I don’t care about a mosque/community center in New York

I really don’t, in any specific way—I have a general distrust of the waste of effort building temples anywhere, but I see nothing unusual or untoward about Muslims (who do live in New York, and may be citizens of this country) building a goofy ol’ religious building in downtown Manhattan…except, of course, with property values being so high there it seems like a poor investment. When I first heard right-wingers yammering about prohibiting the construction of Islamic buildings anywhere near the crater of the 9/11 terrorist act, my first thought was that would only be acceptable if they prohibited any religious structures anywhere near the place.

Jerry Coyne summarizes some of the views by Gnu Atheists — it turns out we don’t all speak with one voice on the matter, which isn’t surprising at all. However, I will turn to my other guru, Jeffrey Rowland, who has a cartoon summarizing the issue.

There’s been a lot of pointless bickering lately about a Mosque being built near where Nine Eleven happened. Exactly what is a “safe distance” to put a Mosque away from a place so that it doesn’t have some imaginary effect on it? I’d prefer a ban on ALL religious buildings being built within 1,000 miles of a place where ANY MEMBER of ANY SPECIFIC religious organization did some harm unto society.

This is the advantage of being a non-religious person. We just look at situations like this and scratch our heads, then we move on and try to figure out how to make life less terrible in ways that can actually help.

I like his ban. It would instantly free up a lot of real estate for productive use.

I also like his term for churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques: “Worshippin’ huts”. I may have to use that more often.

Australian priorities

Australia is not a particularly religious nation, and they’ve got the same problems we all do—a sagging economy, and essential demands for social programs that ought to be met…but compromises have to be made. Here, though, is a compromise I can’t understand: the Labor government has decided to throw away huge sums of money on something ridiculous.

That something else is school chaplaincy. Last week the Gillard government pre-empted its own review and increased the program’s funding by more than a third. The total cost to the taxpayer now stands at $437 million.

What are these chaplains supposed to do? It seems to be a sinecure for god-wallopers, who get a privileged position in a school, and $20,000 per year for…it’s not clear.

The Government knows chaplains are evangelical Christians, not mental health experts. This is why departmental guidelines prohibit chaplains from counseling students. They also ban chaplains from providing educational and medical services, as well as from proselytising. All of which begs the question: what exactly are we paying chaplains $20,000 each to do?

I’m not the only one wondering. As a report on the program reveals, many chaplains are unclear about their role. A majority admits they do deal with student mental health and depression issues, student alcohol and drug use, physical/emotional abuse and neglect, and suicide and self-harming behaviours. What most don’t do is refer to appropriate professionals when out of their depth.

If you’ve got problems in the schools like the ones listed above, it seems to me that hiring someone incompetent and untrained will not solve them.

Lazy poll

This is a piddly little poll on a lame Christian web site, and it only has a few votes — it’ll be a pushover. Give ’em a thrill and more votes than they’ve ever had before.

Are you good enough to get to heaven?

I don’t believe in heaven or hell
71.8%
No, but I put my trust in Jesus Christ who promises to take away my sins and give me His righteousness
15.4%
Yes, I fully measure up to God’s standard and have kept all His commandments
12.8%
I’m good enough in my sight, so I think God will let me in
0%
No, who is good enough?
0%

Democracy leads us into a vortex of self-destruction!

We’ve been doing politics all wrong. Michael Voris has the answers. The problem with democracy is all these voters with different views on things like abortion and homosexuality, where people who vote for such things are just rotten parasites who want to destroy civilization. So he has two solutions: 1) only allow good Catholics to vote, and 2) ideally, get rid of democracy altogether and instead install a Catholic dictatorship.

Really. He says that. I’m not making it up!

By the way, If you want to know more about life in a Catholic dictatorship, read this letter from Jim Walsh. He’s being completely non-judgmental!

I want to be perfectly clear. The contents of this letter are not to be construed as judgmental but rather observations of Catholics as it pertains to Mass attendance and conduct.

From early childhood Catholics are taught of the true physical presence of Christ in the holy sacrifice of the Mass,

This letter is not a catechism lesson. As a Catholic enters the church they are expected to display the utmost respect of Christ’s presence in the tabernacle at all times not just during the Mass. The Catholic church is not just an ordinary building, it is holy ground.

The respect for the Mass, etc., has been deteriorating at a rapid pace. Disrespectful making the sign of the cross. Do not know if they are making the sign of the cross or swatting a fly.

Irreverent genuflecting or bowing before entering the pew. Using the church bulletin as a substitute for pre-Mass spiritual meditation as though they were reading the Sunday paper or at the reading room of the library.

Loud verbal socializing with their neighbor. Dress more appropriate for the beach or working in the yard, garden or I personally wouldn’t be seen taking the garbage like some dress.

Does God care? Probably not if that’s all you have to wear. Be mindful what you wear can advertise your attitude.

Remember before receiving Holy Communion a Catholic must have made his confession and fasted one hour from food products, juices, sodas, gum, mints, etc., before he may receive communion. Drinking water is permissible. If violated, one should not receive the Eucharist.

Approach to receive the Eucharist with utmost respect and reverence and with hands held in a respectful position, not in your pockets or down by your side. You’re not standing in the communion line to receive a piece of candy. If received by hand, they be sure they’re clean.

After receiving the Eucharist, return to your pew reverently, not chewing the Eucharist like a piece of candy. Kneel and reflect prayerfully on what has just taken place. Thank Him for allowing Him to come into your body.

Recite all prayers of the Mass and sing all the hymns which are prayers put to music.

