Oh, dear. John West of the Disco Institute is in a furious snit because, after refusing to grant tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University did promote Hector Avalos, of the Religious Studies department, to full professor. You can just tell that West is spitting mad that Iowa would dare to keep Avalos around, and thinks it a grave injustice that one scholar would be accepted, while their pet astronomer gets the axe. So now they’re going to do a hatchet job on Avalos.
Never mind that the two are in completely different departments, with very different standards. Never mind that the tenure review committee judged that Gonzalez’s work did not reach the standard that their department expected, while Avalos’s department obviously felt quite differently about his. Never mind that Avalos seems to have written four books in the last four years. Why should Avalos’s appointment be regarded with horror?
Because he’s a secular humanist who opposes religion.
That’s pretty much it. West’s tirade consists entirely of quotes delivered with breathless incredulity, showing that Avalos has an uncharitable view of modern religious thought. You know, I’m a pretty harsh critic of religion myself, but you won’t find me protesting the appointment or promotion of a professor because of their religious beliefs — you might find me sneering at those beliefs, but that’s quite a different thing from saying that so-and-so should not be promoted or should be fired because they are, say, Catholic. Yet Disco doesn’t seem to have any qualms about rousing the mob to attack an unrelated promotion case in order to distract attention from the failings of their little protege. And really, that’s all this is: blatant demagoguery calculated to anger blind Christian faith-heads who don’t want atheists to have any position at all in our universities (by the way, while West calls Avalos an atheist, I haven’t seen any evidence that he is; he could be a deist, for all I know.)
What are the specifics that have angered the petulant Mr West? Well, Avalos wrote a book titled Fighting Words(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) in which he says:
We acknowledge that some Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians accept, especially in more recent times, that some of their theologies are violent. But they do not seem able to surrender general religious traditions that are no more well grounded than the religiously violent ones. In fact, until the Abrahamic religions overthrow the master-slave model in which they were born, we see little progress to be made. Since all religious beliefs are ultimately unverifiable, the greatest scarce resource of all is verifiability. And one way to remedy or minimize unverifiability in any decision-making process, especially that leading to violence, is to eliminate religion from human life altogether.
Why, what a delightful suggestion! We are in agreement, Dr Avalos. I would dearly love to see that happen, and I may just have to buy that book.
West is also giddy with ineffectual rage because Dr Avalos compares the Bible to Mein Kampf. It’s actually a reasonable argument, deliberately chosen to make his argument clear. Here’s what he says, at some length.
Even if we do not eliminate religion from human life, an argument can be made to eliminate any scripture that contains religious violence from religious life. A zero-tolerance argument means the rejection of any scripture that contains any religious violence in any portion. Thus, even if religion is retained, we can remove such scripture as a whole genre of religious experience.
We begin our zero-tolerance argument with Mein Kampf, a book that is held to be the paradigm of evil in modern society. Imagine that a new religious group were to call themselves the Hitlerian Church, and that the main text would be Mein Kampf. Certainly, the name “Hitlerian” by itself would arouse anger and suspeicion. The reason, of course, is that Hitler is righly held responsible for the murder of millions of people.
So the question can be posed: Would one act of genocide advocated in Mein Kampf be enough to repudiate the name “Hitlerian” from our church? What if the acts of genocide were on a smaller scale? Let us suppose Hitler had advocated killing only a few hundred people, just as Muhummad is said to have done at Qurayza. Would we still repudiate the label? I would guess that most people in our society would rightly repudiate the Hitlerian Church label even if we were to somehow prove that Hitler actually ordered a few killings, while the rest could be attributed to out-of-control operatives at the local and lower levels.
But suppose now that someone argued that there were some good things within Mein Kampf. Hitler, after all, said he stood for family values. He said he was following God’s wishes. He said he loved his fellow community members. I would speculate that most people would still not be convinced that we should keep any part of Mein Kampf, even if there were “good” chapters. The genocide committed under Hitler is so heinous that it would outweigh any supposed good in Mein Kampf.
…
In sum, just as we should reject all of Mein Kampf because of its racist and genocidal policies, we should reject the Bible for any genocidal policies it ever endorse. We should reject other scriptures if they also ever advocate any sort of violence. In fact, Mein Kampf does not contain a single explicit command for genocide equivalent to those found in the Hebrew Bible. Yes, Mein Kampf describes the Jews as an evil to be expelled from Germany, but nowhere in Mein Kampf is there anything as explicit as the policy of killing Canaanites in Deuteronomy 7 and 20 or 1 Samuel 15. Thus, if all of Mein Kampf is to be rejected simply for its implied genocidal policies, we should certainly reject all of the Bible for some of its explicit and blatant genocidal policies.
So maybe we should slice out those bits of the Bible that are evil and offensive? Avalos doesn’t favor that, either.
Indeed, any reappropriation of biblical texts is vacuous, for it does not explain why we are investing so much effort in maintaining a book that we can do without. Societies existed before the Bible, so there is no logical reason why they cannot exist without it. Maintaining the Bible is another form of “essentialist” thinking. My analogies with Hitler and Mein Kampf are deliberate here, for I see very little difference in the techniques used by biblical scholars and theologians to maintain the relevance of a text that we otherwise believe meant something completely different or violent in its original context.
Avalos has a new book coming out, The End of Biblical Studies(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Here’s a bit from one of the reviews.
In a controversial conclusion, Avalos argues that our world is best served by leaving the Bible as a relic of an ancient civilization instead of the “living” document most religionist scholars believe it should be. He urges his colleagues to concentrate on educating the broader society to recognize the irrelevance and even violent effects of the Bible in modern life.
Now I think these are wonderful ideas, and I am fully in agreement with Avalos’s conclusions, as I’ve read them so far. Of course, since I’m not religious studies scholar who was reviewing Avalos’s promotion file, am not a colleague in his department, and actually don’t have a good grounding in the academic context of his writings, my opinion doesn’t matter. West may disagree with his conclusions, but since he also doesn’t meet those criteria, his opinion doesn’t matter. All that counts is that his colleagues regard him as a productive and interesting scholar and want to reward him for his work.
