Faith Infiltration: Jubilee Church

A few weeks ago, Flimsy and I accompanied some other local St. Louis bloggers to The Jubilee Church. Jubilee was running a series of sermons on S.E.X., so of course we had to check it out. We heard about Jubilee via several billboards in the St. Louis area featuring the words, "XXXPOSED CHURCH." The accompanying website explained that, "Contrary to popular opinion, God is not against sex—He's 100% for it! He created sex and meant for us to enjoy it. He even gave us special instructions that will maximize our enjoyment if followed, but if ignored will produce pain and hurt. This is why we have decided to set aside four weeks in our sermon calendar to address the topic of sex."

Woohoo! How could we pass this kind of thing up?

Jubilee Church (which is part of the Newfrontiers movement) is set inside a rather Spanish looking building, complete with a Spanish tile roof and stucco walls. Though the building seemed rather large, the sanctuary was surprisingly small and intimate. My guess is that it tightly held about 200 people. The congregation consisted of a racially-mixed group, most of which were around their 30's. The sanctuary had a very auditorium-like feel to it, having a center stage and bland walls that lacked any kind of religious décor or pictures on the walls.

Someone stood at the front of the stage and told everyone – as the music began - to remember that they can't do anything of their own power and can only accomplish things through Jesus by being born again. He also told the audience to open their hearts to the message and to be "set free in your thinking."

The worship team performed this song, which causes the hairs to stand on my neck even though I am not a believer. If I were a Christian I would totally be into this:




While the song went on, people lifted their hands up and held them there, singing along. It was then that I noticed a very young sign language interpreter at the front, interpreting to what appeared to be one person, who nodded along. The song ended, and a video was launched. The video (parts of which can be found here) featured the PG-13 warning before diving into scenes of St. Louisans being interviewed about sex. The interviewer asked people questions like, "Have you ever been hurt by a sexual relationship?" and people answered. Most people told stories of having negative experiences with sexual relationships. The video ended, and the sermon began.

The pastor opened by telling everyone that god is a fan of sex – in face he is The Fan of sex, because he invented it. "Culture," he said, "assumes god is a killjoy – that Christians are sexual prudes, or Ned Flanders, or judgmental." The implication, obviously, is that "culture" is wrong – Christians aren't prudes, like Ned Flanders, or judgmental.

God, the pastor explained, wants sex to occur within certain constraints: within the "blood covenant" of marriage and as the act of two souls becoming "one flesh." If you're doing it right, your marriage will be one in which companionship, passion and intimacy occurs. When we go outside this ideal, "little foxes" come in and ruin the vineyard that is a marriage. Marriage is hard – said the pastor – because a good relationship is hard to maintain, the devil hates everything that god loves, and so the devil will attempt to distort everything to keep people from experiencing god. Because life starts with and ends with a marriage (to god), god loves marriage, and the devil hates all the things god loves, the devil is obviously going to try to destroy your marriage.

Personally, I don't see any evidence that the devil is mucking things up. Instead, a lot of what I see (and even Christians agree…) is that marriage fails due to these things: lack of honesty, lack of communication, lack of intimacy, lack of trust, and jumping into marriage too early in a relationship, inappropriate expectations, etc.

Apparently last week the Pastor addressed all of the bad things that men do to muck up a marriage, and so this week he focused on the ladies. He started out by saying that ladies should not be selfish with intimacy. If a lady pretends to "have a headache" (obviously, what he meant is when women don't really feel like having sex, so they make up an excuse not to) she is being self-centered, and she needs to learn to serve and think of one-another. The Pastor explained that he was not advocating that a woman be treated like a piece of meat, just that withholding oneself for selfish reasons is one of these "foxes" he was talking about.

The problem I see with this scenario is dishonesty and lack of understanding. Most people enter into marriages with the expectation that their sexual needs will be met. If one partner is not meeting the needs of another partner, this is obviously a problem, and it is also a problem if she is not honest about why she is not meeting those needs. There are better ways to solve this than to say, "quit being selfish", though. For example: he could masturbate. He could watch porn. He and she could agree on an open relationship. He and she could work on spicing up their sex lives. They could work on issues coming between them and sex. There are a multitude of things a couple could do in this situation, so much that I could probably start a whole new blog and write about just this issue. But the pastor chose to solve it in a different way:

Instead of talking through good ways to solve a problem like this, the pastor resorted to guilt: if you selfishly withhold sex and leave your husband sexually unfulfilled, he'll probably turn to porn because men "either fight or just quit." Specifically, the pastor cautioned that, "if you refuse your husband, you are training him to quit on you."

Enter discussion about porn.

The pastor threw out a bunch of rather interesting statistic about porn at this point:

1. It's a 14 billion dollar industry. (It's probably more like a 4 billion dollar industry according to Forbes.com and The Scientist and pro-porn group the Free Speech Coalition.)
   
2. 11 thousand porn films are made a year. (This number seems actually accurate!)
   
3. There are 22 times as many porn video releases as there are movie releases. (okay, that's probably true, but each porn title sells many less copies than a movie release)
   
4. There are more porn stores in America than Mcdonalds. (Are you kidding me? Citation needed! The only one I could find that even remotely came close was this college newspaper citing that there are more strip clubs than McDonalds. Or maybe this website saying there are more strip clubs in Tampa than McDonalds. This statistic appears to have been invented by the National Coalition in an unfindable document titled, "Pornography's Relationship to Sexual Violence and Exploitation." There are 13,383 MickeyD's in the USA. Since pornography stores are not franchised, it is difficult to pin down statistics on how many there are and it looks like no one has really done it, so I am confident in saying this number was pulled out of thin air for shock value. Maybe if you combined all porn stores, strip clubs, video stores that had an "adult movie" section, any store that sold sex toys or lingerie, you might have 13,383.)
   
5. 14% of men are addicted to porn, and 6% of women are addicted to porn. ("pornography addiction" is not found in the DSM and thus is not accepted by mainstream psychology as a disorder. Thus, it has no widely accepted "diagnostic criteria." For example in a survey conducted by Christian net of its readership, "porn addiction" was diagnosed by an affirmative answer to this question, "do you struggle with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis?" They concluded that 60% of men and 20% of women were addicted to porn.
   

It really bothers me when statistics are abused like this or simply made up and passed on as fact to people who place high value on information given by authority figures. After mentioning Bible verses to support the contention that porn is bad (looking upon a woman with lustful intent is the same as committing adultery in the heart, you can't dabble into sexual sin without being burned, etc) the pastor went on to talk more about the evils of porn. He told his audience that porn use inhibits one's ability to cope with reality. It leads to aggression, addiction, depression, loneliness, and detachment. It must become more graphic in order to excite the watcher, who will seek out porn depicting younger people. Role-playing and violence toward women are the obvious step once graphic porn is no longer satisfying.

What's wrong with role-playing, exactly? If two adults in a safe, sane, consensual relationship want to roleplay, who cares? Is porn really that dangerous? How about we look at some unbiased data?

Over the years, many scientists have investigated the link between pornography (considered legal under the First Amendment in the United States unless judged "obscene") and sex crimes and attitudes towards women. And in every region investigated, researchers have found that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased.

Few studies link the availability of porn to antisocial behavior and sex crimes. Even though the rate of porn use is going up in the US, Denmark, Sweden, and West Germany, the incidence of rape is going down. It is especially going down among people aged 20-34 – those most likely to use the internet and have ready access to porn.

Rapists are more likely than non-rapists to have been punished for looking at porn. Rapists and child molesters use less porn than "normal" males. The only real environmental correlation between sex-offenders is a strict religious upbringing.

That's right. Porn use has a negative correlation between sex offenses and crimes. If you want to reduce the number of sex crimes in a given community, it is better to give people open access to porn than to make people guilty for even thinking about it.

Obviously, anything that has the potential to be used has the potential to be abused, but it makes little sense to find people who self-describe as being addicted to porn, and then extrapolate that information to claim that porn is addictive. I could probably locate 100 people who are addicted to corned beef and ask them how this addiction has affected their lives and extrapolate that corned beef is addictive.

The pastor mentioned Ted Bundy. Okay, so Ted Bundy liked to look at porn. It's disingenuous to take the actions of one sociopathic serial killer, point fingers at a single aspect of his life (he was also active in his church…) and then blame that aspect of his life for his actions unless it is obvious that there is a clear correlation. Most of the link of Ted Bundy to pornography is due to an interview that he had with James Dobson (of Focus on the Family) before he was executed.

If Jubilee church really wanted to be "not Ted Flanders" they would look objectively at pornography statistics. Instead, they believe porn is wrong and evil, and so pick and choose their information to fit in with their preconceived notions. Given the reality of pornography, this can only hurt society rather than help it. That would be the moral thing to do.

Okay! This blog post has gotten long enough. Tune in for part II later this week.

