A 15-year-old boy, the son of Obama devotees, was visiting the teenage children of one of our editors. He was thin, pale, sensitive, well-mannered and articulate. When invited to stay to dinner his immediate reply was, “No, thank you, I‘m a vegetarian.” He was assured that there were vegetables, salads and fruit on the menu. Rather reluctantly he sat down and spooned some food on to his plate. He explained that he had become vegetarian because he thought it wrong to kill animals for food. He felt very bad about the suffering of animals at the hands of human beings.

“And before you ask,” he went on, “I do not usually wear leather. It’s true that I’m wearing leather shoes today, but I know who produces them. It’s a small group of craftsmen who’re careful to get the leather from a place where the animals are well cared for, roam freely, and are killed humanely. I make sure that none of the things I buy is made by exploited workers.”

He went on to list other concerns of his. People on minimum wages were not being paid enough to live on. Illegal immigrants were unable to get health care. Blacks were perpetually discriminated against in all walks of life. Corporations were the curse of the earth. It was horrible that some people were rich while others were poor. America bullied other nations.

By the time everyone got up from the table, he hadn’t eaten more than two or three mouthfuls.

His hosts wondered if his parents were aware of the heavy burden of guilt and shame they were laying upon on him – no doubt reinforced at his public school – and whether they had noticed how severely he was punishing himself.

The poor kid felt bad about being well housed and provided for. He felt bad about being an American. He felt bad about being white. It seemed that he even felt bad about being a member of the human race.

How many millions of children are there now who are like this boy?

Raising generations that blame and despise themselves and their exceptionally bountiful country is surely the worst crime of the Left in America.

Saturday is a good day for exposing silliness.

Silliness is always to be found among the devotees of political correctness.

And the devotees of political correctness are always to be found in the universities.

Today it may be found in the University of Michigan. It is “banning” words.

Professor Jonathan Turley writes:

The University of Michigan has spent $16,000 on a campaign to get students to use “inclusive language” and stop using certain words and phrases.

Among the banned words and phrases are: crazy, insane, gay, tyranny, illegal alien, fag, ghetto, and raghead.

He points out that –

Once schools begin to list approved and disapproved words, there is a slippery slope toward the inclusion of any word that could possibly insult any person or group.

And that –

Most of my friends who are homosexual refer to themselves as “gay”.

The level of intelligence among those at the University of Michigan who are trying to shrink the English language is demonstrated by this:

“I wanted to die” is listed as offense to “people who have attempted or committed suicide”.

That prompts us to say that the language-censors at Michigan University are positively retarded.

But – oops! – that’s another “banned” word. This comes from Truth Revolt:

Students at UCLA are uniting in solidarity over a new political correctness campaign: to ban the “R-word”.

The campaign, called “Spread the Word to End the Word”, asks students to pledge to eradicate the words “retard” and “retarded” from their vocabulary. 

UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) hopes to get the entire nation to stop using those two words.

The Spread the Word to End the Word campaign is part of a larger national movement to stop people from using the word “retard” or “retarded”. Using the word as a negative label can be offensive because it is associated with people who have developmental or learning disabilities.

In other words, retarded people.

Let us celebrate this season of the year with feasting and carousing, with good cheer in good company, with music and laughter. 

December 25 was not the birthday of that tragic rabbi, “Jesus” of Nazareth; nor claimed to be for St Paul’s (completely different and totally fictitious) “Jesus Christ”.

December 25 was only chosen as the day of the Christian god’s earthly birth (from the womb of a virgin!) in the third century CE at the earliest.

A Christian source states authoritatively:

The eventual choice of December 25, made perhaps as early as 273, reflects a convergence of Origen’s concern about pagan gods and the church’s identification of God’s son with the celestial sun. December 25 already hosted two other related festivals: natalis solis invicti (the Roman “birth of the unconquered sun”), and the birthday of Mithras, the Iranian “Sun of Righteousness” whose worship was popular with Roman soldiers. The winter solstice, another celebration of the sun, fell just a few days earlier. Seeing that pagans were already exalting deities with some parallels to the true deity [haw-haw, yeah, sure – ed], church leaders decided to commandeer the date and introduce a new festival.

The day has been called “Christmas” for some 1,841 years.

So we say to our frequent readers, casual visitors, highly valued commenters, critics, and even our less insulting abusers:

We wish you a Very Merry Christmas! 

On this Thanksgiving day, November 27, 2014, we at The Atheist Conservative thank our readers and commenters – especially our frequent commenters – for helping so vitally to make our online magazine of analytical opinion the success that it is.

We extend our thanks also to our occasional visitors and even to our (more indulgent) critics.

The greater part of the value of our site results from your interest in it, your contributions to it, your sympathetic and corrective views.

Thank you for the links you send us, the knowledge you give us, the works you tell us about, the ideas you stimulate us with, the anecdotes you enthrall us with.

