Biblical authority as a justification for misogyny

I greatly appreciate Dan McLellan’s work — he’s a serious scholar of the Bible and he often addresses the shallow assumptions some people make about their religion, and delves into the complicated history of Christianity. Sometimes, though, I think his focus on Biblical scholarship can lead him to miss the big, glaring horror behind belief.

This video begins with an arrogant Christian prick reading triumphantly from the Bible. It confirms his prejudice that women are less important, and that their purpose is to bear children.

I was surprised at McLellan’s criticism. The guy is quoting this verse of the Bible, 1 Timothy 2:11:

Women are to learn in silence with complete submission. I do not allow a woman to teach or to hold authority over a man. She should keep silent. For Adam was formed first, and Eve afterward. Furthermore, Adam was not deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and fell into sin. However, women will be saved through the bearing of children, provided that they continue to persevere in faith, love, and holiness, marked by modesty.

McLellan rightly points out that this book of the Bible is presented as the work of the apostle Paul, but it isn’t — it’s regarded by scholars as the work of someone else altogether. Fine. So? Those words and ideas are ugly and do harm, no matter which ancient evangelist wrote them, and those words are canonically in the Christian Bible. Are the words of Paul generally regarded as true and accurate representations of Christian belief? That’s one implication of McLellan’s criticism, that the only valid source of information is Paul’s writings.

My objection is to the blatant misogyny — the actual empirical evidence is that women are just as intelligent and just as worthy as men, and that there was no Adam & Eve & an apple, and therefore reality contradicts the literal stories told in the Bible. I don’t give a damn who wrote it. It’s just another example of how the wickedness in their holy book inspires the wickedness of smug young men, like the one in the video.

That’s the better argument, not quibbling over authorship, but simply talking to women and recognizing their personhood and autonomy and equal worth to men. It’s so weird to see a kid who doesn’t care about scholarship being rebuked for his lack of scholarship, when he’s treating the Bible in the same way he would an Andrew Tate podcast.

That’s beautiful, man

I might have to become a fan of the boxer, Mike Tyson. He has an ugly history, and now he’s going to be in a match with that jumped-up YouTube influencer, Jake Paul (it’s a fake match, with shortened rounds and padded gloves, but the prize money is real, tens of millions of dollars), and none of that is worthy of respect, but he had an interview with a young kid who asked him what his legacy would be. It sure won’t be boxing with Jake Paul, but this answer was excellent.

I don’t know. I don’t believe in the word ‘legacy.’ I just think that’s another word for ego. Legacy … means absolutely nothing to me. I’m just passing through.
…
I’m going to die, and it’s going to be over. Who cares about legacy after that? What a big ego. So I’m going to die — I want people to think that I’m this, I’m great? No, we’re nothing. We are dead. We’re dust. We’re absolutely nothing. Our legacy is nothing.

Can you really imagine somebody saying, ‘I want my legacy to be this or that’? You’re dead. You really want them to think about you? What’s the audacity to think, ‘I want people to think about me when I’m gone’? Who the fuck cares about me when I’m gone? My kids, maybe, my grandkids. But who the fuck cares.

That is such a strong, honest reply, and I love it. It’s an anti-narcissist answer, and I wish more people would share it. I don’t know if Tyson is an atheist, but that kind of stoicism/nihilism is the kind of atheism I favor.

A theological dilemma

A silly speculation: what if you die, go to heaven, and discover that a god had a set of fundamental rules that it didn’t tell anyone about?

I was initially sympathetic to the idea that a god would judge you for doing harm to small helpless creatures — I avoid killing insects without cause — but then there were a few disparaging comments about spiders, natural given the god’s nature, and I started tallying up my invertebrate body count, and I realized that the video character’s tally of having killed 11,000 insects was pathetic.

I’d be going to bug hell, wouldn’t I?

Fluff and nonsense

I opened up the Washington Post this morning to see an article titled, what science says about the power of religion and prayer to heal. OK, I’ll bite. What does science say about the power of religion? The author begins with a little anecdote that says it all.

As a medical intern, I once treated a young woman with metastatic breast cancer, whose sparkling blue eyes looked up at me every morning with hope. I did as much as possible for her medically, but unfortunately, her cancer spread further. She developed ongoing fevers and nausea, and soon rarely glanced at me when I entered her room. Most of the days, she lay on her side, fatigued, her face turned to the wall.