Pants on Fire

I stumbled upon this article from Bodie Hodge of Answers in Genesis from a couple months back.  It asks the classic yet seemingly simple question of whether it's ethical to lie to Nazi soldiers in order to save a hiding Jewish family.

For most of us, including the vast majority of Christians (which I'll get to in a moment), I think that this is a pretty easy answer - the simple act of lying is nowhere near as unethical as directly endangering the lives of innocent people.  Amazingly, AIG disagrees:

The most common example sent to me was envisioning the Holocaust and being placed in the position of lying to potentially protect someone’s life. Like most, if placed in such a difficult situation, it would be very difficult. In fact, I could never be sure what I would do, especially if it were a loved one.

Ah, it would be much easier to endanger the life of someone that you didn't know very well.  Good to know.

But consider for a moment that we are all already sentenced to die because we are sinners (Romans 5:12). It is going to happen regardless. If a lie helps keep someone alive for a matter of moments compared to eternity, was the lie, which is high treason against the Creator, worth it?

It would be like sitting in a cell on death row and when the guards come to take your roommate to the electric chair, you lie to the guards and say you don’t know where the person went—while your roommate is hiding under their covers on the bed. Does it really help?

So there we have it.  Knowingly causing the death of one or more innocent people is insignificant to offending God.  As he points out, scripture is pretty clear on these priorities, after all.

I don't think I need to explain in much detail what's so wrong with this worldview.  Thankfully, Hodge himself admits that such an action seems wrong to him, and that he's not at all certain what he would do if he found himself with such a choice.  I sincerely hope that he never finds himself in such a position, and that if he does, he chooses the ethical course, and discards his God's wishes entirely.

He offers some other examples:

Stephen in Acts 6–7 preached Christ, and men came against him. This culminated with a question by the high priest in Acts 7:1 who said: “Are these things so?”

At this point, Stephen could have done a “righteous lie” to save his life so that he could have many more years to preach the gospel. However, Stephen laid a long and appropriate foundation for Christ—then preached Christ. And they killed him.

Obviously, I strongly doubt that this story took place exactly as it is portrayed.  If we give it the benefit of the doubt, however, I still think that it's a pretty easy answer, especially considering that Hodge concludes that good came from Stephen's death - his martyrdom to the Christian cause.

Martyrs can be a source of great good, if a person's life is given in service to a worthy cause.  The Revolutionary War, the Civil War and abolition of slavery, various civil rights movement, etc. are all good nominees for such causes.

I don't think that making people Christian is such a cause.

To put it bluntly, Stephen lost his life for almost nothing.  Whatever positive effect could have occurred as a result of his death, I conclude that such hypothetical benefits are not greater than his worth as a person, and the lives of his family and friends.

I find it telling that Hodge specifically states that the good that would have come from Stephen lying to save his own life would come from his continued preaching and proselytizing.  There's no mention of Stephen's own worth, or the effect on his loved ones.

Also, do I even need to say it?  While we (arguably, potentially) have a right to choose to be a martyr, even in a cause of questionable worth, we clearly have no right to martyr other people to our cause.  He could have even responded to the Nazis-hunting-for-hiding-Jews example with something about the value of those lives as martyrs to the cause of rallying support for the Nazi's defeat.  He doesn't, though, he only considers the value of their lives vs. his religious doctrine.

Later in the article, even more disturbingly, he himself has to resort to lying outright about a passage in Exodus, to desperately try and prove his point that God always condemns lying, even to save innocent life (!).

In summary, Pharaoh has decreed to the Hebrew midwives that they put to death all male children that they deliver.  They disobey, and when Pharaoh asks them why the cock they've got all these newborn Hebrew cocks running around, the midwives tell him that the Hebrew women are just giving birth really, really fast, too quickly for the midwives to show up.  God wholeheartedly approves of this falsehood, and blesses the midwives for it by multiplying the Hebrew people.

Hodge claims that the midwives did not lie.  His alternate explanation of the passage is that the midwives simply told Hebrew women that their sons would be in danger unless they managed to give birth very quickly, on their own, without a midwife, and they somehow managed to do so.  Okay, okay, stop laughing.  He also suggests that the midwives just took a really long time to get to a woman in labor.  Of course, this would also mean that the midwives basically lied to Pharaoh (can anyone really claim with a straight face that deliberately dragging their feet and then claiming that Hebrew babies are like greased lightning would not be completely deceptive?).

Both possible explanations suffer from one glaring drawback, hence the clear fact that Hodge has lied about what the Bible says; the Bible passage clearly states that the midwives didn't simply show up late:  "But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the male children alive."

This leads me directly to my main point - the Bible contradicts itself on this matter (no surprise there, I suppose . . .), but we have a Christian who, I think, knows what's right, as shown by his hesitation to hand over an innocent family to be murdered.  However, he has concluded with all his rational faculties that the opposite is true - that lying to Nazis is a greater evil than letting an innocent family die.  People, both religious and nonreligious alike, are quick to point out that many people would oppose gay rights based on their own bigotry regardless of whether they had religious doctrine to fuel it.  That is absolutely not what we have in this case - Hodge has reached this grossly immoral conclusion exactly as a result of his religious doctrine.*

*Note that this last paragraph is completely philosophical in nature, and actually only represents what I sincerely hope to be the case.  It is entirely possible that Hodge is, in fact, a violently bigoted closet-Nazi anti-Semite.  I suppose we'll never know . . .

Faith Infiltration: World View Community Church, Pt 3

We're continuing our Faith Infiltration of World View Community Church, in which Flimsy and I watched a video on Sunday at a church called the 7 Mountain Mandate, led by Lance Wallnau. This is part 3 of our infiltration. Previous parts can be found here and here. You can also find more Faith Infiltrations by clicking the Faith Infiltration tab at the bottom of the page.

Today's post is particularly timely in light of the Prop 8 trials.

One of the causes that Wallnau was called by his god and in which his god "showed up" to fight is the passage of Prop 8 (the removal of laws preventing homosexual couples from having the same civil rights to marriage as heterosexual couples) in Rhode Island.

"The warfare issue is particularly important right now because there are strongholds that are not going to come down through five-fold ministry gifts, they're going to come down through the saints. And the reason is because where god is inviting us to go is someplace we've never gone –it's to the strategic recapturing of culture by the anointing of the people of god for the spheres they're assigned to have authority in, that leadership in the church for the most part does not have authority to go into. I can go speak before legislatures as I've had to do on same-sex marriage. I can sway a vote. But you know how I had to do it? I had to drop my "Pastor" title.

He goes on to say that he was called to Rhode Island to speak on the issue of gay marriage by a friend of his. He described the event as an orchestrated media event, complete with the ACLU, lawyers, protesters, a budget, a war chest, a "gay lobbyist initiative who wants to make Rhode Island the first same-sex state" with "only a handful of believers showing up". Wallnau describes his initial reaction:

"Aww man… God didn't call me to have to take on the homosexual issue. Besides, I'm not angry at anyone, I like everybody, I love 'em, I want more of 'em in my programs – my secular programs by being a Christian in a different form than they're used to anyway."

But his friend said, "Lance, it isn't like that. If you don't show up… there are Christian legislators that are saying if they don't see and hear any people with another viewpoint they have no choice". Wallnau shuffles his feet, not really wanting to be there and hoping that by the time he gets there that the room will be full. Apparently he tells himself that if his god really wants him to be there, then his god will open doors for him. He has no idea what to say, so he goes to Google and finds James Dobson's 8 points against gay marriage (Dobson has expanded this to 11 points. Guess what we're going to blog about soon!). He goes to the courthouse with his "Google talking points" and finds that the meeting room is full and the people who were not able to get into the main meeting room at the courthouse are all sitting in an adjacent room, watching the events unfold via video feed.

But wait! He has another friend at the courthouse who sneaks him into the courtroom and finds a seat for him -the seat of a guy who happened to get up to speak, leaving a chair empty. Wallnau is shoved into the empty seat. He describes how he sat there and watched as the other guy finished speaking, went to sit, and couldn't find his seat - because Wallnau took it. His friend then manages to get his name put on the list of people signed in.

Wallnau goes onto to explain what he observed while sitting in his stolen seat. He says that Christians do not understand how power works and that no one was listening to the Christians or reverends – even the Unitarian reverends who are endorsing gay marriage. He describes the senators as "checking out" whenever a Christian got up to speak. Huh? I thought his friend described the scene as having so few believers that legislators would have no choice but to support civil rights for same-sex couples. Instead, the legislators are apparently just ignoring all the believers. Interesting…

"In the social capital of influence, that means every sphere has a currency and you gotta know the currency of that sphere – you can't just go in with your currency… In the political sphere they like professors, they like any businessperson who looks like a big donor. They like people with a constituency that can influence their election. So I did a quick makeover. Because I noticed that they were knocking off those Christians fast. One woman in particular, her response to the legislatures was almost like cross-prosecuting. So I listened to all of her arguments because I was going last, so I prepared well… I readjusted my 'Google points' to go on the assault against her."

