Westboro Baptist makes an official statement on the death of Fred Phelps

I think. There’s no expression of human sentiment, grief or loss in this incoherent ramble of pissed-offedness at the world. I guess it’s a fitting tribute to the man’s life, after all.

Fred W. Phelps, Sr. Has Gone The Way of All Flesh, And Has Died on March 19, 2014

Westboro Baptist Church Issues the Following Commentary:

Psalm 2:1 ¶  Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

The world-wide media has been in a frenzy during the last few days, gleefully anticipating the death of Fred Waldron Phelps Sr.  It has been an unprecedented, hypocritical, vitriolic explosion of words.

Do they vainly hope for the death of his body?  People die – that is the way of all flesh:

Psalm 90: 9  For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.

10  The days of our years are threescore years and ten [that would be 70]; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years [80], yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away …

12 ¶  So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Our lives are like a vapor; like the flower of the field that comes and goes in its season.  The fact is, that God almighty is the one that appoints the precise measure of that season.  He fashioned each of us according to his righteous, unchangeable will and he will dispose of each of us at his pleasure.  Consider the scripture:

Deut. 32:39 ¶  See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand.

Heb 9: 27-28  And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:  So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation.

So – the death of Fred Phelps’ body, a man who preached a plain faithful doctrine to an ever darkening world, is nothing but a vain, empty, hypocritical hope for you.

It’s like every journalist in the world simultaneously set aside what little journalistic integrity they have, so that they could wait breathlessly for a rumor to publish:  in-fighting, succession plans, and power struggles, oh my!  How shameful!  You’re like a bunch of little girls on the playground waiting for some gossip!

Listen carefully; there are no power struggles in the Westboro Baptist Church, and there is no human intercessor – we serve no man, and no hierarchy, only the Lord Jesus Christ.  No red shoes, no goofy hat, and no white smoke for us; thank you very much.

No board, no separate decision making body, just humble servants of God – qualified according to the scriptures, and chosen by the church – privileged to feed the sheep for a time.  2500 years ago, the Prophet Jeremiah described this tabloid journalism quite well:

Jeremiah 20: 10-11  For I heard the defaming of many, fear on every side. Report, say they, and we will report it. [who cares if it’s true:  we’ve got our twitter machines all ready to go!] All my familiars watched for my halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him.  But the LORD is with me as a mighty terrible one: therefore my persecutors shall stumble, and they shall not prevail: they shall be greatly ashamed; for they shall not prosper: their everlasting confusion shall never be forgotten.

Remember that the Lord Jesus Christ warned us that a man’s foes will be they of his own household:  So again, there is nothing surprising about these shenanigans, spurred on by faithless, ax-grinding, God-hating deserters of the cross, and it amounts to nothing but vain, empty, hope.

God forbid, if every little soul at the Westboro Baptist Church were to die at this instant, or to turn from serving the true and living God, it would not change one thing about the judgments of God that await this deeply corrupted nation and world.  That is the pinnacle of your hopes, and by far the most vain.  Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, or the power of God.

There is only one hope for any human – inside or outside of this little church – that God gives you repentance unto salvation.  We pray that the Lord will do just that for any of our enemies whom he has predestined to eternal life.  And for those who are truly the enemies of God – ordained of old to such a condemnation – we pray his righteous wrath and vengeance, wherein we rejoice.

Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!

Amen

Contrast that with Nathan Phelps’ statement.

Fred Phelps is now the past. The present and the future are for the living. Unfortunately, Fred’s ideas have not died with him, but live on, not just among the members of Westboro Baptist Church, but among the many communities and small minds that refuse to recognize the equality and humanity of our brothers and sisters on this small planet we share. I will mourn his passing, not for the man he was, but for the man he could have been. I deeply mourn the grief and pain felt by my family members denied their right to visit him in his final days. They deserved the right to finally have closure to decades of rejection, and that was stolen from them.

