Why Pick the God of the Bible? pt. 2

A couple months back, I started rebutting an article from EveryStudent.com and said I'd do the rest in a week. Oops. Here's the rest now. We got through "A God Who Is Greater Than We Are" and now I just need to wrap up "A God Who Can Be Known Personally".

A person can have the same kind of relationship with God that he or she has with a close family member. In fact, those that know him, he calls his children, bride, friends. So the God of the Bible is anything but impersonal. He gets angry and sad, shows mercy, kindness and forgiveness, and is a wholly emotional being. He is highly intellectual, having personality and wit. We can know more than just merely facts about him, we can actually know him intimately like a best friend. "Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God."

Maybe my definition of "same" is narrower than the folks at EveryStudent. See, I would consider the relationship I used to think I had with an invisible, unproven, never appearing God was pretty different from the relationship I had with my physical, obviously real, genetically linked family members.

And let's think for a moment about what being a child or a bride meant in the Biblical era. Hmmm, property! Women and children were essentially the property of men in those ancient Jewish tribes. The Bible even includes laws for how to go about selling your daughter as a slave. Gee, being God's special little daddy's girl kind of sucks in that light.

To quote Rupert Giles and apply it to the "entirely emotional" god of the Bible, "You have the emotional maturity of a blueberry scone." I don't think more emotion is what's needed to improve the image of the Christian God. Perhaps some bipolar medication, but not more emotionality, please. This is a guy who supposedly floods a planet for a temper tantrum. It'd be good if he did a little less emoting and a little more helping.

I'd really like to see the evidence that the Biblical god is intelligent or witty. Unless of course you consider having to scrap your plan for humanity - multiple times - as evidence of someone being "highly intelligent". I don't.

Nor do I think turning a woman to salt is the best example of wit. After all, isn't brevity the soul of wit? The Bible is long, and much of it painfully boring. Clearly, God needed an editor. Oh, and I have yet to become intimate with an imaginary being, but if I got to pick on, it wouldn't be Yahweh.

• The nature of God - A God Who Can Relate to the Human Experience

Some think of a God as being remote and distant, like he created the universe, then left it alone to operate on its own. Wouldn't it be better to have a God who is involved in the universe, and specifically, in what's happening here on Earth? And what about the unique difficulties, responsibilities and challenges that we face as human beings? Wouldn't it be better to have a God who could understand those things, a God who somehow knows what it's like to endure life in the harsh world he's allowed to exist?

Once again, "wouldn't it be better" is not a sufficient reason to behave as if something is true. And I also disagree with the premise that it would necessarily be better to have an involved god. I think the nature and character of the deity would play a large role in how I viewed it, and what level of influence I might appreciate. As a general rule, the concept of servile worship as decreed by monotheism is vile, disgusting, and insulting to human dignity. It is distasteful. Furthermore, I think reliance on an omnipotent best buddy robs people of a sense of accomplishment for their achievements, and responsibility for their actions. Furthermore, to anyone proposing that such an omnipotent god exists, I offer to the Problem of Pain. Why does your god love middle-class white Americans more than he loves poor African children, born with HIV and deprived of proper nutrition and education? Rather than a god who "knows what it's like to endure life in the harsh world", I'd prefer a god who would actually do something to alleviate suffering and reduce the world's harshness.

The God of the Bible knows what it means to be one of us. Jesus Christ was not only God's Son, he was God who had taken on a human form and a human nature. "In the beginning was the Word [Jesus], and the Word [Jesus] was with God, and the Word [Jesus] was God. The Word became flesh [human] and made his dwelling among us."

Well, see, there's a problem with that statement. If Jesus took on a human nature (a sinful nature), then he would have been "guilty" of the same original sin we're all supposedly born with. Which means he would not have been a sacrifice with no blemish (like an all white lamb or other animal sacrifice, as detailed in the Old Testament), and the entire Atonement idea rests on this. And if Jesus was born without this sinful nature, then he was not fully human. Ta-da! That was way too easy. (How did I believe this crap for two decades?)

I'll skip all the verses of god-said-he-was-super-cool stuff, and move on to the next outlandish and unsupported claims instead.

Though he was fully God, Jesus was also, somehow, fully man. He hungered, slept, wept, ate. He endured every kind of difficulty we face, and then some. Therefore, the Bible says he is not "unable to sympathize with our weaknesses." He was "tempted in every way, just as we are -- yet was without sin."

