Category: Religion


God is love… and divine justice for all.

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April 14, 2012
Ethics and justice

Ethics and justice, the Bible will teach you it...

There are many lovely tales of love and justice found in the Holy Bible. “What, pray tell, is the Holy Bible”, I can almost hear you ask. Excellent question! Let’s have some devout Christians tell us (emphasis mine):

Despite what the world would like to say, there is such a thing as absolute truth, coming straight out of the Word of God, and people ultimately act on what they really think is true, whatever they may say. At Antioch, we want to lay it out up front. Our doctrinal statement declares what is really true, straight from God’s Word, and our Philosophy and Mission statements flow out of our desire to act on that truth.

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And:

We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be the verbally inspired Word of God, the final authority for faith and life, inerrant in the original writings, infallible and God-breathed (II Timothy 3:16,17; II Peter 1:20,21; Matthew 5:18; John 16:12,13).

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And:

I. Biblical Authority

Example Verses: II Timothy 3:16-17; I Peter 1:23-25

Baptists hold to the belief that the Bible and its clear, literal teachings are the final authority for faith and practice. We at least attempt to back up everything they believe with “Chapter and Verse”, and hold that anything that is contrary to the clear teaching of the Bible is not true. Such things as church councils, church leaders, tradition, and other books are often hold some authority for other Christian groups.

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And:

For the Catholic, what follows will make clear the harmony of Scripture and tradition: truth cannot contradict truth. Whether God speaks to us through the Bible or through the voice of tradition, the word spoken is always a true and steadfast guide.

[link]

In short, the Bible is God’s Own Truth.

And, just so we don’t forget, God doesn’t change. “What do you mean God doesn’t change”, I hear you cry. Good that you should ask! Let us get some guidance from ‘the final authority for faith and practice’, God’s Own Truth, The Holy Bible (emphasis mine):

Psalm 102:

102:26 They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed:
102:27 But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.

Hebrews 1:

1:10 And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands:
1:11 They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment;
1:12 And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.

Hebrews 13:

13:8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.

So, God never, ever changes and the Bible is the inerrant, literal Word of God. Got that? Right, with that out of the way, I have a story I should like to tell. A parable if you will.

Not too long ago there was a gentleman by the name of Rush “Randy” Limbaugh (all characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental) and he was very close to God. As a conservative man, Randy went to church every Sunday (see, I told you it was a coincidence) and prayed to God several times a day and he read the Bible which he firmly knew was the literal Word of God. Randy was as close to God as a good, God fearing Republican could be.

Now, Randy being Randy, he got involved with several women during the course of his life. He was at various stages married to Roxy, Michelle, Marta and Kathryn and he had several sons. Notably, by Marta he had a son called Adam.

Tragically, Randy couldn’t control his… er… love for woman and the one day he saw a very attractive intern at the broadcast corporation where he worked called Betty. Now, Betty was in a relationship with Uri who worked for Randy. Randy was pretty well connected and quite devious. Through some sneaky scheming he got Uri re-assigned to a foreign office on the very day that – incredibly conveniently – incriminating photo’s of Uri were delivered to Betty. Betty broke up with poor Uri and Randy provided a convenient shoulder to cry on. He quickly managed to seduce Betty and have… er… carnal relations with her – which was cheating on his current wife Kathryn. Betty fell pregnant almost immediately - Randy was sure his God didn’t approve of birth control you see.

God didn’t like this one bit – he was incredibly pissed off – so He cursed the child that Randy and Betty had created.

Some time after Randy started cheating on Katheryn with Betty, God spoke to pastor Rick ‘Nathan’ Warren (purely coincidental fiction, I assure you) personally and told him to go and punish Randy. He gave explicit instructions on how Randy’s punishment was to be carried out.

Nathan went forth has God had commanded and hired a great stage to be constructed on the National Mall in Washington DC with all the bells and whistles – big screens so everybody in a large crowd could see the action, fancy lighting, huge sound systems, the works. Nathan then invited every devout Christian in the country to come and witness Randy’s punishment, to be carried out exactly as required by Yahweh – the creator God of the universe.

On the day of the punishment, Nathan’s henchmen brought Randy to the stage and put him in a chair off to the left of the stage where he could properly witness the events of the day. After Randy was seated, Nathan’s people brought out Roxy, Michelle, Marta and Kathryn to the stage followed by Randy’s son, Adam.

Next, Randy’s wife and ex-wives were stripped naked in front of the crowd of millions and Adam proceeded to rape them where everybody could see, so that all in attendance knew the justice of the Lord.

