Cassandra had it easy

Our species has had wild success in the natural world, to such a degree that much of the world draws its nature from our designs. Most of that success has come in the past few tens of thousands of years. Often, we self-flatteringly credit our intelligence for this result - when we're not claiming even more self-flatteringly that god made us special.

We have souls, fer chrissakes. That makes us and us alone eligible for eternal paradise. God made us in his own image, so we're like so goddamn good-looking that it's a wonder satan doesn't hit on us. (Oh, right, he does. Yeah, in your hairy butt cleavage dreams.)

So we have to be the most intelligent species that ever could exist. We have to believe in human exceptionalism. We can't admit that eating and breathing and fucking and shitting and dying make us pretty much exactly like every other mammal, reptile, or amphibian that ever lived. Where's the wanking self-flattery in that!

In thirty years, we Americans have gone backward on accepting the plain truth that humans have existed longer than 10,000 years:

[T]he ”prevalence of this creationist view” has remained essentially unchanged since 1982.

The underlying Gallup poll shows that both religiosity and Republicanism damage American reason, but the damage doesn't stop there by any means. Four in ten Democrats believe god spat in a handful of dust and made Adam, navel-free and special. Never mind anything we might have learned since a bunch of scientifically illiterate Jews found their promised messiah. Never mind that Genesis is so filled with errors of fact that Bible literalism is falsified.

One thing that has changed in the past three decades: The profusion of fools in media has increased the ability of fools to assert they know things that just ain't so. Their tribe tells them to know nothing, and they do, not quietly, not ashamed of their ignorance, but ardently asserting it. They aren't stupid. But they willfully deny confirmed truth. They choose to bear the tribal markers of that chosen ignorance with pride.

It's not our intelligence that has made us successful, not in the sense of our ability to do science. Science is extremely recent, too recent to have been the evolutionary goal of our intelligence. Not many people can do it - or even understand it.

The big brains that permit us the pre-scientific intelligence to dominate the world, to proliferate across it, to alter the landscape and the atmosphere, evolved because social cooperation was so important to a weak and slow primate - perhaps the least physically imposing large primate. Weapons were (and are) important, but we needed language most of all. No one of us could bring down a mammoth. We needed a tribe. It took a village.

Tribalism has been very successful, and conservatives try to sneak it back in even when we've excluded it:

 In 1990 a colleague at the College of Charleston, where I was a math professor, pointed out that the South Carolina Constitution prohibited atheists from becoming governor.

Since the U.S. Constitution bars religious tests for public office, I asked a local ACLU lawyer how this obviously unconstitutional provision could be removed.

South Carolina's wackaloon voters were not going to elect an open atheist anyway. It's doubtful they would even consider someone who professed evolution guided by god. But it was tribal to continue the plainly illegal prohibition, the treatment of a group of citizens as second class, as outside the tribe:

I assumed, in my political naïveté, that state officials would consent to bring South Carolina into compliance with federal law. They didn’t. Governor Carroll Campbell said, “The South Carolina Constitution was fine as it was because this country was founded on Godly principles.”

When a social scientist tells you that conservatives are loyal and value authority, that sounds positive. But it isn't. Loyalty to the tribe can destroy ardor for the truth. Valuing authority to the exclusion of all else inevitably puts shameless shamans and charlatans in charge. Or royalty, if there's any difference.

In the immortal words of Kay:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

I've been expecting too much rationality from our society and our politics. Most humans just aren't built to examine their cherished beliefs. They're built to rationalize in order to stay right with the tribe.

Cassandra had it easy.

Start making sense

Found this interesting:

In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organized enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. ...

Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. “This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighborhood context,” Dr. Campbell said.

The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines, girls playing with girls, boys with boys. They have an avid appetite for learning the local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behavior. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.

For me, the years between toddlerhood and puberty were filled with growth.  My mom taught me to read at 5, which opened the world to me.

She and my dad also inculcated fairness in me, although I think I had been born with a strong streak of it. The central issue of the time and place - Memphis, Tennessee in the mid-1960s - was race, and they were rare white liberals in our all-white neighborhood.

I ruefully remember telling my friends "that's illegal" a lot. I didn't know much about the law - how could I at that age? But I had a well-taught but still precocious grasp of the golden rule to compensate for my poor ability to keep track of the complicated rule-based codes of Christianity and etiquette. Forks and graven idols didn't matter to me a whit, but my vocabulary-challenged view of legality was really a sense of justice that I carry to this day, albeit more developed.

We moved several times, so I had new starts in which I could experiment with my social position. I was never an alpha (except in the classroom), but I could hold my own, and eventually I found sports as a path into kid society. At Little League try-outs, a schoolmate gibed, "Science and baseball don't mix." He had a forgettable Little League career; I became the best hitter in the league.

To fit in even better, I learned to identify the make and model of many cars - somehow important in elementary school - learned to bullshit from what little I knew of the automotive world into more. What does it mean to wind it out? I learned from the sound effects of other boys without ever having driven anything faster than a 3-speed spider bike.

