If My Wife Dumps Me I'm Marrying Paula Kirby

...if she'll have me.

This editorial from the Washington Post's On Faith column should be required reading. She begins with the question posed to the panel:

Q: Rick Perry, at a campaign event this week, told a boy that evolution is 'just a theory' with 'gaps' and that in Texas they teach “both creationism and evolution.” According to a 2009 Gallup study, only 38 percent of Americans say they believe in evolution. If a majority of Americans are skeptical or unsure about evolution, should schools teach it as a mere “theory”? Why is evolution so threatening to religion?

So-called “reality TV” has done the world a grave disservice. I don't just mean because the vast majority of such programs are mind-numbingly tedious, but because they have given people the idea that reality is something that can be decided by popular vote. In a “reality TV” show, the winner is decided through a popularity contest: the person who gets the most votes from viewers emerges triumphant. Anything less like reality it would be hard to imagine - when it comes to facts about the world, at least.

In the real world, facts are stubborn beasts. They are supremely unmoved by whether we like them or not. We may sternly disapprove of the idea that stepping off the window ledge of an apartment on the 14th floor will result in our death; we may go further, and resolutely contradict all claims to that effect, clinging religiously to our belief that such activity is nothing more than an enjoyable and exhilarating way to spend an afternoon; but neither our disapproval nor our disbelief will make the slightest difference to the real-world splat.

And it is the same with evolution. Evolution is a simple fact. We can choose to remain ignorant of it, we can stick our fingers in our ears and refuse to think about it, we can even rail against it and shout and scream that it is not allowed to be true. But facts are facts, and will not go away just because we don't like them. We don't get to vote for our preferred method of having come into existence as a species, any more than we can choose to have been delivered by stork rather than conceived and born in the usual way.

The primary role of the school is pretty straightforward: it is to educate. It is to give young people the opportunity to learn as much as possible about the world, on the basis of the very best knowledge we have. Education is about overcoming ignorance - so the idea of allowing ignorance to set the school curriculum and to perpetuate itself by continuing to teach generation after generation information that for the last 150 years we have known to be false, is a shameful betrayal: a betrayal of young people, who put their trust in us and who deserve better; and a betrayal of the very concept of education itself.

Remember that 'ignorance' is not an insult, but merely a term for 'lack of knowledge'. Many of the people who protest so vociferously against the teaching of evolution do not understand how overwhelmingly strong the evidence for it is; and many of those who proclaim “But it's only a theory” do not understand that the scientific and everyday usages of the word 'theory' are very different. In everyday English, 'theory' can mean something vague, a hunch, a guess. In scientific English, it is almost as far from that meaning as it's possible to get: in science, a theory is the best explanation for a set of facts. It carries real weight: in science, nothing can be called a 'theory' until it is very well established indeed. Science has its own term for what, in a non-scientific context, the rest of us might call a 'theory': the scientific term for a suggestion, a best guess, something that seems plausible but has not yet been shown to be reliably true, is 'hypothesis'. You will never, ever hear a scientist talk about 'the hypothesis of evolution', for the simple reason that evolution is long past that stage. Evolution is a theory in the scientific sense of the word - tested, researched, explored and supported by masses and masses of evidence. There may still be specific details that are not entirely agreed upon; but the fact of evolution itself is not disputed by any reputable scientist. (If you are in any doubt about the evidence for evolution, I highly recommend The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins or Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne , because both authors have explained comprehensively, beautifully and very accessibly just why we can be so sure that evolution really is a fact.)

To deprive children of this knowledge, or to water it down so as to pretend that it's just a wild guess, is to deliberately deprive them of one of the most powerful and illuminating pieces of knowledge that humans have ever acquired. It is to deliberately keep them from what we know to be the truth. It is to conceal from them their true identity, and all meaningful knowledge of their roots. To suggest that creationism is in any way a rival 'theory' is to confuse reality with myth. Creationism is to evolution what Santa Claus is to frazzled parents frantically buying and wrapping presents for their children at Christmas. There comes a point in our childhood when we must let go of the fantasy of Santa Claus; and there comes a point in our civilization when we must let go of the fantasy of creationism too.

Evolution is science, and should be taught in science classes. Creationism -- let us be very clear about this --is a purely religious doctrine, with no scientific underpinning whatsoever. Indeed, all the evidence points very strongly to its being false. It therefore has no place in a science lesson. Science proceeds on the basis of evidence, religion on the basis of faith, and any teacher who tries to teach faith-based dogma in a science class is clearly demonstrating her unsuitability for the role.

But of course evolution poses a problem for Christianity. That's not to say it poses a problem for all Christians, since many Christians happily accept evolution: they see Genesis 1 as merely a metaphor, and declare that if God chose to create us using evolution, that's fine by them. I used to be this kind of Christian myself; but I must confess that my blitheness was only possible because I had only the vaguest possible idea of how evolution works and certainly didn't know enough about it to realize that unguided-ness is central to it. While I welcome anyone who recognizes that the evidence for evolution is such that it cannot sensibly be denied, to attempt to co-opt evolution as part of a divine plan simply does not work, and suggests a highly superficial understanding of the subject. Not only does evolution not need to be guided in any way, but any conscious, sentient guide would have to be a monster of the most sadistic type: for evolution is not pretty, is not gentle, is not kind, is not compassionate, is not loving. Evolution is blind, and brutal, and callous. It is not an aspiration or a blueprint to live up to (we have to create those for ourselves): it is simply what happens, the blind, inexorable forces of nature at work. An omnipotent deity who chose evolution by natural selection as the means by which to bring about the array of living creatures that populate the Earth today would be many things - but loving would not be one of them. Nor perfect. Nor compassionate. Nor merciful. Evolution produces some wondrously beautiful results; but it happens at the cost of unimaginable suffering on the part of countless billions of individuals and, indeed, whole species, 99 percent of which have so far become extinct. It is irreconcilable with a god of love.

Evolution poses a further threat to Christianity, though, a threat that goes to the very heart of Christian teaching. Evolution means that the creation accounts in the first two chapters of Genesis are wrong. That's not how humans came into being, nor the cattle, nor the creeping things, nor the beasts of the earth, nor the fowl of the air. Evolution could not have produced a single mother and father of all future humans, so there was no Adam and no Eve. No Adam and Eve: no fall. No fall: no need for redemption. No need for redemption: no need for a redeemer. No need for a redeemer: no need for the crucifixion or the resurrection, and no need to believe in that redeemer in order to gain eternal life. And not the slightest reason to believe in eternal life in the first place.

Christianity is like a big, chunky sweater. It may feel cozy, it may keep you warm, but just let one stitch be dropped and the whole thing unravels before your very eyes. Evolution is that stitch. Evolution destroys the loving creator on which the whole of Christianity depends. I can quite understand why the evangelicals throw up their hands in horror at the very idea of it and will do everything in their power to suppress it. But they can throw up their hands all they like: it won't make any difference to the reality. All that will be achieved by their determined efforts to keep young people misinformed about it is that another generation of Americans will be condemned to ignorance, unable to understand the world around them properly, and at a real disadvantage when having to deal and compete with their peers from more enlightened countries. Willful ignorance is a choice; evolution is not.

