Unforgiveable sins

What's the worst thing a person can do? The utterly worst, most despicable, abominable, loathsome, unforgiveable thing? Murder? Rape? Raping a baby? Genocide? Torturing an innocent to death, slowly, over many days?

How about swearing an oath in the name of something or someone other than god?

In Islam, the only unforgiveable sins are "kufr" (disbelief) and "shirk" (ascribing a partner to Allah). Disbelief is obvious: you better believe or you're in trouble. (One wonders why a supposedly all-powerful deity who created the entire universe cares so much about being worshipped by beings who are like ants compared to him.) Shirk is a little more complicated: it encompasses a variety of sins, such as the belief that some other being is an equal or a peer of Allah. There is major shirk, such heinous sins like making fun of religion, belief in other gods, loving anyone as much as you love Allah, or creating laws that take priority over Allah's laws.

There is also minor shirk, such as superstition, or swearing an oath in the name of something other than Allah (although Allah himself is permitted to do such a thing, since he makes the rules and the rules don't apply to him). Unlike major shirk, minor shirk alone doesn't quite put the transgressor beyond the pale, but it's a near thing. It is a major sin to swear a false oath by Allah, a terrible sin, but it is worse by far to swear an honest oath by something else.

This tells us the priorities of the (supposed) all-good, all-loving, all-knowing god (or rather, the priorities of the people who made this stuff up): you can spend a lifetime stealing, murdering, raping little babies and torturing people to death, polluting the world, ruining the lives of all those around you, and still be forgiven. You can be a totally immoral, lying, cheating, despicable monster, and still be forgiven. You can be a blight on the lives of everyone around you, and still be forgiven. But entertain the merest thought that god has a rival or peer? Unforgiveable.

Christians should not feel too superior here. Have you read your Ten Commandments? They too make it obvious that the number one ethical principle of god is the jealous insistence on being worshipped.

Numbering the so-called Ten Commandments is not simple: they are listed three times in the Bible, twice in Exodus and once in Deuteronomy, where they are worded differently, unnumbered, and in no simple or obvious set of ten. Consequently, the major religious groups disagree on what the Ten actually are: Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish and Samaritan sects do not agree on either the wording, numbering or even what the Commandments are. One Mormon sect, the Strangites, includes as one of the Ten something which no other group includes: Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbour As Thyself. The second set from Exodus 34 are especially problematic: although they are stated by god to be the same words as those written on the stone tablets smashed by Moses, they are radically, and obviously, different.

But however you divide them, it is clear that a high priority is not good, ethical behaviour, but protecting Yahwah's monopoly on worship. There is no prohibition on rape, the molestation of children, torture, or despoiling the earth, and especially not genocide (beloved by the god of the Old Testament -- god warns the Israelites that if they aren't successful in his ordered genocide of the Caananites, he will change sides and do to them what he was originally planning to do to the Caananites). There's no nothing about respecting human dignity, justice or mercy, or prohibiting slavery. (There is a minority view among some biblical scholars that Thou Shalt Not Steal refers not to mere theft of property, but to theft of people, that is kidnapping and slavery, but that seems unlikely given that the Israelites were enthusiastic slave holders.) Except for the Strangite Mormon addition, there's nothing even close to the Golden Rule of ethical behaviour, to treat others as you would hope to be treated in their shoes.

Depending on how you count them, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 might contain as few as 3 out of 10 or as many as 5 out of 11 commandments about protecting Yahweh's monopoly: Thou shalt have no other gods before me, remembering the sabbath, and variations on the same theme. Exodus 34 is even more extreme: all of the commandments relate to worshipping Yahweh, making sacrifices to Yahweh, keeping the sabbath, avoiding worshipping other gods, and then right at the end, almost like an afterthought, a strange comment about not cooking lambs in the milk of their mother. And these are supposed to be the great moral and ethical principles that Christianity rests on.

Happy Darwin Day

Hello to all. After a seven month absence I have returned. I'd like to explain my absence with a tale of derring-do, of frontiers crossed and mountains scaled and disasters averted, of femmes fatale and gangsters and wild ambulance rides and desperate last stands, but the honest truth is that I've just been busy with ordinary life. Sigh.

Today is the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth. Happy 200th birthday to him! (It's also Abraham Lincoln's 200th.)

It's astounding that, in the year 2009, more than one in two people in the USA don't accept the reality of biological evolution. This is the cause of, and is caused by, the politicisation of biology by religious fundamentalists: evolution has been, for well over half a century, a convenient whipping boy to rally the troops. Opposition to a scientific theory has become a good defining characteristic of a certain type of fundamentalist. It's relatively safe and easy too: it doesn't require you give up your DVD player or plasma TV, like the Amish do, or avoid medical treatment like followers of so-called "Christian Science" do.

