I really don’t want to be the one to rain on Custador’s “UK, F%@# Yeah!” parade, but … well, OK, yes I do.

Yesterday, Martin Robbins had an editorial on The Guardian, the title of which challenges the notion that the Brits are always more subtle than us yanks:

‘Choice’ fetish spawns mind-meltingly stupid homeopathy policy

The editorial is about the response by the Secretary of State for Health (pdf) to a report from the Science and Technology Committee that completely panned homeopathy and the government’s support of homeopaths.

The Secretary for Health defended the government’s position, and Robbins takes serious issue with the common refrain the the government is protecting consumer choice:

What I find so frustrating is this dedication to a form of “consumer choice” that is absolutely anything but. If I walk into a pharmacist looking for a packet of condoms, and I’m given the choice between a packet of Durex and a sock, it isn’t a choice, it’s just a pointless piece of confusion that’s going to lead to lots of people having really uncomfortable sex, and a localised population explosion.

I will give the government a half-point for one of their arguments, though it doesn’t seem to appeal to Robbins. The Secretary states that a ban on homeopathic medicine would “risk the introduction of unregulated, poor quality and potentially unsafe products on the market to satisfy consumer demand.”

Jokes about poor quality water aside, I think it’s wise to acknowledge that there will be loopholes in whatever anti-homeopathic legislation that comes down, and that homeopathic medicine will still be sold. This will probably mean that much of it will be produced in someone’s basement, and be based on whatever cockamamie theory is currently in vogue. (“Trace amounts of arsenic are good for you!”)

The Secretary is saying that it would be better to permit the sale of homeopathic medicine and regulate it for things like accurate labeling than to permit a grey market with unregulated products. But, as Robbins points out, this leaves the government in the schizophrenic position of accepting homeopathic medicine, while acknowledging that it doesn’t work. In fact, they go on to endorse an educational campaign that would inform the public that this officially accepted product does not, in fact, do anything. Let’s give Robbins the final say:

So the government is planning to launch a public information campaign against homeopathic treatments at the same time as it continues to fund those treatments through the NHS. In this glorious mess of a policy the government has come up with something so brain-meltingly stupid that even the satirical brain of Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It, In the Loop) would struggle to match it.

Over at the Accidental Historian, Geds is starting a series on the Byzantine Empire. Like all good historians, he realizes that to talk about a period of history, he has to go back to well before that period actually began. Back to, say, when the universe cooled enough for protons to form.

Geds splits the difference and goes back to before Constantine, to the appearance of Christianity. In his discussion of religion in the Greco-Roman world, he throws out this:

There was absolutely nothing special about the persecution of Christians.

The Roman authorities saw Christianity as a potentially destabilizing force in exactly the same way it saw criminals and revolutionaries as a destabilizing force. The only reason we’re lead to believe the stories of the Christian martyrs are special is because we have a lot of them.

That reminded me of a quote from a Roman text dated to the early fourth century:

The guilty thief is produced, is interrogated as he deserves; he is tortured, the torturer strikes, his breast is injured, he is hung up … he is beaten with sticks, he is flogged, he runs through the sequence of tortures, and he denies. He is to be punished; he is led to the sword. Then another is produced, innocent, who has a large patronage network with him; well-spoken men are present with him. This one has good fortune; he is absolved. (quoted from The Inheritance of Rome. p.21)

Note the assumptions here. Do you see the casual acceptance of what Chris Wickham calls “judicial violence”? Do you notice the implicit class assumptions?

Does it change your perceptions at all to know that this text was a Greek-Latin primer for school children?

This is the world that early Christianity found itself in.

This is one of the most dishonest and over-the-top political ads I’ve ever laid eyes on:

How much dishonesty can you pack into sixty seconds? Let’s count off a few:

1. “They”? “They” who? If you’re trying to blame all Muslims for the actions of Al Qaeda, you’re going to have to do a better job than that.

2. It’s not a 13 story Mosque, it’s a cultural center called the “Cordoba House“. That’s kind of an obscure reference. Cordoba, Spain, during the early middle ages was one of those rare places that Islam, Christianity and Judaism existed side by side without too much friction (as near as historians can tell). Understanding that makes it’s purpose pretty clear.

3. It’s not at Ground Zero, or looking down on Ground Zero as some have suggested. It’s three or four blocks north of the site.

… and so on.

The Livingston Parish School Board looks like it may be first in line to test this hypothesis. According to The Advocate:

During the board’s meeting Thursday, several board members expressed an interest in the teaching of creationism, an alternative to the study of the theory of evolution, in Livingston Parish public school classrooms.

[...]

Benton said that under provisions of the Science Education Act enacted last year by the Louisiana Legislature, schools can present what she termed “critical thinking and creationism” in science classes.

Board Member David Tate quickly responded: “We let them teach evolution to our children, but I think all of us sitting up here on this School Board believe in creationism. Why can’t we get someone with religious beliefs to teach creationism?”

While there is some mention of the ACLU, there is no sign that the board is thinking about the legal ramifications of this. Some of the arguments that were made are just odd, for example:

Martin, noting that discipline of young people is constantly becoming more of a challenge for parents and teachers, agreed: “Maybe it’s time that we look at this.”

I’m guessing that this is the standard “We need to teach them Christianity so they’ll be moral” argument, though it may just be a poorly written section of the article.

The photographer of celebrities David LaChapelle has a new show of his artwork up entitled “American Jesus”. It seems that Mr. LaChapelle has a specific identity in mind for who this Jesus was. See if you can guess:

I’ve previously made reference to the post A Sociologist Lives Among Christian Fundamentalists: His Conclusions over at Blog on the Way. One of the insights that Jeri mentions is about the damage done to the fundamentalist community by the constant outrage:

These days, even those American Christians who oppose abortion, sexual promiscuity, and homosexuality find the Fundamentalist culture of Outrage to be unacceptable. [...] Indeed, in America’s increasingly pluralistic society where tolerance is now accepted as essential just for domestic peace in the nation, the Fundamentalist habit of Outrage has become increasingly polarizing even among conservatives. More and more, the culture of Outrage resembles ignorance, fanaticism, and even disobedience to God.

That “culture of outrage” is also present in many conservative Christian groups who aren’t technically fundamentalists, and I believe we’re seeing signs that it is causing damage. The constant battle over issues of morality – the Culture Wars – are pushing some people, particularly young people, away from their communities.

That’s basically what I get from books like The Outsider Interviews, which is a follow up to the Barna Survey at the core of the work unChristian. It seems that many in America’s younger generation have a perception that the Christian church is hostile, arrogant and judgmental. Young men and women, both inside and outside the church, feel that the American Evangelical Christian church isn’t … well, isn’t very Christian.

There was a recent post at CNN’s Belief Blog based on a conversation with Jim Wallis that expands on that, Has The Religious Right Lost It’s Children?:

Wallis said the children of ultra-conservative Christians are deserting their parents’ theology in droves. Wallis is the president of Sojourners, a network of progressive Christians.

He says a new generation of Christians are tired of their faith being defined by two issues: fights over abortion and homosexuality.

(As an aside: I’d be a lot happier if this wasn’t coming from Wallis, a man who has been predicting the eminent fall of the Religious Right for over a decade now – usually with very flimsy evidence. Here’s Frederick Clarkson with a rundown.)

My impression is that the younger folks are trying the leave the acrimony behind without leaving their faith. In many cases, I still get the feeling that they accept the party line about homosexuality, women’s equality and abortion, but they’d rather talk quietly about Jesus than shout about the Bible.

Marie Claire is not a magazine known for its hard hitting journalism. The article frames the story as an examination of Islam: religion of peace? or violence? Fortunately, The Last Psychiatrist does a better job of opening it up and looking at it. Even better, LP does a good job of getting to the heart of what “honor killings” mean in the culture:

Why didn’t he kill her when she when she first started talking to boys? Why didn’t he kill her when she started wearing American clothes at age 4?

The answer is: they lived in America for 16 years, where that behavior doesn’t shame him. He may not like it, but there is no one who would look down on him here. Shame is exposure, and as long as all these behaviors stay in Phoenix, no one knows what “s/he’s” done.

It all fell apart because he sent her to Iraq. When he committed to the all-in, hail mary plan of sending his daughter to Iraq to get married, where she either rejected five men as unsuitable(!) or worse, got married to one of them and then went on cavorting with men in the U.S. (!!!!)…

… never mind what Allah thinks, now everyone in Iraq knows what kind of a man he is.

For the record, America has had its own honor cultures, like in the Old South. The South Carolina politician James Henry Hammond said, “Reputation is everything. Everything with me depends upon the estimation in which I am held.” That’s as good a statement of what it means to live in an honor culture as any I’ve heard.

Living in an honor culture means being very sensitive to being “discussed,” to borrow a southern euphemism. You don’t want the neighbors talking about how you can’t handle your daughter. This can be serious business, since such things will affect your status in the society. But Noor‘s father was living in American society, and doesn’t have that excuse. Again, here’s LP with the diagnosis:

He doesn’t care that she’s Americanized or even an adulteress. He cares that people are laughing at him.

This is narcissism, and here I do not hesitate to spell it out explicitly. The obvious is that he sees her only as an extension of himself, only as she impacts his own existence and not as an independent entity. He’s not better than her, she’s just not a fully formed character, she’s an extra. But the more telling and scary part of the narcissism is that he thinks that by killing her, he has not merely stopped her but fixed things, erased his shame, as if it never happened. As if the people back in Iraq aren’t still snickering, as if human nature and reality are subservient to the magical thinking of a man who believes a Jeep can alter what God already saw.

(I like John Cole’s summary better: “Hitchens may have cancer, but he can still kick Braveheart’s ass.”)

We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.

[...]

Yet I still saw a report the other day about a fan site where the members were just beginning to ask, “What’s with him?” Why is there this reluctance to call something by its right name? It’s not as if Gibson was issuing a cry for help. On the contrary, what he is issuing is the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry—and sexual hypocrisy—that stretches from the Crusades through the Inquisition to the “concordats” between the church and Hitler and Mussolini. Yet he’s still reporting for work. When will Hollywood, and the wider society, finally decide to shun and spurn him utterly, both for what he is and for what he represents?

My guess is that Hitchens thinks that this in another case of the deference shown to religion; many people are unwilling to blame the schismatic sect of Gibson’s father for instilling Gibson with his paranoia, anti-semitism and racism.

But part of me is wondering if this isn’t another case of the “Polanski effect.” Is it maybe that people are unwilling to call out the “genius” behind the Passion of Christ for being a racist, the same way they’re unwilling to just admit that Polanski is a rapist on the run from justice? And if so, why?

Yesterday, the dumbass quote was from a Republican candidate in Missouri named Ed Martin:

“We’re great because we created a place and space where people can be free,” said Martin. “And they can choose Christ, they can choose to be faithful. They can worship, and they find their way to the Lord.”
“And that’s one of the things that’s most destructive about the growth of government. It’s this taking away that freedom. The freedom — the ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation,” he continued.

This is about two hours worth of suck in a two second quote.

The opening isn’t far off, even if it’s still a hasty generalization. Most of the founders considered themselves Christian (though many probably would not be considered Christian by many Christians today), and several did seem to think that by allowing “freedom of conscience” if would lead everyone to a purified “true” Christian church. Of course, it didn’t work out that way …

But as someone who has pushed for a secular Government, it’s galling to see someone saying that government is depriving him of his religious freedom. America provides as much freedom of religion as any other time or place in history. You are absolutely free to worship who and how you choose – so long as you allow others that exact same right.

And I suspect it’s that last part that Mr. Martin would like to change. If you want to pray in school, bow your head in prayer. Form a prayer circle during lunch, or start up a bible study in an unused classroom. But you can’t expect the school to pray with you, and that’s the rub for some people. They won’t be satisfied until the government institutions like schools are confessional organizations that officially reflect their religion.

This was kicked around a bit in yesterday’s post, but let’s focus on it a bit more.

How should the attendees at Comic Con respond to Westboro Baptist?

Some thoughts: Westboro seems to want two things, publicity and lawsuits. So the best response is to deny them both, while still marginalizing them.

