The Invisible Library

So, I was reading Pandagon yesterday when I discovered that some really weird folk think Battlestar Galactica is secretly a Mormon recruitment tool[1]. Their evidence? The show makes use of religious imagery and mythology. Which is pretty week as arguments for propaganda go. By this definition, Superman,[2] Star Wars[3] and everything Philip K. Dick[4] ever wrote is also super secret (but right out there in the open) religious propaganda.

Once upon a time, this argument might have applied to the original BSG, which was Mormon mythology dressed up in swank, quilted late seventies space opera. But the new series? Not so much. As Amanda Marcotte pointed out, just because a story derives some of its momentum from popular religious ideas doesn’t automatically mean the creators are promoting that religion. Also, religious pluralism, modern gender roles with women in leadership positions and decidedly secular attitudes towards sex, drinking and drug use don’t exactly scream, “Join The Mormons!” As with any artfully done work of storytelling, it’s not that simple. BSG can’t be broken down into simple declarative statements about its morals and message. It’s a nuanced discussion of various current ideas.

But there is one really obvious way you can tell that BSG isn’t telling it from the mountain: stories told with an ideological agenda are no fun. Whether they are serialized TV dramas, movies, comics or novels, an ideologically driven narrative stands out because the author is selling you a flat pack of easy answers to hard questions. And he (usually it’s a he) is not afraid to beat you silly with the truth stick to make his point[5]. This has some predictable effect on the way the story is told.
(more…)

Greetings to all my Communist Comrades!

Secret handshakes to my Anarchist buddies!

For all you Socialist Workers out there, keep up the good work!

I hope all you Witches had a lovely Walpurgis Night and many happy turns around the May Pole! Think of me whilst you frolic.

It’s a joy to see hundreds of little Catholic School Children twirling around a fertility symbol, all in honor of the Virgin. Wink.

Happy Birthday Ma Sanchez!

Unfortunately, May 1st is The National Day of Prayer, according to the Bush Administration*. Fuckers know how to spoil a good thing, that’s for damn sure.

A holiday about activism and social reform? Not anymore! Now it’s a day to commemorate the absolute, literal least you could possibly do to change anyone’s situation, anywhere.

Razib at Gene Expression has a great post on Christmas and what it means, if anything:

Ed, Greg & PZ have commented on the strange reaction of the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary toward Richard Dawkins’ enthusiasm for Christmas traditions. So “why would an atheist want to sing Christmas carols?”

The same reason that the study and reading of literature has not been reduced to physics. We humans appreciate great stories, and we can conceive in our mind’s eye ideas which may not be true, but we enjoy the play of those ideas nonetheless. One does not have to be a Greek pagan to appreciate the beauty and power of the Iliad, and in fact for centuries pious Christians have been moved by the poems of Homer without acceding to the reality of its relgious vision. For them Homer was not about the Truth of the gods, but the Truth of human experience. We don’t need to appeal to a classical education though, anyone who reads a piece of moving fiction can be emotionally impacted, without entertaining that the narrative is real in a positivistic sense.

Today many Christians complain about a “War against Christmas,” but they might be surprised to know that until recently the soldiers in that war were avowed Christians! During the 1650s the ascendant Puritans in England waged a war against Christmas because of its associations with “Popery” and paganism. The reasoned argument was that Christmas had no Biblical foundation, that was not grounded in Truth, and that a host of practices were obviously extra-Biblical interpolations from the pagan milieu of their ancestors, residue from the age of darkness before the Savior. Politically, the practice of Christmas traditions was a sign that perhaps one was for the Cavalier cause or a recusant Catholic. In the the name of utilitarian economic efficiency these early fundamentalists also abolished most holidays and religious festivals because they had no Biblical grounding, and so were not rooted in Truth, and were a waste of time and without any utility. In may ways I think these early Protestant fundamentalists had much in common with latter day social engineers, such as the Khmer Rouge, who seemed driven by an unnatural and distorted Benthanmite conception of what drives human nature and what gives joy and fullness to our lives.

I believe in human nature. We are not a blank slate into which one can pour in prior values and assume that our lives will be shaped by these exogenous inputs through a chain of necessary propositions. We enjoy good food, music, the company of family, gossip, socialization and the broader succor of our community. These are not social constructions, they are are the core of our humanity, and any belief system or model of human action which neglects these natural impulses will lead us astray. I am not denying flexibility of the parameters, but that flexibility exhibits constraints and stress when deviated from the central tendency.

