Guess whose house is getting TP’ed this Halloween?

Oh, man, everyone I knew when I was a kid hated these people: you’d go trick-or-treating at their house, and they’d hand out cheesy stupid bible tracts or worse, pieces of paper with bible verses on them. Now some horrible, joyless people are promoting Jesusween, where they encourage more people to do just that.

Ick. Smug and sanctimonious. The only good thing about their website is the graphic prediction on the page.

In addition to the toilet paper, though, expect the cross to be eggsplattered, too.

The Fermi paradox explained at last

The Fermi paradox is a question: if other intelligent alien life is present in the universe, why aren’t they here?*

Even if we postulate large numbers of aliens with the technology to visit Earth, we can now explain why they aren’t saying hello. We’ve been broadcasting idiocy into space.

During a recent conference that focused on the possibilities and implications of long-term space flight, a German professor made an attempt at applying Christian theology to extraterrestrial aliens, leading him to ask the question “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?”

We’ve moved so far beyond speculating about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Now we’re wondering how many Jesii exist in the galaxy.

If other life forms exist in our universe, he said, we should try to understand why Jesus chose to save those from Earth over other civilized life forms from other planets.

Did God reserve his grace solely for Earthlings and abandon the rest of the intelligent creatures in the universe? If not, how did God deal with the sin problem on multiple planets?

One possibility he mentioned is that God-incarnate visited each of the civilized planets and saved each of the races that inhabited them separately.

In order for that to be possible, however, he says multiple incarnations of God would have to exist at the same time. Assuming each incarnation took about 30 years, and based on how long civilizations are expected to survive, he estimates that there would have to be approximately 250 incarnations of God present in the universe at any given time to cover the sins of each civilization.

So picture the poor bewildered aliens parked out there in the Oort cloud, proposing to send a diplomatic mission to Earth. They aren’t worried about us as a threat — star-faring civilizations aren’t going to be intimidated by a species that has barely been able to wobble a handful of missions to their moon, and is even rethinking their space program — but they are going to be considering the other implications of contact. “The humans…next thing you know, the Seventh Day Adventists will be knocking on our doors on Saturday mornings to hand out tracts; the Catholics will be building special schools and flooding our courts with Jesuits; and the Baptists will be telling us we can’t bezorp the paramales with our deedloids or we’ll burn in Hell. And their arguments will be so stupid. Scratch the contact mission, I don’t think we can handle the exasperation!”

And so the earth orbits alone around its star, abandoned and avoided by the more sensible species of the galaxy, like the creepy born-again Jesus-freak at school with the glassy eyes who you avoid having a conversation with because all he wants to talk about is the Bible. Damn you, religion! It’s your fault we can’t commune with the great minds of the galaxy!

*It’s not really a paradox. It’s an observation that can be explained by the idea that technological intelligence is very rare, and so widely dispersed that communication, let alone travel, between them is unlikely.

A stupid argument for God

There’s this guy, see, and he was talking to his friend who was a physicist, and he got A decent argument for God, so he published it in a newspaper. Where I read it. I hope he’s misrepresenting his physicist friend, because it turned out to be so stupid that he ought to be booted out of the science club if he actually made it.

It started out badly enough.

After reading that astronomers had updated the estimated number of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, to around 400 billion, Matt started thinking about the total number of stars in the known universe. The estimate now is about 70 sextillion stars. That’s 7 with 22 zeroes after it.

This is the boring old argument from complexity. It doesn’t work. Natural processes are really, really good at generating complexity: intelligence is good at honing and refining. We generally don’t regard piling up excess and superfluous complexity as a hallmark of intelligence in a design process.

But no, his argument is even worse. He babbles about the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox, and then makes his ultimate argument, which is what makes me hope this gomer isn’t actually a scientist.

He smiled and said that was why he had started to doubt his atheism.

“Either scenario,” he said, “leads me to believe that this isn’t all random. In the first case, you have a universe filled with amazing, varied species that all have somehow evolved to the common point where they can speculate, wonder and create. That is really a pretty decent argument for God.

“But in the second case, you have an even stronger case for God. If we are alone in the universe, then our solitude has so overwhelmingly defied statistics that you almost have to believe something supernatural has occurred to bring our very existence about.”

So if there are more than one intelligent species in the universe, god exists; if there is only one species, god exists. I think any semi-competent scientist or philosopher should be able to tell you that he has just shown that counting the number of intelligent species in the universe offers no power to distinguish between the the two alternative hypotheses presented, not that it demonstrates the truth of one hypothesis.

Maybe he meant that a “decent argument for god” is any argument that supports his prior belief, no matter what the observations.

Theocracy will sneak in one justification at a time

Rick Perry is unsuited to high office. That he’s a cretin is one thing, but that he has an anti-American, unconstitutional attitude towards the law is another. He thinks the US is in an alliance with Jesus, as revealed in his recent comments about Israel.

Well, obviously, Israel is our oldest and most stable democratic ally in that region. That is what this is about. I also as a Christian have a clear directive to support Israel. So from my perspective, it’s pretty easy. Both as an American and as a Christian, I am going to stand with Israel.

So the US role in the Middle East is driven by Christian fundamentalist theology? That’s scary stuff to announce, on top of practicing.

I don’t even know what the Israel of the Bible is, except that it is defunct and doesn’t exist anymore. To equate the modern state of Israel with the fantasy kingdom of the Bible is even more absurd than pointing at Italy and calling it the Roman Empire.

I knew it all along

Hey, it’s sure been quiet around here. I just got back from Fargo and the Project 42 conference where, most unfortunately, my hotel room’s wifi was abominable and intermittent. I figured you’d all be able to cope without me for a day, right? No panicky withdrawal symptoms, no rioting, no furious outrage and decisions to become a Christian because I wasn’t entertaining enough?

I just started sucking in the mountain of email that came in, so don’t expect much from me for a while. As a sop, you might be amused by this story out of Bay Minette, Alabama: they’ve decided that as an alternative to jail, people convicted of misdemeanors can opt to go to church instead. Didn’t you just know it all along? Church is the equivalent of prison, and attending church is a punishment.

More ugliness laid bare

I missed one example of ugliness in my last post. I already thoroughly detest Christianity, but if I didn’t, one way I’d learn to hate it would be by standing outside of Planned Parenthood and witness the faith on display in the horde of abortion clinic protestors.

If we want to encourage more atheists, maybe one way would be to organize days of service as an abortion clinic escort. It might be a little unfair, though: that really does expose you to some of the worst Christians on the planet.

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.