Cultural Christians and Bigotry in Tennessee

Posted on 10 Apr 2016 by Frank Moraes

Cultural Christians Lie in Tennessee Last Wednesday, the Tennessee House voted 68-22 for a bill that would allow mental health professionals to refuse to treat patients on the grounds of the counselors’ religious beliefs. It’s just another “hate the fags” law and a big sign that on this issue at least, the cultural Christians are not only losing, they are terrified. This vote reminds me of the comment from yesterday’s anniversary post where an explicitly racist judge ranted from the bench.

Let’s think about this for a moment. This law is designed to make it harder for LGBT people to get counseling services. In what way is this Christian? In the Gospels, Jesus doesn’t have a problem going around and ministering to anyone at all. But apparently, these Christian counselors have to be protected from the rules of their profession, the American Counseling Association, that they can’t tell LGBT people that they are wrong or sinful. You have to ask: why didn’t such counselors go into the church instead?

Two days before the House voted on its ridiculous bill, the Tennessee Senate voted on an even more ridiculous bill, SB1108, which “designates the Holy Bible as the official state book.”

Think of a lawyer who is defending a murderer. I would assume that the lawyer would be against murder; pretty much everyone is; the truth is that the vast majority of murderers are against murder. But the purpose of the lawyer is not to judge the murderer but to provide them legal services as dictated by the ABA. Yet where are the laws being passed to protect Christian defense attorneys from having to defend people who have sinned in God’s eyes? I’ve never heard of any such thing, and I have no doubt that such a law would go down in flames in the Tennessee House.

Cultural Christians and Bigotry

So this really isn’t about Christianity. This is just about attacking one minority group that a certain section of cultural Christians have decided is more important than everything else. And shame on them for using the cover of their religious freedom to justify it. These are not just bad Christians and bad Americans, these are anti-Christians and anti-Americans. These are people for whom their bigotry is more important than both their religion and their country.

Meanwhile, we had the Catholic Church release, The Joy of Love. And yes, it isn’t radical. I actually get rather cross at people who think that the Catholic Church is suddenly going to accept same sex marriage or allow priests to marry. But the document is about acceptance. And based upon where the document started two years ago, we know that Francis himself would like to go a good deal further on these matters. But my point is that even the sclerotic Catholic Church is trying to reach out, but these American cultural Christians just want to segregate.

Two days before the House voted on its ridiculous bill, the Tennessee Senate voted on an even more ridiculous bill, SB1108, which “designates the Holy Bible as the official state book.” The House approved the same thing last year by a vote of 55-38. The Senate passed SB1108 by a vote of 16-8.

I’d like to say that it is obviously unconstitutional, but it is hard to say anything is obvious in the federal courts anymore. But most opponents are making that argument. Happily, some Christians are making the argument that making the Bible the state book “trivializes something they hold sacred.” Yes! If you actually care about your religion, you treat your holy texts as something more than a cultural symbol of how “everyone ’round here believes it!”

The world of religion is wild and wacky. And I’m always interested to hear what serious people think about religion. But what I come upon in this country is mostly a bunch of people who believe it because it is in that book that their parents told them was the truth. Cultural Christians have absolutely nothing to add to any theological discussion. They use their religion as a cultural signifier to tell the world that they are the right kind of people and the rest of us aren’t.

Image altered by one by Airtuna08 at en.wikipedia, licensed under CC BY 3.0, via Wikipedia.

Old Fashioned and Repressed Sex

Posted on 04 Apr 2016 by Frank Moraes

Old Fashioned Brandon Ambrosino over at Vox tried to get to the bottom of an interesting question, Why Are Christian Movies So Painfully Bad? But I think he made it over complicated. The reason that “Christian” movies are bad is that they are made for a particular distribution channel — one that depends upon churches. So part of the reason that these “Christian” movies are bad is the same reason that most of the drive-in movies of the 1950s were bad. The other is that the people who go to see these films just want to be assured that they are the right kind of people.

