Category Religion

Is ISIS’s popularity low? Hard to Tell

The Washington Post reported on a Pew survey of countries with a significant Muslim population, asking whether people there have a positive or negative view of ISIS:

FT_15.11.17_isis_views
Pew survey of countries with a significant Muslim population, spring 2015.

As the graph shows, in every country, ISIS is unpopular, by huge margins (and I find it interesting that according to the same survey, attitudes vary more from country to country and between religions; but I’m not sure that’s important right now).

But there’s low, and then there’s low. I wouldn’t drink water that was “only” 1% arsenic (the EPA limit is a million times smaller than that), and if there were “only” a 1% chance of crashing every time I got on the Beltway, I’d likely be dead within a year. So there’s small and then there’s small.

If the KKK enjoyed the same level of popularity in Alabama as ISIS does in Turkey, above, it wouldn’t be reported as “KKK only has minority support”. It would be reported as “One in 13 Alabamans still supports KKK”.

So I’d like to see some figures for comparison: how popular is ISIS compared to, say, the Lord’s Resistance Army, or Nazis, or the Tutsi army? Maybe they have comparable levels of popularity, and the double-digit favorability numbers are statistical artifacts. And in fact, it seems that the fact that its popularity varies more from country to country, than from religion to religion within the same country, points at this explanation.

But my fear is that ISIS really does enjoy insufficiently-low popularity.

Hey, the Vatican Has Jail Cells! Who Knew?

The Associated Press reports (via WaPo): “Vatican arrests 2 people in latest probe of leaked documents“. In brief: a few years ago, a monsignor and a collaborator leaked documents relating to pope Benedict 16’s finances.

A Vatican spokesman said Vallejo Balda was being held in a jail cell in Vatican City, and that Chaouqui was allowed to go free because she cooperated in the probe.

This is news to me. I didn’t realize that the Vatican had jail cells, and I’d never seen the words “Vatican arrests” before.
But this raises a further question: evidently the Vatican sees leaking documents as a crime serious enough to warrant arrest and imprisonment. But raping children or covering that up? Not so much. Why is that?

Persuasion ≠ Persecution, Dumbasses

So I was pointed at an appalling post, and after clicking around a bit, found this other post, entitled “The battle Gay Rights advocates will never win”.

He (yes, the author is quite obviously male) goes on for a few pages, whining about bakeries being forced—forced!—to serve gay customers as though they were ordinary members of the public, and the usual whining. But if we skip down to the conclusion, he writes (emphasis added):

So to gay rights advocates I say – you may have been able to convince a large part of our population to think there is nothing wrong with your way of life – but you will never convince or convert Bible believing Christians into accepting your lifestyle or to service your weddings or other events than honor homosexuality.

Christians have faced far greater persecution than what you or the courts can bring against us and in your futile attempt to force total acceptance of homosexuality – you will actually strengthen and galvanize Bible believing Christianity, and if you are not careful you may turn others against you as they see the results of your persecution of Christians.

Many people have pointed out that right-wing homophobes behave as though they think that having to accept that gay people exist is somehow persecuting them; that telling them that they can’t just be dicks to anyone they feel like somehow limits their freedom of religion. But this guy actually says so. Normally I’d say that this marks him as a troll, but of course Poe’s Law says that there’s no way to distinguish a real belief from a parody, so who knows?

I also note that he writes “to gay rights advocates” about the problems with “your way of life”. Of course, many straight, monogamous, vanilla, dare I say boring people support gay rights. And while it would be nice to persuade him to be more accepting of people who aren’t exactly like him, I’ll settle for him obeying anti-discrimination laws, and telling him to suck it. And by “it” I mean a rainbow-colored dildo.

Pope Francis Might Not Be A Liberal Savior After All

BillDo, the founder and sole apparent member of the Catholic League, has decided to make himself useful by listing a number of things Pope Frankie Goes to Vatican has said that may not entirely square up with some people’s image of him as the liberalest theologian since Hippie Jesus.

A lot of these quotations are short, and thus I suspect that they’re as cherry-picked as anything, but some of them stood out to me (emphasis added by me, throughout):

“Those with alternative teachings and doctrines [have] a partial belonging to the church. [They] have one foot outside the church. They rent the church.”

which sounds like “make up your minds. Do you want to control your sex lives with contraception, or do you want communion?”

“The dominant thinking sometimes suggests a ‘false compassion,’ that which believes that it is: helpful to women to promote abortion; an act of dignity to obtain euthanasia; a scientific breakthrough to ‘produce’ a child and to consider it to be a right rather than a gift to welcome; or to use human lives as guinea pigs presumably to save others. Instead, the compassion of the Gospel is that which accompanies in times of need, that is, the compassion of the Good Samaritan, who ‘sees,’ ‘has compassion,’ approaches and provides concrete help.”

No, you don’t get to control when you have kids or how many, nor do you get any say in when you die. Sorry not sorry.

“If someone says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s normal. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”

Not a big fan of the US First Amendment, or of article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I’m guessing.

