Category Religion

Why Gay Marriage Is Exclusionary

The reason I read Catholic League releases is that BillDo’s stage persona, that of the hypersensitive apoplectic paranoiac stamping his little feet is amusing. Lately, though, he’s been in a bit of a slump, his tirades not quite over the top enough to be funny.

So I was pleased to see this item from last week:

For all the happy talk about inclusion, gay marriage is positively exclusionary in its effects. How so? Next month we will celebrate Mother’s Day. How do two men tell their legally acquired children that they are excluded from celebrating this special day? How do two women tell their legally acquired children that they are excluded from celebrating Father’s Day?

Stop teh gays from marrying, won’t you? Do it for the children. And for the gay parents who don’t want to explain things to their kids.

NOM Ad Parody

$NOM_ad =~ s/gay/interracial/ ==

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC4B4LknF90&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

I think this perfectly illustrates what’s wrong with the
original NOM ad.

(HT Cyde Weys.)

(PS: Amusingly enough, the song that was playing when I got this link was Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is.)

Secular Bible Study: The Book of Joshua

I’m leading Secular Bible Study today, so here are my notes on the book of Joshua (org-mode version).

More details later, hopefully.

Update, Sat Apr 18 17:42:26 2009:

Well, that went pretty well, I thought. I didn’t get to give my presentation, just give out bits and pieces of it as they became relevant to the conversation. Then again, since I wasn’t really able to turn my disjoint collection of notes into a coherent presentation, it’s probably just as well.

I mentioned Iron Chariots, the counter-apologetics wiki (which is where I got the definitions of henotheism and monolatrism. (Consider this a plug for the site. All of you who attended had interesting things to contribute, so you might as well contribute to the wiki and share with the world.)

The topic of theologians tying themselves in logical knots to justify or rationalize things like the book of Joshua reminded me of this post by Greta Christina, comparing religion to fan fiction.

I’ve probably forgotten some references that I promised people. If so, please speak up in the comments.

Discovery of the Day

The book of Proverbs
is funnier if you add “in bed”
at the end of every verse.

For instance:

1:8 Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction
and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.

12:18 Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

13:4 The sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.

Freedom of Religion = Freedom of Bigotry, Apparently

According to
today’s Post:

Faith organizations and individuals who view homosexuality as sinful and refuse to provide services to gay people are losing a growing number of legal battles that they say are costing them their religious freedom.

The lawsuits have resulted from states and communities that have banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. Those laws have created a clash between the right to be free from discrimination and the right to freedom of religion, religious groups said, with faith losing.

(emphasis added)

The article lists a few examples, such as a photographer who refused
to photograph a commitment ceremony, and doctors at a fertility clinic
who refused to inseminate a lesbian. The only one that I think I might
have a problem with is a student group at the University of California
that was denied recognition because of its views on sex outside of
“traditional” marriage, but the article is short on specifics.

What these people are saying, as I understand it, is that practicing
their religion requires them to regard certain other people as
inferior, and to deny them the services they offer to most people. In
short, they’re feeling butthurt because the courts are stomping over
their perceived right to bigotry.

"We cater to white trade only" restaurant sign
How exactly is this different from refusing service to blacks or Jews
because one’s religion says they’re inferior?

The law doesn’t say you can’t be a bigot and a homophobe. That would
be thoughtcrime, which would be unenforceable, apart from the very
abhorrence of the notion of crimethink. The first amendment even gives
you the right to tell that world that gays or blacks or lefties or
Mets fans are inferior. What the law does say, however, is that you
can’t necessarily act on your bigotry. “Your right to swing your fist
ends where my nose begins”, and all that.

IANAL, but as I understand it, if you run a business that purports to
be open to the public, that means you can’t just arbitrarily decide
which groups you will and won’t cater to. That’s probably a gift from
the civil rights movement.

Now, historically, religious groups have gotten a fair amount of
slack, from zoning law exemptions, to tax exemption, to drug law
exemptions. But the US constitution also includes the
14th
amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States

The whole point of the bill of rights, the foundation of the freedoms
that we Americans rightly pride ourselves on, is the idea that America
should be a land where everyone has an equal shot at happiness, and no
one is privileged by virtue of noble birth or preferential treatment.
And that means that your freedoms stop when they prevent others from
seeking life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And if your religion requires you keep others down, so much the worse
for your religion.

(Photo credit: Image Editor at flickr.)

UMD to End Graduation Prayer

According to the not always reliable
Diamondback
(hey, whaddya want? It’s a student paper), the University of Maryland
senate has voted to stop having prayers at graduation ceremonies. This
doesn’t affect individual colleges’ ceremonies, though.

It seems to have been a pretty decisive vote, too: 32-14.

