In Florida, a woman has slain her son, and then herself. In her suicide note, she says ‘I had to send my son to heaven and myself to Hell.’

I wonder if she didn’t believe in heaven or hell, if she would have done this anyway. She reportedly had a history of mental illness, but surely, the religious crap she was being fed did nothing but fan the flames.

Crazy breeds crazy. Religion is one form of crazy. ‘Nuff said.

The first thing we notice about the world around us is that it’s self sustaining. Every observable effect has an observable cause: babies are born because eggs are fertilized; rain comes from clouds, which form from evaporated water; the sun rises and sets because the earth is spinning. These processes are no longer miracles because at no point do we need to assume an interventionist deity to explain them.

Not only does the world exist independently, but we don’t even expect god to intervene when we want him to. When I drop my toast, I don’t expect a little chariot of cherubim to intercept it before it hits the ground. I shouldn’t expect to wake up with straighter teeth if go to church enough. Alleged instances of god intervening on someone’s behalf can always just as easily be attributed to fortuitous chance. For example, he only cures diseases that might have gotten better anyway — he never heals amputees. If there is a god, he has apparently made the universe in such a way that it can exist independently, and without his continued tinkering.

This is why intelligent design is so unappealing to me. It admits that that natural systems are pretty much self contained, but at the same time, invokes a creator to explain certain special cases, like the bacterial flagellum, the bombardier beetle, or the blood clotting cascade. It’s inconsistent. I mean, if an omniscient, omnipontent god went to all this trouble to create a world that functioned without him, he could have accomplished it, right?

Presumably he could have, but creationists and design proponents seem to think we would be able to catch this guy with his finger in the pudding if we find examples of ‘irreducible complexity.’ These are places where conventional evolutionary explanations are purported to break down. One of their favorite examples is the bombardier beetle, an animal with a very strange defense mechanism. The beetle ejects two chemicals from its body to create a boiling hot spray that drives away predators. Design proponents say that since neither of the chemical components is of any use to the beetle without the other — the system could not be simplified and still be functional, hence irreducible complexity — this constitutes evidence for an all-in-one-go biological creation. Come on!

We have natural explanations for the hand, the eye, goosebumps, canine teeth, the spinal cord, mammary glands, feathers, flippers, egg laying, and camouflage, why wouldn’t evolution or physics explain a chemical reaction that happens on the back of a beetle?* If that were the case, we’d have to assume god stopped short of creating a pristine universe free of all supernatural influences, and just bitched out in a few places. This doesn’t really say much for god’s alleged omnipotence.

Imagine god, in the process of creation, working himself into a corner. “Shucks, I did all that work laying out the evidence for evolution — working in all of those details about common descent, features shared in lineages, the fossil record – but now I have to find a way for this bacterium to locomote. Oh well, they’ll never be able to see anything this small, so they won’t mind if I cheat a bit.” This is totally unsatisfying from both a scientific, and theological standpoint.

It makes no sense why god would make a clockwork this intricate, carefully avoiding leaving evidence of his agency, and then in handful of places, slip up or get lazy. However, a creationist/design proponent may come back with the old ‘god works in mysterious ways, that we may not understand.’ If they want to play it that way, then they should admit that they aren’t actually in the business of explaining things.

Personally, I think life is wondrous mainly because of things like the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting cascade, which are so remarkably unlikely they must give you pause. That these seemingly irreducibly complex things have an explanation within the bounds of physics and evolution should be something to marvel at.

*Hint: It does.

Last night I attended a talk at UC Berkeley put on by Students for a Non-Religious Ethos (SANE), and the speaker was Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist fame. The talk was primarily about his eBay story — he is the ‘man who sold his soul on eBay’ —  but his overall message was that non-believers shouldn’t be so quick to throw up a wall and alienate moderate theists. Not only because the eucharist-in-the-garbage-bin approach is detrimental to our image as atheists, but  if we really want to work for the common good, we can’t erect imaginary barriers between ourselves and others who are essentially on our side.