“If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him?”

Sure, we love gays! At least, as long as they repent and promise to stop acting gay in public.

“Gender ideology is demonic!”

On the issue of women priests:

“The Church has spoken and said: ‘No.’ John Paul II said it, but with a definitive formulation. That door is closed.”

As I said, this is BillDo we’re talking about, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he were spinning some or all of these quotations to fit his right-wing agenda. But I don’t think it’s all him. I’m pretty sure that while Francis may seem progressive in the Vatican, elsewhere that just makes him slightly less reactionary than other cardinals.

Even the Faithful Have Given Up on Faith

Over at The Way of the Mister, Brian Dalton makes an important point:

I’ve often heard the argument that “I don’t have enough faith to believe in {evolution/the Big Bang/atheism}”, and maybe you have, too. Hell, it’s the title of a book by apologist heavyweights Norman Geisler and Frank Turek.

“I don’t have enough faith” is usually presented with a good dose of sneering at the fools who believe in such obvious fairy tales as evolution. But saying “I don’t have enough faith to believe in something so utterly ridiculous” implies that faith is something that you use to believe utterly ridiculous things, something you resort to when you don’t have evidence or reason.

I expect someone will say “Ah, but we’re talking about two different types of faith, here. One is a vulgar, colloquial form, closer to naïveté or even gullibility, than to the pure, sublime sort of faith that allows contact with God.” I don’t buy it, because it’s always presented as “I don’t have enough faith”, never “I don’t have the kind of faith that would allow me to believe in evolution”.

Consider, too, that religious institutions — high, low, and everything in between — love the idea of physical evidence for religious claims, especially things like miraculous cures of diseases, but also glossolalia (speaking in tongues), demonic possession, and other forms of supernatural intervention. No one ever seems to exalt those of Jesus’ disciples who, unlike Thomas, didn’t ask for evidence: “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).

People pay faith a lot of lip service, but that’s all it is. In every area where we can see the results, we’ve figured out that evidence and reason are far more reliable pathways to knowledge than faith is. If you were considering lending me money, and I suggested that you take it on faith that I’ll repay the loan, rather than running a credit check, you’d laugh me out of the room.

Faith has failed. It failed a long time ago. It’s just that people don’t want to admit it, because it allows them to believe in gods and miracles.

The Vatican Needs to Make Up Its Damn Mind

Washington Post story, two days ago:
Vatican fires gay priest on eve of synod

Washington Post story, today:
Pope urges prejudices be put aside at start of family synod

Homophobic Pope Distances Self From Homophobic Clerk

The Associated press reports that

The Vatican on Friday distanced Pope Francis from Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who went to jail for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses, saying she was one of dozens of people the pope greeted in the U.S. and that their meeting “should not be considered a form of support of her position.”

The article goes on to quote a spokesman (I almost wrote spokesperson, but then remembered that this is the Vatican we’re talking about) that the pope meets with lots of people, and doesn’t necessarily agree with — or even know anything about — all of them.

So basically, Kim Davis is like a stereotypical teenage girl who’s over the moon because One Direction waved to her from on stage at a concert, and she imagines herself BFF with the band. Meanwhile, Harry Styles is all, “Who?”.

I do note that Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman (remember? I was talking about the pope a moment ago) is quoted as saying,

“The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” Lombardi said.

The emphasized weasel words allow the Vatican to play it both ways: they’ll be able to either agree or disagree with her in the future, depending what’s more convenient at the time, because hey, Davis’s position is complex.

And by the way, I’d like to welcome our conservative friends: for years, pope Francis has been quoted by the media as saying some reasonably liberal and forward-thinking things (“Who am I to judge [gay people]?”), and then his people come back a day or two later and explain that ha ha no, he didn’t actually mean it (“no, gays can’t marry or form relationships or have sex, but if they want to come to church and confess that they’re sinners, we welcome them.”). This time, he just did it with a conservative cause instead of a liberal one.

Happy Blasphemy Day

There are no gods, unless you redefine the word to be so trivial as to be meaningless. Jesus, if he ever existed, was just a guy; he died two thousand years ago and isn’t coming back. His dad isn’t watching you, nor are his angels.
Mohammed was a merchant who managed to appropriate and adapt some extant texts to conquer a huge tract of land and get himself a pile of gold and booty.
The Dalai Lama doesn’t reincarnate. Nor does anyone else. Nor is there such a thing as karma: you’re just selectively interpreting random occurrences, using a brain that sucks at statistics.
The Redskins, the Cowboys, the Eagles, etc. are just guys paid a ton of money to play games.
Rachel Maddow is smart, but she’s not the last word on anything. Richard Dawkins is good at explaining science, but boy howdy has he said some stupid things.

Happy International Blasphemy Day, y’all.

Update: Fixed typo. Thanks, alert reader Fez!