A-freakin'-men.

***

ADDENDUM:

The great Richard Dawkins' response is similarly entertaining and brilliant and contains this zinger:

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.

Long Live The Hitch

Alas, I fear it is not to be. But through his good works he has attained a sort of immortality.

I could listen to this all day. My gloom is always reliably lifted by a good smackdown of adherents of mythology.

I Should Hope To Die This Well

We don't know how long Christopher Hitchens has as he battles esophageal cancer, but he's far from gone at the moment. What I wouldn't give for half his brain.



Berlinski is hard for me to listen to; he sounds puffed up and oblique, as though he's trying to make arguments too turbid to allow for rebuttal. (But maybe that's just me.) I suspect he would do better if he weren't arguing a position that thumbs its nose at rationality itself.

(The videos don't sequence automatically; one must go up to the Fixed Point video menu to find the other four videos.)

From America's Finest News Source

From The Onion's Patriotic Issue: "News Only Visible to Real Americans."

It's like Faux News with a sense of humor.

********

Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be

November 14, 2009

ESCONDIDO, CA—Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head.

Kyle Mortensen would gladly give his life to protect what he says is the Constitution's very clear stance against birth control.

"Our very way of life is under siege," said Mortensen, whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination. "It's time for true Americans to stand up and protect the values that make us who we are."

According to Mortensen—an otherwise mild-mannered husband, father, and small-business owner—the most serious threat to his fanciful version of the 222-year-old Constitution is the attempt by far-left "traitors" to strip it of its religious foundation.

"Right there in the preamble, the authors make their priorities clear: 'one nation under God,'" said Mortensen, attributing to the Constitution a line from the Pledge of Allegiance, which itself did not include any reference to a deity until 1954. "Well, there's a reason they put that right at the top."

"Men like Madison and Jefferson were moved by the ideals of Christianity, and wanted the United States to reflect those values as a Christian nation," continued Mortensen, referring to the "Father of the Constitution," James Madison, considered by many historians to be an atheist, and Thomas Jefferson, an Enlightenment-era thinker who rejected the divinity of Christ and was in France at the time the document was written. "The words on the page speak for themselves."

According to sources who have read the nation's charter, the U.S. Constitution and its 27 amendments do not contain the word "God" or "Christ."

Mortensen said his admiration for the loose assemblage of vague half-notions he calls the Constitution has only grown over time. He believes that each detail he has pulled from thin air—from prohibitions on sodomy and flag-burning, to mandatory crackdowns on immigrants, to the right of citizens not to have their hard-earned income confiscated in the form of taxes—has contributed to making it the best framework for governance "since the Ten Commandments."

"And let's not forget that when the Constitution was ratified it brought freedom to every single American," Mortensen said.

Mortensen's passion for safeguarding the elaborate fantasy world in which his conception of the Constitution resides is greatly respected by his likeminded friends and relatives, many of whom have been known to repeat his unfounded assertions verbatim when angered. Still, some friends and family members remain critical.

"Dad's great, but listening to all that talk radio has put some weird ideas into his head," said daughter Samantha, a freshman at Reed College in Portland, OR. "He believes the Constitution allows the government to torture people and ban gay marriage, yet he doesn't even know that it guarantees universal health care."

Mortensen told reporters that he'll fight until the bitter end for what he roughly supposes the Constitution to be. He acknowledged, however, that it might already be too late to win the battle.

"The freedoms our Founding Fathers spilled their blood for are vanishing before our eyes," Mortensen said. "In under a year, a fascist, socialist regime has turned a proud democracy into a totalitarian state that will soon control every facet of American life."

"Don't just take my word for it," Mortensen added. "Try reading a newspaper or watching the news sometime."

[I gotta say it: Amen!]

On Knowledge

I made a statement a few days ago in another post to the effect that scientists are passionate about the real world as revealed by science. A commenter dubiously asked what, exactly, we really know.

The irony meter clanks loudly at a person expressing doubt in the verity or usefulness of scientific data only to promote supernatural explanations of natural phenomena instead. Claims of certainty where no knowledge actually exists is not a bad working definition of religion. Whatever the weaknesses of science, we know absolutely nothing whatsoever of any supernatural world (except that everybody's version of it is different and every attempt to verify "expertise" in the realm--or even the very existence of the realm--has been roundly debunked).

Still, questioning the verity of scientific results is absolutely fair game, even part and parcel of the methodology; and so, what of it? What DO we know (with an apologetic nod to those scientists who object to a lug with no science training such as myself attempting to answer)?

There are millions of scientific discoveries from the past century or two we might pick (it's always a shock to me to read history and see how utterly clueless we were--and not so long ago--about things which are now well in hand), but here's an especially good one: one established fact is that life exists on our planet in its present form by way of the process of evolution. We know this as surely as we know the constituent gases of our atmosphere or that the Earth is not flat. Indeed there is very little in our natural world which science has more thoroughly verified than the process of evolution. We don't yet understand every detail of the process (though we know a great many details), and we may not like the implications of it, but the fact that evolution has occurred--and is occurring--is beyond dispute.

Even the most fervent adherent to creation mythology (of which there are countless versions from which to choose) cannot dispute a few simple facts: that the characteristics of individuals of a given species occur with a natural degree of variance along a continuum of possibilities (people vary in their strength and stoutness, in their height, in their intelligence and keenness of smell and eyesight, in the length of their fingers and the cavity-resistance of their teeth, in the pigmentation of their skin, etc., etc.); that most of those characteristics are genetically heritable; that a species' environment is not static when looked at in geological timescales; and that the natural variation of a species makes certain individuals more suited to survival--and ergo reproduction--in a given environment than other individuals (especially in our ancestral environment--think 10,000 years ago). There are a million other details, but these above facts outline the whole banana. There's no getting around these, and with these you get evolution.

The reason the 747-being-blown-together-from-a-junkyard analogy (which is just an update of William Paley's original pocket-watch-in-the-woods scenario) does not hold water is twofold. First, it leaves the even larger question of where the watchmaker came from unanswered--indeed, blithely unaddressed. Thus our "answer" leaves us hanging with our original question and adds an additional problem to our roster, one which is inscrutable by design. (This is like drinking to make your problems go away. You wake up with the same unsolved problems, and now you have alcoholism to boot.) Some solution. Second, and more importantly, the demonstrated action of evolution shows that a "creator" is redundant (except perhaps as some ultimate prime-mover, though that only points us back to the futility of the plainly unknowable, at least at present).

Life takes an influx of energy from our sun--which is a finite resource, so the law of conservation of energy is not violated--and builds increasingly complex machinery by way of an arms race: the fitter variants bestow a survival advantage, and a population as a whole becomes statistically fitter for that environment over time. This happens gradually and continuously by tiny increments, and possibly occasionally by larger mutations. Look at the process closely and Darwin's discovery is undeniable. We debate some aspects Darwin's and other geneticists' works (gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium, for example), and scientists will continue to duly put these ideas in front of the firing squad as people test competing theories. But the mythologists' hopes that Darwin was wrong were dashed decades ago. (And it bears repeating that if creationist mythology is subjected to even a shred of the same scientific scrutiny that the doubters apply to Darwin their entire edifice disappears without so much as a puff of smoke.)

