Steven Benen brought my attention to some recent Christian silliness in Congress in his most recent installment of, This Week in God. Texas Republican Representative Joe Barton put forward a new bill to lift regulations on oil exports. But it was given the the title House Resolution 666. Barton freaked out. How could his bill be given the number of the beast?! Well, if you ask me, a bill designed to promote more oil extraction and more wealth for the already insanely wealthy deserves the mark of the beast. But that hardly matters in this regard.

I’m more interested in how it is that a 65 year old member of Congress feels the need to be protected from such obvious nonsense. And then, the leadership in Congress feels that they must pander to him. According to Michael Marks at The Dallas Morning News, Rep Joe Barton Changes Bill Number From 666 — Not That He’s Superstitious. His staff want you to know that.

Barton’s spokesman Sean Brown said, “The Congressman isn’t superstitious and doesn’t see the number as unlucky. We decided to change the number because of the reaction it gets from others. It can be distracting because it carries different negative connotations for some people.” But that’s always the way. For example, people are never racists; they would have no problem with a black family moving into their neighborhoods; it is just all the other neighbors who would move out and lower property values. In this case, Barton is clearly just pandering to other Christians such as himself.

Of course, Barton isn’t known as a wacko Christian. His thing is oil. He is best known for his involvement in the BP oil spill. After the company reached a settlement with the administration, BP CEO Tony Hayward testified before Congress. Barton felt that he was being ill treated, “I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, is subject to some sort of political pressure that is, again, in my words — amounts to a shakedown, so I apologize.” But when Barton isn’t protecting the millionaire CEOs of billion dollar corporations, he’s looking out for the feelings of ignorant Christians. In this regard, he’s an innovator.

I searched back through previous Congresses, and no one seems to have had a problem with the 666 number for quite a while. Going back through 2003, only Democrats had bills with the number 666 — so obviously, they didn’t care. But in 2001, another Texas Republican got the number and didn’t have a problem with it. From that point, there were a mix of Democrats and Republicans. I went back 30 years — 15 Congresses — and there was no one who had a problem with the 666 bill number.

What’s going on, I’m afraid, is the increasing pandering to religious conservatives. This has gotten much worse after 9/11. A lot of people think we are in the middle of some kind of religious clash. It’s as funny as anything this dangerous can be. We have the wacko fundamentalist Christians on one side going against the wacko fundamentalist Muslims on the other. It’s too bad we can’t ship them all off to an island where they can have their war to determine which of their gods is the One True God™. Sadly, for many Americans, the response to religious extremism is another form of religious extremism. And the nation as a whole feels that it must pander to these people.

I discussed all this nonsense about the “number of the beast” in some detail a year and a half ago, Christian Suffers for Her Ignorance. It was about a young woman who refused to run in a school race because she was given the number “666.” The problem is that this whole thing about the “number of the beast” is nonsense.

To start with, Revelation 13:18 does not say that all people and things with the number are the beast — just that the beast will have that number. But more important, it is not at all clear that the number of the beast is in fact 666. Most theologians think it is. But the oldest copy of Revelation lists the number as 616. And there is much evidence in its favor. I understand though: Christians don’t much care about the basis of their religion; they just want to go along with what everyone in their “group” thinks.

But as a society, we shouldn’t pander to such nonsense. Being a mathematically inclined person, I have strong feelings about different numbers and functions. I actively anthropomorphize them. For example, I consider large prime numbers as snobs who don’t get along with others. And I find the number 2 very suspicious indeed — the only even number that is also prime; I just don’t trust it. Similarly, I find cosine functions contrarians, and don’t get me started with differential equations. It is all very real to me. But it would be madness, for example, to change a bill’s number just because I claim we can’t trust the number 2.

But when it comes to mainstream religion, no amount of silliness is acceptable to mock. Thus we mock the followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult, but we venerate Saint Sebastian who forced his own death for even sillier religious reasons. In America, there can be no religious test for holding public office. Sadly, there is no knowledge test either. And rather than just tolerate such nonsense, we applauded it. Apparently, stupidity or villainy in the name of an approved religion is good.

