And all the Whos down in Whoville…

According to Time magazine, we’re apparently a nation of gentle New Age bliss-ninnies. All that sectarian stuff, the Nicene creed, even Jesus…nobody really believes all that with any conviction.

Just as Christian fundamentalists insist on a literal reading of the Bible, angry atheists tend to insist that belief in God qualifies you as a raving creationist.

Here’s what they refuse to get: Yes, Christians believe that Jesus’ nativity was a virgin birth and that he rose from the dead on Easter. But if you were to show most Christians incontrovertible scientific proof that those miracles didn’t occur, they would shrug — because their faith means more to them than that. Because in the end, what they have faith in is the redemptive power of the story. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, an agnostic says to his Catholic friend, “You can’t seriously believe it all … I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.”

“Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.”

“But you can’t believe things simply because they’re a lovely idea.”

“But I do. That’s how I believe.”

I’m willing to bet it’s how most believers believe. Before Hitchens died at 62 from esophageal cancer, he made a point of declaring he was certain no heaven awaited him. But that swipe at the faithful always misses the point. Most of us don’t believe in God because we think it’s a ticket to heaven. Rather, our belief in God — our belief in the living ideal of ourselves, which is something even atheists ponder — instills in us a faith that in the end, light always defeats darkness (which is how people get through the wars and natural disasters I cover). That does make us open to the possibility of the hereafter — but more important, it gives us purposeful inspiration to make the here and now better.

What a load of reeking bullshit.

Try telling the congregation at your local Catholic church that if it’s more convenient for them, they might just as well attend the Baptist church, if it’s closer. Then go to the Baptist church and suggest likewise that the Catholic church is a lovely building and the priest is very nice and they should switch.

Try suggesting to the 40% of Americans who oppose good science in the classroom that they should be fine with teaching evolution, since their faith is all about love and light, and Adam and Eve are just lovely myths.

Apparently, no one ever really gets indignant at being cheerfully told “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”. Everyone is untroubled by trivial differences in emphasis, and all that matters is that we’re all happy in our own way.

There is no hell. No one believes in it, anyway. We’re all about light defeating darkness, so the screams of the damned in torment are only invented by a few imaginative horror story authors. No true Christian believes in such evil!

Close your eyes real tight and imagine real hard, and all those people demanding that the schools sponsor public prayer will just vanish … and Tim Tebow is just expressing his appreciation of the Buddha, and his missionary family thinks Catholics are just as Christian as they are.

We can revoke all the special parking dispensations the clergy has at hospitals, because they aren’t really needed to usher the dying into heaven, after all. And isn’t it more important that the afflicted spend more time with their loved ones than that irrelevant guy with a funny collar?

Rick Perry wasn’t actually elected to be governor of Texas. Rick Santorum is just gentle humorous satire (come on, the name is a dead giveaway — no one would call themselves that if they were serious). For that matter, the entire slate of Republican presidential candidates is a hallucination.

The Mormons didn’t pump millions of dollars into the fight for Proposition 8 in California. They just believe in Love! And the Living Ideal of Themselves! And Lovely Fucking Ideas!

I could go on. Tim Padgett, the author of that tripe in Time, is simply a delusional liar — while accusing Hitchens of taking religion too literally, he goes far, far off the deep end to conjure up an entirely imaginary Christendom of pablum and soft, soothing breezes and no difficulties whatsoever, where everyone is stretched out on a comfortable sofa with some really good weed, toking themselves into half-lidded and smashingly baked heedless bliss. He himself might be wallowing deeply in that gooey non-sectarian treacle — these people do exist, from Karen Armstrong to Chris Stedman — but they are in total denial of reality. I can go down to the coffee shop on Tuesday mornings and find the Men’s Bible Study group going strong on the reality of Noah’s Ark and the submission of women; I can open up the local paper and find letters to the editor complaining about the university’s awful tolerance of The Gays; I could, if I were sufficiently masochistic, attend any of a dozen churches here in town and find people who will tell me that believing the earth is millions of years old (or older!) means I will burn in hellfire for eternity (oh, wait, I have done that! Painful, it was).

Unlike Padgett, I have a realistic view of religion. I do not think all Christians are creationists, as he falsely claims, but I also know for a fact that most Christians are damned insistent on the literal reality of Jesus, Heaven, Hell, and their sectarian views about how one can achieve or avoid a meeting with any of them.

