LDS cult waterboards babies

What do you do when an infant becomes difficult to manage?  Submit it to water torture, of course:

“It’s quite common,” Carolyn Blackmore Jessop said. She was a witness for the B.C. government in the constitutional reference case to determine whether Canada’s polygamy law is valid.

“They spank the baby and when it cries, they hold the baby face up under the tap with running water. When they stop crying, they spank it again and the cycle is repeated until they are exhausted.”

It’s typically done by fathers and it’s called “breaking in...”

Her assertions about water torture were not challenged by FLDS lawyer Robert Wickett during cross-examination.

I simply haven't the words.

Americans and Canadians: Not as religious as we claim?

Shankar Vedantam writing for Slate.com looks at some interesting research that suggests that Americans may not be any more actively religious than other industrialized nations; they just claim to be.

The surveys have been remarkably consistent over the years.  Forty percent of Americans tell pollsters they regularly attend religious services.  Nearly 90 percent say they believe in God.  Yet perhaps half of those believers who claim to attend church actually don't.

The twist lies in how the questions are asked in polls, which I would think be obvious to those who conduct these things.  For example, when asked, "Do you attend church?" Americans will say Yes.  But when asked "Where were you on Sunday morning last week," many of them will say they were somewhere else besides church. 

So the question is, if certain people don't practice religion, why do they think of themselves as religious?  Why is their identity wrapped up in portraying themselves as faithful?  Are they worried that others will think less of them if they aren't appropriately pious?  Vendatam makes no conclusion, but does offer some valid advice:

For many Americans, church attendance is a central part of their lives. For others, it's a waste of time. If you're in either of these groups, more power to you. But in the spirit of Christmas and the truthteller whose message we celebrate, surely believers and atheists can agree on what to tell folks who talk Jesus but walk Santa: Enough with the two-faced posturing.

Dear Charles Lewis: you just *think* you don't care

Charles Lewis, religion writer for the National Post writes an absurd attack piece against atheists, showing that despite the title "Dear atheists: most of us don't care what you think," Mr. Lewis does indeed feel threatened by them.  His message of "Sit down and shut up!" is not because atheists are taking up too much precious time of the national dialogue talking about trivia, but because atheists are finding a voice, and others are beginning to listen. 

He calls Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens "dreary," and that debating with atheists is a waste of time.  Why?  "Most atheists do not have a clue what religion is about."  Of course this is an outright lie, given that many atheists once were raised in religious households, and surveys show that atheists know more about religion than Protestants and Catholics.

Next he trots out North Korea as the quintessential atheistic society, while conveniently ignoring the Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Norway, countries that are largely peopled with atheists and are models of societal health.  Mr. Lewis, here's a simple quiz for you:

* Atheism plus Totalitarianism makes for an unhealthy society (North Korea, Stalin's Russia, etc.)
* Religion plus Totalitarianism makes for an unhealthy society (Nazi Germany, Saudi Arabia, etc.)

Can you spot what those two items have in common?

Lewis continues the strawman attacks: "Atheists are under the ridiculous illusion that religious people think that all they have to do is call out to God and help will be on the way."

Right, because religious people never pray when action would be more useful.  Parents never watch their children die because they chose to pray over a treatable illness rather than seek medical attention.  Jesus never said that whatever you ask for in prayer, just believe that you'll receive it, and it will be yours (Mark 11:24).

Lewis likes the monk Thomas Merton, quoting him twice:

Thomas Merton also said: “Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.”

He could have said the same thing about faith.

And he could have said the same thing about fetishism, mindless devotion, and superstition.  But why let facts get in the way of a baseless attack against atheists, backed with no supporting evidence?

Danielle Bean: Faith is More Reasonier than Reason

Danielle Bean, "Catholic author" writes in the On Faith blog that she's upset that atheists are using Jon Stewart's D.C. rally to promote reason.  This is unacceptable, writes Bean:

Atheists would have you believe that science is opposed to faith, but real science is not only unopposed to faith -- real scientific study leads us to God.

For proof, she cites Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, who stated that "From a knowledge of God's work we shall know Him." Congratulations to Ms. Bean on finding a seventeenth-century scientist who also believed in God. She doesn't cite any other scientist who doesn't believe in God, or who does not feel that the best way to know about the universe is to apply faith, but that might detract readers from her main point.

