God, Ponca City, and the Chrysler Building

Ponca City has been mentioned in public, and get this: it wasn't in this blog, nor was it in Ponca City itself! It was at Butterflies and Wheels, and the person doing the mentioning was Ophelia Benson, whom I now admire more than ever. I am totally quoting this:

[W]hat else would Allah do to give a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind? Write his name in letters of fire across the night sky, high enough and large enough for a whole hemisphere to read? Send his only begotten daughter to be tortured to death? Dictate another really boring book about camels and finance? Pick up the Chrysler building and move it to Ponca City Oklahoma? Issue the 11th commandment, forbidding people to wear their baseball caps backward? Of course not. The only sensible way to give a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind is to write your name and your prophet's name on three pieces of meat the gristle thereof in the kitchen of a restaurant in Birnin Kebbi, Nigeria.

Did you catch that part I bolded? Ophelia Benson could have picked any crappy little town, but she picked out Ponca City, Oklahoma -- exactly the kind of notice for which Ponca City has long been hungry. Take that, other crappy towns everywhere!

It's an interesting thought, to be sure. It may surprise you to learn that if Allah or any of the other leading deities suddenly relocated the Chrysler building to Ponca City, it would not only substantiate the god's existence and awesome powers, but would also dominate the local skyline, its 1000+ feet challenged only by a couple of the larger grain solos in the area.

Church, State, Pledge, People Fighting. Film at 11.

I got a chance to watch Pledge of Allegiance Blues, a documentary by Lisa Seidenberg concerning Michael Newdow's efforts to take "under god" out of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Well, that's how it begins. The documentary opens by asserting that there are two kinds of stories --- the kind in which a stranger arrives in town, and the kind in which the protagonist goes on a journey -- and that the documentary will be both. In fact it is both of those things and more things besides.

A blurring of purpose dogs the film, but what emerges is nonetheless an interesting and informative snapshot of some of the lively antagonisms roiling the USA as of 2005 or so, and of some of the people involved:

• The historical, political and legal questions of "under god" in the pledge.
• Alan Dershowitz overcomes his crippling camera-shyness and gives an interview in which he uses the F__ word.
• Speaking of the F__ word, Larry Flynt appears to discuss the usual things he discusses when he's not discussing his porn empire: censorship, the schemings of the religious right, etc.
• Sandy Rios, arguably the most concerned of the Concerned Women for America, speaks for the theocrats. She's quite a piece of work.
• There are scenes concerning Judge Roy Moore and his Ten Commandments monument. He's quite a piece of work.
• Above all, the film profiles Michael Newdow himself: concerned parent, doctor, lawyer, publicity whore (not necessarily a bad thing), singer-songwriter, citizen activist, self-made man, contrarian, possible crackpot.
• The film offers plenty of 'man on the street' interviews that show just how low the Low Information Voter is capable of going in the USA, especially when it comes to these hot-button cultural divisions.

The film is worth watching for the portrait it paints of a society divided over some very basic questions -- strangers to each other in surprising ways and yet trying to take a shared journey.

God as Amazon Reviewer

Another day, another effort to make the Koran compatible with modern life:

An-Na`im holds that traditional sharia, as it developed over the centuries following the revelation of the Quran, indeed sanctions aggressive jihad, the killing of apostates, the subordination of women, and dhimmitude or worse for non-Muslims. This history cannot be interpreted away. What can be reinterpreted is the Quran, which includes verses both from the earlier, more tolerant, Mecca period of Mohammed’s life, as well as those from the later Medina portion, marked by conquest and subordination. It was the Medina version that had become orthodoxy by the 10th century. But it is the verses from the earlier period that represent the true, universal message of Islam; the Medina verses were in fact an adaptation to particular historical circumstances in the life of the embryonic umma.

The argument that the Mecca verses are superior to the Medina verses rests on the idea that "particular historical circumstances" gave rise to the latter, but this begs the question. It's trivially true to say that texts originate in particular historical settings, so this just shifts the question from "which text is authentic" to "which particular historical setting gave rise to an authentic text?" Insofar as conformity with god's will is the measure of authenticity, any answers to this question will be unverifiable unless and until god shows up to answer: until then, we humans have the texts, and we have the historical settings of the texts (those historical settings and our understandings of them are, incidentally, available to us via texts unless there is a time-travel technology I've not heard about). What we don't have is god logging in and giving his five-star Amazon rating to one text and a one-star rating to the other text.

