Archives 2011

More Christians Endorse Genocide

You may remember that an editorial by Richard Dawkins in which he explains why he won’t debate William Lane Craig, has caused a bit of a tempest in the religious teapot. At issue is the fact that Craig has defended divinely-commanded genocide in the Bible, not just once but twice, and Dawkins doesn’t want anything to do with a man who can espouse such odious views. Picky, picky.

Just as a reminder, here’s some of what Craig wrote:

So the problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.

On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command.

In other words, killing hundreds or thousands of men, women, and children is murder. Unless God commands it, in which case it’s not just okay, but mandatory.

By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.

These children had to die because their parents worshiped the wrong gods and were thus impure.

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

This part is so disgusting that I can’t even muster the snark to make fun of Craig. It’s like saying that we should shed a tear for the poor Nazis who were ordered to gas Jews.

It seems to me that when an otherwise-respected person says something stupid or reprehensible, the right thing to do is to denounce the stupid idea, even while acknowledging the person’s other accomplishments. See for instance the firestorm that erupted over Dawkins’s comment about elevatorgate, or when PZ Myers criticized the idea of humanist chaplains.

So how have Christians responded to Craig’s abhorrent rationalization of mass murder? I haven’t seen any of them repudiate his views. Instead, I see comments like Tim Stanley’s at the Telegraph:

Dawkins writes that he is so disgusted with Craig’s thesis that he cannot possibly agree to meet him in person. “Do not plead that I have taken these revolting words out of context,” he adds. “What context could possibly justify them?”

Actually, the context is called “Christian apologetics”, and it’s been around for centuries.
[&hellip]

Ergo, Craig’s purpose in writing this piece is to unravel the paradox of a moral Bible that also includes lashings of apparently random violence. Craig stresses that these passages of the Bible are difficult for us to read because we are not of the age in which they are written – they are just as alien to us as Beowulf or the Iliad. That’s because Christian society has been shaped by the rules of life outlined in the New Testament, not in the section of The Bible in which this massacre occurs. Far from using this passage to celebrate the slaughter of heathen, Craig is making the point that the revelation of God’s justice has changed over time. The horrors of the Old Testament have been rendered unnecessary by Christ’s ultimate sacrifice. That’s why the idiots who protest the funerals of gay soldiers or blow up abortion clinics aren’t just cruel, they’re bad theologians.

See? It was the Old Testament god, not the New Testament god, who’s much nicer. Which is not to say that it was wrong of the Old Testament god to have thousands of people killed. That’s just par for the course.

And jbarham at TheBestSchools.org Blog:

Now, I do not mean to defend the book of Deuteronomy, or even to defend Professor Craig’s defense of that recalcitrant book. But I do think it is a little rich that Dawkins should seize on Craig’s more or less unexceptionable exercise in Christian apologetics as a means of wriggling out of what had clearly become for him a very disagreeable situation.

(emphasis added.)

Really? Excusing mass murder is “unexceptionable […] apologetics”?

This is also cited without comment (and therefore, I assume, tacit approval) at Uncommon Descent by “News” (whom I strongly suspect of being Denyse O’Leary).

And Christians have the gall to accuse atheists of having no morals? As some guy once said, take the plank out of your own eye before complaining about the speck in your brother’s eye.

I Send Email

You may have seen this image floating around the web (also at Chez Hemant):

In case you don’t recognize the reference, it’s a photo of Hugh Laurie as Dr. Greg House, saying “Rational arguments don’t usually work on religious people. Otherwise there would be no religious people.” For those who don’t know, House is not only an atheist, he’s also not shy about slamming religion, and never allows theists to get away with saying something stupid. I mention this in case someone thought maybe after the quote above, he went on to say something about the necessity of believing in transcendent spirituality because it’s psychologically true or some such nonsense. He didn’t. He wouldn’t.

So I don’t know what this church was thinking when it put up this banner. But I figure that the best way to find out would be to ask them. So I found a contact address on their web page and sent them mail:

Dear sir or madam,

There is a photo circulating on the Internet, purporting to show a banner outside Rathmine’s Parish, quoting the character House, from the TV show of the same name, saying “Rational arguments don’t usually work on religious people. Otherwise there would be no religious people.” See http://twitter.com/#!/bdbdbdbd/status/124582300972351488

First of all, may I ask whether this is correct? I have no reason to believe that the photo has been edited, but it can’t hurt to ask.