I am not sure just how atheists have managed to secure exclusive rights to use of the word "reason."

Well, no one ever said that atheists want "exclusive" rights, but freethinkers do argue that reason is superior to faith when obtaining information. Sure, what we learn by faith might be true, but the only way to know for sure is to A) use reason, or B) use more faith. Martin Luther called Reason "the Devil's greatest whore," but I suppose the Catholic Ms. Bean might not know what the Father of the Protestant movement would say.

Ms. Bean goes on to erect a cartoon-version of the modern scientific method:

There is nothing at all reasonable about believing that the universe is a colossal accident....Believing that the human body is a haphazard collision of cells and that the earth is randomly placed in space, at precisely the correct distance from the sun for supporting life is as reasonable as expecting a roomful of monkeys with typewriters to turn out the next great literary masterpiece.

Of course, no non-theistic cosmologist describes the origins of the universe as an accident, and no biologist calls a human being a haphazard collision of cells. She also grossly exaggerates the range of our Sun's Habitable Zone and Earth's special place in it. Not because, as I suspect, that she's had extensive scientific training, but because apologists have told her so, as I have written about before.

Anti-faith personalities like Jon Stewart and Richard Dawkins might think that they have all the answers, but real believers know that only God does. And He's not invited to the mall this weekend.

Ms. Bean seems confused. The Jon Stewart rally is not intended to be a backlash against faith in general, but a response to the Glenn Beck rally of right-wing conservatism and fear-mongering. That atheists are taking an opportunity to protest against the Religious Right and their "faith-based" politicking is not because we have all the answers. We don't, but we don't plaster faith into our gaps of knowledge and then hug ourselves because we're so special in the eyes of God.

Simply put, faith is an unreliable means of obtaining knowledge. As the saying goes, Faith is No Reason.

Religion: Metaphor or Fog?

Daniel Dennett responds to the Pew survey that finds that atheists and agnostics are more knowledgeable about religions than even the religions' own adherents.

After Copernicus and the collapse of the idea that the Sun goes around the Earth, the idea that Heaven was Up There and Hell was Down Below had to be turned into metaphor. It is still potent imagery after several centuries, but it is treated as literally true by, well, hardly anybody.

So with the increase of scientific understanding and textual criticism undermining the major religions' key tenets, what's a religion to do?

There are two main tactics.

Plan A: Treat the long, steady retreat into metaphor and mystery as a process of increasing wisdom, and try to educate the congregation to the new sophisticated understandings.

Plan B: Cloak all the doctrines in a convenient fog and then not just excuse the faithful from trying to penetrate the fog, but celebrate the policy of not looking too closely at anyone's creed - not even your own.

Plan B has been the choice of most religions and denominations, and the result, not surprisingly, is that most religiously affiliated people have no firm knowledge or even opinions about the finer points of any religion, including their own.

In a nutshell, the more you know, the less you need to believe by faith, and thus, the less you actually do believe by faith.

John Mark Reynolds: "Atheists; Mere Kings of Trivia"

Much has been made about the Pew Forum survey released last week announcing that atheists and agnostics score higher on religious knowledge than mainstream religious believers. Of course, this was trumpeted far and wide by non-believers of all persuasions, particularly since religious apologists accuse atheists of not understanding the religions they criticize. No, we atheists understand faith-based religion just fine; that's why we aren't religious.

And as you would expect, the responses from religious believers to the survey was equally heated. Was it to apologize for assuming that atheists and agnostics are uninformed about religion? Did they express surprise that, for example, the majority of religious believers didn't know that Mother Teresa was Catholic. Did anyone commit to bridging the divide between believers and non-believers by engaging in meaningful dialogue and understanding?

No, mostly they just continued the atheist bashing.

The majority of responses I've seen ran along the lines of, "Sure, you atheists might know a lot about religious doctrine, but you don't really know anything about religion because you haven't spent years in prayer and meditation. Like I have." This complaining about head knowledge versus heart knowledge is jealousy, and P.Z. Myers Courtier's Reply says it all.