And all that matters in the Gonzalez case is that his colleagues did not think that of him.
I think that every time anyone at any university who supports evolution doesn’t get a job, we should start some angry rabble rousing. We shouldn’t even restrict ourselves to biologists, anyone in any field who believes in evolution, who has done work which we can claim supports evolution, or has ever said anything we can twist with enough ellipses into being favorable towards evolution should suffice. If such a person is denied tenure, doesn’t get hired, is fired, resigns, changes offices, has a class canceled, or doesn’t get the parking space closest to the entrance, we need to have dozens of angry blog posts, protests, boycotts, petitions, sternly-worded letters, and a healthy dose of outright bitching.
The evolution side does deserve “equal time”, after all.
Tiax, unless there is a lunatic who can find me the verses in the Bible that talk about the mysterious appearance and disappearance of placoderms on this Earth, “the evolution side” deserves nothing less than all the time as a science.
Godwin!
This is the first I’ve heard of this Avalos guy, but I really like what I hear.
One my old boss’s favorite stories from his days as a state legislator concerned the earnest woman who approached him to seek introduction of a bill establishing a state Department of Religion. The boss demurred, pointing out that California could not put itself in the position of officially promoting or espousing religion. His constituent delightedly informed the boss that she had anticipated his concern and he could rest assured that she had the solution: Her proposed Department of Religion would support all religions, so there would be no question of favoritism and absolutely everybody would be happy!
She really believed that.
“I think that every time anyone at any university who supports evolution doesn’t get a job, we should start some angry rabble rousing. ”
This would basically mean getting upset any time any biologist didn’t get tenure, since biologists who don’t accept evolution are basically nonexistent.
That Godwin problem…the xkcd comic applies perfectly here.
The Bible contains incitement to commit genocide. He’s making an argument that urging genocide is grounds for rejecting the contents of a book, and he needed to find an equivalent example that a) people would be familiar with, and b) didn’t elicit the warm fuzzy feelings they all have for the Bible. Mein Kampf fills the bill. You know, there really aren’t that many books that are both fairly famous and tell people it’s OK to kill the men of tribe X, rape their women, and sell their children into slavery. (And not even Mein Kampf does that, although the Bible does.)
I suppose he could have used the Turner diaries or the Left Behind books instead.
Avalos addressed Minnesota Atheists regarding his scarcity theory of religion (beginning page 8) and I found it fascinating, whereas many other theories of religion strike me as inadequate. Whatever they think of Avalos’ ideas, believers should read his work and address his points. They are good ones. At any rate he is a legitimate scholar who deserves tenure, and certainly this case should not be yoked or compared to that of Gonzalez. They are independent events.
This is off-topic, but I must say that I could not believe my eyes when I read Dembski’s whine about Dawkins’ supposedly not having many peer-reviewed papers published. There I was on the ship with a book by the man himself that had a bibliography of his own papers. Do I have to go to Waco, Texas myself and shove the relevant page into Dembski’s myopic view? Geez Louise, these embittered palm-pilot-slapping glorified appliance salesmen at the DI are making asses of themselves!
The RWAs are such believers in double standards it is amazing. Completely different rules apply to them versus everyone else.
Laws, rules, and standards are for everyone else. They should just get their way on their say so. Bushies work it the same way.
As Leona Helmsley said, “We Don’t Pay Taxes. Only the Little People Pay Taxes.”, except now it all comes true under BushCo, and these god-nutters would do the same.
I wonder if West will appreciate the irony of his attack if he manages to increase Avalos’s book sales.
What blows my mind is that accredited universities have tenured faculty in the sciences, who are religious. How can someone claim to be a scientist, and also be willing to accept such an important thing as the assumed existence of an all-powerful being, given the complete absence of scientific evidence? Either you’re a scientist, and you’re rational – or you’re not. How can you expect to teach someone the scientific method if you choose to ignore it on such an important topic? It seems really cut and dried to me.
I had a psychology professor in college that I got into it with about religion and challenged him on that issue – then, when he started to angrily reply, I interrupted him, “oh, right, psychology isn’t really science, is it?” Aaaah, college fun. ;)
How did Behe get a job in the Bio department at Lehigh? Are they all glue-sniffers there? Is the department chair a retard? Or is he just there as a case study?
We have all sorts of experts on various particular religions in which the experts themselves do not believe, such as non-Muslim experts on Islam (a very valuable type of expertise these days) so why not an expert in religion in general who doesn’t believe in ANY religion?
Gonzalez was the IDers Great White Hope. Coming off his postdoc., he had a really impressive resume. He lived off his previosuly unpublished work for a couple of years, and looked like he was on the fast track. Then he started spending time on The Privileged Planet book and movie. He started speaking before uncritical religious audiences who were impressed by the fact he had a Ph.D.. They were much easier to impress than his peers, who would have wanted to see new, interesting results, and who all had Ph.D’s, just like him. His productivity dropped. Astronomy, like most every other science these days, is fiercely competitive, and you simply can’t spend a large part of your time doing something else, and still make it. He sold out, in short, for the approval of people who really didn’t understand his work, and who just wanted to hear a credentialed scientist tell them their credulity was OK.
The same thing happened to Behe, twenty years ago. He was a good biophysical chemist, but after ‘Darwin’s Black Box,’ he effectively quit real science.
There’s a book that includes the line ‘no man can serve two masters’. You’d think the two of them would be familiar with that book.
Re Marcus Ranum
So Mr. Ranum would be in favor of firing Ken Miller of the biology department at Brown Un.
I think they should rename themselves the Disco Institute, officially. It’d frame the debate in a far more funkilicious manner.
Trust me, Kristine, you don’t want to go to Waco. Come down to Austin, and we’ll make you feel welcome. ;-)
How did Behe get a job in the Bio department at Lehigh? Are they all glue-sniffers there? Is the department chair a retard? Or is he just there as a case study?
Behe was a good biophysical chemist. He did some of the earliest work on Z-DNA. Unlike Gonzalez, he waited until after tenure to reveal his True Mission.
