Amorality?

My attention was recently drawn to an article called A Plea to Atheists: Pedophilia Is Next On the Slippery Slope; Let Us Turn Back Before It Is Too Late. The article was written by Rabbi Moshe Averick. The article can be found here: article.

The article gets off to a terrible start by asserting "It is axiomatic that in the world of the atheist there is neither morality nor immorality, only amorality." It later says  "There is nothing that atheistic societies are incapable of rationalizing and accepting – including the sexual molestation of children." It later says "The atheistic notion that life emerged randomly from ancient Earth’s prebiotic slime, coupled with the Darwinian belief that humans are no more than intelligent chimpanzees, leaves us morally bereft."

I'm obviously an atheist. If I'm supposed to be ok with pedophilia, I mustn't have gotten the memo from Chimpanzee Atheist Headquarters.

The article goes on. The author lists a number of moral criteria that he believes that everyone should agree on to prevent this atheist pedophile rampage. The list combines ideals loosely based on the 10 commandments and the United States Declaration of Independence.

• All men are created in the image of God and are therefore inherently and intrinsically precious.
• All men have been endowed by God with unalienable rights and among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• Thou shalt not murder.
• Thou shalt not steal.
• Thou shalt not bear false witness.
• Thou shalt not commit adultery, incest, or bestiality.
• Thou shalt not have sex with children, and if you do you will be looked upon as a disgusting and contemptible criminal and will be treated as such.
• Thou shall teach these laws to your children.

The irony lost on  the rabbi is that the God that he believes in doesn't seem to have the same moral indignation about the things that he does. For instance, he believes that God gives everyone the right to liberty. According to Exodus 21 and some other chapters in the Bible, God seems to be perfectly ok with slavery. Slaves do not possess liberty. He doesn't seem to think that people have the right to live because he kills people over and over again in the Old Testament. God didn't seem to feel too strongly about the right to live of the firstborn in Egypt or the inhabitants of the promised land not to mention everyone in the world except Noah and his family. If I was arguing against something written by a Christian instead of a rabbi, I'd point out that if God can send people to hell, it doesn't seem to agree with the idea of every life being precious.

The truth of the matter is that both he and I get our morals from the same places. We get them from society. We get them from our family and friends. We get them from our culture. We get them from philosophy.

More is learned about morality by asking questions than by asserting that we get it from a supernatural God. There are a number of ways in which the God in the Bible seems to disagree with our modern morality. Imagine if believers really got their morals from God. Disobedient children would be stoned to death in the streets. Human or animal sacrifices would be happening. There would be slavery. There is a very long list of biblical immoralities that I won't list here. Suffice to say that morality clearly does not come from this God.

Even the perpetrators of the holocaust felt justified by God in doing what they were doing.

This is the belt buckle that Nazi soldiers wore with their uniforms in World War 2. In German it states "God is with us" The worst immoralities are almost always religious in nature.

If you believe that a loving God exists and sat back and witnessed the holocaust and let it go on for so long without intervening and you think that this God is our moral example, then it is you Rabbi who is amoral. Not me.

Christians and crime

In a previous blog, I talked about Gareth Douglas. He was a former Salvation Army officer who was convicted some years ago for sexually abusing boys in a residential school. He attended the church in Hazelton, BC that my parents pastored at back when I was in grades 4-6.

Just yesterday, I learned that another former aquaintance of mine has been convicted of sex offences. My mother called me and told me about the conviction of Jonathan Hartman in Indiana two years ago.

Jonathan's parents, Richard and Susan Hartman, were friends with my parents. They met when my parents were stationed in Brandon, Mb. The Hartmans were in Bismarck, ND at the time. We used to go down to North Dakota and visit and they used to periodically come to Canada to visit us. The last time I saw them was in 1991, if I remember correctly. They came to visit us after we'd moved to Vancouver. Jonathan would have been 11 then.


My mom said that she had been thinking about the Hartmans and was thinking about making contact with them after 20 years and catching up. She, of course, turned to the internet to track them down and was horrified at what she found.

