Tag Archives: religion

U.S. Teenager Cut With Knife. Could It Be…….Satan?

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Culture is a funny thing.

It seems that most–perhaps all–cultures have, somewhere down deep in their collective folklore, some very strange embedded ideas that simply refuse to go away no matter how implausible (or impossible) they are.

In the Congo, for example, there is a deeply held belief that sorcerers can use black magic to steal men’s penises. Despite how absurd this belief is on the face of it, every so often there will be a penis-theft panic that results in suspected penis-ensorcering black magic users getting killed in the streets. Apparently, one’s penis grows back after this is done. Seems to me a quick status check of a purported victim’s trowser snake might be a good idea before lynching someone, but what do I know?

Here in the States, we have a couple of these bizarre nuggets of superstitious moose dung, sitting buried deep within the veneer of civilization surrounding us.

One of these is the notion that there are people who produce snuff films–movies intended for sexual entertainment in which a person is actually killed on screen for the sexual gratification of the audience. A lot of folks believe that these movies actually exist (and some folks believe them to be the logical end result of any interest in porn), despite the fact that thousands of investigations by law enforcement on several continents has yet to turn up even one example of such a thing.

Another common cultural trope is the notion of ritual Satanic human sacrifice. This idea is so firmly engrained the in the American psyche, despite its ridiculousness, that even ordinary crimes can end up being reported with breathless hysteria if there’s even a hint of violent religion tangentially associated in any way, however ephemeral or indirect, with perpetrators or the victim.

Or, any violent religion other than those which are culturally endorsed, in any event.

So it is with some amusement that I direct your attention, Gentle Readers, to a series of events that took place on November 6 of this year, and more to the point, on the way those events are reported.

Let’s start with CBS News. According to a CBS News article headlined Cops: Man bound and stabbed over 300 times by two women, a rather unfortunate 18-year-old kid met a couple of women on the Internet, and then travelled to Milwaukee with the hopes of having a kinky threesome with them. The women tied him up and then over an extended period of time inflicted 300 cuts on him. He escaped, called the police, and they were arrested.

Pretty straightforward, seems to me. Some folks, including several sweeties of mine, are into erotic knife play as a kink. I’m assuming that’s what this is based on the notion that if one intends to kill one’s victim and after 300 cuts fails to do so, one is either using the wrong tool for the job or is so stunningly incompetent as to be quite unable to work a typical, average doorknob, much less a computer. Hell, even a pair of those blunt scissors they give you in kindergarten can be used to kill someone, if you’re willing to put that much effort into it.

But there is one additional little detail in the CBS News report, a tiny little inconsequential thing that has turned the whole affair, sordid and sad as it is, into a bit of a circus.

Apparently, you see, one of the two women involved owns some books that might be about pagan or occult stuff. They were sitting on the bookshelf when the police arrived. And so…

OMG SATAN!!!

It ratcheted up quickly. Before long, the headlines started featuring the word “Satanic” prominently.

In the UK, where the news-reading consumer likes a bit of salaciousness with their Satanism, the Daily Mail went for the sex angle, with a headline reading Two female room-mates ‘tied up teenager and cut him 300 times during two-day satanic sex torture marathon’

Over on Whacktrap, the headline read, Teen Plans Sex with Two Women But Instead Gets Cut 300 Times in Satanic Ritual Stabbing.

By the time the story had spread across news outlets, it was all about the Satan. By far the most common headline on the story reads “US Teen stabbed 300 times in Satanic sex ritual”–in fact, it’s actually pretty tough to locate news articles that don’t play up the Satanism.

And finally, by the time it got ’round to Glenn Beck (a man who is, I have it on good authority, personally knowledgable in all things Satanic, seeing how he has the Great Horned One on speed-dial), the sex bit had disappeared entirely; Beck’s take is Man stabbed over 300 times in satanic ritual. The first version of the article claimed the luckless teen had been killed–Mr. Beck has never met a fact-checker, or a fact, that he doesn’t want to drag out behind the chemical shed and shoot in the head, as his regular listeners know–and the URL on his Web site still reflects that mistaken notion. It has better narrative value, I’m sure.

So what we seem to have is that this kid decided to have a kinky threesome with a couple of women who were into knife play, they had some books on werewolves and pagan ideas sitting on the bookshelf, and these things combined into “ZOMG Satanic ritual stabbing!” Even though there seems to my eye to be nothing particularly ritual or Satanic about it.

Though I bet they totally used sorcery to steal his penis. It happens, you know. All the time.

Force Wins Out

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On March 23 of this year, two notable things happened.

The first was that I celebrated the anniversary of my birth. My sweetie zaiah and I have been working very hard on the project to remodel our home into a dungeon to host play parties; to help celebrate the occasion of my birth, a lot of friends came over and did a bang-up awesome job of helping us paint the soon-to-be dungeon. It’s still not finished, but we made a lot of progress.

The second thing that happened is that Apple Computer, in apparent response to a petition by a GBLT group, pulled an app by a group called Exodus International from the App Store. And in all honesty, I’m a bit disappointed in the activists who demanded its withdrawal.

Exodus International, in case you have been fortunate enough to avoid these lunkheads so far, is a right-wing Christian organization founded on the premise that through prayer and “spiritual healing” (whatever that is), they can cure people of homosexuality and turn them into nice, normal, inoffensive heterosexuals.

Leaving aside for a moment that there are many people who can shag members of the same sex and then end up in heterosexual relationships–a better term for such folks than “ex-gay” might be “bisexual” or “pansexual,” if one wants to get all semantic about it–the notion that homosexuality is a condition or that it can (or should!) be “cured” is absurd on the face of it.

I don’t much cotton to Exodus International, nor for that matter to any other group that thinks there’s an invisible dude who lives up in the sky who has rules about who you’re supposed to shag or how to do it, and that they have the direct skinny on what those invisible dude’s rules are and how they should be implemented.

But here’s the thing. As odious, offensive, and just plain stupid as Exodus International (the “Exodus” is an exodus from gayhood–get it? Get it? Aren’t they just so clever?) might be–and believe me, if you look at these folks’ Web site, the stupid, it burns–I think the GBLT shot itself in the foot, and in the process showed that some of its members can match the Christian right intolerance for intolerance and deception for deception–by petitioning for its removal.

