On “Why do you hate God?”

We’ve heard it numerous times. You’ve encountered someone going by the name of ‘Truth Speaker’ on the interwebs on a discussion board or a blog. The argument is getting more and more intense and just like clockwork there it is:

“You atheists just hate God”

Other flavours of this approach include:

“You just don’t want to live by God’s rules”
“You’re just angry at God”
“You’ve turned you back on God”
“You’ve rejected God”

Why do some conservative religious types insist on using this rhetorical device? Anyone with a functioning brain cell can see the problem with it, and even though you point it out they just won’t give it up. It seems the existence of someone who doesn’t believe in their deity of choice and is at the same time living a happy and fulfilling existence scares the bejesus out of them and this poor excuse for an argument is how they stick their head in the sand.

It’s an argument stopper. How can one continue an argument with someone who claims that you don’t actually know what you believe? Someone who claims to know the inner workings of your mind better than you do? You can’t. The “You just hate God” argument is short for “I don’t want to hear any more. You’re challenging my sacred beliefs and it’s making me uncomfortable. I’ll just pretend you don’t really mean what you’re saying and that deep down you’re on my side, even if you don’t realise it.”

Is there any way to talk sense into someone who tries this on?

Hooray for Hallmark

I don’t know any gay people who are getting married, but I might buy some of these Hallmark cards just to piss off the American Family Association:

Hallmark is a private company obviously driven by greed. Let them know you do not appreciate Hallmark promoting a lifestyle which is illegal in 48 states. American Greeting Cards, Hallmark’s competitor, does not offer same-sex marriage cards.

TAKE ACTION

* Send an e-mail to Hallmark. Ask them to stop promoting a lifestyle that is not only unhealthy, but is also illegal in 48 states.
* Forward this to your friends and family.

Why does the 21st century hate families?

Flag bearing woman delays apocalypse

Want to carry the flag for Iran at the next Olympic Games? Don’t forget your penis…

Iranian religious figures have criticised that Olympic female rower Homa Hosseini was chosen as the flagbearer of Iran, calling the move a ‘heresy’.

“To make a woman march with the flag of the Islamic Republic in Beijing, is pure heresy and shows total disobedience of the laws mandated by our spiritual guides,” said Seyye Ahmad Elmalhoda, leader of Friday prayers in Iran’s holy city of Mashad.

Oh noes! Iranian women are bringing enough shame upon their country as it is by being raped, and now this.

“To make this woman march means to openly declare war to our religious values. Whoever is responsible for this unforgivable act, he should know that this gesture constitutes an obstacle for the ‘appearance’ of Mahdi,” said Elmalhoda.

He was referring to the mainly Shia Islam belief that imam Mohammed al-Mahdi will appear to fight a final apocalyptic battle over the forces of evil.

Followers believe he was born in the year 868 and has been in hiding ever since awaiting a decision from god to reappear.

“This woman”. Touching. It’s funny though, most people would be thanking someone who managed to delay the end of the world. But I suppose everything’s different when you’re a member of misogynistic, hate-driven death cult.

If you ask me, an open declaration of war against these kinds of religious values is more than welcome.

I’m back.

Well I have been for two weeks now. But with things like getting a job, catching up with friends and relatives, looking for a car, pre-start for a house and other things on the ‘to do’ list I haven’t had a chance to get back to blogging.  Hopefully I’ll be back to it within a week or so. 

Stay tuned.

BRB (In two months)

I’ll be MIA until the end of July, as I’m about to embark on two months of travel around Europe.  Hello Greece, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, Sweden and France!

See you ’round like a rissole.

The womans are coming!

Oh Noes! :

An Anglican splinter group has warned that the consecration of Perth Archdeacon Kay Goldsworthy as Australia’s first woman bishop tonight will pave the way for the appointment of openly gay priests and further deepen the rift between Church factions.

Bishop Harry Entwistle, who heads the WA chapter of the breakaway conservative group the Traditional Anglican Communion, said the consecration would add weight to the call from liberal Church elements to accept gay priests and bishops.

Teh gays are coming!

These 1950’s style religious folk just can’t get enough of the slippery-slope argument. The thing is, the slippery slope argument doesn’t help Harry Entwistle’s case as much as he thinks. Many would respond to his claim with “Yeah. And?”

It’s also interesting to note that he believes a course of action is best not pursued if it is contentious. If he thinks female bishops are a bad idea he should give reasons why. The exact same line of argument could have been used in justifying separate schools for black and white children. “Oh, we can’t put black children in with the white children because it will create tension in the community”.

My brush with religion

While listening to the most recent episode of Two Smokin’ Hot Freethinkers in which Reed and Sam discussed their journey from theism to atheism I started to reflect on my own brush with religion in my childhood years.

