Author Archives: Jacob Fortin

William Lane Craig tries to defend Biblical genocides

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A few weeks ago I posted a video of a debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig. The video made it clear that Craig is no dummy, despite believing in absurdities. He’s been particularly busy recently defending the faith, and one of his latest articles tries to justify the genocide and infanticide in the Bible. It’s pretty messed up, actually:

According to the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), when God called forth his people out of slavery in Egypt and back to the land of their forefathers, he directed them to kill all the Canaanite clans who were living in the land (Deut. 7.1-2; 20.16-18). The destruction was to be complete: every man, woman, and child was to be killed.

The command to kill all the Canaanite peoples is jarring precisely because it seems so at odds with the portrait of Yahweh, Israel’s God, which is painted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Contrary to the vituperative rhetoric of someone like Richard Dawkins, the God of the Hebrew Bible is a God of justice, long-suffering, and compassion.

We’ve obviously read a different book. God doesn’t strike me for one second as having any kind of compassion at all. He kills people for burning incense improperly. He commands his “people” to kill all the other tribes who happen to live around them. This whole “God is love” shit is a pretty recent phenomenon. Just ask Pope Innocent III.

According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are.

In other words, if the commands of an all loving God sound evil, it’s only because good and evil are not really concepts he has to worry about, since he’s not subject to his own moral laws. In other words, if God does something we consider evil, like command the Jews to slaughter innocent people, it only seems that way to us because we’re subject to moral laws, not God.

So the problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their own initiative, it would have been wrong.

Wow. So if I kill my neighbor, I’m committing an evil act. However if a voice in my head told me to do so, it’s kosher. Good to know!

God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel.

Yeah, clearly little children who remember nothing of their parents equally stupid religious beliefs would have been a major threat. Better that they should all be smashed against rocks, right?

Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation.

See, that’s the kind of ignorant shit that drives us crazy. You’re literally suggesting they were in fact saved by being brutally murdered. That’s just fucking ignorant.

Muslim actress threatened over Playboy pictures

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When I think of someone famous taking off their clothing for money and more attention, it’s rare that I compare their actions to those of great revolutionaries. Of course, that’s probably because I live in a society that values freedom of expression, and where the female form isn’t something we like covered up (which is why winter sucks so hard). That’s why I had to take a few moments to appreciate the fact that a German Muslim actress named Sila Sahin has received death threats after posing nude for Playboy.

Her Turkish parents are apparently uber-conservative and called her all kinds of nasty names for doing what she wants with her own body.

“For years I subordinated myself to various societal constraints. The Playboy photo shoot was a total act of liberation.”

You know you’re on the side of good when you’re trying to defend a society that has citizens who feel liberated when they show people their naughty parts!

Kiwi youths uninformed about Easter

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How did your Zombie Jesus Weekend turn out? Personally I stuffed myself with food and partied way too hard, but it’s pretty much the only way most people I know tend to celebrate. In fact, it looks like most of New Zealand has no fucking clue what the holiday is actually about. According to a super unscientific survey they did, kids are generally ignorant as to the history and purpose of Easter. It’s hilarious:

The 10-question survey, which asked basic questions about Christ’s death and resurrection, returned a mean test score of 5 out of 10…The question as to whom betrayed Christ confused a number of others, with one young respondent believing it was his dog who was disloyal. Another was hazy about the entire concept of Easter.

I remember that part in the Bible when Old Yeller betrays Jesus too. Bastard.

A 16-year-old believed Christ was referred to as “King of the World”, and was crucified wearing a “halo made of bunnies”.

A halo made of bunnies.. How does that even work?

All of this is a positive sign that no one really gives a damn about Christianity enough to pass on their stupid stories to the next generation. So while some may lament about this, the rest of us secularists can take comfort that the world is slowly losing its religious flavor. It might take a while, but it looks like we might be on the winning side after all.

Negligent mother thanks invisible friend for rescued baby

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Imagine you’re a shitty parent, and your unsupervised 16 month old falls through the balcony railing of your 4 story hotel room and into the arms of a resourceful passer-by. Is your first instinct to thank your invisible friend in the sky for the rescue?

Jah-Nea Myles, 16 months, apparently slipped through the balcony railing and fell into the arms of Helen Beard.

Ms. Beard, of Worksop, was at the pool at Orlando’s Econo Lodge hotel when she saw the baby hanging from the railing and ran underneath, she said.

