On Sunday, Bishop Donal McKeown addressed a 112-year-old Irish temperance association in a homily during which he spent a large portion of the time discussing clerical abuse:

Many criticised the Holy Father when, in his letter to the Catholics of Ireland, he spoke of the need to do penance and proposed that Friday should be kept as a weekly day of penance.  Some commentators dismissed that as asking the ordinary people of Ireland to do penance for the sins of clergy and bishops — and they couldn’t understand that idea.  But all Christians come from the strange belief that Jesus is the innocent One, the Lamb of God that took away the sin of the world.  Our secular society — that so often likes to locate sin and repentance only in individuals rather than accepting the possibility of corporate responsibility — cannot easily comprehend the idea of doing penance and making reparation for others. But Pioneers and all Christians can. … Continue to do penance for the sins of those Church personnel who abused children.

He also, by the way, wished that the “secular hierarchy” would “accept that they too share responsibility” for child abuse because they are entrusted with “righteously punishing offenders”.  These would be the same offenders that the Church has … actually, never mind.  There’s just simply nothing snarky that I can say here that would begin to do this wickedness justice.  I guess I can sum it up this way: the bishop is right in his argument that this is strong evidence for the existence of evil and the need for reparation.  But the evil is in his speech, and the responsibility for reparation is not on the secular.

Government responses to various ad campaigns:

“Join our health club and you will live forever” → Fines
“Join our diet program and you will live forever” → Fines, FDA investigation
“Join our church and you will live forever” → Tax exemption

Do you know about Sharron Angle yet?  She is the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for the 2010 election challenging Harry Reid. 

So, here’s a HuffPost article about a January 2010 exchange on the Bill Manders show.  You can play the audio at that link, but here’s a transcript:

Manders:  I, too, am pro life.  But I’m also pro choice.  Do you understand what I mean when I say that?

Angle:  I’m pro responsible choice.  There is choice to abstain, choice to do contraception. There are all kind of good choices.

Manders:  Is there any reason at all for an abortion?

Angle:  Not in my book.

Manders:  So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something [trails off]?

Angle:  You know, I’m a Christian.  And I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations.  And we need to have a little faith in many things.

So — going to try to be exquisitely fair here: if a father holds his little girl down and rapes her, and she becomes pregnant, God could intercede.  If he doesn’t intercede, that’s part of his plan.  We would be sinning and subverting divine will if we allowed the girl to have an abortion.  The proper response is faith in God.

Does that about cover it?

This.  Woman.  Is running.  For national office.

She is the candidate of the more-conservative of the two main U.S. political parties.

Before I move on to the rest of my post, let’s get this vile piece of Angular detritus out of the way.  It is too late to unspeak the words she spoke about rape and incest.  That horse has left.  There is no way you mess that one up that bad.  It’s more absurd than saying, ‘Officer, when I said ‘Open the register and give me all your money!’, I meant to say ‘Do I have to buy something to get some change for the pay phone?’”

So, I’m setting my clock as of the timestamp of this post.  The RNC has 48 hours to withdraw all support for Angle.  That much is a given.  A statement on the order of “We were unaware of the insanity of Ms. Angle, and we apologize for our previous support of her.  The Republican National Committee does not oppose abortion in the case of rape nor incest.  We disown anyone who argues otherwise, for any reason, including superstitious special pleading.”  If they do not, they are complicit.  If they do not, and if you are registered Republican, you must be publicly vocal about how abhorrent this is, and at least write a letter to the party, or you are complicit.  That’s my line in the sand.

OK, now that I’ve established (to my satisfaction) that she is reprehensibly inhuman, or sociopathic, or both, my main point is done.  But I want to take a look at something very interesting that fell into place while researching this post.  I want to argue that this functions as a case study of when some religious conservatives choose to play the “illegally imposing their agendas” card.  Let’s do a little quoting:

Here’s Sharron Angle’s official “About” page on her website:

She is proud of her past chairwomanship of We The People Nevada PAC

We The People used to have a web presence, but no longer.  But that’s what archive.org is for.  Stored on the archive servers 2005-03-11:

There is a strong movement by atheists to ban religious thought form the public square.  This should be recognized as an attempt to establish atheism as the national religion. … The ACLU, NEA, and other organizations are examples of atheistic institutions trying to gain political control and an unfair advantage over Christian groups

So: atheists are trying to illegally impose their religious beliefs (“lack thereof”, actually, but when your only book is the Bible, everything looks like a faith), through political means, to the unfair detriment of some others, in a fashion that would set national policy.

One more.  Also from the cached PAC page:

The radical homosexual movement and other groups seek to destroy the traditional family structure which is the underpinning of society.  Their agenda should be opposed.

Gay activists (and, remember, the ACLU was implicated above) are trying to destroy the underpinnings of society.  Their agenda should be opposed.

So, tying it together: silly, silly, silly me.  You know how crazy-liberal I am?  I thought one of the underpinnings of society was undoing the harm caused by fathers who rape their children.  I thought that, given that We the People and I agree that “The establishment clause prevents the combining of the state with religious organizations”, that dictating the definitions of what family means — not only who can get married, but why it is OK to let a god mediate when a “traditional family” is destroyed by a villain from the inside — on the basis of what the god the person speaking happens to believe in is interpreted to desire — could be considered … pretty much nuts.

But that’s just me.  I’m an atheist.  I, therefore, am probably using this unfairly in an effort to make my lack of religion the official national religion, to the unfair disadvantage of these Christians.  Who, of course, have no such desires.  Unless they win.

