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

Edge.org brought my attention to responses in the letters column of the New York Times (quoted below the cut), by the three atheists most prominently cited in the resurgence of outspoken atheism-- Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. They plead for the simplicity and gentleness of their positions, against the reputations they are acquiring from those who have only heard about them from their detractors. Those who take the time to actually read their books find out that far from over-reaching, cruelty, or arrogance, they gently point out obvious ennobling and enriching insights which it has been impolite to mention.

In a free society, most secularists are far more interested in ending the immunity which religious faith is granted than we are interested in the hopeless folly of attempting to end faith itself. Unfortunately, it seems that faith reacts badly to challenges to its sacred-cow status, resulting in the mischaracterizations of the New Atheists.

A frequent objection is made that Harris, Dawkins and Dennett mischaracterize religion. Exactly what religious adherents are those objectors looking at? It doesn't matter that the top 1% most sophisticated religious people are not as bad as all that. They aren't the 99% who are making problems for us. There is a No True Scotsman fallacy at work here.
Argument: "Religious faith isn't a problem."
Reply: "I'd be wealthy if I had a nickel for every example of family, friends and local leaders in the past couple of months making an appeal to credibility, where no attempt in the slightest has been made to establish that credibility, and any such attempt would be considered disloyal. They call that 'faith'."
Rebuttal: "Well, no true religious faith is a problem." The remaining rebuttal consists of the flavor-of-the-month redefinition of religion and faith to have nothing to do with the tactic we encounter in our lives from about 325 million users of the English word "faith".

Few of those who call the New Atheists "mean" notice the focus on beautiful, ennobling, enriching, and motivational answers offered by secular world views to traditionally religious questions ... even for traditionally religious purposes such as understanding your brain and genes well enough to seek how to be happy and find meaning! This New York Times article about a conference of scientists dealing with religious objections to their findings is typical in that it focuses on how many of them were combative, but in this social climate the article is remarkable that it notices their positive alternative offering at all.
( Read more... )

"Memo May Have Swayed Plan B Ruling in WashingtonPost.com.

One of the silver linings of an administration's dependence on the loudest minority of zealots in its religious base is that they're so loud they open their mouths and insert their feet, as Pat Robertson recently did when he warned Dover PA that God might smite them for voting out the anti-evolutionists on the school board.

A conservative doctor gave a sermon at his church about how his memo to the FDA prevented the availability of a contraceptive. Of course churches tape their sermons because they're in the business of getting their message out. So now this videotape is giving credence to the claims of the contraceptive's supporters that the FDA's rejection of the contraceptive ignored scientific evidence in order to make social decisions for Americans about their private lives. Decide for yourself from his sermon:

---

"I argued from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and he used it through this minority report to influence the decision," Hager said. "Once again, what Satan meant for evil, God turned into good."
...
Hager has been a highly controversial figure because of his strong views against abortion and emergency contraception and in favor of abstinence education. In his October sermon, he said that Christians such as himself were at "war" with people who would take faith and values out of medical care.

---

Does he mean the FDA should reject the contraceptive because Satan meant it for evil? Or does he mean that Satan meant the scientific evidence for evil but God turned it into good? Of course when a person who says that goes on to say he has a "scientific perspective" he means that the evidence he sees happens to go along with what he would still go on believing even if the evidence contradicted it.( 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.

Click here to read a riveting news story on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center. It's a story of child brides, rabid racism, multiple wives, and a secretive, religious dictator. A new Waco confrontation could be imminent.

David Allen Steed leads "a breakaway Mormon sect known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS)."

"In the two years since he became prophet, Jeffs has ordered all dogs shot; closed the town zoo; forbidden television, holidays, movies and music; banned laughter; forbidden swimming and water sports, and sent "God Squads" of young men to inspect residences and report any violations of his edicts."

--From the first page. Reading the story it just gets worse and worse. This is happening in America.

In a recent reply on this blog to rikhei's question
I get the impression that you feel our political system should reflect Christian morality - if that's so, may I ask how you feel about the doctrine of separation of church and state?
sibbidy said:
This country was founded on Christian morality. The seperation of church and state was created so the government would not interfere with the church, not vice versa.

What this fails to take into account is that the involvement of your church in the state is state involvement in church-- just interfering with somebody else's church. If it was Islamic involvement in our government, sibbidy would quickly see a demonstration of this.

The view she expresses is Christian Supremacism, an interpretation of religious freedom identical to that of Islamic Supremacists. The shared idea of these movements is that since their nations have traditions from one particular religion, "freedom of religion" means that other religions are free to practice in privacy as tolerated guests. In this interpretation, the public sphere is a place on which a majority religion can plant a flag as the sole basis for legitimate authority, as Judge Moore did in Alabama, and which currently also exists in Iran.

I'm not sure which I would rather have: a nation under attack by Islamic violence because we hold fast to a principle of separation between church and state, or to defeat Al Quaeda abroad while succumbing to Dr. James Dobson's American Taliban in our laws. But it's clear that the threat from Christian political supremacists will be, and already has been, a greater threat to the personal first-hand experience of you and me than the threat of violence from Muslim political supremacists.

The SF author Orson Scott Card posted an essay to a Mormon website about why Mormonism is incompatible with being openly homosexual.

