Let’s test the proposition.
“The man shouted ‘God will save me, if he exists’, lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions,” the official said.
The answer?
No.
There were some interesting responses to my post on the god worm. There were some that were just annoying. I’m not impressed with the ones that make excuses for religion by calling me “naive” and lacking an impression of the diversity of religious belief out there; one bothersome strategy that I also saw in Barbara O’Brien’s post was an attempt to defocus religious belief.
Barbara O’Brien is doing a guest post for Glenn Greenwald, and she’s chosen to talk about religion—you can guess what her position is from the opening paragraph.
…sometimes I find myself defending Christians from the religion haters among us lefties.
I confess. That’s me, religion hater. Go ahead and read the whole thing. It’s interesting. It argues that we should tolerate Christians (I’m all for that), and that some Christians have very sensible secular views, and that some American Christians have been responsible for social progress. Sure thing! No argument!
Isn’t it charming how the most contemptibly corrupt scoundrels are so pious?
Are you ready for the hot new game of the 2006 Christmas season, Left Behind: Eternal Forces?
Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a military mission — to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state – especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is “to conduct physical and spiritual warfare”; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.
I almost forgot: there was another comment in the Karen Armstrong interview that I found irksome…but my complaint is mainly with the interviewer. Here’s one question he asked her, and her answer.
But certainly there are a lot of people — both scientists and religious people — who speculate about whether there’s some cosmic order. For the evolutionary biologists, the question is whether there’s some natural progression to evolution.
Who knows?
Her answer is a kind of weak cop-out, but it’s acceptable…avoiding a question on which you are ignorant is not a problem. The question, though…jebus.
For evolutionary biologists, that isn’t the question at all. We have a darned good mechanism that doesn’t involve teleology, and while some may speculate, there’s no supporting evidence for any kind of purpose or progress (in the sense of change towards a goal) in evolution. Biologists don’t even ask that kind of question.
Note that this is not the same as saying we avoid the issue: it’s that there hasn’t been any reason to invoke teleology in evolution. Explanations are thought up to explain observations, not the other way around, and there aren’t any observations yet that require purpose in an explanation. All I can imagine here is that the interviewer has some weak and muddled view of the Intelligent Design creationists having some legitimacy, and that kind of dribbled out into his question.
Salon has an interview with Karen Armstrong, and I don’t know whether the interviewer just did a poor job or whether her ideas really are that sloppy and confused. She definitely has interesting ideas about religion, but while she’s dismissing simplistic ideas about gods and the afterlife on the one hand, she’s also clinging desperately and irrationally to nebulous beliefs about religion and spirituality and the art and poetry of myth. Armstrong is smart enough to see the hokum in dogma, but she’s still so strongly wedded to the idea of religion that she struggles to contrive fuzzy justifications for it.
Armstrong does say some things with which I can agree, and some might be a little surprising.
I’ve received a personal email from Rabbi Avi Shafran—the fellow whose graceless and ignorant opinion piece I criticized a while back. It’s a peculiar thing: he wrote a public editorial, I criticized it publicly, and now he asks that we have a private discussion on the matter. I won’t post his whole email, but I will put up the main point, what he plainly says is the main point and a restatement of the thesis of his original editorial, and address that here.
If Rabbi Avi Shafran wants to continue the discussion, he should do it publicly. I’m not going to convert him, and he’s not going to convert me, so a private conversation would be futile—let’s let the readers see our arguments and make up their own minds.
Confirming my obvious un-Americanism, let me praise two things: Godlessness and Socialism. And here, watch a video that ties the two together.
(Actually, I’m not against America. I’m just for a godless America that cares about the welfare of its citizens.)
This Casciola case in Italy is still going on? I mentioned it a while back, with an ennui-laden tone, I’m afraid—suing the Catholic church to demand they provide evidence for the existence of Jesus is a futile endeavor, I think, and isn’t going to change anyone’s mind.
He also seems to be a bit of a kook. It looks like Anderson Cooper might be doing a show on him, and this sounds wrong.
He says he has dedicated his life to bringing down the Catholic Church, and he’s spent years of his life researching his subject. He says there was, in fact, no Jesus, but a military man named John of Gamala who lived in the time of Christ. And, he claims, it was the gospel writers who turned that mere mortal into the character of Jesus, a figure powerful enough on which to base an entire religion.
I agree that the contemporary evidence for the existence of Jesus is completely lacking, but the evidence is going to be just as weak for this “John of Gamala” guy, and furthermore, the connection between a random John and Jesus is going to be extremely tenuous. He can’t simultaneously argue for the inadequacy of the historical information about Jesus while saying it is sufficient to justify his weird little hypothesis.
Of course, even a kook can be right sometimes.
He calls the Catholic Church leaders “con men,” and says “they take advantage of the popular belief.”
I don’t think it’s a very interesting story, but what is cool are the comments to the article, which give an interesting snapshot of the state of unbelief in this country. There are the usual apologists who insist that it is a matter of faith not fact, and a lot who insist that Jesus’ existence is documented in the historical record (it’s not—all the accounts significantly post-date his reported death. My favorite comment there is the guy who says, “My faith in Christ is based on rock-solid historical evidence…” O Irony!). But it’s much more encouraging that the comments are about evenly divided between the nonsense-spouters and people critical of religion. Either we freethinkers are getting more vocal, or there are more of us in this country than have been reported. Or maybe Anderson Cooper just has a godless fanbase.
