The big "A"

I follow several blogs and this post on Richard Carrier's blog piqued my interest:  Abortion Redux.  The "25 most influential atheists" have been polled on the subject of personhood of infants, which was inspired by a PZ Myers post on his blog.

The critical thing for me is that of the 25 most influential atheists, only three are women.  Sure, women can be either pro- or con- in the abortion debate, but it seems to me that people with wombs should be consulted a little more often about this.  Asking 22 men who are atheists about their opinion is about as valid to me as asking 22 Catholic Cardinals.

In deference to the seriously influential atheists, if these are important questions, then why aren't all atheists being asked?  It seems to me that important social issues that religions have laid claim to deserve thought from all of us, being free-thinkers and all.  I mean, why on earth would I need 22 men and 3 women to influence my thinking?  I am willing to consider their positions and justifications but I'm not so stupid that I can't come up with my own thoughts.

Here are the questions:

(a) Do you believe that a newborn baby is fully human?

(b) Do you believe that a newborn baby is a person?

(c) Do you believe that a newborn baby has a right to life?

(d) Do you believe that every human person has a duty towards newborn babies, to refrain from killing them?

(e) Do you believe that killing a newborn baby is just as wrong as killing an adult?

I have a problem with all of these questions because 1) the womb is out of the picture, therefore the woman's right to control what happens to her body has been made irrelevant for the purposes of questioning these men about how women's bodies should be treated and 2) what about mercy killing/euthanasia?

This presumes that all newborn babies / former fetuses are equal in viability and "humanity."  But what of the former fetus that is born without a head?  What of the former fetus that has a head and all the nerve structures necessary for feeling pain but no skin?  or no kidneys?  Parents have two choices in these cases: they can take extreme measures to prolong the suffering of their former fetus in an effort to keep themselves from going to hell, or they can have the nurses pump morphine into the fetus and let "nature take its course."

Option #3, euthanasia, almost never comes up in these situations.  If you can keep a former fetus from feeling the pain of its death after you let it linger in the ICU for days or weeks destroying its parents' finances, why not give it some morphine and then a little extra to relieve its suffering forever?

The questions are almost always loaded on the side of normal, healthy pregnancies, the type that never get aborted in the final few months when the fetus has the viability to become a former fetus.  Late-term abortion is the agonizing choice of women who face their own death.

So let's ask these other questions with this ultimate question in mind:
If a woman has six children and her husband has died, and her seventh pregnancy will most certainly result in her death and the death of that seventh fetus, is it wrong to deny her the option to terminate that pregnancy?

(a)  Do you believe that an adult woman is fully human?

(b)  Do you believe that an adult woman is a person?

(c)  Do you believe that an adult woman has a right to life?

(d)  Do you believe that every  human person has a duty towards women, to refrain from killing them?

(e)  Do you believe that killing a woman is just as wrong as killing a man?

If you answered "yes" to any of the above, how could you deny a woman the right to a life-saving abortion?

God hates "God's Country"

My college years were spent in Wisconsin, which I was informed by some townies is "God's Country."  Since then I have lived in a few other states that claimed to be "God's Country."  In the Northeast the word "country" signified hick music and toothless miners, so they made no such claims.  (I suspect a superiority complex - no need to assign a deity to the best city in the world)

And now 100,000,000 people, mostly in "God's Country" are being tormented by ice, sleet, snow and wind.  God hates the Midwest, obviously.

It's up to the atheists to make that declaration.  Fundy televangelists were quick to blame Katrina on New Orleans' lack of morals, but where is God's wrath when the midwest is attacked by an "act of God?"

If they look hard enough they can find reasons why God would smite the people in his "country." 

I think hubris is reason enough.  Bigotry is a good one. 

I was going to make a list but I live amongst these people.  Suffice it to say, winter sucks, and that's all there is to it.  And New Orleans is in a part of the country that's subject to hurricanes.  And California is prone to earthquakes.  These things aren't "Acts of God" because 1) there is no god and 2) there is no agency to any of this.  Weather just happens.