Bless yourself and bow reverently at the appropriate times of Mass. If you are a cantor, lector or choir member dress appropriately. Don’t be a distraction. Many altar servers are not trained properly or in cases I’ve seen not at all. Ushers should be properly dressed and when passing the collection basket do it with respect, not like passing the hat at a sporting event.

Priests, refrain from using the pulpit for humor. If you want to be a stand-up comic go on Saturday Night Life. I don’t think Christ began his sermon on the mount with a joke.

Finally, let’s cut out the applauding. You have not just attended a rock concert or state show.

Yours for improvement and the proper respect for the Catholic Mass. Less than that is not expected, I am not judgmental but rather observant concerned practicing Catholic.

Jim Walsh

Wilkes-Barre

His message is incomplete, though. I could help him out with suggestions on how to reverentially and appropriately desecrate Jebus crackers.

I’m lazy today

In the past week, there have been a couple of anti-atheist articles published in the newspapers. I have it easy, though: other people have taken care of the rebuttals.

Gary Gutting thinks Dawkins missed the boat on the serious philosophical reasoning behind god-belief. Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer any. As is typical for this genre of apologetics, it founders on an incoherent, absurdist definition of deity.

Here Dawkins ignores the possibility that God is a very different sort of being than brains and computers. His argument for God’s complexity either assumes that God is material or, at least, that God is complex in the same general way that material things are (having many parts related in complicated ways to one another). The traditional religious view, however, is that God is neither material nor composed of immaterial parts (whatever that might mean). Rather, he is said to be simple, a unity of attributes that we may have to think of as separate but that in God are united in a single reality of pure perfection.

“Whatever that might mean”, indeed. Gutting has contrived a hodge-podge of attributes that are all tailored to remove his god from consideration by natural, human means…which then leaves unanswered the question, “How does anybody know anything about this being?” After all, we atheists aren’t the ones making declaratory statements about the desires and actions of this simple, immaterial cloud of vapor.

But I’m lazy. Go read Ophelia Benson for more.

Gutting is at least trying (and failing) to make a rational argument. Suzanne Fields, on the other hand, is slobbering out pure trash talk. She likes to sneeringly, viciously accuse atheists of being sneering and vicious. The low point for me (and it’s really low, a kind of Marianas Trench of rhetoric) is the part where she tries to imply that Christopher Hitchens has come over to the godly side, now that Jesus has given him cancer.

But his writing on atheism is short on sophistication. “With all this continual prayer,” he asks with the air of an adolescent, “Why no result?” But since he has been diagnosed with cancer, he seems to appreciate not only his physicians but the “astonishing number of prayer groups” working on his behalf.

Where does this “with the air of an adolescent” come from? It’s a good question. Religious people make claims of influence on an all powerful deity, but he seems to do squat-all. What’s really cheesy, though, is that implication that Hitchens now appreciates the power of prayer. He does not. He’s very clear on that. What he and most atheists can appreciate is the good intentions of most praying people. It’s rather sad that Christians themselves work so hard to make charitable interpretations of their actions so difficult to give, since we know that they will be misused and abused.

But hey…lazy. Fields has an article that I could do a sentence by sentence demolition on, but I don’t need to: Russell Blackford utterly destroys it.

Now, back to other things.

It’s the patriotic thing to do

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12 September will be Burn the Confederate Flag Day.

Burn the Confederate Flag Day is a protest against the right’s exploitation of racial prejudice for political gain. We urge you to burn the Confederate flag, a long-time symbol of racial hatred, on Sept 12, the date when the racially-divisive Tea Party holds its annual hate fest.

Now I just have to figure out where to get a cheap traitor’s flag in Minnesota. Hmm…it sounds like the kind of thing a truck stop might sell.

Let’s do the time-warp again!

I was sent a link to an excerpt from a brand new creationist book, and I expected yet another twisty bit of dishonest weirdness of the sort that the Discovery Institute has conditioned me to see. But then I saw the title, The Death of Evolution, and felt a twinge of deja vu — as Glenn Morton says, the imminent demise of evolution is the longest running lie in creationism. And then there was the blurb: “A growing number of respected scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp purely on scientific grounds.” Wow, that’s gotta be like the second oldest lie by creationists. I haven’t even opened the cover, and it’s already boring me!

Open it, and you discover it begins with a series of quotes — again, an old game the creationists have been playing for years, trotting out a series of authorities, some of them quote-mined, some of them from creationist nobodies, some of them from the turn of the last century.

And then you get to the first chapter. It opens with the bombardier beetle! And then it declares that evolution is in violation of the second law of thermodynamics! Both claims are ridiculous. The bombardier beetle is an animal that farts caustic substances, all of which have evolutionary precursors, but creationists are fond of claiming it couldn’t have evolved, because it would have exploded during the intermediate steps. The second law of thermodynamics gets trotted out because they don’t understand it and claim that it means everything has to be getting worse and running downhill. I hadn’t even gotten to page 10 and I could tell this was antiquated, useless crap.

These are arguments that were made by creationists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It’s a book full of recycled stupid. It’s a sign that creationism, not evolution, is dying when they have to resort to dredging up old dead arguments that were unconvincing targets of derision when Duane Gish was on the creationist talk circuit.

But then I look in the acknowledgments: the author, some right-wing kook named Jim Nelson Black, thanks West, Dembski, Meyer, Richards, and Bohlin of the Discovery Institute. Isn’t that sweet? I think I know what they must be doing in their ‘research’ arm of the Biologic Institute: they are trying to reanimate the moldy corpse of George McCready Price in order to get some fresh ideas.