Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I was all prepared to criticize a young atheist who refused to read the bible as literature in an English class.
Newton South High School officials dropped a requirement to read excerpts from the Bible for one student last month, after he refused to read the Biblical passages as a literature assignment because he is an atheist.
Jack Summers, a 15-year-old sophomore, said he objected to reading the religious text as part of an honors English class that also includes writings by William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, among others.
“This is the word of God. People take this literally … I don’t want to read about what they believe to be true,” said Summers, who described himself as an atheist.
That is so wrong. We are immersed in a culture that believes this nonsense is true, so we should read about it, the better to oppose it. It’s also a simple fact that, wrong as it is, that bible has been a major literary and cultural influence on the West…and it should be read critically for that reason alone. I think it’s a good idea for our schools to discuss these kinds of important influences, and I’m also in favor of teaching comparative religion in the public schools.
But then I read further and changed my mind.
South’s freshman curriculum lists the Book of Genesis from the Bible as a required academic subject in ninth-grade English courses, alongside “Lord of the Flies,” “Catcher in the Rye” and “House on Mango Street,” plus passages from “Romeo and Juliet.”
Whoa, hang on there: they want to teach the bible as literature, but their choice of an excerpt is the Book of Genesis? They pick one of the parts that purports to be a scientific and historical account of the world, that is cheesy, badly written, and wrong? Why not pick Revelation and really mess with their heads?
There are excellent parts to the bible, chapters that are not only beautifully written, but also would make students think: try Ecclesiastes, or even the book of Job, for dog’s sake, where everyone could chew over the ideas without inviting an intelligent teacher to have to help them understand all the elements of the story that are flat-out wrong. You cannot responsibly teach Genesis to 21st century students without explaining that it is not science, and that if you try to squeeze it into a literal, accurate description of our origins, you are both defying the evidence and buggering up the literature; and that all the accounts therein of the Chosen People’s tribulations and triumphs are utterly bogus tribal propaganda.
I am not sufficiently delusional that I would believe a public high school could actually teach Genesis critically, not without bringing down fierce parental wrath. That leads me to suspect that what the students would get is faith-affirming pablum, a survey of the book that would gloss over minor little problems, like that it is a frickin’ myth that contradicts reality.
So, while I think Jack Summers is wrong in principle in rejecting an education that makes him uncomfortable (I’ve said it over and over again, that that is what a good education should do), I’m suspicious of the school and the teacher, and don’t trust their motives at all. Why that book? How would they approach the material? Are they going to encourage criticism of its content?
I’m also even more suspicious because of this line.
JC Considine, a spokesman for the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said the state has a suggested book list that includes religious texts such as the Bible, the Koran and Buddhist scriptures, but local districts decide which books to use in classrooms.
Hmmm. So the local school board decided to include only religious material out of several choices that happened to coincide with the majority beliefs in the area? Apparently, the only people who get to be made uncomfortable in the classrooms are the ones who aren’t Jewish or Christian. If they genuinely wanted a compromise that would still show a little integrity, they should have included a chapter of the Koran to be discussed — and make everyone think.
The story has a poll associated with it, too.
Should the Bible be part of the 10th grade English literature curriculum?
Of course. It’s among the world’s most famous books 42%
No. It’s not fair to those who don’t believe in the Bible’s teachings. 20%
Are you kidding? This is a phony controversy started by a kid who was too lazy to do his homework. 38%
Undecided 0%
I hate all three choices. Yes, it’s one of the world’s most famous books; it’s also 90% crap, and the school district picked one of the crappy parts. The second choice is the only one that criticizes the choice, and does so for the wrong reason: it’s because they can’t include a religious book without encouraging students to criticize it, not because non-believers will be annoyed. And that third question is just slimy and loaded. I ended up voting “no” just because I think the poll sucks and the school district is dishonest.
