The Streets Will Flow with the Blood of the Non-Believers!

Lots of people are picking up on the fact that Obama purposefully name-checked "non-believers" while listing the Religions of America during his inauguration speech:

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus–and non-believers."

It's nice to be included, and I'm glad Obama's not a Bush-style troglodyte who rejects the notion out of hand that atheists are part of the American fabric. (You'll recall that it was George HW Bush who, allegedly, does not think atheists should be considered citizens or patriots. I use 'allegedly' here because Bush has always denied making this comment, though it appeared in a newspaper which has never retracted the article, so he probably did.)

But I can't really get all that excited about having my non-adherence to a religion acknowledged by the president this way. OF COURSE I'm allowed to believe or not believe whatever the hell I want. OF COURSE I can be an American citizen and not be religious. It's completely asinine to believe anything else. Obama doesn't need to say it to me. I'd rather he not have to talk about religion at all.

I feel like only someone deeply insecure needs the President to tell them they're okay all the time. It's Obama's job to run the government, not to listen to a list of things I think and then pat me on the head and tell me I'm smart. So many Americans demand this kind of hand-holding...It's just desperation for approval.

If he had just said:


"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus..."

and left it at that, he'd still technically be correct. There are many people from all of those faiths in this country. That statement is not exclusive. He's merely describing some different religious groups in America, not listing all of them, or the degrees to which you can or can not adhere to them. Sikhs are not hurt that they didn't come up. (I'm not sure, actually? Are they? If so, they should get the fuck over themselves.)

Here's the point...I think people are too sensitive about religion, and that includes people who do not follow any religion at all. I'm not religious because I don't care about it. I think it's kind of interesting, actually, and have probably read more about it than a lot of very religious Americans. But I don't care about it. That means I don't have to hear the president discuss whether or not my take on it fits in with the larger patchwork of his plans and ideas. I don't care about it.

Anyway, I appreciate the gesture. I'm sure, in part, what Obama and his speechwriters were doing was signaling, through language, their overall intention to be a more inclusive, tolerant administration. Which is great. I just think atheists make too much of these sorts of stupid gestures. Fight the real fights, where the separation of church and state matters - science classrooms, stem cell research divisions, and so forth. Nitpicking things like "In God We Trust" on the money and mentions in high-profile speeches just makes the non-believers seem shrill and arrogant.

Plus, I think there were more interesting aspects of the Inauguration on which to focus attention. Like that thing Aretha Franklin had on her head. What was that thing? It's stretching things to refer to it as a "hat."

Beghe Ideas (Don't Get Any)

Wow, Scientology makes you freaking insane...



This guy's not even a Scientologist any more, and he's still not making any goddamn sense at all.

The last thing he says during this 2 minute-or-so, largely nonsensical anti-Scientology rant really struck me. He says that he has a unique perspective - he was in Scientology and now he's out. But isn't this true of most people? I'd have to guess that the majority of Scientologists were not raised Scientologists, but came to the "faith" later in life. All of these people have the experience of not being a Scientologist and then becoming one.

What the "ruggedly handsome" Jason Beghe says indicates that Scientologists essentially forget what their lives were like before joining the church. Brainwashing...it's fantastic...

The other part that's just...kind of incredible to me...is the thing about migraines. He was genuinely surprised to meet an "OT VIII" who had a migraine. It just hits home with me sometimes. People really believe this shit. They think that reading a lot of bullshit and giving the Church of Scientology money will give them Cosmic Anti-Migraine Powers. I mean...wow...

I will say this...I hope to begin working the phrase "where's the fucking clear?" into daily conversation.

Bible Basher = Bible Thumper

The title of the BBC documentary "Baby Bible Bashers" is confusing for Americans. Over here, to "bash" the Bible would be to criticize it. I myself am a bit of a Bible Basher (though a bit hirsute for a baby). I'm pretty sure the American English equivalent title would be "Baby Bible Thumpers."

The film is about child evangelists, two of whom live deep in the heart of Dumbfuckistan, the American South. Aren't you proud, America? 2 out of 3 brainwashed zealots under 12 ain't bad!

The entire film is on YouTube, and I highly recommending it, if you have room in your calendar for a decade-long bout with clinical depression. Just as you'd expect, in each of the three cases, we're presented with a demanding stage-parent (altar-parent?) instructing their child to blather a lot of nonsense and generally humiliate themselves in front of strangers.

The delusions voiced by these "adults" and abuses visited on these kids are far too numerous to mention. The father of a 9-year-old Fort Lauderdale preacher Terry Durham could not be any more transparent about his crass desire to profit from his son's "preaching" (really just singing mixed with some of that ludicrous "laying on of hands" pretending to cure people stuff...I didn't hear him say a single coherent sentence about God, Jesus or anything else). It's actually kind of a shame the Dad is so hung up on making a living off of his child's preaching, when he could at least try to profit off of his child's singing. Or, you know, he could get a job that didn't depend on exploiting his 9-year-old.

But I'd take 20 greedy Todd Durham's over one Kendall Boutwell. This nutjob (a former "sinner" himself) is one of these guys who puts on signboards listing off all the various groups of people that are going to Hell and then walks around major cities getting into pointless, violent arguments with passersby. This guy takes his 7-year-old son on the streets of New York and demands that he begins preaching fire and brimstone to strangers.

The kid is clearly not particularly keen on the idea, but fears his father (who beats him regular, to keep him from "rebelling," naturally), so he forces himself to do it anyway. I'm embedding Part 1 to get you started below (the whole documentary can be seen here at Thought Theater), but in Part 5 you actually see this kid, Samuel Boutwell, snap on the streets of Manhattan. This is ugly stuff, a vivid portrayal of a pathetic character so insecure, he must rant at strangers and torment his young son in order to feel powerful.

Oh, and the Brazilian girl sleeps with her father and describes him as "her whole world." This movie makes Jesus Camp look like Wet Hot American Summer.

Just Another Darwin Day

So, former game show host and present Nixon apologist Ben Stein has a new film out in which he argues that God-talk is forcibly kept out of the classroom by jackbooted professorial thugs, possibly linked up with this whole Liberal Fascism movement I keep hearing so much about...

Here's how he described Expelled on his new...sigh...blog:

In a scientific world gone mad, EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed is the controversial documentary that will chronicle Ben Stein’s confrontation with the Neo-Darwinian machine, exposing widespread suppression and entrenched discrimination in his heroic quest to bring back freedom in our institutions, laboratories and most importantly, in our classrooms, with the help of the world’s top scientists, educators and thinkers.

I've got to say, it's pretty ballsy to come right out and call your Creationism documentary No Intelligence Allowed. This is the easiest punchline for critics and satirists since the heydey of '90s alt-rock mainstay Garbage.

You've also got to love the epic language with which Stein describes his bitchy academic slapfight. "You big meanies won't give my nonsensical bullshit beliefs the same weight as your rigorously-tested scientific theories!" suddenly becomes "Let My People Go!" I mean, his confrontation with the Neo-Darwinian machine? Is that "machine" anything like a large, disconnected group of angry nerds with mild superiority complexes? Seriously, his heroic quest to bring back freedom in our institutions? Freedom to believe made-up fake shit? This is too much...

The whole blog is chock full of complete dumbfuckery. I can't imagine how silly the movie is going to be. I mean, say what you will about Ben Stein...I enjoyed (and once appeared on) his game show. His single scene in Ferris Bueller is mildly amusing. Those Clear Eyes commercials weren't the worst thing I've ever seen. Um, he's probably not the single most oily douchebag from the Nixon administration...

But strong, well-reasoned argumentation has never been his strong suit. Attentive readers will recall his unspeakably distasteful, sociopathic reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The main post on the site right now is about how Charles Darwin's birthday has supplanted Lincoln's birthday in the "imagination" of Americans. (They were both born on the same day: February 12, 1809). Which, of course, is not true. Like most people who believe evolution is essentially correct, I couldn't have told you Charles Darwin's birthday off the top of my head.

But Stein doesn't stop with mere mendacity. Check this out:

The title of Charles Darwin’s book is not “The Origin of The Species.” The full title seems shocking: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” That last half of the title, often overlooked, sounds like it could come straight out of a Ku Klux Klan manual - which is precisely why Big Science rarely quotes the full title (even though Darwin was not referring specifically to “man” in his use of the words “favoured races.”). Big Science is uncomfortable with even the suggestion that evolutionary theory might favor politically incorrect thinking.

