Atheists sink to new depths of depravity!

Ken Ham has a new post up about how evil atheists really are.

It seems like atheists will go to pretty extreme lengths to combat the words of a God they don’t even believe exists.

Uh-oh. What have we done now? Beheaded people? Tossed them in prison for believing? Stoned them to death? Persecuted people who don’t practice sex exactly as we do? Demanded legislation to allow us to demand that everyone use contraception?

No. Worse.

A recent article from the Religion News Service reports, “Atheists use a popular Bible app to evangelize about unbelief.” The article contains interviews with a number of young atheists who have chosen to use YouVersion, one of the most popular apps around, as a way of trying to shake the faith of Christians.

That’s right! We’re reading the Bible!

He goes on to whine about atheists using “supposed contradictions” and how they’re supposed to use a “literal translation”. The implication is that it is young naive atheists who don’t understand the deepities of the Bible who are doing this, but as always, Ingersoll was there first, and he knew exactly what an evil book the Bible was.

Ministers wonder how I can be wicked enough to attack the Bible.

I will tell them: This book, the Bible, has persecuted, even unto death, the wisest and the best. This book stayed and stopped the onward movement of the human race. This book poisoned the fountains of learning and misdirected the energies of man.

This book is the enemy of freedom, the support of slavery. This book sowed the seeds of hatred in families and nations, fed the flames of war, and impoverished the world. This book is the breastwork of kings and tyrants — the enslaver of women and children. This book has corrupted parliaments and courts. This book has made colleges and universities the teachers of error and the haters of science. This book has filled Christendom with hateful, cruel, ignorant and warring sects. This book taught men to kill their fellows for religion’s sake.

This book funded the Inquisition, invented the instruments of torture, built the dungeons in which the good and loving languished, forged the chains that rusted in their flesh, erected the scaffolds whereon they died. This book piled fagots about the feet of the just. This book drove reason from the minds of millions and filled the asylums with the insane.

This book has caused fathers and mothers to shed the blood of their babes. This book was the auction block on which the slave- mother stood when she was sold from her child. This book filled the sails of the slave-trader and made merchandise of human flesh. This book lighted the fires that burned “witches” and “wizards.” This book filled the darkness with ghouls and ghosts, and the bodies of men and women with devils. This book polluted the souls of men with the infamous dogma of eternal pain. This book made credulity the greatest of virtues, and investigation the greatest of crimes. This book filled nations with hermits, monks and nuns — with the pious and the useless. This book placed the ignorant and unclean saint above the philosopher and philanthropist. This book taught man to despise the joys of this life, that he might be happy in another — to waste this world for the sake of the next.

I attack this book because it is the enemy of human liberty — the greatest obstruction across the highway of human progress.

Let me ask the ministers one question: How can you be wicked enough to defend this book?

Well, we all know…Ken Ham is pretty damned wicked.

Anderson Cooper is going to be embarrassing, I bet

Brace yourselves. The heaven brigade is going to get another whirl on the mass media carousel.

AC360° Special report Sunday

"To Heaven and Back" airs Sunday at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. E.T. Randi Kaye meets three people who were on the brink of death, when they say they left this world for another.

I’ll probably tune in to cringe. It’s good timing, though: after watching Anderson Cooper give attention to the silly people who claim to have gone to heaven, I’ll flip channels to watch The Walking Dead, which will be slightly more credible.

One law for all

The report takes a little too much glee at poking at the JREF, but it does seem fair: Broward County is cracking down on tax exemptions for non-profits, including the JREF and churches. If they have undeveloped or unused property, property that isn’t being used for a charitable function, they are being told to pay taxes on it.

They lead with the example of the JREF, which has an unused million dollar building up for sale, and they seem to have ambushed Randi about it (I don’t think he’s much involved with the business of the JREF, so he was the wrong person to talk to). They owe about $23,000. At the end of the video, they finally mention that the JREF has paid up about $21,000.

What I find most promising though, is that they also mention going after churches — just on their unused property so far. But they make much of the fact that these exemptions are costing the people money, and that they are going to be much more thorough in auditing tax exempt institutions, which is a good thing.

One can only hope that they eventually get around to rethinking the charitable purpose of sitting around in pews getting hectored by a priest, and start yanking tax exemptions from churches wholesale.