Every kind of difficulty, huh? Did he lose a child to cancer, like my friend Amber? Was he gang raped? Did he ever get diddled by a priest or rabbi? Did Jesus have crabs, herpes, HIV/AIDS, an enlarged prostate, a ruptured appendix, a yeast infection, back problems, arthritis, and erectile dysfunction? Because otherwise, this claim is laughable on its face. Christianity holds the idea that the crucifixion was the absolute worst thing that could ever happen to someone; it was the Biggest Deal Ever. And to that I say, Auschwitz.

So the God of the Bible didn't remain aloof from the pain, suffering and evil in our world. He endured life as we must endure it. In fact, he had a very humble time while on this planet. He was born into a poor household, was not physically attractive, encountered prejudice and hatred, was misunderstood even by family and friends, and was wrongfully executed.

I just don't buy the idea that a dude who can magic up some loaves, fishes, and wine when he's feeling a bit peckish ever "endured life as we must endure it" in terms of hunger. There's no way Jesus was waiting in line for food stamps. If I had superpowers and could make food appear whenever, I'd do it. I'd also do it for a ton of people. I'd go travel around the world producing food for hungry people. It might be a little more helpful than getting martyred for them, right?

And hey, in most of the Jesus pictures I've seen he was a hotty. Where does the idea that he was physically unattractive come from? And see every cult leader feels "misunderstood". It's not really an indication that what they say is true. I'm sure Marshall Applewhite, Jim Jones, and David Koresh all felt very misunderstood. (Oh, and they all thought they were the second coming of Christ.)

Moving on to the fourth "reason" to pick the God of the Bible as your deity or choice.

• The nature of God - A God Who Really Cares About Us

Most of us want to be accepted and loved. We want people to really care about us, and not just with superficial words. We want their care and concern to be proven by their actions. Wouldn't the same be true for God? Meaning, wouldn't it be ideal if God really cared about us and then gave us tangible proof of that love?

Well, gee, I'm still just waiting on tangible proof of his existence. God's lack of discernible action is actually one of my many objections to belief.

"This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."

Christians sure do love John 3:16. And I sure do love John 3:18 (which the always seem to leave off, for some reason.) "Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son." "God is love", right?

The God of the Bible claims to be a perfect and holy being. "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all." As such, he desires relationships that are clean and pure. Therefore, God sent his own Son to make a way for us to become clean before God. Jesus lived a morally perfect life and then was beaten, tortured, and crucified as "payment" for all the wrongful things we've said, done, or thought (called "sins").

As I discussed in a recent post on mental illness, some people have a harder time than others with unwelcome thoughts. For some of us, they just pop up, like having nightmares during the day when you're wide awake. The idea that I could be found guilty for having these thoughts, against my will or influence, is merciless. Thoughts cannot be sins. No real-world harm has been done, so no real-world punishment should be exacted. And while this passage from EveryStudent claims the crucifixiaon was payment for things we've done, the scriptures actually claim that it's atonement for the sinful nature God allowed each of us to be born with (except his son, who we're supposed to pretend experienced life just like we did, despite having super powers and no sinful nature.)

Also I love the "logical" progression. It moves from "God claims to be perfect" to "as such, he desires" to "therefore" torture is justified, because it's a ticking time bomb scenario. Get Dick Cheney and the waterboard - quick! Ahem. This is a classic example of basing an argument on a faulty premise. Just because the Bible claims God is perfect and holy, does not make it so.

God cared for us enough that he sent his Son to die in our place, for our sins. That's how much God wanted to know us. He was willing to do whatever was necessary...dealing with our sin was necessary. Now we can be fully forgiven and begin an unhindered relationship with God.

This "whatever necessary" attitude might explain why so many Christians support torture. Also, here's one of my major objections to the Atonement. Our forgiveness hinges on an action Christ took (or perhaps, that Judas and the Romans took) and on belief, not on our own actions, intentions, or character. We can "be fully forgiven" only if we believe that this outlandish tale is true. Christians disagree on what is required besides belief (or "accepting Jesus into your heart"), whether that includes works of charity, tithing, or abstaining from secular music, but the Bible is expressly clear on the subject of disbelief. Again, go look at John 3:18 up above. Atheists fry forever, according to your all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful deity who did not see fit to let people of this millenia know with any certainty that he existed. And since disbelief is an express ticket to hell, this lack of action on God's part to reveal himself indicates that either God does not actually desire the majority to make it into heaven (Jehovah's Witnesses, superiority cults) or that god does not exist. It certainly isn't evidence for the divine plan explained by Christians.