Even more, I mourn the ongoing injustices against the LGBT community, the unfortunate target of his 23 year campaign of hate. His life impacted many outside the walls of the WBC compound, uniting us across all spectrums of orientation and belief as we realized our strength lies in our commonalities, and not our differences. How many times have communities risen up together in a united wall against the harassment of my family? Differences have been set aside for that cause, tremendous and loving joint efforts mobilized within hours…and because of that, I ask this of everyone – let his death mean something. Let every mention of his name and of his church be a constant reminder of the tremendous good we are all capable of doing in our communities.

The lessons of my father were not unique to him, nor will this be the last we hear of his words, which are echoed from pulpits as close as other churches in Topeka, Kansas, where WBC headquarters remain, and as far away as Uganda. Let’s end the support of hateful and divisive teachings describing the LGBT community as “less than,” “sinful,” or “abnormal.” Embrace the LGBT community as our equals, our true brothers and sisters, by promoting equal rights for everyone, without exception. My father was a man of action, and I implore us all to embrace that small portion of his faulty legacy by doing the same.

At least it says something about his father’s character…something more than that he’s now a corpse, larded with bible quotes.

Christian mercy

Ken Ham is very sad for Bill Maher. Maher is going to die someday, as are we all, and then, according to his cult beliefs, Bill Maher is going to suffer in torment for eternity because he called his peculiar god mean names. And you know what that means? Right now, in this life, Ken Ham gets to put on his sanctimony face and drone on about how his god is a loving god who will set you on fire if you don’t love him back … all while completely oblivious to how his every word shows that Maher is right, god really is a psychotic mass murderer and tyrant.

So Ken Ham says, I’m reminded that God is a God of grace and mercy, and then quotes the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men and cites the Bible, cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death (Revelation 21:8).

Yes, one day, when God determines, Bill Maher will die and enter eternity: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).

And just where, in Ham’s testimony, is he refuting rather than reinforcing the fact that his god is a monstrous psychopath, a horrible, awful being we’re supposed to worship submissively or face the most awful torture?

Ham ends by saying he fears for Bill Maher’s soul. I fear living Christians and their death cult far more.

Turns out Bryan Fischer is saying the same thing. His proof that god is merciful is the fact that Maher wasn’t struck dead instantly.

Still picking nits over Giordano Bruno

The NCSE, which does good work otherwise, is a bit too apologetic to religion for my taste. They’re bumbling all over themselves to criticize Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos because it highlighted the conflict between religion and science, which is always a no-no for the NCSE. Now it’s Josh Rosenau’s turn to complain bitterly about the historical inaccuracy of even mentioning the unpleasant fact that the church has burned people alive.

Against that outpouring of objections from historians of science and others who want to see the rebooted Cosmos live up to the highest ideals of scientific and historical accuracy…

Hang on there, that’s a bit slimy. Who is saying it was inaccurate? Rosenau cites a bunch of people claiming that Bruno wasn’t a scientist and didn’t die for heliocentrism; but the episode nowhere claimed that he was a scientist. It actually said he was a mystic. You can’t complain that the show was wrong, only that it put the Catholic church in a very bad light…which is actually what has all the complainers wound up. How dare you point out the pernicious influence of religious dogma on civilization? That has nothing to do with science!

…PZ Myers insists that we are all Missing the Point of Giordano Bruno. In PZ Myers’s reading, the point of having a science show talk about Bruno and his cosmology (which he arrived at through a mystical vision and which he set at odds with Copernicans because they did not use heliocentrism as a religious argument) was not to tell a story about the history of science and its relationship to society or religion, but to simply alert the world to the fact: “Bruno was tortured to an agonizing death for his beliefs. Full stop.” And more generally: “The Church maintained an Inquisition to torture people who didn’t follow Catholic dogma in thought.”

Rosenau’s argument is that the Bruno story was misleading and inaccurate. Is there anything inaccurate in those quotes? Here’s a fuller summary of what I was saying.

I don’t think it odd at all that the series brought Giordano Bruno to the fore. This is not at all a show for scientists, but to bring a little bit of the awe and wonder of science to everyone. I think it was a good idea to use a non-scientist as an example of how dogma oppresses and harms everyone. Bruno was an idealist, a mystic, an annoying weirdo, a heretic, and for that, the Catholic Church set him on fire.