So that’s how religious fantasies directly harm people…

The child-raping and the beheadings get all the headlines, but meanwhile, the machinery of faith keeps clawing at the foundation of society in subtler ways as well — it’s a free-wheeling parasitic scam, an infection that our social immune system is conditioned to tolerate. Answers in Genesis is a beautiful example. They have millions of dollars that they funnel into lying to people and corrupting education, and ultimately, they really are just a grand scam for leaching money out of their environment. I mentioned that they’re selling junk bonds to expand their operations, and that their ridiculous Ark Park is a boondoggle retreating into the distance as they continually promise and fail. Americans United describes their other tactic: hoodwinking secular government into propping up their depradations.

The latest ploy comes courtesy of the city of Williamstown, which is not far from Cincinnati. The town already gave the overtly religious park a 75 percent property tax break, and Bloomberg News reported this week that the city plans to sell $62 million in municipal bonds in December for AiG affiliates. This means the city is actively taking on quite a bit of debt for the sole purpose of funding the Ark Park.

And by “the city”, of course, what they mean are the citizens and businesses of Williamstown, who are being robbed of massive sums of money to support that con man, Ken Ham.

The article also mentions that AiG has received $40 million plus in tax incentives from the state…for a proposal that has only managed to get somewhere around $4 million in donations. That’s a whole lot of huffing and puffing to inflate the lead balloon of the Ark Park. Further, they’re sinking $2 million into improving a road to nowhere, the proposed Ark Park site.

But let’s step back a bit. This isn’t just a sinkhole into which the state of Kentucky proposes to throw money — even if it were to “succeed” as a tourist attraction, the existence of a state-subsidized monument to anti-scientific idiocy ought to be an embarrassment and an impediment to the status of the region. The state of Kentucky and the city of Williamstown seem to be happily shooting themselves over this deal…all because it’s in the name of faith and piety and god.

Why would any parent do this?

You’ve just had a baby boy! You’ve brought him home from the hospital, you’re getting into that routine of late night feedings and too frequent diaper changes, and you think, “Hmmm. What this situation really needs is for someone to take a pair of scissors to this little rascal’s penis.” I don’t get it. But apparently, home circumcisions are a thing, and there are “professionals” (using the term loosely) who are so committed to their hobby of chopping up baby penises that they’ll resign from regular work to commit to the practice.

As part of the BBC investigation, an actor phoned up Dr Siddiqui and asked him to conduct a home circumcision on their baby. He agreed, in direct contravention of his GMC ban. Since then, and after discovering he had been exposed by the BBC,  Dr Siddiqui has resigned from his NHS job. The astonishing consequence of that resignation is that it now allows him to resume conducting circumcisions, which it appears he fully intends to do.

Yes, you did read that correctly. Circumcisions are completely unregulated in the UK, and anyone – you, me or the local barber – can set up a business cutting off baby boy’s foreskins at a hundred quid a pop.  Any doctor under the employ of the NHS, however, is bound to the regulation of the GMC and the Quality and Care Commission. A circumcision conducted in a hospital, with anaesthetic and surgical implements is carefully controlled and subject to monitoring and audit. A circumcision conducted on a kitchen table or in a community centre is completely unregulated. There are more regulations surrounding the piercing of an ear than the surgical amputation of a foreskin.

Weird. You know, if a guy made a habit of going around kissing baby penises, he’d be locked up on the spot, but add some sharp knives and olive oil to the process, and suddenly it becomes an honored and respected traditional folk practice that must be allowed to continue without interference.

Please, Christians, keep making these guys the frontmen for youth outreach

Amanda Marcotte has a list of 'Hip' Christian Right-Wingers Trying to Make Conservative Christianity Look Cool for the Kids, where “trying” is the operative word. At the top of her list: Bradlee Dean. It makes her point perfectly.

Bradlee Dean is in my backyard, metaphorically speaking: he’s based in those Bachmann suburbs, full of far right wing nuts with upper middle class money, and I’ve seen his garish vehicles driven by teams of tattooed zealots many times.

No one thinks Bradlee Dean is cool. No one. He’s only cool in the sense that Ted Nugent thinks he is, by mistaking loud, stupid, and reactionary for ‘hip’. I don’t think Dean has played at the Morris high school, but similar Christian fronts have done so, and if you ever want to see a conservative town full of disaffected teenagers all going “WTF?”, try visiting us after the school administration puts on a religiously-motivated assembly.

But keep doing it, Christians. Keep believing that the best way to win over young people is to have middle-aged blowhards yell at them about Jesus.

Don’t forget the other coping strategies

In a rather cheerful article about the increasing numbers of Americans who insist on secularism, especially among the youth, we get a number of explanations for why young people are leaving religion.

