The predictable after-catastrophe story

There was a terrible plane crash in India — a plane overshot the runway and plummeted off a cliff to explode. 158 dead; 8 survived. You can guess where this is going: Koolikkunnu Krishnan, one of the survivors, chose to spit in the dead faces of all the casualties and sneer at their families.

“I’ve been thinking, ‘Why me? Why me?’ And I can only think that God wanted to give me a second life,” he said from his hospital bed in Mangalore.

Keep this in mind, please. If you’re ever in a tragic accident, and you survive while others are seriously harmed, don’t claim it’s because you’re special and a divine being thinks you are more special than the others. Because you aren’t, and because I’ll think you’re an insensitive moron if you do.

You know why some live and some die? Pure chance. It’s not an indicator of heavenly privilege or destiny.

No better demonstration of the futility of prayer

Angela Wright had a serious heart attack two months ago; she seems to have had a history of cardiovascular problems, because she’d also had a series of blood clots in her leg that required a partial amputation about 20 years ago.

Her very supportive family seems to be the pious sort. They dropped to their knees and started praying fiercely for her. Then she had another heart attack, but she didn’t die, and the family prayed harder and also said ‘hallelujah, the prayers are keeping her alive!”

Then there was another heart attack. More prayers, more certainty that the prayers were all that was keeping her going (ignore for the moment the fact that she’s in a hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses and monitoring equipment).

Then there was another heart attack, and another, and another. Pray, pray, pray. Pray some more.

She isn’t dead yet. At this point I feel like screaming, “Stop praying! You’re killing her!” It sure doesn’t seem like they’re helping at all. I would call six heart attacks in a row a good reason to admit that no, God doesn’t seem to want to stop tormenting this poor woman.

Now it’s really getting ridiculous: Wright has been lying in bed for months, her heart battered and scarred, and meanwhile, more circulation problems or clots have reduced blood flow to her extremities, and her toes have turned black and are rotting. The doctors want to amputate, they need to amputate, and her husband Dwight is refusing, and is actually making a scene at the hospital — they had to bar him from the ward. Why is he refusing?

Because he wants to give his prayers more time to work.

Now that is delusional thinking. Face reality, man. Prayer doesn’t work, never has, and all the evidence is staring you in the face that your wife is dangerously ill and needs the best, unimpeded medical care possible…not more muttering to a heedless myth.

There can be no happy ending here. If she dies, her family is going to blame the doctors for interfering with their magical treatment of happy thoughts and shouting into the ether; if she lives, the family will blame the doctors for any reduction in the quality of her life afterwards.

I’m just impressed with the dedication of the medical staff to keep on persevering for the benefit of this woman from a family of ignorant jackasses.

Another reason to ban official prayer at public meetings

Cynthia Dunbar, one of the wingnuts on the Texas board of education, is a revolting human being. She delivered a ‘prayer’ before a meeting that is an excellent example of grandstanding piety. She seems to be lecturing god on American history…her version of American history.

Of course she wasn’t actually lecturing god — that entity doesn’t exist, and if you believe he does, then it would be an act of hubris to stand there and tell him what to think — but she was instead taking a moment to harangue the committee and audience with her far-right revisionist baloney without risk that someone might challenge her. In a room full of god-fearin’ folk, she didn’t have to worry about anyone interrupting a prayer to tell her that she’s full of crap. It was an act of outrageous cowardice.

Here are a few bits of what she said.

I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses.

Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia, or the charter of New England…the same objective is present — a Christian land governed by Christian principles.

I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country.

That’s not a prayer. Those are dogmatic assertions, used to advance a loony political position.

Why shouldn’t public meetings begin with a prayer? Because they’re usually sectarian, always inane, and as we see here, can be used to advocate a specific political point under the mask of piety.

Spain has a blasphemy law on the books, too

Way back in the 1970s, a Spanish songwriter named Javier Krahe made this short satirical video.


Let’s take a gaunt Christ for every two persons. Remove the spikes and take the body from the cross, which will be left aside. The stigmas can be stuffed with bacon. Uncrust with warm water and dry carefuly. Abundant butter will be spread on the Christ, which will be then placed on an ovenproof dish, over a bed of onions. Spread over it some salt and pepper, other spices and fine herbs can be added to suit your taste. The mixture is to be left in a moderate fire oven for three days, after which He will get out on his own.

