Sunday Sermon: Sometimes a scarf is just a scarf

Assuming Jesus of Nazareth really existed (and I have no problem with the notion that he did), there’s still no record of what he looked like, or what his mom looked like. Maybe he had a beard and long hair, maybe not. Maybe his mom went around in a head shawl, maybe she didn’t.

But why is it that whenever someone looks at a tree stump or a piece of toast or a pattern of light on the side of the building that looks like a guy with long hair and a beard, they think it’s an image of Jesus rather than, say, John Entwistle? Why does every image of a woman in a scarf or shawl remind people of Mary, rather than Benazir Bhutto?

There have been guys with beards and women with scarves throughout pretty much all of modern (or semi-modern) human history. And there’s no record, oral or written, that says either Jesus or Mary looked the way they’ve traditionally been rendered by European artists.

Sure, an all-knowing and all-powerful God might choose to take into account a particular culture’s iconography, and make His miracles conform to those traditional images. But wouldn’t an all-knowing and all-powerful God have created an iconography that’s a little bit less generic? Maybe a distinctive facial scar, or chin dimple, or harelip or something to make an actual image of Jesus next to Mary somehow distinguishable from an image that could just be from a sidewalk in Cairo or Riyadh (or New York, for that matter)?

And BTW, am I the only one who thinks there are lots of Christians who will fall down and worship an image of a woman in a headscarf if it appears on a piece of toast, but who make a wide path around a real, actual woman who’s dressed that way? Especially if she looks like she’s Middle Eastern — just like Mary was?

(Atheist melon pic from Mitchell and Webb sketch via Buzzfeed)

Sunday Sermon: Bacon bits

There’s a bumpersticker that says, “If we’re not supposed to eat animals, why are they made out of meat?” That’s funny, in a question-begging* sort of way, but there’s a similar question that needs to be asked of Judeo-Christian-Muslim worldview: If we’re not supposed to eat pigs, why are they made out of bacon?

Essentially, the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) ask us to believe that God basically said to mankind, “Hey guys, see this animal here? It’s called a pig. I made the top part out of baby back ribs and the shoulders out of pork that makes fantastic barbecue. The legs are made out of ham, and just in case that wasn’t enough, I made its belly out of bacon! And guess what, humans? You can’t eat any of it! Bwahahahaha!”

Even if such a deity ever did exist, I could never bring myself to worship such a sick and twisted being.

* Pet Peeve: The phrase “begs the question” refers to a failure of logic in which one attempts to prove a proposition true via a proof that itself assumes the proposition as true, e.g. “The Bible is the infallible word of God, because there’s a verse in the Bible that says so” (and yes, you can easily find Christians who will use precisely that argument). The phrase “begs the question …” does NOT mean “raises the question …” or “brings up the question …” or “leads logically to the question …” and I’m really sick of seeing it used that way — not just by the unwashed masses, but even by professional journalists who should know better. Knock it off, already!

{“Receive Bacon” pic via Pieces of Limbo)

Sunday Sermon: “It takes faith to be an atheist”

Some Christians seem fond of declaring, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.” That’s a pretty stupid thing to say if you’re someone whose religion is based on faith. It’s also a pretty stupid thing to say to someone who’s actually an atheist, rather than a fellow Christian who’ll smile and nod “knowingly” without bothering to think about it.

One thing that’s stupid about it is that it denigrates faith. Even for an atheist like me, that seems wrong. Faith is a powerful thing. Even in a world devoid of deities, we have faith in other people. I know what it’s like to have faith in someone. I know what it’s like to have that faith rewarded. I know what it’s like to have that faith betrayed. And (as a former born-again Christian) I know what it’s like to have faith that’s neither rewarded nor betrayed, but still abides nonetheless. It’s not a trivial thing.

One reason Christians pursue the “atheist faith” line of reasoning (or perhaps I should say “reasoning”) is because it’s a way to equate atheism with religion. This has tactical advantages — for instance, if there’s some public school curriculum you don’t like (e.g. evolution), you can declare that it’s atheist in nature (even if it’s not), and try to have it banned because it’s religious (since atheism is a religion, right?).

But while there are a few activist Christians pursuing such blatantly tactical approaches, most of them are just talking about and thinking about stuff. So why the denigration of faith? Why try to undermine the mainstay of their own religious view?

Maybe it’s because they think they can win on an appeal to what “makes perfect sense,” either literally or sarcastically. Maybe that’s the whole reason they’re theists in the first place — they simply can’t believe that nobody’s in charge, and their religious belief isn’t really based on faith in the first place, but on a need to feel certain about something, even if what they feel certain about is absurd. For some people,  answering a question like “How did the universe come about?” by saying “It’s magic” is more satisfying than saying “I don’t know.”

But in a straight-up debate about cosmological-type issues, “I don’t know” wins every time, especially when you can pin down the Christian about specific details of what they claim to “know” (or at least have faith in).