While Darwin's contributions to biology are eminently worthy of respect and even celebration, I don't think the plans for Darwin Day are entirely innocent. After all, there's little or no serious movement towards celebrating Sir Isaac Newton's birthday (25th December), or Maxwell's, or Einstein's, or any other noted scientist. I think that there is a little bit of cocking a snook at the Fundamentalists here. They've spent decades demonising Darwin, and I'm sure a lot of people (myself included) wouldn't be too unhappy to see the fundies squirm over Darwin Day. But I think it is important to remember that Darwin never sought controversy, and although he became an atheist himself, he wasn't a militant one. He never begrudged his wife Emma's faith, and he deliberately held off publishing his theory as long as possible because of his concerns that it would upset people.

So, for Darwin Day, some links on why Darwin is important.

From the Guardian:

There can be no such equivocation in the week of a survey which showed that only around half of all Britons accept that Darwin's theory of evolution is either true or probably true. In a democracy, citizens should respect each other's beliefs; and citizens have a right to express their beliefs. But in a democracy, a newspaper has an obligation to what is right. The truth is that Darwin's reasoning has in the last 150 years been supported overwhelmingly by discoveries in biology, geology, medicine and space science. The details will keep scientists arguing for another 200 years, but the big picture has not changed. All life is linked by common ancestry, including human life. The shameful lesson of this 200th anniversary of his birth is that Darwin's contemporaries understood more clearly than many modern Britons.

Jerry Coyne on why Darwin is still important, 150 years after Origin Of Species:

Darwin had far more influence on modern evolutionary research than Newton has on work in modern physics. In fact, in no other area of science has a research program suggested by one person lasted for a century and a half. ...

But some biologists, chafing in their Darwinian straitjacket, periodically announce new worldviews that, they claim, will overturn our view of evolution, or at least force its drastic revision. During my career I have heard this said about punctuated equilibrium, molecular drive, the idea of symbiosis as an evolutionary force, evo-devo, and the notion that evolution is driven by the self-organization of molecules. Some of these ideas are worthwhile, others simply silly; but none do more than add a room or two to the Darwinian manse. Often declared dead, Darwinism still refuses to lie down.

(A small aside: Richard Dawkins has a glowing review of Coyne's book Why Evolution Is True. One for the shopping list, methinks.)

And Darwin fan-grrl Soupytwist has written a short, sweet and kick-arse post about her attitude to Darwin and his theory:

It's about seeing the world for what it is, not for what we might percieve it to be, and seeing the actual underlying processes underneath: processes at once so simple and so far-reaching that they boggle the mind.

I mean, "things that survive are the ones who get to pass on attributes to the next generation" seems pretty obvious, really. But as simple as that idea is, it really wasn't obvious, not in the face of a world where basically everybody thought species were created immutable, and absolutely not before we knew there was definitely such a thing as DNA which might provide the actual mechanics of the whole thing.

On a related note, if anybody tries to tell you that Darwin recanted his theory on his deathbed and returned to Christianity, don't be fooled. It simply isn't true.


UPDATE: thanks to Mrs Impala for her l33t editing and proof-reading skills, and the link to Soupytwist.

Silent longing

What a piece of work this guy is.

Last month, Sith Lord Benedict XVI declared that American Indians had been "silently longing" to be converted to Christianity by the Spanish Conquistadors 500 years ago, and had been seeking the god known only as God "without realizing it".

(One wonders how Emperor Popetine knows what was going through the minds of people from a foreign culture who died half a millenium ago? Oh wait, that's right, the god known only as God has made him infallible. That's what the Pope says, and he's infallible so he must be right.)

(Click image for full view.)

Losing the faith

Over the last century, what's the most successfully growing religion? Is it evangelical Protestant Christianity? Islam? Scientology?

Trick question: the answer is actually not a religion at all. It is the faithless -- atheist, agnostic or simply "no religion" -- that has seen the largest, most sustained increase in numbers over the last century. From a minuscule 3.2 million people (0.2% of the globe) in 1990, the number of non-religious has sky-rocketed to almost a billion people world-wide in 2000, and continues to increase at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million people per year. Worldwide, there are almost as many non-religious as Muslims, or as Hindu and Buddhist combined.

In the USA, the proportion of non-believers has increased from 1-2% in the 1940s and 50s to 9% today, with a further 12% saying they are not sure. At a growth rate of more than tenfold, the raise of atheism and agnosticism far outpaces even the growth in Mormonism and Pentecostalism.

There are now 30 million American atheists, far outnumbering American Jews, Muslims and Mormons combined. They outnumber Southern Baptists, and gaining new recruits every day.

