Friday Bird Impression

Someone over on twitter posted this picture of a Sri Lankan frogmouth (originating here), and it's just glorious.

It's not just the plumage. It's not just my weakness for animals with other animals in their names.  It's how absolutely perfectly this bird has captured the facial expression Richard Dawkins would pull if you mentioned you'd met a Muslim and they were perfectly lovely.

Back Into The Swamp

Erick Erickson - AKA the world's most cowardly Viking - has a new screed up at RedState (I'm not linking to RedState, but it has the characteristically subtle title of "Shibboleths of the Damned") that's an almost perfect example of violating SpaceSquid's Sin Standard.  He starts off making what is genuinely a reasonable point (made in a thoroughly unreasonable way, natch); there's little point in haranguing homophobic Christians over their dislike of homosexuality by quoting Leviticus at them.  These people are hiding behind the New Testament as cover for their prejudices, hitting them with the Old Testament isn't going to get the job done.

With this small victory won, Erickson proceeds to entirely fall apart, by insisting Christian supporters who believe gay marriage is acceptable are deliberately ignoring Matthew 19:4-5.

"Haven't you read, he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'. 

(It's always "ignoring" with these people, isn't it? Never disagreeing. Never realising words offer themselves up to multiple interpretations.  I wonder what it's like to live in so wretchedly simple a world).

Notice anything strange about that extract? Seems to be a missing quotation mark, doesn't there? That's because Matthew 19:4-6 says

"Haven't you read, he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” 

Erickson is quoting a passage on the Bible banning divorce to prove Christianity defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

I don't even want to bother with arguing as to whether that quote actually justifies refusing to accept that marriage need not be between a man and a woman.  I mean, you'd think if Jesus had a strong position on the matter he might have wanted to explain a bit better; "No backsies on them nuptials, pal, and while I'm on the subject; gay sex is totes icky." (I may not have gotten a handle on Biblical dialogue.) Because it doesn't matter here. Erickson's hilarious attempts at truncation aside (well done trying to FOX News Jesus, dickhead), Jesus clearly considers gay marriage as a less pressing issue than divorce.  Jesus says, right there; no divorce.

So if divorce is more clearly wrong than gay marriage, and given that divorce is clearly more common than gay marriage is ever likely to be (though doubtless the intersection that is gay divorces must give Erickson the chills), and given that gay marriage is being talked about at the secular level when divorce is already permitted by the vast majority of churches, why in God's name (quite literally) would you conclude the most important use of your time is speaking out against gay marriage rather than divorce?

Because you're a coward and a bigot, is why.  Because this battle looks like an easier battle than the other one.  Because this is the always the first impulse of men who refuse to understand what Jesus tried to explain to them again and again: you never punch down,

I've said before that the "God of the gaps" idea is a truly awful one; a shrinking cloud of proofs by contradiction that squeezes an Almighty being into an ever-smaller space as we learn more about the universe.  What, we're supposed to believe God wants us to find our own way to faith unless we happen to look at a particularly complicated shrimp-tail? Please.

What's even worse, though, is the God of the society gaps approach bullies like Erickson cling to. This is the idea that says anything society has agreed on for sufficiently long - e.g. divorce, but also for example bombing the shit out of innocent people because we don't like their leader, or insisting there is something noble in pulling in dollars faster than a singularity inside Scrooge McDuck's money-bin - must be something God wants, or it wouldn't have happened, and anything that hasn't happened yet must be against God's will.  There are many ways to do Christianity wrong, but working from the principle that the machineries of humanity derive divinity simply through success  must surely be one of the worst.

Actually...

The problem with Universities UK coming out in favour of gender segregation in talks given by outside speakers does not particularly strike me as an issue of religion freedom.

This is important, because actual conflicts between the right to religious freedom and the right to equal treatment can actually be a pretty tough area, with any number of different scenarios one must navigate. A lot of them boil down to the idea that if someone voluntarily joins an organisation which offers them less than equal treatment, does the state have the right to interfere in that choice?

(Consider the discussion on banning burqas, for instance. The mighty Jane Carnall takes this apart pretty thoroughly here, rooting her argument in the fact that the state has no business telling women they must submit to its definition of equality or face prosecution.)

But this isn't that.  Consider what is happening here.  Students are being asked to comply with the demands of religious speakers from outside their institutions. Speakers who, in the main if not exclusively, represent important figures within their communities and with a profile high enough outside those communities to get speaking gigs.

People, in other words, with power.

This is not about religious folk asking for exemptions on the grounds of their beliefs.  This is about men with power refusing to talk to those with less power unless those people agree in advance to comport themselves according to those men's rules. And then to complain that others refusing to unilaterally concede to their terms violates their free speech (freedom of expression obviously not applying to a university student who wants to sit next to her boyfriend whilst listening to a talk.)

In that sense, this is no different to the cases the Supreme Court in the US is busying itself with right now, in which corporation owners are actually arguing they should not be expected to pay for birth control for their female employees; this despite the fact that said corporations receive tax relief in exchange for providing health insurance for their employees. Essentially, these people are saying they should be allowed to partially pay their employees with health care in in exchange for lower wages, but only provide the health care they themselves consider moral.  Naturally, smart money has the court upholding these objections, because the only thing the Roberts Court likes more than helping out big business is dicking around with Democratic healthcare priorities.

In other words, the powerful demand that their own beliefs should be allowed to trump those with less power, and all of a sudden people are falling over themselves to talk about "fairness".

Odd, that, isn't it?

Dawkins Go Home

Can we please retire Richard Dawkins, already?

Look, I get that he has his uses.  There are plenty of people in the world who are under more social pressure - or even threat, explicit or otherwise - than myself, and certainly many people with a more valid beef with religion than my own - I regret my parents having taken me to church for fifteen years, but the worst it ever led to was severe boredom.  For these people, having a strident voice calling out various religious figures for their inconstancy and refusal to aid society's ills (or even to add to them) makes sense to me.

But just as I get tired of the constant broadsides against religion itself - which, unlike specific religious figures, cannot possibly be dismissed as a clear negative; whether it's actually a net negative is a question way above my pay grade - one can't simply point to the fact that Dawkins has a role to play and leave it at that. The next two questions are these: does it have to be him performing the role, and how well is he performing it anyway?

Because the decline in Dawkin's critical thinking (as presented  to the world) has been utterly amazing and distinctly unpleasant to watch.  I will defend to my dying breath The Blind Watchmaker, which contains the best arguments for the theory of evolution I've come across, not just in form, but in  presentation.  How does the man who wrote that come to tweet crap like this:

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

As Nesrine Malik says,where does one start? How about the fact that though the Nobels have been running for 112 years, fully half the Muslim Nobel Prizes were awarded in the last 13 years?  Have Muslims suddenly become far more intelligent, industrious and  peaceful than they were in the 20th Century?  Or is there, just maybe, something else going on?

I mean, what could possibly lead a western institution filled with westerners chosen by other westerners to focus more on contributions from the west than elsewhere?  What could possibly explain why western places of learning might have natural and obvious advantages over their counterparts elsewhere?  Why, when Jewish recipients receive ten times as many prizes as they should based on global population alone, has Dawkins not hailed them as some kind of super race?

The answer, I'm afraid, is neither particularly difficult or particularly pleasant.  Dawkins has tipped his hand on this before, remember, back in 2011, when he lambasted a woman who'd complained about an incident at a conference she had been speaking at.  She wanted to make a point about it not being cool to follow women into elevators and proposition them.  Because, hey, that's a shitty thing to do, and if you do it, you're making it clear that you don't care how something might look  to a woman you're interested in, your  manly man-view  of the situation should carry all.

In response, Dawkins decided he wanted to make his own point: Watson's experience pales massively into comparison to some of  the shit  Muslim women have to go through.  What does this have to do with the original incident?  Nothing.  Dawkins apparently didn't believe it even needed to be addressed at all.  But it sure as hell gave him the chance to have a pop at those crazy Muslims!

The same process seems to be in evidence here, except it's far, far worse (in logical terms, I mean; his response to Watson strikes me as much more unpleasant).  Look at what he's doing here.  He's using a college created following a religious power grab that cost the lives of thousands, which was a recruiting ground for the "Cambridge Apostles", which has benefited handsomely over the years from associations with the Church of England, which saw its Master awarded the Templeton Prize - for "affirming life's spiritual dimension" - just two years ago, which is named after the fucking Trinity, as a club to beat Muslims with.

And he wants us to believe this is a point about how religion is bad?

Nope.  Ain't gonna wash.  I'm not trying to have a pop at Trinity itself, here.  That place is amazing.  But it didn't get to be amazing because no-one working there had to stop to pray five times a day.  Pretending otherwise is the absolute worst kind of half-considered prejudice.  Which coming from a man who insists religions exist only due to a lack of critical thinking skills, is pretty reprehensible.

It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Gets Filled By Satan

This is from the fairly far-right and utterly anti-logic Corner, so I suspect they actually agree with him, but holy chickenballs, Virginia has some interesting politicians.  Would-be Lieutenant Governor E.W. Jackson:

[M]ost people are dead spirits. As such they have the nature of Satan who does not want to have anything to do with God or anyone related to Him. Of course they are not aware that they are imbued with the nature of Satan. They would be mortified by the idea of becoming Satanists or devil worshippers. Satan benefits far more from people who do not know they serve him than from those who knowingly bow to him. Your spirit was made for attachment. It is either attached to God or to Satan, but it is not neutral, no matter how much people think themselves to be. 

 My question is: if my soul is attached to Satan, why isn't my life much cooler?  I've seen Good vs Evil (man, I miss that show).  I could get some awesome shit from this deal.  I could bang Jolene Blalock in-between chase scenes in golf carts, for instance.  And that's just off the top of my head.

Still, it could be worse, I suppose.  At least I don't have the patience for yoga:

The purpose of such meditation is to empty oneself. . . . [Satan] is happy to invade the empty vacuum of your soul and possess it...You will end up filled with something you probably do not want. 

 Like bullshit, for example.

Annoying All The Right People

Well, this is interesting.  It would be wrong of me to claim this is the most encouraging thing I've heard the new Pope say since his arrival; that towould be him dissing rapacious capitalism.  Nor will either of these rather surprisingly sensible positions be enough if he continues the Vatican's appalling policies on contraception, though apparently there's some hope that he won't.

Nevertheless, to me personally, this is kind of a big deal. It's always been my feeling that atheists and Christians should be able to work together on any number of causes, focussing on what needs to be done rather than why we think we should do it.  This is harder than it should be in practice.  Partially this is due to anti-religious sentiment amongst some atheists, but also partly responsible is the view held by some Christians that the real-world effects of such alliances are less important than the knowledge those they're working alongside have no interest in their theology.  The memory of attending a Christian talk three years ago in which the audience was told atheists are more deserving of heavenly punishment than Hitler springs immediately to mind.

So here's hoping that Pope Francis' words on the subject are a first step in mutual co-operation.  It's not like we couldn't get anything done with that.

A) Aggravating, Or B) Aggravating And Enraging

Here's an interesting study dug up by bspencer over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, who right now is embroiled in a massive sprawling multi-thread discussion on what it means when men complain about feminists being dismissive of them.

On that more general point, I don't want to say too much (short version: there is a big difference between recognising some people can use "check your privilege" as a way to shut down male comments and thinking it's so major and commonplace a problem as to make it worth mentioning in your introductory talk for a secular conference for women, because they'll totally never have thought about that), but the secularist issue has spawned some interesting tangents, including bspenser's suggestion that, per the link above, Americans dislike atheists more than they do Muslims.

Again, this isn't something I want to dwell on - there's all sorts of reasons why labelling of a hypothetical person as a Muslim does not translate into how actual Muslims (for which one can frequently simple read: brown people) are considered, and of course there's a greater distance still between how people feel about a minority and how oppressed that minority is (I should note that bspenser isn't claiming otherwise on that score).

I'm mentioning all of this because the suggestion that atheists are more reviled than Muslims struck me as so ludicrous on the face of it that the Patheos link proves strikes me as very important (though it really demonstrates a lack of trust than hatred, I think).  Even with - or maybe because of - the amount of time I spend reading up on American culture and politics, I have to continually remind myself how very differently atheism is viewed in (some or much of) the United States to my own experiences in Britain, especially since it's so completely counter to how one would expect things to be given which of those two countries has Christianity as its official state religion.

Let's break down the Patheos piece a little.  Firstly, a few sentences on the conjunction fallacy, which basically goes like this: "a figure bounds out of a TARDIS and saves Earth from the Daleks.  Is it more likely our saviour is a) a Time Lord, or b) a Time Lord and the Doctor".  Much is made of the fact that most people will choose b), even though by its very nature, a) is more plausible, since if b) is true, a) is true as well.

To simplify significantly, the idea here is that the fallacy is more seductive the more the question seems to describe the subset of people in the second group. If the above was re-written to have answers "a) a Time Lord" and "b) a Time Lord who is under 170cm tall", people would be more likely to realise what's going on.  There is, in other words, a correlation between people's inherent assumptions - and by extension their prejudices - and how likely they are to commit the fallacy.  Whether this is because the added assumptions make it harder for someone to not read option a) as say, "a Time Lord but not the Doctor", or if people's grasp of probability is being overloaded, I don't know [1].

So, here the idea in this research was to see how often the fallacy was applied when considering different types of people.  If the question is re-written as "Somebody does some pretty shitty things, is he a) a teacher, or b) a teacher and some quality X", where X is Christian, Muslim, rapist, or atheist.

You can see the results at the link.  Even when you offer the idea that the man is a rapist - that is a man who's already committed criminal acts worse than the ones described in the study - fewer people make the intuitive leap.  I suppose one could make the argument that it's easier to spot the fallacy when given other unrelated crimes than when considering a persons' (lack of) belief system, but even so, when "just because he's a rapist doesn't make him a thief" carries more rhetorical power than "just because he's an atheist doesn't make him a thief", something strange is definitely going on. [2]

All of which is a sobering reminder of how lucky I really am.  Not only am I a heterosexual white cis man with a middle class background and a decent job, but I also get to be an atheist in a country and in a societal circle in which the only reason people would have to think me likely to commit acts of grotesque immorality is having met me.  Thank the lack of God for that!

[1] There's an alternative version of the question that goes like this: "Emma is a sexually confident, assertive woman, who likes to wear high heels and tops that show off her cleavage.  Is she most likely to be a) a librarian or b) a stripper? The idea here is that there are (allegedly) fewer strippers in the UK than librarians, and therefore if the other information offered to us is irrelevant, a) is the correct answer.  You can learn a great deal about people by seeing how much of the additional information they will claim isn't irrelevant at all.

