But I don’t think I want to be this bigot’s brother

The Republican governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, has moved on a little bit from the 1950s — he made a speech on Martin Luther King Day in which he declared himself colorblind and the governor of all the people of Alabama. How nice! But then, unfortunately, he had to ruin it by making a few exceptions.

But if you have been adopted in God’s family like I have, and like you have if you’re a Christian and if you’re saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.

Now I will have to say that, if we don’t have the same daddy, we’re not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.

Gosh. I guess Christians in Alabama are just extra-special people. The rest of us — Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, Hindus, animists, whatever — not so much.

Isn’t it just amazing that the governor of a secular state would stand up and unabashedly make a speech declaring a specific religious group as having a privileged status with him?

That answers nothing

Here’s an interesting exercise for you: summarize the Bible in one sentence. A bunch of theologians and pastors took a stab at it, and failed to escape their preconceptions and say anything that made any sense.

The statements all vary in their length and their floweriness, but I picked this one example because it’s fairly clear and representative. This is a one-sentence summary of the Bible by a Christian pastor:

A holy God sends his righteous Son to die for unrighteous sinners so we can be holy and live happily with God forever.

That is an empty statement, one that explains nothing and simply sits there looking absurd. I don’t understand how anyone can commit themselves to a life spent promoting that kind of nonsense; these people really should try taking their summaries and looking at them carefully to try and see the peculiarity of their claims.

I’m not cherry-picking, either. Here are a couple more examples just so you can see the general thrust of the arguments.

God was so covenantally committed to the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him may have eternal life!

God is redeeming his creation by bringing it under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

The message of the Bible is the transforming grace of God displayed preeminently in Jesus Christ.

The good news is that they all mostly agree with one another. The Bible is about a god who is trying to get people into his heaven by asking them to believe a story about his son being killed and rising from the dead.

The bad news is that the story makes no sense. I’ll give them the existence of their god as a premise, just as I’d grant Herman Melville the existence of Ahab as the start of his story. But what follows doesn’t work. This god has a son — there’s a whole story there that is glossed over. It rather anchors the deity into the prosaic, doesn’t it? He’s a discrete being with an anthropomorphic capacity for procreation. OK, let’s just give them that as a premise, too, although my experience with theologians is that they’ll sit there endlessly arguing with you over that detail.

But then it gets sillier. He sends this son to us to die. He dies? So he’s not an immortal god? Oh, wait, he doesn’t really die, he bounces back a day and a half later, and again, Christian theologians will weeble at you incessantly about how Jesus really is their god, their one true god, who is part of a trinity.

And then that bit about his death “redeeming” us? No way. That makes no sense. If I commit a crime, having someone else suffer 2000 years ago for some other crime that is completely unrelated to what I did does not have any logical connection at all to absolving me of guilt. It’s simply crazy talk, theological noise.

I have my own one-sentence summary of the Christian bible. It actually fits well with human behavior, unlike the prattling nonsense of theologians.

Here is a long tome containing fractured history and arbitrary and patently ridiculous rules that, if you say you believe them, will represent a costly signal to indicate that you are a committed member of our tribe.

Or if that’s too long for you, “Be stupid and belong.” Theology then fills the same role as frat-house hazing or blood-brother rituals, and all the contributors to that list of summaries can be proud brothers together in blissful inanity. It’s clubhouse psychology.

I can even sympathize a bit with that purpose. Lots of organizations have similar trials to secure their membership. Even science does this: we’ve all been through that long gauntlet of calculus and chemistry and basic physics. The difference is that scientists are expected to master something difficult and useful, not bullshit.

Why we need separation of church and state: an example

Jackie Trebesh and her daughter attended a Catholic church presided over by “Reverend” John Kelly. One weekend she was surprised when they were both denied communion. She was in for a further surprise: when she left the church, she was pursued by a Santa Rosa County deputy, pulled over, and given a warning for trespassing, at the request of the priest.

What do you think her crime was?

According to Trebesh, she learned the reason she was denied communion was because someone at the church had seen the daughter dispose of the host, as it is called, improperly in the church parking lot.

