C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

Watch episode 11 of Louis C. K.'s show Louie on Hulu, or through Netflix instant watch if you have it. The show is normally a comedy, but this episode isn't.

You know, I could write several pages about it. But I'll give my blood pressure a rest.

The phrase "the Alpha Male Monkey" may be the most useful new explanatory tool I've encountered in years. paranthropus gave it to me in a recent LJ post about primate group psychology. It was an inspirational and motivational insight into the evolutionary biology of my psychology which has kept me up at night thinking of the implications. I wrote about it in this subsequent LJ post, but it occurred to me that this is valuable for explaining myself to bible-believing Christians.

We're genetically programmed to see an Alpha Male in our primate pack as the source of truth and moral law. This explains the difficulty I have in communicating alternative models of truth and moral law to bible believers. It's not that they reject the model I present, it's that they literally don't know what I'm saying. It's a mental block. We take away the concept of the Alpha Male Monkey in the sky, and they think we've declared truth and morality to be nonexistent, because to them, "right" is defined as: "whatever the Alpha Male Monkey says." By definition. ( I put the discussion behind this link ...with drawings. ) Morality doesn't look like this:

It looks like this:
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The village of Hell, Michigan threw a party yesterday because the date was 06/06/06. My friends and I visited, and found it to be strangely worthwhile.

It's a large clearing in a forest. I had to drive all over Hell's half acre to get there. The road to Hell is hemmed in on both sides with trees, and on 6/6/6, it was also lined with cars on either side for a couple of miles. The townsfolk clearly were insufficiently prepared; they did not expect tens of thousands of people to break Hell wide open. They had good intentions-- but they paved the road to Hell with asphalt.

The three buildings were the general store, the "Screams" ice cream shop where Hell freezes over, and the Dam Site Inn. Behind this restaurant I visited a river with a dam across it. This town is where Hell Creek is dammed.

It's said that "wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in thereby," but that was not the case. Other than the scattering of homes, the only three buildings in Hell had lines stretching out in which one could wait for an hour, more reminiscent of the line for Peter's pearly gates. Hell is long lines.

There were a lot of signs to stick your head through and take pictures with; hearses painted with macabre and beautiful illustrations; a bell with a huge wooden gong; souveneirs for $6.66; people wearing elaborate monster costumes and handbaskets; and a singing, guitar-strumming vampire from whom we bought CDs. And yet despite the quick depletion of everything to see in Hell, and almost nothing to do, the occupants of Hell had no fury like a woman scorned. Instead there were smiles everywhere. It was the typical fairgoing crowd, made up of hundreds of curiosity seekers from most walks of life, plus massive quantities of bikers and several extremely visible police. I expected to say "never was there a more wretched hive of scum and villiany" but ... no. Not so much.

I arrived too late to see the main attraction, which was a street preacher. He warned the revelers of impending catastrophe and offered salvation, until the bikers blew an enormous cloud of tire-smoke on him. (Image from the Detroit Free Press is here.) And the street preachers walked away; that means on 6/6/6 the bikers made the lame to walk. But they were still lame.

I'm kind of upset that I missed it because that's really what 6/6/6 in Hell Michigan is all about. We were there to celebrate that man's insane mythology just like we celebrate a TV show or a comic book. These tales would not have come down to us through the centuries without people who took them seriously. He was like that lady I met at a Star Trek convention who said that one day, after she fell down the stairs and hit her head, she started picking up transmissions from the Pliades constellation, and forgot 200 words of Klingon vocabulary.

The original author of the book of Revelation in the New Testament of the Christian Bible didn't take 6-6-6 seriously, and might be amused by the Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia of those who do. The attributes of the Beast, such as this number, were a set of euphemisms he used to represent Emperor Nero, who was persecuting Christians at the time. He couldn't come out and name the things he was talking about because he would get in trouble, so the entire book is full of satirical symbolism. Our own editorial cartoons will probably make no sense 2000 years from now, but I hope they don't become the source of a superstition.

( Images behind this link. )

And so concludes another discussion, this time with someone who says he is "completely objective now as faer [sic] as is humanly possible". According to him, the way to become objective is to stop hardening your heart against Christ, and instead harden your heart against anything other than Christ. I particularly love how he prefaces a statement by saying "LOGIC:" Isn't that cute?

On the one hand he is proud of his higher education and expects me to take his word for it because of this; and on the other hand he simultaneously considers universities to be in the business of deceiving people. He is really impressed with pseudoscientist Creationists who have not published any papers through peer-reviewed journals. In those rare moments where he stops telling me what my motives are and attempts to put together an argument, this is the main thrust. He eventually concludes our exchange with a frustrated series of insults couched in love and friendship. He specifically denies that I got to him, but obviously I did. Poor guy.

Not trusting e-mail alone to keep my records, I am archiving it here even though it will be of limited interest to you. I am also removing the name of my correspondent.
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Remember the woman in Atlanta who was held hostage in March by a courtroom shooter, and said she convinced him to turn himself in by "witnessing" to him out of the Christian book The Purpose-Driven Life?