In "Why the Gods Are Not Winning", Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman write:

To put it starkly, the level of popular religion is not a spiritual matter, it is actually the result of social, political and especially economic conditions (please note we are discussing large scale, long term population trends, not individual cases). Mass rejection of the gods invariably blossoms in the context of the equally distributed prosperity and education found in almost all 1st world democracies. There are no exceptions on a national basis. That is why only disbelief has proven able to grow via democratic conversion in the benign environment of education and egalitarian prosperity. Mass faith prospers solely in the context of the comparatively primitive social, economic and educational disparities and poverty still characteristic of the 2nd and 3rd worlds and the US.

[...]

The practical implications are equally breath taking. Every time a nation becomes truly advanced in terms of democratic, egalitarian education and prosperity it loses the faith. It's guaranteed. That is why perceptive theists are justifiably scared. In practical terms their only practical hope is for nations to continue to suffer from socio-economic disparity, poverty and maleducation. That strategy is, of course, neither credible nor desirable. And that is why the secular community should be more encouraged.

Even the fear, uncertainty and doubt following Sept 11 didn't put a dint in the rapidly increasing secularization of the world. Church attendance increased immediately after the tragedy, and then fell back to previous levels, and continue to fall. America has seen its first openly atheist Congressman, something which just two years ago I didn't think I'd live long enough to see.

And even among the religious, belief is becoming more liberal and less virulent: in the US since 1972, liberal religion has grown at a significantly faster rate than Fundamentalist religion.

We're still along way away from a world where people stop clinging to myths, but despite the priests and the mullahs, every day we get a little closer.

Sagan's dragon

The late Carl Sagan once declared that he has a fire-breathing dragon living in his garage:

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

And for every test that the skeptic proposes, Sagan had an excuse for why the test won't detect the dragon. It floats in the air; it's incorporeal; the flame it blows is heatless; and so on.

Naturally Sagan didn't actually believe he has a dragon in his garage, but he was making a point about religion and the invisible, incorporeal god that many people believe is in their garage. Instead of gathering evidence to support the idea of the dragon in the garage, believers insist that we accept the existence of such an invisible, soundless, heatless, incorporeal, undetectable dragon unless it is disproved. But of course it cannot be disproved, because there's an excuse for every failure.

Under normal circumstances, we treat the failure to find expected evidence as almost as good as positive evidence. In a murder trial, the failure to find gunpowder residue on the accused shooter can legitimately cast doubt on the claim he was the shooter. But such negative evidence is only useful when there is a clear-cut pass or fail. You can't accuse somebody of shooting the victim, and then when no evidence supports your accusation, turn around and say that the murdered must have used a special gunpowderless gun that fired invisible bullets that left no visible wounds.

God is invisible, that's why you can't see him.

In the face of such special pleading, then the failure to disprove the claim doesn't mean anything. There is no way to disprove the existence of god, because for every test there's always an excuse after the fact why it didn't work.

The game is always rigged, and you will lose if you play.

The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously?

(Thanks to PhillyChief.)

Believers will counter that of course they have positive evidence for their god. (It's evidently only other gods that are illusionary or mythical.) But the problem with the evidence given is that it either has other explanations ("see, there are no elephants living in my garage, because the dragon ate them"), or that it's entirely subjective. Your epiphany is my bad burrito -- and contrariwise, the awe and sense of wonder I have when I contemplate dirt is a never-ending source of amusement for Mrs Impala and her friends. (Some people hug trees. I play with dirt. If rocks are the bones of the Earth, then dirt, earth, is the flesh. Carl Sagan famously said we are all star-stuff, but the star-stuff had to become dirt before it became us.)

I can put my hands in the dirt, I can touch it and weigh it and dig it over, and if I treat it right, it will bring forth all manner of life. Perhaps that's the difference between religion and spirituality: spirituality is about subjective feelings related to real things, while religion is about subjective feelings about imaginary things.

The theological necessity of goats

Thanks to PZ Myers, I hear that Texas is hearing legal arguments concerning the theological necessity of goats related to a priest's argument that if he is prohibited from sacrificing live goats his god will cease to exist.

(And that would be a bad thing, why?)

In related news, the British government has taken blasphemy off the books, and a Malaysian woman has been jailed for worshiping a giant tea pot. No, seriously. It seems that while Malaysia has laws permitting freedom of worship, it also has sharia laws which prohibit apostasy. See here for more.

Now that's a thought... one way that Obama could gain the redneck vote would be to remind everyone that millions of Muslims will be absolutely shattered to learn that the son of an apostate is the most powerful man on Earth. Oh my.

Speaking of PZ Myers...

Oh my, check out what he has to say about the latest in a long, long line of toxic evangelists here.

In the spirit of Oscar Wilde, I think I shall have to start using the term "demented goblin" at every opportunity.

Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that."
James McNeill Whistler: "You will Oscar, you will."

