In a post over at Balloon Juice DougJ criticizes the people at Reason magazine for being ‘gutless’ essentially because the images they chose as winners of the contest weren’t particularly offensive and a lot of the commenters pile on. Well, I have to kind of disagree with most of the people there.

Not that I think the draw Muhammad day is a big deal, it isn’t, but people seem to be missing the point here. It wasn’t intended as a manly, ‘pistols at dawn’ type of challenge to Islam, to be tough, or to even be clever. “They’re also the kind of things that won’t piss anyone off.” DougJ said, and that is kind of the point. Drawing cartoons shouldn’t be the kind of thing that pisses anyone off, but apparently for a segment of the Muslim population it is. The point of the draw Muhammad thing is to simply highlight that absurdity.

As far as the point being to ‘inflame Muslims’ I can’t quite agree with that either. If your neighbor hates looking at your car and tells you that you best keep it in your garage or he will beat you to death and you leave it out are you ‘inflaming’ him? Getting ‘inflamed’ over silly, trivial things is a problem for those people getting angry, not for the people doing silly, trivial things.

It would be convenient if you could just chalk it up to mocking them for being different as some in the comments seem to want to do but there is a world of difference between that and drawing attention to the fact that you have people breaking into cartoonists home and killing their families over this kind of stuff.

As for not choosing the most offensive drawings (in order to really piss off Muslims), again that kind of misses the point. Once again the point isn’t to piss off Muslims. The point is to draw attention to the fact that even simple, relatively non-offensive depictions of Muhammad get responded to with violence and that is insane. So I think choosing rather innocuous pictures is more in line with the intended goal. Sort of, see how pointless and non-offensive these pictures are? And yet still there are certain parts of the Muslim population that will kill over it. (of course I didn’t really think much of the pictures myself, but I’ve never been an artsy person)

A lot of the people there seem to be condemning them for antagonizing Muslims but then hammer them for essentially not being antagonizing enough. It isn’t a toughness test. It is like at some gay pride events you have some gay people that dress up in really flamboyant costumes to highlight their homosexuality. It is silly and over the top precisely to draw attention to the fact that objections to their lifestyles are absurd. Likewise, the draw Muhammad thing is just about drawing attention to this absurd notion that some followers of that religion think that killing people over drawings is actually okay. It isn’t a challenge, it is intended to raise awareness.

As for those that claim it is just being ‘rude’. Think about this, if you lived next to a crazy cat lady that shrieked curses at you every time you turned on your porch light because she believe electricity and lights were of the devil and EVIL, would you be ‘rude’ if you chose to continue using your porch light? The fact the the Muslims are trying insist others abide by their beliefs no matter how crazy and unreasonable they may be is really no different. So I can buy into the notion of rudeness but not when someone is making crazy, irrational demands such as, I don’t know, drawing a picture of a historical figure is punishable by death.

This article by Paul Prather entitled “New atheists embody the very things they hate” gets wrong just about everything you could get wrong about atheism. It commits the aggravating assumption that religion and atheism are two equally valid sides of an argument. They aren’t. It’s like someone centuries ago saying that the belief in a flat earth or round one are just two ideas that should each be given equal respect. Or the heliocentrist debates of centuries past arguing against the idea that the sun revolves around the earth.

Prather writes:

The irony is that this current brand of aggressive atheism is just another form of fundamentalism. These particular atheists are zealots on the subject of faith who see no shadings of gray, only black and white. They’re dead-set against religion but weirdly obsessed with it.

Can you imagine it rewritten like this:

The irony is that this current brand of aggressive heliocentrism is just another form of fundamentalism. These particular heliocentrists are zealots on the subject of interplanetary orbits who see no shadings of gray, only black and white. They’re dead-set against geocentrism but weirdly obsessed with it.

Oh those fundamentalist heliocentrists! Galileo, acting so smug, domatic, and mean spirited insisting that all those people that believe that the sun orbits the earth are wrong. What nerve! Let me clue you in on something, the best position on everything isn’t the middle ground, it isn’t some feel good, everybody is equally justified kind of attitude. Some things are wrong. Just flat out unjustifiable. And you aren’t being ‘just as fundamentalist as the other side’ if you point that out.

