Ken Ham's ham-handed response to James McGrath

I'll admit that I don't normally hang out at very many Christian blogs, but Exploring Our Matrix, written by Butler University religion professor James McGrath, is certainly worth having a look at. McGrath is a progressive Christian, and while he's a spiritual man, he's far more concerned about issues of social justice and the advancement of humanity than pretending that the Bible is literally true.¹ A couple of weeks ago he took Ken Ham, owner of the Creation Museum and Kentucky's most famous creatard, to task for aggressively peddling his wild pseudoscience rather than actually working to help people in need or otherwise live up to the supposed tenets of his faith. McGrath wrote:

[Young-earth creationism is] an attempt to distract from the fact that Christians aren't treating the Bible as the Word of God, taking it literally, or doing any of the other things Ken Ham and others like him claim to stand for - not when it comes to the Bible's teaching about economic and social justice, concern for the poor and oppressed, renunciation of wealth, and most other matters of practice.

Those are strong words, and they point to an obvious question that Dr. McGrath is too polite to ask directly: Why have Mr. Ham and his backers seen fit to spend so much money and time building a gaudy pseudo-museum designed to convince people of the scientific accuracy of The Flintstones when those resources could have been much better spent on a worthier cause? After all, Ham proclaims that he's doing the work of Jesus, and Jesus was all about healing the sick and clothing the naked²...but wasn't nearly as hung up on singing asinine songs about dinosaurs as Ham and his cronies.

According to the Christian Website MinistryWatch.com, Ham's Answers in Genesis organization generated over $22 million in revenue in 2007.³ Do you have any idea how much good you can do in the world for $22 million? How many TB vaccinations would that buy? Conversely, how many animatronic cavemen riding dinosaurs would it buy? I have a feeling Ken Ham knows the answer to one of those questions.

McGrath contends, without quite saying so, that Ham is turning the spiritual passions of his followers towards useless ends. After all, a fervent Christian can "stand up for the faith" by spewing forth nonsense about a 6,000 year-old earth without having to think very hard or put forth all that much effort. Actually reaching out to the disadvantaged in a meaningful way or standing up for the rights of the truly oppressed requires a little more work. Meanwhile Ham is leading his followers on little more than a self-righteous snipe hunt. They get to seethe with indignation about all those evil scientists and atheists, but they don't really have to stick their necks out for anyone either. It's a stinging accusation, and I'd be curious to know what Ham's rebuttal is.

Unfortunately, while Ham has responded to McGrath's post, he hasn't worried himself with answering the claims McGrath has leveled against him. Instead, after tossing out a rather meaningless disclaimer that he doesn't consider the authority of the Bible to be "conditioned upon the age of the earth"⁴, he trots out the tired old "he's not a real Christian" routine and tries to wish McGrath away. Ham quotes extensively from one of McGrath's own entries in which he discusses faith, then huffs that

...I do not know what Dr. McGrath believes about the gospel. It certainly does not sound like orthodox Christianity to me. Sounds to me like some intellectual assent to some aspects of Christianity, but he gets to pick and choose the parts he likes. There is no hint in what he has written that he understands or believes what it means to be truly born-again...

Ham also goes to great pains to point out that Butler University also has an atheist professor on staff. He does so to drive home the point that McGrath is from a dangerous outgroup and therefore his position is invalid by fiat. After all, if he works with those evil atheists and doesn't adhere, with no exceptions, to fundagelical biblical literalism, then he can't possibly have a salient point. Sorry Ken, that's not how it works. You still haven't refuted his claim. Why is peddling young-earther nonsense more important to your Christian ministry than doing "Christian" work like helping the poor? We're still waiting for your answer.


Post Script - Early in this post I asked how many kids could be vaccinated against TB for $22 million. The low-end answer, based on figures from the World Health Organization, is that $22 million would provide vaccinations against TB, diphtheria, pertussis, polio, measles, hepatitis B, and Hib for 55o,000 children. But hey, all those robot dinosaurs are cool too.


__________
1.) McGrath kind of reminds of Ken Miller, the Catholic biologist who has worked so hard in recent years to combat the arguments of young-earth creationists.

2.) Well, Jesus was also pretty concerned with following the tenets of Judaism to the letter and preparing for a fast-approaching, cataclysmic divine intervention that never occurred, but those are topics for another day.

3.) Though it also had expenses in excess of $20 million.

4.) Yet Ham goes on to state in the next paragraph "If a person has to reinterpret the clear teaching of Scripture to fit in millions of years (e.g., reinterpreting the days of creation), this clearly undermines the authority of God’s Word." So which is it, Ken? Is the authority of the Bible "not conditioned upon the age of the earth", or does acceptance of an ancient earth "undermine the authority of God's Word"? Make up your mind, man.