Ms. Myles told Reuters: “I’m thanking the Lord above right now for saving my child’s life. I’m also thanking that lady because she was an angel sent from heaven.”

It wasn’t your Iron Age God, or one of his sexless servants who saved your kid; it was a young woman from Worksop, England with a head on her shoulders.

I received another email

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A fan of the show sent me this letter:

I recently observed a “lunch-table” debate regarding religion, which I thought had a slightly different twist on morals. The debate quickly heated between a Muslim woman and a Christian man over why hard alcohol cannot be purchased on Sundays. The Muslim women, seeming a lot more level-headed, asked how this was not an affront to the separation of church and state. This was followed by several back-and-forth comments, but one of the comments made by the Christian man really intrigued me and I thought I would see what you thought. In defense of this absurd law, he said that all politicians bring in their own morals that are based on their own world views. He continued that whether you are an atheist, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, or anything else, that you have certain beliefs that make up your worldview. Thus, because these individuals are being elected, means that people want them to govern with their world view. It isn’t about separation of church and state to him because he views it as just another alternative background for moral teaching. I think he was trying to separate laws that are specifically indicative of the religion, like posting the 10 commandments at public buildings, or prayer in school, and those that are more disguised like, no alcohol on Sundays, no gay marriage, no abortions, etc. Not wanting to inject myself into a conversation with several colleagues, I sat back and listened.

Do you have any insights on how to address the Christian man’s assertions, or how to address the moral authority of the religious in general, specifically in a quick, succinct argument?

First of all, I have to fundamentally disagree with the Christian man’s opinion. In most countries, politicians are usually elected because they belong to a specific party, or because their political platform appeals to voters. It’s mostly in America that you find “value voters”, and these are merely religious folks masking their theological ambitions. The rest of us take a much more pragmatic view of politics.

Once they are elected, politicians have a duty to serve the interests of all their electorate, not just the people that voted them in office. Politics is about compromise; the ability to get the best results for the most people. Ideologues are the dangerous ones. The already fragile gears of bureaucracy can quickly come to a grinding halt if people refuse to play ball because of their “convictions”. That’s why your government has effectively stopped functioning. Rather than try and reach a consensus, the portion of American politicians who were voted in based on their “values” continue to undermine the system trying to square off their beliefs with the way politics works. As a way of leading, it’s an unmitigated failure.

If you’re engaged in an argument about religion “as an integral part of morality”, you’ll simply get caught in a different discussion altogether. It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain and a proper education in history that religion has NOTHING to do with morality. If it did, witch burnings, genocides, pogroms, infanticides et al would never have been a problem at all. How many religions can claim to have no blood on their hands? Why have they failed to provide the answer to such a simple question?

The simple fact is the separation of church and state is the only way that our society can work for the good of more than the people in charge. What is their alternative to secularism? How would they feel if a religious minority dissimilar to them was suddenly in power? I bet you they would be much less excited about their “moral views” then…

Dead nun credited for medical marvel

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With all the bad press they’ve been getting recently for harboring child-rapists, continuing their campaign to prevent contraceptive use in AIDS-ridden Africa, and saying generally hateful things about gays, the Vatican is looking for a bit of good news. Their deliverance has taken the form of a disfigured young boy, saved from the clutches of death by medical science and a combative immune system. His parents happened to be Catholics, and the child’s “miraculous” recovery was seen as an opportunity to thank the wrong people for saving their son.

Catholics believe in the ability of dead people to intervene in prayer. Often this is referred to as “intercessory prayer”, a kind of bureaucratic way of talking to God. Because you’re a worthless ant, someone dead but far worthier of God’s love can attempt to compel this capricious entity to be merciful. In the case of Jake Finkbonner (yes, that’s a real last name), this apparently involved him being saved from one of God’s loving flesh eating viruses.

At the trauma unit at Seattle Children’s Hospital, Craig Rubens, a pediatric infectious disease specialist, instantly suspected a flesh-eating bacteria called strep A. It was consuming Jake’s face with terrifying speed.

“It’s like lighting one end of a parchment paper,” he says, “and you just watch it spread from that corner very fast, and you’re stamping it on one side, and it’s flaming up on another.”

Dr. Richard Hopper, chief of plastic surgery at Seattle Children’s, had never seen a case so dire.

