It is an accident, in truth, that I am writing this on Christmas.  The ones who really commit to the family and being around others won’t be reading mcgees.org today anyway, right?

Here is Garrison Keillor on Christmas.  It is levied squarely against Universalists who want to — in the example he gives — rewrite Silent Night.

“Christmas is a Christian holiday — if you’re not in the club, then buzz off,” he writes.  Wow.  OK.  “Club”.

But I’m totally with you, dude.  I feel the same skin-crawl when Christian radio in America (for real, they do this) excise the “… and no religion too” line from John Lennon’s Imagine.  (According to Dawkins, sometimes the substitution is made, when others sing it, “… and one religion, too,” but this is so horrifically repulsive that I’m going to have to hear it myself before reporting it as fact.)

But Garrison: cool.  Christian holiday.  That’s what I’ve been saying all along.  Now what you’ve got to understand is, this is a secular nation.  Even when Christmas became a national holiday in 1870, the wording, approved by both houses of congress, didn’t say something like “on the day Our Dear Lord was Born in Bethlehem,” it said “the twenty-fifth day of December, commonly called Christmas Day.”  And it took 100 years for this to happen.

So, Garrison, if you’re going to claim Christmas only for “the club”, then do the thing privately.  Right?  I’m not talking about malls, owned by people.  I’m talking about libraries, courthouses, schools … everywhere my taxpayer dollars go.  Please.  Keep.  Christmas.  But:  Please.  Keep.  Christmas.  To yourselves.  Commit to this, I’m with you.  Don’t commit, then “buzz off”.  It may be your religion more than it is mine, but it’s as much my country as yours, and I won’t tolerate hypocrisy, especially when you write stuff like “And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck.  Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’?  No, we didn’t.”

If you’re not committing to this, and just want to lob this stuff from offstage, then as far as I’m concerned, you can go directly to hell without passing “Go ye forth.”

Enjoy your celebrations — all of you — I mean that.  And if you’re offended by my blogging today (I’m having family celebrations starting tomorrow, by the way): maybe consider why you are checking email today? 

Loves!

I’m calling on my fellow secularists, atheists, and, indeed, all those who care about the U.S. Constitution and how non-Christians are treated in the United States.

The principal at Emperor Elementary school in Temple City, California, USA — Kathy Perini — is fiercely Christian.  In the teachers’ areas of the school, she has religious messages spread throughout.  But that’s not what I’m complaining about.  Those target adults.

At the “Breakfast With Santa” today, I got a complete blow-off when I brought up my concerns about the music being played (loudly) in the area where those attending were to eat.  It wqas all seriously hard-core Christian carols and songs — indeed, not a secular song to be heard, until, by accident, “Let It Snow” came on the mix as I was leaving in protest.

“Complete blow-off” is not strong enough, though.  When she said that she had it put together specially, and I asked “You do understand my point, though, right?”, her “Yes” was accompanied by a wicked smile.  The smile of someone abusing authority.  The smile of a bigot.  The smile that says “I have power, you have none.”

She is wrong, and not only morally.  She is wrong that we, as citizens, as secularists, have no power.

We have power.

I’m organizing a letter-writing campaign.  Please consider writing a paper-and-envelope letter to the Temple City Unified School District, expressing whatever concerns you have about this incident.  Please feel free to post here asking for more information.  And, if and when you send a letter, please note so here.  I think we can easily get 100.

Here is what I have sent to local newspapers:

At the “Breakfast With Santa” event held at Emperor Elementary School (Temple City, California) on December 5th, 2009, strongly (and exclusively) Christian carols and hymns were played loudly in the auditorium where attendees were to eat the breakfast they purchased at the event.  I approached Principal Kathy Perini and expressed my discomfort at the music choices.  She explained they were put together for the event to “Make it nice for the holidays”.  While she understood my secular concerns, she expressed an intention to continue playing them.

This is illegal, inappropriate, and an abuse of her office.  Temple City Schools must abide by California standards and the US Constitution.  Students from families of other faiths — and those of no faith — deserve to be educated in as respectful and inclusive an environment as the children of Christians.  Citizens’ tax dollars must not sponsor partisan religious behavior by school administrators.  A formal written apology by Mrs. Perini, distributed to every student at the school, and a commitment to abandon such behavior in the future, is the only appropriate course of action.

I have sent similar letters to our California State Assemblyperson and Senator; Governor Schwarzenegger; the California Board of Education; the Freedom From Religion Foundation; the ACLU; the Center For Inquiry: West; and American Atheists.  If you have a blog, Twitter account, or social networking account, please consider propagating this.

We can make a change.

We have power.

Here is contact info.

Temple City School Board
c/o Temple City Unified School District
9700 Las Tunas Drive
Temple City, CA 91780
Phone: (626) 548-5000
Fax: (626) 548-5022

• Aha! The reason #KGmailNotifier is not alerting me to new emails is that it's NOT RUNNING! That's an acceptable excuse, I feel. #
• #npr.org top emailed stories: Northern Calif. #marijuana sales boosting revenue and whether sandwich triangles or squares are better. [sigh] #
• #NPR's #AllSongsConsidered: best albums of 2009? Write-ins OK, but #PearlJam is on their canned list. Bravo! http://bit.ly/8WZsbQ #
• In #Firefox, CTRL-leftclick opens a window in the background, unless the target is _blank.  Is there anyway to make THIS open in the bg? #
• Two sample points now: I think #StephenKing has a deep #fear of #lobsters (a narrow #ostraconophobia?) Hell, after HIS descriptions… wow. #
• Political conservatism and religiosity seem well-correlated. The "why" is not obvious to me. Maybe both require not thinking critically?   #
• One more #atheism tweet: "no deities" is SO BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS to me that I am baffled by faith. Why? Skinner's pigeons? Real question;help! #

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Dick Gorden’s show tonight had a (truly heroic) woman on who spent time infiltrating white supremacist groups.  There is a long, long post in here for me, that I just don’t have in me tonight, largely because it would have to address this post at length, which I basically got tired of arguing at the time, and that entails trying to guess Bob Mike’s first-round arguments, which can be tiring. 

