Building better nations with better foundations

I’m sorry, I had this little afterthought after writing the last post, in which I briefly compared the Bible to Shakespeare, and judged Shakespeare the better source. And then I ran across some standard web babble about America being a Christian nation, and that we have to get back to the Bible fundamentals, and I thought…wait a minute, the Bible is a truly horrible sourcebook for defining a national character. Why not be more selective in our literary foundations?

Let’s not be a Christian nation — it’s modeling after an ugly source. Let’s all pick better heroes. The United Kingdom should aspire to be a Shakespearean nation: literate, complex, and bawdy. Ireland can be a Joycean nation, verbally playful and inventive. The United States, obviously, should try harder to be a Mark Twain nation: cynical, humane, sacrilegious, and humorous. There is potential for this notion to go horribly wrong — Czechoslovakia, please do not become a Kafkaesque nation — but you know, steeping our countries’ youth in the best of our literature and openly saying that this is how our country could be sets up universally better role models than that demented Jehovah character.

The only problem is the variety of choices (although maybe that really isn’t a problem so much as a benefit). I’d also kind of want to live in a Melville nation, mainly because I want to see the kids wearing bracelets that say WWQD (“What would Queequeg Do?”).

Other people will have to leave suggestions for their literary exemplars of their national character. I don’t want to make the mistake of suggesting that Sweden Finland can be the Moomintroll Nation.

The Bible is the Bad Book

Jonathan Kay is some conservative Canadian columnist who doesn’t think much, but has nonetheless managed to write something that amused me. It’s an article in which he proposes his solution to just about everything: Everyone should read the Bible (especially atheists). I know already that a lot of you are already giggling: we have read the bible, that’s why many of us are atheists. But as you’ll see, it’s not just the title, but the whole article has this smugly unaware air — he hasn’t thought at all deeply about this subject, but he can wag his finger and lecture us sternly on the conventional wisdom with blissful pomposity.

You might be wondering why he’s taking special pains to hector the atheists. It’s because we’re especially annoying — he was driven to write his article because some damned atheist, Michael Arsenault, is campaigning against the Gideons invading public schools to hand out bibles.

Religious extremists often frighten me, offend me, disgust me. But in terms of provoking irritation, none compare to the militantly godless.

Wait…the Gideons are the ones pushing their faith on schoolkids; Arsenault is only asking them to stop doing that. How is it he’s the irritating one? Kay’s logic is awesome: it’s because religious fanatics believe that the omnipotent lord of the universe has told them to do that, but atheists do it all on their lonesome, without that excuse. Atheists using their brain = massively irritating. Christians slavishly obeying ranting preacher = well that’s all right then.

But there’s even more cluelessness! We are apparently supposed to worship the bible, no matter what our religious beliefs, and Mr Kay obligingly gives us an abbreviated summary of the basic Biblical concepts we must master.

I am not a Christian. But I still keep on my National Post desk a well-thumbed copy of the King James Bible I received from my Moral & Religious Education teacher in 1979. I can’t claim to have read the whole thing, but I have read enough of it to understand basic concepts, such as the genealogy of Abraham’s immediate descendants; the flight of the Israelites from Egypt; the description of Jesus’ life and death contained in the Gospels; and the eschatology of Revelation. Even atheists must understand these concepts if they are to have an educated understanding of our world, for they have a direct bearing on everything from the modern Middle East, to the popularity of Rick Santorum, to the plot of Justin Cronin zombie novels.

So one of the important things we atheists should learn is Abraham’s genealogy? Why? I also suspect some blithe ignorance on Kay’s part: the notorious begats of Genesis 5 are the descendants of Adam; the further begats of Genesis 10 are the descendants of Noah. There are some complicated summaries of Abraham’s descendants, for instance in Genesis 25:

Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Ketu’rah.

And she bare him Zimran, and Jokshan, and Medan, and Mid’i-an, and Ishbak, and Shu’ah.

And Jokshan begat Sheba, and Dedan. And the sons of Dedan were As’shurim, and Let’ushim, and Le’ummim.

And the sons of Mid’i-an; Ephah, and Epher, and Hanoch, and Abi’dah, and Elda’ah. All these were the children of Ketu’rah.

And Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac.

But unto the sons of the concubines, which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country.

So what, exactly, is the basic concept here? Are we supposed to memorize these names? What is the relevance of Ishbak, Let’ushim, and Elda’ah? Would Canada be a better place with a greater appreciation of the unimportance of Abraham’s many nameless concubines?

