Category Religion

That Arizona Bill Isn’t Primarily About Homophobia

A lot of ink has been spilt lately about Arizona Senate Bill 1062 being a homophobic bill. Take, for instance, this leading paragraph from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze (emphasis added):

A debate over a proposed Arizona law that would exempt individuals and legal entities from having to cater to gay customers exploded Tuesday night on CNN when an opponent of the measure accused former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of being a “homophobe.”

But the thing is, the word “homosexual” (or any synonym or related term) does not appear in the text of the bill. The bill adds a few words to the definition of “Exercise of religion”, and expands “Person” to include people, clubs, and companies (think Chic-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby); not just churches and congregations. I’m no lawyers, but it looks to me as though the bits that come after that make it harder to pass laws that someone might claim infringe on their religious rights, and easier to sue the government.

Now, I have no doubt that this bill, if it passes, will be used to make gays’ lives miserable. But I also don’t see that at its primary thrust.

Rather, this is a bill that enshrines religious privilege. It’s a bill that says “I’m used to being on top. I’m used to being able to use “it’s my religion” as an excuse for anything I do, and I don’t like it when people challenge that.” It’s a reaction to people starting to treat religion with the respect it deserves, rather than the unearned levels of respect it has enjoyed in the past.

Maybe this was primarily intended as a gay-bashing bill. Maybe the authors realized that in 2014, you can’t just introduce a bill saying “It’s okay to hate on them queers”, and felt the need to disguse that message in some more palatable rationale. But it’s still significant that the more-palatable rationale is religion. “We’re just standing up for freedom of religion. Who would say anything against that?” Well, people who are harmed by your religion, for one. People who sympathize with people harmed by your religion, for another.

Watch Anderson Cooper’s interview with Arizona senator Al Melvin:
//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/QvYYU7ECM_k
As Cooper’s examples illustrate, this bill would allow Arizonans to be dicks to other people in all sorts of ways, not just homophobic ones. And Melvin’s justification is that hey, it’s religion, so it needs to be coddled.

Update: The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty has expressed some objections to a similar bill in Georgia. I have no idea what the group is or what they stand for, but I like the way they put it:

While religious liberty is one of our most precious rights, it is not an automatic trump card.

Water Is Wet. Dog Bites Man. Answers in Genesis Maligns Atheists.

Terry Mortenson has a blah blah blog post, ironically posted under “Thoughts“, and favorably linked to by loser-to-science Ken Ham, that opens thusly:

Over the years the American Atheists have been having some serious problems with social behavior at their national convention. So they have developed a code of conduct for the 2014 conference. It is interesting to observe the things they tolerate (e.g., many kinds of sexual immorality) and the things they will not tolerate (e.g., lack of social etiquette). It should also be noted that Christian conventions do not need to post such a code of conduct because the attendees have been redeemed by the grace of God and gladly submit to His code of conduct in the Bible.

But in an atheist worldview, these atheists have no basis for this code. In their view there is no God and therefore no moral absolutes.

This is straight from atheist bingo, right next to the one about atheists eating babies. The idea that you need an invisible father figure to tell you whom not to stick your baby-making bits into has been around since before this selfsame invisible father figure created the world 6,000 years ago. But these days, it’s usually considered ever so slightly gauche to so blatant about it.

Can we put the immoral atheist, along with the lazy Mexican and the hook-nosed Jew, in some box marked “Bogus stereotypes: do not use”, and padlock the box and then encase it in cement and dump it in the ocean?

Apparently not.

Anyway, Mortenson continues:

In a related news item, the University of Virginia hosted a conference on February 10, 2014, involving top leaders of six secular colleges and universities to discuss the topic of sexual misconduct among college students. This is a vexing problem. Research shows that 20% of college women at secular schools have been sexually assaulted, but only 12% of the victims report the incident. But given the depravity of man and that these schools are dominated by evolutionary thinking that destroys any basis for moral absolutes, this behavior is not surprising.

My first thought was that while it’s appalling that 20% of women at these schools have been assaulted, and shameful that 88% of such assaults go unreported, Mortenson gives us no reason to think that Christian schools are any better. After all, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the ongoing Catholic pedophilia scandal is that if you got raped, it’s probably your fault for looking attractive and slutty and stuff, and that God hates people who rock the boat.