She was Catholic, and one day, I noticed that a priest had started visiting her. A week later, when I entered the room, she looked up at me again and smiled. I sensed that she felt a renewed connection to something beyond her.

Sadly, she died a month later, but had seemed far less despondent. Her priest had offered her something that I could not.

Jesus, that’s grim. Noticing that a dying patient smiled at him once after a priest visited her is quite possibly the weakest, most pathetic evidence for the power of religion that I’ve ever heard. The patient died! Not only was she beyond the reach of prayer, but beyond the reach of medicine.

Oh, but we’re supposed to believe that fostering a positive outlook is a benefit. Why? Where’s the benefit? The best the author can do is tell us that polls show that 72% of Americans believe in the power of prayer…but that’s just telling us that a majority of Americans are gullible. Show me something that says it improves health outcomes, doctor!

He gives us four things that religion does.

But evidence suggests that having strong spiritual or religious beliefs, however defined, can assist psychologically in fighting, and coping with, illness. Here are some of the ways prayer and faith can affect patient health.

Brain changes: Neuroscience research shows that strong religious or spiritual beliefs are associated with thicker parts of the brain, providing neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair.

Purpose: Religion and spirituality, broadly defined, provide a sense of meaning, purpose and hope.

Meaning: Many patients come to find or construct their own sources of meaning. It may be through traditional faith or a belief in art, poetry, science, mathematics, nature or the universe. As one patient, who said he was “not religious,” once told me, “I believe in the Third Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroy; it merely goes on in another form.”

Social support: Religious and spiritual groups also commonly provide valuable social support and interactions. Such a group doesn’t need to be religious. It could be a yoga group, a book club, or a Facebook discussion group about Harry Potter.

I have a sense of “purpose,” but I am not religious. He undermines his statements about “meaning” and “social support” by mentioning that you don’t need religion to have them, so why demand that people follow a delusion to get them? By the way, that statement about the Third Law of Thermodynamics is not your salvation; if my house were to burn down, it’s no consolation to suggest that my home goes on as heat, gas, and ash.

But it’s his first claim that irritated me, this idea that religion/spirituality is associated with “thicker parts of the brain” that can provide “neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair”. WTF? How does that work?

That’s the only part of the article that includes a link, so I followed it to see what evidence he’s got. It leads to a systematic literature review published in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and it is a godawful hodgepodge of random results coupled to wishful thinking. It summarizes the observations made in EEG, PET scans, and fMRI to try and find a consistent, meaningful effect of religiosity on brain activity or morphology. It fails. It’s full of tables like this one.

You tell me: what does “greater posterior alpha” or “negative association between left medial orbitofrontal cortex volume and neurofeedback performance” mean in the sense of providing a benefit to the subject? Study after study is listed, and they all show different patterns of differences. These are all studies of religion/spirituality that, I would guess, are all looking for correlations of something, anything with religious belief, and they all publish whatever parameter they fish up. Never mind that religious experiences are diverse, or that the development of the brain is a complex process that is going to provide all kinds of spurious variations. You put people in complicated, sensitive machines, and you can get a number out. That’s publishable!

But what about that claim of neuronal reserves that made my spidey sense tingle? Here’s the bit where the Harv Rev Psych article talks about it. I’ve emphasized the words that represent guesswork.

Taken together, it is reasonable to speculate that these brain regions represent access to a neural reserve that likely results from the process of neuroplasticity. A greater neural reserve could, in turn, support an enhanced cognitive reserve that enables R/S people to cope better with negative emotions, more readily disengage themselves from excessive self-referential thinking (e.g., rumination), and ultimately be more resilient in the face of various psychopathologies.

They have no evidence for any of that. Saying that something is a result of “neuroplasticity” is meaningless — I’d go so far as to say that most of the variation in the brain is from neuroplasticity. The existence of a “neural reserve” is hypothetical and not demonstrated at all. You can’t just point to a thickened chunk of cortex and call it a “reserve”! They then go on to suggest that these “reserves” enable religious/spiritual people to cope with negative emotions and be more resilient, phenomena that were not evaluated in any of the studies!