But somehow, being a weirdo means, in Rosenau’s eyes, that Bruno must be set apart from the real scientists. The church was only burning heretics, it would be a whole different matter if they were burning scientists.

To PZ’s eyes, nothing about that segment rested on whether Bruno was the brave vox clamantis in deserto, calmly championing heliocentrism and an infinite universe. The fact that Bruno wasn’t killed for those beliefs (not, of course, that he should have been killed for any of his beliefs, nor for stating them publicly!), that he didn’t arrive at his conclusions for scientific or empirical reasons, and didn’t try to test those ideas scientifically, are all, in PZ’s telling, irrelevant.

Exactly! Completely irrelevant!

Why is this so hard to understand? How could science function in a world where theological arbiters of the permissible truth can silence anyone who disagrees with them? I should think living in a culture of fear where you could be murdered for saying something the pope didn’t like was a rather effective way of suppressing scientific progress. Kill a few idealists for saying something against church dogma, and suddenly, those scientific investigations begin to look rather dangerous.

How long would a Darwin have lasted if he’d been born 200 years earlier?

But also, I’m getting a little annoyed with these people claiming that Bruno wasn’t killed for that one specific belief about the movement of the earth. He was! We have the list of eight charges for which Bruno was condemned. Note especially number 5.

1 – The statement of “two real and eternal principles of existence: the soul of the world and the original matter from which beings are derived”.

2 – The doctrine of the infinite universe and infinite worlds in conflict with the idea of Creation: “He who denies the infinite effect denies the infinite power”.

3 – The idea that every reality resides in the eternal and infinite soul of the world, including the body: “There is no reality that is not accompanied by a spirit and an intelligence”.

4 – The argument according to which “there is no transformation in the substance”, since the substance is eternal and generates nothing, but transforms.

5 – The idea of terrestrial movement, which according to Bruno, did not oppose the Holy Scriptures, which were popularised for the faithful and did not apply to scientists.

6 – The designation of stars as “messengers and interpreters of the ways of God”.

7 – The allocation of a “both sensory and intellectual” soul to earth.

8 – The opposition to the doctrine of St Thomas on the soul, the spiritual reality held captive in the body and not considered as the form of the human body.

It’s mostly a lot of New Agey sounding bollocks, with a fascination with contradicting bizarre Catholic doctrine with new, equally bizarre nonsense. So? That the earth rotates around the sun was one of his beliefs, and he didn’t come up with it any more than Josh Rosenau or I came up with the idea of evolution—but you still don’t get to murder people for their harmless beliefs, whether they’re original or scientifically tested or not.

Here’s another example that would have really driven the apologists for religion nuts: Michael Servetus. He was also set on fire in the 16th century for ideas that the Catholic Church detested, specifically for denying the trinity (stop right there and think about it: one of the most ridiculous, unsupportable (by evidence or the Bible, even) beliefs of modern Christianity, and they’ve been killing people and committing genocide for disagreeing with it). But Servetus was an early scientist — he was the first to figure out that the heart was a double-circuit pump, identifying the pulmonary circulation.

But most people didn’t know about it, because after they set him on fire, they set his books on fire too. No one knew about this discovery until William Harvey rediscovered it a hundred years later…and the last few hidden copies of Servetus’s books (I think only 3 survived the flames) were revealed.

So he was executed for his theology. But to pretend that this had no consequences for the advancement of science is ludicrous.

Watch the show yourself and judge what point the segment is making. But if PZ is right and the point was to talk about the horrors of the Roman Inquisition, why not expound upon the Albigensian Crusade or the Hussite Crusade or Joan of Arc or Girolamo Savonarola or William Tyndale, who also were put to death for their theological heterodoxies? Why spin a misleading [assertion not in evidence–pzm] tale about Bruno, implying that he inspired and laid the groundwork for a modern cosmology in which the universe is infinite, our sun is just another star, and our planets orbit our sun as other planets orbit other suns?