Now, as long as he covers his teaching load, he’s got a job forever.
Re Harbison
The difference between Gonazlez and Behe is that the latter waited until after he had tenure before turning into a whackjob.
I have heard of Hector Avalos before. He was oddly on the Infidel Guy show. Of his theories the scarcity theory rings of particular truth.
The reason why religion causes war isn’t because it’s divisive (at least not directly). Wars are caused due to a scarcity of a resource and religion creates scarcity. Not real scarcity like “I don’t have water”, but religious scarcity like this land here is special and I must own it, or you aren’t including me in your holy book, or your holy book excludes all of my beliefs and my gods. If there is only one God and it’s mine then, you must be wrong and your God isn’t a real God.
This is interesting stuff. Breathtaking, even. Those excerpts alone are some of the best arguments I’ve seen against undue reverence of the Bible. Someday I’ll have enough knowledge, and courage, to confidently engage people on the topic of The Bible Ain’t All It’s Made Out To Be. But on top of feeling under-educated, I also feel afraid. Sad, isn’t it? I worry about what my friends and family will think of me.
But on top of feeling under-educated, I also feel afraid. Sad, isn’t it? I worry about what my friends and family will think of me.
–Kseniya
I hear ya, but feel the waters, you might surprised how many have their toes in there too.
Strength in numbers. Dawkins, Hitch, Avalos… feel it build. Very exciting times indeed.
What blows my mind is that accredited universities have tenured faculty in the sciences, who are religious.
Me too! Get a load of this guy!
Q. ActionBioscience.org: How is it possible to believe in the evolution of a complex world and God?
A. Miller: That’s an interesting question. God, for those of us who believe in Him, is the Creator and the Master of the universe. As C. S. Lewis once said, “[God] likes matter. He invented it.” [Mere Christianity, Harper, 2001] It seems to me that an all-powerful Creator, who is behind both the material of the universe and the laws that govern the interactions of that material, would be able to accomplish any goal He wanted to in terms of the process, the architecture, or the ultimate fruition of the universe.
Now, what I don’t find useful to speculate about are the exact physical, chemical, or biological processes that could be attributed to God, or identified as God working His magic in the world. I think both Western religious tradition and scripture itself tell us that God is very subtle and He can use many ways to accomplish His ends.
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/miller.html
Can you believe it?
A scientist who believes there is a master of the universe? And yet he doesn’t want to speculate on anything to do with him (I guess that means god is not in the details)?
Incredible? No! It’s….
(Kenneth T. Miller, Ph.D., a Christian and evolutionist, is professor of biology in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry at Brown University, in Providence, RI.)
I’ve had the plesure of talking with Avalos on a couple of occations and seen him debate. He’s a former preacher who later became an atheist.
At the end of one debate, during the Q&A, a student asked him why he became an atheist. his response was, “Simple, I read the bible.”
my congradulations go out to him!
How can someone claim to be a scientist, and also be willing to accept such an important thing as the assumed existence of an all-powerful being, given the complete absence of scientific evidence?
compartmentalization can do wonders.
just ask Miller or Collins.
Re Behe
Even whackier then Behe is Brian Josephson who is a Nobel Prize winning physicist with a tenured position at Cambridge, Un. Prof. Josephson, since winning the prize for his discovery of what is known as the Josephson effect, has gotten involved in a number of dubious activities.
1. He was an early supporter of cold fusion and my information is that he still believes it is a real phenomena.
2. He got involved in PK and ESP, and was favorably impressed with the phony Uri Geller. He was apparently unimpressed with the debunking of Geller by James Randi. Mr. Randi likes to use Josephson as an example of a scientist who believes that just because he has a Dr. in front of his name he is immune to being fooled by conjurers.
Not “a retard”
Shit. Here’s the link:
http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/faculty/Sands/jasands.htm
Even whackier then Behe is Brian Josephson who is a Nobel Prize winning physicist with a tenured position at Cambridge, Un. Prof. Josephson, since winning the prize for his discovery of what is known as the Josephson effect, has gotten involved in a number of dubious activities.
there’s also the infamous John A Davison, who did some decent work and had published articles in Science… before he lost it in the mid 80’s.
also, I think we recently addressed the “mother” of the endosymbiont theory, who is a rabid HIV denier these days.
then there’s Michael Egnor… isn’t he still acting Vice Chair of the dept. of Neuroscience at Cornell?
What blows my mind is that accredited universities have tenured faculty in the sciences, who are religious.
Another example:
Although the evangelical church as a whole has definitely not yet “come to peace with biology,” I remain confident that because of the personal warmth of lives filled with God’s Holy Spirit of love, the day is coming when the church as a unit will personify the answer to Jesus prayer: “May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know.”
– Darrel Falk, biology professor at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego.
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:q6K315hH-7kJ:www.stnews.org/Books-2808.htm+Professor+of+biology+god+belief&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us
Wikipedia:
He has also authored a book on the creation-evolution controversy titled Coming to Peace with Science: Bridging the Worlds Between Faith and Biology (InterVarsity Press, 2004), forward by Dr. Francis S. Collins. Dr. Falk is a Christian and a theistic evolutionist and a former fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, an intelligent design think tank.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrel_Falk
Trust me, Kristine, you don’t want to go to Waco.
Ah, c’mon, the Dr. Pepper Museum is a lot of fun. The Texas Ranger Museum? Not so much.
PZ, you said, re: Disco’s take on tenure,”And really, that’s all this is: blatant demagoguery calculated to anger blind Christian faith-heads who don’t want atheists to have any position at all in our universities (by the way, while West calls Avalos an atheist, I haven’t seen any evidence that he is; he could be a deist, for all I know.)”
It is that but it’s also something more basic, more primitive; learned early on. This is elementary-school-playground-thug politics. (Who was is said, “Everything is politics”?) I started meeting these punks on the playground in the second grade. It just seemed that there were certain kids who would, for no apparent reason, lean on other kids. Pushing and squeezing they sought out weak spots in anyone handy. Having found a chink in which to gain purchase they would then invent various ways to exploit their ability to intimidate, cajole or otherwise obtain a reward unearned, at the expense of another person, coerced.
