Richard Dawkins Goes to Heaven

Here is the last of Anthony Horvath’s ghastly morality tales. This one is the easiest to summarize, because there isn’t much to say about it: Richard Dawkins dies, goes to heaven, is judged, and sent to hell. It’s short, only seven pages long, and five of them are spent in loving description of the disintegration of Dawkins. It’s nothing but a horror story for Christians in which the bad guy meets a grisly end.

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The hypocrites of Polk County, Florida

Polk County, Florida has a public school board that meets in the county school district auditorium to discuss the secular, governmental functions of running the public schools. Despite their purpose, though, they insist on opening with a prayer, a practice which has encountered some criticism and which they have dealt with evasively and dishonestly.

Earlier this month, the School Board began a new practice in which the board placed a disclaimer on the meeting agenda and held a prayer before the meeting officially began.

The policy change came after a letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation threatened a lawsuit if prayers during regular meetings continued.

The disclaimer reads: “Voluntary invocation may be offered before the opening of the School Board meeting by a private citizen. The views or beliefs expressed in the invocation have not been reviewed nor approved by the School Board, and the Board is not allowed, by law, to endorse the religious beliefs or views of this, or any other speaker.”

So they invited a local minister to say a prayer before the meeting officially began. Everyone is present, sitting in their chairs, ready to get to work on public business, but they’re just pretending the meeting hasn’t actually started until their god-botherer has finished begging Jesus to come into their lives.

It’s a lie and a game. They are still making religion part of the session, and there is no reason any gods need to be invoked prior to handling secular affairs. But of course the purblind Christian wankers on the board don’t see any problem with stuffing their religion in everyone’s faces.

John Kieffer sees the problem. He announced that “Prayer has no place in government!” — and he’s right — during a recent hypocritical flaunting of Jesus jabber before the meeting, and has been arrested for disorderly conduct. Apparently, invocations that are pro-god are legal, but invocations that reject gods will get you arrested in Polk County.

That challenging dogma is a criminal act isn’t the biggest issue in the county though. What’s even more appalling is the discussion that the school board then had in their meeting — they seem to think the problem will be resolved by packing more jeebus-jabber into the proceedings.

Audience member Tabitha Hunt told board members that the invocation needed to return as a part of the regular meeting.

“They (the atheist group) are very outspoken and I think as Christians we need to be just as outspoken,” she said.

Retired School Principal L.D. Wilcox said the incident brought tears to his eyes because of the children who were sitting in the audience.

“We talk about not leaving debts for our children, but what about integrity and responsibility?” Wilcox said. “It’s all right to disagree, but we have to learn how to respect one another.”

Fields said she would meet with School Board Attorney Wes Bridges about returning the prayer to its former spot on the meeting agenda.

O’Reilly said that while district officials want prayers at the meeting, it will be a costly legal fight and the district needs the community’s support.

“So if there are people who say we want prayers, then you better step up,” he said. “You go to your churches and synagogues and tell them they’ll need to help us.”

So they have a little dodge and disclaimer that they’ve implemented to justify their claim that they aren’t including religion in official county business…but now they’re arguing that they need to get more prayer into their governmental functions and that they want the local churches to help them do that. I think their cover is blown: these are wannabe theocrats in action.

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.

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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.

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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.