“We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace,” Obama stated in his inaugural address.

Within his first few months in office, Obama has already reached that hand of respect out to all corners of the earth, from offers to speak with leaders of Muslim nations to actually visiting heavily Islamic countries , bringing offerings of peace, and an explicit assurance that the United States is not at war with Islam.

Domestically, Obama has reinvigorated the controversial faith-based initiative, favoring religious discrimination in organizations that receive federal funding, and stocking his advisory panel with a heavy majority of theists.

Despite this overt and frequent outreach to religious organizations domestic and foreign, Obama has made no effort to connect with the non-believers he pledged to treat with the same respect and attention as believers. His reference to non-believers seems, in hindsight, to have been nothing other than a hat-tip to the often left-leaning fifteen percent of the nation, most of whom helped him get elected.

Obama has also pledged to seek a new church for himself and his family, subjecting his minor daughters to indoctrination in dogma almost universally rejected by the scientists of the world, with details disagreed upon by nearly every other religious denomination or sect. He has yet to choose one, indicating that he must take into consideration the interference he would cause with church attendance of fellow church members. Why has he not taken into consideration the idea that by choosing to be an active practitioner of an ancient superstitious ritual, he interferes with the ability of both non-believers and those who believe in different superstitions to be treated with respect and equality in a nation founded with an explicit separation of church and state?

President Obama, pick yourself a church along with your wife. Let your children play in the White House playground, or have them tutored by someone who respects reality and can encourage them to be skeptical instead of dogmatic. And then make a surprise visit to a Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, or Sam Harris lecture/debate, or an atheist meetup. You might get some shit from the fundamentalists, but didn’t you say something about reaching out to everyone, despite their beliefs? You reached out to one of the most hated homophobes, Rick Warren, for your invocation. What’s stopping you from reaching out to people who don’t happen to share your monotheistic point of view?

—

This article is a rebuttal to the Fox News Blog comment “BILL SAMMON: When Will Obama Go to Church?” by Bill Sammon, Managing Editor, Washington Bureau, FOX News Channel, which, out of all the things that someone could find fault about Obama over, chooses to attack Obama’s lack of church attendance since his swearing-in.

First, we start off with the imbecilic local government in Clearwater, Florida, who first fined a store owner for having upon his store wall an image of a fish of the type that he sold in the store (violating a code against store owners having on display a depiction of something the store sells — uhm, that makes sense), and then was fined yet again for him covering it up with a naked picture of his wife! No, just kidding. Actually, he was fined again for covering it up with the U.S. Constitution. According to the St. Petersburg Times, the ACLU is suing the city of Clearwater, alleging that it has violated the shopkeeper’s First Amendment rights. Pshaw. What First Amendment?

Next, Vjack asserts that a qualified apology (a non-apology apology) isn’t really an apology, especially with respect to the kind of public apology that seems expected from those responsible for what is being claimed to be a racist cartoon. Although Vjack has his points (when doesn’t he?), the most interesting part of his article is the comments, which lean toward suggesting that an apology isn’t necessary at all. Particularly in cases where either the meaning is misunderstood, or if the would-be apologizer meant to do whatever it was that caused offense. I agree with Vjack that people should take responsibility for their actions, but I also don’t think that people should apologize for something non-existent caused by a misunderstanding, when there was no intent to do harm. But I mean that as a general principle — no “default” knee-jerk apologies; that doesn’t mean there aren’t cases where it’s in everyone’s best interest for someone to make a real, formal apology. Unfortunately, though, in this world, an apology, even when there’s no actual harm or intent to harm, is often perceived as pleading guilty, and it’s possible that the idea behind not giving a “real” apology is really just a way of saying, “Look, this isn’t what you think it is, and if I apologize for it, you’ll think you were justified in thinking it was what you think it is.” Apologies shouldn’t be evidentiary (except maybe while being interrogated by police), but they are.

This burns. Jesse at Rant & Reason brings to light the fact that a sole Colorado legislator voted against a bill that would require HIV tests for pregnant women (to ensure the health of the foetus/baby), specifically because HIV “stems from sexual promiscuity” and that he didn’t want to “remove the negative consequences that take place from poor behavior and unacceptable behavior.” What a crock! Read the article if you want to be further disgusted by the inhumanity of some of the idiots we elect to represent our interests.

As I re-Tweeted on Twitter the other day, Christopher Hitchens was on Lou Dobbs (no, not like that!), and I’ll let PZ Myers at Pharyngula give the rundown, because I’ve had a shitty week. The issue is the UN’s proposed resolution banning blasphemy. (It’d make it a crime in the U.S. to criticize religion (specifically Islam). WTF!). Fuck Islam. Fuck Mohammed, Muhammed, Muhammad, Mohinder, whomever. Where was that First Amendment again? Oh, that’s right, we don’t have one. Fifty-fucking-seven nations supporting this!?!? If it passes, the U.S. should leave the UN. “Universal human rights exist whether religion recognizes them or not,” says Hitchens. Woot.

Oh, hey, remember when I said that there’s no First Amendment? I meant that we civilians, we “people” don’t have First Amendment rights. Apparently, though, government entities do. WTF? According to The Legal Satyricon, the U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously held “that a city’s government has a right to decide which donated monuments to display on municipal property.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State suggests dropping prayers and invocations at political rallies. “The only thing worse than having these prayers in the first place is to have them vetted, because it entangles the White House in core theological matters.”

And that’s it for this first and last edition of February Friday Fun, which is just some name I made up just now, because “Daily Dose” was just too alliterative for me.

The targets of my deep-seated, unrelenting, merciless hatred?

The men and women who condone the stoning to death of a 13-year-old girl.

For being the victim of rape.¹

No one on this planet should ever sit back and relax comfortably with thoughts of how pleasant this world is (for them) until everyone even remotely considering such a heinous act are utterly wiped from the face of this earth. I’m not advocating genocide. I’m advocating justice, and an end to fatal sexism, fatal racism, and any other type of discrimination founded on religion or prejudice that ends in pain, suffering, death, or other injury.

She begged for mercy.

As she was taken to the place to be stoned, she asked what they wanted from her.

“We will do,” they replied, “what Allah has instructed us.”

She pleaded for her life. “Don’t kill me,” she pleaded, “Don’t kill me.”

In a football field, the men forced her into a hole and buried up to her neck.

A thousand witnesses stood by, watching.

Then, over 50 men hurled stones at the 13-year-old Somali rape victim.

They hurled stones until they thought she was dead.

There was some confusion. Nurses went over to her to determine whether she was still alive.

Yes, she was still alive.

So, they re-buried her and the men continued to stone her.

To death.

She died because three men raped her.

This is Shar’iah law.²

This is religion manifest in law.

We consider ourselves icons of worldwide justice. We rescue small countries like Kuwait from oppressive dictator invaders like Saddam Hussein. We later oust him and advocate for his death for his crimes against humanity. We stick our aquiline nose into whatever business around the world seems to favor our own interests, but we ignore these little religious sacrifices because, well, we can’t be intolerant, can we?