This is some intensely intellectually dishonest writing right here. Stein essentially acknowledges that his analysis is incorrect. Darwin used the term "favoured races" in a way that had nothing to do with our current ideas about racial diversity in humans. Then he just goes ahead and discusses implications of his incorrect analysis anyway. I mean...what? That's the opposite of how persuasive argumentation works. You establish a premise and then back it up with evidence, guy.

Darwinian evolution theory is a viable scientific theory. Author of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins has stated that Darwin’s evolution theory has provided atheists with “intellectual fulfillment.” If you grant that, then you must also grant that it has given a great many racists “intellectual fulfillment,” too.

Because...some racists...many years ago...were inspired and comforted by elements of Darwin's theories...that means they are wrong? Or it means they are right, but so toxic, we should pretend they are wrong? W

Ben Stein is an old man, and I'm pretty sure a reasonably intelligent middle-school student could unravel this argument. I mean, it's not like racists have exclusively used evolution to justify their racism. They'll use any means to justify it they can think of. What about religion? Ann Coulter said we should go kill the leaders of Middle Eastern countries and convert the people to Christianity, not Secular Humanism. That mean we should give up on Christianity? Hey, Ann Coulter used it in a racist context!

What a child this man is. If you want to be super-super-religious, go for it. No one's telling you not to. But why do strangers have to justify your belief system to you? If Ben Stein's answer really is The Truth, then Science will come around to it eventually through the standard process of hypothesis and experimentation. He knows that won't happen, so he has to cheat, to bully and pester people into accepting his unique brand of ignorant twaddle.

But cheating is all Stein knows how to do. A little box on his website features insulting snippets from comments/e-mails from detractors and reads: "Intelligent Quote of the Day!" Rather than present arguments from his critics and then take them on honestly in the forthright manner that might spark an actual dialogue, he prefers to cherry-pick substance-free insults and present them as the sole opposition. See, I must make a lot of sense if all these hysterics come here unprovoked and insult me! What a loser.

[Hat tip: Sadly No]

Weitz and Darks

So it seems Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy will not make it intact to the movie screen any time soon. After the The Golden Compass' holiday season box office belly flop, New Line has no desire to invest in two more controversial atheist fantasy films that don't seem to interest Americans. (The movies did better overseas, where audiences are smarter and therefore more receptive to this kind of message. Wait, did I say that out loud or just think it?)

This is a shame. Not because The Golden Compass was terrific - it was stridently mediocre and rushed, rushed, rushed. (Here's my original review). It's a shame because these books get better as they go along, and because the one-half of the team o' doofuses responsible for American Pie, surely one of the most overrated comedies of our time, messed up the only adaptation we're likely to get in the near future.

Why was Chris Weitz put in control of this project? What in his filmography convinced the New Line execs that he was up to adapting a popular, controversial series of intricately-plotted fantasy novels, or any film series told on kind of massive scale? Before this, he directed American Pie with his brother, then the miserable Chris Rock disaster Down to Earth, then the slightly-above-average Hugh Grant comedy About a Boy, then an unsuccessful pilot.

Um...what? "Hey, he did that one where Chris Rock turns into a fat old white guy and dances silly! I'm sure he can handle armies of talking polar bears and witches battling hordes of heavily-armed troops." It'd be like getting Eli Roth to helm "Rainbow Brite: The Movie" Not appropriate...

I'm not really trying to say that it's Weitz's fault that the next two books in the series won't get made, or that American didn't go see Golden Compass en masse. (Though it is his fault that the first movie isn't better). As soon as Americans are told by their churches and media that something is anti-religion, and therefore offensive, they pretty much accept this judgment and even start repeating it themselves in everyday conversation. The message went out from a few prominent sources...The Golden Compass is against God. So Americans stayed home. It's really as simple as that.

That is happens to be true that the His Dark Materials trilogy preach against organized religion is immaterial. I have seen this same phenomenon happen this week with Cloverfield. As soon as newspapers and Fox News began telling the world that Cloverfield mocked 9/11, this verdict was pretty much accepted as holy writ. (A friend told me about a radio call-in show in which a woman who clearly had not seen Cloverfield argued that the only appropriate use of 9/11-style imagery would be to "let everyone know how evil Al-Qaeda is." This is the level of our cultural discourse.)

It was pretty optimistic of New Line to imagine that a few big stars and a nice trailer might make Americans ignore a film series' anti-religion bent. We're talking about a country that's considering electing mad Baptist Mike Huckabee, who wants to actually revert to a Bible-based legal system.

Mission: Impenetrable

Tom Cruise discusses Scientology for 10 full minutes in this video, and I'm not sure I understand a single thing he says clearly. It's really quite remarkable. If you tried to make up 10 solid minutes of constant gibberish, you'd eventually stumble on to some kind of rational statement purely by accident.

As best I can tell, Cruise's message is that one must decide whole-heartedly embrace Scientology and all of its principles and take up whatever intense, constant fight the Scientologists are waging. Cruise seems to pity those who do not understand Scientology (he calls membership in the religion a "privilege") but has only scorn for what he refers to as "Spectators," presumably those who belong to the Church of Scientology but don't take up the fight with the mania and fervor of Tom Cruise.

He really goes on and on, ranting, about Spectators. I guess this is a big problem for Scientology? Lots of people want the fun and glamor of practicing America's Third Most-Hilarious Religion (behind Mormonism and the all-time champion, Judaism), but without the hard work of...doing whatever it is Tom Cruise wants you to do.

He never comes out and says who, exactly, he's fighting against, but apparently it keeps poor Tom from taking any kind of break or vacation, and it requires a lot of time and effort (though not so much time that you can't run your own movie studio, raise several children and star in a feature film each year). Seriously, Tom's talking about how he never gets a break from fighting, but I guess these Scientology fights are metaphorical, because I can't remember the last time I heard about Jenna Elfman or Giovanni Ribisi kicking someone's ass. In fact, I'm not entirely sure Giovanni Ribisi is physically capable of doing any sort of ass-kicking at all. The guy looks like he has tuberculosis or something. He's more and more pale and sickly with each new film role. In Sky Captain, you sort of wish Jude Law would forget about the robots for a second and get his buddy a cold compress and a grilled cheese sandwich.

I guess I could, in the sort of cynical, pseudo-Freudian gesture you'll commonly find on this blog, explain Cruise's ridiculous Scientological fantasy away...And I will do so right now:

A lifetime of fame, wealth and adulation have given him a delusionally oversized ego and sense of self-importance. And yet, he lives a life of no particular consequence, making silly, typically forgettable films for an increasingly disinterested audience. Once a sex symbol and national obsession, he's now on the verge of becoming a national joke, and the adulation of his peers has turned into a kind of derision. We're talking a middle-aged, thrice-married guy still hounded by gay rumors.

Yet here's this religion that tells him he's a leader who has been given some extremely important, highly secret information, information capable of changing the world if only it were known. And he has to organize and execute a war against the forces of evil, literally holding the fate of the universe in his hands. That's the rhetoric of this video. "How can I know this and do nothing? I couldn't live with myself," Cruise intones, darkly. It's so dramatized. So fraudulent. If he didn't talk to people about L. Ron Hubbard, he couldn't live with himself...

When you think about it, it's not all that different from what all the other religions tell believers. Still, it's more explicit about all this stuff, and that's what makes it so creepy. I mean, Mike Huckabee talking about how we should redo the Constitution to be more like The Bible is kind of scary, but it's also kind of funny. I mean, how do we decide what parts of the Bible get into the Constitution? Cause the Bible's a lot longer than The Constitution, and it also recommends punishing disobedient children by stoning them to death.

So, Huckabee's brand of in-your-face, goofball Christianity would be cute if he weren't a possible contender for the presidency. There's nothing cute about Tom Cruise in this video; he seems like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or possibly in the sustained aftermath of one.

More peculiar and abstract than Cruise's actual statements about Scientology, however, are his mannerisms. He's performing this monologue in the exact same manner he'd use in one of his films. It's as if Aaron Sorkin's Few Good Men script had been reinterpreted by...well, by a hacky science-fiction writer...It's just weird.

It's Fundilarious!

God bless Gorilla Mask for posting this link. It's the Top 100 Quotes from Fundamentalist Christian online forums. So, I mean...you can just imagine...

Here's the very first quote on the page!

No, everyone is born Christian. Only later in life do people choose to stray from Jesus and worship satan instead. Atheists have the greatest "cover" of all, they insist they believe in no god yet most polls done and the latest research indicates that they are actually a different sect of Muslims.