The complexities of life may LOOK like "design," but that illusion is precisely the point that Darwin, a fervent Christian, was making: what appears to have been designed is in fact the culmination of a very gradual process--a process we've each witnessed innumerable times even in our own lifetimes. We see variance everyday in disease resistance or vulnerability or in sports prowess or food tolerance, countless things. Look at dog breeding, at how trivially easy it is for us to artificially select characteristics we wish to favor (the whole panoply of dog breeds are a human contrivance). Natural selection works exactly the same way, except it's the environment that supplies the survival pressures.

The big picture of this process has not been easily won by humanity. Our brains are not equipped to process astronomical numbers, and it can be hard to wrap our intuitive heads around the work of billions of years. (One solution, of course, is to deny the billions of years--"if I can't grasp it it cannot be so;" this is called argument from personal incredulity.) But the logic of it is so well supported as to be irrefutable by any credible means.

There's no way for an untrained enthusiast such as myself to quickly summarize all this and do justice to the massive supporting data. Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, is a credentialed scientist, and he has done an astounding life's work of making this data clear to any who will read him. But there's the rub: it requires time and effort to work through this body of writings. Unfortunately, he is often criticized not by those who have troubled themselves to actually read what he has written but from a kind of creationist's Cliff-Notes summary of hoped-for weak points. Fundamentalists love to hate Richard Dawkins, as he has made a spectacular career of decimating the card-house of irrationality that their worldview requires. But Dawkins has a great talent for clarity and elucidation (making him uniquely suited to hold the position of Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position from which he has since retired after 13 brilliant years). I mention this because even if one discredits Dawkins (Darwin's discovery being now quite secure) one is only discrediting the popularization of the science and not the science itself. In that sense, this attention to Dawkins is misplaced. And I have yet to read a criticism of Dawkins (let alone Darwin) that floats a valid argument against his reasoning. Dawkins has been maliciously maligned now for a couple decades yet his position has never been stronger.

The march of rationality plods inexorably forward. As it does so, and as people see more and more the silliness of religious "authority" and the gaseousness of religious thinking, people are increasingly declaring themselves to be irreligious--"unaffiliated" is the largest growing religious group. This is good news--the sooner we leave religion behind, this artifact of humanity's childhood, the sooner we will solve our problems.

The Internet: Where Religions Come to Die

An excellent documentary-style video about religion in the age of the internet.

Great Essay by A. C. Grayling

This is from The Independent of London, courtesy of Richard Dawkins.net.

A. C. Grayling: Why No Asbo for the Pope?

Sunday, 2 May 2010

Why is it that large, rich, influential organisations and those who run them get away with big crimes and misdemeanours, when ordinary folk are punished for their miniature versions of them? It's an old story, of course, but no more pleasant or right for being so.

Compare the circumstances of two men whose occupations and avocations have brought them to pubic notice recently. One is Harry Taylor, an unemployed 59-year-old, who was found guilty last week in a Liverpool court of putting "offensive religious images" in the prayer room of the city's John Lennon airport (which he did on the grounds that having such a room in an airport named after John Lennon would, he said, have offended John Lennon). The jury of 10 women and two men had all sworn to consider his case fairly – on the Bible.

Mr Taylor received a five-year Asbo [Anti-social Behaviour Order] forbidding him from carrying religiously offensive images in public, and sentencing him to six months' imprisonment suspended for two years, but with 100 hours of unpaid work and £250 costs to make him feel the sting of the judge's disapproval.

The other man is Joseph Ratzinger, otherwise Pope Benedict XVI, right, current head of the Roman Catholic church. To appreciate the contrast between the Pope and Mr Taylor, we need to remind ourselves of the following simple facts. Child sex abuse is a serious crime. Concealing crimes is a serious crime. Systematic, decades-long deliberate concealment of many thousands of crimes in many countries is a very large-scale criminal conspiracy. It is a matter of public record that the Catholic church is guilty of just such a conspiracy. The Pope, as head of the church, is accountable for the its actions. It is also on public record that he personally protected abusers and covered up cases of child abuse before becoming Pope.

Is the Pope in any danger of receiving 100 hours of community service for hiding hundreds of paedophiles from the law all round the world? Is he likely to get an Asbo? Or has he been invited to the United Kingdom as an official visitor who will meet the Queen and be feted and courted, secure in the knowledge that efforts to arrest him and put him on trial for heading a huge criminal conspiracy will fail?

It is not only the Vatican that enjoys the immunity, the get-out-jail-free card, so willingly conferred by far too many people and their governments on anyone or anything big, rich and influential. The same curious and unquestioning deference is accorded to institutions like (to take a relevant current example) Goldman Sachs. This enormous bank has more in common with the Vatican than the fact that both "do God's work", as the Goldman Sachs chairman, Lloyd Blankfein, claimed on his organisation's behalf. (By "God's work", he meant creating wealth and jobs. The irony is that for everyone other than itself, Goldman Sachs has lately done the very opposite.) It shares with the Vatican the same immunity, the ability to do massive harm and yet, Teflon-like, get away without a scratch.

For only consider: for years, it seems, Goldman Sachs had knowingly and deliberately packaged and sold bad debt and then bet against that bad debt, thus winning twice at others' expense. Goldman maintains that its clients knew what the score was. To the untutored eye, this looks straightforwardly like the crime of fraud, but hey, who are we non-bankers to judge? What we know is that as tens of thousands of people lost their jobs and homes in 2009 because of the dodgy things that banks such as Goldman Sachs were doing, Goldman Sachs was making a profit of $13bn (yes, billion).

Is Lloyd Blankfein, as head of the bank in question, in danger of an Asbo preventing him from going anywhere near an investor? Is he likely to get 100 hours of community service for earning tens of millions of dollars in recent years as he and his bank helped drive the world economy towards meltdown by their unscrupulous tricks, thus seriously harming millions of people?

Well, Mr Blankfein and others in his company's management testified before a Senate committee last week. Even as they were being told by one senator that Las Vegas was offended by comparisons with Wall Street – because Vegas casinos are honest enough to acknowledge that the odds are on their side – the share price of Goldman Sachs rose. Why? Because everyone knows that Mr Blankfein and his cronies and their bank are safe as houses and will come to no harm. (By the way, the senator in question, John Ensign, is himself under investigation for sexual inappropriateness with a member of his staff. In America, "ethics" is about money and "morals" is about sex.)

Two images spring to mind regarding the Pope of Banking and the CEO of the Vatican, each heading organisations publicly acknowledged to have done immense harm and yet neither is in any danger of having to pay for it, not even with the punishment that Harry Taylor must undergo. One is the image of such men as Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, suddenly exposed by the collapse of the gigantic cardboard myth behind which they hid. The other is the image of the Wizard of Oz at his levers, caught as the curtain hiding him is whisked aside, revealing a puny fellow in his underpants.