I have been assured by quite a few people who have more direct knowledge of the Newton school district that they actually do teach Genesis critically, which removes most of my objections to their handling of the issue. I’m left with my first impression, which is that the student was out of line — he shouldn’t be avoiding instruction in material which makes him uncomfortable.
Unfortunately, I am not a resident of liberal Massachusetts. Out here in the rural midwest, a class in Genesis would mostly be a whitewash used to make excuses for fundamentalist beliefs. May the spirit of Newton spread a bit further westward!
This will be handy: it’s a long list of secular and atheist charities. Science, education, medicine, civil rights, fighting poverty and hunger…we have a lot of areas in which secularism is the best way to contribute.
The theists are on a crusade to deny a legitimately elected city council member in Asheville, NC, his office because he is an atheist. His policies don’t matter, his competence doesn’t matter, the only issue being used to prevent Cecil Bothwell from taking his position is his disbelief in god, and that just isn’t right.
Fox News apparently think the rights of a minority should be determined by the prejudices of a majority, since they’re running a poll on the issue. Given that it is Fox news, the results shouldn’t be surprising…but they do need adjusting.
Should Atheist Councilman Step Aside?
Yes. The law may be inappropriate, but if it’s in their constitution, it IS law. Step aside, councilman. 64%
Maybe. I can’t say that religion – or lack of it – should deter fitness for public office because it opens the door to all sorts of beliefs. 4%
No. Look at the calendar – it’s 2009! Religion – or lack of it – should never be a factor in qualifying someone for public office. 31%
I’m not sure. 1%
NPR asked kids and young people that question. I rather liked the young lady who said “I stopped believing in the hairy man, when I stopped believing in the Bible“. Very good!
The godless must have some fans in the comic book world. In an issue of The List: Wolverine, the heroes Fantomex (a genetically engineered supersoldier) and Captain Marvel are faced with an army of zombie-like creatures, people who have been infected with an evil virus that can only take over your mind if you believe in some sort of god. So they swing into action, safe from the infection, because neither one believes in gods.
Nice. Well, except that I do think atheists will save the world…but not by putting on a mask and drawing a pair of pistols. That’s just nuts.
I had no idea cartoonists wielded such vast power. First it was the Danish cartoons that outraged the Muslim community, and now an Austrian named Manfred Deix has drawn the ire of the Catholics: the Viennese archdiocese has ‘tattled’ on him to the public prosecutor for violating the National Socialist Prohibition Act and for degrading religion (it’s in German; there is a horrible Google translation).
He has mocked the EU’s ban on crucifixes in the classroom with a cartoon that argues that the “ban shall be deftly circumvented,” and which includes a “multicultural compromise” — Jesus on a cross with a crescent and a Buddha on it, wearing robes with both the hammer and sickle and the swastika on them.
The top right example is familiar — that’s a typical American classroom, I think.
Another one that has spurred Catholic outrage is a cartoon that speculated about just what this god we’re supposed to worship looks like, and asks, “we know the church, but just who is god?” (nudity and some scatological content in portraits of the deity…click at your own peril).
How odd that people would react with such anger at depictions of what the earnest apologists for religion are always telling us is just a metaphor. If their god really is the grand creator and maintainer of the entire universe, reducing him to a sketch in a magazine is really no more degrading than reducing him to, say, a set of stained glass windows, a liturgy, and a holy book. If he really is a cosmic being who loves everyone, I should think he’d love a cynical cartoonist as much as he does a pope. Or are they going to declare certain renditions of the deity privileged, while others are proscribed? How will they determine which vision of god are true and accurate, and therefore protected by secular law?
For more thought on these kinds of issues, read Greta Christina’s article on the great metaphor myth of religion. If religion really were an abstraction, a metaphor, a personal sentiment about a universal divinity, we’d expect a certain kind of response to satire, art, and opinion about this god-creature…and it’s not the reaction we see. The Austrian Catholic church seems to have a fairly specific idea about what kind of portrait of god you are allowed to paint — I wonder where they get their specific details?
