Antony Flew Goes to Heaven

Anthony Horvath is responding to my reviews with some flustery bluster. He’s insisting that you must buy his stories in order to have any credibility in questioning them, which is nonsense: I’m giving the gist of his fairy tales, and he could, for instance, clarify and expand on the themes of his story, explain what I’ve got wrong and where I’m actually seeing the True Christian™ message, but instead he chooses to run away and hide while flogging people to buy his stories.

He does throw out a hilarious complaint cloaked in his refusal to address anything I’ve written, like this:

As before, I have no interest in responding in any detail, although I might say some things when he is done. I will say: “PZ, what makes you think Antony awakes in a garden?”

Well, hey, how about the fact that the very first sentence of the story is:

When the man opened his eyes the first thing he beheld was a garden.

I’m looking forward to his denials that the Dawkins story isn’t torture porn tomorrow.

This is the weakest of Horvath’s trilogy of morbid tales of dead celebrities. It’s just not very interesting. One flaw is the protagonist: not to disparage Flew, who was an entirely respectable philosopher, but he wasn’t much of a star outside the world of academic philosophy. His sole claim to any kind of popular prominence was driven by the fact that evangelicals loved that he backed away from atheism to adopt a kind of fuzzy deism in his dotage.

He was a rational atheist until almost the end, though. He was best known for arguing that one should follow the evidence, and that until real evidence for any gods was disclosed, one ought to assume atheism as the default position. He later converted to deism, claiming (erroneously!) that the argument from design was persuasive.

Horvath’s story is mainly a tiresome exercise in mocking Flew’s arguments. The vehicle is that dead Flew wakes up in a garden, and a gardener comes along and has a boring dialogue with him.

[Read more…]

Mother Teresa goes to heaven

I’m reviewing a series of three fundagelical short stories about famous people entering a Christian afterlife. Anthony Horvath is going to pretend that his dogma is true, and in the first story place the dead Teresa in his version of heaven to play out events as his puppet. It’s not a pretty story at all; the main lesson I took away from it is that Horvath is a proponent of a vile doctrine that cheapens our lives and turns an imaginary afterlife into an exercise in servility. Later in this series, he’s going to send Richard Dawkins to hell in an explicit and horrible way, but it says something about Horvath’s religion that I still find his hell more appealing than his ghastly heaven.

Warning: there will be lots of spoilers.

[Read more…]

Christians are morbid ghouls. No one is surprised.

How tasteless, tacky, and dishonest can a Christian get? This will do: selling fictional fantasies about what will happen to people when they’re dead.

What’s going on? Are all universally saved, after all? Did Richard Dawkins become a Christian? Did he… remain an atheist, and STILL go to heaven? Such questions leap to mind when presented with title of the newest short story collection released by author and Christian apologist Anthony Horvath: “Richard Dawkins, Antony Flew, and Mother Teresa Go to Heaven.”

Written over a span of two years, these three short stories detail what happens as each of the individuals come face to face with the reality of life after death. From Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to God but felt abandoned by Him to Antony Flew who vowed to ‘follow the evidence,’ to Richard Dawkins, who with Bertrand Russell said, “Not enough evidence!” these stories draw from what is known publicly to imagine what would happen in this most private of moments.

I thought to myself that someone who isn’t one of the ghouls ought to pick this book up and review it, even though it puts $2.99 into the pocket of a rather repulsive apologist. Since I have a strong stomach, I volunteered myself, and I’ll actually review the three stories right here on Pharyngula for you. Not just yet, though…let me draw out the suspense and space them out over a day or two. They won’t be drawn out for long, though, because there isn’t much to review. These stories aren’t particularly substantial, and it’s rather appalling that the guy took two years to write such fluff, and is then overcharging everyone by selling them for almost $3.

I will give you an overview right now, though. The author is capable of stringing English words together grammatically and competently…and that’s the kindest thing I can say about it. The stories are mostly incoherent and not very bold at all; all but one rely on ambiguity to make a case for their highly fundamentalist, extraordinarily nasty version of heaven. The one that doesn’t is poor Richard Dawkins, who I will tell you is not saved, and receives a sanctimoniously cruel eternal punishment.