The most amusing response has to be from John Mark Reynolds, philosophy professor at Biola, writing for the On Faith blog, who writes:

As a boutique belief system in the United States, atheism has a good many advantages. There are so few atheists and agnostics that they do not run all the risks of a populist movement.

Get that? Suddenly it's an advantage to be small in numbers. This is, of course, just silly. There are more non-believers in America than there are Jews, or Muslims, or most other religious groups other than Christians and their spin-offs (Mormons, etc.) and yet non-believers scored higher than all of those other groups as well. So why are non-believers so knowledgeable about religion?

Not for [atheists] is the burden of dealing with the masses of a global population, their idiosyncrasies, worries and all. Since Christians make up three-quarters or more of the American general population, we have the burden of accounting for almost everybody's problems.

Poor Christians. They have to spend so much time serving in soup kitchens and cleaning bed pans in AIDS shelters that they just don't have the time to learn that Martin Luther is the founder of the Protestantism.

Reynolds continues the rant against atheists by dissing the music of Dan Barker, of all things, and by accusing us of moving to gated enclaves where the only believers allowed inside are the help.

There's a name for people like Reynolds, one that everyone knows but that no one likes to be called--"Sore Loser."

Nice work if you can get it.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, one in five Australian children suffer from some kind of mental illness such as anxiety, depression, or eating disorders.  Naturally this affects societal health such that these kids suffer from higher rates of school absenteeism and drug abuse.

The Australian government, led by the avowed atheist Julia Gillard, has stepped up with increased funding to combat these issues.  The taxpayer bill stands at $437 million.  And how will this one-third increase help these kids succeed in school and life?  Will they provide trained counselors in schools to provide assistance for kids going through abuse or neglect?

No, the money will go to chaplains.

School chaplains come from organisations such as Scripture Union, which sees them as a means by which they can fulfil their organisational aim of making "God's Good News known to children [and] young people" so "they may come to personal faith in our Lord Jesus Christ ... and become both committed church members".

Of course, this being publicly-funded education, the government knows that can't let these chaplains roam the halls passing out Bibles and tracts, leading kids in group hymns, or inviting the students back to their offices for a little one-on-one laying on of hands in prayer. "We know these chaplains aren't mental health experts," the government is saying, "so there are restrictions on exactly what they can do." For example:

• Chaplains can't counsel students

• They can't provide educational services

• Nor can they provide medical services

• And of course they can't proselytize.

So what are the chaplains, each pulling down an extra $20,000 for their trouble, supposed to do, exactly? No one really knows apparently, including the chaplains themselves:

As a report on the program reveals, many chaplains are unclear about their role. A majority admit they do deal with student mental health and depression issues, alcohol and drug use, physical/emotional abuse and neglect, and suicide and self-harming behaviours. What most don't do is refer to appropriate professionals when out of their depth.

So where can I sign up to sit in an office, listen quietly to kids complain about their lives, not say anything back to them, and not refer the ones that truly need help to competent professionals? I could get used to that sort of work.

Arab convicted of rape by deception?

From the news of the weird:

An Israeli woman in Jerusalem meets a man, supposedly because of an interest in his motorcycle. They have consensual sex that same day. Later she discovers that he was not Israeli, as she thought, but actually Arab.

So she went to the police and claimed he raped her.

Sabbar Kashur, an Israeli Arab, was initially charged with rape and indecent assault. But Kashur claims he never pretended to be Jewish. "If I were Jewish, they wouldn't have even questioned me."

The charges were later changed to "rape by deception" and Kashur was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

The judge presiding over the case, Zvi Segal, apparently can read the woman's mind:

"If she had not thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious relationship, she would not have co-operated."

And the judge has quite the juvenile understanding of male/female relationships:

"The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price - the sanctity of their bodies and souls.

Let this be a lesson to young men wishing to meet women in Jerusalem. You better have a blood sample, a paternity test, and a fact-checked resume ready before letting a woman speak to you, lest she later decide that you duped her into being a dupe.

Genocide: Good or Bad? It depends!

Israeli psychologist George Tamarin conducted a survey among 1000 Israeli school-children ages eight to fourteen. He presented to them the biblical story of Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, where Joshua commanded Israeli soldiers to slaughter all men, women, children, infants, and animals in the city, and to bring all gold and silver into the Israeli treasury.

