0% success of doomsday prophecies

Faith is false certainty, pure and simple, and nowhere is more false certainty on display than in the actions of doomsday cultists. Every year, and often multiple times a year we hear about groups, large and small, arrogantly insisting that they have the all-important knowledge that the world will end. Of course, it always turns out the opposite, and we like to see such blatant arrogance fall upon its face. By its very nature, they can only be right once, so, in some sense, it might even seem unfair to point out that they have a 0.0000000% success rate at predicting the end of the world. However, in a more general sense, we do use trends to predict many other future events. Geology and Astronomy tell us that the Earth has existed for billions of years. Even our distant, caveman ancestors probably feared the world was ending every time an eclipse or a severe storm, earthquake, or volcano ravaged an area.

In the relatively short time that humans have been making up stories and pretending they were true, which is the basic role of religion, the predictions of final battles and supernatural cataclysms have been fulminated fast and furiously. The fact that none of these claims have even been close to correct might give us reason to question the fundamental premise of whether an immediately impending, supernatural doomsday is a justified belief at all. Sure, there might even eventual, natural phenomena that cause a global catastrophe, but what non-faith-based reason do we have for believing that non-natural world-ending events are even remotely reasonable?

In almost all cases, doomsday predictions are not just a little wrong, but starkly, dramatically wrong these days. That is, they are not even a little bit right. There isn't even a little event, like a moderate earthquake, or a respectably-sized hurricane, which frightened our caveman ancestors. We get a perfectly unremarkable day of mostly sunshine and clear skies. Of course, since true believers ignore evidence that contradicts the fictional narrative they enjoy telling to themselves, this has little effect. Yet, as alluded to above, we are actually worse off than our caveman ancestors in terms of our predictions, because now we can't even predict supernatural cataclysms based upon some kind of evidence that nature gives us.

I am suggesting that we should start counting, and why not arbitrarily decide to start counting now, when doomsday turns to dudsday. After all, the media devotes considerable hype and attention to these kinds of stories, if for no other reason than the human interest angle. Camping has been wrong before, and yet, people go on believing him anyway. However, for that matter, Pat Robertson also predicted that the world would end in the early 1980's and few people seem to hold that error against him. Shouldn't there be some kind of consequence for making a false prediction of this magnitude, which is at least as severe as a parking ticket or jaywalking? It would not infringe upon religious belief either, any more than current parking tickets infringe upon your ability to worship on a sunday morning. Saying that any minister who publicly predicts a current time frame for the end of the world, and then ends up being wrong should have to pay a symbolic fine of $50 would hardly seem excessive.

In any event, we certainly seem to have different standard for religion leaders than almost any other kind of leaders. If our political leaders screwed up in major ways like this, we would see considerably more ridicule. If a football coach bet everything on a play and lost then there would be massive scorn heaped upon him (or her). However, religion makes it against the rules to ridicule it, even when it produces ridiculous claims. Why is it that we have declared it off limits and in poor taste to ridicule the ridiculous, as long as a person declares the ridiculous statement to be religious?

Those who did criticize Camping often did so with kid gloves. Some religious people expressed their own religious certitude that Camping was wrong because of their different beliefs. Some have pointed out that Jesus himself declared that nobody except "the Father" knows when doomsday will happen (Mt 24:36). What is less well remembered is that Jesus also had his own failed doomsday predictions, and in many ways was the father of the Christian cottage industry of doomsday prophecy, claiming that the high priest caiphas would live to see Jesus return at the second coming (Mk 14:62).

The point is that it is not clear why we should feel any more comfortable with other religious beliefs using their whacky claims in an attempt to counter the whacky beliefs than Camping. Why should we believe their counter claim any more than Campings, when both are just going on unsupported claims? What got us into this mess, in the first place, was accepting, uncritically, whacky religious claims, and it would seem that the solution should be to reject them up front, or at least not give them so much deference and attention as we see today.

Calling BS on May 21st Rapture

According to a media campaign with far more money than sense, Harold Camping and his "Family Radio" insist that the "rapture" will occur tomorrow. As popularized by the Tim LaHaye _Left Behind_ series of books, the "rapture" involves god turning on his huge Cosmic Vacuum Cleaner (tm) and sucking the bodies of devout Christians right out of their clothes and up into the dust bag known as heaven. According to bizarre, illogical, and impossible to follow numerological arguments and word games by Camping, he has determined that this event, predicted "any time now" for the last 2000 years, will happen tomorrow. As I have pointed out to many people, there is hardly a year that goes by that someone doesn't think the "End of the World" will happen. Camping himself claimed this would happen in 1994. However, he says that he made a math error on that one. However, he now thinks the bible "guarantees" that it will happen tomorrow.

As fun as it is to prove these people wrong again and again, it might be cool to fake them out too. People have done this before too, leaving sets of empty clothes around the office, sitting on the chairs to make a christian co-worker think that people had been "raptured" out of the office and that he or she had been left behind. It might be fun to wander around with halloween makeup in zombie hordes, or to dress up in devil costumes, and pretend to writhe in agony in front of churches. The zombie hordes would be a reference to the fact that even the long dead are supposed to be resurrected. The devil stuff would be just for fun.

It's conceivable that a person could use a powerful LCD projector and project an imagine that looks like Jesus onto a cloud, perhaps from a high building. I wonder how many people would be taken in by that kind of thing. At least it would be based upon some kind of evidence, unlike the stuff from Camping, et al.

Stephen Hawking Imagines No Heaven for Computers

Religious people are running around whining and complaining, which seems to be what they do best, this time about statements by Stephen Hawking, in a recent interview, where he opines that heaven is a "fairy story for people afraid of the dark". Of course, they are forever insisting that others take the Bible "out of context", so it would seem that they would heed their own advice and at least look at a few sentences surrounding his statement. He actually said, "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark." A literal reading of his statement, and you know how much Bible fans love literalism, is that computers don't go to heaven. He also says that the brain is a computer, but if you don't believe that your soul resides in the brain then it still doesn't rule out a heaven for these undetectable, immaterial souls.

However, this does raise some interesting questions. For one thing, why does God hate computers so much that he won't provide them with a special heaven. For example, I have previously hypostatized (look it up) a Land of Lost Electronics Accessories (tm), to explain the almost supernatural disappearance of various electronic chargers, adapters, etc whenever people need them most. Anyway, didn't Jesus unplug himself for computers too, or do we need a special messiah made out of silicon to accomplish that? I'm surprised that we don't see more computer scientists up in arms about the way that Hawking is callously consigning used computers to oblivion. I mean what will motivate them or their computer chips to keep on cranking out algorithms and computations if they can't expect some final reward for all their hard labor? By standard theological arguments, this proves that the existence of computers is completely pointless because they don't get to go to heaven. Oh, poor computers. The only person who seems to hate them more than God is Stephen Hawking.

Secular view on eye for an eye

I would be one of the first people to condemn the use of religious superstitions as a basis for decision-making in the modern world. However, I am not sure that "an eye for an eye" is always a bad idea. To wit, Iran is planning on blinding a man who threw acid in the face of a woman who spurned his marriage proposal. Even though they are basing their decision on primitive, ignorant, absolutist standards found in the Koran and the Bible, I think that, in this case, by accident, the standard may not always be wrong. The big problem with much of absolutist morality, in general, is that it is too general, and commits the moral error of assuming that the circumstances contribute nothing to the definition of the problem or the solution. Instead, they invoke simple-minded, one-size-fits-all rules that usually do not fit the actual situation well at all. I also realize that codes of modern justice often focus upon rehabilitation, rather than mere vengeance.

Yet, having said that, when a person throws acid in another person's face that is a pretty brutal and irreversible act. I have no problem with that person being dealt with in a brutal, irreversible way, and no it doesn't make the state "just as bad". Their action was provoked and his was not. The victim herself says that she hopes this man's punishment will deter this all too common type of activity on the part of men. Perhaps revenge isn't the most noble of sentiments. Instead of focusing on harming the other person, it might be better to focus on fixing the injury that did occur. However, when one has been gravely injured and one's rights have been violated the victimizer has created the justification for defensive retaliation, even if that retaliation is in cold blood.

Now some people seem to think that self-defense only applies at the moment where one is fending off an attack. However, defense is not exclusively confined to the moment of an attack. Defending one's country, for example, is something that can be done even outside the heat of the moment. If one is injured in battle, then one can still be defending oneself from enemy aggression by attacking them in another battle, on another day.

It's absolutist thinking to believe that something, like injuring another person, is always wrong, no matter what the circumstances are. If someone punches me in the face with no justification then they have created the circumstances, by their unjustified attack that very definitely justifies me punching that person back. If, one day, I am too old and weak and arthritic to smash that person's back in the face then I expect the state to defend my rights for me.

