The next time, there will be Hell to pay

I haven't blogged much (or enough) lately, partly because so much crap has been going down and my ADHD makes it hard to focus: ISIS (or ISIL, or whatever; Al Shabaab; Boko Haram; the Republicans; and so on...

Maybe I'll eventually get around to some of these, but for now I've been thinking about the "religious freedom restoration acts" or whatever they're called. Can't we agree that it's a tad nonsensical to imagine that stories told by Iron Age Middle Eastern goat-herders should be taken as a guide to living in the 21st century? The authors of the Bible, etc., simply did not have either the scope or depth of knowledge of human nature that we now possess. Give these poor, long-dead people a rest, for Vishnu's sake!

And, perhaps, can we agree that the raison d'etre of these acts is bogus.  Business people claim that that by providing goods and/or services to homosexuals, they are violating their religious principles.  Say again?  They act as though they are being coerced into homosexual acts or getting gay-married.  No!  They are business people being asked to not discriminate among the people who come to them for their goods and services.  That's not making them gay, that's good business!  What is the matter with these people?

And while we're on the subject, we know that this is really about "Christian freedom," not any other religious freedom.  The Christians, we hear (no need for citations) feel oppressed, bullied.  There's a "war on Christianity."  I don't see how how they come to that conclusion.  If anything, the (some) Christians have been bullying everyone else ever since the nation was founded (and before that, too).  I personally have spent a lifetime, now almost 70 years, being bullied by Christians.  Bullied into reciting the Lord's Prayer, bullied into saying or pretending to say grace at the table, bullied into moments of silence while we thank the Christian god for something or other.

I recall a visit to our house by a family a couple of years ago.  The father considered himself to be a preacher.  As they were getting ready to leave, he asked us to join hands while he thanked God for our opportunity to visit together.  I felt bullied in my own home, but I let it go out of politeness, or at least that's what I told myself.  But I was seething with anger inside, and I wanted to say something along the lines of "How dare you come into someone else's home and presume that they share your religious beliefs and behaviors?"

I was as I say "polite" this time.  No more.  No more being bullied.  The next time, there will be Hell to pay...

Time to lose that imaginary friend!

OK, here's the thing. I'm pretty sure that religion is not the root of *all* evil. But I am sure that if your imaginary friend is telling you to kill schoolchildren, you need to lose that imaginary friend.  She/he/it is not doing you or the planet any good.  Just lose them.

While we're on the subject, I might give the same advice if your imaginary friend(s) are telling you to hate homosexuals, Blacks, poor people, foreigners, or almost anybody.  Except those whose imaginary friend tells them to kill schoolchildren.  With them, you're on your own.

The Hobby Lobby malfunction

Here's the thing: No matter how "sincerely" you believe in them, your imaginary friends should have absolutely no say in how you treat your employees. Period.

Wait. What?

This may be the weirdest story I've heard in a long time.  I have not yet seen the new documentary Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, about attempts over the years by high-ups in the Catholic church to hide the church's rampant pedophilia.  But, according to a review in the San Francisco Chronicle, the makers of the film claim that:

In 1965, the Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald, who had co-founded the Servants of the Paraclete, advanced a plan to have the church buy the Caribbean island of Carriacou and even put a down payment on the island. His plan was to move all the pedophilic priests to the island to keep them from harming other children - like some kind of sexual deviant version of an old-fashioned leper colony. While the idea seems absurd, the fact that it was even considered shows how committed the church was to the cover-up.

 Wow.  Can this be true?  Carriacou is where I spent my Peace Corps service (1971-74) and also where I have, over the years, carried out linguistic research on the English and French Creole languages spoken there. Due to its French colonial past, Catholicism has been a fixture of Carriacou culture for centuries.  But this, really?

If it is true, what was supposed to happen if the "sale" went through, I wonder?  Would the local people be allowed to continue living there, and if so, what sort of safeguards would have been put in place to protect the island's children from these repugnant "priests?"  And if the idea was to move them, where would the 3,000 or so people have been moved to?  Or were the descendants of African slaves on a little Caribbean island sufficiently unimportant that nobody really cared? 

 

And what role might the Grenadian leader of the time, Eric Gairy, have played in this?  Given that Carriacou was typically the center of political opposition to Gairy, and remembering what sort of leader he was, it's not hard to imagine him selling off the people of Carriacou, especially if enough money were involved.

 

I'm no fan of religion, especially Big Religion, but it's hard even for me to believe that a religion could foster such obscene callousness.

God's grade inflation, and more...

