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Apatheists?

By BJ Bjornson

Neil MacDonald has an interesting column up regarding the rise of those without any religious affiliation. It starts off quite well.

I have no belief as to whether intelligent life exists on other planets. Furthermore, I don't care. I don't bother reflecting on the matter. It's utterly irrelevant to me.

Similarly, I have no religious beliefs. None. When Homer said "all men need the gods," he was wrong. Like roughly 34 million other people in this country (more than the population of Canada), I don't.

Why do I feel the need to go into this here? Because I live in, and write about, the United States. In this most religious of countries, I have learned to keep my lack of belief to myself.

There are signs now that attitudes here are slowly changing and I'll get to these in a moment. But think about it: holding no religious opinion at all, and saying so, has for many, many years been considered something of an antisocial act in this country.

While my neighbours might be amused by a discussion about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the sudden unveiling of an atheist at their table would likely provoke an uncomfortable silence.

Discomfort over the fact someone's an atheist doesn't apparently stop at the unveiling.  People who've known I'm an atheist for years still get uncomfortable around me whenever the topic of faith comes up.  MacDonald does go a bit off track in his next section.

The thing is, though, I'm not even much of an atheist. That would require a belief of some sort.

Atheists are people like Christopher Hitchens, the author of God Is Not Great, or Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion. They go around attacking the very notion of God, and they have at least something in common with the religious fundamentalists they attack: great faith that they are right.

This is a common if incorrect reading of what atheism is. I had the same argument with my sister recently. Saying somebody is wrong is not the same as saying you are right. Hitchens certainly has a big enough ego that he may well believe he has all the answers, and Dawkins is starting to act in a similar vein, but their egotism doesn't define atheism.

Atheism doesn't have a belief structure. Belief is the acceptance of something you have no evidence for. Atheists aren't content with such things and dismiss any such claims as unsubstantiated, which generally speaking covers all supernatural phenomena. It doesn't pretend to have the "Right" answers, since its basis tends to be science, and part of being science is the ability to be disproved.  Finding answers in this manner isn't about being "Right", but rather the ability to say you're less wrong.

In any case, because MacDonald doesn't want to be lumped in with Hitchens and Dawkins, (and I can certainly sympathize with the former), he came up with a new term to describe himself.

There's a better word for what I am: an apatheist.

It's a neologism that fuses "apathy" and "theism." It means someone who has absolutely no interest in the question of a god's (or gods') existence, and is just as uninterested in telling anyone else what to believe.

I do like the term, but I think it is being misapplied. Given the rather overwhelming religiousity of North American culture, the non-religious are going to have to give some thought to the existence of gods, particularly if you're going to reject such. The same goes for any of those holding beliefs outside the mainstream religions. Holding a nonconformist belief requires considerable personal conviction, which implies considerable thought on the matter.

No, most of the apatheists I know fall into the category of religious believers. They've accepted whatever religion they were born into, but rarely participate in its rituals, follow its precepts, or give much thought to what belonging to such a group means. Its background noise so far as their everyday life is concerned. They are the ones who've always given me the most trouble, intellectually speaking. As in, how can you say you believe in something when you do absolutely nothing that conforms to that belief?

Not that I'm complaining. Apathy regarding religious belief certainly beats the religious right trying to beat everybody over the head with it. If we're all lucky, religion will fade into being a private matter rather than one being fought over in the public sphere, or causing acts like this.

Abortion Doctor Murdered

By BJ Bjornson

Via McClatchy:

George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death Sunday morning as he walked into church services. Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. Witnesses and a police source confirmed Tiller was the victim.

. . .

Tiller has long been a focal point of protest by abortion opponents because his clinic, Women's Health Care Services at 5701 E. Kellogg, is one of the few in the country where late-term abortions are performed.

Protesters blockaded Tiller's clinic during Operation Rescue's "Summer of Mercy" protests during the summer of 1991, and Tiller was shot by Rachelle Shannon at his clinic in 1993.

