“If God created the Universe, then who created her?”

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Michael

Every so often I will see some God issue where God is referred to as a woman. For instance, there’s a Facebook group I recently saw on my feed with the same name as the title of this post, and there are countless other examples where people intentionally use the feminine pronoun. I find it annoying and here’s why. In almost no instance has the writer of such a question had the intention of opening up a discussion or making an important metaphysical point. No, the entire point is simply to needle the religious.

I know the first thing frequent readers are probably thinking is that I commonly needle the religious too, so who am I to talk. That misses a key component: I don’t merely write to bother Bible, Koran, and other holy text thumpers. That may be one goal of mine, but it’s really quite secondary. I don’t think that’s the case when people go out of their way to refer to God as a woman. I think in almost every instance the point is to simply be spiteful. It isn’t a matter of women’s issues or talking about religious perspectives and assumptions. Someone has just decided to be a jerk because they know most religious people care whether or not their particular god is referred to as a man or a woman.

Filed under: Religions | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Cranston ordered to pay ACLU $173,000

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Michael

The school district that knowingly attempted to defy the constitution is being asked to pay the ACLU $173,000 in legal fees. And this is after the ACLU decided to give deep discounts:

The Rhode Island Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which won a lawsuit against the Cranston School District for a religious display at Cranston High School West, filed a request for repayment of attorney’s fees in the amount of $173,000 in U.S. District Court today.

In a release, Steve Brown, executive director of the RIACLU, said the amount includes major discounts for hours of work by volunteer attorneys Lynette Labinger and Thomas Bender. He also said the amount is mindful of the school district’s budget woes in recent years.

“In terms of its complexity, the ACLU noted that the school district initially raised ten affirmative defenses when it filed its answer to the lawsuit. The amount sought by the ACLU attorneys pales in comparison to the attorneys’ fees that lawyers working with the Becket Fund, the national group that assisted the school district in defending the case, obtained in a church-state lawsuit two years ago. In that case from Colorado, dealing with a church zoning dispute, attorneys working with the Becket Fund were awarded over $1.25 million in attorneys’ fees for their work handling the case in the district court.”

This is what these people get. If they really didn’t think they were going to lose this lawsuit, they had to at least know there was a possibility they would have to pay attorney fees. And for what? An old prayer banner? They should have just taken it down when it was brought to their attention. Hell, they could have even taken it down months after they were made aware of its problems:

“In fact, in an attempt to avoid the costs of litigation and spare the taxpayers, we waited eight months before filing suit in the hope that this matter could be informally resolve,” [Brown said].

Part of me is glad the school district has this bill. It would be ideal if they could spend the money in more fruitful ways, but they brought this on themselves. It isn’t what the students should get, but it is what the administrators deserve.

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Rhode Island prayer mural ordered taken down

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Michael

A high school in Rhode Island had an obviously illegal prayer banner hanging on its walls. It opened with “Our Heavenly Father” and closed with “Amen”. Student Jessica Ahlquist pointed out that the school can’t go about promoting Christianity, so they ought to take it down. She made a few direct pleas, spoke with administrators, and made a Facebook page for starters. In other words, she had a perfectly reasonable and measured initial response. So you’ll never – never! – believe what happened next: the Christians and high school administrators were stubborn and said “no”. I know, I know. Who would have thought people who supported Christianity and chose to spend their lives controlling teenagers would be stubborn. I swear, I can’t think of more than three or four thousand instances of stubborn actions from the people who ran my high school.

Anyway. Once the mooks rebuffed the constitutional efforts of one of their better students, Ahlquist sued. And won:

U.S. District Judge Ronald Lagueux rejected the school’s claims that the message in the mural – which opens with “Our Heavenly Father” and closes with “Amen” – was purely secular.

“No amount of debate can make the School Prayer anything other than a prayer, and a Christian one at that,” Lagueux wrote in a 40-page opinion.

And now the school has a short period in which it must remove the mural. This is excellent. No one should be using public funds to promote any particular religion. This is especially true when those subjected to that promotion are impressionable teenagers.

Of course, the school had the audacity to claim the prayer was somehow secular in nature. I can’t help but feel everyone involved knew that was a lie. But even if they didn’t, it’s still a stupid argument. I’ll let the judge take this one:

[N]o amount of history and tradition can cure a constitutional infraction.

Not even for you Christians out there.

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And if it was all true…

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Michael

Cee-Lo Green, an artist who I think has a pretty good voice, took a big poop all over John Lennon’s “Imagine” during one of those awful New Year’s Eve shows. Instead of saying, “Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too”, he opted to say, “Nothing to kill or die for, and all religion’s true”. So let’s imagine what that means:

You’ve got Muhammad and Quetzalcoatl fighting the Titans in Valhalla while Vishnu commands the Taurus bull. The Galatic Overlord Xenu is dodging djinns and Anubis to tempt Jesus in the desert before he breeds with giant Aryan women to bring them down to size. Who’s in charge here, Ra, Jehovah, Zeus or Taiyang Shen? Can the light side of the force prevent Cthulhu from bringing Ragnarök to the world, which is made from the dead dragon Tiamat, or will the ancestral spirits and great mother turtle have to create a new one. Do faeries have chakras?

