Mauritanian justice

Is this a sign of moderation by Muslim theologians? Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed was a journalist in Mauritania who was accused of apostasy and of criticizing the prophet; a preacher, Abi Ould Ali, then chipped in and announced that he would pay €4000 blood money to anyone who would murder Ould Mohamed. Surprisingly, the preacher was condemned!

His call was immediately denounced by theologians and journalists in the north-western African country formally known as the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.

This would be a more promising development if Ould Mohamed hadn’t already been arrested by the state, which has a law making it a death penalty offense to criticize the prophet. I’m not hearing much condemnation for an unjust and evil law — although I do suppose it’s progress when they shut down vigilanteism.

Meanwhile, Ould Mohamed is in jail awaiting a possible death sentence.

Clear-eyed commentary on the pope

Finally! Someone sees through the façade.

That is how the Pope has come to be spun as a left-liberal idol. Whenever he proves himself loyal to Catholic teaching — denouncing abortion, for instance, or saying that same-sex marriage is an ‘anthropological regression’ — his liberal fan base turns a deaf ear. Last month America’s oldest gay magazine, the Advocate, hailed Francis as its person of the year because of the compassion he had expressed towards homosexuals. It was hardly a revolution: Article 2358 of the Catholic church’s catechism calls for gay people to be treated with ‘respect, compassion and sensitivity’. In simply restating Catholic teaching, however, Francis was hailed as a hero. When a Maltese bishop said the Pope had told him he was ‘shocked’ by the idea of gay adoption, that barely made a splash. Time magazine, too, made Francis person of the year, hailing him for his ‘rejection of Church dogma’ — as if he had declared that from now on there would be two rather than three Persons of the Holy Trinity. But for cockeyed lionisation of Francis it would be hard to beat the editors of Esquire, who somehow managed to convince themselves that a figure who wears the same outfit every day was the best dressed man of 2013.

Some pundits have noticed the gulf between what you might call the Fantasy Francis — the figure conjured up by liberal imagination — and the actual occupant of the Chair of St Peter. James Bloodworth, editor of the political blog Left Foot Forward, recently urged his journalistic allies to show some restraint. ‘Pope Francis’s position on most issues should make the hair of every liberal curl,’ he wrote. ‘Instead we get article after article of saccharine from people who really should know better.’

I’ve been astounded at how many atheists have been taken in by this geezer. He’s the goddamn POPE; by nature, intent, and training he’s fanatically against everything atheism stands for.

The cure for rape: Universal Ordination

Creationist John Mackay gave a talk at the University of Western Australia, and as these wackaloons are wont to do, also expressed lunatic opinions beyond his belief that the earth is only a few thousand years old. In particular, creationism seems to be rife with misogynistic and homophobic twits.

After the lecture many of the attendees stayed for a BBQ and to talk to John Mackay. He made various homophobic comments, including using homosexuality as his go-to example of “immorality” in modern society. In a conversation about the Bible after the lecture, a student pointed out that the Bible condones rape in the following passage from Numbers 31:

“17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that has known man by lying with him. 18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.”

Mackay argued that this is not rape, because the girls were forced to enter a “legitimate Jewish marriage” first (after having their family murdered by their soon-to-be husbands), and obviously you can’t rape your own wife. Not only is it not rape, but Mackay believes this is apparently not even immoral for God to command this and for the Israelites to carry it out.

Typical. Although it does suggest a new strategy for wanna-be rapists: get ordained first, or have an ordained wingman. Say a few words over your unconscious victim, grab her head and make it nod in agreement, then go to town. One of the results of marriage is the complete loss of volition by the bride, turning her into a meat puppet for your convenience.

Be sure to pick a religion that lets your priestly types say a few words afterwards to annul everything!

Or maybe we should just take religion out of marriages, and all relationships, altogether. It doesn’t seem to be a very good guide for moral behavior.

Vikings football is rather hard to support now

Not that I was ever much of a booster, but this behind-the-scenes look at how team management operates by Chris Kluwe is disappointing. He was fired from his position as a punter after he’d achieved some notoriety for his progressive positions and lack of religiosity — and he now explains that it’s likely that it was because of those positions. And man, it sounds like he was working in an ugly environment.