“It’s almost as if you could watch it moving in front of your eyes,” he says. “The redness and the swelling — we would mark it and within the hour it would have spread another half-inch.”

While surgeons struggled valiantly to save Jake’s life, his parents busied themselves with superstitious nonsense.

“Donny and I went off to the chapel and just surrendered Jake back to God,” she recalls. “We just said, ‘God, he is yours. Thy will be done, and if it is your will to take him home, then so be it.’ “

Jake is of Native decent, so the local priest instructed his parents to pray through a dead Mohawk nun by the name of Kateri Tekakwitha. Born in 17th century America, Kateria had horrible scars from small pox (brought on by God’s love no doubt), and took an interest in Christianity, fleeing to a convent in Quebec. Her faith took on a masochistic element; she would often perform acts of self mortification such as sleeping on thorns or cutting herself while praying for the salvation of her people. This insane woman, who died at the age of 24, would later become the subject of Leonard Cohen’s second novel, Beautiful Losers.

And guess what? The doctors pull it off, and the kid gets a new lease on life:

Surgeon Richard Hopper says after two weeks and a dozen surgeries, the team of doctors had little hope they could get ahead of the bacteria. And when they realized they did, he says, it was breathtaking.

So where exactly is this fucking miracle, you ask? It seems pretty clear that the surgery worked, and yet purveyors of nonsense are tripping over themselves trying to congratulate a confused and isolated nun who died over 3 centuries ago. Congratulations, guys: you’re all fucking geniuses.

Fighting Irrationality is hard

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A fan of the site sent me this depressing letter, and it’s just another example of the difficulty we have fighting stupidity in today’s society:

Hi Jake,
Your stuff is always entertaining. This is connected with your latest tirade (and well-justified, I might add!) about so-called psychics. I have been trying to get something done about them here in the UK but am having little success. I did get an ad. feature pulled from our local paper for this guy*, who was making blatant claims about his service that could not possibly be substantiated, but the main man I am trying to put out of business is here*, if you can stand the excessive use of Flash! His website is good for a laugh, if nothing else!

See “shop for goodies”. I have reported him to our ASA. (Advertising Standards Authority) now they can investigate web ads, with a view to stopping him selling his so-called “healing cream” and other items (see also “quartz stone”) with his preposterous claims about them, but they came back with:

“Thank you for your recent complaint about claims made by Quintin Smith on his website. I understand you challenge whether they can be substantiated. We have assessed the specific claims you highlighted but have concluded that there is insufficient grounds for ASA intervention on this occasion. Whilst we appreciate your views and acknowledge that many people will be skeptical about services of this kind, the claims you mentioned seem to convey the marketer’s own opinion and are unlikely to be mislead consumers to their detriment. We do not consider that they require objective substantiation and do not propose to investigate your complaint further on this occasion. I realize that this outcome will disappoint you, but thank you for taking the time to contact us with your views.”.

Total whitewash, in my opinion. It seems to me that he’s making quite clear, nonsensical statements about the products that can’t possibly hold water. Also tried our medicines regulatory authority. (After all, what IS the stuff? No provenance quoted. Could be anything). Answer: “We would expect these products to be regulated by the Trading Standards Services” Had a go at them, but an auto reply and nothing further. Seems I’m banging my head against a brick wall here!

Man, I feel like we’re fighting this war on idiocy with blanks! We can’t even get a bunch of scammers to stop selling their dangerous products to the public. How can we ever hope to win this thing?

*(Update: Both sites are thankfully no longer active)

Doug Stanhope on making up your Christianity

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If you picked up the Bible and tried reading it cover to cover, it’s doubtful you’d make it past Exodus before you’d put it down, utterly disgusted by the characters and their evil actions. If anyone was later to tell you this was a moral guide to live your life by, would you believe them?

Psychic steals $250,000 from victim

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It takes a special kind of scumbag to be a psychic. Seriously. I mean, your job is basically to manipulate people who are at a low point in their lives. Lonely, sad, desperate and terribly uneducated people are seduced by these charlatans intent on bilking them out of their hard earned money.

It’s easy to feel judgmental about the suckers, like the case of “Jane Doe”, defrauded to the tune of 250,000 dollars by Lisa Debbie Adams. A self professed psychic, Adams told her that a curse had been placed while she was still a baby inside her mother’s womb. Despite how utterly stupid that may seem to us, people like Jane are susceptible to these superstitions. In the end, Adams succeeded in convincing Jane to give her entire life savings in a series of increasingly wild spending sprees (including the “spiritual” benevolence of Mercedes-Benz, a feeling perhaps familiar to some owners).