Religious Pandering in the State Senate

Recently a handful of state Senators here in Kentucky have introduced a bill that would allow Bible studies to be added as an elective social science course in public schools. The bill's main sponsor is a Democrat by the name of David Boswell who's (coincidentally, no doubt) up for reelection soon. Theoretically Senate Bill 142 (the full text of which is available here) would only allow for the creation of religiously-neutral Bible study and would not allow for proselytizing, but anyone who thinks that this is anything more or less than a political ploy by an endangered incumbent is kidding themselves.

Perhaps more interesting than the creation of Bible study course is this little delightful addendum that read in part:

Any school council organized pursuant to KRS 160.345, or, if none exists, the principal, may the display of historic artifacts, monuments, symbols, and texts, including but not limited to the display of religious materials...

I think it's pretty safe to assume that this provision in the bill would result widespread placement of the Ten Commandments in classrooms for "educational" purposes. The Ten Commandments are a hot button issue here in Kentucky (perhaps even moreso than in the rest of the country thanks to Roy Moore), and the casual inclusion in SB 142 of a backdoor to place them in public classrooms is so shameless as to border on the ludicrous.

The most irritating part about this whole situation is that actual, honestly academic Biblical literacy courses, if done right, aren't really that bad of an idea. There's an old canard which goes "if more people read the Bible there'd be more atheists", and while I'm not certain that's the case, I suspect that if more people read the Bible from the textual critical viewpoint there would be a lot fewer foaming inerrantists roaming about. In any event, it's undeniably true that the Bible has had a profound effect on Western civilization, for good and ill. The exploration of the Bible's origins, the development of the NT canon, and the ongoing ramifications of the Jewish/Christian split are all interesting and intellectually rewarding areas of study.

The problem is that you and I both know that public school Bible courses in Kentucky would not involve discussions of the Documentary Hypothesis, higher criticism of the NT, or any talk at all about social construction - They'd consist of KJV readings of Genesis, John, and Revelation.¹ Senator Boswell isn't looking to establish the intellectually rigorous teaching of the Bible as an historical document, he's looking to score cheap votes in what's likely to be a close state senate race in November.

_______
1.) My sophomore year social studies class in high school (taught by the track coach) including a comparative religions unit which the teacher saw fit to preface with a statement of "We all know which one is true, but the state says we have to study this."

"Holy" Water + Paramecia = ?

Apparently God is working in mysterious ways for a bunch of Russian Orthodox Christians: Over a hundred believers have been hospitalized with acute intestinal symptoms after drinking "holy water" from a local church. According to an Associated Press report these wells of holy water are fed by a nearby stagnant lake. The article says that it's not yet clear what caused the illness, but goes on to note that most water in Russia, holy or otherwise, is generally considered unsafe to drink without further sterilization.

I'll admit that ordinarily I'd find this pretty amusing, but 48 of the folks who've been sickened by this exercise of blind faith are children. Therefore the incident passes from the category of "misfortune befalling adults who ought to have known better" and into the category of "religious abuse visited upon helpless kids who were unlucky enough to have rubes for parents".

A Chilling Taste Of Things To Come...

For those of you who are wondering why the blog has been neglected lately, I've been working on a review of Barrie Wilson's book about Christian origins, How Jesus Became Christian. I wasn't especially impressed with it - While Wilson is right that Pauline Christianity is rather removed from the apocalyptic Judaism preached by the historical Jesus, he overreaches in his conclusions and mucks up his thesis with bombastic language and a heaping helping strawman arguments.

The going has been slow. I have numerous concerns about the book, but a lot of them are relatively nuanced and require a lot of explanation. Since keeping things concise is not one of my strong suits, I'm afraid I'm going to end up with a gigantic commentary that will be long on background explanation and short on real meaty content. I've also contacted a couple of Bible-literate friends for their opinions on the book, just in case my objections to Wilson's thesis turn out to be specious.*

So why am I, an atheist, bothering to come to the defense of Christianity? I'm not. I think Wilson has been a bit overzealous in conclusions and I hope to convince my readers of the same. A specious argument is a specious argument, no matter how attractive its conclusions may be.

* I cannot tell a lie: I've also been distracted in no small measure by Batman: Arkham Asylum.

A Collector's Dream...?

Everybody knows about "Chick tracts" - those shrill evangelical mini-comics that one occasionally finds in hidden in public places as a means of stealth ministry. I don't think they're as popular now as they once were (I've noticed that I encounter a greater number of Ray Comfort's million dollar bills these days than anything else related to proselytizing.), but they're still out there. I suspect that a troubling number of folks take them seriously, but I think that, as a classic example of Poe's Law, the things are a hoot. A few years ago I even decided I was going to start collecting them for fun and profit, but unfortunately I just haven't run into that many. To make matters worse, I never found any of the really good ones!* You can imagine my disappointment. What ever was I to do?