Feast, drink deep, be merry!

We drink to your good health, happiness with much laughter, and enduring liberty.

Andrew Klavan interprets the language of the Left.

We wonder which of the 71 genders now recognized, these three belong to. Anyway they’re all feminists. Shouldn’t Pajama Boy be with them? And Barry “Chickenshit” Obama?

Our opinion: They’d all look great in a Burkha! 

*

Here’s the Telegraph’s list of the 71 genders:

The 21 new options for UK Facebook users

Asexual

Female to male trans man

Female to male transgender man

Female to male transsexual man

F2M

Gender neutral

Hermaphrodite

Intersex man

Intersex person

Intersex woman

Male to female trans woman

Male to female transgender woman

Male to female transsexual woman

Man

M2F

Polygender

T man

T woman

Two person

Two-spirit person

Woman

The list of the 50 previous gender options

Agender

Androgyne

Androgynes

Androgynous

Bigender

Cis

Cis Female

Cis Male

Cis Man

Cis Woman

Cisgender

Cisgender Female

Cisgender Male

Cisgender Man

Cisgender Woman

Female to Male

FTM

Gender Fluid

Gender Nonconforming

Gender Questioning

Gender Variant

Genderqueer

Intersex

Male to Female

MTF

Neither

Neutrois

Non-binary

Other

Pangender

Trans

Trans Female

Trans Male

Trans Man

Trans Person

Trans Female

Trans Male

Trans Man

Trans Person

Trans Woman

Transexual

Transexual Female

Transexual Male

Transexual Man

Transexual Person

Transexual Woman

Transgender Female

Transgender Person

Transmasculine

Two-spirit

At least one of these should be easy to recognize: the Bigenders.

There seems to be a certain redundancy in (for instance) Female to Male and also FTM and even still F2M. But I can already hear an exasperated voice – breaking in mid-sentence – crying out impatiently: ‘You’re so dumb! Can’t you get it that there’s all the difference in the world whether you want a full label applied to you or only the initials or a description suitable for a text message?”

What is the difference, we wonder, between the first list of Trans- (female male man person) and the second list of the same which we have italicized? We suspect a printing error occurred there, and if so the total of the tally is wrong. The number needs to be reduced from 71 to 67 max.

The Trans person is a particularly curious category. What can a person trans into? An animal? A plant?

Man and Woman were not among the previous options, and have apparently only just been introduced. Most people were ahead of Facebook there.

Gender Fluid brings to mind the shape-changers of Star Trek. 

Amazing that, with so comprehensive-seeming a list, there is still the category of “Other”. Wouldn’t Male, Female, Other have covered everything?

And most amazing of all is Pangender. There are people going about among us who are all of the listed genders simultaneously? Aren’t some of them mutually exclusive – as, for instance, Neither and Man/Woman? Or Agender and most of the others?

*

(The picture of the three feminists comes from a Front Page article by Daniel Greenfield.)

(Hat-tip to Robert Kantor for the 71 genders.)

This video is one of a series – a pleasure to watch in its entirety – in which Charles R. Kesler of the Claremont Institute interviews Heather Mac Donald. She thinks clearly and speaks plainly. Her ideas are genuinely profound.

Very rare, that. Most intellectuals are not very intelligent, and seem to hold to the precept: “I cannot be profound so I’ll be unintelligible – and trust that few who hear me can tell the difference.”

Heather Mac Donald is an atheist and a conservative. We expect most of our readers will be in agreement with what she says here:

The Golden Rule: Treat others as you want them to treat you.

Or (better): Don’t treat others as you’d hate to be treated yourself.

It is worth noting that belief in the Golden Rule is not common to all religions. Not even to all the “moral religions”.  There is nothing in the teaching of Islam that approximates to it, even with the most liberal interpretation of Muhammad’s less offensive doctrines.

The Golden Rule is, however, reasonable. Sensible human beings don’t need a message from a mystical sphere to see that it makes good sense.

Sam Harris is an atheist. We like a lot of what he writes and says. Just recently one of our readers sent us this statement of his, which we acknowledge, sadly, to be most probably true:

For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, we are going to be confronted by people who don’t want to live peacefully in a secular, pluralistic world, because they are desperate to get to Paradise, and they are willing to destroy the very possibility of human happiness along the way.

We have watched videos of him lecturing. We have read some articles of his. And all with appreciation. So when we were sent his new book for review, we expected to like it.

Do we like it?

To read  Jillian Becker’s review of Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris, click on its title in our margin, under Pages.

In the midst of so much bad news, of wars and massacres and the decline of the West, we thought something cheerful would be a nice change.

Perfectly irrelevant to any of our concerns, here’s three-year old Lyonya Shilovsky, a Russian drummer, performing with the Novosibirsk Symphony Orchestra.

We first saw the little drummer boy at PowerLine, and captured the video from YouTube: