The Indigestible

The Chick mockery that began last week and was most recently done yesterday concludes here, at least for now.

As a professed atheist I’m sometimes confronted with a question that strikes me as being, on the face of it, silly: Why do you hate God?

I don’t hate God. I just don’t believe there is one.

I don’t hate unicorns, or dragons or Shiva or the Easter Bunny or Allah; I simply don’t believe they exist. My world doesn’t lack wonder, joy or happiness, but when I feel those emotions I don’t also feel a need to attribute them to some kind of Higher Power. Denying something exists does not equal hating it; I can say with perfect equanamity that hydras are mythical beasts. The idea of hate doesn’t enter into the equation, any more than I hate a concept such as the square root of a negative number. I can think about it, sure, but I know that such a thing simply cannot be.

But to someone who believes in a god, the declaration that such an entity doesn’t exist is a direct threat to his point of view; when he hears me say I don’t believe what he does he interprets that as hatred of his ideas and projects that hatred onto the thing of which he’s so fond.

If you believe in a god, then, the denial of that god’s existence feels a lot like hatred.

I don’t hate God, nor do I hate those who believe in God; what I hate is the blind pig ignorance that some people suffer from when the idea of God is brought up.

The fact is that belief in God causes airplanes to fly into buildings. The fact is that belief in God causes the murder of abortion doctors. The fact is that belief in God causes gay-bashing, enables slavery and allows choirboys to be raped.

If this sounds terrible, perhaps we should ask ourselves why we allow an institution to continue committing atrocities — not why we sound so hateful when we sit in judgment of it.

After all, which is obviously worse: A few cartoons on the Internet, or a cadre of believers incinerating themselves rather than bow to the will of a secular government?

You have a brain. For God’s sake, USE IT!

Episode 4: “I sure am glad you stopped me from using the Internet to sin!”

BONUS! For holding out to the end, here’s a gift for you: a PDF of the entire tract. Darwinism: The Devil’s Religion (600 KB)

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Jack Chick mocked yet again, continuing #2, beginning with #1.

One of the eternal questions faced by religion, philosophy and science is where did it all come from?

This is a damned good question and should occupy any thinking person’s mind from time to time. It’s one of those queries that may well never be answered, because we’re within the system that has caused us to be. In order to really understand it in all its complexity, we might have to be entirely beyond it — but the idea of being beyond the entire universe raises another set of equally unanswerable dilemmas.

So we come to the question of probability — or, more accurately, improbability. Which sounds less improbable to you?

1. The cosmos came into existence by a process we don’t entirely understand just yet, but we think that in the first few moments of its emergence most of the laws of physics and matter we consider de rigeur now were somehow coalesced into a reasonably predictable set of steady states. Following those simple rules all the heavier elements past hydrogen fused in the hearts of ancient stars, and some of those elements coalesced into compounds which developed a means to remain internally coherent and, eventually, a way to replicate their patterns with a reasonable degree of verisimilitude. However, the processes involved in that replication were so complex that occasional errors crept in, some of which caused replication failure but most of which had no apparent effect — until the setting changed somehow, forcing certain erroneous patterns into a state of greater success at replication. After several million years of such errors and successes, eventually some of the universe’s elements developed an emergent property called consciousness, contingent entirely upon a niche position in an otherwise entirely-reactive and nonstochastic field. Of course, this current understanding could well change with further iterations of discovery and refinement; science is a lot like a calculus approach to a limit, always working toward complete understanding but always bafflingly, tantalizingly just falling short — which is frustrating to many, but beautiful to some.

2. God did it. Now eat the cracker, drink the wine and stop asking so many questions.

Episode 3: “But a monkey can’t redeem the sins of the world!”

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The Jack Chick sendup started there and continues here.

I find it striking that right-wingers seem to define the entire world in terms of religion; I’ve been accused more than once of making science my “religion”. The notion is foolish in the extreme, of course; religion relies on inerrancy, received Truth and unreasoning appeal to authority.

