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reject the one true God

Depends on who’s counting

Source: Welcome to The Barna Group!
Evangelical preacher baptizing believerThe Barna Group seems to be a Christian research organization. They’ve done a study of people who identify themselves as “evangelicals”; the demographics and attitudes of that group were compared with those of people who revealed themselves as evangelicals on a nine-point scale that the Barna people developed based on the belief statements of the national’s leading participants in the National Association of Evangelicals. The two groups—self-described evangelicals and “nine-point” evangelicals—were very different:

The most striking differences relate to the beliefs of each group. Compared to the 9-point evangelicals, those who say they are evangelicals are:

  • 60% less likely to believe that Satan is real
  • 53% less likely to believe that salvation is based on grace, not works
  • 46% less likely to say they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs with others
  • 42% less likely to list their faith in God as the top priority in their life
  • 38% less likely to believe that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth
  • 27% less likely to contend that the Bible is totally accurate in all of its teachings
  • 23% less likely to say that their life has been greatly transformed by their faith

In fact, the Barna research also noted that one out of every four adults (27%) who say they are evangelicals is not even born again, based upon their beliefs.

The self-defined evangelicals were also less likely than the nine-point believers to be well-off, to have a college education, and to be married. And this one surprised me: the self-defined group was less likely to call themselves conservative on social and political issues and more likely to identify themselves as Democrats.

The most important finding in the Barnes study involves numbers. By the study’s count, the “true” evanglicals, i.e. those who fit the evangelical ideological pattern, number just about 9-10% of the population, compared to the 35-40% who label themselves “evangelical”. It’s the latter number that’s used most often, and it’s misleading. It implies a level of rigidity and dogmatic belief in the U.S. population that just does not exist. Thank God!

2007 01 22

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Schadenfreude

Cocksucker
Ted Haggard

And here’s Good Pastor Ted giving Richard Dawkins a Christian “Welcome to the United States”:

2006 11 04

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reject the one true God

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Listen up, and listen good!

Source: My Way News - Pope: How Could God ‘Tolerate’ Holocaust?
Pope Benedict XVI toured Auschwitz, and was upset by his visit.
Joseph Ratzinger, 1940"In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"
What a cowardly, evasive, self-serving, pius pious piece of shit. And what he said, too. And today, while genocide is going on in Darfur and throughout Africa, while AIDS is on its way to kill one third of the population of that sad continent, while a thoroughly ruinous, unjust, and unjustified war is being prosecuted in Iraq, while the land of the free is contemplating a final solution to the brown-skinned people who clean our toilets and serve our tacos, while the earth itself is being raped by greedy, short-sighted SOBs and hurtling toward an environmental crisis that will make the holocaust look puny in terms of numbers killed and populations extinguished, while the Pope’s own Holy Land is torn apart by suicide bombers on one hand and self-serving nativist hawks on the other, what are the Pope’s hundreds of thousands of priests thundering about in their hundreds of thousands of pulpits? Gay marriage, the right of a state to force women to carry a foetus to term, the morality of fucking with condoms and the assorted immoralities propagated by all those brown people, or turbaned people, or atheists. It makes me sick.

And to answer Ratzo’s question, perhaps God’s silence is always and only apparent in retrospect. Or it may be that God was screaming His head off then, and is screaming His head off now, and nobody’s listening. Or maybe, just maybe, the persistent delusion of the faithful that God speaks to them and their mad longing to hear His voice is deafening them to the worldwide cries of human misery.

2006 05 30

observe the passing scene
reject the one true God

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Separating State from Absurdity

Source: The Raving Atheist » Archives » May 2006 » Unbright
Madeleine AlbrightJoan and I watched The Colbert Report the other night, on which Stephen interviewed Madeleine Albright, and we were impressed by her composure and her intelligence. But something about the interview, in which Ms Albright was defending her new book, The Mighty and the Almighty, bothered me. I didn’t pay much attention to my discomfort at the time, but now the Raving Atheist does a number on Albright’s performance and nails the source of my discomfort.

Separation of church and state cannot be rationally defended except on one ground: that religious beliefs are fundamentally false and worthless drivel, no more useful than astrology or alchemy. The notion that religion is the ultimate and most beneficial truth, but for some reason must be nonetheless be walled off from politics, defies common sense. Nobody advocates separation of science and state, math and state, physics and state — or even separation of the state from softer sciences such as economics and sociology.

So it’s hilarious to watch purported believers, usually religious liberals or moderates, trying to justify separation on other grounds. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, promoting her book The Mighty and the Almighty, took a crack at it the other night on The Colbert Report. Here she addresses the problem of religious elected officials keeping their faith out of public policy:

Albright: I think that we have to keep the separation of church and state, but we cannot separate people from their faith.

