Feelings... Nothing More Than Feelings

It used to be that if you asked people to list places they'd like to travel, it was all but certain that a huge percentage of people would include Paris on the list.  Well, France in general has a reputation for being one of the great bastions of culture, philosophy, art, literature, and heck, gastronomy for that matter.  In days past, it was the hub for the likes of Sartre, Dali, Camus, Hemingway, Picasso, Beauvoir, and god knows who else.  Maybe that's why it was targeted last week -- cultural beacons that aren't advancing some morally bankrupt vision of backwards disgrace unto humanity are the single greatest enemy of religion.  For any religious fundamentalist, moral, intellectual, and social regression of mankind into a condition of universal detriment is the greatest possible good.

Aamir Khan recently met with backlash, as usual, for the crime of opening his mouth and saying things people didn't want to hear.  He brought up a sense that there was an atmosphere of growing intolerance in India...  Sure enough, he brought up a wide array of details and elaborated on the matter, but do you think a single person heard that?  Everywhere it was about taking it personally as if Aamir was somehow making a blanket statement.  How dare you spout an unpleasant truth, Aamir?  The boycotts and such, just as he saw from the furor over PK and/or the threats around Satyamev Jayate before only betray an abject lack of self-awareness when people shout -- "We're so not intolerant that we won't tolerate you saying anything bad about us!"  It was especially hilarious to see some other defenses like those who argued "If we're so intolerant, what about ISIS?"  That is a pouting child defending his transgressions by saying "That other kid down the street is worse, so that makes me awesome by default."

Then of course, you've got the Republican talking heads who, as a rule, spread lies in the course of their discourse about Planned Parenthood and promote more guns as the answer to gun problems, and are suddenly shocked that a Planned Parenthood gets attacked.  Naturally, they want to say "I didn't do anything"...  Never mind the outright falsehoods we spouted...  Never mind the propaganda of antipathy towards Planned Parenthood...  Never mind the bending over backwards for gun lobbyists...  People are responsible for how they're influenced by our rhetoric!  It's so unfair to blame the political demagogues who didn't do anything other than double down on fallacious bullshit!

When IS it the Fault of Religion?

One of the standard behaviors of religious zealots whenever some atrocity is performed in the name of their faith is to try and distance themselves from the criminals.  Christians bomb an abortion clinic?  Well, then you get the typical "they don't represent Christianity" and "no true Christian would do that!" and so on.  Muslim terrorists suicide-bomb a bus?  You hear the classic talk of "Islam is a religion of peace" and all the usual garbage.  It makes some sense that less criminally insane believers want to create some distance between themselves and the disgraces to humankind that commit endless atrocities in the name of religion.

From the outside, it is relatively easy to put the blame on religion for every crime its followers commit...  especially considering that most if not all such examples can be traced to actual screeds within their respective scriptures.  The most common defense, though, is to pretend those edicts aren't actually there and just focus on the good bits.  Does Christianity endorse slavery?  "Ummm...  uuuuhhh...  Love thy neighbor!"  What about murdering any and all dissenters?  "Uuuh....  Turn the other cheek!"  There are times, though, when the nastier bits aren't disavowed, of course, such as whenever LGBT matters come into play.  That's where religion is on the right track, of course.  Suuuuure.

Reza Aslan has frequently made the point that people put their own values into scripture rather than drawing from it.  He's technically right on this with regards to the more moderate majority, but I don't know if I would say that this is universally true.  More recently, he has been on the kick of saying that if we condemn religion for its harms, it is only fair to also credit religion for every good act done in the name of faith.  Well, to be fair, I would say that this form of the point, more than anything, elucidates that things can be a little more nuanced.  There is the famous quip by Steven Weinberg, that "with or without religion, you have have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."  But if people are actually just projecting their own values on religion, then where does religion come in in making the good do evil?

Je suis Charlie, que tout le monde devrait

Greetings, readers!  It's been a while since I've posted on the blog, and there's really little more to it than being insanely busy working long hours through the would-be holidays and all.  It's more than a little bit annoying that CES happens pretty much the first working week of January (after the New Year's holidays and all).  Well, it was like this last year as well, and this year, the crunch was not quite as bad, but there was a lot more shown from my department this time.  Anyway, during all this, there was the attack on Charlie Hebdo after a supposedly insulting-to-Muslims cartoon appeared, and there's already plenty out there about the attack itself.  What I wanted to get on was the so-called "liberal" reaction.

We generally expect the atheist community to have a problem with the attacks, but the flavor of multiculturalism that imbues the so-called liberal viewpoint comes out with every condemnation of violence hedged and qualified.  "Freedom of speech is incredibly important but..."  "Violence is inexcusable but..."  If there's a "but" in that sentence, it means that you're willing to make exceptions for that principle, and that already puts you on a spiral of wrongness.  All the "but"s regarding the Charlie Hebdo attack basically lead down this view that insulting religion is inherently wrong, and therefore, Charlie Hebdo brought it on themselves.  One article on Time suggested that anything that could be construed as an insult to Muslims automatically means you're not a bastion of free speech.  The Daily Beast said that being deliberately provocative isn't really part of free speech.  Really?  Then what is?  The worst part is that this is also a sentiment coming from the right wing religious nutbars (in a thinly veiled effort to intimate that they, too, should be shielded from all criticism).  If you're a self-described social liberal, and you find yourself agreeing with Bill Donohue, there's a chink in your armor somewhere.

