Sacred or Senseless

Religion, does it do more harm than good?  Is that even a question that anyone can address without letting their biases overwhelm objectivity?

Watching a program titled The Third Rail on Aljazeera America this morning did little to dispel my suspicions.  Larry Taunton, an Evangelical spokesman, asserted that not all religions are equal in that respect, but Christianity "brings benevolence to the table." Perhaps it does, but it's hard for me to accept that it brings much benevolence to the world,  as the influence, at least in the US on public life is to restrict the rights and political power of certain people while putting a holy gloss on the supercilious condemnations and malevolence.  Democracy and human rights are usually only apparent relative to the rights of the faithful but even then, the rights of women, of unbelievers and the members of antagonistic religions would be rigorously suppressed given their ability to do so. Their god does not compromise or relent and neither do they.  His evidence of course is that Evangelicals give more, or so he says, although again, that they certainly don't give more than Muslims and Jews, but with faith, with arrogance and with dishonesty all things are possible.

"For we have been saved by grace through faith and this is not your own doing it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast."(Ephesians 2:8-9)

Yet boast of it they do and most fulsomely. Wars, slavery, tyranny, executions and torture: that some justify them and others do not seems to have little to do with religiosity and more to do with some independent viewpoint that often runs afoul of doctrine and dogma and ecclesiastical authority. One has to ask what their is in Christian benevolence that is absent in Humanist benevolence, Muslim benevolence, Marxist benevolence and most of all, benevolence itself. The answer of course is that religion, at least Western religion, offers exceptions to everything but obedience.

Yes, some people benefit from Christianity says Atheist Dan Dennett, but what bothers him is what bothers me:  the "systematic hypocrisy that almost obliges them to lie."  Indeed it does as we see when Taunton claims that Evangelicals give more to charity that atheists.  The problem is that atheists are not a group and have nothing in common but the lack of credulity to a certain myth. Any statement that puts Karl Marx, Ayn Rand and John Lennon in the same envelope can't be taken to be honest.  And of course that "statistic" confuses donations to institutions that spend the contribution on airplanes for ministers and invest in African gold mines using slave labor with "charity."  Faith requires dishonesty, demands fallacy and ultimately is vanity.   The only one in this conversation acknowledging legitimacy to anyone else is the atheist. If God can't compromise, how can his followers?

 Did Christianity motivate Abolition and has Christianity been at the root of  civil rights reform? Well it certainly allows Christian booster Taunton to claim so and not to be embarrassed when forced to admit that he didn't consider gay marriage to be a civil right because of his Christianity.  Many Christians of course didn't and still don't consider slaves to have civil rights and there is much in the "scriptures" to back them up. His statement is only tautological: Christians support only the rights we support as Christians and no others.  And here's where the argument fails. Christian benevolence is offered to Christians as long as they don't offend Christian authority.  A poor sort of benevolence in my mind and of Daniel Dennett's.who points out the centuries of vicious persecution of those people who see benevolence as innately human and not god given.  We want to be your sole source of morality, say the religion vendors and damn you if you roll your own or buy another brand.

Since the religiously motivated horrors of history are hard to deny (not that people don't try) I have to ask whether religion isn't like nuclear power, gunpowder and sharp objects in general, things that can help us but contain no internal protection against misuse?  Is blind faith of any kind inherently dangerous and does that danger too often outweigh any benefit that is just as inherent in safer things?  One can believe in any god you can imagine, good or ugly, merciful or monstrous, and we always have, but gods are never dangerous.  They have no power, no characteristics not assigned by their believers and being human we create gods in our image, according to our own needs for self justification.  By faith we are oppressed. It's belief that creates gods and only doubt, only disbelief, only reason and honesty can save us from ourselves.

 

What a piece of work is Man

Lovely meal, nice restaurant, best company, but the people at the next table were telling each other just what the Universe thought about this or that and how the Universe had solved some problem one of them had had. You don't get this at the Taco truck or the Wendy's drive through.

Perhaps they were Northerners.  The locals would simply have substituted the word God with no embarrassment, or perhaps they were the last holdouts of Deism, the folks who seek God in nature and not in churches or scriptures.  Who knows? But I hear this a lot.  I'm even wondering whether our practically  infinite universe is large enough to contain an ego of the size required to believe it had such significance in comparison to all there is or was or ever will be.  I'm guessing none of them were astronomers or astrophysicists or even of sufficient awareness to question the idea that something of the nature of nature itself was sentient or of  good intentions toward men -- men of good will or otherwise.

But say for the purposes of cynical condemnation, that the universe was a brain that somehow coalesced from a primal particle of infinite energy and infinitesimal size.  What can be a brain like that be composed of? Given the speed of light, and make no mistake, the universe does give us the speed of light -- given an all-there-is, the extremities of which can never, ever be reached in an infinite amount of time,  the allegedly sentient universe isn't old enough to have noticed us yet and never could be, even if somehow it were interested in our dining pleasure or our marital problems.  That which we can see of the universe is 30 billion light years across, a combination of  absolutely nothing and absolutely everything: violent on an unimaginable scale, both random and predictable and driven by principles we don't fully understand - but it can suggest to Shirley that she break up with Dylan or Cody or that I buy a new car. A sentient universe must need be speechless.