If we did not buy the big cardboard myths that protect the papacy and the bankers, we would apply to these men exactly the same standards as we would if, say, our government's inspectors of schools were shielding sexually abusive teachers, or if the finance department of our local authority were betting other people's money for its own gain. This is precisely what the Vatican and Goldman Sachs have done: but they are not being held accountable because of the cardboard myths that they, in their turn, hide behind.

In a world that was the right way up, what Harry Taylor did might be regarded as bad manners or lack of taste, but not a crime. Giving offence in respect of what someone chooses to believe or do should never be a crime; matters are otherwise with gender, sexuality, age or disability, because these are not matters of choice. In the Taylor case, the real offence is the crime committed against free speech. But it is even more offensive that Harry Taylor can be subjected to a criminal prosecution and the Pope and Lloyd Blankfein not. Tearing down the cardboard myths that protect them would be the first step to putting this right.

A Venting Of Spleen, Pt. XXII

Gee, I didn't see this coming.

More cancer from the New American Dark Age. Any religious billboard or church marquee or newspaper ad or bumper sticker is angrily defended as an exercise in religious freedom and First Amendment prerogative; this is just speakin' free for Jebus, as the abandoner-of-Alaska's-gubernatorial-post-for-no-honorable-reason might say. (On my drive to and from KY--especially in the backwater of IN--there are several "HELL IS REAL" and "JEBUS IS REAL" billboards--as though the dude who went to the trouble to put them up would know; but hey, they're a nice complement to the official "In god we trust" license plates with waving Amurrican flag background.) But the simplest, most innocuous statement of an alternate way of thinking is deemed intolerable, free speech be damned! And not just by the truck-driving wacko who can't bear this idea to be floating in the aether; even the newspaper calls the billboard "controversial." Please.

"Don't believe in God? You're not alone."

Sorry, Bubbles, but this is just a simple statement of fact. Controversial might be: "Christianity: Stackin' Up the Bodies Like Cordwood" or maybe "Scientists Confirm: Allah Could Kick Jebus' Ass (But Zoroaster Trumps Them Both)." Or how about: "Leave Your Son Alone With A Priest for REAL Sex Education." THESE would be controversial. That above billboard? Not even close.

But at least there's a weird denihilistic consistency among the fundies. They've suffered similar bouts of intolerance with bus billboard campaigns here in the US and abroad, with people crying that even having to look at the assertion that gods are mythology is "offensive." But the inescapable fact is this: any religious conviction other than what a person believes amounts to the same thing, a denial of MY god-figure. Christians tolerate Jews and Buddhists and Muslims and Shintos and Hindus as simply practicing their First Amendment rights, but the assertion that ALL religions are false (instead of all but one, which is the claim of every religious person on the planet) justifies an enraged response. Well, at least they're not 'misunderestimating' their foes.

I'll happily contribute a few bucks to fix that billboard.

More Bullshit From Rome

What could be more illogical than for people forced into lifelong celibacy to pontificate about what constitutes sexual health and how to achieve it? Yet here we have the Catholic church--the widespread protectors and harborers of pederasts--harping yet again that homosexuals are evil and (with unimaginable cheek) claiming that child molestation and homosexuality are linked!

Wednesday's comments by Tarcisio Bertone, the "Deputy Pope" on the matter are infuriating:

"Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and pedophilia, but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia."

Interesting that the church should now cite psychologists and psychiatrists, fields for which I should think church leaders would happily have burned people at the stake not so very long ago.

And speaking of the church's present predicament in the quicksand of really revealed truth,

"This pathology is one that touches all categories of people, and priests to a lesser degree in percentage terms..."

How disgusting. Here's yet another dismissal of the church's culpability by saying effectively that "priests are human too," as though this made the abuse of trust and power over defenseless children acceptable. No, it's always horrible and morally bankrupt but when done serially by a priest--the one person with a direct line to irrefutable, infallible moral guidance--it should be a capital crime.

I'm accustomed to hearing religious "leaders" hold forth as experts about matters of which they know absolutely nothing--indeed, matters of which nothing can possibly be known by anyone: what happens to the "soul" upon death, what their godhead's "plan" is, what behavior is or is not pleasing to the god figure, what "angels" can do, what things are the work of "the devil." But human sexuality is firmly in the purview of social and behavioral sciences. Ouija boards and tarot cards are of less-than-zero value in understanding human behavior. And I'm especially tired of ignorant, self-proclaimed "experts" telling me what is and is not a natural occurrence in our world. Especially when their proclamations seek to demonize others for the same crimes for which they themselves insist on immunity (and indeed traditionally have failed to acknowledge as crimes at all).

What irony that the sexual abuse of children is one field of which the church HAS demonstrated firsthand knowledge--a shameful, ignominious expertise. To paraphrase Lincoln, if we want to know about sexual behavior we should observe nature directly and face the subject pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Here's hoping this vile institution is irretrievably on its way to the dustbin of humanity's great mistakes.

From Slate.com

My apologies (for those who are not fans) for another Christopher Hitchens piece. But the essay, and the issue, deserve as much press as we can stand.

This story--moral atrocities perpetrated against children under the umbrella of divine sanction--gets worse and worse. Whatever good one may be convinced the Catholic Church has done, at the very least this episode destroys any shred of possibility of the church leaders being any more closely connected to some divine entity than is any other person. Quite to the contrary, it shows how much less than most people are some of those to whom we have entrusted our own--and our defenseless children's--emotional well-being. Nobody lays all this out better than Christopher Hitchens. (The original file is recommended for his numerous links and citations.)

***

The Pope Is Not Above the Law
The crimes within the Catholic Church demand justice.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, March 29, 2010, at 1:53 PM ET

One by one, as I predicted, the pathetic excuses of Joseph Ratzinger's apologists evaporate before our eyes. It was said until recently that when the Rev. Peter Hullermann was found to be a vicious pederast in 1980, the man who is now pope had no personal involvement in his subsequent transfer to his own diocese or in his later unimpeded career as a rapist and a molester. But now we find that the psychiatrist to whom the church turned for "therapy" was adamant that Hullermann never be allowed to go near children ever again. We also find that Ratzinger was one of those to whom the memo about Hullermann's transfer was actually addressed. All attempts to place the blame on a loyal subordinate, Ratzinger's vicar general, the Rev. Gerhard Gruber, have predictably failed. According to a recent report, "the transfer of Father Hullermann from Essen would not have been a routine matter, experts said." Either that—damning enough in itself—or it perhaps would have been a routine matter, which is even worse. Certainly the pattern—of finding another parish with fresh children for the priest to assault—is the one that has become horribly "routine" ever since and became standard practice when Ratzinger became a cardinal and was placed in charge of the church's global response to clerical pederasty.

