I’m breaking my New Year’s Resolution for a couple of posts today. In a minute I’m going rail against the administration, but first, a rant against religious delusion. (I’ll get back to being positive after this; this is only a temporary resolution break. I’ve been doing pretty well all things considered so far.)

Mark at Sojourner has a post: Rational Morality. He mentions a “good conversation” he and I have had (I’m “Mechphisto,”) and I’m glad he thinks so. For me, it’s like arguing with someone who thinks they’re Napoleon. One of the ways I promised myself I’d stay more positive is if I stay away from blogs that make me bristle. I failed. I need to go back to ignoring blogs like that one and Stands to Reason and other delusionally religious blogs that are filled, teeming with cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, logical fallacies, and a lot of ignorance.

In that previously mentioned post Rational Morality, Mark uses spurious logic to try to prove objective morality. (See existing threads on this topic: Time For a Fish Fry–Attacks on Naturalism Don’t Hold Water, and Absolutely Relative (The Theme Continues).) In those articles and ensuing comments I have tended to argue to the extreme position of relativism sometimes for entertainment, sometimes to improve my own understanding, sometimes to draw out the counter argument. But the bottom line is that objective morality or not, religious morality is devoid of true ethics, morals, reason, logic, or empathy (which SHOULD be what any sense or morality be based on!)

Before I continue, I digress to repeat a couple of interesting past posts. From A Lil Squeek of Christian Relativism:

Naturalist: As there is no way for us to determine absolute morality, we must determine it as best we can with what we have.
Christian: Ah—but we have Absolute Morality!
Naturalist: Grounded in what?
Christian: God.
Naturalist: And what is God’s morality?
Christian: As there is no way for us to determine God’s morality, we must determine it as best we can with what we have.
Naturalist: And this is different from me….how?

And a little more serious and helpful when looking at such posts as Mark’s linked above: How We Know, and Relative Application of Motive. That one may be helpful in seeing through the spurious logic, sophisms, and tautological reasoning.

In analyzing objective vs. relative morality we can implore the words of any philosophers, theologians, People With Big Books we want and it all comes down to “My Calvin can beat up your Spinoza.” Whether “morality” is objective because of a “higher power” or through anthropological evolution or is totally relative, it’s all pointless to try to base it on religious dogma because even IF it’s from a “higher power,” how do you know it’s Yahveh or El, or whatever other Hebrew/Sumerian name for God you want to use, that’s provided it? These spurious exercises of erroneous logic repeated by Mark aside, his and other religious ideologue’s fundamental point is that Yahveh is the provider of the objective morality, and to that I say bulls**t. Regardless of if morality is divinely given, you cannot prove it’s Yahveh of Christianity that’s given it any more than you can prove it’s Zeus of the Iliad or Osiris or Odin or Marduk or Great Sky Spirit or Atlantians. Every attempt to try invariably takes the debate back to the Judeo-Christian Bible. A Bronze Age book of collected history from an ancient Semitic people who evolved the Sumerian pantheon they emerged from to rule over a patriarchal and even barbaric culture. Followed by a charismatic cult surrounding a supposed messiah based on this ancient culture which actually has very little in common with that ancient culture except for some terribly misapplied attempts to connect the former with the later using prophesy that only half matches up if at all.

All that babbling to say, that book is not proof of Yahveh being the source of morality and in fact, it’s evidence against it.

A previous post: Why Does God Hate Me When I Die? addresses this somewhat, and has links to other posts on the topic. Basically, religious morality is the lowest form of morality. It’s immature carrot-and-stick morality. “Do what I say and you get paradise, don’t do what I say and you suffer eternal punishment, and I’m always watching you,” is the fundamental morality from the god of love and mercy and justice. That is not morality or ethics. That’s divine fascism. To be ethical, to be moral, you don’t just follow commandments. You have to empathize with others. You have to understand what is right (what helps and promotes) and what is wrong (what harms and negates) and be able to discern the difference. Being told what to do and not to do is not morality.

