The Agnoticism/Atheism page at About.com has a decent bit about the constitutional history of the religious tests for public office that we were talking about in the earlier post, Fortunately, we’re smart enough to not want to be the Governor of North Carolina

Check it out: Torcaso v. Watkins (1961): Supreme Court Decisions on Religious Liberties12 k edution loanlink 2 car loan5 home 80 15 loanpayday advance loan cashauto loans americanloan 100 percent homeafrica business loan100 percent loan home Map

In honor of the day, why not read Frank Zindler’s Did Jesus Exist?

Michael Novak, whom you should despise for his politics alone, has a Xmas linked anti-atheist screed in the National Review (which you should despise for its politics alone) that exemplifies the bullshit of the right-wing pseudo-intellectual Xian. From his State of the Faith, we get things like this (in reference to uber-atheist Richard Dawkins):

A nice irony is this: Whereas Christianity (and Judaism) can give atheists a dignified place within their own theory of religious liberty, it seems quite difficult for atheists such as Dawkins to assign religious people any place in their own theory other than the loony bin. For Jews and Christians, freedom is so dear to the Creator that He allows free human beings to turn away from him, to reject the granting even of His existence, and to scorn Him and His works. In their refusal of His friendship, He vindicates His love of liberty. Thus, atheists too give witness to His glory.

Of course, he calls on his follows to kill them for their blasphemy, and tortures them for enternity after death for this turning away. That’s the “dignified place” we get. Again, the theme recurs: We’re the bad guys because we say they’re wrong and use arguments — and a little ridicule, sometimes — to get them to see it (even though most of us support strongly their right to be wrong as long as they don’t inflict their dogma on us or our children); they’re the good guys because they love God, support our right to turn away from God (at the cost of death at the hands of the pious and eternal torture at the hand of God), and don’t make fun of our views (OK, maybe some of them do make fun.) We inflict on them: Argument and a little making fun. They on us: Death and torture. You keep score.

Also, he does one of your standard “bad faith” attacks on rationalists.

Time and again in history, reason has proved to be inadequate to its own defense. Most people most of the time live by passion, sentiment, custom, emotion — many such guides influence them — but few live purely by reason. Even famous philosophers of very high scientific standards have insisted that they did not choose their wives or guide their loves by scientific reason. Reason is but a thin sliver to build a civilization upon.

Well, OK then. Because “pure reason” is not the sole embraced motivation for my actions, my holding reason as the standard of belief is obviously in bad faith. Kind of like “You have no objective reason for preferring chocolate over vanilla; therefore, you cannot hold to rationality as your reason for believing that 5 x 7 is 35 rather than 36.5″.

And another, before I stop ranting:

And the situation is far worse than that. The scientist qua scientist typically writes that the universe was formed by chance. At this starting point, then, there is a fundamental irrationality at the heart of science. There is a superstructure of towering reasonings, but based upon an absurdity — in the strict sense, an utter absence of discernible reason, a surd at the root of the matter. The thorough cultivation of science alone as a philosophy of life, therefore, normally ends as Nietzsche sadly announced, that, in our civilization, it already had: in nihilism.

So, the implicit inference here would seem to be “Science recognizes that there are no anthropomorphic “reasons” for some aspects of the world (like, say, the exact expansion rate of the big bang, or the exact distribution of cosmic ray bombardment of the young Earth); therefore, science leads to nihilism — i.e., the denial of all value.” Now how exactly is it that the randomness of some features of the world leads, by itself, to the conclusion that (for example) it’s not better to love and care for my son than it is to poke his eyes out with a hot fireplace poker, just to hear them sizzle? Why isn’t this just some stupid inference of the form “If the origins of X are partially random, none of X’s properties can be more valuable than others”?

And one more, for the road: Why does anybody think this shit is intellectually respectable?

A week ago, Saddam Hussein was captured. I’m no fan of W or his war on Iraq, but I don’t dispute that the “Butcher of Baghdad” is a really really bad guy — so bad that the way in which W’s daddy and Reagan cozied up to him in the 80’s just because he was anti-Iran is really obscene. But that’s a different rant. For now, the news is that this nasty man has been caught, and now they’re torturing — er, interrogating him to find those elusive (or is it illusory?) WMDs. So, do we rejoice, or not? We turn to the scriptures for guidance. Take your pick; is it

The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. (Psalms 58:10)

Or, maybe it’s

Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth. (Proverbs 24:17)

Geez, that would be a, whaddya callit, a contradiction. Oh well; maybe He just forgot what He’d said earlier. Or changed His mind. Or was distracted by something more important. Or was just fucking with our heads.

So, I kept seeing these references to a Harris Poll that said 79% of Americans believe in God. Now, the last Harris Poll I saw (The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans — February 2003) had it at 90%, and Gallup (with their conservative bent) puts it at 94%. So this number seemed, sad to say, too low. But sure enough, here it is. The Harris Poll #59, October 15, 2003, says “This survey found that 79% of Americans believe there is a God, and that 66% are absolutely certain this is true. Only 9% do not believe in God, while a further 12% are not sure.” But even that “only 9% do not believe” is pretty misleading, because 9% turns out to be the number who believe that there is no God; surely that other 12% who neither believe nor disbelieve (you know, the agnostics) do not believe in God.

