Onward Christian Soldiers: Theocracy and the U.S. Military

May 2, 2008 Greta Christina15 Comments

This one scares the bejeezus out of me.

A lot of atheist blogs have had this story. For some time now, actually, But the New York Times has finally covered the story, which seems like a good excuse for me to talk about it.

The Times headline sums it up pretty darned well:

Soldier Sues Army, Saying His Atheism Led to Threats

And here’s a few pertinent quotes before I get into my analysis:

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

And:

Perhaps the most high-profile incident involved seven officers, including four generals, who appeared, in uniform and in violation of military regulations, in a 2006 fund-raising video for the Christian Embassy, an evangelical Bible study group.

And:

Specialist Hall began a chapter of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers at Camp Speicher, near Tikrit, to support others like him.

At the July meeting, Major Welborn told the soldiers they had disgraced those who had died for the Constitution, Specialist Hall said. When he finished, Major Welborn said, according to the statement: “I love you guys; I just want the best for you. One day you will see the truth and know what I mean.”

And:

Complaints include prayers “in Jesus’ name” at mandatory functions, which violates military regulations, and officers proselytizing subordinates to be “born again.” After getting the complainantsâ€™ unit and command information, Mr. Weinstein said, he calls his contacts in the military to try to correct the situation.

“Religion is inextricably intertwined with their jobs,” Mr. Weinstein said. “You’re promoted by who you pray with.”

Okay. Do we have the picture now, everybody? Read the whole story if you don’t. And this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this story: plenty of atheist blogs have been carrying it for a while, along with many others like it. (More info — not just on this case, but on an appalling number of similar ones — at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.)

And here’s why this scares the daylights out of me. More than just about any instance of creeping theocracy in our country. More, even, than creationism and other forms of religious fundamentalism being taught in our public, taxpayer-funded schools.

This is the Army.

This is the branch of our government with the big rifles.

And increasingly, they seem to be placing their allegiance to their religion over their allegiance to the country and the Constitution.

There’s a story that Ed Brayton (who’s been covering this story a lot) had over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. The whole story is excellent, but here’s the truly terrifying part:

One individual, posting under the name “Hidog,” suggested Hall put on an orange vest and carry a sign “Bong hits 4 Allah” through the streets of Iraq, “because apparently, your Bill of Rights trump your CO’s (commanding officer’s) orders.”

As Ed pointed out, “Well yes, the bill of rights does trump the orders of a commanding officer when those orders violate the bill of rights.”

And it scares the merciful crap out of me to think that the Army is increasingly full of people — not just mooks with no power, but officers — who don’t understand that. It terrifies me to think of an Army populated by both officers and enlisted men whose hearts — and guns — belong, not to the citizens of this country who employ them, but to Jesus.

And it terrifies me to realize these are not isolated incidents. There’s so much more to this story that I haven’t gotten into, that I don’t have time to get into without this turning into an unreadably long screed. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is the dominant culture of the current United States Army.

With support from the Pentagon.

Because that, people, means that we really are living in a theocracy. Right now. The armed enforcers of our Federal government are the defenders, not of our country, not of our Constitution, but of their God and their faith.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Okay. Perhaps I’m being a little panicky, a little overdramatic. The good news is that we’re not overtly a theocracy. Yet. When caught in these shenanigans, the perpetrators still have to shimmy and sidestep, deny that it happened or hastily issue regulations to halt the more grotesquely blatant examples of it. And if the Supreme Court hasn’t become completely craven, hopefully they’ll be spanking the Pentagon long and hard over this. (Military fetishists, take note.)

And the good news is that the story finally got out of the atheist blogosphere and into the New York Times. (CNN has the story, too.)

But this is not a few isolated incidents. This is not a few bad apples. This is, as Mikey Weinsein of the MRFF called it, “the intentional dismantling of the Constitutionally mandated wall separating church and state by some of the highest ranking officials in the Bush Administration and the U.S. military.”

