waagnfnp

By James Killus

I cried because I had no shoes,
’till I met a man who had no feet.
So I said, ‘You got any shoes you’re not using’?

– Steven Wright.

My last summer at RPI (Rensselear Polytechnic Institute), when I was putting some finishing touches on my Master’s Project, I had a roommate named Ed Kulis. This isn’t going to be a “funny name” essay, though I acknowledge the potential..

I had a pretty good apartment down on 10th St., close enough to campus to walk if I wanted, far enough that it wasn’t embarrassing to drive. I’d had a couple of other roommates while there, but there were also several stretches where I lived alone. One of the nice things about the place was that it was cheap enough that I could do that.

Anyway, Ed always drove. The first thing I ever noticed about him was that he walked funny. A short while into our acquaintance, when we were walking across a parking lot, having just climbed some stairs, I asked “What’s wrong with your legs?”

“What legs?” he replied, and grinned a little.

Several years earlier, Ed’s car had broken down on the Sawmill Parkway, just north of New York City. It was a VW, engine in back, and while he was checking the engine, a truck hit him. He woke up several days later in the hospital, minus much of his legs. One ended mid thigh, the other had a bit left below the knee. His “funny walk” was nigh onto a miracle of rehabilitation therapy and athletic level control of his prostheses.

The whorehouse Madame answers the door and at first doesn’t see anybody. Then she looks down a bit and sees a guy in a motorized wheelchair. He’s a quadruple amputee, no arms, no legs.

“Don’t just stand there,” he says. “Let me in.”

“But you’re a quadruple amputee,” she blurts out.

“I rang the damn bell, didn’t I?” he replies.
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We have all heard of the famous Monty Hall problem, and only the most stubborn
still disbelieve the solution - you gotta switch!

In this spirit, here’s another one. Let’s say you have a choice of two envelopes containing money, one of them twice as much as the other. You are not, however, told how much money. You select one envelope; a person opens the envelope you chose and gives you the opportunity to change your choice to the other envelope. What should you do? Is there a paradox here, and if so, how is it resolved?

We accept all answers - mathematical, poetic, political,…

Also, this is an Open Thread.

By Dr. Free-Ride

Before I have a go at addressing some of the comments from the original post, I need to express my gratitude (and frankly, my amazement) at the quantity and quality of those comments. Long live civilized discourse in cyberspace!

Questions and comments that can be answered briefly, answered briefly.

1. In comment 69, Janus said:
“I have never read anything by a theistic scientist who understands the scientific method so well.”

I never said I was theistic. And, while I was trained as a physical chemist, I am not a working scientist. I am currently working as a philosopher of science — which is to say, understanding the scientific method is part of my job.

2. I am not claiming that atheists don’t take a lot of crap in the U.S. at this moment in history. They do. Nor am I claiming that “believers” are persecuted in the halls of science. To the best of my knowledge, they are not.

My initial post wasn’t trying to establish a point about current power relations in American society at large, nor in the community of science in the U.S. Rather, it sought to establish that proper use of scientific methodology to answer scientific questions need not keep a scientist from holding certain beliefs that aren’t certified as knowledge by the scientific method.

3. Hank Fox, in comment 8:
“The generosity you allow religious, faith-based, subjective believers is not shared by the other team. AND … all of this takes place against a political backdrop — a statistical field in which, no matter the eventual real-world benefits and results of the two mindsets, NUMBERS of believers on both sides matter.”

I agree that, in the current political landscape in the U.S., religion has an unfair advantage and appealing to folks on the basis of reasoned arguments is generally not a winning strategy. This depresses me like you would not believe. (Lately, I have this hunch that the real reason Socrates drank the hemlock was that he was fed up with folks who should have been susceptible to reasoned arguments but stubbornly resisted them.) However, I think it would be unfair to cast all the “faithful” as enemies of reason. (The Jesuits who trained my dad, for example, were huge fans of reasoned arguments.)
Even if the “faithful” fight dirty, I personally am not ready to say that scientists and science fans should sink into the mud as well. To my mind, intellectual honesty and fighting a clean fight go hand in hand. Then again, there’s probably a reason that the whole “philosopher kings” idea never caught on, so don’t let me stop you from formulating your own political strategy.

