The Archbishop of Westminister wants Christians to play nice with the godless!

The Archbishop of Westminister wants Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with deep esteem. I laughed and laughed.

I mean, obviously, it'd be nice to be respected by Christians. I like being treated with respect! And I feel the reason I'm so militant is largely because after years of trying to be respectful to Christians I got deeply tired of their lack of respect so I started getting more and more aggressive until, y'know, I wrote Simon Peter.

I find this statement as a backhanded way of saying that, y'know, it's just a well-known fact that religious people don't respect or esteem non-beleivers. So, at some level I know it'd be nice for Christians to treat atheists respectfully.

But so long as Christianity is a religion, that can't really happen. The problem isn't one of respect, in the end, but that sincere religious people feel morally compelled to act on their religion. And no religion is based in honest reason. In the end, all religions take certain facts for granted - unalterably for granted. The usually take the physical existence of their god as a fact beyond dispute, and they usually take their primary religious works as truth beyond critique or reproach. The problem is that religious people use religion to make decisions that effect me, and they make these decisions on grounds that are beyond reason.

For instance, the Archbishop of Westminister is against gay marriages, against birth control, abortion, stem cell research, human cloning and a bunch of other things. Not because they hurt people. Indeed, they sometimes provide considerable help to people. Like condoms. They protect people against STDs. And they allow people to rationally plan families. How is this bad? Even vaguely? Even if you take the position that "fornication" is immoral, how can protecting yourself and your partner from a disease be immoral, too? Or explain how gay marriage is immoral? In all of these things, ultimately, they have to say that their god believes them to be wrong and it doesn't matter the rational explanation. They're wrong because Jehovah said so. And these people are advancing these positions because of their religion. In my democracy!

So, even if they pretend to listen to what atheists say, and say "please" and "thank you", well, there's a deeper problem than that, once that can't be fixed by superficial politeness. These religions, based on arbitrary authority, are doing things to the world. Things that need to be stopped. And so long as religious people believe these things based on their invention of divine authority, atheists will attack religion itself. Because religion is a stumbling block to making the world a better place. Which is the real problem with respect between atheists and religious people.

Another pervert messiah! And a contest!

A friend of mine posted this news story on their blog about a pervert messiah being arrested. My friend's post mentioned my research for Simon Peter into this area so I suppose it's relevant to this blog, it being very close to the central premise of one of the books I've written.

Many of the founders of religions are deeply twisted people. Because of how religions whitewash the founders of their religion, this can be hard to see. We can see this whitewashing in progress in, say, Scientology, a cult that managed to survive it's insane founder. All of L. Ron Hubbard's human flaws are being culled by Scientology to create a mythology of him being this enlightened, benevolent person working for the good of all humankind - standard messiah stuff.

Likewise, when looking at any so-called messiah, it is important to remember that none of them say that they're crazy perverts, money-grubbing frauds or deeply disturbed people in need of psychological help. They all say they're around for the good of everyone, full of love and peace. It's pretty predictable stuff.

But pretty much every religious person that you can actually study in history has been deeply sexually twisted. I'll give a couple of examples.

Muhammad, founder of Islam, had thirteen wives or concubines. Thirteen. One of the people he married, calling Aisha a "woman" is a stretch, was six years old. Even Muslims admit that he consummated the marriage when Aisha was nine or ten years old. This is the stuff that's in the historical record, this is what we know about.

Even so, it is brushed off by many historians - even non-Muslim ones. The most interesting argument is when they talk about his first marriage to Khadija - he was loyal to her until she died. It was only then, when he was about fifty, that he freaked out and starting marrying and engaging in concubinage, when he was the leader of a large and growing religion that regarded him as a sacred being. I think this supports the idea that messiahdom makes a person insane - it wasn't until Khadija died and all his ties with the fallible, mortal Muhammad were gone that he felt comfortable reveling in his godhead, which had grown huge by the time of her passing.