Ken Ham Mad at Miley Cyrus for Not Being As Stuck Up as He Is

Ken Ham, best known these days for losing a debate to Bill Nye the Science Guy, has always held some… colorful opinions. The best that I can say for him, really, is that at least his organization distanced itself from Kent Hovind (see Arguments to Avoid at Answers in Genesis, and Maintaining Creationist Integrity at talkorigins’s Hovind page).

But now he’s gone off in a rather unintentionally-entertaining manner against Miley Cyrus, who posed nude at Paper. In particular, Ham didn’t like this part of the article:

Although she was raised Christian, Cyrus maintains a particular contempt for fundamentalist lawmakers who rally against this sort of progressive, potentially life-saving change. “Those people [shouldn’t] get to make our laws,” she says. Those people — the ones who believe that, say, Noah’s Ark was a real seafaring vessel. “That’s fucking insane,” she says. “We’ve outgrown that fairy tale, like we’ve outgrown fucking Santa and the tooth fairy.”

except that the two instances of the word “fucking”, even when reduced to “f–king” by Fox News, were enough to give him the vapors, and he had to bowdlerize them still further.

He also has the sads because Cyrus doesn’t share his superstition (emphasis added):

The same expletive was used a number of times in the interview. As you read what she reportedly said, it becomes very obvious that it’s not just the biblical accounts of the Ark and Flood in Genesis she is dismissing, but she is rejecting our Ark of salvation—Jesus Christ.

Of course what she means is that she wants to make her own “laws”! And she uses her “laws” and beliefs to judge Christians as her aggressive judgmental attitude toward Christians is so apparent, though in reality it is really about her attitude toward God and His Word.

Um… of course. Don’t we all want our values to be represented in the law? And of course we use our beliefs to judge those around us. As for making her own laws, isn’t that what democracy is about?

The article goes on to state,

Sexually, Cyrus said she is “down with” anything. She views her sexuality and even her gender identity as fluid. “I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn’t involve an animal and everyone is of age. Everything that’s legal, I’m down with. Yo, I’m down with any adult—anyone over the age of 18 who is down to love me,” she said. “I don’t relate to being boy or girl, and I don’t have to have my partner relate to boy or girl.”

Question for her: Why not involve an animal? On what basis does she decide that?

I’ve highlighted the word “consenting”, because Ham seems to have missed it. Animals can’t give consent. Neither can children. In the latter case, it’s more complicated, but our society has come up with 18 years as a not-entirely-arbitrary dividing line between children who can’t give consent, and adults who can.

He goes on to quote a bunch of Bible passages because he’s a Christian fundie, and that’s what they do. But I think this post says a lot mor about Ham than it does about Cyrus. In particular, that he thinks of morality in terms of obedience and disobedience; that he can’t think of a reason why he wouldn’t, say, fuck a sheep if he thought he could get away with it.

It also sounds as though he’s been drinking his own Kool-Aid, and actually believes that

in her heart she knows God exists (Romans 1) […] she has a conscience (as seared as it is because of her sinful rebellion) because the law is written on our hearts (Romans 2).

Someone who’s been telling himself he’s right so hard and for so long that he’s now convinced himself that everyone knows he’s right, and anyone who disagrees with him is only doing it to be contrarian. And that’s sad.

Won’t stop me from laughing at him, though. Just, maybe, not quite as hard as I would otherwise.

Encouraging Islamic Reform

In 2010, Ayaan Hirsi Ali participated in an Intelligence Squared US debate on whether Islam is a religion of peace. In it, she made the argument that while Islam is not currently peaceful, it can become peaceful if it reforms.

More recently, her latest book, Heretic, lists specific recommendations for an Islamic reformation. Things like accepting non-literal interpretations of the Quran.

So I was heartened when I listened to the Intelligence Squared US debate, and heard the the two pro-Islam debators argue that certain verses needed to be “contextualized”, or understood within the culture that Mohammed lived in. To my ears, this sounded an awful lot like “you’re taking it out of context” and “oh, but that’s the Old Testament!”

These are, of course, two of the rationales that Christians love to use to explain away those passages of the Bible that they don’t like. Those two will do the trick 90% of the time, even when “that’s not in my Bible!” won’t.

The problem is that these excuses are, well, excuses. Don’t get me wrong: they allow Christians to get along with other people in the 21st century. It’s bad enough that there are any people left who still believe in witchcraft; let’s not encourage them to believe that “Do not allow a sorceress to live.” is still accepted as mainstream.

Clearly, we want to encourage people to ignore, downplay, or reinterpet the less-savory parts of their holy books. The problem is, how to sell this without being too obvious that that’s what’s going on?

Christianity benefits from the fact that most Christians don’t bother to read the Bible. That means that they tend to be unaware of passages advocating slavery or genocide, unless their pastor chooses to mention them, which I think most pastors are loath to do. For those who do want to read the Bible, there are Bible study materials and ready-made apologetics to explain away the inconvenient passages.

I’m guessing that similar interpretations and apologetics exist for the Quran as well. But how widely are they used? And how can we encourage more people to gravitate toward the hip-and-groovy interpretations?