Earlier today, I saw a great article by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, Vox Got No Threats for Posting Charlie Hebdo Cartoons, Dozens for Covering Islamophobia. The website decided that as part of the coverage of the recent massacre, they would publish the cartoons that supposedly caused the whole thing, because they were part of the story. I think there are a couple of problems with this. One is that I don’t actually think the murders were a response to the cartoons — any more than the Columbine murders were a response to The Basketball Diaries. Another is that I don’t think people needed to see the cartoons — everyone knows that they aren’t offensive in a general sense the way that the photographs from Abu Ghraib were. But that doesn’t mean I have a problem with them being published. It was an editorial decision — just not a necessary one in my opinion.

One thing is for sure: the act was not “brave” — a fact that the editors of Vox agree with. The same act in isolation was brave. And the same act in other areas — like Saudi Arabia — would be brave. But not for a media group based in Washington DC and read by people like me. But there is another reason why I think that Vox had nothing to worry about: it isn’t an Islamophobic outlet. And that really does seem to be a critical element in the anger of normal Muslims about such cartoons: they feel like they are a sign of hatred.

I discussed this issue a year and a half ago, Another Conservative Atheist? It had to do with a comment by Robert M Price — a man I greatly admire for his writing about religion, and the Bible especially. But in an interview, Price expressed surprise that a fatwa hadn’t been taken out against the artist who creates Jesus and Mo. I had read the strip a long time before then, so I knew it and liked it. I wrote, “It is kind of like a road picture, but instead of Hope and Crosby, it has Jesus and Mohammad. It is silly and insightful and even, I would say, sort of sweet.” I grabbed the most recent installment and asked if people could “spot a reason why Muslim’s might not find this cartoon so offensive.” Here it is:

Or consider the strip this week and how scrupulously evenhanded it is to both religions (Moses shows up now and then too):

Note that I am not talking about murderers. I’ve always found the excuses of murderers in cases like this to make no sense. I mean, Mark David Chapman claimed that he killed John Lennon because he somehow offended God by saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus or some such. There were millions of Christians who Lennon offended, but it was only Chapman who murdered him. So I’m talking about the general offense that any religious person feels when their religion is depicted in an unflattering way. I don’t think they should be pandered to. But I understand. I was offended when Glenn Beck co-opted my hero Thomas Paine with the insipid Glenn Beck’s Common Sense (it is clear that Beck has never actually read Paine). I assume most Muslims think as much about these cartoons as I do about Glenn Beck.

As expected, Vox has not had its offices fire bombed:

You should read the whole article. It goes on to discuss how the coverage of the threat to free speech has been almost entirely focused on Muslim extremists. But the threat of violence — which comes fast and heavy from Islamophobes in this country — is also a potent threat to free speech. There are a lot of people who don’t want free speech. They just want an excuse to hate Muslims. And the smartest of them can finesse the argument by claiming that Islam is an especially bad Abrahamic religion. But it’s still just an excuse to hate a minority group.

Over at The Oregonian, Melissa Binder interviewed University of Washington political science professor (specializing in religion) Tony Gill on an issue that I’m quite interested in, Why Is Congress Overwhelmingly Christian With Only One Religious “None”? Interestingly, Gill doesn’t answer the question. In fact, we mostly get a lot of apologetics from him.

His answer is that since Congress is a small sample size, we wouldn’t expect it to correlate very well with the whole 316 million people in the United States. That’s shockingly ignorant. With a sample size of 535, we should have reasonably large errors — but not an almost total lack of correlation. For example, 1.6% of Americans state explicitly that they are atheist or agnostic. When we include people who just aren’t religious, the number can go up as high as 10%. Yet there is only one member of Congress who claims no religious affiliation. That’s less than 0.2%. That isn’t “small sample size” error; that’s “heavily skewed sample” error.

