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Category: religion (page 7 of 36)

“Inspired fiction”

12 February 2012 / / 6 Comments

While reading a post on Wheat and Tares, I tripped over this term: “inspired fiction”. I decided I’ve been ignoring it long enough.

If you want to be a Mormon, but you don’t think that the Book of Mormon is literally true, you could call it “inspired fiction”. This means that instead of thinking Joseph Smith made up a bunch of stories that aren’t true, God told Joseph Smith to make up a bunch of stories that aren’t true. (What’s the difference? Well, if God does it, it’s all right, you see.)

When I see someone taking this tack, it’s like they’re saying, “Oh, of course the Emperor has no socks, but the rest of his couture is exquisite!” It’s a partial credit situation; points for realising it’s not true, but demerits for going along with it anyway. Call me crazy, but it matters to me if my beliefs are true. If it’s not true, I don’t have time for it.

What about the idea that, although not true, the stories in the Book of Mormon are good moral stories that can help you to live a better life? That’s where it all comes down. The Book of Mormon’s a terrible guide for moral living! Here’s what you’ll find:

and that’s just off the top of my head.

Are there no other fictional books that people could use as a guide for life? Of course there are, but it doesn’t really matter to these people — I suspect the reason they’ve mistaken this awful book for a guide is that either they’re tied to it by their social group, or maybe they enjoyed reading it and believing in it once, and they can’t bear to relinquish it completely. Which is kind of sad. I can understand if someone thinks these stories are a literal true account of the dealings of a cruel god that they have no choice but to obey — who can say how they’d act in a hostage situation? But imagine not thinking this stuff is true, and digging on it anyway. Somehow I think that’s worse.

Heaven’s gape

1 February 2012 / / 1 Comment

Religious people are posting this image on their walls and pages unironically as an inspirational photo.

What they’re missing is that the pic (‘shopped, natch) is actually a reference to the infamous and incomprehensibly gross ‘goatse’ image. If you don’t know what that is, don’t look it up. Just check out the Snopes page, or use your imagination: Instead of hands stretching a hole in the clouds, think ‘giant gaping rectum’.

I think the ‘goatse cloud’ image might be a perfect analogy (sorry) for religion in general. Some people find inspiration in it, but it’s just something that someone made up. There’s nobody in the sky, but if there were, he’d be a huge asshole.

The atheist temple

28 January 2012 / / 4 Comments

The big news in atheism this week: Alain de Botton wants to build an atheist temple. Which seems strange — atheism isn’t a religion, so why would it need to borrow religion’s trappings? I think de Botton tipped his hand, though, in this pronouncement:

The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre tower to celebrate a ”new atheism” as an antidote to what he describes as Richard Dawkins’s ”aggressive” and ”destructive” approach to non-belief.

Rather than attack religion, Mr de Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.

”Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary or Buddha but you can build a temple to anything that’s positive and good,” he said. ”That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective … Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, atheism has become known as a destructive force.”

Destructive force? For me, Dawkins and Hitchens are two guys who have come to epitomise well-tempered reason, intelligence, and courage in the face of mortality, so de Botton’s criticism doesn’t ring true for me. I’d like to suggest a little test which I’ll call the S.E. Cupp test: When someone says they’re an atheist, do they spend more time promoting atheism, or castigating other atheists because of their tone? If the latter, then what’s the difference between them and a theist?

Dawkins has called the project a waste of funds, PZ says it’s a monument to hubris.

Me? I say it’s redundant. We already have a temple. I was there earlier this month. Or, at least, at one of them.

The atheist temple I went to was the Temple of Knowledge, and it’s better known as the New York Public Library.

It gots lions.

Why would I call it an atheist temple? Because it’s filled with the work of people. People; not gods. People (and you can see them there every day) engaged in the process of gathering knowledge and combining it to make new knowledge. This is the goal of science, which is an atheistic form of reasoning.

I walked along its halls of solid marble, where generations of humans have come to read and learn.

No gothic arches, these. How could you help but be in awe of not just the building, but the building’s purpose?

Like a temple, the magnificent Reading Room prompts a hush. 

And the people who built this place — yeah, they were tycoons who made their money from the skins of small furry animals. But they wanted to build a place where the knowledge of the world could be preserved, and they cared enough to make it amazing. And they inscribed this on the walls, in letters big enough for anyone to read:

“On the diffusion of education
among the people
rest the preservation
and perpetuation
of our free institutions.”

