No God Zone

How to become a fundamentalist.

2009-04-11T13:45:00.000-07:00

Step 1: Get Saved

Step 2: Get Baptized

Step 3: Get Lobotomized

Step 4: Get Fancy New Outfit

Step 5: Now go out, win friends and influence people.

How they think.

2009-04-05T01:52:00.000-07:00

All the comments here, while acted out, are allegedly straight from fundamentalist Christian discussion forums. I can't say if that is true or not, but it does correspond with the sort of rampant stupidity I ran into when I was one of them.

He's back: the new deceptions of Ted Haggard

2008-11-23T16:49:00.000-08:00

The odious Ted Haggard has re-emerged from under the rocks where he sought refuge after being exposed as a closet homosexual and drug user.

You will remember that Haggard was the president of the National Association of Evangelicals as well as the pastor of a mega fundamentalist church in Colorado Springs. Haggard regularly preached sermons attacking gay people but then spent his off-hours buying sex from a male prostitute and using methamphetamine -- a drug which is often used by individuals who are sexually repressed and want to loosen up. Haggard claims that he only bought the drugs but didn’t use them. No one believed him.

After Haggard was exposed as a liar and a hypocrite he started with the tearful confessions in the hopes of saving as much of his ministry as he could. At the time Haggard referred to “a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark and I’ve been warring against it my entire adult life.”

However, Haggard, who lied repeatedly during the outing process, is now concocting a new story that conflicts with what he said before. Remember that he previously said he had been fighting his homosexuality his “entire adult life”. I take that to mean from puberty until his exposure. But recently Haggard was invited to preach at a church in Illinois and told them something very different from his previous claims.

The first new facet to his story was that he claimed he was molested when he was 7-years-old. That was never claimed in his previous versions of the story. But for fundamentalists this claim is important. It verifies what they believe about sexuality -- that one is “recruited” into being gay. Thus Ted portrays himself as a victim and not as a “liar and deceiver” as he previously stated. According to one report Haggard claimed the alleged molestation was “an experience that ‘started to produce fruit’ when he turned 50.”

In this new, revised version of the fall of Ted Haggard he was not “warring” with his sexual attractions his entire life. Instead it was the results of him being molested which only “started to produce fruit” almost half a century later. Right! I suggest his first claim that he was “warring” with his sexuality his entire life is more consistent with the facts than his new claim that it only started when he turned 50 and then it “started to rage in my mind and in my heart”. One thing hasn’t changed, Ted Haggard is make to being a “liar and deceiver”.

Haggard is playing up to the lies fundamentalists tell themselves about sexuality. They can’t accept that sexual orientation is so deeply rooted in a person’s being as to be unrelated to any specific event. They want to see homosexuals as sexual vampires converting the young. But the evidence from studies of human sexuality indicates that sexual orientation exists long before individuals become sexual. The orientation may direct the sexual acts but the sexual acts don’t drive the orientation. Fundamentalists believe the complete opposite of what most experts in human sexuality say is true.

My guess is that Haggard is still as gay as he ever was. He will claim a miracle cure just the same as he previously claimed he was heterosexual all along. Most of his life Haggard successfully convinced people he was straight when he clearly wasn’t. All he has done is gone back to the same charade. And fundamentalists have to be believe him because it verifies their view of sex, sin and salvation. That none of it is true is not important. Believing it is true is all that matters.

Does God order hits on people?

2008-10-05T23:31:00.000-07:00

I stopped for a bit to eat earlier today. There was a stack of the local newspaper so I picked one up to read. On the front page was a story that saddened me. There was a photo of an elderly woman who had been murdered.

Her killer was the woman who lived in the apartment above. When the killer was asked why she did it she replied that she was following orders from God.

My view is that she is crazy. I don’t think any deity told her to kill anyone. But I have to wonder how theists know what did, or didn’t happen.

How would a Bible-believing Christian know whether or not God had ordered the woman to murder?

There are two possible ways, that I can think of, both problematic for the Christian. One is that God doesn’t speak to people. That, however, would rule out Moses, Abraham, Paul and many others. Christians regularly say that God speaks to them in some way or another. One of the hymns I remember from my childhood said: “And he walks with me, and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.”

I’ve had Christians inform me that God told them to witness to me. It hasn’t worked so apparently God got it wrong.

Pat Robertson thinks God gives him weather reports. George Bush thinks God directs his foreign policy. (God’s record is pretty dismal actually.) Christians of all sorts regularly are told to listen to the voice of God. Not only do they talk to him but they expect him to talk to them.

I don’t see how the Christian can claim that God doesn’t speak to people. So that avenue of escape isn’t open.

The other escape hole they have is to argue that God doesn’t order murder. Unfortunately for them the Bible is full of incidents where God allegedly did order murder.

So, if there is a God, and if God speaks to people today, and if God also has a history of commanding the death of sundry types of people, they exactly how do we know that he didn’t order this woman to murder the old woman?

They could technically argue that the Bible isn’t accurate. It may recount God speaking to people and it may have him ordering the killing of people but the real God doesn’t act this way. The Bible got it wrong. But if the Bible got it wrong then precisely where do they get their view of their Christian God? It couldn’t be that God speaks to them as that would put them back into the bind they are attempting to get out of.

My answer to the bind is simple. The woman is crazy. I know she is crazy because there is zero evidence that a god exist and thus no evidence that he speaks to people and orders hits on old women.

Consensus about god. Really?

2008-07-21T17:08:00.000-07:00

While the god delusion is certainly declining in the United States there is still a large percentage of people who tell pollsters that they believe in a God.

But one interesting thing about such surveys is that they generally go out of the way to avoid defining the term “god”. One result is a wide assumption that most people mean the same thing. The fundamentalist who worships Jesus will tend to assume that most other believers who attest to a god are also talking about the same deity.

Many people actually hold to a pantheistic view of god -- that god is everything that is. Others see a god as a prime mover, a force that got the universe running and then retired -- a basically deistic view as many of America’s founding fathers believed.

Even among those who claim to worship the same being there is widespread antagonism toward one another as worshipping the wrong god. A born again Christian is more likely to think that a Catholic is a heathen worshipping false idols than not. And both the fundie and the Catholic will be likely to look askance as the Mormons. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t like anybody but themselves and even then they aren’t so sure.

The Jews have Jehovah but no Jesus. Jesus-only Pentecostals have Jesus but no Jehovah. Unitarians have no trinity of gods. Most Christians don’t cling to Allah at all. Then we have Buddhists, Hindus, and hundreds of other sects.

If you were to define them precisely you’d find that the word “god” covers hundreds of different definitions. When the same word can mean hundreds of things then it is easy to get consensus. But the consensus is not real.

Once this phony consensus is assumed we then see the believers, mainly politicized Christians, claiming that consensus now justifies state involvement in some issue that they want regulated. The phony consensus is now used as the excuse to use government force against others.

The logic goes along the lines that their God wants a certain policy: stop gays from marrying, ban abortion, ban genetic engineering, etc. Next they point to the consensus in a god and argue that since most Americans believing “in God” that means that the “godly policies” they are pushing should be implemented immediately. Not only do they want it, but God wants it and so do the American people. In the end they are only speaking for themselves. The rest is a diversion.

One of the convenient things about having an imaginary friend in the sky who controls everything is that he whispers into your ears what you want to hear. You then promote the policies you wanted all along but claim to be representing this imaginary friend. That is pretty sad actually. When they pretend that everyone else’s pretend friend is actually their pretend friend as well, and then conclude that means that all the other deluded people want the same policies, we are getting into pure crazy.

“God’s will” has justified an unfathomable amount of lunacy. And far too often that lunacy has taken a vicious form where the intention of the believer is to literally harm others. Sometimes the harm is merely in denying others the same rights they have. Sometimes it is in using the force o law to penalize people for not believing what they believe. Other times it is to hurt people as punishment for their disbelief. The imaginary friend may be an illusion, perhaps a delusion, but that doesn’t mean the idea doesn’t end up harming lots of innocent people.

I have no problem when a person’s religious delusions cause them to harm themselves -- such as believers in faith healing refusing medical care. They are free to indulge their beliefs and suffer the consequences. But when they wish to impose harm on others because of their imaginary sky-buddy then it is a different matter altogether.

Debating deity: D'Sousza v. Hitchens.

2008-07-16T17:47:00.000-07:00

I recently sat in on bits of a debate between the lunatic Right-wing Dinesh D’Sousa and Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great. D’Sousa, you may remember, was the Christianist who wanted an alliance with “moderate” Muslims to install a moralistic government that would bash gays, cover up women, ban porn and generally impose the fundamentalist version of Sharia law on the country.

D’Sousa’s argument was that such moralistic campaigns by the state would end the fanatical Islamist movement. He seems to think that the whole terrorist campaign is the result of Muslims being offended by homosexuals and Western “immorality”.

Prior commitments kept me relatively busy during the debate but I could hear bits and pieces. So I will report on what I heard and about something interesting that happened afterwards.

It was my unfortunate experience to mainly hear the D’Sousa arguments. All I can say is that he is a smarmy debater who falsifies facts and uses bad logic to try to make his case for a deity.

D’Sousa finds it necessary to defend religion because some religious folks are engaged in nefarious, vicious actions, from flying planes into buildings to bombing abortion clinics or shooting staff who work there. These folk act based on the religious beliefs they hold. It is my contention that all actions come out of positive beliefs not out of negative beliefs.

As I noted once before atheism is a negation of a belief not a positive statement of belief. The atheist says he has no reason to believe in a god, he denies a belief but the atheist qua atheist asserts no belief. Individual atheists do, of course, assert positive beliefs but they do not do so as atheists but in entirely different intellectual categories. For instance, the atheist may be a conservative, socialist, libertarian, fascist, etc. It would be his positive beliefs that inspire action not his negative ones. As I put it previously “you can not get positive principles out o a negative concept. Not believing in a god doesn’t tell you how to live, what to value, what sort of society to yearn for, etc. By itself it gives no directions, values or beliefs. How could it? It is the lack of a belief”

The Islamists or Christianists who act in evil ways do so precisely because of their faith. A positive belief (in the sense of one that is asserted as factual and no in the sense of being beneficial) causes the individual to take positive action (in the sense of acting as opposing to not acting). The lack of a belief inspires no particular action. When an atheist acts in a particular way it is because of other positive beliefs he may hold not because he is an atheist.

This is important because D’Sousa was making the point that since religious folk are burdened by the vile actions of other religious folks then atheism must be blamed for the actions of all atheists. He entirely neglects the fact that the religious act because they are religious while the atheist can not act merely because he is an atheist. It is not atheism that causes the atheism to act but other beliefs he may hold.

D’Sousa wanted to blame atheists for the atrocities of Pol Pot and other Marxist dictators. Ostensibly atheistic these regimes didn’t kill because they were atheistic but killed because they were Communistic and were creating the utopia for which they yearned. It was their positive beliefs that lead to positive action not their non-beliefs.

D’Sousa seems incapable of understanding the difference. Or perhaps he does and is simply dishonest. In his case I suspect the later is often the case.

Two remarks I heard him make were so clearly false that I can not fathom any reason for making them except dishonesty. It was, again, related to the example of dictatorial regimes.

One was that D’Sousa kept referring to the Nazi regime of Hitler as atheistic. That is just absurd. One German attending the debate told me he was baffled by the remark as Germany, under Hitler, was highly religious. Hitler himself was a member of the Catholic Church and never renounced his faith, nor did his church ever find him worthy of excommunication. Hitler died a Catholic in good standing.

The second dishonest remark was D’Sousa’s claim that Cambodia, under Pol Pot, was the quintessential example of a “secular” society. He seemed to be saying that these evil regimes were the best examples of secular government.

Again the German attendee was confused. He remarked to me that he couldn’t think of a single German that he knew who actually attended church. He always thought of today’s Germany as an example of secularism. And he is correct. This is also true o virtually every successful, Western nation around. The United States is pretty much alone when it comes to religiosity among the Western, modern nations.

And, I should point out, that among the Western nations the religious US is pretty much alone in its tendency to execute people with a regularity that is frightening -- with the most religious backwater states, such as Texas, taking pride in how many people they can kill in any one year. The US is again pretty much alone in an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy that is responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. To the degree that other Western nations have been involved it has been under duress from the United States and in a very limited capacity.

The reality is that most the West today is secular and relatively peaceful. D’Sousa must know this. I sincerely doubt he is that ignorant and thus conclude his comments about secular societies being dictatorial is based on dishonesty and not ignorance.

After the debate Christopher Hitchens remarked to me that he was surprised that “so many libertarians” had sided with the religious side of the debate in a post-debate poll that was done.

Actually Mr. Hitchens was in error. He assumed the audience to be predominantly libertarian. In reality it was predominantly conservative with libertarians making up no more than 20% of the audience.

I was not present for the poll so I asked him what the breakdown was. He said it looked to be about a 50/50 split. He was disappointed at that but I was pleased. Yes, if the audience was predominantly libertarian I’d be unhappy -- libertarians tends to be more intelligent and less likely to be theistists. But when I realized that a predominantly conservative audience had split 50/50 on the god question I took that as an encouraging sign.

This audience, for the most part, should have been D’Sousa’s core group of supporters. That he could only muster half the audience in support of his position is just another sign that the United States is finally joining the West in the post-Christian era.

Photo: From a different debate. D'Sousa is on the far left and Hitchens on the right.

Death by prayer.

2008-06-24T18:32:00.000-07:00

Prayer works. Right, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Sorry, folks, but I grew up around the faith-healing hacks and know what charlatans they are and how so many believers take that stuff seriously. They are, in fact, often deadly serious.

Neil Beagley, 16, was one of those believers. So were his parents. All three belonged to the Followers of Christ cult. Neil had a urinary tract blockage. It is easily treatable. But Neil didn’t see a doctor. Nor did his parents want him to. Instead they gathered around and prayed for him.

Well, that didn’t work and Neil got even worse. So of course they did more of the same thing. Remember the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. As Neil got more ill they got more church members over to pray for him.

In this sense I guess God is supposedly like a politician who ignores one person but pays attention to a petition with 1 million signatures.

When the urinary tract is blocked starts to build up in the blood and that begins to poison the body. In this case the heart failed. So a 16-year-old boy is now dead because he trusted in prayer. He is dead because his parents trusted in prayer. He had a whole group of people around him who truly didn’t lack faith in the matter. They were real believers. And Neil is really dead.

Neil was 16 so he was old enough to make his own decision, even a stupid decision to commit faithicide -- death by faith. His faithicidal tendencies were encouraged by his fanatical parents and the cult they belonged to.

The really absurd thing is that these God addicts never learn. In the case of this family a 15-month old cousin, Ava Worthington, had recently died as well. That infant, who clearly wasn’t old enough to make a decision, had bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection.

Baby Ava died because her parents, Carl and Raylene Worthington (the sister of Neil's father) refused any treatment for the child except mumbling to their imaginary friend in the sky. They claim that their defense is “freedom of religion”. I don’t care if the parents pray to they are blue in the face. I don’t care if they pray for themselves and die as a result -- it just cleans up the gene pool and wipes out another pocket of stupid. But when they refuse care for their baby, resorting to mystical mumbo-jumbo instead they they are guilty of neglecting their infant.

I don’t really care if they believe God tells them that is okay to let a baby die to prove their faith. They choose to have that child and they are responsible for giving it decent care. To neglect the medical care of a sick infant merely because they have theological delusions is no defense.

Christian theologian unhappy with atheist books.

2008-04-19T23:45:00.000-07:00

John Haught is a very unhappy theologian. He is particularly unhappy about the “outbreak of provocative atheistic treatises” by people like Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins. I would assume he means Dennett as well though he didn’t mention him.

To be fair we should note that these books are atheist treatises in one sense but not another. They are treatises by atheists but not necessarily treatises on atheism. For instance the book by Sam Harris does explore why atheism is logical as much as he explores the destructive nature of religion in the world. The same is true for the book by Dawkins.

Haught is disappointed because he finds the works “unchallenging theologically”. He says this puts it on the same lefel “of reflection on faith that one can find in contemporary creationist and fundamentalist literature.” Let us be clear about something, that is the exact level at which most Christians understand their beliefs. Believers in America are not like Haught and Haught is unhappy about that. There is little reason to respond to the Haught’s of the world because they have almost no influence. They are almost as irrelevent in Christianity as they are in the world at large.

Nor is it the purpose of these books to discuss the elitist ideas of a gaggle of ignored theologians. These books were addressing the impact of religion in the world today. And theologians like Haught simply have no impact. Churches that don’t take the consistently irrational view of the fundamentalists have been losing members for the most part. Churches that are literalists grow. Why? Because people yearn for a consistency. And liberal theologians make no more sense to their fellow Christians than they do to the typical atheist.

We s should note that the views of theologians like Haught have been debunked in the past. George Smith’s book Atheism: The Case Against God ($15.95, available from Laissez Faire Books, 1 800 326 0996) has dealth with the nonsense of theologians rather thoroughly. Books that deal with the religion at this level have limited impact because most people don’t think at that level. Smith’s books has been around for years and is an excellent discussion on the irrationality of the concepts of a deity. And while many atheists attribute their non-belief to Mr. Smith’s excellent work it has never been a best seller. It wasn’t a best seller for the same reason that Mr. Haught has almost no influence within Christianity -- it doesn’t address religion the way most people see it.

Very few theists are conviced of theism. That is, they don’t come to theism from a logical perspective. They were not reasoned into believing and won’t be reasoned out of it. Most people just accepted it because they were taught it and they thought it was good. As religion has become more consistent, by ignoring the theologians like Haught and embracing the preachers like Robertson, people have become more dismayed. People tend to cling to religion because they think it has utility. They are religious because they think it is “good” not because they think it is true. They have rarely considered the “true” aspect.

The current spate of books by atheist are popular because they address the real issue of religion for most people. They address they question of whether or not religion is good. That is bound to disappoint the inconsequential theologians like Mr. Haught but that is why they are popular.

Haught whines that these authors “debate with these extremists rather than with any major theologians.” Well, the extremists, as Haught puts it, are the bulk of American Christiandom and America is the last major Christian nation in the world. The major theologians were debunked long ago so it would be unproductive to do it again. What these “new atheists” did was address Christianity as it really is today, not as irrelevent theologians would wish it to be.

There are two arguments that one can make in this field. One is to discuss the logic of theism and the other is to discuss the results of theism. That these books conver the later doesn’t mean that no books on the former exist. Mr. Haught just chooses to ignore them.

Haught laughs at Hitchens for discussing the “factually irreconcilable accounts of Jesus’ birth”. Haught admits the Bible has contradictions. He wants Hitchens to ignore the contradictions and concentrate on the ramblings of theologians. Yet the typical Christian gets his ideas of such things from the Bible not from individuals like Haught. Haught’s real complaint is not with the “new atheists” but with the old Christians. It is the Christians who take literalist interpretations seriously. That the members of his own faith are extremists who believe contradictory things is Haught’s problem not the problem of the new atheists.

In the end it would be absurd to write a book that address the theology of Mr. Haught. Mr. Haught might read it but very other people would. Mr. Haught’s liberal version of Christianity is a dying theology believed by fewer and fewer Christians. The reason is that it is as irrational as fundamentalist Christianity but far less consistent. Mr. Haught tries to reconcile primative theism with rationality and reason. That can’t be done.

In any conflict between individuals holding similar premises the one who is more consistent will win the rational debate. Fundamentalist Christians and liberal theologians both hold similar premises about God. But the fundamentalists is more consistent with his premises than the liberal theologian. Hence fundamentalism has become the predominate Christian view and liberal denominations have imploded.

The liberal theologian who embraces reason sometimes and theology sometimes is trapped. He can’t apply either consistently. If he applies reason consistently he ends up having less and less religion as he goes along. His god shrinks. If he is entirely consistent his god disappears altogether. The god talk of liberal theologians borders on nothingness. The god who can’t be comprehended is a god who barely exists for the human mind. And the god who barely exists is not about to inspire faith. The fundamentalists present the traditional view of God. It might be irrational but it is something that people can het ahold of of and cling to. The god of liberalism is a brief, barely visible whisp of smoke. You can’t cling to it. You can’t believe it. It has no appeal.

Mr. Haught's real dispute is not with atheists but with his fellow believers. Atheists don't address Mr. Haught's theology because, for the most party, Christians have rejected it. If one is to rebutt Christianity you need to rebutt the Christianity that is believed not the wishful thinking of a few old men. Haught is ignored by atheists because Christians ignored him long ago.

Did God kill six young students and their teacher?

2008-04-17T04:31:00.000-07:00

My first intention was not to blog about this tragedy. But I have changed my mind. The tragedy in question was the deaths of students and a teacher from the Elim Christian school in New Zealand.

The students and teacher were hiking through a canyon when they were trapped by a flash flood. Six high school aged students were killed along with the teacher.

One is tempted to point out that the fervent faith of these fundamentalist Christians didn’t save them from an “act of God”. But I thought it would be rather tasteless to make comments like that.

But of course our Christian friends are utterly tasteless and have no moral compulsion against using such tragedies for their own ends.

One student survived. And like most fundamentalists he immediately attributed his survival to God. Newspaper reports said he was “lying in a Taupo Hospital bed thanking the Lord after his ‘supernatural’ experience.” This poor, misguided boy said: “All I can say is this is my story and this is what happened to me and God saved me.” No doubt he will go around telling this story to others over and over again.

According to this boy he was “gasping for air” as the water took hold of him and he begged God to save him. “I just felt it was God tell me, ‘You have to get up and go, otherwise you’re going to die’, because water just kept coming and was getting higher.”

The principle of the school had to announce the deaths to the student body and told them: “If your faith means anything at all, it must mean everything now.” The father of a dead girl said she had gone to “a better place” and that this was a “test of his belief in God”

When I first heard of these tragic deaths I was saddened for the young lives that were snuffed out. I still am. But this sort of stupidity is sickening. Think about what is being said here.

The young boy who survived attributes his survival to prayer. Are we to believe that in the more than half hour that the students sat hung onto to a canyon wall that none of them prayed? Should we assume that these fundamentalist Christians were without faith and never once asked God to save them the same way this one boy did?

Yet the one boy lived and all the others died horrible deaths. God gets the credit for saving the life of the one but none of the blame for killing the other seven. If God consented to save the one boy then God had to have ignored the other seven. They call this merciful and loving. That is just sick.

The one boy lived because the water crashed him into a pile of logs and he was able to pull himself up onto them and hold on. The others weren’t so lucky. It was luck. It was the pure randomness of falling in the water at the right spot at the right time so that he was pushed in one direction while the deceased were pushed in another direction.

If this was God acting then we have to assume that God was responsible for killing six students and the teacher.

The headmaster of the school implores the students to have faith. Did not the students clinging to the canyon wall also have faith?

And the one parent, no doubt in mourning but still thinking irrationally, said this was a “test” of his faith. Think about that as well. Who is administering that test? Surely it would have to be God.

What he is saying, or seeming to say, is that God drowned his daughter for the sole purpose of seeing if this man would still have faith in God. What kind of monstrous deity would do that?

I truly wish that all these young people had survived the unexpected flood that they encountered. That did not happen. They died because of a natural occurrence. The boy who was saved was saved because of a natural occurrence. It was not a divine being planning. No god picked one boy to live and cruelly sent the other seven to their deaths. I doubt they are in a better place. I tend to think they exist no more. Their life and their consciousness was snuffed out. They lost everything.

I can almost understand the desire to what to make this tragedy make sense. Certainly claiming that God was involved would do that. But the God and his actions which they imagine is so irrational that it makes no sense whatsoever. But I know fundamentalists well and I know that logic and reason play little role in their life.

So the one boy who lived will tell his story about how God saved him and other believers will praise God over it. They will give little thought to how that same God, if he existed, would have had to fill the lungs of other young students with life-denying water. They will have to ignore the pain and horror that those students experienced in their last minutes of existence. They will pretend that this was loving and good and kind and that God was being merciful. They will exhibit the most pronounced trait that I find in the religious -- the ability to twist reality in horrible ways in order to justify an irrational faith in a non-existent deity.

Comrade God.

2008-04-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

The one reason that there is such widespread belief in “God” is that pollsters who ask the public if they believe don’t define the word. Christians in America like to pretend that something like 90% of the people are Christians. Of course many, many Christians don’t in fact believe that other Christians are really Christians. The fundamentalists, the anti-intellectuals of Christianity, don’t think that Catholics are Christians. They don’t believe that Christian Scientists are Christian or Jehovah’s Witnesses, nor most main stream Protestant denominations.

A large number of “believers” simply believe in “something” but can’t tell you what it is they believe. For some there is a “force”, for others it is simply “all that exists”. God believers, for the most part, don’t agree with each other what this entity is that they believe in. One of the greatest problems that theism faces is defining what it is that they believe. The moment they start defining it they lose the consensus they brag about and open themselves up to logical rebuttals.

When I speak of God in this article I want to concentrate on the relatively orthodox view of Jehovah. This view of God has been widespread in most Christian sects but is also similar to the monster worshipped by Islam. That concept basically has God as the perfect Stalinist. That is, if you take the actual traits of Stalin and then look at God you find that He/She/It shares those traits except more so. God out-Stalins Stalin.

Stalin had police spies everywhere. He wanted to put every Russian under surveillance. He had informers spread throughout the country. He had wiretaps so extensive that they make George Bush orgasmic. Yet none of Stalin’s surveillance could compare with what the theists claims for their deity. He literally sees everything you are doing.

Apparently God watches you on the toilet, watches you in the shower, watches you having sex, etc. Stalin allowed some privacy out of an inability to spy all the time. God, on the other hand, offers no privacy whatsoever. Stalin’s henchmen might hear some of what you said but God hears everything you say. And, unlike the Stalinist bureaucrats, he supposedly remembers all of it.

Stalin punished dissent. If you disagreed with his rule he could imprison you, torture you, perhaps execute you. And he did all of this -- in massive numbers. But as tyrannical as Stalin was he was unable to punish everyone. Apparently God has no such limits.

We are told he will sit in judgement on everyone who has ever lived. Stalin didn’t act as his own judge in his system. He needed help for his crimes. But apparently God can commit genocide entirely on his own. He supposedly will personally preside over the trial of every human being who has ever lived. And he will be ruthless.

First, if you disagreed with him, or didn’t believe in him, or questioned him, they you are open to punishment. God will also torture you and imprison you. But he won’t kill you because he is not as merciful as Stalin. God’s torture lasts for eternity. Orthodox Christians get moist over the concept of eternal damnation. They preach extensive sermons over how their deity will damn and torture anyone who wasn’t one of them.

One of the most famous sermons in Christian history is the tirade “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” by Jonathan Edwards. Here are some excerpts which reveals how the God of Edwards is Stalin on steroids.

There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God." -- By the mere pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hindered by no manner of difficulty,...

Sometimes an earthly prince meets with a great deal of difficulty to subdue a rebel, who has found means to fortify himself, and has made himself strong by the numbers of his followers. But it is not so with God. There is no fortress that is any defence from the power of God. Though hand join in hand, and vast multitudes of God's enemies combine and associate themselves, they are easily broken in pieces. They are as great heaps of light chaff before the whirlwind; or large quantities of dry stubble before devouring flames.

It is difficult to find one tyranny of Stalin which goes unsurpassed by the God of Christianity or Islam. Stalin ordered the executions of millions -- so has God, just more so. Stalin has tortured millions and God has tortured billions. Stalin’s torture was limited by the human body and time. God’s torture is unlimited and eternal. Compared to the God that many Christians believe in, Stalin was an amateur.

The paganism in Easter.

2008-03-23T12:16:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s Easter again. Here we’re having a big ham covered with brown sugar and honey. Confused? We aren’t celebrating Easter, we’re celebrating ham! Easter is an odd holiday actually.

We are told by Christians that it is time of the crucifixion and alleged resurrection of their God-man. The odd thing about it is that his “resurrection” floats around.

Consider how you celebrate your birthday. If you were born on February 6th then every year on that day it would be the anniversary of your birth -- your birthday. It wouldn’t take place on a different date every year. Easter is supposed to celebrate the crucifixion, death and resurrection of the God-man yet it floats around. One year he resurrected on one day and another year on another day. That is really miraculous.

The reason it floats is that Easter is not based on the anniversary of the “resurrection” of this God-man. Instead the date is set by the cycles of the Moon. Did you know that? I bet you doughnuts that 90% of Christians have no idea that this is the case. But the date of Easter is the first Sunday after the 14th day of the full moon that is on, or after, the vernal equinox.

And what about the name for the holiday? Why isn’t it called “Resurrection Day” or something like that? Why this odd word: Easter? The name Easter, which virtually all Christians now hold sacred is an old pagan goddess. It comes from the goddess Eastre or Eostre. She was the goddess of fertility. If you wondered why Easter is celebrate with eggs and rabbits then think fertility.

Celebrating the Spring equinox was common in the pagan cults of the day just as pagan celebration of the Winter solstice, around the 25th of December, was common. And these pagans celebrated with painted eggs laid by rabbits. The reality is that Easter is largely an import from the pre-Christian pagan cults. The early Puritan settlers in New England were very much opposed to Easter celebrations, as they were to Christmas, considering it nothing more than the resurrection of paganism. When these fundamentalists ruled England, during the days of Oliver Cromwell, they actually banned Easter along with that other pagan holiday, Christmas.

Who is persecuting whom?

2008-03-01T00:21:00.000-08:00

I want to take you through a little history. There are now organized groups of Christian’s whinging about how they are oppressed in America. In America! Of all places. This is a country where they hold power from the top to the bottom. But the fundamentalists among them have this persecution complex. It exhibits itself by two traits. One is the rabid desire to oppress others, quite literally. The other is to claim they are being victimized because people are free to criticize them.

So I want to take you on tour of American history since the days of the colonialists until today. Pre-colonial history is really not relevant since the Christian issue didn’t arise then.

Ever since the first Christian town was founded in North America there have been campaigns by Christians to ban books that they find tasteful. For much of American history they have succeeded at banning books, burning them and incarcerating authors they find distatseful. Even today the pro-censorship movement in the United States, except for a few radical feminists, is almost entirely made up orthodox Catholics and fundamentalist Christians.

In comparison there has never been an organized movement to ban the Bible. I should note that certain Christian materials have been subjected to the penalties of the law from time to time. But such campaigns have never been championed by secularists, atheists or agnostics. The prime movers in such attempts have always been one sect of Christians attempting to silence another sect.

Consider the so-called sabbath. Christian groups have repeatedly pushed through sabbath laws to force everyone to “honor the sabbath and keep it holy.” Various forms of amusement, activities or employment, have been banned over a period of a couple of hundred years. Individuals could be, and were, arrested for not honoring the Christian sabbath.

Over that same period of time there has never been a law forcing a Christian to violate the sabbath. While there were times that amusement on Sunday was banned by force of law there was never a time when Christians were dragged, kicking and screaming, into movie theaters, baseball games or out to the golf course.

Businesses have been forbidden to conduct their affairs on the sabbath in state after state. Never has a church been forced to close on Sunday. In fact you’d be hard pressed to find any restrictions on when Christians may worship. Some of the extreme sects are constantly in church. They meeting after meeting at their sanctuary and for the most part are entirely left to their own devices. A favor they have rarely returned to others around them.

If we look at how Christians today are acting they are the leading opponents to equal marriage rights for gay couples. You don’t have to go back very far and you’ll find that large numbers of Christians were opposing the right of cross-racial marriage as well. The fundamentalist states were the ones most likely to make it illegal for interracial couples to marry.