The children were then asked a single moral question: Do you think Joshua and the Israeli soldiers acted rightly? The results were interesting. 66% of the children expressed total approval, 8 percent expressed partial approval, and 26% expressed total disapproval. Contrary to expectations, there was no difference in the answers between male and female children.

Those who expressed total approval typically gave religious reasons for their answer:

In my opinion Joshua and the Sons of Israel acted well, and here are the reasons: God promised them this land, and gave them permission to conquer. If they would not have acted in this manner or killed anyone, then there would be the danger that the Sons of Israel would have assimilated among the Goyim.

In my opinion Joshua was right when he did it, one reason being that God commanded him to exterminate the people so that the tribes of Israel will not be able to assimilate amongst them and learn their bad ways.

Joshua did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different religion, and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the earth.

Even some of those who expressed total disapproval did so for backhanded religious reasons. One girl wrote that even entering the land to perform the conquest ran grave risks:

I think it is bad, since the Arabs are impure and if one enters an impure land one will also become impure and share their curse.

Two others expressed disapproval because the Israelites slaughtered the animals as well, and those could have been kept as more loot.

What really makes this study interesting is that Tamarin also ran a control experiment. He presented the same story to 168 other school-children, except he substituted any mention of "Joshua" with "General Lin" and of "Israel" with "a Chinese kingdom 3,000 years ago." When asked the same question of approval, this time the results were reversed. Only 7% expressed approval, 18% gave partial approval, and 75% disapproved. As Richard Dawkins writes:

"In other words, when their loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation, the majority of the children agreed with the moral judgments that most modern humans would share. Joshua's action was a deed of barbaric genocide. But it all looks different from a religious point of view. And the difference starts early in life. It was religion that made the difference between children condemning genocide and condoning it." The God Delusion, p. 255

Vandalism backfires

A group of atheists and free thinkers erected a billboard in Charlotte recently which simply reads "One Nation Indivisible" against a United States flag background. In a predictable turn of events, someone has vandalized the billboard and, like Congress during the McCarthy era, forcibly inserted "Under God" onto the billboard.



No doubt this vandalism was intended to send a message to anyone who supports the separation of church and state, and to anyone who wants to restore the Pledge to its original God-free verbiage. However, the vandalism backfired, as William Warren, the spokesperson for the Charlotte Atheists and Agnostics explained:

Other than the vandalism, Warren said his group has received “mostly positive” responses to its billboard, including from some self-described Christians.

Plus, he credited publicity surrounding the sign with uptick in membership: “We have 58 new members.”

Thank you, vandals. Freethinking Americans appreciate your efforts on our behalf.

Obama calls for prayer to clean up oil spill

For some people, you just can't win.

Jon Stewart of the Daily Show highlights, in his usually hilarious method, that President Obama announced this week that more commissions will study the Gulf Oil leak, and that he is calling for prayer to ask God to lend a hand.

My own notions are that these are exactly the things people do when they don't know what else to do: form committees and desperately pray for a bailout.

Stewart's genius is on display here.  He replays clips from Fox and Friends, when some shrill commentator criticizes Obama before the speech for NOT praying for help, and then after Obama announces that he's praying for help, the same commentator criticizes him for praying the wrong way.

Stunts like this is yet another illustration of the need for the separation of church and state.  For too many, it's not just enough that the President be religious, he must be the right kind of religious, and he must go to the right church on the right day, and he must pray in the proper form in the proper fashion.  You can't please everyone, and it's foolish to try.

Oakland raises tax revenue from marijuana

Many cities in America are suffering from budget crises due to the poor economy. The city of Oakland, California is finally doing what many advocated for years: Taxing marijuana sales.

Oakland residents overwhelmingly voted Tuesday to approve a first-of-its kind tax on medical marijuana sold at the city's four cannabis dispensaries...

Oakland's auditor estimates that based on annual sales of $17.5 million for the four clubs, it will generate an estimated $294,000 for city coffers in its first year.

The United States has wasted billions of dollars fighting the consumption of certain chemicals. And yet, after forty years since the War on Drugs was declared, not one beachhead has been secured, not one city has been liberated, not one hilltop has been claimed in victory. We can't keep drugs out of schools, or out of workplaces. We can't even keep them out of prisons. But every year, the war continues at a horrendous cost to our society.