“The matter of disposing of the Eucharist in an inappropriate way is a serious matter to us,” Peggy Dekeyser, the communications officer for the diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee said in confirming Trebesh’s theory.

Trebesh said the only thing she could think of that Kelly or anyone else might have seen her daughter do was “spit out a piece of gum in the parking lot.”

It’s fine that crazy Catholics want to enforce their crazy doctrines within the scope of the church; if crazy John Kelly wants to refuse to do his crazy mumbo-jumbo for anyone, that should be his right. But what’s really disturbing here is the county deputy using his official status to administer punishment outside the church.

I don’t care what the priest believes or does, but that deputy needs to be fired.

Vae, puto deus fio!

It’s good to see the old traditions kept alive. The Romans were fond of monumental marble architecture, formal public ritual, and deifying their emperors after their death, and look at the Vatican: monumental marble architecture, formal public ritual, and now the rapid beatification and expected canonization of their popes. Unfortunately, none of the popes have had the wit and humor to appreciate the custom, as Vespasian did, and laugh on their deathbed, “Alas, I think I’m becoming a god saint.”

So one dead pope, John Paul, is about to be officially beatified, which means the Catholic Church has determined that John Paul is actually in heaven right now. How do they know? Because they found a nun who said she prayed to the dead pope (which is weird right there), and her Parkinson’s symptoms were alleviated. Why is this a miracle and not a spontaneous remission or a misdiagnosis or a response to treatment or a hysterical game (“He turned me into a newt!” “I got better.”)?

The Congregation for the Causes of Saints said doctors “scrupulously” examined the nun’s claim and could find no scientific reason for her cure.

Ah, they don’t have any positive evidence of divinity…all they’ve got is a scientist saying “I don’t know,” and from that they leap to the conclusion that the ghost of John Paul is selectively and invisibly dispensing magic. Our ignorance is their evidence. All they’ve got is the bits and pieces we can’t answer yet.

So, Religion, how does it feel to be reduced to feasting on the scraps left from the table of Science?

The parallel universes of the Zeller family

I know that many people read the suicide note of Bill Zeller — it’s terrible story of an intelligent young man who was racked with internal demons, and who finally ended his life. The primary causes of his torment were memories of sexual molestation, but there was also another significant factor: his family’s fundamentalist religion, which provided him no comfort and was apparently more of a straitjacket to limit family interaction. He wrote this:

I’d also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they’re dead–one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they’ve constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don’t understand that good and decent people exist all around us, “saved” or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.

That’s a harsh condemnation, and I feel some pity for parents who had to read their child’s suicide note, and then also read that bitterness as well.

But then I read the coverage in the New Jersey Star-Ledger. It’s simply surreal; read the description above of how Zeller felt about his family’s faith, and then read all the newspaper printed about that aspect of their life.

Prayer and Bible reading had made them a tight-knit family — Anna read stories to her son, including a children’s version of “Pilgrim’s Progress.” And five days a week, they gathered for a few minutes of “family time,” in which Bill; his brother, John; and his parents would all enact scenes from the Bible.

But as Bill Zeller grew up, religion became a wedge, admits his father. When the younger Zeller was in his teens, he decided he could no longer accept his family’s evangelical life and left home, eventually attending Trinity College and paying for his tuition by developing software programs.

“There were guidelines for anybody that lived here that we would expect him to respect,” said George Zeller, who admitted the religious rift “was the hardest thing that ever happened” to the family.

Was the religious rift harder than losing a son to suicide?

Compare the two quoted sections above, though: notice any difference? Sure, it was a grieving family, and it’s not the best time for some investigative journalism, but then the reporter should have simply left out the bit selling soap for the wholesome religious life. And who should we believe, the son who says he was thrown out and cut off financially, or the father who says only that he “left home” and had to pay tuition on his own? Those sound like exactly the same stories — only good old Dad leaves out the damaging influence of his dogma.

And oh jebus…a childhood where the fun times were re-enacting Bunyan and the Bible? Hellish.

Whose side was Chuck Grassley on? We know now

Senator Grassley launched an investigation into the finances of religious organizations, after reports of abuses — you know the sorts of things that are common, like obscene salaries to ministers, active politicizing from the pulpit, etc. The Grassley report has been released, with a dull thud.

