Archives August 2012

Headlines

A selection of headlines in my news aggregator this morning:

One of these things is not like the others.

(Also, what’s with the scare-quotes around “Isaac”?)

Religious People More Generous?

One item in the news today is a study in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, where the main take-home message for a lot of people is that religious conservatives are generous to the needy, and liberal atheists are miserly Scrooges. In fact, teh BillDo has a picture of Scrooge next to his summary:

Liberals are the least likely to help the poor. That’s the inescapable conclusion of this new study: states where people participate in religion at a high rate are also the most generous; conversely, the least generous states are also the least religious. Importantly, nine of the ten least generous states voted for Obama in 2008.

Note that he says “help the poor”. The Chronicle of Philanthropy‘s writeup says something significantly different:

The study, based on the most recent available Internal Revenue Service records of Americans who itemized their deductions, examines taxpayers who earned $50,000 or more in 2008. They donated a median of 4.7 percent of their discretionary income to charitable causes.

There’s a difference between “the poor” and “organizations that the IRS considers charities”. For instance, Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Megachurch is a charitable organization for tax purposes. So if you donated to them, and some of your money went to pay for Joel Osteen’s mansion, that counts as a charitable donation (or, as BillDo put it, “help[ing] the poor”) for purposes of this study.

In other words, some portion of the sensational headline “Less-religious states give less to charity” is “Less-religious states give less to churches”. Like, duh.

In fact, what the Chronicle of Philanthropy says on the subject is:

Religion has a big influence on giving patterns. Regions of the country that are deeply religious are more generous than those that are not. Two of the top nine states—Utah and Idaho—have high numbers of Mormon residents, who have a tradition of tithing at least 10 percent of their income to the church. The remaining states in the top nine are all in the Bible Belt.

When religious giving isn’t counted, the geography of giving is very different. Some states in the Northeast jump into the top 10 when secular gifts alone are counted. New York would vault from No. 18 to No. 2, and Pennsylvania would climb from No. 40 to No. 4.

(emphasis added.)

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the study’s data set, to see how removing donations to churches changes things. And even then, there would be the problem of subdividing religious donations into what can genuinely be considered charitable (e.g., providing meals for the homeless) from administrative costs (like clergy salaries) or proselytizing (like sending Bibles to Haiti). Of course, churches encourage the idea that tithing = charity and don’t publish their books the way other non-profits do, so we can see how much overhead they have.

Having said that, it’s entirely possible that atheists and agnostics genuinely give less to charity than more religious people; but that’s not apparent from what was published (in other words, BillDo’s “inescapable conclusion” is entirely escapable). After all, churches are already set up to accept donations, so it’s easy for them to raise money for, say, tsunami victims in Indonesia. And of course if you give a sermon on the importance of charity, you’ll probably raise more money when you pass the plate than if you don’t.

Family Research Center Shooting

In case you missed it, someone shot up the <a href="http://wwwfrc.org/"Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, DC.

Greta Christina puts it thusly:

This is not acceptable. We do not shoot people just because we disagree with them.

(read the rest of it for context which makes it better.)

Hemant Mehta passes on official statements from the Secular Coalition of America

“While we disagree with the Family Research Council on nearly every issue, the debate surrounding the role of religion in the public sphere should be fought with reason and logic, not guns,” said Edwina Rogers, Executive Director. “We absolutely condemn this sort of senseless violence.”

and American Atheists:

American Atheists is saddened to learn about the shooting at the Family Research Council today. Our thoughts are with the security officer who was injured and the other employees who were traumatized.

American Atheists never advocate violence as an answer to disagreements, even with those who believe differently than our members.

I can’t think of anything to add. I don’t like the FRC or what they advocate, but you don’t go around shooting people you disagree with, or otherwise doing or threatening violence. This is not acceptable.

Defining God Into Existence

One of the more slippery arguments for the existence of God is the ontological argument. It goes roughly as follows:

  • God is the most perfect being imaginable.
  • A being that exists is more perfect than one that doesn’t.
  • Therefore, God exists.