One-Line Proof that God Didn't Write the Bible

Here's a one line proof for those who insist that the Bible is the direct, literal "word of God". Saint Paul tells us (in the Bible, no less) that "God is not the author of confusion" (1 Cor 14:33), so he could not be the author of the Bible. That's it -- I rest my case -- because there perhaps nothing mankind has invented in all of literature that is more confusing than the Bible.

Of course, some people try to equivocate and say, "Well duh, God didn't write it physically. He just inspired the prophets to write this or that." Well, sorry, but that is writing the Bible. You don't have to physically write a book with your hand in order to be the author of it. Stephen Hawking can't physically write with his hands, but he is the author of many books. Other authors have dictated their books and never wrote them by hand. If God gave the exact details that he wanted his prophets to write and they simply reported what God told them to say then we would attribute authorship to God, not the scribe who took down the words. Anyway, according to Moses God did write parts of the bible physically, as in Ex 31:18 which says, "When the LORD finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the Testimony, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God." Throughout the books attributed to Moses it also contains statements that say, "I am the Lord" who did such-and-such, or "The Lord says..." do this or that. Later prophets like Isaiah use a formula where they say, "This is what the Lord says", and then they provide a verbatim quotation attributed to God. Sorry, but that sounds like more than just inspiring a vague idea.

Of course, if you want to reject this and admit that many prophets appear to heavily modify what God told them, injecting their own ideas in place of God's, and failing to fully and accurately report what God supposedly said to them then we could call it the work of man. Then God would not be the author of such works, though perhaps he could still be listed as a co-author. I think many religious people, particularly of the fundamentalist variety, would have a lot of problems with that position. However, since this Bible passage says that God couldn't have written the confusing parts, and most of the Bible is highly confusing to just about anybody who has ever read it, the only alternative is that human beings were the authors....unless you want to try the Muslim strategy, ala the Satanic Verses, and say that Satan wrote or inspired the confusing parts. After all Paul admits that he sometimes does bad things, even though he doesn't want to and claims it's the "sin living in me that does it". Remember that this is a guy wrote significant parts of the Christian New Testament, leading us to wonder if this might have happened when he was writing his various epistles. So, I'm not sure that this excuse really helps much. As with with much excuse-making, it just digs the hole deeper. Now we're not sure what we can believe from him and what we can't. If God is not the author of confusion then certainly Paul is.

BTW, this does raise an interesting legal issue. If God is the author of the Bible and God is immortal, then, under current copyright laws he should maintain exclusive ownership of this work and control over derivative works. However, again, perhaps no work of literature has been more infringed upon, in terms of authorship rights than the bible. Often, when a person blatantly refuses to assert his or her rights, despite overt, hostile, and notorious infringement upon those rights then this person can lose those rights by a process called "adverse possession". However, given that so many people have infringed upon these rights for so long, to whom should we award ownership? For the most part, we treat the bible as a work in the Public Domain, but it does seem funny that God would not even own his own work.

Free will, like free market, doesn't exist in pure form

When people start slapping the word "free" on things, it is usually a reason to be suspicious. The old axiom says "there's no such thing as a free lunch", and likewise when I hear about things like "free markets", I like to ask people, "Can you show me one", because I am not convinced that anything approaching a "free market" has ever existed in the history of civilization, or ever will (...and it's probably good they don't, too!)

This leads us to so called "free will". Like free markets (or free lunch for that matter) some people believe in it with religious intensity, and just like with free markets, where ever we look we don't see anything even approaching 100% free will that prevails in life.

Sure people say that want something, but it seems this is largely because they have been told by family and friends that they should want it. For example, in theory children should have different careers than their parents, and the great promise of education is to elevate people out of poverty and low wage jobs. Yet studies find that, contrary to the rosy optimism, most kids don't do better than their parents. Most kids go into the same or very similar professions as their parents. There's this myth about upward mobility, which supposedly comes about due to higher levels of education, and it is cherished one, particularly in America. While it may be true for a few people, they appear to be the exception, rather than the general rule.

Consider, as well, the people to whom we are attracted or marry. While some diehard religious types like to insist that homosexual attraction is a "choice", heterosexual attraction appears to be fairly clearly dictated by hormones and a variety of built-in biological preferences. People end up being attracted to other mates that look similar to them, and hold similar opinions, and come from the same socio-economic background. Again, there are endless fairy tales about rich guys marrying working class women, but it doesn't usually happen, movies notwithstanding. As above, we even marry people who are similar to our parents.

Whole fields of industrial psychology explore how to get people to spend more money or make purchases that they would not normally make. Real estate agents, for example, find that when a house is "staged" with furniture and decorations, for example, that they tend to get a higher price for it than when it is sold empty. Adjusting the temperature in a bar, or the kind of music in a restaurant can cause people to spend more money without even being aware that they are doing it. It is not 100% cause and effect, but it increases the odds a noticeable number of percentage points, on average.

Think of free will like the flip of a fair coin. It is free to come up heads or tails with equal likelihood. However, if we start monkeying with the coin so it becomes 45-55 or 40-60 or 30-70 odds then we now have some seriously rigged choices. Purists will still say that you have the same two choices or heads or tails, but you're being pushed by forces outside of your own will to make certain choices, often without even being aware of being influenced. There is really some thing or even some one who controlling the probability that you will make a given choice. If you still want to call this a "free choice" then that's because you were programmed to say that ;-) Seriously, though, it's not what most people would call free choice.

Please note as well that I am not talking about mere physical limitations on what it is impossible to do. The traditional example is that one has "free will" to flap one's arms like wings, but the physical world makes it impossible for you fly like a bird by doing so. I am saying that even the desire to choose to flap your arms like wings is subject to interference and manipulation by external forces. In theory, people have a wide range of choices in any given situation, however, in reality, only a very limited selection of choices get made. People can't very well choose things of which they not even aware exist. By constraining peoples knowledge of the possible choices that exist out there their "degrees of freedom" become more limited.

The imaginary teaching of Jesus

In Romans 7:20 Paul makes the claim that, “Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” So Paul believes that sin lives inside us and acts against our will. This would seem to undermine traditional arguments based upon free will. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak (Mt 26:41)

Of course, what Paul seems to be talking about, from a modern perspective, is biological or hormonal urges. Your body has certain physical reactions that are reflexive and do not even go through the higher brain. Your heart rate quickens. Males may get an erection. Certain things like this are not 100% under conscious control. Indeed, modern physiology tells us that the brain has many layers, and some of these lower layers, around the amygdala, for example, are concerned with the more base instincts of fear and gratification.

Yet Christianity still sets impossible standards, saying that we should avoid these things over which we have little or no control. Jesus, in Matthew 5:27-28 says, for example, “You have heard it said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” This may even be the basis for Christian opposition to pornography, for example.

It is easy to demolish this silly claim, and once one does then Christians will resort to some sort of mind reading act about Jesus saying, “(I think) what Jesus meant was that you should try to control yourself,” etc, etc. The really slippery ones will then go back and try to quibble about wording after the fact, so it is also important to *pre-test* them and ask them, “Is it committing adultery or not, as Jesus says, to look at a woman lustfully? Answer yes or no right here:____” As I have said, later on they will come back to a single word to try to equivocate and pretend that you did not force them to change their view.

To quickly summarize the arguments against Jesus's belief that thought crimes are equivalent to real crimes, let us start with food. Gluttony, is one of the seven deadly sins, so imagine eating mountains of cake and ice cream. Oh, wait, Jesus says that it's wrong to even look lustfully at a pie. It's the same as being a real glutton, despite the fact that you haven't gained an ounce or deprived anyone else of a single morsel of food. Please hold off on the mind-reading apologetics, because I'm not done beating on this silly teaching of Jesus. If you imagine killing someone that may not be a good thing. It might lead to the real thing, but it might not. It might relieve your anger to imagine it for an instant, just as it might relieve your sexual tensions to look at a woman lustfully. Furthermore, and here's the clincher, if just imagining a forbidden act like adultery is the same as doing it, then why not go all the way and rape her, especially if nobody is around and you can get away with it? God says you have already committed adultery and presumably will already be punished for it. So why not actually follow your fantasies or vague intentions?

At this point, the Christian shouts, “A ha, I've found an excuse!” (in their own minds). They finally realize, via the thought experiment, that there is a difference between the physical act of adultery and the vague mental intentions. Thinking “Damn, she's hot” is a lot different than throwing her down and raping her. However, under no circumstances will they admit that it was your discussion which caused them to see the passage differently, because then they might have to admit that their faith can be changed or shaken. Instead, they will say, “Jesus says the act was only committed ...'in his heart',” versus “in her vagina”, so Jesus is off the hook for saying its totally the same. Not so fast.

To begin with, that effectively means that Jesus is saying nothing, because he is just restating the obvious that when you imagine doing something bad that you have committed an imaginary crime. So should you just burn in “imaginary hell” instead of the real thing? Is imagining being the King of England even close to actually being King of England, especially if you cannot really become the king of England? Then why is imagining sex with someone even comparable to the physical act?

