Let’s not get confused

The television series by Tom Holland that was censored in the UK is a serious, respectful look at the history of Islam.

The movie that has provoked riots and murder in Egypt and Libya is a ghastly bit of hackwork associated with Terry Jones, the fanatical Christian pastor from Florida. Follow that link to see a clip: it’s incredibly bad. It’s got terrible acting, inconsistent and bad fake accents, white actors in blackface (poorly applied blackface, even), beards straight out of Monty Python, sloppy greenscreen work, and it goes out of its way to portray major figures in Islam as gloating gay parodies and pedophiles. It doesn’t just criticize Islam (and when it does, it does so with painful ignorance); it criticizes ethnicities, sexual orientations, and nations wholesale. It is simply a calculated, ugly insult with no redeeming qualities at all.

It does not justify rioting or killing people. But let’s not mistake what it is: the movie is the work of a group of incompetent fundamentalist Christian assholes pissing on entire cultures.

Oops, not just Christian assholes. As noted in the article:

the film was in fact directed and produced by “an Israeli-American California real-estate developer who called it a political effort to call attention to the hypocrisies of Islam.”

It seems to have called attention to the hypocrisies and vileness of the Judeo-Christian Right.

Tom Holland is censored

Channel 4 in the UK made a program called “Islam: The Untold Story”, and got so many complaints and threats that they have cancelled the screening of the show. This is a disgrace: the program is a serious, historical look at Islam, and the protesters are complaining because it takes an objective look at the evidence. We must be able to scrutinize Islam. If they’re going to hide their origins in obscurity, lies, and threats, then their beliefs should be dismissed.

I haven’t seen the program (and at this rate, I never will!), but I can make an informed guess at the content. It’s presented by Tom Holland, author of In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, an excellent and entirely sympathetic review of the history of Islam. He discusses the deep roots of Islam, formed in a culture that was shaped by its proximity to the frontier between the two great empires of the ancient world, Rome and Persia. He traces the origins of the Islamic holy book, and discovers that no, it didn’t simply appear in 7th century Arabia (although he does think there was a singular original text), but that Islamic thought coalesced long after the time of Mohammed…and he points out that there is no contemporary evidence at all of this person Mohammed — which sounds awfully familiar to those of us who are more exposed to the Jesus myth — and that there is a long history of self-deluding Islamic ‘scholarship’ that has a lot of similarity to the self-serving confabulations of Christians.

It doesn’t make negative judgments about Islam at all, unless, of course, you find reality offensive. I thought it was an excellent book to explain the complexities of Islamic history, and it made Islam more human and more interesting. It’s well worth reading.

It would also be worth watching, if Channel 4 would grow a spine. And if Channel 4 can’t manage it, I don’t know how we can ever hope to see it in the US.

Those of you living in the UK can watch it here. They block us Americans, I’m afraid.

What can you do about a rebellious woman who will not submit to her husband’s authority?

Pat Robertson was asked that question. His answer was simple: you’ve got to stand up to her, and oh, how he wishes he could announce on television that you should beat her.

Well, you could become a Muslim and you could beat her. … This man’s got to stand up to her and he can’t let her get away with this stuff. I don’t think we condone wife-beating these days but something has got to be done.

How clever! To simultaneously advocate domestic violence while distancing oneself from it, and at the same time get in a little Muslim bashing! Who says Pat Robertson is senile? He’s not — he’s just evil.

But he’s wrong. You don’t need to be a Muslim to beat your spouse; we’ve got relatively few Muslims here in mostly lily-white Minnesota, and we’ve still got a tremendous number of domestic violence cases.

  • One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. 1 One in 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape.

  • An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year.

  • The majority (73%) of family violence victims are female. Females were 84% of spousal abuse victims and 86% of abuse victims at the hands of a boyfriend.

And then there’s this juicy statistic: in Minnesota alone in 2006,

5,295 battered women and 5,131 children used
Minnesota emergency shelter services.

