A compromise: maybe they could operate with their feet?

So…Muslims want special foot washing stations so they can tidy up in order to pray, but at the same time, Muslim doctors don’t want to have to wash their arms before they plunge them into my guts. “No practising Muslim woman — doctor, medical student, nurse or patient — should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow,” they say.

A belief system that prioritizes washing up before mumbling at an invisible man over sterile technique in surgery does not require accommodation. It needs to be the target of laughter and contempt.

Institutionalized misogyny

Saudi police arrested and strip-searched an American businesswoman for the crime of visiting a Starbucks with a male colleague.

“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?’ I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” she told the Times.

It could be worse. In Iraq, women who violate “Islamic teachings” are tortured and murdered. The “Islamic teachings” that are so important that violators must be tortured and beheaded involve wearing a headscarf.

You can imagine the reaction, then, when the Archbishop of Canterbury suggests that England ought to legally recognize Sharia law. It’s foolishness with well-meaning intent — let’s help the waves of Islamic immigrants acclimate — but it’s also a perfect example of why even moderate religions are dangerous. What he proposes is outrageous appeasement, an accommodation to a primitive religious tradition, when what ought to be said is that the uniform application of secular law is what a civilized society demands, not a patchwork of piecemeal laws which apply differently to different people, and especially not the corrupting insanity of irrational, hateful, vile nonsense like Islam.

Perhaps the Archbishop was concerned that if he didn’t support the Islamic version of irrational insanity, people might notice that the Anglican church is also a bastion of irrational insanity. Let’s hope that instead this will help open people’s eyes and get them to wonder, “why the hell do we even pay attention to old fools whose only claim to authority is their position in an antiquated ecclesiastical hierarchy?” Go away, archbishops and imams — you harm our culture.

Loyal Rue vs. (?) PZ Myers

At some time, a recording of our ‘debate’ will be available online, so I won’t try to do a play by play now. I will say that I found this one pretty much impossible to prepare for — there was no way this debate could be shoe-horned into a good vs. evil or smartness vs. ignorance conflict, making it a much more complicated discussion, rather than a television wrestling storyline. We’d had a few conversations in email and there were several points of disagreement, and in fact Dr Rue showed those points in a slide, but you know, he had good reasons for all the stuff he got wrong. I read his book, Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which is actually very good: he doesn’t advocate the abandonment of religion, but rather the evolution and transformation of religion to incorporate the best of modern science in its cosmology, rather than the best of Babylonian science from the first millennium B.C. We have our differences, but I couldn’t help but feel that I’d be quite content if all the reactionary religious nuts would convert to Rue’s religion, even if they did fall shy of the perfect ideal of atheism.

So we had a discussion rather than a debate, a discussion that revolved around some of our differences, but our intent was more mutual enlightenment than mutual evisceration. We got good probing questions from the audience, too, so I think a lot of us had our thinking caps on. I had a good time. I had two dark ales afterwards to celebrate a pleasant evening.

Some of you loyal readers were there, feel free to chime in with your impressions in the comments. Maybe it looked completely different from the bleacher seats…?

P.S. Greg Laden was there, and he made some really good points about how morality isn’t a product of religion at all in most cultures. We should have dragged him up on the stage to give his perspective, but maybe he’ll expand on that on his blog.

Let us pray

i-694592ab1c79d8dcf9596842757bc6fe-cig_prayer.jpg

Just the title of this book is good for a laugh: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Prayer. They’ve certainly got their target audience pegged.

As an added bonus, the reviews are amusing.

Have reviewed a number of books on prayer and they usually get too complicated and bogged down.

“Close your eyes and pretend” is too complicated? Are there rules and regulations and rituals that must be performed for this prayer thing that are baroque and beyond my understanding, or is this reviewer the kind of person who finds swallowing to be an act of will that requires concentration and practice?

I just recently returned to my Christain roots and the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Prayer helped answer a question that many of us are afraid to ask; “How do you pray?” I’ve seen it done hundreds of times but it’s all so mysterious. This book explains a variety of options to mix it so that prayer doesn’t become a chore.

