God doesn't kill people. People kill people.

It's not just Christians who rationalize God permitting the death of an innocent child.  Buried in the description of the funeral of Leiby Kletzky, the Orthodox Jewish boy who was murdered this week, we find this gem:

At one point the rabbi of the synagogue that Leiby attended recalled the boy’s devotion to his studies.

“He was such a good learner,” the rabbi said, according to a translation. “He used to pray all day. It was a pleasure to have him in the class. We’re not the boss. Everything is as God wanted it.”

Why the hell would God want a schizophrenic pedophile to kidnap, kill, and dismember a young child?  That's flipping insane!  Yet Christians and Jews alike rationalize the irrational this way.  It's supposed to give them some kind of comfort, but I don't see how.  If I were that boy's mother I'd slap that rabbi!

I used to live pretty close to that neighborhood, and I knew a lot of Jews, from cultural Jews who were atheists, to nutty Lubavitch Hassidim.  There's a kind of fatalistic thinking in my old neighborhood.  Almost every day I might hear someone shrug and say "Whaddayagonna do?" Italians, Irish, and Jews say it in equal numbers in that corner of Brooklyn.  I just assumed it was because life in the big city is such an uphill struggle every day.  Life is exhausting, and you learn quickly not to sweat the small stuff.

Child murder isn't "small stuff" though.  That boy did not deserve to be victimized and killed.  The Old Testament God can't possibly have any grievance with the Borough Park neighborhood like he did with Sodom & Gomorrah.  Borough Park people are the chosen of the chosen - observant and obedient in more than just their goofy clothes.  They're not crazyass nutters like the Lubavitch nor atheists.  There's just no reason for God to want that boy to die unless God is a crazyass nutter.

According to Rabbi Simmons, on about.com, that Brooklyn rabbi today was dead wrong.  Bad things come about because of free will, blah blah blah about a dozen reasons, and then he goes on to name eight "ground rules."  During the years that I attempted to be a believer, I took great comfort in some of the ideas he expresses there, but not for any supernatural reasons.

This comforting advice is part of the reason why believers think that atheists must be unhappy.  They get common sense advice and some uncommon advice from religious leaders but the best stuff doesn't require any supernatural intervention.  I think the worst stuff is the supernatural, like saying that God had planned for an eight-year-old boy to be kidnapped and killed.  You could secularize the typical rationalizations of religious responses to bad stuff happening, such as Simmons' ground rules, and wind up with something much more helpful and comforting than the convoluted stuff religion throws at you.  For example:

Ground Rule #1  "The Possibility of Evil," or Shit happens.  Some people are sick and people around them will suffer.  Others are just selfish.  And then there's lightning, tornadoes, earthquakes.  They happen because it's part of nature for these things to happen.  It's nothing personal.  The boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  There was no more reason to this than there would be if he'd been struck dead by a lightning bolt.

Ground Rule #2  Intervention.  Chance doesn't have a brain capable of forming intent, so stuff happens equally to good and bad people.  Lottery winners are no more deserving than any other players of the lottery, and murder victims are not deserving of their fate either.  Randomness is random.  Nothing personal.

Ground Rule #3  Our time on Earth is limited.  There will be both bad and good.  Shockingly bad things are only shocking because good/beneficial things are so common.  The boy suffered for one or two days but had a great life for the rest of his eight years.   Likewise the people around him.  This is not an everyday experience for them.  They can choose to focus on the good in the world in order to put the horrors of child murder into perspective.

Ground Rule #4  The Big Picture: there are unintended consequences to "good" things (i.e. "No good deed goes unpunished," another slogan I learned in Brooklyn!) and "bad" things alike.  Some things are random, some are the direct result of some previous random event.n Keeping a nuanced perspective can help us go on.  Resilience is in our DNA, or else we wouldn't have been able to spread out around the world.

Ground Rule #5 Opportunity for Growth.  The more experiences we have the more we can relate to other people.  Difficulties "build character," they say (whoever they are).  All of our experiences contribute to who we are, and we can choose to bring something "good" from something "bad."  It's hard to think of a way that something good could come of something so horrible, but there probably will be, like the man who took precautions during a tornado warning for the first time because of the recent example of Joplin and wound up surviving.

Ground Rule #6 We're all human.  We're all mortal.  Nobody is immune to the types of things that happen to humans (unless you've been vaccinated against contagious disease!)  Again, nothing personal.  No reason.  No plan.  Children sometimes die.  There are horrible people and horrible diseases and horrible people who get horrible mental illnesses.  Even when DNA or some choice points to a specific instance, it's still impersonal. Some other little boy could have been that man's victim that day.

