religion
stcynic | April 7, 2006Mark Olson has an interesting post, responded to in part by Jason Kuznicki here, at least partly as a reply to things I and others have written lately about atheism and morality. It's worth a serious response, but first there are a couple of misconceptions to clear up. He writes:
Atheism is defended often (see Mr Brayton) by the idea that atheism has the means to come up with reasonable ethical frameworks to live by and that God is not necessary for that.
I just want to make my own position clear on the subject. First, I am not an atheist, I am a deist. On the issue of morality, there's no…
stcynic | March 29, 2006I saw this article, titled Satanic Art in Catholic Church Exposed, a few days ago at the Worldnutdaily and made a note to write about it. The article details a new documentary called Rape of the Soul that claims that throughout the history of the Church, artists have been subliminally encoding "satanic and occultic imagery" in their paintings. The WND article begins with their standard breathlessness:
Could the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse crisis be tied to embedded Satanic and occultic imagery in its artwork - some of it hundreds of years old?
The film, which is being released by Silver…
stcynic | March 25, 2006My old friend Henry Neufeld has written a response to all of our discussion of slavery and the Bible, as I actually hoped he would. Henry is a Hebrew scholar, a Christian and the director of the Pacesetter's Bible Institute in Florida. He was among the first people I encountered online about 13 or 14 years ago, in the Compuserve religion forum, and he was a big influence on my thinking about religion. Until I met him, I really thought that all Christians were fundamentalists as that was pretty much all I was raised around. Henry showed me that are other ways to look at things.
On the subject…
stcynic | March 25, 2006Mark Olson has written a response - well, kind of - to my post about slavery and the Bible. It's not really a response so much as it is a sneer in my general direction, and a highly inaccurate one at that. He makes no attempt to actually answer my arguments except for a relatively irrelevant one in my first post that was tangential to the real issue. He begins:
Now I've written about this before, Mr Brayton does not give the same consideration to theology that he does in the other parts of his life. He is ready and willing to chide a person critical of, say, evolutionary science for not "…
stcynic | March 24, 2006Eric Seymour has written a response to my post on slavery and the Bible and takes the often-stated position that Biblical slavery wasn't like modern slavery. He writes:
But we also must bear in mind that the slavery which existed in the times and cultures in which the Scriptures were written was not the same as the enslavement of Africans in North America during the 18th and 19th centuries. It was not as brutal, not based on race, nor was it always lifelong. Some have compared Biblical slavery to military service.
Likewise, a commenter named John Rabe after his post takes an even stronger,…
stcynic | March 23, 2006In a thread down lower, totally unrelated to this subject, slavery and the Bible came up and David Heddle made a comment that I want to reply to in full here. I want to move this up because I think this is a really important issue and, for me, it was hugely important. It was one of the key reasons why, as a young man, I ultimately decided that the Bible was not the word of God and left Christianity. I don't intend this as a slam on David; it is entirely incidental that he happens to be the one making this argument, which could have been made by millions of others. When the subject was brought…
stcynic | March 21, 2006There's never any shortage of people ready to claim that the latest disaster or problem is God's punishment on us for this or that. Here's the latest, brought to my attention by Jason Kuznicki.
An outbreak of deadly bird flu in Israel is God's punishment for calls in election ads to legalize gay marriages, according to Rabbi David Basri, a prominent sage preaching Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism.
"The Bible says that God punishes depravity first through plagues against animals and then in people," Basri said in a religious edict quoted by his son.
Basri said he hoped the deaths of hundreds of…
stcynic | March 1, 2006There's a conference coming up in Washington DC the end of this month to discuss the "War on Christians". You gotta love this kind of over the top rhetoric:
Conference convener Vision America says "The War On Christians And The Values Voter in 2006" will be the first "to consider the savage and accelerating" attacks by groups such as the ACLU and Anti-Defamation League.
Oh yeah, savage attacks. Those poor folks in Uganda being slaughtered by the machetes of the Lord's Resistance Army have nothing on the poor Christians in America, who hold virtually exclusive control of every branch of…
stcynic | February 27, 2006Perhaps the most amusing and ridiculous pop culture phenomenon of our times is the Kabbalah fad currently gathering more of Hollywood's most shallow every day. Britney Spears, Roseanne, Demi Moore and, of course, Madonna, are all converts to this vague, new agey version of Jewish mysticism. Jewsweek has a funny article up about it that dubs the phenomenon "McMysticism". Not since Shirley MacLaine was channeling the voice of a 35,000 year old Egyptian man has Hollywood been caught up in such a whirlwind of stupidity. And I think we all know where this is inevitably leading: a Survivor style…
stcynic | February 14, 2006Fox News is reporting that Mel Gibson has spent $5 million to set up a foundation to build churches for the very strange quasi-Catholic offshoot sect that he and his father belong to. Mel has tried to publicly distance himself from his father's bizarre views - he's a holocaust denier, among other things - but he sure has spent an enormous amount of money funding the dissemination of those views.
stcynic | February 5, 2006So I'm flipping channels last night and I come across TBN, the Christian TV network, where they're interviewing members of the two Super Bowl teams who are Christians to get their witness. And Jeff Hartings, center for the Steelers, makes this statement:
I know that God didn't bring me to the Super Bowl one year before I was ready for it, he brought me here right when I was prepared.
