The Atheist News Podcast

This is just too amazing to not propagate.  Pharyngula links to this spectacular piece of right-wing kitsch that depicts Jesus (Caucasian, like he should be) personally delivering the Constitution to a group of awed on-lookers who include, children, school teachers, US Founding Fathers (including, ironically, notoriously atheistic Thomas Payne), Ronald Reagan, dead astronauts, black soldiers (specifically), and a godless group of professors, Supreme Court Judges, politicians, and Hollywood producers.  Every individual and object in the picture has a nice little mouseover text (eat your heart out, Randall Munroe!) describing how that individual either worked to create the United States of Jesus America, or how he is working to bring Satan (can you find him in the picture?) into the White House.  This is absolutely golden.  Enjoy!

Jesus delivers the Constitution

I like apocalypse movies just as much as the next guy, but this one was far better than any other I have seen in quite a while.  Left behind, the end all of Kirk Cameron christian apocalypse movies, I laughed! I cried! It was better than Cats! And yes the Russians are the bad guys, why not they were the bad guys in all other christian movies, plus all older christian guys love Red Dawn.  Apparently Jesus was against communism, he didn’t much care for the whole people living equally thing, and he hates the color red.

So Kirk Cameron is playing a guy named Buck Something, we will just call him Buck Futt.  Before I get started I just want to point out that no matter how many times Buck Futt gets injured below the waist they manage to patch him up with out taking hit pants off, by I shit you not, stitching him up through the hole in the knee of his pants he got when he was standing next to a car bomb.

So buck Futt is a reporter, and some guy in the middle east makes some grow all drug thing that makes shit grow in the desert.  So he is covering the story in Isreal and there is some giant fucking attack, like 100,000 planes, seriously there are more planes in the movie than there are on the entire planet (including scrap yards, museums and the ones on the bottom of the ocean).  Then somehow he gets dragged into this “top secret” underground base and then all the planes blow up very dramatically, apparently God found out how shitty the special effects were and decided to unleash some wrath onto the cgi set.

So then Buck Futt is on a plane heading back to the us, he didn’t get hurt, hes fucking Kirk Cameron, and holy shit half the people on the plane dissappear!  (I should mention that this movie jumps around a lot, making it nearly impossible to follow).  Apparently  the Rapture (a mythical mass abduction discribed in Revolations) happens on the plane.  At this point Buck is not a Jesus freak, I can just imagine him doing an interview about the movie saying something about how it was really hard from him to play a non-christian on screen, overall being a pretentious prick.

So he gets home and guess what a russian sniper is following him and his buddies around  (all his buddies that didn’t get “left behind”).  There is a confusing mass of informants he uses and blah blah blah, they all get killed, some shot, and some in car bombs, which is how he get injured and subsiquently healed through a hole in the knee of his pants, It was just to riscay to take his pants off on screen, he didn’t want to put naughty thoughts into any little girls heads.

So then throught a Buck Futt in the story line, Buck Futt gets to go hang out with the “anti-christ” whose name is Nicholai Carpathia, Like I said earlier, the russians are bad bad people.  The movie ends quite soon after when Nicolai shoots some world leaders in the head, yeah he has some mind controll shit going on too.  I really wish that Tbn was having a marathon and showed the other movies in the series because I really want to keep drinking and yelling at the television into the wee hours of the moring.  But alas I have to save my 40ozers of PBR until next sunday when they continue to Buck Futt public access television.

Ps… If any of you know any religious movies I should watch and then make fun of, let me know I am open to anything I can find in a video store or on the internet…

In the second of what I suspect will be a scattered series of posts on Darwin–I’m TAing a class on him this semester–I bring you some facepalm-worthy news on this godless Sunday morning.  The UK’s Telegraph reports that a new drama about the life and times of Charles Darwin has recently made its premier at the Toronto Film Festival to much acclaim.  The film–which, judging by the trailer, looks quite good–is titled Creation, and is apparently centered around a portrayal of Darwin as a father, husband, naturalist, and human (rather than as an almost legendary scientific figure); it seeks to depict Darwin’s “struggle between faith and reason” as he wrote the Origin of Species, and throughout his life.  The producers have had no trouble finding distributors for the film in most of the world, but have been unable to find a single distribution company willing to take the film on in the United States.  The reason?  The film’s central topic–evolution–has been deemed too controversial in the United States.

