Fox News’s “The Five” Debate (ha!) The Pledge Lawsuit

I know, in this country, we’re free to praise God
And we’re free to ignore those who don’t
We’d be free to spread some of this freedom around
But we’re also free not to… and won’t.
Some people might claim that we’re doing it wrong—
Why they’d say that, I cannot conceive—
Those people have freedom, like everyone else;
I suggest that they feel free to leave.

Via Opposing Views, who note Former Bush Spokesperson Dana Perino is literally telling atheists to leave the country, a case study of privilege at work. Take a look at the segment (I can’t embed it or I would); listen to the same old arguments (including “‘in god we trust’ is on our money”–so there’s another batch of coins off to the engraver–and the old favorite “they don’t believe, so why do they care?“–apparently you can either believe in god or the constitution, but not both), and then try turning it around. Imagine that there was nothing on the coins at all–not God, not Allah, not Thor, but also not “there is no god”–and imagine that their arguments were being made in opposition to a push to put “In God We Trust” on the coins to begin with. Virtually every argument they make works just as well against putting their god in our pledge (or on our money).

And then, look up in the right hand upper corner of the site, and read their own pledge:

The Fox Nation is for those opposed to intolerance, excessive government control of our lives, and attempts to monopolize opinion or suppress freedom of thought, expression, and worship.

And they probably believe it. They just don’t understand it.

Anxiety In Hindsight

There’s a tenseness in your stomach
And a flutter in your heart
You may find it hard to focus
Any noise can make you start
Since it came upon you slowly
Or your thoughts were turned aside
You believed it would be something
You could easily abide
Hell, you might not even notice
As you go about your day…
But I guarantee, you’ll feel it
When the feeling goes away!

So today, when I got the news that Cuttlespouse’s father’s surgery went well, it was (understandably) a relief. I knew (and expected, or hoped) that it would be. I had forgotten, though, just what a palpable, physical feeling that relief is.

I suffer from anxiety on occasion. I’m getting much better at recognizing it and taking steps to avoid it, or when it is unavoidable, to take steps to handle it (up to and including anti-anxiety meds). It is rare that I notice the beginning signs, though, until they are jumping around in front of me chanting “neener neener boo boo” and distracting me to the point of insomnia and digestive problems. And the biggest bouts I have ever experienced, I did not notice at all until something happened to impose understanding on me from without.

So I guess what I’m saying it, it’s real, it’s palpable, but it can be helped. And if you feel like a fool not realizing that you are suffering, you’re not alone there either. There are perfectly good reasons to get all stressed out about something (that’s life for you), but that feeling of relief is nature’s way of saying “y’know, it might be nice to try something different right about now.”

Surgery

So… at some point today, pretty soon now as I write, my father in law is going under the knife. Like any operation on an old man, it could kill him, but the hope is that he gets another 10 years of kicking ass on the tennis court.

Unless you are in the operating theatre right now (and if you are, get back to work!), there’s not a damned thing you–or I–can do for him now, so I’ll just use this space to mention that if you are ever on the fence about donating blood, or visiting your parents, or picking up that phone (I do that all too seldom, cos I have great anxiety about phones), or encouraging that kid in a science class or that teacher who makes a difference… it’s all connected, and maybe you can help someone else’s loved one on down the line.

Edit… 4 bypasses and a new valve later, things look good. A long road ahead, but that sure beats some of the shorter ones.

Time To Bring Back Public Whippings! (Or, Maybe, Not)

We’re pampering our prisoners
We’re treating them like guests
Instead of just ignoring them
We honor their requests

Free food, a bed, and exercise,
We cater to their needs
When what they’ve earned is punishment
It’s harshness that succeeds

No coddling them with training,
Cos they’ll never get a job
No need for education,
Cos a slob remains a slob

No TV time, no DVDs,
No books upon the shelves
These thugs want entertainment?
Let them work it out themselves

Let’s lock them in a tiny cell
And throw away the key
Unless it hurts, it really isn’t
Punishment, to me

We’ll show them, in the clearest terms,
What vengeance is about…
I wonder how they’ll thank us
When it’s time to let them out

You’ve probably all heard by now, Ariel Castro was found dead, having apparently hanged himself. As the poster child for horrible and criminal behavior, you’ll have to search a ways before you’ll find anyone mourning his death. Well, aside from those wishing he was still alive so that he could be dying more slowly; those voices are easy to hear.