• The nature of God - A God Who Has Things Completely Under Control

All the terrible things in the world prove that a good, all-powerful God doesn't exist, right? Not necessarily. Even a perfect God might allow bad things to happen for a time, as part of some higher plan. God could know exactly what's going on all of the time and only allow so much, all as part of his grand scheme.

Ah, well as long as the Holocaust, 9/11, the Crusades, the Plague, HIV/AIDS, and the rise of Islam and nonbelief are all part of the Christian God's plan, then I guess it's okay!
"Perfect" even.

The God of the Bible is that God. He claims that nothing on Earth happens without his say-so. He is completely sovereign over all things. "Who can speak and have it happen if the Lord has not decreed it?" "I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please." "The plans of the Lord stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations." "It is the Lord's purpose that prevails."

Okay, again people, just because the Bible claims something, it's not necessarily true. I know this may come as a shock to some, but the Bible is a highly disputed book of questionable authorship, with known errors and a canon voted on by a committee of men, which may not fit in with your concept of a God-breathed perfect Word of Life.

Also, I guess this means we atheists can just quote these verses back to Christians who try to pin the Holocaust or Stalin on us. Clearly it was all part of their God's divine plan, right? I mean, after all, it's not like men are actually able to thwart his plan! So clearly, every bad thing is here on earth because God wills it so. And yet you call him good.

This does not mean, however, that everything that happens is something God likes. For example, Jesus told his disciples how to pray; in that prayer, one of the key statements is: "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."²⁶ God's moral will is always done in heaven, but not on Earth. While God is sovereign over all things, he doesn't like everything that takes place on Earth. But for some reason, he allows those things to happen (his permissive will), maybe as part of the freedom of choice we have as human beings.

It was so nice of God to allow humans freedom to abuse and under-educate their children, all as part of his free-will gift to us. Too bad not guessing the right set of propositions about eternity and origins lands in you hell forever, but it's so nice he doesn't interfere with terrorists, Nazis, and pedophile priests. He gives us free will where it *really* counts - in our ability to harm others. (He's much less concerned with saving our souls than he is with allowing rapists, murderers, and cult leaders to have their free will unencumbered.)

But the God of the Bible does have a plan, and he will not rest "until he fully accomplishes the purposes of his heart."²⁷ What is that plan? God's ultimate goal is to dwell with people in a totally different environment than what we presently experience. Of that next world, this God says, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. I am making everything new!"

Again, John 3:18. (I might get a tattoo of that, just to start conversations.) If God's goal is to reside with all or most of humanity in heaven, then he has some major design flaws in his plan. I can think up a half a dozen ways to improve it from my armchair, but I'll just offer this one: Prove you exist. If God proved he existed, to every generation as expressly as he supposedly did for the Biblical Israelites, there would no atheists. Millions upon millions of souls throughout history would be saved, rather than singed. And I'm not talking about Hitler (a CHRISTIAN, by the way so please drop that straw man). I'm talking about Bertrand Russell, Robert B Ingersoll, Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Carlin - people you might actually want to spend an eternity with, or at least a few hours. I wouldn't want to be stuck in the same eternity as Jerry Fallwell for five minutes, much less forever.



I will do my best to get to the remaining "reasons" in the very near future. Stay tuned for next time when we'll be discussing "A God Who Gives Meaning and Purpose to Life", "A God Who Offers True Fulfillment" and "The Ideal God". Until then, lightspeed and godless.

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"The Case for God" Review Squared

My Mormon reader, Seth R., suggested I look at the NY Times book review for "The Case for God", by Karen Armstrong. So here are my reactions from that piece. Bear in mind, I'm commenting only on the content of that linked review; I have not read the book in question.

And the new atheists seem to have temporarily run out of ways to call believers stupid.

Really? Clearly, she hasn't seen my blog. Or Pharyngula. Or Religulous. Or the Iron Chariots Wiki. Or Edward Current and Betty Bowers. Or any number of other great sources of religion mockery. (Ooh! Let's not forget Landover Baptist and Sex in Christ!) So, already I'm disagreeing with the writer of the review. Moving on.

