The short answer is ‘yes’

I laughed my ass off when I saw this. That being said, obviously not everyone in the Tea Party is there because they are racist – smaller and more efficient government has nothing at all to do with race. However, due to its stubborn opposition to any program designed to level the playing field or correct for historical injustices, it tends to attract the racist fringe with open, monochromatic arms. In the same way that supporting a larger role for the federal government isn’t a gay thing, but homosexuals tend to fall on the left side of the political spectrum (because that’s where all the equal rights are).

A commenter pointed out something that didn’t occur to me right away: how racist do you have to be to print out signs and go looking for a black person? I’m trying to imagine their thought process:

“Okay, so we’re going to print out these signs and take them to the rally, right?”

“Yeah, that’ll show all those liberals that the Tea Party is about state’s rights and small government, not a thin veneer of politics hastily brushed over a rotten core of deep-seated xenophobia, unwarranted entitlement and good old-fashioned ignorance!”

“Wow, that was deep.”

“Thanks. I read the New York Times today, and just said the opposite of what was written there.”

“I wish I could read.”

“Hey Steve?”

“Yeah Larry?”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just take these signs over to the houses of one of our many black friends and/or work colleagues and/or neighbours, rather than having to sleuth around at a rally to find the token fanny-pack-wearing dark-skinned guy at a rally of thousands of white people?”

“We don’t have any black friends and/or work colleagues and/or neighbours, Larry.”

“How come?”

“Uh… because of LIBERALS!”

“Yeah! Fuck those racist asshole liberal faggot commie Muslim terrorist Mexicans!”

“You said it, Steve.”

Madness? THIS… IS… well yes, this is madness

Sometimes something happens in the news that is so painfully stupid that it’s hard to hold out any kind of hope for the future of mankind. It’s like watching a slap-fight between two legless drunks – it would be funny if it weren’t so macabre.

Such is this “International Burn a Koran Day” bullshit. For those of you who haven’t been following the news, there is a tiny church group in Florida that decided it would have a book bonfire, in which they torch several copies of the Qu’ran. Thirty people down in Florida decide to burn a book they haven’t read, to protest a religion they don’t know anything about.

Big hairy deal, right?

Ah, but because it’s a religious thing, of course the whole world goes indiscriminately insane.

Muslims all over the world began protesting, burning effigies, American flags, and chanting “death to Christians.”

Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across Afghanistan over plans, now on hold, by a small Florida church to burn copies of the Koran. Three people were shot when a protest near a Nato base in the north-east of the country turned violent. President Hamid Karzai said the stunt had been an insult to Islam, while Indonesia’s president said it threatened world peace.

It’s absolutely shocking the complete lack of a sense of irony or proportion that religious groups have. “30 people burned the book of the religion of peace? Well then we will call for the indiscriminate murder of all Christians, and the President of the United States. Also we will burn objects sacred to you, because your actions threaten world peace!”

So the Islamic world did pretty much exactly what everyone thought it would do – go batshit nuts and renew the chant of “Death to America” or whatever. Ho hum, nothing to see here, move along folks. That should be the end of it, right?

No, let’s turn up the stupid, shall we? General Petraeus, what would you like to sing for us this evening?

“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort,” Gen Petraeus said in a statement to US media. “It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world, we are engaged with the Islamic community,” added Gen Petraeus, who heads a 150,000-strong Nato force against a Taliban-led insurgency.

Thirty people in Florida are about to do something stupid. What’s a proportional response? Let’s get the commander of NATO allied forces to comment directly on it, elevating it to an international incident! Well now it will absolutely cause danger to the troops, because it’s received national attention!

Hold the line, I believe we have a comment from Darth Helmet:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper added his voice to the global outcry against a U.S. church’s plan to burn 200 copies of the Qur’an on Saturday — the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. “I don’t speak very often about my own religion but let me be very clear: My God and my Christ is a tolerant God, and that’s what we want to see in this world,” he said. “I unequivocally condemn it,” he said. “We all enjoy freedom of religion and that freedom of religion comes from a tolerant spirit.”