It’s silly. It’s a little weird. It also could cost Krahe €192,000.

The catholic organisation was enraged when the TV program Lo+Plus (in Canal+) referred to the video in 2005, while the author was being interviewed. The claimant organisation, whose motto is “Christianizing law, Christianizing society” understands that the short film attacks their religious feelings, a crime as described in Article 525 of the Spanish legal code.

That organisation also charges the director of the TV program, Montserrat Fernández Villa, who is asked for a bail of 144.000 euros. Both she and Krahe were astonished yesterday by the prosecution. “We didn’t air the video. Just some frames of it were displayed in the background while the last question of the interview was being answered.”, says Fernández Villa. The program apologized a few days later, after receiving some complaining calls.

So you can get massive fines in Spain for hurting Catholic feelings? There’s another country that I’d like to visit that I’m going to have to cross off my to-do list.

Everyone Draw Mohammed

It’s that day when everyone should draw Mohammed. You can just do the traditional stick figure, or you can get fancy — I like this one, a kind of Mohammed transitional series in which you have to draw the line where blasphemy occurs.

I can’t draw. The only thing I could think of was to sketch out this picture of a hybrid cow-pig.

i-79148186b05bae303b43ff8ab282a2ba-moo-ham-ed.jpeg

It’s Moo-ham-ed. Get it? OK, you’re allowed to groan and close the page.

Would it add to the verisimilitude if I said he was mooing/squealing excitedly at the prospect of raping a 9 year old girl (not shown)? Sharp-eyed observers will also note that Moo-ham-ed is a hermaphrodite, since he also has udders. I just thought that would make it a little more offensive.

Your turn. You can try to do better—actually, you could close your eyes and stab a piece of paper with a pen and do better—but there’s not much point. It really doesn’t matter what you draw or how rude or explicit or stupid or accurate or respectful it is, since someone somewhere is determined to be offended by it anyway.

Also, Pakistanis won’t see it: they’re trying to block the internet, demonstrating their own stupidity. Not only is it easy to get around, but I could easily show you a plenitude of obscenity and hatred and violence that has been on the internet for years, and is far more offensive than amateurish stick figures.

The worst job in the world

Are the fundies imploding? Look at this summary of their own assessment of the status of the evangelical priesthood:

Another article reveals even more telling statistics based on a survey of 1,050 evangelical Pastors (note these are evangelical pastors not liberal pastors):

  • 89% considered leaving the ministry at one time.
  • 57% said they would leave if they had a better place to go—including secular work.
  • 77% felt they did not have a good marriage!
  • 75% felt they were unqualified and/or poorly trained by their seminaries to lead and manage the church or to counsel others. This left them disheartened in their ability to pastor. 
  • 71% stated they were burned out, and they battle depression beyond fatigue on a weekly and even a daily basis. 
  • 38%  said they were divorced or currently in a divorce process.
  • 30% either has an ongoing affair or a one-time sexual encounter with a parishioner.
  • 23% said they felt happy and content on a regular basis with who they are in Christ, in their church, and in their home!

The same article also gives the following research distilled from Barna, Focus on the Family, and Fuller Seminary.

  • 1500 pastors leave the ministry each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout, or contention in their churches.
  • 50% of pastors’ marriages will end in divorce.
  • 80 percent of pastors feel unqualified and discouraged in their role as pastor.
  • 50% of pastors are so discouraged that they would leave the ministry if they could, but have no other way of making a living.
  • 80% of seminary and Bible school graduates who enter the ministry will leave the ministry within the first five years.
  • 70% of pastors constantly fight depression.
  • 40% of pastors polled said they have had an extra-marital affair since beginning their ministry.

I imagine it’s a high-stress job. These people are actually intelligent, and relatively well-educated…and their job requires standing up in front of crowds every week, and dealing one-on-one with others frequently, and telling them a line of foolishness.

It’s an interesting complement to Dan Dennett’s work on priests who don’t believe — the statistics tell us something about the frequency of doubt, while Dennett’s stories tell us what’s going on in their heads.

