I woke up this morning after a poor night’s rest, with a surly brain and tired eyes, and what do I behold as I scan through the last few day’s worth of email? Stories of faith that piss me off. So allow me to purge my demons by slapping around a few religious goofballs — it’ll take the edge of my headache and lighten my step for the rest of the day. Don’t worry, I’ll start off easy and work up to the really bad ones.

• John Shelby Spong is giving some lectures. You know, I think I’d like Spong as a person, and I think he espouses some worthy humanist values, but jeez, he always comes off as a cheerful airhead. He’s essentially an atheist who skims off a bit of the moldy skin of the rotten fruit of religion, and tells us how pretty the colors are…thereby making an implicit argument to keep the decaying garbage around.

  Yes, God exists, but God is not a separate deity who intervenes in our lives.

  Jesus’ resurrection is not an historically accurate event, but a symbolic story of what it means to live a fully human life.

  Eternal life is not a journey to heaven or hell, but a state which can only be glimpsed when we experience love.

  He’s like Karen Armstrong, so taken with the language of religion that they’re willing to ignore the substance. When you’ve reduced god to the uncaring smear of cosmic background radiation and a collection of psychological quirks in the human brain, you might as well admit it: he’s dead. Get over it and move on. And deceased figments don’t need a weepy wake or much sympathy for the family.

• Similarly, Bible scholars can be such nuisances. Actually, Bible scholarship is a fine thing; I appreciate historical analysis, and think the secular study of old documents is an eminently respectable academic discipline. Unfortunately, the freaking Bible is fraught with cultural connections that lead too many people to draw unwarrantedly deep conclusions from it. I’m sure this Professor van Wolde is a reasonable scholar, but her conclusions about Genesis are fine nits that need picking, nothing more.

  Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

  She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

  Yeah, yeah. It’s a small piece of the puzzle, nice to know, tells us squat-all about the origin of the world (which van Wolde is not claiming), and a little bit about the culture that scribbled down the Genesis myth. It generates breathless excitement among the credulous, though, who believe the book actually provides some insight into the creation of the world.

  It doesn’t.

  Here’s how you should look at the book of Genesis. Long, long ago, a tribe of desert nomads bumped up against the more cosmopolitan culture of Mesopotamia. They learned useful skills from the city people, like writing, but at the same time, the allure of those older, more sophisticated ideas was leading to the dissolution of tribal identity, and especially to a loss of respect for the austere and demanding desert god. Who wants to worship dry old El when slinky, sexy Innini is calling?

  So in a move as old as religion, almost, the desert priests slyly adopted the popular culture of their neighbors, stealing all their myths, but rewrote them to put their one great god in charge of the whole story. Genesis is an exercise in syncretism, a wholesale theft of one tradition to be repackaged with a new set of symbols. It is not about the creation of the universe. It is about resolving a conflict between two human cultures. That’s interesting, sure enough, as long as you don’t forget where you are and start building big pseudo-museums in Kentucky dedicated to your misconceptions.

• It’s also a problem when you have professional rabbinical nit-pickers who use their silly fine-grained interpretations of ancient texts to demand ridiculous and irrelevant impositions on people’s lives. As a further example of scholars losing sight of the context of their great big dusty books, consider the case of Shabbos elevators. There is a strict Jewish tradition of not doing any work on the sabbath, even to the point of not flicking any switches, so many buildings in Jewish communities have ridiculous and wasteful elevators that stop at every floor, so the devout don’t need to push a button. Except that as they learn more about the technology, they are becoming afraid that it might offend their god.

  But the recent ruling, whose signers included Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv — at 99, widely considered the most influential Torah sage of his generation — introduced a caveat based on new technology in elevators. The rabbis wrote that this new technology, which was explained to them by elevator technicians and engineers in “a written and oral technical opinion,” made them aware for the first time that using Shabbos elevators may be a “desecration of the Sabbath.”