We also don't have a god snapping his almighty fingers and causing the inauthentic, unrepresentative, faulty verses to vanish. One would expect that to be an easy feat for an omnipotent deity notorious for caring about what people think and say about him. Evidently, if the god of the Koran exists, that god is content with the verses as they are, nice and nasty, Mecca and Medina alike.

As if that weren't enough to be swimming against in this effort to tart up the Koran for modern times, the many generations of Muslim scholarship have kept all the verses around and have considered them authentic, valuable, truthful, representative, and so on. The various contradictions have been noticed, and an entire subspecialty of Muslim exegesis has developed under the title of Naskh, or abrogation, which sets rules (or tries to) for cherry-picking interpretations amid the contradictions.

I would like to believe the Koran is compatible with the modern world and modern notions of human rights. I would like to believe a lot of things. The fact is, it isn't. And I've noted before the very steep challenges associated with efforts to whitewash holy texts.

Stones and Circles

In Iran, eight women and a man have been sentenced to death by stoning:

The eight women sentenced, whose ages range from 27 to 43, had convictions including prostitution, incest and adultery, Reuters news agency reported. The man, a 50-year-old music teacher, was convicted of illegal sex with a student, reports said. ... Under Iran's strict penal code, men convicted of adultery should be buried up to their waists and women up to their chests for stoning. The stones used should not be large enough to kill the person immediately.

Oh goodness no -- you don't want vile miscreants like this to die swiftly. I mean, you definitely want them to die -- that should go without saying, yes? -- but you want them to experience several final minutes of agonizing pain during which they can contemplate how wrong they were for deploying their genitals in ways that god, in his infinite wisdom, disfavors.

God wants what he wants, and if that means he wants people tortured to death for sex acts, who are we to question it? And who would question the premise that Iran's judiciary functions in accordance with the will of god? And who would dare look upon any of this and permit themselves to doubt whether Islam is a religion of peace? Of course it is a religion of peace -- and mercy, justice, wisdom, love, compassion, etc. It says so itself.

Jesus Burns Your Pickle

It's hard to know what to say in response to this video. I will simply submit that "burn your pickle" is the new "drink your milkshake" and leave it at that.

(H/T Portland Mercury)

What If An Atheist Was One of Us?

On the most recent Freethought Radio podcast, guest David Mills spoke one of those little truths that's almost too obvious and yet, I think, very valuable: that one of the most powerful things atheists can do by way of outreach is to show that we're just regular people. We go to work; we hate paying so much for gas; we hang out with our friends; we try to keep our kids out of trouble; our television sets tune in all the same crappy programs; we glue our fingers together with Krazy Glue, etc. We're no better and no worse than anyone else out there. We're not only like your friends and neighbors, there's every chance that we are your friends and neighbors.

So while I have my quirks, I think I'm a pretty regular person in most ways, so here are a few mundane details plucked from the recent tedium of my life that serve to show it.

• As of last week, I am on a new medication to treat narcolepsy. It's not working, but I am told that it will accumulate in my system over several days so I should resist drawing any conclusions about its efficacy until Friday. Clearly I have gone ahead and drawn some conclusions about its efficacy and yet it's not Friday. That shows how good a patient I am, which in turn lends support to my suspicion that the doctor is just feeding me the several-days-of-accumulation line to buy himself some time during which I won't pester him.
• The men's room situation I mentioned before is terrible, just terrible. Traffic is diverted to the men's room the next floor up, so it smells like an open sewer, it's almost always crowded, toilet paper supplies are chronically low, I feel like I'm spending inordinate amounts of time walking to and from it, and I would like to use this last item in the comma-delimited list to re-mention the sewer smell.

The point is, the next maddeningly normal person you encounter might not believe in god. Note the absence of horns. We all want better-smelling public restrooms.

More Framing Dust

Wow. Frame-master Nisbet has really outdone himself with this post on The Great Wafer Crisis of 2008; let me count the ways:

• Even as he trolls with concern over the state of scienceblogs, the photo at the top of the post shows PZ Myers standing next to Richard Dawkins. While PZ Myers is a leading contributor to scienceblogs, Richard Dawkins has nothing to do with scienceblogs. Nisbet couldn't find a photo of PZ Myers without Richard Dawkins? For exactly how many seconds did he try?
  