So if 20% of women at secular schools have been assaulted, what’s the figure for Christian schools, where demon evolution isn’t taught?

Let’s bear in mind also that in the past week or so, we’ve had the story of Bob Jones University shutting down an investigation about sexual assaults on campus, which certainly looks as though the investigators were about to uncover something that would make the school look very bad.

There was also the story of Patrick Henry College (“God’s Harvard”) blowing off allegations of sexual abuse.

And just for good measure, we’ve had the news of Archbishop Roger Mahony withholding information from police in an investigation into sexual abuse.

Mortenson can rail about evilution allowing child rape, but it doesn’t seem as though God’s law is much better.

If I have to choose between the tribe that says it’s not okay to rape women and also allows two men to have consensual anal sex in the privacy of their hotel room; or the tribe that pretends that rape doesn’t exist, and if it does exist, it’s the victim’s fault; then I know which one I’m going with.

The Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye Debate

I watched the debate between Bill Nye “The Science Guy” and Ken Ham, director of Answers in Genesis, the outfit that runs the creation museum in Kentucky.

When I heard that Nye had agreed to the debate, I thought it was a bad idea, for all the usual reasons, and in particular that it would give creationism too much credibility: if you put Neil DeGrasse Tyson on stage with someone who thinks we can travel to mars by growing pixie wings, the latter has a lot more to gain than the former. Pixie-wing-guy gets to brag that he discussed issues with a prominent scientist, whereas Tyson has to admit that he wasn’t allowed to laugh pixiw-wing man out of the room.

And so it was last night. A man who basically believes that, as Robin Ince put it, “Magic Man done it!” got to share a stage with a man who has mountains of real-world evidence behind his assertions.

Having said that, it didn’t turn out as badly as I feared. Not so much because Nye did well, though for the most part he did. Rather, because Ken Ham did a pretty good job of explaining what young-earth creationism is: it has nothing to do with evidence (he said in the Q&A that there was nothing that could change his mind) and everything to do with believing a particular interpretation of the Bible.

It’s traditional to say that no one’s mind is ever changed by such debates, but that’s not always the case. I don’t know how many people were on the fence last night. But if any of them didn’t know what creationism was before, they do now. As stealth-creationist Casey Luskin puts it:

People will walk away from this debate thinking, “Ken Ham has the Bible, Bill Nye has scientific evidence.”

I haven’t done an extensive search, but the consensus seems to be that Nye won the evening. Yes, that’s what you’d expect from sites like Pharyngula or Friendly Atheist or Daily Kos, but Uncommon Descent, Evolution News & Views seem to agree as well. Charisma News doesn’t have any comments, gloating or otherwise. The Blaze’s comments seem about evenly split between “Ham won” and “Nye won”; given its readership, I would’ve expected it to tilt much farther toward Ham’s side.

I’m also surprised at how big a deal this was. I’ve seen plenty of these sorts of debates over the years, but typically they don’t interest anyone except the sorts of wonks who actually follow this stuff. But this one was streamed live on CNN, and covered in the Washington Post and on NPR. So it’s possible that a lot of people who haven’t thought much about creationism have now been introduced to it, and hopefully shown that it’s not science, not even close.

See also

The Blaze: Does the Bible Really Condone Stoning?

A while back, but you’ll forgive me for not posting this earlier because I’m lazy, the Glennbeckistan Times posted an article with the provocative title, Fact Check: Does the Bible Really Condone Stoning?.

Spoiler alert:

Theologian R.P. Nettelhorst added that capital punishment is seen in the Bible for a variety of offenses: Murder, adultery, rape, Sabbath breaking, disobedience to parents, witchcraft, and idolatry.

That answers the question posed in the title: yes, the Bible does condone stoning. Glad we’ve cleared that up. Oh, wait, did someone have any excuses theology to offer? (Emphasis added)

Rabbi Aryeh Spero, author of “Push Back: Reclaiming Our American Judeo-Christian Spirit,” told TheBlaze that the Bible speaks openly about stoning, however he said that the Judeo-Christian texts differ greatly from “the procedures we see today in Islamic countries.”[…]

“Any Biblical death penalty procedure had to be accomplished in one instantaneous stroke,” he explained. “For while the death penalty may have been administered, it was not done in a way to prolong agony or suffering, nor in a manner of public humiliation that degraded the human being created in the image of God.”

