Carnival of the Godless #91 . . .

is up at State of Protest. Thought you’d like to know.

Things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City XIV (updated)

The week in fundie . . .

1. No doubt by now you’ve all heard tell of “Sister Mary Bernadett” and “Bishop John Peter Bushey,” who left a dead woman to rot on the toilet in their house. The two have been charged with causing mental harm to a child, after they tried to convince a boy living in the house that “demons” were making it appear as if the decomposing woman was dead, and that if she (the deceased, that is) prayed hard enough she would return to life. (Via Pharyngula)
2. Sean the Blogonaut blogs on the cultish activities of another Mercy Ministries-style faith-based rehab service: Teen Challenge.
3. Christian Right leaders in the US are getting awfully uncomfortable about Senate investigations into the finances of certain “mega-ministries”–Benny Hinn, for example, pays no taxes on his seven-bathroom eight-bedroom home because he calls it a “parsonage– and have adopted a time-honoured counterstrategy: wailing about Christian persecution. (Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion)
4. Bartholomew also blogs on the upcoming carnival of stupid in California involving Creationists and Christian Zionists.
5. In Malaysia, a religious court has allowed a woman to deconvert from Islam. Don’t applaud: she needed a court’s permission to deconvert. (BBC)
6. In the Indian state of Gujarat, you’re facing a year in prison for conversion to another religion unless you tell the District Magistrate the time and date of your conversion, the length of time you followed your previous religion, and the reason for your conversion. (Inspire)
7. The Observer reports on Yemen, “the worst place on earth to be a woman.”

Brainfarts of the week

Brainfart #1 comes via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Brainfart #2 occurred recently in a thread at Matt’s Notepad:

I said:

Go back to school, Christopher. What you have committed there is a Argument from Ignorance fallacy. If you make a claim that you want others to accept, the onus is on you to substantiate the claim. You’re entitled to believe anything you want, of course. You’re entitled to believe that the moon is made of green cheese and that an invisible pink unicorn resides in your garage, having landed in a spacecraft in your backyard last Thursday. But if you want others to accept your claims, you’re going to have to back them up with supporting evidence.

He replied:

First you prove your “invisible pink unicorn” exists. Then if you have the courage to admit it doesn’t, we will talk more. Until then you and your friends in fantasy excuse land enjoy your weekend.

He cannot be serious.

Irrational and proud of it

Ben Stein on science:

Anyway, I couldn’t give a [profanity] whether a person calls himself a scientist. It doesn’t earn any extra respect from me, because it’s not as if science has covered itself with glory, morally, in my time. Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists were telling Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists were telling Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to kill 50 million people in order to further the revolution. [Via Memeplex]

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor on reason:

if you go just by reason, I think, without faith, without belief in God, you can imagine, for instance in the last century, some of the faith(less), or supposedly faithless societies - people, whether it’s like Hitler or Stalin, bringing up - having a country in which, if you like, a God free zone, a dictatorship ruled by reason, and where does it lead? To terror and oppression [Richard Dawkins.net]

Regarding the second quote, Richard Dawkins remarked that while the use of the reductio ad Hitlerum against science is commonplace, “this is the first time I have heard any reputable spokesman (a) say that Hitler and Stalin’s dictatorships were ruled by reason, and (b) say that reason leads to terror and oppression.”

Further reading: Memeplex and Terry Sanderson at <i>The Guardian</i>.

Spend Gerry Rzeppa’s Money

As I blogged last month, Gerry Rzeppa wants to pay Richard Dawkins a shitload of money for the privilege of proselytising to him. Rzeppa is offering Dawkins

$64 000 of my very own money if he will join me before a live audience to answer a single question about my little poem. I’ll read the story aloud and pose the mystery query. He’ll answer and walk away with the loot. Simple as that.

There are very good reasons to be skeptical about whether it is possible to collect on these “challenges,” given the likelihood that goalposts are greased up and ready to shift at a moment’s notice. As for whether Dawkins himself will ever take up Rzeppa’s challenge, you do have to bear in mind that he’s been lied to by Christians before. And let us not be sucking each others’ jagons here: who doesn’t look at a “challenge” like this and think to themselves that the author might as well have written, in the subject line of the mass-email, “CONGRATULATIONS!! RICHARD DAWKINS MIGHT ALREADY HAVE WON $64,000!!!”

Still, Rzeppa assures us that his gauntlet is being thrown down in good faith:

My offer to Dr. Dawkins is essentially a speaking fee. ANY response he cares to give to my question at the public event — even “No comment” — will be acceptable and will result in his collecting the $64,000.

Which causes me to wonder. Richard Dawkins is doubtless a wealthy man by now. If Rzeppa has a small fortune that he’s willing to just give away, can’t he find a more worthwhile use for it than to deliver to a man who probably doesn’t need $64,000 to begin with? That kind of money could go a long way in one of the 63 villages devastated in the Burmese district of Labutta last weekend. It could help deliver sanitation, hygiene education and safe water in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World. Wouldn’t something along these lines be a more productive investment than the opportunity to preach to Richard Dawkins? That’s all I’m saying, and I don’t care if you’re Gerry Rzeppa or David Coube Larry. As long as you’re prepared to give away tidy sums of your cold hard cash, there have to be more worthy causes out there than preaching in public to celebrity atheists.

So here’s my challenge to my readers. Suggest a more worthwhile use for Gerry Rzeppa’s money.

The Bill Muehlenberg Trophy: Why does the Archbishop of Westminster hate democracy?

He’s demanding unopposed time for Christians to proselytise on the BBC. From the National Secular Society:

The BBC should not apply its impartiality rules when it comes to religion, and the Corporation should be biased in favour of Christianity, said Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor last week. [. . .] Murphy O’Connor also said that Christianity should have unopposed time to deliver its message on the BBC. “Sometimes the adversarial aspect — if you’ve got one view you’ve got to have the opposite view — supplants what we need.”

Murphy O’Connor is a representative of the whiny conservative wing of Catholicism, which unfortunately occupies many of the key positions in the Church and keeps the hierarchy of that particular denomination firmly entrenched in the Middle Ages. In 2001 he was wailing about the decline of Christianity in the UK, advancing the claim (with zero justification) that in the absence of his preferred dogma “Society had been demoralised, with people seeking transient happiness in alcohol, drugs and pornography.” In 2006 he sacked his press aide for being homosexual, and then declared that “the Church has consistently spoken out against any discrimination against gay persons.” He has also complained about taxpayer-funded “faith schools” being “threatened with having to take a quota of non-believers” (never mind the fact that their parents pay the taxes that fund those faith schools), and has not been reluctant to play the poor-persecuted-Christian card, accusing secularists of being “Christophobic:”

They wish to close off every voice and contribution other than their own. Their inability to see the Christian seed in what is noble and good in Western culture chills the possibility of a true pluralism.

They wish to close off every voice and contribution other than their own. Do not adjust your monitor. The man who wants Christianity to have unopposed time to deliver its message on the British national broadcaster, in a country with significant non-Christian religious communities, and in which only 38% of the total population (and I assume, taxpayers) believes in a deity, actually said that.

Via Dogma Free America.

Can you hear it pumping on your I-Pod? II

Since I last blogged about the podcasts I regularly listen to, several more have been added to the rotation, and one has returned to the fold . . .

Dogma Free America
This was a favourite of mine, and I was disappointed when its fiftieth and final episode aired last November. Here’s what I had to say about it then:

DFA’s shows weren’t theme-based or guest-based like Freethought Radio and The Non-Prophets, and mainly consisted on commentary on the latest news concerning magical thinking and theocracy. DFA also canvassed more international (read: non-US) news than other podcasts, and often ran stories on religious violence in sub-Saharan Africa (usually perpetrated against individuals suspected of “witchcraft”), as well as atrocities perpetrated by theocracies in the Islamic world. Hence, Christian listeners might (I imagine) have found it more even-handed than other non-theist podcasts.

The good news is . . . it’s back! Rich Orman and friends have returned with their usual light-hearted take on the week in witchcraft and fundamentalism, and with the introduction of a new segment modelled on the “Science or fiction?” segment from The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe.

