I get email

Fanatical Catholics are always good for a laugh.

I’m not sure to what degree you’ve studied the history of Christianity, but I assume you’re at least somewhat aware that the Catholic claim to a historic link from the time of Jesus to now is accurate.

Which explains how Catholic church services and doctrine is so precisely like what a poor first century Jew would have experienced.

Yes, there is a historic “link” from a Jesus cult in the ancient Mediterranean to the modern Catholic church. There are also historic links to pagan practices in Germany, the Mithraic cults from Persia, the political maneuvering in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE (which makes House of Cards look tame), etc. — syncretism is the rule, not the exception. The church has been evolving for as long as it existed, and when cladogenesis occurs, as in the Reformation, both branches are able to trace their lineage back to the same original set of founding events.

I’m not defending Protestantism, by the way. You’re both loony.

Since the historical record is clear, since we know that the Catholic church–contrary to Protestant propaganda–has supported science throughout the ages, why exactly does Western society have to conform to liberal cosmopolitan norms, by accepting matters such as gay marriage which run contrary to our culture?

The historical record is clear — all religions are products of their times. You can’t make a case for Catholic exceptionalism without some Protestant making a case for the new and superior revelations of Martin Luther, or Muslim making a case for their prophet, whom you neglect or revile.

Since you are so focused on the historical record, you are aware, are you not, that Catholicism formed in a very cosmopolitan culture, in the heart of the most powerful empire in the ancient world? The core of Catholicism is very urban. Visit Rome and see.

Oh, I can tell you’re just one of those conservative Catholics who believes that their current social beliefs have always been so, and seeks to justify their every kneejerk rejection of change by claiming that the founder of your religion would have agreed. Sorry, no. Paul of Tarsus might well have been a nasty homophobe and misogynist, but that doesn’t mean we have to be. Catholics have changed a lot in the last few centuries. You’ve changed how you handle marriage a lot…unless you’re also one of those reactionaries who thinks love is irrelevant and women should have no say in who they marry.

It just seems bizarre to me that every other culture around the world is allowed to keep their traditions but for whatever reason, in large part due to Protestant superstitions, we’re told we must abandon the Catholic tradition. You don’t see anything strange about that?

Protestants are squawking just as loudly as you are about gay marriage. Mormons are on your side in this issue, which ought to make you pause. This is not a conspiracy by organized religion to make Catholics suffer, so just crawl down off that cross.

I think it’s cute what you did there: Protestants have superstitions, but you have traditions. You really are peas in a pod.

Also, no one is making you change your traditions or telling you what to believe. You don’t have to get married to someone of the same sex. Your church doesn’t even have to carry out gay marriage ceremonies. You get to do as you want.

Except where it hurts people.

That’s the thing. Where you think you are just so fucking special because you’re Catholic, the rest of the world is trying to grow up and recognize that every one of us, gay or straight, man or woman, brown or pink, are human beings who deserve equal treatment under the law, and that ‘tradition’ is not a sufficient excuse to refuse some people their rights.

I would also ask how, if a pair of gay atheists marry, it makes you abandon your Catholic tradition? Or what if it’s a pair of liberal Lutherans, or a pair of ex-Catholics? Is it just violating your Catholic tradition of treating some people as less than human?

You don’t have to like the Catholic church but you must know that a lot of the science/faith nonsense was created by Protestant propagandists all too willing to exaggerate any little hiccup in Catholic land. They didn’t think the Earth was flat, I assume you know that. I know I’m a Catholic apologist but you should at least look fairly at matters such as the Inquisition and the Galileo trial, there are a lot of exaggerated stories about both.

No, the Catholic church has not been a defender of science. It has been a defender of its own power and its own dogma. Science that contradicts your silly beliefs is either slapped down or mangled to fit. And it has always done that.

The Catholic church does not actually support evolution, for instance. It supports a bastardized version of directed evolution (two words that contradict each other profoundly), with your god creating beings who resembled him in some way using evolution (again, nonsense) and then suddenly creating a distinct transition with magical ensoulment.

Galileo and the Inquisition…just “little hiccups in Catholic land”. Right. Sounds like Catholic history, to me: self-serving distortions everywhere.

