Tag Archives: God

Religulous

Posted on by
Comment

A movie review.

ReligulousI just watched Bill Maher’s documentary, Religulous. It’s been in my Netflix queue for some time now and I recently let it ride to the top. I watched it on my second monitor while doing some relatively mindless work on the other.

The movie was just what I expected: Bill Maher trying to talk reason to religious zealots. While his breakaways to movie scenes and comic subtitles were generally amusing, much of the rest of the movie was quite disturbing. It isn’t Maher’s views that bother me — I share them. It’s the stubbornness of the religious zealots he spoke to. They simply did not want to listen to reason.

Want some specific examples?

He spoke with Christians about Jesus and pointed out that an ancient Egyptian god named Horus shared much of Jesus’s history, from virgin birth to crucifixion and resurrection. This is documented in ancient Egyptian writing. Yet the Christians refused to acknowledge that the Egyptian myths exist. How can they be so stubborn?

He pointed out to Christians that the New Testament, which forms the basis of Christianity and Christian beliefs says nothing about homosexuality being a sin. He pointed out other things that are and are not in the Bible. If what he said contradicted current Christian beliefs, however, these people denied what he said. They clearly had no clue what was in the holy scriptures they swore was the word of god.

He pointed out to Muslims that the Koran contains multiple references about violence against non-Muslim “infidels.” They either denied the meaning of those references or tried to claim that they applied to another time.

He had similar confrontations with Jews, Mormons (and ex-Mormons), and members of other religions.

This went on for nearly two hours.

This was exactly what I expected and, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it very much. It’s an argument he’ll never win. None of the atheists will. People have faith — blind faith in whatever it is that they believe. They ignore the evidence that they’re wrong. They go on believing, thinking that they’ll be rewarded someday while the non-believers — or the people that believe in Brand X religion — will be punished.

Meanwhile, they keep fighting and hating and killing and keeping their women and children in the dark ages intellectually — all in the name of their god.

It makes me sick.

I’m not quite sure what Maher intended to do with this movie. He’s obviously not going to convert anyone. There wasn’t enough comedy to make it fun to watch. Was he just trying to give atheists a bit of support in their quest for reason? To convince us to speak out as he has?

What’s the point?

This reminds me of a post I read last week on Think Atheist, “Why Talk About It?.” In it, the blogger compares religion to collecting stamps:

When you are in safe company, you poke fun at the stamp collectors and their silly beliefs. You find comfort in the fact that you are not the only sane person around. In a world of stamp collectors, you are one of only a few non-stamp collectors.

Maybe that’s what Religulous was all about: To remind us that we’re not the only ones who don’t collect stamps.

Note to Religious Fanatics

Posted on by
Comment

You are not welcome here.

I am not a religious person. In fact, I’m an atheist.

I don’t use this blog to promote my religious (or non-religious) views. While some of my comments may reflect those views, I’m not trying to convince anyone that they should change their views. Religion (or lack thereof) is a personal choice.

By the same token, I don’t expect or want any reader to use the comments feature to try to convince me or any other reader to change their religious views. If you want to preach, go bother some other blogger. Don’t bother me.

Read this carefully: I will delete any comment that attempts to communicate what I or any other person should believe about a higher being. This blog is not a forum for religious debate. Period.

I just had a four-comment exchange going with a reader who found God and evidently looked down on me because I hadn’t. When I told him I wasn’t interested in a religious debate but offered to leave his comments online for others to discuss with him, he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a debate with me. His final comment — which never appeared here — was a condescending jab at me. I’m inferior in his eyes because I don’t believe that his god is watching over me and controlling my life. This same god, I should mention, is also just standing by while innocent people all over the world suffer from illness, starvation, and the cruelty of others.

God is all powerful and all good? Give me a fucking break.

In the meantime, I think this guy is an idiot for wasting his time preaching religion to the non-religous on the Web.

Well, he blew it and he screwed it up for anyone else with the idea of talking religion here. I won’t tolerate it any more. All of his comments have been removed and you won’t see any others.

You don’t like this policy? Don’t fool yourself into thinking that I care. There are millions of other blogs out there. Go bother someone else.

Reality Check

Posted on by
6

Are you as sick as I am of the media spinning what it wants to turn into issues?