Secondly, if the photo is accurate, then I admit I am as puzzled as the person who posted it to Twitter. It seems to say that there are no good rational arguments for religious claims, and indeed that rational arguments point toward the falsehood of religious claims. Certainly that is what the character meant in the show.

So may I ask why Rathmine’s Parish would display this? Is there some secondary meaning I’m not seeing?

Thank you,

We’ll see what kind of response I get, if any. It’s been two days, and so far I haven’t heard back.

Update, Oct. 28, 2011: I’ve heard back.

Sunday Morning Talk Show Playlist
  • The Police, Someone to Talk To
  • Opposition, Small Talk
  • Laurie Anderson, Talk Normal
  • Butthole Surfers, Let’s Talk About Cars
  • Talk Talk, Talk Talk
  • The Strokes, You Talk Way Too Much
  • Freezepop, Less Talk More Rokk
  • Cliff Richard, We Don’t Talk Anymore
Hemorrhaging Catholics in Brazil

The AP reports:

At the start of the last decade, millions of Brazilian Catholics joined flashy Pentecostal congregations expanding in the world’s biggest Catholic country. Now, Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation finds, the country’s Catholics are still leaving the church and at a higher rate than ever, but many younger parishioners, like Maragato, are simply becoming nonreligious.

Color me surprised. I knew (and the article confirms) that Latin America is considered a Catholic stronghold, one of the last places where you’d expect religion, especially Catholicism, to decline. Heck, even in the US, it appears that one reason religion hasn’t declined more precipitously than it has is that it’s being propped up by immigrants from the south. But according to the article, a study has found that 68% of Brazilians were Catholic last year, compared to 90% thirty years ago.

The article suggests several reasons for this decline, including a burgeoning middle class, which certainly goes well with the common notion that as the more well-off people are, the less they need to turn to religion.

This is also in part a self-inflicted wound:

Marcelo Neri, the author of the study, also said he thinks the Catholic decline was sparked by a “female revolution.”

The foundation study discovered that Catholic women, instead of giving up entirely on religion, are largely going to traditional Protestant denominations such as the Presbyterians or Methodists, which are viewed by many as less patriarchal.

This is the point, I think, at which any decent consultant would say that the franchise needs a reboot to remain relevant for modern audiences. Make Jesus a woman, or change the setting from Jerusalem 2000 years ago, to Sao Paulo in 2010. Maybe add a shootout at the last supper. Add corporate sponsorship and tie-ins; instead of bread and wine, have priests turn Big Macs and Coke into Jesus’ flesh and blood. Don’t worry about continuity: the fans will retcon it easily enough.

But of course the Catholic church is nothing if not reactionary. Change of any kind terrifies them. And so they’ll continue to lose the younger generation, the one that lives in this century instead of the fourteenth.

For lifelong Catholic Leila Ribeiro, the church’s misfortunes mark a break from generations of church tradition.
[…]

“I was brought up with the notion that religion is passed from mother to child, but I fear for what will happen to the church in his generation,” she said, looking toward her son. “If the Catholic faith isn’t spread within the family, how will it grow?”

Well, they could provide some evidence that their claims of magic people, of a candyland in the sky, and so on, are actually, you know, true. But they’ve been trying that for 2000 years now without success, so I wouldn’t bet on it happening any time soon.

Update, 12:49: More support for the “self-inflicted wound” hypothesis, courtesy of the Washington Post. Not in Brazil this time, but in the US:

New research by the Barna Group finds they view churches as judgmental, overprotective, exclusive and unfriendly towards doubters. They also consider congregations antagonistic to science and say their Christian experience has been shallow.
[…]

“Churches are not prepared to handle the ‘new normal,’” said Kinnaman. “However, the world for young adults is changing in significant ways, such as their remarkable access to the world and worldviews via technology, their alienation from various institutions, and their skepticism toward external sources of authority, including Christianity and the Bible.”

