At last, I get it. I understand what “framing” is. It’s pandering to the status quo, the petty conventions, and the bigotry of the majority. It means don’t rock the boat, don’t be different, don’t stand up for your beliefs. It means CONFORM. You will get other people to support you if you just abandon your principles and adopt theirs. That’s the clear message I get from Matt Nisbet now.
Forget it. If this is “framing,” it’s useless—it’s a tool for opposing change.
Australia is trying to show us up again, aren’t they? Their 2006 census shows that religious believers have dropped to 79% of the population, a substantial decline from 83% in the the 2001 census. And from previous data, it looks like an accelerating trend. Come on, America, we have a godlessness gap! We have to catch up!
Of course, I’d be even more impressed with Australia if I didn’t have a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t caused by a rapid growth of rabid, militant, middle-of-the-road fundamentalist agnostics.
The Washington Post had a ‘conversation’ on a very stupid question:
Do you believe in heaven or hell? If not, why not? If so, who’s going there and how do you know?
It’s a stupid question, because the only sensible answer is “no” and “because there is no evidence for it, nobody has been to either place and come back to tell us about it, and everyone who makes claims about them is using them as a carrot-and-stick to compel you to obey them”. Unfortunately, What the WaPo did was gather a bunch of gullible theobabblers, and it’s a collection of the most absurdly pious garden mulch this side of the Crystal Cathedral. It’s got short essays from the Dogmatic A-hole Brigade (Chuck Colson and Cal Thomas) to a swarm of blithering churchmice who squeak out vacuous promises of eternal love.
It’s uniformly awful, with one exception: the token nonbeliever, Susan Jacoby. She doesn’t believe in either heaven or hell.
But I certainly do believe in purgatory. Purgatory is wondering whether the human race in general, and my fellow Americans in particular, will ever grow up enough to realize that we ought to treat one another decently simply because of our common humanity—not because we are looking forward to being entertained by harpists among the clouds or are terrified of eternal flame.
That’s the only one worth reading in the whole bubble-headed, mindless collection. It’s also the one that gathered the most comments. That should tell everyone something right there—shouldn’t we all be tired of the empty promises and delusional fantasies of the theologically inclined by now?
(via gnosos, who has a shorter summary of many of the articles)
I’m sorry to say that Stanley Fish is treading the same futile path that every defender of religion follows: there’s the knee-jerk detestation of atheism, then there’s the argument that atheism is nothing but faith itself, and now he’s reduced to impotent handwaving about a sublime but unknowable god, and therefore religion is … what? He’s not clear. He seems to be saying we can’t criticize religion because we have imperfect knowledge of a perfect being.
I’ll be speaking at the Minnesota Atheists on 22 July, on “There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations
for the Mind and Religious Belief“. Michael Egnor is welcome to stop on by.
Well, cool — this post, “We stand awed at the heights our people have achieved“, has been translated into German as “Die Höhen, die unsere Leute erreichten,” in case you’re more comfortable with that language.
Catch this Hitchens interview while it’s still available. He’s lovably irascible. My favorite part:
Interviewer: Do you think you would win more converts to atheism if you were less dismissive of religious…
Hitchens: I have no idea, but I can’t be other than dismissive. I hear someone like that sheep-faced loon from [garbled…a previous caller] I have to say it sounds like bleating to me, and I have to remember why you people call yourselves a flock. Be like a sheep yourself if you must, but please leave me out of it. I’m not a sheep and I don’t need a shepherd and what shepherds do when they’re not actually messing around with their sheep is they’re keeping them around and alive so they can be fleeced and then killed. And yes, hearing these bleatings from the church of England does remind me of that and I don’t feel any need to make converts by not saying what I think. I leave it to them to make their hypocritical, unctuous, pseudo-friendly statements in the hope of keeping people inside the church.
Two videos with surprising similarities: Richard Dawkins and Digby. Both discuss being vilified by conservative forces for being “strident”, and both explain that it’s all about passion for a cause—Digby for progressive politics, Dawkins for godlessness.
Don’t even try to tell me that science and religion are compatible — Phil has just encountered a perfect example of why they aren’t. He’s irritated that the jury at a trial used prayer to help them come to a decision, and he comes right out and says it: prayer doesn’t work. That’s an empirical and logical conclusion, and the efficacy of prayer is something that has constantly failed any test, and further, has been the subject of some egregiously bad testing. Prayer is an excellent example of religion trying to claim their metaphysic has real world consequences, and it has been consistently slapped down as nonsense.
Now the sad part: a number of his readers are very upset that he dared to criticize a religious concept (this is probably not the subset of readers we share; I drove those blitherers away screaming, long ago) and some are even saying they won’t read the Bad Astronomy blog any more. You know me, always kind and generous and helpful, and willing to encourage infidelity wherever I see it, so I’ll just step in and urge any of the readers here who aren’t regulars at Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog to head on over there and fill in the gaps left by the few fleeing Christians. It’s worth it for the science, and no, Phil doesn’t impose any doctrinal demands on you, so you can read it if you’re a rational Christian too.
(Why do I feel a little bit like the Wicked Witch urging my minions to “fly, my pretties, fly!” as I do this?)
Well, you know it’s not going to be a good article when it’s found on Newsweek’s goofy “Beliefwatch” section, and it has this kind of inauspicious beginning:
It may not be fair to call what’s happening in the atheist community a backlash, since atheists have always been and continue to be one of the smallest, most derided groups in the country.