"This is what the lord told me to do. He said, 'Don't tell 'em you're a pastor. Practice social capital. Go in and out of their world where they are.'"

"Now it just so happens that our church had the largest daycare in the state of Rhode Island, of which I am – by virtue of my role as a pastor – the uh, official president of the daycare. I also know I figured calculating-wise that we had at least, oh, a number of graduates that come through our daycare– a hundred a year, two hundred and we've been doing it for ten years – I figured I represented 10,000 radiuses of people that had family members in our little Rhode Island area because we had the largest daycare, so I sat down and said:

"'thank you very much. I realize it's very late and I appreciate your patience. I think I'm the last person so I'll make this really quick. First of all, as you look at me I want you to realize that I represent 10,000 people who vote for you. I am the president of a large daycare in the state of Rhode Island.'

"All of 'em leaned in like 'okay we got somebody now where's he going' and I proceeded to do the talking points. I had no idea how inflammatory the rhetoric of some of these talking points is. As I hit the fact that there is no statistical evidence to support the fact that same-sex marriage is going to be helpful but I have evidence from the Danish experiment which says that divorce has gone up 65%... Are we a culture that can endure reducing the status of our children to lab-rats in a vast sociologic untried experiment? At which point lesbians in the back shrieked in manifestations. I'm serious. They were screaming… they were freaking out that I was referring to kids that they wanted to adopt as lab-rats. I had no idea the words would have that kind of power.

"I saw smiles on the faces of all the legislatures that looked at me and said, 'that was sufficient'… you should know that it is 65%. Though you should know that at least 62% of most statistics quoted in public are spontaneous… 65 sounded good to me.. As I'm walking out the corridor…a legislature was saying 'put that in the [news] paper'. I gave them the talking points to go in and vote it down by a margin of 2 votes… I didn't even know what I was talking about. But I had Google and a cause. That was all I needed.

Wallnau's ultimate point is this:

I made the adjustment… If believers would think in terms of social capital, If we would start to raise up the next generation to link anointing, revival, the supernatural and the prophetic with the invasion of culture in spheres they have a passion for through the acquisition of social capital, we could take a nation within a generation. It will not come by the methodologies that we have assumed would work in the past. I am a little freaked out that there is no consensus on this within the body of Christ, that there will even be a debate over it. But this is the way power works and we are naive if we do not understand it.

Be wise as a serpent! Did he say serpent? Well I am glad Jesus said it because I wouldn't want to put it that way. Be shrewd as the devil and as innocent in motive as a lamb. Be wise in the adaptation of means to ends.

I chair the Fringe Science Committee of the Skeptical Society of St. Louis and am assistant organizer of the St. Louis Atheists – these groups have about 500 members between them. I have had over one hundred thousand unique visitors to my blog since it started. Wallnau claiming that he represents ten thousand voters is equivalent to me saying that I, Ziztur, am vice-president of a large nonprofit science organization and represent half a million voters. The population of the city in which his church is located is only 79 thousand! 

I don't represent half a million voters. I'm not vice-president of a large nonprofit science organization. To say as much would be a lie. Yet here we have someone basically bragging (it might be a touch difficult to read "bragging" into this without the audio) that he loves gays, so he snuck in to a courtroom with statistics pulled off the ever-accurate Google, lied about who he represented, gave statistics that by his own admission he had not verified as accurate because of the hasty way in which he had found them, and made a really ridiculous argument all in the name of preventing the homosexuals he loves so much from having equal civil rights. He did this, and then takes credit for swinging a vote in favor of his position. He tells his nodding audience that they should invade culture. Not because they have the facts on their side, but because their god has anointed them.

The "lesbian screaming" comment I find quite hateful. How did he know they were lesbians? He doesn't. He uses the term in order to be derogatory and to dismiss people for having a legitimate emotional expression to what is probably the most inane argument against civil rights I have ever heard.

Saying that if we do social change X, we are treating children like lab-rats is not an argument against social change X, because it can be used as an argument against any social change. What, abolish slavery? Well then we'd be treating our kids like lab rats! Desegregate schools? Why would we treat our kids like lab rats? De-institutionalize kids with disabilities and integrate them into the classroom? Our kids would be lab-rats! Stop performing female circumcision on young girls? We don't know the consequences of that vast sociologic untried experiment!

What if we lived in a society in which people were not allowed to marry or adopt children if the couple had different religious beliefs? Would Christians shriek and scream if someone argued that we should deny them the right to adopt because if we did, we'd be treating children like lab rats? The people in the audience shrieked and screamed because Wallnau's lab-rat comment was hateful, bigoted and discriminatory. He is saying that we should deny people civil rights because we don't fully know the consequences of granting them. We've never fully known the consequences of granting people civil rights until we've already done it. This is coming from the same guy who claims that all legitimate liberation of people and nations is due to prayer – yet he is actively fighting to withhold liberation and making an argument that could be made by anyone who intends to deny rights to people.

Believing that you've been anointed by god to take nations is an echo of the crusades and every single act of religious warfare throughout history. If you're anointed, then there is no argument – no room for rational discussion, no room for evidence, no room for critical thinking, no room to question that you might be wrong. You've effectively shut down and dehumanized your opponents. Believing you are anointed gives you the ability to rationalize away oppression, tyranny, or taking people's lives and freedoms.

This is why atheists and nonbelievers stand up to religion. This is why we care about your belief in god. We have seen people's lives and freedoms stamped out in the name of religion long enough.

I can't find this Danish study that supposedly shows the divorce rate has gone up 65%. I can, however, actually fact-check rather than just saying, "hey, this sounds good for my position, so who cares if it is true!". Divorce rates are higher in states that ban gay marriage. Marriage has increased while divorce has decreased in Scandinavia. Wallnau's agenda and belief system is more important than actual facts.

The last point that Wallnau makes is that he has not actually given people the complete key to seeing "obscene amounts of wealth". In order to see this wealth we have to understand that

"God wants to give Jesus his inheritance. Because Jesus died for more than souls. He died for nations. The actual assignment is to go make disciples of nations… Jesus is going to have nations given to him and god the father is going to bankroll the enterprises of people who give his son what he wants him to get. God is going to bankroll enterprises for those who are engaged in giving Jesus his inheritance. God is going to bankroll the enterprises of those people and organizations who make it their mission to give god what he wants – and he wants his son to have his inheritance!"

As Flimsy and I are sitting her watching this presentation, I wrote, "War Room" in my notebook and showed it to Flimsy. He nodded. I felt like a spy. We're the other side. We're the culture that this man is advocating invading and taking with lies and deception. I cannot say for sure what exactly the congregants at this church thought of this presentation, but I can only assume – given that no objections were raised – that they largely agree. There was some talk afterward about social capital and how to get people on the "outside" to listen, and taking on only one wrong in the world at a time instead of all of them. Taking on one problem instead of many is great advice. Utilizing social capital is also good advice. Using lies and deception is not. good. advice.

I can tell you now that using lies and deception, coupled with a fervent insistence that you've been anointed to invade and destroy the culture so that you can be rewarded with "obscene wealth" by god himself when you give Jesus his "inheritance" isn't going to work. When people lie, we do not trust those people. When people advocate infringing on the rights of others while simultaneously undermining fact and science, we will call those people out.

I can understand wanting to change the world. The world is a screwed up place, and it needs to be changed. I also agree that one needs to understand how to speak the language of the opposing side. But "speaking the language" does not mean failing to check your facts or being deceptive. If you need to resort to actively ignoring facts, perhaps you're fighting for the wrong side. Can you imagine what it would be like if we held private atheist meetings in which we advocated telling legislators that married Christian couples were 79% more likely to shoot their children than atheists or homosexual couples? What if we advocated toying with facts to promote our agenda? We'd be rightfully called evil and immoral. I've always said that people can believe whatever they want so long as they are not infringing on the rights of others or undermining science. Wallnau is doing both.

Even though I absolutely do not agree with the material presented on the DVD, I still have to thank the folks at World View Community Church for being nice and allowing a couple of atheists to spend a few hours as spies in their war room. I have to wonder what they thought of us being there. Usually I like to believe that Christians and atheists in a way want the same things out of life, but I am not sure if that is true in this case. Regardless, we appreciate the chance to engage in dialogue.

Interviewing Jeff Schweitzer soon!

I feel sort of bad, because it took me about 4 months to read Jeff Schweitzer's awesome book, Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World. During that time, he actually took time out of his busy life to email me and ask if I had finished it – and I had to tell him that my internship was taking up all of my free reading time.

However, I have officially, finally, finished Mr. Schweitzer's book, and so you will find, in the coming weeks, an e-terview between he and I.

Beyond Cosmic Dice is perhaps not the book you would expect from the title. To me, the title suggests that the book is primarily about morality and ethics in a world in which there is no ultimate purpose or absolute morality. In a very real way, this is what this book is about, but not in the way you'd think.

