Tag Archives: religion

How religion has let society down

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In 1977, a guy named Stewart Parnell founded a company called Peanut Corporation of America. Parnell built the company into an enormous supplier of peanut butter, primarily for candy makers, that eventually was responsible for about two and a half percent of the nation’s total production of peanut butter. He had a very simple strategy for business success: underbid everyone.

Peanut Corporation of America made tens of millions of dollars a year but ran on a shoestring budget. In fact, Parnell Was so cheap that some of his processing plants were unlicensed and unregistered; he ran a plant in Plainview, Texas, that the state government didn’t even know existed.

Which is an awesome money-saver, if you think about it. You can’t be forced to comply with inspection results if the facility is never inspected; you don’t have to worry about FDA regulations or compliance with OSHA mandates if the FDA and OSHA don’t know you exist.

This is actually a post about religion, and not, say, Libertarianism. Hang on, I’m getting there.

Anyway, as you might expect, this approach to business had a predictable result. In 2008, nearly 700 people had food poisoning from peanut butter produced by Peanut Corporation of America, and nine of them died. A massive recall was launched, the government started inspecting Peanut Corporation of America facilities and discovered a horror show (peanut butter that was shipped even though the company knew it was contaminated with salmonella, leaky plant roofs, air conditioning systems that sucked bird shit from the roofs and sprayed it over vats of peanuts, that sort of thing. The plants were closed by the government, the company went bankrupt, and there are still Federal investigations pending against our hero, Mr. Parnell.

All this did lead to one humorous moment, when he was called to testify before Congress and took the fifth when he was asked to eat some of his own peanut butter. Mad lulz aside, though, it seems Mr. Parnell is a very bad man.

He’s also a very bad man with an unimpeachable religious pedigree. He belongs to that particular school of Evangelical Christianity prominent in his home town of Lynchburg, VA. His sister was married to a relative of Jerry Falwell’s family, and he himself was a conservative Southern Baptist.

Now, one of the things we hear about religion is that religion serves a valuable social function by providing a framework of morality. Morals, the religious say, are codes of conduct created and sanctioned by God to direct human behavior toward one another, and indeed some religions claim some morals which are, in fact, good ways to behave.

The problem is that the moral values promoted by religions, especially conservative religions, tend not to focus very heavily on things like “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”–a value claimed by many religious tradition but not really advocated very strongly by most of them. Instead, the moral values are more often, it seems to me, promoted as arbitrary lists of things you’re supposed to do and things you’re not supposed to do, with no coherent underlying logic to them.

And it seems a lot of them are about sex.

When you look at the major organized religions in the United States, and examine their moral teachings closely, you can’t help but come away with the notion that God is nothing short of obsessed with what goes on with our crotches.

This obsession with sex extends to social ideas about morality. If someone tells you “I have strong morals” or “I believe in good moral values,” you can be pretty sure that what they’re talking about is sex.

And they’re probably not going to follow those statements up with “I believe that people should do unto others as they would have done unto them,” either. For all the fact that religion likes to give lip service to notions like that, I doubt many “moral values” folks actually say “That’s why I believe in people making their own choices about who they have sex with, because I want them to let me make my own choices about these things.”

There are all sorts of reasons why institutional power structures are obsessed with sex. It’s a great hook; control people’s basic drives and you control the people. It’s an inevitable outcome of the way our brains work; fMRI studies have suggested that people who hold socially conservative ideas are strongly motivated by feelings of disgust, and tend, by and large, to believe that if something makes them feel an emotion of disgust, their emotional response is proof that the thing itself must be inherently wrong. It’s a characteristic of the way we form social bonds; we are strongly driven, as part of our evolutionary heritage, to divide social groups into “in” groups and “out” groups, and to seek differences to delineate those groups.

And so on, and so on. None of those things is really all that interesting, I think; it’s all just part of the tedious and yucky parts of how social power structures flow, as disagreeable but inevitable in its operation as the flow of sewage through a city’s pipes, and often just as pungent.

That’s not the bit I think is important. The drab banality of institutionalized power isn’t, for me, the most disappointing thing thing about organized religion. The most disappointing thing, to me, is the way that such organizations have seized the mantle of moral authority and then utterly fumbled it, to the detriment of society as a whole.