I can remember thinking each time a school year ended that the next grade who be populated by nicer and more rational people. Damn.
It seems that a dishearteningly large number of these types of kids simply hone their skills as they grow. It’s not the meanness that accompanies their mechanizations or even the acquisitiveness engendered thereby. What really gets me is the growing conviction that a (possibly) critical mass of humanity is deeply retarded in terms of basic social, political, intellectual and emotional maturity. All about me rages a never ending battle of “I Got You Last.”
But good things still happen. Before this brouhaha came to my attention I knew next to nothing about the nature of tenure. Now I know much more and I can guess much of the rest. I consider that one small way of wringing something palatable out of an episode that caters directly to this smallness of mind and heart.
I like the how you point out in your last two paragraphs that unless one is directly involved in the tenure process there is no way to make any meaningful statement that is not at least second hand. Funny thing about tenure. Reminds me of people agreeing to go about a certain business according to certain rules, privileges and responsibilities. And then, lo, actually doing so! This is very much the same as responsible, and I’d say, somewhat mature people in any walk of life simply taking care of business.
I tire of immature adults with too much money or access or celebrity status baking too little imagination, too little sound argument and too much shrillness. Then I remember, “Suffer the little children.”
Ahh, that would be “backing to little imagination.”
Ah, c’mon, the Dr. Pepper Museum is a lot of fun. The Texas Ranger Museum? Not so much.
How about the Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Library at Baylor? Only reason I would go, other than to hop on the Dembster. But hey, I’d come to Austin, too.
I just thought this quote was telling:
“We have a better product than soap or automobiles. We have eternal life.” (Rev. Jim Bakker)
Nothing is better than soap. Nothing. Soap is the greatest invention ever. Not body wash, not scented crap… just a white bar of dirt and oil slaughtering goodness. And the white stuff is cheap.
Everyone should use soap. I don’t care how you look or how nice you are… if you smell, I will not talk to you.
Nothing is better than soap. Sometimes, I’ll take three showers a day just to use the stuff. I’ve gotten by all of my life without eternal life. And if I had to choose between eternal life and soap, I’d take soap.
Another vote for soap! Please spare us from the great unwashed!
(I actually know a guy whose nickname is “Soap”. I don’t know where he got it. Seems clean, though.)
I highly recommend Fighting Words. Avalos doesn’t simply detail the atrocities committed in the name of religion. He uses the scarce resources model to illustrate a qualitative difference between religious violence and most other violence, and to show that the abrahamic traditions have the roots of such violence firmly ensconced in their sacred texts. He futher makes a good argument that religious violence is intrinsically less moral than most other types because the scarce resources that they create are not verifiable. I keep this book on my “frequent reference” shelf.
As far as I’m concerned, Christ threw out all the apocalyptic slaughter-thy-neighbour bullshit and told His followers to treat the neighbours nice. All of them. Doesn’t it go something along the lines of “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbour as you do yourself: on this hang the Law (i.e. Leviticus and Deuteronomy) and the Prophets (most of the rest of the OT) also”?
Falwell, Robertson… all those who encourage nasty behaviour in the name of God, or Christ… they are all anti-Christian and they are all destined for Hell (if not already there).
You will NEVER talk their flocks out of their delusion; you will NEVER counter these idiots’ religious claptrap with science; you can ONLY beat them on their own ground, and wean the faithful off the poisoned teat by proving that what their geocentrist, creationist, homophobic, racist, sexist leaders have done from day one is to betray God and Christ. Then, and only then, can you wean them onto a more ‘godless’ approach to the origins of Life, the Universe and Everything. The important thing is first to wean them off the Filthy Tit of Ignorance and Hate and make them your friends. Until then, all your ranting about atheism just pushes them further and further into the arms (maw?) of their evil masters.
I wonder if West will appreciate the irony of his attack if he manages to increase Avalos’s book sales.
He already has, a copy of The End Of Bibilical Studies is winging its way out to me right now, with Fighting Words in my Wishlist if it’s any good!
Justin makes a good point above though, didn’t JC say, “All that Old Testament fire and brimstone stuff, that was just my Dad having an off day, sorry! Be excellent to each other. And party on dudes.”, (or words to that effect)? I suppose to acknowledge that would kinda mean acknowledging the infallibility of the Big Fella so the god-botherers go on quoting Leviticus and smiting their neighbours.
Same really, always though JC seemed like a nice guy. If he could only keep the rowdy drunks in the fan club in check…
@Justin: “You will NEVER talk their flocks out of their delusion;”
Nonsense. I was talked out of the craziness, a fact for which I am thankful to those who voice, loudly and clearly, the insanities of religion every day.
Why is it that all the good studies on religion is done by non-believers? Avalos is rocking my world for several reasons.
First, by really pointing out my vague troubles with religious texts. In the society where I live they are most often thought of as allegories, a sentiment I haven’t been able to shake.
But Avalos points out that it isn’t enough – religious violence promoted in the texts are always immoral, being about made-up resources. He reveals for me what Dawkins and others couldn’t, concentrating on the stupidities and dangers of superstition. This is great stuff!
Second, his resource view of values seems both clarifying and powerful. I have to digest that, but it doesn’t seem to be the constrained descriptions of utilitarianism as much as a general description of value handling. Anything that casts light on the nature of values is fine by me.
Btw, the discovery of DI that an atheist can make a good researcher in religious studies reminds me of the latest campaign here, using sex to fight HIV!
The idealistic organization RFSU (roughly, ‘the national organization for sexual education’) has started selling the condom “Love Support”. The proceeds goes to the zambian non-profit organization “Youth Vision”. Youth Vision works with information on hiv/aids and contraceptives. Looks like an action with a lot of love in it. :-)
Guess the Divine Wind Institute would throw a fart about that too. Not that they are ever ‘taking a stance in religious matters’, of course.
Gerhard:
Thanks for expressing so succinctly on this case what I have been slowly fumbling towards. Fundamentalism is a brain eater, that is for sure.
Why is it that all the good studies on religion is done by non-believers? Avalos is rocking my world for several reasons.
