Crazy talk from ministers

We’ve got a fine gang of nuts coming up through the religious ranks right now. There are some real lunatics associated with Sarah Palin: she’s linked to her home-town priests, Ed Kalnin and Thomas Muthee, who are linked to Morningstar Ministries and Rick Joyner. These cranks have a plan.

Muthee is an international celebrity for his role in a series of documentary videos, seen by millions worldwide, that claim Christians can reduce crime, murder, traffic accidents, addiction, and environmental degradation by driving out, from cities and towns, demon spirits and accused witches.

I am most amused by the clip at that link in which Joyner complains about the unfair treatment Palin received from the press, because they jumped on every crazy little thing she said. The press largely missed her religious beliefs, possibly because they’re so far out there it’s hard to believe a candidate for high office believes in any of that nonsense. She’s a “third wave” Christian.

In an interview for a September 12, 2008 Religion News Service story Rick Joyner stated, “We are probably described as Third Wave. We have had a lot of influence from movements that I think are identified as Third Wave.” The Third Wave is a newly emergent tendency in Christianity, little more than two decades old, which now encompasses by some estimates five percent of the Earth’s population and has been promoted from Ted Haggard’s former Colorado Springs mega-church.

Third Wave doctrine teaches that Christians must reclaim the Earth from demons spirits which possess cities, towns, geographic territories, people, ethnic groups, and even family lines. The cleansing of those demons, and unbelievers, from Earth will usher in a Christian utopian age.

And then there’s Pastor Steven Anderson, the loon who has been praying for Obama’s death. There is a short compendium of some of the most hateful, looney things Anderson has said, and it’s not pretty. Homophobia and petty-minded vindictiveness are apparently not obstacles to claiming spiritual authority…they seem to be more like preliminary qualifications.

Let’s keep all of these nasty, crazy people out of political power, OK? Please?

A peek into Obama’s “Faith Council”

Frank Page is a former head of the Southern Baptist Convention (i.e., nuts) and is also now a member of the Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. In an interview, he talks about what’s going on in that council, and there is actually some good news.

My hope was that there would have been more time for focusing on formulating actual policy recommendations for the president. They keep saying that that’s something we’ll have more time for in the future. But most of our time so far has been briefings from administration officials about various government programs that are already in place.

So they’re wasting a little money and time by keeping these believers around, but they’re not wasting a lot of money by actually paying attention to them and letting them set policy. That’s reassuring, but not particularly efficient…unless, of course, the efficiency lies in keeping the delusional thinkers tied up in committee meetings.

But then, the way they’re thinking delusionally is aggravating. Page is the most conservative member of the team, and what do they put him on? A fatherhood committee.

There have been times when my voice and voices of others have been kindly heard, but the wish is always expressed that we need to find common ground or consensus. For example, I’m on the fatherhood task force, and there have been times when I have attempted to deal with the issue of fathers being better fathers because of their faith traditions, that they need to be true to the Bible or some other holy book about what makes a man a good father.

And they kindly listen, and then we move on to what government programs are available for fathers. It’s more about how the government would like to help fathers and here’s what government money is available for this problem. I feel that the key to solving those problems is not government money but the responsibility that’s rooted in one’s faith.

I can’t quite imagine a more disastrous social policy than basing male roles on the patriarchal misogyny of the Bible. Well, except for using that book to define female roles.

I also doubt that they’re actually honestly looking for common ground. There’s a notable absence of fierce god-hating atheists on the council (hey, if they can put conservatives who want to destroy the public school system on school boards, why not anti-religious crusaders on the Faith Council?), so I think the system is more interested in stacking the deck.

Prophet, Patriarch…PZ

Michael Dowd, the peculiar author of Thank God for Evolution, has a strange podcast up that promotes the New Atheists because they are the new prophets — we’re telling it like it is, and religious folks need more of that. He also urges people to read Pharyngula, or, if they want something a little gentler, to read Richard Dawkins’ site…ah, flattery.

Anyway, the gist of his argument is that “The religion that the New Atheists are attacking is otherworldly, superstitious religion when it’s interpreted as objectively real. And that’s not where the power of our religious language lies…”, which is, in part, the point I was making when I criticized those faith-heads who make up pseudo-scientific explanations for the miraculous. Of course, I disagree that there is any power in religious language, except as potent mind-games to tap into kinks and biases in human psychology.