Okay, so the Bible condones stoning for a number of offenses, but not the way the Taliban does it, so that’s okay.

Back to Nettelhorst:

“The laws are applied equally to all members of society.  There are not different laws for different classes,” he told TheBlaze. “Second, the laws were intended to be proportional. The lex talionis ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth’ was designed to limit punishments to being no worse than the offense.”

Proportional? Really? This is the guy who said that the Bible prescribes the death penalty for things like adultery, Sabbath breaking, and disobedience to parents.

Which of these merits the death penalty? Show me the kind of aggravated premeditated first-degree Sabbath-breaking that warrants death. Here’s what Nettelhorst gives us:

“An individual who breaks the Sabbath (by gathering firewood on Saturday) shortly after the Sabbath was instituted by the Ten Commandments, is soon dispatched after a brief consultation with God.  It is the only instance in the Bible of someone being executed for violating the Sabbath.

The article provides several more instances of this: cases in the Bible where people weren’t execute for trivial crimes. So the argument seems to be “the law is rarely enforced, so it’s not a bad law.”

What else?

He also detailed 2 Kings 10:18-28, noting that, while it appears that God’s blessing is upon Jehu, who gathers servants, priests and prophets of Baal and executes them for worshipping other gods, this may not actually be the case. After these deaths — and a coup against the former king and royal family — God seemed anything but pleased.

So Jehu does what God wants, as far as he can tell, and then it turns out that’t not what God wanted after all. I’m not sure what the lesson is, here: that God sucks at communicating his desires, maybe? At any rate, if this explanation is correct, then how can you be sure that anything you do has God’s blessing? With your finite human brain, you might be misreading things entirely.

Anything else?

For those who struggle with the notion that everything in the Bible is God’s word and should be taken literally, Spero explained that the Old Testament includes certain societal practices and occurrences that were meant to — and have — changed as mankind has matured and evolved.

Ah. This is a Jewish variant of “oh, but that’s the Old Testament!” Spero probably goes into more length in his book, but in this article, he gives no reason to think that he hasn’t just pulled this excuse out of thin air. Especially since the problem with divine law seems to be that it can’t be changed.

Just recently, for instance, we’ve learned about a ring of Jewish kidnappers: under Jewish law, a couple can only get divorced if the husband okays it. So a woman could give these guys $70,000-$80,000 and they’d kidnap her husband and beat him up or torture him until he agreed to the divorce. It would be far better for everyone to just change the law so that the husband’s consent isn’t mandatory. Except that if it’s God’s law — or perceived to be God’s law — then the law is very hard to change. (And if you can’t even repeal stoning, then what chance is there of repealing God’s no-cheeseburgers rule?)

Finally:

The contradiction, the theologian [Nettelhorst] says, might be rooted in the notion that there was a disconnect between what ancient Israelites thought God wanted verses what the Lord really requested of them.

So to sum up, yes, the Bible condones stoning people to death for minor offenses, but it’s okay because:

  • It wasn’t done for fun.
  • It was intended to be a quick death.
  • It usually wasn’t enforced.
  • It’s the Old Testament. Nobody does that anymore.
  • It may not have been God’s law to begin with.

Have I missed anything? Because it looks to me as though pile of apologetics doesn’t address the central problem, which is that THE BIBLE CONDONES AND EVEN COMMANDS STONING FOR TRIVIAL OFFENSES.

Did it used to be okay to stone people for breaking the Sabbath, but now it isn’t? Then God’s moral law isn’t absolute, but changes over time.

Did God’s law change, but God forgot to edit his rulebook to reflect this fact? Then he sucks at communicating his wishes.

Was that not God’s law to begin with, but mere humans’? Then there are probably other mere-human laws in the Bible as well. How do you know which is which? (And if we can’t tell them apart, why bother consulting the Bible to begin with?) And why didn’t God make it clearer that he’s opposed to killing people who break the sabbath?

This reminds me of Bryan Fischer’s commentary on slavery in the Bible. He uses a lot of words, but it basically boils down to “the US did slavery wrong”, the obvious implication being that there’s a right way to do slavery: by following God’s rules and regulations for how to correctly own another human being.

