Ugh, sorry about this—-this post was supposed to go up yesterday afternoon, and I screwed it up somehow.  So here it is, and apologies.  I didn’t get to it until now because I was at a panel/feminist event all night.

Hemant at the Friendly Atheist jumps into a “debate” between fire-breathing wingnut Dennis Prager and occasionally-not-a-complete-asshole Conor Friedersdorf about why kids get less religious when they go to college.  (By the way, there’s no real evidence for this assertion that I can see.)  Prager is all about the “don’t teach your kids to read, they’ll get ideas” argument, of course, but Friedersdorf has a different take.

To me, there are better explanations for the fact that “the more university education a person receives, the more likely he is to hold secular and left-wing views.” One is that people who attend college leave home. That is to say, they leave their church, the community incentives to attend it, and the watchful eye of parents who get angry or make them feel guilty when they don’t go to services or stray in their faith. Suddenly they’re surrounded by dorm mates of different faiths or no faith at all. For many of these students, it turns out that their religious behavior was driven more by desire for community, or social and parental pressure, than by deeply held beliefs.

Hemant is quick to dismiss Friedersdorf, which is usually a wise thing to do, since Friedersdorf kicks off his post with an overt falsehood, calling Prager “thoughtful”, when the more appropriate words would be “reactionary”, “mean-spirited”, “disingenuous”, “pandering”, or “dishonest”.  Hemant’s reply:

There’s also the possibility that when you realize how much we really know about biology and zoology and anthropology and chemistry and genetics and astrophysics, the stories in the Bible just become silly and antiquated.

You can’t take religious myths seriously after you’re forced to think critically for a few years.

I think Hemant is over-rating how much colleges expect undergrads to think critically, sadly.  Plus, he’s underestimating how much people can compartmentalize.  And again, there’s no real evidence that I see that people with bachelor’s degrees are less religious.  What little effect there is is small. 
Still, I think Friedersdorf has a point that shouldn’t be dismissed.  He’s essentially saying that religion is social and not spiritual, and I think that’s an accurate view of why people believe.  In fact, the social nature of religion is one of the strongest arguments against it.  It’s clear people believe in their god mainly because people around them do, and bucking the common sentiment requires paying a social price most people aren’t willing to pay. If it was a free choice, then the faith people have wouldn’t correlate so strongly with geography, family of origin, or peer group.  You choose what to believe not on the arguments, but based on what people around you need you to agree to believe to get along with them. A lot of people are natural conformists, but even people who aren’t inclined to go with the flow often choose to go with it because the consequences are so high.

In fact, just a couple posts down on Friendly Atheist, you see this play out.  A woman writes Hemant for advice on how to handle the evidence in her history of her atheism now that she’s looking for jobs.  She and he both acknowledge that atheism can be held against you in job-hunting.  Now, some people are just stubborn bastards—-or, in my case, just congenitally incapable of playing along when something doesn’t strike me as right—-but most people, when faced with this sort of social ostracism that can hurt your paycheck, etc.?  They’re going to believe in god.  It’s just easier to do so.  And if their doubts nag at them too hard, they’re going to be an “agnostic”.  But straight up disbelieving creates too much tension with other people.

Which is why I think Friedersdorf has a point about even the small effect college has on belief.  The main pressure to believe is conformity, and once you’re removed from the people exerting that pressure, it’s easier to quit believing.  If there were more pockets in this country where atheism was acceptable, I think you’d see an even more dramatic effect.  In fact, I’d bet if you broke it down by schools in more liberal vs. less liberal areas, you’d see that the more liberal areas have a lot more defectors.

Jamelle Bouie takes on the question of why Mitt Romney still seems to be getting a hit for being a Mormon with evangelical voters, who are threatened by Mormons.

Evangelical hostility toward Mormons isn’t as widespread as it was a decade ago—a result, in part, of coalition politics (the Religious Right), Romney 2008 and Glenn Beck—but it’s still present, thanks mostly to irreconcilable theological views and practices. Mormons disavow belief in the Trinity, draw their doctrine from outside the Gospels, and use an altered version of the Bible, which runs counter to evangelical views on the book’s essential perfection. Indeed, more than a few evangelical leaders have labeled Mormonism a “cult.”

As for Glenn Beck, I will point out this: Beck has been getting into wild-eyed Bible-based conspiracy theories as of late, doing that thing Bible thumpers do where they try to imply that the prophecies of Revelations are coming true right now, even though you’d think the fact that their claims never to come to pass would start embarrassing them.  I noted to Marc when the whole Lawrence O’Donnell-dressing-Beck-down thing happened that Beck doesn’t ever thump the Book of Mormon.  This oversight struck me as strange for a man who claims to be as sincere as Beck is.  The Book of Mormon is just as important as the Bible, is it not?  At least to Beck, that is.  If he’s speaking directly from his heart and his faith, you’d think he’d mention that on occasion.  But nope.  Just silence on that front.  It’s almost as if he’s sculpting his views for propagandistic purposes that have little to do with his sincerely held beliefs. 

Anyway, I think that there’s more to the over-the-top suspicion of Mormons that some evangelicals display that a theological belief.  In general, I’m skeptical of looking at dogma first and extrapolating from it.  In my experience, beliefs are held first, and theological arguments are brought in to rationalize them.  Jamelle notes that hostility towards Catholics has faded.  I don’t think this has anything to do with fading theological disagreements—-evangelicals can claim just as surely as ever that Catholics are violating the commandment against worshiping non-Yahweh gods with their saints—-but because Catholicism has become mainstreamed and isn’t considered weird anymore.  Plus, I think evangelicals realized that most Catholics are only nominally Catholic, and the church generally isn’t competitive in the recruitment department.  Numbers of Catholics are growing only because of immigration and reproduction, not because they’re converting your kids or anything.  This makes them less of a threat.  I’ll point out that evangelicals have come around in a similar fashion on Judaism.  It used to be that “Jew” was a dirty word in your more fundamentalist corners of this nation, and while they still believe all Jews are going to hell, along with the Catholics, there’s been a cultural shift where Jews are now considered as being Chosen and having a special place in god’s heart.  It’s all confusing, but there it is.  And I think part of the reason is that evangelicals have come around to seeing these religions are non-threatening.  These two groups aren’t competing with them for converts, and in fact represent only a conversion-possible population for them.