She found that in 2009 they were stationed in Greensboro, Indiana. Jonathan, now 29 years old, served as a volunteer youth pastor in the church. In April of that year, Jonathan was arrested for having sex with three 13 year old girls that he had met through the church's music program. Evidently the sex occurred sometimes at Jonathan's home, but mostly inside the church building. One of the girls became pregnant by him, and had his baby.

In jail for child molestation, apparently unsatisfied with the amount of trouble he was already in, Jonathan attempted to offer another prisoner the sum of $50,000 in exchange for murdering 13 people including the three girls and his own illegitemately conceived baby.

In 2010 he was convicted of the molestation charges and the added charge of conspiracy to commit murder and was sentenced to 70 years in prison.

Of course, my mother's feeling was for her friends and how horrible it must have been for Richard and Susan to go through all of this mess that their son created. She said to me "I'm so glad that you guys (referring to my brother, Craig, and me) never got into trouble like that. I could hear the strain in her voice as she struggled to not cry.

It got me to thinking about this idea that teaching Christianity to children makes for more moral people. The fact is that the opposite appears to be true. In 2005, a study was done by the Kripke Centre called Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies. The study sought to determine the impact of religioscity on criminal behaviour. The results were probably not what they were looking for. They found that there is an inverse correlation between how religious a country is and how healthy the society is. The more religious a country is, the worse the country does in terms crime levels and many other societal indicators.

Denise Golumbaski, Research Analyst for the Federal Bureau of Prisons released the following numbers that show what percentage in incarcetared inmates belonged to which religion:

Response              Number      %
----------------------------  --------
Catholic               29267   39.164%
Protestant             26162   35.008%
Muslim                  5435    7.273%
American Indian         2408    3.222%
Nation                  1734    2.320%
Rasta                   1485    1.987%
Jewish                  1325    1.773%
Church of Christ        1303    1.744%
Pentecostal             1093    1.463%
Moorish                 1066    1.426%
Buddhist                 882    1.180%
Jehovah Witness          665    0.890%
Adventist                621    0.831%
Orthodox                 375    0.502%
Mormon                   298    0.399%
Scientology              190    0.254%
Atheist 156 0.209%
Hindu                    119    0.159%
Santeria                 117    0.157%
Sikh                      14    0.019%
Bahai                      9    0.012%
Krishna                    7    0.009%

Obviously, one could argue that there are more religious people than there are atheists. However, Atheists in most polls make up 15% or so of the population and account for 0.209% of inmates? Fifteen percent of the population and only one fifth of one percent of the prison population. Christians make up 85 percent of the population and about 80% of the prison population.

This is why nobody should believe the lie that without God, morality falls apart. It actually appears that the opposite is true. The best thing that could happen to society is to see God thrown out.

Ark Encounter

Answers in Genesis is a young earth creationist Christian group that describes itself in the following way:

Answers in Genesis is an apologetics (i.e., Christianity-defending) ministry, dedicated to enabling Christians to defend their faith and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively. We focus particularly on providing answers to questions surrounding the book of Genesis, as it is the most-attacked book of the Bible. We also desire to train others to develop a biblical worldview, and seek to expose the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas, and its bedfellow, a “millions of years old” earth (and even older universe). 

Answers in Genesis crowning acheivement is the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. In this museum there are displays of such examples of creation science as a domesticated triceratops wearing a saddle and a human girl side by side with what appears to be a velociraptor. I remember going to a theme park like this when I was a kid. It had a Flintstones theme. It wasn't meant to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, these next two images are.

In 2010, Answers in Genesis announced that it was building an attraction based on Noah's Ark, also in the state of Kentucky. The State government is providing tax incentives toward this project. The centrepiece of this park is a life-sized replica of Noah's Ark.

The Ark that will be built will be built according to the specifications in Genesis 6:14-16

Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.
Ok...so lets do a little math. A cubit is the measure of the distance between a man's elbow and his fingertips. It's not the most exact measurement, but it's estimated at between 17 and 21 inches. For the sake of a round number, I'll use 20 inches.

