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Would they rather win elections or go to heaven?

19 November 2008 / / 1 Comment

Can you throw God under a bus so big that he can’t lift it?

Giving Up on God

By Kathleen Parker

Wednesday, November 19, 2008; 12:00 AM

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I’m bathing in holy water as I type.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth — as long as we’re setting ourselves free — is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

I think she’s figured it out. I don’t envy her email inbox though. It will soon be scorched with the rantings of the True Believers, who really seem to think that overreach is impossible if it’s in the service of the Sky Fairy.

Since the 80s, the GOP has angled for the votes of the Christian Right, and now they’re having trouble separating themselves from the delusion-prone. It’s a lose-lose for them.

Option 1: Continue to play to the Christianist right, and alienate even more moderate voters and intellectual conservatives until the Republican Party really is a tiny regional faction, or

Option 2: Cut the Christianists loose in an effort to move center-ward. They won’t be happy about that, and they don’t have to stay with the GOP. Watch as some of them move ever farther into extremist country. The Constitution Party (or worse) will experience an influx, and the Republican Party will shrink.

Too bad for them that the trouble centers around an all-powerful being whose will must be guessed at. That makes this conflict both high-stakes and unresolvable. An explosive combination.

Religion in the news: Gayness edition

18 November 2008 / / Comments Off on Religion in the news: Gayness edition

The divine will can be so inscrutable sometimes.

Got wildfires? Must be teh gays.

Today, people are running for their lives as 800 California homes have burned down and the firestorm is spreading like a nuclear holocaust. Yet, the radical homosexual anarchists rampage upon the streets of this state demanding the destruction of marriage and family, and the establishment of their socialistic dark vision for society.

You see, the problem is this: God has plans for California in the near days ahead. Thus, these attempts to force an ungodly tyranny on this state are being met blow with blow by God. God is saying, “California shall be a refuge for America when the catastrophes come. California belongs to Me, not the advocates of sexual anarchy.”

Blow with blow by God. Heh.

Actually, it’s my fault. I haven’t been marking exams fast enough, and God is displeased. Sorry about that, everyone.

In other news, Focus on the Family is laying off people.

Focus on the Family announced this afternoon that 202 jobs will be cut companywide, bringing the total number of employees to around 950.

Focus on the Family is poised to announce major layoffs to its Colorado Springs-based ministry and media empire today. The cutbacks come just weeks after the group pumped more than half a million dollars into the successful effort to pass a gay-marriage ban in California.

It can’t be that God is displeased, because James ‘Spanky‘ Dobson is fighting gays, which is always good, infinity, no touchbacks. Wonder what he thinks God’s trying to tell him.

But here’s a guy who knows what God’s all about.

When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion—Prince tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

The comments were made by this man:

Kerry’s 2004 loss: Not all bad

17 November 2008 / / Comments Off on Kerry’s 2004 loss: Not all bad

I’ve been thinking this for a while now:

After the 2004 presidential election Democrats were crushed. Four more years of George W. Bush seemed unthinkable, disastrous. But now that the Obama era is beginning, Democrats should view John Kerry’s defeat as something else entirely: the luckiest break the party has caught since at least the 1964 election

Yes, the nation and its people suffered mightily under Bush. People died as a result (Iraq, Katrina). But imagine the alternative. Kerry wins, and If anything then goes wrong, for the next 20 years we have to hear about how everything’s Kerry’s fault. We coulda won Iraq if it wernt fer Kerry. Economic meltdown? Kerry’s fault. Yadda yadda. (Okay, so they’ll still blame some Democrat. But now they have to go all the way back to Clinton, which is obviously reaching.) As it happened, the Republicans had to fully own the mess, and it’s destroyed the brand. Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

Perhaps Prop 8 could be seen the same way. (No, I’m not even close to done with that issue.) The theocrats overreached, and people are now horrified. They’re realising that godbots can do some real damage to freedoms we enjoy, and they’re increasingly standing with gay people. Like the 2004 election, it really stung. But we won’t forget that sting, and we’ll make sure that Prop 8 and the like were the last victories of their kind.