Throughout the months of September, October, and November, Minnesota Vikings special-teams coordinator Mike Priefer would use homophobic language in my presence. He had not done so during minicamps or fall camp that year, nor had he done so during the 2011 season. He would ask me if I had written any letters defending "the gays" recently and denounce as disgusting the idea that two men would kiss, and he would constantly belittle or demean any idea of acceptance or tolerance. I tried to laugh these off while also responding with the notion that perhaps they were human beings who deserved to be treated as human beings. Mike Priefer also said on multiple occasions that I would wind up burning in hell with the gays, and that the only truth was Jesus Christ and the Bible. He said all this in a semi-joking tone, and I responded in kind, as I felt a yelling match with my coach over human rights would greatly diminish my chances of remaining employed. I felt uncomfortable each time Mike Priefer said these things. After all, he was directly responsible for reviewing my job performance, but I hoped that after the vote concluded in Minnesota his behavior would taper off and eventually stop.

My limited experience with football coaches suggests that this isn’t an unusual attitude they take. Kluwe also stirred up concern because he said a few harsh things about the Catholic Church — I can relate.

On Feb. 11, I received a message saying, “Please fly under radar please,” from a phone number I would later learn belonged to Rick Spielman. The text message presumably concerned several things I had tweeted that day regarding Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to step down. Spielman later called me and asked me to stop tweeting about the pope because angry people were ringing up team headquarters in Winter Park, Minn. It should be noted that my tweets concerned the lack of transparency and endemic institutional corruption of the Catholic Church, which among other things allowed child abuse to flourish. I also pointed out how that applied equally to financial and government institutions, and reiterated that I had nothing against anyone’s religion, only against the abuses of power that institutions allow. Nonetheless, I complied with Spielman’s request and did not tweet anything else about the pope that day, or in the future.

Now I’m really looking forward to the American Atheists convention in Salt Lake this April — Kluwe is the keynote speaker. I hope I can meet him there, and shake his hand.

But then there are a lot of good people who will be speaking there: Barry Lynn, Maryam Namazie, Matt Dillahunty, Greta Christina, Sikivu Hutchinson, Vyckie Garrison…you should register now!

The Supreme Court is full up on Catholics, I think

Six of nine is too many, I think, especially when their religion is beginning to shape court decisions. Even the judge we’d hoped would be a little more progressive, Justice Sotomayor, bent over backwards to pander to weird Catholic views on contraception. It’s even worse than that: she granted an injunction to allow Catholic employers to not fill out a form stating that they were not providing coverage for contraception.

Late on New Year’s Eve, Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a small number of religiously affiliated groups a temporary injunction from a provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows them not to cover contraception in their health care plans if they fill out a form that states that they want an exemption from the law for religious reasons. Go ahead and read that sentence again. These Catholic non-profits that wanted an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—and got an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—are now fighting the provision (that exempts them from covering their employees’ contraception needs) simply because they don’t want to have to fill out a form that states that they are exempt. Why? Because their employees need that form in order to get birth control directly from their insurers (which they need to do because their employers—these Catholic non-profits—are exempt, as they want to be). 

Those wicked people! Their bosses told them that they weren’t paying for their condoms, so it’s perfectly reasonable for the bosses to also dictate that they can’t go anywhere else to get support for contraception.

That church really is an evil and controlling organization, through and through.

The lesser evil is still evil

One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

-Shakespeare

Every time I see another atheist praising Pope Francis, I think of that quote from Hamlet. It could be worse, they say; at least he seems to have a conscience, he nods to the outcasts now and then, he may even be a tad more liberal than that last pope, so we should be thankful for the small improvement. I’m not. I’d rather have an unbeguiling bad guy in the papacy than the kind who does a better job of public relations. You’ve heard of the metaphor to describe optimists and pessimists: the optimist sees the glass as half full, while the pessimist sees it as half empty. But what about the guy who sees the glass as half full…of poison? Because that’s me.

There are a lot of issues in the Catholic Church that we all ought to find repugnant, say, child raping and forced birth and disease spreading policies, and I don’t see Pope Francis changing a thing about church culture on matters that are important. I’m going to focus on a less significant concern, but one that I find personally indicative, and one that I know a little bit about: evolution.

Gallup has been polling the American public on the question of evolution for 30 years, and the results have been remarkably consistent: a bit less than half our citizens have been reporting back as holding young earth creationist views. Here are the results of the 2012 survey:

Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process 32%
Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process 15%
God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time in the last 10,000 years or so 46%

A pessimist would say that 46% are creationists; an optimist would say that 47% believe in some form of evolution; I would say wait a minute — the poll designers don’t understand evolution (“from less advanced forms of life” is a clause that would have caused Darwin to cringe — “never say higher or lower”), and that 32% who claim evolution is divinely guided get it completely wrong, as badly as the young earth creationists. That’s poison in the cup, and we’re perpetuating misinformation if we continue to treat that as an acceptable answer.

