Other people think Karen Armstrong is wearing diapers too!

So I've been perusing the atheist blogosphere and what have I found? PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne, two of my favorite biologists and atheists, shredding Karen Armstrong for her fantasy land. Check out Myers' post, "The power of nonsense" and Coyne's "Jesus and Mo on apophatic theology."

I especially enjoy Coyne's bit. In essence, apophatic theology is so empty that the great prophets that the monotheists adore would have been silent had they been apophatic. This presents no small problem.

And isn't there some call to go out into the world and do something? Oh yeah! Mark 16: 15-20!

15 And he said to them: Go into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
16 He that believes and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believes not shall be condemned.
17 And these signs shall follow those who believe: In my name they shall cast out devils: they shall speak with new tongues.
18 They shall take up serpents; and if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them: they shall lay their hands upon the sick, and they shall recover.
19 And the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven, and was seated at the right hand of God.
20 But they going forth preached everywhere: the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs that followed.

So those that follow this just don't get it at all do they? Following commands and all. Karen Armstrong sure understands what to do with this one doesn't she? Those silly people following orders from an apostle no less. Geez.

Karen Armstrong's diapers

John Grace shreds Karen Armstong in a marvelous parody at The Guardian. And it got me thinking and fulminating a bit. Mostly, I'm annoyed.

I don't care for Karen Armstrong's versions of theology and over-intellectualized apologetics disguised as hemi-semi-demi-apologetic-non-apologetics and historicism. She is the vanguard of silly academics who think that they can concatenate words into erudite sentences and bedazzle us with rhetorical acrobatics to show us how literal religious belief just isn't the point and that atheists are silly because all of belief is really just above reason, rationality, evidence, and logic. No no! We mustn't be duped by that ability innate in humans to detect baloney and test truth claims because, well, God is just beyond that and not to understand the existence of the apparently explicately non-existent is to make a cardinal error about categories of existence. Or something.

She's wearing designer diapers.

Armstrong and her comrades like to pretend that those silly fundamentalists don't really exist or if they do they're just sillies. They don't really believe in things like 72 virgins in heaven if they're Muslim or the Rapture if they're Christian. Well, I guess they do exist but they aren't really religious. Those are just some misguided wingnuts who don't vote with their mouths, hands, or wallets. No no. Well, if they do, then we can just explain away what they believe and practice as some kind of misunderstanding because they haven't read as deeply as Armstrong has. They don't really understand Jesus, Allah, Moses, or the Buddha. We can be certain of that. Right?

That substantial 1/4 of the U.S. population that thinks it's likely that Jesus will come back to Earth as a super-hero and will whisk them away to eternal bliss with some stadium seating views of the rest of humanity in tribulation doesn't really think that. That's all just fantasy. No one is really a literalist in the really real world where we all understand that God is just some ineffable ground of being, a verb, a transcendent force of inexplicable existence behind/beyond/within/throughout all of existence but is not necessarily existence itself nor non-existence itself but something else.

Well...if they are a literalist then they are infantile. Her ideas aren't infantile. They are grown-up. They are very clear in their total obscurity.

See, "Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words. Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God." Because that's what so many people believe and act on and have certainly believed in and acted on for the ~2,700 years since the first monotheism was enshrined. And all of those animists out there and former believers in the pantheons of Greece or the Aztecs, they weren't really religious either right?

How convenient for her to define religion this way and then categorically dismiss huge swaths of living and dead people's ideas about what religion is and how it ought to be believed in and practiced. "They've messed it up with their piffly misunderstandings of nuance," she seems to say.

And people say the "New Atheists" are condescending. At least we have the grounded realism to understand that people who haven't had the leisure to ruminate on whatever they want to come to plain conclusions about their religious teachings and that those conclusions make plain sense from the scriptures they read. Please. I can enjoy me some good woofdyfarkle, historicism, and semantic play. But when it comes to understanding God and his/its will through the scriptures, can we please be realistic in our expectations of what we think Joe and Janet Believer can be expected to believe? They might agree that "God is beyond language" because, as they like to sing, "Our God is an awesome God," but when they do it, they are making God a part of language. When you make Jesus a man, you've made God identifiable as a person. He becomes limited and explainable. He's become not just a piece of language but a being like you that has desires and hatreds and so on.

