The unspeakable vileness of religious law

Am I supposed to believe religion is a force for morality, when I see so many examples of it more being a force for mindless obedience to arbitrary rules? This story out of Pakistan is disturbing in many ways.

Zilla Huma Usman, the minister for social welfare in Punjab province and an ally of President Pervez Musharraf, was killed as she was about to deliver a speech to dozens of party activists, by a “fanatic”, who believed that she was dressed inappropriately and that women should not be involved in politics, officials said today.

Ms Usman, 35, was wearing the shalwar kameez worn by many professional women in Pakistan, but did not cover her head.

Executed for not having a piece of cloth on top of her head; what god looks down on our world from his cosmic perspective and thinks that is an important concern for humanity? Allah, apparently; I can find commandments in the Bible that make similar demands.

Mr Sarwar appeared relaxed and calm when he told a television channel that he had carried out God’s order to kill women who sinned. “I have no regrets. I just obeyed Allah’s commandment,” he said, adding that Islam did not allow women to hold positions of leadership. “I will kill all those women who do not follow the right path, if I am freed again,” he said.

I’m sure religion’s defenders will shout long and loud that this guy Sarwar is simply an isolated lunatic, and that if he’d been an atheist he would still have been a monster. True enough; one asshole might be an exception, and godlessness is no guarantee of goodness, but a series of incidents is a pattern, and we have to look at who is inciting it.

General Musharraf, whose support for the US-led war on terror has caused consternation among Pakistan’s hardline elements, has promised to address women’s rights as part of his more moderate agenda.

But analysts said that the murder of the female minister highlighted the failure of his government in curbing Islamic extremism. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in a recent report said that violence against women had increased alarmingly, with some of the incidents incited by Mullahs opposed to women’s emancipation.

Face it, everyone. Religion is not a source of moral behavior. It’s a source of tribalism and obedience to authority, which sometimes coincides with respectable morality, but isn’t necessarily associated with it. We have to find our virtue in one true thing, our common humanity, and these ancient superstitions actually interfere with instruction in how to be good by encrusting it with nonsense.

(via Pro-Science)

Too damn religious

This letter to the New Zealand Herald was written to protest a claim that NZ was a “Christian nation”. It’s got a nice twist to it.

If my resistance to deem New Zealand to be a Christian nation makes me a traitor, as Brian Tamaki suggests, take me to the Tower, or the New Zealand equivalent, for it would be greatly preferable to living in such a country.

You might think, then, that I am one of the 48.8 per cent of non-Christian New Zealanders.

I am not. I am an Anglican priest serving an Auckland church. And no, I’m not Bishop Richard Randerson under a nom de plume.

As an immigrant from America I know what it means to live in a Christian nation. That’s why I left. New Zealand’s respect for human rights is why I chose to live here as a permanent resident.

Read the rest. You can tell he was more than a little disgusted with America’s Christian hypocrisy. As a confirmation, you can also listen to this NPR panel debate

that concluded that the US was “too damn religious”.

The Curse of the Prayer Study

It’s not looking good for the authors of a study that evaluated the efficacy of prayer. The authors were Rogerio A. Lobo, Daniel P. Wirth, and Kwang Y. Cha, and now look at what has happened to them (link may not work if you don’t have a subscription to the CHE).

Doctors were flummoxed in 2001, when Columbia University researchers published a study in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine that found that strangers’ prayers could double the chances that a woman would get pregnant using in-vitro fertilization. In the years that followed, however, the lead author removed his name from the paper, saying that he had not contributed to the study, and a second author went to jail on unrelated fraud charges.

Meanwhile, many scientists and doctors have written to the journal criticizing the study, and at least one doctor has published papers debunking its findings.

Now the third author of the controversial paper, Kwang Y. Cha, has been accused of plagiarizing a paper published in the journal Fertility and Sterility in December 2005. Alan DeCherney, editor of Fertility and Sterility and director of the reproductive biology and medicine branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said on Monday that it was clear to him that Dr. Cha, who has since left Columbia, plagiarized the work of a South Korean doctoral student for a paper he published on detecting women who are at risk of premature menopause.

Isn’t the explanation obvious? God really hates scientists who poke at him.

Call me when the angels come down and do something; until then, give the credit to people

Ugh. Jim Wallis. That left-wing theo-nut.

Progressive politics is remembering its own religious history and recovering the language of faith. Democrats are learning to connect issues with values and are now engaging with the faith community. They are running more candidates who have been emboldened to come out of the closet as believers themselves.