Later, Betty gave birth to Randy’s son but since God had cursed the child, he died a week later. Randy went on to live a long and illustrious life, sleeping with literally hundreds of women.

The end.

I will leave you to figure out the moral of that parable on your own. Now, strangely, some people might be upset by that story and I am not sure why. It is a beautiful depiction of how the justice of the Christian deity works, how much he loves people and how much he loves and respects women in particular. It is a beautiful thing is it not?

What? You don’t believe me? Come on now, you give me too much credit. I couldn’t come up with a gem of a story like that on my own – I simply don’t have the skills. Nay, I did but paraphrase a story directly from the unchanging, inerrant word of the almighty creator of the universe. I shit you, in fact, not.

The beautiful tale is found in 2 Samuel 11 and 2 Samuel 12 with the delightful conclusion in 2 Samuel 16.

Let me quote some of it, I do insist (emphasis mine):

2 Samuel 11:

11:2 And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.
11:3 And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?
11:4 And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her; for she was purified from her uncleanness: and she returned unto her house.
…
11:15 And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.

2 Samuel 12:

12:1 And the LORD sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor.
…
12:11 Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun.
12:12 For thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.
12:15 And Nathan departed unto his house. And the LORD struck the child that Uriah’s wife bare unto David, and it was very sick.
…
12:18 And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died.

2 Samuel 16:

16:21 And Ahithophel said unto Absalom, Go in unto thy father’s concubines, which he hath left to keep the house; and all Israel shall hear that thou art abhorred of thy father: then shall the hands of all that are with thee be strong.
16:22 So they spread Absalom a tent upon the top of the house; and Absalom went in unto his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel.

And there you have it. Divine love and justice. It does make me wonder though, what kind of person – who in their right mind actually – would want to worship the being that figures that having several women raped in public by the son of their husband (I believe that’s a stepson…) and an unborn child killed for the adultery of a man is good and just? Who, in their right mind?

I figure its pretty freaking terrible to be a female Christian. Just think what it must be like to live in a world where, should your cheating bastard husband find himself a bit on the side, you get raped in public for his crime and sweet nothing happens to him. Couldn’t happen? Why not?

And Christian men? How would they feel if dear Jesus had to come down out of the clouds and had to instruct them to rape their stepmother (and possibly their own mother) in public because their father cheated on his wife with another woman and arranged for her husband to have an ‘accident’? I have to ask Christian men the following:

Yes or no: would you happily rape your stepmother in public if God told you to?

Won’t happen? Can’t happen? Why not?

If it can’t happen… then one or both the following is true: God changes and the Bible lies or – more simply – there is no God and these tragic horror stories are entirely man-made.

Seriously, there is something very, very wrong with people who believe in this horror, want to worship the monster who thought it up and who are not utterly repulsed by the thought of this travesty.

God is love? Christian morals? Right. Tell me another one.

Always! Be awesome.

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Caring about what is true – a triumph of science, religion’s greatest failing.

Filed under: Featured, Religion, Science — 2 Comments
April 11, 2012
The Dirac equation in the form originally proposed.

The Dirac equation. Science, winning.

I care about what is true. I care very much about what is true.

One of the things about myself that frustrates me the most is how I am often not skeptical enough. I tend to make snap truth judgements in the moment – due to excitement or distraction or whatever – and later I end up feeling like I didn’t properly evaluate the situation before accepting something as true. This is why I prefer written over verbal discourse: it allows me to properly consider my response, evaluate my position and avoid rash acceptance of claims. I recognise confirmation bias in myself and actively work to overcome it. I realise I am essentially an illogical creature and I try hard to overcome it because I care very much about what is true, about what is in accordance with fact and reality.

Fact and reality.

One could complicate the concept of ‘truth’ and discuss correspondence, coherence, constructivist, consensus or pragmatic theory or the opinions of Fromm, Hegel, Nietzsche or Kant. Or one could just stick to the simple definition of:

truth:

  • The quality or state of being true
  • That which is true or in accordance with fact or reality

What got me started on this post was seeing a picture of Penn Jillette with a quote that says something to the effect of: if every trace of every religion had to be removed from human consciousness, something similar might be recreated in its place but it would never be exactly the same. If every trace of science had to be removed from human consciousness then it would still be true and it would be rediscovered again and the discovered truth’s would be exactly the same.

I think that is pretty profound. Remove everything we know about science and find it all out again from scratch and it would be exactly like it was. The truth discovered by science will not have changed. Remove religion and the facsimile which could replace it will never be exactly the same – other than the fact that it will also be nonsense. Religious ‘truth’… changes.