Chapter 1 is an extremely compelling description of the difficulties in defining life. Schweitzer explains quite convincingly that life is not an either-or proposition. Rather, the difference between life and non-life is a gradation. Instead of life being white and nonlife being black, life is closer to blue and nonlife is closer to green, with gradual shades in between. One can look at a dog and say, "this dog is definitely alive" and one can look at a rock and say, "this is definitely not alive", but not all things are so easily classified. As he puts it, "Nobody would deny the existence of green or blue, yet nobody can define when one color becomes the other. That inability to draw a clear line between them does not diminish the reality of the two colors" (pp 46). This is important to understand because when people ask, "how did life arise out of nonlife" they imagine life and nonlife as binary constructs, when in fact they are constructs on a spectrum. "Life" is nothing more than "an arbitrary label we apply to distinguish extremes of complexity along a continuum" (pp 47).

After explaining that life is an arbitrary label, Schweitzer goes on to briefly explain evolution. What I find most spectacular about this chapter is that while I am a seasoned reader of explanations and treatises on evolution, he offered a very unique perspective. He explains that evolution has no direction, purpose or drive toward complexity. Humans, in all of their complexity, are not abnormal in the grand scheme of evolution. In the grand scheme of evolution, simple, single-celled organisms are much more favored by natural selection than complex beings such as us. As Schweitzer puts it, "bacteria can easily live without us, but we would die quickly without them" (pp 65). Bacteria and other simple organisms outnumber us by both sheer numbers and mass – we are the latecomers, a "biological aberration", and when humanity is gone, the bacteria will go on living, having for all intents and purposes not noticed our coming and going at all. If there is a god and he designed the earth for any type of organism, it is not for complex humans but for the single-celled. The earth is far more suited to their kind, and they can survive where we absolutely cannot.

Chapter 3 deals specifically with humans, and the fact that most of the cells in our bodies are not ours (they are the cells of microorganisms using our body as a convenient apartment complex) and most of our DNA is not human either. We are they, and they are us. The other characteristics that we believe make us unique and special (intelligence, tool use, self-consciousness, self-awareness, etc) are not uniquely human. They are present in other species as well, to different degrees. A cheetah could just as easily point out that they are the pinnacle of evolution because they are the fastest land animal, making our claims to superiority quite arbitrary. The only thing that really separates us from everything else is our capacity to choose to be moral.

I found the first three chapters to be the most enlightening aspects of the book. These chapters make up part I. Part II of the book (the next 3 chapters) deals briefly with how religion arose and the shortcomings of religious morality. Part III deals with cultivating a natural ethic based on part I. Schweitzer defines a natural ethic as, "based on the principal that with the ability to choose to be good comes the obligation to make that choice; Choosing to be moral is what makes us special. The act of choosing to live a good life is the foundation for all pleasure, peace and happiness" (pp 176).

All organisms exploit their environment to the maximum extent possible, and humans are the only organism capable of recognizing this and then rising above this exploitative relationship. We should do so because we can.

Schweitzer then lays out moral foundation that he feels arise out of this natural ethic, but he stresses that these are personal guidelines and not universal ones. While I absolutely understand this tack, I feel as though the loose link between the strong and insightful first half of the book and the guidelines for ethical behavior in the second half of the book leave something to be desired. I wanted the book to end as strongly as it started. It didn't, but in a way I think that reflects the reality of morality. I have yet to find a system of morality that operates prescriptively that is also based on solid foundations, and instead I am left with shades of gray and bell curves of behavior. Perhaps that means it is time for me to abandon my childish notion that moral questions can be examined in the same way that we examine other empirical facts about the universe.

Beyond Cosmic Dice is written in an accessible, almost conversational style and is an excellent read for non-theists and theists alike. It may even be a good starting point for a theist with a desire to better understand the naturalistic worldview.

Interview with Ray Comfort: Discussion

After several days off for the holidays, we're back to discuss some of Ray Comfort's ideas that we saw in his e-interview that he was kind enough to provide for us.

The first question observed that many Christians don't recognize Ray Comfort's name, and asked if he was possibly more famous among atheists.  His reply:

Not every Christian watches TV or reads books. However, it seems that most atheists (thanks the Richard Dawkins and others) are pretty familiar with the brainless idiot known as "banana-man."

It's not just Comfort, though; if you name Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, William Lane Craig, etc., I wouldn't be at all surprised to find a higher proportion of atheists recognizing these names than Christians.  I can't cite hard data here, so this is just speculation rather than observation, but bear with me.

Two possible perspectives on this possibility.  From my perspective as an atheist, it seems to be the case that self-described "atheists" as a group are self-selecting for people who seek out other perspectives and willingly challenge even widely-held opinions.  In a culture like America, so saturated with religious and spiritual belief, people who reject religious and spiritual claims are clearly far less likely to simply "go with the flow" and accept the perspective of their culture.  This is not to say that all atheists are shining beacons of rationality, incapable of error - far from it (there are certain conspiracy theorist nutjobs I could mention, and there's always Ayn Rand . . .).  Even these individuals, though, are still more likely, as a rule, to actively familiarize themselves with differing perspectives.

Of course, the common theist has a simple response; we atheists (or any other culturally non-conformist label) are clearly quite convinced that we're wrong on some level, and we are "seeking answers" not because we want to be certain that we're not mistaken, but because we actually believe that we are mistaken.  When Ziztur and I visit different churches, on occasion we will politely inform church-goers who ask about us that we're atheists.  Far and away, the most common response we hear is that we've found ourselves in the pew because we are being "called" or "led" to search for God.  To this, all I can say is that in my own limited experience, such church services or apologetic books are no more convincing to we atheists than the "new atheist" books are to your average theist.  After many churches and many books, our atheism is, if anything, is less dispute than it ever was.

The next question was, seemingly, an extremely simple theological question; it asked Comfort to define "the Gospel."

In a nutshell--that Christ died for our sins and rose again on the third day. The word "gospel" means good news, and the gospel doesn't make sense until we see why we need it, in the same way the good news of a cure makes no sense until we understand that we have a disease. The terminal disease is sin. If it's allowed to take its course, it will not only kill us, it will justly take us to a terrible place of punishment called "Hell"--because each of us has violated God's Law (the Ten Commandments). He sees lust as adultery and hatred as murder. He is morally perfect, and that leaves us all in big trouble. The good news is that God is rich in mercy, became a human being, and took our punishment upon Himself. That means, because Jesus paid our fine and rose again from the dead, God can legally let us walk out of the courtroom. He can forgive us and let us live. Our case can be dismissed upon repentance and trust in the Savior. The good news is that any of us can have everlasting life. Read the Gospel of John for details.

Interestingly, this "Gospel story" is possibly the single largest barrier to my ever becoming a Christian (and that's saying something, considering all the other reasons I could name).  To put it simply, if I tell you that this season's particular strain of the flu could be very nasty, and that you should get vaccinated ASAP, I can explain why.  If you ask, in all innocence, "So this flu thing . . . is that bad?  Why?"  I can explain that the flu could give you headaches, muscle aches, a cough, and just generally make you feel like crap, and that a few people who are particularly susceptible can even die from it if they catch it from you.  Now, here's the important part - if you ask, "Why does the flu do that?" I could answer that it's simply a result of how the flu virus reproduces with the living cells in your body.  I could say that the flu doesn't have a mind, and that if it did, it would be wrong for the flu virus to hurt and kill people like it does.  Thus, it's easy to understand why you should get vaccinated (in theory, anyway . . .).

I should mention, first of all, that not all Christians believe in a literal hell, to their immense credit.  With or without this traditionalist theology, though, the Gospel story raises more questions than it answers.  Why does God feel the need to punish us with eternal torture simply for disbelieving in him?  Why is there such a harsh penalty for having lustful thoughts, especially when every single human being has lustful thoughts, without exception?  Even without a literal hell, are "anger" and "lustful thoughts" still sins?  Who should rationally be held responsible for lustful thoughts or anger being universal amongst human beings, us or the being(s) who created us?

Additionally, how does the death of Jesus Christ absolve us of our crimes?  I've noticed that whenever Comfort discusses our "criminal actions" as sinners, he almost always uses the analogy of a legal fine being paid for us so that our case can be thrown out of court.  I would have thought that it's obvious why this analogy isn't convincing to non-believers:  If a crime of any significant severity is committed, the court doesn't just administer a simple fine - the offender goes to prison.  If hell is an appropriate punishment for sin, then the analogy of a legal fine is grossly inaccurate (in fact, there really is no good comparison at all, because in America we don't even punish our very worst criminals by torturing them to death, which is still far more humane than the traditional concept of hell).  Perhaps the closest we can come is the death sentence, or in societies that don't even permit the death sentence on ethical grounds, perhaps life imprisonment without any possibility of parole.  Why doesn't Comfort use these punishments as an illustration of the punishment we deserve for our sin?  Why does he use the very lightest punishment that our system has for any crime, a mere fine?  It's possible for a person to pay a fine for someone else, simply because there's no good way to make sure that the guilty person pays it themselves.  A prison sentence, to say nothing of a death sentence, on the other hand, obviously must always be paid by the person who committed the crime. 