I wasn’t raised in a religious family. Mum and Dad never went to church and as far as I know, neither did my grandparents. In fact, my folks never brought up the topic of religion at all. I’ve been inside a church for non-sight-seeing purposes perhaps three or four times in my entire life, usually for weddings.

At the age of about nine I became friends with a kid in my class at my primary school who, I soon learned, was religious. When visiting his family’s house I noticed pictures of JC on the walls, Bibles strewn throughout the house and other religious paraphernalia. I was curious, so I asked what it was all about. I already knew about the concept of God, but my friend filled me in on all the details concerning JC, the ten commandments, heaven and so on. He also told me about hell.

This hell place didn’t sound too pleasant. I started to think more about death and what would be happening to me ‘on the other side’. If I didn’t want to be cast into everlasting fire it seemed I would have to start paying a bit more attention to all this.

At about this time I asked my Mum about which religion (specifically which Christian denomination) we belonged to. The reply was that we belonged to no religion, and that it was a matter for me to decide and for me alone. So I decided I was a Christian.

Somehow a Bible came into my possession around this time too. I don’t recall where I got it from – perhaps it had been dropped off on a Saturday morning by one of God’s door-to-door salesman, who knows. Anyway, I started to read it, and even though I couldn’t make any sense of it, I thought the big guy upstairs would be pleased. I’d also started praying, and even though I was sure I was doing it wrong, I was confident that it was a case of ‘it’s the thought that counts’.

This went on for perhaps a year or so. The thing was, as time passed, I’d forget to look at my little pocket Bible for weeks on end, and would fall asleep mid-prayer at night. I was thinking the big guy upstairs wouldn’t be too impressed by all this, but I’d also been told that if you say sorry he always forgives you. So that made me feel a little better.

At about this point I became acutely aware of the existence of religions other than Christianity. I started to ask myself questions. “How do I know I’ve chosen the right religion?” “What happens to the people who choose incorrectly?” I also started questioning elements of the religion I proclaimed to be a member of: “If this God loves us so much why is there so much human suffering in the world?” “Is there really a crime worthy of eternal burning agony?” “How can one be absolved of their wrong-doings by the self-sacrifice of another?”

It must have been at the age of ten or eleven that the friendship with my religious mate came to an end, and not on good terms. My religiosity had already started to wane a little by then, and in our arguments I would taunt him with claims that I no longer worshipped his God but the Devil instead. Saying you worshipped his nemesis would be a sure way to get on the wrong side of God I thought. Then I realised something – I no longer feared or revered this God character. In fact, I simply didn’t believe in him at all anymore. It seemed as if I realised I’d been playing Pascal’s wager the whole time.

I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist at that point – I was probably more of a deist, as I thought I still needed something to explain things like the origin of the universe and life. I found religion in general to be quite suspect, and I certainly didn’t believe in some kind of deity that took an active interest in human affairs. But even the idea of an benign deity that simply got the ball rolling didn’t hold for long. I realised that a more intellectually honest answer to questions about life and the origins of the universe at that time for me was “I don’t know”.

Throughout my teens I probably would have described myself as agnostic, but I’d pretty much lost all interest in the God hypothesis. I’d heard about evolution by then, but it had always been described in the crass fashion of “humans came from monkeys”. Later, I came across The Blind Watchmaker and by the time I put it down the final traces of belief in the some kind of deity had withered away. The theory of evolution by natural selection was so much more elegant and compelling than any creation story, and a clear understanding of this amazing advance in human knowledge led me to be what Dawkins describes as “an intellectually fulfilled atheist”.

Just thought I’d share that.

Janet & Teh Evil Judges

The ruling by the Supreme Court of California in favour of gay marriage has resulted in a predictable whinge from Janet Albrechtsen about a “a tyranny of judges”.

The Supreme Court of California, in a 4-3 ruling last Thursday, legislated in favour of gay marriage. Never mind that 61% of Californian voters said no to gay marriage in a state wide plebiscite on the matter in 2000. The judges apparently know better what the people should want.

Argument ad populum. “The ruling is wrong because most Californians disagree”. Piss weak.

It’s funny how Judges are only activists when they rule against the wishes of the conservatives. Ed Brayton summed this up nicely:

It’s outrageous when courts overturn the “clear will of the people,” especially when that will is expressed directly through popular referendum. That’s absolutely wrong. Or is it? Let’s hit the rewind button back to 2006 when the case was Gonzales v Oregon, where the people of Oregon passed a law authorizing voluntary assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

In fact they did it twice, once in 1994 and once in 1997, before the law took effect. Religious right groups immediately filed suit to have those evil activist courts overturn the law and the Supreme Court upheld the law in 2006 by a 6-3 vote. Guess what Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council thought about the “clear will of the people” in that case? They filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to strike down the will of the people and screamed bloody murder when the ruling went the other way.