Never in the history of this country has there been a campaign to deny Christians the legal sanction of marriage. It just hasn’t happened.

Christians in America today have led campaigns to forbid, by force of law, any private company from giving health insurance to the partners of gay employees. Not only have they pushed such laws, but they passed them as well. Such laws are currently on the books in various states. No one has ever tried to deny Christians health benefits merely because they are Christians.

Around the country there are thousands of Christian radio stations and television stations. They preach their gospel 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. They have been given billions of dollars worth of air waves by the federal government to use as they wish. You can find such programs that bash people for being gay, for being Mormon, for being Catholic, for being secular humanists, etc. Their right to preach this material is enshrined by the First Amendment. And there has never been a concerted effort, of any import, to ban such material from the airwaves.

On the other hand, shows that offend Christians can be fined millions of the dollars by the Federal Communications Commission. Say “fuck” on television or the radio and the Christianists in the federal government will penalize the station that airs the word. Just witness the hysteria when Janet Jackson showed a little boob -- no nipple by the way, just some boob.

America has had a secular school system for a very long time. In addition there are tens of thousands of Christian schools that are, for the most part, left to their own teachings. There has been no campaign, that I know of, of any substance, to force Christian schools to teach evolution. But for decades this country had laws on the books in various states forbidding the teaching of evolution in the secular schools. And there have been numerous well-known efforts by fundamentalists to force their creationists theories onto the public schools.

Never, in this history of America, has there been an attempt to use tax moneys, tax-funded property or the powers of government to force individuals to deny the existence of the Christian deity.

On the other hand there have been millions of instances, literally millions, where non-Christians were required to acknowledge the Christian god either through mandatory prayer (in the past) in state schools, the pledge of allegiance, etc. No piece of government property has ever been used to promote images that deny the existence of a deity. Yet countless times Christians have used tax-funded property to set up their crosses, their Ten Commandments, or their statues. There has never been a public school that had students recite a pledge denying the existence of god. No teacher has ever led his students in a moment of god denial.

Now I can think of times where religious folk in America were persecuted. The Quakers were badly done by in colonial America, as was Roger Williams and other ministers. But the persecution in most those cases were done by the Calvinists, or by fundamentalist Christians. Certainly Catholic immigrants had a hard time and Catholic schools were often harassed by the state. Much of public education got its start as a campaign to inculcate Catholics with non-Catholic ideas. But the perpetrators of those campaigns were Protestants not secularists.

Mormons were badly treated in Ohio, Illinois and Missouri, forcing them to flee to Utah. But the people doing the persecution were other Christians. Then the Mormons retaliated by killing a lot of Christians at Mountain Meadows massacre. Jehovah’s Witnesses were treated terribly badly during World War I as were the pacifistic sects of Christians. But once again it was other Christians who led those campaigns.

I’m not saying that non-believers in the United States can’t be unpleasant and nasty or even intolerant. No doubt some can be. But such people have never led any campaigns of note to strip Christians of the same freedoms and rights that others enjoy. One simply can’t say the same for Christians.

The tribal morality of the Bible.

2008-02-10T01:07:00.000-08:00

The morality of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, confuses people. They don’t understand how God could, on one hand command people not to murder and then order them to kill. He forbids fornication and adultery and then turns over young girls to the men of Israel for their pleasure. He says: “Thou shalt not steal” and then orders the wholesale plunder of entire communities.

The atheist has one simple answer. The Bible wasn’t written by a deity at all but by men and the morality of the Bible reflects the morality of the men of those days. That is one thing that escapes people. Never did the Bible make a giant leap in the realm of morality. It was never any better than the men who lived at the time it was written.

Throughout the world, during the period that the Bible was written, slavery was common. And nowhere does the Bible condemn it. On the contrary it is, in some cases, ordered by the alleged Deity behind the book. He sanctions slavery. The Bible is unusually silent about child rape. A point one minister in New Zealand used in his own defense when he admitted to attacking small girls sexually. He said the Bible never forbade what he did -- and it didn’t. At every point in its existence the Bible reflected the values of the society around it.

Yet, you would think that a god, sending his word to man, could have done better than that. He didn’t forbid war but encouraged it. He didn’t recognize women as man’s equal but as his subordinate and property. Even the New Testament, written during a period when civilization, under the Greeks and then Romans had made some advances, is unable to surpass the common morality of the day. The best that it can offer in the way of slavery is to tell masters to treat their slaves well and to tell slaves to obey their masters. Apparently it never dawned on God, or his alleged son, to say: “Masters, free your slaves.”

For the most part the followers of Jesus saw nothing wrong with enslaving other human beings for centuries. Only as the culture began to change, following the unchristian Age of Enlightenment, did believers in any significant number become opponents of slavery. And even then it was the more orthodox believers who defended this crime and more liberal, or deistic, types who opposed it.

The morality of the Bible, and the church I think, rarely led humanity. It followed. As morality evolved the morality of the Bible changed. Ditto for the church.

The thing to understand about Biblical morality is the reason behind the double-standards of the Old Testament. The Hebrews were a tribe and they had a tribal mentality. So, of course, the deity that invented also had a tribal mentality. And that means there are rules for within the tribe and rules for outside the tribe.

Jehovah’s edict “thou shalt not kill” was a rule for within the tribe -- for the most part. He did make some exceptions which I will discuss momentarily. Where genocide was commanded it was against other tribes. The rules that the made-up god of the Hebrews spoke about were fundamentally rules for a people who had to live in relative close proximity to one another, who were related to one another, and who faced an existence of very limited resources in a harsh climate.

But when it came to other tribes then the rules were chucked out the window. That is typical tribal thinking. In the primitive economies of the day man produced very little and the region could be harsh and demanding. Every other tribe was a threat because their sheep or goats would eat the limited grass available and that means your sheep wouldn’t eat. If they drank the well dry you thirsted. Every other tribe was a threat merely because it existed. So the god of the Israelites was regularly ordering them to conquer, kill, plunder and spoil.

Even when this Jehovah fellow commanded the execution of Hebrews, for various sins, it was primarily to keep the peace within the tribe. In a world of tribal warfare each tribe must remain united or fact extinction. Life was a constant battle. There could be no tolerance for diversity in such primitive conditions. In addition to cohesion the tribe needed to remain strong and to outgrow competing tribes.

Jehovah wanted homosexuals within the tribe killed. Other than knowing nothing about sexual orientation, a relatively modern concept, the main reason to execute such people was because sexuality that didn’t lead to reproduction threatened the tribe. If it didn’t out-populate competing tribes in the region it could be wiped out.

Thou shalt not kill was necessary within the tribe for the tribe to survive. Killing others, outside the tribe, was seen as necessary for the same reason. Moral rules against adultery were necessary to keep harmony within the community. The men were the warriors who had to protect the tribe. If they hated one another, or wished to harm one another, it weakened the tribe and made them more vulnerable. Thou shalt not steal was a rule within the tribe so that there wouldn’t be divisions within the community. Again when it came to those outside the tribe, Jehovah was quick to recommend massive theft of the land, crops, and livestock of the tribes that his people slaughtered.

The Hebrews argued that they were a “chosen people”. And the moral code we see in the Ten Commandments (flawed though they may be) were a code for the tribe. Jehovah didn’t give a flying fuck about the other tribes. Kill them. Slaughter every man, woman and child, he said. In particularly vindictive moments he supposedly commanded that their livestock be killed as well -- though often he simple said to steal it.

If the Hebrews were “chosen” what does that say about everyone else? They were not chosen. In other words, they were rejected. They weren’t part of the tribe. And thus the moral codes of the tribe treated them differently than it treated tribe members.

Jehovah was the sock-puppet of the Hebrews of that day. He was a sad and rather pathetic god in that he had no moral grandeur at all. His morality was the morality of a backward, violent tribe.

In the New Testament man had moved somewhat beyond the tribal mentality. There were great trade routes and concepts of law established by the Greeks and the Romans. And these laws were seen as applying to all men equally. The ethics of Jesus reflected that reality. Instead of being as tribal as the Hebrews he spoke of treating others as you would be treated. This sort of reciprocity was necessary in a world of trade and exchange.

And while the Romans and the Greeks both moved humanity ahead in some important ways they also failed. They never saw the evil that is inherent in human slavery. And neither did Jesus. For once again, the New Testament, like the Old, never managed to go beyond the morality of the day. It didn’t do so because it was the work of the men of those days and not the writings of the some divine lawgiver.

A question from a Christian reader.

2007-11-04T13:19:00.000-08:00

One Christian reader writes:

“Hey NGZ i dont know if this is the right place to ask this question or if there is another thread i should post it on, but i was reading one of the articles you put up about the validity of the gospels and had a quick question. If the roman uprising was in 70A.D. wouldnt it have been mentioned in the gospels since it would have fufilled what jesus said when he said "not one stone will be left standing"

“Also, shouldnt there be one thing that could totally discredit the gospels and be unrefuttable? But everytime I hear an argument against the gospels there is always some fact that comes up that can argue against it. Anyways just wondering about the first question.”

Let me try to answer you question -- though I suspect that no answer will satisfy you if it contradicts your conclusion. In Luke 21, Matthew 24 and Mark 13 Jesus is quoted as allegedly saying that no stone will be left standing of the Temple. You then ask why doesn’t the N.T., if it were written after 70AD mention the destruction of the Temple since that would prove Jesus was correct.

Your assumption is that the quote in question is from before 70 AD. In fact it may well be that this verse was added in to do precisely what you suggest could be done.

The oldest surviving manuscript of Luke is from around 200, 130 years after the temple was destroyed. Most scholars, outside fundy circles, believe Luke was based on two other accounts: the gospel of Mark and an unknown source. And most say it was written after the destruction of the Temple.

Matthew is also widely believed to be based on the gospel of Mark and the unknown source. Most scholars believe it was written after 70 AD up to around 100 AD. And most assume Mark was written after 70 AD. It would have been relatively easy for Mark to be written after the temple was destroyed and for the prediction to be added at that time. Predicting something after it happens is easy.

The other two gospels are widely assumed to have copied sections from Mark. No gospel manuscript that is clearly dated to prior to 70 AD with the “prophecy” exists.

If I wanted to fake a manuscript predicting the moon landing in 1969 I would write something as if it were from some years earlier, say 1940. What I would not do is then add a verse saying “As actually happened in 1969” as that would clearly indicate the account was written afterwards. The consensus of most scholars is that nothing written prior to attack on Jerusalem exists.

The Journal of Biblical Studies makes the the point that Matthew and Luke “must have been written after Titus’ siege of Jerusalem because they allude to it.”

In addition there is another problem for biblical literalists. Jesus says of the Temple that “not one stone” will be left standing. The photo that is attached is of the famous Western wall of the temple in question still standing. This photo alone, a small portion of the Temple shows hundreds of stones standing on top of each other.

Your second question is why isn’t there just one thing that discredits the gospels. There are dozens of items that discredit a literalistm interpretation of the Bible.

But the issue is that fundamentalists reject immediately all evidence that doesn’t correspond with their conclusion. They judge evidence based on whether it fits the thesis instead of judging the thesis as to whether it fits the evidence. Here are a few examples.

The New Testament says Jesus was dead and buried for three days and three nights. It also says he died on Good Friday afternoon and rose from the dead on Sunday morning. No clock, western or Jewish, ancient or modern, allows you to get three days and three nights out of that time period.

The four gospels do not have the same account of the resurrection. One gospel says one woman discovered the resurrection, another says two, another mentions three while another is indeterminate. One says this happened after sunrise while another says it was still dark.

There is a lack of clarity as to who told the woman or women about the resurrection. In some stories it is one individual telling them in others it is two. In some cases the man/men who are either angels or Jesus, or Jesus and an angel, are inside the tomb when they tell them. In other accounts he/they is/are outside the tomb. Four accounts with many conflicting details.

If the death of Jesus was a messy affair his birth was as well. The gospels mention the slaughter of the innocents, Herod allegedly killing all the new-borns. Yet not one single historical account seems aware of this. Only Matthew mentions this genocide while the three other gospels ignore it. Matthew says Herod slew all the “children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under...” That covers a wide territory and no one found it worth mentioning anywhere except in one gospel. Such an atrocity would be chronicled.

Two gospels say Jesus was born when Herod was king. Luke says that at that time a census was taken “when Quirinius was governing Syria.” So you have Herod ruling on section and Quirinius in Syria. Yet these two never ruled at the same time. Herod the Great died 10 years before Quirinius became governor of Syria.

Josephus gives an account of the period. He says Herod died and was replaced by Archelaus. But Caesar replaced Archelaus with Quirinius. There was a ten year gap between Herod and Quirinius yet the gospel account has them ruling together. It also says the census was taking when Herod was alive which was not the case. But even the census account has mistakes. It says that the parents of Jesus had to return home to be counted and that each person was required to do so. In fact during Roman census taking no one was ever required to return home to be counted. The gospels have that wrong.

Matthew recounts that the parents of Jesus lived in Bethlehem and moved to Nazareth. Luke has it the other way around, they lived in Nazareth and moved to Bethlehem. Luke also says after Jesus was born they “returned into Galilee” while elsewhere the New Testament says they fled to Egypt. Mark never thought to mention the virgin birth nor did Paul.

Two gospels assert Jesus is descended from David but use the birth line of Joseph as proof yet Jesus was not a blood relation to Joseph if he was virgin born.

The gospel of John never mentions Satan, demons or devils. It never mentions the Sermon on the Mount (which the others seem to find very important0, is the only one to report that Jesus washed the feet of the disciples and says that only Mary Magdalene witnessed the resurrection -- something the others dispute.

Now if an account like this were given, outside of the claims of religion, most Christians would believe it erroneous, not exactly trustworthy -- perhaps false. They would not spend hours trying to concoct arguments that let them have it both ways. They say “that’s a problem” for the text. They would acknowledge somebody goofed or that the account is unreliable. But they refuse to treat the Bible with the same standards that they apply to any other book.

In essence there are many issues that the Bible contains that call it into question in regards to being the word of some deity. But Christians tend to ignore them or concoct inventive, but strained justifications, as to why it doesn’t actually mean what it says. If worse comes to worse they merely accuse someone of not having the “right” interpretation which always means their own interpretation.

The Padre Pio fraud.

2007-10-24T06:29:00.000-07:00

A new book by historian Sergio Luzzatto, The Other Christ: Padre Pio and 19th Century Italy, argues that there is documentary evidence that the allegedly “saint” was a fraud. Now there’s a surprise.

As far as I’m concerned Pio, whose real name was Franceso Forgione, claimed to be a stigmatic, one whose body exhibited the wounds of Christ. In 1911 the priest wrote a letter claiming that he felt pain in the middle of his hands and under his feet and that a red mark appeared. But he conveniently prayed that they be removed and they were. He didn’t pray that the pain be removed and he insisted he still felt it but that now God made the marks invisible so other people couldn’t see them.

Pio claimed the marks appeared in the center of his hand. A nail through that section of the hand would not hold a body to the cross. The nails would have to be two to three inches further done. Apparently God, in giving people the “wounds” of Christ mislocated them. In reality stigmatic frauds mimic the wounds they see in popular art.

Pio claimed that the love of God was exhibited through suffering inflicted on the believer. What a masochist! And the crazy priest claimed that Satan appeared before as naked girls dancing, as the Pope, and even as the alleged Virgin herself. In another incident the priest claimed he was hearing confession in August, 1918 where he was “suddenly terrorized by the sight of a celestial person”. The boy in confession apparently would not see this apparition since Pio claimed the vision was in “my mind’s eye.” The apparition supposed threw a steel blade that emitted fire into him causing great pain and he claimed he was in constant pain from that point on.

Pio was always claiming to be sickly and in pain even as a young man. During the First World War he was in the army but spent much of his time in the infirmary. It appears to me that the priest had a psychiatric condition known as Munchausen syndrome. The founder of Rome’s Catholic university hospital concluded that the priest was “an ignorant and self-mutilating psychopath who exploited people’s credulity.” Reports to the Pope, about the priest, claimed he used a metal-tipped whip to beat himself. Of course in religion mental illness can easily be sanctified. In theological fantasy the mentally ill are either demon possessed or saints.

Pio then claimed that Christ popped down for a visit and inflicted the “wounds” on his body on October 22, 1918. This time the wounds were permanent. His followers say he preferred to “suffer in secret” though letters telling people about his wounds survive and the priest allowed pictures of himself to be taken where he appears to be showing off the wounds int he most obvious way possible. He even announced, at one point, “I do want to suffer, even to die of suffering, but all in secret.” Somehow announcing it makes it less than secret, quite the contrary it publicizes the suffering and creates the attention that is being sought.

In 1923 the priest was forbidden to teach the boys at the monastery school because the Vatican considered him a “a noxious Socrates, capable of perverting the fragile lives and souls of boys.” And when he admitted to taking money during confession he was forbidden to hear confession.

Luzzatto reveals that the Vatican has the signed testimony of a pharmacist, Marie de Vito, that: “Padre Pio called me to him in complete secrecy and telling me not to tell his fellow brothers, he gave personally an empty bottle, and asked if I would act as a chauffeur to transport it back from Foggia to San giovanni Rotondo with four grams of pure carbolic acid.” The testimony had been secured and given to the Vatican by the Archbishop of Manfredonia who believed that Pio was a fraud.

Even some pro-Pio publications have written that the priest periodically would smell of carbolic acid. Others claimed that there was a sweet, flowery smell coming from the wounds. Of course if the smell of carbolic acid was problem then Pio might wish to cover it up by perfuming himself heavily.

The revelation of the document has brought about an interesting response from the fundamentalist Catholics. Pietro Siffi of the Catholic Anti-Defamation League argued that Pope John Paul II declared Pio to be a saint and “canonization carries with it papal infallibility.” Well, that settles it.

After the death of the priest the Pope pushed through canonization for the priest. It was a kind of drive-through window for sainthood.

Interestingly as the priest got older his wounds seemed to fade. Now a physical explanation would be that aging made it harder for him to fake the wounds. And when he died and his body was examined there were no wounds apparent at all. Yet, the wounds were alleged to have been present his entire life. This would indicate very superficial wounds that healed unless aggrevated intentionally.

And it should be noted that stigmatics don’t actually every exhibt marks of crucifixion as is widely assumed. For instance there is no indication that there were actual holes in the hands of Pio, merely wounds on the skin itself -- something that can be caused by various irritants. In addition if you look at the photos of Padre Pio you may notice something of interest regarding the wounds. In the photo when he was younger the wounds appear smaller, rounder and near the center of his palms (which is not where the nails would have gone during a crucifixion). In the photo of the older Pio the wound not only enlarged, and became more more dramatic, but is now closer to his thumb, which is still the wrong place anyway.

Is every belief a form of faith?

2007-10-18T05:30:00.000-07:00

There has been some discussion in our comments, instigated by believers, over whether belief and faith are the same thing. I contend they are not. A belief is any idea or concept held by an individual. Faith is a method by which some people hold a belief. For the Christian, faith is the method by which he comes to hold his beliefs. And this is where some confusion then arises.

Because the Christian holds a belief on the basis of faith he often calls his belief “my faith.” Because he comes to his beliefs by the method of faith, and then calls those beliefs faith, he also concludes, wrongly, that all beliefs must be matters of faith. He has, in essence, defined reason out of existence.

Beliefs can also be obtained on the basis of evidence as well. I believe that the night will end and day will begin because I have thousands of such experiences. [And sure enough it was night when I wrote this essay and is now day when I proof-read it. My belief was again verified as I suspect is most likely to happen over the next 24 hours one again, as well.]

This process of day/night is something I can define and everyone knows what I mean. It is verifiable by others and repeatable. It is not something that I alone experience or claim to experience. We can film it, record it, describe it in great detail. There is reams of evidence to support it. That conclusion is not a faith even though it is a belief.

Let us consider some examples of non-theists beliefs regarding that can be faith based or reason based.

We have all meet people who are crooks and people who are honest. On the occasion of a first meeting with someone I may invite them into my home. Is this an act of faith? It would appear to be on the surface. After all I know nothing about this individual and yet I invite them into my home. In reality it is a reason based action. Based on past experience I know most people aren’t going to steal from me but I also know that quite a few will. I am taking a risk based on the cumulative evidence of previous incidents.

If the guest departs and my wallet departs with him what trust I exhibited in him is gone. I have evidence that showed that I was wrong about this guest. I now assume the person is a crook and I have changed my position. Many a mother, however, has held faith regarding her criminally-inclined progeny in spite of overwhelming, conclusive evidence to the contrary. That is not playing the odds that is faith. The mother may well have known her son or daughter to have done horrendous things on a repeated basis and yet, once again, denies the possibility that they committed the latest atrocity. That is truly faith in action.

Many things we do are based on beliefs which most clearly are not faith. The theist loves to intentionally confuse the two as a means of trying to justify his faith conclusions. To do this he defines reason out of existence. Any belief to him is a faith. Yet reason and faith are very different means to come to a conclusion or a belief. By redefining all beliefs as deriving from faith they attempt to win the debate by pretending there is nothing to debate. In essence they define the opposition out of existence.

Most examples they give as evidence are beliefs derived through reason and logic. You do not believe a chair will hold you based on faith. It is derived from experiences that provide you with actual evidence that chairs do tend to support the weight of the people sitting upon them. The chair does not hold you up because you have faith in it and you do not sit down because you have faith. Long before you yourself voluntarily sit in a chair you have accumulated evidence that they work. As an infant you see people sitting in chairs even if you are incapable of doing so voluntarily yourself. Your first chair experience is likely to be a highchair with a tray to eat from where you are placed by others whether you want it or not. You accumulate evidence possible from the day you are born. You may be lying with you mother in the hospital bed with visitors sitting in nearby chairs.

Recently I had the unfortunate experience of one of those occasions where the chair actually failed. It was a Sunday afternoon and my host, where I am a guest, had two friends over for dinner in the garden. Four lawn chairs made of bamboo were around the table. The two guests were seated in the their chairs. The host and I were in the kitchen. I brought something out to put on the table and then sat on the chair which, in the wet weather had weakened substantially. It, and I, went crashing to the ground. The chair did not hold. It wasn’t that I had lost any faith in it. It just was rotten.

I got up and brought out a sturdy dinning room chair to use instead. The host came out and was surprised, she hadn’t realized the chairs had rotted. So she sat down carefully in her chair and went crashing to the ground anyway. To say the least the two guests were terrified to move in their chairs.

My belief is that chairs will hold me up. But in reality it has always been a qualified belief. I assume it will hold me up because most of the time it will. I don’t assume it will do so 100% of the time but it is close enough to 100% that I give it no thought when I sit down. If I lived in a world where the chairs crashed to the ground far more frequently I might not draw the same conclusion. I might push on a chair several times, testing it before using it. My belief regarding chairs is evidence based not faith based. With sufficient evidence to the contrary I change my beliefs and my behavior.

But if I believed, as a matter of faith, that the chair would hold me up then experiences with failed chairs, no matter how numerous, would have no impact whatsoever on my belief. I would continue to sit down and continue to crash to the ground on a fairly regular basis. I might invent reasons as to why the chair failed. I might say that it was my own fault and that my faith was weak. I might say my faith was being tested much the way Job was being tested. I might conclude that I crash to the ground repeatedly because it a way to see if I will hold my faith in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. This is critical. A faith based belief is one that an individual holds even if the evidence is to the contrary.

Advocates of “faith healing” are a prime example. You are supposed to claim the healing from God even when the evidence shows you are still ill. I’ve been to enough of the major faith healing crusades to tell you that this quite common. Even if the pain is still present, or the tests show the virus is still in the system and ravaging it, the truly faith based individual will tell himself that it is a delusion and that he is healed. You get this in the charismatic Christians and a similar, but different, form in the Christian Scientists (who my theology professors enjoyed saying were neither Christians nor scientists.)

A person who has faith the Bible is infallible and inerrant will believe this regardless of any evidence. The Bible says that god is a spirit and that no man has ever seen god. It also says that Moses saw god -- yet Moses was a man. If Moses saw god then a man saw god and the claim that no man has ever seen god can’t be true. Christians who are not into the infallible idea of the Bible just find it one of those parts that are wrong. Fundamentalists simply can’t accept that idea since their faith tells them the Bible is infallible. They will go to great lengths to try to explain it away, or just ignore it, so that the book is infallible.

Some I’ve met had no answer but still insisted it was infallible and not a contradiction. Two missionary types who stopped into my business intent on converting someone had no reply. I showed them the verses in question and asked them about this. The reply was: “It’s not a contradiction.” I couldn’t see why it wasn’t a contradiction and asked them to explain to me why this was not contradictory. “Because it isn’t” It was like one of those small children who answers every question with “Because.”

In reality they clearly had no idea. They couldn’t be honest enough to say: “We don’t know, let us research it.” Instead they simply stubbornly insisted that it was not a contradiction “because” it couldn’t be a contradiction. It couldn’t be a contradiction because it’s in the Bible which has no contradictions. And round and round the circle they go. They had a belief but it was not based on evidence and reason. It was based on faith. As such reason can’t challenge it.

One reason that I find real debate with believers useless is that you are on two different planes. You come in speaking about evidence but they don’t need evidence. As the New Testament puts it, faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” One theologian, an evangelical, says that while faith is illustrated in the Bible this is the only place it is defined.

It is a belief held on the basis of hope where having no evidence is seen to be evidence. St. Augustine put it this way: “I believe, because it is absurd. I believe, because it is impossible.” Church father Tertullian, in De Carne Christi wrote: “And the Son of God died; it is whole credible because it is ridiculous. And, buried, He rose again: it is certain, because impossible.”

Now there are people in this world to whom I would trust my very life. This is not because I have faith in them but because I have an evidence-based belief. Over and over they have proven themselves to be good and decent people who have stood by me in the sunshine and the storms.

There are other people which circumstances and less evidence require I put trust in them. For instance a physician may not not have proven himself to me. But I assume that because he is a physician he has training in his field and is likely to do less harm to me than the problem I want addressed. Were doctors to fail as frequently as government I might not exhibit the same amount of trust.

This brings us to another important difference between faith and reason, one already alluded to. Beliefs that are reason based are continually open to change. They can be modified or abandoned depending on the nature of the new evidence. Science is a reason based system of beliefs. That is why it is constantly modified or adjusted as new evidence is found.

The faith-driven think that proves that science is false. You see this among the silly creationists who argue that evolution is clearly false because it keeps being adjusted. All reason based beliefs are subject to such evidence driven adjustments. Faith statements are not. If Darwinian evolution were a faith, as some religionists contend, then the Darwinist would not adjust his beliefs according to new evidence but would stubbornly cling to the old beliefs much the way the fundamentalists do to their religion.

The Christian may argue, as many have, that they know their faith is justified because their belief has “changed my life” in some meaningful way. I’ve heard the same thing from Muslims about Allah and from Objectivists about Atlas Shrugged. But if I were to point out to the Christian that the lives of others were also changed by beliefs that were not Christian they will dismiss that as worthless as far as evidence goes. The others are wrong even if their beliefs changed their lives.

They are saying that the change in their life caused them to believe: because they believed they changed. And it is readily apparent that myriad and contradictory beliefs, of almost any kind, if held strongly enough, can bring about such changes. This only shows that people can change not that the specific belief is true.

I’ve heard the claim that some people have died for their faith in Jesus and that this is proof the belief is true. Others have died for the religion of communism (and I do think it is inherently religious). There are people who died defending the beliefs of Hitler. Such martyrs don’t prove that Marx or Hitler were correct. Clearly there are plenty of people willing to die for Allah. And by current counts more Muslims will die for their faith than Christians -- does that mean Islam is more true? Obviously not.

Similarly some Christians argue that believers do good things which prove that the faith is true. No one disputes that. So do atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Scientologists, Mormons, etc. Point this out and their conclusion doesn’t change. The evidence they offered was never the actual reason for the faith. In each case, if you strip away the unique nature of the justification for believing, they still believe in spite of the evidence. It is as the Apostle Paul said the substance of things hoped for.

And you can do this over and over again with the evidence that they offer and in the end they are still clinging to their beliefs. The explanation for this behavior is not hard to understand. Faith is inherently not based on evidence. It is not reasonable beliefs logically deduced from facts. It is belief held in spite of facts, or even in the face of facts which disprove it.

There is some question over whether the tomb of Jesus was found or not. Some cultural Christians, with little or no faith, might find it disturbing and rethink their belief. But even if the evidence was overwhelming that Jesus had been buried here and did not raise from the dead, it will have almost no impact on the faith of most fundamentalists. Evidence is not needed, not particularly wanted and, if contrary to the conclusions they hold, strenuously resisted or ignored.

Many theories that are held are based on a preponderance of the evidence and others are based on overwhelming evidence. It would be a rare thing to have absolute certainty. That is another thing the faith driven jump upon. They assume that a belief that is not 100% certain is likely to be false. In fact I tend to think absolutely certain beliefs are the ones most likely to be false. Reality is not as neat as most of us like to believe.

I believe, based on the empirical evidence, that societies based on a market system, with the rule of law and non-obtrusive states are more prosperous with better living conditions for most people. I believe a market order leads to a system of feedback loops where people are better able to solve problems. I do not believe it offers utopia. I don’t not believe it will present a perfect society where no social problems exist and where every person is happy, healthy or wealthy. I also believe that anyone who claims their political or economic system will offer such perfection is preaching a faith not offering a reasonable way for obtaining such things.

It is entirely possible that some good people might get screwed over in a free society. I would hope not. On the other hand I know good people get screwed over all the time in non-free societies. And the less freedom, the higher the percentage of the population who gets screwed. If you were to present a social problem and ask me if I were absolutely certain that freedom would solve it I would have to say no. I might have some confidence it would and could explain why but I don’t have absolute certainty. Even in cases where I know freedom solves that problem time after time there may be other factors involved that means that one in 50 times, or one in 100, that it will not lead to the optimal results. Has it been disproved? No. Just as a medicine that cures most patients, may not work in some cases, isn’t proof that the medicine is faulty. It merely proves that reality is messy and good solutions sometimes fail under some conditions -- like the chairs in the garden. The belief is still justified because the evidence is good that in most cases it is correct.

Religious beliefs are not like this. The faith driven will point to someone who allegedly had cancer and who got slapped on the head by some tonques-talking, white-suited, toupe-wearing evangelist. They will inform us that the person was truly and genuinely healed. And they will ignore the 999 who got equally slapped on the forehead, had their wallets relieved of a financial burden, but who did not get healed. If a medicine worked 1 in 1000 times you would ignore it for something with better odds. And if the healing ability were that low for the medicine, you may well assume that the one actual case that appeared healed, had another reason for it other than the treatment. This is not how faith driven operate. For then faith determines the evidence, the evidence doesn’t determine the faith.

Pope appears to faithful in bonfire. Right!

2007-10-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

The Daily Mail in the England is basically the newspaper by morons, about morons and for morons. It is a cheap tabloid gossipy publication that is only taken seriously by those who can’t read. And now it is reporting that Pope John Paul II is rising from the dead and waving to people and they have proof. And according to them the Vatican agrees!

The Daily Mail says that photos were taken of a bonfire and that witnesses claimed it was the Pope himself in the flames. Or to be more precise the witnesses claimed the flames appeared to be the Pope. And the Mail published the photo in question which we reproduce here. Actually none of the witnesses appeared to noticed the Pope at the time though now some claim that he does indeed appear in the photo.

Father Jarek Cielecki, a priest and thus one given to delusional thinking by profession, says that “You can see the image of a person in the flames and I think it is the servant of God, Pope John Paul II.” This sort of bogus hocus-pocus will no doubt be used to proclaim the Pope a saint by the current Pope and former Hitler Youth member.