  They did not name the offending technology. But for several years there has been debate among Orthodox rabbis in Israel over whether devices that measure the weight in an elevator car, and adjust power accordingly, effectively make entering a car the equivalent of pressing a button.

  Come on. Seriously? Listening to the most hidebound, most literal, most conservative, and most ancient geezer in your community is a useful way to maintain tribal tradition, but sometimes traditions need to break and respond to the times. Whoever scribbled down the old Sabbath laws couldn’t even imagine elevators, let alone electronic sensors, so it would make more sense to abide by the spirit of the old laws rather than trying to impose a precise meaning on them that simply isn’t there. Adapt! Your pointless dilemmas simply make you look like a gang of unimaginative old fools.

• Adhering to ancient dogma kills people, too. Khristian Oliver has been convicted of murder and sentenced to die. I’d be willing to concede that he’s a bad guy who committed an evil act — nobody seems to be arguing over whether he actually committed the crime — except that his trial took place in Texas, and we’ve had a few examples of Texas “justice”. But let us, for the moment, concede that he has legitimately been found guilty. Now look at how the decision to execute him was reached.

  After the trial, evidence emerged that jurors had consulted the Bible during their sentencing deliberations. At a hearing in June 1999, four of the jurors recalled that several Bibles had been present and highlighted passages had been passed around.

  One juror had read aloud from the Bible to a group of fellow jurors, including the passage, “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death”.

  Holy crap. Condemned to death because of a Bible verse? By the way, if you read the rest of Numbers 35, from which that verse was taken, it’s fairly exhaustive: if somebody kills someone else with iron, wood, or stone, they’re murderers, and need to be put to death. It’s simply yet another piece of Old Testament blanket savagery: simple-minded, unthinking, absolutist, and prejudicial demands for execution of anyone who violates their rules.

  The jurors also seem to have ignored the subsequent verses, where it says that you can offer an alternative verdict in the absence of malice of confining the killer to his ‘city of refuge,’ until the high priest dies, at which time he’s free to go. Is that a valid sentence in 21st century America, too?

  Given that Texas is a state that can’t be trusted in determining guilt, and given that the dim-witted jurors threw away reason and justice to blindly obey an archaic book (and only a select, small piece of that book), that sentence ought to be reduced, and the death penalty in general stricken from the state law books. Until, that is, enough of the state’s population is well-enough educated to make rational determinations of guilt, at which time they’ll also be smart enough to reject the death penalty as a primitive barbarism anyway.

I feel a little better now. Still need a nap, though, and maybe some aspirin.

I was sent this scan of a delightful article from Watchtower Magazine — you know, that bizarre piece of pulp from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Look at their list of wicked temptations that might lead a faithful person into a life of sin. Take special note of #2.

“A well-intentioned teacher urges you to pursue higher education at a university.” Oooh. Sends a chill down my spine.

I guess I’m even more evil than I, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, can imagine. I’ve urged many students to go on to graduate school, which as all of you advanced students know, is where all the real licentiousness, wickedness, baby barbecues, and bonobo sex goes on.

(Hat tip to WVCSR)

By now, you probably already know that Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath won the Nobel in chemistry for their work on the structure of the ribosome, and a well-deserved award it is. They (and many others) put a lot of work into puzzling out how this central feature of the cell works.

However, wouldn’t you know it, there are always religious parasites around who want to coopt a scientific discovery.

What strikes me today, however is that scientists who receive these honors win such praise for what they discover, not what they create. Through their cleverness, hard work, and remarkable brilliance, they have asked new questions and devised creative methods to unwrap hidden mysteries in the universe. But their success is detective work, not invention. This year’s award for the explanation of how ribosomes work is notable and certainly deserved. But these scientists discovered wonder that was already there – put there by the Creator!

Our deeper delight today is the surprising and vivid new window this work has created for those of us who want to give honor and glory to God, our Maker. The work of these Nobel laureates is a profound act of worship to the One who thought up the very possibility of “LIFE” and is slowly but eagerly giving us the right and capacity to uncover His secrets. As we honor those who discovered and explained ribosomes, we also pause to praise and honor God the Creator of ribosomes!