According to the review, many of the ministries operate multiple non-profits, with the leaders drawing some form of compensation from each of them.

“The number and types of entities, including private airports and aircraft leasing companies, raises concerns about the use of the church’s tax-exempt status to avoid taxation. However, given the four churches’ refusal to provide tax information, we are unable to determine whether and the extent to which they are reporting and paying taxes on income earned in those entities,” the review states.

Notice…six were investigated, but only two cooperated. The investigators declined to submit subpoenas to get to the heart of the potential scofflaws. Their final conclusion: these megachurches ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong. They make one big recommendation: maybe we should change our laws to allow church electioneering.

Big investigation. Scamming churches allowed to decline to participate. No wrong-doing found. Only significant conclusion is to increase the politicization of religion.

I think we were had. Grassley wasn’t digging into malfeasance, he was throwing up a smokescreen to cover efforts to give further benefits to churches.

I think I understand why religion is so successful

It’s because it is the absolute bottom floor of any descent into crepitude. That’s all I can conclude from looking at the fate of various cable television channels: they all seem to start out well with commendable goals, and pretty soon they’re all selling out to the cheapest, sleaziest advertisers and producing the worst shows they can imagine, all to pander to the lowest common denominator. Look at The Learning Channel (you won’t learn anything watching it anymore), the History Channel (yeah, if your idea of history always has Nazis in it), and the SciFi channel, which now isn’t even trying and has renamed itself the SyFy (what?) channel and hosts what I once thought was the lowest of the low, Ghosthunters.

But the Discovery Channel has out-bottomed even the SyFy channel: they have made a deal with Satan the Catholic Church and will be producing a show on exorcisms.

This is why NetFlix will conquer the home entertainment universe: all the broadcast and cable channels have become the domain of the dumb.

More examples of that sophisticated theology

I know you’ve been wondering about the answer to these questions: Does Poop Smell in Heaven? How about before the Fall? Now you can get answers.

The answers are:

  • Nobody poops in heaven.

  • If you’re a young earth creationist, nobody may have pooped during creation week, but if they did, it didn’t stink.

  • If you are a theistic evolutionist, then poop did smell.

All I can infer from that is that the more godly and fundamentalist you are, the more likely you are to be constipated.

So this is how mainstream religion responds to extremist violence?

I know the excuses already. The cowardly assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, who murdered Governor Taseer in Pakistan was an outlier, a freak, a weirdo, and we atheist bastards better not try to demean religion by associating a rogue individual with it. Can we spit in contempt on an entire culture instead?

Taseer was buried in his home town of Lahore. The 66-year-old was assassinated yesterday by Mumtaz Qadri, one of his police bodyguards, after he had campaigned for reform of the law on blasphemy.

Qadri appeared in court, unrepentant, where waiting lawyers threw handfuls of rose petals over him and others in the crowd slapped his back and kissed his cheek as he was led in and out amid heavy security.

Yeah, Qadri must be a despised outcast and entirely unrepresentative of what the moderates believe.

To be showered with rose petals for gunning down a defenseless man you were hired to protect…it sounds like Islamic Paradise.

So, a cross actually is a Christian religious symbol, then?

The Mount Soledad Easter Cross has a long and contentious legal history. It’s a 43-foot-tall concrete cross standing on public land, initially erected by Christians, and used as the focus of Christian religious ceremonies, and is clearly intended and used for a sectarian religious purpose. It is clearly a violation of the separation of church and state to use public land to promote a specific religion, yet a federal judge ruled that “the memorial at Mount Soledad, including its Latin cross, communicates the primarily nonreligious messages of military service, death and sacrifice,” and decided it was constitutional. I suspect that judge was not an atheist, a Moslem, or a Sikh; it takes some twisted logic to decide that a prominent religious symbol is not actually a religious symbol.

That’s been settled for now. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a humongous cross erected to celebrate Easter actually is a religious symbol, despite all the dishonest subterfuge by Christians who were emulating St Peter. I recommend that, after reading the ruling, they open their bibles and turn to Mark 14:66-72. The denial isn’t usually considered a high mark of Peter’s service.

They might consider that before filing for yet another appeal, as we all know they will.