Oh, I forgot to say: there will be spoilers in my discussion of each story.

My overall impression of the book is that the author basically demonstrates Richard Dawkins’ point: their heaven is a hell, and these believers are a vile lot that would turn even paradise into an eternity of disgust.

Anyway, if you were itching to get your hands on this hot and exciting property, you might want to wait a little while until you’ve seen the full review.

Ludicrous religious behavior compounded by altitude

Here’s some more sophisticated theology for you. “Prayer Warriors” in Colorado Springs are hopping into helicopters to fly over the city and deliver prayers from on high. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s the same urge I had when hiking in the mountains in the Rockies and Cascades, and every time I stood at the edge of a high cliff, I felt a temptation to unzip and sprinkle a little shower on the objects below me. I resisted, but gullible Christians apparently lack self control.

The Alister McGrath sneaky side-step shuffle

McGrath is back, straining to refute atheism. This time, his argument is with the claim that faith is blind. Is not, he says! And then proceeds to muddle together faith with belief with morality with science until he’s got a nice incoherent stew, at which time he points to a few floaty bits in the otherwise unresolvable mess and calls that support for his superstitions. It’s pathetic and unconvincing, except perhaps to someone who wants to believe anyway.

Here’s an example of where his whole argument falls to pieces. He wants to claim that faith is simply a reasonable extrapolation from evidence.

The simple truth is that belief is just a normal human way of making sense of a complex world. It is not blind — it just tries to make the best sense of things on the basis of the limited evidence available.

Well, OK, Alister, if you say so…so then where’s your evidence that there is an afterlife, or that god listens to prayers, or that Jesus rose from the dead? If you’re planning to argue that the atheist dismissal of faith as an evidence-free leap of irrationality is incorrect because you do have an evidential foundation, then perhaps you’d be so kind as to shut down the gripes of those damned empiricists by citing your evidence.

Nope, it’s not forthcoming anywhere in his essay. He’s just going to insist that his faith is actually based on evidence…without mentioning what that evidence might be.

However, he does go on to argue that some human convictions cannot be demonstrated with logic or observation; apparently, he wants to have it both ways, where he claims his faith is both based on logic and observation and undemonstrable with logic and observation. He can’t lose! Well, he can, of course, because he’s arguing inconsistently and stupidly, and also because he goes on to justify faith in god by giving examples of undeducible and unobservable beliefs that we accept all the time.

It is immoral to rape people. Democracy is better than fascism. World poverty is morally unacceptable. I can’t prove any of these beliefs to be true, and neither can anyone else. Happily, that has not stopped moral and social visionaries from acting on their basis, and trying to make the world a better place.

But it’s another sneaky side-step! Now he’s conflating moral decisions with verifiable observations. Take his first point: we know that people are raped. We know that unraped people try to avoid being raped, and that raped people will say that it makes them unhappy. These are provable facts. We desire to live in a society where we are not raped, and because we are social animals who empathize with others, in a society where others are not raped, too. Therefore we make a moral decision that rape is wrong. So what if I can’t prove rape is morally wrong; I can show that it has undesirable consequences to individuals and society, and therefore should be discouraged. Those moral and social visionaries reduce undesirable consequences, which is what makes the world a better place.

But this has nothing to do with believing in supernatural entities in the sky!

It reminds me of a common misguided tactic believers sometimes take. They confront some hard-bitten atheistic realist, and challenge him or her by saying they believe in invisible, intangible things, too: they believes their spouse loves them, for instance. The reasoning, apparently, is: “Aha! You believe in an invisible attraction between your spouse and yourself, therefore, my belief that an invisible god-man with holes in his hands and magic powers loves me is perfectly reasonable!” Never mind that the partner is visible, communicating, and capable of action, and may have made many long-term commitments — the theist makes a false equivalence and thinks he’s won a significant point.

That’s McGrath. Incoherent and contradictory, vacuous and vapid, and bumbling along, triumphantly making fallacious arguments that he thinks are irrefutable.

Jebus, but I love “sophisticated theology”. It makes its practitioners look like such hopeless dolts.

Buying science

This week’s Nature has a substantial and fairly even-handed article on the unease Templeton funding causes. Jerry Coyne is prominently featured, so you know it isn’t an entirely friendly review.

Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning,” says Coyne, echoing an argument made by many others. “In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.” The purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to break down that wall, he says — to reconcile the irreconcilable and give religion scholarly legitimacy.

They also quote scientists who found the Templeton Foundation fairly open and tolerant of results that were not supportive of their prejudices…but I still don’t trust them. They’re busy putting on a show of open-mindedness, and they are staffed by some competent and politically savvy people, and they know that a few Potemkin scientists with contrary results will help in their overall goal of counterfeiting scientific credibility for their religious cause.

This is especially pressing now as Republicans strain to cut science funding — do we really want American science to become increasingly reliant on funding from organizations with an agenda?

Goodbye, Kiribati

It’s a triumph of hope over reason, and that means the residents of the Kiribati Islands, an archipelago of tiny islands with an average altitude of 6.5 feet, are doomed. They’ve got faith, you know, but one thing they haven’t got is any reason. NPR reports on their dire situation as the waters slowly rise and the climate changes:

“I’m not easily taken by global scientists prophesizing the future,” says Teburoro Tito, the country’s former president and now a member of Parliament.

Tito says he believes in the Biblical account of Noah’s ark. In that story, after God devastates the world with a flood, he makes a covenant with Noah that he will never send another.

So while Tito does acknowledge that global warming is affecting the planet and that he has noticed some impacts, he says rising sea levels are not as serious a threat as Tong and others are making them out to be.

“Saying we’re going to be under the water, that I don’t believe,” Tito says. “Because people belong to God, and God is not so silly to allow people to perish just like that.”

Tito is not alone in his views. Of the more than 90,000 people counted in Kiribati’s last census, a mere 23 said they did not belong to a church. According to the most recent census, some 55 percent of citizens are Roman Catholic, 36 percent are Protestant and 3 percent are Mormon.

As a result, many are torn between what they hear from scientists and what they read in the Bible.

That’s just sad. They’re sure they’re safe because God doesn’t allow people to die for stupid reasons…but people do die for stupid reasons all the time.

Will Scientology be defeated?

Once upon a time, everyone trembled in fear at the thought of antagonizing the Church of $cientology. Everyone knew their response to any criticism would be heavy-handed and unconscionable, and that they’d harrass you persistently if you ended up on their enemies list. That’s changing, though, and the stupidity and viciousness of the cult is seeing more and more exposure. The latest is Lawrence Wright’s big exposé in the New Yorker and upcoming book on the subject. The article is well worth reading, all 28 online pages of it.

I hope the book casts a wider net, though. The New Yorker article focuses almost entirely on Paul Haggis, the recent apostate from the cult, and the impression I got from the article was that he is a flighty flibbertigibbet, a gullible enthusiast who’s been insulated from the consequences of bad decisions by an overpaid career as a Hollywood fantasist. I came away from it really disliking Haggis, and almost feeling like he deserved to be sucked into an all-devouring celebrity religion.

Which is really unfair…$cientology is being investigated for brain-washing and human trafficking, and these techniques do destroy human lives.

Who would want them?

What an odd news item: there is a rule that the Pope can’t be an organ donor. My first thought was ick — he’s rather decrepit, and if I ever require an organ transplant, I’d rather the source were a young, stupid motorcyclist who doesn’t wear a helmet. The Catholics have other reasons, though.

Vatican officials say that after a pope dies, his body belongs to the entire Church and must be buried intact.

That’s rather morbid and weird. Why bother? It’s not going to be intact for long, and it’s actually going to belong to the worms and bacteria.

But it’s this part that blew my mind.

Furthermore, if papal organs were donated, they would become relics in other bodies if he were eventually made a saint.

I would never have thought of that. Ever. That’s really twisted. What about blood transfusions, then? A few popes are known to have fathered children, too—are they and their descendants actually considered holy relics, too?