I guess what I’m saying is that to be Catholic, truly Catholic, you can see just how wicked Protestants behaved (and can you not laugh at their ignorance of history, their belief that the Bible just appeared in English in the 17th century?), how blurred they made all of history, and how it’s a shame that they planted these seeds of confusion in this land. There is really no need to reconcile science with faith, whether you like it or not the Catholic church has always supported science.

Man, you really have a hate-on for Protestants, don’t you? Weird. I get Protestants who tell me how unchristian and evil Catholics are, too, you know. I think you’re both bonkers.

So, what century did the Bible appear, and in what languages was it composed? How was it assembled? Or is that too much sausage making for you?

Math with letters is a liberal conspiracy

There is no test for competence before any old yahoo can get elected to congress. Take Al Melvin, a Reagan Republican from Tucson, who recently joined in the vote against implementing the Common Core standards in Arizona. He has a fabulous reason for voting down the standards.

Pressed by Bradley for specifics, Melvin said he understands some of the reading material is borderline pornographic. And he said the program uses fuzzy math, substituting letters for numbers in some examples.

Holy crap! Math that uses letters? Abomination! I expect to see this become an important issue in the Republican Party platform.

Don’t tell him that the math also uses Arabic numbers, and that algebra comes from an Iranian (well, it was called Persia then) Muslim named Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī — he’ll die of apoplexy.

These are the people running the country. Fills you with confidence, doesn’t it?

Amazon’s inhumanity

Is it really worth it to order from Amazon? Read this exposé of Amazon’s labor practices — they are ruthless, demeaning, and evil.

At the Allentown warehouse, Stephen Dallal, also a “picker,” found that his output targets increased the longer he worked at the warehouse, doubling after six months. “It started with 75 pieces an hour, then 100 pieces an hour. Then 150 pieces an hour. They just got faster and faster.” He too was written up for not meeting his targets and was fired.27 At the Seattle warehouse where the writer Vanessa Veselka worked as an underground union organizer, an American Stakhnovism pervaded the depot. When she was on the line as a packer and her output slipped, the “lead” was on to her with “I need more from you today. We’re trying to hit 14,000 over these next few hours.”

Beyond this poisonous mixture of Taylorism and Stakhnovism, laced with twenty-first-century IT, there is, in Amazon’s treatment of its employees, a pervasive culture of meanness and mistrust that sits ill with its moralizing about care and trust—for customers, but not for the employees. So, for example, the company forces its employees to go through scanning checkpoints when both entering and leaving the depots, to guard against theft, and sets up checkpoints within the depot, which employees must stand in line to clear before entering the cafeteria, leading to what Amazon’s German employees call Pausenklau (break theft), shrinking the employee’s lunch break from thirty to twenty minutes, when they barely have time to eat their meal.

That’s just a small sample. If you work for Amazon, you’re a modern serf, relentlessly monitored and given increasingly unreachable goals.

Jeff Bezos has a net worth of 27 billion dollars. Do you think he works even a tenth as hard as the wage slaves he’s got working in his “fulfillment centers”?

One thing this story makes clear, at least, that a key element in the process of achieving some kind of equality is a vital labor movement.

Christianity has always endorsed gay marriage? WTF?

This long-winded Christian apologist (well, that was redundant) Damon Linker has been making bizarre arguments for some time: he’s one of those deeply dishonest twits who argues that god is the transcendent source, the ground, or the end of the natural world while simultaneously ignoring the specifics of Christianity — and his primary argument against atheism always seems to be that old canard, that good atheists are supposed to be miserable, like Nietzsche — it’s always Nietzsche. His specialty seems to be making overwrought counterfactuals based on how he thinks the world should be…that is, Christian and pious.

His latest? Christianity invented gay marriage. Somehow, he manages to mention the near-universal Christian unity in opposing gay marriage, waves it all away, and then declares,

The ultimate source of the democratic revolution — the motor behind its inexorable unfolding — is the figure of Jesus Christ, who taught the equal dignity of all persons, and declared in the Sermon on the Mount that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, and that the meek shall inherit the earth.

Nothing in the history of the Christian church suggests that they ever followed this rather idealistic interpretation of doctrine. Would the Jews of his time been tolerant of gays? Don’t you suspect that when he said, “the meek shall inherit the earth”, he was actually preaching to a conquered people and promising that the conquerors will get their comeuppance?

But stretching the truth is not an activity Linker confines only to his Bible readings. He’s got a strange view of American history.

