Tough love thuggery under Jesus’ loving hands

New Bethany. New Beginnings. Rebekah Home for Girls. Hephzibah House. Second Chance Ranch. Rachel Academy. Circle of Hope Girls Ranch. These are all places that claim to offer succor to parents of ‘troubled teens’, safe houses where they can send their kids for discipline and loving assistance to overcome whatever has made them rowdy or morose or obstinate or disobedient, all those symptoms of independence, and turn them into cheerful, cooperative, socialized citizens of community conventionality. They all rely heavily on the appeal of Christianity, and their names resonate with biblical themes…when hearing invocations of Jesus to draw children out to isolated camps ought instead to fill everyone with the same sense of dread that hearing the Jaws theme music ought to do.

Predictably, these fly-by-night camps run by Jesus freaks all turn out to be hellholes.

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Tiresome and ill-mannered Muslims

It’s like every time I go to Europe, it’s the same two or three Muslims waiting to greet me. There they were in Dublin, Hamza Tzortzis and his crew, and now I come to Oslo, and there they are, the same Muslims parked outside the Humanist Congress (Google translation).

Islam Net believes Congress is based on “the erroneous assumption that humanism is the way forward for humanity.” Islam Net and its affiliates are not surprisingly more faith in Islam as the way forward.

– Islam is a world view that is not only sensible, but the basis for our values ​​and morals, said the press release.

That’s all nonsense, of course: Islam is a primitive religion with a violent history, and like all those Abrahamic faiths, is all about praising a non-existent patriarchal deity. Islam is the past, atheism and humanism are the future. And if Islam is the basis for our morality, why is the Islamic world such a hellhole of barbarity and opression? (I’d also flip that around and ask, if Christianity is such a moral and righteous faith, why are American Christians so fervent about making the rubble bounce in their bombings of Islamic countries?)

I have no problem with the Muslims putting up their information booth outside the congress. However, what really annoyed me about them was that they were quite dedicated in intruding on the discussion on twitter, using the congress hashtag #humanist2011 freely while not actually attending the congress. We were getting constant exhortations to come out and visit their booth, and they were positively manic in raving about some survivor of the Utoya killings who was a convert to Islam, which was widely considered to be extremely tasteless and inappropriate.

They also got rather frantic when the twitter conversation was about Taslima Nasreen’s talk — you want to annoy an Islamist? Just let a Muslim woman speak. I looked into a few of the angry Islamist tweets: new accounts with almost no history, created just to spam the conference. Bad show, very bad show. They made no new friends with their behavior.

Exercises in obfuscation

As a follow-up to his video of 100 atheists, Jonathan Pararajasingham has collected 20 believing academics explaining their position. Your brain will hurt.

Jerry Coyne has posted brief summaries of all 20, but you’ve got to listen to it all. The point isn’t their answers, which are all non-answers and babbling, but the stark raving incoherence and inconsistency of their attempts to explain themselves.

But why do you believe in Gawd?

This word “god” needs some serious redefining. I keep running into these intentionally obscurantist blitherings about “god” when the definition is clearly bouncing back and forth between multiple meanings. There are at least two categories of gods. Let’s give them different names so we stop confusing them.

  1. Gods as working deities or GAWD. GAWD is an interventionist; it may have created the universe, it has power in the real world, it has a personal interest in human beings and planet Earth. GAWD can answer personal requests, GAWD can carry out miracles, GAWD must be propitiated by thoughts and rituals lest GAWD become wrathful…which is a bad thing that can have dire results in the real world. GAWD is what most religions are about, it’s what most people worship. GAWD is usually portrayed as an omnipotent, omniscient being who is greater than and beyond the universe, but he keeps a hand in and dabbles with virgins and foreskins and sends the occasional tornado and earthquake.

  2. Gods who avoid reality, or GWAR. GWAR is an abstraction, an impersonal and remote being who exists completely outside space and time, who doesn’t actually interact with our world; alternatively, GWAR is simply the state of existence that permeates the entire universe. GWAR does not tinker; it does not modify the rules of existence to satisfy personal requests; it does nothing but be and watch and sometimes, love. GWAR is invisible and indetectable because GWAR does nothing. At best, one can aspire to die and become invisible and indetectable oneself, and then you’ll get to meet GWAR. No religion actually exists to support GWAR. GWAR doesn’t need them, and they don’t believe that GWAR will actually do anything for them anyway.

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Michele Bachmann, Dominionist

You must read the profile of Michele Bachmann in The New Yorker—scary stuff all the way through. It goes right down to her philosophical foundation, and it’s all this crazy Dominionist crap from Frank Schaeffer, with nods to the notorious creationist Nancy Pearcey. Do we really want an apocalyptic believer in Christian tyranny to be in the White House?