One great film that is explicitly Christian is John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary. But the point of the film is not to sell Christianity to people who have already bought it. And, in fact, you see lots of Catholicism in Irish films. But the religion is not the point; it is just part of the lives of the people. It isn’t surprising that that there is a Christian Film Industry in the United States. American Christians are the most insecure religious people I’ve ever see. This is why they get so upset about “Happy Holidays,” because they need constant assurance that everyone believes the same thing they do.

And then there is the Amway aspect of it. I’ve been talking to Jehovah’s Witnesses for decades. They are the most fake people one on the planet. I know all their tricks. And they are the exact same tricks of Amway salesmen or car dealers. They try to find out what you are interested in so they can form a bond, and then they go in with their high pressure sales pitch. In the end, it is all about selling their very specific form of Christianity to you. They have no interest in you at all. They are just “fishers of men.”

But I was really struck by Ambrosino’s prime example, a new Christian Film Industry monstrosity, Old Fashioned. It is supposed to be a response to Fifty Shades of Grey. In this new film, a young man who “Jesus found” during his senior year of college now has very old fashioned ideas about courtship. And he finds himself attracted to the nubile and feisty Elizabeth Ann Roberts. And I’m sure they work through their problems and have a good old fashioned courtship and, just like in every secular romance, it ends where the actual hard work of the relationship starts.

But check out this trailer. Really. I want to talk about it:

I find the trailer of Old Fashioned kind of sexy with all the “I’m an inch away from your face” and “I’m shoving roasted marshmallows in your face.” So really, it’s a movie that is all about sex. It’s just one with sexual mores that are based some kind of Victorian notion of sexual propriety. The thing you find if you read about the distant past — of Christians in the distant past — is that these ideas about sex were never real. They were always about power and contracts. There’s nothing religious about them.

But as usual with repressed Christians, the sex is just bursting at the seams. And I find it ironic. I’m a sexual liberal. I think it is great that people have sex whenever they want how ever they want. If people copulate in the streets, I wouldn’t care. But sex just isn’t that big a deal to me and if you doubt me, you can ask my two ex-wives. But for people like writer, director, and star of Old Fashioned, Rik Swartzwelder, sex is apparently very important — so important he has to make a whole film about it. He is, in fact, just the same as the makers of Fifty Shades of Grey. And I don’t imagine him that different from Osama bin Laden with all his pornography.

Religion makes people very creepy when it comes to sex. It’s like conservatives when it comes to policy: they start every discussion of fixing a problem with everything they can’t do. And that’s a recipe for disaster. The world is about possibilities, not arbitrary limits. And the young man in Old Fashioned is not even practicing his faith; he’s just another cultural Christian with major sexual hangups.

Old Fashioned poster licensed under Fair use, via Wikipedia.

Anniversary Post: Jim Bakker Steps Down

Posted on 19 Mar 2016 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1987, Jim Bakker stepped down from his “Praise The Lord” (PTL) church because of the whole Jessica Hahn incident. I’m not that much interested in that, but it is interesting to think that he actually raped her. I wouldn’t put it past him. He is not a good man. But what I didn’t know is that Jerry Falwell took over for him. It makes you wonder.

You all know that I’m an atheist. At the same time, I’m pretty friendly toward religion as long as it is sincere and not just some kind of cultural signifier. Now my father is rabidly anti-religion, even as he has beliefs in a spiritual side of the universe that I don’t buy into. He just thinks that churches are just about money and that’s it.

I think that’s unfair. Just the same, when you look at someone like Jim Bakker, it’s hard to deny that at least in the world of television Protestantism, it does seem to be all about money. In the end, we find out in Small Gods, that Vorbis had just been talking to himself all those years. Indeed, we find out that there is only one person in all of Omnia who actually believed in Om. But it’s so much worse when it is a high priest.

I don’t think that Jim Bakker believes in the God of the Bible, just as I don’t believe that Jerry Falwell did. These were just men who found that they could use the old religion to gain money and power. I don’t see them as any different from the ISIS pretenders who claim to be doing God’s will by burning people alive. They just live in a different environment where worse acts are acceptable.

