The authors of Freakonomics have a new book out, called Superfreakonomics. It doesn’t look promising: a couple of reports have it promoting climate change denialism, which is unfortunate. There are risks in having skepticism with the status quo (which is a good thing all around) when people lurch too far into simply finding excuses to reject everything.
The story Barbara Bradley Hagerty cobbled together from interviews with atheists is now up. It’s called “A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists“, and it’s very strange. Her emphasis is on the differences within the atheist community, and she makes it sound like atheism is about to blow apart into a collection of warring sects, just like religion, and offers scornful quotes about how the New Atheism offers nothing.
That’s not the message I gave when she interviewed me, but maybe she got it from the others. Or maybe it’s what she wanted to hear.
I told her a number of things. I said that atheism doesn’t have a central dogma or doctrine, so of course we have a variety of different views under the catch-all category of atheism; and that is a strength of our ideas, that we can freely argue among ourselves. I also explained that we need a variety of approaches to appeal to a wide range of people, and that my personal belief was that we should encourage a thousand flowers of godlessness to bloom, all different.
As to the charge that atheism is a purely negative philosophy, I also said that wasn’t so: that it’s a rejection of old dogmas and superstitions, sure, but that it’s built on the positive value of rationalism and materialism, and scientific thinking. We adopt moral values from humanistic ideas that are centered on stuff that actually exists, like other human beings, rather than imaginary commands from an invisible man in the sky.
She also asked about Paul Kurtz, who does sound rather bitter in the sound bites used in the interview. I think Kurtz is a smart guy, and he has made and is making significant contributions to atheism, and I told Hagerty that I respected him…but that he’s only part of the atheist mosaic, not the totality of it. And the same goes for people like Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris and Dennett.
None of that mattered, I guess. She had the goal of making a story that put atheism in a bad light, so she picked a version that made us look like schismatics on the verge of a Thirty Years War. If there’d been some kind of alien unity among us, she probably would have made a story about our intent to crown Richard Dawkins pope. Oh, well. She’s wrong.
This thread is useless. I must have another. And it must be sound…and young.
If only I can keep it going until…
(Hey, does anyone else think Colin Clive was drunk as a skunk when he did this scene? Listen to him slur “simulacrum”.)
Last month, we were told that the Rapture was coming on 21 September. It didn’t happen. You know that there must have been some little mistake in their calculations.
The prophets have double-checked their numbers and found the error, and fixed it. We now know without error the date of the end.
THE RAPTURE IS COMING ON 21 OCTOBER!!!!
Scurry and flee, everyone. They can’t be wrong everytime, can they? This might be it.
It’s a modern-day version of a long-running evil: children in Africa are being murdered in the name of God.
The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.
His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse.
A month later, he died.
Inciting violence against “witches” is only part of the recipe for religious success — that’s the fear part — with the rest of it coming from greed.
Church signs sprout around every twist of the road snaking through the jungle between Uyo, the capital of the southern Akwa Ibom state where Nwanaokwo lay, and Eket, home to many more rejected “witch children.” Churches outnumber schools, clinics and banks put together. Many promise to solve parishioner’s material worries as well as spiritual ones — eight out of ten Nigerians struggle by on less than $2 a day.
“Poverty must catch fire,” insists the Born 2 Rule Crusade on one of Uyo’s main streets.
“Where little shots become big shots in a short time,” promises the Winner’s Chapel down the road.
“Pray your way to riches,” advises Embassy of Christ a few blocks away.
It’s hard for churches to carve out a congregation with so much competition. So some pastors establish their credentials by accusing children of witchcraft.
So here we have a desperately poor region where the people need help…and instead, they get parasites who make promises of prosperity and blame failure on witches. Religion is the obstacle here, it doesn’t help.
We can’t be too smug here in comfortable America, though. Look inside Sarah Palin’s church, and you see exactly the same formula of fear and greed at work. Her church even supported the work of a Kenyan witch-hunter!
This is a video by an apostate: an atheist who has left the flock and become a believer. I was all ready to point a gnarled bony finger at him and screech to my minions that he must be rent limb from limb, but then I made the mistake of listening further…and he actually makes a good case.
I’m thinking, though, that if I get sick this year and don’t recover, then I’ll be able to mock and laugh at him again. Briefly. From my deathbed.
Lose all faith in Catholicism, please. If you haven’t already, this story should help you on your way. If that’s not enough, perhaps Cuttlefish’s poem will persuade you.
