More Facebook Bullshit

Like many of you who have Facebook pages, I see a lot of bullshit posted by Christians. Here’s an item that appeared on my wall some time ago:

Philip Yancey is a well-known author in evangelical Christian circles, a favorite of many. The part of this quote that caught my attention was the final sentence, “We must believe in something-the instinct is as strong as thirst or hunger….”

First, I don’t agree that people must believe in something. Second, I don’t agree that people have an instinct to “believe.” Third, I don’t agree that thirst and hunger are instincts in themselves; rather, they are manifestations of the instinct to survive.

The crux of Yancey’s error is the second idea he states, that people have an instinct to believe. The drive that people have to learn and know is tied to our survival instinct: we must learn to control ourselves and our environment in order to survive. The best way to gain such control is to know what the facts of the matter are, not just to believe that we know what they are. The danger in simply believing in “something,” of course, is that mistaken beliefs often lead to costly, even deadly, errors.

The failure to distinguish between “belief” and “knowledge” is common among fundogelicals. Erasing the distinction makes it easier to settle for accepting simple belief rather than having knowledge about matters of faith. If “belief” and “knowledge” are simply points on the same continuum, it doesn’t matter too much where on the continuum their beliefs/knowledge lie. But, if belief and knowledge do not lie on the same continuum (which they don’t), then religious believers have a serious problem. Regardless of all their prattle about the beauty and value of simple faith (a term often used interchangeably with belief), and despite their many attempts to designate their belief claims as knowledge claims, and notwithstanding their attempts to pretend that belief and knowledge are two different points on one continuum, many believers seem to realize that mere belief really is inferior to actual knowledge. After all, there is nothing inherent in “belief” that makes one belief superior to another. This is why many believers search desperately for historical or scientific evidence that appears to bolster their beliefs and seemingly transform them from the realm of fantasy (which is where all those other wrong beliefs belong) to that of knowledge (where they hope their beliefs belong). Unfortunately for believers in superstition, woo, religions, etc., any and all beliefs not genuinely rooted in reality are false. Any apparent evidence to the contrary, any bit of uncorroborated or unconfirmed evidence that seemingly justifies fantastical beliefs, is either mistaken, or worse, manufactured.

I think Philip Yancey is actually a pretty intelligent guy (this is a statement of what I believe, not what I actually claim to know – I may well be wrong) who just happens to be wrong about this matter. Humans don’t have an instinct to believe; rather, we have an instinct to survive. One of the manifestations of that instinct is a drive to know – not believe – stuff about ourselves and our world, because it is knowledge, not mere belief, that will enable us to survive and, if we use our knowledge wisely, thrive well into the future.

– the chaplain

 

Facebook Nonsense #1

Actually, I suppose this is my second Facebook nonsense post, since I could count this one as number one. But I’ll start with number two and call it number one. Why not? Who’s counting?

First up, then (consider the Reagan post a pre-game warm-up), is an excerpt from Dinesh D’Souza’s recent book, Godforsaken:

My goodness, where do I start with this one? I’ll begin by noting D’Souza’s claim that Richard Dawkins isn’t actually an atheist – just an ordinary (brilliant and famous, but otherwise ordinary) guy who doesn’t believe in gods. Instead, according to D’Souza, Dawkins is actually a wounded theist – someone who believes in god(s) but doesn’t like him/her/it/them very much at the moment. Apparently, either Dawkins doesn’t know he’s wounded, or he knows it and isn’t admitting it. D’Souza’s claim raises some questions for me.

1. The first one has to do with rhetorical strategy: what does D’Souza gain strategically/rhetorically by renaming Dawkins (and his unnamed cohorts, a group that may include, for all I know, you and me)?

2. Another question has to do with ethics: what gives D’Souza the right to label Dawkins (or anyone else) as something other than what he claims to be?

3. A third question is evidentiary: how does D’Souza know whether Dawkins (and others) should be classified as “an ordinary atheist” or a “wounded theist?”

I don’t know if any of you are interested in reading D’Souza’s book, but I’ll pause here to make a public service (or perhaps it’s a disservice) announcement and inform you that the book is currently available as a free Kindle download from Amazon.com. I’ve downloaded it and may actually read it. The only things stopping me at the moment are

a. I’m still reading The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (five books in one volume – convenient!), and
b. I’m not sure I’ll be able to stomach D’Souza’s arrogance. Anyone who thinks he has the right to classify nonbelievers into categories he prefers rather than accepting their claims at face value strikes me as someone with an enormous amount of hubris.

Unless it’s actually weakness hidden behind fake hubris. Maybe D’Souza can’t argue effectively against the actual atheistic claims of Dawkins and others, so he has to reconstruct their arguments into positions that he can argue against. Could this be the rhetorical advantage he seeks? If so, then I’ve answered question number one. And that leads to the answer to question number two: is D’Souza behaving underhandedly (i.e., unethically) by recasting his interlocutors and their claims? If I’m right about number one, then the answer to question number two is yes, he is. He has no right to redefine people or their positions; he appears simply to be staking a claim and hoping that no one catches him crossing the boundary. If I’m right about those two issues, then the answer to question number three is a no-brainer: D’Souza has no evidence for his claim that Dawkins (and who knows who else) is a wounded, angry, perhaps even hateful and vengeful theist rather than a straightforward atheist as he claims to be. It’s just easier for D’Souza to argue that Dawkins himself is flawed than it is to address flaws in Dawkins’ (or anyone else’s) actual atheistic claims, which brings us right back to where we started – question number one.