Most polls? WTF polls are these? Cause I've been an atheist most of my life, and no pollster has ever come by my house asking if I belong to a "different sect of Muslims." Not that I'd know how to answer such a query anyway. ("No"? "Get off my lawn"?) I should think it would be quite difficult to be an atheist Muslim, regardless of sect, what with that whole Allah thing they've got going on.

So, yeah, this page is just pure gold. Hours of entertainment.

several million years for a monkey to turn into a man. oh wait thats right. monkeys dont live several million years.

Yeah, stupid scientists! Monkeys don't live millions of years! Theory of Natural Selection...disproved!

According to evolutionists, it's a fact that aliens ruled the planet before the dinosaurs because that can't be disproven.

It's a fact!

The plain truth is that both the GSA and Gay, Lesbian, Straight Educators Network (GLSEN), the organization that registers GSAs, are part of a vast, interconnected network of Cultural Marxist front groups known collectively as the New Left.

Yes, that's the simple, plain truth. I mean, to lay it out in the most straight-forward manner possible...our problems are caused by a vast network of Cultural Marxists.

Convinced atheists adhere to no concepts of good and bad, but make them up as they go along. To me, they're no different from machines!

Because we all know that's what machines do. Make stuff up as they go along...Oh, no, wait, they do the total opposite of that, they adhere to programs, protocols and repeated patterns set in advance before they're ever used. But it's still a very good point...

Happy New Year!

Let's start 2008 with a chuckle. Here, compliments of the inimitable Prof. Myers, is an ACTUAL FOR-SERIOUS letter to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune. I give you a look inside the twisted mind of one Vera B. Ivie:

In his Dec. 27 letter, Steven Fehr says he believes President Bush is the worst president he has seen. Whenever I hear someone complain about the president, I ask them, “Do you pray for the president of the United States daily?” Is that too much trouble?

She poses this question as if it's obvious. "Oh, no wonder Bush starts illegal wars, tortures innocent people and spies on his own citizenry, then craps all over the Constitution trying to cover it up! We haven't been praying for him every single day! Man, is my face red..."

And I mean...every day? Do we really want to nag the Lord in this way? Imagine if someone asked you to do something and then pestered you about it every day.

"Hey, God, it's me, Lon, again. Look, I hate to be a bother, but you remember how I asked you to bless our millionaire cokehead president? Could you actually get around to doing that? Like, some time soon? I mean, I know you've got a lot on your plate but it's, like, totally super-important that we get this thing squared away. I really appreciate it, Big Guy. Thanks a billion. I'll call you tomorrow to make sure it's done. No, it's no problem. Thanks again. I owe you one."

It's like, he's God. He knows what you're going to ask for before you even ask for it. Once a week ought to be enough.

There used to be a custom of praying for our president.

You know, there used to be a custom of living in caves, dressing in animal skins and doodling on cave walls to pass the hours between sabretooth tiger attacks. It's called progress.

>Perhaps too many people in the United States believe this would be mixing politics and religion.

Yes, I fail to see how engaging in a religious practice on behalf of a politician mixes religion and politics.

If the majority of the people are agnostic and atheistic, it may be that they are partly to blame for the problems we have.

I think, clearly, the majority of the people are not agnostic or atheist...sigh...atheistic. The majority of people still believe in angels and Heaven, last I heard. But you've still got to appreciate how Vera needlessly hedges her bets here. She's saying something irretrievably stupid, but leaves herself rhetorical "outs" anyway in case anyone calls her on her bullshit. the majority of the people are agnostic and atheistic, it may be that they are partly to blame for the problems we have. Why not just out and say it? Shun the non-believers! Shuuuuuuunnnnnn.

To think one man is responsible for the war and the problems we face in our nation is about as foolish as to not believe in the power of prayer.

Where to begin with this one? I mean, what a strawman. No one's suggesting Bush and Bush alone is responsible for the war and the problems we face. It's Bush, Dick Cheney and their cadre of fanatics, of course. I mean, has anyone suggested that Bill Kristol, David Frum, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld and a whole cast of unsavory characters don't share some of the blame here?

Then Vera blathers on for a while meaninglessly. The point is, Atheists is the Devil. Go Bush FTW!

It's gonna be a good year, I can just feel it.

If You Were a Creationist, You'd Be Homeschooled by Now

I love Creationist videos. They're my favorite type of YouTube content, barely edging out hilarious trailer remixes, Tourette's Guy and 2 Girls 1 Cup. (No link on that one...consider yourself lucky...)

In the past, I've linked to such wacky Fundie hijinks as "Moron Uses Woeful Banana Metaphor" and "Moron Confuses Evolution with Spontaneous Generation." Now, I'm pleased to present to you: "Huge Moron Confuses Evolution with Cosmology."



This one is really something special. I'm not sure a single thought expressed in this 3 minute documentary makes any logical sense or holds up to any sort of scrutiny.

I mean, you don't need to actually know anything about astronomy to know this makes no sense. A child would understand that it's completely, bafflingly wrong.

Of course, all of these videos attempting to validate Creationism by poking holes in specific scientific theories are fundamentally flawed. This video opens with a whopper of an assumption - either the universe was created by a Big Bang, or it was fashioned by an intelligent, Judeo-Christian God. Surely, there are other possibilities. Maybe the universe is just an elaborate computer program, a la The Matrix. Maybe we all exist inside a tiny particle of a wholly different universe. Perhaps the universe is actually cyclical, and it breaks down and then reforms as part of some far larger mechanism too elaborate for us to grasp.

Naturally, if you can only comprehend circumstances in this limiting, binary fashion - God or Bing Bang - you would get confused and fail to make clear, concise arguments. This way of thinking is just wrong, so it would lead to wrong conclusions. Under this method of reasoning, if you could disprove the Big Bang Theory, you would then PROVE the alternative - God. But of course, science doesn't work that way. If you disproved the Big Bang Theory, you would just move along to the next-most-reasonable hypothesis and start testing it out. You wouldn't just throw up your hands, say "God musta did it!" and get back to praying.

Most complicated answers in the world of science do not come wrapped in neat little black-and-white, this way or the other packages. It's an ongoing learning process, with each generation getting a bit smarter than the last.

This disembodied narrator just makes outlandish claim after outlandish claim, with no support for his contentions whatsoever. There's no scientific journey of discovery here; just pure authoritarianism. It's this way cause I says so! Just listen to the language:

"Since about 98% of the Sun is hydrogen or helium, Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury should have similar compositions."

SHOULD? Who uses "should" in this way when referring to natural phenomenon. Using an innately human, frequently foolish "common sense" mechanism, yes, I can see how one would assume that the sun and the surrounding planets would have similar chemical compositions. But there's nothing scientific about that assumption...That's why it's called "common sense." It's common to all of us, even those with no background in these sorts of questions.

Someone who's a bit more educated and well-read on the subject might try to figure out why the Sun is made up of different chemicals than Mercury, hoping the answer gets us a bit closer to understanding all our fundamental questions about the nature of things.

I'm just saddened by the kind of mind that works the other way, that attempts to erase these questions out of existence by falling back on an easy answer. ("God done it!") A mind that, in fact, gets upset when others try to answer these questions, and posts videos online about how these questions should be ignored or ascribed to a childish fantasy.

I also don't find this answer any more satisfying than not having any answer at all. Why is it impossible that the universe would have formed like this, with Mercury being composed of different substances than the Sun, but a thoughtful God would have arranged things this way? Oh, some planets orbit clockwise and others counter-clockwise? That must have been God! Huh? Are we really so insecure as a species, that we need to pretend to grasp all this stuff right now? We need to make up answers to fill in every gap left by our imperfect understanding?

Also, the video says that the formation of a large gaseous planet like Jupiter poses an insurmountable obstacle for "evolutionists," which may be the silliest sentence I have ever heard, ever.

First of all, evolutionists don't really give the formation of Jupiter much thought. I'm pretty sure Darwin had absolutely nothing to say about Jupiter's formation. These guys hate Evolution so much, it's literally spilling over into every other scientific discipline.

Also, as far as I know, an observation ("Jupiter is a large, gaseous planet located relatively far from the Sun") cannot be an "insurmountable obstacle" for scientists. If an observation genuinely violates a scientific principle, and the observation can be demonstrated reliably, then the original principle will be amended. This is why you rarely meet any phrenologists. The fact that THIS HASN'T HAPPENED yet to our present understanding of the universe does not indicate that it is 100% absolutely definitely true. But it does mean it is the best theory we have at the present time.