But first, before I go into why, let me explain something about how the app got approved in the first place. Some noisy but uninformed folks have spouted a lot of nonsense about how Bad And Wrong Apple was to have approved the app in the first place, pointing to how its “unoffensive” rating within Apple’s system showed that Apple is an anti-gay, right-wing establishment.

It’s rubbish. Apple’s second in command, Tim Cook, is arguably the most powerful gay man in all of Silicon Valley. Apple has a long history as a gay-friendly place to work. Apple’s App Store submissions are not, and have not for quite some time, screened by a human being; Apple uses a suite of automated tools to check that apps conform to Apple’s programming guidelines. The Exodus International app was not hand-built; it was built using a pre-existing application framework, one that is used for many other App Store apps. The framework draws its content from a Web site (in this case, the Exodus International Web site); its content was not populated until after the app was approved.

So, no, Apple does not habitually go around approving anti-gay apps. The notion that some person at Apple saw the app and said “Cool! An app by an anti-gay organization; well, let me just put this up on the App Store straightaway, then!” is simply factually wrong.

While we’re on the subject, let’s talk about what the app itself is not.

Shortly after the app came out, a GLBT group calling itself Truth Wins Out put up a petition on change.org calling on Apple to remove the app. The campaign that supported the petition described the app as containing information that was scientifically unsound and potentially dangerous about “reparative therapy,” the notion that homosexuality can be “cured,” and described the app as an “ex-gay app.”

To be sure, reparative therapy is dangerous and scientifically unsound. It’s about as scientifically valid as homeopathy or faith healing, and works about as well.

But that’s not really what the app was. The app was, essentially, a calendar of events and a bunch of Web links.

As such, the content of the app was quite a lot different from what it was claimed to be.

Now, this country has a long, storied tradition of dealing with upsetting, inflammatory, objectionable, or uncomfortable content by banning it. For a society of folks quick to shout “free speech!” whenever someone suggests we ought not say something we want to say, we’re just as quick to shout “ban it!” whenever someone else says something we think they ought not say. It’s a sort of national cognitive dissonance, a hypocrisy that’s woven into the American social fabric.

The gay community has been the target of that “ban it!” impulse for longer than this country was a country. It’s no accident that homosexuality has been described as “the love that dare not speak its name.” So it’s a bit disappointing to me to see the folks who’ve been harmed by the notion that certain ideas should not be discussed being so quick to turn that particular weapon back onto others.

And the fact is, by doing so they committed two wrongs. First, they used tactics that are disingenuous at best. Second, they played right into the hands of Exodus International, a group which the cynic in me suspects wanted to have their app banned.

When I first became aware of the Exodus app, I had read about it on Web sites run by pro-GLBT activists and bloggers. I came away with the notion that the app was a how-to guide for “curing” gays. It wasn’t until I started looking at screen shots and app descriptions–by the time I found out about it, the app had already been removed from the App Store–that I learned its content was considerably different from what I’d been lead to believe.

Whenever I hear someone misstate or overstate an argument against something, that leads me to the conclusion that the person who’s making the argument doesn’t really believe his case to be terribly persuasive. Exaggeration is the tool of first resort for someone who really, really, really doesn’t like something, but who doesn’t think that other folks will share his opinion if it’s stated factually.

And the fact that these arguments were picked up by so many folks suggests to me that a lot of bloggers fell into the same trap that the religious right often falls into–condemning something without actually seeing it. We (and by “we” I mean progressive bloggers, activists, and writers) tend to snigger and laugh at Christians who call for banning a book or a movie and then, when asked if they’ve actually seen it, say “No! Of course I haven’t!” as if their ignorance somehow enhances their moral superiority.

Yet this is precisely what a lot of folks who condemned the Exodus app did. I’d be willing to wager that less than one half of one percent of the folks who condemn it bothered to look at it, and barely more than that even bothered to look at screenshots of it.

That’s pretty dumb. Fact-checking is (or at least ought to be) a basic, basic part of informed activism of ANY sort.

On another forum I read, a lot of folks were hailing the removal of the app from the App Store as a triumph of Libertarianism. I found that notion pretty weird; Apple acts as an absolute regulator of the App Store, with the ability to enforce any rules it chooses about what may and may not be found there.

Now, I am not a Libertarian by any stretch of the imagination. But it seems to me that appealing to an absolute regulator to pass a rule banning a product that you don’t like, for the purpose of ensuring that the product is not available to anyone, is precisely the reverse of Libertarian belief. A more reasonable interpretation of Libertarianism, as I understand it, is that the market itself determines what has value; if folks don’t think the Exodus app has value, they don’t download it. If they do think it has value, they do download it. And in that way, individuals, rather than overarching regulatory authorities, make up their own minds about what has value and what doesn’t.

Which brings up a point that I think is absolutely vital in any pluralistic society: the solution to bad speech is more speech, not less speech.

The fact is, there are people who think that Exodus’ ideas have merit. And those folks don’t go away because the app does! The solution is not to try to control the dissemination of the ideas; that’s a fool’s quest. The solution to bad speech is more speech. Hatred and misinformation thrive in dark places.

I wish–I really, really wish–I had been aware of the Exodus app before pple pulled it down. Do you want to know what I would have done? I’ll tell you.

I would have made an app of my own. My app would have parodied and mocked the Exodus app. It would have lampooned the notions in it. It would have made fun of Exodus International–its ideas, its philosophy, even its lame-ass logo. And it would have provided links to better information about homosexuality.

And you know what I would have done then? I would have sold my app for 99 cents, and I would have donated the proceeds from each sale to a pro-GLBT charity.

If there is one thing that right-wing religious wingnuts can not abide, it’s mockery. Humor is a far more powerful weapon than the banhammer. And frankly, I think that providing funds–as in, actual, real money–to GLBT groups would do a lot more to protect at-risk people, particularly the most vulnerable people targeted by Exodus International–than just removing an app from the App Store would have.

