Children and fools are suffered to speak truth; priests and ministers, as men engaged in politics and advertising, are suffered to speak untruth. Like parents who deceive their children about Santa Clause, the men of God enjoy a dispensation to deceive their folds for their own good. Publicly, the shepherds give every appearance of believing what in conversations with philosophers they claim, of course, not to believe at all.

-Walter Kaufmann, from his introduction to Europe and the Jews

That the so-called ‘New Atheists’ do not waste their time engaging with sophisticated theologians is one of the most common, most pointless objections raised against Dawkins and his fellow nonbelievers. This objection, most often raised by sophisticated theologians, is based on the crucial assumption that there is something to be gained by such engagement. That this assumption is false is so evident that hearing it raised is frankly disenheartening: one imagines an unpopular schoolboy picking fights with bullies just to get a little attention. Or, more fairly, one imagines “West Side Story’s” scrawny Anybodys: all bluster, no muster, but hungry nevertheless for an attentive ear.

PZ Myers reminds us that the Emperor may be the subject of an in-depth biopic from an esteemed and respected fashion publication, but he is still naked. This “Courtier’s Reply” is the heart of any sustained attack on the flagging cult of theology. Theology is done in academic journals that nobody reads, in encyclicals that do nothing but support beliefs and practices that are already in place, and in quiet conversations between theologians outside of churches. No religious people listen unless the theologian errs in his exposition of doctrine, at which point the theologian is useful only as an example of the dangers of reason. In either end, the purposes and doctrines of the churches remain intact. The theologian makes no difference to the church, yet the theologian considers himself the apex of and spokesman for that church.

Superfluous for the believer and irrelevant to the non-believer, certainly, but is theology truly without redeeming content? Yes. The embarrassing role of the theologian is this: defend doctrine at all costs. The theologian can claim to be in the business of truth, and sometimes they even deign to conflate themselves with philosophers since their role is both academic and argument-based. This dishonest equivocation is betrayed by three simple facts. First, theologians rarely (if ever) come to conclusions that genuinely dispute the dogmas laid down by their employers. Second, on the rare occasions when they do end up disputing dogma, churches are not changed, they are simply one theologian less shortly thereafter. And third, the methods of argumentation employed in theological circles are so poor that to call them real philosophy is a slander against the rest of us.

Where there is a mystery to be resolved, such as why God permits so much evil in our universe, their defenses are either deliberately obtuse (Plantinga) or insultingly dissatisfying (Swinburne, et al). Where there is a mystery that cannot be defended even poorly, theologians do not give up doctrine, they simply state it as fact (watch Aquinas and Augustine wrestle with the contradiction of the Trinity and you’ll see what I mean).

For the theologian, it is often enough to simply drop a verse of Scripture and call the matter settled. Most of the rest of the time, theologians retreat to ancient and fallacious proofs, subtly re-brand them, and think themselves victorious when the theistically-biased journals in which they publish refuse to publish skeptical ripostes. To be called a ‘Great Light of the Church,’ Aquinas needed little more than arguments cribbed from Plato, the Bible, and decades of free time. This proud tradition continues to this day, and theologians claim their own value on these grounds.

Theology is irrelevant

We are quiet here without strife and disputes since above all else we honour the privilege of silence which is without peril.

-St.. Gregory

This brings us to one good reason that atheists needn’t bother with theology, which is that theology has no meaningful impact on the beliefs or practices of any religious people. Atheists need not engage theologians any more than they need resolve disputes with Raelians, because like Raelians, theologians worship a god or other highly impersonal abstraction that is completely unfamiliar to any religious person. Jews do not say that they worship “knowledge knowing itself,” they worship a real person with moods and emotions named YHVH. Yet Maimonides earned his stars as the greatest Jewish theologian in history worshiping just such a god. Catholics do not recite the lengthy expositions of Aquinas or Augustine, they say the Apostle’s Creed and they are content with it. Theologians make themselves into heretics in their attempts to make ancient superstitions palatable to modern audiences, and in this sense theologians are nothing more than evangelists of a new religion to undergraduate college students.

Churches trust these evangelists-to-the-educated precisely as far as they can throw them. Church authorities can out of one side of their mouth proclaim the proud intellectual lineage of their church while using the other side to condemn the same intellectuals for “erring” on crucial dogmas. Hans Kung might be of extreme use to the Catholic Church as a prop, a smug demonstration that wise men can fill a pew as well as anyone else, but this doesn’t stop the Church from calling Kung a heretic for his views on condom use and female ordination.

Conversely, a loyal theologian can work his way through an elegant proof for each step of such a Creed, but this is nothing but a dusty curio in the Church’s attic: no one reads the proof, or if someone does, he has gained nothing but the satisfaction that a man with a PhD is as comfortable parroting the Creed back at the priest as he is. No one recites creeds because their truth is demonstrated; people recite creeds because the priests says they should and everyone else in the congregation is doing it. Where religious practice is concerned, the most a theologian can do is give you a very complicated reason for doing what you are doing already.

In this sense religious beliefs are immunized against the influence of theology because such beliefs have had centuries to dispense with heretics. If someone disagrees with a core doctrine, they are not welcome in the church, and it is that simple. Given that this is the case, how could we expect a theologian in the employ of, say, a Catholic college to give us an unbiased argument against Catholic doctrine? We could not expect it, and they do not provide it, because their paychecks depend on their faculties being deployed exclusively in defense of what the believer has already been told for his entire life. If a Catholic theologian did come up with a good objection to the Catholic position on female ordination, we can expect that such a theologian would not get to call himself Catholic for much longer. It is noteworthy that the current Pope’s previous job with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (a modern pseudonym for the Office of the Inquisitions) was to deliver threats of excommunication to such theologians. An exhaustive list of those thusly threatened can be found in the brilliant, anonymous Against Ratzinger.

The Catholic Church serves as an excellent example of the fact that modern religions are institutionally immunized against philosophical discourse. When asked to justify, say, a fundamentalist anti-homosexual dogma, or a dogma against condom use, or female ordination, or that the Eucharist host is literally and substantially the body of Jesus, no Catholic authority gives you an argument. They just tell you the page and paragrap where you can find the dogma spelled out in the Cathechism. The same is true of the vast mythology of any Christian sect: they will either tell you that a belief is good because it is the belief of the elders, or if they are in a sporting mood, they will give you a verse from the Bible. Argument and discussion is not the point, the point is the propagation of tradition. When the tradition itself is called into question, the heretic is appropriately dealt with and the conversation ceases.

Not only are religions thus immune to the kind of discourse that the whiny critics of ‘New Atheism’ demand we have, many strands of religion are explicitly anti-theological. One need only spend a moment in works like Peter Ruckman’s Anti-Intellectual Manifesto or such tracts as “The Chaplain” and “Who Is He?” to realize that good credentials and academic prestige are anathema to these believers. (While Jack Chick is on the board, it would do us well to ask if there are any theologians more widely-read than he is.) The theologian can arrogantly assume a position as a spokesman for his denomination, but the atheist knows as well as the religionist does that the theologian is just blowing smoke.

