Start off 2010 with schadenfreude

Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church is bleeding money. He just sent out a letter begging for almost a million dollars from his followers.

With 10% of our church family out of work due to the recession, our expenses in caring for our community in 2009 rose dramatically while our income stagnated. Still, with wise management, we’ve stayed close to our budget all year. Then… this last weekend the bottom dropped out.

On the last weekend of 2009, our total offerings were less than half of what we normally receive – leaving us $900,000 in the red for the year, unless you help make up the difference today and tomorrow.

Good.

I don’t mean that it is good that people are poor and suffering; I think it’s wonderful that a pious fraud who preys upon them is feeling a teeny-tiny pinch. I’d feel even more cheerful if I didn’t think that his begging from the faithful will most likely work.

Hey, if anyone wants to see me go into raptures, all they have to do is add to Saddleback’s woes by making their fleecing operation taxable. That would definitely break the back of Saddleback.

Christian shame

Salon has a peculiarly defensive article by a Christian confessing to being embarrassed about her beliefs, which seems like a good start to me. She should be embarrassed. As a fun exercise, though, try reading her article while categorizing its statements in the Kübler-Ross stages — there’s a bit of denial in there, some bargaining, and a faint hint of depression, but mainly what she’s got is anger. She lashes out at atheists a fair bit, but it’s in a revealing way.

Writers like Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Victor J. Stenger — and, of course, performers like Bill Maher — get loads of press mocking the dummies gullible enough to believe some guy a couple thousand years ago was God’s son. But come on. It’s like shooting Christian fish car magnets in a barrel.

Well, yes, it is easy to mock people who “believe some guy a couple thousand years ago was God’s son.” But, you know, that’s the central tenet of the Christian faith! Shouldn’t you stop and wonder about the validity of your beliefs when you realize the core idea is ridiculous? She isn’t going to defend that idea at all, though — atheists are just mean for noticing it, I guess.

Oh, and of course she trots out the standard fundamentalist canard.

And yet, atheists are at least as fundamentalist and zealous as any religious people I know, and they have nothing good to show for it: no stained glass, no great literature, no great art, no comfort in the face of death. Just dissipated Christopher Hitchens sounding off on “Larry King Live” and a stack of smug books with childishly provocative titles.

Atheists are not fundamentalists. Saying so just makes you look like a moron.

We have nothing good to show for being atheists? Hey, what about SCIENCE? I had no idea that atheists were unable to create stained glass windows — maybe this is the answer to Hitchens’ challenge, to find something good that a theist can do but an atheist cannot. Unfortunately for our distressed Christian, stained glass is a secular technology that has been used to decorate churches…but we godless people can use it just fine, if we want.

No great literature? One name: Mark Twain.

No great art? Berlioz, Paganini, Schubert, Saint-Saëns. If that’s not enough, browse the list.

No comfort in the face of death? What we lack is a collection of lies about death. I could say the same of Christianity, since I certainly find no comfort in unwarranted authority, wishful thinking, and delusional incentives. And at least atheists do not threaten others with hell.

Her snide comment about Hitchens is accompanied by a link which you should watch. It’s revealing. It’s Hitchens surrounded by a couple of McCain apologists before the last election, ripping into Sarah Palin’s anti-scientific views on genetics and research, and her ridiculous creationism. Does the sad Christian somehow find that antagonistic to her beliefs? I know many members of her own faith who would have expressed the same sentiments…just not as eloquently as Hitchens.

Finally, she wonders if she should speak up.

But also, increasingly, I wonder: When I’m getting a ride from some friends and they start talking about how stupid religious people are and quoting lines from “Religulous,” do I have an obligation to point out how reductive and bigoted they’re being, the way I would if they were talking about a particular race? Increasingly I wonder if I should pipe up from the back seat and say, “Excuse me, but these fools you’re talking about? I’m one of them.”

You certainly are. Please do speak up, we like to know when we’re in the presence of fools.

The equation of race with religion is also standard practice for fools. Sorry, lady, ignorance isn’t the same as being brown, and you can’t excuse yourself by claiming that you were born without knowledge.

Wouldn’t you know a whole bunch of people would write to me with examples of stained glass in scientific institutions? Here’s an example from the Pembroke College library at Cambridge:

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Mormon prophecy

It’s a little known disturbing fact that the Mormons have a set of prophecies that foretell that the Mormons will take over the leadership of the US. A candidate for the governor of Idaho has brought this out into the open — he’s having meetings to talk about saving America by having the Mormon leadership intervene.

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I’ve had a few conversations with crazy Mormons who actually take this nonsense very, very seriously. They don’t seem to understand that having the country taken over by a freakish cult with dreams of theocracy would be a way to destroy the constitution.