Nothing like international attention to blow any sense of proportion far over the horizon. We now have international leaders lining up to condemn the actions of 30 morons in Florida. Are we going to make an international crisis out of every act of Islamophobia? Boy howdy!

Amazingly, the only voices of reason seem to be coming (from all places) Iran and Gaza:

Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said Mr Jones’ threat was an “expression of hatred of Islam” but called for restraint. “This disgraceful act contradicts the very duties of religious and spiritual leadership to enhance the value of peaceful coexistence and safeguard the rights and mutual respect among religions,” he said.

In Gaza, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said Mr Jones was a “crazy priest who reflects a crazy Western attitude toward Islam and the Muslim nation”.

When Iranian Ayatollahs and the head of Hamas are the islands of perspective in a sea of complete insanity, you know that the world has gone completely topsy-turvey.

There are two points to be made out of this absolute lack of cognitive processes. The first has to do with the power of religion. It’s almost completely incredible that the actions of 30 people in a backwater part of the Southern United States can set off an international crisis. We have roughly 30 regular volunteers here in Vancouver’s branch of CFI. If we stated burning copies of the Charter or The God Delusion or the Canadian flag (or all three at the same time), we’d get arrested for mischief without a news camera in sight. Why? Because atheists are boring! But put an equal number of Christian extremists around a pile of burning copies of a Muslim book, and watch as the entire world goes nuts. It’s 30 idiots in Florida. Take a deep breath.

The second point has to do with free speech (my favourite ^_^ <3 ). A number of countries have been demanding that the President directly intervene to stop 30 idiots in Florida from burning some books. Ignoring for a second the 8 or 9 levels of the chain of command that would skip (not to mention the fact that the President doesn’t have the authority to order private citizens to do anything), and also ignoring that it’s just 30 idiots in Florida, the United States constitution strictly forbids any kind of legal response to this – an act of free expression. The whole point of free speech is that you are free to say what you want. It’s hate speech, absolutely. I think it’s bigoted, I think it’s stupid, and I think it sends absolutely no worthwhile message other than “we are idiots, and we don’t understand anything about either Islam or our own religion.” But as I’ve said before, laws against hate speech are a really bad idea.

At the end of the whole debacle, the pastor decided to back down, an appropriately anti-climactic conclusion to a blisteringly-meaningless non-issue.

Of course the tragedy here (besides all of the people that will be killed and injured as a result of people being idiots) is that this pushes American Muslims further into the fringes, and closer into the arms of extremist groups that are the real problem. It’s not quite cutting off your nose to spite your face, it’s like cutting off your own hand and giving it to someone trying to choke you with it.

The correct response to this would for the governor of Florida to say “apparently some fundamentalist extremists have decided to do something stupid. I hope they vote for someone else in the next election. Floridians and Americans have more important things to do than worry about some backwash church led by a nutcase” and let that be the last word on it.

TL/DR:The response to the burning of Qu’rans is completely out of proportion to the act. Thirty idiots in Florida shouldn’t have the power to derail the entire world, and it’s only possible because of religion. Also, free speech ought to be absolute, even when it’s stupid.

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Another proud moment for Christians

Imagine that human civilization is the Little Engine That Could, chugging along up the hill chanting “I think I can, I think I can” as it struggles to reach the zenith of a fair and just society that minimizes human suffering and maximizes human happiness.

Now imagine someone drops a giant boulder in the middle of the track and says “No you fucking can’t!”

Boulder, thy name be religion:

U.S. regulations expanding stem cell research have temporarily been blocked by a U.S. judge. A non-profit group, Nightlight Christian Adoptions, contends that new guidelines on stem cells drafted by U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration will reduce how many human embryos are available for adoption.

I’ll wait for you to extricate your face from your palms before I start in on this. Do it slowly, you might have fractured something.

Okay, ready? Good.

First off, nobody adopts an embryo. It is possible to bring an embryo to term and act as a surrogate birth mother, then claim the child as your own. Unless something dramatic has happened to the number of women who are willing to pursue this option, or unless in-vitro fertilization has stopped, there will always be far more unwanted embryos than willing wombs.