The main arguments against the move seem to confuse secularism with
anti-theism:

“We need to be careful not to send the message that
secular language is seen as superior and acceptable while religious
language is seen as inferior and unacceptable,” [the university’s
Episcopalian chaplain, Peter Antoci] said.

It’s quite simple, really: if I’m at a staff meeting, and others are
talking about last night’s basketball game, and I say “Could you
please stop talking about basketball so that we can get on with the
business at hand and get out of this meeting early?”, I’m not saying
that basketball is a Bad Thing, or that talking about basketball is
bad. I’m just saying that it’s irrelevant to the purpose of the
meeting, so please do it on your own time.

According to the article, the university still employs 14, count ’em!,
14 chaplains, and I’m not aware of any movement to fire or censor them
(unless your definition of “censorship” includes denying them a
captive audience).

Of course,
some people
are appalled that this happened around the same time that
a porn flick was going to be shown on campus:

Great: Porn is ok; prayer is not.

I guess I’ll mark this one as “straw man”, since no one is suggesting
that porn be shown at graduation ceremonies.

Unicode and the Pope

I keep thinking that
Unicode
has everything, but it turns out that it doesn’t. In particular, there’s a
collection of emoji
that’s been proposed, but hasn’t been approved by the powers that be.

The reason I bring this up is that recently, the pope made some
remarkably boneheaded comments; naturally, people pointed and laughed,
because that’s what you do when someone says something embarrassingly
stupid.

In response, the Catholic News Service published
a story
chiding people for that:

ROME (CNS) — Mockery is not acceptable in public discussions, especially when the subject is the pope, said the president of the Italian Catholic bishops’ conference.
[…]

“We will not accept that the pope, in the media or anywhere else, is mocked or offended,” said Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa, opening the spring meeting of the permanent council of the Italian bishops’ conference.

I hope that emoji proposal passes; that way, the next time something
like this happens, I’ll be able to write

<span style="font-size: 1">💚</span>

to represent the world’s smallest violin, playing for the poor little
WATBs
and their hurt feelings. To quote Bender, “Oh, wait. You’re
serious. Let me laugh even harder.”

Meanwhile, maybe someone can explain to the Catholic church that if
they don’t like being ridiculed, they shouldn’t say such ridiculous
things.

Seriously, is this the best they have left? People shouldn’t make fun
of religious people because it hurts their feelings?

Oh, and the article also says:

The pope has often urged the world to become “more God-fearing while building a society based on humanitarian values and moral principles of life,” they said.

Maybe the problem is that he’s trying to pull in opposite directions:
it’s hard to build a society “based on humanitarian values and moral
principles” while at the same time telling them to be afraid of a
magic man in the sky. Drop the fear and the superstition, and then
we’ll talk.

Religion and Legal Insanity

You may remember a
story
from last year about a 16-month-old infant who was starved to death by
his mother for not saying “Amen” at mealtime. Today’s
Post has a
followup.

The story is ghastly and appalling, and the mother is obviously crazy
by any reasonable definition of the term. But that doesn’t mean that
she’s legally insane:

Tomorrow, five of the group’s alleged members — including the boy’s mother, Ria Ramkissoon — are scheduled to be tried in Baltimore on murder charges. Sources and Ramkissoon’s mother said Ramkissoon, 22, has agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge on one condition: The charges against her must be dropped if her son, Javon Thompson, is resurrected.

Psychiatrists who evaluated Ramkissoon at the request of a judge concluded that she was not criminally insane. Her attorney, Steven Silverman, said the doctors found that her beliefs were indistinguishable from religious beliefs, in part because they were shared by those around her.

“She wasn’t delusional, because she was following a religion,” Silverman said, describing the findings of the doctors’ psychiatric evaluation.
[…]

Silverman said he and prosecutors think Ramkissoon was brainwashed and should have been found not criminally responsible; prosecutors declined to comment. Although an inability to think critically can be a sign of brainwashing, experts said, the line between that and some religious beliefs can be difficult to discern.

“At times there can be an overlap between extreme religious conviction and delusion,” said Robert Jay Lifton, a cult expert and psychiatrist who lectures at Harvard Medical School. “It’s a difficult area for psychiatry and the legal system.”

(emphasis added.)

This is one of those areas that can keep legal scholars arguing far
into the night. On one hand, religious beliefs enjoy special
protection under US law. Crazy beliefs do not. So what about crazy
religious beliefs? And where does one draw the line?

One obvious place is between beliefs that cause harm, and those that
don’t. Of course, this ignores things like the pope’s and the Russian
Orthodox church’s pronouncements that condoms make the AIDS problem
worse. The problem there, as
Calli Arcale pointed out,
is that while the people who make these statements don’t actually want
people to die, that is the inevitable, demonstrable outcome
of their beliefs. (Of course, one could draw a similar line from a
belief like “healthcare should be entirely in the hands of the free
market, free from government interference” to people dying from lack
of medical attention; but with any luck, a person holding such an
opinion could be persuaded by empirical evidence).