Ground Rule #7  We're all part of the human race and the "Community of Man."  This is because we evolved as a social species and we have organized larger and larger units.  Live like your life depends on the kindness of strangers because it does.

Ground Rule #8  "What goes around comes around" was coined as a supernatural principle but there's an element of truth to it.  Kind people attract kind people, and bitchy people attract uhhh nobody.  Another expression I learned in Brooklyn is "Water seeks its own level."   I associate with a lot of believers not because they're believers but because they're nice people.  I've known some believers who are horrible horrible people.  I've met some atheists I don't care for, too.  This won't protect me from tornados or  serial murderers, but people recognize their own "kind" and nice likes nice.  Perhaps the secular Ground Rule #8 should be "Don't be an Asshole."

What I wish believers would realize is that the best ideas and the best qualities of their religions are secular.  When they rationalize to make their God make sense, they are using their brains!  They've already taken a huge step toward living a rational life when they rationalize how a fairy tale could apply to real life.  To the extent that any holy book offers good advice, it's pretty much identical to what they would come up with on their own without referring to the holy book. 

All they need to do is throw out the book and use their minds.  If they're too stupid, that's okay... just find someone smarter to help them.  Someone who exists in the real world!

Prayer at Medal of Honor Ceremony -- WHY?????

The Medal of Honor is rarely awarded to someone whose bravery didn't cost them their life.  In this case, it cost the soldier a limb.  He deserves the honor and recognition of the award, but I don't see why they needed to begin the ceremony with a prayer (video). It's followed by a presidential speech.  Why not start with a generic speech by a general, and then the president could bring up all the points the chaplain worked into his prayer, without the rhetoric of "God" blessing the nation and making us special blah blah blah

The chaplain starts by crediting God but then segues to the guy's honor and courage, then goes back to asking God for blessings again.  At the end, he quotes Calvin Coolidge (not a Biblical "author"): "A nation that forgets defenders itself will be forgotten..." and then follows with a very Christian ending "in thy holy name, Amen."

The man's colleagues were saved by his bravery and quick thinking, not by prayer or a higher power, or else they'd be awarding the Medal of Honor to Zombie Jebus instead.  They were honoring a PERSON and they didn't need to sully his accomplishment by referencing an invisible sky daddy, even if they believed there was a sky daddy behind it.

It cheapens the award to make him share the credit with a God, and it denigrates other soldiers to call upon God for continued safety instead of the bravery of the soldiers themselves.  If that's not reason enough to eliminate prayer during government ceremonies, I don't know what is.

Gideon and Armpit Fart Guy

Elevatorgate is still haunting the atheist blogosphere, and this post at The Atheist Experience brought a new perspective to the issues.  What fans of Elevator guy and trolls everywhere have in common is that everyone has a freedom of association right.

For those too lazy to read, the AE poster draws an analogy between Elevator Guy, whose social skills are somewhat lacking, and a guy who doesn't know better than to make armpit fart noises constantly.  Armpit farts have their place, but everyone gets tired of it, and Armpit Fart guy won't get invited places.  It's a matter of being socially acceptable in the context of normal associations.  If people don't want to hear your armpit farts they don't have to. 

That's freedom of association.

The analogy for Elevatorgate is that a woman doesn't have to hang out with someone she doesn't like.  But I think it extends to a wider community too.  The blogosphere is a kind of community with neighborhoods and homes.  This blog is my blogosphere home.  Just because I have the drapes open on the picture window doesn't mean everyone who passes by is welcome to come into the living room and piss on my furniture.... or make armpit farts.

So I have the right to stand at my door and say "yes, you may come in" to the people who behave in socially unacceptable ways, and "no" to those who don't.  And I have the right to decide what is socially acceptable in my internet "house."

Casey Anthony hysteria

While athiests have been distracting themselves over whether it's okay for a man to invite a woman to his room late at night in an elevator in a hotel, the rest of the world barely noticed because CASEY ANTHONY WAS FOUND "NOT GUILTY"



Google news gives you some indication of the hysteria with the number of stories it links:

Casey Anthony Story:  all 13,399 news articles »

Space Shuttle's final launch: all 8,336 news articles »

House cancels July recess:  all 32 news articles » (to work on the deficit issue)
Karachi violence leaves 95 dead:  all 715 news articles »

Will & Kate in Canada: all 4,921 news articles »

127 people die in plane crash in The Congo: all 340 news articles »

Harold Camping moves into nursing home:  all 233 news articles » (he had a stroke a month ago)

No other news item has so many articles.  Surely something more important could have happened in the past few days, but nooooo  we love crime and punishment and it's a big scandal when things happen that violate our sense of right and wrong.