Book Pre-Review

Well, PZ finally has an ISBN, as well as a title and release date to go with it. Unfortunately Amazon, being the anti-business poopyheads that they are, have apparently decided that just because a book won’t come out for another eight months, that’s enough excuse to prevent people who haven’t read it from leaving first-amendment-protected negative reviews. So I have to leave mine here:

A Review of PZ Myers’s The Happy Atheist: Dancing on the Graves of the Gods

For a “New” atheist, PZ Myers comes late to the party, five years after Christopher Hitchens’s god Is Not Great. Obviously it’s taken him that long to come up with some original ideas that haven’t been covered better by earlier writers. Perhaps the fact that he fears the light and can only emerge from his submarine squid-cave in darkest night to feed upon desecrated eucharists has played havoc with his schedule as well.

Clearly, this is the work of a man in deep denial, not to mention torment. The title itself is an oxymoron: how can an atheist be happy, without the Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring down in his heart, down in his heart today? This is confirmed by the subtitle: after all, you can’t dance on the graves of gods if you don’t believe they exist, can you? Checkmate, atheists!

The text is probably dripping with scorn for religion, and full of gratuitous invective, because he’s that kind of asshole. No doubt he brings up all the familiar crypto-scientismist-materialist cliches about wanting “evidence” and “facts”, and denigrating faith, and accusing religious people of things like the Crusades and the 9/11 attacks, and burning witches, and opposing birth control, and so on ad nauseam. Granted, those things were and are done by religious people, but they had the wrong kind of religion, and how would we know that if it weren’t for faith (the true faith, I mean).

If the comments at his filthy, heathen blog are any indication, it’ll be bought by the carload by his legions of cult-like followers, eager to show the world their allegiance to the Cult of PZ, oblivious to the irony that, in their zeal to destroy religion, they’ve erected another one.

Rumor[1] has it that the first thousand buyers will receive a bonus octopus beanie. This will no doubt boost the book’s sales among the aforementioned cephalopod hordes. But I ask you, did an octopus ever temporarily sacrifice himself to himself to make a loophole in a rule he created in order to save you and me from the torture chamber he created, to punish us for failing to meet the impossible standard he set for us for being the way he created us? No, of course not! That’s absurd! If he had, the cross would have eight arms, not four, and it doesn’t, so there. QED.

In short, this is doubtless another pathetic attempt by a god-hater to destroy all that is good and beautiful in life, and rape puppies. Don’t waste your time if you don’t want to lose your faith and the mansion in heaven that God has set aside for you. Zero stars.

1: My ass, personal communication, 2011.

Happy International Blasphemy Rights Day

Good morning.

Hey, I had an idea for a movie: Jesus comes back to life and starts wreaking zombie havoc in Jerusalem. In the climax, Peter takes him out with a shotgun blast to the head. Think Passion of the Christ meets Army of Darkness.

Mohammed
No? Okay, how about a porn biography of Mohammed, with Ron Jeremy as Mohammed and Jenna Jameson as Aisha?

Okay, how about a simple PSA featuring Buddha promoting Steak & Blow Job Day?

But we’ve got to find a way to tie in these American flag toilet brushes and constitution toilet paper somehow. I’ve got a warehouse full of that shit to sell.

So in case you hadn’t heard, September 30 is International Blasphemy Day, so go out there and find something to blaspheme. It’s fun, and it exercises your first amendment right. Think of it as tai chi for the soul (wait; did I, an atheist, just say “soul”? Isn’t that blasphemy? Oh my loving God, I think it might be. Lord have mercy on me).

Now, blasphemy is the desecration, profanation, marring, or what have you of a sacred item, person, or even idea. And to hold something sacred involves having an irrational attachment to that thing, well beyond its objective worth. For instance, if you would run into a burning church to save an icon, but wouldn’t do the same for an ordinary painting, then you probably hold that icon sacred.

So why would people do that? I think it has something to do with evolutionary psychology, clan protection, and game theory.

Imagine that you’re living ten or twenty thousand years ago, in a village with your clan. There’s no police, no army. Defense is entirely up to you. One day, a group of people from the next valley over come along to steal your food. You fight them, but at some point the tide starts turning against your side, and you think “screw this. I’ll just run off into the hills and live to fight another day.” Of course, you’re probably not the only one thinking this way. So the village defenders run away, the village falls, and you spend the next month surviving on roots, berries, and the occasional rabbit because you don’t have a hunting companion who could help you take down an aurochs or bison.