  In any case, exactly what argument does Nisbet think he's ending by invoking Richard Dawkins? Here's my wild guess -- the argument that says that Richard Dawkins is bad, bad, bad for science because while his books and other writings reach enormous audiences, he doesn't follow Matt Nisbet's advice about addressing matters falling outside the narrow boundaries of biology. In other words, the argument Nisbet thinks he is ending is his own argument about the proper way to communicate about science. Nice.


• "Don Imus Atheism" -- Nisbet made a funny! Is that framing? And if so, to what end? I suspect it's Nisbet's hilarious way of saying that PZ Myers is to science communication as Don Imus is to ... um, whatever it is that Don Imus is doing. That is, PZ Myers just can't get out of his own way and should just shut up!


• Can anyone spot the gigantic error in the following, as quoted from Nisbet's hiliarious "Don Imus Atheism" post? Here goes:

  Even fellow atheists and free speech advocates are troubled. Here's what Andrew Sullivan has to say:

  It is one thing to engage in free, if disrespectful, debate. It is another to repeatedly assault and ridicule and abuse something that is deeply sacred to a great many people. Calling the Holy Eucharist a "goddamned cracker" isn't about free speech; it's really about some baseline civility. Myers' rant is the rant of an anti-Catholic bigot. And atheists and agnostics can be bigots too.

  What alarms me the most about the incident, however ...

  Kudos to you if you identified multiple errors in this. The first error is in the implication that Andrew Sullivan is an atheist. He is not an atheist. He is a Catholic. And this gets to the larger flaw, namely, the fact that Sullivan has been called out very effectively for this criticism of Myers (e.g., here and here, without even leaving scienceblogs). Several critics have noted that Sullivan's cracker-defending comments represent a complete reversal of Sullivan's take on the Danish Cartoon Controversy, another case in which religious fanatics got overheated about symbols and responded with very non-symbolic, real-world actions.
  
  It's true to say that even Andrew Sullivan, usually an advocate of unfettered free speech, took exception to PZ Myers' insults to the cracker. It would be more completely true to say that Andrew Sullivan engaged in a good deal of special pleading in doing so, and was called on it (and to his credit, published some of the criticisms on his own blog), and subsequently backed away from his initial assessment. The net result, contra Nisbet's implication, is that PZ Myers engaged in free, albeit widely offensive speech, and free speech advocates have coalesced around that view of the matter.

This distinction between presenting what is true and what is more completely true is what irks people about Matt Nisbet's approach to framing, and why his "Don Imus Atheism" stuff will just kick up more dust.

Making a Living with Christian Love

Quelle surprise! Pastor Fred Phelps and his knuckle-dragging church will be protesting another funeral, this time the one held for Tony Snow:

[M]embers are upset because Snow was a “critic” of their operation and “a high-profile representative of godless Big Media and Big Government.” In the past, WBC has said that “war casualties are divine revenge for America tolerating gays and lesbians.”

Being a world-class attention whore must pay well given all the jetting around Pastor Fred and friends have to do to protest all of these funerals, not to mention the costs of making their weather-resistant "God Hates Fags" posters. It's not easy to make a living in these times of economic distress, so we should congratulate Pastor Fred for converting his modest gifts -- bigotry, shamelessness, callousness, Bible knowledge -- to money and fame.

The Troubles

Ostensibly addressing Islam, Benjamin Barber has a very odd way of making his case for the compatibility of religion and democracy:

If democracy means anything it means the right for people to make their own mistakes. To practice their own religion. To pursue their own forms of self-government. I know, I know. That takes time. It can compromise rights. It sometimes allows patriarchy to persist and affords religion the chance to subvert as well as support democracy. But that’s how it is, and history suggests the alternatives, however well intended, are usually far worse.

If by democracy, you refer to "people" -- not sure which people, but Barber's assurances of a persisting patriarchy suggest that these people will all have guy names -- following a religion that sanctions and imposes the abridgement of human rights and encourages other unnamed "mistakes," then the answer is yes.

Whereas if by democracy you mean precisely the opposite of this -- freedom of conscience, full participation by all members of society, upholding human rights -- then the answer must be no.

