Marduk and Baal Were Probably Involved, Too

By in fresh hell, non compos mentis, religion, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Har har. I just wrote in the last post:

That doesn’t even touch on another favorite parlor game of secular liberals, that of insisting that no one with any kind of education or position of power could possibly believe this crap; it has to all be a cynical put-on.

And then I see this:

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”

But I’m sure this was all just part of Rove’s eleven-dimensional chess plan to make Bush appeal to the average Pabst Blue Ribbon-drinking stumpfucker in the heartland, even if we’re only finding out about this now. Or something. Truly crazy people would never actually be allowed near power, right?

What a Fool Believes

By in atheism, religion No Comments


Steven Weinberg:

Religious liberals are in one sense even farther in spirit from scientists than are fundamentalists and other religious conservatives. At least the conservatives, like the scientists, tell you that they believe what they believe because it is true, rather than because it makes them good or happy. Many religious liberals today seem to think that different people can believe in different mutually exclusive things without any of them being wrong, as long as their beliefs “work for them.” This one believes in reincarnation, that one in heaven and hell; a third believes in the extinction of the soul at death, but no one can be said to be wrong as long as everyone gets a satisfying spiritual rush from what they believe. To borrow a phrase from Susan Sontag, we are surrounded by “piety without content.” It all reminds me of the story that is told about an experience of Bertrand Russell, when in 1918 he was committed to prison for his opposition to the war. Following prison routine, a jailer asked Russell his religion, and Russell said he was an agnostic. The jailer looked puzzled for a moment, and then brightened, with the observation that “I guess it’s all right. We all worship the same God, don’t we?”

Wolfgang Pauli was once asked whether he thought that a particularly ill-conceived physics paper was wrong. He replied that such a distinction would be too kind – the paper was not even wrong. I happen to think that the religious conservatives are wrong in what they believe, but at least they have not forgotten what it means to really believe something. The religious liberals seem to me to be not even wrong.

One often hears that theology is not the important thing about religion — the important thing is how it helps us to live. Very strange, that the existence and nature of God and grace and sin and heaven and hell are not important! I would guess that people do not find the theology of their own supposed religion important because they cannot bring themselves to admit that they do not believe any of it. But throughout history and in many parts of the world today, people have believed in one theology or another, and for them it has been very important. One may be put off by the intellectual muzziness of religious liberalism, but it is conservative dogmatic religion that does the harm. Of course it has also made great moral and artistic contributions. This is not the place to argue how we should strike a balance between these contributions of religion on one hand and the long cruel story of crusade and jihad and inquisition and pogrom on the other. But I do want to make the point that in striking this balance, it is not safe to assume that religious persecution and holy wars are perversions of true religion. To assume that they are seems to me a symptom of a widespread attitude towards religion, consisting of deep respect combined with a profound lack of interest. Many of the great world religions teach that God demands a particular faith and form of worship. It should not be surprising that some of the people who take these teachings seriously should regard these divine commands as incomparably more important than any merely secular virtues like tolerance or compassion or reason.

This reminded me of the distaste many liberals have for the so-called New Atheists for supposedly being intolerant and unnecessarily divisive. Personally, I think Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, etc. pay advocates of old-school religion the respect of treating them like honest opponents who know what they believe and are willing to fight for it, not confused little kids who just haven’t grown up enough yet to realize that you’re not supposed to take all that stuff about heaven and souls and judgment literally, you big sillies! (That doesn’t even touch on another favorite parlor game of secular liberals, that of insisting that no one with any kind of education or position of power could possibly believe this crap; it has to all be a cynical put-on.)

The popular bumper sticker image above encapsulates that for me — people who think that “we all worship the same god” and that all faiths are just different paths to the same goal don’t seem to realize that that in itself is a secular ideal. Asking people to subordinate what they believe about the ultimate nature of existence and the meaning and purpose of life to a general commandment to get along and play nice is fine; in fact, I’m all for it! I just don’t pretend that it’s an inherent aspect of religious belief itself. It reduces important issues to the level of lifestyle accessories, and I can fully understand why some people see that as intolerable. Certain belief systems make some very clear truth-claims upon the world, and I think it’s actually more disrespectful to condescendingly tell those people that “Oh, you don’t really mean that,” than to tell them they’re flat-out wrong.

In Hoc Signo Vinces

By in extraordinary popular delusions, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion No Comments

“Turn the other cheek,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “As you have done to the least of my brethren, so have you done unto me” are hardly pro-torture slogans. But in the hearts and minds of movement conservatives, not even Churchill, Saint Ronnie or Jesus himself can compete with the comforting violence of Jack Bauer.

— Battochio

Essays like this would be much better if they could leave out the dishearteningly inevitable appeals to the authority of a certain ancient demagogue. Scrutamini scripturas!