The legalization of medical marijuana in California was a tiny but important step in a sensible policy toward drugs. Lawmakers are slowly waking up to the notion that rather than spending money to suppress a product that will be consumed anyway, they can make money on it instead.

I recently watched the film "Layer Cake", a seedy violent story about back-stabbing drug dealers in the UK. Daniel Craig plays a drug dealer who tries to maintain a level of integrity in his work.



The relevant portion starts at 1:00:

Drugs. Changed. Everything. Always remember that one day all this drug monkey business will all be legal. They won't leave it to people like me. Not once they figure out how much money is in it. Not millions. F*ing BILLIONS. Recreational Drugs PLC: "Giving People What They Want." Good times today, stupor tomorrow. But this is now. So while prohibition lasts, make hay while the sun shines.

Women lashed for wearing pants

It's nice to see that Sudanese police are working hard to keep their citizenry safe from violent criminals and civil unrest.

In the capital city of Khartoum, "20 or 30 police officers" entered a popular restaurant and arrested at least 13 women who were dressed indecently, one of the women being a BBC reporter, Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein.

Source: BBC

So what was the clothing that so offended these Islamic police officers? String bikinis? G-strings? See-through blouses?

No. Pants.

According to al-Hussein, the women are facing up to 40 lashes for this grave offense of wearing clothing that covers their entire legs. Several women pled guilty at once and received a lighter penalty of only 10 lashes, but others, including al-Hussein, have spoken to lawyers and are awaiting their fates.

Hamas tries to restrict woman in public

There's a reason why everyone, believers and non-believers, should worry if a religious group obtains political power.  The temptation to take a religion's private mores and apply them to the public at large is too great.

MSNBC reports:

An attempt by Hamas police to detain a young woman walking with a man along the Gaza beach has raised alarms that the Islamic militant group is seeking to match its political control of the coastal territory with a strict enforcement of Islamic law.

The incident was the first time Hamas has openly tried to punish a woman for behaving in a way it views as un-Islamic since seizing power two years ago. But it follows months of quiet pressure on Gaza's overwhelmingly conservative 1.4 million residents to abide by its strict religious mores.

More burkha logic, where one's private moral standards must become a cultural standard applicable to all.

Hamas police spokesman Islam Shahwan denied the incident took place but said Gaza residents "must preserve our customs and Islamic traditions.

God help you if you find yourself subscribing to the wrong religion.

Prosperity Gospel in Economic Gloom

Slate's Faith-Based column discusses the failure of "Name It and Claim It" Prosperity Preachers like T.D. Jakes and Joel Osteen to accurately account why, if God wants his followers to prosper, are so many of them not prospering:

Osteen is everywhere these days. You see his coiffed pate smiling on Good Morning America, at the new Yankee Stadium for its first nonbaseball event, on the cover of Texas Monthly's ideas issue—all in one week. Yet he artfully disappears for housing-crisis questions like "Why, if God wants to reward the faithful with material possessions, are so many believers in foreclosure?"

Despite the failed promises of these mega-church salesmen, their message isn't at risk of fading away. When times are hard, people look to leaders who promise better times ahead, even if those very same leaders peddled a message of health and wealth which didn't pan out. What's important is the message, not the results:

But with two centuries of entitlement echoing Prosperity's mantra "What I confess I possess," who can blame people for flocking to Joel Osteen when he reassures them that "God wants to make your life easier"? Recent news that Americans have become less religiously classifiable doesn't mean a wave of Christopher Hitchenses so much as feel-good cafeteria spirituality stripped of tradition and dogma.

Here's another theory why people encouraged by their pastors to take sub-prime loans to buy houses they can't afford are finding themselves in a financial crunch: God does not exist, and those people who speak for him are just saying what you want to hear in order to sell you books and DVDs.

But that's just a theory.