Yes, let’s! How about, though, if the lackeys for religion count themselves very, very lucky that Tyson only selected one man as an example, rather than exhaustively listing all of religion’s crimes against humanity? He highlighted one example, and moved on, and still the apologists are up in arms over it.

Here’s the thing. Neil deGrasse Tyson is not a militant atheist. He has specifically said that he does not want to make atheism his cause — he has other goals in mind. And yet, even here, people are freaking out because he openly discussed the deleterious effects of dogma on science.

The Phelps power struggle takes a familiar turn

Fred Phelps is out at Westboro Baptist. He’s off dying in a hospice. Apparently his sin was asking for more kindness. The former big voice of WBC, Shirley Phelps-Roper, has fallen out of favor. She has been replaced by a Council of Elders…all men, of course.

Pastor Fred Waldron Phelps Sr. was excommunicated from the Westboro Baptist Church after advocating a kinder approach between church members.

The excommunication occurred after the formation of a board of male elders in the church. The board had defeated Shirley Phelps-Roper, the church’s longtime spokeswoman, in a power struggle, and Fred Phelps Sr. called for kinder treatment of fellow church members.

The board then ejected Fred Phelps Sr., who founded the church in the 1950s.

Amazing. Yet, somehow, entirely unexpected. How could a woman be expected to run a Bible-based organization? How could kindness be tolerated in a church supposedly built around the teachings of Jesus? That goes against the entire history of Christianity!

Spreading Christian hypocrisy world-wide!

The Nkhoma Synod in Malawi has recently sent out a letter telling all their church-goers who to vote for. It’s an interesting document with some revealing wording.

The Church continues to note with great concern the levels at which moral values are being eroded in the name of civilization, human and minority rights.

Cases of lack of respect for the elders, lack of decency in the dressing, promotion of secular humanism, homosexuality, abortion, prostitution and pornography are all acts that our Lord does not condone.

According to the Pastoral Letter, any nation that promotes these ‘immoral’ values faces judgment from God.

Notice what stands in opposition to their “moral values”: Civilization. Human rights. Minority rights. When you have to acknowledge that civilization and basic humanity are against you, shouldn’t that be a warning sign that maybe you ought to rethink your values?

I like the fact that secular humanism is noted as one of their enemies (and, presumably, one of those forces aided and abetted by civilization and human rights), and that they include a laundry list of other social concerns, like abortion and homosexuality that are all rightfully tangled together with our godlessness.

And, oh yeah, Jesus and the prostitutes. Luke 7.

44 And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head.

45 Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet.

46 My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment.

47 Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.

48 And he said unto her, Thy sins are forgiven.

49 And they that sat at meat with him began to say within themselves, Who is this that forgiveth sins also?

50 And he said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.

So this Jesus legend blesses the prostitutes, and says nothing about homosexuals, but does rage at the moneylenders in the temple…what was it that he doesn’t condone, again, and what are the immoral values that face a rude smackdown from a god?

I’m so sorry, Malawi, I see you’re also regurgitating the poison spread by the likes of Scott Lively.

Feel a little pity

Nathan Phelps reports:

I’ve learned that my father, Fred Phelps, Sr., pastor of the "God Hates Fags" Westboro Baptist Church, was ex-communicated from the "church" back in August of 2013. He is now on the edge of death at Midland Hospice house in Topeka, Kansas.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Terribly ironic that his devotion to his god ends this way. Destroyed by the monster he made.

I feel sad for all the hurt he’s caused so many. I feel sad for those who will lose the grandfather and father they loved. And I’m bitterly angry that my family is blocking the family members who left from seeing him, and saying their good-byes.

What a terrible way to go: it sounds like his family is eating each other from within, he’s been kicked out of his own church (I would like to know the story behind that…if he was drifting away from the message, in what direction?), and now he’s dying alone, isolated by the people who ex-communicated him.

His legacy is a terrible one, but I’ll take a moment to feel a little pity for a tragically misguided old man, and the family who suffered through caring for him.

Now if only the haters of Westboro Baptist who perpetuate that legacy would only take a moment, too, to look at that sad old dying man and realize that there lies the end of the path they are on.