This reminds me of the Summer of 2001, when CNN was obsessed with Chandra Levy, the DC intern who went missing.  The salacious bit is that she was seeing a married senator.  CNN was salivating over the possibility that he was guilty somehow.  With no evidence of what happened to her and no body, their imaginations had to reach further and further to find some way to fill air time without actually investigating something newsworthy.

While American "news" outlets were obsessing about one missing white woman, they weren't telling Americans that fundamentalist muslims hate us so much they want to kill us randomly.  They didn't connect the dots between the embassy bombings and the U.S.S. Cole.  They didn't take G.W. Bush to task for not paying attention to international affairs.

They're doing the same thing now.  We have no idea what evil lurks in the minds of men.  This is why we have nutters promoting conspiracy theories and other nutters following those theories.  We actually were victimized by a conspiracy on 9/11/2011.  Now, almost ten years later we're not paying attention again.  The hypervigilant amongst us are looking for conspiracies and finding them under every rock because the "news" won't do it for us.

The other thing they're not covering is the tragedy of other childrens' deaths.  Where is Nancy Grace's outrage over the death of  Jeziah King or Rilya Wilson?  Why is it not national news when a black child is killed but it's the "trial of the century" (Nancy Grace's words) when a white child dies?

Nancy Grace is a white woman with white babies.  She's on TV because the majority of Americans are white and have or have been white babies.  We mourn our own.  We're not really much different from the Jews who "were permitted" to own slaves of other tribes but not of their own or the medieval crusaders who plundered the wealth of Christian Arabs because skin color and language (and greed) meant more than religion even in a "holy" war.

I'm not saying that society shouldn't care about children, or that this case shouldn't have received any coverage, only that we need some fairness and some perspective.   We have a long way to go.

Disclaimer: I was a missing person at age five for about two months.  My disappearnce never made the news, and I do think it should have.  However, I wouldn't have wanted my disappearance to be covered 24/7 to the detriment of other children or coverage of international threats.

My Take on "Elevatorgate"

Here's the recipe:
One atheist girl ventures into the male-dominated realm of atheism and gives a talk that includes a bit about not liking being treated as a sex object.

Add one atheist boy who has no idea that after you see the atheist girl give a talk you may feel you know her a little but she doesn't know you from ... uh... Adam.

Put them together in an elevator late at night.

Stir in one ill-conceived pick-up line in which geeky boy invites geeky girl to his hotel room. 

She says no.  He shrugs.  She blogs about the irony of being sexualized right after giving a talk about not liking being sexualized.  Boys who could have been him blog that it's no big deal.  Girls who could have been her blog that it is too a big deal.  A few atheists who have actually had sex weigh in.  A few men who imagine themselves equal to atheists who have actually had sex put their foot in it because they think that watching porn has taught them what they need to know about how to pick up women in elevators.

Then a big dick stirs the pot.

The pot boils over.

Oh what fun!

Here's the funny part:  most of the people who are frothing at the mouth over this actually know a little about evolution.   Some have even studied evolutionary psychology - you know, the science of why we have courtship rituals instead of using rape to further the species and how we differ from bonobos or chimpanzees.

Our courtship ritual involves approach and rejection or approach and reciprocation.  We all know that.  Why is it such a big deal that 1) a man approached a woman and 2) the woman rejected the advance?

Apparently, it needs to be spelled out.  As a student of krav maga and veteran of the dating scene in a big city, I am going to explain it to the clueless among you.  (You don't know who you are!)

Mating is a highly dangerous activity.  Both parties have to feel safe for it to be consummated, and if one party doesn't feel safe it's just not gonna happen unless the other party is a rapist.  Men, if you don't know this already:  approaching a woman you don't know is a threatening act!  DUH!  She doesn't know if you're a rapist or a Don Juan or Mr. Perfect.  You have to show her she can trust you before you invite her to your boudoir!  ALL women except perhaps "special" ones should assume strange men are potential rapists.  "Better safe than sorry" is a kind of evolutionary version of Pascal's wager.

