Blithering utopianism in the cause of ignorance

The TED folks are sponsoring a disturbingly vacuous call for a Charter for Compassion, which they claim is an attempt to rescue religion from an aberrant fundamentalism by emphasizing the goodness of faith. I don’t see it. What I see is a foolish whitewashing of religious history to claim that it is all about tolerance, when it’s the opposite: it’s all about tribalism. Instead of opening minds to the wonders of the world, it’s all about clamping down on the human mind and imposing the strictures of dogma. It’s all very nice to sit around and dream up a religion that’s all beauty and sweetness, but it’s the same wishful thinking that drives belief in invisible nonsense.

Throwing up another dishonest façade of a fatuously beatific faith accomplishes nothing but to reinforce one of the greatest promoters of ignorance, hatred, absurdity, and intolerance. We don’t need this. The way to change the world is to work to free people of religion, rather than inventing more rationalizations for it.

I’m with Dan Gardner on this one. Fundamentalism is not some recent historical quirk of modern religions: the selfish, dangerous, destructive narrowness of religious belief has been there in the Abrahamic religions all along, and religions have actually gotten less virulent (with obvious exceptions flaring up sporadically) recently. Would you like to live in an 8th or 14th century Christian, Islamic, or Jewish community? No way. Asking religion to return to its roots is asking for a restoration of theocracy.

A tragic tale, made worse by dogma

Twelve year old Motl Brody has died. A tumor destroyed his brain, and the consequences are unambiguous.

Unlike Terri Schiavo or Karen Ann Quinlan, who became the subjects of right-to-die battles when they suffered brain damage and became unconscious, Motl’s condition has deteriorated beyond a persistent vegetative state, his physicians say. His brain has died entirely, according to an affidavit filed by one of his doctors.

His eyes are fixed and dilated. His body neither moves nor responds to stimulation. His brain stem shows no electrical function, and his brain tissue has begun to decompose.

This is sad, but final…except for one little problem. The boy’s family belong to a sect of Hasidic Jews who cling to an archaic belief that life is determined by the presence of a beating heart, and this particular body is hooked up to drugs and machines that keep the tissue flailing away futilely, and so the parents are taking the hospital to court to keep prodding the corpse into this semblance of life.

There’s another weird twist to the story. The parents are not in denial. They know there is no hope at this point. They are sticking to their insistence that the hospital must tie up their facilities in this useless endeavor entirely because they must dogmatically follow their religion’s laws.

Jeffrey I. Zuckerman, the attorney for Motl’s parents, says they have been “utterly shattered” by the hospital’s actions.

He stressed that the family’s demand for continued life support was based on their obligations under religious law, not an unrealistic hope that their boy will recover.

In other words, they know their religious beliefs are invalid, but they’re going to abide by them, and damn the pain and grief and expense and waste. It’s zombie religion.

Mormon meddlers

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as they insist on being called, has earned another reason to be regarded with a sneer of contempt: they sent a letter to all of their churches in California urging their adherents to vote for Proposition 8. It’s bizarre that a religion known for being out of step with the rest of the country on the issue of marriage, a place populated with polygamists and young girls treated as chattel and coaxed into child marriages, now wants to “preserve the sacred institution of marriage”. They sunk tens of millions of dollars into the campaign.

Californians are rightly demonstrating against the Mormon church—I’d be more than a little pissed off myself. After Enron enriched itself by bilking Californians, now you’ve got Salt Lake City trying to turn you into a little Utah. You’ve got cause to be annoyed at the way you’re being targeted.

People are trying to do something, and one thought is to try and revoke the Mormon church’s tax exempt status. Ah, sweet dream. I’d dearly love to see Obama repair the damage to our economy by revoking religious tax exemptions across the board, and refill our treasury with loot from the theological con artists. Alas, I’m at an Americans United meeting, and the place is crawling with lawyers and experts on separation of church and state issues, and I asked Barry Lynn directly what kind of legal recourse we had, and he regretfully pointed out that what the Mormon church did was entirely legal. It was ethically repugnant, of course, but complaining to the IRS is likely to net you doodly-squat in this case.