Not so with the Mormons.  Mormons, like evangelicals, recruit.  Evangelicals and Mormons are in direct competition for the same resources.  And what’s really threatening is that Mormons are kind of better at being evangelical Christians than evangelical Christians could ever be.  Or at least, that’s the perception.  Evangelical Christians are desperate to put forward a nuclear-family-everything-is-so-great-we-have-10-kids-and-none-are-gay image, but the public facade on that is always slipping.  There’s so many sex scandals in evangelical churches and organizations that it’s not even funny.  Well, okay, it’s always funny, but still.  It’s not just the high profile Ted Haggard and George Rekers cases, either.  Any given week you can probably put the term “youth pastor” in Google News and the top story will be a sex scandal.  Like I did today and this was the first hit:

The Orange County district attorney’s office is attempting to identify any possible alleged victims of a former Orange County youth minister and San Clemente resident Joe David Nelms, 47.

Nelms, arrested last week in Lindale, TX, faces eight felony counts of lewd acts on a child under 14 and could face a maximum sentence of 22 years in state prison if convicted, according to a release from the D.A.‘s office.

There’s also a story of a youth minister boinking teenage boys while claiming it would “cure” their homosexuality and another one in Vancouver.  This is a constant drumbeat. 

Now, I don’t doubt that this shit goes on in the Mormon churches of our country, too, but they manage to evade this kind of coverage for it.  Maybe it’s just that they’re smaller in number and better at keeping a lid on it.  But the point remains—-Mormons are doing a much better job than evangelicals with that squeaky clean image that evangelicals crave.  If I asked you who you’d find least surprising if I told you that a potential Republican presidential candidate released a sex tape that involved a same-sex three-way with scuba gear and a donkey, I’m going to just say that it’s probably not Mitt Romney that you’d put at the top of the list. 

So yes, I think evangelicals are just jealous.  And the theological stuff is all rationale.

In today’s non-surprising news, new research shows that American Catholics are more in line with other Americans than the Catholic church on gay marriage.  That Catholics as a group are more liberal than the church is nothing new.  Catholics tend to fall in line with other Americans when it comes to birth control, abortion, and premarital sex, as well.  Of course, none of this ever means that the mainstream media will stop letting pedophilia apologist who doesn’t even accept the Vatican II Bill Donohue go on TV and speak as if he’s speaking for Catholics, but it’s important to remember that a church’s ideology and its people are not the same thing.  And often, the main victims of a church’s ideology are its people, and that’s certainly true with the Catholic church.  The majority of victims of its anti-choice, anti-gay ideology are Catholics who are gay or in need of reproductive health services, and are blocked by guilt tripping, community standards, or even laws imposed by the church. 

What I think is important to understand from research like this is that people aren’t members of churches, usually, because they agree with the dogma or find that much meaning in the teachings.  It’s mostly for community, tradition, and family.  You average Catholic—-or whatever member of a religion—-is such because they were born into that faith, full stop.  Not that church teachings don’t have influence, but by and large, it’s foolish to suggest you can tell much about people from their religion.  This seems obvious, but it’s an error you see all the time, particularly with conservative writers, who are prone to arguing that Group X does Y because of their faith, when a lot of the time, it’s probably more because of economics, community standards, whatever.  The faithful aren’t really that faithful.  But they do want a place to get married and be buried.  Even with evangelical Christians, I think this holds more than you’d think.

Not that I’m letting Catholics off the hook.  If you disagree with the church, you really should leave as a moral matter.  Money and esteem given to the church allows them perpetuate their evil on the world.  That money and power goes towards depriving women of choices, oppressing gays, spreading HIV by limiting access to condoms, and whatever else they do that you disapprove of.  Particularly in America, there is no reason to think that you need a church for marrying and burying.  We have sufficient civil avenues for that.  It doesn’t mean you can’t believe in god or family.  There’s no reason that perpetuating evil should be the price you pay for community and tradition. That said, it’s really important to realize that for a large chunk of Catholics, being Catholic has nothing to do with the church, and everything to do with community.

If you have the time—-or even if you think you don’t—-to read a 26 page article in the New Yorker, please spend it reading this one about Paul Haggis and the Church of Scientology.  It’s a real argument for the beauty of long form journalism, and came very close to convincing me to adding the New Yorker into my already-growing pile of magazine subscriptions.  (Between those, books, and blogs, I’m perpetually overwhelmed.) 

It’s not only fascinating, but important, too.  I’m usually not one to bash Scientology especially.  Oh, I bash it, but I also have, in the past, defended it on the grounds that its claims are no wackier than the claims made by most religions.  I’m usually skeptical of religious people attacking other religions, because I smell a whiff of, “My bullshit is less bullshit because I can compare it positively to some other bullshit!”  I’m also unconvinced by arguments that point to how Scientology started off as a cult.  Most religions do, after all.  I’m definitely not convinced Scientology screws people up more than, say, Catholicism.  The money exchanging hands has always been the most worrisome aspect of the faith, but I always figured it was just a little more direct than the tithing expected of believers in Christian churches. 

But this article made me realize that the problem with Scientology is that it’s getting more cult-like as it ages, and that’s incredibly worrisome.  There’s physical abuse, alarming reports of peole disappearing, mind control and brainwashing, and the amount of money they’re prying from people is incredibly high, way into the cult levels.  Plus, there’s the worst marker of a cult, which is insisting that adherents cut off contact with anyone in their lives who is skeptical of Scientology, which is a clear sign they’re afraid that anyone asking questions will pull people from the church.  I’m more sympathetic now towards those who treat Scientology like it’s a cult instead of a religion; the difference is really spelled out in the article.