A third explanation [the others being demographic shifts and increasing levels of education –pzm] for the rise of Americans claiming no religion is the increasing politicization of religion. Michael Hout and Claude Fischer argue that the political right has become so identified with a conservative religious agenda that it has alienated moderates who consider organized “religion” a synonym for an antigay, antiabortion, procivic religion agenda. At the same time, while they may feel disenfranchised from organized religion, many of them remain privately religious or “spiritual.” This reaction against the politicization of religion is seen particularly among young adults.

I agree with this. I see it as a psychological coping strategy: as it becomes increasingly obvious that religious explanations fit real world situations poorly, as there is increasing dissonance between faith and reality, people deal with it in rational ways. One way is to distance oneself from specific claims, to generalize, and adopt an increasingly vague term to describe oneself. “Spiritual” is popular. It’s so open and meaningless that conflicts are minimized…and that’s what all of this is about, is reducing disparities between your mental model of how the universe works and your functional behavior.

The article is all about how people and families have adjusted to the declining importance of religion, but I have to say that they left out a few strategies that worry me.

One important long term strategy: we have to recognize that religions are flexible and plastic — even, or especially, the oldest ones are capable of remarkable shifts over time. As dissonance between science and faith increases, don’t expect religions to break. Expect them to adapt and coopt instead (how do you think they managed to last so long, anyway?) We’re already seeing remarkable plasticity in Christianity. Megachurches are crucibles of religious evolution, where the selective pressures are high and the pastors are sensitive to losses in membership and income. Atheists should worry: one beneficial mutation and a new religion could erupt (or possibly worse, atheism becomes that religion).

But the other coping mechanism that we see in play right now is self-reinforcing tribalism. It would be less deleterious to our society for a popular new religion to emerge that accommodates itself to reality better, than for what we see right now: a society fracturing itself as groups wall themselves off into little hothouses of sanctimonious delusion.

The history of creationism is instructive. As we came out of the 19th century, religious people were sincerely trying to reconcile the Bible with science. There were many models proposed for how the book of Genesis, for instance, could accommodate the new geology: there was the gap theory and the day-age theory, and lots of less well integrated attempts to solder faith and rocks together with revelation. But the model that won out, that is now the dominant (but not sole!) form of creationism, is rigid denial. They simply reject the testimony of the rocks, because there is no way their stories can be reconciled.

And how can they do that? Just by forming tight little groups where they repeat their messages to each other incessantly — they are self-affirming enclaves that find vindication by finding other people who want to believe the same things they do. Apes are good social animals who are quite adept at doing that: what rocks and trees and stars are saying is far less significant to an ape-mind than what that other ape who grooms your hair is saying. How do you think Answers in Genesis and the Tea Party can persist, when the real world is shrieking at them at full volume that their myths are false? They simply don’t care.

So I’m a bit more pessimistic than that article. The secular nones are rising, and we could get lucky and just see religious movements slowly fade away and become little more than traditional social groups. But don’t ever lose sight of the fact that, like any group of pathogenic parasites, religions are trying adapt and exploit us, and also that human beings have an amazing capacity for forming weird little subgroups that can have a deadly effect on the body politic.

I’m always getting asked if I think religion will go away and secularism will become dominant. I think the trends are going that way, fortunately, but there’s always this nagging thought in my head that innovation and changing circumstances can bring about novelties that completely upset any trends.

A related story about a religious innovation: That’s what objectivism is, and it certainly does appeal to a subset of the population.

Who needs reason & evidence when you’ve got hurt feelings?

Francis Spufford has written a book called Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Still Makes Surprising Emotional Sense. I don’t think I’ll be reading it, if this excerpt is at all representative, because what it represents is all that I despise about Christianity and Christians. Number one: their persecution complex. That aura of sanctity they all get by piously reciting all the horrible things done to them because of their deep, profound, all-important faith. So Spufford babbles, at excruciating length, about all the misconceptions atheists have about Christians.