We do need to be intolerant. We do need to protect one’s right to think and speak freely, but we do not need to protect one’s right to act, especially when that action results in injury to another, and even more especially if that act has somehow been justified by the actor based on religious belief. Religion itself may be untouchable — it’s a concept. But the religious are not, should not be untouchable. Why aren’t we sending in forces to stop this? What happened to the sanctity of life? Is it void because she’s Somalian? Has she somehow waived her right to life because she was forcibly penetrated by the men who likely participated in her stoning? Is it because she’s not white? How about because Somalia doesn’t have a lot of oil? Or that because last time we went there, we got our asses kicked — by the people we went in to “protect”?

We are hypocrites.

Our leaders are hypocrites.

Our religious neighbors are hypocrites.

If we have the ability to do something to help people like this poor girl, why the fuck aren’t we doing something about it?

I’m getting fucking sick of this planet.

-Procrustes

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Stop Stoning (dot org)

Stop Honour Killings

—

Links to this article:

The Whited Sepulchre: Shar’iah Law

UPDATE / Related News: Saudi judge sentences pregnant gang-rape victim to 100 lashes for committing adultery (found via Deep Thoughts)

A Saudi judge has ordered a woman should be jailed for a year and receive 100 lashes after she was gang-raped, it was claimed last night.

The 23-year-old woman, who became pregnant after her ordeal, was reportedly assaulted after accepting a lift from a man.

He took her to a house to the east of the city of Jeddah where she was attacked by him and four of his friends throughout the night.

A judge in the Saudi city of Jeddah, pictured, ruled that the woman was guilty of adultery and should be jailed for a year

She later discovered she was pregnant and made a desperate attempt to get an abortion at the King Fahd Hospital for Armed Forces.

According to the Saudi Gazette, she eventually ‘confessed’ to having ‘forced intercourse’ with her attackers and was brought before a judge at the District Court in Jeddah.

He ruled she had committed adultery – despite not even being married – and handed down a year’s prison sentence, which she will serve in a prison just outside the city.

She is still pregnant and will be flogged once she has had the child.

The Saudi Arabian legal system practices a strict form of medieval law. Women have very few rights and are not even allowed to drive.

They are also banned from going out in public in the company of men other than male relatives.

Isn’t Saudi Arabia a U.S. ally? Isn’t what the judge there did (and thus the government) equivalent to terrorism? Why aren’t we attacking Saudi Arabia? We went to war with Iraq because we alleged that 9/11 attackers had support from Iraq. Most of those attackers were from where? Saudi Arabia. The last eight years were a terrible joke, and we’ve paid a terrible price, and made women pay an even worse price. Can’t we please fix this?

1. Stoning Victim “Begged for mercy”, BBC NEWS. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7708169.stm
2. Or “Sharia law” or “Šarīʿah law” or “Islamic law” or whatever you want to call it – it’s disgusting that anyone would want or allow people to be punished in accordance with the Islamic faith (or, more specifically, an interpretation of that faith). It’s akin to Americans stoning people to death who claim to believe in Buddha, or Allah, for that matter, or for not believing in the Christian god. I mean, that’s biblical law, right? If we practiced that (and it resulted in death), others would be justified in criticizing us, if not ending the practice by killing those of us who perpetuate it.

You can scale the relative level of activism in most atheists similarly. Starting off as a believer, or at least a follower, we are quite often sure of ourselves. Perhaps we haven’t encountered any opposing points of view. Perhaps we’re stubborn. Perhaps we’re overwhelmed by the religious beliefs and practices of our families. Whatever the case, many of us start off on the theist end of the spectrum, and are quite often advocates of that way of life and belief.

Then we’re hit with some sort of doubt. Bart Erhman, for instance, was awestruck by the fact that the icon of his belief system, the Holy Bible, was severely flawed with contradictions, rewrites, and surreptitiously inserted new passages. How could the bible be inerrant, how could a real god endorse such a mishmash of not only contradictory but also violent and cruel edicts? Doubting is the catalyst that causes us to self-reflect, and to analyze all that we know about what we’ve been told. It’s required for the next stage of development – agnosticism.

Perhaps I’ve intentionally skipped a few minor middle steps, but the phase between doubt and disbelief encompasses a variety of positions, depending on the individual, from confusion to agnosticism to denial to relapse. I like to call this phase the “I don’t know” phase, which is why I associate it with agnosticism.

Eventually, hopefully, we reach a point at which we question why we’re even bothering with the question of “is there a god?” We realize that, since there’s no empirical evidence of the existence of, at minimum, the divine beings alluded to in every god myth, we narrow our scope of world view to two main areas:

First, the area of spirituality. This isn’t to say that spirituality exists or it doesn’t. It’s a concept, and there comes a time where most of us in some way address whether it has meaning to us. When a loved one dies, do you think he or she “goes to a better place?” How do you fit that into your world view? Do you think there is something invisible that is greater than you? Do you think there is destiny, fate, karma? These are things that even agnostics question, even after having rejected their former god of choice, and it’s something that, until all our questions are satisfactorily answered by science, we will be inclined to address.

What matters about that area of interest is that it may help determine your level of acceptance of certain types of activism, because even without a god or doctrine to guide you morally, you may reach for a more metaphysical state of moral choice based on your concepts of spirituality. Hardline skeptics and atheists tend to eschew this point of view, but they cannot deny that people are habitually, if not naturally, sentimental toward the supernatural and spiritual potential in the world.

Second, the area of society. This is not what you think, but how you deal with what others think, and how they deal with what you think, and the acts based upon such thought. This is your relationship with, essentially, the rest of the world. More specifically, it’s what’s mutually tangible. What kinds of laws, regulations, taboos, etc., affect you, and what kind of effect you can have. On our scale of development, this is often a stopping point (or sometimes a starting point for those who were never theists to begin with). It’s a plateau representing a static world view, with no inclination to have that world view affect society.

Beyond that plateau, there is a minority of skeptics, rationals, atheists who attempt to influence society in a variety of ways. The extent to which one is active is often based on the extent to which one has rejected religion. So, there are varying degrees of activism (degrees of intensity) and varying methods of activism. And there’s at least one person or group of people out there in the world opposed to every single type. Surprisingly, many are from the set of non-believers.

The degrees of intensity can be described in another abridged scale: start with the “closet” atheists, who, although in their own minds are atheists, either deny that fact to others, or try to hide it, lest they be reprimanded, punished, or shunned by family, work, friends, or others. Sometimes these closet atheists end up creating alternate identities for use on the Internet, a place in which they can freely express opinions without coming under personal attack. The next level is the avowed atheist — someone who isn’t afraid to tell others, but who doesn’t necessarily seek out others in order to tell them. Next is the conversational atheist — someone who actively tells others, perhaps seeking them out, in order to tell them about non-belief. That category can be split between those who seek just to converse and share ideas, and those who are on the fringes of being active deconverters.

Proactive deconversion is the next level, and it shares its spot with proactive lobbying — efforts either to convert believers into non-believers, or efforts to create a society where law, the government, and public places are secular. My opinion is that this is where most non-believers choose to draw the line. Beyond that line lies anti-religious activism. This is an activist state that actively attempts to purge society of all (or most) things religious. This category can be split between targeting only religious activities that cause specific harm, and targeting all religious activities, regardless of perceived harm (with the idea that all aspects of religion are harmful, because they’re religious).