The time, in other words, is ripe for a book like “The Case for God,” which wraps a rebuke to the more militant sort of atheism in an engaging survey of Western religious thought. Karen Armstrong, a former nun turned prolific popular historian, wants to rescue the idea of God from its cultured despisers and its more literal-minded adherents alike

But see, that misses the activist atheist's point: God is not the only problem. Belief is a problem. Praising faith and religion as "good" is a problem. Fundamentalists may be the ones we all agree are a problem, believers and non alike, but moderate believers are a problem, too. As long as there are moderate, reasonable people who consider devotion and adherence to tradition good, children will die of medical neglect and child brides will be victimized by old men. The fundamentalists won't change until the center changes. As long as "believer" is still the default, extreme belief will flourish and thrive. My objection is not to one particular view of god. My objection is to the idea that humans should prostrate themselves before anyone or anything. It's disgusting and an insult to human dignity.

And why does the idea of God need rescuing? Don't you suppose an omnipotent deity would be able to run his own PR campaign? The review author, Ross Douthat, comments on Armstrong's view of early church fathers and their approach to religion.

These and other thinkers, she writes, understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred” and emphasizes what we can’t know about the divine. And their religion was a set of skills, rather than a list of unalterable teachings — a “knack,” as the Taoists have it, for navigating the mysteries of human existence.

Well, I don't know about you, but I personally can't accept something as "ultimate reality" that there's no reason to suppose even exists! (Yeah, I know you can, Seth, but most of my audience doesn't feel the same.) So everything that follows from that faulty proposition - how one should go about honoring this ultimate reality - still doesn't apply one damn bit to an atheist. To quote Tracy Harris of the ACA in one of the best, simplest explanations for why we should doubt the existence of gods, "Things which exist manifest in reality." In other words, things that exist can be tested and we can at least begin to apply definitions. Somethings are trickier to define than others, like "life" but we can begin to narrow down what something is and what it isn't. If we can't do that, then we really aren't talking about anything meaningful or anything at all. No one worships a nebulous vague concept. The people I've known who didn't bother to define their god, also didn't worship it. They were "everything happens for a reason" types, not true believers. But they, like the moderately religious, continue acting as if believing in a failed hypothesis is virtuous, rather than idiotic. (See Douthat? I'm not even close to running out of ways to call believing in a god stupid! Maybe when I'm 90 I'll start running low, but it's not like any of the old ways have been discredited, so they'll still work fine and dandy, too). Now let's move on to the stuff that get my blood pressure up.

It’s a knack, Armstrong argues, that the Christian West has largely lost, and the rise of modern science is to blame. Not because science and religion are unalterably opposed, but because religious thinkers succumbed to a fatal case of science envy.

Hang on, let me get this straight:

1. Science is to blame.
2. Because religious people can't fit god and facts in their head at the same time.
3. So science is to blame???

Can I hear a rousing cry of "Non-Sequitur!" Geeze Louise, people. "You're asking us to change our views to accommodate reality. Wah! I'm calling my daddy and he's gonna beat you up!"

Instead of providing the usual portrait of empiricism triumphing over superstition, Armstrong depicts an extended seduction in which believers were persuaded to embrace the “natural theology” of Isaac Newton and William Paley, which seemed to provide scientific warrant for a belief in a creator God.

Well, of course she's not going to do the empiricism vs. superstition approach - she's still superstitious. If she were to try that approach, with all honesty and sincerity, she'd become an atheist. Faith doesn't make sense - not because it's some profound mystery, but because you people are morons for doing something that clearly makes life worse for people and doesn't actually deliver on its promises.

Also, Isaac Newton and other creator-God deist types the book author, Armstrong, cites all lived before Charles Darwin took that famous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. You know, before we had a better explanation, one that happened to not require the intentional actions of a thinking or sentient, much less omniscient, deity. God could have either not existed or been asleep at the wheel. Evolution by natural selection works on its own and doesn't have big supernatural anomalies (ie, worldwide flood narrowing each species' gene pool down to 1 male and 1 female) in its history.

An Aquinas or an Augustine would have been unfazed by the idea of evolution. But their modern successors had convinced themselves that religious truth was a literal, all-or-nothing affair, in which doctrines were the equivalent of scientific precepts, and sacred texts needed to coincide exactly with the natural sciences. The resulting crisis produced the confusions of our own day, in which biblical literalists labor to reconcile the words of Genesis with the existence of the dinosaurs, while atheists ridicule Scripture for its failure to resemble a science textbook.

I wish some justification for this statement on Augustine's view of natural selection was provided, but perhaps it is in the full length book (which I still may read, because I have liberal Christian family). Personally, I mock Scripture for offering pathetic advice, advocating intolerant and inhuman behavior, and for stating that bats are birds while at the same time, claiming to be the divinely inspired word of god. That's what I think (from this little review) Ms. Armstrong is really trying to do - suggest we need not look at Scripture from a literal stand point. Great.