The whole post is great and hits on several ideas that have been whirring about in my brain for some time. One idea in particular that jumped out at me was his statement that, “anyone who reads a piece of moving fiction can be emotionally impacted, without entertaining that the narrative is real in a positivistic sense.“ This cuts to the heart of the Fundamentalist problem with other narratives, not just the Christmas Story.

(more…)

So, today the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring Christmas and Christians important. Now, one would think, in a nation that is 70% Christian, where there’s a church on every other fucking street corner, this would be superfluous. Guess not. If the 12% of us Agnostics and Atheists scare American Christians that much, simply by our desire to sleep in on Sunday mornings, than your religion isn’t worth shit. Apparently, the very knowledge that some people, maybe living next door or down the street (or in your own house, even!) don’t believe in the same imaginary friend really spooks True Believers. But it’s not persecution. I live in a state that still has Blue Laws. I can’t buy a bottle of wine on Sundays to go with my dinner, like any civilized European or Northerner, yet you’re the one whose oppressed?
(more…)

So, Mitt Romney gave a speech, did you hear? In it, he blathered on, as politicos are want to do, about the importance of religion, and our shared spiritual values and how, so long as we all believe in Jesus, at least a little, than Freedom! Cake! Puppies and kitties! Vote for Romney!

(more…)

On this, the 6010th anniversary of the World’s supposed creation, the Barma Group releases a poll saying that 60% of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis. At least, they say they do. The problem with this and most religious polls is that they suffer from the Halo Effect.

Americans are raised form the time they are toddlers to say they believe in God because Saying You Believe in God is a signifier. It’s like a Galactic Hitchhiker’s towel; if you have a towel, most people will assume you also have a toothbrush, soap, space suit, etc, or had them at one time and simply misplaced them and so will gladly lend you whatever you’re lacking. Say You Believe in God and most Americans will assume, without any evidence, that you are a good and decent human being who sends their mother Birthday cards and is kind to puppies and children.

So, most people say they believe the Bible, Jesus, God or whatever will make you think they are a good person. They tell pollsters what they think they want to hear, not what is true. Truth is, most Americans don’t really believe any of these things. They just say they do. Probably about 20-30% really do believe these things to some degree but if pressed on the matter, will admit that OK, yeah, a talking snake is a little far fetched and maybe Geologists have a point and the Earth is really 4.5 Billion years old but still they Believe! Every other Sunday. For an hour. Maybe an hour and a half if the Sermon runs long.

The fact that + or - 25% of the population still believes this nonsense is anything but bronze age poetry is a problem and means that we nasty, vociferous atheists aren’t being loud enough. Thing is, it doesn’t take much to convince most people. You just have to ask questions gently, get them to think about how absurd religion is, which most people have simply never bothered to do and they’ll come around on their own. That little hard knot of Fundies and True Believers, well, they’re never going to learn, which is why we make fun of them. because it’s easier than breaking your forehead on a brick wall.

Via: PZ at Pharyngula.

Mother Theresa: Atheist:

Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta’s slums, the spirit left Mother Teresa.

“Where is my faith?” she wrote. “Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness… If there be God — please forgive me.”

Eight years later, she was still looking to reclaim her lost faith.

“Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal,” she said.

As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she said, was a mask.

“What do I labor for?” she asked in one letter. “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”

“These are letters that were kept in the archbishop’s house,” the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk told Phillips.

The letters were gathered by Rev. Kolodiejchuk, the priest who’s making the case to the Vatican for Mother Teresa’s proposed sainthood. He said her obvious spiritual torment actually helps her case.

“Now we have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and for me this seems to be the most heroic,” said Rev. Kolodiejchuk. [emphasis added]

Sure, she didn’t really believe in God but she’s really popular so we’re going to make her a saint anyway. Whatever it takes to fill those empty pews. How many other saints didn’t really believe but were appropriated after their death for reasons of marketing and cajoling? Probably about as many as were just invented altogether.

Mother Theresa of course deserves some of the blame. She continued to force feed the poor and sick nonsense that she didn’t even believe, just so she could watch them suffer, to try and jump start her flagging faith.

