The US Military has a $660 million contract with the Michigan company Trijicon, which manufactures rifle sights destined for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As it turns out, the company has been surreptitiously placing references to Bible verses on their sights. So much for this not being a holy war.

From the company’s mission statement on their website.

“We believe that America is great when its people are good,” says the Web site. “This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals.”

John 8:12 "Prepare to eat lead, raghead."

Dear God. These people make me shudder.

“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they’ve told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.”

He said coded biblical inscriptions play into the hands of “those who are calling this a Crusade.”

That’s precisely how this looks to Muslims.

When imperial powers engage in this kind of religious warfare, things can get very nasty. The Sepoy Rebellion was instigated by the same kind of tactics in colonial India, when the British were accused of greasing their bullets with beef tallow and pig fat, which are ritually unclean to the native Hindus and Muslims respectively.

In order to load their rifles, the soldiers had to bite the cartridges. For Hindus, this meant they would lose their caste. For Muslims, it meant that if they were shot by such a ‘tainted’ bullet, they would die unclean and be excluded from paradise.

So they revolted. And much fun ensued.

(h/t Pharyngula)

This is a continuation of a previous post, in which I lay out my reasons for rejecting the a creationist god. Here I’d like to briefly address another problem I have with the concept of the Judeo-Christian God.

Scientific progress has sequestered modern Christians into a very narrow interpretation of god’s role in the universe — compared with the role he played in, let’s say, the first millennium. God is no longer the architect of the celestial spheres, he is a cosmic watchmaker, and he has stepped back to let his creation run its course. He rarely interferes.

However, the bible tells us of times when god did interact with man. What happened on these occasions? Well, in Genesis he is bested by a snake and two people successfully hide from him (3:5,3:9). Later on, he tells a man to build a boat, so he can flood the entire world, because he thinks that is the best way to destroy evil (Genesis 7:4). Some time after that, he gives us what are ostensibly the most important laws in the universe…carved on rocks (Exodus 20). Too bad the guy he gave them to lost his temper and broke them, so god made him carve them again (Exodus 32). Skip forward a bit, and he makes a wager with the devil about torturing a man (Job 1:9-12). Finally, the last time he really did anything of import, he nailed himself to cross, and cried out to himself “Why [have I] forsaken [myself]” (Matthew 27:46). And then he entreated himself to forgive us, because we know not what we do (Luke 23:34). Can you see where I am going with this?

These are supposedly the actions of the creator of the universe: the most powerful, intelligent entity we can conceive of. And these are the ways he chooses to interact with his creation. Why didn’t he just strike all the evildoers dead, instead of drowning the entire world? It was surely in his power. Why didn’t he carve his commandments in diamond, or titanium, or better still, burn them into the back of our hands? Why is his final redeeming act to mankind so morbid and nonsensical?

If these are the works of the Ultimate Creator, it’s tragic that they are not examples of divine perfection, supreme logic, mind-blowing power, and universal comprehensibility. Instead, his whole plan is foiled by two hungry naked fuckers, and in order to save them from the punishment he devised, he has to torture himself to death.

I’m sorry, I just can’t swallow that.

Quick observation about the nature of god.

In his divine plan, he has condemned mankind to a life of hardship, misery, disease, heartbreak, loss, and ultimately death. But he/Jesus someday plans to ride in to the rescue (on a white horse, pulling a sword out of his throat, wearing a bunch of crowns, with his name written on the inside of his leg in invisible ink, and all the rest of that bad acid trip bullshit in Revelation), and he will make everything better.

Well, if you were watching a kitten suffer with a thorn in its paw, would you pull it out? I would.

But would you consider me a bad person if I waited a while, letting the poor little guy mew and squeal, knowing full well that I could help it at any time, but refusing to? I think, and you would probably agree that the virtuous thing to do would be to put an end to the cat’s suffering. Apparently though, that virtue is not a godly one, and although we generally equate godliness with virtue, this is one instance where the two don’t match up: the godly thing to do is to prolong the suffering of the innocent.

The only retort I can see Christians making, is the whole “god has a plan” cop-out.

What this amounts to is saying “we can not apply the rules of logic to the goings on of the universe, because what god does makes no sense to human minds.”

I would like to point out two problems with this argument. The first is that it directly contradicts one motivation for being faithful, which is that believing in god actually explains something. Creationists simultaneously claim that observing the natural world provides us with incontrovertible evidence of his existence, and that human rationality cannot be applied to the movements of the creator. WTF STFU?

The second problem is that if there’s anything that history has taught us, it’s that humans are impressively adept at figuring out how god’s hand influences the universe. Today we are nailing down the details of quantum mechanics, molecular biology, multi-dimensional calculus etc. In fact, over the ages, god has become progressively feebler, as we have learned that germs cause disease, not evil-spirits or divine punishment. We have learned that the universe as it stands today pretty much takes care of itself, and that we don’t need an invisible scarab to roll the sun across the sky, or a series of animals standing on each others’ backs to carry the earth through the cosmos. It’s painfully obvious that the god of today is impotent compared with the god of old, because the things he was invoked to explain have been sufficiently explained without him. He is vestigial: once useful, but now merely a reminder of how far we’ve come.