Sine-wave speech

17 November 2008 / / 2 Comments

This is very cool. Listen to the first clip. Sounds like twitters and blips.

Then listen to the second clip.

Now go back and listen to the first. It becomes comprehensible once you know what you’re looking for.

This is called ‘sine-wave speech’. When a linguist records your speech using a spectrometer, there are dark patches of high intensity, called formants. Draw the formants using sine waves, and you get the twittery sound that resembles somewhat-but-not-quite speech.

I guess this is yet another example of how perception depends on the knowledge and expectations of the perceiver. Something to remember when I try and understand the voting habits of others.

Meme war: religion and family

13 November 2008 / / 4 Comments

Memeplexes are groups of memes (or ideas). They do the same kinds of things that organisms do: they survive when people believe them, they reproduce when people spread them around, and they die when people stop believing them. Religions are memeplexes (though there are others), and we can learn a lot about them when we examine the memes (sort of like genes) that help them survive.

One good strategy for a successful memeplex would be to have some way to fight off rival memeplexes — an immune system, if you will. A religion that has a ‘we’re the only true church’ meme is using this kind of strategy. But the struggle isn’t just between rival religions. Another formidable rival memeplex is family. To pass on their genes, people spend lots of time and energy raising families; time that won’t go to supporting and propagating the religion memeplex. Accordingly, many religions have evolved memes that serve to reduce the influence of family.

Here’s one from that peaceful fellow Jesus:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

In other words, if you have to choose between supporting the religion memeplex and the family memeplex, the religion says (surprise!) choose the religion memeplex. Well, it wouldn’t be a very robust memeplex if it didn’t assert its superiority. People who draw a distinction between cults and religions say that cults attempt to isolate the believer from family. This meme is a rather primitive attempt, probably a holdover from when Christianity was a Jewish ‘cult’. The memeplex has gotten more sophisticated now; this meme’s something of an embarrassment.

Another strategy: Religions can set themselves up as substitute families. In the LDS Church, it’s not uncommon to hear people speak about the ‘ward family’. Many religions borrow kinship terms, such as calling a priest ‘father’, or (going LDS again) calling fellow congregants ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister So-and-So’. In my mission field, elders would sometimes jokingly refer to their first companion and trainer as their ‘dad’.

But if religions are trying to subvert the family, how do we explain the rise of ‘family-friendly’ religions, like the Mormons, who elevate the family to primary importance, seemingly at the expense of the religion memeplex?

Well, outright suppression is only one way to compete. Another is to be a parasite, and feed off the energy of the host. By attaching itself inextricably to family rituals like birth, death, and marriage, the religions effectively run off the power of the family. If the two are sufficiently tightly connected, it becomes difficult to imagine having a ‘proper family’ without the religion. With all the rituals under its purview, as well as, say, Christian parenting tips, religion harnesses the power of family, and uses it for its own ends. And so now we see religion trying to claim the family for themselves, with names like ‘Focus on the Family’ or ‘Family First’.

This explains why religions resist any attempts to redefine rituals that (they imagine) belong to them: placing ‘marriage’ or ‘family’ outside of their control separates this parasite from its host. It also explains why religions that already carry anti-gay memes need to oppose gay marriage. It would sanction marriages the church doesn’t approve of, driving a wedge between the religious memeplex and its source of power.

Note also that you can’t get a sensible answer out of a religious believer when you ask why they oppose gay marriage. They quickly dwindle down to twaddle about ‘definitions’ or ‘slippery slopes’, and they can never ever say how exactly this will be bad for ‘the family’. They’ve likely never considered the issue from a memetic perspective, and so they only have shadowy feelings that this must be bad for the religion somehow. And they’re right about that.

Another atheist bus ad

13 November 2008 / / 7 Comments

This is great..

You better watch out. There is a new combatant in the Christmas wars.

Ads proclaiming, “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake,” will appear on Washington, D.C., buses starting next week and running through December. The American Humanist Association unveiled the provocative $40,000 holiday ad campaign Tuesday.

People who make their living by pretending there is a god are unthrilled.

The humanists’ entry into the marketplace of ideas did not impress AFA president Tim Wildmon.

