On Faith

Debating God Slobberers

Long before they go cosmological or ontological on you, there’s this bit of pablum you have to wade through with almost all of your run-of-the-mill God slobberers.   Here’s the short list of the debating tactics of those on the religious short bus and how to deal with them:

The Gob Slobberer Starter Toolkit

1. You are mad at/hate God.
2. You wish to masturbate (more enthusiastically?) without oversight. (Masturbation just manages to squeeze out “practice homosexuality” as the ‘go-to sin” above the Mason-Dixon line).
3. You are lashing out at “the church” because (e.g.) a priest masturbated you a little too enthusiastically or you had some other negative experience at church.
4. You haven’t looked for God in the right places.

The Skeptics Responses

1.  I wish there was a God to be mad at but since that’s s a fantasy of yours I don’t share I’m going to have to hold you personally responsible for all the chowder-headed nonsense you’re spewing and the damage that occurs as a result.

2.  I do the best I can not to embarrass the ghost of Oscar Wilde.

3.  The soft hand of a Catholic priest would have been a Godsend in lieu of the total subjugation of my mind which was attempted in order to help me find comfort in the patently ridiculous notions being promulgated by mindless goobers like you.

4.  I looked everywhere for God as a child, but it was all to no avail. Were the father, son and holy ghost all too busy for for my toast?   Upon puberty it finally hit me.  Vaginas seemed the likeliest hideout for God that I hadn’t already searched in my youth.  Checked a bunch….nada God there..

I’ll keep looking to broaden the sample size but I’m skeptical I’ll find anything other than an echo in even the largest of vaginas.

Maybe God is too ashamed to show his face after looking around and seeing what a horrible job he did in the first place.  That’s a distinct possibility and the one I’d run up the flagpole if I was a master goober in religious apologetics.

Enjoy.

Nye-Ham Debate Retrospective

I stayed up half the night here in Germany to live-tweet the event and my overall “impression”? Based on the amount of pre-debate skeptic jitters about engaging in a ‘debate’ with a slobbering God botherer, which I normally concur is a bad idea btw, the whole event worked out quite well for the cause of secularism IMHO. Here’s why I feel that way.

First, there’s the relative popularity of Bill Nye easily trumping Ken Ham with all but the radical right wing ultra-minority of folks willing to overlook the reality of science and physics in the 21st Century. Then you toss in Ken Ham’s reliance on Cliff Notes from the prosecutor’s statements against Galileo.  Those are not nearly as effective as when people were engaged in bleeding themselves to death in their holy efforts to excise demons and return to health.

Finally, Ham’s “Molecules to Man” canard, was wholly inappropriate for a debate on evolution as any seasoned atheist debater is familiar with the tactic of shifting from evolution to abiogenesis willy nilly will be familiar with. I was a little taken back (see my live tweet stream) by Nye’s inability or reluctance to go “Christoper Hitchens” mode on Ham and get to some serious nut-cutting. That was a fantasy of mine I knew would not occur, but I was really saddened that Nye didn’t even do a little “soft shoe” Sam Harris impersonation at some point.

Bill Nye: “That all sounds well and good Mr. Ham, but when I read the Bible, I clearly see the story of “Protons to Polygamy” and your disavowing those parts of God’s holy works that you find unsuitable goes directly against your claims made based on other scriptures literal accuracy and contemporary relevance.” 

If Bill Nye had the quick wit and lust for metaphorical nut-cutting that I do, when Ham was busy refuting the literal facts about the Bible supporting polygamy, Bill should have come back with that line and I GUARANTEE you it would be the thing that made the highlight reel. Of course that overlooks the fact that I invented the phrase concurrent to the time of the debate itself, but great minds think alike and Bill Nye has a great mind.

In retrospect, and perhaps as part of Nye’s master plan, he modified Mohammed Ali’s Rope-a-Dope strategy and just let Ham wear himself out while Nye stood calmly covering his head tucked safely against the ropes. Instead of going for the kill like Mohammed Ali, he was happy to just stand there and witness the exhausted and frustrated puritanical pugilist nearly pass out from running himself in circles?

I dunno, but since the “debate” was taped, I expect the best of our secular public schools to use the footage, not as a religious exercise, but as an all-too-necessary exercise in deconstructing the rhetoric of creationist apologetics. FWIW, I had an extremely valuable class in critical thinking. It was in Lincoln, Nebraska when I was in 7th grade public school. Being armed with a proper list of logical fallacies is the secular armament most lacking in the rank and file militant atheism army I am trying to corral. If successful I promise not to let you all build a new religion around me since I’ve already started one on my WordPress blog.