The only thing worse than sadism wrapped in piety is sadism for it’s own sake.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon makes some keen observations as to why Fundies get so irate over Harry Potter. She touches on a few points I’ve brought up before: that the themes of the Harry Potter books contradict the top-down authority of a Biblical hierarchy, and do so chiefly by demonstrating that rebelling against authority and thinking for yourself is inherently good. But they also fear Harry Potter because they can’t stomach competition. As Amanda puts it:

But mostly, I think that the woman above [in the video clip, which you should watch because it’s a hoot]’s uneasiness with the portrayal of magic and Lev Grossman’s uneasiness with magic that doesn’t explicitly come from god is what, in the end, upsets the religious nuts the most about Harry Potter. For one thing, they admit that outright. But mostly, it’s because fantasy fiction is a threat to religious faith, particularly those faiths that insist on the literal truth of the Bible. Harry Potter doesn’t lay claim to be the truth, yet in many ways, the narrative is much more coherent, cohesive and therefore believable than the Bible’s stories of magic and mystery. Which makes it undeniably obvious that it’s completely possible that someone just made the entire Bible up just as surely as J.K. Rowling made up Hogwarts.

also, for the Biblical literalism crowd, Harry Potter isn’t fantasy. They believe magic is real. In some ways this is a failure on their part to grasp the difference between reality and fiction, but it’s more a side effect of believing that a book of fairy tales is a true depiction of actual events. If you’ve already internalized the necessary logical contradictions needed to believe that a talking snake doomed mankind by offering your great great great to the nth grandma some magical fruit, then you’ve already accepted the idea as a given that magic is real. Sure, Herod called up some ghosts, Giants used to live in the Earth and angels flap their wings overhead. But, more importantly, demons are underfoot, everywhere, and they are really good at convincing you to do things you’ll be sorry about later, like talking back to your father or masturbating or thinking for yourself. And we all know that sort of freewheeling behavior leads to crack smoking, baby sacrifices and midnight graveyard orgies with the Devil. QED, Amen.*

(more…)

William Lobdell, staff reporter for the LA Times, writes about how covering the religion beat for the newspaper cost him his faith. He lobbied hard for the job and then was confronted by an endless parade of child molesting priests, outcast Mormons whose only sin was not being Mormon enough and worst of all, Benny Hinn. It’s a sad story because you see in William Lobdell what you see in a lot of people these days. They desperately want to believe in God as away to give structure and meaning to their lives, to do good deeds and use their faith a s a motivation for creating positive change. But then reality set sin. They see how people let themselves be used by church leaders for the usual pathetic power games, or worse, to cover up and excuse their own twisted, all too human hearts:

On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in the crowd, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, spoke out for the victim.

On Good Friday 2002, I decided I couldn’t belong to the Catholic Church. Though I had spent a year preparing for it, I didn’t go through with the rite of conversion.

I understood that I was witnessing the failure of humans, not God. But in a way, that was the point. I didn’t see these institutions drenched in God’s spirit. Shouldn’t religious organizations, if they were God-inspired and -driven, reflect higher standards than government, corporations and other groups in society?

I found an excuse to skip services that Easter. For the next few months, I attended church only sporadically. Then I stopped going altogether.

Luckily, Mr. Lobdell realized that faith was a crutch propping up institutions that have neither God nor people’s needs in mind, but are just corrupt organizations designed to make money and control the week and desperate. And he walked away. he decided that he didn’t have to be part of that system. It may make it harder to be a force for positive change in the world without an established apparatus with all its infrastructure and support to fall back on but it is still possible. Hopefully, Mr. Lobdell will see that and maybe help us Atheists make some noise and spread some of his hard-won reason and knowledge.

Link via Amanda at Pandagon.

Atheists and rationalists often lament about the increased influence that the dogmatic and religious have in this country and by extension, on the world’s political and social scene. We hear so much about religiosity and it’s discontents with modern civilization, that we think of it as a creeping force to be reckoned with, something to remain ever vigilant against, lest we be dragged kicking and screaming back to the Dark Ages. But a recent report by Gregory Paul & Phil Zuckerman says otherwise.

Their study looked at a number of factors and found that far from the popular claims of a Western World in the grips of a religious rebirth, we are in fact becoming far more secular, faster. And by we, I mean the entire human species, not just the US. The only disappointing news in the whole piece is that the US is moving slower in this regards than everyone else, including China and even Turkey (where one third of the population say that religion is not all that important in their daily life, compared with just over one half here in the US). But just because we’re a little behind in the race to a rational, secular world, it doesn’t mean we aren’t getting there, and faster than the Dominionists would have you believe [emphasis mine]:

(more…)