Well, a solution has finally been offered for all of us down-on-our-luck Chick tract collectors. You can now buy the (nearly) complete set online for the low, low price of $14.95. That's really not much of a deal, since the things cost about 15 cents individually and by my count you're only getting 97 comics and the retail catalogue, but it does save you the time of going through and manually adding one of each comic to your shopping cart. The set also apparently comes with a handy-dandy collector's box.

I imagine it's weird for some of my readers to see me actively hawking religious nutjobbery on here, but honestly these things are hilarious. They're also a window into the minds of many of our fundie friends and neighbors and they bring up some interesting questions. For example, do some fundies really think all atheists are inexplicably hairy guys with bad skin who will actually recoil from a KJV Bible like a vampire being threatened with garlic? Seriously, if you've never had any experience with Chick tracts, check'em out. They're freakin' epic. Just don't go in expecting any nuance or theological sophistication.

PZ, is that you? In Jack Chick's world, this is how atheists look and act.

*The last one I encountered was a copy of "No Fear?", an anti-suicide tract. I found it in, of all places, the restroom at a Panera Bread restaurant. I guess someone stuck it in there for the benefit of the disconsolate masses who were unable to swap out their baguette for a bagel.

Kentucky: Southern Bastion of Secularism...? Really?

The new issue of Skeptical Inquirer has a note about the findings of the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (or ARIS). While the SI article was mainly interest in the survey is the overall increase in non-religious folk, something else caught my eye. Something surprising...

According to the Trinity College researchers that conducted the ARIS, Kentucky is the most secular state in the south! 13% of Kentuckians responding to ARIS in 2008 stated that they either had no religious preference or considered themselves to be agnostic/atheist. That's still well below states like Vermont, New Hampshire, and even Ohio (34, 29, and 17% respectively), but it also indicates that the number of secularists in Kentucky has nearly doubled since 1990 and is now nearly equal to the number of Catholics. I guess now I can quit bellyaching about how weird it is to be an atheist in Kentucky...which in a way is kind of a pity because that's one of my go-to topics.

Anyone interested in checking out the entire report on ARIS can do so here.

Mike Warnke's Still Selling Satan...

I'm reading Selling Satan by Mike Hertenstein and Jon Trott. It's an extension of the Cornerstone article debunking the claims of one Mike Warnke, a preacher/comedian currently skulking about Kentucky whose "hook" is that he's a reformed Satanist. Hertenstein and Trott took issue with some of Warnke's more bizarre claims, such as that he participated in rituals of child murder and cannibalism, and ultimately uncovered witnesses, records, and other evidence that indicate very strongly that most of the claims made his autobiography The Satan Seller were utter fictions. (Especially damning, and hilarious, is a picture of Warnke from 1966 that shows him to be a scrawny, button-downed, bespectacled everyman when his book claims he spent the 60s as a long-haired, wild-eyed, drug addicted Satanic priest with 6-inch fingernails "filed for fighting".*)

The debunking in and of itself is kind of interesting, but it's also old hat: Trott and Hertenstein published their original article in 1992. It got me wondering, however, what ol' Mike was doing these days. See, I have a theory that prominent preachers don't go away. Ever. No matter what kind of earth-shaking scandal or criminal convictions they may be faced with, famous evangelists virtually always retain enough of a following to make a living off of their preaching. Seriously, that sounds silly, but think about it: Peter Popoff was outed as a fraud by James Randi in 1983, but he's still on TV and people still send him money for "miracle spring water". Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker were both caught in sex scandals (Plus Bakker was indicted for mail fraud), yet they still have active ministries with large followings. Fred Phelps is a slobbering lunatic and he still draws crowds.

Mike Warnke? All he did was lie about his entire past to create a preaching industry that allowed him to pay himself and two confidants a total of over $800,000 a year while simultaneously using his ill-gotten reputation as a Satanism expert to stoke the fires of the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare. Small potatoes! Surely he's still around, right?

Yep, he is. He runs the Celebrations of Hope Ministry out of Harrodsburg, KY. He also has a website with the phone number for his Product Sales Department on every single page. Despite his 17 year-old debunking Warnke still markets himself as an ex-Satanist, his current answer to the 1992 scandal being a 2006 report by a tribunal of "elders" in his own church saying that he's awesome. Apparently that's good enough for somebody, since he appears to have speaking engagements all over the country throughout the rest of 2009.

I can't say I'm surprised, but I'm a little let down.

*Warnke claims to have converted to Christianity after joining the Navy in 1966, but the photograph was taken in April of 1966 and Warnke didn't join the Navy until June of that year. (Source)

Child Exorcism in the U.S.

Remember that post from a few weeks ago about religious nuts in the Congo subjecting children to brutal "exorcisms" to free them from imaginary demons? Well, if that wasn't disturbing enough, here's this:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I don't imagine I have to tell you how messed up that it. Freakin' lunatics.

The Art of Oversimplification

Did anyone else stumble upon the CNN article about Bart Ehrman today? As you may have guessed from the title ("Former Evangelical Debunks the Bible") it was not a particularly nuanced piece. It wasn't terrible, but there were a couple of cringe-worthy bits, such as this:

Yet Ehrman's popularity also may be due to a larger trend. The books of people like Elaine Pagels, author of "The Gnostic Gospels," and Dan Brown, author of "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Demons," resonate with people who believe there are parts of the Bible that the church left on history's editing floor.

I rather doubt Dr. Ehrman would enjoy being compared to Dan Brown, especially since he wrote a book eviscerating the historical hocum in The Da Vinci Code.* Likewise, the author mentions that "critics say Ehrman is saying nothing new", despite the fact that Ehrman never claims to be presenting anything new or radical. That's kind of the point - most Christians don't know much at all about mainstream Biblical scholarship and Ehrman wants to make the esoteric accessible.

Bah, that's all I have to say about this. Folks (rightly) like to complain about the horrible contortions of science so rife in science journalism, but watching a complex subject like Biblical textual criticism go through the journalistic wringer is just as bad.

*With the recent theatrical release of Angels and Demons I've been mulling a full post about Dan Brown's work, but I think I can get it out of my system here: Dan Brown writes fiction. If you know so little about religion and/or history that you find his stories either plausible or offensive it's your fault moreso than his. That being said, The Da Vinci Code (I've not read Angels and Demons) is a fun book, but it's absolutely full of historical howlers. Then again, Godzilla breaks the laws of physics at every turn - there's something to be said for suspension of disbelief for the purpose of entertainment.

Human Decency is Hardly Wishful Thinking...

Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and has written numerous commentaries on security issues. As can be expected of a former military man, Lt. Col. Peters is rather hawkish in his outlook, though I rather suspect he regards himself as a realist. In any event, he recently wrote this article for The Journal of International Security Affairs in which he attempts to argue for "moral clarity" and "an end to wishful thinking" in the ongoing military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. His central argument is that the United States has lost it's appetite for bloodshed and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been unnecessarily lengthened by the failure to commit large numbers of troops in the early stages of the conflict, as well as the failure of officials to recognize that "[T]he point of [warfare] is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty."

He goes on to state that collateral damages and civilian causalities are unavoidable in war, which is true, but his implicit statement is that nothing should be done to attempt to mitigate them. Indeed, given that the first several pages of his argument are full of bloviating tirades about how the United States has become "seduced...with a false-messiah catechism of bloodless war" thanks to "think tank scholars" and a "white-collar suburban society" with no "sense of grit in daily life", it's hard not to characterize Peters as a sort of cartoon character macho man. He talks extensively about how "think tank astrologers" wish to "constantly [narrow] the parameters of what is permissible in warfare" and complains that in the fight against Islamic terrorists "[t]hey pray to their god for help in cutting out throats, and we want to chat."

I'm not sure where to begin addressing his mischaracterizations of the issue except to refer the reader to the full article and note that Peters seems at all times to be talking about the current conflict with Islamic fundamentalists as if it were simply World War II with the bad guys in different costumes. This is bizarre, because he's correct to note that Islamic terrorists of the Al-Qaeda vein are not the same as "secular groups groups fighting for power or wealth". He spends nearly two entire pages discussing the contrast between of religiously-motivated terrorists and secular foes, and yet he somehow seems not to notice that that these differences, well, make a difference.

Indeed, it seems very much as if he only mentions Islam as another attempt to jab at what he sees as a weak society in which

We have oversold ourselves on the notion of respect for all religions (except, of course, for Christianity and Judaism) that we insist that faith cannot be a cause of atrocious violence. The notion of killing to please a deity and further his perceived agenda is so unpleasant to us that we simply pretend it away...

...A paralyzing problem...is that our religious class has been educated out of religious fervor...[They] no longer comprehend the life-shaking power of revelation...Emotional displays of faith make the functional agnostic or social atheist nervous; he or she reacts with elitist disdain. Thus we insist, for our own comfort, that our enemies do not really mean what they profess...

Here Peters' has twisted real suggestions that perhaps some Al-Qaeda leaders are using religious rhetoric to motivate their henchman to fight for their own otherwise esoteric or distant political ends into a non-existent claim that no Islamic terrorists are actually religiously motivated. I don't think I've ever heard that claim. Indeed, Al-Qaeda foot soldiers and their ilk are religiously motivated to the core, regardless of whether or not their leaders are sincere in their own professed beliefs. No, this is just Mr. Peters spewing bile. Still, he's correct that religiously-motivated foes are unusual in that they possess a dangerous martyr mentality not present in secular foes- "Where", he notes, "are the atheist suicide bombers?"

Unfortunately it seems that Peters wishes to match fervor with fervor (I don't think I'm being unfair to say that I can see some lionized Christianity between the lines in this article) and that he sees no answers to the problem of Islamic extremism that do not lie on the battlefield:

The essence of warfar never changes - it will always be about killing the enemy until he acquiesces to our desires or is exterminated...