Secondly, nobody said that Jesus didn't know the difference between a thought and an action. We all do. But Jesus is confusing himself and others when he suggests that there effectively is not much difference. Again, you can attempt to deny this, because, like many ancient holy men, Jesus's teachings were vague and incomplete. However, why compare a mental act to a physical act with no additional qualifications, unless you are suggesting an equivalence. When an adulterer commits real adultery, there are presumably thoughts that go with these actions. Jesus is saying that there is no difference between the bad thoughts of the real adulterer and the imaginary adulterer, despite the fact that one acts and one does not. Yet most of us know that there has to be some difference in thoughts, because, in one case, the person's thoughts emboldened him to act, and in the other case the thoughts did not. The thoughts that lead to actual, physical adultery surely had to be more serious in their intentions and more grounded in the real, physical world. Fantasy thoughts of sex with another women may be more generic and not even involve a specific woman, or, if they do, may never be with the serious intention of following through. Why should we be punished for thinking about things that we know we won't actually be able to do? We might imagine having sex with Beyonce, but we know it won't happen. It might be an impure thought, but it's not one that leads to any kind of action. Therefore it's still not as impure as the thoughts of the many men who have had sex with Beyonce.

So what is the substance of this teaching. You can imagine anything, but that doesn't automatically make you take on the character of the individuals who might do these things in reality. It's pretty clear that Jesus is trying to discourage us from thinking lustful thoughts, but his “argument” seems to be absurdly weak, since thinking about a given thing is nowhere even close to that actual thing. The only workable defense is to deny that Jesus was doing any more than making an empty statement about lust producing an imaginary crime. Since he never specifies the penalties for imaginary crimes there is nothing that can really be done with this teaching. Perhaps he wants us to imagine good thoughts, but, even there, imagining them and doing them are quite different things, and we should be hesitant to grant too much credit or blame for things that never leave our own minds.

Free will only partly to blame for evil

Don't blame God for evil, because he only gave you the ability to choose to do right or do wrong. That is the freewill defense in a single bleat. Of course, there are many obvious objections that arise to this approach. The first might be to point out that choice without prior knowledge is merely shooting in the dark. He can sit in judgment of our blindfold marksmanship, but how can he blame us overly much for missing the target when he himself tied the blindfold. Anyway, who would say that it was morally responsible to hand a blindfolded man a loaded gun, spin him until dizzy, and set him loose for a game of Russian Roulette against the world?

Clearly more than mere choice is needed to determine morality. He must also furnish, along with choice, a level of light necessary to see the choices clearly. To the extent that this light appears to some and not to others we can say that some are fortunate and others are not, but is it really fair to consign to flames those whose only sin was to be born with eyes too weak to do day labor as well as others?

Likewise, nobody would fault a person for being born slow-witted, nor can we credit a person with any special moral character for being born a genius. In common parlance we say these intellectual faculties are “God-given”. Furthermore, it should be obvious to all but the most stubborn, that a genius may have an easier time making certain good choices, compared to a slow-witted person, because choice involves thinking, and the genius is, by definition, more adept at some forms of thinking. Even if we take the counter-intuitive Christian view that a slow-witted or ignorant person may sometimes have an easier time of making choices, since such persons don't tend to over-complicate things, we can simply reverse the argument and say that now, slow people end up with an occasional undeserved advantage, compared to others. In either case though, we can hardly sit in judgment of the moral character of these individuals when it comes down to biological qualities of their brains, just as we do not "blame" a person for his or her skin color, sex, etc.

By the way, it is interesting that many religious people go to great pains to insist that homosexuality is “a choice”, yet clearly nobody would say that we choose to be born a man or a woman. By being born a man we tend to have a natural attraction to women. The alternative is to say that we choose it at random, which would mean that it's a fifty-fifty deal, which doesn't match reality. Clearly, if males are naturally predisposed to like women, and women are naturally disposed to like men then we can imagine that wires get crossed and some men end up being naturally disposed to like men. Futhermore, you will note that, the fact that there is choice in the equation still doesn't entirely address the situation. Sure, there is an element of choice, but the choice is a biased one, because, without an inborn, hormone-based biological sex drive, we might not have ever been tempted to philander or “transgress nature”. Therefore, at best we can say that choice is part of the equation in terms of sexual “immorality” and that the other part is not choice-based.

Thus, so far, we have established that moral decisions are based not just upon free will, but also starting knowledge, inborn intellect, and hormonal levels. If we cannot blame God for these factors then whom should we fault? We might say it is “nature”, assuming that god surrenders his prerogatives to its randomness, but this still does not make human free will 100% culpable for the amount of evil in the world.

This says nothing of the more traditional objections, such as natural disasters, which likewise undermine the doctrinaire view that 100% of evil can be attributed to free will. Indeed if even a small percentage of evil can be attributed to factors other than free will then this still creates a problem for the defense. Something else must account for these kinds of problems. While we might attribute natural disasters to mere misfortune, rather than evil, we cannot say that evil created by people who are ignorant or slow-minded is merely misfortune. Nor is pain alone the measure of these evils and misfortunes. An ignorant person may not experience any pain due to some poor choices, and others may not necessarily feel pain from their choices either, but the choice can nonetheless be the wrong one.

Still don't believe me? What about Saint Matthew who famously observed that, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak"? (Mt 26:41). Despite our best efforts and desires to make good choices, our "weak flesh" rebels. This apparently lead Saint Paul to theorize that, "if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it". (Ro 7:20) This is hardly a vote of confidence for free will, because it says that your actual will is thwarted by naughty tendancies within the body itself, which overwhelm the will. Therefore even people who want to be good, like the saints say that they are unable to do good, despite their desires to behave morally. This makes a naive invocation of "free will" as an explanation for the existence of evil completely untenable.

Critiques of Free Will Excuse for Evil

Critiques of Free Will Excuse for Evil

Much is made, by some, of free will as an excuse to get god off the hook for the existence of evil. It is claimed by Augustine, for example, that god is not the author of evil because he only created the ability for humans to choose. They could choose rightly, but they often do not, and therefore evil exists. However, it matters why they choose to do as they do, as we shall see below.

Consider this “intentional intellectual crippling” critique of the FWD. What if a parent intentionally gave brain damage to his children, perhaps through oxygen deprivation? This would correspond to a god who created humans with purposely limited intellects, far inferior to his own, and incapable of understanding many of the complexities of moral decision-making, and details of the cases before them. Given that he gave us a limited intellect, we are not always smart enough to make correct decisions. This is not our fault. We are not the authors of our own intellectual capacities. We can do little about the level of intellect which each of us individually possesses. Therefore, we should not be held culpable for moral decisions to the extent that we cannot reasonably understand and foresee the implications. It is not merely the fact that we are given a choice that creates the evil. It is also possibly due to the fact that we are given limited intellects and limited access to knowledge. If we were given better knowledge of a situation and perhaps a better understanding of what might happen, it is likely that people would make different choices.

On this last point, consider that, in addition to purposely giving brain damage to one's child, one also refused to allow them to go to school or learn a great many things which might otherwise help them. Again, this is not the fault of the child. Therefore, to the extent that an uneducated child makes a bad decision, we might attribute some of that to the fact that the parent deprived the child of an education. Analogously, God refused to educate mankind on a great many facts that he easily could have taught to us or revealed to us that might have made us better moral decision-makers. This includes theoretical knowledge and information pertaining to the specifics of the situation which we might need to know or have revealed to us in order to make an informed decision. As a consequence, when humans make bad moral decisions, that may be partly because God has purposely withheld from us the theoretical and factual knowledge necessary to make better decisions. Therefore, again, humans cannot be entirely blamed for something that god could have assisted us with. God must be partially culpable for denying us the necessary tools to do the job right. Had we been given better tools, we might have done a better job.

Add to this that god also gives us instinctual desires and impulses, which, in some cases, run counter to how we are told by the Bible that he wants us to act. For example, he gives us attraction to members of the opposite sex, or sometimes the same sex, even if we are 80 or 90 years old and may no longer have any use for this impulse. These desires are on a physical level that is below an entirely conscious level, to the extent that a man gets an erection, or a woman becomes moist. We are not entirely in conscious control of these desires, any more than we can prevent our heart from beating faster when we are startled. Granted, we do not have to act on our desires, but it undermines the claim that god is trying to give us a free will choice when he biologically biases us in one direction and then asks his churches to teach the opposite.

Some try to claim that he is “testing” us, or that these desires are “from the devil”, but whether temptations are from god or the devil, actively attempting to entrap individuals into doing something bad would make these entities authors of the evil. That is, even if some claims he or she is just “testing” you by seeing if you will commit a murder by paying you money and giving you the gun to do the act, that person is still partially responsible for the crime if you act.

By naïve Augustinian logic, the person who solicits the murder and provides material assistance didn't do anything wrong because you still have the choice of doing it or not doing it. However, Augustine forgets that the person soliciting the crime also had a choice of tempting or not tempting you and that, to the extent that your so-called “free” choice is biased, the person doing the biasing can no longer claim it was a fair coin flip.