Remember troops. Molecules to Man shall from henceforth on, be responded to with Protons to Polygamy, unless somebody can twist up an even shorter, more catchy “meme’ to undermine the creationist mindset.  H/T to Dan Dennett, and I meme that most sincerely.

Enjoy.

Mormon Blues 2

Dissecting the Document Dump

The other day, I retrieved and posted a PDF document so embarrasing to the Mormon Church, that the errant Mormon apologist who originally posted it on his blog, “disappeared” it from the web the day after the New York Times hyperlinked to his Mormon Stories website.

It’s a long and tedious document, and one of my lazier readers (h/t Americablog) has requested that I break it down and highlight “the good parts”, something that I had planned to do in the near future anyway. Turns out the near future is today.  I still encourage everyone to read it in it’s entirety, if only to experience first-hand, the long and tedious banality of Mormon religious sophistry and rhetorical apologetics in general.

The PDF transcribes the conversation between high ranking Swedish Mormons and a couple church “historians” (Seal Team Slicks) air-dropped into Sweden from Utah to answer the growing concerns of the Swedes over the origins, history and practices of the Mormon church.  The uninitiated may want to read the first part of my expose’ for more background as well as the original New York Times piece that sent me down this rabbit hole.

For purposes of brevity, I will refer to the Mormon historians as “the Church” and the insolent Swedish parishoners as “the Doubters” or “the Swedes”.  The stage is set:

Event: Special Fireside (marshmallows?) for Disaffected (Uninfected?) Swedish LDS Saints
Speakers: Elder Marlin K. Jensen (LDS Church Historian) and Richard E. Turley Jr. (Assistant Church Historian)
Date: November 28, 2010
Location: Västerhaninge Chapel; Stockholm, Sweden

Opening Remarks – The Church (Information Daze)

It is a day of information, but with that comes the challenge of deciding what information is reliable, what information is true, what information is worthy of basing our life on it. And hopefully tonight we can at least offer some information in a reliable and loving way that will be responsive to some of the questions that you have. 

The bar has been set pretty high IMHO.  Using this standard of historical filtering, we’d never have heard of the Holocaust no matter how many reliable reports we got because it’s definitely not “loving” even if we all agree it’s reliable.  Information that is accurate, yet not worthy of basing our lives on, has also been set aside as suspect.  Now that we have the “rules” on how the Mormon Church defines filters information, let us proceed.

Inconvenient Facts = Work of the Devil

In a rather brazen attempt to inhibit and shame the curious, we get scripture quoted from (argh!) The Book of Mormon (Moroni 7, Verse 16) by the Church historians:

“But whatsoever thing persuadeth men to do evil, and believe not in Christ, and deny him, and serve not God, then ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of the devil; for after this manner doth the devil work, for he persuadeth no man to do good, no, not one; neither do his angels; neither do they who subject themselves to him.” 

This verse forms the bedrock on which the Church builds their rationalization for their moral imperative to shut down debate at all levels, as well as lie to doubters, lest the truth somehow moves them closer to the devil.  In standard Christianity it’s often referred to as “lying for Christ“.  In the secular world the expression, “The end justifes the means” can stand in for the religious verses when it is inappropriate to invoke religion in support of an immoral argument (justifying torture e.g.).  Brainwashed believers, even if they have serious doubts about what they witness with their own lying eyes, are routinely shut down with the not so subtle threat that they are risking their place in the Mormon version of Heaven by even asking pondering about it in the first place.

I should know because unlike the memories of the Mormon historical apologists, I have nearly perfect knowledge.  Under Mormon rules, I’d be in contention for serious Devilhood, except  I’m actually encouraging everyone to try to be as good as is humanly possible, not that I think it’ll be an effective defense against pissed-off Mormons whatsoever.

Questions of the Doubters

Six pages in, the Church historians having finally finished with the reading of their formal terms, conditions and disclaimers, I am ready to declare that the details of Facebook’s privacy policy are the only thing in contemporary society as Byzantine as the ground rules laid out by these Mormon apologists.  It is also the place in the PDF where the doubters finally get to ask a question, the first of which is a lobbed softball, left hanging arm’s length in the middle of the strike zone, begging to be belted out of the park by the quick reflexes of the ringers assembled by the Mormon Church Rapid Response Team.

Doubter Question: Will you have very good answers?

Church: You’ll see in a moment. We’ll have what answers we have.….(ed. full answer is 592 words)

Six hundred words to answer to a simple question? Mormon hierarchy is so accustomed to pissing down the leg of their parishioners while simultaneously proclaiming a rainstorm, I’m shocked they didn’t think to just answer with one word, “Absolutely”.