Tiller was wounded in both arms, and Shannon remains in prison for the shooting.

Tiller's clinic was severely vandalized earlier this month. According to the Associated Press, his lawyer said wires to security cameras and outdoor lights were cut and that the vandals also cut through the roof and plugged the buildings' downspouts. Rain poured through the roof and caused thousands of dollars of damage in the clinic. Tiller reportedly asked the FBI to investigate the incident.

More information here, including the fact that the clinic was bombed in 1986.

UPDATE:  I'm not going to get into the whys and wherefores behind the murder at this point, but the Freepers comments to the death are informative in their own right.  DougJ has the permanent record should they be deleted.

A Test for Israeli Democracy

By BJ Bjornson

This weekend, the Israeli cabinet will be making a decision on a couple of bills that will go a long way in showing the world how the country intends to treat its Arab citizens.

After riding an ethnically divisive campaign to third place in Israeli elections, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's party is using its newfound political leverage to push legislation that would force Arab citizens to formally recognize the Jewish character of the state and clamp down on freedom of speech.

On Sunday, cabinet ministers will vote on whether to introduce a pair of bills to parliament, the first of which would institute a loyalty oath as a requirement for citizenship – a proposal at the core of Yisrael Beytenu's campaign promise of "no citizenship without loyalty." The second would outlaw public expressions of grief over the Palestinian displacement in 1948 – known as the nakba, or catastrophe – on Israel's Independence Day holiday.

. . .

Although the status of Israeli Arabs has normally taken a back seat to peace negotiations with the Palestinians, the new leverage of Mr. Lieberman and his ultranationalist allies to build momentum against Arab goals is drawing attention to domestic discrimination in Israel. On Wednesday, the parliament gave preliminary approval to a third piece of legislation that makes it an offense to negate Israel's Jewish character.

The loyalty oath is particularly problematic, as it doesn't call just for loyalty to Israel, but, "loyalty to the State of Israel as a state that is Jewish, Zionist, and democratic".  Jewish, Zionist, and democratic? Somehow that last word doesn't seem to fit very well with the first two.   I often hear that the US is centre-right nation and a Christian nation, most often by Christian conservatives.  I'm sure they'd love to have everybody in the country swear loyalty not only to the US, but to a, "conservative, Christian United States", and make it an offense to insult the Christian character of the country.

And I suppose there are some who would love to imprison indigenous people who don't regard Columbus Day as a something to celebrate but rather to mourn, but those sorts of policies remind me of a quite different type of government than that which normally refer to as "democratic".

I read sometime back that Israel was going to have to decide whether it would be a Jewish state or a democratic one.  The above is a good example of why it cannot be both. To force Jewishness(?) on the state undermines its democratic nature.  We'll have to see what path Israel chooses this weekend.

Catholic Orders Hide Their Money From Abuse Shame Payments

By Steve Hynd

The government and people of Ireland is angry that Catholic orders are hiding their assets to avoid paying their share to victims who are due compensation after suffering sexual, physical and psychological abuse while in the care of the Catholic Church. The order's share comes to only 10% of the $1.5 billion settlement, but even so the orders responsible don't want to pay up.

Irish government leaders said Wednesday they expect the 18 religious orders involved in abusing children in workhouse-style schools to pay a much greater share of compensation to 14,000 state-recognized victims. They also demanded that the secretive orders reveal the true scope of their wealth for the first time in face-to-face negotiations with the government.

"We have to ascertain how much they actually have. The government is adamant and determined that they will make an appropriate contribution," Defense Minister Willie O'Dea said.

... The orders this week have ruled out paying more compensation, even though the report found them principally to blame and guilty of far greater abuses than they admitted to in 2002. Instead the orders have proposed unspecified contributions to a new victims' welfare fund.

The Conference of Religious in Ireland, an umbrella body, said the 18 orders are planning a private strategy session Friday in Dublin to decide on a common approach to the government.