Second, there are lots of live babies and children waiting for adoption. Stem cell research will do absolutely nothing to diminish this supply, and stopping stem cell research in the name of ensuring a sufficient number of adoptees doesn’t diminish it either; on the contrary, it may actually increase the size of this population by reducing the number of potential adoptive parents.

Finally, embryonic stem cell research requires the consent of the genetic parents. There are lots of people who pursue IVF who aren’t comfortable destroying their genetic material, ensuring that there will always be a renewable supply of embryos for those women hell-bent on getting pregnant with someone else’s child.

There is literally zero merit to their argument, but a federal judge decided to grant it anyway because it’s not as though delaying the progress of science is going to cause any suffering. Well, except those people with Parkinson’s, Cystic Fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy, ALS… the list goes on.

This is why secular humanism is a better model for stable and progressive government than theocracy – it is less sympathetic to the capricious whims of a shrieking horde that enters a battle with no evidence and spurious argument. I anticipate that this ban will be overturned by a higher court, but it’s a solid reminder that in the battle between happiness and suffering, American Christianity is on the side of suffering.

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Stop “Fox News North”

I have a bullhorn, and I’m going to use it.

Those of you who come here from Facebook have seen this already, but maybe didn’t sign it. Stephen Harper, I suppose growing weary of pretending not to be a right-wing ideologue, has decided to shed his sheep’s clothing and put political pressure on our CRTC commissioner to bring a Fox News-style channel here to Canada.

This is a petition to stop it. Please sign it.

A few people, some of whom are people whose opinions I greatly respect (although they differ sharply from my own), have pointed out to me that the media is already biased, and/or that my objection to a Fox-style channel is that I just don’t like conservatives. I feel the need at this point to clarify a few things:

1 – I don’t like conservativism (although I greatly enjoy the company of my few conservative friends – there are few in university science programs, which is my cohort). That’s emphatically not the source of my opposition. I’d be just as against this if it was a bunch of lying arch-Liberal finks (who I also detest).

2 – Even if I did buy that our current media outlets are biased, I fail to see how adding one that is explicitly and purposefully biased makes that situation better. An informed electorate is crucial to a healthy country. Adding another voice to the supposed pantheon of radical viewpoints doesn’t improve the situation at all – it makes people less informed. Fox News isn’t watched by those on the left to “get the other side of the argument”, it’s watched by those on the right to confirm their in-grained biases; the same can be said vice versa. The answer is to reduce the amount of bias in media outlets through careful surveillance, not to burn the whole house down because you spilled some wine on the carpet.

3 – Even if I did buy that adding another biased point of view (as all points of view will be) will somehow improve the lives of Canadians, Fox News is not simply another network. They lie, distort facts, invent facts when they can’t twist the ones that already exist, and are unrelentingly hypocritical in their stance on issues. They are unprincipled, they lack integrity, and they are poisoning the political and social discourse of the United States. Any station patterned after them will do the same thing, sending Canada down the road to destruction down which the United States is currently drunkenly weaving.

4 – Even if I did buy that a Fox News equivalent would be a good thing for the country, the Prime Minister has no business spearheading it, or shilling for it in any way. He certainly has no business forcing out the qualified head of the CRTC simply for standing up for media standards. All of this is to say nothing of the meetings that Mr. Harper has taken with Rupert Murdoch in order to make this a reality. It is a blatant political ploy designed to ensure that he has a channel that is completely uncritical of his policies that he can lavish his special attention and political influence upon, much the way that Bush/Cheney/Rove and the Republican Party has done with Fox News.

Personally, I like my country. I don’t want it to turn into the pathetic circus farce that is the current political reality of the United States, where a Harvard-educated constitutional scholar has to fight with a clueless, ignorant and feckless “hackey maam” from Wasilla to win the trust of the populace. Apparently Steven Harper will be much happier ruling over that country – I think we should be aiming to get better, not worse.

Sign the petition.

“Doctor Laura” at the Michael Richards/Mel Gibson school of etiquette

The really frustrating thing about blogging is that sometimes a week will go by where a million bloggable things happen, and I’m left with the choice of either commenting on them 2 weeks late, or flooding you with Facebook/Twitter updates every 5 minutes. As a result, I am writing about this story right after it happens, but you’re not going to read this until today:

Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the talk show host who recently apologized for saying the N-word 11 times to a caller on the air, said Tuesday she plans to give up her radio show when her contract is up the end of this year.