So, there's one of the single, largest questions I have about Christianity.  It seems to me that the very first principle of anything resembling justice is that you punish the person who actually committed the immoral act, and do not punish someone else in their place.  Imagine a society built around the principle that a person who commits a wrongful act cannot atone for their own wrongdoing, and the only way for justice to be served is for an innocent person to be punished ( and that the more innocent the punished person is, the more righteous and just the punishment will be).  If this society does every single other thing with their courts, prison system, and police force correctly, they are still doing nothing correctly.  They could get justice right in every single other way, and would still basically have a completely unjust society.  This Christian, Gospel idea of wrongdoers being incapable of atoning for their immoral actions and instead being redeemed by the punishment of a completely innocent person is not simply incorrect justice, it is not merely mistaken justice, it is the polar goddamned opposite of justice.

More about Ray Comfort coming soon.  Obviously, I would love for Ray to hang out here and reply to our perspective, but I totally understand that he's very, very busy, so I won't see his absence as proof that he can't answer our questions.  Of course, our standard modus operandi is to welcome any dissenting opinion, so I look forward to anyone who can shed some light on this seeming contradiction.  That last question, in particular, about Gospel justice has vexed me all my life.

The Manhattan Declaration; Part 6

Wrapping up the Manhattan Declaration, with their arguments (a term I use very loosely indeed, here) and examples of the religious freedom of Christians being infringed upon:

"We see this, for example, in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience clauses . . ."


Easy answer - if you don't want to do work of a given type (because of moral or religious objection or any other reason) then don't take the job.  I'm always entertained by how they only ever think of Christian doctors whose job involves women who might get abortions or need contraception, or Christian organizations who might not get to discriminate against homosexual couples, or some such bit of Christian fundamentalist dogma.  There are a million examples of other beliefs that are just grossly violated if somebody, for some idiotic reason, takes a job that involves things that they believe to be immoral.  What about a vegan who takes a job at a meat-packing plant?  What about a pacifist who joins the military?  There are even some kookier fringe believers who believe that blood transfusions are a sin; should hospitals and other health care businesses and organizations be forced to hire these folks and permit them to refuse to administer such procedures?


"We see it in the use of antidiscrimination statutes to force religious institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business."

This is an old question - how much discrimination should the government forcibly forbid?  Well, I would just ask the supporters and signers of the MD:  Would you be okay with businesses or organizations  refusing to serve Christians?  Do such establishments have a right to be discriminatory against Christians, in the same way that you're claiming a right to discriminate against others?


"After the judicial imposition of "same-sex marriage" in Massachusetts, for example, Catholic Charities chose with great reluctance to end its century-long work of helping to place orphaned children in good homes rather than comply with a legal mandate that it place children in same-sex households in violation of Catholic moral teaching."

Yes, the Catholic Church ceased it charitable activities because they were told that they couldn't discriminate against gay couples anymore.  The Church made their priorities crystal clear - with a choice between continuing to do material good in the world and maintaining their discriminatory doctrine while ceasing to do that good, they chose the latter.  Again, to the supporters of the MD, what would you think of an organization that believed that Christian homes are so intrinsically hostile to children that they universally refuse to place orphaned children with Christian couples?  What would you think of them if the government told them that they had to stop their discriminatory policy, or they would be risking their tax-exempt status, and they responded by stopping their charity work altogether?

"In New Jersey, after the establishment of a quasi-marital "civil unions" scheme, a Methodist institution was stripped of its tax exempt status when it declined, as a matter of religious conscience, to permit a facility it owned and operated to be used for ceremonies blessing homosexual unions."

This bit doesn't actually reference the incident that it's referring to (no surprise there - you may have notices that the MD doesn't reference any of it's claims).  If it's referring to this semi-famous incident, though, they're being dishonest again.  This was not a Methodist organization being forced to carry out a wedding ceremony, it was a tiny pavilion on a beach that had been open to the public but that they now decided was off-limits to gay couples blessing civil unions.  In the words of a lawyer representing a lesbian couple who was denied by the group, the pavilion is open to everyone — and therefore the group could no more refuse to accommodate the lesbians than a restaurant owner could refuse to serve a black man.  The Methodist group was also not "stripped of its tax exempt status," it was stripped of it's tax exemption only for the small pavilion area that they barred gay couples from.

"In Canada and some European nations, Christian clergy have been prosecuted for preaching Biblical norms against the practice of homosexuality."

Citation needed.  I've heard of a few religious people being basically scolded for disruptive behavior, nothing more.  If there is more, I want to look into it.  You'll be disturbed to know where they're going with this, though:

"New hate-crime laws in America raise the specter of the same practice here."

Um, hate-crime legislation only addresses motivations of violent crime.  I am alarmed and appalled that the MD is concerned over a law's effect on their ability to "preach" their religious beliefs when that law only addresses violent attack.

They go on to use really, really scary language about how the destruction of religious freedom will allow society to devolve into complete tyranny.  Again, entertaining, seeing as how this entire document's central idea is that the government should enforce their specific religion.

"In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, "Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.""

They don't stop hammering this.  They would have a point; I strongly disagree with any restriction on the religious speech of anybody.  Except for one thing:  Nobody is telling anybody to stop preaching!  It's a lie (repeated over and over again in the MD) that any Christians are being prevented from preaching in America.

"There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

The hilarious part is this:  By King's argument, we should be discussing whether gay men and women, along with their progressive, ethical friends, family, and fellow citizens, should be contemplating civil disobedience in favor of gay rights.  The MD, of course, seems to have concluded that it is Christians who should be contemplating civil disobedience because they might not be permitted to uphold their doctrine (even though their fundamentalist doctrine is unambiguously discriminatory).

In any event, I agree wholeheartedly that Letter from a Birmingham Jail is an extraordinarily eloquent reasoning for principled defiance of unjust authority, except for one thing - King clearly does not base his ethical reasoning on Biblical theology - his reasoning is entirely humanistic.  Similarly, he does indeed quote several thinkers from the Christian church, yet all such statements are secular and humanistic in nature, such as, "I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."  He mentions St. Thomas Aquinas and the 'natural law,' but he immediately goes on to define what he considers the 'natural law' to be in completely secular, humanistic terms.

I have more to say about Martin Luther King Jr., but I think he deserves his own blog post.  The capstone to the Manhattan Declaration:

"Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's."

We don't want to make you participate in abortions, "embryo-destructive" research, or assisted suicide.  However, we also won't let you force these religious beliefs of yours on others.  You are similarly welcome to refuse to bless sexual partnerships that you consider to be immoral, but you may not enshrine your bigotry against such partnerships into law, and we will also exercise our right to point out how primitive and downright childish are your doctrines of sexual morality.  We fully render your rights and freedoms to believe these things to you, but under no circumstances will we surrender the rights and freedoms of others that you would take away.

The Manhattan Declaration; Part 5

The last little bit about the Manhattan Declaration; their last point is about religious liberty.  This might seem strange to some.  To their credit, many religious groups and secular groups alike have roundly criticized the UN's anti-blasphemy regulations.  Frankly, from the M. Document so far, I would have bet any amount of money that such an example of an actual violation of freedom of religion is not what the MD has in mind.  So what on earth is the MD complaining about when it insists that Christians will defend their rights of religious freedom?

"Religious liberty is not a novel idea or recent development, but is grounded in the character of God Himself . . ."

The character of . . . which God, again?  Because, of course, the Bible is just oozing with religious freedom.  Yeah, I'm a little sarcastic, but . . . DAMN.  Do we really need to go over all the times in the Bible that God killed or commanded the deaths of people for not worshiping him?

The MD goes on to declare that "No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will . . ."  I agree, of course, but, again, I think that it's clear that they betray the noble, ethical principles that they claim to uphold just a few sentences later:

"It is ironic that those who today assert a right to kill the unborn, aged and disabled and also a right to engage in immoral sexual practices, and even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be recognized and blessed by law-such persons claiming these "rights" are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife."

How many ways can a document be horrifyingly dishonest and unethical in just a single big-ass sentence?

First off; biased language.  I think it's . . . disingenuous, at least, to say that the pro-choice position can be honestly summed up as advocating for the right to "kill the unborn."  I don't say that pro-choice people are those who 'assert a right to control women's bodies,' do I?  That would be a strawman of their position.  More balanced and objective if the description was, "Pro-choice people assert that a fetus should not reasonably be considered a "person, . . ."  In the same way, to those pro-life folks out there, which of these two statements about your opinion on the matter is more honest:  Pro-life people assert a right to control women's reproductive decisions, or, pro-life people assert that a fetus (or unborn child, if you prefer) has a "personhood."?