Some folks have had luck just blocking them from the view of their intended victims, but I think most of us would rather be more proactive.

Absurd mockery seems to work, like the way Purdue’s Society of Non-Theists dealt with an annoying campus preacher. That was pure serendipity – he just happened to show up on their annual Pastafarian Preaching day – but it’s hard to take someone seriously when people are dancing around them singing pirate songs.

Any ideas?

But now the Phelps clan and Westboro Baptist are hitting closer to home (well, for me, anyway): the plan to picket Comic Con on July 22.

By an unspoken consensus, most of us avoid sending traffic to the Westboro Baptist site. But here’s part of the text from one of their press releases:

Comic Con is an excuse for whores to wear skimpy get-ups (as if they don’t already) without censure & for emulating rebels to compare costumes. Yikes. Put away your action figures & get about the business of serving your God. You fail as a human being because you shun your only obligation in this life: “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccl. 12:13). Here is a frightening picture of this doomed generation: “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister (america), pride, fulness of bread, & abundance of idleness was in her & in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor & needy” (Eze. 16:49).

Oh, and they throw in: “You idolaters have far too much time on your hands!”

Pot, kettle.

The following quote is making the rounds, but I can’t source it on the Westboro site – which seems to be having problems. Still, it seems to be an answer to the “WTF?” response most people have had to their announcement:

Are you kidding?! If these people would spend even some of the energy that they spend on these comic books, reading the Bible, well no high hopes here. They have turned comic book characters into idols, and worship them they do! Isaiah 2:8 Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made: 9 And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself: therefore forgive them not. It is time to put away the silly vanities and turn to God like you mean it. The destruction of this nation is imminent – so start calling on Batman and Superman now, see if they can pull you from the mess that you have created with all your silly idolatry.

Can someone point me towards anyone who worships Batman? I’d like to meet them … well, from a distance anyway.

This seems like a poor idea for the Phelps clan. The folks at Comic Con will have a grand old time making fun of this crew.

Cracked.com has gotten ambitious and published a list of 10 Things Christians and Atheists Can (And Must) Agree On. And … eh, it’s Cracked.com. Not bad – I’d say he’s usually half right on both sides – but don’t expect anything deep.

For example, they do the classic comparison of theistic villains and Stalin:

Yeah, yeah, I know the Christians are saying that the guy who fights an unjust or needless war is violating God’s law, and thus isn’t a good Christian. Meanwhile, the atheists are saying that Stalin was merely bloodthirsty, separate and apart from his disbelief in a higher power. Both believe, then, that it is a corruption of their belief system that allows unjust slaughter to happen.

The problem is that atheism is not a belief system, and it has no moral dimension. I’m perfectly happy saying that atheists are just as likely to be horrible people as believers. But you can’t corrupt something as simple as atheism: you either hold a belief in a deity or not.

Atheism is clearly no guard against bad behavior, but no one – well, no one sane – has argued that it is.

And some of is is mystifying, for example:

Atheists, even if you reject the idea of God completely and claim to live according only to the cold logic of the physical sciences, you all still live as if the absolute morality of some magical lawgiver were true.

Do what, now?

Sorry, that’s the southern expression of male bafflement. Have I actually claimed to live only by “cold logic”? I’ve got a microwave, I could warm it up. And the idea of dedicating oneself to living within the physical sciences is just … odd. “With the FSM as my witness, I shall always obey the laws of thermodynamics!” … yeah.

But the most painful part is the confusion of categories implied by his statement “absolute morality.” In this, and later paragraphs, he seems to be saying that if you don’t have God, you don’t have a basis for declaring anything morally good or bad. Thousands of years of thought into the matter of morality and ethics just … gone. You need a God or you got nothing.

Ken Pulliam over at Why I De-Converted from Evangelical Christianity published a coupled of posts full of “music for apostates.” The last one contained ACDC’s Highway to Hell. That works, because I tend to think that ACDC’s continuing career is the best evidence yet against a benevolent God.

Let’s punk it up a bit, shall we?

Bad Religion: “Welcome to the New Dark Ages”

Favorite “band suddenly getting deep” lyric:

“Because we’re animals – with golden rules
Who… who can’t be moved by rational views”

NOFX: “Leaving Jesusland”

Favorite “band being meaner that it has to be” lyric:

“I hate to generalize,
but have you seen the thighs,
most haven’t seen their genitalia in a while.”

Alright, one non-punk Jesus song, just so long as it’s one that would piss off the rednecks I grew up with:

Ian Moore: “Muddy Jesus”

So what’s your favorite heathen music?

Victor J. Stenger, author of works like God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist, came out with a work last year titled The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason. In it, Stenger apparently has a section on the nonhistoricity of Jesus.

First off, he doesn’t do himself any favors by confusing Philo and Josephus. It looks like a simple mistake of confusing quotes, but someone should have caught it.

But second, is this really the battle we want to be fighting?

I know I’m suspect in this discussion, because I’ve stated that I do not accept mythicism. But I think it should be pointed out that even the most scholarly of the mythicists – Robert Price and Richard Carrier – acknowledge that it’s a very complex argument.

For example, Carrier has pointed out that a lot of the arguments from previous generations of mythicists have been really bad. Pointing to parallels between the Gospel stories and other myths in the Greco-Roman world doesn’t cut it. You need to explain why the biblical authors were adapting those stories. Carrier has argued that you really need a solid grasp of Jewish writings and other ancient literature before you can understand what was going on.

Lacking that knowledge, the mythicist argument is going to be counter-intuitive and, therefor, a hard sell.

In contrast, what do we gain from making the mythicist argument? If nothing else, it should be noted that even to mythicists, Paul and the authors of the Gospels did believe in Jesus – just a semi-divine Jesus who wasn’t present on earth. If we could, through masterful debate and sound reason, push believers back to that point, we still haven’t really gained anything for atheism.

I’m not going to argue against mythicism here, but I will argue that mythicism should not become a plank in the New Atheist platform. It is a difficult argument that stands to gain us very little.

Neddy Merrill over at The Edge of the American West has pointed out just how shabby that pretense really was:

Worst non-ex-Muslim ever
[...]
What makes this story so interesting is that he’s terrible at playing a Muslim. Or, more accurately, that he got as far as he did while being so terrible. Check out these videos, posted by one of the bloggers who’s been on this for a while: he gets the Shahada wrong. He thinks there are 40 days in Ramadan. He confuses “insha’Allah” and “alhumdulillah.” The Christian equivalent would be like saying Jesus rose on Christmas– just a straight-up, WTF howler to anyone who’s even casually Muslim.

I’m trying to imagine what the atheist equivalent would be. It would have to be like saying, “I’m an atheist, but Jesus loves me anyway.”

Despite this, a few other evangelical apologists like Norman Geisler, co-author of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (which our friend Deacon Duncan has recently finished demolishing), are sticking by him.

Michael Paulkner has produced this gorgeous depiction of the ancient Israelite view of the universe. You can go to his flicker stream to see it in the original size.

There’s a lot more on his photostream that’s worth looking at. James McGrath likes this depiction of the Ptolemaic Universe, but I have a fondness for this one:

Just thought you should know that as of this morning, Unreasonable Faith has received over 100,000 comments. Way to go, folks!

If you decide to throw a party, just make sure you clean up all the beer bottles before Daniel gets back.

For the record, that’s 100,000 “approved” comments, so it doesn’t count spam or comments that we delete. That’s important, because the recent Facts aren’t Enough post has received over 600 trackbacks from spamblogs so far. I have no idea why.

Over at Religion in American history, Michael Altman has some reaction to an interview with Bear Grylls, star of the Discovery Channel’s Man vs. Wild. When Grylls claims to be non-religious, but gets effusive about Jesus, Altman reflects:

This split between Jesus and religion fascinates me. In the early 19th century American Christians tended to think of “religion” in terms of “true Religion” (Christianity) and the rest–usually four groups (Muslims, Jews, and Pagans/Heathens). By the early 20th century “religion” was a category within which Christianity fell alongside another ten to half-dozen religions (suddenly we have Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto etc.) Now, in the early 21st century I hear more and more (usually evangelical) Christians claiming that Jesus wasn’t religious at all–in fact true Christianity isn’t about religion–it’s about a relationship with Jesus. I’m not spiritual, or religious, I’m with Jesus.

I think he’s on to something there: the “spiritual but no religious” movement is, in part, an attempt to distinguish an individual’s Christianity from the growing mass of other religions – and the growing mass of Christian denominations. It’s a way to stand out and appear exceptional, now that Christianity is starting to look like just one of many religions.

The whole Gryll’s article is a stream with flows from Transcendentalism, Evangelicalism, Promise Keepers, muscular Christianity, and Graham’s “Make a decision for Christ today” revivalism.
[...]
This is a confluence that isn’t necessarily fully thought out or self-selected. I don’t think Grylls went out and thought about becoming this sort of masculine Christian, nor do I think Relevant sought to portray him this way. This isn’t Sheila-ism. It’s something more organic and more accidental. It’s like religious run-off making its way into a creek of spirituality and carrying all sorts of cultural flotsam with it. What to call it, though? Perhaps Bear-ism?

I like the metaphor of the stream. You can imagine the religion as the stream, and the culture as the stream bed. Both shape each other, and you can’t really understand until you look at both.

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

[...]

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

The article focuses on what this means for democracy and the idea that an educated population will govern itself wisely. It points out that frequently it is those misinformed people who are most passionate about what they fail to understand. The author actually makes reference to an article in the Onion to explain the problem, Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be.

But it’s hard for me to get too worked up about this; after all, humans have always been this way, and American democracy has survived for over 200 years. But it doesn’t bode well for our attempts to promote science and reason. The more we push, the more pushback we can expect.

I’m also reading about the controversy surrounding Andrew Marin, whose Marin Foundation got a lot of attention when it publicly apologized for evangelical Christianity’s anti-GLBT stance. Despite the apology, the question remains as to whether or not Marin and his crew still hold to the biblical interpretation that homosexuality as a sin. Folks like “I T” of Street Prophets are trying to hold Marin’s feet to the fire about it.

These are two cases where evangelicals are reaching out to those who are outside their movement. It’s encouraging, but I’m having a hard time believing that this isn’t largely a marketing campaign. “If we strike this pose and say these words, we’ll win more souls for Christ.” Perhaps that’s not the only reason, but it’s there in the background.

But does it matter? After all, I’m pretty confident that dialogue will change some minds on the other side. If evangelicals are forced to deal with gays, atheists and other outsiders as fully human, many are likely to start seeing the sense in the more liberal interpretations of the Bible. I suppose I can be pretty evangelical myself, just less direct about it.

What bothers me more is that the stance being taken by the authors of The Outsider Interviews and Marin specifically precludes talking about the issues that I want to talk about. I’m gratified that they’re willing to apologize for the way that evangelicals have treated the GLBT movement, but now let’s talk about why they were treated that way.

Marin dodges around the issue saying that it’s complex. Fair enough; you’ve got all the column inches you could ever need on your blog, now dive into the complexity. Jim Henderson says that he just doesn’t know what to think anymore. Alright, let’s talk about it until you do.

Todd Hunter points out that many thoughtful evangelicals are unwilling to embrace homosexuality as acceptable. True, but if you polled thoughtful American Christians in 1800, you would have found that most of them considered slavery to be biblically acceptable. It took a number of political shocks and a strong abolitionist movement to start turning that around. We’re trying to provide those shocks, are you open to rethinking you assumptions?

I’m worried that the stance being taken by these evangelicals has the effect of walling off their beliefs from discussion. I hear, “Let’s talk about our feelings, let’s talk about our perceptions, let’s talk about how we’ve treated each other, but let’s not talk about our beliefs and their justifications because those are divisive.” I’m sorry, but that’s exactly what I want to talk about.

I’ve seen too many evangelical act like they’re trapped by the Bible. I’ve heard too many pipe up that they want to “defend the bible” against the GLBT movement, without ever having the introspection to realize that they’re just defending their own interpretation of the Bible.

