Hate is the essential spice

I’ve just started reading Wilson’s The Creation(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I’m enjoying it—my wife read it first and recommends it, too—and I wish it would help. I’m a bit cynical, though, especially since I just mentioned the sad affair of Joel Hunter (certain evangelical Christians refuse to consider any issues beyond the gay and the fetus), and now I caught (via the Friendly Atheist) an episode of This American Life on Carlton Pearson, an evangelical preacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He had a thriving church with tens of thousands of members, when he had an insight: there was no hell. No eternal torment for damned souls. Jesus came to earth to save everyone, not just the few, not just the true believers. He called this the “gospel of inclusion”. You can guess what happened.

The church collapsed. People stopped attending with no hellfire to goad them on.

It’s acutely depressing, if you want to listen.

So far, Wilson is only telling us about the wonders and importance of biodiversity, without one word about being cast into the abyss if you step on an ant, or if you dare to engage in any sexual practices the Cosmic Superbeing dislikes. I wonder if it will resonate with his intended audience.

Priorities!

What’s really important to the Christian Coalition?

The Rev. Joel Hunter, of Northland, A Church Distributed, in Longwood, Fla., said he quit as president-elect of the group founded by evangelist Pat Robertson because he realized he would be unable to broaden the organization’s agenda beyond opposing abortion and same-sex marriage.

He hoped to include issues such as easing poverty and saving the environment.

“These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about,” Hunter said.

Well, I suspect Jesus would have been fanatical about a lot of old rabbinical minutia that we’d find distinctly creepy nowadays, but never mind that—Christianity is clearly the institution to be in if you’re a fussy, petty prude who is most interested in policing what people do in their bedrooms, so Hunter was obviously out of touch with his flock.

Somebody didn’t do their research

I just got this email, addressed to “Dear Blog Author”. This must be the internet equivalent of evangelical door-knocking.

Invitation to Join Christian Bloggers

A small group of us have started a new site called Christian Bloggers. Our prayer and intent is to bring Christians closer together, and make a positive contribution to the Internet community. While many of us have different “theologies”, we all share one true saviour.

Would you be interested in joining Christian Bloggers? Please take a few minutes to have a look at what we are trying to do, and if you are interested, there is a sign up page to get the ball rolling. We would greatly appreciate your support in this endeavour.

May God Bless you and your blogging efforts. We look forward to hearing from you.

Wow, did they ever pick on the wrong guy.

Although, I don’t know…should I take them up on their offer? They don’t ask me to sign any loyalty oaths to Jesus, and all they do is ask for my denomination (“none”). My presence certainly would help bring them all together, I would think.

Remind me why we take these guys seriously at all?

There’s some loony Indonesian witch doctor trying to put a voodoo curse on GW Bush. While I can sympathize with the sentiment, the method is a stupid waste of time (except, perhaps, that it has gotten the witch doctor in the news, so maybe it’s just a high-tech way to drum up business)—and it’s not something anyone could take seriously.

Or so I thought, until a link on Alicublog led me to this fairly well known wingnut, Rod Dreher. He starts out with some offensive macho colonialist remarks, punctuated with a description of this well known scene:

One of my favorite scenes in all of cinema is in one of the Indiana Jones movies, the first I think, when some grand, scimitar-wielding assassin leaps in front of Indy inside a souk, does some whoop-de-do presentation with his sword as a prelude to chopping the American to bits. Indy, unperturbed, laconically pulls out his revolver and blows the dude away.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about that scene—it’s not just a commentary about the superiority of Western technology, but also personifies the casual destruction of non-Western peoples by the European side of the world. But OK, go with the flow, it’s a cartoonish movie that probably doesn’t warrant that kind of cultural concern…and since Dreher started this with the silly witch doctor story, he’s probably talking about the inefficacy of old ideas against new technology and science.

But no…

Nevertheless, I can’t honestly say I don’t believe this stuff can work. If you want to disbelieve in it with ease, don’t hang out with exorcists, or talk with people intimately familiar with the occult. I’ll be praying for the president’s safety, though I would have done so the minute he got there, given how jihadi-infested Indonesia is. I wish he weren’t going, frankly.

What? I read that as Dreher siding with the occultists, supernaturalists, and religious with the Indonesian witch doctor in believing that magic might work. These two procedures are identical in their effectiveness:

Ki Gendeng Pamungkas slit the throat of a goat, a small snake and stabbed a black crow in the chest, stirred their blood with spice and broccoli before drank the “potion” and smeared some on his face.