Equality of the sexes

It's all too easy to forget that "women's liberation" hasn't even begun in some parts of the world, and that women aren't even given the dignity of being treated as second-class citizens.

In Saudi Arabia, an illiterate woman is set to be executed after she was tortured into confessing to using witchcraft to make a man impotent. And tribal elders in Pakistan decide that women shouldn't vote.

Here in the western civilized world (and I make no apology for using that term), there are people who want to roll back the clock and return to their imagined glory days where women knew their place. Childless old men like Pat Buchanan and macho wanna-be Patriarchs are trying to frighten European women with scare stories that if they don't give up their jobs, stay home, obey their husbands and have lots of babies, the terrorists will win and the Muslim Hordes will take over. It's the Yellow Peril redux, only now it's the "slightly off-white, not quite brown, Islamo-fascist Peril".

I believe that many feminists have well and truly lost their way, but don't imagine that means that feminism is no longer relevant or necessary. The forces of evil are still out there.

But it's not all bad news. Although the meme of sexism dies slow, it does die. When a religious school tried to ban a woman from refereeing a basketball match, her male colleagues boycotted the game:

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy's beliefs.

[...]

"I said, 'If Michelle [Campbell] has to leave, then I'm leaving with her,'" Putthoff said Wednesday. "I was disappointed that it happened to Michelle. I've never heard of anything like that."

Fred Shockey, who was getting ready to leave the gym after officiating two junior high games, said he was told there had been an emergency and was asked to stay and officiate two more games.
"When I found out what the emergency was, I said there was no way I was going to work those games," said Shockey, who spent 12 years in the Army and became a ref about three years ago. "I have been led by some of the finest women this nation has to offer, and there was no way I was going to go along with that."

Isn't that something?

The dissolute doctor

I stumbled across a blog -- alas, no longer being maintained -- from a British doctor, "Venial Sinner", who writes about the daily traumas of being a doctor in the British hospital system. Not a lot of humour there, except perhaps the gallows variety, but he writes good blog.

There's his frustration at seeing the only chance of identifying a mysterious disease disappear because of the interference of ignorant, judgmental, self-appointed god-botherers:

We have a single lead: an area of infective looking tissue on CT which we could biopsy and culture. Sharon cannot consent to the procedure; she does not currently have the capacity. In the morning, we spoke to her mother who agreed that the biopsy should go ahead all the same and that she would consent to this in place of her daughter (as the law allows).

That was the morning. By the afternoon everything had changed. Sharon's mother had some news. She had gone to the church and spoken with the Elders. The Elders has listened to the story, considered, and pronounced their verdict. Sharon had had no brain infection. God punishes those who live dissolute lives and Sharon had taken drugs. God does not like drugs. His punishment had been severe but he had heard the prayers of Sharon's mother and, being a good and merciful old chap, he had relented. Sharon would recover and all would be well. There was no infection and, ergo, there need be no biopsy. Sharon's mother, a devout Christian, swallowed it whole. She withdrew her consent for the biopsy immediately.

There's his example of how modern medicine can utterly fail to cure patients, and in fact make their life even more miserable and the common problem of patients with medically unexplained symptoms.

On learning that the new Polish government was cracking down on homosexuals, and that the Party Boss had declared that "The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can't agree to it.", Venial Sinner remarked:

Downfall of civilisation, you say? Goodness, sounds bad. Who’d have thought it? You start off by letting two men hold hands in the street and before you know it the whole of mankind is poised to plunge backwards into benighted barbarity.

Cheers doc, where ever you've got to.

Secular Party of Australia

Thanks to PZ Myers:



Or see the Secular Party of Australia on YouTube.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

One of the supposed "deep" questions that (we're told) only religion can answer is the question, Why is there Something rather than Nothing? Science might be able to explain the workings of the universe, but it can't explain why the universe exists, or so the philosophers and priests say.

But why shouldn't the universe exist? It's been assumed at least as far back as Leibniz that "nothing" is simpler than "something", that nothingness "just happens" but to get the material universe you need to do a bit more work.

But that's just an assumption. Why shouldn't there be Something rather than Nothing? Perhaps the best answer to the question is "Well, why not?". Maybe there can't fail to be Something. There's Something because there cannot fail to be Something.

There's no reason to prefer the assumption that nothingness is simpler than something. We have no experience of nothingness. Nothingness is not the same as a lack of some particular object. There is nowhere we can go or to point to and say "Look, there's nothing. It needs no explanation. Now, how did something form from it?"

We once believed that "Nature abhors a vacuum". Although we now know that it is relatively easy to remove all the matter from a volume of space, indeed most of the universe is a low-grade vacuum, we could easily revise the old saying as "Nature abhors Nothingness". Everywhere you go, there are electromagnetic and gravitational fields -- and even if you could shield a volume of space from them (how???) you can't avoid having space and time itself. Getting space-time isn't hard, it's already there. Getting the nothingness in the first place is hard.