But to get the snark out of the way so that it needn’t pollute that potentially-good yet-to-exist post, here’s Bob Mike, when we were discussing names for non-theists and non-heteronormative peoples:

My problem with “bright” is that it doesn’t really tell you anything about the beliefs of the person in question.  Whether you like “atheist” or not, the word is at least accurate.  Using “bright” just brings the entire system into the realm of corporate branding.  Screw that …

[W]e’re disagreeing on the most effective method of getting [equal rights] done … I feel that it can be best accomplished by gathering together groups that have similar (if not identical) interests into a single, dedicated mass, so “queer” works for me.

To which the obvious-to-me responses are:

1)  Yeah, fuck corporate branding.  Let’s go with something descriptively accurate like “queer” (?).
2)  Betcha there is an at-least-as-high percentage of intelligent (”bright”) atheists as strange (”queer”) GLBTQ folks! 

1.  There exist religions, one of which is Christianity
2.  My parents raised me in that one
3.  I have felt there is something greater than myself
4.  Ergo, God exists and everything in the Bible is true

Yes, I’m a dick, but that doesn’t change the fact that the religionists with more sophisticated reasoning constitute <5% of those I’ve encountered.  (But, for the record, I am certain that you are in the 5%.  Right?  Right?)

I’ve learned that the world is 4,500 million years old.  If you’re very religious, it’s not 4,500 million years old, it’s 6,000 years old.  One of these is not correct.  Using simple logic here.  Now the science boys: they’ve got anoraks, they’ve got glasses, Bunsen burners, and Petri dishes … Then if you’re religious, the religious boys: they’ve got a book … [mimes trying to think of anything else.]  Some really interesting stuff in the book, good stories in the book …

And there’s slavery in there.  Maybe — crime against humanity there?  In a good moral book?  Maybe shouldn’t be in there?  Maybe an editor should have put a line through “How to sell your daughter”?  It makes me think there isn’t a God.  You know?  I used to be an agnostic, now I’m an atheist …  I believe in us!  I don’t believe in God, I believe in us!  Human beings! …

[God writing the Bible:]  “Sorry about the slavery.  Couldn’t get the staff.  They seem to like it?  Shit!  Alright, forget this bit.  ‘In the beginning was The Word!’”

(From Stripped)

I’d like to take a moment and defend Will Smith.  Will Smith is being pilloried on Twitter, largely due to an easily mockable video of Will Smith on Tavis Smiley’s program (previously).  I’ve joined in the mocking.  But the caption of the video is “Will Smith on Will Smith, Scientologist”, and I’d like to reflect on what it means to accuse someone of being a Scientologist in this country, as opposed to what it means to accuse someone of being a Christian.

According to advanced Scientology doctrine, “thetans” are spirits that have existed for 300 trillion years.  This is, of course, ludicrous.  The universe is only, roughly, 14 billion years old.  Scientology is off by four orders of magnitude.  But according to Christian tradition — and many Christians, especially in the United States — the universe is 6,000 years old.  This is off by six orders of magnitude.

Scientology teaches that the human mind is a thing of great power, capable of amazing things.  This is true, in that the human brain does measurably do things.  Not all the things that Scientology says it can do, to be sure, but stuff.  But in the Christian Bible (John 11) human bodies that have been buried for four days come back to health.  This can’t happen.

Scientology uses weird pseudo-technological boxes of wires, switches, and lights to aid in its teaching.  The boxes do nothing.  But some boxes of wires, switches, and lights do do things.  I’m typing on one right now.  But a device made by crossing two sticks?  That’s supposed to be, essentially, magic in Christianity, but most are too small to do anything but metaphorically beat things.

The Church of Scientology is a wealthy organization able to command great donations from its followers, and claims many adherents among celebrities.  But the wealth of this church absolutely pales in comparison with the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, which claims not only many, many more Hollywood celebs, but actual lawmakers able to make decisions that affect my life and the life of my son.

A valid comment on Scientology, however, is that it is new.  As far as I can tell, this is the primary differentiating factor from Christianity.

Now, to you, the Christian reader (I know there are many): some of you will claim that of course you don’t believe in the magic part of Christianity.  Of course the universe is old, of course putrid bodies don’t come back to life, of course totems hold only placebo value.  And many will admit that the Christian churches wield a frightening and inappropriate amount of power in the world, and especially the U.S.  But, to get to the core point: Will Smith is not a Scientologist.  He’s a bit loony, to be sure, but what he actually says is “I just think a lot of the ideas in Scientology are brilliant and revolutionary and non-religious”.  And I’d like you to reflect — to reflect carefully — on how this is different from someone who discards the magic in Christianity and embraces it as a historically novel and revolutionary ethical framework.