It is just as evident that theology is irrelevant because nobody reads it. If you took together every book and commentary written in defense of Biblically-adduced doctrines, would they equal even a minute fraction of the sales of the Bible itself? Of course not. People who believe in the Bible do not do so as a point of reason; reasons fall into place to support a pre-existing belief.

But why stop with the Bible? Take every book ever written by Aquinas, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard and any other great lights of Christendom you please. Will their readership ever equal the readership of insultingly simplistic tracts printed by the millions and scattered at random? No. Religions do not spread with elaborate arguments, they spread with simple messages, and in fact an overly complex, overly theological religion is doomed to fail (this is why early Christians had so little difficulty out-competing Gnostics and mystery cults). The theology is an interesting accessory to be taught to an esteemed few after the religious belief is deeply entrenched in a society. It does not cause religious belief, it sustains it virtually no believers, and it never furthers belief.

This is an admission accepted as readily by the theologian. In his God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga makes a furiously rigorous case for the existence of God adduced from an ancient proof, but prefaces this proof with the disheartening maxim that “few who accept theistic belief do so because they find such an argument compelling.” Self-deprecating confessions of this sort abound in theology.

Churches ignore theologians just as plainly as believers do. How many theologians have, with their philosophy hats on, attacked the superstitious worship of relics, or fables about miraculous healings and dancing suns and demonic possessions? Many have, but who listens? Protestant churches will take your tithes at the revival meeting just the same.

Theology is about dishonesty

Although it is quite true that the existence of God is to be believed since it is taught in the sacred Scriptures, and that… the sacred Scriptures are to be believed because they come from God… nevertheless this cannot be submitted to infidels, who would consider that the reasoning proceeded in a circle.

-Rene Descartes

Like all great religious liars, theologians try to claim God for themselves, dismissing critics as targeting not “their” Christianity or “the real” Jesus. The god written about in the works of theology is an alien, an idol, a demiurge meant to satisfy the superstitions of their elders with the fashionable rationalism of their contemporaries. Theologians can toss around Biblical metaphors and tell us about the “Ground-of-all-Being” (Tillich) or the “Being-Itself” (Heidegger) or the “knowledge knowing itself” (Maimonedes) that they worship alone. They can whittle away the God of folk religion to a metaphysical abstraction so slender that it is unrecognizable. In fact, these are the skills at which they excel. Few are better at discrediting organized religion than those who claim to be using rational methods to defend it. This is how the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, a giant of our century second in his academic prestige perhaps only to Niebuhr, can deny the truth of the Bible but still count himself a Christian, or how Rudolf Bultmann called himself the same while denying the very thing that makes Christianity more than a Sparknotes version of Judaism, that is, the eternal damnation of those who fail to accept Jesus.

Theologians like to call themselves members of religions because they are dishonest. For six days a week, they write essays for poorly-circulated academic journals expounding elaborate and nuanced positions on matters of faith, but on Sundays they switch their Philosopher hat for their Religionist hat and say the same creeds everyone else does. Paul Tillich excelled at this: he advocated lying as an esteemed theological enterprise. If the simple folk religionist could be easily assuaged in his doubts, than a dutiful literalism should be encouraged. But if the questioner showed the least intellectual stamina, only then would Tillich share what he really believed and thereby keep the doubting Thomas in the faith by appealing to his intellect. Walter Kaufmann summarizes:

Tillich, however, does not favor the crude method of confronting men with arguments that he himself consdiers bad. Instead he redefines the crucial terms and cultivates a kind of double-speak. Literalists thus feel reconfirmed in their beleifs and are pleased that so erudite a man should share their faith, while the initiated realize that Tillich finds the beliefs shared by most of the famous Christians of the past and by millions of Christians in the present utterly untenable. [Kaufmann, Walter. The Faith of a Heretic,]

Tillich believed that religious belief ought to be dumbed down, if the “questioning power” in a particular believer “is very weak and can be easily answered.” (See Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith. Harper, NY, 1957, Torchbooks. (c)1958. p.32-34) In his academic writing he excoriated simple-minded literalism, but thought it better that the flock be simple-minded literalists than have them exposed to the dangerous complexities of the cult of the theologian. Dishonesty this profound does not merit conversation, and how could atheists engage with such a person if their claims fluctuated with schizophrenic alacrity depending on what kind of believers were eavesdropping?

But don’t think that Tillich is the only one so guilty. This is the way of all theologians; Tillich is worthy only of such attention because his theological co-cultists hold him up so highly. Most theologians are not clergymen, and those that are do not refine their practice based on their philosophical speculations. They toe the party line in public, and in their private speculations they either do away with God entirely (as the atheist does) but use such convoluted language that nobody notices, or else they do all in their power to defend the dogma just in case an authority happens upon their writings. These cases are opposites, but they both support the conclusion: theology is a dishonest practice.

The Protestant theologian William Lane Craig is as good an example. Recognizing the poverty of his arguments, he has set himself to refining the rhetorical style with which he presents the same tired red herrings year after year rather than find new arguments. He is often described as one of the most talented theistic debaters of our time, but this is precisely the point. He can be refuted as often as he likes, as he has been in person and in writing. John Loftus, Richard Carrier, and Bart Ehrman have all refuted the dramatic misrepresentations of Biblical scholarship of which Craig is so fond (such misrepresentations include the howler that most Biblical scholars agree that the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus were historical events); this has not changed his arguments. Nor does it change the arguments of any preacher or evangelist who has met a stumbling-block, and this proud tradition of feeding the same malarkey to different audiences goes all the way back to the Book of Acts, in which Paul is said to have been confounded by Greek sophisticates and then just continued on his merry way with the same message.

Churches are as dishonest as the theologians are; this is why Anselm was touted as a genius for his ontological ‘proof’ of the existence of God, but the first contemporary to refute his argument (a fellow Catholic named Gaunilo) was utterly dismissed and only rediscovered in modern times through the work of skeptics. In this case, the Church was not interested in the truth of the matter about the ontological argument, they were interested in the propagation of doctrine. How can a conversation be had with such a mindset? Atheists cannot engage meaningfully with such institutions because these institutions have spent centuries signalling their dishonesty and their insincerity. The case of Gaunilo is one of thousands; why should we hail John Calvin as an intellectual great while ignoring his cooperation with the Inquisition in disposing of heretics who disagreed with him? Why should we take seriously a Church that coyly dangles the Shroud of Turin in front of us without taking a stance on its authenticity, saying only ‘believers can have their faith strengthened by it whether it is real or not?’

Catholicism is not alone in this regard. The Buddha himself simply dismissed all questions of theology and metaphysics as “questions that tend not toward edification.” The inventor of Protestantism, Martin Luther, went a step further, calling the use of reason to question religious dogma “the Devil’s bride” and “God’s worst enemy.” Luther’s arguments came from scripture alone, and the dogma of Sola Scriptura is one of which his intellectual descendants are the most proud. The circle is thusly established: Scripture provides the answers, and where Scripture is questioned, the faculty being employed is just a tool of Satan so do not even worry about what good sense tells you.

