When last we visited Barney Zwartz, he was whining about those arrogant atheists having a conference in Australia. Now he’s reduced to filtering and interpreting another anti-atheist, Mark Helprin, who has an essay in a book titled New Threats to Freedom. Apparently, people who are free of religion are a New Threat to Freedom. I haven’t read Helprin’s essay, but I think he ought to bill Zwartz for the price of the book, because after reading Zwartz’s take I’m not at all interested in buying it. (Not that I was before; maybe the bill should be prorated, and Zwartz should give Helprin a nickel for chasing away a few thousand readers who wouldn’t have read it anyway.

Zwartz calls his enthusiastic tirade “The boot changes feet—but still crushes”, which is cute. The premise is that the Gnu Atheists are a gang of illiberal totalitarian thugs who are out to opress believers. It’s always that; anyone who expresses opposition to the glories of faith-based ignorance must be a brute and a philistine.

He opens with an anecdote from his youth of trying to philosophise his way out of a fist fight, only to be told by his opponent, “don’t give me none a dat college stuff!” This, Helprin suggests, is exactly the sort of tactic Richard Dawkins employs, confining any discussion to a realm that will give the answer he wants. “Freedom of spiritual conscience is attacked for departing the limits and dictates of a self-contained system of thought, that of reason which when honourably employed is admirable in part as a means by which to identify questions it is impotent to address, but when dishonourably employed glories in the limits of other approaches while admitting none of its own.”

Wait, what? Has Helprin or Zwartz ever met Dawkins, or even read any of his books? I’m trying to imagine Dawkins belittling higher education, or suggesting some kind of physical engagement rather than a literate exchange of ideas, and am failing. It’s like trying to imagine Gandhi chowing down at the Cattlemen’s Barbecue — there’s a serious disjoint between the metaphor and the reality.

The spiritual nonsense he’s prating about isn’t attacked for not being science — it’s being criticized for its failure to give any reasons or evidence for following it, and for the fact that no two gurus of the metaphysical seem to be able to agree about anything on the nature of the supernatural phenomena they tell us we must respect. I know what to expect next: demanding reason and evidence and measures of success is exactly the kind of scientistic persecution we atheists are being accused of. Well, alright then, come out with it. The faithful should admit that they want to believe something that lacks logic and empirical support. That’s just fine with me.

What other tyrannical crimes have atheists committed, besides Imaginary Pugilism? We’ve put signs on buses.

Helprin attacks the atheist bus campaign that began in Britain and has reached Australia. “Signs on buses tell you it’s OK not to believe in God. Admitted, but what of signs that said, “it’s OK not to be gay”, “it’s OK not to be black”, “it’s OK not to be a Jew”? While true, these statements are more than the simple expression of a point of view. Accurately perceived, they are an ugly form of pressure that while necessarily legal is nonetheless indecent.”

I am forever astounded that those mild-mannered bus signs have aroused such ferocious antipathy. Even admitting that we’re fine with our disbelief is considered antagonistic bullying, which actually goes a long way to explain Helprin’s whole thesis — he’s simply on a hair-trigger over any dissent.

His choices of alternatives are bizarre. He’s picked three things as examples that you aren’t free to change anyway, unlike membership in a religion (I’m assuming he’s referring to ethnic Jews, anyway), and he’s picked phrases that are actually fairly inoffensive. Of course it’s OK not to be gay; I’m not gay, and I don’t feel any pressure to be gay, and I don’t consider that an “ugly form of pressure”. Everyone should be satisfied with their sexuality, or race, or ethnicity, no matter what it is.

Now of course where they get a little dodgy is that they’re all saying it’s OK to be a member of the white heterosexual Christian majority, as if that group was somehow being made uncomfortable for its nature…which is obviously not true. Since atheists are the minority group subject to considerable discrimination, a better comparison would have been to bus signs declaring that it’s OK not to be heterosexual/white/Christian…which is again a perfectly reasonable statement.