Not a troll.  Please think.  And the next time you are writing a check to a multi-billion-dollar organization and supporting it in public: introspect.  And maybe cut the Scientologists a bit of slack.

Graphic found at an atheist site today:

OK, so, look, you know I’m not wont to give Judeo-Christian scripture the benefit of the doubt.  I’d jump on the former if it were remotely fair.  But it isn’t.

I’ve been reading Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, which is absolutely fascinating.  If you thought The Da Vinci Code was kinda cool, and felt like it was “taking a class”, and plowed through the hack writing for the neato stuff about religious secrecy, then, well, you’re an idiot, but a forgivable one; it was nicely packaged.  But Lost Christianities was the book you wanted to read all along.  I know it doesn’t have albino assassins or anything in it, but it’s still gripping.  And while the Luke 19 bit isn’t directly addressed in Ehrman, his books give one a much better understanding of the heterogeneity of early doctrinaires and the numerous forgeries, flame wars, actual flames, actual wars, and other assorted weird stuff going on in 2^nd-3^rd century proto-Christendom.

So, here’s Luke 19, in overview:

Verses 1 – 10: “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he”
Verses 11 – 24: Parable of the Talents, which neocons love so much because they can interpret it as blessing the super-rich who make all their money by investing
Verse 25: “Can I get a witness?!”
Verses 26 – 27: OMFG Hail Hitler!!!1!
Verses 28 on: And then he went to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples stole a horse, and he taught random stuff that was probably furiously modified by later writers, and cried and shit.

Great.  Let’s go back to verses 26 to 27.  Read it in context.  Here it is in KJV:

19:24  And he said unto them that stood by, Take from him the pound, and give it to him that hath ten pounds.
19:25 (And they said unto him, Lord, he hath ten pounds.)
19:26 For I say unto you, That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him.
19:27 But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.
19:28 And when he had thus spoken, he went before, ascending up to Jerusalem.
19:29 And it came to pass, when he was come nigh to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount called the mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples,

There is no way that was in the original.  Damn.  Even in translation it stands out in glaring blood-red.  Look, atheists: you can’t just take random verses out of context and call Christians Nazis.  You need to glork the context a bit more.  I know it’s weird to talk about the impropriety of surreptitiously corrupting Sci-Fi for later generations, but you are not helping if you just stand at the sidelines and throw stuff into the argument.

Eight!  Eight is great!  (or, at least, good enough for Rebecca Gayheart)  This may be the longest any mcgees.org tradition has gone on.

In commemoration of that — or, you know, just because I feel like it — I’m pulling out a huge heavy-hitter this week.

Marker In the Sand

There is a marker;
No one sees it ’cause the sand
Has covered over
All the messages it kept;
From misunderstanding
What Original Truth was,
And now expanding
In a faith, but not in love

What went wrong?
Walking tightrope high
Over moral ground
Seeing visions of
Falling up somehow.
Oh, do come down!
With the living let what is living love.
So unforgiving, yet needing forgiveness first

God, what do you say?

Those undecided
Needn’t have faith to be free;
And those misguided,
There was a plan for them to be!
Now you’ve got both sides
Claiming ‘Killing in God’s Name’,
But God is nowhere to be found, conveniently

What goes on?
Walking tightrope high
Over moral ground.
Walk the bridges before you burn them down!
Do come ’round
With the living let what is living love.
Unforgiving, yet needing forgiveness first

God, what do you say?
God, what do you say?

I feel a sickness,
A sickness coming over me,
Like watching freedom
Being sucked straight out to sea.
And the solution?
Well, from me, far would it be
But the delusion is feeling dangerous to me

What goes wrong?
Walking tightrope high
Over moral ground
Seeing visions of falling up somehow
Oh, do come down!
With the living let what is living love,
Unforgiving yet needing forgiveness first

Oh, what do you say?
God, what do you say?

Calling out, calling out!
I’m calling out, calling out!

Back next week!

All Vedder Tuesday

Someone sent a follow-up to a spammy religious email (to which I had responded snarkily) explaining that he first “contact[ed] me by accident”.  He didn’t really, but never mind that.  The interesting line in the email was:

Not to get too personal but you mentioned on your site how you love spending time with your son.  You have to look at him and know that he and this whole world didn’t just happen for no reason, right?  [emphasis in original]

Usually I go on and on and on about this.  But maybe for the first time, I have something short and useful to show for it.  I responded:

The existence of the universe is an occasion for wonder and humility, no doubt.  It just isn’t evidence for a creator.  But awe is not the sole domain of religion: an atheist is able to look at the heavens and realize that, however they came into being, it wasn’t something I did.  This sort of humility in the face of the infinite (or near-infinite) I think is more flattering to atheists than to theists: Christians believe that the world was created specifically for them, their species, and their children, by a sometimes-jealous-and-sometimes-beneficent god.  Atheists have no illusions: the world is worth saving for the world’s sake, not my son’s sake.

As for “reason”?  I’m unsure whether you mean causal reason (i.e., what chain of events led to its creation) or some kind of “what it’s there for” reason.  I of course have an interest in the former, but I believe that the second is a non-question.  “Why did the whole world happen?”: just because you can phrase a proposition doesn’t mean it has an answer.  Dawkins’s great line is “Why are unicorns hollow?”  You have to unask the question to begin in a meaningful place: we can’t legitimately ask why unicorns are hollow because there are no unicorns; we cannot ask for the “meaning of the world” because there is no meaning.  We, as agents, have the ability — and, I believe, the imperative — to make meaning out of the void.

