Zero surprises

Another child-raping pedophile has been arrested: Caleb Hesse. He’s been busily raping little boys for 30 years.

He’s nobody famous, and his history is totally unsurprising.

An anti-gay activist and donor to California’s Proposition 8, 52-year-old Hesse was a teacher at the Morongo Unified School District who was recently teaching first grade at the Friendly Hills Elementary School.

According to KTLA, the incidents occurred mostly during Hesse’s overnight volunteer trips with the church. Hesse allegedly met many of his underage victims during these outings. Authorities believe the most recent crimes occurred as early as last week.

OK, teaching elementary school was unfortunate, but taking advantage of church trips to abuse children is weirdly typical. School administrators will stomp down hard on any offenses, but churches seem to have a far, far wider range of tolerance of adult male’s behavior.

I don’t understand how this works, though. Thirty years of screwing little boys, and no one noticed? Or more likely, no one cared enough to stop him?

Another level of Catholic corruption

Hypocrisy is apparently a sacrament in the Catholic church. A German bishop has been living an extravagant lifestyle — flying first class (at a cost of €7000) to tour Indian slums where poor children eke out a living breaking stones. He’s also been constructing a multi-million euro mansion while the churches in his diocese crumble.

Bishop Tebartz-van Elst, 52, doesn’t only embrace luxury when he travels to India to visit poor children and nuns. He also puts a premium on a pleasant standard of living back home in Limburg, one that befits his status. His new, multi-million-euro bishop’s residence right next to the city’s cathedral is about to be finished. But the complex has sparked a mix of amazement, rage and resignation among the 600,000 Catholics in the diocese. Many cannot comprehend how they are supposed to live in want while their bishop splurges.

Tebartz-van Elst preaches to his flock to sate their thirst with water not wine. "Renewal begins where the efforts toward making due with less are made," he has instructed them. "The person of faith is dirt poor and rich in mercy," he once said in a Christmas sermon. And on the Assumption, he declared: "Whoever experiences poverty in person will discover the true greatness of God."

Meanwhile, funds are tight or insufficient across the diocese. There isn’t enough money for the upkeep of churches, parishes are being consolidated and funding for Catholic day care centers is being slashed. All of this is part of the bishop’s tough cost-cutting measures.

I don’t get it. Do Catholic bishops have no accountability to anyone?

At least there are no stories about this guy raping children.

I am not a presidential candidate, but…

Some rag called Cathedral Age interviewed Obama and Romney about faith. The two responded by ladling out dollops of pious porridge, all of which was nonsensical and fact-free, but did occasionally serve up scraps of information that were mainly horrifying (did you know Obama has a “faith advisor” who sends him bible quotes and CS Lewis quotes and that sort of thing? That’s not the daily briefing I imagined). Read it if you really want to be bored or aggravated.

It did make me wonder, though — if a bunch of Episcopalians can get the attention of the presidential candidates during the election season, could atheists do likewise? Get on it, Dave Silverman: send the two a set of questions that actually drill down to some secular substance. I suspect they’d both ignore them, unfortunately.

And then I thought, well, what if I were asked these same questions in an interview? How would an atheist answer them? Especially, an atheist who wasn’t trying to pander his way into political office? So I took a vicious, bloody-minded stab at it. These are the same questions Cathedral Age aimed at our two candidates, and I’ll just pretend I’m the nominee of the Atheist Party.

How does faith play a role in your life?

It doesn’t. Faith is a poison, a shortcut to answers that avoids reason and evidence and cultivates an undisciplined and lazy mind. I abjure it and think all political candidates should do likewise.

Do you have favorite scriptural passages, prayers, or other words of wisdom to which you often turn?

No.

Scripture is a morass of inconsistency and lies. Even where it is gifted with poetry (which isn’t often), it is simply an accreted mass of dogma. I never consult the Bible, the Koran, or any other holy book for advice, since they are never applicable, and are usually informed by a barbaric morality.

I don’t do prayers. Entreaties to a nonexistent superman seem singularly pointless.

“Words of wisdom” is a stock phrase that usually means “reassuring cliches”. Nope, I avoid those as well.

How do you view the role of faith in public life?