Damn. Now I’ll have to read the fucking book to find out whether I’ve sussed out D’Souza’s game. Wish me luck. And send me a few bottles of French wine; they’ll make the bullshit go down easier.

– the chaplain

 

No Comfort

In my last post, I wrote about some drivel that was published in a Christian funeral bulletin. In my view, that doggerel was tasteless, but at least it was well-intended. I think the story re-posted below surpasses the previous one in tackiness, as it sets out the most egregious example I’ve ever seen of using a funeral as a bully pulpit to scare people into greater religiosity. Read it for yourself and see what you think.

Is that amazing or what? A priest was asked to perform a funeral service, and he took the opportunity to trash the deceased! I thought the point of funerals was to a) comfort the living, and b) commemorate the life of the deceased. I believe in being honest, but there are some occasions (and I think funerals are among them) on which the adage, “if you can’t say anything good, then don’t say anything at all,” applies. If the priest couldn’t comfort the bereaved, then he should have refused to do the service. I doubt that the family could have been any more offended by his refusal than they were by the way he actually discharged his duty.

And, no surprise here, Major Army Barmy praises the priest’s behavior. Oh, he posted a disclaimer about the “vomit” statement (marked the priest down for poor taste on that one), but was tickled pink that the priest announced his belief – and it is merely a personally held belief, mind you, not an ascertained fact – that the deceased was “going straight to hell.” Think about this a minute. The “vomit” statement is inappropriate (presumably because it raises a graphic image of an unpleasant bodily function), but the “hell” statement – which references eternal torment of unimaginable, unspeakable proportions – passes muster. And Christians think my priorities are fucked up!

Also, notice how the “warning” to preachers plays into the evangelical Christian persecution complex. Golly gee, Major – you don’t think some people may classify the statement “liars and fornicators are going to hell” as hate speech because it’s actually, you know, hateful? At least, it would be if hell were any kind of real threat. Still, if people hearing such a remark actually believe in hell, it’s easy to see how it would be received poorly. I won’t give Major Army Barmy the satisfaction of labeling his hell-remark hateful, since a) the threat is empty, and b) I don’t want to feed his persecution complex (he feeds it just fine on his own). Nor will I insult him by labeling it as ignorant. No. I’ll just call it what it is: the nasty raving of a religiously deluded zealot.

– the chaplain

 

Pastor Preaches About Porn

It may surprise you to learn that I’m still on the email lists of several pastors. My theory is that pastoral email lists get purged about as frequently as voter registration rolls. Anyway, this past Monday, a pastor sent me a sermon outline that included this little gem:

#1 Christian Porn site is xxxchurch.com – 40M Americans visit internet porn sites, 72% Male, 28% Female; 42.7% of internet users visit porn sites; 47% of Christians say this is a problem at home; 89% of porn created in US; 260 new porn sites created daily

The first thing I thought when I read that was, “He gave his congregation the address of a porn site?!? How many people went home from his church last Sunday, ate their roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and spent the afternoon checking out xxxchurch.com? Is he nuts?” That night, I went home and checked the web site myself.

For research purposes.

Honest.

What I discovered was that xxxchurch.com is not a porn site. It’s an anti-porn site dedicated to helping people conquer addictions to porn and/or sex. And stop masturbating. My first thought was, “I can’t believe he didn’t check out the site before preaching about it. Did he just accept someone else’s word that it’s the Internet’s #1 porn site? He didn’t dare risking a peak himself lest he become defiled?” Then, I thought, “On the other hand, maybe he did check it out and knew exactly what it was. And he felt okay about giving out the URL because, even if people in the congregation looked it up, they wouldn’t find porn.” Since I haven’t met him, I haven’t asked him what he actually knows about the site.

Then, I started thinking about the statistics he cited. The last two – the number of porn sites created daily, and the percentage of porn sites originating in the USA – appear to be reliable, since they deal with specific parameters (assuming, for the sake of argument, that “porn” is clearly defined). The others look pretty soft to me, though. For example, what do people mean when they say that porn is “a problem” at home? What is the definition of “a problem?” The other stats – males, females, Americans visiting porn sites – don’t say anything specific. How were these statistics compiled? How does anyone know the gender of people viewing particular porn sites? One can’t assume that all web site visitors fit the site’s target demographic group. After all, 50% of Playgirl’s readers are gay males. It may not be far-fetched to assume that a similar percentage of gay males visit Playgirl’s web site. Moreover, one certainly can’t reliably judge gender on the basis of user names. It’s also unclear whether these millions of people visit porn sites daily, weekly, monthly, or whether these numbers include people who have stumbled across such sites once or twice in their lifetimes? I’m sure you can come up with other questions about these alleged statistics. The bare numbers don’t mean anything without such measurement contexts as explicit, clear time frames and definitions. In short, this pastor’s statistical barrage may have sounded impressive to himself and his listeners, but he didn’t actually say anything meaningful.