Barber's larger point seems to be tu quoque -- yes, Islam is backward and incompatible with democracy, but so is every other religion:

It is not Islam per se, but religion tout court that stands in some tension with secularism and with democracy – a tension that is healthy rather than unhealthy in a free society. Augustine’s Two Cities and Pope Gelasius’s two swords speak to a world of the body and a world of the spirit, of the temporal and the eternal, the worldly and the ecclesiastic. These dualisms do not arise out of theology but inform theology with the deep logic of duality that defines our being. The opposition of morality and politics, and of divine or natural and positive law, is transferred to the opposition of church and state that produces troublesome but healthy tensions for societies everywhere.

Would examples of such "troublesome but healthy tensions" include forced marriages involving child brides? Ritual removals of children's sex parts? Women being forced out of schools, cars, and voting booths? Detonating a belt packed with explosives in a crowded public place? Bombing family planning clinics? Institutions that deal with child rapists by shuffling them down the road to the next parish? These perverse injustices and deranged priorities arise directly from theology, and they're quite a bit worse than troublesome.

Humanist Symposium 22: Questions, Questions, Questions

I wish I could tell you that the postings gathered in this edition of the Humanist Symposium give definitive answers to all of life's enduring questions. I wish I could tell you a lot of things. What I can say instead is that the posts affirm both the importance of the questions and humanists' enduring engagement with them. Enjoy!

The importance of questions and questioning:

• CJ hits the theme directly with The importance of questioning posted at Spiritual Inquiry . com.


• Lirone, Truth and fear posted at Words that sing: that fear and truth are really about the same thing -- asking questions or failing to.


• Hannah presents The Purloined Letter: Approaching Reflection Collectively posted at The Purloined Letter: that clarity comes from posing questions, carefully and deeply.


• Greta Christina, "Ya Gotta Reach for Your Dreams": An Optimistic Realist Perspective posted at Greta Christina's Blog: cliches exist because they contain a kernel of truth, but a well-rounded and wise person will probe the kernel's boundaries.


• PhillyChief, Zarathustra Test posted at You Made Me Say It...: that questions play an important role in keeping us honest and within our limits.

Does observing the contrast between the natural world and the human-cultivated world provide inroads to deeper meanings? Or does it just reflect back what we already expect? The first two posts on this theme are a bit of a point-counterpoint:

• The Ridger, Dragonfly Sign posted at The Greenbelt.


• Nick, All Wrong? posted at Nemesis.


• Andrew Benardin wraps it up nicely with The "Soul" of a Blossom on The Evolving Mind: the idea of biological uniqueness is richer than the idea of a soul -- and it's true too!

Questions about sex, and quite possibly a few answers too:

• Mike White, Christians, Pagans and good ol? sex posted at A Superflous Ramble: a naturalistic, no-nonsense exploration of sex.


• Skeptigator presents Choice vs. Nature (and something about homo-dolphins) posted at FreeThought Fort Wayne: sometimes questions come in the form of thought experiments, and sometimes thought experiments involve gay dolphins. Awesome!


• Paul Sunstone relates The Soul of an Artist posted at Café Philos: an internet café: being a humanist is perfectly compatible with addressing questions to one's inner resources, intuitions, subconscious, gut, "soul," what have you.

Assorted questions, observations, and explorations:

vjack presents Picking One's Battles and Atheist Priorities posted at Atheist Revolution: do humanists and freethinkers choose the right battles and set the right priorities? A valid question.

Two by Phil for Humanity, The Definition of Morality and Ethics and The Origin of Morality and Ethics posted at Phil for Humanity: that moral questions are difficult not least because defining morality is so difficult.

Chris Hallquist, Well, this lack of a God is awkward posted at The Uncredible Hallq: my favorite post in this edition discusses the awkwardness and psychological knot-tying that comes with questioning religious belief.

C. L. Hanson presents Review of Book Reviews posted at Letters from a broad...: who says you need to believe in god to devote yourself to alternate realities?

PhillyChief, Who's Lacking? posted at You Made Me Say It...: not believing in god is no lack.

Last but not least, Ebonmuse offers Smoke on the Breeze posted at Daylight Atheism: dispelling the clouds of dogma and mysticism frees us to see more clearly and appreciate more fully the productions of human creativity.