They do a disservice to people like Slacktivist, who do self-consciously struggle to maintain a consistent approach to the bible yet come to different conclusions. James McGrath has compiled a list of resources on homosexuality and the bible, and I’m assuming they don’t all boil down to, “God said it, I believe it, that does it.”

But if folks like Marin and Henderson don’t stop apologizing, I’m afraid we’ll never get a chance to talk about these things.

I was reading a summary of José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. In a nutshell, Jesus is a human figure who is being used by Yahweh for His own ends. He is guilt-ridden about the Massacre of the Innocents, and about the excesses that will take place in the future in his name.

In the end, realizing that his own sacrifice will not stop Yahweh’s plans or these excesses, he laments, “Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.”

It’s similar in many ways to Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, in which the human prophet Jesus has his message manipulated by his brother Christ. Christopher Hitchens has a good review of it at the NYT. There’s also an expansion on this review on the NYT podcast:

A humanized, manipulated Jesus is also a subplot of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, considered one of the great novels of the last century. In it, Yeshua is pictured as a human philosopher and wiseman who is able to bond with Pilate, even though Pilate is forced to send him to his unjust execution.

There are other examples. I remember a bizarre science fiction story in which a human Jesus is being tortured in hell for inadvertently wrecking monotheism. Part of his torture is to watch the actions of the church founded in his name.

Why is this such a popular theme? Why all these sympathetic portrayals of a human Jesus whose message is lost or distorted? In particular, why do we see it from atheists like Saramago and Pullman?

Daniel checked in to say that he’ll be out of touch for a week, because he’s driving across the country.

He didn’t say why he was driving across the country. My theory is that he’s on the run.

Maybe all the churches he designed websites for have now found out that he’s an atheist, and they’re all after him to get their money back from the heathen.

Right now, Daniel is now flying down the interstate, with a dozen church mini-vans in hot pursuit.

He’s staying ahead of them, but only because they have to stop once a day and hold a bake sale in order to pay for gas.

Anyway, that’s my theory. He’ll be back in a week.

Last month, Nobel winning author José Saramago died. Saramago was apparently a very well respected figure in his native Portugal, being the only Portuguese-language writer to win the prize for literature.

There have been several attempts to honor him. The Portuguese government declared two days of mourning, and Saramago has been lauded by many Portuguese luminaries. All kind of ironic, because Saramago lived in the Canary Islands since the early ’90s. He fled there when the Portuguese Prime Minister had his most popular and controversial book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, pulled from another literary prize competition for being religiously offensive.

Now, Saramago was an atheist, and his Gospel depicted Jesus as a flawed and humanized figure. Which leads to the most interesting homage to Saramago, by none other that the Portuguese Playboy Magazine.

The image that follows is edited, but still just this side of NSFW.

Carved on the headboard there is the title of Saramago’s work.

The blog Geek System has more images, all edited to protect you from the dreaded nipple.

Jesus loves you, but sometimes, he worries …

(via)

From the GodBlock Website:

GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions. When installed properly, GodBlock will test each page that your child visits before it is loaded, looking for passages from holy texts, names of religious figures, and other signs of religious propaganda. If none are found, then your child is allowed to browse freely.

Via Jesus Needs New PR, who comments: “To an atheist, God is like porn.”

For five extra points, explain that analogy.

Alright, show of hands: how many people here remember the 80’s “backmasking” panic? Remember all the people playing Judas Priest backwards in order to hear satanic messages?

Jeff Milner has put together this great bit of flash code which will play selections from some of the songs accused of containing backwards messages. Select a song and listen to the clip. Then hit the “reverse play” button and see if you can figure out the eeeeevil message that it contains. Click on “show reverse lyrics” to see if you got it right.

Note: if the embed code isn’t working, go to Milner’s site to try it out.

Ugh.

I agree with Slacktivist, it’s too hot to blog. Too hot to think. Too hot coherent sentence make.

When I’m done here, I’m going to go become a Baptist just so that someone will dunk me in water.

Or maybe not. I was listening to a local Christian radio station yesterday and I heard a male preacher chastising his female listeners for dressing immodestly. You see, it was their responsibility not to tempt their Christian brothers towards lust.

No mention that maybe those Christian brothers should learn to cope, grow up, get a hobby. No, it was the woman’s responsibility to protect her fragile Christian brothers from their own hormones. Dudes just can’t help it, y’know? Ugh.

Have you ever noticed that when there’s some stereotypical weakness that women supposedly suffer (i.e. inability to control emotions during PMS) it’s used as an excuse to bar them from something (i.e. having a position of power.)

And yet when men supposedly suffer some stereotypical weakness (i.e. inability to control thoughts when cleavage is visible) it’s used as an excuse to bar WOMEN from something (i.e. wearing tattered shorts and a sports bra when it’s 90+ degrees.)

Maybe it’s hypocrisy or a double standard or something. Right now it’s too hot to think about.

This is not the case with James Ault, a sociologist who studied various conservative religious movements in America and spent three years attending a fundamentalist church. The result is a documentary and a book, Spirit and Flesh.

There’s a lengthy summary of the book over at Blog on the Way. I don’t want to summarize the summary, but here’s a taste:

Ault’s most disarming and perceptive insight is that Fundamentalism, though it emphasizes reliance on the sacred Scripture, is primarily a religion in the Oral Tradition. The beliefs, which have a certain flexibility, are disseminated through the sermons and lessons and by person-to-person conversation. People share sermons, pass around tapes, and attend conferences where they hear the leaders of the religion make their pronouncements. Bible reading, rather than being systematic or scholarly, is performed selectively in order to “hide God’s Word in the heart,” which is a euphemism for memorization. At the appropriate time, learned texts are slapped onto a situation. But sermons carry the beliefs and transmit them. Bible reading serves the sermons.

[...]

Ault’s next most disarming insight is that Fundamentalism relies upon situation ethics. He expressed surprise that the preacher, a man he came to admire, would thunder that divorce was always wrong, and everybody would shout “Amen!” yet several people in the church were divorced. They felt no incongruity about condemning divorce yet also being divorced. Ault learned that the Fundamentalist mindset believed that it believed in the absolutes that it claimed, yet the culture was one of addressing every situation individually and evaluating it in light of multiple factors. While remaining conservative and morally strict, Fundamentalism, nonetheless, relied upon situation for its moral decisions, not absolutes. Divorce, in the end, was NOT always wrong if a situation was one that was intolerable or “unavoidable”. The people, he noted, saw no contradiction in what they said vs what they actually practiced. They thought they believed in an absolute morality, and they practiced situation ethics.

Jeri Massi, the blogger at Blog on the Way, is herself a former fundamentalist. She still Christian, but she’s made a study of her former community, and she’s able to provide a list of the aspects of Fundamentalism that Ault and other scholars have picked up on.

Biologists distinguish sexual monogamy from social monogamy. As DNA testing has grown cheaper in recent years, we’ve learned that most species formerly classified as “monogamous” (primarily birds) are socially monogamous, but not sexually so. In other words, they form pairs that cooperatively care for that season’s brood of young, but the male may well not be the biological father.

Most of this is not new. My first encounter with these arguments was in 2001’s The Myth of Monogamy, which is a popularization of much of the science involved. Basically, female animals frequently have more control over mate choice than was previously believed, and will frequently exercise that control before going on to choose a mate to raise offspring with.

But Ryan and Jethá take it a step farther:

Applied to humans, we argue that a more flexible approach to sexual fidelity can increase marital stability and thus lead to greater social and family stability.

I’m always worried when we start trying to tie evolution to modern morality. Perhaps, as the authors point out, we’re as sexually rambunctious as the bonobos. But we’ve surrounded ourselves with a very complex culture, and we’re just as much social and cultural beings as we are sexual ones.

I’ll admit, I’m defensive. I’ve just celebrated ten years of monogamy. Of course, the authors don’t do much to help. Consider this analogy for accepting the costs of going against our polygamous nature:

For example, you might happily choose to work the night shift, but the resulting disruption of your circadian clock will increase your risk of cancer, cardio-vascular disease, gastric disorders, and so on no matter how committed you are to your decision. Similarly, we can choose to wear tight corsets, or ill-fitting shoes, or to live on chili-dogs and ice cream, but because all these behaviors run counter to our evolved nature they will cost us over time.

Gosh, thanks.

I believe that the authors are correct that our evolution has given us instincts that leave us more suited for serial monogamy. But I think it would be wrong to conclude that we’re all that beholden to those instincts.

Humans are varied and flexible creatures, and each of us will deal with our instincts in our own way. Some will ignore them, some will go with them, and some will subvert them. While I agree its best to be aware of them, I suspect that we shouldn’t be drawing too many conclusions from our evolutionary past about our current behavior.

A Swedish scholar named Gunnar Samuelsson has successfully defended his thesis that the Gospels do not clearly describe a crucifixion that matches later traditions.

His argument seems to hinge on the word “stauroun,” which the Gospels use in a way that has been interpreted as meaning “crucified.” As in, “He was handed over to be ’stauroun.’

In this case, “stauroun” simply means to hang or suspend. Samuelsson has apparently done his homework and found that in the Gospel period, “stauroun” used in the case of executions could mean hanging or impaling.

There are a number of places to read about Samuelsson’s argument. CNN’s Belief blog has one report, but like a lot of other reports it has problems. Consider the opening:

There have been plenty of attacks on Christianity over the years, but few claims have been more surprising than one advanced by an obscure Swedish scholar this spring.

How is this an attack? Samuelsson’s arugment is very narrow; one might even say pedantic. He’s arguing that the Gospels – and only the Gospels – do not absolutely say that Jesus was crucified. That might be what they are trying to say, but there’s enough wiggle room in the words chosen that they could also be telling us that he was impaled or hung.

It reminds me a bit of the argument over Joesph’s profession, and by extension Jesus’s early profession: were they carpenters? The word the Gospel’s use is “tekton,” which merely means “manual laborer.” It’s the same root as our words like “technical,” or “technician,” that is, working with the hands. It might mean that Joesph was a carpenter (though probably not a furniture maker as sometimes depicted but rather a home builder), but it might not. The tradition that Joesph was a carpenter is first found in Justin Maytyr a century after Jesus’ death.

Regardless of what the Gospels say, early Christian tradition definitely had the idea that Jesus had been nailed to a cross. It’s possible that they were embroidering a bit, or perhaps were cleaning some things up, but I don’t see any real reason to be suspicious of the traditional reading as long as we bear Samuelsson’s points in mind.

Though I admit, part of me is morbidly curious as to what would have happened to early Christianity if Jesus had been impaled through the anus, as was sometimes done.

Hmmm, no, on second thought, nevermind.

The idea is that Christian fundamentalists are making the Bible itself into a God and placing an heap of of expectations on it that are to much for any collection of books to bear. There’s something to this, but I notice there are all different levels to which even fundamentalists ascribe.

Inspiration

As some basic level, beneath that which most people would call idolatry, is the idea I remember from Catholic school: the Bible is inspired. This meant something very similar to what we means when we say an artist is inspired; the author received some insights and ideas (from God, it was assumed) that they proceeded to work into prose. But they were human authors, who were capable of writing some poorly worded sentences or confusing an issue. Thus we needed something more with which to illuminate the text, and the Catholic answer to that is Christian tradition maintained and developed by the Church.

Dictation

Somewhere beyond that is verbal inspiration, in which the Gospel authors are merely secretaries, taking dictation from the Almighty. This sidesteps the messy process of having to consider the mentality of the author; instead, we’re getting it straight from God. One doesn’t have to believe that every jot and tittle is accurate since the books may have changed a bit since their original manuscripts, but presuambly the Bible is absolutely reliable on matters of faith and salvation.

One idea I often hear is that God is loving, and would not leave us with flawed instructions on how to achieve salvation. This assumes a lot about the way God might operate, or what “loving” means in the context of an infinite non-corporeal entity, but it does make a certain sense. However, once you start reasoning this way, there really is no limit. What else might an all-loving God provide us with in his Word?