We may have to settle for escalating our mockery of mormonism. It’s not hard, after all: it is one of the most palpably ridiculous, unethical, dumb-ass religions flourishing in our unfortunate nation of theological dumb-asses. Did you know that being excommunicated from the Mormon church can get you expelled from BYU? Don’t go to BYU (not that there’s much chance many of my readers would do so), and feel free to sneer a little bit at the poor BYU graduates. Forget that ski vacation in Park City; Colorado has great snow, too. Be even ruder to the next pair of white-shirted Mormon missionaries who come to your door. Hey, does anyone know what a Mormon would find heretical? Send me something they find sacred.

Otherwise, we’re just stuck with this ugly outcome. All we can do is be more aware of the flock of smug, sanctimonious, hypocritical holy meddlers in our midst.

Remember, though, that all they were doing is trying to keep the definition of marriage as it has been since the beginning of time. Dumb-asses.

God and sex: two potent ideas that never get along well together

Imagine yourself in this situation. A young girl is accused of a heinous crime — use your imagination here, too, and think of the most horrible thing a person can do — and she is trapped in front of you, helpless. You have a rock in your hands. People around you are urging you to kill her; they say that you are justified in taking her life. What would you do?

Let’s say you don’t have a rock, but are just part of the large crowd of spectators, witnessing a small group of men killing this girl. What would you do then?

Be honest now.

I wouldn’t be able to do kill anyone, and I would try to stop the killers. She could be an unrepentant mass murderer, and I couldn’t be an executioner — I wouldn’t want to sink to her level, and I think killing is an easy ‘solution’ that solves nothing. At the same time, it reduces the humanity of the killers, and diminishes the quality of our culture. I may not be the target myself, but such acts harm me.

That makes this story of a 13 year old girl stoned to death for adultery in Somalia incomprehensible to me. I know that people do evil all the time, but this was a mob of a thousand people watching 50 thugs murder someone in a particularly brutal fashion. Couldn’t just a few have raised a voice in protest, couldn’t some small fraction of that thousand intervened? Are the killers so divorced from empathy and morality that they would gladly snuff out the life of someone who can do them no harm?

What’s especially appalling is that the murderers weren’t driven by a fundamental human need — they didn’t kill her because they were defending themselves, or because they were starving, or because she had some real power that could harm them. She was killed because she offended their sense of sexual propriety. Because they perceived her as sexually potent, she challenged their own insecure, mouselike manhood. This is outrageously vile.

And even at that, she was an innocent. She was a 13 year old girl who had been raped by three men, and for this she was dragged out, begging for her life, buried up to her neck, and then stoned to death by weak, blustering men who let their machismo overwhelm their humanity.

And of course, this was driven by Islamist delusions. Religion is excellent at elevating intangible, untestable lies to a higher plane of moral significance than something as real and as simple as the life of a child.


I should also add, before everyone condemns this as simply the act of a primitive society, that the same impulse is at work right here in America. Those people who voted yes on Proposition 8 in California were simply performing a slightly more civilized version of casting a stone at those who offend their moral and religious sense of propriety.

More Christian irony

This is a video of Barack Obama pointing out that we can’t use the Christian holy book as a guide to secular law — it has bits that advocate slavery and stoning obstreperous children, and that the injunctions to “turn the other cheek” and follow the golden rule in the Sermon on the Mount would, if taken literally, put the Defense Department in violation.

The irony comes from the outraged Christian fundie voiceover. He accuses Obama of mocking the bible, and then defends it by claiming that the Sermon on the Mount is “spiritually inspiring”…completely missing the point that Obama was not saying otherwise. And then he claims that Jesus would never advocate turning the cheek to terrorists and America’s enemies. What? I don’t think Jesus had much to say about America, and probably wouldn’t have much concern about some strange secular nation far removed from his natal region. To defend Deuteronomy and Leviticus, he makes a similar non sequitur, complaining that the Ten Commandments are also in Deuteronomy. So? Even if you consider the Ten Commandments virtuous, it does not negate Obama’s point, which is that you have to pick and choose bits of the bible, making it an inappropriate guide to civic behavior…and there this narrator is, picking and choosing. And of course, the Ten Commandments are mostly irrelevant, and not the basis of US law anyway.