For those of you who don’t follow talk radio (and Science bless you for that), Laura Schlessinger is a PhD in physiology who hosts a radio show in which she verbally abuses people who call in for help. Why anyone would care what a physiologist has to say about religion (she is, big surprise, a fundamentalist Christian) or relationships, or anything besides physiology, is beyond my understanding. But they do, for whatever reason, and she hands out bad advice.

On the show in question, a woman called in to ask Dr. Laura what she should do about her husband’s friends. It seems that the husband and his friends think that they have license, by virtue of the woman’s race, to make racist comments. It’s the whole “I married a black woman, and therefore I am not racist, and therefore I can say racist things and you’re not allowed to be offended” argument. The caller was looking for the proper way to broach the subject with her spouse.

In a fit of… I really don’t know what, Dr. Laura decided instead to accuse the woman of being “too sensitive”.

“Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO and listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger. I don’t get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it’s a horrible thing. But when black people say it, it’s affectionate. It’s very confusing.”

I’d laugh, but I’ve heard this same stupid argument from my own friends. It’s either that, or saying that it’s okay to say it because it’s in a song lyric, or that somehow “nigg-a” is different from “nigg-er“. These are all profoundly stupid arguments, and all I hear when someone says them is “I want the license to say things that I know to be racist and hurtful, and it’s your fault if you’re offended.” Congratulations, you are making the same argument as those brave freedom-fighters from Courtenay, and also rapists.

I’ve talked about the meaning and history of this word before. In essence, the word has no proper context that makes it not unbelievably offensive. It is rooted in the idea that Africans are not human, and that the sub-human treatment they received at the hands of their slave owners was justifiable. In my opinion, nobody should get to say it outside a discussion of its historical and/or sociological significance. Dr. Laura pretends as though there’s never been a good reason offered for why it’s ‘okay’ for black people to use the word, and that it’s a mystery why white people (and especially white people) aren’t allowed to say it.

I read a bunch of coverage about this issue, which I’m not going to link to because they mostly said the same thing. There was one commentary that I thought was interesting and worth sharing. A blogger mentioned the similarity between black people and the dynamic of a family. I have issues with my family, as we all do, particularly with my father. Because I was raised in a single-parent household, my dad and I frequently quarreled over pretty much everything. This, I gather, is normal parent/child stuff (incidentally, for those curious, things between my father and I are now better than they’ve been since I was a small child – growing up will do that). I used to fantasize about telling him off in front of a large crowd of his friends, perhaps at his funeral. Let’s stop this here, and simply conclude that I am not a daddy’s boy. That being said, I will not tolerate anyone speaking ill of him, even my other family members.

There are things we can say to and about our family members that sound (and may be) incredibly hurtful. But let someone from outside the family come in and try saying the same things, and sparks fly. Someone who is not in full possession of all of the facts, and who is not part of the dynamic, has no license to say things they may have heard just because someone else says them. In the same way, it’s highly inappropriate for any non-black person to use the word nigger, even if many black people think it’s appropriate to use with each other. Those who pretend that they don’t understand why this is so, and belligerently go out of their way to say it anyway, have suspect motives for doing so.

So am I saying Dr. Laura is racist? Let me answer that in this way…

DR. LAURA SCHLESSINGER IS A RACIST HARPY BITCH, AND THE WORLD WOULD BE A MEASURABLY BETTER PLACE IF SHE HAD DIED AT BIRTH.

I hope that clears up any ambiguity you may have at what I think of Dr. Laura.

Interestingly, she stumbled into another wheelhouse of mine when she said that she was quitting to restore her First Amendment rights:

“I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart, and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry — some special interest group deciding this is a time to silence a voice of dissent, and attack affiliates and sponsors,” she said.

Here’s the text of the First Amendent:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Also, you can spread racist speech, and private citizens are not allowed to be upset, or protest against your stupidity in legal ways.”

