This horror cannot be unseen

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield is very concerned: atheism has turned ugly, he says. Oh, no, I says, what atrocity have we perpetrated now? Have we been…

  • raping children in our care?
  • hunting for witches in Africa and setting them on fire?
  • rioting over poorly-drawn caricatures of Madalyn Murray O’Hair?
  • stoning women to death for adultery?
  • telling air force cadets to prepare for a righteous armageddon?
  • hypocritical?
  • chopping the hands off thieves?
  • displacing and oppressing people because they live on land Dawkins said was ours?
  • pouring money into California to suppress the rights of gay couples?
  • building compounds and filling them with automatic rifles?
  • lying to children in our educational system?
  • telling women they aren’t allowed to speak at our meetings?
  • flying planes into buildings?
  • chopping bits off baby penises?
  • inculcating shame and guilt in generations of children?
  • ignoring the stewardship of our planet because nature couldn’t possibly allow us to mess it up?
  • denying children medical care because disease is Hitchen’s will?
  • strapping bombs to our bodies and boarding church buses before detonating them?
  • telling poor people they aren’t allowed to use family planning?
  • butchering albinos for body parts we use in our secret ceremonies?
  • legislating death and imprisonment for sexual practices we disapprove of?
  • making women dress up in bag-like tents before allowing them to go outside?
  • dynamiting ancient works of religious art?
  • crusading?
  • chopping off clitorises?
  • demanding special privileges?
  • dismantling the social support network?
  • using our tax-free income to lobby for conservative politicians in our tax-exempt buildings?
  • calling for pogroms and ethnic cleansing?
  • setting our critics on fire?

Because those would be UGLY. That’s the kind of thing that comes to my mind as representative of disgraceful, hideous behavior by established social institutions. For a representative of a religious faith to claim that atheists have done something ugly implies that they must have really done something awful.

So what has Rabbi Hirschfield covering his eyes in horror?

The Backyard Skeptics were tearing pieces of paper in half…paper that had magic words written on them. O Lord, avert thine eyes that thou would not witness the great evils your people perpetrate on this earth. God, with your perfect all-seeing vision, I think you would prefer to change channels, avoid this heresy, and instead peep in on some of your good and holy people: I’m sure somewhere there’s a priest buggering a choir boy, or a rabbi gnawing on a baby’s penis, or an imam cutting off someone’s head, providing a soothing spectacle for a holy mind. Whatever you do, do not watch this horrific video of smiling people on a sunny day in California cheerfully disrespecting your sacred words. Amen.

You watched it, didn’t you? Now you’re going to have flashbacks to those frightful images all day long. Don’t blame me if you are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder now.

The cool/lame quotient

That Anglican archbishop, Rowan Williams, is complaining about the atheists again.

I’m not avoiding the point that the coolness of atheism is very much in evidence. The problem is it’s become a bit of a vicious circle. Atheism is cool, so books about atheism are cool.

They get a high profile, and books that say Richard Dawkins is wrong don’t get the same kind of publicity because atheism is the new cool thing.

It’s difficult to break into that, but plenty of people are trying.

He’s making a very common error of perspective. I hate to break the news to all of you, but atheism is not cool. It’s not cool at all. It’s the domain of nerds and geeks and sciencey weirdos with beards and snarky women who are way smarter than the guys chasing them. We are not rock stars. We are not fabulously sexy (well, except for Brian Cox). We tend not to have loud movie star personalities (well, except for Neil deGrasse Tyson). Nothing personal, but if you put together a line-up of one of the Kardashians, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Daniel Radcliffe, and Richard Dawkins, and showed them to the average person on the American street, most of our citizens’ eyes would light up in recognition at the first four, and look quizzically at the guy on the end. And no, it wouldn’t help much to swap in Brian Cox for Richard Dawkins.

But that’s the point: cool is a relative thing. Coolness depends on what you contrast it with. And that’s really Rowan Williams’ problem.

It’s not the coolness of atheism. It’s the lameness of religion.

Look at me. I’m moderately popular, and I’m a schlubby college professor at a small college. I’ve got a beard and I wear nerdy ties. I’m nobody. But stand me next to a priest, or a creationist, and the contrast makes me look white-hot and super-cool, even though I’m not. It’s been my cunning trick for years.

So the problem for Williams isn’t that atheism is cool at all — it’s that our cool/lame quotient rockets to stratospheric heights whenever we’re in opposition to old geezy wankers who are chanting antique gobbledygook about magic rabbis and dead people. And those apologists trying break into our schtick? All they are doing is making us look cooler.

There’s only one solution. If the priests just fade away and stop looking like such gomers next to us, then atheism will look much, much less cool. We’ll have to compete with Michael Bay and video games and porn for attention, and then there won’t be anyone chattering about how cool we are any more.

