What’s On My Mind

There is no such thing as "religion"; just this or that form of religious tradition, institution, or belief set.

This is a brief snippet from a comment John left on Russell Blackford's blog that I quite agree with. One of the problems I see atheists making time and again is the conflation of religious belief with institution (or sometimes tradition though I might say culture).

FWIW, as the followup comment points out, religious people are not immune to doing this either.

Q: How?
A: We establish a fund in current time. You make a small contribution to the fund, and in a few hundred years that small amount grows to a very large amount. From that fund, moneys will be taken and used to retrieve you, perhaps seconds after you join, perhaps even moments before your recorded death, perhaps some other point in your lifetime. Further, the fund may even pay to have you "rejuvenated" medically (assuming this is scientifically possible at that time,) and support you financially for a number of years. (Note: Retrieving you just before the moment of death is just one possible scenario, but one that would avoid any Star Trek^(TM) type paradoxes. There are an unlimited number of other possibilities, and we do not know what they will do, we can only make reasonably informed guesses.)

Interesting. I do see a couple of tiny problems.

• If time travel had really been invented wouldn't money become completely valueless as anybody with a working time machine could just pop back in time, invest a small amount then, and hop back into the future to collect their fortune? Why would they even need your paltry contribution?
• And what assurances do we have that the people managing The TimeTravel Fund have the resources to get your money into the right hands (i.e. the people with time machines)? I mean they'll be dead already themselves so who's going to go back in time and fetch them back to the future if they're not around to do it?

Still, nice money making idea. I wonder how many suckers, er, I mean investors, have paid into TTTF?

New York City's oldest library says one of its ledgers shows that President George Washington has racked up 220 years worth of late fees on two books he borrowed, but never returned.

One of the books was the "Law of Nations," which deals with international relations. The other was a volume of debates from Britain's House of Commons.

Both books were due on November 2, 1789.

When the Tea Partier down the street implies that the country would be better off if liberals were dead, and one of your fellow commenters on Pharyngula suggests that it’d be better if “Bill” (the creationist that’s been trolling for a week) were to be set on fire and burn alive, you don’t get a free pass to laugh at the Pharyngula comment and get upset at the Tea Partier just because the Pharyngula commenter is right about evolution and the Tea Partier is wrong about public policy. Truth is important, but it’s far from an excuse to whitewash hate and call it something different. Also, just because a person (we don’t know, let’s say her name is Sheril, and she’s a women’s rights advocate) gets upset when you wax poetic about seeing her sexually violated with a knife, that doesn’t mean that what you said becomes funny, or that you can say whatever the hell you want because, somewhere deep down inside, you don’t think you’d ever actually follow through on whatever you’ve said. You have the right to be a hateful asshole if you want, but at least have the intellectual balls to call it what it is: hate. Don’t try to give it Happy New Labels like “humor” or “satire” or “truth” instead.

From one of many excellent posts this anonymous blogger has been making in recent days. Kudos.

Organizing atheists is like herding lions, or at least ideally it should be. What we want is a community of fiercely independent, roaring, wrestling, arguing, fighting freethinkers; cross them, and you will get rhetorically mauled, and our battles are not about polite batting about with little kitty paws at issues, but should involve claws and fangs and uncompromising forcefulness. Everyone who is complaining that the harshness of the debate degrades the discourse, get stuffed; I think the call to weaken the vigor of the disagreement is the real degradation here.

So, should the entire atheist and skeptic communities turn into Fox News? That whenever we have a disagreement we rip into each other like some kind of imitation of Fox News pundits tearing at each other's throats? Throwing around barbed insults instead of openly and honestly sharing our concerns and criticisms? Good lord. Chris Mooney was right.

A federal judge in Wisconsin ruled the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional Thursday, saying the government cannot call for religious action.

Congress established the day in 1952 and in 1988 set the first Thursday in May as the day for presidents to issue proclamations asking Americans to pray. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Madison-based group of atheists and agnostics, filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 2008 arguing the day violated the separation of church and state.

President Barack Obama's administration has countered that the statute simply acknowledges the role of religion in the United States. Obama issued a proclamation last year but did not hold public events with religious leaders as former President George W. Bush had done.

Government involvement in prayer is constitutional only as long as it does not call for religious action, which the prayer day does, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb wrote in her ruling.

"It goes beyond mere 'acknowledgment' of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context," Crabb wrote. "In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience."

H/T to theformgroup.com.

The one thing skeptics pride themselves on is the use of rationality and reason when making a case, yet it seems to me that quite a few are letting their emotions and prejudices get the best of them. If you perceive Catholicism as the enemy, then so be it. But when faced with overwhelming numbers against you, sometimes a head-on assault isn’t the best idea. I’m angry over this, damned angry, and heartbroken over the lives destroyed by it. But anger is a place to start, something from which we can draw energy and motivation, but we must not let it take over.

We don’t always need warriors. Sometimes we need diplomats.

My point, after all this, isn’t too hard to grasp: if the Pope did what he has been alleged to do, then he needs to be brought to justice. The Church itself looks to have been complicit in hushing up this scandal for years, decades. They too need to face criminal justice. And as skeptics, we need to be vocal about the methods employed by the Church, where those methods can be analyzed using critical thinking and the arsenal skeptics employ. But just attacking them because they are a religion is the wrong reason to do it, and attacking them with abandon, with insults, and with vitriol will not help.

It's long, but I really suggest reading Phil's whole, very well reasoned, blog post on this topic.