----------------

The next Humanist Symposium will be hosted in just a few short weeks at Disillusioned Words on August 3. It's too late for this edition, but it's not too early to turn in your entries for the next one.

Happy questioning!

Snake Handling: Not What It Used To Be

Things have changed, and not for the better for those of us who are not snakes -- the cops are cracking down on snake-handling for god:

The pastor of a Kentucky church that handles snakes in religious rites was among 10 people arrested by wildlife officers in a crackdown on the venomous snake trade. ... Most were taken from the Middlesboro home of Gregory James Coots, including 42 copperheads, 11 timber rattlesnakes, three cottonmouth water moccasins, a western diamondback rattlesnake, two cobras and a puff adder.

It's no surprise that authorities have turned against this faith-based tradition since the listing of snakes has a two-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others ring to it that really jars the purists: it reads like a North American Scary Snakes Hall of Fame until it gets to cobra and puff adder.

Cobra and puff adder? If the snake-handling rubes are trafficking snakes from the old world, they're running an operation that smacks of levels of sophistication ill-befitting dogpatch's proudest and most hidebound barbarities. And it only barely helps that the name "Gregory James Coots" converts so readily to "Cooter."

Freethought To-Do: Support PZ Myers

You've written your letter of support for PZ Myers, right? He is the target of a fatwa, or jihad, or curse, or imprecation, or whatever the Catholics are calling it these days for having expressed forbidden thoughts about Jesus flesh crackers.

I understand that the Catholic League is upset about what he said, but we should stand up for the principle that religious fanatics don't get to dictate our discourse. This sort of thing gets going and invariably ends very, very badly.

They're trying to get him fired from his teaching position. He asks for your support.

God's T-Ball League

Christians and others within the Abrahamic traditions are preoccupied with finding loopholes by which to avoid the many cruel, arbitrary, capricious, inhumane, barbaric, ludicrous, idiotic dictates laid down in the Old Testament, especially Deuteronomy and Leviticus (e.g., no eating eagles, ravens, storks, owls or bats; no houses without parapets; the requirement to kill blasphemers and disobedient children, etc.).

It's understandable. I would probably do the same thing were I cowed into believing that I am required, under threat of eternal torment, to obey and love a god who laid down such rules. One such loophole is, oddly enough, to note precisely that these rules are cruel, arbitrary, capricious, inhumane, barbaric, ludicrous, and idiotic:

... "holy" in the [Leviticus] text tends to carry the connotation of "consecrated": holy to the Lord. A priest is, of course, consecrated to his deity, and his life is a life of liturgical service to his deity. There is no surprise if this liturgical service involves actions that are strange, for instance ordained by ancient tradition, held to be revealed by a deity, and so on. It is no surprise if a priest of a religion should be commanded to wear only certain kinds of clothes, eat only certain kinds of foods, perform special actions on special days, and so on.

In case you missed it, the economical euphemism for cruel, arbitrary, capricious, inhumane, barbaric, ludicrous, and idiotic is liturgical. There are, by definition it would seem, no surprises in liturgy. A world in which people serve bats and storks as part of a nutritious breakfast would be a world that is unholy to the Lord for some reason, and we can't have that.

However economical in terms of keystrokes, using the word liturgy rather conspicuously sidesteps the question of whether people are still required to follow all the rules listed in the Bible, but don't worry, because what is demanded without good reason can be dismissed without good reason:

... while the specific rules no longer literally apply in the Christian era, the idea of a whole life of service to God, a life of liturgy, is intensified in Christianity, in at least two ways. The first way is through every Christian's participation in the sacrifice of Christ, a participation more intimate than that of the Israelite in the Levitical sacrifices, because Christ the High Priest lives through us. The second, and liturgically very significant, intensification is that in the Eucharist all Christians need to participate, in a completely real way, in the quintessentially priestly action of eating of the sacrificial victim.

So the insane liturgy of the Old Testament (mustn't eat owls) was just God's way of setting the stage for a new insane liturgy (must eat Christ), much in the way that T-ball in grade school sets the stage for baseball in junior high.

It's too bad for the people stoned to death in the course of god's high stakes T-ball league, but one has to break eggs to make am omelet. Just don't dare let it be an eagle's egg.