It might’ve gotten more positive press, too.

As it stands now, the GLBT activists have scored a stunning own-goal by playing right into the hands of Exodus International. I really do believe that they expected their app to be banned; c’mon, Apple already has policies against this sort of thing, so it was really just a question of time.

But by creating the petition and making so much noise, the activists have turned themselves into an Exodus photo op. They have allowed Exodus to crank up the press release machinery saying “See? See? Look at these hypocritical gays! They accuse us of intolerance, and then they use distortion and misinformation to advance the Gay Agenda by silencing our voices!” (The fundraising appeal along those lines is already up and running on the Exodus Web site.) And, y’know, it’s kinda hard to argue the point.

Some thoughts about atheists

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I’ve been seeing an uptick lately in popular media about atheism. A lot of these things I’ve been seeing start with “Atheists are…” and then lay out the premise that folks who don’t believe in some kind of supernatural god have all sorts of negative characteristics, whether they be fat or immoral or selfish or whatever.

And a lot of these “atheists are” statements are just silly. Some of them, like “atheists are sexist,” are both silly and also filled with apparently unconscious irony, given the history of organized religion; others, like “atheists are immoral,” are silly and also point to an inability on the speaker’s part to conceptualize an internal code of ethics. But all of them are silly.

And so, I’d like to present this handy, pocket-sized guide to some of those silly ideas, and the reality.

Claim Atheists are immoral I: Atheism offers no framework for morality.
Fact It is possible to construct a rational framework for morality without reference to anything supernatural. For example, racism can be shown to be immoral simply because it hurts everyone–the racist and the subject of the racism alike. The first surgeon to perform open-heart surgery was black; had he not been permitted to go to medical school because of his race, as was the norm at the time, many people would have died because he would not have made the contributions he did. Michael Shermer has written a book, The Science of Good and Evil, that lays out a framework for morality which doesn’t depend on a supernatural entity.
Commentary Claiming a supernatural agent as the framework of morality can lead to some spectacularly, catastrophically immoral consequences–as was the case in 2010 when Pope Benedict XVI, a man whose purported job it is to interpret morality, decreed that ordaining women into the clergy was an immoral act that was equal to pedophilia. When a person who dedicates his entire life to the interpretation of morality as defined by a supernatural entity runs off the rails so badly, it is because he has lost touched with the effects of people’s behavior on other people–which is, after all, the core purpose of morality.

Claim Atheists are immoral II: Atheists can not have a framework of morality. Morality can only come from a god or gods.
Fact Religions do not set the standards of morality; they just reflect the moral ideas that people already have. In a society where slavery is common, the religious institutions tend to say that slavery is OK; when societies say that interracial marriage is bad, the churches agree. When the social mores change, so do the religions.
Commentary When morality is seen as a list of arbitrary rules handed down from a god, then anything that is on that list, no matter how atrocious, is viewed as ‘moral.’ Morality that comes from compassion, on the other hand, does not justify acts of atrocity. (I have actually written an essay about how morality as defined by organized religion has steered us wrong and let society down.)

Claim If you don’t believe in a god, you have no reason to behave in a good or moral way. Atheists have no reason not to murder or rape or commit other immoral acts.
Fact Even without god, there are consequences for violent acts. Going to prison is a pretty good reason not to run around committing rape or murder, no matter what you believe or don’t believe. No society can survive that permits its members to do these things; even an atheist society still outlaws rape and murder. More to the point, though, being an atheist does not mean being without compassion. In fact, if we look at the prison population in the United States, the vast, overwhelming majority of inmates–including violent inmates–identify as religious (primarily Christian), so clearly being religious does not guarantee moral behavior!
Commentary The people who argue that if there isn’t a god, there is no reason not to commit murder are really scary. Basically, they are saying "I can not imagine having an internal sense of morality. The only reason that I am moral is I think I will get punished if I am not. If I believe that my god will let me get away with rape or murder, I’ll do it." Those aren’t folks I would trust with my silverware, my wallet, or my life.

Claim Atheists are arrogant.
Fact Atheism sees humanity as a part of the universe, not set above it. Atheists do not believe that human beings are the centerpiece of all creation; to call humanity the highest point of all the universe is extremely arrogant.
Commentary Many theists believe that the entire world–whose surface is 75% covered with water–was created specifically for man, who has no gills. To my ears, someone who says that the supernatural creator of the universe cares specifically about his life, even down to what job he works and what kind of car he drives, and that he can know what that creator wants from his fellow man, sounds pretty arrogant to me…

Claim Atheists are immoral III: Atheists just want to be free to commit immoral acts.
Fact Atheists don’t believe that there is a god or gods. This has nothing at all to do with morality; many devoutly religious people commit grotesquely immoral acts, and many non-religious people are quite moral.
Commentary If a person wants to commit immoral acts, Christianity is actually a pretty good belief system to allow him to do so. Christianity teaches that the consequences of immoral acts are only temporary (after all, if you kill someone and he goes to heaven, he’s not really gone–at least not forever) and that all it takes is prayer and repentance to wash away any immoral act. Atheists can not fall back on the idea that immorality is only temporary, that someone is not really dead after he has died, or that the right words spoken to someone in the sky will make the consequences of immorality go away.

Claim Atheism is based on faith I: Atheism is a religion.
Fact Atheism is a non-belief in a god or gods. This is a religion in the same way that not betting on horses is a form of gambling, not collecting stamps is a hobby, and bald is a hair color. If you don’t believe that there is a god or gods, you’re not practicing a religious belief.
Commentary The notion that atheism is a religion seems to be held primarily by folks who can not imagine not accepting the idea that the world is under the control of a god or some gods. A lack of belief in a god is not in any meaningful way a religion; there are no sacred objects, texts, or ideas in atheism, nor any of the cultural, doctrinal, social, or philosophical elements that are characteristic of a religion.