First, by really pointing out my vague troubles with religious texts. In the society where I live they are most often thought of as allegories, a sentiment I haven’t been able to shake.
But Avalos points out that it isn’t enough – religious violence promoted in the texts are always immoral, being about made-up resources. He reveals for me what Dawkins and others couldn’t, concentrating on the stupidities and dangers of superstition. This is great stuff!
Second, his resource view of values seems both clarifying and powerful. I have to digest that, but it doesn’t seem to be the constrained descriptions of utilitarianism as much as a general description of value handling. Anything that casts light on the nature of values is fine by me.
Btw, the discovery of DI that an atheist can make a good researcher in religious studies reminds me of the latest campaign here, using sex to fight HIV!
The idealistic organization RFSU (roughly, ‘the national organization for sexual education’) has started selling the condom “Love Support”. The proceeds goes to the zambian non-profit organization “Youth Vision”. Youth Vision works with information on hiv/aids and contraceptives. Looks like an action with a lot of love in it. :-)
Guess the Divine Wind Institute would throw a fart about that too. Not that they are ever ‘taking a stance in religious matters’, of course.
Gerhard:
Thanks for expressing so succinctly on this case what I have been slowly fumbling towards. Fundamentalism is a brain eater, that is for sure.
Oh, and speaking of the Divine wind Institutes’s farting business, today is the 300 year anniversary of Linneaus birth.
As I write this Uppsala (Linneaus and mine alma mater) is visited by the King (Carl XVI Gustaf, Carl Gustaf) and by his guest His Imperial Majesty the Emperor (Heisei, Akihito). The dudes are going to party at Uppsala castle.
Oh, and speaking of the Divine wind Institutes’s farting business, today is the 300 year anniversary of Linneaus birth.
As I write this Uppsala (Linneaus and mine alma mater) is visited by the King (Carl XVI Gustaf, Carl Gustaf) and by his guest His Imperial Majesty the Emperor (Heisei, Akihito). The dudes are going to party at Uppsala castle.
Damn!
I thought that I had invented the compare-the-Bible-to-Mein Kampf argument (to be used against liberal theologians who defend the Bible despite the overwhelming inhumanity that, as they occasionally admit, is in it).
Obviously I’d very much like to read Fighting Words now, but I think I need to get over a little spell of childish bitterness at Avalos first….
Justin Moretti:
Jesus also declared that he came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34); advocated genocide of people who didn’t accept him (Luke 19:27–“But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me”); presaged Inquisitions and stake-burnings precisely (John 15:6–“If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned”); and, something like forty times in the Gospels, screeched that people who don’t buy his religious ideas will go to Hell.
Note also that Jesus claimed that he was not repudiating a single scrap of the Old Testament. (Matthew 5:18–“For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.”)
And don’t forget that Jesus made it clear that his “love thy neighbor” stuff (as Avalos notes, Mein Kampf contains tossed-off “nice” lines like that as well) is a subordinate commandment to the “Great” one–“love God with all your” etc. So when “God” tells you to kill your neighbor (I’m sure Avalos, among many other heretics, can give you a long list of historical instances in which “God” has done exactly that), that halfhearted “second” commandment isn’t much help.
Taboo as it is (and long has been) to point out, nonbelievers have noted for several centuries that the Jesus character in the Gospels is actually not a nice guy with nice ideas at all.
Avalos works primarily in my own field – New Testament studies. He hasn’t been particularly prolific (or if he has, it has been in areas I haven’t touched on in my own research), but what little I’ve read by him has been solid. The reason why many religious believers get so upset with the academy is that atheism (or metaphysical naturalism) obviously doesn’t interfere with taking a naturalistic approach to history, literature, science and so on, while many people such as ID supporters are not only not metaphysical naturalists, they oppose even methodological naturalism, and thus end up either not producing critical scholarly works or have them rejected when they are sent for peer review.
Avalos works primarily in my own field – New Testament studies. He hasn’t been particularly prolific (or if he has, it has been in areas I haven’t touched on in my own research), but what little I’ve read by him has been solid. The reason why many religious believers get so upset with the academy is that atheism (or metaphysical naturalism) obviously doesn’t interfere with taking a naturalistic approach to history, literature, science and so on, while many people such as ID supporters are not only not metaphysical naturalists, they oppose even methodological naturalism, and thus end up either not producing critical scholarly works or have them rejected when they are sent for peer review.
Nothing is better than soap.
I got this for Christmas!
Torbjörn Larsson said:
I would expect that typically, the best and most objective research performed on a given religion is done by non-followers of that religion. They don’t have a vested stake in any of its beliefs and can approach it (generally) much more objectively than a believer could. And for religion in general, it would make sense that a nonreligious person would be most likely to produce good scholarship.
I think that means that atheists are Type O–we’re the universal donors!
That sent me running to my advisor to ask if it was true! But no, thankfully he’s now in Stony Brook.
What was West referring to when he wrote, “Avalos has led the charge against Gonzalez….“?
Justin says:
“As far as I’m concerned, Christ threw out all the apocalyptic slaughter-thy-neighbour bullshit and told His followers to treat the neighbours nice. All of them.”
Well, WOW. That ought to fix it alright. If you recognize the “fixed part” why can’t you recognize the monumental incongruity of the fact that they keep printing that mish-mash of a document in all its gloriously violent and self-contradictory whole?
WHY didn’t ‘Christians’ simply eschew the Old Testament in favor of the gospel of Christ alone?
Hmmm?
I’ll tell you why, in case you are too dunderheaded to grasp it. Its because the whole Christian exercise is founded on the ‘cheap trick’ of the myth of revelation from a divine source: and if it is presumed JESUS agreed with it, you must also. According to the accepted interpretation of fundamentalist Christians THEMSELVES, the two gospels are mutually incompatible and contradictory.
In other words: your characterization of the Bible implies straightforwardly that the old half is “bullshit”. That’s an amazing admission from a Christian, which gives me reason to doubt your faith. (Never mind that OTHER PARTS of the Old Testament are not as gruesome. The point of the post on Hector Avalos’ remarks is that he is pointing out yet another key contradiction out of many that are readily identifiable to anyone who actually respects critical examination).