One irony here is that I think this sort of thing is more of a problem for liberal, enlightened theists than for knuckle-draggers. The crazy Taliban types will just accept that God condones stoning, or slavery, or whatever. They’ll nod and do these horrible things.

A Christian can look at the Koran — or a Muslim can look at the Bible — and say “Meh. That’s clearly not a consistently-good set of moral rules. I’ll just ignore it and seek enlightenment elsewhere”.

But it’s the liberal Christian who looks at the Bible, sees that it condones things that are clearly immoral; but it’s supposed to be God’s word, so you can’t just ignore it; who then has to spend time and mental effort trying to reconcile what’s right with what’s in the Bible.

Someone Would Have a Fit If This Aired Here

This video was posted on the feed of a Belgian comic book artist I follow. I can’t help thinking that if it aired in the US, someone *cough*Bill Donohue*cough* would have an apoplectic fit.


[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pXdavw4NxY?rel=0&w=480&h=360]

Translation for non-francophones:

Announcer: This is what it was like before.
Priest 2: No, tonight, I’m reading the Bible.
Priest 1: No, you read it yesterday.
Priest 2: I didn’t read it yesterday. I read it for an hour while I couldn’t sleep. That doesn’t count.
Priest 1: Give me that Bible, God damn it!
Priest 2: Good one.
Priest 1: See what you made me say?
Priest 2: But still, you’re the one who said it.
Priest 1: Meanie!
Priest 2: Jerk!
Announcer: Today, the life of these priests has changed: In The Bible According to the Cat, which [artist] Philippe Geluck and God have cleverly divided into two volumes, no more arguments. Harmony has again settled upon the couple.
Priest 2: I’ve finished this one. Do you want it?
Priest 1: With pleasure, my angel.
Priest 2: Here it is, sweetie.
Priest 1: What if… we read it tomorrow?
Priest 2: What a great idea!
Announcer: The Bible According to the Cat. The Bible for everyone.

So, yeah. I’m pretty sure social mores in France and Belgium (the author is Belgian; the publishing company is French) are a bit different than in the US.

Update, Oct. 18, 2013: Changed to the new video with English subtitles.

Ow

BillDo is butthurt over the existence of the art-house movie Paradise: Faith, about an ultra-religious woman who wants to not just love Jesus, but make love to him.

It is not certain whether the filmmaker, Ulrich Seidl, who is Austrian, is related to another Austrian, Mr. Adolf Hitler, though he could be. Like Hitler, Seidl is a vicious anti-Catholic ex-Catholic.

Godwin! Now that he’s conceded the argument, we can all go back to not giving a rat’s ass what BillDo thinks. But in case you’re curious how he finishes this paragraph:

When questioned why it was necessary to show the “devout” Catholic woman profaning a sacred symbol, he said, “it is right to show her masturbating using a cross, as she is making love to Jesus. Just because it might be a taboo doesn’t mean I won’t show it.” But it depends: he won’t show a “devout” Jew masturbating with the Star of David. That would be disrespectful. And NPR and the New York Times would never approve.

Um, no. I think the reason may have nothing to do with NPR’s approval, and more to do with the fact that stars of David are pointy, like shuriken. So ow. Ow ow ow. This is in contrast to crosses, which are roughly dildo-shaped, and especially crucifixes, which are Textured for Her Pleasure.

The 95% Textbook

I’m a big fan of consensus, at least when it comes to figuring out whether something is true or not. If your doctor tells you have, say, ALS, well, that doctor might be wrong. But if you seek a second or third opinion, and those doctors independently come to the same conclusion, then the odds are that the diagnosis was correct. If you’ve ever participated in an interest-based community, be it crocheting or motorcycle racing or The Walking Dead fans or parakeet breeding or whatever, you’ll know that enthusiasts in these communities often have heated discussions on all sorts of topics, and will hash out the issues at length. So when it gets to the point where most everyone who knows the subject agrees on the answer to some question, that answer is most likely correct.

By way of counterexample: in the series Black Adder II, episode Potato, Blackadder has chartered the ship of Captain Rum, and discovered that there’s no crew:

Blackadder: I was under the impression that it was common maritime practice for a ship to have a crew.

Rum: Opinion is divided on the subject.

Blackadder: Oh, really?