Fast Forward

There are many questions over the veracity of stories of the magic golden plates and their translations portrayed in Church doctrine (and Mormon Sunday School) that, suffice to say, clearly don’t mesh with undisputed historical facts of the era.

I’m going to focus less on the questions pointing out the obvious bogusness of the “translation” of these imaginary golden plates and more on the doubters questions concerning implementation and operations of the early church, and in particular, the licentous behavior of Joseph Smith.  In order to do so it is not enough to just be familiar with the definition of polygamy.  If only it were that easy I could just refer to Big Love and be done with it.

Invoking Editorial Privilege

From here on out, the questions come from the Swedes faster than the Church can cobble together consistent responses.  Often one questioner will toss several out at once and the Church will pounce on the low hanging fruit of the one they think is most easy to placate, ignoring the more controversial of the mix.  There may be several pages between an original (ignored) question and it’s reappearance by another questioner later in the discussion.

Therefore, I shall remix (in no particular order) from the bevy of scrambled questions and answers, being careful to “cut n’ paste” the relevant bits while attempting to keep the integrity of the overall analysis intact. After all, I’m not hiding the original document from anybody that wants to see it (I’m not Mormon after all…lol), so if someone wants to challenge me from the original text, have at it in the comments.

Enter Polyandry

Question: According to information I have read a number of times which has been published in books, etc., and which I think seem to be very firm and correct, how the wives were forced into marriage. It wasn’t so that they fell in love with Joseph and say, now I would like to be a wife. It was so that they were put under tremendous pressure to accept the marriage and they were told that the church will go under and their family will go under, you have only until, let’s say, tomorrow to decide and to marry me but it will have terrible consequences if you don’t accept the marriage.

Church response to questions about polyandry:

Church: So the question of Polyandry. Polygamy is when a man has multiple wives. . Joseph did both, so your question is about polyandry.

Let that sink in for a minute.  Undisputed polyandry. Not only was Joseph Smith snatching up every available fourteen year old girl like a latter day Warren Jeffs, he was also coercing married women into affairs.  For the record, Ann Eliza Young made the charges in a book she wrote (in 1876!) after escaping bondage from Mormonism by hightailing it out of Utah under cover of darkness.  She was Brigham Young’s 27th wife.  Her book is freely available online (copyrights have long ago expired).

Church Apologetics on Coerced Sexual Relations

Church: In the 1800’s being fourteen years old was like being thirty years old today.  On the issue of coercion, Joseph Smith was a prophet, and it’s widely accepted that prophets get to bone as many chicks as they are able.  Plus, nobody was worried about overpopulating Utah at the time. (Ok, I added the last bit, but the other stuff is accurately paraphrased).  In conclusion, the Church wants to remind everyone that polygamy is bad, bad, bad, and in our advanced society it’s an aberration to ever considering adopting the practice.

The Swedes:  Does this mean I don’t get my multiple wives in Heaven?

Church:  Don’t talk crazy.  Of course you still get to party like the Sultan of Brunei after you’re dead.  Whatever else you might think of Mormonism, we’re not barbarians.  Ferchrissakes.

There are questions about why the Mormon Church hates Black people as well as all kinds of other juicy gobbledygook for folks who enjoy the “inside baseball” aspects of the whackaloon religious world of Mormonism.  I honestly don’t have the patience to wade back through the muck and the mire to mine any more nuggets out of the cesspool.  It’s not nearly as fun as bobbing for apples.

Enjoy.

Dear Atheism Plus

We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your blogs, and the works of your best minds. We have heard your wild claims, your solemn groans and your repetitive ad hominems. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your barricaded forums for just one little fact.

We work tirelessly, bringing together our many disparate voices to implore you for just one fact. We know all about your moldy old logic and your stale misogynist dogma.

We want a ‘this year’s fact’. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Where do you store the information on all the reported rapes and assaults that you form the basis of your movement? Specifically those that have happened at atheist or skeptic events in the past five years (or forever) Call those silly rationalists crazy, but they like evidence.

Your miraculous elevator stories are too ancient. You accord the solitary witnesses with all the accolades normally reserved by the Catholic Church for a teenage girl who chats up the Virgin Mary.

The definition of “truth and veracity” in the neighborhood where you reside is wholly unknown to us. Give us a new miracle, and substantiate it by producing witnesses who still have the cheerful habit of living outside the moat of the #atheismplus castle..

We want a return to skeptic events free of the feminine winds of whine. Most of us were already aware the wine is better in first class before Becky noted it in Slate.. Nor shall you put us in the fire with the actual rapists. Do not compel us to navigate the torrid seas of your pet fears, nor to dine and drink with Rebecca Watson. We have positively lost all interest in that original little speech delivered by PZ’s donkey, a spewage so vile, Richard Dawkins grabbed a shovel.

