Tag: Bible

Right-Wing Evangelicals Claim ‘Good Christians’ Can’t Get PTSD

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Full Moon, Howlers, Religious Crackpots, Right Wing, Wingnuts

Right-Wing Evangelicals Claim ‘Good Christians’ Can’t Get PTSD

On a Veteran’s Day broadcast, two of America’s most influential televangelists claimed that good Christians can’t get PTSD.

Kenneth Copeland, who is famous for pitching a fit [3] when a senator tried to investigate his nonprofits and for inspiring [4] a measles outbreak, said, “Any of you suffering from PTSD right now, you listen to me. You get rid of that right now. You don’t take drugs to get rid of it, it doesn’t take psychology; that promise right there [in the Bible] will get rid of it.”

Copeland’s guest, conservative revisionist historian David Barton, agreed, adding, “We used to, in the pulpit, understand the difference between a just war and an unjust war. And there’s a biblical difference, and when you do it God’s way, not only are you guiltless for having done that, you’re esteemed.”

Barton believes that anybody who behaves “biblically” during war can’t get PTSD. Unfortunately, there is a logical flip side to this statement: someone who has PTSD must have not been biblical in his actions, and thus he is ultimately responsible for his own PTSD.

Understandably, a lot of people are upset by Barton and Copeland’s assertion. Even the staunchly conservative Gospel Coalition [5] (TGC) and America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention [6] (SBC), made no bones about their distaste for Copeland and Barton, the former calling them “profoundly stupid,” the latter “callow and doltish.”

That’s an aggressive attack, especially given that a significant number of Christians, including leaders at SBC and TGC, share Barton and Copeland’s belief that mental illness can be cured by faith. A September survey [7] by LifeWay showed that fully 35 percent of Christians and 48 percent of self-identified evangelicals believe prayer alone can heal serious mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder.

The idea that major illnesses can be cured by prayer feeds the idea that mental illness is the fault of the ill. A 2008 survey conducted by Baylor psychology professor Matthew Stanford showed that 36 percent of mentally ill church attendees (and former church attendees) were told their mental illness was a product of their own sin, while 34 percent were told their illness was caused by a demon. Forty-one percent were told they did not really have a mental illness, and 28 percent were instructed to stop taking psychiatric medication.

These numbers reveal an ingrained distrust of mental illness and the mentally ill. This distrust has a dramatic and negative impact on people’s lives, alienating them from their peers and causing them to question the validity of their own experience, a process that often causes Christians to leave their churches. One of the participants in Matthew Stanford’s study described his experience:

“I felt shunned at the church. A lot of the other members acted as though they didn’t want to get close to me. A lot of people were afraid of me. The pastor didn’t want anything to do with me. Therefore, I no longer attend any church at all. I watch church on TV. I am already paranoid; I didn’t need anyone keeping their distance from me. It makes me depressed to go to a regular church in person because of how I am treated.”

Stanford, a self-described, “very conservative, evangelical Christian” is quite critical of how his fellow Christians handle the issues surrounding mental illness, claiming that the mentally ill are “modern-day lepers”: treated as “unclean and unrighteous” and “cast out” from their communities.

Amy Simpson, another popular Christian voice who critiques mental health stigma in the church, echoes these sentiments. She wrote in her book, Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and the Church’s Mission, “The church allows people to suffer because we don’t understand what they need and how to help them. We have taken our cue from the world around us and ignored, marginalized and laughed at the mentally ill or simply sent them to the professionals and washed our hands of them.”

This widespread stigma has its genesis in an attempt to create a system called “Nouthetic” or “biblical” counseling, a system that was supposed to fix the damage psychiatry caused to Christianity. Biblical counseling had its genesis in the anti-psychiatry movements of the ’50s and ’60s, which united leftist intellectuals like Thomas Szasz with conservative Christians and fringe groups like Scientologists. The founder of biblical counseling was author Jay E. Adams, whom Stanford called the “Moses of the biblical counseling movement.”

Adams’ quintessential work, the 1970 Competent to Counsel, proposes that mental illness occurs not because one is “sick” but because one is “sinful.” Psychiatry, in attempting to treat a disease, is thus ineffective. This idea led Adams to create a method that addressed the sinful roots of mental illness and was based on scripture.

This method was Nouthetic counseling, which comes from the Greeknoutheteo, meaning “to admonish.” Adams believes in solving people’s mental health problems by “confronting” them over their lack of faith. He posits that the best way to deal with sin is to meet it head-on, bible in hand.

Adams’ methods were a product of their time. A negative attitude toward the mentally ill pervaded America in the ‘70s and ‘80s, embodied by the Reagan revolution, which stigmatized America’s homeless and destitute and blamed the downtrodden for their own plight. Meanwhile, Christians had come to distrust the secular world, which they believed was responsible for dissolving marriages, encouraging homosexuality and undermining the Christian faith. They wanted to set up their own institutions that would be separate from the secular world, and thus needed their own psychiatry. In this milieu, Jay Adams’ ideas found the perfect ground to grow in.

The philosophy introduced by Adams in Competent to Counsel birthed a movement, and Nouthetic counseling grew to become a discipline. Although Adams’ specific brand of Nouthetic counseling has gone out of style, biblical counseling, which builds on his ideas, is in.

Nowhere is biblical counseling more in vogue than the Southern Baptist Convention, which adopted a resolution on mental health last August that supported “research and treatment of mental health concerns when undertaken in a manner consistent with a biblical worldview.”

In fact, it was the boss of the SBC spokesman who called Barton and Copeland “callow and doltish,” Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president Russell Moore, who brought counseling into the SBC. In 2005, as the dean of theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Moore unmade the school’s trademark “Pastoral Counseling” program, which integrated psychology with theology, and replaced it with an Adams-inspired biblical counseling program.

While the SBC doesn’t agree with Adams on every issue, it hasn’t tried to hide his influence in its current curriculum. The resources page for SBTS’s Biblical Counseling department contains nearly 30 of Adams’ works, alongside works of conservative Calvinists like Sovereign Grace Ministries’s disgraced founder CJ Mahaney and megachurch pastor John MacArthur.

If the resources page is any indication, most of the people SBC considers adept biblical counselors also happen to be staunch theological conservatives. This is perhaps because anti-psychology tends to fit in with the conservative mindest: Matthew Stanford mentioned that in his personal experience, a significant number of pastors distrust psychology because they are angry the APA stopped calling homosexuality a mental disorder.

Stanford said, “They bring up homosexuality, and say ‘why did the APA take it out of the diagnostic manual?’ There’s this idea that psychology is legitimatizing sin, or saying it’s okay to sin.”

Perhaps this is what Moore was talking about when he claimed that, in a speech on SBTS’s new biblical counseling program, “There’s an ideology driving the research” of psychologists, or when he claimed that pastoral counseling failed “because it is so naive about the presuppositions behind secular psychologies.” Even if he isn’tspecifically talking about homosexuality, Moore thinks that psychology has inherent anti-Christian undertones.

This might hint at why Copeland and Barton felt the need to speak out against PTSD treatment on TV in the first place, and why the contemporary church is so prone to stigmatizing the mentally ill: seeking treatment for clinical depression, even being clinically depressed in the first place, can be construed as being anti-Christian. It can indicate that somebody has embraced the “psychiatric mindset” instead of trusting God with their mental illness. In this world, the mentally ill are not just stigmatized, they are suspected sinners.

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Leviticus On Gay Tattoos…or Tattoed Bigots…or something

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Homophobia, Religious Bigots, Religious Hypocrites

Leviticus On Gay Tattoos…or Tattoed Bigots…or something

BY  

Stupid - http://mariopiperni.com/

If you haven’t seen this pic making the rounds again, this guy thought it was smart of him to tattoo Leviticus 18:22 on his arm – a Bible verse that bans homosexuality and refers to it as an abomination.

leviticus-tattoo

Two questions for this idiot with the bigoted tattoo.

1. Why?

2. Does he know what Leviticus 19:28 has to say about tattoos?

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No Surprise; Atheist Marriages Last Longer Than Christian Ones

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Atheist Marriages

Surprise! Atheist Marriages May Last Longer Than Christian Ones

Conservative Christians see themselves as the last defenders of traditional marriage. Yet many don’t quite live up to the ideal.

  

Conservative Christians think of themselves as the last line of defense for a time-honored and holy tradition, marriage. In the conservative Christian view, marriage is a sacred union ordained by God. It binds one man and woman together so that the “two become one flesh” until they are parted by death.