Religion poisons everything — even porn!

Jen went to a Christian anti-porn crusade, and all she got for her trouble was a lot of lies. It’s amazing how, on these issues like birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and pornography which stir up so much concern among Christians, they always resort to invented statistics and bogus sloganeering to make their case. Shouldn’t it make someone on their side of the argument wake up and wonder what’s going on when they can’t even tell the truth in their PR?

Deluded, but with good intent

The video below is of a devout Mormon (I’m so sorry for him) speaking out against the church policies of discrimination that led to all that money being sunk into Proposition 8 in California. It’s good to be reassured that there are Mormons who aren’t full of homophobia and hate. Unfortunately, the bishop there isn’t quite so open-minded: he tells the fellow to stop, he cuts his microphone, and he has him escorted out.

(via C.L. Hanson)

Saving gods by making them even emptier of meaning

I was having a conversation with a colleague last night, and one of the things we were talking about is the way modern religion has rushed to emulate the trappings of science, where every explanation must have an epistemological foundation in real world observations. A paradigmatic example is Ken Ham’s bizarre Creation “Museum”, which on the one hand repeatedly rejects the power of human reason, while on the other constantly throws up pseudo-scientific displays that mimic those of real museums, trying to illustrate the apocalyptic fever dreams of a world-destroying flood with mechanistic explanations, from floating islands of logs that carried the koalas to Australia to faux-authentic maps of the path of the tidal wave that killed everyone; the literature of creationism is also thick with ‘feasibility studies’ of the engineering of the Ark, estimates of how many species could have fit aboard, peculiar adoptions of physics software that, by diddling certain inputs, they use to justify such nonsense as hydroplate theory, explanations of the distribution of fossils by hydrologic sorting, etc., etc., etc. Witness also the recent small surge of creationists maneuvering to get Ph.D.s from prestigious institutions, from Berkeley to Harvard, not with the intent of doing actual scientific research, but because it adds an illusion of authority to their apologetics and denial of science.

What we are witnessing is the obvious bankruptcy of spiritual thought. We know it, and they know it; it is not sufficient to declare the Noachian Flood to be a miracle, a catastrophe conjured up in an instant with a snap of God’s omnipotent fingers, with all of its traces magically erased or juggled by God for God’s ineffable purposes. It is not enough to say that God willed that trilobites would come to rest in certain layers of Flood sediments, and the bones of mammals would be buried in yet another graveyard of stone; no, they must invent natural processes that assist their enfeebled deity, that sound more plausible than that their god placed each dead clam in its final resting place, one by one, with loving attention to its stratigraphic layer and accompanying fauna.

Their work is an admission of failure. They are struggling to embed their deity in the natural universe of Newton and Darwin, steadily stripping him of powers in order to accommodate themselves to a very human success story, the power of rational, scientific thought, while somehow, they hope, not losing god among the protons and black holes and mitochondria and ion fluxes across neuronal membranes. It’s not working. They dream of shackling dinosaurs to help them popularize creationist apologetics, but it only works if the people don’t look too closely, don’t get so enthralled with the gimmick that they look more deeply at the evidence than at the faith message, and discover that the creationists are lying to them. They are lost because they are praising the evidence of the natural world rather than the unfounded revelations of spiritual guesswork, and at some point, some people are going to notice the bait-and-switch of using dinosaurs to sell god.

At least some people are noticing, though. The Wall Street Journal commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to answer the same question: Where does evolution leave God?. Of course, Richard Dawkins slams that one out of the park. Evolution leaves the gods nowhere, with nothing to do. The world trundles along on the laws of physics, with never a violation in sight, and god has become a cosmic irrelevancy, and worse, a boojum that defies reason and evidence. We have no need of that hypothesis, and it is nothing more than an obstacle to comprehension.

Karen Armstrong takes a different tack. She has noticed that religion has been busily undermining itself by coupling faith to fact. When theologians accept the explanations of science and try to absorb them into their religious understanding, they are binding their notion of god to a rather more limited body of abilities; now God’s actions are suddenly constrained by E=MC2. Not that they would say such a thing, of course; God is omnipotent, so he can break all the speed limits if he wanted to, he just chooses not to. She admits that Darwin has created a crisis for religious thought because “Christians [had] become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource.”

