CelticBear’s Musings

Someone close to me reminded me, again, and rightfully so, that I’m an angry person when it comes to debunking religion (Christianity in particular), and it appears as though I revel in it. Sincere soul-searching leads me to honestly say: maybe a little.
Yet not because of the subject matter, but whatever pleasure I get out of being an apostate solely comes from the intellectual discovery and revelation involved. And until I started back to grad school, the exploration of the knowledge and facts surrounding religious fallacies was all the intellectual pursuit that I had. Fortunately, I’m starting to be able to engage in intellectual and philosophical debate, growth, and development thanks to my work toward my English MA. However…a great deal of my intended career and educational focus is going to be on cultural studies and likely with some focus on religion. So, there’s more danger ahead.

As I’ve said before, I really don’t like being an angry non-believer. I really don’t. But I can’t deny the passion I feel about the subject. I’m advised to just live and let live, and don’t get so upset about religion that I see as being false and dangerous. But how can I just sit back? When these ancient and intolerant and ignorant religious beliefs affect school boards where children (such as my kid) get taught, affect sex education (although yes, we parents should be the ones most responsible for sex ed!) affect public policies such as medical research and even foreign diplomacy and wars. It IS important to feel passionate about beliefs that cause people to promote ignorance at best, and hatred at worst.
For example, these recent examples from the blog Respectful Insolence, in the article:
<> PZ and archy just ruined my day
It’s an article that first reminds you about Fred Phelps and his church of Christian terrorists who go around to funerals for servicemen proclaiming God hates them for serving a country that tolerates homosexuality, and describes a few sites and organizations that make homages to people who murder doctors who perform abortions–making them out to be heroes and with the thinnest of veils, encourages others to murder abortion clinic workers. It’s because of atrocities like that, like attitudes from people running our military who believe in good-vs.-evil Christian-vs.-Islam pro-war policies, and what I encountered this last weekend, that make me so angry and frustrated. (And I realized, sadly, that part of my anger and frustration is significantly directed at the fact that all this horror is going on, and I’m pretty much impotent in doing anything to stop it.)

So this weekend, I attended a Baptist church and went to Sunday School. The teacher is an associate pastor there, runs a burgeoning church off-shoot, and leads occasional pilgrimage trips to Israel. He’s considered by everyone who knows him at the church as an expert in Biblical history and archeology. And he’s incredibly dangerous. because he is very intelligent, extremely well spoken, very fast on his feet, and it appears that because of all this, he’s believed unquestioningly when he speaks to very authoritatively of historical issues. But everything I’ve heard him say is partial truth and twisted facts filtered through the distortion of belief–ignoring the overwhelming evidence that presents a picture different than he’s imparting on his followers. I kept completely silent through the class, and felt literally sick to my stomach from screaming on the inside.

In an effort to keep this brief, here’s a short summary. In studying a section from the OT regarding Gideon, the pastor would “explain” how the whole Canaanite pantheon worked, regarding El, Elohim, Ba’el, Asherah, etc. He characterized the worshipers of Ba’el as sex crazed fanatics who spread venereal disease so badly the animals even had STD’s (thus requiring the killing of every living creature in the cities the Hebrews came to–except the virgin women that the priests got to keep for themselves, but he didn’t mention that part.) He taught how every person of these cultures had to serve a time as a temple prostitute, and how all the offspring of these prostitution gigs were hideously sacrificed to Ba’el.

OK, reality check. All of that is partially true to some small degree–and just a little research will show the rest.
The proto-Hebrews came from the same Syrian culture as the Canaanites, and performed human sacrifice and sex rituals to appease the agrarian gods, as did nearly all agrarian cultures at some very early periods. However, there was a point, as in all agrarian cultures, in which human sacrifices stopped. this is illustrated in the Abraham myth, which has a companion figure in Babylonian mythology, which celebrates the culture’s moving from human to animal sacrifices. This happened before the Hebrews even existed as a separate people. (The Cain and Abel story illustrates the Hebrew split from Canaanite culture, with the farmer Cain killing the shepherd Abel, who God loved more, because God liked the animal sacrifice over the veggies.) And there’s no evidence that the sexual fertility rites and prostitution, which did indeed exist, was more than incidental. The myth of the rampant VD has been a long-held theory of apologetics to try to rationalize why the OT Yahweh would command genocidal destruction of entire cities. Also, early versions of the OT reflected the early polytheistic heritage of the Hebrews, in its use of the various Syrian names for God. Not just when referring to the other gods the “bad” Hebrews would worship, but YHWH himself. (Of course, there are also curious passages in which the Hebrew god El gave the Jewish tribe of Dan to his son, the Hebrew god Yahweh. But that’s not too weird when you realize that Baal eventually became Yahweh, and El and Yahweh eventually merged into one Hebrew god–all before the stories and myths of the Hebrews were eventually written down. But this information is conveniently ignored by people like this Sunday School teacher.)

