Men, Women Divided Over Sex Bill

There is a bill pending in the Bahamas which would outlaw marital rape, and it is facing a lot of opposition. There is a common theme in the arguments against it: see if you can figure out what it is.

“It is ridiculous for them to try to make that a law, because I don’t think a man can rape his own wife. After two people get married, the Bible says that they become one – one flesh. How is it possible to rape what is yours?” asked Mr. Sutherland.

“Even if a woman says no to her husband it still can’t be considered rape because she is his wife. He already paid his dues at the church and she already said ‘I do,’ so from then on, even if [a man] forces sex on his wife, it isn’t rape,” he said.

“I disagree with the bill because I disagree that a man can rape his wife. The Bible tells me that a man’s body is his wife’s and her body is his. How could he rape her?” asked Ms. Sweeting.

It looks to me as if being brought up with a belief in the literal truth of a misogynistic document like the Bible can inculcate the evil idea that women are possessions, and that marriage is an act of handing over a woman’s bill of sale to a man. I thought a wife was a partner, not a slave.

Speaking of paradise…

It’s not just Oklahoma — New Zealand apparently has no sick people. They have a brand new faith-healing clinic that fixes everything right up!

Rea said patients with problems as diverse as stroke paralysis, cancer or dyslexia were cured, usually within one 20-minute session.

Wow. Complete cures, in just 20 painless minutes. Doctors’ offices must be closing all over the place, and the hospitals must be empty.

Sorry, Tulsa, I was going to pack up my bags and move to your shining flawless city, but I think now I’m going to have to move to Christchurch. They’ve probably got more squid.

Never trust a guy named ‘Hayseed’

Israel has no oil, but some people wish it did, for the worst of reasons. This is an amazing story of a con artist and his willing victims…and nothing is better at leading the sheep to slaughter than religion.

When James Cojanis heard the first rumblings of Armageddon, he was sitting in his San Jose home with the radio tuned to a popular Christian show called The Prophecy Club. Featured that day was a charismatic Texas oilman named Harold “Hayseed” Stephens. Speaking in the rousing cadence of a Southern preacher, he told listeners that “the greatest oil field on Earth is under the southwest corner of the Dead Sea”–and that his company, Ness Energy International, was about to tap into it. In doing so, he said, it would drain the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, prompt Arab countries to attack Israel, and at last touch off the great battle that would usher in the end of days.

As soon as the show was over, Cojanis got on the phone to find out how to invest in the venture. Days later the 70-year-old retiree received a form letter addressed, “Dear End Time Servant.” It claimed that the oil reserves at Ness’ planned drilling site ranged “from one billion to 40 billion barrels…putting this prospect in a class of the super giant oil fields of the world.” Without a second thought, Cojanis bought $120,000 worth of stock in Ness. “Faith is a gift God puts in your heart,” he explained when I visited him in October at his cluttered town house, piled with crumpled boxes of prophecy-themed newsletters and cassette tapes of old Christian radio shows. “And I didn’t have any doubt that Ness was a plan of God. He raised up Hayseed Stephens to find Israel’s oil.”

Eight years later, Ness has yet to sink so much as an initial borehole for a Dead Sea well. In fact, for most of its existence it has never even held exploration rights in Israel. Its U.S. headquarters, a barnlike storefront topped with an open Bible sprouting an oil well, was shuttered in 2006. Since then, its stock price has fallen from a high of nearly $5 to a mere 3 cents; Cojanis’ $120,000 investment is now worth $3,000. Not that he’s worried. “I’m glad the stock price is in the tank,” he says. “When they hit oil and the stock goes sky-high, that means Armageddon is around the corner.” At that point, he plans to use his gains to spread the word that the end times are here, preparing as many souls for heaven as possible.

It’s always a shock to see these cheerful people who love, love, love the idea of Armageddon, and want nothing more than for it to come as soon as possible. This isn’t a hard concept to grasp: if your ideal expectation for the near-future is a world-wide catastrophe that has hundreds of millions of people dying in nuclear fireballs, there’s something wrong with you.

A little justice in Wisconsin

Last year, Kara Neumann died of juvenile diabetes. Her death was slow and painful, and entirely unnecessary — her parents believed in the power of prayer and allowed her obvious symptoms to go untreated except for entreaties to an invisible and inert god. They weren’t opposed to technology in general, since they did sent out an email to an online ministry requesting ’emergency prayer’, but they did neglect the only technology that mattered, a simple injection of insulin.

There was some concern at that time that there was actually a loophole in Wisconsin law that seems to say that Christianity was a treatment comparable to modern medicine. Fortunately, the jurors in the trial of the parents saw the neglect that led to the death of their daughter, and convicted the Neumanns of second-degree reckless homicide. I don’t think the father helped his own case with his sincere testimony.

Neumann, who once studied to be a Pentecostal minister, testified Thursday that he believed God would heal his daughter and he never expected her to die. God promises in the Bible to heal, he said.

“If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God,” Neumann testified. “I am not believing what he said he would do.”

He believed. He was theologically informed. He was a member of a church (even if it is an insane organization). He was missing one important thing: the awareness to question. And for that, a young girl died. Religion matters, all right, it matters in an evil way.