Then Prather says:

If you weigh the circumstantial evidence for and against the existence of God, there’s about as much evidence on one side as the other. Ultimately, people can find reasons to believe and reasons not to, and various people will arrive at varying conclusions.

Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. Their is absolutely not even close to the same evidence for one side over the other. First off, to be technical, atheism doesn’t even require evidence because it is a default position. I don’t need evidence to not believe in leprechauns or pink yetis. The fact that you have never seen evidence of either of those things is all the justification you need to hold such a position. The burden of proof is on those making positive claims, like religion does. And the claims religion has made have universally failed to be supportable when scrutinized. They are not only unsupported claims, but sometimes are contradictory to what we HAVE learned about the world.

Prather continues:

It’s that they strike me as hypocrites, which is the charge they unfailingly level, with mixed justification, against the religious. In opposing religion in the manner they do, they betray themselves as possessing the traits they profess to loathe.

They’re smug, dogmatic and mean-spirited. They trot out tired, half-truthful stereotypes, and they cherry-pick historical examples of religious wrongdoing while ignoring the innumerable instances in which the faithful have performed great acts of decency and charity.

They pretend that all Christians are bigots prone to violence. They claim that Christians are by definition illogical bumpkins who mindlessly accept fairy tales.

They act as if Thomas Merton and Bob Jones were of one cloth.

Again, this is simply flat out, demonstratively false. Prather goes on to call out Hitchens and Dawkins by name and both of them I know have on multiple occasions said the very opposite of what Prather is claiming new atheists believe, that all religious minded people are “bigots prone to violence”. You can find many videos and written articles where both men say that there are decent religious people. Prather tries to call out atheists on using stereotypes and then presents that whopper of a straw man?

Next:

I wish these atheists would venture, say, into a seminary library. They’d find tens of thousands of volumes written by thinkers great and obscure across two millennia.

They’d find works by scholars who take every word of the Bible literally and works by others who argue that most of the Scripture is made up and that Jesus said almost nothing attributed to him. They’d find every gradation between those extremes.

They’d find the musings of Christians who are pompous, exclusionary and delusional. They’d find Christians who are tolerant and humble and pillars of common sense.

A lot of atheists do. But Prather seems to conflate the fact that even if a Christian writer is tolerant and humble that doesn’t mean he is any more justified in claiming that a god exists. If a Christian scholar posits that Jesus didn’t say what others claimed he said that is fine, but has essentially nothing to do with the fact that if that Christian scholar finds other justifications for their god belief it is just as flimsy and unsupported as any dyed in the wool Jesus follower.

Finally:

They’d learn that Christians were the driving force behind the establishment of public schools and the abolition of slavery, just as, regrettably, other Christians launched the Crusades.

Christianity is a big, organic, complex system of beliefs with a long, diverse history. It’s not just one thing.

Christianity also supported slavery and some oppose public schools. But either way so what? Nobody debates the fact that Christians can be decent people and do decent things. Anybody can. But that fact is irrelevant to the truth and/or usefulness of religion. That would be like saying that because Tom Cruise is a friendly guy and makes fun movies that makes Scientology just as reasonable as any other belief and we shouldn’t diss the idea as being absurd and silly.

I’m sorry Mr. Prather but your arguments against new atheism are just as weak and riddled with falacies as the ones theists present for the existence of their god(s).

Via The Atheist Experience:

Noted Christian evangelical Ray Comfort writes:

Evolution has no explanation for man’s beginning. Some of its believers think that perhaps there was a big bang, but they don’t know where the materials came from for it to take place. They don’t know what was in the beginning, but they are certain that there was no God. They believe the scientific absurdity that life rose out of non-life. It was simply a case of evolution-did-it.

I don’t know how many time I hear something like this or the the ever popular “Evolution says something came out of nothing. Isn’t that crazy!”. Let me repeat, evolution says nothing and has NOTHING to do with the origin of life. Study of the origin of life is called bio-genesis. Evolution is the study of ALREADY existing life and how it adapts and changes in it’s environment. It is like chemistry or something. It isn’t worried about where iron molecules came from. It merely studies the properties that is exhibits and how it interacts with other elements. Likewise evolution is not concerned with how living organisms came into existence. It is concerned with the properties that life exhibits and how they can change over time.

Please, please, please, can we get it through to people that the origin of life and evolution are SEPARATE issues.