The intentional dismantling of the wall separating church and state. By the armed enforcers of the Federal government. By the branch of the Federal government that has the big rifles.

What is that but theocracy?

(P.S. I’m not even going to get into the fact that these are the people who are enforcing our foreign policy overseas, in parts of the world that are primarily and quite passionately not Christian. Except to say: Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. What a colossally, appallingly, mind-twistingly bad idea that is.)

This has been all over the atheosphere; but Susie Bright is the one who sent it to me. So thanks, Susie.

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My Trip to the Circus: Albert Hofmann and LSD

April 30, 2008 Greta Christina17 Comments

Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, has died at the ripe old age of 102. So in honor of him, now seems like a good time to talk about my experiences with the drug he created.

I took LSD a lot in college, and for a year or two after. Quite a lot. For a while, I was taking it almost every week; and for most of my college years, I was taking it about once a month or so. And after I’d been taking it for a while, I was taking moderately hefty doses. You don’t get a physical tolerance to LSD — but you can get a sort of psychological tolerance to it. After I’d been taking it for a while, a hit or two would give me a light, fun trip — but if I wanted the experience of taking my mind into a radically unfamiliar place, I’d take five, seven, even ten hits.

And for the most part, it was a great experience. Kind of an important experience, too. I had a couple of bad trips (especially early on, before I’d figured out the “don’t take seriously the crazy shit your mind comes up with when it’s tripping” principle)… but on the whole, LSD was a positive, happy part of my life that shaped me in ways I feel good about. Partly it was just fun and entertaining, like fascinating and hilarious movies in my brain. But I actually got some important insights out of it as well: insights that have stayed with me long after I stopped taking the drug.

I could gas on about this subject for hours. But I realize that there’s little in this life more tedious than listening to other people describe their drug experiences. So the main thing I want to say is this: Taking LSD is what gave me the awareness — not just the intellectual concept, but the immediate, visceral experience — of just how much of my perception and intuition was about how my brain worked, and how little of it was about how the world worked. There is nothing quite so humbling as putting a chemical into your body — a chemical measured in millionths of a gram — and having everything you see and feel and know be radically altered, to the point of being unrecognizable.

So in a lot of ways, taking LSD was the beginning of my skepticism. It was the beginning of my awareness that my brain could fool me, that my brain had its own agenda, and I couldn’t automatically trust what it was saying.

Now, the downside is that, in a lot of other ways, it was the total opposite. Many of my stupider woo beliefs came directly out of “insights” I had when I was on LSD or other hallucinogens. The idea that mystical forces were guiding the Tarot cards when I shuffled them. The idea that subatomic particles must have free will, since their behavior isn’t predictable. The idea that every person on Earth was in exactly the right place, doing exactly what they were intended to be doing by the great World-Soul. (A pretty Calvinist idea when you think about it, although at the time I would have rejected that suggestion hotly.) I had drug hallucinations that I took very, very seriously, and believed to be accurate perceptions even after the drug faded. (I was, for instance, convinced for an embarrassingly long time that, when I was under the influence of LSD, I could make rosebuds bloom into roses, simply through the force of my concentrated drug-enhanced will. Loki, have mercy.)

So while I’m overall positive about my LSD experiences, I feel that I should acknowledge this side of them as well. I am strongly of the opinion that a lot of the more fuzzy, uncritical, poorly- thought- out ideas of the hippie and post-hippie movement (New Age woo and otherwise) were the result of an entire generation being unclear on the “don’t take seriously the crazy shit your mind comes up with when it’s tripping” concept.

But you know? All that stuff eventually faded. And what I was left with — along with a lot of warm, happy, hilarious memories of profound and wildly entertaining times shared with friends — was the deeply- ingrained, vividly- understood awareness that my perception and intuition did not necessarily represent reality. It was the beginning of my skepticism. And it was the beginning of the end of my solipsism. In a lot of ways, it was the beginning of my adult compassion: my relativism, my understanding that other people saw reality differently than I did and that this didn’t automatically mean that they were stupid and wrong. It was the beginning of my borderline- obsessive, sometimes irritating dedication to seeing things, as much as possible, from other people’s points of view.