Faith is the great leveler, the delusion that allows any ignorant asshole prancing in self-serving fantasies of being the center of the universe to claim divine, cosmic authority behind his words. It has corrupted American discourse, because it privileges medieval nonsense about how the world actually works and allows antique bigotry to persist, allows people to make claims without concern for evidence, and gives every idiot with a dog-collar a pedestal to stand on.

Faith ought to be mocked and derided. That we give it special authority in public discourse is a disaster.

As a country of great religious diversity and divisiveness, how can faith play a role in unifying america?

It can’t. Faith is unmoored from reality — it gives every blithering child of god a special place free of responsibility, where their beliefs are stamped with divine approval by the voices in their head. Every one of those religions touts itself as the one great truth about the universe, and they can’t all be right, and most likely none of them are right. We’re looking out on a circus arena populated with clowns, and you’re trying to ask me which one’s shoulders I should stand on to bring order out of chaos. And I say none of them.

Some people have questioned the sincerity of your faith and your christianity. how do you respond to those questions?

Well, that’s kind of inappropriate question for me, since I’m not pretending to be a Christian. I’m not and never will be.

What does a political leader’s faith tell you about him/her as a person?

Oh, it hints at many things.

They could be a gullible fool. It could tell me that they don’t think very deeply at all, and have never put much thought into these bizarre claims that they may say are important forces in their lives.

They could be a dishonest opportunist. The media is always touting faith as a marker for morality, despite the fact that it is actually a very cheap signal — anyone can mouth pieties, and even the most corrupt child-raping priest can say they believe in a god — and in the US, it’s virtually impossible to get elected as an atheist because of the raging bigotry against rational intellectuals.

They could be a brilliant rationalizer, who has built up an elaborate set of excuses for their ridiculous beliefs. I would worry that they’d do likewise for any conclusion they wanted to reach in office.

At the very best, they could be a person who’s never put much thought into their inherited religious tradition; maybe it’s because they’ve put more effort into studying economics or political science or sociology, I don’t know. In this case it would be a misleading indicator.

A leader’s faith basically tells me nothing good about them at all.

How can our government and faith communities work together as a positive force for the nation while also respecting the boundaries between the two?

They can’t. Read the Constitution. This country was founded partially on an understanding that bringing god and state together corrupts both. Some thought that because they wanted a secular government free of superstitious influence; others loved their peculiar religions and did not want the state to endorse some other faith. Either way, they were in agreement: government and faith should not work together. So why, Cathedral Age, are you trying to blur the boundaries? Do you think that having a big expensive elaborate building in Washington DC means that when the government decrees a state religion, it will be Christianity or Episcopalianism?

Washington National Cathedral is called to be the spiritual home for the nation. from your perspective, how can the cathedral live out that mission?

This is a secular nation, or it should be. We are not going to have a spiritual home, and we shouldn’t want one.

The best way that the National Cathedral can serve the country is by ending this pretext that it represents faith in America. Gut it completely of its superstitious trappings, fire the god-soaked leadership, and turn it into something secular and useful. Turning it into a bowling alley or a movie theater would be an improvement, but you could also aim higher and make it into a library or a secular meeting hall. Find something better to do with your time and money.

I think you should be embarrassed that you’re maintaining this expensive, opulent building to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year, all for the purpose of babbling at a nonexistent space ghost.

Well, what do you think? Would those answers help me get elected to high political office?

The czar and the patriarch

Forgive me, I haven’t been keeping up with the Pussy Riot story — this is just the worst possible time of the year for me, with classes starting tomorrow. But I strongly recommend Eric Macdonald’s summary: this is a collusion between an old school tyrant, Putin, and the Russian Orthodox church to silence criticism, and to promote an unthinking, dogmatic nationalism. It’s not just Russia, either, but similar forces are at work in the United States, where God and Country are deeply entangled, and it’s a recipe for world-wide catastrophe.

The problem with Pussy Riot is that they see this clearly, and their music opposes both czar and patriarch. Look at their latest video and you can see their contempt for both.

(You don’t like their music? Tough. I thought it was wonderfully loud and angry and political, and if you don’t care for it, I’m pretty sure Lawrence Welk is still available in reruns on cable. Also, you don’t have to like it to respect the freedom of artists to express themselves.)

There’s also a third cause they’re clearly opposing: the historical confinement of women to very specific gender roles. I don’t know exactly what is going on in Russia, but it seems to be the women who are leading the charge against tyranny. Take a look at the Ukrainian FEMEN, too. Women are becoming the bravest of us all.