I’m a big fan of the gloriously cranky Harlan Ellison, and here he gives his opinion of that whole god business in his characteristic way…which means that if you are at work you should not turn the volume up on this one.
I found this on a SF site, and the first couple of comments are from offended Christians, which always makes my day. It’s the usual stuff: atheists are contradicting themselves, god is all-powerful and can do whatever he wants, yadda yadda yadda. I felt like posting rebuttals, but a fellow named Alan Baxter has done an excellent job of swatting them down already.
New Zealand will be getting signs saying “there’s probably no god” slapped onto buses trundling about, and naturally, the newspapers want to hear what you think about that.
Yes 37.2%
No 49.0%
I’m not sure 13.6%
I don’t know. I would have thought New Zealanders could do better than that. Maybe if I close my eyes and wish real hard, those numbers will change.
One of the most important tools for promulgating religion is fear, and one of the biggest sources of fear is the inescapable fact of personal mortality: we’re all going to die someday, and we all know people we’ve loved who have died. Religion steps up to the challenge of death in its usual glib and dishonest way, and promises a mysterious “afterlife,” in which you’ll get to go on being you despite the inconvenience of your flesh rotting away. None of the proponents of this belief have the slightest scrap of evidence for their claims, other than an appeal to emotion and desire, and sometimes some really bad experiments and sloppy observations of phenomena that vanish when a little rigor is applied.
Usually, the defense of belief in an afterlife falls along a couple of lines. One is the absence of a defense; you really want to live forever, so go ahead, simply believe this claim of immortality. It’s easy! Most religions simply do that, assert with no evidence but a hefty demand that you take the story on faith…which the believers have no difficulty providing.
The other strategy is to claim evidence while not having any. Without exception, this approach is appallingly stupid; I have never read anyone claiming to have solid evidence of life after death who fails to provide a train of fallacies and distortions. And if you want appallingly stupid fallacies, there is one man you can always turn to to provide: Dinesh D’Souza. He recently took part in an interview in which he defended the notion of a Christian afterlife.
Kengor: If there is life after death, how do we know that the Christian view of the afterlife is the correct one?
D’Souza: One way is to test a uniquely Christian claim: Remember that while all the religions of the world say there is life after death, only one religion says that it has actually happened. Jews and Muslims, for example, believe that there is a resurrection at the end of the world. But Christianity asserts that its founder, Jesus Christ, died and came back to life. No other religion claims that its founder–say Moses or Muhammad–physically returned from the dead. In one of the later chapters of my book, I examine the resurrection as a historical event. I take the facts that the vast majority of historians would accept–the fact that Christ lived and preached, that he made enemies, that his enemies killed him, that he was buried in a tomb, that his disciples claim to have found the tomb empty, that they said Jesus appeared before them several times after his crucifixion, and that this event filled them with conviction and propelled a movement of conversion that was sustained even in the face of Roman persecution and resistance. So these are the facts, and how do we account for them? If the resurrection stands up to historical scrutiny, if it is an historical event by the standards of historical verification, then the Christian view of the afterlife rises above the pack. It is the one to take seriously.
Wow. He’s making a historical argument while clearly utterly ignorant of the history. Resurrections and visits to the afterlife are practically staples of just about every religion. Osiris was killed, chopped into pieces, and resurrected, yet this is not evidence that the Egyptian pantheon existed. Gilgamesh made a visit to the underworld and returned to report on its existence and conditions, but we aren’t worshipping a mob of Mesopotamian deities now. How can anyone claim that Christianity is unique in having a dead god returning to life when it’s a standard feature of many old pagan religions?