Tomorrow is the start of classes at my school.  I'll be doing Linguistic Anthropology (36 students), Physical Anthropology (28 students), and an Introduction to Anthropology (127 students signed up, but the cap is 200).  These are all undergraduate classes: we have no graduate program in Anthropology.  And thus, no teaching assistants for grading, etc.

Meanwhile....  A couple of days ago a small plane carrying three people crashed into a home south of here.  The only survivor was the person who was at home.  She came out pretty much unscathed and declared "God is good."

Uh huh.  God puts four people in extreme jeopardy, kills three of them, and is pronounced "good."  I wouldn't give a student a "good" if they made 25% on a test. God must be benefitting from grade inflation.

What did Jesus look like?

I just recently stumbled upon this, and thought it worth spreading around a bit.  We're all familiar with the ever-present blond, blue-eyed interpretations of Jesus coming out of Western culture.  In 2002, Popular Mechanics (?!?) published a reconstruction of a more plausible Jesus.  The work was done by forensic artist Richard Neave; the details can be found in the online article.

Probably not much comfort for many of the white born-agains. And, if he were at the airport getting ready to board a plane,  the TSA would surely pull him aside for extra "scrutiny" (if you know what I mean).

It's cults all the way down (and back up!)

Anthropologically speaking, the recent brouhaha over whether Mormonism is a "cult" is amusing, and it offers one of those teachable moments we all live for.  Robert Jeffress, a pastor at the Dallas, Texas, First Baptist Church, referred to Mormonism as a "theological cult" in an interview with reporters at the Values Voter Summit on Friday, October 7.  You can watch him defend his remark on Fox News here.

The whole thing is amusing because, in the US Folk Model, the word cult is to religion roughly what dialect is to language.  A variety of religion (or language) is tagged as non-standard, perhaps a bit weird or undesirable, the property of some minority or other that isn't quite inside the pale.


The Merriam-Webster online dictionary has these as the first three definitions of cult (my emphasis added):

1: formal religious veneration: worship
2: a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also: its body of adherents
3: a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also: its body of adherents

Note that the third definition, the one Pastor Jeffress presumably had in mind, is the negative one.  The first two reflect the history of the term, which has the same root as culture (Latin cultus) and referred to the set of beliefs and behaviors associated with the worship or veneration of a god, saint, etc.  These definitions are not what most people have in mind when they use the term cult, and I would argue that to reflect actual usage in US society Merriam-Webster have these in the wrong order.

At least some anthropologists, following Anthony F. C. Wallace, continue to use cult in this broader, neutral sense to refer to any system of beliefs and behaviors involving the supernatural in some way.  Wallace identified four basic types of cults: individualistic; shamanistic; communal; ecclesiastical. Individualistic and shamanistic cults are most characteristic of small-scale societies whose subsistence is based on foraging or horticulture.  In these cults there are no full-time religious practitioners and most of what needs to be known to manipulate the supernatural is available to all, though especially talented individuals (shamans) may be consulted.  Ecclesiastical cults, typical of large-scale, stratified, state societies, have full-time practitioners who control access to the knowledge and also the performance of rituals.  Historically, the bureaucracy associated with these cults was frequently intertwined with or even equivalent to the state bureaucracy.  Communal cults appear as a bridge, but are most obvious in some pastoral societies such as the Maasai, where for example all males in an age-set undergo the ritual that transforms them from warriors to elders.

Religious cults conceived in this way form an implicational scale, so that for example people whose lives are centered on an ecclesiastical cult nevertheless also have beliefs and behaviors that reflect communal, shamanistic, and individualistic levels of organization.


So, anthropologists might use the word cult to describe Christianity as a whole, or at any level; the same with Islam, Judaism, or any other set of beliefs and behaviors.  Haitian Vodoun is a cult, and so is Jeffress's Southern Baptist Convention.  Everything is a cult, or nothing is a cult.


We can play the same game with the term dialect.  Appalachian English is a dialect of American English, which is a dialect of English, which is a dialect of West Germanic, which is a dialect of Germanic, which is a dialect Indo-European, which is a dialect of Human Language.


It's dialects, and cults, all the way up and down.

We're still here!

Looks like the Rapture didn't happen yesterday after all.  Either that, or only the heathens are left behind; come to think of it, the neighborhood was pretty quiet this morning when I took our dog for a walk.

Incidentally, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, which seems pretty reliable, the word heathen, is from Anglo-Saxon hǣðen, meaning "not Christian or Jew."  The word may have originally referred to people who lived on the heath, i.e. non-farmers, wild people (the word pagan has a similar historical origin).  Old English hǣðen underwent the usual vowel changes, which is why we now pronounce it [hiːðən].