“It’s a stupid ad,” he said. “How do we define ‘good’ if we don’t believe in God? God in his word, the Bible, tells us what’s good and bad and right and wrong. If we are each ourselves defining what’s good, it’s going to be a crazy world.”

Good thing everyone who reads the Bible agrees on what’s right and wrong, right? Not crazy at all.

I can’t decide which one I like more; this, or the one going on in England.


How about some more?

Update: Via Pharyngula, I notice that Bill Donahue, the angriest man in the world, has imploded on Fox News. Everyone gets a mention: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the gay terrorists.

They also give the humanist guy about two seconds to rebut all this. If it were me, I hope I’d have said, “Bill, your religion obviously makes it hard for you to be happy or nice. I’m sure glad I don’t share it.”

Or just: “You’re like that Borat guy, aren’t you?”

How things look from Wingnuttia

10 November 2008 / / 2 Comments

I’m a liberal, so I try to see things from the other guy’s perspective. (I know, it’s probably not fixable. Useful anyway.) But even I’m having trouble digging down to the mindset that would enable a rational human to think the things they’re thinking in Rightistan these days.

They think Sarah’s tops.

They really don’t think she was a drag on the ticket at all.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Republican voters say Alaska Governor Sarah Palin helped John McCain’s bid for the presidency, even as news reports surface that some McCain staffers think she was a liability.

Only 20% of GOP voters say Palin hurt the party’s ticket, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Six percent (6%) say she had no impact, and five percent (5%) are undecided.

Lots of chatter about Palin running in 2012, too. Man, I hope that works out for her. She’d be popular with the know-nothing Christian base, and precisely no one else. It could be the opportunity to extinguish the Republican Party for good.

Republicans lost because they weren’t conservative enough.

Please, let this meme take.

Moderates to blame for GOP losses, conservative leader says

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council told CNN that conservatives need to take back control of the GOP if the party is to return to its winning ways.

Normally as a campaign goes on, you need to play to the center to attract the moderate voters. The 2004 elections were a bit anomalous, in my view. It was the one time when playing to the base was more successful than playing to the center, probably because the uncertainty of the Iraq war kept enough voters holding to the status quo. McCain’s campaign team apparently thought this was going to be a pattern, but no. People like Perkins either don’t realise this, or they’re just trying to grab some power within their party. It’s not a good long-term strategy.

The gay marriage issue is a winner

Given the success of Prop 8, I can see where this is coming from:

GOP leader: Rebuild party based on ‘sanctity of marriage’

When asked by Chris Wallace what “conservative solutions” the GOP would bring to their current minority-party status, Pence said social issues like “the sanctity of marriage” will remain the backbone of the Republican platform.

“You build those conservative solutions, Chris, on the same time-honored principles of limited government, a belief in free markets, in the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage,” Pence said.

The Indiana representative cited the ballot measures against gay marriage that passed on Election Day as evidence of the continuing presence of conservative values.

Okay, short-term I can understand this. Long-term, it’s got no future. It will look worse and worse as younger voters with more liberal social values come down the pike. Obama’s win in the election happened in spite of the GOP throwing up all this culture war stuff. That kind of stuff is so 90’s. (Or else the economy took precedence, and the culture war b.s. will work again when things improve. I hope the former.)

Evolutionarily, this is an interesting time for right-wing watching. They’re generating memes at a furious rate, and it’ll be interesting to see whose version of the Republican future will win. But these memes are losers. If they settle on them, Democratic leadership will likely continue uninterrupted.

Education in reverse

8 November 2008 / / Comments Off on Education in reverse

Does it seem strange that a university would deny a degree to an otherwise capable student just because he’d been booted from his church? Then you’ve never been to BYU.

Chad Hardy was excommunicated for producing the edgy yet cheeky ‘Men on a Mission‘ calendar. Well, religion is religion. But now BYU has placed his communications degree on hold even though he’s fulfilled all the requirements. Somehow that doesn’t seem right. What are they trying to turn out over there? Competent professionals, or think-alike alumni that will one day donate big bucks to the alma mater? Oh. Guess I answered my own question.

