Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
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?
This isn’t Thor, it’s Jesus.
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)
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.
Islamic extremists have been destroying ancient manuscripts in an important library in Timbuktu. You know what that means? It’s time to chastise Richard Dawkins!
The latest furore comes after Islamist extremists burned down a sacred library in Timbuktu, Mali, during the ongoing conflict there. Prof Dawkins tweeted "Like Alexandria, like Bamiyan, Timbuktu’s priceless manuscript heritage destroyed by Islamic barbarians."
Cue much clutching of pearls and fainting. "He’s been mean about a religion!"
The article makes a very good point: “if you burn down a library, ‘barbarian’ is probably the right term.” I’d also add that if libraries are burnt down, your priority ought not to be to wag a finger at the people protesting the vandalism, but to at least wag that finger in the right direction…at the vandals.
That god character’s actions are always contemptible.
(NSFW, because God is a potty-mouth.)
Don’t forget to check the latest Jesus and Mo, too. He’s not a nice guy in the slightest.
I was a bit bemused by this opinion piece in a Canadian paper. It’s a good article, no quibble there, but it’s just so striking that it has taken the emergence of an obviously weird religion like Scientology to make someone notice that this is a general problem of all religions.
…after reading Lawrence Wright’s searing new investigative book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, my usual indifference has given way to concern.
On second thought, make that fright. And not just about L. Ron Hubbard’s secretive army of adherents.
Because Wright’s book demonstrates in granular detail what an organization with enough money and zealous acolytes can do once it has wrapped itself in a religious cloak: assault, conspire, burgle, forge, perjure, spy, bully and intimidate anyone who gets in its way.
Convince your flock that they are above earthly laws, and they go about their task with, well, religious ferocity.
And the real problem is that religions are by their nature “above earthly laws” — reality is no check against their excesses, so they can easily spin into dangerous lunacy, sucking their proponents into an ever-expanding cloud of the absurd. How can they believe our criticisms when the almighty all-powerful all-knowing Master of the Universe has personally told them the Holy Truth?
But at least this guy is expanding his consciousness a little bit. If Scientology promotes evil, what about, say, the Catholic Church?
Ask yourself this: If it were proved that senior employees of Microsoft, or Bank of America, had been sexually assaulting minors worldwide for decades, overwhelmingly young boys in their care, and senior company management had been complicit, either ignoring the abuse or actually taking steps to cover it up in order to protect the company’s image, how long would it be before that company would be facing a Justice Department strike force? Or bankruptcy?
Yet the Roman Catholic Church was, at most, dented by such horrific revelations. Individual priests have been charged worldwide, yes. But efforts to hold the church hierarchy responsible for the crimes that were covered up have been exceedingly rare.
Inevitably, that is because of the severe pushback that any large religious organization can command if it feels threatened.
Let’s not just pick on the Catholics and Scientologists, though. Billy Graham, the National Prayer Breakfast, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Moral Majority, Liberty “University”, the Republican Party…notice how religion is reaching out to grasp secular power and influence?
Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Los Angeles Catholic diocese has been apparently involved in major cover-ups of child abuse scandals during his tenure.He has promoted all kinds of sneaky maneuvers to keep priestly child rapers out of jail.
“Sounds good — please proceed!” the cardinal, now retired, instructed in 1987 after the aide, Msgr. Thomas Curry, cautioned against therapy for one confessed predator — lest the therapist feel obliged to tell authorities and scandalize the archdiocese. The two discussed another priest, Msgr. Peter Garcia, who admitted specializing in the rape of Latino immigrant children and threatened at least one boy with deportation if he complained.
That last sentence jarred me. So the priests are so explicit that they are now specializing in particular flavors of children? They must be parsing Holy Writ very precisely.
Christian talk radio is a real swamp of idiocy. Here are a couple of hosts babbling about feminists.
They did surprise me, though. They started talking about the two kinds of feminists, and oh no, I thought, here comes that boring anti-feminist crap peddled by Christina Hoff Sommers and happily swallowed by every MRA on the planet, that there are gender feminists and equity feminists. But no! I guess there is a lower level you can reach.
Their distinction was between cute feminists and ugly feminists.
I’d like to say we were done there, but they also go on to blame gays and feminists for the decline of western civilization. They’d get along just fine with a few atheists I know.
(via The Raw Story.)
Nobody will be surprised by this at all: L. Ron Hubbard cobbled together Scientology from various bits of old pseudoscience, as well as by inventing things out of thin air.
The source calls them “lies”. This is an ongoing problem: we don’t have a good word for what these people (scientologists, creationists, Christians, Muslims, whatever) are doing. They are making stuff up, they are telling things about the nature of the world that are not only false but contrary to all the available evidence, yet they often fervently believe it all; even the scam artists have to half-convince themselves that they’re doing good. And if we call it lies, some pedant will start complaining that it lacks the element of intent.
So what’s a good word for malicious mind-fuckery backed by devout good intentions? I struggle with this all the time.