Convince all your own people first before you make another comment about atheists. Actually, why don't all believers go do that. You guys form on consensus on who god is and what he wants and then I'll decide 1) if it exists and 2) if it's worthy of worship. Until any of it is shown to be true, this is all just a remarkably masturbatory thought exercise.

Attention Christians: You do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. He either never lived or has long been dead. There is no reason at all to suppose he actually rose from the dead. Even if he had, there is no reason at all to suppose we can communicate with people who have died (whether he's supposedly resurrected or not, it's not like most Christians are claiming he's a real physical person you could sit down and have a chat with. Oh no, he's all invisible and otherwise indistinguishable from non-existence.)

I think Armstrong is missing that part where the Bible itself claims to be the infallible, unalterable Word of God in Heaven. It's not like people "misinterpreted it" to say that "all Scripture is god-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work" (2 Tim 15-17). Like every other Christian, Ms. Armstrong has cherry-picked the parts of the Bible she likes and focused on them, ignoring all the others. She has made her own determination of what is literal and what is metaphoric, possibly based on early church fathers and possibly based on her own brain. I don't know. Like I said, I haven't read the book, just the review. But she's certainly ignoring 2 Timothy 3:15-17. I have no doubt about that. You can't complain that other Christians are being too literal and hold as truth the statement that all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for instruction, etc.

To escape this pointless debate, Armstrong counsels atheists to recognize that theism isn’t a rival scientific theory, and that it is “no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth — or lack of it — only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action.”

It's only a pointless debate when you have no good point to make. I don't know of a single atheist who actually thinks theism is a "rival scientific theory", so you can set that straw man on fire right now. She's clearly ignoring the vast number of atheists like myself who did embark "on a religious way of life". Se's ignoring the Nate Phelps, Ayaan Hirsi Alis, Matt Dilahuntys, Julia Sweenys, and Dan Barkers of the world. And while I'm all about living an ethical life, I have to say I'm opposed to mind-numbing ritual for ritual's sake. It's certainly not a proven method for determining the truth or lack of truth of an idea. (Self-indoctrination rarely leads to truth - just to limited thinking capacity.)

Believers, meanwhile, are urged to recover the wisdom of their forebears, who understood that “revealed truth was symbolic, that Scripture could not be interpreted literally” and that “revelation was not an event that had happened once in the distant past but was an ongoing, creative process that required human ingenuity.”

And now I have my real objection: Revelation. Personal communication with god (who doesn't exist) is really just a conversation with yourself. The "leading" from god, is just what you've decided on your own to do. The problem is in thinking this (your own thought) is the will of god, and the problem is that this kind of thinking impairs your ability to make good decisions. So people with impaired thinking skills are announcing their own bad decisions as the will of god, and even the liberal non-literalist Karen Armstrongs of the world endorse this is a good thing.

Now Douthat, the review author, starts making some good points.

In reality, these Christian sages were fiercely dogmatic by any modern standard. They were not fundamentalists, reading every line of Scripture literally, and they were, as Armstrong says, “inventive, fearless and confident in their interpretation of faith.” ...Their theology was reticent in its claims about the ultimate nature of God but very specific about how God had revealed himself on earth. It’s true that Augustine, for instance, did not interpret the early books of Genesis literally. But he certainly endorsed a literal reading of Jesus’ resurrection — and he wouldn’t have been much of a Christian theologian if he hadn’t.

In other words, the early church fathers being held up as models of faith by Ms. Armstrong are picking and choosing - just like her, just like the hate-mongering Rick Warren, and just like the shyster faith healing televangelists. The church fathers (not all, just the ones she used in her book because they supported her view) just picked and chose something her own innate or nurtured liberal nature finds appealing.

I think that's why Christians end up in the particular denomination that they do (excluding Mormons, JWs, and Christian Science for this argument). I think it's just a matter of preference and what you find appealing. The only god left Ms. Armstrong can make a case for is a vague, non-literal creator (but not Creationism) god, because anything more clearly defined can be tested and Ms. Armstrong doesn't appear interested in having her faith tested. She wants to be left alone to believe, without pressure for certain social actions she disagrees with from her theist brethren, or ridicule from the atheists who see how shallow and superficial this kind of thinking really is, underneath the apologetic gloss of theology. The reviewer continues,

This explains why liberal religion tends to be parasitic on more dogmatic forms of faith, which create and sustain the practices that the liberal believer picks and chooses from, reads symbolically and reinterprets for a more enlightened age. Such spiritual dilettant­ism has its charms, but it lacks the sturdy appeal of Western monotheism, which has always offered not only myth and ritual and symbolism (the pagans had those bases covered), but also scandalously literal claims — that the Jews really are God’s chosen people; that Christ really did rise from the dead; and that however much the author of the universe may surpass our understanding, we can live in hope that he loves the world enough to save it, and us, from the annihilating power of death.

