The Invisible Library

Probably like my grandmother. Still, I don’t know what’s more ridiculous, that the Vatican has issue ten commandments for driving, or that millions of people will follow them just because some guy in a funny hat tells them to. As PZ Myers put it:

Somebody, please explain to me how religion hasn’t already collapsed under the weight of its utterly useless inanity. The Vatican can’t put together a rational policy on contraception, a far more serious problem for the world and to which their beliefs contribute, but they can send out these trivial and irritatingly idiotic suggestions for drivers?

At least now with the Encyclical on Driving out of the way, the Pope can tackle the problem of how the faithful should handle Spam and telemarketers. Truly, faith can work wonders.

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!

In order to reach the conclusion that there is no Limbo, the Pope sent out an official Vatican exploration team, led by a driven, sincere priest who wanted to find out if Limbo was real for personal reasons, to see if his brother, who died as an infant, was there, safe and sound. But after years of plundering heaven, driven mad by his quest, he reached the same conclusion as did Ponce de Leon (and the same fate as Lope de Aguirre): that just because you can imagine something exists, it doesn’t mean it will show up in the real world.

James Cameron thinks he’s found the bones of Jesus:

In a new documentary, Producer Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn’t resurrected –the cornerstone of Christian faith– and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene.No, it’s not a re-make of “The Da Vinci Codes’. It’s supposed to be true.

Let’s go back 27 years, when Israeli construction workers were gouging out the foundations for a new building in the industrial park in the Talpiyot, a Jerusalem suburb. of Jerusalem. The earth gave way, revealing a 2,000 year old cave with 10 stone caskets. Archologists were summoned, and the stone caskets carted away for examination. It took 20 years for experts to decipher the names on the ten tombs. They were: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua.
Israel’s prominent archeologist Professor Amos Kloner didn’t associate the crypt with the New Testament Jesus. His father, after all, was a humble carpenter who couldn’t afford a luxury crypt for his family. And all were common Jewish names.

There was also this little inconvenience that a few miles away, in the old city of Jerusalem, Christians for centuries had been worshipping the empty tomb of Christ at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Christ’s resurrection, after all, is the main foundation of the faith, proof that a boy born to a carpenter’s wife in a manger is the Son of God.

But film-makers Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have amassed evidence through DNA tests, archeological evidence and Biblical studies, that the 10 coffins belong to Jesus and his family.

I’m not sure how they did DNA tests. But I’m interested to see how this all plays out, if it will be as big as Cameron thinks or if it will just piffle out into nothing.

Update: I don’t know how I could forget to mention that Tom Robbins’ first book, Another Roadside Attraction has the discovery of the mummified corpse of Jesus by a drug dealer turned Vatican Kung Fu instructor as a central plot point.

Also, be sure to check out the Reverend in comments.

Note: due to the sudden uptick in comments for this post, I’ve bumped it up to the top of the page.

At the library yesterday we received a donation of DVDs from Bridge Publications Inc. the publishing arm of the Church of Scientology. We regularly receive unsolicited donations from publishers but as these DVDs were lectures by L. Ron Hubbard on Scientology, I was intrigued.

Now, Tom Cruise and his nutty ass aside, Scientology has got to be the single weirdest pyramid scheme mistaken for a cult, masquerading as a religion out there, and that’s taking into account the Church of Latter Day Saints and their Mormon Underwear.

What’s really fascinating is not just how blatant the Church of Scientology is about being so totally made up but how many people still join, thinking that they will somehow find joy and happiness and completion in the half baked proselytizing of some hack science fiction Author. I guess there are an awful lot of Star Fuckers out there who think that if they have a really good audit and become an Operating Thetan that they’ll get to meet Tom Cruise, his zombie wife and their soon-to-be super fucked up baby.

But that’s not the interesting part. What is fascinating is the hokey Space Opera that plays a large role in the basic scripture of Scientology. Wikipedia gives us a run down of the highlights. My favorite is this part:

The Marcab Confederacy is said to be one of the most powerful galactic civilizations still active. He describes it as:

various planets united into a very vast civilization which has come forward up through the last 200,000 years, formed out of the fragments of earlier civilizations. In the last 10,000 years they have gone on with a sort of decadent kicked-in-the-head civilization that contains automobiles, business suits, fedora hats, telephones, spaceships — a civilization which looks almost an exact duplicate but is worse off than the current US civilization.
(”Auditing Comm Cycles”)

The capital of the Confederacy is said to be “one of the tail stars of the Big Dipper“, probably Alkaid, a star 108 light years distant from Earth. The Marcabians used to rule Earth at some point in the past but lost control of it due to “losses in war and other things”.

