61% of Americans believe in evolution?

That's the word I read in a poll. I'll probably post further, but it's late and I'm just going to post the putative fact itself for now. Suffice to say that I've long suspected that the numbers normally reported in the US are due more to social pressures than genuine belief (but I'm an optimist).

Assessing likelihood, part 1

A new Barna group survey on how literally American take their Bible stories just came out.

To combine with the last Barna survey, amongst Christians:

75% believe a virgin got pregnant.
75% believe a dead guy rose from the grave.
69% believe water transformed into wine.
68% believe 5 loaves and 2 fish fed 5000 people.
65% believe a man overnighted with lions, uneaten.
64% believe water covered every mountain on Earth.
64% believe a sea opened to allow foot passage.
63% believe a boy killed a man using a slingshot.
60% believed a man walked on water.
60% believe the universe was created in 6 days.
56% believe in smooth-talking snakes.
49% believe strength can relate to hairstyle.

Two of these are easy enough even for a rationalist to believe; David used an unexpected weapon and was maybe a bit lucky, and maybe Daniel just didn't smell good to the lions.

A couple more could be considered 'stretchers' with a grain of truth; granting preternatural strength in the first place, it's possible to assign a psychological explanation to Samson's couture concerns, and a lot of people could be satisfied with a little food and a lot of goodwill on a one-time basis.

With a great deal of magnanimity, probably best obtained with the aid of large doses of ethanol, and a suitable disregard for the fine details of the stories, similarly obtained, one can allow for a couple more; talking snakes, while they don't appear to exist now, aren't actually incompatible with the physical laws of the Universe, and the antiquity of the Universe could be fudged a bit - rounding, you know.

That leaves seven stories which contain elements any normal rational person would consider flat-out violations of the natural laws of the Universe.

The odd thing is that the level of belief seems to have very little to do with the plausibility of the story. The Ultimate Catering Triumph of feeding five thousand people with one platter of fish sandwiches is considered less likely than pregnant virgins, ambulatory corpses, and an alcoholic's wet dream. It's considered more likely that a man could split an ocean with his mind, than that a boy could split a man's skull with a well-aimed rock.

I suppose we should be grateful that these people do consider that last story, about the superiority of ranged weapons, as being more likely than the one about guys perambulating the surface of large liquid volumes, but I still have to question their ability to assess relative probabilities.

Bear in mind that these are the folks who consider evolution by natural selection unlikely and difficult to believe.

Surely The Winning Idiocy

It's always a tough field to pick from when you try to pick out the stupidest or most pandering comment made by a Presidential candidate in any given election season. With the stellar* quality of some of the candidates, especially on the Republican side, it may seem hubristic to declare a tentative winner with so long left in the ever more interminable contest, but it really is difficult to see how anyone could top "Mitt" Romney's idiocy from yesterday's speech:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. [...] Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

I have followed politics reasonably closely for all my adult life, and therefore bear little respect for any politician, and certainly the toxic meltdown** of the Republican party over the last few decades has produced many a jaw-droppingly stupid soundbite; I have also made a lifelong study of religion, and therefore bear little respect for any given religion, and certainly the Mormons are second only to the Scientologists in the jaw-dropping stupidity of their precepts.

Still: what the FUCK? Did that consummate ass just manage to out-stupid Shrub? I believe so.

I recognize that the kind of simple-minded unreasoning faith that Shrub espouses*** is sadly endemic to much of American culture; the proportion of voters who consider the ability to believe in pregnant virgins and re-animated corpses to be an asset in the person who gets to control the nuclear (or even nucular) weapons is truly retch-worthy.

I also recognize that the word 'freedom' is valued by politicians, particularly American politicians and most especially neoconservative Republican politicians, more for its value as a knee-jerk trigger to jingoism than for any actual semantic content. Still, I thought the blatant misuse of the term pioneered by Commander Codpiece would set the standard for some time; after all, justifying the rapid-fire reduction of actual American freedoms by claiming an existential threat from "those who hate our freedoms" takes an appalling level of chutzpah.

His would-be successor may well have outdone even that hypocrisy, though. Look at it again:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. [...] Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

By this logic repressive theocracies simply don't exist; how could Iranians, for example, lack freedom when they are so deeply religious? Obviously the complete lack of open homosexuality noted by President Ahmadinejad is a completely free choice coincidentally shared by all Iranians, and the draconian prison sentences inspired directly from the hadith are simply an amusing cultural irrelevancy.