From J.L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against the Existence of God:>

Richard Robinson has examined the synoptic gospels as the best evidence for Jesus’s own teaching, and he finds in them five major precepts: “love God, believe in me, love man, be pure in heart, be humble.” The reasons given for these precepts are “a plain matter of promises and threats”: they are “that the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and that “those who obey these precepts will be rewarded in heaven, while those who disobey will have weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Robinson notes that “Certain ideals that are prominent elsewhere are rather conspicuously absent from the synoptic gospels.” These include beauty, truth, knowledge and reason:

As Jesus never recommends knowledge, so he never recommends the virtue that seeks and leads to knowledge, namely reason. On the contrary, he regards certain beliefs as in themselves sinful…whereas it is an essential part of the ideal of reason to hold that no belief can be morally wrong if reached in the attempt to believe truly. Jesus again and again demands faith; and by faith he means believing certain very improbable things without considering evidence or estimating probabilities, and that is contrary to reason.

Robinson adds:

Jesus says nothing on any social question except divorce, and all ascriptions of any political doctrine to him are false. He does not pronounce about war, capital punishment, gambling, justice, the administration of law, the distribution of goods, socialism, equality of income, equality of sex, equality of colour, equality of opportunity, tyranny, freedom, slavery, self-determination, or contraception. There is nothing Christian about being for any of these things, nor about being against them, if we mean by “Christian” what Jesus taught according to the synoptic gospels.

And let’s not forget that his famous love of man seems to have only obtained if you define “man” as “fellow Jew“, not Gentiles.

What about the historical Jesus? What do we know about him?

It’s popular to say he said the good stuff and not the less good stuff. I think it’s the opposite.

He’s typically seen as the great prophet of peace and love.

Yeah. But the fact is, the Sermon on the Mount, which is a beautiful thing, does not appear in Mark, which was the first written gospel. And these views are not attributed to Jesus in the letters of Paul, which are the earliest post-crucifixion documents we have. You see Paul develop a doctrine of universal love, but he’s not, by and large, attributing this stuff to Jesus. So, too, with “love your enemies.” Paul says something like love your enemies, but he doesn’t say Jesus said it. It’s only in later gospels that this stuff gets attributed to Jesus. This will seem dispiriting to some people to hear that Jesus wasn’t the great guy we thought he was. But to me, it’s actually more inspiring to think that the doctrines of transnational, transethnic love were products of a multinational, imperial platform. Throughout human history, as social organization grows beyond ethnic bounds, it comes to encompass diverse ethnicities and nations. And if it develops doctrines that bring us closer to moral truth, like universal love, that is encouraging. I think you see it in all three religions.

If Jesus was not the prophet of love and tolerance that he’s commonly thought to be, what kind of person was he?

I think he was your typical Jewish apocalyptic preacher. I’m not the first to say that. Bart Ehrman makes these kinds of arguments, and it goes back to Albert Schweitzer. Jesus was preaching that the kingdom of God was about to come. He didn’t mean in heaven. He meant God’s going to come down and straighten things out on Earth. And he had the biases that you’d expect a Jewish apocalyptic preacher to have. He doesn’t seem to have been all that enthusiastic about non-Jews. There’s one episode where a woman who’s not from Israel wants him to use his healing powers on her daughter. He’s pretty mean and basically says, no, we don’t serve dogs here. He compares her to a dog. In the later gospels, that conversation unfolds so you can interpret it as a lesson in the value of faith. But in the earliest treatment, in Mark, it’s an ugly story. It’s only because she accepts her inferior status that Jesus says, OK, I will heal your daughter.

But wasn’t Jesus revolutionary because he made no distinctions between social classes? The poor were just as worthy as the rich.

It’s certainly plausible that his following included poor people. But I don’t think it extended beyond ethnic bounds. And I don’t think it was that original. In the Hebrew Bible, you see a number of prophets who were crying out for justice on behalf of the poor. So it wasn’t new that someone would have a constituency that includes the dispossessed. I’m sure in many ways Jesus was a laudable person. But I think more good things are attributed to him than really bear weight.

Why, it’s almost like all he cared about was the supposed imminent end of the world! A fanatically anti-intellectual cult leader who demands unquestioning loyalty, even at the cost of alienating friends and family, who exults in the thought that anyone who rouses his resentment will suffer greatly in the new world order…you know, I don’t think it’s the conservatives who don’t understand how to interpret his message.

The Bright Day is Done, and We Are for the Dark

By in nietzsche, philosophy, religion, the big sleep No Comments

Thus we hear that suicide is the most cowardly of acts, that only a madman would commit it, and similar insipidities; or the senseless assertion that suicide is “wrong”, though it is obvious there is nothing in the world a man has a more incontestable right to than his own life and person.

[…] It therefore seems that the extraordinary zeal in opposing it displayed by the clergy of the monotheistic religions – a zeal which is not supported by the Bible or by any cogent reasons – must have some hidden reason behind it: may this not be that the voluntary surrender of life is an ill compliment to him that said that all things were very good? If so, it is another instance of the obligatory optimism of these religions, which denounces self-destruction so as not to be denounced by it.

– Schopenhauer

Could there possibly be a better way to die? Who in their right mind would prefer the usual alternatives?