An example of the latter point of view is where, recently, the Swedish government is making it illegal for any school, public or private, to teach religion as if it were true.¹

There are two more primary levels of activism. Next is targeting everyone, treating religion as a disease, in a sense, and trying to disinfect everyone, even parents who want to teach their children about religion. In 2001, Richard Dawkins wrote a letter to the British secretary of state, asking that the faith status of existing schools be removed, allowing children to choose for themselves what to believe, in a non-religious school environment.² Essentially, wipe away religious schooling institutions, and eliminate faith-based labeling for children, despite parental wishes. This is a step further in the direction of activism because, unlike Sweden’s attempt to eliminate teaching of religion “as if it were true,” Dawkins (at least then) advocates eliminating religion as a label of any sort — no religious institutions at all, no parental force-feeding of religion, and especially no state-based advocacy of religious belief.

Christopher Hitchens is even a more ardent supporter of this “no religion” point of view. Even from the title of his best selling book “God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” one can infer that Hitchens decries all things religious, and would probably, if in a position to do so, wipe the world clean of religious practice (but for the sake of scholarship, not religious history, I’m sure). Some would call this “militant atheism.” My view is that that term is misused, and should apply only to the final niche in the spectrum of activism.

Real militant atheism is literally taking up a weapon and fighting those who support religion, and in some cases those who merely don’t support real militant atheism. Consider the Crusades. Real militant atheism is similar. It’s a purge of religion, similar to what Hitchens seems to desire, but instead of doing so through legal means, it’s doing so with violence. Have we seen much of this? Hardly. Perhaps none at all, at least in what’s commonly displayed on the news. There are countries, though, that will torture and kill some believers.³ There are also, assuredly, individuals and factions worldwide who, like their religious counterparts, would take up arms in order to fight for what they consider to be freedom from religion (especially if they think that a purported secular government has overly mingled its affairs with religion, effectively creating a theocracy).

Inevitably, those who fall somewhere on the active side of the scale will be directly or indirectly criticized for such activism by those who believe they are the targets. Here’s a fine, succinct, example of what I mean, thanks to Atheist Eve:

To be an activist at any level, one must expect some criticism. My analysis here isn’t about criticism, however, it’s more about ethics. Obviously, the more advanced on the activism scale, the more criticism, but is there a point on the scale that clearly goes too far?

One potential way to analyze what’s an appropriate level of activism is to consider what “the other side” is doing or has done to promote religion. Religious groups have been spending centuries sending missionaries all over the world, establishing churches, shrines, meeting places. They’ve been creating supposed charitable organizations and activities, hospitals, (and in Mother Theresa’s case, places to go suffer and die), youth organizations, private schools, camps, heavily funded lobbying groups, and more. They’ve started and perpetuated military campaigns, sometimes backed by governments, sometimes by radical militants outside of the government. Entire nations currently sway with the religious breezes blown by zealots on both sides. What hasn’t been done in the name of religion? If we are to take the religious as examples of anything, it’s that they have overwhelmingly dotted the landscape of history and the world with religious activism spanning the entire scale. Therefore, citing what the religious are doing or have done is not a good way to measure the ethicalness of our own activist behavior.

Another way to think about where we should fall on the scale is from the consequentialist point of view. Let’s not think too much about what we’re doing on the small scale (whether it be handing out atheist pamphlets or assassinating religious zealot leaders), but what we’re trying to accomplish for the sake of humanity. This point of view may require the activist not only to believe that religion is wrong, but also that religion is so harmful that it must be eliminated by any means necessary. However, that is not the only side one can take as a consequentialist. It could be believed that a well-balanced world is, in the long run, more beneficial for humanity, and that the actions that must be taken should be limited to those which would ultimately treat religion and non-religion as essentially equal. There are those who already think this is the case, and there are those who think that we have a long way to go to accomplish something even close to a balance. Consequentialism, is, then, too ambiguous and subjective to use as a guideline. The same could probably be said of any utilitarian theory — they’re all quite subjective, and goal-oriented.

Let’s just say that I carried on with an analysis of every ethical theory that I could come up with. I don’t think I would find a satisfactory answer to my query. The reason? I don’t know all there is to know. I don’t know and I cannot know what’s in store for humanity. I only know what I’ve seen, what’s occurring right now, and what has apparently occurred in the past, with regard to the rife between secularism and religion, and the firm grasp that religious groups have on so many aspects of the world today. I’m not advocating violence or war on behalf of non-religion. What I’m saying is that I’m not quite sure that it’s unethical, depending on the situation, and from whose point of view it is making the decision.

Most assuredly, though, if the religious zealots of my nation stood up in arms and attempted to create a theocracy by force, I would retaliate in kind. I think that’s essentially happening in some parts of the world today. What’s happening here is that the religious have infused themselves into the government and essential positions in society in order to perpetuate that hold on power and control, and we, as rationals, as skeptics, as atheists, need to do at least the minimum of what it takes to reverse that trend and keep it reversed, regardless of any criticism from any source. I just can’t tell you exactly how that’s to be done, and how far we need to go in order to get it done.

1. God’s Honest Truth, Andrew Brown, Guardian.co.uk. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/oct/18/godshonesttruth
2. Children must choose their own beliefs, Richard Dawkins, Guardian.co.uk. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/dec/30/schools.religion
3. China, among others, has had a blemished history of military-backed opposition to religion.

Here’s his reasoning:

Fifty studies were reviewed that surveyed opinions on teaching origins in public schools. The vast majority found about 90 % of the public desired that both creation and evolution or creation only be taught in the public schools. About 90 % of Americans consider themselves creationists of some form, and about half believe that God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years. In America, about 15 % of high school teachers teach both evolution and creation, and close to 20 % of high school science teachers and about 10,000 scientists (including more than 4,000 life scientists) reject both macroevolution and theistic evolution. Although the vast majority of Americans desire both creation and evolution taught in school, the evolutionary naturalism worldview dominates, revealing a major disparity between the population and the ruling élite.¹

I agree!

I think we should be teaching alternate theories of existence in public schools. And here is how I propose we set up the curriculum:

Monday

1st Period: The Earth was nothing but water and darkness, ruled over by Mbombo, the white giant. One day, he felt a terrible pain in his stomach, and vomited the sun, the moon, and the stars. The sun shone fiercely and water steamed up in clouds. Gradually, the dry hills appeared. Mbombo vomited again, this time the trees came out of his stomach, and animals, and people, and many other things: the first woman, the leopard, the eagle, the anvil, monkey Fumu, the first man, the firmament, medicine, and lighting. Nchienge, the woman of the waters, lived in the East. She had a son, Woto, and a daughter, Labama. Woto was the first king of the Bakuba.²

2nd Period: The Creator split a tree into three pieces. He gave a piece to each tribe, one being a spear, the other a hoe, and the third a bow, and these recipients became the three tribes of people, the beginning of humanity.