Secondly, nobody is asserting a "right to kill the . . . aged and disabled."  This bit is so dishonest, it amounts to an outright lie.  The "pro-choice" position here is that, for example, a person with a chronic, incurable illness that leaves them in a great deal of pain should have the right to decide how to end their own life.  Our position is NOT that we should be able to kill them if we want.  This is effectively the exact opposite of our position.  It is the MD and those who endorse it who advocate forcing something on such persons against their will (sometimes, in the case of some conditions, basically amounting to torture).

Thirdly, we're also wrong to believe that we have "a right to engage in immoral sexual practices"?  What's the solution - government "sexual security" cameras in our bedrooms?  Police raids on people's homes if a neighbor tips them off that they think a gay couple is living next door?  Should Ziztur and I set a court date and hire a lawyer because I put parts of me into parts of her without a wedding ring on?  If you think that these are absurd mischaracterizations of their position, then honestly, if we really shouldn't have the freedom to have sex that the MD declares is 'immoral,' then what the fuck are they suggesting that we do about it?

Fourthly, "even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be recognized and blessed by law . . ."  I've been over this, so I'll just briefly reiterate.  Yes, it's true; we think that it's wrong to outlaw certain couples from getting married just because your religion says that they shouldn't be able to.  I personally think that this follows naturally from your religion being obviously false, but many other Christians recognize that it's immoral to force other people to follow your religious doctrines through the law.  Which brings me to . . .

The fifth major, painfully obvious failure of this single sentence (by my count, at least; I would not be surprised to learn that someone else could identify others).  They actually said it themselves in the previous paragraph:  "No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will . . ."  I am fucking flabbergasted that someone could type that sentence while simultaneously claiming that:

-Women must carry their pregnancies to term against their will because God says so.
-People in chronic pain have no right to decide how to end their own life because God says so.
-The government must exclude gay men and women from a number of socially and financially advantageous rights because God says so.
 -They even imply that people have no right to make private sexual decisions at all if they are "immoral," presumably because God says so.

It's not complicated - The MD acknowledges the ethical statement "No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will . . ."  In this very same document, they discuss over and over how people should be compelled by law to obey their specific religious doctrines.  They are doing it fucking wrong.

Sixth and finally, we have the bright red cherry topping this horseshit sundae, "those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express their religious and moral commitments. . ."  Again, this is so dishonest it amounts to an outright lie.  Regardless of whatever other issues there are in a debate about religious freedom of expression, nobody is advocating for restricting their freedom of speech.  I'll make fun of such a seemingly idiotic document like the MD all day long, but I'll never say that they can't express their religious beliefs.  Saying that we're trying to actively infringe upon the freedom of Christians to even simply express their religion is the sort of bizarre claim that really needs to be backed up with specific examples and references.

Tomorrow, we'll get into the specifics of the examples that they offer, and wrap up this ridiculous document.

3H1P: Keith on morality of witnesses

3H1P is a blogging project wherein three heathens (Ziztur, Flimsy and Petter) and one pastor (Keith) answer questions posed by readers of the blog and discuss various issues related to religion, philosophy, science, etc. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered by 3H1P, ask it in the comment box. We promise we'll probably get to it. The following comment is asked by Lord Runolfr, a long time reader/commenter of this blog (he even wrote a guest post here, just because he felt like it). It is answered (sort of) by Keith.

I guess this is as much for Pastor Keith as anyone.

There was a very serious crime a few weeks ago, right around Halloween: a high school girl was assaulted by a gang outside of a dance. I remember hearing it discussed on a talk radio show while I was driving through Birmingham.

Leaving aside the crime itself and how the criminals should be treated, the host expressed his outrage at the fact that there were a dozen or more witnesses to the crime who did nothing about it. Their inaction left him completely flabbergasted.

If it's morally wrong for people who are witnesses to a crime to do nothing whatsoever to stop it, what about God?

If...

1) You believe God exists, and

2) You believe God has the power to intervene in human affairs, and

3) God is aware of essentially everything happening on Earth, and

4) You believe that taking some kind of action to stop a horrible crime in progress is the morally correct thing to do,...

... then why consider God any sort of moral authority when He routinely allows horrible crimes to occur without taking any action?

-Lord Runolfr

Lord Runolfr,

Thanks for the good question. The short answer is this: I believe that this universe was created to provide objective witness to the power of love. If I, as a part of this world, interfere at my own risk to save another … I have helped further the purpose of this world's existence. If God, as not part of this world, interferes to stop an evil … He would actually invalidate the world's objectivity. This is why it is immoral for me to fail to stop the injustices I witness, and not immoral for God to witness injustices and not immediately intervene.

Since I'm offering a version of the argument from free will, let me dive deeper into this question by responding to one of Flimsyman's comments in the Ziztur's initial post on the morality of witness. I will respond to Flimsy from this point out, but hopefully eavesdropping will help answer your question in more detail. Thanks!

Flimsyman said:

"The most annoying thing, to me, about the problem of evil is the inevitable theist response - "free will." Seriously, I've never heard a theist respond to the problem of evil with anything other than "free will." The claim is that God must allow human beings to commit such immoral acts because if he infringed upon our free will by stopping us, moral right and wrong would lose all meaning, since we could never choose to perform an immoral act.

Two obvious responses to this theology: Firstly, it doesn't address all the voluminous "natural" evil, not caused by human action, that occurs - everything from rarities like earthquakes and erupting volcanoes to relatively common diseases and birth defects. Secondly, none of these theists believe that the government or police are removing all meaning from moral right and wrong by preventing criminals from committing crime. What . . . do people actually trust the government to intervene in such a way that our free will is preserved, yet believe that God is incapable of finding a solution himself?"

Flimsy,

I respectfully disagree with your counter to the argument that free will. First, I don't consider the danger of removing free will being that it robs morality of its meaning ... rather I consider the problem with removing free will is that this world would no longer be objective. Certainly, the interference of a deity to prevent evil would violate the objectivity of this world.

Second, your first point suggested that it does not account for "all the voluminous "natural" evil, not caused by human action, that occurs." I do not think it is possible to prove that human action could not have spawned "natural" evil over the past years and years and years of human decision (for example, global warming is considered by many to be a man-caused action ... yet could be considered a "natural" evil in a couple hundred years or sooner).

Third, law enforcement can subjectively put a stop to evil because they are participants within this universe. In no way would this disqualify the objectivity of this world.

Finally, I have never heard a Christian say that God will never deal with evil. In fact, nearly all (if not all) forms of Christianity point to a time where God will put an end to evil and usher in a new world - one that is subjectively moral in the way you suggest this world should be. In that world, there will be no death, disaster, etc. If this proves true, God's morality is intact … for surely it is not immoral to be unable to stop an injustice, and also not immoral to stop that injustice the moment one is able.

I cannot speak for other Christians, and I am also confident that the argument from free will has been thrown at you before as an excuse to not wrestle more deeply with the problem of evil in this world. However, we know each other well enough for you to know that I am legitimately persuaded that the reason that God does not interfere with specific occurrences of evil is that this world was created to provide an objective testimony to the power of love … and that I neither turn a blind eye to or remain unaware of the evils that I run into in this world. One of the reasons that I give myself to the causes I do is that I believe that we have also been given the free will to do good. Bridging gaps between theists & atheists is one of the many ways we both try to use the life we have on this earth to make the world better. Thanks for letting me partner with you guys in doing that. One thing we all agree on is that human inaction in the face of injustice, misunderstanding, or hatred is not the path for us … whether theist or atheist. And to me, that's moral. Thanks!

The Manhattan Declaration; Part 4

More from the Manhattan Declaration.  Yep, still ranting about gay marriage.  Remember, I had warned you that the closest thing to an argument in their whole section on gay marriage just repeatedly hammers the old, standard "marriage is about making babies" line?  This bit has me scratching my head:


". . . loving sexual intercourse in which the spouses become one flesh, not in some merely metaphorical sense, but by fulfilling together the behavioral conditions of procreation.  That is why in the Christian tradition, and historically in Western law, consummated marriages are not dissoluble or annullable on the ground of infertility, even though the nature of the marital relationship is shaped and structured by its intrinsic orientation to the great good of procreation."

Um . . . what?  Read that again.  They specifically mention "procreation" as the basis of the marriage, yet they immediately point out that it's just downright stupid to disolve a marriage on the grounds that the couple cannot procreate!  How can they not see the blatant inconsistency here?


The only thing I can think of is that they could be claiming that, specifically, a penis being inserted into a vagina is the basis of marriage.  That it is . . . some kind of procreation "ritual," not the actual reproduction, that matters.  What material difference there is, specifically and in terms of procreation, between the sex of an infertile couple and the sex of homosexual partners, well, they don't elaborate.   Either reproduction is the basis, or it is not.  The whole premise of this inane argument is ridiculous - would they lobby for a couple, one male, one female, who are asexual, with no sexual desire at all, but who wish to adopt, to be forbidden to marry?  Why, then . . . horror of horrors, not a single penis or vagina in use at all!


