NonStampCollector reveals the shocking truth about God's Design

*snerk* "Oh, I love being reminded that I exist!"

It's time to draw the line in the sand: No on Prop. 1!

When we talk about reaching further than our ancestors -- by learning about the universe, pushing ourselves, expanding that "comfortable proscenium of our ancestors" -- it isn't just a matter of realizing that the universe is bigger, and older, and weirder, than anything humans could've imagined. The notion encompasses other ideas as well -- pushing ourselves ethically, for instance. One of the most brilliant parts of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion was the chapter on how we don't get our morals from the Bible. Ethics and morals, instead, have been a topic of constant discussion and exploration and progress. The Moral Zeitgeist, as he puts it, has grown over time. A progressive thinker of the 19th century, like Darwin, held many ideas that we find outrageous today -- on race, on gender, you name it.

As for the ancients, they were in most respects quite barbaric by our standards. The cosmopolitan Romans, for all their grandeur and advances, engaged in cruelties that shock us today. And the ancient Hebrews, whether in earlier times or in the time of Christ? Yeah. Barbarians is quite a good term for them. So I'm always a bit concerned with folks that try to claim their ethics are based in the Bible. Or try to make modern ethics more so. It seems like stepping backwards to me.

Case in point:  gay marriage. Modern ethics is actively engaged in an expansion here, right down to expanding the meaning of the word "marriage" beyond traditional usages. Because that is the great journey that we take in ethics when we dare. In Renaissance times, there were spirited debates on whether the natives of the New World were even people. We justifiably look at those views now as being absurd, and indeed evil. But the fight was fought, and slowly the ideas and definitions changed. We have advanced enough in our ethics that the very idea that people would even ask such questions amazes us. Likewise, I believe there will be a time when people will look at the debate over homosexuality, and rights for homosexuality, as equally absurd. Heck, many of us already do, and honestly have trouble even understanding why people get so worked up about it. But they do get worked up about it, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

In the U.S., we will see the latest round in the fight this fall, in Maine, when

Image via Wikipedia

Proposition 1 goes before the voters. Prop. 1 will, if passed, override the Maine legislature's legalization of gay marriage. The Religious Right really, really wants to win this one, because it would be another brutal defeat for progressive forces.

The fight for gay rights has slowly been gaining steam of the last ten years. This fall, we have one of those points in history that could decide a lot of the future course of the fight. Greta Christina has an excellent post on why this one is so important. Go read, then get active. It's time to take the fight to the bastards. It's time to make the big push to expand our ethical proscenium just a little more. Let us fight this one so that the generations following us will be utterly and completely perplexed by how anyone could have questioned gay rights. Let's push humanity forward just a little bit more. Let's win Maine, and then the nation.

Thomas Paine pwns organized religion, part 2: Prophecy

Before the Great Death Plague '09 hit me, you may recall that I had a post on Thomas Paine's discussion of the three tools that organized religion uses to bamboozle people: Mystery, Miracles and Prophecy. Mystery he dispensed with quick contempt; Miracles he spent a bit more time on. He finishes his discussion with the notion of Prophecy.

Paine basically has two points to make about Prophecy:

First, if God did choose to communicate future events to chosen "prophets," one would expect that those communications would be a lot clearer than the ones we see in the Bible. Instead of clarity, we have confusion; instead of easily comprehensible meaning, we have obscure statements that can be twisted to fit most anything. "It is conceiving very irreverently of the Almighty," Paine says, "to suppose he would deal in this jesting manner with mankind; yet all the things called prophecies in the book called the Bible come under this description."

But secondly, and more devastatingly, Paine simply notes this:  it ain't no never mind, kids. It's exactly the same situation as with Miracles -- say you get a Prophecy from God. Fine. How do the rest of us know you did? We don't. We can't. We can't tell if you are lying, or telling the truth. Imagine if Isiah, say, was in fact given important facts about the life of Jesus -- none of the people around him would have any ability to tell whether he was telling the truth or not, because those events lay far in the future. And even if he were to speak of things in the near future and get them right, how do we know he did so because God spoke to him? We can't. He could be a savvy observer of events; he could've guessed and gotten lucky. He could've read something from a savvy observer. Prophecy is personal experience, and thus can't be considered in any kind of rational thought process. It's like expecting other people to believe you saw a ghost just because you're sure you did.


What I find most interesting, though, is the attitude that Paine shows in all of this. It's contained in that quote I used above. "It is conceiving very irreverently of the Almighty..." Paine is a believer. He believed in God. He believed God to be powerful, an Beneficent Creator who had showered mankind with gifts. When push comes to shove, Paine's beef is simply this:  Christianity, and indeed all organized religion, spits in the face of God, hacks away at Him until he is a small and puny thing fit to sit in the confines of weak human imagination. A God who would use such tricks as Mystery, Miracle and Prophecy is worse than a clown, and simply not something worthy of worship.

As an atheist, I sympathize with Paine here. My biggest complaint with religion

Image by adamrice via Flickr

has always been just that -- it is so small, so limited, putting up images that don't challenge our small imaginations in any way. It's easy to laugh at people who, say, see Jesus in a tortilla or a dog's butt -- but really, that's pretty much what organized religion does. It creates small, tiny plays, with small, tiny actors, played out on small, tiny stages. The "religious imagination" is so easily pleased! The vaguest statement can be accepted as a stirring Prophecy. The silliest, flimsiest events can be declared a Miracle. And when in doubt, simply declare something to be a Mystery. Paine, as you may recall from the last post, titled this chapter "Of the Means Employed in All Time, and Almost Universally, to Deceive the Peoples." He forgot, perhaps, to note that they are as much the ways that "the Peoples" deceive themselves. This priestly tricks work because people are so willing to let them work.