Eternal injustice

Sid Schwab considers the meaning of eternal torment. Even a moment’s thought should make anyone realize that eternal punishment, besides being literally unimaginable, cannot possibly be just. Yet this principle is dogma in Christianity — Jesus himself said, “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment” — and even worse, those who are good and are admitted into heaven are going to be eternally aware of the torments inflicted on their unsaved fellows, and will be going out to witness the punishment of the wicked (according to St Augustine, anyway…I hear he’s a fairly highly regarded source on doctrine.)

I suspect that the truly good would be in rebellion against such a tyrant god, but then, we always knew Christianity was a death cult for sheep, that rewards submission to the odious and the unlikely.

I’d add to Schwab’s rejection of the principle that it isn’t just eternal punishment that is a problem, but the whole idea of eternal life. There can be no such thing. People change all the time, and the I that is here now will not be the same I that could exist in 20 years; my mortality is a part of my being, and removing that would be an event so traumatic and so life-changing that it would produce an identity even more substantially different than the vast revolution I went through 51 years ago, when I gastrulated. Immortality is meaningless and achieving it is impossible.

That’s not to say we don’t want a long life and will fight off death as long as we can. It’s just that life itself represents a kind of incremental dynamism that can’t be frozen without destroying it.

Maybe politicians should just avoid evangelicals and used car salesmen

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Why do they waste their time with these idiots? Barack Obama has been struggling against the guilt-by-association of having been a regular member of a lunatic’s church, this odious little ignorant rat-bag named Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Yet at the same time, McCain joyfully accepts endorsements from John Hagee and Rod Parsley…and if Wright is a rat-bag, those two are festering, reeking mountains of putrefying rat-shit. Does the media give a damn? No. They’re also white members of the televangelical racket, and ever since the anti-semitic backwoods babbler Billy Graham was canonized for introducing the appearance of delusional piety into the hypocritical Nixon White House, it’s become the habit to defer to the liars for Jesus who brag about bringing morality to government.

And yet, someone who refuses to sit quietly as these nutjobs rave, who refuses to endorse the lie of religion, who does not suffer through the weekly tedium of sitting in a pew to listen mutely to a know-nothing air his ignorance to a flock of sheep, cannot possibly be elected to the presidency. Meanwhile, if the press is antagonistic towards you, they will cheerfully take some stupid sermon you listened to and blame you for its contents (and if they don’t want to trouble your march to election, they’ll quietly ignore it). It’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation.

So why not just Kobiyashi Maru your way out of the whole corrupt situation and stop pandering to the churchies all together? That’s my advice to the candidates right now. You’re screwed no matter which way you jump, so you might as well take the rational route and announce that you’re washing your hands of the whole wretched lot of preachin’ scalliwags, whose faith-based advice doesn’t belong in government anyway. Be bold! Be free of gods, or at the very least, free of god-bothering liars.

(By the way, if you don’t know how vile Hagee and Parsley are, Revere has video clips.)

Let’s not forget Hillary Clinton. She’s entangled with a far right-wing fellowship of fascists.

That gay religion

Sometimes, I am extremely annoyed with the principle of separation of church and state — it leads to absurdities, like this recent court decision that a gay student support group was was using unconstitutional tactics — it was using materials that mentioned that some religions are more tolerant of homosexuality than others. This is, apparently, an endorsement of particular religions and therefore violates church-state separation.

Well, yeah, it is — for specific subjects, like gay rights, science education, and pacifism, some religions clearly are better than others — yet because we have to mindlessly avoid any perception of preference for one over another at any official level, the more enlightened faiths must be lumped with the dumbest, vilest, crudest kinds of religions, and you are not allowed to distinguish between them. I’ve said it before: church-state separation is a principle that protects and privileges religious belief in the United States, and furthermore as we can see here, it isolates pathological, dangerous beliefs from valid criticism.

