Welcome!

This here is my brand new blog, set up at my very own eponymous domain name. Have I passed into some higher plane of dorkdom? You bet.

Catholic Sexism

The discussion in the comments after a previous entry leads pose this question to Funky Dung (or anyone else who has an answer):

How can you justify completely excluding from the priesthood a class of persons for which there is no other reasonable, objective definition outside of biological sex, but claim that such exclusion is not sexist?

Be obscurely theological if you need to be, as I am confident in my ability to sort out the subtleties as they are presented to me.

Until now, the only argument (presented in the comments at the link above) has been that there is some ontological difference between men and women that makes the former eligible for the priesthood and excludes the latter. Is it mere coincidence that this alleged “ontological” difference is one hundred percent coextensive with the biological sex difference? If you plan to suggest as much, be forewarned that you will have a serious credibility problem to overcome.

Classed with Fables

Join the party! We’re smashing sexist religion. Or try a different theater of operations. It’s all good!

Boy, have I been in a religion-smashing mood, lately. I have had enough of these ancient superstitions. Thomas Jefferson once wrote,

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

What if it were today?

Penn Jillette on Genetic Screening

Check out the podcast of last Thursday’s Penn Radio, in which Penn discusses genetic screening and “designer babies.” As is almost always the case, I agree with him completely.

Atheism & Charity

From Sam Harris‘ new book, Letter to a Christian Nation, page 46:

“Countries with high levels of atheism are also the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is belied by other indices of social equality. Consider the ratio of salaries paied to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms’ average employees: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population expects to be called before God on Judgement Day, it is 475:1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to pass easily through the eye of a needle.”

Check out his source material, too. Sure, it’s just correlation, not causation, but there are all sorts of other interesting correlations, too. Why is the United States alone among the developed Western nations both in its religion and its violent crime rates? Why do the so-called “red states,” where Christianity is more popular, have higher violent crime rates? Why are the percentages of atheists in prison so low? Just something to think about.

More Bullshit Theology

Have another helping of theological bullshit:

The idea that every person has an equal voice and an equal vote — which forms the very basis of our democratic system — is an offshoot of the idea of the “priesthood of all believers,” we are all equal before God.

Similarly, we are all equal when it comes time to vote. This expansive equality is not an idea that sits well in many religious traditions, but nevertheless it is biblical.

So is the U.S. exporting faith with democracy, when it wages war? Explicitly, no, but implicitly, yes, because faith forms the foundation of our democracy.

Ever heard of the Greeks? See, with this democracy thing, they’ve got Christianity beat by five hundred years. Sure, I guess, already knowing what democracy was, you could read it back into the Christian scriptures, but the “priesthood of all believers” says nothing of political governance.

If you’re a Protestant, the “priesthood of all believers” concept addresses whether Christians have direct access to God, or whether their interaction with God is mediated by a priest. If you’re Catholic or Orthodox, the “priesthood of all believers” concept just means all believers are equally responsible for the care and keeping of the dogma (i.e., being sneaky weasels and trying to make sure nobody figures out that it’s bullshit).

Democracy was not invented by the Christians, nor did the Christians, during their thousand years of having control over Europe, make a particularly spectacular implementation of anything but monarchy and theocracy. This crazy democracy stuff that we’re now trying to “export” didn’t catch on fire until people started figuring out that theology is bullshit. (Recall, for instance, that the Declaration of Independence was drafted by a guy who edited out the parts of the New Testament that he didn’t like.)

Democracy may be a quasi-religious idea where people assert in the absence evidence, to the exclusion of potential alternatives, that democracy is the highest and best form of government. But democracy is by no means a “faith” by way of Christianity. That is, democracy is only a “faith” for the same reason Christianity is a “faith”: because people believe in it blindly and without leaving room for the possibility that it may not always be the best solution.

Better Humanity through Smashing Religion

“There is a class of people who seem to think that if a man should fall overboard into the sea with a Bible in his pocket it would hardly be possible to drown. I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” — attributed to Frederick Douglass.