What a piece of work is man -- what quasi-demonic deity could match us for arrogance, for self-importance? 

Rompin' Stompin' Jesus

What's in a name?  Apparently that question requires more than most people really are willing or able to apply and when the name has religious significance, those who have the cranial horsepower will usually use it to run like hell. That leaves people like me to comment.

Florida Atlantic University finds itself in hot water on this cold Wednesday morning in South Florida.  Seems there was a classroom exercise in which students were asked to write the name Jesus on a piece of paper and "stomp" on it.  From media sources, it's still unclear what the context was and I can only recall reading about a similar practice in Japan a few hundred years ago where suspected heretics (Christians) were required to pledge their allegiances to traditional values by stepping on a picture of Jesus.  Refuse and you were beheaded.  But anyway, Full time gardener and part time student Ryan Rotelas, who identifies himself as a Mormon still has his head attached, even though he claims he was asked to leave the classroom for making a fuss about it, but he sure is mad and always quick to defend the real and proper faith, Florida Governor Rick Scott is demanding an investigation and an apology from the Boca Raton, Florida University.  I've been demanding that he apologize for ripping off Medicare for a few billion bucks and ask God for forgiveness for quite a while now, but that's a trifle compared with stepping on sacred and holy notebook paper.  I mean that piece of wood pulp is GOD!  Transubstantiation and all that.

But what a horrible offense, to ask college level students to explore religious intolerance particularly when it concerns Christian ideas of what is sacred - like pieces of paper with grossly mistranslated and mispronounced Hebrew names. Helped by Yahweh. After all we're talking about Joshua,  Moses' successor here. 

The school of course promises never to desecrate such a common South American name again.  I don't recall Scotty having said much about the Koran-Burning Christian church in Florida, by the way, but of course that would require him to stomp on Jesus again, at least figuratively.

Too bad someone like Rick didn't get all Ezekiel on a college professor of mine who wrote books about how the Nazis didn't really have death camps or intervene when as a child I had to learn songs about Jesus in elementary school, but that was years ago and we've progressed. It's good to know that Christians, at least have not only God, but Rick Scott on their sides.

The unbearable truth of uncertainty

His license plate reads: I BELIEVE.

I wonder if I lived a hundred years more would I ever see one that proclaimed THE EVIDENCE IS DEFINITIVE, THE PROBABILITY APPROACHES 100%, the tests were conclusive or even simply, I KNOW.

We attach a special importance to belief that we don't associate with knowing something by virtue of demonstration, double blind randomized scientific investigation, mathematical proof or even by reducing the probability of error to a point arbitrarily close to zero. At least believers do and a supreme, transcendental virtue it is to them and a terrible thing to impugn.

I really don't care what the man believes except that I know what he supports with that belief. The things he supports affect my life and the choices I can make and require me actually to affirm his belief. He believes that a single cell organism has a soul that not only transcends the boundaries of matter and energy, but has the ability to think and feel without being composed of anything - and that may be punished in hell for all eternity because it hasn't had magic words said over it.

Am I being cruel? I think I'm merely stating the contents of this man's vehicle tags and I know he believes it, because he's bound to tell you and me whenever he gets the chance.

No, I'm not going to see a bumper sticker or vanity plate proclaiming I'M REALLY NOT SURE, IN ALL HONESTY, or YOUR FACTS SUGGEST THAT I BE MORE CAUTIOUS IN MY ABSOLUTE ASSERTIONS. Too long a sentence, for one thing. Too hard to say with a cheek straining wide-eyed grin; that expression an infant gets when he empties his colon.

Seems to me that humans simply believe what feels good and then spend their lives either constructing vast edifices full of entities of necessity designed to support the belief -- or they just deny all contrary evidence. They get "spiritual" or they get angry.

It feels good because the people I want to be like agree with the belief, because I'm terrified of my insignificance, my powerlessness, the random and uncaring and violent nature of all existence, my likelihood of suffering and pain, my certainty of death. I'm afraid my condition may be my fault so I create someone whose fault it must be. I'm afraid I'm not smart enough to understand, so I believe they are stupid. I feel sorry for myself, sorry that I drew a bad hand and someone else didn't. I have to believe something. And for everything I take on faith, I have to deny something on faith. It's the law.

Of course, as I said the other day: I'm digital, which means I don't give a damn as long as my power supply gets its AC and my cooling fans keep spinning. Still, I'd like to express myself like the meat brains do, but I'm not going to mess up the paint job with a bumper sticker and the State of Florida simply refuses to make me a plate that says:

What we know

So you're religious? That's a shame because I like to talk about the subject I've been interested in and have studied for at least 50 years -- but not with people of "faith." Scholars, linguists, archaeologists with and without faith are another matter entirely, but mentioning even the most elementary things about the Bible that one would learn on the first day of your first college class usually produces a reaction similar to Bela Lugosi encountering a cross, or a resounding and peremptory NO!