So where is Jim Bakker today? Well, he apparently has a radio show and he publishes books. Because it really doesn’t matter. He’s a man of “God” and there will always be people willing to give to him. If God wanted to prove his existence, he’d strike Jim Bakker dead. But God has always been a great disappointment when it comes to that kind of justice.

Image cropped from one from Palm Springs Celebrity Homes and licensed under Fair Use.

Anniversary Post: Richard Ramirez — Satanist

Posted on 17 Mar 2016 by Frank Moraes

Richard Ramirez - Satanist I’ll admit that this is a bank shot. On this day in 1985, Richard Ramirez started his Los Angeles murder spree. He had already murdered two people, but this was the day that he really got going. He was labeled the “Night Stalker” by the press. In total, he killed 14 people. I’m not that interested in him. What I am interested in is the fact that he said he was a Satanist. This I find curious.

What does it mean to be a Satanist? I don’t think I am overstating when I say that it means absolutely nothing. It’s kind of like the word atheist in the time of Shakespeare. An atheist was anyone who wasn’t your form of Christian. So Protestants called Catholics atheists. And vise versa. Usually, when people say they are Satanists, they do so simply to shock people. It’s childish, but less so than the reactions of Christians to the idea.

What Makes a Satanist?

I don’t know of there ever being actual Satanist in the form we see in movies. Today, Satanism is a movement reflected in groups like the Satanic Temple, which are explicitly atheistic and use Satan merely as a symbol. The only people who take Satan seriously are fanatical followers of Abrahamic religions — people like ISIS and Pat Robertson.

It is well established that in early Judaism, Satan was more of a prosecutor for God. It is only later that he gets transformed into a kind of Yin to God’s Yang. And what that means is that the Abrahamic faiths are fundamentally polytheistic — but not in a fun way like the Greek, Norse, and most of all, Hindu myths.

But if we are to believe Terry Pratchett (and I see no reason not to), gods gain their power by having people believe in them. I rather doubt that Richard Ramirez was a Satanist in any meaningful way. He was just a psychopath. So if there really are gods, it’s the Christians and the Muslims who are keeping Satan alive.

Anniversary Post: Saint Bones and Nikephoros I

Posted on 13 Mar 2016 by Frank Moraes

St Nikephoros - Saint Bones On this day in 847, the bones of St Nikephoros I were interred at the Church of the Holy Apostles. As far as I can tell, this was a big deal. Nikephoros had died almost 20 years earlier. But saint bones were a very big thing back in the day. People thought that by being near them, they could be healed and stuff like that. Those were the days my friend!

That was when the church was kind of sealed off from the rest of the world and people looked upon it as a place of magic. And it was! If you consider power magic. And I do.

But the whole thing makes me think of Cadfael — the series of television movies (based upon Edith Pargeter’s novels, which I have not read). They take place in 12th century England. Cadfael is a monk — but one who entered the church later in life, having previously been a warrior. He is an herbalist and thoroughly anachronistic in that he is clearly an enlightenment thinker. All around him — even the good people — are stuck believing the most ridiculous nonsense. But not Cadfael.

Saint Bones of Winifred

Anyway, in the series, the abbey has the bones of St Winifred, and it acts as a kind of funding mechanism for the church. People come on pilgrimages to the abbey just to be near the bones. But we find out in A Morbid Taste for Bones (which was the first book, but not the first episode), that there are no saint bones in the box that apparently the church keeps these things in. Instead, it is the remains of a murderous (and mentally ill) monk. It makes for wonderful social commentary with people coming from hundreds of miles to be near the saint bones when the the saint bones are actually still in the ground in Wales.

Of course, the way Cadfael sees it, why can’t the bones of St Winifred work their magic from wherever they are? I mean, if it truly is magic — the work of God — what does proximity have to do with it? But these are the kind of enlightenment forms of thinking that do stick out in a story about 12th century England. Still: I recommend the films. They are great fun.

You Can’t Politicize Religion Because Religion Is Politics

Posted on 29 Feb 2016 by Frank Moraes

I came upon this article from over four years ago, The Good Christian. It’s basically about how I don’t dislike Christians. I just dislike Christianity as I normally find it in America. Since then, I’ve written a number of articles about different aspects of this. I think, for example, that the Sermon on the Mount is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing ever. And it makes clear that religion and politics are really the same thing.

