Today’s Freethinker Sunday Sermonette first tells the tale of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which is utterly wacky by intent…and then has a most amusing cartoon retelling of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is even more insane. Who needs the FSM when you can discredit religion more effectively with its own words?
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Yes! We need more bible story cartoons! The heck with Davy and Goliath, this is primo Sunday morning TV fare!
Oh my non-existent god, that was funny.
The history of prayer is explained at Uncyclopedia.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Prayer
Thanks to the excellent “God is for Suckers” site.
PZ asks:
Sometimes we forget how ridiculous certain stories are, simply because we’ve heard them over and over since we were kids.
This is how I responded to a commenter at Telic Thoughts who argued that atheists try to discredit Christianity by lumping it in with questionable beliefs:
Yep. I’m watching 60 minutes right now. They’re showing footage of a 12-year-old muslim kid from Afghanistan, now living in toronto, who is grinning as he recounts how he asked his dad for a suicide belt so he could blow himself up and get to the virgins.
Just a song of Gomorrah, I wonder what they did there
Must’ve been a bad thing to get shot down for
I wonder how they blew it up or if they burned it down
Get out, get out Mr. Lot and don’t you turn around.
Who gave you your orders, someone from the sky
I heard a voice inside my head in the desert wind so dry
I heard a voice tellin’ me to flee the very same voice I always believe
Say alot of trouble comin’, but it don’t have to come to you
I’m telling you so you can tell the rest what you’ve been through.
But don’t you turn around, no, don’t look after you
It’s not your business how it’s done, you’re lucky to get through
You’re a good upstanding man, a credit to the flock
But if you don’t face straight ahead you could not take the shock.
Blew the city off the map, left nothing there but fire
The wife of Lot got turned to salt, because she looked behind her.
–Robert Hunter, as performed by the Jerry Garcia Band
Oh what did they do in Gomorrah,
What was it all about?
In a leather tavern in Stargate.*
a complaint was voiced about.
“What did they do in Gommorrah,
I really would like to know.
It might be a nice variation,
to try out when things are slow.”
Just for the record, there’s all kind of stuff in the animated cartoon referenced on the link, stuff which is not in the Genesis 19 account and which seems to be added solely for the purpose of making said account look even more batshit insane. Which authors were not, BTW—rather, they had an agenda, which is to say justifying the Israelite’s later occupation of Canaan—at the Canaanite’s expense. In a way, this actually makes much of the account more venal, but also more comprehensible.
Granted that some folk just want a cartoon version of religion to argue against, but if we make knowingly bad arguments, how are skeptics to be distinguished from some of the professional liars in the pews?
There is no cartoon version of religion that can possibly be as batshit insane as the real thing. You are cautioning against an impossibility.
Note that the cartoon left off, tastefully failing to dramatize the father/daughters incest scene in which the daughters got Lot drunk and both became pregnant by him.
If you want to
“discredit religion more effectively with its own words”
check out
http://jaypinkerton.com/backofthebible.html
The guy’s a riot.
Ken Cope:
Hi, Ken. You wrote:
There is no cartoon version of religion that can possibly be as batshit insane as the real thing. You are cautioning against an impossibility.
Maybe so, but I still think that ethical skeptics should still argue against Genesis as it is, rather than a cartoon version of Genesis. My previous point still stands.
Note that I’m not trying to argue that skeptics shouldn’t feel free to satirize the Bible, do their version of ‘Jesus and Mo’, ‘The Life of Brian’, etc. That’s intellectual liberty at work. All I’m trying to point out is that the context of these threads tend to give someone the impression that many of the scatological details appear in Genesis, when they don’t.
KC also wrote:
Note that the cartoon left off, tastefully failing to dramatize the father/daughters incest scene in which the daughters got Lot drunk and both became pregnant by him.
A pity, because as I understand it, this little coda to the destruction of S & G is part of the textual justification for the depopulation and conquest of Canaan chronicled in Joshua and other subsequent books. Notice that the older daughter’s offspring is ‘the father of the Moabites’ and the younger daughter’s son is ‘the father of the children of Ammon’, both rival Canaanite tribes.
As I said in an earlier post, this interpretation makes the passage more intelligible. Batshit behavior is described not because the author wants to be perceived as batshit, but because he wants to delegitimize the territorial claims of those not descended from Jacob, including those descended from his kinsman Lot. It’s a nasty little chapter in the history of the Israelites, but nothing especially novel. As anthropologists have noted, warring tribes typically accuse each other of depraved behavior, particularly incest.