I think that she's nuts to think that she really understands something that can't be described in words. She's as lost in her own maze of allegedly transcendent concepts as fundamentalists are in their apparent rigidity.

Armstrong's explanations about God are pure literary theoretical inventions - words piled on words that are chained to other words that make for wonderfully silly things like this - that are justified by whoever she likes:

But God transcends personality as God transcends every other human characteristic, such as gender. If we get stuck there, this is very immature. Very often people hear about God at about the same time as they're learning about Santa Claus. And their ideas about Santa Claus mature and change in time, but their idea of God remains infantile.

I just want to stop right here. How do you know any of this? By what means can you possibly verify any of this outside of human imagination? You can't. This is all convenient hand-waving. She is picking and choosing the parts of whatever scripture she wants to and the theologians and historians she's liked and saying that those are the real deal and that people have just failed to understand concept X (if you can even call it a concept because it might be "beyond" a concept). That's nonsense. She has no way to verify the transcendent rightness of any scriptural claim except to say that she thinks it's right because she feels like it's right and so did someone else. She has no more support that believing in God - whatever that even means in the end for her - than in Santa Claus. Why is believing in a non-existent existent God any less infantile than a personal one? If anything, the first is less likely because it is totally outside of all of human experience. At least the second has the benefit of simple human recognition in whose image we have allegedly been created.

In the end, her beliefs are infantile too. Her ideas haven't matured. They've just morphed into drivel and creativity. I'll take Joseph Campbell please for the mythic.

Armstrong wears a diaper from the infancy of our species that she's dressed up with a Ph.D. and some books. She defends the non-existent existent ungendered Santa Claus with no possibility of providing any check on how she might know what she's talking about.

6,000 years old

Breathtaking ignorance. Simply breathtaking.

A blood sacrifice...a blood sacrifice...

Funny.



Does anyone understand people really believing in talking snakes? I mean REALLY believing it.

Oklahoma rep fights for "righteousness"

I'm sure this is going to work out well. Tulsa World brings us this madness: Representative Sally Kern is floating an "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality," a document that would "acknowledge the need for a national awakening of righteousness." She has some strong economic ideas too.

A prayer to the FSM for Sarah Palin

When Sarah Palin was nominated for VP by McCain, I thought, "Wow. This is shaping up to be a disaster. This woman cannot - MUST NOT - be vice president much less (*GULP*) president." Can you imagine the total incompetence? I know it's hard to fathom. I nearly prayed to keep her out I was so appalled. More on that later.

But it looks like her tailspin into public nothinghood has reached its next nadir with her resignation as governor. So did she blink in the face of tough times? Me thinks so.

The Washington Times reports as follows:

Jason Recher, an aide who worked for Mrs. Palin during last year's campaign, said the environment in Alaska had changed so much since August "with the influx of the national anti-Republican, anti-Palin movement - it's been like an avalanche."

"With all the frivilous ethics complaints, it just had become completely unsustainable for her to be governor," he said.

Good. She blinked and has gotten out of the way.

In the speech she compared herself to a point guard. The WT writes,

In her announcement, Mrs. Palin said it "hurts to make this choice," but compared herself to a point guard in basketball, a position she herself excelled at in high school.

"A good point guard knows exactly when to pass the ball so the team can win," she said. "I know when it is time to pass the ball for victory." She added the decision to step down had been "in the works for a while."

This isn't passing the ball. This is telling the team during half-time that your quitting in the second half. Magic Johnson didn't step back nor did John Stockton. Come on now lady: did the Celtics get to you?