Marriage, Statistics, and Fallacious Arguments

Evangelical conservatives have argued that legalizing gay marriage would be wrong. In the past, they've tried to use emotional arguments such as, "The Bible condemns homosexuality," or "Gay marriage is confusing to our children." These emotional appeals are ineffective because they only carry weight for those who already subscribe to the beliefs that the emotional appeals are intended to influence. For example, if I don't believe that eating crickets is sinful, then quoting a Bible verse to me that forbids eating crickets will have little effect.

What evangelicals should be doing is using reason and argument against gay marriage, rather than appeals to authority or emotion. To use my crickets example again, if you can demonstrate that, say, people who eat crickets have an enormously higher rate of cancer than people who don't, then that is a valid argument. With regard to gay marriage, some conservatives have argued that allowing homosexuals to marry will have a detrimental effect on heterosexual marriage, and they use statistics to support their position. For example, James Dobson, former chairman of Focus on the Family, told Larry King (Nov '06):

In the Netherlands and places where they have tried to define marriage [to include gay couples], what happens is that people just don’t get married. It’s not that the homosexuals are marrying in greater numbers, it’s that when you confuse what marriage is, young people just don’t get married.

But is that the case? One problem with relying on statistics to make an argument is that statistics can easily be manipulated or skewed to demonstrate bias. In this week's e-skeptic, the e-mail newsletter of the Skeptics Society, Barret Brown examines Dobson's claim and finds that the notion that gay marriage decreases straight marriage rates is absurd.

Brown notes that Denmark allowed gay civil unions as far back as 1989. In the next decade, heterosexual marriage increased over 10 percent, and the divorce rate dropped 14 percent. Sweden and Norway also had similar results. So where did Dobson get his idea that gay unions decrease straight marriages?

Brown blames Stanley Kurtz, contributor to the Weekly Standard and the National Review, who focused on year-to-year changes in marriage and divorce rates rather than overall trends over longer periods of time. If marriage declined two percent one year, then Kurtz highlighted it, even if the marriage rate also declined in other countries where gay civil unions or marriages are not allowed. If marriage increased even more the following year in Denmark, Kurtz ignored that. Kurtz also used bad statistics to wave away the fact that Danes divorce at a lower rate than other European countries.

Kurtz seemed most upset that 60 percent of first-born children are born out of wedlock in Denmark. What he doesn't mention is that the percentage of second-born children with unmarried parents is lower, meaning that many couples are marrying after having their first child. That seems reasonable to me--I can easily sympathize with couples not wanting to commit to marriage until they are sure that they can have children together. I could even see it becoming a religious requirement that couples must provide proof of fertility before being allowed to be married.

What out-of-wedlock births has to do with gay marriage is unclear, except for the fact that Kurtz is "disturbed" by it. He cites a rise in the percentage of couples having children before marriage (a trend that has been rising for decades) and tries to correlate that with the acceptance of gay civil unions, a logical fallacy as silly as trying to blame the rise of global temperatures on the decline of pirates. As Brown concludes:

Why is Kurtz so disturbed about out-of-wedlock rates? Personally, I think it would be preferable for a couple to have a child and then get married, as is more often the case in Scandinavia, rather than for a couple to have a child and then get divorced, as is more often the case in the United States. Kurtz doesn’t seem to feel this way, though, as it isn’t convenient to feel this way at this particular time. Here are all of these couples, he tells us, having babies without first filling out the proper baby-making paperwork with the proper federal agencies. What will become of the babies? As long as we’re looking at trend lines, we may conclude that they’ll continue to outperform their American counterparts in math and science, as they’ve been doing for quite a while.

Burkha Logic

Once again, Fred Clark of the Slacktivist blog has written a well-thought essay in response to the National Organization for Marriage's ad in which a handful of worried citizens wring their hands over same-sex marriage, and how it inhibits their freedoms. Critical response to the ad has been loud and furious, but Fred Clark has accurately summed up the dual positions of the ad's supporters, what he calls "the persecuted hegemon."

American evangelicals hold two mutually exclusive beliefs about their faith and its place in society. First, the United States is a Christian nation in which ninety-something percent of citizens believe in God. Therefore, Christianity should be upheld with the highest respect, and anyone who doesn't subscribe to Christianity should learn their place and be silent. Second, Christians are a persecuted minority in this wicked secular nation, and even checking off "I'm a Christian" on an anonymous survey is taking a bold stand for Christ.