I’ll be praying for the president’s safety


The one on the left does have a lot more “whoop-de-do”, but both are indistinguishable otherwise—they’re invocations of invisible supernatural spirits. I therefore think it’s appropriate that we take a “crunchy con” like Dreher about as seriously as we do Ki Gendeng Pamungkas—as a kook, a joke, a rather laughable and backwards clown, a silly political punchline. Maybe we can start calling him “Mr Bone-Through-the-Nose”, too. Ooga-booga.

Chopra, again

Chopra’s latest attempt to critique Dawkins is as lame as his first. I summarized that first one as “Well, you can’t see love in your fancy microscope, now can you, Dr Smarty Pants?”; this one is the Incredibly Agile Evasive God trick. He’s going to play a game and try to define his god and religion into a kind of vague god he’s going to conveniently pull of out his pocket, one fuzzy enough that no one can criticize it, and he’s also going to engage in some blatant projection:

But Dawkins has pulled the same trick that he resorts to over and over. This is the us-versus-them trick. Either you think there is a personal God, a superhuman Creator who made the world according to the Book of Genesis, or you are a rational believer in the scientific method.

I begin to have doubts that Chopra has even read the book. Right at the beginning, Dawkins carefully and plainly explains that he is not setting up this false confusion, where everyone who believed in an impersonal ‘god’ made up of cosmic laws was going to get lumped with the fundies and slapped around with a bible.

By ‘religion’ Einstein meant something entirely different
from what is conventionally meant. As I continue to clarify the dis-
tinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and
Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that I am calling only
supernatural gods delusional.

There is nothing comical about Einstein’s beliefs. Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle- wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

My title, The God Delusion, does not refer to the God of Einstein and the other enlightened scientists of the previous section. That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse. In the rest of this book I am talking only about supernatural gods, of which the most familiar to the majority of my readers will be Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.

Notice that Dawkins has already pre-empted Chopra’s deliberate confusion.

I guess that since Chopra was getting whomped on for the silliness he was saying before, he felt the need to invent some silliness that Dawkins did not argue so he’d have something to whomp back. Pathetic. He’s threatening to have another part to this feeble criticism…it sounds like he’s already dribbling off into irrelevant nonsense.

That’s some concession

As happened in so many places in this last election, a local Democrat won a solid victory over a Republican in the District 50 election. His opponent sent a “concession” letter—see if you can spot what’s peculiar and a bit offensive about it.

Congratulations on winning the District 50 senate race. Your phone is “busy”…no doubt with good wishes!

I’ve enjoyed much of this race, especially the people I’ve met…even you! I see your deficits–not all of them, and your potential–but not all of it. Only your Creator knows the real potential He’s put in you. Get to know Him and know yourself…you’ll be more interesting even to you!

The race of your life is more important than this one–and it is my sincere wish that you’ll get to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. He died for the sins of the world, yours and mine–and especially for those who accept His forgiveness. His kingdom will come and His will be done–on earth as it is in heaven. There’s more….I love belonging to the family of God. Jesus is the way, the truth and offers His life to you and each human being. Pay attention…this is very important, Satveer. Have you noticed Jesus for yourself…at some moment in time, yet???

God commends His love to us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8

Death came upon all and was defeated by the superiority of Jesus’ life and His tomb is empty. God in Christ is reconciling the world back to Himself, with offered forgiveness–this is one choice we get to make nose to nose with the living God–fear Him and you need fear no other. Become His family and know the love of God that passes knowledge. See Isaiah and the Gospel of John…good reading while waiting for fishes to bite.

God sent not His son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
John 3:17

Jesus Christ lives in His earth family by His Spirit. He said He’d be back, and He said it first. You could invite Him to make the race of your life ‘eternal’. God waits to be gracious to each person that knows they need to be forgiven. Do you? I think you do. Just ask. Christ won eternal life for you and said so. Take Him at His Word. Take some time to get acquainted with this power-filled Jesus…God with us. You could be a temple of the living God, by invitation—yours, TO GOD. :) There’s nothing like belonging to Christ…not winning, not money, not degrees…it’s the best.

Good wishes and better wishes…until you wish for the best!

Rae Hart Anderson

To make it particularly piquant, the Democratic victor is named Satveer Chaudary, and he is a practicing Hindu. I suspect that he is more aware that his religious beliefs are not necessarily shared with his fellow members of the Minnesota congress, and might be a little less oblivious…so I’m glad he was elected.