There must also be a terrifically inconspicuous subculture of strongly religious people hiding in countries like the Netherlands, to enable their manifest freedom. The easy attitudes toward drugs, sex, and political activism in Amsterdam, for example, must surely be the result of deeply committed (and deeply hidden) religious zealots.

You may wonder why the Founding Fathers, being the fans of freedom they were, were so perverse as to make a big point of separating church and state; didn't they know that religion and freedom are inseparable? Perhaps they simply lacked the perspective of being members of the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints, a creed which was forced to abandon a major precept of their faith (polygamy) by force of law - backed up, as always, by force of arms - because it conflicted with the religious precepts of their more numerous and powerful neighbors.

No, of course not. It is simply that they were by and large rationalists, products of the Enlightenment who weren't in those days impelled quite so strongly to pander to the demented fuckwits who prefer faith to reason no matter what the cost in thwarted scientific progress, in domestic disharmony and division, and in endless needless wars abroad.

It's 2007, and here in America (the land that likes to consider itself the vanguard of the future) we can't even consider the idea that it might not be necessary or even desirable for our supreme leader to believe in millennia-old agrarian myths. No, we have to spend our time debating whether we can accept an overlay of transparent deception from a more recent era on top, or whether we must insist on leaders who acknowledge only the purest of old hokum in this age of science and reason.

That is the actual issue which grips what passes for minds amongst the great American public; not whether we can accept as a leader someone who espouses lunatic idiocy, but only whether the particular style of lunatic idiocy is sufficiently mainstream. The inertia of popular irrationality is all that saves us from an acolyte of L.Ron Hubbard getting hold of the levers of power. and I still don't doubt the sheeple would pick a Scientologist over a rationalist.

After all, what's 'free' about examining the evidence the world presents you with, applying your best reason and logic to it, elucidating for yourself how it all works, then independently deciding what to do about it?

No, 'free' means you believe in a religion; that unity lies in believing your church is right and the others are wrong, heretical; that freedom lies in submitting to the inabrogable commands of a supreme being; that truth lies in accepting the precepts of your faith despite any evidence.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

Feh.


* For this purpose, 'stellar' includes black holes; strange beyond reason, dense beyond belief.

** Of course, the "Grand Old Party" has tended generally downward since Lincoln's tenure or thereabouts, but the rate of descent has markedly accelerated in recent times.

***Shrub's sincerity is known only to himself; I've never been able to decide if he's a shrewd bastard who pretends to stupidity for tactical advantage, or possibly through sheer love of duplicity, or if it's simply that his idiocy is so profound as to mimic genius.

Persecuting Christians

It never ceases to amaze me that Christians can maintain a sense of persecution in modern-day America, but many of them do.

Not in some faraway republic in the Middle East or Africa, mind you, where actual persecution of their faith might actually be taking place, but here in the United States, where there are more churches than you can shake a pair of crossed sticks at, where all their major religious festivals are legal holidays, where their God is regularly invoked when convening government councils and at every election stump speech, and even on the money.

The form this persecution takes is that Christianity is not given a favored position above all other faiths; we don't allow them to pray in schools, or teach their theology in science classes, or have chunks of their scripture carved into granite monuments on federal grounds.

The fact that other faiths aren't allowed to do those things either is beside the point as far as these guys are concerned. Because they have been in the majority in the United States for so long, and because they have long had such a strong political constituency, Christians have a sense of entitlement as profound as it is mistaken. To them, it is ridiculous that a Buddhist or Hindu should open Congress with a prayer; I agree, but they fail to see that a Christian prayer is just as inappropriate, despite the latter having gotten away with it for so long.

Yes, I said "gotten away with it" and that's exactly what I meant. It is simply wrong, and indeed unConstitutional, that people of other faiths, and no faith, are forcible proselytized by Christians under the auspices of what is supposed to be a secular government.

A good example of persecuting Christians is here; evangelical Christians in the USAF, feeling secure by virtue of being in the majority, mistreated harassed and threatened an atheist for no other reason than his nondeistic beliefs and his wish to set up a support group for himself and others of similar beliefs.

I'd be really interested in hearing from any Christians who want to support this kind of behaviour.

Hein v. FFRF Supreme Court Decision

I feel deeply saddened by today's Supreme Court decision. Another fundamental precept of America has been undermined; it's now okay for my government to spend my tax money to promote religion, as long as it's done by the Executive rather than the Legislative.