To give another example, we all understand how salesmen or politicians might talk a person into making a decision that they would not necessarily make on their own. That is a large part of the job of these individuals. If we really thought that cars would sell themselves, or that communities of people would always vote the right way then we wouldn't need either of these occupations. However, from an Augustinian perspective, the fact that these slick individuals, some bordering on con artists, talked you into the decision cuts no ice whatsoever. He would say that it was still say it was 100% your fault and 0% the fault of the salesman, politician, or con artist. Yet most people disagree by their behaviors, because they recognize that they can be manipulated and misled by others, and they would blame those others, at least partially, for persuading them to make bad decisions.

After all, in the Garden of Eden (Gen 3) Adam immediately blames Eve, and Eve passes blame to the snake. If Augustine were right in his “free will defense”, it would not matter that the snake tricked Eve or that Eve persuaded Adam. Why should the snake be punished at all? It didn't violate God's command. It just persuaded others to do it. Likewise, the fact that Eve persuaded Adam shouldn't particularly matter, because Adam still could have chose differently. However, God seemed to think it did matter in both cases, because he gave special punishments to the persuaders, aside from the punishment given just to Adam. Arguably, the most severe punishment was given to the snake who did not violate God's command, since the command was given only to Adam and Eve

Is everything part of god's plan and what's the point.

If you believe in God then you believe in a being who both knows about every event that is going to happen and permits those events to happen, since He could act to prevent it, presumably, if he so chose. That is, allowing an event to occur that you have the power to stop is itself a moral action and makes one an accomplice in the action.

Therefore, when God believers see any particular event happen in the world, they must believe that it is because it is part of God's plan. Simply put, God wanted/needed it to happen for some perhaps inscrutable reason.

Now the question is, do you believe this? Do you believe that everything that happens really is part of an infinitely complex, incomprehensible plan, or do you think that sometimes things just happen and are not really part of any sentient plan at all? It think that it is easier to believe that sometimes things happen that are not part of anyone or anything's grand plan. Nobody wanted or needed certain things to happen. Nobody let it happen indirectly by refusing to intervene. It just happened and there was nobody at the switch to decide to cause or prevent it either way.

Theism commits itself to the notion that there are no truly "random" events. God is watching over everything and controlling whether it happens or does not happen according to his plan. Non-theism allows that random things can happen from time to time. This is not to say that the events were not caused by some physical mechanism.

Heat inside the Earth, for example, may eventually lead to the eruption of a volcano. However, the volcano was not part of any particular plan. The people who may have died were not targeted for death on purpose as part of a dark, sinister plan or because of sins they committed, or because of divine decree. Volcanos simply erupt from time to time and have no ability to know or care about what might be in their way when this happens.

Some people might look at such a situation and rail against the "pointlessless" for such a system, but the so-called "pointlessness" *is* "the point" here. It is a relief that there was no purpose behind the volcano erupting, and is simply blind, unthinking physical forces. If the volcano had been designed intentionally to kill people this would be some form of supernatural terrorism. It would be better to have a "pointless" volcanic eruption than one planned and executed on purpose.

If god created shadows....

I saw a person, presumably Catholic, with a t-shirt that said, “If God created shadows it was to better emphasize the light”. The quote was attributed to Pope John XXIII. In some ways this is a quite conventional "contrast" argument, but in other ways it is amazingly cynical. I guess I am not surprised that adherents don't see the difficulty, but to recovering former Catholics like myself, the glaring issue is the shadiness of the sentiment. In essence it is saying (if it is saying anything at all) that this pope believes god allows things like mass murderers who torture people to death, so that he can let us know how good we have it. It is saying that god wanted a little accent lighting, so he decided that he would unleash vicious evil upon us so that we could recognize the good things in the world, when we weren't being victimized by evil.

It seems a remarkably bad cop-out for the existence of evil to say that it was put there just to help us better see non-evil. From whom else would we accept such an excuse. What if a sociopath claimed defense against his crimes of raping and murdering a little girl on the grounds that he just wanted to show people how, by following the opposite of his example (i.e. not raping and murdering) that they could be better people? Would we accept that this psychopath or his crime were necessary in order for us to grasp how to be good.

Furthermore, couldn't we argue that there have been more than enough examples throughout history of badness so that allowing even more of these to happen on a continuous basis, is not necessary, and does not communicate any kind of new message that has not been already amply demonstrated.

However, what I like most about the quote is that the pope didn't even commit to whether god created evil. He only speaks hypothetically, and then presumes to know god's motivation for an action which God might not even have taken. Nobody does double talk more blatantly than theologians.

In an age of universal skepticism religion looks worried

It is simply a fact that we live in a world where people are increasingly more ready and able to question things. Now I know that there is cognitive dissonance, where people can apply different standards to their own beliefs than to others. I also know that religion is so engrained in culture that it often passes under the radar. I will even grant that most people are still not all that skeptical, because that requires independent, critical thinking. However, given all that, I still submit that people do question more things. We live in a time where almost anything can be questioned far more openly that ever before. Therefore, because everything is up for grabs it means that even the one thing which declared itself immune from criticism since the earliest of times, is no longer immune from criticism.

Of course people won't always criticize it all that vigorously, because often we just don't care about it. Still, some people will and, as it turns out, in this day and age of modern digital communication, it is a bad day to be an obscurantist bible literalist. Boy did you guys pick the wrong time to invest all your money in buggy whip factories, a century after people stopped riding horse drawn carriages as a primary means of transportation. That is the digital equivalent of what is necessary to maintain the blinders of biblical literalism in an age where people can look at any version of the bible and any number of commentaries, pro and con, on a given biblical passage.

Revelation versus "pulled out of your b*tttt"

Many religious people speak of God "revealing" things to them, perhaps in a dream, or just as a thought. The rest of us just call this thinking, but, in the highly religious mind, these are email style messages beamed directly to them by the creator of the universe.

However, the question arises of how we are tell the difference between a legitimate "revelation" and just random crazy thoughts. After all, we've all had weird dreams. If we took every dream we've ever had seriously as a direct message by God then the world would be even stranger than it is already by at least an order of magnitude (10 times for non-mathies).

Seriously, though. How can you know the difference between something that is truly a divine revelation versus a "brain fart". Furthermore, have many of the so-called revelations, such as the elaborate one recorded in the Book of Revelation (attributed to John of Patmos), been subjected to rigorous standards, so that we can filter the divine nuggets from the proverbial flatulence?

I think the answer is far from an unequivocal "yes", which is unfortunate. People often accept their alleged "revelations" rather uncritically, it seems, and take them at face value. Many Christians, as witnessed by the popularity of the _Left Behind_ series, believe that the Revelation of John is a literal road map to predicting events thousands of years from the date it was originally written (aka today).

Similarly, when many other religious leaders have some off-the-wall idea, they have no way of separating this from divine revelation. Now, I know some people will claim that they "pray about it", but that is using the same suspect process, because the "answer" to prayers is more "revelations".

Some might say that the details of the revelation itself can be tested. However, as we can see, there is little in the Revelation of John which could be "tested", since it is allegedly predicting events that are supposed to happen thousands of years from the date it was written. Of course, it doesn't disclose that fact, so people throughout the past few thousand years have often thought that it was describing events that were happening in their own time.

In other words, many revelations are not specific enough to test, especially when they may not specify even the ballpark time in which they occur. For this reason, we must be careful reliance on "revelation". It is inherently subjective and even otherwise good people can have all kinds of bizarre dreams and brain farts, which could be declared "revelations" if one is so inclined to label them that way.

I wanted to be born again, but ......

I wanted to be born again, but....I didn't want to put my mother through that again.

When you hear most people discussing the term "born again", it's usually as the punchline to a bad joke. It's just a fact that the term "born again" sounds inherently unrealistic, and has become virtually synonymous with "kook" and "religious extremist", at least in the minds of the average person I know who is not one of them.

Naturally, the "born again" don't see themselves the same way. They see themselves as hip and happenin'. They're trying to turn their mega churches into weekly rock concerts in a desperate attempt to court and co-opt popular culture, but the fact remains that Christian Rock doesn't rock and the moment the lyrics betray that the music is Christian, there is a collective groan from most listeners, who don't want a sermon even if it is backed up by steel guitars and a drum solo. A phrase that became overly popular to describe this sort of phenomenon in the last election cycle was "putting lipstick on a pig". Christian Rock is the quintessential lipstick on a megapig, and "born again" is lipstick on Christianity.

If The Devil is just Personified Evil then God ....

I have found that middle of the road, non-fanatic religious people, have an easy time grasping the idea that the “devil” is just a representation or personification of bad behaviors by people. Nobody really believes that a little man runs around the world all the time making everyone do bad things, and that without this man that we would everything right. This is about as credible as believing that there is a little man inside our televisions or computers that furiously pulls levers to make it operate. Evil does not really come from the devil, but from human decisions, and we don't need a person to tempt us, because we tempt ourselves to behave a certain way, with the reward being the outcomes which we hope will occur.