I suppose a certain simplistic mindset can't handle that level of uncertainty, so they have to make 3 minute videos assuring all of us that uncertainty doesn't exist. But of course...it does. Fucking deal with it.

[Hat tip: Sadly, No!]

Durpa Durpa Tweedley Durpa Durp...Have I Converted You Yet?

Wow...This "defense" of religion from Christianity Today is seriously one of the silliest, least-convincing cases for faith I have ever read. It's as if writer Stan Guthrie assumed that, by citing single sentences from various other writers on the general topic of religion, he could forge a compelling argument through an act of sheer will. It doesn't work...Kind of sad, really.

Let's face it: Atheism is in. Not since Nietzsche have disbelievers enjoyed such a ready public reception to their godless message—and such near-miraculous royalties. But even that hasn't put them in a good mood. Snaps Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything (although not, presumably, the pronouncements of atheists), "Many of the teachings of Christianity are, as well as being incredible and mythical, immoral." A feuding Richard Dawkins suggests that believers "just shut up." Apparently, they didn't get the tolerance memo.

I'm not 100% certain that atheism is "in," though this would be a question worth exploring. "Does the relatively recent national discussion about atheist belief in our culture necessarily mean that there are more atheists, or could it just be that the atheists who have been here all along suddenly feel a bit more empowered to state their beliefs openly?" Guthrie's not interested in this question, however, because he'd have to do "research" and consider "evidence." And just making up lists based on nonsense is easier.

So here we go...

Creation: The universe, far from being a howling wasteland indifferent to our existence, appears to be finely tuned through its estimated 13.7 billion years of existence to support life on this planet. Tinker with any one of scores of fundamental physical laws or the initial conditions of the universe—such as gravity or the cosmological constant—and we would not be here. As physicist Paul Davies has admitted, "I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact."

Seriously, religious people? I don't ever want to hear this argument again. I am tired of this discussion, because it never ever changes. You think the alignment of conditions that support human life on Earth must have been the work of a celestial being, I think it all just kind of came together here, and if it hadn't, we'd all be alive and evolving on some other planet, because the universe had pretty much infinite opportunities to make this work. (How can you say anything is impossible in an infinite system? Doesn't the lack of time make anything pretty much possible if you include enough variables?) This argument makes it sound like the Earth just appeared one day in a vacuum, looking exactly the way it does now. The universe is MASSIVE and it has been around for longer than any of us can fully comprehend in our primitive brains.

Also, I don't care what single sentences, robbed of their context, a random physicist might have uttered. That doesn't make it any more or less likely that humans are alive on Earth because the specific conditions that support our life existed on this planet. (Also, I don't think there's any such thing as a brute fact. There are facts and non-facts.)

Beauty: Beethoven's Ninth, a snowflake, the sweet smell of a baby who has been sleeping, and a sunset beyond the dunes of Lake Michigan all point to a magnificent and loving Creator. And isn't it interesting that we have the capacity—unlike mere animals—to gape in awe, to be brought to tears, before them? Truly did David say, "What is man, that you are mindful of him?"

To me, nothing confirms my atheism more than music. Just as Stan here can't bring himself to believe that anything as intricate and perfect as Earth just sprung up one day, I can't believe that any person was able to compose the "Ninth Symphony." And yet...one man did. A person, not a God. It exists because we made it, not because some deity squirted it into being. That's humanism, brah. As for the sunset on Lake Michigan, it is also beautiful, and it is not human-created, but we can explain it. And if we were alive on some other planet, and sunsets were blue-black and ugly, we'd probably have found them beautiful too, after several thousands of years. You come to appreciate what you know.

And of course it's interesting that we've evolved consciousness to appreciate such things. But...so what? How does that prove Christianity? At this point in the essay, Stan seems to realize that he's falling into the Intelligent Design trap, making his case for religious really just a case for some kind of external, intelligent Creator-God-Thing. So he has no choice but to painfully, and ludicrously, shift gears. This is when shit starts to get funny.

New Testament reliability: Compared with the handful of existing copies of seminal ancient works such as Homer's Iliad, the New Testament's provenance is far better attested. There are thousands of NT manuscripts in existence, some made within mere decades of the events they report. Scholar F. F. Bruce said, "The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar."

'Kay, I'm no historian by trade, but even I know that's bullshit. We have primary sources attesting to Caeser's reality as a person, including HIS OWN WRITINGS about his military campaigns. (Check out Mahalo's Julius Caeser page to give them a read.) Jesus may certainly have been real; so far as I know, the case is still out, though the majority of actual real professional historians I've heard speak on the topic tend to opine that he's representative of a number of prophets and rabbis from the time, not just one guy.

It's this sentence that's so stupid: "some made within mere decades of the events they report." But we have documents that report on events in their own time! This is not some golden standard for historical accuracy. "Some people wrote some stuff that contradicts other stuff within a few decades of when this theoretical stuff happened! Case closed!" Finally, "Scholar F.F. Bruce"? Nice try...Make that evangelical Bible scholar F.F. Bruce. Of course he thinks Jesus was real. It was the basis of his religious faith not to mention his life's work!

This article is titled "Answering the Atheists." So, in seeking to affirm that the New Testament is a reliable source for accurate historical information (and even scholar F.F. Bruce admitted it was "imprecise"), this is what Stan comes up with. Yikes...

Scripture: Unlike other religious texts, the Bible gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly of its heroes: Abraham, Jacob, David, and Peter among them. Further, Scripture's message rings true. It has been said that human depravity is the only religious doctrine empirically verified on a daily basis. And the Bible's gracious solution to our predicament, Christ's atoning death on the Cross, uniquely emphasizes what God has done, not what we must do, for our rescue.

Here's about the point when I kind of give up on Stan. This just doesn't make any sense at all. For real. It's a bunch of random sentences that line up at all, clumsily ordered into paragraph form. Try to unpack the argument he's making now.

The Bible's message "rings true?" REALLY? Cause...it doesn't so much ring true to me, what with the constant contradiction of scientific principles and reliance on fairy tale logic. (Does the story of Jonah and the Whale "ring true"? What about a man who can heal the sick, walk on water, transform water into wine and raise the dead? The whole point of "faith" is that this stuff doesn't ring true and you have to kind of force yourself to believe it.)

The Bible's "gracious" solution to our unnamed predicament was a man being tortured and assassinated? That's not so gracious. I could think of a lot cleaner, neater ways for us all to be saved than a guy being stabbed, nailed to a cross and pecked at by crows.

I don't even understand the last sentence's basic meaning, so lets move on.

Jesus: Christ's life and teachings are unparalleled in world history, as any Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim—or atheist—worth his salt will admit. Napoleon reportedly said, "I know men, and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and whatever other religions the distance of infinity."

Now we're supposed to take Napoleon's word for it? The guy responsible for at least six million European deaths? What a good Christian he was...

And that first sentence is just horrible, ugly Christian supremacy stated as fact, the equal of saying that "The white race is just unparalleled in world history, as any African or Asian or South American worth his salt will admit." If a Muslim "worth his salt" really felt that Christ's life and teachings were unparalleled in world history, why would he be troubling himself with this Muhammad fellow? True, if everything Christian's believe about Jesus were true, he'd be a fairly remarkable specimen - a compassionate half-divine educator and prophet who walked around, healing the sick and speaking about peace and love. But that's only if you believe everything that Christian's believe, and this article is supposed to explain why Stan is a Christian. So it's unfair that we be asked to accept all the doctrines as true from the get-go.

The trilemma: C.S. Lewis, commenting on Christ's claim to divinity, said: "You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

I've seriously heard this argument since junior high school. They must teach it to the fundies at a seriously young age.

Which is too bad, because it's stupid, and it's going to make it harder for these young people to fully understand the nature of logic and rhetoric in later years. Again, this only works if you FIRST ACCEPT that everything the New Testament says is true. If Jesus is being accurately quoted for the entire book, then yes, he's either a crazy person, a bullshit artist or the son of God.

But what if he's being misquoted? This book was, after all, written by his own followers years after his death, when they were feverishly trying to convince the maximum number of people possible to accept him as the son of God, a decision that often meant being fed to lions, tortured or just plain executed. There was a huge benefit to flubbing the truth, would you not admit, and no downside? And it was unlikely that anyone could prove he wasn't the son of God because he was dead and it was fucking Biblical times. Proof didn't really enter into the conversation.