Real sign, real poll

The Joliet Jackhammers, a baseball team in Illinois, have put up an interesting sign to get people to buy tickets.

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Some people are unhappy and want it taken down.

“It’s in very poor taste,” Councilwoman Jan Hallums Quillman said. “To have God tell you to buy tickets? Give me a break.”

I wonder if Quillman felt the same way about the serious billboard campaign that had God announcing his will and intentions? There was one that read, “Let’s Meet At My House Sunday Before the Game -God.” Was that in poor taste? It seems to me that many people think it’s perfectly alright to put words in their imaginary deity’s mouth as long as it sounds serious and respectful, no matter what it may be.

Anyway, there’s a poll at the team website.

Should the JackHammers take down the current I-80 billboard?

56%: yes
44%: no

Since it appropriately trivializes the foolishness of claiming that a god speaks, I had to vote no. Keep it up!

Something else the Catholics are very touchy about

It’s not just crackers; they freak out over Mary’s virginity. A New Zealand church put up this provocative billboard to get people to discuss the absurdity of literalism:

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The Catholic Church condemned it as “inappropriate” and “disrespectful.” I think it’s funny (although it is based on an old joke), and does extract the message of the Bible from the remote and theological to something more earthy and thoughtful. And note — this was not put up by a gang of rabid atheists trying to mock Christianity, but by a sect of Christianity itself that was trying to lighten up the arguments.

You can guess what happened within a few hours of the billboard going up.

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A spokesperson for the local Catholic diocese had this to say.

“Our Christian tradition of 2,000 years is that Mary remains a virgin and that Jesus is the son of God, not Joseph,” she told the New Zealand Herald. “Such a poster is inappropriate and disrespectful.”

So? You can believe Mary had three heads and wings and gave birth to Jesus through her anus to preserve her hymen, for all anyone cares. Your delusions are not ours to defend, and you do not have the power to force everyone to stop laughing at you, as much as you’d like to be able to do that. And isn’t that what this is really about? That churches want to be able to punish you for disrespecting their sacred craziness?

Man, but Christians sure hold some silly beliefs. I’d happily desecrate this myth just like I did a cracker, except that I realized I’ve already had sex with a virgin named Mary about 30 years ago, and she won’t let me run around repeating the act now.

The devil stole Rod Parsley’s money!

That’s what he says, anyway: he’s put out a desperate call for mo’ money because he is under a “demonically inspired financial attack”. His ministry is facing a $3 million dollar shortfall. Coincidentally, he also had to make a big payout of $3.1 to the family of a two-year-old who was spanked to the point of being covered in welts and abrasions in his church’s daycare.

At last, we have identified the devil. He’s a naughty little boy in Columbus, Ohio.

European cartoonist on a rampage! Gods derided!

I had no idea cartoonists wielded such vast power. First it was the Danish cartoons that outraged the Muslim community, and now an Austrian named Manfred Deix has drawn the ire of the Catholics: the Viennese archdiocese has ‘tattled’ on him to the public prosecutor for violating the National Socialist Prohibition Act and for degrading religion (it’s in German; there is a horrible Google translation).

He has mocked the EU’s ban on crucifixes in the classroom with a cartoon that argues that the “ban shall be deftly circumvented,” and which includes a “multicultural compromise” — Jesus on a cross with a crescent and a Buddha on it, wearing robes with both the hammer and sickle and the swastika on them.

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The top right example is familiar — that’s a typical American classroom, I think.

Another one that has spurred Catholic outrage is a cartoon that speculated about just what this god we’re supposed to worship looks like, and asks, “we know the church, but just who is god?” (nudity and some scatological content in portraits of the deity…click at your own peril).

How odd that people would react with such anger at depictions of what the earnest apologists for religion are always telling us is just a metaphor. If their god really is the grand creator and maintainer of the entire universe, reducing him to a sketch in a magazine is really no more degrading than reducing him to, say, a set of stained glass windows, a liturgy, and a holy book. If he really is a cosmic being who loves everyone, I should think he’d love a cynical cartoonist as much as he does a pope. Or are they going to declare certain renditions of the deity privileged, while others are proscribed? How will they determine which vision of god are true and accurate, and therefore protected by secular law?

For more thought on these kinds of issues, read Greta Christina’s article on the great metaphor myth of religion. If religion really were an abstraction, a metaphor, a personal sentiment about a universal divinity, we’d expect a certain kind of response to satire, art, and opinion about this god-creature…and it’s not the reaction we see. The Austrian Catholic church seems to have a fairly specific idea about what kind of portrait of god you are allowed to paint — I wonder where they get their specific details?