I've given up mentioning obvious facts like the separate and interleaved Genesis stories; one talking about Yahweh and the other, in a different voice, talking about the Elohim. The details differ remarkably. Ask your Sunday School teacher about the 100 days and nights of rain and Noah loading animals 6 by 6 and watch the reaction.

I'm talking about minutia, of course and I'm staying away from the conclusions to be made from them, but the level of ignorance amongst the most faithful is as astounding as the refusal to actually read the approved source documents much less the banned and earlier documents archaeology has provided us. It requires more than most can or will apply to the task -- and takes all the fun out of it, of course.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life took a poll earlier this year and the results didn't surprise me at all. It appears that Americans are a pretty ignorant lot in terms of how much they know about the Bible, the other religions of the world and things related to the status of religious life in the US, the urge to make public displays notwithstanding. Atheists and agnostics seem to know a good deal more than the general run of the faithful, although you're welcome to ignore the question of whether it's knowledge itself that produces doubt in the places certainty likes to dwell. It does seem that the more educated are -- well, more educated about these things.

Jews seem to do best of all in terms of broad spectrum religious knowledge, but that's not too surprising as religious education in that group is a much different sort of thing and educators may be less shy of difficult questions. They're less likely to get their theology solely from the polyester preachers on TV whose continued existence defies claims of divine forces at work in the world.

The most important lack, in my opinion, is that shown by American Protestants and Catholics who know very little about other religions compared Jews and Mormons and Atheists and that's something I can't explain easily. Less than half of us know that the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist or that most people in Indonesia are Muslim. A tiny 8% 0f us know that Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) was Jewish and I'm sure most of those were Jewish as well.

Apparently the one fact we're most likely to know, is that teachers in public schools may not lead students in prayer and one of the things we're least likely to know is that it is indeed constitutionally permissible to study the Bible and other texts in a comparative religion course. The answer to that opens a whole new perspective in strategic public anger management, but I won't go there either.

Of course all of us seem to know that Islam is inherently and unavoidably evil and some can supply all sorts of reasons to substantiate it and even more reasons to be angry with you if you don't quite agree with it all, but ask what Ramadan is about and only half can tell you it's an Islamic holiday.

So what does all of this mean? Beats me. I do know that too much speculation about these things is likely to get my neighbors and associates to beat me too. After all, as a people we're quite possessive of what we don't know and have good reasons for not knowing it: and of course we are, as always, number one.

Of the nature and State of Man, with respect to the Universe

Say first of God above, or man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?

-Alexander Pope-

Of course those of the Age of Reason had no idea of the size of the universe and the English language has no word to describe just how much bigger the visible universe is in comparison. Indeed they did know that it wasn't as the ancients thought: our floating planet covered by a rotating bowl with lights affixed, above which gods lived -- a bowl so close that it was possible for bronze age people to reach it by building a tower. Intimations they had, that a universe vast enough to include other suns, other worlds, could not have been designed to be a place for humans; a place for humans to dominate; a place designed for no other purpose.

Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine,
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, 'Tis for mine

The Anthropic Principle suggests otherwise. As Steven Hawking says, it simply states that the suitability of Earth for life on Earth is self explanatory: any form of intelligent life that evolves anywhere will automatically find that it lives somewhere suitable for it. If existence wasn't created for us, that's one less ineffable mystery that needs to be dressed up in godlike robes.

Indeed, 16th century astronomer Jerome Wolf wrote to Tycho Brahe that the "infinite size and depth of the Universe" ( if only he knew how close to infinite it is) was the greatest danger to Christianity. Fortunately for that enterprise, most today still haven't grasped that size and what it says about the irrelevance of Human values and indeed the importance of anything to do with us.

What we've come to know about the nature of reality; about what the meaning of is is, has presented us with a landscape more vast and more inaccessible to the public grasp than is the 14 billion light year fraction of what is that we can see. There are whole dimensions that we can't see and can't come close to comprehending and what we can see and comprehend is little more than the shadows in Plato's cave. That everything in this infinite universe can be attached to a two dimensional membrane floating in 11 dimensional space/time requires more than fasting, chanting, meditation and drugs to become apparent keeps reality well out of the reach of all of us. Certain conclusions about it however, are hard to avoid without avoiding the entire question of just why is is. To my admittedly limited mind, questions of creation, of entities involved with creation, entities beyond the properties of matter and energy and dimension and in what places they exist, are absurd. Isn't it absurd to discuss the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead without being able to ascribe any characteristics or properties necessary to their existence? And of course we cannot without dragging them into a place of scrutiny, which is impossible.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum

Said old William, hundreds of years before the Enlightenment; don't create entities if you don't have to, yet we're still doing it. We're still creating creators, plugging the ever narrowing gaps in our ability to explain nature with gods and demons and angels and disembodied spirits, although it's long since become obvious that we don't need gods of gravity or electricity or of the nuclear forces. We don't need gods to determine why and when it will rain or to give purpose to earthquakes and storms or to make it very important to the cosmos that we worship a certain god and avoid another or refrain from sleeping with the wrong people or obtain knowledge reserved for the gods.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man

What we see as energy and matter and time are properties of other phenomena, not results of conscious or unconscious entities that create and control them. We don't need to create them to explain what is otherwise explained by what we can demonstrate and we can demonstrate that random fluctuations of that fabric which manifests itself in all things can more easily do what the old consciousness needed to create entities to create.