Faith-based mathematics

Robert Ingersoll on the Trinity:

Christ, according to the faith, is the second person in the Trinity, the Father being the first and the Holy Ghost third. Each of these persons is God. Christ is his own father and his own son. The Holy Ghost is neither father nor son, but both. The son was begotten by the father, but existed before he was begotten–just the same before as after. Christ is just as old as his father, and the father is just as young as his son. The Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and Son, but was equal to the Father and Son before he proceeded, that is to say, before he existed, but he is of the same age as the other two. So it is declared that the Father is God, and the Son and the Holy Ghost God, and these three Gods make one God. According to the celestial multiplication table, once one is three, and three time one is one, and according to heavenly subtraction if we take two from three, three are left. The addition is equally peculiar: if we add two to one we have but one. Each one equal to himself and to the other two. Nothing ever was, nothing ever can be more perfectly idiotic and absurd than the dogma of the Trinity.

Via Squirrel Island and Freethought Radio.

Things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City XIII

1. The Mayor of Birmingham, Alabama is sick and tired of all the crime and other problems afflicting his city, so he’s decided to take action. He wants a practical solution. And what’s his solution? Prayer.
   

   But not just any old prayer. Langford is going to sponsor prayers of repentance by folks dressed in sackcloth and ashes – just like they did in Old Testament days. [. . .] To make sure everyone has appropriate attire, the mayor has reportedly ordered 2,000 sacks. (Presumably, one size fits all.)

   Do not adjust your sets. (Americans United)

2. Muslim organisations such as the Australian National Imams Council and Muslims For Peace are taking a page out of David Horowitz’s book and calling upon the University of Western Sydney to review the content of the Women in Arabic and Islamic Literature course, complaining that it promotes a negative view of women in Islam, and “an emphasis on sexuality and a sexually explicit content that is not reflective of normative Islam.” Muslims For Peace (certainly not to be confused with Muslims For Irony) also wants the University to fire lecturer Samar Habib, and has declared that “Muslims should fear Almighty Allah and break all connections with this diabolical centre of Kufr (non-believers).” (The Australian)
3. By the way, an eight-year-old girl in Yemen has been granted a divorce from her 28-year-old husband, who, while denying beating her, admits the marriage was consummated. (AFP)
4. In the US, military installations have been used to promote Christian Fundamentalism, as military officials worked with members of the far-right Focus on the Family to promote the recent National Day of Prayer. The military officials involved had to sign an oath stating that they believe “that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God” and that “Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God,” and promising to “ensure a strong, consistent Christian message throughout the nation” and that National Day of Prayer events held on their bases would be “conducted solely by Christians.” (OpEdNews)
5. GodTube claims: “Every whole food has a pattern that resembles a body organ. This could only be achieved by intellectual design.” (Pharyngula)

The lazy Fox jumped over the red herring

You’ll be familiar with the story of Jeremy Hall, a US soldier who is suing the military for violating his First Amendment rights. See here for a fuller account, but in August last year Hall organised a meeting of atheist soldiers in the Iraqi base where he was then stationed. One of the attendees, Christian fundamentalist Major Freddy Wellborne, broke up the meeting, threatened to charge Hall with violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and promised to block Hall’s re-enlistment in the Army if the atheist group continued to meet. Since then, Hall has been removed from his base in Iraq after receiving death threats from his fellow (and presumably not atheist) soldiers.

Hall was recently briefly interviewed on Fox News regarding the lawsuit. (The interview can be seen here, or via the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.)The following exchange took up most of the interview time:

FOX: And Specialist Hall, just so we all understand your mindset. You know there’s this old adage that there are no atheists in foxholes. You’ve been shot at. Did you ever consider that there might be the existence of God?

HALL: No.

FOX: Why?

HALL: I just don’t have a belief in that.

FOX: Why don’t you . . . have you never believed in God, or was there something that happened where you stopped believing in God?

HALL: I was raised religious, and I came into the military. I had some friends with atheist leanings and [. . .] they had questions, and I thought about what they said, and I came up with my own conclusion.

FOX: Which is what?

HALL: That there’s no God, or there’s no [. . .] lucky charms, or anything like that.

Could somebody please explain to me what Hall’s reasons for being an atheist have to do with the price of tea in China? Thanks.