Angie The Anti-Theist Profiled On Slate

My friend, Angie Jackson, is one brave, tough lady. If you don't know the story of her Tweeting her medical abortion, this excellent piece by Kathryn Joyce will clue you in:

"I like to say I'm allergic to secrets," says Jackson. "I grew up in an abusive and fundamentalist childhood, so secrets and lies were par for the course. I've made the conscious decision in the last two years to be open about that. So it flowed for me; I write about everything."

Joyce is the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. Buy it.

My two cents: I have no respect for the opinion that the fetus is more important than the woman. And those who use fear and intimidation are terrorists and beneath contempt. And those who use violence should never see the sun again.

Love u, Angie.

Your most loyal Anteater.

Art Critic Translations

This. Is. Beautiful.

From his 1996 book, Picasso’s Sweet Revenge, art critic Ephriam Kishon (who hates modern art and its pretentious flaks with a passion) takes a phrase from a review of a modern art write-up and translates it into what it really is. Kinda like Defense Department lingo...an “entrenching tool” becomes a “shovel,” that kinda thing. Enjoy:

• Swelling tender structures with a narcissistically effervescent interplay of power. (Brown fleck in the lower left corner. )
• An Apollonian consummation of rhythmatized linear layers. (Two stripes.)
• Cosmically upthrusting cellular currents of timeless transfiguration. (Nothing.)
• Prefigured vibrational synthesis as optical distance to melodic hypertrophy. (Empty canvas, signed on the back.)
• Spiraloid, fluoric antagonisms of archetypical chimeric esotericism. (Five green triangles.)
• A luminous, foetal and autotaxic destruction coefficient immanent in the geometric, somnambulistic precognition of lambent erosions. (An inflated condom)

The Origin of Species Online Version

How cool is this?

HT: Greg Laden.

Loneliness sucks.

And now we have the evidence to prove it.

People do like to be alone sometimes. But no one likes to feel lonely – to feel that they are alone against their will, or that the social contacts they do have are without deeper meaning. According to Cacioppo and Patrick the feeling of loneliness is the least of it. They present scientific evidence suggesting that loneliness seriously burdens human health. By middle age, the lonely are less likely to exercise and more likely to eat a high-fat diet, and they report experiencing a greater number of stressful events. Loneliness correlates with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s. During a four-year study, lonely senior citizens were more likely to end up in nursing homes; during a nine-year study, people with fewer social ties were two to three times more likely to die.

Via Sullivan.

Quote of the day.

"In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should he impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit."

Dr. Frankenstein

(Don't tell the creationists: They'll point to what all that evil, evil science led to!)

Textbooks for Iraq

Could I donate a copy of The God Delusion? How about The Satanic Verses?

Joking aside, it's a great idea. There is no greater aid to civilization and tolerance than education.

(HT: Sullivan)

Salman Rushdie's birthday

From Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac:"

When Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988, most Western critics didn't notice that it would be offensive to Muslims. In the book, Rushdie makes a lot of obscure jokes about the Islamic religion, he names the whores in a Mecca brothel after the Prophet Muhammad's wives, and he suggests that the Koran is not the direct word of God. The book was banned in India the month after publication and then subsequently in other countries. It was also publicly burned. There were bomb threats called in to the publishing house. Translators of the work suffered assassination attempts; the Italian translator was wounded, the Japanese translator killed, and the fire set by Islamic extremists to the Turkish translator's hotel left 40 people dead.

There was a riot in Kashmir over the book, and the Ayatollah Khomeini saw scenes from the riot on Iranian television in which police shot demonstrators. After that, the Ayatollah announced that "all zealous Muslims of the world" should try to find Rushdie wherever he was and kill him. The order of death came from Iran's leader on Valentine's Day, 1989. The Ayatollah promised martyrdom for any Muslim who was successful in killing Rushdie, and another religious leader promised a million-dollar reward, doubled if the killer was Muslim.

Rushdie had to go into hiding for nine years. On the first anniversary of the fatwa, he wrote, "I feel as if I have been plunged, like Alice, into the world beyond the looking glass, where nonsense is the only available sense."

The death sentence was finally lifted in 1998. Rushdie later said, "The experience taught me ... a lot about the human capacity for hatred. But it also taught me the opposite: the capacity for solidarity and friendship. ... My Norwegian publisher was shot three times in the back and ... his first reaction, upon recovering from the bullet wounds, was to reprint the book. That's courage."