Indeed, ha-satan or “the satan” really means “the accuser” or “the adversary”. However, when one thinks about it, one's conscience is one's accuser in many cases. Again, one does not need a separate, supernatural source of guilt. The adversary is our desire attempting to overcome the accusations of our conscience, which says that we should not use this means or that means to gratify our desires, or that our desires may not be healthy in the first place.

There is really very little biblical basis for this notion to begin with throughout the Old Testament. Most Judeo-Christians have a notion that there was some kind of battle in heaven between angels loyal to God and angels loyal to Lucifer, but actually, this story does not occur in the Bible. Notions of “Lucifer” appear to be based upon an Isaiah 14 prophecy where it is predicting that the King of Babylon, whom he dubs “son of the morning”, will lose his throne.

While the Bible does at times describe individual characters, such as an accuser in Job 1, or even tempters, such as the one Jesus experienced during his fast (see Mt 4), it is all completely understandable that these can be metaphors for temptation in general, and not a single, monolithic devil or satan character. Job's accuser, like our own accuser could actually be the thoughts of Job himself saying, “I wonder if I really could do the right thing if I lost all my material success”. In the case of Jesus his tempter is hunger itself, perhaps even induced from hallucinations due to food deprivation. Perhaps there was even a complete human tempter, as many of us have experienced when on a diet, saying "what's the big deal? Have some cake."

However, if there really is no devil, and he is really just a personification of evil then what of God? Couldn't we just as easily argue that, in the same way that we don't need a devil to explain human-caused evil, we don't need a God to explain human good? God too is a personification of all the things that we regard as proper, but that doesn't mean that a real being has to exist with those traits.

When the bible describes a final, epic battle between good and evil, perhaps what they are really talking about then, is mankind's quest to definitively settle the question of how we should behave. If such a battle is to take place at the end of the world then I wouldn't hold my breath, because settling such questions appears to be no closer now than in the days of Jesus or Moses.

Christley's Believe It Or ELSE

Imagine that you are asked to believe 2 + 2 is not equal to four. You've counted it out on your fingers a number of times and you keep coming up with 4, which you are told is blasphemy. If you keep insisting that 2 + 2 = 4 then you are assured that you will be tortured severely, your friends and neighbors tell you with chagrin. Just believe that 2 + 2 is any number but 4 and you will be greatly rewarded. You will be given millions of dollars (later on) and all kinds of special treatment. You can even run for the school board and all your new-found friends will vote for you, so that you can scream down all those secular matheists, who insist on teaching the lie to our precious children that 2 + 2 is 4.

But can your will make your first two fingers and your second two fingers look like three fingers. You try crossing one pair of fingers. It almost looks like three fingers, but you can still see a little bit of the other fingers. You try squinting, but now it looks like 3 fingers + 3 fingers.

Exasperated, you go to the minister for help. He tells you that many people struggle with this issue and that it is OK to struggle, so long as you don't die tomorrow as an unredeemed blasphemer and end up in arithmetic hell.

The minister tells you that if you could only first believe then you would be able to see why 2 + 2 is never equal to 4 and is only an illusion created by the devil in order to trick and test mankind. But, if you could believe, it would not matter whether you would then understand the reasons, because if you already believed it without reasons to begin with, why would you need reasons after the fact to justify your beliefs. Anyway, you tried squinting and crossing your fingers to make it look like they didn't add up to 4, but you couldn't do it.

Another religious expert at another church tells you that their technique for showing that 2 + 2 is not equal to 4 is to recognize the triune mystery that 3 = 1. Once this is understood then even if you start with the false premise that 2 + 2 = 4 then 4 = 3 + 1 and since 3 = 1, 4 = 1 + 1 or 4 = 2. Therefore transitively 2 + 2 = 2, et voila we see that 2 + 2 is not equal to 4. However, upon reflection, you realize that believing that 3 = 1 is just as hard as believing that 2 + 2 is not equal to 4.

You are told that people have suffered and died for the great “TRUTH” that 2 + 2 is not equal to 4 and their agonies are recounted in graphic detail. Why would these people suffer such horrific deaths unless they were truly convinced that 2 + 2 is not 4? If they could do it, then why can't you?

As you are contemplating these issues, you are hit by a bus and as your life drains slowly onto the pavement you accept it. You are so going to hell.

Becoming Critical Consumers of Information

Perhaps you know people who are constantly falling for scams and hoaxes on the Internet. These people just can't wrap their heads around the idea that, just because you read something in print somewhere, by somebody with a cheerful picture who sounds sincere, doesn't mean that you can trust what that person is saying. Human culture has never before had to deal with so much information, so we have not yet developed norms and attitudes that emphasize the need to be critical consumers of information. In fact, unfortunately, to a great extent, present day culture still often is oriented toward the opposite extreme. We still see it as a virtue to accept claims with little evidence. To challenge a claim would be seen as rude, as well as risky for most people. It requires effort and information, so it is much easier to just passively accept what one is told than to question it. However, if we do not develop these skills then people will continue to fall prey to all manner of urban legends and nonsensical claims which circulate around the Internet with increasing frequency.

I maintain that, once these skills are instilled into the general culture that people's attitudes will necessarily change about religion and politics, at least to some degree. Right now people still hold religious beliefs that were formed at a time when believing claims on shoddy evidence was still looked upon in a charitable light. The same applies to many of the political policies that prevail today. Most were formulated in a time when you could get away with making lots of questionable claims without the average person being able to check the facts very easily.

Once people get used to questioning each new piece of information they receive and looking at claims critically, they are bound to do this, at least to some extent with religion. I know that psychologists speak of cognitive dissonance where people can compartmentalize their thinking so that they they can be skeptical of some things but not others. I also know that the things that young children learn, before they develop critical thinking skills, are often less subject to re-analysis later in life. However, I suspect that neither of these systems are perfect.

Religion is successful right now because they insinuated some of their attitudes and worldviews directly into the culture, so that people would think certain ways automatically, with barely ever a question. Once the culture changes to value the ability to reject bogus arguments and unsubstantiated claims, which is necessary in order to avoid getting conned online these days, then religion is sure to start taking some harder knocks.

I know that, right now, religious people like to crow about how they have survived the onslaught of Enlightenment science and technology. They even boast that religion is resurging, after being pronounced on the way out, a century or two ago. However, like many comforting illusions they believe, I think this fantasy is pretty easily dispelled.

The reality is that Churches have less and less power than ever before. Many of their gains are won in temporary skirmishes, but the long term trend is still away from religious authorities being able to call the shots for how society is run. The prestige of religious figures and their authority is nowhere near as high as it used to be. What we call Roman Catholicism or Episcopalianism today is not what it used to be 100 years ago. Even fundamentalists have been forced to make concession after concession to science and modern scholarship, making their naive literalism increasingly less tenable. Therefore the so-called resurgence is hollow at best.

Of course, populations will continue to grow. One is often told about the increasing number of Muslims or even Mormons who seem to be on the march. But even these groups continue to make concessions to the modern world. Young muslims today do not go for the strictness of the last century. The notion that women shouldn't be able to drive or that they must be covered from head to toe and escorted around by males is something that even the most devout muslims find inconvenient, which means that they will find reasons to work around it theologically.

Religions might keep the same names, but they continue to be massive altered by the modern world. They have been pushed and pushed on issues like gay rights, contraception, abortion, feminism, sex out of wedlock, genetic research, and a whole host of other issues. The Catholic Church, for example has taken a reactionary view on pretty much all of the issues mentioned above, and has been forced to make ignoble retreats on pretty much all of these issues, to some extent, and contribution levels and membership plummet.

Unlike religion, which has a very unsuccessful track-record of making legitimate prophecies, I will not pretend that I can predict what religion will look like in coming decades. However, with accelerating technological change, it is clear that the challenge to it has only just begin, and their premature victory whoops are really just preening over surviving total annihilation, despite massive casualties from the first wave of the assault. Those who think they will restore the place of religion to its former glory are truly living in a fantasy realm.

Like Pat Robertson and George W. Bush they might say, "bring it on", but it is already coming at them every day whether they choose to issue invitations or not. Continued breakthrough in stem cell research, contraception, and abortion technologies, for example, will continue to put them off balance. The potential that HIV vaccines might be developed fairly quickly will mean that they can stoke even less fear about sex. The potential that fossilized cellular life may be found on Mars, for example, will be a significant threat to creationism, despite the verbal gymnastics they may use to apologize for the embarrassing results.

These are just a few of the challenges which the future of religion will face, coupled with an exponentially greater ability to communicate those embarrassing results.

What is the point of bodily resurrection?

I spoke to a man the other day who said that his wive converted to a faith I call Jehovah's Witless (I think that's how it's pronounced anyway ;-)). Now he says she is always getting on him about how he needs to read the Bible and "proclaim the new world", etc, etc. He said that she is always talking about this "new world" where all your relatives are going to rise from their graves. Anyway, the guy was not happy about the way that his wife's newfound beliefs are affecting him, so he asked me for some advice.

