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?

Scripture as Metaphor

Recently, I was speaking with someone on the value of religion (or rather, the absolute lack thereof), and he raised the question of whether I think the stories themselves have any sort of value.  I've said on numerous occasions that I do think that at least being aware of the tales within religion is an unavoidable quantity because of the fact that religion has imbued every corner of culture wherever you might happen to be.  For a lot of Westerners who travel anywhere where Christianity is not prevalent, they find themselves completely unable to comprehend any of the cultural norms because they generally don't have a clue about religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Shinto, etc. in the first place let alone how they have influenced the local culture.  Common expressions or phrases that are somehow rooted in Biblical reference are pretty widespread here in this corner of the planet, but you will find similar use of references to Hindu religious literature and the works of religious philosophers throughout India.  That, too, most of us who are atheists are atheists because we know about religion.  We know it well enough to spot the absurdities.  So even in that sense, I think it's worth knowing about the religions themselves.

So in short, I will admit knowing about the religions gives you a lot of information that sets up a sort of cultural backdrop for understanding where people are coming from.  You can't avoid that religion is deeply seated in the extant nature of society, and that even if we grow out of it someday, it's worth knowing that we as a race were once this stupid.  But one question posed to me was that even if you treat all the religious texts of any religion as fables and folklore, do they hold any value in that respect?  We can look at the fable of the boy who cried wolf and at least see that it teaches a valuable lesson.  Do the stories in the Bible hold that kind of value?  Do the Puranas teach those kinds of meaningful lessons?  Do the tales within the Avesta?

Well, to that, I have to ask...  which stories did you have in mind?

If This is How You Question Darwin...

After the Bill Nye-Ken Ham debate that showed just how clearly Ham has no hope of ever being considered scientifically-minded to any degree, there's been a lot of stressing the point.  All over the web, there's a lot of harping about the most important moments of the debate, and most of all, the Q&A where Bill gives examples of evidence that would change his position, while Ken Ham says flatly that nothing would ever change his mind.  The biggest thing about this is that it completely shatters Ham's contention that science is closed-minded and locked on to philosophical naturalism, while simultaneously showing that it is he who is indisputably closed-minded.  It's amazing how clear-cut he makes it for us.

Well, not long afterwards, HBO aired a documentary that featured Ham as well as plenty more incredibly closed-minded people who think...  uuhhh...  well, maybe "think" is the wrong word...  approach reality with the same fractured intellectual modality as Ken Ham and his ilk.  Doing the rounds through the atheist blogosphere are clips from the film, specifically of die-hard creationists and fideists who make even Chuck Missler (Mr. "Comets-aren't-made-of-ice-because-ice-cubes-don't-form-a-tail!") look almost sane.

See the video on Gawker for yourself, and read my thoughts below the jump --
http://gawker.com/watch-creationists-talking-about-creationism-1520841986

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. 2

So there are times when people are just out and out stupid and put out things in all caps and hurl insults rather than actually trying to argue anything.  We've all seen this, and it's the sort of thing where I could post something completely beyond the pale absurd saying that an actual creationist really said this, and you'd have no idea whether I was making it up or not.  Then there are those who seem otherwise well-adjusted and perhaps even normal on the surface.  It's only when you prod a little deeper that you find that these people are really hopelessly brainwashed.  This particular exchange is one of those latter cases.

This is from a discussion on Facebook about 3 years ago.  Obviously, I'm going to be leaving out real names, but it's not as if it really matters who specifically the person is so much as just being able to identify who said what.  The full discussion is actually quite long and involved multiple exchanges, so it will be difficult to really display it all in one blog post.  In between, of course, we had little moments where we had to stop because one of us would be out of town or something or because of text length limitations, we'd split the responses up, and so we would say things like "I'll have to continue this response in the next post" and so on, which isn't really relevant to the discussion, so I'm also leaving all those bits out.

Where it all actually began was a wall post from a mutual friend in which he linked to the news report about Craig Venter and his team successfully creating their artificial phenotype of bacteria containing an entirely synthetic genome.  It was billed in press as creating "artificial life", which is pseudo-accurate at best, and that's where a lot of debate soon came up, especially from the "Intelligent Design" crowd.  In any case, I put up a response saying that it was a great achievement on their part, and also addressing the fact that the ID supporters will say that it proves that you needed a designer just the way the Venter Institute's staff had to design this genome.  The key thing that gives away their fingerprint of design of course, is the fact that they encoded the URL to their white paper in the pseudo-genes of this bacterium.  If there was anything close to that for a hypothetical "designer" for all life, then you've got some sort of a case for ID...  and that's where the discussion began.