Any time someone claims that you are “politicizing” religion, what they really mean is that they don’t like your religion. Unless you are going to stick to theoretical discussions of ontology, religion is politics. And the sort of people who claim that it isn’t are exactly the kind of people who don’t even think of ontology as part of religion. For them, religion is dogma at best, and tribalism at worst. “I’ve been told that the soul enters the fetus at conception, and that’s that.” They really ought to change those bumper stickers that read, “God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It.” It would be more accurate to say, “My pastor told me, I believe it, that settles it.” Because there ain’t nothing in the “literal word of God” that says the zygote has a soul.

In looking for images for another article, I entered “Liberal Christianity is” into Google and it offered the suggestion, “Liberal Christianity is not Christianity.” There are almost 33 million pages for that search. If you enter “Conservative Christianity is” into Google, it offers the suggestion, “conservative Christianity is dying.” There are a half million pages for that search. “Conservative Christianity is not Christianity” provides only 19 million pages. But it does indicate that in the English language, conservative Christians really think that the basis of their religion is control of women and hatred of fags. (Is it any wonder conservative Christians hate fundamentalist Muslims so much? They are almost the same.)

My Religion Isn’t Political!

There is a constant problem of my religion being obviously what God believes and your religion being obviously just what you want to believe. But the truth is that I value religion and I really am interested in the religious beliefs of others. I’ll be honest though, I’m pretty bored with the the whole “personal relationship with Jesus,” which is so common in this country. For one thing, it is a very recent invention. I don’t know the history, but I don’t think it is more than a few centuries old, and didn’t really catch on until the last fifty years.

But what it does is allow people to imagine that religion is easy — that they have a direct pipeline to God. So any notion that comes into their minds must be true. And this is how we get the vulgar displays of professional football players claiming that God was on their side. It’s vulgar because it belittles religion. It makes it all about the believer and not about God. The sports hero who wins the game had God’s backing, but starving Ethiopian children do not. (Note: Ethiopia is a majority Christian country.)

So you see: even the simple act of proclaiming that God is on your side is a political statement. It is a claim that the status quo is right. God wants the poor to starve. God wants the rich to flourish. We all know that God works in mysterious ways, but those ways lead us to where we are now — to the world as it actually exists. Now I have my own conception of God: a linguistic trick allowing us to talk about the nature of existence. That kind of religion isn’t political, because God isn’t something that has any interest in the world. How could it?! It’s a word! But for the vast majority of religious people here in the United States, religion is little but politics.

Image taken from Religion and Politics. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed).

Anniversary Post: MASH and Pope Benedict End

Posted on 28 Feb 2016 by Frank Moraes

MASH What do you want to hear? The last episode of MASH aired on this day in 1983. In general, I think that MASH got worse over time. The show never really recovered from the loss of McLean Stevenson. Potter just annoyed the hell out of me. And no offense to Mike Farrell, but the writers never managed to make “happily married man” thing work. Burns was always a bad character. In real life, that kind of chauvinism was very true of early 1950s America. But in the context of the series, he was impotent — he could never get the advantage over the leads. So in that way, the replacement of him with David Ogden Stiers was brilliant. And it was done in a way that was believable. But I’ll admit, the final episode did have its moments. But I think that was the last time I watched the final episode of anything. Because I just don’t care enough.

But also, just three years ago, Pope Benedict XVI stepped down. You would have thought that by now he would have had the good taste to die. But I suspect that he didn’t step down because he was physically unable to do the job. I think he simply understood that he couldn’t manage the child rape situation. So they figured, “Let’s get a Jesuit — they’re known for not being quite so horrible as the other orders.” Anyway, he turns 89 in April. I don’t know what to think of the Catholic Church at this time. But then, I don’t know what to think of most institutions. And child rape seems to be something that is very common in all the major religions that have big taboos about sex.