Were they all Muslim? Hey, Pat, maybe you can crack a joke about how those 5,000 women and children have learned a little something about submission and respect.

It would have been more impressive if published while he was alive

I guess death was liberating for a certain bishop, who finally called out the Catholic church for its abuses in a posthumous interview.

Hours after Milan’s former Archbishop, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, died on Friday at the age of 85, the leading daily paper Corriere della Sera printed his final interview, in which he attacks the Church – and by implication its current leadership – for being "200 years out of date".

"Our culture has aged, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our rituals and our cassocks are pompous," the Cardinal said. "The Church must admit its mistakes and begin a radical change, starting from the Pope and the bishops. The paedophilia scandals oblige us to take a journey of transformation."

Yeah? So what else is new?

Also, a bit of strangeness: the Independent published this with a photo of Martini’s rather waxy looking corpse. Why? This interest in dead bodies is a very Catholic sort of thing.

The Primate of All Ireland speaks

I don’t follow the who’s who of the Catholic hierarchy; when I hear the phrase “Primate of All Ireland”, I think of Ussher, the fellow who notoriously calculated the age of the earth using a combination of crude genealogy and numerology. He’s gone down in history for getting it all wrong; so will this one.

While I felt that Ireland as a whole had begun to progress, Cardinal Sean Brady recently issued a statement declaring that any attempt made by the government of Ireland to legislate for abortion due to a judgement made by the European Court of Human Rights would be; “vigorously and comprehensively opposed by many”.

This is nothing new. The Catholic church has always taken a strong stand against human rights.

Republicans speak to the invisible man

Marco Rubio spoke to the RNC last night, and reminded everyone that we atheists aren’t Americans after all.

We are special [We are?] because we’ve been united not by a common race or ethnicity [This is true of many countries. What about Canada?]. We’re bound together by common values [Again, trivially true of most countries]. That family is the most important institution in society [Is there a country that doesn’t have and value families?]. That almighty God is the source of all we have [Nope. Wrong. We built that].

Special, because we’ve never made the mistake of believing that we are so smart that we can rely solely on our leaders or our government [Nice sentiment in a speech where he’s trying to convince us to rely on Mitt Romney].

Our national motto is "In God we Trust," reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all [Fuck you too, Marco Rubio].

And special because we’ve always understood the scriptural admonition that "for everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required." [Say what? So the rich should pay more taxes?]

We are a blessed people [Nope. We’re lucky. Some of us are rich. But millions are poor and hungry and ignorant. Don’t forget them]. And we have honored those blessings with the enduring example of an exceptional America [What seems to be making us particularly exceptional among wealthy nations is the idiocy of our leaders and the piety of our population, neither of which is anything to be proud of].

I think it was a theme. They brought on Clint Eastwood to make a stumbling address to an invisible man in an empty chair, and Rubio to do the same thing with a bit more polish.

The Republicans can kiss the atheist vote goodbye, but it makes me wonder…are there any atheists left in the Republican party, besides Karl Rove?

A momentary flash of reason

Matt Abbot is a Catholic columnist with Renew America, Alan Keyes’ wingnutty freaky weird site full of fanatics. You know he’s deep in the tank, so it’s a little surprising when his head rises briefly above the surface to splutter, “wait…Catholic priests…child abuse…disturbing…” before sinking back into the slime. What could possibly have shaken him up? An interview with an actual Catholic priest, of course.

[Interviewer]: Part of your work here at Trinity has been working with priests involved in abuse, no?

[Father Groeschel]: A little bit, yes; but you know, in those cases, they have to leave. And some of them profoundly — profoundly — penitential, horrified. People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath. But that’s not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer.

That’s the Catholic party line, we’ve heard it a lot. These were men of God! It’s those little hypersexualized minxes tempting them who are to blame.

Well, this time even a Renew American partisan had a momentary flash of concern. Don’t worry, he’s looking for excuses even now, and will no doubt reassure himself back into intellectual catatonia soon.