They already did touch in the United States, the world’s first nation settled by egalitarian Christians (the Puritans) and explicitly dedicated in its founding documents to the principle of universal human equality.

Puritans were egalitarians? Only if you were a man.

The US was founded on universal human equality? Only if you were white.

Marriage equality is inevitable. It’s also inevitable, I guess, that some Christians are now maneuvering to take credit for it.

Wait, who’s right, Damon Linker or Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, United States Army, (Ret.)? Boykin has made some interesting comments about Jesus.

The Lord is a warrior and in Revelation 19 is says when he comes back, he’s coming back as what? A warrior. A might warrior leading a mighty army, riding a white horse with a blood-stained white robe … I believe that blood on that robe is the blood of his enemies ’cause he’s coming back as a warrior carrying a sword.

And I believe now – I’ve checked this out – I believe that sword he’ll be carrying when he comes back is an AR-15.

I guess I’m going to have to bet on Boykin’s Jesus. Good, bad, he’s the one with the gun.

For further historical revisionism, guess who wrote the second amendment to the US constitution?

Now I want you to think about this: where did the Second Amendment come from? … From the Founding Fathers, it’s in the Constitution. Well, yeah, I know that. But where did the whole concept come from? It came from Jesus…

I’m not handing out prizes for guessing correctly, you all saw that one coming.

I had to laugh

I have learned that Vox Day is making a video game. He is consciously and proudly making a design decision that there will be no woman characters in his medieval combat game…which is fine. He can design his own game however he wants to.

However, the reason that there will be no women in his game is because Vox Day has integrity, and he is committed to authenticity and realism, and as we all know, women were never engaged in combat. It is the only intellectually honest choice.

We could, of course, throw out historical verisimilitude. But we’re not going to. Because we value that verisimilitude far more than we value the opinion of a few whiny women who don’t play the sort of games we make anyhow.

Stand tall, Vox Day, stand tall for the truth! Historical verisimilitude!

I am the lead designer of First Sword, a combat management game. The game has orcs and men, elves and dwarves. It has goblins and trolls. But it has no women.

elfwoman

Yes! Historical verisimilitude!

Whiny women wouldn’t play his game, but Vox Day is poised to make a breakthrough into the lucrative orc, elf, dwarf, goblin, and troll market with a game that will appeal to them.

KBφ

So the obscenely rich aren’t just profiting off us, they’re laughing at us. The wealthy scum floating at the top of New York society have an annual dinner at which they dress up and sing parody songs and gloat about their money and privilege, and this year a reporter crashed the party and wrote it up. It’s as disgusting as you might imagine.

He was eventually caught out and escorted out. It’s a good sign that he wasn’t summarily shot or even knouted, but that the frantic billionaires tried to bribe him not to run the story.

I wasn’t going to be bribed off my story, but I understood their panic.  Here, after all, was a group that included many of the executives whose firms had collectively wrecked the global economy in 2008 and 2009. And they were laughing off the entire disaster in private, as if it were a long-forgotten lark. (Or worse, sing about it — one of the last skits of the night was a self-congratulatory parody of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” called “Bailout King.”) These were activities that amounted to a gigantic middle finger to Main Street and that, if made public, could end careers and damage very public reputations.

Young, naive, idealistic reporter (they still make those?)! They knew nothing would end careers or damage reputations — they don’t really care that much about what the little people say about them, except that they might face a slight loss of dignity with people they normally just wipe off their shoes.

The press is in their pocket. Nothing will be done. No outrage will follow. The Occupy movement dribbled away into ineffectiveness. The next presidential battle will be an absurdly extravagant event between an array of corporate stooges who are entirely reliant on donations from billionaires to get elected. They can piss on us all they want, and we’ll argue ferociously over which grand protector of the pissoire we should vote for.

Oh, no! We’ve been dismissed by the MRAs!

Well, this’ll put me in my place. The Spearhead noticed that we were hit by a DDOS attack. Or didn’t notice. Whatever.

It just came to my attention that a few feminist-oriented sites went down last weekend, allegedly because of a DDoS attack. Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency blog was hit, as was Skepchick, and the Free Thought network that hosts PZ Myers’ Pharyngula went down, too.