There is also no sort of use in sending us snipe-hunting with Surly Amy, the Mother Teresa of #atheismplus. The 27.3% of me that Is female is offended that she is more concerned with the issue of fake jewelry than the more abusive societal pressures inducing many women into cosmetic surgery. Why she shows more enthusiasm in championing the issue of fake jewelry (isn’t hers “fake” by gemological standards?) above that of the trauma of needless female surgery is beyond me. Ban fake tits, not fake jewelry.

I’m not Huey Lewis. I don’t want a new drug, I want ONE police report that backs up your religious claims with more veracity than a Mormon missionary beating me over the head with Joseph Smith. At this point in time, the Scientologists have better documentation for their beliefs in Xenu than you do for violence against women at any atheist event, ever.

Enjoy.

h/t: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/
Original Remix courtesy: http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/gods.html

Can Math Really be Trusted?

As the creationist movement continues it’s march into public school classrooms all over the US (thanks to Texas FFS??), it behooves all parents to consider the motives and implications of those who are championing this cause.

If you are one of the eighty million Jeebus Camp supporters the answer to the question, “Can math really be trusted?” is not something you need look any further than your Bible to answer.  Why, you ask?

Without written proof from the divine, devout believers are nervous to trust even their own observation that there are an “equal” number of fingers on each of their own “two” hands.

If the Bible said otherwise, then they would assume that their personal observations were being influenced by demonic forces that (somehow) needed expunging.  The emperor runs naked in their kingdom with no fear of over exposure.  The native instincts of any youth who might see it otherwise are squelched at Jesus Camps, which seem to inflict the exact type of emotional mayhem on the participants as the Jihadi variety we are more akin to being shown on US television, though I’m sure they would argue otherwise.  But I digress.  Can we trust math?

I mostly trust math, but then I am considered mostly a godless atheist by many of my fellow countrymen.  Because I lack the necessary fervor to engage in cheer-leading for supernatural causes (or genuflecting to imagined creationist deities), my personal “faith” curries about as much favor in the US as Mitt Romney these days (or alternatively the Mormon idea that beer, coffee, Coca Cola, tea and hot chocolate are all a gateway drugs to Hell).  I love the math. It is the math that is telling me Romney and the Republicans are going to be tossed on their butts in spectacular fashion come Nov 7. #cleansweep

To the minor extent that I don’t trust mathematics, I blame Richard Feynman. I doubt he is very well known in Christian Fundamentalist groups because of his personal views on God.

I decided to check into the issue of how the evangelical fundamentalists in the US feel about math, since it is so obvious that they have total disregard for many of the physical sciences that are entirely reliant on it, with evolution and evolutionary biology being a particular thorn in the side of the lunatic fringe (80 million) activist evangelicals.  Upon review, I found the Bible to be as hazy on the subject of math as it is on just above every other subject.  Questions involving Jeebus the carpenter making misstatements on math are brushed aside, explained as a consequence of his situational humanity.  Pi is three in the Bible because God was rounding to the first digit for brevity’s sake (remember, this is a guy that supposedly created everything else in just six days so he was used to taking shortcuts).

Believe me when I tell you that the “field” of Christian Apologetics is truly getting a workout these days, and the number of people “employed” in that regard is an astonishing thing to behold.  God literally has an army of people out there making apologies for all the crap he did in the Bible that no morally sound and reasonably minded imperfect human would ever imagine.  Takes a great mental leap to “faith away” the ancient slaughter of innocent women and children by the “loving” deity you propose to extoll.

For the Christian Fundamentalist, mathematics is a good thing when it is used in science to cure Grandma’s cancer.  On the other hand, they view work done in fields of math and science that undermine their belief system as an inevitable (evil) consequence of man’s sinful nature.  A desire to know too much.

Rick Santorum, one of the more virulent and high profile of their genre, and a fellow whose Christian belief system leads him to want to impose national laws forcing our wives and daughters to carry the illegitimate spawn of rapists to term, recently stated that people who “know too much” are of no value in his vision of America’s Republican future.  The problem for people like Mr. Santorum, Mr Romney, and the rest of the American Taliban that supports them, is that they have now overly expanded and demonized the group of people who “know too much” to include nearly the entirety of the US voting population.  At the end of the day, I am left to conclude that these folks definitely have more reverence for the crazy ideals they trumpet than the math of public polling that clearly shows how out of touch they are with the electorate they wish to represent.  #cleansweep.

Enjoy.