What It Sounds Like Not to Give a Damn

My thanks to Andrew Sullivan for bringing the utter shallowness of both Libertarianism and Christianity to sharp relief in the course of a single post:

...the cooptation of Christianity for various forms of socialism and redistributionism - Obama's tendency - is worrying to me. Because it isn't about encouraging charity; it is about the enforcement of "charity" by the strong hand of the state. And in so far as it forcibly takes people's property from them, it also diminishes their capacity for real charity.

Libertarians can't repeat this slapdash bit of ethical cant frequently enough -- surely it is their ideological crystal meth.

This differs from its refreshingly direct equivalent -- "I don't give a shit what happens to the downtrodden" -- only in its marshaling of evasive casuistries and verbal chaff. It's the bubblegum-scented puck tossed in the overused, reeking urinal.

But don't take my word for it. Observe Sullivan himself, just a sentence or two later, walking it back:

... In the world as it is, there should be some mandatory public provision for the poor, the sick and the indigent. But it should be a safety-net to avoid specific social evils, not a system of redistribution to construct some notion of "social justice" ...

There should be some mandatory public provision for the poor, the sick, and the indigent, Sullivan says, suddenly unconcerned about the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad prospect of depriving taxpayers of the capacity to do good of their own accord under the crippling scheme of "mandatory public provision."

Presumably Sullivan has in mind some really sharp idea of what he means by such wiggle-words as "specific social evils," "safety-net," "system of redistribution," and so on, but these just beg the question under discussion: one person's safety-net is another's extravagance, the provision of which is bound to sap the recipients' work ethic; one person's shiftless pauper is another's worthy beneficiary.

Sullivan ends where he began, chaining his Libertarian fancies to the alleged purity of Christian ethics:

In the end, the social Gospel can make Christianity less, rather than more, likely. The state cannot experience faith; and it cannot express charity. Only individuals can. One by one.

And there it is: money extracted by taxation and given to the needy doesn't count as giving from our innermost hearts. Mandatory giving is not giving at all. (It's still just a pallid imitation of True Giving if we collectively vote it into place, I gather.)

Quite so. Likewise, laws against child rape deprive would-be child rapists the opportunity to demonstrate the pure, unaided control of their impulses. The crazy quilt of traffic signals, designated streets, and brightly-painted lines deprives all drivers of the opportunity to coalesce into an elegant, self-organizing, voluntary system of vehicular traffic.

Q.E.D., and very compellingly so insofar as you don't actually give a damn about child rape or orderly traffic. Or the needy.

Jesus's Doppelgänger

Someone has been digging up treasures:

A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

Perhaps Jesus took some practice runs at being killed, rising again, and inspiring Gospels? And here's some understatement:

Given the highly charged atmosphere surrounding all Jesus-era artifacts and writings, both in the general public and in the fractured and fiercely competitive scholarly community, as well as the concern over forgery and charlatanism, it will probably be some time before the tablet’s contribution is fully assessed.

Is Jesus the son of god or just another resurrection tale? Christians devoted to the former can be expected to push back and treat this discovery skeptically. As they should -- "Bible times" archeology attracts more than its shares of hucksters and frauds.

Monkish Ignorance: Views Differ

George W. Bush visited Monticello on Independence Day and said, in part,

On the 50th anniversary of America's independence, Thomas Jefferson passed away. But before leaving this world, he explained that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were universal. In one of the final letters of his life, he wrote, "May it be to the world, what I believe it will be -- to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all -- the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government."

Ed Brayton notices that Bush's quotation of Jefferson misses an entire dependent clause that qualifies the nature of the chains Jefferson had in mind:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

It was "monkish ignorance and superstition" that kept people in the thrall of monarchs who claimed a "divine right" to rule. Jefferson didn't deny the existence or the relevance of (deist) god to political economy, but his Declaration of Independence forcefully denied that god enthrones or legitimates monarchs. Instead, Jefferson's god endows people with the capacity for self-government -- "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," not from kings and clergy threatening damnation. This is the central argument of the Declaration of Independence, an argument that is carried forward, underscored, and embodied in the USA's god-free Constitution.

