My baby sister (she was in her thirties and had two kids of her own, but she’ll always be my little sis) died a few years ago of one of those sudden, massive infections—the kind of unexpected reminder of bacterial dominance that killed Jim Henson. When I attended the funeral, I was reminded of another lower life form that afflicts humanity: the minister was an ecstatic Jesus freak who, rather than talking about the young woman we’d lost, or trying to give words of reassurance to a grieving family, instead tried to turn the affair into a revival meeting, asking people to TESTIFY FOR JESUS!!! and otherwise making her superstition the center of attention, rather than Lisa and loss. It galled me no end, as you might guess, and if it weren’t for my respect for members of my family I would have grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and thrown her into the street.
Maybe I should have anyway. Goddamn all preachers, pastors, and priests.
My anger was rekindled by Ken Ham’s “eulogy” for Steve Irwin. The sanctimonious prat uses it as an excuse to babble rationalizations for his religion, throw a little fear at readers to proselytize for his false promises, and use death as a threat. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but the implications he makes are clear. Irwin wasn’t a creationist. Ham knows that people tried to reach out to him with creationist literature. For all his wealth and popularity, Irwin died—and you will too. Repent or burn in hell for all eternity. We’re left to guess where Steve Irwin is right now…except you’d better accept Jesus or you’ll end up in the same place.
Ham is a vile little man, but his sentiments reflect standard Christian tropes. The promises and fears of an afterlife are used to herd the flock into the approved norms of behavior—norms that include respect for and gratuities to the shepherd, naturally—and death becomes an opportunity for reinforcing ‘spiritual’ authority rather than a time for reflection and appreciation. They don’t even use it as a reason to emphasize the importance of living well—death is a reason to waste your time in worship of a phantasm.
The life and death of Steve Irwin reminds us of mortality and enthusiasm and danger and passion. The life of Ken Ham reminds us of how low and despicable and worthless our lives can be if we let religion leech our minds away. Just remind yourself that someday death will whisk Ham away, too, and all he’ll leave is a legacy of lies.
Speaking of insensitive jerks, I’ve been told that Scott Adams also did a little corpse-spitting, had second thoughts, and deleted the entry. The episode has been archived, though.
PZ I never wanted to kill a sombitch as much as I did the pompadoured grease weasel that performed my mamaw’s funeral. That low life scum preached a sermon complete with a call to the altar, and I’m purty sure he was preaching at me since he had been the pastor of my parent’s church for twenty years and knew I was a reprobate and that I knew that he knew that I knew he was full of shit. Beginning the day at age 7 I heard him say ‘If evolution is true why don’t monkeys have human babies?” and I knew that was b.s. then.
Days like this I agree with you that religion is a festering boil on the ass-orifice of humanity.
They’re just bitter that a hugely popular, enthusiastic guy, made more of an impact communicating the wonders of the natural world than their own particular brand of agressive hellfire.
Still, did anyone honestly expect that Ham wouldn’t let Irwin’s death go without a little feverish ranting.
Why th fss? Y r ll spcsts. Th Ry hd s mny rghts s rwn.
t flt thrtnd.
t ctd.
[ NOTE: We really don’t have a large scale infestation of trolls. We’ve got one or a few obsessed creeps who comment under a great many pseudonyms. –pzm ]
Yeah, what’s up with these funerals-as-excuse-for-preaching? When my step-grandmother, a lifelong devout Catholic, died a few years back, her funeral was a 3-hour service at the very large church she had attended every Sunday for pretty much her whole life. The family was good friends with the monsignor, very generous to the church, yadda yadda.
During the entire service, the deceased was mentioned exactly twice, both times in the context of what a good church-going Catholic she was. The rest of the service was a long elaborate infomercial for the church.
From now on, it’s Irish wakes for me.
*looks for where anybody suggested the wholesale slaughter of stingrays*
*fails to find it*
Gee, all I see here is a criticism of Ken Ham being a complete opportunist bastard. (As usual.) I don’t see any criticism of stingrays at all.
Unless you’re suggesting that we should be mourning for the stingray? Well, problem with that is the stingray isn’t the one who died in this particular encounter.
Actually, I’m glad I read that article. I was wondering why Irwin died. Luckily Ham is on hand to provide us with some absolutely vital information:
“Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish (Luke 13:2-5).”
So, now you know.
Do not feed the trolls, please. Ignoring them is a surer way of getting rid of them than dsmvwllng them.
Being (pleasantly) associated with a few Aussies may I suggest that Ham be dropped off in the middle of the Australian Zoo and explain his position and delusions to Mr. Irwin’s family and co-workers.
I’d bet we could sell tickets to the event, and the pay-per-view fee would be quite nice.
And I have to agree with PZ, Erasmus and Jonnhy. The last funeral I went to (on my husband’s side) was nothing more than a ‘come up and be saved or end up like her’ bullshit festival. I DID end up taking my children out of the church and spending the 40+ minutes under a tree explaining to my children why some people are so afraid of death.
I had an experience at a friend’s wedding a couple of years ago that was similar to yours at your sister’s funeral. I decided then and there that never again would I step foot in any church for any reason. If invited to a church for any of the customary rituals, I will send my regards but will not be part of a captive audience to have my intelligence and charachter insulted.
To vaguely defend Chrsitian funerals, I went to my Grandads a little over a year ago. It was in a methodist church and obviously the whole God and Jesus lark was mentioned as you might expect, but it was pretty restrained. The vicar concentrated on my Grandad and his life a whole lot more.
I guess it depends on where you go – my local methodist chruch is from the British school of religion, rather laid back about the whole thing. I suspect most of the congregation would be as horrified as your average atheist by the mad ranting form of evangelism that passes for Christianity in much of the US.
I didn’t hear the Ham-headed One’s comments, but I can surmise. What a shame. As someone who lives in the Bible Belt, I’ve been to too many such funerals when the focus was bringing new Christians into the fold rather than comforting the grieved and celebrating pleasant memories of the person who died. And I resent feeling the societal pressure to conform and nod in affirmation of the pastor’s words rather than rage at the intrusion. Like a previous poster, only respect for the family has kept me from standing up and walking away. (Ditto for wedding “sermons” too.)
Such intrusive opportunism is appalling.
Yeah, what’s up with these Funerals-as-excuse-for-preaching?
Lousy sense of boundries.
One of them started up at my uncle’s funeral. My Jewish uncle.
Come to think of it, we threw the guy out. How come this doesn’t happen more often?
Oh, Ken Ham. Just contemptible!
I am fortunate in that my family gets involved in the funeral service. Funerals therefore consist of people getting up and talking about the deceased’s life. I must say that the pastor who officiated at my father’s funeral was a warm, kind, gentle person and that whole situation went as well as it could go for me. Before my religious father died, he became very scupulous about avoiding sin, etc., and it just makes me crazy to hear the things that he worried about–but the pastor would tease him, “Oh, what insignificant little sin did you commit now?” My father actually thought that he was supposed to “suffer as Christ suffered,” and I was scared that he was going to refuse painkillers but his pastor convinced him otherwise, and I’m grateful for that.
HERE HERE PZ! I just finished reading the AIG article before I got to your blog, I’m glad that you posted exactly what I was thinking.
They JUST stopped short of literally saying that he’s going to hell. Shame on them, Steve-o’s life may have been short, but he lived the life of 10 men in the span of 1 lifetime. Few people in the this world will EVER do as much good as he did. He was/is truely a treasure, and an inspiration to myself. It’s exactly because of passionate people like him that I decided EARLY in my life that my path would be the path of science and the environment.
By the way, I don’t know if anyone caught Larry King last night, but it was all about Steve and I thought it was pretty good (they had jack hanna, jeff corwin, and others). There is a little bit of that episode on his website here: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/larry.king.live/ . I also can not believe how quickly Steve Irwin tributes have been showing up on youtube, there are allready a ton of them.
Again, if anyone wants to donate to Wildlife Warriors (Steve’s creation), here is their website: http://www.wildlifewarriors.org.au/ They have to look for new sources of funding now that their biggest backer, and founder, is gone…
Ken Ham is a disgusting, appalling excuse for a Christian. Whatever miniscule respect I had for him is gone. Part of me wants to see him flayed for this reprehensible, inexusable act.
PZ: Sorry about that. I forgot that trolls were being disemvowelled here. Sometimes, I just can’t hold back the snark, ya know?
As for preachy funerals, it definitely depends on who leads the service. It’s equally definitely really, really tacky. If not straight-out offensive. (Ken Ham’s statements are clearly offensive, but I like to believe that most of the ministers who preach at funerals don’t say, “Well, he deserved it!” That’s a quite special brand of sickness.)
I’ve been fortunate in that the family funerals I’ve been to have always been focussed very strongly on remembering the deceased, with people getting up and telling stories. Sure, there would be prayers, but that really just reflects the religiosity of most of my family rather than any kind of conversion agenda. Prayers are just their form of well-wishing and rememberance. Nobody coopted the ceremonies for preaching fire and brimstone.
I think it is, to great degree, a cultural phenomenon, moreso than being specific to any brand of Christianity. My father was a very strong, very fundamentalist Baptist for most of his life (later switching to a Foursquare church, which is more Pentacostal-style; one fundamentalism for another), but even still his funeral service was as I said above: rememberance, not preaching. That’s just the culture in Hawaii. It’s very family-oriented, rather than religion-oriented (while claiming to be family-oriented) as it may be in other parts of the US.
Is there a way I can send the following?
Hey Ken Ham,
How’s that criminal case going? You know, the one where you and your wife lied to the IRS about your income and didn’t pay the taxes (aka rendering unto Ceasar)? The rest of us call that theft. And how about your museum that got shut down because you violated permit ordinances? We call that obeying the law. And then there is that whole “Dr. Dino (or is it Dinero?) shtick where you misrepresent, misquote, mislead the audience about science and scientists. We call that lying. It’s nice to know you are on high moral ground so you can exploit the tragic death of another to push your con…er, “message” on the public. I believe we call that parasitism, or maybe necrophaga. Oops, just noticed I’m out of TP. Can you send me some of your tracts so I can put them to their proper use?
From the Suggested Corrections Dept.:
Rewrite as:
I think the second rendering is clearer, and likely subtle enough to fly below the right-wing radar.
Somehow I’m reminded of Thoreau: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation… From the desperate city you go into the desperate country and have to console yourself with the braveries of minks and muskrats… Yet it is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” Ken Ham and his ilk are all about the desperation– without it, no one would be fool enough to pay them for their ‘services.’ No wonder they seize on death like the vultures they are.
Um, King Spirula, you’re thinking of Kent Hovind, who doesn’t happen to be officially affliated with Answers In Genesis…
I think you’re talking about Kent Hovind, King Spirula.
Which is not to say that I have never mixed those two up. Partners in crime, Ken and Kent. Opportunists both.
I’ve had the same funeral experience you described — at the funeral for an agnostic friend who had a Catholic family. They spent a good part of it praising her faith, which she didn’t have, because she was smarter than the rest of them.
I’ve really had enough of this Christianity crap. Everyone who contributes to the spread of organized religion should receive the same prison sentence as anyone who contributes to the spread of anthrax.
In Late 2004 my niece was almost killed by a black rhino while doing research on rhinos in Imfolozi-Hluhluwe Game Reserve, Kwazulu/Natal, South Africa. Airlifted from the site of the accident, she remained unconscious for 6 weeks while doctors and surgeons sought to save her and repair extensive damage to both legs and pelvis.
Fearing the worst, my sister called on myself, and two of my nephews to head up to the IC ward in the hospital where she was being housed. One of them is a member of a charismatic christian church being trained as some sort of missionary.
Viewing my niece, lying unconscious in a critical state, with all manner of tubes, monitors and medical equipment attached and having a spell like incantation being chanted at the same time (along with a few exhortations thrown in) chilled me. I
It was not so much what was said but rather the tone in which it was said: an almost arrogant, superior one which, in a way mocked us and our fear. It mocked the science that was trying (and did) keep her alive. What was insidious, was the way in which it seemed he pursued his own selfish feelings above those who had perhaps come to see, and be with someone who perhaps had only afew moments left to live.