Does Mr Kay know that the flight of the Israelites from Egypt was a myth of an event that didn’t happen? There is no archaeological evidence to support the story in Exodus. And again, spell out the relevance, please. It’s a scrap of pseudohistory.

Similarly, vague umbly-mumbly about Jesus’ life is nonsense about a god-man who did not exist, a collection of legends with no primary sources, and no reason to trust the veracity of the authors, who were all religious fanatics with motivation to inflate the grains of truth in the story. We’d be better off throwing that garbage on the trash heap.

And seriously, we’re supposed to know the eschatology of the book of Revelation? I’ve read it for laughs — that stuff is insane. All we need to know is that there is a body of deranged literature which deluded fanatics use to justify violence and a hope for the imminent destruction of the universe; there are no truths in the prophecies at all, and the only people who really need to know them in detail are the experts in psychopathology who are trying to untangle the delusions that drive dangerous human beings.

Here’s the one great truth you need to know. The bible is a bad book. It’s a nearly unreadable mess of contradictory stories, ancient political propaganda, arcane tribalisms, bizarre rituals, and the bragging of petty provincial bullies. There are occasional scraps of genuine literary quality imbedded in it, but it is 95% shit…and unfortunately, the book has been granted such extravagantly unwarranted reverence that people refuse to recognize the shit and worship it all uncritically. Which leads to columnists telling us to read the bible for the genealogies and Revelation, rather than Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon, and whole American industries striving to replace all of science with a few paragraphs from Genesis.

Kay also makes the tiresome argument that the King James Bible is full of idioms that have common currency in the English, therefore…what? I would not deny that the bible has been influential in Western history, but then, so has cholera — I think recognition of the importance of both is essential for an educated person, but I do not endorse being inoculated with either.

In his 2010 book, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, David Crystal concluded that the King James Bible alone created twice as many modern English idioms (think “fly in the ointment”) as all of Shakespeare’s work combined. And even these are only a small fraction of the thousands of idioms given to us by predecessor Bibles, such as the Tyndale, Bishops’ and Geneva variants. The English we speak today and the English of the Bible are inseparable. A common phrase such as “brother’s keeper,” for instance, loses its meaning to someone ignorant of the story of Cain and Abel.

This is a false argument. You certainly can understand that simple phrase without reading the Bible, and you can read the Bible without understanding the phrase. How often have you heard “Am I my brother’s keeper?” used by Christians as an excuse to avoid responsibility, vs. recognizing that it was a transparent rationalization by a murderer? I’d argue instead that many of these well-worn idioms have acquired meanings independent of their sources, and that trying to tie them to Christianity or Judaism ignores their modern usage.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there is a great deal of our modern language that arose from the Bible — evolutionary biologists do not deny the significance of antecedents! But that is not sufficient cause to demand that everyone must learn from the archaic and often irrelevant original source.

That more idioms arose from the Bible than Shakespeare is no virtue. Imagine a table with two books: a copy of the Bible, and the very least of Shakespeare’s plays — say, Troilus and Cressida. Which do you think will be better written, more interesting, more humane, and more coherent? Shakespeare, hands down. Shakespeare was an author who was certainly informed by the Bible, but he was also a literary genius who used the clever 5% and left out the 95% shit, plucking the gems out of the dungheap and giving us a better story and a better morality.

Kay ought to recognize this fact; he even gives an example that ought to have alerted him that his thoughtless assumption that the Bible was a good book was wrong.

My children are too young for the Bible (as I learned from an unsuccessful and unintentionally terrifying experiment at bed-time reading with Robert Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis) — so I had to explain concepts like “wickedness” to them as they arose in Montgomery’s text. [He was also reading them Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables–pzm]

I love Crumb’s Genesis — most people have not actually read the Bible at all, and translating it into a different medium — especially a particularly faithful translation — can jar them into looking at it more closely. And what you learn from Genesis is that it is a truly awful, evil, wretched little book. Kay’s children could see that. Now why can’t Kay himself?

Kentucky has nothing to complain about

I’m going to be a contrarian here. I think the Kentucky legislature has made a perfectly sensible budget decision.

Here’s the deal: in the current budget, a couple of interesting decisions have been made.

Funding for K-12 education: -$50 million

Tax breaks for the Ark Park: +$43 million

Highway improvements for the Ark Park: +$11 million

See? Almost perfectly balanced: all the money handed over to creationists is taken away from education.

And it makes perfect sense, too. It’s not as if the next generation might need a high school diploma to take advantage of the employment opportunities provided by Answers in Genesis. In fact, it’s probably a selling point to the creationists to have an especially ignorant work force already in place.