[2] Admittedly, that's just from looking at the means. Using the confidence intervals, we can only say that people consider lawbreaking to be no less common a feature of atheists than they do of rapists.

A Mistral Of Masks

Of course, the disadvantage in taking the "slow reveal" approach to season openers demonstrated by "Valar Dohaeris" is pretty obvious: it's slow.  One fifth of the way through Season 3, and we're still just seeing the very start of some character's journeys.

Fortunately, that's not all we're seeing.  "Dark Wings, Dark Words" continued the theme of pauses for consideration - and to mourn - but more than that, it offered us glimpses behind a whole hosts of masks, generating revelations that will take us through this season and beyond. Some masks we've already seen behind, others we've long suspected we had deciphered.  Some were new to us, but more importantly, almost all of them were new to our characters, and we can learn a great deal from their reactions as these layers are penetrated, or unwound like the parchment from a raven's leg.

(Spoilers below, but I'll steer clear of discussing the books - this post is TV viewer friendly).

The Whole "No Drinking" Thing Is Still Stupid, Though

I'm not sure this is necessarily popular with the whole congregation, and maybe there are couples who belong to this church who'd rather not be denied a wedding in the sight of God, but the cause itself is entirely worthy, so good on them for that.

If nothing else, this is another useful reminder that when people attempt to prevent the legalisation of gay marriage on the grounds of religious freedom, they actually mean they want to block religious freedom to any faith or denomination that disagrees with them.

The Advantages Of Atheism

I wish I'd gotten around to reading this article by Alan Jacobs when it first went up; I'd have been able to give him a few pointers.  Jacobs is struggling to get his head around the personal and interpersonal benefits of atheistic thinking.

I can certainly see how it could be a relief not to think about how to “justify the ways of God to man,” as Milton put it. But how is this connected to “what atheism has to offer”? What does atheism have to offer when “a loved one [is] losing his mind to Alzheimer’s,” and so on? I don’t see how atheism qua atheism (as the philosophers say) has anything at all to offer, though particular atheists, just like particular religious believers, can certainly offer a lot in the way of care, compassion, physical and emotional assistance.

I think the best way to think about this is in terms of balance.  A religious person, upon facing the horrible fact of a loved one's imminent demise, has to balance their belief that their family member is going to be released into Paradise very soon, and their confusion as to why a supposedly loving God would allow such suffering in the first place.  The force here that actually tips the scales varies from person to person, but it seems relatively uncontroversial to argue that for some people, the confusion is so much more pronounced that they might be better off without it, even at the cost of losing their comfort over approaching Paradise.

Justice Long-Delayed

Like bleedin' clockwork, I'm in a good mood about the way the world is changing and the Tories come along to harsh my buzz.

Actually, there's a lot to celebrate here; gay marriages by 2014, and two Christian/semi-Christian denominations planning to do the right thing and start marrying homosexual couples as quickly as possible.  Given the last Tory government gave us the truly disgusting Section 28, this progress is worthy of praise, even if "We're not going to be openly hateful shits anymore" isn't really the most inspiring political turnaround imaginable.

But it's the idea of refusing to acknowledge a gay marriage performed by a member of the Church of England clergy that pisses me off.  This has been pointed out more than once by other people, but it's worth saying again in this context: anyone who argues they fear for freedom of religion and supports this provision is a fraud.  Legally constraining C of E clergy who support gay marriage is the exact fucking opposite of freedom of religion, and yet it's being supported by a raft of Tories because it's an abridgement of religious freedom that ties in with their private, petty bigotries.

But history marches on.  Twenty years from now, any ultra-right Tory MP who speaks out against gay marriage will be shot down by their colleagues.  Fifty years from now, they'll claim they were in favour of gay marriage the whole time, and it's those pesky left-wingers who are the real homophobes.

One hundred years from now, they'll be using same-sex marriage of an example of a noble British institution in danger of being eroded by the lack of values demonstrated by the 22nd century's young people.  And so it will go on, always and forever; the poisoning of the present, the denial of the future, and the appropriation of the past.  Each step of the way, demanding that if they have to stop being small-minded shits, it'd be really dangerous to not do it very, very slowly.

Wherein I Become Increasingly Irate

Via regular commenter Jamie, the Guardian has up a deeply uncomfortable but utterly necessary piece by American journalist Lynn Beisner on her sincere regret that her mother chose to bring her into the world.

Naturally, it's not an easy thing to read, but you all should read it anyway.  I'd want to flag it up for that reason alone, but if I can be permitted for expanding on such a personal and profoundly emotional piece with  one of my bouts of detached argument (by which I mean detached from the passion Beisner is showing, not that I won't be calling anyone a dick before this is over), I just wanted to pick up on this comment.