I am a militant Atheist.

There is no god, and if you are religious, I can say with confidence that I am more certain of that fact than you are to the contrary. What, you ask, informs this assertion? A lifetime of evidence. Neither I, nor anyone else in my experience, has ever been witness to a miracle, a supernatural event, or anything unclassifiable as either banal, or a hallucination.

Believe it or not, I used to be a devout Christian, but I grew weary of pretending – of finding ever smaller regions at the periphery of my rational mind for god to occupy. As I learned about the world, he retreated farther and farther into the dark recesses of improbability, until ultimately, the alternatives to the Unmoved Mover were sufficiently plausible that I jettisoned the remnants of my faith. As LaPlace famously said “I have no need of that hypothesis.” However, my independence was hard won, and I often wished I could have spared myself the torturous process of self-emancipation, and jumped right to the conclusion.

Even today, I wish there were something in the bible that was demonstrably false, so as to discredit the Judeo-Christian god in his own terms. If only we could catch the bible with its pants down, so to speak, making a claim that no sensible person could rationalize their way out of.

Well, as it turns out, there are indeed such passages. Matthew 4:8, for example:

“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor”

The obvious interpretation of this verse is that the earth is flat, and that there is a mountain somewhere on its surface that is sufficiently tall that anyone who stood at its summit could see the entire world. This is of course preposterous, as any 3rd grader could quickly point out, so Christians have to resort to rhetorical gymnastics to explain why their holy book would say something so patently false.

They usually begin by conceding that it is a metaphor, and then accusing you of misinterpreting it. But they shoot themselves in the foot admitting even that much, because the bible is supposedly the word of an omniscient god, who is unambiguous, and knows every tongue into which his word would ever be translated, and would presumably make it his highest order of business to make a universally interpretable work.

They also might try to invoke some backstory that is necessary to interpret the verse properly, like when rich Christians try to explain how they could get into heaven despite Jesus’ admonishment in Matthew 19:24:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”

They try to explain this away by saying that there was a gate somewhere in Jerusalem called “the eye of the needle,” and camels had to duck a bit to make it through. Nevermind the sheer pointlessness of the metaphor if that were indeed true, but if Jesus were god as they claim, he would surely be aware that this could never be more than a regionally understood analogy.

We don’t need to look far for these kinds of inconsistencies jump from the page. In fact, they are usually lurking right at the surface – to find them, you only have to make minimal investigation. In fact, the most earth-shattering evidence against biblical inerrancy comes from the very story of Jesus.

Matthew 1:1-17 does a nice “begat, begat, begat” tracing David’s lineage down to Joseph, in order to validate Jesus’ messianic status, since the anointed one must be of the line of David. But that means nothing if Jesus was born of a virgin. If that isn’t clear enough, let me spell it out: if you accept the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, then Jesus cannot be the messiah. Here, Christians do make some desperate flailings to explain that Jewish lineage is traced down the woman’s side, but that doesn’t explain away the fact that Matthew offers us the lineage of Joseph, not Mary, as proof of Jesus’ ‘Christhood’.

But even this argument glosses over the absurdity of the virgin birth itself. I forget who said it, and I am surely paraphrasing, but it’s harder to believe that a virgin can give birth than it is to believe a Jewish girl can tell a fib. The Immaculate Conception is a load of manure, as is immediately apparent if you believe in any sort of uniformitarianism.

People have been trying this excuse for centuries, I’m sure, and it has only worked once. Hell, I’m sure Bristol Palin tried it, but even Sarah (who is to MENSA what Gary Coleman is to the NBA) didn’t fall for it.

However, if you analyze the bible as the piece of historical fiction it is, it becomes apparent why the authors would take the risk of writing in such a contentious detail. As Richard Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, the authors were trying to “press the familiar hot buttons of pagan Hellenistic religions.” In other words, they were trying to gain converts. They were doing what later Christians did when they assimilated the unquestionably pagan celebrations of Easter and Christmas. Sorry kids, Christ didn’t give his life so you could get toys once a year under a tree with shiny shit hung all over it, or so a giant pastel colored were-rabbit could lay eggs with candy inside. These obviously pagan traditions date back to the time when Christians were making compromises in order to increase the appeal of their cult. And the same is true of the virgin birth. It was a deliberate and overt attempt to say to other religions of the time “hey, your dude was born of a virgin, so was ours, let’s hang out.”

–

In the end, it is not that hard to knock a leg out from under Christianity, or at least point out that it is just another man-made scam – like Mormonism, Scientology, or Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. But there are so many of them. Couldn’t one be right? Not likely.