The resurrection of Jesus is not a reasonable historical event. There are no primary, contemporary accounts of his existence. The books of the Bible that describe him were written decades after the purported event, and most of the biblical accounts are second-, third-, or distant-hand hearsay written by people with a vested interest in promoting a religion. The accounts we do have are inconsistent or contradictory, or inconsistent and contradictory. By the standards of historical verification, Jesus and his miraculous resurrection are myths. Nothing more. Maybe something less.
This is the kind of idiocy we’ve all come to expect from D’Souza. Another tactic that believers resort to, other than pseudohistory, is pseudoscience. This is remarkably popular, especially among the New Agey set, and the usual science that gets mangled is physics. The quantum is usually involved, too. I’m sure he wouldn’t want to be an exception, so when Robert Lanza asks in the Huffington Post (you already know what kind of fluff you’re going to get from the information given just this far), “Does Death Exist? New Theory Says ‘No’“, you can count on yet more nonsense.
Lanza has respectable credentials as a stem cell biologist, but he’s also the author of one of those all-encompassing, total-explanation-of-the-universe, crackpot theories, which is his, and which belongs entirely to him, called “biocentrism.” We know this because his tag line in the article is “Robert Lanza, MD is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is the author of “Biocentrism,” a book that lays out his theory of everything.” I’ve noticed that leading scientists tend not to have to introduce themselves by declaring that they are a leading scientist, but that’s another issue.
Lanza recently lost a sister in an accident, and most of his article seems to be a kind of emotional denial, that this tragedy cannot have happened and his sister really is alive and well somewhere. I feel for him — I’ve also lost a sister, and wish I could see her again — but this is not a reason to believe death doesn’t happen. I’ve stubbed my toe and wished with some urgency that it hadn’t happened, but the universe is never obliging about erasing my mistakes.
But then Lanza goes on to babble about quantum physics and many-worlds theory.
Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling – the ‘Who am I?’- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?
Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it is you who will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories and universes transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting either this or that result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it’s still the same battery or agent responsible for the projection.
I have heard that first argument so many times, and it is facile and dishonest. We are not just “energy”. We are a pattern of energy and matter, a very specific and precise arrangement of molecules in movement. That can be destroyed. When you’ve built a pretty sand castle and the tide comes in and washes it away, the grains of sand are still all there, but what you’ve lost is the arrangement that you worked to generate, and which you appreciated. Reducing a complex functional order to nothing but the constituent parts is an insult to the work. If I were to walk into the Louvre and set fire to the Mona Lisa, and afterwards take a drive down to Chartres and blow up the cathedral, would anyone defend my actions by saying, “well, science says matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, therefore, Rabid Myers did no harm, and we’ll all just enjoy viewing the ashes and rubble from now on”? No. That’s crazy talk.
We also wouldn’t be arguing that the painting and the architecture have transcended this universe to enter another, nor would such a pointless claim ameliorate our loss in this universe.
The rest of his argument is quantum gobbledy-gook. The behavior of subatomic particles is not a good guide to what to expect of the behavior of large bodies. A photon may have no rest mass, but I can’t use this fact to justify my grand new weight loss plan; quantum tunnelling does not imply that I can ignore doors when I amble about my house. People are not particles! We are the product of the aggregate behavior of the many particles that constitute our bodies, and you cannot ignore the importance of these higher-order relationships when talking about our fate.
The rational atheist view is simpler, clearer, and I think, more true. Lanza’s sister is dead, and so is mine; that means the features of their independent existence that were so precious to us, that made them interesting, thinking, behaving human beings, have ceased to exist. The 20-watts of energy are dissipating as heat, and can’t be brought back. They are lost to us, and someday we will end, too.
We should feel grief. Pretending that they have ‘transcended’ into some novel quantum mechanical state in which their consciousness persists, or that they are shaking hands with some anthropomorphic spiritual myth in never-never land, does a disservice to ourselves. The pain is real. Don’t deny it. Use it to look at the ones you love who still live and see what you can do to make our existence now a little better, and perhaps a little more conducive to keeping our energies patterned usefully a little longer.