4. Several commenters raise the issue that various flavors of religious belief involve a deity who intervenes upon the material world from time to time. Religious beliefs of this sort would seem to have an empirical content that might render them testable using scientific methodology, thus making them eligible to be supported or undermined as “knowledge”.

I purposely avoided using any beliefs of this sort as examples in the original post because I agree that there’s a serious challenge in maintaining these kinds of beliefs while still embracing scientific methodology. But this is not the only sort of belief to which the hard core scientific-method camp objects. (And, there are people who identify themselves as believing in a deity who don’t believe in an intervening deity.)

5. In response to the fine points raised by Aloysius (comment 42ff.), I won’t make any further claims about David Bowie’s best album. While I have strong opinions on this matter, it’s really not my area of expertise.

The issues that require longer responses:

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First, the update: Dr. Free Ride’s much anticipated follow-up to this extremely popular post will be arriving here tomorrow. Don’t miss it!

And now, the Thank-You’s:
The WAAGNFNP would like to thank Blue Gal and all the co-sponsors and organizers of Blog Against Theocracy Week(end). You worked your asses off to make it all possible, and it was a huge success. Thanks for bringing so many people, both religious and not, together to talk, sound the alarm, and share ideas about getting active before it’s too late. Here’s a link to the blogswarm participants. Lots of good reading in there, so check it out.

It is with great pride and an overflowing heart that I proclaim the WAAGNFNP made a truly outstanding showing for Blog Against Theocracy Week. From Friday -Monday, we had four tremendous posts offering unique and insightful angles on both the threat growing theocratic influence poses to our democracy, as well as reasons to be optimistic for the future. For those of you who have not had a chance to read these fine posts (and the extremely thoughtful discussion in the comments - a staple of this nascent community blog which is quickly making it a “must read”), please take the time to do so. Just scroll on down. You’ll be glad you did.

We actually received a total of six BAT Week contributions, but we’ll save those last two for future posting because the spectre of theocracy and the importance of keeping the church and state separate are always timely topics.

So a huge, no, a GIANT thank you to all our BAT Week contributors and commenters. Surely Gojira is smiling upon us all.

In honor of our fine BAT Week posts, I ask the following questions:
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[A WAAGNFNP Special - Blog Against Theocracy Week: Expanded Edition!]

In the United Sates the policy of openly worshipping Undergod in public schools has a long and troubling history.

Oh, of course for the politicians this is a red meat issue, presumed to stir the deepest feelings of the fervid masses of believers and set them marching in droves with their pitchforks and staves and torches down to the nearest polling booth at election time to give a big boost up to the candidate most loudly trumpeting the right, —no, the solemn duty — of each and every otherwise ignorant child to voice allegiance to both the nation and to Undergod in the self-same breath on a daily basis as a regular part of the curriculum.

Only a few years back one tike’s father, appalled by the insistent reference to said deity his innocent child was being subjected to by the standard school pledge of allegiance, won a preliminary judgement in Federal Court that Undergod be stricken from the pledge, and sparked a most curious and heated uproar, as I recall.

Purely out of comity I rarely refer in public to the disturbing tenets of my own so-called “religious” beliefs, and even more rarely do I take advantage of the opportunity so often presented in this day and age to join in the heated discussion of others’. However, as the contentions surrounding Undergod don’t seem likely to dissipate soon, and as in the midst of even the most fractious debate a moderating word must eventually be spoken, I offer up my view on this matter for whatever calming effect it may provide.

The famous First Commandment of that well-known book, The Bible, hallows an insult, the ordinal, founding insult required of all the initiates of all the bewildering variety of groups claiming to adhere to that book’s strictures in some sense or other, an insult offered up as the core necessary and sufficient first nugget of the testament of true faith, pithily given in one exclusionary statement: I spurn your god. Oh, do I ever. Words to that effect, you see.

To my mind this is brisk and direct and useful in establishing the groundrules for further religious conversation, and I have no qualms at all following at least this far along the proposed path of proper religion sketched out there by the Bible. I spurn your god in a most thoroughgoing and adamantine way, — I do. Your god is as nothing to me, I swear, and I’m happy to acknowledge we’re on the same page as far as this goes. But all this pledging faith to Undergod in schools? A step too far, is what I’m saying. I won’t go there.