Should we punish the ignorant? Shall we forget they are victims merely because they were vulnerable, improperly educated dolts who had the misfortune of falling for a scam artist? It’s a cruel world if we can’t feel at least some sympathy. Reading the stories of victims reminds me how easy it is to fool desperate people wanting any easy answer to solve their problem. It’s a sad reality, a reminder that reason – the shield that should have protected these people against fraud – was paper thin.

It’s time for us to ridicule psychics more, and I mean A LOT more. We need to expose them as the fraudsters and tricksters they are. There’s no need to make the belief in superstitions illegal; it’s far more affective to make it shameful, and object to ridicule. The funnier, the better. So you know what to do…

Suicide Bombings are not political in nature

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In a large Suffi shrine in Southern Pakistan, two young men with explosives strapped on their backs navigate nervously through a packed crowd. They are looking for an ideal place to murder as many of their fellow human beings as possible. The plan is surprisingly evil: the second boy is there to detonate himself the moment help arrives to care for the victims of the first attack.

As chance would have it, Umar Fidai‘s bomb didn’t discharge properly. It ended up only partially detonating, ripping away his left arm and tearing his insides apart. Before Umar could reach his grenade – a fail-safe given to suicide bombers allowing them a chance to still enter a martyr’s paradise – he was shot in the other arm by a police officer. Bleeding, incapacitated and watching the torment and pain of those around him, Umar felt shame and remorse at the sight of the medics and civilians rushing to their aid. Mere minutes before, all he could think about was the taste of the otherworldly fruits he would enjoy from such pious labor.

Young Umar is only 14 years old. What motivated him to commit his failed violent act was not political. It was religious. As I read his recollection of the events that led to his mangled state, I couldn’t help but feel that the seeds of his destruction, and of so many other victims, were planted long ago. The soil was fertile from a lifetime of indoctrination to dangerous and poisonous ideas. Umar’s targets were fellow Muslims, part of a different traditional set of doctrinal convictions, and therefore unbelievers. To the Taliban, the nearly endless supplies of human explosives – packed tight with anger, confusion, alienation, and ready to ignite with the mixture of religion- makes their task effortlessly easy. They need only light the wick and point.

You’ll often hear Muslim apologists refer to the problem of suicide bombing in political rather than religious terms. They do this to mask the terrifying reality of religious indoctrination, either deliberately or unknowingly. We ask why humans continue to commit atrocities – why we kill each other with impunity and cause untold misery and destruction – yet we refuse to accept the simple answer. It is unquestionably religion that creates the systemic barbarism, cruelty and ignorance of the world we live in. We have ample evidence of this. That it makes some happy is inconsequential. It should not enter into our minds as something worthy of consideration. Should you care if a drunkard is admittedly happier when he drinks if he later beats his wife and children as a result?

If you still cling to the notion of geopolitics as the root of the problem, why not ask the villains themselves? The very words of acolytes, saved from their own annihilation due to faulty mechanics, is a chilling wake-up call to apologists. It was their conviction paradise awaited them, not their political desires that motivated their actions. Until we stop denying the obvious, it’ll keep blowing up in our faces.

Bill Donohue blames gays for priestly abuse

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You’ve got to admire Bill Donohue – in a rather sick and twisted way – for his unique ability to always “up the ante” of shitty things to say. He’s really an artist of sorts, effortlessly dispatching the truth whenever it seems to be inconvenient, and compensating by making outlandishly false statements, all in a futile attempt to defend what is arguably one of the most corrupt institutions in the world. To defend monsters, one must become a monster.

The latest “Donohism” is a difficult one to top however: he’s accusing the media of improperly reporting the sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children. Most were willing participants, and the real problem was homosexuality:

“The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that ‘more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.’ In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia,” Donohue wrote.

“What accounts for the relentless attacks on the Church?” he asked in conclusion. “Let’s face it: if its teachings were pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage and pro-women clergy, the dogs would have been called off years ago.”

Don’t blame all these priests, says Bill, most were participants who enjoyed what was happening. The real villains were the sodomites, everyone! After all, they wanted to put their penises where God had strictly forbidden it, and we all know if you don’t listen to sky-daddy, he will send a tidal wave after you.