Even Tolstoy, thought to be one of the greatest assets of his type to Christendom until CS Lewis, shrugged off his doubts, coyly remarking that “[w]hat is comprehensible to one may seem obscure to another. But all will certainly agree in what is most important….” And like that, all mystery is gone. As long as the core of the religion is accepted, peripheral anomalies in dogma are inconsequential. This is a common technique of modern apologetics: get people to swallow the message, and doubts about the message will simply solve themselves.

Another common technique is obscurantism. William Lane Craig prides himself on the simplistic, easy-to-understand character of his arguments, yet when asked to solve the ancient Euthyphro Dilemma, he simply bellows in response “God IS goodness!” As if that solved the matter. But oscillating from simplicity into obscure language is helpful because it gives the believer a catchphrase on which to hang his own doubts, and against which to smash the doubts of the skeptics around him. The catchphrase need not make sense. It need not really answer the question. But it is helpful because one can make a creed out of it.

Theology is without substance

In my speeches and sermons that I gave, there were none of the arguments that belong to philosophy; only a demonstration of the power of the Spirit. And I did this so that your faith should not depend on human philosophy but on the power of God.

-Paul, I Corinthians 2:4-5

Whether or not all of the above is enough to dismiss the cult of theology, there is still the crucial assumption that theology has some ultimate substance with which to engage. Even if this substance is presented dishonestly, is without practical impact, and is presented from the obvious bias of “faith seeking understanding” (Aquinas’s motto), we are often told that these intellectual greats have something to contribute that atheists should take seriously.

Paul, father of Christianity, disagrees. He told generations of early Christians that genuine inquiry was insubstantial, and that is how the Patristics and the other early leaders of the Christian religion closed the ears of their congregations to Greek philosophy and other troublingly intelligent doubters. This gave rise to a whole new method of engaging with arguments: ignore them at best, and at worst treat them as dangerous. The Christian crowd that butchered skeptical philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria alive was just following orders from above.

It took until the Middle Ages, when most of the heretics had already disappeared, for Christians to think it okay to engage with the arguments of their enemies. This engagement took a hollow form: parrot a crusty proof from the Greeks or perhaps the Arabs and call it a day. It does not matter how often the traditional ‘proofs’ for the existence of God (ontological, cosmological, teleological, experiential; the proofs are presented so repetitively that they are easily cubbyholed into these simple categories) are refuted by skeptics. The elegant responses by men as diverse as Guanilo, Walter Kaufmann, and John Mackie have never stopped the religious demagogue from thundering about creationism because truthful engagement with arguments is not their business.

Even when great religious men trash the arguments of their co-believers, nobody takes notice. The greatest philosopher in continental history, Immanuel Kant, spends a good deal of his epochal Critique of Pure Reason simply feasting on the traditional proofs for God in ways that have not been satisfactorily refuted since. Yet to this day theologians build careers defending these proofs. The popular Protestant theologian Alvin Plantinga has reformulated the ontological version of these arguments ad nauseum, always in ways that traditional rebuttals are just as successful, and William Lane Craig isn’t going to let go of the cosmological argument no matter what he is told from the religious or the skeptics about its futility. They do not care to make novel or solid arguments, nor can they.

So when the religious critic of atheism demands that we atheists engage with all levels of sophisticated theology, what are they really saying? They are saying that we should copy and paste established refutations in our books and essays to their satisfaction. They are saying that we should waste as much time cribbing from the dead as they do. When one attempts to prove God’s existence from their personal experiences, how many times do we have to point out the inherent unreliability of such experiences? Until the religious person is able to read them? Until the religious person is able to understand them? Until the religious person accepts them? The first step is rarely reached, the second even more rarely, and the third step often makes the headlines (see Charles Templeton) on the rare occasion when it does happen. It is fruitless.

It is fruitless not only because religious believers usually either don’t read or don’t accept the counterarguments, but also because religious believers seem particularly adept at forgetting them. Kai Nielsen explained to William Lane Craig what is wrong with the moral argument for God decades ago, yet Craig continues to use it in his lectures and debates around the world. And why shouldn’t he? He isn’t about honesty, he’s about conversion. And so with his colleagues.

Where theologians attempt to wrestle with evil, things get even uglier. Dawkins famously points out that Richard Swinburne, a celebrated theologian, is fine with the Holocaust because of how bravely it permitted the Jews to act in the face of persecution (which doesn’t matter, because in the theology of Swinburne’s religion they’re all going to hell anyways). JP Moreland’s epic Scaling the Secular City aims to defend God’s existence from skeptical inquiry while dealing with the problem of evil in a single paragraph that concludes unsatisfactorily with “Evil is traceable to the free will of God’s creatures.” The immediate question of why God would value Hitler’s free will over the lives (and, by extension, the free will) of millions of other creatures of God is obvious, and completely unanswered in the whole literature of theology.

When the religious believer cries out for God in times of distress, they do not want Plantinga’s empty assertion that God and evil are merely possibly logically compatible, they want a real answer. And the British bishops who blamed flooding and hurricanes on the sinfulness of the English people or the American televangelists who blamed the attacks of September 11^th on feminists and homosexuals do not provide this answer. When a quarter million innocents are washed away by a tsunami in the southwestern Pacific, the survivors rightfully demand an explanation. They do not get one, they get platitudes. Why should atheists waste time and pages dealing with them when their inadequacy is so painfully obvious?

Theology, like all religious institutions, demands respect where none is earned. Historically they serve only the functions of defending dogma to no one in particular, providing cover for the rare believer who comes to doubt the various absurdities of his faith, and of optimistically regurgitating the failed arguments of previous theologians. There is nothing here with which to engage. There is no novelty among them to treat with new counterarguments.

Show me a proof for the existence of God whose origins are less than five hundred years in the past and perhaps we can talk. Show me where a theologian has genuinely comforted the mother of the massacred or otherwise disposed-of child and I will reconsider. Until then, do not waste my time of the time of others claiming that theology is an accomplishment to be regarded with straight-faced serious argumentation. Quit whining about your obscurity, theologians: it is your own fault. Stop complaining about how you are treated unfairly and start earning the privilege of serious treatment. Until you redeem yourselves from a long, boring, obscure, dirty history of defending dogma, you are not worth the effort. Until you get your churches to stop appealing to magical talismans, supernatural relics, and other folk superstitions, the futility of your writings is apparent. Until you get the religious con-men who refer to you only in the improbable circumstance of the one intelligent doubting believer to stop shouting “but where’d all this stuff come from?” or “but why’s this stuff look so pretty?” or, as Job’s friends were so fond of saying, “your suffering is your fault,” you have not made enough of an impact to warrant our attention. The God you worship is either unfamiliar to religious believers, in which case you are a heretic, or he is completely congruent with established creeds and dogmas, in which case you are irrelevant.

Now that that’s settled, I say we atheists get on with our lives and resume chuckling at the poor schoolboy who smacks us in the shoulder just to get our attention. He is a petty, lonely boy who craves a moment in the sun, nothing more.

There are a few problems that I face with teaching science. First of all the only reason given for teaching anything in science is the state mandated standardized test in science. This is only half the problem. 