I just like his use of the words "parasitic" and "scandalously literal".

Such literalism can be taken too far, and “The Case for God” argues, convincingly, that it needs to coexist with more mythic, mystic and philosophical forms of faith. Most people, though, are not mystics and philosophers, and they are hungry for myths that are not only resonant but true. Apophatic religion may be the most rigorous way to go in search of an elusive God. But for most believers, it will remain a poor substitute for the idea that God has come in search of us.

Of course, as an antitheist atheist, I disagree with Armstrong's conclusion that the problem with faith is the kind of faith (any faith is a problem). Adding myth and mysticism and philosophy may lessen the symptoms but won't remove the underlying problems: faith is a vice and religion is a virus. And that is my review of a review sent in by a theist reader. Thanks for your contribution, Seth R. Somehow I doubt this is what you thought I'd do with it :)

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OYG! It's natural selection

This news made me smile. I read the whole article (and I am a skimmer by nature - it's how I go through so many blog posts and articles per day.) Basically, it's a look at how the recession has affected different denominations (and non-denominations) of Christianity, and Jewish synagogues and schools.

They're numbers are going down the toilet, and I for one am *thrilled*. These numbers might not indicate a damn thing about rising secularism, or decreased belief in some kind of creator god or even a personal "relationship" type god. It does mean the churches will have less people-crushing money. You can't spend quite as much time and money telling Africans why they should get AIDS instead of wearing condoms while you're busy paying out sex scandals. (Notice, almost every single mention of the Catholic Church in the last few years has been about the sex scandal. I don't think their reputation is going to recover for another twenty years or more.)

And while Ted Haggard is completely heterosexual, the evangelical churches he used to head as President of the National Association of Evangelicals are looking to have a little less gay-bashing cash sitting around, as they fire clergy and close buildings and schools.



Kind of brings a tear to your eye, don't it just? Also, Roy Zimmerman is a demi-god. (Joss Whedon is a god. Oh yeah, I decided to make up my own pantheon. Feel free to make suggestions for other deity!)

Anyway, here's the final piece of happy I wanted to share with you, and the reason for this post's title

Religious leaders say the next year or so will be key in determining which organizations survive the downturn intact. Even if the recession ends soon, religious fundraisers say the angst donors feel will not lift immediately, prolonging the difficulties for congregations, schools and ministries.

*Contented sigh* I just get happy thinking about them vying for primacy amongst the new environmental pressures, and the ones found fittest being those that survive. It's such a beautiful analogy, I think I'll use it on the next creationist.

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Crazy in Church

Scrupulosity is a particular form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) that focuses on religion and spirituality. I have OCD, and when I was younger and religious, I used to have irrational fears of future sins that I might commit against my will. (Kind of like my current irrational fear that I'll become a cult leader against my will.) Because of my family's religious practices (faith healing) I didn't get my OCD diagnosis until I had a spectacular nervous breakdown in front of 300 fellow algebra students at age 21, but that's another story for another time.

Scrupulosity was the one of my many mental afflictions that earned me the most praise. (If you don't think having OCD has been an asset at more than one job, you're crazy.) Because we as a society think that faith is a virtue, our moderate religious members don't seem to know what to say to people who exhibit extreme faith. If I'd stayed a believer, even as I got help for other disorders, I think the scrupulosity would have gone unchecked. Most of the therapists and psychiatrists I've seen over the years were Christian, and few people think religious devotion is a problem. (Atheists, you were right. It *is* a problem!)

One of the greatest harms of religion is its ability to inhibit mental health services for those who need them, based on its position of influence and authority. While my family's complete abstinence from medicine was extreme, many denominations and congregations teach against the use and/or effectiveness of psychiatric medications and cognitive therapy. Since, for certain conditions, such as bipolar disorder, this is the only treatment protocol that really works, it's a big deal.

2% of Americans have OCD, ranging from mild (maybe running back to check if the stove is on, two or three times in a day) to severe (Howard Hughes). I'm somewhere in between, but closer to Howie. 7% of Americans will have moderate to clinical depression at some point after age 18; 1 in 8 adolescents will suffer from moderate to clinical depression.