So 300 cubits long times 20 inches is 6000 inches. 6000 inches divided by 12 is 500 feet. The Answers in Genesis people have started that the Ark will be 500 feet long, so it sounds like we're using the same measurements. 50 cubits times 20 inches is 1000 inches. 1000 inches divided by 12 is aproximately 84 feet wide. This gives us square footage of 42,000 square feet. The story says the Ark should have three floors, so 42,000 multiplied by 3 gives us a total square footage inside the Ark of 126,000 square feet.

To give some perspective, I learned while researching this blog that the average Target department store in the US is 126,000 square feet. So that's the kind of space we're talking about.

Genesis 6:19-21 says that God commands the following from Noah:

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them. 

So just how many animals is that. Keep in mind that the story says this boat needs to fit two of every kind of animal on earth. How many different kinds of animal are there in the world? I found on MSNBC.com that The National Science Foundation’s “Tree of Life” project has estimated that there are between 5,000,000 and 100,000,000 animal species in the world. Science has catalogued 2,000,000. For the sake of this estimate, lets use the lower number, 2 million animal species. As well as the animals, some of the square footage needs to be used to store food for all of these 4 million animals. (2 of each of the 2 million species)

Ok, so we have 4,000,000 animals to fit in 126,000 square feet. This allows each animal 0.0315 square feet of floor space to occupy. I am no mathemetician and trying to break these numbers down anymore is starting to hurt my brain. Lets say that this gives us one half of one square inch per animal. This does not allow for the space needed by dividers to keep animals apart. It does not allow for any room for the 8 people supposedly on the ark. It does not allow for food storage or for room to maneuvre for the humans to feed the animals or to remove their waste.

Maybe the many species of small insects might be able to manage. Squeezing a tiger into a space the size of a postage stamp, though, would provide some logistical difficulties.

Keep in mind that these Answers in Genesis, young-earth-creationist types do not believe in evolution at all, so if there are 2 million species alive today there must have been 2 million species on the ark.

Obviously this is all ridiculous. Whomever wrote Genesis was probably only aware of a very few kinds of animals. He had no idea about penguins or caribou or marsupials of any kind. I doubt that any of these difficulties will be presented when this exhibit is built.

The Louisville Courier-Journal reported that this Ark will contain live animals such as juvenile giraffes. I don't know how they intend to keep a fresh supply of juvenile giraffes handy or what will be done with the giraffes when they are too large. Perhaps this hasn't been thought out either.

I almost want to plan a trip to the Ark Encounter when it's completed. The comedy value alone would make for a tremendously enjoyable vacation. I won't though. My paying admission would delay the bankruptcy that this project so richly deserves.

Amnesia?

In a visit to Spain today (Aug 19, 2011), Pope Benedict lamented that modern society has a certain "amnesia" when it comes to God.

Spain, of course, was once a staunchly Catholic country. This influence of Catholicism has dwindled greatly since the end of the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco in 1978. Like in Nazi Germany, the church supported the fascist government in Spain in exchange for domination in public education.

The pope went on to say "This is all the more important today when we see a certain eclipse of God taking place, a kind of amnesia which albeit not an outright rejection of Christianity is nonetheless a denial of the treasure of our faith, a denial that could lead to the loss of our deepest identity,"

Perhaps, Herr Ratzinger, neither the Spanish people or modern society have amnesia at all.

Perhaps we remember that both you personally and the church that you lead have covered up the rape and torture of children by your clergy.

Perhaps we remember that over the years your church has formed alliances with those who would deny us our freedoms.

Perhaps we remember that millions of  people in Catholic countries, especially in in Africa, are dying of AIDS today because you think your "God" doesn't like condoms.

Perhaps we remember that while your church claims to stand against poverty, it does all that it can to make sure women are forced to produce children whom they cannot feed.

If the world has any amnesia at all, it is in the heads of whatever people still come out to mass every Sunday. People who have left your church, sir, seem to remember things quite clearly.

God and sickness.

Anyone who has spent time in church or around Christians for any length of time has experienced something like the following:

A member of the church or a family member becomes seriously ill. For this sake of this post, lets say that this poor person has an organ shutting down and urgently requires a transplant. This scenario almost always goes one of three ways.

