Be afraid

Ross Douthat wrote a column for the New York Times on Sunday…wait, hold it right there. How does that guy even get the privilege of a regular column in one of the biggest papers in the country? It’s a marvel.

OK, but anyway, he wrote this ridiculous column in which he moaned about the decline of Catholic influence in American politics. I would have just said “good!” and moved on, but this analysis made me worry.

The problem for authoritarian conservatives like Douthat is that the GOP is wildly out of step with the US Catholic Bishops and the Vatican on just about every economic issue: wealth inequality, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unions, universal health care — even global warming (not to mention the death penalty and immigration).

The other problem he has is that American Catholics overwhelmingly reject the bishops’ stance on the sex stuff the GOP obsesses about and a whopping 60% of them want the Church’s leadership to focus on social justice issues — which are of course anathema to the Republican Party.

Do you get that? American Catholics find the Catholic bishops too conservative, and the Catholic bishops find the Republican party too conservative. The Republicans are worse than the Catholic hierarchy, and we all know in what contempt I hold Catholicism.

When Catholic bishops find you too stony-hearted and callous, you know you’ve got a problem.

Perhaps they should have tried this technique on the priests?

I don’t know how the Catholic Church manages to hold itself together in the face of all these revelations. The Dutch church was practicing the usual heedless barbarities.

Up to 11 boys were castrated while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic church in the 1950s to rid them of homosexuality, a newspaper investigation has said.

A young man was castrated in 1956 after telling police he was being abused by priests, the newspaper reported.

Although it does suggest a better solution. Like the priesthood of Cybele, perhaps the Catholic priesthood ought to demand voluntary self-castration as a prerequisite to admission? I understand that they’re already having problems getting recruits, and this certainly wouldn’t help — but at least the ones you would get would be much more dedicated.

Wait, no…one thing we don’t need is more dedicated Catholic fanatics.

How about if we stop pretending religion is an important academic subject at all?

I was asked to promote this petition to stop forced religious indoctrination in Greek schools, and I support it and you should go sign it if you agree.

Greek public schools hold daily Orthodox prayer, schedule regular church visits as well as mandate the taking of a “religious studies” class every year. However, Greek law also allows students to opt out by submitting a simple form signed by their guardian if they are under 18. Unfortunately, many school administrators are either unaware or simply refuse to allow the exemption and ministry officials are not holding them to account.

The latest case is Stavros Kanias, School Principal in the Glika Nera suburb of Athens. Kanias is refusing to allow a middle school student to opt out even stating that his refusal is based on a desire to “follow the law of Christ”. Even though the required form has been submitted it is not being accepted. Many similar cases are often not publicized.

When Greek MP’s have raised the question in parliament, the Education Minister has simply reiterated the procedure and deferred to lower ministry officials.

But I do have one reservation: it doesn’t go far enough. It’s a good idea to give students the ability to opt out of religious instruction, but why is religious instruction in any school any where?

I’ve usually taken a pragmatic perspective on this issue before. We don’t have much choice to but to give way on minor compromises in school curricula, and this is often an easy one: if religion is taught comparatively and objectively, it’s a good tool for breaking dogma. I can’t get too irate at a school offering a “world religions” class, because I know that would be the first step towards atheism for the students (for the same reason, though, I’m suspicious. Our opponents aren’t morons, and they’d know this too — I suspect them of plotting to smuggle orthodoxy into the classroom under cover of objectivity, and for instance, knowing that a local priest of the dominant cult will often offer to teach the course.)

But here’s my major problem. It’s a useless subject. And no, I’m not one of those elitist yahoos who thinks art and philosophy are useless subjects, rejecting anything that isn’t a hard science; I mean, it is literally useless, distracting, and narrow. If right now students were getting an hour a week in a “religious studies” class, I think they’d be far better served by getting an hour a week for anthropology, or philosophy, or poetry…or sure, more math.

I know what the usual argument would be: but every culture has a religion of some sort, it’s a human universal, people find it important and we ought to acknowledge it. So? Every human culture has parasites and diseases, so why don’t we have a mandatory weekly course in parasitology? It would be far more entertaining, interesting, and useful. What wouldn’t be quite so useful, though, is a course taught from the perspective of the malaria parasite, praising its role in shaping human civilizations for thousands of years, which is pretty much equivalent to what kids get in a “religious studies” class right now.

I don’t think religion will ever disappear, but I’ll be satisfied when seminaries and theology departments all shut down everywhere for lack of interest.

