Tit-for-tat

The Danish cartoonists vs. Muslims conflict is flaring up again, with the discovery of a conspiracy by Muslims to kill a cartoonist. There are many levels of irony here; it’s simply stupid to try and protest accusations that you are violent by committing acts of violence. I’ve also noticed an interesting pattern of escalation.

The aggrieved Muslims are saying, “Mock our god and we will kill you.” They have the goal of suppressing images they consider blasphemous.

The cartoonists are saying, “Threaten to kill us and we will mock your god.” Obviously, they’d like to stay alive, but their goal in this context is to see their work disseminated widely.

Now ask yourself, who is achieving their goals? Who is winning?

It looks to me like a few relatively obscure cartoonists are crushing the fundamentalist Muslim world. Those cartoons aren’t even that good, and they’re being published everywhere, even appearing on blogs.

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Now maybe I’m misinterpreting the fundie Muslim position here: maybe their goal is actually to make sure the world thinks their beliefs are dangerous and stupid, and also ineffectual; they’re flailing pointlessly to suppress a couple of scribblings that would have vanished into obscurity, and have managed to turn them into icons of Islamic insanity. They’re doing a good job if that’s so. They’ve convinced me, at any rate.

Yeah, that’ll work

So the Catholic church has a problem with pedophilia. In a rational world, there’s a range of options available: stop protecting priests who abuse their position, threaten convicted child-abusing priests with expulsion and excommunication, even revisit this peculiar custom of demanding celibacy for the priesthood. Alas, the Pope has his own very special solution.

Pope Benedict XVI has instructed Roman Catholics to pray “in perpetuity” to cleanse the Church of paedophile clergy. All dioceses, parishes, monasteries, convents and seminaries will be expected to organise continuous daily prayers to express penitence and to purify the clergy.

Pray harder! Exercise a completely ineffective technique more strenuously!

I do wonder how the Pope imagines god will “cleanse” the church. Just tweaking the brains of priests so they don’t feel lust anymore would be a violation of free will and make a mess of centuries of theology, while having god get all Old Testament on the church and smite priests all around the world with lightning bolts would be spectacular and effective, but probably very bad PR.

There is no such thing as a godless family?

John and Cynthia Burke have adopted two children. By all accounts so far, they were a decent couple of an appropriate age and financially able to take care of the kids. The first was from the Children’s Aid and Adoption Society in East Orange, New Jersey. They recently adopted a second child from the same agency — strangely, the article says their first son is now 31, which would put them in their mid-50s at the earliest, and I might see some grounds for objecting to the adoption on the basis of age…but no, a judge has ruled that they may not adopt on the basis of a rather interesting legal requirement.

In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes’ right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes’ “high moral and ethical standards,” he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that “no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience.” Despite Eleanor Katherine’s tender years, he continued, “the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being.”

Wow.

This is so revealing. I’ve mentioned that religious indoctrination is a kind of child abuse, as has Richard Dawkins even more notably, yet when you press us we are both are at a loss to what we can do about it; parents have rights, and this is a situation where there there are all kinds of conflicting interests. Neither of us have advocated taking children from parents, or punishing people for mentioning god to kids, or any other penalties, not even mild ones — all we’ve ever said is that this is a real problem, one with no clear solutions, but we shouldn’t hide away from it.

Of course, the typical reaction from Christians and creationists and wingnuts has been pure hysteria — the atheists want to snatch your children away if you take them to Sunday school! Now we can understand it all as a perfect example of projection: if you don’t take your children to Sunday school, the Christians will try to take your children away.

I hope all those good theists who rebuked Dawkins and other atheists for a false perception that they were out to dismantle their families or deny them the privilege of instructing their children in their religion are howling about this attack on the family right now. Perhaps some of them, especially the New Jersey residents, are writing their representatives right now and demanding that this intrusion on the rights of parents be removed from the New Jersey constitution immediately…and perhaps they should be suggesting that Judga Camarata’s high-handed personal bigotry warrants official censure.

And hey, all you conservatives out there, with all your lip service to “family” — what are you doing about this? James Dobson and Tony Perkins must be furious. I’ll be looking forward to their denunciations, and their cooperation with the ACLU to correct this injustice.

Yeesh — now I discover this is old news, from 1970. Why did so many people suddenly send this in to me, anyway?

Anyway, it’s still relevant — I hadn’t known that theists had in the past tried to remove children from atheists. No wonder some freaked out at Dawkins’ description of religious indoctrination as child abuse…again, it’s projection.

“I don’t think anything predated Christians”

Sherri “the earth is flat” Shepherd advances the atheist cause for us once again by demonstrating just how stupid going to church can make you. This time, it was about history: Jesus came before the Romans and the Greeks, the Greeks threw Christians to the lions, and nothing could have preceded Jesus.

It just goes to show, though, that there is no intelligence minimum for the chattering pundit class.

Don’t worry, kids, Curry is just making it all up

Lots of people have been sending me this bad article from the Daily Mail, “Human race will ‘split into two different species'”. I don’t quite get it. This is the very same utter nonsense from Oliver Curry that came out at this same time last year.

Is this to be a yearly occurrence now? Every Halloween some newspaper will dredge up this bilge from the London School of Economics and try to horrify us with abominable pseudoscience masquerading as evolutionary biology?