(For the sake of rigor:  I haven’t been able to determine [help?] what years Angle chaired We The People, and cross-reference it against archive.org caches of their “Principles” page during her tenure.  Until I get this, it is just conceivable that this politician who thinks that abortion is not justified even in cases of child rape does not believe in a conspiracy of gays and atheists to destroy America.  I think that’s unlikely.  I expect you would think so, too.  But let me know if it’s that’s the case.  I’ll have to Google for another example.  In the interests of efficiency, I’ll start with listings of Tea Party candidates.)

As Plato quoted Heraclitus, and the peerless Dr. Nathan Tierney had us memorize, “ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ”.  Tomorrow may be better.  It may be worse.  But it will certainly be different.

As the Sufis graced us, and Lincoln quoted:

هذا أيضا سوف يمر أو يعدي

And, with any luck, when it passes, it will pass into publication.  Properly lived, then properly rendered, it may be exquisite — and, it is to be hoped, meaningful to Niall in his adulthood.

But that is not for now.  For tonight, I console myself with Tibullus’ elegy: “Credula vitam spes fovet et melius cras fore semper dicit“.  The hope may be unwarranted, but it is good enough for a pillow.  Good night.  See you on the flip-side, friends.

[image at site]

An old joke (presumably told by heavy drinkers?) is that an alcoholic is “someone who drinks more than his doctor.”

So, in this article by Erin Anderssen in The Globe and Mail, placed (incorrectly, I’d argue) in the “Science” section:

In Rorschach ink-blot studies, for instance, believers tended to see images that weren’t there and non-believers tended to miss images that were present.

So, by this definition, the classification of a religionist versus an atheist is the religiosity of the psychologist?  I mean, we’re talking about Rorschach blots.  Gah.

That is one of the least-absurd parts of the article.

Why am I linking to a worthless article?  As a case study of how ridiculous most journalistic coverage of religious opinion is.  Basically, there are two articles one finds:

1) “Quote quote inference quote quote unfounded inference quote quote zOMG God exists!!1!”

2) “Quote quote inference quote quote unfounded inference quote quote zOMFSM God doesn’t exist!!1!”

I’m not going to belabor my views on the issue of religious belief.  Any reasonably-regular reader will know them already.  My stance, briefly, is that all people are fucking useless morons and should be avoided whenever possible.

[image at site]

So, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this question, and I think if I were to spend a year studying one book of the Bible, it would be Hebrews.

Atheist Josh, huh?  Year with one book?  I’ll get back to the general question at the end, but specifically, this book is fascinating.  What an incongruous (nicer term than “fucked up”) Christology.  I haven’t spent a year on it, but as far as I can tell, it was directed to early Jewish Christians.  It tries to syncretize the OT and NT, and it … kind of fails at that.  Granted, it’s pretty much impossible to do that, but with some (fairly deep) reflection on hypostasis, it tries to have Christ be both “son of God” and “high priest”.  Except the latter doesn’t really work with the Gospels.  If this were modern genre fiction, we’d call the attempt “ret-conning”.  Bonus points for the attempt.

I am left wondering how this was accepted into the canon in the first place.  Surely there were people who would have said — “Um … the NT works better without this in it.  Or with just this in it.  Thoughts?”  And I’m repeatedly amazed that the fiercely eschatological stuff wasn’t redacted.  I mean, by the fourth century C.E. it was pretty clear that any generation alive in Jesus’ day wasn’t around any more, right?

Here are some of the (my) highlights:

• This is where English gets both “a little lower than the angels” and “a shadow of good things to come”, which are simply awesome poetic lines.
• I’m pretty sure that 8:6-7 is the origin of the Narnia “deep/deeper magic” bit.
• 12:8: If God doesn’t hurt you, then he clearly isn’t your father.  Editorializing here, but: that’s messed up.
• 12:29: “our God is a consuming fire”.  13:20: “[our God is a] God of peace”.  There’s not even an attempt to separate them in the text.
• By writing this post, I am guaranteeing that (10:28-29) God is going to kill me without mercy.  Just FYI.

I know my Dad’s going to be reading this, but I think this is appropriate to do publicly.  I used to attend my Dad’s weekly early morning Bible study.  But I’m kind of … not welcome any longer.  I mean, I’m totally welcome in lots of senses, but … I guess it’s analysis that’s not really welcome.  That’s not a diss: my Dad is totally down with analysis, and he knows his shit.  But the old dudes (they’re all old dudes) in the class: not so much.  I’ve been ribbed by a venerable member, outside of class, that I’m missed, but that the classes tend to stay more on track without me.  Mentioned in a sincere haha-only-serious way.  And I think: “On track?  What’s more on track than discussing what we’re reading?”  But — again, not so much.

I broached this with my Dad, and the answer occurred to me in mid-sentence: “Wait; is it a devotional group to them, and not at all a study?”  In the broad strokes, he confirmed that.  Again, no diss to my Dad.

As to the general question: why the hell is atheist Josh contemplating spending a year studying one book of the Christian Bible?  Well — I’m kinda damned if I do, damned if I don’t, am I not?  There’s a lot of our culture and nation that’s still pretty die-hard.  When I debate Christians, they frequently fall back to telling me I need to “study more”, and frequently to “find a Bible study”.  And my response in general is “Dude: done that.”  I spent 18 years immersed as a believer, and I’ve done (reasonably) advanced studies of the Bible.  In fact — and this is bizarre — often more than the Christian has.  And almost certainly more extrabiblical reading about the Bible than he has.

