Category Religion

Bill Donohue Bathing in Privilege

The latest twist in Bill Donohue’s Gordian panties is the fact that he was barred from a gallery in New York City that was exhibiting Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ:

I then asked them if I could enter, and they said no, without explanation. At that point I turned to the crowd behind me explaining that my First Amendment rights were being censored by the same people who were proudly displaying Serrano’s crucifix in a jar of urine.

Now he’s posted a video of the incident:
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Cd7h80UUNHg

At around 1:10, he says,

I was just officially denied the opportunity by these people— Censoring my freedom of speech, my First Amendment right. They took this art and they’re going to show it here. […] My problem is with the phonies who run the Edward Tyler Nahem art museum by trying to censor us.

Oh, Jesus tapdancing Christ in a jar of urine. I’ve seen BillDo throw some riduculous tantrums, but this is a contender for Privileged Whine of the Year.

The very fact that he’s airing his beefs on the Internet to anyone who gives a crap is proof that he’s not being censored. But that’s not good enough for him. He imagines that he has not only a right to speak, but a right to be listened to. He’s upset not because he can’t say what he wants, but because he can’t say it where and how he wants it. Apparently in BillDo’s head, it is the gallery’s responsibility to provide him with a platform to air his grievances. Because he’s getting offended on God’s behalf, apparently.

If there’s a more perfect examplar of religious privilege, I have yet to see it.

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.

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.

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.”

Defending the Barking Mad

Recently, at The Catholic Thing, one William E. Carroll posted a piece entitled The Dawkins Challenge (via PZ), in which he takes offense that Richard Dawkins called the doctrine of transubstantiation “barking mad”.

I’ll let him describe it:

When he speaks of the irrationality of religious belief, Dawkins often invokes Catholic faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The Church teaches that with the priest’s words of consecration the bread and wine really become the body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ.

The rationale behind the doctrine, which is known as transubstantiation, employs categories of substance and accident, which have their origin in the philosophy of Aristotle. According to the Church, the underlying substances of bread and wine are replaced by the body and blood of Christ while the external appearances of bread and wine remain. A scientific analysis of the consecrated host and wine would only detect these external appearances.

(emphasis added.)

In other words, as I understand it, and as charitably as I can put it, a regular communion wafer is just a piece of bread. But a wafer that’s been blessed by a priest continues to look, smell, taste the same as before; it has the same mass as before; it dissolves in acid the same way as before; it continues to fail to block neutrinos the same way as before. It is in every measurable way the same wafer as before. But it’s not a wafer: it’s Jesus’ flesh.

PS: it’s not “barking mad” to believe this.

Believe it or not, I am not entirely unsympathetic to this argument: at a recent social event, we got to discussing the difference between boats and ships (all of us being landlubbers). According to the various GooglePedia pages on people’s phones, a boat is a smaller vessel for river or coastal travel, while a ship is typically a larger vessel, built for voyages across open sea.

So then someone brought up Kon-Tiki. It’s a small vessel, indeed a raft, so appearances place it well within the “boat” class (assuming, for the sake of this discussion, that rafts are a type of boat). But of course Thor Heyerdahl built it specifically to cross the Pacific, so that would mean it’s a ship.

It seems to me that there are two ways to resolve this: 1) Kon-Tiki is a boat; you wouldn’t expect a boat to cross an ocean, but Heyerdahl managed to do so. 2) Because of its famous voyage, we’re going to consider Kon-Tiki an honorary ship, even though it looks just like a boat.

Of course, neither of these change what Kon-Tiki actually is. It’s just a matter of how we divide the world into categories (boats vs. ships; should there be a third category for rafts? Or should they all be grouped under “vessels”?) and which pigeonhole to put Kon-Tiki in. This tells us more about the way human brains work than about the nature of the vessel in question.

It seems to me that Carroll is doing something a lot like option (2): “Yeah, it looks just like a piece of bread, but we’re going to treat it as if it were a slice of Christ.” Except presumably he thinks this reflects some reality outside of his head, because he feels the compulsion to defend his belief:

Belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist comes from an acceptance, in faith, of God’s revelation. Appeals to divine authority as a source of truth do not fall within the realm of the credible for Dawkins.

And with good reason: people believe all sorts of wacky and mutually-contradictory things on faith. Faith is not a reliable way of figuring out what’s true and what isn’t. Faith is what people resort to when they really really want to believe something, but don’t have any good evidence or arguments.

So as far as I’m concerned, what Carroll has demonstrated is that the doctrine of transubstantiation is “barking mad” and as unworthy of serious consideration as the idea that Xenu brought aliens to Earth in spacefaring DC-10s, or that the CIA has mind-control rays that can be blocked with tinfoil helmets (shiny side out). If he manages to come up with any convincing arguments, I’m all ears, but until then, I’ll continue to point and laugh.

Massacre Comparison

Comparing Herod and God in the Bible.