OH NO! I just revealed the secret to making atheism irrelevent — for all the religious folk to disappear into the woodwork. Now we’re dooooomed!

Fairness and reason can be opposed by a poll

I’m impressed. The principal at Edgewater Primary School, Julie Tombs, ended the tradition of reciting the Lord’s Prayer at assemblies after receiving some complaints, and she did it for good principled reasons.

…at this school we have students from a range of backgrounds and it is important to consider all views and not promote one set of religious beliefs and practices over another.

Exactly right! This is a simple decision that schools should not be in the business of promoting sectarian religion. But of course, even in Australia the facts can’t be allowed to stand, so opposition must be gathered in the guise of a democratic poll. And so far, the Australians are disappointing me.

Should the Lord’s Prayer be banned from WA schools?

Yes 26.92%

No 54.78%

In state schools only 10.96%
I don’t care 7.34%

People who read Pharyngula might have a different perspective on this issue. Maybe you should make your views known.

Blessings of faith

Taukinukufili Taufa is a New Zealander who ran the Church of Baptism with Fire & Holy Spirit, and he believes that God speaks to him directly and he believes in baptism through “heavenly fire”.

His house caught fire.

The fire killed his wife, his daughter, three grandchildren, and six other people that were staying with him. This isn’t ironic, it’s a great screaming tragedy in these people’s lives; if it had happened to me, I’d be devastated. To lose 11 friends and family members in a great conflagration in one’s own home…I’d be a wreck, struggling to understand what went wrong, worrying over guilt and loss.

Not Mr Taufa! He’s got his religion to console him.

God showed me how to do it, baptise people in the fire of the Holy Spirit. This is not bad after all, it’s a blessing in disguise.

Why is it a blessing? Because now more people will hear about his church.

I know it’s going to be a tourist resort in the future because people in the world heard about it. They will try to come and have a look

The other six people who died in the fire were the wife and five children of Jeremy Lale, who’d been staying at the house. Taufa says they “came here at the right time”.

They [were] included in the people that God chose to become his people in heaven.

There is a fine line between being optimistic and trying to look on the bright side of life, and being an unfeeling psychopath and demented fuckwit. With the aid of his faith, Taufa has skipped across that line and is racing away from his humanity as quickly as his feeble excuses can take him.

The police seem nonchalant and think the fire was only an accident. Maybe they should look a little more closely at the fellow who is bragging about his motive and shows a remarkable absence of grief for someone who just had 11 people die under his roof.

Did anyone complain?

This should make you ill. It’s from B-SHOC, some awful hack of a Christian rapper who normally proselytizes at churches and revivals, where he belongs. In this one, though, he’s bragging about performing in a public school in South Carolina, at the invitation of the school principal.

This was an explicitly sectarian event, done with the goal of converting students to Christianity, and at the end he brags about ‘saving’ 324 students for his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

In a public school.

Can you say “violation of the separation of church and state”, boys and girls?

The comments on the video are revealing.

That was so awesome that you was to do what no body was able to do before which is going into a public school. Awesome B-Shoc only you can pull that off

Ungrammatical and proud of peddling stupidity in school — I am not surprised.

I was amused at the part where one of the zealots claims that the teachers teach “evolution 5 days a week, 9 months a year”. Yeah, right. Otherwise, I’m not laughing. This is egregious and vile.

And I’m not just talking about the “music”.

I guess everything looks Christian to a Christian

I would agree that Christian imagery permeates our culture, unfortunately — but you know, sometimes Jesus isn’t the focus. You wouldn’t know that, though from this list of 50 Films That You Wouldn’t Think Were Christian, But Actually Are. Some I would agree with; The Green Mile, sure, that’s a big ol’ blatant Christ allegory. But the others…whoa.

Would you believe Taxi Driver is a Christian movie? Travis Bickle is “God’s lonely man, working in the modern day equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah. But instead of simply trying to ‘lead a good life’ or ‘do the right thing’, Travis Bickle turns violence and retribution on those he deems most deserving, to the point where he threatens to tip over into the darkness himself.” Yes, I can sort of see it: a violent psychopath does have a lot in common with Jesus Christ, and of course, every 12-year-old prostitute is actually Mary Magdalene.

I expect there will be a new show put on in church basements all across the country: The Rocky Horror Picture Show is now revealed as secretly espousing Christian doctrine.

Considering that it contains lines like “give yourself over to absolute pleasure”, you wouldn’t think that Rocky Horror would have much time for Christian morality. But in its closing section all becomes clear, as Brad and Janet emerge from their ordeal with Frank N. Furter like Adam and Eve crawling from the vanquished serpent, out of the Garden of Eden and into an unknown future. Throw in Charles Gray as a disappointed, distant God and the effect is complete.