So C.S. Lewis is trying to urge non-Christians to make a decision based on...Christian doctrine. Solid...

It just goes on and on like this, and frankly I'm bored, but I can't finish this post off without including this priceless quote:

"While many Christians have behaved badly, Christ specializes in turning sinners around. What other faith can boast of a Chuck Colson?"

Yup, you've got me there, Stan. There's only one disgraced for Nixon Chief Council and rabidly right-wing nutjob Charles Colson, and he plays for your team. This is the same guy that blames American decadence for terrorism:

There was a brilliant but paranoid Egyptian writer by the name of Sayyid Qutb, imprisoned in Egypt in 1956. In 1970, he published a book, In the Shade of the Koran, attacking the West as totally corrupt. Qutb knew what he was talking about. He lived in the U.S. for a time and saw our decadence. He also read Western philosophers like [Martin] Heidegger and [Jacques] Derrida and other intellectuals who hated the West. And he read all the anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic literature.

Qutb's In the Shade of the Koran unequivocally advocates killing of "infidels." He was executed by the Egyptian government, but his brother, Muhammad Qutb, escaped Egypt, went to Saudi Arabia, and became a professor at the university. One of his star pupils: none other than Osama bin Laden.

Lovely...

He's the same Charles Colson, a shining light of truth that confirms the essential rationality of the Christian faith, who said that the illegal immigration problem stems from legal abortion:

Not really much to add to that. It's like praising Judaism because, hey, we gave you Jackie Mason AND David Berkowitz!

[Hat Tip: Sullivan]

Criss Angel Disproves Shit You Already Knew Was False

So, apparently NBC has this show, "Phenomenon," that's like "American Idol" for magicians, and one of the two judges is that Criss Angel "Mindfreak" guy who pretended to have sex with Britney a little while back. Now, I would never watch this show, because I'm generally not a huge fan of magic, but this clip is HI-larious.

One of the contestants is this immense goober Jim Callahan, who claims that he can physically contact the spirit world. He has Raven-Symoné choose a mystery object at random and put it in a box filled with salt, then allows a spirit to actually use his body to write out the box's contents live on stage. (She chooses a toy truck, which is so Raven!)

Honestly, it's one of the silliest performances I've ever seen. He jerks around and makes noises and rolls his eyes into the back of his head - he even has the host caution the audience that his gyrations may be disturbing beforehand. Whoopi Goldberg doesn't take her performance this far in the film Ghost, and she's playing the scene for laughs.

Anyway, Callahan correctly "guesses" that the object in the box is metal and has four wheels. He's being coached by a ghost and he still can't come up with the word "truck"? What, does this ghost only speak in puzzles? Is it the ghost of Frank Gorshin? We're supposed to find this impressive somehow? I mean, seriously, this is such an old, tired line of bullshit...Fake mentalists used to pull this routine all the time, sending assistants into the audience to find random objects which the performer would then identify using code words. (For example, the assistant would say, "Can you tell me what I hold in my hands?," and this meant it was a pocket watch, whereas "What is the object I'm holding now?," would mean cigarette lighter. I'm sure Callahan's act is based on something similar.)

Criss Angel is having none of it, and just completely faces this Callahan guy on national television by holding up two more mystery envelopes and demanding to know what's inside. The ensuing tantrum, with Callahan calling Angel an "ideological bigot" (for not believing in magic!), may be one of the year's TV highlights:



That video was actually posted to YouTube BY Callahan, who seems to think that Angel's a hypocrite for not believing in spiritual possession. I'm not actually sure whether or not Angel has ever insisted that his magic is real and not just entertainment-themed illusion, so I can't speak to the claim of hypocrisy, but I do know that the term "ideological bigot" is really stupid and that Jim Callahan is a massive, ridiculous fraud. And not just a fraud, but an angry, insecure fraud. Which is funny.

Tell Them You Want Them to Wait...That's an Order...

I'd love to embed the execrable new abstinence PSA that my tax dollars are sponsoring (during football games, no less!) here on the blog, so you all could see what I'm about to discuss conveniently. But, alas, the geniuses at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have yet to discover this newfangledy technology called the YouTube what might allow them to disseminate their message of ignorance and Victorian sexual panic to the masses more speedily. So you'll have to go over to their website to watch it and then come back.

The ad features children addressing the camera as if they were speaking bluntly to their parents. "Talk to me about sex," they plead. "Otherwise, I'll learn everything from the Internet, which will likely result in a life-long diaper fetish."

It's a little weird, but there's nothing so horrifying about most of this content. The kids in the commercial are uniformly to young to be having sex...only a real creep would object to parents instructing an 8-year-old to reconsider before trying out his first Hot Karl. As Bob Saget might say 100,000 per hour without getting a single laugh, "That's just wrong!"

But the last little section of the commercial really rubbed me the wrong way, no pun intended. A disembodied but stern voices pipes up and instructs you to "Tell your children to wait until marriage to have sex."

Um...what? Why should I do that? I mean, I don't even have any children, but if I did, I think I'd be okay with them having pre-marital sex. I'm 28 years old and I've never been married. If I had taken this advice to heart as a young man, I'd pretty much be a Judd Apatow movie at this point.

Did we have some kind of vote making this society's Accepted Carnal Standard that I missed out on? Cause the last time I checked, the only people who made a moral commitment to abstaining completely until marriage were religious weirdos. Granted, I'm getting an inaccurate sample because I've spent my entire adult life in Los Angeles, but I'm not certain I've ever known any single, celibate individuals my own age, at least since high school. (And back then, celibacy amongst my peers was not so much a personal choice as an unfortunate state of affairs.)

That's not to say it's a bad choice. If no sex until marriage works for you...hey, best of luck. Seems kind of irresponsible to me, like making a major purchase without shopping around for the best deal first, but I try not to judge. But why is our government buying up air time with my money to peddle this notion?

It's a rhetorical question, of course...I know why...Because these bureaus have all been stocked by lifelong conservative fundie whackjobs and Bush cronies, and thus they no longer represent the majority of Americans, but a small sliver of extremely vocal crazy people who want to enforce their own narrow, theocratic agenda on the rest of us.

Still, all the blog posts and books and newspaper articles laying out exactly how this cabal took hold of and exercised power over every level of our national leadership doesn't prepare you for actually witnessing their handiwork on television. What a disgrace...

[Hat tip: Yglesias]

"The most important thing is that I am a Christian"

That's John McCain today, unable to decide if he is an Episcopalian or a Baptist. But at least he's not one a dem mud peoples whut don' even believe in our Lord Jeebus.

Seriously, religion in modern America is getting so fucked up and tribal, it's making Biblical Rome feel like a bastion of rationality and tolerance.

The comment came after a weekend during which McCain corrected an Associated Press reporter who asked him how his Episcopalian faith plays a role in his campaign and his life. While it's well-known that McCain and his family for years have attended the North Phoenix Baptist Church in his home state of Arizona, the senator had consistently referred to himself in media reports as Episcopalian.

"It plays a role in my life. By the way, I'm not Episcopalian. I'm Baptist," McCain said Saturday. "Do I advertise my faith? Do I talk about it all the time? No."

Wait, now I'm confused. So, it's extremely important that everyone know he's a Christian, but it's not important for him to talk about his faith all the time? Seems contradictory. That statement doesn't hold together unless...he just thinks being a Christian ought to be a pre-requisite to be President. Like, "Okay, I'm qualified to be President...because I'm in the secret Jesus club. But I don't like to be painted with that brush..."

Which is kind of totally un-Constitutional.

In a June interview with McClatchy Newspapers, the senator said his wife and two of their children have been baptized in the Arizona Baptist church, but he had not. "I didn't find it necessary to do so for my spiritual needs," he said.

So he's just a faker. Someone who really believes in a religion, any religion, actually takes it's core principle and namesake seriously. It's, like, the crucial component of your personal instructions on how to live from God, not a checklist of suggestions from the D.W.P.

- Okay, not coveting my neighbor's ass, gotta remember that one.

- Good, good, turning the other cheek, I'll go with it...

- Wait, I have to get water spilled over my head? In public? Nah, fuck that one.

You don't get to pick which rites and covenants you fancy and which don't work for your spiritual needs at this time. But you certainly don't get to ignore the single most important symbolic act of your entire faith, you fucking douchebag. How can you be an unbaptized Baptist? That's just declaring openly that you're full of shit.