In keeping with his tendencies to wish a simpler reality into existence and befoul everything he touches, it is not surprising that Bush would be uncomfortable with recalcitrant words about "monkish ignorance" and cut them from his remarks. It is probably too charitable to assume, in the first place, that Bush himself had anything to do with the drafting of this speech. Perhaps we should be thankful for every word of Jefferson's that Bush leaves unspoken on a "pearls before swine" principle.

Can't They All Lose?

Some portion of the amusement-park-attending public wants tilt-a-whirls painted to glorify Jesus, and this demand begets competition:

Nashville could have two Bible theme parks thanks to a developing rivalry in Middle Tennessee.

The competition comes as The Holy Land Experience plans an expansion from its Orlando base to Hendersonville headquarters of Trinity Music City -- even as Bible Park USA, which has been attempting to buy land outside Murfreesboro continues its efforts to find a site. But some observers have questioned whether there is sufficient interest to support any new amusement park, the Nashville Tennessean reported Monday.

Baby Reason cries every time a new Bible-themed amusement park opens.

(via Ed Brayton)

Monday Vaguely Spiritualist Biophilia Blogging

Toward a partial reply: talking of spirituality is akin to nailing blocks of Jell-o to a wall, if it isn't simply a cloudy way of paraphrasing the claim that the universe revolves around me. That said, I have tried it now and then -- with what success is for others to judge.

I think William Wordsworth took great strides in fleshing out (so to speak) an idea of the spiritual that doesn't rely overmuch on god. He does invoke god and other supernatural entities here and there, but his spirituality is fundamentally grounded in memory, contemplation, the observation of nature, and the appreciation of beauty.

Wordsworth tells us again and again that life can present moments of literary unity which can then, in his case at least, feed the actual creation of literature: ecstatic recognitions of himself in others, echoes of the past in the present, profoundly mood-altering recollections or "inhabitations of memory." He wants us to call to mind, cherish, and renew what we had when, as children, we wandered the woods and tossed stones into a stream. The cultivation, manners, conventions, and necessities of Responsible Adulthood rob us of essential understandings and connections.

Here are a couple of famous examples from Wordsworth on this theme:

Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

And then there's this, which desperately needs a better soundtrack, and the background story of which may be as fake as a three dollar bill, but elements of which can't be denied.

The Atheist 13

Bing, owner-proprieter of Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes, tagged everyone, and I am proud to count myself a member of everyone.

Q1. How would you define “atheism”?

Atheism is what happens in a person's head when he notices there is no good reason for believing that god exists.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?

Yes, vaguely. I was baptised as a Methodist and attended a Lutheran school for a time, and my mom was a sort of William James-ish pantheist, although she didn't take any of it very seriously. My home town was awash in many varieties of Christianity, however. And I think Jews were allowed in town so long as they kept their book-learning ways at a healthy remove. (I picked up that very stereotype there!)

Q3. How would you describe “Intelligent Design”, using only one word?

Superfluous.

Q4. What scientific endeavour really excites you?

The efforts to revive extinct beasties from extant DNA samples. I hope someone pulls this off and we end up with a wooly mammoth, a wooly rhinocerous, a Neanderthal person, a Tasmanian Tiger, whatever.

Q5. If you could change one thing about the “atheist community,” what would it be and why?

We would have more people working to do the hard part more effectively -- namely, helping people envision life after god so as not to be afraid of it. I admit I fall short in this.

Q6. If your child came up to you and said “I’m joining the clergy,” what would be your first response?

"We need to discuss this." I would seize the opportunity to make him a secret agent to destroy it from within [evil cackling].

Q7. What’s your favourite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?

That the Bible or the Koran are "instruction manuals" for life, without which we'd be in a free fall of relativism and indeterminacy. The extent to which people whitewash the major Holy Books never ceases to astonish me. In the words of Reverend Lovejoy, which only barely exaggerate the matter, "have you ever sat down and read this thing? Technically we're not allowed to go to the bathroom."

Q8. What’s your most “controversial” (as far as general attitudes amongst other atheists goes) viewpoint?

I seem to kick up a fair amount of dust every time I suggest that religion causes good people to do evil things. I continue to maintain that religion tends to distort value judgments in a way that makes this inevitable, so that (for example) "Jehovah's Witnesses" really think they're doing the right thing when they allow their children to die from curable conditions.

Q9. Of the “Four Horsemen” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite, and why?