It's just baffling to me how people can believe something like that. Do they put any thought into it at all, or are they just passive recipients of this nonsense and just repeat it by rote? In order for that…
stcynic | February 2, 2006I came across this article at the Worldnutdaily and I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around the concepts found there. The author, Jay Stapleton, is a pastor from Virginia who is urging his followers to pray for God to remove liberal justices from the Supreme Court because the window of opportunity for Bush to appoint "Godly" justices in their place is closing. But before getting to that, let me first debunk his first factual claim:
In Roberts and Alito, Bush got what he requested and conservatives got what they wanted: a crime-fighting duo of young, bright, originalist justices able…
stcynic | November 11, 2005According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Israeli governmemt is donating 125 acres to a group of American evangelical leaders, including Pat Robertson, to build a Biblical theme park right where the Jordan river meets the Sea of Galilee. That's just perfect. Let's take the Holy Land and cheapen it by turning it into a theme park so the Disneyfication of the world will be comiplete.
Let's have guys in Jesus costumes with big foam heads wandering around blessing people and having their picture taken with the kids.
Let's have booths selling deep-fried manna on a stick.
Let's have a game…
stcynic | October 18, 2005Someone emailed me this link and it's hilarious. It's an evangelism video hosted by Kirk Cameron, who used to play teen heartthrob Mike Seaver on Growing Pains. Much of the video is devoted to debunking evolution. Because ya know, when you want solid information about evolutionary biology, the first place you think to turn is to a washed up child actor.
It begins with his co-host Ray Comfort saying, "It's funny how we equate the word 'atheism' with intellectual, and it's the exact opposite." 10 seconds later, he's offering his "intellectually stimulating theory" for how the soda can "evolved…
stcynic | October 13, 2005New documents released by the Los Angeles Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church as part of a negotiated settlement show a 75 year pattern of priests accused of abuse being transferred from church to church and school to school:
The confidential records show that for more than 75 years the nation's largest archdiocese shipped accused priests between therapy and new assignments, often ignoring parishioners' complaints.
And, in many cases, there was little mention of child molestation. Instead, euphemisms such as "boundary violations" were used to describe the conduct.
The documents were released…
stcynic | September 28, 2005One of the arguments we Americans hear constantly from the religious right is that everything went to hell when we "took God out of the schools". In a classic case of post hoc reasoning, they will point to all of the measures of social problems that got worse after 1962 and say, "See? When you remove God as the basis for moral behavior, people behave less morally." Worse yet, they often say, we teach them evolution and that only adds to the problem. Teach them that they are nothing more than animals, the argument goes, and they will act like animals.
My response to this has long been that it…
stcynic | May 28, 2005Kelly Hollowell, the delightfully daffy columnist for the Worldnutdaily, has a new column up about the imminent discovery of the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant was the golden box that allegedly housed the Ten Commandments tablets and the rod of Aaron, and it has been the center of much bizarre speculation. I've actually had more than one amusing wingnut tell me that the Ark was really a "fusion communicator/weapon" given to the ancient Israelites by aliens. Rod Serling, call your office. But now, according to Hollowell, we're about to find it:
One famous adherent to this theory…
stcynic | May 6, 2005George Will has written a column saying many of the things I've long been saying about the tendency of some Christians to strike the martyr pose. I like the way he starts it:
The state of America's political discourse is such that the president has felt it necessary to declare that unbelievers can be good Americans. In last week's prime-time news conference, he said: "If you choose not to worship, you're equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship."
So Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes and a long, luminous list of other skeptics can be spared the posthumous ignominy of being stricken…
stcynic | February 15, 2005Paul Shanley, the defrocked Boston priest convicted of raping and molesting a 6 year old boy in his parish, has been sentenced to 12-15 years in prison. At 74, it is likely a death sentence for all practical purposes. But here's what bothers me about the whole priest sex scandal issue. Why are there no bishops being brought up on charges of obstructing justice or failure to report child abuse? In dozens of cases, the church has been made aware of priests sexually abusing children and has required them to go to counseling and moved them to another parish. In no case, so far as I know, has any…
stcynic | February 14, 2005The Worldnutdaily is reporting that a Scottish minister has written that the enormous tsunami that killed so many people recently was God's revenge on people for not keeping the Sabbath holy:
In the February issue of his church magazine, Rev. John MacLeod of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland writes: "Possibly ... no event since Noah's flood has caused such loss of life by drowning as the recent Asian tsunami. That so many of our fellow creatures should have perished in so short a time, and in so awful a fashion, was a divine visitation that ought to make men tremble the world over."…