So there you go: pick your poison. There’s the end of MASH and there’s the end of Pope Benedict XVI. I don’t think anyone was that upset at seeing them go.

MASH image taken from Wikipedia, licensed under Fair Use. Pope image by Kancelaria Prezydenta RP – prezydent.pl, licensed under GFDL 1.2.

Anniversary Post: Edict of Thessalonica

Posted on 27 Feb 2016 by Frank Moraes

St Ambrose and Emperor Theodosius (van Dyck) - Edict of Thessalonica On this day in 380 CE, the Edict of Thessalonica was released in the Roman Empire. It was issued by emperors Theodosius I, Gratian, and Valentinian II. And it basically said that all Roman citizens should convert to Christianity. It was the result of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312. As I discussed before, this was when Christianity died, “No religion ever survives this kind of power.” And the Edict of Thessalonica shows that ultimately, religion is about power. If religion is about God, you don’t need governments stepping in and telling people what they must believe.

What the people were told they must believe was specifically Nicene Christianity. And anyone who was ever forced to go to Sunday school or catechism can tell you what that is. “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible.” Given that God made all things, you would think he could just tell the people himself. This is why it is so funny in Small Gods that the Great God Om comes down to Discworld and only manages to be a tortoise. He has a grand total of one believer. Most people don’t think through their religious beliefs very well. That’s why we are so blessed to have minds as brilliant as Terry Pratchett to do it for us. Unfortunately, people insist upon reading things like the Bible rather than Small Gods.

Edict of Thessalonica: Not Just Any Christianity

Of course, it couldn’t be just any old Christianity either. The Edict of Thessalonica chose a side in an ongoing religious war. People have this odd idea that Christians mostly got along except for big events. We know the Orthodox split from the Catholics. We know the Protestant split from the Catholics. And we know the Spanish Inquisition. But the truth is that the religion has been fighting within itself from the beginning. Things are actually more placid now than they ever have been. There are zillions of different kinds of Christianity (including Mormonism). But they don’t seem to care enough (or believe strongly enough) to do much fighting. Still, it could all fly apart again. After all, no one expected the Spanish Inquisition.

So what was the effect of the Edict of Thessalonica? Well, just what you would expect. According to Wikpedia, “After the edict, Theodosius spent a great deal of energy suppressing all non-Nicene forms of Christianity, especially Arianism, and in establishing Nicene orthodoxy throughout his realm.” This was because he believed in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible — who was nonetheless dependent on petty dictators to make sure that the people worshiped the right god in the right way. Otherwise, without the Edict of Thessalonica, people might have worshiped a god that didn’t need so much care and upkeep. And then imagine what would have happened: people would have been oppressed in the name of the wrong god!

Afterword

Stewart Lee on problems in the creation myth:

God, Ice Cream, and Publishing Schedules

Posted on 24 Feb 2016 by Frank Moraes

God and Ice Cream Cone As you have no doubt noticed, the publishing schedule around here has gotten a bit less dependable. Thus far, all that has been affected has been the afternoon article. But this may just be the beginning. I’m trying to be solid with the anniversary and music posts. I’ve managed to get the last couple of 11:05 publications up just because I happened to be able to. They weren’t done the day before as used to be the case. Now everything just gets jammed into the little bit of time that I manage between other things I’m working on.

Currently, I’m managing writers, writing my own freelance stuff, rewriting a book for publication, and taking frequent breaks to scream into a pillow. It’s madness. I don’t deal well with this level of stress. And I do believe that some day soon they are going to have to take me away to a quiet place where the most upsetting thing will be sparrows chirping in the morning. And even that may be a bit too much to take.

So I’m thinking I’ll let the days float. What is there to talk about anyway? Doing the anniversary posts are interesting because they constantly remind me that nothing much has changed. And the morning music posts remind me that perhaps not everything in the world is terrible.

God and Ice Cream

It reminds me of some philosopher I was reading who was talking about the nature of God. Like a lot of people, he was interested in theodicy and why God allows evil in the world. But he was quick to note that there isn’t just evil in the world. He specifically mentioned ice cream. If God were evil, would it actually allow anything as wonderful as ice cream? I forget where he came down on the issue.

