I do love to see the trembling of the faithful

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.

I didn’t even know there was a reporter there!

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.

Bill Donohue is getting anticipatory apoplexy

30 September is going to be International Blasphemy Day, and I suspect Donohue will be turning purple while his head twirls around on his neck. It should be entertaining: he’s already sending out press releases to complain.

BLASPHEMY DAY TARGETS CHRISTIANITY

The Center for Inquiry will launch the first International Blasphemy Day on September 30, the anniversary of the 2005 publication of the Danish cartoons that so inflamed Muslims worldwide. Billed as a free speech event designed to oppose such things as a Muslim-sponsored U.N. resolution banning criticism of religion, the day has drawn the support of people like PZ Myers. Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota known for intentionally desecrating a consecrated Host, says the day was established to “mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal”; he wants every day to be Blasphemy Day.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue spoke to this event today:

The Center for Inquiry is factually incorrect to say that “Free speech is the foundation on which other liberties rest.” Freedom of conscience is the first liberty, and it is inextricably linked to freedom of religion. Moreover, the whole concept of inalienable rights presupposes a belief in the Creator. In other words, atheists have the right to mock religion because our Christian Founding Fathers afforded them human rights.

They are all such phonies. The stated purpose of Blasphemy Day has nothing to do with any religion but Islam, yet there is not one scheduled event insulting Muslims. We can only guess why. So who have they chosen to mock? You guessed it–Christians.

Artist Dana Ellyn will wander to Washington, D.C. to show her masterpiece, “Jesus Does His Nails,” a portrait of Jesus polishing a nail jammed into his hand. In Los Angeles, there will be a film about a gay molesting priest and another about a boy who is so angry about being sent to bed that he asks God to kill his parents. Oh, yes, American Atheists will conduct “De-Baptisms” in New Jersey.

Nice to know that even the atheists know that Christians can be counted on to react to their antics like good Christians. Which is why there will be no violence.

Ol’ Bill really doesn’t get it. The purpose of the day is to jeer at religion, not to do his dirty work of attacking just one sectarian slice of the whole pie of absurdity. In the US, we’ll tend to poke fun at Christianity more than Islam because it’s Christianity that’s in our faces every day of the year. Islam also lacks a histrionic spokesman like Donohue to make entertaining facial spasms for us.

I’m hoping there will be no violence, but I can’t say the same for those “good Christians.” I get a lot of threats from those people, inflamed by affronted polemicists like Donohue, and I can also count on the Catholic League to pine for opportunities to turn Muslims loose on atheists.

My Fargo visit makes the local news!

It’s a fine story, taken from the press conference I gave on Thursday, except for two things.

The comments are a mix of the sane and the deranged. Fargo has some interesting people living up there—a lot of smart, sensible, rational people, and some some very noisy lunatics. It’s strange how the lunatics rarely show up for any of my talks, however, but they always have the most vivid opinions of them.

The other problem is the end. The writer just had to do the usual thing of looking for a dissenting voice and giving them the unquestioned last word.

The Rev. Jeff Sandgren, pastor at Olivet Lutheran Church in Fargo, said Thursday that he doesn’t think science and religion need to be at odds.

He tells the story of an astronomy course he took in college and his introduction to the professor who taught it.

“Here comes this well-known physics professor and the guy is carrying two books, one was this great big astronomy book and the next one was the Bible,” Sandgren recalled.

“Mind you,” Sandgren added, “this is a guy who has been working for NASA, he’s a brilliant physicist and he says: ‘I have two books in my hand, this one tells us how – and he holds up the astronomy book – and this book tells us who.’

“For me,” Sandgren said, “that’s always been the dialectic I’ve lived with.”

OK, fine. He’s always lived with insipid opinions. He’s a pastor, I’m unsurprised.

But tell me…what, exactly, does that Bible contribute to students’ understanding of astronomy, huh? It may say “who”, but so does the Bhagavad Gita, so do the Eddas, so do the local Anishinabe myths, so does Dr Seuss (it’s Cindy Lou Who, in case you forgot). Being a ‘guy who worked for NASA’ does not confer infallibility or even a smidgen of authority in a discussion of the identity of invisible intelligent vapor wafting about outside the universe. Let’s hear some of the arguments, rather than waving about holy books and second-hand physics degrees, please.

