Check out the website! Sign the petitions! Read Maggie Koerth-Baker’s summary! Exploration Day is the cool idea to rename Columbus Day, to strip out the ugly historical implications — we celebrate the genocide of the first inhabitants of the American continents? — and build up new and positive associations. I’m all for it. Now we just need to get people with some clout behind it.
I sort of watched the presidential debate last night (actually, I was working on my computer the whole time with the debate on in the background — I am so far behind in everything). It was…disappointing. Both sides swapped exaggerations, Romney, as usual, dodged on all the specifics and successfully avoided mentioning any details that he could be pinned down on, while someone slipped Obama a mickey. He was sluggish and hesitant, and seemed to be taking the safe strategy of avoiding any conflict. In a debate. In a campaign he could still lose. It was a debate about domestic issues and the economy, and Obama didn’t bother to mention that Romney has written off 47% of the electorate as moochers.
Getting sucked into bickering over how many billions of dollars are going to which program is pointless when it fails to expose the substantial ideological differences between the two parties. It was like watching two accountants bicker. Except I did notice one of the accountants invoking God at length near the end.
Can Jim Lehrer retire now? Please?
I remember during my youth I was pretty “spiritual” and believed in an after life, a higher power, etc. I didn’t affiliate myself with any particular religion. I would take a cursory interest in the main ones, but always being an independent (some would say stubborn) thinker I reveled in figuring things out for myself. Why my starting position was that of a spiritual nature I’m not wholly sure of. I wasn’t raised in a religious home or had anyone close to me during my impressionable youth that was overly religious. Maybe it was simply the general consensus in the environment I grew up in – anyway.
All right, Deacon Duncan owes me. He cruelly pointed me at a site where a Catholic tries to justify his faith.
Just that phrase alone is enough to send alarms in your head whooping, doesn’t it? You know it’s going to be a pointless exercise in sophistry, and the only reason you might be tempted to follow the link is to see how awful it is. If you are a connoisseur of bad reasoning, go ahead — it’s an excellent example of the genre.
After the prelude, in which he says that he’s trying to explain his belief to atheists why Christians exist, here is his very first sentence.
Any philosophy that claims that there exists nothing supernatural cannot grant purpose to suffering.
I lost my will to read further. He needs to examine his premises: why must there be a purpose to suffering?
I had stopped caring. But I glanced ahead through the long, tortured prose and shameful excuses for logic (purposelessly, I suffered), and found this little jewel of a dingleberry of thought:
All atheism has its ultimate source in Jesus Christ then, for by his death he negated the existence of God. And in his death, sin itself died, for he became sin itself. And if sin died, suffering died, for suffering is the result of sin. And if all suffering died, than death itself — the ultimate human suffering — dies.
What the hell…do not try to understand. It’s a Catholic thing. Just soak your cortex in a childhood of lies, and while it will never make sense, you’ll just accept without questioning, which is all a good Catholic wants.
I gave up. But I thought I’d check the comments to see if somehow, magically, that fecal slurry somehow resonated with anyone, and gosh, it did.
I love how simply you put it when you said “Christianity doesn’t end suffering. It just redefines it as a positive.” I think a lot of Christians don’t understand why they suffer, and knowing that their suffering is united with Christ’s is beyond comforting.
Catholics. Their logic is of another realm.
The Australian department of health distributed these posters to aboriginals and Torres Strait islanders to improve understanding of their bodies. I’m forced to conclude that either aboriginal peoples in the southern hemisphere are aliens with a remarkably deviant body plan, or the Australian government doesn’t give a damn.
Can you spot all the errors?
Answers:
Heart is reversed
Right kidney is not a pancreas
Ovaries are not kidneys
Stomach is not a respiratory organ
Small intestines are not a pear-shaped organ called the stomach
The poster has been withdrawn. The real mystery is whose understanding of anatomy at the health department is this bad.
I grew up in Northwestern Minnesota in a nominally Christian household; Mom and Dad took us to church most Sundays, and it was usually the Methodist church, although once in a while we would go to a Catholic mass, a Baptist “come to Jesus” meeting, or a Lutheran church — just for variety, I guess. They didn’t say much about religion and it didn’t seem all that important; it was just what you did. I remember in about sixth grade that one of the neighborhood kids said that he could get away with anything he wanted to do, as long as he asked a priest for forgiveness later. He was from a Catholic family, and Mom and Dad told me that he was mistaken about that. I also went to a movie about being saved where I told the nice young man in a suit that I accepted Jesus into my heart; but I didn’t feel any different in the next few days, so I soon forgot about it.
Uh-oh. Someone bootlegged the secret Mormon endowment ceremony. Now us gentiles can sit and watch. Make some popcorn!
Yikes. That was worse than Battlefield Earth.
They don’t tell you that “loud laughter” is prohibited until 45 minutes in, which seems a little late.