Game. Set. Match.

Maybe there’s anything from Janet with a little more substance further on…?

You’d think that America’s senior appellate judges would learn from Roe v Wade. When the Supreme Court of the United States legislated in favour of abortion, the Court did not settle the issue of abortion but inflamed it. For decades now, while most Americans support the right of women to have an abortion, many Americans believe the matter should have been decided by legislatures.

Whether women should have been granted the right to terminate a pregnancy is neither here nor there. What we need really need to be careful of is people getting all wound up about it.

[I]t is not homophobic to criticise an activist judiciary for legislating gay marriage. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia summed it up in his dissent in Lawrence v Texas, a Supreme Court decision which legalized sodomy by overturning a duly enacted law by the people of Texas. “Let me clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means. Social perceptions of sexual and other morality change over time, and every group has the right to persuade its fellow citizens that its views of such matters are best…But persuading one’s fellow citizens is one thing, and imposing one’s views in absence of democratic majority will is something else.

Those filthy sodomites can do what they please in the privacy of their own bedrooms when the majority of this states God-fearing citizens say they can!

[The Judges’] good intentions do not get them off the hook for undermining democracy. Indeed, as CS Lewis said, of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised “for the good of its victims” may be the most oppressive.”

I’ll take ridiculous hyperbole for $1000, Alex.

Janet’s getting thumped in the comments section at her blog, and she deserves it for writing such a poorly argued piece of drivel. There are a few supporters in there though, who think the judiciary should be abolished and started afresh with elected judges who serve 3 year terms…

Maybe the denialists are right?

I’ve always dismissed the findings of the Bolt/Blair School of Global Warming Denialism believing that climate scientists themselves would be the best people to consult on such issues. I always assumed they didn’t have a strong grasp of the details of climate science and that they couldn’t make the distinction between weather and climate, or that they would cherry-pick from the available data to make their case. But I’ve been doing some analysis of the data myself and I’m reluctant to report that based on the evidence, they’re right. Observe:

I’ve mapped the temperature data for Sydney over the last six days (Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology.)

Note the distinctive downward trend for the maximum temperature over the given time period. Global Warming Prophets of Doom say that AGW will lead to higher temperatures, yet the data shows precicesly the opposite.

But that’s not all.

Below is a graph of Sydney’s temperature record for the 12th of May, 2008. The graph maps the recorded temperature from around lunch time until 11:30PM. (Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology.)

Again, notice the distinctive downward trend. It appears we are not undergoing a period of global warming, but global cooling.

I wonder, how will the IPCC spin these latest “inconvenient truths”?

On the Archbishop of Westminster

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Conner was the well deserving winner of The Bill Muehlenberg Trophy at Five Public Opinions the other day for his contempt for a balanced debate over Christianity occurring on the BBC. While boo-hooing over secularists and their supposed desire to “close off every voice and contribution other than their own”, he also suggested that the BBC abandon impartiality when covering religion and instead adopt an active bias in favour of Christian dogma:

“Sometimes the adversarial aspect — if you’ve got one view you’ve got to have the opposite view — supplants what we need.”

Hmmm.

In a lecture presented at Westminster Cathedral the other night, he whinged further about supposed attempts to “eliminate the Christian voice” from the public forum. No examples of these attempts are cited of course, and if he were pressed to provide one how likely would it be that this supposed stifling of the Christian perspective would in fact be criticism. I suspect the cardinal, like many conservative Christians, is unable to see the difference between persecution and criticism. They feel that they should be able to cast their opinion into the public domain and without scrutinisation because they are their deeply held personal beliefs.

In the same lecture he had this to say:

There are social currents today that want to isolate religion from other forms of knowledge and experience in order to marginalise it. One of the things which I challenge is the desire to separate Christianity from rational inquiry. Many of our ‘new atheists’ seem unable to cope with the notion of an intelligent, reflective Christian faith. But the Catholic Christian tradition is characterised by a close relationship between reasoned understanding and religious faith. Faith for us is the flowering of reason, not its betrayal.

Only to follow shortly after with this:

Our faith is not founded on the conclusions of reason, but it is grounded in the Logos, the expressive Word that comes from God, and it is compatible with reasoned thought.

So in one moment faith is “the flowering of reason”, and in the next it’s “not founded on the conclusions of reason”. Confused? You should be.

How is one to know precisely what the good cardinal thinks about reason and faith? If we listen to his interview on the BBC Today program we learn that reason without faith is dangerous and that the societies of Hitler and Stalin were “ruled by reason”. Yes, that’s right – the cardinal believes that the holocaust and the gulags were a direct result of reason untempered by faith. Ben “Science kills people” Stein has met his match.