And even at NPR, where accusations of liberal bias (in reporting and in commenting) are commonplace, the commenters are currently bemoaning the conditions of our prisons, arguing that they need to be harsher, more punishing, so that they do the job they were supposed to do and prevent crime rehabilitate offenders punish evildoers.

These commenters are wrong. You want the most successful prisons, in terms of low recidivism rates, low operating cost, and successful integration of inmates into society when their sentences are up? Let’s compare the US and Norway.

But of course, those are horrible measures of prisoner effectiveness if the real goal of a prison is to assign moral responsibility and punish wicked people. (Or to make money.) I have asked audiences which hypothetical they would choose, a simple procedure that would make certain a criminal would never commit a crime again, and would instead be a productive member of society, or a procedure that would punish that criminal harshly, with no effect on future behavior. A strong majority go for the punishment. (BTW, a strong case can be made that this is a holdover from religious thinking during the Reformation–the blossoming of the prescientific notion of freely chosen, morally culpable behavior. We can’t prevent it, cos it’s freely chosen, but we can and should punish the morally responsible actor, regardless of whether that punishment decreases crime.)

And with Ariel Castro as the poster child, there will be no one, or very few, arguing that our prisons are already too harsh for society’s good, that an overhaul of the system would be hugely beneficial (especially for non-privileged groups). Differential arrests, convictions, and sentences by race? No time for that, there’s a monster in Cleveland who deserves harsher punishment! We would rather punish after the fact than make our streets safer before. We would rather pay for prisons than schools and scholarships. We would rather blame a handful of criminals after the fact, than our own failure to improve society beforehand.

It’s so much easier.

Waiter! This Coffee Doesn’t Taste Like Shit!

I grind my coffee fresh each day,
A hearty, fragrant scoop
With hints of citric acid, and
A note of civet poop
But with the market full of fakes
I might just have to quit…
I mean, who wants a cup of joe
That doesn’t taste like shit?

Via NPR, the latest on Civet Cat Poop Coffee.

The beans are literally harvested from the feces of the tree-dwelling civet cat in Indonesia. The idea is that a trip through the animal’s digestive tract partially ferments the beans and imparts a much-sought-after flavor to the coffee.

The exotic processing makes the coffee, called Kopi Luwak, exceptionally rare — and expensive: Think $600 per pound. And thus, experts suspect that much of what’s sold as civet coffee on the market is actually either fake or made from low-grade beans.

And worth every penny. Think about it–the only possible reason to buy a cup is conspicuous consumption–showing off–and even more than dusty wine and stinky cigars, nothing says “I’ve got money to burn” more appropriately than paying outrageous sums for a cup of literal shit.

But the story is actually pretty cool. Actually, a lot of coffee chemistry and psychophysics is pretty cool. And the picture of the coffee-bean civet cat shit is classic (the living conditions of the animals, considerably less cool). And while I’d be willing to be part of a blind taste test to evaluate the extravagant claims, there is no way I’d pay for the privilege. Anyone who has seen my wardrobe knows, I am not one for conspicuous consumption.

“Maybe Now She Can Do Something *Useful*…”

There’s sharks, and cramps, and jellyfish,
And always, unknown factors
Diana beat them all this time
But still has her detractors
They comment on the internet
Belittling her feat
The brightest, smoothest commenters
You’d ever care to meet.
It’s not that they’re the jealous sorts
You notice now and then
It’s just that—she’s a woman,
And these commenters are men
She’s not allowed to show them up,
Achieving something cool—
They’re guys, and it’s the internet…
It’s almost like a rule.

I love watching someone do something I can’t. Whether it is the Olympics, or surgery, or car repair, photography, interviewing, music, dance… or Diana Nyad’s swim from Cuba to Florida. It really was astonishing to see–in a world where there is literally a queue of people lined up to summit Mount Everest each year, Nyad is the first, and currently the only, to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage or flippers (each of which makes a huge difference in terms of moving water). It is an incredible feat.

And the comments online are predictably horrid. This was a useless waste of time and effort, it was a publicity stunt done for high speakers fees, it was actually something so easy, because of the huge support team, and it’s only a first because no one else wanted to do it. Oh, yeah, and she’s fat and ugly. And they were everywhere I looked. CNN. Fox. Even NPR. (The comment quoted in my title has, sadly fortunately, since been deleted.)

I suppose the good news is, anyone can see what’s going on. Haters are hating, engaging in a concerted effort to belittle the less privileged (in this case, a woman) from the safety of a keyboard. If jellyfish, sharks, dehydration, and exhaustion didn’t stop Nyad, I don’t think internet comments are going to faze her in the slightest.