I’ll admit it: I listen to NPR. (That’s National Public Radio, for those of you who spend more time in front of a boob tube than looking outside your own windows.) Not only do I listen, but I’m now a member of two NPR stations: KJZZ in Phoenix and Northwest Public Radio in Washington State.

Yes, I know NPR leans to the left. So do I. But I think it’s far more thought-provoking than just about every other media outlet out there. And it spends more airtime talking about what’s important in today’s world — world politics, the economy, etc. — than any other media outlet.

Let’s face it: does it really matter to you whether Britney has custody of her kids? Or who won American Idol? Or what happened on last night’s episode of [fill-in-the-blank mindless television show]? And do you really need to know about the fire that leveled an apartment building or the drug-related killing in the city?

This morning, I was pleased to hear two essays on NPR that echoed my sentiments about certain issues almost exactly. I’d like to share them with you as examples of how listening to something with substance can help peel away the bullshit doled out by many other media outlets.

The Truth About Michelle Obama

“Michelle Obama Endures Public Scrutiny” is an essay by Diane Roberts. In it, she discusses the controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s wife — a controversy which has been manufactured entirely by the right-wing media (i.e., the Fox network) and other media outlets who apparently have nothing better to talk about.

Ms. Roberts uses sarcasm to poke fun at this controversy, but she states the truth when she points out:

Where Laura Bush is all pastels and soft-focus, Michelle Obama is strong lines and high def. Where Cindy McCain is a frat boy’s dream girl — a blond beer heiress from the golden West — Michelle Obama is a tall, clever Ivy League lawyer from the South Side of Chicago.

So why is the media so dead-set against her? I think they feel threatened. Michelle Obama is apparently too real, modern, and smart for their tastes. So what do they do? They cast doubt on her character by spreading rumors and interpreting words and actions out of context and in a way that supports their claims.

Frankly, I like what I’ve seen of Michelle Obama. She’s a breath of fresh air — not a phony, old-fashioned “help-mate” living in the shadow of her husband. If Hillary Clinton had been more like Michelle Obama when she was First Lady, I think she would have earned a lot more respect — and more votes — in the primary season.

I’ll go a step further. I believe Michelle Obama is an excellent role model for girls and young women. Sadly, I can’t say the same about either Laura Bush, who can barely read a speech in public, or Cindy McCain, who seems like she’s just along for the ride. While I’m sure she does have her faults — we all do, don’t we? — she certainly doesn’t deserve the abuse she’s getting from the media.

It’s unfortunate that someone as well educated and intelligent as Michelle Obama has to play games to make herself seem worthy to doubters. I think she probably has a lot better things to do with her time than appear on a talk show like The View.

Acts of God? Think Again

Daniel Schorr is NPR Weekend Edition’s senior news analyst. He shares his commentary on NPR every Sunday morning, as well as other times.

Today’s commentary touched on something that has been bothering me: the acceptance by the Midwest’s residents that the recent flooding was an “act of God.” I was especially bothered by an interview earlier in the week during Talk of the Nation. In that interview, an Iowa farmer with 640 of her 800 acres of farmland under 15 feet of water insinuated that the flood was God’s will. She then turned her interview into a preaching session, telling listeners how good God was because he’d sacrificed his only son for our salvation.

Give me a break. She could have made much better use her time on a nationally syndicated radio show to explain what the rest of the country could do to help folks in situations like hers.

This, of course, came on the heels of still-President Bush’s comment last Sunday where he said,

I know there’s a lot of people hurting right now and I hope they’re able to find some strength in knowing that there is love from a higher being.

(I blogged about that comment because it bothered me so much.)

Daniel Schorr, in “Why Are There So Many Natural Disasters?” pointed out research and public statements by scientists who have studied the effects of man’s impact on the earth. These men have found that the flooding was caused, in part, by the land having been “radically re-engineered by human beings.” Farmland is getting ever closer to water sources, removing the buffers between creeks and rivers and farm fields. If the Iowa land were left undeveloped, it would be covered with perennial grasses that have deep roots to absorb water.

I can confirm how man’s changes to the landscape can affect flood waters. As I reported in my blog, my neighbor’s removal of naturally growing trees, bushes, and other plants from the floodplain near our homes changed the course of the wash that flows through it, causing extensive damage to his property — and mine. The lesson to be learned from this: don’t mess with the floodplain!