But how can that work against foes enamored with the idea of a glorious martyr's death? This is not World War II. The United States is not engaged with an enemy state that can be beaten on the battlefield until it's leaders submit under the threat of the annihilation of their country. Indeed the state-to-state phases of these conflicts (the ousting of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and the defeat of the Hussein regime in Iraq) have become in a sense only minor prologues to the ongoing operations in the region. Defeating the state militaries of Iraq and Afghanistan could almost be called relatively straightforward tasks, but subduing the irregular insurgents and extremist forces in the region has proven far more complicated and slow-going. The current foe (or rather, aggregation of foes) is a stateless, decentralized organization able to recruit young, desperate men and fill their heads with religious nonsense and send them off to die. It's leaders don't care in any real way about battlefield losses, the destruction of infrastructure, or the deaths of civilians - all of these things are recruitment tools for the Jihadists. Peters is fond of using the of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an example of "fighting dirty to win", but Bin Laden and his cronies would be delighted to see such catastrophic civilian bloodshed in Iraq or Afghanistan - After all, they have no state to protect per se, and such bloodshed would only help to legitimize their cause in the eyes of their potential recruits.

I studied terrorism under Dr. Okbazghi Yohannes, a man who was involved for years in the struggle to break away from Ethiopia and establish the state of Eritrea. One thing that was drilled into my head repeatedly is that terrorist (or "resistance") organizations can only be successful if they can convince a meaningful portion of the population that their goals are legitimate. Bin Laden recruits his cannon fodder by filling their heads with tales of a hostile, callous United States that wants to wipe Islam from the face of the earth. Say what you will about the evil lunatic, but he's got a good recruiting strategy - And the war of attrition that Peters is advocating feeds right into it.

This is obviously not to say that the United States should not respond with force against terrorist threats from extremist organizations like Al-Qaeda, nor is to to somehow imply that I don't understand that civilian casualties are a part of any conflict. The issue is rather that Peter seems to think we are still engaged in 20th-century state-oriented combat in which strategies of attrition and total war can actually work. That is not the case here. If civilian casualties become too much of a part of the current conflict, the U.S. will simply generate outrage among the Arab world that will lead more and more young Arabs into the clutches of the Jihadists. Peters, I suspect, would respond with something along the lines of "kill those new recruits too, then the ones after that, until there's no one left to recruit." (Or perhaps I'm being uncharitable.) That's perhaps technically possible, but it can also be avoided by a strategy that centers around de-legitimizing and marginalizing the extremists.

If the United States can effectively define its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan as something along the lines of a temporary provider of security - one that can effectively provide protection to civilians while helping their own officials to facilitate a return to normal day-to-day and an improved standard of living - then the extremist's cries of American hostility, colonialism, and a new Crusade will begin to ring false to the people of the region and the numbers of young men enticed to join the the Jihadist cause will begin to dwindle. Religious extremism of all stripes thrives in times of hardship and fear.* Absent these conditions, the appeal of a martyr's death and posthumous paradise begins to dull and the most dangerous religious extremists are left lonely and ranting at the walls in their mosques, synagogues and churches. The cure for most of the extremism in the Middle East may lie in helping people live their lives comfortably and without the shadow of violence hanging over them. Certainly combat missions have a role in the process, but they are only part of the process.

Peters is correct on another point: There will always be religious extremists, just as there will always be factions who wish to do violence to others for a panoply other reasons. That being said, the answer to violence isn't always "kill the enemy until he acquiesces". It's not "wishful thinking" to look for a way to resolve conflicts without resorting to out and out barbarism, nor is it somehow effete to view military force as something to be used sparingly and with an eye to minimizing the suffering of innocents. In the end I'm afraid that the "reality" that Lt. Col. Peters wants us to face exists only in his own mind.

*Peters even notes this, and implicitly laments that increasing standards of living and a decreased perception of danger has led to a weakening religious fervor in the U.S. Why then can he not see how it applies to the situation in the Middle East?

Come join the fun!

Sorry I've been neglecting the blog for the last couple of days, but I've been otherwise engaged. Feel free to come join in on the action.

Tragedy in Florida

Did anyone else see this? Apparently a Florida woman publicly murdered her teenage son and then committed suicide this weekend because she thought she was the Antichrist and had to destroy herself for the good of the world. Marie Moore shot her son in the back of the head with a pistol while the pair was enjoying some target practice at an indoor gun range. Immediately thereafter she shot herself. A recording that Moore left to her boyfriend included a rambling and bizarre explanation that she needed to kill the boy in order to "send him to heaven" and so that her own death would begin "a thousand years of peace on earth".

