Ja, we shall invade this Austrian poll

Hey, I thought Europe was more secular…so why is this poll going the wrong way? Oh, because it’s in Catholic Austria.

In German:

Sollen Kruzifixe aus den Klassenzimmern verbannt werden?

17,68% – Ja, denn Religion soll Privatsache bleiben.

77,04% – Nein, denn das Christentum hat in Österreich jahrhundertelange Tradition.

5,28% – Egal, es liegt sowieso an den Eltern, ihren Kindern Religion nahezubringen.

Auf Englisch:

Should crucifixes should be banned from classrooms?

17.68% – Yes, because religion should remain a private matter.

77.04% – No, because Christianity has centuries-long tradition in Austria.

5.28% – Doesn’t matter, it is up to the parents to bring their children up in a religion.

Can a bunch of Americans reverse this trend? That would be weird.

John Shook weighs in now

And he offers a historical perspective on Skepticism and Religion.

Enlightenment theologians had to strike a bargain with scientific skepticism since they were terrified by a different, far older kind of skepticism: ancient Greek Skepticism. This rationalistic skepticism demanded high standards of provability before accepting anything as knowledge. The basic idea for a rationalist skeptic during the Enlightenment was something like this: Where reason and empirical inquiry cannot confirm, it must be disbelieved as unreasonable. For this rationalist skepticism, all the gods must go. The core of religion, and not just the claptrap, is entirely unreasonable and unbelievable, since no theological argument demonstrates a god’s existence and no empirical evidence is sufficient to support a god’s existence. Instead of saying "No Comment" to religion’s core claims, rationalist skepticism says "That’s unreasonable for anyone to accept."

To this day, many skeptics rely on both scientific skepticism and rationalist skepticism. It’s all about the appropriate use of reason. That is why being a genuine skeptic means being a disbeliever and being open about disbelieving everything religions talk about. But joining up with this current Skeptic(TM) movement means never having to tell the faithful how their god isn’t real. Is that too big a price to pay, to get more science accommodated by society?

To answer that last question, yes, it’s much too high a price to pay, especially since we aren’t getting a reasonable return on the investment. Science is a disruptive, revolutionary force, and lying about its implications does not lead to acceptance — it leads only to acceptance of an insipid shadow of science.

Gene Mims and the mysterious missing point

Some Christian dorkasaur named Gene Mims has an argument for silencing atheists. It’s about unicorns.

Unicorns

Stay with me for a moment and I think I can give you a better understanding to my perplexity concerning atheists.  You see I do not believe in unicorns.  You may and that is surely your right, but I don’t.  They are cute in cartoons, movies, and comic books, but I must confess that I don’t believe in them.  So what’s the point.  The point is that since I don’t believe in unicorns I don’t give them much thought.  I don’t write about them or speak about them.  I don’t go to conferences on how to stop people from believing in them.  I do not fund legal societies to stop people from being able to talk about unicorns in schools and public places.  I  don’t worry if people celebrate holidays dedicated to unicorns.  For me they don’t exist.

Give It Up

To all bent-out-of-shape atheists I say simply, GIVE IT UP! Find something else to worry about like global warming, Republicans, education, war, and rain forest destruction.  Let those who believe in God alone.  If He doesn’t exist then why all the worry and concern?  If He does exist then you don’t care anyway.  He won’t bother you.  Try not to be bothered by what you don’t believe in and work on what you do know. The more you talk about God the more likely it is that those who may share your position might begin to doubt it and actually search for Him and find Him.

Aww, we have something in common. I don’t believe in unicorns, either! So I don’t spend much time dwelling on them, myself. We’re both a-unicornists! We should form a club.

Of course, there’s a reason I don’t worry much about unicorns or unicorn believers. We don’t have institutions dedicated to preaching about unicorns every week. People don’t get tax breaks for believing in unicorns. Unicornists don’t have a de facto lock on elected office. Nobody is telling me I need to include unicorn biology and paleontology in my courses at the university, or in high school. The unicorn lobby is essentially non-existent.