Are you planning to go out to eat today?

We did. My wife and I went out to Mi Mexico in Alexandria for a celebratory lunch (she has put up with me for 34 years! Yay!). It was very good — they have a vegetarian menu and prices were reasonable.

But just before I left, I was reading this terrible site, Sundays Are the Worst, which has a huge collection of stories from restaurant waitstaff about serving the Sunday-after-church crowd. You know where this is going: appallingly rude Christians stiffing people right and left. And then we went to a restaurant.

I think I over-tipped. I felt like I had to compensate for Jesus’ selfish followers.

Missing the point of Giordano Bruno

I’m seeing a lot of silly carping about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos — almost all of it is focused on the story of Bruno told in the first episode. The apologists for religion are upset: how dare a science program point out the poisonous influence of religion? Bruno wasn’t really a scientist anyway, so he shouldn’t count! Peter Hess of the NCSE offers up a good example of apologetics.

Unfortunately, the series premiere risks squandering that opportunity through a combination of misleading history and reliance on an antiquated narrative of inevitable conflict between science and religion—and the Catholic Church in particular—that simply is not borne out by the facts. A generation of careful scholarship has given us a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the long, rich, and complex relationship between religion and the sciences. This latest Cosmos reflects none of that historiography, presenting us instead with what is quite literally a cartoon version of the life story of someone who was not a scientist. Missing were the stories of Catholic astronomers such as Copernicus [delayed publication out of fear; only saw his ideas in print on his deathbed; book was prohibited by the Catholic Church in 1616] and Galileo [tried by the Vatican, forced to recant, spent the end of his life under house arrest], Protestants such as Brahe [Brahe was a geocentrist — a geoheliocentrist, actually] and Kepler [Did you know his mother was tried and imprisoned for witchcraft?] and Newton[Also a mystic, Bible-prophecy walloping, fanatical religious person], or Fr. George Lemaître, proposer of the Big Bang.

Whenever I see one of these guys throw out noise like a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the long, rich, and complex relationship between religion and the sciences, I want to ask…what was nuanced and sophisticated about setting a human being on fire? I also think his list of famous scientists overlooks an important trend: between Copernicus and Lemaître, we are seeing the steady triumph of science over religion, that we see the Church forced to reduce the severity of its enforcement of dogma in the face of the overwhelming success of science in accurately describing the world. The Church was dragged kicking and screaming into an era where you don’t get to murder people for disagreeing with your dogma.

It is odd therefore that Cosmos focuses almost exclusively on the marginal case of Giordano Bruno. Of course, I am not defending Bruno’s persecution and death—no decent human being now would ever condone burning a person alive for any reason. Moreover, in 2014 we view legitimate theological dissent very diffferently than did our ancestors.

But the circumstances were quite different 400 years ago. According to the 16th century Italian legal code and the customs of Renaissance politics, Bruno was judged by an ecclesiastical court to be an obdurate heretic for refusing to cease in promulgating his theological ideas. As such he was deserving of capital punishment and was turned over for execution by the civil arm in Rome. In the 21st century we inhabit a very different era, a religiously pluralistic age of largely secular states in which the nature and exercise of authority are vastly different than they were in Post-Reformation Italy.

Is anyone else getting that queasy feeling, like when you read about William Lane Craig justifying the murder of babies by ‘Israeli’ soldiers? Hey, it was OK to set people on fire in 1600! Why are you complaining?

I agree that we live in a very different era in the 21st century. Give the credit to secularism, rationalism, and the Enlightenment, though, because fucking religion fought every progressive change every step of the way, with liberal religion dogging along by discarding parts of the religious nonsense of previous generations.

I don’t think it odd at all that the series brought Giordano Bruno to the fore. This is not at all a show for scientists, but to bring a little bit of the awe and wonder of science to everyone. I think it was a good idea to use a non-scientist as an example of how dogma oppresses and harms everyone. Bruno was an idealist, a mystic, an annoying weirdo, a heretic, and for that, the Catholic Church set him on fire.