The details vary from one apologist to the next, depending just how much circumlocution he wants to employ, but that’s the gist of it.

A lot of people can see that there’s something wrong, but like a stage magic trick, it’s not obvious what the problem is.

It’s easy to show that something’s wrong, by the way: just replace “God” with “ideal beer”:

  • The ideal beer is better than any other beer.
  • A beer in my hand is better than a beer that isn’t.
  • Therefore, I have an ideal beer in my hand.

It’s exactly the same argument as before, so if it worked, there should be a beer in your hand. And yet, somehow, there (most likely) isn’t. (You can also do this with The Ultimate Plague, is 100% communicable and 100% fatal. But it can’t kill anyone if it doesn’t exist. Therefore, the Ultimate Plague exists, and we’ve all died of it.)

So how is the magic trick done? Basically, it plays fast and loose with language.

It starts out well: the first line defines what we mean by “God”, and the second line sees what follows from the definition. In other words, if we define “God” as meaning a perfect being, then it follows that anything that falls under that definition must also exist.

At this point, some people object that existence isn’t a property like having a brain, or being bigger than a breadbox. I’m not picky. I’ll accept anything that can be answered with Yes/No/Maybe/Dunno as a property. If you show me something and ask if it’s a quadruped, I’ll count its legs and if it has four of them, I’ll say yes. Similarly, if you show me something and ask whether it exists, I’ll say yes.

Definitions are useful, not simply for what they include, but also for what they exclude: if I define a cat as a four-legged mammal, then you can look at a pencil, see that it doesn’t have four legs, and therefore isn’t a cat. You can look at an iguana and see that although it has four legs, it isn’t a mammal, and therefore isn’t a cat (same with four-legged tables). Then you can look at a horse, see that it has four legs and is a mammal, and therefore falls under my definition of a cat. Fair enough. I shouldn’t have made the definition so broad.

And then we get to

Therefore, God exists.

Did you notice the ol’ switcheroo being pulled? Up until now, we’ve been talking about the definition of the word “God”; now we’ve switched to talking about God him/her/itself. If we wanted to be precise, we should write

  • Let us define “God” as the most perfect being imaginable.
  • A being that exists is more perfect than one that doesn’t.
  • Therefore, if an entity matches the definition of “God”, then that entity exists.

Actually, I guess this argument is a deepity: it has two readings, one which is true but trivial; and one which is false, but would be earth-shattering if true.

Or, to put it another way, the ontological argument reduces to “Show me a god, and I’ll show you an existing god.” It tells you which properties an entity has to have to be considered “God”, but doesn’t show that there actually are any entities that match that definition. Ditto the ideal beer and the Ultimate Plague.

Dear Liberal Christians: Do You Know This Is A Christian Nation?

So I ran across this video of right-wing “historian” David Barton saying

If you look at signers of the Declaration of Independence, they said America is a Christian nation. So were we? Yes. … Are we? … America’s 82 to 88 percent professing Christian. I would say that qualifies for a Christian nation.

(emphasis added.)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKUqoboiSWQ#t=1m30s&w=480&h=360]

It’s worth taking a closer look at Pew’s numbers.

Evangelical Protestant Churches 26.3%
Mainline Protestant Churches 18.1%
Historically Black Churches 6.9%
Catholic 23.9%
Mormon 1.7%
Jehovah’s Witness 0.7%
Orthodox 0.6%
Other Christian 0.3%
Total 78.5%

I’m not going to delve on the difference between Pew’s 78.5% and Barton’s 82-88%; let’s just assume that Christianity has fallen by 4-10% in three years, more or less evenly across denominations. Nor do I want to pick on David Barton specifically. He merely provided a representative quote in the general ballpark of “most Americans are Christians, so it’s our way or the highway”.

What’s more interesting to me is that if we take all these different flavors of Christian and bake them into a tasty pie chart, it looks like this:

Now, I’m guessing that Barton is in that blue 33.5% wedge, which many of the people in the other wedges consider crazy, heretical, or worse. I haven’t been following Christians’ internecine sniping much, but I recall a lot of the blue guys saying that the green guys aren’t True Christians. And of course the Mormons and JWs are on the chart not because the bigger sects consider them Real™ Christians, but because they consider themselves Christians.