Women's Ministry

I have a theory about church calendars: they suck in people with social events that have nothing at all to do with theology, so the people become so dependent on the church that they really can't leave even if they do crack open the Bible and see what an incoherent mess it is.

In my case, just having a great organist was enough to keep me coming for awhile. As a child I kept going because I enjoyed singing in the choir. That's the Episcopalian way. It's probably why the Episcopal church is losing members. And now that the "faithful" are mainly blue-haired old ladies, it's too late to start up a softball team.

As I drove through small towns in Indiana over the weekend I kept wondering what there was do to in these places besides work the farm and go to church. Some of these towns were so small they didn't even have bars!

Some of the people I know here are in churches that fill up their schedules with the kind of thing you'd have to live in a small town to find interesting. In a big city you'd have a million more interesting things to do on a Saturday night. In a small town you might have a choice between church bingo and a spaghetti dinner at a different church.  So I have a bit of sympathy for small-town Christians.  They don't know any better.

Then there are the big-city megachurches.  I wondered how hard they work at providing for their sheeple's every social need.  So I took a look at the website for Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church.  Amazingly, they have a Women's Ministry.  Perhaps they figured out that Osteen is damn creepy so they put a woman in charge of keeping the women in line.  I know I'd never want to be in a room with that used car salesman.

Their schedule is truly frightening.  They have a series of psychobabble "courses" and they promote it with this lovely line:  "We would love for you to join us for the entire series and join your faith with ours to see God’s abundance brought forth in the area of your finances in 2011!"  (Osteen is famous for "prosperity theology")

They also have a movie night.  What does watching "Secretariat" and eating popcorn have to do with being a Christian? 

Osteen has also brought his wife into a leadership role as "co-pastor."  This is something I think I've seen before, though it's not like I obsess about churches.  Still... the preacher's wife is supposed to be a kind of adjunct preacher in these fundy churches.  Osteen and his wife have a blog together.  I'd post the header photo but it's just too creepy.  Their most popular post has this gem:  "Today, you may feel like you're in the back of the line and nothing is going your way, but get ready because God is about to turn things around for you!"

Yep, self-centered theology at its best!  I haven't read all their blog posts but I have read enough to be thorougly disgusted.  There's nothing about charity, kindness, being part of a loving society, etc.  Meanwhile, "evil" evolution is starting to probe how these behaviors are adaptive and part of our instinctive behaviors.

So.... it's not really theology that's appealing, though being taken care of by a sky-daddy after your death is a comforting idea.  The real draw for country people is having something to do, and for city people it's almost the same.  If you were new in Houston and wanted to make new friends, the ladies' night out movie and popcorn event would be a safe way to meet people.

Fortunately, in the age of the internet we can find friendships online or through online searches for events we find interesting.  If I were to move to Houston, I'd look for atheist meet-ups, or a club that would involve my hobbies.  If I were to move to small-town Indiana I probably wouldn't get out much, but I do wonder how long it would take for me to feel lonesome enough to go to the local church's spaghetti dinner or bingo night.   And then once I did I'd play "spot the other atheist" in the room, looking for the other people who roll their eyes at the mention of God or praying.

Punching People for Jesus!

This is hilarious!



It's funny how often atheists receive anonymous threats like this. Unlike the rest of us, who use most of our brains, Christians use only the amygdala. Speaking rationally to Christian trolls is a waste of time, unless you need a good LOL at the moment.

Alternative Explanations for the Miracles of the Bible

Let's start with the New Testament, since Christians are nuttier about believing the Bible to be historically accurate than Jews.

 

Virgin birth. There are many possibilities here.

1. It's a meme of the religions of the time, and could easily have been attached to the mythology around Jesus after the religion started taking off. This story added credibility to Christian claims, because it's something the people would expect of a deity.
2. Mary, or Joseph, or the family, or the followers, LIED. Not as likely as #1 above, but possible. Getting people to believe it wouldn't be as hard as it would be today.
3. Mistranslation. The first writers/transmitters never said this but it got translated this way. And Catholicism loves it that way so they perpetrated it.

Food and Beverage Miracles.