The Christian God by all accounts is unchanging and eternal. From the Christian Bible:

Psalm 102:

102:26 They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed:
102:27 But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.

Hebrews 1:

1:10 And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands:
1:11 They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment;
1:12 And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.

Hebrews 13:

13:8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.

Deuteronomy 33

33:27 The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them.

To me, and I’m sure to most people, unchanging would mean that what I hold true today is what I will hold true tomorrow. If you ask me a question, whether it be today or tomorrow or in 20 years from now, if I was unchanging my answer would be the same, unchanging. Not changing your opinion or answer to the same question is the very embodiment of ‘unchanging’.

This alleged property of God being ‘unchanging’ poses a bit of a problem for Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It causes two problems in particular:

1. The Bible condones some pretty horrific things such as genocide, slavery, infanticide, rape, murder, child abuse and so forth.

If God does not change then he must still condone these horrible things, yet his current batch of followers decry these horrors when they happen today in the third world. I find it terribly strange how devout followers of a God who commanded genocide get outraged when the same thing happens in Africa. Take the recent obsession with Joseph Kony as an example. The man is the leader of the “Lord’s Resistance Army” (no extra points for guessing the ‘Lord’ referred to there) and he has done things – terrible things – but they are pretty damn similar to what a man called Moses did in the Bible in Numbers 31:

31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
31:18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

How do these outraged middle class first worlders know that Joseph Kony isn’t following explicit instructions from his God, their God? Because God wouldn’t command it? Is God not ‘unchanging’?

2. For reasons that no religious person has ever adequately explained, religious people almost always get different answers to the same question from the same deity.

Why is it that when people pray to their God, the same God, they can get different answers to the same question? Take the issue in Auckland a while ago where one church put up a billboard and thought it great while another group of Christians thought it was blasphemy. How could two Christians ever disagree over the opinion of the God with which they both have a personal relationship? Is God not unchanging or does he give a different opinion to ever person who prays?

These two issues together pose a massive problem to religious investigation into what is true and what is not. How do you know what is true if your only source of shared knowledge (The Bible for example) contradicts its self in very many places and each person’s personal ‘revelation’ is factually different from virtually every other person’s personal ‘revelation’? On what basis can you decide what is true and what is not?

Science on the other hand has the scientific method.

From Wikipedia:

Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge.[1] To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.[2] The Oxford English Dictionary says that scientific method is: “a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.”[3]

The process that science follows to arrive at what is true and what is not:

Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena, and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses via predictions which can be derived from them. These steps must be repeatable, to guard against mistake or confusion in any particular experimenter. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry may bind many independently derived hypotheses together in a coherent, supportive structure. Theories, in turn, may help form new hypotheses or place groups of hypotheses into context.

The scientific method has built-in safeguards – such as peer review, repeatable experiments, independent reproduction – against the many psychological properties of humans – such as confirmation bias, belief bias, bandwagon effect – that make us fundamentally illogical beings. By following the scientific method we are most likely to arrive at what is ‘really’ true, at what is in accordance with fact or reality.

When a fact has been proven scientifically it can repeatedly be proven scientifically. It is a cornerstone of the scientific method for results to be independently reproduced – every person who properly conducts an experiment should get the same results.

This is in complete and utter contrast to religious revelation and the way prayer is alleged to work. No credible evidence is ever provided by religious revelation. No second person can independently verify that a person who has allegedly had a ‘revelation’ is telling the truth or is mistaken or is completely delusional. When people pray to the same God for some reason they get different answers. The answers so different there is reported to be over 38,000 denominations of Christianity and they all claim to have personal relationships with the same deity.

What could explain this diversity within Christianity (let alone Islam and Judaism which supposedly worships the same deity…)? The answer is unsurprisingly simple: there is no God. When people claim to know what God wants they are making it up. There is no God. People who claim to know the mind of God are mistaken. It is not coincidence that God almost without fail has the same biases and prejudices as those who claim to know what he wants.

Belief without evidence is a mistake. Faith…

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.” — Christopher Hitchens

Simply using modern technology, using modern medicine, even eating modern food is tacit acceptance that science works and finds truth. Useful truth. Religion will try to convince you that the shape of a banana, shaped by generations of human directed artificial selection is proof that a supreme super being designed it for you. The irony is that it’s not too far off – the current shape of the banana is due to science and human intellect. I bet Ray Comfort didn’t have this particular truth in mind when he tried to sell his ‘banana revelation’ but fact is fact and empirical evidence trumps religious opinion every time.