Claim Atheists are actually Muslim.
Fact Muslims believe in a divinity (the same dvinity as Christians and Jews, in fact) and believe that a man (Muhammad) was the prophet of that divinity. They also believe that a book attributed to Muhammad was directly inspired by that supernatural god. Atheists accept none of these things; ergo, by definition, atheists are not Muslim.
Commentary The idea that "atheists are actually Muslim" appears to have originated with a handful of American Fundamentalist Protestant sects. There is a convoluted rationale behind it, which starts with the notion that atheists do not actually not believe in god; in all honesty, though, it looks to my eyes like little more than an attempt to take one group of people who some folks feel justified in hating, Muslims, and turning this bigotry on another group of people, atheists, that they also wish to hate.

Claim Atheists are actually polytheists.
Fact A person who denies the existence of a supernatural entity of any sort most probably denies the existence of multiple supernatural entities.
Commentary The notion that atheists are polytheists appears to have originated with a conservative Muslim named Jaafar Sheikh Idris. It’s the flip side of the "atheists are Muslim" argument; Islam tends to despise polytheism. The argument claims that science, evolutionary biology, and nature are revered and imbued with supernatural powers and abilities by atheists, and therefore atheists worship these things as gods. It’s not clear where the church services are held…

Claim Atheism is based on faith II: Atheists have just as much faith that there is no god as believers have that there is.
Fact Even legendary atheist Richard Dawkins, in the book The God Delusion, says "There almost certainly is no god." Not "There definitely is no god," but "There almost certainly is no god."
Commentary There are atheists who assert that a god or gods definitely do not exist. Atheism, though, is defined by the lack of belief that a god or gods exist (an “atheist” is literally “not a theist”), which is not the same thing. Even theists feel confident asserting that a god or gods don’t exist, as long as we’re talking about a god or gods outside their belief system. Few folks would claim that it is a statement of faith to say that Apollo does not exist or Odin does not exist (or even that Santa Claus does not exist).

Claim Atheism is based on faith III: Atheists are closed-minded about god.
Fact Atheists believe that there is no evidence to believe that there is a god or gods, and that listening to people talk about a god or reading books presumed to be sacred do not qualify as "evidence." Not believing in something is not an act of faith. Faith lies in believing something without direct corroborating evidence; if I say there are invisible leprechauns in my garden, that’s faith, but if I say there is no evidence to support the notion of invisible leprechauns at all, it’s not.
Commentary One of the key difference between every atheist I’ve ever met and every believer I’ve ever met is about evidence. If you ask an atheist "Is there evidence that will convince you of the existence of a supernatural divine entity?" she will almost certainly say "Yes, there is," and probably even be able to spell out what that evidence would look like. If you ask a believer "Is there any evidence that would convince you that there is not a god?" the answer is almost always "No; I will continue to believe there is a god no matter what evidence to the contrary I see." That shows a huge difference between faith and atheism.

Claim Atheists are miserable, unhappy people.
Fact All the atheists I’ve met personally tend to be optimistic and filled with joy.
Commentary If we are fallen spiritual beings, then we can not be any more than what we are right now; if we are the natural result of natural law, then there’s no upper limit to what we might become. Many religions teach that the world is something to be endured. For example, many Christians believe the world to be a burden that should be rejected, while many Buddhists see life as the result of undesirable attachment, and the goal of a spiritual path to be the end of attachment so that the cycle of rebirth is broken. These ideas inherently turn away from the world. Atheists see the world as an amazing, awe-inspiring, incredible, wonderful thing, filled with sublime beauty and working in intricate, subtle, and ultimately comprehensible ways. This is, I believe, a far more optimistic, and happier, view of the world.

Claim Atheists are angry at god.
Fact This makes as little sense as being angry at Santa Claus or the Keebler elves. It’s hard to be angry at something you don’t believe even exists!
Commentary I’ve met some atheists who are angry at being made to foot the bill for tax-exempt institutions that teach things which they see as destructive and harmful, or at the results of writing superstition into penal codes, or at the horrific human cost of the anti-intellectual, misogynistic, and homophobic ideas that permeate many religions, but anger at the machinery of institutional organized religion is not anger at god.

Claim Atheists are fat.
Fact In the US, there’s a strong correlation between obesity and conservative parts of the country, with the most religious state in the US (Mississippi) also having the greatest per capita incidence of obesity. There’s a great map to that effect here.
Commentary The notion that "atheists are fat" comes from Conservapedia…the same source which says that E=mC2 is a liberal plot.

Claim Atheists think that everything in the world came from nothing.
Fact The current model of cosmology is that everything in the universe came to be from a singularity whose total mass energy is that of the universe and whose size was less than the Planck constant, which is not "nothing."
Commentary Many, though of course not all, theists of various stripes reject scientific models of the physical world–regardless of any evidence supports those models. Unfortunately, the folks who reject those models tend not to understand them; so you get misunderstandings like this one and the one below.

Claim Atheists think that everything in the world came to be by random chance.
Fact Cosmology suggests that random fluctuations in the initial makeup of the universe were the seeds from which large-scale structures formed; evolutionary biology suggests that small random variation in individuals is the seed upon which natural selection works. However, the large-scale structures in the universe and the formation of different species of organism are both the result of NON-random forces, such as gravity and adaptation, working on those initial variations. The things we see around us are NOT the result of random chance; they are the result of forces which act to preserve certain kinds of variation, and so accumulate non-randomness over long periods of time.
Commentary As with the notion that atheists believe everything came from nothing, this particular misconception comes from a misunderstanding of principles of astronomy and evolutionary biology.

Claim Atheists are hateful. Atheists hate religious people.
Fact Atheists may hate the effects of organized religion on society–bans on stem-cell research, women being burned alive in rural Hindu areas if their parents don’t pay sufficient dowries, women in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia being kept as virtual prisoners in their homes, and so on–but that’s a different thing from hating people. When it comes to hating individuals, it’s hard to beat fundamentalist theists, who will often proclaim all sorts of horrific torture and atrocity awaiting any person who does not accept their worldview. If atheists claimed that believers would be subject to eternal torture, it’d be easier to claim atheism as "hateful."
Commentary Imagine what would happen if an atheist were to make a claims about believers similar to the one that the former US president made of atheists: "No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." –George H. W. Bush, August 27, 1987.