Record Online News Wire reports her new revelations that he asked her for pot, and not having any pot, she gave him some of her illegal stash of crystal methamphetamine instead. It wasn't supernatural intervention that got the fugitive to relent; it was the gunman snorting the happy-drugs to which Ashley Smith was addicted. But the "life-changing power" of a Godly testimony was given the credit anyway, and Smith started raking in money from church-related marketing. From the article:

"Since Nichols' arrest, Smith has received $70,000 in rewards and has been bombarded with offers for books, movies and speaking engagements. Her ordeal has been held up as an example of the redemptive power of faith."

At one time or another I've faced down most of the arguments listed on this site: Over 300 Proofs of God's Existence collected from discussions with religious people on the Internet Infidels forums. It just keeps getting funnier and funnier.

17. ARGUMENT FROM INTIMIDATION
(1) See this bonfire?
(2) Therefore, God exists.
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From The Onion:

EVANGELICAL SCIENTISTS REFUTE GRAVITY WITH NEW 'INTELLIGENT FALLING' THEORY

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

( Read more... )

Did you really think that every modern bible believer accepts the findings of Copernicus? Witness so-called Creation Science in its purest and least hypocritical form. Geocentricity.com is the homepage of the Biblical Astronomy Association. They attempt to prove the existence of "the firmament" using sophistries and fallacious reasoning clothed in scientific language. All that serves as a good education in how to detect their type of pseudoscience through its comparison with other pseudosciences like Creationism, but when you get to their Credo they unclothe their dishonesty in plain sight:

"...All scientific endeavor which does not accept this revelation from on high without any reservations, literary, philosophical or whatever, we reject as already condemned in its unfounded first assumptions.

We believe that the creation was completed in six twenty-four hour days and that the world is not older than about six thousand years. We maintain that the Bible teaches us of an earth that neither rotates daily nor revolves yearly about the sun; that it is at rest with respect to the throne of him who called it into existence; and that hence it is absolutely at rest in the universe. ..."

{blah blah blah salvation}

" Lastly, the reason why we deem a return to a geocentric astronomy a first apologetic necessity is that its rejection at the beginning of our Modern Age constitutes one very important, if not the most important, cause of the historical development of Bible criticism, now resulting in an increasingly anti-Christian world in which atheistic existentialism is preaching a life that is really meaningless."

So there they blow it by showing their hand and revealing what's really at stake is that they can't mature emotionally and accept the cosmos as it is. As soon as they remove such passages (the same way Creationism was dressed up as Intelligent Design) watch out Kansas school boards. What is really most important about this website is that they acknowledge, and effectively demonstrate with specific passages and arguments about them, that the Christian bible teaches geocentrism and cannot be accepted literally without it. The bible must be taken figuratively.

CHARLESTON, West Virginia (AP) -- Even Jesus Christ can't circumvent the rules for getting a driver's license in West Virginia.

Attempts to prove his name really is Christ have led the man born as Peter Robert Phillips Jr. through a lengthy legal battle and a recent victory in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.( Read more... )Any comment from the man in the middle of this legal tussle?

"Christ is not speaking to the press at this time," Pishevar said.

There is an interesting conversation on saramichigan's blog between those who discard Jesus of Nazareth and those who prefer to salvage the good parts of his teachings. But how can you be a Christian who says Jesus is sometimes wrong? Isn't that a contradiction in terms when it comes to a man who demands nothing less than your complete and utter subjugation? Describing the level of sacrifice that he requires, he compares it to your horrific death by torture: Matthew 10:38; Matthew 10:37-39 Matthew 16:24; Mark 8:34: Mark 8:33-35: Luke 9:23; Luke 9:22-24 You have to brainwash and enslave your mind so that truths contradicting what you are taught can never even be considered: 2 Corinthians 10:5. He doesn't say "follow my ideas," he doesn't say "love is the way," he says "I AM THE WAY. I AM LOVE. I AM PERFECTION PERSONIFIED." The guy is a megalomaniac cult leader.

This is more like the Flaming Eye of Mordor than the cute and harmless depiction so often presented, but even if that were not the case, why should I call myself by the name of a person? Buddhist, Christian, Krishna, or what have you. When you do that, you're attaching yourself to everything about that person, both pro and con, and suddenly you can not admit to any imperfection in that person. It's not enough to appreciate some of their ideas, or you'd name yourself after the ideas, wouldn't you?

For example, there is a good reason that I call myself a libertarian and not a "Randist." Despite her valuable contributions to libertarianism, Ayn Rand was a nasty and unpleasant person who I would not even want to have lunch with. The rightness or wrongness of a message is not dependent on the likeability of the messenger. This is why it's never right to exalt any guru or teacher by labeling one's self by attachment to that person. Even if you can't find a flaw in them, it's a limitation on further impovement. If you glue your feet to the shoulders of the giants on which you stand, you can never get higher. cosette_valjean ultimately decided for this reason to drop the label "Christian" and call herself a "love-ist."

So back to the question for the nice, non-cultist Christians out there: If you call yourself a Christian, but acknowledge that part of Christ's teaching and example is morally wrong, often harmful, and deserves to be rejected, what use is there in keeping the name?