li]I never claimed to be the “arbiter of post content”. Straw man. Fuck you.[/li][li]My point is that the people who oppose religion are acting s famatically as the worst of the endorsers. Fuck you X2.[/li][li]The poor kis awful fate has been lost in the vile, egoistic, self-absorbed, so-called “debate”. Fuck you all[SUP]3[/SUP] [/li][/list=1]
Straw man? Read your own quote:
You are telling people that they may not devaiate from the topic you set? And why the indignation? This is a message board, you twerp. Nothing we say here has any effect the children who have been branded witches. Nothing. So stop your pious mewling about “won’t somebody think of the children.”
I have always thought you to be a fool and you are really confirming my opinion, you self-important jackass.
I’m with Bosda here. I wish that the rest of you had taken the topics you were arguing about somewhere else so I would have felt comfortable rebutting you. As things are, I’ve posted minimally in the thread because I don’t feel okay about hijacking a thread so blatantly.
Back on topic (and this may actually tie the hijack in), I don’t think that superstition is really the enemy in this case. Read between the lines of the article, and you can see that these families are facing changing economic circumstances (diamond prices crashing). They are using the superstition to justify their actions. These people want to survive, and their first instinct is to protect their own children and themselves. They don’t have the resources to care for charity cases like children orphaned by AIDS and/or strife. So they do something enormously convenient by accusing the children of witchcraft and washing their hands of them. Believing in witches (and whether all of them do is up for debate) isn’t making them cast out the children; fearing that they can’t feed their families is. So they “take care of their own” and fuck everyone else. It’s human nature, and unlike superstition, it can’t be resisted with logic and it will never go away. I think blaming the superstitions is the easy thing to do, because actually trying to change people’s hearts when they are desperate, or changing the economic situation for these people, or re-structuring their society, is just too hard.
Bos, while I’m guilty of railing against the anti-spiritual posters in this thread, please note that I have also been directing my energies towards discussing the situation in Africa as well. I would hope that the topic I’ve imported has some merit in this thread.
PS: I like that, “Fuck you all[SUP]3[/SUP].”
Superstitions aren’t the enemy of all mankind. They allow us to identify the stupid and gullible among us.
Well, but in either case, be it magic or prayer, then if the magic or prayer seeks tangible results, then that can be tested, right?
Well, that’s certainly scientific! You’ve met (not interviewed or otherwise rigorously questioned) a dozen or so people who are Wiccan and therefore draw conclusions about the entire religion based on those random encounters.
Why don’t you try reading something a bit more authorative on the subject? Try Drawing Down the Moon (1986) by Margot Adler and Triumph of the Moon (1998) by Ronald Hutton. Both are considered authoratative essays on Wicca and its history. :wally
Please, Rex, you who embraces the rational, you should really know better than that.
I had classmates in high school who were Christian because they were lonely and came from broken homes and their only friends were Born-Agains, so they became Born-Again too. That doesn’t mean Christianity is a sham.
I went to University with people who were Jewish for no reason other than their families are and it’s the way they were raised. This does not mean that Judaism is a sham either.
People come by their faiths for many different reasons. How did you come by your lack of faith?
(This will circle back to the OP)
I arrived at athiesm after careful consideration of the world around us, causality, physics, all pointing towards the conclusions that there was no need for a god, and that a god even if one existed would be impotent to intervene in the world. I was deist for awhile, then agnostic, then finally saw no point in clinging to belief in some form of deity.
Because I arrived at my beliefs through careful consideration, and came finally to rest upon beliefs that I don’t like but I think are nonetheless true, I find it suspicious when someone appears to choose beliefs because they like them or because they are aesthetically pleasing. Nobody wants to be an athiest, we just end up realizing the truth of the proposition. But plenty of people want to embrace superstitions, and they do so because they like believing in them. Perhaps some think they’re true, but perhaps some would much rather believe in them because it’s useful and not think too much about it.
And superstitions are convenient. Look at the OP, an example of people who use superstitions to make scapegoats out of other people during depressed economic times. If they let themselves realize that there aren’t any witches running around casting hexes on them to give them AIDS, they’d have to realize what a horrible thing they’ve done to those kids. Look at the Nazi racist mythology, there were scientists there who believed the Germans were descended from the people of Atlantis, and they believed that because it made it easier to find some wacky way to justify in their minds what they were doing.
Bosda, these people in Africa are scum. . . superstition is for the weak, and feebleminded.
At what point do we throw all political correctness out the window and admit that a culture has failed?