Oh, I believe! What else could this be?
It’s the one on the left. The medium: bird poop on a pickup truck.
This is even better than Piss Christ!
Someday, someone will be able to tell me what distinguishes the theology of Wiley Drake from the theology of any random con man.
I’m feeling a bit uplifted at the word from the other side of the Atlantic: some doom and gloom from the Anglican church.
A long-serving Church of England bishop has predicted that the Church of England will cease to exist within a generation. In an article in the Sunday Telegraph, the Right Reverend Paul Richardson said declining church attendance and the rise in multiculturalism meant that “Christian Britain is dead”.
The Church is rapidly declining, with attendances at its services in freefall, a proposal on the table at the next General Synod meeting to cut the number of bishops, and huge holes in its finances due to the economic downturn and a lack of congregants to donate to the collection plate.
Richardson said that the Church had lost more than one in ten of its regular worshippers between 1996 and 2006, with a fall from more than one million to 880,000.
The only concern would be that some other, more malevolent church could rise to take its place. Maybe the next step would be for the state to declare that the official state religion was atheism, just to preclude any nastier replacement.
How often have you seen this? An affectionate couple are walking along holding hands, and one gives the other a kiss on the cheek.
The only way you might have missed seeing that fairly often is if you are legally blind. It’s common, it’s harmless, and it’s rather sweet — and we normally approve of such mild public expressions of affection.
Unless, of course, the couple consists of two young men, and especially if it is in Utah.
A gay couple says they were detained by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints security guards after one man kissed another on the cheek Thursday on Main Street Plaza.
“They targeted us,” said Matt Aune, 28. “We weren’t doing anything inappropriate or illegal, or anything most people would consider inappropriate for any other couple.”
Aune and his partner, Derek Jones, 25, were cited by Salt Lake City police for trespassing on the plaza, located at 50 East North Temple, according to Sgt. Robin Snyder.
I know exactly where that is — it’s near the huge office building that is headquarters for the Mormon Empire. Good work, Matt and Derek! If there is any place on the planet that most needs some demonstration of gay endearment, that’s one of the best (oddly enough, all the others that I can think of are also centers of established religion…). Maybe a few hundred loving couples of all sexes ought to descend on the place and show the Mormon security guards that they can’t quell people’s feelings for one another.
Mr Aune did show a little naivete, though.
The kiss happened on a former public easement given up by city in 2003 in a controversial land-swap deal. The easement became private property, allowing the church to ban protesting, smoking, sunbathing and other “offensive, indecent, obscene, lewd or disorderly speech, dress or conduct,” church officials said at the time. In exchange, the city got church property for a west-side community center.
Aune said he was one of those who protested the transfer at the time.
“They claimed in 2003 this would never happen, they were never going to arrest anyone,” he said. “It’s clear now they do have an agenda.”
It’s clear now? Trust me, when a church lobbies for the right to police offensive behavior in any place, they’ve got some very specific stuff in mind, and the people who don’t fit into their narrow fundamentalist pigeonhole should know it doesn’t matter what you do — they’re going to get you. You probably don’t even want to bend over to tie your shoelaces when some straitlaced repressed Mormon authority figure with a nightstick is standing somewhere behind you.
William Saletan highlights an interesting study in reproductive biology.
In a paper presented to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, Dr. David Greening, an Australian infertility expert, reports that 81 percent of the men in his study significantly improved their sperm quality, as measured by DNA fragmentation, through a simple one-week program.
The program was so easy that even the average guy could follow it. According to a summary of the study, “The men were instructed to ejaculate daily.”
He presents it as a conflict for religious organizations like the Catholic church, which frown on masturbation. Unfortunately, Saletan gets it wrong. The Catholic Church can still condemn masturbation as sinful and urge their followers to procreate madly because there’s nothing in their doctrine to favor quality reproduction. To the simple-minded, human beings are all r-selected. Pop ’em out and let God sort ’em out should be their motto.
Some Irish workmen were cutting down a tree, and lo and behold, the stump supposedly resembles the Virgin Mary, although how they found a hymen in that lump, I don’t know. The real source of amusement, though, is the way it has put the local Catholic church representatives in a dither.
Local parish priest Fr Willie Russell said on radio station Limerick Live 95FM yesterday that people should not worship the tree. “There’s nothing there . . . it’s just a tree . . . you can’t worship a tree.”
I hope the Irish druids are going to be rightly upset at this horribly offensive slur against their faith.
A spokesman for the Limerick diocesan office said the “church’s response to phenomena of this type is one of great scepticism”.
R i g h t. That would be a first.
“While we do not wish in any way to detract from devotion to Our Lady, we would also wish to avoid anything which might lead to superstition,” he said.
Says the fellow with a fine collection of saints’ feast days, magic crackers, sacred relics, and chants and rituals to invoke supernatural powers.