Over at Ales Rarus, there is a discussion about whether genetic screening of our potential children is a good thing. The Catholic practitioners over there seem to find this a terrifying, dehumanizing prospect. But I have had quite enough of Christians construing technological progress as some kind of evil. There is no God, no magical supreme being, no omnipotent, benevolent overlord to pull us out of our troubles. We have only ourselves and each other and whatever tools we can craft in our quest to make life on earth a better experience for everyone. If we cannot use our ingenuity to better ourselves and our world, then we are truly lost.

What follows is an excerpt from a comment I just left in the discussion mentioned above. (It is a response to the previous comment, so there are portions that address a second person who in all likelihood is not you.) Read on:

For the entire history of humanity, people have had no rational control over what kind of offspring emerges at the end of that nine-month gestation period. To suggest that people should be deprived of the ability to rationalize the process of reproduction is to advocate the perpetuation of the very randomness that provokes people in many cultures to destroy the lives of women and children who already exist. For example, if you had to choose, would you rather have a culture where genetic screening leads to a decrease in female offspring, or a culture where baby girls are aborted, killed, abandoned, or abused?

Or going even a step further, would you rather see a human culture where people are left at the mercies of unpredictable genetic combinations, as we have been for our entire history, putting us in a situation where our technological desires and abilities are often at odds with our biological propensities, or where we, knowing what kind of culture we want to have, are able to actually achieve the biological propensities required to live it?

What if genetic screening could eliminate the production of sociopaths? What if genetic engineering could fix things like the back problems so many of us have because our skeletons were not designed for walking upright? Evolution is blind; we are not. We know what we want out of our lives; our gametes do not. I would rather live in a world where rationality, consciousness, and conscience are made ever more useful and powerful and I believe the vast majority of humans, both living and dead, would agree with me.

Why have people always practiced religions, prayed to gods, and sought methods to make sense of a world that seems random and uncaring? We now, for the first time ever stand on the cusp of being able to achieve with technology what billions of our forebears have tried futilely to achieve with prayer and incantations, potions and spells, and innumerable superstitions. But you want to apply the brakes. Why is that? Maybe it’s because a world where people can make their own meaning is a world where the Catholic church is just a museum piece.

And you can go on and on about Catholic hospitals (so charitably do you leave out institutions of Protestant, Jewish, or other religious persuasions, I notice), but that’s hardly better (or more respectable) than the President waiting until things are particularly bad in some overseas theater of military operations to start talking about how we are so much safer at home. There are certainly lots of Catholic (and other religious) hospitals out there, but that does not change the fact that Christian (not just Catholic) theology glorifies suffering. Yours is not just the religion of the crucifixion, but of turning the other cheek, thorns in sides, and purifying fire.

I grew up in a self-proclaimed “pacifist” sect of Christianity that, despite claiming to love non-violence nevertheless celebrates the stories of its martyrs whose fates were as horrible as one could imagine. It is certainly not irrational to read the scriptures in support of such a view. But a belief system that advocates non-violence against others on the one hand but glorifies violence against its own on the other hand has engaged in a zero-sum theological game. Your Catholicism, I submit, has done no better, especially by exalting those practitioners who speak of suffering as though it is a beautiful method of approaching the divine while simultaneously crowing about its opposition to some bugaboo “culture of death.”

So no, I will not pay lip service to your sacred cows. The crucifixion, as it has come to stand in our culture, to the extent even of making an unmitigated box office success of what was essentially a blood splattering, sadomasochistic snuff film, is one of the foulest pieces of work to afflict the human race. No one who finds an object of adoration in the violent suffering and slaughter of another, nor sees the approaching divine in the violent suffering or slaughter of oneself, has the moral sense that is a requisite for making the world a truly better place.

Regenerating Humans

This is totally freakin’ sweet. I expect they’ll have this figured out in a decade or two, if not less.

In response to the hundreds of soldiers coming home from war with missing arms or legs, Darpa is spending millions of dollars to help scientists learn how people might one day regenerate their own limbs.

Prosthetics are getting better all the time, but they will never be as good as the limbs we were born with. So two teams of scientists at 10 institutions across the country are competing to regrow the first mammalian limb.

Follow the link above and read the rest. Between this stuff, prosthetics, stem cells, artificial intelligence, and body modification trends, expect to see words like “human” get redefined in the 21st century. (And wherever there is opposition to progress, expect to find religious people.)