Can this possibly be a well-hidden slip that the Bible is little more than a historical document that manages somehow to correct itself, in the minds of people milennia after the fact, with the advent of a gospel offered by one of the many self-proclaimed “saviours” (socio-economically-naturally-selected, of course) out of a pool of literally thousands of such prospective “messiahs”?
Its not that hard to simply imagine this as a real possibility, that’s all. And if that’s all it is, then all of the mouth-foaming efforts amongst the faithful to defend the alleged ‘truthiness’ of the Bible is nothing more than gratuitous equivocation and an extravagant display of insanity.
Even children can learn to understand why one shouldn’t accept candy from smooth-talking strangers. Maybe you and other Christians can too.
Christians have an overpowering need to defer to the almighty authority-figure. Trouble is, that figure is just an old figment-of-the-mind tradition begun by one or more sufficiently loud-mouthed schizophrenic personalities that managed to take advantage of the new technology of writing beginning over 2000 years ago, and whose “gospel” has powerfully fueled a dizzying accretion of schizophrenic authority-mongers and followers ever since.
And that’s the problem, mate.
So which ‘message’ is the authentic one: the Old or the New “Testament”? Sorry, no equivocations allowed. (Fundamentalist religious people do not have a monopoly on inquisition either). BUT, as Avalos has so clearly pointed out, (if you can possibly grasp it), you can’t accept BOTH Old and New Testaments, BY YOUR OWN CHARACTERIZATIONS OF THEM, and not think there isn’t something similar to a major train wreck as a consequence.
WHICH ONE is the RIGHT ONE? Hmmm?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
While my observation was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I didn’t realize the implications. I like the implied generosity of “donors”!
In keeping with the simile in your framing, we are also filled with antibodies against brain eating superstitions.
Homostoicus:
West claims “Avalos has led the charge against Gonzalez and intelligent design on ISU’s campus, helping to draft a 2005 petition denouncing intelligent design that ultimately was signed by more than 120 ISU faculty.”
But the petition wasn’t against Gonzalez but against ID. “We, the undersigned faculty members at Iowa State University, reject all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor.” ( http://www.biology.iastate.edu/STATEMENT.htm )
Also, Avalos has criticized Gonzalez ID book when discussing the scientific problems with ID.
“Arguments that the universe was intelligently designed fail to identify anything substantive about that designer, two ISU professors said in a presentation Thursday — a failure they said destroys the scientific validity of those arguments.
Hector Avalos, associate professor of religious studies, and John Patterson, professor emeritus of materials science and engineering, both said advocates of intelligent design — which purports that design of the universe by an external agent can be detected in nature — don’t represent anything new in science.
The lecture, sponsored by the Atheist and Agnostic Society, attracted about 150 people who heard Avalos, who teaches in the humanities, and Patterson, a scientist, offer their critiques of “The Privileged Planet,” a book published this spring and co-written by Guillermo Gonzalez, assistant professor of physics and astronomy.” ( http://www.stuorg.iastate.edu/isuaas/past.shtml )
“”Intelligent design often does not fulfill its own criteria for what is science and what is religion,” Avalos said.
Not identifying the designer, Avalos said, didn’t remove a thorny problem for intelligent design.
“It doesn’t get you away from the problem that you have to match the result with intention,” he said.
The lecture, sponsored by the Atheist and Agnostic Society, attracted about 150 people who heard Avalos, who teaches in the humanities, and Patterson, a scientist, offer their critiques of “The Privileged Planet,” a book published this spring and co-written by Guillermo Gonzalez, assistant professor of physics and astronomy.
“When you’re talking about a designer that has created the entire universe, where do you go for independent evidence? There’s nowhere to go,” Patterson said.” ( http://www.iowastatedaily.com/media/paper818/news/2004/10/15/News/Professors.Question.Intelligent.Design.Theory-1101628.shtml?norewrite&sourcedomain=www.iowastatedaily.com )
There is of course nothing peculiar in a scientist opposing anti-scientific agendas, nor in a critique of a book that touched on Avalos’ specialty.
While my observation was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I didn’t realize the implications. I like the implied generosity of “donors”!
In keeping with the simile in your framing, we are also filled with antibodies against brain eating superstitions.
Homostoicus:
West claims “Avalos has led the charge against Gonzalez and intelligent design on ISU’s campus, helping to draft a 2005 petition denouncing intelligent design that ultimately was signed by more than 120 ISU faculty.”
But the petition wasn’t against Gonzalez but against ID. “We, the undersigned faculty members at Iowa State University, reject all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor.” ( http://www.biology.iastate.edu/STATEMENT.htm )
Also, Avalos has criticized Gonzalez ID book when discussing the scientific problems with ID.
“Arguments that the universe was intelligently designed fail to identify anything substantive about that designer, two ISU professors said in a presentation Thursday — a failure they said destroys the scientific validity of those arguments.
Hector Avalos, associate professor of religious studies, and John Patterson, professor emeritus of materials science and engineering, both said advocates of intelligent design — which purports that design of the universe by an external agent can be detected in nature — don’t represent anything new in science.
The lecture, sponsored by the Atheist and Agnostic Society, attracted about 150 people who heard Avalos, who teaches in the humanities, and Patterson, a scientist, offer their critiques of “The Privileged Planet,” a book published this spring and co-written by Guillermo Gonzalez, assistant professor of physics and astronomy.” ( http://www.stuorg.iastate.edu/isuaas/past.shtml )
“”Intelligent design often does not fulfill its own criteria for what is science and what is religion,” Avalos said.
Not identifying the designer, Avalos said, didn’t remove a thorny problem for intelligent design.
“It doesn’t get you away from the problem that you have to match the result with intention,” he said.
The lecture, sponsored by the Atheist and Agnostic Society, attracted about 150 people who heard Avalos, who teaches in the humanities, and Patterson, a scientist, offer their critiques of “The Privileged Planet,” a book published this spring and co-written by Guillermo Gonzalez, assistant professor of physics and astronomy.