Predatory and reptilian

Thomas Nast, the 19th century political cartoonist who gave us our standard image of both Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, is going to be enrolled in the New Jersey Hall of Fame. This isn’t really controversial: he was extremely influential. He was not entirely a nice guy, though, being a bit of a nativist and also responsible for promoting the stereotype of the Irish as violent drunks…so I would hope that his exhibit in the Hall of Fame would also highlight his bigotry. That’s not acceptable to Bill Donohue, though — Nast is the subject of his latest fit of apoplexy, because, unfortunately, while having a biased attitude towards the Irish people, he also portrayed Catholicism accurately.

I confess. I laughed.

Next time, try it without the antibiotics, then I’ll be impressed

Jake Finkbonner was in big trouble: a minor injury led to necrotizing fascitis, and the bacteria chewed up his face, head, and neck in a horrible life-threatening infection. Fortunately, the family placed a relic from a 17th century Native American convert to Catholicism named Tekakwitha on his pillow (it is not clear whether it was a chunk of Tekakwitha’s bones, or one of these lockets, which you can buy for $19.99), and he got better! A miracle!

Now they’re planning to canonize Tekakwitha.

On Monday, the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI formally recognized the miracle attributed to Tekakwitha – the last step on her way to canonization.

Tekakwitha, known as “the Lily of the Mohawks,” was born in 1656 in upstate New York to a Mohawk chief and an Algonquin mother. A smallpox epidemic killed both her parents and left her with partial blindness and a disfigured face. She converted to Catholicism after meeting several priests. Ostracized from her tribal community, Tekakwitha devoted herself to a life of deep prayer. She died in 1680 at age 24. According to the Catholic Church, witnesses said that within minutes of her death, the scars from smallpox completely vanished and her once-disfigured face suddenly shone with radiant beauty.

Oh, I forgot to mention…in addition to the magic locket, Jake spent 9 weeks in a modern hospital, received major surgeries to extirpate the infected tissue, massive doses of antibiotics, and apparently substantial cosmetic surgery. If only St Tekakwitha had been able to get the same, instead of relying entirely on Catholic hoodoo — maybe she wouldn’t have died at 24.

Oh, and there’s a poll. It’s got over 60,000 votes on it already, so I doubt we’ll be able to budge it much, but you can take a stab at it anyway.

Do you believe in miracles?

86.9% Yes
9.5% No
3.6%Not sure

“Do you believe in modern medicine?” would have been a better question. They never ask that one, though.

I do have to say I’m much more impressed with Jake Finkbonner. Here’s what he had to say about it:

There’s been a lot of media around me lately especially with the announcement of Blessed Kateri becoming a Saint based on my story. Please don’t confuse the issue which is that my survival is a miracle. We thank the doctors at Children’s Hospital for all that they did to save my life. I wouldn’t be here without them. I also thank all the people that prayed for me. Obviously, God heard their prayers. This decision to canonize Blessed Kateri is something that the Vatican and the Pope declared, not us. Although we are a part of this story, we did not have any influence on this decision. Congratulations to the Catholic Church and the Native American culture in the canonizing of the now Saint Kateri.

He seems like a gracious and sensible young man.

The toxic solution

I suspect a bunch of male priests thought this was a good idea for an ad campaign.

I rather doubt that recruiting from the ranks of people who talk about Real Men and think that Real Men cluster with other Real Men and exclude Real Women is going to help the Catholic Church’s problems — these are not the human beings you’re looking for. Also, isn’t it a little odd to emphasize the masculinity of a profession that demands all of its members be celibate?

I think Cybele had the right idea. Try campaigning on the notion that Real Men cut off their junk in the name of Mary Mother of God and serve as eunuchs. At least that would promote real change in the culture of the church.

Vile Islam

Hawa Akther Jui wanted to go to college and get a degree. Her husband, Rafiqul Islam, disapproved. So he tied her up, gagged her, and chopped off all of the fingers on her right hand.

I won’t just blame Islam, though. All the patriarchal religions are disgusting.

The one scrap of salvation in this story lies in the human response: Hawa Akther Jui is learning to write with her left hand.

Alister McGrath fails to make the next obvious statement

I will never forgive Leon Lederman for calling the Higgs boson the “god particle”. It’s fueled decades of unjustified patronizing nonsense from theologians, and the latest is Alister McGrath, who babbles obliviously about it.

Science often proposes the existence of invisible (and often undetectable) entities – such as dark matter – to explain what can be seen. The reason why the Higgs boson is taken so seriously in science is not because its existence has been proved, but because it makes so much sense of observations that its existence seems assured. In other words, its power to explain is seen as an indicator of its truth.

There’s an obvious and important parallel with the way religious believers think about God. While some demand proof that God exists, most see this as unrealistic. Believers argue that the existence of God gives the best framework for making sense of the world. God is like a lens, which brings things into clearer focus. As the Harvard psychologist William James pointed out years ago, religious faith is about inferring “the existence of an unseen order” in which the “riddles of the natural order” can be explained.