3rd Period: Mangala was an entity made up of four divisions, and two sets of dual gendered twins. Being tired of keeping it all inside, Mangala compiled all the matter into a seed, which was the world. And the seed exploded, disappointing Mangala, who destroyed it. Then Mangala tried again with two sets of twin seeds, which, after having been planted in an egg-like womb, along with other sets of seeds, emerged as fish, representing fertility. One of the male twins tried to escape from the egg. This trickster, Pemba, stole a piece of the womb’s placenta and threw it down, creating the earth. He then tried to refertilize the remainder of the womb. Mangala castrated and killed Farro, Pemba’s brother, to save creation, and then Mangala raised Farro from the dead. Mangala then took the remainder of the placenta and transformed it into the sun, leaving Pemba for the darkness and night. Mangala transformed Ferro into a human, and was taught the language of creation. Farro’s newly created twins came and joined him on the earth, and they all propagated humanity.

4th Period: Lunch

5th Period: Damballah created all the waters of the earth. In the form of a serpent, the movement of his 7,000 coils formed hills and valleys on earth and brought forth stars and planets in the cosmos. He forged metals from heat and sent forth lightning bolts to form the sacred rocks and stones. When he shed his skin in the sun, releasing all the waters over the land, the sun shone in the water and created the rainbow. Damballah loved the rainbow’s beauty and made her his wife, Aida-Wedo. The revelations of the loa (deity) descended upon the first faithful in Ifé, a legendary city located in Nigeria. Therefore, everything in life and all spiritual strength comes from Ifé. In death, the higher soul will return to Ginen (the world of the dead, said to be under the water below the earth) to reside with the loa and the ancestral spirits.

6th Period: In the beginning, there was only water and chaos. The supreme being sent Obatala or Orishanla down from the sky to create some land out of the chaos. He descended on a long chain (umbilical cord) and brought with him a rooster, some iron, and a palm kernel. First, he put the metal on the earth and the rooster on top of that. The rooster scratched the metal and spread it out to create land. Then he planted the palm seed and from it grew the earth’s vegetation. Olurun named earth “Ife” and the first city “Ile-Ife.” Orshilana created humans out of the earth and got Olurun to blow life into them.

Tuesday

1st Period: Physical reality (space, matter and/or energy) is eternal, and therefore does not have an absolute origin. The Creator is an architect and organizer of pre-mortal matter and energy, who constructed the present universe out of the raw material (demiurge). There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; we cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.

2nd Period: Xenu was the dictator of the “Galactic Confederacy” who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of his people to Earth in spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and killed them using hydrogen bombs. Their essences remained, and that they form around people in modern times, causing them spiritual harm.

3rd Period: Auditing practice.

4th Period: Lunch

5th Period: Everything begins in a state of chaos where nothing exists but two gods named Tiamat and Apsu, who give birth to the first generation of gods, which one is Ea. Apsu cannot sleep because of these god children so he plans to kill them. Ea finds out and kills Apsu and Tiamat plans to avenge her husband. Ea has a son named Marduk. Tiamat assembles a huge army to avenge her husband and names Qingu the commander. Marduk is named as commander of the younger gods as long as he kills Tiamat; which he does through an arrow to the throat. Marduk splits her body in half and uses the back half to make the sky (which holds back the cosmic ocean) and the front half to make the earth (which holds the subterranean ocean). Marduk takes out Tiamat’s eyes and allows some of the subterranean ocean to flow out into two streams that become the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Finally, Marduk and Ea (and other gods) decide to create human beings to bear the burden of the gods, so that they can rest and not have to do all the hard work. Marduk creates people by killing Qingu and mixing Qingu’s blood with clay.

6th Period: The Ground of Being is the First Cause.

Wednesday

et cetera.

I think this would be an excellent way to introduce much needed mythological and spiritual awakenings in students, letting them know that plenty of other people around the world actually believe this stuff, AND, since they do believe this stuff, that makes this stuff VALID as alternate theories to evolution, and that no “theory” is better than any other belief in creation. I mean, it only makes sense that we give everyone a fair shot, right? I’m all for that. I’ll have to get my kid an afterschool tutor so he can learn to do some basic math, but it’s worth it for all the myriad wonders of creationism he will learn! Now that’s tolerance!

So, now that that point has been conceded and taken care of, I propose we move to the next item on the agenda, regarding tolerance, fairness, and whatnot: required programs for every religious institution.

All religious institutions shall, with their own funding, thoroughly and objectively instruct their staff, members, and guests, with government oversight, in the following areas:

-Heredity
-Variation
-Mutation
-Sex and recombination
-Population genetics
-Mechanisms
-Natural selection
-Genetic drift
-Gene flow
-Outcomes
-Adaptation
-Co-evolution
-Co-operation
-Speciation
-Extinction
-Evolutionary history of life
-Abiogenesis
-Common descent
-Evolution of life

-The scientific method
-Basic and intermediate mathematics
-Logic
-Philosophy
-Classic literature
-Civil rights
-Constitutional law
-World history
-Domestic history

Religious institutions will be required to hire experts in these fields who are unaffiliated with any religion (lest there be an unfair bias in favor of one “theory” or religion over another), and will be subject to strict scrutiny with regard to the curriculum and teaching standards. Standardized exams will be given, and religious institutions will have adjustments in funding and tax exemption based on the scores.

It would be my honor to assist in implementing this fair and balanced program. I hope it gets kicked off right away!

What a great day for tolerance!

1. Teaching creation and evolution in schools, Jerry Bergman, Answers in Genesis. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v13/i2/teaching.asp.
2. This, and the following excerpts, quoted and paraphrased from Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_myth

God: the Evidence

Come again? What “evidence”?

In religion, man is assumed to be the most important thing in the “universe”, the special project of some deity. This has lead to religion ignoring observable facts and insisting that the earth is the “center” of the universe” and indeed that everything revolves around it. This baseless assumption defined how most religions and especially Christianity interacted with humanity and our world.

The heliocentric solar system was not unfamiliar to those in ancient times, or to those from other religions. Aristarchus of Samos wrote that he was furthering the theories of Heraclides Ponticus in the third century BC.¹ Muslim scholars did work to show that the earth rotates.² However, all of these early scientists were decried by contemporaries.³ How dare they say that the earth is not the center of the universe! This slowly started to change when instruments were developed to allow us to observe our world more accurately. Galileo saw the moons revolving around Jupiter.⁴ Copernicus came up with the data and formulas to demonstrate how we revolve.⁵ We then had to acknowledge that pretty stories meant nothing when reality was knocking on the door.

When Copernicus originally revealed his theories, they were met with interest but not yet aversion. However, they met opposition 3 years later when a Dominican monk denounced them in a work that indicated that the Bible was inerrant, the absolute truth of how the universe worked.⁶ Following that, Galileo dared to reveal that his telescope supported the heliocentric model. With such an “attack” against the infallibility of the Bible, and therefore Catholic Church, that which was acceptable as an idea became unacceptable as reality.⁷ Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for supporting Copernicus’ ideas and Galileo was convicted of heresy.⁸ Any heliocentric works were on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1616 and the specific books by Copernicus and Galileo were on that list until 1835.⁹

As you can see above, Copernicus did much to advance man’s knowledge of his world. In 1973, there was a celebration of the 500th anniversary of his birth.¹⁰ At this celebration, many scientific papers were presented by many of the preeminent scientists of that time. However, there was one paper presented that was not of this caliber. One of the articles in U.S. News and World Report’s special edition “Secrets of Christianity” mentions this one in its “God: the Evidence” article. One would assume that a magazine dedicated to pursuing the facts about things would have perhaps read this article over more closely, looking for facts to support the subject’s claims or making sure that questionable claims weren’t included. However, that is not the case.