What makes [stories from those relieved their mother chose to keep them] so infuriating to me is that they are emotional blackmail. As readers or listeners, we are almost forced by these anti-choice versions of A Wonderful Life to say, "Oh, I am so glad you were born." And then by extension, we are soon forced into saying, "Yes, of course, every blastula of cells should be allowed to develop into a human being."

I'm not sure I'd say the stories themselves are infuriating so much as those who propagate them to score political points, but that's probably semantics. In any case, what infuriates me so much about those who push  these kinds of stories is so many of them are so totally sold on the "if you had your way I'd be dead" argument for this one topic, and treat it with so much utter contempt in any other context (I have no idea if either of the people Beisner discusses are so inclined, which is why I'd rather focus on those using the stories, rather than those providing them).

Where, for example, is there any difference in the formulation "I'm glad abortion was illegal when my mother was pregnant, or else I would not be alive" and "I'm glad refusing people health insurance for pre-existing conditions was illegal when my wife applied for a policy, or else she would not have the medicine keeping her alive"?  Or "I'm glad Obama didn't slash the food stamp program like many demanded he did, or else my children wouldn't have had anything to eat"? [1]

To be clear, I'm not suggesting all three statements should be equally persuasive; only one of those is bound up in denying people the right to control their own bodies, for example.  One can be affected by such appeals without concluding they warrant action.  One can certainly point out that, in fact, society is already managing the best balancing act it can on a given subject, with no action possible that would not cause entirely unacceptable consequences elsewhere (not that there's anything like balance regarding the state of abortion in the US, at an absolute minimum, that would require that people stopped shooting abortion doctors in the head).

No, the problem stems from the hideous idea that the progressive desire to lessen suffering is somewhere between naive "bleeding heart" foolishness and active sedition, irrespective of the testimonies of those who have been damaged beyond most people's imaginings by some policies and saved from that horrible fate by others, except in this one case where they're all heartless monsters who just need to think of the children.

If you want to be a empathy-free moral vacuum and blight upon humanity, that is your right.  But don't come to me with your crocodile tears waving sworn statements from people glad to be alive, telling me how much you're hurting in the name of the innocent.  Your list of those you're willing to see sacrificed is too long for that, and no small few of them match up with those you insisted deserved their chance at life.  I don't know how anyone could twist themselves into arguing "We must ensure these children are born so we can deny them food, housing and medicine once they arrive in the world", but congratulations; you found a way to do it.  Slow-clap for the vampire squids.  Now fuck off.

[1] This might be an appropriate moment to explain Glenn Greenwald's quote on blog banner, which came about when I pointed out to him that Obama's domestic agenda involves body-counts just as surely as his foreign policy does, and so there's only so far he can fight Congressional Democrats on the latter before he runs into problems with the former. 

This did not go down well with Greenwald, who's phenomenal skills with logical thought and argument crafting are entirely tossed aside the moment he's faced with a situation in which there's no one person he can point to as the clear villain.

First Time They've Beaten Us Since Dunkeld

Good.  Unequivocally good.  One more reason to love Scotland, aside from its scenery, wildlife, music, food, and flame-haired Scottish lassies, who I can now only appreciate in the abstract (my flame-haired lassie being Welsh).

Not everyone is thrilled by the idea of gay marriage in Scotland, of course. It's interesting to note the difference between the objections of the Church of Scotland and the Catholic Church in Scotland.  Sayeth the CoS:

We believe homophobia to be sinful and we reaffirm our strong pastoral commitment to all people in Scotland, regardless of sexual orientation or beliefs [but we] are concerned the government will legislate without being able to effectively protect religious bodies or their ministers whose beliefs prevent them from celebrating civil-partnerships or same-sex marriages.

If we can only have one of same-sex marriage or religious freedom in this field, I know which side I'll be standing on, and I don't believe it will come to that in any case.  Nevertheless, it's a sensible, considered response.  OTOH, opines the Catholic Church in Scotland:

The Scottish government is embarking on a dangerous social experiment on a massive scale.

Nice, guys.  Nice and measured.  And it gets better:

[S]ame-sex sexual relationships are detrimental to any love expressed within profound friendships. 

When will gay people wake up and realise the love they think they're experiencing is just friendship with fucking?

Jesus Of The Future

Regular readers will perhaps remember Mr Ross Douthat, a man determined to bring about a return to Christian morality at the centre of public life through the tools of deception and oppression.  Well, he's back this week with another silly article, this time about how liberal Christianity seems to be on its last legs:

In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the [US] saw churchgoing increase... 

Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance...

Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis... Liberal commentators... consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week's showing of "Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc", in which our brave Mr Douthat will once more again seek to silence poor women seeking abortion the very laws of logic themselves!  Drum-roll, please!

Notice any major denominations missed out the list above?  I'll give you a clue. Ross Douthat is Catholic.  He's spend hundreds of column inches on the complexities in interpreting Catholic doctrine when faced with modern life, and the importance in making the attempt.  He briefly mentions that liberal Catholics are having problems too, but he avoids any figures.