The actual historical record of Muhammad is scant, too, coming almost entirely from Muslim sources. There are some Persian and Byzantine documentation of his life - he was definitely a real person - but they dealt only distantly with Muhammad and largely with his political life. His personal life comes to us from Muslims, exclusively, and even there we find this man who engaged in sex with children and kept concubines.

Jumping ahead to an American case, we have Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of Mormonism. In his religion, against the standards of his time, he created a religion of polygamy. Compared to Joe Smith, Muhammad was pretty tame. Joseph Smith had around thirty-four wives. Thirty-four. Joseph Smith damned to hell those wives who did not except polygamy! Joe Smith also married women who were married to other men. He told the first woman he bullied into this position, Zina Jacobs (at the time), that unless she married him that god would take away Joseph Smith's authority. Must be nice to be able to tell a woman you want to fuck that god himself said that she must fuck him. He'd do this time and again, and so would Brigham Young, who had something like fifty-four or fifty-five wives. He occasionally demanded that wives married to other men should be divorced so he could marry them! .

With L. Ron Hubbard, not only did he repeatedly seduce wives of Scientologists, but when he started the Sea Org - a flotilla of ships that operated in international waters after various pressures of government forced Hubbard into hiding - he would have "messengers" do his bidding. They were pretty young girls of around 14 years of age. Occasionally, Hubbard would sleep with them. Naked. I don't know if it's more or less perverted that he didn't have sex with them. But he did it, which is deeply weird.

Other so-called messiahs, like David Koresh or Jim Jones, would do things like outlaw marriage except to the messiah, and openly have sex with all the women they wanted in their little twisted compounds.

As far as I can tell, sexual abuse and messiahdom attend each other. I don't know of a single religious messiah that wasn't a pervert, who didn't do some really twisted, sick thing with sex.

So I want to know what my readers think! Or readers anywhere. Is there a messiah who existed in history that wasn't a pervert? I won't accept a messiah whose life is only recorded by religious people, there's got to be some legitimate history out there about the person. Has it ever happened that a messiah hasn't been a sexual weirdo?

Depression and not-depression

This is about the most personal post I've ever made on a blog! Here it is. I suffer depression. Personally. Immediately. And after taking medication for it, it is clearer than every how crippling depression is.

I'm saying this because, well, I mean, honestly I know I'm not risking anything, as about five people will ever read this, but I am sorta daring people to take umbrage with the idea of depression. A lot of my life, a lot of people close to me have said that the problem has been a character failing. A form of weakness, and if I just applied myself more and better that's all it would take. Man up, cowboy! Stuff like that. This was told to me by some members of my family and some previous close friends. It's easy to believe when you're told it. And for years my mind has told me that depression and mental illness are real, and that people who claim mental illness are not weaklings or "faking it", that they are not to blame. They're not. But while I sincerely believed that, for my own part, I didn't take those words to heart. I persisted in believing that the troubles I have in my life - such as the crippling anxiety and depression about the process of getting published as a writer, and the various problems I've had with authority, employment, etc. - were not because of some stupid chemical in my brain working improperly. I bought into the myth that I could only be held responsible for my "failings".

But now, in light of what I am feeling here and now, it is clear to me the anxiety and depression I felt, the terrors in my head of both success and failure, were at least in part a disease. Something in my brain doesn't work right, the wiring is messed up a little bit, creating a powerful dread that spirals into a hard and dark depression without rhyme or reason. It is difficult for me to describe the change in my mood - the improvement. All the drugged experimentations of my youth are nothing compared to the profound change that has overcome me these past few days without any of the mental confusion of drugs. (Tho', to be honest, the way I feel now is very like the day after I've taken LSD. I feel cleared and focused and unafraid, intellectually energetic and curious. Which I think is very interesting.)

But I'm saying this because I will not feel any shame for this disease I am suffering under, so I'm gettin' it out there. Mental illness is real, it's more crippling than many physical illnesses or injuries (for instance, I find depression far more debilitating than any physical injury I've had; I'd much rather have a broken leg than depression!) and it can be treated.

