They let anybody onto the faculty at Oxford nowadays

A few readers sent me a link to this interview with Alister McGrath; most thought it was worth a laugh, but one actually seemed to think I’d be devastated. I’m afraid the majority were correct: everything I’ve read by McGrath suggests that here is a man whose thoughts have been arrested by a temporal lobe seizure that he has mistaken for a lightning bolt from god. He’d probably be flattered to be compared to C.S. Lewis, but I see some similarities in the shallowness of their thinking that they believe they’ve deepened by tapping into theological tradition, but I’m sorry — my bathroom tap could drip for millennia, but it’s a nuisance, not Niagara.

It also doesn’t help that his argument is basically one of dogma and contradiction.

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Shades of Haryun Yahya!

The Turkish creationist sunk a whole lot of money sending an elaborate creationist book to thousands of biologists. I’m sure he felt he was doing us a favor in sending us the light, but most of the recipients were feeling something less pleasant — it’s like receiving a gilded dead rat in the mail. Now the conservative Christians are going to get in the act, and in a low-rent version of the game are going to send a few hundred thousand cheap bibles to newspaper subscribers.

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Desecration: it’s a fun hobby!

i-b09551f6b7f071fa14c9437188995f78-quran.jpg

I am appalled. A man in New York was arrested for throwing a copy of the Quran in a public toilet. He deserved arrest—everyone knows it is vandalism and criminal mischief to clog a public toilet with debris.

Oh, hang on — the guy was arrested for a hate crime? Are toilets now on the list of victims targeted by fringe fanatics? What’s their slogan: “Bring Back the Open Trench!”? It is a shame to see innocent and useful toilets persecuted in this ghastly way …

Wait, never mind. He was arrested for being mean to Muslims, which also makes no sense. He destroyed a book and clogged a toilet. If some local nut started setting fire to copies of The God Delusion, I wouldn’t feel personally victimized — let her burn all the copies she can buy, it’s just more money in Richard Dawkins’ pocket. (If she started stuffing copies into the toilets, though, then I might feel oppressed. When you gotta go, you gotta go.)

You know, there is a tradition around here, one that I’ve practiced for a few years: overwrought sanctimony must be met with disrespectful insolence. So I’m thinking of picking up a cheap copy of the Qu’ran. And I’m thinking … what to do, what to do. It will, of course, be something in the privacy of my home, with my very own copy — none of this public vandalism and veiled threats to people who believe. It will just be a demonstration of my right to treat my property as it deserves and of my opinion of this silly book.

So here are a few ideas. Maybe you can think of some more.

  • I could simply urinate on it, but that’s old hat.

  • If I had a puppy, I could use the pages for paper training. But I do not have a puppy and I’m not going to get one for this horrible reason.

  • The traditional approach: keep it near the fireplace, and use the pages for kindling. Of course, there’s no way I’m going to start a fire in the fireplace in August in Minnesota, so that’s going to have to wait a while.

  • I could doodle cartoons in the margins and make my own crudely illustrated (I have no talent) version of the Qu’ran. Then I could put it on ebay and make a profit.

  • Here’s an artsy option: I could make a new cover and a bookmark for it … out of bacon.

That last one sounds fun, and I could also put up photos on the blog (there’s also a tradition there) but perhaps some of you can come up with a better suggestion.

(via Deep Thoughts)

The A-bomb

Oregon looks to have an interesting senate primary race, with two excellent Democratic candidates, Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick, vying for the chance to give the boot to two-faced Republican Bush booster Gordon Smith. I think it’s great that more progressive candidates are being drawn into loftier tiers of the political arena, and that good wholesome sparring in the primary is going to help them both out, no matter who wins the nomination. Why, though, should this Minnesotan care? Aside from having lived in Oregon for 9 years (and loving it!), it was brought to my attention that there’s a sly tactic being carried out here. Someone dropped the A-bomb in the discussion already: they’ve asked “Is Steve Novick an atheist?“

That quickly developed into a major topic of discussion at BlueOregon. One of the major points is that while Oregon is one of the least godly states in the country, it still has a large Christian majority, and the assumption is that tagging him with areligiosity will hurt Novick’s chances.

What this kind of tactic actually does, though, is tarnish the reputation of Christians, so I’m saddened but unsurprised that more believers aren’t distressed by it. Imagine if a black candidate were running, and someone tried to argue that he was going to be beat because a large percentage of the voters were white. That’s not a commentary on the candidate, although there always is a tendency to hold the victim accountable: it’s an acknowledgment that the majority of voters are superficial bigots, an appeal to the prejudices of the lowest of the mob.

At least nowadays people wouldn’t try to publicly defend their bigotry against blacks, although I suspect many still practice it in the privacy of the voting booth (it’s also still a useful dirty campaign issue, as was used against McCain). We’ll still see people argue that atheism is a legitimate reason to vote against someone though, because he doesn’t share their “values”. That’s an admission, I think, that they want a Christian candidate who will inject religion into the secular task of running the country.