The take-away point of my sermon is not the one the pastor intended, but it’s one that all of us should remember: never be persuaded by “statistics” that lack specific definitions, contexts and parameters; such “statistics” are really nothing more than numbers.

– the chaplain

 

Gawd Said, Let There Be Irony – And It Was Good

The gallons of irony contained in a recent story from One News Now is so astonishing it nearly took my breath away. The astonishment and irony begin as soon as one reads the story’s title:

Children Shouldn’t Be Protected From Truth

I agree with that statement. There’s not much more in this story with which I agree, so I figure I’ll start positively and work from there.

A California bill opposing Christian ideals in social studies textbooks has passed a 6-2 vote and is making its way into the Senate.

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted last week in favor of S.B. 1451, a measure that will combat the religious revisions to textbooks launched in Texas earlier this year. The bill now heads to the full Senate.

This is great news and gives me hope that there are at least a few sane people governing the USA.

Introduced by California Democratic Senator Leland Yee, the bill would require any information about Texas’ revisions to be reported to the legislature and the secretary of education. S.B. 1451 also calls the modifications “a threat to the apolitical nature of public school governance and academic content standards in California” and would expect the California Board of Education to review social studies textbooks.

Anyone who thinks that public schooling in the USA has ever been apolitical has never gone to public school in this county. Or they’ve drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid and are still functioning under its influence. Public school education in the USA, as in other countries, has always been about grooming children to be good citizens, an aim that is inherently political. In the American context, partisanship between accepted alternatives, i.e., Democratic and Republican parties, has been minimized, but it would be foolhardy to think that some partisanship doesn’t exist. When I was in public school, I was taught that everything about the Soviet Union was inferior to everything about the USA, that Soviets were the Bad Guys and Americans were the Good Guys – all the time. We were always right, and we always did the right thing in the right way, while the Soviets were always wrong and they always did the wrong thing in the wrong way. Having said all that, I agree that the recent curriculum changes that have been mandated in Texas are bad for any students who will be unfortunate enough to be exposed to indoctrinated into them. Apparently, enough state legislators in California agree with me to have taken action to address the situation:

The measure states that the revisions to Texas’ textbooks were propelled by an “inappropriate ideological desire to influence academic content standards for children in public schools” and that they were a departure from accepted history.

Yes! Someone had the guts to call a spade a spade. The changes in Texas are about a specific religious ideology, not fact or truth; they are about revising and re-writing history and, consequently, can’t be anything but “a departure from accepted history.”

Randy Thomasson, a conservative activist and president of SaveCalifornia.com, believes the regulation is unnecessary. Although he is advocating changes in California’s schools, he contends that the state “doesn’t need to ‘protect’ children from the truthful lessons of history.”

“History classes need a makeover so that students are accurately taught about the history, values, and persons that made America great,” Thomasson adds. “Who can be against this but those who despise the moral values that founded this country?”

Oh, Gawd, the irony is killing me! I agree with Thomasson that no one, especially children, should be “protected from” or otherwise denied access to the truth.  I agree that children need to be “accurately taught about the history, values, and persons” that shaped the USA. But, Thomasson and I are light-years apart regarding the substance of those lessons. What he is calling truth is bullshit, lies and the vile emissions of conservative Christian wet dreams. And please, for the love of truth, don’t overlook the way he substitutes the phrase “moral values” for “religious dogma.” Don’t ever let wingnuts like Thomasson get away with using such duplicitous terminology. Make them spell out clearly that they are speaking about specific religious values espoused by specific sects of the Christian church. Liberals, progressives and all others interested in speaking clearly must stop letting the wingnuts select and define the terminology of political debate; their deliberately obfuscating terminology masks more than it reveals. Also, Thomasson’s assertion notwithstanding, it was secular, Enlightenment values that made this country great (though flawed), not Christian values. Again, liberals, progressives and other clear thinkers can’t let wingnuts get away with misrepresenting their values and our history with their fuzzy, misleading terminology.

The state of Texas received criticism earlier this year for seeking to introduce Christian ideals into social studies textbooks. The revisions included the fact that the Founding Fathers established the country on Christianity.

The criticism leveled at the state of Texas was completely warranted – explicitly sectarian Christian ideals have no place in any textbooks used in publicly funded schools in a secular society.  Moreover, it is by no means a “fact” that “the Founding Fathers established the country on Christianity.” That is precisely the issue under dispute – although it is only disputatious to religious right wingnuts; most historians do not agree with the state of Texas, Randy Thomasson, or any other wingnuts. Slapping the “fact” label on an idea doesn’t magically or miraculously transform it  from “disputed idea” to “fact.” Obviously, the American Founding Fathers could not help being influenced by Christianity; it pervaded their culture more than any other religion of the time. It’s also not disputed that some of the Founding Fathers were  Christians. But, those few who wanted to establish trends that fuel the fantasies of today’s religious right lost the fight, and secularists won. I view the result of that struggle today and say, “And it was good.”

– the chaplain