Do I need to repeat that? Bruno was tortured to an agonizing death for his beliefs. Full stop. Don’t even try to rationalize that.

Furthermore, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s own words, transcribed by Wesley Elsberry, are crystal clear on the point he was making.

Giordano Bruno lived in a time when there was no such thing as the separation of church and state, or the notion that freedom of speech was a sacred right of every individual. Expressing an idea that didn’t conform to traditional belief could land you in deep trouble. Recklessly, Bruno returned to Italy. Maybe he was homesick, but still he must have known that his homeland was one of the most dangerous places in Europe he could possibly go. The Roman Catholic Church maintained a system of courts known as the Inquisition, and its sole purpose was to investigate and torment anyone who dared voice views that differed from theirs. It wasn’t long before Bruno fell into the clutches of the thought police.

The Church maintained an Inquisition to torture people who didn’t follow Catholic dogma in thought. Let’s not hide that fact. Let’s not pretend it was OK because it was 400 years ago. Let’s not say it was irrelevant because many of their victims, like Bruno, were not scientists. I think it’s a rather important point that the progress of science requires that we not set people who disagree with us on fire.

Wesley makes a very good point at the end.

The point “Cosmos” was making was more basic. At the level of telling people about science, we don’t need a lot of historical nuance about the Inquisition: what they did was so far out of bounds of the way discourse needs to be handled that simply noting the historical divergence is sufficient. “Cosmos” did that, plainly told people they were doing that, and, sadly enough, a lot of people of otherwise lofty intellect managed not to take the point.

I will also disagree with Hess. There is a conflict between science and religion. Somehow, these people think that the historical evidence of people leaving behind their antiquated religious ideas and gradually adapting to a more secular view of the world is evidence that religion and science are compatible.

You know, I’d heard this vague euphemism that the church “immobilized his tongue” to prevent Bruno from speaking heresy on the way to the stake, but I didn’t know how. The answer was provided in the comments:

[on the way to the stake, Feb 19, 1600] As the parade moved on, Bruno became animated and excited. He reacted to the mocking crowds, responding to their yells with quotes from his books and the sayings of the ancients. His comforters, the Brotherhood of St. John, tried to quiet the exchange, to protect Bruno from yet further pain and indignity, but he ignored them. And so after a few minutes the procession was halted by the Servants of Justice. A jailer was brought forward and another two held Bruno’s head rigid. A long metal spike was thrust through Bruno’s left cheek, pinning his tongue and emerging through the right cheek. Then another spike was rammed vertically through his lips. Together, the spikes formed a cross. Great sprays of blood erupted onto his gown and splashed the faces of the brotherhood close by. Bruno spoke no more. … as the fire began to grip, the Brothers of Pity of St. John the Beheaded tried one last time to save the man’s soul. Risking the flames, one of them leaned into the fire with a crucifix, but Bruno merely turned his head away. Seconds later, the fire caught his robe and seared his body, and above the hissing and crackling of the flames could be heard the man’s muffled agony.

Yeah, that’s what the apologists want to dismiss as irrelevant.

There’s a secular argument for wearing underpants on your head. So?

Sarah Moglia points out that David Silverman has been saying some weird things recently.

Yesterday, an article was published about atheists at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference). Featured prominently in the article was Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists. In it, Dave was quoted as saying, “I will admit there is a secular argument against abortion. You can’t deny that it’s there, and it’s maybe not as clean cut as school prayer, right to die, and gay marriage.” Is that so?

I’m trying to figure out what this ‘secular argument’ actually is; he didn’t say. I have encountered anti-choice people tabling at an atheist convention, and they couldn’t say either — I got the impression these were actually religious people trying to evangelize to the atheists with a pretense, and they stood out oddly from the rest of the crowd…rather like an atheist shilling at CPAC. So speak up, Dave, tell us what these secular arguments are.

I’m also wary because in my business we’ve run into folks peddling religious bullshit under the guise of being secular before: we call them intelligent design creationists. No one is fooled. Similarly, the anti-choicers who claim to be making a rational secular argument are easy to see through, since they ultimately always rely on some magical perspective on the embryo.