Good work, Governor Beshear!

(Also on Sb)

Indonesia does make Rhode Island look relatively sane

Yeah, I went there and made fun of Rhode Island again. It is our latest national example of fuming ignorance, you know.

But let’s put it in perspective. Nowhere in the US is as awful as Indonesia.

An Indonesian man could be hit with a five-year jail term after posting “God does not exist” on an atheist group’s Facebook Page.

The civil servant, described as a 31-year-old named Alexander, told the Jakarta Globe that an angry mob had accosted him and beat him up on Wednesday, after reaching his office at the Dharmasraya Development Planning Board.

The man moderates a Facebook Page for the Minang Atheists, and says that in addition to his impromptu punishment at the hands of a baying mob, he’s also facing dismissal from his job and a prison sentence under strict blasphemy laws. Furthermore, Dharmasraya Police Chief Chairul Aziz said Alexander is currently in “protective custody”, adding that Alexander was afraid of physical assault.

Hmmm. I’m scratching “visit Indonesia” off my bucket list.

Rhode Island synonymous with bigotry?

I had not realized how stupidly bigoted the people of Cranston, Rhode Island were becoming. After losing a fight against the Constitution, being slapped down for demanding the right to maintain a blatantly sectarian, religious prayer in a public school, they’ve been threatening and persecuting Jessica Ahlquist, the atheist who was brave enough to bring the law to bear on the promotion of religious views in a school.

Now a new development: the Freedom From Religion Foundation wanted to send flowers to Ahlquist: none of the florists in Cranston would do it. They had to find a florist in a more distant town to do the deed.

It’s all shockingly petty and discriminatory.

Here’s the list of cowards and bigots, four florists who would not deliver a bouquet to a teenage girl because she’s an atheist.

Twins Florist

Floral Express

Flowers by Santilli

Greenwood Flower

If you want to contact them and express your displeasure, please remember to be civil.

Why I am an atheist – Hazuki Azuma

Before anything else, let’s get some definitions nailed down first: I call myself atheist, but it’s only in the weakest sense of the word, and nearly anyone who doesn’t understand the orthogonal nature of atheism (belief claim) versus agnosticism (knowledge claim) would call me an agnostic. That is, while I have no specific God-belief, I also don’t claim positively that there are no Gods, no way, no how, no where, no sir. Formal or dogmatic atheism of this sort is at best unfalsifiable and at worst immediately self-refuting; even the Catholic Encyclopedia gets that much right.

With that said, here is my background: raised by a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, I am the oldest of three siblings, with a sister and a brother at 2 and 6 years younger respectively. All three of us went to CCD, but it seems like I was the only one it took hold of; my brother could best be described as “ignostic” and my sister is, sad to say, the living embodiment of every negative atheist stereotype on the planet. I mean it. She has no philosophical background, almost no knowledge of the history or mythology around any religion, and zero grounding in logic. Her entire argument can be summed up as “Religions people do stupid things, therefore all religion is wrong and there is no God, homie.” My parents, as you might expect, are extremely cavalier about their supposed beliefs, and I think it’s fair to call them Deists.

Unfortunately, the CCD program I went to was run by a bunch of hellfire and brimstone charismatic Catholics, and I personally got fire and brimstone pounded into me from a very young age. I believe this was responsible for a lifetime of panic disorder, OCD, anxiety, depression, and schizoid symptoms. It only got worse when I discovered (well, admitted to myself more like) that I was a lesbian around age 16, though the signs had been there since early junior high. Luckily, though, I had stumbled on either Deism or “liberal” Christianity without knowing it, and simply lived like my parents for a long time.

That changed around 2008, which was the start of a still-ongoing series of kafkaesque, frightening events which have so far lost me everything from jobs to a long-time lover to…well, if my parents hadn’t let me move back home I’d be dead dozens of times over. In April 2009, having had brushes with insanity, homeless, and death (and not in this order), the floodgates opened and I found myself in the middle of a perpetual religiously-fueled nervous breakdown. This is the sort of thing former fundamentalists usually describe: constant shakes, oppressive fear of hellfire, feeling as if some huge, angry deity has it out for you, and so forth. This led to over 2 and a half years of obsessive and unhealthy research into the origins of the Abrahamic religions, much study of Biblical languages and text criticism, and archaeology. The result is that most people think a) I have a Master’s in religious studies and b) I’m in the throes of terminal caffeine poisoning.