So many religions have made such vigorous claim to the throne of moral arbitration that there are actually people who believe that without religion, a person can not be moral. People ask ridiculous questions like “Can atheists be sexually moral?” Commentators claim that without a god, a person can not have “morality in his heart;” and some people even point to the fact that the non-religious are less obsessed with sex than the religious as proof that those without religion are less moral.

But having successfully made the argument to a great many people that they and they alone can protect and promote morality, what do they do with it? That’s the part that disappoints me.

You can argue, of course, that men like Stewart Parnell are driven by greed, and would not behave in moral ways regardless of the teachings of their adopted religions. And that might be true. But the fact is, the major religious organizations tend to focus so heavily on sex as the beginning and end of morality that other lessons are let slip by the wayside.

When a person adopts the idea that morality is primarily about the goings-on in his crotch, a dangerous thing happens. That person can very easily say to himself “I m a good person; I don’t cheat on my wife, have premarital sex,lie with other men as I lie with women, or do her up the poop chute. I am a moral person; immorality is about my sexual behavior, and I keep my sexual behavior confined within the proper parameters.” And once a person says “I am a moral person,” he may stop watchdogging his decisions. He doesn’t question the moral nature of his own actions, because, after all, morality is about sex, right?

I’m not saying that religions don’t talk about the moral dimension of things besides sex. But I am saying that, by and large, so much emphasis is placed on sex that they don’t make the case for an overarching, coherent foundation or morality; they don’t argue that morality is ultimately founded on the notion that you should treat others with compassion and respect, and not make decisions which adversely affect the lives of others.

By, for example, selling them contaminated peanut butter.

And they can’t. They can’t make this case, because if they do, many of the constraints they place on sex begin to look like anomalies, arbitrary rules not founded in any sort of notion of treating others with compassion and respect.

Looked at through the lens of treating others the way they want to be treated, there is nothing immoral about, say, oral sex. Or sex with two partners, if all the people involved are on board with that. Or masturbation. These things don’t fit the notion of morality as a framework that prevents people from doing harmful things to one another; they aren’t harmful.

In fact, if you assume that framework for moral choices, prohibitions on masturbation begin to look downright stupid, and a god who would send someone to an eternity of suffering simpy for touching herself begins to look vicious and petty.

Especially if you accept that it was that very same god who put our wibbly bits within arm’s reach in the first place.

Morality is not about memorizing a set of rules. It is, when it is most properly applied, an entire system of ethical decision-making, one that places a watchdog within us which examines our choices in light of the way those choices affect others. It is an internally consistent set of checks and balances, which reminds us to place ourselves and our actions within a larger context and take responsibility for the effects of those actions on other people.

Masturbating isn’t immoral. Poisoning seven hundred people with products that you know to be contaminated because you can make money by doing it, is. By creating the perception that morality is first and foremost about sex, the large religious institutions have consolidated social power and, in the act, destroyed their own moral credibility. They have failed to teach morality as more than a list of rules about who to fuck, when to fuck, and in what position to fuck, and in so doing they have exerted a harmful influence on society as a whole. The Catholic church, for instances, focuses so heavily on ideas of sex that they condemn the use of condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa, a moral teaching which helps promote the very human misery and suffering they then spend millions to try to relieve. Conservative Islamic teachings on sex are so repressive that to a Fundamentalist Muslim, paradise is a seedy gang bang out of a 70s porn flick, where the pious can look forward to the awkward ministrations of 72 sexually inexperienced women.

This weird, obsessive-compulsive fixation on sex will have to end before any religious institution can really become the moral authority they all claim to be.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some peanut butter eggs to eat. I hope the company that made them isn’t owned by a conservative Christian.

List o’ Linky-Links, Christian Fundamentalist Edition

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My browser has 32 open windows, so you all know what that means: time for another list of Linky-Links, where we see who fed it and who ate it all across the Whacky Wide Web!

This episode seems to have a special theme: those whacky Christian fundamentalists, up to their silly hijinks in their classic laugh-a-minute way that we all know and love.

So without further ado, on to the links!

First up, we have this breaking news from Muckflash: Christian Group to Produce Clean Pornography.