Her story can be read here:
http://www.talkingtravel.co.za/november2005.html#kirsten
& here:
http://www.theherald.co.za/herald/2004/09/23/news/n04_23092004.htm
And details about the research project here:
http://www.5050.co.za/inserts.asp?ID=6073
I have attended three Quaker funerals in my time. (my mother and my grandmother, and grandfather) I found it rather respectful of the deceased. The Quaker “service” is held in a room with pews or chairs. There isn’t any alter or anything like that. There isn’t any preacher. Everyone comes in and sits down. When somone has something to say they stand up and say it. They can tell a joke, they can read from a book, they can speak from their heart. When they are finished they sit down. Then someone else can stand up and speak if they feel like it. The general rule is not to get up and speak while someone else is speaking.
Most people talk about the deceased. Some tell a funny story. (and people do laugh) In the three I went to no one tried to prothalisize or preach “hell fire and damnation”. It was more like a get together of friends to remember someone.
It ends when no one has anything else to say. (generally about an hour later) There is a designated person to kick it off and end it, but all they do is welcome everyone, explain the “rules” (standard ettique, don’t interupt others) and notice when no one has anything more to say they get up and dismiss everyone.
My dad died in May and the preacher at the funeral did the exact same thing. I think they need to undergo sensitivity training, if this is the norm.
For my grandfather, we didn’t really have a funeral. He was cremated, and we had a bit of a wake with friends and family. No preacher was present, and everyone thought it was good. We didn’t even bury him or scatter the ashes; he’s still in an urn in the living room.
I did have experience with preacher weddings. A friend’s wedding was like that, hardly any talk of my friends getting married, or of marriage itself. Mostly just preaching; it was exactly like a church service with a 5 minute wedding ceremony tacked on the end.
My great-grandfather died recently, and they held the funeral at the Pentacostal church he had founded and pastored for 70+ years.
I was not surprised that the funeral was used as a sermonizing opportunity. It’s exactly what my great-grandfather would have wanted. There were a lot of people there who would never step foot in the church otherwise. A lot of unsaved souls.
The logic is that there is nothing in this world more important than being saved. Once you accept the Christian cosmology, it’s the only logical way to be. What does suffering or death in this world mean in the grand scheme of your eternal existence? This life isn’t your real life, it’s some shadowy, muddy, fleeting, dreamlike precursor to your real existence, which will be eternal, and clear and sharp with pure joy or unrelenting hellish torment. Given this worldview, what kindness can you do anyone that compares to saving his soul? Grief is irrelevant. You’ll never know true grief unless you find yourself in hell.
So I understood what they were doing and why it was appropriate at this man’s funeral, but I also felt very alienated and rather cold toward the whole thing. Then two of my cousins got up and started to speak about their memories of the man. These two women are no longer part of the church, and I know they asked to speak because they wanted at least a small part of the service to be dedicated to the memory of the man as a grandfather rather than a preacher. I was grateful to them for speaking, because it was the only time during the service I felt emotionally involved. It was the only time I didn’t feel like an outsider at my own grandfather’s funeral.
But I could see the elders of the church sitting behind them getting antsy and even irritated. These two women were creating a distraction. They were wasting time that could be used for something more important. And I knew that my great-grandfather lying in the casket in front of them would have agreed. Heck, he probably would have refused to let my cousins speak.
It’s wrong to stereotype ministers as cynical manipulators. I’m certain my great-grandfather believed in what he preached. He wasn’t in it for money. He never lived a lifestyle more opulent than what would be described as lower middle-class. The salary he took from the church in later years was $300 per month.
I walked away from the church as soon as I was old enough to assert myself. I have lots of issues with the church and the role the religion has played in my family. But I do recognize that the funeral sermon is an unavoidable byproduct of consistency of belief.
I think only a pastor or priest with shallow belief could give a funeral service that comforted the living without regard to their religious alignment, and honored the life of the dead as if it were his real life. Such priorities don’t really make sense if you’ve truly embraced the Christian cosmology.
One of the catalysts of my “embracing my inner atheist” was the sudden death at 38 of a childhood friend, who had some 12 years earlier been born again. She attended the Calvary Chapel megachurch, so her service was less about her life (other than how she prayed so hard for her loved ones’ salvation in Christ) than it was about getting people to come up for the obligatory altar call. Her own daughter wasn’t even allowed to eulogize her mom, much less anyone else. The preacher was the sole speaker and he sermonized for 45 minutes. My friend’s (nominally Catholic) father was fit to be tied, and I barely retained enough composure to wait to start screaming obscenities until I got into the car after the service.
Ken Ham isn’t fit to scrape the muck from the boots of Steve Irwin; and it’s difficult NOT to wish there’s a place of eternal torment into which people like him, who prey upon the vulnerability of those in mourning of a loved one in order to get more converts. It’s disgusting.
It is a reasonable assumption that anyone who is a long-time member of a church has some understanding of that church’s funereal rites, and expects no less on the occassion of their own death. What makes this inappropriate is when family, making decisions for the deceased, provide them the dubious benefit of posthumous membership in a church to which they never belonged in life. The lesson those of us without religion should take from this is to make clear our wishes: that we wish to be remembered as we lived, and that in our memorials, we want no religious rites, no prayers, no preachers, pastors, or priests.
My atheist uncle died suddenly of heart disease at age 54. “For the family”, we had the Catholic funeral he never wanted. I can understand that some of the living might want something different from the last wishes of the dead, but the idea of holding a religious funeral for an adamant atheist disturbed me at the time (I was 19) and still disturbs me today.
As for Ham: I don’t care a whit about him while he’s living, and I don’t give a crap where he goes when he dies.
My brother’s funeral several months ago was the same evangelical advertisement. Creepy, really creepy. The funeral home was the same way. So, where was the comfort for the grieving family?
Next time, I guess I’ll take my iPod and find a nice science podcast to listen to.
This looks like a good reason to get ex-communicated from the Catholic church. They’d have to refuse to give me a funeral, I would think. Awww.
Thank you for your website and views. At first I thought you might just be an angry old bastard, but I guess I myself am an angry young bastard. I sympathize with you on the funeral for your sister and I know a lot about the whole, “come to Jesus” fiasco. I had to listen to this girl I worked with over the summer tell me that I’m going to hell for my thoughts and views. I myself am hoping for a deeper circle of hell, haha, just keeping my fingers crossed in some cynical slur of sarcasm.
I myself wasn’t a huge fan of Steve Irwin, but when I saw he had died I felt bad, because he was such an ecstatic guy, glad to be alive… and the whole crickey brought a smile to mine and everyone’s face. He brought some forms of joy to me when I saw him on television, and in these times, people will always show their true colors… and unfortunately they’re be a lot of these assholes who feel a need to “convert” people and make Steve’s an example because of his misfortune. He’s a lot better man than a majority of the preachers out there. He’s done a lot more than all the preachers I know.
Thank you again.
Kristine,
You’re right, my mistake. Although, for some reason, I keep confusing the two, maybe something to do with their virtually identical arguments.
for some reason, I keep confusing the two
So do I. Their initials don’t help. I think those two even look alike!
I’ve been here a few times now and I am absolutely amazed at how each and every one of you highly-evolved brights are so totally and utterly convinced that the movement of your own particular neuro-chemicals are somehow TRUE.
You must be constantly measuring the truthiness of your molecular movements against something “out there” otherwise how could you know your “thoughts” (simply molecular motion remember) are TRUE. This TRUTH idea is imponderable.
I don’t mind if you state what the current movement of your molecules force you to state but you all seem so convinced that it’s better to have your molecules moving in a certain way than in another way. Where did you get this idea from? It’s certainly NOT part of the evoutionary canon.
Why are you so angry at Mr Ham? He can’t help it.
Just state what your molecules are doing and leave it at that. That’s all Mr Ham was doing. He is NOT repsonsible for the position of his chemicals. Responsibility is also NOT part of the evolutionary canon.
I am NOT responsible for these words either. I have no choice but to simply state what position my chemicals are in at this point in time. Moralizing. Isn’t that absurd? A remnant of your religious past? It’s absurd to assign a TRUTH value to your molecules.
Shortened Form: The chemicals made him do it.
P.S. Whatever response you might make to this essay has no meaning for me. In your world meaning can have no meaning. Virtually everything you have written is philosophy, psychology or religion. For self-professed scientists most of you appear to have little ability to do real science. Just measure and report please. None of us can help the position that our chemicals are in. Blame? That’s just trying to force your own particular version of chemicals on mine. Absurd waste of time.
The first step is to realize that pastors and deacons really just don’t have any authority–they aren’t able to reach into some deep dark realm which the rest of us can’t find. Their revelations are mundane and human, and so are their motives.
If you don’t understand something, don’t give them the benefit of the doubt. If something goes unspoken in your small group, bring it up. Realizing a lack of faith or belief is the first step to either solving it or discovering that no one is satisfied with the question.
Jacksondbn, I can sympathize
When my wife had some fairly invasive surgery she was in intensive care for a day and in a hospital room for 3 more. While she was checking in, when the hospital asked her about her religion she told them she wasn’t religious and asked them to not send a religious counselor during her recovery.
During intensive care I was by her side the whole time and never saw a religious person. After she had checked into a room and was heavily sedated I took a break to get some food. Once I got back I found a preacher comfortably seated in her room and talking to her. My wife, whose first language is Korean, not English, was groggy with morphine, confused, and asked me in Korean who this guy was when I entered the room.
I asked the preacher what the hell he was doing, and he had the nerve to tell me that my wife had called him. I later figured out she had called for me in Korean because she wanted a blanket. Since she was on morphine her speech was a mash-up of Korean & English that no one would understand. Preacher man came in and started a one-sided ‘conversation’ with my incoherent wife.
When I told him we were non-believers and that he had to leave, he tried to give me a cheap pocket bible. I’m afraid I got rather nasty afterwards.
They do it then because it’s all they’ve got. Think of it – if you follow the basic tenets, you give up most all of the fun things of life and doom yourself to a lifetime of feeling guilty when you do slip up and always afraid that Daddy’s going to get you for it. The only time they’ve got a decent chance to convert people is by forcing open the tiny chink of worry about mortality and shoving god into it.
Do not feed the trolls, please. Ignoring them is a surer way of getting rid of them than dsmvwllng them
I keep thinking it would be fun to take one of those posts and rewrite it with different vowels to create an entirely different meaning, or perhaps a version of spam gibberish, but I have neither the time nor creativity needed to do so.
Why th fss? Y r ll spcsts
Why those ferrets? You race llamas, spectators.
See? I can’t do it.
My little brother was 18 when he died after a 10-month battle with cancer, and he will always be 18 and my little brother). My parents are atheist and agnostic, but my grandparent were religious. My grandmother insisted on a church service, but we attached some conditions. The whole service was entirely about my life-loving brother, and we played heavy metal and hard music the entire time, there wasn’t a single “hymn” throughout the ceremony. My brother was rather popular and about 300 people attended the ceremony, and I remember through my tears, I could see people nodding their heads to Metallica, Iron Maiden and the like. And the reverend never once mentioned that the background music was inapropriate. I’ve never known another funeral like it. It is definitely possible to have a service that pleases both sides of the family.
It’s their chance to try to recruit new converts who don’t normally go to any church service.
What’s scarier than death? Great opportunity to make your case for your eternal soul.
We’re all gonna die! Come to Jesus and you get to see you relatives when you do!
I say wear your “Jesus was wrong” t-shirt to the church.
PZ, I just want to thank you again for the kill file script!
It has really helped bring me a more rational understanding of molecular movement in neuro-chemistry.
I’ve never been to a Quaker funeral (but my grandmother was offered one by her Quaker friends if a humanist one couldn’t be arranged- this was in the ’80s and the British Humanist Association wasn’t as influential, or widespread as it is now), but I have attended a Quaker wedding- which is much the same. I think God was mentioned once. Maybe not at all.
My mother’s parents both had humanist funerals- they’re becoming much more common in the UK, and they concentrate on the person. They’re very much like the Quaker ceremonies in that respect. And yes I think we did laugh.