I'm glad she's being shelled. She has become an icon of fundamentalist politics and she has been a bumbling mess. Her family and work life have been nothing short of a travesty as her daughter's unwed pregnancy and its hullaballoo have shown as have the ethics charges and her total incompetence when questioned about anything of substance. I suppose that it didn't help that we discovered she was exorcised by a shaman...witch doctor...err...pastor and that this sort of magic working is par for the course in her church. She's a quack and she shouldn't be in politics.

On that note though, I think a good sturdy prayer is in order. [Puts on pirate patch, does a shot of rum, and preps to sneer you barmy swags.]

Let us pray,

Our holy and blessed Flying Spaghetti Monster and your outer space avatar the Celestial Teapot, please bless Sarah Palin. May her family be happier outside of the public eye and may she have the wisdom to not drag them back into a circus and fray. Please help her to understand that she is not a blessing for the United States, its people, its teen boys and girls, nor its wolves.

Offer her the insight to carry on her neuroses and bizarre religious rituals in the privacy of her own home.

Also, can you somehow give her an education to understand how impossible it is that the Earth is ~10,000 years old? Can you add to that evolution is a naturally occurring process? Oh yeah, and please don't forget to tell her that human-induced climate change is real and terrifying. That's a biggie. I mean, how does someone from Alaska not get it? With your combined noodliness and interstellar steaminess you can work out all things.

Finally oh master with noodly appendages and co-master with your smooth metallic sides immune to asteroid strikes, I entreat you to bring Ms. Palin and her family great happiness. May the time outside of the circus bring her peace, insight, happiness, and health.

Ramen.

P.S. Can you provide her with tofu wolves to shoot? I guess that's too much to ask.

Notes on the annual double century

For five of the last six years I have gone on a cycling double century. Friends and I - some racers, some not, but all enthusiasts of the highest degree - roll out of State College, PA and head north to Wellsboro and then back along the Pine Creek Gorge and eventually back to State College over the course of roughly 210 miles in one day. It's a brilliant day. This year, we had 15 people make the whole thing, 7 first-timers and 3 women, and one (me) with a cold. Incredible.

And my friend Leah has chronicled the whole thing over at her blog Chaya de Cacao in two entries, one in pictures and the other in words.


(Left to right: Leah, Rachel, Joe, Allen, Steve, Ho, Vicki, Rich, Eric, Bill, Jim, and Me)

Ricky Gervais redux on Genesis

"Free your minds. Listen."

The sisters are in trouble.

This isn't especially comment-worthy, but does anyone else find it generally disturbing how much institutional control men have over women in the Catholic Church? A story in today's New York Times, "Nuns in the U.S. Are Facing Scrutiny by the Vatican," just kind of generally troubles me. I guess some of the sisters are out of line and need to be whipped back into shape so they've ordered an Apostolic Visitation. These women are going to be "corrected" by a corrupt oligarchy of old boys? Right.

My sister was almost a Sister of St. Joseph. I think I'll have to ask her about this.

But on a side note, I agree with the Catholic Church that the nuns should stop practicing Reiki. I don't care if it's non-Christian but it is unscientific. We're not Jedis.

"Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview..."

Thus spake Lawrence Krauss in a Wall Street Journal article titled "God and Science Don't Mix." I think that it's about time that a scientist as generally diplomatic as Krauss has come out with a vigorous and overt defense of atheism and its implied defense of philosophical materialism. For years he has said that he is an atheist and that science and fundamentalist versions of religious belief are incompatible but I haven't read him go after religious belief in general like this, even taking on the evolutionary defender and Catholic biologist Ken Miller. [I am glad for Miller's work, very glad, but his very public religiosity is confounding. I agree with Jerry Coyne and others that Miller's grandstanding on this issue is intellectually dishonest and/or philosophically inconsistent.]

Krauss writes,

Though the scientific process may be compatible with the vague idea of some relaxed deity who merely established the universe and let it proceed from there, it is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed tenets of most of the world's organized religions. As Sam Harris recently wrote in a letter responding to the Nature editorial that called him an "atheist absolutist," a "reconciliation between science and Christianity would mean squaring physics, chemistry, biology, and a basic understanding of probabilistic reasoning with a raft of patently ridiculous, Iron Age convictions."

