Category FFS

Oh, the Irony!

In a post railing against the organization Catholics for Choice, BillDo writes:

Here’s another irony: there really is no organization called Catholics for Choice. It has no members, and is in fact nothing more than a well-funded letterhead, sponsored by the establishment.

I’ve been keeping a distracted eye on the Catholic League for years, and for all intents and purposes, it’s just Billy and his Electrified Rage-Powered Press Release Machine. So he might not be the best person to complain about one-man operations that look like large organizations.

This press release was written and approved by Americans for Transparency in Douchebaggery. For immediate release. All rights reserved. And your mother dresses you funny.

Victim Card Fatigue

From yesterday’s WaPo:

BALTIMORE — The Penn State scandal over a former football coach accused of sexually abusing young boys “reopens a wound” for the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, a leading bishop said Monday.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the crisis reminds the bishops of their own failures to protect children.

Well gee, maybe they shouldn’t have covered up chld rape, then. Was I supposed to feel sorry for Dolan? Hang on, let me find my World’s Smallest Violin™…

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.

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.)

Ironic Story Is Ironic

This Is Plymouth (Devon, UK) reports:

A CHURCH worker whose job was to protect young people from abuse had thousands of indecent pictures of children, a court heard.

Married father-of-four Christopher Jarvis, aged 49, advised the Roman Catholic Church in Plymouth how to keep youngsters safe but had more than 4,000 pornographic images of children, Plymouth Magistrates’ Court was told.

At this point, I’m suffering from irony fatigue, so supply your own punchline in the comments. The winner gets… oh, I don’t know. How about if I transubstantiate an item of baked goods into the deity of your choice?

On a more tragic note, the thing preventing me from simply pointing at a bunch of hypocritical fucktards and giggling is the fact that Jarvis appears to be a victim himself:

Jodie Baker, for Jarvis, said he had been the victim of abuse. She said he was abused aged 11 by a family friend through a church social club.

Miss Baker said: “At the age of 16 or 17 he admitted to a priest that he had a homosexual encounter and he was then abused by that priest.”
…

She said that two suicide attempts which led to Jarvis being arrested and produced in custody were ‘half-hearted’ and a ‘cry for help’.

Is there anyone the Catholic church hasn’t fucked up? (*cough*LouisCK*cough*)

And could someone tell me why anyone still remains a Catholic? It’s not like there aren’t other churches out there. In the US, at least, it’s a buyer’s market and always has been.

Does Symmetry Exist?

Well, duh, yes.

But is symmetry a thing? Well, no. Again, duh.

The reason I bother to bring this up in the first place is that I’ve stumbled on the festering swamp of pretentiousness that is Edward Feser’s blag

One thing that annoys me is the way he constantly reifies ideas, and acts as though that Means Something.

Take a look for instance at this bit (he begins by summarizing a physicist’s post about philosophy):

Arguments for God as cause of the universe rest on the assumption that something can’t come from nothing.  But given the laws of physics, it turns out that something can come from nothing. 

Here was my reaction:

Is this guy serious?  The laws of physics aren’t “nothing.”  Ergo, this isn’t even a prima facie counterexample to the principle that ex nihilo, nihil fit.  That’s just blindingly obvious.  Is this guy serious? 

In other words, what Feser is saying is that a law of physics is something. Is this true?

So let me back up a bit and look at symmetry (for simplicity, I’ll just consider mirror symmetry). Some objects, like cue balls and 2×2 Lego bricks, look the same in a mirror as they do by themselves (plus or minus however much we care about; if we care about the specific positions of atoms, a cue ball isn’t symmetrical; if we don’t care about the number indicating the point value, an “M” tile from a Scrabble set is symmetrical).

This fact can be expressed in multiple ways. In English, it feels natural to say that an object has symmetry. In another language, such as French, one might say “this object is symmetrical”. In yet another language, the most natural way to express this (or indeed the only way) might be to say “this object mirrors-without-changing” or “this object endures mirrorily”.

Whether the idea is expressed using a noun, an adjective, a verb phrase, an adverb, or even as a mathematical equation, it doesn’t change what the object is. People from any country can look at at the object and agree whether it has this particular property.

So what is “symmetry”, then? Presumably it’s some data structure in the mind of an English speaker that gets excited when she thinks of an object that looks like its mirror image. An artifact of the way that person processes information about the world, that happens to be implemented as a noun.

But just because there’s a noun for something, that doesn’t mean that that something actually exists out there in the world.

And a law of physics isn’t a thing. It’s a statement about how things behave. In fact, it can be expressed as an if-then statement: “if certain things existed and certain conditions held, then such-and-such would happen”. For example, the statement “if my refrigerator had a mass of 100 solar masses, it would collapse into a black hole” is true even though my fridge doesn’t mass anywhere near that much, due to the way that implication statements work. So a statement like “all masses attract through gravity” can be expressed as “if there were any masses, they would attract” and would thus be true even if there weren’t any masses in the universe.

But in the end, a law is a statement about how things behave; it isn’t a thing itself. And when people talk about the universe starting from nothing, they’re generally wondering how all this stuff came to be here in the first place.

Now, it’s certainly fair to ask why stuff in the universe behaves the way it does, and whether the laws of physics could have been different, whether there are other worlds where they are different, and so on. But when Feser says “The laws of physics aren’t `nothing'”, he’s projecting the way his mind works onto the universe and trying to make that someone else’s problem. It’s as if he had asked the name of the man in the moon, or asked why two holes don’t repel each other, since they have negative mass.