Ronald, you fail to realize that the reason why Prof Myers is so angry with Ken Ham is because Ken Ham is using Steve Irwin’s death as an opportunity to both insult the deceased (by inferring that because Steven never repented the sin of believing in evolution, his death was not only just, but inevitable, and that he’s now burning in hellfire, forever denied God’s love), and to frighten more people into converting to Christianity.
…
Tell me, Ronald, does your faith in God excuse you for belittling justified anger towards injustices committed by a charlatan?
I kicked a minister out of my father’s funeral reception. I had explicitly asked him to go light on the religious aspect, and yet he assured all comers – many of whom were non-Christian – that they’d burn in hell without Jesus. I regret not punching him, but my mom wouldn’t have been impressed with that.
My grandma was catholic, but all of her sons and grandchindren are atheists (except for one guy who keeps seeing flying saucers, but never mind him). When she died, we held a service in her church, mostly for her (many) religious friends. It was a very small church, and all of us bunch of atheists had to seat in front. In the middle of the service (I don’t really remember what the priest said) my uncle whispered us to stand up
– Stand up, everybody is up! Tell the others!
and a few moments later:
– Sit, sit! Everybody is sitting again!
And on it went untill the end of the service. None of us knew when to sit or stand, we had to keep looking towards the back of the church, where the religious people were, to see what to do.
Even though it was my grandma’s funeral, that was very funny!
I went to my landladies humanist funeral recently. I was very impressed (if thats the right word to use); dignified, moving yet also positive and uplifiting.
Also, I was happy to learn that she was buried a few plots away from the legendary British geologist Roderick Murchison, who instituted the Silurian system and performed some absolutely heroic feats of geologic mapping.
“I had an experience at a friend’s wedding a couple of years ago that was similar to yours at your sister’s funeral. I decided then and there that never again would I step foot in any church for any reason.”
If it was their wedding, clearly that was how they wanted their wedding to be run. That shouldn’t offend you, as the day was specifically about them. Obviously, their faith was very important to them, it is part of their relationship, and therefore they felt strongly it should be part of their wedding.
As for preaching at funerals–if it is for a very devout person who clearly would want their funeral to be administered in that fashion, then there shouldn’t be a problem in anyone’s mind–again, if it was important to that person, they probably would have wanted that, and in fact, probably expressly requested it. If, however, the person was not devoutly religious and would not have ever wanted that kind of a funeral–you are correct, that is, in fact, disrespectful to the deceased and their wishes, and therefore offensive.
My uncle’s funeral was of the former variety, and since I knew him, I knew that was exactly how he would have wanted it, and it was a very fitting and appropriate memorial to him.
It’s stuff like this that makes me, at exactly Steve Irwin’s age, to have my funeral already laid out and communicated to my loved ones to prevent ANY preaching being done at it or about it. I have a great reading from Phil Pullman’s “The Amber Spyglass” about death, some good quotes from the infidel Greek philosophers (but you know, like the sunny upbeat ones–“Where you are, death is not; where death is, you are not”–that sort of thing), a few god-free songs (including the Rush song “Bravado”), and even a clip from Joss Whedon’s TV series “Angel.” To reflect who I am in the least, my funeral must “testify” for the other side, and promote reason and human values. I think this might be a good idea for other non-religious people, too.
Actually, the last funeral I went to was a rather nice experience, considering. I’m an atheist and the funeral was for a friend of mine who was agnostic, but his family was devoutly Catholic. However, out of respect for Vinny (my friend) the family limited the priest to an opening benediction and one hymn. The rest was an hour of memories of him. I can’t imagine a better way to recognize someone’s death than to share all the memories you have with others who will miss him just as much. Far more meaningful than any sermon.
I think that you really need to know who is going to be giving the service. The priest at my step-father’s father’s funeral started the sermon telling us that it was too late for him because his life was over but the rest of us should start going to church because we needed to be ready for when our time comes. My father-in-law was from Turkey and wasn’t a very devout muslim and even went to church occasionally. He once told me that he wanted to have freedom of religion in his house so his kids would have been allowed to go either way or have none at all (which is what happened). He really was a wonderful man in a lot of ways. My mother-in-law is friends with the minister at her church. He gave a Christian service but also included passages from the Koran rather than getting an imam. It was a real service, not a generic “go to church!” lecture that seems to be the norm from what I am seeing here. I wonder how many other families that priest annoyed.
Kristine:
Here’s the question. Have they ever been seen together? Perhaps they are only one person?
That said, I’ve confused the two. Differentiating is like trying to decide if an egg is spoiled or rotten.
PZ and everyone: I’m sorry for your losses, and even more sorry that you were abused by the clergy while dealing with them.
andre: my husband’s family is devout catholic and I’ve had to go to church with them for family functions a few times. I had exactly the same experience, except I was on my lonesome. My inner dialogue was like this:
Oh crap, everyone is kneeling!
Okay, stand up now. Do that thing with your hands
And now they’re all sitting.
Man that incense makes me want to sneeze.
Why do people keep trying to shake my hand?
And so on. And it was weird to see my husband, who is not officially an athiest but has no religious practice at all, do everything so robotically and automatically.
Catholic mass is not for the uninitiated, I guess.
FALSE. At our wedding, we had a preacher at the in-laws request, and we said specifically that we were not religious, and asked him to refrain from a lot of religious talk — that it would be inappropriate. He even agreed. Then, once the two of us were standing up there, he went into the Jesus jive.
What the happy couple wanted was for there to be no incidents and for everything to move smoothly so we could get on with our lives, so I didn’t smack him. I’ve gotten more curmudgeonly over the years, though, so if we were to go through it again, I would tell him to shut up and sit down.
This behaviour (trying to sell your religion at a funeral) is every bit as tacky–and morally worse— than if , e.g., McDonald’s bought the rights to come in, erect some golden-arches decorations over the casket and spend a few moments explaining to the bereaved why they deserve a break today. At least McDonald’s would pay the bereaved a few bucks for the rights.
Oh, and I wrote about this a while back. Warning: there is another picture of a youthful PZ there that will frighten the horses.
Man, Scott Adams is a fuckwit. WTF. And his commenters are apparently as dense as he is. How’s about we make a little jokey joke about tragic death! So funny!
Even a civil marriage is no guarantee that the god-botherers won’t try to preach at you, at least in the Bible Belt. My fiancee at the time (now wife) arrived a few weeks ago from Thailand on a fiancee visa, which has the condition attached that you contract a marriage within a certain period of time. Since we were planning a Buddhist ceremony back in Thailand for this coming spring, we decided to have a civil ceremony to get the legal niceties taken care of. Got our license, picked up a friend to serve as a witness, showed up at the courthouse, got an appointment to see a judge. The judge started his little spiel about the importance of marriage, the importance of communication, blah blah… boring but rather inoffensive stuff. Then he started the Jesus stuff. I winced but didn’t say anything (was just ready to get the paper signed and get out), my fiancee just smiled (she can’t understand Southern accents very well and had no idea what he was talking about)… my witness, after the first couple minutes, helpfully interjected “Umm… your honor? She’s Buddhist and he’s an atheist.” Which deflated him a bit, but not enough to stop him- his remark was that he was just doing his standard speech, it wouldn’t last more than a couple minutes, and at the end we’d be just as married one way or the other. Which we were.
In the end, I guess it serves me right for expecting a government official in Mississippi to understand the distinction between civil and religious authority.
My younger sister, a great-hearted and loving person, was diagnosed with a rare, progressive liver disorder, possibly caused by exposure to agricultural chemicals while she was working at an experimental seed farm in order to pay for college.
A Southern Baptist friend of her husband’s used my sister’s illness to terrify him into converting. However my sister refused to knuckle under this guy’s persistance. During the fifteen years, as her disease slowly progressed, was briefly held off by a liver transplant, and then finally descended to the end, she maintained her independence and dignity.
Her funeral however was an outrage. It was held in her husband’s church. The friend got up and announced that during the week before she died, he and two other church members formed a ‘tag team’ that prosthletized my dying sister daily until she finally ‘accepted the Lord’. I lived four hundred miles away from her, and had spent the previous week with her, helping her wrap up personal matters. If I’d known tht this evil plan was afoot, I’d have stayed and defended her to the end.
Needless to say, my other siblings and I were appalled both at these heartless ‘spiritual’ marauders, and her husband for failing to defend her peace.
PZ writes, “At our wedding, we had a preacher at the in-laws request, and we said specifically that we were not religious, and asked him to refrain from a lot of religious talk.”
One of the tropes common to Christians is that their religion isn’t actually a religion at all. Since what they believe and do was invented by a “real” god, unlike all those other religions invented by man, it’s not really religion. Or by religion, they mean the church and its trappings, not the beliefs behind it. In other words, their brainwashing is so deep that many believers have lost the understanding of some common English words. It’s really an amazing thing.
Stingrays will sting you if you mess with them, and so will preachers. It’s what they do.
This reminds me very much of my cousin’s funeral. There was, to the pastor’s credit, quite a bit about his life, but the “Christian” elements of it were overemphasized (I’m not sure much of anything else was, actually), and the tone of the sermon was aggressively pro-Jesus and in addition to a kind of evangelical opportunism vibe, it gave me a presumably unintentional, but intense, message of exclusion. “This is a Christian funeral for Christians. What do you mean we aren’t all Jesus Freaks here?” is what they seemed to be saying; and I KNOW I wasn’t the only unbeliever present. And I found it particularly galling when the pastor insisted, almost verbatim, that “our only hope and comfort is the promise of resurrection through Christ.” Somehow, I don’t think my cousin, devout as he was, would have agreed with that.
I’m with PZ here. Weddings do NOT go exactly as the happy couple want them to, because the pastor will do whatever he damn well pleases. Point of fact, I went to a wedding of two very good friends, and it included a long, long, LONG harangue on the evils of divorce. Much longer than the ceremony itself. Another friend who was attending said at the reception afterward very sweetly, “I didn’t think that was really appropriate”. Oh, BTW, the couple is now divorced. Lotta good that harangue did.
Ronald, what on earth are you babbling about? I think it’s time you upped the dosage on your own ‘chemicals.’
I can’t reach the archived link to Scott Adams’ fuckwittedness. Is it me or has it been removed?
Ronald,
Stay off the pipe man…..and go get some help.
Please, shhhh, I think that Ronald’s chemicals have settled to a steady state. Don’t shake him or he may react again.
He’s a mixture. Vinegar and water. If you get my drift.
does anyone have a copy of the scott adams thing? the archive seems to be gone too
@Ronald
What a coincidence…
I think this is the Scott Adams post in question:
Ronald.. You are clueless. First off, not valuing your BS doesn’t mean we arbitrarilly devalue other things. Second, I also don’t blame my computer when a part fails, my software for when it crashes or the cord on my TV when the power fails. I do blame, in proper order, the company that made the defective parts, the company that wrote buggy software, then didn’t give me much option to buy something that worked better, and the city of Lake Havasu for not #$@#$#$ following their own charter by installing underground systems, but opting instead to put up over head powerlines every place, in an area that, for roughly 2-3 months a year, has massive lighthing storms every other week.
I don’t **entirely** blame the clueless dimwits that get dragged into religion, turned into mindless zombies that can’t understand that they shouldn’t use every person they see as a urinal, in order to promote their delusions, but human brains, despite being nothing but chemicals, have a) adaptive ability, and b) unpredictable events that effect how thoughts form, both of which lend this mass of chemicals the capacity to change its opinions, or at the very least, opt to show enough respect to fracking shut up. Ken Ham has obviously never had the need or desire to do the former, and at this point, no random event, short of one that rendered him brain dead, is likely to reshape his mind enough to change his opinion. That leaves just shutting up, which he won’t do, because he thinks he is on some grand crusade to promote some strange truth that inexplicably requires 10,000 times as much lying, injustice, insecurity, inhumanity and execution of double standards to get everyone to belive in, than to just leave everyone the frack alone in the first place… This understandably confuses me. I can understand a lie, with no thruth in it at all, requiring an army of lies, fear, hate and hypocracy to promote to the level of everyone calling it “truth”. But ***real*** truth stands on its own merits and must be, by definition, tarnished by association with those that need to do all of the former. Yet, the “truth” you think we should all believe, has **never** in its entire history, even in the texts describing its own legends, **ever** stood on its own, without the need to lie, cheat, steal, kill, terrorize or enslave people to its will. Some great truth you have there….