Oh, great. He’s been appointed by Obama.
He’ll do a fine job…he’s a competent administrator. I think we can trust him to manage the institution smoothly.
We can also trust him to drape Jesus over every major announcement, use the office as a platform for promoting religiosity, and otherwise taint the whole business with embarrassingly inane nonsense…just as he did with the human genome press conference. Isn’t it about time our government promoted secular values that work over these antique and ineffective superstitions that just make their proponents look goofy?
Forgive me, readers, but Madeline Bunting has raised up her tiny, fragile pin-head again, and I must address her non-arguments once more. Well, not her non-arguments, actually, but the same tedious non-arguments the fans of superstition constantly trundle out. She was at some strange conference where only people who love religion spoke and came away with affirmations of the usual tripe. It’s as if the “New Atheists” have provoked a counter-attack by critics armored in pudding and armed with damp sponges.
…the Archbishop of Canterbury was brisk, and he warned, “beware of the power of nonsense”. Science’s triumphalist claim as a competitor to failed religion was dangerous. In contrast, he offered an accommodation in which science and religion were “different ways of knowing” and “what you come to know depends on the questions you start with”. Different questions lead to “different practices of learning” – for example different academic disciplines. Rather than competitors, science and religion were both needed to pursue different questions.
We’re quite aware of the power of nonsense — and I agree that it certainly has a powerful draw on some people, from those who frolic with fairies to the Archbishop of Canterbury. That’s the frightening element of this whole argument, that people get sucked into spiritual fol-de-rol and think they’re suddenly deep and perceptive thinkers, and that waving a little fluff at the atheists will make them run away.
We often get this vague claim that religion is a different methodology and a different way of knowing things, and that judging religion as a science is a category error. Very well: different way of knowing what? What are these different questions that they are asking, how do they propose answering them, and why should we think these questions are even worth asking, and that their answers are valid? They never seem to get around to the specifics.
I mean, religion might well be the only avenue for addressing the question of how many bicycles are being peddled by angels right now, but that’s because it’s an irrelevant question that doesn’t affect our lives or the universe in any way, doesn’t have any way of being answered, and is built around imaginary referents, “angels”, for which we don’t even have evidence of their existence. But if religion is a way of knowing, how do they know what the answer is? What is their methodology? How do they verify their answers? Why is it that every religion, and even every individual within a religion, comes up with different answers?
That’s an example of a trivial question, but the same problems apply to the big questions central to their beliefs. How do we even know that we need redemption from sin? Is sin even a valid concept? They can’t answer these questions in an independently verifiable way.
Even when they try to get specific, they are hopelessly vague.
The second question from the audience – from the philosopher Mary Midgley – was what comes next? What both science and religion needed, argued Conway Morris was a more fruitful conversation. He raised the possibility that religion might be needed to help develop understanding into questions which have baffled scientists such as the nature of consciousness. The future of science is a series of imponderables, he concluded, and it may require a set of scientific skills “of which we have no inkling at the moment.”
I think the fruitful conversation we need between science and religion is more of a loud roar from the science side to silence the lies of the faithful. This argument that we need more input from religion comes almost entirely from those already committed to the superstition — personally, I think we could use entirely less babbling gobbledygook from the apologists.
But Conway Morris’s suggestion is pointless. How will religion help us understand the nature of consciousness? Having someone assert that it is the product of ghosts, spirits, or other such invisible manifestations from some non-place outside our universe is, it has turned out, a useless, unproductive, and old, dead hypothesis. Just to suggest that we may need new ways of thinking to approach a complex problem does not imply in any way that a very old way of thinking has some utility.
People like Conway Morris keep claiming that science and religion are not only compatible, but that both are necessary. I don’t buy it. I have two simple questions for those who claim that the two are complementary.
What specific fundamental principles of your religion do you actually use in your science? I don’t mean just general ethical principles, because atheists also have those, but tell me something specific about how you apply your religion to science?
Do you apply scientific principles to your religion, and do you do so consistently? Do you, for instance, test religious claims with experiment?
When you put it that specifically, most of the religious scientists I know would unashamedly and rightly say that no, they practice science in the lab or field without expectation of an intervention by Jesus to change the results, and that no, turning the skeptical tools of science against their faith would be inappropriate, or that god is not subject to our scrutiny. This is not compatibility. This is tergiversation. The only way they can claim compatibility is by pointing out that some individuals practice both religion and science, like Simon Conway Morris, but that says nothing, since people are damned good at encompassing contradictions.
For a terrifying look at what we get with religion, turn to this a review of Karen Armstrong’s What Religion Really Means. What a promising title! We godless atheists are always being told that we don’t really understand the depth of religion, so a book that promises to clearly state what it is sounds like a welcome addition to the debate. Until, that is, you read what she says it means.