And what kind of example for morality is Yahveh anyway? There’s the wonderful story of how the nomadic tribe of Dan saw a fertile and prosperous land and because the people already there were defenseless, took it as a sign of God that they should go and slaughter them all and take the land. There’s Samson’s “suicide bombing” basically. The children who were slaughtered by God’s 40 she-bears for teasing one of his prophets. There’s the countless genocides and slaughters by the Israelites at God’s behest. The stealing of virgin girls to be given to the priests. The commands to kill rape victims if it was in town. The promotion of slavery, selling daughters, “righteous” men offering daughters to raping mods to protect house-guests…. The list of atrocities and God decreed immorality is as long as the Old Testament!

Now, the common Christian rebuttal here is that that is all Old Law and Jesus came to fulfill the Law (so says Paul, who really said a lot of stuff that has little basis in the Gospels. I mean, Jesus supposedly said the Old Law must still be observed. And Psalms says God says the Law will stand always. Did he change his mind? He could have said “The Law stands until the Messiah comes” which would make more consistent sense.)

But here’s the thing… even if Paul’s letters to Romans and I think Timothy stands and Jesus makes the Old Law irrelevant, you still have 4,000 years beforehand of God inspired, God provoked, God decreed atrocities and barbarism. 4,000 years of a God that slaughters innocents and advocates such death and destruction and hatred and intolerance and prejudice that he puts Allah and Baal and Vishnu to shame! 4,000 years of religiously dictated horror before Jesus comes and God evidently decides OK, slavery is wrong now and so is war and killing your family members if they break commandments…. Even if Yahveh exists, that is not a capricious, feckless, psychopathic thug that I would want to worship!!

The Christian can’t dismiss the Old Testament. There is no Messiah without Judaic myth religion. There is no Son of God, no fulfillment of covenants, no salvation from original sin, no fulfillment of prophesy without the Old Testament and the God of Abraham. Without the Old Testament, the New Testament is about a meaningless cult. (Which, is what I believe is the case, but for people who call themselves “Christian” it is disingenuous to worship Christ and act like the Old Testament doesn’t matter.) Whether you take the OT literally or symbolically, the underlying message is the same: The God of the Hebrews is and represents a horrible, cruel idea of “morality” that we today would put down as being “evil”.

How can any sense of absolute, objective morality be said to come from a deity that one epoch tells his small group of chosen people to slaughter and hate in his name, who commands people to be killed for farming or dressing incorrectly, and then suddenly change everything the next? How can you even say anything we consider moral and ethical today come from a supposedly all-loving being who creates people for no reason other than his own personal glory, tells them they have “free will” but if they exercise that free will incorrectly during their life (they didn’t have a choice in having in the first place) when they die they will have eternity of punishment? Morality that comes from a “perfect being” that creates conditions on a planet for the people he “so loves” that results in endless, countless pain and suffering that ends for supposedly most people in eternal pain and suffering so that he can ultimately be glorified?!

My god, how can people not see how much this all screams of ancient, primitive mythology?! It’s so blatant, so obvious, so clear! Even so, even I didn’t see it until reason let the scales fall from my eyes, so to speak. For believers, no amount of reason will ever pierce their armor of rationalizing and delusion. The delusion rules the psyche, and arguing with even an otherwise intelligent and sane person, like Mark above, is like arguing with a paranoid schizophrenic that no the aliens are not listening to his thoughts. Whether it’s psychological, or even some remnant of evolutionary biology, some people HAVE to believe, whether it’s in Yahveh, or Allah, or Sylvia Browne, or Oprah, or astrology. Belief is a powerful force that twists logic, perverts reason, makes one immune to facts and reality.