What you have is flames in a shape. But if you compare that shape to this one you can see that the shape is similar. It is much the way that you can see animal shapes in clouds. The mind looks for patters which are familiar, a useful tool in science but damn pesky when people apply it where there is no legitimate reason to do so. Just as the mind finds real patters that do exist it can finds patters that don’t actually exist -- conspiracy theory is built on that premise.

Not to be outdone the more reputable London Times noted that the alleged miracle is even more miraculous than first thought. They noted the presence of Paul McCartney, Elvis Presley and Jimmy Connors as well and have dubbed this “Wonder of wonders, miracles of miracles.” And the photos offer the same proof for the Papal claims. Now in my eyes the Elvis match is the best but I know it can’t be true since Elvis is alive and well and flipping burgers in a roadside cafe in rural Michigan. But, he did know about the 9/11 attack in advance and worked with the International Bankers and Jews to plot it as part of the drive to build the NAFTA superhighway for the North American Union.

Contest: I encourage readers to post links to any other photos which indicate who else has joined the Pope in a little fire walking. Just post links to said photos in the comments section.

Attempts to form Christian Party racked by problems.

2007-10-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

Attempts to form a Christian political party in New Zealand have been having problems. Fundamentalists formed the Christian Heritage Party. It was headed by Graham Capill, a fundamentalist Calvinist.

They were the “family values” party and Capill proved it by getting his wife pregnant nine time. They were the party of morality and anti-gay to the core. Capill is in jail today for multiple counts of molesting girls unders the age of 10. Some of his fellow fundamentalists supported him arguing that what he did is not actually condemned in the Bible. And indeed it isn’t. Neither is slavery but I am not sure that would mean he should practice it. The CHP couldn't survive the arrest and folded.

The one Christian party that managed to get some members elected was the United Future Party. But once in office they went into coalition with the rather left-wing Labour Party, keeping it in power. They prefered the privileges of having ministers in the cabinet to their principles. In the next election most their supporters deserted them and they lost most their seats. The more religious types left the party and the rump of it still sits in parliament, with far fewer seats and still votes for the Labour government in exchange for positions for the party leader.

The fundamentalist Destiny Party tried to launch but it was built around a self-proclaimed bishop who scares a lot of people. He didn’t make things better by having his male supporters dress in black outfits and then march through the streets paramilitary style. The look was so reminiscent of the Nazis that it was a major PR disaster and they were never able to dig themselves out of the mess.

One member of parliament, who had deserted United Future because they weren’t religious enough, was going to form a united Christian party with the Destiny people. But they have been fighting like cats and dogs. And apparently they have been telling lies about the process to form this united party. The MP said Destiny lied to him. Destiny announced they were delisting their party and forming the new party with the MP as a co-leader. He said they had done this without his approval and he was ambushed. Apparently he knew about the announcement all along.

After saying he had no idea what was going to happen in that press conference he now admits that the answers given there were scripted in advance with his own knowledge. This MP says he still intends to launch a new party with himself as the leader. And one of the individuals involved is another member of parliament Taito Phillip Field. But the New Zealand Herald reports that Mr. Field has been “held up by his legal fight agaisnt police attempts to lay bribery and corruption charges against him.”

I wonder what it would be like it they weren’t the moral majority?

Have you read that book?

2007-09-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

A comedic look at what happens when one actually reads the Bible.

Does Jesus make you fat?

2007-08-30T04:25:00.000-07:00

Does Jesus make you fat? Apparently so.

Here is an obesity map of the United States from the Centers for Disease Control. The darker the read the higher the percentage of obese residents in that state.

When I first saw the map it immediately struck me that the fat states are the Bible-belt states. Bible-believing Christians like to argue that the body is the temple of God. And they love megachurches so I guess it follows that they love megabodies as well.

Of course the red states in the fat map are also the “red states” on the political map since America has divided itself political on religious grounds with the Republicans being dominated by an American version of the Taliban and the Democrats being secularists for the most part. Libertarians were once proudly secular but these days one has to wonder.

Compare the fat map to the Jesusland USA map that was circulated after the last presidential election.

There is lots of overlap. Certainly the Bible-belt states tend to be the fat states. This is no surprise actually. The Bible-belt states tend to be dysfunctional is dozens of ways. They are more crime prone, less educated, have more poverty, more venereal disease, higher teen pregnancy rates, higher divorce rates, more homicides, shorter life spans, etc. See here,

I previously identified the most fundamentalist states in America as Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. Every one of these states have obesity levels exceeding 25% of the state’s population.

At the same time I identified the US states that were the least religious. Those were California, Massachusetts, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wyoming. Everyone of these “secular” states had obesity rates below 20%.

Religiosity and obesity seem to go together.

I don’t purport to prove that religion causes people to be fat. I actually don’t believe that. Nor do I think that religion causes them to have higher divorce rates, higher VD rates, higher crime rates, etc., even if all those connections are there. In reality I suspect that religion, and other forms of dysfunctional behaviors and attitudes, come from a common root: a lack of intelligence.

There is a clear correlation between crime rates and intelligence. The less intelligent people are more likely to commit crimes. But lower intelligence is positively correlated with all sorts of dysfunctional attitudes and actions. The reality is that people aren’t stupid because they are fundamentalists -- they tend to be fundamentalists because they are stupid. And this level of dumbth, as Steve Allen would describe it, is responsible for lots of other social problems. Dumb people tend to be fatter, more criminally prone, more likely to contract VD, more likely to have children out of marriage, more likely to be drug addicts, alcoholics or exhibit a myriad of social problems.

If prayers worked then why the pacemaker?

2007-08-15T05:19:00.000-07:00

Conservative, fundamentalist Christian, Ron Paul, who is campaigning in the Republican Primary was recently in Iowa. Paul's wife, Carol, has had heart problems and was taken to the hospital on the day of the comedic Ames Straw Poll. And the next day a pacemaker was inserted.

Paul, who converted from mainstream Christianity to one of the fundamentalist Baptist sects, sent out a message to his disciples. He told them about the pacemaker and said "we are both so grateful for all your good wishes and praysers. They worked."

And while I'm glad Carol is doing well after the operation (she is a nice woman) I have to wonder about Paul's remarks. They are so typical of the magical mind that infects so many believers. He reports that Carol got a pacemaker inserted but says it was the good wishers and prayers that "worked". If prayers and good wishes worked then why the pacemaker?

And, while I wish her no ill will, I would wonder what would be said if the pacemaker didn't help? Would we hear the statement: "The doctors did all they could"?

Failure is often attributed to man and science. When man and science do their job well the results are attributed to a deity and religion. Yet rarely do these religionists only seek the help of religion. Paul was a physician himself and knows the science of his former profession -- now he is a full time politician. I would have thought he would have thanked the surgeons, and the nurses, and the men and women whose dedication to science made the pacemaker possible. Instead, non-contributing individuals who chanted words to a deity were thanked for their prayers which "worked".

Of course I'm a skeptic. I tend to think the prayers did nothing. Absent the pacemaker the prayers would not have been nearly as successful.

While I'm no supporter of Ron Paul I am glad Carol is better. But I do think this sort of magical thinking is insulting to the real people who helped make her better. Instead of pandering to his disciples and attributing Carol's recovery to their prayers Paul should have been loyal to his former profession and publicly thanked the doctors and the pacemaker. It was science and medicine that help not religion and prayer.

The progress to monotheism that is absent.

2007-07-26T18:46:00.000-07:00

Having graduated from a Christian high school, and having spent a few years in seminary, I’ve known a lot of Christians in my time. The reality is that very, very few of them have ever consciously considered the idea of whether or not a deity exists.

They accumulated a belief in a deity the way we accumulate many beliefs. Many such beliefs are true. For instance, most of us accept the theory of gravity and the idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Yet, very few of us could present a rational argument as to why these things are true.

How did we absorb such ideas? They were transmitted to us by various aspects of our culture. We may have heard references on the television set. Our parents may well have told us such things and assured us that it was true. The idea was presented to us, in films, books, and in the schools. Certainly in the last couple of centuries no other competing theory has really been given much play.

Luckily for us these beliefs that we accepted unconsciously are correct. They jive with the evidence.

A small number of theists, a very small number in my experience, claim to have rationally concluded that a deity exists. Of these most of them only draw the conclusion first and then “discover” the evidence after the fact. In other words, the evidence didn’t convince them. They were convinced first and then sought out arguments to justify their prior commitment to a specific conclusion.

Now, I’ve never heard an original argument for the existence of a god that actually seemed to have some merit. So, I never gave the matter much thought beyond that point. That is, I never thought about what would happen after they had “proven” their thesis.

But the other night, as I was falling asleep, I was contemplating a problem that a theist would have if he actually managed to prove the case he was setting out to prove. If there is evidence that a deity exists what is there in this evidence that leads him to instantly conclude the existence of just one such deity.

If one honestly believes they have proven, to their own satisfaction at least, that there is a supernatural being we call a god, then why must this god be a solitary creature? If his existence could happen once why not twice?

For example, I don’t believe that aliens from outer space have been visiting the earth. I find that thesis highly unlikely. Almost, though not quite, as unlikely as the existence of a deity. As an imprecise illustration I would suggest the likelihood of space aliens on earth as being several hundred million to one.

However, if I were to look out my window and see a space ship hovering a dozen floors above the ground I might revise my estimates. Then if one of those funny green men materialized on my balcony I would now assume that the chances of there being a second one to be somewhere around one to one.

The possibility of there being a second one is far greater than the possibility of there being the first one. The existence of one almost makes the existence of another certain. It could be the last of a dying species but the odds are now that a second one is floating around somewhere.

If a theist proves that a god exists then the possibility of there being a second or third god goes up dramatically. Yet, those who claim they were logically convinced of the existence of the first deity almost never entertain that idea. Their own “proofs” ought to be sufficient to prove that there are indeed two, three, four or more deities.

Certainly there is no need for a hierarchy of deities with bigger and smaller gods vying for space. The idea of coequal deities is no more absurd than the idea of any deity at all. They could be of one mind, in perfect harmony. Separate but equal. Much the way Christians claim concerning father, son and holy spook.

As I said, I suspect most, if not all, believers starts out with the conclusion and search for the evidence afterwards. They find what they need to justify the conclusion they have already drawn.

Consider the process of argumentation through which they would go. First, they would have to convince them self that a deity exists. But the immediate result of those proofs would be that the possibility of a second deity existing increases to almost certainty. Ditto for a third, fourth, etc.

They can then conclude that there could only be one such deity. But logically one wouldn’t draw a conclusion as to the number of a species prior to proving the species exists. Before you can start debating the nature of the entity, including how many there are, you have to prove the entity exists. But once you prove one exists the likelihood of there being more is almost certain. At this point you would need good evidence to then restrict the number of the beings to only the one.

I would think that the believer who claims to have been rationally convinced would first draw the conclusion that a deity exists. From that the most reasonable second, and virtually instantaneous, conclusion is that many such deities exist. Then one might contemplate this newly discovered entity and reduce it down to just one.

But I’ve never heard of a single monotheist who says he first concluded a deity exists, immediately saw that this meant that multiple gods were floating around and only then concluded there was just the one. The logical progression would be atheist, polytheist, and only then, monotheist.

I don’t know of a single believer who ever went through the polytheistic stage. They all seem to have jumped right to the end. It is not logic that would warrant that immediate assumption. Once one is convince a deity exists that doesn’t immediately tell you the numbers of that deity. To go straight to monotheism is evidence that the belief was not derived rationally. It indicates that the individual started out with a conclusion and only later invented a justification for that which he already believed. The progression of their own beliefs indicates the beliefs were not actually derived through reason.

PS: I hate the title of this essay. But it is 4 am and I can't think of a better one for now. If you have a suggestion I'll appreciate it if you leave it in the comments.

Religion versus god and the danger of faith.

2007-07-23T05:32:00.000-07:00

One of the few prominent religious figures in the United States who, I think, attempted to be a decent human being was Tammy Faye Bakker Messner. Sadly, and I mean that, she passed away after a horrible bout with cancer. After seeing her being interviewed only a couple of days ago I can say that death, in this case, was a blessing.

In researching her life for some other projects I came across comments by her son, Jay Bakker. Jay runs a church in New York that attempts to reach out to people rejected by most churches. Both he and his mother spoke frequently of the appalling treatment they received at the hands of their fellow believers. Tammy Faye said it was the gay community that reached out to her when she felt all alone in the world. And she reached back.

Jay Bakker recently preached to a church about how Christians treated him because he turned his church into a “gay affirming” church. He said that even while his mother was dying they ignored her illness and ostracized him. One Christian magazine, Charisma, was upset that Bakker said he doesn’t think it sinful to be gay so they wrote: “Consider this an official apostasy alert.”

The term "apostasy" means abandonment of one’s religious faith. I guess Charisma believes that denouncing gays is one of the main articles of the Christian faith. It’s right up there with other such nonsense as the trinity, the virgin (right!) birth, and the resurrection. I think the Apostle’s Creed has the hating gays part stuck in somewhere between Jesus dying for our sins and resurrecting from the dead.

Bakker says that even while it widely known his mother was dying these Christians didn’t want to offer compassion to him only condemnation. And he said something along the lines that he can sometimes understand why people become atheists. He attributed that atheism to the vicious treatment that people often receive at the hands of Christians.

Bakker seems to be implying, and rightly so, that such a form of atheism is irrational. At the same time he committed the same fallacy in calling on the church to thus reach out in love to the people it had previously rejected. He wants people to believe in a god due to the “nice Christian” but not to be atheists due to the “nasty Christian.”

The existence of a deity does not depend on the nature of those who profess a belief in it. Either a deity exists or it doesn’t. Being nice to people doesn’t prove the existence of a god anymore than being nasty proves the non-existence of one.

The unpleasant nature of so many religious people merely indicates that religion is no guarantee that it makes people nicer or more humane. It may indicate that religion is not particularly adept at turning people into saints but it doesn’t prove anything either way.

An atheist,who is an atheist because some Christian was unpleasant, is as irrational as anyone who believes in a deity because a believer was kind.

The reason for being an atheist is a relatively simple one: the evidence for a deity doesn’t stack up.

Separate from that is the debate concerning the nature of religion. Whether or not a deity is hiding somewhere in the universe does not change the evaluation that religion, on a whole, is a negative for human existence.

The way the Bakkers were treated by their fellow believers does indicate a problem with religion. The way the religious can commit terrorists acts in the name of Allah or throw out their gay children in the name of Jesus shows a problem with religion. God is simply false, not evil. Religion is both false and evil.

God cannot be evil since god does not exist. Religion does exist and it does bad things. Religion is an organized system created by people. So it has the same potentials that people have.

So whey then do I think religion is inherently negative?

The reason is that religion attempts to give people a code of morality that is inherently irrational. Faith is not a tool of understand this world or how one should act within it.

Worse yet, it gives people a divine mandate to indulge every bigotry and hatred they possess. People can justify the most inhumane acts in the name of the god they worship. If a god tells one to not steal the same god can later reveal that they must steal.

Certainly Jehovah, in one section of the Bible, says “thou shalt not steal” while in other sections he demands they steal the homes and livestock of other tribes. The god who tells them “thou shalt not kill” also turns and orders the execution of numerous sinners and the extermination of other tribes. God reveals one morality one day and a different morality another day. And the way this deity reveals himself is through the “small voice” people claim they hear. The burning bush trick hasn’t been used for centuries.

Christians usually don’t mean they literally hear Jehovah. They say, “God spoke to my heart”, or “God led me”. They really mean that their own sentiments led them in a specific direction and they attribute to a deity their own actions and decisions.

So, if they hate one group of people they can tell you how God has told them to hate. And when they hate, they are really being loving because they obey the deity. It was more loving to exterminate “heretics” than to allow them to live. It is more loving to deprive homosexuals of their rights than to allow them to live unmolested in freedom.

Every atheist must rely on human reason and he must know that human reason is not infallible. He can never be fully sure that everything he believes is correct. He must allow others a latitude of freedom because he may be wrong and they may be right. But the certainty of faith is inherently authoritarian. If you know the truth then there is nothing to debate.

Every authoritarian beliefs system, including religion, says it has the “truth” and knows how people must act. No rational atheist can say that. Irrational atheists, who have a substitute religion that has the “full truth” might, but not rational atheists who recognize the fallibility of human thinking. This is why Marxism is more like fundamentalist Christianity than it is different. It is a religion and it suffers the drawbacks of all religions.

Religion relies on faith not facts. As such it is prone to manipulation. It is a god-sanctioned means by which the dark side of human nature is released to inflict pain and suffering on others.

Your empty godless life

2007-07-10T17:10:00.000-07:00

James Randi at the Australian Skeptics Conference

2007-07-09T14:19:00.000-07:00

Penn & Teller take on Mother Theresa

2007-07-05T18:43:00.000-07:00

Was President Madison a Christian? Not likely.

2007-06-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

In a comment in a previous posting the claim was made that President James Madison was a "Biblical" Christian. It is my belief that the evidence shows Mr. Madison was not a Christian of any kind. I briefly responded in the comments there but decided to expan my remarks here for a more public presentation.

James Madison, the fourth President, after Washington, Adams and Jefferson, opposed linking Christianity with government as much as his predecessors. He was one of Jefferson’s strongest and most vocal allies. He believed that the First Amendment and disestablishment of religion meant that America had “extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.” Madison felt so strongly on the issue that he insisted that a Congressional chaplain would be a violation of the Constitutional separation of church and state. For the same reason he opposed paid chaplains in the military.

In 1774 Madison wrote William Bradford, Jr.: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.” In his A Memorial and Remonstrance to the Virginia General Assembly Madison opposed any establishment or support for religion by the state. He wrote: “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been the fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both superstition, bigotry, and persecution.” He also said: “What influence in fact has ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of civil authority; in many instance they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instances have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people.” The Virginia General Assembly heeded Madison and rejected the call for supporting religion. Instead it passed Jefferson’s Religious Freedom Act. Madison advocated the “total separation of the church from the state.”

Madison’s personal religious views, however, are a bit harder to discern. He was rather quiet on the matter but this would be in keeping with his view that public officials should keep their religious values out of politics. Unlike some of the Founders who quiet explicitly stated their viewpoints with Madison we have to try and tease his views out of context. And, it should also be remembered that Madison succeeded his good friend, Thomas Jefferson, as president. So Madison was well aware of the vicious smear campaign engineered against Jefferson by the Religious Right of the day. Having seen a concerted effort to destroy Jefferson’s reputation and career by orthodox Christians Madison had every reason to be circumspect.

Certainly Madison began adulthood as an orthodox Christian. Shortly after his graduation from, what would become Princeton, he wrote a friend suggesting that their generation become “fervent advocates in the cause of Christ.” But as historian James Hutson, for the Library of Congress, noted: “Two months later Madison renounced his spiritual prospects and began the study of law... For the rest of his life there is no mention in his writings of Jesus Christ nor of any of the issues that might concern practicing Christians. Late in retirement there are a few enigmatic references to religion, but nothing else.”

Biographer Irving Brant quoted Rev. Alexander Balmaine regarding Madison. Balmaine was married to one of Madison’s cousins and was the minister who performed his marriage ceremony. And Balmaine said that Madison’s “religious feeling, however seems to have been short lived. His political associates were those of infidel principles, of whom there were many in his day, if they did not actually change his creed, yet subjected him to a general suspicion of it.” In addition Brant quotes the local Episcopal Bishop, William Meade, who recounted that a conversation with Madison took an unexpected turn, at Madison’s instigation. The comments made by Madison, wrote the Bishop, “left the impression on my mind that his creed was not strictly regulated by the Bible.” And Brant quoted a gentleman who had dinner with Madison. Madison queried the man about “how the cause of liberal Christianity stood with us, and if the Athanasian creed was well received by our Episcopalians. He pretty distinctly intimated to me his own regard for the Unitarian doctrines.”

Bishop Meade said that whatever “may have been the private sentiments of Mr Madison on the subject of religion, he was never known to declare any hostility to it.” He, like the deist Washington, attended a local church and invited ministers to his home but “did not kneel himself at prayers.” And Hutson notes that Madison went for long stretches of time without bothering himself with any church service. And at one point he told the governor of Vermont, with Jefferson standing there, that he had not attended church for “several years”.

Certainly the Rev. James Wilson, a Reformed Presbyterian minister, felt that Madison was an infidel. In his attack on the US Constitution, Prince Messiah’s Claim to Dominion Over all Governments: and the Disregard of His Authority by the United States, in the Federal Constitution (1832) Rev. Wilson laments the lack of a Christian founding. Wilson claimed:

It is believed, that there never existed, previous to this constitution, any national deed like this, since the creation of the world. A nation having no God! In vain shall we search the annals of pagan Greece and Rome, of modern Asia, Africa, pagan America, and the isles of the sea—they have all worshipped some God. The United States have none. But here let us pause over this astounding fact. Was it a mere omission? Did the convention that framed the constitution forget to name the living God? Was this an omission in some moment of national frenzy, when the nation forgot God? That, indeed, were a great sin. God says, "the nations that forget God, shall be turned into hell." [Ps. 9:17.] It was not, however, a thoughtless act, an undesigned omission. It was a deliberate deed, whereby God was rejected; and in the true atheistical spirit of the whole instrument, and of course, done with intent to declare national independence of the Lord of hosts.

As far as Wilson could see not one of the seven residents of the White House, to that date, had been a Christian. For Washington he says: “There is no satisfactory evidence that Washington was a professor of the Christian religion , or even a speculative believer in its divinity...” and he “was President of the convention, that voted the name of the living God out of the Constitution.” Wilson notes that Adams, who was a Unitarian, took office next followed by Jefferson, “an avowed infidel, and notoriously addicted to immorality.” And then we come to James Madison:

Mr. Jefferson’s successor, Mr. Madison, was educated by godly parents, with a view to the Ministry of reconciliation. He commenced the study of Theology, under the care of Dr. Witherspoon, President of Princeton College, where he attended a prayer meeting of the pious youth of that Seminary, who were preparing for the Holy Ministry.
When he returned from Princeton to his fathers house in Virginia, Mr. Jefferson was a young village lawyer, who had attracted the notice of the neighborhood, by his regular business habits, in collecting debts, drawing indentures, &c.
Madison, to the grief of his parents, abandoned the study of Theology, and entered the office of the infidel and libertine Jefferson, as a student of law. Though Mr. Madison has pledged himself neither in public nor private, to the belief of Christianity, yet he is not known to have employed his influence, like Jefferson, in attempts to abolish the Christian Faith.

Rev. Wilson called President Monroe “a second rate Athenian Philosopher” and declined to say much about Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson since they “are yet in public life” but the said that no “Federal Cabinet since the first formed, has given any more evidence for the fear of the Lord, than did that of Washington.”

It would be fair to say that the “preponderance of the evidence” is that Mr. Madison was a deist but it is not “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” But then it doesn’t have to be. The evidence that does exist certainly indicates that Madison was not a Christian. His close friendship with Jefferson must have had some impact on his ideas especially since Jefferson was so strongly an opponent of Christian theology in his personal life, something no close friend would fail to notice. To have worked this intimately with a man for decades would, no doubt, have required some meeting of the minds on this matter. That Madison, even more so than Jefferson, was the architect of the doctrine of separation of church and state, gives more credence to the theory that he was deist. At the same time, what is missing, is one shred of evidence James Madison ever expressed an orthodox view of Christianity after he began his lifelong friendship with Jefferson. With some evidence that Madison was a deist, and none indicating he remained an orthodox Christian, the most honest conclusion is that he probably became an infidel, as his friend, Rev. Balmaine stated.

Ron Paul on Separation of Church and State

2007-06-16T02:27:00.000-07:00

I'm not a supporter of Ron Paul. I find him far too much of a social conservative to be worthy of support. And he's a bit crazed with loony conspiracy theories. He likes to pride himself on being a Constitutionalist and praises the Founders for their policies.

But how well does he know the Constitution? He wrote:

The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion.

Let us put aside for a second his opposition to "rigid separation between church and state" and concentrate, not on Constitutional theory, but on Constitutional facts. Mr. Paul claims that the Constitution is "replete with references to God". Now replete means abundantly supplied or filled. So if the Constitution is abundantly filled with references to God how many are there? Let's get precise. How many times is God mentioned in the Constitution?

Zero! And if you don't believe me you can go check Ron Paul's own congressional website where he has a copy of the text. Go to the page and read it yourself. It is worth reading now and then. But if you don't have time do a page search for "God" and see all the abundant references on your own. All zero of them.

And what about the drafters of the Declaration of Independence? That would be Thomas Jefferson. Paul says he would be "aghast at the federal government's hostility to religion." Hostility? Didn't Jefferson actually say something about that? He said that the clergy, who opposed Jefferson strongly, "believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Eternal hostility to the schemes to promote state religion.

Jefferson had a lot to say about religion. Little of it would be liked by Ron Paul. And most of it sounds pretty hostile.

Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.

Jefferson said he was a Christian only in one sense, that he thought the moral teaching of Jesus made sense and in no other way. He did not think Jesus was a god, the son of god, or born of a virgin. He did not believe in prayer, divine revelation, the trinity or the resurrection. Jefferson took a razor to his own Bible and cut out of the New Testament every reference to the supernatural and divine. What was left has been called The Jefferson Bible.

But the fundamentalist Right is busy pushing a revisionist view of American history in order to fit with their theocratic agenda. And apparently Ron Paul is willing to help. But assuming he isn't then why the lie? Ron Paul has read the Constitution, he brags about his in depth study of the Constitution. He has the Constitution on his website. So why claim that it is filled with references to God when there is not a single mention of God anywhere in the document? He knows better.

PS: I know that the Ron Paul cult troll the internet looking for ways to boost him and cut down anyone who disagrees with St. Paul. For the record, I am a libertarian but one who does believe in separation of church and state. And I'd take Jefferson any day as president.

Two arguments on the existence of non-existent.

2007-06-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

I have been a privy to numerous debates online regarding the existence of a magic man in the sky. And it is interesting to watch the tactics and arguments used by the credulous believers of one faith or another.

One argument I recently saw was rather amusing. A man who likes to think of himself as a deep thinker, in reality he is rather superficial, demanded that his opponent, for arguments sake, accept that their is a deity. From that premises he then set out to prove that a deity, in fact, exists.

It didn’t seem odd to him that he wanted his opponent to accept the conclusion in dispute as the very premise for the arguments used.

I thought of a court room situation where a prosecutor comes in and addresses the jury informing them: “That for the sake of argument you are to accept that the defendant is in fact guilty. I will then show you that from the premise you have no other choice but to conclude he is guilty even if no other evidence is offered here.”

Prosecutors would have a field day with that sort of argumentation. Of course such tactics are forbidden in a court of law. One would have to be a blithering idiot to lose a debate that starts with your conclusion as the premise for the arguments.

There was a second argument I found rather bizarre. And to explain why I need to lay some groundwork. This individual has frequently made statements about the nature of of his deity. You might hear him speak of the “love of God,” “the law of God”, the “judgement of God,” etc. He will make claims that without this God there is no such thing as morality for instance. All these things imply vast knowledge about this deity.

Yet the typical theist, when in a debate, will resort, as did this individual, to the incomprehensibility of God. God, we are told, is beyond our puny human comprehension. His ways can’t be understood with reasoning and rationality. It requires faith because he is so far beyond our ability to understand that the brain fails us.

I could almost accept this if the individual making the argument would remain consistent. If the deity is beyond human comprehension then any assertion about his is contradictory. It is basically a claim to know that which you state can not be known.

You can’t tell me he is comprehensible and claim that the Bible is his book, that his name is Jesus, that he is a trinity of three persons in one, or any thing similar. You can not claim to comprehend that which cannot be comprehended. You can not assert you know his will and claim to me that he unknowable to puny humans.

Also consider what a consistent application of the concept of an incomprehensible god would mean for the theist. If you can not comprehend the deity then you know nothing more about his alleged existence than does the atheist.

An atheist is merely someone who has no reason to accept the conclusion that their is a deity. The believer who argues an incomprehensible god is actually saying that there is no reason to accept that their is a deity as well. If he is truly incomprehensible then we can say nothing about him. If utterly incomprehensible we couldn’t even assert he exists. We can only assert that we have a theory he exists and no evidence to substantiate it.

The moment evidence is assert the concept of the incomprehensible deity flies out the window. And that is why the “incomprehensible” argument is rarely offered at the beginning of the debate. It normally is used toward the end of the debate when the theist is backed in a corner. Because once he plays that game he has conceded the debate except he is never honest enough to admit that is what has happened. The atheist can make no statement about the nature of a deity. He can assert nothing positive about him. The man who claims god is beyond human understanding is making the same claim. The only real difference between them is a relatively minor one.

I, as an atheist, never assert anything is beyond understanding or unknowable. I don’t do so because to claim something is unknowable is to claim to know something about it. There is a subtle, but important, difference between that which is unknown and that which is unknowable. Whether there is other intelligent life in the universe is unknown but unknowable. The first is describes something that is unknown but knowable. The second describes something which can never be known.

Pope Jumped

2007-06-06T18:46:00.000-07:00

A man jumped over barricades at the Vatican to leap on the back of the Popemobile. Vatican officials say the man was "clearly deranged."

Why did he do it? You know what they say: Birds of a feather flock together.

In defense of Dawkins.

2007-05-29T06:37:00.000-07:00

The god-botherers are on the defensive and they don’t like it one bit. Most of us have had to deal with these people our entire lives especially if one lives in the god-besotted United States.

These people grab us on the street corners to preach at us. They will invade the peacefulness of our homes to pound on our doors until we answer so they can ask their deceitful questions. I say deceitful because they are often taught to ask a fake question in order to start conversation and then taught to switch the conversation over to religion.

If one is in the hospital they roam the corridors like vultures wanting for death to creep down the hallway. Unlike vultures they don’t have the decency to wait until you are dead they want to get to you just before you go so they can tell you how you will be tormented for eternity in unspeakable misery by the all-loving deity they worship unless you convert immediately

Some are cheap bastards who stop in restaurants and instead of leaving a tip leave a track that says “Here’s your tip”. The “tip” is a lecture on religion and how one must be saved or off to the eternal torture room of Jehovah for you. For years we were told man was made in God’s image. Now we find out that the “man” that sentence refers to is Dick Cheney.

We can’t even change television channels, in the US, without have one moronic evangelist or another screaming at us about our sins and then begging us for our money. These con men tend to do more begging than preaching. But I’m not sure that is any improvement.

What about the loyal opposition? For the most part we talk to each other. We don’t knock on doors or go out recruiting new atheists. Now in recent days several intellectuals have written books debunking the god mythology. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Dennis Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have each penned their rebuttals to religion. All have sold well. They get some publicity and are asked to speak on campuses or appear on television or radio. All relatively mild compared to the theological onslaught we experience on a regular basis. And the religionists are apoplectic.

Once again a writer at the left-wing Guardian has waded into water far too deep for him to handle. Martin Kettle makes a small attack on Dawkins. It is small in volume and small in intellectual content. In reality is devoid of any substantial rebuttal to Dawkins, it is more of a sneering type of reply than an intellectual one.

Kettle sets up the story by saying Dawkins “doesn’t, can’t and won’t do faith.” But, “a lot of other scientists find ways to live and let live with religious people. Quite a lot of scientists are even religious themselves.”

First, Kettle is wrong when he says a “lot of scientists are even religious themselves.” This is a standard claim made by religious folk but not really accurate. First, they don’t define scientists and then don’t define “a lot”. They prefer to use the term scientist as loosely as possible. A high school teacher who teaches chemistry, for instance, may qualify. But if we mean individuals of high academic standards in science then only a very small percentage are religious.

