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Category: religion (page 3 of 36)

Imaginary debate between a progressive liberal atheist and an anti-Islam anti-theist.

Reading Sam Harris always gets me thinking. I’m trying to figure out if Islam poses a unique threat, and what chances there for them to change. So here’s an imaginary debate I staged to help me get things straight in my own mind. There’s Person A and Person B with my own thoughts after each question. Is A a hopelessly naïve liberal, or is B an Islamophobic racist? Or both!

Tell me if I’m straw-manning anyone.

Why are Muslims doing rotten things?

A: Because they’ve lived with pre-Enlightenment values, they feel aggrieved by Western imperialism, and to compound it all, they have a religion which tolerates violence.

B: Because Islam is a uniquely violent faith, and when they engage in violence, they’re really just taking their faith seriously. This is not a bug; it’s a feature.

Me: I’m with A. Islam is definitely a contributing factor, but I think it can be domesticated, as we’ve seen with other religions.

Is there any way around it?

A: Sure. Once Muslims become educated and affluent, and join the world community, they’ll mellow out and act normal, just like violent Christians did.

B: No. This kind of behaviour is an inextricable part of Islam. It’s naive to imagine that education is going to help. The bombers and terrorists that we’ve seen have actually come from the more highly-educated groups.

Me: Christians and Jews have violent scriptures, and they’ve chilled out. Never underestimate the ability of religionists to throw core doctrines under the bus when it suits them. The trick is getting it to suit them.

What about moderate Muslims?

A: Even now we see that some Muslims are disavowing the violence that comes from their own people. They need to be encouraged so they become the norm.

B: So-called moderate Muslims will never be able to disavow the violence inherent in their religion, no matter how many disapproving noises they make. It’s moderates’ interpretation of Islam which is deviant, not the radicals’.

Me: No freakin’ clue.

What do we do about this as progressives?

A: Promote education and Enlightenment values, hoping that they’ll take. Speak out against Islam, but don’t be discriminatory against Muslims themselves.

B: Don’t let them in. They are having a radicalising effect on each other. The new generation of European Muslims are more radical than their parents.

Me: I think the current generation of Muslim immigrants are going to be the next generation of ex-Muslim atheists. Yes, some Muslims are radicalising, but I think this is a blip. I have no way of proving this, but it seems likely that these shocking cases would take up space in our minds out of proportion to their actual incidence, as they typically do. It’s normal for the first generation of immigrants to be more conservative than their parents, but over time, this changes. I hope.

Help me out, people. Your comments in comments. Religion bashing is fine, but no racism allowed.

Pareidolia of the Daylia: God moves in eggplanty ways

It’s not just Christians and Muslims who imagine religious images in food. Now Hindus are getting in on the act.

Believers are flocking to a Leicestershire temple to pray twice a day to a vegetable that looks like a Hindu god.

The divine aubergine was discovered among a box from a wholesalers and has been worshipped by more than 80 people so far.

Hindus: Behold your god!

I’m sure that many Hindus would think this is silly, just as many Christians think that Toast Jesus is silly. But according to the article, about 80 people have come to the restaurant to pray. For every one of those people, their religion has short-circuited the part of their brain that helps them realise that it’s stupid to venerate an eggplant. And that’s a terrible thing.

The danger is that, by worshipping an eggplant, they might accidentally be paying homage to the Eggplant God, and that’d really piss Ganesha off. Tramplings would ensue. You don’t want to make Ganesha mad — he never forgets.

Don’t take the candy

I met this Jesus guy while waiting for a train.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lots more cartoons here.

Another chat with the Witnesses

It’s almost Passover time again, so that means Jehovah’s Witnesses are coming around. And that means it’s a good time to remind us all that:

1) Bible believers are, of necessity, apologists for genocide, and

2) religion doesn’t make people more moral. If anything, it turns normal moral people into amoral robots.

Verbatim, by the way.

More cartoons like this can be found under the toons tag.

LDS Church is offended by your taking offense at their offensiveness.

The LDS Church has filed a brief with the US Supreme Court, claiming that their involvement with Prop 8 wasn’t motivated by hatred.

“On the contrary, our members supported Proposition 8 based on sincere beliefs in the value of traditional marriage for children, families, society, and our republican form of government.

We don’t hate them! We’re just trying to protect ourselves from them!

And then they whip out a little bit of “shame on you for demeaning our bigoted beliefs”.

Only a demeaning view of religion and religious believers could dismiss our advocacy of Proposition 8 as ignorance, prejudice, or animus.”

I’d say that only a demeaning view of gay people could view their marriages and relationships as antithetical to children, families, society, and government.

People operating under a sense of religious privilege, lifted up by the unquestionable righteousness of their cause, have literally no idea how offensive their actions are. They also have no clue about how ridiculous their umbrage looks to normal people.

In the car

An awful lot of churches seem to be shutting down. Yay!

But what to do with the buildings?