–Something tells me that the media already had his obituary written with a fill-in-the-blank for the specific creature that killed him–
That is just faux-cynicism; I believe it’s common for news media to have “obituaries” written for all sorts of public figures, to use in case of sudden and unexpected death. Nothing morbid or exploitative about it.
Ken Ham is not the only one exploiting Irwin’s death. Brandt Dary asks in his blog “is Steve Irwin resting in peace? Did he go to heaven or hell?”
“I sure hope that Steve Irwin realized that no one is good enough to go to heaven, not one. I know that if we did get to heaven by being amazing entertainers, Steve would surely be there – but we don’t.”
I’m not convinced Scott Adams can be such a huge pile of crap and also write Dilbert at the same time. I think he has a ghost-writer.
I haven’t been to any funerals recently (thank Longevity!), but my cousin’s wedding last month was amazingly focused on the couple and getting along with each other. He and his immediate family are more fundagelical than my parents/siblings, but the wedding hardly had any Jebus filling. All the better, as far as I’m concerned.
Perhaps inappropriately proselytising ministers, priests and preachers should be forced to go around wearing T-shirts (or tabards or whatever outer garment would work) saying “Pimp for Jesus”. Or “Jesus’ Pimp” if the first version sounds too much like an exhortation for others to do likewise!
Meanwhile, I can understand PZ’s wedding dilemma. The promise of acquiring a bride like that, as a result of enduring the preacher’s offensive sermonising and bogus oath, had to be quite a serious principle-compromising temptation for even the most hardened atheist.
Ronald is a troll… please do not feed him.
Who the hell is Brandt Dary (ouch, what a name) and why would we care?
When Van Allen passed away recently, i thought it was interesting that an obituary for him was written by someone who died in 1996.
Ronald: I don’t mind if you state what the current movement of your molecules force you to state but you all seem so convinced that it’s better to have your molecules moving in a certain way than in another way. Where did you get this idea from? It’s certainly NOT part of the evoutionary canon.
Welcome aboard!
I think you’re confusing “evolution” with “philosophical naturalism”. “Evolution” is the process by which species change over time. “Philosophical naturalism” is the belief that the universe can be described in terms of matter and energy. (Without resorting to weird new-agey stuff like “magic” and “ghosts” and “souls”.)
Philosophical naturalism does say that beliefs and emotions are caused by chemical reactions. But that doesn’t mean that beliefs and emotions can only be discussed in chemical terms. It’s almost always more interesting to talk about them as high-level processes.
(Here’s an analogy: Weather is caused by the movement of molecules in the atmosphere. But if I talk to you about the weather, I’m going to use high-level terms like “warm front” and “cold front” and “cumulus cloud” that describe sets of countless trillions of molecules. It would be silly for me to give you a list of the position and velocity of every single molecule in the atmosphere and then expect you to make sense of it!)
Why are you so angry at Mr Ham?
Speaking naturalistically, Mr. Ham’s molecules constitute a structure that can be described in high-level terms as a “vile little man”. Such structures influence their surroundings so as to create multiple copies of the molecular pattern we call “anger”.
That’s a lot of words, isn’t it? It’s easier if we just say, “Mr. Ham pissed a lot of people off by being a sanctimonious prat.” (The stuff about molecules and structures isn’t relevant to the point we’re trying to make, so we can leave it off.)
If you have any more questions, please don’t hesitate to ask! After all, it’s the only way you’ll ever learn anything!
‘Goddamn all preachers, pastors, and priests’.
Whodamn all preachers, pastors, and priests?
Good for you, you caught the irony.
Scott Adams: Wow. Why isn’t that getting tons of publicity?? He should be called upon to explain those comments.
Ken Ham: Frikkin’ hypocrite.
My bad funeral experience was at a Mormon funeral, where, as I recall, the pastor used it as an opportunity to speak for about 2 hours. The audience kept thinking it was over, and you could see people getting ready to move out… And he kept going on about God’s love. I felt really, really bad about having an intense desire to get up and leave a funeral when I really liked to man who died.
I hope no one feels like that at my funeral, that they want to get up and leave. I felt very bad for the family.
Similarly, I hope no one in Irwin’s family has to read what Ham and Adams had to say.
Well, if you ask me, Adams’s piece was funny from beginning to end. The beginning of the second paragraph is clearly tongue-in-cheek and makes it obvious that he is joking throughout (in case you would have missed it otherwise).
People who refuse to laugh at death, or who criticise others for laughing at death, puzzle me. Don’t they understand how that kind of humor is an attempt to deal with mortality, not just of the deceased but also of the bereaved and the onlookers? Death, be not proud, because you’re actually pretty ridiculous sometimes. (Anthropomorphizing death is another way to try to mitigate its psychological impact, by reducing it to something comprehensible and finite.)
Yes, Irwin is dead; each of us will some day be dead. But don’t let that poison the life we do have. Morbidity lies not in looking at death, but in allowing death to dominate your life. Spending your life in fear of your death, or someone else’s death, is a waste.
Irwin is fortunate; he lives on through his work, a monument more lasting than bronze (as some dead guy once said). Most of us won’t even have that. We’ll be gone except for gradually fading memories and maybe some old records nobody cares about. And those of us who are atheists don’t comfort ourselves with fictional afterlives, either.
All the more reason to do what we can with the lives we do have.
Meanwhile, I can understand PZ’s wedding dilemma. The promise of acquiring a bride like that, as a result of enduring the preacher’s offensive sermonising and bogus oath, had to be quite a serious principle-compromising temptation for even the most hardened atheist.
I hate to encourage litigiousness, but what would happen if you sued? If a caterer screws up your wedding, you’ve got a case. Why not an officiant?
I have long had these same feelings at weddings and funerals. I don’t know how much longer I can sit quietly biting my tongue while people are singing hymns and bowing their heads.
As I understand it, in line with Irwin’s wishes, he will be cremated and the ashes shoved up an oriface of some reptile to see how fast it moves when annoyed…
Havent read all the comments so this may have been written before, but I just wanted to say that though im usually a fan of your rants, this is not very tastefull. Your writing seems as opportunistic as the one your critisising. Though I agree with your opinions, this was somewhat of a dissapointment. My first here on Pa…whatever.
Was that supposed to be funny?
How is it not tasteful? Ken Ham is a putz.
Of Ken Ham, a Christian may observe (with only slight modifications from what Ham said about Irwin):
Sadly, Ken Ham was a creationist. He slammed God’s creation and evolution and the concept of millions of years many times in his television programs. For example, Ham said Irwin “once told Larry King on CNN’s Larry King Live cable program that crocodiles had been around for 200 million years, and if you weren’t careful they would kill you,” as if that were not the gospel truth. Clearly Ham has no sense of danger, and would be a danger to everyone in any sort of laboratory.
Over the years, I’ve had people tell me they sent Ken Ham some of our evolution books — it’s pretty clear he never read any of them. At least these science and reason supporters tried to witness to this very famous but silly and wicked man. Listening to Ken Ham plead in a church for donations to his museum dedicated to ridicule of science, one reflects that Jesus drove the moneylenders out of the temple, because their actions profaned that sacred ground. And so does Ken Ham profane the creation God pronounced good, when he erroneously criticizes those who study it, as the Lord advised.
Our hearts and prayers go out to anyone blighted by the rantings of Ham. Euripides said that whom the gods destroy they first make mad. There goes Ken Ham, no oil for his lamp, and no clue about how late it is. It is a warning to all who reject science. While Steve Irwin in his short life brought joy and knowledge to millions of children, and donated millions to preserve the habitat and animals for future generations, Ken Ham blunders on, ranting against the medical science that saves millions, against the agricultural science that feeds billions — what would Jesus, who healed and fed as a mission, say?
Years ago now my immediate boss, whom we all loved dearly, died in a car wreck. He was Catholic – most of us weren’t. We went to the funeral, and I was appalled when the priest spent half the homily ranting against abortion.
mndean: I once went to a Catholic wedding where the priest railed for a while on the evils of premarital sex.
A acquaintance of mine was once a missionary in a poor part of the world, and once wrote an unbelievably perky letter about how overjoyed she was to be present when a young woman “embraced Christianity ” a few minutes before dying of tuberculosis. My assumption: The young woman spoke and understood little or no English, was frightened, confused, and in pain, and was just relieved to have someone holding her hand — even if that person was chirping incomprehensible platitudes at her at the same time.
I really don’t get it.
I guess I have been lucky, funeral-wise. Most of the ones I have been to have been Greek Orthodox, and they have all been focused on the person. At least here in Australia, most of them involve telling the story of the persons life, and members of the family do get up and speak too. The religious bits are all in non-contempary greek, and the churchs do look rather nice inside. It is hard to keep track of when you need to stand and when you need to sit though.
If you think what Scott Adams said was bad ( personally I did not think it was that offensive, clumsy perhaps, not really funny, but not offensive ), you should see what Greer has written. I don’t think she knows what to do about someone who has better green credentials then hers, and yet likes John Howard.
As far as churches go, Quakers are eminently sensible and not prone to the kind of insanity we’ve seen at other protestant churches, and way, way back when we were first dating, my wife and I attended various churches to see what their ceremonies were like, and my favorite was the Russian Orthodox — very solemn, they gave great ritual, but the people were the friendliest afterwards. We made the ghastly mistake of sitting in the very front row, which meant we were peering out of the corners of our eyes throughout the thing to keep track of when the people behind us were standing up and sitting down.
Second favorite was the Episcopalians. They had a parade with banners and musical instruments before the sermon!
mndean: I once went to a Catholic wedding where the priest railed for a while on the evils of premarital sex.
. . . while the happy couple tried not to laugh.
Well, I’m a troll! So be it. My mother would be horrified.
Not one of you “got it”. You tried, but you just didn’t “get it” which was a big part of my point I guess. Philosophical Naturalism was close but still not on the money. Sigh.
Every one of you is almost unbelievably moralistic. Ken Ham (and every other Christian) has done wrong. He (and they) must be ostracized and punished. Do you ever listen to yourselves?
Atheism is a religion and the history of it and its violence dwarfs the errors of Christianity by a factor of about a million.
Each one of you seems to want to impose atheism on others. Why? BECAUSE IT’S TRUE!
Oh, and so is evolution.
I prayed last night (sorry) that God would open my mind to the truth (I actually believe that there is such a thing of course) about evolution. I studied it at university level and try as I might I still think that there’s something else going on. I’m Catholic so I can believe it or not. I haven’t quite figured it out yet but I’m trying. I’ve read and read and read and thought and prayed and etc. Still can’t quite get there. Something BIG is missing but I’m working on it. Please pray for me (sorry again).
Sometimes I think I’ve got it and one day I might write a DVD but so far I find it easier to believe e.g. that Jesus rose from the dead than “Everything started with Nothing”. At least God is a sufficient cause. Nothing isn’t.
Hey, that last sentence is just so beautiful! “Nothing is not.”
I think I might write it down.
But then again, I’m just a troll :(
Atheism is a religion and the history of it and its violence dwarfs the errors of Christianity by a factor of about a million.
Each one of you seems to want to impose atheism on others. Why? BECAUSE IT’S TRUE!
Oh, and so is evolution.
what separates a troll from an intelligent comment is often evidence.
you have none to support your contentions, so you are correct in labeling yourself a troll.
at least you recognize the weaknesses in your own argument.
You could try again after your bout with your own dissonance dissipates a bit.
good luck with that.
hmm, seems the code is performing strangely.
put and end italic after the word “evolution.”
haven’t got a clue why it isn’t recognizing the end tag in the right place.
I tried a couple of times to figure out what is going on there to no avail.
Atheism is a religion and the history of it and its violence dwarfs the errors of Christianity by a factor of about a million.
BAH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Oh wait, you were….SERIOUS?! Definitely a troll, or at least a troll that hasn’t read history.
