Deck chair religion

He frowns slightly at my comment, then laughs.
‘Oh, we no longer believe in the bearded man in the sky,’ he says, and goes on to tell me about continuous revelation and having a personal relationship with Jesus.
‘You see’, he adds, ‘Modern Christianity has come a long way.’

No it hasn’t.

100’000 years ago, mankind explained what they couldn’t understand with ghosts, gods, demons and spirits. And for good reason: they assumed super-natural causes for super-human events like lightning, volcanos or earthquakes. Today, that belief hasn’t changed. It’s our understanding of nature that has.

Continuous revelations and ‘personal relationships’ with gods are nothing more than new struts on the same old pillar of belief. A fresh coat of paint does not make a new house. Astrology done on a computer is still astrology. Nothing has changed. This belief is still bronze-age morality founded on stone-age knowledge.

All Christians are doing is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Nomen est Omen?

Even if you are not superstitious, you avoid giving names that portend calamity. You won’t, for example, call your cat Road Kill, nor would many people think it wise to name a jet Crater.

Although named after a native tribe of the Wichita people, one can’t help but wonder if ‘nomen est omen’ adheres to the town of Waco, Texas. In 1993 it was home to a group of world-class religious wackos who called themselves Branch Davidians and managed to not only get themselves killed, but also took a number of innocent law officers with them.

Recently, “The Science Guy” Bill Nye got a taste of some more Waco wackiness: as one of the speakers in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series, he incurred the wrath of religious nut-cases who took offense at him pointing out that the moon does not glow by itself, but merely reflect sunlight. The problem? In Genesis 1:16 it’s written that God put up a Light to rule over the night, not a mirror. And everyone knows that the Bible is always right. The nuts left the lecture in protest over Nye’s irreverence.

Luckily this kind of crazy does not extend to nearby Huston – else we’d really have had to fake that landing.

‘Science’ in the hands of homophobes

A recent article reported that Gulf States are working on a medical test to ‘detect’ homosexuality in humans.

A medical test being developed by Kuwait will be used to ‘detect’ homosexuals and prevent them from entering the country – or any of the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC), according to a Kuwaiti government official.

First, the consensus among real scientists is that this will be as likely to succeed as trying to find a medical test that detects if you like collecting stamps: Zero. The Gulf states are rich, and can afford some of the best scientific minds money can buy (those aren’t necessarily the best scientific minds, but close enough). It is safe to say that they know that this is a hare-brained idea. So why are they doing it?

Now, it is important to remember that the Gulf States (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the UAE) are deeply islamic countries. Like all deeply islamic countries, they are also deeply homophobic (unfortunately, the same can be said about deeply christian countries). Being a homosexual is a crime in the GCC, in Saudi Arabia it’s even a capital offense.

But I don’t think that they are trying to actually produce a working test. Here, the message is more important than the facts. What The GCC are really trying is to

  • publicly associate homosexuality with a disease. If something can be detected ‘medically’, it must be an illness, right?
  • create the illusion of an ‘impartial’ test. Much like the historic tests that determined if you were a witch Number Search , this test can be used against anyone the state deems unsavory. There is no appeal against a ‘scientific’ positive. This will be just another way to suppress people. The GCC are not democracies – pretty much the opposite.
  • establish the opinion that homosexuality is a growing problem that is invading from the outside (hence airport screening), and that they are trying to stop it at the border. People should think that homosexuality is carried into their pure country by foreigners, and that perhaps, as a medical condition, it may be even be an infectious disease.

In short, this is little more than trying to shoehorn science into providing justification for their repulsive beliefs. Something like this has been done before, and resulted in one of the greatest sufferings the world ever endured: the ‘scientific’ racism of the aryan race theory.

Holy Alka Seltzer!

True ‘Miracles’ have become indistinguishable from the Placebo Effect, as the Catholic Church officially proved today.

In a couple of months, the catholic church will make saints out of two former priests. That’s nice. We’ll just note as an aside that they are made saints, and therefore, by definition up until now did not have had to be saints.

But just what is required of someone to become a saint? First, you have to be dead. That’s sensible – this precludes that future unsaintly actions of yours could embarrass the church. But the church allegedly sets ‘high standards’ before they elevate someone into sainthood. In the case of the late Pope John Paul II, the church requires no less than two miracles.

Now, that is a high standard. The problem is: the church has a lamentably low standard when it comes to miracles. This pretty much mirrors the way people nowadays believe that random occurrences are miracles. In NGNG is snidely commented:

Gods in the past created the universe, parted seas, smote unbelievers, regularly performed miracles on the grandest of scale, raised the dead, drowned whole populations and caused plagues. Today it is already considered a miracle when His/Her face appears on an ice cream stain. How pathetic is that? Gods of Today are sissies, while their believers talk up the good old times when their god still had some machismo.

The same pathetic standard is now applied to miracles performed by priests. The alleged ‘miracles’ are just two counts of a spontaneous remission of an illness. A real miracle would be if someone spontaneously regrows an arm or leg. If that happens, I’d be the first to acknowledge it. But – come on! – something that can’t be distinguished from the Placebo Effect? Something that is bound to happen given the sheer number of ill people? The only miracle here is that they only found two cases.

Now, if I was to be sainted for that, those ‘miracles’ would have been an embarrassment to me. After all, my fellow saints did some really miraculous stuff, not just a couple of lousy remissions.

The question here is when the Church will make Alka Seltzer a holy substance. After all, I can attest to it’s miraculous power to cure headache. More than just once.

Warning: Religion can be hazardous to your health

In NGNG I wrote

“your religion is a cruel, terrible, and sometimes deadly joke on you”.

If you need proof for this, look no further than today’s story of a teenager who suffers from a life-threatening disease (Hodgkin’s) and refuses life-saving treatment because of the twisted, sick religion that his parents and priests poisoned his mind with.

Here we have a young man who is ill, who needs help, and whom his community abandoned because they are willing to sacrifice him on the altar of their superstition: Jehova’s Witnesses. To sum up, this particular Christian sect was invented in the 1870s; it believes that the ‘end of days’ has already happened in 1914 (they have to, otherwise a holy prediction of theirs from 1877 would be false), that the end of the world is imminent, and – which is relevant here – they are opposed to blood transfusion.

As a boy he was so heavily indoctrinated by his parents that today he refuses life-saving blood transfusions. Since he’s only 17 and legally a minor, a court ordered the treatment be forcibly administered – at least until he turns 18 in January 2014. Given the history and level of brain washing this youth has undergone I think it is likely that he’ll die soon after his coming of age.

Now, cynics may argue that we really shouldn’t bother: grant his wish now, and put him on the list for a Darwin Award (posthumously awarded to people who removed themselves from the human gene pool by means of stupendous stupidity). But this is really a tragedy.
Our society has failed to protect this youth. I believe that Religious Freedom must be curtailed when it endangers an innocent’s life. Now, even though I am against religion, I still think that Freedom Of Religion is one of society’s highest social achievements, so I do not say this lightly. Everyone should be free to do to themselves as silly as they wish.

Yet, brainwashing an impressionable child into self-sacrifice for a religion should be a crime. Telling a child that basic modern medicine is harmful is a morally bankrupt act of religious selfishness. You may believe it, but your child suffers the consequences. Society must step in and prevent this cruelty.

A crime was committed. The boy’s parents and his priests are the perpetrators. They should have been stopped when there still was time.

Ours is a guilt of omission.