For once, I agree with Armstrong. She’s precisely correct — rational thinking, evidence-based reasoning, and science in general are inimical to the spiritual state of mind, and draw us away from superstition and other failed modes of thinking. What has occurred over the course of the last few centuries is a growing (but by no means universal or certain) recognition that science gets the job done, while religion makes excuses. Sometimes they are very pretty excuses that capture the imagination of the public, but ultimately, when you want to win a war or heal a dying child or get rich from a discovery or explore Antarctica, you turn to science and reason, or you fail.

If you’re one of these New Atheists, the lesson is obvious: ditch the useless faith, and follow science. But then, we’re the results-oriented children of the Enlightenment, so of course we prefer to do what actually works. If you’re a die-hard faith-head like Karen Armstrong, though, you instead turn to that religious style of thinking, and make excuses for happily following the path of failure and nebulous, airy-fairy know-nothingness.

But Darwin may have done religion–and God–a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped–even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

Neat trick, that; she takes the notion of a worldly god, one tied to the operation of the world, and calls that “primitive”, while suggesting that a god that is a symbol, a transcendence, a spiritual (whatever that word means) intuition, is somehow the more sophisticated god. As Dawkins explains, mere existence and effect are trifles with which a truly awesome god does not trouble himself. Armstrong carries it even further: her god is a sublime state which we can only appreciate by contemplating the pain and suffering of life and distancing ourselves from it — god seems to be that which we get when we reject the universe. She even asserts that religion explains nothing, as if this were a positive attribute.

Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace

Shorter Karen Armstrong: Ignorance is bliss.

I don’t want to live peacefully with difficult realities, and I see no virtue in savoring excuses for avoiding a search for real answers. I am the product of millions of generations of individuals who each fought against a hostile universe and won, and I aim to maintain the tradition. I want my children to do the same, and I want all of my fellow human beings to struggle to wrest a better world from the rocks and gasses and radiation of this universe we find ourselves in. There are no easy solutions. Each of us can think of a thousand thorny problems, from the personal to the global, and we all know this: we will not solve them by going to church and kneeling down and praising an immaterial god whose primary attribute in the sloganeering of theologians like Armstrong is that he is a symbol of that which doesn’t exist.

In my conversation last night, my friend reminded me of a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche that is appropriate here: “Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.” Let’s work to spare humankind from further further religious ‘thought’, that shallow pretentiousness with delusions of profundity.

Born to believe?

Not this nonsense again: it’s the argument that it’s only natural to believe in gods.

Atheism really may be fighting against nature: humans have been hardwired by evolution to believe in God, scientists have suggested.

The idea has emerged from studies of the way children’s brains develop and of the workings of the brain during religious experiences. They suggest that during evolution groups of humans with religious tendencies began to benefit from their beliefs, perhaps because they tended to work together better and so stood a greater chance of survival.

The findings challenge campaigners against organised religion, such as Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. He has long argued that religious beliefs result from poor education and childhood “indoctrination”.

Oh, piss off, you tiresome apologists for superstition. Dawkins did not make any such simple-minded argument; The God Delusion really is becoming one of those books beloved by those who haven’t read it for their ability to misrepresent it. There may very well be natural biases that incline people to see agency everywhere around them, and to accept the dogmas of the tribe. So what?

I am an atheist, and it feels good. I am not a mutant freak who is struggling against either my instincts, radio waves broadcast from CIA satellites, or the sub-etheric pleas of downy-winged angels. I have hardwired bits in my brain, I am sure, and I also have the forces of history and culture shaping the way I think, but that does not mean anything as shallow and simplistic as that I should surrender to my church for the good of my biological impulses.

I was also born with a brain that found object permanence extremely surprising. My parents could play peek-a-boo with me, and it took me a year or so to realize that it was not a massively beneficent act of nature that my mother’s face could still exist! Behind her hands! When I wasn’t looking! Hooray! Ha ha! This does not imply that thinking, conscious, educated adult human beings should continue to collapse in peals of childish laughter every time they open a door and find that their family doesn’t vanish when they aren’t in sight.

The weakly formed predispositions of babies are not obstacles to rational thought. Except, maybe, to adults with the brains of babies. The rest of us can grow out of that nonsense.

A clarification: I actually do think there are inborn biases that tend to make religious belief a path of least resistance for many people. To escape that trap is not ‘fighting against nature’, nor is it an obstacle to godlessness.