Absolute Sufficiency

Ken Pulliam over at Why I De-Converted from Evangelical Christianity has some thoughts on the more extreme form of this idolatry, in which the Bible offer guidance on things having little to do with salvation. As one fundamentalist co-woker explained to me, “All truths are found in the Bible,” and these apparently include truths relating to psychology; thus Biblical or “nouthetic” counseling:

“Nouthetic” comes from a NT Greek word meaning: “to admonish,” or “to correct.” This type of counseling says that man’s basic problem is sin and that the job of the counselor is to point out to the counselee the nature of his sin and then admonish him to confess it and ask God to heal him. The father of the movement is Jay Adams, longtime Professor of Pastoral Counseling at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Westminster is a very conservative evangelical Reformed seminary. Adams burst on the scene in 1970 with his book, Competent to Counsel: Introduction to Nouthetic Counseling. The very popular book has been used by thousands of Pastors to guide them in their counseling methodology.

And so Adams believe he can derive principles for the Bible which allow him to deal with depression and other psychological problems. You can read Pulliam’s entire post, but I can give you a hint: Adam’s methods are both misogynistic and toxic.

Let me close with a joke that Darrell Dow, blogger at Stuff Fundies Like, left in one of his comments on the topic:

Jay Adams, Tom Cruise, and Mary Baker Eddy walk into an emergency room…and see a man in a full body cast moaning in pain.

Tom Cruise declares “this man is not injured, he merely needs to audit himself into a clear state to uncover his thetan reality then his so-called pain will cease.”

Mary Baker Eddy contradicts “No, this man merely needs to acknowledge that his physical flesh is a sinful manifestation and that only pure spirit can be righteous then he will understand his pain is an illusion.”

Jay Adams says nothing but picks up a Gideon Bible and begins beating the man on the head with it.

“What are you doing?!” ask the other two in horror.

“Discipleship!” yells Jay loudly “By the time I’m done he’ll still be in pain but by golly he’ll at least have the decency to feel guilty about it!”

(via lolgod)

Johnathan Acuff, creator of Stuff Christians Like, wrote about the inspiration of his site on the CNN’s Belief Blog some time back:

As a pastor’s kid, I always found it odd that we Christians sprinkle a little church flavor on popular secular ideas and make them our own. We turned, “Got Milk” into, “Got God,” and “Adidas” into, “Add Jesus.” I feel like we often don’t use our best creativity to express our love of the person we believe created it all. So when the site stuffwhitepeoplelike.com blew up, I thought it might be fun to discuss that problem by committing that problem. I started stuffchristianslike.net thinking it would be like one of the many ideas I’ve written online.

That’s as good a way of describing the problem as any. A lot of American Evangelical pop culture seems to consist of taking something popular from the wider culture and importing it into the subculture after sprinkling it with a little magic Jesus dust.

And there’s only so much we atheists can complain.

But, seriously folks, with all due respect … just stop rapping. Please. Magic Jesus dust doesn’t work on everything.

Case in point:

And frankly, magic Jesus dust doesn’t work really well when the original was painful to begin with:

(both videos via Scotteriology. Blame him.)

James McGrath declares this video (originally from Stuff Fundies Like) as “one of the least intelligible “arguments” I’ve ever encountered to support any point of view, anywhere, ever.”

I’m having a hard time disagreeing.

However, this may be a perfect time to try out YouTube’s “vuvuzela” function. Click through to the YouTube site (by clicking on the YouTube logo at the bottom right). Once there, click on the soccer ball/foot ball icon on the bottom right, just beneath the video.

There now, doesn’t that just improve his argument immensely? That’s the magic of the vuvuzela button. Use it wisely.

‘Tis the tenth anniversary of my marriage, and according to my co-workers this is when it all start to go downhill. (working in a house full of divorced women has it’s downsides)

I’m going to go off and enjoy the good times while they last, so I’ll be out of the loop for a couple days. Ya’ll don’t make trouble for Daniel.

Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence.

[...]

Atheists have no evidence—and certainly no proof!—that science will ever solve the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Just because other difficult-seeming problems have been solved does not mean all difficult problems will always be solved.

I’m always uncomfortable when I receive criticism that I feel misses the mark. I simply don’t recognize any of myself or my community in Rosenbaum’s remarks. I’ve seen a kind of messianic scientism before, but unless I’m missing something I do not see it reflected among the atheists I know.

Oh, it’s true that some of the statements made by Carl Sagan, as an example, could be interpreted as a type of “science as messiah” sermon. But when he talked of people joining hands and marching forward into a new age free of superstition, I interpreted that as a particular type of rhetoric; a pep talk or a type of soaring inspirational language rather than an accurate description of how he saw the future.

(hey, whattaya know, our own “literal-vs-metaphorical” debate!)

I myself am not convinced that we will ever know how the universe came to be. I suspect that there are scientific and philosophical hurdles that we might never clear. Our friend Daniel Frinke – at his newly renovated blog Camels with Hammers – has this response to the problem of how something came from nothing:

My best philosophical answer—not a dogmatic assertion with no reasoning, not a faith position I am committed to against all contrary arguments and evidence, not my 100% certainty, but merely my best philosophical answer is that we need to better understand the words creation and nothingness. Everything we see “created” is only a recombination of preexisting matter. We never see creation from nothing, but only creation from something.

And we have no experience whatsoever with “nothing”. We can only have experience with some things which are not other things. If I say there is nothing in the cupboard, it is not because I have encountered nothing, but it is because what was there was nothing edible or nothing but air and woodshavings and bacteria invisible to my naked eye, etc. I have no experience of nothing. I just have experience of things which are not expected things or things detectable by the senses.

So at least for Frinke and myself, Rosenbaum’s comment just don’t hit home. Simply because we see insufficient evidence to conclude that there is a deity – and thus we don’t believe in a God and are therefor atheists – it doesn’t follow that we worship at the altar of science.

After attacking King Leopold’s memory, I probably ought to leave Belgium alone. But this came down a few days back, and I’m not sure how I feel about it:

Vatican Criticizes Raid on Belgian Church Offices

The Vatican expressed “shock” on Friday at the raid on Thursday by the Belgian police of church offices in their search for hidden evidence of child sex abuse by priests. It also voiced its “indignation” at what it called the “violation” of two cardinals’ tombs in the search.
Related

In a bold and provocative assertion of state over church as anger rises in Europe over abuse by priests, the police not only detained the members of the Belgian Bishops’ Conference for nine hours on Thursday while searching for documents related to sex abuse cases, they also drilled into the tombs of two cardinals in the Brussels Cathedral.

Given the grudging response of the Catholic hierarchy to government demands for accountability in the pedophile scandal, I’ve been hoping that some country would take a more aggressive response. I cheer the Belgian attempts to force the Church to give up its incriminating document, and I hope that other countries follow suit. But some of this seems excessive. Drilling tombs? Based on what evidence?

In another example, the government confiscated some confidential files from a child psychologist, which may cause collateral damage.

A panel set up by the Catholic Church in Belgium to investigate sex abuse by priests is disbanding after a police raid last week that confiscated documents the panel says were confidential.

Members of he Andriaenssens Commission, named after its president, child psychiatrist Peter Andrianssens, met today and announced they would be resigning because of the breach of confidentiality.

Raid the Church, surely. But raiding related groups that were (I presume) trying to aid the victims seems like a step too far.

Ian over at Irreducible Complexity gives a great summary of half the plots from Science Fiction shows:

“Oh no, there’s a blurflurgh!”
“What’s a blurflurgh?”
“A blurflurgh is the only thing that can destroy the universe, we can’t let the blurflurgh flemmoxate.”
“It’s flemmoxating.”
“Its okay, I have a praxindoodle, which prevents the flemmoxate of the blurflurgh destroying the universe.”
“But the praxindoodle only works in the presents of gamma-umithrons.”
“We can desedrify the ship’s jimgraxle to generate a stream of gamma umithrons to power the praxindoodle that will prevent the flemmoxate of the blurflurgh from destroying the universe. But only if I hold down the button from inside the jimgraxle room.”
“But that will kill you.”
“Yes, but its a sacrifice I must make. Goodbye everyone”

…5 minute FX shot…

“Wait, you’re alive? How?”
“I realised that the only way to survive the desedrification field is to finally understand the meaning of love.”
“Cool – what’s next?”

Arbitrary peril, arbitrary solution, all tied to some saccharine sentimentality. But it’s the underlying structure behind a great many of our televised stories and, as Ian points out, behind Christian cross theology as well.

Which, now that I think of it, ties in to a quote over at Exploring our Matrix from Philip Gulley’s If the Church Were Christian:

“Isn’t it odd? Christians created a theological scenario that placed the soul of every person at risk of eternal damnation. To counter that threat, we interpreted the life and death of Jesus in a particular way, then spent billions of dollars battling the threat we created. Wouldn’t it just be easier to stop perpetuating the scenario?

Perhaps the day might come when Christianity will reconsider its priorities, when preparing souls for an afterlife we have no proof exists fades in importance, and we can use the church’s energies to improve this life.”

Louis Michel, the Belgian former EU development commissioner and current prominent Liberal MEP has shocked his home nation and its one-time central African subjects by calling King Leopold II, the Congo’s colonial master responsible for between 3 million and 10 million deaths, a “visionary hero.”

“Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero,” he told P-Magazine, a local publication, in an interview on Tuesday. “And even if there were horrible events in the Congo, should we now condemn them?”

Yes, we damn well should. We should never forget the atrocities committed and the millions dead. And we should never allow vacuous apologists like this one to sweep them under the rug. Consider his argument:

“The Belgians built railways, schools and hospitals and boosted economic growth. Leopold turned the Congo into a vast labour camp? Really? In those days it was just the way things were done.”

It’s the same tired old rationalization in favor of colonialism. “Oh, being oppressed was good for them!” But the sad truth is that even other colonial powers were appalled by the excesses that were being committed in Leopold’s “Congo Free State.” Chris Bertram is right to compare Michel’s statement to Holocaust Denial.

Look, I could rant myself hoarse here. But instead I’ll just encourage folks to read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost and get the full story of how Leopold scammed together his colony and how he ran it.

Of course, you could also read Heart of Darkness to get Joesph Conrad’s from-the-gut feelings after his visit to the Congo.

Finally, you can read the great Mark Twain and his work King Leopold’s Soliloquy, which has all the scathing lines and all the venom necessary to respond to Louis Michel.

[King Leopold II:] “These meddlesome American missionaries! these frank British consuls! these blabbingblabbing Belgian-born traitor officials! — those tiresome parrots are always talking, always telling. They have told how for twenty years I have ruled the Congo State not as a trustee of the Powers, an agent, a subordinate, a foreman, but as a sovereign — sovereign over a fruitful domain four times as large as the German Empire — sovereign absolute, irresponsible, above all law; trampling the Berlin-made Congo charter under foot; barring out all foreign traders but myself; restricting commerce to myself, through concessionaires who are my creatures and confederates; seizing and holding the State as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private “swag” — mine, solely mine — claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves; their labor mine, with or without wage; the food they raise not their property but mine; the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land mine — mine solely — and gathered for me by the men, the women and the little children under compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilation and the halter.

His closing is true enough to be painful. Leopold is reading an article from one of his detractors:

[reading:] It seems strange to see a king destroying a nation and laying waste a country for mere sordid money’s sake, and solely and only for that. Lust of conquest is royal; kings have always exercised that stately vice; we are used to it, by old habit we condone it, perceiving a certain dignity in it; but lust of money — lust of shillings — lust of nickels — lust of dirty coin, not for the nation’s enrichment but for the king’s alone — this is new. It distinctly revolts us, we cannot seem to reconcile ourselves to it, we resent it, we despise it, we say it is shabby, unkingly, out of character. Being democrats we ought to jeer and jest, we ought to rejoice to see the purple dragged in the dirt, but — well, account for it as we may, we don’t. We see this awful king, this pitiless and blood-drenched king, this money-crazy king towering toward the sky in a world-solitude of sordid crime, unfellowed and apart from the human race, sole butcher for personal gain findable in all his caste, ancient or modern, pagan or Christian, proper and legitimate target for the scorn of the lowest and the highest, and the execrations of all who hold in cold esteem the oppressor and the coward; and — well, it is a mystery, but we do not wish to look; for he is a king, and it hurts us, it troubles us, by ancient and inherited instinct it shames us to see a king degraded to this aspect, and we shrink from hearing the particulars of how it happened. We shudder and turn away when we come upon them in print.”