Yeah, right, the Discovery Institute appeals to science-minded people. Here’s an interesting analysis of the 2500 people who bother to follow the Discovery Institute’s twitter feed: the top 25 or so followers are all apologists for Christianity, with only two exceptions, who are primarily classified as political. Those two? Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter.
I checked. Neither Malkin nor Coulter follow me. What a relief!
Also, I tried to look at my twitter followers and see if there were any consistent patterns. Not that I could see, but there were 118,000 of them — I took one look at that roiling mob and ran away.
Ruse has long been in his maundering dotage, but at least he could be counted on to maintain a thought in his head for more than a few minutes…and sadly, he has now written an inconsistent and incoherent pile of drivel in which he clearly rides his favorite hobby-horses while failing to notice that he’s skewering his own windmills.
Let us begin with Micheal Ruse’s wounded pride. It’s a common marker of a Ruse article: the litany of his grievances, the stinging memory of past defeats. He will never forget an insult. It’s as if every time he mentions me, it’s solely to complain that I once called him a ‘clueless gobshite’ (a remark made in passing; if I’d known it was going to be immortalized by Ruse I would have tried to be more creative.) Yes, he brings it up again in his latest article.
And yet I, and others of my ilk, am reviled in terms far harsher than those kept for the real opponents like the Creationists. We are labelled ‘accommodationists’ for our willingness to give religion a space not occupied by science. We are put down in terms that denote powerful emotion, way beyond reason. In The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, I am likened to Neville Chamberlain, the pusillanimous appeaser of Hitler. Jerry Coyne, the author of both the book and the blog Why Evolution is True and an ardent fan of Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, wrote about one of my books in terms used by George Orwell: ‘There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.’ The Minnesota biologist PZ Myers, who writes the blog Pharyngula, has referred to me as a ‘clueless gobshite’.
Let it go, Michael. It was 3½ years ago. I’ll try to find something new for you to be bitter over.
And then he says this:
I don’t care about the personal attacks. Indeed, I have the kind of personality that welcomes being in the public eye, even if the attention is critical.
He doesn’t care? Michael Ruse obsesses over past insults more than anyone else I know…well, except maybe John Kw*k.
What else is this article about? Why, the horribleness of those New Atheists. They’re just like those religious fanatics, especially that guy Richard Dawkins. It’s yet another familiar tirade about how atheism is just another religion.
But then, this is weird…after excoriating the New Atheists for their fanaticism, he declares that he, Michael Ruse, is the fanaticalest of them all.
Dawkins has said that on a scale from 0 to 7, from belief to non-belief, he scores about 6.9. I place myself even higher than that. I am a true non-believer. I am also a fanatical Darwinian — more so even than Dawkins because I think that, when it comes to culture, genes do much that he hands over to his own special cultural notion of ‘memes’. I have written many books about the implications of Darwinian thinking for epistemology and ethics.
What’s more, I think that religion has done and continues to do much harm to society.
If certainty and aggressive advancement of ideas are the signifiers of a ‘religion’, and if Michael Ruse really dislikes those atheist proselytizers, I suggest that he go lock himself in an empty room and beat himself up for a while.
But wait! There are more paradoxes! One of the big problems with the New Atheism, says Ruse, is the way we idolize and support our leaders unquestioningly.
There are other aspects of the New Atheist movement that remind me of religion. One is the adulation by supporters and enthusiasts for the leaders of the movement. It is not just a matter of agreement or respect, but of a kind of worship. This certainly surrounds Dawkins, who is admittedly charismatic.
We worship Dawkins? And possibly Hitchens and Harris? Has he ever noticed how much we all freaking argue with each other? There are no saints and popes in the New Atheist movement.
Oh, wait, yes he has noticed. In the very next paragraph.
Freud describes a phenomenon that he calls ‘the narcissism of small differences’, in which groups feud over distinctions that, to the outside, seem totally trivial. It is highly characteristic of religions: think of the squabbles about the meaning of the Eucharist, for instance, or the ways in which Presbyterians tear each other apart over the true meaning of predestination. For those not involved in the fights, the issues seem virtually nonsensical, and certainly wasting energies that should be spent on fighting common foes. But not for those within the combat zone.
The New Atheists show this phenomenon more than any group I have ever before encountered.
So which is it? Blind, unquestioning worship of our leaders, or incessant fractiousness and dissension? It doesn’t matter. Ruse is just spinning his wheel of deplorable sins and accusing us of whatever random flaw pops up.
It’s a freakishly odd article. It turns out that a major crux of his argument is that these New Atheists are all Humanists…and Humanism is bad. It’s an awful muddle, free of all distinctions and thought. Atheism is the same as Humanism is the same as Religion. It’s the most useless philoosophical assertion ever.Which makes it entierly appropriate that the comment is coming from the most useless philosopher ever.