Looking forward to Armageddon and the cleansing of the earth

Last summer, a lot of people hated this post where I advocated calling the apocalyptic cultists on their evil delusions. Then we had some prominent Christian leaders calling for war with Iran, and John Hagee gave a demented interview with Terry Gross, in which his rapture rubbish was used as an excuse to advocate hate and war and destruction, all because his “prophecies” said that’s what we need to do.

Want some more fun?

Watch this video from a Christians United For Israel conference. There’s Hagee promising unconditional support for Israel until the Messiah comes, and then standing up in a press conference to claim that their support has nothing to do with end times theology. Watch people cheer at the urging to have a preemptive military strike against Iran. Listen to the interviews with creepy “just folks.” See Tom DeLay and Rick Santorum as honored guests … and the hero of the whole show? Joe Lieberman. Our “moderate” religious former Democrat. A perfect example of a religious moderate happily and enthusiastically supporting unabashed evil and ignorance.

How about waterproof, buoyant pizza?

Having read Mooney’s Storm World last week, I can’t be too disturbed by this bit of news: the pizza man who is fanatically devoted to the pope, Tom Monaghan, is opening his new planned town dedicated to Catholic values next Saturday. There will be no porn or contraceptives available in town, but I hear there will be a whole clinic dedicated to pediatric proctology on Main Street.

Anyway, the town is Ave Maria, Florida. Mooney’s book points out that one of the looming problems from catastrophic storms and global warming is man-made, the growing investment in valuable infrastructure and population in precisely those areas at risk from natural disaster. This gives me an idea: I think the southern coastal states ought to give incentives to religious organizations to build along the shores. Pull back all those merely material and economic developed resources farther inland, and construct wall-to-wall religious enclaves everywhere that we worry about hurricanes instead, as a bulwark against acts of god.

We can’t lose. If they’re right, their prayers and purity will stave off disaster. If they’re wrong, well, no loss to the country if ten thousand churches get inundated.

It also puts a nefarious twist on the closing quote in the story.

Monaghan has said his goal is to help as many people as possible get to Heaven. And he hopes these homeowners will have a head start.

Hide the guillotines, they’re on to us!

We should be quaking in our jackboots: a media counterattack is being launched against us wicked atheists. They have a website!

American Vision is launching a relentless and systematic response to militant atheism. We’ve produced a brilliant 2-minute commercial that we plan to broadcast globally via the Internet and Television. Atheists present themselves as enlightened and civil. But this new commercial will reveal the shocking truth to viewers. The French Revolution, Communism, Nazism, etc. have taught us that the atheistic worldview will inevitably lead to the persecution of Christians and the killing of anyone who gets in the way. What’s worse is that atheism is paving a wide road for Islam to advance in our nation and around the world.

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A general predilection for delusion

The first review of my talk yesterday is in! Too bad it is from somebody who wasn’t there and who is a world-class fool. Yes, it’s Michael Egnor again, and he’s got a lengthy post up with the pretext of giving me advice on future talks, but is really an attempt to preempt my arguments and chide me for my crazy materialist position. He doesn’t even come close to any of my arguments, and he makes false assumptions all over the place about what I and the audience think. I’m used to straw men from creationists, but this is ridiculous.

Here’s what I actually said at the talk.

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All the mistakes of the godly are merely metaphor

Imagine you found a population in the US where the majority of the people believed that 2+2=5, and that attempts to correct them with the actual, correct result of adding two numbers were regarded as insults to their revered traditions. I think we’d all agree that they a) they were wrong; b) they were misled, misinformed, and miseducated; c) that they were ignorant of arithmetic; or d) might very well have been maliciously deceived by someone in their midst. Somehow, though, if the ridiculous error involves God, some people take a big step backwards and are appalled that anyone might criticize them. Those “revered traditions” become more than mere excuses, they are inviolate.

You guessed it, once again someone was aggravated that I have dared to call adherence to religious belief a case of being “ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed.” This time our indignant contestant is Mark A. R. Kleiman, who considers it atheistic bigotry to enumerate the reasons why people might come to absurd and erroneous conclusions. That 80-90% of this population, which is not hypothetical at all but is the entire US, believes that chanting their wishes into the sky might get them granted by a magic being, or that over half use the excuse of their religious dogma to reject the basic facts of modern biology, is something we must not question and especially must not criticize. Because it is religion, it must be respected.

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Spontaneous religion — that’s our test

The new burned-over district lies in the wreckage of Russia — take a look at the new weird cults flowering in Siberia. Jesus is hanging out on a hilltop there, even.

There’s something strange in the human brain that, when people are uncertain and stripped of security and bewildered by too much change, they try to find refuge in any nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it’s said confidently and is reinforced by social pressures. This is a real phenomenon that’s cropped up again and again in human history, and it’s sad to see it rising again.

People have been talking a lot about these “New Atheists” lately, and I haven’t liked the term at all. I don’t think we can call anyone a “New Atheist” yet, until they actually come up with something new…and I think the new thing, the Holy Grail of godlessness, ought to be the articulation of a framework for rational thought, ethics, and social organization that excludes reliance on divinity or revelation, and yet is strong enough to anchor human minds in the face of desolation. Not another cult like the brew fermenting in Russia, but a defense against cultish thinking that inoculates the mind against that kind of susceptibility.

Somebody figure that one out for me, willya?