The Marcabians had an oppressive political system: “if [a person] was considered to be in contempt of court or anything like that, [he was] simply fried since there was a curtain of radioactive material which went clear across the front of the bench anywhere that a witness or anybody would stand, and so on.” (”History and development of processes: question and answer period”) They invented income tax as a means of punishment, with the death penalty imposed for making even the slightest mistake in returns — “one comma wrong and it’s ‘dead forever’.” The Marcabians also appear to have been distinctly socialistic, having “had plan balanced economies” (presumably some form of planned economy). (”E-Meter Actions, Errors in Auditing”)

They were also keen on motor racing and every once in a while Scientologists undergoing auditing “will run into [memories of] race tracks and race-track drivers”. Hubbard described this in some detail in a 1960 lecture:

They had turbine-generated cars that went about 275 miles an hour (443 km/h). They ran with a high whine. I notice they’ve just now invented the motor again. And they had tracks that were booby-trapped with atom bombs, and they had side bypasses. The tracks were mined, and the grandstands were leaded-paned.
(”Create and Confront”)

The tracks were deliberately designed to be as dangerous as possible, with “a mountain that you went up to the top of and fell off”, and death was commonplace. This, however, was not a problem, as Marcabian medicine was so good that nobody ever died permanently. According to author Russell Miller, Hubbard liked to reminisce to his followers about “how he was a race-car driver in the Marcab civilization”. One of the people who accompanied him aboard his private fleet in the late 1960s described Hubbard’s stories of life with the Marcabians:

LRH said he was a race driver called the Green Dragon who set a speed record before he was killed in an accident. He came back in another lifetime as the Red Devil and beat his own record, then came back and did it again as the Blue Streak. Finally he realized all he was doing was breaking his own records and it was no game any more.
(Miller, p.280)

Hubbard describes exactly this in his lecture “Create and Confront”, telling how he went through multiple lives as a Marcabian racing driver with names like The Green Rocket, The Red Comet, The Silver Streak, The Gold Bomb, and so on.

Hubbard stated that the Marcab Confederacy was now using Earth as a “prison planet”. When a person dies or “drops the body”, as Scientologists put it, his thetan is pulled into a Marcab-established “implant station” or “report station”. The idea that Earth is a “prison planet”, maintained by “entheta beings” or Targs who dumped their enemies on Earth, was first put forward in a 1952 lecture, “Electropsychometric Scouting: Battle of the Universes”. A steady flow of flying saucers is said to be still dropping off more entheta beings.

The report area for most has been Mars. Some women report to stations elsewhere in the Solar System. There are occasional incidents about Earth report stations. The report stations are protected by screens. The last report station on Earth was established in the Pyrenees.
(Scientology: A History of Man)

The thetans are brainwashed and sent back to Earth, where they find a new body to inhabit. Only Scientologists who have reached the level of “Operating Thetan” are said to be able to avoid this fate.

[…] Hubbard mentions a number of other alien civilizations in his writings, though he does not go into any detail about them. These include the “Three-and-a-half Invaders, … the Psi Galaxy, Galaxy 82.” (”The Story of a Static”) According to the official Church of Scientology notes accompanying the lectures in which he alluded to them, these were “made up” (presumably for humorous effect), contrasting with the supposedly real invader forces and civilizations cited above.

I love that last part. He just made up some shit to throw people off. Ya think?

But there are some very telling details to this elaborate story. Most notable (beyond the ridiculous time scales—Xenu apparently ruled this quadrant of the Galaxy for 2 Trillion Years) is how this advanced civilization that had beat death, liked racing cars and setting off random nukes, was just like the US in the 1950’s, only they were all evil Socialists who killed the inherently good natured and capitalistic Thetans for sport and their technology was just like ours (down to even flying through space in Douglas DC-8s).

What’s telling about all this is that it emphasizes just what an unimaginative hack Hubbard was as a sci-fi author. He couldn’t conceive of a 200,000 year old space faring civilization that was any more advanced than the US at the height of the Cold War. Did they speak English and watch Leave it to Beaver as well? Take two hour long, four Martinni lunches? Chase their secretaries around the office making lascivious faces? Enjoy a tight crew cut?