Colbert: Right, how do you separate people from their job . . . if the faith is in them, and they’re in their job, the transitive property of religion says their faith has got to be in their job also, right?

Her statement was complete double-talk, and Colbert nails her hard. Unfortunately, the audience reaction suggested to me that they were as clueless as Albright. They laughed at his question as if it were nonsensical (perhaps in part because of his usual mock-serious delivery), but what’s nonsensical is claiming you simultaneously “bring your faith to your job” without letting it influence you in the least.

One more reason—they’re coming fast and furious these days—that moderate religion shares much of the blame, and perhaps most of the blame, for the current ascendency of the mullahs and theocrats. We have to be courageous enough to follow the logic of enlightenment ideology to its conclusions. And the conclusion regarding religion is that belief in an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing deity is absolutely absurd, logically and empirically, and has no place in the rational management of civic affairs. Follow the link and read the whole post; RA does a nice job analyzing the rest of the Colbert/Albright dialogue, and, in the process, reveals Albright to be more muddled than she appears, and Colbert to be immensely sharper than his stage persona.

2006 05 19

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The Devil’s Minions

Mitchell Stephens is working on a book about the history of atheism, and he reports the striking absence, in the atheistical literature he’s been reading, of the Devil. “Am I reading badly”, he asks, “or does the devil really not fit, even as an object of scorn, in the atheist’s cosmos?” In my comment on Mitchell’s post, I explore an idea that I’ve been mulling for some time now.

Fred PhelpsIf there were a Devil, and if he were as devious and clever as he is purported to be, and if his most persistent desire is to corrupt God’s highest creation, Man, then would he attempt that corruption through drug addicts, drunks, and various types of thugs? Not a very attractive picture of evil.

No, I think that the Devil works by presenting himself as the messenger of God, and persuading those who accept him to behave in wicked ways - ways that contribute to the increase of pain and sorrow in the world and to each individual’s own degradation and unhappiness. I think that the Devil exists in the person of those priests and ministers, rabbis and imams, who persuade their congregations that hatred of others is the will of God, that greedy accumulation of wealth is not only acceptable but proof of God’s grace, that the environment was given to Man for his exploitation, that those who think or behave differently, or belong to different tribes, or speak a different language, or have skin of a different color, or who accept different scriptures, deserve death at the hands of the faithful - i.e. those who are deluded by the Devil’s imposture.

So the Devil, in my way of thinking, exists, and his minions include Fred Phelps, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Muqtada Al-Sadr, Baruch Goldstein, Binyamen Kahane, and Pope Benedict, among many, sadly many others. If you look for those who are causing most sorrow in the world, and leading the greatest number of people to behave cruelly, ungenerously, and murderously, it is those and their allies. To the Devil they’ve gone, and to the Devil may they go!

2006 03 14

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Axis of Evil

Source: Daily Kos: So You Want to Play Hardball Eh?

They are vehemently against abortion, they resist progressive woman’s rights. They view homosexuality as a crime against nature and God, some advocate the death penalty as an option for it. Separation of Church and State is despised by these folks; they insist the nation is founded on the principles of their religion, and they work hard to bring that de facto theocracy about. They deplore strong language, gay characters, and sexual content on TV and in the media. And they ignore the Geneva Convention when it suits their ideological purposes, including provisions against torture or due process. They’re anti-stem cell research, pro-creationism, and generally distrustful of science. These folks are easily whipped into a state of frenzy with ideological manipulation to the point where they will commit violence, or at least tacitly endorse that violence is acceptable, if it advances their Divine agenda. They then take great pains to justify that violence, including unprovoked attack of civilian areas, under certain conditions, with convoluted theological gymnastics. They are almost to the man pro-death penalty

Osama bin BushDarkSyde is, of course, talking about Osama bin Laden and the fundamentalist Wahabism that Osama subscribes to, along with hundreds of millions of others, more and more each day. In a typically well-written article, he calls bullshit on Fox News and others who compare bin Laden to Michael Moore and other gadflies of the left, and he tells it like it is: “It’s the Neocon, fundie dominated, GOP that is the closest thing to fanatical Wahhabism in our nation today and there’s no major political faction anywhere near giving them a run for the money.”

2006 01 22

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God 1, Sharon 0

Source: CNN.com - Robertson suggests God smote Sharon - Jan 5, 2006
Morbidly obese SharonGod picks easy targets. First, New Orleans—a city built below sea level and protected by poorly designed and badly maintained levees. Now, Ariel Sharon—morbidly obese, hypertensive, over-stressed. God got him with what Josh Marshall called “punitive cardiology”. Here’s Pat:

"He was dividing God’s land, and I would say, ‘Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America,’" Robertson told viewers of his long-running television show, "The 700 Club."