Experts on the global fight against abuse claims say the orders won't shed light on their finances voluntarily.

"First off, don't trust anything they say," said the Rev. Thomas Doyle, an American Catholic priest who is an expert on canon law and a champion of abuse victims' rights. "And be prepared to follow up the urging for voluntary donation or contribution with some form of force."

Lawyers and investigators from the U.S., Canada and Ireland say the orders responsible are hiding their assets by shifting ownership to individual members, trusts, corporations or offshore bodies - then pleading poverty so great they can't come up with the money required for compansation payments. At the same time, these same orders are using their massive wealth to fund litigation to reduce their losses.

"Their clumsy and self-serving efforts to protect their own interests are rapidly alienating whatever limited support they have. This is how institutions perish. The gross imbalance which leaves the state paying 90 percent ... is indefensible," the [Irish Times] said in an editorial.

This isn't just happening in Ireland - it's happening worldwide. And the Pope, although apologetic, isn't telling these orders to open their wallets as well as their hearts and make restitution for the despicable crimes of their members.

Infuriating. And as I read the story I couldn't help but wonder how this kind of behaviour - shirking responsibility after years of rape and torture of children - is any better than the atrocities we hear about Islamic extremists beheading hostages, or executing gays, or trampling on women's rights. The rabid Right repeatedly point out that Christians aren't doing those things as they stampede towards Islamophobic bigotry. Maybe not, but Christians are doing these things. Unless the Christian Right wants to argue that repeated raping of children is somehow a lesser crime than beheading then they must admit their co-religionists are just as guilty of mass atrocities. Neither holds any moral high ground at all.

Never to Early to Start Saving

By BJ Bjornson

Do you believe in reincarnation and worry that in your next life you may not be born into wealth?  Well, some bright people have come up with a solution!  Just dump your life savings into the handy Reincarnation Bank, and then come back in your next life to pick them up.  Hey, just because you can't take it with you doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to enjoy it all later.

Granted, PZ Meyers has noticed something a little odd about the website:

Their web page has a link to make deposits, but strangely enough, there isn't a link to make withdrawals.

I'm sure that's only a temporary oversight that will be corrected once you've shuffled off the mortal coil and returned to collect your hard-earned, previous-life dollars, though Meyers does pose an interesting dilemma with his wish to reincarnate as a squid.

Today's Irony Watch

By BJ Bjornson

From the NY Times story about how gay marriage opponents in New York haven't managed to mount much of an opposition so far:

The state’s Roman Catholic bishops have been somewhat distracted, too, having focused their lobbying energies this session on defeating a bill that would extend the statute of limitations for victims of sexual abuse to bring civil claims, and have appeared unprepared for the battle over marriage.

Don't you just hate it when your own indiscretions distract you from moralizing about other people's private business?

A Toxic Brew

Commentary By Ron Beasley

 

The above is an example of the daily Worldwide Intelligence Update given to the wet brained titular Commander in Chief by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.  As Frank Rich points out just an example the to toxic brew of incompetence, hubris, evil and ignorance that was the Bush administration,

This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

And it just gets worse. Rumsfeld was concerned more about covering up his own incompetence than national security.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

Rich has additional examples but closes with this premoniton:

The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.

And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.

It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew...” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.

I'm not convinced that either Cheney or Pelosi - the Republicans or the Democrats, actually want a lot of light shined on the events of the last eight years. 

And on the 7th day man created God

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Upon on occasion I like to watch something from the dark side.  Last night I watched Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.  Since it's an attempt to push "intelligent design" over evolution one would expect warped logic and intellectual dishonesty but the scope was truly amazing.  When Stein attempts to blame the holocaust on Darwinism he makes use of the two best tools of deception - quotes taken out of context and selective history.  Stein interviews both sides but taking a cue from Roger Moore manages to make the proponents of evolution look like crazed zealots and those in favor of "intelligent design" look like reasonable and thoughtful  men.  Scientific American magazine has some good point by point take downs here and here.