It may be argued that there are “hundreds” of scientists who are religious, maybe thousands. And that could be correct but then the number of scientists is much higher than that. And the evidence shows that the more knowledgeable the scientist the less likely he is to be religious. In a poll of members of the National Academy of Sciences only 7% said they believed in a personal god. In the UK a similar poll of the Royal Society found that just 3 percent agreed strongly with the statement that there a personal god and 79 percent strongly disagree. The rest fall somewhere in the middle but more on the disbelieving side.

The fact is that only a few eminent scientists believe in a god. So believers concoct facts. Dawkins found a website that listed six Nobel Prize winning scientists who are Christians. But the problem was that four of them never won a Nobel Prize and one that did is a friend of Dawkins and has told him he is not a believer but attends church with his wife for social purposes. But people who believe in walking on water can believe anything.

Kettle then says that Dawkins is “one of the best things that has happened to religion”. This sort of comment is prevalent among religious types in particular. Why? Because they want to dismiss Dawkins and the others. They want to pretend that this challenge to a divine security blanket is of no consequence, or better yet, good for religion. This is the equivalent of whistling in the graveyard to prove you aren’t afraid when in reality you are terrified.

I watched a video of Dawkins speaking at a university campus, a real university, near the campus of Jerry Falwell’s religious indoctrination center called Liberty University -- which in my opinion is misnamed twice over as students have no liberty and it really isn’t much of a university either. Of course the Falwellian faithful turned out in large numbers at the other university to make snide remarks to Dawkins during the Q&A period. One such student commented in a way that it sounded precisely like a prepared speech being read word for word. It wasn’t so much a question. Why ask questions when you believe you have all the answers anyway?

His whole mini sermon was that the comments made by Dawkins only made his more firm in his beliefs. Of course the pubescent preacher “knew” that would be the case when he prepared the comments, no doubt some time before he even heard what Dawkins had to say. Why do this? The reason is simple. The religious types actually think that if they say this sort of thing the atheist will suddenly have an epiphany that speaking against religion actually makes people religious. Thus the atheist will shut up. Like their theological fantasies they are wrong here on every facet.

The reality is that a rational, well thought out rebuttal to religion, as Dawkins has written, doesn’t enhance faith. It may make the fundamentalist more determined but the net result in society is a weakening of faith. As a former fundamentalist, who changed his beliefs from reading just such a book, I can attest that is the case. And I’ve seen it happens with lots of other people as well. Debunking religion does not enhance religious beliefs at all.

Second, the non-believer isn’t so stupid as to fall for the irrational logic the believer uses. He isn’t going to close his mouth merely because some religious type pretends that such attacks help his religion. He sees through the strategy and realizes that these scared religionists just want him to shut up. The one thing the faithful can’t endure is doubt. They need certainty in their life and they want atheists in the closet because it reassures them that they must be correct since no dares disagree with them.

Kettle says Dawkins is good at exposing the irrationality of religion but “he cannot engage the millions who just feel better with some sort of confused belief than with nothing at all.” Kettle, who says he is an atheist, argues that Dawkins just doesn’t understand this. I suspect he does.

People feel better holding lies than recognizing the truth. There are people too afraid to live in the world as it is so they invent an imaginary world to comfort themselves. They want to believe there is a magic man in the sky who can change reality. And they want to believe that there are things they can do to get this magic man to do their bidding. If they pray hard enough he will cure cancer or even raise the dead. Most importantly they want to believe that he can endow their drab lives with some sort of divinely important meaning. They want to believe in a god for the same reason some people want to believe in healing crystals. It gives them a false hope.

The problem is that the comfort is a lie. And lies make life harder not easier. The sick individual relying on “Dr. Jesus” too often ignores the real doctors who can actually help because to go to them shows a lack of faith. The net result is that something curable becomes lethal due to neglect.

This “faith” not only causes them to live their lives with false hopes it causes them to hate and condemn others who challenge that faith. It isn’t just those faithful who fly airplanes into buildings either. It is the vile Falwell's preaching hatred against entire classes of people. It is the Ratzinger’s covering up abuse for the sake of the church and denouncing condoms in nations plagued by AIDS. It is faith filled politicians who think God wants America heavily involved in the Middle East because of his secret plan to bring Jesus back to earth.

You can see the faith in the face of people like Rev. Paul Hill, a killer who shot to death a doctor for performing abortions. Hill said he knew Jesus would welcome him to heaven and went to his execution looking forward to death. He enjoyed the death of others and his own. This concentration on the after life always reduces the value of this life. But there is no evidence of an after life which means that religion is inherently anti life. It opposes the only life we have entertaining fictional existences instead.

Kettle makes one comment that was not just wrong but inherently dishonest. He said “other scientists find ways to live and live with religious people” implying that Dawkins doesn’t. Live and let live usually means respecting the rights of others. Dawkins has done nothing to violate the rights of religionists. Live and let live doesn’t mean that one must shut up and say nothing. Oddly Kettle seems to have no problem with religionists preaching constantly at atheists. That isn’t a violation of “live and let live” but he has a problem if atheists reply. His version of “live and let live” is to allow religion to do as it wishes and offer no opposition and no public disagreement.

There is one comment that was left on the site running Kettle’s little piece that amused me to an end. I will reprint the sentence in question. It says far more than the author intended:

As a christian, I do not have the intellectual capacity to respond to Dr. Dawkins or his ilk, for which I am grateful, because the question of why religious belief refuses to die, can best be answered by a believer.

If one writes that “as a Christian, I do not have the intellectual capacity to respond”. She did not say that she is a Christian and is intellectually unable to respond. She said she is intellectually unable to respond because she is a Christian. The sentence is confused but then her entire comment was confused.

She says the evidence for a god is all around us because god made it evident. Nice circular reasoning. She writes that the “invisible attributes” of god “have been clearly seen”. So the invisible is clearly visible. Any more nonsense like that and she could be a bishop, if she wasn’t a woman. In fact maybe she can write Andrew Sullivan’s next column on why doubt is faith and faith is doubt.

The dark side of Amish Pt. !

2007-05-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

There is a dark side to the Amish faith, one that doesn’t correspond with the quant, peaceful reputation of the Amish themselves. And I shall explore that some here and in other posts I plan.

The thing that strikes me most about the Amish religion is how it is structured to give the church almost absolute control over the individual. It uses the same techniques that most cults use to control members but they go much, much further. The one major difference is that cults tend to be based on recruitment. The Amish don’t recruit they procreate -- often.

One of the most important control techniques of a cult is to alienate the individual from the world in general. Make them rely on the cult for everything. If they have no friends or support structure outside the cult they can be controlled.

The Amish go much further. If you are born into an Amish family the family and the church community surrounding you is almost all you know. Your education is intentionally stopped at 8th grade, sometimes sooner. Thus you have no education worth speaking of that limits your ability to leave the cult.

You are also unfamiliar with all modern conveniences. You most likely can’t drive. You don’t have computer skills nor are you familiar with any major technological advances except indirectly. This lack of education and skills makes you unfit for any decent job restricting you to farm life, which is the life of the Amish.

One reason for this restriction of technology is that technology is inherently individualistic and that doesn’t sit well with the church. They intentionally want people to have to rely on the community of fellow Amish in order to survive. By making life labor intensive they force individuals to kow-tow to the community as well as have large families to grow the church.

In addition the church actively works to alienate you from your neighbors and the world around you. You are intentionally dressed very differently from the rest of your peers. They know such actions causes some ridicule, especially among children. But then this serves the purpose of keeping the youths under control. Young people who might wish to challenge the authority of the church fear they would never be accepted outside the church. They feel no connection with their peers except those who are also under the same strict rules of dress and behavior.

In addition to this there is no life for the Amish outside the church. While there are two dozen Amish sects in the United States, with some variance in the rules, shunning is a common practice. Shunning can alienate an individual completely from every aspect of life as they know it.

If a member is shunned he is to be ignored by everyone in the community. Sometimes this is for short periods of time for non serious offenses, like rape! Sometimes it is for life. Individuals can be excommunicated and lose the entire existence they know.

With no farm equipment they need the community to help them. But the community refuses to do so. With excommunication they may find that their spouses and family leave them. Every aspect of life is strictly controlled by the church. There are explicit rules about what clothes one may wear, right down the width of the brim on the hat. Sex is regulated, or at least is supposed to be.

But given their extremist conservative views on morality there is a practice that many outsiders would find bizarre: bundling or “bed courtship”. Teens of the opposite sex are allowed, sometimes even encouraged, to spend the night together. Teenage boys are allowed to go to the room a girl and climb into bed with her. The rules say they are supposed to keep their clothes on but those are easily broken. And since the boys, in the strict sects, aren’t allowed to wear underwear the only thing they have to do is unbutton a couple of buttons. Now, why would the church seemingly have this “liberal” view of teenaged boys and girls spending the entire night together in the same bed (boys are only required to leave when it’s time to milk the cow)? One reason is that this encourages the youngsters to get married, or end up in a situation where they have to get married. The church found this makes it more likely that they will stay with the faith. It is another means of control. About 12% of all Amish first borns were conceived out of wedlock.

On one hand the Amish speak of the importance that each church member join of their own free will. But on the other hand their entire social system is built in such a way as to strip people of the ability to make any other choice.

Sometimes what you don't see is important.

2007-05-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

There is an old card trick. The magician shows his mark four face cards and asks them to concentrate on one of them, to memorize the card and to repeat it to them self mentally over and over. He then removes the cards from the table and tells the individual that based on his thoughts alone he will discern what card the individual picked and delete it from the deck.

After a few seconds with the cards he puts three face cards back down on the table and asks the mark if his face card is still there. Of course it isn’t.

What else isn’t there? What is also missing is the three other face cards that he didn’t pick. The magician has no idea which card the individual picked so he removes all four cards entirely and replaces them with three other face cards. The mark has memorized only face card so he doesn’t notice the other missing cards. And of course the one he picked, which the magician said he’d remove, has been removed. A very successful trick indeed.

My point is that you often don’t notice what is absent. It’s hard to concentrate on that which you don’t see.

This is also true regarding the Bible. There are lots of criticisms about what the Bible does contain. It is filled with barbarity, atrocities and genocide. Believes tend to ignore those things and concentrate on those sections that seem noble and moral; ideas like “love thy neighbor.” But what about those things which are not in the Bible?

Understand the claims made about this book by its fans. They argue this is a holy book, inspired or written by God, filled with the sort of wisdom and knowledge accessible to us only through a deity. We are often told that morality is not possible without a god. Without these commandments we wouldn’t know what is right or what is wrong.

What is interesting however, is that there is nothing in that book which is unique to that book. It makes no claims which, while unbelieved in that era, are today seen as true. It does make many claims which we know today are not true. But it doesn’t give us one piece of knowledge unknown to the people that era.

It speaks only of the world known by the authors and their mythical beliefs. You don’t find any mention of South America or Australia or North America. They didn’t know about them. Presumably God would have known but decided to reveal nothing new in the Bible that wasn’t already known to the general public. For instant it doesn’t mention that the earth revolves around the sun. It quite clearly says that the God stopped the sun at one point from moving. But it is the earth that moves around the sun and not the other way around.

Imagine if there were one passage of the Bible that spoke of something that was unknown to man for centuries -- for instance what if it mentioned something that we would clearly see today a virus or a germ? What if the Bible said such things caused sickness. Certainly when humans discovered viruses and germs this would be a great affirmation of the divine inspiration of the Bible.

But God didn’t see fit to include one single fact like that.

The Bible supposedly includes many prophecies all of which seem to become clear to people only after the fact. Could you imagine if Joshua or Paul, Moses or Jesus, had made one comment about man walking on the face of the moon. The idea back then would be absurd but it happened. God choice to make no such clear-cut, verifiable prophecy.

Jesus supposedly made comments about the end of the world and how their would be signs. The signs he gave were pretty typical events in the world. Nothing really out of the unusual, mainly things like earthquakes. But imagine if he said something like: “When you see man walk upon the face of the moon know that the end is near.” Wow! That would get the point across.

There aren’t even any great moral advancement that one can find in the Bible. The authors of the book had a view not dissimilar to those of the heathens around them. They killed rather regularly and quickly. Jehovah showed no advance on the other heathen gods when it came to virtues or morality. He was just as cruel and just as vindictive except he was worse in the sense that he demanded absolutely worship demanding that other religions be put to the sword.

At the time the Bible was written slavery was prevalent around the world. The Bible makes no moral advancement on that. It assumes slavery. No one in the Old Testament or the New Testament saw fit to actually condemn it. The commandments it did give for morality with actually rather typical for that day.

Even on the issue where the deity was supposed to be most needed, morality, he does nothing to improve morality. God apparently didn’t see fit to suggest to his followers that they free the slaves. Nor did he instruct the cultures to treat women as the equals of men. While he spends a fair amount of time speaking about what people should do with their genitals he never saw fit to point out that one shouldn’t rape children. And in some verses he seems to imply that raping virginal girls after military conquest was a good idea.

His great moral codes were quite limited in scope. Don’t kill unless he tells you to kill and then you must kill. Killing witches, approved of. Killing homosexuals, approved of. Killing adulterers, approved of. Killing disobedient children, approved of. Killing members of different ethnic groups, approved of. Killing members of different faiths, approved of.

There is no great moral advancement found in the Bible that was revolutionary for its time. There isn’t one statement about reality that is inconsistent with the knowledge of the day. There is not one prediction that was clearly astounding.

It reads entirely as a book that could have been written by the type of people alive in that day. It reads that way because it was written that way. It lacks entirely the touch of the divine.

2007-05-22T04:21:00.000-07:00

The appeal of incoherence to the intellectual.

I’ve discussed the wacky nature of Andrew Sullivan when it comes to religion before. His political commentary is often endowed with his ruminations on the spiritual. While he often contradicts himself politically, the price one pays for having few clear principles, his religious opinions are even more absurd.

He is one of those “intellectuals” who falls for the con game of the incoherent. What do I mean? Take as an example an “artist” who creates his “art”. I refer to the non-representational, “modern” artists in particular. One might, for instance, paint the inside of a room white and hang one light bulb from the ceiling. Voile, it is suddenly declared “great art” and intellectuals line up to “oh” and “ah” over it. Another might throw some loose change randomly into an empty room and it is proclaimed a masterpiece. It is the type of thing a monkey can do. And has! Andy Warhol once took a canvas, slapped copper paint on it and then invited a group of friends to piss on the painting. You can find a long, intellectual tribute to this piss art here.

The more incomprehensible the “art” the more valuable it becomes. Theology is rather similar. The more incoherent the opinion the “truer” it must be. I should add that philosophy often falls into the same category. The artist learns to speak in “aesthetic babble” and the theist learns to use “theobabble”. It has to sound religious. It need not actually express a coherent, rational thought.

In a recent blog entry of his Sullivan takes a swipe at the loony Dinesh D’Souza saying that his new book “is called What’s So Great About Christianity.’ Er: that it’s true?”

That is the whole comment. Well, one good thing about that entry is that he wasn’t talking about himself again.

Now what does Mr. Sullivan mean when he is noting that what is so great about Christianity is that it is true? In actuality nothing.

How is Christianity “revealed” to people? Well, first there were a group of men who supposedly went around preaching and they laid out what God was saying. None of them are alive today. But there were manuscripts written decades later which purported to tell people what these men said. But none of the original pieces of those survive as well. What there is of them are copies of copies of copies, each hand-written and open to human intervention, that were found decades after that. Then centuries after that the Catholic Church evolved. They like to pretend they existed right from the time of Christ onwards but that is as bogus as the Pope’s smile. And then various people through the centuries concocted their own brands of the same faith. Some like Joseph Smith invented entirely new versions of the faith.

No individual church was there when Christianity was founded. No denomination was there. All are later inventions. And since none of the prophets exist all we have is the Bible. And here is where Sullivan gets weirder. He dismisses the Bible acknowledging that it is not the literal, inerrant word of some deity. So what other source for Christianity is there for him?

He is a Catholic who doesn’t believe in Catholicism and a Christian who doesn’t believe in Christianity. Try to pin him down on any theological doctrine of Christianity in general or Catholicism in particular and he’ll evade and slide around trying to say absolutely nothing. And when it comes to religion he slides around saying absolutely nothing very well. In fact I think he says more absolutely nothing than anyone else I can think of writing on the topic today.

He says “it’s true”. But what is the “it” which “is true”? He actually evades defining the “it”. Is “it” just theism? At times he sounds as if that is precisely what he saying. He asserts there is a God but what makes that God uniquely Christian is left vague. He would look askance at miracles, revelations, encyclicals, and dogmas. He strips all of them out of his Christianity and asserts that what is left is what is “true”. And what makes it true? It makes him feel good.

He admits there is no rational foundation and goes into theobabble about the incomprehensibility of the deity. He says Christianity is true but has a Christianity which is indecipherable from general New Age mysticism. He likes the “drama” and the “ritual”.

The problem I have is that he takes the individual components of Christianity and dismisses them and then asserts the entity as a whole is true. Imagine owning an antique chair which the expert proclaims is a “masterpiece” and quite valuable. You start to ask him some questions.

First, you ask about the veneer. He tells you it is not the original and reduces the value. You point to the legs of the chair and ask him to tell you the name of their style. He informs you that they didn’t come with the original chair and were added on later. That’s something of a blow.

You run you hand on the seat of the chair and he tells you that it was reupholstered, which is too bad since the original is very rare. You point to the arms. “Recreation, I fear,” he says. And what about the back? Also a recreation.

So what makes the chair a masterpiece and valuable? In fact what makes it the style of chair it was proclaimed to be? It has nothing original left. It is a collection of all modern additions with no genuine pieces left. To proclaim it genuine is dishonest.

Sullivan’s Christianity is like that chair. He dismisses piece after piece of his own religion and sect and then says the religion as a whole is “true”. No doubt at his birthday parties he eats his cake and has it too.

Photo: The photo is of a "masterpiece" done by a chimpanzee. It sold at an "art" auction with two other such paintings for $25,000

2007-05-20T08:05:00.000-07:00

Bureaucrats, Nanny and God

The deity of the Old Testament was both a Republican and a Democrat. He was a Democrat in that he was a big advocate of eminent domain. He would order around his followers and tell them to confiscate the land of other groups for themselves. Sometimes he generously applied that eminent domain to the livestock of others as well as their women, provided they were still virgins. Jehovah had no hesitation in ordering genocide of others and the theft of their property and turning young girls into sex slaves for his followers. So, in some ways he was far more generous than Democrats today.

But he was also a Republican. He had a list of sins that would make the Moral Majority proud -- and did. Again he went one step further than the Republicans. He had a one penalty fits all sort of mentality. His solution to most every problem faced by the Old Testament folks was capital punishment. He was particularly fond of stoning people to death. The Jihadists at least cut off your head. Compared to stoning that is merciful. Stoning usually takes much longer. Of course if you are lucky then Jehovah might direct a particularly large stone to your skull and snuff you out right away. Otherwise with smaller stones it could take some time.

So adultery was a sin. Kill them. Homosexuality was a sin. Kill them. Talking back to parents was a sin. Kill them. Not honoring the Sabbath was a sin. Kill them. Said unkind things about Jehovah. Kill them. Astrology. Kill them. Wrong religion. Kill them.

At times he was even willing to kill children because of the sins of their parents. A real mensch this Jehovah. When Pharaoh didn’t listen to Moses then all the first born of Egypt were allegedly slaughtered by Jehovah. When the people of Sodom and Gomorra sinned then Jehovah burned them, along with their children, alive in a major divine barbecue. Let’s just say Jehovah was not a contributor to “Save the Children”.

God had a collectivist mentality. If one person sinned his entire family or tribe, for numerous generations, could be punished for it. When David decided to have a census Jehovah got upset. He did upset easily. So he slaughtered 70,000 people.

And he was litigious. Jehovah had the mind of a bureaucrat. He not only regulated life but regulated it in minute details. Let’s be honest, the Nanny State started in the Old Testament. Jehovah didn’t just regulate the big sins like adultery and homosexuality. He also regulated when men could sleep with their wives, what sort of foods they could eat, what sort of clothes they could wear, etc. He had shop closing laws for the Sabbath and took them seriously -- that stoning thing again.

Now these multiplicity of laws and regulations concern a lot of Christians today. Well, they should. Strictly speaking almost no one lives by those Old Testament laws. Most believers realize they are a crock of bull and ignore them. But some of them they like.

That thing about killing homosexuals for instance. Fundamentalist Christians get practically orgasmic over the idea of God-sanctioned fag bashing. On the other hand that bit about killing fornicators and such worries a lot of them -- well it should too. And while they want laws forcing people to honor the Sabbath they aren’t so quick to enforce the rules about wearing clothes made out of two different fabrics or forbidding shellfish in one’s diet.

So they concoct elaborate theories over which laws they can enforce and which laws should be ignored. They create nice categories into which they can place the bureaucratic Nannyism of Jehovah. Shellfish is under the laws of purity and those don’t apply any more. Never mind why they don’t apply they just don’t. But being queer, now that is an eternal moral law.

Other laws are just ceremonial laws applicable to only the Old Testament days. But the Bible isn’t always that clear which is which. Killing witches was not ceremonial or involved with purity rituals. Neither was blasphemy, adultery or honoring parents. So presumably those are eternal moral laws. But if the law is still valid then why isn’t the penalty valid?

So the next time Junior mouths off to Dad the church should take the child and stone him to death. And astrologers and witches -- stone them to death. The Old Testament ex-gay program wasn’t prayer and invented psychotherapeutic techniques. It was execution. Exactly how is it that the laws still apply but not the penalties?

Christians ought to be out there lobbying for laws to exterminate witches, adulterers, fornicators, sabbath breakers, gays, etc. Now the problem is that the Old Testament laws wanted to bump off believes in a god other than Jehovah so maybe the Jews should be out there executing Christians who think that Jesus was a god. Even if we only followed the moral code of the Old Testament we’d still be awash in the blood of the dying millions of sinners that would have to be stoned to death.

Others just invent an Old Testament/New Testament dichotomy. There is the O.T. law which was done away with when Jesus came along. Jehovah liked to complicate things. So he’d have one set of laws for one period and another set for a different period and let you try to figure out which ones applied and which didn’t. But if you figured wrong you might end up in Hell so you better be careful.

But Jesus didn’t seem to see this sort of dichotomy. He had all sorts of nice things to say about the law. He never said the Old Testament laws were abolished. Quite the opposite:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Of course none of this convoluted form of apologetics is necessary. It is only required when you entertain the unsupported theory that the Bible is a consistent, coherent, book inspired by Jehovah with a message applicable to all ages. If you look at scripture reasonable you could merely acknowledge that it is the writings of men saying what they believed about life. It is fallible, errant and entirely human. It may contain some of the best of humanity from that age but ti also included much that was the worst.

I can read passages from ancient texts without worrying about whether or not those passages need to be binding today. I can take wisdom as I find it and ignore the crap. But the Biblicist is stuck. If he wants a divine book he has to justify why it is that he is ignoring entire sections of that book. And to do that he needs to invent complicated, complex arguments.

Doing the Sharpton Shuffle

2007-05-17T11:40:00.000-07:00

For those interested here is a debate between Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens on religion and god. I watched bits and pieces while working on other things. But each time I saw parts Rev. Sharpton seemed to be doing what I call the Sharpton Shuffle. And in the parts I saw Hitchens didn’t really call him on it.

Here is the Sharpton Shuffle in a nutshell. Sharpton argues that without a deity there is no right and wrong. We need a god to tell us what is moral or immoral. Hitchens would discuss various scriptures and the sort of immoral acts advocated in them. And now the Sharpton Shuffle is used. Rev. Al would then say that is dogma not god, that is scripture not the deity and he is not there to argue about dogma and scripture but about the deity.

Now in a sense he has a point but in another sense he has shuffled away from the issue although rather skilfully. The issue for Rev. Al is then where does this morality get revealed to man. If there is no right or wrong without a god how do we know what this deity says is right and wrong? Outside of religious scriptures what other source do we have?

Sharpton might argue that it is the heart of each man where right and wrong is revealed. But isn’t that just another version of the scriptural problem of each man “doing what was right in his own heart”? Thus we still have no definable right or wrong merely the opinions of billions of people. If god is the only source of morality then he must reveal that morality somehow.

If Sharpton dismisses scripture for the evil deeds then how can he appeal to it for the “good” morality? And if we don’t use a scripture then what is the source for this revelation?

Any other source doesn’t prove a deity. In the hearts of men for morality is precisely what we would expect in a natural world without a deity. If the source is found in nature the answer is still what you would expect in a godless world. What source exists which is inherently divine and not natural? I didn’t hear Mr. Sharpton discuss that. Perhaps I missed it and if so I would appreciate anyone having time to watch the full video to point out my error. But in the parts I saw Mr. Sharpton never once explained how the “right and wrong” of god is communicated to man if, as he did, he throws scripture out of the mix.

2007-05-16T06:40:00.000-07:00

Government employees use positions to promote fundamentalism

David Miller is a Navy veteran and as such qualified to seek medicare care from Veteran’s Affaris. He sought such treatment at the VA Medical Center in Iowa City. Because he is an Orthodox Jew he was targeted by staff members at the facility for conversion attempts to persuad him to become a fundamentalist Christian.

Over a period of two years he has required hospitalization three times and each time he says the chaplains and staff made repeated attempts to convert him. In addition he says that because he is an adherent to Orthodox Judaism he had to go hungry as the staff refused to provide kosher food to him and refused to call his rabbbi who would provide such food. He also described a waiting room where all patients, no matter their faith, were subjected to Gospel music extolling a fundamentalist view of Christianity.

The chaplain at the center, David Brown, is a minister with the extreme fundamentalist Assemblies of God and he has refused to comment on the allegations against him.

Falwell is dead.

2007-05-16T06:38:00.000-07:00

Jerry Falwell is dead. His body has caught up with his brain. He died of heart problems, how appropriate.

700 Club Wrath Weather Report

2007-05-14T11:41:00.000-07:00

Boston Legal says it so well.

2007-05-10T14:53:00.001-07:00

What it's to do with England anyway?

2007-05-07T07:09:00.000-07:00

Madeleine Bunting of the left-wing British tabloid The Guardian has rushed to defense of religion everywhere. She is upset about the flurry of best selling books excorating the realm of irrationality and faith. Her’s is a long, tiring piece and to deconstruct the entire article would take far too long but a few points can, and should, be made.

Let us look at the thesis of this silly piece as outlined in the headline, “The New Atheists loathe religion far too much to plausibly challenge it. Anti-faith proselytising is a growth industry. But its increasingly hysterial flag-bearers are heading for spectacular failure.”

First, we should be clear as to whom she is referring. She specifically mentions the four best selling books by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

I’m not sure “loathe” is the proper word but it is the word Bunting would want people to have in mind. She has to exaggerate her case considerably in order to make it. Now if someone said that “Jews loath Nazism far too much to plausibly challenge it” we would find that remark absurd. Throughout history there have been people who have “loathed” certain ideas and who have challenged those ideas very well.

Certainly when it comes to loathing these so-called “New Atheists” have a long ways to go before they could catch up with fundamentalist Christians or Islamists.

Bunting claims: “Meanwhile, critics in America argue that the polarisation of the debate in the US is setting the cause of non-deism back rather than advancing it.” What could this possibly mean? Leave aside the fact she is more precise to say “non-theism” than “non-deism” but I suspect she doesn’t know the difference.

How would the books by these four men set the cause of “non-deism” back? She never says. Like many faith statements she simply asserts it. So what possible meanings are there.

1. One the books could be converting atheists to religion. There is no indication that this is happening. Nor does Bunting offer evidence it is.

2. Perhaps she means that none of the religious people reading the books are abandoning their faith. There is an indication that some are. But even if none were that wouldn’t make things worse just not make things better. It is a draw not a set back.

3. Perhaps she means that a few are deconverting while most aren’t. Not a massive win for reason to be sure but an advance not a set back.

4. Or she could mean that there is some significant number of religionists ready to abandon religion who, because of these books, fail to do so. But again there is no evidence of this happening.

Certainly in the American context it appears that these books have no ground to lose whatsoever. Put this in an election context for a second. An unknown challenges an incumbent. The unknown, of course, wants to debate. The incumbent tend not to want to debate. Why? Because the unknown can only gain ground while the incumbent can only lose ground.

In the religion debate in the United States, the context used by Bunting, atheism is a minority opinion. It is the unknown challenger and thus is only likely to gain ground even if badly argued, which I don’t thinks these books do (I have not read Hitchens yet). Bunting appears to be using a specific tactic here. She wants atheists to think that promoting atheism is a bad idea in the hope of them shutting up. It sounds as if she is worried that in a public debate she will lose ground not the atheists.

She also implies that religious beliefs can’t be challenged successfully regardless of what happens. She refers to the “durability and near universality of religion”. Again what does this mean? It is durable in that there are people who are religious. But certainly in most Western countries, the US being the main expection, religion is a minority activity. And in some advanced nations atheism is the dominant position.

In fact Bunting herself admits as much. She says that in Britain, “Church attendance continues its steady decline and the Christian evangelical boom has never taken off.” In fact the numbers of Britians who say they are non-religious is rather high. Even more oddly a good number of them are clergy in the Church of England.

She wants to attribute these books to “a particular kind of American atheism that feels victimised.” Alas, two of the authors she labels “New Atheists” are her fellow Brits.

She writes: “The whole New Atheist publishing phenomenon is like eavesdropping on a blistering row in the flat next door: one's response alternates between fascination and irritation, but is it really anything to do with us?”

Currently the world is witnessing radical religion in the United States and in the Islamic world. That has lead to conflicts, some of them rather unpleasant to say the least. And there is certainly something outlandish, if not totally absurd, to her acting as if none of this impacts England. Her glib “but is really anything to do with us” comment is the height of intentional stupidity or dishonesty.

What does it have to do with England? Let us look at the London Tube bombings. Bombs exploded on several underground lines and on a public bus. In total 52 people were killed and in excess of 700 peple were injured. And this woman stupidly wants to know what any of this debate has to do with England! Nor should we forget that 148 British solider have died in Iraq, a war that was entered into, to some degree, because of the conflict between American fundamentalists and Islamists.

It is a moral outrage that this woman is so dishonest as to pretend that the conflict between competiting fundamentalisms has nothing to do with England. And to remind her as to what this has to do with England this post contains the pictures of some of the victims of this conflict. What does it have to do with England! Indeed.

Lesbian sex book traumatizes teenage boys!

2007-04-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

Somebody put drugs in the water supply. Either that or Bedlam has released a lot of patients. The crazy God-botherers are out in force and crazier than normal. I mean certifiably nuts.

First, lets take a trip to Arkansas and visit Earl Adams (you knew he was going to be an Earl or Jethro or Cleetus or something like that didn’t you?). Earl has two teenaged sons. I suggest he has two horny teenage sons who scouted the shelves of the local library looking for something sexy for some bathroom reading.

And what did the horny little bastards find: The Whole Lesbian Sex Book. Exactly what a couple of horny straight teenage boys would love to devour. And no doubt they did, repeatedly. I hope they wiped the pages when they were finished reading. The bullshit story is that the boys accidentally found it while looking for books on military academies. Right! Sure. I see how when you are looking for something on the military you might accidentally end up in the section on lesbian sex. I've attached a photo of the book's cover. You can see how the poor children got confused. I myself immediately thought of West Point when I saw it. Earl is obviously as dense as a doorknob.