So, y’all, both atheists and theists: your choice for a book to study for a year?

It is an accident, in truth, that I am writing this on Christmas.  The ones who really commit to the family and being around others won’t be reading mcgees.org today anyway, right?

Here is Garrison Keillor on Christmas.  It is levied squarely against Universalists who want to — in the example he gives — rewrite Silent Night.

“Christmas is a Christian holiday — if you’re not in the club, then buzz off,” he writes.  Wow.  OK.  “Club”.

But I’m totally with you, dude.  I feel the same skin-crawl when Christian radio in America (for real, they do this) excise the “… and no religion too” line from John Lennon’s Imagine.  (According to Dawkins, sometimes the substitution is made, when others sing it, “… and one religion, too,” but this is so horrifically repulsive that I’m going to have to hear it myself before reporting it as fact.)

But Garrison: cool.  Christian holiday.  That’s what I’ve been saying all along.  Now what you’ve got to understand is, this is a secular nation.  Even when Christmas became a national holiday in 1870, the wording, approved by both houses of congress, didn’t say something like “on the day Our Dear Lord was Born in Bethlehem,” it said “the twenty-fifth day of December, commonly called Christmas Day.”  And it took 100 years for this to happen.

So, Garrison, if you’re going to claim Christmas only for “the club”, then do the thing privately.  Right?  I’m not talking about malls, owned by people.  I’m talking about libraries, courthouses, schools … everywhere my taxpayer dollars go.  Please.  Keep.  Christmas.  But:  Please.  Keep.  Christmas.  To yourselves.  Commit to this, I’m with you.  Don’t commit, then “buzz off”.  It may be your religion more than it is mine, but it’s as much my country as yours, and I won’t tolerate hypocrisy, especially when you write stuff like “And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck.  Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’?  No, we didn’t.”

If you’re not committing to this, and just want to lob this stuff from offstage, then as far as I’m concerned, you can go directly to hell without passing “Go ye forth.”

Enjoy your celebrations — all of you — I mean that.  And if you’re offended by my blogging today (I’m having family celebrations starting tomorrow, by the way): maybe consider why you are checking email today? 

Loves!

David Cross has a bit in (the caustic and exquisite) Shut Up, You Fucking Baby! CD in which he is skewering — harshly — the Bible.  He uses examples like “angels took blood and …”, ages of religious heroes in the Old Testament , and calls it “D&D bullshit” (that’s from memory — can’t find my CDs).  To pillory this, he says “Where are the unicorns?!”

Um …

Um …

There.  And by “there” I mean:

• Numbers 23:22
• Numbers 24:8
• Job 39:9-10
• Psalm 29:6
• Psalm 92:10

For real.  Look it up.  Those are hyperlinks.  Click any — click all — of them.  Or pick your favorite Bible from your bookshelf (if you got it from a motel, you officially didn’t steal it, so don’t feel guilty.)  I’ll wait.

Back?

OK.  Um … unicorns.  From a Christian site — biblestudytools.com — here are the search results for ‘unicorn’.  The word in Ancient Hebrew, phonetically, is reh-ame’. 

But picking on the King James Version is like picking on conservatism by criticizing Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and Coulter.  I really do know that.  KJV is unsophisticated scholars interpreting ancient texts to conform to the whims of royalty.  My favorite version is the New International Version (NIV).  Yes, I have a favorite.  For me it’s the best balance of solemn formality, readability, collation of (wildly) varying texts, and accuracy (in my word-by-word Greek examination, at least.)  Yes, some interpretations have more scholarship behind them — NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) is frequently lauded, but my fave is still NIV.  It says “wild ox”.  For the record, here’s a survey of the word in the translations I’ve found online:

Unicorn: 4
Wild ox (one is hyphenated): 12
Ox: 2
Wild bull: 3
Buffalo: 1
Bison: 1
Reem: 1

OK, so the clear winner is “wild ox”.  But the second is “unicorn”.  But keep in mind: there are at least four different species here.  Wikipedia them. 

So: biblical inerrancy?  How is this possible?  Well, the answer is in Brown, Driver, Briggs, and Gesenius: “The exact meaning is unknown.”  So the answer is simple: the scriptures meant exactly one thing, and we’ve lost the referent.  Happens.  No fault there.  I’m not unsophisticated or strident enough to not realize that.

What my point is, though, is that among the (staggering small) number of Christians who have read the whole Bible, some believe that the Bible is inerrant.  Some of those will say that the Bible in the original languages is what is inerrant.  I can swing with that.  But the others (who’ve read the book — again, small) will stick by their favorite translation, and they can’t all be right.  This is not dickishness, this is just logic.

I believe the best argument for “unicorn”, by the way, is that Psalm 92:10 says “But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorn.”  All translations I’ve found are singular.  I must demur here: I don’t know nearly enough about Ancient Hebrew to judge fine issues of ordinality (if nothing else, Japanese convinces me of possible weirdness in the way things are counted.)  Why not … “horns of a wild ox”?  Dunno.

But who cares about what fucking animal a reh-ame’ is.

Few, I expect.  Fine.  The real problem I want to discuss is not there.  The problem shows up in Isaiah 7:14, which portends a birth that was ret-conned (I think it’s fair to say the burden of proof is on the believer to disprove this) onto Mary.  The word is `almah, which can mean either “young woman of marrying age” or “virgin”.  That’s reasonable if it’s in a culture where all unmarried young women are (upon-penalty-of-death-assumed-to-be) virgins — it’s like a language in which “Republican” and “asshole” map to the same token.  One brilliant translation I’ve read translates ‘almah to “maiden”, which is ambiguous in English.