Because I have such profound respect and admiration for Father Groeschel, it pains me to say this, but I think he’s terribly misguided here. Perhaps in his advanced age he’s not articulating himself as well as he used to; I don’t know. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but, in this instance, it’s very difficult.

Hey, Matt! You’re so close! Just recognize that he’s wrong, the Catholic church is wrong, and that your understanding that raping children is simply wrong is the right attitude to take. And maybe you need to learn that your respect and admiration was misplaced.

Zero surprises

Another child-raping pedophile has been arrested: Caleb Hesse. He’s been busily raping little boys for 30 years.

He’s nobody famous, and his history is totally unsurprising.

An anti-gay activist and donor to California’s Proposition 8, 52-year-old Hesse was a teacher at the Morongo Unified School District who was recently teaching first grade at the Friendly Hills Elementary School.

According to KTLA, the incidents occurred mostly during Hesse’s overnight volunteer trips with the church. Hesse allegedly met many of his underage victims during these outings. Authorities believe the most recent crimes occurred as early as last week.

OK, teaching elementary school was unfortunate, but taking advantage of church trips to abuse children is weirdly typical. School administrators will stomp down hard on any offenses, but churches seem to have a far, far wider range of tolerance of adult male’s behavior.

I don’t understand how this works, though. Thirty years of screwing little boys, and no one noticed? Or more likely, no one cared enough to stop him?

Another level of Catholic corruption

Hypocrisy is apparently a sacrament in the Catholic church. A German bishop has been living an extravagant lifestyle — flying first class (at a cost of €7000) to tour Indian slums where poor children eke out a living breaking stones. He’s also been constructing a multi-million euro mansion while the churches in his diocese crumble.

Bishop Tebartz-van Elst, 52, doesn’t only embrace luxury when he travels to India to visit poor children and nuns. He also puts a premium on a pleasant standard of living back home in Limburg, one that befits his status. His new, multi-million-euro bishop’s residence right next to the city’s cathedral is about to be finished. But the complex has sparked a mix of amazement, rage and resignation among the 600,000 Catholics in the diocese. Many cannot comprehend how they are supposed to live in want while their bishop splurges.

Tebartz-van Elst preaches to his flock to sate their thirst with water not wine. "Renewal begins where the efforts toward making due with less are made," he has instructed them. "The person of faith is dirt poor and rich in mercy," he once said in a Christmas sermon. And on the Assumption, he declared: "Whoever experiences poverty in person will discover the true greatness of God."

Meanwhile, funds are tight or insufficient across the diocese. There isn’t enough money for the upkeep of churches, parishes are being consolidated and funding for Catholic day care centers is being slashed. All of this is part of the bishop’s tough cost-cutting measures.

I don’t get it. Do Catholic bishops have no accountability to anyone?

At least there are no stories about this guy raping children.

I am not a presidential candidate, but…

Some rag called Cathedral Age interviewed Obama and Romney about faith. The two responded by ladling out dollops of pious porridge, all of which was nonsensical and fact-free, but did occasionally serve up scraps of information that were mainly horrifying (did you know Obama has a “faith advisor” who sends him bible quotes and CS Lewis quotes and that sort of thing? That’s not the daily briefing I imagined). Read it if you really want to be bored or aggravated.

It did make me wonder, though — if a bunch of Episcopalians can get the attention of the presidential candidates during the election season, could atheists do likewise? Get on it, Dave Silverman: send the two a set of questions that actually drill down to some secular substance. I suspect they’d both ignore them, unfortunately.

And then I thought, well, what if I were asked these same questions in an interview? How would an atheist answer them? Especially, an atheist who wasn’t trying to pander his way into political office? So I took a vicious, bloody-minded stab at it. These are the same questions Cathedral Age aimed at our two candidates, and I’ll just pretend I’m the nominee of the Atheist Party.

How does faith play a role in your life?

It doesn’t. Faith is a poison, a shortcut to answers that avoids reason and evidence and cultivates an undisciplined and lazy mind. I abjure it and think all political candidates should do likewise.

