The Clockwork Chartophylax

PZ Myers – noted atheist, cracker perforator and squid fancier – was in Dublin tonight to lend his support to Atheist Ireland (AI) and their campaign against the Dermot Ahern blasphemy law and for a secular constitution and education system in Ireland.

And I got to meet him! (And a gracious, soft-spoken gent he was – not a lick of fire-breath or a squirm of tentacle in sight).

PZ Myers in Dublin

Fanboi frothing aside, PZ spoke on several topics along with Michael Nugent of AI, ranging from the many ways that the Dermot Ahern Blasphemy Bill is both stupid and dangerous to his experiences in dealing with evangelical pastors who accuse him and science lecturers in general of undermining their children’s faith. As PZ put it – it’s as if fundamentalists are teaching their kids that the sky is green and that they will go to hell if they think anything else. All universities do is ask those kids to look up.

Earlier PZ had been on the Tom McGurk show on 4FM and was subjected a tirade of righteous outrage from Senator Ronan Mullen. The good senator’s argument basically amounted to calling PZ stupid -  his arguments were “intellectually weak” and he didn’t understand “the nuances of western society” where people are free to express themselves as they wish – just so long as they don’t do anything that might offend a religious person, that is.

Ronan wants to avoid people being gratuitously offensive about religion – though what he didn’t say was that he actually voted against the blasphemy bill when he failed to get an exception allowing religious people to blaspheme against other religions put into the text.

Ronan’s heartfelt love for western freedoms didn’t stop him expressing a bit of fatwa envy though – PZ wouldn’t think of pulling such a stunt in a Muslim country – ha-ha, so there! What Ronan also failed to mention was that several Muslim countries have expressed their their enthusiasm for the new Irish blasphemy law and want to use its form of words for an international law to ban defamation of religion.

PZ Myers is plotting your downfall. Or thinking about squid. Probably both.

Ronan did think, though, that as a scientist, PZ shouldn’t be so irrational and admit that all the claims of the great religions are possible – except for that Creationist stuff, of course. The Virgin Birth, the Flood, Muhammad travelling from Mecca to Jerusalem and back  in a single night on a flying horse – all perfectly possible, but the literal truth of the Creation – sure only a gullible fool could believe that.

Tom McGurk, meanwhile, was hardly the paragon of journalistic impartiality. First, he claimed that the Blasphemy Law had been brought in because of  “Constitutional changes in other parts” what ever the hell that means. Then Tom got audibly annoyed when PZ said that the Eucharist was an empty superstition to him and snapped back that PZ was unqualified to discuss the matter. (So Tom McGurk thinks a  man is not qualified to discuss his own opinions about the Eucharist – that’s what priests are for, eh, Tom?)

Tom then claimed that the Eucharist was the central part of post-Renaissance tradition in Europe, neatly missing the point of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

McGurk then tried to claim that the blasphemy prohibition in the Constitution was to protect Jews from anti-Semitism in the 30’s – a claim that appears to be as untrue as it is ironic, given that host desecration was used as pretext to launch pogroms against Jews in Medieval Europe. Though the 1937 Constitution did offer protection to Jews in Ireland, it was provided explicitly in Article 44.1.3  (which was removed by the Fifth Amendment in 1973) and not by the blasphemy provision in Article 40.

Tom couldn’t see why anyone would be upset by a blasphemy law .  No, Tom thinks that blasphemy laws are just great “to stop people like you [PZ] writing this kind of crap”. The thought that his assertions about the Eucharist could be seen as blasphemous by any number of religions obviously never crossed his mind.

McGurk later claimed that PZ’s desecration of the cracker and his reasons for it was “close to racism” and that PZ would be arrested in the US if he’d said similar things about blacks or Jews – because attacking religious symbols and beliefs is exactly the same attacking people because of their race or religion. Tom’s clearly not heard about the First Amendment, and if he did, he probably wouldn’t have much truck with people having the freedom to say what they like.

But then, as a rugby commentator done good, it’s clear Tom’s not exactly qualified to discuss theology, European history or American Constitutional law.

So seriously, dude, stick to the odd shaped balls.

February 2nd, 2010 | Tags: 4fm, atheism, atheist ireland, blasphemy, dublin, Ireland, law, myers, PZ, pz myers, ronan mullen, tom mcgurk | Category: Ireland, atheism | Comments (11)

Just been watching the first episode of Channel 4’s “The Bible – A History“, in which Howard Jacobson talks about the creation myth in Genesis and demonstrates the apparently detrimental effect that reading English at Cambridge has on one’s reading comprehension.