1. The person makes a full recovery.
2. The person continues struggling with their for some time.
3. The person dies.

No matter which way it works out, Christians figure out for themselves the will of their God. In the first case, God gets the credit for healing this person. I find this baffling because if you believe in God you must believe that He created the faulty organ or the disease which caused the illness in the first place. Imagine if I punched you in the head, causing you a headache. Would you be that grateful to me for giving you an advil to cure the headache that I, myself, caused?

In the third case, the person dies and God is wonderful because he called the person "home" to heaven. It seems odd to me that if this paradise that is Heaven is somehow lacking for the presence of this wonderful person that God would choose to bring this person there by means of a terribly painful disease.

It's in the second case that you'll find the true nature of Christianity to be entirely make believe. Ask a Christian why this person is suffering and why God permits it and you'll get as many opinions as there are people as to what God's will for this person is.

All the while, Christians are busy praying for this person and if asked why their prayer wasn't answered the way they asked for they usually answer in some variation of the following.

God answers every prayer. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes the answer is not now.

How convenient to have every angle covered. How convenient yet how totally unconvincing. After all, that's the same result you would get if making a wish on a star or in a fountain or by praying to your toaster.

If God was ever really curing diseases, then I have a few questions. Why is life expectency increasing as scientific understanding of health increases? Is it a waste of resources training people to become doctors when ultimately all the decisions of a person's health are decided by God? Why do we build hospitals? Shouldn't we be building more churches, instead?

9/11 Cross

There is a controversy brewing in New York City and across the United States about the inclusion in a new 9/11 museum of a piece of wreckage from one of the Twin Towers that happens to be shaped like a cross.

The organization "American Atheists" has sued to have this item not included in the museum on the basis that it is a violation of the American rules regarding separation of church and state. I agree with the American Atheists press release which stated:

The cross has become a Christian icon. It has been blessed by so-called holy men a few times, and presented as a reminder that God, in his infinite power of goodness, who couldn’t be bothered to stop the Muslim terrorists, or stop the fire, or hold up the buildings to stop 3000 people from being crushed, cared enough to bestow upon us some rubble that resembles a cross. Ridiculous.

If people were able to appreciate the irony involved here, then I'd almost be in favor of the inclusion of this "cross" if only for that reason. If I were a Christian and believed that God let that happen, and his only physical intervention was to make sure that this piece of wreckage survived the explosion to remind people of him, like some pathetic bumper sticker, it might be enough to make me stop believing that such an apathetic being existed.

It has been ten years since that event and I still remember the day very vividly. Anyone who was old enough at the time to understand the profundity of what was happening remembers it as vividly as I do. One can only imagine how much more vividly people who were directly involved remember it. Rather than watching it on tv as I did, many stood knee deep in, and also breathed in dust from those collapsed buildings.

My most vivid memory of that day was the horror of watching fall from 80 or more storeys rather than burn alive inside the towers. I remember how surreal it all seemed at the time, how something so horrible couldn't possibly be really happening.

People who want the cross included are aghast and cannot understand why even atheists would want to prevent what they characterize as a symbol of hope from being included in this museum. Many of these same people, I would argue, had no trouble finding fault with the idea of building a mosque only a couple of blocks from ground zero.  They were offended that an institution of the same religion whose adherents flew those planes would be built under what would be the shadow of the World Trade Centre were it still standing today.

Although it was muslims flying the planes, there were also muslim victims in the buildings. There were Jews in the buildings and atheists and agnostics too. The only reason that it was a Christian symbol in the wreckage is because a cross is a simpler shape than a star of David or a crescent moon with a star in it.

If there is any perspective to be taken from this tragedy it should be how dangerous it is to believe things without evidence. It was muslims on September 11, 2001, but it has been Christians who have committed attrocities in the past and will probably do so again. Rather than put up this religious symbol or that religious symbol it would be preferable to have a dialogue as a society about how much better the world could be if we could get past these tribal superstitions and work together, all of us, towards a better future.

We have real issues in the world. We need to work on renewable energy, the environment, food sustainability, water management and economic issues. The more time we are distracted by playing "My God can beat up your God" the less time we'll have to fix some of our problems before they are beyond fixing.

