Sunday Sermon: In praise of subversion

The word “subversion” (or “subversive”) is often misunderstood as being some sort of synonym for “opposition” or some such thing. It’s actually subtler than that. Subversion is an act of destroying or attacking from within — it involves getting inside the thing you’re attacking, and persuading other people inside that thing to participate in destroying or weakening it.

From the perspective of religion, a song like XTC’s “Dear God” isn’t really subversive, except to the extent that some religious person might look at the title and decide to check out the song, thereby being exposed to the explicitly anti-religious sentiment in the song itself.

But there’s an anti-religious anthem that really is subversive — so subversive that most people (including, I suspect, most atheists) don’t actually realize it. The song is Julie Gold’s “From A Distance,” popularized by Bette Midler a few years back. It’s wonderfully subversive, in that it can get a crowd of people singing along with “God is watching us, God is watching us … from a distance,” without realizing what the song is actually saying.

At first blush, the song appears to be yet another bromide in a long tradition of attempts (some simperingly well-meaning, some downright scary) to find good news (or Good News) in the midst of tragedy. It looks like yet another iteration of “God answers all prayers, but sometimes the answer is no,” or something along those lines.

It’s closer to the mark to say the song addresses what theologians call the “Problem of Evil” — how can an omni-max God allow evil to exist?

What the song actually says becomes clear when you look at the verses and chorus together (and separating the message between verse and chorus helps slip it into the minds of people who might notice if the whole premise were put into one verse or one line).

From a distance (the song says), the world looks like a nice place. You don’t see that it’s full of poverty, disease, war and hunger. From a distance, you might think the world is a place of harmony, with hope and peace echoing through the land.

And the chorus, of course, supplies the punchline. God is watching us — from a distance. Why is there evil? Because God can’t see it. That’s what all those folks are saying when they join in on the chorus, waving their hands over their heads and singing “God is watching us, from a distance.”

Best. Joke. Ever.

Sunday Sermon: Worth a thousand words

(via Godless Blogger)

Sunday Sermon: Dhimmi eat world

There’s a word that’s becoming popular among the more hysterically Islamophobic wingnuts these days. The word is “dhimmi,” and while it technically means people who are allowed to remain non-Muslim while living under Muslim law, it loosely refers to someone who gives in to the demands of Islamic extremists, or even enables them.

When someone on a Christian online forum suggests that maybe not all Muslims are evil terrorists, or that maybe they’re human beings with the same rights as other human beings,it won’t be long before some Christian fundie accuses them of Dhimmitude.

So, then, what does that say about American society, in which separation of church and state is enshrined in the Constitution, but where the Pledge of Allegiance describes America as “one nation under God,” and the legal tender includes the phrase “In God We Trust,” and our main legislative body opens its sessions with a prayer offered by a Christian minister?

Looks to me like Muslims aren’t the only ones capable of establishing religious rule, and “generously” allowing non-believers to tag along, provided they know their place.

(cartoon via Yoism)

Sunday Sermon: What if God was one of us?

So some creationists are trying to be happy about a recent scientific study that says the appendix isn’t as useless a vestigial organ as was previously thought.

As has already been pointed out, the study is based on a phylogenetic analysis of various critters, including humans — that means the results are based on the assumption that humans and those other critters all evolved from a common ancestor.

But creationists have a long-standing explanation for the evolutionary relationships between various critters (again, including humans). They say it’s “common design” rather than common descent. After all, when we design things, we often reuse the same components for different designs, don’t we? So of course it’s not surprising that God would do the same thing.

There are lots of problems with this — ask yourself why the same bone structure would be ideal for a bat’s wing, a human hand and a dolphin’s fin — but what interests me about it is its sheer anthropocentrism. Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing deity, whose mind we can’t begin to fathom, do things the way ordinary humans tend to do them?

It’s funny how when humans describe how God works, it always seems to be pretty much the way humans work — except when God does something no self-respecting human would ever do.