When I confronted my two Catholic colleagues on the panel with the apparent miracle of the virgin birth and asked how they could reconcile this with basic biology, I was ultimately told that perhaps this biblical claim merely meant to emphasize what an important event the birth was. Neither came to the explicit defense of what is undeniably one of the central tenets of Catholic theology.

Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Moreover, the true believers in each of these faiths are atheists regarding the specific sacred tenets of all other faiths. Christianity rejects the proposition that the Quran contains the infallible words of the creator of the universe. Muslims and Jews reject the divinity of Jesus.

And there it is. The world of a God who is active in our lives would be very different from the world we live in. Quite simply, there is no evidence whatsoever that this God exists and for active and engaged scientists to defend and propagate the view that such an activist God as the ones in the Abrahamic religions exists and acts is kind of nuts. As Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence." Sans the evidence, why should we buy the most extraordinary claims - the virgin birth, raising people from the dead, and a bodily resurrection - ever made? There are no good reasons and it's perplexing that some scientists are keen to protect it.

Krauss does point out that science doesn't require atheism. That is, it is methodologically atheistic and naturalistic (he quotes Haldane on this at the article's opening), but it needn't be philosophically atheistic. That is, you can believe whatever you want to about any number of things and still use science to understand nature and ignore its philosophical implications for the breadth of your thought. But to deny it access to the breadth of your thinking is to live in a divided mind.

The Bible and homophobia

This Monday a woman in town near mine wrote a letter to the editor that I found preposterous and vicious. It is immoral homophobic nonsense of close to the worst kind. She's no Fred Phelps but she's pretty awful. As you read it, wonder at this person's conception of morality. Obedience. Follow the rules and it will make you good no matter how absurd those rules are.

So I responded and it was printed. Here is the beginning.

A recent letter exemplifies poor moral reasoning to continue oppressing gays and lesbians.

The writer argues that “our Creator” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence is both the Christian God and the source of our human rights. I invite the letter writer to visit a few facts.

First, there is no mention of any Christian deity in the founding documents.

Read the full response at the Centre Daily Times here. Leave comments there or here.

The excitement is just barely contained.

Our friend, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and the father of the Creation Museum, is going to bring us a state of the nation address tonight at 8 pm, subtitled, THE COLLAPSE OF CHRISTIAN AMERICA. This will be something insurmountably ridiculous I'm sure.

The site states,

America has more Christian resources and Bible colleges than ever in its history, yet the nation is on a spiritual downward spiral. What has happened? Why is the church not reaching the culture today as it has in the past? Get the full report on June 25 at 8:00 p.m. as Ken, in his dynamic style, recounts the secularization of American culture and explains why we are losing generations from the church—why, in fact, they are already gone!

You know, I might usually just laugh at this as just so much hand-waving and chicken little garbage. But recent polling shows that 16% of Americans self-identify as non-religious. This is a huge shift from the past Pew and other surveys that have shown the religious "nones" to be ~8%. Maybe Ham does have something to worry about. More people are tired of the fundamentalist anti-reason and arm-waving garbage that clogs our airwaves.

I don't doubt for a second that he will ramble on about some ridiculous problems that evolution causes in the United States. He will likely claim that Christians are being attacked by a secular state and that a new state-sponsored religion of secular humanism is being placed on people by the government and a liberal evolutionist elite who are doing wicked anti-Biblical work. He might even be right.

Of course, I am speculating now. But given the incredible volume of anti-evolutionary, anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-liberal logorrhea he's produced over the years, I'll wager I'm right.

"For the Bible Tells Me So": A few thoughts

Last night my wife and I watched For the Bible Tells Me So, a movie about the way that lots of branches of Christianity crush gays' sense of self and self-worth. It's a moving film that looks at the experiences of gay children of straight Christian parents. For those of you interested in this, I highly recommend it. I am going to offer some spoilers and a small critique.