Okay, now imagine that in the middle of the village is the clan totem pole. This seemingly-ordinary carved tree trunk is the holiest thing you know, and the thought of the marauders using it for firewood, or even coming near it, fills you with disgust. Now you’ve got a greater incentive to defend the village, and won’t be as likely to run away when the fight goes against you. And the more people around you who feel the same way about the totem, the better your side’s odds. Furthermore, since the attackers don’t place the same value on the totem as your side does, they don’t have the same kind of incentive to take it.

So assuming that this just-so story is anywhere close to truth, then sacredness is a mental mechanism that unites clans against the outsiders. It’s a way of ensuring that you have more at stake than would normally appear. It can also serve as a loyalty test: if a new guy shows up in the village, and is willing to desecrate an item that’s sacred to the people in the next village, then you can be pretty sure he’s not secretly working for them.

(The above contains ideas I got from Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Dennett, and probably others.)

Of course, the world we live in today is a far cry from the environment in which we evolved. We have police and armies these days, and a lot of the tribalism that may once have been useful just gets in the way of progress and cooperation these days.

But fundamentally, the notion of blasphemy is: “I hold this object sacred. Therefore you must not say anything bad about it.” Um, thanks but no thanks. You can be as attached as you like to anything you like, be it a flag or a crucifix or your collection of Pokemon cards, but don’t make it my problem. Your club, your rules. Keep me out of it.

So why is it so much fun to blaspheme? Basically, it’s like poking the fundies with a metaphorical stick; they can’t help but jump in a most amusing manner. And that’s the other thing to remember about sacred objects: the things you hold sacred also control you. And personally, I’d rather not be controlled by a statue or a piece of cloth.

PS: L. Ron Hubbard was an unimaginative hack.

He Just Doesn’t Get It

In today’s WaPo, we find an account of the pope’s visit to Germany.

He told reporters on the plane that there needs to be an examination of why people have been leaving the church recently, and the part that the abuse scandals played in the phenomenon.

Well, let’s see… How about increasing irrelevance in a world that has largely moved beyond the 13th century? No? What about ridiculous and dogmatic stances on contraception and homosexuality? Perhaps monsieur would like to see something in our “hypocrisy of speaking out against greed while living in a golden palace” line, or view the “spreading AIDS in Africa by pooh-poohing condoms” collection?

Oh, wait. He said something about some scandals:

“I can understand that some people have been scandalized by the crimes that have been revealed in recent times,” he said.

What? Seriously? “some people”?

He really doesn’t get it, does he?

What I want to know is, why is anyone not scandalized by the church’s crimes? Why is anyone still a member of an organization that for decades, possibly centuries, covered up child rape as a matter of policy?

Boycott

If you’ve been around for a while, you may remember Bill Donohue as a guy who has called for boycotts of Calvin Klein, HBO, Disney, Target, the TV show Nothing Sacred, 20th Century Fox, the Brooklyn Museum of Art , the city of San Francisco, Showtime, the New York Jewish Museum, the Arlington diocese lenten appeal, Wal-Mart, Madonna concert sponsors, the Roger Smith Hotel, the movie The Golden Compass, Miller beer, and probably others that I’ve forgotten.

Now he warns us of a new threat:

The Charity Give Back Group (CGBG), formerly known as the Christian Values Network, is an online service that partners with more than 170,000 charities, religious and secular, enabling users to support their favorite charities when they shop on the web. Because some of the charities embrace the traditional Christian understanding of marriage, some activist organizations have sought to pressure retailers not to associate with CGBG.
[…]

If these extremists get their way, they will silence the Christian voice. Which is why the bullies must be defeated.

Right now, Catholics need to let three major companies know of their need not to follow the dictates of these anti-Christian forces: Netflix, Walgreens and Petco. We are not asking them to jump into the culture war on our side; we simply ask that they remain neutral.

(emphasis added)

I suggest starting a new charity, to be affiliated with the Christian Values Network CGBG: the Buy BillDo A Mirror And A Fucking Clue Foundation. BillDo and thousands of religious leaders like him live lives bereft of any smidgen of self-awareness or sense of irony, condemning in others that which they routinely advocate themselves. Please, won’t you think of the bigots?