These have not been good years. My resting heart rate and blood pressure have spiked, I lost a lover of almost 4 years largely due to her inability to handle the panic, and in general I feel as if all my axons have been sandblasted. I am afraid of everything. But, thanks largely to people like Richard Carrier and Dan Dennett, I’m escaping the Abrahamic religions. I still have some residual fears left over, and forget what I learned when sleep-deprived or panicked. But progress is being made.

As to why I’m an agnostic-atheist specifically: evidence. Not just lack of evidence for certain propositions, but anti-evidence against them. I tend to play devil’s advocate (angel’s advocate?) for any position I oppose, as a way of keeping honest; yet despite that, no apologist from Craig to Bahnsen to van Til to Aquinas to Anselm to Bultmann has been able to offer competent theodicy and apologetics. Science has disproven the major tenets of the Abrahamic faiths. Bob Price and Richard Carrier have done stunning work in revealing the seeds of Christianity in Judaic thought (cf. “Not the Impossible Faith”) and while I am not a mythicist I agree with much of their scholarship. Quiet, softly-powerful Dan Dennet introduced me to philosophy, and Dan Fincke (Camels With Hammers) has personally been helping me work out some moral philosophy and meta-ethics, for which I owe him a debt that can never be repaid. And you, PZ, have given me a home base in the world of freethought, introducing me to many other likeminded people via Pharyngula.

I am on a quest to regain what was lost so long ago and re-integrate myself. I want to breathe innocently again, and not feel that I must hold all existence in contempt or still all desire for it being the root of suffering. I want to experience the quiet and peaceful wonder of existence, the universe-spanning transcendence Sagan and others spoke so lovingly of, and which is my birthright as a scientist. I want to sleep peacefully in the arms of the Milky Way above and wake refreshed to the blue of the sky. And someday, I want to love and be loved again. None of these are possible in a milieu that assumes for its foundation that we are evil, fallen creatures at the mercy of a Bronze-age throwback who thinks that an eternity of torture is meet for finite sins. I am learning that it is not so; but I have lost so much in the learning.

Hazuki Azuma

Alain de Botton is right about one thing

At the end of this video, he suggests that both sides will be out to shoot him. Yes, they will…well, I’m wielding a great heavy two-handed sword, but I’ll accept the general equivalence in intent of pointy sharp nasty weaponry and projectile-flinging guns. In this TED presentation, he advocates just adapting religion to atheism, something he calls Atheism 2.0, but which is actually just Religion 0.0 again.

This is not what the New Atheism is about. It’s the antithesis of what we’re after. We’ve had a few thousand years of the godly shuffle: here’s a temple to Zeus, he’s out so we swap in Jupiter; he’s not exciting, let’s try Isis; now Mithras; Jehovah; Jesus; Mohammed; back to Catholicism; on to Protestantism; oh, you’re atheists, eh, here’s a fine altar, hardly been used, we’ll just rededicate it to your god Athe then. New gods same as the old gods, right?

Wrong. It’s that the whole structure of religious thought is wrong, that we’ve been spending these few thousand years digging the same old pit, deeper and deeper, maybe putting a little more gilt on the shovel and roofing it over with ever fancier architecture, but now we’re saying maybe it’s time to climb out of the hole and do something different. I don’t want a new label, I want whole new modes of thought.

de Botton wants to pick and choose from religion and keep the good parts for atheism, which is a nice idea, but he seems to be totally lacking in sense and discrimination in what the virtues of religion are. And then, unfortunately for him, he picks a few examples of something he thinks religion got right, and one of them is education. Fuck me.

He suggests looking at how churches teach the ‘facts’ of their faith, and is quite enthusiastic about the importance of repetition. Repeat things five times, he says, and then you’ll master it; he just suggests replacing God and Jesus with Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Has de Botton ever been anywhere near a classroom?

Let me give an example from my teaching; I’m familiar with what he proposes. For instance, I teach genetics, and one of the big concepts there is linkage and mapping. I’ve stood up and lectured on Sturtevant’s original mapping experiments; I’ve given the class the numbers from his observations, and had them do the calculations themselves; I’ve then had students come up to the whiteboard and show everyone how it is done; and then I’ve gone through it again on the board, step by step. The students nod and smile, they understand, give ’em these numbers and they can trot through the calculations without hesitation.

Then on the test I give them the same problem, but I change the names of the alleles, swap in a zebrafish for a fruit fly, and half the class is totally stumped. “But you didn’t teach us how to do that problem,” they whine.