To begin with, I'll start with the part of the discussion that happened in the thread of the original post.  There are extremely long exchanges that happened afterwards when we took the discussion to PMs that I'll probably have to save for some follow-up posts.

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.

On Vicarious Sacrifice...

So yesterday was the day associated with the festival of Karwa Chauth.  The fourth day (hence "chauth") after the full moon following Dusshera.  For my non-Hindu readers, I can summarize it as a day when women (by in large, married women) turn into Jesus.  Okay, that's a bit extreme, but the simple form of it is that it is a ritual of willful self-sacrifice (in this case, fasting) for the imaginary benefit of someone else.  It's profoundly nonsensical on the face of it and has no capacity whatsoever to be considered based in any way on reality.  Well, there are so many things I could say about it.  Many of the criticisms about it tend down the path of its inherent sexism because of the fact that only women really have to observe the fast with no reciprocal fasting on the part of the men.  Some argue that it puts the role of the wife as a tool for the spiritual aid of the husband and not as an individual unto herself.  Fortunately, it's not something observed in the part of India from which I hail, but that isn't the case with my wife.  Nonetheless, nobody considers going through it in my house because it's an utter travesty.

In the modern era, it has been commercialized into a sort of Hindu Valentine's Day where fanciful images of romantic love are tied to the rituals.  But just like Valentine's Day, none of those images have anything to do with how the day was originally defined.  Valentine's Day, for instance, was originally a religious feast that celebrated the execution of a martyr.  It only got connected with love in the High Middle Ages when courtly love was basically the primary M.O. of almost all literature of the age.  That too, it only became the dominant mode of celebration in the post-industrial era.  Karwa Chauth is much the same story.  It's only associated with love because mythological literature and Bollywood tells us so.  We associate Valentine's Day with love because Chaucer told us that's how it should be.  We like diamonds because N.W. Ayer & Son told us we don't qualify as humans if we don't.  We give out candy on Halloween because of commercialization of an older practice that involved bribing beggars for future prayers (at least, according to Shakespeare).

But commercialization and sexism aside, I have a problem with the whole vicarious sacrifice issue, as it seems to be a common thing.  The whole premise of Karwa Chauth is the idea that by fasting from dawn to dusk, a woman can provide a divine blessing for health and longevity unto her husband or some other significant member of the opposite sex.  Ummm...  seriously?

This is not from The Onion

Bryan Fischer proves rather conclusively that there are plenty of ways to be more stupid than previously thought possible.  I've seen plenty of clips of him on Right Wing Watch wherein he tries to make the claims that bigotry and misogyny are all good things because Jesus.  Or that gay marriage is actually a socialist conspiracy.  Or that birth control causes tiny micro-babies to collect inside the womb...  seriously, this guy is for real.  And then I see this gem, and I'm just speechless.

Unfortunately, the video is apparently blocked from embedding, but here's the direct link --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP8bM87awiY

I...  what on Earth...?  Seriously?  I don't even think a word can be invented to sufficiently describe the stupidity I see here.

First of all, even if we didn't already have gluons in the standard model,  and have experimental observations of their existence...  let's just say that this is an unsolved problem.  So he's using the god of the gaps fallacy, no surprise there...  but then there's the little point of "now we know".  Now?  People looked into the atomic nucleus and only now found Jesus?  Boy, that guy's pretty tiny if they had to look down there to find him.

Now Jesus is an elementary particle?  Gluons died for my sins?

Lo, is it not written?
That the lord so loved his baryons that he sent down his own vector gauge boson to the nucleus to save all matter!  Right.  Sure.

Worst of All

A recent question was posed to a group of atheists on a forum about the worst bits of the Bible.  Among the common counterarguments that any nonbeliever has against the "objective morality" argument is that the Bible espouses some pretty darn vile moral lessons.  Rarely do we ever get into the topic of whether or not objective morality even exists, because that is a topic that can trail off on a wide variety of tangents that can't really be resolved that easily.  The reason the "Biblical morality is reprehensible" argument is used is because it at least points out that even if there is such a thing as objective morality, the Bible certainly isn't the source of it.  The other thing is that it's patently obvious to anyone who has bothered to read the darn thing that it has some pretty deplorable attitudes about just about everything from slavery to misogyny and rape.  That, and it is lacking sorely in even offering a position on several moral question that we know ought be addressed, such as pedophilia or domestic violence.