I really dug that. I mean, I’ll admit that I gravitate to the more militant end of the spectrum, and it’s fun watching PZ Myers go at it. However, you can’t make it an all out culture war, and that kind of resonated with me. On the other hand, I could tell that some of the other people at the talk were just expecting more ammunition for their anti-theist rhetorical arsenal.

I’m all for inclusiveness, but there is one important caveat. We shouldn’t be afraid to stand our ground when the stakes are high. Abstinence-only education and creationism aren’t equally valid opinions, they are straight up wrong, and we have evidence for it. They shouldn’t even be granted consideration in rational discourse. In contrast, the morality of abortion and stem cell research should probably be open for discussion. These are hard questions.

Lately, I have stumbled across some weird people calling themselves Christians. First it was the Christian Atheists, who believe worship and ritual are beneficial for the psyche, but that there is no god. Yeah, real good for the soul, just like plopping down in front of an empty fireplace with a hot cup of nothing, and cozying up inside a lack of blanket to read your favorite air novel.

Then there’s this guy Justin Cannon, who set up a Christian dating site … for gays. They call themselves, ‘Rainbow Christians’. Why do these people go through such odd contortions to keep hold of their faith?

I suppose the latter example is at least encouraging evidence that,  in some circles,  the bible is gaining a more moderate and tolerant interpretation. But in my opinion, they should go for the gold and call it the fairytale that it is.

I have recently been deeply pondering the relationship between morality and society. The question driving me is whether society defines its moral precepts, or whether morality exists independently. In the end, I think it’s some combination of the two: the trolley car tests point to a universal moral compass, but in other cases we have more liberty to define boundaries — sexuality and drug use, for example.

Anyway, the conclusion I am leaning towards leaves no room for morality from god, or other supernatural source. This flies in the face of those who think god’s law is a moral standard, and that without it, our world would be some frightening combination of The Garden of Earthly Delights and Mad Max. These religious types equate god with morality, and therefore maintain that a world without the former entails a world without the latter. However, I think their line of reasoning is fallacious.

The religious person first looks at the world around them, and sees it is governed by moral principles, and then looks for a source for these principles. However, unlike a sociologist, anthropologist, or biologist, they default to “goddidit” immediately, and say “mystery solved.” They then say, “if you don’t acknowledge my hypothesized source of morality, morality will cease to exist.” This is insane.

If you know anything about history, it is readily apparent that the so-called “moral absolutes” of religion are bent to the trends of the era. Things like slavery, which the bible permits, are thrown out and judged immoral when society says they are, and things like divorce get reclassified as permissible when the bible cleary says they aren’t. This is strong evidence that our morals do not derive from god.

Further evidence that morality is not indexed to religiosity is the atheist, like myself. I am not running through the streets raping children and stealing VCR’s, and neither are my buddies over at Unreasonable Faith. The atheist understands perfectly well that morality just is. You don’t kill and lie, because it’s a dick thing to do, not because your imaginary sky-papa told you not to.

I know that what it really comes down to is religious people are unsettled by the “just is” part. Morality has to come from somewhere, they’re right, but we don’t have to immediately identify the origin, and build it an altar to keep it from forsaking us. Leave it to the philosophers and social scientists, and in the meantime, just be happy I won’t steal your cookies.

I wish I could roll this out whenever I come across some creationist hater.

[Update 5/18: apparently, Billy Graham didn't write this. Blast! Foiled again by the e-mail forward goblins.]

Yet another silly e-mail. This time, a friend of mine got one entitled ‘Prayer for our Nation.’ It started with a huge black and white picture of a seated Billy Graham, staring stoically off into space. Following that was this prayer:

Billy Graham’s Prayer For Our Nation

‘Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, ‘Woe to those who call evil good,’ but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the earth with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and Set us free. Amen!’

I don’t even know where to begin, it’s just so wrong. I guess the worst part is that it just forgoes the debate as to whether or not these things are indeed wrong, calls them a loss, and beseeches the sky fairy for forgiveness.

I think the ridiculousness of the self-flagellatory judgment is evident enough, but there is one sentence that was particularly ridic. When Graham said “We have polluted the earth…” I was on the verge of conceding that he had at least one point, but then he went on to totally ruin it by specifying “with profanity and pornography.” Damn him.

