How convenient

Gary Bradley, a professor at the Seventh Day Adventist college La Sierra University, has been under fire because he teaches evolutionary biology competently — he doesn’t accept the young earth creationism that SDA dogma demands. The battle is over, though, and he and several others have been asked to resign for great crimes.

According to the Spectrum article, Darnell met up afterward with Beach, Bradley, and Kaatz at a private home, where they watched a National Basketball Association playoff game and discussed the meeting. The recorder kept running, unbeknownst to the four men. It captured “foul language, references to alcohol consumption and unflattering comments being made about board members, administrators, and church leaders,” according to the article. Darnell then sent the recording to a number of key members of the Adventist community, including The Spectrum, reportedly without knowing that it contained more than just the audio of the meeting. Eventually, the recording made its way to Ricardo Graham, chair of the board of trustees.

I think they’re all better off getting out of that crazy place. The absurdity of being pressured to teach lies in the classroom ought to have been reason enough to leave, but that they have employers who want to control what they do after hours in their own homes ought to convince anyone that it’s time to leave.

Who says we don’t need bible scholars?

John Loftus criticizes the Courtier’s Reply. How dare he? I thought it was Holy Atheist Writ by now.

But the Courtier’s Reply as an answer for theology needs to be discussed critically. First off, I do not expect anyone to understand any particular theology in order to reject it. We all do this easily. I doubt very much anyone understands all of the religions they reject. I don’t. No one does. We reject them all for the same reasons, because they have not met their own burden of proof. So I agree very much that neither PZ Myers nor Richard Dawkins needs to fully understand the various forms of Christianity in order to reject them all. They can certainly use the Courtier’s Reply, and for them it’s legitimate, as it is for me when rejecting Hinduism, which I know little about. Christians do not fully understand the other Christianities they reject, so why should anyone expect this from skeptics?

But here’s the problem. PZ Meyers and Richard Dawkins, and others, have the clout to recommend those of us who do understand the various Christianities that exist who know how to debunk them on their own terms. But perhaps, and I’m only suggesting perhaps, they are so committed to the Courtier’s Reply when it comes to their own lack of understanding of Christian theology that they don’t realize this will not do if they want to change the religious landscape. If they do, then may I humbly suggest they recommend the work of Biblical scholars like Robert Price, Hector Avalos, Bart Ehrman and others like them, as well as philosophers like John Shook, John Beversluis, Richard Carrier, Keith Parsons, Matt McCormick and others like them. But they can’t do it, because they are committed to the Courtier’s Reply, and that’s a shame. I can embrace the Courtier’s Reply when it comes to religions I reject. But given the power and influence of Christianity in particular, they need to recommend and embrace those of us who know it and argue against it. The Courtier’s Reply may some day be the blanket response to religion. It isn’t yet. Until then let them recommend those of us who do understand the dominant religion of our land, both philosophers and biblical scholars. It takes all of us together with all of our talents, all of our knowledge, and all of our abilities.

No, no, no. Loftus is making the same misinterpretation I’ve heard from creationists and theologians: that the Courtier’s Reply is a call for ignorance and an excuse for not trying to understand religion. It’s not. Rather, it’s an amusing way to tell someone that they haven’t established their premises (the existence of deities), and that all their phantasmagorical elaborations on their fantasies are irrelevant. Cut to the core issue; if you haven’t shown that Jesus even existed, it’s silly to be arguing about the color of his socks.

I have no disagreement with the approach of the scholars listed above; in fact, I’m a big fan, particularly of Carrier and Avalos. They’re taking a different angle: even if we set aside the fundamental fallacy of the premise, we can assay the ramshackle rationalizations and irrational excuses and shoddy scholarship and show that the whole construction is bogus from root to crown.

For me, the Courtier’s Reply is sufficient because I’m not wedded to any particular doctrine; it’s enough for me to see that the core is rotten and hollow. But I entirely agree that for most religious people, the existence of a god isn’t even an issue — it’s assumed and taken for granted. What most people have locked into their brains is a pattern of ritual and dogma and pseudohistory so intricate that it obscures the central assumption, and to chip through that we need Biblical scholars who grapple with the details.