The big ret-conning of the conception of Jesus, largely furthered by the proto-orthodox (see Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christainities), is and was super-hyped by the Roman Catholics who, in a baffling indulgence in syncretism, believe that Mary was a virgin after giving birth.  By the way, he source of that — and I would expect fewer than 1 in 1,000 Catholics could cite this — is solely The Proto-Gospel of James, a book considered non-canonical by (I believe) every modern denomination (“proto-gospel” is a technical term that means “gospel describing the life of Jesus before he began his ministry”, and most are delightfully amusing, describing Mad Magazine-esque escapades of the miracle-working young Christ.)

So, faced with all that: what would be the likely translation of the Isaiah passage if we didn’t have the Greek Gospels?  Without the later ret-conning, would we read that Jesus would be born to a “virgin”, or to “a young woman of marrying age”?  If you will set aside for the moment the conceit of Biblical inerrancy — and the facts that the book is internally inconsistent and demonstrably wrong give ample reason to set inerrancy aside permanently — what would be your response to an ambiguous email forward or newsstand tabloid that claimed a virgin birth?  Please be honest to yourself.  Would you say “Hells Yeah!”, or would you check Snopes?

It’s.  Just.  An.  Old.  Book.  Gah, can’t you see that?  Except it’s not.  It’s lots of contradictory old books sewn together with authorship attributed to a deity.  The power of unicorns?  Pregnant virgins?  For real, Christians: if this were anywhere other than the Bible, WWYD?  ‘Y’ is the most important critic: “You”.

I’m calling on my fellow secularists, atheists, and, indeed, all those who care about the U.S. Constitution and how non-Christians are treated in the United States.

The principal at Emperor Elementary school in Temple City, California, USA — Kathy Perini — is fiercely Christian.  In the teachers’ areas of the school, she has religious messages spread throughout.  But that’s not what I’m complaining about.  Those target adults.

At the “Breakfast With Santa” today, I got a complete blow-off when I brought up my concerns about the music being played (loudly) in the area where those attending were to eat.  It wqas all seriously hard-core Christian carols and songs — indeed, not a secular song to be heard, until, by accident, “Let It Snow” came on the mix as I was leaving in protest.

“Complete blow-off” is not strong enough, though.  When she said that she had it put together specially, and I asked “You do understand my point, though, right?”, her “Yes” was accompanied by a wicked smile.  The smile of someone abusing authority.  The smile of a bigot.  The smile that says “I have power, you have none.”

She is wrong, and not only morally.  She is wrong that we, as citizens, as secularists, have no power.

We have power.

I’m organizing a letter-writing campaign.  Please consider writing a paper-and-envelope letter to the Temple City Unified School District, expressing whatever concerns you have about this incident.  Please feel free to post here asking for more information.  And, if and when you send a letter, please note so here.  I think we can easily get 100.

Here is what I have sent to local newspapers:

At the “Breakfast With Santa” event held at Emperor Elementary School (Temple City, California) on December 5th, 2009, strongly (and exclusively) Christian carols and hymns were played loudly in the auditorium where attendees were to eat the breakfast they purchased at the event.  I approached Principal Kathy Perini and expressed my discomfort at the music choices.  She explained they were put together for the event to “Make it nice for the holidays”.  While she understood my secular concerns, she expressed an intention to continue playing them.

This is illegal, inappropriate, and an abuse of her office.  Temple City Schools must abide by California standards and the US Constitution.  Students from families of other faiths — and those of no faith — deserve to be educated in as respectful and inclusive an environment as the children of Christians.  Citizens’ tax dollars must not sponsor partisan religious behavior by school administrators.  A formal written apology by Mrs. Perini, distributed to every student at the school, and a commitment to abandon such behavior in the future, is the only appropriate course of action.

I have sent similar letters to our California State Assemblyperson and Senator; Governor Schwarzenegger; the California Board of Education; the Freedom From Religion Foundation; the ACLU; the Center For Inquiry: West; and American Atheists.  If you have a blog, Twitter account, or social networking account, please consider propagating this.

We can make a change.

We have power.

Here is contact info.

Temple City School Board
c/o Temple City Unified School District
9700 Las Tunas Drive
Temple City, CA 91780
Phone: (626) 548-5000
Fax: (626) 548-5022

1.  There exist religions, one of which is Christianity
2.  My parents raised me in that one
3.  I have felt there is something greater than myself
4.  Ergo, God exists and everything in the Bible is true

Yes, I’m a dick, but that doesn’t change the fact that the religionists with more sophisticated reasoning constitute <5% of those I’ve encountered.  (But, for the record, I am certain that you are in the 5%.  Right?  Right?)

I’ve learned that the world is 4,500 million years old.  If you’re very religious, it’s not 4,500 million years old, it’s 6,000 years old.  One of these is not correct.  Using simple logic here.  Now the science boys: they’ve got anoraks, they’ve got glasses, Bunsen burners, and Petri dishes … Then if you’re religious, the religious boys: they’ve got a book … [mimes trying to think of anything else.]  Some really interesting stuff in the book, good stories in the book …

And there’s slavery in there.  Maybe — crime against humanity there?  In a good moral book?  Maybe shouldn’t be in there?  Maybe an editor should have put a line through “How to sell your daughter”?  It makes me think there isn’t a God.  You know?  I used to be an agnostic, now I’m an atheist …  I believe in us!  I don’t believe in God, I believe in us!  Human beings! …

[God writing the Bible:]  “Sorry about the slavery.  Couldn’t get the staff.  They seem to like it?  Shit!  Alright, forget this bit.  ‘In the beginning was The Word!’”