And why? Because the attendance drop amongst US Catholic congregations in the last 25 years is approximately 30%.  That's two and a half decades, so it's a bit apples and oranges to compare it to the figure Douthat quotes, but still, Douthat is arguing liberal Christianity is facing extinction based on loss rates not dissimilar to those of conservative Christianity (maybe the Baptists are going great guns, though).

Christianity is undergoing a recruitment crisis.  Christianity is having profound difficulty in persuading young people to join the church and ensure its relevance for another generation (something which, to be blunt, isn't something secular liberals really need to give a shit about; liberal Christianity is the only alternative the religion has to total irrelevance, but the choice isn't ours).  Trying to blame this on the reformers is a typical Douthat switcheroo.  That man never saw a logical fallacy he didn't like, just so long as it helped him in his quest to deny women autonomy rehabilitate Catholicism.  Presumably this is why he says something as stupid as this:

Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. 

Actually, we kept that one quiet as a favour to you, Ross, because the last thing the public needs right now is further evidence that the Vatican is far too busy keeping the church in one piece to worry about whether or not its actual doing its damn job.  The truth of that - and the horrible, despicable consequences of that truth - are far too obvious already.

What Will Be Born, And What Has Already Died

A few quick comments on Ross Douthat's latest piece.  First, the obligatory cheap shot, which I wouldn't make if if he didn't leave himself open to it as often as he does: this is not a man who should feel comfortable criticising others as "privileged have-mores with an obvious incentive to invent spurious theories to justify their own position".  This in an article arguing that liberals are going to bring back social Darwinism with all our Godless science, no less.

Secondly, consider the meat of Douthat's argument: some people who championed eugenics in the 1920s were liberals.  The idea became morally repulsive after WWII, and provably unhelpful a few decades later.  But that doesn't mean we've abandoned the idea!

Yes, Ross.  Yes, it does.  Dredging up the spectre of a past long since dead is pointless, a way of distracting readers from the fact that you're actual argument regarding the here and now is nothing more than "it's theoretically possible we'll find ourselves atop what might be a slippery slope, maybe".  At heart, it's no different from those recent painfully dumb articles about how Republicans are the real party of civil rights, because they were better on the subject until the 1960s, and should be taken no more seriously than all those the jokes about Germany's recent economic strong-arming being their closest alternative to invading France.

There's another of Douthat's most common themes in here, a tendency to think the worst of science.  He admits that the eugenics of 80 years ago didn't understand how intelligence is linked to genetics (or rather, they thought it was linked in ways it it isn't), but it doesn't occur to him to make the obvious link: it's through scientific advancement that we worked all that out.  Exploits like mapping the human genome are what has made the concept of social Darwinism medically counter-productive in addition to morally abhorrent. 

That means those who might champion the idea no longer need to merely switch off their basic humanity, they need to ignore the data as well.  Perhaps more than a handful of people still exist.  Perhaps, some are even liberals, though I can't for the life of me imagine the tangled thought processes that would take to justify.  But the same research that makes it increasingly unlikely that anyone would sensibly want to try such a thing would also make it theoretically (as oppose to economically) feasible to try it, and that's all Douthat can think about.

In some ways, this is a more disappointing article than usual from Douthat, because his final point - should we feel comfortable about aborting foetuses with serious life-long but not life-threatening genetic conditions - is worthy of discussion. Contra Douthat, that's not really a consideration which depends on one's feelings regarding the nature of a foetus; if you're pro-life, the answer is clear.  It's only a thorny issue for those of us who are pro-choice: does supporting a woman's right to say "I do not want to have this baby" extend to supporting them saying "I will only have this baby if..."

Like I said, it's a conversation worth having.  Douthat either can't or doesn't want to go there, though, so he's reduced to arguing that voluntarily deciding whether to have a baby given certain conditions is kind of like forcing people who are more likely to generate such a baby to undergo sterilisation.  Like those evil liberals once wanted to do.  Or something.

One last point.  It would be hard to pin Douthat down on this, because the man has an insufferable habit of pretending to be arguing from a secular perspective until actual secularists slap him down, when he suddenly claims to be writing for Christians after all, but there is one question I'd dearly like to ask him: what are the secular grounds for not allowing siblings to marry?

Right now, of course, incest is illegal. A lot of reasons are given for this, but as far as I can tell, they break down into social points and medical points, and almost invariably involve the resulting children.  The former are frequently persuasive as to why it's not a good idea (two parents who had the same upbringing don't have the necessary spread of experience, social ostracism, confusing family reunions), but many of the specific arguments can also be aimed at single parents and same sex (or even mixed race) marriages, which makes it hard to believe they're strong enough to justify a blanket ban.

The genetic argument seems to me to have far more force; there's an increased risk of all sorts of unpleasant conditions that a child borne of siblings can have.  But if Ross is against the idea of medical tests to determine the genetic structure of a baby, shouldn't he be in favour of allowing siblings - at least those separated at an early age and being reunited as adults - to get married? 