As shocking as this might seem, I suppose the distribution companies are on firm statistical ground here: a Gallup poll conducted in February (to mark Darwin’s 200th birthday) found that fewer than 40% of Americans endorse the theory of evolution even in the broad strokes, and the number falls to just 24% if only those who regularly attend religious services are considered.  That makes for some reasonably fierce opposition to the topic of Creation, and perhaps some good reason to think that the film might struggle to find a wide audience in the United States.  Even still, though, I find it hard to believe that there’s no audience here at all: Bill Maher’s Religulous, after all, was able to find enough of an audience for a release, so it can’t just be that Creation offends America’s religious sensibilities.  Is there a deeper opposition at work?  Perhaps.  Much of US culture is profoundly anti-scientific and anti-intellectual, so perhaps the fact that Creation is about science (or, rather, about a scientist) is as off-putting as the fact that it covers evolution specifically.

Whatever the reason, I hope that the film’s producers are able to strike a deal soon: this looks like a really entertaining and well-done look at Darwin the man.  I was happy to see hints at the inner turmoil he must have experienced as he pushed his theory to its limits and yet still tried to maintain a close relationship with his highly religious wife Emma, for whom he cared a great deal.  It also seems to deal with the tragedy that was the death of Annie Darwin, the scientist’s favored daughter, at age 10–the event was to haunt Charles for the rest of his life, and may well have helped shape his waning religious sensibilities as well.  Non-American atheists can expect to see the film soon; my fellow Yankees and I may have to wait a bit longer.  Still, I suspect it will find its way here eventually.

It’s just like a movie, but much more violent, a hell of a lot shorter, and with crumby metal music playing.  What is it?  You guessed it - heavy metal Christian music videos!  Nothing says, “I love Jesus and I genuinely care about the well being of other people,” like death metal and disturbing images of murder and mutilated animals (you know basically everything the Christian Church stands for).  But I do have to give the bands props for finding a new way to, “praise the Lord,” by getting a bunch of crazed teens to punch each other in a mosh pit.

The first band up is called The Reaping.  Everyone in the band is thrashing around playing their music, but in-between the fantastic shots of the would-be-singer, “singing,” there are disturbing images of a decapitated pig.  Eventually, after more headbanging, it is evident that there is some sort of butchering going on for a feast; so the pig head was for dinner, it’s ok!  Then the man at the head of a table keels over and dies.  Oh no it’s a poising!  Just like the twelve apostles did to the Pharisees right?  Did I miss something here?  Why does a, “Christian,” music video have someone being poisoned in it?  Oh, sorry, I forgot that Jesus poisoned people all the time, that’s what the Sermon on the Mount was all about, right?

I’ve never been a big fan of music videos; short, plotless, confusing films have never really been my bag, but i have to say the next video intrigued me.  It’s by a rather popular band called Norma Jean.  The video isn’t necessarily violent but has a what-the-fuck-is-going-on feel to it.  I can just see the producer pitching the idea to the band: “Ok, so there is this underground bunker, right?  Yeah and there are two really skinny boys riding stationary bikes that are powering machines and there is a screen on the back wall showing weird plants and animals.  Rad, right?”  There are some mild torture scenes where they inject the kids with hypodermic needles and what-not, but nothing too bad.  Although, one has to wonder what an underground testing facility would have to do with Jesus, maybe Nike was in charge of this video?

The church I grew up in used to brag about how they, “loved everyone,” and that violence is not the answer, yada, yada, yada; everyone has heard this schpeil.  I understand that in order to convert all the young guns they need to be hip-for-Christ, but I thought most of the time the Church tried to hide all the horrible violent acts they committed in the past.  The really ironic thing is that one of the commercials in between videos is about being a, “peaceful warrior.”  So why the violence?  Why decapitated animals and tortured kids on bikes?  Do these videos have anything to do with religion at all?  I turned off the television confused at the meaning behind the videos.  So if I am missing something here, if there are biblical references that I am missing out on, please let me know, let me in on the secret.

Back when I was a human larva, Bertrand Russell was one of the first philosophers I ever discovered, let alone read in any depth. I was raised moderately Catholic, but by the time I was 11 or 12, I was wrestling with nascent feelings that Catholicism–and indeed, all of religion–might be terribly inadequate. One day, while hanging out in a bookstore (yeah, I was that kind of 12 year old), I happened on a book called Why I’m Not a Christian. I read the titular essay right then and there and, after buying the book, soon devoured the rest of them. Russell’s clear, lucid, humorous prose expressed all the doubts I’d been unable to put into words (and then some!) and exposed me to serious analytic philosophy for the first time. If anyone out there hasn’t read this book, I’d strongly recommend it–it’s highly accessible, but still penetratingly incisive.  Russell–himself raised in an almost abusively strict religious household–is often considered the patron saint of philosophical atheism, and this book is a good example of why.