(From Stripped)

I’d like to take a moment and defend Will Smith.  Will Smith is being pilloried on Twitter, largely due to an easily mockable video of Will Smith on Tavis Smiley’s program (previously).  I’ve joined in the mocking.  But the caption of the video is “Will Smith on Will Smith, Scientologist”, and I’d like to reflect on what it means to accuse someone of being a Scientologist in this country, as opposed to what it means to accuse someone of being a Christian.

According to advanced Scientology doctrine, “thetans” are spirits that have existed for 300 trillion years.  This is, of course, ludicrous.  The universe is only, roughly, 14 billion years old.  Scientology is off by four orders of magnitude.  But according to Christian tradition — and many Christians, especially in the United States — the universe is 6,000 years old.  This is off by six orders of magnitude.

Scientology teaches that the human mind is a thing of great power, capable of amazing things.  This is true, in that the human brain does measurably do things.  Not all the things that Scientology says it can do, to be sure, but stuff.  But in the Christian Bible (John 11) human bodies that have been buried for four days come back to health.  This can’t happen.

Scientology uses weird pseudo-technological boxes of wires, switches, and lights to aid in its teaching.  The boxes do nothing.  But some boxes of wires, switches, and lights do do things.  I’m typing on one right now.  But a device made by crossing two sticks?  That’s supposed to be, essentially, magic in Christianity, but most are too small to do anything but metaphorically beat things.

The Church of Scientology is a wealthy organization able to command great donations from its followers, and claims many adherents among celebrities.  But the wealth of this church absolutely pales in comparison with the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, which claims not only many, many more Hollywood celebs, but actual lawmakers able to make decisions that affect my life and the life of my son.

A valid comment on Scientology, however, is that it is new.  As far as I can tell, this is the primary differentiating factor from Christianity.

Now, to you, the Christian reader (I know there are many): some of you will claim that of course you don’t believe in the magic part of Christianity.  Of course the universe is old, of course putrid bodies don’t come back to life, of course totems hold only placebo value.  And many will admit that the Christian churches wield a frightening and inappropriate amount of power in the world, and especially the U.S.  But, to get to the core point: Will Smith is not a Scientologist.  He’s a bit loony, to be sure, but what he actually says is “I just think a lot of the ideas in Scientology are brilliant and revolutionary and non-religious”.  And I’d like you to reflect — to reflect carefully — on how this is different from someone who discards the magic in Christianity and embraces it as a historically novel and revolutionary ethical framework.

Not a troll.  Please think.  And the next time you are writing a check to a multi-billion-dollar organization and supporting it in public: introspect.  And maybe cut the Scientologists a bit of slack.

I was listening to The World (Best.  Program.  Ever.)  A reporter was interviewing a woman in Nigeria about her family’s economics.  She was looking for a job to help support herself, her husband, and her nine children.

I think I see a possible area for optimizing Nigerian family economics.

Could we, like, petition the Vatican or something?  Petition them to sell all their (billions of dollars worth of) assets, give the money to Oxfam, and transition all the priests to, say, gardening?  Small-scale rural heirloom vegetable gardening, maybe?  With the gardens at least, say, 10km from the nearest primary school?

</snark>

Graphic found at an atheist site today:

OK, so, look, you know I’m not wont to give Judeo-Christian scripture the benefit of the doubt.  I’d jump on the former if it were remotely fair.  But it isn’t.

I’ve been reading Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, which is absolutely fascinating.  If you thought The Da Vinci Code was kinda cool, and felt like it was “taking a class”, and plowed through the hack writing for the neato stuff about religious secrecy, then, well, you’re an idiot, but a forgivable one; it was nicely packaged.  But Lost Christianities was the book you wanted to read all along.  I know it doesn’t have albino assassins or anything in it, but it’s still gripping.  And while the Luke 19 bit isn’t directly addressed in Ehrman, his books give one a much better understanding of the heterogeneity of early doctrinaires and the numerous forgeries, flame wars, actual flames, actual wars, and other assorted weird stuff going on in 2^nd-3^rd century proto-Christendom.

So, here’s Luke 19, in overview:

Verses 1 – 10: “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he”
Verses 11 – 24: Parable of the Talents, which neocons love so much because they can interpret it as blessing the super-rich who make all their money by investing
Verse 25: “Can I get a witness?!”
Verses 26 – 27: OMFG Hail Hitler!!!1!
Verses 28 on: And then he went to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples stole a horse, and he taught random stuff that was probably furiously modified by later writers, and cried and shit.

Great.  Let’s go back to verses 26 to 27.  Read it in context.  Here it is in KJV:

19:24  And he said unto them that stood by, Take from him the pound, and give it to him that hath ten pounds.
19:25 (And they said unto him, Lord, he hath ten pounds.)
19:26 For I say unto you, That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him.
19:27 But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.
19:28 And when he had thus spoken, he went before, ascending up to Jerusalem.
19:29 And it came to pass, when he was come nigh to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount called the mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples,

There is no way that was in the original.  Damn.  Even in translation it stands out in glaring blood-red.  Look, atheists: you can’t just take random verses out of context and call Christians Nazis.  You need to glork the context a bit more.  I know it’s weird to talk about the impropriety of surreptitiously corrupting Sci-Fi for later generations, but you are not helping if you just stand at the sidelines and throw stuff into the argument.

