Determined beliefs at birth

Posted on November 19, 2008 by Michael

George Smith of the Kennebec Journal recently wrote an editorial prattling on about the state of the Republican party in Maine. He lists some of the recent failures of the Republican party and even invokes some of the older ones, a la Nixon. This is standard for George Smith. But then he goes on to say this.

Having switched from Republican to Democrat to vote for Adam Cote in the Democratic congressional primary last June, I told a friend on Election Day that I had not switched back because I wanted to be on the winning team.

But in truth, I remain a Republican regardless of what is recorded on the town voter list, just as I am a hunter, angler and Methodist. These things were determined at my birth and I remain true to the path of my parents.

Well, isn’t that just an awful reason for holding a position? This is actually a rather serious issue, not just in America, but among most civilizations. People believe A, B, and C because their parents happened to also believe A, B, and C. That isn’t ignorant or stupid or inane. It’s silly. It’s plain silly.

George Smith, as usual, is offering up evidence as to why he isn’t interesting in thinking. Mommy and daddy believed in a magic skyfairy and so does he. More over, he believes very specific things about this skyfairy – the very same specific things as mommy and daddy. Can you imagine if science were conducted this way? We’d still be stuck believing the world was stacked on turtles or flat or specially created just for us. Okay, well, a large number of people are actually arrogant enough to believe they are so important that they were specially created and have an entire planet, nay, a whole universe, which was created specially for them and their like kind. Fortunately, the best way of knowing, science, is doing its best to combat such insanity.

What George Smith needs to do is stop and actually invest some thought into a topic. I presume he’s being rather tongue-in-cheek about angling and hunting, but it looks like he’s waded too deeply and come to discover himself lost in the woods of silliness by just blindly believing in but one of thousands of religions simply because mama and papa believed this one, too.

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Einsteinian Religion

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Michael

There are these perverse notions floating around about what Einstein believed or didn’t believe regarding religion and god(s). The page at Conservapedia – which deserves no link – will give the impression that Einstein believed in some sort of conscious, higher power. Any research will show this is highly unlikely. Einstein believed in ordering physical principles to the Universe which are ultimately far beyond the understanding of humans. This is not a god at all, which is why it’s somewhat unfortunate that he used the term “god” to describe these ordering principles. On the one hand, it’s misleading and it tends to invite people to attempt to associate a brilliant thinker with their own positions, as if appeals to authority confer truth to a statement or thought or idea. On the other hand, there’s a certain poetry to his language; we should all appreciate personification in our literature.

Ultimately, Einstein was an agnostic. Precisely where he stood on, say, Richard Dawkins’ Scale of Religiosity is unclear. I suspect he may be slightly to the left of someone like Carl Sagan (physically assuming “1” is left and “7” is right – see scale video). That may place him as a 4, as I would place Sagan as a 5. Unfortunately, neither man can clarify at this point. However, it is quite clear that neither one believed in any personal god – the seeming indifference of Nature to our plights, our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, it all indicates a lack of personality, of personalization, no matter how much poetic personification we like to use.

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I am Darwin

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Michael

There is a campaign being put on by i-am-darwin.org where users are encouraged to submit videos to YouTube where they describe how Darwin has influenced their lives. It shouldn’t be terribly difficult since the man made one of the most significant scientific discoveries yet known to man.

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Really? Prince?

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Michael

Apparently, Prince hates homosexuals. He has evidently been a conservative Christian for some time. You’d think a guy who writes about fucking Darling Nikki and makes songs about sex toys and dresses flamboyantly might be a little bit looser. Nah. The virus that is religion has found another host.

Prince

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Huntington, West Virginia: Most disgusting place in America

Posted on November 17, 2008 by Michael

Apparently, Huntington, West Virginia is the fattest town in America. And they don’t care.

As a portly woman plodded ahead of him on the sidewalk, the obese mayor of America’s fattest and unhealthiest city explained why health is not a big local issue.

“It doesn’t come up,” said David Felinton, 5-foot-9 and 233 pounds, as he walked toward City Hall one recent morning. “We’ve got a lot of economic challenges here in Huntington. That’s usually the focus.”

I’m really glad the reporter went ahead and did the research for this article. The very next graf:

Huntington’s economy has withered, its poverty rate is worse than the national average, and vagrants haunt a downtown riverfront park. But this city’s financial woes are not nearly as bad as its health.

I guess I shouldn’t expect a town that doesn’t seem to even discuss its horrid weight problem to do well with its economy. Health is one of the most important aspects of life, usually regardless of one’s priorities. By ignoring something so significant, this town has demonstrated its willful stupidity. That stupidity, in addition to America’s existing woes, seems to have spread to its economy. Of course, I say its “willful stupidity” because it seems doubtful one could ignore all the broken chairs, crowded rooms, and cracked sidewalks in such a fat, disgusting town.

This city on the Ohio River is surrounded by Appalachia’s thinly populated hills

This just makes things all the worse. This is hiking country. It doesn’t take much to go for a walk in the hills and mountains (not to mention just around the damn neighborhood). These people are wasting their health when they could truly exploit it to seek out the beauty that is the West Virginia landscape. The overweight residents of this town who plainly do not care about health are doing a disservice to themselves, to their children, and to the rest of their town. It isn’t that they overweight and thus bad. That isn’t true. It’s that they’re overweight and they do not care. That’s morally repugnant behavior. We do not want to treat other humans with such physical (or mental, for the matter) disdain, why would we want to do it to ourselves?