They aren’t just fighting against a tyrant and orthodoxy, but against the gender police. I’ve got to admire that.

I guess you shouldn’t always trust your doctor

Especially if that doctor is associated with Physicians For Life, an organization of ideologically warped doctors who abuse science to justify anti-abortion screeds. In one article, they carry out a set of weird calculations to trivialize pregnancies from rape. They go through a series of calculations to throw out most rapes (the woman is too old or too young to get pregnant, for instance…which should set off your alarms right there. Child rape is less of a problem simply because they won’t get pregnant?), and then comes to this weird excuse:

Finally, factor in what is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that’s psychic trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman’s body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, and implantation.

Does that sound familiar? Missouri congressvermin Todd Akin recently echoed that sentiment, claiming that ‘legitimate rape’ rarely causes pregnancy (and it’s not just Akin — right-wingers everywhere parrot that claim).

Dr Jen Gunter speculates that Akin got his misinformation from Physicians for Life, and also takes apart their claim.

The Physicians for Life site quotes 3 sources, only one is original research. The one article was authored by Goth and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 1977 (yes, 1977) and in NO WAY SUPPORTS THE NOTION THAT RAPES ARE RARE OR THAT THE STRESS RESPONSE LOWERS THE PREGNANCY RATE. It is an article about sexual dysfunction among rapists. Put another way, the Physicians for Life have not provided a single published article to support their claims. Interestingly, Physicians for Life also promote the long disproven claim that abortion causes breast cancer.

It’s based on nothing but air and lies, in other words.

That’s not an experiment

Only a theist could come up with this one. It’s the Atheist Prayer Experiment; they’re recruiting atheists to say prayers. It’s an amazing pile of sneaky, devious, theological nonsense.

Here’s what we’re supposed to do:

We are asking each atheist who wishes to take part to pray for 2 to 3 minutes a day for 40 days for God to reveal Himself to them.

We would like any reflections, reactions, or revelations (positive or negative) experienced during the experiment to be recorded by participants. This may be video/audio Journal, blog, on a dedicated Facebook page, sent in by email etc.

Any participants need to be willing to record a radio interview about their experience of the experiment, though not everyone who takes part will necessarily be asked to do this.

This isn’t an exercise in appealing to a deity. It’s an exercise in psychology. If you tell yourself something every day over a fairly long period of time, will it affect how your mind works? I suspect the answer would be yes. Just the act of making a commitment to a religious belief and reinforcing it with daily rituals and reflection is going to fuck up your head. Most of us atheists have defenses against it — I couldn’t go through this without grumbling to myself that this behavior is bullshit, and it would probably end up making me even more disgusted with religion (if I bothered to do it, which I won’t) — but it could affect somebody who is gullible and impressionable. There’s nothing in this ‘experiment’ that could provide evidence of a god, but there is plenty of stuff to show that plastic minds exist…which we already know.

So why are they doing this? It’s based on a philosopher’s rationalization for prayer.

The experiment is based on the paper by Oxford philosopher Tim Mawson titled Praying to Stop Being an Atheist. In it Mawson argues that, on balance, it is in the interests of those atheists who don’t think it’s absolutely impossible that there’s a God to investigate the issue of whether or not he exists by ‘the experimental method’ – trying to ask him. Those interested in participating will be sent a copy of the paper.

I haven’t read the paper, and I’m not particularly interested. I did look up the abstract:

In this paper, I argue that atheists who think that the issue of God’s existence or non-existence is an important one; assign a greater than negligible probability to God’s existence; and are not in possession of a plausible argument for scepticism about the truth-directedness of uttering such prayers in their own cases, are under a prima facie obligation to pray to God that He stop them being atheists.

If a god actually existed, it would be an important matter; the fact that in millennia of searching no one has found reasonable evidence of such a being is empirical evidence that there isn’t one. This philosopher doesn’t seem to realize that atheists don’t believe in any gods at all; the reason we are overtly godless is that there are so many people who do. We believe in god-belief, not gods, and we also are pretty damned sure that believing in things that don’t exist is bad for you.

