A seriously funny trashing of a liberal atheist.

I don't know the proper etiquette for the following post. Am I supposed to just link to it or cut and paste it? Whatever, I'll do both!

It is not my work. It comes from the guys at WHO Radio in Des Moines. Jan Mickelson is my favorite talk show host, bar none. I have been listening to him since 1989? and I sincerely believe he is one of the best at his craft ever. His letter is posted by Steve Deace the afternoon host at WHO. Deace is slowly learning the truth. He started out as a Republican bootlicker, and has now learned enough to be an independent who is despised by the Repugnant party.

The letter is in response to one from Hector Avalos the atheist religious studies professor at Iowa State University. Dr. Avalos is one of the leaders of the group that help keep Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez ("The Privileged Planet") from getting tenure. Gonzales story is one of those featured in "Expelled" by Ben Stein.

I went to a "debate" between Avalos and Mickelson at Iowa State, featuring a topic related to sodomy marriage. Mickelson didn't really so much debate as throw hand grenades, which amused the large crowd of supporters and enraged the small contingent of sodomites.

So these two have a very public history. And it is clear that Mickelson enjoys sticking in the knife and twisting it, before he pulls it out and sticks it in again.

I hope you enjoy the exchange. I sure did.

here is a link to the original post at WHO Radio,


February 8th Steve Deace



Deace's Daily Diary: February 8th, 2010
Monday 02-08-2010 8:08am CT
There are times you come across something that somebody has written that makes you realize you can't possibly top their work, so you just get out of the way and let it speak for itself.

Today's blog is one of those days.

My fellow WHO broadcaster Jan Mickelson exchanged emails recently with a militantly atheist religious studies professor at Iowa State named Dr. Hector Avalos, who once compared the Bible to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf: Dr. Hector Avalos

The exchange is below and is today's blog entry for two reasons:

1) I'm lazy.

2) This is so good nothing I could possibly write today as the Sultan of Snark himself could top this, so why try to reinvent the wheel?

Guest commentary:
Haiti’s suffering is ungodly


By Hector Avalos
Special to The Tribune

Published: Saturday, February 6, 2010 11:45 PM CST

Haitians were just starting to be dug out from collapsed buildings, when Pat Robertson, the televangelist and former presidential candidate, told us he knew what had caused Haiti’s horrific earthquake.

Hint: It was not geology.

As Robertson phrased it on his show, The 700 Club (Jan. 13): “They (Haitians) were under the heel of the French ... And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you get us free from the French.” Haiti’s earthquake and poverty are punishment for that pact.

Where do Robertson’s ideas come from? The earliest trace of any legend of a Haitian “pact to the Devil” is a book on the history of Haiti (titled, “Histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue”) published in 1814 by a French inhabitant of Haiti named Antoine Dalmas.

According to Dalmas, on the first night of the Haitian revolution (Aug. 20 to 21, 1791), some slaves at a plantation drank the blood of a black pig sacrificed to an African deity. The ritual supposedly made participants invincible.

That’s pretty much it. Later writers added more dramatic and uncorroborated details, including an oath. Since the ceremony involved nothing beyond a few hundred slaves, it cannot be described as an entire nation making a pact.

Nonetheless, Dalmas describes a ceremony associated with Voodoo, the collective name for diverse African religious traditions, which were often combined with Christian elements, in Haiti.


Voodoo, now an officially recognized Haitian religion, was often denigrated as devil-worship by Christian slavemasters. Robertson simply continues this demonization of African religions.

And as for poverty being God’s punishment for Voodoo, a World Bank study, titled Social Resilience and State Fragility in Haiti (2007), calculates a poverty rate of 47 percent for Voodoo practitioners, 49 percent for Catholics and 51 percent for Baptists. Therefore, Haitian Christians actually are slightly poorer.

Furthermore, Haitian slaves did not see just the “French” as their oppressors. Haitians saw white Christians enslaving them. Since Christianity was not helping them, slaves appealed to their African gods. Slaves could argue the appeal worked because Haiti became the only nation established by a successful slave revolt.