This article begins with mentioning the august figures in attendance at that 1973 symposium. The author takes great pride in listing the names of Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, etc. However, it immediately insists that the “only” paper to be “remembered” from that conference was one by Brandon Carter, “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology.”¹¹ Now, I suspect that there were many papers that were remembered from that conference. One, “Large Scale Anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background” by R.B. Partridge,¹² did much for advancing Big Bang theories.

Dr. Carter’s idea was one that many apologists attempt to use today. The idea is that the universe, with its myriad laws and constants are “perfect” for human life, or as Dr. Carter put it, “[W]hat we can expect to observe must be restricted by the conditions for our presence as observers.” This has been claimed to “prove” that God exists, because there needs to be an “intelligence” that decided it wanted humans and it then created a universe to support those humans.

The article goes even further to claim that the theories based on observation of facts, such as evolutionary theory and the heliocentric fact, “explained the tone of despair and angst that came to characterize modern culture, the desperate feeling that humankind was along and without moorings, and above all, without God.” However, the article does nothing to show how this supposedly occurred. This is an excellent example of more baseless assumptions upon which religion builds its claims.

Baseless claims like this are rife throughout the article. It is claimed that “scientists began to notice a strange connection among a number of otherwise unexplained coincidences in physics.” This “connection” is supposedly the one “overriding fact”: “Such values had been necessary for the creation of life.” Now, a fact is a very specific thing, especially in the scientific world. A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality.¹³ Because we do not know exactly what is required for the creation of life — something that creationists are quite fond of reminding everyone — it cannot be claimed that it is known for a “fact” that the constants and laws of physics are indeed required for it. The article also does not cite who these “scientists” were, which is always a sign of a claim with no evidence to support it.

The article claims that the argument of “God did it” is a “simpler way of explaining” these constants and laws than the “exotic theories” of physicists. This could be a good assumption if one also believed that fairies made shoes for people in exchange for a bowl of milk rather than the “exotic theory” that cobblers make shoes.

Dr. Carter attempted to make his idea more scientifically palatable by attempting to claim that the “coincidences” that he claimed were too many to just be that, coincidences. However, there is no way to determine how many was “too many.” He also relied on an old idea about the universe. Once, it may have been considered simply “random” by 19th century thinkers, but no scientist thinks that the universe is totally random today nor is it likely that they did even back in 1973. Also, the author of the article has attempted to claim that “Darwin’s theory of “natural selection” could no longer be taken as an exhaustive explanation for the phenomenon of life. Again, these are common mistakes by apologists, using very outdated information and presenting half-truths, since evolutionary theory does not address abiogenesis as he attempts to call the “phenomenon of life.”

There are further attempts to claim that “20th century science is closer to in spirit to the vision of the Book of Genesis than anything offered since Copernicus.” Unless one takes it all completely as “metaphor” and shoehorns any definition one likes into it, it is not. If one does this, then what of the Bible is “metaphor” and what is literal? Why is one person’s “interpretation” better than another’s? The article also tries to claim that finding an origin to the universe is some kind of “scientific embarrassment” and it adds to this the lie that science agrees at all with this unsupported idea that the universe is “expressly designed for life.”

Unfortunately, this article is emblematic of many other Christian apologist arguments. They try to co-opt the terms and discoveries of science to make Christianity sound more plausible, which is especially ironic when “good Christians” didn’t believe any of this when the theories were new and had less evidence supporting them. The article attempts to say that the burden of proof is on those who don’t believe that “God did it.” However anyone knows that the person who proposes an idea is the one who must provide the proof that it is correct and none has been provided. Each scientific discovery pushes any deity farther and farther into the gaps that they try to exploit. Life is in the universe because that’s what those constants and laws just happen to allow to arise. If those constants and laws were different, we would either not be here or we would be here in a different form. The universe isn’t “perfect” for us at all. We are “perfect” for it.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_heliocentrism
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_heliocentrism
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus
6. Rosen, Edward (1995). Copernicus and his Successors. London: Hambledon Press. ISBN 1 85285 071 X
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum
10. http://siarchives.si.edu/findingaids/FARU0500.HTM
11. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1974IAUS…63..291C
12. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1974IAUS…63..157P
13. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fact

selected by Christopher Hitchens

$17.5o, Paperback, Da Capo Press, Perseus.

Christopher Hitchens is a truly fascinating creature. I have met him on two separate occasions, and was intrigued, impressed, repulsed and annoyed by the man both times. He is a self-described contrarian, a position which demands confidence and a perverse pleasure at the destruction of the beliefs that most people hold sacred. Even Mother Teresa’s good intentions– usually lionized as an example of sympathetic humanity– suffer under his gimlet eye. While I sometimes strongly disagree with Mr. Hitchens, I will read anything he writes, because the man thinks, and he reads. In a world filled with people who habitually struggle with incomplete, incoherent, error-ridden sentences, he is fully armed with well-reasoned rhetorical elegance and acerbic wit. Christopher Hitchens can and does out-wit most of his opponents with half a liver tied behind his flask, and he doesn’t mind us knowing it.

When I came across this collection of readings that he selected and edited, I was intrigued. When I read the table of contents, I was enthralled. Hitchens’ selections form a powerful compendium of rationalist thought and argument. This collection bears his stamp of the unexpected perspective; the readings date from Antiquity to the present day, and come from all over the world.

Each reading provids cogent arguments useful to the rational activist who spends any amount of time refuting the most common and pernicious arguments used by religious apologists. This element was somewhat expected, but deeply appreciated. Few of us have infinite patience when dealing with the 75^th iteration of the “What is Morality to an Atheist” routine, or the 195^th verse of the old anthem “Atheism is a (fundamentalist) religion”. Elizabeth Anderson takes care of the first, while A.C. Grayling the latter.