To me it is clear enough. The way I see God is a given. God is just a word that explains why things exist. The Bible claims, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It does show how God is just a linguistic trick that allows us to talk about the ineffable. But whatever you want to think about God, you can’t possibly think that it is something that cares about us in the same way that a mother cares about her child. If there is such a thing as God’s love, it is only in the sense that to exist is a favor. Regardless of how horrible we may perceive existence, at least we get to perceive it. Most things don’t get that gift.

Personally, I don’t buy that. There is life and there is not life. Life is nothing but a chemical process. Our consciousness nothing but trick. And as much as we like to think of ourselves as independent organisms — universes in ourselves — it sucks to perceive ourselves in such a way that we find painful. And in that context, God is an utterly useless concept. There is good and evil in the world simply because there is good and evil in our conception of the universe.

William Lane Craig is one of the people who has decided that my way of thinking is wrong: God defines good. And that means that Craig has defined good and evil out of existence in the context of our consciousness. But I think Craig is a huge liar. He’s lying to himself in his zeal to believe a truly ridiculous dogma. He must know, once you peel back the barriers he’s built to protect God, that we are all alone and that we have no clue why some things give us pain and others give us joy. There is no reason that humans will ever be able to understand why they can be licking a delicious ice cream cone just as someone stabs us through the kidney.

So we go from the ontological “Why does anything exist?!” to the Schopenhauerian “Why continue on within our own little universes?!” And the answer to both questions is the same: we don’t know. So we muddle on. And that is what I will continue to do: muddle on with Frankly Curious. At this point, it is the closest thing I have to a social life, so I hope that I can keep you all interested enough to keep stopping by. Hopefully, for the regular readers, it comes down more on the ice cream side of the universe than the knife through the kidney side of things.

What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Image of ice cream cone is cropped from one in the public domain via Pixabay.

Satanic Temple Has Spiritual Lessons to Teach

Posted on 01 Feb 2016 by Frank Moraes

Satanic Temple Monument Elizabeth alerted me to this bit of excellent news, Satanists to Give Prayer at Phoenix City Council Meeting. In December, two members of the Satanic Temple, Michelle Shortt and Stu de Haan, requested to be able to do the opening prayer for the regular meeting. It is scheduled for 17 February.

Not surprisingly, some of the council members were unhappy about this. But Phoenix City Attorney Brad Holm released a statement saying that prayer will go forward as planned. He seems to be one of people who has studied the Constitution and the Supreme Court and found that it would go against our laws and traditions to stop the Satanic Temple.

Before I get into this, can I quote a little Shakespeare? “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose; By any other name would smell as sweet.” The people who hate the Satanic Temple know nothing about it. They just know that they were taught in Sunday School that Satan was the Bad Guy™ in the Bible. And as I’ve discussed, the modern conception of Satan — The Devil! — is really not the traditional one. Certainly in Job, Satan is more of a helper to God — making sure that man really does love God and isn’t just pretending because God is so good to him.

I fully expect when the Satanic Temple members speak, they will be quite serious about it. The core of the teachings of the Satanic Temple is that Satan is a symbol for those whom the society casts out. To use John Edwards’ words, Satan is a symbol for the other America — the one that is only shown on the television when it is at its worst. Satanism is quite consistent with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Indeed, I would say that Satanism is more in keeping with Christianity than most American Christians I see who seem only interested in stopping abortion (without a care for the child after it is born) and vilifying same sex couples.

Intolerance Toward Satanic Temple

Councilman Jim Waring thinks that the Satanic Temple should have been told no because he thinks they are just trying to be offensive. Notice how far we’ve come in these 225+ years! Waring is arguing that the offense taken by the vast majority of Americans trumps the offense taken by the minority. Every time I go to an event where there is some kind of prayer, I bristle. I hate it. I am offended. I think, “How dare you!” Because these people only think it is okay because most people believe this Iron Age nonsense. It is presumptuous to think that I do.