That said, the best and most interesting aspect is that the journalist Lawrence Wright is actually sympathetic to why someone might be drawn to Scientology.  He doesn’t dismiss L. Ron Hubbard as quickly as some do, and he gets Paul Haggis and others to explain what it was that they actually got out of the religion, and it’s really convincing. (Plus, for Hollywood types, there’s a lot of professional connections created.) I felt that it has a lot in common with modern day evangelical Christianity.  Both religions have moved towards embracing self-help and psychology as models of what they do, instead of former models where personal assistance was part of the faith, but definitely took a backseat to community and theological questions.  Nowadays, evangelical Christianity is pushed as a very individualistic thing, like a “Be A Better You Through Jesus!” kind of thing.  Rick Warren is the master of this, and the blog Stuff Christian Culture Likes is an excellent examination of how this mentality creates a conformist, rules-obsessed culture where actual community is more an illusion than a reality.  Scientology does all this and adds a bunch of New Age mumbo-jumbo that makes it feel very modern.  I can definitely see the appeal now, though it’s absolutely a scary cult. 

Thank you, Sean on Twitter, for making my day last night by drawing my attention to the latest front in the battle of wingnuts vs. science.  Often, when we pro-science sorts are arguing about evolution with wingnuts, they’ll pull the “it’s just a theory” card, to which we often reply, “It’s also called the theory of gravity.  Are you going to argue with gravity?”

Answer: Of course they are.

I sometimes still find that people on the liberal, or at least thoughtful, side of the fence still think that global warming denialism and creationism are discrete things borne out of an emotional need not to believe either in global warming or evolution, and while that’s true, I think it’s deeper than that.  I think that science itself is under attack, and that the reason that conservatives are so eager to lash out against it has to do with an anti-modernist bent.  This is especially true when you understand that science really is a threat to religion.  A lot of people say it’s not, because science doesn’t address “spiritual”  needs, but said folks are really overrating the importance of spirituality for most people—-or assuming that this urge isn’t better scratched by loving others and enjoying life.  Religion really draws its power from explanation.  It gives order to the world.  And science is poaching that territory rapidly, which pisses off authoritarians, because they rightfully understand that if they lose the power to create facile goddidit explanations for everything from gravity to the problem of evil, they will lose their power over people. Thus, the attack not just on specific scientific theories, but on science in general, and most of academia, as well.

The latest installment is Bill O’Reilly’s war on gravity. Or, specifically, his belief that goddidit is a better explanation for the tides than the real explanation, which is that they’re created by a combination of moon and Earth gravity.  He had this exchange with David Silverman, president of the American Atheist Group on his show:

O’REILLY: I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O’REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can’t explain that.

Of course, the problem with this is that 3rd graders can in fact explain that, at least well enough to basically trump the goddidit theory.  You don’t need in-depth knowledge to understand that gravity pulls on the oceans, and they basically slosh around, except with predictable regularity because the moon is predictable.  Once this was pointed out to O’Reilly, he called people who understand the theory of gravity “pinheads” and suggested they hadn’t thought this through, because they totally didn’t know where the moon came from!  Also, they can’t explain why god gave us a moon but didn’t give those uninhabited planets moons.*

I would like to point out that O’Reilly’s explanation of why you have to believe in god because that means there is “order”.  To which I must point out that this is the authoritarian, patriarchal mind at its best—-he wishes to believe that him being on top of others is the natural order, so he creates a parallel fantasy of a white guy in the sky who created everything, and his power is derived from the magical white guy in the sky, because presumably they look alike and are both assholes. Also, said white guy in the sky making all the rules means you don’t have to think any more, just obey.  People who say that religion is about “spirituality” miss this, because really, many religious people like O’Reilly like religion because it makes the universe seem small and orderly.  In reality, the universe is huge and, from the small human perspective, seemingly chaotic, making an atheist understanding of nature ironically more awe-inspiring than any petty god invented by mostly illiterate people from the ancient world.

At one point in this rant, O’Reilly, in an attempt to be satirical, suggests that the non-god explanation is something crazy, like suggesting that a meteor hit the planet and created the moon.  In fact, this is basically what happened.

Because we know how the Moon got there (a Mars-sized planet struck the Earth a glancing blow about 100 million years after it formed, splashing debris into orbit which coalesced to form the Moon).

I’d read the whole post by Phil Plait, who breaks down just how silly this all is.  Basically, we know all the stuff that O’Reilly claims we don’t know: where the Sun came from, where the moon came from, and of course, why other planets don’t have moons.  The answer to that is, they do.  Mars—-who O’Reilly says doesn’t have a moon—-has two.  If I recall from my days of star-gazing with my dad, Jupiter has like eleven billionty moons.  If you’re trying to make an argument that god loves us special best by looking at moons as evidence, then you have to believe god loves Jupiter most of all. 

The only move O’Reilly can make now is to attack the theory of gravity, which is how all these other ideas hang together.  Screw attacking Darwin!  It’s time to go after Newton!**  Maybe O’Reilly can work with the Insane Clown Posse on their next big hit single, “Miracles II: Falling Apples, How Do They Work?” 

The good news is that this expanded war on science from conservatives is going to eventually come into conflict with their support of endless spending on weapons research, some of which requires knowledge of the basics of astronomy and physics that explain how the moon got there and the tides works.

*Yes, I know.  Finish the post before leaving a comment crowing about how I didn’t note that there are other moons, because I did, in fact, do so later in the post.  I don’t want you to look foolish in your eagerness to demonstrate your swift recall that Mars has two moons.

**Seriously, we all know is more complicated than that, and that Einstein played a role in revising Newton’s theories, etc. Just let that pedantry go for a moment and enjoy the joke.

In what may really win the award for tastelessness in the ongoing contest of conservatives to see who can deflect criticism of their lies and eliminationist rhetoric the hardest, Erick Erickson may win with using the occasion of the attempted murder of a Jewish congresswoman (and the deaths of six others) to launch a maudlin recruitment ad for Christianity.  (Though, it’s hard to be conservatives using the occasion of an attack on a Jewish woman to claim that criticizing them is “blood libel”.)  This sort of thing is sadly inevitable; amongst fundamentalists, blaming atheism (and evolutionary theory) for murder and mayhem is a favorite tactic. 