Here’s to you, Diana Nyad! Congratulations! Well done!

Oooh, Look! A Non-Atheist Manifesto!

My aggregator is having fun with me. It doesn’t often link to the Christian Post iPost section, but this one is special.

TEN REASONS I’M NOT AN ATHEIST (AND NEVER WILL BE)

Here it is, beloved folks! The world’s first ever non-atheist manifesto! Feel free to spread it online to as many people as you like. Just click “share” on the button below and the article will pop up on your page. Blessings…!

The first ever! (Excluding every religious manifesto ever, of course. I think maybe he means “anti-atheist”, and even there he may be a few generations late. Or maybe he means his first non-atheist manifesto… anyway, he’s new to the game, so maybe it’s something we’ve never seen before.)

1.- I shall not be an atheist because something doesn’t come from nothing.

I look forward to his explanation of where God came from. I also wonder which definition of “nothing” he is using. It matters.

2.- I shall not be an atheist because there is no way such harmony, order and perfection could exist in the universe without an intelligent mind behind it all.

He must be referring to multi-host parasites. It is indeed elegant, how a single organism can infect fish, birds, and snails in turn, or snails, ants, and sheep. It truly is a beautiful harmony. Of course, he could also be talking about the harmony, order, and perfection of a universe that is utterly hostile to us with the exception of less than half of one small planet, an infinitesimal fraction of the known. Beautiful in its rarity, but a cruel beauty.

3.- I shall not be an atheist because a mere chance explosion cannot explain how the structure of my brain is able to understand the laws pertaining to the universe’s harmony, order and perfection.

He’s absolutely right, there. Fortunately, no atheist has ever claimed this, ever. And I would argue that, without an understanding of natural selection (one of many important intermediates between the big bang and an understanding brain), his brain does not in truth understand the laws pertaining to the universe’s perceived order.

4.- I shall not be an atheist because I am much more than a rational bio-chemical machine. I am full of love, desire and hope. And I also recognize beauty when I see it.

Does he really think atheists do not feel love, desire, and hope? Does he really think we don’t recognize beauty? As an evolved animal, I will allow that I am a bit more elegant than any machine any human ever made, but “evolution is smarter than you are“, so this is to be expected.

5.- I shall not be an atheist because I have a moral conscience. I can tell the difference between good and evil. I believe in objective moral values.

A moral conscience is so important to humankind that we created religions just to support it. And while I believe that the writer believes in objective moral values, so do many others whose objective moral values disagree with his.

6.- I shall not be an atheist because every tribe and tongue on the face of the earth has a religious consciousness and the idea of a transcendent (or supreme) something or someone.

The fact that their religious consciousnesses disagree with one another to the point of conflict is only relevant when arguing against each other–when arguing against atheists, you all worship the same god.

7.- I shall not be an atheist because I whole heartedly believe my life has a purpose and a meaning.

If your life would be meaningless without a god, I humbly suggest you are doing it wrong. My life has purpose and meaning as well–it just does not have a god.

8.- I shall not be an atheist because although I am imperfect, I have the idea of an insuperable perfect being within me. Such a sublime concept cannot stem from little old me.

How do you know? And how do you know? If you are imperfect, how is it possible to know that the insuperable perfect being within you is not an illusion, and imperfect after all? And how, as an imperfect being, can you possibly know that it is impossible for you to believe this illusion? Sounds like wishful thinking to me.

9.- I shall not be an atheist because the fruits of practical atheism are- for the most part- ugly, wicked and downright perverted. And much of intellectual atheism is nothing more than an exercise in insoluble contradiction(s).

Well, yeah, I am just an accident. I don’t claim any privileged revealed information, like religions often do. But, frankly, there are moral imperatives because I am an atheist. But they do require us to think for ourselves.

10.- I shall not be an atheist because the Holy Spirit abides within me. I know God’s alive. I spoke to Him only five minutes ago.

To him, not with him? I spoke to my dog, but he did not speak back. Well, a bit, but I don’t speak dog. It is not abnormal, even in this modern day, to speak to (or with) God. What would be remarkable, though, would be if all those who claim to speak to God actually agreed on His message. We’d only need one religion! Gee… I wonder which one?

So… nothing new. Oh, well.

The Same God?

Theologians and logicians have a tapestry to weave
And their task is more annoying than it’s fun
They’re looking at the details that religious folks believe
And they’re asking—are these separate gods, or one?