The other half is that most science teachers don’t know science themselves. 

These problems compound to getting a batch of students who are basically good kids, whose parents have no idea who Carl Sagan was. Their number one extracurricular activity is usually based in Church (probably because its free). Their only exposure to science is fed to them by the ignorant who don’t give too much of a shit about science themselves and they only do it to appease a test which seeks primarily its own market share. 

My states test is definitely made by a private company, and that private company holds a strict monopoly of the whole educational system. 

What do you do?

Most of the stuff I can think off would border on being either unethical or depressing. 

In spite of writing this highly cathartic anonymous blog I do try to maintain a relatively mainstream professional ethic about teaching. 

I wear my goddamn tie, something which I don’t even have to do. 

I mostly get my paperwork in on time. 

I give my principal the benefit of the doubt. 

But I really feel like my legs are broken on getting these kids to love science. 

And let me be clear, my incentive as a science teacher is to cultivate a lifelong love for science. 

People who love science take good care of the world.

I became a teacher because unscientific, mooshy, subjective thinking dominates the world. I want to teach kids to be driven by reason and critical thinking. 

I became a teacher to give youngsters, especially those who are less likely to succeed academically, an edge in life. 

I have a science degree with a great deal of primary scientific research experience. 

I became a teacher to save the world. 

But so far my first three weeks of being a teacher have consisted of being given too much secretarial work to properly prepare my classes or even grade work. I have to have 12 grades by Monday. Actually, technically they are 3 days late on Monday, but thats when the administration starts paying attention. 

I would love to have my grades. I have been gauging what my kids know from class work and discussions that I can watch, but their independent work is what will really show me what they are getting or not.

I need to spend my time assessing student mastery of what is being taught. 

I need to spend my time designing creative lessons and classroom activities that will maximize my student’s  interest and mastery. 

I really want my kids to succeed. I want them to be smarter than anyone ever expected them to be, I want them to be life long learners and leaders. 

My students are 100% latino, they are what is referred to as a “bilingual” class which means (where I live) that Spanish is the language spoken at home. 

On CNN Lou Dobb’s talks about my kids like them and their parents are pests who should be dragged off into camps for stealing jobs, healthcare, and the education that I am trying to provide. 

My kids are seen as “beaners, greasers, wetbacks,” and “spics.”

I became a teacher to save the world. 

By school district mandates, passed on to me by my state legislation I am required to track, process, maintain and write so much paperwork that I have been working 12 hour days to maintain a mountain of this inane secretarial work. 

I need to figure out how to make sure my kids see the links between critical thinking and science. Logic and math, and math and science. 

I get to go through four years of records and make sure that papers that their parents fill out (or often don’t fill out) are turned in and organized. 

I need to figure out how much math my kids missed as it was not properly emphasized since it was not a required state standardized test in 3rd or 4th grade. 

I get to go to dozens of hours of “development” meetings in which former kindergarden teachers treat me and a room full of adults like kindergardeners and call it “modeling.” In these meetings I am taught to use software so basic, as an experienced behaviorist, I am confident I could teach rats to use it.

I need to have individual time with each of my students so that I can help them iron out their academic weaknesses and come up with engaging strategies that I design with them to maximize their potential. 

Instead I have individual time with ” new teacher liaisons” who eat up time and space so that I can meet some criteria decided in a boardroom somewhere by people who haven’t been in a classroom for a decade. 

I became a teacher to save the world.

There were well over 200 skeptics, and we caused a back-up at the “museum”. Despite the lines, the crowds, and the outright misleading information, people seemed to be having a good time. We were surrounded by people who were of similar ideas and thoughts on science and religion. Ironically, it was here in a place of religion over science that many of us felt as if we belonged. It is no secret that skeptics are a marked minority, for now. Many student and community groups have trouble breaking 50 members, many of whom are never really active. To be immersed in such a large crowd was a shock. Everywhere I looked, I saw the black and white SSA sticker. We didn’t have to make noise or rattle the cage or cause a stink; our mere presence was enough to get the message across loud and clear.

I would like to state that I’m not knocking the work that many like PZ do. Until skeptics are acknowledged as part of society, attention is necessary, even if it’s bad attention. We can’t let people pretend that we aren’t here. This wasn’t the case August 7th. The need to get attention was no longer needed, which left more room to be respectful and polite. I saw many skeptics quiet their snickers and move aside to let the families on vacation look at the exhibits. I know many would say they shouldn’t have to do that. Those people are right. They don’t. But they did. And although that might have meant they missed the chance to try to convert someone, they did something that is by far more important. The skeptics showed respect to the believers. They proved that we aren’t evil, rude, immoral hooligans; they proved that even when we hold the majority we still respect the minority.

PZ Myers is amazing at what he does. He can bring a small news story to the front of the internet is less than a day. Anything posted to his blog is circulated within minutes. His controversies bring attention to the skeptical movement. He even admits he loves causing so much outrage. There is no question that his tactics are needed at this point in time and, unfortunately, for some time to come.

I find it mildly amusing that the “bad cop” of the movement made so many “good cops” simply by visiting some obscure place in Petersburg, Kentucky. Bad attention is better than no attention, and can obviously have positive effects. Just remember that you also need enough good attention to balance it all out.

When i was fifteen i decided to make a leap of faith and became an orthodox Jew. It was a long journey. 3 years later, I woke up in the summer of 06′ somewhere in the heart of Brooklyn, i had a beard that touched the ground, my tefillin (Jewish phylacteries) next to my bed, and my siddur on the cabinet next to me. I was in a Hasidic Yeshiva waking up at 6:00 am on a Saturday to go downstairs and pray. My parents were deeply distressed that I had ended up here (the rabbis had insisted I separate myself from them, especially my father who is not Jewish), my health (mentally and psychologically) had been damaged by the advice of Rabbis who did not even have a bachelor’s degree (Hasidim are not supposed to go to college). I can’t tell you exactly why i fled that day , all I know is I looked around at all these Yeshiva students sleeping in the bunk beds near me, and forced myself to get on a bus back to Philadelphia and never looked back.

I was a member of the very well known Jewish Hasidic movement, Chabad-Lubavitch. Chabad is not only the second largest group of Hasidim (A populist Jewish religious movement that was born in eastern Europe) it is also an international organization that runs educational institutions, has its own publishing house, and sends out its most charismatic students around the world to proselytize to unobservant Jews. It also has its own political lobbying group, with a decent amount of pull in Washington.

I think Chabad’s existence illustrates the need for secular activism, for a demand that religion and state remain separate, a defense of secular humanism, and a sharp critique of arguments based on any sort of divine mandate.

Chabad gains a massive amounts of its funds via charity from non-orthodox Jews (Mainly Jewish people who identify with the reform movement) who are uneducated about many of the things that Chabad promotes: an uncompromising view of Israel’s right to every piece of the Biblical kingdom; a mystical ideology that draws deeply on racism towards Non-Jews; a deeply misogynistic attitude towards women; and finally although the official organization would never admit it, the majority of them firmly believe that their last Rebbe (Grand Rabbi and Leader) Menachem Mendel Schneerson is the messiah and is coming back to save the Jews and punish the gentiles.