Further, most men do understand this.  Asking a woman to your room out of the blue is just plain stupid and indicates that either 1) the man is just plain stupid or 2) the man thinks the woman is just plain stupid.  Men, this should be your last move, not your first one!  So right there, Rebecca was absolutely correct to think something was very wrong.  Going to someone else's territory would have put her in a very vulnerable position.  She was already away from home, so her own room was barely a sanctuary for her.

It's actually been demonstrated that women have a harder time identifying a rapist than men do.  Rapists' success comes from giving the appearance they are as safe as non-rapists in order to gain trust (think Ted Bundy).  They can also be successful by trapping a woman in a vulnerable place (such as the serial killers who attack prostitutes).  And in case we forget that some men are rapists and murderers, we have the news (formerly called "gossip") to remind us.  Notice that nobody ever finds naked men in ditches or ponds.  If there aren't enough real life rape-murders to remind women how vulnerable they are, we'll make up stories and call them "Criminal Investigation" or "Law and Order."

85-year-old woman getting mugged in an elevator

When in danger, we have a "fight or flight" instinct.  If you are in an elevator, you can't run away!  DUH!  If you are diminuitive and inexperienced in fighting, and you are in an elevator with someone bigger and stronger and potentially experienced in fighting, you are fucking doomed.  That goes for scrawny men, too.  Elevators are vulnerable places.  This is why there are security cameras in many of them.  It is also why people with normal social manners don't start conversations in elevators.  Nobody wants to have anything to do with anybody they don't know when they're in a tight space.

This happened late at night, and night time is dangerous for humans.  We don't see well at night and we don't react well at night.  If you are out late at night and someone wants to mess you up, you're kind of screwed just because of that.  Your brain is swimming in melatonin, and possibly alcohol.  Even if you could run away, could you take that first step before you get grabbed?  Could you run faster than your attacker?  Probably not.

Add to this the fact that she was an invited speaker at this event.  This is an honor and she no doubt felt flattered to have her THOUGHTS valued at the type of event where women tend to be in the minority.  If I had been in her shoes, I'd have been on a kind of high, feeling respected and perhaps admired, and if talk went well, competent.  Afterward she probably had a lot of engaging conversation with other attendees, which would elevate the buzz a notch or two.  And then moving instantaneously from that feeling to "Hey, piece of meat, let's get it on" (Not what he said, but what she heard) would be even more jarring than it normally would be ... in an elevator in a strange city in a strange country late at night with nobody around to help you.

My conclusions (based on my experiences and insight):

1. Atheist gatherings need more women in attendance to teach clueless men how to behave!
2. Being an atheist doesn't render one any more or less capable of doing something really stupid.
3. Being a scientist doesn't make one particularly smart about male-female relationships.  Possibly the opposite!
4. Being taken seriously for your opinions about atheism doesn't mean that people of the opposite (or even same) sex won't also find you attractive.  Again, possibly the opposite!
5. She should be congratulated for merely being insulted and then blogging about the experience.  He's lucky she doesnt' know krav maga!
6. Atheists disagree about things.  We only really agree on one thing, which is actually a non-thing.  Everything else is up for debate.
7. Women are correct in assuming that all men are potential rapists until proven otherwise.  It's in our DNA to protect our DNA.

Yes, it's de rigeur for everyone to blog about this.  I didn't want to feel I'd missed the bandwagon.  If you have blogged about this, feel free to link to it in the comments section.

And p.s. about that krav maga video, I've learned all those techniques except for the last one, so if you meet me in an elevator, keep the conversation above the neck, m'kay?

"Dead Assets" in Religious Holdings

From India:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/07/05/india.temple.wealth/

Hoard of treasure uncovered in Indian temple

...Under orders of India's Supreme Court, officials since last week have been auditing precious royal offerings kept in underground vaults of the famed Sree Padmnabha Swamy temple in the coastal state of Kerala.

V.K. Hari Kumar, the shrine's executive officer, explained court-appointed observers were making records of the treasure. The stock-taking came after a legal petition over allegations of temple mismanagement.

...Indian media suggest the worth of the new-found religious trove is more than the nation's expenditure on education.

I wonder what would happen if the Mormons, Catholics, and megachurches were subject to the same kind of auditing.  Apparently some Indians are shocked to discover a parallel economy working through religion. They shouldn't be.  Vishnu's many arms are handy for grabbing up the wealth of believers!

