Gloat, everyone!

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. James Dobson gives up.

I want to tell you up front that we’re not going to ask you to do anything, to make a phone call or to write a letter or anything.

There is nothing you can do at this time about what is taking place because there is simply no limit to what the left can do at this time. Anything they want, they get and so we can’t stop them.

We tried with [Health and Human Services Secretary] Kathleen Sebelius and sent thousands of phone calls and emails to the Senate and they didn’t pay any attention to it because they don’t have to. And so what you can do is pray, pray for this great nation… As I see it, there is no other answer. There’s no other answer, short term.

Oh, no…wait. They’re going to start praying? Don’t do that! When they’ve got the power of their almighty god behind them, they’ll be unstoppable! Please, conservapublitards, don’t do that. Don’t spend all your time on your knees, praying. That would give you such an unfair advantage! Play fair!

Cardinal Cormack Murphy-O’Connor thinks you aren’t fully human

In a bizarre conversation, Murphy-O’Connor demonstrates a Catholic version of open-mindedness: human beings must have a sense of the transcendent, and must search for god. And those atheists? “Not fully human“.

It’s not that unusual a sentiment, and I’ve heard it often. Usually it’s not said as directly; most often, the phrase is that “religion is a human universal,” or some such nonsense. It’s not often announced that I don’t qualify as a member of their species.

There is a temptation to agree with them, I’m afraid: the idea that I’m a post-human mutant bestowed with the super-powers of reason and the ability to see through superstition is flattering. But it’s not true. Everyone has those powers, it’s just that some of us have had the good fortune and a history of experience that allows us to shake off some indoctrination. Nothing more.

Also, the Cardinal’s statements are the kind of thing you’d expect from a Catholic theocracy trying to politely rationalize why they’ve put up a row of stakes in front of the cathedral.

You can’t win

I have a…errm…reputation for offending Catholics. It’s undeserved, since I try so hard to offend everyone, but also because some Catholics are too easily offended. Can you spot the unforgivable offense the writer is complaining about in this story?

Your April 27 front page had an article, “World government race to contain swine flu outbreak.” The article was from the Associated Press.

A picture of a priest distributing the Eucharist had a caption, “Catholics who entered a closed door Mass line up for a communion wafer Sunday at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City.”

That one line drove Helen Licon to write a letter to the editor.

[Read more…]

Another vastly important event

Baseball. Baseball and god. What could be more important? An now a couple of baseball players are in a snit.

The Cliff Notes version: After hitting a homer off Wilson in the 12th inning of the Giants’ 7-5 13-inning victory, Blake was seen on television making the same well known gesture that Wilson makes after every save in tribute to both his Christian faith and his late father. 

By the time Wilson returned to the clubhouse after securing the win in the 13th, some friends had sent images of Blake to his cell phone, sending him into an agitated state that his teammates instantly had to calm him down from.

After all, Wilson must have a patent on the “two forefingers pointing to the sky” gesture, and only he should be using it. Why, if just anyone could do it, god wouldn’t know how special Mr Wilson is.

Wilson explains the importance of the gesture.

“It shows no disrespect toward anybody. It’s all positive praise. It’s not for showboating. It’s not to start an epidemic. It’s just me getting a quick message out to the world and to Christ and that’s it. I just thought, ‘What more perfect time to display my faith than at the end of a game?'”

Indeed. What more perfect time could there be?

Idiot America, new and expanded

Charles Pierce has expanded an essay into a full blown book on Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), soon available in fine bookstores everywhere, and I recommend it highly. You might be wondering what Idiot America is, and he explains it well.

The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ’s Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool.

Pierce then goes through several sublime instances of American Idiocy: the Creation “Museum”, the Terry Schiavo case, the Dover creationism trial, the War on Terror, right-wing talk radio, climate change denialists, the Republican roster of candidates in the last presidential election…it’s terrifying and humbling that this country has so excelled at churning out such appalling stupidity. And, of course, he points out everywhere how our journalists simply gaze on approvingly, churning the chum and making money out of mindlessness. He uses one of my favorite (for a version of “favorite” flavored with schadenfreude) examples, the way the NY Times covered creationism and evolution, and especially that willing palimpsest, Jodi Wilgoren. Wilgoren, by the way, has since been promoted at the Times — I think for vacuity above and beyond the call of duty.

Lest you think Pierce is doing nothing but delivering a thunderation of his own, he also often reveals a fondness for the quirkiness of cranks and kooks — he clearly thinks they spice up American intellectual life. He even starts his book with the tale of a famous local kook, Ignatius Donnelly, a 19th century visionary who founded a utopian city on the banks of the Mississippi…a dream that failed dismally, after which he turned to writing bestsellers about Atlantis and Velikovskian (although he long preceded that crank) cometary catastrophes. He was a crank, but he was an entertaining crank, and most importantly, there was little risk that he could rise to run the country as president.

That’s the heart of the problem. Wild, loony ideas aren’t dangerous in themselves — what’s dangerous is when criticism is set aside and wacky ideas are given unquestioning acceptance and allowed to set the national agenda. It changes the dynamic: no longer do kooks have to work to get their voices heard, but the more insane their claims, the more likely they will be given media attention, promoted and passed around, given the imprimatur of authenticity because, well, Larry King featured them on his show.