What planet is he from? Have American politicians of any party been afraid to label themselves as religious at any time in the past century? We see the opposite problem: they all declare themselves best buddies with a god.

He also goes on to do the usual post-hoc appropriation of every good idea that has ever come along to the credit of religion: abolition, civil rights, the overthrow of communism, on and on, glossing over the fact that we people of reason were fighting the good fight, too, and that religion seems to be one of those nonsensical foundations that allows people to argue any ol’ which-way they want, and that there people of faith fighting against those same good ideas.

I think all religion is good for is moral thievery—stealing the credit for the good that human beings do and passing it along to their priests and fictitious gods.

Stephen Frug gets even crankier about this. Please, please, get these raving kooks out of both parties, and let’s have rational policy making that owes nothing to religious nonsense.

Call your legislators and protest, Californians

Take a look at the newly introduced California Bill AB 165.

This bill would establish the Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives within the office of the Governor and would require the
office to serve as a clearinghouse of information on federal, state,
and local funding for charitable services performed by charitable
organizations, as defined, encourage those organizations to seek
public funding for their charitable services, act as a liaison
between state agencies and those organizations, and advise the
Governor, the Legislature, and an advisory board of the office on the
barriers to collaboration between those organizations and
governmental entities and on strategies to remove those barriers.
This bill would also create the Advisory Board of the Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, to be appointed as specified,
and require it to provide direction, guidance, and oversight to the
office and publish a report of its activities on or before the first
day of August of each year.

Yep, California legislators will be considered establishing a Faith-Based Office. That’s all we need—the legitimization of more unsupported nonsense in our government. Please, let’s stick to evidence based leadership, OK?

Mac Hammond and his cheesy Prosperity Gospel scam

Minnesota has its own Christian ministry scandal, but it probably won’t get that much national attention, since there’s no sex and it’s just the usual “minister fleeces flock” story. Mac Hammond runs one of those mega-scam mega-churches in a Minneapolis suburb, where he preaches and practices his Prosperity Gospel. It’s a story to make an atheist or a Christian retch.

“Noah was the first investment banker,” he said at the start of one recent sermon, which was filled with folksy charm, biblical references and business jargon. “He was buying stock when the rest of the world was liquidating.”

He’s a smug little bastard, too.

He got one of many laughs when he said the Star Tribune story had “left out” his two motorcycles. He also quipped that his Porsche has been “an expensive ministry tool” because a State Patrol officer who gave him one of four speeding tickets he has gotten in it went through church membership classes. He said he buys expensive clothes because “if I look decent, I preach better, so I’m really doing it for you, amen.”

He’s in trouble right now because he has been using his church for political purposes (to promote Michele Bachmann, of course, who else?) and he’s been skimming the cream off the church to hand him sweetheart loans for his personal real estate games and for his own plane. Jesus really wants him to have that plane. Here’s hoping there’s enough dirt on him to shut this con artist down.

There’s also a little tidbit to completely sour you on “Christian” charity:

The congregation was presented with the annual report, which said the church had $34 million in gross revenues last year and gave $3 million to charitable causes and evangelism.

There’s much more—Jeff Fecke and Andy Birkey have been covering this story well over at Minnesota Monitor.

Evolution Sunday?

Today is Evolution Sunday. It’s that day when participating ministers will say a few supportive words about evolution from their pulpits, or as I prefer to think of it, when a few people whose training and day-to-day practice are antithetical to science will attempt to legitimize their invalid beliefs and expand their pretense to intellectual authority by co-opting a few slogans.

As you might guess, I’m not exactly against the event, but I definitely do not support it. I’m sure a few readers are going to complain that I should be praising these efforts to get people to take baby steps in the right direction, but I just can’t do it.

I’m sorry, but when I see people in chains shuffle a few steps at the behest of their jailer, my heart isn’t in to shouting, “Hooray! You’re free!” You have a choice. You can go to church today, and among the hymns and prayers and magic rituals and chants to nonexistent beings, you can hear a few words in support of science; or you can refuse to support the whole rotten edifice of religion and stay home and read a good book. Which alternative do you think I would support?

Instead, I’m going to encourage you all to participate in my Enlightenment Sunday project. Skip church every week. Ignore the pleas of your priests. Donate money and time to charities of your choice directly, rather than through the intermediary of the church bureaucracy. Improve your brain with books and videos and conversations about science. Think skeptically. I’m sure the participants in Evolution Sunday mean well and are sincere in their wish to reconcile faith with science, but we’ll do far more to promote reason in this country if we withdraw from all participation in the church and let religion wither away from disuse, than we will by encouraging these modern day witch-doctors to spread their delusions.