In a given year, 26.4% (just over 1 in 4, or 57.7 million) Americans will have a diagnosable mental illness. Of those, 45% will meet the criteria for two or more distinct mental illnesses (like me) "with severity strongly related to comorbidity." (In other words, if you have depression and anorexia, each one is likely to be more severe than is typical for people only showing one of these disorders. I've had both. Plus OCD, PTSD, and generalized anxiety disorder. I rarely leave the house these days.)

What these figures show is how prevalent mental illness is in our society. (So we need to quit acting shamefaced about it and just say - "Yes, I have this problem. Let's find ways of fixing it and/or dealing with it, instead of pretending it's not real.") About 80% of Americans are Christian, which means that even if every non-Christian was included in that 26.6% with psychiatric conditions, at least some Christians have gotta be crazy.

That's why it's so dangerous when churches mock science and keep their flocks ignorant, or conflate mental illness with demonic possession, and give an already vulnerable person more reason to put off getting treatment. When churches and church leadership suggest that prayer is preferable to psychiatric help, or that listening to the voices in your head is a good thing, they risk creating another Timothy McVeigh or Scott Roeder or Roland Robideux. Crazy people do crazy things - that's why sometimes we get locked up, and sometimes we get medicated. (The demon exorcisms, on the other hand, were NOT helpful.)

I've always been crazy, but I didn't know there was a name for what was going on in my head. Getting my diagnosis was this strangely empowering moment. Now that I knew what the problem was, I could start to actually deal with it. Early treatments were spectacular failures - Prozac made me hallucinate and think that I was melting, on campus - but it's better than doing nothing and infinitely better than trying to "cast out" my craziness through loud, authoritative prayer.

I think that we in the skeptical, secular humanist, ethical community need to start talking more about mental health issues, and we need to call what churches do abuse. I don't just mean exorcisms, although my personal experience with them brings gang rape to mind. When the church says that the voice in your head is real and is someone else, a demon or a god or the holy spirit, people who have problem voices *put off getting help, or try to get the wrong kind of help. When the church says that God gives comfort, people wait a lot longer - sometimes forever - to talk to someone about the incredible well of sadness inside them.

Mental illness is not "spiritual". It is largely the result of genetics, trauma, and chemical imbalance. It is not the fault of the afflicted person; it is not a generational curse brought down through the family line; and it is not rare. More than 1 in 4 Americans will have a mental illness at some time. That may mean periodic reoccurring bouts of bulimia, a single episode of severe depression, or a few months in intensive therapy dealing with PTSD, but it does mean that someone you know is likely to be affected.

If people get help, they're significantly less likely to commit suicide. Since this is the one shot at life people have, I would hope they'd get a long, good run out of it. I hate to see anyone cut their time short, for lack of simply knowing someone cared or lack of the ability to calm and comfort oneself. A person who gets mental health services is also less likely to hurt someone else.

I used to work typing up reports for a psychiatrist who did SSI disability determination, so the people in his office usually had pretty severe problems. Without fail - every. single. person. who talked about hearing voices in their head said the exact. same. thing. "They tell me to do bad things." No one ever goes to a psychiatrist for a voice that tells them to pet kittens. No, it's the person hearing a voice telling them to do "bad things" that we need to get help for - soon.

Here's a link to the 1.5 hour long Atheist Experience episode on Religion and Mental Health. (Skip ahead to 12:05 to bypass the several years out-of-date announcements.)

* All facts and figures are from the National Institute of Mental Health.

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Moral Panics and Shysters

I've been thinking about con men and moral panics.



I grew up watching "The Music Man" and other musicals. My grandmother loved the confidence man or the shyster character. She gave me an early appreciation of a good villain. Even as a child, Ursula reminded me of her, though I think at that age it was largely a cosmetic similarity I saw. (Some of us grandkids used to joke, "Giggy's not out of shape. Circle is a shape.")

Joseph Smith was a convicted con man before he started the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (How is it LDS instead of LdS ince the "d" in the full name is lower case? This kind of thing bugs me.) L. Ron Hubbard was most assuredly a liar and a shyster and crazy as hell to boot. Of course, Marshall Applewhite wasn't a paragon of sanity himself. (Pop unders on that last link.)