Now there’s one piece of Helprin’s essay that Zwartz has apparently turned into an incomprehensible mess, but actually either interpretation I give to it is awfully silly.

On separation of church and state, Helprin says atheists who insist church beliefs must be excluded from the law miss the difference between exclusively religious doctrines, such as the divinity of Jesus, and social ones such as the prohibition of murder. “Primitives” on the religious side think if something is religious doctrine it should be law, but they are far fewer than primitives on the secular side who think if it agrees with religious doctrine it must not be law.

OK, I get that: we can segregate religious rules into two categories, those that are intended only to support the internal religious beliefs of the cult, such as “chop off your foreskin” or “don’t work on the sabbath”, and those that are more generally applicable to the whole of society, such as “don’t kill” and “don’t steal”. Another way to look at it is that religious rules overlap with secular rules.

Now I know of many religious “primitives” who want to impose their religious rules on the whole of a mixed and secular society — they want to put up ten commandments monuments in our courthouses, for instance, or go whole hog and replace our government with a Catholic monarchy or a Puritan theocracy. Those guys are crazy.

But who are these atheist “primitives”, and what exactly are they trying to do? That’s unclear, whether by Helprin’s omission or Zwartz’s garbling.

Are they the atheists who say that the conventions and dogmas of a purely supernatural nature, such as that god wants you to mutilate your penis, or that you need to go to church and worship a deity at least once a week, ought not to be enforced by secular law? Because that’s entirely reasonable and fair, and I don’t understand what Helprin is complaining about…unless he’s arguing for a theocracy.

Or are they atheists who say that any law that overlaps with a religious prohibition must be invalid? These would be the atheists who claim that because the Bible says murder is a crime, murder can’t possibly also be a secular law, and therefore atheists are free to kill people.

Of course, there are no such atheists that I know of, and that would be an utterly ridiculous and irrational position to take, which means that if that’s what Helprin is arguing against, he’s got to be stark chittering freakbar nuts. Which implies that he’s arguing that the imposition of purely religious rules on secular society is reasonable — which makes him merely right-wing teabagging American nuts, which isn’t really much better.

The other thing that amazes me is how dim you can be and still be a widely published defender of religion. Standards are pretty low, I guess, or desperation for anyone willing to praise vapor and lies is pretty high.

Why do horrible things happen to faithful people?

The religious run a protection racket. The key thing about that is that no actual protection is offered, only threats.

Warning: anyone who tells that really, really stupid story about a man in a flood praying for rescue will be disemvoweled. It’s a stupid story that makes excuses for the inaction of their deity, and I’ve heard it a few hundred times too often.

(via Joe.My.God)

I really don’t, in any specific way—I have a general distrust of the waste of effort building temples anywhere, but I see nothing unusual or untoward about Muslims (who do live in New York, and may be citizens of this country) building a goofy ol’ religious building in downtown Manhattan…except, of course, with property values being so high there it seems like a poor investment. When I first heard right-wingers yammering about prohibiting the construction of Islamic buildings anywhere near the crater of the 9/11 terrorist act, my first thought was that would only be acceptable if they prohibited any religious structures anywhere near the place.

Jerry Coyne summarizes some of the views by Gnu Atheists — it turns out we don’t all speak with one voice on the matter, which isn’t surprising at all. However, I will turn to my other guru, Jeffrey Rowland, who has a cartoon summarizing the issue.

There’s been a lot of pointless bickering lately about a Mosque being built near where Nine Eleven happened. Exactly what is a “safe distance” to put a Mosque away from a place so that it doesn’t have some imaginary effect on it? I’d prefer a ban on ALL religious buildings being built within 1,000 miles of a place where ANY MEMBER of ANY SPECIFIC religious organization did some harm unto society.

This is the advantage of being a non-religious person. We just look at situations like this and scratch our heads, then we move on and try to figure out how to make life less terrible in ways that can actually help.