They will defend their debris to our death

I can’t say that I’m very keen on this lawsuit by American Atheists opposing the “9/11 cross” in some museum in New York; I can understand that in principle it’s promoting religion, and I look at that random chunk of steel that forms a crude cross and can see that it is abysmally stupid to consider it a holy relic, but man, if atheists have to police every single act of stupidity committed by the human race, we’re going to get very, very tired. We need to pick our battles better, and this one is just plain pointless.

Except for one thing: look at the response it generated when aired on Fox News. EIGHT THOUSAND DEATH THREATS from arrogant Christians. Here’s just a sampling.

I have a recommendation for American Atheists.

Back off on the lawsuit. Come right out and tell the world it’s your error, it’s clear the serious objections to memorializing a fragment of metal that has the simple shape of a cross will not be considered in a rational way, and instead point to these insane, hateful messages from Christians. Point out that you can step away from a divisive issue on the recommendations of many of your constituents, but that Christianity clearly has little to distinguish itself from the terrorists who committed the Trade Towers atrocity: religion turns people into ravening monsters who abandon common decency to defend their bogus tribal mythology.

That people can stupidly fall for pareidolia (and trivial pareidolia at that; that pieces of metal would be connected at right angles in a modern building has zero significance) is not a surprise or a major revelation. That they can defend their misbegotten perceptions with threats of murder and rape is a more important issue.

Live by the science, die by the science

This is a wonderful video debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument. What I really like about it is that it takes the tortured rationales of theologians like William Lane Craig, who love to babble mangled pseudoscience in their arguments, and shows with direct quotes from the physicists referenced that the Christian and Muslim apologists are full of crap.

(via Skepchick.)

(Also on FtB)

Live by the science, die by the science

This is a wonderful video debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument. What I really like about it is that it takes the tortured rationales of theologians like William Lane Craig, who love to babble mangled pseudoscience in their arguments, and shows with direct quotes from the physicists referenced that the Christian and Muslim apologists are full of shit.

(via Skepchick.)

(Also on Sb)

I don’t think Genesis can be turned into a good movie

Darren Aronofsky wants to make an “edgy re-telling” of the Noah’s Ark story for $130 million. I don’t know why; if you ask me, it’s a stupid story, on the order of wanting to do a live-action big budget remake of the Flintstones…and nobody would be stupid enough and unimaginative enough to do that, would they?

It does have potential as a bitter, nasty story: tyrant god kills everyone and everything on the planet in a massive, brutal catastrophe, leaving one family to salvage the entire worldwide ecosystem with a wooden boat; despite that, the first thing this family does when the boat lands is a mass slaughter of representatives of every species to propitiate their evil deity. Then Noah gets drunk and curses his son and all of his progeny with eternal servitude.

So it could be written as a grim, bleak, apocalyptic tale, but I don’t see much of interest in it…largely because the spectre looming over it is the fact that it isn’t true, and not just in a fictional way, but because we know it couldn’t have happened.

Also, the Christians (or at least, apologists for Christianity) are already girding themselves to hate the movie. Don’t you know, the Ark story is supposed to be uplifting and cuddly-cute, with all those animals?

First of all, the story of Noah has been told on the big screen before, most notably in John Huston’s superb film The Bible: In the Beginning (1966), in which one of the central episodes tells the story of the Ark with Huston himself playing Noah. The Bible features an all-star cast of Ava Gardner, Peter O’Toole, George C. Scott, Richard Harris, and Stephen Boyd. Huston’s retelling of the Noah’s Ark story is stylish and insightful. A real warmth and joy pervades the scenes in which Noah runs around the ark caring for and soothing the animals during their long voyage. This kind of warmth and humanity is notably lacking in Aronofsky’s coldly neurotic films.

I only vaguely recall that movie; it came out when I was 9. I do remember that it was cheesy and boring. Here’s the trailer.

Yeesh. A disaster movie about the obliteration of life on Earth is supposed to be filled with “warmth and joy”? Only by ignoring the magnitude of the events that occur in it.

These reviewers are very distressed at the possibility of a dark movie about an imaginary cataclysm.

Can we not see these demons in the much-lauded ‘edginess’ of Aronofsky’s films? Films like Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and Black Swan are replete with masochism and bodily mutilation. Aronofsky seems possessed by a Manichaean viewpoint that sees the world and the flesh as fallen and subject to mortification of a kind usually only seen in medieval art and literature. Demented, self-flagellating figures are the villains in movies and books like The Da Vinci Code – but in Aronofsky’s films, they’re actually the protagonists we’re supposed to identify with. The madness and self-mutilation in Aronofsky’s films takes the place of any serious exploration of character or story and has only one motivation: to transgress life with violent images that abuse the human body.

OK. I will mention one name and one movie. Mel Gibson. The Passion of the Christ.

Maybe it will be a perfect fit to Christianity after all.