Mighty fine lawyers down there in Kentucky

The Kentucky office of Homeland Security is being sued by American Atheists and others for the absurdity of a statement on a plaque and their training materials that the “safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God” — that statement just fills you with confidence in their competence, doesn’t it? Splattering an official document with testimonials to your failure to cope except by closing your eyes and praying is not something I want to see from people responsible for my security.

The state Attorney General has responded, and no, I am not reassured or confident that we’re dealing with grown-ups anymore. The gist of his arguments that this is not a problem of church-state separation is that:

  1. Denial! State security has a secular purpose, so this isn’t really a religious claim.

  2. Evasion! They aren’t making anyone swear an oath, so it’s OK.

  3. Contradiction! While there may be a mingling of religion and government (? See statement 1), you can assess the statute while pretending it doesn’t have a religious component.

That’s in a petition to the Supreme Court defending the right to rely on their god. I’d say it doesn’t have a chance, except…SCALIAAAA!

Who cares if the pope retires?

Get rid of one, and they’re just going to appoint another one. It’s not as if the job description has changed: the primary criteria are the ability to profess brain-buggering bullshit and work your way through the arcane medieval hierarchy of church politics, so it’s not as if we’re going to be surprised. It’s going to be another old guy who has dedicated his entire life to superstitious nonsense.

How I’ll always remember this pope:

The expected Phelps reply

You’ve probably heard by now that Megan Phelps-Roper and her sister Grace have publicly left the Westboro Baptist Church. It’s not exactly a friendly place, you know.

An official spokesman for the church has made a statement:

“If they continue with the position that they have, those two girls, yeah, they’re going to hell.”

Well, that was predictable.

I wonder how far their defection will take them? Will we be seeing Megan and Grace at an atheist meeting in the future, along with Nate?

Aryan Jesus

This isn’t Thor, it’s Jesus.

aryanjesus

There is a lot of cheesy Christian art that looks like this, and I get the same message from all of it. At worst, it’s freaking racist — these are people trying to draw the Ideal Man, and every time they fit him into the western, north European mold. Most charitably and at the very least, it tells me that Jesus isn’t a historical figure to these people, his reality isn’t a concern, and they need make no effort to put him in a place and time and people. He’s a legend, and so he’s a plastic figure with no strong attachment to history…but he can be freely warped to fit the ideology of the individual.

Either way, I feel no need or desire to worship or even respect a cartoon.

(via Zeno)

Another really stupid argument from William Lane Craig

Craig is not one of the clever ones. He’s one of the glib, superficial ones, and he impresses a lot of superficial people. Here’s one of his latest, the Argument for God from Intentionality.

God is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness in the world. Philosophers are puzzled by states of intentionality. Intentionality is the property of being about something or of something. It’s signifies the object directedness of our thoughts.

For example, I can think about my summer vacation or I can think of my wife. No physical object has this sort of intentionality. A chair or a stone or a glob of tissue like the one like the brain is not about or of something else. Only mental states or states of consciousness are about other things. As a materialist, Dr. Rosenberg [the interlocutor] recognizes that and so concludes that on atheism there really are no intentional states.

Dr. Rosenberg boldly claims that we never really think about anything. But this seems incredible. Obviously I am thinking about Dr. Rosenberg’s argument. This seems to me to be a reductio ad absurdum of atheism. By contrast, on theism because God is a mind it’s hardly surprising that there should be finite minds. Thus intentional states fit comfortably into a theistic worldview.

So we may argue:

1. If God did not exist, [then] intentional states of consciousness would not exist.

2. But intentional states of consciousness do exist!

3. Therefore, God exists.

The link is to a philosopher’s debunking, pointing out the obvious fallacies and some of the more subtle arguments against it from serious, non-superficial philosophers. It doesn’t bring up the first counter-argument that came to my mind, though.

We know what the physical nature of intentional states are; they are patterns of electrical activity in a network of cells with specific physical properties. We don’t know how to read that pattern precisely, but we can measure and observe them: stick someone in an MRI and ask them to think about different things or engage in different cognitive tasks, and presto, blood flows shift in the brain and different areas light up with different levels of activity. These are properties not seen in chairs or stones, which lack the neuronal substrates that generate these patterns.

Intentional states are ultimately entirely physical states; they are dependent on organized brain matter burning energy actively and responsively in different patterns. There is no evidence that they require supernatural input, so Craig’s first premise that these could not exist without supernatural input is not demonstrated.