Where are the anti-Christians?

So, where are the anti-Christians?

By anti-Christians I don't mean people who hate Christians or atheists. I'm taking about the Christians who accept the truth of Christianity but fail to worship the Christian god. I don't even mean Satanists who think that Christianity is bogus, but the people who go, "Yes, the metaphysical order of the universe is as the Christians describe it, but I am taking a principled stand against god. Even if it condemns me to hell."

Because the way I see it, there's a lot to object to concerning the Christian god's ordering of the universe. Even beyond the absurdity of an all-benevolent omnipotent being allowing random pain and suffering into the world, what with all the natural disasters and cancers or whatever, but the total two-faced nature of religious literature. Where are the people who accept that Jesus died for our sins but . . . don't consider that being worthy of worship?

Where are the anti-Christians?

An IDer lays it on the line about faith and reason!

Over at Stardust's blog she posted about the movie Expelled. Like pretty much all atheists, she's offended at the links between Hitler's genocide and evolutionary biology. I'm offended! It's offensive! It's a terrible slur and not true.

But this is about Stardust's post about Expelled, right? Right. Well, her blog was trolled by a a fundie Christian who thought Stardust was being ridiculous. It's . . . amusing. The fundie is a young woman of about 17 years of age who is full of vim, vigor and idiocy. I will let her speak for herself:

And, in response to your question, "What are ID's scientific predictions, what are its unifying principles, and what experiments have been done to support your ID theory? WITHOUT THE MYTHOLOGY BOOK." Alright, telling me to do so without the Bible is like telling you to prove one of your bunk theories without the world or without your brain.

WHOA! I mean, you don't get it much clearer than that! When I read this quote to my wife, she said, "That's your primary objection to religion in a nutshell." Yes. You have this person who's saying that the problem with evolution is that it relies on our knowledge of the world, and that is irrelevant to what's in the Bible.

So, no, she can't prove intelligent design without the Bible. Which means it's not science, of course. On the other hand, what's in the Bible is more important than the mere world and reason.

I laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

A bit of a rant on cultural imperialism

After reading The World Republic of Letters, I was pretty horrified. The basic thesis of the book is that international literature is largely formed by a small group of editors in Paris and to a lesser extent in London and New York. That these editors decide what bits of literature the world over are internationalized.

The horror came over me because I realized how homogenizing this must be - and, indeed, I find international literature to be very much of a particular cast. I mean, take magical realism. It is very much the sort of thing that white middle class people like - it's about extraordinary renditions of fairly ordinary things but with shades of the exotic. Some time later I recall talking to a South American - I don't even know who he is! - about magical realism and though I do not remember the person, I remember what he said very well. He said, "That's not what South Americans really read." He told me that science-fiction is huge in Latin America. I read science-fiction so I said I'd never heard of it, and he said that almost none of it has been translated. Then my mind veered towards this world republic of letters. A group of college educated middle-class Frenchmen (and almost certainly most of them are French men) would have little interest in Spanish language science fiction. What those French editors want is literary fiction - the same stuff that literary fiction writers in the US, and England, and France write, but written exotically. The quality of international literature is being defined as nothing more than what appeals to Western educated French people. It was right then that I really understood what cultural imperialism meant - the attitudes of those white well-to-do Western college educated French men were defining world literature and by doing it, they would create a self-fulfilling system. The more they define "international" literature as what appeals to white well-to-do Western college educated French men the more the continuing standard of quality will be so defined. Like how it's impossible to talk about English literature without someone bringing up Shakespeare, even tho' . . . he's not that good by today's standards, and even by the standards of his day he was . . . sorta . . . shallow. But you can't say that, because Shakespeare has come to define English language literature.

