War is no place for the deluded

A good column by James Carroll in the Boston Globe criticizes the absurd piety being peddled in the military, especially the discovery of Iraq war briefings laced with militant Christianity. He lists 7 reasons why it is a bad idea that the military has become wrapped up in religious jingo.

  • Single-minded religious zealotry bedevils critical thinking, and not just about religion. Military and political thinking suffers when the righteousness of born-again faith leads to self-righteousness. Critical thinking includes a self-criticism of which the “saved” know little.

  • Military proselytizers use Jesus to build up “unit cohesion” by eradicating doubt about the mission, the command, and the self. But doubt – the capacity for second thought – is a military leader’s best friend. Commanders, especially, need the skill of skepticism – the opposite of true belief.

  • Otherworldly religion defining the afterlife as ultimate can undervalue the present life. Religion that looks forward to apocalypse, God’s kingdom established by cosmic violence, can help ignite such violence. Armageddon, no mere metaphor now, is the nuclear arsenal.

  • Religious fundamentalism affirms ideas apart from the context that produced them, reading the Bible literally or dogma ahistorically. Such a mindset can sponsor military fundamentalism, denying the context from which threats arise – refusing to ask, for example, what prompts so many insurgents to become willing suicides? Missing this, we keep producing more.

  • A military that sees itself as divinely commissioned can all too readily act like God in battle – using mortal force from afar, without personal involvement. An Olympian aloofness makes America’s new drone weapon the perfect slayer of civilians.

  • A bifurcated religious imagination, dividing the world between good and evil, can misread the real character of an “enemy” population, many of whom want no part of war with us.

  • The Middle East is the worst place in which to set loose a military force even partly informed by Christian Zionism, seeing the state of Israel as God’s instrument for ushering in the Messianic Age – damning Muslims, while defending Jews for the sake of their eventual destruction.

I read that and agreed with it all…except for one thing. Those criticisms don’t just apply to the military, they also apply to our civilian population. Maybe #5 is a bit of a stretch — most of us don’t have military drones at our disposal — but scale it down a bit, and picture a religious fanatic with a rifle aimed at an abortion doctor. It’s the same principle.

Strip away the specific references to the US military, and that whole thing is an argument that could have come straight from the keyboard of a New Atheist criticizing American culture in general.

A first hint of decency from the Irish Catholic church

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has written what Catholics should have said from the very beginning of this Irish scandal. It really didn’t take much, just the recognition of failure.

The church has failed people. The church has failed children. There is no denying that. This can only be regretted and it must be regretted. Yet “sorry” can be an easy word to say. When it has to be said so often, then “sorry” is no longer enough.

He goes on to say that the church needs to get out of its state of denial, that they have to admit that they’ve done wrong, and that they have to make restitution. It’s a 180° reversal from what Bill Donohue was doing: blame the victims, blame the investigators, try to downplay the results of the investigation.

What Martin is saying is what I would have expected to hear from an organization with good intentions; Donohue was confirming what I expected to hear from an inherently unscrupulous institution. It will be interesting to see which approach ultimately wins out.

Unfortunately, Martin still seems to think his religion is a force dedicated to doing good for humanity. It’s sweet that he still thinks so, but then, he’s an archbishop, and well-schooled in the art of self-delusion.

What a brilliant scam!

It’s called the Reincarnation Bank. You put a bunch of money in now, and then when you die and are reincarnated, your new incarnation comes to bank and gets the money back so you can start your new life with the advantage of a wad of moolah. I presume you must have to do something like memorize a secret account number before you die, and remember it again once you’re reborn.

Their web page has a link to make deposits, but strangely enough, there isn’t a link to make withdrawals. I have to marvel at the con — only very, very stupid people are going to fall for it.

That said, though, I’m planning to reincarnate as a squid, so I’m wondering…can I deposit a couple of buckets of fish heads and guts, and how am I going to get that back in my nonverbal, illiterate and innumerate form?

Oh, no — she’s questioning everything they taught her!

One of those agony aunts, Dear Margo, got an amusing request for help.

Dear Margo: Our daughter started college a year ago, and we’ve noticed during her visits home that she’s not the sweet, innocent girl we sent away for higher learning. We raised her with strong Christian beliefs, but lately she’s saying that she’s joined an atheist club on campus and is questioning everything we taught her. Now my husband refuses to let her in the house and is threatening to turn her in to the FBI. I’ve tried to cure our daughter and reconcile with her, but nothing seems to work. I’ve prayed over her at night while she sleeps, enlisted friends in a phone prayer tree and even spoken to my priest about the possibility of an exorcism. I’m at my wits’ end. How can I recover my daughter and keep her from hell? — God-fearing

There’s a regular stampede of young people doing exactly what “God-fearing” describes — isn’t it wonderful? This is exactly what happens when you send your kids off to college: if it works, they start thinking for themselves, develop surprising new opinions, and aren’t afraid to share them with other people. Hooray for college students, some of my favorite people!