". . . it could be asserted with equal validity for polyamorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers, sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships.  Should these, as a matter of equality or civil rights, be recognized as lawful marriages, and would they have no effects on other relationships?"


Honestly?  Easy answer.  Yes, they should be, and no, they wouldn't.


"The truth is that marriage is not something abstract or neutral that the law may legitimately define and re-define to please those who are powerful and influential."

Um, isn't that exactly what you, the Christian, heterosexual majority, are doing?  This is exactly what has been done throughout all of marriage's history.  It has been redefined to mean a union of choice and mutual love, instead of one arranged or forced.  It has been redefined to include interracial couples.  It has been redefined, starting with polygyny, to mean a union of one man and only one woman, then again to mean a union of one man and many, many women,and back again.   If redefining it again will make the institution worse off, then make that case.  The Manhattan Declaration, though, has NOT done this; it has simply tried to scare people with emotionally-charged, prejudice-exploiting language.


". . . it is the duty of the law to recognize and support [marriage] for the sake of justice and the common good.  If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow.  First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience is jeopardized."


Oh, I see.  The government must recognize and uphold your religious opinion, even if it's discriminatory to others and clearly excludes other people's religious opinions, or you will consider your own religious freedoms to be violated.  It should be obvious that there are religious persons who disagree with your traditional view of marriage; what of their religious freedom?  By this tortured logic, isn't their religious freedom being violated when the government specifically enforces your view of marriage?


"Second, the rights of parents are abused as family life and sex education programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlightened understanding recognizes as "marriages" sexual partnerships that many parents believe are intrinsically non-marital and immoral."


Yes, there is a role in public education in promoting a healthy, humanistic societal ethic, or, at the very least, mildly discouraging blatant, outright prejudice.  If there is a rational reason for declaring gay men and women to be immoral people, then make that case.  Sorry, but until then, you are, by definition, a bigot, and you cannot use the public schools to disseminate your bigotry.


"Third, the common good of civil society is damaged when the law itself, in its critical pedagogical function, becomes a tool for eroding a sound understanding of marriage on which the flourishing of the marriage culture in any society vitally depends."


Not to get too intellectually elitist, but blah, blah, blah.  There's been no attempt, at all, to make this case so far.  No case that marriage should be intrinsically between one man and one woman, and no specifics of the "damage" of the terrible, terrible gay marriage.  Only repeated, vague statements about how society will somehow be irreparably harmed if certain people are allowed to get married.


"And so it is out of love (not "animus") and prudent concern for the common good (not "prejudice"), that we pledge to labor ceaselessly to preserve the legal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman and to rebuild the marriage culture."


Your position would have more credibility if you went after divorce instead of gay marriage, given how much more often divorces occur than gay marriages would occur.  Also, given that Jesus never explicitly condemned homosexuality, but he did specifically state that Christians should not allow divorce, it seems to be the big J's higher priority, too.


"The Bible teaches us that marriage is a central part of God's creation covenant."


Firstly, no, it doesn't, as I mentioned in the last installment of this review, the Bible gives highest honors to men like Jesus and Paul, who never touch a woman at all, and both of them explicitly stated that all Christians should refrain from marriage if they possibly can.  Secondly, the Bible also teaches that marriage, that central part of God's creation covenant, is between one man and as many women as he can afford.


"Indeed, the union of husband and wife mirrors the bond between Christ and his church."


Yes, the Bible often compares "husband and wife" to "Christ and his church."  Um . . . isn't the church expressly subservient to Jesus Christ in all things?  So . . . Christian marriage is unambiguously sexist.  Nice.  Topping it off with a great note, there.

Next time; their final point:  Religious freedom.  Yes, after all this, they actually end the Declaration with a supposed oath to defend religious freedom.  We'll see how that turns out.

The Manhattan Declaration; Part 3

The second main point of the Manhattan Declaration, predictably, refers to gay marriage, and it's quite long.  There's so much madness here, I'll need to split this one point of theirs into two blog posts on it's own.

"In the transmission of life and the nurturing of children, men and women joined as spouses are given the great honor of being partners with God Himself."

So, obviously, filthy atheists like Ziztur and I should not be permitted to marry.  Being incapable of "the transmission of life," neither should anybody be issued a marriage permit if they are infertile or elderly.  Yes, I know, these are the same objections to this stupid reproductive argument that we've all heard before, but I intend to keep repeating them until I hear a decent answer to them.  This spectacularly bad argument makes up the vast majority of their text on "marriage," and this point about gay marriage has more text than either of the points about abortion or freedom of religion.  They just hammer this "natural reproductive nature" of "true" marriage over and over again.

"In the Bible, God Himself blesses and holds marriage in the highest esteem."

Jesus Christ of Nazareth, claimed to be perfect in every single way, never married.  Paul never married.  Actually, highest biblical honors are given to men who don't ever touch women, and the Bible states as much.  Matthew 19, 10-12: 

The disciples said to him, "If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry."  Jesus replied, "Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given.  For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it."

Paul likewise says, "Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry. . . .  I wish that all men were as I am. . . .  Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. . . .  I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord's affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord's affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband. I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord. . . ."

Etc., etc., etc.  Anti-gay marriage folks always go on and on, in very emotionally-charged language, how important marriage is.  Not only should this rhetoric illustrate how important it is to give marriage rights to everyone, including gay men and women, but it is also directly contrary to the Bible.

"Vast human experience confirms that marriage is the original and most important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all persons in a society."

Um, no.  A cultural respect for individual freedom and human rights is far more important, for one thing.  Nazi Germany had marriage.  Imperialist Japan had marriage.  Islamic fundamentalism has marriage.  Etc., etc., etc.  Even if this weren't obviously false, again, arguing for the extraordinary value of marriage only illustrates the importance of protecting the marriage rights of everyone.

"Perhaps the most telling - and alarming - indicator is the out-of-wedlock birth rate.  Less than fifty years ago, it was under 5 percent.  Today it is over 40 percent.  Our society - and particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sectors, where the out-of-wedlock birth rate is much higher even than the national average - is paying a huge price in delinquency, drug abuse, crime, incarceration, hopelessness, and despair."

Except that rising rates of out-of-wedlock birth over the last fifty years would primarily affect crime rates in the last 15-20 years, as those "illegitimate" children reached adolescence and adulthood.  So have crime rates went up or down in the last 15-20 years?  Down.  Sharply.  So, the document is dead wrong.

"We confess with sadness that Christians and our institutions have too often scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage and to model for the world the true meaning of marriage.  Insofar as we have too easily embraced the culture of divorce and remained silent about social practices that undermine the dignity of marriage we repent, and call upon all Christians to do the same."

This is what really gets my blood up over the earlier claims about Christians and Christian churches being the ones responsible for abolition, women's suffrage, and civil rights.  They can't examine Christian history with open-minded ethical humility when it comes to those social evils that the Bible explicitly condones, but they are aware of, ashamed of, and need to repent of the fact that some Christians occasionally get divorced?  WTF.

"We call on the entire Christian community to resist sexual immorality, and at the same time refrain from disdainful condemnation of those who yield to it.  Our rejection of sin, though resolute, must never become the rejection of sinners."

This would be a nice sentiment and all, except for two things:  One, they are still describing a person's private sexual choices as immoral without any justification.  If we said this about anyone else's private decisions that don't infringe upon the rights of others in any way, we would transparently expose ourselves as bigots.  Two, this statement, and the larger context in which it appears, illustrates a profound prejudice.  They are trying to claim humility with this seeming recognition that there are other forms of sexual immorality besides homosexuality.  My question is simple:  If homosexual relationships are no worse than premarital or extra-marital sex, pornography, and/or divorce, they why aren't they lobbying for any of these acts to be restricted by law?  Any one of these other forms of "sexual immorality" are far, FAR more widespread than homosexuality, so why are they ignoring them to focus so exclusively on the terrible gays folks?

More about gay marriage next time; like I said, they have a lot to say about how dangerous the monstrous gay folks are.

3H1P: morality of witnesses

3H1P is a blogging project wherein three heathens (Ziztur, Flimsy and Petter) and one pastor (Keith) answer questions posed by readers of the blog and discuss various issues related to religion, philosophy, science, etc. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered by 3H1P, ask it in the comment box. We promise we'll probably get to it. The following comment is asked by Lord Runolfr, a long time reader/commenter of this blog (he even wrote a guest post here, just because he felt like it). It is answered (sort of) by Ziztur. I say sort of because I didn't really answer it. Instead, I pondered…


There was a very serious crime a few weeks ago, right around Hallowen:
a high school girl was assaulted by a gang outside of a dance. I
remember hearing it discussed on a talk radio show while I was driving
through Birmingham.