So the question that was posed partly split the case two ways between Old and New Testament.  Presumably, this is because of the argument about how the Old Testament was a lot meaner and harsher than the New Testament...  despite the fact that the New Testament is where the concept of Hell and eternal torment enters the picture.  It was to ask what people thought were the worst moral precepts of two sections of the Bible.

More On the Dishonesty of WLC

William Lane Craig never seems to appear in any venue without demonstrating his inordinate intellectual dishonesty.  Even when given an relatively short amount of time to work in, he still shows he can be as dishonest in a moment as he is throughout an hours-long debate.  This is nothing really new per se.  Apologists everywhere constantly change the rules of discourse just in order to give room to their propositions because they know they have no capacity to stand up to a strict rigor.  Of course, in any instance that the bullshit is exposed, they always change their story, and without exception, they distort the position of their opposition.

WLC does enough of this in the course of a debate that were he Pinocchio, his nose would grow long enough to circle the Earth.  But he's deft enough in doing so, that most of the time, his lies are difficult to refute on the spot, though they are easy to refute when you have unlimited time to look up sources.  When he does lie about the opposition, he does it somewhat more brazenly, and it is in an effort to goad a response so that his opponent spends more time defining his own position than in arguing back (since a debate has limited time for each side, this leaves less available time to really form an argument).

Nonetheless, it's always funny to see him go and just keep on demonstrating that he has no concept of intellectual honesty, and basically never will.  It's a wonder that he ever got anybody to debate him given his track record.

Arkansas Proves Itself Worthy of Notice

...  by showing that they, too, can set new and previously unimaginable benchmarks in human stupidity and downright evil.  So we all expect this sort of thing out of states in the deep South like Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, etc.  Arkansas technically falls under the same wing when you think about it, but because the stupid burns so deep in those other areas, and also quite recently, that Arkansas kind of just never really gets noticed.  After seeing the Texas Republican Party proclaim proudly that they are against thinking, I made it clear that they deserve a mighty eradication from existence.  But now, I feel it is only fair to include Arkansas Republicans in the picture, too.

Congratulations, Jon Hubbard, Charlie Fuqua, and Loy Mauch.  You, too, much like the entire Texas Republican Party, Michele Bachmann, Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, Paul Broun, et al. all deserve to be launched directly into the sun where every last molecule of your physical substance will be vaporized and all of existence will be better off.

Idiocy as Mastered by Plantinga

Among the most read posts on this blog are the ones in which I dissect the artful dodger named William Lane Craig.  I have plenty more to say about him and his outright intellectual dishonesty and endless double standards, and his tendency to change the definitions of words so long as it suits him.  The thing is that I mentioned in the past that I'd also address another mind-numbingly laughable apologist.  In relation to that, I've been getting emails that rather make me think even less of Christian apologetics than I already had.  Yes, some people picked up on my use of the term "Plantinga-class circularity" and decided they should defend by singing the praises of the Magister Stultitia, Alvin Plantinga.

It's kind of fun to see them all act so desperate.  But in general, a lot of Christians seem to think Plantinga is one of the premier purveyors of apologetics out there.  A lot of theists of various religions consider him one of the most important of all modern philosophers because of his arguments for theism, dualism, etc.  They seem to miss the fact that that's really quite pathetic.  Really, the man peddles the sort of idiocy packaged in such a shoddy veneer of fake sophistication that it would make even William Lane Craig blush.  If this is really the best Christian apologists have to offer, it's pretty astonishingly sad.

The easiest way to identify instances of Plantinga-class circularity when someone begins a sentence the same way Plantinga invariably does whenever he wants to accumulate details on his arguments in order to make it sound more solid -- "If Christianity is true..."

The Inherent Dishonesty of Creationist Debate

Ever since the 2012 Reason Rally, there have been a number of videos popping up both from Youtube atheists like Thunderf00t and AronRa as well as from the subhuman creationist black holes of infinitely dense stupidity like Ray Comfort and his ilk.  As a rule, they all tended to be about the same, where the creationist leads into a systematic circle of gaps for sensible doubt, and argue that all such gaps indisputably prove god.  Presuppositional apologetics were among the things strut out proudly as if they had any measure of validity, and a number of atheists caught in this web engaged in rather futile struggles to try and break out of the ineffable circularity of creationist thinking in order to draw a line.