Has a specific religion – such as Christianity - ever arisen spontaneously without the intervention of it’s adherents, in a remote part of the world? No, not one time. Copies of religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) never arise spontaneously in other parts of the world because religions are made up by people. They can’t spontaneously arise because the deity that each alleges to worship doesn’t exist and so can’t inform people elsewhere of the religion. If Europeans had arrived in Australia (or pick any remote people in the world, Amazon, Pacific islands, China…) and found that the Aborigines were devout Christians even though they had never had contact with Europe or the Middle East it would have gone a long way towards showing Christian beliefs to be real. This has never happened. Not once. And don’t hold your breath, it never will.

Revelation is baseless opinion and it is disturbing how many people will accept a person’s word that his opinion is true without questioning or demanding verifiable evidence. You’d think by now, through the manifold scandals by church leaders that have been exposed, that people would be a bit more skeptical about the motives and truth espoused by those who claim to know the mind of God. It’s not even hard to test: ask three different church leaders what their God thinks about a subject – blasphemy is usually a good subject – and my money is on three different answers. They all claim to have a personal relationship with the almighty. It shouldn’t be a difficult thing to ask your personal friend his opinion. Three different answers, which one is telling the truth? Ask 30. Which one is now telling the truth? Ask 300? Ask 38,000. Who is now telling the truth? All of them? 38,000 different opinions and they are all truthful? Unlikely.

There is a much simpler truth: there is no god.

Science strives to find actual, empirically verified, useful truth while religion tries to sell baseless – often contradictory – opinion as truth. Give me science any day.

Always! Be awesome.

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Easter. Seriously.

Filed under: Furiousity, Religion — 11 Comments
April 7, 2012
Jesus and the Easter bunny.

Jesus. Because believing in the Easter Bunny is just silly.

So. Easter. I wasn’t going to bother writing about it but here I am. The idiocy is so thick in the air I just can’t help myself.

Easter. What is it?

It’s a mid-spring pagan festival co-opted by Christianity, pretty much like every other Christian holiday and ritual. Yea, Christians, followers of the most unoriginal creator of the universe imaginable, might (or might not) be surprised to know that the whole death and resurrection thing is in fact quite a bit older than the badly recorded travesty that they’re fawning over this weekend – where I am forced to see it. And be reminded of just how much ridiculousness people actually claim to believe. (Edit: check out Easter isn’t a Christian holiday either at Atheism Resource)

So, the plagiarism aside, what’s Christian Easter about? Let me tell you.

Easter is the celebration of the torture, execution, temporary ‘death’ and resurrection of the human incarnation of the creator of the universe. The omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator of the universe, God if you will, needed to have himself tortured and temporarily killed by his errant creations so that he could be convinced to create a loop-hole in the rules he created himself so that he could be convinced to forgive his creations for being the way he created them, having known how they would turn out before he created them, so that he wouldn’t be forced by himself to torture them for eternity.

Seriously. It’s THAT ludicrous. I have some questions:

  • God is omnipotent – why didn’t he just forgive people without having himself tortured and temporarily killed?
  • God is omniscient – if he knows everything to be known, he knows he’s going to be resurrected less than 72 hours later. How is that a sacrifice? It’s not even an inconvenience for an almighty super being.
  • God is omnibenevolent - why does he torture people for eternity?
  • God is omnipotent – why not just unmake Satan?
  • God is omniscient – if he knows a person is going to be bad before he creates them and that he will be torturing them for eternity… how is that unlike breeding cats for the sole purpose of burning them alive?

Dear merciful Christ, why are people so incredibly stupid? But thanks for the public holidays, appreciate it.

Always! Be awesome.

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Evidence for and against Evolution.

Filed under: Religion, Science — 9 Comments
April 1, 2012
The evidence for and against Evolution.

The evidence for and against Evolution.

There are people who dispute the fact of Evolution (evolution by natural selection). They are usually of the non-scientific religious type. It’s not surprising you see, because as Ken Ham completely agrees, if Evolution is true (and it is…), it completely destroys Christianity. If Evolution is true (and it is…), it means that there was no garden of Eden, no Adam and Eve, no talking snake, no original sin and no reason for a god-man to have himself temporarily murdered to create a loop-hole in the laws he created himself, so that he could forgive his created creatures for doing what he knew they would do before he created them because he created them that way.