And for that, I’m grateful.

Thanks, Albert.

(Tip of the hat to Susie Bright, both for the news and for the “everyone tell your LSD experiences” meme. Also for this unbelievably hilarious video. Video below the fold.)

Photo of Albert Hofmann by Stefan Pangritz, copyright CC-BY-SA.

Continue reading “My Trip to the Circus: Albert Hofmann and LSD” →

The Blasphemy of Creationism

April 6, 2008 Greta Christina25 Comments

The story of the UC-Calvary lawsuit has been all over the atheosphere in the last few days. I’m not going to get into it in much detail (good pieces about it on Daylight Atheism and Dispatches from the Culture Wars), but to give you a quick summary so you know what I’m ranting about: A federal judge recently issued a preliminary ruling saying that UC Berkeley could, in fact, refuse to give college credit in biology for courses that taught young-earth creationism. (Calvary Chapel Christian School was trying to argue religious freedom; UC Berkeley was arguing that Calvary could have all the religious freedom they wanted, but they shouldn’t expect UC to drop its academic standards and recognize non-science as science.)

So the Daylight Atheism piece on this had an excerpt from one of the textbooks in question. The textbook is Biology for Christian Schools, and the excerpt is as follows and begins now:

(1) “‘Whatever the Bible says is so; whatever man says may or may not be so,’ is the only [position] a Christian can take…”
(2) “If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.”
(3) “Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible.”

And this isn’t buried somewhere in the back. This is on the very first page of the textbook. The science textbook.

After the top of my head had finished blowing off, I finally figured out why exactly this bothers me so much. Apart from all the obvious reasons, of course: the arrogance, the close-mindedness, the complete missing of the point of what science is about, etc.

What bothers me so much about it is how grotesquely disrespectful it is to their own God.

Let’s say you’re a theist. Let’s say you believe in God, a creator god who made the world and the universe in all its beautiful and astonishing complexity.

Wouldn’t you want to understand that universe, as well and as thoroughly as you could?

To me, the idea that scientific evidence is always trumped by the Bible is one of the most disrespectful attitudes you could possibly have about God. Even if you believe that the Bible was written by God (and you ignore all the evidence to the contrary), wouldn’t you believe that the universe was also written by God? And in a much more direct way than the Bible was written, without having to be dictated through human secretaries? Wouldn’t you put the universe, at the very least, on equal footing with the Bible? In fact, shouldn’t you really be seeing the universe as much higher, much more important than the Bible, because the Bible is just one small part of God’s creation and the universe is so much more vast?

It seems to me that setting your human religion above the enormous and awe-inspiring majesty of God’s creation is blasphemy of the worst kind. To say that the Bible is always more real than the reality of the universe seems to me to be spitting on God and his creation. And it’s not just spitting on the universe: it’s spitting on that part of God’s creation that is your brain and your mind, your capacity to perceive the universe and use reason and logic to understand it.

Of course, this sort of thinking is a perfect example of what Daniel Dennet was talking about in “Breaking the Spell”: the ways that religion functions as a self-perpetuating meme, one that has built up an impressive array of armor and weaponry to defend itself against being seriously questioned. The idea that sacred texts can’t be questioned; the idea that letting go of doubts and questions about your faith will make your life easier; the idea that holding onto faith in the face of evidence contradicting it makes you a good person… all of these function as an immune system that stops questions from breaking down the belief, or even from penetrating it in the first place.

But I think that’s awfully sad. To think that your faith — not just a general faith in the existence of God, but your particular version of the specific details of how God does and does not work — is more real than the reality of the universe…. that’s just sad. It’s isolating. It’s cutting yourself off from reality, from the enormous, majestic, unutterably complex, constantly- surprising reality of the physical universe. And if you believe in God, a god who created all this majesty and whatnot, it’s cutting yourself off from God.

