Demon squid?

This is just not right. Orac finds some wacky spiritualist ‘healer’ who claims to have the cause for diabetes: a demon, the great spirit squid of doom. What? A squid demon? How kooky. Everyone knows no self-respecting squid demon would confined itself to screwing up one subset of cells in your pancreas.

You’ll have to read the original page to find a list of other demons. There is, apparently, also a Demon of Excessive Foot Odor which you can cast out, and you can also have Demons in your Blood Sugar.

Look at it as voluntarily flagging their impairment

Now Phil is trying to kill me—he sent me this link with a knowing smirk, plainly telling me that he knew it would raise my blood pressure. People, think this stuff through: if I were found dead in my chair, one clawlike hand clutching my chest, my face in a rictus of agony, and there on the computer screen in front of me was an email chortling over giving me apoplexy, the police would come calling, and they wouldn’t be cheerful. My family, amoral godless atheists all, would probably put out a hit on you via the Infidel Mafia. Be more careful!

As you can tell, though, I survived this episode. Basically, it’s a small, studied insult, just one more piled up on many: in Alabama, getting a license plate with “God Bless America” stamped into it has no extra cost, but various specialty plates (such as those for some veterans) will require a few bucks extra.

It’s stupid, but I can’t respond with much more than a resigned sigh. For one thing, it’s Alabama (sorry, Blue Gal, but if I got upset every time Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, etc., insulted my intelligence and that of every sensible person north and south of the Mason-Dixon line, I’d be exhausted); secondly, looking at the standard plate choices, I see it as similar to the choice between an ordinary plate, and a disability plate. People who pick the “God Bless America” plate are merely notifying other drivers that their car is being piloted by someone with a different kind of disability.

Poor things. Maybe they could be privileged with special spots in their church parking lots, too.

Who counted them? And how?

Sean notes without comment a piece on how Muslims should find Mecca when traveling in space. I am in awe of the mind that could write this.

A user-friendly, portable Muslims in Space calculator , could determine the direction of the Qiblah and prayer times on the ISS. Its essential feature would be the use of the Projected Earth and Qiblah Pole concepts. These are based on the interpretation of the holy house of angels in the sky above Mecca. The place is always rich with angels worshipping. As many as 70,000 angels circumambulate it every day. Thus, one virtual Qiblah pole can be taken as a universal reference to determine the direction of the Qiblah. When Earth is projected to the height of the ISS, every point on its surface is projected also, including the Qiblah point, which can be projected upwards and downwards along the Qiblah Pole. This allows the direction of the Qiblah to be determined in space and in the bowels of the Earth.

It’s got space stations and angels all muddled up in one paragraph. Can we get the ISS to fly directly above Mecca? Would we need to install windshield wipers on it if we did so, in order to clear off the angel splat?

Pinker says a whole lot of sensible things all at once

I’m not a big fan of Steven Pinker’s work, but I have to agree with just about everything he says in this letter arguing against the planned “Reason and Faith” requirement at Harvard.

First, the word “faith” in this and many other contexts, is a euphemism for “religion.” An egregious example is the current administration’s “faith-based initiatives,” so-named because it is more palatable than “religion-based initiatives.” A university should not try to hide what it is studying in warm-and-fuzzy code words.

Second, the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for “Astronomy and Astrology” or “Psychology and Parapsychology.” It may be true that more people are knowledgeable about astrology than about astronomy, and it may be true that astrology deserves study as a significant historical and sociological phenomenon. But it would be a terrible mistake to juxtapose it with astronomy, if only for the false appearance of symmetry.

There’s more, but here’s the conclusion.

Again, we have to keep in mind that the requirement will attract attention from far and wide, and for a long time. For us to magnify the significance of religion as a topic equivalent in scope to all of science, all of culture, or all of world history and current affairs, is to give it far too much prominence. It is an American anachronism, I think, in an era in which the rest of the West is moving beyond it.

One of the sad consequences of the American separation of church and state is that it has fed the notion that church is as important as state, and that it needs to be accommodated with ever-growing privileges.

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.