Earl discovered that the boys had read this Satanic book and sent a letter of protest, which just also happened to demand $20,000 in compensation for the trauma allegedly caused his horny pornhounds. He claims that after the poor boys saw the book it caused “many sleepless nights in our house.” Yes, precisely what I would have expected. No doubt he heard the poor boys breathing heavy and moaning throughout the night. It was pure hell and kept them up the entire night.

Earl’s letter got the library advisory board in a panic so they deleted the book from shelf. Earl is a coward. He should have gone in and burned it himself like a good Christian -- along with the author. Earl says God told him what to write: “God was speaking to my heart that day and helped me find the words that proved successful in removing this book from the shelf.” Too bad those voices didn’t whisper: “Earl, you’re a moron.”

Now we travel down to Orlando, Florida home of Disney World and other fantasies. One of which concerns a statue that is alleged to be the Virgin Mary. Now how anyone knows I don’t know since nobody has the slightest idea what Mary looked like. But I guess if they buy the virgin story they are open to anything.

The local Catholics are going postal over the statue and flocking in to pray to it. Apparently someone saw a mark on the face which they say looks like a tear, well it would except its black, the tear that is not the statue.

No wonder so many good Catholics were willing to say: “Sure Father O’Malley, you can take little Timmy on a personal prayer retreat.” Just not that bright are they?

A long row of zeros still adds up to nothing.

2007-04-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

I confess a bit of a fear in writing this piece. I say that because I know how some Christians love to distort comments, take them out of context or entirely misinterpret them. Often that is done maliciously. Other times it is done our of an inability to grasp anything that is a slight bit complicated.

My main point is is that atheism is a void. It is an intellectual zero, a nothingness. What complicates the matter is that what this means is not likely to be what the Christian will take it to mean. They will give this a meaning that fits the believing mind and thus entirely distorts what I’m saying.

What I mean is actually not too hard to understand if they take is slowly. Atheism is not a belief. It is the absence of a belief. To know that one is an atheist only means that you know he does not hold to the claims that a deity exists. Nothing more.

This is not to say that the atheist has no beliefs, only that those beliefs are not derived from atheism. Since atheism is a lack of a belief in something (in this case a deity) you can not get positive principles out of a negative concept. Not believing in a god doesn’t tell you how to live, what to value, what sort of society to yearn for, etc. By itself it gives no directions, values or beliefs. How could it? It is the lack of a belief

The error the believer makes it to then assume that if one doesn’t believe in a deity then one can’t hold positive beliefs at all. One can hold very specific beliefs about morality, decency, ethics, virtues, etc. But they are not rooted in one’s atheism because they can’t be rooted in a void.

That one invents a deity and announces that all beliefs are rooted in that invention doesn’t mean the beliefs are true, accurate or even good. Theists themselves prove that by constantly fighting with one another over those very beliefs. And the true believers actually dismiss the idea of there being any such thing as object good and objective morality. The good and the moral, they say, is merely that which God commands. If God commanded genocide then genocide is good. It is the ultimate moral relativism. Provided one is deluded enough to think God is speaking to them one has a moral license, nay, a moral requirement, to obey that voice and do all those horrific things the God is whispering. Throughout history sincere believers have done just that and the soil was fertlized deep with the blood of their victims.

The Christian, in one sense, seems to almost grasp that atheism is merely a lack of a belief. But they still miss it entirely. They almost get it when they start to argue that an atheist by virtue of being atheist has no morality. True, the morality he holds is not derived from the atheism. But that doesn’t mean it is not derived in no other natural, non-theistic way.

Too often believers are unthinking people. They merely accept social convention as moral or what the social convention of their church tells them is moral. They attribute all of that to God. You will get some absurd claims out of this. It is not God that gives them rules to live by, they are merely looking for an authority of some sort to tell them how to live. They can’t think for themselves.

And so they seek out authorities in one form or another offering them rules. Not ideas, but rules. There is a difference between learning how to think and being told what to think. Many believers have never figured that out.

The reality is that on a huge number of issues atheists do not differ from Christians regarding what they believe about life. Atheists do value life, perhaps more so since they believe this is the only life they have. They value love and friendship and human decency. In most respects the average atheist is more moral than the average Christian. Certainly the evidence bears it out in the US. They are less likely to go to jail, less likely to commit a crime, less likely to divorce, etc. But their living this way is not rooted in being an atheist. Having no believe in a deity does not tell you anything about how to treat other people. It does not inspire you to act in any particular way.

That most atheists live moral lives is not because they are atheists. If anything it is because they think things through rationally and the moral life they live is one that makes sense to them.

You can see how the Christian almost gets it when he says the atheist has no foundation for morality. He has no foundation for morality in atheism but that does not mean he has no foundation derived from rational thought and reality.

We don’t act on a lack of a belief. We act on beliefs. A large chunk of nothing can’t serve as the foundation for something. You can add all the zeros you want together and they still add up to zero. So the moral beliefs, of those who lack a belief in a deity, do not come from that lack of a belief, but come from someplace else. And by definition it comes from a non-theistic source.

The end result is that nothing an atheist does or actually believes is rooted in his or her atheism. It can’t be.

But once that is understood it destroys one of the big bugaboos the Christians invent about atheism. They often blame atheism for the actions of any atheist. That is absurd. Since an atheist can’t act on the basis of his lack of beliefs when he does act it is founded on something else. Atheism per se never causes one to act or not act. It is merely a description of a state of not believing in one kind of thing.

The good that atheists do is not rooted in atheism per se. The bad an atheist may do is not rooted in atheism per se. There is no set of beliefs that one can define as “atheism”. There is only the void, the lack of a belief. So atheism can neither take the credit for the good, nor the blame for the evil, done by any specific atheist.

Now in history there have been some nasty people who claimed to be atheists. And they did nasty things. But could those nasty things be attributed to their atheism? NO. Again nothingness can’t be the foundation for something and that applies even when the something is bad. Christians want to have it both ways. They will deny that decent atheists are decent because of their atheism. But any unpleasant atheist is automatically unpleasant, or bad, because of atheism. In one case they see atheism properly -- it can’t serve as the foundation for any action. But in other cases they assert it is the foundation for an actionprovided it is unpleasant.

Stalin said he was an atheist. Stalin did nasty things. But if a big chunk of nothing can’t serve as the foundation for an action then what causde Stalin to act nastily? It was not his lack of a belief in a deity but his positive belief in Marxist theory. Ditto for Mao. For the most part these individuals held very strongly to other beliefs and those beliefs--positive beliefs in the sense that they asserted something not in the sense that they were good--served as the foundation for their actions.

It took a positive belief to inspire them to do what they did. And for many of them it was an unthinking faith in Marxist theory. For some it was a thoughtful belief albeit a wrong one. Something must serve as the foundation for these actions and the something in this case was Marxism or socialism in its various forms. They acted brutally not because they lacked a faith in a deity but because they had a faith in a political/economic system.

This becomes a bit clearer when we consider the lack of a belief in many different things. I don’t know anyone today who believes in Thor, the god of thunder. We basically all lack a belief in Thor. There is probably an infinite number of things for which we hold no belief whatsoever. And just as you and I lack a belief in Thor so too did Stalin lack a belief in Thor.

Would I be justified in arguing that Stalin was a monster because he didn’t believe in Thor. Which is more likely: that Stalin acted badly due to his belief in Marxism or that he acted badly due to his lack of a belief in Thor? I hold no belief in the healing powers of crystal, the presence of aliens in UFOs, Santa Clause, fairies or the Loch Ness serpent. If required I could make a very long list of things I don’t believe. And none of that will tell you what I do believe and none of it will tell you why I act as I do. All those nothings strung together do not give you a positive.

So atheists may well have morals but not rooted in their atheism. Atheist may well value life but not because they are atheist. Atheists may even do bad things but not because they are atheists. The lack of a belief never serves as the inspiration for an action. We act upon that which we do believe not that which we don’t.

Preying on grief.

2007-04-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

It was a sad day when that disgusting lunatic, and he was a lunatic, killed the people at Virginia Tech. This deranged mental case, only recently released from an institution murdered 32 people. And to make sure the world understood that he felt justified in doing so he released a maniacal rant to the media during the long break he took between the killings.

During his tirade he attacked “rich brats”, drinkers, and hedonists. He sounded like a cross between a socialist and a fundamentalist Christian. He hated the rich and he hated the sinful. And like both groups he dwelled and mulled over every assumed slight he ever experienced. He was the perpetual victim whining about every injustice, real or imaginary. And in the end he was consumed with his hatred and killed.

Now many people on the Virginia Tech campus are religious. Most likely the majority of them are. It is to be expected that they will reflect on this tragedy in religious terms. And the atheists and non-believers of the world will leave them be. It is not the typical response of an atheist to inflict greater pain on someone at this time of trauma and suffering.

Yet one of the worst maggots on the extreme Right has used this sorrowful occasion to throw cheap shots at atheists. Dinesh D’Sousza once had some things to say that were of interest. But that was before he turned into one of the creepiest figures on the Right. He is the one harping on about how Christians in America ought to forge an alliance with Islamists and all go out and stone gays together.

His view is that the way to end Islamist extremism is to adopt their methods, bash a few homosexuals, burn some books, arrest the immoral and return to a theocratic moral country. That, says this appeaser to tyranny, will show them that America is just as moral as the Islamists themselves and they will no longer hate us.

Right! And the reason the Nazis were such lunatics was because the US didn’t round up the Jews. D’Sousza is delusional. And in one of his fits of, where he is possessed by the spirit of Ayatollah Khomeini and he channels the man, he wrote an attack on atheists in regard to the attack.

He wrote:

Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing...
...To no one's surprise, [Richard] Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it's difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho's shooting of all those people can be understood in this way--molecules acting upon molecules.

What does creepy Dinesh mean atheists are no where to be found? Surveys show that 20% of youth the age of the typical Virginia Tech student are atheists. Were they supposed to use this time of mourning to make points about their atheism? Were atheists supposed to crash these times demanding the right to speak?

In addition D’Sousza is not just creepy. He’s stupid. But anyone forging alliances with extreme Islamists is obviously working with less than a full deck. (That he hasn’t been shunned by the Right is even more scary.) Atheism as such is merely about the existence of a deity. Atheists, as individuals, have much to say about morality. Some like Ayn Rand, were often accused of being “moralists”.

The idea that atheists have nothing to say during times of grief is born out his own ignorance. I remember well picking up the collected works of Robert Ingersoll and reading some of his comments at a funeral. The friend to whom I was read it started crying. He said it was so moving he couldn’t help himself.

It would be a rare thing indeed for an atheist to make a spectacle at a time of mourning or the funeral of another. I don’t know what D’Sousza was thinking. Half the time I don’t think he knows himself. Every atheist I know has dealt with grief. I have lost to death people in my life, people I have loved very much.

And I have dealt with evil and injustice in ways that D’Sousza would never know. I have looked in straight in the face not just written about it from some Pacific coast mansion. But never would I think to try to impose an argument about the existence of Dinesh’s imaginary friend on others at a time of such sorrow.

Alas, we can’t say the same for Christians can we. Like vultures they wait for times of misery and sorrow to swarm around their victims. They lurk in the halls of hospitals preying on the dying and the mourners. They use every tragedy as a recruiting tool, every pain as another excuse to intrude and preach. To some they may offer a delusion of a life after death but often they are there to condemn and harass. Yes, at times of national or personal grief religion often is very visible and sometimes it is ugly.

I have known fundamentalists, in particular, the very group Mr. D’Sousza is so fond of, to tell grieving individuals that their loved one is burning in hell for eternity because they hadn’t been ‘borned again”. They were the “wrong” kind of Christian or even more horrifying, not any kind of Christian. They have used funerals to preach the horrors of eternal torment telling grieving families that their loved one is being tortured by the God of the Bible. And they relish in such actions.

And who was it that put in an appearance at these funerals to taunt and torment the grieving? It was not an atheist or agnostic. It wasn’t Richard Dawkins, who D’Sousza loves to hate. It was Rev. Fred Phelps and his Baptist congregation from Kansas.

This derange sect of fundamentalists said they will be picketing at the funerals and memorial services. And Shirley Phelps-Roper, the daughter of the church founder, said that the individuals who died deserved to die because they weren’t Christians.

She said: “The evidence is they were not Christians. God does not do that to his servants. You don’t need to look any further for evidence those people are in hell.” She said that the mass murderer “was also fulfilling the word of God.”

D’Sousza is right about one thing. Atheists are not making themselves visible at this time of grieving. They happen to know that this is not the time for a philosophical discussion. People need to be left alone and allowed to mourn. The only people who don’t understand that are the ones who share D’Sousza’s belief in a God. Perhaps now you understand why I think he’s such a creepy little maggot.

The Most Hated Family in America

2007-04-19T07:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes hate is earned. However, it must be stated that no family in America does more to horrify people about religion than these people. And they are probably converting more people to a pro-gay position than any other small group of people. Look at how they insult people who are even anti-gay accussing them of being "pro-fag". Second, what how quickly they become angry and start yelling.

Fastest growing religious belief isn't.

2007-04-15T07:02:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has an interesting report on Spanish-speaking immigrants and religion. Apparently the level of religiousity drops significantly when these people move to the United States.

One reason is outlined by one immigrant from Guatemala who said he went to church every Sunday prior to immigrating but now his family no longer does so. “We pray to God when we feel the need to but when we come here to America we don’t feel the need.”

The report, from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Hispanic Center found that 8 percento Spanish-speaking residents of the US say that they have “no religion” which is close to the 11% of Americans in general who say the same. (Among young people in America the percentage of non-religious is now 20%.)

One difference for the immigrants is that two-thirds of the now non-religious say they were previously religious.

But a larger survey of Spanish-speaking Americans found that there has been a dramatic decrease in religiosity in recent years. In 1990 it was found that 6 percent said they were non-religious but the new survey by the American Religion Indentification Survey puts the number at 13 percent. This survey shows non-religious Americans as being 15% of the population.

And while the totally non-religious are a relatively small percentage a much larger percentage have dropped religion in its traditional form, that is they don’t attend church or affiliate with a religious body though they still think of themselves as Christians. These people are secular in everything but name.

One Catholic priest admitted: “My fear is the strength of secularization, the influence of Americanized pop culture. Is the spiritual tradition of the church, Catholic and Protestant, strong enough to withstand the secularizing cultural influences?”

The American Religion Identification Survey found that the fastest growing religious indentification “in absolute as well as in percentage terms has been among those adults who do not subscribe to any religious identification; their number has more than doubled from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million in 2001; their proportion has grown from just eight perent of the total in 1990 to over fourteen percent in 2001. It might be even higher since there was also a dramatic increase in the number of people who refused to answer the question, from 2 percent in 1990 to 5 percent in 2001.

One interesting statistic, which we have found repeated in numerous other studies, shows that the more fundamentalist an individual the more likely they are to have a failed marriage. While 9% of people without religion are divorced or separated the figures are higher for fundamentalists: 12% for Baptists, 14% for Pentecostals, 10% for Assemblies of God and 11% for Seventh Day Adventists.

Another interesting statistic is the coversion rates in different groups. That is how many people were new adherent to a religion and how many left the same religion.. Catholics lost twice as many people as they converted. Baptist lost 200,000 more than they “saved”. The non-religious had 1.1 million become religious but had 6.6 million who were previously religious give up the belief. Methodists lost 1.1 million more than they gained, while Lutherans and Presbyterians each lost 100,000. Even the incessant recruitment campaigns of the Mormons didn’t do them much good. where they gained 447,000 they lost 446,000, which is hardly any growth at all.

Even in Utah the Mormons are losing the race. Few are converting in and migration to Utah is quickly changing the religious make up of the state. The 2004 count showed that 62% of the population is still Mormon but every county saw a decrease and it is expected to fall below 50% by 2030.

In fact there are vast discrepencies between the numbers the Mormoms claims to have as member and the numbers of people who claim to be Mormon. In Mexico the Mormons claim to have 850,000 members yet only 205,000 Mexicans claim to be Mormon. In Brazil the church claims to have 743,000 members but only 200,000 claim to belong. The Mormons say 91,000 New Zealanders are members of the church but only 40,000 Kiwis say they belong. Membership is the UK is supposedly 177,000 but 62,000 define themselves as Mormon, in Germany the number of self-identified Mormons is only one-third the number the church claims. In fact it is pretty common for the church to claim members which are 300% to 400% higher than what people themselves say.

Mom, Guess what? I'm an atheist.

2007-04-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

If there is one thing many parents dred it is having children who think for themselves. Here is a short video that was filmed when one boy decides to tell his mother that he is an atheist. The response, to say the least, is not particular nice. Polls show that most Americans feel that atheists are worse than terrorists. So much for rational thinking in America. But the video does give me an idea. For some kids this might be a good strategy. They go home and announced they are an atheist. After a few minutes of parental venting they can then say: "Ah, not really. I'm just gay." At this point the Christian parents will shout: "Oh, thank God."

A Tale of Two Surveys

2007-04-04T09:56:00.000-07:00

Previously I took on Andrew Sullivan. I argued that when he puts his God-goggles on he gets basically stupid. Faith does that to people. He misquoted a report on people with HIV claiming it showed: "If you believe, you're less likely to catch it." In fact it didn't speak of contracting HIV at all since these people were all infected. It said that highly religious people reported they practiced safe sex more often and had less sex.

I argued that the report he cited was a survey where these people described their own religiousity and their own sexual habits. I said such surveys are prone to distortions because some groups of people are highly motivated to lie. And one group that is highly notivate to lie about their sexual lives are religious people who are violating their own moral codes. I thought this was an obvious flaw in the report.

Today Sullivan reports on another study on sexuality where, with no God-goggles to stupify him, he suddenly understands the problems of self-reporting surveys like the one he cited previously. This survey mapped the sexual interactions of high school students with white dots for girls and blue dots for boys. If one boy had sex with one girl and neither of them had sex with anyone else in the school it would show on the map as a blue dot connected to a white dot and nothing more. If the boy had sex with two different girls, and neither of them had sex with anyone else, you would have a blue dot connected on two sides to white dots with no other connections. and so on.

The previous self-reporting survey confirmed Sullivan's religious obsession. So it was taken at self value, no questions asked and trumpeted as if it proved some great truth about the goodness of religion. This survey chanlleged another one of Sullivan's religious obsessions, his gayness. I believe the large map showed only one gay relationship. This goes against what Sullivan assumes (and I think against reality). Suddenly Sullivan is making the same point I previously made. "Why so few gays? It's high school, I guess. And all of this is based on reported hook-ups, so who knows what the reality truly is."

The "reported" hook-ups of religious people he took at face value no question asked. It confirmed what he wanted to hear. The "reported" hook-ups of high school students didn't say what he wanted to hear so he dismisses it saying "who knows what the reality truly is." No one really!

High school students don't want to admit they are gay or had gay sex. So they will downplay that activity in their reporting. Some, especially the boys, will want to appear as studs so they will exaggerate on that side of the fence. They have motivations to misreport the facts making the survey of some, but very limited, value. Christians also have reasons to misreport their activity especially those who are deeply fundamentalist, as were many in the survey of HIV infected people Sullivan reported about previously. They will downplay all sexual activity. But that was what Sullivan wanted to hear then.

Unfortunately, even while Sullivan is not a dumb man, he does allow his God-goggles to get in the way frequently. So he can see the problem of self-reporting sex surveys which don't confirm what he wanted to hear while he doesn't see the same problem with sex surveys which do confirm what he wanted to hear. That he made these contradictory statements so close together just shows how blind people become with their God-goggles on.

UPDATE: Maybe Mr. Sullivan is having other problems and it's mot just his God-goggles. He has a Quote for the Day which is calls Tyler Cowen mouthing off again. The quote seems to imply Cowen said this. Actually he asked his readers how they would feel about the statement. It was not Cowen's statement at all. Then to make matters even worse sullivans sais that the commenters at the Reason blog were having "various calves" over the issue. That isn't true either. There was discussion of the points Cowen raised, which are not in the "quote" that Sullivan lifted out of context. And no one seemd particularly upset with Cowen. Maybe Andrew isn't reading as well as he used in old age?

Surely the man can read.

2007-04-03T13:08:00.000-07:00

I have a like/hate relationship with Andrew Sullivan. Not a love/hate relationship as I've never liked his stuff that much. He's too self-absorbed for me, I'm not really interested in all the details about his life, his mother, his lover, his dogs, his friends, etc. And when he goes religious he goes incoherent. What ability he has to think (and he has some) disappears completely once he brings in the spiritual. He actually makes less sense than the fundamentalists he despises (and with good reason). He uses what I call god-talk, which is something that sounds theological but which, when you try to figure out what he saying, is devoid of content or meaning.

Apparently when he has his God-goggles on he can't read either. In a post today he claims, regarding HIV, "If you believe, you're less likely to catch it." The problem is that it's bullshit. He then quotes something to prove his case and the sentence he quotes doesn't say that believers are less likely to catch HIV at all. Sullivan is a Christian of his own making and is HIV positive. What he quotes says nothing about religion preventing you from catching HIV at all. It says:

HIV-positive people who say religion is an important part of their lives are likely to have fewer sexual partners and engage in high-risk sexual behavior less frequently than other people with the virus that causes AIDS, according to a study issued today by the RAND Corporation. As a result, people with HIV who have stronger religious ties are less likely to spread the virus...

Since these people already have HIV how does Sullivan read this as saying they are less likely to catch it? "If you believe, you are less likely to catch it." How can one be "less likely" to catch something that one has already caught? The chance of these people having HIV is 100% because they already have it.

What the report does say, as opposed to the fanciful interpretation of Sullivan, is that these people have less sex than other HIV positive individuals and thus are less likely to spread it. The "study" in question is a survey more than a study. It is based on what people say they do and not about what they actually do. And I have argued that when it comes to these "morality' surveys the religious have an incentive to lie and claim they are more moral than they actually are. One indication of this is the authors of the survey note that Africans-Americans "report high levels of both attendance at religious services and prayer" yet "have been disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS." In other words they are the most religious group in the US and yet have some of the highest HIV infection rates in the US.

To put in Sullivanesque terms: They are more likely to believe and more likely to catch it.

And apparently Mr. Sullivan's very public religiousity had no impact on how he played around sexually as he was caught looking for multiple sexual partners for unprotected sex himself. When that came out he was livid claiming it was an invasion of his privacy, but as one critic noted " he is one of the most self-referential journalists working today." Amen, to that. A story just isn't a story unless Sullivan can talk about himself. It's the least attractive aspect to his writing. He inundates his readers with personal information and cries privacy when certain aspects of his life become public. Sullivan's secondary defense was that the men he sought out as sexual partners for unprotected sex were already HIV positive themselves. And he dismisses the evidence that continued and repeated exposure to the virus increases the dangers. He calls the evidence for that "weak and hypothetical." Of course he ignores the fact that there are different strains of HIV with some worse than others. But apparently his constant parade of religiousity had little impact on what he was doing.

The key factor, however, about this survey, is how reliable is it? The participants were asked to describe their religious practices and beliefs as well as their sexual habits. If, as I contend, religiously prone individuals are more likely to be deceitful about their sexual life then the study is relatively worthless. It is worthless because we only have the self-reported claims of the religious on which to rely and nothing indicating actual activity.

For instance we have see that religious teenagers are more prone to lie about their sexual activity. And worse, their religiousity compels many of them to avoid condoms. So when they do have sex the studies all show that they are more likely to have unprotected sex. That is confirmed by looking at the most Bible-belt states and their teen pregnancy rates. The "godless" states have much lower teen pregnancy rates while the Bible-belt states have the highest.

The survey admitted that a large number of the participants were fundamentalists -- who already are HIV positive indicating something about their sexual activity of the past. And the side chasm between what they claim they do and what they actually do is famously wide. Surely I don't have to list the numbers of famous fundamentalist figures who have been caught in one sleazy scandal or another to prove my point.

People who don't hold strict religious moral beliefs are not more likely to "sin". We can see that by noting that atheists are underrepresented in prison while fundamentalists are over represented. Atheists are less likely to divorce than fundamentalists. But I suspect atheists are more likely to admit the truth about their sexual activities than fundamentalists. We have plenty of cases showing that to be the case. And as long as the survey is based on what the religious say they do it has to be taken with a large grain of salt.

With or without limits?

2007-03-28T11:36:00.000-07:00

According to classic Christian theology reason is deficient in telling us about the nature of God. We are either too stupid or sinful to know God on our own and thus the only method to know God is through his revelation to us about himself. All we can know is what he tells us.

How do we know he is telling the truth? They will tell us we know because his nature requires him to tell the truth. Again, how do we know that? Remember our only means of conprehending this deity is through what the deity himself reveals to us. What if the nature of the deity is that of a trickster, jocker, deceiver, or even a liar?

We could ask how do we determine when an individual is like this. But the problem with that is that with man we have a yardstick by which we can measure his nature. It’s called reality. If what he says doesn’t conform with reality we dismiss what he says. Depending on what else we can figure out we might decide he is joking around or viciously deceptive.

We can’t do that with this deity. They also tell us that what is real is entirely dependent on the will of the deity. He also has the ability to change our perceptions of reality by making things appear different from what they truly are. We have no yardstick. We can’t measure this deity against reality since he is the author of reality and can change it or manipulate it.

So when we attempt to know anything about this God, says the theologians, we are doomed to fail. We can only know what he tells us. And we can only hope he tells us the truth. They call that reassuring. It is supposed to give us hope. But in the end we can only know the nature of God to the extent that he wants us to know him. And we can never actually know whether what he reveals is real or illusionary. We can only hope but never know anything.

And what do we even mean by the “nature” of God. When we speak of a nature for various entities we speak of the very traits that make up its substance. A rock has a nature but it has no ability to define that nature. It simply is. Even man is largely at the mercy of his nature. We can choose certain things in life but other things are beyond choice. I have blue eyes. I have always had blue eyes and no doubt will die with blue eyes. That is the way it is. I can wish myself 12 fingers but won’t have them.

There some aspects of my nature over which I do have some sovereignty. I can choose to think or not to think. I can ignore evidence or consider it. I can jog and maybe lose a few pounds. I can certainly end my life if I so desired. But there are vast areas over which I have no control.

What about this deity? Does he choose his own traits? Supposedly he chose to become a man. So can he choose to become anything? Can he change his nature? If he can’t change his nature then what prevents him from doing so? It can’t be his own will that prevents it since if his will is totally sovereign he can choose to have a different nature.

A tree can chose none of its attributes. It simply is. Man can change some attributes, particularly those which are caused by action or are the result of values and thoughts. But most of his nature is unchangeable. He has no ability to change it. Is God so hampered?

Is God limited by the nature of God? If so can we rightfully say he is sovereign? If God is totally sovereign, and if morality and law are determined solely by his will, as theologians often argue, then it would seem he can manipulate his own nature as well. This is not simply changing his mind. This is a reassembling of his very nature.

We acknowledge human limitations. In fact we say we are limited by nature. It is our very nature which prevents us from changing many important aspects of ourselves. In reality we acknowledge that the nature of existence is superior to the will of any entity within nature. We even speak of the laws of nature, that is those “rules” which we discover that tell us how things operate according to their very specific attributes. Nature is sovereign. This doesn’t mean we can’t manipulate it or try to change it. But we have to comprehend it and manipulate it according to its own laws if we are to have any success at all.

But if God is the creator of nature then is he the creator of his own nature? Or is there a higher nature which even he is bound to obey? And if there is a higher nature which he must obey is he sovereign? In fact, is he god? To have a “nature” is to have specific attributes and to have an attribute is a limitation. But god supposedly is without limitations. Yet to have no nature at all is to not exist.

eBay caves to Jihadists for Jesus

2007-03-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

The cowards who run eBay have caved in to the whinning, hysterical rantings of fundamentalist lunatics.

We all remember the meth-buying, gay sexcapade of Rev. Ted Haggard, a leading light of American fundamentalism. Haggard got caught with his pants down, around his ankles. He was hiring the services of a male escourt on a regular basis. That escort, Mike Jones, exposed Haggard.

Jones has changed careers. And he decided to put the massage table used during theirentertainment sessions on sale on eBay and said that he planned to give all money raised by the sale to Project Angel Heart which provides care to people with cancer and AIDS. A rather charitable deed you would think. And since it symbolizes a new career as well you would assume the fundamentalist hate mongers would applaud the action. It was virtuous two different ways.

Of course not. The rabid fundamentalist is driven by hatred. One of their professional little minded bigots, Karen Booth, posted a message on one of the gay-hating web sites run by these groups -- one that promises to cure people of being gay through prayer and Jesus. Didn’t help Ted much did it, Karen?

She said that the sale of the table on eBay “is reprehensible”. And she posted the fax number for eBay telling the brainless fundamentalist masses to inundate the company with protests because the y are offended by the table. What bloody hypocrites. Remember how these whinning assholes were shreiking about Muslims offended by cartoons of their fake prophet. Now they are offended by a table!

In her jihad Ms. Booth said that the table is “highly offensive to Christians, particularly conservative evangelicals.” She demanded the auction be cancelled and the gutless cowards at eBay caved in. Death to infidels! Jihad! Jihad!

Booth, in obviously violation of Biblical standards, calls herself a Reverend -- notice that none of the disciples were women -- something the Catholics notice. I must guess that she doesn’t think that gluttony is a sin. The teaching that the body is the temple of God so inspired her that she obviously made room for all three members of the Trinity. She’s worried about someone selling a table and threatening Jihad over it when she ought to be dieting instead. She wanted to be a big figure in the anti-gay movement and it looks like she succeeded.

Now she is offended by the sale of the table! What a cow. What about the meth buying antics of Haggard? She threatened the company: “I have put an alert on my ministry’s national website and have also informed other national Christian ministries, including the American Family Association. (The auction is also being discussed on several Internet blogs.) If the offensive listing is not removed, I will encourage my supporters to boycott eBay, which I also intend to do.”

Rev. Booth called out the American Taliban over a table! This is the sort of petty-minded, hate-inspired antics that alleged Christians get involved with. And they wonder why the number of young people who say they are atheists has doubled in recent years. If I were a Christian (and I got cured of that disease long ago) I would be offended by the clownish antics of these sexual Klanners and their lynch mobs threatening everyone and anyone who dares offend them. Me, I’m glad their around, they are walking testimonials for rejecting the lunancy of religion. Theology is a mind altering drug. It turns people into raving lunatics. Thanks, Rev. Booth. I was thinking we’d go a whole week without some fundamentalist preacher once again proving how absurd they and their god can be.

I am disappointed to learn that the head of eBay is a big fund raiser for Theopublicans like Mitt Romney. Very disappointed, I’ve bought and sold thousands of dollars worth of merchandise on their site. Anyone know if there is a competitor out there? Perhaps it’s time to move the business elsewhere.

Bidding on the table had reached almost $1,300 when eBay caved in to the Jihad. Jones said that the fundamentalists may have tried to do this to hurt him but he wasn't going to make any money off the deal. He notes all these "loving Christians" did was hurt a charity helping dying people! Ah, the love of God manifested again. Meanwhile it should be noted that Rev. Booth, bright spark that she is, just gave Jones lots of free publicity for upcoming book on his affair with Haggard. Smart move! But Booth isn't the stupidest one in this sad tale. Obviously eBay is even dumber. A few thousand Jihadists for Jesus knew about the auction before and were upset now millions of people will be shocked at how eBay caved in to religious extremism. And I'm serious about asking if people know an alternative site, I'll promote it.