So what we have is a religious movement that gains its wealth primarily from the moderates or even those who are only “culturally Jewish.” The money pours into a whole network of institutions that promote ideals that these very charitable people deeply dislike and don’t know they are supporting, convinced by a massive PR campaign that they are promoting Judaism. This is an organization whose ideology is actively promoting hard-line policies in Israel and values  that are deeply unhealthy and destructive. That’s why there needs to be a Secular, Free-thought movement. To make people realize what a leap of faith really is. We need to go to the moderates and the liberal defenders of faith and make them realize what they are defending. We need to show there is an alternative to taking ethics by divine mandate, to  show religion is not making the world a better place, an demonstrate how people are suffering because they are not making the effort to really look and see what the faithful are saying.  We need to show people what faith really is or someone you love might be tricked into a leap of faith and not have a bus to come back home on.

If I had a soul, this is what it would look like.

Who is the Punk Teacher?

I decided to create the pseudonym “Punk Teacher” first and foremost so that I could write frankly about my new teaching career without risking drama, or worse, my job.

I am literally started my teaching career this year, summer 2009. My first experience was doing about a month of student teaching with Latino 5^th graders who had failed my state’s standardized test.

I am completely thrilled to be a teacher. It is my dream career. Yet there are a lot of problems with the educational system, and I have no intention of turning a blind eye. In fact I think my perspective is uniquely honed in such a way as to cut through bullshit in a refreshing and relevant way.

Even in my limited experience I already have much to say and many stories to tell, but I will try to stay focused on introducing my motives and myself.

I am a 29 year old Latino male who has lead a sketchy enough life that I feel that “punk” is the best adjective for it. The word “punk” has many connotations which include everything from French situationism to homosexuality in gang culture. But I hope the word invokes some more common imagery. I hope it calls forth images of angst ridden dirty kids with mowhawks, of anarchists and skinheads, full of rage at a society that they are struggling to understand. I hope that it invokes this imagery because this imagery describes my own youth, which still permeates its influence into my adulthood.

My own story with education is mostly a failed one.

I am the middle son of a college professor.  By the time I was 13 I had enough traumatic childhood experiences which ranged from just growing up in a repressive Latin American dictatorship to being sexually abused. By the 5^th grade I had been psychiatrically hospitalized, by the 7^th grade I had been placed in a school for troubled kids who’s security was so high that teachers watched the students urinate to prevent the smuggling of drugs and weapons. My classmates were hardcore gangsters.

By 9^th grade I was going to school drunk or on drugs, by 11^th grade I dropped out with a GPA beneath a 2.0.

I had but one refuge in life; it was the punk subculture, which I will define as the collective youth cultures, which based themselves in anti-establishment music, clothing, philosophy and lifestyle. My favorite bands growing up were the Dead Kennedy’s, The Misfits, Black Flag, Bauhaus, Skinny Puppy, Last Resort, Brutal Juice,  The Business, Neurosis, and other classics of hardcore, Oi!, industrial, and old school punk.

By the time I was 18, I was working professional as a tattoo artist and facing felony charges for organized crime. Though the two are completely unrelated it does give a good impression of what kind of background I have.

A few years later I underwent an intense religious conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. This may seem like a strange dichotomy, but if one reads the book Righteous by Lauren Sandler , it is clear that the evangelical religious right has invested a great deal of resources at massive campaigns to co-opt anti-establishment youth cultures and is quite good at it. I never quite fit in well with my fellow fundamentalists due to bad habits like identifying myself as a Christianarchist; I reasoned that the Christ like life should lead one to an anarchist utopianism.  My brothers and sisters in Christ did not agree.

Right smack in the middle of my evangelical Christianity I panhandled my way across the United States, and enjoyed a great deal of volunteer work with the Anarchist community of Santa Cruz, California. I will never forget attending a training camp where many of the attendees where veterans of the notorious Seattle WTO Riots, where anarchists basically shut down Seattle, Washington in protest of globalization.

At the tail end of my evangelical Christianity my politics took a slightly right wing shift when I became a member of the Progressive Labor Party, a Communist party which counts among its slogans “Don’t Vote, Revolt!”

So don’t assume that in my religious days I was somehow wearing my trousers up to my chest with coke bottle glasses sitting around in pews singing 100 year old hymns. Though my education was marginal I was a voracious reader and studied Church history, and varying and competing theologies, including the Liberation theology of Latin America and the Social Gospel espoused by Martin Luther King. I also merged these ideas with a traditional southern Pentecostalism which teaches that God is a very active and evident supernatural entity which manifests miracles on a regular basis. The traditional view of this latter theology is called by its proponents “Charismatic Christianity.”  If it sounds like I was insane and dangerous I will not disagree.

But I will say that I believed that poverty was the product of social immorality and I wanted to fight it. I just happened to believe, like all Charismatics, that Jesus was talking to me inside my head and guiding my actions.

It was working with a youth ministry at my church where the congregation was mostly white middle class and the youth and children’s ministry was mostly black neighborhood kids that I began to develop my current worldview about education. As I got more and more involved with the kids and got to know their families, situations, and attitudes I realized that what they needed was a way out of a cycle of poverty and that education was a more realistic vehicle for that than prayer. This caused conflicts with my church and me and caused me to leave, never to return to a Charismatic congregation.

Shortly after that I started college, realizing that I needed to take my own advice.

College changed everything. Learning became my new addiction. It was hard as hell to get in and the whole process terrified me. I had no idea how I was going to pay for it, but the financial aid turned out to be enough. I made the lowest possible ACT score to be accepted into the University, but I was accepted nonetheless. Within 1 year I had a high GPA, laboratory research experience, and was the member of two prestigious academic organizations including HHMI, which is one of the world’s biggest supporters of biology research.

This December I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience.

What college did for me was powerful. My formal science education along with my own voracious reading habits caused me to abandon my religion. This was not a passive process for me but a deep internal conflict about the ethics of truth, the death blow to my religion was inflicted by Richard Dawkin’s book The God Delusion which caused me to accept either I believed science and evidence were the best and most reliable road to truth or that willful faith was. The two were epistemologically incompatible, and anyone who has a science education and denies this is like an ostrich with its head in the sand.

Since I came from a punk-anarchist background it was deeply entrenched in my habits and worldview that when I see such a major problem with the world as the destructive power of religion I had to do something about it. So within a few months I became an active member of the secular and skeptical movements and remain one today. My activities have included podcasting, organizing campus clubs, traveling to conferences and blogs like this one. I don’t feel like I do enough and consider it one of my goals to increase my output; this is a very punk way to deal with a beloved cause.

I am now a 5^th grade bilingual math and science teacher.  As someone who believes that the most powerful force in democratizing our society is education I believe that I am in the trenches of the culture war.

In this blog I hope to communicate effectively what my experiences are as an educator and hopefully to inspire and inform people on how they might act to improve education in this country.