Similarly, when discussing why Americans are so negative toward atheists, Gill had really no insight other than to claim that people don’t trust the political system so they want to make sure that there is a God their politicians are afraid of, “An atheist doesn’t have those checks and balances on them — a supernatural individual checking them when we can’t see them.” It’s amazing that this guy is a professor at Washington — a university I hold in high esteem. This, after all, is no kind of analysis. If you strip away all nice words, his argument is, “People are bigots, and I agree with them.”

I think there is an obvious answer to the main question — one that ought to be the first thing that a political scientist would mention: incentives. Most people are religious. I’m not. I’m an atheist. As a result, I really don’t care the religion of people I vote for. I just care about their policies. Now, I understand that there are anti-theists who do care, but this is a tiny minority. So if a woman who isn’t really religious decides to go into politics, she will grab onto a religion — for purely political reasons if for nothing else. Gill does eventually touch on this, but only in passing — and while answering an entirely different question.

The problem with the general attitude of religious people toward atheists is that they simply don’t know atheists. So their attitudes toward atheists really are a form of bigotry. It’s the same reason that we didn’t elect an African American president before 2008. People we don’t know scare us. I suspect that The Cosby Show was as important to the election of Barack Obama as his Harvard education. I suspect that atheists need to do what the LGBT community did and be more public about who they are. Maybe in fifty years, atheists will have a 50% approval rating.

There was one part of the interview that was of interest. There is a strong tendency in the atheist community to think that atheism is really taking off. Gill rightly poured cold water on that. As the numbers I quoted above indicate, this just isn’t true. The number of explicit atheists is about the same today as it was when I was born. The trend that I’ve seen in my life is that a lot more people take their religions ridiculously seriously. The one bit of good news for the country is that there is a growing number of people who just don’t care about religion. But Gill tosses this idea aside as just part of the “life cycle” — claiming that people come to church later. But again, he shows his mathematical ignorance: that would always have been true. His “life cycle” argument doesn’t explain the trend.

So I really don’t appreciate Professor Gill’s apologetics. And it is amazing that a political scientist at a major American research university could be so ignorant of mathematics and statistics. I have no idea why The Oregonian chose to run the interview.

According to the Catholic Herald, Archbishop Óscar Romero Was a Martyr, Declare Vatican Theologians. It’s about time. The man was murdered while serving Mass 35 years ago. But for the last 20 years, the Catholic Church has been dithering. Finally, they decided that he was murdered “in hatred of the faith” and not because of his political stances. It seems pretty clear to me that the only reason this issue has moved along is that the Catholic Church has its first liberal pope in fifty years. (Or forty years if I’m being liberal.)

It’s all nonsense, of course. Romero was most definitely assassinated because of his political views. And he’s been “hung up in committee” for two decades because of his political views. The idea that religion is not political is a joke. Certainly, there are theologians who work with ontology and other purely theoretical topics. But mostly what churches do is political. And they are right in the thick of it. “Blessed are the meek” (Matthew 5:5) is a political statement. “Turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39) is a political statement. And the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12) is a political statement. Yes, those are all from the Sermon on the Mount. It is the best thing in the Bible and it is entirely political.

I don’t mind that the Catholic Church feels it must play this semantic game. We should all be allowed our delusions. But it doesn’t mean the rest of us should follow along. The whole thing reveals an important rift not only in the Catholic Church but in religion generally. As social organizations, churches cannot help but be political. But the more a church claims to be purely religious, the more overtly, and vilely, it seems to be political. I think it isn’t at all surprising that whenever I talk to a member of the explicitly non-political Jehovah’s Witnesses, she usually spouts some of the most careless Fox News inspired conservatism imaginable.

And this is what we see from the absolute focus of Evangelicals on abortion and homosexuality. Homosexuality is a bit of a stretch, but at least it is in the Old Testament. But abortion really is the “72 virgins” of Christianity. It isn’t in the Bible. It is just something that Catholic scholars worked out over hundreds of years. Certainly in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas didn’t believe that “life begins at conception” or that every sperm is sacred. And it wasn’t these finely argued considerations that ended evangelicals antipathy for the issue in the 1970s. It was their concern that they would be forced to accept African Americans into their religious schools. But if you ask them about abortion, they will tell you that it is all about God’s law.