This view of marriage is unbiblical, to be sure. See Captive Virgins, Polygamy, Sex Slaves: What Marriage Would Look Like If We Actually Followed The Bible. But hey, who actually reads the Bible? Surely, what God meant to say is that marriage should take the form that is most familiar and traditional to us: One male plus one female who is given to the male by her father–that part is biblical–for life.

In this worldview, Christian marriage is under assault by an anti-trinity of powerful and dark forces: feminism, homosexuality and godlessness. Faith, on the other hand, saves both souls and marriages. When I was young, a slogan made its way around my church: The family that prays together stays together. Tom Ellis, former chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Council on the Family boldly claimed that “born-again Christian couples who marry…in the church after having received premarital counseling…and attend church regularly and pray daily together… experience only 1 divorce out of nearly 39,000 marriages.”

But then came data. According to research by the Barna Research Group over a decade ago, American divorce rates were highest among Baptists and nondenominational “Bible-believing” Christians and lower among more theologically liberal Christians like Methodists, with atheists at the bottom of the divorce pack. When the findings were made public, George Barna took some heat because Christians expected the difference to be more dramatic and to favor believers. Ellis suggested that maybe Barna had sampled badly. Perhaps some people who called themselves born again had never really devoted their lives to Christ. But Barna held his ground, saying, “We rarely find substantial differences” [in the moral behavior of Christians and non-Christians].

Fancy that.

In 2008, Barna again sampled Americans about divorce rates. The numbers fluctuated a bit, but once again atheists came out painfully good from a prays-together-stays-together perspective. Thirty percent reported ever being divorced, in contrast to 32 percent of born-again Christians. Slicing the U.S. by region, the Bible belt has the highest divorce rate, and this has been the case for over a decade, with the institution of marriage faring better in those dens of blue-state iniquity to the north and west.

What is going on? Even some secularists are puzzled. Churches provide strong communities for families. Many offer marital counseling and parenting classes. Love, they say, is a commitment, not a feeling. God hates divorce. They leverage moral emotions in the service of matrimony: a righteous sense of purity rewards premarital abstinence and post-marital monogamy—replaced by guilt and shame when nonmarital sex is unveiled or a marriage dissolves. Couples who split may find themselves removed from leadership positions or even ostracized. On the face of it, even if there were no God, one might expect this combination to produce lower divorce rates.

The reality, however, appears complex. Churches do honor and support marriage. They also may inadvertently promote divorce, especially—ironically—those churches which most bill themselves as shining lights in a dark world.

To prevent that greatest-of-all-evils, abortion, such communities teach even high school students to embrace surprise pregnancies as gifts from God. They encourage members to marry young so they won’t be tempted to fornicate. But women who give birth or marry young tend to end up less educated and less financially secure, both of which are correlated with higher divorce rates.

After marriage, some congregations, such as those in the “quiver-full” movement, encourage couples to leave family planning in God’s hands. Leaders echo the chauvinistic beliefs of Church fathers like St. Augustine and Martin Luther or the Bible writers: Women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety (1 Timothy 2:15). Such teachings grow congregations, literally, from the nursery up, but the very same attitudes that help to fill church pews can erode marital bliss. Ample research shows that for couples under age 30 marital satisfaction declines with the birth of each child. (Parenting tends to make couples happier only after age 40, when kids become more independent, and only in countries with comparatively weak social supports for aging adults.)

Secular couples tend to see both marriage and divorce as personal choices. Overall, a lower percent get married, which means that those who do may be particularly committed or well-suited to partnership. They are likely to be older if/when they do formally tie the knot. They have fewer babies, and their babies are more likely to be planned. Parenting, like other household responsibilities, is more likely to be egalitarian rather than based on the traditional model of “male headship.” Each of these factors could play a role in the divorce rate.

But a bigger factor may be economics, pure and simple. In the words of some analysts, marriage is becoming a luxury good, with each partner, consciously or subconsciously looking for someone who will pull their weight financially and declining to support one who won’t. “The doctor used to marry the nurse,” says Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. “Today the doctor marries the doctor.” Sixty percent of college educated women get married, as compared to 50 percent of women who hold only high school degrees or lower. Couples who stay married also tend to be wealthier than those who divorce. In Barna’s 2008 sample, couples with an income of less than $20,000 a year broke up almost twice as often as those earning $75,000 or more (39 percent vs 22 percent). Advocates who want to promote traditional marriage might do well to foster broad prosperity.

Even if they did, though, they might be swimming upstream. In 1960, almost three quarters of American adults were married; by 2008 that number had fallen to a half. The difference came from a combination of two factors—more divorce and more people who had never married. The concept of family isn’t becoming less important, but Americans are increasingly flexible in how we define the term. Over 80 percent say that a single parent living with a child or an unmarried couple with a child is a family. Over 60 percent say that a gay couple with a child is a family. A growing number say that marriage is obsolete.

In one of those peculiar twists of fate, conservative Christian obsessions with abortion and sexual purity may be accelerating this trend. Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, authors of Red State, Blue State, propose that Bible-belt opposition to abortion has increased the non-marital birthrate and acceptance of single parent families:

The working class had long dealt with the inconvenient fact of an accidental pregnancy through the shotgun marriage. As blue-collar jobs paying a family wage have disappeared, however, so has early marriage. Women are then left with two choices: They can delay childbearing (which might entail getting an abortion at some point) until the right man comes along or get more comfortable with the idea of becoming single mothers. College-educated elites have endorsed the first option, but everyone else is drifting toward the second.

Conservative Christians thought they could have it all by promoting abstinence until marriage. But virginity pledges and abstinence-only education have failed. If anything, they have once again accelerated the trend, leaving Christian leaders fumbling for answers. Some hope that more flexible, egalitarian roles for Christian wives and husbands may be the answer. Others think that doubling down on traditional gender roles is where it’s at. Either way, gone is the bravado that once proclaimed marital salvation by faith alone. “Marriages and families within faith communities are no healthier than in the rest of society,” concedes Christian author Jonathan Merritt. “Faith communities must provide support systems to salvage damaged marriages.” Whether the institution of marriage itself can or should be salvaged is, perhaps, a question none of us are prepared to answer.

Do atheists do it better? That is unlikely. Divorce rate differences between theists and nontheists tend to depend on how you slice the demographic pie, and for both groups, the shape of marriage itself is changing. As culture evolves, we’re all in uncharted territory together.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of “Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light” and “Deas and Other Imaginings.” Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.
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Breaking Their Will: The Sick Biblical Literalism That Leads to Child Abuse and Even Death

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Authoritarian Parenting, Biblical Literalism, Child Abuse, Evangelical Adoption

Breaking Their Will: The Sick Biblical Literalism That Leads to Child Abuse and Even Death
Authoritarian parenting and abusive practices are all too common in some Evangelical households.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Suzanne Tucker

In 2008, Hana Williams was adopted from an orphanage in Ethiopia and brought to the United States where she died at the hands of her Bible-believing American parents. Their notion of Christian discipline required breaking her will, a remarkably common belief among conservative Evangelicals. To that end, they frequently beat her, shut her in a closet, and denied her meals. Ultimately, she was left outside where she died of hypothermia exacerbated by malnutrition. They were convicted ofmanslaughter this month.

In carrying out their obsession with child obedience, Hana’s adoptive parents drew tips from Tennessee preacher Michael Pearl, whose spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child book, To Train Up a Child, has been found now in three homes of Christian parents who killed their adopted children. The title comes from a stanza in the book of Proverbs: Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

M. Dolon Hickmon is the author of an upcoming novel called 13:24that includes religiously motivated abuse. Hickmon was raised by parents who subscribed to this kind of discipline, and he knows first-hand about deep and long-lasting scars from Bible-based childrearing. Hickmon left his 6,000 member megachurch after a pastor seized on Father’s Day as a prime occasion to teach the congregation how to shape and sand wooden spanking paddles. For Hickmon, the sermon triggered memories of the beatings he had suffered as a child—administered by Christian parents and justified by biblical teachings.

While struggling to hold together his faith, Hickmon sent a letter soliciting advice from an online ministry run by the authors of a popular Evangelical parenting manual. He wrote as if he were a father experiencing marital conflict because his wife interfered when he hit their terrified, screaming six-year-old. In reality, Hickmon was describing his own childhood experience. (You can read his letter, which is full of intentional red flags, here.) The response: Your wife is at fault in coming to your son’s defense. Your son uses her. Either she stays out of the way, or you will have to stop being a real Dad.