I hasten to add that in no way does that prove religion as a whole is more or less batshit—I’m just looking for better arguments than such, pro or con. That parts of the early OT was used to justify conquest and genocide does not make the belief in God any more or less rational. It does mean, however, that the Christian have a lot of explaining to do where the God of the Bible (particularly the OT God) is concerned.
Scott, using typically self-deprecating concession, just for the purpose of asserting, “My previous point still stands,” merely by making it again and with slightly more detail is just another way of saying, “Is so!”
More concession here, disguising a facile equivalence:
You’re the one who offred the “pro” side of the coin stating that religion as a whole is batshit insane (please note that I’m stealing and keeping your phrase, “batshit insane,” while also refraining from quotemining you), but only to imply that there are arguments to the contrary, while refraining from making them. How could that be? If anybody is going to support the claim that religion is not batshit insane, and do so with any scholarship or credibility among any but other theists already convinced, that task is going to fall to you. Here, I’ll practice some concession. No, one need not resort to exaggeration or embroidery to point out how batshit insane the OT god is concerned. But seeing as how the OT is relied upon in terms of the theme of bloody human sacrifice rooted particularly in the story of Abraham and Isaac, and its vigorous retconning to make the NT the fulfillment of various bloody messianic prophecies, along with the apocalyptic psychosis of bits of Mark and Revelations (cited for brevity, not completeness), I sincerely hope you’re not trying to get away with the implication that the god of the NT has any less explaining to do. I still can’t understand why intelligent people still advocate on behalf of either fictional monster.
Ken Cope:
Hey, I appreciate the chance to swap ideas with you. I’ll try to address the points you made, with your comments in italics, and my responses below…
You’re the one who offred the “pro” side of the coin stating that religion as a whole is batshit insane
I guess that’s true, though I’ve heard the expression used here before. I was just basically amplifying on PZ’s take at the beginning of this thread for rhetorical effect, which is no worse than the rhetorical excesses in the cartoon referenced. I’m of the opinion that equating religion or faith with insanity is a bad strategy/argument on a number of levels, since it is self-evidently true that many otherwise sane people hold various things to be true on faith, batshit or otherwise. Good arguments exist that such beliefs are irrational, unjustified or incoherent; it doesn’t make those arguments any less necessary or more persuasive to ‘pile on’ with the claim that those who hold such are necessarily batshit.
If anybody is going to support the claim that religion is not batshit insane, and do so with any scholarship or credibility among any but other theists already convinced, that task is going to fall to you.
I’ll think that I’ll pass on the question of proving a negative (‘believers are NOT batshit insance!’), which is a tall order, and focus on the question that actually interests me, which is the nature of belief and the status of arguments for or against belief. On a related topic, have you read Wilkins’ series of posts on the origins of religion? It’s interesting—in fact, it’s a comment on my esoteric interests that I find almost everything John Wilkins writes about to be interesting.
I sincerely hope you’re not trying to get away with the implication that the god of the NT has any less explaining to do. I still can’t understand why intelligent people still advocate on behalf of either fictional monster.
Absolutely not. In fact, I think any deity that’s claimed to exist has a lot to answer for, including all the weirdness and cruelty found throughout the Bible. I also think that any deity worth worshiping would value those who posed the tough questions. E.O. Wilson, quoted in this interview, makes this observation:
EO: If the neurobiologists came through with enough evidence and said, There is another plane, and it is quite conceivable that the individual essence somehow implanted there is immortal, wouldn’t you be happy? I’d be very, very happy. I’d congratulate my colleagues when they went to Stockholm to get the Nobel Prize, and I’d be personally relieved.
(INTERVIEWER:) Relieved of what?
EO: It would mean that human existence really is exalted and that immortality is a prospect, providing this God is not a God of irony and cruelty who is going to send everybody the other way. That reminds me of an argument I like to give. Maybe God is sorting the saved from the damned, but the saved will be those who have the intellectual courage to press on with skepticism and materialism. They would be His most independent and courageous creations, would they not? Particularly the ones who faced the charges of heresy.
Now, lest it be said I’m quote-mining, the interview doesn’t say whether or not Wilson believes this, but just that he likes to pose this as a thought for discussion. For my part, I’d rather count an honest skeptic as a friend than anyone who would ‘lie for Jesus.’ I would love to know what you think about Wilson’s ‘thought experiment.’