Matt Taibbi takes a look at the religious VS the godless in Religion, agnostics, and the cure for baldness.

Read it all but here is a snip:

Like almost all great defenders of religion, Eagleton specializes in putting bunches of words together in ways that sound like linear arguments, but actually make no sense whatsoever. In one speech he takes issue with what he calls the “Yeti” view of faith as espoused by atheists, i.e. the idea that religion is based upon the belief in an object whose existence, like that of the Yeti or the Tooth Fairy, cannot be verified by observation “in the reasonably straightforward way that we can demonstrate the existence of necrophilia or Michael Jackson” (one of a disturbingly high number of Eagleton jokes that nonsensically reference pop culture figures of at best semi-recent vintage). Eagleton’s response to what he calls this “travesty” of illogic:

For one thing, of course, God differs from Unidentified Flying Objects or the Yeti or the Tooth Fairy in not being even a possible object of cognition… it’s not just we cannot see Him, it is as it were that our not seeing him is inherent to God Himself, which is presumably not true of the Yeti.

Got that? It’s not that we can’t see God — it’s that God is inherently unseen! Take that, atheists!

As absurd as that might be we shouldn't laugh - religion has always been and remains today a dangerous form of tyranny.

Religious bullying is a problem around the world

Vigilante enforcement of theocratic codes can crop up when a minority group doesn't conform.

The tribal Muslim clerics in Swat, he said, have declared open season on reporters whose writings they disapprove of. My friend, a brave and devout Sunni Muslim, seemed quite shaken, having spent two weeks reporting under threat in Swat, an area once called the Switzerland of Pakistan. Several journalists have already been murdered for a perceived breach of theocratic codes.

Such violence is religious "correctness" in the extreme, but vigilante enforcement of theocratic codes can crop up whenever and wherever an individual or minority does not conform to the religious tenets of the majority.

In the United States, when Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison (D) of Minnesota asked to be sworn in using the Koran, the personal attacks on him from the Christian right were just short of poisonous.

In areas such as the Balkans and Iraq, religious intimidation has taken the form of ethnic cleansing, forcibly coercing religious minorities to emigrate.

In the West Bank a decade ago, I witnessed Hamas activists taunting Christian women for wearing crosses around their necks. Though Palestinian officials deny religious coercion, the exodus of Christian Arabs from the West Bank suggests otherwise.

Another form of religious intimidation worms its way through US high schools. Teenagers complain of being verbally assaulted by "God squads," whose members roam corridors demanding to know if their fellow students share their messianic religious visions – and if not, why not?

The insistence that theology and mythology be taught as science and given the same respect as science is part of this "bullying."  As the Religious Right begins to lose it's political clout this we can expect to see it increase.

Pakistan's Anti-Taliban Offensive, Some Context

By Steve Hynd

I'm been planning a series of posts on recent events in Pakistan and their future consequences. The best place to start is probably with a link dump of pieces I've been reading that struck me as noteworthy.

-- The Pakistani military's "all out" offensive continues in the Swat Valley, with 15,000 regular Army troops supported by gunships, tanks and fighetr-bombers facing about a third of their number of poorly-armed Taliban milita. Pakistan has said "it is the resolve of the army that there should be minimum collateral damage" but that's not the same as none, especially in this kind of war. It's been interesting to watch how the Pakistani military gave the Taliban an opportunity for peace that contained exactly enough rope to hang themselves with broad Pakistani approval if they didn't keep to the deal. US officials still don't quite get that part.

--Up to one million displaced persons are already on the move as refugees, straining aid agency's resources. I figure a lot of those refugees and fleeing Taliban fighters, being Pashtun and not really caring about the Durand Line, might end up in what everyone else calls Afghan territory. It's unclear at the moment whether the vast proportion of Pakistanis, being Punjabis and Sindhs who think their Pashtun compatriots are brigands and barbarians, are going to care very much about minority suffering. How that one turns out may well be the determiner of how comprehensive the military's scorched earth in Pashtun/Taliban areas becomes.