One thing I told him was that, if she is going to insist on bodily resurrection, you might want to ask her at what age these individuals will be resurrected. After all, we don't expect their mangled old corpses to come back all worm-eaten and injured, even though this is how the Bible portrayed the resurrection of Jesus, complete with injuries in his palm and side. However, it would be a bit gruesome to see a relative who died in a car wreck all smashed up and bloody. So presumably god would at least clean these people up a bit and restore them to a state of health before they were mortally injured. Otherwise this would really be a zombie freak show.

So far, so good. But why stop there? For example, I pointed out to him that, if I live to 100, I wouldn't want God resurrecting my 100-year-old body. I would want him to resurrect me at 18, or 21 or maybe 25 when I was presumably in better shape. I would imagine that many other people would have similar sentiments. Perhaps one would be okay with even being resurrected looking like you did at 40, but you certainly wouldn't want to be wrinkled and fat and out of breathe trying to gallivant around heaven.

A standard answer that I have heard from religious people in response to this, which they usually make up on the fly, is that "god will let you choose" what age you will be. Perhaps one day you will appear to be 65 externally (only in better health) so you can visit your grandkids, and the next day you will be 17 so you can make out with your high school sweetheart. Perhaps you will some kind of shape shifter going from one form to another instant. This will make it hard for people to recognize you, but I'm sure that religious people will invoke magic again and say people will still instantly know who you are. It's their fantasy, so I'll let them pretend whatever they want.

However, this raises the question of why bodily resurrection is necessary at all, in this case. If you can shift your form at any time, and people know who you are anyway, regardless of what you look like then what the heck do you even need a body for. We have bodies on Earth so that we can move and eat and drink and breathe. Presumably we won't have to worry about such things in heaven. So why should we need a body at all?

As I have long argued, if it were possible for being to exist without any kind of body, then why would having a physical body seem like a good or desirable thing? If you could exist eternally without having to eat or drink, or sleep, or feel pain, all of which are associated with having a body, then why would you want the terrible inconvenience of a body?

More pointedly, if you don't have a body then how can you burn an immaterial being in the fires of hell? Some religions are now trying to say that hell is not literally flames, despite centuries and millennia of teaching that it was quite literal, but rather it is just a psychological torment of being separated from god. However, that would seem to depend upon one's individual psychological disposition. Some people are loners to begin with. Sure God might give you great goodies, but I'm sure there would be plenty of people who would be just fine to go it alone as a spirit, since one would still be free of the need to eat or drink, or worry about health or otherwise support oneself. I'm not convinced that it would be so bad to permanently retired in such a state even if one wasn't is magic candy land with angels and harps. Many people would kill for the opportunity to have some privacy and just being left alone in one's own thoughts and to one's own devices.

Of course, there are many other issues which could be raised about the particulars of the screwball beliefs of the Jehovah's Witless. They seem to believe, assuming that you can pin them down on anything officially, that people will have to live in a physically restored body on the Earth, which will become God's perfect kingdom for 1000 years, and then that non-believers will die, with no-resurrection, simply ceasing to exist. I will note that, in this case, if non-believers are simply extinguished then the observation of Epicurus still holds that Death would be nothing to fear, for when it is, you are not. In other words, when you cease to exist, you won't be around to worry about anything, so it too would not be any kind of terrible anguish. If you were to disappear suddenly, five seconds from now and cease to exist, you wouldn't be around to have any regrets. However, my point was simply that they do not seem to have thought through a number of the particulars, such as the need for a body at all.

Eve was entrapped ... not framed

There is a popular bumper sticker that says "Eve was framed", but it would be more accurate to say that "Eve was entrapped". Perhaps that would be too complicated a sentiment for a bumper sticker, but let's look at the situation.

God apparently wants to test Adam and Eve, but it seems that he has trouble playing fair when it comes to tests. It would have been one thing to just tell Adam and Eve not to do something and then wait a limited period of time to see of they would disobey. It is another thing to allow another one of your craftiest creations to actively attempt to persuade Eve to act otherwise than she would have acted on her own. That is the essence of the modern concept of "entrapment". By one definition it is, "To lure into performing a previously or otherwise uncontemplated illegal act". In modern jursiprudence, entrapment is a valid defense against committing a crime because you were lead by the hand, meaning that it's not a true test of your obedience, but rather, reflects how gullible and easy to manipulate you are.

To wit, Genesis 3 opens with the serpent asking, in perfect Hebrew, presumably, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" In other words, the serpent is planting the idea in Eve's mind. Eve's response is to reject the snakes subtle advance, even including the embellishment that God said touching the fruit would cause death (Gen 3:3). In other words, Eve is perfectly content to stay away from the tree and its fruit. So the serpent perssssists, and actively assurse her that she is not going to die. Instead he promises that, if she does, she is going to gain wisdom from it, at which point she is persuaded and eats.This is clearly inducement.

Consider this example. A mother tells her five-year-old daughter, "don't eat these fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies because they are poisonous and you'll die". Then the girl's cool older sister comes in after mom's gone and puts her arm around her kid sister and says, "hey kiddo, why aren't you eating any of these delicious cookies?" The little girl explains, "Mom said they were poisonous and I don't want to die". The older sister assures her, "You're not going to die, silly. Look, I'm eating one now. Mom just doesn't want you to eat cookies because she knows that eating cookies will make you cool like me. So dig in." What kid would be expected to have the adult level of responsible judgment to resist that kind of thing?

Of course, the story gets even more sordid in the case of Genesis, since almost none of what God claimed to Adam and Eve about the trees was actually true. He supposedly put some trees in the middle of the Garden of "Delight" (aka Eden), as per Gen 2:16-17, saying, "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." He technically tells them they can eat from ANY tree but the" tree of knowledge of good and evil" (tokogae), and yet in Gen 3:22 he goes back on this saying, "[Man] must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever". This would be like the mother saying to her young daughter, "you can eat anything in the kitchen besides these chocolate chip cookies" and then freaking out when her daughter tried to eat s'mores.

Furthermore, from a literal perspective, Gen 3:22 proves that Adam was not immortal. He had not eaten from the tree, so there is no reason to believe he has immortal before eating from the tokogae. And Adam very certainly doesn't die the next day, or next week, or next year, or next century. He lives for 930 years. Dishonest apologists try to claim that this is because to god "a day is like a thousand years", but that is a figurative, non-literal interpretation. These same people claim to be "bible literalists" and say that one can rely upon the "plain meaning" of words in the bible without embellishment. However, that apparently only applies unless there is some kind of difficulty with the text, at which point, anything but the plain meaning of the words are read into the passage to square it with preconceived dogmas.

If the mother, in this example, told her daughter that eating the cookies would cause her to die instantly, and then her daughter died ten years later in a car wreck, nobody could reasonably say, "maybe in her mother's mind, 'instantly' meant something like ten years". Anyone claiming this, at the very least, would have to prove that adam died from slow, 930-year-old apple toxicity, and not for some other reason.

More importantly, one wonders why God withheld a full and fair description of what he actually intended to do to Adam and Eve if they ate from the tree. Most people cast this as "disobedience", but actually, God fails to say, "just don't do it". Instead he just describes a false consequence of eating the fruit as an apparently ineffective deterrent. Then, when Adam and Eve test the claim and find it to be clearly false, God applies all kinds of consequences that he never warned them about. How might the test have turned out differently, had he been upfront with them about the actual consequences? As Voltaire observed, God seems to care a lot more about a piece of fruit than he does about his own children.

Broken Logic of Labeling Arizona Shooter a Liberal Atheist

Right-wingers, which almost automatically means fundamentalist pseudo-christians, have been beside themselves with panic to attempt to dishonestly portray the Arizona assassin, Jared Loughner as being motivated by liberalism, pot-smoking, or atheism, despite the fact that these portrayals make no sense. Religious people often have an easy time believing nonsense like this, because they practice believing even crazier nonsense on a daily basis. The fact is that Jared Loughner was a registered REPUBLICAN, according to voting registration records and a certifiable GUN LUNATIC who was AFRAID of BIG GOVERNMENT. These are verifiable facts, but republicans and the fundamentalist religious extremists who control that party have long felt, as Ronald Reagan so ineloquently put it that "facts are STUPID things". Perhaps, if Loughner had not registered as a republican then one might say that his philosophy is closer to right-winger Libertarianism, but I'm not going to second guess what this person says his party preference is.