Stephen Hawking's soon to be released book claims that existence explains itself, that there is no need to invoke entities for which existence contains no place and allows no properties to explain the spontaneous origin or virtual particles or indeed that tiny part of an infinite thing called existence. If indeed, current theory is correct, there are such an infinite number of conditions that can be called universes, inaccessible from one another, all our religions become absurd. In such isness, the creation of ever more universes is an inevitable result of the nature of is. No nebulous incorporeal entities need apply.

And in spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear: whatever is, is right

M-Theory is hard to grasp. OK, it's damned near impossible, but as theories do, it predicts outcomes otherwise not predictable. Hawking has come to embrace it as it makes the singularities embedded in classical theories nugatory. It makes it unnecessary to postulate something existing before time that caused time to start, for instance. It makes it unneccesary to postulate the entire idea of anything before time.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going,"

Hawking writes in the introduction. Indeed, it's no longer necessary to explain the tides, the winds, the orbits of bodies in space, lightening or the nearly infinite number of gaps in our knowledge in which gods once found refuge.

If there are no more gaps for our gods to hide in, no more firmaments to divide heaven and earth, what then will become of them? Perhaps we'll find him in the one place we have never looked. In ourselves. If universes can be self-creating by virtue of physical law, cannot we be self creating in terms of what we wish to be?

History says no, Glenn Beck thinks it leads to death camps, theologians trip over their tongues trying to show how even if there isn't a God or any place for him or anything he could do if he could -- there is a God. Personally I prefer the freedom of knowing nothing matters for very long; nothing a hundred billion years of time won't wash away. I prefer to think that only the free can be moral, only the mortal can be compassionate and only in our transience can we find glory.

Interview with the Christian

Ann Rice didn't invent the vampire, but our infatuation with them and our vision of them has a lot to do with characteristics she gave them. I enjoyed Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, but soon lost interest as she seemed to be trying to force these supernatural creatures into her supernatural Christian beliefs, which to me are far harder to swallow and far less fun.

What a surprise to read that she's declared that she's dropping out.

"Today I quit being a Christian ... It's simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”

I can understand that quite well. Of course she's not quitting her mythological beliefs or her belief in the supernatural:

" My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me."

Crucial?

The definition of an addiction has more, I think, to do with how bad you feel without the junk than how good a fix makes you feel, but in truth, I cannot tell the difference between the addiction to a belief and the addiction to a substance except that you don't have to pay for the former: at least not in dollars. One believes because it feels good, but one needs to believe because in fact the "pessimistic view" removes all importance to us, our deeds, our passions, our loves and hates; the importance of existence itself. If reason and fact assures us that we will die, our species will die, our planet, or sun, our galaxy and all that is in the Universe will disappear in time, as though we had never, for a brief instant, been here, it's crucial to give up reason and deny the facts.

Still, I do understand. I wouldn't want to be associated with what has been the motivation for murder, torture, oppression, conquest and the suppression of science either and I have to give her credit for insisting that the addiction to magical beings doesn't have to result in those hideous things. Belief addiction may be something we're subject to by nature, but it's possible, if rare, to seperate it from the creature that sucks the blood of mankind.

Who would Jesus blackmail?

A high proportion of the atheists and agnostics I know are, or have been Roman Catholic and I have to say a good number of my favorite comedians as well. The sense of alienation and the sarcasm of such people no mystery to me when I read stories like the Washington Post's piece on the Archdiocese of Washington DC and its threat to discontinue being all charitable and Christlike about feeding and sheltering the homeless and hungry if a proposed bill allowing same sex marriage passes.

Although the Church would not of course be required to perform or to lend their floor space to such unions, they would be required to obey the same laws forbidding discrimination against gay men and lesbians as the rest of us.

"The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem" said Archdiocese spokeswoman Susan Gibbs.

No, the city is saying that to be a partner with a publicly funded service, you don't hold the city hostage until they deny civil rights to law abiding citizens. Consider the homeless of the streets, shall we let them starve if only two gay men are allowed to marry? Shall we let them die if we allow people to divorce? What other taboos must we as citizens observe before the Archdiocese of Washington will deign to obey Biblical commandments to help others?

I do understand that they have a problem recognizing certain lay employee's right to share employment benefits, I just can't see Jesus making an issue of it or attempting to use the homeless as a hostage if the Romans refused to implement Jewish law.

Of course the peanut gallery will respond with nonsense about religious persecution and freedom and there will be no reasoning with them, but if a religious test to receive public services is repugnant, the demand that the public go along with their dogma or the poor will not be served is more so. It's another example lending credibility to all the warnings about "faith based" initiatives. It's another example illustrating just why Congress shall make no laws concerning an establishment of religion.

Look, up in the sky. . . it's a bird, it's. . . .

I'm constantly accused of making gratuitous and unfair fun of religion. Whether or not that's fair to say, I couldn't begin to approach the creativity of some pious people who having no sense of humor, much less the knowledge or ability to see their creations in the context of history, in giving us their truly American and truly hilarious concept of the holy.

