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Humanists in the noooz

19 November 2010 / / Comments Off on Humanists in the noooz

Nice to see that humanists are making some noise recently. Where to start? How about the new ad campaign “Consider Humanism“? They show what’s lurking in holy texts, and contrast that with what humanists think.

One example is the following pairing:

The Bible: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” I Timothy 2 (New International Version)

Humanism: “The rights of men and women should be equal and sacred—marriage should be a perfect partnership.” Robert G. Ingersoll, in a letter dated April 13, 1878.

Another pairing is:

The Bible: “The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.” God, Hosea 13:16 (New International Version)

Humanism: “I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.” Albert Einstein, column for The New York Times, Nov. 9, 1930.

There’s video too:

Consider Humanism – Ambassador Carl Coon from American Humanist Association on Vimeo.
I love it, but some people are hopping mad. The writer for USA Today’s entirely superfluous “Faith & Reason” blog isn’t a fan.

The American Humanist Association is going for the ugly — in the name of no God.

Their newly announced 200,000 advertising campaign ditches last year’s fairly benign good-without-God approach and rips into the nastiest quotes it can cherry-pick from Scripture.

It seems she’d like us to go back to just peeping quietly. But just to take it over the cliff, she draws a comparison between Humanists and the Westboro Baptist Church.

But ditching the thoughtful-alternative concept approach for an in-your-face aggressive one just in time for Hanukkah and Christmas may be less a call to “reason” than the kind of irrational annoyance of a Westboro Baptist Church demonstration.

Those are the ones where the followers of Fred Phelps’ twisted version Christianity march around the funerals for war veterans saying their deaths are God’s retribution for society’s acceptance of homosexuals. The distance between a hateful message from Phelps that “God is your enemy” isn’t so far from saying God is hateful, is it?

Well, the Humanists and the WBC do have one thing in common — they’re both stating clearly what’s in the Bible.

I can really get behind this effort from UK Humanists:

Humanists launch ‘no religion’ census campaign

The British Humanist Association has launched a campaign to encourage non-believers and the seriously lapsed to tick the “no religion” box on the 2011 census with the aim of challenging religious privilege in Britain.

According to the organisation, public figures have spent the last 10 years claiming that most people in this country are religious to justify the money or attention spent on these communities.

While the statistics show that 37.3m people stated their religion as Christian, these figures are not reflected in church attendance.

This is worth doing in Australia, too, where we’re having our census next year. I’m writing ‘atheist’, but ‘no religion’ is fine too. Don’t go to church? Don’t tick the church box out of habit. Let’s get the census to reflect what’s really going on with religion.

Fatherly chat

11 November 2010 / / 1 Comment

He swears he was ‘shopped. 
Actually, this conversation is heavily edited and fictionalised. But we have had chats about managing social relations online, and it’s only slightly less fraught than the sex talk.

And atheists blaspheme everyone, no touchbacks.

10 November 2010 / / 2 Comments

From the news:

Christian woman sentenced to death in Pakistan ‘for blasphemy’

A Christian woman has been sentenced to hang in Pakistan after being convicted of defaming the Prophet Mohammed.

Asia Bibi, a 45-year-old mother-of-five, denies blasphemy and told investigators that she was being persecuted for her faith in a country where Christians face routine harassment and discrimination.

Christian groups and human rights campaigners condemned the verdict and called for the blasphemy laws to be repealed.

I don’t know if this is for real or not (it’s the Telegraph, after all), but it makes no sense. Of course Christians blaspheme against Muslims. And Muslims against Christians. And everybody against everybody.

Every religion that makes exclusivist claims automatically and constantly blasphemes every other religion, by implying that those other religions are untrue.

I just hope it doesn’t get this person killed. Just another reason why blasphemy laws have no place in a world where ideas can be exchanged freely and openly.

Michael R. Ash concedes, and then misses, the point

5 November 2010 / / 19 Comments

I haven’t commented on Mormon apologist Michael R. Ash’s stuff for a while, for the simple reason that when someone’s wanking, it’s rude to interrupt. But he’s been going on like that for quite a while, and I’m afraid he’s going to hurt himself. He’s been covering the Book of Mormon bit by bit, and it’s the same old tactic Mopologists have always used: rather than find evidence for religious claims, just cast about for a nearest match, and say that this shows the claim is ‘plausible’. For example, Ash thinks the Tree of Life metaphor is plausible because early people used the same metaphor. (Really? Ancient people knew about trees?) Or look around for features of ancient boats for a nearest match so you can validate Jaredite barges. Find an NHM inscription somewhere, and try to match it to ‘Nahom’. As long as it looks close enough to something out there, you can claim a match, coincidence be damned.

