It’s true, according to Bible scholar Joel Green, who argues that in order to be a good Bible scholar, one must be a devoted Christian.

The best biblical scholars genuinely love Scripture, and come to its pages ready to hear God’s address. They exhibit both a certain posture vis-à-vis the text and their own formation in relation to it, and a commitment to the hard work of reading Scripture that takes seriously the nature of the text.

The former involves the life of discipleship, of Christian formation, of worship, and of prayer. As I have written elsewhere: “Formed by our reading of Scripture, we become better readers of Scripture. This is not because we become better skilled at applying biblical principles. The practice of reading Scripture is not about learning how to mold the biblical message to contemporary lives and modern needs. Rather, the Scriptures yearn to reshape how we comprehend our lives and identify our greatest needs. We find in Scripture who we are and what we might become, so that we come to share its assessment of our situation, encounter its promise of restoration, and hear its challenge to serve God’s good news.”

Huh. I’d argue sort of the opposite. The challenge of being a good scholar is to maintain some objectivity and ability to assess one’s biases. Being a devout Christian doesn’t help studying the Bible as a historical document — it also doesn’t preclude it, although it does generate many subjective obstacles. It also makes you a crap scholar if you automatically dismiss the contributions of atheist, Muslim, and Jewish scholars.

So I can keep studying spiders after all! Yay!

Everything was working against me. I took Lutheran confirmation classes in about 1970, and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life didn’t come out until 1983. And even when it did, they cut this scene out of the movie! Tsk. I would have appreciated learning more about the life of Martin Luther.

There is a new Contrapoints video, and it’s about comedy, as you can tell from the title, “The Darkness”. I think there were some insightful ideas in there, in particular the argument that edgy humor comes from exploring ones own place of darkness with familiarity and detail, and that one way that “edgy” comics fail is that they try to describe someone else’s darkness, while being completely unfamiliar with the terrain. She uses as an example Ricky Gervais, who made a Netflix comedy special where the opening was about mocking trans people. He identifies as a chimp rather than an attack helicopter, and there — I’ve just revealed the sole scrap of originality and creativity in the whole routine.

It’s a good point, and a different way of looking at the whole “punching up” vs. “punching down” distinction. In part the problem is comedians who babble on promoting their audiences’ prejudices rather than using humor to expose a truth.

Anyway, she also briefly expresses scorn at the privileged, white, atheist male comedian who can’t even see the place of pain they are invested in scoring points against. Ricky Gervais is a great example — there’s a loud and proud atheist who has become a terrible scab marring the movement. I thought of another example, too: a prominent cringe-beast whose flaws were obvious from the very beginning. I speak of Bill Maher, the unwatchable one, the Friday night affliction on HBO. And just by coincidence, I ran across an entertaining criticism of Maher.

Bill Maher, like Kevin Smith movies, was a vice that I could excuse in my teens and 20s but now seems extremely dated, disconcertingly bro-ish, and just all-around embarrassing. As Maher himself would surely explain, in a gratingly patronizing tone, the whole point of Politically Incorrect was to push the envelope. Though much of the time the show was actually pretty tame, unless you consider Carrot Top and Tom Arnold making jokes about home-schooled kids to be the height of edgy television. But there were other moments from Politically Incorrect that remain genuinely provocative, and not in a good way — like when Maher explained to a black woman that the n-word was acceptable for white people to use because you hear it so much in rap songs. Now there’s an argument you could imagine Rush Limbaugh making today.

When you watch that clip, it seems clear that Maher was always a jerk, rather than evolving into a jerk later on. Now I’m wondering, was he ever funny? As a stand-up comic, Maher is generally respected as a legacy act. But on Real Time, he can be painfully, excruciatingly unfunny. Maher might want to believe that people object to his jokes because they’re social justice warriors who can’t take a shot of unvarnished truth. But the actual substance of his humor doesn’t support that belief.

There are still some great atheist comedians out there — George Carlin was mostly hilarious, Eddie Izzard is still worth listening to. But I think we’re beginning to see the genre eroding into the Dennis Miller swamp.

Related:

this incredible graph from a Koch outfit is secretly amazing pic.twitter.com/Yw4FFlI1cS

— Christian McCrea (@christianmccrea) March 2, 2019

How do you quantify “artistic standards” like that?

Since he’s been kicked off of most social media platforms, Alex Jones’ revenue has been drying up, and he’s getting desperate. He’s at the stage where he’s appearing on bottom-feeding podcasts trying appeal to his hardcore conspiracy theorist fans to get their approval, which means he’s battier than ever. Go here; it’s just a series of short clips from the Joe Rogan show (ewww), in which Jones feverishly declares that “they” have made fricken’ deals with interdimensional aliens and a post-human error has occurred and none of us are going to make it. He’s not looking particularly good, either.

Now I’m wondering what’s going to happen with another crazed, not-very-bright, delusional manipulator notices the walls closing in on him…only this guy has a button to our nuclear arsenal, and, presumably, direct access to the interdimensional aliens. If we’re lucky he’ll just go on the Joe Rogan show, where all the crackpots go for a little friendly stroking.

George Pell’s own defense lawyer begged for leniency in the treatment of his client. These are his excuses. Below the fold because they are revolting.

[Read more…]

In 2016, Pell wrote an essay titled “A wise reply to atheism’s strongest argument”. It gets off to a bad start — don’t brag about how wise your answer is before you’ve even given it — but it gets even worse.