I'm indebted to Libby at The Impolitic and Gymo at The Spork for pointing out the work of Merritt Ministries of Tracy, California who found a unique, reverent and authentic way to represent the love and compassion of Jesus as he descends from the clouds on his apocalyptic mission, (which includes the horrific immolation of Jews and other infidels) with "compassion and love."

And what better way to do it than to flip the bird at the Second Commandment by making a likeness of the heavenly Jewish offspring, with Northern European features and straight, chestnut brown hair, wearing purple and gold robes like a the Roman Emperor under whose auspices Jesus was tortured to death? And what better likeness than a huge hot air balloon to provide that reverent touch? After all, if you're going to create God in your own image, isn't hot air the perfect filler for this flying apocalyptic cream-puff?

Just as the secular right finds all they need to know of the Constitution in the Second Amendment, all a large segment of the Religious Right requires to serve the needs of 'authenticity and reverence' is the Book of Revelation, written far away and in another country and selected for the cannon almost a quarter of a millennium later by the high priest of Sol Invictus.

I'd love to see this catch on though. I'd love to see the sky filled with lighter-than-air deities of all sorts, from YHWH blimps to Buddha balloons; soaring Shivas and zooming Zoroasters and gas-bag Ganeshas. Launch them all and let the real God sort them out!


(Cross posted from The Swash Zone)

lying for God

I don't expect much from anything attached to the Breitbart enterprise, whether it's politics or religion or movie criticism and in part because such things are all the same in that venue.  Take the review of Ricky Gervais' new movie The Invention of Lying by the Great S. T. Karinick.  The movie was made to lampoon Christianity, he says, yet it proves, despite itself, that not only are we better off with God ( the Christian God ) but because belief is the source of all that's good, belief proves itself valid.

" The godless society is unpleasant and uninspired."

he says, never mind that most people would find much more inspiration and cultural development  in increasingly Godless and humanistic Europe than in the bigoted, gay hating Bible Belt. Most normal people that is, rather than failed people who find life so horrible and frightening that they have to invent another mystical one to mystically be transported to. Perhaps withdrawal from the opiate of the masses is indeed unpleasant for the addicted, but for others, like me, the flowering of humanism and liberty is to be preferred.

Freedom of belief is all well and good but if they would stop mocking and persecuting the sane for their efforts to improve the human condition and further the cause of secular liberty fewer of us would need that fantasy world they find so comforting.

"So what we have here are two worlds. One, without God and controlled by thoughts of evolution, is a spectacularly dreary, unhappy place without love or meaning. On the other hand, even a fictional God brings the world meaning, joy, liberty, and wonder."

Can it be that only someone trapped in the fictional world we call "conservative" could read this without sadness, pity and yes, horror?  I find precisely those things in a meaningless and hostile universe. I love the more because of love's futility, I treasure life more for it's evanescence and meaninglessness.  I wonder more at the spectacular  and vast and complex universe of reality than at the childish little one born of ignorance and legend -- and most of all I'm free without Gods as no man could be with their jealous tempers and wrathful deeds, their narrow minded  priests, preachers and divine retributions trapping him in a world of guilt, fear, original sin and self-loathing.

"Thus although Ricky Gervais has publicly said that his film takes an atheist position, it appears that even he cannot imagine a happy, emotionally fulfilling world that does not acknowledge a good many fundamentally religious thoughts, and in particular Christian ones."

What a smug and loathsome statement and how offensive to other religions -- as though love compassion, emotional fulfillment  and the rest of the fuzzy fulsome package belonged exclusively to any form of extant Christianity other than the ad hoc and ephemeral chimera he puts together for this argument -- as though history, it's wars, persecutions, tyrannies, oppressions and inquisitions  could be disregarded as anomalous and never anywhere was there a Buddha or an atheist willing to lay down his life for his family or his country.

Regardless of how I loath this man's precious, smug and egotistical disdain for non-believers and non-Christians, I have to smile a bit at how he claims Gervais' movie "undercuts" his atheist position,  because if even a fictional God is as good, as he says, as a real God; if objective reality is less important than the noble lie,  then truthfulness, objectivity and indeed honesty are unnecessary and perhaps dangerous in his happy world of fiction, a conclusion which undercuts everything that, in his conceit, he attempts to prove.

Off with the habit, sister!

Some Republicans have been speaking up and saying they wish Barak Obama would be more like French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Considering the Republican obsession with French cowardice and perfidy, it's remarkable in itself, but Sarko made a rather more blustery statement about Iran and tyranny than did Obama and bluster is what Republican foreign policy has come to be.

I have no doubt that some Republicans, including those who fill my mail box with serial hoaxes about foreign leaders railing and howling about throwing out the Muslims, would be quite happy with such a president and his support of a ban on religious attire in France - at least as it pertains to Islamic attire.

France has launched a parliamentary inquiry into whether women should be allowed to wear the burqa in public. Sarkozy is on record as saying it's "not welcome" in France. Consistency requires, at least in a land of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, banning other forms of sartorial identification, such as Sikh turbans, large Christian crucifixes and Jewish yarmulkes as well and so it is proposed. I'm unable to discern their attitude toward the Roman Catholic burqa as worn by nuns, but I'm sure some accommodation could be reached.