Eight!  Eight is great!  (or, at least, good enough for Rebecca Gayheart)  This may be the longest any mcgees.org tradition has gone on.

In commemoration of that — or, you know, just because I feel like it — I’m pulling out a huge heavy-hitter this week.

Marker In the Sand

There is a marker;
No one sees it ’cause the sand
Has covered over
All the messages it kept;
From misunderstanding
What Original Truth was,
And now expanding
In a faith, but not in love

What went wrong?
Walking tightrope high
Over moral ground
Seeing visions of
Falling up somehow.
Oh, do come down!
With the living let what is living love.
So unforgiving, yet needing forgiveness first

God, what do you say?

Those undecided
Needn’t have faith to be free;
And those misguided,
There was a plan for them to be!
Now you’ve got both sides
Claiming ‘Killing in God’s Name’,
But God is nowhere to be found, conveniently

What goes on?
Walking tightrope high
Over moral ground.
Walk the bridges before you burn them down!
Do come ’round
With the living let what is living love.
Unforgiving, yet needing forgiveness first

God, what do you say?
God, what do you say?

I feel a sickness,
A sickness coming over me,
Like watching freedom
Being sucked straight out to sea.
And the solution?
Well, from me, far would it be
But the delusion is feeling dangerous to me

What goes wrong?
Walking tightrope high
Over moral ground
Seeing visions of falling up somehow
Oh, do come down!
With the living let what is living love,
Unforgiving yet needing forgiveness first

Oh, what do you say?
God, what do you say?

Calling out, calling out!
I’m calling out, calling out!

Back next week!

All Vedder Tuesday

eBay has always had an odd culture: eBay treats its sellers like crap, but the same sellers hang out on discussion boards and flame any newcomers who try to bring up complaints.  Serious, horrible flames.

This has struck me as rather a cult arrangement: infinite power vested in the authority structure, progressive limiting of freedom, cutting members off from their assets, and, all the while, the people most hurt by this behavior are supporting the power in a fashion that would make Joe the Plumber recoil.

But this is not a rant against eBay.  There are plenty of those.  I’m not even bitter that no one is answering any of my emails trying to clarify the situation, namely, that I owe them about $100, that I consider paying this back a moral obligation as well as a legal one (like I feel with my personal loans), and the only thing that has kept me from paying so far is I don’t have the money.  Concisely: when I’z gots the money, theyz gots it. 

I’m not bitter.  Bemused is better — by the progressively more Jonestown tone eBay is taking with me in automated emails.  So this was a really long wind-up for this, received today:

Because you are delinquent in paying your fees, we have suspended your eBay account.  Your current listings have been ended and you are no longer a member of the eBay Community.  [emphasis added]

But … but but but … why couldn’t you just end my listings and suspend me, but [sniffle] not excommunicate me?  I want to go hide under a blanket and cry.  I’m not a part of the eBay Community any more [sob]!!1!  Can’t I just do some penance?  Like, make me pay $0.30 to use their profoundly ugly templates ten times, and twenty Hail Donahoes?  Readers: any suggestion how to handle this without self-flagellating?  I’ve asked eBay but … but but but … they seem to have better things to do.                      More important than the survival of my very soul?!

Do you know the true irony?  The best way I have to generate $100 on short notice is to sell shit on eBay.

L’esprit d’escalier is one of the most useful French terms to know.  It successfully predicts that a slow wit, a few hours, and a blog can turn someone into Cyrano, albeit a still-slow-witted one.

So, usually I’m not that fast.  Today I was.  A commentator on NPR was discussing Bagram Airfield, where, notoriously, prisoners were tortured to death (fuck “allegedly” and “arguably”) in 2002.  They were beaten, hung by their arms, and subsequently died.

“You know, the Bush Administration talked a lot about another guy who was beaten, hung by his arms, and died,” I said.  “They also used it as an excuse to hate the Jews, and they started praying to the guy.  How did they not know this would produce martyrs?!”

(Ha!  See that?!  My nose is pointy, and I got a cheap wisecrack out of illegal war, torture, and religious persecution!”)

Frequently atheist arguments, when simplified enough for a blog post, end up squarely in “Shut up, you’re not helping” territory.  And despite several misfires, I would recommend “It’s no mystery how Nonbelievers stay moral without God”, if only for the presentation of a false syllogism that seems to explain the believer’s logic:

1. If God does not exist, then there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail.
2. If there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail, then there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful.
3. If there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful, then people cannot be reasonably motivated to behave morally.
4. People should be reasonably motivated to behave morally.
Therefore,
[5]. God exists.

In these situations, I am often struck with the idea that I must be completely missing some subtlety — the conviction that in the argument, surely one of us is being a moron.  But the justifications for faith really do seem pervasively fear-based.  I run up against “If there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail, then there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful” all the time.  My response is, “So?!”  What bearing has an idea’s ability to comfort have on an existential claim?

I must — must — be missing something.  I know there are several devoted readers of my blog of an Abrahamic bent, and I would be indebted for an explication.

The reflexive claim of religionists seems frequently to be “without the fear of damnation, I surely would rape, torture, steal, and murder.”  Really?  Seriously, have you thought this through?  If it is only the fear of divine retribution that keeps you from commiting atrocities, would you be so kind as to stay the fuck away from me and my child?  Or, at the very least, comment on this post?

“Hey, little boy!  My sense of decency has run off with my sanity.  Would you like to get into the back of my van and help me find them?”