Similarly, last week, Archbishop Thomas Wenski sent out a memo to his employees telling them if they made public statements in favor of same sex marriage, they risked being fired. Do you feel that Christian love?! I am very curious how this is in the least bit theological. The archbishop, after all, is not saying that employees shouldn’t advocate for the Catholic Church doing same sex marriages. This is strictly a secular matter: what the government will allow, not what the Church must do.

So if some same sex marriage advocate went crazy and killed Archbishop Wenski, it would clearly be a political act. But the Catholic Church would also be right that he was killed for his faith. Because the two are the same thing. But I’ll bet you this: it wouldn’t take the Vatican 35 years to say that he was a martyr.

This is the cover of 19 September 2012 issue of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that was attacked this morning during an editorial meeting. It seems at this point that 12 people were killed — ten at the magazine and two police officers. There were three gunmen who shouted the usual tired Islamic slogans, in particular, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad.”

What the Muslim and Jew are saying on the cover of the magazine is, “Faut Pas Se Moquer!” That means roughly, “You must not mock!” The whole thing kind of reminds me of Kirby Delauter who said, “Your rights stop where mine start.” Somehow, reactionaries think their right not to hear or see anything they don’t like trumps everyone else’s right to say and do what they will. I understand this: if my life and ideology where totally vacuous, I too would make a big deal any time someone mocked me.

So there is a sense in which I think it is wrong to pointlessly poke at religious people and their dogma. That’s not a defense of these and many other evil murderers. But there are lots of devout Muslims, Jews, and Christians who get offended when we mock them. If it’s a priest or a mullah or a rabbi, I don’t care. But it is never my wish to make the powerless suffer more. Of course, mostly these people would never see the offensive material. It is usually priests, mullahs, and rabbis who are out fomenting disease, “Look at this thing! Now be outraged!”

In the case of Charlie Hebdo, any outrage is totally unjustified because the magazine took on everyone. Hugh Schofield of the BBC explained the magazine’s history:

And today’s violence is not new to the magazine. Its editor, Stephane Charbonnier, is under police protection following death threats. And the 2011 cartoon of Muhammad titled, “Charia Hebdo” resulted in their office getting fire bombed. The cartoon is, you know, hilarious. But such silliness is apparently forbidden by the true believers who think that God is so great that he needs murdering psychopaths with assault rifles to protect him.

What’s curious about this whole “no representations of Muhammad” is that it is supposedly following from the Fourth Commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” Followers of Islam don’t want people to worship Muhammad — he was a prophet, not a God. But this just shows how religious dogma becomes a muddle. People creating cartoons mocking Muhammad is not going to make anyone worship the prophet. So what’s the big deal? If I were to create a great and reverential stained glass window of Muhammad, that ought to upset the Muslims. If I create a picture of Jesus urinating on Muhammad, it shouldn’t matter at all. Muslims should just write me off as the heathen that I am. God would take care of me!

But the concern about unflattering images of Muhammad have no theological backing. They are instead cultural. I talk a lot about “cultural Christians” here, so let’s extend the concept: these are cultural Muslims. Their complaint is the same as the Christian complaint about businesses saying “Happy Holidays!” instead of “Merry Christmas!” Their complaint is that non-Muslims aren’t treating their religion as though it has the special status of The Truth™.

I’m not just talking about the normal — non-psychopathic — Muslims who would never think of gunning down a dozen people because they don’t like some cartoons. It’s a continuum. It is part of the same screwed up mentality. It’s also what causes Planned Parenthood clinic bombings and doctor assassinations. And I’ve always thought that if American Christians were a minority and they were being just a tiny bit oppressed, we would see widespread acts of terror.

It’s all just so horrible.