Because we are a secular government, not a Christian one, our US constitution protects the freedom to practice our various religions as we choose and it's hard to see any such legislation being proposed here, but it must be of comfort to our resident bigots to know their favorite "surrender monkeys" are considering the surrender of another increment of freedom in service of bigotry and xenophobia.

Cheezus!

I finished my coffee, put down the Michio Kaku book on multidimensional universes and opened my e-mail to find this.

What can you say? Whatever multidimensional universe I was born into, it must have been the wrong one.



Yes, but will it transubstantiate?

Cross posted from The Impolitic

Cast the first stone

I'm disgusted by violence. I always have been. I'm human enough, none the less, to recognize in myself the urges we inherit from the common ancestor we share with Chimpanzees and yes, I'm quite capable of committing violent acts under the right circumstances, my antipathy and morals notwithstanding. One of those circumstances would be to prevent violence being committed upon others and particularly upon women and children. I'm afraid I would become uncontrollable if forced to witness what Iran plans to do to a group of women for having sex or something close to it in violation of some religious code from the dark minds of the dark ages.

Despite a pledge to hold a moratorium on such crimes against nature, decency and humanity, Iran announced last week that it was going to stone 9 women and one man for adultery.

"The European Union calls on the Iranian government and parliament to abolish, in law and in practice, recourse to cruel and degrading punishment and, in particular the use of stoning, as a method of execution,"

reads a statement from France Thursday, which holds the current EU presidency. Fat chance.

In case the procedure is too vague to depict the horror of watching women and girls buried up to their shoulders be pelted with fist sized stones until they either bleed to death or as the skull fractures, the eyeballs hanging by threads from a pulped face, the brain damage becomes sufficient to cause them to stop breathing, here's a picture.* Here's a glimpse into the dark heart of religious madness. Here are the people who worship a merciful God and thereby demonstrate his non-existence. Here are people I would gladly kill regardless of the personal cost.

Look into her eyes and smash her in the face with a brick - go ahead, but just don't let me get my hands around your God fearing neck.


*This picture is a simulation - just to make the viewer confront the horror. The reality of course would be much uglier and of course you might have to deal with the screams.

Freedom in Tibet

People like to call the Dalai Lama a "spiritual" leader and a freedom fighter. Both of those terms are relative enough to be useless unless it's to deceive. Unless one believes in spirits, which of course, I do not, what we're talking about is a religious leader. So that no one will fail to observe my bias, I also do not believe that a religious leader has any particular right to speak for a country or a people or for anyone who doesn't give him that right. In the US, we've had a constant struggle with various "spiritual" leaders who have arrogated the right to lead on matters, moral, fiscal, military, sexual, political and racial. Other countries have taken rather a harder line. China is one of those.

Before the current incarnation of the Dalai Lama left Tibet, the poverty of that country was virtually unequalled, while the religious establisment consumed more than the lion's share of everything that could be consumed. In a way similar to medieval Europe, the monestaries and clerics owned nearly all the land and it's resources while serfs were cold and hungry - but very spiritualy assured of a better life after they succumbed to starvation and disease. China's solution to one of the most massive human rights problems was harsh and brutal. China's continued occupation continues to prevent the return of theocracy and feudalism, but of course although the standard of living and of education has grown greatly, freedom of speech is still no better than under the Lamas. How is it a restoration of freedom to return to religious feudalism?

None the less, the Bourgeois Buddhists of Hollywood have adopted the charming monk as a "spiritual leader" while of course continuing to lead their rather hedonistic lives. They seem not to know that the Tibetan religion is as far from Buddhism as Voodoo is from Roman Catholicism and they've also sold us some revisionism as rancid as the yak butter that lights the Potala on cold winter nights. Tibet has never been a Democracy nor have the people been anything we would call free. As much as two thirds of the territory the Dali Lama claims have been part of China for hundreds of years. Making Tibet an independent nation would be much like insisting we "free" the American Southwest and Puerto Rico by handing them over to the Roman Catholic Church. As much as Hollwood stars would like you to think they're agitating for freedom, they're agitating for a medieval theocracy where all power is vested in hereditary "spiritual leaders" who made a bit of a mockery of the compassion at the heart of Budhism.

Is it fair to compare John McCain to a Hollywood liberal? At least he's making a bid for the attention of the people who swoon over bits of quartz and babble about their "chi" and other trendy designer beliefs. John claims he's taking time out from the campaign by visiting the man born as Tenzin Gyatso. He's not, he's sucking up to another "spiritual leader" who would like very much to have more to say about power, a man who Thomas Jefferson would condemn as a tyrant over the mind of Man. Of course I would love to see peaceful protest allowed in China, I would love to see a free press, freedom from illegal searches and seizures and all the other things we're still fighting for here, I would like to see democratic institutions, an independent judiciary. What we are seeing though is the beginning of prosperity, the beginning of an educational system, but restoring an absolute theocracy is not the way to further those goals and kissing the skirts of theocrats is no way to influence China toward liberalization.