For one thing, there’s the sheer vast emptiness of most of the universe. Creationists like to claim the universe is “fine-tuned” for life, but so far we only know of one planet that has life, and that planet is a tiny portion of its own solar system, which in turn is a really tiny portion of its galaxy, which in turn is only a tiny part of the universe. What’s the deal with creating this whole vast universe just to do a little social experiment on one tiny blue ball in one tiny corner of it?

And then there’s the actual creation story in Genesis. Not only do the first 2 chapters contradict each other (not my favorite Bible contradiction, but a good one), but the second chapter makes God into a colossal cosmic Homer Simpson character, making huge blunders and then cobbling together half-assed kludges to compensate for his mistakes.

For starters, he creates the earth and puts plants on it, but there’s no one to till the soil (BTW, most plants on earth grow in the wild without any tilling needed). So he creates a man (scoops up some mud, shapes it into a man and breathes life into its nostrils), but — D’oh! — the man is all alone! That’s not good. So God decides to create a mate for the man. How does he do this? By creating animals. He creates every animal in the world (same process, breathing life into the nostrils of mud sculptures), and brings them to Adam to name them.

(Question for creationists: There are at least 250,000 species of beetle we know about so far — how much time did Adam spend just naming beetles? If he did it really quickly — say, one beetle per second — that’s still 3 solid days, without pausing to eat, drink, sleep or anything else, just naming beetles. And how many  beetles did Adam go through before saying, “Hey, God, I think maybe you’re on the wrong track with these critters. You’ve brought me 185,394 of them already, and I’m pretty sure they’re not getting any closer to being a suitable mate”?)

So God ends up creating every single animal on earth, but — D’oh! — Adam still doesn’t have a mate! So then God (finally!) abandons the whole mud-sculpture concept, and takes a rib out of Adam and makes another person out of that. You’d think, being all-knowing and all, he might have foreseen that the mud-sculpture method wouldn’t work, wouldn’t you? And even if he didn’t foresee that, you might think he’d figure it out fairly early on — maybe around the 497th beetle or so.

Now, if a Christian challenges you to explain how all this stuff got here, you might think “I don’t know” is a lousy answer. But you don’t need to know how it got here to know that it’s here. You can observe that the universe exists, that the earth exists, that life on earth exists, without having any idea whatsoever how it got here. Saying that reality exists isn’t faith, it’s just observation.

But the Christian can’t just rest on “I don’t know” for explaining why (or how) God exists, or any other tenet of his religion — he can’t fall back on saying “I don’t know how God got here, I merely observe that he is here.” Because that’s not an observation — that’s faith.

And, I suspect, that’s why Christians want to claim atheism is also a faith — because it’s the only way they can even begin to attempt to make our worldview appear as comically absurd as their own.

(Christianity cartoon via Migrations; atheism cartoon via The Web Elf Report)

Sunday Sermon: Wichita

I already had last week’s Sunday Sermon prepared when I got the news out of Wichita, so I went ahead and posted what I had. But this still seems like a timely opportunity to discuss the events of last Sunday.

Pro-lifers were quick to condemn the murder of Dr. George Tiller, reportedly one of only 3 doctors in America who perform late-term abortions. They were almost as quick to claim that he’d performed 60,000 abortions in his life (where did they get that number from?), and that he was earning a million dollars a year in his practice, and make lots of other claims designed to portray him in a negative light.

I understand the posthumous smear campaign, and I understand the thinly veiled satisfaction oozed by many pro-lifers (some big names, some semi-anonymous forum posters) at the news of his death. What I don’t quite understand is the condemnation of his murderer — what’s with that?

As far as I can tell, Tiller’s murderer merely embraced the mainstream pro-life message and took it seriously. If O’Reilly’s sobriquet “Tiller the baby killer” was even remotely accurate, and Tiller really was in the business of snuffing out thousands of innocent human lives, the question isn’t whether a pro-lifer can justify killing him — it’s how a pro-lifer could possibly justify NOT killing him.

Here’s a guy who’s the point man for the biggest holocaust of modern times, whose name and location are known, and who lives in a country where you can buy a gun at Wal-Mart. If you really believe fetuses are  babies with full human identity and full human rights, and if you believe their rights supercede a woman’s right to control her own body (including her womb), how can you stand idly by while more human beings are killed?

And it’s not just Tiller, either. What about the women who hire him? If the “babies” they paid him to kill are really human beings with full human rights (and the extra right, not shared by any other humans, to occupy another human being’s body without their consent), then they’re committing first-degree murder just as surely as they would be if they hired a hit man to kill somebody.

When prosecutors are dealing with a “hit man” case, they sometimes offer the hit man a deal if he testifies against the real murderer — the one who hired him. They never offer the hirer a deal for testifying against the triggerman he hired. And yet there are lots of pro-lifers who don’t think women who procure abortions should be charged with murder — they say the focus should be on the doctors who perform the procedure, with the women walking away scot-free.