Quoth our nimrod:

In all the discussions we’re having, let’s not forget that bad things have happened throughout history, but we are seeing more and more a pattern of violence from those who reject Christ and we are seeing the most extreme rhetoric from those who reject the only real truth while embracing every other historic fad and nonsense as variations of truth. The one true way has been shunned, ridiculed, bastardized, co-opted, and buried over in psycho-babble nonsense, “find your own spirtual self” crap, and haphazard soul damning assorted other garbage.

For a taste of what I’m talking about, look at Timothy McVeigh. Raised a Catholic, McVeigh self-admitted that there was a god of some sorts, but that he was agnostic, had no belief in hell, and had drifted far from anything having to do with Jesus Christ. But the left routinely tries to portray McVeigh as some sort of Christian terrorist. They know not of what they speak.

The topic of faith in Christ makes people cringe. But whether you believe it or not, here is the reality: beyond us is a world we cannot see with our eyes. It impacts us on a daily basis. It is a world of very real angels and very real demons. It is a world of a very real God and a very real Satan, a very real Heaven and a very real Hell.

My feeling is that I don’t really feel comfortable around people who claim the only thing standing between them and mass murder is their relationship with an imaginary friend.  He didn’t even try to generalize and suggest that religion was necessary for morality.  He went all in and said that only Christianity is responsible for morality.  If you poked him, I bet he’d offer some opinions on what kinds of Christianity are the only kinds that prevent people from shooting up public events at supermarkets or schools.

Which leads me to his claim that non-Christianity is why there’s murder and chaos.  Most people in the world aren’t Christians, so by his measures, we all should have killed each other off by now in bloody rampages, due to that being the normal state of humans who are uncontrolled by Jesus.  Weirdly, that hasn’t happened, inclining me to think morality might have another source besides Christianity. 

What is interesting to me is that this is a threat at its core.  Which makes sense; as Media Matters demonstrates, Erickson is a nasty piece of work who enjoys threatening rhetoric:

Erickson is right. Why, just this morning, I came across a quote from a loud-mouthed atheist who denounced former Supreme Court Justice David Souter as a “goat fucking child molester.”

No, wait: That was Erick Erickson. And so was this: “At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?” And it was Erick Erickson who said he’d pull a shotgun on any government employee who tried to make him fill out the American Community Survey, too.

If Erickson’s well-advertised fondness for Christ doesn’t stop him from talking about beating people to a pulp, or pulling guns on them, or from referring to public servants as child molesters, or from presuming to know who God is angry with at any given moment, he should at least take a look at what the Bible has to say about hypocrisy before going on about the “extreme rhetoric” of non-believers.

And so this column is basically a threat: share my religion or there will be more mass murders.  Makes you long for the people who are more into speaking in tongues and self-help books sprinkled with Jesus, doesn’t it?  And the hell talk is just more threats.  As was his response to the anger his column provoked.

Atheists don’t believe in hell, so this threat doesn’t sound nearly as scary as Erickson thinks it does.  It’s like telling someone that they have to do what you say, or you will launch your army of leprechauns on them.  This almost makes me feel bad for him; he has no idea how what he thinks is a tough guy act makes everyone who hears it cluck at what a simple-minded coward he seems to be. 

This sort of thing is always tried by right wing Christians who’ve convinced themselves everything should be a recruiting opportunity.  And, in my experience, it’s not very sticky.  I don’t think most people think about Timothy McVeigh’s religious beliefs one way or another, but if you want to know, he seems to have created a mish-mash of some Christian beliefs and some Christian Identity beliefs.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: since religion is made up, it’s endlessly malleable.  It’s really a poor predictor of moral behavior, because people can adjust their beliefs as they go to rationalize whatever they want.  Erickson is functionally trying to argue that religion is an effective form of mind control; ironically, he shares this belief with the Jared Loughner, though they obviously differ on the value of mind control, with Erickson in favor and Loughner against.  I don’t think it’s that simple.  I think religion is, at best, a weapon in the art of social control.  But Erickson is definitely saying Christianity works by getting inside someone and creating morality where none existed, which is definitely more akin to mind control. 

For the record, it actually seems like atheists are underrepresented in prison populations. But I would caution against reading causation into what is almost surely just correlation; many of the factors that make it likelier someone will be an atheist also make it likelier that they won’t go to prison. I just don’t think there’s much of a relationship between criminality and religion one way or another.

I was lucky enough to be the first speaker at Skepticon 3.  I was unlucky enough to have a cold.  But you can barely tell!  I was really happy with this talk, so check it out.

Roy Edroso has his annual round-up of wingnuts pretending Christmas is under assault up at the Village Voice, and it’s a doozy this year. What’s fascinating is that they’re always wrong.  It’s always bullshit.  A creche is moved from public to private property, and the assessment is this “ruins” Christmas, presumably for the 1-2 people in the world whose entire Christmas experience is about staring at a creche that is on public property.  (It loses all its magic if it’s not a state endorsement of religion.)  Then you have wingnuts pretending that a museum exhibit at the Smithsonian that is running October 30-February 13th was somehow done because of Christmas, as a direct assault on it.  Now, I realize that Christmas season starts earlier and earlier every year, but in what part of the country is it still Christmas up until Valentine’s Day?  If you’re going to be paranoid that an exhibit that features gay artists is some kind of assault on your traditional values blah-di-da, at least get creative about it.  The exhibit runs over Halloween (what Dan Savage calls Heteroween) and near Valentine’s Day (where the most irritating portrayals of heterosexuality imaginable blanket the airwaves)—-you could at least come up with a more interesting, paranoid attack than pretending that gay people don’t have Christmas trees.  Or in the case of Pat Buchanan, pretend that people with genitals don’t have Christmas.