The group, recently incorporated as the Southern Coalition for Progressive and Pure Change (an obscure sub-branch of the International Congress of Church and Ministries), will pay for the production of 5 films which they say will act as a “stepping stone away from iniquity” as viewers use the films as an intermediate step as they “switch paths from the sexually impure world of the devil to the white shining path of the Lord.”

“We’re envisioning a kind of ‘nicotine patch’ for the tortured souls that struggle in this world to find a Christian voice in the midst of a popular culture that has lost the Word of God in a heathen cacophony of selfish desire,” said Reverend Dr. Stanley Lovett, Founder and Executive Director of SCPPC.

Let’s not forget the subtext of racism and good old-fashioned slave-era stereotypes about blacks, which tend to follow conservative Christianity like flies following a charnel wagon:

Dr. Lovett was willing to give a general description of the the first film, however. According to Lovett, Jodie and the Great Black Whale will feature an 18 year old missionary in Jamaica who is swayed by native temptors into working as an exotic dancer.

And just in time, too, because over at the God and Science site, we learn that pornography leads to sex with robots, and sex with robots leads to the extinction of the human race.

The data underlying the “radical” predictions laid out in this page come from scientific studies that have examined the pervasiveness and effects of pornography upon men and women. In particular, recent data show widespread acceptance of pornography among today’s young adults as “an acceptable way to express one’s sexuality.”1 For males the acceptance rate is 67% compared to 37% for their fathers. Among young adult women the acceptance rate is 49% compared to 20% among their mothers. So, the rate of acceptance of pornography has doubled in just one generation. When those young adults raise their own children, the acceptance rate will probably be greater than 80% for both males and females. The step between watching pornography through technology and engaging in sex acts through an attractive technological object is not that far, especially when the object acts as if it were a real human being.

I don’t know what’s more silly about this article–the notion that human beings don’t actually sex out to have babies and certainly won’t go out of their way to have one if there’s a convenient, non-baby-making alternative, or the even more insulting notion that human relationships are a dismal, unhappy affair, filled with complication and weighed down by erratic, moody women, and that anyone who could skip the whole sordid mess by having sex with robots would never want human companionship.

The Religious Right truly is the village idiot of American culture. These guys never cease to blow my mind with their bizarre misunderstanding of basic human emotion. They really, truly do not get it, on a level that borders on autistic.

Oh, and anti-intellectualism. Mustn’t forget anti-intellectualism. Over on the NY Times Stanley Fish blog comes this astonishing condemnation of intellectual enquiry, Does Curiosity Kill More than the Cat?

Most conservative Christians seem content to keep anti-intellectualism as the subtext of their basic world view. Not so for Stanley, who puts it right out there:

In short, curiosity — sometimes called research, sometimes called unfettered inquiry, sometimes called progress, sometimes called academic freedom — is their God. The question, posed by thinkers from Aquinas to Augustine to Newman to Griffiths, is whether this is the God — the God, ultimately, of self — we want to worship.

And finally, PZ Myers posted this little gem, which neatly sums it all up:

How to create a religion

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Have you ever thought about all the world’s religions, looked at how downright goofy they are, and thought “Hey! I can do better than that!” Have you ever wanted to start your own religion, and go down in history with men like Joseph Smith (minus the part about getting shot in a prison cell), Paul of Tarsus (minus the bit with the beheading), or L. Ron Hubbard?

Well, look no further! Here’s an easy, step-by-step guide to building a religion of your own.

Step 1: Start General

“There is a divinity and this divinity created the universe.” People are natural storytellers, and people are naturally curious about where they came from, where the stars came from, and where the ground they’re standing on came from. But, people are also lazy, and don’t want to spend years learning about the physical properties of the universe, or the mathematical models that describe the formation of the heavens and the earth. “God did it” is an easy explanation that appeals to folks, and you’ll find that people will accept it wholeheartedly without one single shred of evidence.

Step 2: Work from the general formation of the universe to human beings

People want to believe they are special. People adopt worldviews that are inherently self-centered; if you tell a bunch of folks that god made the universe, people are going to want to know if god made them. “God made the universe with a set of immutable natural laws and then those laws took over to form, over many millennia, us” just isn’t satisfying for most people. It’s not a good story.