We can’t cure the disease by praising the symptoms

Karl Giberson, who I’ve bashed once or twice, has a fresh new pile of nonsense on the Huffington Post. Jerry Coyne has already tackled it, but it pushes a few of my buttons, so I’ve got to say my piece, too.

To summarize the Giberson nonsense briefly, he claims that Intelligent Design creationism is not dead, but is thriving, and in order to defeat it, we need to shut the atheists up who are making people choose between gods and science. I disagree with every bit of it.

ID is not only dead, it was stillborn. No one believes in it; it is a sterile abstraction with no evidence that was cobbled up entirely to pass the church/state separation tests in the courts. Phil Johnson, the fellow who invented it, has plainly stated that he is a born-again Christian lawyer, and his goal with the development of ID was to create a legal construct that could not be excluded from the schools, because it left out any mention of gods. Yet all the major players on the ID side are devout: Dembski is a crazy evangelical, Behe is a Catholic, and if you go through the roster at the Discovery Institute, you’ll find similar religious/ideological leanings throughout (except, maybe, Berlinski — but he’s his own unique brand of supercilious lunacy).

The Dover trial laid it bare. ID was simply the façade a troop of fervent Christian creationists used to conceal their true motivations. ID isn’t the problem. The problem is wide-spread sectarian Christian beliefs that want to masquerade as science — they finally realized after three quarters of a century of courtroom failure that going about with bare-faced Jesus freakiness was going to get them nowhere, so they’ve pulled down ID as a handy mask. It doesn’t work. Everyone can see right through it, and the cdesign proponentsists rely on a lot of wink-wink you-know-I-love-god-even-in-my-labcoat games to get support.

ID is dead, except as a political tool, which is all it ever was anyway. The only people who use it are plain old creationists; strip away ID, and they’ll just grope for a new guise.

Giberson drags out 4 bad arguments for why Intelligent Design is still vital.

1) The complex designs of many natural structures that have not yet been explained by science. As long as there are ingenious devices and intricate phenomena in nature (origin of life, anyone?) that we cannot understand, there will be ID arguments.

2) The remarkable, finely-tuned structure of the cosmos in which the laws of physics collaborate to make life possible. Many agnostics have had their faith in unguided materialism shaken by this, most recently Anthony Flew.

3) The widespread belief that God — an intelligent agent — created the universe. The claim that an intelligent God created an unintelligent universe seems peculiar, to say the least.

4) The enthusiastic insistence by the New Atheists that evolution is incompatible with belief in God. Most people think more highly of their religion than their science. Imagine trying to get 100 million Americans to dress up for a science lecture every Sunday morning — and then voluntarily pay for the privilege.

Hang on, wait a minute. I’ve heard all of that from the Intelligent Design creationists, but I’ve also heard it somewhere else…where could that be…hmmm. Hey, I know! Those are the same arguments that the theistic evolutionists use on the Biologos website!

As long as we don’t understand every detail of how life originated, the theistic evolutionists will be claiming a role for gods in it. As long as they’re preaching about souls, they’re rooting beliefs in ignorance about how minds work.

The theistic evolutionists make a big deal of fine-tuning arguments. I fail every time to be surprised that life like ours exists in a universe where the physical constants allow the formation of stars. Oh, and please, Antony Flew’s late-life fame seems to derive entirely from the fact that he tepidly embraced ID when he was fading into senility and was being coached by a sympathetic advocate for creationism.

Theistic evolutionists believe a god or gods created the universe!

Theistic evolutionists get really peevish at all those atheists pointing out that their belief in magical beings is very, very silly. They now use that as a recruiting tool, trying to convince people that they can have their science and still believe in ghosts and spirits and demons and angels. You know, Ken Ham tries the same thing, coupling dinosaurs to biblical literalism. It’s awfully hard to distinguish the principles and tactics of Biologos from those of the Creation “Museum”.

Weird, isn’t it? It’s as if Giberson doesn’t realize that demolishing the foundations of Intelligent Design creationism would also undermine theistic evolution…and that maybe the atheists he is complaining about are aware of this, realizing that creationism, intelligent design, and theism all share precisely the same faulty construction — we can’t get rid of one without shattering all the others.