She draws on 2,000 years of Christian theology and mysticism to demonstrate rich alternative ideas of the divine. Back in the 4th century AD, long before Wittgenstein and Derrida, Bishop Basil of Caesarea understood all about the limits of language, and stated them rather more clearly, too. “Thought cannot travel outside was, nor imagination beyond beginning.” God is, by definition, infinitely beyond human language. Earlier still, the Christian scholar Origen (185-254) discussed the “incongruities and impossibilities” in scripture. The fact that Dawkins et al think that pointing out the Bible’s imperfections undermine Jewish or Christian belief only demonstrates their ignorance of the traditions they presume to undermine. Of course it’s not meant to be understood literally, the early Christians seem to sigh across the centuries.
Armstrong further shows how even the words “I believe” have changed, and become scientised, to mean “I assert these propositions to be empirically correct.” Yet the original Greek pisteuo means something much more like “I give my heart and my loyalty.” In the gospels, she says, quoting the great German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus himself sees God not as “an object of thought or speculation, but as an existential demand”.
What a sodden pile of words rendered meaningless by the attempt to bloat their meaning.
Yes, we know that many rarefied theologians believe in a lot of airy nonsense, but let’s not pretend that the vast majority of Christians would not reject those claims out of hand — they are far more literal. Or, rather, they claim to be more literal, but actually hold a body of faith that is just as subjective, just as highly evolved and refined, as the set of beliefs held by the most opaque and obfuscatory theologian. There really isn’t much difference in the methodology of Rudolf Bultmann or Ken Ham — both are piling up the subjective bullshit as fast as they can shovel it, they are just using different conventions and different language tailored to their different audiences. It’s simply different…framing.
As an example of Bunting’s different way of knowing and different kinds of questions and different practices of learning, though, what do I learn from that slippery gemisch of pious protestations? One thing and one thing only: the power of nonsense.
I think we’ve all mastered that lesson by now. It’s time for the theologians to grow up and move on to questions with some heft and meaning, that are actually applicable to our lives and our culture.
I just got this note from Richard Dawkins, who is attending the Cambridge Darwin Festival.
Robert Hinde is the elder statesman of the science of Ethology and one one of the most respected figures in British biology. I just met him at the big Cambridge Darwin Festival. Robert had agreed to speak in one of the sessions on ‘Religion and Science’ but withdrew on learning that it was sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. He is now even more respected among British biologists.
We need more of this kind of action, and we need to publicize it more.
One other curious phenomenon: I searched the website for the festival for mention of the Templeton Foundation sponsorship. It’s not there! It is, apparently, noted in very small type on the printed program. Isn’t that odd that a big bucks foundation would be so shy about having their involvement advertised? Maybe it’s because it’s getting around that associating with the Templeton is a mark of shame, and the Templeton itself has noticed that people tend to turn away when their name is mentioned. Or maybe they’re just noble and self-effacing. Right.
Orthodox Jews are rioting in Jerusalem. The reason: because the city allows a parking lot to remain open on Saturday, which means people are able to drive on their holy day, which they consider sacred. Anne Barker was there to record the event as a journalist, and she switched on her recorder to document it all — when the protesters turned on her.
I found myself herded against a brick wall as they kept on spitting – on my face, my hair, my clothes, my arms.
It was like rain, coming at me from all directions – hitting my recorder, my bag, my shoes, even my glasses.
Big gobs of spit landed on me like heavy raindrops. I could even smell it as it fell on my face.
Somewhere behind me – I didn’t see him – a man on a stairway either kicked me in the head or knocked something heavy against me.
I wasn’t even sure why the mob was angry with me. Was it because I was a journalist? Or a woman? Because I wasn’t Jewish in an Orthodox area? Was I not dressed conservatively enough?
In fact, I was later told, it was because using a tape-recorder is itself a desecration of the Shabbat even though I’m not Jewish and don’t observe the Sabbath.
This is something too many religious people fail to understand — you can practice your religion, other people can practice their religion, but you don’t get to tell other people that they must practice your religion. If your crazy superstition says you aren’t allowed to push a button on a certain day of the week, then don’t. If your old myths claim that your god turns into a cracker when the right ritual is carried out, go ahead and believe that. If your dogma dictates that you should visit a certain magic rock before you die, then go ahead, make your pilgrimage.
But excuse us, everyone who doesn’t have these wacky ideas has a perfect right to push the button, disrespect your cracker, or stay home and skip the crowds…and we also have the right to point and laugh at you. And if you are so intolerant, so irrational, and so vicious as to try and impose your foolishness on others, especially in such disgusting ways, then we have an obligation to use civic law and the power of the state to protect those others’ liberties.
Unfortunately, some states become so entangled in the religious absurdities of a segment of their society that they lose the ability to protect every citizen’s rights. That’s happening in Israel, and it’s happening to a lesser degree here in the US.