One element that was unexpected, however, was the sustaining richness of the texts. These aren’t just diatribes to read only when angry, appalled or up in arms. Those things are represented, surely, but these are also texts to be savored, accented with poetry (of all things), humor, charm and wit. Ian McEwan’s “End of the World Blues” lopes through the history of the End of the World, one hysterical prediction at a time. Some people show up and do what they’re expected to do. Thomas Hardy breaks your heart, Mark Twain makes you laugh at something infuriating George Orwell shoots straight and Penn Jillette is Penn Jillette. Less expected are appearances by H.P. Lovecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley (refuting Deism!) and Albert Einstein, whose vaguely Deist comments have been liberally misrepresented. Salman Rushdie’s “Imagine There’s No Heaven”: a Letter to the Sixth Billionth World citizen, might alone be worth the price of the book.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. What I can do, however, is show you the table of contents:

Chapter 1: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Book I, Translation by W. Hannaford Brown
Chapter 2: Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Paraphrase from Several Literal Translations by Richard Le Gallienne
Chapter 3: Thomas Hobbes, Of Religion, from Leviathon
Chapter 4: Benedict De Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise
Chapter 5: David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, Of Miracles
Chapter 6: James Boswell, An Account of My Last Interview with David Hume, Esq.
Chapter 7: Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Refutation of Deism
Chapter 8: John Stuart Mill, Moral Influences in My Early Youth, From Autobiography
Chapter 9: Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
Chapter 10: George Eliot, Evangelical Teaching
Chapter 11: Charles Darwin, Autobiography
Chapter 12: Leslie Stephen, An Agnostic’s Apology
Chapter 13: Anatole France, Miracle
Chapter 14: Mark Twain, Thoughts of God, From Fables of Man Bible Teaching and Religious Practice, From Europe and Elsewhere and A Pen Warmed Up in Hell
Chapter 15: Joseph Conrad, Authors’s Note to The Shadow Line
Chapter 16: Thomas Hardy, God’s Funeral
Chapter 17: Emma Goldman, The Philosophy of Atheism
Chapter 18: H.P. Lovecraft, A Letter on Religion
Chapter 19: Carl Van Doren, Why I am An Unbeliever
Chapter 20: H.L. Mencken, Memorial Service
Chapter 21: Sigmund Freud, From The Future of an Illusion, Translated and edited by James Strachey
Chapter 22: Albert Einstein, Selected Writings on Religion
Chapter 23: George Orwell, From A Clergyman’s Daughter
Chapter 24: John Betjeman, In Westminster Abbey
Chapter 25: Chapman Cohen, Monism and Religion An Old Story
Chapter 26: Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish
Chapter 27: Philip Larkin, Aubade/ Church Going
Chapter 28: Martin Gardner, The Wandering Jew and the Second Coming
Chapter 29: Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World / The God Hypothesis
Chapter 30: John Updike, From Roger’s Version
Chapter 31: J.L. Mackie, Conclusions and Implications, From The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God
Chapter 32: Michael Shermer, Genesis Revisited: A Scientific Creation Story
Chapter 33: A.J. Ayer, That Undiscovered Country
Chapter 34: Daniel C. Dennett, Thank Goodness!
Chapter 35: Charles Templeton, From A Farewell to God, A Personal Word, and Questions to Ask Yourself
Chapter 36: Richard Dawkins, Why There Almost Certainly is No God/ Gerin Oil/ and Atheists for Jesus
Chapter 37: Victor Stenger, From God: The Failed Hypothesis/ Cosmic Evidence
Chapter 38: Daniel C. Dennett, A Working Definition of Religion from “Breaking Which Spell?”
Chapter 39: Elizabeth Anderson, If God is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?
Chapter 40: Penn Jillette, There is No God
Chapter 41: Ian McEwan, End of the World Blues
Chapter 42: Steven Weinberg, What About God? From Dreams of a Final Theory
Chapter 43: Salman Rushdie, “Imagine There’s no Heaven”: A Letter to the Six Billionth World Citizen
Chapter 44: Ibn Warraq, The Koran, The Totalitarian Nature of Islam
Chapter 45: Sam Harris, In the Shadow of God, From The End of Faith
Chapter 46: A.C. Grayling, Can an Atheist Be a Fundamentalist? From Against All Gods
Chapter. 47: Ayaan Hirsi Ali: How (and Why) I Became an Infidel

Scientology states that it is fully compatible with all existing major world religions, but in fact, Scientology only allows a passive formal membership in a second religion. Because of the major differences in beliefs and practices between Scientology and most major world religions, to call them compatible is disingenuous. Followers are not permitted to participate in other religious activities or ceremonies outside of Scientology. They do, however, celebrate many of our cultural holidays such as Christmas and New Year’s, although these celebrations remain primarily secular.²

Scientologists believe that humans survive across eight dynamics, “Self,” “Family and Sex,” “Group,” “Humanity,” “The Animal Kingdom,” “The Physical Universe,” “Spirits,” and “God or Infinity.” They believe all of these dynamics must be considered equally. The Scientology cross, which is often used to represent the Church of Scientology, has eight sides which represent these eight dynamics.³ Scientology offers no specific dogma, but Scientologists believe the nature of a Supreme Being is revealed to individuals as they become more spiritually aware. They believe that a universal life force (theta) exists in all humans and that humans (thetans) are capable of achieving a nearly godlike state through Scientology practices. One of these practices is Dianetics, which Hubbard claimed could “invariably cure all psychosomatic ills and human aberrations.”⁴ According to Hubbard, people become “aberrated” by traumatic incidents and bad decisions (even those that occurred in past lives; Scientologists believe we are immortal) and must free themselves of this trauma through a process called “auditing.” They believe that through this process, they can achieve states of increasingly greater mental awareness, called Pre-Clear, Clear, and Operating Thetan. They believe Operating Thetans have the power to control matter, energy, space, time, thought, and life.⁵

Most auditing sessions employ a device called the Hubbard Electropsychometer. Scientologists believe this “E-Meter” can help an individual achieve a state of Clear, and eventually Operating Thetan, through measuring changes in the electrical resistance of the mind. To do this, approximately 0.5 volts are passed through a pair of tin-plated tubes held by the Pre-Clear and attached to the E-Meter by wires. It is believed that this aids the auditor in identifying engrams (unconscious, painful memories), incidents (alien interventions from past lives), and implants (engrams which are inflicted deliberately and with evil intent). According to Hubbard, extraterrestrial dictatorships such as Helatrobus attempted to brainwash and control the population trillions of years ago through these implants, and this is the derivation of many of our past traumas. Hubbard wrote extensive accounts of complex extraterrestrial civilizations and their interventions in earthly events, collectively described as “space opera.” Scientology’s Trementina Base has a huge symbol carved into the ground which marks a ‘return point’ for members, so they can find the founder’s works when they travel here in the future from other galaxies.⁶

It is very difficult for Scientologists to advance into the eight Operating Thetan (OT) levels of study. Those who participate in these advanced courses are strictly forbidden from discussing or disclosing their contents. However, in 1995, a former member published excerpts and descriptions of these materials online, and they were quickly circulated by the mainstream media, so we now have access to much of the teachings.⁷ Those who reach OT level III are told of the story of Xenu, an alien who lived 75 million years ago and was the ruler of the “Galactic Confederacy.” According to these teachings, he brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living. Scientologists believe that many of the physical illnesses modern-day humans experience are caused by these clustered alien souls, or “Body Thetans,” who continue to stick to us today.

-Laura

1. Bridge Publications: The Basics
2. Steve Bruce: Cathedrals to cults: the evolving forms of the religious life. In: Paul Heelas (Hrsg.): Religion, Modernity, and Postmodernity, Blackwell, Oxford 1998, pp. 19-35, 23.
3. Introduction to Scientology Ethics, 2007 edition, pg. 12
4. Hubbard, “Dianetics,” Astounding Science Fiction, May 1950
5. http://www.beliefnet.com/story/80/story_8057_1.html
6. Leiby, Richard Scientology church’s mark inscribed in N.M. desert scrub, published November 29, 2005 in the Free New Mexican
7. Reitman, Janet, “Inside Scientology: Unlocking the complex code of America’s most mysterious religion,” Rolling Stone, 2006

One day, the old man had candy.