Frequently atheist arguments, when simplified enough for a blog post, end up squarely in “Shut up, you’re not helping” territory.  And despite several misfires, I would recommend “It’s no mystery how Nonbelievers stay moral without God”, if only for the presentation of a false syllogism that seems to explain the believer’s logic:

1. If God does not exist, then there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail.
2. If there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail, then there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful.
3. If there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful, then people cannot be reasonably motivated to behave morally.
4. People should be reasonably motivated to behave morally.
Therefore,
[5]. God exists.

In these situations, I am often struck with the idea that I must be completely missing some subtlety — the conviction that in the argument, surely one of us is being a moron.  But the justifications for faith really do seem pervasively fear-based.  I run up against “If there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail, then there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful” all the time.  My response is, “So?!”  What bearing has an idea’s ability to comfort have on an existential claim?

I must — must — be missing something.  I know there are several devoted readers of my blog of an Abrahamic bent, and I would be indebted for an explication.

The reflexive claim of religionists seems frequently to be “without the fear of damnation, I surely would rape, torture, steal, and murder.”  Really?  Seriously, have you thought this through?  If it is only the fear of divine retribution that keeps you from commiting atrocities, would you be so kind as to stay the fuck away from me and my child?  Or, at the very least, comment on this post?

I’m engaged in a frustrating but rewarding and civil conversation with a Christian, a Mr. Wade Duroe, about the nature of reality.  I have his permission to post our discussion so far (which started on The Sunny Skeptic) and to invite my readers to join the conversation.  I will thread our posts back and forth in the comments; the first several posts attributed to “wljc” are my posting with quotes of Mr. Duroe’s.

This was forwarded to me by someone who simply thought I would find it interesting, not so I could vote.  I did find it interesting:

Will NBC be surprised?
Here’s your chance to let the media know where the people stand on
our faith in God, as a nation.
NBC is taking a poll on “In God We Trust” to stay on our American
currency.
Please send this to every Christian you know so they can vote on
this important subject.
Please do it right away, before NBC takes this off the web page.
Poll is still open so you can vote.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10103521/

This is not sent for discussion, if you agree forward it, if you don’t, delete it.

By me forwarding it, you know how I feel.
I’ll bet this was a surprise to NBC.

I want you to savor the deliciousness of this for a moment.  “Please send this to every Christian you know,” it says.  “This is not sent for discussion, if you agree forward it, if you don’t, delete it.”  In other words, “Please help self-select NBC’s sample.”

Yes, straw men and fish in barrels, not all religionists are like this, etc.  Not my main point.  My main point is: please use this to become more wary of online polls of any kind.  There is probably even a law we could devise, something along the lines of “The accuracy of an online poll varies inversely w.r.t. its emotional weight.”  Yes, gotta say emotional; it’s not like there’s anything more rigorous going on.  “vi vs. emacs” is not called a religious argument for no reason.

I am left to wonder how many times the charming bigot who sent this originally voted herself.

There are plenty of people here, I estimate, who would think I completely support this article.  I am here to disown it.  It is poorly-written, confrontational, unhelpful, rude, offensive, supercilious, bitter, and useless.  You are not helping, Polly Toynbee.

I meant to publish a specific article on 30 June 2008.  Best-laid plans and all that.  So I’ll try to make up for it now.

That date is important, in that Western culture attaches high significance to century markers.  A hundred years previously, the “Tunguska Event” occurred.

Tunguska?  If you’re a fan of the X-Files, you have probably been exposed to a highly fictionalized version of the story.  An object a few tens of meters across — it could be a metallic asteroid or a piece of a traditional comet, but likely nothing else — exploded in the air above a remote area of Siberia.  It is estimated that the yield of the explosion was between ten and 15 megatons, or about one thousand Hiroshima bombs.  Yeah, big, but not uniquely big: the US and the USSR were each planning on deploying Hydrogen bombs on Real Live Human Cities several times as big.

So, it blew up in the atmosphere, whatever it was.  This area of Siberia was (and is once again) heavily wooded, and the blast is estimated to have knocked over an estimated 80 million trees (which contemporary sources allege were innocent bystanders), radially outwards, for about sixteen miles in all directions.

OK, so that was 100 years ago.  A fortuitous location for an impact, with relatively minor effects on civilization.  Which takes us to the K/T boundary.

The K/T boundary is the separation between the Cretaceous (K is for a German word) and Tertiary periods.  It is marked by unusual amounts of certain elements, such as iridium, in the geological record.  Iridium stands out because it’s rare on Earth.  Most of the planet’s allotment bound to iron while the planet was condensing and sank into the core, so big amounts in sedimentary layers tell us something important.  This deposition was caused by another impact.  If you think that we still don’t know what killed the dinosaurs, you are a victim of the time it takes for scientific data to trickle down into public school classrooms, which is about as long as it takes for money to trickle down from a tax cut for the wealthiest citizens to the proles (and, Columbus’s discovery that the world is round attesting, it has approximately the same probability).  This impact killed the dinosaurs.