You might be wondering what atheism’s strongest argument might be, and I’ll cut to the chase: Pell thinks it’s the argument from evil. Personally, I don’t find it very compelling or interesting, because it presupposes a god whose purposes we’re supposed to be arguing over, but OK, I can see where a Catholic would find it relevant. And then…this is child rapist George Pell. I would think he’s spent a lot of time contemplating evil, rationalizing evil acts, fantasizing about evil, condemning evil people, practicing evil. He’s an evil authority! If anyone is going to be an expert on justifying how god would allow evil to persist, it’s a devout evil-doer who has to be having an interesting internal monologue on the acts he has committed.

Evil and suffering constitute the most formidable argument against monotheism, for those who believe in the existence of one good and transcendent Creator God.

So I settled down to read a challenging argument about how a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient being could co-exist with evil in his personal hand-made universe, and boy was I disappointed. The entirety of his argument is one paragraph. One short paragraph. Most of the essay is namedropping philosophers and theologians and explaining how the resurgence of atheism should jolt us out of our silence and indifference because oh, this is such an important question, and isn’t suffering such a wonderful gift from God yadda yadda yadda. The Catholic bullshit gets thick in there.

But here is the one paragraph which purports to answer the whole Problem of Evil.

I believe that the intellectual arguments now available to be drawn from biology (the discovery of DNA) and from physics and chemistry and the fantastic improbabilities necessary for evolution from the Big Bang to humans, mean that the rational or metaphysical path to the Supreme Intelligence is easier for us than in the past. Thinkers are coming to God from or through science.

It’s lies and nonsense through and through, and it isn’t even relevant to the question.

The intellectual arguments from biology and physics and chemistry are all about the fundamentally natural properties of our universe. They don’t say a god did it; they say chemistry happens whether a god wills it or not. The probability argument is not an answer to the evil argument, and you can’t use improbability to claim that the current state of life couldn’t possibly arise without design and purpose. Also, the more science you’ve got in your life, the less need you have for silly mythology, so no, with few exceptions, scientists aren’t suddenly flocking to church every Sunday.

This isn’t what I’d be interested to hear from Pell. God did wicked things; George Pell sexually molested 13 year old boys. Is he going to claim that DNA and physics and chemistry and biology compelled him to force his penis into a child’s mouth? That it was fantastically improbable that he was wracked with sexual obsessions, therefore God must have made him do it? Save it for the trial defense. I’d like to hear how a man who thinks he is good can commit gross, unforgivable crimes.

Maybe I should just read Dostoevsky instead.

I despise “psychics”, so I’m happy to see John Oliver go after them. He makes a very good point, too, that those media personalities like “Dr” Oz and “Dr” Phil who cheerfully endorse psychic quackery on their shows are just as evil.

It wouldn’t be John Oliver if they didn’t have a gimmick. This time, they’ve set up a website with their “psychic”. Go ahead, get a reading. It’s just as accurate as John Edward.

Adam Lee says a lot of things about the atheist movement I’ve said before — the deplorable leaders, the avid adoption of alt-right ideology, the islamophobia and misogyny, the dominance of awful people over YouTube atheism. He ticks off all the same check boxes I do.

But one thing different is that he ends on a note of optimism. I think he makes an important point here that I’m typically too exhausted to care about anymore — it’s not all bad and hopeless.

It can’t be denied that many prominent atheists, as well as some of the louder and most vehement voices in the community, have supported Alt Right ideology and White male supremacy. However, many of the larger atheist and secular groups have gone in the opposite direction and are quietly engaged in serious work on social-justice and intersectional issues. Organizations like the American Humanist Association, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the atheist charity Foundation Beyond Belief have a solid record of supporting women’s equality and reproductive justice, promoting the voices of people of color, and supporting non-church-based charitable programs in underserved communities worldwide.

These groups and others like them have recognized that society is diversifying, and so must the atheist movement. To remain narrowly focused on the issues of greatest concern to White men, and no others, would lead the secular community into an ideological dead end. To actively scorn the concerns of women and people of color isn’t just morally abhorrent, but self-eradicating. As for atheists, there are strong currents pulling the movement in both directions. Which one will win out, and how that victory will reshape the movement’s priorities, are very much open questions.

It’s true — some of the best, most inspiring people I’ve met have been atheists, and they do sometimes end up in leadership positions in good organizations, too often with little fanfare. Part of the problem here is that it’s easy to be loudly aghast at the scattered assholes with loud voices, and overlook the majority who share decent progressive values. While religious people are also mostly good, there’s always this one commonality they hold: an intellectual and emotional commitment to raving lunacy, proudly held. When I would attend atheist conferences, one of the biggest reliefs was finding oneself in a community where the superstitious foolishness of religious gatherings was gone, and it was a welcome absence.

We just went looking for other bad ideas in our groups, and we let them taint that joy, rather than simply casting them into the void, where they belong.

One other factor I have to mention is that the villains of atheism were passionately dedicated to making sure their views, and only their views, were allowed to be expressed. I had a conversation with a conference organizer who was feeling me out to see if I’d be willing to speak at their event, and I was…but they then explained that it was a tentative invite, because while the majority of the committee were eager to get me, there was this one guy (there’s always one guy) who hated me and was going to raise a big stink. I never heard from them again. Which was fine…I don’t feel a right to a platform.

But that’s what’s been happening: a few loud voices can dominate the discourse, and the tolerant Left tends to avoid the whole idea of “domination”, while the intolerant Right embraces it. It leads to an asymmetry that influences our perception.

In addition, the bad voices are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to secure that dominance. Just look at our Republican party. Or look at YouTube, where the name of the game is fooling the Algorithm, and using endless sock puppet accounts to generate an illusion of overwhelming numbers. Those assholes have built an amazing Potemkin village to subvert any principle of democracy or merit.

It’s hard because I’m so goddamn tired of the game any more, but I have to try and remember there is a virtue to godlessness, and a majority of good people in atheism. It’s just been subverted by an unscrupulous minority.