Rum: Yes. All the other captains say it is; I say it isn’t.

So I wondered, what if we wanted to write an utterly uncontroversial textbook on some subject, to introduce elementary or High School students to the subject. Uncontroversial because we’re not interested in presenting the controversies at the cutting edge of research; just present what’s been learned about the subject so far.

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Horrible Acts Too Horrible to Release

In the AP’s story about the Milwaukee diocese having to release its records of priestly sex abuse and shuffling priests around to protect Holy Mother Church, one part jumped out at me:

Listecki, who succeeded Dolan in Milwaukee, said Tuesday in his weekly email to priests, parish leaders and others that he hoped releasing the documents would allow the church to move forward. But he also warned that descriptions of abuse can be “ugly.”

“I worry about the reactions of abuse survivors when confronted again with this material and pray it doesn’t have a negative effect on them,” he wrote.

which I think translates to “the things we did to those people are so horrible, we don’t want to hurt them further by releasing the details of our horrible actions to the public.”

This deserves to be the the prime textbook example of a self-serving rationalization.

And here I thought confession was supposed to be good for the soul.

Paul Taylor’s Fickle Exactness

Paul Taylor, who helps Eric Hovind run the family misinformation mill in the absence of his father Kent, accuses people who think Noah’s Ark was just a story of not having done our homework:

Question 1: How did they all fit on the boat and who put them in there? Don’t forget that there were two of each specie(sic) (male & female) 

[…] The questioner makes a more serious error, however, by not actually reading the Bible. If he had read the account in Genesis, then he would have realized that the biblical account does not even refer to “species.” Instead, it refers to kind. The Hebrew word for kind is mîn. For this reason, creation biologists have started to use their own technical term for this grouping of creatures—baramin. The Hebrew bara means “created,” so baramin is a created kind.

Got that, scoffers? Specific words have specific meanings, and unless you’re careful to use just the right word, you’re arguing against a straw man!

For example:

Question 4: Didn’t Noah have to wait for many years to get the snail on-board?

Noah did not take invertebrates onto the Ark, only animals with lungs (Genesis 7:15). Invertebrates can survive such conditions.

Spineless, lungless, eh, what’s the dif’?

Anatomical snail diagram
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Aside from the absence of a spine, note the presence of a rather large lung, which Taylor says doesn’t exist.

Of course, that’s just a diagram. That snail lung could be as fictitious as dragons and unicorns. How about a photo?

Snail lung. Photo by salyangoz, from here.

Yeah, but that’s ‘shopped. I can tell by the pixels. Pixels are scoffers. Well-known fact, that.

CNSNews Doesn’t Like Girls Learning About Their Naughty Parts

This tweet from @Defund_PP

led me to this article at CNSnews.com about girlshealth.gov, an HHS site offering information about sex, aimed at girls ages 10-16. They disapprove of it.

But the site also includes a glossary that explains anal sex and “mutual masturbation” and includes information about birth control and how to access everything from condoms to “emergency contraceptives.”

Let’s see what it says:

anal sex (say: AYN-uhl seks) = sex that involves putting the penis in the anus, or butt.

and

mutual masturbation (say: MYOO-chuh-wuhl mas-tur-BAY-shuhn) = when two people touch each other’s sex organs or genitals for sexual pleasure.

Maybe I’m being obtuse here, but I don’t see the part where HHS is telling girls to go on a spree lesbian anal orgy-ness and how their parents can write off the KY as an educational expense. Likewise, on the page on contraception, I don’t see a 10%-off coupon on birth control pills, I see an explanation of the facts that tries to be clear and not tiptoe around the subject with twee euphemisms.

But apparently the author of this piece — and many times more so some of the commenters — doesn’t seem to understand the difference between sex ed and porn. Apparently it all goes into a big mental bucket marked “Sex. Don’t touch.”

I suspect that something like this also contributes to the popularity of the “abstinence-only” movement: many religions treat sex as a taboo subject, so if you just tell kids not to do it, then maybe you won’t have to talk about it.

No, I don’t think ten-year-olds should be having sex, and neither should sixteen-year-olds be getting pregnant. (And neither, probably, should they be reading that site without parental guidance.) But “don’t do it” sex ed is about as effective as “don’t do it” driver’s ed. And the prudish attitude exhibited above isn’t helping.