People accept this “god-guided” caveat as a reasonable compromise in far too many circumstances. In the last presidential elections, for instance, Mitt Romney, one of the presidential candidates who did not raise his hand to testify in his disbelief in evolution at a Republican debate, later explained exactly what he meant.

I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe. And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.

That is not evolution. That is freaking bullshit. Evolution is not the magic wand used by the Space Fairy to conjure people into existence. Evolution is an unguided process. Nobody called him on it, though, because if you’d asked any of the Democrats, they’d probably mumble the same nonsense about believing in a god who created the world and then shaped it to his own ends. It’s the poisonous platitude injected into the culture to reconcile a creation myth to a biological process that directly contradicts their story.

The Catholic Church has a similar rationalization. The church “allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms, under God’s guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul,” according to catholic.com. Notice the magic words: guidance from a god, and a special creation event for an invisible ghost. And yet, somehow, everybody is under the impression that the Catholic Church has endorsed evolution.

That is not evolution.

If your auto mechanic said they used standard mechanical and electronic tools to fix your car, but oh, by the way, there’s a charge on your bill for the necessary sacrificing of a goat, would you trust their work?

Claiming that the inclusion of a teleological function within our understanding of evolution is a reasonable accommodation is a fundamental distortion of the evidence and reflects a serious misunderstanding of the science of evolution — an awkwardly common misunderstanding, but still definitively wrong. It’s a very common error to mistake a phenomenological description of a march of species as a proxy for the theory of evolution — but it’s not. From the very beginning, in its formulation by Charles Darwin, and in our current ongoing research in the field of evolutionary biology, evolution is a mechanism and a process. Many scientists before Darwin had hypothesized that species transformed into other species, but the Darwinian difference was that he proposed how these changes could take place.

Evolutionary theory is not about the detailed phenomenology of what species evolved into what, what structure is derived from what, or what gene is present in what frequencies in which organisms, although of course those details inform our understanding of evolutionary history or trajectories. What evolutionary theory is about is how environment and time and chance modified a species, how novelties and changes arose, and what processes changed the frequency of alleles in a population. These questions are all answered by understanding mechanisms, and we’ve got long lists of factors that shape evolution, from random chance to environmental selection to sexual selection to recombination to the constraints and opportunities of sexual and asexual reproduction.

Most importantly, nowhere in the lists of processes that enable evolution is intervention by a god. We’re explicit: there’s no teleology in evolutionary theory at all.

But religious meddling, including but not exclusively that of the Catholic Church, has poisoned the idea in the public mind, and made this nonsense about “guidance” and some special things being “created”, part of the common understanding of evolution. The revolutionary nature of the theory has been blunted by slathering it with this toxic, misleading lie.

And it’s everywhere!

Here’s Francis Collins, in The Language of God:

God, who is not limited in space or time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanics, of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him .

That’s the same manure Mitt Romney was spreading. Show me the evidence for any of that; how does Francis Collins know? This intentional intervention by a deity is not supported by anything in the science, it is all entirely derived from religious claims.

Then there’s the National Academies statement on the Compatibility of Science and Religion. This is painful.

Acceptance of the evidence for evolution can be compatible with religious faith. Today, many religious denominations accept that biological evolution has produced the diversity of living things over billions of years of Earth’s history. Many have issued statements observing that evolution and the tenets of their faiths are compatible.

Look at the Catholic statement that evolution and the tenets of their faiths are compatible. Do you see any conflicts at all? I should think that the little unscientific addenda postulating that evolution is a guided process with a specific purpose and end would be setting off alarm bells in any scientist’s mind — but no, it’s the slick goo that lets the lies get injected smoothly.

Take a look at the results of the Gallup poll above once more. The real lesson of those numbers is that only 15% of the American public actually have the slightest glimmerings of the implications of evolution, 78% are creationists, and about half (at least!) of the creationists are actively spreading disinformation about the meaning of evolution.

I’ll believe people who tell me that Pope Francis is different when I see him demonstrating that he actually understands the import of evolution, that there was no guiding influence, that humans are a product of chance and natural selection, and that we aren’t any more special to the universe than a sea slug. And the only thing that would demonstrate that is an open repudiation of all of Catholic doctrine, which I don’t quite see the Pope doing.