But lately, he’s been writing about the Tower of Babel. Ah, Babel. It was one thing that did Mormonism in for me, as I’ve recounted here. The short version: The T of B presents a special problem for Mormons. It’s a myth about why there are different languages, but Mormons can’t really play it off as a myth because the author of the Book of Mormon wrote into it a character (the Brother of Jared) who was ostensibly at the Tower at that time. If you concede that Babel’s a myth, then the Book of Mormon can’t be taken completely literally, and this makes for shaky ground for Mormons.

I’ll be addressing the problems with Babel from a linguistic perspective in a later post. For now, let’s just point out that Mike Ash concedes that the Tower story might be mythical…

it’s possible that the confounding of tongues is an aetiological myth or legend that attempts to explain the divergence of languages. Anciently, such traditions were passed from generation to generation and, in a pre-scientific era, were never questioned for historical or scientific accuracy.

…but fails to see why that is a problem for the Book of Mormon.

While some believers may prefer either a literal or mythological approach to this topic, we should be careful to understand that a mythological approach doesn’t mean that the Nephites were fictitious. Ancient histories and scriptures can contain mythical elements as well as actual history.

Let me explain: If something is a ‘myth’, then that means ‘it didn’t happen’. So if your book claims that literal people were there for that event, then it’s wrong.

Not for Ash.

We don’t have the brother of Jared’s personal journal. We have Joseph’s translation (which was dictated in King James vernacular) of Moroni’s abridgment of Mosiah’s translation of Ether’s long-after-the-fact traditions. Perhaps the tower saga was part of the Jaredite lore which Ether interpreted according to his cultural heritage and recorded on his plates.

Ancient redactors (or abridgers) — which include Moroni and Mormon — were editors who often added to or adjusted elements to fit their view of the story or to square with the conclusions they were attempting to project.

Redacted by Mormon and Moroni? Well, what did they know? They were only prophets! They weren’t as smart as Mike.

In other words, even if he’s right, and if the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, its message is still just a fourth- or fifth-hand account through a string of biased and uncomprehending middlemen. Which is convenient for Ash, because then he has a lot of latitude to massage the text into whatever he wants. But it opens the question of why anyone should believe such a muddle to be a factual record at all. I hope Mormons are paying attention, because what Ash is showing is that you have to dismantle the Book of Mormon in order to defend it.

But this Babel blunder does not weaken the Book of Mormon’s veracity in Ash’s estimation at all. Of course not. On the contrary, it actually strengthens it.

If the Book of Mormon was written by real ancient people it should contain ancient mythological elements.

See how it works? The more mistakes, the truer it gets! Let’s see if we can take it farther: Real people make mistakes, and real people lie. If the Book of Mormon contains mistakes and lies, that just proves that it was written by real people!

Real people from the 1800s, that is.

Supernatural thinking can be deadly

1 November 2010 / / 6 Comments

A horrible story from France reminds us yet again why it’s always a bad idea to jump to supernatural conclusions.

Thirteen people were watching TV in a flat, when one of the men heard the baby crying. So he got up to get a bottle for the baby. Apparently he wasn’t wearing any clothes at the time.

“The man got up to prepare a bottle for the baby when his wife, seeing him, screamed ‘It’s the devil, it’s the devil’,” she explained.

In the confusion following this apparent case of mistaken identity, the naked man’s sister-in-law stabbed him in the hand and he was ejected through the front door of the flat. When he attempted to get back in, panic erupted.

“The other occupants of the flat fled by jumping out of the window,” Faivre said. According to police, one man jumped with the two-year-old in his arms and crawled two blocks away to hide in bushes, screaming: “I had to defend myself.”

The two-year-old died in hospital, another victim of superstition.

If you’re trying to explain something, you can go with natural explanations or supernatural ones. Natural explanations are always better. For one thing, you can check them out. And if you have two natural explanations for something, it’s possible to figure out which one is better experimentally. But how do you distinguish between two supernatural explanations? Who made the world, Elohim or Zeus? Or perhaps the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

But supernatural explanations are extremely tempting. They’re easy to come up with and they don’t require understanding anything at all. Saying that a god made the world is easier than understanding biology and cosmology.

In my Mom’s final days, she would sometimes call out the names of deceased family members. My family tended to favour a supernatural explanation for this: the spirits of these people were in the room, waiting to take Mom to a heavenly world. (That they were waiting to take her to Hell didn’t seem to occur to them. Observation: People only arrive at supernatural conclusions that support whatever narrative they buy into.) But there are many natural reasons why she might have called out names. Perhaps she was seeing hallucinations. Perhaps she was calling out lots of names at random, and we only noticed those that were dead. I noticed that she also called out the names of living people, as well as the names of people not in the family. (There was ‘Warren’ — we don’t know a Warren — as well as Charlemagne.) It took a bit of thought and knowledge to come up with these natural explanations, but in general my family liked the supernatural ones better.

The idea of spirits is a very pervasive one, but imagine the implications. There are unseen beings which could possibly be all around you. They might be watching you (yes, even in the bathroom), listening to you, and forming opinions on the things you’re doing. It would be easy to see how this belief could lead to a kind of paranoia. How could it do otherwise? Why wouldn’t you jump out of a window to avoid an evil supernatural enemy?

