Is anyone else getting these?

A long white envelope with no return address, postmarked San Francisco. Inside, a folded piece of paper that looks like this:

That’s all.

I’ve received four of these so far, some at work and some at home. My wife has been sent one.

I wish to complain.

This is the most rinky-tink, cheap, pointless evangelical campaign yet. Come on, whoever you are, put some goddamned effort into it. Throw a Chick tract in the envelope. Pound a keyboard for a while and produce a little screed with your religious views that you photocopy and stuff into the envelopes. Personalize it a little; scribble your initials in the corner. Toss in a cheesy poem you copied off a greeting card in the evangelical bookstore. Do something — man, you couldn’t even bother to send a whole sheet of 8½ x 11 paper, you could only send me a quarter slice.

And no, I don’t believe for a minute that this was a personal message from Jesus Christ. If it was, though, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn he’s living in San Francisco. Probably in the Castro. And loving the fact that he’s escaped those assholes promoting his religion by hiding in the last place they’d look for him.

I’m a total piker when it comes to blasphemy

I have been put in my place. This is a fantastic way to blaspheme. Behold, the Jesus Christ Ice Pop.

At a party this weekend celebrating New York Design Week, which begins today, the Chilean-born artist [Sebastian Errazuriz] plans to hand out 100 “Christian Popsicles” made of “frozen holy wine transformed into the blood of Christ” and featuring a crucifix instead the tongue depressor that typically hosts the frozen treats, he said.

An image of Jesus Christ positioned traditionally on the cross is visible once the ice pop is consumed. As for the frozen wine, Errazuriz said, he concealed it in a cooler and took it into a church, where it was “inadvertently blessed by the priest while turning wine into the blood of Christ during the Eucharist.”

Excellent! I bet they’d go well with crackers.

Joe the Plumber is simply not very bright

The recent conversion of Leah Libresco has exposed some really stupid thinking: one of the junior woodchucks at Stedman’s site, for instance, chastised atheists for not realizing that “some people have good reasons for believing in God,” the kind of assertion that should make one stop and think, “Hmmm, and what might those reasons be?” They never follow through and explain what they are. And for the record, I think that Libresco’s reason, because she wants to personify her ethics, is pretty damned stupid.

But here’s a guy who makes Libresco and the Stedmanites look like super-geniuses of reason. Joe the Plumber explains why he became a “Bible-believing Christian” (in case you’re unfamiliar with the code words, that phrase means he’s a fundagelical wackaloon).

He first claims the Bible contains “everything we need to live a great life is right in the Bible”. Really, Joe? You get your plumbing instructions from the Bible? You live your life by the principles of blood sacrifice and retribution? Again, I wish these bozos would get specific: what, exactly, is the principle of life found in the Bible and not found anywhere else?

But then his big conversion moment comes from the fact that his doofus pastor shows him a science book and the Bible and points out that the science book gets revised, but the Bible never changes. My jaw dropped twice!

  1. That science adapts to new information is a strength, not a weakness. No one knows everything; as we learn more and more, an ability to change our ideas is a good thing.

  2. If the Bible were really that inflexible, it would be a terribly useless document — does he really think ‘everything he needs’ is to be found in the words of dead scribes and priests from an ancient iron age civilization?

    But mostly I wanted to ask him if he thought the Bible was originally written in English. I’d also like to see him babble if confronted with your average Christian bookstore, which will contain dozens of versions of his one true Bible.

Joe the Plumber: dumb as a soggy cardboard box full of bricks. And he’s running for congress. Why am I not surprised?

Guilty, guilty, guilty

The verdict has come down, and Jerry Sandusky has been convicted of 45 out of 48 counts of child abuse. He now faces life in prison at sentencing.

But he was just guilty of a poor career choice! Imagine, if he’d been a Catholic priest instead of a football coach, he’d simply be quietly relocated to a new venue, or paid $20,000 for his silence.

Seriously: I will slap you down hard if you dare to make prison rape jokes here. Don’t try it.