I know, because I used to be there. For years I was clouded by religious delusion, and every argument, every debate I went toe-to-toe using as much twisted logic and sophisms at my disposal and when they would ultimately fail, my final refuge was “God is mysterious,” “who are we to question God,” “God’s will is more powerful than my mind,” “we’re only seeing the back of the tapestry,” etc etc. No amount of arguing will make any difference. They have to learn it, if ever, on their own. And people like Mark who, like me, started life out with the deck stacked against them by being raised in a family/culture that indoctrinated then during the formation of their basic psyche in the myth, the psyche (which is basically your center of reality) fights tooth-and-nail against anything that would weaken a belief system that one has invested everything about themselves into. Family, career, way of viewing the world. How much pain and torment the psyche is protecting the person against, protecting one’s beliefs from reality, when they have so much to lose. So much built around the fantasy and myth. It’s sad, really. It took me years to finally see the truth, so I have sympathy for people who still suffer under the delusion…but not much. There comes a time when a person has to honestly question their beliefs and for the sake of living in reality, for the sake of everyone around them, give up myth.

Point of Inquiry’s latest show has an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of PBS’s ScienceNow.

http://www.pointofinquiry.org/?p=94

He discusses how important it is to embrace the tools and methods of science. He states that ignorance of and lack of accepting the scientific view of examining the universe will be as personally harmful and dangerous in the new millennium as being illiterate in this last century.
He discusses how all the aspects of theological passion and joy and wonder is just as valid for him in the discoveries and appreciation of the natural world. When he considers the way in which photons from stars and galaxies light years away register on his retina and allow him to see the universe, the same words of amazement that are familiar to the religious come from his mouth.
He discusses that it’s vital that scientists work to popularize science as it’s the foundation of modern existence, and the key to understanding reality.

James Randi, famous magician, skeptic, debunker, was on Larry King Live last Friday. Man, it’s painful to watch.
Oh not because of Randi! But because King is an idiot and the “psychic” he also had on the show was a fount of ridiculous rationalizations.
(Nurk! Too negative of me…. gotta be positive…. Hmm, is doing that sort of like giving those fake apologies: “I’m sorry if anyone was offended”?)
What can I do to be more positive…. The psychic had interesting hair, and Larry has smart looking suspenders. =)
OK, the show is in three parts on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzkgskUkOlE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehYIXAbM3Ss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nqBNUDxzk8
Maybe this embedding will work for part 1:

They discuss the now famous instance where “psychic” Sylvia Browne told parents on national TV that their missing son was dead, and he was just recently found quite alive (see my blog: All You Must Do Is, BELIEVE!)

The most important aspect of this show though, is how great of an experience is in recognizing logical fallacies and cognitive biases and possibly con-artistry. Unfortunately, they don’t give Randi much time to talk and so he comes off just as a cranky old man.
You should listen to some of his essays on the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast:
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/

Debunking Christianity has a post by Theresa Frasch entitled:

Things I Like About No Longer Being a Christian

Really good, positive post (with a little negativity, but let’s focus on the positive.)
Here’s a small sample:

This is all there is; make the most of it.
I like this thought better than thinking about spending eternity in heaven. This makes life more exciting and enjoyable. I know I can’t just laze around because I’ve got something better coming. I appreciate my world more now and want to take care of it because this is all there is, and all those who come after me are going to have.
There is no fear of punishment.
No more do I have to worry if god is going to punish me or my kids or my friends because we did something wrong, or chose an alternative lifestyle, or because of the sin of the world. I no longer have to view tsunamis and AIDS as punishent sent by God.

Argh, that’s so annoying!
I could have sworn that a few months ago I’d blogged about about a podcast I listened to where the guest discussed fallacies of probability and chance. Specifically in applied to religious arguments against evolution/Big Bang by citing the astronomical chances of our universe existing exactly as it does now.
But I can’t find that blog, nor can I find the podcast that supposedly prompted it. =P

But, here’s a blog thread that I’ve commented to on that subject:
http://newsojourn.blogspot.com/2007/01/not-chance.html
In it Mark posits believing if God is the only rational explanation for our “unique” universe and naturalists are arrogant fools for thinking we’re an accident of nature.