Sorry for just trailing off at the end like this, but I’m still aghast at this whole situation.

(HT D. Edward Farrar.)

Update, Mar. 30: Given the number of times I’ve been told that right and wrong come only from religion, I wouldn’t think there’d be any gray area between religion and insanity. And yet there is. Go figure.

A Smart Person With Daft Beliefs

PZ has a
post
today about how intelligence and atheism don’t always go hand in hand.

Intelligent people who are indoctrinated into a faith can build marvelously intricate palaces of rationalization atop the shoddy vapor of their beliefs about gods and the supernatural;

A perfect case in point is
this post
in the “On Faith” section of Thursday’s Post by John Mark
Reynolds. The bio says he’s a professor of philosophy at Biola
university. So we have an apparently intelligent, apparently educated
person in the 21st century who writes things like this:

Satan’s existence is suggested by human experience and the Bible and is confirmed by reading the Washington Post. The Post is almost surely not a particularly diabolical organ, but it does report the news, and the news often shows signs of the demonic.
[…]

Religious experiences can be confusing partly because we misunderstand them, but partly because some spiritual beings are deceptive and malevolent.
[…]

Nobody save a prophet can look at the Post and be sure what God or the Devil is doing at any given moment or in any given news story. God’s providence is inscrutable in its complexity, but rational, while the Devils work is manifestly irrational and thus difficult to discern.
[…]

The irrational, wicked, continuous, and destructive hatred of the Jewish people has a bloody and sordid history. Anti-Semitism has sponsored so much wickedness that it is reasonable to suspect diabolical force behind it.
[…]

Satan exists with his demons and he is intent on destroying as much that is beautiful as he can. We need not fear him, but cannot ignore him.

In other words, here’s an intelligent, educated, respected man who
believes in a magic man with a personality more one-dimensional than
any Saturday morning cartoon villain’s who causes trouble because…
well, because he’s a bad guy. A man who can look at an obvious fairy
tale and rationalize his way into thinking that it’s real.

When Alan Moore
retconned the adventures of Miracleman,
it was interesting and entertaining. At least both he and his readers
knew that both versions of Miracleman were just stories. Here, it’s
just sad.

I’ll give Reynolds props for sticking around and participating in the
comments. There, he
writes

I should add that the argument (roughly) is that:

1. We have reasons from private experience to think the Devil exists.

2. We have reasons from religious literature to think that the Devil exists.

3. The existence of the Devil seems consistent with human history and in fact helps explains certain events.

Therefore: it is reasonable to think the Devil exist.

Except, of course, that 1) private experience is often suspect. 2)
Just because some people who wrote a book a long time ago believed in
devils does not make it so. 3) If you’re predisposed to see evidence
of the devil’s work in world affairs, of course you’re going to see
it; it’s called confirmation bias.

When we hear about Africans who believe in witchcraft, we shake our
heads in dismay that such superstition still exists. We laugh at
Icelanders who believe in elves and fairies.
Is there any reason not to put Reynolds’s magic man in the same
category as those beliefs?

(Tip o’ the fez to Fez.)

HPV Vaccine: Then and Now

Remember back in the summer of 2007, when two pharmaceutical companies
released a vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV), how if girls
were vaccinated against HPV, it could prevent them getting cervical
cancer later in life, and the religious right
got all bent out of shape about it?:

A spokeswoman for the Family Research Council (FRC) says young women should have to deal with the consequences of a rapidly spreading sexually transmitted disease rather then rely on a new vaccine.

The FRC’s Bridget Maher said her group believes over-reliance on the vaccine for the human papilloma virus (HPV) could send the wrong message to young women. “Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV,” Maher told New Scientist. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”

Rivka at Respectful of Otters has a
summary
of similar sentiments from the theosphere in 2006.

But that was then. Now, Merck has
released a new version of the vaccine
suitable for boys, which can prevent penile and anal cancer later in
life.

Groups that initially were critical when Gardasil was introduced for girls say they now want to make sure the decision is left up to parents.

“We do not oppose the development or distribution of the vaccine,” said Peter S. Sprigg of the Family Research Council. “The only concern we have is about proposals to make vaccination mandatory for school attendance. It’s a parental rights issue.”

In fairness, I should note that the FRC’s official position
in 2007
and
today
seems to be the same:

Q: Would vaccinating individuals against a sexually transmitted disease lead them to be more sexually active?

A: Not necessarily.

so it may be that Bridget Maher wasn’t speaking on behalf of the FRC,
or it could be that they were careful not to put their fearmongering
on the web where it could be scraped by the
Wayback Machine. It’d be
interesting to go through the organizations mentioned at Respectful to
Otters and see if there’s the same kind of indignation against a
vaccine for boys as there was against one for girls.