Alas, poor Jerry

Jerry Coyne is reading the Bible — the whole Bible, from beginning to end — and is discovering that it is boring and insipid. We could have told him so, but he’s such a scientist and had to confirm the observation himself, and now he’s in for some suffering.

Most Christians don’t read this book that they claim is the divine and holy word of an omniscient being, which would be odd if they actually believed that. If I had a message from a cosmic alien intelligence, I’d sure be studying it carefully. Unfortunately, even a casual scrutiny of the book reveals no useful knowledge, and no sign of a special privileged source of information.

I’ve attended and observed Bible studies. They really don’t look at the book — which isn’t surprising, these are generally people who think of reading as boring work and can’t be troubled to read a good book — they usually have a ‘study guide’. This is a book that excerpts a few verses and then tells the reader what they’re supposed to mean, in the context of their particular and peculiar sect. You know what question the study leaders often get? “What do I believe?”

I find that mind-blowing.

Anyway, let’s hope Jerry’s brain survives rolling about in drivel.

By the way, a hint: he mentions how awkward it is to be seen reading the ‘holy’ book. One solution: I’ve got it on my iPad, so if I’m caught I can tap a button and quickly swap in some kitten photos or something slightly less embarrassing.

Bill Donohue sticks his foot in his mouth again

He’s such a charming fellow. A rabbi in New York wrote an op-ed in which he defended the right of women to make their own choices about reproduction, and in reply, Donohue called him a “man full of hate” and issued a veiled threat.

Donohue responded with a note to Waskow that launched an email exchange that ended with a warning, forwarded to BuzzFeed by a source close to the rabbi, that "Jews had better not make enemies of their Catholic friends since they have so few of them" (Donohue writes that this is a saying of Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York).

Those Jews. Everyone hates ’em, so they better not cross the few Catholics who are willing to let them live, I guess.

But wait, there’s more!

Donohue also includes a postscript saying, "I do not have a long nose."

Donahue also raised a recent child abuse scandal in Orthodox Jewish communities.

“You need to do something about this epidemic right now,” he told Waskow, who is not Orthodox, suggesting that Jews follow the Catholic Church’s reforms in dealing with clerical abuse.

Wait, what? The Catholic church is now the model in how to handle priestly child-rapers? Please, no, not that…anything but that.

The Church Business

The Council for Secular Humanism has posted a most revealing analysis of church finances in the United States. It’s excellent — if only all our politicians would read and grasp it. Religion is a gigantic money pit.

First, the authors point out that the idea that churches deserve their money because they are non-profit charitable organizations is a myth. I wouldn’t donate money to an organization that was this wasteful.

Do religions engage in charitable work that addresses the physical needs of the poor? Many do, but that is not their primary focus. Religions are quick to trumpet when they do charitable work—ironically for Christians, since the Bible explicitly says not to (Mathew 6:2). But they don’t do as much charitable work as a lot of people think, and they spend a relatively small percentage of their overall revenue on such work. For instance, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS or Mormon Church), which regularly trumpets its charitable donations, gave about $1 billion to charitable causes between 1985 and 2008. That may seem like a lot until you divide it by the twenty-three-year time span and realize this church is donating only about 0.7 percent of its annual income. Other religions are more charitable. For instance, the United Methodist Church allocated about 29 percent of its revenues to charitable causes in 2010 (about $62 million of $214 million received). One calculation of the resources expended by 271 U.S. congregations found that, on average, “operating expenses” totaled 71 percent of all the expenditures of religions, much of that going to pay ministers’ salaries. Financial contributions addressing the physical needs of the poor fall within the remaining 29 percent of expenditures. While these numbers may be higher as a percentage of income than typical charitable giving by corporations, they are not hugely higher (depending on the religion) and are substantially lower in absolute terms. Wal-Mart, for instance, gives about $1.75 billion in food aid to charities each year, or twenty-eight times all of the money allotted for charity by the United Methodist Church and almost double what the LDS Church has given in the last twenty-five years.