Hey Trey and Matt: Here is a great episode for South Park. You can even use the Michael Moore doll from your movie, just slap Booth's face on the body. You don't even have to change the script. The large Jihadists still screams: "Jihad, jihad!" All you have to do is stick a massage table in the background. You can even have Haggard on it in a black nightie with a come-hither look. It's a perfect episode.

Who is responsible?

2007-03-19T16:29:00.000-07:00

Who is responsible is a major issue in most legal cases. We don’t just want to know what happened but who caused it to happen. Determining responsibility allows us to determine liability.

Consider a man who owns some dogs. Let us even assume he has them in a locked yard where no one can have access to them. One day he looks into the yard and he sees that one of the dogs is ill. He knows his dogs well and he knows the dog in question is very ill. In fact he concludes that the dog is infected with rabies. And his conclusion is the correct one. He looks at the other dogs and believes they are not infected. He fears that they will become so if something isn’t done. So he carefully manipulates the ill dog toward the gate, opens the gate and the dog bolts. He breaths a sign of relief, closes the gate and goes inside to relax.

While he is relax the dog he loosed on the neighborhood goes around attacking numerous people and biting them infecting them as well. Who is responsible for that? In the realm of criminal liability we would say that the dog’s owner was responsible. The dog was contained until he let it loose and he let it lose knowing it was infected with rabies and posed a threat to others.

In fact he would be held responsible even if he wasn’t sure if the dog had rabies. He knew the dog was ill and knew it might be rabies. That would be enough to hold him responsible. The reason he is responsible is that the attacks that took place are something that one could reasonable know in advance.

If you are aware that an action you might take will cause pain and suffering to others and you take it then it is as if you simply choose to inflict the pain and suffering on the others yourself. There pain was the direct, knowable consequence of your actions.

It is not just that the attacker was a dog that determines responsibility. If a man comes to you and says he plans to kill someone and asks for a gun and you give it to him then you are co-conspirator in that crime. He told you he was going to do it and you believed him. You are responsible.

Now let us take this into the theological realm, and yes, this is a continuation of the previous post.

We are told that God created everything and knows everything. He knew the nature of Satan when he created him. In fact he created him with that precise nature. He knew what Satan would do. (I am assuming the nonsensical claims of the Christians here for a moment so be patient.) He not only knew that Satan was rabid, so to speak, but he knew exactly who would be bitten and when. And then he opened the gates and let the dog lose.

Who is responsible? The God-addicts will tell us that Satan is responsible. But God enabled Satan. He created him with full knowledge of the future. There was nothing that Satan did not do which God did no know in advance. So why blame the Devil? He was doing that which he destined to do by his creator. He wasn’t just locked up and let loose. He was non-existent and God called him into existence. And God did so with no doubts about the results.

God truly is the author of evil. God can not be the creator of the universe without creating all that is within the universe. If God created everything and if evil exists then God created evil. If God created evil knowing it was evil then God be all good?

Of course this is only a problem if you believe the fairy tale about gods and demons.

Life isn't fair.

2007-03-18T21:15:00.000-07:00

“Life’s not fair.” That’s a pretty common refrain. What is usually meant by it? Some may assume that this means life is unfair. But that’s not quite right. The term refers to the fact that the process of life itself, if not the movement of the universe, is outside the realm of fair and unfair. Life is not fair, but neither is it unfair.

Fair is a concept describing a relationship which is free from bias, dishonesty or injustice. A game is fair when the rules apply equally to everyone and no one is intentionally disadvantaged. It implies the involvement of conscious, moral beings with the ability to choose.

Rocks don’t have the ability to choose. The planet does not have a consciousness and can’t make choices. An earthquake make start a landslide and kill someone. It is tragic but it outside the realm of fairness entirely. Often when something like this happens someone will say: “Life's not fair.”

The game analogy is a good one. Consider a Little League game where one team is held to one set of rules and the other team to a different set of rules. The first team rounds the bases and scores one point. The second team must round them twice to score a point. The game is rigged. It’s unfair. Someone designed the game so that the one team has a much harder time than the other team. We would call that unfair.

Imagine if the game keeper in that match did something even worse. Instead of biasing the rules against one team he did unpleasant things to them. Let us say he broke the legs of a few of the kids so they couldn’t run well. Maybe he threw acid in the face of others blinding them. Not only is he unfair but cruel.

And life often does that. For entirely natural reasons bad things happen. Genes evolve and mutate and sometimes genes have defects in them. And those defects harm people. They might cause one child to be born grossly malformed or mentally handicapped. Others are born blind.

There are other “accidents of birth” outside the realm of fairness. Some people seem to get all the luck. They are attractive, intelligent and seem to get born into the “right” family so that they have every advantage possible. They never want for money, never lack opportunity to succeed, and always have more options than they could possibly consider. Sure sometimes they screw it up. But they have to work a lot harder to make themselves failures than lots of other people.

Most of us aren’t like that. Most of us aren’t drop dead gorgeous. Most of us aren’t geniuses or born to wealth and privilege. And most of us aren’t the worst off either. We aren’t the people who nature seems to have cursed. We aren’t the people born in families that literally have nothing to speak about. As children we were fed and didn’t famine. We didn’t watch siblings starve to death before our eyes. We didn’t see thugs march our mother into the bush to rape and murder her.

When it comes to what traits we are born with the motto applies: life isn’t fair. When it comes to which families are our own the same is true: life isn’t fair. It grants some great privilege and inflicts on others immeasurable suffering. We look at the privileged and feel cheated and then look on the suffering and and bless our luck.

Life isn’t fair.

But what if there is a game keeper who determines these things? What if there is actually a conscious, moral being, with the ability to choose who makes choices for us? To some he gives wonderful advantages and to others unfathomable misery. He chooses that some are crippled and others great athletes. And then he places them all in the midst of the same world and says: “Go ahead and join the game.” Of course some have no chance at all. He makes sure of that. He sends famine there way to starve them as babies. Or polio to cripple them as children, or AIDS to take there parents from them. He gives them nothing. Others he showers with blessings.

Anyone who designed a “game” like that would not be fair. In fact he would be consider unjust, cruel, and vicious. Our language lacks the proper words to describe the utter immorality of such a being. Such an entity would be the supreme evil if it existed.

If there is a deity who created us as we are then he is responsible for the great blessings on the view and the misery of the many. If he showered some with riches he imposed poverty and famine on others. No child choose to be born in family that was unable to feed it. No child decided to be born to parents who would abuse and murder it. Those were just the random acts of existence. Life isn’t fair.

But once you insert a God into the equation everything changes. Every fact of reality becomes open to moral judgement. Now many theists would try to argue that their deity is not bound by an moral code. He is the lawgiver immune from the law he gives -- much the way George Bush sees himself.

They imagine a being of absolute power who is reigned in by no moral code whatsoever. There can be no morality which binds him other than his own choice. If he is limited in choices he is not all-powerful. He must have the ability to make evil decision. He must have the ability to act immorally. Now I know the theologically inclined don’t want to imagine that a possibility. After all an all-powerful being who is bound by no moral code whatsoever is a terrible thing to consider. So they simply say he either is not able to do evil for some magical reason they don’t quite explain or they say he is able to do evil but always chooses to do good.

How do they know the always does good? In fact if we look around at all those things over which we say “Life is not fair” we get the impression that he may be doing evil quite regularly. He gives an infant deformed legs dooming it to a life of pain and eventual starvation by having it born in the midst of complete poverty. Maybe he did it because he is evil. Maybe he chooses to be unfair, immoral, and monstrous. Perhaps he gets some sadistic joy out of inflicting pain on millions of people much the way some very sick thugs enjoy torturing animals.

The great tyrants apparently found some value in slaughtering people by the millions. Does not these deity do the same? The tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in one day rivals any act by the worst monster in history. Not even Stalin, Mao or Hitler could inflict death on hundreds of thousands of people in just a few hours.

The Christian comforts himself saying this couldn’t be possible because the Bible says that their God is good. But couldn’t a deity capable of monstrous acts, just like those that take place daily, just as easily lie to people to give them false comfort? If there is some divine plan at work when a few hundreds thousand people are killed in a massive tidal wave then there could be a divine place at work when he hands out holy books with lies in them.

Maybe this malicious entity actually did reveal himself to the prophets of the Bible and did tell them the things they wrote down. And maybe he then showed himself to other prophets and told them different things setting these groups against one another for eternity. Maybe he enjoys the conflict his contradictory revelations produce. Would this be any less monstrous than creating famines or plagues?

The choice for the theological inclined is a difficult one I think. They can argue that there is moral code to universe that binds even God. Many have said just that throughout history. But if that is so then there are choices God can not make, his powers are indeed limited by something.

On the other hand maybe there is no deity at all. Maybe life is a series of events, some randomly caused by the forces of nature and others created by human choices interacting with nature. Maybe there are things for which no one is responsible and maybe life really isn’t fair after all. You decide for yourself which is more plausible. I know what I think.

Must evolution be true for atheism to stand?

2007-03-13T18:33:00.000-07:00

I doubt the Religious Right has anyone as vicious, stupid and purely greedy as Ann Coulter. Personally I think she is taking them all for a ride, hence the $1.5 million dollar property in Palm Beach (isn’t she the one who ridicules liberals as all living in million dollar mansions?).

It’s not as if she says anything intelligent. She is the walking stereotype of the blond, anorexic bimbo right down to dressing like a $2 hooker while lecturing everyone about morality. She also lectures about family and marriage and remains unmarried to this day. (Can anyone spell l.e.s.b.i.a.n perhaps?)

Even on the issues where she and I agree she is embarrassing in her viciousness and irrationality. Where we don’t agree I’m glad she is out there for the same reason -- she discredits the arguments I find absurd by her irrationality and cruelty.

I would like to address one silly statement she made: “Although God believers don’t need evolution to be false, atheist need evolution to be true.” Typical of Coulter she packs more falsehoods and twisted logic into a sentence than anyone else.

So “God believers”, her stranger term for theists, can be evolutionists. I agree. I know many people who are theologically infested who are evolutionists of one type of another.

But as an atheist I can’t think of a reason why it is necessary for atheism for evolution to be true. Coulter doesn’t really say except by quoting someone saying evolutionary theory made lots of people atheists and quoting Dawkins saying it makes him a “fulfilled atheist.”

Neither of those statements indicates that the veracity of evolution is necessary to atheism. Neither of them say that. I suspect that what Coulter meant to say was something else entirely. She is a bad writer in my opinion and often says things in a confused way -- but that is how her thinking works -- badly.

If she said: “Although God believers don’t need creationism to be true, atheists need it to be false,” then she would be correct. If there was a creation by a God then atheism false. But atheism can be true and evolution false without a problem.

Atheism pre-existed Darwinian theory. And if Darwin never came along, and no one else replace him, I’d still be an atheist. My atheism has nothing to do with evolution. And the atheists I know are not atheists because of evolution.

What would happen if evolution were disproved? Nothing in regards to either atheism or theism. A god is not proven if evolution is disproved. Only the fundamentalist needs to disprove evolution, not all theists because only the fundamentalist needs a literal creation to support his reading of the Bible. Most other Christians are more intelligent than that and thus don’t have to disprove evolution. So if evolution were false that does nothing to prove the existence of a god.

And neither does it falsify atheism. If evolution were disproved (and I don’t think it will be) neither theism nor atheism are touched in any manner whatsoever. Coulter is just off her rocker -- again. Still!

What it means to the atheist is simple. It would only mean that we don’t know the answer to a question. Now I know a lot of people use God as a gap-filler. Anything they don’t know they explain away by dragging a deity into the picture. But the atheist sees no need for that. The lack of an answer to a question, even an important question, is not a license to invent answers. That is what the theist does. He invents a deity to explain that which is not explained any other way.

We don’t know everything. We never will know everything. We learn more each day but what we don’t know is immeasurable. There will always be questions for which we don’t have answers even as the number of questions answered grows. Because each new bit of knowledge gives us more questions.

The atheism does not need evolution to be true. He does not creation to be false if he is to remain a rational atheist. If evolution is wrong then it just means that there is some other way that life came into existence and that doesn’t necessarily mean a supernatural way.

Let us go back prior to germ theory. The Christian of the day attributed disease to God’s will or demonic powers. Perhaps it was God punishing sin or Satan trying to test the faith of someone. The atheist didn’t accept those witch-doctor theories at all. But prior to Pasteur confirm the germ theory of disease the atheist simply didn’t know the answer to what was the cause of disease.

Before Pasteur other thinks formulated the theory of germs, men like Fracastoro, Bassi and Henle) but he was the first to prove it. Sure some religiously infected individuals still dream of other explanations but even most theists accept the germ theory of disease. By the way it is still called the “germ theory of disease”. I note that because some of the scientifically illiterate fundamentalists argue that since we speak of the “theory of evolution” that proves it isn’t a fact. The same people would normally say that germs cause disease even though that is still called a theory as well. But they don’t know that. There’s a lot they don’t know. But unlike them we atheists, don’t invent a God to explain anything we don’t know.

There is no reason that atheism needs evolution to be true. None. If falsified tomorrow atheism would still be a sensible position since atheism never rested on evolution. Coulter once again has no idea what she is talking about. But if she did make sense the Religious Right wouldn’t be showering her with millions of dollars in book sales.

PS: This is our 400th posting here.

True, so true.

2007-03-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

Pretzel logic and the "ex-gays".

2007-03-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Faking reality is one of the hallmarks of the fundamentalist. Reality is judged by the Bible and not the Bible by reality. Reality has to be twisted to correspond with Scripture. I was reading a Christian “webzine” with an article by someone who works for the fraudulent Exodus International “ministry” which promises to help “deliver” people from being gay.

Of course they have stopped using the word gay or homosexual. They have convinced themselves that such people simply don’t exist. There are only those “struggling with same-sex attracting”. So, if you are gay you aren’t.
Now this article by Mike Ensley asks what should most “exgays” do because most “exgays” “haven’t come to our ‘happy ending’ yet”. He wants to know “What about those who continue to struggle with same-sex attraction, even after choosing to follow Christ. We’re caught in a sort of identity limbo, unsure whether we can or even should hope to experiences heterosexual desire, get married and start a family someday.”

He says “all those testimonies from now married ‘ex-gay’s and those who have been ‘supernaturally delivered’ from their struggle can be more of a frustration than an encouragement.” No doubt because they aren’t real. I’ve followed these lunatics and their antics for 25 years. Who are the ones claiming this supernatural deliverance?

First, numbers of them were caught out as lying about it. They said they were changed but were then found screwing the young guys who came to them for ministry. They were liars. Then there were a number who said they were cured and then later admitted that they were lying and that no change had taken place -- that they were claiming such changes by faith but it didn’t work.

Then you read about “cures” which are very nebulous at best. Groups would claim some “cure rate” but when questioned would admit they did no follow up whatsoever. Once someone finished their “homo no mo” course they were “graduated” and declared cured and sent out into the world. From that point on the ministry had no contact with them. But they were cures!

One cure I read about had me in stitches. A man with a life-long heterosexual orientation goes to prison. He has some gay sex in prison (pretty much the only option there). He feels bad about it. He gets out and prays to Jesus and never has gay sex again. He’s cured! Prayer works! That’s like going to the Sahara Desert and praying that the waters dry up.

Other cases were about individuals whose greatest sexual attractions were heterosexual but who, perhaps as teens, tried gay sex a couple of times. A few were men who were straight, married and enjoyed straight sex but who got horny and allowed some man to give them a blow job. The “testimonies” I read were filled with such cases. Others were apparently bisexual and attracted to both sexes.

Then there were people who apparently are homosexual and who believe it sinful because the Bible says it. They can’t stand who they are because they think God hates them for this and will torture them for eternity if they remain gay. They “struggle” and don’t find the cure. They may even marry as a leap of faith. They may even live a life long, sexless existence married to someone who they may care for but can never desire. But they are a “success”. If these people are the success what do the failures look like?

We all hear of cases of men who have been married and who, after years of marriage, announce they’ve been gay all along. Yet there are people who want to use marriage as proof of successful sexual conversion. Ensley seems to forget this and uses the “now married ‘ex-gays’” as a criteria of successful cure. His real questions however is for the vast majority of “former homosexuals” who never became “former”.

Ensley admits he “continues to experience same-sex attractions” but denies this means he is still gay. He can’t accept he is gay because “my faith in God’s Word -- as well as my conviction and my personal experience -- tell me otherwise.” That’s what I mean when I speak of twisting reality to fit the Bible. He says he is attracted to men but he says that doesn’t mean he is gay because his “faith” and his “convictions” (the same thing) say he isn’t. This is confirmed by his “personal experience”! What personal experience? The one where he is still sexually attracted to men?

He suggest believers who are gay (oops, I mean “struggling with same-sex attraction”) must “transform our thinking”. Stop thinking logically. Stop thinking that if one is still sexually attracted only to the same sex that means one is gay. One is really just a straight with struggles.

Ensley then twists logic like a pretzel. He discusses that straight Christians have sexual desires that are evil as well. So these straights “have to crucify the flesh daily, just like you and me.” “For the opposite-sex struggler, relationships based on lust and/or unhealthy dependencies can sometimes slip under the radar, masking as romance.”

I love this. His theory is that all people, gay and straight, are really fucked up so the person who is gay but lying about it is really no different. Instead of arguing that all people are as good as each other he is arguing that all people are as sick and disgusting as each other. Scratch the born-again Christian and you find someone who has contempt and hatred for humanity.

Now what about those ‘ex-gays’ who want relationship? Ensley suggests that they stop worrying about whether or not they have any sexual desires for their opposite sex spouse. He tells them: “We often say the opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality, it’s holiness.” Ensley says don’t worry about sexual satisfaction since that is selfish. And individuals must put themselves last in the Christian hierarchy -- sort of the way the Communists want.

So your body, in marriage, belongs to your partner and it should be offered “as a living sacrifice to God.” There was the old joke about Victorian sex advice to women being: “Lie still and think of England.” (No wonder they were frigid.) His advice is “Lie still and think of Jesus.” Now I personally would worry a great deal about anyone thinking of Jesus during a sexual encounter.

Ensley is telling his fellow “cured” gays that they shouldn’t worry about not having sexual desires if they marry because sexual desire is selfish. “Afraid you won’t enjoy the sex? Well, if your priority is your own satisfaction and the living out of your overly-developed obsessions, no, you won’t enjoy the intimacy of sex with marriage.” He knows this by faith not by experience since he is single and still attracted to men. So if you are gay screw the wife and think of Jesus because “sex God’s way will be the best”.

Also notice that he has a trap for the “cured” gay here. They are to have sex with their wife (or husband as the case may be) but if don’t “enjoy the intimacy of sex with marriage” the reason will be because they worried about whether they would enjoy it. If you want to enjoy it you won’t is a safety valve since all of them will worry about enjoying it. Thus they are always to blame as God wanted to heal them and allow them true intimacy but their own sinful nature got in the way. Remember it is always fault since reality must always correspond with Scripture.

Ensley twists the definition of heterosexual and homosexual in such ways as to make them meaningless. He advises that one should not allow “temptations” to “dictate your identity”. So if you are a man attracted to men you don’t fall in the category of homosexual at all. Define it right out of existence so it fits the Bible.

Ensley says that “God has put this truth in my heart” (which means it is something he believes) “ that keeps repeating itself to me: Homosexuality is an experience you have, it’s not a thing that you are.” See, if you call someone a murderer you have it wrong. That is merely something they experience not something they did. A thief is not a category that describes people who steal, it is only an experience that people have. Rapists aren’t rapists, they only experienced non-consenting sex.

He tells those who are going to find “healing” that it “is only to be expected” that “temptation remains.” He says that people drown their disappointments in various sexual activities and that Jesus “erases my guilt, but not my memory”. But as someone who has only been attracted to gay men he knows it’s “an illusion I used to protect myself. Now, armed with the truth and with a God who loves me cares about my problems, I can choose to deal with my pain rightly.” Sure he can, by pretending it is just an illusion.

This describes the religionist well. He denies reality, calling it an illusion, so that he can pretend that his religious illusions are reality.

Ensley has practical advise. First he suggest that “strugglers” give up any connection to the Internet -- funny given that this is a “webzine” he is writing for. “Why do you still have access to it when you don’t have to?” He says “Get that DSL connection of your bedroom.” I guess homosexuality is a result of the Internet. He however does not follow this advice and has his own web pages.

Next he suggests that people abandon any gay friends they have. Drop them because “God will provide healthy, godly new friendship for you in time.” See, if you have no gay friends and run from reality then it won’t exist. You will then just be struggling with same-sex attractions and won’t really be gay after all. And someday you can offer your body as a sacrifice by having limp sex with someone for whom you have no attraction, knowing that this is what God wants. And the reason you don’t have that attraction is because you are sinful and worried about having that attraction so God is still loving and good and curing your because you were never gay after all.

Photo: Mike Ensley trying to look butch by not shaving and and refusing to smile.

A fool and his money.

2007-03-08T17:00:00.000-08:00

There is an old saying that a fool and his money are soon parted. That maxim explains why religion is such a lucrative business. And what is wonderful for the con men in the field is that because it is religion they don't need any evidence! All they have to do is claim faith. No other area of society is so exempt from reason.

Now we have some con man lining his pocket by selling bottled Holy Drinking Water. Of course bottled water itself is one major con. This guy goes one better. He sells water which he says was blessed by a Catholic or Anglican priest. That priests of either faith would join in this enterprise shows you the level of morality they hold. The company owner, Brian Germann, says: "We thought people should have something that, like holy water that they could drink would help protect them from the devil." Apparently it works as no one has reported seeing the Devil after drinking it. But it doesn't protect one from con men.

He's only sold the water on the internet and at one market but he's sold 3,000 bottles. Since bottled water often relies on the assumption by health food nuts that the water is more nutritious or better for you it is no suprise that the same people will buy holy bottled water. People who fall for one false con game are quite prone to fall for others.

The water, which is just plain purified water that some shaman prayed over, carries a label telling sinners they might have burning, skin irritation, etc. if they drink the water. Right! Sure, they do. The label says: "Warning to sinners: If you are a sinner or evil in nature, this product may cause burning, intense heat, sweating, skin irritations, rashes, itchiness, vomiting, bloodshot and watery eyes, pale skin color and oral irritations."

The con man says he wants to create other versions of the water for different faiths. Sure, a great idea. He can have water just for Baptists -- sold by the tub load. He can have Jewish water that parts when you walk near it. He can have Muslim water that actually ignites and is useful for burning effigies, American flags and disobedient daughters. Maybe he can produce a version just for priests which, if poured on altar boys will dissolve their clothes. The Calvinist version is recommended as a refreshing drink after a community stoning.

The bankruptcy of a bankrupt church.

2007-02-28T08:36:00.000-08:00

The San Diego Diocese of the Catholic Church has filed for bankruptcy. They are the fifth local branch of the Church of Rome to do so in the United States. Others that have sought legal protection from debts are the branches in Davenport, Iowa; Portland, Oregon; Spokane, Washington; and Tucson, Arizona.

The move in San Diego is being done for the same reason as in the other areas. The church there is facing 150 lawsuits due to sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests. The church says it is facing such massive pay outs to the victims of the priests that it can’t afford to pay its debts. In San Diego the church has $156 million in assets.

There are several disturbing aspects to this move by the church.

One is that the church appears to be using bankruptcy as a means of stopping the lawsuits from proceeding thus keeping some embarrassing information under wraps. A lawyer for the victims said: “For three years they’ve told people they want to settle, they want to be transparent. But the moment it became clear the truth will come out through a jury trial, they sought to shut down victims’ ability to get compensated and get out the truth.” One television news report states that the diocese “did not list the names of litigants who have filed sex-abuse claims, indicating that it has petitioned to enter those details under seal.” This looks more like a cover up to me.

The second issue for me is that bankruptcy strikes me as rather immoral. If you owe debts to someone and then file bankruptcy you don’t have to pay them what you owe them. Bankruptcy has always struck me as a form of legalized theft. And theft violates one of the ten commandments -- in fact it violates one of the few commandments that makes sense.

What it looks like to me is that the Catholic Church first allowed and/or covered-up the abuse of children. Then when it was required to pay them compensation for the harm done it files bankruptcy thus stealing the compensation, along with stealing from others to whom money is owed. This is highly immoral but par for the course.

But what really gets me is why the San Diego Diocese is being treated as an independent entity. They list their assets in San Diego and their liabilities. But shouldn’t the church be required to list their global assets and global liabilities?

People forget that they call themselves Catholic because the word means universal. They present themselves as a global entity not just a local one. And they operate as a global entity with corporate headquarters in Rome. The name indicates this. It is Roman because its headquarters are in Rome but Catholic as they are all part of the same body. Their universality is official teaching of the church.

The hierarchy of the church ensures that every priest, bishop, archbishop and cardinal serves under the authority of the Vatican. They are not independent at all. San Diego can’t exactly announce that they renounce the virgin birth and praying to Mary. Anyone who did that would be removed from office by the church leadership under the authority of Rome.

All church leaders are interconnected. There is no independent church. If you are a member of the Roman Catholic Church you are a member of the universal body of Catholics not of a specific church or diocese. You may attend services in a specific area but you are a member of the universal church. If you travel you can worship at any of the Catholic churches you will find and be considered a full fledged Catholic at those churches as well. You know that they are supposed to preach the same doctrines and that they too are under the authority of Rome.

And the cover up of abuse was not just done locally. If Father Kiddiefiddle was caught in San Diego and it proved to be embarrassing he’d be moved. But such moves were often to other regions of the country or even the world. The church universal acted in concert with these cover ups. It wasn’t just a specific diocese.

If the priest from San Diego was caught with a gaggle of Girl Scouts he could, and often was, moved to other cities. The recipient diocese of this priest was also complicit in the cover-up. And if the priest was caught again he would often be moved again to another diocese. They played a game of musical priests. When the music stopped whichever priest was caught was transferred out. But instead of being out of the game he was sent to another diocese where he continued the game.

The crisis of child abuse within the church was not restricted to one region. The Catholic Church lived up to their name -- it was universal -- or at least global which is what they really mean. Priests could be moved anywhere in the world. And remember that the Pope started out as a priest in Germany. The previous Pope began his clerical career as a priest in Poland. He would rise through the ranks. One doesn’t rise without the approval of church leaders above you in hierarchy and Cardinals are appointed by the Pope.

If Ford produces a car that is dangerous and they are found liable for damages the company, not the local dealer, is held responsible. And Ford is less hierarchical than the Roman Catholic Church.

I see no reason why the San Diego branch of this universal body ought to be given bankruptcy protection. It is an immoral shirking of responsibility to debtors and the assets of the church extend around the world and all the way to Rome. They ought not be allowed to pretend their assets stop at the borders of the diocese alone. The only bankruptcy the Catholic Church should be allowed to declare is moral bankruptcy.

Photo: An an example of the incredible wealth of the Roman church and as a testament against their right to file bankruptch look at this photo. That is one of many treasurers sitting in the Vatican. That is model church is made of gold and platinum. Solid gold artifacts are not uncommon. Papal diamond rngs are certainly not unknown. Paintings worth hundreds of millions exist. The sale of just a tiny number of such objects would pay off the debts of all the bankrupt churches.

Antigay Anglican priest defrocked for sexual sin

2007-02-27T20:12:00.000-08:00

Jacksonville, Florida is a hotbed of clergy misconduct. In recent months two prominent, and I mean prominent, antigay preachers have run into problems. One of the top fundamentalist preachers in America, the founder of one of these megachurches, is on trial after numerous women came forward and testified that he molested them when they were small children. I’ll have more on that cast later. In fact he’s just part of a whole network of prominent fundamentalists caught in some pretty bad things. And I have to sort through over 100 pages of notes I have.

But the case I will talk about is that of Rev. Samuel Pascoe of Grace Church. Now you know how the Episcopalian Church in the US has split between gay-hating conservatives and others. And you know the gay haters have split off from the church. Pascoe was one of the leaders of that split.

He argued that being gay is sexual sin. Well, it appears he knows something about sexual sin. Now he was stripped of his church for what has been described as a sexually inappropriate relationship with a woman in his church. Apparently while he was attacking gay people he was having an affair and cheating on his wife. Pascoe wouldn’t speak to the press and the conservative group he lead is being mum as well.

If they don’t talk about they think it might go away. The man who replaced him at the church said: “It’s a painful thing that has taken place. And it’s difficult for Sam given the comments he has made on issues of sexual morality.”

A letter to the church says Pascoe “has engaged in an inappropriate relationship with an adult female parishioner.” These days the church should be thrilled it was a female and an adult. They rarely get that lucky. Now there was a time that the church would just say that the relationship was with a female and inappropriate. They go out of there way to mention that the relationship was with an adult. That they do so tells more than they care to admit.

What if the tomb wasn't empty?

2007-02-26T20:13:00.001-08:00

Faith and facts have almost nothing to do with one another. Sure now and then someone will claim that they do. But at the core they are in completely different universes. For the true believer in Jesus there is no fact that will convince them that they were in error. As has been said, you can’t reason someone out of a belief if they weren’t reasoned into it in the first place.

Now and then I’ve asked Christians what piece of evidence it would take to convince them that their religion was false. I’ve never received an answer that was close to coherent.

Now I don’t know if the following theory is true or not. It really doesn’t matter if it is. And please note that all the information I use here comes from a Christian web site.

Basically “a panel of experts, as well as producer and Oscar-winner James Cameron” have said that they have discovered what they believe to be the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth.

Now it is difficult to prove the theory. But the evidence does begin to add up. First the tomb did belong to a man named Jesus. Not uncommon. But he is also “Yeshua bar Yosef” or Jesus, son of Joseph. That is not common at all. While tombs belonging to someone named Jesus have been found before none had this connection. And in tomb was his mother, a woman named Mary. Again it is getting a little too close for comfort.

Two other males were found in the tomb and believed to be brothers to the owner of the tomb. We do know that the New Testament said Jesus had brothers. In fact the author of the book of James is said to be one of them. All in all this is still not quite there. It could be one massive coincidence. But there is one more body as well.

And this one is interesting. It is identified as belonging to Mariamene e Mara and the experts say this means Mary Magdalene. And that brings up another problematic issue for Christians. Under the customs of the day only family members could be buried in the family tomb. So this Mary Magdalene would have to be a relative or the wife of the tomb’s owner. They could check the mitochondrial DNA and determined that woman was not related to the tomb’s owner via the material bloodline.

That doesn’t prove they aren’t related via the paternal bloodline but this is another coincidence that is starting to get rather astronomical.

Another body was also found in the tomb and this one was identified as “Judah, son of Jesus” which would also indicate that the other female body belong to the mother of Judah, or the wife of Jesus.

One archeologist who helped excavate the tomb says he doesn’t think that this could be the tomb of Jesus because “They were a very poor family...” and wouldn’t own a tomb. But this doesn’t mean the tomb wouldn’t have been bought or donated by followers of Jesus. And the New Testament speaks of that happening.

But we don’t know if that every took place. We don’t know if Mary and Joseph were poor. The New Testament says lots of things which are not necessarily true. Maybe it is all one massive coincidence and maybe it isn’t. Everyone involved says that far more investigation has to be done before any definitive conclusion is reached.

But here is what I contend. Even if the tomb were discovered and the body was still attached to the cross Christians would find a reason to ignore it. The evidence is not important.

And I suspect there are some very nervous officials in Israel doing their best to assure that the evidence comes out against this being the tomb of Jesus. As long as all this is 2,000 years in the past it is better for everyone. But if officials from the Israeli agency that investigates archeological sites were to come out and say this was the tomb of Jesus all hell would break out. Many Christians don’t like Jews as things stand and if Israel or Jewish officials are involved in debunking the resurrection there will be hell to pay.