Mercifully, secular courts don’t agree that inflicting physical wounds is an acceptable part of parenting. Hana’s parents have been convicted for her death at their hands and will be sentenced in October. Their seven biological children and adopted son—they had also adopted a boy from Ethiopia ironically named Immanuel, meaning “God is with us”— are now safe from their abuse. It is noteworthy, though, that American children are being made safer by secular institutions, not adherence to ancient texts and traditions.

Child protections have become established in most countries, and conversations about child-friendly religion are gaining ground. Even so, many children are subject to patriarchalgroups that take parenting priorities from the Iron Age. Evangelical Christians, fearing that their religion is losing ground, have ramped up recruiting activities targeting high school and college students but also young children. Their tool bag includes afternoon club programs and enticing camps. Some churches, like that of TV’s Duggar family, promote a high birth rate, adding young sheep to the fold the old fashioned way. Many churches encourage members—even those who already have numerous children—to adopt.

Kathryn Joyce’s book, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption exposes Evangelical ministries that have resorted to even lies and bribes to pursue their mission of getting children into good Christian homes. A more common criticism is that Evangelical adoption priorities fuel construction of aid-dependent orphanages rather than addressing the underlying systemic issues that cause maternal destitution and death, leaving children parentless.

Many Evangelical families provide a balance of love and structure and moderate discipline that helps kids thrive. But even well intentioned and loving parents can be thrown off by a church or books that hold up spare the rod, spoil the child as advice from God. When parenting practices derive literally from the Iron Age texts of Bible, the price can be enormous.

As a child, M. Dolon Hickmon collected bits he’d heard in sermons and adult conversations, trying to understand his fear and hurt. Ultimately he decided the fault lay in himself:

Here are the messages I gleaned from the church of my childhood: that beating children is acceptable—good for them, in fact; bruises and welts are of little consequence; that fear is desirable, as is pained screaming and broken sobbing. I’d heard that kids were to be whipped for the least act of disobedience, with belts and sticks and plastic racecar tracks; on bare skin, and as often as an adult thought was necessary.

A child abuser, on the other hand, is someone who doesn’t love you. A parent who never gives hugs because he is angry all the time. A child abuser is a drinker, a druggie, or at best some kind of wild animal. An abuser has no reasons or explanations. He just burns kids with cigarettes and gives them broken arms.

My abuser loved me and hugged me, and he overflowed with explanations. I once got an hour-long lesson on disobedience for leaving a crayon on the floor. While the belt clapped with the measured rhythms of chopping firewood, I struggled to commit verses to memory and to answer quizzes on the metaphysical meanings of the word honor in scripture. . . .

I tolerated being degraded, because that was what I thought a Christian child was supposed to do.

Children generally have a hard time protecting themselves from abusive caregivers. Children who are made to believe that God is on the side of the abuser and that they deserve to suffer are all the more unable to fend off physical and psychological wounds. To quote Pat Benetar’s song “Hell is for Children,” love and pain become one and the same in the eyes of a wounded child.

As of late, critics have been raising awareness of the link between certain kinds of religious parenting and abuse. Janet Heimlich, author of Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment, recently founded the Child-Friendly Faith Project, a national nonprofit organization that educates the public about the impact that religious, spiritual, and cultural beliefs and practices have on children.

We now know a great deal about how children flourish and how adults can manage parent-child conflict for positive outcomes. Psychologist Laura Kastner distilled two decades of parenting research into seven basic principles, which provide the structure for her book, Wise-Minded Parenting. When asked to comment on recent tragedies, Kastner suggested that we may have learned a thing or two in the millennia since our sacred texts were written:

Our growing knowledge of child development suggests that authoritative parenting grounded in mutual respect works better in the long run than threats and force. It is a shame that factions among us still support the use of the “rod” when we have abundant evidence that non-violent parental strengths are the key to building success and character.

Tragedies like the death of Hana Williams prompt soul searching. For example, the case has prompted calls for adoption reform. But what shape should reforms take? We cannot exclude prospective parents on the basis of their religious affiliation, nor should we. Many adoptive parents are inspired by their faith to step up and do the hard sustained work of loving and raising orphaned children despite their special needs and challenges.

And yet beliefs matter. They can override compassion and common sense, as Hickmon’s experience so clearly shows. Encircled by like-minded believers, parents and children may get little exposure to outside parenting practices. This means that religious leaders have tremendous power to either cause suffering or to help families develop skills that are grounded in a genuine understanding of child development. As we collectively muddle our way toward a better future, we need to engage in a thoughtful, complicated conversation about parental power and children’s wellbeing, and the positive and negative roles religion can play in finding a balance that helps kids flourish.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of “Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light” and “Deas and Other Imaginings.” Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.
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More Liars for Jesus, Concerning Sex

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Liars For Jesus, Sex

More Liars for Jesus, Concerning Sex
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Why Genesis Is Literally False, But Also Metaphorically False!

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Fundamentalism, Genesis, Metaphor

How Genesis Is Not Only Literally False, But Metaphorically False
Posted by Daniel Fincke
Mary Midgley argues that only the views of fundamentalist literalists are refuted by the fact of evolution:

Appeals to evolution are only damaging to biblical literalism. Certainly the events described inGenesis 1 are not literally compatible with what science (from long before Darwin’s day) tells us about the antiquity of the Earth. But this is not news. The early Christian fathers pointed out that the creation story must be interpreted symbolically, not literally. Its message centres not on the factual details but on gratitude for the intelligible unity of the creation. Later Christian tradition always understood this, even before the historical details began to be questioned.

This argument is so old that I feel justified in simply replying by reiterating the points I made in an old post.I

I made the central argument more clearly in the comments section, so I’ll start by reproducing most of that remark:

just because science-accepting Christians offer to read Genesis only  metaphorically does not exempt them the metaphorical or mythical  meanings from scrutiny.  Just being a myth does not make the ideas  contained within it automatically true.

If this was indeed a book described by God, why is it false both  literally and metaphorically?  Can’t God get his story right?  If he was  divinely writing books why not just be literally true and tell us about  evolution in the Bible?  Why not tell us we emerged through a long  process and because we were naturally selected for different  environments and ways of life than those in which we presently live, we  must take care to  correct for some of our ill-fit cognitive tendencies.   In other words, if this were a divine book it would get these sorts of  facts right.  But it doesn’t.  Because it wasn’t inspired by God it was  dreamed up by ancient people doing the best they could to imagine and  wonder what things were like.

There was nothing wrong with that at the time, but now we’ve moved  past those primitive guesses and we should accept that authorities once  taken to be true simply are not.  That’s not “war” against Christianity  and religion, it’s how reason works.  We abandon ideas and authorities  when they are proven false.

The problem with religion is that it wants to freeze us in the past.   We must forever think of humanity as fallen, even when we realize we’re  just descended from other animals and not from a pristine state of  human perfection in a pristine garden.  We must forever think that pain  comes from a curse when in reality it’s just an adaptive trait that  warns us of danger and it existed long before humans could have ever  sinned.  We must forever think of humans as inherently corrupted by some  ancestor’s sins instead of fundamentally innocent beings who learned a  set of social relationships of cooperation and hierarchy while still  lower order primates and are still struggling to learn the best ways to  take care of our own needs and flourishing while balancing the interests  of our society.

Religion insists we must always freeze our knowledge, we must suspend  our ability to say, “oh, the old religious myths turned out false—we’re  not inherently evil, we’re not to blame for suffering in the world, we  don’t have to mistrust our natural drives as corrupt—just instead see  them as sometimes ill-fit for contemporary society since they evolved in  another time for different needs.”

Religion tries to teach people to defer to ancient authorities who  have no knowledge credentials and to override free, rigorous, and  sincere reassessment of what is good and bad in our nature.  Religion  teaches you that bronze age people’s fantasies are somehow divine  revelations when there is not a single good reason to think so.  They  have no special knowledge that only a God could give them.  They didn’t  give us the theory of quantum mechanics as a gift from the designer of  quantum mechanics.  They don’t seem to know any single fact about that  alleged creator’s world that they couldn’t have made up themselves.  So  why think they got special knowledge from that creator?

It goes on and on and on, Lisa.  There is no good reason to believe.   The Bible is false on every level.  The legal code it gives is repulsive  barbarism and the antithesis of the democracy I believe is just and  enlightened.  The genocides of the Old Testament are the height of  immorality.  They’re indistinguishable in their evil from the actions of  Hitler.  There are commands to slaughter men, women, infants, to rip  open the wombs of pregnant women.  It’s pure corruption and no sign of  divine wisdom.  It took a turn away from faith to Enlightenment to get  the democratic institutions and scientific advancements that make  possible an egalitarian society and technological power to extend  lifespans into the 70s and to create powerful means of creating and  communicating.  Faith doesn’t do these things.  It freezes knowledge in  the past, it teaches us to hate our human nature as fallen, and it  opposes the spirit of free, secular society.  And in all these ways, it  represents an obstacle to people’s free reason and rational decisions  about ethics.