We just don’t need Bible scholars who layer on more crud.

Ireland: victim no more

It’s as if the media is finally getting it right and timing the news to match the World Atheist Convention in Dublin with stories that show why we must oppose religion. The New York Times tells the story of the Magdalene laundries, in which 30,000 women were used as slave labor (and victims of abuse) to profit the Catholic church. Representatives of the victims are going before the UN to request justice, or at least some sort of rebuke of the church. Somehow, I doubt that they’ll get it — there are a lot of factions squabbling in the UN, and many of them defend religion and care little for women. But we’ll see.

Also, a documentary has been broadcast in Ireland (but it’s also available on the web) describing the horrific abuse of African children by Irish Catholic missionaries. One of the perks of being a missionary in Africa was that one could pick up a young boy or girl for cheap — promise them a path out of grinding poverty, and an education, for instance — and have a live-in sexual servant for the duration of their stay. Don’t watch it if you’re sensitive to personal stories of abuse: they interview many of the victims, who are broken and ashamed and overwhelmed by the betrayals of the church.

Another curious aspect of the story is the dates. The recent Catholic-commissioned John Jay report on Catholic sexual abuses pinned the blame on the hippies and the attitudes towards casual sex of the 60s and 70s (which makes no sense: pedophilia and child rape are not about love). They claim that there was a peak of such abberant behavior that coincided with that period, and that it has declined since. But this report discusses vileness that was being perpetrated in the 80s and 90s.

It sounds to me like the decline wasn’t real. It was just the Catholic church becoming aware of a major PR disaster, and shipping their child-rapin’ priests off to places like Africa and India, or to the Inuit of Canada, where they could destroy the lives of people who didn’t matter…that is, people who didn’t have access to lawyers and the media.

The power of faith

It’s amazing what religion can do. In this case, it motivated some dim old fart who ought to have been loafing about watching Glenn Beck and drowning his anger with a six-pack of Bud to go out and try to murder gynecologists. He didn’t actually succeed, fortunately: he was playing with his gun in his cheap room at the Motel 6 when it went off and sent a bullet flying into the room next door…so bad-ass that he is, he called up the front desk to mention that he was worried he might have hit someone else.

Then the police came and found out what he was really up to. He didn’t want to accidentally shoot someone, but he definitely intended to march into Planned Parenthood and murder as many people as he could.

Ralph Lang, 63, told a Madison police officer at the Motel 6, 1754 Thierer Road, that he had a gun “to lay out abortionists because they are killing babies,” according to a criminal complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court.

Lang said he planned on shooting the clinic’s doctor “right in the head,” according to the complaint. Asked if he planned to shoot just the doctor or nurses, too, Lang replied he wished he “could line them up all in a row, get a machine gun, and mow them all down,” the complaint said.

And he’s proudly confessing all this to the police! These religious excuses do attract the dumb ones, that’s for sure. And yes, he had a vague plan to go on a nationwide shooting spree, and he was driven by his religion.

Sgt. Bernie Gonzalez looked around Lang’s motel room and saw a box that contained several documents, including a map of the U.S. with dots in each state and the handwritten words “some abortion centers.”

Also written on the map was “Blessed Virgin Mary says Hell awaits any woman having an abortion.”

I think someone needs to lock up Ol’ Grandpa Gunman in a nice institution somewhere with a chapel and an absence of firearms and a multituded of locks on the doors, for the safety of society.

Nobody will be surprised by this

Father Riccardo Seppia is a priest under one of the advisors Pope Ratzi appointed to oversee church reforms in the wake of the pedophilia scandals.

You know exactly where this is going, don’t you?

Investigators examining tapped cellphone conversations between a Moroccan drug dealer and 51-year-old Father Riccardo Seppia found evidence of arranged sexual encounters with young boys, some of whom were paid for sex with cocaine.

“I do not want 16-year-old boys but younger,” Seppia is accused of having said on the tapes. “Fourteen-year-olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues.”

You mean it wasn’t the hippies’ fault?