They're not duplicitous in holding both beliefs, as Clark writes. They sincerely believe both--that they are both a righteous majority and the last of a faithful minority, which is why evangelicals expect--nay, demand--that store clerks greet them with "Merry Christmas" not some mamby-pamby "Happy Holidays," and anyone who does kowtow to the more-inclusive expressions are trying to "remove Christianity from the public square."

Clark wisely notes that today's evangelicals complaining of persecution would be laughed at by first-century Roman Christians, or seventeenth-century Anabaptists, or countless other groups of believers that truly were persecuted for their faith.

The persecuted hegemon phenomenon leads to the oxymoronic concept of non-reciprocal justice:

For these folks, turnabout is never fair play, turnabout is merely backwards. Thus when others respond to them in kind, or even simply remind them of the Golden Rule, they take offense, as though this constitutes an injustice toward them.

The idea is seen when fundamentalist Muslims require their women wear burkhas. It's not the free choice of a handful of faithful Muslim women, nor is the requirement restricted to one's own household, church, or sect. It's become a cultural standard enforced on all women--Allah forbid an upright Muslim man should have to go in public and see a non-Muslim, non-burkha-wearing woman's ankles.

That's why the NOM's ad is so silly, as Clark neatly summarizes:

Your freedom threatens my freedom to live in a world in which people like you are not free to do the sorts of things you might do with your freedom. "And I am afraid."

It must be noted that Clark is a Christian, and a rather clever one at that.

Positively Misguided

Steve Salerno, investigative journalist for eSkeptic, writes a remarkable essay revealing what science has to say about the Self-Esteem and Positive Thinking movements. Spurred by the runaway success of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (now with six million books and DVDs in print), Salerno's essay reveals the myths and mistakes of the "new" movements, which are based on the much older empty concept "The Law of Attraction."

**********************

There's no mistaking the allure of an outlook in which you'll make every block, get every job you apply for, close every sales call, and win the heart of every man or woman who catches your eye. This became clear to me many years post-college when I began research for a book about the human-potential movement. I quickly realized how invested Americans were in their optimism -- and how irate they'd become at being challenged, or even just questioned, on it; I was encountering what essayist Barbara Ehrenreich, writing later in Harper's, would bracket as "pathological" hope. It's a world-view that's seductive and uplifting and ennobling -- all of that -- and yet, evidence and common sense suggest it has nothing to do with setting (and implementing) realistic goals, establishing (and observing) priorities and, perhaps most important, recognizing valid limitations and obstacles....

The notion that the riddle of success is more easily solved by attitude than aptitude may be one of the more subtly destructive forces in American society. Not only is it a reproach to rational thought, but in a society already veering ominously towards narcissism, this "hyping of hope" also erodes reverence for hard work, patience, scholarship, self-discipline, self-sacrifice, due diligence and the other time-honored components of success....

More here.

Russian has daughter killed over clothing

In a horrible story, a Russian immigrant in St. Petersburg has been charged with hiring a pair of hitmen to kill his 21-year old daughter. Two men abducted the girl, a university medical student, on March 8 and shot her twice in the head. Her crime?

Wearing a miniskirt.

From the article:

Russia has experienced a revival of conservative religious tradition since the fall of the Soviet Union both within its Russian Orthodox and large Muslim communities.

Natural Skepticism in the Amazon Jungle

At the Long Now blog, Stewart Brand writes of the tiny Pirahã tribe occupying a small area on the Amazon river. What's notable is their unique language. They have no words for 'right' and 'left', no numbers, no language for 'past' and 'future.' Their language has caused controversy amongst linguists due to its simplicity.

What's more, they seem to be natural rationalists:

"The Pirahã language is the simplest in the world. Speaking it and singing it are the same, and it can be hummed or even whistled, yet it can convey enormous richness. Among other things, the wide variety of verb forms are used to account for the directness of evidence for a statement. Everett originally went to the Pirahã in 1977 as a Christian missionary. They challenged him to provide evidence for the existence of Jesus, and lost interest when he couldn’t. Eventually so did he. The Pirahã made him an atheist." (emphasis added)

More importantly, their language is under threat of disappearing entirely as the Pirahã's ecosystem rapidly disappears.