Now consider the so-called logic right-wingers are using here. They insist, in spite of the facts, that Loughner was a "liberal". Then why would he kill liberals. It wasn't liberals who hated Giffords. It was right-wingers. Sarah Palin was the one who put the graphic of gun crosshairs on Giffords specifically, on her website. It was Giffords opponents who put Giffords image on paper gun targets and invited republican supporters to come out to the gun range and shoot at those targets. It was republicans who said, "if ballots don't work, bullets will". If Loughner was a liberal then he shouldn't have been sympathetic to all of this. What about being a "liberal" should have motivated Loughner to want to assassinate one of the few liberal politicians in his state when there were plenty of right-wing extremists throughout Arizona? Indeed it would be hard to find a few other liberals in the heavily republican enclave of Arizona.

So how do republicans conclude that he was a "liberal" and therefore falsely reason that liberalism is to blame for his actions? They say that he read Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. Of course, most educated people would have trouble understanding why right-wingers think that that the ultra-rightwing writings of Adolf Hitler would be "left-wing", but you have to understand that in the semi-literate world of republicanism, they consider Hitler a "socialist", despite the fact that Hitler was at war with communists, outlawed trade unions and despised socialists. As far as reading the Communist Manifesto, reading it does not make you a liberal. Marx and Engels say, in the Manifesto, that they borrowed basic principles of Communism from the Christian bible. From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs comes from the New Testament book of Acts., for example. Christianity, in its original form, was the socialism that right-wingers hate so much.

Ah, but they claim Loughner was an atheist. As some honest right-wingers have admitted, you are not absolutely required to be a fundamentalist christian to be a republican. There are republicans who are atheists. As I have pointed out there are also right-wing Libertarians, who tend to be more religiously skeptical and favor things like marijuana use. However, for this point to really matter we have to believe that there was anything about atheism that would make Loughner do what he did. An atheist who did not believe that he gets forgiven and admitted to eternal Candyland for saying "I wuv u Jebus" one second before death, would be unlikely to throw away his one and only life like this. Atheists might not believe that god is watching them, but they certainly believe that other people are watching them, and, given that there is no conceivable way that he could have gotten away with this crime and not been subject to either the death penalty or lengthy prison, he was not acting as a atheist.

Right wingers have tried to compare this guy to the Columbine kids, but they actually killed themselves. That might be more consistent with nihilism. Instead, this guy was indiscriminate in his choice of targets.

If Loughner was influenced by anything he was influenced mainly by right-wing ideologies like fascism and libertarianism, which caused him to lash out primarily at liberals. It is clear that his mind was not functioning well to begin with, so it is likely that he would have been highly susceptible to the not-so0-subtle assassination rhetoric that rightwingers have used almost constantly, when they call for armed insurrection against their own countrymen and "2nd amendment remedies" when they lose at the ballot box, as they lost to Giffords.

Atheists Have Plenty of Holidays

Morons sometimes use the discredited, nonsense line that they ripped off from someone who mistakenly thought he was clever that, “I can't be an atheist because they have no holidays”, when, in reality, most so-called “holidays” are secular. Think about it. New Years, Martin Luther King Day (yes he was a religious man, but no we don't go to church on that day). Ground hog day, valentines day (yes, saint valentine was christian, but no you don't need to be christian to celebrate it and other cultures had their own similar days) arbor day, flag day, Columbus day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day, Spring Break, Mother's Day, Father's Day. Even Halloween and Thanksgiving are celebrated in completely secular ways by people of many faiths or no faith at all. The same is true of Christmas, or Boxing Day the next day. You don't have to be Christian to give gifts. If you want to, you can celebrate solstice, yule, festivus, or any number of other alternate events, but why bother. There is nothing uniquely Christian about reindeer, elves, pine trees, stocking or any of that. Even Santa himself might have been based on “Saint Nicholas”, but is an entirely different, secular, modern invention. That is just the reality. You might be thinking that the word “holiday” means “holy day”, but you would be wrong. It doesn't mean that anymore either. The majority of holidays are not “holy”, nor does it have to be a religious event to be called a holiday. Words change in their usage and you can't assume that the definition of a word is 100% derived from its components or etymology. As it turns out then, there is pretty much no “holiday” that atheists cannot celebrate. If only Christians can celebrate Christmas because it is a Christian holiday, then, by your logic Christians should not be able to celebrate explicitly secular or non-religious holidays like The Fourth of July, or Columbus Day, or Flag Day. The majority of our holidays are not even religious in origin, but none of them have obligatory religious components. Oh and, before you make another mealymouthed, worn-out joke, no April Fool's Day is not(1) a holiday and (2) for atheists -- it is for you gullible religious people. It was originally created because some of you die-hard religious types refused to change over from the old calendar when the Pope decided to update things, so those following the new calendar decided to mock and play tricks on people following the old ways, which were often the hyper-conservative, religious types. These days, you can bet that the religious people are the ones being fooled and mocked, due to their apotheosis of gullibility, and the atheists are the one's playing the jokes and having all the laughs at the expense of the “faithful” or more accurately “faith fools”. That is, after all, what faith turns people into and some church fathers even had the good sense to admit it.

'Tis the Season For Stupid Xmas Songs

'Tis the season to hear crazy Christmas jingles virtually everywhere, in the malls, on the radio, and even being sung by drunken frat boys. Most people just seem to hum along, never listening to the lyrics, but if you're cursed, like me, to actually listen to the words being sung then you've probably realize that this is a mighty weird-ass time of year. I would like to encourage like minded-individuals to be taking mental notes as you read this and contribute your own favorite examples.

For starters, it seem that many popular Christmas songs were written like 900 years ago, so they have all kinds of retarded, old-timey words that only Amish people would use, like “thou” and “art” and “yon”. The vocabulary of Christmas is full of these crusty, old fogey terms, where half the time you're probably thinking, “I'd like to buy a vowel, here”, but you can't because vowels hadn't even been invented yet. When else do you say, “yo, I needs me some boughs of holly so as I can deck my halls wif 'em?” How about, “don we now our gay apparel?” Yeah, I think I'll pass on that one. I can't believe religious people haven't launched a crusade against this one. “Troll the ancient yuletide carol”? A lot of people think the word is “toll”, but that refers to bells, and the only troll they've ever heard of is Shrek. No wait, he's an Ogre, but close enough. “Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh”? If you say so, Father Time. I can honestly say that I've never been in a “one-horse open sleigh”, so I can't verify “what fun it is”, but it probably ain't quite so much fun for the horse, who gets to freeze his butt off.

Anyway, I'm not even going to talk about the really whack sounding songs like “Good King Wencelaus” or “the Wassail Song”, because those songs sound like such looney tunes that they will seldom ever get played, except maybe on the History Channel. I'm talking about songs that you hear all the time like, We Wish You a Merry Christmas. That doesn't sound too weird, but, if you think about it, do we ever use the word “merry” without the next word being “Christmas”, unless you're a big Robinhood fan? Merry Arbor Day? Not so much.

But that's not the weirdest part of the song. The really weird part is where they start singing, “Oh bring us the figgy pudding and a cup of good cheer”. It then goes on to say, “we won't go until we get some” three times, followed by “and bring it out here”. Now then, it almost goes without saying that “we won't go until we get some” has a WAY different connotation today than when it was originally written. Get your figgy puddin out here right now, girlfriend. But seriously, how many of you all eat figgy pudding? I've caroled a few times and I have never been served, nor have I wanted to be served figgy pudding. I'm just saying... a cup of good cheer maybe, though it would probably violate alcohol serving laws today.

Another pretty common song you'll hear is “I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus”, especially as performed by the Jackson 5. It's only mildly creepy, now that Michael's dead, to hear him testifying in his clear, innocent voice about witnessing a sexual encounter between his mother and some old pervert.

Speaking of his clear voice, is it just me or do other people notice that Michael pronounces his words perfectly when he sings, but then, when he stops singing, and does interviews as a young kid, he lapses into a thick, 1970's jive-talking accent? Anyway, back to the magic of mistletoe, I'm sure his dad would just laugh and laugh about some fat, horny cracker snogging his wife. Now then, if mistletoe makes it okay to “kiss” a married woman on her “lips”, I wonder if this includes “special kisses” on the lower extremities. Maybe that's how Michael justified it. If only he were alive today he could experiment with tunes like “I saw santa kissing mommy's mound, underneath her cameltoe last night”. How about, “I saw mommy riding santa's salami”. Santa always struck me as a pimp. That would explain his fur coat, and his dope ride, and the way he's always saying, “Ho ho ho”. Come on now, we have to contemporize these songs, you know.

Speaking of that, there's “Winter Wonderland”. What I “wonder” about in “Winter Wonderland” is who the effin hell Parson Brown is and what he's doing trying to marry children? You might be saying, isn't this the dude who married Frosty the Snowman and his girlfriend Crystal, but I'm pretty sure this song just borrowed that name from Winter Wonderland as a send up. Anyway, here are the lines I'm talking about. It reads, “In the meadow we can build a snowman. Then pretend that he is Parson Brown. He'll say are you married. We'll say no, man. But you can do the job when you're in town.” Well, he is “in town” because you just built has happy ass in the meadow, and holy under-aged shack-ups, Batman, is this guy a Mormon or something? I'm sure kids today are totally confused anyway, thinking “What the heck is marriage? Oh, yeah I heard it's kind of like what old people do instead of just hooking up, only way less cool?”