The K/T boundary event: bigger.  Seriously bigger.  Really, absolutely, seriously bigger.  Instead of an object with width and breadth each equal to the length of a Mack truck, it was an object the size of Manhattan.  Seriously.  It crashed in an area near what is now the Yucatan Penninsula.  And goodbye big, expensive animals; goodbye most plants; goodbye frakking phytoplankton; hello only to tiny annoying shrewlike pests content to dig holes and venture out into the big cruel world only to snack on dead things.  The latter would be unimportant, historically, except they happen to be our grandparents.

The worldview that embraces such sudden changes is known as catastrophism.  And because some scientists (ahem, Stephen Jay Gould, ahem) get absurdly entranced by one possibility and embrace it to the exclusion of all others, very many educated Americans think that the history of the world proceeds in fits and starts, going so far as to think the Cambrian explosion was actually special for a reason other than historical accident (I don’t want to go off on the tangent, so, Wikipedia’s entry on the Cambrian explosion, which I have not yet read.)

That the history of the world proceeds in fits and starts is unlikely.  It’s unlikely for a number of reasons, that (again) I don’t want to get into, that I largely understand and creationists (whether or not they call themselves Intelligent Design — uh — ists?) don’t.  Richard Dawkins thinks it is a capital-letter Bad Thing for scientists to entertain this hypothesis in public.  He thinks this for the same reason he thinks The Brights movement is a good thing, which is that we should be artificially buttressing the apparent number of people that mostly agree with him.

It’s not honest, intellectually, but it’s not totally crazy.  Amidst the blatant incomprehension and more blatant lies of the creationists, there comes the gem that is represented by the line “See, even evolutionists don’t agree about the ‘facts’ of evolution!!!”  Yes, the multiple bangs are implied in their contentions thereof.

The logical response to this takes a bit more time than pretending that all evolutionists agree, but is a much more convincing argument.  Basically, it goes “I may not be completely right about the details of evolution, but a talking snake in a tree is not even close.”  Think about it.  “God created the universe” is not the default position, and even if 100% of your claims about the truth of evolution (in actuality, the proportion of true claims among creationists is around negative 8.3%) are valid, that doesn’t help your case.  Seriously.  This is logically true.  If you think that your “received Word” is, shall we say, gospel truth, and you must only find inconsistencies in other arguments to support your own, you’ve given the game away.  You’ve begged the question in the real, useful meaning of the phrase.  There are as many creation myths as there are historical tribes, and why should yours have special position when “turtles all the way down” doesn’t?

I didn’t start this as another harangue of religion.  So let’s get back to the topic at hand.

When Shoemaker-Levy impacted Jupiter, it gave us pause.  Pause, because that’s really frakking close to us as such things go, and it was unbelievably huge.  Velociraptors — and I’ll entertain arguments of whether this is, on the whole, a good or bad thing — can’t and don’t much worry about impact scenarios.  We do, as humans.  We were steeled by this, and we raised hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with this possible threat, and spent it on really shitty movies.  Like you do.  Fun stuff.

So, next time a batter (Rays?  Seriously, the Rays?  The most common response I’ve heard is “There’s a team called the Rays?”) gets beaned by a ball, think about how much more it would hurt if the pitcher could throw at twenty thousand motherfrakking miles per hour, and a baseball weighed something like a battleship, because that’s what we’re talking about for Tunguska.

And not that the difference would matter much to a Rays batter, but what if it was the size of Manhattan?  Seriously, someone might lose an eye.

mcgees.org has recently been accepted into the Atheist Blogroll, an international list of blogs on atheist topics written by atheists (no, this is not special, and took almost no effort on my part to accomplish.)  A random selection of twenty-five from the list are visible in my sidebar at right (if you’re viewing on the actual site and not on a feed reader.)

If you are interested to join, visit Deep Thoughts here.

Visit the following links to view posts on mcgees.org on the topics of atheism and religion.

On April 2nd, Representative Monique Davis of the Illinois Legislature, during a session, condemned Jewish activist Rob Sherman for “destroying what this state was built upon”, shouted in open session, told him to “Get out of that seat, you have no right to be there!”, and commented, “What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous.”

Oh, wait.  Did I say Jewish?  I meant Atheist.  Brad Sherman is atheist, an activist, and an American.

If Sherman had been Jewish, the airwaves would not have stopped shrieking the story for the last six days.  Monique Davis, a black, female legislator, went all 1841-Mississippi on Sherman’s ass, and there was barely a murmur in the media.

Some of you who get your news entirely online will contend “Oh, everyone covered that, Josh!”  What I want the rest of you to do is, if this is the first, or the first detailed, report you have encountered of what happened, to post, “I didn’t know about that.”  You with me?  The usual suspects can go ahead and tell me I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, and I’m just asking the rest of you to be honest about this.  Did this get the coverage it would have if, for instance, an Atheist legislator (Ha!  Must be a fucking incredible duck hunter!) had told a 71-year-old black woman that she had no business in a legislative session?

(You can see it buried deeply in the Chicago Tribune.  I know the Web has a way of flattening sites, but just note what column it appeared under, when, and where.)

This was going to be a single sentence in the next post, but it sort of grew out of hand.  If you’re of an Abrahamic bent, and want to believe that I’m not really an asshole, stop reading.  Here’s your chance.

Still with me?  Are you sure you want to be here?

OK, thanks.  Regarding the shared bits of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc., here it is, in second person:

I believe that your God was the favorite tribal deity of a polytheistic, nomadic, historically insignificant Bronze Age people living in North Africa and the Near East.  Through a bizarre historical accident, a tiny messianic doomsday cult of this people was adopted as the state religion of the most powerful empire on the planet, despite the utter failure of any of the doomsday prophecies to transpire in the allotted time.