[Leopold:] Why, certainly — THAT IS MY PROTECTION.. And you will continue to do it. I know the human race.

We may shudder, but this time we will not look away.

Via Game Blend, a new video game is coming out that is based … excuse me, “based” on the Book of Enoch:

El Shaddai: Ascension Of The Megatron Breathtaking Debut Trailers

The book of Enoch was one of the coolest books of the Bible no one ever got to read in the original KJV. Nevertheless, Ignition Entertainment is taking the missing book of Enoch and turning it into one kick-butt game called El Shaddai.

The book of Enoch is originally what spawned great works like The Divine Comedy, and subsequently, Dante’s Inferno. The new game based on the book follows Enoch’s journey to bring back the soul’s of the original Fallen Angels whose actions ultimately resulted in the great flood.

Alright, number one: That’s Metatron, who appears in 3rd Enoch. Metatron is supposedly Enoch, who was taken up into heaven and exalted to become one of the God’s highest angles, or even a lesser God. He is described thus:

This Enoch, whose flesh was turned to flame, his veins to fire, his eye-lashes to flashes of lightning, his eye-balls to flaming torches, and whom God placed on a throne next to the throne of glory, received after this heavenly transformation the name Metatron.

Or you can just think of him as Alan Rickman from Dogma:

Megatron is a Transformer. He’s the leader of the Decepticons and violates the heck out of the law of Conservation of Mass by transforming into a handgun.

There’s a little bit of a difference.

Oh come on … don’t tell me you didn’t know that the whole church service was just a one hour commercial for these things.

(via Jesus needs new PR)

“It appears that although the Court has twice required Plaintiff to re-plead and set forth a short and plain statement of the relief requested, Plaintiff is entirely unable to file a complaint which is not overly verbose, disjointed, incoherent, maundering, and full of irrelevant information”

– From the Texas Court Ruling (pdf) which continues to deny the Institute for Creation Research the right to award a Masters Degree

You ever notice how some true believers – not all such, and not all of any one type – but how some true believers cannot pass up a chance to write a manifesto?

I think the very extreme end of this spectrum are visible in parts of Africa. Graeme Wood at The Atlantic has the story, which he gave the punny title of Hex Appeal:

By some estimates, about 40 percent of the cases in the Central African court system are witchcraft prosecutions. (Drug offenses in the U.S., by contrast, account for just 12 percent of arrests.) In Mbaiki—where Pygmies, who are known for bewitching each other, make up about a tenth of the population—witchcraft prosecutions exceed 50 percent of the case load, meaning that most alleged criminals there are suspected of doing things that Westerners generally regard as impossible.

[...]

The classic study of witchcraft in Africa occurred among the Azande, who inhabit the eastern edge of the Central African Republic. The anthropologist Edward E. Evans-Pritchard found that the Azande attributed a staggering range of misfortunes—infected toes, collapsed granary roofs, even bad weather—to meddling by witches. Nothing happened by chance, only as an effect of spell-casting by a wicked interloper. That sentiment remains widespread among Central Africans, who demand that the law reflect the influence of witchcraft as they understand it.

[...]

I asked how one determined guilt in cases where the alleged witches denied the charges. “The judge will look at them and see if they act like witches,” [Bartolomé] Goroth said, specifying that “acting like a witch” entailed behaving “strangely” or “nervously” in court. His principal advice to clients, he said, was to act normally and refrain from casting any spells in the courtroom.

]]>

According to Dunning, the epiphany came to him when he was reading an unusually ridiculous “dumb crook” story in which the bank robber, McArthur Wheeler, had managed to convince himself that covering his face with lemon juice would prevent the security cameras from getting an image of his face.

If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence. Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research. Their paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” was published in 1999.

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

Dunning goes on to consider the evolution of the species and points out the limitations of being at the top of the food chain:

People will often make the case, “We can’t be that stupid, or we would have been evolutionarily wiped out as a species a long time ago.” I don’t agree. I find myself saying, “Well, no. Gee, all you need to do is be far enough along to be able to get three square meals or to solve the calorie problem long enough so that you can reproduce. And then, that’s it. You don’t need a lot of smarts. You don’t have to do tensor calculus. You don’t have to do quantum physics to be able to survive to the point where you can reproduce.” One could argue that evolution suggests we’re not idiots, but I would say, “Well, no. Evolution just makes sure we’re not blithering idiots. But, we could be idiots in a lot of different ways and still make it through the day.”

The interview is at the blog The Opinionator.

And then you step outside and find your neighbor is worshiping a tree.

It’s a pole. You watched him cut it last week. Half of it went into his fire, and the other half he paid Jethro down the street to carve an image into. He’s kneeling in front of a log.

Alright, you know that if you approached him he’d have some explanation. Maybe a dream directed him to make an image of Asherah and burn incense in front of it. It’s not really a God, he’d say, it’s just a representation of a God. Or maybe it is inhabited by the spirit of a God. He’d have some way of explaining how he wasn’t really worshiping a chunk of kindling.

And maybe you know that the majority of the world (or the little of it you know of) worships in front of idols. And maybe you are uncomfortably aware that your family used to worship in front of Asherah poles like that one. And maybe a few of your family members still keep small idols of their household gods around.

But, I mean, come on! He’s worshiping a stick!

The New Iconoclasts

Pullquote: “Any God who can be killed, should be.”

It’s not a perfect analogy by any means, but I think this relates well to the reactions of atheists towards religion.

If Atheists have a God, the way many believers insist we have, it isn’t science. The God of atheists is Truth (or Reality, or the Universe, depending on how you want to spin it.) Science, reason and logic are only the means of finding the Truth, but they’re also the only means we’ve found that work.

We are constantly appalled at the things that people want to slap the label of “Truth” on. Time and again we find people declaring something to be Truth on the flimsiest of pretexts. A reference to a holy work, or some revelation in the distant past or some deep inner feeling.

Yes, we know that there are many arguments to be had. Many religions have theology that is internally consistent, and many have theology that is quite beautiful. But when you hold them up to the light of Reality, it’s hard not to feel that your looking at some fancy decoration painted on a stick.

And so the temptation is always there to take up the hammer and join in the long tradition of idol smashing.

All of this brings up a strange inconsistency to the opponents of same-sex marriage. Their ends — every child gets a mom and a dad — are strangely mismatched to their means — prohibit same-sex marriage. It’s sort of like banning bad moustaches to stop pornography. Perhaps there’s some vague association, but that’s about it.

Jason Kuznicki, “Means, Ends and Same-Sex Marriage”.

On the plus side, that would finally rid us of Ray Comfort.

(Kuznicki is one of the bloggers at the libertarian blog The One Best Way …. (No, Really!), the reincarnation of Positive Liberty.)

I was reading through the old Slacktivist archives and laughing at his deconstruction of Left Behind. LeHaye and Jenkins did a miserable job of, among other things, predicting what their “not to distant future” would look like. They made no real attempt to predict technological change, and their work looked dated as soon as it was published.

But are we any better?

What technological changes are you predicting for the near future? What modern trends will turn out to be important?

Craft Shop Family Buys Up Ancient Bibles for Museum

[...]

With a goal of establishing a national Bible museum of great depth and size, the evangelical Christian family behind the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores has been spending heavily to amass a collection that has set dealers buzzing in the staid world of rare books.

First off, what is it about the founders of big box stores that makes them want to open museums? Alice Walton is building an art museum in Arkansas – and swiping Hudson Valley art in the process. *grumble*

Second, this is something that could be done very well, or very, very poorly. Many Americans are woefully ignorant about the history of the book itself. A museum about the collection, transmission and translation of the bible could be a real educational asset, or just another Creation Museum.

Even if the museum has a clear Evangelical bias, I think it might still be worth it. If nothing else, there are enough good Evangelical scholars that I think would give the exhibits a very balanced tone. The patrons might not hear the theories of the Dutch Radicals, but I can live with that.

Plus, there’s a lot of potential to tell engaging stories that bring people in, while also leaving them with a sense of how complex the book and its history really are. How about the stories of some of the great translators like John Wycliffe? The politics and personalities involved in the creation of the KJV? The controversy around Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum?

Or how about stories from the formation of the canon? Granted, there would be a challenge there, since it’s a long, drawn-out and frequently unsatisfying story. But it’s got shocking twists (the first canon was probably established by the arch-heretic Marcion), heroes (Eusebius recording the names of the fallen before undertaking one of the great feats of scholarship in the ancient world), and lots of funny names (“Polycarp of Smyrna”? C’mon, you just made that up.)

But I’m afraid that it’s going to turn out to be a one-dimensional presentation of some canned stories without any scholarly underpinnings. I’m afraid, given some of the quotes in the article, that it will just be seen as another tool for evangelism, like the Creation Museum.

A lot depends of the adviser, Dr. Scott Carroll, who is unfamiliar to me. Anybody know his background?

I had a friend in high school – let’s call him Jacob – who was a stone-cold biology geek. He was the kind of person who would always have a bottle of flynap in his bag.

We teased him unmercifully, of course. But there was a real tinge of jealousy there. Jacob seemed to know where he was going, had a plan for his life and confidence in his abilities to see it through. The rest of us, flailing away, couldn’t help but envy his competence. While the rest of use were struggling with college applications, he already had scholarships lined up.

We all knew that he’d go far. In fact, we expected him to do some real good in the world, since his interest was in genetics and agriculture.

After my freshman year in college, a group of us met up with Jacob again. We were shocked to find that he’d found Religion.

Well, actually, he’d found the Girl, who had introduced him to the Church, which had given him the Religion. The Girl went the way of most freshman romances, but he kept the Church and the Religion.

Now, we’d gone to a Catholic high school, so we were all religious to some degree. Had Jacob just gotten really zealous in his Catholic faith, or jumped ship for a mainline Protestant faith, we wouldn’t have batted an eye. But the Church was a storefront affair with a Charismatic service. The sermon was from a traveling evangelist, and his message was trite and ended with “give me money.” The preacher had a half dozen people with him in front, all playing instruments.

(Incidentally, believers, just because Jesus has inspired you to play music in his honor doesn’t mean that he’s given you the talent to do so. Please, please, put the mandolin down.)

I could just see Jacob throwing away his future to become just one more Charismatic preacher in a little storefront church. Jacob had started believing in the apocalypse and prophecy and the literal word of scripture. We tried to talk to him about it, but, well, college sophomores are not know for their subtle methods of persuasion. Things got ranty, on both sides. We lost touch after that.

How do you talk to someone who seems in danger of slipping into religious fervor? How do you throw them a lifeline?

I guess by now you’ve heard about South Carolina state senator Jake Knotts (R), who went into a rant about Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley. On an internet political show called “Pub Politics,” Knotts called Haley a “raghead” and claimed that she was a Sikh pretending to be a Christian. He explained, “We already got one raghead in the White House, we don’t need a raghead in the governor’s mansion.”

He’s apologized, naturally, but his apology wasn’t that much better than the slander:

“My ‘raghead’ comments about Obama and Haley were intended in jest,” Knotts said in a statement. “Bear in mind that this is a freewheeling, anything-goes Internet radio show that is broadcast from a pub. It’s like local political version of ‘Saturday Night Live.’

“Since my intended humorous context was lost in translation, I apologize. I still believe Ms. Haley is pretending to be someone she is not, much as Obama did, but I apologize to both for an unintended slur.”

According to Think Progress, Knotts has now been censured by the Republican party, but he remains unrepentant:

In response to the censure, Knotts said he “could care less” and would not resign. In a separate interview, he said the censure was “all politics,” and warned that libertarians had “infiltrated” the party. He said he had not called Haley to personally apologize, and that the “press has given Nikki Haley a free ride.” When a reporter asked where the press had failed to hold her accountable, Knotts said, “have you ever asked her if she believes in Jesus Christ as her lord and savior and that he died on the cross for her sins? Have you ever asked her that?”

