Why we need separation of church and state: an example

Jackie Trebesh and her daughter attended a Catholic church presided over by “Reverend” John Kelly. One weekend she was surprised when they were both denied communion. She was in for a further surprise: when she left the church, she was pursued by a Santa Rosa County deputy, pulled over, and given a warning for trespassing, at the request of the priest.

What do you think her crime was?

According to Trebesh, she learned the reason she was denied communion was because someone at the church had seen the daughter dispose of the host, as it is called, improperly in the church parking lot.

“The matter of disposing of the Eucharist in an inappropriate way is a serious matter to us,” Peggy Dekeyser, the communications officer for the diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee said in confirming Trebesh’s theory.

Trebesh said the only thing she could think of that Kelly or anyone else might have seen her daughter do was “spit out a piece of gum in the parking lot.”

It’s fine that crazy Catholics want to enforce their crazy doctrines within the scope of the church; if crazy John Kelly wants to refuse to do his crazy mumbo-jumbo for anyone, that should be his right. But what’s really disturbing here is the county deputy using his official status to administer punishment outside the church.

I don’t care what the priest believes or does, but that deputy needs to be fired.

Vae, puto deus fio!

It’s good to see the old traditions kept alive. The Romans were fond of monumental marble architecture, formal public ritual, and deifying their emperors after their death, and look at the Vatican: monumental marble architecture, formal public ritual, and now the rapid beatification and expected canonization of their popes. Unfortunately, none of the popes have had the wit and humor to appreciate the custom, as Vespasian did, and laugh on their deathbed, “Alas, I think I’m becoming a god saint.”

So one dead pope, John Paul, is about to be officially beatified, which means the Catholic Church has determined that John Paul is actually in heaven right now. How do they know? Because they found a nun who said she prayed to the dead pope (which is weird right there), and her Parkinson’s symptoms were alleviated. Why is this a miracle and not a spontaneous remission or a misdiagnosis or a response to treatment or a hysterical game (“He turned me into a newt!” “I got better.”)?

The Congregation for the Causes of Saints said doctors “scrupulously” examined the nun’s claim and could find no scientific reason for her cure.

Ah, they don’t have any positive evidence of divinity…all they’ve got is a scientist saying “I don’t know,” and from that they leap to the conclusion that the ghost of John Paul is selectively and invisibly dispensing magic. Our ignorance is their evidence. All they’ve got is the bits and pieces we can’t answer yet.

So, Religion, how does it feel to be reduced to feasting on the scraps left from the table of Science?

The parallel universes of the Zeller family

I know that many people read the suicide note of Bill Zeller — it’s terrible story of an intelligent young man who was racked with internal demons, and who finally ended his life. The primary causes of his torment were memories of sexual molestation, but there was also another significant factor: his family’s fundamentalist religion, which provided him no comfort and was apparently more of a straitjacket to limit family interaction. He wrote this:

I’d also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they’re dead–one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they’ve constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don’t understand that good and decent people exist all around us, “saved” or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.

That’s a harsh condemnation, and I feel some pity for parents who had to read their child’s suicide note, and then also read that bitterness as well.

But then I read the coverage in the New Jersey Star-Ledger. It’s simply surreal; read the description above of how Zeller felt about his family’s faith, and then read all the newspaper printed about that aspect of their life.

Prayer and Bible reading had made them a tight-knit family — Anna read stories to her son, including a children’s version of “Pilgrim’s Progress.” And five days a week, they gathered for a few minutes of “family time,” in which Bill; his brother, John; and his parents would all enact scenes from the Bible.

But as Bill Zeller grew up, religion became a wedge, admits his father. When the younger Zeller was in his teens, he decided he could no longer accept his family’s evangelical life and left home, eventually attending Trinity College and paying for his tuition by developing software programs.

“There were guidelines for anybody that lived here that we would expect him to respect,” said George Zeller, who admitted the religious rift “was the hardest thing that ever happened” to the family.

Was the religious rift harder than losing a son to suicide?

Compare the two quoted sections above, though: notice any difference? Sure, it was a grieving family, and it’s not the best time for some investigative journalism, but then the reporter should have simply left out the bit selling soap for the wholesome religious life. And who should we believe, the son who says he was thrown out and cut off financially, or the father who says only that he “left home” and had to pay tuition on his own? Those sound like exactly the same stories — only good old Dad leaves out the damaging influence of his dogma.