So now a new defense has had to be hastily improvised. It is argued that, during his time as archbishop of Munich and Freising, Germany, Ratzinger was more preoccupied with doctrinal questions than with mere disciplinary ones. Of course, of course: The future pope had his eyes fixed on ethereal and divine matters and could not be expected to concern himself with parish-level atrocities. This cobbled-up apologia actually repays a little bit of study. What exactly were these doctrinal issues? Well, apart from punishing a priest who celebrated a Mass at an anti-war demonstration—which incidentally does seem to argue for a "hands-on" approach to individual clergymen—Ratzinger's chief concern appears to have been that of first communion and first confession. Over the previous decade, it had become customary in Bavaria to subject small children to their first communion at a tender age but to wait a year until they made their first confession. It was a matter of whether they were old enough to understand. Enough of this liberalism, said Ratzinger, the first confession should come in the same year as the first communion. One priest, the Rev. Wilfried Sussbauer, reports that he wrote to Ratzinger expressing misgivings about this and received "an extremely biting letter" in response.

So it seems that 1) Ratzinger was quite ready to take on individual priests who gave him any trouble, and 2) he was very firm on one crucial point of doctrine: Get them young. Tell them in their infancy that it is they who are the sinners. Instill in them the necessary sense of guilt. This is not at all without relevance to the disgusting scandal into which the pope has now irretrievably plunged the church he leads. Almost every episode in this horror show has involved small children being seduced and molested in the confessional itself. To take the most heart-rending cases to have emerged recently, namely the torment of deaf children in the church-run schools in Wisconsin and Verona, Italy, it is impossible to miss the calculated manner in which the predators used the authority of the confessional in order to get their way. And again the identical pattern repeats itself: Compassion is to be shown only to the criminals. Ratzinger's own fellow clergy in Wisconsin wrote to him urgently—by this time he was a cardinal in Rome, supervising the global Catholic cover-up of rape and torture—beseeching him to remove the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who had comprehensively wrecked the lives of as many as 200 children who could not communicate their misery except in sign language. And no response was forthcoming until Father Murphy himself appealed to Ratzinger for mercy—and was granted it.

For Ratzinger, the sole test of a good priest is this: Is he obedient and discreet and loyal to the traditionalist wing of the church? We have seen this in his other actions as pope, notably in the lifting of the excommunication of four bishops who were members of the so-called Society of St. Pius X, that group of extreme-right-wing schismatics founded by Father Marcel Lefebvre and including theHolocaust-denying Richard Williamson. We saw it when he was a cardinal, defending the cultish and creepy Legion of Christ, whose fanatical leader managed to father some children as well as to shield the molestation of many more. And we see it today, when countless rapists and pederasts are being unmasked. One of those accused in the Verona deaf-school case is the late archbishop of the city, Giuseppe Carraro. Next up, if our courts can find time, will be the Rev. Donald McGuire, a serial offender against boys who was also the confessor and "spiritual director" for Mother Teresa. (He, too, found the confessional to be a fine and private place and made extensive use of it.)

This is what makes the scandal an institutional one and not a matter of delinquency here and there. The church needs and wants control of the very young and asks their parents to entrust their children to certain "confessors," who until recently enjoyed enormous prestige and immunity. It cannot afford to admit that many of these confessors, and their superiors, are calcified sadists who cannot believe their luck. Nor can it afford to admit that the church regularly abandoned the children and did its best to protect and sometimes even promote their tormentors. So instead it is whiningly and falsely asserting that all charges against the pope—none of them surfacing except from within the Catholic community—are part of a plan to embarrass him.

This hasn't been true so far, but it ought to be true from now on. This grisly little man is not above or outside the law. He is the titular head of a small state. We know more and more of the names of the children who were victims and of the pederasts who were his pets. This is a crime under any law (as well as a sin), and crime demands not sickly private ceremonies of "repentance," or faux compensation by means of church-financed payoffs, but justice and punishment. The secular authorities have been feeble for too long but now some lawyers and prosecutors are starting to bestir themselves. I know some serious men of law who are discussing what to do if Benedict tries to make his proposed visit to Britain in the fall. It's enough. There has to be a reckoning, and it should start now.

Christopher Hitchens Rewrites the "Commandments."

And how many centuries overdue is it? This list culminates an excellent article in Vanity Fair about the so-called Ten Commandments (of which there are several versions--so much for sacrosanctity). I believe Hitchens has a book shortly forthcoming on the subject, so this can serve as a primer.

Though he does not, I'll put them in list form for easy reference. He begins--

It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words “Thou shalt not.” But who cannot summon the confidence to say:

• Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color.
• Do not ever use people as private property.
  
• Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.
• Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
• Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?
• Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly.
• Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
• Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us.
• Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions.
• Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.

In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Amen!

Let The Show Continue

I'm just finished with Richard Dawkins' latest opus, The Greatest Show On Earth: the Evidence For Evolution.

This book follows on his very successful The God Delusion, which was one of a suite of recent books (comprising what is called "the new atheism") seeking to specifically debunk religious faith. Much as I sympathize with and cheer the motivating force behind The God Delusion, I'm happy to find that The Greatest Show On Earth returns Dawkins to his home field of biology and Darwinian evolution. As I've said before, this is where "Darwin's rottweiler" is at his very best. The God Delusion is most certainly not ineffective, but I think (as I said in my review of that book) the people who most need to have their faith in the literal truth of the Bible shaken will refuse to read a book with this title, and those who are eager to read this book are likely already converted. I like to think--I hope--people even of fairly staunch faith are willing to read a book on biology (though these people have been increasingly marginalized by evangelical Christianity and the mantra that education is "liberal" and science is somehow subversive and not to be trusted). Faced with the simple evidence of the world, it becomes much harder to dismiss Darwin.

Has anyone done more in modern times to promote Darwin's miraculous and far-reaching discovery than Richard Dawkins? Recently retired from the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, Dawkins has written 10 or so books about evolution, both explaining Darwinian theories with fantastic lucidity and wit and also putting forth some theories of his own. This body of work--The Selfish Gene, the Extended Phenotype, the Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, River Out of Eden--constitute a massive and eloquent popular primer of evolution for the non-scientist, a magnificent treasure trove of human wisdom. And now The Greatest Show On Earth, which is a most worthy addition to the canon.

This book takes the form of the others, starting with simple precepts and using evolutionary evidence as exhibits in an increasingly-complex argument. Some of the chapter titles reference creationist claims: Only a theory?; The primrose path to macro-evolution; Missing link? What do mean, 'missing?'; The ark of the continents; etc. He begins his book with some very basic parsing of terminology, addressing common (and clumsy) misuses of the terms 'theory' and 'selection,' and talking about basic scientific methodology, including radiometric clocks (with a delightful explanation of how radio dating definitively debunked the so-called Shroud of Turin) and the like. He spends some time--a lot of time throughout the book--debunking the bumbling failure of creationists to grasp the concepts and ramifications of evolution; for example, creationists love to claim that evolution posits that "humans descended from monkeys" ("so why are there still monkeys?" they ask triumphantly). The truth, of course, is that humans and, say, chimps share a common ancestor which is neither human nor chimp. There are a lot of these not-so-subtleties that are regularly misunderstood or willfully misconstrued. He talks about the lessons learned from artificial selection, which has given us every breed of dog. Talking of Darwin's time:

Everybody knew about artificial selection, or at least everybody with any experience of farms or gardens, dog shows or dovecotes. But it was Darwin who first spotted that you don't have to have a choosing agent. The choice can be made automatically by survival--or failure to survive.

