New poll shows that the more religious you are the more okay with torture you are. I know, right?

Courtesy of Libraland:  

One characteristic, above all else, defines the sociopath: an utter lack of guilt or remorse. One characteristic, above all else, defines Christianity: freedom from guilt and remorse. Christianity, as a rule, doesn't explicitly endorse the worst possible things a person can do. But it does forgive them, and that insidious negation of conscience is a quietly lethal thing. Anything's possible when you don't have to live with the guilt of doing it. And as one poll from NBC shows, even a group less trusted than rapists can be good, if there's no one around to take away the guilt of being bad. 

The poll comes from MSNBC's This Week in God, 12/20/14 edition. It was conducted in concert with MSNBC's friend in print, the Washington Post. First up, this question, with results sorted by race and religious affiliation, or lack thereof:

 The poll also asked the respondents if the CIA torture was justified. This how they answered in response to that question.

In the headline to this article over at Liberland was the word "shocking." However nothing about this shocks me.

The idea that people of faith are more moral or ethical is false, and one of the main reasons that I started The Immoral Minority in the first place.

Anytime any group claims to be the moral superior of others not in their group you can be dead certain that that is where you will find the most morally corrupt of them all.

Chicago investigating mysterious robo-calls that caused 2,000 election judges not to show up on election resulting in seven hour long lines at the polls. Want to guess which political party was responsible?

Courtesy of Think Progress: 

Chicago election judges received misleading and factually incorrect robocalls before the midterm, causing close to 2,000 of them to not show up on Election Day. As a criminal investigation gets underway, the Chicago Sun-Times has tied the calls to two Republican activists while the Republican Party has denied involvement and distanced itself from the party members who it claims acted alone. (Yeah, sure they did.)

An unknown number of election judges received one or more automated phone calls that informed them about an additional required training session or told them they needed to vote a certain way in order to keep their position. As a result, polling places across the city were understaffed and lines reached seven hours in some precincts. A smaller number of voters were turned away from certain locations. 

The city was forced to dispatch standby election judges when some polling places had just one or no election judges present at 6 a.m. when polls were scheduled to open. At the time, the Chicago Board of Elections said it didn’t know who made the calls or why they were sent out. The Cook County State’s Attorney has launched a criminal investigation and Mayor Rahm Emanuel called for hearings on the robocalls.

Of course this is on top of gerrymandering that has made some Republican strongholds bullet proof, and the influx of enough corporate money to drown a medium size city under a tidal wave of dollar bills.

You know I did not play too many team sports growing up as I don't work or play well with others. However I did compete in individual sports like powerlifting, wrestling, and martial arts.

And I cannot think of one of my coaches or instructors who would EVER have encouraged me to cheat in order to win. Even if winning were the most important thing in the world to them.

I was raised to try my hardest, refuse to give up, and to accept defeat graciously if I could find no path to victory.

Losing sucks balls. But winning, when you know you do not deserve to win, well that would shame me to my very core.

And what type of people do we have running our local and federal governments, if they have no problem showing up for a job that they know they do not deserve? How can we expect them to be ethical and honest, if they got where they are by being the exact opposite?

Because if you have to cheat, lie, and bully in order to get into a position of power, than that is the very last place you should be.