They also point out that the churches are incredibly poorly regulated — which is probably one of the reasons they are so popular among grasping frauds. They do give out a few unfortunate ideas, though.

What this means is that donations to religions are largely unregulated. In our discussions while investigating the subsidies to religion, we realized that religions would be the ideal way to launder money if you were engaged in an illegal enterprise. Hypothetically, the leader of a drug cartel could have one of his lieutenants start a church and file for tax-exempt status. Once granted, money from the sale of drugs could then be donated to the religion, which could use the funds to build extravagant buildings (including a “parsonage”), host extravagant “services” (a.k.a. parties) for members of the religion, and pay extravagant salaries to its ministers (including the leader of the cartel). Drug money could be laundered through the church’s bank accounts with little risk of being caught by authorities. If drug cartels and the Mafia aren’t already doing this, we’d be surprised.

Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised, either. If you want to make money disappear, run it through a church — no one will ever question it or look deeper into it (except those damned atheists.)

But now, the big bottom line: exactly how much money is religion sucking out of our pockets for no purpose whatsoever?

More than $71 billion. To put that into context, the authors mention that US agricultural subsidies, which are huge, are about $180 billion.

They mention that if Florida, for instance had just revoked the property tax exemption for religions, it would have brought in a few billion dollars that would have prevented their recent major cuts in police and firefighting, and their slashing of the education budget.

Except, let’s get real here: removing the subsidies wouldn’t suddenly bring in piles of cash; instead, it would probably kill a lot of the parasitic churches.

If these subsidies were removed—though we have no basis for believing that they will be anytime soon—we wonder what the damage to religion would be. There is evidence that donations to religions are tied to taxes; as the tax benefit of donating goes up, so do donations and vice versa. In other words, it seems likely that the removal of these subsidies would result in a substantial decrease in the supply of religion in the United States. To what extent it would affect demand for religion is uncertain.

Let’s do the experiment and find out.

The Dawkins Challenge…doesn’t even get out of the starting gate

Are there any good Christian writers who write about Christianity? I’m always astounded at what a confusing mess they generate when they try to explain their faith.

Case in point: some theologian named William Carroll has issued something he calls The Dawkins Challenge. I read halfway through it before I could puzzle out what it was about. He’s annoyed that Richard Dawkins (along with many other atheists I could name) has knocked the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Dawkins opined both in Australia and previously at the Reason Rally in Washington, D.C. that people should be encouraged to confront Roman Catholics about transubstantiation. Do they really hold the “utterly nutty belief that a wafer turns into the body of a first-century Jew just because a priest blessed it?” Such a view is “barking mad.”

He goes on and on about Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss, and I thought he was going to get around to issuing some challenge to them…but no, it’s completely different. He’s challenging Catholics to defend themselves against charges that their beliefs are silly. Fair enough, and a good idea; please do. I’d love to hear your sensible, rational defense of transubstantiation. Go ahead, be bold and open in your beliefs and explain them!

So this is what we get from William Carroll.

The body of Christ, present in the sacrament of the Eucharist, although real (neither symbolic nor metaphorical), is vastly different from the ordinary bodies subject to empirical analysis. It is sacramental presence and theology, aided by philosophy, that help to make intelligible what is believed.

Oh.

Well, I guess you showed Richard Dawkins…that he’s completely right and that your beliefs are “utterly nutty” and “barking mad”.

I think Carroll recognizes that his explanation is pretty damned stupid, because he wraps it up in excuses, claiming that the conclusions of physics are also hard to comprehend and often defy common sense. But what he really doesn’t understand is that those conclusions are a consequence of mathematical reasoning and actual experimental observations — they aren’t just made up, but are derived from the real, natural world, and can be evaluated objectively no matter what your religious upbringing. The accreted natterings of Catholic apologists have no such virtues.

You can’t say something is “real”, and then claim it exhibits none of the properties of any other real objects, and can’t ever be examined or analyzed empirically. That’s pretty much a good definition of “not real”.