No, we don’t. Your god did not create ribosomes — they evolved. Not only did your god not have anything to do with it, his priests and unthinking followers, like the wanking cheerleader at beliefnet who wrote that piece, made no contribution to our understanding of how life works, and in some cases either discouraged knowledge-seeking or drew away resources for their pan-handling churches that could have been used, for instance, to educate the poor and bring up a generation of smarter, more productive citizenry who might have helped broaden and deepen our understanding.

Notice, too, how the fraud who wrote the piece also gives credit for the work of discovery to his god — as if he were giving us the ability to figure it out.

That freeloading moocher, that imaginary phantasm, deserves and gets no credit for anything. The bottom feeders of faith just want people to bestow their gratitude on the coffers of their churches, nothing more, and they will lie and steal credit for their personal benefit.

I get thrown the miracle of the shroud of Turin on a regular basis — just last week someone confronted me with it, basically saying “A-ha! Jesus existed because there’s an old scrap of cloth with a face on it!” It doesn’t matter that I point out that it’s been dated to the 13th century, and was nothing more than a profit-making ‘relic’ for churches that would also hawk Jesus’s foreskin and John the Baptist’s pinky bone. They’d usually retort that it was not humanly possible to make the shroud, so it had to be a religious miracle.

Now I’ve got more ammo. The Shroud of Turin has been recreated, using simple medieval technologies. No magic, just acidic pigments.

I know, it won’t stop the kooks, but it’s still useful to know. Next up, we need more evidence against the patently goofy Miracle of Luciano, which is the other ‘proof’ of god that gets flung around a lot.

There is an utterly ludicrous evangelical ‘course’ which has been advertising in England by slapping big ol’ polls on the wall. Like this one:

As is, those boxes are blank…but man, they’re just begging to be filled in, and a lot of people can’t resist walking up to them and marking the right answer. Unfortunately, the transit police are then arresting them.

There’s a metaphor there. Looking at this Alpha Course, what I see is a narrow evangelical game that pretends to be an open arena for skeptical inquiry, but is actually nothing of the kind. Their ads are full of questions that by their very nature reveal that they expect certain kinds of answers, answers that only verify the dogma of Christianity. Look what they go on about:

Who is Jesus?
Why did Jesus die?
How can we have faith?
Why and how do I pray?
Why and how should I read the Bible?
How does God guide us?
How can I resist evil?
Why & how should we tell others?
Does God heal today?
What about the Church?
Who is the Holy Spirit?
What does the Holy Spirit do?
How can I be filled with the Holy Spirit?
How can I make the most of the rest of my life?

But it seems to me that if your answer to the basic question of whether there is a god is “no”, it’s silly to go on to make assumptions about the divinity of Jesus, or babble about prayer, or talk about mysterious magical entities like the Holy Spirit.

You know what they’re doing. Answer any question with reason, or an expectation of evidence, anything but blind affirmation, and they will lock you up. It’s how religion works.

The number of godless Americans rises a few percentage points, and O Woe Is Us among the apologists. They are so weak and easily discomfited that it makes me chortle.

This one is pretty funny, too — he urges all the religious people to drop their differences (hah!), “Or risk becoming Europe, where religion is fast becoming an afterthought.” What is it with these guys? Europe is a fine, successful place, the thriving heartland of Western thought, and they do very well with a diminished religious influence. I think we’d do well to steal the best parts of European culture, and use them to replace the creaky embarrassing bits of ours…and that means religion should go.

My appearance at Bates made it to the Lewiston Sun Journal.

They did get a little piece of one point I tried to make. I don’t think religion makes people do wicked things, and that’s not my gripe with it. What it does is cut an intellectual brake line, making them incapable of dealing with certain situations rationally — they may do what is right, or they may do something that’s just nuts, but you just can’t rely on them doing what is reasonable.