First you have to start a moral panic. You have to convince people that they have a problem only you, your infomercial product, your business seminar, your health care plan, or your cult can solve. Religions capitalize on this largely by telling people that perfectly natural elements of their lives - everything from natural disaster to sexual arousal - is the product of sin in their lives. Guilt for perceived wrongs, and fear of retribution, are the primary tactics used by religion.

A technique used by politicians, televangelists, and Professor Harold Hill is the moral panic. I'll let Tracy explain.





(Gotta love the Westboro Baptist Church for showing the world just what the Bible really says. They may be vile and hateful, and they are definitely damaging their children, but they aren't hipocrits.)

You can see this technique now in the Astroturf campaigns against health care, and paying your taxes, and getting a better source of energy than coal. The Deathers and Birthers and Tenthers and 9/12ers. The 9/11 Truthers.



There are a shit load of crazy people running around right now, and I for one and am not happy about it. Goddamn moral panics!

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Blasphemy Recap

I made the conscious choice to blaspheme the Christian god yesterday, not the Islamic one. Why on earth would I do that? Am I lending more credibility to one than the other, or letting one off the hook for being full of ridiculous, untestable, supernatural claims? No. A flying horse is no more likely to be true than a talking snake or a talking ass. And we have equal evidence (none) for the supernatural claims of the Koran and the Bible. We have better historicity establishing Mohammad's likely existence than Christ's, but even if two men by those names lived in their respective times, there is still no evidence that any of the miraculous deeds credited to either actually happened.

Still, I chose to mock the Christian god in honor of Blasphemy Day. I did it in part because I was a Christian. I really did think blasphemy was a very bad sin. I was a sexually active, drug abusing teen and young adult, who wouldn't listen to a song if it had the words "God damn" in the lyrics. This particular insane form of guilt was in effect as recently as when this song first came out.



This was my first Blasphemy Day and I wanted to concentrate my efforts on "the god of my understanding" or the god I used to worship and cry out to and grovel before, literally, each Sunday morning. No, thank you! I'm done with all that and I wanted to have a big spectacular "In your face, Jesus!" kind of day. (What? If people worshiped Voldemort I'd be just as pissed at them and think just as highly of their deity, while still not believing it was REAL.)

I saw a lot of people on Twitter and YouTube yesterday had replaced their user icon with the infamous Danish cartoon. I didn't. 1) Because I'm lazy and 2) Because there is still a lot of mistreatment of Muslims in America, and I don't want to encourage that behavior. Words matter. What we say and what we write down matters. My grandmother influenced the lives of and even killed people in far away states and countries through the power of her written words. Until Muslims aren't so mistrusted - I'm sure they rank close to atheists, even if we are the most distrusted minority in the US - I'm not comfortable with the same level of mockery and anger from myself that I direct at Christianity.

I have several very different pictures of Islam in my head. One is of suicide bombers - young men, deprived of healthy sexual relationships with healthy and free women, brainwashed by faith and fervor and wicked Imams - blowing up dance clubs and coffee shops and buses with school children on them in Jerusalem. Another is of the Green Revolution in Iran. Yet another picture of Islam is of the woman forced to wear a burqa, and to quit her teaching job, after the Taliban moved into her country. One more picture in my head is of my old neighbor and friend Khadija, who was born in the US and converted to Islam in her early 20s and chose to wear a burqa. I think of the Muslim girls on my college campus, who were sweet and kind and models of "Christian virtues" while not being at all Christian in their faith or beliefs.

I think that until more Americans have as complex a picture of Islam as they do of Christianity - recognizing the gulf between Scott Roeder, Pat Robertson, and Rev. Barry Lynn; understanding the differences between Catholic, and Pentecostal, and Mormon - until Americans see Islam as being a religion with as many facets and faces as Christianity, I'm not comfortable adding to hatred. I do think that Islam in the larger world is a threat, largely because Islam is so often theocratic and totalitarian. In this country, in my community, Christians are more likely to oppress both me and the Muslim, than the Muslim is to oppress me. When that changes, my approach and tactics will change as well. But for now, I'll leave that particular form of scrutiny, mockery, and blasphemy to someone else.

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Bitterness

My mom's on a plane now, flying toward the cult survivors seminar hosted by ICSA. I'm crazy jealous. I want her to pay to fix my head; after all, she let me people break me. She can afford to go to therapy and get medication (although she doesn't need it) and even fly out to Denver for a healing week. Not me though. The kid she raised in a cult? I get to stay broken. Even with all her growth in the last few years, I am still subhuman in her eyes and it sucks. I don't usually cry on the blog, so I'm gonna go away now. Bye.

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