I don’t know whether it’s the thought of the Republicans being infiltrated by those eeeeevil Libertarians, or that evangelical screed at the end, but I find this just hilarious. Please, please South Carolina, keep this clown around.

One of the good things about working in the museum field is that other museum folks are more willing to tell it to you straight. And so, during a tour of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, one curator told a group of us about the historic baseball that Abner Doubleday didn’t have when he didn’t invent baseball, when he wasn’t in Cooperstown, which wasn’t in 1839.

Of course, not everyone wants to hear that, which is why the curator was venting to us. Despite the fact that the Doubleday myth has been roundly debunked for decades now, people still show up at the Hall of Fame wanting to hear the old story about the Civil War general designing the baseball diamond.

This kind of story is sometimes called a “zombie fact,” no matter how many times you try to kill it, it always rises again. Somehow they just seem lodged in our collective memories, and no amount of pounding gets rid of them.

There are a number of national “zombie facts,” like the idea that Columbus was trying to prove the world was round, or the story of Washington and the cherry tree. But I think most of these facts exist on the local level, just as little stories that get passed around the community that no one ever bothers to check.

In this region, we have to tell people that the song “Yankee Doodle” probably wasn’t written at Fort Crailo – which, incidentally, wasn’t really a fort. And no, I’m sorry to say, Captain Kidd did not bury his treasure anywhere along the Hudson, nor did Robert Livingston abscond with any and bury it on his land.

Not, of course, that telling people does any good. The zombie fact always rises to lurch another day.

What sort of “zombie facts” do you have in your region? Are there any that particularly get under your skin?

The “King of Kings” statue in front of the Solid Rock Church, on I-75 between Cincinnati and Monroe, Ohio, was struck by lightning and burned down to the frame.

The headlines read, “Jesus destroyed by Act of God.”

In memorial, here’s Heywood Banks tribute to the statue, “Big Butter Jesus.”

GenJ, as it is fondly called by its more than 5,000 teenage members, is a division of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), the world’s largest and most influential [and most shrill -VJ] homeschool advocacy organization. “Generation Joshua is engaged in the battle for the hearts, minds, and futures of America’s youth,” proclaims Will Estrada, GenJ’s director. “Our goal is to ignite a vision in young people to help America return to her Judeo-Christian foundations.”

Just the name should tip you off as to what we’re dealing with. The OT character of Joshua is known to most of us as the leader of the Canaanite genocide. But to the GenJ crew, he’s the person who brought the promised land under the control of God’s chosen people.

Generation Joshua is hoping to reshape America into the conservative culture warrior’s vision of what the country should be. And it’s using a sneaky and underhanded trick to do it: they’re teaching kids basic civics!

The real power of the GenJ experience, however, is the opportunity for genuine political involvement. Students are encouraged to participate in summer camps such as iGovern, voter registration drives, regional clubs, and an intriguing feature called Student Action Teams (SATs). These adult-supervised teams of students engage directly with the political process through participation in electoral campaigns. Several prominent politicians credit the efforts of GenJ’s SATs with their campaign victories, most recently Rep. Tom McClintock, who won California’s 4th Congressional district by a mere 2,000 votes. “Generation Joshua fielded over 100 volunteers who walked precincts in a driving rain, and made thousands of phone calls throughout the weekend to every targeted voter in the district,” McClintock remarked. “I can confidently say that those 2,000 votes were Generation Joshua votes.”

Such praise is heady stuff for teenagers who want to feel they can make a difference in their world, who yearn for a sense of efficacy and belonging. More specifically, it assures them that the world of politics is understandable and accessible, and can be a means to shape the world to reflect their values and commitments.

This is a sore point for me, since I tend to feel that American schools do a very poor job of teaching their students how to use their democracy. In fact, Kunzman cites a 2006 NAEP study that only 27% of high school students ranked as “proficient” or above on a civics evaluation.

This creates a void that groups like GenJ can fill. They can get behind local candidates – since those are the elections that frequently turn on a few hundred votes – and push forward people who agree with their conservative Christian message. The cumulative effect of these small elections can eventually be felt all over the country.

I’d love to see public schools do a better job of teaching civics, but I doubt that will happen in my lifetime. Does anybody know of a free thought or humanist group that has a “get out the vote” campaign or a civics educational program?

Something strange is afoot in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, according to data sent back from the Cassini mission. Data returned from a spectrometer on Cassini indicates that there’s a large flux of hydrogen in the moon’s atmosphere, with the gas forming in the upper atmosphere and being removed from the atmosphere at Titan’s surface. We don’t currently know what process is ensuring its removal, but the amounts of hydrogen being taken out of the atmosphere are consistent with an earlier proposal of methane-based life.

Titan’s atmosphere is rich in hydrocarbon compounds, and chemical changes in the upper atmosphere are driven by the arrival of ultraviolet light from the sun. One of the expected results of the UV exposure is the liberation of molecular hydrogen from methane via a process that produces more complex hydrocarbons. With little oxygen to react with, the molecular hydrogen should remain stable. Some of it will escape into space, but a new paper indicates that a substantial amount of that hydrogen migrates down through the atmosphere towards Titan’s surface.

Since it’s not accumulating there, some chemical process must be removing it from the atmosphere; right now, we don’t know what that process is, and, as NASA’s own news piece on the topic notes, the first option for scientists is to consider simple chemistry.

However, the abstract of the paper notes that this level of hydrogen consumption is consistent with an earlier prediction of methanogenic life. In short, the life would get its energy by “burning” the hydrogen with a carbon source instead of oxygen, releasing methane (CH4) in the process. The source of the carbon is where a second paper (not yet online) comes in. Models of Titan’s upper atmosphere suggest that significant amounts of acetylene should be produced by the reactions there, and this would provide an excellent source of carbon to any hypothetical metabolisms. The surprise of the second paper is that there’s very little acetylene to be found on Titan’s surface.

I will now step out of the way while those more competent than I evaluate this. Right now it appears at least intriguing.

I discovered a pamphlet under my windshield the other afternoon. It was a typical and rather unimaginative evangelical pamphlet. It took promised me salvation and eternal life, and paved the way to heaven with a string of bible quotes.

I started to think about what beliefs were required to make this argument work. How many layers of faith existed between myself and the person who wrote this pamphlet.

We could start at the bottom: what do we mean when we use the word “God?” Is it a force? an entity? a person? Can we speak meaningfully about such a thing? Given two statements about God, how do we determine which is accurate? Is there one God, or more than one, and how can we tell?

We could start at the top: who is this Paul person? What authority does he have? How far can we trust a man who acknowledges that he never met the living Jesus, and proclaims that he received his message directly from God without the instruction of those others who had known Jesus? If we’re to seek some knowledge of Jesus and what he meant, wouldn’t it be preferable to find someone who actually participates in Jesus’ ministry?

Or we could bore in on that word “salvation.” Is the pamphlet just inventing a disease and peddling a quack cure? I remember a Jewish theologian pointing out that God was always willing to accept a straying follower who was willing to repent. So at least for the Jews, Jesus’ sacrifice was unnecessary.

All of these are questions go unasked and unanswered in the sort of “convert or burn” discussions that the pamphlet entails. The only reason the pamphlet can exist is because it can skip over all of these issues.

The evangelist is leaving it to our culture to do all the heavy lifting. Each and every one of us knows what it means when someone asks us, “Have you been saved?” We absorb monotheism and salvation with our mother’s milk.

It’s sometimes called “public religion.” If you raised a child in this culture without giving him or her any religious education, what would they pick up from the society around them? For most of American history it would be a sort of Protestant Christianity. It’s been getting a little more complicated in the past few decades, but I think it’s still the case today that a broadly Protestant Christianity is our public religion.

One of the things that I think atheists can do is help to break down this public religion. First, just by being us. But second, we can promote a healthy separation between church and state, in order that the playing field between various religions should be more level. As American culture continues to get more religiously diverse, and as more of the religious minorities – including us – find their voices, we complicated things for the public religion. We don’t have to stop people from saying “Merry Christmas,” all we have to do is say “Merry Newtonmas” and keep pushing that diversity into the public sphere.

We may never reduce religion to the point of bing a knitting club, but at least we can make the evangelists work for it.

In his work Remembering Ahanagran, historian Richard White examines his mother’s stories of Ireland. It produced a favorite quote of mine:

I once thought of my mother’s stories as history. I thought memory was history. Then, I became a historian, and after many years I have come to realize that only careless historians confuse history and memory. History is the enemy of memory. The two stalk each other across the fields of the past, claiming the same terrain. History forges weapons from what memory has forgotten or suppressed.

Glen Urquhart is a Republican candidate for congress in the state of Delaware. Here are his thoughts of the separation of Church and State:

Urquhart is backing away – slightly – from that statement, according to Delaware Online. He says he did not mean to imply that liberals were Nazis. What he did mean was that we should be careful with the phrase “separation of Church and State”

“Let’s all be careful about what phrases we use without thinking them through,” he said. “The Nazis used the same separation-of-church-and-state rhetoric for a very, very bad purpose. I didn’t mean to suggest — and I am not suggesting — that people who are liberals are Nazis.”

He might have a point in that “separation of Church and State” has become a cliche in America, and we need to be careful to explain what we mean when we use it.

But still, I think he’s got the history wrong. The Nazi party has a twisting history with official Christian churches, but I don’t believe they ever officially advocated an absolute separation of Church and State.

They did end up formalizing their relationship with the Catholic Church, and this ended up cutting out much of the Church’s political influence. But this was at least half at the instigation of the Vatican, which was seeking concordances to create a clear legal relationship between the Church and certain Governments. The Vatican got official channels though which to lodge complaints, which the Nazis then proceeded to ignore.

“Are you gay?” the prophet asked him.

In a quiet, gentle voice, Kevin acknowledged that he was.

“Speak up,” the woman commanded. “I can’t hear you.”

Yes, Kevin repeated, he was gay.

“You need to be delivered from homosexuality,” the prophet said into a microphone so that all the church could hear. Kevin was embarrassed, but he stayed put. This was no normal preacher—she spoke God’s truth. According to church dogma, homosexuality is a sin foisted on humans by demons who take possession of their bodies and compel them to act against God’s will. These evil spirits can be exorcised by those trained in spiritual warfare in a ritual known among Pentecostal Christians as deliverance. Perhaps, Kevin thought, this prophet could finally deliver him from his demons.

The prophet placed her hands on Kevin and began to pray over him. “Come out, come out!” she shouted. “In the name of Jesus, I command you to come out! You gonna free him right now!”

Kevin closed his eyes, thinking to himself, “There’s something wrong with me; I need to change.” A part of him believed this prophet could do what no one else had been able to do during previous deliverance attempts—make him heterosexual. But the prophet was loud and she looked at him with disgust and contempt as her chants became more and more belligerent. Even now Kevin can’t bring himself to repeat the most hurtful things she said. He soon began to cry. And then, with the prophet still exhorting the demons in him to depart, he blacked out and collapsed. When he regained consciousness, he stood up and returned to his seat. His shame was turning to rage. He searched his mind and thoughts and found he was unchanged—he was still attracted to men. In the past it had been family members—his mother, his aunt, or his uncle, the church’s pastor—who performed deliverance on him. This time it was a stranger, and she had pushed him beyond the breaking point. Never again, he decided, would he allow himself to be treated this way.

It was, by Kevin’s count, at least the 10th time since he was 16 that he’d subjected himself to gay exorcism.

Everything is caused by demons and all ills can be cured by prayer. Here, I think, we’re seeing more of the spread of some of the stranger Pentecostal ideas into all corners of America, along with movements like the New Apostolic Reformation. The article notes that the above scene takes places in West Springfield, Massachusetts, where gay marriage is quite legal.

Recently I visited one of the elaborate Shaker historic sites in the region. Most of these seem to have a “living history” component, where they try to maintain something of the rural character of the Shakers. You can milk a cow, pet the sheep and watch someone weave a basket the way the Shakers did.