But in the midwest — and elsewhere in our country — cities are built in known flood plains. The residents depend on levees to hold back floodwaters in the event of a flood. They bandy around terms like “400-year flood” to give people the idea these floods only occur ever 400 years. Yet some towns can tell you that they’ve had several of these floods over the past 20 years. When the water can’t soak into the ground and is funneled through a series of levees, there comes a point when the levees simply can’t handle floodwater volumes. The result: levees break, towns and cities built in the floodplains flood.

Is this God’s will? Did God remove natural vegetation buffers around streams and rivers and replace it with plowed farmland? Did God build towns and cities in the floodplain? Did God build the levees that failed?

Daniel Schorr doesn’t think so. And neither do I.

Think

Is it too much to ask for people to think? To consider all the information that’s out there and form conclusions based on the evidence?

Or will you simply believe the hate messages and excuses you hear on network television and read in viral e-mail messages?

A Higher Being?

Posted on by
Comment

Maybe that’s what Bush & Co. were waiting for after Katrina.

I was absolutely disgusted when I heard, on BBC World (via NPR), still-President Bush’s comment regarding the flooding in Iowa. He was in Paris on his last publicly paid vacation to Europe. It was easy enough to find the source of the quote on AP:

PARIS (AP) — President Bush on Sunday expressed concern to those affected by record flooding in Iowa and other parts of the Midwest.

Bush, addressing reporters after attending a church service in Paris, said his “thoughts and prayers go out to those who are suffering from the floods in our country.”

“I know there’s a lot of people hurting right now and I hope they’re able to find some strength in knowing that there is love from a higher being,” the president said with first lady Laura Bush at his side. (emphasis added)

This makes me sick. In a week when four boy scouts were killed by a tornado, two young girls were brutally murdered in Oklahoma, and one of the media’s finest reporters was permanently struck down by a sudden heart attack, our president is reminding us that a “higher being” loves us?

People have lost their homes and everything in them. Some people have lost their lives. Is that the way a “higher being” shows love?

It should be interesting to see how this midwest flooding drama plays out. Will it be another FEMA fiasco? Maybe that’s what FEMA was waiting for when Katrina struck: intervention from that “higher being.”

Letter to a Christian Nation

Posted on by
5

Another book review.

Those who know me well, know that I am not a religious person. In fact, I’m about as unreligious as they come.

In general, however, I’ve never been against any religion. I see it as a way that people fulfill social, idealistic, and spiritual needs in their lives. If they want to believe that the earth was created as it is today in seven days by a supernatural being seven thousand years ago — or any of the other ideas and themes of their religion — that’s fine with me. (Just don’t teach these religion-based ideas in public schools with my tax money.)

Sam Harris’s Letter

Letter to a Christian NationLately, seeing what’s going on in the world and the political influence of America’s religious conservatives, I’ve begun to doubt whether there’s a positive value to religion in society. No book has helped fuel my doubts more than Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. This tiny, 96-page book was written as a letter to devout Christians, pointing out the inconsistencies in Christian beliefs and how some of these beliefs negatively impact today’s world.

The main gist of Harris’s book is the fact that some policies promoted by Christian politicians and their backers are causing far more harm in good. He cites many examples. The ones that stands out in my mind are those related to sex education and their affect on the population, both home and abroad.

Consider, for instance, the human papillomavirus (HPV). HPV is now the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States. The virus infects over half the American population and causes nearly five thousand women to die each year from cervical cancer; the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that more than two hundred thousand die worldwide. We now have a vaccine for HPV that appears to be both safe and effective. The vaccine produced 100 percent immunity in the six thousand women who received it as part of a clinical trial. And yet, Christian conservatives in our government have resisted a vaccination program on the grounds that HPV is a valuable impediment to premarital sex. These pious men and women want to preserve cervical cancer as an incentive toward abstinence, even if it sacrifices the lives of thousands of women each year.

He follows this up with some statistics from studies that show how the “abstinence-only” approach to sex education in 30% of American sex education programs simply does not work. American teens may be participating in “virginity pledges” for eighteen months or more, but they’re having oral and anal sex instead. American teenage girls are also four to five times more likely to become pregnant or contract a sexually transmitted disease than teens in the rest of the developed world. Why? Could it be because they weren’t taught about condoms? Or worse yet, because were taught that birth control is “sinful”?