I do agree with Giberson on one thing. Most Americans do think more highly of their religion than science. But there’s a significant difference: I think that having a citizenry that worships irrational, fact-free thinking and zombie gods and believes in a coming apocalypse — which they consider an event to be greatly desired — is a bad thing. Giberson regards it as a virtue. That difference dictates that we’ll have different strategies: I want to break people’s habits of gullibility and supernatural delusions; Giberson wants to prop them up. If you really want to defeat ID, the way to do it is to defeat religious thinking.

Giberson wants to claim that a godless scientific approach is a failure, and as an example, he uses the persistence of astrology.

Consider astrology. A 2009 Pew Poll showed that some 25 percent of Americans “believe” in astrology. President Reagan “believed” in astrology. Twenty million astrology books are sold each year. What is going on here? Didn’t science thoroughly discredit astrology at roughly the same time it was establishing the motion of the earth? How can an idea so thoroughly refuted be so popular?

If the scientific community cannot successfully convince Americans to abandon belief in astrology — which is not tied to any powerful religious tradition or even to belief in God — what hope is there to refute an idea like Intelligent Design, which is so much more complex than astrology?

What an odd argument. The Bible condemns astrology; Jehovah wants his chosen people to have no truck with divination, sorcery, omens, witchcrafte, necromancy, or any attempt to contact the dead. Yet still 25% of Americans, many of whom must be Christians, still persist in it! What hope is there of refuting bogus ideas like astrology or ID with an Abrahamic religion, which has a 3,000 year record of failure?

I’ve looked into both ID and astrology, and again, Giberson is completely wrong. Astrology is much more complicated. It has accreted many centuries of rationalizations and anecdotes and weird thefts of bits and pieces of mathematics and astronomy. There’s virtually nothing to ID but hot air in comparison.

Of course, I don’t accept one bit of astrology. However, it does have widespread appeal because it can provide a long history of tradition and dogma, scholarly works that go back to the Middle Ages, an endearing habit of claiming that the entire universe is all about you, and thousands of sects and variants that one can fall back on if a prediction in one schema fails. It has all the properties of religion!

I would argue that one reason that astrology (and religion) haven’t gone away is that people like the answers they provide, even if they’re wrong, and that celebration of wishful thinking is an epidemic in the populace. And one reason it persists is that we have a significant number of our citizens dutifully trotting into churches every Sunday, where they are told by solemn authorities that the universe loves them personally, and look, here’s an old book reassuring us that it is so. Religion is a cultural parasite that weakens our intellectual immune system, and opens the door to lots of other opportunistic infections. Jesus cults and astrology and scientology and snake oil and the Secret and quantum woo are the Kaposi’s sarcoma of a deeper disease—faith.

We’re just now beginning the process of rooting out the causal agents of that disease, and what we need to do is promote more intellectual hygiene, like skepticism, which is the rational equivalent of washing your hands. The wishy-washy, ridiculous theism that Giberson promotes echoes the medieval scholars who tried to argue that bathing was a nasty habit.

Giberson doesn’t want that. We’re supposed to endorse one version of humbuggery, religion, while deploring another, ID, all in the name of keeping everyone comfortable in their prejudices, no matter how erroneous.

If the scientific community wants to dislodge ID, they need to start by admitting that their efforts have been an abysmal failure so far. And then they need to turn their considerable analytical skills on the problem of explaining that failure. If they do this, they might discover that enthusiastic pronouncements like “ID is dead” or “science has proven God does not exist” or “religion is stupid” or “creationists are insane” are not effective. They might discover that affirming that the universe is wonderful, despite our bad backs and the nonsense in our genomes, makes it easier for people to accept the bad design in nature.

And above all, they need to decide that it is OK for people to believe in God. For millions of Americans belief in ID is tied to belief in God. Unless people can find a way to separate them — and not be told by agnostic bloggers this is impossible — ID’s coffin will remain empty.