Also: The response “No Comment”, when it comes to mind-raping children, should be a felony.

I’m engaged in a frustrating but rewarding and civil conversation with a Christian, a Mr. Wade Duroe, about the nature of reality.  I have his permission to post our discussion so far (which started on The Sunny Skeptic) and to invite my readers to join the conversation.  I will thread our posts back and forth in the comments; the first several posts attributed to “wljc” are my posting with quotes of Mr. Duroe’s.

I’ve begun, and deleted, my varying comments about this about half a dozen times so far.  I’m giving up.  Here it is:

The [Organization of the Islamic Conference] resolution [proposed in the UN] says “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism” and calls on U.N. member states “to combat defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general…”  — Reuters

I don’t even know.  This just makes me want to cry.  If the leadership of fifty-six countries can parse that paragraph and interpret the logic as A→B→C, let alone advocate for it, what possible chance is there going to ever be for peace worldwide?

There are plenty of people here, I estimate, who would think I completely support this article.  I am here to disown it.  It is poorly-written, confrontational, unhelpful, rude, offensive, supercilious, bitter, and useless.  You are not helping, Polly Toynbee.

I just saw a special-interest election ad on television:

After Massachusetts legalized [interracial] marriage, our son came home and told us the school taught him that [white people] can marry [black people].  He’s in second grade!  We tried to stop public schools from teaching children about [interracial] marriage, but the courts said we had no right to object or pull him out of class.

Do note that these warm-hearted followers of Jesus consider it a mortal sin to detach a bundle of 32 cells from a uterine wall but apparently have no qualms about denying rights to Real Actual Adults.

Fine print on the bottom of these pesky California election ads is insufficient.  It needs to have a pathetic, hateful, and ideally terminally ill old man come on and say “I’m James Dobson, and I approve — and funded — this message.”  I am willing to negotiate about whether he should be forced to wear an SS uniform while reciting the sentence.

It’s rather a good thing that I didn’t get to write the No on Prop 8 tagline, because “Don’t be a fucking Nazi, asshole” is probably not the most even-handed approach to this issue.

I have a tank of water containing three plastic jellyfish.  Through cleverly-contrived motors, the plastic jellyfish move in lifelike fashion.  To Niall they are beloved pets.  We buy them food at the local aquarium shop.  He always says “hi” to them.

This is the most severely I have ever lied to my son.  There’s no lie even close to this, which makes me extremely uncomfortable about this one whenever he greets the novelty fishtank.

Others in his life have no such qualms.  They lay myth on top of him, thinking that they are giving him charming stories.  Most of the stories are profoundly not charming, and I spend a large portion of my time with Niall trying to undo the Gordian knot of mythos that his grandparents, for instance, see fit to inculcate in him.

Why are they not charming?  Because Niall is hyperintelligent, hypersensitive, and possessing the typical (but still scary) sense of responsibility that frequently accompanies children of his brilliance.

Before the age of five, Niall would pick up every newspaper he saw and start to read it.  Really read it, with total comprehension.  When asked why, he would respond, “I have to make sure that everything is OK in the world.”  Egads.  Niall needn’t be worried about the content of newspapers as a preschooler.  That’s not lying, that’s responsible parenting.  The adults in his life need to take newspapers away from him.  And take myth away from him, I contend.

Of all his myths, he is most captivated — and disturbed — by the Babylonian/Judeo-Christian myth of Noah and the Ark.

In a recent reverie — that’s his default state, much to his teachers’ frustration — he began visibly shaking and was on the brink of tears.  I quickly asked him what was wrong.  He told me that he was “worried about the penguins on Noah’s Ark”, because Noah failed to take any fish onboard, and he was sure that penguins couldn’t go forty days without food.

Funny how this problem occurred to my then-four-year-old and escapes over half the adults in the U.S.

A big part of my education of him is differentiating “stories” from “real life”.  I have used many arguments that I’m rather proud of, but one of the coolest I’ve generated is that stories are fun if we control them and bad if they control us.

And he gets it.  Mostly.  He has come up with a charming alternate world called Character Land, for instance.  In Character Land, he explains, there are no real people, but every character (yes, he uses that word) from stories lives there.

I love this.  I was creating worlds by his age, too, and they are great tools for imagination — far better than those insipid, preachy, parochial Thomas the Tank Engine stories he likes.  I encourage him in this pursuit, and ask very leading questions.  Such as: “Wow!  So Nemo, Pooh, and Noah all live there?”

“Noah from the ark?” he asks.

“Yes,” I reply.

“Um, yes!” he responds.

Which is all very good until the next weekend I see him, by which point he has either forgotten my tutelage or been reinfected by sharp-clawed religionists.

So, parents: really, really, really think about the content of the stories you are ladening your children with.  Just because we were raised on them doesn’t mean you need to pass on the memes.  I am sure you don’t want your children to lie awake at night asking, “Why did God turn her into salt for looking at something?  Why did the woman amputate the tails of three disabled rodents with a carving knife?  Why is a fat man going to give little boys and girls lumps of dirty coal for Christmas if they’re naughty?”

To close with Thoreau, my son’s middle-namesake: “It is never too late to give up our prejudices.  No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”

On April 2nd, Representative Monique Davis of the Illinois Legislature, during a session, condemned Jewish activist Rob Sherman for “destroying what this state was built upon”, shouted in open session, told him to “Get out of that seat, you have no right to be there!”, and commented, “What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous.”