Mr. Harris drives the point home with this statement:

The problem is that Christians like yourself are not principally concerned about teen pregnancy and the spread of disease. That is, you are not worried about the suffering caused by sex; you are worried about sex. As if this fact needed further corroboration, Reginald Finger, an Evangelical member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, recently announced that he would consider opposing an HIV vaccine — thereby condemning millions of men and women to die unnecessarily from AIDS each year — because such a vaccine would encourage premarital sex by making it less risky. This is one of many points on which your religious beliefs become genuinely lethal.

I’ve done some research into this statement about Reginald Finger and, unfortunately, can’t find the New Yorker article where it was made. But you can learn more about his views on this issue on Bionity.com, Wikipedia, Time Magazine, and Dr. Finger’s Web site. It’s clear from these sources that Dr. Finger is very interested in abstinence education, but whether he would oppose an HIV vaccine, as Mr. Harris claims, is extremely difficult to believe. Surely no one would go to that extreme in efforts to stop people from having sex.

More Than Just Sex

Of course, the book isn’t just about the sex education issue. Mr. Harris goes into great detail on a number of other issues, including the Bible as the word of God, morals as defined by the Bible, and the clash between science and religion, including the conflict between evolution and intelligent design. He also writes a bit about atheism and the Christian view that atheists are “evil.”

Mr. Harris presents all of his arguments calmly, with many examples and quotes from the Bible. At no time does he become offensive — he remains quite reasonable throughout. Still, I know that what he has to say will trouble most devout Christians who read it. So although I think he hopes to reach these people, I doubt that he will succeed. Instead, he may reach the more moderate Christians who can look objectively at their beliefs and see how they might cause problems in today’s world.

My Thoughts on Extremists

I agree with much of what Mr. Harris says, but not all of it. He makes some very strong statements near the end of the book about Muslims that I find difficult to believe:

The idea that Islam is a “peaceful religion hijacked by extremists” is a fantasy, and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge…most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith…

Maybe I’m naive, but I still like to think that most people want to live their lives in peace. So, unlike Mr. Harris, I cannot generalize like this about Muslims — or Christians, for that matter.

I see parallels between members of the Christian and Muslims faiths. Just as there are Christians who make God and the trappings of their religion part of their lives, I believe there are Muslims who do the same with Allah and the trappings of their religion.

Both religions have extremists. In America, we use the politically correct terms “Conservative Christians” or “Evangelical Christians” to describe these people. We also use the term “Radical Muslim” to refer to Muslim extremists. (Funny how we drop political correctness for the Muslims, isn’t it?)

But do these people control either religion? Do they speak for all of their fellow believers? I’d like to think they don’t — that there are reasonable members of both faith that know which parts of the Bible or Koran shouldn’t be taken literally in this modern world.

I Recommend It!

I recommend this book for anyone who is alarmed by the growing power of the religious right in America. It will help arm you with the facts and background information you need to:

  • argue in favor of sex education programs that include birth control information, thus reducing unwanted pregnancies (and their social and economic impacts), abortions, and sexually transmitted disease
  • fight back against the proposed teaching of intelligent design in public schools
  • allow vaccinations to protect your daughter from HPV and, possibly, cervical cancer
  • enable government funding to continue efforts to find cures for AIDS and other diseases — yes, even through the use of stem cells

If you are a true believer, I urge you to consider Mr. Harris’s arguments — and the arguments made by others like him — and look objectively at how your beliefs affect America and the rest of the world. While neither Mr. Harris nor I am saying that you should give up your belief in God and the values of your religion, you need to understand that some of your religious beliefs and values cannot be imposed on others without drastic consequences for all.

Got Something to Add?

June 30, 2014 Update
I’ve finally gotten around to writing up the site comment policy on a regular page (rather than post) on this site. You can find it here: Comment Policy.

I’ll leave the comments open for this post — at least until things start getting out of control. Remember three basic rules:

  • No stating “facts” unless they are facts that can be backed up. (You can link to articles.)
  • No nasty comments directed at me or other commenters. If you think we’re stupid or we’ll rot in hell, keep it to yourself. Just state your case without getting personal.
  • Remember, what you say here really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. So don’t let the discussion get your blood pressure up. It ain’t worth it.

I will delete comments that don’t follow these rules. If you have a problem with this, read my Comment Policy to learn why.