Now, all this may be academic. Who cares whether the Hebrews worshiped El or Yahweh or Baal or Adonai (except when one wants to consider the validity of the Judaic myth since it’s “truth” is the foundation of Christianity.) Well, what was also discussed, briefly, in the class was the case of the school is Boulder, Colorado which had psychologists who told the students to go ahead and experiment with sex and drugs and homosexuality, since they would anyway. Or so that’s what people in the class believed happened–as I discovered, thanks to Bill O’Reilly and FAUX News. It seems that a school in Boulder had a guest speaker who did mention something about safe exploration of sex–but the school has stated their investigating the claim, which is a far cry from endorsing it.
Media Matters has an article discussing O’Reilly’s lies and misrepresentation of the event HERE.
But, instead of checking facts or thinking critically (when I heard this, my immediate thought was “what?! You’re kidding. No school, even in liberal Boulder, CO, would encourage such a thing! I need to check this out,” the pastor/teacher harped on this as fact, as a sign of the destruction of God-fearing society, and an excuse to disparage evolution. In fact, he said, “If one is to accept evolution, that we’re nothing more than the result of random mutations, then you accept we’re nothing more than a more advanced animal, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t just do what we want.”

That was the point where I felt the blood drain from my face, my stomach turn, and my hearing fill with the singing buzz of a massive headache. I have yet to meet a conservative Christian who actually bothered to understand what evolution actually is. And it disgusts me to no end that someone with an obviously high IQ as this guy, intentionally choses to mischaracterize evolution so as to be able to disparage it, with abandon and not a care to the moral and ethical crime he’s committing by doing so. Evolution is not random. Genetic mutation is a fantastically minor component in evolution. We are the result of millennia of careful selection by nature. And being animals, which we are, does in no way absolve us from being reasonable, ethical, moral, rational, careful in behavior. We are different from “the lower animals” in that we have developed the ability to empathize, to be selfless, to make “moral” decisions and act ethically.
But this guy, who is looked up to and respected by so many in that community, has influence over parents, grandparents, perpetuates atrocious straw-men fallacies for a religious agenda.

(See Evolution for Christians, and Myths About Evolution for info on how grotesque and unethical of a lie his misstatement about evolution is.)

It’s because of people like him, and the influence he wields, and the influence his followers wield, that we have this situation:

Percentage of Population that Believes in Evolutionary Theory
1. Iceland (over 80%)
2. Denmark
3. Sweden
4. France
5. Japan
6. UK
7. Norway
8. Belgium
9. Spain
10. Germany (over 70%)
11. China
12. Italy
13. Netherlands
14. Hungary
15. Ireland
16. Finland
17. Czech Republic
18. South Korea
19. Portugal
20. Switzerland
21. Malaysia (over 60%)
22. Poland
23. Austria
24. Romania
25. Greece (over 50%)
26. Bulgaria
27. Lithuania
28. Latvia (over 40%)
29. United States (40%)
30. Turkey (28%)
Sources: Science Magazine, National Center for Science Education, National Science Foundation

How disgusting is that.
And so, they spoke briefly about how the county’s going downhill and it’s the fault of sex education. Of course, let’s just ignore the fact that not only does abstinence-only education not decrease teen sex but often is correlated with increased teen pregnancy and abortions:
Abstinence-Only Sex Ed Classes Have No Effect
Teen Pregnancy Rates in the USA …which are the highest in the western world. Odd that Canada, Britain, and Swedish teen pregnancy and abortion rates are lower–oh yeah! They have very progressive sex education for teens! (And they are also fractionally as religious as the US and better understand evolution.)

These are real-world effects of fallacious religious beliefs that have very real effects–that don’t have to be! Nearly every other modern country is significantly less religious than the US, is not afraid of sex, of science, of evolution, and have less social sexual issues and higher education standards. If we non-believers continue to just sit idly by and live and let live, we’re going to enter a modern Dark Age. The US is on its way to becoming a Christian Afghanistan or Iran, or Turkey. I don’t want a part in allowing that to happen! I don’t want my daughter to be a victim of religious intolerance, hatred, ignorance–and she doesn’t have to be!

It’s time once again to feature the video that expresses so very well why I feel so much passion and angst, why I’m so often a fundamental apostate–and I so don’t want to be!

(God, I STILL cry every single time I watch that….)
“If we are not able to ask skeptical questions to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority then we are up for grabs.” — Carl Sagan