Ronald van Wegen writes, “I prayed last night (sorry) that God would open my mind to the truth (I actually believe that there is such a thing of course) about evolution. I studied it at university level and try as I might I still think that there’s something else going on.”
The truth about evolution can no more be had through prayer, than can the truth about Bell’s theorem. More, I don’t want people to believe in either. Not in the way they believe in Jesus or they believe in the rightness of standing up when the flag passes or they believe in not wearing white after Labor Day. If one wants to understand Bell’s theorem, I can recommend some books on quantum mechanics. Just as PZ frequently points to a variety of sources about evolutionary biology. All you should believe about a factual issue is what you understand. What you don’t understand, you shouldn’t believe. And while I’ve seen many students pray before a math exam, I’ve never seen it help their understanding.
“Each one of you seems to want to impose atheism on others.”
No. I want people to stop thinking they should choose a belief on factual issues, driven by what they think is right or wrong, as taught by preachers, pundits, quack philosophers, and a variety of other talking heads. I have absolutely no desire for you to “believe in” evolution. If you want to understand it, study it. If not, then leave it to the biologists.
“Atheism is a religion and the history of it and its violence dwarfs the errors of Christianity by a factor of about a million.”
Don’t confuse atheism with communism. And even there, you’re wrong in your comparison.
Man, I completely left the three post decorum. He totally had one more post. Shucks.
“Goddamn all preachers, pastors, and priests.”
You’re a distburbed man. I enjoy the blog despite.
Man, I completely left the three post decorum. He totally had one more post. Shucks.
oh, I think you’re safe. he admitted he is a troll himself.
fair game after that.
I’m sorry
I am confused about the popular perception and the media’s insistence that Steve Irwin died because he was a thrill seeker. All he did was jump in the water at the unpredictably wrong place and time. He wasn’t wrestling crocodiles – or creationists – and he wasn’t handfeeding scorpions to rattlesnakes. He was just diving. Although Mr Irwin promoted himself as a thrill seeker, precious little bad seemed to happen to him (as opposed to somebody like Evel Knievel) which makes me suspect that he was a lot more knowledgable and a lot more careful than inexperienced dolts like me an Scott Adams might think. I’d bet that naturalists like Mr Irwin have a much lower accident/death rate than coal miners, fire fighters, police officers, lumberjacks, and teenagers working on their parents’ farms. I enjoyed his show and liked him a lot. My three cats, who are pagans, tell me that we are all reunited at the rainbow bridge. For once I hope they are right and I am wrong and that we get to see Steve in action again.
I am confused about the popular perception and the media’s insistence that Steve Irwin died because he was a thrill seeker.
rest assured, it’s not you who is confused. The media like to play up to what they think are “object lessons”.
just like Ham, the typical media outlet promotes the angle of the story they think will generate the most “buzz” for the most folks.
Ronald:
For the record, I’m a believer myself but I find your post not only unconvincing, but weirdly off-base. The original intent of this thread was to pillory the odious Ken Ham (a preacher with phony ‘scientific’ credentials) for attempting to exploit the death of a fellow Australian (Steve Irwin) who actually was a *real* naturalist, in the traditional sense of the term.
One doesn’t have to be a believer to find something immoral in Ham’s attempt to use Irwin’s death to advance his anti-science agenda. You gain no credibility with non-believers by somehow imputing them with insincerity in the exercise of their moral sense. Many skeptics are among the most moral people I know.
Sincerely…Scott
My grandmother passed away at the age of 90 back in 1986. At the funeral some gasbag made it a Jesus and the Sky Daddy chat, some yahoo who did not know her, did not have a clue about her as a human being. I swear on a stack of dogma I will walk out of the next funeral if some hack shoves his religious garbage at the mourners. I have better things to do with my grief than be preached to by some death-exploiting fabulist.
+++
I apologize at the beginning if my post seems to be a bit off-topic, but since Dr. Myers and others have talked about religious rites during weddings and funerals, I wanted to share a few thoughts on similar subjects.
Most of the theological discussions (and denouncements thereof) in the Pharyngula blog seem to center around major Western organized religions, Judaism/Christianity and Islam, which are purportedly bound together by common origin, and are known especially for their proselytizing zeal, and inordinate and facile emphasis on post mortem destinations, namely, heaven and hell. These are also monotheistic, to the exclusion of everyone else’s beliefs. History of the Roman Catholic church, for example, is a testimony to that fact. I had an early brush with Christianity when I studied my first seven years of grade school in a Catholic public school.
I was born and brought up into one of the oldest religions/philosophies of the world, hinduism. In the brand of hinduism practised by my parents and generally people from my part of the world, the concept of God was monotheistic-pluralistic – in that, there is one God, he/she/it is everywhere and in everything, living and non-living, natural and artificial, and the same God is perceived in different ways by people all over the world (which may be the reason for the 330 million Gods and Goddesses in the hindu pantheon). I was told that even for those who did not believe in a God, when they did something good or participated in something for the common good, such as education, socially conscious work, or simply helping others, God manifested in those individuals. There was no proselytization, absolutely. Everyone was free to see God (or not) in his or her own way; it was rather doing a good deed that mattered.
During hindu weddings and funeral rites, the Gods are invoked to shower blessings and confer peace in the ancient language of Sanskrit (the mother of many Indo-European languages), but that’s it. There is no discussion about heaven and hell really. The marriage chant asks the bride and groom to declare, “My heart is wherever your heart is”; the funerary chants simply proclaim that while the mortal body of the deceased has returned to the elements (following cremation), the spirit shall live on, the rest of the time being spent to reminisce about the departed.
I have, till now, never found it difficult (or for that matter, necessary) to reconcile my hindu upbringing to my chosen career in life-sciences and medicine; I was (and am) pursuing the acquisition of knowledge (which is considered a sacred duty in hinduism), and the rational, evidence-based explanations, or even speculations, of natural phenomena (which include evolution of life and the theories about the beginning of the universe) were perfectly normal and understandable to me. I guess, that is because there is no “intelligent design” or “creationism” (machinations of a “divine agency”) in hinduism; it implicitly assumes that there is God everywhere (in every single sub-atomic particles, atoms or molecules), and whatever happens following natural laws (including Darwinian variation, natural selection and survival) just happens – without any interference whatsoever, in any way, shape or form. There is no concept of good or bad, no imposed beneficience or maleficence. It is a very simple, and at the same time, very complex concept that predates any theology or organized religion in the world.
I am very grateful to Pharyngula (actually more so to my wife, who introduced me to Pharyngula). Reading here everyday the opinions of Dr. Myers and others, the logical and coherent arguments, sharp ripostes, as well as glimpses into the strange and inchoate minds and utterings of the trolls, I have learned a lot (and continue to do so); it has broadened my mind and honed my critical and questioning attitude. I have begun soul-searching regarding my so-long held understanding of the concept of God, and I have realized that I really detest any kind of organized religion (Western, Eastern, middle-Eastern alike) that preaches, proselytizes, and belittles or decries others.
However, till now, I have not found a conflict between my original concept of an all-pervasive God (as I outlined above) and my quest for the truth through research. Perhaps my understanding of either is incomplete and inadequate; only time will tell.
Sorry for the long post!
Suirauqa:
Your post was refreshing. While a Christian, I share your general outlook and, I suspect, am engaged in a similar process of ongoing self-examination. I find the forum here invaluable for that, as well as other things. I can’t speak for others here, but I bid you ‘welcome’ and look forward to learning from those aspects of your journey that you might choose to share from time to time.
Sincerely…Scott
I have to wonder if the folks at AiG have a form letter at the ready for any time a celebrity dies unexpectedly (was John Ritter sufficiently literal with regards to the Bible?). Or is Irwin singled out because he worked with animals? I hope they at least realize that they’re seriously barking up the wrong tree with regards to selling creationism to anyone who works with wildlife in any serious capacity.
I haven’t had the bad experiences with evangelical christians as some above. But death is difficult and religious ceremonies does make it even more so. It is the will of the deceased but each of us has our own grief to get to grips with. But so far the ceremonies I have visited has been enough lowkey to be passable.
Ronald here, he is really immoral by denying outsiders any sense of morality. Whodamn him and Ham, indeed.
All quotes from Ronald unless otherwise noted.
No one here, to my knowledge, has verbally identified themselves with the label “bright.” “Neurochemical isn’t generally hypothenated. And while I can’t speak for the others, I do happen to be convinced that my beliefs are true, because I reserve belief for things that can be supported evidentially or logically, rather than by sheer petulant aggressiveness or the handwaving of a questionably unquestionable authority figure who speaks with passion and conviction from underneath a funny hat and may or may not be able to find his ass without a map (see below).
Where our (or, at least, my) beliefs related to issues of factual truth (as opposed to value or personal preference–I shall charitably assume, despite some evidence to the contrary, that you don’t need the distinction explained to you)We are measuring it against something out there, the observable natural world. As we’ve said many, many, many times; I thought you had been reading the blog. As the Brights, which you implicitly claim to be familiar with by applying the label to us, probably assert. Are you really this thick?
There is no such thing as an evolutionary canon, as you will most likely be reminding us as soon as it becomes convenient to your argument to point out that evolutionary biologists haven’t settled all possible questions beyond a possibility of a doubt. This is where the troll label comes from: trolls are concerned with provoking a reaction, not with actually fostering discussion or even a win-or-lose debate. A glaring lack of consistency among one’s arguments is almost (but not quite) a smoking gun.
He can, and should. While some materialists apparently do deny the existence of free will, I am quite certain that few, if any, are present, and my uncertainty that PZ Myers is not among them is infinitesimal. I thought you had been reading the blog.
There are so many things wrong with this passage, it boggles the mind. Evolution is not the same as atheism, humanism, philosophical naturalism, or (for the amount of sense you’re making) Illuminati-ism. Atheism, humanism, and philosophical naturalism do not have anything that could be called a canon, and the Illuminati, so far as any undeluded observer with no conflict of interest can tell, do not exist. Atheism and philosophical naturalism do not entail a denial of responsibility and humanism explicitly affirms it; the Illuminati’s position is unknown. Your presumptiousness in attempting to dictate to us first what sort of philosophical body we subscribe to and second what it contains when you clearly know nothing of consequence about it is arrogant and, in a surreal sort of way, comical.
Incidentally, since your religion (see below) entails that God is omnipotent and omniscient (and therefore nothing can happen unless he wishes it to), doesn’t that amount to a denial of responsibility?
You’re not responsible for what you choose to say? You mean you have no self-control, then? That you’re (mentally, at least) a very small child?
Isn’t telling us that a little redundant, after the semi-coherent rant above?
Shorter form: “They might be giants!”
Um. You’re…serious. This “essay” of yours would get an F from even the most permissive and desperate of my middle school teachers. It fails to address a coherent thesis, it provides no evidence, and it is a stylistic and mechanical nightmare. An explosion in a printing shop certainly won’t produce a dictionary, as almost anyone who is eager to argue against “evomolution” without actually addressing any aspect of evolutionary theory past or present can tell you, but a few of them, in sequence, stand a fair chance of producing a piece of this quality.
At any rate, yes, we can see you really don’t care, since you took the time to write first this bug-eyed rant, and then another in response to the people who pointed out that your first post demonstrated you to be about fourteen fruitcakes short of a baker’s dozen.
From dictionary dot com, since PZ’s insufferably twitchy spam filter would likely eat that link as well:
But even if you were right that our world was meaningless, it’s completely beside the point, since you are referring to your perceptions and opinion here, and you clearly don’t live in our world (and in fact could not poke it with a ten foot pole).
PZ is one person. Use the singular. Most of the rest of us are not, and to not claim to be, scientists. And this is not the only place PZ writes anything, and the biologically relevant posts are almost, if not literally, daily. Or do you consider everything related to evolution to be philosophy or religion? Perhaps I’ll start considering any writing you do on religion to fall under “auto maintenance.”
As a side note, virtually everything you have written is in- coherent, sipid, and sufferable.
A statement of opinion is not an attempt to force anything on anyone. Gods you’re whiny. Now, are you planning to wipe that snot nose of yours and actually debate us instead of attacking straw men and being beaten black and blue by them?
Guess not.