The children were very excited. Candy was a rare treat.

The old man carefully counted out one, two, three, four, five, six, seven pieces of candy, as he handed them to each child but the eighth.

Although the seven children with candy were smiling and thanking the old man, the eighth child’s lips began to quiver upon the realization that the old man had no more candy to give. When the old man noticed the child crying, the old man said, “Oh, child, don’t cry. You realize that were it not for your suffering, your friends could not enjoy their candies?”

The next day, seven children ran down to the shack near the sea, to visit the old man.

Is there a moral to this story? This is the story I use when responding to someone who claims that there cannot be good without evil and there cannot be evil without good. Some people use that line as a defense of god when a rationalist asserts that there cannot exist a omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being. The conversation usually goes something like this:

Believer: God exists.

Non-Believer: Do you assert that your god is all-powerful?

Believer: Of course. Nothing is greater than my God.

Non-Believer: Being all-powerful, your god is also omniscient, right?

Believer: Absolutely. As it is written, God sees all.

Non-Believer: You also assert that God is Love. You’ve also been known to say that God is all-good. Is that right?

Believer: Yes.

Non-Believer: So, your god is all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful?

Believer: Yes. Would you please get to the point?

Non-Believer: If your god is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, then how come evil exists in the world?

Believer: Ah, not this again! Look, everything happens for a reason. It’s all part of God’s plan, and we’re not meant to understand it fully. We cannot know the mind of God.

Non-Believer: Yes, I’ve heard all that before. You’re justifying cruelty based on the fact that you can’t understand why your god would allow it. But it still doesn’t make any sense.

Believer: Well, you don’t understand. For there to be good in the world, there must be a counter to good. Sins are a good example. Temptation constantly urges us to act in violent ways, and those who do are punished. But we need that distinction, that relationship between good and evil. Everything can’t be all-good. It wouldn’t make any sense without the contrast of evil. So, it holds that God must provide both in His perfection.

Non-Believer: So, every good event must be offset by a bad event, and every bad event must be offset by a good event?

Believer: No, it’s not that simple. It’s not like a balancing act where it must be even all the time. However, you just can’t have one without the other. You wouldn’t be able to recognize good without evil with which to compare it.

So. Is the believer right? I don’t think so. The necessity of evil is merely an excuse, a justification for the actions of a mythological being that was one of the cruelest in all literature. This being felt it necessary to punish all of humanity for the apparent sins of a few — sins which, if the assertion of omnipotence is true, were also creations of this being. So, an all-powerful being created creatures, created sin, tempted the creatures with the sin, and then instructed that the creatures not commit sin lest they burn in a fiery pit? And this is somehow necessary for there to be a heavenly afterlife for the few who happen to do everything just right? In order to maintain this amazing assertion, the believer must justify the bad things in life. For, if those bad things aren’t justified (by their contrast to good), it would hold that God is truly malicious for no good reason. In other words, why can’t an all-powerful god just make everything good? Ah, he doesn’t work that way. Why doesn’t he work that way? Because he’s a mean bastard who loves torturing his creations.

So, in my little story about the old man and the candies, is the old man right? Is the suffering of one child necessary for the pleasure of the others? Or would they all be happy if all received a piece of candy? Was the old man’s purported moral message beneficial? What was the result, and why? Do you believe that if there were no war, no death, no violence, no disease, no suffering, we would be less happy because we wouldn’t have anything with which to contrast our good fortune? Why are so many people quick to accept the necessity of such contrast? And is accepting that contrast without examination, without analysis, something a rational person should do?

What do you think?

-Procrustes

Christians don’t agree on much, particularly about the bible. They agree on very little about what the bible actually says, what it really means, and what parts of it are true and applicable. In fact, the single thing on which Christians seem able to agree is that parts of the bible claiming to count don’t really count and that parts of the bible demanding obedience don’t really require obedience. Naturally, they don’t agree on what those parts are, only that those parts exist.

What Christians don’t understand or simply won’t admit (and why they’re so damned annoying) is that because Christianity professes to be a revealed religion, rejecting any part of the revelation requires rejecting the entire revelation, together with the god it purports to reveal. Of course, the bible claims to be that revelation and a unique source of truth—the inspired revelation of the singular God explaining both his exclusively salvific religion and the source, purpose, and end of the world.

So, let’s examine its reliability as the trustworthy self-disclosure of a condescending god.

The bible reports in Exodus 33:23 that Moses saw the “back parts,” apparently of god’s body, because according to god in verse 20, no man can see god’s face and live. So to protect Moses from such an unfortunate death, god covered Moses’ face with his own hand until his face was safely hidden from view and Moses was able to safely satiate the curiosity by looking at god’s ass. That was certainly thoughtful of god, but here’s the rub: John 1:18 declares that no person, save Jesus, has seen god at any time. That would make sense in light of 1 Timothy 1:17—which asserts that god is, among other things, invisible—but it certainly gives rise to the obvious question: What was Moses looking at when he saw god’s “back parts?” Meanwhile, according to Deuteronomy 34:10, Moses knew god face to face and according to the historical opinion of the church, god had no body at all, because considering Deuteronomy 4:15-16 with John 4:24 and Luke 24:39, we get the following:

“Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire: Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female. [Jesus said:] God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”¹

These are the exact verses adduced by the 1646 version of the Westminster Confession of Faith to “prove” its declaration that the “one only, living, and true God” is “without body, parts, or passions.” Apparently, when declaring truth, church councils ignore contradictory proof texts.

The puzzles don’t end when trying to understand what, how, and who has seen god, either. For example, whether god changes his mind is also a puzzle. According to Genesis 6, observing the utter wickedness of humanity so repented god for having created at all and so grieved his heart that he destroyed his own creation (save the Noahs, of course). That’s powerful repentance and apparently god has a propensity for it, because in Exodus 32, we learn that Moses persuaded god to repent of the evil he intended doing to his people. Nor is Moses the only prophet aware of the divine propensity to repent. In Jonah 3:9, that prophet banks on the same penchant when encouraging Nineveh to repent, and sure enough, the next verse finds god repenting “of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.”

This divine propensity to repent is an odd one, though, because James 1:17 tells us that with god there “is no variableness, neither shadow of turning,” and Numbers 23:19 assures us that, “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent,” and mockingly asks us, “hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?” ²

Obviously, it’s impossible to reasonably believe all of those things and the honest answer to the bible’s sardonic question must be an equally sardonic, “I dunno.” When confronted with a formal contradiction in the bible, the rational mind concludes that the bible makes false statements and when the subject of those formal contradictions is god, the rational mind concludes that the bible makes false statements about god. The consistent rational mind then proceeds to reject the bible as a reliable revelation of god, to evaluate the bible both in terms of that fact and its internal testimony, and ultimately to reject the bible and the god it purports to reveal. That leaves the rational mind free from struggling with the archaic biblical ethic that approbates rape, slavery, and genocide, while promulgating the subjection of women to men.