You could learn a lot about how the Shakers lived. About the Shakers, not so much. I don’t believe I heard a word about their distinctive beliefs, or how they fit into the bizarre melding of religious ideas that was early America or where they fell in the history of religious thought. These were the ideas that created the community, but they faded into the background.

Honestly, so much attention is paid to the Shaker’s material creations that you could walk away thinking they were some renegade wing of the Arts & Crafts movement.

I’ve had the same problems at other such sites dedicated to the Moravians and other separatist groups. Hell, I grew up in Winston-Salem, NC, where they rebuilt the Moravian village Old Salem just outside of the downtown area. They tore down the first Krispy Kreme Doughnuts to do it, too. But what I remember is the bakery, or watching the men in period costume hitch horses to a wagon, or the working pump in the town center.

I know that most historic sites traffic in nostalgia. Many of the first sites were funded by capitalists like Ford or Rockefeller, trying to preserve some of the rural charm that their industrial empires helped to destroy. There’s an unpleasantly political edge to that nostalgia, an attempt to create an idealized past that would help shape the right kind of Americans in the future.

But I suspect that the real reason is just that it’s easier to dress volunteers up in costumes and have them churn butter. Or if not easier exactly, then at least less potentially controversial. Less likely to make people uncomfortable or chase away parents who don’t want their children asking unpleasant questions.

But it’s those questions that were important to the people that we’re remembering. We can talk about what the Shaker’s did, but it seems ridiculous to ignore why they did it. Particularly since those motivations tell us something about the history of Christianity, which is still the majority religion of this country.

The Moravians called themselves -still call themselves – the “First Protestants.” You ought to walk out of Old Salem knowing what that means. American’s have such an appallingly narrow understanding of their own religious history, and I think that’s part of why we have problems with Fundamentalism. Maybe by showing people all the twists and turns their religion took before it reached today will give them some humility.

All the “living history” elements can be fun and fascinating, and I think they help us understand the world that our ancestors lived in. But I think it’s by studying our ancestor’s ideas about religion, politics and the world that can help us understand the world we live in now.

Well, sadly enough, no I didn’t. I yield to Duane’s superior understanding of the apocalyptic nutjobs in America. Via Newsweek:

A growing conversation among Christian fundamentalists asks the question that may have been inevitable: is the oil spill in the gulf a sign of the coming apocalypse?

[...]

Now blogs on the Christian fringe are abuzz with possibility that the oil spill is the realization of Revelation 8:8–11. “The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed … A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.” According to Revelation, in other words, something terrible happens to the world’s water, a punishment to those of insufficient faith. The foul water, according to the New Oxford Annotated Bible, mirrors one of the plagues God called upon Egypt on behalf of his people Israel.

Of course, Duane is right and I should have seen this coming. Anything and everything is grist for the millennial mill. You can find such time-lines as A Brief History of the Apocalypse, which list the various predictions for the end of the world. Most of those predictions would have been accompanied by signs and omens that the believer would have seized on for confirmation.

Modern apocalyptics – of which there are startlingly many given the failure rate of such predictions – are ready to seize on anything out of the ordinary to confirm their belief that the end times are upon us.

Historian John Sparks talking about Barton Stone, grandfather of Charles Chilton Moore, who may have been suffering a brief crisis of faith:

It is not inconceivable that, at this time, [Barton] Stone could have come to that realization so unsettling to anyone who has somehow become convinced and assured that he or she possesses pure biblical truth: that no one’s system of belief can truly be straight exegesis from Scripture so much as it is, and ultimately always proves itself to be, instead more of an eisegesis, that is, an attempt to reconcile one’s own varied passions and prejudices with one’s perceptions of the Bible.

–John Sparks, Kentucky’s Most Hated Man, p. 27-28

I’d be lying if I said that this wasn’t one of the reasons I left the faith. A feeling that all Biblical interpretation was eisegesis: “I believe it, the Bible says it, that does it.”

Fred Clark over at Slacktivist is looking at a aspect of this right now. In this case, the conflict between the way that many American Evangelicals interpret the (many) passages about economic justice verses the way they interpret the (few) passages about homosexuality.

(I’m sorry, I just can’t bring myself to put an image here.)

You know, when Jen McCreight of Blag Hag started boobquake, I never thought it would lead to this. It looks like some Saudi clerics have finally made peace with boobs.

Saudi Clerics Advocate Adult Breast-Feeding

Women in Saudi Arabia should give their breast milk to male colleagues and acquaintances in order to avoid breaking strict Islamic law forbidding mixing between the sexes, two powerful Saudi clerics have said. They are at odds, however, over precisely how the milk should be conveyed.

The notion is that when a man drinks a woman’s breast milk, he becomes a symbolic member of her family. This means that the man and woman can work together in close quarters without violating the tenants of Wahhabi Islam that women and unrelated men should not interact.

This fatwa is not without controversy:

[Sheik] Al Obeikan, who made the statement after being asked on TV about a 2007 fatwa issued by an Egyptian scholar about adult breast-feeding, said that the breast milk ought to be pumped out and given to men in a glass.

But his remarks were followed by an announcement by another high-profile sheik, Abi Ishaq Al Huwaini, who said that men should suckle the breast milk directly from a woman’s breast.

Abi Ishaq Al Huwaini: man of God or dirty old fraud, you decide.

Thankfully, folks like Eman Al Nafjan of Saudiwoman’s Weblog are speaking out against fetishistic old men with religious power:

“The whole issue just shows how clueless men are,” blogger Eman Al Nafjan wrote on her website. “All this back and forth between sheiks and not one bothers to ask a woman if it’s logical, let alone possible to breastfeed a grown man five fulfilling breast milk meals.

“Moreover, the thought of a huge hairy face at a woman’s breast does not evoke motherly or even brotherly feelings. It could go from the grotesque to the erotic but definitely not maternal.”

Al Nafjan said many in the country were appalled by the fatwa.

“We have many important issues that need discussing,” Al Nafjan told AOL News Friday. “It’s ridiculous to spend time talking about adult breast-feeding.”

Thank you, Al Nafjan. And I’d just like to point out that it’s not ALL men who are this clueless. Though I probably haven’t done my case any favors by writing about this.

For me, one of the most fraught and frustrating words in the english language is the word “spiritual.” Salman Rushdie once complained that everything in Western culture gets stuck with the “spiritual” label. Even walking your dog could be considered spiritual.

There was an episode of Nature dealing with Death Valley. They interviewed some participants in a marathon that ran through the heart of one of the hottest places on earth. One participant, a doctor who could have done a great impression of a dessicated corpse, acknowledged that the race did lasting physical harm to the participants. But, he said, there were spiritual rewards.

Here, “spiritual” is being used as a synonym for “stupid”.

What does the word “spiritual” mean to you? Is there any use for it?

During the interview, which was then published by L’Osservatore Romano, Father Crepy made several distinctions. “First of all, it must be noted that sexuality is not limited to the genital dimension, and thus the emotional life is much vaster than the sexual life, although the latter is of obvious importance.”

– Father Luc Crepy, Celibacy does not deny priests their sexuality or freedom, asserts French seminary rector

This seems disingenuous, since the Church has frowned on very intimate emotional relationships among priests, for fear that they might enter “the genital dimension.” (great band name, BTW)

I’m guessing that Father Crepy is thinking of Abelard and Heloise.

(via The Teapot Atheist)

Some time back I wrote about Charles Chilton Moore, the Kentucky atheist and editor of the Blue Grass Blade. (and thanks to reader Sman for providing the link to this repository, as the LoC link I originally used is no longer working).

At the time, I gave a tongue-in-cheek description of Moore as the “first atheist blogger,” because his confrontational style and the personal voice of his articles made him seem more like modern bloggers than modern journalists. Bodie Hodge of Answers in Genesis picked up on this and set out to deconstruct the snippet of Moore’s writing that I provided. In typical AiG fashion, Hodge provides no link to my post, any source for Moore’s writings, or the Religion in American History post that started it. As I’m more versed in netiquette than Hodge, let me direct you to his post, Feedback: Back to the Future? (and thanks to reader MaiaZavala for finding this.)

He never got out of the rut

The key to understanding Moore, and his diatribe, was diagnosed by one of his fellow freethinkers: Moore started out as a preacher and never got out of the rut. He was an atheist second but a moralizer first.

Moore was the grandson of Barton Stone, who formed an offshoot of the Presbyterian Church during the Second Great Awakening. He later merged with the Campbellites to form what is now the American Restoration Movement. At an early age, Moore was tapped to follow in his footsteps, which he did with all signs of faithfulness.

Moore lost his faith in the normal manner for a child raised to believe in the innerrancy of Scripture. He and an unbeliever both agreed to read some of the new works arguing both sides of the issue. Oddly, both ended up converting to the other side – though it took Moore a while to admit it and leave the pulpit. It might have ended there, but Moore was too much of a moralizer.

This played out in two ways. First, it limited his sources of income. He owned the family farm, but his opposition to gambling meant that he could not invest in Kentucky’s famous racing thoroughbreds, and his support of temperance meant he couldn’t sell corn to the distilleries. So, while keeping up his farm, he sought additional means of supporting his family. He eventually turned to writing columns for the newspapers.

Second, his upbringing seemed to give him the urge to thunder against hypocrisy. Given that Moore had been a young man during the American Civil War, there was plenty of that hypocrisy on display. Both sides claimed God as an ally and prayed for the destruction of the other. Both sides claimed to be the more Christian while engaging in the bloodiest war in American history. Both sides argued the issue of slavery while quoting scripture. During his college years, Moore himself had been read the riot act in college, in to form of 1st Timothy, for daring to suggest that slavery was less than good.

Newspaper men meet such interesting people

Both his grandfather and Alexander Campbell, one of the leaders of the Campbellites, had edited and published newspapers. They were an effective way to preach to a sprawling congregation in the American west. So it’s not surprising that Moore took up the trade as well. He was already known as an “infidel” (to use the word he preferred) by that point, since he’d announced from the pulpit why he was leaving the pulpit. It took him three tries to figure out that his attacks on hypocritical preachers went down much better if he broke them up with his uncompromising Prohibitionist stance.

Moore’s style is very reminiscent of those precious “editor-preachers” of his grandfather’s movement. What you’re reading is in the thundering style of a Kentucky preacher – complete with hyperbole – turned back on itself.

The original selection that I posted, and which Hodge rebutted, was the opening to Moore’s article about the assassination of the controversial Governor of Kentucky William Goebel. It was a polemic directed at the good Christian folks who, in Moore’s eyes, supported and initiated that assassination. After all, the title of the piece (with typical extensive subtitles and Prohibition tie-in) is “Damned Drunken, Christian Devils Assassinate Their Christian Brother, Goebel, Taylor Should Be Arrested as Accessory Before the Fact, Down With The Sky-Pilots.” It is heavy handed, but basically it is a condemnation of how supposedly Christian men in a Christian society would look the other way while a Christian is murdered over political issues.

I’m not going to defend Moore’s exact words; defending a polemic is pointless. You don’t look to an intemperate rant for factual accuracy. It’s purpose is to have an emotional impact, much like a fire-and-brimstone sermon. But frankly, I expect that this comes too close to Form Criticism for anyone at AiG. It’s silly to expect someone who insists on literal, factual accuracy from their ancient myths to appreciate the genres of modern writing. So let’s just pat Hodge on his tousled head and move on.

Bonobo’s are probably best known for their sex lives. Sex acts as a sort of social lubricant in Bonobo society, and the apes use it as a bartering chip, a form of apology and numerous other functions. Given that it serves purposes other than reproduction, it’s not surprising that Bonobos engage in many kinds of sex, including homosexual.

This is what caught the pastor’s attention and caused him distress:

However, what’s different about this particular behavior is that in an orthodox biblical position, homosexuality is a sin… but animals don’t sin. We don’t typically place animals in a moral category. In other words, they don’t do righteous acts or unrighteous acts. So…what am I to make of these animals that engage in homosexual activity?