Claim Atheists are like Hitler.
Fact In 1922, Hitler gave a speech in which he said, "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who—God’s truth!—was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders." Upon his rise to power, Hitler banned atheist organizations throughout Germany. In the book Mein Kampf, he wrote "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
Commentary "Hitler was an atheist" is a standard part of Christian trope in the US and parts of Western Europe, but it isn’t true. That doesn’t really matter, though. If the atrocities of Hitler (and other figures, such as Stalin and Pol Pot) can be laid at the feet of their supposed non-belief in the supernatural, then it seems reasonable to lay the atrocities of believers upon their belief in the supernatural. You can’t have it both ways, saying that non-belief leads to atrocity but then excusing believers who commit atrocity by claiming that there’s no association between their religious beliefs and the evil things they do.

Claim Atheists are sexist.
Fact Atheist activist organizations tend to have more men than women in them, but it’s a chicken or egg problem. Many mainstream magazines aimed at women, like Ms. magazine, like to portray atheism as sexist, which discourages women who otherwise identify as atheist from coming out of the closet.
Commentary Given a world in which Orthodox Jews spit on, beat, and/or arrest women who want to worship at the Wailing Wall, Muslim countries in which honor killing is seen as acceptable, Hindo countries where women can be burned alive in "cooking accidents" if they displease their husbands, Catholic leaders who say that allowing women into the clergy is as immoral as child rape, and Baptists who say that the role of the woman is to submit gracefully to the divine authority of her husband, the claim that atheists are sexist is a bit…odd. There are misogynist atheists, to be sure, just like there are misogynist believers; the difference is that I have never seen a misogynist atheist who tries to set up organized systems that tell other people THEY should be misogynist, too!

Claim Atheists think that life has no meaning.
Fact Many atheists think that life has the meaning we give it, not the meaning that is imposed on us by a divinity.
Commentary "We exist to worship a divinity" is not, in my opinion much of a meaning, really.

Claim Atheists think that there is nothing beyond human understanding.
Fact There are many things that are still not understood. That’s why scientists still have jobs, and haven’t all packed up and gone home.
Commentary Many people feel a need to believe in something greater than human understanding; it’s part of the drive toward everything from religious belief to belief in ghosts to belief in UFOs and alien abductions. The natural world is absolutely filled with beauty and wonder that’s way beyond simple human stories about Sasquatch or space aliens, but I think that many people don’t see that…which is a damn shame.

Claim Atheists are selfish.
Fact There is a strong correlation between secularism in a country and care for the poor. Secular Western nations like Sweden and the Netherlands consistently have better social programs, greater peace and stability, and a smaller division between the rich and poor as more religious nations. (Note, however, this assumes a nation that is secular because its citizens freely choose to be so, not a totalitarian nation whose dictators force atheism on people. Totalitarian nations tend not to be stable, peaceful, or prosperous, regardless of whether the dictators are religious theocrats or atheists.)
Commentary Many religious people claim that without a belief in a god or gods, there is no reason for altruism. Leaving aside the fact that all cooperative societies benefit from altruism, when we look in the United States we see that many secular charities exist, and that the largest donors to charity, men like Warren Buffett, tend to be non-religious. Also, religious charities often tend to use donated money for the promotion of religious values not necessarily directly connected to charity; the Salvation Army uses money to promote ideas opposing homosexuality, and the Mormon church has spent millions on TV ads against gay marriage, which is millions of dollars they do not have for charitable endeavors.

Claim Atheists don’t recognize the good that religion does.
Fact On the contrary–atheists simply don’t think that believing in a god or gods is necessary in order to DO the good that religion does.
Commentary Many religious folks credit religion for the good that is done in its name–for example, by saying that the good works of Catholic charities proves the goodness of god and of religion. Theses same folks, though, when asked about the atrocities perpetuated by religion, dismiss religious responsibility, saying things like "Those were just men claiming to do things in the name of religion, but the religion wasn’t responsible for the evil they did." Again, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t credit religion with the good that people do in its name but dismiss the evil that people do in its name; either religion motivates people or it doesn’t.

Link o’ the Day: The Rapture

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A Christian radio station says that the world will end on May 21, 2011; listeners quit their jobs to join caravans traveling across the country to warn people.

This is, apparently, the third time this particular radio station has announced the End of the World in the past twenty years or so. They obviously haven’t learned the lesson of the boy who cried wolf: never repeat the same lie twice.

I threw a party on a different End of the World day back in 1989. Maybe we should host another one on May 21. Who’s in?

Adventures in Europe, Chapter 11: I have so many names…

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One of St. Petersburg’s most famous monuments is a sprawling, ornate Russian Orthodox cathedral. Unlike most of the various Orthodox cathedrals throughout Russia, this one isn’t built in the Baroque style, but is built in a style that recalls Medieval Russian architecture.

Medieval Russian architecture is modeled, it seems to me, on the basic design of a turnip. Or perhaps an onion. One of those little white kinds of onions they chop up and put on hot dogs that you get when you’re visiting Boston and you kinda feel hungry but you don’t want to waste the time it takes to go to a restaurant or something, so you stop at a street vendor who’s selling hot dogs out of a little push-cart thingy. There’s an art to finding just the right hot dog street vendor…but I digress.

The cathedral has many names. In Russian, it’s called “Собор Воскресения Христова”. In English, it’s most often referred to as the Church on Spilt Blood, but it also goes by the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, the Church of our Savior on the Blood, the Church of the Resurrection, or the Church of the Assumption.

Personally, I call it the Church of Tsar Alexander II Was a Fucking Idiot.

It was built, explained our tour guide of the Name Whose Utterance Invokes The Walking Nightmares, as a monument to Alexander II, who was assassinated on that spot in the late 1800s.

Apparently, he’d been riding along the road, just minding his own business and doing whatever it is a despotic monarch does, when some Anarchist threw a hand grenade at him. The grenade totally missed, and did little more than make some noise and frighten the horses. So Alexander, being a despotic monarch who thought he could do whatever the hell he wanted to, stopped the carriage, got out, and started yelling at the Anarchist who had just thrown a grenade at him. Whereupon another Anarchist just happened to wander by, and just happened to have a grenade in his pocket, and it was curtains for the luckless Tsar. Lacy, gently wafting curtains, on windows gilded in gold with a strange half-Greek-god, half-angel, half-tentacle-monster thing embossed over the top, but curtains nonetheless.