But my favorite has to be annual feigned outrage that Planned Parenthood sells gift certificates, so you can give someone a check-up for Christmas.  Not the most exciting gift, but don’t worry, wingnuts think it’s totally sexxxxxxy, by claiming that the gift certificates are actually for abortion.  I’m trying to imagine how they think an abortion gift certificate presentation would go.  Here’s my guess:

VIRGINAL INGENUE (OPENING ENVELOPE): Oh wow, an abortion!  Thanks, older friend from the Feminist Recruitment Conspiracy. 

FEMINIST SLUT MACHINE: I know you’re not sexually active, but….

VIRGIN (WHO LOOKS LIKE SARAH PALIN MIXED WITH TAYLOR SWIFT, BUT WITH EYES THAT TAKE UP MOST OF HER HEAD): Well, I had no interest in sex before, and didn’t even really know what it was, but I’m going to go out and ride like 15 cocks tonight, all because now I can an abortion!  I can’t wait. 

FEMINIST: There’s nothing like your first abortion.  Getting your uterus scraped out is always a pleasure beyond compare, but your first time is special.

VIRGIN: Hey, look, I can spend this gift certificate on condoms, so I don’t even get pregnant in the first place.  That’s strange.

FEMINIST: Eh, that’s just there to keep the government money coming in.  No one actually uses birth control.  Why would you, when you have the chance to have someone put a tube in your cervix, drain your uterus, and give you a giant pad to sit on for the next week or so while you bleed out your ladyflower?

Yeah, that’s how we live.  Sure.

Anyway, with all these imaginary assaults on people’s right to enjoy Christmas, I thought you all would enjoy a fun counterpoint—-an actual attempt to censor atheists who are reaching out to each other during this holiday season.  (Via.) Atheists are buying ad space that is available to everyone, believers and non-believers alike, and putting up what I would consider exceedingly boring messages about how you’re not alone if you don’t believe in any gods.  In Ft. Worth, there are four ads on the side of buses, and some ministers tried to strong arm the city into refusing the ads by arranging a bus boycott, which failed.  The justification for this attempt at censorship was awesome:

“It’s a season to share good will toward all men,” Mr. Tatum said. “To have this at this time come out with a blatant disrespect of our faith, we think is unconscionable.”

It’s the season to have good will towards men, so the proper behavior is to tell some of those men that they have no right to express their opinions or seek community.  Strange definition of “good will”. 

That said, I don’t necessarily agree with atheists who think bland messages—-in this case, that it’s okay not to believe in god—-can’t be taken as an attack on religion.  I mean, they’re not in the most formal sense, but the mere existence of atheists is upsetting.  That other people gave in to their doubts means that the doubts that nibble at the you the believer’s brain might be true.  The biggest obstacle for many people in admitting that religion is pretty stupid-sounding is the fear that they’ll be all alone and rejected.  Being exposed to other atheists and seeing that they’re just fine is what often tips people over.  So yes, just existing and being out about your atheism is bad for the churches and their ability to retain members. 

Via Lindsay comes one of those stories that just brightens up a day that was otherwise ruined by this white, wet stuff on the ground you Yankees call “snow”. 

Locked up in a California jail, Malcolm Alarmo King wanted healthier meals. In an argument apparently made to a friendly court, he won a ruling from Superior Court Judge Derek Johnson that he should be fed double-portion kosher meals.

Battling to keep its food costs down, the sheriff’s department argued that King himself admitted “healthism” was the so-called religion justifying this request. But Johnson wasn’t daunted, calling a sidebar with King’s lawyer, Fred Thiagarajah, and the county prosecutor and asking for suggestions about a religion he could cite in the kosher-meal order to nail the issue down once and for all, reports the Orange County Register.

“I said Festivus,” Thiagarajah tells the newspaper—and Festivus it was. The holiday (Festivus for the rest of us) was created by the writers of the popular Seinfeld television show, county counsel argued to no avail.

Sometimes you can feel it when a million pedantic internet commenters are firing up their keyboards, so let me just pre-emptively note that everyone is aware that Festivus was conceived as a holiday, not a religion.  But surely we can see the forest despite the slightly inaccurate trees here.  And that forest is composed of win.  Decisions like this tend to expose the underbelly of religious claims, which is that they are based on air and bullshit and so there’s exactly zero reason that you can’t make similar claims that are admittedly farcical, and deserve to have them taken exactly as seriously.  How do you rank bullshit, after all?  Why should someone else’s made-up bullshit be considered superior because it’s so much older?  There was a time when Christianity was as new as this faith “Festivus”, after all. 

You could, I suppose, say that a faith should be judged by how much the people in it actually believe it.  But my faith, the Church of the Mouse and the Disco Ball, was established on the grounds that our devout don’t believe their own bullshit.  This is a core tenet of our faith, and to deprive us of it would be religious persecution.  Also, if you start demanding that people actually believe bullshit before it becomes a real religion, you’re going down a rabbit hole.  If believers actually have to believe their beliefs, you’d start losing a bunch of ‘em, honestly.  Not that you could tell.  How would you prove someone really believes what they say they believe, or that they just follow a religion because of convenience, custom, or an inability to ask hard questions of themselves?  You can’t.  In fact, belief in Festivus has one thing going for it over many other believers’ beliefs, which is that the faithful person has converted, so there’s some evidence that they really thought about it and made decisions.  Most religious people simply believe what they were raised to believe.  So who believes more—-the person who has made a conscious choice, or the person who just does what they were expected to do?

As the head of the Church of the Mouse and the Disco Ball, you have my complete permission, should any of you get locked up, to claim you’re a member of the faith and must be indulged whatever dietary restrictions you feel are necessary.

Via Media Matters comes one of those stories that really drives home how much you have to, if you’re a modern conservative, completely switch off your brain so that no evidence or reason ever penetrates.  And just in time for the holiday season, too! Here is the story that kicked off the stupid-fest:

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you—because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”

Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin’s blog had the best possible response ever to this little rhetorical flourish.

When you’re pushing a myth, there’s no more appropriate entity to pray to than a mythical goddess.

Seventeen words, three lies—-two direct lies, one implied.  That’s not a wingnut record, but a nice contender in terms of packing bullshit into minimal space.  Well-played, Powers!  Let’s take these lies one at a time.