Science is, of course, imperfect; the history of science is rife with examples of arrogance, willful stupidity and even outright hoaxes. The difference, though, is that hoaxes in science are always quickly found out and debunked. The perpetrators are ridiculed and lose all credibility, and no one takes any of their claims seriously any longer.

Yet we still hear of religious statues weeping tears, or oozing blood, or leaking milk — and even though these are shown to be cheap parlor tricks, still the faithful line up to see the next occurrence, seeking after a miracle to try to affirm something that is ultimately nonsensical.

Think about it. If you really did create the entire universe, wouldn’t you find a better medium to leave a signature than a burn mark in a tortilla? I mean, come on — even Slartibartfast managed to put his face into an entire glacier.

Episode 2: The Unholy Trinity of Science!

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Jack Chick is famous to fundamentalist Christians for creating a library of incredibly narrow-minded tracts which present an almost Jihadist view of right-wing ultra-fundamentalist Christianity.

Everything’s there including paranoia that God will cast you into hell at the drop of a hat; the complete Caucasian-ness of God, Jesus and angels; and of course gargoyle-like aspects on anyone non-Caucasian.

Chick tracts are also easy targets for parody because of their over-the-top batshit lunacy. This is one bandwagon I decided to try on for size. The results follow.

Episode 1: “That man is more dangerous than the Devil!”

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A host of idiots has come crawling to light after the tragedy of Virgina Tech,* most of them making the fatuous claim that some kind of lack of religiosity is the cause of death for 32 humans and one psycho gunman. Pam notes that the most recent in this list is Chuck Norris, who is a sort of poor-man’s prophet, if by “prophet” one means “muscle-headed cretinous extrusion of ignorance”.

Quoth Walker, Texas Fuckwit:

I believe those who wield the baton of the secular progressive agenda bear significant responsibility for the escalation of school shootings. […] If we are ever to restore civility in our land and our schools, we must turn back the clocks to a time when such shocking crimes didn’t even exist - when we valued life and respected one another much more then we do today.

Now this isn’t as bad as suggesting marriage-equality laws in Oregon are the cause, but it’s pretty damn close, and it’s typical of the nattering drivel issuing from the orifices of the goddishly deranged.

The problem is that it’s a load of horseshit. School massacres are actually on the decline in the US, not the rise, and the truly worst one in US history took place in Michigan in 1927 — back when prayer wasn’t simply acceptable in schools, but a required start to each morning’s work.

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So a local columnist in the daily paper, Jim Hinckley, decided to show his ignorance.

To question openly the theory of evolution in this, a modern, enlightened society freed from the superstitions of religion, is little more than a public proclamation of ignorance.

After all, evolution is an established scientific fact. On the other hand, is it?

Yes. Yes, Jim, you public embarrassment. Evolution is an established scientific fact.

One of the primary problems with evolutionary theory is its very foundation.

How did nonliving chemicals become life?

If this were possible, how did a “simple” life form develop into something more complex?

Here Jim just displays his ignorance of, oh I don’t know, perhaps the last 40 years of research, or what “deep time” means. Now I know Jim, or at least I know who he is. He’s old enough to know better than to be silly in this way. But he gets sillier.

Evaluation of what constitutes a “simple” life form even from a naive, unscientific standpoint illuminates the need for an incredible amount of faith to accept evolution as established fact.

Which is bizarre, since his entire article is a clear essay on naivete and unscientific principles, and especially the need for blind, unthinking faith.

Certainly it’s true that we know, for instance, a lot more about the planet Saturn than we do about how proteins collide and curl. But does our ignorance require us to propose a God of the Gaps to explain it all? Hardly. It’s just as rational to suggest that Santa magicked it all from his bag of toys.

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In the face of evidence such as this, still some claim Earth to be flat and our universe to be geocentric. After all, that’s what the Bible proclaims.

The video is of Luna in transit across Sol and it’s stunning. (H/T Stranger Fruit.)