It’s going to take an eternity to sort all of this out.

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Catholics, adoption, intolerance, and non-acceptance

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Michael

A friend recently made a post on Facebook where I felt she did not distinguish between intolerance and non-acceptance. I’ve written about the issue before, so I naturally responded. I think it’s more than a mere semantics issue: If we conflate intolerance with non-acceptance, we bring everything into a false equivalence, often causing us to overlook actual issues of intolerance. Let’s take the issue of Catholic adoption agencies in Illinois:

Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money.

This is blatant intolerance. Rather than continue placing orphaned children into loving homes, these Catholics are actively seeking to impede the rights of others by way of shutting everything down. If they weren’t legally bound, there is no doubt they simply wouldn’t allow gay adoptions at all – ya know, since that’s the sort of intolerance they had been practicing for decades.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, look at the gall of these people:

“In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill., a civil and canon lawyer who helped drive the church’s losing battle to retain its state contracts for foster care and adoption services.

I suppose the Bishop is technically right. No one is willing to tolerate his bigotry, so that is itself a form of intolerance. Of course, this is nothing more than a caveat: Intolerance is unacceptable except where it has a compelling reason. I think that much is implied, assumed, and understood. The Bishop is trying to exploit an unspoken yet implicit issue in order to gain pity for discriminating Catholics. It’s pathetic.

It should be obvious to any thinking person that this really isn’t a matter of mere semantics. If we’re going to allow people to run around, without challenge, claiming they are facing intolerance, as if connotations and implied meaning have no place in language, then real issues of intolerance – such as gays not being allowed to adopt – will have far less impact in the public mind when they are identified and pointed out: the dilution of language is always the dilution of meaning.

via Friendly Atheist.

Filed under: Politics and Social, Religions | Tagged: , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

The religious fighting of Nigeria

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Michael

As I have pointed out a number of times here, severe violence in Nigeria has long been based in or exacerbated by religion. In many cases we see Islamic sects bombing Christian sects, causing eye-for-an-eye retaliation. The motivation is sheer religious fervor, belief that one’s faith is more important than others’ lives. In other cases we see a division of goods and farmland which leads to disagreements. These disagreements often escalate into violence. Of course, no one would see such systematic violence were it not for religious labels. It would certainly still be there – Nigeria has distinct ethnic groups and that can and does cause problems – but much of the bloodshed would disappear. For, why would Nigerians fight other, for all intents and purposes, random Nigerians? (Looking at the situation this way, this arbitrary nature of division resembles the one between different Christian sects of Northern Ireland in relatively recent years.) No rational, fair-minded person can look at what is happening in this West African nation and deny that religion is a significant problem, often even at the base of the problems. We may see things come to a head in coming years:

Northern Nigerian Christians said on Tuesday they feared that a spate of Christmas Day bombings by Islamist militants that killed over two dozen people could lead to a religious war in Africa’s most populous country.

The warning was made in a statement by the northern branch of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), an umbrella organization comprising various denominations including Catholics, Protestant and Pentecostal churches.

Some political-religious leaders are denying as much will happen, even going so far as to lie about the nature of the conflict. But the facts are the facts. People are fighting and religion is making things worse. There are surely solutions, but I’m not going to pretend I know what they all are. Nigeria has democracy, the usual curing agent for much violence. It could be strengthened; rooting out corruption and greed would be a start – these things inevitably lead to someone’s oppression and that leads to as much violence as religious fervor does. But this is a small piece to the problem here and, again, I’m not going to pretend like I know all the answers. Nigeria is a complicated nation which is going to have to wait many, many years before it sees peace between its two violent religions.

Filed under: News, Religions | Tagged: , , , , , | 10 Comments »

The Afterlife Survey

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Michael

A few months ago my father put me in contact with a co-worker of his, Maureen Milliken. She is a news editor for two of the major local papers and she was in the process of writing a book called The Afterlife Survey. Her methodology for the book was to send out thorough surveys to a variety of people from a variety of faiths and non-faiths and I guess I fit the bill. She asked a number of questions that were designed to get at what people really believe, not just gather statistics. It was very much a journalistic approach (which certainly makes sense given Maureen’s occupation), and it makes for an interesting read.

I have only just begun reading the book now that I have legal and scholastic issues put behind me, but I can already say I recommend it. It’s a bit late for Christmas, but one-day shipping would get it delivered in time to be put under the tree. Sans that option, it makes for a good gift any time anyway. Take a look.

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The origins of morality and Christian arguments

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Michael

Christians have two primary arguments for the origins of our morality. Both fail to be logically convincing. (That’s sort of a theme with Christianity, isn’t it?)