What has America become? America has become an episode of The Office, where lovable assholes are put in charge to fumble their way along incompetently, coasting on the slack, disinterested efforts of their underlings. The show is a comedy, and it can be hilarious, in part because there is some stinging truth to it.

You won’t laugh very much at Idiot America, though. It’s too real.

Death by religious ignorance

Hodgkin lymphoma is one of the more curable forms of cancer — the 5 year survival rates for patients who are middle-aged or younger is over 90%, and for kids, it is over 95%. These results assume, of course, that the cancer patient is actually treated with modern medicine — neglect that, and all bets are off. You’re almost certainly going to die of it.

Daniel Hauser is a 13 year old victim of Hodgkin lymphoma here in Minnesota. Doctors give him a 5% chance of surviving the disease, not because he has some particularly lethal form of the cancer, but because his mother is a religious fruitcake who who wants to deny her child treatment. Her reasoning is insane.

Hauser, whose son was diagnosed in January with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, said conventional treatments such as chemotherapy conflict with the family’s religious beliefs. She said they prefer natural remedies such as herbs and vitamins.

Asked where she learned about the alternative healing techniques, Hauser said, “on the Internet.”

If one of my kids was deadly ill, and I had a doctor who was telling me that she has a very good treatment, and she can tell me how it works, and she could show my statistics and clinical trials that backed up her claims, and on the other side I had priest waving his bible and telling me that it was a sin to treat the disease with secular medicine, but had no track record of success, and no solution other than vague claims of herbs from the internet, I would not be facing a difficult choice. I would commend my child into the hands of the person who had evidence of a 95% cure rate, without hesitation. There is simply something wrong with a parent who selects the 5% success rate over the 95% success rate, no matter what their motivation.

It would be easy to write them off as taking the Darwinian cure — that harsh statistical view that they’ll simply be extinguishing their contribution to the gene pool — especially since Daniel Hauser is agreeing with his parents. But he’s a 13 year old boy — no 13 year old is informed enough about medicine to make a good decision, and no 13 year old deserves to die of cancer because all he is given for treatment is “herbs”.

And this is all about religion. What a sick, stupid, wasteful thing to die for.

The Hausers declined to speak to reporters after Friday’s court session. But Dan Zwakman, a member of the Nemenhah religious group to which they belong, acted as the family spokesman. He argued that this is a case about religious freedom, noting that the group’s motto is “our religion is our medicine.”

Your medicine doesn’t work, and it’s going to kill a child. If you’re going to equate the two, the reply is obvious: your religion is wrong and lethal.

You know, this could also be a factor in the declining appeal of religion

Some of these cults are stocked with puritan prudes. Baptists, in particular, are a bit nuts.

A student at a fundamentalist Baptist school that forbids dancing, rock music, hand-holding and kissing will be suspended if he takes his girlfriend to her public high school prom, his principal said.

The student is named Tyler Frost, not Kevin Bacon, by the way.

You want to dance, dance. You want to sing, sing. The two of you want to kiss, kiss. I think those are all beautiful acts, and as long as no one is harmed, it is ridiculous to forbid them.

I also think the school has stepped way out of bounds when it tries to control activities well outside the domain of the school itself. But sure, go ahead and act like repressive tyrants — Mr Frost may well go looking for a more tolerant religion, or will perhaps leave that body of superstition altogether.

Happy news!

Look at what’s happening to the opinion on religion in our country:

Historically, the percentage of Americans who said they had no religious affiliation (pollsters refer to this group as the “nones”) has been very small — hovering between 5 percent and 10 percent.

However, Putnam says the percentage of “nones” has now skyrocketed to between 30 percent and 40 percent among younger Americans.

Putnam calls this a “stunning development.” He gave reporters a first glimpse of his data Tuesday at a conference on religion organized by the Pew Forum on Faith in Public Life.

It’s a poll, so it doesn’t say much about causes, but I can guess that two factors have been at work: that religion has become associated with the spectacular failure of reactionary conservative politics, and that at the same time, atheists have become more vocal and made the option of avoiding religion altogether viable. I suspect the former is more directly causal, but don’t discount the latter — young people aren’t leaving their obnoxious old church to find a new church, they are leaving the whole rotten shebang altogether.

Mormon ghoulishness exposed

Five months before the election, and thirteen years after her death, the Mormon Church posthumously baptized Barack Obama’s mother into their church. This is a common practice. It’s harmless and stupid, but it does highlight the fact that the church is a collection of ghouls. They’re also chronic liars about it all.

Mormon Church spokeswoman Kim Farah said that “the offering of baptism to our deceased ancestors is a sacred practice to us and it is counter to Church policy for a Church member to submit names for baptism for persons to whom they are not related. The Church is looking into the circumstances of how this happened and does not yet have all the facts. However, this is a serious matter and we are treating it as such.”

She’s lying. The church is slack about who submits the names — they maintain vast genealogical records, records that are continually growing as they scavenge the world for more information, and they rather freely toss the names into the baptismal font.

They only regard it as a serious matter because they’ve been caught at it. It’s one good sign: they have a little bit of shame left. But, you know, it’s kind of like visiting the graveyard and discovering that a ghoul has dug up your grandma; maybe he looks a bit abashed and quickly hides a gnawed-upon femur behind his back, but that wins him no sympathy and you still have to choke back your disgust and revulsion, and resist the urge to kick him until he is bruised and bloody.