And oh jebus…a childhood where the fun times were re-enacting Bunyan and the Bible? Hellish.

Whose side was Chuck Grassley on? We know now

Senator Grassley launched an investigation into the finances of religious organizations, after reports of abuses — you know the sorts of things that are common, like obscene salaries to ministers, active politicizing from the pulpit, etc. The Grassley report has been released, with a dull thud.

According to the review, many of the ministries operate multiple non-profits, with the leaders drawing some form of compensation from each of them.

“The number and types of entities, including private airports and aircraft leasing companies, raises concerns about the use of the church’s tax-exempt status to avoid taxation. However, given the four churches’ refusal to provide tax information, we are unable to determine whether and the extent to which they are reporting and paying taxes on income earned in those entities,” the review states.

Notice…six were investigated, but only two cooperated. The investigators declined to submit subpoenas to get to the heart of the potential scofflaws. Their final conclusion: these megachurches ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong. They make one big recommendation: maybe we should change our laws to allow church electioneering.

Big investigation. Scamming churches allowed to decline to participate. No wrong-doing found. Only significant conclusion is to increase the politicization of religion.

I think we were had. Grassley wasn’t digging into malfeasance, he was throwing up a smokescreen to cover efforts to give further benefits to churches.

I think I understand why religion is so successful

It’s because it is the absolute bottom floor of any descent into crepitude. That’s all I can conclude from looking at the fate of various cable television channels: they all seem to start out well with commendable goals, and pretty soon they’re all selling out to the cheapest, sleaziest advertisers and producing the worst shows they can imagine, all to pander to the lowest common denominator. Look at The Learning Channel (you won’t learn anything watching it anymore), the History Channel (yeah, if your idea of history always has Nazis in it), and the SciFi channel, which now isn’t even trying and has renamed itself the SyFy (what?) channel and hosts what I once thought was the lowest of the low, Ghosthunters.

But the Discovery Channel has out-bottomed even the SyFy channel: they have made a deal with Satan the Catholic Church and will be producing a show on exorcisms.

This is why NetFlix will conquer the home entertainment universe: all the broadcast and cable channels have become the domain of the dumb.

More examples of that sophisticated theology

I know you’ve been wondering about the answer to these questions: Does Poop Smell in Heaven? How about before the Fall? Now you can get answers.

The answers are:

  • Nobody poops in heaven.

  • If you’re a young earth creationist, nobody may have pooped during creation week, but if they did, it didn’t stink.

  • If you are a theistic evolutionist, then poop did smell.

All I can infer from that is that the more godly and fundamentalist you are, the more likely you are to be constipated.

So this is how mainstream religion responds to extremist violence?

I know the excuses already. The cowardly assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, who murdered Governor Taseer in Pakistan was an outlier, a freak, a weirdo, and we atheist bastards better not try to demean religion by associating a rogue individual with it. Can we spit in contempt on an entire culture instead?

Taseer was buried in his home town of Lahore. The 66-year-old was assassinated yesterday by Mumtaz Qadri, one of his police bodyguards, after he had campaigned for reform of the law on blasphemy.

Qadri appeared in court, unrepentant, where waiting lawyers threw handfuls of rose petals over him and others in the crowd slapped his back and kissed his cheek as he was led in and out amid heavy security.

Yeah, Qadri must be a despised outcast and entirely unrepresentative of what the moderates believe.

To be showered with rose petals for gunning down a defenseless man you were hired to protect…it sounds like Islamic Paradise.

So, a cross actually is a Christian religious symbol, then?

The Mount Soledad Easter Cross has a long and contentious legal history. It’s a 43-foot-tall concrete cross standing on public land, initially erected by Christians, and used as the focus of Christian religious ceremonies, and is clearly intended and used for a sectarian religious purpose. It is clearly a violation of the separation of church and state to use public land to promote a specific religion, yet a federal judge ruled that “the memorial at Mount Soledad, including its Latin cross, communicates the primarily nonreligious messages of military service, death and sacrifice,” and decided it was constitutional. I suspect that judge was not an atheist, a Moslem, or a Sikh; it takes some twisted logic to decide that a prominent religious symbol is not actually a religious symbol.

That’s been settled for now. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a humongous cross erected to celebrate Easter actually is a religious symbol, despite all the dishonest subterfuge by Christians who were emulating St Peter. I recommend that, after reading the ruling, they open their bibles and turn to Mark 14:66-72. The denial isn’t usually considered a high mark of Peter’s service.