It’s saying that, given a choice between trying to understand the reality of God’s creation, and convincing yourself that you and your sect are right, it’s more important to be right. And that really is placing yourself above God… in a way that I think is more blasphemous than anything any atheist could ever come up with.

(Photo of Synchiropus splendidus by Luc Viatour.)

A Tale of Two Scandals: The Obligatory Eliot Spitzer and “American Idol” Stripper Column: The Blowfish Blog

March 21, 2008 Greta Christina4 Comments

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog, a piece that manages to tie together the two big sex scandals of the week — the Eliot Spitzer scandal and the “American Idol” stripper scandal — into one, hopefully not overly belabored analogy. The piece is called A Tale of Two Scandals: The Obligatory Eliot Spitzer and “American Idol” Stripper Column, and here’s the teaser:

When the governor of New York resigns due to the revelation that he had sex with a prostitute — and a contestant on a top-rated TV reality show is found to have been a stripper — sex columnists around the world are driven to the stories like salmon returning home to spawn. So this is kind of an obligatory column. I am powerless to control myself. Can’t… stop! Must… blog… about… Spitzer… and… the “American Idol”… stripper! Send… help!

But until help arrives, Iâ€™m going to have fun with it.

To find out why a weird part of me is glad that the latest major politician to get embroiled in a sex scandal is a Democrat — and to why find out why I think so many Americans are wigging out over the fact that an “American Idol” contestant was once a male stripper — read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

The Texas Dildo Massacre, or, Reason Number 2,767 Why Gay Rights Matter To Everyone: The Blowfish Blog

February 24, 2008 Greta Christina3 Comments

As youâ€™ve probably heard, the Texas law banning the sale of sex toys has been overturned. I have a new piece about it on the Blowfish Blog: in it, I talk about what this ruling means — not just for consumers of sex toys, but for everyone who cares about the right to sexual privacy. And I talk about the Lawrence v. Texas case — the Supreme Court decision legalizing sodomy and same-sex relations, the case that was the foundation for the Texas dildo decision.

It’s called The Texas Dildo Massacre, or, Reason Number 2,767 Why Gay Rights Matter To Everyone, and here’s the teaser:

The Lawrence case didn’t just say that gay sex couldn’t be criminalized. It said that people — all people — have the right to engage in any consensual intimate conduct in their home, free from government intrusion. It said that people’s sex lives are not their neighbors’ business, not society’s business, and most emphatically not the government’s business. It said that the fact that the State doesn’t happen to like a particular kind of sex doesn’t mean they have a right to ban it, or indeed to have any say in it at all.

This case says, “Yup. That’s what Lawrence meant, all right.”

And that has enormous implications.

To find out what I think the implications are of the Texas dildo case — and the Texas sodomy case that preceded it — read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

Hypocrisy or Bigotry — Which Is Worse? Huckabee and Guiliani on Gay Rights

December 27, 2007 Greta Christina12 Comments

Via the HRC:

“Unless Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain to tell us something different, we need to keep that understanding of marriage.”
–Mike Huckabee

“It’s the acts, itâ€™s the various acts that people perform that are sinful.”
–Rudolph Giuliani on homosexuality

There are so many different ways I could go with this.

I could go with Huckabee’s snarky, smirky Brokeback Mountain reference. I could gas on about how “Brokeback Mountain” has become the new “Adam and Steve,” the default catch-phrase for when people want to make bigoted jokes about gays.

I could also point out how wildly inappropriate the Brokeback Mountain reference is. I mean, did he see the movie? Did he think it was a ringing endorsement for gay people denying their sexuality and getting into heterosexual marriages? The whole point of that damn movie was that gay people staying in the closet ruins lives — not just their own lives, but the lives of their wives and their families and everyone around them. To make a “Brokeback Mountain” joke in support of a “traditional marriage” position is clueless to the point of delusion.