I believe your shared “testament” is a heterogeneous anthology of self-aggrandizing revisionist history, stolen legal codes, institutionalized bigotry, justifications for ethnic cleansing, “Just So” stories, the ravings of the mentally ill, census data, a sprinkling of common sense, and some truly beautiful poetry and children’s literature, all of which was rolled together and authorship attributed to a deity, which means to many of you that it has to be 100% factually accurate, even when it’s internally inconsistent or demonstrably wrong.

I believe the premise and existence of the modern state of Israel is at least as bizarre as if my family declared ownership of the British Isles, invaded, subjugated the citizenry, imposed martial law, renamed the nation “Mordor”, and declared war on Western Europe.

I believe that were we to argue theology, I’d argue to the point where we agreed that your god is undetectable, untestable, unpredictable, inelegant, unnecessary, paradoxical, and at least one of impotent, malicious, and completely incomprehensible, not to mention just plain weird, at which point I’d consider the topic not worth any further thought, you’d declare ineffability a feature rather than a bug, and I’d look at you as if you turned into a walrus in front of my eyes.

I believe people who “sort of” believe in God, “don’t really think about it”, “guess they do”, or find it the path of least resistance, are pussies leading unexamined lives.

I will, however, fight tooth and nail for your right to engage in your superstitions in your own home or normally-taxed buildings, or very quietly and personally in public.  I believe it is your right to live an unexamined life, in the same way that it is my right not to exercise, even though I know failing to will contribute to my early death.  I get it, kinda: we all have mental blocks.  I will even tolerate you indoctrinating your own children, although I really wish you wouldn’t, in the same way I wish Jews would stop mutilating the genitals of their male infants and Mexicans would stop piercing the ears of their female infants.

So there.

The “asshole” in the tagging of this post refers to me, by the way.

So, I’m looking at my referrer logs (or, in Apache-speak, “referer logs”) and I see this page on a site called StumbleUpon.com: http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.html.  A page that clearly couldn’t have referred anyone to me.  So it’s spam, right?

Well, technically.  StumbleUpon is, in fact, forging the referrer header.  But the mass behind it is real, and the referrals are real.

It turns out to be a social-network Alexa.  And it’s really cool, and highly reliable.  You download a toolbar, tell it your interests, hit the “Stumble!” button, and find great sites — great sites that people with similar interests liked.

I have to go to bed, but I’ve been having too much fun stumbling on “Atheist/Agnostic” sites.  They are wonderful.  Haven’t hit a bad one yet.  And that’s only one interest category I’ve explored (Maybe the rest aren’t as good.  But I expect they are.)

Check it out.  It’s really good.  And check out this, this, and this for fun.

The page people were raving about at mcgees.org was Postal Cancel Art, by the way.

The Theocratic Inclinations of the Republican Electorate.  From The Nation.

Truthdig – Reports – Robert Scheer: ‘Anti-Christian Conspirators’ Slay DeLay.  Ah, if only we could take credit for DeLay’s downfall. That would have been a major coup. Instead of, say, something akin to the laws of physics.

Myths about the sanctity of life, or of consciousness, cut both ways. They may be useful in erecting barriers (against euthanasia, against capital punishment, against abortion, against eating meat) to impress the unimaginative, but at the price of offensive hypocrisy or ridiculous self-deception among the more enlightened.

Absolutist barriers, like the Maginot Line, seldom do the work they were designed for….  Surely it would be better to try to foster an appreciation for the nonabsolutist, nonintrinsic, nondichotomized grounds for moral concern that can co-exist with our increasing knowledge of the inner workings of that most amazing machine, the brain. The moral arguments on both sides of the issues of capital punishment, abortion, eating meat, and experimenting on nonhuman animals, for instance, are raised to a higher, more appropriate standard when we explicitly jettison the myths…. — Daniel Dennett.

Discuss, if you are so inclined.

Truth be told, I mostly subscribe to Free Inquiry for Dawkins’s column and in spite of Kurtz’s. The latter is one of the most simple-minded voices in Secular Humanism today, but the former has such an intensely biting and ferocious wit and such reckless abandon to state what he believes that it’s worth the subscription price on its own, and makes up for the boneheadedness the rest of the magazine frequently achieves.

Two gems from the most recent issue:

“I have never found the problem of evil very persuasive … There seems to be no obvious reason to presume that your God will be good… [T]he “jealous God” of the Old Testament is surely one of the nastiest, most truly evil characters in all fiction.”

“The world is divided into those who can see that the capacity to comfort has no bearing on the truth of a cosmic claim and those who cannot.”

I was a bit skeptical, and … annoy[ed] at the possibility that the word bright would be used to imply that we are smarter than other people. Yet, reading some of the essays posted on the brights’ web site quickly changed my mind. After all, not all “gay” people are gay in the sense of being happy, easy-going fellows, right? — Massimo  Pigliucci

And I sigh.

Look, Massimo, Richard, Daniel: you’re not helping. I know you feel crapped upon — most atheists do — but we’re not going to increase tolerance and education by referring to ourselves as smarties or clevers, even if we were to contend that “by saying I’m a clever, I’m not saying I am clever.”  You cannot just hijack terms with unflattering antonyms because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy.  That just puts people on the defensive, and it’s frankly offensive.