Well, regardless of how easily one notices the fact that all creationists are indisputable failures at thinking, it is difficult to look at the way people with brains actually managed in those situations.  Part of it is that the way creationists operate is that anything that is too vague, anything that is unclear, is by definition the space where "God" resides.  So as long as you can be loose with your language, God exists.    The argument from ignorance is the way all things are proven.  Anything that could hypothetically be possible is necessarily true so long as your opposition doesn't deny the hypothetical possibility (on account of actually being intellectually honest).  The other thing is that by being as brainless as they are, it is particularly frustrating for people like myself who have such a low threshold for stupid.  Especially since we're necessarily dealing with a stupid which is opposed to listening.  So at some point or other, it's hard not to get annoyed to the point of just telling the creationists, "get the f**k out of my sight, you intransigent filth."

Which is pretty much what they're looking for.  It's nothing more than a game of provocation for them.  And that's because creationism is foundationally dishonest in every way.

Dinesh D'Souza and the Problem of Evil

The Problem of Evil, also referred to as the "Problem of Suffering" has been a huge difficulty for theists for quite a few millennia.  It's quite the problem because no one can possibly refute the foundational aspect of the dilemma since no one can possibly claim that there is no such thing as evil or suffering in the world.  As such, it's something that comes from non-believers and it is just as well something that believers themselves have to wrestle with in the throes of doubt.  A lot of times, theists seem to think that atheists use this argument as a strong refutation against their god's existence, which I don't think is the case.  It's really not much of an argument against any god's existence so much as an argument against the extant theology of most current religions.  It shows that the proposition of a benevolent god as is the framework of most modern religions is really not consistent with the nature of reality.  It still leaves room for an uncaring god or a malevolent god.

Dinesh D'Souza seems to think this is a solved problem, so I was curious if he'd uncovered some new mode of apologetic that no one had noticed.  Given that it was Dinesh D'Souza, though, I really shouldn't have expected much.  Indeed, there was nothing new.  It was little more than a series of bald assertions that old arguments made hundreds of years ago and still parroted today are solid proof that there is no problem in the first place.

Seriously?  All those brainless platitudes about God working in mysterious ways or placing the greatest trials on those he loves the most and so on solve the problem of evil & suffering?  Is there a brain in there, Dinesh?

Christian Dogma Gone "Deepak Chopra"

It's normal in the course of dealing with creationist dimwits that people are going to reject science and pretty much all facts.  Hell, the entire Republican party is about that.  Even those right-wingers who seem to have some semblance of sanity like Ron Paul throw their hats into the crazy ring on scientific matters.  All the members of the CSE, DI, or whatever fountainhead of creationist stupidity you can imagine all have some fundamentally anti-science bend to them.  Science and intellectual formality are illegal in their minds.  So that's why you always hear these sorts of self-defeating arguments like saying that "science always changes, but the Bible remains the same"...  which in turn only demonstrates that religion is all about never learning from mistakes and simply digging your heels deeper in the mud after the mud has been smeared on your face.

Hinduism and many of its offshoots have always seemed to have had a different approach to taking on scientific discovery.  Rather than taking some new discovery and shouting "that's HERESY!! BURN THE FOUL WRETCH!!!", Hindu apologists always seem to reinterpret some bit of religious literature (or create new literature on the spot) to say that ancient philosophers knew it all the time.  One thing about Hinduism, being what I call "disorganized religion", is that people create random tales all the time that just become accepted as canonical within a localized community, and in essence, everything becomes ancient and traditional because nobody remembers how these legends made their way into the ether of random noise.  As such, it is very easy to just find one or twist its otherwise vague meaning to match what science says and posture in that "I told you so" kind of way.  A good example of this would be how people twist the Dasha Avatara (10 avatars) of Vishnu into something that shows ancient people already knew about evolution...  citing that the order of the avatars vaguely resembles the evolutionary line of humans (fish, aquatic reptile, terrestrial mammal, half-man-half-beast, pygmy/hobbit, followed by a series of homo sapiens)...

Modern scientific knowledge, especially quantum mechanics, happens to get a lot more detailed, and thus a lot more specific, and a lot more difficult to comprehend, which makes it hard to really fit it in so nicely with ancient pseudo-intellectual ramblings.  But then you have guys like Deepak Chopra who found that because it's so difficult to grasp and even serious scientists will tell you its virtually impossible to explain in layman's terms, you can pretty much make anything sound right by taking advantage of the general public's lack of understanding.

Well, it seems Christians are also taking a page out of Chopra's playbook.  Apparently, quantum theory proves everything Jesus ever said...

Are they really that stupid?

About a year ago, I came across an example page out of a "Christian Science" textbook.  To be exact, it was a textbook published by Bob Jones University expressly for use by Christian homeschooling parents.  This particular page scan was actually a margin note/caption about the nature of electricity.  Here, you can see the actual scan from BJU's great and wonderful 4th-grade level "science" textbook.