So… to those who reckon they have evidence that proves that Evolution is not true, I have only one thing to say:

Write down your evidence on a piece of paper, get it peer-reviewed and collect your Nobel prize.

What? They haven’t done that? But why not? Is a global conspiracy of an evil evolutionist cabal of scientists working to orchestrate the global suppressions of all this evidence? Even in America where 80% of the population are Christian? Yea, of course this is what is going on. It’s got nothing to do with the complete lack of evidence and the ridiculous nonsense that the Discovery Institute insist on calling science right? Right.

The statement up there is true though and this is how serious it is. If you can prove Evolution wrong, it will be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time since the mountain of evidence that one must disproved is very, very large. Successfully doing so will certainly result in a Nobel prize, which does beg the question, why has it not been done? Why do all serious scientists laugh at the feeble attempts of the intelligent design movement to publish their ‘science’?

Evolution wins until somebody collects that Nobel prize. Until then, I have one thing to say to those who believe evidence exists that disproves Evolution:

Shut up about your ‘Intelligent Design’ until you have actual proof. You actual idiot.

Always! Be awesome.

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Pretending to be asleep

Filed under: Atheism, Featured, Religion — Leave a comment
March 31, 2012
You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

Pretending to be asleep; what being religious is all about in a modern era of pervasive and universal knowledge.

I think that proverb is pretty profound.

Basically it’s saying you cannot reason with somebody who is being unreasonable. You cannot reason with somebody who does not care about the truth, who is willing to ignore facts, evidence and the truth in favour of continuing in whichever belief they prefer.

Because I care very much about the truth and what is true, it is one of the most frustrating parts of dealing with otherwise intelligent people who claim to be religious. There is no reasoning with somebody who is acting stupid, who is forcing idiocy on themselves. Presenting facts and evidence to somebody who flat-out refuses to see it is a pointless and frustrating task.

Having said that, it’s becoming more difficult (in the developed world anyway) to pretend to be asleep. Knowledge and information is so easy to come by now that you have to work much harder to ignore it than before, which is why the global atheist movement is growing so fast. That’s my opinion, at least.

There is another saying that’s similar which says you can’t reason somebody out of something they are not reasoned into. It’s true I think. You don’t reason somebody out of the religion they weren’t reasoned into. You present the facts and hope that eventually they pull their head out of their arse and see the light. Metaphorically speaking of course.

Always! Be awesome.

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Video: Playing God: The Loving Psychopath

Filed under: Religion, Video — Leave a comment
March 27, 2012

So… what to say about that. Nothing. That is all.

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Adverts, indignation and a little problem.

Filed under: Comment, Featured, Religion, Video — 5 Comments
March 15, 2012

I had a bit of a laugh today when my wife pointed out this status from a Facebook friend of ours. I find it terribly amusing and not just a little bit ironic.

I will never again in my life drink a Red Bull. It is one thing to have fun with ads, but completely unacceptable to depict the Jesus, whom a large number of us on this planet consider to be the Son of God in such a manner.

Seems a bit like a Muslim sentiment no? Isn’t that amusing.

The indignation comes from a Red Bull advert. It seems the poor guy had his sensibilities insulted when he read this article on South Africa’s News 24 site: http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Jesus-ad-doesnt-fly-with-Catholics-20120313 and then watched the horrifyingly offensive video.

The Red Bull energy drink’s “Jesus walks on water” campaign should be cancelled, the SA Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) said on Tuesday.

“We question the timing of the release of the advert – which seems to be part of an international campaign,” spokesperson Cardinal Wilfred Napier said in a statement.

“While the Red Bull adverts are characterised by their cleverness, we believe that Red Bull South Africa have overstepped a mark.”

Napier said the SACBC welcomed the halting of the campaign, but asked Red Bull SA to cancel it completely.

…

And now… for the horror video. Are, you, ready, for… RED BULL JESUS!

Well torture my ass and condemn me to hell. The horror. Red Bull Jesus.

Haha that’s pretty funny – I love it! I think the advert is great. Of course, I may be biased. Red Bull is, after all, the greatest drink the world has ever beheld.

You see, here is the problem. I asked ANOTHER Christian what he thought of the advert. And THAT Christian loved it. Both Christians talk to Jesus. Christian B reckons Jesus doesn’t have a problem with the ad. Christian A is royally pissed off.

So my question is… which one of them is lying? I mean, before approving it or decrying it… surely they bothered to get the opinion of the figment person deity on who’s behalf they are doing it right? Yea… right.

The religious will never cease to amuse me. Brain. Fail.