From simple steps he moves into more and more complex elements until we have a whole picture of evolved life before us. And along the way we are treated to a delightful (and instructive) assemblage of nature's oddities, including remarkable instances of co-evolved, codependent species and of effectively unrelated creatures evolving to similar habitats from very different backgrounds to arrive separately at amazingly similar forms. Specifically, he talks of Australian marsupials (marsupials exist most prolifically in Australia), some now recently extinct, which are the ecological equivalents of mammals: wolves, cats, rabbits, moles, shrews, lions, flying squirrels and more (some taking very similar forms). It's a fabulous argument, and he does not tread lightly.

Once again, I am sorry to have to take a sledgehammer to so small and fragile a nut, but I have to do so because more than 40 percent of the American people believe literally in the story of Noah's Ark. We should be able to ignore them and get on with our science, but we can't afford to because they control school boards, they home-school their children to deprive them of access to proper science teachers and they include many members of the United States congress, some state governors and even presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

There's an especially fascinating section about a long-running experiment by bacteriologist Richard Lenski at Michigan State University involving e. coli bacteria (an introduction to which can be read here and the project website here). I'd really love to reprint Dawkins' whole section, as the experiment is so bloody fascinating; but alas, it's too long for me to type. But given the asexual nature of bacterial reproduction and the rapidity with which they reproduce, the experiment has enabled the scientists to closely observe tens of thousands of bacterial generations. The study has gone on multiplying flasks daily for years, and has demonstrated a great deal of evolution right before the experimenters' eyes. (It's thrilling to see the creationist blubbering over the incontrovertible findings of this ongoing experiment. The creationist weasel Andy Schlafly, head of the website Conservapedia--because the world found in Wikipedia just doesn't have the proper right-wing slant, apparently--has tried with risible feebleness to take on Dr. Lenski, only to have his ass handed back to him in a smoldering heap.)

The breadth of the body of knowledge encompassed in Dawkins' arguments here is really astounding, taking in mathematics and geology and archeology and biology and morphology and on and on. I should be thrilled to be conversant in 1/4 of these fields, and yet Professor Dawkins brings them all to bear on his argument, finding supporting evidence in nearly everything he looks at. The end result is such a wall of evidence and argumentative weight that one would need to put one's head in the sand to turn away from it. But there remain a lot of people who do just that, and in a depressing variety of ways:

Shooting the messenger is one of humanity's sillier foibles, and it underlies a good slice of the opposition to evolution that I mentioned in the Introduction. "Teach children that they are animals, and they'll behave like animals." Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality, that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false. It is quite astonishing how many people cannot grasp this simple point of logic.

This reminds me of a similar passage from The God Delusion (which I quoted in the review above):

There must be a God, the argument goes, because, if there were not, life would be empty, pointless, futile, a desert of meaninglessness and insignificance. How can it be necessary to point out that the logic falls at the first fence? Maybe life IS empty. Maybe our prayers for the dead really ARE pointless. To presume the opposite is to presume the truth of the very conclusion we seek to prove. The alleged syllogism is transparently circular. Life without your wife may very well be intolerable, barren and empty, but this unfortunately doesn't stop her being dead. There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.

He finishes with an epilogue that shows a series of recent statistics of religiousness of various nations, and of the specific content of these peoples' beliefs. America fares quite badly in these statistics, and with our continuing failure to emphasize math and science in public education (a problem which assuredly does not exist in China), the outlook of our country to remain in a privileged position is grim indeed.

For this and so many reasons, I think this book--and all of Dawkins' work--is not just recommended but vitally important. I wonder at his energy and stamina to face this fire of ignorance all day, every day.

From Paula Kirby

This comes from yesterday's On Faith column at WaPo. I really don't think a waterhead like Pat Robertson needs answering, and in any case he's been ripped apart on this and so many other subjects by so many. But this piece by Paula Kirby seems particularly well-constructed and aimed and I'm compelled to repost it. Paula Kirby, the WaPo site says, is a writer and former Christian living in Scotland.

Suffering and the vain quest for significance

Question: Many have criticized Pat Robertson's suggestion that the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti was the work of the devil or a form of divine punishment. But if one believes God is good and intervenes in the world, why does God allow innocents to suffer? Why does God allow Haiti to suffer so much? What is the best scriptural text or explanation of that problem you've ever read?

It is the year 2010. Over the last three to four centuries we have amassed a huge amount of knowledge about the Earth and its place in the universe. There is much yet to learn, but the knowledge we have acquired would have astounded our forefathers.

Thanks to marvelously sophisticated technology, itself the result of an accurate understanding of the workings of the universe, humans have walked on the moon. We have landed explorer robots on Mars, and have photographed the nucleus of Halley's Comet, the surface of Betelgeuse and new planetary systems forming in Orion. We know the approximate composition of the individual planets and comets, we know the approximate number of stars in our galaxy and of galaxies in our universe. We know the size of the universe, and its age, and the forces that drive its expansion. We know which stars are hot and which are cool, which ones are new and which are ancient beyond all imagining. We have detected planets in other solar systems, and know their size and the shape of their orbit, and whether it is possible that they contain any of the chemical prerequisites for life. Back on our own planet, we know how it was formed, and when. We can read its history, inscribed forever in the rocks. We know what forms its surface and the underlying mantle, and can make an informed guess at what makes up its core. We know how life evolved from its earliest, infinitely primitive forms into the staggering array of species we see around us today. We know what causes night and day, the seasons, and the tides. We can predict to the minute when the next solar eclipse will take place, and from where it will be visible.

And - crucially, in the context of this question - we know exactly what causes earthquakes.

All this knowledge is new to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has been in existence for at least the last 100,000 years, perhaps more, and for the vast majority of our collective past, we had no proper explanations for any of these things. No wonder, then, that our forefathers imagined that storms and tempests, floods and droughts, famines and disease, volcanoes and earthquakes were caused by demons, or at the hands of divine beings whose wrath they themselves had been so unfortunate as to incur.

Our primitive ancestors - and even our more recent ones - had no knowledge of plate tectonics, of subduction zones or sea-floor spreading. How could they know of the pressures that build up along faults in the Earth's crust, sometimes over hundreds and hundreds of years, but no less inexorably for that? To them earthquakes, when they came, were not just terrifying and devastating - as indeed they still are today - they were utterly mysterious, beyond comprehension, totally inexplicable. And yet humans have minds that seek explanations and so, in the absence of scientific understanding, they resorted to the supernatural. We can forgive them for that: any apparent explanation, no matter how preposterous, no matter how harsh, is comforting compared with the terror of unknowing. The idea of a cosmic battle between Good and Evil, or of natural disasters as the acts of a wrathful deity, must have seemed reasonable enough, in the absence of anything better.