Race vs. Religion

The only way to get a situation as stupid and as absurd as this one would be if you pitted racists against religionists:

[A] chapter of the NAACP has filed a complaint accusing the Ben Gilman Medical and Dental Clinic of religious discrimination for closing on Saturdays.

The complaint, filed Sept. 6 with the state’s Division of Human Rights, alleges that the clinic’s practice of remaining closed Saturdays in observance of operators’ Jewish Sabbath, unlawfully imposes their religious beliefs on others.

. . .

Willie Trotman, president of the Spring Valley branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the purpose of the complaint was to have the clinic open on Saturdays.

Those who work — more than 80 percent of the clinic’s clientele are Hispanic or black, according to a letter the clinic sent to the Human Rights Commission earlier this year — would find it convenient to visit their doctors on a Saturday when they had the day off, Trotman said yesterday.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re looking at the parties to this dispute — Jews and the NAACP (which we all know is about “colored people,” even though we’re not allowed to actually say it out loud) — and you’re remembering what I said up above about “racists” and “religionists.” You’re thinking, “Well, I’d guess that Jews who practice enough that they still recognize the Sabbath might be called ‘religionists,’ but how are the NAACP racist? I thought they were an anti-racist group.” But you are dead wrong.

Anybody who advocates for a class of people based not on their chosen conduct but on their race or skin color is in fact declaring by implication that people ought to be classified by the circumstances of their birth before they are classified by their own decisions. That, dear reader, is racism.

So why not have a National Association for the Advancement of People? No, wait, we already have that, but under different initials.

At any rate, just put aside the issues of race or religion. What the hell is wrong with the people who own and operate a medical clinic deciding to close it on Saturdays? What if they just want a day off and Saturdays are the day they want? The last time I checked, this was still the United States of America. If you see a gap in the provision of services, the Real American Thing To Do™ would be to step up to the plate, fill the gap with your own enterprise, and knock one out of the park.* You don’t go down to the local Racist Lawyers Club and file a lawsuit to make somebody else give you what you want.

If the people involved in this stupid, stupid dispute were just being human beings, instead of racists and religionists, then one of two things would happen instead of a lawsuit. Either (1) the people of the community would go to the medical clinic and say “We desperately need your services on Saturdays. How can we make it happen?” or (2) somebody else would say, “Hey, I can provide medical services on Saturdays. Let’s do it!”

But, unfortunately, this is the United States of America, and being racist and religious is one of our great talents. But if you want to make the world a better place, as many of us do, then you have to get rid of these stupid classifications of people. If you want to know whether someone is your friend or your enemy, get beyond appearances and assumptions. Maybe those different-colored, different-believing, different-thinking folks across the street from you are actually on your side.

* Yes, that’s a baseball metaphor, because, like I said, the last time I checked, this was still the United States of America, land of the free, home of the Braves. (Okay, yes, now I’m just being silly. But seriously.)

Mixed Bag

Awesome headline, lame article.

The world of Evangelical Christians is about as frightening as the world of extremist Muslims, and both give their moderate brethren a terrible name.

Huh? Evangelical Christians are about as frightening as kittens without claws. They’re culturally indistinguishable from the rest of the world (except on Sundays) and they don’t have anything approaching the theological discipline of extremist Muslims. When’s the last time you heard of evangelical Christians strapping bombs to themselves or flying jetliners into skyscrapers? Yeah, that’s what I thought. It takes some serious hardcore faith to overcome the biological imperative to survive; would you give up your life and sacrifice the lives of others for your theological propositions? (If you answered “No,” that means you’re a decent human being. If you answered “Yes,” that probably means you’ll be hunting me down pretty soon.)

So while the person who wrote the article linked above gets kudos for having a way clever headline, he or she (the name is Devin, which I can’t immediately place with either sex) loses almost all of those points with the idiotic comparison between evangelical Christians and extremist Muslims. What the world really needs right now is for extremist Muslims to turn into something like evangelical Christians. Then they’ll be hopeless, harmless, and irrelevant, just the way religious people ought to be.