There are two main reasons to adopt an umbrella term for people currently identifying as atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, secular humanists, and rationalists, and neither seem particularly beneficial. The more reasonable one is to promote a sense of self-identity, using a “positive” term (and I mean that both linguistically and approbationally.) I understand the draw of having a desirable term with which to self-label, but it seems clannish and petty. The second, worse reason seems to be apparent inflation of our ranks, trying to look like a larger minority, which is a bit sneaky.

Massimo Pigliucci and Daniel Dennett (they’re the less shrill ones, if you’re keep track) admitted wariness in initially embracing the term. Go with your instincts, guys.

(Note 31 October 2002: This came about a bit more harshly than it should have.  Sorry about that.  I have left it up unedited as it has already been discussed at QuickTopic, where a good discussion is going on.)

From the Christian Charity Department of mcgees.org:

If you don’t like Christianity, [t]hen why don’t all of you leave America, this country was founded by Christians for Christians. And if you don’t like it then go to a Godless heathen nation that agrees with your retard tinged philosophy. Their are way more of us Christians than you losers. Their is NO separation of church and state and you heathens will lose. Thankfully you are old and I hope you get a painful disease like rectal cancer and die a slow painful death, so you can meet your God, SATAN . . . .

There’s more.  You can view other hate mail filled with intolerant diatribes, racist, misogynist, and anti-gay messages, and anonymous death threats.

I am told frequently by Christians that while Christians might say hateful things and perform horrific acts, this is not the fault of Christianity.  Besides echoes of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, it is simply untrue.  Racism, intolerance of homosexuality, misogyny, and death threats are what the Bible excel at.  The book has taken these sentiments to dizzying heights.  Yes, I know that the Bible also attributes to Jesus the sentiment that we should love our neighbors.  But accepting that in light of other Biblical tales requires either a very diseased notion of love or a very limiting definition of neighbor.

Talk some time to a mainstream Christian and try to discern his or her criteria for determing whether something in the Bible is custom, a fallacy of man attributed to God, or truly God’s word.  A woman wearing men’s clothes is an abomination to God: that’s just a custom, you will be told, especially by a woman in slacks and a shirt.  We’re allowed to keep slaves: whoops, that’s a fallacy of man attributed to God, because we know slaveholding is wrong.  You must believe in God or you will go to hell: tada, that one’s God.

If the Christian is a non-fundamentalist with even an gram of education or understanding of physical processes, ask about the six day creation story.  Umm, must be a customary story, or a metaphor of some sort.  A woman who commits adultery, or a son who disrespects his parents, should be killed: yikes, that’s a fallacy of man, because, after all, God is Love.  One should love one’s neighbor as oneself: yep, God.

A pattern emerges quite rapidly.  If your conversation partner has already decided something is right, that’s the will of God.  If he or she has already decided something is wrong, that’s the will of man.  And if he or she has decided something is absurd, that’s custom.  In a way you have to respect the logic of Orthodox Jews more, who follow jaw-dropping, staggeringly pointless rules such as a hamburger being OK to eat, and a grilled cheese sandwich being OK to eat, but a cheeseburger being an abomination to God.  For the mainstream Christians, it’s all ad hoc justification.  It’s just each person’s prejudice given selective support by a deity.  (I’m not, by the way, saying Christians should logically follow kosher laws.  In their “New Testament” kosher laws are explicitly overturned.  “Yes, I know that eating pork was an abomination last Tuesday,” God says, “but it’s not any longer.”)

Rather than send hate-filled, death-threat-laden, and badly spell-checked missives to people in their communities, this group of Christians should grow spines, stop threatening that their invisible friend will beat people up, and begin to come to grips with their own hate, bigotry, and closed-mindedness.  We are all neighbors, folks.  Put down your Bible, unload your shotgun, and start acting like it.

I was reading the opinions of a well-informed poster at a technical site, a man who signs himself by the somewhat pompous title “software craftsman” (presumably contrasting a homespun, artistic, pride-in-one’s-work approach to all the ‘engineers’ doing impersonal number grinding.)  His posts were good, though, and I was sufficiently curious about the “software craftsman” bit to visit the homepage he linked to.

The gentleman is one Eric Sink.  The name did not originally spur my memory, but reading his About Me page I learned he was the original architect (er, craftsman) of the AbiWord project, a terrifically important and impressive semi-clone of Microsoft Word for Linux.  I have used this program extensively, and finding this, thought I would read more on his site.  I turned my attention to his Weblog.  On the navigation bar to the left of the page, there was a link to a post called Rebuttal to Richard Dawkins.

The thing I can truly thank Mr. Sink for is the pointer to a Guardian editorial by Richard Dawkins, published four days after the World Trade Center attacks.  Although I am an avid reader of The Guardian (as regular readers of this blog will know) I had somehow missed this article.  I read the editorial before reading Mr. Sink’s response.

Dawkin’s writing was (as usual) powerful and lucid, and I admired his bravery in discussing something that I have been somewhat reticent to discuss in mixed company: that it could be said to be an accident that the hijackers were fundamentalist Muslims.  In describing the zealous brainwashed state of the hijackers and the origins of this state, the reader is keenly aware that the words could apply to zealots of any denomination.  I think the his main thesis may be summarized in this excerpt:

Promise a young man that death is not the end and he will willingly cause disaster

Could we develop a biological guidance system with the compliance and dispensability of a pigeon but with a man’s resourcefulness and ability to infiltrate plausibly?  What we need, in a nutshell, is a human who doesn’t mind being blown up.  He’d make the perfect on-board guidance system.  But suicide enthusiasts are hard to find. Even terminal cancer patients might lose their nerve when the crash was actually looming.  Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? … [C]ouldn’t we sucker them into believing that they are going to come to life again afterwards? …

It’s a tall story, but worth a try.  You’d have to get them young, though… If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it… [I]t would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.