So a new supreme court justice is being nominated, Elena Kagan, which of course has triggered the conservative, ‘Say no to everything democratic’ process. Now first of all, I know very little about Ms. Kagan. I have no idea if she would be a good supreme court justice, a terrible one, or somewhere in between. I really have no feelings one way or other on if she is worthy of the position or not.

However, the thing that I do have a problem with is disingenuous arguments. Going around that airwaves are claims that she can’t be a justice because she was never a judge, which is obviously bull since roughly 1/3 of all the supreme justices in history also had no prior judicial experience. Or that she is a bad nominee because she didn’t pay enough lip service to the constitution by quoting a Thurgood Marshall speech that said that that constitution was ‘defective’. Of course the constitution had defects, that is beyond debate as any woman or black person should tell you. So what? Or most ridiculous of all claiming that she is unfit because she waited until her 20’s to get a drivers license.

I know that conservatives will oppose any democratic nominee, that is their nature, and of course they simply can’t just come out and say, “We are voting no for this person because she is a democratic nominee and we won’t support the other side, ever.” So they have to come up with some excuses for their opposition but come on guys, you have got to try a little harder then that. These are truly pathetic and lame. If you are a going to oppose someone at least oppose them for good reasons.

UPDATE: John Cole has a much more amusing take on this same subject.

Mark Thompson has written a post that anyone would be well served to sit down and read on the absurd nature of the “War on Drugs”. I don’t really have much to add as Mark made most of the points nicely, but I think good ideas and such should be repeated and spread around in the collective consciousness. That is how ideals are changed after all. It isn’t one simple mind blowing new idea that nobody ever thought of, it is the repetition and building on of existing ideas. Mark writes:

By emphasizing that militaristic and violent service of warrants is caused by making drug law enforcement a top priority, I was merely arguing that we must stop making enforcement of drug laws such a high priority that we view it as a “War.” This is a far cry from saying that we shouldn’t enforce drug laws at all.

Instead, making drug law enforcement a lower priority means that we recognize that every time we bust a dealer or supplier (or even a network of dealers or suppliers), a new dealer or network is going to rise up to replace them, supply and demand being an immutable law. As such, there is little-to-no deterrent effect involved with busting up dealers or suppliers. The social benefit, if any, of busting dealers is thus purely punitive.

What making drug law enforcement a lower priority thus means is that we’re willing to risk a few dealers dumping their stashes down the toilet because we give them a couple minutes to answer the door rather than waiting five seconds before knocking it down and entering with guns at the ready and in full military gear. There is simply no way in which the added risk of violence this creates is worth the handful of convictions it protects.

This is absolutely true. When did it become so earth-shatteringly critical that we bust some nobody (that generally isn’t harming anyone but themselves) with a small stash of weed that we need to institute a culture of black bag, KGB type raids? The bottom line is what has the “War on Drugs” gained us? Certainly not fewer drug users as the US is the largest drug market in the world. Certainly not safety as drug violence continues unabated and prisons fill with countless people on minor possession charges. And what of the costs of the “War on Drugs”? Of the billions spent that could be better used on social programs or returned to people in the form of tax cuts. Or the creation of the violent drug dealing subculture that costs countless lives, even of those completely uninvolved. I mean when you talk legalization you don’t have Safeway and Albertsons cartels gunning each other down in the street in grocery competition. The dangers of the violent black market are a product of this war.

When you sit down and weight the costs of this “War on Drugs” versus the gains it should be obvious to anyone that it is ridiculous to pursue. When are we going to wake up to this fact and stop being our own worst enemy in this matter?

UPDATE: Some good news for the possibility of ending the ‘war’ from the Obama administration.

I like what Chris Hedges has to say on a lot of things, he is a smart guy, but in a recent article amid a handful of smart points he makes some rather dubious non sequiturs. First of all he takes a gentle stab at science by saying:

We are not going to be saved by faith in reason, science and technology, which the dead zone of oil forming in the Gulf of Mexico and our production of costly and redundant weapons systems illustrate. Frederick Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or “Superman”—our secular religion—is as fantasy-driven as religious magical thinking.