I can’t speak as anyone’s mother, but I know if Joey were to say anythign this hateful, arrogant, and ill-conceived, I would indeed be horrified. Fortunately, she’s already past this stage into the baby-babble phase.
What was there to get? The energy you’re wasting tsk-tsking us for not reading your mind (or looking at the pictures, whichever) could be more profitably employed developing a coherent point and expressing it in a fashion that doesn’t make me feel embarrassed for sharing your language and cladistics.
You’ve gotta be kidding me. Tell me, would you find it unbelievable if we were to object to people we hired to perform funeral services using them as an excuse to advertise big-screen TVs or Viagra? It’s the same principle.
Ken Ham has done wrong, and every other predatory opportunist, Christian or otherwise, has done wrong. How did “every other Christian” enter into this conversation?
Verbal criticism on the internet. That’s your idea of being “ostracized and punished.”
…
Are you really this absurdly histrionic? If only your chosen sect stuck to this level of ostracism and punishment in dealing with those who disagree with them at all, let alone those who do reprehensible things to further those beliefs.
We do, and between us and you, that makes one party.
Really. Even granting your idiotic assumption that Communism is the same as atheism, or is in any way representative of atheism as we define it, am I to believe that between 15 and 60 people died in the Inquisition, then?
Come on. The Thirty Years War alone killed a comparable number of people to Stalin’s regime. The Taiping Rebellion killed possibly as many as 30 million. The witch hunts, another 2 million. The inquisition I used to have memorized. The plagues, which were prolonged and exacerbated exponentially by the church’s vicious suppression of medicine and other sciences…hmm, does anyone have statistics for those?
Not to mention the atrocities of the Third Reich, which a trivial selection of links that PZ’s damnable spam filter invariably eats will show was not based on atheism or evolution but on a variant of Tinfoil Hat Christianity.
But ok. I will cheerfully unilaterally condemn every evil act ever committed by an atheist (there are many, though far fewer than for most religions) or in the name of atheism (to the best of my knowledge, none). But you can’t do the same for Christians, because many of the evil acts committed by Christians or in the name of Christianity, were committed by the order of the Pope at the time, whom you, as a Catholic, are obliged to regard as infallible on matters of faith and morals.
Impose? We’re stating our beliefs. We’re pointing out examples of disgusting things done in the name of, and for the purpose of spreading, opposing beliefs. That’s your idea of what it means to “impose atheism on others.”
Are you really this absurdly histrionic? If only your chosen sect was content to impose its beliefs on others in such a fashion.
And yes, by the way, those of us who are atheists and promote atheism do consider it true. We wouldn’t accept or promote it if the evidence weren’t convincing.
Evolution is true; populations of organisms change over time. This is supported by a cornucopia of obsevational data, such that only the deluded and ignorant dispute the fact of this change. As far as we can tell, the explanatory model (“theory”) of evolution known as the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis is, for the most part, true, otherwise we wouldn’t be espousing it.
Sorry for what? You’re free to pursue your religious beliefs if you want, so long as you don’t try to force them on others, commit atrocities in their name, or expect to be able to express them without anyone voicing disagreement or critique. And why should you apologize to us; you’re the one we’ve failed to convince of the silliness of sitting in the dark talking to yourself, wasting time that could be more profitably spent in writing, reading, interpersonal connection, or at least a more direct form of self-stimulation.
To which? I gathered that you believe all three exists. However, while I agree that something identifiable as truth exists, I don’t believe that God exists, and based on your comments, I have my doubts about your mind.
There are many other things going on, but if what you mean is that you don’t believe (or “understand how”) evolution can explain the development and diversification of life on earth…well, short answer: evolution is smarter than you.
I’m atheist, and I can also believe it or not, but my integrity and rationalism oblige me to believe evolution or any other proposition with a similarly robust and thorough base of evidential support.
If you’re sincerely trying, that’s good, and I provisionally apologize for some of the tone of this post. I might suggest that you’re looking in the wrong place. I would recommend the Ebonmusings website (that the board likely won’t let me link to) for a good discussion of evolution aimed at non-experts. I’m sure the other posters can suggest some excellent hard-copy sources.
First, “everything started with nothing” is not a part of evolutionary theory as it relates to biological evolution. I don’t think, except in the most abysmally colloquial sense, it’s an accurate description of the current thinking in astronomy or physics, either.
The reliability of intuition as a means of discovering empirical truths about the world was shattered by the simultaneous impact of two cannonballs of different weights dropped from the leaning tower of Piza by Galileo. Unless I’m mangling history. But the point is the physics-vs.-intuition, not the history. Intuition dictates that heavier objects will fall faster; in fact, the increase in inertia and the increase in gravitational attraction with an increase in the mass of one of the two objects cancel each other out, so objects with the same aerodynamic qualities fall at the same rate (it took me *forever* to get an adult to explain WHY this worked the way it did; I gave up on the teachers and asked my engineer father. Perhaps you are a victim of the same abysmal public education system?). Intuition dictates that evolution is incompatible with Christianity; millions of Christians certainly don’t think so. Intuition dictates that it makes more sense that an intelligent god created things than that they “just evolved.”
What makes more sense intuitively ultimately has no bearing on reality; the only way to determine the truth of a proposition is to test it against the evidence. And the evidence supporting evolution is tremendous, no matter how implausible it may seem to you intuitively. A substantial proportion of the evidence is presented here daily, and you can be easily directed to more. I’d offer some if the board didn’t eat my comments with links in them.
More or less all of your first post certainly gives one that impression, and I responded to it accordingly. The same is true of a substantial portion of your second post, but some of the second half of it suggests some potential to rise above this, and that is something you would do well to cultivate. Disagreeing with the consensus in a social environment isn’t a bad thing, so long as one can support one’s position and does not express it in a fashion which stridently suggests that the most suitable response from the other participants would be to send one to bed without one’s supper. I feel a little sheepish, given this, about some of the mockery above, but…well, a Christian should understand the concept of “carrot and stick” well enough, I should think. x.x
Truer words were never spoken, PZ. I’m not even going to bother reading Ham’s crap. Irwin was a personal hero of mine and his death broke my heart. To try and turn it into a “love Jeebus or die” thing is just…well, a stinking pile of croc crap.
Azkyroth, I strongly doubt that your excellently written rebuttal will have much effect on Ronald: he, like Ken Ham, uses his faith in God as an excuse to be an elementary school bully, as well as abandon his logic and compassion for the sake of getting his jollies at others’ expense.
Suirauqa, welcome! And don’t apologize, I found your post to be very much on-topic. Thank you.< ./I>
Your experience of Hinduism differs from other people that I have known, so I am glad that it’s a positive experience for you that it doesn’t conflict with your scientific aspirations.
One of my favorite film directors is Satyajit Ray, who explores the tension between doctrine and wisdom, traditionalism and globalization in his home country, India, especially in his films The Stranger and An Enemy of the People (his own take on Ibsen’s great play).
It seems to me that strict dualist thinking is the real culprit here; however, I find that dualism asserts itself even in Hinduism and Buddhism, as I’ve lamented at other postings on this site.
Despite everything I remain quite a fan of the ancient Egyptian religion, particularly the Old Kingdom era. This is a greatly misunderstood culture and religion that was, as is Hinduism, polytheistic within monotheism, and imposed no limits upon the search for knowledge.
Welcome Suirauqa.
It’s nice to have a religious person here who understands how to talk about religion and their experiences. It also helps that your religion isn’t about converting or “saving” the unbelievers.
Most of us here are on a search for knowledge and understanding.
Those who aren’t, try to convert us. ;)
suirauqa,
Wow! very impressive and I enjoyed the post alot.
And the REAL moral? –
The ‘sea’ of humans that we wade through can be just as dangerous and chaotic, yet apparently gentle, as the sea that killed Steve.
I am truly overwhelmed by the welcomes in response to my post. Thank you all.
Steve_C, there is just one thing… I am not “religious”, not in the sense and connotation it seems to purvey in the present world. I don’t subscribe to religious rites and rituals, and abhor any association with any organized form of religion, particularly since I am painfully aware of the shocking outrage that is going on in present day India under the guise of hinduism. I think I am more ‘spiritual’ than anything else, having no need for any ritual or outward display – insofar as God is within, without and beyond me, and my communion with God being through doing my work honestly and contemplation.
Kristine, Hindu monotheism has gone through phases of non-dualism (monism), dualism, and qualifications thereof. But rather than religious, these were more of philosophical schools of thought about the nature of reality. The concept that I presented in my previous post was monistic; in the final synthesis, all these schools of thought talked about betterment of the self, and seeking of the truth. But none of these concepts has anything to do with the religious jingoism that has raised its ugly head in today’s India and is responsible for the strife therein. These insane, rabble-rousing zealots quote scriptures (partially and out of context, much in the line of televangelists) to further their own political or venal agendas, and shamelessly exploit the ignorant, the insecure, the disenfranchised, and other intellectually weaker segments of the society, by subverting their attention and zeal to non-existent causes. Their faces are many, there is a host of them in every religion, but they represent the same vicious evil all over the world.
In my moments of deepest frustration, I feel that if I really had to pray to some omnipotent deity, or if I had that power, I would pray for, or effect, the instant removal of these excrescences from the face of the earth.
But then, it would be a fairly long list to enumerate… You know, perhaps this was the punishment meted out by the Biblical God for the Original Sin – that we would have to live, and share the same oxygen, with the likes of Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, the IDiots, the ‘born again’ village idiot who is king, the erstwhile Ayatollah, my country’s very own ‘Hindutwa’ propagandists, and so forth. Hmmm…
Sidestepping the trollishness for a moment, I’d like to point out that the archive of Adams’s posted-then-deleted post on Irwin appears to have vanished from both Google cache and the Internet Wayback Machine.
It’d be nice if anybody who managed to grab a snapshot of it could get it back up again, assuming that’s not, like, illegal or anything.
I agree! I, too, could not find any mention of that entry on Irwin anywhere, in the Google Cache or in the IWM. It is almost as if it never existed!! I was very surprised, because I did not know one could do that – remove the traces of a posted entry from servers and search engines!
By the way, I am intrigued by David Wintheiser’s opening gambit, “Sidestepping the trollishness for a moment…”. Is trollishness something that can be sidestepped? Can there be a reasonable intelligent being behind every troll? Is it possible to practice trollishness as a pastime, or general entertainment, a pleasure derived from irritating others?
So much to learn, so little time…
Not one of you “got it”.
Actually when it started looking like computer generated gibberish (a couple sentences in) I stopped reading it. I’m surprised that a real live human wrote this and am wondering how many people also tuned out.
suirauqa, I don’t think that the problem here is with religion but with people who try to hawk it with the same zeal and aggressiveness that someone selling Amway or insurance would sell it. There are some Christians here, and probably other religions but I don’t remember seeing anyone mentioning them, and they are a valuable part of this community. They aren’t made fun of or shunned because they actually contribute to conversations. Then there are the ones that need to be disemvoweled because they don’t seem to have anything better to do than to harass other people. What I find ironic is that Ken Ham et al are doing more to turn people away from religion than any evil atheist conspiracy ever could! Is that kind of what you were talking about with the Hindutwa propagandists?
Hey, I don’t see the major problem with the Scott Adams post. I loved Steve Irwin (not that way) but the only thing I can find offensive about Adam’s post was that it was pretty soon. It’s like when Gilbert Gottfried told a joke on stage like a week after 9/11, “Sorry I’m late, my flight had a stopover at the Empire State Building.” Too soon, boo, people said. But the fact is that it was still funny. Scott Adams post is funny. I think it’s terrible that Irwin died. I thought he was a great guy and most of the world loved him. But that doesn’t mean we have to shit on someone trying to make light of a tragic situation. People need to be less serious in their lives.
jake: Hmmm. Scott felt it appropriate to remove that post from his website. Does that mean something to you? Think it over.