This may come as a surprise to him, but the argument on which Mr. Card bases his entire essay actually is ethical relativity. Let us take an example. Either raping a woman is wrong because of the suffering of the victim, or it is wrong just because god happened to arbitrarily roll some dice and decree it. Mr. Card is among the type who would say the latter. "Against thee and thee only have I sinned," wrote the Psalmist David addressing god. In other words the suffering of the victim is inconsequential. This is a form of ethical relativism. If wrong is only wrong because of the preferences of a deity, then that preference is arbitrary whim because there is no standard higher than god for a god to judge itself against. If instead, Mr. Card believes that god observes behavior and then conforms his own laws to the evidence based on the suffering of the victims, then he is holding his decisions to an exterior standard and is therefore not god. "Arbitrary" means "held to no exterior standard."

Mr. Card thinks god's will is loving, pure, just and good. This statement can have no meaning in a theistic framework, because what standard is he using to let himself stand as judge and jury over god to say that? Is god's will the standard against which god's will is measured? Then we have said nothing about god's goodness, but only that god's will is god's will. That becomes the arbitrary definition of "good." Then it's only immutable in the sense that it immutably defines morality by its whim from moment to moment. Every time it arbitrarily changes its mind, that change becomes the new definition of morality. If it stays the same forever, so what? It is held to one arbitrary roll of the dice, forever.

The Christian or LDS rules-based moral system cannot accomplish the objectivity which they claim they want from a moral system.

This is because it confuses mere rules with moral truths, and bases morality on a set of rules instead of the other way around. Objective moral truths do not change just because an authority changes a rule-- not even god. If Mr. Card believes they do, then he is a moral relativist, except even worse, because he extends it to a cosmic scale. Only rules are man-made or God-made. Objective morality, on the other hand, cannot be man-made or God-made, it's not made by anybody. 2 + 2 = 4 doesn't need to be decreed by royal fiat. Neither does the fact that unprovoked harm of another person is biased towards you and against them. Theism makes it impossible for moral truths to be objectively real. If there is a god, then, and only then, is morality subjective and relativistic.

However, Mr. Card is right about one thing:

"Those who are not willing or able to obey the rules should honestly admit the fact and withdraw from membership. ...the LDS church, which is founded on the idea that the word of God as revealed through his prophets should determine the behavior of the Saints, is under no obligation to protect some supposed "right" of those members who would like to persuade us that neither God nor the prophets has the authority to regulate them."

I would not stop to urinate on Mr. Card's supposed god and prophets if they were on fire. This is not specifically because I disagree with them on an issue, such as homosexuality, which is just one of many problematic issues with religion. It's because of authoritarianism. Just as we can't learn to do arithmetic by always looking it up on a chart, and refusing to countenance the idea that the chart is wrong -- so too we can't practice ethical reasoning by looking it up in a so-called holy book. Therefore there is nothing so evil in the holy books as the claim that we should unquestioningly get our rules for living from them, rather than from personal reason and observation. The specific errors such as the prohibition on harmless sexual quirks would be easily repaired if it weren't for their Stalinesque attitude toward authority.

Nevertheless, I can't help but agree with Mr. Card that there are no gay Mormons by definition. To claim that his view represents a mere misunderstanding of the book of Mormon, and that the book actually does not prohibit homosexuality, is as absurd as saying that chairman Mao really was a capitalist if you read between the lines, and therefore a capitalist can legitimately claim to be a Maoist.

It's time to draw the line in the sand and step firmly across to the ethical side. The Church of Latter-Day Saints, along with other scripture-following authoritarian religions, have abandoned their responsibilities to individually observe the data of lived experience with a mind to personally weigh the costs and benefits of behaviors.

I grew up listening to the Focus on the Family radio program, and continued listening several years into adulthood. Both there, and in the church I attended in Warren, Michigan, and at Pensacola Christian College, I was exposed to Christian Supremacism. Phrases like "taking back America for God" or "putting King Jesus back on the throne" were commonplace. This is an interpretation of religious freedom identical to that of Islamic Supremacists. The shared idea of these movements is that since their nations have traditions from one particular religion, "freedom of religion" means that other religions are free to practice in privacy as tolerated guests. In this interpretation, the public sphere is a place on which a majority religion can plant a flag as the sole basis for legitimate authority, as Judge Moore did in Alabama.

Christian Supremacists are not a fringe group. If you think I'm being histrionic, read the headlines:
Faithful say their votes carried the day - San Diego Union Tribune
'Moral values' agenda proves edge - Chicago Tribune
Election reinforces U.S. religious divide - Los Angeles Times
Polls show faith, morality issues drew voters to Bush - Newsday
Conservative social values helped forge Bush re-election - San Jose Mercury News
A victory for 'values,' but whose? - Washington Post

Which would you rather have? A nation under attack by Islamic violence because we hold fast to a principle of separation between church and state? Or would you rather defeat Al Quaeda abroad while succumbing to James Dobson's American Taliban in our laws, because we're too afraid of hurting the feelings of Christians? Which one is, and already has been, a greater threat to the personal first-hand experience of you and me?( Read more... )

In my discussions of marriage law (which are frequent) it amazes me to hear gays tell me how conservative they are. You want to hear an irony? Socially, gay-marriage advocates tend to be conservatives who are romanticizing the stone age.( Read more... )we should not allow the state to acknowledge ANY relationships with the special designation of "legal marriage," meaning "this relationship is acceptable to the State but that one is not." Instead they should all be "civil unions" in the eyes of the state, and whether or not you're "married" depends entirely on what your church/synagogue/coven says, if any. The state shouldn't even ask about that. In this I include Christian heterosexual weddings and their "gay-inclusive" update.( Read more... )