Blog for Religious Freedom graphic by Liz.

By Frank L. Cocozzelli

“Give me their names!” Demanded Bill Donohue, honcho of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, when the artist Cosimo Cavallaro stated during a TV interview that two priests wanted to display his statue, Chocolate Jesus.

The confrontation took place during a recent edition of Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN. While Cavallaro remained dignified, Donohue was bombastic: “You’re lucky I’m not as mean [as the Taliban], because you might lose more than your head” he declared, displaying his usual Un-Christian scowl..

Donohue, if nothing else, is consistent, having once said, that bringing back the Inquisition “… is awfully tempting.”

But Cavallaro was wise to Donohue. He stood his ground — and refused to name names. He defended his right to express his beliefs according to his own conscience, free of coercion and called the Catholic League president the bully that he truly is.

It seems that Donohue and his Catholic League cannot handle the supposition that a Catholic artist would express his ideal of Jesus in a manner very different from his own. Why? Because Cavallaro had the nerve to cast Jesus in chocolate, crucified in the nude (as the Romans actually carried out such executions). Another Bill Donohue dust-up that is designed more to create anger and hatred for the freedom of expression rather than to further an ethic of self-discipline, charity and tolerance that signifies Catholicism at its finest, just as its Founder meant it to be. The self-styled Grand Inquisitor, once again, failing to see the forest for the trees.

“Give me their names. ”

These are chilling words that have echoed throughout history. It is the demand of agents of authoritarianism. Embedded within its use is the pernicious offer of “perhaps I’ll go easier on you if you give me someone more important for me to destroy.”

In our own recent American experience Senator Joe McCarthy demanded the same of witnesses who appeared before his Senate Committee on Government Operations that he chaired; as did members of the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). We know what happened to some of those whose names were given; blacklisting, bankruptcy, family break-up and even suicide. Names were demanded for the purpose of instilling fear and stifling dissent.

We can easily imagine what Bill Donohue would do with the names of those two priests. Being the bully that is, he would most likely give their names over to Church hierarchy-perhaps Cardinal Egan or even to my own faith’s version of HUAC, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in Rome. In case you didn’t know, the CDF’s former name was The Office of the Inquisition and was headed by the former Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

If Cavallaro had given the names of two priests, Donohue would have made their lives hell. After all, that is what bullies drunk on power do to others less powerful. Sadly, Donohue has more and more friends in the Vatican who think like him; men who will stifle anything that threatens their narrow interpretation of faith.

The truth is that their Catholicism lacks confidence. They fear new ideas and different forms of expression. And because of its own self-constricting nature, their Catholicism demands the need to control the freedom of thought that exists within the surrounding secular society. What the Catholic League and its ultra-orthodox Pharisees offer is not spiritual hope, but a faith of anxiety. It is an aspiration of the church and state as one acting as the gatekeeper to salvation but attained at the cost of both government and Catholicism defiled.

In order to carry out his increasingly theocratic agenda, Donohue cynically uses his faith as a prop to undermine liberalism. He abandons coolly reasoned discussion in favor a hysterically exaggerated accusations of anti-Catholicism; a technique designed to push the emotional buttons of faction-all while often ignoring real expressions of anti-Catholic bigotry of his fellow Religious Right provocateurs.

But as history has shown, the inflexible often become the victims of their own set ways. Such religion crumbles from its own inability to foster agreement and cooperation. Corruption is often hidden in the name of the image of sanctity. As we have witnessed, reasoned dissent naturally arises. Perhaps we will even soon see the Catholic will be the Joseph N. Welch to Donohue’s Joe McCarthy. Welsh, a hero of American democracy stood up to McCarthy–who was also demanding names– saying in the infamous Senate Army-McCarthy hearings:

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

We now have the example of an artist standing-up to the bully on national television. I hope it will give others the nerve to do the same.

Oh, and if Donohue fails to get Cosimo Cavallaro to give up the names of the priests who wanted to display his Chocolate Jesus, don’t feel sorry for him–he can always wage his culture war on those candy companies that sell chocolate crosses around this time of the year.