-- I've got answers for Matt Yglesias, though. He asks why, until this offensive, the Taliban's encroachment on Islamabad so hyped by Western media was a bigger deal for the US than Pakistan. Firstly, the Pakistani military can read topographic maps. Secondly, they know their own country's tribal demographics. Thirdly - they don't have the same linear approach to negotiations of all kinds as Westerners do. I don't think Matt's ever had to do business with the average machievelian Pakistani (or Indian, or Afghan) small-business owner.

-- Matt's not alone in wondering, though - a lot of US government officials are wondering why Pakistan doesn't share US priorities in the War On Terror (tm) too. For myself, I'd point to the fact that Pakistan's elite is looking out for its own business interests as a major contributor to that, playing China off against America as the two larger powers conduct an economic and geopolitical low-level struggle in the region and looking to benefit whichever of those two gains the ascendancy. As Pepe Escobar writes, Balochistan figures heavily in everyone's geopolitical plans and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see that as the next region into which the Pakistani military will push in force. Escobar points to a great primer on the region's issues and opportunities: "Baloch Nationalism and the Politics of Energy Resources: the Changing Context of Separatism in Pakistan" (PDF).

-- Western mystification isn't helped by an insistence on planning based on dearly-held myths about Western involvement in the region and by a fatal inability to differentiate between modernization and Westernization. Many Pakistanis, like Afghans and many other Moslems, "are eager for the former but will fight the latter to the death."

-- All of this isn't to say that long-term, creeping radical Islamization of Pakistan isn't a threat to the military/feudal elite's supremacy, though. Fatima Bhutto is undoubtably right that the Taliban "fill a vacuum that the state, through political negligence and gross graft, has created" among the general populace. In the long run, Ian Welsh is correct when he writes, following her, that "If the current Pakistani government wants to stay in charge, Fatima is right, it needs to do its job.  If it doesn’t, those who are willing to do the job will take over."

One friend who watches Pakistani events closely points out that the nation's investment in education runs at only 2.6% of GDP and that literacy levels are the third lowest in Asia. The madrassa network of perhaps as many as 45,000 schools, which another journalist friend notes is largely funded by Saudi money and tends to emphasise rote memorization over reading, is a breeding ground for Taliban-esque militancy but remains the accessible route to any kind of education whatsoever for many of Pakistan's poor. He writes in an email that "The result is that an entire generation in much of the world has been converted to this highly ascetic, sexually repressive, anti-literate, historically anomalous branch of the faith, one that throws away many of the more beneficial and human aspects of Islam."

The feudal middle upper class are involving themselves in a geopolitical feud between China and the US to their own selfish enrichment and neither larger power can truly say it "rules Pakistan's rulers" just yet. I think ethnic cleansing in Swat (emeralds, marble) and Balochistan (uranium, oil, gas, stategic ports) give both China and the US common realpolitik cause for the moment, though. Only after the scorched earth will they really return to feuding over the spoils. Meanwhile, Pakistan's vast uneducated underclass is being effectively run by remote control from Saudi Arabia. It seems to me there's definitely a cross-current here, between a religio-cultural bottom-up supremacy struggle and a geopolitical top- down one. Ignore either one in your analysis at your peril, I would think.

Torture and Morality

By BJ Bjornson

Since we atheists are often told that it is impossible to have any sense of morality without religion, it is always nice to point out the evidence that the two often have an inverse relationship.

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

In truth, there is nothing here that I find particularly satisfying. The difference isn't really huge, and the whole survey makes it clear that there is an uncomfortably large number of Americans who don't have any problems with their government breaking its own laws, although I suppose I can take some comfort in the fact that the question asked,

"Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?"

is loaded, in the sense that it presupposes important information can be gained. As noted here previously, that's highly debatable, and any such information it does glean could likely be obtained by other means, and in all cases, it probably doesn't outweigh the costs.

Update: Great minds and all that, see also Ron's post above