Rather, the Court has left no remedy to prevent it; taxpayers can't sue the Government for spending our tax money in such a blatantly un-Constitutional way, and no one else has standing to do so. It's typical of how those people operate; they have no shame or hesitation in using the most obtuse technicalities to utterly gut the law of any meaning.

Of course, they don't have any hesitation in actively, flagrantly breaking the law either - look at their contempt for FISA. What really depresses me is that no one with any ability to do anything about it seems prepared to call them on it in any significant way. As a group, the Democrats in Federal government seem as spineless as the Republicans are heartless, and as a nation, Americans seem to care more about their stupid celebrities than the fundamental principles their nation used to stand for. There are exceptions in each case, but all their struggling against the tide of venality and apathy seem depressingly Quixotic by times.

I swear, if it wasn't for my son I sometimes think I'd like to just give up and leave the US to decline on its own into the tarpits of history.

Evangelism in the USAF

This is in reference to the following article:

Group Threatens to Sue Pentagon Over Military Role in Evangelical Festival

As a US Navy veteran I'd like to point out that the military is a particularly dangerous venue in which to allow this kind of unfettered evangelism.

There are obvious Constitutional difficulties inherent in having what is, if not the, certainly one of the most visible and respected parts of the US Executive becoming so obviously partial toward a particular religious congregation. It is also an arena which is directly on point as to why the Founding Fathers wanted to raise the Wall of Separation in the first place; you do not want all the serious firepower concentrated in the hands of a particular religious faction!

I would add that giving over all the big guns to an emotive, evangelizing and millenarian style of religion is a particularly dangerous idea; this isn't paranoia, history books contain many examples of states which have been overthrown by militaries in the thrall of such ideologies.

On a smaller level, spare a thought for individuals within the military who aren't of the dominant religion, as was my own situation while I was in.

As a military subject you are usually a captive audience; on board a ship, or in a barracks, there is no easy way to escape the proselytizing. I can't count the number of times on board ship when I was forced to sit through lengthy prayers and even full religious services, broadcast over the ship's loudspeakers into every corner.

Consider also that a military subject, by the nature of the profession, is often forced to live and work in continual close proximity with other members of his or her unit, under extremely stressful and unnatural conditions. Not only success in mission or career, but sometimes life itself is at stake, and dependent upon being able to develop and maintain close and trusting relationships. If a majority of the unit belongs to a particular faith, and is encouraged or simply allowed to push it onto the minority, it is difficult for a civilian to even imagine the overwhelming social pressures which can be brought to bear.

If impartiality of religion is not vigorously enforced as a principle of military life, eventually you will end up with a self-enforcing culture; only Christians will be able to effectively work in the unit, because the existing members won't trust or bond with a non-Christian. There's a reason why Iraqi police and military units aren't typically mixed Shia and Sunni; the analogous issue fails of becoming a problem for US forces by a much smaller margin than you might imagine. Take it from one who's been there.

Falwell's Funeral Focuses Freaks

I was glad to hear Falwell was dead, frankly, and give me no truck about an automatic respect for the dead unless you wrote a eulogy for Saddam Hussein. He may not have been an actual killer, but Jerry Falwell was the worst kind of theocratic hatemonger, constantly spewing out quotes whose inanity and incoherency were rivalled only by their invidiousness and ill-will.

The vortex of evil and stupidity surrounding his funeral show (in a completely non-supernatural way, I hasten to add) that what goes around comes around.

One of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University students was caught trying to bring home-made napalm bombs to his funeral. Let that sink in for a moment. Falwell's conservative boosters have been playing up how he founded this wonderful center of learning full of good Christian virtues, how he inspired young students to follow the ways of righteousness - and here's an example for you.

Don't think that the student in question wasn't a fan, either; his stated reason for bringing the ordnance was not to cremate the carcass, but to disrupt protests at the funeral. Again, absorb that a second; this acolyte, inculcated with the clear-thinking virtues of Liberty University, thought that the appropriate response to people waving banners and chanting slogans was to hurl napalm at the chanters - in order to prevent the disruption of the solemn event.

If you think the man's friends are weird, though, take a look at his enemies. Who was it that was planning to picket the funeral? If you were thinking it was "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way," think again. It was the Westboro Baptist Church, best known for their usual practice of picketing the funerals of US service members who died in the service of their country - their logic being that US soldiers deserve no honors, as the military representatives of a country which tolerates the existence of homosexuals.

Bizarre as it may seem, they were planning to picket Falwell's funeral, because, despite saying things like "AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals," Jerry Falwell was too tolerant of gays.

I must confess, I haven't been able to quite wrap my head around that one myself.