Interestingly, nobody seemed to care much, or even notice, which makes me wonder why anyone would bother targeting these sites in the first place. This little axis of feminism is one of the seedier, ramshackle outposts, as opposed to bigshots like Salon, Jezebel and Valenti’s Feministing. Maybe that explains why they were chosen as targets; without male techies on staff, they are doubtless easier to disrupt with low-tech attacks.

Weird. So nobody noticed or cared much, except for the Spearhead, where they noticed and cared enough to mention it. I rather like being one of the seedier, ramshackle outposts anyway, although I’m pretty sure the MRAs are dismissive of Salon, Jezebel, and Feministing when they feel like it, too.

I only found their post because David Futrelle mentioned it. Seedy and ramshackle is a good description of every MRA site, and I don’t read them much.

By the way, the people who do the tech stuff for FtB all happen to be men.

Plantinga!

I should pay more attention to the Digital Cuttlefish — apparently, the recent rash of “Plantinga!” in my in-box might be because Plantinga has an interview on the NY Times Opinionator, and it’s making the same stupid argument my correspondent gabbled at me.

DC has taken care of the gist. Let me point out one thing that jumped out at me, bizarrely. It’s his rejection of Russell’s Teapot.

Russell’s idea, I take it, is we don’t really have any evidence against teapotism, but we don’t need any; the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and is enough to support a-teapotism. We don’t need any positive evidence against it to be justified in a-teapotism; and perhaps the same is true of theism.

I disagree: Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism. For example, as far as we know, the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit. Furthermore, if some country had done so, it would have been all over the news; we would certainly have heard about it. But we haven’t. And so on. There is plenty of evidence against teapotism. So if, à la Russell, theism is like teapotism, the atheist, to be justified, would (like the a-teapotist) have to have powerful evidence against theism.

<blink, blink> Seriously? He rejects the Russell’s Teapot idea because he can only imagine a methodologically natural process for launching it into orbit, and because we lack concrete physical evidence of the technological apparatus for putting it in space, we have evidence that it doesn’t exist?

Alvin Plantinga, go look in a mirror.

If that is sufficient cause to dismiss the space teapot theory (which I’d agree with, actually, and I suspect Russell would, too), then the complete absence of evidence for the origin of a god; the conflicting stories about the nature of these gods; the frivolity of the supernatural manifestations of these gods; the lack of a natural framework in which to explain the machinations of these hypothetical gods; all that is evidence against theism, and justifies the rational rejection of god-belief.

Also, here’s Russell’s own account of the teapot.

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Notice that he does not postulate launch facilities in Siberia to put it into space — it just is, as if “affirmed in ancient books”. His whole point is that in the absence of corresponding evidence, with only the testimony of religious texts, you are justified in rejecting the teapot hypothesis.

So Plantinga willingly flips into pure materialist mode to dismiss a claim of an orbiting teapot, and then happily flips back into supernaturalist mode when he wants to believe in a god, and he doesn’t even notice. Some philosopher.

I’m not even going to try to puzzle out the rest of the interview. Too much exposure to Plantinga causes brain damage, as the state of his fans testifies.

I get email: Jesus’ hairstyle edition

For some unknown reason, there has been a recent spate of weird people shouting “Plantinga!” at me. Has he said something idiotic lately that has inspired his idiotic fans?

Hi Paul. I hope you are well and having a good week. I am writing to you from the vicinity of Kremlin in Moscow, Russia.
What is the origin of human faculty of reason? What authority or what reliability and warrant has our reason?
How can it be that what goes on in our tiny heads can give us anything near a true account of reality?

How can it be that a mathematical equation thought up in the human mind of a mathematician, can correspond to the workings of the universe out there?