Yes, we godless scientists are often affirming the wonderful qualities of the universe. But, and this is an important distinction, we do so by discussing what is real, not the awesomeness of some imaginary phantasm that the theists want us to worship. We are not going to succeed at getting people to embrace reality if some dufus in a clerical collar keeps trying to insert some ridiculous proxy he calls a god into our understanding, and further, insists that we can really only appreciate physics and chemistry and biology if we deeply adore a particular dead prophet.

ID and a belief in gods are all tangled together, and they are inseparable. Killing one requires killing the other, and it seems to me that only the atheists are recommending the practical approach of tossing out the whole religious package with its attendant absurdities, and rebuilding an ethical, rational vision of the world that does not require any supernatural bullshit at all.

Bill Donohue always acts like a spoiled little child

It’s hard to believe, but Mother Teresa is getting her own US postage stamp. She was a horrible woman who practiced the Christian ideal of poverty as a virtue by doing her very best to keep as many people poor and miserable as possible — and I hate to see the post office promoting her delusional cult. I sure won’t be buying any of them, but I just know that much of my incoming hate mail will be plastered with them after September.

Having a stamp is not enough for Bill Donohue, however. He is stamping his little foot and demanding that the Empire State Building be lit up in blue and white in honor of the poisonous little promoter of pain and pauperdom on the day of the stamp’s release. Gosh. And next year, when my wife gets me an iPad, a full body massage, and a submarine cruise to visit the squid in their natural habitat for my birthday, I’m going to rage and scream and pound my fists if she doesn’t also get me a fireworks show. She must not really love me enough if she won’t launch skyrockets for me.

Donohue has to spice up his tantrum by making a totally inappropriate comparison, too. He’s not happy that a spokesman for the Empire State Building is stonewalling his demands.

Imagine a spokesman for the Vatican responding to a reporter about an indefensible decision made by a cardinal, and all he offers is, “there is no issue here.” Better yet, imagine him saying, “I’m only telling you what I’ve been directed to say,” and expecting the reporters to simply walk away disappointed.

Right. Like the Vatican would never make excuses and cover up bad decisions by Catholic priests. Did Donohue really want to go there? The first thing that came to my mind was that he seems to be making a comparison between priests raping children and refusing to acknowledge responsibility with a building refusing to switch on its lights according to a color scheme dictated by the Catholic League.

Good work, Bill! Keep reminding us of the sense of entitlement and privilege the Catholic Church has, with nice little fillips that bring up their penchant for child abuse. It’s almost as if he’s an atheist working from inside the establishment to bring it down.

Pansies everywhere

I’m glad someone occasionally looks into the other side of the net to see what they’re talking about — I can’t bear to read religious forums, myself. Here’s why: take a look at what they’re saying on BaptistBoard.

I believe women in politics have done a great disservice to the sovereignty and resolve of a our great Republic. Many issues that face our nation, from without and within, need to be decided from a place of strength instead of weakness. Women are gifted from God with a lot of skills that are good in the home, but not in the Government. They tend to base their decisions from a security standpoint and believe that they have the ability to rehabilitate and nurse others to mental and social health. Men are more pragmatic and can make the tough calls that have to be made in matters of war, also in domestic and international policy. Maybe I should have said men used to be able to make the tough calls. Women in politics have been in position so long now that men are not the men they once were. They have to take into account how their decisions and policies will be viewed by the ladies. Being weak, pathetic, and a bunch of pansies being entrusted with positions of power are all the result of this great error.

Even the loons there who disagree with this nonsense are saying it’s because God gave men and women complementary abilities!

I’m also greatly offended. One consequence of that attitude is that, in order to be True Men™, we have to be ignorant, brutal, and ready to go off to war whenever our testicles tingle…and if you aren’t, you’re a “pansy”. It’s a bias that is as demeaning to men as it is to women.

Progress in Saudi Arabia!

In 2002, 15 young girls burned to death in a school fire because firemen were not allowed by their religion to enter and rescue females who might not be covered head-to-toe in concealing clothing. In fact, religious police had actively hindered the escape of the girls, with reports that they were hitting them and pushing them back into the building, because they were trying to run out without putting their head coverings on first.

Now, in 2010, the religious ministry has given orders to the religious police to allow even male rescue workers to enter girls’ schools in an emergency.

Wow. So it only took them 8 years to figure out that maybe lives are more important than modesty.