1) Global warming is a “myth”.  This one is kind of awesome, because it’s an exact reversal of the truth.  The conspiracy theory that would have you believe the vast majority of the world’s scientists have colluded to falsify data and create an elaborate lie about global warming is hard enough to believe just on the organizational level, but the assumption that their motivation was to steal your penis-substitute SUV makes it even better.  I would actually say that it’s harder to believe that this could happen than there’s a moon goddess of reason, and I’m a pretty hardcore atheist.  But as Christian apologists are always whining, you can’t prove a negative—-there could be a teapot in space, an invisible dragon in my kitchen, and a Mayan moon goddess.  But you can disprove the assertion that global warming is a myth, due to the overwhelming amount of that stuff that we in the field of knowing how to use our brains call “evidence”. 

2) Christiana Figueres and her “moonbat” coalition actually intend to pray to Ixchel.  If you can read, you’ll see the problem with this assertion.  Figueres said, at least according to this report, that you should be inspired by Ixchel.  This is what those of us in the field on knowing-how-to-read call an “allusion”: “Allusions are often indirect or brief references to well-known characters or events….. Allusions are often used to summarize broad, complex ideas or emotions in one quick, powerful image.”  Allusions to mythological figures are a common rhetorical flourish.  If Figueres, for instance, was Greek, she could have made a similar speech asking her audience to be inspired by the ancient Greek goddess of reason, Athena.  This likely wouldn’t have created nearly as much snickering on the right, however, because Athena has a long history of being referred to in European literature.  Once you get the white people literary allusion blessing, I guess you’re not as funny any more.  So extra points deducted for using racism to bolster your non-argument.

3) That Ixchel is a myth, but Jesus is totally real.  This isn’t stated, but implied in the context of a wingnut landscape that involves lots of screeching about the “War on Christmas”. (Malkin is a consistent warrior on behalf of the belief that someone is trying to steal Christmas from her.)  The amount of proof that a god was born to a human virgin, sacrificed his life to save all of mankind from paying for a woman who ate an apple, and rose three days after dying is equal to the amount of proof that a moon goddess gave birth to 13 sons, two of whom created heaven and earth.  Which is to say, there is no proof of either. Apply reason and logic to both stories, and they are equal.  Except that the former is more obviously misogynist in its summary, so I suppose some wingnuts would see that as “proof”, but by actual logic standards, it’s not. 

I would generally caution people who are so gung-ho about believing in Jeebus to carefully consider if they want to even acknowledge, much less deny, other beliefs.  The realization that other people believe something you’ve always believed wasn’t true—-whether it’s that a moon goddess blesses childbirth or that heaven involves virgin-boinking—-is often the first step to looking at your own beliefs with a critical eye.  Skepticism about other supernatural claims puts more people on the path to atheism than any other factor, I’d guess.  For people invested in keeping believers believing, the smartest stance is to pretend no one has ever actually had a belief other than yours.

But Powers did write more than one sentence in his post, so the stupidity doesn’t stop there!  While this statement fails on the test of packing as many lies as he can into minimal space, I liked it for just general dickwaddery. 

Here’s an image of Ixchel found on a Wikipedia page. If Helen Thomas and Code Pink had a love child…

That’s some top-notch argumentation there!  Powers doesn’t find that this ancient drawing of a goddess makes his dick hard, therefore neener neener neener.  That Ixchel is no looker!  She’s nothing like the Virgin Mary.

Now there’s a fine piece of ass—-she could almost be a Fox News anchor, if she just submitted to the bleach bottle.  Either way, Powers would totally stick it to her.  What other proof do you need?  Powers and his penis’s reaction to religious art is far better evidence in the argument over whether global warming is real than all those stupid scientists and their dumb numbers and measurements.

And, in one of my favorite wingnut tics, Powers basically contradicts his already silly argument:

In any case, it looks as if Ixchel is smiling on the Cancun Summit attendees:

Let’s see how this works.  Global warming isn’t real because there’s a moon goddess that Powers totally wouldn’t stick it to, which means that liberals are ugly and sexless.  But global warming also isn’t real because people who accept the evidence have fun at parties, which you, the embittered wingnuts, are jealous of because that’s certainly not the life you’re living.  Liberals are evil because they’re no fun/too fun.  And that makes global warming not real.  If he’s only have called the attendees hipsters, I think we would have had a real contender for the contest of what wingnut post best exemplifies using button-pushing on an audience of embittered assholes with insecurity complexes over actual reason.

All weekend at Skepticon, books were everywhere.  The book seller had books about atheism, about science, and books written by the speakers.  There were books being purchased, read, carried around, and signed.  But these were not the books that were the ones being most discussed, even as the speakers hawked their own books from stage.  That honor went to two highly contested texts: the Holy Bible and On the Origin of the Species.  Never were two books so discussed while remaining largely unread. 

Copies of The Origin were all over the place.  The reason was that a creationist group set up in front of the convention to protest it (which was really odd to me, but was shrugged off by a lot of people who had dealt with these folks before), and their form of protest was to hand out copies of The Origin with an intro to it written by evolution denialist Ray Comfort.  His creationist group put out their own version of The Origin in order to swing people towards creationism a couple of years ago, and they’ve been handing out free copies ever since.  You can tell the second you see their copies of the book that they’ve vandalized the text somehow, simply because their copies are a lot lighter than the actual book On the Origin of the Species.  A quick Google search demonstrates that this suspicion in correct, that the Comfort version of the book has four excised chapters, because Comfort doesn’t actually want people exposed to the evidence that Darwin marshaled for his theory.  He also replaced Darwin’s actual introduction with his own evolution denialist gobbledy gook.  Comfort would have you believe that actually reading The Origin will turn you against it, but his censorship of its actual contents proves that he knows that claim is false.  Conventioneers responded to this peculiar protest by taking the books and then circulating them around so that the speakers could sign them, turning them into souvenirs of the event. 