And:

the non-literal reading of Genesis is just as false as the  metaphorical one.  When religious people argue that the Garden of Eden  story is unaffected by scientific knowledge they ignore the fact that  the Eden myth asserts an initial state of perfection from which we have  fallen because of a sin.  But that’s not “metaphorically” or  “mythically” true.  Our ancestors were (1) not even better human beings  than us, let alone “metaphorically perfect” humans, in fact they were  “lesser” evolved than we are socially, culturally, morally, and  physically—pretty much by every standard we have for judging human  excellence, (2) they did not incur pain on the universe, either  literally or metaphorically, since it already preexisted our arrival by  millions of years, and (3) our tendencies towards ethical failings and  our sufferings are not punishments for any sins (“original” ones or  otherwise, either literally or metaphorically) but are in fact  explicable in terms of both the precision and imprecision of complex  sets of strategies for social and environmental success that proved most  benefiical to our survival.  Similarly our intellectual shortcomings  have everything to do with an evolutionary necessity for making  judgments of a local kind coupled with an evolutionary indifference to  judgments of highly precise theoretical kind.

In other words, an evolutionary understanding of primeval history  exposes not only that the Genesis story is not literally true but that  its mythically presented propositional claims that pain in the universe  is connected to moral failing, that moral failing is a punishment for a  sin, that the need to work and for women to suffer excruciatingly during  child birth are both owed to matters that are our faults, and that  humanity was initially better off than we are now are, are all flat out false.

And finally I want to repost two superb videos that add much, much more to those points I just made.  The first points out the falsehood, both literal and metaphorical, of Eden myths and the points out the harmful consequences of such thinking.

embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt And start Christopher Hitchens’s brilliant speech below (maybe my favorite of his) and think about whether the scientific picture of reality he presents is one that we were made in the image of God by a benevolent personal God who selected the ancient Israelites to reveal himself to us and to provide us with our morality:

embedded by Embedded Video

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The Mafia Has Higher Standards Than the Catholic Church

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Catholic Church, Mafia

Non-theistic State Senator Says the Mafia Has Higher Standards Than the Catholic Church
By Hemant Mehta
Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers is one unique politician. After being the longest-serving senator in the state’s history (serving for 38 years, starting in 1970), he was term-limited out and left office in 2008. This past November, he was eligible to run for office again and took advantage of that opportunity, winning his race fairly comfortably.

Chambers 

Chambers is one of the few non-theistic, high-ranking politicians in the country. He’s also African-American and a powerhouse legislator.

He’s making headlines again for filibustering a bill that would “expand a prison work program.”

How is that news? Well, his filibuster included lots of unrelated remarks about religion:

Then, while burning up time trying to talk [Sen. Mark] Christensen’s bill to death, Chambers talked about attending a fundamentalist church where, as a child, he claimed children were terrorized and made to feel they were headed for Hell. He called Bible stories “fairy tales” that he outgrew.

Chambers sounded more like a preacher — albeit an unconventional and blasphemous one — than a senator, but he blamed the Legislature for that, too, noting that the body “invites religion into the chamber every morning” with a prayer. He said preachers who enter the legislative chambers are entering “my territory” to “do their damage.” He accused senators of not heeding those preachers’ calls to “do the right thing,” which he said “brings condemnation on you.”

While on the subject of Christianity, Chambers noted that Jesus “looked more like me than you all.” Despite his claims he doesn’t believe in God (though he sued God once), Chambers demonstrated that he knows the Bible (which he derisively calls the “Holly Bibel”) well, telling his fellow senators that you can judge a society by how it treats its children, elderly and enemies.

…

Finally, Chambers said the Mafia has higher standards than the Catholic Church hierarchy because if their members were “raping children, they’d off them.”

After three hours of talking on Wednesday, the Legislature closed up shop for the day. But Chambers is expected to continue where he left off this Monday.

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It Can Be Confusing to Find the One True Religion

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Brain Damage, God, Gods, Religion

It Can Be Confusing to Find the One True Religion
Many of God’s Rules Are Contradictory.  Help Us Lord!
 
— by Gad Saad, Ph.D.
 
 

I have often had conversations with religious people about their utter convictions that their religious narrative is THE correct one (as opposed to the narratives stemming from the other 9,999 religions).  Usually, the response is one that defines the meaning of a tautology:  “I know that it is the true narrative because my religion is the revealed truth.” Nice!

Suppose that a Martian had moved to Earth recently.  He is shopping for the one true religion.  Let’s see where this exploration takes him.  As a logical and rational Martian, he begins by asking a few basic questions to get the ball rolling.

Can I drink alcohol?  It depends on who the true God is.

Can I eat prosciutto?  It depends on who the true God is.

Can I eat some fried rice with shrimps?  It depends on who the true God is.

Can I listen to music?  It depends on who the true God is.

Can I turn on the computer to work on Saturday?  It depends on who the true God is.

Can I have more than one wife?  It depends on who the true God is.

Can I masturbate?  It depends on who the true God is.

How easy is it to obtain a divorce?  It depends on who the true God is.

What should the punishment (if any) be for homosexuality? It depends on who the true God is.

Can one commit suicide?  It depends on who the true God is.

Can I take prescription drugs if I am sick?  It depends on who the true God is.

Are particular animals considered sacred?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is there one God or multiple Gods?  It depends on who the true God(s) is/are.

Does hell exist?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is premarital sex allowed?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is the sun divine?  It depends on who the true God is.

Can I be reincarnated?  It depends on who the true God is.

How should women dress?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is male circumcision a Divine obligation?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is female circumcision a Divine obligation?  It depends on who the true God is.

Has the Messiah revealed himself?  It depends on who the true God is.

Can I buy indulgences to “fast-track” my dead ancestors into Heaven?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is it important to always be aware of where you are standing in relation to the Cardinal directions?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is there a direct representative of God on Earth?  It depends on who the true God is.

Are atheists going to hell?  It depends on who the true God is.

How easy is it for me to join your religion?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is it blasphemous to have a tattoo?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is there such a thing as a sacred river?  It depends on who the true God is.

Should I seek revenge on my enemies?  It depends on who the true God is.

Are we close to Armageddon?  It depends on who the true God is.

Do some souls reside on other planets?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is the wearing of leather shoes prohibited on particular days?  It depends on who the true God is.

Are pilgrimages a Divine obligation?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is apostasy permitted?  It depends on who the true God is.

Is evolution true?  It depends on who the true God is.

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Is Homosexuality an Abomination?

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Homosexuality, Religious Reich, Right Wing

Is Homosexuality an Abomination?

One of the things I like to do here is point out how those who claim to follow the Bible, or whatever holy book you choose, pick and choose the passages that support our chosen beliefs and prejudices.

Right-wing Christians are fond of pointing out, for instance, that homosexuality is a sin because the Bible says so, not because they have a personal problem with the Bible.

And yet they allow their friends and neighbors who choose to do yard work on the Sabbath, to live when they should, according to the Bible, be put to death. The following clip from the West Wing does a fantastic job of making this point.

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Religious Right Pseudo Historian David Barton Claims Few Gun Accidents During Founding Era

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in David Barton, Religious Right Crazies, Sandy Hook

Barton: There Were No Gun Accidents During the Founding Era

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla

Today, Rick Green and David Barton weighed-in on the tragedy at Sandy Hook by laying out not only the standard Religious Right solutions of putting prayer and the Bible back in schools, but also adding a unique suggestion to start arming everyone from early childhood.

Explaining that he began teaching his own kids how to use guns at the age of four, Barton said that people only want to get rid of guns because they are afraid of them, which can be attributed to the fact that they don’t know how to use them.

As such, if everyone had a gun and was taught how to use it from childhood, there would never be any firearm incidents or accidents, just like during the founding era:

That’s what these guys do not see and do not look at; they’re just flat scared of guns.  And the solution to that is exactly what the Founding Fathers said and that is you start teaching kids to use guns when they’re very young because gun accidents are caused by non-familiarity with guns; once you’re familiar with them, you don’t have accidents with them.

I have searched and in the founding era I think I’ve only ever found two gun accidents and everybody was hauling guns back then; you took your guns to church, you were required by state law in some states to take your guns to church.  We didn’t have accidents because everyone was familiar with how to use them.  It’s not being familiar that makes is dangerous.