And of course, I could go the “laughably hypocritical” route on Guiliani’s comment. The twice-divorced, thrice-married, adulterous Giuliani, lecturing gay people on their sinful sex lives? Please.

But that’s not where I want to go with this. Instead I want to pose a question that kept me and Ingrid entertained for hours:

Which do you think is worse — craven hypocrisy, or close-minded bigotry?

Here’s the thing. I don’t believe for a moment that Giuliani actually thinks homosexuality is a sin. He supported civil unions and domestic partnerships when was mayor of New York. Hell, when his second marriage was breaking up, he moved into the apartment of two gay friends. He did a Victor/Victoria drag show with Julie Andrews. He’s far from the most enlightened person on the planet when it comes to LGBT issues; but I doubt that he has anything against us personally.

I think his move to the right on LGBT issues is purely pragmatic. He wants to be President. He thinks he has to suck up to the far right to accomplish this goal. Gay-bashing is the quickest, easiest way to do that.

Huckabee, on the other hand:

I am quite sure that Huckabee means every word of it. His entire record speaks of passionate homophobic bigotry, fueled by a particularly virulent form of close-minded religious fundamentalism. When he said that “homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle,” I have no doubt whatsoever that he meant every word.

So here’s my question:

Which is worse?

The close-minded, true-believing bigot — or the craven, self-serving hypocrite?

My thoughts:

From a purely ethical standpoint, I think the true believer has the stronger position. Their bigotry is evil, it’s harmful — but at least it’s sincere. It’s not held simply for selfish gain. Itâ€™s internally consistent.

But from a purely practical standpoint, I think I’d rather have the hypocrite in public office.

Because you can change a hypocrite’s mind.

If someone is taking a bigoted position purely to advance their self-interest, all you have to do to change their mind is shift the political scales. Mobilize your forces. Make alliances. Get better organized. Convince the hypocrite that their self-interest would be better served by sucking up to you instead of your opponents, and they’ll be your new best friend.

It’s much, much harder to change the mind of a true-believing bigot. If their bigotry is a consistent, integral, fundamental part of their view of the world and themselves, changing their mind about their bigotry requires them to rewrite their entire life story. Very few people are up to that.

And while internal consistency can be an admirable trait, it’s not so admirable when it comes at the cost of shutting out the world around you. Prioritizing your own belief system over human reality is really just another way of being self-serving.

Then again, as Ingrid points out:

If you do succeed in changing a true believer’s mind, chances are that you’ll have them for good. The ranks of LGBT supporters are filled with former bigots who changed their minds when their friends, their colleagues, their children or grandchildren, came out as gay. And their newfound tolerance is as strong — and as sincere — as their old bigotry.

Whereas the craven hypocrite who makes nice with you today will toss you like last week’s leftovers the minute you become inconvenient.

Just ask Giuliani. And the gay friends who took him in when he needed help. The friends who he’s now calling “sinful” — because he wants to be President.

“Trusted adults, including priests, may be the abusers”

December 15, 2007 Greta Christina7 Comments

From USA Today comes this story about coloring/ comic books that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York is handing out to children to warn them about sex predators. (Click on the image to see it in its full glory.) I quote:

The Archdiocese of New York is handing out coloring and comic books that warn children about sex predators, the first such effort by a U.S. Roman Catholic diocese. In the coloring book, a perky guardian angel tells children not to keep secrets from their parents, not to meet anyone from an Internet chat room and to allow only “certain people” such as a doctor or parent to see “where your bathing suit would be.” In a comic-book version for children over 10, a teenager turns to St. Michael the Archangel for strength to report that two schoolmates are being sexually abused. The books have been distributed to about 300 schools and 400 religious education programs to use as a resource. They also can be viewed online. Some critics, while applauding the intent, say the books should say explicitly that trusted adults, including priests, may be the abusers. (Emphasis added.)