That brings us to “Away in a Manger”, where we're told that Jesus had “no crib for a bed”. Actually I think that Jesus's crib in heaven was pretty tight and tricked out, but that's not the crib we're talking about. I'm fairly sure that people 2000 years ago didn't have fancy baby cribs, play pens, romper rooms, baby monitors in their nurseries for their kids. I'm guessing that they didn't have cable TV either, and they couldn't play him Baby Mozart, or use plastic pampers or feed him Gerber baby formula, either. The point is that it probably wouldn't have been unusual for a baby to be sleeping in the same room as goats and other domestic animals. That's how you stayed warm back then, to say nothing of the opportunities for “companionship”. I know, I know, I am so totally going to hell for these blasphemies, but I gotta call them like I see them. Anyway, the song goes on to ask Jesus to “stay by my cradle till morning is nigh”. I think most people believe this word is “night”, because, unless you're King Lear, you probably don't use the word “nigh” to mean “near” on a regular basis.

Another pretty trippy song is “We three kings of orient are”. It's about these dudes who are supposedly kings, but they apparently don't have any crews to come with them and carry their s*** and didn't even have couriers to go on their behalf. Instead, they come all by themselves following lights in the sky. It sounds like someone was smoking more than just frankincense, when they decided to make that trip. Anyway, in the song they describe their long journey by saying, “Bearing gifts, we traverse afar”. OK, fine, it was written in the 1850's, so they say “traverse” instead of “travel”. But they go on to say, “Field and fountain, moor and mountain / following yonder star”. Sure, they want a word to rhyme with “mountain”, I understand that, but “fountain”? That doesn't quite sound right. A fountain doesn't exactly sound that terrible. It sounds like a refreshing little dip or a quick drink, which would actually be pretty nice, considering that there are tons of DESERTS in the Middle East. How did they fail to notice that little fact? And what's up with the reference to a “moor” or swamp? Is this The Hound of the Baskervilles or what? Hey, that might not be a bad plot twist, if the Three Wisemen got eaten by the Hound of the Baskervilles and Jesus had to use his superpowers to hunt it down and cut it open to extract his “gifts”. Now that might be a flick I could watch, if the graphics were decent.

I could go on almost without end. I was going to say “ad infinitum”, but we don't even want to get into all the Latin stuff like “Ave Maria”. I'd like to hear from other like-minded Christmas song critics about your own pet peeves and favorite finds, so make sure to contribute to the discussion.

Christian Grinches aka Crinches

Nothing quite conveys the hateful spirit of extremist Christianity during this "season of joy" so much as a Dallas megachurch setting itself up as politically correct language police and threatening to boycott and defame businesses who don't say "Merry Christmas", by labelling them "Grinches". Right-wingers love to bloviate about "political correctness", because they wrongly believe that the term can't apply to them, since they have no intention of sparing anyone's feelings. In reality, however, right-wingers are often far more politically correct than their opponents, because if they hear one word or phrase that is counter to their orthodoxy, they throw a tantrum about how their feelings have been hurt, and then proceed with these kinds of crazy witch-hunts and crusades immediately to persecute the perceived perpetrators. That is the very political correctness they attempt to criticize when liberals do it. If one asks "What Would the Grinch Do WWtGD?", almost certainly the Grinch would be a Christian extremist, since these individuals have no love for people in general. They only love those who agree with them and hate and scorn the rest of humanity, for daring to disagree with them.

It is even more ironic that these same individuals who attempt to mandate the automatic proclamation of "Merry Christmas", regardless of whether the speaker or the target is Christian would be terribly incensed and offended if ordered to say, "Happy Hannukah" during Hannukah. True, the christian doesn't celebrate Hannukah, but ...oh my non-existent being I think we just had a "do onto others" breakthrough...if these people actually followed the teachings of their founder. Instead, these same individuals want to force other people to help them advertise Christmas, while they would never accept the same level of coercion, instead of simply saying something more inclusive like "Happy Holidays".

I have spoken to a few of these fanatics and they inform me that, if a cashier dared to say "Happy Holidays", that they would demand a refund on the spot. As a former shop keeper I have expressed some skepticism about how well this might work. After all, if you want a refund, you are no longer a customer, so why should I go out of my way to please you. I think that many shop keepers, when confronted with this kind of mindless, passive-aggressive nonsense, that inconveniences the customer and the store, would like say, "Get the f*** out of my store, and don't come back....Oh and happy assHolidays to you too." In fact, I was suggesting that non-religious people should get temporary jobs at big retailers like Walmart during the *HOLiday SeASSon* and go out of our way to wish people "HaPPy HOLidays", or other inappropriate things, like wishing customers "Merry Kwanzaa" or "Super Solstice" or "Fabulous Festivus". In fact, my favorite phrase during this time of year is "Merry Christmyth", which sounds almost like what fanatics want us to say, especially if you say it quickly or pretend you have a lisp. When the fanatics complain one can say, "Christmas goes against my religious beliefs, so asking me to say 'merry Christmas'" is religious discrimination. It might even work if tried by a liberal court in California or something. That could stop these demon-hearted Christian Grinches (Crinches) deader than the Crucifiction [stet].

Suspicious timing of Olbermann silencing

Isn't it interesting that, right after the election, at the very moment that Keith Olbermann might be most able to be the voice of the opposition, he is effectively fired. Isn't it interesting that Comcast has inked a deal to take over MSNBC and COO Steve Burke, a Bush fundraiser, wants Olbermann gone. Isn't it interesting that people like Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchannan have openly admitted to contributing to political candidates and raising funds for candidates on the MSNBC airwaves and they have never been hit with trumped up ethics charges involving a few thousand dollars. For the mathematically literate out there, about $3 billion dollars was spent by both parties in this election cycle. The idea that contributing a few thousand dollars to a candidate would destroy the journalistic objectivity of a left-wing political commentary TV show is beyond absurd.

This certainly destroys the myth of a liberal media, yet again. Suspending Olbermann hurts the network far worse than they hurt him, but they don't care because the corporate masters are more worried about currying right-wing political favor than even the money they make on his show. To claim that the silencing of Olbermann is being done in defense of journalism and the free-press is precisely the kind of orwellian double-speak we would expect from these monolithic, undemocratic, unaccountable corporations.

PolitiCliff Notes for Confused Masses
It might be a nice idea if people could start posting some one page "CliffsNote" (not affiliated with the publishers of Cliffs Notes ) style short summaries of political issues, to help sum up some issue for those who remain confused about it.
Here is an example of what I'm talking about:

Take the issues of a “Ground Zero Mosque”....


which is now strangely intertwined with Koran burning (note how much easier and less snobby it is to spell Koran with a ‘K’ instead of a “Qu’….you’re welcome). Here are the political cliffsnotes:

1. It is not at ground zero. (game)
2. It is not a mosque (set)
3. There is already a mosque closer than this proposed community center (match)

…..But just for the heck of it:

4. Under what specific principle of law would you forbid muslims building a mosque (or a community center) on their own property, next to other churches and community centers, without the courts immediately overturning it as blatant religious discrimination and awarding monetary damages?
5. If you think the law and Constitution should be changed to veto muslims building a mosque (or community center) on their own property then you have just admitted that

(a) there is no current principle of law under which you can stop it

(b) your current advocacy of stopping it is illegal (and unconstitutional)

(c) you don’t really believe in small government if you want to pass special, new, convoluted laws designed only to take rights away from people you don’t like.

6. Touche, biacche.


See that cleared up all the confusion in short order. Of course I could have added


7. Pastard Terry Jones and his intention to burn Korans (which he has clearly never read) has absolutely, positively, nothing (at all!) to do with this issue (whatsoever), except in Jones's own mind.
1. He tried to link his actions (in Florida) to something going on in New York
2. As a consequence he completely discredited the MosKowards (read it slow) by associating them with bigots who burn books, and endanger our soldier in wartime
3. Bravo, Terry. Nicely played.
4. (Bonus point) Terry doesn't even know the word is "Imam" not "Iman", and no you can't defend him by saying "shucks, I don't know that either".

Of course, as far as Obama is concerned

8. He should immediately fire his PR and speechwriting people because they absolutely screwed the pooch on this one
9. They decided to have him give a speech defending the right to build the Mosque
10. This played right into the hands of his opponents, who gleefully framed it as confirmation of their talking point: "That (Barack Hussein) Obama is a (closet) Muslim."
11. This forced Obama's desperate backpedal that he “questioned the wisdom” of building it, but not their right to do it. That made him about as popular as the ACLU defending kiddie porn.
12. Hint to dumbsh**s on the presidential staff: He never should have mentioned the mosque specifically, and then only referred to it as a “church”, in general.
13. In other words, if you’re going to take the high road then be abstract and say things like “we don’t discriminate against anyone’s religion in this country”.