There are just so many things wrong with that... where do I begin?  Oh yeah!  About the same place I begin with Bill O'Reilly's insane argument that the tides are an unexplained phenomena!

Go get yourself some cancer!

I was recently reminded of an old argument I once came across in a discussion with a Young Earth Creationist.  It came up in the course of a discussion on the League of Reason forums regarding stupid things we've heard from creationists.  All the way from the public humiliation of Michele Bachmann arguing that global warming is fake because CO2 is natural or Bill O'Reilly "proving" that God is real by asserting that sunrise and sunset are things scientists have yet to explain...  to the neighborhood creotard who admonishes that Darwinian evolution can't explain rainbows.

What came up in the thread was someone who mentioned a New-Age Deepak Chopra type arguing with him that cancer is beneficial.  Before you think that I or the person who posted that entry into the thread happen to be straw-manning said quantum-consciousness-woo-woo-nutbar, the actual quote began with the statement in bold that cancer is beneficial.  Here's the original quote from the email from one ZelatorUK --

Cancer is beneficial, if we did not have cancer we would not live as long. When telomeres run out cells have 2 choices, suicide or bypass the procees and get immortality (Cancer). If all the cells chose suicide there would be a massive hole and chain reaction because other nearby cells would have to reproduce faster and end up losing a lot of lifespan. Do some research, cancer is a natural process designed to prolong the survival of the system, sometimes it looks like its bad.

The person who received that was apparently attempting to actually teach the zealot a thing or two about genetics, mutations, etc. and got this little gem in the middle of a longer response.  The nature of our New Age-y woo-woo believer, though, was to connect that Deepak Chopra idea of consciousness being intrinsic in every cell in our bodies, and somehow that includes cancerous tissue which is apparently conscious and makes the "intelligent" decision to become cancer.  That's a completely different tack to it than what I had come across, but in response, I mentioned my experience with a Young Earth Creationist who argued about cancer being a good thing.

If only Ancient China was a Christian Nation

It isn't often that I look through WorldNet Daily, since reading it probably lowers your IQ by a few points each time.  This time, I ran across it for its review of the film, Kung Fu Panda 2.  Being one of the crew members, I can't help but be curious.  Being an atheist, anti-theist, and someone who knows the kinds of immeasurably concentrated stupidity that WND cannot help but spew out, being the fountainhead of creationist crockery that they are...  I really can't help but be curious how they're going to play this one.

For a few sentences, I thought I might be disappointed, as it started to look like a serious movie review.  The reviewer, Drew Zahn, offered a very valid criticism of the film in that the Furious Five's role is still relatively small (at least Jackie Chan got to speak a little this time), with Po and Tigress taking control of the show.  He also offers praise of the visuals, the humor, and the typical feel-good ending that all family-friendly films apparently must have.

Then came this little gem in the segueway of his review (emphasis added) --

The movie's messages likewise offer promise, but stray from the truth down some heavily New Age paths.

Oh, boy...  the truth...  and here we go.

Grown-ups can't be healed

Just over a week ago, I was sitting down at a cafe noshing on a tabouleh salad and at a table behind me, there was a guy I wanted to murder.  Okay, I'll rephrase that -- there was a guy at a table behind me who was preaching to his compatriots that he'd discovered that The Scripture^TM has healing powers.  Oh, the many mortifyingly moronic manifestations of mindlessness I did hear.  (Why yes, I do have a fondness for alliteration!)

Among the most fun of them was when he draw a parallel between the power of the Holy Spirit and the Marvel Comics character, Wolverine.  I later discovered that this man apparently believed that the Wolverine character was based on a real person who had historically been mistaken to be Bigfoot (but was in fact Hugh Jackman's father?), but more on that later.  The basic thesis this guy was pushing was that there's apparently some mystical energy intrinsic in the Word of God, and that it provides an unexplainable and unknowable power that can physically heal wounds, cure sicknesses, and raise the dead.  I guess he must have been taking lessons from Randy Demain.

Well, at the cafe, I was quiet about it, but a few days ago, I ran into the same fellow again, and this time, he was trying to sell others (myself included) on his claims rather than simply preaching to the choir.  Though I was eating my lunch, I was unable to keep my mouth shut at this point.  I will say, though, that I didn't murder the fellow.  I did better than that -- I ripped him to shreds to the point where he just plain walked away silently realizing he had no hope of getting anywhere.

That was a happy moment.