This decision could be of some concern for future court battles over creationism, too, because science support organizations clearly do have a preference for some kinds of religions over others, and actually do promote certain doctrines over others. This is a fight driven by religious ignorance by the creationists, so of course we’ve got to engage them on the wrongness of their stupid claims about science … but if they wrap those up in the protective mantle of their holy and sacred religious beliefs, this decision says criticism is violating their religious protection. Will we have to worry that someone in the court system will take seriously the claim that teaching that the evidence says the earth is 4½ billion years old amounts to belittling religions that preach that the earth is 6000 years old, and favoring those that are agnostic on the age of the earth?

At least I can take comfort in the fact that the Pharyngula strategy is still safely on the side of the constitution: I don’t favor any religion at all, I despise ’em all equally.

The stupid, it burns

Oh, no … I mentioned the existence of godtube the other day, and now people are farming it for incredibly stupid videos that they send to me. It’s rich soil for stupid over there, and they’ve got a bumper crop — you would not believe how awful some of their arguments are.

I hesitate to mention this one because I know it’s going to trigger yet more bad videos in my in-box, but it is so bad, so crazy, that I have to share it. This one claims that Food Patterns of our Body Proof for Intelligent Design, and, well, you have to see it. It starts with the claim that a sliced carrot looks like a human eye, and carrots are good for your eyes, and just goes downhill from there — tomatoes are red and have chambers, just like the heart, walnuts look like brains, kidney beans look like kidneys, etc.

I think the creator must be a virgin. He also claims that citrus fruits look just like human mammary glands.

Happy National Day of Prayer!

Today is actually the National Day of Prayer. Really. Let that sink in for a moment.

We have regional coordinating groups — Minnesota is having events at the Capitol today. Did you know that prayer is “America’s strength and shield”? I didn’t. Our governor has issued a proclamation asking citizens to “open our hearts in thanksgiving”. It’s a weird document. It announces that we have all these problems like poverty and sickness and crime, and then declares that we’ve been strengthened by the “conscience-based actions of people of faith” … I guess we people of reason don’t have consciences, and I think it’s setting the bar awfully low anyway to declare prayer an “action”. It’s more like an inaction, with lame excuses.

The head wackaloon of this year’s National Day of Futility is Shirley Dobson … of those Dobsons, the fundagelically evil kooks behind Focus on the Family. This was supposed to be an ecumenical event, as near as something that celebrates religious idiocy can be ecumenical, but it has since evolved into an exclusively evangelical Christian church service, sponsored by our federal government. Using her vast powers as chair of the national task force, Dobson requires her coordinators to sign this statement of faith.

I believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God. I believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, his virgin birth, his sinless life, his miracles, the atoning work of his shed blood, his resurrection and ascension, his intercession and his coming return to power and glory. I believe that those who follow Jesus are family and there should be unity among all who claim his name. I agree that these statements are true in my life.

Hello, Jews and Moslems! Nice to see you’re joining us atheists in rejecting prayer. Oh, you’re not? Well, at least we’ll be able to keep each other company with all the other second-class citizens.

Fuck the National Day of Prayer.

I can scarcely believe my country is officially pandering to such willful stupidity — elevating evangelical kooks to positions of prestige, trumpeting the virtues of sectarian religion, and actually crediting the successes of America to the fact that a subset of deluded, demented fools sit on their asses and beg an invisible man to protect us and help us kill people in foreign countries. What a waste, and what an encouragement of further waste.

I feel like just declaring this the official National Day of Derangement and writing it all off, maybe spit in the soup of people who say grace, or flip off any group I catch trying to do a collective exercise in ritual invocation of nonexistent beings, but the Minnesota Atheists have a more productive idea: they are calling this a National Day of Reason and are setting up to demonstrate in the Minnesota capitol in St Paul today. They actually have a prime position, and all the legislators leaving their workplace to join in the National Day of Inanity will have to troop by them. In my dreams, these politicians would feel a little sense of shame at the foolishness of the official events, but in reality, I’m sure they won’t.