My point here is that if you’re a non-crazy-right-wing-holy-roller Christian, then you’re probably not in the same wedge as Barton and the crazy right wing holy rollers. But they’re speaking for you anyway. In the video above, for instance, Barton is saying that since most Americans are Christians (call themselves “Christian”), therefore laws should follow Christian (right-wing Evangelical) principles.

But for some reason, I don’t hear a lot of liberal Christians calling right-wingers on this, demanding that the conservatives stop speaking for all Christians. Except, I guess, when the craziness reaches Fred Phelps levels. In most cases, however, silence is perceived as agreement.

So if you’re a Christian who doesn’t agree with the Pat Robertsons and Maggie Gallaghers and Bill Donohues and David Bartons of the world, you have a few options:

a) Get the right-wingers to stop using the word “Christian” when they really mean “Fundie”. Good luck with that.

b) Pick a different word for yourselves. I’d suggest “Jesusist”, but that has too many esses, so how about “Yeshuist”?

c) Stop giving cover to the crazy Christians. Raise a stink whenever someone says something crazy and claims to speak for you.

Or, I suppose, you could d) agree that yes, unbelievers and gays should be second-class citizens just like it says in the Bible, that there should be no wall of separation between church and state, and like that. I’d just like to know where things stand.

NPR Almost Uses the L Word

From this morning’s NPR news podcast (starting at the 1:28 mark, if the link isn’t stale by the time you read this):

[Romney is]continuing to hammer at the president for allowing some exemptions to the work requirement in the welfare law.

Romney: “It is wrong to make any change that would make America more of a nation of government dependency”.

And that’s Romney in Iowa yesterday. Independent analysis shows the president’s changes simply could allow states exemptions when they can show that their own processes would place more people into jobs than by meeting the welfare law’s requirements.

(emphasis added)

So basically, <quote Romney saying X>; but actually, not-X.

NPR doesn’t actually use the word “liar”, but this comes pretty close. And given the current state of American news media—where if one person says that kittens should be killed with giant mallets, and another person says they shouldn’t, the average news outlet will treat both as equally-respectable opinions and that the truth lies somewhere halfway between (you should get a permit to kill kittens with mallets, after proving that you’re not some sort of weirdo, perhaps?)—I’m grateful for any advance in the direction of letting people know what’s going on.

So thank you, NPR.

Being Anti-Gay Doesn’t Mean You’re Anti-Gay

Not too long ago — I remember it as though it were yesterday — the BillDo competed in the olympic 200-word blithering competition (emphasis added):

Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A, has said that we are “inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.’” How this unremarkable statement, which never mentions homosexuals, can be labeled anti-gay is astounding. But according to the editorial board of the New York Times, it can be. After quoting Cathy, the Times says, “Antigay remarks like these are offensive.”

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Except for the part about how, for I don’t know how many years now, “defending traditional marriage” has been code for preventing gays from marrying the people they love, for no rational reason I’ve been able to discern. So yeah, if you’ve been in a coma since the Clinton administration, you may not realize that “I support traditional marriage” means “I’m a homophobe” in the same way as “I support Separate But Equal” means “I’m a racist”.

Of course, reality isn’t BillDo’s strong suit. But still, you’d think that after writing the afore-quoted paragraph #1, and taking further offense in paragraph #2, that he wouldn’t write this as paragraph #3:

Nature, and Nature’s God, has ordained that marriage is the exclusive province of a man and a woman; they are the only two people capable of naturally creating a family. But now, all of a sudden, we are expected to believe that such a pedestrian view is wrongheaded. Worse, there is a growing segment of the population, overwhelmingly white and well-educated, who want to punish those who hold to the traditional view. This is madness laced with fascistic elements.

Shorter Bill: “Only one man and one woman should be allowed to be married; anything else is an offense to God. And don’t you dare call me a bigot, because I never mentioned gays! All I did was strongly suggest that those people shouldn’t have the same rights as I do.”