I also had this brilliant idea for a cheesy serial-killer thriller novel, too. Pope after pope murdered and butchered, and the killer implants bits and pieces into himself…and then a team of ninja jesuits is commissioned to defend the murderer from the secular police, since he is after all now a sacred artifact of the Catholic church. Conflict! Car chases! Long abstract discussions of the nature of good and evil! Halberd-wielding fanatics vs. Carabinieri with machine guns! Evil madman manipulating the church while preying on it at the same time! Papal gore! And then, in a triumphant ending, a courageous atheist cutting through all the bullshit and taking out the killer while making some sardonic one-liner! “Nothing is sacred, meatsack!” BAM!!!

If you steal my idea, I want royalties.

Creepy priest and a church with creepy priorities

Thomas Euteneuer was an up-and-coming star of the Catholic priesthood: he was a charismatic fellow who appeared on radio and TV and other media to fight for the dogmatic Catholic position on just about everything. He was a crusader against homosexuality, against sex outside of marriage, against contraceptives, against abortion. He was also an official Catholic exorcist, which tells you right there that he was batty all the way through.

But then he was suddenly dismissed from his position on the board of an anti-abortion group, stepped down from one diocese and was transferred to another, and went quiet. There was a conspiracy of silence to keep his crimes, whatever they were, hidden away. That has changed recently, thanks to constant pressure from many angry Catholics, and a few statements have emerged from the church and from Euteneuer himself. They don’t clarify much, and in fact leave me even more curious.

What we know is that whatever Euteneuer did, it was dire — you can rape children in the church and the wheels of Catholic justice turn slowly, but Euteneuer did something that got him whisked out of the public eye surprisingly abruptly.

Whatever it was, it had something to do with his job as an exorcist.

The circumstances that led to my departure from HLI were related exclusively to my own decisions and conduct within the ministry of exorcism that I carried out independently from my responsibilities at HLI.

Hmmm. Curious. Even curiouser, his crime was sexual.

My violations of chastity were limited to one person only, an adult woman;

The violations of chastity happened due to human weakness but did not involve the sexual act;

We also have some other accounts that suggest these events occurred multiple times.

Father [reportedly] admitted to having ‘an inappropriate relationship’ with an employee in his letter of resignation [and] a second woman [apparently] came forward to say that Father had engaged in sexual activity with her — not intercourse, but close to it — while he was performing some type of exorcism prayer(s).

Catholic prayers must be kinkier than I ever imagined. I admit it, I do have a somewhat dirty mind, but looking at that list of admissions, I am totally stumped about what Euteneuer actually did … which is actually amplifying my imagined creepiness of whatever it was. I’d speculate further except that there is a victim involved: as much as Euteneuer may deserve some contempt, the victim deserves some respect.

Which brings me to the really weird part. Everything I’m reading about this situation contains these insistent declarations that the act involved an ADULT! WOMAN! Even the Catholic bishop’s statement about the case emphasizes this.

Euteneuer has been undergoing intensive evaluation and counseling to address admitted inappropriate crossing of adult heterosexual boundaries on the occasion of carrying out his priestly ministry.

See? ADULT! and HETEROSEXUAL!

This bugs me. It’s like they’re saying, “At least it wasn’t gay sex, and it didn’t involve a child.” They’re trying to reduce the magnitude of whatever perversity was committed. And it’s as if they’re reassuring everyone that it wasn’t that awful homosexuality was committed.

And weirdest of all, it’s as if they’re saying that because a woman was the victim, it wasn’t so bad. Women are the designated victims; oh, sure, it’s not good that he was abusing a woman, but it would have been even worse if a man was hurt.

And then there are the people rushing to defend this priest…by attacking the victims.

I think these women are shameful. Their attack will probably backfire on them. They are possessed with evil and it seems that they are getting worse whenever someone disagrees with them. They seem very vindictive in character and self righteous. They don’t seem credible to me.

I have known Fr. Tom personally for more than 13 years and I can assure you of Father’s devotion to the unborn. I have never seen him falter in his ministry as a priest. Being exposed to demons is not an easy thing. Sometimes the demons will purposely twist the bodies of their victims that will have their sexual parts touch the one who is trying to remove the demons. This, I am sure must have happened several times to Father Tom. Many of the women who are possessed also have other mental problems like ADHD and Bi-polar and these people lie very often just to get attention.

Even when the church acts quickly to stop a predatory priest, they just can’t do it right. It’s all those demon women and their wicked ways.