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THE CHRISTIAN’S BIBLE IS A DRUG STORE | Mark Twain

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Bible, Mark Twain

THE CHRISTIAN’S BIBLE IS A DRUG STORE

Christians bible is a drug store - quotes, mark twain, christians, bible

Mark Twain

The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes…The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession- and take the credit of the correction. During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. the Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.

Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry…..There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.
– “Bible Teaching and Religious Practice,” Europe and Elsewhere

Anti-Science Mormon Kook Glenn Beck Declares The Earth Is 7,000 Years Old

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Anti-Science, Buffoon Glenn Beck, Religious Crazies, Religious Frauds, Religious Nuts, Religious Wankers

Glenn Beck Decides: The Earth Is 7,000 Years Old
Wrestling with a controversial issue
Via:- Charles Johnson
 

Following Marco Rubio’s comments about the age of the Earth (“I’m not a scientist, man”), it’s been tragically hilarious — and sadly revealing — to watch the entire right wing wrestle with the issue.

Here’s Glenn Beck and his crew struggling to figure out whether the Bible actually gives an age for the Earth, because of course that would be the true age, never mind what those secular elitist eggheads think, they’re going to hell anyway.

Beck eventually decides that since each day for God equals 1,000 years, and God created the universe in 7 days, that must mean the Earth is 7,000 years old.

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One Less Religious Charlatan | Callous Christian Apocalyptic Conman Grant Geoffrey Dead

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Antichrist Hysteria, Christian Hucksters, End Times Charlatans, Religious Frauds, Religious Money Racket, Religious Racketeers

One Less Religious Charlatan | Callous Christian Apocalyptic Conman Grant Geoffrey Dead
Christian Apocalyptic Paperback Author Grant Jeffrey Has Died
‎Thanks to:-  Richard Bartholomew

Jim Fletcher reports at WND:

Grant Jeffrey, the Canadian teacher who took the marketing of Bible prophecy to new and unprecedented heights, has passed away. He was 63.

Jeffrey entered full-time ministry in 1988, with his wife, Kaye. Jeffrey’s communication skills quickly gained the attention of the public, and he launched Frontier Research Publications, a publishing arm that allowed him independence in distributing his message. He also worked with several mainstream publishers, including WaterBrook, HarperCollins, Zondervan, Word, and Tyndale House.

A thorough researcher, Jeffrey would go on to write 27 books, which have sold seven million copies, and have been printed in 24 languages.

In fact, Jeffrey never marketed “Bible prophecy”; instead, he used Bible prophecy to market a farrago of fear-mongering conspiracy theories, subjecting Biblical texts to the most egregious eisegesis. His books include The Signature of God: Astonishing Bible Codes Reveal September 11 Terror Attacks (“Remarkable new computer discoveries from the Bible Codes reveal astonishing details about the September 11 Islamic terrorist attack on America that were encoded in Hebrew text thousands of years ago”); The Next World War: What Prophecy Reveals about Extreme Islam and the West (“How Russia and extreme Islam will launch World War III”); and Millennium Meltdown: Spiritual and Practical Strategies to Survive Y2K (“explores the potential of the disastrous Year 2000 computer meltdown that will set the stage for the rise of the world government of the Antichrist” – Jeffrey attempted to justify his scaremongering in January 2000). Last year, he brought out The Global-Warming Deception (“How a secret elite plans to bankrupt America and steal your freedom”).

In 2009, Jeffrey bizarrely shared top billing at a rally with Karl Rove. Fletcher’s article includes statements of appreciation from his peers: Hal Lindsey (whose books, we should remember, include The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon), William T. “Terry” James of Rapture Ready, and Bob Ulrich of Prophecy in the News. According to Ulrich:

“If Hal Lindsey’s ‘Late Great Planet Earth’ defined the prophetic landscape for the 80s and this generation, Grant Jeffrey took things to a whole new level. Heralding the pre-millennial revival, Grant perfected the art of the prophecy book in a way no one ever did before. Spectacular new discoveries; cutting edge research; timely subjects that were on the minds of the public – there was no end to the excitement he created…”

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Is The Bible More Violent Than The Koran?

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Bible Violence

999-159

Dark passages

Does the harsh language in the Koran explain Islamic violence? Don’t answer till you’ve taken a look inside the Bible

By Philip Jenkins

WE HAVE A good idea what was passing through the minds of the Sept. 11 hijackers as they made their way to the airports.

Their Al Qaeda handlers had instructed them to meditate on al-Tawba and Anfal, two lengthy suras from the Koran, the holy scripture of Islam. The passages make for harrowing reading. God promises to “cast terror into the hearts of those who are bent on denying the truth; strike, then, their necks!” (Koran 8.12). God instructs his Muslim followers to kill unbelievers, to capture them, to ambush them (Koran 9.5). Everything contributes to advancing the holy goal: “Strike terror into God’s enemies, and your enemies” (Koran 8.60). Perhaps in their final moments, the hijackers took refuge in these words, in which God lauds acts of terror and massacre.

On a much lesser scale, others have used the words of the Koran to sanction violence. Even in cases of domestic violence and honor killing, perpetrators can find passages that seem to justify brutal acts (Koran 4.34).

Citing examples such as these, some Westerners argue that the Muslim scriptures themselves inspire terrorism, and drive violent jihad. Evangelist Franklin Graham has described his horror on finding so many Koranic passages that command the killing of infidels: the Koran, he thinks, “preaches violence.” Prominent conservatives Paul Weyrich and William Lind argued that “Islam is, quite simply, a religion of war,” and urged that Muslims be encouraged to leave US soil. Today, Dutch politician Geert Wilders faces trial for his film “Fitna,” in which he demands that the Koran be suppressed as the modern-day equivalent to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

Even Westerners who have never opened the book  – especially such people, perhaps  – assume that the Koran is filled with calls for militarism and murder, and that those texts shape Islam.

Unconsciously, perhaps, many Christians consider Islam to be a kind of dark shadow of their own faith, with the ugly words of the Koran standing in absolute contrast to the scriptures they themselves cherish. In the minds of ordinary Christians  – and Jews  – the Koran teaches savagery and warfare, while the Bible offers a message of love, forgiveness, and charity. For the prophet Micah, God’s commands to his people are summarized in the words “act justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Christians recall the words of the dying Jesus: “Father, forgive them: they know not what they do.”

But in terms of ordering violence and bloodshed, any simplistic claim about the superiority of the Bible to the Koran would be wildly wrong. In fact, the Bible overflows with “texts of terror,” to borrow a phrase coined by the American theologian Phyllis Trible. The Bible contains far more verses praising or urging bloodshed than does the Koran, and biblical violence is often far more extreme, and marked by more indiscriminate savagery. The Koran often urges believers to fight, yet it also commands that enemies be shown mercy when they surrender. Some frightful portions of the Bible, by contrast, go much further in ordering the total extermination of enemies, of whole families and races  – of men, women, and children, and even their livestock, with no quarter granted. One cherished psalm (137) begins with the lovely line, “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept”; it ends by blessing anyone who would seize Babylon’s infants and smash their skulls against the rocks.

To say that terrorists can find religious texts to justify their acts does not mean that their violence actually grows from those scriptural roots. Indeed, such an assumption itself is based on the crude fundamentalist formulation that everything in a given religion must somehow be authorized in scripture. The difference between the Bible and the Koran is not that one book teaches love while the other proclaims warfare and terrorism, rather it is a matter of how the works are read. Yes, the Koran has been ransacked to supply texts authorizing murder, but so has the Bible

If Christians or Jews want to point to violent parts of the Koran and suggest that those elements taint the whole religion, they open themselves to the obvious question: what about their own faiths? If the founding text shapes the whole religion, then Judaism and Christianity deserve the utmost condemnation as religions of savagery. Of course, they are no such thing; nor is Islam.

But the implications run still deeper. All faiths contain within them some elements that are considered disturbing or unacceptable to modern eyes; all must confront the problem of absorbing and reconciling those troubling texts or doctrines. In some cases, religions evolve to the point where the ugly texts so fade into obscurity that ordinary believers scarcely acknowledge their existence, or at least deny them the slightest authority in the modern world. In other cases, the troubling words remain dormant, but can return to life in conditions of extreme stress and conflict. Texts, like people, can live or die. This whole process of forgetting and remembering, of growing beyond the harsh words found in a text, is one of the critical questions that all religions must learn to address.