However, Haitians paid a price for liberty. First, their revolution devastated the sugar industry, the heart of their economy. Revenues plummeted.

France also imposed a price of 150 million francs (perhaps tens of billions in today’s dollars) to recognize Haiti’s nationhood in 1825. Paying that debt with already limited resources proved difficult. It took Haiti until 1947 to pay it off.

Moreover, big slave-trading countries initially refused official recognition of Haiti’s nationhood in order to punish it for the sin of overthrowing slavery. The United States waited until 1862. This delay further distanced Haiti from all the benefits of trade that accompany recognized nationhood. Thus, much of Haiti’s poverty resulted from burdens imposed by outsiders.

And this brings me to Iowa pigs. The former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, wrote a book called “Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization” (2000), which claims Iowa pigs impoverished Haiti even more.

According to Aristide, prior to the 1980s, Haiti used very hardy local (Creole) pigs that could withstand tropical heat and eat almost anything.

But, in 1982, international agencies, many influenced by the United States, convinced Haitians to slaughter their pigs because of concerns about a swine flu epidemic. The United States promised that better pigs would be substituted, and these came mostly from Iowa.

However, Iowa pigs required clean water, which was unavailable to 80 percent of Haitians. Special roofed pens had to be built because Iowa pigs were susceptible to the sun. While Haitian pigs ate anything, feed for American pigs cost $90 per year in a country where the annual per capita income was $130.

If a pig sacrifice helped to liberate Haiti in 1791, Haitians were being sacrificed to American pigs in the 1980s. Aristide claims that Haitian peasants lost $600 million in this fiasco (“Eyes of the Heart,” page 14).

So, if Robertson had read Haitian history, he might have spotted a club of Christian slave-trading nations, and not God, shaking the foundation of Haiti’s society and economy to this day.

Hector Avalos, a professor of religious studies at Iowa State University, writes monthly for The Tribune. His columns appear the first Sunday of the month.

Doc,

Always great to hear from you. I always enjoy reverse engineering. And Billy Bob Robertson always is entertaining as well. That guy serves up a lot of nonsense for the consumption of the rubes…when he isn't rebuking hurricanes and taking out third world dictators, he still managed in his spare time to raise over two billion dollars for the relief of the poor over last couple of decades. Puzzling how crazy people do things like that.. And about those evil Christians who in the last several weeks have donated nearly another billion for Haiti relief….must be residue guilt over what those French Christians did don't cha think? I used to be similarly afflicted.

Then, I became enlightened by science. Since then, I've come to realize compassion and altruism is completely wasted upon the lesser evolved races. All the money spent on those "yard apes" has been mostly wasted. By any objective standard, continuing to subsidize genetically deficient sub-species is a waste of time and money. In fact supporting humans who can't seem to get it together either before their African Muslim brothers sold them into slavery, nor after more than a century of welfare, should be cut loose. Nature should be allowed to take its course.

I agree with that Darwin fellow. "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes [that is, the ones which look like the savages in structure] . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."

That earthquake is merely expediting Darwin's interrupted good works.

Maybe we should keep a few Haitians alive and put them in the zoo like Darwin's buddies did to the Australian Aborigines during the World's Fair in the last century…and if they become extinct we could employ the services of a good taxidermist (as was done to some Aborigines) so as to keep alive at least the image of a Haitian so our grand children can get a glimpse what we overcame.

I am appalled as you must be to see some deluded zealots try to adopt Haitian orphans…a genetic cruelty which will just keep the legacy of those savage races extant way beyond what Darwin intended.

As to that slavery thing, perhaps if we have to keep around the legacy of those savage races, then "…if we are all biological accidents" as Darwin teaches, "why can't the white accidents own and sell black accidents?"


Anyhow… always nice to hear from you. I was beginning to doubt my resolve.

Mickelson

BTW… it's always gratifying to see atheists affirming competing religions. Your support of the religion of Voodoo is indeed heartwarming. Certainly a feeble step in the right direction. A few more natural disasters like this and you may be found humming "nearer my God to Thee"….