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.

There is no such thing as magic

This is horrifying and barbarous.

Saudi authorities have executed a woman convicted of practicing magic and sorcery.

There is no such thing as magic or sorcery, so this is murder for a crime the person couldn’t possibly have committed. But then, there’s a little clarification…

The London-based al-Hayat daily, however, quoted Abdullah al-Mohsen, chief of the religious police who arrested the woman, as saying she had tricked people into thinking she could treat illnesses, charging them $800 per session.

That’s still horrifying and barbarous, but quackery at least is a real offense. It’s an offense not deserving of execution, however.

A glimpse into the vague and blurry mind of a proud None

I don’t go to church on Sundays anymore, so it’s so kind of the New York Times to serve me up a bit of that familiar sanctimonious, self-congratulatory bullshit from a guy named Eric Weiner. Weiner is a smug member in good standing, he thinks, of that demographic called the Nones: people who don’t belong to a church, but maybe believe in a higher power. Or maybe not. It’s a broad catch-all category, so their beliefs are hard to categorize.

All I can say is that if Eric Weiner is at all representative, a lot of Nones are idiots.

For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us?

I believe xkcd has already addressed this attitude.

I can also quote myself: “squatting in between those on the side of reason and evidence and those worshipping superstition and myth is not a better place. It just means you’re halfway to crazy town.”

I must also point out that Weiner is making a common mischaracterization of atheists: we aren’t sitting around fuming at the world, and we’re not primarily angry. Most of us are pretty damned happy with the universe (or at least, aware of reality), and we mainly get angry at denialists and fools — people with whom we should be angry — and if you aren’t pissed off at people who set environmental policy by the backward whims of their bible, or who deny civil rights to people because they don’t like their private behavior, or who vote for political candidates on the basis of how loudly pious they are, then there is something wrong with you.

And yes, there is something wrong with Eric Weiner.

Nones are the undecided of the religious world. We drift spiritually and dabble in everything from Sufism to Kabbalah to, yes, Catholicism and Judaism.

He says that like it’s a good thing. Does he even realize that these are mutually antagonistic religious views? Does he care that they say very different things about the nature of the universe? Nah. Here’s the heart of Weiner’s essay:

We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day.

WHY? I may not believe in Emperor Ming the Merciless, but I hope to one day. I may not believe in Satan, but I hope to one day. I may not believe in Ceiling Cat, but I hope to one day. I may not believe in elves, but I hope to one day. These are absurd statements. They speak of someone who has decided what the answer should be, and is prepared to rationalize that conclusion.

The atheists he doesn’t like have a better answer: we will embrace reality, whatever it is. And we will work to discover that truth, not bury it because we have a fantasy we like better.

Weiner’s concluding solution is so oblivious to history that I read it with disbelief. How does something this stupid get into the pages of the New York Times? (I know, it’s incredibly common, but it’s just so annoying.)

What is the solution? The answer, I think, lies in the sort of entrepreneurial spirit that has long defined America, including religious America.

We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.

It’s been done. The entrepreneurial spirit of America spawned Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Jim Jones, David Koresh, JZ Knight, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Mary Baker Eddy, Helen Blavatsky, Werner Erhard…we are the home of thousands of wacky, weird, novel religions which flourish unchecked and draw in all those mentally unmoored people who drift spiritually until they waft into the orbit of the latest cult fad.

Guess what, Mr Weiner? They’ve made god an even greater embarrassment.

I have a better idea. Instead of inventing yet another religion designed to make the gullible feel good about themselves, how about if we grow up, shed the superstitious preconceptions, and instead strive to see the truth about nature? How about if we all become atheists?

Bill Donohue finds the proper bait for trolling

Bill Donohue has noticed that there are a lot of atheists running around and getting all up in his face, so the Catholic League is launching a counter-insurgency program, an Adopt An Atheist campaign, which I find kind of sweet and stupid.

Today we are launching our “Adopt An Atheist” campaign, the predicate of which is, “We want atheists to realize that there may be Christians in their community, even if those Christians don’t even know they are Christian.”

Uh, Bill…we know there are Christians in our communities. They’re all over the place, and they’re always rather loud about it. This is a campaign designed to ape what American Atheists do, and it puts Bill Donohue in an unfortunately defensive situation, in which he’s basically reacting to Dave Silverman by doing what Dave Silverman does…and it’s not going to work for him at all.

Here’s what our campaign entails. We are asking everyone to contact the American Atheist affiliate in his area [click here], letting them know of your interest in “adopting” one of them. All it takes is an e-mail. Let them know of your sincere interest in working with them to uncover their inner self. They may be resistant at first, but eventually they may come to understand that they were Christian all along.

If we hurry, these closeted Christians can celebrate Christmas like the rest of us. As an added bonus, they will no longer be looked upon as people who “believe in nothing, stand for nothing and are good for nothing.”

When atheists heard about this deal, they scrambled to beg to be “adopted”. He’s already hooked Cuttlefish, Greg, and JT, and heck, sign me up, too. Why? Because the comedic opportunities are freaking ripe. Donohue’s hooks are improperly baited — all they’re going to snag are happy atheists who’d love to see a fanatical Catholic willingly get in range for a mix of rational discussion, critical evaluation of Christian absurdities, and outright mockery.

Bill Donohue doesn’t seem to realize that he and Dave Silverman are in highly asymmetric situations (which doesn’t surprise me — Donohue is not a particularly insightful fellow). The Catholic church’s problem is not that people are unaware of them; as the largest single Christian denomination, Catholicism has name brand recognition. Their problem is that people know all about the Catholic church, and they run away screaming from it.

Its fusty medievalisms are the stuff of gothic horror novels and Dungeons & Dragons games, not contemporary life. Its most notable claim to fame recently has been raping children, and I think anyone can tell you, getting your brand name associated with child abuse, enslaving women, and providing a cushy old folks home for unrepentant pedophiles is not good marketing.

And along those lines, proposing to “adopt” people, something we usually associate with children…that’s not a good reminder to throw out there, Bill. When I first heard of this misbegotten plan to have a Catholic ‘adopt’ people like me, it wasn’t that they’d teach me to appreciate the true story of Christmas, but that my virginal anus was under threat.

Besides, I already celebrate Christmas the right way: with cephalopods on a fake tree, lefse and krumkake, kissing a pretty girl, and lounging about indolently all day long. We’ve successfully stolen the meaning of “holiday” away from the believers: instead of a day of sacred obligations, it’s now a day of freedom from obligations of all sorts — it’s a day off, when we can just relax and do what makes us and others happy.

And isn’t that what Christmas is all about?