You want to tell folks that your god made them specifically. This, too, you will find accepted without question or proof; people are already halfway to believing it before you even begin, because it’s a damn good yarn that appeals to their inherently self-centered worldviews.

Plus, you’ll find it useful for the next step.

Step 3: Since god created human beings, he must have had a reason for doing so, right?

Human beings are inherently prone to promiscuous teleology–the tendency to believe that things happen for a purpose. It’s not enough for us to look for the explanation about how things came to be; we also want to know why. This appears to be a side effect of a hyperactive sense of agency, which has a positive survival value; we see agency because it helps keep us alive. It’s easy to mistake a shadow for a burglar, but people rarely mistake a burglar for a shadow!

Anyway, appealing to this sense of purpose will help reinforce your religion in the minds of the people you talk to. It’s a great shot of self-esteem; “God has a plan for me!” It helps personalize your religion by appealing to people’s inherent self-centeredness. And it’s massively helpful in establishing the creeds you’ll be using a bit later.

The notion that your god has a purpose for humanity makes the next step logical and easy to swallow:

Step 4: Since god has a purpose in creating us, there must be a right and wrong way to live. The right way to live is in accordance with this purpose; the wrong way is in defiance of it.

This is a step that’s surprisingly subtle in its ramifications. Anyone who believes that your god had some reason for creating human beings is going to find this easy to believe also; you won’t have to sell this point. And it opens the door to all sorts of distractions you can easily use to deflect conversation away from anyone who wants to challenge the assertions you made in the first three steps. Just bring up the philosophical idea of “free will,” assert that your god wants us to live according to his plan of our own choice, and any inconvenient conversations that start to head too close to “Well, how do you KNOW god created the universe?” will quickly become bogged down in the semantic morass of free will and determinism. You can trap the conversation in this mire for decades.

But, now you have a problem. Now you have to figure out some kind of way to codify what the right way to live is, because people are going to want to know. So far, you’ve been able to skate along without offering even the tiniest scrap of evidence that ANYTHING you say is true; people will believe you because they want to believe you. But once you start telling folks what the right way to live is, people are going to want to know how you know.

This is a problem that’s never been completely solved; look at all the other religions and you’ll see that folks really like to bicker about this stuff. But there is a solution that works well enough to get you by, and that is:

Step 5: Tell people that your god writes books.

Books are awesome. You can claim that your god gave the book to you by divine revelation without also leaving the door open to other folks saying they’ve had revelations that contradict yours, because where’s the book? You don’t have to remember all the various tenets of your religion, because hey, they’re in the book. You can fend off challenges to your authority by referring back to the very book that you wrote to begin with. It’s brilliant!

It doesn’t even have to be a very good book. It can be filled with contradictions (your god created the world, then created man, then did some stuff, then man got lonely, then your god created woman; no, wait, your god created man and woman at the same time). It can make assertions that are provably false (the Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israel). Doesn’t matter. All you really need is a story that sells the book–some kind of tale that’ll help people accept that the book is actually written by your god.

A story involving magical plates made out of gold hand-delivered to you by an angel is good. If your imagination fails you, though, you can always just say that you sat down and thought about it really hard and it came to you.

Step 6: Sell the books by preying on natural human drives

We’ll use two emotions here that are often called ‘negative,’ but as we’ll see, thinking of these as negative emotions is nonsense! They’re positively wonderful for helping you to get people to believe what you want them to believe.

The first is fear. In your book somewhere, you have to say that people who don’t believe this book will have bad things happen to them. This is a must. It doesn’t matter what the bad thing is, provided it’s bad enough.

If you’re a traditionalist, burning forever in a lake of fire is good. So is being ground beneath a wheel or being torn apart by demonic dogs. If you’re more modern, you can talk about how mysterious spiritual entities will be drawn to unbelievers and clog their thetan energy or something.

People tend to fear death, so playing on that fear is brilliantly successful; you can do it directly, by telling folks that anyone who doesn’t believe your book will die; or indirectly, by telling them that they don’t really die, but if they don’t believe your book they’ll come back to life in an undesirable form.