The first argument I want to address is the one that says we get our morality from the Bible. This is the easiest one to dismiss; simply pointing out that people cherry-pick what they consider to be good and bad in the Bible shows that, at the least, even Christians disagree that the Bible is even entirely moral. (The Christian excuse that some of the evil things in the Bible were only culturally relevant falls on its face. God still commanded evil things, including rape and forced marriages as a result of rape. Christians don’t get to argue for objective morality and then make their figurehead into a cultural relativist.)

The second argument from Christians is one designed to address secular claims. That is, we know that many of the good things found in one religion will be found in another. In fact, such things will be found without any religion whatsoever. Humans converge on common ideas of what is right and wrong quite often (and this, incidentally, also goes to defeating the first argument). The Christian answer to this is that God has put within us an innate knowledge of what is right and wrong – we just need to access it, something Christians presumably have done better than others. What’s amazing about this argument is that its proponents don’t seem to realize that it is entirely vacuous. Let’s break it down:

Bill the Christian: We get our morality from God.

Denise the Skeptic: But what about those who don’t believe in your god? And those who don’t even know of your god?

Bill: God put that morality within them at birth. They just need to find it.

Denise: Okay, but how do you know that?

Bill: I just believe it.

Denise: So then do you agree that your argument is equally valid in the hands of anyone? Do you see that anyone can say ‘My god gave us morality. I know so because I believe so.’?

Bill: Well…wait a minute…hm…

Denise: Or I could say I believe our morality comes from unicorns. It’s all the same, isn’t it?

Bill: UNICORNS?! How dare you! I can’t believe you would compare my LORD to unicorns! Why can’t you engage in a civil argument? I don’t even have to answer you because you’ve proven you’re wrong by offending me! So militant…

~~~

Okay, that last part took a real wild swing, but I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve had Christians use offense as an excuse for why they are unable to argue their case.

The fact is, arguing that our sense of morality comes from God because he put it within us at birth is a non-starter. Obviously it will not work for a non-Christian because it assumes the existence of the Christian God, but it shouldn’t even work for Bible-thumping Christians. It pretends to have knowledge of something but when push comes to shove, it turns out the entire premise is mere faith. That is literally the furthest possible thing from evidence and is entirely useless to logic.

Filed under: Religions | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Other ways of knowing

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Michael

It’s a popular meme amongst the sans-science crowd to claim there are ‘ways of knowing’ besides science. They don’t simply mean ways of ‘knowing’ things like whether or not someone loves us, but rather they mean ways of knowing significant, world view-altering things beyond our personal lives. That is, they want to bring their non-methods up to the level of knowing that science gives us (or, perhaps, they want to bring science down to their level). It’s sort of cute, but it never stands up to scrutiny. There is a reason, after all, why no respectable institution teaches that Adam and Eve actually existed – even if genetic facts didn’t tell us they are 100% fictitious, religion offers zero in the way of knowing otherwise.

So that brings me to Deepak Chopra. The anti-science quack is always embarrassing himself one way or another, and he does so in this video in exactly the same way the mainstream religious embarrass themselves when they talk about ‘other ways of knowing’:

The guy is entirely unable to answer the question. He waffles and waddles about, at some point launching into a weak attack of science, implying the entire field needs to evolve to include some weird, unscientific ideas he has. Just like the Expelled creationists, he wants to redefine science to fit the ideas he wishes were true.

The fact is, science is the best way of knowing that we have. It offers concrete methods for coming to conclusions as objectively as humanely possible. Chopra and other religious nutbags (i.e., the mainstream) want to substitute that objectivity for subjectivity – if we cannot confirm or falsify a claim, then all claims become equal, and wouldn’t you know it? that makes everything equal, giving religion and ‘spirituality’ (whatever that is) quite a bit more space to operate.

Filed under: Religions, Science | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

Jesus the liar

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Michael

I’ve had conversations where I’ve asked people to tell me who they think is among the greatest humans to have ever lived. Unsurprisingly, Jesus is a common answer. And for a long time I didn’t disagree. After all, the things Jesus said really aren’t represented by the religious, so it isn’t so much to say he was a good person. Of course, I’m granting that he really did exist, but that’s another discussion.

But I’ve been thinking. Sure, Jesus said some good things. Of course, other philosophers have said the same good things – and done so with actual, ya know, reasons – but good is good. Except that pesky detail about using reason is where things get sticky. Okay, Jesus wasn’t great at arguing his case logically (that part is well represented by the religious), and that obviously doesn’t make him a bad person by any means, but consider the way he did argue his case: he lied. He claimed he was a divine being from some magic place. He said he had a mandate from the one true god to save the world. Whether it was an actual man named Jesus who said those things or if scribes simply made them up along with the miracles they invented, none of it is true. Not a bit. It’s all a lie.

I don’t know about anybody else, but I have trouble ranking a fundamental liar among the greatest people the world has ever seen.

Filed under: Religions | Tagged: , | 9 Comments »

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