Though billed as a history of the Bible, only about the first quarter of the programme actually dealt with the history of where the book of Genesis came from. The bulk of the remainder seemed to be a dig at “militant” atheists (though creationists do get a disapproving shake of the head too). “Militant” atheists, you see, are just as bad as fundamentalist creationists. In fact they’re just fundamentalists in negative – being as unswerving of their beliefs as the fundies.

According to Howard, Richard Dawkins “is the high priest of the new atheism” and the Natural History Museum in London is one of its temples – because there’s no equivalence like a false equivalence.

In a moment of unintentional comedy, Howard tells us why Richard Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” moves him to fury (about 24.00 mins in). In part he says, it because of its certainty. “Where’s the point in attacking religion for thinking it has all the answers when you have all the answers yourself. Blind faith is fatuous, but so is blind doubt,” Howard huffs, a few seconds after opening the book to the start of the chapter entitled “Why There is Almost Certainly no God”. Those New Atheists – so shrill and dogmatic .

But “The God Delusion” isn’t the only book that Howard either hasn’t read or has plainly failed to understand.

“A far cry from the benign god of my cousins or from  any god I recognise is the genocidal lunatic and bigot described by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins,” says Howard, demonstrating that his perusal of the Bible may have started and finished at the first chapter of Genesis.

Only five chapters on from the benign wishing into existence that Howard seems to taken with, God is having creator’s remorse:

⁵ The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. ⁶ And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. ⁷ So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

Genesis 6, 5-7

And like someone who got a cat for Christmas and ruefully discovers on New Year’s Day that she’s had a litter of kittens, the benign god of Howard’s cousins bundles the lot into a sack and tosses them in a river.

²¹ And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man; ²² everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. ²³ He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark.

Genesis 7, 21-23

Because there’s nothing that so defines a loving and all-powerful god like drowning nearly every man woman and (presumably innocent) child on the planet in a wanton act of collective punishment. Even if you read The Bible as a work of literature, as Howard wants us to, what is the moral lesson we’re supposed to derive from this story – create in haste, indiscriminately exterminate at leisure?

And that’s just the warm-up act (note:  this is not an exhaustive list of Yahweh’s genocidal diktats)…

Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I am driving out from before you the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite. Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land where you are going, lest it be a snare in your midst. But you shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images (For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.)

Exodus 34,  11-14

1 And Samuel said to Saul, “The Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. 2 Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.

Samuel 15, 1-3

So clearly the moral of the story is that Richard Dawkins and his militant atheists are shrill and ignorant, what with their arrogant and intolerant pointing out of what the Bible actually says.

January 24th, 2010 | Tags: atheism, Channel 4, creation, howard, jacobson, religion, the bible, TV | Category: TV, atheism, religion | Leave a comment

Cults. At the end of the day it always comes down to the fucking, doesn’t it?

Context.

January 15th, 2010 | Category: Crazy, atheism, religion | Leave a comment

2010 was always one of those dates that seemed fantastically far away back in the 1980s. It was one of those benchmark dates that was spoken of in terms of jet pack and flying car type predictions in science and technology shows like Tomorrow’s World on BBC.

And yet here we are in 2010, living in Tomorrow’s World. While it’s easy to be despondent at the marked and unremitting absence of jet packs and flying cars, here’s something to cheer you up – a page by page reproduction of a kid’s book from 1972 called “2010 – Living in the Future“.

While it’s funny to look at how quaint and crazy some of the predictions are, it’s interesting to see how much the author got right, more or less. The vision phones are essentially internet-enabled computers with web cams. The video school is a distance learning set up, with streaming video conference. The school computer is an combined learning management and learning content management system. The library system is Google with ebooks and YouTube. The planes like a town bus is Ryanair.

It’s also interesting to see the kind of systemic mistakes that futurologists make. Futureologists seem to have a complete blind spot for the role of social inequality (everyone lives in a house suited to their needs), fashion and trends (everyone wears jumpsuits), markets and economics (free public transport and a 3 day work week?), not to mention basic practicality (country-wide transport by a literal series of (pneumatic) tubes?)

One elephant trap no futurist seems to be able to avoid is the fact that technology doesn’t always progress linearly or even exponetially without hitting hard physical limits. In 2060, Ray Kurzweil’s  Singularity may well seem as quaintly mad an idea as Geoffrey Hoyle’s 4,000 mph rocket planes.

January 14th, 2010 | Tags: 2010, Futurity, futurology, paleofuture | Category: Futurity | Leave a comment