When God tells a loyal follower to tie his son to a slab and plunge a knife into his heart, or instructs a tribe to kill all the men, women, boys and babies of a rival tribe, saving only the young girls for themselves, or tells a couple to let their teenage son die rather than seek medical help —  suddenly God’s ways become mysterious and unfathomable by us puny humans with our tiny brains.

Sunday Sermon: Motes and beams

For quite some time, there’s been a steady stream of Christian schoolteachers getting in trouble for using the classroom as a pulpit, preaching religious messages to their students. Whenever these teachers are called out for their unconstitutional (and unconscionable) attempt to use their position of power and authority to pound religion into the heads of impressionable children, various religious groups are quick to whine about oppression, making the bogus claim that being denied the ability to ram their religion down other people’s throats is tantamount to being denied freedom of speech or freedom of religion.

But now, the shoe is sort of on the other foot — but the big difference is that the other foot doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

Hemant Mehta is an atheist — he calls himself “The Friendly Atheist” on his blog, which makes him something of a rival of mine (a friendly rival, as I’m pretty sure I’ve linked to his blog in the past). He’s also a schoolteacher. Does he use his position to “preach” atheism, or otherwise promote it? No, he does not. He keeps his views on religion out of his classroom.

But he doesn’t keep them in the closet. He has a blog on atheism, and he’s active in other ways as well. Because of that, the Illinois “Family” Institute wants him fired.

First, they wrote to his school board to complain about his non-school activities, and when that didn’t work, they started writing letters to parents of kids in his school, urging them to insist that their kids be removed from his classes.

PZ Myers makes an excellent point: If this is how a “Friendly Atheist” gets treated, where’ the motivation to be friendly?

(Pic — and shirt — via Zazzle.com)

Sunday Sermon: Wafer controversy revisited

A few weeks ago, I touched on the controversy sparked by PZ Myers when he desecrated a communion wafer, and noted the double standard at work — apparently people who believe a cracker turns into the flesh of Jesus when you say a magic spell should be respected when they act on that belief, but people who believe it’s just a cracker don’t deserve the same respect.

But in reviewing that post, I can see that I went way too easy on the nutjobs. It’s not merely that there was a double standard in how they claimed the two camps should be treated, there were different standards in what the two camps had already done.

What PZ Myers did was, he obtained a communion wafer and desecrated it. He publicly ridiculed the beliefs of a group of people. What the other folks did was, they mounted a massive hate-mail campaign against him and tried to get him fired from his job. So let me amend my earlier post with an addendum.

Here’s the thing: No matter how people may criticize or even ridicule you for your views on Holy Communion, nobody is trying to interfere with your belief that a Communion wafer is the body of Christ, or your actions based on that belief.

Nobody is mounting a hate mail campaign against you because you consume the Holy Eucharist.

Nobody is taking to the airwaves to denounce you because you like to eat the body of Christ in church.

Nobody’s trying to get you fired from your job because you like to eat a piece of Jesus for Sunday brunch.

So lighten the (bleep) up.

(cartoon via Ruining the Internet)

Sunday Sermon: Nuts of all stripes, revisited

Sodini’s ex-pastor can’t explain the hatred

So, the pastor of the church attended by the nutjob who shot up a health club in California is shocked — shocked! — to learn that one of his parishioners used his religion to justify his twisted hatred for women (and some other folks besides).

Weird. Are we talking about the same Bible? The one where God destroys a city because he’s so homophobic? The one where God drowns nearly everyone in the entire world because he’s so disappointed with the people he created?

The one where God strikes down the firstborn son in every household in an entire country just because of the actions of the despot who happens to be in power there? The same God who dictates that rebellious offspring should be stoned to death?

The news account quotes the pastor thusly: “It’s clear that this man acted on his own,” he said. “From bitterness and rage.” Sounds pretty Godly to me.