It’s in situations like this I wish I could produce a report that could explain the depth of all the sexual abuse that occurred to both men and women…Oh wait, silly me, it turns out there are a ton of them, with more popping up all the time. Perhaps the most comprehensive of which is the Ryan Report, a difficult and lengthy volume detailing all aspects of abuse of Catholic-run institutions in Ireland. So without needing to trust Billy-boy at his words, we can instead rely on the litany of statistics on female sexual abuse by clergymen. I’ll go out on a limb here and say it was definitely not consensual:

Reported abuse ranged from inappropriate fondling and touching to oral/genital contact, vaginal and anal rape. There were 128 reports of sexual abuse from 127 female witnesses (34%). One witness reported that she was sexually abused in two different Schools. Witnesses described their experience of sexual abuse as either acute or chronic episodes occurring throughout their admissions in the Schools. Witnesses reported being sexually abused by religious and lay staff in addition to other adults, the majority of whom were understood to be directly associated with the Schools. Witnesses also reported being sexually abused by co-residents.

Before you feel entirely too depressed over the fact such stupidity still makes the air on a regular basis, take comfort in the knowledge, so long as people like Bill speak for their churches, the job of demonstrating the poisonous nature of religion is made much easier. Bill is a cruel, stupid brute whose actions undermine the false idea that religion moralizes an otherwise evil creation. In other words, with fuckheads like Bill at the wheel, it’s a lot easier for these morons to careen off a cliff.

Buddhists are confused about everything

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A fan of the site sent me this Buddhist exchange that I had to say something about:

Curious Buddhist:

I have an odd question which was raised by a friend, who was asking me questions about Buddhism. They wanted to know how Buddhism deals with the concept of evolution? Are Buddhists creationists? Our teachings don’t seem to deal with such matters and I was rather at a loss as to how to answer them.

Lama Shenpen:

I suppose one would have to say Buddhists are evolutionists in the sense that they do not think God created everything in seven days.

That’s not really a good start. Creationists don’t all believe in that exact nonsense. Some are far more sophisticated in their stupidity.

The Buddhist view is that everything emanates from the Primordial expanse of Openness Clarity Sensitivity and is illusion-like, never really coming into existence but the illusion is created by infinite intricate connections that are not anywhere and not in time.

Wow, the bullshit train is riding hard right now. Am I to believe that the Universe is an expanse of Sensitivity? I would argue that stars exploding in massive gamma ray bursts might not be entirely too sensitive to the feelings of nearby planets.

Time and space are part of the illusion that is emanating from that Primordial expanse – so it’s all very mysterious. From the Buddhist perspective there is no problem with life on earth having evolved somehow – but evolution is not in itself a full story or full account of life on earth – it leaves quite basic questions left unanswered.

Yes, evolution leaves tons of unanswered questions for Buddhists, such as “how did the first human exist if we’re all reincarnated”, and “how can human beings be so fucking gullible”?

In a way one might want to argue Buddhism is closer to creationism because our world is created by awareness – the awareness of the beings that inhabit it – evolution only gives a kind of history of how that illusion unfolds.

They love their whole “illusion” angle, don’t they. It’s a great way to avoid having to explain anything concrete about your stupid belief system. Hey, how do protons and electrons work? It’s all an elaborate illusion, so don’t bother trying to find out!

Buddhist do indeed share much in common with creationists: for starters, they have no desire to discover the natural world, and rely on tradition and superstition to tell them about the Universe. While they smugly assert that all the Cosmos is Maya (or illusion), this impossible to disprove condition is just another example of the nonsense of religion. If they had their way, scientific progress would end as we know it, in favor of mumbling some shitty prayers and believing that justice is handed out by an invisible force.

Isn’t religion great?

David Cross is hilarious

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I’ve got to figure out a way to get David on the Show. Guess I’ll need to stalk him for a while or something…

US Rep thinks Einstein would be a creationist

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Is this guy for real? You think Albert Einstein would be a creationist? You think this Spinozan would consider your quaint little religion the only true one? What kind of ballooned existence do you experience to say such idiocies? You are either a liar, having fabricated your fictitious idea with the intent on making it stick, or a farcical imbecile who has never bothered to read anything that contradicted his limited world view. I suppose both are probable, but for the sake of humanity, I hope it’s the latter. I really do.