And that’s just a small piece of the problem with the Catholic Church. If he’d actually been different, he wouldn’t have accepted the leadership of the world’s richest pedophilia ring in the first place. That alone is sufficient to mark him as a villain, smile and smile as much as he wants.

Free Raif Badawi

badawi

Raif Badawi has already been sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes, and now he has been recommended to be be brought before a high court on a crime that carries the death penalty. All for having a remarkable resemblance to Tom Hiddleston.

No, wait, it’s for an equally trivial crime: he founded a blog network that is critical of political and religious figures, he disobeyed his father (he is 31 years old), and he does not believe in god. Ed Brayton better watch out.

One of his great crimes is that he once wrote about Valentine’s Day, a prohibited holiday in Saudi Arabia.

This is what theocracy takes us to. And Saudi Arabia is one of our allies? Shouldn’t we have better taste in friends?

Here’s a petition.

I don’t smile back at the smiley pope

The pope has included (nominally) atheists in his Christmas message.

He proved unpredictable again on Wednesday, when he went off script to include atheists in his call for peace, rare for a Catholic leader.

“I invite even nonbelievers to desire peace,” he said. “Let us all unite, either with prayer or with desire, but everyone, for peace.”

Speaking for myself…NO. I turn my back on this pope and any other.

I believe strongly that how you arrive at a conclusion is just as important as the conclusion itself; I care about the process, because even a flawed method will give you an answer — you just don’t know whether it is right or not. I can agree with the pope that peace is a desirable end, but I only happen to agree with him this time. I probably won’t agree with him on just about any other subject, and I can’t trust how he arrived at this mutually copacetic idea.

I also disagree on the nature of the peace he is looking for. The Catholic church desires the peace of ignorance, the peace of acquiescence, the peace of unquestioning acceptance of a dogma calibrated for fools. No, thanks. Give me the kind of peace where dissent can thrive and knowledge grows and ideas can change.

The pope can join in the quest for peace as a fellow human being, but he is not a leader and he is not representative of humanity in any way, and the media attention on his toothless pronouncements is unseemly. I also don’t want to live under a peace that allows misogyny to thrive and lets child rapists roam free and thinks fetuses are more precious than women. This pope is not my friend nor my ally.

I want to live in a world in which it is not sufficient for a clown to get a prestigious position by bowing to an arcane hierarchy, and then gets a lot of fawning friends, even among atheists who ought to know better, because he is glib about preaching platitudes. I’m not taken in by the smiling façade plastered over the goddamned Catholic Church.

Don’t forget what this man represents, even when he kisses you on the cheek, atheists.

Douthat’s Christmas delusion

I see it’s time for Ross Douthat’s Christmas folly. Once again, we get that casual assumption that his personal freaky weird favorite religious myth is utterly true and significant, while reality is a fringe occupation. I wish I knew how that guy got to be a NYT columnist. I suspect we all wonder at the parade of wackaloons who get prime real estate on the esteemed Times’ opinion page.

He’s writing about the Jesus story, of course. The theme of his little essay is that there are three worldviews used to interpret Christmas. There’s the Biblical view, that’s all about the complete picture: gods, angels, people, the whole shebang.

Because that’s what the Christmas story really is — an entire worldview in a compact narrative, a depiction of how human beings relate to the universe and to one another. It’s about the vertical link between God and man — the angels, the star, the creator stooping to enter his creation. But it’s also about the horizontal relationships of society, because it locates transcendence in the ordinary, the commonplace, the low.

And then there’s the waffly vague non-Catholic spiritual picture, which doesn’t try to claim that the details are real.

This is the world picture that red-staters get from Joel Osteen, blue-staters from Oprah, and everybody gets from our “God bless America” civic religion. It’s Christian-ish but syncretistic; adaptable, easygoing and egalitarian. It doesn’t care whether the angel really appeared to Mary: the important thing is that a spiritual version of that visitation could happen to anyone — including you.

And then there are those damned atheists.

Then, finally, there’s the secular world picture, relatively rare among the general public but dominant within the intelligentsia. This worldview keeps the horizontal message of the Christmas story but eliminates the vertical entirely. The stars and angels disappear: There is no God, no miracles, no incarnation. But the egalitarian message — the common person as the center of creation’s drama — remains intact, and with it the doctrines of liberty, fraternity and human rights.