That paragraph was pure, unadulterated bullshit. You don’t need a Ph.D. in neuroscience to see that — it’s an unsubstantiated collection of wishful thinking that should not have passed peer review. The whole paper is a tremendous amount of work, sifting through a huge literature that is shot through with delusional vagueness, trying to extract a few reliable, useful interpretations, and not finding any. The paper does not find evidence of neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair, but that does not stop the WaPo writer from claiming positively that it does.

I am once again confirmed in my expectation that any attempt to justify religion with science is only going to produce bad science.

The naturalistic fallacy is only to be deployed when favorable to your cause

Ken Ham is relieved that a gay penguin has died. Sphen and Magic, two male penguins in an Australian zoo, have had their unholy pairing broken up by the death of Sphen. Did you know that they’ve been used by secularists to claim that gay sex is natural and moral? (I don’t think so — it’s more that it’s clear same-sex behavior is not unnatural, since it occurs in, you know, Nature). According to Ham, though, it doesn’t count! Because they’re animals.

Yes, these penguins have been used to teach children that same-sex attraction is “natural” and therefore it must be moral. But animals are not moral creatures! And to impose human characteristics on animals is a fallacy called anthropomorphism.

I kind of agree. The relationship between Sphen and Magic does not say that this is how humans should behave; it only says that the rules various cultures have imposed on people are not universal and immutable…but then, that’s exactly what fundamentalists object to, that their rules are not absolute.

But ol’ Ken goes on to say his Bible does insist that monogamy between a man and a woman is the only allowable relationship.

Now, unlike penguins and other animals, humans are moral beings as we are made in the image of God. And God has written his laws on our hearts (Romans 2), which is why we have a conscience that knows the difference between right and wrong. Furthermore, God created marriage, so God defines marriage, and true marriage is one man for one woman as we learn in Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24.

One man and one woman? His patriarch, Abraham, had one official formal wife, Sarah, and two concubines, Hagar and Keturah. King David was married to Michal, Abigail, Ahinoam, Maakah, Haggith, Abital, Eglah, and Bathsheba, and others that we don’t have names for. That last one is an appalling story of sexism, misogyny, and murder that, we’re told, is a shining example of God’s forgiveness.

David first caught a glimpse of Bathsheba one evening while she was bathing on her rooftop. Lust overtook him, and even though Bathsheba was already married to a soldier named Uriah, David slept with her. When David found out she was pregnant, he tried to cover up his sin by calling Uriah home from the battlefield so that he could sleep with his wife. When Uriah refused to have relations with Bathsheba, out of duty and respect for the men still in battle, David sent him back into the war and had him killed so that Bathsheba would be free to marry him.

God sent the prophet Nathan to confront David about his grievous sin. David wholeheartedly repented and God mercifully forgave him, but the consequences of David’s sin plagued him for the rest of his days. Bathsheba’s first son died as a result of David’s transgression, but God gave them Solomon soon thereafter—who would one day take the throne and be listed in the lineage of our Savior.

Everything is OK if you make a show of repentance. That’s the lesson I learned from the Bible.

Oh, what a catastrophe the New Atheism was for lower-case “a” atheism

Fuck all of these guys

There is no doubt but that the New Atheism was a channel that directed people towards right-wing, conservative, anti-immigration politics. Eiynah explains it all, and I think she’s right.

This link between New Atheism and the far-right is a dangerous and an under-discussed one. This has never been demonstrated so starkly as when Richard Dawkins tweeted out a recommendation for a book by fellow atheist Douglas Murray.

The day after the mass shooting in Buffalo that was explicitly motivated by great replacement theory, by ideas like there being an outright “war on white people,” Dawkins chose to tweet praise for a book titled The War on the West. He called it “utterly superb” and urged his nearly three million followers to read it with an open mind and “forget about labels like right wing”…Because surely, among us secular friends, we can overlook an inconvenient term like that, even in the aftermath of a mass shooting underpinned by the same ideology.

I’ve been listening to the audio version of Murray’s book myself, and it is reminiscent of the incendiary rhetoric of former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. In his promotional podcast tour for this book, Murray talks repeatedly of an “outright war on white people.” He is losing patience, he says, done being polite with people who don’t “respect [his] ancestors, history and culture” – while disparaging other cultures for supposedly not contributing to “mathematical, scientific or artistic discoveries”. The combination of ignorance and arrogance is staggering, as this is patently, overwhelmingly untrue.

This is no dog whistle, it is an airhorn.