Alexander, like many a monarch before him, forgot the lesson so clearly articulated by Ambrose Bierce, which is that an absolute monarch can do as he pleases so long as he pleases the assassins.

His successor to the throne, the unimaginatively named Alexander III, commissioned the church to be built in the exact spot where Alexander II was sent to meet his maker in little teeny bits. Hence, Church of Tsar Alexander II Was a Fucking Idiot. There’s an important lesson in here for you, kids. When someone has just tried to kill you with an explosive device, don’t stand around arguing with him. His friends might have explosive devices, too.

And better aim.

Alexander III wanted a way to memorialize his dear departed dad. Since the first thing he did upon reaching the throne was to try his damndest to erase his father’s legacy, and since one of the ways in which he set about doing that was to fuel a revival of nationalist sentiment by strengthening the Russian Orthodox Church at the expense of other religious traditions, memorializing his rather unwise predecessor by building a church seemed like a gimme.

The place is mind-blowing, in a way that only religious edifices can be. This is what it looks like on the inside:

A few months ago, I visited a Mormon temple for the first time. Mormon temples are awe-inspiring structures, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible. Every aspect of the temple’s architecture, from the choice of materials to the shape of the front door, is carefully calculated to create feelings of awe in anyone who sees them. It’s a devastatingly effective technique for emotional manipulation; if you can stir up the right feelings, you can make people forget that the religion was founded by a huckster and convicted fraud artist as a way to con people out of their money.

It works. I could probably write an entire book about creating spaces that manipulate people on an emotional level, just from one afternoon at the temple. The Disney Imagineers have nothing on the Mormons when it comes to manufacturing spaces that inspire an emotional response.

And the Mormons got nothin’ on the Eastern Orthodox architects when it comes to doing the exact same thing. It’s difficult to express in shitty low-resolution JPEGs just how incredibly affecting the architecture of this place is designed to be.

I probably need not say this by now, but yes, that’s real gold up on the walls.

The impact such a building must have had on an illiterate, poorly-educated serf must have been fiercely overwhelming. Take a guy who’s never learned to read, has never seen anything more grandiose than a wood shack or the back end of a horse, a guy whose life is metered out in units of cow manure and bales of hay, and bring him into a place like this, and he’s yours. One look around inside this cathedral and you’d be able to convince him that up is down, black is white, left is right, and there’s an invisible man who lives up in the sky and who wants him to give you money. Or his wife. Or both.

Speaking of invisible men who live up in the sky, the entire building is filled, from one end to the other, of pictures of them. The Roman Catholics don’t got nothing on the Eastern Orthodox when it comes to saints. They gots hundreds of them. They like putting pictures of all of them everywhere they can, floor to ceiling, culminating in this picture up on the central dome just in front of the altar in almost every Orthodox church:

That’s Jesus up there, in his role as Jesus, King of the Universe–a depiction which the actual person, if indeed he existed, would no doubt have found…surprising. It is a truism of Christianity that Jesus became what he set out to destroy.

But I digress.

The Russian Orthodox Church is so fond of its saints that it even puts ’em all over the screen that separates the main part of the church from the sanctuary, where the altar itself and the various widgets and objects used in the magical process of turning cheap wine and bland crackers into the stuff of ritual cannibalism is kept.

These icons dedicated to the hundreds and hundreds of sacred figures in the vast pantheon that is monotheistic Orthodox Christianity are adulated by the faithful, but it should be pointed out that this is not idolatry. The Orthodox understand that when they pray before or genuflect to an image, they are actually paying respect to the thing the image represents, not like those idolaters who build a representation of a sacred force and then pay homage to them as a way to respect the thing that the image represents. Clear?

Add the grandeur of this place to the secret magical rituals carried out by the priest class behind that screen, and our poor illiterate serf never had a chance.

The Church of Tsar Alexander II Was a Fucking Idiot is no longer an actual cathedral. When the Bolsheviks took power, they looted the place. Lenin reportedly wanted to demolish it, according to our tour guide, but was persuaded not to by some of his underlings. For a long time, it was used as a warehouse for potatoes, and it wasn’t until after the fall of the Soviet Union that anyone bothered to restore it.

Back when I was a a very young child, I used to love playing hide and go seek. Somewhat later, in my middle school days in Nebraska, I played a more elaborate version called “ditch ’em,” which pits two teams of players against one another, preferably late at night on a minimum of fifteen acres of ground or so.

A central part of the structure of both games is the concept of a “home base.” People who are on their home base can’t be tagged by the people chasing them; home base is the ultimate sanctuary.

After it was restored, the Church of Tsar Alexander II Was a Fucking Idiot was never reconsecrated. Consecration is, as near as I can gather, a process by which a church or other religious structure is specially designated as a sort of religious home base in the grand theological game of tag; a consecrated structure is safe against demons or the army of the walking dead or something. If it ain’t consecrated, the rules say you can’t use it as a church, or something like that.

Since this place isn’t consecrated any more, on account of the potatoes, it’s now just a museum rather than a church. I’m not sure the distinction really matters much to Alexander II, who I’m sure if he had it to do over again would perhaps prefer to forego the honor of having the church built in his memory in favor of not being blown to bits with a grenade in the first place.

We interrupt this stream of vacation posts…

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…for a bit of very funny, very clever pro-rationality ranting disguised as beat poetry. joreth and the rest of the Squiggle, this one’s for you!

Electricity? It’s a mystery!

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From The Pharyngula blog comes this little gem, a page from a Fundamentalist Christian textbook about electricity.

Now, anyone who’s read my blog for any length of time will know I’m no fan of right-wing religious zealots. But occasionally they manage to surprise me. Sadly, they tend to surprise me by not even rising to the bar of my already abysmally low expectations; no matter how bad, how ignorant, how credulous, or how dishonest I think these guys are, they somehow manage to be worse.