Repetition doesn’t work. It’s great for memorizing dogma, but it’s awful for mastering concepts. Students don’t understand, they just learn to robotically reiterate.

What I do is very different. I give them the Sturtevant data and we work through that problem, sure, but then we try other angles. Here’s data on the recombination frequency between pairs of loci; assemble them into a map. Here’s a triple-point cross, and the phenotypes of the flies we get back; calculate a map. Here’s a problem; work it out in groups. Here’s a problem; teach your partner how to solve it. Here’s a map; work backwards and predict the frequencies of phenotypes of a cross. You invent a problem, give it to me, and let’s see if I can get the right answer. Here’s how the problem is solved in flies, and fish, and nematodes, and humans, and tissue culture. Here’s how we do it with molecular biology techniques rather than genetics. What if the traits are all sex-linked? What if this locus interacts epistatically with that other locus? What if the two alleles at this locus are codominant?

The whole purpose of what we do in the science classroom is to get the students to understand that you can’t master the concept by rote memorization. You have to understand how someone came up with the idea in the first place, and you have to appreciate how understanding the concept gives you the mental toolkit to grasp novel instances of related phenomena. I could just show them a fly gene map and tell them to memorize it, I suppose, and teach them this idea that genes have locations on the chromosome, and leave it at that, but then they haven’t really learned anything deep, and haven’t learned how to integrate new observations into the concept. They’re also going to be totally unprepared for going off to grad school, reading McClintock’s papers, and learning that sometimes genes don’t have fixed locations on the chromosome.

So you can imagine how appalled I was listening to de Botton tell us that one thing society could benefit from adapting from religion is their approach to education. That’s simply insane. If you want to improve people’s understanding, we should model learning more on those secular, progressive, well-honed methods you find in good college classrooms, not church. Church is where you go to learn how to hammer dogma into people’s heads.

That is not what the New Atheism wants. Apparently, it’s what Atheism 2.0 wants, though.

His approach to art is about as horrifying — “religions…have no trouble telling us what art is about, art is about two things in all the major faiths; firstly, it’s trying to remind you of what there is to love, and secondly it’s trying to remind you of what there is to fear and hate…it’s propaganda”. To de Botton, that is a virtue. He suggests that museums ought to adopt the approaches of the churches, and organize their art by themes and tell everyone exactly what it all means. Jebus. Can you imagine a van Gogh hanging on the wall, with a little checklist next to it telling you what it is supposed to mean, and everyone dutifully reading the museum’s imperative and making sure they’ve got exactly the right interpretation? Some excited little girl makes the mistake of looking at the painting not the placard and telling her mother, “Look at the light and color shining through the confusion!” and the guard has to tap his stick on the wall and tell her, “No, it says CONFORM and OBEY or suffer. Can’t you read?”

Worst TED talk ever — well, it’s competitive with that horrible drivel from Elaine Morgan, anyway. de Botton is one of those superficial atheists who hasn’t quite thought things through and has such a blinkered optimistic perspective on religion that he thinks faith provides what reason does not.

Australian hospitality

I’m looking forward to the Global Atheist Convention (have you registered yet?). I had a grand time the last time I was in Australia, the organizers have been helpful and obliging, they were responsive to the few security concerns that came up, and they’ve been accommodating — my wife Mary is joining me in Melbourne this time around. And now they’ve gone above and beyond, and the fun people of Australia are providing chew toys for us while we’re there.

Carl Wieland’s organization, Creation Ministries International, is declaring themselves pleased to have the GAC in their country — they claim it will “stimulate Christian evangelism”. I remember well their huge representation at the 2010 convention: it was one quaintly bearded guy, his wife, and their daughters, weebling about outside the convention center with a sign. It was laughable. That year they also sent out an offer to debate some of the atheists — they were salivating at the prospect of nabbing Richard Dawkins — on creationism. The organizers flatly rejected them. Then they reached out to individuals — I gave them a visual response. The snubbing was vicious and unhesitating, so they aren’t going to try that again, I guess.

Instead, they’re publishing a rag called the Regal Standard, a 12-page propaganda paper, and asking people to buy them and give them away to the heathens. Yeah, that’s gonna work. I’m hoping I’ll be able to pick up a copy while I’m there.

I’m also not going to have a formal debate with these loons, but I do look forward to a few casual conversations with the sad, deluded few who will probably make brief and pathetic appearances outside the convention center. It’s always fun to travel to exotic lands, meet strange, wacky people, and gnaw on their goofy ideas for a bit. Keeps the fangs sniny and makes for a good laugh and always seems to end up on youtube.