Can you figure out what part I added?

One step forward, two steps back

Sadly, there is very little Paula Abdul in this post.

The Vatican issued a revised set of church guidelines Thursday to respond to the clerical sex abuse scandal, targeting priests who molest the mentally disabled as well as children, and defining child pornography as a canonical crime, but making few substantive changes to existing practice. (Full story here)

The Church is, let’s say, 1500 years old. Charitably, we could forget about the first 1000 years. We’ll chalk that stuff up to youthful exuberance. For past 500 years, the church has existed in its more-or-less present form – intimately involved in political power, having to deal with an increasingly-secular world. It took them 500 years to recognize that child pornography and the abuse of children and the mentally disabled are crimes. This only after condemnation from pretty much the entire world. Here’s a hint: when the world has to come together and bully you into passing rules against the abuse of children and the mentally disabled, you’re probably on the bad side of good.

But hey, they did it eventually, right? So bravo, we can finally all get off their back.

The Vatican’s sex crimes prosecutor… defended the lack of any mention of the need to report abuse to police, saying all Christians were required to obey civil laws that would already demand sex crimes be reported.

This is exactly like the non-apology from a few weeks ago. If you pass rules that don’t do anything to solve the problem, you’ve done exactly nothing to help. You might as well have not passed the laws. If the Church was interested in even appearing to make amends, it would pass rules with some teeth, and bring about rigorous enforcement. Instead, they have elected to continue to hold themselves above secular authority, as though they have some legitimate Earthly power (which, incidentally, is the only type of power there is).

So they’ve passed a law, but the law is useless. So we’re no further ahead, but no big deal, right?

The new Vatican document also listed the attempted ordination of a woman as a “grave crime” to be handled by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, just as sex abuse is.

There cannot be any more proof in my mind that the Catholic Church does not understand why the world is upset. It doesn’t get that its claims to supernatural authority are meaningless, and increasingly rejected by the world at large. They can’t comprehend the fact that it’s not the simple matter of abuse that is making the world so angry – it’s the repeated attempts to cover it up and defy secular authority. They don’t get it, and it looks like they never will.

New elements in the text include treating priests who sexually abuse the mentally disabled — or an adult who “habitually lacks the use of reason” (emphasis mine) — with the same set of sanctions as those who abuse minors.

Surely that describes anyone who believes a thing these people say.

Movie Friday: The Real Jim Carrey

This would be funny if it wasn’t serious:

I am going to try taking this step-by-step.

0:30 – “I understood how thought was just an illusory thing”

Undoubtedly true for Mr. Carrey, who clearly has not thought one bit about the nonsense he’s about to spew out of his face-hole.

0:47 – “Thought is responsible for, if not all, most of the suffering we experience”

This means either one of two things. Either a) Jim Carrey is speaking of the ‘we’ in the room – rich, privileged people who don’t really suffer in any meaningful way; or b) he is completely ignorant of the multitude of people who suffer horribly every day because of lack of thought (and the resulting lack of food, or safety, or education, or human rights…). As someone who works as a thinker and a solver of problems, this is probably the most insulting thing to me personally in this video.

1:05 – “Who is it that is aware that I am thinking?”

Here you go, Jim. I hope this link is helpful.

1:29 – “I was suddenly aware… that I was bigger than what I do, I was bigger than my body…”

Subjective, personal experiences like this can be valuable. Everyone experiences them from time to time, particularly those who are being deeply introspective (or who are using LSD).

2:15 – “… and I want to take as many people with me as I possibly can, because the feeling is amazing.”

Is this the real Jim Carrey or the real Jim Jones?

2:28 – “It’s our intention, our intention is everything. Nothing happens on this planet without it; not one single thing has ever been accomplished without intention”

Ever fallen down? Ever been in a car accident? Neglect happens without intention, Jim. Suffering (the same kind of suffering that you think is caused by thinking) happens without intention, Jim. 5 billion years of life on the planet happened without intention, Jim. Channeling Deepak Chopra, are we Jim?

4:22 – “I’m so lucky to be part of this community, and to be doing something of value.”

Debatable. You at least gave me an excuse to scream at my computer screen, and enough fodder to write a blog post.