I find it strange that the right-wing in the U.S. includes people who are against taxes yet think it's okay for the church to demand a 10% tithe.  The tithes supposedly go (at least partly) to missions overseas, where they build up the infrastructure and spread "The Word" at the same time.  If they got their way and the U.S. could no longer afford roads, bridges, water filtration or education, would they move their tithe money to the U.S. infrastructure?  Apparently India's religions have plenty of money locked up in their vaults to take over for Mother Teresa's cult.  Who knows how much money could be redircted to worthy projects if people in other countries & the U.S. gave up their fairy tales?

Vacation Bible School

I stopped believing in God through skeptical thinking: I found the whole idea of a supernatural entity as preposterous as the ideas of New Age nonsense.  Having recently tried (again) to belong to a church and read the bible and all the rest of it, I just couldn't see any particular reason to be a believer other than wanting to believe.

The Bible's Like a Box of Chocolates

That is apparently enough for many believers.  I doubt that most believers know who William Lane Craig is.  The Catholics I know haven't pursued religious education beyond catechism, or perhaps Catholic high school.  The evangelical Christians I know seem satisfied with psychological comfort.  Other than a few Bible verses that they quote frequently, they don't seem particularly well-versed in what their religion actually teaches. Many of the believers I have encountered have never actually read the Bible cover-to-cover.  If they go to church at all, they let their pastor's pablum suffice for "theology."  One I know insisted that nobody could ever memorize all 150 psalms even though monks have been chanting them from memory since about the Fourth Century (or even earlier).

For most of the history of Christianity, believers were indeed illiterate.  Slaves of the American South were even prohibited from learning to read, but they were Christianized nevertheless.  American education began with "Sunday School," when children were taught a few basics after church in order to learn to read.  After public education took over the task, "Sunday School" became religious education.

Now there is also "vacation bible school," a week when parents send their children off to be indoctrinated in order to get a break from them during the long hot summer.  Around here, they have bought the "Pandamania" system.  You see a child wearing panda ears and you know they're Christian.  Forget crosses and forehead smudges, yes, it is now panda ears that mark your children for Christ.  Here's the curriculum:

Day 1
Bible Point: God made you.
Bible Story: God creates the world. (Genesis 1)
Bible Verse: "Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!" (Psalm 139:14)

i.e., Creationism 101. You are complex, therefore Goddidit.  Everything else is complex too, uhhhh.  Let's sing a song!

Day 2
Bible Point: God listens to you.
Bible Story: Elijah confronts the prophets of Baal. (1 Kings 18:16-39)
Bible Verse: "You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord." (Psalm 139:4)

i.e., God listens to you say what he pre-ordained you would say.  So do you really have to say it?  Why does he pre-ordain it anyway?  And if blasphemy is a sin, then he knows you're going to say it and doesn't prevent you from saying it so you go to Hell and he has pre-ordained it.  uhh.... Let's sing a song and make bamboo crafts!

Day 3
Bible Point: God watches over you.
Bible Story: Jonah tries to escape from God. (Jonah 1-3)
Bible Verse: "Even in darkness I cannot hide from you." (Psalm 139:12)

Leave your happy bits alone. God can see what you're doing under your sheets.  Let's sing a happy song!  Wheee

Day 4
Bible Point: God loves you, no matter what.
Bible Story: Jesus dies and comes back to life. (Luke 23:1-24:12)
Bible Verse: "Lead me along the path of everlasting life." (Psalm 139:24)

So God knew in advance you'd eventually say or think something damnable, then he decided to make his good son suffer in your place.  So go ahead and sin all you want because God loves you!  Let's sing a happy song and pretend we're hungry pandas in a bamboo forest!

Day 5
Bible Point: God gives good gifts.
Bible Story: God gives Hannah a baby. (1 Samuel1:1-2:11)
Bible Verse: "You place your hand of blessing on my head." (Psalm 139:5)

Remember, kids... when you grow up you must procreate, and if you put your happy bits together with someone else's happy bits and someone winds up pregnant, you must have that baby even if it's the result of rape or incest, or is deformed or or will force you into poverty or will kill you.  Because babies are gifts.  God puts babies on your head.  uhhh  Let's put on panda ears and sing a happy song!

What does a panda have to do with any of this? It's a distraction. It keeps the children from thinking too hard about what they're being told. This quote from a review is very telling:

On our last day, we had a parent come for the first time. She cried during the entire program because of the presence of God's love and the love that was expressed for all the children especially her two daughters. This was truly a God sighting.

The other reviews mention how great the songs are, or they talk about the crafts.  They don't say anything about the theology of what they're supposedly teaching these kids.  They don't say anything about the Bible. They might as well be hari krishnas.