It isn't as if nothingness floated around in space for millions of years before suddenly exploding into something in the Big Bang. Time and space themselves began in the Big Bang. There was no "before the Big Bang". The very question "what happened before the Big Bang?" is meaningless, like "what's north of the North Pole?".

We shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that Something needed to be somehow created from Nothingness. Maybe the natural state of being is that Something is easy and Nothingness would be the hard thing to explain -- except that naturally if there was Nothing we wouldn't be there to ask why there was Nothing rather than Something.

(We wouldn't be where?)

There is no justification for the priests' assumption that only God or Gods can explain why there is Something rather than Nothing. Consider: suppose we said that God created the universe from Nothing. But hang on a second -- we had just agreed that Nothing existed. How does God fit into Nothing? Isn't God Something? If you're going to say that God existed, why not just accept that the universe existed and be done with it?

"How do you get Something from Nothing?"

"Well, start with Nothing, then add one God that you had prepared earlier, and voilà! you have Something."

Cosmic Variance has more:

Ultimately, the problem is that the question — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — doesn’t make any sense. What kind of answer could possibly count as satisfying? What could a claim like “The most natural universe is one that doesn’t exist” possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole. It makes sense to ask why this blog exists, rather than some other blog; but there is no external vantage point from which we can compare the relatively likelihood of different modes of existence for the universe.

So the universe exists, and we know of no good reason to be surprised by that fact.

If you spend some time reading the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, you may notice the knots philosophers have tied themselves into by confusing privatives like "holes" with actual things. Our human penchant for reification, as useful as it can be, also confuses us.

Atheists in foxholes

Reader Tootsie's Mom (hi!) raised the question of the lack of atheists in foxholes in this comment.

At the risk of driving away a valued reader, I have to respond that Tootsie's Mom is wrong: there are atheists in foxholes, both literally and figuratively, for all that the religious try to comfort themselves by denying it. For example, Master Sergeant Gid L. White wrote a public letter to Katie Couric chastising her for publicly propagating the untruth that there are no atheists in foxholes.

Another atheist who has been in foxholes is this guy's dad.

And as I've written about here and here, football star Pat Tillman, killed in Afghanistan, was also an atheist.

But what if it were true? Suppose that, when disasters are upon us or the bullets are flying, even the most hard-bitten rationalist atheist turns to the god or gods of your choice. What would that mean about the existence of god?

Very little. Just because we clutch the security blanket doesn't make it effective. Those who have watched as many Road Runner cartoons in their youth as I have will remember the running gag where the Coyote would often find himself standing beneath a falling anvil or rock. He would invariably get a look of resignation and despair and hold up a ridiculously tiny paper umbrella over his head, hoping against hope that, this time, it will protect him.

It never did.

I leave the last word to PZ Myers, who wrote:

It has always seemed to me that that old myth is actually an admission: an admission that religion is driven by fear. Just crank up the terror on people, it's saying, and we can get 'em to believe anything. There might be some truth to that, but if anything, it's an adage that is damning to religion, saying that faith is an exploitation of human weakness.

Faithless

That pious old fraud who spent her life shilling for the Vatican, Mother Teresa, turns out not to have been quite so pious after all: it seems that for most of her life in Calcutta, Teresa had serious doubts about the existence of the god known only as God. As CBS reports:

Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta’s slums, the spirit left Mother Teresa.

“Where is my faith?” she wrote. “Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness… If there be God — please forgive me.”

Eight years later, she was still looking to reclaim her lost faith.

“Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal,” she said.

As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she said, was a mask.

“What do I labor for?” she asked in one letter. “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”

(And why shouldn't she doubt? She'd spent her entire life doubting the existence of all the other gods.)

I can feel pity for the emotional pain she was going through, but her doubts make her actions even more unforgivable. Teresa, it seems, feared that she was a hypocrite. Not only was she a hypocrite, but one of her last wishes was for her letters revealing her doubts to be destroyed. That's hardly the action of somebody humble and unconcerned about her reputation, that's the action of somebody who wanted to protect her reputation after she was no longer around to look people in the eye and lie to their face about faith.

To pervert charity, as she did, in the name of saving people's immortal souls is bad enough, but to do it when you are sure that there are no immortal souls is far worse. If she had actually used the millions of dollars she had collected for charitable purposes, then she would be worthy of being made an icon of charity and compassion. But she didn't: the money disappeared into the Vatican's investment portfolio, enriching the church, while leaving the hospital she ran in a worse state than when she took it over.