Here’s the page, scanned from a fourth-grade home-schooling textbook on science (click for a larger version):

This kind of thing is the reason I cringe whenever I hear the phrase “home schooling.” I know there are home schoolers who aren’t ignorant Fundamentalist boobs, but damn, they sure do seem to be a small percentage.

The notion that someone can spout nonsense like “We can not even say where electricity comes from. Some scientists think the sun may be the source of most electricity. Others think that the movement of the earth produces some of it” interspersed with Biblical passages and call the result a science textbook is, to me, beyond belief.

A part of me wants to think that whoever wrote this nonsensical tripe was deliberately lying, because the notion that the author genuinely doesn’t know what electricity is, and furthermore can’t be arsed to look it up on Wikipedia or something, blows my mind. But, no, I do think it’s at least possible that whoever wrote this passage sincerely believes what he wrote.

Taken in a larger context, though, it doesn’t matter whether or not he believes it, or understands enough basic science to understand what electricity is. (“We cannot say what electricity itself is like”? Seriously?) The goal of this book is not to educate the reader about science; indeed, I think the goal of any home-schooler using this material is not to educate their child about science.

No, the goal is something very different. It’s twofold, really. The most obvious intention here is to present the world in a way that makes it as opaque as possible, while simultaneously denigrating the ability of science to make any sense of it; science, in the minds of the Fundamentalists who write and teach drivel like this, is a haphazard conglomeration of a bunch of competing wild-ass guesses about the way things might work, each of which has no real basis in fact. Some scientists think our electricity was produced in the sun; others think that some of it might have come from the movement of the earth. (As a person in the dismal movie Jesus Camp says, “science doesn’t prove anything.”1)

The second aim of this textbook is something more subtle. There is an axiom among many religious Fundamentalists that we can never know something which we do not observe directly. This argument pops up in Creationist arguments with depressing frequency; since we can not go back and directly observe, as a firsthand eyewitness, the creation of the earth or the advent of life, we can never know how it went down; ergo, all ideas about what might have happened are equally likely. And since only one of those ideas has the imprinteur of God, that’s the most likely one. All the other ideas are merely idle speculation; since we can’t go back and see it happen, we can’t actually say we have any evidence for it. Only eyewitness evidence2 matters.

And on those counts, I think this passage does precisely what it intends to do.

1 Which might be true from a particular perspective, in the sense that the scientific method seeks hypotheses which are falsifiable, and model is only as good as the next data point which contradicts it. But the Fundies who spout “science doesnt prove anything” mean something quite different; they’re basically saying that science is not useful as a tool to understand the physical world. And that blatantly isn’t so.

2 Or the scribblings of a bunch of barely literate Bronze Age tribesmen which have been shuffled around, rearranged to suit various political factions several times throughout history, and then badly tanslated into a succession of languages, presumably.

Why the Ten Commandments Suck

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For as long as I can remember…even, truth be told, back when I was a kid and still religious–I’ve always had a problem with the Ten Commandments.

People hold them up like they are some sort of amazing moral code that would make the world a better place, if only folks would follow them. And some of them are not bad, really. But honestly? If you set out to make ten rules of conduct that’d make the world a better place, the Ten Commandments really aren’t very good. They read like a hasty and poorly-thought-out first draft, scribbled on the back of a napkin at a greasy all-night diner rather than handed down from the divine lips of a burning bush and carved by an act of supernatural will onto tablets made of stone.

So let’s look at ’em, shall we?

#1: I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me.

Okay, fine, we get it. The god of Abraham is a jealous god. In fact, the formal name of that god is not “Jehovah” or “Elohim” or “YHVH” but “Jealous,” according to Exodus 34 (“Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee: But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves: For thou shalt worship no other god: for The Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God”).

Now, one might argue that this commandment, if it were followed, would make the world a better place, or at least one less fraught with religious warfare; if everyone is following the same god, there’s no religious strife, right?

Well, no. Protestants and Catholics, Catholics and Jews, Protestants and Jews, Protestants and Muslims, Muslims and Jews–they all find plenty of reason to beat one another up even though they nominally have the same god.

And what’s so great about a god who’s insecure, anyway? I’d give this one a miss completely.

#2: Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth.

This is the one that everyone gets wrong. The Catholics, who have a rich and proud tradition of idolatry, ruled that this rule applies only to idols, but the language is pretty clear…no likeness of any thing. The original intent was to prohibit ALL representational art–an intent that portions of the Muslim community still follow today.

No representations. Virtually the entire Western world totally ignores this. Lose it. Next:

#3: Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

Another one that nobody gets right.

The ancient Israelites had a very deep set of beliefs about the power of a name (why do you think the Genesis story features Adam naming all the animals so prominently? It was a symbolic way of giving Adam power over them.) To “take the name” of someone is to call yourself that thing; if I take the name of my neighbor, it’s identity fraud. Vanity is pride. If I take the name of the Lord in vain, it means to call myself god (or, presumably, an agent thereof) out of pride.

It does not mean to say “goddamnit,” goddamnit.

But even if it did, seriously, there’s a lot more evil done in the world than folks saying “goddamnit.” Wasting ten percent of the entire moral code on this seems quite a waste to me. Lose it. Next:

#4: Remember to honor the Sabbath, and keep it holy.

Except that the Sabbath is…err, Saturday.

But what exactly does this mean? In Atlanta, it means you can’t sell beer on Sunday until the afternoon, because Jesus don’t drink beer ’til twelve o’clock, but that’s about it. Now, I can get behind the notion of having a day that’s reserved for not working, especially in a Bronze Age slave society–hell, everyone needs a day or two off. But again, reserving 10% of a universal moral code for this?

#5: Honor thy father and mother that thy days be long in the land which the Lord gives thee.

No.

Seriously, no. Even as a 5-year-old, I thought this was a terrible rule. Now, as an adult, I think it’s even worse.

Honor and respect are always earned. They are never automatic. I’ve met waaaaaay the fuck too many parents who do not deserve honor–parents who abuse their kids, parents who neglect their kids, parents who rape and sexually violate their kids.