The MSNBC article says that Moore was mentally ill* and have been involuntarily committed a few years ago, which makes it all the more bizarre that she was able to rent a gun at a gun range. Apparently she had to fill out a set of forms to the effect of "Are you crazy? Yes/No" in order to use the gun range, but there was no way for the company, Shoot Straight, to verify the answers. That's freakin' ridiculous. Hell, I had to jump through more hoops than that to get a Hollywood Video card.

If you follow the link in the opening sentence of this post you'll also have the opportunity to listen to one of Moore's recordings, and frankly it's pretty chilling. She talks about how she "wants everyone to turn to God and stick with God" and how the murder/suicide she was planning would bring about this end. This is a ghastly situation, especially with the spate of other religiously-motivated shootings recently. To be fair, this woman was obviously unstable to begin with, but her apocalyptic religion did her, and her son, no favors.

*As if that weren't obvious.

Here's a Hint: Read First, Review Second

I finished reading Jesus Interrupted yesterday, and as usual I found Ehrman's work to be informative and well-spoken. To be fair, much of what he discussed has been covered in his other books, but I think it's kind of his style to write each of his popular books as a stand-alone piece (With the exception of Lost Christianities and Lost Scriptures, which are best read together). Biblical criticism aside, one thing that was of interest was his insistence throughout the book that it was not his study of the Bible that caused him to embrace agnosticism, but rather the problem of theodicy.

Ehrman repeats several times throughout the book that he doesn't view higher criticism as a path that leads inexorably down the road to a loss of faith (I'm not sure I really agree with him, but that's another post for another time) and that contradictions and whatnot in the Bible are not what led him to lose his own faith. He even devotes the final chapter of the book to this discussion, under the title "Is Faith Possible?", to which he answers, ultimately, "yes". To quote Dr. Ehrman, "I decidedly do not think that historical criticism necessarily leads to a loss of faith."

Why then am I seeing Amazon reviews that look like this:

A pot pourri of anti-Christian non-sequiturs, arguments from outrage and warmed over Dawkins-isms.... "Contradictions" are thus created ex-nihilo by Ehrman's hostile worldview and by nothing else.

and

And there is something increasingly disengenous about Ehrman's claim in the last chapter that he is not trying to destroy anyones beliefs...while that is obviously his agenda from the first page.

Could it be that, just maybe, some folks aren't bothering to read the book before they review it? Shouldn't it be, you know, the other way around?

Who the hell is Rene Salm?

Though it apparently came out last summer, I just recently caught wind of a book called The Myth of Nazareth by a fellow named Rene Salm. In it, Salm attempts to argue that the town of Nazareth did not come into being until after the time Christ, which would in turn make a powerful argument that Christ was merely a mythological figure. Apparently this is the first volume of series of books that Salm is cooking up that question the traditional origins of Christianity. It's all very interesting if true, but I'm troubled that I seem to find can't find any credentials for Salm save for a few notes here and there that refer to him as "a historian" and a composer.

If it is indeed the case that this Salm fellow has no formal archaeological training and is in fact just an amateur historian, this book ceases to be especially intriguing. Granted, Robert M. Price certainly seems to be excited by it, but there's a paucity of what I would consider to be unbiased reviews floating around out there. It is (rather predictably) being fiercely attacked on religious sites like Theology Web*, and while the sole review on Amazon says that it's the best thing since toast, said review was written by an author who is featured prominently on Salm's website.

Still, I think I may have to order this book, if only for curiosity's sake.** That's not to say that I don't find a rather large bit of Salm's thesis, that there's some kind of conspiracy amongst archaeologists to promote incorrect dating for the founding of Nazareth, pretty freakin' hard to swallow. After all, books that purport to offer stunning new insights (from a laymen, especially) into a well-studied field should be treated with caution (see here), and philosophically attractive theses should be treated with even more caution. I'm not especially bound up in the idea of a purely mythological Jesus (Unlike, I should note, Robert M. Price) so I'm not going to cry if Salm turns out to be mistaken.

That's a good thing too, because at this point I think there's even odds that Salm has his head up his ass.

*Actually, a large percentage of the unfavorable reviews floating around out there trace back to a Theology Web user called J.P. Holding, aka Robert Turkel, aka the guy that runs that Tektonics apologetics website. He's not held in high regard even for an apologist, and a Google search for "Robert Turkel intellectual dishonesty" returns nearly 900 hits.

** The same reason I own this book, written by a fellow who apparently thinks trolls are real...

It's Not Quite "King Kong vs. Godzilla"...

I saw over on Pharyngula today that my pal Ray Comfort and uber-Catholic venom machine Bill Donohue are currently locked in a brutal slap-fight about evolution. Since Ray is arguing for instantaneous special creation* and Bill is arguing for God-driven theistic evolution combined with the special ensoulment of humans, both of them are wrong, but it's still kind of an interesting match-up to watch.

I can see the resemblance, but it just isn't the same.