Do you have favorite scriptural passages, prayers, or other words of wisdom to which you often turn?

No.

Scripture is a morass of inconsistency and lies. Even where it is gifted with poetry (which isn’t often), it is simply an accreted mass of dogma. I never consult the Bible, the Koran, or any other holy book for advice, since they are never applicable, and are usually informed by a barbaric morality.

I don’t do prayers. Entreaties to a nonexistent superman seem singularly pointless.

“Words of wisdom” is a stock phrase that usually means “reassuring cliches”. Nope, I avoid those as well.

How do you view the role of faith in public life?

Faith is the great leveler, the delusion that allows any ignorant asshole prancing in self-serving fantasies of being the center of the universe to claim divine, cosmic authority behind his words. It has corrupted American discourse, because it privileges medieval nonsense about how the world actually works and allows antique bigotry to persist, allows people to make claims without concern for evidence, and gives every idiot with a dog-collar a pedestal to stand on.

Faith ought to be mocked and derided. That we give it special authority in public discourse is a disaster.

As a country of great religious diversity and divisiveness, how can faith play a role in unifying america?

It can’t. Faith is unmoored from reality — it gives every blithering child of god a special place free of responsibility, where their beliefs are stamped with divine approval by the voices in their head. Every one of those religions touts itself as the one great truth about the universe, and they can’t all be right, and most likely none of them are right. We’re looking out on a circus arena populated with clowns, and you’re trying to ask me which one’s shoulders I should stand on to bring order out of chaos. And I say none of them.

Some people have questioned the sincerity of your faith and your christianity. how do you respond to those questions?

Well, that’s kind of inappropriate question for me, since I’m not pretending to be a Christian. I’m not and never will be.

What does a political leader’s faith tell you about him/her as a person?

Oh, it hints at many things.

They could be a gullible fool. It could tell me that they don’t think very deeply at all, and have never put much thought into these bizarre claims that they may say are important forces in their lives.

They could be a dishonest opportunist. The media is always touting faith as a marker for morality, despite the fact that it is actually a very cheap signal — anyone can mouth pieties, and even the most corrupt child-raping priest can say they believe in a god — and in the US, it’s virtually impossible to get elected as an atheist because of the raging bigotry against rational intellectuals.

They could be a brilliant rationalizer, who has built up an elaborate set of excuses for their ridiculous beliefs. I would worry that they’d do likewise for any conclusion they wanted to reach in office.

At the very best, they could be a person who’s never put much thought into their inherited religious tradition; maybe it’s because they’ve put more effort into studying economics or political science or sociology, I don’t know. In this case it would be a misleading indicator.

A leader’s faith basically tells me nothing good about them at all.

How can our government and faith communities work together as a positive force for the nation while also respecting the boundaries between the two?

They can’t. Read the Constitution. This country was founded partially on an understanding that bringing god and state together corrupts both. Some thought that because they wanted a secular government free of superstitious influence; others loved their peculiar religions and did not want the state to endorse some other faith. Either way, they were in agreement: government and faith should not work together. So why, Cathedral Age, are you trying to blur the boundaries? Do you think that having a big expensive elaborate building in Washington DC means that when the government decrees a state religion, it will be Christianity or Episcopalianism?

Washington National Cathedral is called to be the spiritual home for the nation. from your perspective, how can the cathedral live out that mission?

This is a secular nation, or it should be. We are not going to have a spiritual home, and we shouldn’t want one.

The best way that the National Cathedral can serve the country is by ending this pretext that it represents faith in America. Gut it completely of its superstitious trappings, fire the god-soaked leadership, and turn it into something secular and useful. Turning it into a bowling alley or a movie theater would be an improvement, but you could also aim higher and make it into a library or a secular meeting hall. Find something better to do with your time and money.

I think you should be embarrassed that you’re maintaining this expensive, opulent building to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year, all for the purpose of babbling at a nonexistent space ghost.

Well, what do you think? Would those answers help me get elected to high political office?