The most powerful evidence against the existence of any particular god, for me, is that so many exist all over the world and have throughout history, and that the people who (have) believe(d) in them do so just as earnestly as everyone else. Which brings us to another question: why is it the lamentable case that religion is so ubiquitous?

Well frankly, faith offers powerful solace against death, which is probably one reason it is so ineradicable from our primitive meat-machine brains. We, unlike other animals, who only know they are going to die when death is imminent, must find a way to cope with the knowledge that we will someday die. This is of highest priority to the perpetuity of our species, because if we couldn’t cope, we might well spend our entire (short) lives in a state of mortal fear.

While our consciousness evolved quickly, as evidenced by the poor fit between crania and hips, so did our coping mechanism. It arose from pre-existing instincts for superstition and it stuck. It began to manipulate sentience in order to ensure its own existence, and soon it came to hold dominion over the rationality it evolved to facilitate.

Some have hypothesized that religion’s stubborn persistence and imperviousness to rational scrutiny arises from what was once an evolutionarily advantageous trait, and that religion is therefore just a by-product of a useful adaptation. Faced with the dangers of everyday life, and a rather frail biology, early human children couldn’t have been afforded the luxury of trial and error in a hostile environment, and so they would have been selected to unquestioningly heed the cautionary advice of their elders when such advice was available. Important suggestions like “stay away from that cave, there is a bear inside,” or “don’t eat that berry, it will make you sick,” surely saved lives, but when the drive to obey got hijacked by “sacrifice a goat on the full moon, or the rains won’t come,” or “cut off the skin at the end of your male children’s penises, or suffer the wrath of Yahweh” we suddenly had a problem on our hands. The indelibility of today’s faith may be very well be because our brains still treat it as a life or death issue, regardless of how silly it is.

One of the odd facts of religious silliness is that the longer it stays around, the more legitimate it becomes. It builds up momentum, and like gonorrhea, if you don’t catch it early, your dick is forfeit. What we atheists need to do (I am assuming that I have successfully effaced any faith you may have had, and that you’re now with me on this one…), is build up sufficient momentum in the opposite direction. As Dawkins is frequent to point out, we already make up a respectable chunk of the population – in America, ten times the number of Jews – but we are as of yet an untapped demographic politically.

We need to call people out when the make stupid assertions, like that god should be put in charge of Homeland Security. This is the kind of thing that we should consider contemptible, dangerous, irrational, juvenile, and such irresponsible and inappropriate political behavior as to warrant the end of a person’s career. We need to practice Sam Harris’ “conversational intolerance,” and when George Bush says his foreign policy is dictated by god, we need to say, “why not Zeus, or Hadad, Osiris, Shiva, or, as your actions most often seem to indicate, Mars?”

We need to encourage a new kind of discourse – one of critical thought and challenging dogma: of science. Religious apologists are quick to point out that scientists are fundamentalists in their own right, but this is a fallacy. Science is necessarily the antithesis of fundamentalism because its characterized by ongoing self criticism and reevaluation, while religious fundamentalism thrives in the realm of dogma. The most fervent believers are always found in the most insular communities, and this isolation tends to foster religious solipsism.

I have made the observation from personally transformative experience that the more individuals learn about one another, and about one another’s beliefs, the less likely they are to subscribe exclusively to any one ideology or set of values. This is what is so alarming about the growing trend among evangelical Christians to home-school their children, and to insulate themselves against challenging viewpoints.

We need to open up a new dialogue in which nothing in sacred. Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines dogma as follows:

“ ‘Here is an idea or notion you are not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ ”

These are exactly the rules we must refuse to play by.

If we slowly chip away at this edifice, I am sure we can be done with it eventually, although I admit that we would still be left with that big question mark at the end. I am still looking hard for an answer to that, but I will leave you with the modicum of consolation to which I currently cling: whatever the end may bring, I have experienced it before, because there was a time when I was not.

I will begin by disclosing the fact that I do not believe that the bible is worth consultation as a source of moral authority, but as some atheists are wont to do, I am going suspend disbelief just long enough to use it to make an argument to the faithful from their own canon.

We all remember the story of the woman who was to be stoned to death for adultery, and whom Jesus spared from that fate with the famous “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” speech. Most people also know that this story is that it was an attempt by the pharisees to discredit the teachings of Jesus.

Jesus claimed to believe in the old testament, which, barbaric as it often was, called for the woman to be put to death. However, by his own teachings, she should be spared. The pharisees wanted to catch him in this contradiction, and knew that if he agreed she should be executed in concordance with the bible, his teachings would be invalidated, and he could be discredited. But if he said she should be spared, he could be called a heretic for disagreeing with the holy books.

In the end, it is made very clear that Jesus opposes enforcement of any biblical injunction against unholy sexual practice if the accusers are sinful themselves.

It should therefore be apparent to followers of Jesus that we as men shall not deny rights, be they to life or marriage, to those who flaunt the carnal prohibitions of the bible.