The other book that was being carried around by some folks was the Bible.  They snagged the free ones that the Gideons put in hotel rooms, and also asked speakers to sign them.  (I joked that I should have written, “Have a bitchin’ summer!” as my tag in the Bible, except my handwriting is so poor that people probably wouldn’t get the joke.)  One guy came up with a fun idea of putting stickers that said “I Doubt It” that were advertising Skeptical Inquiry on the Bible and then returning it to the hotel room for the next person to find.  This entire incident was another reminder to me of how different it is to be an atheist living in hyper-liberal and tolerant areas (like I do).  My usual stance towards the Bible is indifference, honestly.  It’s not that I don’t know about Gideon Bibles, for instance, but I so rarely think about them that it would have never occurred to me to look for one in my room for any kind of protest stunt to pull.  But I think in some parts of the country, being mindful of the non-stop Christianity shoveling isn’t a choice. 

As Ray Comfort clearly understands, actually reading On the Origin of the Species is likely to move someone closer to accepting evolution.  In contrast, actually reading the Bible tends to turn people away from faith, which is why churches tend to discourage it, substituting “Bible study” for actual Bible reading.  But it was clear from the way these books were being bandied around that this isn’t really about what’s in them, but what they symbolize: traditionalism vs. modernity, faith vs. reason, patriarchy vs. feminism.  And that’s fine, I guess.  Something had to be the symbols for that, though there’s a distinct reluctance on the part of the modernists in this equation to make Darwin’s book a symbol, because we reject the idea of treating science like received wisdom.  But you have to work with what you got, not what you wish you had.

There was some amount of butt hurtness from the actual (and rare) accomodationists about the fact that this conference was mainly about atheism.  Even talks that weren’t about atheism had atheist implications.  Mine, for instance, was about feminism as the rational position, but the entire first half of it was about how religion is a major obstacle for women’s rights.  (The second half was about pseudo-science.  I’ll be putting it online soon, I hope.  They were taping all the talks given.)  PZ Myers talked about evolution and how it works on a genetic level, but the conclusion was about why evolutionary theory is, whether people like it or not, a threat to the god hypothesis.  Rebecca Watson’s was about Christmas and the value of the various fantasies about it, but the conclusion was about atheism and whether or not atheists should celebrate Christmas.  (Her conclusion was abso-fucking-lutely.)  The claim was being floated that 3 out of 15 speeches were on atheism, but honestly, ever single one I was able to catch was about atheism on some level.

And that’s fine.  It’s asinine to claim that the focus on atheism is going to run off a handful of religious people who might otherwise be interested in skepticism because they’re skeptical of UFOs and Bigfoot.  Not that it isn’t true, but it’s basically beside the point.  This claim underestimates the intelligence of religious people, because it assumes they don’t understand that skeptical claims about other supernatural beings have implications for claims about god.  It also assumes they wouldn’t get that they’re in a thicket of atheists because everyone just politely refuses to talk about the obvious. 

But more than that, the argument fails to honor the people who actually show up, who actually give money, and who actually care about this event.  Those people want to talk about religion.  They fall into two camps, though many people have a foot in each one.  First you have people like me, who are atheist activists because we see the horror religion does in the world and we simply think challenging it is more important than challenging beliefs in, say, fairies.  Then you have people who’ve actually been the direct victims of horrible actions taken in the name of religion, or they’re close to someone who has, and for them atheist organizing is a healing thing to do.  For instance, there’s a whole lot of child abuse going on in this country in the name of Jesus Christ, and people who see that and are distressed by it don’t need someone blabbing on to them about how they have to turn down the volume on their objections because they might offend someone. 

Talking about atheism doesn’t preclude talking about other stuff.  The fear is that if you talk about atheism too much, you’ll run off religious people who might otherwise add value.  But I would argue that the atheist talk gets people in the door, and once there they are happy to hear your arguments about resisting quack medicine, promoting science, and, in my case, embracing feminism.  You would lose half those sets of ears if this was a conference that had more stuff about Bigfoot than it did Jesus.  That’s just a cold, hard fact.  People turn against religion for emotional reasons, but that doesn’t mean their arguments aren’t rational. Treating the angry atheists like they count less because they’re angry is simply unfair.  They should be angry.  Also, that they are angry doesn’t mean they are strident, humorless, or scary.  As I noted above, for instance, instead for reacting to the creationists protesting the event by yelling at them, most people expressed their anger with humor, by defacing the books with the signatures of noted heathens speaking at the event.  When you speak to people, they often have stories of beatings at the hands of fundamentalist parents, harassment at work from believers, and feelings of isolation in their various communities because of their atheism.  They should be angry.  I feel a lot of the debate about turning down the volume on atheism is telling the angry people that their feelings don’t count, and that’s simply unfair.

So, I’m sure you saw the latest Pew report on Americans and religious knowledge.  It, unsurprisingly, discovered that Americans are both really religious and profoundly ignorant, even about their own supposed faith.  But the big news is that atheists score better than all other groups on the test. 

This, of course, was absolutely no surprise to the loose online atheist community.  I took abbreviated version of the test, and wasn’t particularly surprised that I got 15 out of 15 questions right.  Many, maybe most, atheists that I know came to atheism because they learned so much about religion, enough that the logical inconsistencies and overt wish fulfillment aspects of it made it impossible to take it seriously.  They’re often people who are inclined to pay close attention to the content of things instead of just the social context—-the kind of people who, when sitting in church, actually think about the texts being presented and not so much about the role the church plays in their social life and self-identity. Thus, it’s easy to ask questions, and once that starts happening, atheism is right around the corner. 

I just want to note that activist atheists who interrogate religious claims by a rationality standard and piss people off should bookmark this study.  That’s because it’s an excellent refutation to the Courtier’s Reply.  The Courtier’s Reply is a believer tactic that involves the believer telling an atheist that they don’t appreciate religion because they don’t see how complex it is, as if elaborate arguments about angels on the heads of pins somehow is evidence towards the claim that angels are real. 

So, when believers tell you that you only criticize religion because you’re ignorant, just point out to this survey. Turns out knowing more about the actual details of religion correlates more to rejecting.  Religion reminds me of those insects that have showy, beautiful colorings.  It seems really beautiful, but if you examine it up close, it’s actually a big, gross insect with hairy legs and overall creepy-crawliness. 