Maybe back in the fifties and sixties when Hubbard made this stuff up it sounded sci-fi and futuristic but fifty years on, it creeks like a badly made B-movie, complete with rubber aliens, technobabble and cardboard flying saucers.

It would be amusing if it weren’t for the thousands of people all over the world who fall prey to this nonsense. Bellow the silly Space Opera and gibberish about Thetans is an organization that takes in millions of dollars from people who are just looking for answers in a weird and confusing world, exploiting them and encouraging cult-like behavior, just to make a buck.

Operation Clambake is an organization dedicated to exposing this fraud. Drop on by and let them know they aren’t alone, that Tom Cruise and the crazy science Fiction writer he worships aren’t going to win. A few trillion years form now, people will ask what was Scientology all about and will be able to snicker and laugh, they way w do now about other religions that have fallen out of fashion, like the cult of Mithra or Christianity.

Seems that the Evangelical children’s brainwashing camp “Kids on Fire,” featured in the documentary Jesus Camp will be closing.

Fisher’s camp—located in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota—has been the subject of much attention since the film’s release, with many critics and moviegoers denouncing the camp’s methods as militant and inappropriate. Upon the film’s release, the Kids on Fire camp site and the local Assemblies of God church were both vandalized, with damages at the camp totaling $1,500. Says Fischer about her decision to close down her camp: “I have a responsibility to keep the children safe.”

It’s too bad about the vandalism but I can’t say I’m sorry to hear about such a foul place shutting down. The poor Dominionists are left with just Church, Sunday School, Summer Bible Class, popular movies and the Left Behind Video Game to turn their children into Christian Terrorists.

The revised Player’s Guide to the Catholic Church is about to be released and there are a few changes to the Doctrine of the Faith that old Pope Rat has seen fit to make. Most noteworthy is the abolition of Limbo, which has many die hard players up in arms.

“I have sent countless souls to limbo!” exclaimed one adamant young player named Adolf, “Now where are they going to go?”

“what’s next?” asked a skeptical Bishop, “Reduce Vampire hitpoints from holy water?”

While the Pope acknowledged that some of the revised rules are controversial, he has stated publicly that it is all simply to make game play more streamlined and easier for new players to pick up the rules quicker, “It’s hard to attract new players to a system that is so outdated. All the other religions have already switched over to the 20d system, for Christ’s sake! All I’, doing is modernizing the Church’s rules a bit while keeping the same flavor of play that our fans have come to expect.”

No news yet on whether or not the rules restricting use of altar boys to seventh level clerics and above will stay the same.

seriously though, if the Pope can just change the rules of theology, just because they are unpopular and no one believes them anymore, than maybe we can really streamline this whole religion thing down to just the bare bones, maybe a few deacons in casual wear offering pamphlets with a few words of generic advice and a stern foot rub.

Why stop with Limbo? After all, most Catholics hardly take the Pope seriously anymore and it’s been decades since anyone has mentioned the whole Infallibility thing, so maybe it’s time to retire the funny hat as well.

 [Update below]

After pissing off the Muslim world (again) Pope Rat said this weekend that when he said that Muslims were filthy barbarians and that Islam was a religion of violence, he was just quoting a predecessor, from the 14th century. Memo to the Pope (who, I’m sure reads this blog): If you’re trying to win over the Muslim world, here and now in the 21st century, it’s probably best not to quote from a document that dates from the tail end of the Crusades. They’re a tad sensitive about that whole time period.

Of course, this is all based on the common assumption that the Pope really was trying to open a genuine dialogue with the Muslim world. But let’s be honest, Pope’s aren’t known for their ecumenical olive branches (JP II aside, and even he had limits). Pope Benny “I never was a Nazi, really” XVI has made it clear in the short time he’s been wearing the Funniest Hat of All, that he has no intention of following in his predecessor’s fancy footsteps by trying to foster understanding between people of different faiths. Benny has declared that it’s his way or the highway, and here’s a quarter for the toll booth. Which I’m sure is the best way to fill empty churches and inspire a new generation of pedophiles to become priests. Everyone I know says, “I’m tired of thinking for myself. My life would be so much better if only I had one more authoritarian asshole to tell me what to do.” And the kids, they love 14th century didactic dialogues.

Once again, this demonstrates the whole problem of two groups who both wish it still were the 14th century trying to talk. There’s no way to do so without making a lot of people angry, setting Burger kings all across Southern Europe on fire and generally fuelling religious violence. And, predictably, to prove the Pope right, the Mujahadin Army is threatening violent reprisal against Vatican City.

So, it’s the usual mess. Bloody, violent Islamic fundamentalists getting irate because a bloody minded Catholic fundamentalist called them bloody and violent. And the root of all of this lies in a disagreement as to just which book, supposedly penned by an invisible man who lives in the sky, should be used as the basis for world domination.

Back in my D&D days we solved all disagreements with a swift roll of the ten sided dice. To this day, there’s still no better way of solving petty squabbles about the peculiar rules governing intricate fantasy worlds.

Update:

Sam Harris gets a few good punches in, too:

While the pope succeeded in enraging millions of Muslims, the main purpose of his speech was to chastise scientists and secularists for being, well, too reasonable. It seems that nonbelievers still (perversely) demand too much empirical evidence and logical support for their worldview.  Believing that he was cutting to the quick of the human dilemma, the pope reminded an expectant world that science cannot pull itself up by its own bootstraps: It cannot, for instance, explain why the universe is comprehensible at all. It turns out that this is a job for… (wait for it) … Christianity. Why is the world susceptible to rational understanding? Because God made it that way. While the pope is not much of a conjurer, many intelligent and well-intentioned people imagined they actually glimpsed a rabbit in this old hat. Andrew Sullivan, for instance, praised the pope’s “deep and complicated” address for its “clarity and openness.”

As PZ Myers points out, Pope Rat comes off as more dottering and opaque than crystal clear:

This was an appeal to treat Christian superstition as primary, ruling over the false religion of Islam and the even more detestable godlessness of much of Western culture. It was played for the Catholic conservatives, no one else.

Frank the Financially Savvy Atheist is soliciting tales of how we Atheists and agnostics lost our faith, so I thought I’d share mine with the class.

***

My parents, born and raised Catholic, became Lutherans when they were old enough to leave the house. I don’t blame them one bit. My first girlfriend was a neurotic mess and made so by her strict Catholic upbringing. She was afraid of saying I love you too often for fear it would make the sentiment less meaningful. I stopped saying it to her altogether and never looked back.

So I was raised with a Protestant sense of the spiritual. Which means I hardly had a sense at all. Religion was a social function. You went to church in order to see the neighbors dressed in their Wal-Mart finest, sat through Sunday school where they showed you cartoons of Jesus holding a lamb and petting kittens. I was in my early teens before I actually sat down and read the Bible and found out how my Sunday School teacher neglected to mention the passages where Jesus cursed all Gentiles (non-Hebrew) as swine and vipers and went on and on about how they were bound for hell, with glee in his eyes. And the Old Testament? I still find it hard to believe that Fundies want impressionable, school age children to read about Lot letting his daughters being raped by a mob (and praise dd forit afterwards), or all the various and sundry reasons given for why slavery and genocide are a good thing.

My childhood Sundays were all about the aafternoon wich was when Star Trek, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica came on. That’s what was meaningful to me, because it was time spent with my father, talking about science and robots and how spaceships fly. So, it’s no wonder I started having doubts and questions by the age of thirteen. After all, my parents are both teachers.

But for the most part, my disbelief in God was purely academic. I could see no evidence for an invisible, intangible, absentee divinity who was nowhere yet influenced everything, which is as close to a summation of Protestant Theology as I can recall. But neither could I see any evidence against such an inconspicuous God. My agnosticism was a philosophical decision, one made after years of study and introspection and exploration.

Ultimately, however, there comes a point where you realize that the horrors of history are not personal horrors. I was not there to witness the Crusades. I was not burned as a Witch. I did not see the Conquistadors Save a Heathen Soul by running women through with lances or trampling children with their horses. These things are centuries distant from us her in the twenty-first century. As distasteful as I found them, they were not personal horrors, merely philosophical objections. At least, I used to think so. I have since decided that the dark ages aren’t over yet and may only just beginning in some parts of the world.

Like many, I am now fully aware of just what sort of modern horrors God’s faithful can come up with. And while I was not in New York City that day and didn’t loose anyone in the collapse of the World Trade Center I, like millions could not escape seeing the virtual horror replayed over and over for the following weeks. And one fact, above all the others became crystal clear: This is what people with Faith can do.

Since then I have had a tangible dislike for Religion in general and the idea of God in particular. It turns my stomach to know that millions of otherwise intelligent people can shut off their critical thinking at will and do so on a weekly basis, that millions simply refer to three thousand year old sheep herder poetry when it comes time to make a decision. Religion is the reason why most people are content to be screwed by the more Machiavellian members of our society who hide behind religious rhetoric as they lie cheat and steel their way to fame and glory and above all money. Oh and sweet, sweet altar boy ass. because they’ve been taught since childhood that what happens here doesn’t matter (so long as you aren’t having any fun. Bu t touch yourself and suddenly God gets quite irate). This is a world of suffering. Except it doesn’t have to be. I learned early on that it wasn’t the faithful who discovered the vaccine for polio, or put men on the Moon. Every great achievement in history was made by someone who put aside the silly fairy tales of our ancestors and took a good long look around and said, “yeah, I think I an make this a better world.” And then worked their ass off to do just that. No clouds parted and handed them the instructions. No leprechauns appeared with the cure for the Plague and they didn’t hunt down Unicorns. They just read and studied and experiemented, got depressed, inspired and persevered for no other reason than they wanted to acomplish something.

When I was thirteen, my parents made me attend confirmation class. it was the one and only time my parents enforced any sort of religious education, and they did so more out of a desire to keep the aunts and uncles from talking about what a godless sort we were, than out of any real desire for me to have religion in my life. So I got confirmed, all right. Reading the Bible in an organized fashion, confirmed just what a stupendously bloody foundation religion was based on. And I wanted nothing to do with it. I spent the rest of my teenage years studying other religions, out of a desire to be fair. I found eventually that they all follow the same basic template: do what the rich and powerful* say, or suffer the consequences.When I was thirteen, I decided that I’d rather suffer the consequences, because it means I can read books and admire art and think for my self. And I’ve never been happier.

The Secular Outpost reviews a fascinating new book, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously, by Jacques Berlinerblau.

Berlinerblau premis is that Secularists don’t take religion seriously:

Today’s secularists too often have very little accurate knowledge about religion, and even less desire to learn. This is problematic insofar as their sense of self is constructed in opposition to religion. Above all, the secularist is not a Jew, is not a Christian, not a Muslim, and so on. But is it intellectually responsible to define one’s identity against something that one does not understand? And what happens when these secularists weigh in on contentious political issues, blind to the religious back-story or concerns that inevitably inform these debates?

It’s a bit of a generalization but he has a point: Sometimes, for some of us, we define ourselves by what we aren’t. I disagree that we need to take religion as serious as the true Believers would like. That gives the fundies too much leeway. If we start granting their beliefs prima facie value, they have enough wiggle room to build their usual wicker traps, “But you agreed that the Bible has some validity, and God wrote the Bible, therefore you admit there’s a God!”

But that’s not really what Berlinerblau is suggesting, which makes this book sound all the more intriguing:

Jacques Berlinerblau suggests that atheists and agnostics must take stock of that which they so adamantly oppose. Defiantly maintaining a shallow understanding of religion, he argues, is not a politically prudent strategy in this day and age. But this book is no less critical of many believers, who–Berlinerblau contends–need to emancipate themselves from ways of thinking about their faith that are dangerously simplistic, irrational and outdated.

To this, I wholeheartedly agree. You must know your enemy and why they believe the crazy ass shit they do. You also need the scholarly tools to pick those irrational beliefs apart, leaving the rational though dodgy bits intact so that, eventually the believers begin to doubt their long held superstitions and reject them on their own terms. That’s how you help people see the light without being thought of as an asshole. But to suggest that Secular thought is in some sort of crisis, as Berlinerblau does, is a bit of a stretch. Tanner Edis, from the Secular Outpost made a similar point:

So I’m not sure about secular thinking about religion being in a state of crisis. I don’t want to deny that Berlinerblau has a valid point, and that it would be good if there was more explicitly secular reading of the Bible going on. This would have immense practical value, and it might even help break the isolationism within religious studies. Nevertheless, there’s a lot more secular thinking about religion going on that Berlinerblau does not recognize. And in this wider context, I suspect that a certain lack of interest in the Bible is more understandable.

still, it sounds like a fascinating book and will be added to my Amazon wishlist, forthwith.