Actually, while I'm loathe those to type these words, I think Ray is actually right here. He's correct to note that the Bible is a purely creationist book, and that Donohue is trying to revise its meaning to fit in with findings of modern science and is therefore undermining the point of his own holy book. Unfortunately for Ray, stubbornly clinging to a literalist interpretation of the antiquated doctrines of of the ancient Hebrews doesn't make him any more correct about reality itself than Billy. It just makes him wrong in a slightly more philosophically honest way. Bill is trying to slyly modify his doctrines to fall in line with reality, all the while trying to pretend that his religion was correct all along. Ray, on the other hand, is content to fiercely insist that his religion is correct as-is without any need to dilly-dally with such buzzkillers as observable reality and the totality of geology, astronomy, biology, and genetics. Each one is still wrong, but Ray is closer to being correct about what his religion actually claims than Bill, while Bill is a baby step closer to being right about biological reality, despite having to be intellectually dishonest about what his own Holy Book says to arrive at that position.

Alas, I'm afraid that they're pretty unlikely to engage in a brutal death-struggle on top of Mt. Fuji before being plunged into the Pacific Ocean by a sudden earthquake.

*At least as far as I can tell. Ray usually doesn't pin himself down by taking positions that are more specific than "atheists/evolution/Catholicism/paintings of boobs are bad."

Oh, And One More Thing...

Our buddy Ken Ham recently put up a blog post about stopping the "moral freefall" in the United States. His answer, of course, is that we're in this "freefall" because people are getting less religious and thus the solution is that people should get more religious. Unfortunately, Ken's got it all wrong. Church attendance in the U.S. remains both relatively stable and unsually high compared to the rest of the world.* At the same time, our crime rates have been trending unmistakably downward for years. (There's a slight hiccup in the last couple of years, accounted for by worsening economic conditions, but 2007 remains well below, say 1980 in terms of per capita crimes.) So wait...church attendance is more or less unchanged and crime is decreasing.+

What moral freefall is Ken talking about? Hmm...what's he define as a moral freefall?

...replacing God as the cultural centerpiece.... abortion, sexual permissiveness and moral relativism.

Oh, okay, so when Ken talks about a "moral freefall" he doesn't mean actual crime, he just means stuff that he doesn't like. Luckily for Ken, there's a place on earth where God is the centerpiece of all of daily life, abortion is almost totally illegal, sexual permissiveness is strongly discouraged, and morals are defined with absolute rigid certainty. Have fun, Ken. Don't forget to write.


*These church attendance numbers may be somewhat higher than reality. Surveys like the ones cited above rely on self-reporting and thus are prone skewing because respondents tend to tailor their answers to fit what they think is socially acceptable. Since church attendance is still considered to be a morally desirable thing in this country, some respondents may be likely to answer "yes" to the standard "have you been to church in the last seven days" question even if they really haven't.

+ Don't get cocky though, both our violent crime rates and religiosity are unusually high compared to rest of the world.

I Can Hardly Wait For This...

This should be good. The whackaloons over at Answers In Genesis are peddling this silly book about global warming. Interestingly, it apparently does not deny the reality of global climate change, but rather seeks to write it off as something that doesn't matter because it's what Yahweh wants. Check out this snippet of the AiG synopsis:

The truth is that the earth has always been warming very gradually and that the current warming is insignificant—especially considering the scope of God’s ultimate plan for each and every one of us. Unlock important clues to this contemporary
controversy. Includes Scripture references, scientific data, and biblical prophecy for the future. This book clearly illustrates that the concept of “man induced global warming” is totally unfounded, and that God alone is in control of our destiny.

I think I may have to order this one. It was written in part by Dr. William M Curtis III, but seeing as how his doctorate is in theology and his other education (which does include degrees in aeronautics and physics) does not seem to actually have anything to do with climate science I'm not sure what actual expertise he brings to the subject.

One thing that I've never quite gotten is the weird opposition lots of conservative religious folk have to the idea that global warming a.) exists b.) may have anthropogenic roots and c.) could conceivably be a problem. Is it as simple a formulation as "God made the world, therefore we cannot possibly do it serious harm"? Surely it's more complex than that. There are certainly religious groups that also have an environmentalist slant, and their position (Something to the effect of "God made this, ergo we must take care of it".) seems to make a bit more sense than the head-in-the-sand position that AiG seems to be advocating. But then again, very little of makes any sense to me at all.

Baby Mohammed's Cuddly Jihad...? Nah!

Remember back in the 1980s when everyone was aghast at "secret Satanic messages" hidden in rock music and whatnot? Well, there's a lady in Indiana who's currently aghast about "secret Islamic messages" hidden in her children's dolls and video games. You see, Rachel Jones heard this stock baby coo emanating from both a Baby Cuddle & Coo doll and a copy of the Nintendo DS game Baby Pals and has come to believe that's an insidious pro-Islam message meant to tear down the fabric of our society. Who would have thought that Mattel and Crave* were fronts for a shadowy Islamic organization? Presumably no one that isn't excitable.