Supernatural thinking does nothing to advance our understanding. It’s the kind of thinking that kills people.

Obama, “is is”, and “was is”

29 October 2010 / / 6 Comments

I’ve been noticing a phenomenon I call the ‘double is’. That’s where you say “The thing is, is that…”. This phenomenon has been noted before, but it’s not clear what’s happening. The ‘double is’ resembles (superficially) other grammatical sentences in English, like “How serious the problem is is less important than how serious it feels to them.” It’s also normal to put other verbs before an is, like “The thing to do is to be honest.” Even so, the ‘double is’ is sort of hard to account for grammatically.

The thing is is that people still use it. I just heard it from US President Barack Obama on his recent Jon Stewart interview.

But then Obama does it again, this time using the past tense:

The point “was is…”? Now that’s something I hadn’t heard before.

Uchtdorf tells ’em what they want to hear

27 October 2010 / / 4 Comments

That was quick.

Mormons may not know until the hereafter what causes same-sex attraction, but “God loves all his children” and expects everyone to do the same, an LDS Church leader said Sunday.

While the message — delivered to more than 200,000 Utah Mormons — may not seem significant, the messenger was.

As second counselor in the governing First Presidency, Dieter F. Uchtdorf is one of the highest-ranking leaders in the hierarchy of the nearly 14 million member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to address the thorny topic of whether same-sex attraction is inborn.

Ain’t that sweet?

But what qualifications does Uchtdorf have to address whether SSA is inborn? None — he’s just a mystic. No, he was sent to ‘Save the Sale’. Church doctrine changes when it looks like it’s going to affect the bottom line. Hating on homos made good business sense in the past (and thus good doctrine), but it’s been playing increasingly poorly as of late. Answer: Downplay Packer, so Uchtdorf gets to be the good guy.

“Many questions in life, however, including some related to same-gender attractions, must await a future answer, even in the next life,” Uchtdorf said. “Until then, the truth is, God loves all his children, and because he loves us, we can trust him and keep his commandments.”

Have you ever noticed how that ‘wait until the next life’ thing gets played a lot?

Some audience members welcomed Uchtdorf’s approach, which seemed more consistent with the church’s position.

“It seemed fairly close to the line we’ve been getting lately — the idea that the practice is sinful, but homosexual tendencies are acceptable within the church as long as people don’t act on them,” said Jennie Pulsipher, a Mormon who watched the regional conference via satellite at her east-side Salt Lake City stake center. “He also emphasized that [gays] should be treated lovingly as children of God.”

Hear that, gay people? Mormons will treat you like humans, as long as you never have sex for the rest of your fucking life. Sounds like a deal to me.

Joust marathon

23 October 2010 / / Comments Off on Joust marathon

John McAllister is challenging a 25-year-old Joust world record. It’s going on now, as I write this. I’m following the live video feed sporadically.

I found out about John’s attempt yesterday morning, had a look, and I thought, “Wow, he’s really good.” At that point, he’d been going for 22 hours.

Then I worked all day, came back to check out the game in the evening, and he was still going. Now I’ve had a night’s sleep, and he’s still going. He’ll need to go for about 60 hours total to beat the 107 million points. When he takes a break, he just walks away from the controls and burns off a few of the hundreds of extra guys that he’s built up.

Joust is a fast game at the higher levels, and the gameplay is more or less constant. It requires an almost cyborgian level of endurance, but there he is, working with precision at a frenetic pace. He always knows exactly where to be, whether facing the ‘unbeatable?’ pterodactyls, or taking on the blue knights at the top of the screen, predicting their unpredictable fluttery arcs.

So all right, yes, it is the same thing over and over again. And yes, it goes for a long time. Even so, I find the marathon to be strangely compelling viewing. Kind of like when I was a kid in Cheney, probably hanging out at Zip’s, watching someone who was really good. Video games are time machines.

UPDATE: He’s done it. All hail Sir John. His record will live in the annals of history. Ages hence, bards will sing of his jousting exploits, and maidens will swoon.

Or it’ll be YouTubed, which is close to immortality.

Not what I expected

19 October 2010 / / 2 Comments

Complete this sentence:

If a business is manufacturing products that pose real risks of serious disease, we believe it is all the more important that it…

Stop manufacturing the product?

Get taxed into oblivion?

Be legally disbanded?

None of the above, according to British American Tobacco’s website. Their answer:

…we believe it is all the more important that it does so responsibly.

If you make products that kill people when used as intended, how do you do that ‘responsibly’? That’s quite a different definition of ‘responsibility’ than the one I’m accustomed to.

AltMed Flowchart

19 October 2010 / / 1 Comment

Just had to link to the wonderful AltMed Flowchart.

This will help you to select your preferred healing modality, restoring balance and draining away unwanted funds.

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