But we have no such excuse today. The physical processes that cause natural disasters are well understood, and we know that they proceed in total blind indifference to us, our wishes, our fears, our hopes, our desires, our virtues or our peccadilloes.

To be fair, even most religious people acknowledge this (how could they not?). Indeed, it is this very realization that underlies the question of how a loving God could permit such suffering, a question that has kept generation after generation of theologians in a living. As ever, instead of looking at the reality of the world around them and drawing their conclusions about the nature - or even existence! - of the god they worship based on what they see, the theologians start with their desired answer - God is good! - and then contort themselves into ever more desperate intellectual non-sequiturs in order to twist the evidence to fit that answer.

The explanations (sic) that they come up with fall into three broad categories:

1. God wanted to create humans, and human life is only possible where there are plate tectonics and, consequently, earthquakes. (That life is only possible on Earth because of plate tectonics may well be true; but how odd that theologians should wish to claim that the all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful creator of the laws of physics could not have created them so as to permit life without the kind of suffering that plate tectonics cause.)

2. That God created the world perfect, and that such suffering was never part of his purpose for us, but that human rebellion opened the door to our suffering.

3. It's a mystery.

The third of these can be dismissed since it just means, 'Yes, you're right, it really doesn't make sense, does it? But I want you to go on believing it anyway.'

The first two are more interesting, because you will note that they put humans well-and-truly center stage. It's all about us! Yippee! We are important! So important that the whole universe was created with us in mind! And so important that our misdeeds are enough to change all the laws of physics!

We humans cannot even survive in the vast majority of the conditions prevailing on our own planet. The Earth's atmosphere extends to about 60 miles above us, but we can only breathe at altitudes lower than roughly one and a quarter miles above sea-level. 70% of the surface of the Earth is covered by water, an element in which we are unable to survive unaided for more than a few hours. The deepest point of the oceans is nearly 36,000 feet; but if we venture unaided more than about 180 feet down, the pressure will crush us. Too hot and we die. Too cold and we die. Too high and we die. Too low and we die. And humans have only been around for less than one-hundredth of one percent of Earth's history. And this, on a planet supposedly created for us!

It gets worse. This tiny planet is not even a pinprick on the scale of the universe, a universe which is something like 40 billion light years in size. What is that in miles? The distance traveled by light in a single year is 5.87 trillion miles, so I'll leave you to multiply that by 40 billion and find space for all the zeroes.

The idea that any of this has anything at all to do with us, that it was created with us in mind, or that our 'sinfulness' has had any effect whatsoever on the majestic, monumental and utterly indifferent laws of physics, is egotism of the highest order. Not bad, for a religion that preaches humility!

It would be comical, hilarious, side-splittingly funny - but for one thing. This obsession with human behavior and the ugly conviction that there is some kind of link between suffering and sin, whether individual, national or original, leads to the kind of repugnant, sickening, disgraceful attitudes voiced by Pat Robertson this last week. Just when the rest of the world is overwhelmed with compassion, with the urgent desire to help those whose suffering is beyond our capacity to imagine it (with initiatives such as Non-Believers Giving Aid, for instance), Pat Robertson and others like him are saying, 'They brought it on themselves'. It is not enough, apparently, that they should be traumatized, grieving and in pain. They should be feeling guilty as well. It is not enough that we should help them. We should judge them too.

Give me the indifference of the laws of physics rather than the hubristic self-righteousness of the religious any day.

By Paula Kirby | January 22, 2010

WGSWJU? (Which Gun Sight Would Jesus Use?)

A posting from Ed Brayton yesterday drew my attention to a Michigan company, Trijicon, which has been supplying precision gun sights to the US Army and other armies of the world with biblical citations embossed on their exterior casings.

Quite apart from the whole Establishment Clause business (in which conservative Christians seem blithely disinterested), can one fathom anything more inappropriate than to put biblical citations on equipment designed--with great precision and care--to kill people? How deeply fucked-up is that? Not that the Bible doesn't give ample justification for the maiming, torture and murder of others; the Old Testament is a pretty bloody place to visit. But these citations seem to be from the New Testament, from the whole Jesus-loves-you-and-is-peaceful-and-forgiving part of the cobbled-together collection of scattered mythologies that constitute the Christian holy book.

(If the fundamental issue eludes us, we need only change the Bible references to Koran references to see it more clearly.)

Now the Associated Press has announced that the New Zealand military is filing the citations off, and other countries are holding reviews of the matter to see how to proceed.

Here's hoping for big fines and a shuttered company. And here's hoping for another lesson that religion is a private matter, a matter between an individual and the voices in his head.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

Here's an excellent little morsel courtesy of Ed Brayton over at Dispatches From the Culture Wars.

It appears that someone has invented a no-touch holy water dispenser for churches in an effort to allay people's fears of contracting Swine Flu from the community finger bowl!

How magnificent is that?! What has become of these people's faith?

Pick your bedfellow. Either the water is holy or it isn't. Clearly one should have at least enough faith to be assured that holy water can't transmit disease (unless, of course, it's meant as a direct punishment from the gods--in which case one had better step up and take one's lashes).

(P.S. How do we know the H1N1 virus doesn't have a "soul?")

Family My Ass

A lesson in irony: one of my pet peeves about the poisonous Faux News is their use of fear and anger and lies to sell their partisan view of the world. Glenn Beck (and Hannity and O'Reilly and Coulter, etc., etc.) bounces from one world-threatening conspiracy to the next, all in the guise of "exposing the sordid truth which the liberal media is trying to keep from you."

It's funny how often these claims are a spooky mirror-image of reality, an attempt to obscure conservative attempts to perpetrate exactly the sin of which liberals are accused.

In my current read, Republican Gomorrah (review to follow), the book's author Max Blumenthal talks about a secret society called The Family, a powerful organization centered in Washington, DC that seeks to implement and spread a fundamentalist christian worldview. It is an anti-democratic entity, one dedicated to gaining power and influence without the burden of making its case to the voting public. The modus operandi is rather to gain power by secretly supporting candidacies of Family members to elected positions, thereby packing the halls of power with Family-friendly minions. It's all secretly done, of course; no one openly admits 1) to being a Family member, or 2) what the Family's goals are; no candidate admits to getting support from the Family, nor do they run on a Family platform. Blumenthal names a number of politicians who belong to the organization (Wikipedia names 11 current Senators and nine Representatives as current members, among others), none of whom, naturally, will talk about the Family or confirm / deny their membership in it (though lots of people will acknowledge the Family's influence in their lives). Many of them live at the organization's properties in Washington called the C Street Center.

Today I was reading up a bit about the Stupak-Pitts Amendment--a fascist little 11th hour addendum to the House health care bill, a sop thrown to white men which played some role in getting the bill passed. And I was surprised to learn that a number of Democrats voted for this bit of institutionalized misogyny.

All are reputed to be "Family" members.