Why do you care?

When people learn of my atheism and how strongly I feel about my position they often ask me why I care about what other people believe. This is, in my opinion, a perfectly valid question. If religion was as benign as some like to make it out to be, I probably would not care what people believed. After all, there could be people who believe in the tooth fairy and I wouldn't devote any time to thinking about that. I certainly wouldn't write a blog about it.

First, most religions are not benign. It's easy to point to the Inquisition, to child raping clergy or to September 11, 2001 as examples of the evils of religion. The common defence for these sorts of things is that these were acts of extremists and are not reflective of mainstream religion. An argument against extremism would be self-evident. I am arguing that moderate or even "cultural" christianity is harmful and even deadly. There are a number of ways this is so. There is one area in particular that I will argue one in this blog.

Almost 20 years ago, I got the opportunity to travel to Brazil and one of the things that I saw there was one of the many "favelas" or slums of Rio de Janeiro. I have never since seen poverty and conditions of living such as I saw there. There were streams of raw sewage going down the street. There were also scarcely clothed, unsupervised and apparently undernourished children all around.

Ironically, on the drive to Rio de Janeiro, we stopped at a large Catholic Basilica. Evidently, the largest Catholic church in the world outside the Vatican is in Brazil. Brazil is very much a Catholic country. Estimates put adherants of catholicism at about 75% of the population. Protestants are 15%. Are the catholic and christian attitudes about sex and/or birth control at least partially to blame for the poverty in that country?

From www.catholic.com:

In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Latin, "Human Life"), which reemphasized the Church’s constant teaching that it is always intrinsically wrong to use contraception to prevent new human beings from coming into existence.

Contraception is "any action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act [sexual intercourse], or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible". This includes sterilization, condoms and other barrier methods, spermicides, coitus interruptus (withdrawal method), the Pill, and all other such methods.

One could argue that just because the church teaches against birth control does not mean that individual adherants do not practice birth control anyway. This is probably largely true of more affluent believers. However, in a most hypocritical example of christian piety, the religious in the West have used their influence to make it much more difficult for families in the third world to have the luxury of ignoring church teaching as they have enjoyed.

Sadly, in 2010, the government of Canada altered it's position on foreign aid. The government followed a conservative position in the US of giving aid only on the condition that the money not go to provide abortions. When Aid groups protested such a move, Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth advised aid groups to "Shut the fuck up on this issue".

From The Star, published On Mon May 03 2010:

“If you push it, there will be more backlash,” said Ruth, who fears that outrage will push her boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to take further measures against abortion and family planning – abroad, or maybe even in Canada. “This is now a political football. This is not about women’s health in this country.”

No, it's not about women's health in Canada. What, though, about women in the third world? What about the women in those favelas in Brazil who are chained to the animal cycle of reproduction and forced to produce children whom they cannot feed?

Here in a nutshell is what is wrong with even "cultural Christianity".  In the 2001 Canadian census, 77% of people identified as being Christians. Does this statistic means that 77% of Canadians are actually practicing Christians? In a country of 30 million people, are there actually 22 .5 million people attending church on any given Sunday? Data taken from the Millennium Study by Taylor Nelson Sofres Intersearch in 1999 showed that only 20% of Canadians regularly attend church. That essentially amounts to 57% of people in Canada claiming a Christianity when asked by a poll that they do not appear to actually practice.

In a democracy, politicians do what they believe to be popular or at least what will not shoot them in the foot come the next election. Since the statistics are so skewed, isn't it reasonable to assume that politicians would feel better about enacting a policy that 77% rather than at best 20% of voters would agree with?

I care about these things because I have seen how the sometimes well-meaning positions of the religious have disastrous consequences in the real world. It seems especially cruel to me for churches in these impoverished countries to preach to uneducated people that there is another life to come that will be much better than this one and that the God that will provide this greater life for them doesn't want them to practice birth control. The twisted result is that their condition in this world, the only world that we know exists, is made more and more miserable. The promised world-to-come never does.

Is it not preferable to give up the superstitions about the next world and get down to the serious business of improving the world that we actually do live in?