"Well, yes, I am a lifetime member of the KKK, but I love black people. I just like the hats. And it's good for networking. If you need some moonshine, I've got a great moonshine guy."

Your Women...How Much for the Women?

Check out this hilarious, likely-to-be-a-hoax website Marry Our Daughter It allows prospective grooms, provided they are good Christians, to bid on teenage brides!


The late Founder and CEO of MarryOurDaughter.com

Kyra's 14 and a half. She's a real bargain at $27,995:

Kyra likes the outdoors, more the open air of the beach or the desert than the woods. She would love to live somewhere away from it all. She is bright and funny and full of life and while she has little direct experience with the opposite sex we have made sure she is aware of everything she needs to know to be a good wife and mother.

See? It's almost creepy enough to be real.

But, alas, it's not. How do I know? Well, first off, the folks at Snopes, who are always on top of such things, have pretty much declared the thing fake.

There's very little actual information on the site, save for a FAQ:

Q: WHAT IS A BRIDE PRICE?
A: The bride price is an ancient custom, somewhat like a dowry. A man wishing to marry a woman would offer her family a Bride Price in cash or kind, or sometimes offer to work for their family.

Q:WHAT IF NO ONE ACCEPTS MY PROPOSAL?
A: In that case, you might want to closely examine how you are proposing and how carefully you are matching your likes and dislikes, your goals and dreams, to those of your prospective bride.

Also, lines like this kind of give it away:

Please do not propose to multiple Daughters or you risk having all your proposals disqualified.

Plus, the "testimonials" are just too perfect:

"Thank God for your site! Our daughter was really nervous walking down the aisle, but she seems okay now and the money we got let us keep our farm and even add on a few acres."

—Mrs. Addrien L.

[Hat tip: Tristero at Digby's blog]

I take back everything bad I ever said about Christians...

Okay, not everything. In fact...nothing. But this is still pretty hilarious, though I'm not certain it's hilarious in quite the way that was intended:

Scary Mormons and Even Scarier Non-Mormons

So I'm reading this Des Moines Register article about conservative Christians meeting with Mitt Romney (helpfully linked by Oliver Willis), and it slowly dawns on me that the whole country has gone completely fucking sideways...

Many conservative Christians are quietly nervous about Romney's religion and the issue surfaced as Romney opened his campaigning at a forum in Pella, about 40 miles south of Des Moines.

Mary Van Steenis asked Romney how he would ponder important decisions as president and which source of inspiration he would seek.

"Where would the Bible be in that process?" she asked. "Would it be above the Book of Mormon or would it be beneath it?"

I mean...the guy's running for President. It's an important job. But I don't see how asking the candidates for this job to evaluate the world's great religions makes a whole lot of sense.

This is a complete moron's version of a "gotcha" question, because there's no correct way for Romney to answer. We know he's a Mormon, so we know that he thinks The Book of Mormon is right-on and correct. And the woman asking the question thinks otherwise. But if he were to answer that her book is actually the A-#1 absolute primo bestest scriptural type book, like, ever, he'd be basically admitting he doesn't believe in his own religion. Lose-lose.

I mean...seriously...what does this question even mean. Couldn't you use BOTH the New Testament and the Book of Mormon to guide your prayers, if you were into that sort of thing? Does it have to be one or the other. You either dig Joseph Smith and the plate bullshit or St. Paul and the cross bullshit. Pick your side and run with it, Mittster!

Facing an unanswerably fucking stupid question, Romney comes up with his usual heaping load of dogshit, helpfully scraped off the back of his car after driving to the townhall meeting with the family pet strapped to the roof of the car.

"I don't know that there's any conflict at all between the values of great faiths like mine, like yours, like other faiths, like Jews who don't believe in the New Testament," Romney said.

"People of faith have different doctrines and different beliefs on various topics of a theological nature. But in terms of what it is we are going to believe and also based on our values for our country, I think we come from the same place," Romney said.

And that place is...Bugfuck Crazytown, Population: Most of America

The answer did not satisfy Van Steenis.

"I asked if you had to look to one source what would it be? He didn't really respond to that," she told reporters after the event. "This is serious to me."

Yeah, this is serious. This is some serious stupidity. Mrs. Van Steenis, whose name was just DESIGNED to be the first line of a limerick, is just intent on turning a Presidential Election into a Deity Beauty Contest. A person who insists on their President being part of their particular BRANCH of Christianity is deeply, deeply confused about what it means to be American, yet presidential candidates (well, soon-to-be-former Presidential candidates) go and play right to these people, telling them that their erroneous view of the fundamental principles of our society is justified. It's not! It's completely nonsensical!

Ruben Bolling Explains It All For You

"Tom the Dancing Bug" is definitely my favorite running comic strip. Cartoonist Ruben Bolling is really working on a different level from any other person in the medium right now.

I particularly love these "Super-Fun-Pak" features he does once in a while, consisting of a few high-concept comic strips. This one features such highlights as "Cool White Guys Using 10 Year Old Black Slang" and "Science Facts for the Immature." Check out "Death of a Detective Who Dies" to get a taste for this guy's defiantly cynical, highly warped sense of humor. Then there's always God-Man's classic showdown with Dr. Moral-Relativism.

Anyway, I'm bringing up Mr. Bolling because a recent "Dancing Bug" strip perfectly encapsulates my feelings on this whole atheism/evils of religion debate. (Yes, I'm still going on about all that).

Atheists, as you'd expect, are a philosophically and intellectually diverse bunch, so it's impossible to encapsulate the fullness of the group's ideas into any kind of generality. Still, I think it's safe to say that a lot of the more militant atheists base their hostility towards religion on a belief that a world without religion would be far better than the one in which we live. As John Lennon sings in "Imagine," a very subversive song that vast numbers of religious Americans apparently enjoy without truly comprehending, a world with no religion is an idealistic dream that maybe, one day, we can all bring about in reality.

And I just think this is more utopian crap. Religion, near as I can tell, is an excuse for awful behavior, not a cause. People don't really do the things their religions command them to do; they just pretend to in order to hold on to some absurd notion of moral superiority. I don't actually believe in any of the mythology, but if more Americans actually behaved the way Jesus told them to, turning the other cheek and giving away all their money and respecting the least of God's creatures, it might be a more comfortable, friendly country in which to live. And we certainly wouldn't be pursuing any wrong-headed surges to needlessly prolong any failed wars of occupation...

Surely my fellow atheists have noticed that there's a lot of highly religious people who are also highly strange and/or crazy. (Not that I'm saying all religious people are crazy...just a whole lot of them...) Do we really think these people would stop being crazy if there were no more church services? They'd just channel the crazy into something else.

Who knows what more horrific pursuit might come along to take the place of goofy religious rituals? Better that the nutters spend their Sundays praying to Invisible Sky Man than taking on that second trailer-park meth lab.

Really, what I'm trying to say is that humans are, as a group, a bunch of despicable, greedy fucks, and that religion makes a convenient excuse for all sorts of self-serving behavior. When Muqtada al-Sadr rallies Iraqis to his cause, he's really saying, "Come do exactly what I tell you. Cause...you know...Allah and stuff. Praise be to his name." That's it. And if there were no Allah, it'd be some other stupid thing, a cheap diversion used to seize greater and greater power and control. Because some people are just sick twisted fucks who need to divide and conquer in order to feel important.

Anyway, Bolling captures the argument perfectly (and far more succinctly) in the comic. Give it a read.

[UPDATE: Compliments of Andrew Sullivan comes this post by Norman Geras, making a similar and excellent point.]

Why Be An Angry Atheist?

Seriously...I don't understand. Why does an acknowledgment that religion is kind of dumb necessarily carry with it a need to be so condescending and haughty? In the course of a single day, how many people will I interact with who agree with me about everything? Even everything important, as in moral codes or models for appropriate public behavior or views about humanity's place in the universe? Very few, if any. Everyone's different.

So why is it that my fellow atheists insist upon being so aggressive about challenging religion? I'm not saying that we shouldn't defend ourselves, or that we shouldn't feel free to express an opinion openly about other faiths or lack thereof. I enjoy this freedom all the time. But it's perfectly simple to let people know where you stand on the issue of religion without calling them stupid or belittling their beliefs. See, I don't like it when Christianists and wannabe theocrats try to exert their religious beliefs on me, but likewise I find it counter-productive to repeatedly insist on the rightness of my perspective.