I’m not at all concerned about unicorns. If we had them, it would be unicorn-believers who would worry me. I’m not afraid of getting gored by a unicorn, and neither is Mr Mims, but we might just have reason to be terrified of the kind of fanatic who would consider mindless faith in unicorns to be a necessary prerequisite to moral behavior and inclusion in civilized society, to the point where they try to force unbelievers to obey and be silent.

Same with God, Mr Mims. Gods don’t exist, so they don’t trouble me in the slightest. But I fear your dumbassery, Mr Mims — that exists, unlike the invisible being to which you so zealously devote your life.

Maybe you should think just a little bit more deeply about your analogy between god and unicorns. I think there’s a significant similarity that you missed.

How about if we all end the killing?

deathtoatheists
One point! One demand! Atheists must be hanged!

Half a million Islamists marched in Bangladesh, chanting their desire to murder people who don’t believe in their demented, angry god. I take that personally — they want to kill people like me, for the crime of not thinking as they do. If I’d been there, that mob would have torn me to pieces.

And it’s not just atheists they hate. Women must live in service to the men, they are to have their rights diminished. Education is to be crippled, reduced to rote memorization of their holy books. This is awful, poisonous stuff, and I condemn it without reservation.

But let me remind you, the United States has been carrying out routine drone attacks against Muslims…attacks that kill children.

drone-attacks

So angry mobs threaten and howl and promise to roll their culture back to the Middle Ages. Americans calmly sit in air-conditioned rooms and push buttons and joysticks and send robots through the skies to pour death on civilians. Obama calmly rationalizes the murders and cracks jokes about predator drones.

obama
The rules outside of the United States are going to be different than the rules inside of the United States.

One side wants to kill people like me, is furious and destructive, and rages passionately about killing the Other; the other side wants to kill people outside our borders, is calm and dispassionate, and marshals machines to execute the Other without risk to ourselves.

I cannot condemn one without condemning the other. Especially since our tactics seem to be so much more effective at butchering people.

Today is the National Day of Reason

We live in an unreasonable country, so I don’t expect that the National Day of Reason will get as much attention as the idiocy of the National Day of Prayer. But apparently we’re not supposed to pray today. Big change for all of you, I know.

But here’s a suggestion: usually we just sit quietly and let the faith-heads get on with their ritual nonsense. Today, though, take another step: if you find yourself in a situation where people are wasting your time babbling at an imaginary man in the sky, don’t hold your tongue. Stand up, say “NO”, and turn your back or leave the room. Let them play their game, but don’t let them continue without knowing that you reject superstition.

Unfortunately, that’s easy for me to say — I’ll be at a university, where I’ve never seen a prayer invocation. I think I’ll keep the television news off, too, or I might be waving my middle finger at the screen a lot.

If you don’t have an opportunity to openly express your contempt for prayer, you can at least sign the petition being sent to Obama.

A Moroccan hero: Imad Iddine Habib

The state religion of Morocco is Islam, so it took real guts to establish a Council of Ex-Muslims in that country Imad Iddine Habib was awesomely courageous to do so.

What followed next was predictable. Under the yoke of Islam, shaking yourself free of superstition is a crime punishable by death. So Morocco’s High Council of Ulemas has issued a fatwa decreeing the death penalty for Moroccans who leave Islam. I wonder who might be subject to that? Imad Iddine Habib, of course.

The state police have come looking for him, but Imad Iddine Habib has gone into hiding. There will be more news to come on this subject, I’m sure…although you know that people will be trying to shush the media on religion-sponsored terrorism, silencing the revelation of the evil committed because it’s all about religion.

How dare you condemn the attempted murder of a man because he does not share your faith? That’s Islamophobia!

What point would a protest have if it didn’t piss someone off?

Amina-Tyler

This well-written article in The Atlantic remarks on a familiar tactic. It’s about the Femen, the topless jihad, and Amina, and the complaints an annoying number of stodgy critics have made. You know the ones: the people who demand that all arguments be respectful, and insist that there are proper channels for debate, and protests that actually rile the establishment are inappropriate.