Personally, I assign a zero probability of “God’s” existence, because no one can define specifically what it’s attributes are. Every god that is defined semi-specifically — say, the Catholic god or the Lutheran god — contradicts known aspects of the universe and doesn’t exist. The vague deist’s deity only has a minuscule chance of existing because nothing is specified about its nature, so they reserve the right to label just about anything that does exist as “god” (I also reject that approach — I think it’s dishonest.)

We all have plausible arguments for skepticism: the absence of evidence for this being, the inconsistency of definitions for a deity under different faiths, the godawful nebulous handwaving of believers, and the incompetence of sophisticated theologians in being able to generate reasonable tests for the truth of their beliefs. That Mawson even thinks there is good cause to not be skeptical discredits him.

I am under no obligation at all to practice this guy’s weird magic rituals. Every religion has its own strange practices that believers are quite sure are essential to maintain their relationship with whatever gods they think are floating around; am I obligated to follow every random cult’s beliefs for some period of time? Is he?

Now look at the procedure they expect us to follow:

The question of how an atheist should pray is an interesting one. [No, it’s not.]

Tim Mawson has some suggestions in his paper: the prayer should be kept as open as possible, e.g., rather than ‘God of Christianity; if you’re out there, turn this water into wine for me’, ‘God, if you’re out there, reveal yourself to me’ would be better.

We only ask that anyone taking part commits themselves to finding a quiet meditative ‘space’ and praying there for two to three minutes each day as earnestly as they can for any God that there might be to reveal himself/herself/itself to him or her, and that he or she remains as open as possible to ways in which that prayer could be answered.

As expected, the rule for theologians to keep the story as fuzzy as possible, and to accept any unexpected result as evidence for their specific belief. It reminds me of those idiotic ghost hunter shows that infest television right now: send some people off with night vision cameras and microphones and have them wander about in some dark and crumbling relic of a building, and every odd noise and glitch and cold draft and emotional tremor is frantically reported as a sign of unusual paranormal activity.

That is not an experiment. An experiment would have a clear hypothesis, would define the parameters of the procedure precisely, and would set specific criteria for success or failure of the experimental test. See any of that above? No. It’s just another set of wackos building a pseudo-scientific rationalization for their delusions.

I, for one, welcome our new holy corporate overlords

You already knew that the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have First Amendment rights. Now the courts are working on giving them religion, too.

"Can a corporation exercise religion?" federal district court judge John L. Kane recently asked. He answered his own question with a provisional yes. In Newland v Sebelius, the court granted a commercial enterprise a temporary injunction exempting it, for now, from providing female employees with coverage for contraception and sterilization required by the Affordable Care Act.

The churches are already full of abstract entities with no material existence celebrated at the altar, so hey, let’s start packing the pews with them, too. In these years of declining attendance, the churches will probably welcome well-heeled worshippers, especially since letting them in also grants the churches lots of privileges.

But look where this is leading the rest of us.

Now, according to Judge Kane’s decision in Newland, secular businesses may enjoy similar status and similar immunity under federal statutes, at least, if not the Constitution. His ruling is an initial salvo in what may well be prolonged litigation, but it represents an ominous legal trend: Religious freedom is morphing into religious power. If the rights of diverse employees in a secular enterprise are subject to the beliefs of their employers, then religious people will not simply be laws unto themselves; they’ll determine, in part, laws governing the rest of us.

Religious employers are the worst employers. Now the American courts want to give them even more power to meddle in their employee’s lives…a power completely contrary to any of the principles of liberty on which this country was supposedly founded.

Wanna see something funny?

It’s a Romney campaign ad. The thesis? Obama has declared war on religion, while Romney will defend it, with shots of the Pope (not the shadowy-eyed inquisitorial current pope, but the old fatherly one, John Paul II).

There are a couple of things wrong with that. Obama is no friend of atheism; he’s expanded faith-based charity programs, continues to support the right-wing Prayer Breakfast nonsense, and has openly expressed his Christianity. I’m certainly not enthused about voting for him (athough, to be sure, his continuation of policies of tyranny and violence abroad is a bigger issue for me than his faith).

For another, why doesn’t he show the Elders of the Mormon Church rather than Pope John Paul II? I can guess: because if there’s anything creepier than one geriatric manipulator of your sex life, it’s a whole assembly of creepy geriatric genital diddlers. I haven’t looked lately, but when I was living in Salt Lake I saw those Mormon leaders in the paper all the time, and seriously, the head guy looked like the Crypt Keeper.