To me, this impulse plays into the pervasive stereotypes about atheists: that we are angry or mean or bitter people, that we are simply contrarians by nature, that we don't admire humanity and reason so much as we loathe morality, God and family. None of these things are true, and yet their are reinforced by half-assed caustic anti-faith screeds...a-like a-this a-one:

Why Won't God Heal Amputees for some reason feels that humiliating and mocking the religious is the best way to get them to see things from another perspective. It clearly feels that its titular query - about God healing the wounded - definitively disproves the existence of God for all time, always.

Which is just dumb. I mean, I've never really believed seriously in God, and even I can argue my way out of that one.

For this experiment, we need to find a deserving person who has had both of his legs amputated. For example, find a sincere, devout veteran of the Iraqi war, or a person who was involved in a tragic automobile accident.

Now create a prayer circle like the one created for Jeanna Giese. The job of this prayer circle is simple: pray to God to restore the amputated legs of this deserving person. I do not mean to pray for a team of renowned surgeons to somehow graft the legs of a cadaver onto the soldier, nor for a team of renowned scientists to craft mechanical legs for him. Pray that God spontaneously and miraculously restores the soldier's legs overnight, in the same way that God spontaneously and miraculously cured Jeanna Giese and Marilyn Hickey's mother.

If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch.

What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once -- he says it many times in many ways in the Bible.

And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen.

Every religious person I have ever met would concede that God doesn't answer every human prayer. This argument is a complete strawman. Different religions would have different ways of answering this particular problem, but it's not like the schmendrick who runs this website was the first person to ever come up with this line of reasoning. Maybe God caused that person's legs to be amputated for some larger purpose, alright? So eventually, he'll get around to answering the person's prayers in a roundabout way without physically returning his or her legs. There. Done. I mean, we're talking about an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. If such a thing really did exist, we wouldn't necessarily expect It to obey all of our laws of fairness, consistency and timeliness.

Take a look at this 10 minute video, in which a nasally, ANGRY narrator informs you of 3 things:

(1) You're an idiot

(2) He's going to miraculously free you from your delusions

(3) But, seriously, you're a fucking idiot

How is this in any way helpful? The guy opens the video by making some extremely bold statements:

If you are a Christian, you are about to begin a fascinating journey.

I would never in one million years say this at the beginning of a presentation. Talk about setting yourself up for failure. This is what producer Joel Silver does before every film of his opens, and it usually doesn't work out that well. ("Swordfish is going to change the way you think about action movies, the Internet...and yourselves...")

Still, he gets away with it every once in a while, when the film turns out to be The Matrix or something and audiences flip for it. Regrettably, the folks at WWGHA do not have a blockbuster kind of argument.

It all boils down to this: because you don't believe in ALL the world's religions, and the faith of their adherents is just as strong as yours, you must concede that almost all of world's religious people are totally wrong, and therefore you are most likely wrong. After all, what reason do we have for believing that our holy books or writs are MORE CORRECT that those of other faiths and cultures, whose practicioners have passed them down and fervently practiced them for just as long as our people or longer?

This is certainly something that occurred to me as a child. I think being Jewish calls your attention in particular to this issue. The most popular religion in America is an explicit rejection of Judaism. Despite the unifying political rhetoric between Jew and Fundamentalist Christian, most Americans feel that the Jews believe in an outdated religion that has long-since been revitalized. So any believing Jew must make peace with the fact that they're going against the grain.

But this is not revolutionary thinking that's likely to alter the perception of someone religious, particularly because it's delivered in this hectoring tone that's just unpleasant. I mean...I agree with the narrator for the most part, and yet I still disliked him and found him unconvincing.

In the next ten minutes it will become clear to you that your belief in God is delusional.

The problem is that your delusion, combined with the delusion of billions of other religious people like you, is hurting us as a species. It does not matter if you are a fundamentalist Christian, a moderate Christian or a casual Christian. Your delusion is hurting us.

Again, this leap in logic has never fully been made clear to me. Yes, most people are religious. Yes, most people are also violent. Sometimes (not all the time!), people excuse their violent behavior with religion. This does not, DOES NOT, necessarily indicate that religion incites people to violence!

I mean, that's just silly. Look at the issue of, say, spousal abuse. I'm sure many men who are arrested for spousal abuse (not that all spousal abusers are men...just the overwhelming majority...) have lame excuses for why they needed to hit their wives. But we don't accept these excuses at face value! Of course we don't! There's no one saying, "If we could only keep women pregnant and in the kitchen and stop their constant backtalking, we could end spousal abuse in this country!"

Because the real reasons guys hit their wives are alcoholism or drug abuse or that they're just a dumb violent asshole, and we all know it. And the reason there's so much violence in the world is that people are angry, violent, greedy fucks. And we all know it. And it has nothing to do with God, Ganesha, Mohammad, Jesus, the Prophet Elijah or anyone else. Being an atheist is just recognizing that those are either fictional or historical characters; it doesn't say anything about believing that they are responsible for the downfall of humanity or the horrors of the the 20th or 21st Centuries.

Yet this guy just brashly states it outwardly in a video that's meant to appeal to Christians. Guys...That's not gonna work. At all. In order to be convinced by your rhetoric, a subject must find you sufficiently trustworthy and charismatic. A good first step would be to convince them that you think very much like them but for one or two crucial, correctable differences. Not to call them delusional and say that they're hurting our species, and then move into your arguments.

Okay, moving away from the WWGHA crowd, let's take a look at this blog post, about the divide between "mean atheists" and "good atheists."

What it really comes down to is this: There are two types of atheists, which (for simplicity) I'll call the "nice atheists" and the "mean atheists." As P. Z. Myers points out, it's absurd to call atheists "militant" since it's not as if they're burning down churches -- they're just criticizing religion. However, it's not unreasonable to suggest that some atheists are not very nice.

The difference between the mean atheists and the nice atheists is that the mean atheists think that religion is ninety-nine parts pure stupidity mixed with one part lying, opportunistic con artists. And they want to tell that to religious people whenever they're asked to "respect" someone's faith.

This is just stupid. The divide has nothing to do with being "nice" or "mean." It's about goals. The atheists blogger C.L. Hanson refers to as "mean" want to eradicate religion from the public sphere entirely, or even eliminate its very existence. The atheists that are called "nice" aren't any friendly as people; they just don't give a shit what people say or believe, as long as they personally don't have to believe it.

I'm not religious because I think it's silly and I don't want to waste my time with it. I think we'd all be better off accepting such a philosophy, of course - if I thought such a belief made people worse off, I wouldn't believe it myself - but when it comes right down to it, I'd rather not get involved in what everyone else does. Their business, you know? Just like I don't care what home computers other people use, or their favorite late-night snack, or their masturbatory practices. I have my own preferences, and they have theirs, and that's how it ought to be.

I think all atheists believe religion is just about equally stupid. The notion that there's 1% of me that thinks religion should be handled with respect is very strange; where did Hanson even come up with this stuff? If you don't believe in Islam or Christianity or Mormonism or Scientology, it seems ridiculous from the outside. That has absolutely nothing to do with ones approach to dealing with religion. Can't we interface at all with ideas we dislike?

I mean, I'm not a libertarian, but am I not capable of discussing their ideas with them? Should my goal instead be the eradication of that entire system of thought? I think these sort of notions fuel a lot of our political and social discourse any more. Politics is no longer about ensuring your perspective is represented in some kind of larger Grand Compromise. It's about the utter and complete defeat of any and all opposition to your unitary, uncompromised will.

Like I said, I just don't get it. To me, so-called "mean" atheism reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. I mean, it's great you guys figured out God's not at the center of the universe, but that doesn't mean you're there either.

Evangelical Atheism

I use this phrase sometimes as a joke, to refer to the more militant anti-religionites in my family. Really, I get that it doesn't make a ton of sense. To "evangelize" is not merely to preach or to persuade, but to spread the message of the Christian gospels. Still, even if I swapped the verb into "proselytizing" atheist, it's still only a half-sensible statement, because it then implies that a person could potentially preach a lack of belief.

There is no inherent belief behind atheism. It doesn't definte what I think, but what I don't think. So how could I proselyize?

But you get what I'm saying when I say "my cousin Michael is an evangelical atheist." It means, he dislikes statements of religious faith and desires for all the other people around him to stop believing in God.