1. Completely made up.
2. Something unusual happened that wasn't very impressive, so it was exaggerated to be worthy of mythical/miraculous status.
3. Trickery.  The disciples put wine into water barrels, or had a stash of bread and dead fish at the ready. 
4. Numerology.  Any time miraculous numbers are mentioned in the Bible you have to suspect a total dissociation from reality due to possible magic numbers being used to make some point.

 Healing. Really? We don't have to look further than examples of faith healing today to know that they could have been false then but here goes: 

1. Lies. Gotta convince the masses to convert, so some miracle stories are in order. Easy stories to make up. It's not like people in Italy or even Lebanon would have been able to verify something like that.  How many people were named Lazarus?  You would be hard pressed even in a well documented society to figure out which one was named.
2. Fakes. Shills brought out to fool the crowds. How hard would it be to fake a withered hand? Blindness? Lameness?
3. Spontaneous healing, due to the effect of faith on the mind of the believer, not intervention by a deity or a magical power. Or, the person is so swept up in the moment they have momentary improvement. Did anyone follow up on these people a year later? No, of course not.
4. Actual sick people being made to look more healed than they are. The disciples support the lame person in such a way that they seem to be walking, or straighten out the "withered hand" by force.
5. Confirmation bias. Would Jesus' followers really document the many times he was unsuccessful? (assuming any of it is historical)

Miscellaneous points

 

The fig tree. My favorite. Jesus couldn't make the tree bear fruit out of season so he zapped it. Wouldn't making the tree bear fruit have been a much better miracle than setting it on fire? If this is historical at all, what is the time frame? Could it have been a set-up? Could it have been the highest point during a lightning storm?

 

Calming the storm. This sounds a lot like Moses parting the sea, so right there I suspect it's fabricated. If the writers are trying to convince the heathens that Jesus was indeed the heir to the Judaic tradition, having him do something Moses-like would be a good start.  This is probably the easiest thing to make up, and not being able to find witnesses wouldn't prove anything because lack of evidence would just be lack of evidence.  Could a storm suddenly stop on its own? Sure. It happens often enough that a coincidence is possible if there's historical accuracy to this story.  Confirmation bias here, too.  If you tell the sky to shut up often enough, one day it will obey you.

 

Turning water to wine.  This one is just stupid. It's not that hard to switch containers.


If you're going to believe the miraculous claims of one group of bronze-age people without question, you have to believe all of them.  I don't see Christians pointing to the miracles of other religions as evidence that miracles happen, only the ones from their own religion.

Comment Moderation is OFF!

People have been responding to the blog, and to each other, so I have taken comment moderation off.

Christians, bear in mind, most atheists who hang out on internet blogs have heard it all before and we weren't impressed.  You won't convert us but we find you entertaining.  We prefer thoughtful, reasoned, well-read Christians for our web entertainment, so if you're the typical Christian web troll who's going to threaten us WITH ETERNAL DAMNATION IN ALL CAPS AND WITH MENNY MYSPOILED WORDS... expect us to point and laugh.

My Top Ten Grievances Against the Bible

1. Authority -- NOT -- it was compiled, copied, edited, codified and translated by men. Men with agendas. Over the hundreds of years it was put together there were perhaps hundreds of "hands" tinkering with the unalterable "holy" words.

2. Inconsistency. Two Adam & Eve stories. Two genealogies for Jesus. Discrepancies amongst the Gospels. Too many inconsistencies to mention, and anyway The Skeptics Annotated Bible did it already.

3. God's nature is fickle and inconsistent. He is forgiving or resentful depending on the situation. Sometimes he tinkers in the Affairs of Man and sometimes not. He wants you to follow his rules, but then there's the parable of the prodigal son. He made the world and all the animals, including people, and yet made all sorts of really horrible and stupid things. For instance, why do humans have "tail" bones if we don't have tails? Having broken mine I can tell you I'd rather not have it. If he wanted us to protect the useful parts of our spine in a fall, then why put nerve endings there?

4. Miracles. They have no corroboration outside of the Bible. They could have been faked or made up as propaganda or exaggerated over time. If Jesus really did walk on water, how do we know he didn't go there in advance and put a table just under the water line? How do we know there wasn't a sandbar there? And yet he couldn't make a fig tree yield fruit out of season, which would have been a more difficult feat than appearing to be walking on water. Couldn't pop the nails out of his hands and feet and jump off the cross, either.