I read that, and I think, you know, they got it. They really got it! Even back then. Our society depends on education. Our freedom depends on it. You can’t preserve freedom in a population of ignoramuses; they’ll just tear it down again the instant they feel afraid. It’s such an alien concept in this age, when one political party has dedicated itself to the destruction of the Department of Education, and (through homeschooling) constantly works to undermine the public school system so that children will be protected from education. It seems like a quaint and noble sentiment, but we need to relearn this thinking that came from better minds than ours. Just as we need another quaint and antiquated notion symbolised by libraries: the public good.

But that’s not all I saw. There were treasures.

Holy shit! It’s a Gutenburg Fucking Bible! One of only 40 perfect ones left. Yes, it’s a bible because for some reason, people thought the Bible was important back then. But what this book did was make reading and publishing commonplace. That’s much more important than the book’s rather poor contents.

And check this out: it’s Christopher Robin’s toys! That’s not just Winnie a Pooh — it’s Winnie THE Pooh. And the others! It was great to see them there, even though it made me think of Toy Story 2. I look at Tigger and realise that Ernest Shepard really nailed it.

These are clay tokens with cuneiform on them, some of the earliest writing that people ever used. That made it possible for people to transmit knowledge over generations.

And while I was in this Library, I felt so connected to people in other ages and to the future. It was a feeling that I can only describe as spiritual, even though I don’t like that word. But it was the same feeling that I felt in the old religion but more intense and meaningful.

You can keep your paltry theist cathedrals. Do not copy Mormon temples — they are monuments to superstition and foolishness. Let St Patrick’s fall. Instead, build a library, Mr de Botton, or an observatory, or a university, or a museum. They’re the only temples that atheists have any business building.

Actually, St. Patrick’s will make a very nice reading room in about 100 years.

Coffee with a liberal Christian

26 January 2012 / / 3 Comments

I recently had coffee with a Christian friend, and the subject was religion. I was all geared up for battle, but he had to go and spoil it all by being a non-fundamentalist non-loony liberal Christian, and a good guy whose conversation I quite enjoyed! ¿What fun is that?, I ask you.

Not being a fundamentalist means that he avoided making strong claims, and he didn’t have to defend so many indefensible things. He doesn’t hate gay people, thinks that not every part of the Bible is meant as history, and recognises the difficulty in discerning the intentions of biblical authors. Wouldn’t it be somewhat better if more Christians were like this?

The one thing he kept saying, though, in response to my questions was: “I don’t know.” Was the flood literal? Will people get resurrected in some form after death? He didn’t know. And he seemed rather relaxed about that.

It’s good to say when you don’t know, if you don’t. People should do that in the sciences, too. But if there’s something you don’t know and it’s a scientific question, you can find out by experimentation and observation. If it’s a religious or metaphysical question, what do you do? Interpret inconsistent texts? Try to have a revelation? Those approaches have only ever yielded contradictory results. Metaphysical questions can’t be resolved by observing physical reality, which is why every religion has a different answer to metaphysical questions. There’s no court of appeal. Notice the difference between religion and science. Scientists eventually reach consensus; religions come to schism.

My Christian friend was honest about not knowing. What I wanted to communicate was that religions don’t provide a reliable way to know. And they really should, if they’re going to claim that they have the answers to life big questions.

The man who made too much sense

22 January 2012 / / 1 Comment

I’m a Yellow Dog Democrat — I’d vote for a yellow dog in the road before I’d vote for a Republican — but I’m kind of bummed out about the end of the Huntsman campaign. Not because it signals the end of moderate Republicans; those days are long gone.

From what I saw of Huntsman, he was a smart guy who took his party to task for ignoring science. He believed the science on climate change (although he seemed to backtrack a little). He didn’t take his Mormon religion too seriously. And he had foreign policy experience. Unlike other Republicans, who were either evil (Gingrich), stupid (Santorum), crazy (Bachmann), or a mix of the three, Huntsman stood out as a sane person. No wonder he only ever polled in the single digits with Republican voters.

Could it be that he was a guy I could have voted for, under the right circumstances? Naw, there are lots of yellow dogs out there. But I would have had something other than a beer with him. And if by some chance he had won, I’d think, well, maybe this won’t be a disaster.

Big Dog gets the last word:

ESQUIRE: It’s remarkable that there would have been a time in living memory when someone like Jon Huntsman would have been regarded as the most conservative candidate in the field. Maybe even unacceptably conservative. But because of his insistence on having a grown-up discourse, he’s somehow seen as a moderate.

CLINTON: Huntsman’s economic record — and his positions on the abortion issue and other things — is every bit as conservative and considerably more consistent than the two front-runners’. But he also doesn’t make any bones about being willing to work with people and thinking you ought to put your country first. When the president asks you to serve — to go to China, and you speak Mandarin Chinese and you think you can help American business and America’s national strategic interest by doing it — you do it.

