The source of our doom

America is not in trouble because we've fallen away from god. We're in trouble because bullshit, rather than honest inquiry, is the social norm:

[A]t this point the conventions of punditry call for saying something to demonstrate my evenhandedness, something along the lines of “Democrats do it too.” But while Democrats, being human, often read evidence selectively and choose to believe things that make them comfortable, there really isn’t anything equivalent to Republicans’ active hostility to collecting evidence in the first place.

The truth is that America’s partisan divide runs much deeper than even pessimists are usually willing to admit; the parties aren’t just divided on values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.

Looking for grace

Newt Gingrich (R-dumb idea of smart) handles a question about his health - and by implication his plutocratic girth - with humor, self-effacement, and a hint of grace:



Then, he alibis that god wants him to be fat. He held his huge vanity at bay for 30 seconds, but that was all.

Gravity is only a theory

Pat Robertson intentionally misquoted:

“We have to remember that the heavens are where God lives,” Rev. Robertson said during the broadcast. “If we launch something into outer space that God thinks is gay, He’s going to kick it right back to us.”

Argument from ignoramus incredulity

It's easy to see why Bill O is so popular in the ignoramus caucus. His basic message is that anything he's ignorant of isn't cause for learning since it proves that god exists.

This use of god as a safe container for ignorance is actually a basic philosophical problem of many arguments that claim the world shows the existence of god.  The more we explain naturalistically, the smaller a sphere remains for a god.

When Intelligent Design creationists claim irreducible complexity, they are trying to dress this same principle in sciency truthiness.  In their logic, the science is unable to explain something (undeniably true in many cases), therefore, ahem, mumbo jumbo, bafflegab, there is no explanation other than god.

Of course, so far, every so-called example of irreducible complexity the ID creationists have raised has been shot down by real scientists.

The forces of ignorance can't win in science.  They should stick to politics, where they completely dominate the Republican Party, especially its base of religious and free-market fundamentalists.

(h/t Salon)

Cause and defect

President Michael Steele? I realize that you have to be a world-class narcissist to think you should be President, but doesn't a little reality ever creep in. I guess if Sarah Palin is a popular candidate in the Republican rump, anything is possible.

Still, I have no idea how to reconcile this statement:

"I am a cause and effect kind of guy," he said.

with this one:

"[If I run] it'll be because that's where God wants me to be at that time."

The only way god would choose Steele to run for President is if she wanted to obliterate the Republican Party. Hey! Maybe there is a god.

Pray it away

Why can't Pat Robertson pray Gustav away? If God is a Republican as the Republicans seem to think (but won't admit they think), why would he send a hurricane at this critical time?

Republicans have learned something since Katrina: They've learned to turn disaster to PR advantage:

"He wants to do something service-oriented if and when the storm hits and it's as bad as its expected to be now," the McCain source said.

They are also hoping to get McCain himself to a storm-affected area as soon as possible.

There he goes again, presumptuously acting as if he were already President.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Update (8/31): More analysis, less snark at Massachusetts Liberal.

God's punishment or obvious evolution

Methicillin-resistant staph is killing people. Fundamentalists are in the brain-blowing position of having to assert that their God is taking lives randomly to send us a vague message of ... what exactly? Is that moral? Wouldn't they be better off blaming this on evolution and the effects of antibiotic abuse? Then God could still be a good guy.

But they don't actually want that. They want, in best Old Testament fashion, to have the biggest, baddest tribe-defending fearsome God in greater Palestine.

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.)