As for these poor parents, they shipped their daughter off to college with the wrong idea. They thought college would just confirm them in their same old traditional beliefs. We really ought to send little information packets to the parents of our students, carefully explaining that there will be little shocks like this, because their kids will come back as smart, independent human beings.

Margo’s answer isn’t bad — she tells them that it is normal for people to think for themselves — even if she does bend over backwards to give some unwarranted sympathy to freaky religious beliefs.

And that fanatical devotion to peculiar Christian dogma? Well…

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The forgettable Mr Birdnow

Timothy Birdnow is one of those common wingnuts: he worships GW Bush, thinks global warming is a hoax, homosexuality is evil, evolution is a lie, and history is all about the triumphant ascent of Judeo-Christian America. I’ve laughed at him a few times before; now he’s venting his diseased, shriveled spleen at atheism. It’s funny stuff.

A lot of it is the usual ahistorical tripe which can be summed up in this cliche:

This prohibition was clearly intended to restrain governmental interference with the right of the individual to believe and worship as he sees fit. The “Wall of Separation” was put in place to secure freedom of religion, not freedom FROM religion.

So, apparently, Americans do not have a right to be godless, and we can be compelled to join some church, any church, just to keep us from marching around free FROM religion. It’s the weirdest argument, though, because at the same time he’s damning us for being free of religion and insisting that we have no right to be god-free, he’s insisting that atheism is a religion. The inconsistency doesn’t matter when your brain is as scrambled as Birdnow’s; but I am amused by his most extreme efforts to shoehorn atheism into his narrow vision of what a religion is. Behold: we are trinitarians now!

Radical Atheists hate it when their belief system is categorized as religious, but it is. What is religion after all? It is a system of beliefs about the nature of the Universe, of Man, and of the Hereafter. It generally has a moral code. It has a creation story, and often a prophecy of the end of the world. Atheism has all of these things.

Atheism is triune in nature in many ways; we have Universe the Father (Let there be light, and there was the Big Bang), Earth the Son (all life evolved from the mechanistic determinism of the Blind Watchmaker), and the Holy Spirit of Human intellect. As a result, atheism incorporates several beliefs into one system.

Atheism worships (they hate that word) the Cosmos, Evolution, and Reason. The Big Bang and Darwinian Evolution are the creation myths, and the Big Crunch the prophecied cataclysm. Oh, I know; these are scientific concepts and not simply faith-based stories. Still, the atheist has decided that he will not believe in anything that cannot be given in evidence by the senses. Of course, this means that the ultimate questions of where this random, mechanistic universe came from cannot be answered. God is as good of an answer as any, but most atheists simply insist there can be none and believe in a mechanical universe that generated spontaneously with physical laws balanced just right for the evolution of life and human consciousness.

Oh, yes. And bdelloid rotifers are our Madonna, and ichneumonid wasps our Satan. Could he possibly stretch the comparison a little further?

Why is he concerned about this? We’re destroying Western Civilization!

That is why our society is sliding down the long, greasy pole; too many believe in nothing. This is evident in every facet of our lives. All of society`s problems can ultimately be traced back to the severing of human reason from human passion, and that is the fruit of Western Civilization`s arrogant belief in himself, the material world, and his disbelief in the Divine. The looming triumph of Atheism is bringing forth the demons of the human abyss, as surely as did Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or the other Atheists who ruled over their kingdoms for one hour. The bell is now tolling for we.

As we all know, sliding down a long, greasy pole is the homophobe’s worst nightmare, which is why they dwell on it so much. The poor man is deranged, so I’ll just have to forgive him for his very typical, hateful attitude. Unfortunately, I have to despise him forever for “The bell is now tolling for we.”

You can always trust a Dane, right?

One of my goals for this coming week is to get the book piles sorted and put away. I’m one of those academics: if you visited my house right now, probably the first thing you’d notice is a few dozen piles of books stacked up on the floor of the living room. Some I’ve read and just need to shelve properly; some I’ve glanced over with amusement and will be adding to my growing collection of creationist literature; and some will put ready to hand because they’re on my list of books I should get read this summer. One in that last category is Phil Zuckerman’s Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I guess I’ll have to sort it somewhere towards the top of that pile, now that I’ve seen a review by a Dane that says it actually gets the godless Scandinavian culture right. Apparently, what Zuckerman finds noteworthy also says a lot about American culture.

Scandinavia isn’t quite perfect yet, though. Here’s a story of a Norwegian doctor who prescribed Christianity for depressed patients (google translation). A few kooks still slip through, but the culture as a whole seems to regard that doctor as a nut — here in the US we’d be having sober, serious discussions in the opinion pages of our newspapers about how maybe he was doing something positive.