That's the problem with bright-line positions like the one Douthat is knocking around here.  Sooner or later you find something that's on the wrong side of it.  The problem with Douthat himself, of course, is that this sort of realisation always leads to another horribly tortuous spiel of sophistry in an attempt to paint the line somewhere slightly different, rather than facing up to the fact that the bright line never existed, and never can.

For God's Sake

Seems there's some debates goin' on over this series of tubes regarding the debt modern liberalism owes to Christianity.  This is worth getting into more detail over (though no promises; The Other Half and I have friends to visit and cider to consume this weekend), but for the moment I just want to consider this comment from Ross Douthat, which Larison has highlighted.

Indeed, it’s completely obvious that absent the Christian faith, there would be no liberalism at all. No ideal of universal human rights without Jesus’ radical upending of social hierarchies (including his death alongside common criminals on the cross). No separation of church and state without the gospels’ “render unto Caesar” and St. Augustine’s two cities. No liberal confidence about the march of historical progress without the Judeo-Christian interpretation of history as an unfolding story rather than an endlessly repeating wheel.

Larison notes that the progress of liberalism has indeed gone hand in hand with the development of our civilisation, which until recently has been explicitly Christian.  It would be pretty hard, I think, to argue liberalism in the exact form we currently recognise it (to the extent that such nebulous concepts can be described as "exactly" anything) would have evolved without Christian influence.

It's much harder, to put it mildly, to believe that absent Christianity, liberalism in some form wouldn't exist.  Indeed, Douthat's argument isn't "completely obvious", it's somewhere between a completely unproveable counter-factual and an assertion which is absurd on its face. 

Whenever an atheist argues that without Christianity there'd have been no Crusades, no Inquisition, and no Nazi Party, it pisses me off.  The human desire for power, wealth, and the subjugation and hence neutralisation of the "other" is sufficiently ingrained in our lizard brains for it to be easily arguable that Christianity has provided an excuse for atrocity, not been the cause.  At least some of the Crusades were undertaken for no better reason than the Holy Church wanted more power, and whilst the glib (and common) response to that is to point out that, yes, the church is explicity Christian, the concentration of so much power in the hands of so few on the grounds that God wants it that way is just further evidence that religion can be applied as a tool by some very, very bad people.

Douthat's claim seems to be the mirror image of that approach.  Those who forged the philosophy of liberalism did so through reference to the Bible, therefore the Bible deserves the credit.

Consider what would have happened were Christianity removed from world history.  Would the West be atheist from coast to coast?  This seems vanishingly unlikely, given the way religions spread.  I'd assume we'd be Muslims, or possibly Hindu.  Does Douthat really want to argue that universal human rights aren't something any other religion could conceive of?  Does he really want to tell the descendents of Gandhi that he owes his view of the universal dignity of man to the religion of his colonial oppressors?  Really?  Even the famously peaceful Gandhi would have wanted to tell him to fuck off for that one, I'd have thought.  Ditto the tens of thousands of human rights activists in jail across the world right now, an awful lot of them who aren't Christian, and would be fairly outraged to learn they owe their deep convictions to Jesus.

I realise that Douthat is making these comments in the middle of a conversation about the American approach to liberalism, but that's precisely why his sweeping generalisations are so problematic; he's writing off the entirety of non-Western culture as being philosophically incapable of even conceiving of human rights or the separation of church and state.  It's that latter point, by the way, that confirms he's insisting these ideas are generated by Christianity specifically, and not religion in general, since without religion of any kind there indeed wouldn't be a concept of separation of church and state, for the same reason there'd be no concept of anti-aircraft guns without anyone ever having built a flying machine.

I'd actually really like to see a consideration of how a society without any kind of religion could generate what for shorthand I'll call humanist principles.  That isn't what Douthat is doing, though.  He's claiming Western civilisation has a copyright on a decidedly global concern, and in the process arguing that those who for so long were oppressed by Christians could only conceive of their right to be free because of the religion their oppressors brought with them.  Nice.

In Which We Cry Out With One Voice: "Enough, Already!"

There's been a number of articles and news stories about Christianity and homosexuality in America, and the scorched, barren earth that seems to be pretty much all that's left of the intersection between.

The good news pretty much everyone knows: Obama has come out in favour of gay marriage.  Not to the extent one might like (I'd be interested to see how he'd respond to the idea that it should be left to the states to decide whether a black man and a white woman can get married), but historic progress is historic progress, and I'd suggest we take what we can get, for the moment at least.

The rest of the week's developments have been less encouraging, not just for gay rights activists but for Christians too (and I'm not ignoring the fact that there are plenty of people who are both, indeed given the demographics of the US, I'd be more surprised if the majority of gay activists weren't Christian).  A new survey lists the number one description of Christianity among 16-29 year-olds, and among all non Christians, as "anti-homosexual".