The parallel breaks down hard, though. Yes, the Higgs boson is a satisfying theoretical construct with much power to explain. But notice that mathematical beauty was not enough: the physicists of the world, from over 100 countries, gathered and spent over $9 billion to build the largest scientific instrument in the world to test the hypothesis. Faith was not enough.

In contrast, you couldn’t convince a Baptist and a Mormon to get together and chip in $1.98 to test their god. Because they don’t have the slightest idea how to do it, and wouldn’t be interested if they did.

That’s the real lesson to be learned from the science: you have to do the test.

Anger doesn’t make the irrational more sensible

I actually enjoyed this little rant by a fervent Catholic, Mary Kochan: You Whiny Sniveling Little Atheists Are Pathetic! She’s in a rage because the Freedom From Religion Foundation challenged the declaration of a “Day of Prayer” in Arizona (a case they lost, by the way).

Let’s get this straight. The atheists are suing because they had to turn off the television to avoid the topic of religion or news announcements about the Day of Prayer. They had to alter their conversation to avoid the topic of religion. This made them feel like “outsiders”.

No. We atheists are quite accustomed to silly people praying, and we see religion on TV all the time; it’s entirely within everyone’s personal rights to believe whatever they damn well please, as long as it doesn’t infringe on others’ rights to do likewise. The case was about an elected official using the apparatus of our common government to endorse sectarian religious belief. We don’t mind altering our conversation to avoid religion, and sometimes we’ll alter it to confront religion. It looks like the atheist case was poorly argued, but the crux of the problem is the violation of the establishment cause.

Once upon a time, in a country containing diverse religious views, Catholics and Baptists could appreciate the fact that the absence of a state religion allowed both to flourish, and would have been standing right up there with the atheists demanding that the government not meddle in religious belief. Now, though, as atheists get louder and more prominent, they instead find common cause in this myth of a “judeo-christian nation” to start using government to enforce belief. Let’s hope for their sake that the Mormons never take over the government!

But let’s move on to Ms Kochan’s entertaining fury, built on a false understanding of the substance of the complaint, and in which she throws in further stupidities.

You whiny, sniveling, little, pusillanimous cowards. You have the audacity to tell us Christians that we are “weak” and that our religion is a “crutch.” You are supposed to be so “courageous”, venturing forth boldly into the existential mystery of being alone, facing with stoicism the nothingness that awaits you at death, priding yourself on your realism and self-reliance. You are a bunch of feeble fakers.

Yes, you are outsiders. Go start your own damn country. This one was started by Christians, you puerile dimwits. It is Christians who established and largely Christians who fought and died to maintain the freedoms you enjoy. And Christians are still the majority. Apparently your vaulted belief system doesn’t equip you to handle being in the minority. That’s interesting, isn’t it? After all, this was and is a societal situation valiantly handled by millions and millions of Christians who suffered — and currently suffer — real oppression, violence, torture, economic deprivation, and cruel deaths. But you have to go through turning off the TV once in a while and so your precious puny feelings are hurt. How delicate and frail your mental architecture is!

You are a pitiful joke. Trembling over the mere mention of God. Running like babies to court because of your brittle feelings. “Oh, but judge, but judge, I saw a cross and I just can’t stand it.” “I heard someone say ‘Merry Christmas’ and it hurt my feelings.” “I just can’t sleep knowing there is a manger scene at the courthouse.” “The sight of the Ten Commandments makes me wet my pants.” Now we see how inadequate and feeble you really are. Rage, therapists say, is the flip side of helplessness. And so we see your rage against religion in the public square for what it is: a product of your own insubstantial internal resources. Go look at yourself in the mirror if you can bear the pathetic, contemptible sight of yourself. Our merest martyr shows you to be a wimp – fourteen-year-old Kizito of Uganda singing hymns while being burned alive. But you, you anemic, lily-livered worms – you quail at pushing the off button on the remote! Hah!

Right there in the second paragraph is the justification for the FFRF’s lawsuit, and she doesn’t even notice it. She wants to use religion as a criterion for citizenship, something clearly in violation of the letter and spirit of the American constitution. There certainly were Christians involved in the founding of the United States, but also freethinkers — and the US Constitution is largely a product of the Enlightenment, not Christianity. If Christianity had its way, we would be living in a theocratic monarchy, like those in the Bible, not a representative democracy.