Lets not conflate human beings poor decision making and technical failures as a failure of reason, science, and technology. The fact that people often tend to NOT exercise reason when exercising their use of science and technology is in no way an indicator of the that science and technology aren’t incredibly useful and valid. This seems just a poor attempt at the old game of attempting to place science and understanding on the same level as religion, different but equal.

Chris then says:

There remain, in spite of the leaders of these institutions, religiously motivated people toiling in the inner city and the slums of the developing world. They remain true to the core religious and moral values ignored by these institutions.

In which he paints a picture of his version of the True Scotsman, er, I mean True Christian to give people the warm fuzzy about what *real* religion is. Continuing on….

We are rapidly losing the capacity for the moral life.

I’m sorry, but as many problems as currently exist, and as fucked up as people can act, the fact remains that this statement is simply untrue. Viking raiders pillaged and raped countless villages. King Henry VIII executed a wife or two. The Conquistadors wiped out a couple cultures. Human life throughout history has always been a mix of moral and amoral. There were people that sacrificed everything to help others or for a better world in ancient times just as there are similar people working soup kitchens and donating life saving organs today. It is a pet peeve of mine when people start implying that things are going to hell and just aren’t as great as the ‘good old days’.

The great religions set free the critical powers of humankind. They broke with the older Greek and Roman traditions that gods and Destiny ruled human fate—a belief that, when challenged by Socrates, saw him condemned to death. They challenged the power of the tribe, the closed society. They offered up the possibility that human beings, although limited by circumstance and human weakness, could shape and give direction to society and their own lives. These religious thinkers were our first ethicists.

Okay. What? I mean really? What ‘great’ religions were those? Certainly not Christianity, whose central doctrine is that god does indeed control human fate. And ethics were certainly not limited to religious thinkers as Epicurus and the aforementioned Socrates clearly demonstrate.

These religious institutions are in irreversible decline. They are ruled by moral and intellectual trolls. They have become arrogant and self-absorbed. Their sins are many. They protected criminals. They pandered to the lowest common denominator and illusions of personal fulfillment and surrendered their moral authority. They did not fight the corporate tyrants who have impoverished us. They refused to denounce a caste of Christian heretics embodied by the Christian right and have, for their cowardice, been usurped by bizarre proto-fascists clutching the Christian cross. They have nothing left to say. And their aging congregants, who are fleeing the church in droves, know it. But don’t think the world will be a better place for their demise.

Here Chris I think accurately describes the current state of religious institutions but then at the end with that last sentence hints that despite all it’s flaws that there was some deeper good to religion that will be missed. There is that vibe throughout most of the article, never explicitly stating it but always alluding to this notion that sure, a lot of religion has been negative, but if you just find the ‘true religion’, the diamond in the rough, you will see what a wonderful thing it is for society.

As we devolve into a commodity culture, in which celebrity, power and money reign, the older, dimming values of another era are being replaced. We are becoming objects, consumer products and marketable commodities. We have no intrinsic value. We are obsessed with self-presentation. We must remain youthful. We must achieve notoriety and money or the illusion of it. And it does not matter what we do to get there. Success, as Goldman Sachs illustrates, is its own morality. Other people’s humiliation, pain and weakness become the fodder for popular entertainment. Education, building community, honesty, transparency and sharing see contestants disappeared from any reality television show or laughed out of any Wall Street firm.

What is interesting here is that none of these traits a new development as Chris portrays them to be. Obsessed with self-presentation? Primitive tribes exhibit this too. Ancient kings, queens, and nobility all suffered from it. This is not a new development in human history. Success and money drive people? Really? That is as old as the first coin, it is not a modern invention, or a Chris implies, a recent devolution of human culture.

We spurn virtue. We think we have the moral fortitude and wisdom to create our own moral code.

To a degree we have proven that we do, in the sense that any ‘morally good’ acts exist at all. And even if it turns out that we can’t create an ideal moral code for ourselves, so what? We can’t obtain a moral code from anywhere else, so whatever we can come up with is going to have to do. And please don’t say religion, that is a tired, well-beaten horse.

The consumer culture, as Nietzsche feared, has turned us into what Chalmers Johnson calls a “consumerist Sparta.” The immigrants and the poor, all but invisible to us, work as serfs in this new temple of greed and imperialism. Curtis White in “The Middle Mind” argues that most Americans are aware of the brutality and injustice used to maintain the excesses of their consumer society and empire. He suspects they do not care. They don’t want to see what is done in their name. They do not want to look at the rows of flag-draped coffins or the horribly maimed bodies and faces of veterans or the human suffering in the blighted and deserted former manufacturing centers. It is too upsetting. Government and corporate censorship is welcomed and appreciated. It ensures that we remain Last Men. And the death of religious institutions will only cement into place the new secular religion of the Last Man, the one that worships military power, personal advancement, hedonism and greed, the one that justifies our callousness toward the weak and the poor.

Certainly this is mostly true, and I can sympathize with the notion that people are not as skeptical and involved in their world as they should be. But lets be clear, this is a human issue, not a secular/religious one as Chris hints at. When Chris interjects statements like “the new secular religion of the Last Man” he is once again making that ‘different but equal’ implication and attempting to tar secularism with the problems that human being are often self-interested, violent, etc. All these less then virtuous traits existed just as much in religious dominated societies as they do in modern secular ones. They are not secular problems, they are human ones.

So yes, people deserve to be called out for living in a stupor, or being willing pawns of larger powers and all that, but we can do that without the subtle undertones that it is all because we are losing our roots in religion.

This post by Chris Dierkes is in response to the question “Are Christianity and Homosexuality Reconcilable?” In the post itself and a number of the comments people jump through the usual mental gymnastics in order to say that yes they are reconcilable. It is funny because much virtual ink is spilled discussing things like sin and various interpretations of sections of the bible and largely misses the bigger point. (although a couple people hint at it)

The fact is, of course they are reconcilable because religion itself is a malleable human construct and will, and has, changed in response to changing cultural and social norms. Just as Christianity has ‘reconciled’ support for slavery, opposition to women’s rights, and a host of other issues, it will reconcile homosexuality the same way. Those teachings of the bible will be shuffled off to the corner of things that have been deemed as allegory, or bad translations, or a ’sign of the times’ or any of the other excuses used to whitewash objectionable parts of the bible. The fact is that cultural norms have always set the boundaries on religion and the believers of those religions will do whatever revisions or mental gymnastics necessary to fit their chosen faith into current social standards. These metaphysical or theological debates needed to reconcile are just that exercise in process. Something that is simply non-fiction like religions can, and have been, easily modified to abide by the changing cultural tides. You don’t need to analyze scripture to understand that religion will align itself to whatever the prevailing social attitudes are, and that it will to yield to the pressure they exert.

It’s really quite easy to see standing outside the box of organized religion. Watching the conversations on sin etc you realize they are discussing things that simply don’t matter at all to answer the original question that was posed.

So Charles Krauthhammer in the Washington Post has written an article echoing a lot of the talking points that are going around in the media about how reading the Miranada rights to Faisal Shahzad (the Times square bomber) is such a mistake. It is rather absurd that this point has gotten any traction considering what a no-brainer it is.

First of all, Shahzad is a United States citizens which means he is entitled to any rights that anyone else has in this country. You don’t get to selectively choose who you get to apply those rights just because you have deemed him guilty already. Remember innocent until proven guilty? Sure the evidence is there and it is a slam dunk that he will be convicted but things like Miranda rights exist to protect people from wrongful accusations and in order for them to work you can’t just circumvent them at your pleasure.

Secondly, whether the authorities read him his rights or not is irrelevant to the fact that he has those rights. It has been decided in courts before, even if a suspect is not read their Miranda rights they are still entitled to them. So reading him the rights doesn’t grant him anything, it just informs him of what they are. A fact Krauthammer seems oblivious to when he says “Or the administration could, in an actual case, refrain from Mirandizing until it had explored the outer limits of any plot” They could, but that wouldn’t change his rights one bit.

Next, Krauthammer states:

But then Shahzad was Mirandized. If he had decided to shut up, it would have denied us valuable information — everything he is presumably telling us now about Pakistani contacts, training, plans for other possible plots beyond the Times Square attack.

Okay, either two scenarios exist, either Shahzad was inclined to talk or he was not. Now suppose he was not inclined to talk, do you think not reading him Miranda rights would have changed his mind? If he didn’t want to give up info on other plots can you tell me with a straight face that he would suddenly reveal all simply because he wasn’t told that “you have the right to remain silent.”. Seriously? I doubt that kind of interrogation psychology would work even with a 6 year old. I mean if you think that terrorists are suddenly going to reveal all simply because you tell them that some congressional statute (Krauthammers suggestion) says they have to talk you need to wake up and smell some reality. The notion is completely delusional.