Think about that for a moment.  Nothing about loving thy neighbour, or peace on Earth, or even making sure the Philistines get a damn good kicking.  When young people and those outside the faith think of Christianity, their first thought is of the subsection of the population that a vast swath of a religion has dedicated itself to treating as shittily as possible.  Pro-tip, church bigwigs, when more people think you primarily stand in opposition to gay people than think you're against tyrants, the greedy, and those who worship graven images ( the American flag ) you have fucked up, and I make no apologies for my choice of phrase, to a Biblical extent.

And it keeps getting worse.  A man who made a fortune - which Jesus said he shouldn't want and should give away if he got it - by screwing over as many of the people God told him to help as he possibly could is busy suggesting that five centuries of theological differences (to say nothing of a few decent-sized and exceptionally bloody wars) should be swept aside in the face of the true enemy; men deciding they only want to bum one other man for their entire remaining span in this veil of tears.   He's by no means alone in his crusade; the goldhugging Catholic muckity-mucks in Vatican City (national motto:-"If we can't engage in criminal conspiracies to protect those who abuse children, then those who want the right to love who they choose have already won") have been sending "Disgusted of Italia" letters to American convents, expressing their outrage that these be-wimpled ladies spend so much time healing the sick and helping the poor and take so little opportunity to tell homosexuals and pro-choice women that they're going to burn for eternity, along with the Protestants and Muslims and everyone stupid enough to violate their oaths of care in the most hideous way possible before being ordained.

(Also, while we're on the subject?  Fuck off out of secular concerns, 'K?  Is there any more disgusting insight into the current Republican id than them arguing they didn't reject someone for the bench because they're gay, but because they're gay and think they should be allowed to get married?  Well, the answer is "yes", actually, since they're worthless, unrepentant fuckers.)

The various Christian hierarchies treatment of the issue of gay marriage has long since moved past busybody nose-poking, driven past obsession, and has become an all-consuming hunger for getting their own way not seen since Captain Ahab decided that getting himself some white whale-skin slippers was totally worth being smashed to a paste and/or drowning.  If the Christian Right keeps on down this road, it's only a matter of time before they realise they've made the same decision.  I say the arc of history bends towards justice, but they say their God will roast them in fire for all eternity for being douches.  

Which you'd think would give them pause, quite frankly, but maybe not.  Maybe they've finally realised their time on this earth is coming to a close, and it's simply a matter of being as colossal a group of dicks as possible before time swallows them forever, leaving a footnote that simply reads "Hundreds of thousands of citizens wanted public recognition of their vows to love their partners for the rest of their natural lives; these people stood against that."

Vote Evil, Children!

I tend to be agnostic (no pun intended) on the subject of faith schools, because there are so many angles to consider that I can never slice through them.   Clearly, though, they have can cause problems , and this story from New Humanist illustrates one such instance:

[P]upils at St Philomena’s Catholic High School for Girls, a Catholic state school for 11 to 18 year-olds in South London, have been urged by the headmistress to sign the Coalition for Marriage petition against the legalisation of gay marriage. This followed a request from the Catholic Education Service, which sent a letter to all Catholic secondary schools asking them to draw attention to the petition and the Catholic leadership's opposition to the reforms.   

Not only were several of the pupils present themselves gay - which must be difficult enough in a Catholic school - it doesn't seem particularly unreasonable to suggest that a secular society allowing faith schools is different to allowing faith schools to engage in political activity. People would be furious, and rightly so, if a secular school's head teacher were to encourage their students to vote for or otherwise support anything but the most anodyne of political initiatives (and by "anodyne", I essentially mean no-one in parliament is objecting to the idea). 

If this woman simply wanted to point out the Catholic church isn't in favour of same-sex marriage, I'd say (like normal) that it's a ridiculous thing to get worked up about and makes the speaker seem paranoid at best, and I'd also point out (as does Philomena student Katherine) that it's kind of a shitty thing to do when talking to kids who might be gay and want to get married themselves one day, but that would at least arguably be what faith schools get to do. Attempting to mobilise one's students for a political cause seems unambiguously bad. 

(This would be true if she'd been "urging" them to sign the petition going in the opposite direction, of course, though if she'd wanted to put together an assembly calling for acceptance of homosexuality, that'd be fine.  It's brandishing the paperwork at the end that's the problem.)

Update: Had to edit the penultimate paragraph so it actually scanned.

Calmly Wrong

Let's stick with the home front for a bit, shall we, and shake our heads over a rather different subject.  I suppose this article is one of the better ones on the subject of opposing gay marriage, insofar as it at least makes a valid point: just because a massive amount of those against the idea are colossal pricks, it doesn't mean they're automatically wrong.

Of course, whilst "valid" applies as an adjective, "vacuous" works rather better.  I'd be dubious about the idea of it requiring the Guardian to pay someone to make that point, even if the article put together to do so wasn't so rambling and unformed.  Also, I'd suggest that anyone who writes lines like

[J]ust glimpse those mindlessly violent video games, sheer porn ...

has perhaps little to teach us on what constitutes rational fears regarding cultural change, and nothing at all on the issue of the preservation of accurate terminology.

Misheard Bible Stories