The Indigestible

Well, one so far. But I’ve a hunch there will be others.

This is called Darwinism: The Devil’s Religion. The idea (insipiration is too graceful a word for what I feel when I read a Chick tract) is obvious.

The mini-essay that precedes the actual tract began as introductory comments to sectional posts of the material, but since there’s a common thread running through the subject it was easy to string it together into a coherent statement.

Following the graphics is the tract in PDF. Suitable for printing and distribution.

Hint, hint.

Darwnism: The Devil’s Religion

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.

Us Vs. Them?

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 science is self-correcting. Hoaxes in science are always found out and — usually — quickly 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.

On the Question of Origins

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.

— or —

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

Dawkins’s question is cogent here: Who made God?

It’s Not About Hate

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 useless wars, 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 — and their children — rather than bow to the will of a secular government?

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

As promised, here’s the PDF of the entire tract. Darwinism: The Devil’s Religion (600 KB)

n.b. I updated this a little since posting it earlier today (2 May 2007, revs same day; see the original four posts in the blog proper for the unaltered contents). I added subsection headings and a little more clarification on a couple of points. The “imaginary number” ref quibbled with by Bronze Dog I left intact for context.

I also added outsite links to reference some of my commentary.

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