Faithful Muslims believe that the Koran is the inspired word of God, delivered verbatim through the prophet Mohammed. Non-Muslims, of course, see the text as the work of human hands, whether of Mohammed himself or of schools of his early followers. But whichever view we take, the Koran as it stands claims to speak in God’s voice. That is one of the great differences between the Bible and the Koran. Even for dedicated fundamentalists, inspired Bible passages come through the pen of a venerated historical individual, whether it’s the Prophet Isaiah or the Apostle Paul, and that leaves open some chance of blaming embarrassing views on that person’s own prejudices. The Koran gives no such option: For believers, every word in the text  – however horrendous a passage may sound to modern ears  – came directly from God.

We don’t have to range too far to find passages that horrify. The Koran warns, “Those who make war against God and his apostle . . . shall be put to death or crucified” (Koran 5.33). Other passages are equally threatening, though they usually have to be wrenched out of context to achieve this effect. One text from Sura (Chapter) 47 begins “O true believers, when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads.”

But in such matters, the Bible too has plenty of passages that read painfully today. Tales of war and assassination pervade the four books of Samuel and Kings, where it is hard to avoid verses justifying the destruction of God’s enemies. In a standard English translation of the Old Testament, the words “war” and “battle” each occur more than 300 times, not to mention all the bindings, beheadings, and rapes.

The richest harvest of gore comes from the books that tell the story of the Children of Israel after their escape from Egypt, as they take over their new land in Canaan. These events are foreshadowed in the book of Deuteronomy, in which God proclaims “I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh” (Deut. 32:42). We then turn to the full orgy of militarism, enslavement, and race war in the Books of Joshua and Judges. Moses himself reputedly authorized this campaign when he told his followers that, once they reached Canaan, they must annihilate all the peoples they find in the cities specially reserved for them (Deut. 20: 16-18).

Joshua, Moses’s successor, proves an apt pupil. When he conquers the city of Ai, God commands that he take away the livestock and the loot, while altogether exterminating the inhabitants, and he duly does this (Joshua 8). When he defeats and captures five kings, he murders his prisoners of war, either by hanging or crucifixion. (Joshua 10). Nor is there any suggestion that the Canaanites and their kin were targeted for destruction because they were uniquely evil or treacherous: They happened to be on the wrong land at the wrong time. And Joshua himself was by no means alone. In Judges again, other stories tell of the complete extermination of tribes with the deliberate goal of ending their genetic lines.

In modern times, we would call this genocide. If the forces of Joshua and his successor judges committed their acts in the modern world, then observers would not hesitate to speak of war crimes. They would draw comparisons with the notorious guerrilla armies of Uganda and the Congo, groups like the appalling Lord’s Resistance Army. By comparison, the Koranic rules of war were, by the standards of their time, quite civilized. Mohammed wanted to win over his enemies, not slaughter them.

Not only do the Israelites in the Bible commit repeated acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing, but they do so under direct divine command. According to the first book of Samuel, God orders King Saul to strike at the Amalekite people, killing every man, woman, and child, and even wiping out their livestock (1 Samuel 15:2-3). And it is this final detail that proves Saul’s undoing, as he keeps some of the animals, and thereby earns a scolding from the prophet Samuel. Fortunately, Saul repents, and symbolizes his regrets by dismembering the captured enemy king. Morality triumphs.

The Bible also alleges divine approval of racism and segregation. If you had to choose the single biblical story that most conspicuously outrages modern sentiment, it might well be the tale of Phinehas, a story that remains unknown to most Christian readers today (Numbers 25: 1-15). The story begins when the children of Israel are threatened by a plague. Phinehas, however, shrewdly identifies the cause of God’s anger: God is outraged at the fact that a Hebrew man has found a wife among the people of Midian, and through her has imported an alien religion. Phinehas slaughters the offending couple  – and, mollified, God ends the plague and blesses Phinehas and his descendants. Modern American racists love this passage. In 1990, Richard Kelly Hoskins used the story as the basis for his manifesto “Vigilantes of Christendom.” Hoskins advocated the creation of a new order of militant white supremacists, the Phineas Priesthood, and since then a number of groups have assumed this title, claiming Phinehas as the justification for terrorist attacks on mixed-race couples and abortion clinics.

Modern Christians who believe the Bible offers only a message of love and forgiveness are usually thinking only of the New Testament. Certainly, the New Testament contains far fewer injunctions to kill or segregate. Yet it has its own troublesome passages, especially when the Gospel of John expresses such hostility to the Ioudaioi, a Greek word that usually translates as “Jews.” Ioudaioi plan to stone Jesus, they plot to kill him; in turn, Jesus calls them liars, children of the Devil.

Various authorities approach the word differently: I might prefer, for instance, to interpret it as “followers of the oppressive Judean religious elite,” Or perhaps “Judeans.” But in practice, any reputable translation has to use the simple and familiar word, “Jew,” so that we read about the disciples hiding out after the Crucifixion, huddled in a room that is locked “for fear of the Jews.” So harsh do these words sound to post-Holocaust ears that some churches exclude them from public reading.

Commands to kill, to commit ethnic cleansing, to institutionalize segregation, to hate and fear other races and religions . . . all are in the Bible, and occur with a far greater frequency than in the Koran. At every stage, we can argue what the passages in question mean, and certainly whether they should have any relevance for later ages. But the fact remains that the words are there, and their inclusion in the scripture means that they are, literally, canonized, no less than in the Muslim scripture.

Whether they are used or not depends on wider social attitudes. When America entered the First World War, for instance, firebrand preachers drew heavily on Jesus’ warning that he came not to bring peace, but a sword. As it stands, that is not much of a text of terror, but if one is searching desperately for a weapon-related verse, it will serve to justify what people are going to do anyway

Interpretation is all, and that changes over time. Religions have their core values, their non-negotiable truths, but they also surround themselves with many stories not essential to the message. Any religion that exists over long eras absorbs many of the ideas and beliefs of the community in which it finds itself, and reflects those in its writings. Over time, thinkers and theologians reject or underplay those doctrines and texts that contradict the underlying principles of the faith as it develops. However strong the textual traditions justifying war and conflict, believers come instead to stress love and justice. Of course Muslim societies throughout history have engaged in jihad, in holy war, and have found textual warrant so to do. But over time, other potent strains in the religion moved away from literal warfare. However strong the calls to jihad, struggle, in Islamic thought, the hugely influential Sufi orders taught that the real struggle was the inner battle to control one’s sinful human instincts, and this mattered vastly more than any pathetic clash of swords and spears. The Greater Jihad is one fought in the soul.

Often, such reforming thinkers are so successful that the troublesome words fade utterly from popular consciousness, even among believers who think of themselves as true fundamentalists. Most Christian and Jewish believers, even those who are moderately literate in scriptural terms, read their own texts extraordinarily selectively. How many Christian preachers would today find spiritual sustenance in Joshua’s massacres? How many American Christians know that the New Testament demands that women cover their hair, at least in church settings, and that Paul’s Epistles include more detailed rules on the subject than anything written in the Koran? This kind of holy amnesia is a basic component of religious development. It does not imply rejecting scriptures, but rather reading them in the total context of the religion as it progresses through history.

Alternatively, one can choose to deny that historical experience, and seize on any available word or verse that authorizes the violence that is already taking place  – but once someone has decided to do that, it scarcely matters what the text actually says.

Philip Jenkins teaches at Penn State University. He is the author of “The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia — and How It Died.”

 

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The False Equation: Religion Equals Morality

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Anti-Reason, Atheists, Atheists Are Smarter, Cowering to Superstition, David Cameron is an idiot, Freedom From Religion, Neo-Con, Neocon Crazies, Religion Destroys the Brain, Religious Bloviate, Religious Delusion, Stupid People, Superstition

The False Equation: Religion Equals Morality

by Gwynne Dyer

In the United States, where it is almost impossible to get elected unless you profess a strong religious faith, it would have passed completely unnoticed. Not one of the hundred US senators ticks the “No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic” box, for example, although 16 percent of the American population do. But it was quite remarkable in Britain.

Last Friday, UK Prime Minister David Cameron urged the Church of England to lead a revival of traditional Christian values to counter the country’s “moral collapse”.Last Friday, in Oxford, Prime Minister David Cameron declared that the United Kingdom is a Christian country “and we should not be afraid to say so.” He was speaking on the 400th anniversary of the King James translation of the Bible, so he had to say something positive about religion – but he went far beyond that.

“The Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today,” he said. “Values and morals we should actively stand up and defend.”

Where to start? The King James Bible was published at the start of a century in which millions of Europeans were killed in religious wars over minor differences of doctrine. Thousands of “witches” were burned at the stake during the 16th century, as were thousands of “heretics”. They have stopped doing that sort of thing in Britain now – but they’ve also stopped reading the Bible. Might there be a connection here?

