This long article by Lawrence Wright goes into great detail on the abusive practices of this creepy organization, using the defection after thirty-five years of Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Paul Haggis as a focus.
It seems like the widespread ridicule that O’Reilly got for his ‘argument’ that the tides proved god’s existence has got under his skin. He tries to explain and hilariously exposes his ignorance even more.
So basically god is for those who do not know any science. Glad you cleared that up, Bill!
I’m at a conference and the moderator at a session that I attended gave us an anecdote during which she said “I’m a good Catholic girl”. Was I offended at her injecting religion into a secular meeting? Of course not. She wasn’t preaching to us, it was just a passing comment, inserted for humorous purposes and we all laughed.
But what if she had said, “I’m a good atheist girl”? I bet you that that there would have been sharp intakes of breaths and some mutterings that she had delivered a gratuitous slap at religion. This is the protective shield that religion has built around itself that has to be dismantled.
It turns out that about 200 cows suddenly died in Wisconsin, which, along with other recent reports of mass deaths of birds and fish, are taken as signs that the end times are near.
Such mass deaths are not uncommon and only seem so because the media’s interest is triggered by one unusual event and they then report every subsequent similar event as if they are mysteriously connected, until it gets bored and moves on to a new pseudo-trend. But religious folk, ever eager for a sign that their god is still around, desperately seize upon these natural events as evidence of the supernatural.
Apparently the willingness of people to be duped by hucksters into believing that inanimate objects wield magical powers that can improve their lives has resulted in the popularity of something called ‘Power Balance’ bands, a silicone band containing a hologram. It seems like all it takes is for some celebrity to endorse some nonsense for others to rush out and buy them, even if there is zero evidence in its favor. Articles about these things never seem to include people who buy these things and then have their lives take a turn for the worse.
I blame religion for this kind of idiocy. It encourages people to believe in magic, and once you go down that anti-science road, you become a sucker just waiting to be taken in by hucksters.
Following up on the post about the fraudulent study about how the MMR vaccine may cause autism, I came across this sad report of 70 children dying of measles in Zimbabwe. They were part of a religious community that shunned vaccines because “it contradicts their belief in supernatural powers.”
The story illustrates what a deadly threat measles is, and how its threat escalates rapidly as the proportion of unvaccinated people in a population increases.
Watch the expression on the face of David Silverman (of the American Atheists) when Bill O’Reilly gives his argument for god’s existence.
Steven Colbert shows that O’Reilly seems to be very fond of this argument.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson oversimplifies his explanation for the tides by suggesting that it is entirely due to the moon’s gravitational pull that changes direction as the Earth rotates. That would explain only one ebb and flow a day. The effects of both the Sun and the moon are required to create the two daily tides.
Does O’Reilly really not know that we understand tides so well and that it is not an inexplicable mystery that requires god? Or is he, like some religious people, simply going through the motions of trying to find things to buttress a belief that he suspects deep down is insupportable, because is too scared to go against prevailing orthodoxy?
Laws against blasphemy constitute the ultimate concession by religious people that their god does not exist. I think religious leaders secretly realize that the non-existence of god is such an obvious fact that allowing people to publicly say so might cause the whole religious house of cards to topple, and so they have to resort to legal measures to prevent people from pointing out the absurdity of their beliefs.
But blasphemy laws are not only stupid, they are evil. We currently have the terrible situation of a Pakistani Christian woman who is under a death sentence for blasphemy and two days ago a Pakistan provincial governor was shot to death by his own bodyguard because the governor had opposed this blasphemy law. What is particularly disgusting is that mainstream religious organizations in Pakistan are lauding the murder and militant clerics in Pakistan have been protesting any changes to this barbaric law.
The Islamic countries seem to be the worst perpetrators of this blasphemy evil. What is worse is that they are trying to gain international acceptance for their medieval ideas, using the United Nations as a vehicle. In November 2010, the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee of the 192-member General Assembly voted 76-64 (42 abstentions) in favor of a resolution condemning the ‘vilification of religion’. While this is a smaller margin than last year (81 to 55 with 43 abstentions) and is non-binding, it is still disturbing that so many countries would support it.
I described yesterday how I use the Noah’s flood story to get Biblical literalists to confront the fact that the story, like many other stories in the Bible, describes god as a monstrous genocidal maniac. In this post, I will describe some of the ways they respond.