Last week, the news was full of stories about this report that supposedly explained the Catholic church’s history of pedophilia: the major surprising conclusion that was reported is that the problem wasn’t gay priests, it was all those dirty rotten hippies who were miseducated in the free-love Sixties. Until now I’ve seen one substantial ‘analysis’ of the report, but unfortunately, it was by Crazy Bill Donohue, who is frothingly angry that it didn’t blame the homosexuals. He also blames the hippies, but it’s all the fault of all those gay hippies who infiltrated the church, with their weird ideas about being nonjudgmental. Catholics are supposed to be angrily judgmental about any deviance from whitebread procreation, and Bill is the world’s expert on angry denunciation of any variation from his narrow version of Catholicism.

Now, though, Miranda Hale has read the whole ugly thing, and it doesn’t sound good…but for very different reasons than Donohue’s. She points out that the study was entirely funded and approved by Catholic organizations — if it hadn’t arrived at pre-approved conclusions, it would not have been permitted to have been released. They also fudged the data in unconscionable ways: by changing the definition of pedophilia in an entirely arbitrary way, they changed the frequency of pedophilic abuse in the church from 73% down to 22%. Tsk, tsk. Not only were they dishonest, they were stupidly dishonest.

And what about those hippies?

In other words, the researchers believe that the vast majority of priest-abusers, whether they attended seminary in 1930 or in the early 1970s (or any time in-between), committed their crimes during the 1960s and 1970s (the time they refer to as the “peak”), and that this is primarily due to the fact that their seminaries failed to provide these priest-abusers with a proper “human formation” curriculum.

All of this begs the question (one that the researchers completely ignore): why would any priest have to be taught (in a “human formation” curriculum or otherwise) that it’s never acceptable, ethically or legally, to sexually abuse a child? According to the researchers, we should unquestioningly accept their baseless assertion because, without a proper training in “human formation”, these priest-abusers were unable to understand “appropriate forms of closeness to others” (121) and that certain behaviors are not “appropriate to a life of celibacy” (120).

That argument never did ring true. I’m old enough to have known hippies, although also young enough that I just missed most of the fun, despite at least living in Eugene, Oregon for 9 years, where the hippie subculture still lingers. And never did I encounter a hippie who endorsed the idea that child-raping is OK.

I guess you had to be brought up in the amoral atmosphere of a Catholic seminary to absorb that message.

Wrong, root and branch; wrong at every cell and molecule; wrong to the core

The world didn’t end last Saturday (obviously), but Harold Camping and his predictions are just a smokescreen, and everyone is missing the heart of the problem.

Camping has now spoken. He now claims that Jesus did arrive ‘spiritually’ on the 21st, and that in his generous mercy, God has decided to spare us the 153 days of the tribulation, but that the world will still be ending on 21 October. This is no surprise. This is exactly what these crackpot prophets do: they’re never right, but they are great at rationalizing.

His followers are busy readjusting. Here’s a radio interview with one bible-thumper; the guy who threw away his life savings on subway signs was left wandering in Times Square, confused and disappointed. None of them has changed their beliefs about the biblical apocalypse, they’re just fudging the dates.

The Family Radio website has been scrubbed clean of mentions of Judgment Day.

And what do I see from most people? A stern finger-wagging with biblical authority reaffirmed.

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I was sent that image by someone who clearly thought it was a joke, but I am not laughing. I’m angry, instead. I don’t fucking care what fucking Jesus fucking said. The problem is NOT that some kook in California plucked numbers out of the Bible and conjured up a numerological justification for a date: the idiocy runs much deeper than that.

  • The entire myth of dispensationalism — that time is divided into distinct ages with discrete beginnings and ends, characterized by distinct bodies of knowledge granted us by divine will — is nonsense. These fairy tales of a rapture and tribulation and world destruction are entirely the invention of crank theologians elaborating on the ravings of the 19th century Irish priest, John Nelson Darby. It’s no more sourced or historical or rational than the goddamn Book of Mormon.