Debra J Saunders of the SF Chronicle struck what I think is a fairly balanced view in her column today:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/07/EDGK1KT7GT1.DTL
Mena said:
Somewhat, yes! But I hope you appreciate that there is a very real, inherent danger with organized religion. You see, very few people actually understand the true, spiritual meaning of religion. On the other hand, religious rituals and practices – which often become the mainstay of organized religions – create a larger, more visible impact on most people. Particularly for a country like India, where religion, philosophy and the development of civilization have remained largely entwined for a very long time, people have become accustomed to having such religious practices as a part of their daily lives, and often see it as a security blanket, without realizing that it precludes conscious thought, rational attitude and temperance.
As a result, it becomes very easy for the rabble-rousing demagogues to tickle religious sentiments through half-truths, untruths, fear, emotional blackmail, and all the other usual arms in the arsenal of the propagandist/ evangelist, and rally a huge mass of people – all ignorant, unthinking, zealous and intolerant – behind their own particular agenda. We have seen this happen in several painful incidents in the past decade, resulting in meaningless violence, needless loss of innocent lives, bitter acrimony and suspicion between communities, and so forth. And all in the name of organized religion! Do you see why I feel sick to the stomach when I think of it?
The players and the sentiments are only slightly different in the Western world, the right-wing religious leaders, the rampant opportunism, the mindless propaganda – all the hallmarks of organized religion. It is easy to see the parallel between all of them across the globe.
Unfortunately, contrary to what you feel, Mena, the likes of Ken Ham et alia are not driving enough people away from religion; rather, they are insidiously gaining a foothold in niche segments of the society that are either largely ignorant, intellectually challenged, economically or socially disenfranchised, or worse still, ignorant AND arrogant, harboring secret personal aspirations to power, by throwing out promises (however empty) of an improbable future. And equally unfortunate is the fact that the size of this segment is larger than we would care to admit. In simpler words, there are always people who lap up the bilge that Ken Ham and his ilk peddle. It sets up a very dangerous trend.
I shall finish with an example: a younger friend of mine, a colleague of four odd years – a perfectly normal, intelligent, conscientious student of biology who recently finished her graduate studies. A stint in her early years as an altar girl exposed her to the avarice of priests, and the huge gender disparity encouraged and institutionalized in the Catholic church, and she swore herself off religion and religious practices. Well, until recently. Her friend, a non-denominational Christian, re-introduced her to the ‘joys of Christianity’ and serious studies of the Bible, and persuaded her to attend regularly a nearby non-denominational church. I was quite surprised at my friend’s renewed endeavour to embrace religion, but I respected her choice (even if to make a fool of herself). The problem I had, however, stemmed from two facts: (a) The friend who ‘got her back to the fold’ did not believe in evolution, and did not even want to admit that he was hardly qualified to negate such an idea which is so strongly backed by scientific evidence (His circular arguments about the Bible being true because it said so itself reminded me painfully of M Peterson – can anyone forget him?). He, in the guise of a friend, clearly conned/bamboozled/fooled my friend into giving up her lifelong ideas gathered from studies. (b) The church that she ended up visiting regularly is guided by a priest, who, from an open pulpit, derides and decries evolution, which people accept and enjoy, despite his complete lack of any training in or understanding of that phenomenon. My friend feels very uncomfortable during those lectures, but her sense of propriety impedes her from speaking out. I am afraid that by passively allowing herself to be sucked into this vortex of ignorance, she will soon be completely assimilated.
The moral of this story is that one has to maintain constant vigilance. There are agents less visible than Ken and Kent, but equally (if not more) insidious – because they assume the guise of a friend, are not easily dismissed, and spare no opportunity to misguide one, leading away from sanity, rationalism, consciousness and understanding. Atheist conspiracy, as Mena mentioned? Theistic conspiracy is more like it!!
So does this mean you won’t be coming to the revival?
I thought the Adams bit was funny. If you think it’s bad u wanna see some of the jokes I got from friends on my email!
suirauqa:
Your “long” post made my week. Thanks.
What’s with all the hatred and disdain for religion here? Some of you guys are just as bad as those who use their religion against others.
I’m a Christian who also believes in Science. Please do not lump moderates like me into the Ken Ham camp of thinking. Moderate Christians like me outnumber the fundamentalist whackos (contrary to popular belief). However, you guys think that we’re two peas in a pod and that they represent my views. You’re dead wrong.
Half of the posts I’ve read thus far are so full of hateful sarcasm that the ONLY thing that differentiates you and those whom you disdain is the belief in God.
Ryan,
One doesn’t ‘believe’ in science the same way one believes in a variety of supernatural ideas.
I’m thinking it most likely didn’t vanish from the caches (unless you know differently, in which case I will stand corrected). More likely it was never there to start with. If the pages don’t have static links, but are instead generated dynamically from a database using a php front end (just for example, but a common one…) the pages wouldn’t have been picked up by the caches.
I saved a copy of the page from the Google cache the other day. The page formatting is jacked up, but I’m too lazy to fix it…
Moderate Christians like me outnumber the fundamentalist whackos (contrary to popular belief). However, you guys think that we’re two peas in a pod and that they represent my views. You’re dead wrong.
But they talk louder, and the moderates are not trying to publically shut them up. If Ken Ham doesn’t speak for the majority of Christians, then there should be a concerted effort from all moderate arenas to put out press releases and interviews unequivocally denouncing him every time he and the others show up in the media. Don’t blame us for lumping you all together when we hear no dissent.
Half of the posts I’ve read thus far are so full of hateful sarcasm that the ONLY thing that differentiates you and those whom you disdain is the belief in God.
Not at all. This is a simple little internet blog that has people who vent about their peeves to each other. No one here is preaching and pontificating from a position of authority about it. There is a big difference between saying I think someone is a stupid idiot and preaching to others that a person is absolutely going to hell and you will too if you don’t follow what I say.
Carlie, very well said. I’m all for fairness but this ‘don’t diss the moderate Christians’ nonsense is all played out. The loudest Christians seem to be the biggest hatemongers. If the moderates want to be seen as fairly and non-psychotic asses, then let them speak up. Otherwise, they’re pretty much agreeing.
Carlie:
re the obligation of moderate Christians….right on!
It’s what I’m about.
Scott
Wow! What a bunch of pathetic Whiners!
I loved Steve Irwin because he was a down-to-earth kind of guy. I don’t judge him and hope he is in heaven today but I don’t know for sure where he is. At least I’m honest.
But you people are just seething with HATE! Yeah, go ahead and mock God and his servents for doing what He commanded them to do by calling the lost to repentance; even if it is at a funeral.
Yes make fun of Him and insult His people all you want. But at your end you’ll wish you had accepted the truth.
If your an athiest or a Saganist (that’s not a typo) and you refuse Christ’s free gift of salvation that’s YOUR PROBLEM!!! NOT MINE or ANYONE ELSE’S!!! YOU deal with the conseqeunces NOT ME!!!
If your going to Bitch and Moan now about Jesus and Christians then you’d better shut up when you arrive in Hell. No one down there is going to want to hear all your bullshit about how no one told you the truth!
They told you the truth but you HATED God more and loved the lie that God is dead.
If your living like there is no God then you had better the HELL BE RIGHT!!!
David
KEN HAM….
NO REAL “Christian” would ever, ever .. EVER have the cruel spirit that you obviously do.’
Oh btw.. I’m Wiccan & a Military Wife… wanna spit on me.. GO FOR IT YOU IGNORANT ASS!
KEN HAM.. WHAT YOU DO COMES BACK TO THEE….. TIMES 3!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SO SHALL IT BE!
….WELL SAID!
I was not aware that Steve Irwin was a Buddhist which was his ‘free will right.’ I was sure that some Christian leader would comment on his ultimate destiny. I was surprised to see that it was Ken Ham.
My quesion for all your commenters is: “If you are standing before God and He askes you, ‘Why should I let you into MY heaven,’what would you say?”
Steve Irwin would most certainly say, “Look at all that I have done for your precious animals. I’ve lived a righteous life that was dedicated to all your wonderful creatures.” [We need to recognize that as a Buddhist, Steve would be quite surprised to be talking to a God that he didn’t believe existed.]
God did provide an answer for us in His Holy Word, the Bible, in the Old Testament book of Isaiah [64:6]— “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as ‘filthy rags'(quotes are mine) … It is important to look at the Hebrew words for filthy rags. They mean “the rags from the sores of a leper” or “the used rags from a woman’s menstrual time.” So much for our righteousness in God’s eyes.
If you go back a few chapters in Isaiah [59:2], you will see what God thinks about our disobediant state: “But your iniquities have separated between you and your God and your sins have hid His face from you, that He will not hear.”
That’s why Jesus HAD to come to earth to give us the opportunity to re-connect to God. We can posture all we want, but each of us WILL DIE. I’m 62 and did not receive Jesus as my Lord and Savior until I was 45. My life has been every bit as fulfilling as the recently departed Steve Irwin whose zest for life I will miss.
Whether we like it or not we ALL will stand before God some day.
I was not aware that Steve Irwin was a Buddhist which was his ‘free will right.’ I was sure that some Christian leader would comment on his ultimate destiny. I was surprised to see that it was Ken Ham.
My quesion for all your commenters is: “If you are standing before God and He askes you, ‘Why should I let you into MY heaven,’what would you say?”
Steve Irwin would most certainly say, “Look at all that I have done for your precious animals. I’ve lived a righteous life that was dedicated to all your wonderful creatures.” [We need to recognize that as a Buddhist, Steve would be quite surprised to be talking to a God that he didn’t believe existed.]
God did provide an answer for us in His Holy Word, the Bible, in the Old Testament book of Isaiah [64:6]— “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as ‘filthy rags'(quotes are mine) … It is important to look at the Hebrew words for filthy rags. They mean “the rags from the sores of a leper” or “the used rags from a woman’s menstrual time.” So much for our righteousness in God’s eyes.
If you go back a few chapters in Isaiah [59:2], you will see what God thinks about our disobediant state: “But your iniquities have separated between you and your God and your sins have hid His face from you, that He will not hear.”
That’s why Jesus HAD to come to earth to give us the opportunity to re-connect to God. We can posture all we want, but each of us WILL DIE. I’m 62 and did not receive Jesus as my Lord and Savior until I was 45. My life has been every bit as fulfilling as the recently departed Steve Irwin whose zest for life I will miss.
Whether we like it or not we ALL will stand before God some day.
Dear PZ – I was pretty surprised when my comments were rejected as being abusive, so I read your title page and saw your “godless liberal” tag, I laughed. You need to change your tag to “close-minded godless liberal.”
Dear PZ – I was pretty surprised when my comments were rejected as being abusive, so I read your title page and saw your “godless liberal” tag, I laughed. You need to change your tag to “close-minded godless liberal.”
My quesion for all your commenters is: “If you are standing before God and He askes you, ‘Why should I let you into MY heaven,’what would you say?”
Virgins. I need the virgins, pleeeeze, God, I want those virgins!
Since your comments not only were not rejected in any way, but that you posted them twice, I had to read what you said and saw you quoting the bible at a bunch of atheists as if we’d be impressed. So I laughed. You need to change your username to “demented stupid Christian.”
Learning to read would be useful, too.
Where are these fundie nitwits coming from? The ranting bible verses are a giveaway that there’s a rather different clientele showing up here, and just to this one post.
David Lynch – how does it feel to be a slave to a vengeful and petulant deity who ranks the best of your works with a pile of pustulent rags?
BTW the “free” gift isn’t “free” – it comes with strings attached. It can be revoked, withdrawn from non-believers. Am I wrong? If I’m not, then it really isn’t a gift at all, is it?
I’m not seething with hate or anything else, but your posts suggests some anger management problems. This seems like a clear case of projection.
My quesion for all your commenters is: “If you are standing before God and He askes you, ‘Why should I let you into MY heaven,’what would you say?”
Shouldn’t I be talking to St. Peter manning the pearly gates?
Ooops, that’s wrong, apparently:
The Pope slams the pearly gates
For those expecting to be welcomed by St. Peter, paradise has just been postponed.
Because Heaven isn’t quite the place we may have been led to believe, says the Pope.
We must not imagine fluffy clouds and angels playing harps in the sky, according to the Pontiff. Instead, we should think of Heaven as a ‘state of being’ after death.