5. Revelation. Dreams, voices, visions... they are all reminiscent of what today would be considered symptoms of psychosis. If they're psychotic symptoms now, they very likely would have been then, if they even happened. Primitive people can't be faulted for believing that dreams or migraine auras or psychotic breaks came from some supernatural entity, but we shouldn't believe them now. The opposite is possession by an evil spirit. Also mental illness that was misunderstood by bronze age superstitious people.

6. Scientific inaccuracy. God could have revealed the truth about the Sun revolving around the Earth, at the very least. All of God's words seem to be consistent with what humans would have known at the time, and not at all revelatory or helpful. Every human culture has a creation story. The Judeo-Christian-Muslim one is just one of many with no claim to accuracy in the least.

7. Similarity to mythologies in other Middle Eastern religions. Just a little too many similarities to dismiss. Mithras, for example.

8. Speaking of Paul, Paul's role is a little too important in early Christianity. He never met Jesus, yet he supposedly explains Christianity with authority. He has a completely different message from Jesus' supposed words. A lot of Biblical inconsistency right there. Why should anyone believe anything he said? None of it was of a nature that couldn't have come from psychosis, imagination, or calculation. If he was divinely inspired, he could have set people straight about the Sun, for instance.

9. The Book of John. Written much later than the other "gospels" and seems very biased. Coincidentally, "fundamentalist" Christians are fond of quoting John. They like his brand of Christianity so much that their whole theology would crumble if that "book" was taken out of the Bible.

10. Disturbing "morality." Over and over there are truly disgusting examples of God or his favorite people doing the most heinous things. The worst of all for me is the central tenet of Christianity: that Christ was sacrificed for the sins of mankind... all of us or some of us, depending on your denomination. This means that a "loving" God practiced scapegoating, punishing his one good child for the sinfulness of all the others. No actual sinning is required to be defined as a bad child, since sinfulness is inherited. Inheriting the "sins of the fathers" is also immoral. Other repugnant practices are portrayed without any negative judgment: war, genocide, polygamy, rape (but only of women!), and slavery to name a few. Then this "loving" God will send everyone who doesn't say they "accept" him to eternal fire and pain. What kind of "love" is that?

10a. Cannibalism. Yech! You can say it's just metaphorical and wine doesn't really turn into blood, but still, it's a repulsive practice and extremely barbaric. Early Christians already had the practice of baptism for the cleansing of sins, so they really didn't have to have eat their god in a repulsive ritual meal. That practice is also waaaay too similar to that of other religions to be taken seriously as a true historical tale.

I could probably come up with more but these are the big ones for me. Much ink has been spilt explaining the problems in the Bible. People get Ph.D.s in something aptly called "apologetics." They call the Book "god-breathed" or inspired rather than taking it as the literal gods-ear-to-man's-pen truth, because they know deep down it's really a bunch of ridiculous nonsense. To believe in this book is to believe in a God that's mercurial, vengeful, narcissistic, and possibly insane.

Or... you could believe that the Bible is just like all the other holy books of all the other religions, just a bunch of fairy tales with supernatural buddies and/or bullies as the main characters.

Some of my smaller grievances don't get much attention, but for what they're worth:

• If all of creation was 'good' then wouldn't Adam & Eve have been exiled to a pretty nice place?
• Why is it an "abomination" for men to have sex with men but not for women to have sex with women? Isn't that also homosexuality?
• Why was there no judgment against Lot's daughters after they got him drunk then got pregnant by him? His wife was turned into a pillar of salt just for looking over her shoulder at her former home. That seems a little harsh.
• If Jesus' conception was immaculate, then why does he have a genealogy traced through Joseph's side of the family?
• And the fig tree, wtf? Why doesn't Jesus regret his temper tantrum if he's such a great guy? Come to think of it, why did he smite the tree in the first place? Is this some kind of metaphor that a woman who won't have sex during her off-cycle will be smote?