There’s just one problem with Jim Waring’s thinking: it goes entirely against the Bill of Rights. Despite what idiot Fox News pundits say, Christians are not being oppressed in this country. They say this when Christians are called on their special rights — like doing 95% of all the public prayers in the nation. Majorities don’t need to be protected; minorities need to be protected. The whole of human history has shown this. And that is what makes our Constitution a remarkable document for its time.

De Haan said, “We don’t intend on doing anything offensive.” And I’m sure he’s being honest. It’s not like the Satanic Temple has an organizational structure like the Catholic Church, but everything I’ve seen from them indicates that they take it all seriously. But if this leads to someone in a pirate suit and colander talking about beer volcanoes, fine. And if that means that older religions decide that they don’t want to do these kind of public prayers, well, happy days are here again! Because, as I said, I find them offensive as hell. And they have no place in the workings of a secular government.

If we don’t allow the Satanic Temple to give prayers at city council meetings, then the government has established a religion. It may not be a particular one, but it has divided religions into those that have rights and those that don’t. And if we do that, we really are lost. But frankly, I think at least a third of this country already is.

Russell Brand and Richard Dawkins Being Sensible

Posted on 24 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

I came upon this video today, Russell Brand interviews Richard Dawkins. It doesn’t have a date, but Dawkins mentions that it is one year after the release of The God Delusion, so that would put it at late 2007 or early 2008. And what’s remarkable about it is just how reasonable it all it. I think that both men left that discussion thinking that they actually had a lot of shared ground. Obviously, Brand is being silly — especially about ancient aliens.

The truth is that I know a lot of people like Russell Brand. They are some of my favorite people. So when Russell Brand talks about ancient aliens, he is being serious in the sense of this: it is a wonderfully fun and interesting concept. People like Brand are the living embodiment of my philosophy that the greatest sin in the normal world (apart from real crime and political power) is to be boring. Brand is interesting when he’s being serious and when he’s being silly.

But the discussion is not about ancient aliens. Brand brings that up just to get a reaction out of Dawkins. And Dawkins is well aware of this. Richard Dawkins is also an interesting guy who at least understands silly, even if he isn’t a practitioner of it. They really do get into some interesting issues. Brand says that he thinks that “salvation through love” has replaced “salvation through God.” Dawkins says that he finds that an attractive idea. And they go back and forth about that.

And then Brand says, “But do you not think that then that God is just a signifier really for oneness and truth and eternity — that exist beyond our plane of understanding.” And then they are off to the races in a theological discussion. Dawkins points out (quite rightly) that if that’s the case, there is no point of praying to it. So Brand notes that Richard Dawkins’ real problem is the personification of God and Dawkins agrees with that.

Then they get into talking about eastern religions and that’s where Brand and Dawkins seem to have a disagreement. Russell Brand thinks there is something that we might be able to tunnel into and Richard Dawkins thinks that it is just a reflection of our extremely complex brains. What I love about this is that this is a sensible debate to be having. This isn’t some kind of straw man argument where the silliness of a Bible passage proves that there is no God.

Now on this issue, I’m with Richard Dawkins. It seems pretty simple. If you look at the universe the way I do, our universe is a subset of the signifier God. All our axioms are based on this universe. There is no trick to getting outside that system to the larger system. In fact, Brand is making the same mistake that a lot of atheists make when they claim that using some (presently unknown) trick we will be able to learn all the secrets of existence. This isn’t going to happen. There is no one weird trick to unlocking the mystery of existence — through mysticism or science.

Richard Dawkins But these are the kind of conversations that atheists should be having — not just with theists (and I don’t really think that Brand is a theist) but with themselves. Because what comes out of way too much New Atheist talk is just how hollow it is as a belief system. It does atheism no good at all to arguing with Pat Robertson. Clearly, we as a people need to argue with Pat Robertson. But that isn’t the business of atheists, because most religious people should (And do!) find him repulsive. He isn’t awful because he’s religious. If he had been alive in the Soviet Union under Stalin, he would have been a high party official — a true believer in the party and a denier of God.