(thanks to commenter “satanhimself in PA” for the article)

Sunday Sermon: Anti Christ Superstar

So, they’ve got a Bible verse about seeing Satan as lightning from the heavens, and claiming the Hebrew word for lighting is “baraq” and the word for heights (not “heavens,” but hey, it’s sort of close, right?) is “bamah,” so in Hebrew the name of the Antichrist would be “Baraq U Bamah.”

Gee, it’s good to know it’s not our current president — after all, his name is Barack Obama, and presumably an all-knowing and all-powerful God who was writing a Bible would know how to spell his name, if he were the guy.

Or maybe God is just teasing us, making the name close enough, but still different enough, that even He has plausible deniability. Or maybe it’s just His idea of a big practical joke. Maybe Regina Spektor is right — God can be hilarious.

Seriously, though, this is what I’m wondering: The Bible’s been around quite a while, and the Hebrew language has as well. If the name of the Antichrist could be figured out by applying those two things, why didn’t anyone do it before 2009?

Why didn’t they do it 100 years ago (or 200, or 800), and then keep their eyes open for someone with a name like that taking prominence on the national/international stage?

Sunday Sermon: Is “Dear God” really the best we can do?

I really like XTC (the band, that is — I’ve never tried the drug), and I’m an atheist. So logically, I should love their atheist anthem “Dear God,” right?

But I don’t love it. I don’t even like it. I can stand to listen to it (Andy Partridge writes good tunes), but I actively dislike the lyrics. Here’s why:

First of all, there’s the underlying assumption that God actually does exist, whether we believe in him or not. The same assumption behind the question “Do you believe in God?” The same assumption that gets some atheists’ backs up because they’ve already been put in a rhetorical box just by the way the question is framed.

Secondly, there’s the assumption that the God in question is the Judeo-Christian-Muslim one, as if it’s the only one worth talking about. You could argue, therefore, that “Dear God” isn’t an atheist anthem, merely an anti-Christian (or anti-Judeo-Christian-Muslim) one, but I don’t know of anyone who thinks of it like that.

But my main objection is that the lyrics are just so simplistic, superficial and, frankly, childish. They sound like the rantings of a 14-year-old who just discovered that the universe isn’t perfect. It’s the kind of argument that Christian apologists set up as a strawman, just because it’s so easy to knock down.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the universe having some overly simplistic whining about religion. But the problem is, because XTC is a fairly famous band (and a good one), “Dear God” is easily the most famous song in the world (at least the English-speaking world) that carries an atheist or anti-religion message.

As such, it creates the impression that the fatuous, petulant whining found in the song is the best the atheist side can do when it comes to critiquing religion through song. Surely that’s not the case … is it?

Could any you, my legions of loyal readers (and by “legion” I of course mean “tiny handful”), come up with better examples? I’d love to hear about them.

Sunday Sermon: Holy Eucharist, Batman!

I’ve been talking a lot about “New Atheists” and “accommodationists” recently, so this might be a good time to take a look at a controversy from last year, when militant atheist PZ Myers deliberately desecrated a Catholic communion wafer and provoked a storm of controversy.

From the “atheist etiquette” POV, of course, it’s anything but polite to deliberately offend someone, and very few things are more offensive to Catholics than a deliberate desecration of what they believe to be the actual body of Jesus Christ.

But there’s an interesting double standard at work here. The assumption seems to be that if somebody views a wafer made of flour and water to be the body of Jesus, and treats it accordingly, we should respect that view, no matter how silly or misguided we believe it to be.

If that’s true, then what about the belief that a wafer made of flour and water is, well, just a cracker? What if someone believes that, and treats that wafer accordingly — that is to say, with no more respect than we’d give to any other inanimate object? Shouldn’t we respect that viewpoint, and that action, just as much as we respect the other view?

Last time I checked, the Golden Rule was one of the “biggies” in Christian doctrine. Why aren’t any of the outraged Catholics applying it? If they would have others respect their view that a communion wafer is more than “just a cracker,” shouldn’t they respect the view that it isn’t?

(Communion cartoon via St. James Westminster Anglican Church, London)