Steeped in Darwin, also through my mom, I had that sudden aha moment when I realized the mythic nature of Christianity, at least the Bible Belt Christianity that surrounded me. Jonah and the whale, heavenly streets of gold, Noah's ark? All fanciful, just like Loki's liver or Athena's birth or Santa Claus. By the time I was confirmed, with puberty no doubt already well under way, I made reservations from doctrine at the altar. I was a cafeteria Methodist!

I also remember how different rich people were from poor. Boys in the richer neighborhood cared about cars. Boys in the poorer neighborhood had seen education as their meal ticket.

By the time I was 12, my identity was formed. There were many gaps to fill in, but the boy I was then is clearly the same as the man I am today.

(And I love the A.A. Milne reference in the page URL.)

Less popular than atheists

Less popular than Muslims!

 [T]he Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

Of course, those of us who were not performing daily self-service colonoscopies also knew this:

Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born.

Taking bullshit seriously

America is filled with ignorant religious nuts (and they're not the only kind).  Some of them make a fetish of the end of the world.

That's not news.  Or, it shouldn't be news.

Yet the media continues to report the pro-rapture statements of Harold Camping as if he were credible.

Camping said that he's now realized the apocalypse will come five months after May 21, the original date he predicted. He had earlier said Oct. 21 was when the globe would be consumed by a fireball.

Who are the AP's sources?  Camping, a disappointed follower, and Tim LaHaye, another pro-rapture voice famous for his bullshit "Left Behind" fictionalization of the fiction of Revelation.

I guess all the atheists they asked for a comment must have sputtered out something with bullshit in it, and they couldn't use that.  Yeah, sure.

Usually the media does its false objectivity dance to keep from noticing Republican bullshit, but Christianity is even more completely immune from media critique, no matter how bizarre its backwaters and increasingly its mainstream.

Sorry, the god ate my homework

Click image for full Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times Free Press cartoon.


When was the last time a prominent atheist wished for the end of the world?

What will the media do the next time a prominent fundie wishes for it?

Jesus spoke the King's English

As long as I'm on an atheist's tear this Super Bowl Sunday, here's something that would be funny if it weren't so scary:

MediaMatters has the story:

Somewhat ironically, while Fox Nation appears to be positioning themselves as the arbiters of authentic Christianity, they seem unfamiliar with the fact that there is more than one version of the Bible. ...

Most likely, they won't bother to correct their story, and their goal will be accomplished: the readers that trust them will remember the time Obama "misquoted" the Bible, some more people will question the authenticity of Obama's faith, and the smear machine will move on.

Fundies think that the verses they memorized in their particular churches are the literal word of god, even though they've been cobbled together out of many sources long after the death of Jesus (if he even lived), winnowed down to a canon (actually, several canons), translated multiple times since the original texts are often lost, and frequently mistranslated at that.

Yet the slightly modernized King James Version, with only selected remnant uses of saith and goeth to remind us that we should all be happy as filthy, oppressed peasants, is gospel.

And fundamentalism is a great force in our politics.  Argh!

But

I'm an atheist from a Protestant background. Still I can see the good works of the Catholic Church. I've known priests who were good men. The Church gives comfort to many people, including loved ones.

But...

Guilt for the child rape scandal pervades every level of the Catholic hierarchy, up to and including the pope. In practically every diocese where there has been sexual abuse by priests, their monsignors and bishops have covered it up, many by acts of commission. The higher priests, even if not pederasts themselves, have looked first and last to protect their fellow priests, rather than the children in their charge. Far from being punished and defrocked under canon law, the enablers in the hierarchy - I'm thinking of Bernard Law, formerly archbishop of Boston and still Cardinal - have been protected.

The church authorities - to put their own best spin on it - were concerned about the damage to their institution that revealing priests' misconduct would have done. Instead, they have allowed it to rot from within, and this belies all their claims to special knowledge of and access to god.

The doctrine of papal infallibility was obviously self-serving bullshit in the first place, but this ought to put the last nail in its coffin. If the holy spirit will protect popes from all doctrinal error when they merely say they're serious, don't you think it would at least protect the church from conspiring to put thousands of children at risk of being raped? It might be beyond the power of god to keep the first child safe in god's own house, but a god, supposed to be all-knowing and all-powerful, that would permit the second child to be raped is no god I could ever respect, much less worship.

And if he has a problem with that, may he strike me dead.

Update (3/15): Judging god:

[Eva Wankerl, 61,] also said it was time that the church stopped hiding abuse cases and questioned why priests seemed to be held to a less strict standard of morality than ordinary parishioners. “If you get divorced and remarry you can’t take communion, but someone convicted of molesting children can celebrate Mass for the rest of his life,” she said.

Getting right with god

[T]he football cheerleaders at a public high school here wanted to make the Bible a bigger part of Friday night games. So, ... they painted messages like "Commit to the Lord" on giant paper banners...

That eight-year-old tradition ended last month after a parent expressed concern that it could prompt a First Amendment lawsuit. ... [T]he school district agreed.

... [T]he new policy has produced an unexpected result: more biblical verses than ever at football games, displayed not by cheerleaders but by fans sitting in the stands.