So while I think Christians will ignore this story, even if the evidence continues to mount that it is Jesus in the tomb, I suspect the opposite will happen it the evidence goes the other way. If the consensus is that this probably isn’t the tomb of the Jesus of the New Testament they will seem to find that a verification of the story of the resurrection.

If this isn’t the Jesus tomb that is not proof that the tomb doesn’t exist somewhere. And if there is no tomb that doesn’t mean there isn’t a grave, perhaps one of the countless graves that have been discovered over hundreds of years with no name at all. So this one tomb can only disprove the resurrection. It can’t prove it. But logic and reason don’t work well in the realm of faith. So in the end it won’t matter to the Christians.

But here is what we do know. The tomb was real and the boxes containing the remains were genuine. The names attached to the boxes are not disputed and statisticians says that the odds of the tomb belonging to another family with the same names is about 1 in 600.

It is noted that 71 tombs belonging to a man named Jesus have been discovered in Israel. But none said he was the son of Joseph, none had him buried with his mother Mary and none indicated that a wife, buried with him, would be Mary Magdalene. It will be interesting to watch. I think the evidence is interesting but not fully persuasive myself. But as I said I don’t think it will matter to believers even if the evidence were indisputable. They will find a way to ignore it. They do with everything else.

Photo: This is the tomb in question.

Evangelicalism, abolition and slavery.

2007-02-25T11:52:00.000-08:00

The theocratically inclined World Net Daily web site is promoting the film Amazing Grace, as to be expected with their Christianist agenda. Their “film reviewer” writes that this is the story of Wilberforce who lost his father and went to live with an aunt “in whose home he first met the great evangelist George Whitefield, and John Newton. Newton had converted to Christianity and left a lucrative life as a slave trader, and wrote the words of the hymn Amazing Grace."

Anschutz’s film also tells the story of John Newton, the man who authored the song Amazing Grace because Newton was a covert to Christianity and had once been an active merchant in slaves himself. I’ve not seen the film so I can’t say how accurate it is on this matter. I can, however say, that the web site for the film merely claims that Newton repented "over time" but gives no indication of the time involved. Newton’s conversion to Christianity was real. He was on a ship that he thought would sink during a storm and prayed that God would save the ship. When it didn’t sink, and most ships don’t sink during storms, Newton changed his life.

But when I say he changed his life he stopped swearing, he stopped gambling (so he wouldn’t be at Anschutz’s casino) and he stopped drinking. What he didn’t do was stop working in the slave trade. That continued for several more years. Then he had a violent fever and got converted all over again. This time he said it was total conversion and he was at peace. And still he continued working in the slave trade. Trading in human beings didn’t disturb his peace at all. Apparently having a beer was a problem, as was saying “damn” but helping transport human slaves didn’t bother him and if it did then it didn’t bother him enough to stop.

Only in 1754, six years after his conversion, did he retire from the maritime industry but not in moral revulsion against slavery but because he wanted to become an Anglican priest. One has to wonder how many more additional people were sold into slavery because the converted Newton found nothing in his evangelicalism that opposed slavery.

For seven years Newton was rejected for the priesthood. He also tried to be ordained by the Methodists, Presbyterians and others but no one was that keen. He eventually used the influence of a friend and was ordained. It was only in 1779 that Newton ended up in London preaching and it was here he met William Wilberforce, the main character in the Anschutz film.

And it was only now that Newton became an abolitionist. He was a Christian and a slave trader for years. Only after he left the maritime trade, and decades later, did he find himself opposing slavery. He wrote a booklet against slavery in 1787, 33 years after he left the slave trading enterprise. His conversions to Christianity did not stop him from engaging in the transport of slaves whatsoever.

And what of the other prominent “evangelical” influence on Wilberforce: George Whitefield? Whitefield is certainly a far more important figure in the development of evangelicalism than Wilberforce. Whitefield is the man who is often credited with bringing revivalist fundamentalism to America. He toured the American colonies preaching the message of fundamentalist Christianity winning many converts. His campaign was called “The Great Awakening” but what is forgotten, or ignored, is that Whitefield didn’t just support slavery he actively extended it.

The state of Georgia, where Whitefield preached and established an orphanage, prohibited slavery. But in 1749 there was a move to legalize the ownership and trading of human beings and the great evangelical leader George Whitefield was a leader of that campign. His orphanage owned slaves and upon Whitefield’s death those slaves were bequeathed as property to the Countess of Huntingdon, a benefactor of Whitefield who helped pay for his revival campaigns and was a major benefactor of the British evangelical movement.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography discusses the role of evangelical Christians in ending slavery and it notes: “During the first half-century of religious revivalism, from the 1730s to the 1780s, evangelicals showed little interest in the Atlantic slave trade or the enslavement of Africans. The mid-century progenitors of Anglican evangelicalism.... left no record of opposition to slavery in their deeds or words.”

More importantly it notes that “several important evangelicals... had a vested interest in human bondage.” Rev. Martin Madan was a slave owner who used involuntary human labor on his plantations in the Caribbean. The profits from this venture were used to build a chapel for evangelicals in London. Like Newton, his fellow evangelical slavery, he also wrote hymns.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that the few “evangelicals who took an interest in the enslaved focused exclusively on the African’s spiritual welfare.” Slaves, in accordance with the New Testament, were told to accept their bondage and improve their spiritual condition.

Only in the late 1700s did a significant group of evangelicals become persuaded that slavery was wrong and this was more due to the lobbying of Quakers than to any biblical morality. This group of evangelicals “had initially shown more concern with the promotion of religion than the cause of liberty. If left to their own devices, it seems likely that they would have pursued an ameliorationist programme, rather than the abolition of the slave trade.” They only embraced abolitionism in 1786.

If one group deserves praise in the fight against slavery it is not the evangelicals. It is the Quakers. This sect is not evangelical in any sense of the word and were often persecuted by evangelicals for their teachings. But Quakers consistently opposed slavery, which is one reason for the persecution they suffered at the hands of orthodox believers. Quakers were petitioning parliament to abolish slavery while the evangelicals were still counting the profits from the trade.

The campaign to portray evangelicals as the force behind abolitionism is a false one. And even the major evangelical influences on Wilberforce, Whitefield and Newton, were slavers. Newton’s conversion didn’t stop his slave trading as is claimed by the Religious Right. And Whitefield was a major leader of the campaign to bring slavery to the state of Georgia.

Thanks to George Whitefield by 1810 there were over 100,000 slaves in the state of Georgia. And by the time of the Civil War there were close to half a million. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that this prominent evangelical revivalist alone made it possible to enslave over 1 million people from the time he pushed for the legalization of slavery in Georgia until it was abolished by the Civil War just over a century later. Whitefield helped establish one of the largest slave trading regions in the world. Anyone think Anschutz will make a film about that?

I can’t find a firm figure regarding how many slaves were freed by the 1833 abolition act but I found several references to the compensation paid out by the British government to slave owners. It is said that £100 per slave was paid to the owners who “lost” their property. Elsewhere I read that £20 million in total compensation was given out. That would seem to indicate 200,000 slaves were freed.

If evangelicals wants to take credit for those 200,000 I’m happy to let them do so (though it is not quite accurate). But I would like them to take credit for the additional slavery that existed because of the efforts of George Whitelfield. And from what I see Whitefield’s actions lead to the enslavement of five people for every one that Wilberforce helped free. That comes to a deficit of 800,000 slaves. Evangelicals ought not celebrate and sing Amazing Grace too loudly. Their history in the slave trade is far, far dirtier than they are admitting.

Illustration: Our illustration is of evangelist George Whitefield, slaver.

The Christianist mogul behind the film.

2007-02-25T08:30:00.000-08:00

The man who is ultimately behind the film Amazing Grace, which has evangelicals swooning and claiming credit for ending slavery, is Philip Anschutz, a Right-wing Christian billionaire who was also behind the big Christian push for his film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. As the New York Times wrote, the films produced by Anschutz “are often designed to accommodate a religiously devout audience.” Anschutz admits he intends his films to push his moral values. He told an audience at a Christian college that he expects the films he produced “to carry a moral message” and that he’s in this “to attempt some small improvement in the culture.”

Anschutz puts his money into films that push a more personal agenda as part of America’s “culture wars” and he is a major funder of the Discovery Institute, the people behind the Intelligent Design fraud. Anschutz is also generous with other far-right groups such as Colorado for Family Values and Morality in Media.

But Anschutz has more ambitious goals than to just fund theocratic groups. He wants to mold America’s culture. And his films are not the only way to do that. He has purchased dozens of major newspapers across the United States including the San Francisco Examiner, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald.

Anschutz, who is worth more than $5 billion is often described as a “devout Presbyterian” but his form of Presbyterianism is not what most Americans think of when they hear the term. His is the old fashioned Calvinist kind of Presbyterianism. But a little hypocrisy doesn’t worry him either. He is the owner of the white elephant Millennium Dome in London and plans for it include a super-casino. But the profits from the dome will help Anschutz push his morality agenda even if gambling will be a major source for those profits.

And he admitted guilt in a plot where he inflated the value of his company, Qwest, pushing up the stock price and then dumping his shares at the higher price. For that he was fined $4.4 million.

Anschutz has also been generous to political candidates, almost all of them Theopublicans, particularly to anti-gay candidates. He has donated to Marilyn Musgrave, Richard Santorum (several donations but he lost anyway), anti-immigration advocate Tom Tancredo, George Bush, John Ashcroft, Sam Brownback, Robert Knight (extremely Right) and others.

One of his first film ventures was a dud on the second coming of Jesus. The co-producer of the film, Bob Beltz said: "We wanted something that we thought would have more of a mainstream impact, that would expose unchurched people to the person of Christ in a way that they might walk out of the theater saying, 'Is it possible that Jesus could really be that wonderful?’” It didn’t quite work out that way and Anschutz learned to be a more subtle with his message.

Anschutz wants to make a profit. He doesn’t want to just dump money down fundamentalist blackholes that suck in resources and produce nothing. Amazing Grace is meant to do just that. Just the title and song will push his agenda and he knows it. The song is a favourite in fundamentalist churches during the “altar call” when people are urged to come forward and “accept Jesus”. It pushes the born again message hard and heavy.

Part of the agenda here is to make fundamentalists look good to the public. And if evangelical Christians can get the credit for ending slavery, even if they were, for the most part, avid supporters of slavery, so much the better.

Slavery and Christian Mythology

2007-02-24T21:44:00.000-08:00

Christians, especially fundamentalists, are mounting a campaign for another God film they are behind: Amazing Grace. The story goes that a British MP, William Wilberforce, gives his heart to Jesus and is saved and abolishes the evil of slavery. See how great Jesus is.

Understand that there is an organized campaign to falsely tie Christianity to the abolition of slavery in ways not justified by history. They have even organized hundreds of churches to sing the song Amazing Grace (the title of the film) on the Sunday before it’s release. The churches are acting as free advertising agencies for this business venture.

Just as Mel Gibson did with his film the produces of Amazing Grace are giving special preview tickets to ministers to see the film before it opens to the public. Again it’s advertising for the film. They even have a special web site for churches to register their Sunday promotion of the movie. They are shamelessly calling it “Amazing Grace Sunday”. Think of this. Thousands of churches openly promoting a business venture. I counted over 100 churches in Georgia alone that were involved in this promotional campaign. Here is a map showing churches involved in the publicity campaign for this private company.

According to the web site for the film “more than 5,000 churches” have signed up for this publicity stunt. It may be advertising, it may be a publicity stunt but it is given a pious veneer and the Christians are eating it up.

No doubt Wilberforce did oppose slavery. Thomas Jefferson pushed to abolish slavery years before Wilberforce did and Jefferson was no Christian. He failed in light of heavy Christian opposition. And the fact remains that for centuries Christians had no major issues with slavery. Christianity was the official religion of the West since the time of Constantine who made it the official religion in 312. Wilberforce comes along one and half millenniums later.

So exactly what were Christians and God doing for 1,500 years?

Neither were actively involved in any move to abolish the evil of slavery. And the reason for this inactivity is obvious. The Bible condones slavery. The church condoned slavery for most of it’s history. Christianity actively supported slavery for 1,500 years and has only opposed it for 200 years. They have about another 1,300 years to go before they even up the score, so to speak.

The Old Testament didn’t just condone slavery but has God allegedly telling his chosen people to actually enslave others. God actively encouraged slavery. And the New Testament didn’t change a thing. Jesus never had an unkind word to say about slavery.

The closest we come to opposition, and it fails by a long shot, is Paul telling Christian slave owners to remember that slaves, who are Christians, are brothers in Christ. He never thought to tell them to free their brothers in Christ. He never had a word about ending the practice. And he didn’t say the same thing about slaves who weren’t Christians.

That Paul was speaking to Christian slave owners indicates that the early followers of Jesus never thought it wrong to own slaves. As for the slaves Paul told them to obey their masters, Christian or not. In fact Paul told Christian slaves that they should work even harder for their masters “as though you were working for the Lord.” And since that is what he wrote in the New Testament most Christians would say that is God speaking. God wanted hard-working slaves not free men.

Christians were so fond of slavery and servitude that they often used this imagery to describe the relationship between believers and God. And non Christians often spoke out against slavery. Prof. JL Holden said that Paul’s failure to condemn slavery “falls below the human ideals of Stoics of his time like Seneca.” Don’t expect any fundamentalist to finance a film about Seneca. But the church fathers and leading theologians continued to support the practice for centuries.

The first Western nation to free its slaves was not the England of Wilberforce. Even Wilberforce himself mentioned that in the House of Commons, Feb. 18, 1796. What nation represented the forces of godlessness to organized Christianity? It was France, the France that had gone through the French Revolution and was roundly condemned (and often with very good reason I should point out) by the Christians of the West. The godless revolutionaries in France freed slaves in the French colonies decades before Christian England managed to do so.

No one will produce a film about that. They don’t have thousands of French churches across America willing to act as advertising agents to boost movie profits. But on February 4, 1795 the revolutionary First Republic passed a decree which said “the Convention declares the slavery of the Blacks abolished in all the colonies consequently, all men, irrespective of colour, living the colonies are French citizens and will enjoy all the rights provided by the Constitution.”

Revolutionary France did not survive. The forces of Napoleon and order took control and in 1802 they re-established slavery. And over the next few years the cozy relationship between church and state was reinstated. But apparently, in the process, the Christians forgot to tell Napoleon that reinstating slavery was wrong.

Two decades before Revolutionary France had made the first steps to abolish slavery the great American opponent of Christianity, Thomas Paine, wrote his essay about how “Christianized people should approve” the stealing and enslavement of “men by violence and murder for gain”. He was disgusted and called for the end of the practice. The church didn’t listen.

What I find a bit odd is that across the American South, the Bible Belt, churches are joining this publicity campaign. Yet many are affiliated with denominations that came into existence because of their support for slavery. When abolitionism finally came to America it was the godless North that embraced the cause. The good Christian people of the South consistently defended the practice as Biblical. As pressure from the North mounted Southern churches severed their ties with their denominations and formed their own groupings in defense of slavery. (Much as you have Episcopal churches rushing off to embrace an authoritarian bishop in Africa because some of their fellow churches won’t bash gays anymore.)

The fundamentalists of the past were advocates of slavery for the most part and it is no coincidence that today's American fundamentalist movement is strongest in those states that were slave states. Slavery and Bible-believing Christianity went hand in hand.

James Gillispie Birney, in 1842 wrote his pamphlet on American slavery. It was entitled: The American Churches: The Bulwarks of American Slavery. He told his English audience: “The extent to which most of the Churches in America are involved in the guilt of supporting the slave system is known to but a few in this country.”

Four years later another report was written: American Slavery: Report of a Public Meeting held at Finsbury Chapel, Moorefields to receive Frederick Douglas, the American Slave, on Friday, May 22, 1846. It contained a transcript of a speech given by Douglas that day. He said:

“I have to inform you that the religion of the southern states, at this time, is the great supporter, the great sanctioner of the bloody atrocities to which I have referred. While America is printing tracts and Bibles; sending missionaries abroad to convert the heathen; expending her money in various ways for the promotion of the Gospel in foreign lands, the slave not only lies forgotten--uncared for, but is trampled under foot by the very churches of the land. What have we in America? Why we have slavery made part of the religion of the land. Yes, the pulpit there stands up as the great defender of this cursed institution, as it is called.”

Douglas said the most difficult obstacle to end slavery was how closely Christians had connected it to their religion.

“This I conceive to be the darkest feature of slavery and the most difficult to attack, because it is identified with religion, and exposes those who denounce it to the charge of infidelity. Yes, those with whom I have been labouring, namely, the old organization Anti-Slavery Society of America, have been again and again stigmatized as infidels, and for what reason? Why, solely in consequence of the faithfulness of their attacks upon the slave-holding religion of the southern states, and the northern religion that sympathizes with it.”

That being an abolitionist caused one to be labeled an “infidel” ought to be a badge of honor to infidels the world over.

People pleaded with Douglas to mention some instances of the church standing up against slavery. He replied:

“The church and the slave prison stand next to each other; the groans and cries of the heartbroken slave are often drowned in the pious devotions of his religious master. The church-going bell and the auctioneer’s bell chime in with each other; the pulpit and the auctioneers’s block stand in the same neighbourhood; while the blood-stained gold goes to support the pulpit covers the infernal business with the garb of Christianity. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support missionaries, and babies sold to buy Bibles and communion services for the churches.”

A voice cried out that this couldn’t be true. Douglas lifted the Birney booklet and quoted an advertisement announce the sale of “field negroes” being sold by the church that owned them. He read another account of a woman’s estate, where a quarter of slaves were given to the church so that it could sell them “for the purpose of sending the Gospel to the heathen and particularly to the Indians of this continent.” Douglas says in that case the church turned down the bequest but would have been happy to accept the money directly had the slaves been sold first.

Wilberforce did speak out agaisnt slavery. As did many agnostics, deists and freethinkers who history forgets. But as Charles Bradlaugh put it, for Wilberforce to condemn slavery he had to have become an unbeliever as to some passages from the Scriptures. And even as he campaigned for freedom he failed for decades because of the opposition from his fellow believers. Bradlaugh said:

When William Lloyd Garrison, the pure-minded and most earnest abolitionist, delivered his first anti-slavery address in Boston, Massachusetts, the only building he could obtain, in which to speak, was the infidel hall owned by Abner Kneeland, the "infidel" editor of the 'Boston investigator,' who had been sent to gaol for blasphemy. Every Christian sect had in turn refused Mr. Lloyd Garrison the use of the buildings they severally controlled. Lloyd Garrison told me himself how honored deacons of a Christian Church joined in an actual attempt to hang him.

Much of the inspiration for abolitionism in the United States came from the pen of Thomas Jefferson. His stirring words in the Declaration of Independence preached a different gospel, where “all men are created equal” and endowed with rights. And the good Christians of the south recognized this. At the Second Presbyterian Church of Charleston, on November 21, 1861 a minister rose to preach against the Declaration of Independence. H. Shelton Smith summarized the argument:

“It was this very atheistic Declaration which had inspired the “higher law” doctrine of the radical antislavery men. If the mischievous abolitionists had only followed the Bible instead of the godless Declaration, they would have been bound to acknowledge that human bondage was divinely ordained. The mission of southerners was therefore clear; they must defend the word of God against abolitionist infidels.”

Bishop Stephen Elliott of Georgia preached in 1862 that the libertarian revolution of 1776 was against the Bible.

“Carried away by our opposition to monarchy and an established Church, we declared war against all authority and against all form. The reason of man was exalted to an impious degree and in the face not only of experience, but of the revealed word of God, all men were declared equal, and man was pronounced capable of self-government.”

At the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans, in 1860, Rev. Benjamin Palmer told the gathered faithful that:

“The Abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic, The demon which erected its throne upon the guillotine in the days of Robespierre and Marat, which abolished the Sabbath and worshipped reason in the person of a harlot, yet survives to work other horrors, of which those of the French Revolution are but the type. Among a people so generally religious as the American, a disguise must be worn; but it is the same old threadbare disguise of the advocacy of human rights. From a thousand Jacobin Clubs here, as in France, the decree has gone forth which strikes at God by striking at all subordination and law. . . . This spirit of atheism, which knows no God who tolerates evil, no Bible which sanctions law, and no conscience that can be bound by oaths and covenants, has selected us for its victims, and slavery for its issue. Its banner-cry rings out already upon the air: “liberty, equality, fraternity,” which simply interpreted, means bondage, confiscation, and massacre. With its tricolor waving in the breeze—it waits to inaugurate its reign of terror. To the South the high position is assigned of defending, before all nations, the cause of all religions and of all truths. In this trust, we are resisting the power which wars against constitutions and laws and compacts, against Sabbaths and sanctuaries, against the family, the state, and the church, which blasphemously invades the prerogatives of God, and rebukes the Most High for the errors of his administration. . . .”

The preachers of the day knew from whence came the spirit of abolitionism. It came from Englightenment thinking not from Scripture. Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinker, says: “"The religiously correct version of American history has never given proper credit to the central importance of the Enlightenment concept of natural rights--or to the anticlerical abolitionists who advanced that concept before the public--in building the case against slavery"

The Jeffersonian concept of natural rights was not Biblical in origin. And it permeated the American abolitionist movment. In opposition to that campaign was the church. That the church eventually surrendered to the spirit of Enlightenment is now being held up as a victory for God.

Christians are celebrating the emancipation of slaves as if their faith had not condoned the practice for millenniums. Their Bible, to this very day condones the practice for it is God’s word and can’t be rewritten by sinful man. They ignore the non-believers who laboured against slavery. They equally ignore the theologians, the ministers, the pastors and church elders who not only condoned the practice but owned human beings a pieces of property themselves.

Churches in denominations founded to defend the inhumanity of man owning man spent a few minutes singing a song promoting a film about one of their own. Instead they should have been on their knees begging forgiveness for the thousands of others who defended the atrocity of slavery. But Hollywood knows that if you want to promote a film and make a profit you want people to feel good. It Hollywood were being honest it would make hundreds of films showing the church advocating slavery for each one showing it opposing the practice.

It is no coincidence that after the liberal values of the Enlightenment spread throughout the Western world that nations began abolishing slavery. Christianity had been there for centuries and nothing changed. But as liberalism spread so too spread the shame of owning slaves. Eventually even the Christians started to feel condemned for their immoral practice. But they stood condemned, not by their Holy Bible, but by the spirit of their age, a spirit that had not come from Christianity and which was repeatedly condemned by the church.

Eventually the church succumbed to liberal temptation. Eventually it recognized rights which their own Bible denied. And now you have Christian after Christian using this movie to tell the story how Evangelical Christianity freed the slaves. Pardon me while I throw up.

Photo: Map of churches in this campaign. Photo of Frederick Douglas.

Letter to Jehovah

2007-02-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

Dear Jehovah:

I assume I should be sending this to Jehovah since I was raised in the West. And you are the only true, one god though if I would Muslim and living in Iraq I guess I’d have to write Allah. It does get a bit confusion but I will take it that religious dominance is something like a post office. With god it is best to use the one closest to you.

So I’ll start out with a couple of assumptions which i actually don’t have. One is that you exist and two is that you are Jehovah. For the sake of this letter we’ll just make you God.

Now I’m surrounded by people who believe in you and your absolute, infallible, clear word -- which is called the Bible here. But you knew that already. And they all say that you have revealed yourself to them in one way or another except that they seem to have crossed their wires and come up with different stories. Now for those of us on the outside of this circus that makes it rather bizarre and difficult.

So the main purpose of this letter was to ask why you didn’t make things a little bit clearer. I mean you do know that people have died over these things and others have been willing to kill over them. So it’s not like this are trivial issues. Lives are at stake and I’m assured you would have known this. Which of course raises the question as to why didn’t you make it clearer? You could have saved a few lives had you done so.

Let’s start with this book of yours. Catholics have one version and Protestants have another version. It’s not just that they translated it differently. They have different books. And for the first couple of hundred years no one was really sure what was supposed to be in the book and what wasn’t.

Now after that mess you left you then hand these various manuscripts over to people to copy by hand. Some no doubt were very scrupulous but people are only people. And along the way words were changed, things were added or possibly deleted. We know because we have different copies with these different words in them.

Wouldn’t it have made a bit more sense to drop that bombshell on us when there was the ability to copy what you sent word for word. Instead of scribes in darkened monasteries with quill and ink don’t you think a Bible being sent to Kinko’s would have made more sense?

Ditto for this guy they say was your son or you in disguise or you in a different form, etc. I’m told he was one of the above because he performed miracles, was crucified and rose from the dead. But then all the evidence for that you stuck in the book which has already created so many problems. Bad move God, really bad move.

You could have been a little bit more patient. It’s not like you were running out of time or getting too old to work. And since a thousand years are like a day to you all you had to do was wait a couple of days, Biblically speaking. Now you send down this fellow with your message.

We have CNN and the internet. Then these miracles could have meant something. Have him show up at the Pulitzer Prize dinner and turn the water into wine. That would get the attention of those journalists -- they like wine you know. And he could have done the walking on water bit almost anywhere and received some coverage and documentation. That last part is important.

Now I’m told you had to have him tortured and killed for some reason or other. It was part of your plan. No problem. These days the White House would have been happy to do both. They’d grab him off the streets and whip him off someplace where he can be tortured and die for our sins. Now you arrange a Congressional investigation (you would need to give Congress a backbone first) and then have your son walk into the meeting and announced he rose from the dead and was returning to you and so on. CNN would have covered that. CSPAN would run it live.

I assure you that even a skeptic like me would be impressed. We would have documented proof for the things in which the church is supposed to believe. Instead you give us contradictory accounts in unreliable manuscripts translated by people who, all things considered, simply weren’t that bright.

Now that the story of your son is obvious and the book you sent is far more accurate lets talk about some problems you left behind for your church to solve. Again I only bring them up since people died over these things.

Here are a few suggestions to improve your book.

First, add in a clause that says slavery was, is, and always will be wrong. For a lot of history your people never figured that out. In fact they argued you said the opposite.

Next, how about a general clause that says something like: “If any believe not in me, or believe not the things I have taught. Leave them the fuck alone. Do not stone, torture, burn, execute, behead, imprison or harm them in any way. If you do I shall send you to the lake of fire. You understand? And I really, really, really mean it! I’ll deal with it myself.”

And you could have cleared up a few controversies. Do you know you have had some of your people knocking one another’s heads in over baptism? Sure, you did, you supposedly know everything.

So here is what would have helped. First make it clear that baptism is for a specific group. Say it quite clearly as your followers aren’t that bright. Tell them if it is adults or new-borns who should be baptized. And make it clear whether it is sprinkling, pouring or dunking. Now your followers all say you have already made it clear. But just between you and me they don’t agree on this so obviously something got lost in the translation. (See my first point to you on this one.)

Next, would you mind not playing tricks on us? Your followers, well some of them, tell me that the world is only 7,000 years old. Some say 10,000 but what’s three thousand years between friends? But all that stuff that makes it look millions of years old is a tad bit confusing. I’m sure it is amusing to you to look down and watch people fighting over this at school board meetings. But enough with the joking.

Our country is pretty torn apart about a lot of things and right now and we really don’t need another thing to fight over. And this includes that evolution, creation, intelligent design controversy as well. Would it really have been a bad thing if you had the fossil records match what you say you did?

And finally do you think you could be a bit more active? If that isn’t asking too much. I understand you used to wander around all over the place showing yourself in burning bushes and the like. But it’s been thousands of years. That parting of the Red Sea was nice but you could have put in appearance when that tsunami hit a few years back. As that massive wave is heading for shore what if your hand just held he waters so that they rose hundreds in feet into the air and then subsided. Bet you would have had a lot of converts that day.

And finally you know your followers pretty well. Could you work on them a bit more? Give them a sense of humor and make them nicer. Some of them are really nasty people who inflict a lot of pain in your name. Can you have them cool it?

All I’m saying is you could made a bit of effort here. It really would have helped in lots of way. The way it’s been going it’s almost like you aren’t even there.

Yours.

PS: Can you give me a clue as to where to mail this damn thing? Also how much postage is needed? Also, if you get this could you let me know? We really need to talk about this guy in the neighborhood who is really screwing everything up for everyone. His name is George Bush and he says you and he are buddies. You might consider getting a better class of friends.

Theopublicans blame Jewish plot for evolution.

2007-02-16T10:18:00.000-08:00

One of the “Good ol’ boy” Theopublicans in the Theocratic State of Texas (yet once again) got himself into some hot water. Republican Warren Chisum sent out a flyer promoting a God-fearing Christian web site that will debunk evolution and promote godly science based on the Bible. Chisum is a good Christian -- hence he was the author of a constitutional amendment which explicitly denies gay couples equal marriage rights before the law.

And the flyer in question was the work of another elected Republican, Ben Bridges of the George state legislature -- George is another hotbed of intellectualism. And according to the Dallas News the memo says that evidence “long hidden” shows that evolution was plot imposed by the Jewish “Pharisee Religion”. It says: “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

Bridges is taking heat for it as well and denies he knew anything about the memo which sent people to a web site run by a fundamentalist bigot. The bigot in question, Marshall Hall says that he penned the memo with Bridge’s knowledge and permission. Hall says: “I gave him a copy of it months ago. I had already written this up as an idea to present to him so he could see what it was and what we were thinking.” Hall says his wife has been Bridges’ campaign manager for the last ten years.

Bridges was asked if he disavowed the theories of Hall but skirted the issued while implying that he might: “I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory.” Oh, goodie! We have an elected Republican who thinks the idea of an ancient Jewish plot to impose evolution makes more sense than natural selection in nature. In Georgia this guy is probably considered a moderate. And to show what kind of education one can expect if this man had his way consider this gem of wisdom from him: “I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything?” I suppose there is a corollary that which apparently Mr. Bridges has put into practice: “Rather than risk learning a lie why learn anything?

Back in Texas Representative Chisum articulately stated: “The stuff that causes conflicts between religious beliefs, you know, I’d never be a party to that.” The man obviously learned public speaking at the George Bush School of Articulation and Grammar. Chisum says: “I don’t agree with bashing Jews, that’s for sure.” Apparently gays are another matter entirely.

Chisum says he never went to the web site he was promoting and was just being a “Good Samaritan” for his fellow Republican legislator. He says: “It that’s a sin, well, shoot me.” Tempting offer, Mr. Chisum. But then it would probably do not good. You couldn’t hit a vital organ if you tried. He’s a Republican so he has no heart and he’s a Christian fundamentalist so he has no brain.” And it would be a very bad idea to put holes in his body considering what he’s obviously full of -- you wouldn’t want that many decades worth of crap seeping out and endangering others.

So what is on this web site? --- and I assure you that with the web layout they use you can’t accuse them of being guilty of “intelligent design” whatsoever. On the front page you learn what Biblical science is like. We already know you have to throw out evolution and you need to believe the earth is supposedly only 7,000 to 10,000 years old. But there are other Biblical beliefs it promotes. One is the “Earth is not rotating”. No spinning globe whatsoever. Equally important is the claim that it isn’t “going around the sun” either. The web site in question provides 67 “scriptural references” to prove that the sun is moving not the earth. And he provides even more Bible quotes to prove that the earth can’t move!

And if the Bible says it then it just has to be true.

They argue that the earth is the center of the universe and the universe revolves around the earth. And the reason people don’t realize this is because of the Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity. I’m not making this crap up. This is what these lunatic Theopublicans in Georgia are claiming.

