Oh Shit! Yes, and lots of it!

Members of a small, isolated Amish community are refusing to follow state code in their handling of waste from a school’s two outhouses, citing their religious convictions.

The Amish property owner said he is even willing to go to jail to defend his beliefs.

Local officials aren’t eager to go to that extreme, but are in a quandary over how to assure the laws are applied uniformly and the raw sewage doesn’t contaminate water supplies.

Waste from the outhouses has been collected in plastic buckets, then dumped onto the fields.

The county is demanding the Amish install a holding tank and contract with a certified sewage hauler for disposal.

A district judge last month found Andy Swartzentruber, on whose land the outhouses sit, and school elder Sam Yoder in violation of state sewage disposal law. They have until Tuesday to pay more than $500 each in fines or to appeal the ruling.

“I’d rather go to jail, and abide by our religion,” Swartzentruber told The Associated Press one recent afternoon while taking a break from tilling a field.

While all Amish shun the modern world, the Swartzentrubers are known for their more austere restrictions on technology, more severe limits to interaction with the outside world and more rigid notions of the separation of church and state, Donald Kraybill, an Amish expert at Elizabethtown College said.

Yoder and five other Amish men laid out their beliefs in a handwritten letter to the sewage enforcement agency in January.

It seems their troubles began in October 2006 when residents complained anonymously that the schoolhouse and outhouses were erected on his property without permits.

Residents said they worried about potential water contamination since non of the waste disposal system (Or lack there of)conformed to code.

An inspection found plastic buckets collecting waste in the outhouses, and Swartzentruber told sewage officials the waste was disposed of by being dumped onto his fields, according to sewage agency documents.

County officials said they want to work something out with the Amish. If they choose, they can propose building their own holding tank, as long as it can be shown to meet construction standards.

“People respect their religious beliefs,” township supervisor Giles Dumm said. “Nobody’s coming down on them about that.”

But, he said, “it’s not fair to the rest of the community if some people have to abide by the sewage laws and some don’t.”

Agency, state and township officials have met with Swartzentruber and other local Amish at least seven times since October to discuss permit requirements.

If the stalemate continues, county officials said, another option may be seeking an injunction to prohibit use of the school or the outhouses.

“We feel this sewage plan enforcement along with its standards is against our religious (beliefs),” they wrote. “Our forefathers and the church are conscientiously opposed to install the sewage method accordingly to the world’s standards.”

O.K. kids, listen up! This is one of the best examples of how religion can fuck up your head in no time flat.

To think that some dogma is supposed to prevent you from giving away or even disposing of your shit, and at the same time is threatening the outside water supply is not only stupid, but downright criminal.

I have had all the members of the Perspective research department scrutinise the entire bible and there is NOT ONE any reference to spreading your poop on your fields.

(Besides that, manure from vegetarian animals like cows is a lot better for the crops!)

I can definitely say that the shit is going to hit the fan on this one!

Your "full of shit" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://Allans-Perspective.blogspot.com

Set in Stone!

I have spent a bit of time on "Stumble" over the past week and if your not familiar with it, Stumble is a site that randomly takes you to pages on the Internet.

Anything and everything can pop up and this is part of the appeal.

I have serendipitously gone on many "Creationist" as well as "Evolution" sites and after a while it started to occur to me that people who were that far into their beliefs, or stand on the matter, had made up their minds about it a long time ago.

It seems that once a person hits their mid to late teens they have made up their mind about religion and evolution and creation and masturbation and procreation and no amount of manipulation or arguing or logic is going to change many minds at this point in the game. In other words, you usually can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Unless you start teaching someone critical thinking in their formative years, all is lost. Their soul might be saved but their brain is fucked!

Because of this I am going to stay away from these religious debates as much as possible because the only ones I am going to be able to preach to is the "converted" on which ever side of the issue I address.

These people have their minds made up and if religion has taken too strong a hold on them then no amount of persuation will budge them. It's like flogging a dead horse, it doesn't get you anywhere!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God at www.God-101.com and the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

Oh God

While I disagree with Dr. Richard Dawkins contention that there is no God period, and would rather take a more agnostic point of view, however, I do agree with a lot of what he has to say.

This is an exerpt from his book "The God Delusion," where he makes some valid and pointed arguments.

America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers.

The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds.

More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the 'Armageddon' that is to presage the Second Coming.

Sam Harris, in his new short book, Letter to a Christian Nation, hits the bull's-eye as usual:

"It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ...

Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious.

The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency."

Does Bush check the Rapture Index daily, as Reagan did his stars? We don't know, but would anyone be surprised?

My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare an emergency.

Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular Republics.

Science education - and hence the whole future of science in this country - is under threat.

Temporarily beaten back in a Pennsylvania court, the 'breathtaking inanity' (Judge John Jones's immortal phrase) of 'intelligent design' continually flares up in local bush-fires.