  • Christian eschatology is a vile and hateful message about their imaginary tyrant god who, once again, is scheduled to have a temper tantrum in which he kills almost everyone, snatches up their souls, and makes them suffer for eternity for being human. A few will be spared; their reward is an eternity of servility, but at least they get to know they’re better than everyone else. And that’s the real lesson here: it’s all about elitism and the most extreme threats imaginable to anyone who does not support these self-appointed masters of dogma. Again, there’s no reason to believe any of it, other than that people have absorbed the propaganda for the whole of their lifetime.

  • The Christian bible is supposed to be the ultimate source of authority, and to many of the more extreme, the only source of authority. It’s got ‘bible codes’ in it; it’s a rich vein of numerological bullshit to be mined; it’s vagued, confused, ambiguous, and contradictory, a refuse heap of tribal gobbledygook hallowed by nothing other than long ages of accumulation. Our minds try desperately to find pattern and meaning in what we observe around us, and the best source to trigger all kinds of lunatic pattern generating theories is a nearly totally incoherent mass of text with huge cultural signposts pointing at it and screaming that it is important.

    It’s like being told that a tangled, confusing clump of jungle, all bewildering with shadow and random shapes slashing across it, is the home of a fierce tiger that will kill you if you get close. Stare hard at it, and you can convince yourself that there is something dangerous lurking there, even if it contains no animal larger than a rabbit.

Sure, everyone is laughing at Harold Camping now, except his followers, who are undeterred. But you’re missing the real joke. Look at every Abrahamic religion, with their myths of prophets and favored peoples and fate. Look at the crazy conservative church in your town, that preaches homophobia and anti-science and supports Israel because of the Armageddon prophecy. Look at the liberal Christian church down the street from you that has the nice Vacation Bible School and puts on happy plays for the older kids, and also teaches that one day you will stand before a great god and be judged. Look at your family members who blithely believe in death as a mini-apocalypse, in which they will be magically translated into another realm, again to be judged.

It’s the very same rot, the poison of religion that twists minds away from reality and fastens them on hellish bogeymen. They’re demented fuckwits, every one, and the big lie rests right on the fundamental beliefs of supernaturalism and deities, not on the ephemera of one crank’s bizarre interpretations.

And to the next person who quotes Matthew 24:36 at me: you’re part of the problem, too.

They gave glory to her lord

We all knew this was going to happen. The Bastrop High School graduation ceremony began with a prayer.

Do I have to say it again? That’s what the moment of prayer is for. If you feel the need to give “glory to your lord”, go for it, do it then. But telling everyone else to give glory to your lord is grandstanding and drafting unwilling people to promote your freakish cult.

I know, I shouldn’t bother. They’re Christian. Telling them again is pointless—mindless evangelism is part of their culture.

Never trust a Christian

Bastrop High School promised to obey the law against school-led prayer at official events, although they were also petty and mean about it, and have been making life hellish for the young man who complained. Now here’s the surprise (not): in an official function called Senior Night, they announced a moment of silence…and then said a Christian prayer anyway, to the cheers of the Christian majority. Never mind that it was illegal, never mind that they broke their agreement; religious sanctimony trumps all.

And we have video.

I suspect that at the official graduation ceremony tomorrow, they’ll also manage to get someone up there to lead the school in sectarian proselytization and social pressure, and they won’t even care that it’s discriminatory.

I do hope they get sued.

I suppose I should start including general explanations for the terminally obtuse.

There is no proscription against individual prayer. If 99.9% of the students had taken advantage of the moment of silence to bow their heads and beg Jesus to help them get laid after the kegger that night, NO PROBLEM.

There is a proscription against compelling EVERYONE to participate in sectarian prayer. When someone stands up and announces that we’re all going to ask Jesus Christ for a blessing, PROBLEM.

I know you Christians out there have very limited brains and can’t quite comprehend this basic concept, but try. Imagine if that woman had gotten up there and announced that she was going to ignore the rules, and asked everyone to turn and face Mecca, get down on their knees, and join in the salah. Would you be cheering then?

Keep it in church. Don’t muck up secular, public events that are supposed to be inclusive of everybody, including non-Christians, unless your goal really is to send a message that non-Christians are not part of the community.