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Wanganui District Council Drops Prayer

Filed under: Comment, Religion — 3 Comments
March 13, 2012
Clive Solomon

Clive Solomon: Your magic spells. They are powerless against me.

So, the Wanganui District Council has finally seen the light. And, like every other societal advance, the Christians fought it kicking and screaming right to the end. Thankfully Dr. Clive Solomon persevered and the council has eventually seen the light. Of reason. Finally.

Here’s the press release by the NZARH:

The New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists (NZARH) welcomes todays decision by the Wanganui District Council to remove prayer from the formal proceedings of all Council meetings. We believe that this is a victory for all the residents of Wanganui and for the wider New Zealand community representing, as it does, the first step towards a true separation between church and state. The signal that this sends to the entire community of Wanganui is that the Council is not prepared to tolerate discrimination on the grounds of their religious beliefs or lack thereof.

Following the decision Peter Harrison, spokesperson for the NZARH said “We are very pleased to hear that the Wanganui District Council has decided to conduct prayer outside official Council business. This approach is in accordance with the Bill of Rights, and recognises the importance of a tolerant multicultural society.”

Annette Main, Major of Wanganui commented on the decision, saying “I believe that the decisions we have made today are pragmatic and provide a reasonable compromise. It will allow those who wish to participate in a prayer or reflection to do so immediately before our Council meetings start. Those with an alternative view will also be provided for by removing the prayer from the meeting agenda.”

The NZARH recognises the instrumental work of Clive Solomon in standing up for religious equality in the face of sometimes emotional resistance. We also applaud the Councilors of Wanganui for coming to a resolution that is a credit to their city.

The NZARH sincerely hopes that the divisions caused by this issue will be quickly healed so that the Wanguanui District Council can continue it’s good work.

(http://www.nzarh.org.nz/news.htm#wanganui)

There is an article in Stuff about the result of Clive Solomon’s battle against bronze age magic and superstition:

…

The change of heart was prompted by a judgment from the High Court of Justice in Britain last month, which ruled that reciting prayers as part of a formal council meeting was not lawful under its Local Government Act.

However, the court did not believe reciting a prayer discriminated against councillors with no religious beliefs.

Councillor Clive Solomon, who first raised an objection to the prayer back in April, tabled the new information.

Dr Solomon indicated he would mount a legal challenge if his request to remove the prayer was defeated yesterday.

…

(http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/6563096/Wanganui-District-Council-abolishes-prayer)

Well done Clive, your tenacity in fighting this idiocy is an inspiration to all of us.

The only down side to this debacle is that the Wanganui District Council wasted $24,000 of tax payer money on legal fees trying to keep their magic spell as part of a secular government organisation agenda. That’s a bit tragic but it’s also par for the course when it comes to the religious. Thankfully, they do seem to eventually see reason.

I think this quote by the most brilliant Mr. Robert G. Ingersoll is most apt:

“I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.”
- Robert G. Ingersoll

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Inventing religion

Filed under: Comment, Featured, Religion — 6 Comments
March 10, 2012

Just because you want it to be true, doesn't mean it is true.

I have a question for… I’m not even sure what to call them. The question is for those people who consider themselves to be Christian but who don’t follow any of the traditional Christian denominations or denominational rules.

My question is this:

How did you come to the conclusion that it was OK for you to invent your own religion and how do you continue to justify it to yourself?

Let me explain.

From my point of view there are several types of Christian. By that, without getting into too much detail, to an average outsider it looks like there are Catholics, Methodists, Anglicans, Baptists and Pentecostals for example. Now I realise that’s not an exhaustive list and even in the few I’ve mentioned there are many sub divisions but I can’t very well list all 38,000 odd denominations. I think this few will serve the purpose.

There are the hard-core fundamentalist Christians and the Biblical literalists who take the religious thing very seriously. Then there are Christians that go to church every Sunday and follow the rules of whichever denomination they belong to and I feel like this is the majority of Christians  - average Christians if you will.

Then you get another kind of Christian. I’ve noticed this new kind of Christian becoming more popular and more prevalent lately. I classify this new kind of Christian into 3 sub groups (as one does with Christian denominations…): Holiday Christians, Creative Christians and Christians-By-Default.

I know a couple in each group and they are the ones I have in mind. Holiday Christians are – and you often find these in the Orthodox denominations – those Christians who go to church for the big holidays like Easter and Christmas and possibly a wedding or the odd communion in between.