Each of the stories is quite different:

• A gay black woman whose preacher father and very active mother have difficulty accepting her lesbianism but are able to get to some kind of reconciliation.
• Anglican bishop Eugene Robinson and his family's journey.
• A woman whose daughter was active in drama and singing in school, went to college and decided that she was gay, and then became totally alienated. The daughter, Anna, eventually committed suicide. It is heart-wrenching and a bit graphic with a picture of the suicide.
• Senator Dick Gephardt's daughter, Chrissy, who got married to a man and then divorced as she finally "woke up" to understand that she was gay (pictured above from the movie website's gallery).
• A teenage Minnesota boy whose parents were at first quite upset and read a great deal to learn about homosexuality. Some of what they read was by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. At the film's end, they try to confront Dobson and are arrested.

Each story is both touching and instructive. Learning these families' journeys is both heart-wrenching and sometimes beautiful. My sister is gay, so I had much in common with the people I was watching, though we were always very accepting and open to my sister's sexuality. Today, she is happily married to her wife and they are a model for other couples. But I am reminded of all of the shame that was instilled in her by our culture, much of which comes from the kind totalitarian religion.

The movie goes to great pains to try to distance the "true" message of a semi-liberal or liberal Christianity from the "false" message of literalists/fundamentalists. Bishop Desmond Tutu, Harvard's Peter Gomes, Orthodox Rabbi Steve Greenberg and Reverend Jimmy Creech all discuss at length how literalists take things out of context and cherry pick from the Bible to support their homophobic agenda. They castigate the Falwells, Robertsons, and Dobsons of the world for decontextualizing the word "abomination" in the book of Leviticus 18. I concur. It's placed among verses that tell you not to eat shrimp and so on. Many of today's Christians are shrimp eaters...including the liberals. So why are they selective about what they follow and what they don't?

Let me say that I am certainly sympathetic to and seem to share the values of many of these liberal Christian thinkers. But when they say that the fundamentalists are cherry-picking verses and keeping this and throwing out that, they are engaged in a big act of hypocrisy. They are using non-divine information all the time to make logical and ethical judgments about an allegedly divine book. I really don't see why we should believe that the book is actually the written word of any God at all. There's a lot of this strange theological circumlocution in this movie and I find it socially pleasant and ethically more responsible insofar as it encourages compassion and understanding. But it is also logically appalling. It's so many intellectual gymnastics moves - it's a lot of elaborate and difficult thinking that gets us to a conclusion we like with false thinking and justification of a culturally authoritative book. It just reinforced my already pretty sturdy belief that theology is just a dressed-up version of fantasy literature theory and criticism.

I recommend this movie for its insight and hope for a more compassionate world. It is also a fantastic critique of Christianity by Christians so those of you who are religious might find it useful. The unbelievers among us are invited to see a panoply of views and feelings. I, for one, was a bit more hopeful at the movie's end.

Epistemic authority

Jerry Coyne has a really solid post up on the problem of conceding authority to faith and faith-based views titled "Does religion have greater “epistemic authority” than science in some areas?" In short: faith-based authority on most matters is null because it lacks any evidentiary grounding. It's a game of "he said, s/he said" and fantasy. The lack of hard corroborable evidence for supernaturalistic beliefs - religion, astrology, astral projection, UFOs, ghosts, etc. - removes its epistemological authority.

More reasons the Disco Tute is bunk

They're trying to censor people on YouTube. They can't take the heat so they have to strong arm people using pseudo-legal methods. I guess a bunch of dishonest lawyers are good at something: virtually mugging critics.




I take it that it's about something like this.

I'm shrill. I'm now boycotting Coke.

I didn't really drink soda anyway, but now I can really hate Coke for selling at the Creation Museum and being their soft drink of choice. Making a buck means endorsing creationism I guess. Anything for a dollar.