Go ahead, listen to the clip without reading what Jones thinks it says. I guarantee you'll just hear a bunch of gibberish.

On the other hand, once you have it in your head that the unintelligible baby babble is actual saying "Islam is the light", you'll probably hear that too. This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly the same way those silly "EVP" ghost tapes work. When you hear something that's hard to understand (or even just plain random) you'll naturally tend to try to make it sound like something, and if you have a suggestion as to what it ought to say then that's what you'll hear. Why do you think EVP shows always have the "ghost voices" subtitled? It's because without guiding the listener into hearing a certain thing, lots of folks wouldn't hear much of anything at all.

Think of it this way: Have you ever misheard a song lyric? Every time you listen to the song you "hear" what you think it says, but then one day you read the actual lyrics that came with the album and suddenly you can "hear" the correct words. It's magic! No, wait, it's just your expectations coloring your reactions to an ambiguous stimulus.

Oh, one last thing: If you watch the video clip in the sidebar of the news story in the first link, you'll see Mrs. Jones voicing her concerns about how she has to check out everything she gives her children (One would think you'd do that anyway...) and then hear the narrator solemnly intone that "[Baby Pals] received an E rating". But, even if the baby was telling everyone how awesome Islam is, why wouldn't it get an E rating? Overtly religious Christian games like The Bible Game and Revelations: The Demon-Slayer get E ratings all the freakin' time, and the second one is actually kind of violent. So why wouldn't an otherwise completely wholesome game with a throw-away line about how cool Islam is get the same treatment? Maybe because reactionary, conspiracy-minded Mid-Western housewives are scared of Muslims..?

*Crave has published such insidious games a Crayola Coloring Adventure and Defendin' DePenguin.

I Have My Concerns...

I sat in on a behavior meeting for an incoming client at work this morning, which in and of itself is nothing particularly amazing. We're about to accept another gentleman with a mental disability to the workshop, and he occasionally has instances of verbal aggression when people aggravate him...which makes him virtually identical to not only every client we have but also every person in the freaking world. All in all it was a pretty by-the-numbers meeting, but towards the end one of his advocates said something that struck me as odd.

Apparently this client (who is now in his mid-60s) was raised as a Jehovah's Witness and, because of this, didn't celebrate Christmas. In fact, he kind of had Santa Claus mixed up with the Krampus - rather than a benevolent entity, he thought of Santa Claus a vindicator character who beat bad children rather than rewarding the good ones. All that is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned - what I do at work iswholly unaffected by the religious beliefs of the clients. However, the liason from the group home insisted that they'd "fixed his problems with Christmas" (apparently by going to great lengths to convince him of the literal reality of a benevolent Santa Claus) and now he's no longer a Jehovah's Witness but instead is rather in line with the rather generic Christianity practiced by most of the other residents at his facility.

That concerns me. Substituting one daft religious belief for another isn't trading up, but more importantly it's not within the purview of care providers to try and alter the religious beliefs of their clients, especially not clients who are dependent on the provider for care, shelter, and privileges. It's an abuse of the care provider's position of authority to alter the pre-existing and long-held beliefs of a client solely to conform to their own tastes. That's not what social workers are for. We're here to help people lead better and more independent lives, not coerce religious compliance from the people we're supposed to be empowering.

Another Embarrassing Moment for Kentuckians...

So Kentucky has its own Office of Homeland Security, which in and of itself is maybe kind of silly, but now the group American Atheists is suing my home state for the asinine wording of the law that created the Office of Homeland Security. You see, the law (KRS 39G.010) names the primary function of the executive directive of the KOHS as:

...stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth...and prominently displaying a permanent plaque at the entrance to the state's Emergency Operations Center stating the text of KRS 39A.285(3)

In case you're wondering, KRS 39A.285(3) includes the following Bible verse:

Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

Isn't that just freakin' awesome? The main duty of the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security is to use sorcery to protect us. Luckily we have the Constitution to protect us from that. Apparently the religion language was put into the law by state rep Tom Riner, a Democrat and Southern Baptist Minister from my hometown of Louisville. Honestly you don't see too many religious controversies around here that don't have the Southern Baptists attached to them, so this was rather predictable. At this point the governor has made no official comment on the issue, but the Baptists are a strong political force around here and I expect most of our public officials to grit their teeth and grab their ankles in order to serve that particular group's interests.

The KOHS may as well call on Mothra to protect us.

This story made it onto The Rachel Maddow Show last night, so it's only a matter of time until Fox News pics it up and it becomes the next gigantic embarrassment to my state. Rather annoyingly though, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit have (according to the Lexington Herald-Leader) not only asked for the religious language to be stripped from the law, but also for monetary damages to be awarded to them due to their "having suffered anxiety" over the law. I'm not sure if I buy into that last little bit, but I wholeheartedly support the effort to strip the law of its superstitious god-politics.