But here’s the bottom line: it is not enough to make a purely secular argument. It has to also be a good argument, unless atheism is to become a smokescreen for nonsense, to be accepted purely because of its godless label. And then atheism might as well just be another religion.

The knights errant sally forth against the Hitchens dragon, end up toast

Some columnist named James Knight has decided to strike back against New Atheist tyranny by rebutting their major claims, and he’s starting out by picking on Hitchens and Dawkins, who, he says, make terrible arguments.

As you’ll see, Dawkins and Hitchens have ready-made methods for twisting meanings and distorting logic in a way that the more pliant and impressionable individuals don’t seem to notice.

Prepare yourself; that’s from a guy who’s about to launch into a series of theological arguments. Self-aware, he’s not.

Knight has a whole series of excerpts from the Hitch he warbles about, and I’m just going to pick two of the more famous arguments he’s made, and I think that will be enough to see that Knight is all pompous puffery. I’m sure you’re all familiar with Hitchens’ theistic challenge.

Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.

Now read Knight’s pratfall:

To me that is the sort of pliable question that sounds intelligent but isn’t really. I think Hitchens’ question shows a lack of understanding of what religious belief entails, and also the overlooking of something that should be trivially obvious. The short answer is, the question is as meaningless as asking whether quenching thirst is better than feeding oneself. It is true in most cases that there is no ‘statement’ or ‘action’ that a theist can make or do that others cannot, but that tells us nothing meaningful about the God debate, because a proper analysis involves much more than just the statement or action – it involves analysing the beliefs, intentions, humility, motive, and other psychological factors that do not come out in a mere action. Naturally we could name good moral actions taken by both religious and non-religious people that have produced the same results, but that does not tell us anything about what is directing the action, or whether the person is living a Godly life, and it certainly has no bearing on whether there is a God.

That’s not a reply, it’s an evasion! We don’t understand what religious belief entails? Then tell us what it does. Throughout his replies, he does this constantly: you just don’t understand, he whines, implying that there is some great deep thought behind his claims, while never illuminating exactly what it is.

But most importantly, it’s an abject concession. He can’t cite anything a believer does that could not be done by a non-believer — there is no special grace granted by faith. We have good moral actions taken by both religious and non-religious people that have produced the same results, is one concession, but this is the bigger one: that does not tell us anything about what is directing the action. Exactly! You cannot discern the presence of a guiding moral force outside of any individual person, and Knight agrees…so how can he talk about a Godly life? How does he know?

It certainly does have bearing on the argument about the existence of gods. I have never debated anyone who doesn’t eventually get around to an argument from consequences: How can you be good without god? Aren’t you worried about Hell? Society will fall apart without god! Yet here is Knight, admitting that there are no moral consequences to disbelief, while also implying that goodness is a Godly life. He wants to simultaneously argue that unbelievers can be morally good, while predicating the standard for moral goodness on a god.

Here’s another famous Hitchism that Knight dislikes:

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Watch out, here comes the egregious relativism, which sounds like something straight out of Answers in Genesis.

To express fully what is wrong with this statement would take a whole essay in itself. But briefly, it grossly caricatures religious faith to state that it is ‘asserted without evidence’, when, in reality, evidence is in the eye of the beholder, and different people accept and interpret different evidences differently. Maybe some people are too easily seduced by interpretations that shouldn’t ever be offered as reasons for belief in God, but equally there are going to be lots of people whose psychological agitations predispose them to a scepticism that demands too much evidence, or the wrong kind of evidence.

I suspect Christopher Hitchens’ main problem is that he’d never thought through properly what evidence for God actually means, and how it might be different from the more simplistic evidence found in empirical science. Never once did I ever hear Christopher Hitchens tell us what he thinks good evidence is, what makes good evidence good, how belief in God differs from knowledge of the empirical world, and what he thinks would be satisfactory evidence for God.

I really despise the vacuous Well, we just interpret the evidence differently argument — it’s a lie. Over and over, I see it said in order to defend ignoring the bulk of the evidence.