Wheaton is a weird place

Wheaton has a good academic reputation, but man, it’s the little things that make it frightening. I would not want to live in the theocratic world it represents. Hank Fox has a couple of stories about Wheaton.

The first is the blog of a recent graduate of Wheaton who determined halfway through his undergraduate education that he was an atheist. It sounds like it was rough. He’s ended the blog, though, with a statement that “…now that I’m slightly closer to the real world, I just don’t think it’s that important whether you’re an atheist or a Christian” — which is true. The differences are accentuated when you’re wrapped up in a culture that makes religious belief central to everything; when Christians back off and don’t make their ridiculous superstitions a prerequisite to participation in politics and everyday life, they are entirely tolerable. I think the anonymous student is a little bit optimistic in his confidence that religion won’t intrude on him as much in wider American culture, but perhaps compared to Wheaton, that’s also true.

The second is more disturbing. A professor of English at Wheaton got a divorce from his wife — which the university considers grounds for firing him. The college actually has staff people who assess faculty divorces to determine whether they meet “Biblical standards,” and if they don’t, pffft, you’re gone. This isn’t a guy who was doing substandard work, nor, as his comments reveal, did he abandon Christianity. Other faculty have lost their job for converting to Catholicism. This is just plain freaky: “Wheaton requires faculty and staff to sign a faith statement and adhere to standards of conduct in areas including marriage.”

Has anyone noticed that our evil secular universities do not monitor the personal beliefs of their faculty, and do not consider going to the church of your choice grounds for dismissal? We even let our students believe whatever they want!

Can we please just establish this one principle?

Prayer doesn’t work. Enshrine it in the law — prayer is not a helpful action, but rather a neglectful one. Teach it in the schools — when the health class instructs students in how to make a tourniquet or do CPR, also explain that prayer is not an option. Faith in prayer kills people.

The Wisconsin parents who allowed their daughter to die in a diabetic coma because they believed prayer was sufficient aid have been charged with second degree reckless manslaughter. That seems about right to me.

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Atheism is a condom for your mind

Matt Taibbi went off on a three day Christian retreat, and discovered how ridiculous they are…but he also discover the deep emotional, anti-intellectual pull of these kinds of events.

By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to “be rational” or “set aside your religion” about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you’ve made a journey like this — once you’ve gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It’s not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that’s the issue. It’s that once you’ve gotten to this place, you’ve left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you’re thinking with muscles, not neurons.

By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you’ve gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no “anything else.” All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this “our thing,” a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that’s all.

Insulating yourself against the taint of all religion is a kind of psychological, informational hygiene. Abandon all rigor and requirement for reality-based evidence for one’s ideas, and you open the door wide for the kind of conditioning in dogma modern religion promotes.

When will Maj. Freddy J. Welborn be court-martialed?

I think he’s due, but he’s not the only one. It’s like our entire army is being turned into a pocket theocracy.

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

Ugh. Threats from a commanding officer over what our soldiers believe? Not that anyone will chastise him; the conversion of our military into a goon squad for the believers is coming along too far for that.

But Mikey Weinstein, a retired Air Force judge advocate general and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said the official statistics masked the great number of those who do not report violations for fear of retribution. Since the Air Force Academy scandal began in 2004, Mr. Weinstein said, he has been contacted by more than 5,500 service members and, occasionally, military families about incidents of religious discrimination. He said 96 percent of the complainants were Christians, and the majority of those were Protestants.

Complaints include prayers “in Jesus’ name” at mandatory functions, which violates military regulations, and officers proselytizing subordinates to be “born again.” After getting the complainants’ unit and command information, Mr. Weinstein said, he calls his contacts in the military to try to correct the situation.

“Religion is inextricably intertwined with their jobs,” Mr. Weinstein said. “You’re promoted by who you pray with.”

“Promoted by who you pray with”…that’s scary. We’ve got selection going on in the armed forces for uniformity of religious belief, and worst of all, it’s for the kind of religious belief endorsed by loud Christianist wackaloons.