I recommend the latter, because it gives you a natural hook into the other emotion you’ll want to use, which is greed. Tell people that they can have things they want and they will be happier if they believe your book. Again, you can do this directly, by saying that people who believe your book will never die but will instead go on to a wondrous place where the streets are made of gold, they will have stables full of hot women who want to fuck them, and they’ll be able to create worlds of their own if they like; or do it indirectly, by describing how people who believe your book will become successful and wealthy. (They might not, but that doesn’t matter–if you’re doing this properly, you will! Should someone tell you “I believed your book and I haven’t become rich,” you need only say “God is testing you.”)

By this time, people will believe your book because they’ll be too damn scared not to.

You might think that people would say “Wait a minute–you mean your god prepares pits full of fire and razor-clawed wolves to tear us apart because he has a plan for us and wants us to be happy? How on earth does that make sense?” But you’d be surprised.

Step 7: Lay down the rules

This is trickier than it sounds.

A natural beginner’s mistake to make is to set down a bunch of rules for people’s lives that will cause them to act the way you want them to. Remember, though, you’re dealing with human beings, and human beings are notoriously resistant to changing the way they behave, even when they think that behaving the wrong way will cast them straight into a burning pit full of lava and body thetans.

And also, people are excellent rationalizers, who are very crafty at making up reasons why rules they don’t like don’t apply to them.

So you have to be careful. You can’t just write a bunch of rules without thinking about what the folks yu’re talking to are already doing.

Successful religions succeed because they do not try to set morality; they instead cater to the various prejudices, bigotries, and moral beliefs that people already have.

If you live in a slave society, you will not gain any traction if your book says that god thinks slavery is wrong. More likely, you’ll get arrested as a public nuisance.

Similarly, if you live in a racist society, you won’t gain any followers by telling people that god says blacks and whites are equal. if you live in a society where women are second-class citizens, you’re not going to get too far by saying that god wants men to treat women well. You can’t just go making new rules willy-nilly; even if you’ve sold people on all these ideas so far, they’re going to balk at actually changing their moral code.

So, the professional instead makes a list of all the various prejudices that the people around him already have, then writes the book to justify those existing prejudices. That way, your book becomes an easier sell.

Don’t worry that the prevailing cultural prejudices will change over time. Nobody’s actually going to read your entire book anyway; only the parts of it they like. If you write in your book that your god thinks that slavery is a pretty neat idea, and then centuries from now slavery is abolished and people start believing that it’s morally wrong or something, they won’t say “But wait, this book says that god is OK with slavery! That must mean that god is immoral!” Instead, they’ll simply stop reading those parts of your book. It’ll be like a little secret, you know?

If you find yourself in a place where you’ve run out of ideas about what sorts of rules to write about, write about sex. There’s always someone doing some sex stuff that his neighbors don’t like. You can milk that for thousands of pages, if you want to.

Step 8: Sell the book

If you’ve written the book correctly, this step is already halfway done. Make sure you feature prominently in the book or (better yet) in the story about the book in some way. Making up stories about your lineage helps.

You don’t really have carte blanche to write whatever rues you like into the book, but there’s nothing stopping you from putting a few things in there to benefit you. If you sell yourself and sell the rules that benefit you at the same time, you’re golden.

It’s important to sell yourself in the book because remember, folks will believe that the book was written by your god. If the book makes you out to be special, that will give you legitimacy, and your legitimacy will help you get folks to accept that the book was written by your god. It’s win-win!

At this point, you’re basically done. It’s important not to get too ambitious, though. A good messenger of god knows his limits; if you make a practice of boinking all the townspeople’s wives like Joseph Smith did, there’s bound to be talk. Similarly, if you try bringing your book and its rules into places that have different prevailing prejudices like Paul did, you may come to a sticky end, which is what usually happens to moral leaders who try to lead rather than follow the morality of their flock.

Instead, I advise stepping away from the day-to-day management of your religion once it becomes established. Let the faithful manage the enterprise; they’ll really believe it, so they might even work for free. You can distance yourself from any messes they manage to get into while still collecting generous stipends from your religion. Play your cards right, and by the time you die, you, too, may have a $600,000,000 ranch in California!

Linky-Links: iPanties, Discordianism, and God is a hit man

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This will appeal to a number of folks on my flist: Discordian Quotes, a fun little project brought to you by a friend of mine. Sample quotes:

– A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
– Epistemological relativism may be true for you, but it isn’t true for everyone.
– Good for you, you’ve learned to extinguish your personality for my comfort

There’s even a Twitter feed!