While I was attracted towards Dawkins’ ideas, at least I was never tempted by Murray. I was actively repulsed by Douglas Murray — he was just a garden variety Nazi wanna-be, fed on racist literature and never questioning it. It was one of the factors driving me away from New Atheism and the Dawkins fandom, evidence that he was losing it altogether with his fawning over Murray. Sure, Murray is an atheist — but he’s a cultural Christian atheist who values his local religion as a tool to bludgeon those foreign people with different traditions.

Of course, Douglas himself is no outsider to the atheist scene. He too is a well-known and prominent atheist figure, one who happens to lament the loss of Europe’s Christian heritage and the supposed identity-crisis caused by increased secularization. Despite this, he has been propped up in vocal anti-theist circles because, rather than consistency on the matter of critiquing religion, it is his views on Islam and immigration that are appealing to a certain crowd. Murray has a long history of cloaking extreme statements in a posh accent, his rhetoric has been described as gentrified xenophobia. Which is putting it mildly.

Remember Dawkins’ declaration that he was a “cultural Christian” because he like hymns and church bells, and hated Islam because it was “indecent”? That sounds like he’s been hanging out with Douglas Murray too much.

Any much is too much.

Let’s not forget Sam Harris, who has also been sipping from the chalice of Douglas Murray.

Harris often claims that ‘woke identity politics’ is destroying the path to a harmonious ‘colourblind’ world. But his actions and endorsements do not paint a picture of someone who truly prioritizes colour-blindness, as seen by his repeated promotion of race and IQ, or his endless propping up of Douglas Murray.

The War on the West is overflowing with racialized language. The first chapter is even called “Race.” It wouldn’t be unbelievable as a parody of a far-right book featured in The Onion. But colourblind Harris has been filled with praise, referring to it as a “fantastic read and a doubly fantastic listen.”

Interestingly, Harris’s attitude changes completely when it comes to anti-racists like Ta-Nehisi Coates whom he refers to on several occasions as a “pornographer of race”—not Douglas Murray who talks obsessively of race, or even Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a book funded by the white supremacist organization Pioneer Fund. In fact Harris is also a dedicated defender and promoter of Charles Murray, referring to him as a “deeply rational and ethical thinker” and “the intellectual who was treated most unfairly in my lifetime.”

Has anyone else noticed that all of the worst people associated with atheism have been gravitating together into one horrible toxic clump? And that they’re all making apologies for conservative Christianity nowadays?

“Iles” is an anagram for “lies”

Martyn Iles, the heir to the pile of dishonest shit that is Answers in Genesis, has posted a tirade about the sin of lying.

One of the biggest changes | have seen over the course of my not-that- long life is the normalisation of lying.
Yes, at the level of worldview and culture . .. “woke” is effectively an “objective truth is evil” belief system. Politics is a festival of lies to the point of being a depressing joke. The media lied so much they’re dying. But also at the level of relationships. People actively deceive each other, deny their behaviour, say whatever is expedient to the moment, or hide their true agenda, simply as a way of life.
And when you catch them out, they kick you out of their life.
It’s become shockingly normal.
Effortless, brazen, easy liars, and deceivers are multiplying. People who have become so calloused in their own self-interest and self-serving that they say whatever it takes.
I have sat in rooms where apparently reputable people tell outright lies to get what they want or avoid scrutiny. It’s so shocking that your first assumption is to imagine that you must be mistaken.
Are you a Christian? Then you tell the truth. Ruthlessly. Consistently. Without fail. Without fear. Every time. Because truth is good, no matter what. .. even when we feel like it will cost us. The cost will ultimately be for good.
The closest you will ever come to a lie is remaining silent in those exceptional situations where wisdom demands it.
And if your goals cannot be achieved with honesty, then your goals are simply wrong, and you are on a wrong path, no matter how self- righteous you may feel about it.
Remember, the Holy Spirit is called “the Spirit of truth™—and Satan is called “the father of lies.” Your denials, misrepresentations, masked agendas, and self-serving deceptions only serve one of those two. Really, this issue is a barometer for measuring how active Satanism is in a given place or situation. If there is a pattern or system of deception, you know what’s up.
Stay true.

The most brazen, easy liars I’ve ever met have all been creationists. I am reeling at the level of projection and the lack of self-awareness in his post.

If this is an admission that Satanism is active at Answers in Genesis, I might agree with some of it.