Guess which one he’s going to argue is the right and proper one?

Oh, he tries to put up the illusion of even-handedness. The spiritual view is more flexible, he says, and notice that he acknowledges that atheists can be egalitarian; he also notes that the Biblical view has the problem of “how to remain loyal to biblical ethics in a commercial, sexually liberated society” (Really? That’s the Bible’s big problem? How about why we should believe in its nonsensical stories at all?)

But ultimately, his goal is to snipe at non-Catholic interpretations of the Christmas story. The spiritual New Age version lacks the Bible’s “resources and rigor”, at which point I just about fell off my chair laughing. Rigor? In biblical theology? That word does not mean what you think it means. Both are just arcane rationalizations for whatever they want their religion to mean.

But here’s what you want to see: how does Ross Douthat dismiss godlessness?

The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals, because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss.

I can be fair-minded too. Part of that is actually accurate: atheism does propose “a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory.” That’s our reality. That’s what science tells us about our history and the nature of our existence. We are contingent products of chance events, shaped by necessity, alone (so far) in our universe, with no supernatural agents telling us what to do with our lives. We have had millennia of evidence, of people crying out for help to their imagined heavenly saviors, and they never answer, they never give aid, they never ever do anything that isn’t better explained by natural causes. The concepts of gods and angels fail to harmonize with the reality of human experience, and therefore cannot support any rationale for moral behavior.

The desperate rope-flinging is all done by believers. When confronted with pain and suffering, with our limitations, with our mortality, they’re the ones who conjure up ridiculous rationalizations to try and reconcile reality with their fantasy of a purposeful and benign universe. They look up to a sky where a thin film of atmosphere separates us from a vast, cold, and barren void and invent a grandfatherly puppetmaster to fill the terrifying emptiness.

Atheists turn to one another — our hope lies in substance and reality, not wishful thinking and delusion, and what we know exists are our fellow human beings, our world, and that ultimately we must rely on our interactions with what is, rather than what isn’t, to find happiness and survival. We don’t have absolute answers on how to do that, and we do have to continue to struggle to work out principles to promote that essential cooperation, but it’s absurd for someone to accuse us of absolutism (comparing us to religious advocates, no less, with no sense of irony) while arguing for a literal interpretation of an Iron Age god-myth. And further, to argue that our reliance on human values rather than theological ones is tantamount to trying to bridge a chasm with failed hopes.

You know, we’re not the ones even trying to bridge a chasm separating us from an invisible fantasy-land on the other side at all. We’re here on our side, with each other, trying to build a society that fosters equality right here.

“Sad to see America INFECTING the rest of the world”

No, Ken Ham, it’s not. It’s sad to see a “public figure” like yourself preaching hate and homophobia, in response to this story.

It’s not just Ham. Here’s a sampling of the comments on that post:

Wow. These folks should actually be offended. They were selected not for merit, but as props. How nice for the Administration to reduce their identity to their sexuality.

Not just sexual preferences, but to their sins.

America is sending a message “we are a ungodly place” that mocks God

We are not so much a diverse place as we are a sinful place continually rejecting God’s word. Pray for repentance before it is too late for this country.

Just hope the Russians arrest these athletes. If it is illegal and they are there, then they are breaking the law – simple as that

Diversity happens in the sewer. You can’t stop it. Unity in the Truth is the high calling.

We have become a place of tolerance, tolerant to everything but the Truth. GOD is not mocked!

Sickness of soul. Pawns of Satan himself.

Seriously? What does being gay have to do with their athletic prowess? Go as athletes, not athletes with an agenda! And WHY does the FORMER DHS Secretary warrant tagging along? She does in NO WAY represent our country, in any facet, anymore. Send someone that does!

So the homosexuals are going to represent me? Even the communist’s deep in Russia reject homosex. I’d never thought that an atheist like Putin would be standing up for American values!

Obama has to be a closet homosexual. My mother has always said that she believed he was, and now I too have become convinced. I think that the wife and kids was just a cover up to get him elected in politics. Onama is a homosexual.

Now all that is sad.

I don’t think they bothered to read the article. The Obama administration is snubbing the Russian Olympics by not sending any high ranking members of the administration as part of the delegation — the most prominent politican in the group is the former head of Homeland Security — but they are including openly gay athletes, Billie Jean King, Brian Boitano, and Caitlin Cahow as representatives, not competing athletes.