I’m also feeling a bit cranky about the asymmetry of the situation. You won’t catch me striding boldly into my classes with a biology textbook in one hand and The God Delusion in the other, triumphantly announcing to the students that one book explains biology, and the other is the philosophy of atheism they should follow — that would be inappropriate, a distraction from the subject students were there to learn, and an unprofessional violation of my responsibilities as an instructor.

Yet here’s this guy proudly recounting tales from his college days when a bible-thumping bozo would come into a science class and preach Christian superstition. No wonder he’s a benighted peddler of hoary dogmas now, instead of an astronomer — he got screwed over in his education, and he’s not even aware of it.

My new, revised retirement plan

My former plan for a prosperous retirement plan involved suddenly finding Jesus and winning a Templeton Prize, but it always left an unpleasant taste in mouth. Sure, I’d be rich, but to do it I’d have to stand up in front of the whole world and pretend to be an addled moron. It was going to take a lot of drinks-in-coconuts-with-umbrellas to wash that indignity into unawareness, you know.

But now I have a new plan that leaves my dignity mostly uncompromised! Well, somewhat compromised. Here’s the idea:

  1. Go to England.

  2. Chat up a few vicars.

  3. Become horribly offended that they are not atheists.

  4. Sue the whole delusional lot of them for rejecting my unbelief.

I’ll be following the case of the Muslim woman who had a conversation about religion with her Christian hotel hosts with some anticipation — it could set a very useful precedent for me. Oh, and if that isn’t enough, Melanie Phillips and Andrew Brown have already said some horribly unkind things about us atheists. Perhaps I can hang the whole British journalistic establishment upside down and shake them for the pennies in their pockets.

Other strategies involve hunting down Simon Cowell and singing in front of him. I’m positive that whatever he says will be actionable. People can’t go around having different opinions and even expressing them, you know!

Missiology?

I have learned something new today: you can get a Ph.D. in converting the heathen!

DEVELOPING A CHURCH PLANTING MOVEMENT IN INDIA
By DANE WINSTEAD FOWLKES
submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in the subject
MISSIOLOGY
at the UNIVERSITY OF THE FREE STATE
SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR PIETER VERSTER
November 2004

Here’s the abstract, if you’ve got a hankerin’ to head on over to India and undermine the Hindu religion, it might be useful.

This dissertation acknowledges the need for Church Planting
Movements among the unreached peoples of India. Of particular concern to
this study is the application of Church Planting Movement strategy to
forward caste Hindus of India.

It traces the historical development of group or people movement
strategy and then compares that strategy with traditional missionary
approaches in India. It shows that evangelizing households is the primary
strategy of the New Testament and the most appropriate strategy for
initiating Church Planting Movements. The thesis carefully examines
salvation understanding in the Hindu context and its relationship to the caste
system. All of this lays a foundation for a proper approach to evangelization
of forward caste Hindus in light of the fact that there have been no
documented Church Planting Movements among forward caste Hindus in all
of India.

The paper concludes that the best approach to facilitating a Church
Planting Movement among forward caste Hindus is by not planting
churches. As contradictory as this sounds, the paper shows that Christian
disciples remaining within Hindu culture and familial systems holds the
potential for the most indigenous approach to establishing multiplying
churches among forward caste Hindus.

Now I’m wondering…are there equivalent documents in India that describe how to peel American Christians away from their churches? It would be useful information to have.

An evangelical subculture has rotted the mind of America

Frank Schaeffer was on fire in this interview with Rachel Maddow, prompted by a bizarre NJ poll that showed 35% of the conservatives in that state believe Obama is the anti-christ. Heh, “We have a village idiot in this country, it’s called fundamentalist Christianity”. Gold star for Schaeffer!

He’s right. Those are minds that are lost, and we have to move past them.

A completely unsurprising result

A recent survey that correlated the degree of fundamentalism, as measured by positive responses to questions about the absolute, literal truth of the Bible, and teenage birth rates, has discovered something we all suspected all along: fundie kids are getting pregnant despite their stern, restrictive upbringing. There are caveats, of course, and some implied messages here.

However, the results don’t say anything about cause and effect, though study researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh offers a speculation of the most probable explanation: “We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself.”

Fancy that. The adolescent sex drive is a power greater than Jesus.