I have never believed in God, pretty much since Day One, but I frankly don't give two shits about you. Believe whatever in the hell you want, just leave me alone, that is my Spiritual Philosophy in a nutshell. I deeply, deeply resent uptight assholes attempting to push their ludicrous, baseless beliefs on me. I want to do drugs, have pre-marital sex with girls who can potentially go and get abortions if they're not 100% satisfied with my seed, watch unseemly movies, buy beer on Sunday mornings, attend gay weddings, sponsor stem cell research and forget that there was ever such a thing as "The Da Vinci Code." And I hate the fact that pushy moralists want to stop me from doing these things.

But that's all I hate about religion. Nothing about the specific rituals and beliefs themselves, really. I mean, yeah, they're wrong, but a lot of people believe a lot of things that are completely wrong, and it usually doesn't bother me. (I've talked to individuals who actually enjoyed Garden State!)

I think my general, overall misanthropy probably has something to do with this. I think religious people are wrong about everything, but I think non-religious people are wrong about everything too, so there's no need to single anyone out specifically. I'm not one of these people who believes that we'd all be way, way better off without religion, either. Human beings are just massive pieces of shit, and we would be whether we all believed in Jesus, Satan or nothing at all. Our problems are all about tribalism, ignorance and avarice, not faith. Come on...this is obvious...

But I'll even take it one step further! I genuinely find the subject of religion fascinating. And so does every hardcore atheist I've ever met! If they didn't find it terribly interesting, they'd just be another lackadaisical, semi-religious American who never thinks about religion except when they are participating in it. It's counter-intuitive but true. The people who spend all their time wrestling with the Big Questions of religion and the universe are the non-believers. Those who have faith don't really bother with the small stuff, like the fact that the shit they believe makes no sense. "Who cares? I'm already saved already! Let's go get ice cream and hate sins but try our best not to hate sinners too bad!"

Sure, there are thoughtful, philosophical types who are also religious, but not many. It's not a worldview that lends itself to introspection. Your more inquisitive types kind of get turned off by any book that tells what to think and when to think it. This is how you can have a nation full of self-identified devout Christians who don't know shit about their own book.

That USA Today link is about Professor Stephen Prothero, who did a survey which made Americans look very silly. Many of Prothero's subjects were unable to name the authors of the Four Gospels and believed that Sodom and Gomorrah were married. (I guess the test was multiple choice?) The Professor takes this data and concludes...that we need to educate children more about religion in public school.

Wait, what? To me, that data suggests that America's churches are doing a shit job, spending all their time ministering against abortion and for the Republican Party and not getting around to the part about this guy Jesus and all the swell things he said and did.

I've argued on the blog a whole bunch that Christians don't seem to pay attention to what Jesus was all about any more, and this news just advances that theory.

Prothero, who is after all a Professor of Religion at Boston University, clearly disagrees with yours truly. It's not that Americans don't really care about religion and just go to church to be social or to fit in, he seems to believe. It's not false piety that they're constantly exhuding, along with nacho breath, flatulence and megalomania. The problem with Americans is that they're not taught from a young age what grows in the Garden of Gethsemane. (Olives, but I had to look it up).

The idea of World Religion or Comparative Religion education itself is a solid idea. I had a great class like this when I was a sophomore, and it really was my initial exposure to all non-Jewish religion. And it was great! We visited a Hindu monastery (where we took a tour led by the inimitable Swami Viprananda), discusses the wisdom of the Tao, and Mr. Antenore became the first in a long string of people over the years to get mildly frustrated with me after having to explain the concept of a "three-personed God." Catholics, PLEASE, do something about this...It's really confusing...

(For some reason, my parents had raised me and my brother Jewish, despite none of us really believing any of it. We later joined an entire congregation full of Jews who met weekly despite not believing in anything about Judaism, and openly admitting as much. I guess they were all just bored?)

So, I'm all in favor of teaching the older kids a bit about religion, provided you give equal time (say, two weeks each, as I seem to recall we did in Mr. Antenore's class) to all the religions and not frontload one or two preferred subjects. This, of course, will never happen, because most religious Americans don't want to teach children about the beautiful diversity of faith around the world. Rather, they want public schools to indoctrinate. Teach kids about how Christianity is the One True Faith and that all the Eastern religious are adorable but, you know, essentially incorrect and therefore subservient. (This message, I should note, is already taught in public schools to some degree, with the aid of movies like 300 on the side to reinforce the same concepts about Western, white dominance).

My point is, I don't think we need to pretend religion isn't there, like it's not one of the predominant forces behind human history. Because it totally is.

Which brings me, at long last, to an intriguing discussion at PZ Myers' place (another Professor!), Pharyngula.

PZ received a letter, which I will reprint in part:

Today I went to get my car inspected as my state requires it annually, and you will get a ticket for having an expired inspection sticker. The inspection place I went to had a Christian radio station in the waiting room. I politely asked the guy at the desk (who I later confirmed was the owner) to change the channel to one that was not religious. He said he would not.

Eventually, the letter writer left the shop after the guy behind the counter flat-out refused to change the channel.

Now, I'd agree that this is not the best business practice for this guy, turning off anyone who differs with him on religious grounds and kindly makes a simple request. But still...could the letter-writer be any more of a whiny, petulant little child? I mean, I wouldn't listen to Christian radio on my own, but it's hardly going to actively hurt me to hear it for 10 minutes while I wait to have a smog inspection or whatever in some guy's place of business. The letter doesn't say what the Christian DJ was actually discussing, but it's highly unlikely that anything being said was actually Offensive with a capital O. Probably just a lot of God-this and Jesus-that. Maybe a little Satan-the other thing.

Who gives a shit? I mean, to me, it's almost more silly and superstitious to believe that 10 minutes of Christian radio is going to somehow hurt you than it is to listen to the stuff in the first place! I mean, yes, a lot of people are very devout and it's very difficult to take seriously, but God talk isn't Atheist Kryptonite or anything. Unless you're ridiculously weak-willed, you can still be a freethinker with James Dobson on in the background.

Here's PZ's advice:

I think a smart strategy in this kind of situation is not to go after the shop owner, but go after the source. Write a letter to the paper, highlighting some offensive stupidity from that radio station, and make it clear that you won't frequent businesses that play that kind of inanity.

Geez, really? Make trouble for a Christian radio station just because they're talking about being Christian? I don't really believe all this right-wing distracting rhetoric about a "war on Christians" or anything, but that's cutting it pretty close. How about you just don't listen to that station? And bring a magazine when you go to get your car smog-checked? Or go somewhere else? Or, you know, you could start a boycott...Either way.

Truly, You Have a Dizzying Intellect

Words fail me...Some idiot named Chuck Missler makes what has got to be the stupidest anti-evolution argument I, personally, have ever heard. The weird thing about these Creationism/Intelligent Design advocates is their hideous confusion about the VERY BASIC scientific underpinnings of the Theory of Evolution.



See, I am no scientist. In fact, I was never very good at science. I find biology fascinating, and enjoy reading about it, but I'm bad at math and am generally out of my element in studying hard science. Words and conceptual ideas were always more my forte than the complex formulas, cycles and chemical equations of the Life Sciences.

But anyone capable of taking a high-school biology exam could explain to this douchebag why his little peanut butter "experiment" is deeply, deeply flawed. For those of you not bothering to watch that 2 minute clip (it's worth it...trust me...), the guy attempts to disprove evolution by opening a vacuum-sealed jar of peanut butter.

See, evolutionists believe that, occasionally, the combination of energy and matter will create new life. But experience tells us that dead matter will never spawn new life. Therefore, evolution is wrong.

Missler is just confused. He has actually disproved Spontaneous Generation, which has been disproved already, over and over again, throughout the history of Biology. (If I recall 9th grade science correctly, Louis Pasteur famously debunked the theory.) In fact, near as I can tell, the exact origin point of life from non-life isn't really a major focal point of evolutionary science. Rather, it's the study of how life progressed from single-celled organisms to the complex forms we have come to know and love.

My point is not that Missler's wrong. He's obviously, OBVIOUSLY wrong. (And what's with his constant insistance that evolution is wrong because the FOOD INDUSTRY says so. Why should we trust what the food industry thinks more than scientists, professors and other experts? The food industry thought Lunchables and New Coke were awesome ideas.)

My point is that ANYONE could tell that Missler's wrong, including young children and particularly attentive housecats. Either he knows what he's saying is ridiculous, and just hopes to win over one or two lunkheads, or he's just an extremely silly person. It's amazing he's capable of operating a video camera or, failing that, convincing someone who knows how to operate a video camera to assist him.