is what i do» reject the one true God

Yeh Hum Naheem

richard — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:21:45 +0000

I never thought I’d write a post praising moderate Islam. I’ve pretty much concluded that the phrase is an oxymoron, like “tolerant fundamentalist”. But this video is almost enough to convince me otherwise:

For one thing, it’s a lovely song, with lyrics that seem, from the subtitles, to be graceful and true. Its message is universal; although the images are of Islamic terrorists, and its clearly aimed at an Islamic audience and clearly intended to move that audience to reject terror, it is a song that any of us can sing with feeling and with broader intent. I call myself an atheist; you repeat the term, and there is venom in your tone. Yeh hum naheen. You look at an old white man; you see an Imperialist American, and you scowl and spit. Yeh hum naheen. I look at a cluster of Hasids in Williamsburg; I think of their wives, bewigged and burdened with babies, and I see deluded oppressors. Yeh hum naheen. This is not us; I am not that: not that one you reduce me to, not that one you label me, not one at all, but many, and you as well. Yeh hum naheen.

I can see this song joining others I have sung in my life whose lyrics were not in my tongue, but whose meaning added richness to my life: Die Gedanken est frei, Kumbaya, Guantanamera, Viva la Quince Brigada, Hey, Zhankoye. I will listen again. And again. I hope to hear it sung by many who are not Muslims.

I am still suspicious of and disgusted by Islam as it is revealed in the Koran, just as I am suspicious of and disgusted by Judaism as it’s revealed in the Torah, and by Christianity as it’s revealed in the Gospels, in Revelations, and in the epistles of Paul. Those books are full of bile and vengeful rage; the God Who terrified their authors is a paranoid solipsistic SOB, powerless, irrelevant, and almost certainly illusory. Those who believe that God to be real and who try to live their lives according to His will are to be pitied.

But this is a great song, and it carries a message we would all do well to hear and to integrate into our view of things and our habits of mind. There’s a website and a foundation. There is a petition against terrorism, which millions of Pakistanis have signed – more Pakistanis have signed the petition than voted in the last Pakistani election. That is hopeful.

Quote Without Comment

richard — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:34:01 +0000

“My life is never dictated by superstitions. My faith is first and foremost. If you believe that God’s in control, there is no reason to believe in superstitions.”

Thanks to PZ

Harry Stoddard talks to God

richard — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:50:42 +0000

Harry’s blog is the Ragged Trousered Philosopher, and I’d not seen it until today. “A Division by Zero“, one of the blogs comprising Planet Atheism, pointed me to Harry’s tale:

I met god the other day.

I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did you know it was god?

Well, I’ll explain as we go along, but basically he convinced me by having all, and I do mean ALL, the answers. Every question I flung at him he batted back with a plausible and satisfactory answer. In the end, it was easier to accept that he was god than otherwise.

Which is odd, because I’m still an atheist and we even agree on that!

It all started on the 8.20 back from Paddington…

The conversation between Harry and God, who enters the car in the form of a 30-year-old white guy in jeans and a tee shirt, takes a number of totally unexpected turns. It’s moving, and funny, and wise, and enormously thought-provoking. I encourage you to read it.

Depends on who’s counting

richard — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 16:18:43 +0000

Source: Welcome to The Barna Group!

The 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!

Schadenfreude

richard — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 16:19:53 +0000

Ted Haggard

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

Listen up, and listen good!

richard — Tue, 30 May 2006 13:21:53 +0000

Source: My Way News – Pope: How Could God ‘Tolerate’ Holocaust?

Pope Benedict XVI toured Auschwitz, and was upset by his visit.

"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.

Separating State from Absurdity

richard — Fri, 19 May 2006 14:20:24 +0000

Source: The Raving Atheist Â» Archives Â» May 2006 Â» Unbright

Joan 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.

The Devil’s Minions

richard — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 02:30:44 +0000

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.

If 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!

Axis of Evil

richard — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 16:52:39 +0000

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

DarkSyde 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.”

God 1, Sharon 0

richard — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 18:10:09 +0000

Source: CNN.com – Robertson suggests God smote Sharon – Jan 5, 2006

God 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.