The mermaid fatwa

We are often told that religion is a different way of knowing, that it can provide us with a different perspective and different information. I have not believed this at all, because no one has ever been able to give me an example of actual, useful information obtained from a religion, that could not have been generated by a reality-based approach.

Until now.

This is a question that I had never even considered before; it was unexpected and surprising. I think I’ve finally experienced an insightful religious question.

Are you allowed to eat a mermaid?

Apparently, the Koran or some of its promoters discussed mermaids at some point, therefore they are presumed to exist. The question is then a reasonable one: if you throw a net over the side of your dhow, and haul in a mermaid along with a nice catch of ordinary fish, is she halaal? Can you chop her up, sell her at the market, or take her home to the family for dinner?

There is a fatwa on the subject of eating mermaids that cites many scholarly Islamic sources. Here are a few.

Al-Durayr – a Maaliki scholar – said in al-Sharh al-Sagheer (2/182): Sea animals in general are permissible, whether it is dead meat or a ‘dog’ (shark) or a ‘pig’ (dolphin), and they do not need to be slaughtered properly. End quote.

Al-Saawi said in his commentary on that: The words “or a ‘dog’ or a ‘pig’ also include a ‘human’, referring thereby to mermaids. End quote.

Shaykh Ibn ‘Uthaymeen (may Allaah have mercy on him) said, after stating that it is more likely that it is permissible to eat crocodiles and sea snakes: The correct view is that nothing is excluded from that, and that all the sea creatures which can only live in water are halaal, alive or dead, because of the general meaning of the verse – i.e., “Lawful to you is (the pursuit of) water game and its use for food” [al-Maa’idah 5:64].

Well.

That was a revelation. I’ll never be able to watch Splash with the same eyes again.

Now I just need recipes. I’ve gutted enough salmon that I probably don’t need cleaning instructions.

Oh, and a mermaid. I wonder if the Asian market in the Twin Cities would have any?

(via Salty Current)

Ken Miller on Collins

Sam Harris wrote an op-ed criticizing Francis Collins’ nomination to head the NIH titled “Science is in the details”. Now Ken Miller has written a short letter in reply, and I think he would have done well to have heeded that title.

Dr. Collins’s sin, despite credentials Mr. Harris calls “impeccable,” is that he is a Christian. Mr. Harris is not alone in holding this view. A leading science blogger, also attacking Dr. Collins, demonstrated his own commitment to reasoned dialogue by calling the scientist a “clown” and a “flaming idjit.” When reason has such defenders, Heaven help us.

No, that first sentence is completely false. The head of the NIH can be a Christian, a Jew, a Moslem, even an atheist, and it won’t disturb us in the slightest. Here’s a list of past directors of the NIH; can you identify their faith, their hobbies, their sexual orientation, their favorite kind of music? Do you care? The fact that Collins is a Christian is not a problem at all — we are not interested in narrowing the search pool for science administration to the extent that we exclude the majority of people in this country.

What is disturbing is that Collins is a fervent evangelical believer who inserts his superstition where it doesn’t belong, in the execution of his job. James Wyngaarden and Bernadine Healy and Harold Varmus did not do that. I cannot trust him not to Christianize his responsibilities — from reading his book, it is clear that he actually feels a moral obligation to add religious instruction to everything he does. That should bother everyone.

There should be no religious litmus test for the office, but that does not mean that there shouldn’t be constraints on how the office should be used — it should not be steered into becoming the National Institutes of Holiness.

Jerry Coyne also makes the point that the tolerance always goes only one way: if the nominee were aggressively atheist…oh, never mind. A person who was as vocal an atheist (or Muslim, or Scientologist, or Hindu) as Collins is a Christian would never even be considered for nomination. The kind of behavior exhibited by Collins on his BioLogos website, if done in service of any other belief than evangelical Christianity, would be a great big waving red flag to anyone vetting the nomination.

As for the rest of Miller’s complaint, it is true: I called Collins a “clown” and a “flaming idjit”. But that’s because I believe in telling the truth.

I did not say those things because Collins is a Christian, but because of the bad science and poor logic he uses in his talks. Those imprecations were inspired by an examination of what he did.

I will repeat what I wrote about the Collins nomination again.

The situation is this: the White House has picked for high office a well-known scientist with a good track record in management who wears clown shoes. Worse, this scientist likes to stroll about with his clown shoes going squeak-squeak-squeak, pointing them out to everyone, and bragging about how red and shiny and gosh-darned big his shoes are, and tut-tutting at the apparent lack of fine fashion sense exhibited by his peers who wear rather less flamboyant footwear.

I would rather Obama had appointed someone who wore practical shoes, and didn’t make much of a fuss about them, anyway. And excuse me, but I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.

I stand by that still. It’s what I think of the situation.

But notice that nowhere have I or Coyne or Moran or any of the people critical of this choice ever claimed that “Dr. Collins’s sin…is that he is a Christian.” That’s simply a disgraceful lie, one designed to imply false motives and generate an unjustified sympathy for Miller’s choice.