Last year, I wrote about a discussion with a religious woman who stopped me on the sidewalk outside my office to hand me some Jesus literature. At some point she started talking about Hitler, as such people invariably do. I reproduce part of the Q and A I had with the Jesus woman.
Q: Do you believe that Noah’s flood actually occurred? A: Yes.
Q: In that flood, god deliberately murdered all but the eight people in Noah’s family, including tiny infants. Wasn’t that worse than anything Hitler had done? Didn’t that make god the worst genocidal maniac in history? A: No.
Q: Why not? A: Because all those people died because of their sins.
Q: What about the infants? Doesn’t it bother you that god murdered vast numbers of tiny newborn infants by drowning them? What had they done to deserve that awful fate?
At this point, she started making stuff up, the way that religious people do when they have no answer. They think they can get away with this because they assume that the person they are talking to does not know the Bible. The doctrine of original sin that says that even newborn babies are also sinners has always been a tough sell, even for the most ardent believers, and she did not even try to pull that one on me. She instead said that god had immediately gathered up in his arms all the babies who had died in the flood. It is a nice cozy image but irrelevant. A murderer who cuddles his victim immediately afterward is still a murderer, and even creepy to boot. It is also totally fictitious. I told her that the Bible said no such thing. As far as the Bible was concerned, in drowning babies god was carrying out his plan exactly as envisaged and I challenged her to show me where in the Bible it said that god had scooped up the drowned babies.
She was stumped and asked me to wait and went off to get reinforcements from the rest of her group and came back with a middle-aged guy and a younger man. But not only could they not back up her assertion of god’s act by providing me with biblical verses (which I knew they couldn’t) they had no better responses to the questions I posed to them.
Q: Is murdering a baby an evil act? A: Yes.
Q: Is drowning huge numbers of babies evil? A: Yes.
Q: Wouldn’t a huge number of babies have drowned in the flood? A: Yes.
Q: So aren’t you worshipping an evil, infant-murdering god? A: No, because if god does something, it cannot be evil.
At that point, I could not help laughing at the absurdity of the logic. When I asked the same question (in a private email correspondence) of someone named Henry (who also believes that Noah’s flood actually happened and is not perturbed by that act), he too gave an incredible reply: “You have to take into account that God is the creator and he has the right to destroy His creation for reasons He chooses.”
In other words, we are merely possessions of god that he can torture or murder at will because he created us and thus owns us. This extraordinary position was also taken by some unidentified religious person to Christopher Hitchens (starting at the 6:55 mark). In other words, the same people who insist that each of us are precious in god’s sight, that he knows each hair on our head, and that he cares about our personal welfare can, when cornered, turn on a dime and say that he has the perfect right to treat us as if we are disposable commodities, to be tortured and murdered at his whim, just because he created us.
I also had a very similar exchange with a commenter to an earlier post where he tried to justify god’s command to stone to death rebellious children by arguing two points: that someone who rebels against his parents is also rebelling against god and is thus on the road to evil and will end up committing murder and rape, and so being stoned to death was a good thing, a form of pre-emptive crime fighting. This is of course a patently ridiculous argument and not to be taken seriously. But the other argument was the same as Henry’s, that since god owns us, he can do what he wants with us. The ironic thing was that this exchange was in response to my post about how religion can make good people do bad things, sort of proving my point. Only a truly religious believer could justify stoning to death of children.
It does seem to be unavoidably the case that if you believe in god and take these allegedly holy books as revelations of his divine will and instructions for how you should behave, you are ultimately forced into a masochistic relationship with your god, where you accept any and all atrocities committed by god, even against you and your loved ones, because he is your master.
The only way out of this is to pick and choose what parts of the holy book you consider the ‘good bits’ and want to follow and create a tortuous re-interpretation of the plain text of the words of the ‘bad bits’ that it makes a mockery of the holy book being divinely inspired, because what you are doing is imposing an externally derived ethical sensibility that has no religious basis onto your supposedly divinely inspired book. If you are willing to do that, why use the book as a moral basis at all?
There is something disturbingly pathological about the relationship of Biblical literalists to their imaginary god. Having someone demand that you love and worship him even while he abuses you is bad enough. To comply with such a demand when you can simply walk away seems to me to be a telling indicator of a masochistic personality.