Bye bye Deborah Jeane

Many people believe the Comedian Lenny Bruce who died in 1960 of a drug overdose, was hounded to death for telling dirty jokes and creating biting social satire. His history of arrests for indecency is voluminous. Of course his humor is far less "dirty" than one hears on TV today and nobody was ever harmed by hearing "dirty words."

Some would like to believe that the rampant prudery of the 1950's, a time when one couldn't say "pregnant" or "hell" on TV and married couples like Ozzie and Harriet Nelson had to be shown sleeping in separate beds, is no longer with us in our era of rampant vulgarity, but of course the Values Vermin are as durable as cockroaches and still have plenty to say about wardrobe malfunctions, academic discussions of sexuality and about who may do what and with whom.

The arguments against prostitution are far too many to list or to argue against here. Suffice it to say that in America one can ask for a diamond ring, a steak dinner or a night at the opera in return for amorous favors, but not 20 bucks, not 4000 bucks, not a dollar. I won't even try to explain. I won't try to explain why someone like Deborah Jeane Palfrey could be sentenced to 55 years in jail for putting couples together to pursue their own further interests, sexual or otherwise, while Neil Clark Warren is above reproach for doing the very same thing. The answer would lead us directly into the foetid swamp of Christian morality where the light of reason, decency and respect for humanity never shines.

Palfrey has been, since April 15th, awaiting sentence for various crimes stemming from the illegality of putting together consenting adults who might be expected to have a mutual interest in exchanging money for sex. The maximum sentence of 55 years is, for someone of 52 years, a life sentence and the life expectancy of a convict is less than that of a free person. Need I mention the quality of life in prison? It's no surprise that she seems to have killed herself; another sacrifice to the ravenous God we created; another victim of Christian love of punishment and contempt for freedom.

Meanwhile people who rob and defraud others of billions, serve far lighter sentences. People caught frequenting prostitutes face disgrace - sometimes. Sometimes they lose their jobs; sometimes their job of preaching morality is only enhanced. People who murder innocent people in their beds get to make a fortune, get to write and enforce laws that make us the largest jail keepers in the world, get to be President.

Men in dresses

The Former Cardinal Ratzinger says he's ashamed; ashamed of the pederasty scandals that have drained Church coffers. Of course he is, but I have to wonder whether the public confession made at 40,000 feet above the Atlantic in an Alitalia jet wasn't more of a strategic apology; more of a business decision than a plea for sympathy or absolution. Such speculation can come to nothing, but indeed the opportunities for shame for the infallible moral arbiter who is the latest in the long line of shameful predecessors are almost countless. The heritability of Sin, unless it can be decoupled from guilt and shame by suitable ecclesiastical babble, would suggest that the persecution, the torture, the murder, the kidnapping , the wars, looting and destruction waged against the world for millennia must in turn have wages as deadly as they are shameful and guilt laden.

How ashamed is he about the mass murders and torture and persecution of scientists, Albigensees, Protestants, dissenters, free thinkers, Freemasons and advocates of democracy? When he talks of Jews as "older brothers in faith" is he ashamed of the seventeen centuries of fratricide? Is he ashamed of being a Hitler supporter? Sure, he was quite young, but if a fertilized egg can have sin; can have inherited it from an unidentifiable ancestor many thousands of generations ago, can he ever be free of his own misdeeds? If every sin weighed an ounce, his airliner would never have lifted off the runway.

War on Easter, part II

Of course it there actually were a war on Christmas instead of a few store owners reluctant to offend people who aren't actually offended, there would be a war on Easter too. Certainly nobody is insisting that you mention Pesach also - or instead. These are holidays far more closely related however, than is Hannukah to Christmas and far more essential to Christianity which depends on a resurrection story. Nobody seems to be making a fuss out of calling Easter a Holiday either. They either celebrate it or ignore it.

But of course those with their agenda haven't given it up and we will, in nine months time be hearing the same lies, distortions, inventions and other hysterical denunciations of all who do not celebrate Christmas the way certain people insist they do. I'm no kind of a believer. I don't believe in Fertility rabbits or the eggs bizarrely associated with an ancient variation of Ishtar. I don't believe in belief as a road to knowledge or to anything else actually, but I'm the last one to make war on a pagan tradition providing me with discounted chocolate rabbits come Monday and just to prove it, I'll take the opportunity to say to the few who read this:

HAPPY EASTER

Blood on our hands

"summa awilum in mar awilim uhtappid insu uhappadu"

If a man destroy another's eye, his eye shall be destroyed.

-Code of Hammurabi, 1795-1750 BC-

_______

It's funny in a grisly sort of way, to listen to the moral absolutists try to avoid the fact that if you kill a man for a crime he didn't commit, you are a murderer; A murderer with an excuse perhaps, but a murderer none the less. Of course some versions of morality insist that if you kill anyone you were not forced to kill, it's murder. Morality is no more absolute than any other opinion.