They’re looking through the histories, the prophets, and the books
They’re attending to what expert scholars say
But I found another resource—one where no one ever looks—
It’s the comments on the internets today

They have a common ancestor, these Abrahamic sects
One god is shared by Christians, Muslims, Jews
It’s clearly in the histories, for anyone who checks
But what about the people in the pews?

Are they one big happy family, with one familiar god,
As the expert theologians all agree?
Are we really, as the pope said, all god’s creatures? See, it’s odd,
Cos it really doesn’t look that way to me

Hee,hee… CNN’s Belief Blog asks the musical question “Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews worship the same God?” And as such articles so often do, they explore the claims of the experts, pointing out similarities and differences, noting the historical common Abrahamic ancestry and current schisms, before taking the easy way out with the concluding sentences:

So do all three faiths actually worship the same deity, whether they call him God or Allah or Adonai?

God only knows.

What is amusing, though, is that the Belief Blog writers pay attention to the experts, to the leaders, to the scholars… and ignore the beliefs of, oh, I dunno, the commenters on CNN’s Belief Blog itself. There, we see the non-scholars (oh, I’m sure there are some scholars commenting as well), certain that their own sect has it right, and that the others are heathens, infidels, idolators, followers of false prophets, and worse.

I remember arguing with my dad about “In God We Trust” on money. He was amused by the thought of “In Thor We Trust”, but really taken aback by the idea of “In Allah We Trust”, even as he was well aware that his own Christian beliefs were cousins to Islam and unrelated (well, mostly) to Norse Polytheism. Sometimes, the closer we are to our neighbors, the more we find the need for fences.

Do they follow the same god? Don’t tell me what they say; show me what they do. And what they do is fight. Are these the squabbles of siblings, or of strangers?

I don’t much care.

Unknown Unknowns And Atheism

You atheist types are an obstinate sort
You could choose to believe, but you won’t
You say there’s no god in the world we can see…
Ah, but what of the world that we don’t?

What percent of reality really is known;
What percent have we left to divine?
With an unknown infinity left to explore
Who says your view is better than mine?

I choose to believe in the things we can’t see
In the not-yet-discovered reality
With no data at all, I still choose to believe
That there’s something transcending mortality

I won’t limit myself to observable facts
I won’t bow to the mere scientific
While the views I’ll admit are remarkably vague
My religion is very specific.

My God thinks as I do; what’s right and what’s wrong
His will is as clear as can be
You atheists want to know why I believe?
It’s all there… in the things we can’t see.

So at my previous post, I got a comment:

There is an important question which needs to be asked here.

How many percent of reality do you know?

How many percent of all the parallel universes?

How can you consider it unlikely that there might exist entities somewhere else who are so wonderful and powerful that they cannot be comprehended by a human mind?

I’ve never read or heard convincing answers from self-proclaimed Skeptics.

Kind regards from Europe.

It linked, by the way, to a post which approvingly linked to a very poor argument attempting to shift the burden of proof onto atheists by narrowly defining atheism (in a manner which few atheists actually agree with–I, for one, much prefer a privative definition) and by conflating knowledge and belief (thus arguing for agnosticism as an alternative to atheism, rather than as orthogonal concepts).

But, yeah, it always seemed odd to me to play the “there’s so much we don’t know” card against atheists. There’s a quote, attributed to Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Josh Billings (with a variant attributed to Ronald Reagan), “it’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble, it’s what we do know that just ain’t so.” To claim that the vast amount of the universe we do not know may hide something akin to a god, flies in the face of the claims of religions, who are awfully specific about the attributes and adventures of their gods. It’s not that some god might exist in a parallel universe, it’s that they lived atop Mt. Olympus. It’s not that some hidden corner of a far-off galaxy might have time-traveling magicians, it’s that one was born to a virgin in Bethlehem. It’s not that maybe on some distant star there are levitating humanoids, it’s that one ascended to heaven from a rock in Jerusalem.

Atheists are not discounting the possibility of unknown things occurring in unknown places. We don’t have to. These events and places are unknown. No one is making a positive claim that needs to be evaluated. There is nothing to deny, nothing even to comment on. But that has little or nothing to do with the actual and specific claims of religion. If, tomorrow, a time/space traveling alien materialized at, say, MIT, and provided evidence (the alien equivalent of DNA, and demonstrations of technology) of something “wonderful and powerful”, then A) skeptics would evaluate the evidence and (assuming it is sound) conclude that their world had just been expanded beyond their previously wildest beliefs, and B) it would not provide the slightest bit of evidence for any of the world’s religions.