"God says, ‘This land belongs to me, and you’d better leave it alone,’" he said.

I don’t believe that God smote Sharon, as much as he might have deserved smiting. As far as I can tell, the only thing that God does to people is make them arrogant and stupid. But He seems to do that to just about everyone He touches.

2006 01 06

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reject the one true God

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School of Morals

Philip PullmanLast week’s issue of The New Yorker had a fine article on Philip Pullman, whose superb trilogy, His Dark Materials, makes Narnia and Harry Potter look like, well, kids’ books by comparison. The article calls the trilogy “the first fantasy series founded upon the ideals of the Enlightenment rather than upon tribal and mythic yearnings for kings, gods, and supermen”. A thrilling plotline, inventively developed, complex and sympathetic characters, and a prose style that refuses to condescend to its adolescent audience all combine to make Pullman’s books a rich reading experience. And it’s an experience that’s carefully tailored to improve the moral education of its readers.

The New Yorker article covered a speech that Pullman made at the University of East Anglia on the subject of “Religion and Education”. Pullman’s speech contrasted morality as it’s preached by theistic religion—morality based on fear, focussed on sexuality, obsessed by God—with the lessons in behavior that are transmitted through stories with “morals”—lessons about acting decently, thoughtfully, independently, with kindness and courage.

In his speech, Pullman contended that the literary School of Morals is inherently ambiguous, dynamic, and democratic: a “conversation.” Opposed to this ideal is “theocracy,” which he defined as encompassing everything from Khomeini’s Iran to explicitly atheistic states such as Stalin’s Soviet Union. He listed some characteristics of such states—among them, “a scripture whose word is inerrant,” a priesthood whose authority “tends to concentrate in the hands of elderly men,” and ‚”a secret police force with the powers of an Inquisition.” Theocracies, he said, demonstrate “the tendency of human beings to gather power to themselves in the name of something that may not be questioned.”

This impulse toward theocracy, he announced at the end of his speech, “will defeat the School of Morals in the end.” He sounded oddly cheerful making this prediction; in his books, Pullman enjoys striking a tone of melancholy resolve. He continued, “But that doesn’t mean we should give up and surrender. . . . I think we should act as if. I think we should read books, and tell children stories, and take them to the theatre, and learn poems, and play music, as if it would make a difference. . . . We should act as if the universe were listening to us and responding. We should act as if life were going to win. . . . That’s what I think they do, in the School of Morals.”

Consider the marks of a theocracy as Pullman identifies them. And then consider the behavior of the anointed leader of our country and the elderly men who surround and advise him. His Dark Materials ends with a difficult journey through a cold dark land, and an achingly sorrowful sacrifice. Are we prepared to make such a sacrifice to save our enlightenment values from the theocracy that threatens to destroy them?

2006 01 02

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reject the one true God
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The worst idea in history

Peter WatsonIn Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (free registration required), Deborah Solomon had some questions for Peter Watson, author of the new book, “Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud”. I was taken by his response to this question:

Solomon: On the other hand, not all big ideas are good ideas. In fact, most big ideas are probably terrible ideas. What do you think is the single worst idea in history?

Watson: Without question, ethical monotheism. The idea of one true god. The idea that our life and ethical conduct on earth determines how we will go in the next world. This has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history.

Amazon offers the book as a $7.95 PDF download; I think I’ll sample it that way.

2005 12 13

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Hallelujah!

AdamOK, here’s what you need to do:

  • First, do not click on this link to Sam Harris’s astoundingly wonderful manifesto, “Imagine There’s no Heaven“.
  • Second, take a few deep breaths, compose your mind and consider how you typically deal with a long interesting article on the web.
    • If you print it out, with the intention of reading it later, DON’T DO THAT!
    • If you bookmark it, with the intention of reading it later, DON’T DO THAT!
    • If you skim the first page to pick up the high points and don’t click through to read pages 2,3, & 4, DON’T DO THAT!
  • Instead, do this:
    • Clear 15 minutes of time, during which you will let nothing distract you from the task at hand.
    • Close, hide, or minimize all of your running applications except for your web browser; maximize that to fill your screen.
    • Resolve that you will read this one through to the end. If you must, pray to God for the strength to do that.
  • Now, click on this link. Don’t come back here (or go anywhere else) until you’ve read Sam’s article through to the end.
God touching Adam

Wasn’t that worth it?

2005 12 09

reject the one true God
respect rationality

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