I reply that’s a cognitive bias based on a misunderstanding of applied probabilities, and I comment that scientists seek to find answers and try to disprove each other to get to the truth, while religion assumes it knows truth based on ancient and primitive documents and no amount of scientific method will shake that belief–which in my opinion places the burden of arrogance on the other foot.

Jennifer on her blog “The Idle Rambling Thoughts…” has made an interesting post on her findings in Gnosticism.
Check it out. =)
http://whatbox.blogspot.com/2007/01/ive-been-doing-some-personal-research.html

I Blog, Therefore I am:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/generic/8f5d/
I like the “0 comments”

Among the shirts I really want are of course:
“Science: It works, bitches” (but I can’t really wear that in public.

and my favorite:
> SELECT * FROM users WHERE ‘clue’ > 0;
0 rows returned

I enjoy that there was a time that I had no idea what that means. Then one day after months of learning mySQL pretty hardcore I stumbled upon that shirt again, and I ’bout died laughing.
What a difference “being in the know” makes.

Oh wait, they are.
Yesterday’s Penn Jillette radio show was prompted by a clip from an Andy Griffith episode (posted on Reason.com) where he addresses Opie’s act of taping a private conversation of an accused prisoner:

“Why Does Andy Griffith Hate America?”

The clip can actually bring a tear to your eye. Especially when you consider: Illegal government wiretaps, secret prisons, opening citizens’ mail without a warrant, repealing of habeas corpus, advocation of torture, the accepting of torture induced testimonies in trials, RFID tracking chips in passports, all from a n attack by terrorists who attack us because in addition to religious issues hates our freedom and liberty and pluralist society.

Does anyone see the irony here?

As Penn says, the best response we could have had to the terrorist attacks would have been to immediately start repealing laws. Terrorists want to make us afraid, want us to respond to them and validate them? Then we should have immediately relaxed security measures. Let the terrorists know we are not afraid. They can’t change America from being the land of the free and home of the brave, into the land of security and home of the fearful. Fear is all the reason fascists need (and by fascists I mean neo-cons in our government, not the terrorists) to remove liberties and freedoms and take greater iron fist control.

The terrorists are winning, and it has nothing to do with Iraq.

Here’s an interesting article on the NY Times regarding magical thinking from superstitions to prayer. Why we do it, what use is it, can it be helpful, when is it harmful, etc.

Cool thing is this is one online NY Times article that’s appearantly open to public viewing without requiring a user account.

Wow. I mean, wow!

I just had my first ENG 500  class, “Professional Non-Fiction Writing.” Surprise, it’s an Integrated Service Learning class, meaning, we’ll be working with a community service to do something “real.” In this case: As a class we’ll be researching, writing, editing, and publishing a book. Something probably around 80 to 130 pages or so and with a Web content component (which I’ll probably be given the majority of the responsibility for.) It’ll be an edition of primary sources, local Civil War documents and materials that have never been transcribed and published before. We’ll be researching, annotating, and transcribing them and doing the layout and publishing.

It’s a scary thought, but incredibly exciting! I’m thrilled! Not just for the opportunity and experience, but because it will be a huge boon for my resume which will be vital for getting into a good doctoral program. I’ll have my name in this book, I’ll have presented a paper at a conference, I’m working on getting a scholarly book review, and all before my 2nd semester of my MFA is complete! Oh I am SO capable of attending McGill!