The world is a rough place, especially for those of us who will never read this blog post because they don’t have a computer, or electricity, or food. Improvements have been made and can be made by putting concentrated thought and effort into coming up with real, practicable solutions to problems. No problem has ever been solved by sitting around and waxing poetic about how suffering is caused by thought, and how we need to “be the universe”. That’s simply a load of arch-liberal hippie bullshit. I’m all for being aware of the individual’s membership in a larger entity. I’m all for the value of subjective experiences that take you outside your narrow ego-centric view. None of that is going to help anyone except you. It’s what you do in the world that matters, not the spiritual revelations you have in a semi-conscious state. If those revelations help you understand something about the world, then I applaud you, but magical thinking doesn’t solve problems. Action does.

Damn this video pisses me off…

Here’s something to make us all feel better: a marmot eating a cracker

Everybody must get stoned!

Aaaaand we’re back to Iran:

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a mother of two, faces imminent death by stoning after her appeals for clemency were denied. Ms Ashtiani had already been punished with flogging for what a court called an “illicit relationship”, when she was then charged with committing adultery.

The death penalty under any form is bad enough, but stoning? As if living in a theocracy wasn’t bad enough, if you step out of line you might get bludgeoned to death with stones for having a boyfriend after your husband dies – or at least being accused of doing so. There is a debate in many cases like this (particularly with ‘honour killings’ and homophobia laws) that what we’re talking about is a secular issue dressed up in religious clothing. We can put such debate aside in this case:

Under Iran’s strict interpretation of Islamic law, sex before marriage is punishable by 100 lashes, but married offenders are sentenced to death by stoning. The stones used must be large enough to cause the condemned pain, but not sufficient to kill immediately (emphasis mine).

(Gotta love religious rules. Not only do they specify the way in which a person must be executed, but they ensure the maximum amount of suffering possible. It takes a certain license for unabashed cruelty to write something like that into law, and only religious justification allows such license.)

That should be the first clue that your society is morally bankrupt: you must find a way to kill people for having sex, and in such a way as to cause them the maximum possible discomfort before they die. This is the reason the West cringes when Iran announces it intends to develop nuclear weapons. It’s not simple arrogance on behalf of the imperial powers, as many of my arch-liberal brethren like to claim. It’s not just that we want to keep ‘the club’ small or that Iran is a threat to American dominance – this is a country of people who murder people with stones for the crime of having sex. They’ve already demonstrated that they have the desire – what happens when they have the means to punish the entire world for its “sins”?

The government did a quick back-pedal after overwhelming condemnation from the international community (gotta love peer pressure) and said that the woman would not be stoned to death, but refused to specify whether or not her death sentence had been commuted. To be fair, apparently stoning is a rare punishment meted out to only the most deserving. Clearly, a woman who tried to move on after her husband died, was arrested, whipped and tortured into confessing crimes she now denies is an exemplar of those most deserving.

IRONY!

One of my common complaints about the forces of stupid is that they seem to have no sense of irony. When, for example, Christians reference the bible to persecute gay people as unrepentant sinners, whilst simultaneously forgetting the parable about the adulteress who was saved from stoning by the admonition “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” It’s especially funny when those same anti-gay crusaders turn up in a bath house or in a men’s room somewhere having all kinds of kinky gay sex. The complete lack of a sense of irony or self-critical skills that is required to make such leaps of hypocrisy is one of the hallmarks of the footsoldiers of “DUH”.

So it came as no surprise when I read this news story:

A radical Muslim group has warned the creators of South Park that they could face violent retribution for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit during the 200th episode of the animated TV show.

I love South Park, I think it’s one of the smartest shows on TV. While I don’t always agree with their views, I do enjoy good satire, and South Park dresses that satire up in good wholesome filth, tearing down the notion that anything is sacred. In the episode(s) in question, the characters were extorted into exposing Muhammad so that celebrities could capture his powers of “never being mocked”. Of course, in true South Park style, things just get more and more ridiculous.