Creative Christians are an interesting bunch and they’ve really been popping up everywhere recently. I call them Creative Christians because they say things like “I hate religion but I love god” or “I am a passionate follower of Christ” or “I’m not religious, I follow Jesus”. These people – I really do hesitate to call them Christians since most of them avoid even calling themselves Christian – eschew the standard religious practices in favour of… well, something else. They might even join in when one pokes a bit of fun at their more traditional Christian compatriots and their traditional Christian views. Some Creative Christians even think that religion is a bad thing! I know a couple of people who fall into this category.

And then there are the Christians-By-Default. I know very many people who fall into this category and to be honest, their ‘beliefs’ seem a little bizarre to me. Where the Holiday Christians have re-invented Christianity to be easier to live with while still keeping up pretenses and the Creative Christians have invented an almost entirely new ‘spiritual religion’ loosely based on Christianity, the Christians-By-Default have not bothered to change or re-invent anything, instead watering down a fine, if a bit diverse, two thousand year tradition to a basic, effortless superstition. For example, I know a bunch of people who call themselves ‘Christian’ who have not once in their lives set foot in a church, do not own a Bible and have never read it, who do not normally pray, do pretty nasty things and are generally pretty indecent people. Yet, they firmly believe that they are Christian and will be going to heaven – based purely on the luck of being born into a moderately Christian environment I would imagine.

I have very little respect for any of the three categories. To be fair, I have a really hard time respecting any religious person – for obvious reasons – but I do respect the ones who take their religions seriously a bit more than the ones who don’t. Anybody who claims to believe that there is a God and that eternal happiness and eternal torture is in the balance and doesn’t take it seriously is in my opinion the worst kind of…. stupid? Hypocrite? Fool? I just can’t understand how it’s possible to ‘do religion’ in such a disgustingly half-arsed way. If you believe it’s true, and the consequences are pretty damn severe, it should matter a lot. It should matter much more than anything else in the world matters.

So why doesn’t it I wonder.

The Holiday Christians that I know are a little… perplexing. They love the big orthodox church ceremonies and superstitions. Some of them claim to be Christian but they don’t read the Bible and don’t go to church any other time outside of Christmas or Easter. Some of them claim they think the Bible is rubbish but that ‘there must be something’, ‘there has to be a God’ and ‘there can’t be nothing’. And they flat-out argue this point and insist that one day I too will know (presumably when something bad happens to me). This is confusing. You have to wonder how do they arrive at ‘there must be something’ without even having so much as a Bible to refer to? What evidence could bring them to this conclusion if they admit that the Bible is hogwash and every other religion is wrong? I find their attitude very curious. It seems to me that they’ve invented a fairy tale of their very own to believe in that is really easy to follow since it doesn’t take much to get up early (or stay up late) for church twice a year while still believing you’re going to see dead friends and family in paradise. Convenient; reassuring perhaps, but baseless.

The Christians-By-Default are pretty much useless, some of them even useless as people (at least the ones I have in mind). So intellectually lazy that they couldn’t be bothered to learn the first thing about the religion they claim to be a part of. So ignorant of basic Christian doctrine they’d be hard pressed to state the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. What’s there to say? They’ve warped a religious belief so much that the convenient superstition that now features briefly in their lives when things get a bit shitty is barely recognisable. And based on what? Nothing but what is the easiest most convenient outcome for them.

And Creative Christians? How did they come up with this new ‘spiritual Christian’ philosophy? How are they getting it right where a billion Catholics are not?

Which is how I got to my original question. How did they come to the conclusion that it would be just dandy to invent their own religion? I guess the answer lies in the 38,000 odd denominations of Christianity. It seems every second Christian invents his or her own flavour.

Do none of them find this strange? They all claim to speak to the same God. Since they all seem to be getting a different message, are they all right? Does God really enjoy this much variety? It seems a little unlikely to me since He picked only the Israelites to be his extra special people back in the beginning and showed the finger (and the ugly edge of genocide) to the rest. And that’s after granting the even more unlikely situation of this deity existing in the first place.

Before you can even begin to answer how it’s OK to invent your own religion, there are several fundamental hurdles a Christian must cross before being able to legitimately invent a new kind of Christianity.

Jesus Christ said point-blank that you have to obey all of the old laws, all 613 of them in the Old Testament. I guess if your new religion includes all the ’old laws’, no problem there; however, none of the Christianity 2.x religions I describe above do… A bunch of them want to do away with the Bible even (for good reason, it’s chock full of bullshit and contradictions).

Which sort of begs the question of how you know about Jesus Christ without the Bible. They can’t have it both ways: either the Bible is in or its out. If its out, you can’t be a Christian and you have no other way to know about Yahweh.