But all of a sudden that’s disqualifying. So I think that it shows you, we’re, you know, we’re living in a time when the Republicans have only pushed harder and harder to the right. And every time the president adopts a plan that they once advocated, they abandon it and push farther to the right. But the voters can push them back.

Getting an early start on the War on Xmas

1 January 2012 / / 7 Comments

I couldn’t believe it. There I was watching the NYE festivities, waiting for the ball to drop, and Cee-Lo Green is doing a version of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. Hm, thought I, a secular song. Wonder if he’ll tamper with it. And, sure enough, instead of “and no religion too”, he decides to slide in “and all religion’s true”.

How does that work? “Imagine there’s no heaven… And all religion’s true.” All religion can’t be true! They teach mutually incompatible, multiply contradicting things.

Couldn’t we just have one atheist song performed in public this holiday season? You know, all Xmas long, I sang songs about Jebus, and I wasn’t that happy about it, especially because Xtianity is not the whole point of Xmas. But I sang them anyway, words intact. And fuckers in the USA can’t even play an atheistic song straight. Seriously, fuck you, Cee-Lo Green, even though I don’t know who you are. You’re a horrible singer.

That does it. Now I’m going to give Xtians the War on Xmas they always thought they were getting. Tooth and nail. Anybody says anything remotely religious around me, I’m going to tell them they’re a deluded fool. It’s war.

Another thing. Someone asks me if I want to go to church on Xmas, I’m going to tell them they are wasting their time in that place. I went this year, and I was nice about it. No more. What’s the two things that apologists always say in defense of religion? They have great music, and they have great architecture. Well, I went to church, and the music was excruciating, and it was being done to me in a horrible featureless suburban church building. Fuck you, Mormon church.

In a year, all the religious people will thank me for speaking out and helping them see how they were wrong. If not, fuck them anyway. Fuck cultural deism, fuck Xmas carols, and fuck default Xtianity.

This is the new me.

Why do Mormons cut Christmas services short if they fall on a Sunday?

27 December 2011 / / 5 Comments

Nobody asked:

Dear Daniel: In other churches, people go to church on Christmas. There’s a Christmas Eve service at midnight, another in the morning, and maybe even again that night! It’s all they do! But Mormons seem to do it differently. They don’t go to church at all on Christmas if it’s not on a Sunday, and if it is, they actually reduce the length of the meetings. Why do Latter-day Saints do it this way?

Dear Nobody:

It’s because Mormons secretly loathe and detest their church meetings, and look for any way to avoid them if they have anything better to do. And who can blame them? Between the well-meaning but excruciating ward choir numbers, amateurish talks, infantile lesson manuals, and other people’s screechy children, many Mormons are under the (probably correct) impression that their meetings are the worst part of being in the church.

The Mormon method of worship has a lot to do with this. At their meetings, Mormons try to ‘feel the Spirit’. This essentially involves boring themselves into a quasi-meditative state in which any sensation they feel is assumed to be the Holy Ghost. No wonder they gratefully escape when there’s an opportunity to do something fun with family.

As for other churches, they ramp up their Christmas services because they secretly loathe and detest themselves.

The yearly War on Christmas email from my family

9 November 2011 / / 10 Comments

A family member has sent this rather long and well-circulated email.

Apparently the White House referred to Christmas Trees as Holiday Trees for the first time this year which prompted CBS presenter, Ben Stein, to present this piece which I would like to share with you. I think it applies just as much to many countries as it does to America .

The following was written by Ben Stein and recited by him on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary.

My confession:

I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees, Christmas trees. I don’t feel threatened. I don’t feel discriminated against. That’s what they are, Christmas trees.

It doesn’t bother me a bit when people say, ‘Merry Christmas’ to me. I don’t think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn’t bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu. If people want a creche, it’s just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don’t like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don’t think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from, that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can’t find it in the Constitution and I don’t like it being shoved down my throat.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship celebrities and we aren’t allowed to worship God ? I guess that’s a sign that I’m getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where these celebrities came from and where the America we knew went to.
– – – – –
In light of the many jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke; it’s not funny, it’s intended to get you thinking.

Billy Graham’s daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her ‘How could God let something like this happen?’ (regarding Hurricane Katrina).. Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, ‘I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?’

In light of recent events… terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O’Hare (she was murdered, her body found a few years ago) complained she didn’t want prayer in our schools, and we said OK. Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school. The Bible says thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn’t spank our children when they misbehave, because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock’s son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he’s talking about. And we said okay.

Now we’re asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with ‘WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.’

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world’s going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says. Funny how you can send ‘jokes’ through e-mail and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing. Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.