–

It’s amazing how religion mutates with time. The ’sins’ it obsesses about are totally a product of the political climate of the era. Religious people ally themselves with a certain political group, and all of a sudden, the positions of their political opponents are listed among the religious transgressions, and the behaviors of their own party that are explicitly condemned in their holy-book are just swept under the rug.

Abortion? The bible says nothing about it, but it’s arguably one of the most egregious sins, according to fundies.

Usury? The bible condemns it repeatedly, but it’s a non-issue among religious conservatives, because the business world runs on interest, and Republicans love business.

Destroying the environment? I’m sure there are plenty of verses in the bible that could be used to condemn those who knowingly destroy that which god has given us. But conservatives pussyfoot around this topic, because environmental protection is the Democrats’ bit.

Slavery, subjugating women? The bible condones it throughout, but it’s not in vogue today so religious people just jump on the bandwagon.

Homosexuality? There are a few passages about it sprinkled through the bible, but there are far more about how it’s immoral to be rich. Nonetheless Christians fixate on gay marriage, and virtually ignore the socialistic implications of their holy-book.

Religion can a tool of political movements: it allows the difference between you and me to be more than a matter of opinion, but a matter of supernatural law. It’s a powerful weapon to wield against your ideological adversary, to call him/her damned. It’s even more powerful when you try to take some kind of moral high-ground — like Mr. Graham does above — by asking for forgiveness for your rival’s political positions.

Lately, my housemate and I have been having a heated debate about religious inclusion. He takes the position that governments should have an inclusionary stance towards religious groups in the interest of getting them on your side, and eventually liberalizing them out of their fundamentalist beliefs. Furthermore, he maintains that the benefits of this bridge building outweigh the risks to our separation of church and state. While he very cogently points out that secular government is not a mutually shared ideal, and therefore cannot be used as a nucleation point for reconciliation, I still believe that we can’t give these people any leeway: an inch of theocratic encroachment eventually amounts to a mile. He says I’m stonewalling religious people.

What initially ignited the debate was the the Israel-Palestine situation. He says that if Israel has any chance of ousting Hamas, it needs to beat Hamas at its own game; that is, move into Palestine, provide social services, and build mosques. His plan is essentially for Israel to appoint more liberal imams to run the mosques, and shepherd the masses to a more moderate interpretation of Islam.

I think this is a terrible idea, because it doesn’t address the core dispute between the people: the holy-land. Muslims want Jerusalem back, and while it’s true that the mutual antagonism over the years has obscured the root of the problem, it’s really a religiously motivated land dispute. Period.

Take for example the Sinai war. Soon after the creation of Israel, the entire Muslim world lined up at the side of Palestine, and basically attempted to choke Israel to death. They refused to let Israeli planes into their airspace, and wouldn’t let any ship coming from or bound for Israel dock at their ports. This ultimately culminated in Israel lashing out and invading the Sinai Peninsula, but it’s a good indicator of the importance of Jerusalem to the Muslim faith: it transcends borders. Any solution that does not take this into account will ultimately fail.

This is why if you went in and supplanted Hamas with Israeli funded religious and social programs, you could only get rid of suicide bombers and extremists temporarily. If there is anything we have learned from the existence Israel, it’s that you can deny a people their religious holy-land for a very long time, but they will continue to stew about it.

It’s clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at its core a religious problem, and as long as people are allowed to confound religious political issues, it will remain a political problem too. This is why regardless of the side you support, the values you should espouse should be separation of faith from government. I don’t see how demanding reasoned, secular diplomacy is stonewalling when your opponents are religious nutjobs refusing to even sit down and discuss diplomatic solutions with an ‘illegitimate state.’ Having qualifications for what should be considered rational discourse is not stonewalling.