The Stoopid 50

This Sunday I will do the Stoopid 50. A 50-mile (maybe actually 53 or something) mountain bike race with a good bit of trail and tons of climbing...something like 7,000' of it. Yikes. I hadn't planned on doing it but here it is and it's become part of my training for the Wilderness 101 - a 101-mile mountain bike race. I haven't raced in a couple of years and even then it was not very serious at all. But this year I am hoping to get back to something like the form I had 4 and 5 years ago when I was actually pretty quick. All the miles will probably pay off and the races I do in the next few weeks will put me in good shape for the 101.

Anyway, here's a map of this year's Stoopid made by my friend Ray Crew (sweet eh?). The race is sponsored by Shenandoah Mountain Touring with help from Freeze Thaw Cycles and The Bicycle Shop. No doubt volunteers are coming out from the locals in the Nittany Mountain Bike Association and Centre Region Bike Coalition.

Wish me luck.

My new favorite book: The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible

I've been lent Paul S. Taylor's The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible (only $10.19 at Amazon!) by a friend and peer in my program. This book is brilliant. It is a no-holds barred pile of fantastic silliness so that you too can convince your children that dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth together, that the Bible says so, and that some very scientifical sciencey science supports this tissue of poor imagination.

The whole thing begins with a "Special Note" from our friend, Henry M. Morris, Ph. D. (founder of the Institute for Creative Creation Nonsense Research). He assures us that it "will prove delightfully enjoyable to the children for whom it was written [and] it is also a significant contribution to Biblical apologetics." Would you like a side of indoctrination and brainwashing with that too? Sure thing!

It has small chapters on fossils, where dinosaurs came from, why they became extinct, the Noachian flood, the "Lost Paradise," dinosaur ferocity, and "Important Things to Remember." The section on what happened to the dinosaurs after the flood is particularly touching...err...ridiculous. Apparently, dinosaurs lived on for a few centuries after the flood, but even still, earthquakes, volcanoes, extreme temperature, and harmful radiation made the world "too harsh for dinosaurs. No longer did the earth have the same great forests of huge nutritious plants." I guess that goes for every other extinct species too?

And in case your were wondering whether creationists think that everyone was a vegetarian in the Garden of Eden: the answer is "Yes." "Before the Flood, there is no indication in the Bible that any of he animals ate meat or were violent and vicious. It is the people that God says were so terrible and violent." So I guess we have to wonder why so many Christians still eat meat if it's so bad? Why is lamb slaughtering sanctioned by God? Why show how great you are by killing yourself as your own son in front of a bunch of people if a world without death is ideal? Why would Jesus give all those dead fish to those hungry people? Not very peaceful of him. I think this book is cranially-rectally inverted.

Do you believe the Deinonychus ever ate anything but meat? Didn't think so. Look at the hooked sharp teeth, perfect for gripping and tearing? What's it going to do? Shred some wheat? Jump up into the air and viciously rip some papayas down and pulp them with those steak knives? And that claw is for tapping out some modern dance too.

But what do YOU and your kids really need to know about dinosaurs? It's not science. The last two pages (58-59) are full of useful dinosaur information. "Dinosaurs fit in perfectly with the Bible's record of history." They didn't evolve. Jesus made everything. The perfect world fell because people were disobedient which brought sin, death, pain, the Flood, and punishment. But don't worry, Jesus loves you and will forgive you, you can live forever, and the world will be perfected again. But the decision is yours.

Okay. I'll take the science please. The real stuff.

Eastern Box Turtle on the Lewistown Contingent trail

Check this little guy out. I was moving pretty quickly on this low boggy trail, the Lewistown Contingent, when I came upon this Eastern Box Turtle. Those oranges were really kind of brilliant up close and watching him move along the leafy ground you could see how well-camouflaged they are. I harassed only momentarily, picking him up for a minute to look at his underbelly and claws and to share him with my riding buddy.

Gorgeous. We saw a mother turkey with chicks, a turkey take off, and some turkey vultures too. Sadly, my camera battery was not charged. Next time perhaps.

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