I don't expect these revelations will make any difference whatsoever to the move to make her a saint. Her immoral perversion of charity has been known -- not widely known, but known -- for many years. But sainthood isn't about what Teresa actually did in real life, it's about creating a myth of Christian charity and compassion to inspire the next generation of believers who can be fleeced. It's no coincidence that Christianity holds up the sheep as the ideal to aspire to: fearful, stupid, prone to mindlessly following the leader. Goats, which are intelligent and independent-minded, have a poor reputation in the Bible.

Three Wise Men

Writing about recent politics can sometimes, by which I mean almost always, be quite depressing. There is a distinct sense that they're all a gang of thieves, liars, hypocrites and fools -- and some of them are all four.

So it is refreshing to come across three examples that give me hope that not all is wrong with the world.



The late President Dwight Eisenhower wrote in 1954:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Alas, Ike underestimated the power of rich, stupid, greedy men to get what they want, no matter the cost to the rest of the country or the world. Half a century later, the tiny splinter group of stupids has become the backbone of the GOP and even a goodly portion of the Democrat party.

President Eisenhower, a former general in the US Army, later warned America about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Unfortunately, the MIC has become the elephant in the room which nobody dares speak about, but that's a discussion for another day. Ike wasn't perfect, but he was the sort of conservative politician I could respect.

---

The author Kurt Vonnegut penned an insightful piece about America's addiction to oil. At 81 years old, it his Vonnegut's prerogative to see no hope for the future -- but so long as there are still people like Vonnegut, there is still hope.

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

[...]

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

---

Lastly, and most recent, 82-year-old businessman Lee Iacocca let fly with a scathing condemnation of the Bush administration and the pitiful lack of leadership in US:

Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?

I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have.

My friends tell me to calm down. They say, "Lee, you're eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people." I'd love to — as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I'm going to speak up because it's my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I'll tell you how I see it, and it's not pretty, but at least it's real.

[...]

How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them — or at least some of us did. But I'll tell you what we didn't do. We didn't agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn't agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that's a dictatorship, not a democracy.

Iacocca's "Nine Cs of Leadership" are worth reading. It's shameful how few of our so-called leaders display any of them, in any field other than the ability to lie and manipulate their way to winning popularity contests.

Tribulation Force

Alternet reports on Operation Straight Up (OSU), an evangelical entertainment troupe that, as an official part of the Defence Department's America Supports You programme, has the blessing of the administration. OSU actively proselytizes among active-duty US military personnel, and is about to mail out copies of the apocalyptic video game Left Behind: Eternal Forces to soldiers serving in Iraq.

OSU is also scheduled to embark on a "Military Crusade in Iraq" in the near future.

"We feel the forces of heaven have encouraged us to perform multiple crusades that will sweep through this war torn region," OSU declares on its website about its planned trip to Iraq. "We'll hold the only religious crusade of its size in the dangerous land of Iraq."

The Defense Department's Chaplain's Office, which oversees OSU's activities, has not responded to calls seeking comment.

"The constitution has been assaulted and brutalized," Mikey Weinstein, former Reagan Administration White House counsel, ex-Air Force judge advocate (JAG), and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told me. "Thanks to the influence of extreme Christian fundamentalism, the wall separating church and state is nothing but smoke and debris. And OSU is the IED that exploded the wall separating church and state in the Pentagon and throughout our military." Weinstein continued: "The fact that they would even consider taking their crusade to a Muslim country shows the threat to our national security and to the constitution and everyone that loves it."

Left Behind is especially interesting. In the game, players get to make believe they are commanders of an evangelical army in a post-apocalyptic American city, where they wage violent war against United Nations peacekeepers. When the game was first published, it garnered a storm of controversy, with Christian and other groups condemning it and demanding that Walmart pull it from the shelves.

Even Marvin Olasky, the evangelical publisher, intellectual author of "compassionate conservatism," and a force behind the George W. Bush Administration's White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives," denounced the Left Behind videogame.

The game is inspired by the best-selling pulp fiction series about the Tribulation following the Rapture. During the seven years of the Tribulation, surviving Christians battle everyone else in the Battle of Armageddon.

For more about Left Behind the series, see Wikipedia's article and Conservapedia's take on it. For a long, detailed, chapter-by-chapter critique from a Christian, see Fred Clark's review.

Five years old forever

Sara Robinson writing on Orcinus has an interesting take on why fundamentalist conservatives have such a warped relationship with masculinity.

Over the years, my online ex-fundie community has spent a lot of time puzzling over the ways in which fundamentalism arrests the moral, social, emotional, intellectual, and sexual development of anyone who embraces it. (And I could argue that, inasmuch as fundamentalism is authoritarian religion, this observation may well hold true for political and social authoritarians as well.) Specifically, we've come to a consensus that the belief system traps people somewhere around the age of five or six -- and keeps them there for as long as they continue to believe.

[...] Authoritarian followers crave someone who will keep things ordered and safe, someone who will provide and protect and set firm rules and boundaries; someone all-powerful and all-knowing who can teach you right from wrong and keep the harsh parts of the world at bay. Someone, in short, who looks like Daddy looked when you were about five years old.

[Right-Wing Authoritarians] RWAs would far rather curl up in Daddy's lap -- even if it means abandoning reason and taking the occasional spanking -- than try to deal with the world by themselves, on adult terms. This is also why RWA family and community relationships (as Lakoff has explained) are necessarily hierarchical. These people still need parents around, because they don't feel emotionally safe without the presence of a strong authority figure. Egalitarian relationships terrify them, because there's nobody in charge to make the rules and set the boundaries that keep people from hurting each other.

For all their loud talk about responsibility and freedom, these RWAs are terrified of taking responsibility, of being free. That's why they're always looking for somebody else -- the government, Daddy, "Community Values", God -- to tell them how to behave: because they know that, left to their own devices, they'll get it wrong wrong wrong.

Hey, we're all human. We all make mistakes and get things wrong. Adults -- regardless of mere age in years -- learn from their mistakes. Some mistakes are so serious that you can't learn from them, you can only atone for them. And some mistakes are too serious to even atone for them. But adults try, they take responsibility. RWAs avoid responsibility, blame others, deny that they did anything wrong. It's hard enough to get a 61-year-old boy-president to admit that "mistakes were made", let alone to admit who make them.

Being terrified of freedom, the freedom to make mistakes, RWAs are constantly looking for a Real Man to protect them -- except they can't tell the sizzle from the sausage. Talking the talk is more important than walking the walk. Republicans will tell anyone who listens how much they "support the troops", and admire the brave men and women of the armed forces who commit war crimes sacrifice themselves for their country -- and then these same chickenhawks dump on actual warriors like John Kerry and triple-amputee Max Cleland, preferring instead to give their support to a faux-warrior who used his Daddy's connections to get a cushy job in the National Guard, and when even that was too much bother, he simply went AWOL during wartime.

( [...] Remember the fuss over Jet Pilot Action Figure Bush's "package"? Damn fool didn't loosen his straps before getting out of the jet. Nobody else on the deck had his crotch trussed up like a Christmas goose; and to them, he looked like a rookie idiot. But Chris Matthews practically had an orgasm on-air while watching him prance and strut.) The fact that so many mainstream and conservative media guys are suckered by this posturing shows that they don't really have a clue about what a Real Man looks like -- though, somewhere deep down inside, they're pretty sure they don't qualify. That's why they're so easily wowed by men who can put on the costume and make it look good.

Baptists for Brownback

It took me a while to decide that this site is actually a parody: "Baptists for Brownback", proporting to be a website for Baptists who wish to support former Methodist and now Catholic convert Sam Brownback in his run for the US presidency. (The Legal Statement was the first clue.)

On men wearing kilts:

I will agree to believe that some of you are not sodomites. That said, there arises an equally as disturbing of an issues, if you are not in fact a homosexual then why would you want to wear a skirt, or kilt if you will. The only rational conclusion I can come up with is that the freedom of not having slacks with sippers and belts, grants you easy access for spontaneous fornication.

On Unplanned Sexual Events:

We have concluded that the acronym U.S.E. (Unplanned Sexual Event), when used regularly to replace the word “rape”, will remove the stigma associated with this sometimes unpleasant situation. It is our mission to protect the innocent lives of the babies that are part of His plan and eliminate the excuses given by many women when a precious baby just isn’t convienient.

On teaching your children that all atheists are actually Devil-worshippers:

Peggy’s mommy was just about to chastise the girls for making her leave her chores because of their alarmist reactions to nothing, when she saw something that would nearly take the curl out of her home perm: it was the next-door neighbor man and his beer-drinking friends & they were wearing black robes and each holding a dead kitten. One of the men was even a Negro!

[...] Peggy shouted, “Mommy! Why is that man skinning our cat?” It was right then that her mother grabbed the two girls by their little arms and ran with them as fast as she could back into the safety of their Christian home.“Honey come here”, her mother said as soon as they were back inside the cheaply appointed but clean kitchen, “Those men are Atheists, and, as you know, Honey, all Atheists will try and tell you that they are not Satanists but they are. Every single one of them kill small animals, and sometimes even little children too, as part of their glorification of the Devil”

Pell demands devotion

Cardinal George Pell has demanded that students going to Australia's Catholic schools, together with their parents, be more devout, and that the schools give preference to children of Catholics over other Christians, and those over believers of other religions.

As many as 20% of students attending Catholic schools in Australia are non-Catholic.

Pell said, "With as many one in five of the students non-Catholic, how can our schools live up to the grand old traditions of my alma mater without the instinctive, unconditional obedience of Catholic children to their priest, no matter what disgusting, perverted acts they ask the child to perform?"