My first reaction to the “some critics say the books should say explicitly that trusted adults, including priests, may be the abusers” part was this:

Gee, ya think?

In the wake of a widespread global scandal about priests molesting children as a common occurrence — and the Church acting to cover it up, even when it meant exposing children to known child molesters — do you really think it might be a good idea to warn children that priests, specifically, are among the adults who might be sexual abusers?

Gosh, what on Earth might have made you think that?

(We need a sarcasm font. Imagine the above three paragraphs in a sarcasm font.)

But then, it occurred to me.

Of course the Catholic Church can’t tell kids that priests, specifically, might be abusers, and that they shouldn’t automatically trust them.

Once you start telling children that priests are fallible human beings and that you can’t necessarily trust everything they tell you…

…well, you see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Once you start telling children that you can’t necessarily trust everything the priest tells you, you undermine the whole foundation of your religion. As Dennett and Dawkins and countless others have pointed out, the survival of religion depends on the indoctrination of children. The single biggest factor, by far, in predicting what religion you are is what religion you were brought up in. Children’s brains are designed, for very good evolutionary reasons, to trust what adults tell them. It’s like that Jesuit motto: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”

The perpetuation of religion depends, not only on teaching children your religion, but on teaching them that religious leaders and teachers are special and trustworthy, that they know more about God than the rest of us, and that they deserve a special level of respect and trust. If you tell children not to automatically trust priests, the whole house of cards falls down.

But it’s completely half-assed to to warn kids about generic abusers without pointing out that the adults most likely to abuse them are adults they know and trust — including parents, teachers, coaches, and, hello, priests.

This doesn’t read to me like taking responsibility for the sexual abuse scandal in the priesthood. It reads to me like PR. It reads to me like yet another case of the Catholic Church covering their own ass — at the expense of children’s actual safety.

Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor

December 12, 2007 Greta Christina23 Comments

I am getting so sick of this, I could spit.

Commenting on the recent shootings at the New Life Church — and on the bravery of one person who helped stop the shooter before he could do more damage — the Atheism Sucks blog comments thusly:

What would the atheist do in this situation but run away and scream, “Hey, survival of the fittest! See ya later suckers!”

And when confronted with atheists in the comments, pointing out that this is not even remotely how atheists think, feel, believe or act, the blogger, Frank Walton, still insists that his opinion of atheists and atheism is correct. To quote again:

The atheist can save a life if they want, but according to the atheist worldview man is nothing more than matter and motion – saving a human life is no more better than saving protoplasm.

Okay.

Deep breath.

I can understand this attitude from a theist who hasn’t spent any time talking with atheists. I can understand it from the theists who come into the atheist blogosphere without any previous knowledge or experience of actual atheists, who only know about atheists and atheism from the monstrous, pathetic picture their pastors or other religious leaders have painted for them.

But once you’ve actually spoken with a few atheists — once you’ve had, say, half a dozen atheists tell you, “Of course I treasure human life; of course I believe in ethics and altruism; of course I’m not nihilistic or amoral or hopeless or joyless” — then you don’t have any excuse.

You know that itâ€™s not true. You have the evidence of thousands of people telling you, and showing you with the reality of their lives, that it’s not true. You have, just for example, atheist soldiers, atheist cops, atheist firefighters… all willing to risk their lives for their fellow humans on a daily basis.

And yet you still insist on saying that atheists don’t value human life; that atheists selfishly look after themselves at the expense of helping others.

So what I want to know is this:

Whatever happened to “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”?

Every now and then, I do an ego-Google search on my name. (No, this isn’t a tangent; stay with me.) And experience has taught me to search on my name plus the words “Comforting Thoughts.” Because a number of Christian ministers have been using my essay, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God, in their sermons — as an example of why atheism is a depressing, joyless, terrifying, nihilistic worldview.