I sometimes think that what really offends the conventionally religious about people who claim godhood is not that it’s blasphemous, but that it exposes, simply and directly, the incredible foolishness of their own beliefs.

When you analyze the claims of most apocalyptic cults, after all, they do tend to say some pretty ridiculous things. Their eschatology is always primitive and literalist, and tends to be utterly convinced of the direhood and imminence of doom.

And the stories spun are just wacky. Bodies churning themselves out of the ground, literally brought back to life — presumably at whatever age they’d been on death — somehow reconstituted back into personhood despite the corruption of mold, bacteria and worms that even the best aldehydes can’t forestall indefinitely.

This literal bodily resurrection myth is one reason a lot of right-wing Einsatzgruppen-ÜberKristians refuse to be organ donors. They think that they have to be buried whole so they’ll be resurrected whole. They believe this in spite of the incontrovertible truth that a being capable of performing a resurrection is probably going to find it pretty fucking easy to replace a kidney.

Beyond that, though, is the uncomfortable messianic trend in all Christianity, a belief inculcated at first by Paul in his attempts to found a new religion, the belief that there really was once a Jesus Christ; and that he came back from being dead in the name of redeeming the sins of all mankind.

See, a major belief in virtually all Christian systems is in the return of their god. Most of them at least claim to believe their god will eventually return — but the hypocrisy they manifest is made obvious when they reject the claims of a man living today who says he is the very god they’ve been awaiting.

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I’m known to lump Christanity and Islam into the same general category, a sort of “pox on both their houses” approach to religion that usually overlooks Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism — mostly because the first two religions are foremost in my mind. Christanity is, after all, the dominant cult in the US, and Islam was shoved blinking and naked onto the US stage in 2001.

Periodically one comes across objections from Christians to the effect that it’s unfair to group their religion with that of Muhammad, usually because:

1. Christianity isn’t violent;

2. At least, not any more;

3. And besides, those guys who bomb abortion clinics and kill doctors are lone nuts;

4. And anyway, it’s not like praying in school or displaying the Decalogue is actually harmful to anyone;

5. Except possibly the minority in the US who aren’t Christian in the first place; but still, why worry, since marginalizing a group based on a given behavior never actually leads to discrimination or harm;

6. Like what happened to Matthew Shepard.

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Of all the Christian and quasi-Christian groups that exist, of all the possible sects one might encounter, I think the Catholic brand remains the most consistently exasperating.

Whether they’re refuting the heliocentric model, torturing Christ into infidels, or buggering acolytes, their particular model of goddishness is at once infuriatingly arrogant and laden with self-righteousness. These guys have had hundreds of years to perfect the art of being smugly wrong, and they are masters at it.

On the other hand they have managed to do — or back — some damned fine things, such as the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Gregor Mendel’s rather significant work in studying inheritance.

Nevertheless, if you want to match empires in terms of protection of human learning and early scientific progress, Islam is well ahead of the game.

Not that I’d like to see a return of Islamic caliphates, mind you; however, I can’t say I like the Catholic trend in fertility much either.

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I present to you an open letter in three parts, a sort of triune epistle issued in the hope that it will save one, just one of you from the trap of self-imposed ignorance that is religion, particularly the fundamentalist type. Following find my notes on “Intelligent Design”, prayer in school, and the mix of religion with politics.

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Actually, this one is true. Herr Ratzi is considering abolishing the idea of limbo, which is a significant theological tenet of Catholic teaching. (It is, among other things, the place that unbaptized souls are said to go, and was the “paradise” that Jesus allegedly was referring to when he supposedly told a fellow victim of the Romans that he’d meet that person there.)

[T]here are those who argue that it is not simply a “hypothesis” that can just be swept aside; that the notion that unbaptised children do not go to heaven has been a fundamental part of Church teaching for hundreds of years.

So if limbo, which is so important to Catholics, is a lie … well, where exactly does this slippery slope end? Transubstantiation? Saints? Virgin birth? Resurrection?

Golly, is it possible the whole thing is based on a silly, pointless fantasy?