It seems to me that this behavior reveals a sense of brokenness in the natural world. Paul spoke of the unnaturalness of homosexuality, “men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men…”(Rom. 1:27). So, what he says is unnatural, now looks to be natural! But, just as natural disasters aren’t normative, neither is homosexual activity within animals. The creation itself is marred with the effects of sin (i.e. death).

The good pastor seems fuddled. As he says, animal behavior is not usually cast in a moral light. Animals may commit infanticide, cannibalism and incest, but we don’t attempt to draw any moral conclusions from it. But homosexuality seems to be something he cannot ignore, and he must seek solace from Biblical quotations in order to face it.

Anyway, I think there’s an opportunity here. If we can convince conservative evangelicals that they need to visit the Bonobos and preach to them, we might have a win-win situation.

Its been my observation that some evangelicals can funnel a lot of money into missionary trips. If the missionaries can be persuaded to put that money towards protected the shrinking habitat of the Bonobos, we might just be able to preserve the apes. And watching the missionaries try to translate the bible into the Bonobo’s native language is going to be a hoot. Let’s see just how far “dynamic equivalents” will stretch.

Republican officials are working to derail the campaign of a tea party supported candidate in North Carolina — circulating documents from the man’s messy divorce that depict him as a pot smoker who has called himself the messiah.
[...]
Tim D’Annunzio, a congressional candidate in North Carolina’s most competitive district, has run an anti-establishment campaign with vows to dismantle entire branches of the federal government. His ideas have drawn support from tea party activists, and he has raised more money from individuals than his GOP rival while also contributing more than $1 million to his own campaign.

If I remember correctly, the 8th district contains both Charlotte and Fayetteville, making it one of the more important districts, politically speaking. But what really makes this interesting is the kinds of dirt that the Republican Party is spreading about someone who should be one of their own:

In Hoke County divorce records, his wife said in 1995 that D’Annunzio had claimed to be the Messiah, had traveled to New Jersey to raise his stepfather from the dead, believed God would drop a 1,000-mile high pyramid as the New Jerusalem on Greenland and found the Ark of the Covenant in Arizona. A doctor’s evaluation the following month said D’Annunzio used marijuana almost daily, had been living with another woman for several months, had once been in drug treatment for heroin dependence and was jailed a couple times as a teenager.

The doctor concluded that his religious beliefs were not delusional. A judge wrote in a child support ruling a few years later that D’Annunzio was a self-described “religious zealot” who believed the government was the “Antichrist.” The judge said he was willfully failing to make child support payments.

Getting information from an ex-spouse during a divorce is a bit dubious. I suspect that D’Annunzio believes that the pyramid will be only 500 miles tall.

I’m reading Diarmid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years right now. Let me just say that I will NOT be reviewing this thousand page monstrosity. It’s fairly good so far, but I can’t see myself finishing it any time soon.

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that Christianity has gained another one thousand years of history in the subtitle. MacCulloch threw that in to represent the fact that Christianity grew out of a thousand years of Jewish theology and Greek philosophy. And also the fact that Christianity isn’t done yet.

That last bit is an exercise for the reader. Given that no one in America a century ago could have predicted the rise of Mormonism or the rapid spread of Charismatic worship, I’m leery about trying to make predictions about where the religion is going.

Still, it’s worth thinking about. In your country or region, where do you see Christianity headed?

I’ve heard a lot of Glenn Beck’s fans talk about his accuracy and how he always checks his facts. Well, recently he got something seriously wrong, and it got the biblioblogosphere in a huff. Joel over at Diglotting and Robert Cargill both give it full treatments.

The error went out on an episode of Beck’s radio show, which was caught and posted by Media Matters. Here’s a transcript (ripped from Diglotting):

… the Dead Sea Scrolls, you know what they are? … So here’s what happened. When Constantine decided that he was going to cobble uh together an army, he did the um Council of Nicaea, right, Pat? (Pat: Yea.) The Council of Nicaea, and what they did is brought all of the religious figures uhh together, all the Christians and they said, “Ok, let’s put together the Apostles’ Creed, let’s you know, you guys do it.” So they brought all their religious scripture together, that’s when the Bible was first bound and everything else. And then they said, “Anybody who disagrees with this is a heretic and off with their head!” Well, that’s what the Dead Sea Scrolls are. They are those scriptures that people had at the time that and they said, “They are destroying all of this truth.” Whether it’s truth or not is up to the individual, but at that time those people thought that this was something that needed to be preserved and so they rolled up the scrolls and put them in clay pots and they, they put them in the back of caves where no one could find them. They were hidden scripture because everything was being destroyed that disagreed with the Council of Nicaea and Constantine. That’s what those things are.

There’s a lot wrong with this. For example, the Council of Nicaea produced the Nicaean Creed, not the Apostle’s Creed – the two are quite different.

But the two big errors are the notion that the canon was set at the Council of Nicaea, and the idea that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of non-canonical Christian literature. Interestingly enough, both of these errors can be found in Dan Brown’s The Davinci Code, which may tell you something about Beck’s sources.

For the record, the canon was not defined at the Council. That was an ongoing process that did not become de facto settled until much later.

But the biggest problem is that Beck has confused the Dead Sea Scrolls with the Nag Hammadi Library. The Dead Sea Scrolls mostly predate Christianity and are not Christian documents.

It’s a surprisingly common mistake, which is why I’m bringing it up. For example, I once heard a reporter on NPR get it wrong. So it’s not entirely something to beat up Beck over. Still, why don’t we give the last word to Bob “The Man with No Shift Key” Cargill:

i am a political moderate, with an appreciation of pundits on both sides. there are smart liberals and there are smart conservatives; glenn beck is neither. mr. beck is not as cunning as bill o’reilly, not as witty as keith olbermann, not as smart as rush limbaugh, and not as hot (intellectually) as rachel maddow. glenn beck lacks the political acumen of george will, the savvy of paul begala, the objective demeanor of juan williams, the strategic humor of james carville, the ingenuity of thomas friedman, the inquisitive journalistic tenacity of steve inskeep, the experience of david gergen, the brains of jeff greenfield, and the influence of matt drudge. rather, our friend mr. beck, apparently suffering from diarrhea of the mouth, is little more than an annoying sideshow – an overly dramatic, undereducated, sub-populist, train wreck, that makes the otherwise media-wise rupert murdoch look like a fool for signing him.

Synthetic life form accuses God of ‘playing science’

The world’s first artificially created life form has accused God of ‘playing science’ and ‘meddling with things He cannot possibly understand.’

The single celled organism, created by Dr Craig Venter and his team, was said to be ‘outraged’ when it discovered that a supernatural being, not subject to any form of regulatory control, was still involved in the creation of life.

[...]

Many ethicists believe that God has repeatedly overstepped the mark. ‘Nobody objects to the Lord producing a few miracles here and there,’ said philosopher AC Grayling, ‘but when he starts playing around with the very stuff of creation then He has clearly exceeded his remit. I am beginning to think that this omnipotence thing has gone to His head.’

God’s continued tampering with scientific matters has already been blamed for numerous ‘all-mighty blunders’ including Flu, Malaria, HIV and Piers Morgan. ‘He cannot be allowed a monopoly on this level of unregulated power,’ said Dr Venter, ‘that is why I am currently seeking to patent the genetic code for omnipotence so that we can keep His crazy meddling under some kind of control.’

This time the deception was aimed at a number of Unitarian Churches across the pond. It seems that the first person to pick up on it was Rev Andy Pakula, a Unitarian minister in north London who has a PhD in biology (FSM forgive me, but sometimes I do love the Unitarians.)

Pakula maintains the blog Throw Yourself Like a Seed, where he reports that he received the following email:

I am going to be in London over the summer with my girl friend Amy and we are interested in your fellowship. The issue is we are both people in the arts and grew up in conservative churches .. me Roman Catholic, she Protestant fundamentalist and we really got hurt. We found a Unitarian fellowship in America and this was healing for us both. Would we fit with you? We are “out there” in terms of style. I (Chad) wear short skirts and tall boots and Amy goes bra-less and wears very very short dresses. We have been rejected in our home churches and wonder if we would be welcomed dressed as we are in your church.
Chad Bradford

Something about it struck him as odd. He did some checking and found that the return email was from Canon Mark Pearson, the pastor at a conservative Charismatic Episcopal church, here in the state of New Hampshire.

Pakul wrote to Pearson about Chad and Amy. The response:

[Pearson] replied by email that Chad and Amy were staying with him and had borrowed his computer – but that they were good people. All my requests for contact information for “Chad” and “Amy” were fruitless… “Oh, Chad doesn’t have an email address…”

And here’s the really interesting part: in the comments to Pakula’s post, a couple more people chime in that other Unitarians have received the same message, elsewhere in the UK and in the Netherlands. Apparently “Chad” has been busy writing.

I, as an experienced atheist blogger, immediately thought that “Chad” might be Pearson’s cross-dressing alter-ego, and that he was planning a European getaway with his illicit lover, “Amy.” Pakul decides that he’s being baited, and he’s probably the wiser one.

Still, as baiting goes, this is an odd one. I wonder what Pearson was planning to do with the responses?

Despite the attention received by the New Atheists, they are just the most recent face of atheism. There have been many previous generation of atheists. In my recent poll, 18% of respondents stated that they had always been an atheist, and presumably this means that most of them were raised in non-theistic households.

The divide between first generation atheists – those who were raised religious but deconverted – and second generation atheists – those who were raised in non-theistic families, is starting to get some attention. There was a recent episode of Point on Inquiry that discussed the matter, creating some discussion in places like Blag Hag and other atheist blogs.

In your experience, is there any difference between first- and second-generation atheists?

Are the first-generation atheists more confrontational, as Elaine Ecklund suggested in PoI? Or is it more complicated than that?

And also, If you’re a second-generation atheist, what motivates you to get involved in the atheosphere?

It’s no secret that atheist blogs frequently act as support groups for people leaving the faith, and a chat rooms for people trying to dissect their old religion. Don’t you occasionally feel left out?

(Thanks to reader Revyloution for suggesting these questions)

From this perspective, religion is not innate, but rather a cultural development that we might call “cognitive-emotional cheesecake”. I adapt this metaphor from Steven Pinker’s claim that music is not innate, but rather amounts to “auditory cheesecake”. A preference for cheesecake is not innate, since cheesecake did not exist during the early stages of human development. But preferences for sugar and fat are innate, and cheesecake cleverly combines them in an appealing way. Similarly, I conjecture, religion is appealing because it combines the psychological needs for explanations and emotional reassurance.

Paul Thagard, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo.

There’s just something about the phrase “cognitive-emotional cheesecake” …

Scalzi gives us Gods that need – or at least benefit – from human faith and worship. I’ve seen this idea used before, in everything from comic books to Terry Pratchett. The idea is that faith gives sustenance and power to Gods, creating a sort of market in which Gods trade favors and blessings for worship. It’s pretty close to some of the worldviews of the ancient world, where Gods could be bribed and placated with worship and sacrifice.

This gives us Gods who are identifiable as human – powerful and enigmatic, but with human motivations. That’s probably part of the point for the authors; it gives the Gods some human drives and a way to work them into the plot. You try writing the ineffable and see how far you get.

But it does raise the question of whether or not we can trust these Gods. How do we know they have our best interests at heart? How do we know they can deliver on their promises? To the ancients, every misfortune was evidence of divine displeasure, and every stroke of good luck was a sign of divine favor. Ironically, any God that existed at that time would never have needed to do anything for its worshipers; just be around to take credit for life’s ups and downs.

But what about now, when we’ve left such human-scale Gods in the dustbin of history? What about our modern God, beyond all description and human understanding? I’d argue that we’re now in a worse position than before. What motives might such a being have? Presumably most of the human motivations, plus a whole realm of motivations that we cannot even articulate.

If there’s anybody who has the capability to lie to us, it’s the being who supposedly knows our innermost thoughts. If there’s anyone who can maintain a poker face, it’s the invisible guy. And how do we seek to analyze something that is supposed to be beyond our understanding?

I’ve seen people try to argue from the Bible. These are usually people who also believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. So we’re being asked to take God’s word that God is playing straight. Frankly, it seems like this is one of those problems that can only be answered with faith and a shrug.