This is not going to be an “all debate, all the time” blog, but readers have sent me a few accounts of recent skirmishes, so I’ll toss ’em up here. This one is a description of a debate between the ferocious Mr Hitchens and that smooshy gooey feel-good rabbi, Shmuley Boteach. It’s like pitting a knife against jello, I’m afraid.
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.
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.
Many people have been sending me links to the latest comments by our charming Catholic pontiff, and I don’t know, I’m just finding the old boy increasingly irrelevant as he continues his reactionary slide into medieval thinking. More and more it’s like hearing reports of what some random homeless man in a Philadelphia subway station ranted about — it’s amusing and appalling, but it’s hard to work up the outrage to care any more. Yes, you can argue that the Pope is influential, but even there, how many self-identified Catholics pay any attention at all to what he says about contraception, for instance? But alright, once more unto the breach, etc.
So here’s what the pope babbled recently.
Thanks, Revere, for making me the point man.
I didn’t even mention the crazy people whose faith was rejuvenated by an imperfect potato. Although I would agree with your policy of agreeing with me.
It’s getting to be about that time: science fair season. I’ll remind you all that we have an infamous local event, the Twin Cities Creation Science Fair, in which real live homeschooled creationist kids will present their experiments at the Har Mar Mall, on 16-17 February. I’m hoping to make it this year, but I’ve got a lot of other traveling to do that week, so I’m not sure that I’ll be able to make it…if I do, though, I’ll let you know.
Because I have to deal with this all the time, I’ll also remind everyone that the Objective: Ministries Creation Sciende Fair page is a satire, OK?
This, however, is real: Possummomma finds a lovely example of Christian “science”. A sixth-grader in her area decided to test the hypothesis that “unchristians” are less moral than Christians with a questionnaire — a badly done questionnaire. Some amusing bits: the student had his subjects report on their amoral behaviors, and didn’t keep their answers anonymous. Cool. That could add some fun to a community event.
The other amusing thing is the conclusion: everyone failed the morality test. The answer, then is that we are all sinners, so we’d better become Christians.
The kid ought to come on up to Minnesota — he’d fit right in.
So Heath Ledger, the young actor, is dead of unknown causes. I don’t know much about him, I did not have any kind of personal interaction with him so I don’t need to know much about him — I liked some of his movies, he was young, it’s tragic to see a life ended so early.
Those demented ghouls at Westboro Baptist Church have a different point of view, though.
It’s just a lunatic ranting his hate, but that last paragraph is fascinating.
Heath Ledger is now in Hell, and has begun serving his eternal sentence there — beside which, nothing else about Heath Ledger is relevant or consequential.
That epitomizes the problem, I think. There is a kind of sliding scale of belief: most of us value our lives to some degree, and consider how we spend our three score and ten to be important; then there are people who attach some degree of importance on an afterlife they’ve imagined, and consider this hypothetical eternity to be a matter of concern. Atheists have the scale pegged way over to the left and see this little slice of time we have as all we have, and therefore the only thing we have to make work. Most religious people have the dial turned up a little to the right — they are clearly operationally secular, spending most of their time on work and family, and socking away a little Sunday prayer time for an anticipated and wholly delusional Heaven. We can all live with that.
But then there are these wackos like Fred Phelps who have the dial turned so far to the right that they place a higher priority in their fantasies about what they’ll be doing after they’re dead over what they’re doing with their life right now. That’s where religion becomes a great evil, where it destroys lives and compels people to commit acts that are materially insane, but make great logical sense to people infected with the idea that there is an eternity of consequence for trivial transgressions against a shared belief.
This is why we have to strike right at the root of religious belief. It’s an unfounded expectation of a magic post-mortem resuscitation in a new universe with different rules that has the potential to completely change the equation about how we live our lives in this brief span — and not for the better, as proponents pretend — and to those of us who care about our lives, our world, and our legacy rather than our imagined ghost-existence, that matters.
P.S. Note the inconsistency in Phelps’ position, too. If what Heath Ledger did in his life is such a tiny, irrelevant fragment of god’s great plan for his existence, why is his role in a movie Fred Phelps didn’t like so important that it dictates an eternity of pain?
Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, a journalist in Afghanistan, has been arrested and condemned for downloading articles on the internet that are critical of Islam.
Kambakhsh, a student at Balkh University and a journalist for Jahan-e Naw (New World), was arrested in October 2007 after material he downloaded was deemed to be offensive to Islam.
Shamsur Rahman, the head of the court, told Reuters news agency: “According to… the Islamic law, Sayed Perwiz is sentenced to death at the first court.
“However, he will go through three more courts to declare his last punishment,” he said.
I would say right now that Islam is an evil and atrocious collection of obsolete myths that is a threat to human sanity and safety (along with Christianity and Judaism, the other Abrahamic afflictions), but I better not—somebody reading it in the wrong place might get arrested.
Ali G interviews four people with opinions about religion. It’s a bit hit or miss, but listen for the bit at the end.
Ali G wonders why so many nuns work as strippers on the side, and the easily offended Catholic priest says, “I don’t think you can demonstrate that statistically…it’s an absurd statement that you’ve just made. …
I would really prefer that you move off this topic because I find it offensive. It’s not documented by any kind of evidence. It’s hearsay.”
Hilarious irony there.
The North looks ever more attractive — read this excellent article on the collapse of organized religion in Canada. The numbers of church members is simply plummeting up there, a state we can only dream of bringing to pass here in the US (numbers are declining here, too, but we can hope that this is an inevitable descent and that Canada is only leading us by a few years.)
One interesting hypothesis for why it’s happening is that we can thank, in part, feminism.
Women the traditional mainstays of institutional religion in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church’s patriarchal exemplar of them as chaste, submissive “angels in the house” with all of the social and moral responsibility for community and family but none of the authority.
Unable to find acceptable religious role models or religious ideals that were not painful or oppressive, they reconstructed their identities as secular and sexual beings.
As they progressed into university graduate and professional schools and entered the work force, their horizons broadened and they discovered ways of serving that were more valuable than doing dishes and running church picnics.
I don’t know how solid the data is on that claim, but it’s at least intuitively attractive. Mothers are typically far more influential on their children’s religious belief than fathers, at least in my experience, so anything that draws women away from the church is going to have strong effects.
Maybe if we want atheism to succeed, we need to promote women more. Everyone thinks of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens when we discuss the godless movement — but perhaps we should be giving more props to Susan Jacoby, Julia Sweeney, Ellen Johnson, Natalie Angier, Margaret Downey, even Madelyn Murray O’Hair … hey, have you noticed? There are lots of actively atheist women!
