Faith is all about acquiescence to the intolerable

What are you going to do if you’re trapped in a loveless marriage with a physically or emotionally abusive spouse? For me, the answer would be straightforward, if not easy: get help to protect yourself, and leave.

If you’re a Christian woman, though, you can do something different: you get to be strong and take the abuse, because you can find refuge in the Lord.

You too, can find contentment, despite the fact that you may be living in an emotionally abusive situation. You can find contentment in the Lord and in yourself.

No one wants to be in an abusive marriage, but if you are a Christian woman the decision to leave or stay is not yours alone. The Lord has a plan for you and if you seek His wisdom, He will show you the way. Just know that if He leads you to remain in the marriage, He will be your strength. In “Our Daily Bread” by RBC Ministries, this sentence brings it home. “Assignments from God always include His enablement.”

Isn’t that sweet how religion complements the patriarchy so well? Abused wives will not resist their degradation, because they’ll have an imaginary friend who will tell them to stick with it and give the abuser everything he wants.

Hey, but I’m being gentle here. Vyckie Garrison tears into it, and she’s not nice at all.

Why I am an atheist – Jonny Scaramanga

Unlike most former fundamentalists, I’m from England. It happens over here too. I went to a school that used Accelerated Christian Education, so I knew that the world was less than 10,000 years old. ACE schoolbooks say it is “not possible” that we evolved, and “scientific evidence proved the Darwinian theory of evolution was false.” On the contrary, they said that Creationism has “unquestionable proofs.”

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My vast powers transcend space and time!

After I explained that both Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum were wrong about the frequency of Young Earth Creationism in America, another disputant enters the fray: Robert Wright claims they’re both right, and further has identified the true cause of all those citizens jumping on the creationist bandwagon.

You’ll never guess whose fault it all is.

A few decades ago, Darwinians and creationists had a de facto nonaggression pact: Creationists would let Darwinians reign in biology class, and otherwise Darwinians would leave creationists alone. The deal worked. I went to a public high school in a pretty religious part of the country–south-central Texas–and I don’t remember anyone complaining about sophomores being taught natural selection. It just wasn’t an issue.

A few years ago, such biologists as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers started violating the nonaggression pact. [Which isn’t to say the violation was wholly unprovoked; see my update below.] I don’t just mean they professed atheism–many Darwinians had long done that; I mean they started proselytizing, ridiculing the faithful, and talking as if religion was an inherently pernicious thing. They not only highlighted the previously subdued tension between Darwinism and creationism but depicted Darwinism as the enemy of religion more broadly.

Gosh. Richard and I don’t know our own strength.

Just to help you all out, here’s the graph that is the subject of the discussion. I’ve helpfully added a couple of arrows to help you see exactly when we started to cause this problem.

How can you possibly argue with that dramatic correlation?

Pharyngula + Dawkins → increase in Christian commitment to anti-science!

Yeah, I also remember to going to high school in a fairly secular part of the country — western Washington state — and getting no exposure to evolution at all in my science classes. I also recall major court cases in 1968 and 1982 and 1987 in which creationists tried to force the teaching of creationism and block the teaching of science in our public schools — that was some nonaggression pact.

But then, 1968 was roughly when I first decided that religion was crap — I’m forced to conclude that it was the stirrings of doubt in a prepubescent kid near Seattle that fired up the creationists in Epperson v. Arkansas.

Damn, but I was ferocious.

Either that, or Wright is an idiot who knows nothing of the actual history of this subject and is willing to make up explanations that defy the evidence.

We can learn things from the 17th century

I was amused overall by this timeline of hysteria and sex toys, but I have to say that the 17th century entries were my favorite. So informative!

Nathaniel Highmore, an English surgeon who was one of the few doctors to publicly acknowledge that the end result of pelvic massage—the “hysterical paroxysm”—could also be described as an “orgasm,” noted that it was no easy task. He likened it to “that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.”

I’m going to have to play that game more. For practice. I’m confused though — I’m supposed to give her an orgasm by rubbing my stomach and patting my head, or hers? Or some other combination of the two motions? I suppose that trying all the permutations could be fun.

English physician Thomas Sydenham estimated that hysteria was the most common disease after fever, accounting for a sixth of all human maladies. Among women, he wrote, “there is rarely one who is wholly free from them.”

Oh, my. The poor dears. We must do whatever we can to save them!

A con with an anti-harassment policy

Both Freethoughtblogs and Skepchick are going to be represented heavily in the science and skepticism track at CONvergence on 5-8 July in Bloomington, MN (you’re all coming, right? If you’re not, what’s wrong with you?). Both of us are going to be hosting party rooms on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, which will be fun and welcoming, but you should be prepared: there is a policy in place, and both party rooms will be staffed with polite, friendly people who will call the con staff to take care of you if you get out of line.

By the way, it’s not just skeptic/atheist conventions that have problems with a few rude assholes who try to ruin everything for everyone; CONvergence last year experience several harassment incidents and are taking strong steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I was very impressed in conversations with ops the other day; they aren’t in denial, they aren’t pretending this stuff goes on, they are going to actively try to prevent bad stuff from going down. Women should feel safe and comfortable attending!

Get with the 21st Century, Strib!

This is an annoying thing about newspapers: I discover browsing through yesterdays paper at the coffee shop that there is an excellent editorial cartoonist at the Star Tribune — he had a surprisingly anti-religious cartoon in the 11 June newspaper. I get online to look it up, and discover that the Star Tribune effectively buries everything other than the today’s newspaper, so I can’t find it! Can anyone out there help me out? It’s by L.K. Hanson, 11 June, on page A13 of the Opinion section — I’m looking forward to the outraged letters to the editor that will follow.

I can find examples of Hanson’s work on the web, but I wanted this specific cartoon…although it’s true that the more of his work I see, the more I like it. So why does the Strib make it so hard to see it?

Found, on Hanson’s Facebook page!

I like it.

A well informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will

Both Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum are wrong, but I think Drum is infuriatingly wrong.

They’re arguing over a statistic, the observation that about 46% of Americans believe the earth is 6000 years old and that a god created human beings complete and perfect as they are ex nihilo. Andrew Sullivan sees this as a consequence of the divisiveness of American politics, that they’re using it as a signifier for red vs. blue.

I’m not sure how many of the 46 percent actually believe the story of 10,000 years ago. Surely some of them know it’s less empirically supported than Bigfoot. My fear is that some of that 46 percent are giving that answer not as an empirical response, but as a cultural signifier. That means that some are more prepared to cling to untruth than concede a thing to libruls or atheists or blue America, or whatever the “other” is at any given point in time. I simply do not know how you construct a civil discourse indispensable to a functioning democracy with this vast a gulf between citizens in their basic understanding of the world.

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