I’ll think that I’ll pass on the question of proving a negative (‘believers are NOT batshit insance!’), which is a tall order
That’s not been the topic of this thread so far, Scott. Rather, the claim is that religion, particularly its stories, especially this example of Lot, is crazy. When it comes to tall tales, the crazier the better. There are any number of reasons people believe the stories, or at least, endure a great deal of cognitive dissonance while trying to behave as if they believe they’re true (because if they’re true, and you don’t believe them, and you don’t generate spontaneous genuine selfless love for the guy bleeding up on that stick, well, what’s wrong with you?), especially because they’ve been raised from childhood to do so, to pick an obvious one. Another reason to believe is to fit back into some social order you think you need to belong to, and everybody else is acting like they believe it. No, there are any number of justifiable reasons to act on the assumption that these stories are true and that any problem one might have with doing that is personal, and nothing to do with how batshit insane the stories are. Do you think there is some reason to take the question of their veracity seriously?
As for whatever gets the estimable Mr. Wilson through the night, I’m afraid that doesn’t reassure me in the least. How is a deceitful liar, with creation as hallucination at the hands of a joker ripping off his Nature mask to laugh hysterically at his cosmic joke, “Fooled ya!” any better than spiteful bloodthirsty psychopath? Sure, they’ve got two separate slots on a spectrum, but I don’t feel warm and fuzzy about either unevidenced story.
I don’t read Wilkins as much as I should, especially once I weaned myself away from talk.origins. He had me convinced early in my apostasy that agnosticism was more virtuous somehow than atheism, but I can no longer see how agnosticism has any more god, or any less godlesssness, or whatever its secret ingredient is any more. Agnostics and atheists are both without theism, and as I’m not shy about offending nice people by using the scarlet A, I’ll just out with it. But yes, I’ll need to procrastinate over on his blog a bit more as well.
Ken Cope:
Again, thanks for your reply. You wrote:
That’s not been the topic of this thread so far, Scott. Rather, the claim is that religion, particularly its stories, especially this example of Lot, is crazy.
My point is just that I don’t think this example is that crazy if you understand the culture and the likely motives of the writer. The story is meant to legitimize the Israelites’ conquest of their Canaanite rivals. Essentially, all of the Canaanites are implied to be descended either from the irredeemably wicked judged by God (Sodom or Gomorrah) or from the debased, apostate family of Lot (the children of Moab and Ammon).
Remember that hospitality was a major virtue in the culture, as were the necessary provisions for widows and unmarried daughters. In the rabbinical tradition, the great crime of the Sodomites is not so much sodomy, but their violation of hospitality. For this and other crimes the Genesis author alleges they’ve provoked the Lord’s wrath, and so ‘they’ve got it coming to them.’
Does this make the general claim that there is a vengeful Sky Daddy any more palatable to our modern sensibilities, or that the supernatural details (fire and brimstone, pillar of salt) are any more credible due to the self-serving motives of its likely author? Of course not. But it does help us understand that there might’ve been a practical, non-crazy (albeit loathsome) point to this story’s original inclusion. And, ironically, I think that’s actually a better argument against the inspiration of this particular passage than the cartoon version that spawned my comment.
Peace..SH
Also, check out the Brick Testament. Just straight up bible stories without the Sunday school edit and illustrated with legos. The best argument against Christianity is the Bible. http://www.thebricktestament.com
Hey Ken,
The ability to empathize is a gift of evolution, not to be squandered in anger. And having an exercised historical imagination is empathy across time.
What the hell am I getting at?
OK, it’s 2000 or 3000 BC, and in some tribes, having your child chosen for sacrifice is about as common as getting audited by the revenue service is today. And people have mixed feelings about it. Some go along with it because they trust the priests and they want the gods to be happy. Others are angry; maybe after few bad crop years they’re less accepting of the correlation between the sacrificin’ on the one hand and the health, wealth and happiness on the other.
Consider the rival priests who want to promote their god, One and True. They need great stories to make their point. Now, think of the characteristics of certain great (i.e. popular and/or long-lived) stories. Aesop and the Lion: the lion remembers the guy and doesn’t eat him! Pretty far out of character for a lion, right? Think of Snow White: the woodcutter decides to deceive the queen, a triumph of empathy over murderous obedience! The list goes on and on. Towards the end of Gladiator, the grizzled and greedy old trader decides to help the rebel, risking his very life! Towards the end of Bend It Like Beckham, the traditionalist dad recalls his own thwarted aspirations — an epiphany! — and permits his daughter to go play! “Yay!” shouts the audience!
You see where this is going? With Abraham, God ultimately proclaims, both your kid’s life and your obedience to me are important! Again: Yay!
OK, Abraham’s obedience wasn’t as cool as the woodcutter’s disobedience, but in the context of the times, it weren’t all that easy to say no to the all-seeing Mr. G. You gotta focus on just how out of character Mr. G was compared to all them other gods in the neighborhood.