God and sports

With the Super Bowl on the TV, it’s a good time to remember that 27 percent of Americans think God plays a role in determining which team wins a sporting event.

How is that supposed to work? Presumably fans on both sides are praying for their team to win. Does god ignore half the prayers? It recalls John Steinbeck: “Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.”

It’s also odd to think that some people are sufficiently self-absorbed to think that their god would intervene in the entertainment of affluent North Americans, while ignoring real suffering around the globe.

Maybe he’s just a really intense sports fan.

Meme alert: Any good man and any good woman

“Do you think it’s true that any good man and any good woman can make a relationship work?” a friend asked me today.

“No,” was my immediate response. I’m a good man, and my relationship with a good woman didn’t work. I guess it depends on what you call ‘good’. But if you go there, the whole proposition gets untestably vague. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh,” she said, “I was in a relationship with a Jehovah’s Witness guy once, and that’s what he said.”

“Really?” I said. “That’s odd. They used to say the very same thing in the Mormon Church. Exact same wording and everything.”

Unless he was actually a Mormon guy, and she got mixed up. But she should know, wouldn’t you think?

Like I say, I don’t believe it. Maybe two good people can tough it out, but will they be happy? I think the extra effort is going to cost them in other ways.

But let’s not go too far the other way, and say there’s a “one” out there for you. I’m with Dan Savage: there is no “one”. But there are lots of .8s and .7s. Then you round up to 1.

And I think it helps if you can start as close to 1 as you can. My wife and I are about a .995 for each other. And that makes it so much easier and nicer.

But it got me thinking: Why would it benefit a religion to have this “any good man and any good woman” belief? I have one possible answer.

Religions operate well in a ‘bubble’ — an environment where only positive information gets in, and disconfirmatory information bounces off. People inside the Bubble continually reaffirm to each other that life inside the Bubble is good, and life outside the Bubble is dangerous and scary. It’s very nice.

For the concept of a ‘bubble’, this video is worth watching again.

There can be lots of bubbles. Utah is a bubble for Mormons, as are parts of Idaho. But when your religion doesn’t have a geographical majority, the most effective bubble is a family. Marrying outside your faith is a killer for religious bubbles. It helps you see someone else’s point of view too well. That’s why religions explicitly forbid it.

Now imagine that you’re a member of a minority religion, and you’re only supposed to marry within your faith. The dating pool is going to suck. (Mormon YSAs: amirite?) So the “any good man and any good woman” idea is a way to convince people to settle for someone of the same religion who’s not right for them. It’s amazingly effective at building bubbles — as well as miserable but occasionally functional relationships.

A new one

Well, I thought I’d heard all the excuses for why an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god allows horrible things to happen to children. But here’s another: The victims must have done something to deserve it.

It happened in this clip from ‘The Atheist Experience’. The hosts, Matt and Tracie, are discussing god’s continuing non-intervention in child sexual abuse, with caller ‘Shane’.

Tracie starts off with a bracing observation, which has already been made into a meme:

And then?

Shane begins his response by saying, “First of all, you portray that little girl as someone who’s innocent, she’s just as evil as you.” Dillahunty then cuts off the call and spits, “Good-bye, you piece of s**t.”

Here’s the clip.

That’s right; according to this caller, if a child gets raped, we shouldn’t automatically assume that she didn’t deserve it.

But really, isn’t this just the standard answer for Old Testament genocide? The Israelites (allegedly) wiped out entire tribes, and when I’ve pointed this out, Christians have told me something like, well, we don’t know that the Canaanites didn’t deserve it. Richard Dawkins has refused to debate William Lane Craig for this very reason.

It’s a new rhetorical low for the religious: blaming innocent victims for the awful things that people do to them, instead of blaming an (allegedly) all-good and all-powerful god for his tendency to watch and do nothing. Once someone decides that’s acceptable, there’s nowhere else you can go. They’re morally gone.

Education in reverse: Indonesian edition

Indonesia is planning to gut science and social studies in schools. What are they going to focus on instead?

You guessed it.

Millions of children in Indonesian elementary schools may no longer have separate science classes starting in June, the beginning of their next school year, if the government approves a curriculum overhaul that would merge science and social studies with other classes so more time can be devoted to religious education.

Why? What benefit could this provide?

Officials who back the changes say that more religious instruction is needed because a lack of moral development has led to an increase in violence and vandalism among youths, and that could fuel social unrest and corruption in the future.

“Right now many students don’t have character, tolerance for others, empathy for others,” Musliar Kasim, the deputy minister of education, said in an interview in November. He proposed the changes in September.

If the youth lack morality or tolerance, they won’t learn it from any holy books, be they Bibles or Korans. To build character, the kids should be learning from the very classes they’re cutting. Science encourages openness to real-world evidence, critical thinking, and honesty. Social studies gets kids to think about what it takes to live in a society with others. Religion just encourages dependence on imaginary beings.

If Indonesia wants to raise a generation of dummies, they’ve found the way to do it. Religion poisons everything.

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