I see a pad of post-it notes next to my keyboard on my desk. This is clearly evidence that tiny invisible elves from 3M climbed up the wall outside my window, translocated extradimensionally through the glass into my office, and left me a present. Or is it evidence that I picked up a pad at the central office and put it in a convenient spot near my phone? You don’t get to say that the existence of this pad is equal evidence for both claims; you have to ignore the consilience of phenomena that provide better explanations. There is a cabinet of these things just down the hall from me; it’s a mundane object with obvious utility; there are torn-off post-it notes with scribbled comments attached to my phonebook. At the same time, 3M elves have no evidence for their existence, have posited powers with no known mechanism, and are arbitrary, ad hoc, bizarre explanations for a perfectly ordinary object. It is not demanding too much evidence to expect some independent corroboration of the mechanisms of the phenomenon that aren’t more simply explained by my ability to walk 50 feet to a collection of supplies.

In the same way, believers like to say they do have evidence for their supernatural phantasm…and then they point to their Bible. Sure, it’s evidence. Evidence backed up by documents and history that over the course of many centuries, human beings collected stories and legends and hectoring homilies and poetry, all written by people, and assembled them into a clumsy compilation, and stamped it all with the imprimatur of religious authority. Meanwhile, you’re trying to tell me this hunk of cellulose and ink was magically transported into the world of Catholicism by the equivalent of invisible elves.

Who actually has evidence for the origin of the object?

Knight’s second paragraph is a complaint that Hitchens’ didn’t tell them what evidence for their god would be acceptable, which is a fair complaint. Or it would be, if there weren’t another problem: define God. I can’t tell you what would be evidence for or against it if you’re not going to settle down and get specific about this god’s properties and nature. Is it an anthropomorphic being with a penis that can impregnate human women? Is it a vast eternal cosmic intelligence that encompasses the entire universe and manipulates matter and energy with its will? Is it benign fluff, a happy feeling of love that permeates us all? I suspect he’d tell us some meaningless noise about a “ground state of being”, which seems to be the universal bafflegab right now to avoid answering the question.

You know, this is the big difference. If you tell a scientist that their evidence doesn’t distinguish between two alternatives, it’s the scientist who thinks hard about the problem, comes up with what would be differing consequences of an experiment if his hypothesis was valid or invalid, and does the work. We actually love this part of theorizing, thinking through the implications of a hypothesis and then testing them. And that’s a process that involves getting specific about the details of our hypothesis.

Theologians, on the other hand, hate that part. We can ask them what the difference would be between a universe that had a god and one that didn’t, between a god that answers prayers and one that doesn’t, between a Christian god and a Muslim god, between a Catholic god and a Protestant god, and they love to tell us that the differences are profound, but not anything specific. And then they yell at us that we haven’t given them the criteria that we could use to discriminate between the alternatives. And then, most aggravatingly, if we go ahead and make some predictions ourselves about what the universe ought to be like if there is or isn’t a god, they yell even more that their god isn’t like that, we used the wrong premises, we didn’t address their idiosyncratic view of a god…which is always conveniently tailored to circumvent whatever test we propose.

Do you theological wankers even realize that as the proponents of hypothesis about the nature of the universe, it is your job to generate testable hypotheses about how it all works? And that we, as agents in opposition to your nonsense, would be overjoyed to have you say something explicit about an implication of your ideas that we could test? Actually, I think you do know, because you so invariably avoid presenting any useful descriptions of what your philosophy entails. We keep waiting. And right now, your silence and the vacuity of what few feeble replies you make are just added to our stockpile of evidence that you’re all farting theology out of your asses.

James Knight ends with what he thinks is an insightful comment about the nature of god debates.

The God one accepts or denies is only likely to be as intellectually tenable as the intellectual tenability of the person holding those ideas.

I will therefore take the lack of intellectual competence of his arguments for gods as evidence of his own, personal intellectual emptiness.

Don’t worry, James. You’re in the company of a great many idiots, so you’ll just blend in.