“When you’re talking about a designer that has created the entire universe, where do you go for independent evidence? There’s nowhere to go,” Patterson said.” ( http://www.iowastatedaily.com/media/paper818/news/2004/10/15/News/Professors.Question.Intelligent.Design.Theory-1101628.shtml?norewrite&sourcedomain=www.iowastatedaily.com )
There is of course nothing peculiar in a scientist opposing anti-scientific agendas, nor in a critique of a book that touched on Avalos’ specialty.
It’s bad form to call San Francisco “Frisco,” and it’s bad form to call Discovery Institute “Disco.” Don’t ask why. Just is.
The Discovery Institute has mounted the latest in a long string of creationist smear campaigns against me in Iowa. While I have never called for Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez to be fired, or even to be denied tenure, there are plenty of creationists who blatantly direct our university to fire me.
All such efforts have failed because they clearly distort the facts and my academic record. Here are some of the most significant questions and distortions voiced in these attacks:
1. Avalos is not a scientist, and so cannot critique ID
I have a formal degree and a year of graduate work in anthropology, which is home to the study of human evolution. The study of human evolution is a legitimate scientific field. I have published numerous articles on science and religion.
Nature and Science also have recognized my expertise in the area of science and religion in a number of news articles. See, for example, my quoted comments on scientific studies or prayer in Science, 276 (1997): p. 359; and on religion and violence in Nature 446 (March 8, 2007), p. 115.
ID is regarded by virtually all scientists and scholars of religion to be a theological argument, and I have the training to evaluate theological arguments. I have a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in biblical and Near Eastern Studies from Harvard.
I may not be an astronomer, but my article, “Heavenly Conflicts: The Bible and Astronomy,” passed the editorial review of Mercury: The Journal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 27 no. 2 (March/April, 1998), pages 20-24. There, I critiqued fine-tuning arguments before I even heard of Gonzalez.
The Astronomical Society of the Pacific is the SAME organization that has published, via a sister publication (Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific), some of the work of Guillermo Gonzalez.
So the irony is that it is the scholar of religion whose work passed the editorial review of a legitimate astronomical organization, and it is the astronomer who has not published a refereed article on ID in an astronomical journal.
2. Avalos’s book, Fighting Words, blames the Jewish people for the Holocaust
This is an outright canard. I see the Holocaust as the synthesis of many factors. But I place much of the responsibility on a long Christian history of anti-Judaism. I explicitly (Fighting Words, pp, 195-96) say that Hitler’s plan is an updating of Martin Luther’s famous seven-point plan for the Jews.
This outrages creationists because they have long held that evolutionary theory led to the Holocaust (e.g., Richard Weikart’s biased and grossly uninformed From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany [New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004]). I show that every major feature of Holocaust had a long religious history that predated Darwin.
That some authors of the Hebrew Bible (1 Samuel 15, Deuteronomy 7) advocate genocide is a well-known fact recognized by nearly all Christian and Jewish scholars, and not a statement against Judaism or an effort to blame the Jews for the Holocaust.
Moreover, Jewish scholars who have reviewed Fighting Words have viewed it positively. Note these comments about Fighting Words by Prof. Martin Jaffee of the University of Washington:
“Hector Avalos (of Iowa State), joins the conversation with a lucid,
provocative, and deeply disturbing study of the role of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in fostering the conditions necessary to liberate human ingenuity in the services of unspeakable acts of carnage.”Source: Comparative Religion (A Publication of…The University of Washington (2005-2006), p. 3 (http://jsis.washington.edu/religion/46756.CompRel.NL.pdf)
Finally, perhaps the DI should also note that I have also been a member of the Jewish Studies Committee at Iowa State for many years. My doctoral research won a dissertation grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
3. How can Avalos, an atheist, teach courses on the Bible and religion?
Unlike learning Bible in Sunday School classes, courses on the Bible in public universities are descriptive not prescriptive.
We study what people believe about the Bible, and not what people should believe. We report what different viewpoints (including Christian, Jewish, and secular) say ABOUT the Bible, without forcing students to believe in any viewpoint.
Such pedagogy is premised on the idea that a professor can objectively describe what other people believe about their religion. If that were not the case, then Christians could never teach about the religion of anyone else in a public university either.
My ability to be objective has been validated by the fact that I was named Professor of the Year at Iowa State in 1996, after being nominated by CHRISTIAN students. I was named Master Teacher in 2003-04. I usually receive some of the highest,
if not the highest, teaching evaluations in my department, and most of the students are Christians.
And while pro-ID advocates make much of the fact that Dr. Gonzalez supposedly promotes ID only outside the classroom, they always erroneously assert that I promote secular humanism inside the classroom.
In addition, some of my books and articles have been published by well-recognized Christian presses, including Abingdon Press, Hendrickson Press, and Eerdmans (Dictionary of the Bible).
4. Avalos is too anti-religious to teach in Iowa
The Discovery Institute will first have to convince a number of churches who have invited me to speak with the full knowledge that I am an atheist.
My lectures based on Fighting Words and on other topics have been delivered, by invitation, at the following Christian churches in Iowa:
Collegiate United Methodist Church, Ames, Iowa, February 15, 2007
West Des Moines United Methodist Church, January 7, 2007
Westminster Presbyterian Church (Des Moines), November 7, 2006
Bethesda Lutheran Church, Ames, IA, December 7, 2003
Unitarian Fellowship, Ames, IA, November 10, 2002
Open-minded Christians do want to hear an alternative viewpoint
from me, and we have had many constructive discussions.
If I am not anti-religious enough to be speaking in churches, why am I too anti-religious for public universities?
5. Avalos spearheaded an atheist plot in Iowa
No true. Any success against ID in Iowa has come because we have assembled a coalition that cuts across religious lines, and includes Christians, Jews, Hindus, and secularists. They all recognize that being against ID is to be against pseudo-science, and not to be against religion.
Christians can recognize that, even if God exists, there are bad arguments for the existence of God (and ID is one of them).