Please do send me photos of your local Baptist minister struttin’ his stuff in fishnet stockings.

Other films in the Christian vein: Eraserhead, Total Recall, Bladerunner, A Clockwork Orange. Bring that list to church (those of you who go to church at all, which probably isn’t many of you) and ask that they be shown in Sunday School!

Funny thing, though: I’m not seeing much correspondence between this list and CAPalert.

Belief matters, and bad beliefs hurt us all

Tell me if you’ve heard this excuse for religion before. Religion isn’t really about what people believe — all that stuff about salvation and an afterlife and heaven and hell and holy books isn’t that important, it’s instead all about comforting rituals and emotion and feelings. It’s like art, like poetry — nobody really believes in that stuff literally, except crazy people, so all those rabid atheists are barking up the wrong tree.

That is so tired, so old, so familiar that anyone who tries to advance such a stupid argument ought to be ashamed at how out of touch they are. John Gray, that favored religious apologist for the British press, drags out the old fleabag and tries to coax it around the track once more. That horse is dead, though, and all the flogging is doing nothing but making the bones and hide bounce about.

[Read more…]

Christian compassion

Pat Robertson gets a difficult question: a man’s wife is suffering from Alzheimer’s. He thinks he ought to go find a new wife. Pat, what should he do?

Divorce her. She’s gone, so your marriage vows don’t apply any more. How sweet!

I’m going to have to have a talk with my wife, though: if I go senile in a few years, I don’t think I’d like to be thrown out of the house while she goes looking for a date, and so no taking advice from fundamentalist kooks.

(via Right Wing Watch.)

Who won?

St. Xavier’s is an all-boys Catholic high school, and apparently they’re proud of it. In a game with a rival school, Colerain, the team started chanting about how their invisible man gave them an edge: “We’ve got Jesus!”. Ah, the arrogance of Christians…isn’t it nice that they think they get to deploy the Lord and Master of the Universe to assist them in football games?

The Colerain team responded effectively, I think. They chanted back, “We’ve got girls!”

I don’t care what the score was. Colerain wins.

If there is no transcendant moral law, asking us to submit to it is a bad idea

My opinion of the rabbinical mind is plummeting downwards, thanks to the determined efforts of one man, Moshe Averick. We’ve encountered him before, and he was most unimpressive. Now he’s got a new line of criticism of atheists: we’re on a slippery slope. You know what comes next? What horrible abominable practice we’ll be endorsing?

Pedophilia!

Yeah, because without god’s laws to guide us, we will start running around raping little children willy-nilly. Never mind that atheists haven’t shown, as a whole, any such pattern or predilection, it’s just inevitable that we’ll want to abuse children. I think it’s a bizarre case of projection, again: really, I have no desire to have sex with small children, to rob banks, to rape dogs, or even to set churches on fire. You might as well suggest that without god I’ll become a NASCAR fan, start chewing tobacco, or vote Republican, all things I have no desire to do and which are not a product of theism or atheism.

I’m always baffled by this argument. What, there’s something about church or synagogue that suppresses your natural urge to rape, murder, and rob? But I feel no such urge without church!

And then, of course, he’s picked the very worst example. Nowadays, mention the word “pedophilia”, and nobody thinks of atheists — you know, even though pedophiles are a minority in their ranks, everyone considers “Catholic priest” virtually synonymous with “child-raper”. So much for religion suppressing those urges — it’s more like it attracts and enables monsters.

And then, having gnawed on one foot, Averick sticks the other one in.

A wise man once observed that while belief in God after the Holocaust may be difficult, belief in man after the Holocaust is impossible. The choices before us are clear: we will either seek a transcendent moral law to which we will all submit, or we will seek our own personal and societal indulgence. If we turn to God in our quest to create a moral and just world, we have a fighting chance; if not, we are doomed to spiral into the man-made hell of the human jungle.

Germany at the time of the Holocaust was a predominantly Catholic and Lutheran country. Hitler claimed to have a transcendant moral law, as well — that his people were the Chosen People, the best and greatest Volk, who by their intrinsic physical and moral and intellectual superiority were compelled to maintain their purity and exterminate the lesser races. That’s where you end up when you decree a source of absolute morality, a morality that isn’t based on equality and empathy and fairness, but on authority, especially the intangible untestable authority of an invisible magic ghost.

All moral laws are manmade. Do we recognize that reality and struggle to make them better as a community of reasonable human beings, or do we pretend that a few of us have special privileges and insight into the desires of a cosmic tyrant, and let them tell us how to live? Given that anyone claiming such authority is mad and delusional, I say no.