Besides, what Cameron said is just not true. In last year’s British Social Attitudes Survey, conducted annually by the National Center for Social Research, only 43 percent of 4,000 British people interviewed said they were Christian, while 51 percent said they had “no religion.” Among young people, some two-thirds are non-believers.

Mind you, the official census numbers from 2001 say that 73 percent of British people identify themselves as “Christian”. However, this is probably due to a leading question on the census form. “What is your religion?” it asks, which seems to assume that you must have one – especially since it follows a section on ethnic origins, and we all have those.

So a lot of people put down Christian just because that is the ancestral religion of their family. Make the question more neutral – “Are you religious? If so, what is your religion?” –and the result would probably be very different. There were attempts to get that more neutral question onto the 2011 census form, but the churches lobbied frantically against it. They are feeling marginalized enough as it is.

Why would David Cameron proclaim the virtues of a Christian Britain that no longer exists? He is no religious fanatic; he describes himself as a “committed” but only “vaguely practicing” Christian.

You’d think that if he really believed in a God who scrutinizes his every thought and deed, and will condemn him to eternal torture in Hell if he doesn’t meet the standard of behavior required, he might be a little less vague about it all. But he doesn’t really believe that he needs religion HIMSELF; he thinks it is a necessary instrument of social control for keeping the lower orders in check.

This is a common belief among those who rule, because they confuse morality with religion. If the common folk do not fear some god (any old god will do), social discipline will collapse and the streets will run with blood. Our homes, our children, even our domestic animals will be violated. Thank god for God.

Just listen to Cameron: “The alternative of moral neutrality should not be an option. You can’t fight something with nothing. If we don’t stand for something, we can’t stand against anything.” The “alternative of moral neutrality”? What he means is that there cannot be moral behavior without religion – so you proles had better go on believing, or we privileged people will be in trouble.

But Cameron already lives in a post-religious country. Half its people say outright that they have no religion, two-thirds of them never attend a religious service, and a mere 8 percent go to church, mosque, synagogue or temple on a weekly basis. Yet the streets are not running with blood.

Indeed, religion may actually be bad for morality. In 2005 Paul Gregory made the case for this in a research paper in the Journal of Religion and Society entitled “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look.”

Sociological gobbledygook, but in a statistical survey of 18 developed democracies, Gregory showed that “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, (venereal disease), teen pregnancy, and abortion.”

Even within the United States, Gregory reported, “the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and Midwest” have markedly worse crime rates and social problems than the relatively secular North-East. Of course, the deeply religious areas are also poorer, so it might just be poverty making people behave so badly. On the other hand, maybe religion causes poverty.

Whatever. The point is that David Cameron, and thousands of other politicians, religious leaders and generals in every country, are effectively saying that my children, and those of all the other millions who have no religion, are morally inferior to those who do. It is insulting and untrue.

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Gwynne Dyer

Gwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years, but he was originally trained as an historian. Born in Newfoundland, he received degrees from Canadian, American and British universities. His latest book, “Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats“, was published in the United States by Oneworld.

10 Signs God Hates Right Wingers

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in American Right, American Superstitions, Bad Religion, Buffoon, Collective Punishment, Conspiracy Theories, Crackpots, Crazy for God, God Crazies, Gullible Christians, Lunatic Fringe, Religion, Religious Crazies

10 Signs God Is Furious With the Right
Whatever disaster strikes, there’s always an upside in
religious rightland, always somebody to point the finger at with glee. Let’s
turn the tables.
September 16, 2011  |
Editor’s note: the following is satire… for the most part.

Why is it that whenever disaster strikes, right-wing religious nuts seem to
have all the fun? Some might say it’s just because they’re sadists, but they
always seem to find the silver lining. 9/11? God’s calling on America to repent!
(No, not for it’s foreign policy, you dummy!) Hurricane Katrina? It was that
darned homosexual parade the organizers forgot to tell anyone about!

Whatever disaster strikes, there’s always an up-side in religious rightland,
always somebody to point the finger at with glee. How come they get all the
fun?

So when the East Coast got a one-two punch last month, earthquake-hurricane
within a few days of one another, it got me thinking. When another hurricane
followed up afterward, it was more than I could bear. And so, I offer you a list
of God’s Top 10 Targets from a
not-so-right-but-possibly-more-righteous point of view.

There are at least three different ways to approach this subject, and we have
examples of all three. First is to identify specific target groups for repeated
offenses—sinners who just won’t mend their ways. Second is to identify
geographic targets for specific offenses—sin city or state, as the case may be.
Third is to identify specific individuals.

1. Republicans, for bearing false witness.

It’s not just one of the Ten Commandments — the Bible has repeated warnings
against slander, false testimony and plain old lying. But Republicans apparently
think that God was talking to somebody else—the exact opposite of their usual
assumption—especially since Barack Obama arrived on the scene. Obama was born in
Kenya, he is a Muslim, he’s a socialist, a Marxist, a fascist, he hates white
people (like his mom and his grandparents), he hangs out with terrorists. It
goes on and on and on.

God has repeatedly told them not to act like this—yet they pay Him no mind.
It’s not just Obama, either. When it comes to science, things get just as bad,
be it evolution, global warming, reproductive health, or gender orientation;
when the science isn’t on their side, the lying and slander take up the slack.
It’s not just that the science is against them, you see. Scientists are
fraudsters; they are always conspiring against God and his people, according to
some of the more whacked out types—like GOP senators, for example. God may have
a great deal of patience, but when folks start trying to drag Him into the mix,
that’s when the earthquakes and hurricanes begin.

2. The Religious Right, for ignoring Jesus on the separation of
church and state.

More than 1,600 years before John Locke and 1,700 years before Thomas
Jefferson weighed in on the subject, Jesus said, “Render therefore unto Caesar
that which is Caesar’s and unto God those things which are God’s.” (What’s more,
he said that, in part, as a way of opting out of a tax revolt!) But the
Religious Right defiantly continues to oppose Him. God’s been extremely patient
with them over the years, but that patience has finally run out, as the most
anti-separationist elements of the Religious Right—known as dominionists—have come increasingly to the fore.

Some might say they’re embarrassing Him personally. Others will say it’s starting to get
really dangerous. Whatever the reason, God’s had enough.

3. The nativist right and the GOP, for a rash of anti-immigrant
laws.

“Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in
the land of Egypt.” Exodus 22:21 could not be clearer—unless, of course, we
switched from the King James Bible to the New International Version: “Do not
mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.”

But for some in the GOP, them’s fightin’ words. All they can think about is
disobeying God. They are positively possessed with the Satanic spirit of
disobedience. It began with Arizona’s SB-1070 last year. And while a number of
states followed Arizona’s lead with anti-immigrant laws of their own, the most
notorious was Alabama, which faced “a
historic outbreak of severe weather” in April.

The same day the law was signed, Alabama’s Episcopal, Methodist and Roman
Catholic churches filed a separate lawsuit, claiming the law unconstitutionally
interferes with their right of religious freedom. Church leaders said the law
“will make it a crime to follow God’s command.” Among other things, the suit
said, “The bishops have reason to fear that administering of religious
sacraments, which are central to the Christian faith, to known undocumented
persons may be criminalized under this law.”  If criminalizing Christian
sacraments isn’t inviting divine retribution, what is?

4. The predatory lending industry and all who enable
them.

There are numerous Bible passages condemning usury. Typical of these is
Exodus 22:25: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do
not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest.” Naturally, the whole of
modern capitalism is built on ignoring a broad reading of this. But predatory
lending is a particularly egregious form of defiance. It’s proved rather costly
to our country as well.

A Wall Street Journal article on December 31, 2007 reported that Ameriquest Mortgage
and Countrywide Financial, two of the largest U.S. mortgage lenders, spent $20.5
million and $8.7 million respectively in political donations, campaign
contributions, and lobbying activities between 2002 and 2006 in order to defeat
anti-predatory lending legislation. Such practices contributed significantly to
the financial crisis that plunged us into the Great Recession. But it seems that
wasn’t a clear enough lesson, especially since those who lobbied most intensely
benefited most from the bailouts as well, according to an IMF
study. So earthquakes and hurricanes are an old school, Old Testament way
for God to make his point.

5. The GOP, for its contempt for the poor.

For more than half a century, the GOP has attacked Democrats and liberals for
their concern for the poor. At least since the 1980s, the neo-liberal wing of
the Democratic Party has tried to distance themselves from the poor, and
reposition the party as defenders of the middle class, instead. The GOP has
responded with policies to impoverish the middle class as well, so that they can
be safely demonized, too.