Are you laughing yet?

Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.

Pass it on if you think it has merit.

If not, then just discard it…. no one will know you did. But, if you discard this thought process, don’t sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in.

My Best Regards, Honestly and respectfully,

Ben Stein

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
I sent this back:

As the atheist of the family, I thought I’d respond.

There seems to be some idea floating around that atheists hate Christmas and want to stop it. Well, that’s just silly. I love Christmas! In fact, for the last ten years, I’ve been in a choir that puts on a big Christmas show. (Some of the other singers are atheists, and they like Christmas too.) I’ve got most of Handel’s Messiah memorised, and when we do “Angels We Have Heard on High”, I can belt out a lusty “Glo-ria” with the best of them. I don’t believe the story, but I keep singing at Christmas because I like the music. I like the lights, and the food, and being with family, just like everyone does.

What I don’t like, however, is compulsory worship. Christians like their religion, and that’s fine. But I don’t like how some Christians have decided that schools are the place where they want this part of the culture war to play out. I hope nobody I’m writing to thinks this, but maybe someone thinks that prayer in school is a pretty good idea. So here’s a thought experiment.

Imagine your school district announced that, starting tomorrow, everyone was going to have Muslim prayers to Allah. If you’re thinking, “Gee, I don’t know if I’d feel very comfortable with that,” well, that’s about how an atheist feels. And that’s not just because atheists don’t want to have prayers to Allah in school (although that’s true). It’s also because we think public schools ought to be neutral on the subject of religion. That way, the children of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Wiccans, Mormons, and (yes) atheists all get a level playing field. No one’s religion is promoted at the expense of anyone else’s. Sounds fair to me. And by doing it that way, schools are obeying the Constitution, which is the law of the land.

If people (including Ben Stein) are concerned that there isn’t enough religion in society, then I have some good news: there are already buildings for teaching religion, and they’re called churches. They’re very nice, they’re already built, and you can choose exactly which kind you like. (And they’re tax-free, because tax-payers are compelled to pick up the financial burden for churches, even wealthy ones, whether they want to or not.) Worshipping at home is also a very good option.

I don’t know if I really needed to write this. I actually think that most Christians are smarter and more fair-minded than the person who wrote the latter half of the email (and it wasn’t Ben Stein). The idea that God is going to allow the nation to be smitten with horrible disasters unless enough non-believers are compelled to grovel before him against their will is, fortunately, not an idea that I have seen too many Christians get behind. But here it is, just in case.

Comments welcome.

Love,
Daniel

A chat with the Witnesses

2 November 2011 / / 9 Comments

Some Jehovah’s Witnesses came around this morning. I decided to go all Socratic on them, and just ask them questions. It didn’t last very long.

If you had to pick a religion…

28 October 2011 / / 6 Comments

I’m hard on religious belief, but I try to be good to the actual believers. That’s hard to do with (say) apologists, who don’t approach the business of gaining knowledge in an honest way — some kinds of dishonesty aren’t to be tolerated. But there are a number of believers that I quite enjoy talking to.

I was talking to a Christian friend the other day, telling him my deconversion story (the mercifully short version). And he asked a question:

If you weren’t an atheist, what religion would you go for?

That’s tough, I said, because religions don’t do what I’m interested in doing, which is finding out what’s true. More to the point, a lot of religions claim to teach truth, and they advance claims that are either demonstrably false, or else unverifiable and very likely to be wrong.

Religions get it wrong because it’s so hard to get it right. To get it right, you have to observe, make testable hypotheses, observe some more, get other people to check out your findings, and even then what you’ve found is probably a little bit wrong, and it’ll need to be updated in future. If religions went about their ideas this way, they wouldn’t be religions; they’d be doing science. Instead, religions typically get their data from holy books, pronouncements from authority figures, or from traditions. Religions are non-empirical belief systems.

So, in order to accept a religion, I’d have to try one that made minimal truth claims (Unitarians?), or I’d have to be into it for some other reason — perhaps the refreshments.

Some religions are non-theistic (Buddhism, some kinds of Hinduism), and I have some friends that enjoy aspects of those religions, or perhaps it would more accurate in their case to say ‘philosophies’. The Dalai Lama makes noises from time to time about Buddhism’s compatibility with science:

“If the words of the Buddha and the findings of modern science contradict each other, then the former have to go.”

Not good enough, I’m afraid. Nothing can contradict a non-falsifiable belief (think reincarnation).

So I’m afraid that I can’t pick anything. I’m allergic to religion in all its forms. If you put a gun to my head, I’d be UU. At least they’re undemanding, and probably nice most of the time.

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