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Boy Dies Twice

Posted on November 17, 2008 by Michael

Boy dies two times.

NEW YORK – A 12-year-old New York boy with brain cancer has died after his family battled a hospital to keep him on a ventilator.

The lawyer for the Orthodox Jewish family says Motl Brody’s bodily functions ceased Saturday. A machine had continued to work his lungs after he was pronounced dead Nov. 4 at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

The boy had already been declared brain dead, but some adherents of Jewish religious law say death occurs only when the heart and lungs stop functioning.

The family had asked a judge to prevent further tests for brain activity. The hospital argued that its “scarce resources” were being used “for the preservation of a deceased body.”

After having no brain activity for nearly two weeks, a Jewish family thinks their child just died. They’re wrong. Despite what their irrational religious beliefs (sorry to be redundant) claim, their child died on Nov. 4. They wasted not only financial resources, but the medical resources of nurses and doctors who could have been improving and even saving the lives of those who were (and hopefully are) still alive. It was selfish and irresponsible of these parents to pit their crazy beliefs against the lives of others. Why do we give such deference to insane ideas?

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Catholics denied Captain's Wafers

Posted on November 15, 2008 by Michael

A South Carolina priest has said Catholics who voted for the evil Barack Obama should not eat crackers. He says doing so would destroy the integrity of the cracker industry, and in a time of credit crunches and government bailouts, we just cannot afford that.

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Catholics denied Captain’s Wafers

Posted on November 15, 2008 by Michael

A South Carolina priest has said Catholics who voted for the evil Barack Obama should not eat crackers. He says doing so would destroy the integrity of the cracker industry, and in a time of credit crunches and government bailouts, we just cannot afford that.

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Maine religious leaders get it right

Posted on November 15, 2008 by Michael

A collection of religious leaders across Maine recently held a news conference advocating that Maine end its current policy of active discrimination.

BANGOR — Religious leaders across the state held news conferences Thursday to urge Mainers to end marriage discrimination against gay and lesbian couples, and called for the state to create same-sex civil marriages.

“We feel a moral obligation at this pivotal time to raise our voices on behalf of Mainers who are denied that most basic human right — the right to marry and form a family with the person of their choice,” said the Rev. Mark Doty, pastor at the Hammond Street Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Bangor.

It’s refreshing to see some of the semi-rational religious leaders of Maine finally get their voice out there (there are still religious leaders, hence the “semi”). Of course, with the semi-rational leaders come the crazies.

“I [Marc Mutty, director of the Office of Public Affairs] don’t think [the coalition] represents a great majority of the religious community in Maine,” he said. “They represent marriage as a civil right and believe that anyone that meets certain criteria should be able to marry.

Of course they don’t represent a majority of the religious community. They aren’t bigots.

“Marriage is the building block of society and includes procreation,” Mutty continued. “Without procreation, and same sex couples can’t, they’re missing out on a huge piece of the puzzle. The argument is not any more complicated than that.”

It’s beyond me why someone thinks this is a valid argument. It is not required that one have children or even touch one’s partner upon obtaining a marriage license. Intent or ability to procreate is irrelevant when the state issues a marriage license.

Unfortunately, one of the semi-rational leaders had to go and reconfirm the need for the “semi” before he stopped speaking.

“I cannot fathom a God who would discriminate based on gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity,” she said. “My Universalist tradition believes that God loves everyone equally. Why then should we deny anyone who loves the right to make a lifelong marriage commitment?”

I can fathom a god who is misogynistic. It isn’t very hard. I can also fathom one that discriminates based upon sexual orientation. In fact, the particular Christian god feels sodomy is a capital crime.

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Be good for goodness' sake.

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Michael

Recently, an atheist bus campaign was brought to fruition in the UK. Its point was to convey a message that worrying about what happens after life really doesn’t do much to improve what’s happening during life. Now there is a new humanist campaign. This one takes place in the United States.

DENVER — Ads proclaiming, “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake,” will appear on Washington, D.C., buses starting next week and running through December, sponsored by The American Humanist Association.

…

“Our reason for doing it during the holidays is there are an awful lot of agnostics, atheists and other types of non-theists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion.”

While the religious who are utterly offended by the notion that morality can exist outside their world of make-believe will object to this message, they really shouldn’t. It does one of the few good things religion has going for it – it reaches for a sense of community. As one of the social animals, humans need the contact and closeness which religion has the ability to harness. Hopefully this humanist message can help to foster the community sense by appealing to the wide-spread desire to simply be a good person.

It’s too bad people like Bill Donahue are under the delusion that morality somehow comes from religion. See a video with the same general idea here.

Codes of morality, of course, have always been grounded in religion. For those of us in Western civilization, its tenets emanate from the Judeo-Christian ethos. By casting this heritage aside, and replacing it with nothing more than the conscience of lone individuals, we lay the groundwork for moral anarchy. And that is because there is nothing that cannot be justified if the only moral benchmark is what men and women posit to be right and wrong. Indeed, every monster in history has followed his conscience.

The man is blatantly wrong. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say he isn’t willing to stone a woman to death for adultery or any other absurd command that is in the Bible. It’s morally repugnant by today’s standards. But what makes Donahue not cast (physical) stones? It certainly isn’t the idea of morality in his religion or from his god. The very reason he (and all others) pick and choose from holy books and philosophers is that our sense of morality comes from somewhere outside these books.

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