Since I respect them all, it's rather meaningless to pick only one, but I'll say Hitchens because a) he comes at this from roughly the same angle as I do (politics, humanities) and b) he recently allowed himself to be tortured and demonstrated great intellectual honesty about it.

Q10. If you could convince just one theistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be?

Joe Six-Pack.

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Just Words

Interviewed by Salon.com in support of his book-length expatiation of the Courtier's Reply, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, Karl Giberson lets this fly:

In the Bible, you read the same events chronicled by different writers, and they put things in different orders or leave things out. If someone is really chronicling events, then events would be lined up in the right order. We know the Civil War comes after the American Revolution. But a biblical author, who thought for some reason that the American Revolution seemed more relevant, might reverse the order. It wouldn't be because he was incompetent historically, it would be because he was presenting these events from an agenda that's not that of a historian.

Karl Giberson is quite sure, somehow, that biblical authors are not really chronicling events but doing something else altogether. He isn't very clear just yet about what they are doing, but what's even more interesting is that if Giberson is right, it follows that they themselves were unclear about what they were doing. Reading biblical authors, one gets the distinct impression that they were chronicling events; if they were doing something other than that, they've done a piss-poor job of specifying it. But Karl Giberson knows better. He just knows! He put it in print, after all, and we should believe everything we read, provided, of course, that we're careful to pick out what the author is really doing as distinct from what he seems to be doing. Sigh.

The interview continues:

[Interviewer]: Many Christians insist the Bible is the literal word of God.

[Giberson]: Yes, that's widespread and again it's because of a certain lack of sophistication from a literary point of view. Many people translate "the word of God" into the "words of God." They don't recognize that when you talk theologically about the Bible being the word of God, you mean that it contains an important message, that God is revealing himself through the history of Israel and Jesus Christ. New Testament theology gives us the "Word made flesh in Jesus." But that phrase makes no sense if you're talking about words and sentences. But it does make sense if you're talking about some kind of revelation about the nature of God.

The Bible is correctly understood in Christianity as the Word of God. But it's a distortion to say the Bible contains the words of God as if God had dictated these things. We need to grant that there are differences in the way that biblical authors talked about the world. We can't just pull all of this into the 20th century as if it was just recently written down by God for our benefit.

Whew. It's a good thing we have Karl Giberson around to dispel the distortions afoot about what the Bible really means and really expresses. For example, he gives us this priceless business about "the word made flesh through Jesus" pointing us to a revelation about "the nature of god" above and beyond mere "words and sentences." Even if we squint hard enough to try to make sense of that, it founders on realization that when it comes to the life and times and deeper meanings of Jesus, all we have is words and sentences; that's the form of the very thing that calls for interpretation, explanation and reconciliation with the rest of our observations and knowledge. Youtube wasn't around; the camera crew for Punk'd wasn't around; there weren't any paparazzi whirling around photographing it all; no one thought to swab any good DNA samples out of any one's cheeks; no one living today was a witness to any of the events or personages, er, chronicled. We have a smattering of written records -- words and sentences -- and almost nothing more. Pointing at those words and saying "the word of God, not words of God," however emphatically, doesn't feed the chihuahua.

As for the larger question of evolution and religion, plenty of people say they accept evolutionary science comfortably alongside belief in god, and I take them at their word. I don't accept both, but that's because I accept the first and reject the second, not because they're necessarily opposed. At most, evolutionary science explains a number of things about the natural world and thus closes a steadily increasing number of gaps into which one might need to insert a god of the gaps. Moreover, evolution's track record of explaining the natural world is such that I have a high confidence level that it, and not god belief, will close the gaps that remain; and as far as track records go, assertions about god fail utterly as explanations since they invariably beg larger questions even in the rare case they succeed in saying something definite. That said, evolution is limited in scope, as is any scientific theory deserving of the name, so it doesn't pretend to be the kind of comprehensive, ultimate explanatory scheme that god belief claims to be. Thus evolution and god belief do not stand in a strictly zero-sum relationship.

Here are a couple of other discussions of Karl Giberson's new book:

PZ Myers - If you read only six pro-science, anti-fog, anti-bullshit atheistic tracts on the internets this year, make this one of the six.

Jason Rosenhouse - Thorough and knowledgeable.

Tristero - S/he tragically calls him "Gilberson," but the rest of the review is well stated.