Next up, for those of you with iPhones, there are now iPanties to go along with them!

Yep, that’s right, panties with the iPhone’s iconic “Slide to Unlock” graphic. There are some iPhone users on my flist who I wouldn’t mind seeing in these. Hell, there are some non-iPhone users on my flist who I wouldn’t mind seeing in these. Wouldn’t object too much to sliding where required to unlock them, either.

And finally, to some Baptists, God is a gun for hire. These people, who are currently busy praying for God to strike Obama dead, subscribe to a principle called “imprecatory prayer”–the notion that the book of Psalms validates calling upon God to kill one’s enemies.

Another List of Linky-Links

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Today’s crop of links covers a lot of territory, from cutting edge science stuff to LOLcat perversaions. Off we go:

Science

Our World May Be a Giant Hologram

A device intended to look for gravity waves may instead have provided evidence confirming a strange hypothesis that space itself is composed of subunits, and that there is a “smallest possible unit” of space.

Scientists Stop the Ageing Process

Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine report the ability to prevent ageing in the cells of a mouse liver by blocking the accumulation of protein detritus.

What’s In the Vault?

Vaults are cool nanoscale, spontaneously self-assembling structures within cells…and nobody knows what they do.

Humor

Яolcats

LOLcats as seen through the prism of Stalin-era Soviet propaganda ideology.

Caligula for President

Uncomfortable truths about American democracy, helped along with a little black humor. “In thrall to the natural, inexorable, cyclic states of empire, the American government is finally beginning to sprout hair on its lip and smell like all the others, and is almost beginning to resemble an adult superpower, in regard to the vast, regrettable and boringly predictable evils of monarchic leadership.”

I Want to Be a Kitten

An antidote to the previous link.

LOLkink

Because sometimes BDSM is just funny. Warning: Not safe for work.

Technology

Military Investigates Amnesia Beams

With a flash of light. Seriously.

Philosophy

The Idiocy of ‘Defamation of Religion’

Some folks, and some nations, are seeking to make “defamation of religion” a crime. Why that’s a profoundly stupid idea.

Well, that’s unusual…

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For what may arguably be the first time in its history, the Catholic Church has anticipated a new technology, rather than lagging a few centuries behind, as is more traditional.

Last year, Pope Sidious I Benedict XVI announced the addition of seven new deadly sins to the old list of seven deadly sins (which, frankly, I believe is flawed to begin with). On the new list is genetic engineering, which th Vatican defines broadly to include anything which changes DNA.

Eleven months later, researchers announced a major breakthrough in fighting HIV: a therapy that extracts the patient’s cells, genetically alters them to make them resistant to the AIDS virus, and then re-introduces them into the patient’s body.

The circle is now complete, as Darth Vader says. For the first time, with the newly updated list of deadly sins, the Catholic Church has a complete, end-to-end policy on HIV:

It’s wrong to wear condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, and it’s wrong to use gene therapy to treat AIDS.

Like many other religions, the Catholic Church has long viewed HIV as a behavioral problem, and felt that rigorous control of sexual expression, rather than condom use or research, are the ideal solution. They don’t go quite as far as to say that HIV is a punishment from God, but approaching HIV as a behavioral problem rather than a n epidemiological one still falls flat to me.

Folks who think that HIV is a consequence of an immoral lifestyle or a punishment for wickedness would do well to consider the case of a man who called in to the Playboy Radio talk show I was a guest on several months ago; he was HIV positive not because he’d had wild, deviant unprotected sex, but because he witnessed a car accident. One of the accident victims was thrown through the windshield and badly lacerated. In his efforts to save her life, he cut his hand on the glass and was exposed to her blood. She was HIV positive; now he is, too. Frankly, and I want to be very clear on this point: any omnipotent, merciful, benevolent god who is OK with that can suck my cock kiss my ass. If there is a god who would be fine with that, I think such an entity is manifestly and plainly not worthy of adoration.

But I digress.

Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other “sin” is invented nonsense. The idea of criminalizing lifesaving research by holding that certain forms of medicine are inherently sinful–and not just sinful, but mortal sins–that’s a level of wrong I can’t quite even find the words for.