Oh, wait.  Did I say Jewish?  I meant Atheist.  Brad Sherman is atheist, an activist, and an American.

If Sherman had been Jewish, the airwaves would not have stopped shrieking the story for the last six days.  Monique Davis, a black, female legislator, went all 1841-Mississippi on Sherman’s ass, and there was barely a murmur in the media.

Some of you who get your news entirely online will contend “Oh, everyone covered that, Josh!”  What I want the rest of you to do is, if this is the first, or the first detailed, report you have encountered of what happened, to post, “I didn’t know about that.”  You with me?  The usual suspects can go ahead and tell me I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, and I’m just asking the rest of you to be honest about this.  Did this get the coverage it would have if, for instance, an Atheist legislator (Ha!  Must be a fucking incredible duck hunter!) had told a 71-year-old black woman that she had no business in a legislative session?

(You can see it buried deeply in the Chicago Tribune.  I know the Web has a way of flattening sites, but just note what column it appeared under, when, and where.)

Billion dollar organization The Roman Catholic Church, previously brought to trial for electromagnetic pollution and known worldwide for freely distributing intoxicating substances to visitors (including minors), asking the desperately poor for 10% of their earnings, and subjugating reproductive, expressive, and scholarly rights around the world while denying positions of power to women and any but chaste, heterosexual men, has generated a new list of Seven Deadly Sins. 

The sins are:

Environmental pollution
Genetic manipulation
Accumulating excessive wealth
Inflicting poverty
Drug trafficking and consumption
Morally debatable experiments
Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

To the best of my knowledge, the Catholic Church does not conduct in vitro human or genetic experiments, so five out of seven ain’t too bad!  That only gets the Church damned five out of seven possible times.  Bravo!

This was going to be a single sentence in the next post, but it sort of grew out of hand.  If you’re of an Abrahamic bent, and want to believe that I’m not really an asshole, stop reading.  Here’s your chance.

Still with me?  Are you sure you want to be here?

OK, thanks.  Regarding the shared bits of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc., here it is, in second person:

I believe that your God was the favorite tribal deity of a polytheistic, nomadic, historically insignificant Bronze Age people living in North Africa and the Near East.  Through a bizarre historical accident, a tiny messianic doomsday cult of this people was adopted as the state religion of the most powerful empire on the planet, despite the utter failure of any of the doomsday prophecies to transpire in the allotted time.

I believe your shared “testament” is a heterogeneous anthology of self-aggrandizing revisionist history, stolen legal codes, institutionalized bigotry, justifications for ethnic cleansing, “Just So” stories, the ravings of the mentally ill, census data, a sprinkling of common sense, and some truly beautiful poetry and children’s literature, all of which was rolled together and authorship attributed to a deity, which means to many of you that it has to be 100% factually accurate, even when it’s internally inconsistent or demonstrably wrong.

I believe the premise and existence of the modern state of Israel is at least as bizarre as if my family declared ownership of the British Isles, invaded, subjugated the citizenry, imposed martial law, renamed the nation “Mordor”, and declared war on Western Europe.

I believe that were we to argue theology, I’d argue to the point where we agreed that your god is undetectable, untestable, unpredictable, inelegant, unnecessary, paradoxical, and at least one of impotent, malicious, and completely incomprehensible, not to mention just plain weird, at which point I’d consider the topic not worth any further thought, you’d declare ineffability a feature rather than a bug, and I’d look at you as if you turned into a walrus in front of my eyes.

I believe people who “sort of” believe in God, “don’t really think about it”, “guess they do”, or find it the path of least resistance, are pussies leading unexamined lives.

I will, however, fight tooth and nail for your right to engage in your superstitions in your own home or normally-taxed buildings, or very quietly and personally in public.  I believe it is your right to live an unexamined life, in the same way that it is my right not to exercise, even though I know failing to will contribute to my early death.  I get it, kinda: we all have mental blocks.  I will even tolerate you indoctrinating your own children, although I really wish you wouldn’t, in the same way I wish Jews would stop mutilating the genitals of their male infants and Mexicans would stop piercing the ears of their female infants.

So there.

The “asshole” in the tagging of this post refers to me, by the way.

Whereas H.R. 888 is a series of lies of Stalinist dimensions seeking unabashedly to create institutions of Christian nationalism;

Whereas this is completely intolerable;

Whereas our insistence in urging Muslim nations to seek secular institutions will be seen as blatantly hypocritical and, in actuality, an urging of Muslim nations just not to create Muslim institutions (“Christian” ones would be OK!);

Whereas this resolution, while not having the power of law, will inevitably be used by the reptiles in the Religious Right to further their nefarious agenda to inject Christianity into public places, schools, and courtrooms;

Whereas I’m a fucking American, and, like the majority of the Founders and Framers, not a Christian, let alone an evangelical;

Whereas this is an utter betrayal of me, and those like me, who have done great service for this country;

Whereas this is the final straw in a battle that began in earnest seven years ago reviving the despicable history of McCarthyism;

Whereas this fucking bullshit was what made the fucking founders take up fucking arms in the first fucking place; Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, that —

1. Randy Forbes can go fuck himself;
2. everyone who voted for this piece of shit can go fuck his or herself;
3. everyone who agrees that this Resolution is appropriate can fuck his or herself;
4. this means fucking war; and
4. every reader of mcgees.org who agrees with this resolution needs to be very clear that if you agree with H.R. 888, you are no friend of mine, no friend of mcgees.org, and not welcome in my home or life, any more than you would be if you used racial slurs around me.