In retrospect, this story seems a bit inevitable and yet, at the same time, almost impossible to believe.  For those who don’t know (and shame on you!), the New Pornographers are a beloved indie rock band who have taken on the admirable task of filling the needs of a nation that has burned holes in their Replacements and Cheap Trick records. 

They also have a great name, the origins of which are disputed (naturally) on Wikipedia.  I’ve always appreciate their name, insofar as wearing the T-shirt when I’m flying tends to reduce the number of people who strike up pointless conversations with me despite my obvious investment in the book I’m reading.  What I really like about their name is that they skip right over the cutesy nickname “porn” and go straight for the dirtier-sounding “pornography”.  Plus, there’s a pleasant fissure derived from the dramatic difference between their sunny, cheerful power pop and the name, which seems dark and mysterious in all the ways their music really isn’t.  I love incongruous band names, like The Smiths. 

Alas, their name has caused them to be canceled from a performance at Calvin College.  All we know from this press release is that the university determined that many of its students and staff were simply incapable of understanding irony.  No, I’m not really paraphrasing to make fun of them. This was their exact conclusion:

However, after weeks of discussion and consideration, the irony of the band’s name was impossible to explain to many. The band’s name, to some, is mistakenly associated with pornography. Consequently, Calvin, to some, was mistakenly associated with pornography. Neither the college nor the band endorses pornography.

The ongoing battle between rock music and Christianity—-at least conservative Christianity—-continues to amuse and fascinate me.  Rock musicians belligerently continue to do their thing with little regard for how many sad little wannabe rockers want to join the party, but are bound by their faith to avoid most forms of fun that are too, you know, fun.  Calvin College seems to have a long history of bringing bands on campus to entertain the kids, including many that I’d probably think have content more troubling to conservative Christians than the lyrics of the New Pornographers. 

But what do I know?  I’m the kind of asshole who thinks that the real problem that should worry conservatives is that the family values teabagger crowd turned out in large numbers to nominate a man for New York governor who thinks it’s fucking awesome to send a bunch of people pictures of a woman being fucked by a horse, a situation that I highly doubt was fully consensual.  But what do I know about morality?  My brain’s been fried by overindulgence in power chords and peppy harmonies. 

Like Atrios, I feel both surprised that Cal Thomas went there and sadly ashamed that I was surprised.  And by “there”, I mean that Thomas has gone ahead and come out against the First Amendment.

We are doing a poor job of fighting the terrorists at home if we continue to allow Muslim immigrants, especially from Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, into America. We won’t win this war if we permit the uncontrolled construction of mosques, as well as Islamic schools, some of which already have sown the seeds from which future terrorists will be cultivated. We won’t win this war if we continue to permit the large-scale conversion to Islam of prison inmates, many of whom become radicalized and upon release enlist in al-Qaida’s army.

He then suggests that we model ourselves after Syria when it comes to monitoring imams and Muslim congregations.  No word, of course, on whether or not we should extend that surveillance to Christians, even though Christian terrorists are an ongoing problem.  Ask any abortion provider. 

Of course, because some moron will inevitably accuse me of wanting to monitor all Christians, I am not saying that.  It’s a violation of basic human rights and not a good use of limited resources to monitor everyone.  Which is to say that Thomas manages, in a couple of paragraphs, to come out against the Fourth Amendment that protects against unwarranted search and seizure, as well as the First Amendment, that protects the freedom of religion.  My point is simply to draw attention to the wild double standard here.  Thomas would revolt if you proposed putting the same restrictions on Christians that he would have put on Muslims.  Which means, once again, that he and people like him are motivated by delineating who is and isn’t a “real” American, and only extending rights to those people who pass their arbitrary, unconstitutional standards. 

I also want to draw attention to how unabashedly fascist Thomas is, in his use of the term “purging” to describe his proposal to scrub Muslims and presumed Muslims out of our society through immigration restrictions, harassment, preventing prisoners to convert, and disallowing Muslims to build houses of worship. If you suggested that Muslims be pushed into ghettos and had their movements controlled through the use of a badge system, I have little doubt that Thomas and his buddies would be all over that, too.  Of course, we had idiots showing up in comments here and claiming that Islam is an “ideology” and so the concerns about racism are misplaced, as if restricting people’s basic human rights based on a cultural/religious/ethnic identity is so easily bracketed off from previous and similar assaults on Jews, African-Americans, the Irish, etc.  If you don’t think so, ask yourself this: How do you think Thomas and his buddies intend to tell who is Muslim and who isn’t?  Do you think that someone who, like Barack Obama, had a Muslim parent but isn’t Muslim himself would count?  What about someone who isn’t really faithful, but does participate in family occasions and holidays?  What about people who hail from predominantly Muslim countries but aren’t Muslim?  The haters have already made it clear that they don’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and a thoroughly integrated Muslim community center like Park 51, and if anything, they find the latter more threatening because it exposes the lie that is their black and white worldview.  This is about creating an “us” and a “them”, and then scapegoating the “them”.  Truth and basic decency get in the way of that project.

By the way, if it wasn’t true before, it’s now true that the word “balance” has come to mean “right wing propaganda”.  A Maine newspaper ran a fairly pedestrian story about the end of Ramadan on September 11th, and the date gave the bigots their in for freaking out.  And the paper apologized for not having “balance”.  What do they mean by “balance”?  If you show Muslims doing things that threaten to make readers ponder the possibility that they’re human beings, are you obliged to balance that with a story declaring that they aren’t human beings? 

This just reinforces the theory that what is really sending wingnuts around the bend is the understanding that the vast majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists.  They’re harder to scapegoat if the majority of Americans realize that they’re not scary, monstrous, or even particularly different.  And it’s clear that it’s really, really important to wingnut America that Muslims are available as scapegoats.  So any story that is humanizing or informative causes the wingnuts to lose their shit. 

It is entirely un-American to persecute Muslims.

In ways that look like persecution, at least.