And then he accuses Obama of distorting the bible. That’s the whole point, bozo! The bible is a welter of contradictions and archaicisms — you are unavoidably distorting it if you try to take that mess literally and run a country on its precepts.

Where’s Charlton Heston when you need him?

Some Christian fanatics are concerned, quite reasonably, about the economy, and have chosen, quite absurdly, to try and correct the problem with prayer. So far, so typical, but then … well, they picked a peculiarly oblivious way to do it. They prayed before a statue of a golden bull on Wall Street.

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We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems. While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.

Just a clue: there’s this book called “the bible” that these people claim to follow, but I suspect they’ve never actually read it, or they might have seen Exodus 32.

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1And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.

 2And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.

 3And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.

 4And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

 5And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD.

 6And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.

 7And the LORD said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves:

 8They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

 9And the LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people:

 10Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.

They even made a movie of it, if cracking a book is too highbrow.

Trust me, this is one of those things in the Judeo-Christian heritage that never ends well. There’s this jealous god who does smitings.

More crazy from that homeschooling mom

She may have deleted her post that called for killing homosexuals, but now she’s put up a guest post from some freaky Baptist minister, shrieking about “Sodomites” who are being punished by her loving god, with quotes from the usual suspects — Romans and Leviticus — demanding that they be put to death.

That Christian deity sure is a cranky, bitter, hateful old guy, isn’t he? And Christians sure are talented at inventing imaginary enemies to work themselves into a frothing rage over.

OH NOES! SPIRCHUL WARFARE!

Great. It just gets more and more insane. It seems that while McCain’s side knows how to do ‘spiritual warfare’, Obama has all the witches on his side.

Minutes ago I spoke with friend Dr. Norman G. Marvin, M.D. and he is so concerned at what he has learned about Barack Obama’s family in Kenya that he is calling a special prayer meeting in his home to pray against the witchcraft curses attempted by them against John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Dr. Marvin sent me the below e-mail from Flo Ellers. Flo is credentialed with the International Fellowship of Ministries which is based in Washington State. She is also a member of EndTime Handmaidens and Servants of Jasper, Arkansas.

IF YOU KNOW HOW TO DO SPIRITUAL WARFARE, PLEASE PRAY TODAY AND CONTINUALLY THAT ALL SUCH CURSES BE BROKEN AND SATAN’S PLAN FOR AMERICA BE DEFEATED, IN JESUS’ NAME. PRAY AND COVER MCCAIN AND PALIN WITH THE BLOOD OF CHRIST. IF YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DO SPIRITUAL WARFARE, IT IS TIME YOU LEARN!!!

Two days ago, I listened to a 9-6-08 message by Bree Keyton, a young woman evangelist who had just traveled to Kenya and visited Obama’s home village and what she found out about his relations with his tribal people was chilling. And his “cousin” Odinga was dreadful. She said the witches, warlocks and those involved in satanism and the occult get up daily at 3 a.m. to release curses against McCain and Palin so B. Hussein Obama is elected.

<Pssst. McCain supporters. Here’s the secret to winning the election: stay home for the next few weeks praying nonstop. Especially when the polls open up in November, you must stay on your knees calling on your god the entire day. Otherwise, the witches will get us.>

Witch doctors kill

Ignorance leads to evil: albinos are being butchered for their body parts in Burundi. Witch doctors are spreading the claim that their body parts are valuable in attracting gold, so stupid and greedy people are killing them and selling off bits and pieces.

Officials have gathered all the albinos in the country into a walled safehouse to protect them, which seems like a short term solution. I say since their number came up in the genetic lottery as cursed in Burundi, offer them asylum and bring them to Minnesota, where their paleness won’t be at all exceptional.

Say…wasn’t an African witch doctor one of Sarah Palin’s heroes? Let’s be sure not to bring them to Alaska, then.

Short takes from the mailbag

I get tons of news tips all the time, and I can’t use them all — so here’s a quick dump of a few items from the let’s-laugh-at-religion file.