To summarize: A Franciscan priest uses his office to seduce multiple women. He lives with at least one of them as husband in all but official name, and gets her pregnant (which he suggests ending with an abortion; she refuses), and has a son. He then scampers off and leaves both. The woman rattles the cage of the Catholic church and gets child support…as long as she signs a confidentiality agreement and promises to never mention the matter publicly. Now in her later years, she has cancer, and even worse, her son has cancer, and where’s good ol’ Father Willenborg? In a new diocese, acting as if it had never happened.
A few amoral, irresponsible individuals don’t ruin the reputation of an organization — they’re everywhere, even among atheists — but what does indict the church is their response to bad behavior. It’s the cover-up, stupid. It’s not just the demand for confidentiality, but that they continue to enable their sleazy playboy priest to go about his seductions with only an occasional finger-wag.
Clergy members of many faiths have crossed the line with women and had children out of wedlock. But the problem is particularly fraught for the Catholic Church, as Catholics in many countries are increasingly questioning the celibacy requirement for priests. Ms. Bond’s case offers a rare look at how the church goes to great lengths to silence these women, to avoid large settlements and to keep the priests in active ministry. She has 23 years of documents, depositions, correspondence, receipts and photographs relating to her case, which she has kept in meticulous files.
Those files reveal that the church was tightfisted with her as she tried to care for her son, particularly as his cancer treatments grew more costly. But they also show that Father Willenborg suffered virtually no punishment, continuing to serve in a variety of church posts.
And then there are the statistics.
A landmark study in 1990 by the scholar A. W. Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine, found that 20 percent of Catholic priests were involved in continuing sexual relationships with women, and an additional 8 percent to 10 percent had occasional heterosexual relationships.
I actually have some sympathy for the priests here: celibacy is an aberration for most people, and for the church to demand it is bound to induce or attract pathological individuals. But if they’re going to insist on it as a matter of dogma, at least be consistent and boot out priests that violate their doctrine; they’re obviously not suited for the job.
But I have no sympathy at all for Willenborg. He is a father — a literal father, more than the fake title he’s given as a priest — and that means he has certain moral responsibilities. Yet he ignores them, and thinks that having his religious order grudgingly sending an allowance fulfills his obligations to a very sick son.
Why would anyone expect him to tend to his duties to his religious flock if he is so aloof to his own true child?
Americans have to own up to a little bit of an inferiority complex in one thing: our accents. If you watch TV at all, you know that whenever a documentary wants its viewers to be impressed with the erudition of the narrator, it’s got to have a British accent — it sounds so posh and educated and aristocratic, you know.
I have a cure.
Watch the videos below. These are direct recordings from the exhibits in a creation museum in the UK, and you get to hear those lovely British voices reciting the most godawful drivel, the most cliched creationist nonsense, the most ridiculous lies, and I guarantee you that after 20 minutes of that, those round vowels and gentle ‘r’s will sound to your ears like the braying nasalities of an episode of Hee Haw.
Oh, and you will realize that English creationists are just as stupid, if not more so, than their American counterparts.
I shouldn’t pick on Hee Haw, though. The most beautiful accents in America are from the South — just listen to Shelby Foote sometime. There are good things that come out of Mississippi, even.
Sorry, there’s another piece there that really irritated me. Maher reads the data selectively: he quotes the CDC’s list of possible contaminants of vaccines, like aluminum, insect repellant, formaldehyde, etc. But that is simple honesty in advertising! Everything you put in your body contains at least some trace amounts of environmental contaminants; if you freak out over the fact that insects have crawled over the organic and chemical components of food and drug manufacture, don’t look at the FDA description of what you might find in a jar of peanut butter. And especially don’t look at the crap that you’ll find in the unregulated herbal and organic nutritional supplements that Maher probably considers just wonderful.
So Maher just looks at a tiny piece of the detailed information that the CDC presents about the vaccine. He must think they’re some kind of sophisticated authority on this matter, or why doesn’t he simply dismiss everything that the CDC says because they’re pawns of Big Pharma?
Here’s a suggestion. Read the CDC’s recommendations and explanations of the swine flu and its vaccine. Read the whole thing. That’s where you’ll find the settled medical science, with overall results and recommendations, and reasonable discussions of the reservations. Maher is not an informed source at all. He’s bought into quackery and is searching for rationalizations.
Orac is breathing fire over this, as expected. He points out that Maher’s litany of ingredients isn’t just from the CDC’s list, but also comes from another site: that lunatic radio personality, Jeff Rense.