That's how it's supposed to work! People express their own religious views. Government institutions don't.

In this case, an evangelical raised the issue of separation of church and state. No one's free exercise of religion was suppressed, quite the contrary in fact.

“From an atheist’s standpoint, it’s frustrating because I don’t want more religion in my face,” Caleb [Wickersham] said. “But it’s their constitutional right.”

Why is it that a 17-year-old atheist can understand this, while it goes straight over the heads of adult fundies?

De devil made me do it

What's Sunday without something funny!

Christmas spirit

What I want to know is what she was doing when she broke her jaw, but I don't want to hear it from her. I would encourage her to do it again, though.

Click image for whole Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon. It has at least three six literal LOLs in it.

Foxholes, hell

There are places outside of foxholes where it's not safe to be an atheist or even an agnostic. One of them is, no surprise, Congress. You can be a total lunatic fundamentalist Christian and people will happily vote you in, but disbelieve and it's hard to get elected dog catcher.

We free-thinkers are the minority group with the greatest differential between our size and our representation.

Ghost of Jesse Helms

Bullshit plays in North Carolina. Jesse Helms proved that, may he burn in hell, with obvious racist appeals against Harvey Gantt. Now, Elizabeth Dole wants to tar her opponent as an atheist.

The problem for Dole is that a black man can't really deny being black, but a church elder and Sunday school teacher can make a pretty convincing argument that she's not an atheist.

This just shows how low a losing Republican will go, even one who has a soft image.

The proper response is to say, "I'm sure Elizabeth Dole thinks of herself as a Christian, but after this, the people will have to decide whether she is capable of living up to Christian principles."

Anonymous entertainment

Just to get the vituperation out of the way up front: Scientology's empirical teachings are as ridiculous as those of many other religious traditions, Mike Huckabee's for example. Mitt Romney's, too. I'm not too keen on the whole virgin birth myth, either, nor on transubstantiation. Hindu cosmology is wacko. Islamic science used to be pretty good, though it has fallen on hard times for the past several hundred years and shows little sign of recovering - quite the contrary in fact.

Scientologists, Southern Baptists, Mormons, Catholics, Hindus, and Muslims are probably all evil or good in about the same proportions, which is to say in proportions that don't respect stated belief or lack of it.

I'm an atheist; as a group, we're no better morally than anyone else. Nor are we worse. We do tend to be better at distinguishing empirical fact from the made-up metaphysical bullshit that charismatic leaders can't seem to avoid, but even among us you'll find all sorts of believers in crystals, the Force, etc.

The strangest thing is what happens to the metaphysical bullshit once the charismatic leader is no longer around to make up metaphors and call them doctrine. His words harden into coprolitic dogma. So, because Jews thousands of years ago wrote about nature as they understood it then, fundamentalist Christians refuse to find any factual errors in a text plainly littered with them.

Really, though, it's a happy day when people hold a party to protest Scientology in such an entertaining way.

Questioning God

A contrarian is suspicious of all rushes to judgement. In any society that channels both its good and its evil through every handy institution, religious, scientific, whatever, real contrarians are very valuable even if they are often despised or even hated. Any society? Really, every society.

When I think of contrarians, I think about the common characters from folklore of hermits and wizards and other weirdos. They don't get carried away by mob psychology, though sometimes they do get carried away by the mob to be killed. Still, enough must survive that the ability to stand apart can be passed down through genes or culture.

The value of a contrarian is that a monolithic culture always fails. It lacks the flexibility to overcome inevitable change. A contrarian or two can provide a margin of "odd" thinking that saves the day, though no contrarian should expect to get credit.

Jesus was a contrarian, too. It's not solely that he ministered to the poor - Mother Teresa did that without stepping outside her indoctrination (at least not willingly). Jesus also subverted the savage laws of the Hebrew Bible, not to mention the authority of its keepers. That's what made him dangerous and brought the whipped-up mob to kill him.

Paul was no free thinker, more an institutional revolutionary. Even Protestantism is marked by the dogmatic ossification of Paul.

Both Jews and Catholics have mostly escaped Old Testament savagery through gradualism, as have mainstream Protestants. (Well, Catholics did have several centuries of corrupt sectarian murder to learn repentance, and Protestants joined the battle, too.)

Fundamentalists, far from learning, have retreated to the vicious "morality" of tribal survival that fills the Old Testament in particular. They just don't put people to death for eating lobster. Islamic extremists may have mistaken Islamic society's present mean state as damning modernity and justifying their own retreat to savagery.

Where does that leave me? I'm an atheist. I don't believe God exists. I'm not quite fully to the disbelieving end of The Mystic's taxonomy of unbelief, however. I'm still willing to weigh evidence for the existence of God. But I've concluded that the likelihood of any God remotely resembling a person is nil, and that, based on every piece of evidence I've seen so far, the fundamentalists and even more liberal Christians are dead wrong about a personal God known from this one very local myth, a myth whose each day in the modern world more strenuously alienates it from its rigid ties to the culture of its origin.

(Adapted from a posting on Philosoraptor.)