With its topless jihad and Femen leader Inna Shevchenko’s subsequent incendiary blog post on the event, Femen was both defending one of its own and upholding a right to freedom of expression (to say nothing of life and liberty) flagrantly violated by Amina’s own family and by an angry, largely Muslim, community from which threats against Amina and Shevchenko continue to emanate. It’s worth pointing out that Femen’s critics, several of whom professed concern for Amina’s well-being, did not speak out in Amina’s defense before the jihad, but only post-factum and in passing, all the while pummeling the group standing up for her with stale, politically correct shibboleths and demands to stay out of what they perceived to be their own business.

We saw this in all the battles over accommodationism: there’s always someone on your side who offended that you have chosen to battle antagonistically or unconventionally against oppression and foolishness. I think their favorite word must be “hush” — don’t upset the status quo, even if it’s the status quo you’re trying to upset. And most importantly, they insist that you have to follow their tactics, and they get to tell everyone how to engage, even if their history is one of largely sitting on their thumbs and getting chummy with the enemy.

Guess what is often at the root of that reluctance to actually confront? Yeah, it’s the same old boogeyman everytime, conservative traditionalism in the guise of religion.

There is a problem, however. The media has long fostered the view that religion should be de facto exempt from the logical scrutiny applied to other subjects. I am not disputing the right to practice the religion of one’s choice, but rather the prevailing cultural rectitude that puts faith beyond the pale of commonsense review, and (in Amina’s case), characterizes as “Islamophobic” criticism of the criminal mistreatment of a young woman for daring to buck her society’s norms, or of Femen for attacking the forced wearing of the hijab.

We’re seeing a lot of that lately, but it’s been going on for a long, long time. Point out that transubstantiation is ridiculous, and that Catholics don’t get to tell you to honor a cracker, and Bill Donohue raves that you’re an anti-Catholic bigot; stand aghast at ultra-orthodox Jews spitting on little girls for “immodesty” and you’re an anti-semite; critize the deeply rooted misogyny in Islam, a misogyny that harms men and women in the faith, and you’re declared an Islamophobe.

Just because it’s cloaked in the self-declared mystery of religion doesn’t mean it’s exampt from scrutiny and rejection.

The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree

There’s another Hovind! And he’s an idiot, too! I’m no fan of genetic determinism, but man, when every person I know saddled with the name Hovind is a bible-thumping twit, I begin to have doubts.

The new Hovind is Chad. He’s a preacher, of course, and he likes to turn complex subjects into simple-minded Bible verses, of course, and he’s making videos to promote his nonsense, of course. His thing is Godonomics. You guessed it, the Bible tells you everything you need to know about economics. And his god is a free market capitalist, of course.

I watched a couple of his introductory videos. It’s the usual schtick: selective use of Bible verses with his own interpretations that allow him to twist it into his desired conclusion. We’re apparently supposed to recognize that “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn” is a deep insight into modern economics, if only we’d see it.

I was also amused…hey, is he using a felt board to make his arguments? I haven’t seen one of those since Sunday school. Imagine Glenn Beck (who praises “Godonomics”, as does Mike Huckabee) using a felt board to put up his frantic diagrammatic scenarios. That’s this Hovind.

I looked, but I couldn’t see if Chad is fond of the kind of economic advice that put Kent in jail.

Now I understand why the BBC pulled it

The BBC recently broadcast a program for the charity Comic Relief, but yanked one sketch deemed too offensive from their online iPlayer. They’d apparently received thousands of complaints about it, and it was the only sketch on the program found so horribly offensive.

Apparently, regulators are now investigating the BBC, and the ever-charming Daily Mail is blustering that “BBC faces Ofcom probe into Rowan Atkinson’s foul-mouthed Comic Relief archbishop impression”. Rowan Atkinson? Foul-mouthed comic? Did they confuse him with Gilbert Gottfried or something?

So I finally got a look at the ghastly wicked sketch, and now I see why it got people upset. Here it is:

Oh, yeah, that’s some primo religion bashing. “Foul-mouthed” is the wrong word, though: Rowan Atkinson’s sin was being deadly accurate, perfectly portraying the cheerfully vapid fluttery chumminess of a thoroughly liberal Christian. That’s what got people angry: he didn’t just start roaring at religious leaders, he showed the viewers what they looked like through our eyes…and it was also so damned close to how the believers see them, too, that it wasn’t easily dismissed and was a palpable smack in the face.

Excellent work, Rowan Atkinson!