Believers Never Look in a Mirror

"You atheists are so intolerant!"

How many times have you heard this?  Chances are, it's happened enough times that you want to choke somebody...  and chances are good that the person who says it is himself/herself entirely intolerant of everyone who doesn't agree with them on matters of faith.  It's staggering the sheer level of hypocrisy that is inherent when someone who is religious actually dares to talk about others being intolerant.  Pretty much all religions espouse some form of intolerance and hate.  While you can argue that the individual followers do not necessarily share properties with just every view of the doctrine itself, that doesn't mean they don't agree on some looser level (which can be evidenced by their voting patterns).  But even beyond that, following anything on faith primes you to follow more harmful ideas because someone with a certain level of charisma conflated something horrible with some faith-based belief you do agree with.

Even the more moderate religious folks will still at some point fail to show a moderate attitude about something when really pressed to certain limits.  That's where we have to start saying -- if you are religious and you dare talk to anyone about being intolerant, that makes you in every sense an extreme hypocrite.

Dialogues With Hopeless Delusional Idiots ep. 1 epilogue

Before I continue with the primary content of this little series, I wanted to include some particularly hilarious responses I got from the first one.  Since the Google+ feed of comments/responses is directly visible at the original posting, I'm more or less not including anything from there.  Instead, I'm including some of the direct messages I get here and there (such as on Facebook, where anybody can message anybody).  Some of them are truly amazing, and I feel it is only right to include them so that everybody gets a good laugh.  Note that I'm only including the responses from delusional idiots in order to keep up with the theme of the series. I will say that I got a lot more positive responses than ones from crazed religious morons, but there is clearly a great deal more entertainment value in reveling in the inane stupidity borne of faith the world over.

So without further ado, I submit to you some truly magnificent morons.

Dialogues with Hopeless Delusional Idiots ep. 1

Yeah, I get email.  I also get PMs over various networks and forums, and so on, and there's a general rule about the internet -- No, I don't mean rule 34...  I mean the rule that only stupid exists on the internet.  In this case, it was a PM on a forum some years back where I was the as-yet-unassigned-as-a-name-but-essentially-filling-the-role-of "grumpy anti-theist" in a crowd full of people.  But although the blog may be relatively new (it's only been around a few years), being a grumpy anti-theist is not at all new for me.  Perhaps 10-12 years ago, when I was a naive undergraduate, I might have been more of an apatheist, and identified at least culturally as a Hindu, but I really couldn't help but call religious nutbars on their bullshit nonetheless.

So this particular message I got was a PM I got in response to some activity on a forum thread...  in fact, it was on a forum for which I was an admin.  The thread was mainly about religious indoctrination and the forceful instigation of religion on people.  And of course, one delightfully delusional idiot comes along and pretends that it's not true...  at least not of his religion.  Well, the fellow happened to be Muslim, but what I had to say as far as the issue of forcing beliefs on people really isn't exclusive to Islam.  Just so happened that the conversation was on that topic.  I feel that this particular exchange is a pretty good example to illustrate the degree to which religious nutbars can have an inordinately distorted view of reality.

Below the jump are his claim and my response inline.  Names are hidden, but not really significant in any case.  All the original grammatical and spelling errors are preserved (including my own).  In yellow are his words, and mine in white.

"Respect" Your Culture?

I watched through a 10 minute collection of clips from the "Innocence of Muslims" film that has been sparking riots, threats of additional attacks on the U.S., as well as supposedly driving the attacks on the U.S. Embassies in Cairo and Libya.  It was painful to watch.  I don't mean that in the sense of it was morally troubling -- it was really just very poorly done.  Painfully poor green-screening, and agonizingly awful sound quality, and it was extremely obvious that nearly every line that the actors spoke was dubbed over with something entirely different from what they're actually saying.  Mainly, I just wanted to see what the fuss was about.

It was almost as painful as watching the first 20 minutes of the The Secret, though that at least had higher production values.  That was painful because of the intensely burning stupidity.  This 10 minute collection of clips I saw was just plain weird and made no sense, and was pretty much laying out on the table the message without a hint of subtlety.  Nonetheless, as poorly made as it was, the immediate reaction to it (that too, from seeing only the 1-minute trailer) was to take it as an egregious insult to all Muslims that necessitates violent reaction.

It is funny when people who do this sort of thing say that there is an imperative on the part of others to respect their beliefs and culture.  This is funny because these are the same people who wouldn't dare extend the same courtesy to others.