Along the same vein, the craven Joe Lieberman has introduced a bill called the Terrorist Expatriation Act (TEA? Really now?) that would strip a person of citizenship “if found to have provided material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization — as designated by the secretary of state — or participated in actions against the United States.” A side of McCarthyism to go with that cup of TEA Joe?

As Ed Brayton points out such a punishment could only be administers after someone is convicted which mean after trial, which is after capture and Miranda rights and all that. So really it wouldn’t change the fact that people would still be entitled to their rights.

Also, I would like to point out, what would be the point? So you declare some guy a non-citizen. Then what do you do with him? If he is serving a jail sentence then the fact that you are a citizen or not is pretty irrelevant is it not? Unless you are going to argue to throw all prisoner and human rights out the window À la Gitmo which would be nothing short of institutionalized evil. And if you aren’t going to imprison them then what? Just drop them at the border and say goodbye? Wouldn’t that be tantamount to just setting them free? Might as well just have let him fly off on that airplane to Dubai then.

So really what would be the point of it? You can’t take away someone’s right before they are found guilty, and after being convicted people have very limited rights anyways. The whole bill is nothing but political grandstanding by a gutless, pandering politician and if it was ever passed and attempted to be implemented in any way would lead to terrible abuses of freedom. The one notion that is supposed to set a country like this apart from oppressive regimes.

So Jon Stewart tells us that after the passage of the health care bill the insurance companies are busy at work looking for loopholes so that they can deny coverage to children with preexisting conditions. Jon asks the obvious question “Why would anyone do that?” Well obviously we all know from health care opponents that people that get sick due so because of their own poor lifestyle choices. So obviously we can’t have freeloader kids who made poor lifestyle choices such as eating the school lunch, eating crayons, and riding their bicycle without a helmet to rip off the insurance companies right?

Also a little angry because I have a friend that is in need of an organ transplant. Their story is basically this:

• They spend years working for “The Company” and gets the company insurance from “Insurance Co. A”
• After years of working hard and being a good employee they get “the illness”
• It is a constant battle but “Insurance Co. A” pays for some medical costs.
• “The Company” decides to change who they partner with for health insurance so “Insurance Co. A” is out and “Insurance Co. B” is in.
• Even though they are at the same job everyone is considered new customers to “Insurance Co. B” who says, “whoa, you have yourself a ‘preexisting condition’, no coverage for you for 6 months”
• Friend is dropped off potentially life saving organ transplant waiting list because “Insurance Co. B” won’t cover it.

I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t be sorry if these greedy bastards drown in a shallow pool.

So by now everyone has heard the story about the Catholic Church in general and the Pope in particular covering up for child molesters among the clergy. The Vaticans response has at every step shown that they just don’t get it. First they seemed shocked that people would actually feel the church should be held accountable for the misdeeds. I mean sure, you get written letters saying that there is a problem with a pastor molesting boys and your response is just “move along, nothing to see here”, why would anyone have a problem with that? So now in response to public outcry they have created new ‘procedures’ for handling sexual abuse guidelines.

This is stupid on so many levels. First off, the church doesn’t get to set the rules for sexual abuse, the local governments do. It goes on to talk about sending this and that to their CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) but whatever their CDF may or may not decide is completely irrelevant. An issue such as sexual abuse would be settled in a civil court and punishment determined likewise. What their CDF thinks of the matter doesn’t amount to jack shit. It is really simple, if you have evidence that abuse is occurring you go to the police, they will investigate. It is a criminal matter not a church one.

But I guess issuing these guidelines is better then nothing since apparently the men of the cloth can’t tell right from wrong without being explicitly told it. And since nowhere in the ten commandments (the only law you need!) does it cover rape I can see how they would be confused on the matter.

PS – If my tone comes off as angry then good. This has been a truly immoral and disgusting occurrence, just simply because of the tragic abuses that occurred but because of the despicable excuse making and responsibility dodging that the church has engaged in. They have basically been going to bat for child abuse and that is inexcusable.