(via I’ll explain it when you are older)

Bizarro Chez Myers

For a little context, you need to know that we had a foreign exchange student from Italy living with us for a year. If you’ve been reading this blog for long, you may also know that I have somewhat strong feelings about religion—OK, I’m one of those surly evil atheists your momma warned you to avoid.

So now go read this story of a Polish foreign exchange student who came to the US…and found his host parents were Christian fundamentalists. Keep in mind that foreign exchange programs are often stressful, and sometimes the students and host families experience a little culture shock, but still…!

I don’t know exactly what our student thought of us—she hasn’t been interviewed in Spiegel and given an opportunity to dish the dirt—but despite my horned and fanged reputation, when she came to stay with us we showed her where the local Catholic church was and told her we’d willingly give her a ride if she wanted to go. We didn’t try to convert her to atheism, either, or make plans to have her disseminate our godless doctrines when she got home.

I guess we missed our opportunity.

This is your body on religion

Religious ritual can make you very, very sick, and even kill you. This somewhat morbid, mildly gross, and terribly sad story about the Essenes, the religious zealots who authored the Dead Sea scrolls, is an interesting anthropological look at an ancient failed cult.

It seems that their requirements for dealing with their own waste were mistakenly ineffective. They excreted into pits that protected parasites, which they would then carry back…and before they could return to the group, they had to bathe by total immersion in a cistern, which meant they’d basically soak in each other’s infestations.

The ritual cleansing “is a total immersion, which means that it gets in your ears, in your eyes and in your mouth,” Zias said. “It is not hard to imagine how sick everyone must have been.”

The sickness is reflected in the Qumran cemetery, which had been partially excavated previously.

“The graveyard at Qumran is the unhealthiest group I have ever studied in over 30 years,” Zias said.

Fewer than 6% of the men buried there survived to age 40, he said. In contrast, cemeteries from the same period excavated at Jericho show that half the men lived beyond age 40.

Bleh. I think I need to take a shower.

There is a kind of metaphor here, though—this is what you get when you seek religious purity.

What’s so unusual about this?

You have to applaud the courage of this history teacher in Kearny, New Jersey:

Among his remarks in open class were statements that a being must have created the universe, that the Christian Bible is the word of God, and that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark. If you do not accept Jesus, he flatly proclaimed to his class, “you belong in hell.” Referring to a Muslim student who had been mentioned by name, he lamented what he saw as her inevitable fate should she not convert. In an attempt to promote biblical creationism, he also dismissed evolution and the Big Bang as non-scientific, arguing by contrast that the Bible is supported by what he calls confirmed biblical prophecies.

He’s just reciting standard fundagelical Christian doctrine, the same things a hundred million people believe, but usually keep quiet about, and now he’s going to be hounded and harassed for it. This teacher, David Paszkiewicz, is simply standing up for and representing good Christian values!

After taking the matter to the school administration, one of Paszkiewicz’s students, junior Matthew LaClair, requested a meeting with the teacher and the school principal. LaClair, a non-Christian, was requesting an apology and correction of false and anti-scientific statements. After two weeks, a meeting took place in the principal’s office, wherein Paszkiewicz denied making many of these comments, claiming that LaClair had taken his remarks out of context. Paszkiewicz specifically denied using the phrase, “you belong in hell.” He also asserted that he did nothing different in this class than he has been doing in fifteen years of teaching.

At the end of the meeting, LaClair revealed that he had recorded the remarks, and presented the principal with two compact discs. The teacher then declined to comment further without his union representative. However, he fired one last shot at the student, saying, “You got the big fish … you got the big Christian guy who is a teacher…!”

This is why good Christians must oppose science. If it hadn’t been for science, the devil-spawned technology of audio recording and CDs wouldn’t exist to entrap the devout. Although, actually…maybe Paszkiewicz should have confined his perfectly ordinary remarks to the four walls of his Baptist church, where they would have earned him applause rather than censure.

At least Mr Paszkiewicz can take comfort in the fact that he’s about to become a martyr. One of those living martyrs who will get to make the right-wing church circuit.

Oh. So we lost after all.

According to the mealy-mouthed Jim Wallis, anyway, the recent election was a defeat for the religious extremists and the secular Left, and a great victory for moderate and conservative Christians. Fortunately, we’ve got Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden to administer a corrective, or I’d have to throw a snit and go start piling faggots for the long-postponed atheist revolution. Since they’ve got it under control, I guess I can let it pass. This time.

But Wallis does join Amy Sullivan on The List.