John Paul II told pilgrims outside the Vatican: “The Heaven in which we will find ourselves is neither an abstraction nor a physical place among the clouds.” Instead, he added, it is a “living and personal relationship with the Hold Trinity” and a “blessed community of those who remained faithful to Jesus Christ in their lifetime, and are now at one with His glory”.
http://www.ianpaisley.org/article.asp?ArtKey=gates
If it means hanging out in blessed community with the fundies for eternity, I think I might get cold feet.
I am as sad about Steve’s death as everyone else. I cry about it almost every day. Steve was an awesome guy! Everybody dies, but not everyone lives. Steve LIVED every moment! He was King of the jungle! He helped bring understanding of animals, who are mostly misunderstood, and mistreated due to our ignorance.
I loved Steve Irwin! Loved his funny sayings…loved his Aussie accent…loved his zeal and passion for life, for the work he did, and for his family. I will miss Steve very, very, very much! My prayers go out to his family, friends, and all the people who worked for him at Australia Zoo.
There was a man (Ian McCormick) who had a similar experience, who died from a box-jellyfish sting, but actually came back to life!…I’d like to share it with everyone here. It was very well done! You can see it here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3682855866783766146
Whether you want to or not, you have to face it – everybody has eternal life…where will YOU be spending YOURS?
http://www.HopeHasCome.net
http://www.NeedHim.com
I am as sad about Steve’s death as everyone else. I cry about it almost every day. Steve was an awesome guy! Everybody dies, but not everyone lives. Steve LIVED every moment! He was King of the jungle! He helped bring understanding of animals, who are mostly misunderstood, and mistreated due to our ignorance.
I loved Steve Irwin! Loved his funny sayings…loved his Aussie accent…loved his zeal and passion for life, for the work he did, and for his family. I will miss Steve very, very, very much! My prayers go out to his family, friends, and all the people who worked for him at Australia Zoo.
There was a man (Ian McCormick) who had a similar experience, who died from a box-jellyfish sting, but actually came back to life!…I’d like to share it with everyone here. It was very well done! You can see it here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3682855866783766146
Whether you want to or not, you have to face it – everybody has eternal life…where will YOU be spending YOURS?
http://www.HopeHasCome.net
http://www.NeedHim.com
I don’t even know where to start since I’ve gotten so many replies. First off, I speak out often against the hard-liners that exist within my Christian faith. In fact, I refused to go to church for years because I didn’t believe in what was preached (what I thought was intolerance). However, when I finally decided to attend, I was pleasantly surprised at my pastor’s positions on all earthly matters. Why do some of you hold so much contempt for those who believe in God? I believe that it’s possible to believe in creation and evolution. If I’m for religious tolerance, why are some of you for Christian intolerance? It’s not like I’m trying to convert anybody. It’s totally cool with me if you don’t believe in God.
BTW, I used to be a hard-line atheist but I all of a sudden shifted towards spirituality. I didn’t do it because I was raised that way or because I’m afraid of dying or because of a desperation to become a part of something bigger. It was because of an organic transformation in my soul. I can’t fully explain it.
BTW, I find it strange that the people who have the strong feelings against Christianity also seem to be benign to fundamentalist Islam (who poses a much greater threat than some hick preacher in the deep south).
***NOTE: if there are any spelling or grammatical errors, please ignore them. I’m extremely tired from working all day and I’m in a rush.***
**I FORGOT TO INCLUDE THIS IN MY LAST POST***
I speak out all I can but if the Christian leadership doesn’t speak out then what can I do about it? Short of depriving them of their freedom of speech rights, all I can do is voice my opinion like I’m doing right now.
Once again, please don’t take your frustration out on moderates like me. It’s a childish position to take when you say that “we can bash you all we want since you’re leadership isn’t taking a moderate tone”.
But you all ARE going to hell. That’s a point you all seem to have missed.
I’m so sorry we lost Steve, but RE: Ken Ham’s eulogy, all I can say to those upset by it is: If the truth rubs the cat’s fur the wrong way, the cat should turn around.
Why is it that Mr. Irwin can be passionate about what he belived in and devote his whole life to that passion. But Mr. Ham cannot? What if, God forbid, or who forbid for all you atheists, Mr. Ham is right. What if there is more and that Jesus was and is who He says?
For open minded folks you sound kinda narrow.
I’m so sorry we lost Steve, but RE: Ken Ham’s eulogy, all I can say to those upset by it is: If the truth rubs the cat’s fur the wrong way, the cat should turn around.
I agree.
What truth? Ken ham is a creationist. He lies about biology and geology and scientists. Why should anyone believe what he says about his god or his fantasy of the afterlife?
I want to apologize for the frustration and pain that so many well meaning “Christians” cause through their insensitivity, ignorance, and zeal. I am deeply vexed by the Christianity that many believers preach and live. Many years ago St Augustine made a comment about the church that I just love, “She is a prostitute, but she is my mother.” I couldn’t agree more.
If any one has every read the bible, there is a truth that bears sharing: 2000 years ago, the world loved Jesus and the religious hated Him – in fact they killed Him. I find that the same bears true today. Religion continues to kill the real message of Christ and is offended by the His true message.
For years I rejected God because of religion. Then I discovered that the God that most Christians preached was not the God who really is. The message of Christ is one of Grace and Mercy, not judgement and condemnation. God says that those who judge shall be judged. Those who condemn, reap condemnation. But those who love mercy shall receive mercy. I am vexed that so many people preach a different Gospel than the one Christ preached. He didn’t come to condemn, but to save!
Steve Irwin was an inspiration to me and to my children. We were all grieved to learn of his death. I only hope that I can live as well as he did.
crap, crap, CRAP!!!!!! Steve Irwin was everything to me, he was the greatest guy in the world, i am now studying herpetology to do what he did. I too share the same great passion for wildlife as he did. I would give anything and i mean ANYTHING for him to have been a Christian…I can’t even prevent myself from crying as I write this. The day he died I had a hope that he might have known the Lord, that would have settled my peace, but i just found out that he wasn’t, but i am still going to confirm this by asking terri herself. I don’t know if i’ll be able to continue on if he wasn’t a christian…that is by far the worst thing that could ever happen to me, to know that a guy as great and as passionate as steve irwin will not me able to spend eternity in heaven and will never know the Lord and how great of an impact he would have had on his life and how great it would have been afoter he passed…..LORD PLEASE LET HIM HAVE BEEN A CHRISTIAN, PLEASE LET THESE RUMORS BE FALSE, PLEASE LET HIM BE IN HEAVIN WITH YOU NOW PLEASE…PLEASE…PLEASE….
I’ve got news for you, David Attenborough (Steve’s hero) is agnostic. Penn and Teller won’t be doing magic tricks, and you won’t be able to get Star Trek either.
“If you are standing before God and He askes you, ‘Why should I let you into MY heaven,’what would you say?”
I’d say he’d have to sell me on why I’d want to hang at his crib to begin with.
sounds pretty dull based on what I’ve heard from the “born again” types over the last 30 years or so.
really? should be a great party, then!
Hey, Ichthyic–
Look for me when you get there. I’ll be in the back, with all the other hoods–just like high school all over again.
We’ll even let you pick the crappy SciFi movies to make fun of.
[quote]We’ll even let you pick the crappy SciFi movies to make fun of.[/quote]
oh, perfect. I’ll start off with “Day of the Triffids” (’cause the hero is a marine biologist), and we’ll go from there.
shouldn’t take more than, oh, 2 or three years to get through my list.
muahahahahaha!
Sounds like fun, Ichthyic–“MST3K Goes To Hell”. I’ve got you pencilled in for it.
I miss Joel.
*sniff*
’nuff said.
PZ Myers,
You obviously understand a great deal about a very small sect of Christianity. The ideals you described do not pertain to the religion of Christianity as a whole, and I’d thank you to do a little research before you make yourself look like an ignorant ass.
Dr. Myers:
Your post captures my feelings about exploitative funerals conducted by evangelicals. I struggled with this world view for years until I found the cure: reading the entire Bible. Thank God for the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the separation of church and state. I extend my condolences for the loss of your sister. I am grateful for those, like you, with the courage and integrity to stand up and speak out against the lies and propaganda that, among other things, have made evolution and science heresies in the minds of many.
-Tom Johnson
How full of hate some of you people are. Obviously in your eyes as a creationist I am sort of on a par with a child molester. What is the great crime? Actually the crime is wanting us to admit to students that some scientists do not believe in Darwinian evolution. Come clean, admit that macro-evolution has never been observed and stop using Ken Ham as a scapegoat using words like “vile” I cannot believe how low some of you sink.
Ken Ham is a liar. Period. He spends his days trying to make children dumber and taking away the tools they will need to function above the knuckledragging stupidity he espouses as a creationist. A lying creationist.
There is exactly zero science that supports creationism. Zero. The fact you ignore the mountains of research, data and observations that support evolution is further proof of the need for creationists to lie.
liar
How full of hate some of you people are.
“How full of hate some of you people are. Obviously in your eyes as a creationist I am sort of on a par with a child molester. What is the great crime? Come clean, admit that macro-evolution has never been observed and stop using Ken Ham as a scapegoat using words like “vile” I cannot believe how low some of you sink.”
We’re full of hate? Ever met your average, garden-variety, gays-arabs-and-jews-hating Christian?
And you’re wrong, at least with respect to me. I don’t hate creationists; I pity them for being willfully ignorant, and I despise them when they become malignant and actively work against the rights of others to not have to believe and follow the arbitrary rules of their petty little deity. (Yet the average of your two-faced ilk claim to want the same treatment: “Actually the crime is wanting us to admit to students that some scientists do not believe in Darwinian evolution.” Oh, you poor fucking downtrodden souls.)
On par with child-molesters? Probably not. But you are the social equivalent of a drunk driver: you insist on foisting your lack of responsibility and your poor thinking on an undeserving public. And, like drunk drivers, if you were only content to restrict your stupidity to your own driveways, no-one would take issue.
But you assholes insist on swerving all over our highways and main streets, taking swipes at the rest of us without a care with blatant and willful disregard with respect to the effects of your actions (abstinence-only sex-ed ring a bell?), all the while demanding that we accept your assertations at face value that a few swigs of Theology Lite (slogan: “Tastes Okay; All Empty Calories!”) make you a better driver than anyone else.
And you exemplify this type of thoughtless douchebaggery perfectly Graham, with your stupid, smug, holier-than-thou comment. Christian-style shaming hasn’t shown itself to be at all effective in coercing Christians to follow their own rules; only someone so divorced from evidence as to be a creationist would show so much hubris in assuming it’s gonna work on atheists.
So from now on, Graham, keep your stupidity to yourself, and you’ll find that we don’t have any problems.
Yeah, what he said.
I think Brownian covered all the bases very well. Definitely a Molly worthy rant.
Yeah, what he said.
Thanks, Rev.
I also think it takes a special breed of clueless narcissist to express genuine shock that the people that s/he gleefully threatens with eternal torture might express anger or hate at him.
But don’t let that bother you, Graham. After all, you’re just a poor Crusader beset on all sides by the Forces of Darkness, aren’t you?
I’ll be sure to light a candle for your suffering, Warrior.
Graham Rogers, death-cultist troll @ #169:
Not a child molester. A piglet rapist. :P
The creationist troll lies, not that that’s a surprise:
No, the crime is fraud. Lying to children and the gullible, and getting rich off those lies. Slandering scientists. Using a tragic death as an opportunity to Lie For Jesus™. Isn’t your imaginary god supposed to have some sort of problem with bearing false witness? Because it’s obvious you and Ham don’t.
Graham Rogers, closet evolutionist:
“Macro-evolution” is a made-up term. It has no meaning. Though the very existence of the term testifies to the amount of evidence for evolution. Creationists speak of “macro-evolution” when they want to pretend there’s some magical threshold beyond which evolution does not work. Which means even Ken Ham’s brain-dead drones admit that evolution happens.
Evolution is real. It has been observed in the real world. You would probably rather die than even look at the evidence. But even you know that evolution happens. Becasue if you didn’t, you wouldn’t need to pretend there’s some magical barrier keeping it below some ill-defined level.
Graham Rogers, brain-dead enabler of piglet rape: