7 posts tagged “atheism”

I promised this to IG months ago, but I recently saw something that reminded me of it.  Hubby and I watched Babel finally, and the scene that really stuck with me was when Gael Garcia Bernal kills the chicken by using the tried and true "tilt-a-whirl" method, as the little boy looks on in horror/fascination.  From there I'll take my first piece of parenting advice.

Principle #1: Knowledge is power

Factual information is one the greatest gifts you can give your children.  If you try to always provide them with factual information, they'll learn and you'll build a reputation for being reliable. 

• Don't let your children grow up to be ignorant city kids.  Children should know where food comes from.  That means they need to see a farm or a garden on a regular basis, and they need to know how meat gets on the table.

• Conversely, don't let your children grow up to be ignorant hillbillies.  Children need to see a museum, go to a concert or two.  Learn how to take a bus or use a subway system.  Meet people from other cultures.

• Don't betray your children with an easy lie.  They will find out that you lied to them, and then what are you? A liar who can't be trusted to provide good information.  Then, when they need information, like about sex or drugs, they will not come to you for it.  So don't destroy your credibility with "the stork brings babies."  Come on, it's easy: Men have a little seed inside them and women have a little seed inside them.  Men have a special part that goes into women, to put their two little seeds together.  Women have a special place inside them where the two seeds can grow into a baby.

• Don't betray your children with a ridiculous lie.  Why in the world would you try to trick your kids into believing in something you know doesn't exist?  Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy?  The cultural aspects built into these lies work just as well without the lie.  The kid misbehaves, he's getting fewer presents.  Losing baby teeth is an important milestone, worthy of gifts.  Chocolate bunnies taste good.  (Plus, if you've lied about all of these, how is a child supposed to know when you're telling the truth?  That's how I became an atheist.)

• Don't try to protect your children from reality.  When the family pet dies, don't say it moved away.  Unless your kids die young, they're going to experience pain, so it's best to ease them into it.  (And this one is as easy as the sex issue: animals and people have to die, so that other animals and people can live.  If every dog ever born was still alive, how horrible would that be?)  So help your children learn about the world, including the scary parts.  It will be less scary if you tell them about it, than if they figure it out on their own.  Let your children know that there are dangerous people who will hurt kids.  Tell them how to recognize those behaviors and what to do about it.  Don't tell your kid, "It's going to be okay," if you know it isn't.

In short, educate your kids and be honest with them.  In your personal relationships, you probably expect honesty and respect, why not treat your kids that way?

*Dr. Redzilla is neither a doctor, nor a parent.  Her credentials are: being raised as one of five children, being a nanny for six years, powerful observation skills, and having a particularly vivid memory of what being a child is like.

You thought Kathy Griffin was in trouble?  A report by the government of India suggests that the Hindu god Ram doesn't exist.  More specifically, it claims that a bridge allegedly built by Ram and his army of monkeys (how cool would that be?) is actually a natural formation of rocks, caused by erosion.  Those blasphemers are likely to get what's coming to them, either by the hand of Ram, or more likely by the hands of Ram's angry followers.

Elsewhere, a Nepali airline sacrificed goats in an effort to get one of their planes back in the air.  This got played up in the media as a "humor" or "oddball" story, which strikes me as a bit of a double-standard.  You won't see stories about the Pope performing the communion rite in the "news of the weird" sections of your paper, because the Western world only demands respect for its own religions.  As an atheist I love stories like this, because they just highlight what are to me the basic absurdities found in all religions.  Some people pray, some people speak in tongues, some people hold brunches and rummage sales, some people handle snakes, some people sacrifice goats, and everybody thinks he's got the in, the secret, the true path.  Here's the kicker: the plane made it safely to Hong Kong.  Conclude what you will.  The aircraft mechanics do good work without the goat-fueled intervention of a Cosmic Muffin.  Or the Mighty Akash Bhairab received the sacrifice with pleasure and helped out.

I feel a similar annoyance when I contemplate Emperor Qin's terracotta army or the public display of Egyptian mummies.  Westerners treat these things like cultural artifacts, suitable for display in museums, but the actual dead people involved, this was part of their religious life.  Why do we find the Egyptian approach to the afterlife any more bizarre than Christian expectations of an afterlife?

Let me close by mentioning that today is Lord Ganesh's birthday.  If I were going to believe in a god, I think I'd go with Ganesh, who symbolizes wisdom, prosperity, and happiness, and is also considered the "Patron of Letters."  The perfect god for a writer.  (Plus, he has this adorable little mouse companion who serves as his trusty steed.  Shhhh...don't try to make it make sense.)

So, have a joyful Ganesh Chaturthi and a pleasant weekend!

...and religion goes home crying to his mom about what a bully science is.

I went to see Richard Dawkins speak at the university last night. It was a full house, and arriving 5 minutes before the talk was set to begin, we ended up with nosebleed seats, mostly surrounded by students. As Dawkins is a rather famous evolutionary scientist and infamous atheist*, lots of people have expressed surprise that he came to Kansas, primarily because they are unaware that Lawrence is a little blue island in a sea of red.

The most interesting and compelling parts of Dawkins’ lecture have to do with applying simple logic to the question of biological development. Too often, he observes, if science cannot immediately answer a question on some biological complexity, religion is quick to step in and say, “Well, it must be the work of God then.” As though there are only 2 possible answers. What he calls the “default” answer is what gets people into the faux debate about evolution. If Darwin’s theory can’t easily or readily explain natural selection so everyone with an 8th grade education can understand it after a 2 minute explanation, the default answer is God. Don’t understand natural selection? It must be God. (Familiar? Don’t support the War on Terror? You must be a terrorist.)

Dawkins’ main concern is a valid one—that children in America are being indoctrinated, not educated. I got to see that first hand, sitting next to a couple of students, who were forced to attend the lecture, and did not enjoy it. I sat right next to a prime sample of religious indoctrination.

Perhaps because of the size of the audience, but most likely because of the propensity for people to overtalk, the organizers didn’t offer a microphone for questions at the end. Instead, everyone received a little card prior to the talk, on which to write a question. When question writing time came, I couldn’t help but read the question of the student sitting to my right. Throughout the talk, he’d fidgeted in his seat and muttered vague sounds of indignation and disgust to his other neighbor.

(The two had come into the auditorium together, but in true Kansas small-town fashion, they’d left a seat between them. As the place filled up, they’d been forced to scoot together, leaving them both on high fag-rebuttal status, leaning away from each other, careful not to let their knees touch.)

At any rate, here is what my totally-not-gay student neighbor wrote on his card: How can you prove you have a brain, since you can’t see it?

It took a great deal of restraint on my part not to lean over and say, “Hey, retard, we have this thing called an MRI. Let’s us look inside peoples’ skulls. It’s a scientific advance.”

sigh If you have many religious friends, you’ll recognize where Mr. Not-Gay’s question comes from. That’s right, he didn’t even have the religious indignation to write his own question—he plagiarized it from a rather popular Christian indignation/Atheist “mockery” e-mail that has made the rounds many times over the last few years. I put mockery in quotes, because I suppose that’s what the e-mail intends to do, when all it succeeds at is making Christians look rather dumb.

The e-mail goes like this: a grade school teacher tells her kids that God isn’t real, just like Santa and the Easter Bunny. The proof she offers is that you can’t see God. One Christian child in her class oh-so-cleverly retorts that the teacher must not have a brain, because the children can’t see it. Hahahahah! Ha. Ha. The Christian who sent me the Hurricane What? e-mail also sent me this e-mail.

*Actually, I’d go so far as to say that Dawkins is an untheist, a word I coined to describe my own feelings about God and religion. It’s not so much that I simply don’t believe in an omniscient, omnipotent alien overlord. It’s more that the very idea of such a monstrous construct deeply offends me. I don’t disbelieve, I oppose theism, sometimes with a good deal of vitriol. Dawkins is in a similar frame of mind, and in addition to showing how religion has very little to offer the rational mind, he also took a few potshots at religion, including dismissing any suggestion that one need be an expert in “theology” to prove it ill-suited to explain most anything. He pairs up science and religion with astronomy and astrology. One seeks to explain things through observation and research. The other seeks to make a science of ignorance and superstition.

Richard Dawkins will be on The Colbert Report tonight. Hijinks will surely ensue.

I wanted to give Pope Benedict XVI the benefit of doubting that he would be as much of an oppressive, hateful jerk as his predecessor. Why not? I didn’t know him. I figured it would be fair to see what he did before I started ranting about how creepy he looks, or brought up the whole business about his time as a Hitler Youth. Alas, P. Benny has not benefited from my initial doubt.

Here’s his latest deed in Jesus’ name: he wants to do away with limbo. Limbo, people, limbo! Come on, all ye faithful. What’s the harm of limbo?

(I mean, aside from the risk of your crotch catching on fire.) Even nuns can drink, smoke and gamble, but now the Pope wants to hit the island tourism industry where it lives! What next? Will the Pope speak out against conga lines?

Okay, but seriously: doesn’t this just illustrate how artificially constructed religions are? The Pope’s argument seems to be this: Since we made up Limbo anyway, to make people feel better about where dead babies end up, we can un-make it up.

Here’s my question: Since they made up heaven, to make people feel better about what happens after they die, can we un-make up hell, too?

Or maybe we could just all take a very deep breath and look around at the world’s religions. What we would see is that almost without exception, they are all desperately seeking to offer us some comfort about what happens after we die. Because we’re scared about what happens after die. Who can blame us? Because maybe nothing happens. Maybe after we die, there’s a funeral and a coffin. Or maybe a bulldozer and a mass grave, or just wild animals tearing at your flesh. Maybe this life is the only shot we get.

If we all looked around and realized that, maybe we would rise up in revolt against our unhappiness—in whatever form it might take. If we threw off the shackles of religions and accepted the likelihood that the only happiness and joy in the world are available here in this life, what would happen?

Talk about dangerous. If people realized that, they probably wouldn’t settle for oppression or marginalization or cruelty or death and dismemberment in the names of their gods: Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, or Money. They might want something good, now, for everyone. They might start wanting justice and equality and respect. That might bring the house of cards down.

Surprise, surprise…majoring in English has made me unusually adept at fucking with Biblical interpretation. Until this morning, I never thought about it, but Biblical interpretation is pretty much the same as literature interpretation. It is all, of course, a glorious endeavor in the manufacture and spread of bullshit.

As I’ve mentioned, I work at a church which is located in a very wealthy neighborhood on a piece of multi-million dollar real estate. Now, since the church has been there since 1899, we didn’t pay much for the land we’re on. However, the senior pastor and many other people in power now want to purchase the adjoining property, with the intention of being able to expand our available space. The cost: 5 mill-i-on dollars. (Insert Dr. Evil laugh here.) How badly do we need this land? Almost not at all. Oh, sure, there are some days of the week when we’re a bit pressed for space…people have to shuffle about to find an open room to meet in…but we’re not really crowded. We have a chapel that seats 200, a sanctuary that seats 800, a 4,000 square foot administrative office, a gymnasium, a 10,000 square foot meeting hall, and a three story education building. Jesus has been a busy little carpenter at our church.

Every Tuesday, we have our staff meeting in the chapel, where we pray, sing hymns, and discuss miscellaneous work stuff. Today, we had prayer time so that we could all pray for discernment about this proposed property purchase. We were even given little note cards with a piece of scripture that the Rev. Doc. picked out:

Ephesians 3:14-21

Now, Rev Doc does nothing by chance, and he wants us to buy this piece of land, so I can see that he wants this particular piece of scripture to guide us to agree with him. (Hey, I’ve been pretty straightforward about the fact that I’m a cynic. I don’t believe for an instant that Rev Doc really wants us to pray for discernment. He just wants all the staff on board, so we’ll help him convince all the parishioners.)

After prayer time, we’re invited to write an anonymous comment on the back of the scripture cards, which will be read aloud. He almost didn’t read mine. He saved it until last and I could see his hesitation.

On the front of the card, I made the following marks on the scripture selection:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

On the back of the card, I wrote: Through this piece of scripture, God is telling me that the church is more than just a building, more important than a building. It is also the good works of its congregants. Our richness is in Christ’s glory, and his glory is in the church eternal, not the church building. I wonder if this money wouldn’t be better spent on the homeless transitional housing program that is currently struggling for funding.

I had a good viewpoint to see him frown, and after chapel he went away muttering with one of the other pastors. Thank the Cosmic Muffin for that Masters Degree in English. It has served me well today. Amen.

Or so the subject field of the e-mail I received from the pastor at work would have me believe. Because of things like my previous post, I'm always a little wary of e-mail forwards from my co-workers, even from the pastors. As well-meaning as many of my co-workers are, it doesn't stop them from being boobs, asses, racists, and of course, sentimental cornballs. In fact, the well-meaning genetic trait is probably right next to the cornball trait on the human DNA strand. So, with that warning: A picture is worth a thousand words, I opened the e-mail from the pastor.

Is this picture truly worth a thousand words? Let's see...

A word of warning to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nannies, and older siblings. Small children are gullible. They don't yet know that the world is full of lies and purposeful obfuscation and cruel manipulation. Not to mention the fact that the world is full of minor deceptions, accidental misconceptions, and wholly ambivalent manipulation. The average three-year old doesn't know that. He is innocent, trusting, and easily trained. Like a dog. If you so choose, you can teach him to mimic certain celebrities at a young age (Groucho Marx is an easy one.) You can teach him to sing silly songs to accompany his daily hygiene activities. ("Teeths you got to brushy-wushy. After pooping, wipe the tushy-ushy.") You can tell him that he should not poke a toad with a stick, if only because the toad might have a much larger, and very hungry older brother who will not approve of the poking. I did all of these things to the little boy I cared for as a nanny. Probably didn't hurt him.

Or you can train him to fold his little hands and pray to the Cosmic Muffin. You can tell him that Santa brings gifts, the Tooth Fairy pays cash for lost teeth, the Easter Bunny brings chocolate effigies of himself, and that Jesus saves little boys from an eternity in the fiery pits of Hell. He'll probably believe all of that, but does that make it right? Remember, he's a blank slate. He'll probably believe whatever you tell him.

Of course, I get it. The photo is supposed to be cute, because the dog is "praying," too. Except, do you really think the dog is praying? No. The dog has been trained to act like he's praying, and so has the little boy. Now, if the little boy is really praying, does he have any idea what he's praying to? Probably not. He's either been fed some line about a cuddly, fuzzy God, or he's been told about a powerful, vengeful God. Either way, maybe he's praying, "Please, God, take care of my family. Don't let my dog get run over. Or my mom get cancer. Or my dad get laid off from his job."

The sad part? It's wasted effort for the kid. If the dog doesn't get run over, or the mom avoids cancer, or the dad gets to keep his job, well, that's great, but it doesn't have anything to do with little Bobby praying.

The cruel part? If the dog does get run over, or the mom gets cancer, or the dad loses his job, is it because little Bobby didn't pray hard enough? Or because God just doesn't like little Bobby as much as he likes little Janie? Or because God only likes kids named Muhammed and Hareendran. Oh, and he prefers to be called Allah. And if any of these things happen, whose fault is it? Are we going to blame God? Or are we going to blame fate? Or the driver of the car? Or the culture that gave us the careening vehicle through residential neighborhoods? Or the pesticides in the mom's food that turned her breast into a mutant cell replicating hoedown? Or the enormous multi-national corporation that just downsized or off-shored the dad's job? Funny how religion discourages you from looking around to see how cause and effect really works. Ask and you shall receive? Who came up with that one? Ask whom? What will you receive? More e-mail forwards? Probably.

So, it turns out, this picture is only worth about 800 words, to Redzilla anyway. Maybe it's worth more to you.

Here's the thing most people don't want to talk about on the Hurricane Katrina front: if everyone is thanking God for sparing them, then who's to blame for the hurricane in the first place? I don't ask this idly or because I'm a smug bastard. The truth is I am both a.) an unbeliever and b.) a church secretary. I work with Christians all day long, and they seem like nice people.

Deluded, but nice.

There are two kinds of people with cancer (or insert other lethal disease) at this church where I work. There are those who owe God their lives, and those who have gone on to a better place. It's the perfect sort of relationship for this God guy. When his followers die, they don't blame him. When they don't die, they're grateful.

NPR's Daniel Shore said something similar this afternoon on All Things Considered. He questioned how intelligent could be the designer of a thing like a hurricane. A natural result of climatological fluctuations vs. A creator with the ability to design a system that randomly kills large numbers of its creations.

And don't you think it's interesting how God always gets credit for intervening on people's behalf during times of natural disaster, but everybody blames Mother Nature for the disaster in the first place.