One of the common refrains in my field is that failures of Bayesian reasoning are behind lots of our errors of reasoning in general – Linda the Feminist Bank Teller and the Asian Disease framing problem immediately come to mind. Consider the first problem:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more probable?

1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

And then the second. There will be a short quiz next period.

The England team has withdrawn from the World Badminton Championships in India because of “a specific terrorist threat” made by extremists.

The eight-strong squad pulled out of the tournament, which starts on Monday in Hyderabad, after reports of threats by Muslim extremists Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Lakshar-e-Taiba has shown that, sometimes, terrorism does work.

I cannot fault the English team here for cowardice, and in fact I commend their courage in acknowledging that the safety of their players is more important to them than the interests of whatever groups own and profit from the team. In fact, the failures involved in this event (the failure of Indian society to cultivate and protect a humanist ethos, the failure of the Muslim intelligentsia to combat fundamentalism, the failure of the British and Indian governments to ruthlessly exterminate those who issue such threats, etc.) are too broad to even be meaningful. The real questions here are: what are the short-term effects of L-e-T’s victory in Hyderabad? And what are the long-term effects?

The immediate effects of the withdrawal will probably be, in the long run, small. But in the long run this is another victory for terrorists in their seemingly endless war on modernity. Lashkar-e-Taiba is more of a Kashimiri nationalist organization than a Muslim reactionary militia, and Islam is simply a willing, almost eager puppet-ideology for these people to exploit in their political agenda. The association in the minds of L-e-T is the same tiresome trope that drives nationalist idiocy all over southeast Asia: modernity (read: the “West,” whatever that is) is the enemy. To them, intellectual progress stopped in the mid-7th century when an Arabian bandit cribbed a nationalist ideology of his own from Judaism, Christianity, and local pagan myths. This ideology they will defend to the end.

So, even if the immediate fallout is minimal (I can find no major American news story reporting on this issue), L-e-T is emboldened, and every victory like this is a recruiting slogan. To Indian nationalists and religious fanatics who agree with the objectives of L-e-T (even those who don’t agree with its methods), the urgency in eliminating this group is diminshed because they see it as merely wrong-headed but good-hearted tendency towards the ultimate goal of purging southeast Asia of Western influence and, more potently, of convincing the next generation of fanatics that triumph over modernity is a worthy, attainable goal.

Introduction

The great John Milton, referring to American eloquence, said: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” It seems that within the framework of what constitutes “liberty”, the lighted fire called “free-speech” is the greatest sight. The cracks and fissures in the monument we have to human solidarity – supported by the pillars Rights, Liberty, Freedom, Equality – is made to echo by simply the function of free-speech. In order to fix the problems, we must first identify them; this can only be done by the same tools that made them, that raised such a monument to the heights man has allowed himself. To such heights have we been able to gaze far into the future, deeply into grains of sand, and eloquently into our deepest selves. The problems we find – in the future, the grains and ourselves – are made apparent by the liberty to speak. Silence does not remove problems, it only covers them with a transparent veil. To fill the fissures, to smooth the sutures, we must open our eyes and minds and mouths and be prepared to engage with our own fallibility.

We dislike hearing of our own failings and here-in we must allow some support. None wants to be thought a failure. Yet, there is a vast chasm between missing a step and plummeting to the ground. People often mistake the latter for the former, their emotions matching the overzealous self-harm. Jane has forgotten her child at school, thus she is a failure as a mother. She feels the brunt and punishes herself emotionally even when she picks up her child two hours later. But she is not a failure, she is a fallible human. Yes, she has made a mistake. We do not aid Jane by mocking her, though we silently rebuke her to each other. As Bertrand Russell said, we do not gossip about each other’s virtues. The point remains however that she is not a complete failure, though her emotions are dictating as such.

Many will argue that such strong emotions prevent the recurrence of such a mistake. The punishment is done for the benefit of both Jane and her child. This is certainly true, but the problem remains to what extent do we allow such cross-firing to take in collateral damage. That is, how far do we take such a loathing of failing into the public sphere?

The Loathing of Failing and Berlin’s Concepts of Freedom

Jane is not a failure as human being to forget her child, though her actions are examples of what a terrible mother would do. However, it was not Jane’s intention to forget or leave her child (how does one deliberately forget anyway?). She made a mistake and, as a human being, this will happen. No one, not even Megan Fox, is perfect (though in the looks department, she comes “close”). Thus Jane must forgive herself and continue, trying harder. This is a healthy way to progress and better herself. Mistakes are not wooden-planks to produce our own crucifix, but to take higher steps toward an intended destination. This false-dichotomy plays out when it sets it sights on the freedom of others.

The reason to restrict anything within a society, that is curb liberty, is a form of coercion. This might be under the archway of what Isaiah Berlin calls “negative liberty”. To better understand “negative” notions of freedom (within Berlin’s context, freedom and liberty are interchangeable), we can also focus on its corollary.

Berlin states, in his famous essay Two Concepts of Liberty, that negative freedom is defined by the absence of coercion. As Nigel Warburton has succinctly stated: “Coercion is when other people force you to behave in a particular way, or force you to stop behaving in a particular way. If no one is coercing you then you are free in this negative sense of freedom.” An example might be that no curfew prevents one being on the streets, no police force prevents one from driving down to see friends, and so on. If one was prevented because of a curfew, police presence, threats of violence, then one would not be free (in this negative sense).

Berlin then goes on to define a positive conception of freedom. This is the freedom to do as one wants with one’s life, within that life’s context. As Berlin puts it with his usual beautiful phrasing: ” ‘positive freedom’ – the doctrine of self-adjustment to the unalterable pattern of reality in order to avoid being  destroyed by it.” The big concept is self-realisation and the actions toward exercising control over one’s life – rescinding such rights is absolving one’s positive freedom. The point is to help people realise their best virtues, their greatest strengths, their abilities. An example is someone who is stuck in a relationship with an abusive partner – no one is forcing her to stay in the relationship. The partner has told her to leave and abuses her emotionally and sometimes physically. Though the abusive partner is telling her to leave, she keeps telling herself she “loves” him. Her friends and family know this relationship is bad for her and if she could learn to love and appreciate herself more, she would realise she deserves better. In this context, she is not free – even though no one is stopping her from leaving this terrible relationship.

Thus, positive freedom is freedom to do something, as opposed to negative which is freedom from something.  Positive freedom might be thought of under the domain of “rights”. This means the allowance of slight paternalistic interferences – such that, someone who is wasting their life would be put on a better path. However, if the former part of the previous paragraph is troubling – talk of what’s best for the citizen, making them better people – then one is not in solitary company. Berlin himself maintains a heightened suspicion of positive freedom. Throughout history we have seen governments do the most horrid actions in the name of bettering themselves and their citizens.

So, positive freedom is the way one’s freedom is outlined – as outlined perhaps by declaration of rights and constitutions – and negative freedom is lack of coercion when performing certain actions.

Free speech is the ability to speak or express oneself without fear of being “coerced” into silence or violence. Thus, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy also states, freedom of speech is a negative freedom. Curbing it thus rescinds liberty, not so much bending as breaking it.