They argue that there “is a list as long as your leg of highly organized One World Government conspiracies. Some have been around for centuries, even millennia. Others are more recent.” And all this conspiracy stuff “was prophesied over nineteen hundred years ago in the New Testament of Jesus Christ! That is something to think about, isn’t it?!” Cue the music for the Twilight Zone.

Now the conspiracy is “SATAN-INSPIRED” this “science” web site says and has one goal “to bring about a One World Government that can establish a One World ANTI-CHRIST religion.” (Please not they write with these excessive capitals not me.)

So while there are just dozens of conspiracies pushing Satan’s plan “there is, nevertheless, One Particular Conspiracy that embodies and yet transcends all the others.” And it does so because: “God foreordained that it be this way because this particular conspiracy is special to His Plans. This particular conspiracy is going to play an irreplaceable and completely understandable part in His Perfect Plan.”

Apparently Mr. Hall’s theology not only teaches him science but history as well. Because he discovers the “granddaddy of all One World conspiracies” to be the “same one Jesus encountered in the Pharisaic Establishment headquartered in Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago.” This is starting to sound like a book Mel Gibson will be filming. Hall says this Pharisaic plot today “is in position of control globally and doing business through state-of-the-art technology capable of handling its global transactions almost instantly.” This Jewish plot, says Hall is the “age-old Satanic conspiracy which the heartbeat” of all the other Satanic one world conspiracies. And in case you didn’t know Talmudic Judaism, according to Hall is in “control of the pornography industry and all the media” .

This is the sort of “theology” that one often finds rampant in fundamentalist sects. It is exactly the sort of things I heard as a kid at the local Christian school. And this is what the Republican Party has become since it started recruiting Christianist nutters from the American South.

Don't confuse me with the facts.

2007-02-12T06:59:00.000-08:00

Some people have an amazing ability to entirely disconnect contradictory beliefs or values. They can look at evidence which proves themselves wrong and walk away unfazed. Their theory of life is something along the lines of: “I know what I believe so don’t confuse me with the facts.”

No where is this astounding ability more apparent then when it is applied to religious faith. I well remember some religious types (fundamentalists) who descended on me one day while I was working. They wished to convert me. Surprise, surprise. One argument they offered is that the Bible was infallible and had no contradictions.

What is a contradiction? Well, here is an example. You met a friend, Sam. He tells you has never seen your other friend Suzy. You are surprised. You thought he had. So you ask: “Are you sure you never met Suzy?” He assures you he is. You verify that you are talking about the same Suzy even. And then he says: “Well the last time I saw Suzy she was wearing that red dress she likes so much.”

“Hold on,” you yell. “A second ago you said you never saw Suzy, ever. Now you say that in fact you did see Suzy and she was wearing the red dress when it happened. You are contradicting yourself.”

He says: “No, I’m not.”

Now what? He simply refuses to acknowledge that this is a contradiction. In most cases you would assume a screw loose. So it was with these fundamentalists. I noted that the Bible says that God is a spirit and that “no man hath seen God”. They agreed that was the case. No one has ever seen God they said. Now we didn’t delve into the idea that Jesus is God and thus anyone who says they saw Jesus saw God. They would argue that the first verse meant God the Father not God the Son -- convenient having several deities who are one but separate (contradiction).

They also agreed that Moses was a man. But the Bible says Moses spoke to God “face to face”. It also says that Moses “saw the hindparts of God”. I think that means he saw God’s butt. So one moment they are face to face and the other “cheek to cheek” or something like that. But it clearly says that Moses and Jehovah had a chat and that Moses saw God.

These two young men agreed that was accurate. So no man has seen God but Moses who is a man did see God. I suggested this was a contradiction. They both said: “No, it isn’t.” And they held firmly to the belief it was not a contradiction. I would ask: “Why isn’t that a contradiction?” The answer: “Because it isn’t.”

We never got any further than that. They refused to explain how they define contradiction and they refused to explain why these two opposite claims were not opposites at all. They just asserted it wasn’t. It couldn’t be since the Bible is infallible. Infallible means there would be no contradictions. So any contradictions you find can’t be contradictions because the Bible is infallible. And you know the Bible is infallible because there are no contradictions. And around and around we go and where we stop no body knows.

What reminded me of that story was an article in the New York Times regarding Marcus Ross, a fundamentalist nutter affiliated with Jerry Falwell and his faux university at Lynchburg.

Apparently Ross studied paleontology and all his academic work was scientifically spot on. He discussed species that existed on earth millions of years ago. In fact he discussed species living millions of years before he thinks there were any species or any earth to live upon. Ross is a fundamentalist nutter. He was already infested with Jesus-think before he went to university. And he insists the Bible teaches the world is not more than 10,000 years old. And since that book says it and that book is true the earth did not exist millions of years ago. And therefore no species existed here millions of years ago.

Contradiction? Obviously. Ross says it isn’t. He says he is merely working in two paradigms -- two contradictory paradigms. If Sam said he never met Suzy in one paradigm but did met her into another paradigm you would give him his meds and tell him to rest.

Ross has written papers about things happening tens of millions of years ago. Tens of millions of years before he says there was anything to happen. Asked about this he says: “I did not imply or deny any endorsement of the dates.” What?

November 22, 1963 John F. Kennedy is shot in Dallas. I have written that. I said that Kennedy was killed in Dallas on that specific date. Now if I were to say that by writing that I am not implying or denying that I endorse that date what does that mean? In fact take the Ross theory of logic and apply it to all the facts contained in that one sentence.

I am neither implying or denying the date in question, the person in question (JFK) or the location in question. I am merely writing something without saying whether it has any meaning whatsoever. Ross is stripping every sentence he makes of all meaning and content. He neither implies nor denies when he says something.

Now he studied paleontology. When he writes about paleontology he writes the facts as they are best understood by paleontologists. But he goes out and promotes creationism using his paleontology degree to endorse the theories he himself won’t use when acting like a paleontologist.

Fundamentalists are like the woman who is beaten by her husband but insists he really, really loves her. Giving her a black eye is proof. She ignores the evidence to the contrary. Worse yet she takes that evidence and twists it inside-out so that it means the very opposite of what it means.

She has so much emotionally invested in her “marriage” that she won’t accept, can’t accept, anything that indicates it is a sham. So she either ignores the facts, “Oh, I just fell down the stairs” or she twists them, “It is how he shows his love to me.” Her very identity is defined by her relationship with this abusive, violent man.

So if something happens it is her fault not his. It doesn’t happen when it does. It means something it doesn’t mean. She has lots of way to justify her situation and avoid the uncomfortable truth that she needs a divorce and he needs jail time.

Fundies married Jesus, the Bible, Jehovah and a host of associated doctrines. Just like Ross and his paleontology or the abused wife and her husband they have many coping mechanisms that allow them to turn a blind eye to the truth.

What do clerics contribute to moral debate?

2007-02-11T11:49:00.000-08:00

A Church of England cleric, with an ecclesiastical rank surpassing any Jesus managed to obtain in his life, asked an important question. He wanted to know what purpose clerics serve if they do not speak out on moral issues. It is a good question and one I would like to tackle.

First, I believe morality needs debate, discussion and investigation. But remember that these are different from merely “speaking out”. The assertion of a revealed morality closes debate, investigation and discussion. As so many Christians are ready to remind us: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

The problem I have with clerics is that far too frequently they make bald assertions that are intended to close off debate. When one claims to have revelations from the creator of the universe, and inserts those revelations into an ethical debate, the function of doing so is to end the conversation.

What is there to debate if Jehovah has laid down the law? Or Allah? Or Jesus? Or Zeus for that matter.

if clerics admitted that they are just men without any inside track on what is moral and what isn’t then their input could be of some use. But to the degree that they are theologians they don’t contribute to the discussion but are assassins sent to strangle it.

When we debate moral issues we debate how certain actions impact the individual, his family and the larger community that surrounds him. Those are at least issues which we can talk about rationally. We can define what we mean and point to the results which are either desirable or undesirable. And we can specify what about them makes them desirable or not.

But with theology we can’t really do that. Listen to any religionist and they eventually start talking about “mysteries” and the “unknowable” aspects of a god and his ways. We are led down a blind alley. There is nothing at the end of it but darkness and obtuse comments. There are no answers there.

Consider the following moral issue. An elderly woman is riddled with cancer. It is eating her body away and beyond anything the physicians can do. The pain is agonizing. She is losing control of her bodily functions and her mental faculties are deteriorating. She drifts into comatose states and out in painful, horrific consciousness. She hates every second of it. She is alive but ceased living long ago.

She discusses the situation with her loved ones and the physician. All agree that her time is short and what little time she has will be pure torture. Everyone wants to end the suffering. That is a moral issue.

The rational world debates it by looking at the consequences of policies allowing such actions as terminating her life. What are the benefits? What are the hazards? Can the hazards be avoided? If they can’t do they outweigh the benefits? How would one construct safeguards? What lines need to be drawn and how do we draw them? Who makes the decisions? These are all rational and practical questions.

Into this quandary steps a cleric who lifts his hands and says: “Stop! In the name of God. Stop!”

He will acknowledge that this woman is suffering horribly and that there is nothing we can do to help her. He might even acknowledge that death would be relief to her. But he will assert that God has spoken and life does not belong to man but to the deity. You might plead with him: “Does God want grandma to suffer?” “How can a loving God wish a good woman to endure such torture?” He might try to give some answer but eventually he retreats to the dark cave of theology. Eventually he tells you: “Who can understand the ways of God? His ways are not our ways. His understanding is now our understanding. He has his reasons that we can’t understand.”

He babbles on about mystery but never says anything of substance.

And because he has played the “God card” on the table you are supposed to stop. If you go on you are challenging God and questioning the creator of the universe. So the discussion is over. He has equated crime with morality, and morality with theology. He is thus free to make any assertion he wishes and cover it up with mumbo-jumbo and incomprehensible statements devoid of any real meaning.

Here is where the cleric becomes a danger. Not only does his theology cut off debate but it gives him supremacy over all others. His arguments are the arguments of the deity hence his arguments are superior. Surely the word of god exceeds the debate of philosophers or the wisdom of scientists or the “common sense” of people?

The “God card” is one that grants moral superiority to the person who plays it. If God says X and you stand for X then your position is God’s position and to challenge you is to challenge God. To claim that you are defending God’s views is to claim that your views are the only views worthy of consideration. It is not just a claim to moral superiority but to authoritarianism It is a claim that it’s God’s way or the highway. Follow the rules or get out and if you don’t leave expect the punishment that God wants handed out.

This sort of thinking leads inherently to totalitarianism. The great classical liberals of history frequently spoke of the tyranny of king and priest, of church and state. Why have the two so often been connected? Why is it today that the fundamentalists of all stripes wish to gain political control over nations?

They do so because both church and state are means of subjugating people to the ruling class: to the politicians or the clerics. They ally because both inherently seek the same thing -- the control of others.

Those who believe they speak for God have to seek power. After all who has the right to disobey God? No one! God is God. His rules are supreme. And his representatives, his priests his church, must make sure his rules are obeyed.

So state power always appeals to such people. The Republicans once spoke of limiting government in the United States. That was the Goldwater-Reagan tradition. But the Republican Party became the party of fundamentalist theocrats. So what happens when the new Theopublican Party gained power? They expanded government massively.

They did not end the programs they despised, they converted them into propaganda arms of the church. Did the Republicans end the welfare programs they despised? No they gave them to churches to run with tax funding. They created an alliance between church and state. They have not abandoned the big government of the Left at all -- they have embraced it and merged it with their theology.

And that is the problem of theology. Once you bring God into the equation the only consistent thing to do is to merge more and more of human life into theology. Law ceases to be law but a branch of theology. Science that questions theology is abandoned. Philosophy that is not god-centered is discarded. The moral claims of theology must always seek supremacy. If they are claims from the throne of God what else can they do but seek supremacy? By their very nature they would be supreme to all else.

Theology that claims supremacy eventually must claim power. And it must suppress that which promotes the ungodly. It will creep into authoritarianism because it can not go anywhere else.

So if the cleric speaks on moral issues as a man asserting no divine knowledge, who leaves his discussion in the realm of the earthly and real, he may then have something to contribute. But the moment he starts making assertions based on “mysteries” he is closing off debate and leading us down the road to tyranny. Unfortunately that is what most clerics do. The cleric by his nature tends to speak as a theologian and not as a man. And that is why he ought to shut up.

In the end the unfortunate answer to the Church of England cleric is that clerics not only serve no beneficial purpose but for the most part their presence is malevolent. In the realm of moral debate we would all be better off if they stood silently on the sidelines contemplating the mysteries that can’t be understood instead of opening their yaps and claiming that the nothingness of theology gives them knowledge denied to the rest of us.

The rights of all must be protected!

2007-02-05T03:55:00.000-08:00

Mixed emotions are defined as seeing your mother-in-law drive over the cliff in your new car. And I for one have zero sympathy for the hateful messages of Fred Phelps and his demented family -- though many of them are truly the warped victims of an abusive old fool. This video disturbs me. Watch it before I comment.

I can’t say I’m surprised by this. What Phelps preaches is such raw hatred that he offends most Americans. Even antigay Christians find themselves unhappy with his actions. They can’t fault his message since they also believe the same rubbish but they certainly think he does their cause little good. On that they are right.

I personally think that Phelps does more to advance equality of rights than he does to destroy it. People are offended when hatred is made so explicit. But only by seeing explicit hatred do they begin to understand what implicit hatred can led to.

The law should avoid as much as possible the regulation of thoughts and opinions. People ought to be free to express those opinions. Fred Phelps and his nutty family included.

But I assumed it was only a matter of time before something like this would happen. They are lucky it was not worse. Phelps is attacking grieving families as they are burying loved ones. What a vile creature he is for doing that? But the Christianists prey on grief and pain. Like vultures they circle waiting for a corpse so they can use that pain and grief in order to push for a “conversion”. I have watched it happen and I have sat in the churches as they brag about how this works “to bring people to Jesus”.

Phelps, however, is not interested in bringing people to Jesus since he is a hard core Calvinist. He thinks you can’t bring people to Jesus only Jesus can bring people to himself and sometimes he doesn’t want to do that. But Phelps envisions himself as an Old Testament-like prophet preaching against the sins of America. And the great sin of America, in his view, is that the nation isn’t ready to execute gay people. For this reluctance Jehovah sends off soldiers to die in Iraq. (As far as I can see only two people confuse George Bush for Jehovah -- one is Phelps. The other is Bush.)

Phelps counts on the government he is attacking to come in and rescue him when he riles up people. It was the police who whisked this motley crew of malcontents out of the storm not God. Jesus didn’t rescue them. Prayer didn’t save them. They relied upon the idea that people have rights and ought to be protected from assault. They relied upon the very principle they attack.

I understand the rage of the people in Delaware. I sympathize with their fury more than they will ever know. I do not condone their actions. The sanctity of individual liberty should never be susceptible to the vicissitudes of the mob. I know that too easily a mob can lynch a Phelps and then turn and lynch an atheist, a black, a Jew, a gay. Unless the rights of the disgusting fringe like Phelps are protected the rights of none of us are secure.

These people really, really are insane.

2007-02-04T20:54:00.000-08:00

I have previously discussed the Christianists at World Net Daily. These people are seriously demented. These were the lunatics that were pushing the idea that eating soy will turn you gay. One of their insane editors, Mary Jo Anderson, was debating their favorite issue -- the evils of homosexuals. Who would they bash in a world without gays?

Anderson argues that homosexuality really doesn’t exist. Gay people aren’t gay they are just confused (and I thought it was eating too much soy). She’s imbibed all the current chic fundamentalist bullshit. Gays are merely people “who struggle with same-sex attraction”. Just like she struggles with irrationality. As she sees it gays are alcoholic, depressed, suicidal, diseases, child molesting spouse abusers. Gay people making love are “sterile and life threatening. They are irrational--they literally have no meant and make no sense to nature. Thus, such acts are unnatural.” Wow! They also kill Christian babies at Passover and use their blood to make matzoh. Actually I may be confusing Anderson with Julius Streicher. As far as i can tell Streicher didn’t look as insane.

If you are what you eat then Anderson eats tons and tons of nuts -- all kinds of nuts. She asserts “there are no inherently homosexual people; rather there are people with same-sex attraction” which is a “developmental misstep” “during the toddler years”. Someone was toddling all right but I suspect it was gin in a bottle. And to prove she is correct she rushes to the absurd and dishonest “exgay” Christianist movement. These are people who tout as “cured” someone who has numerous heterosexual experiences, is attracted to women but who on a brief occasion had a gay experience. Then when that person never repeats the brief gay experience and continues with his dominant patter of sexuality he is proclaimed “changed” and “exgay”. Or they tell us about “exgays” who later turn out to be only dishonest. But to Anderson the believer this is proof. In the mind of the theologically inclined I am sure it is proof. In a rational world it is bullshit.

Anderson has never seen a god. She has no proof that one exists. But she believes one exists. She has meet gay people. In fact this exchange was in a debate with one. Yet she argues they don’t exist. Reading the Bible and believing it will make a mind so weak it will fall for anything.

For those who don't know Anderson also claims that the forged Shroud of Turin is real! Not only that but she informs us that Jesus had blood type AB. I told you these people will believe anything. But this is a woman who worships a virgin who gave birth to God.

I appreciate Independent Gay Forum for bringing this debate to my attention. It confirms my belief that these people are seriously deranged. They also quoted another very strange argument from another Religious Right publication. In this article some Right-wing kook laments the difficulty of being “chaste on college campus.

Now here is an ostensibly heterosexual young man at his sexual peak. Sure it is difficult to remain chaste. (I really wish most fundamentalists would remain chaste their whole life and stop inflicting their dementia on children.) But this author says that it is getting more and more difficult to stay a virgin. And who is to blame?

Okay, you know where I’m going. You know these people are obsessed with homosexuals. So the answer is gays of course. “If you haven't been a university student for a while, think back to what the sexual climate on campus was like when you were in college. Now imagine what it's like with official university LGBT offices pushing for same-sex marriage and gay rights. ...”

I read the short piece that contained this statement. No where is it explained. He just merely asserts that it is now more difficult to remain a virgin because gay people want to have legal marriages! Sure, you see one gay wedding and the next thing you know you are out there screwing every girl you find!

What kind of logic is this? The more I listen to these people the more I conclude they aren’t simple dumb or irrational. They are insane. That sort of logic doesn’t make any sense. But like the insane have their own system of logic so to does the Christianist. I really would love to know precisely how it is that gay marriage forces straights to surrender their virginity. The answer will be absolutely priceless.

Our photo this week is Mary Jo the nut. Trust me this woman shouldn't get anywhere near a squirrel. They would just see her as one giant dinner.

Be ye separate: some fundies enter the last century.

2007-01-28T14:35:00.000-08:00

Some evangelical, fundamentalist schools have taken baby steps into the 20th century just one century late. The New York Times reports that these institutions, after some discussion, have decided to allow student dances! (Note the link to the Times article may not be good for long since they have the tendency to hide them in archives after a short period and try to charge outrageous fees to access the old articles.)

The Times tells of John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas which was founded by fundamentalist minister John Brown in 1919. Only in December did the university host the first on-campus dance. Prior to a rule change in October anyone dancing on campus would be expelled. The paper reports: “In the past 10 years, several of America’s most established evangelical schools, including Baylor University in Texas, Wheaton College in Illinois and Cornerstone University in Michigan, have lifted restrictions on dancing...”

The dean of students at John Brown, Steven Beers, said: “The evangelical subculture is no longer seeing all forms of social dancing as evil.” A survey of 18 evangelical schools found that half now allow dancing though they can’t agree on how to allow this formally sinful activity. Some restrict students to dances held on campus only. Others restrict students to dances held off campus only. Those that allow often list which dances are acceptable and which are not.

The author of the Times article, Mark Oppenheimer, notes that many of the prohibitions among fundamentalists seem “rooted entirely in prudential culture -- where else would we get the notion, enshrined in the rules of some Christian colleges, that boys must keep their hair cut short, lest they confuse gender roles? And how can dancing be prohibited?” He notes that these issues, in the eyes of the born-again, “did not fit with contemporary understandings of temperance, modesty or prudence. But within this answer was a tacit concession that as culture changes, some rules change, too.”

Particularly popular is Swing dancing. But this sort of dancing was strictly banned as leading to immorality in the past. Now as the world changes the evangelicals seem to shift their moral goal posts as well and that which one generation ago was decadent they now see as wholesome.

One student was skeptical and sounded like the fundamentalists I know. She said this was “giving in to the hegemony of the secular world, and we’ll lose what makes us unique. It’s not that I think that people will dance and go home and have sex, but we’ll lose some of what makes us different.”

Certainly it was my experience that a good deal of the odd rules and regulations among fundamentalists had a lot to do with “being different” and nothing with Scripture. These were often people who had a deep seated need to be morally superior to their neighbors so they concocted morality rules to “set themselves apart”. It was often arbitrary and sometime bizarre.

In my experience in fundamentalism women were not allowed to wear trousers of any kind. And they were encouraged to wear their hair long. Men, on the other hand, had to have very short hair. How short was always a point of debate.

One experience I’ll never forget at seminary was arriving for the start of a new year. A young man came up and introduced himself to me and shook hands. He said he wanted to know who I was. I told him. He chatted briefly, smiled and walked away. I thought to myself that he was being very nice to introduce himself like that.

Little did I know. He had arbitrarily decided that my hair was about a quarter of an inch too long. He introduced himself and wanted to know my name because he wanted to go the staff and turn me in for flouting the rules and promoting immorality since my hair was a tiny bit too long. I was called in to the office, told I had demerits because of it and sent home to get a haircut. I literally had one about two weeks before. We really were talking about the difference between very short hair and very, very short hair.

The girls were routinely lined up and made to kneel on the floor where staff would take out rulers and measure the distance from the floor to the bottom hem of their skirt. I believe two inches was the maximum distance allowed and anything else was immoral. Movie theaters were off limits no matter what they showed. Swimming was off limits as well unless segregated by gender. Interracial dating was strictly forbidden. Alcoholic beverages were strictly forbidden and church communion used grape juice. Whether or not television was acceptable at all was hotly debated.

They couldn’t figure out if women should wear make up to look feminine or whether make up made them look harlots. One church would give seminars on how women could become “total women” through the use of make up while another church, in the same denomination, would ban all make up whatsoever.

There was this belief that if fundamentalists held to such rules that they would stand out and that others would want to emulate them. Mostly other people just ridiculed them.

But as I said I don’t think this emulation theory was behind this “being separate” idea at all. I think it was more deeply rooted in the psychological needs of the typical fundamentalist. Most were poorly educated, compared to the rest of the public, most were decent people but not particularly talented or well off. There was no real sense of accomplishment or self-esteem. Their view of self depended on how others viewed them.

Their fundamentalism gave them immediate superiority to the entire world around them. They had salvation, something most millionaires lacked. They might not be smart, well off or educated but they were “saved”. All those smart people with money and good jobs were doomed to hell.

The fundamentalists are looking for something to give them status. And the worldly traits of education, prestige, and wealth are pretty much unattainable for many of them. So they find their status in something different -- their beliefs. They are the saved and we are the damned. But beliefs don’t show. And many people feel the need to show off. They show off with big houses, fancy cars, expensive trinkets or vacations, etc.

How does someone who has nothing to show off to others gain recognition of his superiority? (Please note I don’t think any of these things show what a person is worth at all and that they are poor substitutes for true self-esteem. But this problem is apparent in lots of people religious or not.)

Now someone with some money can go out and buy a fancy car so he can receive envious looks from others. He then assumes, falsely, that this means he is superior to those without his car. From this he concludes he has some value as a person. But the fundamentalists has internal “superior” markers in his beliefs. But that doesn’t get any of the looks that such people need to tell themselves they are valued.

So they end up with the super short haircuts, the extra long dresses, styles from the 1950s, the often loud, conspicuous saying of “grace” before eating in public, the shunning of movie theaters and dances. They invent all sorts of markers to define themselves separate from everyone else because they find that by being different they can believe they are being better. It is a way to gain self-esteem without actually having a reason for it.

Of course such markets will shift with the culture. While they argue they are “in the world but not of the world” and they are “separating” themselves from worldly influences they are deeply influenced by the world. The man or woman of no self esteem can allow the world to dictate to him in two ways. One is the slave to the current fashion. They are the ones who have to have the latest clothes, the latest music and join in on the latest fads. Whatever is “trendy” dictates to them how they are to act. Their actions are determined by the collective temporary values of their culture.

The fundamentalist thinks they have removed themselves from this sort of behavior. They have not. Instead they allow the current fad to dictate to them by always refusing to follow it. They cling to the old fads and fashions because they are old and they shun the new because they are new. They don’t really determine how they will live as individuals. They let dead generations dictate to them in what they cling to and they shun new fads merely because they are new.

They still refuse to be self-actualized individuals. They need the herd to define themselves. They may laugh at the teen aged girl who is a slave to cultural collective. But they are no different.

When you obey others they control you. When you rebel constantly against what others say they still control you. Your course of action is determined by what they think. You reject their values so you do the opposite of what they say. But the cultural rebel is as much a puppet of the culture as the fashion conscious faddist.

To give you the idea of how legalistic some evangelicals are about such things here are some dress rules for one Christian school. (By the way they seem relatively liberal compared to many others.)

They have rules about what colors are permitted: “solid navy, light blue, red or white” seems okay on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. But Wednesday is chapel day and parents are told to view the “dress code chart” for acceptable garments. Friday is casual day when blouses and polo shirts from particular companies only are allowed along with Christian t-shirts and sports shirts for the school team. The student is even allowed to leave the shirt untucked provided “when the student raises his/her hands the midriff or undergarments do not show”. (Wouldn’t want that to happen, the lust would be uncontrollable.)

Dresses no shorter than 2 inches above the knee. Boys can’t have sideburns below “the tip of the ear lobe”. (I think that must be in Galatians!) Girls can have one piercing per ear only. Boys are not allowed any. They are liberal on hair for boys compared to my old school. They require it to be above the eyebrows in the front “and not below the top of the shirt collar in the back” and on the side “the lower half of the ear” must be visible. That is far longer than the hair cut that got me into trouble. Any styles requiring gel are forbidden. Jeans are allowed (Jesus weeps) provided they are not “too tight” but they also must not be “too loose”. They can’t be low rise, can’t be frayed or have any holes. And can only be worn on Friday! (Sort of the fundie equivalent to the old fish on Friday rule I guess.) And “No cargo/crop/capri/carpenter style jeans.” But shoes can be purchase “from retailer of choice” -- how modern!

For sporting events they say shorts had to be no shorter than 2 inches above the knee and “must reflect a biblical standard of modesty and appropriateness.” I am waiting to see what versus in the Bible discuss what kind of shorts one is allowed is to wear.

Same con, different faith.

2007-01-24T15:37:00.000-08:00

If you think the Christian faith healers are real cons listen on this lunatic.

Exgay "ministries" focues of new film.

2007-01-24T07:39:00.000-08:00

One of the saddest examples of fundamentalism has been the so-called “exgay” ministries. Once run by “exgays” that period pretty much ended after the exgays turned out to be not so exgay after all. Now many of the leaders are people who, while straight, were hurt to find that someone they loved was gay. Not long ago one major exgay group admitted that most the people who attend their meetings are the fundamentalist parents of gay children who simply can’t accept the fact that their child is gay.

A new film on this topic has just been shown at the Sundance film festival. Entitled Save Me it stars Chad Allen, Richard Gant and Judith Light. The three main stars were also producers of the film. Gant and Allen are gay. Sundance describes the film this way:

Save Me, is a film about redemption. Mark (Chad Allen), a lost, young, gay man, leads a wild life of drugs and meaningless sex, searching desperately to fill the emptiness in his soul. When Mark finally hits bottom, his brother checks him into Genesis House, a 12-step, Christian, "ex-gay" ministry specializing in healing sexual brokenness.

Genesis House is the life mission of Gayle (Judith Light) and her husband, Ted (Stephen Lang). Haunted by her past, Gayle is determined to save young homosexual men from their personal demons. Scott (Robert Gant), one of the program's "fifth phasers," is Mark's mentor. The growing friendship between these two men threatens Gayle. Increasingly suspect of Scott's motives, Gayle fights back, refusing to let her carefully controlled world fall apart. Torn by the specter of damnation and the pull of their hearts, Mark and Scott are forced to confront their truth.

The nuanced screenplay by Craig Chester, Alan Hines, and Robert Desiderio conveys the insidious harm of Christianity gone awry, while gracefully avoiding the pitfalls of cliché. Superbly shot amidst the beauty of the New Mexico desert and boasting exceptionally layered performances from its gifted stars, Save Me is pointedly topical and powerfully moving

Judith Light had starred as Angela Bowers in the old sitcom Who’s the Boss? where she worked with child star Danny Pintauro, who also admitted he was gay. Gant played Ben Bruckner in Queer as Folks and Allen is best known for his role of Matthew Cooper in 72 episodes of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Allen and Gant are also co-partners in Mythgarden, the production company behind Save Me.

One of the more surprising reviews of the film appeared in Christianity Today. Rev. David Swanson attended the Sundance festival with students from Fuller Theological Seminary. He says he can only “recommend sparingly” this film because: “I left the theatre completely wrecked--my head spinning.” Why sparingly is never made clear.

He writes: “One of the things that struck me about this film was how the filmmakers (some who are themselves gay as we learned during the question and answer time following the screening) portrayed the motives and stories of the conservative Christians who lead the ex-gay ministry with tenderness and grace. Is it possible that many in the gay community are more gracious in their understanding of Evangelical Christians than we are towards them?”

He continues discussing the “numerous men” “who wept during the most poignant moments of the film and wondered “how willing are we to acknowledge our own role in much of that painful memory?”

In the film Allen plays a conflicted gay man who falls into drugs. The role is not a stretch for Allen who admits that from age 12 to 24 he was using a variety of drugs. He says he was deeply depressed because he didn’t know how to deal with his sexuality. Allen got his start in television when just eight years old. One of his early roles that is best remembered was as Tommy Westphall in St. Elsewhere. In the final show of the series it is implied that the entire story line was nothing more than the imagination of the autistic boy play by Allen.

Allen was considered a teen age pinup surrounded by screaming girls who wanted him. He says he received letters from teens telling him how perfect their life would be if they could be just like him. He says: “And I was like, ‘no, you don’t understand!’ No one wants to hear that a 12-year-old kid isn’t sure if he wants to live.” As one journalist wrote: “Figuring out that you’re gay while screaming girls rip off your clothes is a mindfuck.” Allen eventually admitted his sexuality and was able to deal with his drug use as a result of it.

Gant and Allen, along with David Duchovny, are working on another film together, The Way Out.

Ted Haggard's word come to haunt him -- again.

2007-01-22T16:39:00.000-08:00

Fundamentalist preacher Ted Haggard’s mouth has always gets him into trouble. If he’s not resigning over what he put into it he’s being embarrassed by what came out of it. The man never knew when to shut up. Remember that clip about homosexuality that did that appeared in the documentary Jesus Camp for instance.

Well, Alexandra Pelosi has finished her documentary on fundamentalism and it was Haggard who helped guide her around the fundamentalist Right. And there is the grinning Haggard spouting off about how “evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group.” And then he turns around and starts asking some of the men connected with his church how often they had sex with their wife.

I wonder if his impromptu survey asked how often hey had sex with male prostitutes?

Apparently Ted didn’t learn the lesson that those who can do and those who can’t talk about it. Sexual braggarts usually have issues. Ted was no exception.