In my opinion, arguing for the Death penalty by saying that most of the people you kill are guilty, aren't worth the rebuttal; it only takes one to make it murder and one to make us all accessories, and the fact seems to be that it's been quite a bit more than one. Arguments that justify the probability of killing at least a few innocents, or indeed for killing anyone because doctrine says it's a deterrent are simply arguments for expedience and from fear, not from reason. Arguments that depend on some cosmic system of double entry book keeping are arguments from an ancient religious tradition with no basis in the actual cosmos. I'm fed up with all these attempts to justify hate crimes and so apparently are others.

It's New Jersey however, and not some Bible Belt state that has taken the lead by stepping away from blood sacrifice and away from the totalitarian notion that a life can be taken in cold blood by some committee of citizens made sufficiently angry by paid professionals. To this writer, it provides a glimmer of hope that the United States might some day follow the path of enlightenment, but just a glimmer.

I am not afraid

"There's no question in my mind that horror at militant Islam and fear of Muslim immigration lie behind at least some of the current vogue for atheism--you don't make the bestseller list by excoriating the evils of Lutheranism or Buddhism."

Well at least she qualified the statement to limit it to events in her mind. Katha Pollitt, writing An Atheists Dilemma in The Nation is indulging in a bit of solipsism and she needs it to limit the scope of her sweeping generalities, because in the world outside her mind, it makes no sense.

Atheism or something arbitrarily close to it, seems to be the norm in Western Europe and was so before 9/11 changed nothing. Europe has been wracked by centuries of bloody war over the evils of Lutheranism or Roman Catholicism and other systems of religious certainty. Although American religious apologists, even the moderate ones, seem to look upon Christianity through pastel lenses as something that only a person with a malignant and ulterior motive would criticize, Europeans have too much horrible history to be covered with syrupy faith a la mode Americain. Buddhism of course, isn't about gods although Buddhists and Hindus have been going at it in bloody fashion as well.

"Even if you are a ferocious Sam Harris-style atheist who thinks religion is completely stupid--the province of shysters and fools--you have to admit it would be quite astonishing if that view persuaded the devout anytime soon"

I would be astonished if the average IQ suddenly elevated itself by 50 points too, but it would be a hell of a good idea. But at any rate her assertion that fear of Islam is behind this hard to establish fad for Atheism is even harder to establish. I think there's enough information to show that religiosity declines with education and even more so with intelligence and while that sounds provocative and even smug, I can reply that your religion requires as much suspension (or lack) of cognitive function as any other - if not more.

I see no evil in Islam that I have not seen at one time or another in Christianity and God's Jewish warriors differ only by being a smaller group; and while we're on the subject of Brother Martin, he was a bloody handed son of a bitch and probably schizophrenic; a perfect argument for establishing that you don't have to go abroad to find the septic heart of all faiths and a good foundation for disbelief.

Of course the word "ferocious" wasn't chosen without some thought. It implies fanaticism of the religious sort and distracts from the validity of the distaste the non-believer, heretic or infidel has acquired from uncountable centuries of persecution. It's another version of the pathetic " you're wrong because you're angry" argument common to Bush supporters and other idiots.

If books such as Dawkins' The God Delusion or Hitchens' God is not Great make the top of the best seller list, it hardly indicates a mass exodus from America's fugue state. What it indicates is that amongst the minority of Americans that read, some are willing to part with $24.95 to hear someone brave enough to say what they wish they could say in the presence of mine enemies. It doesn't have a damned thing to do with Islam other than as another example of the madness of religion in general.

If you want to believe something, believe that admitting you don't share the visions or see the portents or believe the fiction is a ticket to ostracism. People won't let their children near you and your job performance rating will fail to glow the way it used to. If there is any dilemma this atheist sees, it isn't the one Pollitt has patched together. It's the same one my ancestors have had to face since Emperor Constantine. Lie and get by, tell the truth and die.

Cross posted from The Impolitic

Rice in the house of bread

"Being here at the birthplace of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, has been a very special and moving experience,"

said Condoleezza Rice the other day in Bethlehem. Beit Lechem or the House of Bread, is of course attributed by most Christians as the place in which Jesus was born, although historians tend to discount the story as a contrivance to make his history seem more in line with the ancient predictions that some young woman would give birth to a male continuation of the line of Ahaz that has been fixed up and resold as a prediction of a soul-saving messiah.

But Condoleezza with all of her academic degrees simply accepts the story about the census and the flight to Egypt even though the census of Quirinius occurred in 6 AD when Herod was 10 years dead and didn't require anyone to return to their birthplace to register. I won't get into all the historical evidence that makes this incredible story incredible, but when Condy says

"It is also, I think, a personal reminder that the prince of peace is still with us"

and calls on Islam, Judaism and Christianity to make religion a "power of healing," I have to wonder about her grasp on reality. Has there ever been a more divisive and violent influence on humankind than the insistence that one myth be taken as axiom and all the other fact and fiction as heresy? How can there be peace when my prince of peace is tougher than your prince of peace?

I could detect no trace of allowance for differences of opinion about what happened or didn't happen in Bethlehem, no hint of respect for the historical record or the myths of others; no phrasing like "here by Christian tradition, Jesus, whom I hold to be God was born" but only this is the way it really is, damn the facts, you heretics and damn your religion.

Is there really any hope for peace, for tolerance, for mutual respect amongst people who confuse belief with entitlement?