The whole "rapture" thing reminds me of a story about the late Sir Eric Gairy, former Grenadian political leader and a sort of mini-Papa Doc.  During one of his campaigns in the 50s or maybe 60s, he told people that he would prove his power by walking on the water of St. George's harbor, which is actually the partly submerged rim of an extinct (?) volcano.  On the appointed night he was rowed out to the middle of the harbor.  He stood up in the boat and started to step out onto the water, and then dramatically stopped and looked up, cupping his ear with his hand as if listening to something.  He sat back down in the boat and they rowed him to shore.  There he told the onlookers that just as he was about to walk on the water, he received a message from God who told him it wasn't the right time.

And here's the sad part: a lot of those people on shore believed him.

Bill O'Reilly thinks the tides can't be explained

Stephen Colbert and Neil DeGrasse Tyson help him out:

                                   

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bill O'Reilly Proves God's Existence - Neil deGrasse Tyson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog March to Keep Fear Alive

                                   

Does Palin know what she's talking about? You betcha... Not!

Here is Alaska half-governor Sarah Palin in a recent interview with Bill O'Really O'Reilly of FAUX News:

I have said all along that America is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs and, you know, nobody has to believe me though. You can just go to our Founding Fathers' early documents and see how they crafted a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that allows that Judeo-Christian belief to be the foundation of our lives. And our Constitution, of course, essentially acknowledging that our unalienable rights don't come from man; they come from God. So this document is set up to protect us from a government that would ever infringe upon our rights to have freedom of religion and to be able to express our faith freely.

And she is clearly and indisputably wrong. Here is the Preamble to the US Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And if you keep reading, there is no mention, not one word, of God or religion. The only place religion is mentioned is in Amendment I of the Bill of Rights, to wit:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

And, for good measure, here is a portion of the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams in 1797:

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

But, to give her credit, maybe Palin's just reading the wrong documents. Here is the Preamble to the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, March, 1861 (my emphasis):

We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America.

Could it be that she and the other Teabaggers who insist that the US is a "Christian nation" are reading the wrong documents? It seems implausible. More likely, they just make up whatever fits their agenda, and happily proclaim it to be The Truth.

Amen.

Dawkins: "If science worked like religion"

1775 wasn't what Sarah Palin thinks it was

Here, Keith Olbermann brings Sarah Palin into direct competition with the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams over the role of religion in government.  Guess who wins...

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Educational malpractice at Liberty University

The internet news site Common Dreams carried an article recently about a group of students from Liberty University visiting the Smithsonian Institution. Students at LU are encouraged to fit natural history, and especially biological evolution, into the fantasy religion-based creationist biblical literalism advocated by the school's founder, the late fundamentalist evangelist Jerry Falwell. And, as an Indonesian fundamentalist Islamic saying goes, "when faith and facts conflict, faith wins."

Illustrating how faith wins over facts, LU students scoffed at the Smithsonian's model of a 210 million year old rat-sized creature hypothesized to be the common ancestor of all mammals. First, there's no way a ratty-looking thing could ever become a human being. Second, the 210 million year window for this to happen violates the young earth creationism taught at LU, which is based on arithmetical gymnastics of Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) who calculated that God created Everything on October 23, 4004 BC, making the Earth only around 6,000 years old.

Further reinforcing the triumph of faith over facts, Marcus Ross, an Assistant Professor of Geology at LU, made this comment about Adam and Eve:

"I feel they were real people, they were the first people."

OK, then. But there's a problem. "I feel..." is not a legitimate way to introduce a scientific proposition. "The evidence suggests..." would be more appropriate. But for these folks, evidence is not required. In fact, evidence that conflicts with "faith," which really means unquestioning obedience, is ignored, disparaged, ridiculed, tossed aside. It doesn't matter that the evidence suggests that there really never was, at any single point in time, a "first woman" or "first man." When evidence conflicts with faith, faith wins.

Anyway, I was intrigued by this article, so I went online to look for course descriptions at Liberty University. After all, LU is accredited by the same agency as my school, the University of North Florida.  I found a course called History of Life, and here are the description and "rationale" for that course:

COURSE DESCRIPTION
An interdisciplinary study of the origin and history of life in the universe. Faculty of the Center for Creation Studies will draw from science, religion, history, and philosophy in presenting the evidence and arguments for creation and against evolution. This course is required for all Liberty students. 

RATIONALE

This course is designed to instill in our students a clear understanding of the relationship between science and Scripture as it pertains to the study of origins. In particular, it is designed to help students develop a clear and consistent Biblical creationist worldview and defend it.