This led to a very interesting little exposé from Rachel Maddow:



Her guest here is Jeff Sharlet, author of the book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (rapidly added to my to-read list). I'm interested in the Catholic angle he talks about at the end. It's like a clever little escape valve for public anxiety. I wonder how calculated this is? Or are Catholics just happy to take credit for someone else carrying their water? We can all roll our collective eyes at the Catholic Church's desire to implement a theocracy here; but it appears there's a new enemy of democracy in town. One which no one will talk about.

We should be outraged. Just like Glenn Beck says, except for real reasons and not the lies that keep him eating lobster every night.

That any woman would support (let alone celebrate!) this amendment--a group of white men determining en masse what all women should and should not be allowed to do concerning their own bodies!--is absolutely stupefying. What's next? A repeal of voting rights? The illegalization of mothers working? Why not just mandate the wearing of a large No. 2 on the outer layer of clothing to connote women's second-class citizenry?

I'm accustomed to conservatives hypocritically crowing about Freedom while blithely working to restrict the freedoms of others; I did not expect this war on women from Democrats.

Pat Condell for Pope!

British comedian and atheist Pat Condell has an excellent series of YouTube rants on religion. Here are his two most recent.

Here he talks about Islamic efforts to curtail religious free speech, particularly giving warning to America--our Constitution, with its Establishment Clause and First Amendment, is one of the few beacons of light for religious freedom--about this impending threat to our founding principles.

And here he waxes eloquent on organized religion, particularly the tyranny of the clergy.

Even if one disagrees with him (which I do not), I think there is great value in exercising skepticism and critical thinking--in all aspects of life; we should adopt views which we have reason to adopt and not because we are told we must.

Where I Take Sam Harris to the Mat

(...well, in the alternate fantasy universe where I actually know something Mr. Harris doesn't.)

During some recent long drives, I've been listening again to the two hour audio program of the Four Horsemen, a discussion about religion with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. These four are the spearhead of a burgeoning atheist movement, all four brilliant writers and thinkers and educators who seek to put rationality front and center in our discussion about religious matters.

I'm entirely in these guys' camp, of course, as numerous posts and book reports will attest. But after listening to this discussion a few times, there's a thing that gnaws at me. About halfway through the second hour, the four are discussing whether they would prefer to see churches empty, and there's a consensus, more or less, that what is desired is not that there be no churches, but rather that we evolve a different kind of church.

And in this context, Sam Harris makes this statement [emphasis mine]:

I think there's a place for the sacred in our lives, under some construal that doesn't presuppose any bullshit. I think there's a usefulness to seeking profundity as a matter of our attention. And our neglect of this area as atheists at times makes even our craziest opponents seem wiser than we are. Take someone like Sayyid Qutb, who's as crazy as it gets--Osama bin Laden's favorite philosopher. He came out to Greeley, Colorado, I think, around 1950 and spent a year in America, and noticed that all his American hosts were spending all their time gossiping about movie stars and trimming their hedges and coveting each others' automobiles, and he came to believe that America, or the West, was so trivial in its occupation, and so materialistic that it had to be destroyed. Now this shouldn't be construed as giving any credence to his worldview, but he has a point: there is something trivial and horrible about the day to day fascinations of most of us and of most people most of the time. There is a difference between really using your attention wisely in a meaningful way, and our perpetual distraction. And traditionally only religion has tried to enunciate and clarify that difference. And I think that's a lapse in our focus.

Far be it from me to critique Sam Harris--whose writings I love and esteem--but I think he's wrong here on several counts, criticizing what is not so toxic and quite giving (even guarded) credit where none is due.

First, the person who does not grasp the profundity in cosmology or in the flowerings of Darwinian selection (with all that follows on from it) has not in the least grasped these subjects--to say nothing of music or literature or art.

Second, the head-in-the-sand mystic doesn't get to determine what is worthy for anyone but himself; and inventing a self-validating mythology which demands that IT is the essence of the profound doesn't give a scrap of validity to a made-up story or to its claims to profundity. Questions about what the universe is and how it exists and about how humanity came to exist and even about how we should interface with each other; these things certainly touch the profound, but the answers are only profound to the extent that they give us a glimpse of something real or probable. And I submit that religious answers to the big questions are fantastic, politically-motivated guesses, and answers to the small questions have nothing to do with religion.

Third, the realization that people occupy themselves with the trivial is Day One of Human Psychology 101 (the non-credit course). People in virtually all cultures ARE obsessed with just the things Harris mentions, but clearly these attentions serve a function (even if we haven't fully sussed it all out). The status contest with others in our community; the love of gossip as an exchange of social currency; a fascination with celebrity--these things are in no way confined to America or the West. And much of this behavior appears to be hard-wired, part of the psychological mechanisms that provide an aspirational ladder and social cohesion and general group function. In any case, chatter about celebrity and hedge-trimming and automobile-coveting is harmless, even if shallow, and infinitely to be preferred to the ascetic sociopath bent on genocide if we don't see things his way.

A variant of this concession to religion comes up in almost every debate between the religious and the secularist. The religionist typically trots out the argument that there's a place for religious contemplation because scientific knowledge--by its own admission!--is limited. But there's no traction to this argument: our knowledge of the universe and philosophy are simply what they are, no matter what games we play or how we pretend (and this knowledge has increased exponentially because of the scientific method and very much despite organized religion). Whatever it is that science cannot answer, I guarantee that the religious leader doesn't know the answer either. On the contrary, pointing out what science does not yet know only shines the spotlight on all that religion claims but can't possibly know. The deus ex machina leaves your question still unanswered, and it lacks the dignity of the simple truth: we don't know.

I think Sam Harris approaches this question as one who has experimented with, and is interested in, consciousness-expanding by way of drugs and mysticism. As a practitioner of neither of these things, I cannot claim there to be no basis for his thinking. But I think I can say this: the religious foot in the door of the sacred to which Harris alludes is a reality which applies to the tiniest handful of people. I simply don't believe that most people's grasp of the profound extends beyond the outer reaches of normal curiosity, whether exercised in a setting of religion or science or art. I reject the idea that religious contemplation opens up vast worlds of profundity--except for those who would think profoundly in any case. I've spent my whole career working around default-religious people, and they certainly are not attuned to the profound in any demonstrable way.

There is awe enough to be found in the real world, in an honest assessment of what we do and do not know. Fairy tales only cheapen and brutalize the body of real knowledge amassed by our species on this speck of a planet.

A Toast To The Hitch

From Richard Dawkins's blog:



(The whole piece, lecture and Q&A session, is wonderful and can be found here.)

Sam Harris on Francis Collins

I had a post mostly ready to go a week or so ago about President Obama's nomination of Francis Collins to head the National Institute of Health. I was alerted to this by a typically brilliant Op-Ed column in the New York Times by Sam Harris.

Now I see that the NYT piece was a condensation of a much longer piece that Harris has subsequently posted on The Reason Project. It's a lengthy post, but it really excoriates the man who would control $30 billion in public money for research in public health issues.

I didn't manage to push the send button on my original post because I could not improve on Harris's original NYT piece--for my money, nobody can improve on Sam Harris. But the longer version is so worth the trouble and deserves wider dissemination.