Leaving aside the crime itself and how the criminals should be
treated, the host expressed his outrage at the fact that there were a
dozen or more witnesses to the crime who did nothing about it. Their
inaction left him completely flabbergasted.

If it's morally wrong for people who are witnesses to a crime to do
nothing whatsoever to stop it, what about God?

If...
1) You believe God exists, and
2) You believe God has the power to intervene in human affairs, and
3) God is aware of essentially everything happening on Earth, and
4) You believe that taking some kind of action to stop a horrible
crime in progress is the morally correct thing to do,...

... then why consider God any sort of moral authority when He
routinely allows horrible crimes to occur without taking any action?

-Lord Runolfr

Admittedly, this question is not one I can really answer. The idea of some god as a moral authority does not make sense to me (and before someone says: "saying that something does not make sense is not a good argument", know that I am not using "this doesn't make sense" as an argument. I've written about god being a source of morality many times on this blog) Morality should be decided by the application of reason to reality. My personal leanings regarding morality are fairly close to the natural ethic explained by Jeff Schweitzer in Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World. I find the whole idea of there being a personal god who allows horrific suffering on earth and who does nothing about it to be morally bankrupt. Why wouldn't he stop a 3 year old boy from being tortured, raped and murdered? Why would he let an infant with eczema suffer in horrific pain until death while her parents fed her homeopathic remedies? Saying that we're judging the actions of said god with our fallible human morality is a cop-out, placing god squarely in the realm of you-can't-question-land.

I think that this question of god's morality is interesting, but I think an equally intriguing question is this: what caused people to react in this way – to see a crime and do nothing about it?

For a little bit of background, here is a link to the story. Basically, during a homecoming dance, a girl was gang-raped and assaulted by high-schoolers. She was not only raped, but other students stood by and did nothing, laughed, and recorded the incident on their cell phones. My guess is that the teenagers who were involved in this indecent acted in the way they did due to several factors. Reports said that the victim struggled to fit in at school, which very likely meant that she was dehumanized, mocked, or bullied before this incident. In-group bullying is a high problem in high schools – remember high school? If a teen involved considered calling for help, they would have risked being similarly treated. When I was in high school, a group of teenage boys tied up a friend of mine with jump ropes during gym class, so I can see how that type of behavior could be magnified in more hostile situations. There is also the bystander effect, which is a phenomenon in which individuals do not help in an emergency situation because there are other people present. Teenage brains are a work in progress.

I would agree that taking action to stop a horrible crime in progress is the moral, ethical thing to do, and I also think that it is possibly morally wrong to fail to intervene when witnessing a horrible crime. The wrongness of non-intervention depends in the specifics of the crime, and we could debate for eons about whether or not crime X in situation Y warranted intervention, and of what kind. Obviously, there are some actions that are currently criminal that are in a moral gray area where some people believe they are morally wrong and others do not. I, for example, would not intervene or report the crime of someone smoking marijuana, because I do not feel that it is immoral to smoke marijuana, even though I recognize that such activity is a crime. I would absolutely intervene if I were witness to someone throwing a newborn baby in a dumpster. Obviously, there is also the trouble of putting oneself at risk of being injured if one intervenes or reports a crime. Would I intervene on behalf of someone being mugged at gunpoint? Perhaps not directly for want of my own safety, but I would certainly report such a crime.

Of course, if god existed and god had the power to intervene in human affairs, that god would be under no threat of negative repercussions or injury, so that god would be without excuse. Sure, we could blather on about free will and such, but is free will so important that a god would rather a man rape and murder a young girl than temporarily suspend the free will of the murderer to prevent the girl from suffering?

The Manhattan Declaration; Part 2

So the first part of this document declares boldly and without reservation that it was Christianity and Christianity alone that was responsible for abolition, civil rights, and most laughably of all, women's suffrage.  Ziztur and I discussed this last night, and she pointed out that such a statement could be technically true in one sense, that Christians have always constituted an overwhelming majority in America.  Thus, it wouldn't actually be possible for any of these events to occur unless they received at least some significant support from the Christian majority.

Of course, this doesn't say anything about whether Christianity was the force that originally championed these societal changes.  To my mind, it's clear that if abolition, civil rights, women's suffrage, gay rights, etc. are gates of progress that America passes through, then Christianity (as an overwhelming majority of the population) holds the key to each gate.  Yes, Christianity eventually unlocked each of these gates one by one, but the had to be dragged kicking and screaming to each one, complaining the whole time.

Obviously, Christians will strongly disagree with the conclusion that their religion seems to be intrinsically resistant to ethical, societal progress.  Here's my honest question:  If Christianity was such a champion of these specific ethical causes, then why did they continue to exist for almost two millennium after Jesus Christ?  In contrast, The United States of America, clearly founded as a Secular Humanist nation, began seriously considering these important issues right off the bat, and beginning to accomplish these goals in less than a century.

(/rant)

In any event, the main point of the Manhattan Declaration is three issues.  The first is abortion.  I won't ramble on about it for too long, for the simple reason that the Declaration doesn't even attempt to defend it's view.  I have nothing to argue against.

"A culture of death inevitably cheapens life in all its stages and conditions by promoting the belief that lives that are imperfect, immature or inconvenient are discardable."

Basically, the Declaration simply states, over and over again, that they "affirm" that killing people is wrong, and so abortion is too.  This is often the form that arguments against abortion take.  As an aside, I freely admit that pro-choice arguments often take a similar form - people will simply assert that abortion is a woman's reproductive right, and how dare people take that right away.  I'm not saying that such declarations, on either side of the issue, are wrong, because not everybody always speaks specifically to persuade those who disagree.  If you're pro-choice and giving a talk to a pro-choice crowd, of course you won't get into the details of why abortion isn't morally evil.  In the same way, the Manhattan Declaration doesn't exactly seem to be intended for an audience of Secular Humanists, so it's nothing wrong with it, per se . . .

Just be aware, if you're pro-life, and you are trying to persuade others of your opinion, it might seem obvious to you that abortion is murdering an innocent person, but you will never convince a pro-choice person of this simply by stating it.  I know it's hard to believe, but no, really, we pro-choice folks don't sit around talking about how it's stupid that homicide is against the law, about how murdering innocent people should be everybody's right.  We agree with you that killing innocent people is grossly immoral.  We don't agree that a fetus should rationally be considered a "person" (or some variation of this argument).

There's some other interesting bits in this first point about abortion:

"The President says that he wants to reduce the "need" for abortion - a commendable goal. But he has also pledged to make abortion more easily and widely available . . ."

I agree, yet it is exactly conservative Christians in America who are directly combating this goal by opposing contraception and science-based sex education.  Entertainingly, the Manhattan Declaration itself does exactly that, later on, in a different point.  I'll get to that in a future post.

"As predicted by many prescient persons, the cheapening of life that began with abortion has now metastasized."

This is the beginning of long rant about several different topics, starting with embryonic stem cells.  I'll just comment briefly on each one.  Regarding stem cells, if you say that a late-term fetus should rationally be considered a "person," I'll respectfully disagree.  If you say that a just-fertilized human egg should be considered a person, . . . honestly?  I'll probably question your sanity and basic powers of reason.  To claim that a clump of cells too small to see with the naked eye is so definitively a "person" that we should not use said clumps to save or improve countless innocent lives is bordering on certifiable.

"At the other end of life, an increasingly powerful movement to promote assisted suicide and "voluntary" euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable elderly and disabled persons."

Only if, in your view, people should not have the freedom to end their life on their own terms, even if they are in extreme pain and/or have a chronic, incurable condition.  As usual, no rational explanation for this stance is provided, nor have I ever heard one.

I'll quote the entire last paragraph, beginning with universal, humanistic morality that we can all agree with, and then degenerating into a simple restatement of previous claims:

"Our concern is not confined to our own nation.  Around the globe, we are witnessing cases of genocide and "ethnic cleansing," the failure to assist those who are suffering as innocent victims of war, the neglect and abuse of children, the exploitation of vulnerable laborers, the sexual trafficking of girls and young women, the abandonment of the aged, racial oppression and discrimination, the persecution of believers of all faiths, and the failure to take steps necessary to halt the spread of preventable diseases like AIDS.  We see these travesties as flowing from the same loss of the sense of the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life that drives the abortion industry and the movements for assisted suicide, euthanasia, and human cloning for biomedical research.  And so ours is, as it must be, a truly consistent ethic of love and life for all humans in all circumstances."

I would only point out that, again, conservative Christianity has been opposed to contraceptive and evidence-based sex education, which is the single greatest weapon against "preventable diseases like AIDS."  As well, no argument is given for embryonic stem-cell research and pro-choice stances on abortion and assisted suicide being equitable to sex trafficking and racial genocide.  If there's a connection there to make, by all means, make it.  Whatever you do, don't simply declare it and expect it to convince people who have already considered your perspective and rejected it.

Next time, the second main point of the Declaration, out of three:  Gay Marriage is evil!  Interestingly, this point receives more text than either of the others.