Unfortunately, Christians, if not utterly irrational, are certainly not consistently rational individuals and—whether for want of thought, want of courage, or want of honesty—the Christian won’t say, “I dunno.” Therefore, the Christian never arrives at the point of rational activity, rejecting the bible, its ethic, and its god in toto. Instead, the Christian will admit the bible’s failures—explaining them as transcription error, allegory, or cultural limits³–but insist on the bible’s overall validity as a peculiar religious revelation, despite both its failure to cogently reveal anything and its primitive and abhorrent ethic.

Having embraced a self-refuting, ethically repugnant ersatz revelation, the Christian has forfeited any objective religious canon and must adopt a subjective religious standard. Not surprisingly, that canon becomes his or her own predilections, so that every Christian will describe and interpret the bible in a manner that matches his or her intellect (or lack of intellect) ethic, and personality, using the bible’s own objective unreliability and primitive content as reason to reject what doesn’t appeal. Rather than rationally rejecting the entire revelation, the Christian eclectically picks, chooses, dismisses, ignores, and rationalizes the bible’s various and conflicting commands, ethics, accounts, and contradictions to self-project her or himself into the bible.

Some Christians will dismiss more of the bible, others less, some in pious sounding ways, and others more flagrantly. The better educated, more articulate Christians might perform mental genuflections to explain biblical contradictions and write grand systematic theologies to describe the gods they project, while the uneducated ones might tell you only what they feel in their hearts and the religious yuppies will tell you what meaning they take from the bible. What each Christian is telling you, though, in her or his own way, is that he or she is god. The result is a rank and unique pride that claims a divine stamp of approval upon the Christian’s own life, while rejecting both all of the bible that doesn’t appeal to her or his liking and the gods constructed by other Christians, reflecting other parts of the bible.

Ultimately, the god to which every particular Christian prays is identical to the god which every particular Christian shaves: The god in the mirror. It’s an arrogant syncretism of life and religion that we call Self-Projection as God (SPAG).

For a practical demonstration, just pick a pair of contrary or contradictory bible verses that are on either side of a sensitive issue and ask a Christian what she or he thinks about them. The better you know the bible and the Christian, the easier it will be to pick the appropriately contrary verses, but the result will always be the same: The Christian will start rationalizing and explaining the contradiction in a way that accommodates them to his or her own life.

Press the Christian on inconsistencies and you’ll find that she or he sit upon the horns of a dilemma: A revelation the Christian can neither dismiss nor embrace in whole. On the one hand, the bible contains many paradoxical statements, contrary accounts, and even a formal contradiction or two. Invariably, it also has commands that the Christian does not wish to obey, ethics of which the Christian does not approve, and revelations of a god that the Christian does not want to worship. On the other hand, the Christian needs the bible to believe certain things he or she does hold dear. Whether it’s the beliefs that his dear old grandma is “in a better place”, that there was once a very special baby in a feeding trough, and that no matter how bad life gets there is a god to love us and make it all better, or the beliefs that grandma “went to hell,” that there was once a very special baby in a feeding trough, and that no matter how bad life gets, there is a god to hate our enemies and send them to hell, the Christian needs the bible to hold onto those things. They don’t make sense without religion.

Understand that we’re not merely intending to demonstrate simply that the bible is an inconsistent hodgepodge of ancient mythology and antiquated ethics rife with error, a Godian Knot that cannot be unraveled. That’s an obvious prima facie case and it’s not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is that because it’s an obvious prima facie case, that SPAG is the necessary and universal form of Christianity in practice, an absolute identity: All Christianity is Self-Projection as God.

Of course, the good news here is that at some level, SPAG is the Christian’s tacit admission to what we rationalists understand clearly: Far from being an inspired text from an eternal and unchanging god that is truth itself, the bible is a primitive book written in primitive cultures by primitive men with agendas and intentions that are below the dignity of any decent thinking person today. The bad news is that by the Christian having made that tacit admission without arriving at the point of rational activity, the bible has become a book that no enlightened person would rationally embrace,⁴but simultaneously a book that otherwise enlightened men and women embrace and defend, while—for the most part—refusing to defend it.

The Christian has not finally embraced the bible, but projected his or her own values, ego, and opinions an external revelation of god, claiming it as the bible’s god. That is the god the Christian will defend, not any historic definition of god. Not a “more biblical” [sic] version of god, and certainly not another person’s Self-Projection as God. It changes the ground of debate with the Christian. The dispute is no longer over the veracity and value of the bible as words bound in leather covers. We decisively have won that battle, but the Christians have outflanked us.

Convincing the Christian to reject the bible is simple, but convincing her or him to cease Self-Projecting as God proves far more difficult. Rather than filtering the evidence for god against reality and determining what it means, the Christian filters everything through his or her SPAG, doing whatever it takes to make it fit. While we continue to fire bullets cast in a rational mold at the non-existent god that we have already convinced the Christian to reject, the living-breathing god the Christian worships stands before us, freshly shaved and impervious to our logical ammunition.

It’s an infuriating battle to fight. We demonstrate that the bible is a self-contradictory book replete with inconsistency and error that could not stand scrutiny in an American court of law. The Christian will agree and insist that his god is true and good. We demonstrate that the bible is an appalling book replete with heinous accounts of atrocity that would have Yahweh tried as a war criminal under the Geneva Convention. The Christian will agree and insist that her god is true and good. We demonstrate that the bible is a primitive book replete with approbations of slavery and misogyny that would be rejected by any enlightened society. The Christian will agree and insist that his god is true. We say that the bible is an antiquated book abounding in anti-scientific accounts of the natural world and fanciful mythological tales that belie an omnipotent creator as its author. The Christian will agree and insist that his god is true.

We marvel at the Christian’s imperviousness to our logical arsenal until we finally throw up hands in frustration and concede, not the content of the argument, but the wherewithal to continue in the quagmire of irrational guerilla warfare. Meanwhile, the Christians win the war of attrition and elect leaders that go to war based on discussions with god about faulty intelligence, which is why religion is not a harmless and private matter.

As long as men and women are claiming to be god, Christianity must be objected and defeated, but the battle is not waged over an objective religion with an objective revelation. The battle has shifted to the Christian’s mind and psychology and the point of contention has become his or her claim of jus divinum for personal predilections. Focusing on the new objective is a matter of shifting our focus from the ridiculous religion that is objective Christianity to the ridiculous incongruity of SPAG in an otherwise intelligent and enlightened person’s life.

Next month: Part II- Fred Phelps and Quintessential Christianity: Helping Christians Recognize SPAG

-Vincent Skolny

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1. Westminster Confession of Faith, 1646 edition, Chapter II, paragraph 1 at http://www.reformed.org/documents/wcf_with_proofs/index.html.
2. The King James version of the bible correctly captures the existing Hebrew manuscripts focus on both god’s repenting of an original desire to do evil. Appropriately, biblical quotes here are from that version.
3. The various rationalizations and devices will be discussed in Part 3 of this 3-part series.
4. Which is why most Christians renounce the serious literalist and Fundy Christians. More on that in Part 2.