Unless… Jesus is speaking to them!

But he’s not. It’s simple to prove and any honest Christian could prove it to themselves pretty quickly. They just need to pray to Jesus to put a verifiable fact that they could not possibly know into their brain – preferably one that’s really good and useful like the cure for cancer or a way to end world hunger.

That’s two birds with one stone. Nothing will happen which proves that prayer doesn’t work and Jesus doesn’t talk to anybody.

What about self-labelled ‘passionate followers of Christ’? They might avoid the ‘Christian’ label but the Bible makes a couple of suggestions about ‘following Christ’. Have they sold all their possessions to follow their deity as he suggested? Do they take no thought for the morrow? Do they ever put their own family before their deity? Do they avoid getting rich so that it will be easier to get into heaven? Every single one of the examples I can think of do exactly none of those things. And why not? If they really believe and they sure claim to believe, why do they not do the things Jesus said they should do to increase their chances? Why do they not put everything they have into this belief that is supposed to be the difference between eternal happiness and eternal torture? Or have they also edited out the eternal torture part? I find it very strange that people who claim to believe only do barely enough to satisfy their own conscience or keep up appearances.

How did you come to the conclusion that it was OK for you to invent your own religion and how do you continue to justify it to yourself.

I have a hypothesis.

Holiday Christians are desperate and a little full of crap, Christians-By-Default are flat out lazy and Creative Christians have recognised that Christianity is bullshit but are emotionally invested in it for whatever reason and so are changing arse-backwards bronze age myths into something more palatable, something more ‘modern’, something they can and want to believe but which is no less ridiculous.

If you have a different hypothesis, I’d love to hear it.

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Religion and the advancement of knowledge.

Filed under: Featured, Religion, Science — 2 Comments
March 4, 2012
Beautiful DNA.

Reality: more beautiful than you think and more complicated than you can imagine.

One thing about religion that’s really bothered me from the start is how it does nothing to advance or increase human knowledge and let’s face it, it’s not for a lack of people who spend their entire lives studying religion.

A fundamental part of religion, the Abrahamic religions in particular, is that the devout claim to have a direct line to and converse with the almighty creator of the universe. This super being allegedly invented everything, knows everything and can do anything. People firmly believe they converse with this being. Yet they do not find it strange that they are – and have been for thousands of years – unable to get a single factual bit of new information, that they did not have before, from this being.

Some might want to point out how religious people such as Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton and Max Planck have made many scientific advances. It is true that some scientists are and were religious, especially in the days when not being religious was essentially a death sentence. They, like every other scientist – religious or not – made their discoveries through hard work and by using the scientific method. None of them claim to have received any information directly from the almighty creator of the universe and nobody who could not possibly have come up with a discovery has come up with a discovery. An illiterate goat herder, for example, did not discover perturbation theory.

And why not? If you believe in a ‘loving’ God how do you reconcile that this God withheld the germ theory of disease for several thousand years thereby condemning millions upon millions of people to suffer horribly and then dying prematurely? A huge proportion of the unfortunates being children. Do you just ignore the inconvenient fact and get on with it?

People claim to speak to their God all the time. People claim their God speaks to them all the time. Why does nobody care that they are completely unable to get any new information that they didn’t have before from this God when it speaks to them? How can this not bother people?

The Bible is chock full of vast stretches of bullshit and inanity such as how to burn farm animals – a smell the Christian god apparently finds terribly pleasing – and what to (or not to…) do with woman on their periods. About the only truly useful thing in the Bible was allegedly said by Jesus and goes something like “love… thy neighbor as thyself” but as it turns out he wasn’t the only person to say it and wasn’t the first person to say it, by a long shot. So to be a Christian you need not only accept that your God gives you no information you don’t already have but when he did give you some good advice, it wasn’t even his own, unique idea. And most of the preceding ideas, called the Old Testament, were truly terrible, decidedly inferior to many other civilisations that existed during that time (yes, surprise! The middle east was in fact not the only populated place on earth during the time of the Old Testament).

If you are religious and you want to learn something fundamental about what you believe, say the following prayer when next you speak to your deity:

Dear Lord, please tell me a fact I do not already know.

Want to put money on what you’ll learn? No? Let me help you: you’ll learn that you’re talking to yourself.

There is nothing in any religious text or any religion at all that could not have been invented or imagined by human beings. In fact, that is all religion really is: primitive human musings.

Religion does not increase human knowledge because the universe is stranger than humans are able to imagine and religion is nothing but humans imagining.

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