I ask myself, would I have come up with a story that good for that time?
Bottom line: try having some fun with your atheism — more understanding, less anger, less abuse of words like crazy and insane — you listening, PZ? — and, most likely, more converts.
Scott, and Neil,
Somehow, I’m supposed to feel better about these tales of “heroes” who heed the voice of the monster inside their head, even when it tells them to gut their child and burn the body in ritual sacrifice, because they were fables generated by deceitful Straussian priests for, shall we say, understandable reasons (at least in a Karl Turdblossom Rove push polling sense), in order to subjugate their own and neighboring tribes, to demonize their enemies and work up the soldier class so they’d feel good about [insert priest approved atrocity here] the women and children, because hey, they’re descended from Lot’s whoring daughters, and Gob sez it’s the thing to do!
It does not make me feel any better about making sure these stories are the most widely distributed on the planet.
But hey, if somebody makes a Flash cartoon picturing angels in tighty whiteys, that’s just taking the argument beyond the pale.
Look, obviously humans are storytellers. Not to get too Straussian, but as a parent, and as I’ve already got my name on a coupla Disney fairy tale credit crawls, and Joseph Campbell’s signature in my copy of Hero With a Thousand Faces, I’ve had a ponder or two about the power of stories. Get back to me after reading this dialogue from Plato’s Republic advocating censorship and regulation of the types of stories that will be permitted in the Ideal State, and get back to me. It won’t take long. Tell me what you think once you’ve read this, especially this little passage:
Every parent ought to consider their answer to the question posed in the dialogue I’ve pointed to and excerpted above:
With a 6 year old son and 2 year old daughter, you can bet that I am very carefully regulating and monitoring the stories they read, watch on DVD, or games they play on consoles or online. I want them to develop judgement and discernment, because my son is such a voracious reader he’ll start reading my library, which has a huge stack of religious literature and mythology from all over the planet. If he wants to read a bible though, he’ll have to go to the library.
Ken:
Just for the record, I agree with you: acknowledging the Karl Rove-like element (good comparison!) of the original author’s intent doesn’t make me feel better, either. I can’t speak for Neil, I don’t feel the flash animation was ‘beyond the pale’ nor am I in any way making excuses for religion in this thread.
I just thought, for the benefit of those who hadn’t read Genesis 19, that it might be a good idea to put the animation and the (sorry) ‘framing’ put on it by PZ in this post in context.
Congratulations on having a voracious reader for a son, by the way. If you’re both encouraging him and carefully monitoring what he reads, you’re already ahead of the game. An NEA poll released this week says that, following graduation from high school, more than half of all 18 to 24 year olds spend less than ten minutes a week reading ANYTHING. Sad but true, if my experience as a teacher is any guide.
[brag]My son’s veteran first grade instructor told us that Zack is just the third student he’s ever tested who could, at the beginning of the year, read all 85 words, expressively, of which they hope at least 65 will be mastered by the end of the year by all the students. He could have chewed through that list at the beginning of Kindergarten, as well.[/brag]
Ken,
You really didn’t speak to the heart of my post (and worse than that, you failed to acknowledge its stunning edutainment value). My point was that there’s a distinction between considering certain stories crazy, and considering as crazy people who in 2007 believe such stories to be true.
In the former case, it’s wrong because the stories make a good amount of sense in their historical context, including its political and literary and moral dimensions. Calling them crazy is evidence of a lack of familiarity or concern with that context, and of a mindset more typical of tribalism than enlightenment rationalism.
In the latter case, it’s wrong because it confuses bad hardware with bad software: the problem of today’s literal believers is overwhelmingly a problem of nurture. It’s not the end of world to get a self-indulgent buzz of superior feeling by calling them crazy once in a while, but if that is one’s primary mode of thinking about such people, it reduces one’s ability to engage them effectively.
As to the chunk of Plato, well, very nice, and I somewhat agree, although I think modern neuro-psych provides a better platform to think about what influences personality development, and, that exposure to stories with blood & guts & cruelty & treachery & rape shouldn’t be overly delayed. I also gotta say that if you change a few nouns in the dialogue, it could almost be a chat between J Stalin & L Beria in a Georgian cafe in 1915.
In any event, enjoy parenthood! Two of my three kids entered kindergarten as full-fledged independent readers (and the third by grade 1). This was only in part due to my distrust of the educational system; to a large degree it was just super fun having a kid on my lap enjoying books and groping towards understanding.
By the way, in I think either Finland or Denmark, the early-ed system delays emphasis on reading by a year or two as compared to in NA, and I believe certain advantages are claimed, perhaps even supported by data, but I forget the details.