The praise for the bullying capability of a majority is ironic, too. One of the concerns at the founding of the country was giving protection to minorities — they tyranny of the masses is always going to be a worry in a democracy. Perhaps Ms Kochan would be more appreciative of that if she recognized that America was also largely founded by Protestants, and Catholics through most of our history have been a mistrusted minority, despised as Papists, and the focus of a great deal of hatred, particularly when Catholic immigrants started to enter in large numbers. It’s kind of amusing in a sad, bitter way to see members of an oppressed minority now sidling up to downplay their differences and claim membership in the biggest gang of bullies, in order to shout down another minority. The worm has turned.

It’s also telling that in her last paragraph she has to invent imaginary quotes. My response on seeing a cross publicly displayed is a sneer of contempt, a roll of the eyes, a snide curl of the lip, not fear. But I recognize that the deluded are also citizens with the right to erect whatever personal exhibitions of their foolishness they desire. I don’t object to “Merry Christmas” at all, and even say it myself now and then — the War on Christmas is a nonexistent Christian boogeyman that makes atheists laugh. I lose no sleep over Christian myths, nor am I incontinent at the sight of the ten commandments, that irrelevant collection of silly rules that are unenforceable and mostly ignored even by believers, except for the few that are actually common to every lawful society, including that of atheists. We aren’t afraid of Christians, but we are rather tired of seeing their useless delusions promoted as solutions to real problems.

It’s also ironic that her own post full of rage and fury tries to make the claim that rage is a symptom of helplessness. Oh, really? Just how self-unaware are you, Mary Kochan?

And that parting snipe is so Catholic — to find smug satisfaction in the brutal, painful death of a fellow believer is beyond barbarous. It does not justify your superstition to have people suffer pointless agony while under its spell — atheists find greater virtue in living for our ideals.

The ghouls are gathering

Ophelia has found a live one: a Christian zealot happily anticipating Christopher Hitchens’ deathbed conversion. He also claims to have diagnosed Hitchens’ cancer when he briefly met him months before his real diagnosis, which makes me wonder why the bastard didn’t take him aside and let him know.

Since Ophelia has dealt with him with a more than adequate curl of the lip, I’ll just mention one paragraph that annoyed me immensely.

I wouldn’t tell Christopher Hitchens that now is the time to get right with the Lord, or to pray or read the Bible. I wouldn’t try and convince him of the resurrection. I would only ask him to entertain the notion that love — the love he has for his life, his wife and his children, the love his readers have for him and the love that the doctors and nurses are showing him — is a real thing whose origins are worth exploring without glibness (sorry, saying “love for your fellow mammals” doesn’t require religion, as Hitchens did once, doesn’t cut it). It also can be done without Christophobia. I know that my discovery that I had cancer focused my mind on discovering the true nature of things, and I’m not talking about wishful thinking.

There’s practically nothing more supercilious and obnoxiously sanctimonious than a Christian deciding to lecture an unbeliever on love…because these prissy assholes all believe they have a monopoly on the One True Love™, which is servile obedience to a domineering tyrant. I trust that Hitchens knows love just as well as I do, and there’s nothing of gods in it — it’s between people, dammit, not fantasies. That is the way it always has been, and to taint it with the nonsense of religion and the slimy author’s submission to an imaginary lord is to diminish the reality.

Oh, the “true nature of things” on which the author, Mark Judge, focused after being diagnosed with cancer himself? Catholicism, that stodgy humbug and haven of horrible old men who think they’ve found love in the rape of children, that citadel of cowards who retreat from reality to find meaning in the dust and lies of antique theology.

Christians get a taste of how it feels to be a minority

And they don’t like it. Santa Monica had a lottery to distribute public spaces for Christmas displays — and non-Christians won almost all of them. I suspect it was because non-Christians were motivated and submitted many more applications than the Christians, but you never know, it could be because our God of Random Chance rigged the lottery to the atheists’ advantage.

Anyway, so this year the Christians only got 3 of the 14 spaces in the city park, the Jews got 1, and the atheists got 10. Now the Christians are upset, because they see themselves as oppressed, forced out of the park.

But the group that has long organized the Nativity scenes bristled at the atheists’ move, saying it upends a long-standing winter tradition for the city — and impedes their freedom of expression.

“By trying to push the Nativity scene out of the park and silence us, these people are infringing on our freedom and 1st Amendment rights,” said Hunter Jameson, a Nativity organizer, said in a statement.

It seems to me that everyone played fair and followed the rules, and the atheists were just more eager and enthusiastic about expressing themselves. The Christians weren’t pushed out — they’ve got 3 slots, and you know they’ll rebound next year and make many more applications — but are only getting a season to experience what it’s like to be the minority group. They should take advantage of the opportunity and get used to it — that’s their future fate, to be a small part of the American panoply.

Also, look at the photo of the displays: they’re hideous, walled off behind chain-link fencing. And no, lacing Christmas tree lights around the fencing does not make it look more festive.