This strikes me as sloppy thinking (and related to the use-mention error). And I see it all too often when I read Sophisticated Theologians™. Which is one reason why I have as little respect for that occupation as I do.

Fitna in Arkansas

Fitna is an Arabic word meaning something like “disorder” or “unrest”. It’s often used as a justification for women covering themselves up, by not tempting men into lustful thoughts and the depravity and civil unrest that are sure to follow.

Now, I’ve always found this argument rather insulting: it basically says that men are weak-willed, that the moment we see an exposed elbow, we’ll go into some testosterone-fueled frenzy, unable to think straight, stopping at nothing in our craving for sex.

In other contexts, this is not considered a virtue. If I walk past you with my new iPad 2 or whatever the hot toy du jour is, and you like it so much that you steal it from me, that makes you a thief who needs to learn some self-control.

Now, obviously it’s polite to refrain from drinking in front of an alcoholic, or smoking in front of someone who’s trying to quit, but as a rule, people should be expected to control their antisocial emotions (although there’s an interesting exception, that I keep hoping to write about).

So anyway, the reason I bring this up is because of the bus ads in Arkansas, which you’ve probably heard of by now: in brief, the Central Arkansas Coalition of Reason wanted to put some billboards on buses, saying “Are you good without God? Millions are.” The Central Arkansas Transit Authority had a fit, but decided that it couldn’t legally stop them. So instead, they demanded that the CoR pay a $36,000 deposit to insure against vandalism. As a person at the company that handles advertising put it,

“in reality, Arkansas is the buckle of the Bible Belt and I can easily envision zealots or upstanding citizens with a strong faith acting out.”

In other words, fitna. The transit authority and its advertising agency are afraid that the good people of Arkansas, once they see an atheist ad, will fly into a fury of vandalism and won’t be able to help themselves from keying the bus or slashing its tires.

Arkansans, is that really how you want to be seen? Unable to control your temper or play nice with others? Because if so, you may want to get a nice, modest gingham burqa to cover up your wimminfolk. I’m sure there’s someone out there who’ll be happy to sell you one.

Update Fri Jun 17 12:50 2011: Fixed broken HTML. HT alert reader Fez.

GDMF Exchange!

Yet more reason to hate MS Exchange. Here are the relevant headers and MIME lines from a meeting notification I got recently:

Header:

Subject: XXX Staff Meeting
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
	boundary="_000_A32122FBAE23C145ABBEFDEA852187CE01E77A1505B7BLADEBLA03V_"
MIME-Version: 1.0

Body:

--_000_A32122FBAE23C145ABBEFDEA852187CE01E77A1505B7BLADEBLA03V_
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

…
--_000_A32122FBAE23C145ABBEFDEA852187CE01E77A1505B7BLADEBLA03V_
Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

…
--_000_A32122FBAE23C145ABBEFDEA852187CE01E77A1505B7BLADEBLA03V_
Content-Type: text/calendar; charset="utf-8"; method=REQUEST
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

…

--_000_A32122FBAE23C145ABBEFDEA852187CE01E77A1505B7BLADEBLA03V_--

At first glance, all might look normal: there’s a calendar entry with a note attached.

So first we have the plain text version of the note, followed by the HTML version of the note, followed by the vCalendar file describing the meeting itself.

But a closer look at the header shows that the message as a whole has Content-Type: multipart/alternative.

RFC 1521 says:

The multipart/alternative type is syntactically identical to multipart/mixed, but the semantics are different. In particular, each of the parts is an “alternative” version of the same information.

Systems should recognize that the content of the various parts are interchangeable. Systems should choose the “best” type based on the local environment and preferences, in some cases even through user interaction.

In other words, any standards-compliant mail reader should see those three MIME chunks as three different versions of the same information. So if it decides to (or you tell it to) display the HTML version of the note, it shouldn’t display the calendar file. And if it displays the calendar entry, it shouldn’t show the attached note.

Clearly somebody at Microsoft needs to be slapped. Hard.

(And in case you’re wondering, the proper way to do what they’re trying to do would be for the message as a whole to be multipart/mixed with a multipart/alternative chunk for the note, and a text/calendar chunk for the calendar entry. The note chunk would be further subdivided into a text/plain chunk and a text/html chunk.)

I think that when people are first told that Exchange is both a mail server and a calendar server, they think it’s kind of like a goose — something that can competently walk, swim, and fly, even though it may not excel at any of those — but in reality, it’s more like a crocoduck: massive fail at every level, no matter how you look at it.

Inexplicably-Elected Official Recommends Magic Spell

From the office of the governor of Texas, Rick Perry:

WHEREAS, the state of Texas is in the midst of an exceptional drought, with some parts of the state receiving no significant rainfall for almost three months, matching rainfall deficit records dating back to the 1930s; …

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal and robust way of life.

Yup, magic. An elected official of a populous state in an allegedly advanced country is using his office to tell his constituents to use rain magic.

Notice that Perry’s proclamation, like a well-crafted ad for a magnetic bracelet or an herbal boner pill, tries to give the impression that the product works, without actually making any actionable claims:

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;

Shorter Perry: “We have a drought, with the ensuing wildfires and crop failure. Here, have a pacifier!”

(Via ThinkProgress.)