Frank L. Cocozzelli is a director with the Institute for Progressive Christianity and writes a weekly column at Talk to Action concerning both Liberalism and the Catholic Right. This article originally appeared Talk to Action.

Thanks to Liz for this graphic.

For more than a decade, I have been a proponent, member, supporter, contributor, advocate, and activist for various groups including MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), and CCLE (Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics). At the core of my participation and activities has been my deeply held conviction that human beings share one absolute and essential core liberty: the freedom to think for themselves. Enlightenment philosophers, the “Founding Fathers” of the US, hell even Maslow—all recognized and acknowledged that the one constant in the expression of all human rights and liberties is cognitive freedom.

Among the various historical attacks upon cognitive liberty has been the repression of, and coercive violence against, freethinking by religious authorities. If the Spanish Inquisition doesn’t pop into your head, or the Taliban, then I suppose you are blissfully unaware of exemplars of these sorts of perpetrations and crimes against humanity. Religious leaders in the United States in the latter half of the 1800’s were able to successfully lobby Congress to pass laws prohibiting American Indians from celebrating and participating in their own religious activities. And so it goes on, and on.

Though I am not intentionally channeling Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (both for whom I have deep respect), I propose that we do a grave injustice to the minds of our forthcoming seven generations when we allow, indeed insist, that religious leaders in the US demand that they be free to inculcate their theocratic beliefs in the minds of the children.

Hidden in the beauties of Babylon
The civilized behavioral notoriety
The more evil the empire
The more paranoid the society
Building to the new world order
We’re expected to carry the stone

Emperors and the feeding Class
Human beings being used up fast
The miners keep on mining
Intelligence is the mother-load
Imagination as an energy source
In this predators way of dining

Defining how and what we think
As we’re led to the way to believe
Conditioned reaction
We call thought
Our reality rides
In how we perceive

In the ways of being lost and alone
Who runs from their doubt and fear
In the mask of everything’s normal
Who’s not feeling or seeing too clear

Could be we’re being programmed
Anyway our spirit bleeds
All over our lives.
Our lives become fuel
For predator needs

Hidden in the beauties of Babylon
The civilized behavioral notoriety
The more evil the empire
The more paranoid the society

This John Trudell poem is my daily reminder that we cannot, must not, continue to allow our children’s minds to be mined for power and energy, especially by religions. It is the propagation and perpetuation of sectarian religious ideologies and creeds that are being mined from the minds of our nation’s children. They are fodder in the future battles of theocratically-driven agents whose sole duty and purpose is to expand their congregational flocks to control the destiny and future of the planet. Convert the children and they will become the soldiers of the future wars, guided not by service to their inalienable rights, but rather by their sworn allegiance to religious authority.

Do I really need to mention the Academy Award nominee documentary: JESUS CAMP? Good lordy, the promo enough should freak you out:

At a summer camp for Evangelical Christians, children have their faith reinforced and their ideology honed by the camp’s founder, Becky Fischer, whose stated objective is to “take back America for Christ.” Under Fischer’s tutelage, the children speak in tongues and pray for the appointment of pro-life Supreme Court justices.

This is just one particularly vulgar and obscene perversity in the assault on the minds of the children. It is not, unfortunately, an isolated case. Legal teams encourage religiously misguided youth to stage actions to establish claims against local and regional governmental agencies, particularly schools, hoping to erect protocols and precedents reinforcing the theocratic intentionality. Pastors and corporate ministers shout from their pulpits (bully ones on broadcast and cable networks) inflaming the faithful to push their children towards belief in some rapturous salvation, thereby increasing the willingness of the children to commit acts of violence and hideously-vile intolerance.

The children are being mined. We are allowing these sub-humans to drill into their minds and extract political, social, and economic power from them. And as with any other mining process, we create the waste and tailings. Children intentionally left behind, labeled with various syndromes and disorders simply because they refuse to be drilled to their spiritual and psychological cores by zealots bent on accumulation of power and wealth. I am pretty sure I read once that that guy Jesus said something about protecting and keeping from harm the children. Well his acolytes are doing a really terrible job at that.