Does this make any sense at all? Well, yes, under one condition. If you don’t really believe abortion is murder, that fetuses are really human beings, and you’re just saying those things because they make good sound bites and bumperstickers, then it makes perfect sense to take that view.

And it makes equally good sense (if you want to call it that) for a pro-lifer to condemn someone who treats abortionists like they really are killing babies en masse, and kills one to save numerous unborn lives.

But if a pro-lifer really believes the pro-life rhetoric, it makes no sense at all.

(cartoon about punching Bill O’Reilly via MythTickle)

Sunday Sermon: My favorite contradiction

Some atheists love to stump Christians (particularly fundamentalists) with the question, “How did Judas die?” This is a pretty good one, since the Bible contains 2 completely different accounts.

In one version (Matthew 27:5), Judas hangs himself, after throwing away the “blood money” he was paid for betraying Jesus. In another (Acts 1:18), his belly spontaneously splits open and he falls over dead, in the field he bought with the blood money he was paid for betraying Jesus. That would seem to be an airtight contradiction (especially given that one version has him throw away the money, while the other has him spending it), but fundamentalist Christians can be remarkably creative about interpreting a book they claim needs no interpretation.

They’ll claim he threw the money away and later picked it up, or just threw some of it away, and then they’ll claim that he hung himself and then his belly split open after his body rotted. No contradiction at all! Just 2 stories emphasizing different details. Don’t  believe me? Try it in a forum and just see what answers you get.

I prefer to ask the simple question, “How many times did Peter deny Jesus before the rooster first crowed?” (I prefer to say “rooster” because I don’t want people thinking I’m just looking for an excuse to say “cock”). The thing is, there are 2 different versions of that story too, and they directly and unequivocally contradict each other. They simply can’t both be true.

In the better-known version (related in Matthew, Luke and John), Jesus says Peter will deny him 3 times before the rooster crows, and that’s what happens — 3 different people come up to Peter asking if he knows that guy they just arrested, and each time Peter says he doesn’t know him — and then the rooster crows.

But in the book of Mark, it’s a different story. Jesus says Peter will deny him 3 times before the rooster crows twice, and then Peter’s very first denial is followed by the rooster crowing, then 2 more denials, then the second crow.

This might seem like a trivial quibble. But remember, fundamentalists don’t merely claim the Bible is highly accurate — they say it’s authored by God His own Self, and contains no errors or inaccuracies. Lots of contradictions can be waved away by dedicated fundamentalists who say that each version tells part of the story, but you just can’t do that with the contradictory accounts of Peter’s denial.

If Jesus said Peter would deny him 3 times before the rooster crowed, and if that actually happened, then any account that has a rooster crowing before Peter’s third denial — in Mark’s case, actually even before the second denial — must simply be false.

And if Mark’s version is true, then the other three versions are false. There’s just no way around it — the Gospels contain at least one story that is, at least in the details, just plain false. If God authored all of the Gospels, then He really should have had a fact-checker or a copy editor or one of the other support staff employed to help fallible authors keep their stories straight.

(Don Addis cartoon via Friendly Atheist)

Sunday Sermon

I’ve been doing this blog for a couple weeks now, and one thing I’ve learned is that talking about being polite is, well … boring. I’m thinking it might be interesting to liven things up a bit by leaving the area of politeness occasionally, and talk about ways atheists can engage with the world without worrying about ruffling feathers.

So let’s look at an area where it’s totally acceptable (IMHO) to stop worrying about being polite — debate forums that  have been set up explicitly for the purpose of debating the merits (or lack thereof) of religion or atheism.

I’m not saying there aren’t any restrictions (moderation is often an issue), or that you always feel free to let fly with all the vitriol  you can muster (I have many online “friends” who are devout believers, and I try to respect their feelings even though we’ve never met).

But if it’s an online forum, set up for the express purpose of arguing about atheism (or arguing about religion), then you don’t need to be closeted, you don’t need to worry that announcing your atheism will be a bummer or will distract people from the event at hand and make it “all about you,” or any of the other considerations that often motivate atheists to keep a lid on it in public settings.

Needless to say, not all non-atheists are equally fun to debate (or argue with, or hassle, or whatever). There are those really annoying believers — the cool ones who know that they don’t have some special line to God, they just have a faith that they believe in. Those people are a real pain.

Fortunately, those types of believers are a minority. The really awesome non-atheists are the ones who combine ignorance and arrogance for a perfect storm of nose-tweakability. You know the kind — the ones who insist the Bible is completely accurate because nobody’s ever sat them down and showed them the contradictions.

The ones who say the reason there’s good in the world is all because of God, and the reason there’s evil is all because of humans (without pondering who’s responsible for creating the humans in the first place).

The ones who say God knows everything — even the future, even all the bad things  you’re going to do, even before you decide to do them — and then claim you have free will (without pondering what would happen if you used your free will to choose to do something God “knew” you wouldn’t choose to do).