It means that we’re dogmatic. That we’re self-righteous. That we fetishize pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die. That we’re bleeding hearts who don’t understand the wealth-creating powers of the market. That we’re too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy. That we uphold the nuclear family, with all its micro-tyrannies and imprisoning stereotypes. That we’re the hairshirted enemies of the ordinary family pleasures of parenthood, shopping, sex and car ownership. That we’re savagely judgmental. That we’d free murderers to kill again. That we think everyone who disagrees with us is going to roast for all eternity. That we’re as bad as Muslims. That we’re worse than Muslims, because Muslims are primitives who can’t be expected to know any better. That we’re better than Muslims, but only because we’ve lost the courage of our convictions. That we’re infantile and can’t do without an illusory daddy in the sky. That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in your minds. That we oppose freedom, human rights, gay rights, individual moral autonomy, a woman’s right to choose, stem cell research, the use of condoms in fighting AIDS, the teaching of evolutionary biology. Modernity. Progress. That we think everyone should be cowering before authority. That we sanctify the idea of hierarchy. That we get all snooty and yuck-no-thanks about transsexuals, but think it’s perfectly normal for middle-aged men to wear purple dresses. That we cover up child abuse, because we care more about power than justice. That we’re the villains in history, on the wrong side of every struggle for human liberty. That if we sometimes seem to have been on the right side of one of said struggles, we weren’t really; or the struggle wasn’t about what it appeared to be about; or we didn’t really do the right thing for the reasons we said we did. That we’ve provided pious cover stories for racism, imperialism, wars of conquest, slavery, exploitation. That we’ve manufactured imaginary causes for real people to kill each other. That we’re stuck in the past. That we destroy tribal cultures. That we think the world’s going to end. That we want to help the world to end. That we teach people to hate their own natural selves. That we want people to be afraid. That we want people to be ashamed. That we have an imaginary friend; that we believe in a sky pixie; that we prostrate ourselves before a god who has the reality status of Santa Claus. That we prefer scripture to novels, preaching to storytelling, certainty to doubt, faith to reason, law to mercy, primary colors to shades, censorship to debate, silence to eloquence, death to life.

Jesus fucking Christ, man, get down off that giant cross you’ve erected! You’re going to hurt yourself!

And that’s only a small piece of the long tirade. He has more than a few misconceptions about atheists, himself. He goes off about how Christians are supposed to be embarrassed because they’re not Harry Potter or Star Wars, how atheism is all about hedonism rather than the richly human complexity of Deep Theology, and how he’s so bitter about suggestions that we enjoy our lives, and “Imagine”, and pop culture, and how much he thinks Mozart is wonderful, and there’s not one word that explains why religion adds anything to our lives.

Fuck it, never mind, Spufford, go ahead and climb back up on that rickety cross with your mouthful of nails — it’ll shut you up and keep you happy for a while.

Especially when this is the one strong assertion you make in the midst of all your whiny caterwauling about how awfully terrible it is that some of us look at your tearful tantrum with contempt.

I think that the reason reality is that way, is in some ultimate sense merciful as well as being a set of physical processes all running along on their own without hope of appeal, all the way up from quantum mechanics to the relative velocity of galaxies by way of “blundering, low and horridly cruel” biology (Darwin), is that the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love. I think that love keeps it in being. I think that Dante’s cosmology was crap, but that he was right to say that it’s “love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”

And you’re unapologetic about dishing up that load of bullshit? Shameless, more like.

In case you were wondering, gravity and momentum keep the stars and planets moving, and not one bit of love or absence thereof will nudge stone or plasma a nanometer.

Religion is destroying the nuclear family!

It’s not gays that are corrupting traditional family values, it’s god. The latest survey shows that members of Bible-believing churches are more likely to divorce than atheists are.

There are a number of explanations. Here’s one.

Secular couples tend to see both marriage and divorce as personal choices. Overall, a lower percent get married, which means that those who do may be particularly committed or well-suited to partnership. They are likely to be older if/when they do formally tie the knot. They have fewer babies, and their babies are more likely to be planned. Parenting, like other household responsibilities, is more likely to be egalitarian rather than based on the traditional model of “male headship.” Each of these factors could play a role in the divorce rate.

I also think there’s a difference between the sexes in traditional marriage, too: for women, it’s an obligation to live a life of service; for men, it’s a privilege to obtain a cheap servant who is required to give you cheap sex. That kind of differential can easily fracture what ought to be a partnership.

I’m relieved to see, though, that the article doesn’t imply that it’s something intrinsic to being an atheist, stating that it’s more like what slice of the socioeconomic pie you’re likely to get if you’re an atheist vs. a Christian, and it also suggests that the way to reduce divorce rates overall isn’t to get everyone to become an atheist, but to build a better social safety net and encourage more equality. Which also leads to more atheism, by the way, which is why the people suffering most under an unfair system will oppose changes to make it better.

I’m still going to deplore how all those religious organizations with “Family” prominently planted in their name are ironically poisoning the American family that they worship.