It came from religion.  To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns.  Do not be surprised if they are used.

I half forgot that there was an attempted rebuttal waiting for me, so I went back to see what the software craftsman had to say.  The tone of the attempted rebuttal was rather insulting, but I expect that Richard Dawkins is used to this, even if it offends me.  In his third paragraph, for instance, Mr. Sink writes “Beginning in paragraph eleven, may I assume that your local village idiot finished the article for you?”  Later in the essay he writes “As my eyes glazed over, I found myself unable to proceed past paragraph thirteen.”  I intend to extend to Mr. Sink two courtesies that he found unnecessary to grant Dr. Dawkins: politeness, and bothering to read a short article to its completion.  Let me begin with one of Mr. Sink’s statements:

First, you categorize all religions together, as if all people of spiritual beliefs are equally capable of the heinous acts committed last week… Did you really intend to dump Orthodox Jews, Christians, Mormons and others into the same contrived pigeonhole?

Well, yes (by the way, this is stated explicitly in the unread last paragraph of the essay.)  Breaking the argument into steps might give us a good place to start.

1. Valuing one’s own life is natural (except perhaps in extreme cases in which the life of one’s offspring is more likely to bring about survival of the agent’s genes; consider the fabled lioness protecting her cubs.)
2. Therefore, external education is necessary to have a rational agent select death.
3. The hijackers received an education that taught that death is not final and led them to choose death.
4. Therefore, this education devalues life in the eyes of the agent.

It follows that all religions that offer such an education devalue life to one degree or another.  Mr. Sink’s insertion of the word “equally”, as in “equally capable of the heinous acts”, is his introduction and does not appear in the original argument.  Sink maintains that the

willingness of an individual to sacrifice their own life for a cause is not evidence of the cheapness of that life.  On the contrary, martyrs understand the value of that which they are giving up.

One clarification: all that is necessary is that the value of an agent’s life is devalued in the agent’s eyes.  However, the main point that martyrs are making a considered personal sacrifice is not borne out by the evidence in this case, nor indeed in most cases of religious martyrdom.  In a non-theistic framework, or a theistic framework that teaches life to be finite, such acts may evidence altruism.  But this is not necessarily (and not likely) the case if the agent is expecting a reward.  An argument that an “eternal life” argument does not contribute to a person’s likelihood to martyr himself defies credulity.  Mr. Sink writes:

You offer no indication that you understand any of the actual intended functions of religion in society.  The world’s religions have brought hope and assistance to billions of individuals for several millennia.

To an extent I agree with Mr. Sink’s second claim here.  It is true that the role of religion at all times and in all places has not been to create homicidal sociopaths.  For instance, it has frequently served as a rapidly-instilled substitute for education (e.g., “allow your fields to lay fallow because you sin against a deity otherwise” versus “allow your fields to lay fallow because this will increase crop yields.”)  It has served as justification for social support by a community.  It has served as a convenient method to instill personal morality, using inexpensive fear as a motivator rather than time- and thought-intensive analysis and deliberation.  It has inevitably and largely unintentionally been passed as a meme along with other elements of group knowledge (”this is how to speak, this is how to make a fire, this is how not to piss of a fierce creature in the sky”).  But the only point where these considerations come into play is in a cost-benefit analysis, namely, “Are the benefits of religion worth the evident costs?”  It is not the case that Dr. Dawkins does not recognize the broader impact of religion in the world; his cost-benefit analysis convinces him that the world would be a better place without it.

Consider the following also:

You  identified yourself as a person who does not know the difference between religion and faith. And, you appear to be a person who is afraid of both.

I admit to some confusion here myself.  However I am in some company.  The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the terms as follows:

faith: belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion; firm belief in something for which there is no proof

religion: commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance; a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices

Considering that the terms are mutually referential, the question is far from settled.  I have re-read Sink’s article and I cannot determine which he is eschewing and which he wishes to be associated with.  Would it be too obvious to note that “you disagree with it, you must be afraid of it” is a less-than-impressive argument?

On to another argument.  Those versed in formal logic will recognize the term Argumentum ad baculum, an appeal to force.  This is the classic but reprehensible technique showcased in “I’ve got a knife to your throat, still disagree with me?” arguments.  So when Mr. Sink writes the following, his argument inevitably deteriorates from unsubstantiated and rude to simple bullying:

I’ll defer discussion of [an afterlife] for the time being, but I would enjoy the opportunity to discuss this concept with you in person.  Let’s meet over coffee in a thousand years or so.  I’ll be living in a large city that is extremely well-lit.  If you need directions to get there, you should probably ask me soon, because you might want to get started on the journey.

The reader will surely recognize an irony here:  Religion is not here to brainwash people nor manipulate them with tales of a glorious afterlife.  Religion is not violent.  If you do not accept this, you will burn in hell forever, whereas I will be treated to an eternal life of luxury.

I cannot credit Mr. Sink with the invention of brute-force, logically fallacious arguments.  But we would be doing ourselves a disservice not to notice one here.