The entire point of the episode arc was how ridiculous it was to respect the beliefs of complete nutjobs who make ridiculous terrorist demands. In the episode, the characters have to resort to a series of increasingly-ridiculous stunts to avoid accidentally showing any part of Muhammad: locking him in a U-haul trailer, not letting him walk around, and then finally dressing him up in a bear costume.

South Park shows Muhammad as a bear

All this to avoid reprisal from a group of people who lack the basic level of self-awareness to avoid becoming willing participants in their own public lampooning. In the next episode (it was a 2-parter) the image are covered with large black bars that say “CENSORED”. This is of course to say nothing of the fact that Muhammad has appeared, unmasked, on the show before:

Muhammad on South Park

Of course, just as the show’s creators intended, radial Muslims became incensed by the (non-)portrayal of their religious symbol. This ridiculous reaction to a cartoon bear which may or not contain a cartoon of a person who may or may not resemble Muhammad (nobody knows what he actually looked like) played right into the purpose of the show. It’s one of those “art imitates life imitates art” things where a television show caused the world to behave in the way the show predicted, which allowed the show to turn around and lampoon that reaction.

There’s also an argument to be made that, by outlawing the portrayal of Muhammad, Muslims are making it more likely that people will do just that for shock value. Talk about suicide bombing yourself in the foot!

CFI Debate: What’s Right and Wrong with Religion?

I had the distinct pleasure of attending an event co-sponsored by the Centre for Inquiry – a skeptical organization and Reasons to Believe – a group that promotes the harmonious co-existence of science and religion. The event took the form of two 30-minute presentations from a skeptic speaker and a believer:

  • Dr. Hugh Ross (the believer) is an astrophysicist from the California Information of Technology
  • Brian Lynchehaun (the skeptic) is completing a degree in philosophy at UBC

This was the first such event I’ve ever attended personally, but I’ve watched videos of several. The usual format is that the religionist makes a series of unfounded assertions, tortures logic and evidence to support those assertions, and spouts old and refuted theology as a conclusion. The skeptic/atheist speaker, thus completely drowned in nonsensical and illogical statements, must spend his/her valuable time refuting these statements and, as a result, has no time to present any reasonable argument of his/her own. The feckless wimp of a moderator then says something along the lines of “well we’ve heard a lot of good arguments on both sides” and opens the floor to questions. I assumed this CFI/RTB event would be much of the same.

Happily, I was only half-right, and the forces of stupid were not allowed to roll on unopposed.

I took the liberty of recording the presentations by Dr. Ross and Mr. Lynchehaun. As fair warning, Dr. Ross’ presentation is not for the faint of brain. If you are prone to headaches when exposed to assertions passed off as fact, theology substituted for logic, or self-contradiction, you should probably not watch this video. My father, who as a former priest in the Catholic church is fairly knowledgeable about church doctrine and theistic philosophy, joined me in recognizing that the theories propounded by Dr. Ross are both scientifically and theologically way off base. It might be worth watching for lulz. Also, the people sitting next to me were being jerks and laughing disruptively, so occasionally that happens.

Here’s part 1:

Part 2:

and part 3:

Like I said, it’s some pretty heady stuff. Apparently, aside from the outright lies like the proof of the existence of Adam, we are to believe that there is scientific evidence that there is a being outside of space/time (note: evidence not shown). Also, God likes to tinker with species from time to time because He apparently can’t get it quite right the first time. Additionally, the biblical writers believed simultaneously in a geocentric universe and the Big Bang – two perspectives which are directly contradictory. Ross’ explanation of the problem of evil is about the least artful I’ve ever heard – God invented evil so he could test us to make sure we can get into Heaven; why He didn’t just start humanity in Heaven is a problem best left unmentioned. This is all to say nothing of the fact that Dr. Ross has studied all the world religions, and only Christianity is the true one (again: evidence not shown).

At this point, I was dreading listening to Mr. Lynchehaun’s response – not because I was worried that his argument would be as brainless as that of Dr. Ross, but because I was worried Mr. Lynchehaun would try and address the glaring contradictions and illogic present in his counterpart’s reasoning. I was pleasantly shocked when Mr. Lynchehaun started his talk by saying ‘I’m not going to address the science – I can tell that this crowd is not amenable to another science talk.’ From there, Mr. Lynchehaun presented a coherent argument for why Christianity is not a good moral system, which was supposed to be the topic of both presentations (to Dr. Ross’ credit, astrophysics can say very little about ethics, so it wasn’t really a good idea for him to try).