Removing freedom of speech is done out of this hatred or loathing of failure (and perhaps other reasons, though I won’t be addressing those here, since I am dealing with freedom of speech in a societal framework). People do not want to hear contradictory remarks about their most deeply held beliefs. The important point here is that the very existence of a challenge to conventional views is evidence of liberty and freedom. It was of course the Greeks who started this idea that one should challenge tradition (what the classicist Peter Jones calls “the tradition of challenging tradition”), basing thought and inquiry into and, more importantly, from the human realm, since this is the only realm that has utility. Even if one is completely wrong to speak out against evolution or Darwinism or cosmology, the fact remains that the established view is forced to cement itself within a stronger foundation. This means more of those who accept the established views within a framework – so the majority of scientists and Darwinism, the majority of liberals and freedom – must almost relearn their views, express them eloquently and understand why their views are better than their opponents’. Notice: I did not say their views are “true” or “perfect”. According to Karl Popper, we should work with ideas that are strongest against its counter-theories. We have ideas that withstood the onslaught of prevailing criticisms. Beneath the storm of outrage, these are the ideas that bloom even in the fog of obscurity, the rain of anger and thunder of discontent.

But these ideas only come to fruition with the ability to express them. Hating an opponent’s view, simply because it upsets or hurts one’s feelings, is not reason enough to rescind freedom of speech.

Religions are often the  groups responsible for demanding censorship,  banning and burning. Throughout modern history, it has been the policy of papal instruction to burn books that speak out against god,  to restrict scientific inquiries which upset the geocentric world-view, and the demand from an Iranian leader to kill a man who lives in London for writing a work of fiction. Unfortunately, religions have been granted so much freedom within a liberal and secular framework that it has poisoned the well of freedom for all. The religions have taken hold of the bucket and laugh as we flail for our fingertips to touch the water’s surface. Instead, our wavering reflections on the water mock us and the bucket is punctured by the religions’ thorny retribution. Now, whenever we reach in to drink from freedom, most of it drains out because of the loopholes driven in by the religions.

This is not meant to sound extreme or to highlight that we have lost this battle. It is true that talking of liberty is hardly ever done in the context of praising it – it is usually done to defend it.

So to be able to express views, within the framework of rescinded coercion, is the most important element of any form of liberty. To encroach upon that fundamental framework for the purposes of avoiding hurt feelings is to ignore that one is rendering the framework hollow. The religious tend to forget that freedom of speech to criticise should be met by freedom to criticise back. In most other areas, it seems that many religious people share the fundamental principles of a liberal society. Yet it is no irony that we often hear about protestations (from where, ironically but unsurprisingly, Protestants derive their name), from religious groups, against the most important value within a free society: free-speech.

The Silencing of Mankind – Why Free Speech Matters

Consider any other fundamental right or important element of freedom – such as equality, justice, and avoidance of harm. All these would be close to nothing if freedom of speech was eliminated, undermined or restricted. Indeed, though freedom of speech is fourteen shades of grey, it is grey nonetheless – not black and white. We can only talk about freedom of speech with freedom of speech; we can only highlight restrictions to our rights with free-speech; we can only find power in numbers to eliminate despotism with free speech.  The first mark of a society that is ruled by a totalitarian regime is when there is no freedom of speech (this does not mean that all totalitarian regimes did not allow free-speech, only that it is a clear indication of a violation of an important freedom).

If we arbitrarily demarcate lines based on nothing but the “tyranny” of “majority” opinion, as Mill viewed it, then we have got no closer to doing best for mankind. All we have done is catered to the feelings of one group – even if it is the majority. Even if the whole of mankind believes the earth flat, the planet remains stubbornly spherical. A better writer than myself, John Stuart Mill, put it like this:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. (”On Liberty”, Chapter II. Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion, 1869 – Italics mine.)

“Silencing mankind”. The power of Mill’s image is a resounding call to prevent a gag being placed in the mouth of humanity. Mill’s point on the censor himself runs further. The censor must assume infallibility when censoring a work, since he must know beyond all doubt that a work is better off being censored. But this is blatantly incorrect since no one can be absolutely correct in their judgements. The difficulty of course could be shifted to the other extreme: allowing a work to be published which causes harm. The point however that we need to address is that people must be given the choice. When a work is banned, restricted or pulled from distribution, a censor has taken it upon himself to read a work for a whole society. This is paternalism of the worst kind, grinding our emotional maturity into a fine powder of obedience. It seems that on the whole it would be better that a work is presented, even if it does cause harm, as this leads to the overarching growth of maturity in our species. Censoring seems to only allow for juvenile and loud voices to find support for their views: for example, a work is censored, a few “liberals” cry out. No one is hurt. A work is not censored and someone is killed by fanatics who are offended by it. The latter of course we have seen occur to the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verse. Whilst it might appear harsh that we should risk our lives for the sake of some ideal, like freedom, it seems we risk our lives and freedom by not standing up for it. The allowance of religious arrogance threatens every aspect of freedom one can name: personal autonomy, sexuality, friendship, fashion, careers.

Yet some things should be contentious for the liberal agenda, such as racist or misogynist writings. But then, they should be rejected from publication not because it hurts people’s feelings, but because of poor scholarship. I for example would be very interested to read a case, based on reason, evidence and good logic, that states we are better off denigrating women, treating them like cattle, and reducing their minds to dull throbs of rhythmic idiocy. I would like to read this because I know – as far as I know anything – that I never will. The case for the equality of humanity and the emancipation of women is so strong, in terms of a Popperian paradigm, that we can easily backhand arguments against it.

Thus it seems the censor is useless. Who is this person reading works for society? Who is deciding for the average citizen that material is too harsh?

Progress in terms of equality comes about through discussion. Limiting access to the public domain of ideas is to prevent the growth of these ideas toward the betterment of society. Before we can allow the ideas to come to fruition, we must have a foundation open to the light of reason and comprehension. Lucidity, ease of access and an understanding that ideas are fallible and to be contested should be the benchmark for policies that we decide for ourselves. Arbitrarily limiting or restricting certain forms of information assumes, as previously said, infallibility from the censor and as Mill also highlighted, the problem that the restricted document could contain the truth we seek.

The final problem in limiting free speech or censoring a work is the assumption that: only one group is harmed, or, if the whole of society is harmed, that no one benefits. Both are wrong. If, as constantly occurs, Muslims are offended by a work of art or fiction or the way someone scratches their nose, those targets are censored to placate Muslims (similarly when other religious groups cry out that they are offended). Now, that work of art is gone completely and the Muslims are satisfied. But what about the artist, the producer, the audience, and so on, who do appreciate it? Their concerns are swept aside to placate one group because they are religious as opposed to artistic or academic. Religions should not have a moral high ground but should be on the plateau of equality with the rest of us. Then we can speak of judging something; not because the religious groups hanker over us, but because we are all equally horrified at a dog being tortured to death as a work of art, equally dissatisfied with publication of some poor novel. This would mean that religions are taken seriously, not because they are religious people, but because they are people. Mature people, treated as such to show that we want to put them in line with ourselves, as adults dealing with a chaotic world. Not as children who have loud voices and toys of mass destruction they throw out their cot of platitude.