Wow. The "History of Life" is essentially a course designed to show students how to ignore almost everything we know about the history of life in favor of a rambling collection of myths written down by some Middle Eastern nomads centuries before anyone even knew that life on Earth is carbon-based. And just to drive the point home, here are the course's "measurable learning outcomes" (at least they have the academic assessment jargon down pat):

A. Students should be able to discuss and contrast creation science and evolution worldviews.

B. Students should be able to discuss the creation science view from Biblical accounts and rebut creation compromise views. 

C. Students should be able to discuss the theories of natural selection and evolution. 

D. Students should be able to discuss scientific evidences in support of a recent creation. 

E. Students should be able to discuss the evidence of the fossil record and its implications of origins. 

F. Students should be able to discuss evidence for the unique creation of man. 

G. Students should be able to discuss evidence for creation using concepts such as irreducible complexity. 

H. Students should be able to discuss the importance of the Biblical creation message in understanding major doctrines and application for personal evangelism.

Why is this "educational malpractice," as I suggested in the title of this post? It's malpractice because this university's faculty are lying to their students, just as egregiously as if, in an astronomy class, they taught them that the Sun revolves around the Earth. And, by the way, this would be true even if the lies were not based on religious dogma.

The empirical, objectively valid facts about the history of life on Earth, the falsifiable hypotheses that scientists create to describe and explain those facts, and the theories that result when related  unfalsified hypotheses converge on the explanation of some set of those facts, cannot be evaluated by what's in the Bible, any more than they can be evaluated by what's in Lord of the Rings.

I believe that the accrediting agency should put Liberty University's program in biology on probation until those who teach in that program stop lying to their students.

Florida Governor Charlie Crist does not like atheists!

And if you want to get an idea of how much he doesn't like them, read this personal account by one who tried to talk to him. (Thanks to PZ Myers at Pharyngula.)

What evidence?

NIH Director Francis Collins was just on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR, talking mostly about genetic testing and its benefits for medicine, and so on. Pretty sensible stuff. But then, the host asked about his religious belief. Collins replied that although he was an atheist as a graduate student, he decided at some point to pay attention to "spiritual" matters that he had been ignoring. I can't quote him exactly (I was driving to campus) but he gave the impression that he researched the question and came to the conclusion that the "evidence" (his word) pointed to the existence of god.

What I want to know is: exactly what "evidence" could he have found? Of course, the host did not ask; we are brainwashed into holding "people of faith" to be so fragile that they should not be challenged, poor things.

Meet the devil!

From what I've been able to piece together, this is probably the "devil" that Pat Robertson and other hyperchristianists are referring to when they talk about Haitians having made a "pact with the devil" to help win their freedom from France. That's right: the "devil" is the Catholic St. George.

Wade Davis (Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, University of North Carolina Press 1988, pp 225-226), describes the event this way:

The historic gathering was invoked by the maroon leader Boukman Dutty and was held on a secluded knoll at Bois Caiman near Morne-Rouge on the night of 14 August 1791 (Bastien 1966). An old woman possessed by Ogoun, the god of fire and metallurgical elements, drew a cutlass and sacrificed a pig. The leaders of the revolt were named—Boukman himself, Jean François, Biassou, and Jeannot—and one by one the hundreds of slaves present swore allegiance

My conclusion: the “pact with the devil” thing is the ethnocentric interpretation by Christian outsiders of a Vodoun ceremony. Vodoun is a syncretic religion that fuses West African beliefs and behaviors with Catholic ones. But of course, these Hyperchristians, past and present, take any deviation from their version of “religion” to be paganism, devil-worship, etc. The irony is that the lwa Ogoun’s iconic image (the painting is borrowed from a Vodoun web site) is that of St. George, the dragon-slayer; it makes sense that this would be one of the lwa called forth at a ceremony in which people were preparing for war.


[Update Jan 16 2009]


Other sources, including the Sage Encyclopedia of African Religion (vol 1, p 262) suggest that the lwa that possessed the old manbo at Bois Caiman in 1791 was Ezili Dantò. She is the country cousin of Ezili Freda, and she is, apparently, pretty feisty: a good source of support for a revolution. Her icon image is on the right. She also has a web site at the American Museum of Natural History.


The same source also identifies the old woman who was possessed as Cécile Fatiman.

Happy post-Halloween!

Here's wishing everyone a happy post-Halloween sugar rush. We greeted the neighborhood kids with a scary bat-pumpkin carved by daughter Aimee.

And we ate plenty of that demon-blessed candy. At least that's according to someone named Kimberly Daniels, who, according to Ed Brayton at Dispatches From The Culture Wars, wrote a bat-poop looney anti-Halloween essay that was posted on the Christian Broadcasting Network's web page. The post has been removed (too nutty even for them???), but not before Ed could save us a, er, taste:

During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

I need some more candy...