And finally, have you ever heard about the Mormon perspective on Catholicism? It is the “great and abominable Church”! I really wonder if this ad will be played in Morridor…I don’t think having Romney suck up to the Catholic church would play well in the Mormon homeland.

Pity and pitilessness

Maggie Koerth-Baker, ex-fundamentalist, has a fine post up explaining why fundamentalists are against seemingly innocuous things like set theory. It’s because it’s symptomatic of a deeper conflict with the modern world.

Instead, they see modernism as the opposing worldview to their own. They are all about tradition (or, at least, what they have decided is traditional). Modernism is a knee-jerk rejection of tradition in favor of the new. Obviously, they think a very specific sort of Christian God should be the center of everything and all parts of society, public and private. Modernists prefer ideas like secular humanism and think God is something you should be doing in private, on your own time. They believe strongly in the importance of power hierarchies and rules. Modernism smashes all of that and says, “Hey, just do your own thing. Nobody’s ideas are any better or worse than anybody else’s. There’s no right and wrong. Go crazy, man!” [Insert obligatory bongo drumming session]

I am hamming this up a bit, but you get the picture. Modernism, to the publishers of A Beka math books, is sick and wrong. The idea is that if you reject their specific idea of God and their specific idea of The Rules, then you must be living in a crazy, dangerous world. You could kill people, and you would think it was okay, because you’re a modernist and you know there’s really no such thing as right and wrong. Basically, they’ve bumped into a need to separate themselves from the almost inhuman Other on a massive scale, and latched on to modernism as a shorthand for how to do that. It doesn’t matter what you or I actually believe, or even what we actually do. They know what we MUST believe and what we MUST be like because of the tenets of modernism.

I understand this. They’ve been brought up to think the godless world is a deeply dangerous threat to everything they hold precious, and it’s simpler to just shut down any thing that has to do with it. It’s like somebody has been told that some mushrooms are delicious, and others are deadly poisonous, and they’ve been told that they can, if they’re very careful, tell the difference between them…and they choose to never, ever eat mushrooms because they don’t want to go to the bother of learning how, and they also don’t want to put anyone they love at any risk at all. So they’re very, very cautious about new ideas, because their social structure is both important to them and sensitive to external perturbations.

I can even sympathize with this conclusion.

If this sounds crazy … you’re right. It’s pretty crazy. In fact, it’s this kind of thinking, and my realization that it was based fundamentally on lying about everybody who wasn’t a member of your religious tribe, that led me away from religion to begin with. Ironically. But there is a coherent thought process going on here, and I want you to understand that. If all you do is point and laugh at the fundies for calling set theory evil, then you are missing the point. This isn’t about them being stupid. It’s about who they think you are.

Yes, I can appreciate that. I could be toxic to their worldview. I’m (and you all, too) are dangerous in that we could damage their equilibrium and send their children — and maybe even themselves — off into new patterns of thought that would repudiate all that they hold dear right now.

I read Maggie Koerth-Baker’s piece and had no problem putting myself in their shoes: if someone were making a serious challenge to my social and intellectual framework, if I were concerned that some blundering clod could come along and with some thoughtless nudge, knock it all down, I’d be protective and suspicious, too. I would be building fences around my world to keep those evil insensitive assholes out.

And then I read stuff like this summary of what Bobby Jindal’s education plan is going to do to children in Louisiana: the stupidity of arguing that dinosaurs were fire-breathing dragons who lived into the middle ages, the callousness of teaching that the Trail of Tears was an opportunity for Christian proselytization, the evil of putting a happy shine on slavery and the KKK, the equation of gay people with child molesters and rapists, the contempt for the environment, and I think…

Tear it all down.

They’ve built cages for themselves and their children, and have beliefs that harm others. I can see that they’re quivering in fear at the modernists, the liberals, the gays, the atheists, all coming to expose their ‘worldview’ for the rickety tissue of lies and hate that it is, and I say…no mercy. No hesitation. No apologies. Break it apart, and set those people free.

Pointing and laughing is just one step in the process of liberating those Christians trapped in their prison of lies. I can feel pity for them, while I let reality crash into their delusions and send them scurrying. They fear change, but they must change.