(HT Ed Brayton.)

Learning to Learn

The Aug. 29, 2011 episode of 60-Second Science talks about a finding that drawing helps scientists develop their ideas.

I can’t say I’m terribly surprised at this. Drawing seems to me to be more concrete than speech (or raw thought). Just as a simple example, I can say “two circles”, or I can draw two circles. If I draw two circles, rather than just talking about them, I must necessarily place them next to each other, or one above the other; close together or far apart; of equal or different sizes; and so on. Depending what the circles represent, these small choices might matter, and force me to think about some aspect of the problem.

Chabris and Simon’s The Invisible Gorilla describes something similar: pick some object that you know well — the example they use is that of a bicycle — and draw a diagram of it. No need for artistic verisimilitude, just try to get all the important parts and how they relate to each other. Now, compare your drawing to the real thing. Are the pedals attached to the frame? Do the pedals go through the chain? Is the chain attached to both wheels, by any chance? According to the authors, a lot of people make glaring mistakes. I think it’s because, while people know how to use a bicycle (or a stove, or a TV set), we rarely if ever need to think about the way the parts have to fit together to actually work.

Which brings me to my own field:

It has often been said that a person does not really understand something until after teaching it to someone else. Actually a person does not really understand something until after teaching it to a computer, i.e., expressing it as an algorithm.

— Donald E. Knuth, in American Scientist:61(6), 1973, quoted here

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve learned something about it yourself.

— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Computers have a nasty habit of doing exactly what you tell them, and only what you tell them (or at least they did back when I learned programming; since then, they’ve occasionally attempted to be helpful, which usually means they’re not even doing what you tell them). This means that to write any kind of program, you have to think about absolutely every step, and make decisions about everything. And the machine isn’t at all shy about letting you know that YOU GOT IT WRONG HAHAHAHA LOSER!, although it usually lets you know through a cryptic error message like segmentation fault (core dumped) or dropping your Venus probe into the Atlantic.

But in most disciplines, we are not so lucky to have such stupid students, or to receive the kind of feedback that programmers do, so we need to resort to other methods.

Explaining things to someone else helps, probably because it forces you to explicitly state a lot of the things that you can just gloss over when you’re thinking about it. John Cleese has talked about the importance of test audiences in improving movies: they’ll tell you about all sorts of problems with the film that you never would have noticed otherwise. One of the cornerstones of science is peer-review, which basically means that you throw your ideas out there and let your colleagues and rivals take pot-shots at them. And the study I mentioned at the the top of this post says that it helps to draw pictures of what you’re thinking about.

It seems to me that the common element is looking at every aspect of a design, the better to try and make its flaws evident. The human brain is a remarkable organ, but it’s also very good at rationalizing, at overlooking details, at making connections that aren’t there, and the like.

But the good news is that we do have techniques like doodling, explaining, soliciting feedback, and so on. And that suggests that we can learn to think better. Genius may not be something innate, something bestowed by whichever Fates decided your genetic makeup, but rather something that you can learn over time and improve through practice, like playing piano or baking a soufflé.

I hope this is the case. It would mean that our children can be better than we are, and there’s something we can do about it. Heck, it would mean that we can improve ourselves.

Stop Calling Neocreationists Creationists, Dammit!

Here’s the blurb attached to the latest episode of the Intelligent Design the Future podcast:

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin exposes how evidence given for macroevolution in The Language of Science and Faith is too weak to hold any weight. In their book, Francis Collins and Karl Giberson make the all-too-common claim that macroevolution is merely microevolution over a prolonged period of time. Are the proposed mechanisms really as simple as they sound? Luskin discusses the insufficiency of Collins and Gibersons’ argument in Part 5 of his continued review of The Language of Science and Faith.

Gosh, it’s nice to know that ID is not creationism, nosirree! It’s a completely different thing altogether, you betcha!

But wait, what’s this? Huh. It turns out that “Microevolution is true but not macroevolution” is on Answers in Genesis’s list of arguments that creationists shouldn’t use.

Okay, maybe there’s a difference between ID and young-earth creationism after all, if Luskin is still pushing arguments that even AIG has disavowed.