You Paul essentially obliged to regard “thought” as some kind of neurophysiological phenomenon. For atheists pure blind chance is at the very root of evolution that produced such neurophysiology. Why should anyone think for a moment that the beliefs caused by that neurophysiology would be mostly true? After all if the thoughts in my mind are just motions of atoms in my brain – a mechanism that arisen by mindless random accidental unguided processes, why should I believe anything it tells me – including the fact that it is made of atoms. American philosopher Alvin Platinga sums it up: “If Paul is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce – including Paul’s own science and his atheism”
Thus, atheism undermines the very rationality that is needed to construct or understand or believe in any kind of argument whatsoever – let alone scientific one. Reducing “thought” to nothing but neurophysiology leads to the demise of science, rationality, and belief in truth itself. There is no rational basis for truth. Science and truth are left without warrant.
By contrast, what is found in ancient Jewish manuscripts is coherent in its explanation of why the universe is (scientifically) intelligible. It teaches that God is ultimately responsible as Creator, both for the existence of the universe and the human mind. Human beings are made in his image: the image of a rational personal Creator; and that is why they can understand the universe, at least in part
And I think you’ll be happy to know that someone in Wales, United Kingdom, saw Jesus recently. It’s actually a true story in the context of a 5-year scientific study carried out by Dr Penny Sartori. Here is her 1-hour long presentation about it, given at a conference in US.
http://www.btci.org/bioethics/2012/videos2012/vid2.html
It also been published in a journal. Here is the link if you prefer to read about it
http://www.iands.es/bibliografia/Sartori_Fenwick.pdf

I don’t think Plantinga is actually talking about me — I suspect my correspondent made up the quote, cobbling together phrases Plantinga has said. But this is all just Plantinga’s stupid argument that basically claims that you can’t get order out of chaos; that something that arose by chance cannot possibly ever acquire properties that are ordered and rational. It also ignores the fact that even an irrational mind can develop orderly processes that allow it to discern and interpret patterns in the universe around it. His idea requires Plantinga to also ignore the fact that no one says evolution or neurophysiology are products of pure chance alone. But then who cares? Plantinga is quite possibly the dumbest philosopher on the planet. You might as well write to me citing Joel Osteen as your infallible authority — I’ll just laugh and laugh and laugh.

But I did read the cited paper anyway. It’s junk. It’s an anecdotal story of one patient’s lapse into unconsciousness and the happy and familiar confabulation he came up when he woke up. That’s it. It’s published in the “Journal of Near-Death Studies,” which sort of tells you what level of credibility it has, and it’s by Penny Sartori, NDE crackpot.

Long story short: Cancer patient in organ failure lapses into unconsciousness, and recovers three hours later. He then says that he saw his father and Jesus, and described medical procedures that were done while he was out cold. Furthermore, he was miraculously healed of a congenital condition.

The story falls to pieces pretty quickly, though. The medical procedures he described? 1) A doctor checked his pupillary response by flashing a light in his eyes, 2) a nurse swabbed drool from his mouth with a suction catheter, and 3) another doctor peeked around the curtains surrounding his bed.

Yep, that’s it. Mundane events in the world of the hospital. And he doesn’t even get the details right, but the author of the paper just ignores any deviation.

The consultant checked that the patient’s pupils were reacting by shining a light into them. He remarked, “Yes, they’re reacting, but unequal.” The patient reported hearing the doctor saying, “There’s life in the eye” or “something like that.” This was inaccurate, although this highlighted his interpretation of what was said and was a good comprehension of what the consultant meant.

Inaccurate, but a good comprehension, so she ticks that off as one of her three examples of veridical confirmation. That’s the level of quality we’re talking about.

As for the magical healing, the patient was born with cerebral palsy that caused a constricture of his right hand; the muscles were in spasm so he couldn’t open it. After a traumatic event in the hospital in which his brain was fried by anoxia, he could open his hand! You know, that is not at all surprising, and can easily be explained by purely physical events — we don’t need to invoke Jesus.

By the way, the only interesting thing in the account is that the patient claims Jesus has long, black hair, which needed to be combed. Yeah, you finally meet Jesus, and what do you do? Criticize his hairdo.

Apparently, atheism has been disproven

At least, that’s what a guy with some children’s toys thinks.

I take flour, butter, sugar, eggs, and milk and mix them up even more thoroughly than our smug Islamist fool does his Legos; then to be really, really sure, I put it in a 350° oven for 40 minutes and totally destroy the original ingredients. And out comes…CAKE (no lie!).

Thus, I have disproven god.

Look, their argument is invalid. You can’t talk about a chance-driven process shaped by selection over billions of years and so blithely compare it to a few seconds of shaking, with no selection, of building blocks. You also cannot compare one specific possible combinatorial outcome out of an uncountably vast number of possibilities and say, presto, that you didn’t get this one result implies that the process doesn’t work. Every poker hand, with its improbable individual likelihood, does not in any way imply that dealing cards is impossible.