Actually, I tell a fib -- he didn't say that at all. In fact, despite the grand old tradition of abuse committed by priests, there's no evidence what-so-ever that Pell considers that abuse a desirable consequence of the unquestioning devotion to the Church that he propounds. And in fact, as Catholic cardinals go, Pell has been relatively clean when it comes to covering up the child abuse (sexual and otherwise) of the Church, such as that of Father Gerald Ridsdale of St Patrick's College, where Pell himself studied. (Pell accompanied Ridsdale to trial, but did not give evidence on his behalf.)

God, punishment and raisin cakes

Go on, you know you want to, God says it's okay. Get yourself a harlot for a wife:

When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, "Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry; for the land commits flagrant harlotry, forsaking the LORD."

Hosea 1:2

See also this take on it (warning -- mildly Not Safe For Work).

Having a harlot for a wife isn't all fun and games though. God has a plan: Hosea's first born son will, by God's design, go on to commit some terrible bloodshed, giving the Lord an excuse to punish the entire nation of Israel, the guilty and innocent alike.

Imagine being the son of Hosea, being told day in and day out by your father that the only reason you were born was to be God's instrument, and that your role in life will be to commit some heinous crime so that God can rain punishment on the entire nation. Imagine how twisted that poor child would grow up to be.

I hate to belabour the obvious, but when it comes to the Bible, it's amazing how many otherwise intelligent people grow blinkers. God planned for Hosea's son to commit this horrible crime. Hosea would probably have been perfectly happy wearing a hair shirt and beating himself off with knotted ropes if God hadn't ordered him to get a wife and have children. The act of bloodshed which leads God to collectively punish the entire nation of Israel only occurs because God directly set it in motion. Had God not acted, it would not have occured.

Sounds like entrapment to me. Sounds like God was just itchin' to rain down some divine retribution, and if he didn't have a good excuse, he'd damn well make sure he'd get an excuse, no matter what it takes.

Barely is Hosea done having children for the sole purpose of giving God an excuse to curse Israel, than God orders him to go get himself a second fallen woman:

Then the LORD said to me, "Go again, love a woman who is loved by her husband, yet an adulteress, even as the LORD loves the sons of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes."

Hosea 3:1

Just when you think you understand the mindset of the people who wrote the Bible (mostly "disturbed"), out pops an idiom that just blows you away. Eating raisin cakes is a sign of moral depravity? Gosh, I'm glad God has his priorities right. Wouldn't want him obsessing on trivialities, like cotton-blend fabrics and tassles.

Hosea goes on to say he purchased a woman from her husband, for 15 shekels of silver and some barley. I must admit to a little confusion: if her husband loved her, why was he selling her?

Dead man walking

Injustice comes in many forms, but one of the most pernicious is the injustice of the death penalty on the basis of shoddy, questionable evidence and perjury.

Troy A. Davis has been on the Georgia death row for 17 years. His trial was a paragon of injustice: at one point, his state-appointed lawyer turned up drunk in court; when one prosecution witness tried to change her testimony and admit to perjuring herself, she was arrested and prevented from giving evidence at the trial. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, and of the nine eyewitnesses who testimony convicted him, seven have recanted or changed their testimony, and claimed that they were pressured by investigators to lie under oath.

As Digby of Hullabalo writes, the US Supreme Court has refused to hear his appeal, on the basis of a 1996 law which "streamlines" the death penalty, allowing the state to kill people faster, with fewer of those pesky appeals, and new evidence proving his innocence be damned.

This sad case is another demonstration of the moral bankruptcy of the Christian Fundamentalists who decide matters of life and death for decent people. I don't know which is worse: police and prosecutors willing to convict the innocent and allow the guilty to escape, or the hypocritical, Holy-Than-Thou Christians sitting in judgement over others. One of the old men of the American Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, wrote in Herrera v. Collins regarding the possibility of an innocent man being executed:

With any luck, we shall avoid ever having to face this embarrassing question again, since it is improbable that evidence of innocence as convincing as today's opinion requires would fail to produce an executive pardon.

Never mind the rule of law. Don't bother finding innocent people innocent or reversing unjust and unsafe convictions. The President will simply give the guy a pardon.

With any luck.

(In)Justice Scalia, who apparently believes that bringing evidence to trial is the defendant's privilege and not a right, doesn't see the execution of the innocent as anything worth getting upset about: it just sends them to God sooner. In 2002, he gave a speech explaining:

For the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal, a grave sin which causes one to lose his soul, but losing this physical life in exchange for the next – the Christian attitude is reflected in the words Robert Bolt’s play has Thomas More saying to the headsman: "Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God." And when Cramner asks whether he is sure of that, More replies, "He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to him."

Save us from the Believers and their "morality".