By jimmyraybob

The Grand Canyon of the Colorado is recognized as one of the greatest wonders of the natural world, breathtaking in its incredible splendor as seen from the rim, and at river level. It is not just an icon of beauty, however, it is a solemn witness to the mighty power of God … the beautiful rock strata of the Canyon, with their evidence of deposition under widespread waters, speak of His world-convulsing judgment at the time of the great Flood. Similarly, the mile-deep canyon itself, which could never have been carved out by the waters of the present river, tells of a time when a great damned up lake full of water from the flood suddenly broke and a mighty hydraulic monster roared down toward the sea, digging deeply path it had chosen along the way.

Tom Vail in Grand Canyon, a Different Story (2003)

Thus begins a book about a new myth about an old myth; a book that lays claim to one of the greatest geological marvels and open air textbooks in the world. It’s a book of creative and fanciful musings - at best a hypothesis - presented to fit a creation myth as old as mankind (e.g., Epic of Gilgamesh, Genesis). But it’s more; it’s become a textbook in the science curriculum of the fundamentalist Christian universities and colleges. It’s science – devoid of the encumbrance of the methodology of science – for a new Theocracy.

A view of the Canyon from Guano Point, East Grand Canyon, Hualapai Nation, AZ.

***********************

Dateline STL (March 28, 2007): I have returned from my Ministry of Geology and Glitter (MOGG) junket to the wilds of the American Southwest and would like to thank our glorious Minister of Justice for extending a gracious invitation to share the results of my fact-finding mission with the Party. First of all, I have to post a disclaimer: In no way shape or form has Jack Abramoff influenced or subsidized any MOGG activities. Second of all, I am pleased to report to the membership that the state of the Southwest is good.

The MOGG entourage first encampment was an abandoned ranch near St. Johns, AZ., complete with Mesozoic Era, late Triassic Period Chinle Formation outcrop décor…

laundry room,

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ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE MINISTRY OF OFFENSE AND DEFENSE

Comrades, Blog Against Theocracy week with the WAAGNFNP starts tomorrow.

As speaker of the More Radical than the Radical Caucus Caucus, I argued strenuously that the Party should endorse the slogan After Theocracy, Revolution! - but my motion was voted down in the Central Committee. This humble blog will therefore be turned over to those who blog against theocracy for now; we expect all loyal Party members to contribute.

Please note the dates: April 6-8. The WAAGNFNP blog will have fresh, vibrant, gripping new posts all weekend long in support of BAT Week(end). Those of you in the habit of doing strange and bizarre things on the weekend that, for whatever reason, take you away from your computers, are asked to please adjust your schedules accordingly. (Seriously, we hope you’ll take a little time out to support and acknowledge the efforts of our fine, hard-working contributors).

In the meantime, this is an OPEN THREAD for all your ranting, grand-standing, pet issue, shout-out, baseball season-opening, networking, and squirrel-blasting needs.

christian h.
Tribunus Laticlavius, MoOaD.
WAAGNFNP

By Amanda French

From my enormous second-story concrete porch or deck or balcony or
whatever it is (and by enormous I mean twice as big as my apartment’s
living room), I have a great view of squirrels. Lots of squirrels.
Thereare lots of trees near the house, so when I sit out on my second-story
porch (I’m going with “porch”), I’m kind of up in the boughs right
among’em, the squirrels. There’s one methodically tightrope-walking the
telephone line about twenty feet straight in front of my nose and
exactly level with my eyes. There’s two chasing each other in a
skittering helix up and around and down the tree trunk like red stripes
up and around and down an electric barber pole. There’s one eyeing me
worriedly, completely still except for the whipcracking bushy tail.
There’s one triumphantly making the notoriously tough leap from the
thick fallen branch stuck in the tree crotch to the thin branch of the
next tree over. The branch dips and sways as the leaper grabs it and
scurries upward.

I like watching the squirrels, and I feel fairly expert at it by now.
One of the reasons that I like watching them is that I know what
they’re called. Squirrels. They’re called squirrels. They don’t have any other
name that I should be calling them, as far as I know, though I’m sure
there is some Latin term. Maybe biologists call them “American
squirrels” or “gray squirrels” or “brown squirrels” or “common
squirrels” when they’re not using the Latin, but only the pedantic
would call them something like that. They’re called squirrels, and everyone
knows it, and everyone knows exactly what I mean when I say squirrels.
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