Here’s part 1:

and part 2:

I disagree with Lynchehaun on a couple of points, the largest of which being that science cannot inform ethics (note: he may not have actually said this… sorry Brian :P). I guess the material sciences can’t really say anything about ethics, which may have been what he meant. However, the scientific process of testing hypotheses from reasoned first principles can be adapted to issues of morals. The point that you can’t measure good and evil with scientific scales is well taken. However, on the whole I think Lynchehaun did an admirable job of presenting a non-judgmental and inoffensive argument for why secular value judgments are not only superior to those from scripture, but are actually what’s done already even by believers. It’s crucial to note something here, and that’s the fact that Lynchehaun started his presentation by providing a definition of his first principles. He didn’t just launch in and then try to shift goalposts when confronted; he defined his terms a priori and even allowed his opposition a chance to object or refine them. That’s real debate.

After the two presentations, the participants were invited to engage in a moderated debate, in which they were allowed to address each other. I didn’t record this part (I had poor sight-lines – if CFI puts the video online I’ll link you to it later). Suffice it to say that it was essentially more of the same – Dr. Ross made assertions and wove cherry-picked sciency-sounding things in order to support his claims, while Mr. Lynchehaun sat quietly and waited until Dr. Ross stopped speaking.

The floor was then opened to questions from the audience, which is, in my mind, a complete waste of time. Dr. Ross has shown himself to be logic-proof and absolutely will not accede any points that refute his narrative of the universe. The skeptic audience members who asked their questions were not going to unseat his arguments because they are relying on logic and reason while Dr. Ross is starting from a “God is true, therefore anything else can be explained in terms of God” position. There was only one believer who got up to say something to Lynchehaun, but his “question” was just a series of faith-based platitudes about the infinite mercy of God. Lynchehaun, without missing a beat, said to the guy “this will likely come as no surprise to you, but I disagree” which got thunderous applause from the audience.

The other high point occurred when Dr. Ross explained the reason why God has not directly intervened to make the world a paradise yet – yes, in direct contradiction of both scripture and his own previous statements. See, since we know that the world is 5 billion years old, and God created the world in 6 “days” and rested on the 7th “day”, we can assume that we are still in that 7th day of rest. God isn’t dead, ‘Es just restin’.

UPDATE: I can’t believe I forgot to mention this part. Lynchehaun did take a moment to expose Dr. Ross’ weird argument about the disappearing body of Jesus. He (Lynchehaun) mentioned casually that growing up in Ireland, he was aware (although he was not personally associated with, again my apologies for not making this 100% clear, Brian) that there were great many people who were experts at making bodies disappear, and that it’s probably not as hard as Dr. Ross was making it out to be. Dr. Ross countered by saying that it’s impossible to perpetuate such a large fraud only 30 years after the event. I felt like asking him if he wanted to buy a bridge from me.

If there’s any lessons to be learned from this talk, it’s how startlingly bankrupt the argument “well some scientists believe in God” is. When you have to rape and pervert the scientific method to accommodate your belief in a supreme being, you’re betraying science. During questioning, Dr. Ross said that the way to establish the truth of scripture is to give consider the “truth” therein to always have the best possible benefit of the doubt – a complete inversion of the scientific process. If you’re willing to abandon the ideals of establishing truth through observation and reason, then you abdicate the title of ‘scientist’. Of course, this smacks of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy that Lynchehaun talked about, but it’s different in an important way. Science and belief are incompatible because the former demands a default position of skepticism, while the latter begins by assuming the truth of unprovable claims and then fits evidence to support those claims. They are polar opposites. Can scientific findings be twisted to fit religion? Absolutely. Can blind belief and faith advance the philosophy of science? God Almighty, I hope not.

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UPDATE: PZ Myers has cross-posted this entry over at his blog, Phayngula! Hits! Oooh, sniny!