The only place that I have a good idea of what I'm missing is Japanese fiction. Due largely to the efforts of a small group of Japanophiles in the United States, to some extent the "republic" of letters - which is a misnomer, really, it's far more like the oppressive racist aristocracy of letters - has been circumvented. Japanese animation has brought over Japanese comic books which is now translating into bringing over Japanese popular literature. But it's limited, and rare. What goes on, even in fields I'm very interested in, like science-fiction, remain opaque to me.

The same thing happens everywhere. So, the Wikipedia article of the day - yeah, yeah, I know some of you don't like Wikipedia, but I do in large measure because it is way more likely to have information I want than a traditional encyclopedia, like up-to-date comic book summaries - they have it an Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray He does stuff like the Apu trilogy, Ghare Baire and Shakha Proshakha. He would influence people like Mrinal Sen.

Ray's movies are . . . I mean, they're what almost all foreign movies I see are. They're these personal and family dramas! Look at what Ray did, what Sen did! Nothing but personal and family dramas. And with both directors the articles will go on and on about how wonderful and splendid they were and I found myself thinking that we're back in the territory of the international republic of letters. That what we praise is what art house movie people praise.

I know what Indians actually watch - and it isn't these movies! Indians watch a lot more stuff like Dhoom 2 than they do the Apu trilogy. Who watches stuff like the Apu trilogy? Well-to-do Western educated Indians, who contact their well-to-do Western film contacts and international acclaim is given to movies that are not representative of India cinema.

What I feel is going on is that . . . they're not interested in Indian cinema. They're interested in seeing the reflections of the Western artistic aesthetic outside of the West. What Indians are actually interested in isn't nearly as important, to the people who decide what the world sees about all of the parts of the world, as a narcissistic reflection of their own aesthetic. It's a racist pat on the head. We'll acknowledge Indian cinema, or South American literature, if it conforms to the standards of a tiny section of Westerners - almost all of whom are rich, college educated white men. We'll be glad to let them into our circle if they act like us.

I hate that, and I just had to say something.

May Day or, as we call it in America, the National Day of Prayer

In much of the rest of the world, today is May Day or the International Workers Day. It's what the rest of the world has instead of Labor Day. It has socialist and communist roots, so Americans don't celebrate it - instead we were given Labor Day. I don't like Labor Day. I do like May Day. It won't be until workers unite that we'll have any real chance of changing the world.

For a long time, May Day was nothing in America. Most Americans didn't, and still don't, even know that this is a big worker's holiday in most of the rest of the world. But recently it's become the US National Day of Prayer.

It's one of those holidays that really twists in my gut. First, it does that thing that happens when religious folks get defensive about religion - it lumps them all together. Sorta forgetting that virtually every religious person in the world is condemning people of other religious fates to a variety of horrible events, mostly in the form of eternal punishment. But for little get togethers like this, the first thing that everyone pretends to do is forget that folks in those different religions hate each other's guts, too. But I guess they hate and fear atheists more, which is absurd, because atheists aren't the people going door to door or standing outside of churches trying to convert people to their cause.

The second thing that is actually happening is that the National Day of Prayer is being hijacked by fundamentalist Christians. PZ Myers had a link on his website that linked to this little article about how the multi-faith NDP celebrations have been taken over by the fundies in the form of Shirley Dobson. Which is what people with brains in America knew would happen from the outset. One of the things I repeat again and again in religious discussions with moderates is that the face of religion in America is fundamentalism - because moderates spend all their time trying to convince atheists that they're not like those nutjobs, they aren't spending too much time trying to convince their co-religionists to stop being nutjobs (which would be a more effective way of getting us atheists to shut up, if religious people had the guts to clean their own house, by the way). Tho' I guess that makes sense, too. Fundies are crazy. Us atheists might be adamant, but there's not any chance we'll burn your house down or kill you, which isn't a guarantee with fundie nutjobs.

Still, I obviously loathe everything about the "National Day of Prayer". It was founded in bad faith and intellectual deceit and has been taken over by stupid reactionary religious fundamentalists.