But the GOP’s venom for all but the wealthy has reached new heights during
the Great Recession. Not only should those who caused the crisis be taken care
of while all others suffer—far too many national Democratic politicians seem to
agree on that one—but a renewed rhetoric of contempt for the poor has emerged,
in direct contradiction to what Jesus said, in Luke 6:20: “Blessed are you who
are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

Increasingly, it seems, Republicans don’t think poor people are even
human. In January 2010, South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Baurer (R) compared poor people to stray animals: He told an audience
that his grandmother told him “as a small child to quit feeding stray animals.
You know why? Because they breed.” He compared this to government assistance,
which he said is “facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person
ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too
much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail
that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.” Then, in early August,
Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning, the frontrunner for the GOP senate
nomination, compared poor people to scavenging racoons. Talk like that is
what causes earthquakes and hurricanes.

6. Privatized public utilities, for the worship of
Mammon.

Public utilities are natural monopolies, totally unsuited to private
enterprise, since there is no competitive marketplace. This, of course, makes
them perfect targets for monopoly capitalists—Mammon’s greatest worshipers.

Against them, God struck a mighty blow. In Mansfield, Massachusetts, which
has had its own municipal power service since 1903, electrical service was
restored for most customers within 24 hours after Irene hit, even though 4,000
out of 9,500 households had lost power—quite unlike what happened to nearby
communities served by a commercial outfit. According to a local report, the storm “uprooted old trees and knocked down
utility lines all over town.”

“Unlike homes and businesses in Easton, Norton and Foxboro, however, local
customers did not have to wait for National Grid to respond with crews or listen
to a recording on the telephone…. [M]uch of Easton waited three days for power
to return and areas of communities such as Foxboro are still in the dark.”
According to another report, about Foxborough, “The outrage expressed… is
similar to the movie Network in the scene where people flung open their windows
and said, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.’”

Then there are a couple of geographically specific targets:

7. Virginia.

Virginia was the site of the earthquake’s epicenter and the second state
where Irene made landfall, so the state is a target-rich environment.

There’s House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. On God’s bulls-eye scale, the
epicenter near Mineral, Virginia is in Cantor’s district—a direct hit. And in
budget negotiations this year, Cantor’s contempt for the poor came through loud
and clear. He’s been the most aggressive congressional leader when it comes to
budget-cutting and pushing the economy as hard as possible over the cliff. Then,
after the earthquake hit, Cantor said any federal relief would have to be offset
with spending cuts, and quipped, “Obviously, the problem is that people in
Virginia don’t have earthquake insurance.” He reiterated his demand for offsetting cuts when Hurricane Irene hit shortly
afterward—even though he voted against such a provision after Tropical Storm Gaston hit
the Richmond area in 2004.

Then there’s Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. No way he escapes
God’s wrath. Cuccinelli’s widely criticized witch-hunt against eminent climate scientist Michael Mann
represents the most extreme right-wing attack on the mythical “climate-gate”
scandal, which consisted primarily of scientists making snide remarks about
ignoramuses like Cuccinelli. He’s all wrapped up in sin of bearing false
witness. Which is where Hurricane Irene comes in—although it surely doesn’t help
that Cuccinelli is suing to keep people sick, and has told Virginia’s colleges
and universities that they can’t ban anti-gay discrimination.

And, of course, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell has tried to have it both
ways with God, as well as with the people of Virginia. On the one hand, all the
way back in 1989, he wrote a Christian Reconstructionist M.A. thesis, “The
Republican Party’s Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade” at
the College of Law at Pat Robertson’s Regent University. McDonnell’s authorship
of the thesis came to light during his 2009 campaign for governor, but because
the establishment is in deep denial about Dominionism in general, and Christian Reconstructionism in
particular, the full weight of his thesis never really sunk in. On the other
hand, McDonnell has tried very assiduously to walk away from that past, given
that almost no one wants to admit to such extreme views. He’s wobbled back and forth on a number of issues, but generally
tried to strike a reasonable demeanor—in sharp contrast to Cuccinelli. But God
doesn’t like folks who run hot and cold, which is why McDonnell’s a target,
too.

Finally, just to be a wee bit bipartisan about it, we need to include
Virginia’s Democratic Senator Mark Warner in our list—though with a bit of
twist. On the day of the earthquake, Warner was scheduled to speak at the
Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpepper,
Virginia. He arrived about 10 minutes after the quake, according to the local Star Exponent, which reported:

The building had been emptied of its staff and the approximate 75 people who
came to hear Warner so the former governor talked from under a tree atop Mount
Pony.

“I was not going to mention the fact that one of the last times I was in
Culpeper there was a tornado,” he said of an appearance years ago at
CulpeperFest marked by wild weather. “If you don’t want me to come back, there’s
an easier way to do this. If we start seeing frogs, it may be a sign of things
to come,” he said.

So it’s not that God is angry with Warner, exactly. He just targets Warner
for amusement, to see what he’ll say next. And, of course, because he, too,
represents Virginia, truly a state of sin.

8. North Carolina.

Hurricane Irene could have barreled directly into South Carolina, but it
delivered a stiff upper-cut to North Carolina instead. And why not? Governor Bev
Perdue tried her darnedest to protect the state. She vetoed its draconian budget
bill, only to see her veto over-ridden. It too was an attack on the poor — the bill
didn’t just fail to balance spending cuts with tax increases, it actually let a
temporary one-cent sales tax expire, along with some income taxes on high
earners, while cutting $124 million in local education funding on top of $305
million cut in previous years. Perdue also vetoed a highly restrictive abortion
law—one that, among other things, has a 24-hour waiting period, and force-feeds
anti-abortion propaganda to women seeking an abortion—call it the “Bearing False
Witness By Doctors Act.” But that veto was over-ridden as well—by a single vote in the
state senate. So, really, God’s hand was forced on this one. He had no choice
but to strike North Carolina, and strike it hard.

Finally, there are two individual targets to consider:

9. Rick Perry.

While the one-two punch of the Virginia earthquake and Hurricane Irene were
far removed from Texas Governor Rick Perry’s stomping grounds, God had not
forgotten Perry, but was merely preparing to toy with him. Perry, after all, had
responded to a terrible drought in Texas not by implementing any long-term
policy measures (which might make Texas better able to deal with the prospects
of more severe droughts to come as global warming impacts increase), but by
calling on Texans to pray.

Back in April, Perry proclaimed the “three-day period from Friday, April 22,
2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of
Texas.” Since then, however, things have only gotten worse, as Timothy Egan noted in the NY Times “Opinionator”
blog, “[A] rainless spring was followed by a rainless summer. July was the
hottest month in recorded Texas history….Nearly all of Texas  is now in
‘extreme or exceptional’ drought, as classified by federal meteorologists, the
worst in Texas history. Lakes have disappeared. Creeks are phantoms, the caked
bottoms littered with rotting, dead fish.”

Somehow, though, it seemed like most folks outside of Texas had no idea of
Perry’s failed prayer initiative. That’s where God came in, following up Irene
with the tantalizing prospect of a Gulf of Mexico storm that would finally bring
relief to the Longhorn state. But alas no. First Tropical Storm Jose petered out
entirely, then Tropical Storm Lee turned to Louisiana instead. If you pray with
Perry, you obviously take the Lord’s name in vain. As one frustrated Texan wrote on Reddit, “Perry’s prayer has been answered. The answer
was ‘No’.” God is making things perfectly clear, as Richard Nixon would say: If
you want someone praying for America in the White House, Rick Perry is not your
guy.

10 God.

Yes, it’s true, God Himself was one of the main targets of God’s wrath,
particularly during the earthquake, which did remarkably little damage to the
living. But, as Rob Kerby noted at BeliefNet, churches took some pretty hard hits:

“Churches seemed to bear the brunt of Tuesday’s 5.8 earthquake on the East
Coast.

“Significant damage was reported to Washington, D.C.’s National Cathedral and
St. Peter’s Catholic Church, historic St. Patrick’s Church near Baltimore, and
two churches in Culpepper, Va., close to the epicenter — St. Stephen Episcopal
Church and Culpepper Christian Assembly.”

Okay, so maybe God’s not self-flagellating. Maybe it’s the tenants who are
being targeted. But who’s to say, really? And if the God’s wrath biz is all
about appropriating authority to cast blame around, then why not think really
big, and proclaim God Himself to be the target? Pat Robertson & company have
monopolized this gig for far too long. If the rest of us are to have any hope of
catching up, we’re got to make ourselves a splash. And what better way to make a
splash than proclaiming that God is the target?

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