It really is an affirmation of life — a refusal to allow all that made life worth living to be degraded by a sentimental clinging to mere biological existence. We’ve all seen relatives who died in a hospital or nursing home, blind, deaf, sickly, bedridden, dependent on nurses to feed and wash them. What’s the point? Why not make one courageous final stand for dignity and meaning? Why not proudly sign your name and close the book of your life of your own volition?

Our greatness and efficiency crumbles away not all at once but continually; the little plants which grow up in and around everything and know how to cling everywhere, it is these which ruin that which is great in us – the everyday, hourly, pitiableness of our environment which we constantly overlook, the thousand tendrils of this or that little, fainthearted sensation which grows out of our neighborhood, out of our job, our social life, out of the way we divide up the day. If we neglect to notice this little weed, we shall ourselves perish of it unnoticed! And if you absolutely must perish, do so all at once and suddenly, then perhaps there may remain of you some sublime ruin! And not, as there is now some reason to fear, a molehill! And grass and weeds upon it, little victors, modest as ever and too pitiable even to celebrate their triumph!

– Nietzsche

The Lamps Are Going Out

By in history, the big sleep No Comments

Jul 25th, 2009 | LONDON — Harry Patch, the last British military veteran of World War I, has died at 111, the nursing home where he lived said Saturday.

The Fletcher House care home in Wells, southwest England, said Patch died early Saturday.

Patch had been the last surviving soldier from the British Army to have served in the 1914-18 war. The only other surviving British veteran of the war, former airman Henry Allingham, died a week ago at age 113.

I’ve long shared the conviction of many authors and thinkers that World War One was the most momentous event of the 20th century, “[t]he blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction,” as Jacques Barzun put it. Of course I have nothing profound to say about it; I just feel that this sort of moment deserves a long period of somber reflection.

This Message Brought to You by Porn Stars for Abstinence Education

By in augean stables, jests japes jokes jollies, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Yeah, you know, if you want to tell kids to not be fools, play by the rules, stay in school, it’s probably best if you don’t hire a motivational speaker who dropped out in ninth grade and grifted his way to fame and fortune.

Iran only needs to look next door to be reminded that cooperating fully with inspectors to prove that you have nothing but Ewok weapons to defend yourself with will lead to nothing but brazen lies about your obstinate refusal to cooperate, followed by invasion and occupation.

We Have Always Been at War with Obesity

By in jests japes jokes jollies, ohferfucksake, tribalism No Comments

Wasn’t it the eminent scholar of fascism, Jonah Goldberg, who called our attention to the theretofore unnoticed line connecting healthy lifestyles to the death camps? What, has the right wing gotten in touch with their inner health Nazis all of a sudden?

The Surgeon General’s job is a bureaucratic one; I’m sure Benjamin can keep up to date on the latest health news, give lectures and shuffle papers full of statistics as well as any skinny person. It’s not as if she’s going to be leading the nation every morning at eight a.m. in a televised, government-mandated five-mile jog, and needless to say (but I will anyway), if she were going to do something like that, these same people would have one enormous, collective aneurgasm. The howls of outrage would be deafening as our basement-dwelling shut-ins would be frantically stockpiling candy and soda while insisting that the Bill of Rights guaranteed everyone the opportunity to eat junk food soaked in beer for breakfast, who do these granola-munching hippies think they are, and so on.

It’s almost like they just reflexively bitch and complain no matter what.

Better Living Through Chemistry

By in drugs, extraordinary popular delusions No Comments

Yup:

For Grim, most of these mistakes have roots in an elementary error, the inability to accept that “altering one’s consciousness is a fundamental human desire.” The craving to be more relaxed or more alert, more outgoing or more reflective, happier or deeper or even just sillier and less bored — in one form other another, this drive has always been and always will be with us, though many of us refuse to admit it. As a result, our political response to drug problems tends to be blinkered.

That’s why I’ve long been weary of the “disease” rhetoric surrounding substance abuse. It’s an attempt to disguise a moral judgment as scientific, clinical detachment. Anti-drug crusaders don’t want to have to acknowledge that people might willingly choose the joy of being high over the more subdued pleasures of being a responsible and respected spouse, parent, employee, member of the community, etc., thus the transparent attempts to pretend that people somehow catch drug addiction like a virus and continue with it even though they get nothing out of it. Bullshit. People do it because it’s enjoyable. Any response to drug problems that doesn’t take that basic fact into account will be blinkered. And how does the disease model explain those who actually do just quit cold turkey and walk away without looking back while others relapse repeatedly?

Of course heavy users will tell you that they hate what their life has become and they really want to quit, but why do we take that as proof that they’re being held captive against their will? People want contradictory or mutually exclusive things all the time. We want to lose weight without exercising or changing our terrible eating habits. We want to “save the planet” without making any drastic changes in our consumer habits or affluent lifestyles. The spectacle of people trying to have their cake and eat it too is so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable. Why is it so hard to accept that some want to be able to enjoy being high without having to suffer the consequences, either socially or physically?

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