The Times article was a very poor mish-mash of Bruce Hood’s ideas. Hood has his own commentary on the press — once again, some journalists make themselves the enemy of clarity of expression and accuracy.

“The mantle is far, far greater than the intellect; the priesthood is the guiding power.”

I got email from a young former Mormon who has been trying to puzzle his way through some of the craziness that comes out of Utah, and he sent me this strange document by Elder Boyd K. Packer, which is apparently representative of a lot of Mormon scholarship. I think he wants to know if I think it is as bat-rogerin’ insane as he does.

Yes. Yes it is.

Basically, it’s the Mormon version of the Courtier’s Reply. It goes on and on about how the only way to write a true history of the Mormon church is to fully accept all of its superstitions. It’s blatant and explicit.

Do you believe that God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ personally appeared to the boy prophet, Joseph Smith, Jr., in the year 1820?

Do you have personal witness that the Father and the Son appeared in
all their glory and stood above that young man and instructed him according to the testimony that he gave to the world in his published history?
Do you know that the Prophet Joseph Smith’s testimony is true because
you have received a spiritual witness of its truth?

Do you believe that the church that was restored through him is, in the
Lord’s words, “the only true and living church upon the face of the whole
earth, with which I, the Lord, am well pleased” (D&C 1:30)? Do you know
by the Holy Ghost that this is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints restored by heavenly messengers in this modern era; that the Church
constitutes the kingdom of God on earth, not just an institution fabricated
by human agency?

Do you believe that the successors to the Prophet Joseph Smith were
and are prophets, seers, and revelators; that revelation from heaven directs
the decisions, policies, and pronouncements that come from the headquarters of the Church? Have you come to the settled conviction, by the
Spirit, that these prophets truly represent the Lord?

Now, you obviously noted that I did not talk about academic qualifications. Facts, understanding, and scholarship can be attained by personal
study and essential course work. The three qualifications I have named
come by the Spirit, to the individual. You can’t receive them by secular
training or study, by academic inquiry or scientific investigation.

I repeat: if there is a deficiency in any of these, then, regardless of what
other training an individual possesses, he cannot comprehend and write or
teach the true history of this church. The things of God are understood
only by one who possesses the Spirit of God.

I don’t believe any of that nonsense. I guess I can’t criticize the Mormon church ever, any more. Isn’t that handy? The only people who can comment on the church are those who have fully accepted all of its fundamental premises.

That Catch-22. It’s the best catch there ever was.

Boom-boom-chika-wow-wow. Amen.

The Catholic church has instructions for you before you get down to business with your sweetie: you’re supposed to say a little prayer. This one.

Father, send your Holy Spirit into our hearts. Place within us love that truly gives, tenderness that truly unites, self-offering that tells the truth and does not deceive, forgiveness that truly receives, loving physical union that welcomes.

Open our hearts to you, to each other and to the goodness of your will. Cover our poverty in the richness of your mercy and forgiveness. Clothe us in true dignity and take to yourself our shared aspirations, for your glory, forever and ever. Mary, our mother, intercede for us. Amen.

Ooooh. Gets me hot*. Maybe Kristin Maguire can write a story with this little fillip in it.

Hey, wait a minute…what are a bunch of old pseudo-celibates doing recommending prayers before sex? Do they teach this one to the altar boys?

*Actually, it doesn’t. I lied. I think it would be kind of a buzzkill.

Like ripe fruit, ready for the picking

If you’re going to build a massive con to defraud people out of $50 million, you want to pick your marks carefully. You want people who are gullible, don’t demand a lot of evidence, and are willing to go along with you as long as it takes to milk them dry, as long as you promise bliss. Where would you go to find a large number of such people? It’s obvious: go to church, like Tri Energy did.

Like those caught up in other get-rich scams — from Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme, which initially snared wealthy Jews, to an alleged $4.4 million fraud aimed at deaf people — Tri Energy’s investors had something in common. Many were Mormons and born-again Christians who shared dreams and prayers on nightly conference calls. They vowed to use the profits for charitable works and kept raising funds, at times taking out second mortgages, draining retirement accounts and recruiting relatives.

No one deserves the fleecing these victims got, though. Elderly people had their savings cleaned out; at least one committed suicide after he realized how thoroughly he had been ripped off.