In the words of the BYU official:

Your graduation application will be placed in a “hold” file and your name will not be resubmitted for graduation. If in the future you are reinstated as a member of the Church in good standing, you are invited to contact my office regarding your possible eligibility for the awarding of a degree.

For some reason, Mr Hardy’s not accepting the gentleman’s awfully decent offer. You can read about his impending legal struggles (and possibly contribute to his legal fund) at his website.

The Fundy Club

8 November 2008 / / 1 Comment

Alarik from comments raised an issue I’ve been thinking about quite a bit.

The cynic in me thinks that this was less about the Church defending its principles and more about convincing the rest of the religious right that we’re on their team.

I’ve been hearing this from quite a number of people, both members and non. Also frequently heard: “Evangelical Christians can’t stand the Mormons, so why are the Mormons knocking themselves out for their approval?”

I must admit, this is the way it comes off. But on reflection, I’m taking an ever-so-slightly different view. I don’t think the LDS Church is itching to get into the Fundy Club. I think they’re going to the wall on the gay thing mostly because they want to, and less because they think the Talebangelicals want them to.

I think they’ve seen what American evangelical Christians have been able to do in American politics, and they’d like a little of that action themselves. (The priest class always wants to expand their power, remember.) I think they’re willing to engage in temporary ad hoc alliances toward that end. But I think they’d be just as happy to have the power without having to deal with other Christian groups at all.

Fundies have no love for the Mormons? That’s true, but then again that feeling is mutual. Doctrinally the LDS Church couldn’t care less about impressing them. The Mormons view themselves as the embodiment of the Lord’s will in (these) the latter-days, and they’re equally certain that the evangelical Christians are Not. However, the Religious Right has really shown the Mormons the way — emboldened them, you could say. The Mormons are happy to pull techniques from their playbook, but they’re not looking for a long-term political merger.

So I’m thinking this is less about joining the Fundy Club, and more about getting political power on their own terms, plus making the kinds of changes they want to have happen. If they have to deal with other Christians, they will, but I don’t see it as a priority.

This is just my opinion from way over here. I’m only basing it on my subjective impressions of Mormon ideas about the other Christian churches. Anybody got better instincts than I do?

Proposition 8: Just getting started

7 November 2008 / / 7 Comments

Before the elections, a group called the Courage Campaign Issues Committee ran this ad against California’s Proposition 8.

It copped a bit of flack. Some god-soaked loon jumped up and down, said it was an example of ‘religious bigotry and intolerance’, and so on. I don’t know — I liked the ad, maybe a bit over the top.

But now, after the passage of Prop 8, can anyone tell me that that isn’t exactly what happened? A religion pumped money into an effort to strip rights from a group of people, and it worked. Why wouldn’t they try it? It was a win-win for the LDS Church. Prop 8 passes, they get what they want. Prop 8 loses, they get to pretend it’s the end of days, the world’s getting wickeder, and the fambly’s under attack, which brings in the easily frightened.

Now I think it’s fine for a religion to require or prohibit certain behaviours for its membership — that is, for adults who have chosen to belong to that religion, and I do not include children in this group. But when they try to force non-members to live by their rules, they’ve overstepped. And that’s what’s happened in California.

The argument from the religious right — not that they ever had a coherent argument against gay marriage — was that gay marriage would affect straight marriage. Make it worth less, devalue it somehow. That argument was a furphy, of course, but strange to say, the converse actually seems true. I heard a saying once: When one is not free, I am not free. I don’t know about that, but today it feels like: if someone’s relationship is devalued, mine is devalued. It’s strange, but it feels like my relationship with Ms Perfect is somehow the lesser for Prop 8’s passage. Maybe someday we’ll get married, but that’s only an option because we’re straight. Then again, maybe some religious group will intervene to stop us and enough voters will agree. That’s the world we live in now.

That’s why I think the last line of the ad is the most telling: “What shall we ban next?” Anything that conflicts with their delicate sensibilities, that’s what. Abortions? Why not go all the way and make it birth control? Or alcohol? Hey, what about Asian restaurants? You never did like Asian food, did you, Elder?

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