So, when you look at the actual questions asked, what you get is this: 79% say they “believe in God” (made of of the 66% who say they’re “absolutely certain that there is a God”, and the 12% who say they’re “somewhat certain that there is a God”. 9% say they “believe there is no God” (made up of the 4% who say they’re “absolutely certain that there is no God”, and the 5% who say they’re “somewhat certain that there is no God”). And then, there’s the 12% who say they’re “not sure whether or not there is a God”.

A few comments about all this:

(a) This surely makes clear that if the only options given are “believe in God or not”, essentially all those who are actually agnostic will say “believe” (I think the reasons for that aren’t hard to understand), and the only ones who will say “don’t believe” given only those options are the 9% or so who would also say they “believe that there is no God”. After all, in Harris’ own poll from only 8 months earlier you get 90% “yes” if you ask “Please indicate for each one if you believe in it, or not” and then give “God”. (Or, maybe belief declined from 90% to 79% in those 8 months. Now that would rock.)

(b) Given that fact, it’s clearly just an outright lie on the part of the pollsters to ask that question and report as fact that 90% (94% in Gallup’s version) “believe in God” — as Harris’ own Febrary 2003 article does (e.g., “The 90% of adults who believe in God include 93% of women, 96% of African-Americans and 93% of Republicans but only 86% of men, 85% of those with postgraduate degrees, and 87% of political independents”). It’s like finding that 40% of people think that Michael Jackson is a child molester, and concluding that 60% think he isn’t, when you know damn well that 35% don’t feel they know whether is he or not. (Personally, I have no idea what further evidence they need, but that’s just me.)

(c) Things aren’t quite as dismal as we thought, but the willingness of the pollsters to effectively lie over long periods of time about levels of belief suggests just how strong the impulse to create an illusion of near-unanimity of theistic belief is — thus supporting the continuing and ongoing attempt to utterly marginalize those of us outside that mainstream.

In what has been said to clearly be the most ignorant philosophy EVER, a Philadelphia woman named Donkers (seriously) was pulled over for driving while breast feeding her child, talking on the phone, and taking notes from her husband, who continued to give her instructions despite the efforts of local police to successfully pull the woman over.

The woman belongs to the patently insane group of First Christian Fellowship of Eternal Sovereignty, which defeats all attempts at a rational explanation of their beliefs by spouting various and sundry early American documents and speeches. One of their tenets is that the man is the head of the house and his wife obeys every one of his whims, even when said whim is stupid, dangerous, and illegal.

Donkers seemed bewildered when pulled over by police and wanted them to tell her how her actions were wrong. “I have learned the the liberating principles of individual responsibilities under God,” Donkers spouted from rote memory, “and I am confident that my instructions from my husband were correct and proper in every way.” Donkers made this statement from underneath a fitted sheet from behind her front door so as to appear properly modest and chaste.

Donkers’ public defender said he’d be asking for leniency, as his client was clearly one taco short of a combination platter.

W the Burning Shrub says in his interview last night on ABC News/Primetime that judicial rulings (like the recent one in Massachusetts) “undermine the sanctity of marriage”; and for this reason, they could make it necessary to enact a constitutional amendment to codify marriage as the union of a man and a woman. “If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman, codify that,” Bush told ABC’s Diane Sawyer (Bush would back constitutional ban on same-sex marriage). But he also said it would be the position of his administration that “whatever legal arrangements people want to make, they’re allowed to make, so long as it’s embraced by the state.” That is, that individual states should not be prohibited from allowing and embracing same-sex civil unions.

So, civil unions which have all the legal status of marriage are OK if the states want them, but we should amend the constitution to keep them from being called “marriage” and thereby “undermining the sanctity of marriage”. That is, we should amend the constitution, not to provide legal protections, extend rights, protect the nation and its citizens, or increase liberty and justice, but to preserve the “sanctity” of something — even though that would have no actual practical or legal consequence.

You know, when “sanctity” is a reason for a constitutional amendment, its hard to see how you can even pretend you aren’t trying to have a theocracy.

A friend and I were talking about the horrors of Passover recently, so I thought it was a good time to mention God’s well-known technique or placing pressure on a leader (Pharaoh) to get him to do something: Kill a child from every family! Y’all know the story; here’s Exodus 11-12:

[11:1 ] And the LORD said unto Moses, Yet will I bring one plague more upon Pharaoh, and upon Egypt; afterwards he will let you go hence: when he shall let you go, he shall surely thrust you out hence altogether… [11:4] And Moses said, Thus saith the LORD, About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt: [11:5] And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts… [12:29] And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. [12:30] And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.

Now is that doesn’t deserve U.N. condemnation, what does?