How do they manage this, you may ask?

Well, they take the first part of the essay — the part where I try to be honest about the very real problem of permanent death and how frightening and paralyzing it can be — and they quote it out of context. They make it seem as if that’s the entire thrust of my piece. They conveniently neglect to mention the entire damn point of the essay… which is that, while the permanence of death may seem to be an impossibly horrible buzzkill for atheists, in fact it is not.

It is difficult to see this behavior as anything other than a flat-out lie. It is a deliberate misrepresentation of others, for the sole purpose of supporting your own world view.

And again I ask:

Whatever happened to “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”?

Even I know that you shouldn’t bear false witness against your neighbor. Even I know that you shouldn’t intentionally tell lies about people; that you shouldn’t deliberately misrepresent other people’s actions and beliefs and opinions. And I’m an atheist. I don’t think it’s wrong because God told it to Abraham. I think it’s wrong because it hurts people needlessly.

How difficult is that?

Is your belief that atheism is a joyless, heartless worldview so important to your faith that you have to deny the largely positive reality of atheist lives? Is your belief so important that you not only deny that reality in your own heart and mind, but feel compelled to convince others of it? Is your belief so important that you have to lie about that reality, not just to yourself, but to the rest of the world?

And is your faith so weak that it can’t accept the existence of people who don’t share it and yet have good, happy lives, full of meaning and connection and concern for others?

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

It’s not rocket science.

(P.S. Thanks to Susie Bright for the tip.)

Hopelessness, Stalinism, Yawn: Pope Ratzi’s Encyclical Against Atheism

December 5, 2007 Greta Christina9 Comments

It’s not like I expected the Pope to be gung-ho about atheism.

It’s not like I expected him to be all ecumenical and Unitarian about it. It’s not like I expected him to say, “We love our atheist brothers and sisters, and we think they make some good points, and everyone finds God in their own way, and as long as they live ethical lives they’re okay with us.” I’m not completely stupid.

But really. Is this the best he could come up with? This tired old crap? “Atheism is hopeless,” and “Atheism caused Stalinism”?

Here in the atheist blogosphere, we eat arguments like that for breakfast. (We’ll start the bidding at, “No, it’s not,” and, “No, it didn’t.”) Does he really think that’s original? Or, indeed, interesting?

So here’s what I actually did find interesting about the Pope’s recent encyclical about atheism:

It’s such a perfect example of the True or False? Helpful or Harmful? point I’ve been making — about how far too many religious debaters mix up the arguments about whether religion is true with the arguments about whether it’s beneficial.

I mean, look at it. In this encyclical, Pope Ratzi addresses one of the central atheist arguments for Why God Doesn’t Exist: the problem of suffering. He spells it out very eloquently, in fact.

The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is — in its origins and aims — a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested.

Yup.

I rarely say this, but the Pope sure got that right.

But his response? His response to this centuries-old argument against the existence of God?

Atheism is bad.

Atheism is harmful.

Atheism is a philosophy that is devoid of hope; and atheism “has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice.”

I’m not even going to get into why atheism isn’t, in fact, a hopeless philosophy. I’m not even going to get into why atheism wasn’t responsible for Stalinism. Plenty of atheist writers, including myself, have addressed either or both of these questions in lavish detail. (For a couple of examples, here’s Ebon Muse on the hopelessness question and the Stalinism question.)

What I want to point out instead is that “Atheism is bad” is a lousy response to an argument for why God doesn’t exist.

In fact, it’s not even a lousy response. It’s not actually a response at all. It’s changing the subject because you don’t like where the argument is heading. It’s a classic example of an ad hominem argument, and a schoolyard one at that. “Dickie says Santa Claus isn’t real, and it’s just our moms and dads sneaking stuff under the tree.” “Yeah, well, Dickie is a nerd, and he made my sister cry.” Even if Dickie were a nerd, and even if he had made your sister cry, that’s hardly an argument for the existence of Santa.