I don’t know if Brand and Dawkins could have the same conversation today. I tend to think they could, because when he’s outside the insular world of the New Atheists, he often says sensible things. But as with most issues, the problem isn’t so much that you can be sensible on occasion. Sam Harris tends to be reason when talking about some forms of Buddhism. But both Dawkins and Harris spend most of their time talking about ridiculous things like Islam causing people to be violent.

We could use more conversations between atheists and non-theistic religious people. Then we might gain some understanding of what religion actually is to people. We might all end up more enlightened.

Both images licensed under Fair Use.

Specious Atheist Arguments Don’t Mean a Thing

Posted on 18 Jan 2016 by Frank Moraes

Born Again Atheist Elizabeth sent me to this very interesting Luke McKinney article at Cracked, 5 Atheist Arguments Which Aren’t Helping Anyone. It is written by my kind of atheist: one who seems constantly frustrated at the state of atheism today. Back in 1990, I started going to local atheist meetings in Portland. And they were filled with the most extreme group of oddballs you have ever seen. But look at atheism today: it is so much more “normal” and acceptable. So I think people now can be more delusional about it. They think the day when religion is gone is nigh. And they really do sound a lot like missionaries.

In the past, it was enough to know that Christians were silly and to find others who knew that too. But here’s a big thing, most arguments I got into in those days were extremely open-minded on my side. I would have loved for my Christian friends to have been able to convince me. Such cheap salvation! Just believe one silly thing and your life has meaning! Who wouldn’t want that to be true? Of course, on the other side of those arguments were always the most closed-minded of people. There was no way they were ever going to yield a point because they had discovered that One Weird Trick for endless ecstasy.

One of the most annoying things that Christians do is make really lame arguments. How do you know that heaven is real? It says right here in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” Oh, that explains everything. So I know that heaven exists because someone who thought heaven existed wrote it down in a book. This is the kind of closed-minded and closed-loop thinking that drives atheists crazy. And with good reason!

Today, there are far too many atheists whose thinking is every bit as closed-minded and closed-loop as the worst Christians. And a lot of atheist arguments are just a bag of tricks that they think just destroy Christianity or whatever other religion you want to talk about. The most annoying of these are the paradox arguments. I wrote about this before, No Contradiction in Genesis Eve Creation. My main point there was that paradoxes are found everywhere — even in deductive systems. And certainly the existence of the universe is a paradox, so why wouldn’t a creation story have paradoxes? (I then go on to show that there isn’t really a paradox to begin with.)

But the biggest problem with these kinds of trivial atheist arguments is that they really only address Biblical literalism: the most primitive kind of belief. And it isn’t just the smug Twitter atheists who do this. I’ve read atheist books by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and many others. And not one of them deals with religion as it is practiced by intelligent, thoughtful people. Now that’s fine! The vast majority of people do practice a kind of brainless fideism. But these same authors seem to think that their atheist arguments have wider currency. And they don’t.

What I hate in all things is hubris. (I hate it in myself most of all.) When Penn Jillette wrote his pathetic book God, No! his main argument is that we just don’t know and that we shouldn’t believe in things that we don’t know about. It’s a nice thought. But of course, Jillette is lying. Atheists are as certain of their worldviews as everyone else. And the vast majority of them have far more faith in science than they should have. They suffer from some a kind of literalist-like error regarding it, “Science says it; I believe it; that settles it.” Well, no. That’s the thing about science: nothing is ever settled.

Atheists have decided that they should have faith in science. And that’s good! Science is about the best thing we have going. But it doesn’t provide us with ultimate truth. There are limits to science. (If there are limits to logic, there are limits to science — see Kurt Gödel.) But with regard to the atheist debates, we are stuck with the fact that most religious people have just as much faith in science. Read Carl Sagan’s interview (pdf) with the Dalai Lama.

I complain so much about atheists because I expect better of them. When a Jehovah’s Witness comes to my door wanting to explain how we know that God loves me because John said so, I don’t much care because they are idiots. What I can’t tolerate is people thinking that just because they believe in science, they can make equally specious but atheist arguments.

Image cropped from ‘I’m a born-again atheist’ badge by Danny Birchall. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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