And the second point, that no one benefits is also wrong. By a group censoring or crying for a limit to the free speech in this instance, they prevent themselves from judging it. How many Muslims read The Satantic Verses before deciding Rushdie & Co. should die? How many people bothered to see the cartoons made by Jyllends-Posten before they marched in the streets, demanding death and blood of those who mocked Islam? In these instances, the groups would have benefited by simply engaging with the work. They then have a choice: ignore the silly infidels who just do not understand the power of Allah or retaliate by drawing satirical pictures of the cartoonists, writing a strongly-worded letter (minus death-threats) and so on. There are ways of “retaliating” that do not cross the bounds of discourse to enter the minefield of violence. Muslims reacting in such brash, harmful and violent ways are not making Islam any more a “religion of peace” or their faith any more acceptable by behaving in such stupid, childish ways. If religions want to be taken seriously, they must accept the rules of adult discussion which govern our growth and not the monkey-bars of juvenile delinquency that lets them leap over the lines of conduct we have in place.

This even before equality, justice, and equal suffrage. This before the inducing of minds toward intellectual adventure and fulfilment regardless of race, sex and ethnicity. This all before we decide on how create a path to glory, unifying our shaking hands and raising a platform toward peace. Freedom of speech is itself the decider in what should be free. Not everything should be said or spoken but the decision as to what we shall say, read or publish can only be decided on an open platform, using reason and not emotion as the yardstick. All this can only occur with the freedom to speak, ideas flying across the mental landscape like a flock of migrant birds blackening the ground with their shadows. Freedom starts with the first flap of wings and the dilation of the pupil toward the horizon. Now we can set off and take our wings toward a more peaceful horizon.

]]> http://factonista.org/2009/08/08/within-liberty/feed/ 0 http://factonista.org/2009/08/07/the-wantonly-amoral-theologically-correct-worldview-of-george-sodini/ http://factonista.org/2009/08/07/the-wantonly-amoral-theologically-correct-worldview-of-george-sodini/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:29:34 +0000 Chris Ray http://factonista.org/?p=2895 The first thing the public wanted to know was: why? Why did 48-year old George Sodini, a gainfully employed middle-aged man with no apparent history of violence, stroll into a gym earlier this week armed to the teeth and shoot thirteen women, killing four of them, before killing himself?

Sodini himself told us, for months or even years leading up to the incident, in an online blog and video diary. His print diary was just as insightful. Yet even with a plethora of detail on their side, the experts quickly whittled away the complexity behind this man to the singular convenient trope of the modern serial killer: George Sodini hated women.

This was the media’s story, and that was all they would say about it. Sodini was a loner, Sodini was frequently rejected by women, Sodini felt hurt by all the women in his life who declined his advances, and so they had to die because of his rejection issues. In the fast-paced world of 24-hour news reporting it was important to reduce the complex psychology of a deranged loner down to an easily-digestable theme, regardless of extemporaneous details like Sodini’s deep religious convictions.

And yet the only play that Sodini’s religious convictions received in the whole discussion following his death was in online secular freethought media. Every mainstream source was so hooked up on the convenient excuse of Sodini’s hatred of women that they never bothered to ask the hard questions about Sodini’s motivations. This is doubly perplexing because Sodini himself was quite clear on this point:

Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not matter. I was reading the Bible and The Integrity of God beginning yesterday, because soon I will see them.

But of course, such truths would be confusing to the average consumer of mass media today. It simply does not comport with the current accepted social narrative that ‘religion = morality’ to think that a Christian could be both motivated to violence by religion and also be theologically correct in his understanding of doctrine.

‘Magic Words’ theology

Sodini comes from an Evangelical tradition that explicitly states that morality is irrelevant. Its apologists go out of their way to attack and ridicule those Christians who dare suggest that goodness matters. To the Evangelical, what is important is submission to doctrine, and nothing else. A man who is ’saved’ through the born again experience is in heaven guaranteed, not because they have earned it, but because they have recognized that they can’t earn it. The core principle here comes from Paul: humans are inherently filthy, perverted creatures (Paul’s word is ‘worthless’) who always fall short of God’s moral demands, so why bother trying to be good? We are so evil, in fact, that God himself had to come down from heaven and let himself be murdered on a tree just to give us the chance of some day receiving divine forgiveness.

Equipped with a “get out of hell free” card in the cheap excuse of a ‘born-again’ experience, Sodini felt empowered to do whatever he liked, whenever he liked, because he believed that his actions wouldn’t count in the long run. This ‘magic words’ theology teaches that, once you say the magic words admitting your inherent moral worthlessness and accept the human sacrifice necessitated by our worthlessness, you’re in the clear. Everything else is secondary to God, including your moral choices.

The average American is bombarded with propaganda linking irreligiosity to immorality, social deviance, and crime, so it makes sense that mainstream media wouldn’t burden them with the thought that religion could encourage immorality in this fashion. Yet this is exactly what the Evangelical mindset seeks to do: to cheapen goodness. They do this by equating value on goodness with heresy.

Sodini was indeed correct in his realization that, once he had met the minimum criteria of salvation, he was all set. Any expression of Evangelical born-again doctrine would have to agree with him, and indeed they have been agreeing with him for centuries. In his monstrous rampage Sodini has laid bare the central contradition of the American right: they preach and lecture and moralize endlessly as to how we should and shouldn’t behave, yet they are doctrinally committed to the notion that behavior is irrelevant except where it concerns submission to doctrine.

Not only that, but why has no one in the mainstream media asked if the Evangelical perspective on women poisoned his behavior as well? Theologians call the most popular conservative Christian perspective on gender roles ‘complementarianism.’ It holds that men and women have innate functions, and of course the innate function of women is submission to men. Sodini’s deeply unsatisfying relationships with women must have been truly perplexing to a Christian like him. What else to do with any element that persistently confounds your worldview except eliminate it? And so he did. Again, Christian doctrine gave him all the excuses that he needed, and yet popular media is stuck on square one, content to say that Sodini hated women without saying why his hatred would lead him to violence. For most people, being rejected by women does not lead to murder, but Sodini had religious passion on his side.

This question should have led to a sobering internal discussion among Christians as to how they can reconcile their doctrine with the social narrative that religion makes people better. The Christians should have been forced to review their scriptures and talk to their leaders and explain Sodini’s behavior to their congregations as some kind of error. But they can’t. The belief is too deeply-ingrained in centuries of Protestant dogma and apologetics. And the media prevented even a prelude to conversation by stopping everything at Sodini’s chauvanism.

If the media had the courage, and the public had the honesty, to confront this question, then we would really have something productive to talk about. Does religion cause morality? No, because they say that it shouldn’t. The Evangelical doctrines, plainly visible to the initiated but completely hidden from the public who are meant to believe that religion is about goodness rather than against it, have to be brought to light and seriously discussed. How can you be good without God?, they ask us. It’s very simple. How can you be good with God? According to the Evangelicals, you aren’t supposed to be. Sodini understood this, and it’s high time that the public realized this doctrinal monstrosity for what it is: an excuse to be evil.