And if, by some extraordinary chance, it turns out that this alien provided hard evidence that its alien race was behind the miracles of the bible, that they had actually occurred just as written, and that some version of Christianity (not all of them; they disagree with one another) was absolutely true… then skeptics and atheists would largely say “well, damn, I was wrong.” But that extraordinary evidence would not change the fact that, up until that evidence was provided, there was no reason at all to suspect it ever would be.

And right now, that alien has not visited, and right now, the existence of unknown mysteries in unknown corners of the universe is not, in the slightest, an argument in favor of any religion.

Atheism’s “Impoverished Narrative”

The universe’s marvels, which our Holy Books revealed,
Simply cannot hold a candle to the things that stayed concealed
But Holy Men weren’t worried—no, they knew just what to do;
When science showed new wonders, they just said “God did that, too.”

My aggregator threw me a strange one today–“Atheism and girl guides“, a post mostly grousing about the changes in the Girl Guides’ oath, removing the religious language to make it more inclusive. And an early paragraph sums it up nicely:

At one level, the atheist reworking of the Girl Guide oath to drop mention of God makes absolute sense: if you have disparate groups, you try to find a common level on which they can all agree. In the past, Catholics, Muslims, Jews etc managed to meet on a non-denominational theism. Now, theists and atheists meet on a programme of shared morals. It’s about compromise and agreeing on what we share rather than what divides us.

Although it is not an atheist reworking, but a secular reworking. As the author says, this is common ground, not exclusion of believers.

And then…

For a Christian, however, what you have is a serious impoverishment of a culture. Particularly in an organization which is devoted to the character formation of the young, that formation essentially consists in getting young people to see the difference between what they think or feel, and what is actually the case; what they want to do, and what they should do. There are (at least) two elements to this: a cognitive element based on understanding the world in a certain way; and a narrative element which provides us with a network of stories and heroes that provide analogies for our own behaviour. So, eg, a Christian formation will regard the world as meaningful and directed by the will of God, and will refer to (eg) the Bible as a stock of narrative on which we can draw.

From a Christian perspective, the more attenuated the stock from which the formation is drawn, the worse that formation. At best, the formation of character is weakened. At worst, it is actually poisoned by a pernicious alternative: to replace, “love my God” with “to be true to myself and develop my beliefs” is to replace an objective source of values with feeling.

*sigh* Yes, god’s values are objective. That’s why there are so many different versions of them, and why god always seems to agree with the person quoting him.

In the end, this is not just about atheism vs theism, but an impoverished narrative vs a rich one, and relativism vs objectivity. A lot of modern atheism is simply dumb: it’s the sort of thing 18 year old computer geeks would come up with. Christianity is being dumped, but instead of being replaced by a rich humanism soaked in the classicism and literature of the past, it is being replaced by a void. The better sort of atheist realize that but most don’t and even fewer have any sort of viable proposals to fill that void.

Impoverished vs rich is all? The Greek and Norse mythologies are incredibly rich–I loved reading those as a child, and studying them up through college (and one of my favorite books is the Mythological Atlas of Greece, which locates the physical areas that gave rise to various myths. It’s not just that the gods existed, but here, specifically, is where they did this or that. Frankly, the rich narrative was lost when the girl guides decided on “god” rather than “the gods”. And as for the void that god fills and atheism can’t? Please, take a look at how much of “creation” is in the bible. When the bible was written, our understanding of the universe was tiny. The notion of a galaxy, let alone of a universe full of countless galaxies, was unimaginable. Mind you, a god giving revealed truth to his chosen representatives could have mentioned something about it (along with suggesting that people wash their hands regularly), but it wasn’t until humans discovered it that suddenly it was part of God’s Great Universe, and evidence of How Much He Loves Us. (This bit was the inspiration for the opening verse, btw.)

From a Catholic point of view, there is simply nothing that will work in the long run beyond a true religious formation. I don’t expect atheists to agree, but I do expect them to start provide suggestions which go beyond simply using the delete key or suggesting that four year olds study Darwin.

Nice. As wonderful as Darwin’s view of life is (and it is far richer than the tapestry you claim the bible and religion in general present), it is a tiny fragment of the astonishing world we know now that we did not know when the universal and objective truths of religion were revealed. We can and do apply science to all of the questions that religion pretends to give answers for. We know more about human nature, we know more about our environment, we know more about our universe… Go to any modern college or university library, or major public library, and separate out the information therein into to piles–what religion has taught us, and what we learned apart from religion.

Then tell me which world view is impoverished.