According to Wikipedia, the Catholic Encyclopedia places the death toll in the massacre of the innocents between 6000 and 20000.

Christianthinktank.com estimates the number of firstborn killed in Exodus at 69,000.

Credits

Massacre of the innocents by Daniele da Volterra, 1557.

Death of the firstborn by the LaVista Church of Christ (or so it says), licensed under a Creative Commons non-commercial license.

Motivational-poster-izing by Despair.com.

Church-State Separation in Norway

Whøå (Google translation).

The Norwegian government is expected to amend its constitution to become a more secular society: the Church of Norway will no longer be the official state religion. As I understand it, from now on the government will no longer have any say in how the church is run (and will abolish the post of Minister of Churches), and the church will appoint its own bishops and other officials.

This all sounds rather… civilized and sensible, I must say. As an American, I’m not used to such things happening without a whole lot of hand-wringing, hyperbolic rhetoric, and accusations of treason, communism, and collusion with Satan. I don’t suppose we could get some Norwegians to come over here and show us how it’s done, could we?

War Is Peace. Slavery Is Oppression. Ignorance Is Strength.

Once again, it seems that the word “Family” in an organization’s name can be more accurately replaced with “patriarchy”.

The Illinois Family Institute didn’t like President Obama’s National Day of Prayer proclamation. No, they didn’t:

President Obama’s proclamation has raised the eyebrows of some because he is thankful that we live in a country that “respects the beliefs and protects the religious freedom of all people.” Critics have noted that this point seems to fly in the face of the President’s failure to defend the Defense of Marriage Act which would have huge ramifications for religious freedom should marriage be undefined to allow for homosexual couples. (The repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is already causing problems for military chaplains.) The President’s prayer proclamation also contradicts his actions associated with his health care plan that could force people to pay for abortions and contraceptives against the teachings of their faith

Got that? Failing to uphold a law that tells gays they can’t marry the person they want is at odds with religious freedom. Not forcing gay soldiers to live a lie is at odds with religious freedom. Telling religious employers that they have to play by the same rules as everybody else is at odds with religious freedom.

Anti-Christian Bigotry
"Anti-Christian Bigotry" by Dana Simpson

I once had a discussion with my friend JB about the Civil War, and mentioned the argument that the war was fought not over slavery, but over states’ rights. She snorted and said, “Yeah. The right to own slaves.”

Your right to religious freedom ends when it affects people outside of your sect. Your right to worship as you see fit does not include the right to be kowtowed to, the right to make other people live by your rules, or even the right not to be offended. Put on your big-boy pants and deal with it.

Cooches Are Filthy and Disgusting. Who Knew?

The BillDo is up in arms again. This time, he’s unhappy about a piece that aired on The Daily Show a few days ago about the right’s War on Women, contrasting it to the War on Christmas™. And specifically at a bit where Jon Stewart suggested that, to prevent unwanted government intrusion into their sex life, women could protect their vaginas by placing mangers in front of them:

Vagina manger

It’s hard to tell what exactly it is about that image that has given poor Billy the vapors. He’s called it “obscene” and “vulgar“, “Stewart not only made a vulgar attack on Christians, he objectified women“; an “unprecedented assault on Christian sensibilities“, “anti-Christian and grossly misogynist“, even “What Jon Stewart did ranks with the most vulgar expression of hate speech ever aired on television“; “so indefensible—putting a nativity scene ornament in between the legs of a naked woman—that no one save the maliciously sick would even try to defend it“.

So he’s clearly in a tizzy, but doesn’t say exactly what the problem is, or why this comedy bit should warrant such over-his-usual-over-the-top rhetoric, which means that I need to guess.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been working on a theory of morals, studying what people find to be moral or immoral. This is from a psychological standpoint, not a philosophical or ethical one. That is, he’s not interested so much about figuring out what’s right or wrong, as much as he is in finding out how people think about right and wrong.

One of his categories is “sanctity/degradation”, which concerns purity and contamination: an action is immoral if it contaminates the purity of the person or community. Thus, for instance, I’m guessing that most people would object if someone brought a dog turd in a clear Ziploc bag onto a subway train, because (in people’s minds, at least) dog turds are filthy and disgusting, and the subway car and its passengers would be in a sense contaminated by its presence.

As far as I can make out, this is the explanation that best fits BillDo’s reaction: he feels that manger scenes are pure and holy, and photoshopping one in proximity to a set of ladyparts contaminates it with, I don’t know, cooter cooties or something. Which leads inexorably to the conclusion that Bill thinks vaginas are filthy. I wonder how Mrs. Catholic League feels about that. Or maybe Bill feels this way because he’s gay. Dunno.

At any rate, this seems like his personal hangup. And maybe, until such time as he can get over it, and realize that a vagina is no more dirty than any other body part, especially once it’s been thoroughly washed, ideally by a willing showermate, that he should just fuck off.

(Psychological analysis brought to you by the Institute for Advanced Psychological Research and Bajingo Jokes.)