This becomes ESPECIALLY odious when you consider that it’s a one-way street; parents are nowhere commanded to treat their children with respect, and not, y’know, rape and abuse them. Any just system of morals has to apply both ways. It cannot place bounds on the behavior of one group toward another while also tacitly permitting the second group carte blanche with the way they treat the first. This rule is fucked-up and poorly conceived from the get-go. More on it in a bit.

#6: Thou shalt not kill.

I have no problem with this one.

Nobody I know actually takes it as a given; everyone I’ve ever personally met, without exception, carves out exceptions and limitations. Like in self-defense, for instance, or defense of another. Or in war. Or if the other person is gay, or has brown skin. Or if the other person has been convicted of a capital crime, or has brown skin and lives in Texas, which is pretty much the same thing. Or when the spirit of the Lord fills him to plant pipe bombs in women’s clinics, that the Lord may blow people into bloody scraps, in His Divine Mercy.

I think the world might be a better place if people applied fewer exceptions to this rule, actually.

#7: Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Back in the days of the ancient Israelites, only women could commit adultery; if a married man slept with a woman not his wife, that was considered fornication, not adultery. The Ten Commandments were written by–err, handed down by men. They condemn only adultery specifically. Coincidence? I think not.

In any event, I can get behind the notion that it is wrong to betray the trust of a person to whom you have pledged your love. Betraying the trust of another person sucks, and it’s wrong.

But adultery, whether narrowly or widely defined, isn’t always a betrayal of trust. There can be and are people who genuinely don’t mind if their lovers have other lovers. I’m one of them. Any reasonable universal code of morality has to recognize that not everyone is the same, seems to me. More on this one in a bit, too.

#8: Thou shalt not steal.

A good start. I’d like to see language that makes it plain this applies not only to direct theft, like at the point of a gun, but also to any deliberate attempt to defraud, either a person or a group of people, through direct or indirect means (I’m looking at you here, Enron). This can and should explicitly be extended to contract fraud, price-fixing, securities fraud, pension-skimming, Ponzi schemes, bribery, counterfeiting, forgery, license fraud, kickbacks, insurance fraud, investment fraud, and so on, which are all theft in my book, and deserve to be explicitly identified as such.

#9: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Thou shalt not bear false witness period. Police officer who lied under oath at zaiah‘s traffic court hearing, I’m especially looking at you.

It’s interesting to me that Biblical morality does not prohibit lying; only bearing false witness, a very narrow and specific type of lying. While I am reluctant to go so far as to outlaw every form of falsehood, I think this rule could be expanded a bit.

And finally:

#10: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house or fields, nor his male or female slaves, nor his ox or ass, or anything that belongs to him.

You know, the notion of thought crime has always smelled a little rancid to me. I can see not stealing one’s neighbor’s goods, but not wanting them? That’s reaching. First, because we don’t really have a good grasp on controlling what we want; I desire an iPhone 4, but I hardly think that makes me a menace to society. Second, because detachment from desire as a general principle leads, I think, to stagnation; sometimes it’s desire that gives us the impetus to accomplish something.

Ixnay.

So out of ten commandments, we have five that I’d lose completely, a couple more that have serious problems, and some fine-tuning on the rest.

Just as important as what the Commandments say is what they DON’T say. For a list of supposedly divinely inspired moral absolutes, they sure do leave a lot of room of some pretty reprehensible stuff.

Like using violence, torture, or threat against another person, say. Or unlawfully depriving other people of what is theirs without actually stealing it…say, by burning down someone’s house. Or depriving other people of their life, property, or dignity on the basis of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on. Or engaging in corruption as part of a civic, religious, social, police, or government institution.

Or running forced labor camps like those in North Korea, where people convicted of a crime are punshed “to the third generation.”

Or, y’know, engaging in slavery, that appalling and horrific institution of evil which the Bible nevertheless accepts and condones.

So here’s a Ten Commandments as I might find it more palatable:

#1: Thou shalt not have, keep, or deal in any slaves; nor indentured servants, nor any other kind of unpaid serf; nor shalt thou traffic in human beings as chattel for any purpose.

#2: Thou shalt not deprive any person of the liberties thou claims for thyself, on the basis of that person’s religion, nor race, nor creed, nor ethnicity, nor language, nor sex, nor sexual identity, nor gender identity, nor parentage, nor occupation, nor caste.

#3: Thou shalt not hold the transgresses nor infractions of the law against any individual save for those who committed those transgresses, or caused by act of will the transgresses to be committed; thou shalt not hold the sins of the father against the son, nor of the aunt against the niece.

#4: Thou shalt not use torture, nor threat of torture, in any way for any means, whether to interrogate or to coerce any statement from any person.

#5. Honor thy family, and treat them with respect and compassion, if thou expects respect and compassion in return. Thou shalt not commit any abuses upon those in thy care, nor abuse others, but shall instead seek to treat all persons with the respect and compassion thou feels is thy due; and to acknowledge that we are all family.

#6: Thou shalt not kill, nor justify killing in the name of any god who thou dost worship; for surely any such god does not deserve thy worship. Thou shalt not commit violence upon another. Thou shalt return violence for violence only as a last resort, and only to the extent necessary and no more.

#7: Thou shalt not betray the covenants of thy relationships with thy spouse or spouses, or thy lovers or romantic partners.

#8: Thou shalt not steal, nor deprive of others their possessions or property by any unlawful means, direct or indirect. Thou shalt not extort, nor seek through violence, trickery, coercion, graft, extortion, falsehood, scam, or misrepresentation to obtain that which belongs to another.

#9: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, nor seek through falsehoods or misrepresentation, direct or indirect, to manipulate, control, or coerce other people.

#10: Thou shalt not deprive unlawfully thy neighbor or any other person of his property, his money, or anything else which belongs to him, by taking it for yourself, by destroying it, or by otherwise maliciously preventing him from using it. Thou shalt not poison nor pollute thy neighbor’s land or his fields, or the air he breathes.

Honestly, I think my version is a lot better than the first draft in the Bible.