It was actually sort of disappointing. I mean, the guy is the head of one of the largest and most powerful religions in the world. He must have spent years — decades — studying theology and apologetics. And this is what he comes up with against atheism? Hopelessness, and Stalinism? Couldn’t he at least have come up with something original? Atheism will make you impotent? Atheism makes people root for the Los Angeles Dodgers? Atheism has led to deconstructionism, which is boring and impenetrable? Atheism is the reason the Earth will be burned up in five billion years?

I guess not.

Hopelessness, and Stalinism.

Pathetic.

Sacrificing Your Legal Rights, or, Why Robin Tyler is an Asshole

October 5, 2007 Greta Christina3 Comments

A little backstory first.

There’s a big kerfuffle in the world of gay politics about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, now in front of Congress, that would ban job discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transpeople. Kerfuffle in a nutshell: Some politicos and gay-rights lobbyists are advocating for, or else not speaking very strongly against, stripping the bill of its protections for transpeople, and limiting it to the LGBs in the LGBT community. (To be more accurate, there are now two versions of ENDA, one with the language protecting transpeople and one without: the question is whether we should support both bills or just the stronger trans-inclusive one. To be even more accurate would require me to write a whole goddamn novel. Google “Employment Non-Discrimination Act,” or visit the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, if you want to know more.)

Which brings me to what Robin Tyler, longtime lesbian activist, had to say about it:

I agree with Barney Frank. I support full transgender rights. However, when I have been invited to the legal weddings of some of my transgender friends, not one of them has said “we will not get married until Diane and you and other same gender couples can get married”. They did not sacrifice their legal rights on the alter of political correctness, to give up the benefits of marriage. And yet the lesbian and gay community is expected to do so, leaving millions and millions of us in the majority of states, once again, unprotected.

There are so many things wrong with this, I don’t even know where to begin. So I’m going to limit myself to three.

One: How exactly would this help?

In the absence of a well-publicized nationwide boycott on marriage, how would individual transgendered heterosexuals refusing to marry until same-sex couples can get married in any way help the cause of same-sex marriage?

I’ve had hetero friends nobly say that they won’t get married until same-sex couples can get married. I think the sentiment is sweet, but I also think it’s completely pointless. Their refusal to get married does me — and the cause of same-sex marriage — no good at all. It’s a touching personal gesture, and if they feel that strongly about not wanting to participate in an injustice I won’t argue with them… but as an effective political act, it’s totally useless.

On the other hand, pushing for trans inclusion in ENDA — and refusing to accept or endorse ENDA if it’s not trans inclusive — does help. As many people in this debate have pointed out, ENDA isn’t going to become law while Bush is President anyway. It may not even pass the Senate, even in the watered-down version. It’s going to take several practice runs until it gets passed by both houses and signed by the Pres. And if we insist that gender identity be included in this practice run along with sexual orientation, it familiarizes Congress with the issues and the language of trans rights, and makes it that much easier to get the gender identity language included when we actually do get the thing passed.

Two: For lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to ask transpeople to make “sacrifices” for us is laughable. T’s have been getting the short end of the LGBT stick for years. The fact that heterosexual T’s have one goddamn right that G’s and L’s and same-sex-oriented B’s and T’s don’t have… this hardly balances the scales. It’s hardly the injustice of the century. To present transpeople as a privileged class who should be willing to sacrifice some rights to be in solidarity with their oppressed gay/ lesbian/ bi siblings… it’d be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.

Is Ms. Tyler prepared to give up the rights she has in cities and states where GLB’s have legal protections but T’s don’t? Is she willing to not sue for discrimination, not file hate crime charges, etc., in cities and states that give these protections to gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, but not to transpeople? If not, then she absolutely does not have a point. Or rather, she has a point, but it’s shaped like a corkscrew.

Three: She spelled “altar” wrong.

I’m just sayin’, is all.

Greta Christina's Blog

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