Anyway, our debate moved on to Obama’s new ‘faith-based office,’ which I believe is an absolute waste of time. I know it’s in the interest of everyone to move forward together, but I don’t understand why we have to kowtow to people who unabashedly admit that the US would be better off as a theocracy. We have standards for rational discourse, and just like we would have a hot fire under our asses to shut down Nazi talk in Congress (sorry…Godwin’s law…), we can’t tolerate people telling us that their invisible sky fairy opposes stem cell research. Or that some holy book written by some bronze age desert people offers genuine insight on gay marriage and abortion. I’m sorry, that just isn’t the kind of reasoning I expect from the governing body of the most powerful nation in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t seek to confront their beliefs — telling them that they’re idiots would be unproductive. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to base their political convictions on empirical evidence, and therefore keep god out of government. The problem is that if you place any limitation on these people they take it as an affront.

Take senator Jim DeMint, who is claiming that this stimulus package is actually an attack on people of faith because it specifies that any school facilities that receive federal funds for renovation may not subsequently be used for religious activities. He claims this is an infringement on existing liberties, because the activities are currently permitted, and may not be in the future.

Well no, not exactly. If you were getting free fruit from your neighbor’s tree, it wouldn’t be an infringement on your rights if that neighbor decided to cut you off. He would just be exercising his prerogative to keep his own fruit. In the case of the federal government, they aren’t supposed to be giving funds to religious institutions anyway, so this is really just enforcement of a previously ignored stipulations.

If you give Christianists an inch of political ground, they are bound to take a mile. They say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That’s why I think faith needs to keep its place.

An Illinois court has ruled that a ‘moment of silence’ statute is unconstitutional. The law mandated that public school students observe a daily moment of silence, for “silent prayer or for silent reflection on the anticipated activities of the day.”

Naturally, Christianists are up in arms, saying that this is another attempt by a minority of secular-progressives to push their radical separation of church and state agenda on the embattled theist majority. However, the judge had a very interesting take on the statute:

The Statute violates this [the second prong of the Lemon test] because it prefers some religions over others. It is firmly established that “[n]either a state nor the Federal Government . . . can pass laws that aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.”

…[T]he ACLU has identified a number of religious practices that are neither silent nor still…

…These includes [sic] certain Jewish traditions, Muslim prayers that require a variety of postures and gestures including bowing and prostration, Native American religions and Krishna Hinduism.

Practitioners of these religions would, apparently, be excluded from praying according to their faith during the “period of silence.”

In other words, a moment of silence could be utilized by Christian children for prayer in school, but would by definition preclude the prayer rituals of other religions, and is therefore a ‘religious preference’ of the state — Christian children may participate in semi-organized prayer during school hours, while others may not.

What’s interesting to me is how the defenders of the statute want to portray its opponents: as bloodthirsty secularists who will attack something as simple as a moment of silence if there are intimations of religiosity associated therewith.

Well, it’s very telling that the people who are most outraged by this ruling are … Christians. If it were an innocuous ‘moment of silence’ as they claim, they would have as much to lose as an atheist. The reality, which the judge was apt to point out, is that the statute was a deliberately underhanded attempt to surreptitiously slip prayer back into the public school system — and surprise, surprise somebody finally caught on.

So now we get to listen to Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh drone on and on about how this is a Christian nation*, and how our morals come from god because the forefathers wrote in the Constititution that god endowed us with inalienable rights^†, and that they wrote his name on our money and into the Pledge of Allegiance^‡, and blah, blah blah.

Well you know what, I don’t in principle have a problem with god’s name popping up everywhere — he’s kind of our mascot, like the San Diego Chicken — but the moment these things are used as evidence that we have a national religion, or that I am less of a patriot because I am an atheist, then I want it off the money, and out of the schools and courtrooms, and stricken from the Pledge.

*See the Treaty of Tripoli, article 11.

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen…”

† Actually, that was in the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution is an explicitly secular document by design.

‡ There was no ‘In God We Trust’ on our money, or ‘under god’ in the Pledge until the 50’s. Look it up.

h/t Pharyngula

Here, I thought Rick Warren was going to be nothing but an embarrassment at the invocation. Turns out, his prayer was a great addition to the ceremony: classy, elegant, touching. Reminiscent of the Christians of old.

What was I worried about? Silly me.

h/t Pharyngula