I like his ban. It would instantly free up a lot of real estate for productive use.

I also like his term for churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques: “Worshippin’ huts”. I may have to use that more often.

I don’t know why we should; he’s a delusional old man who uses fear to demand obedience to archaic dogmas. But Carla Powell tries to make the case for the Pope, and fails. Here’s her reason why we should be nice to the guy.

Though he has none of John Paul’s film-star charisma [Wait, what?], Benedict is a man with a message. He was the late pontiff’s closest friend, his intellectual soulmate and loyal colleague. In all his time in Rome as Pope, and on his travels around the world, he has argued against what he calls “the dictatorship of relativism”.

Moral relativism has become a kind of intellectual disease, weakening the vitality and self-confidence of Europe and the west. Left unchecked, it will destroy us, because it removes our power to resist the distortion of our values, erosion of our liberty and, ultimately, threats to our democratic way of life.

Well, you know that this kind of preaching of an absolute morality, usually backed up by nothing more than tradition and power and fear, isn’t unique to Catholicism. Powell’s words are clearly dogwhistles for the evil Muslim threat, but the thing is, they aren’t big on ‘relativism’ either — both Christianity and Islam seem to be in a competitive race for the title of most deranged patriarchal tyranny on the planet.

But OK, let’s play her game. Let’s admit that there are some things that really are wrong and even evil. I’ll start.

Raping children is wrong. Using the power of a wealthy institution to shelter people who rape children is wrong.

See? No relativism at all.

Now what was Ms. Powell saying about treating the papacy with the respect it deserves?

Harriet Baber is a philosopher, and I say that with the most sneeringly disparaging tone I can muster. I don’t normally dislike philosophy, but there are a lot of philosophers I detest, and Baber exemplifies why. She has a remarkable article in The Guardian in which she says a series of astonishing things — which is often one of the good things philosophers do, surprising me with weird ideas that make me think. In this case, though, she makes some stupid pronouncements, doesn’t explain why she thinks she’s making a good argument, and then thoroughly undercuts her own credibility.

She starts by announcing that she’s a Christian who arrived at that idea via Pascal’s Wager. I know Pascal was a brilliant fellow, but his wager is bollocks — it’s built on the premise of the unreliability of reason and the deficiencies of evidence, reducing our choices to desperate gambles, where we make decisions only on the basis of the desirability of outcomes — a strategy, by the way, that makes casinos rich and gamblers paupers. Accepting Pascal’s Wager is admitting the defeat of reason, a very peculiar position for a philosopher.

But then Baber says something really bizarre, that actually does explain why she falls for the Wager. She declares that the truth is overrated.

People in any case overestimate the value of truth and underestimate the difficulty of arriving at it. There are a great many truths in which I have abolutely no interest – truths about the lifecycle of Ctenocephalides felis, (the common cat flea) or the extensive body of truths about the condition of my teeth that my dentist imposes on me. I see no reason why I should bother with these truths or make a point of believing them.

This is actually a consistent position with her appreciation of Pascal’s Wager, but she’s also sawing off the limb she’s standing on. Why should I care what she says when she admits the truth is unimportant to her? The title of her article is “My faith is an informed choice” (I’ve chosen to retitle her article more accurately for this post) — what does “informed” mean when you’ve confessed that truth is irrelevant and information is not to be bothered with? And what kind of scholar dismisses curiosity about the world with such casual contempt?

Although she did get me wondering about one thing, which is a virtue of fools: I wonder how much misery and death has been caused by dental disease in human history? I suspect that it has been a significant player, but I don’t have any sources of information on that — but there must be a forensic anthropologist or two out there who has some idea.

Oh, wait, sorry — curiosity, an interest in the evidence and the truth, and an expectation that truths about the condition of people’s teeth actually matter assumes that the truth actually does matter. Forgive me.

(The gang at Ophelia Benson’s place are also discussing this strange article.)