My only concern is that the necessary research and field work for this project won’t interfere with my day job. =(

After a week, we finally got power last night! *glee*

Too late to watch the season return of Battlestar Galactica (the best show on TV since Firefly) and series premiere of Dresden Files, and Heroes and Studio 60. Oh well. Thank goodness for magic. *evil grin*

I think the outage or return blew out the RF converter we use to run the PS2 and VCR through to the TV, and there’s a slight mildew smell in the house from having been closed up in the cold with water running all week (to prevent freezing pipes,) but man! We got off easy! So many people I know have had heaters or water heaters or expensive electrical equipment blow, trees damage their house, wires pulled out from the house requiring electricians… in fact, nearly everyone I know has had it worse than us in some way this last week. (I can’t help it: Each of these people are faithful Christians. Makes you wonder how “blessed” they are vs. how basically random life just happens to be.) So, I’m pretty thankful we just had to stay with relatives, have to replace a $20 RF converter, and shampoo the carpets.
It was good to finally sleep in our nice, cozy bed last night.

But then, it could have been better as well. The day after we lost power we checked in on our neighbor to the right. She’s an older lady who lives alone, so we wanted to makes sure she was OK. Seems she didn’t lose power. And never did. So, glad for that! Better for a young, reasonably healthy family to have to deal with lost power for a week than an elderly lady alone.

Life is crazy like that! What an adventure. *smile*

I’ll try to make this quick. Power is still out, after a week, at home and I came in to work to recharge cell and laptop batteries before I go waste some time at Barnes & Noble. This is going to be a little critical and negative of a post harming my New Year’s Resolution a bit…but, I’ve been pretty positive in all else so far. In fact, I’m treating this ice storm power outage as an adventure! *grin* I got a new knit stocking cap and have discovered I look better in stocking caps than I do ball caps. Cool. Anyway….

Before I get to religion, a comment on psychics. There’s a video on YouTube of Anderson Cooper doing a segment on the famous hag “psychic” and ghost whisperer, Sylvia Browne:

(Grr. I can’t embed the video. Click here to view it.)

She told the parents of one of the kids in Missouri who was abducted four years ago and found alive recently, that he was dead, killed by a Hispanic, and buried near two boulders. Did I mention the kid is alive? Oh yeah, I did. And the very Caucasian creep who kidnapped him was…Caucasian. Sylvia has told people dead relatives have messages for them that has lead to serious legal issues for the family, told people someone was alive when they were dead, someone died by drowning when in fact they died in the 9/11 tower collapse, that the trapped miners were all alive…. She and “psychics” like her are cons and media whores and vultures and pure evil.And people still believe. The psychics defend themselves by saying “not all predictions can be accurate” and “only God is right 100% of the time.” If you’re constantly wrong, then what power do you actually have?! A stopped clock is right twice a day and you can be right about guessing a coin flip half the time without having any special powers.

And still people believe. Because people WANT to believe. People have grief, they have fears, they feel loss, feel lost, feel small or powerless, and people want to believe in magical events, powers and spirits bigger than them. They’re afraid of death and belief gives them the ability to not fear it so much. So no matter how often Sylvia and John Edwards and other psychics and conspiracy theorists are proven wrong, people will still believe.

And that reminded me of a video I saw the other day of a holiday concert at one of the megachurches in Texas. Huge production. And there was a part that was put in for the DVD’s (that may have been displayed live at the concert too, I don’t know,) where a narrator asks in a reassuring voice while images are displayed on the TV, “Are you alone? Do you feel lost?” Then in a sort of mystically affected voice with a cool graphic animation showing the word… “Believe!” And it goes on like that, the voice asking questions about whether you feel you need help or guidance, “Believe!” And describes how loving and merciful and powerful God is “Believe!”

And people believe. People…believe! They believe with absence of anything except faith in the face of evidence and proof of being bunk, in ghosts, Zeus, totems, aliens, water dowsing, Hindu, the Great Coyote spirit, herbal remedies, Illuminati, Odin, Baal, Marduk, Isis, Tarot, astrology, New World Orders, shamen…. On and on! People believe because they want, sometimes need to believe. But belief does not make something real!

You might ask, what’s the harm in someone believing? Watch the YouTube video and get back to me.