Dowsing them is a time-consuming but important responsibility, and scientists are finally being jolted out of their complacency. For years they quietly got on with their science, underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent nor interested in science, attended to the serious political business of subverting local school boards.

Scientists, and intellectuals generally, are now waking up to this threat from the American Taliban.

Dr. Richard Dawkins


Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html

A tale of two brothers.

This is the tale of two brothers. Let's draw a rough parallel and say one is a "hippie" and the other is a "punker."

Although they come from the same Father and had the same set of values instilled in them, in the long run they turned out to be two very different people.

The one, (the hippie) walks around with flowers and prayer beads and since he is a Beatles fan preaches, "All you need is love,” in the tradition of John and Paul.

He sees the world as a garden (although it was once a paradise) and himself as its caretaker. His main job is to get people to come into his garden and share in the bounty of pot, chanting and free love!

The other, (the punker) has a much harsher view. He thinks the world is a dangerous place, much like a desert, and the only way to get ahead is to make his own way by his own means.

The world to him is unforgiving and his way of coping is to live by a certain set of rules and then to get as many others as possible to follow those rules as well.

That way they can all live in relative peace and harmony in the neighbourhood.

In this tale there are also cousins around who are skinheads, rappers, jazz buffs, classical musicians, into reggae and country plus all sorts of buskers, freelancers and people from Utah, but that's another story for another time.

Now the hippie has been around a long time and been through a lot of trials and tribulations. He has had his ups and downs and for a while he was even the town bully. Also, due to his drug dealings he was quite well off. But, age and a few appearances before the (secular) courts have mellowed him somewhat over the years.

Becoming a responsible adult with age and experience the hippie has started to become the sort of man his Father wanted him to be. True, he still occasionally listens to the Beatles and rock music. He still espouses his philosophy to his neighbours, and once in a while he even plays his sitar.

Overall though, he has learned many of life's cruel lessons and is becoming an adult who is responsible for his own actions. He got a job, will probably marry and have children one day and for him the world is slowly unfolding as it should.

His younger brother, meanwhile, came from a different Mother and grew up in a totally different neighbourhood. His was a life of conflict and strife and the one rule he learned early is that you have to survive by your wits and strength.

His was not a world of love and peace but rather a test to see who was strongest.

Gone was the concept of "Love thy neighbour" and in its place the family became all-important. To survive he had to rely on his brothers and half brothers and together with them face what life had to offer. In times of crisis, his cousins and uncles were called upon, and as a last resort he would even have to convince his neighbours that a united front was needed.

Instead of “love one and other,” it was a case of “us against them” and he looked inward instead of outward. No “sit-ins and protests” for our punker friend here. No, rather he became a “head banger” and instead of pot he turned to harder drugs, which he had to take 5 times a day.

Under the onslaught of heavy metal and the sayings of people like Curt Cobain, (who by the way, died tragically) the younger brother had a much rougher childhood and adolescence than his older hippie brother.

Unemployment was rampant in the family and many times he had to live on government handouts and the kindness of strangers. Crime was all around him and the struggle to survive gave his life a rough edge.

Early on, the younger brother discovered a drug called “ecstasy” that took away much of the pain of living and replaced it with boundless energy and a feeling of ………well, ecstasy!

Now the days were less cruel and at times even pleasant. The drudgery of life was lifted whenever his pusher filled him with the magic elixir and he began to feel so good that at times he swore he would go so far as to kill or give up his life for it.

His ecstasy was carried as a shield before him and he began to live his life around it, much as his older brother had done before him with his "pot" and “counter-culture.”

So, that’s the way the story sits to this day. Oh, I’m sure that the younger brother will one day follow in the footsteps of his older brother and start to grow up and become the man their Father wanted them to be. But you see the teen years are not easy and I fear junior still has a few bumps ahead of him. Only time will tell.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html

Excedrin headache #3

The holy month of Ramadan is being oserved as we speak and while Muslims around the world pray to God they have Christian groups praying right along with them.

BUT, the extra prayers may not be all that welcome.

In a campaign called the "30 Day Muslim Prayer Focus," Christians are asking God to help Muslims realize the error of their ways. They pray that followers of Islam accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour so that they might follow the TRUE path to salvation.

Meanwhile, Imam Yahya Hendi, a Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University says he believes true followers of Jesus should not pray for the conversion of others to the Christian way of life. They should instead show their faith throught good works much like Mother Teresa. He said; "Mother Teresa did not go out and pray for people to convert to Christianity, but rather selflessly took care of the poor and that's what made people love her and her faith."

But Jamal Badawi, an Islamic scholar and professor emeritus as Halifax's Saint Mary's University, says he prays daily that Christians finally see the light and realize the truth in the teachings of Muhammad and that they embrace Islam. He said: "I know that in many cases people really have that sincere desire in their hearts to pray for other people who cannot see the error of their ways and that is why I pray they realize the truth of Islam."

Well I have news for you, God sent a message by long, long distance.
He said: STOP IT................ you're giving Him a headache!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html