They might consider that before filing for yet another appeal, as we all know they will.

Awe ≠ Religion

Jerry Coyne has just heard that Chris Mooney has an article in Playboy — I knew about this a while back, and have a copy of the text. I didn’t mention it before because it isn’t online, and it’s dreadfully dreary stuff. The entire article is a case of false equivalence: he cites scientists like Einstein and Darwin writing about a sense of awe and wonder at the natural world, and then tries to slide a fast one by…the idea that this means science and religion really are compatible. Well, science and spirituality. Well, spirituality is all about the believers. It’s a slimy game relying on the fact that apologists love to dodge criticisms of religion, the body of concrete, specific, institutionalized beliefs about the supernatural, by retreating to the tactical vagueness of “faith” or “spirituality”, whatever the hell they are. Apparently, in Mooney’s head, spirituality is just like religion is just like a scientist appreciating nature. It reduces these words to diffuse meaninglessness.

Would you believe he cites Darwin as a spiritual leader of the sort he likes?

You may argue that Charles Darwin was another spiritual leader of modern science. While he ultimately concluded he would have to remain an agnostic with respect to God, Darwin expressed great wonder at the diversity and interconnectedness of nature.

That’s it. All you have to do is love biology and science, and Chris Mooney has you drafted into the clergy. I guess that makes me a leading ally of the faitheist/accommodationist church of sacred worship, then.

But this is what Darwin actually thought of religion, as he described in his autobiography.

But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.

And this is a damnable doctrine.

Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.

Darwin is not the man to recruit in a crusade to reconcile American Christians to evolution.

Along the way, Mooney praises E.O. Wilson and his book, The Creation, as examples of making a spiritual appeal to find common cause with believers. I’ve read that book; it’s nicely done from the perspective of a liberal environmentalist, but I found it a doomed effort. Wilson is not a believer, he doesn’t hide the fact, but he tries to frame — no wonder Mooney likes it — the issues in a way a religious person could appreciate, and it clunked dreadfully, false notes every step of the way.

In his book The Creation, celebrated Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson makes a spiritual appeal to religious believers for help in preserving the diversity of species on Earth. Similarly, other scientists have reached out to religious audiences to find allies in the fight against climate change and for environmental protections.

It’s true. It was a resepected scientist reaching out to religious audiences. Did it work? It doesn’t seem to have had the slightest effect. If you want to see how religious audiences respond to pleas to preserve the environment, try reading Resisting the Green Dragon. The Green Dragon, obviously, is anyone who tries to argue that the environment is anything but a resource to be plundered. This is how religion — not faith, not spirituality, not awe — responds to science.

Mooney wrote almost two pages of fuzzy drivel, ignoring the actual threat of religious zealotry, and concludes this way:

There is, after all, a common interest between scientists and believers: Secular or otherwise, we cannot have spiritual experiences without an Earth to have them on. “Whether you believe all life reflects the operation of evolution or God’s good grace, our responsibility to future generations is to ensure that the creation is preserved in all its magnificence,” says Doherty. “That will happen only if those who live by science and/or by faith can work together in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance and respect.”

Sorry. You can’t expect us to simply respect foolish ideas. We tolerate them, but people like Mooney go further and demand that we respect nonsense, and that’s not going to happen, and shouldn’t happen.

And trying to coopt an honest scientific appreciation of the wonders of the universe as support for religion is a dishonest attempt to prop up bogus superstitions with an appeal to emotions — any emotions. If a scientist isn’t a passionless robot, Mooney wants to be able to pretend they’re on the side of religious dogma. That rankles. Love of science is not equatable to clinging to ignorance, although Chris Mooney is straining to make it so.

Murder in the name of intolerance

Don’t ever call atheists militant, except where they do something like this. A governor in Pakistan has been killed for opposing blasphemy laws.

Interior minister Rehman Malik said the killer was a member of Mr Taseer’s own security team, who quickly confessed to the crime and who had apparently worked for the governor on five or six previous occasions.

“He confessed that he killed the governor himself because he had called the blasphemy law a black law,” Mr Malik said.

“He has confessed his crime and surrendered his gun to police after the attack,” he told reporters.

That’s militancy. That’s closed-mindedness. That’s fanaticism. That’s intolerance.

Everytime those apologetic wankers who object to blunt speech apply those adjectives to people who simply write articles and books, they’re weakening any objection we might have to the real zealots.