I’ve seen it done, too, and no, it isn’t mysterious. People just talk to themselves, silently or aloud. It isn’t hard. It also doesn’t work. But it’s that last line that I found weird.

These people supposedly believe they have a direct, personal relationship with the Supreme Omnipotent Overlord of the Universe, and not only that, but he loves them and is deeply interested in the tawdry minutia of their personal lives. Yet they can consider having a conversation with such a being a “chore”? If such a being existed, and if I were able to talk with him, ask questions, and get answers, I’d be online with the big guy all the time and asking all kinds of questions. He’d be better than Google!

Of course, if he were a colossal tyrannical jerk who refused to answer any of my questions, then I’d consider it a chore. I’d also stop calling him up.

But then, I’m an atheist, and I’m smarter than they are — the Bible says so.

Our congress takes care of the IMPORTANT stuff

We’re in a war, we’re looking at a looming mortgage crisis, and I can tell you that our educational system is getting flushed down the tubes, and what does our brave congress do? Why, it decides to make the words “In God We Trust” bigger on our coins.

Responding to complaints from the Religious Right, Congress has passed legislation mandating that the phrase “In God We Trust” be moved from the edge to the back or front of the new presidential dollar coins.

President George W. Bush signed the measure into law Dec. 26. It was tucked into a $555 billion domestic spending bill after having been pushed by U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). Brownback and other Religious Right conservatives have been complaining about the new coins since the series started last year.

Oh, yeah. That’s a solution. Maybe God will like us better if put his name in bigger print on our money.

They’re all demented fuckwits.

Are you ready for another debate?

I’m engaged in battle again this next week, on 7 February, on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. This one is going to be very different than that last one, though; the other side isn’t some ignorant wacko, but will be Loyal Rue, a Templeton award winner, and someone who has a rather more nuanced (I’m tempted to say “fluffy”) vision of religion. I suspect that it will be much, much less antagonistic, and more of an open discussion.

The questions we’ll be debating discussing are:

  • Are the religious and scientific worldviews (or epistemologies) antithetical to one another?

  • Are the processes of scientific thought antithetical to the processes of religious thought?

  • Are religion and science both useful in the search for truth and meaning?

  • Do you think that science can inform/confirm/suggest religious “truths” or vice versa?

  • Is philosophy more like a science or more like religion?

My answers will be yes, yes, no, no, neither (Hey! I’m done! Boy, that’s going to be a short debate.), but I think I’ll probably have to spend more time defining what I mean by those answers and how I interpret religion and science, and that’s where Dr Rue and I will probably slide right past each other. We’ve been corresponding a bit and we may also get into the issue of teleology and Kauffman’s recent work (about which I have very mixed feelings).

It should be fun as long as you don’t come expecting beat-downs and knife fights — come to think and argue, instead.

Richard Dawkins, tune in on Friday!

I’m sure he will be looking forward to this: his funeral is going to be held tomorrow.

Since the teaser calls him “one of the most wicked and vile human beings ever to walk the face of this earth”, and since they’ve already done a hack job on Heath Ledger (in which they build a crude dummy of the actor and set it on fire), I have a sneaking suspicion that this won’t consist of a reading of
Dawkins’ suggestion for his funeral. In fact, I don’t think these hateful yahoos are capable of reading that; the examples on their website are less than eloquent. These are not your Southern gentlemen with the lilting accents smooth as honey, but rather, a couple of dumb crackers, shrill and nasal, who can barely read their own scripts.

It’s coming from a small group of ignorant haters called the King of Terrors Ministry. I find that appropriate and amusing. Some people got seriously bent out of shape that Dawkins dared to call the Christian god “a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully,” but here’s a group of cultists who revel in that kind of description, who worship a being because he inspires terror. Oh, and like the god of Fred Phelps, their god is intensely obsessed with homosexuality.