Pro-ID forces in Iowa can usually muster only fundamentalists, who write letters in the local papers defending ID with biblical passages. Thus, these letter writers only expose the fact that ID is a religious position, and not a scientific one.
The Discovery Institute has only itself to blame for its string of defeats in academia and in court. The DI underestimated Iowans who know the difference between science and religion. And these smear tactics will not help the DI with those who know my academic record best.
Do you have to hand links to the specific spots where the DI folk have made the claims against you that you are responding to?
I don’t have any doubt they are real (having seen similar and worse), but if I were to draw this to the attention of others who aren’t so familiar with the ways of the creationists, they might wonder if the DI folk have really said those things.
Fighting Words is now on hold for me at my university library and I will be getting it pretty shortly.
The quotations that West used are also pretty easy to see as being part of a larger context and I’m glad PZ that you fleshed them out. What startles me most about these pseudo-literalists (b/c they can’t really be literalists) is the way in which they are unable to consistently apply a definition: genocide for example. The mere suggestion that the parts of the Old Testament – of the Judges, the entrance into Canaan, the angel of death in Egypt – are genocidal simply shuts down their ears and brains. They seem literally unable to weigh that evidence at all and then determine if it’s genocide or not.
Thanks for the updates.
Avalos is not a scientist, and so cannot critique ID
Gee, THAT rule would kick out pretty much everyone at UD, especially O’Leary and Dave Scot! I’m glad to hear that out of intellectual honesty, Bill will now dismiss them, to be sure that UD is above reproach.
Oh, I forgot: you have to be a scientist before you can condemn ID, but you don’t have to be a scientist to argue in favor of ID. Gotcha.
Further proof that ID is nothing more than religious apologetics is how the promotion of martyrs and creation of villains has always been the cornerstone of their movement. Have to do something to keep busy when you’re a ‘scientific’ movement that doesn’t do science…
Avalos is not a scientist, and so cannot critique ID
Gee, THAT rule would kick out pretty much everyone at UD, especially O’Leary and Dave Scot! I’m glad to hear that out of intellectual honesty, Bill will now dismiss them, to be sure that UD is above reproach.
Oh, I forgot: you have to be a scientist before you can condemn ID, but you don’t have to be a scientist to argue in favor of ID. Gotcha.
Further proof that ID is nothing more than religious apologetics is how the promotion of martyrs and creation of villains has always been the cornerstone of their movement. Have to do something to keep busy when you’re a ‘scientific’ movement that doesn’t do science…
Avalos is not a scientist, and so cannot critique ID
Gee, THAT rule would kick out pretty much everyone at UD, especially O’Leary and Dave Scot! I’m glad to hear that out of intellectual honesty, Bill will now dismiss them, to be sure that UD is above reproach.
Oh, I forgot: you have to be a scientist before you can condemn ID, but you don’t have to be a scientist to argue in favor of ID. Gotcha.
Further proof that ID is nothing more than religious apologetics is how the promotion of martyrs and creation of villains has always been the cornerstone of their movement. Have to do something to keep busy when you’re a ‘scientific’ movement that doesn’t do science…
Ack! Sorry for the triple post! I got a big fat error message each time, so I assumed it didn’t go through (which is what big fat error messages *usually* mean).
To nitpick one particular point (and assuredly not a crucial one) from Dr. Avalos’s comment:
The “Unitarian Fellowship” in Ames (actually the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames – http://www.uufames.org/ ) is, like the vast majority of congregations within the national Unitarian Universalist Association, not a “Christian church.” As its members page ( http://www.uufames.org/members.html ) states, among the Fellowship’s parishioners are “Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, humanists, atheists, and many others.” Indeed, Unitarian Universalism has not been a Christian entity since the Association was born in a merger in 1961. Christians have been a minority within the UUA since day one, and believers in the supernatural only amount to a tiny handful. (UU Christianity–indeed, UU theism–is extremely liberal, for better and for worse; almost all Christian and/or theist UUs contend that theirs is a non-supernatural God. As far as I can tell, Dawkins’ term “Einsteinian religion” describes these folks’ ideas fairly well.)
I’m a UU (though not an Iowan), and I’m as atheist as anyone–check out my posts upthread. I’m also an enthusiastic fan of PZ, Dawkins, Harris and company. I’m guessing I’m going to like Fighting Words a lot.
So please don’t make the mistake of thinking that all (or even a consensus of) Unitarian Universalists are Christians or supernaturalists. There is definitely a longstanding struggle within UUism that bears significant similarities to the conciliation-vs.-activism battle often witnessed on this blog, but the “activist atheist” side includes plenty of UUs–including, I suspect, at least a few at the Fellowship in Ames.
The DI complains that Avalos “equates” the bible with Mein Kampf, when he merely says they are “similar.” More evidence of DI’s love for rhetoric over scholarship.
“The DI complains that Avalos `equates’ the bible with Mein Kampf, when he merely says they are `similar.’ More evidence of DI’s love for rhetoric over scholarship.”
Wow, that clarifies matters. Imagine if someone said, “Dan, your wife is not a money-grubbing, two dollar, prostitute. She is just similar to one.” I’m sure you would find this “modest” version no less offensive.
“Do you have to hand links to the specific spots where the DI folk have made the claims against you that you are responding to?”
I’d like to see those links as well. I don’t recall those claims being made.
I also ran across a blog where you wrote that you were once a fundie/creationist preacher until you realized the bible was a crock.
When a fundie preacher receives that enlightening revelation that the cosmos arose from absolutely nothing (quite an unscientific claim, IMHO), they pretty much find themselves out of a job. Shoot, that would suck.
Oh, wait…the next best place for them to go would be our public universities.
That would make for a good poll…how many university religion instructors hold atheist or agnostic faith beliefs? How does that number compare with those who hold to other religious beliefs. Has anyone run across a poll of this type?
I don’t think we’re very sorry that the truth hurts Tommy.
Genocide is endorsed in both books.
It’s a bit worse than that. The Bible endorses inflicting infinite suffering on each of billions of people. And that’s in the “nice” New Testament.
*boggle*
Godwin notwithstanding, Hitler just wasn’t in that league.