In any case, after finishing that work I was hooked, and before long I was plowing through Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and every other piece of philosophy I could get my hands on. Though I’m not a logician–and though Russell’s work on religion was only a very, very small part of his mostly logic-and-math-oriented corpus–I still have a soft-spot in my heart for him: he was my first doorway into what eventually would become a career.

Through GE Moore at Cambridge, he discovered Leibniz and Boole, and became a logician. Through Alfred Whitehead’s influence, he travelled to Europe and met Gottlob Frege, who believed in a wholly logical language (and was borderline insane) and Georg Cantor, the inventor of “set theory” (who was locked up in an asylum) and a mass of French and German mathematicians in varying stages of mental disarray. Back home he and Whitehead wrestled with their co-authored Principles of Mathematics for years, endlessly disputing the foundations of their every intellectual certainty, constantly harassed by Russell’s brilliant pupil Wittgenstein.

If the subject matter seems a little arid, with its theories of types, paradoxes and abstruse language (calculus ratiocinator?), and if its recurring theme of how logic and madness are psychologically intertwined seems a touch gloomy, don’t let that put you off. Logicomix tells its saga of human argumentation with such drama and vivid colour that it leaves the graphic novel 300 (Frank Miller’s take on the Battle of Thermopylae) looking like something from Eagle Annual.

Since I talked a bit about Penn & Teller’s atheiskeptihumanist-style show “Bullshit!” yesterday, I thought this might be appropriate to mention.  While I was rambling around the Internet last night, I came upon a short, two-part series that Richard Dawkins did in much the same vein.  It’s called “Enemies of Reason,” and features much of the same material that one might find on “Bullshit!”  I suppose I should confess that I’m not a tremendous fan of Richard Dawkins’; he’s certainly a great evolutionary biologist, but his philosophical acumen has always struck me as somewhat less certain.  Still, he’s been an impressive force for populizing atheism and making it at least acceptable to talk about religion in mixed company, and those are important works.

In any case, as condescending and shrill as Dawkins can sometimes be, he’s miles beyond the outright mockery and antics of Penn & Teller; there’s nothing wrong with antics or mockery per se, but I’ve often been struck, while watching “Bullshit!”, with the wish that Penn & Teller–who are obviously quite intelligent–would engage with the subjects of their episodes a bit more.  There’s never any discussion or argument; all the narration and mockery is done via voice-over.  As Lord Scarab pointed out in his comment to my last post, that makes for good “preaching to the choir” style entertainment, but doesn’t advance the cause a whole lot.  That’s why I was so pleased to find this series by Dawkins.

“Enemies of Reason” seems to be freely available online in two 45 minute chunks.  The first episode focuses on the notion of irrationality generally, and features Dawkins interviewing and talking to a variety of religious/spiritual/irrational subjects.  The second episode–which should strike viewers in the United States as eerily appropriate–deals specifically with anti-rationality as it pertains to the health care industry; Dawkins talks to various “alternative” medicine practitioners about what they do, organizes a few minor studies, and so on.  It’s good stuff.  He’s uniformly polite throughout the series (that might be a feature or a bug, depending on your viewpoint), and is never overtly argumentative.  The characteristic Dawkins smirk only made one appearance that I noticed, and he really can’t be blamed for it: a woman was earnestly telling him that DNA is a “big deal these days” in human evolution, as we’re just now starting to rediscover the rest of our DNA strands–while most of us today only have two strands (for a double helix), apparently all humans had twelve strands of DNA when we lived in Atlantis.  After Atlantis, we “forgot who we were” and (somehow) lost those DNA strands.  I would have been smirking too, if I were Dawkins.

That’s not to say that he’s totally non-confrontational, though: on more than one occasion he says something like “I think you’re wrong, and here’s why.”  In any case, if you enjoy this sort of thing, it’s a very nice little series.  I wish they’d made more of them, as I strongly prefer this style to the somewhat more low-brown style of “Bullshit!”, but I’ll take what I can get.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Enemies of Reason (Part 1)

Enemies of Reason (Part 2)

As you probably have heard if you follow our news feed, the Catholic League is calling for Penn & Teller’s Showtime show “Bullshit!” to be cancelled after an (as-yet unseen) season finale attacking Catholicism.  For those who haven’t had the pleasure of seeing “Bullshit!”–which, as you might be able to tell already, I quite enjoy–I suppose a few words are in order.  Penn & Teller are well known for their sensationalized skepticism and hatred of trickery; they are magicians who, despite being world-class illusionists, have been thrown out of the Magic Castle in Los Angles for repeatedly (and gleefully) revealing the sleight-of-hand behind various magic tricks.  Professional magicians frown on this sort of behavior, but Penn & Teller maintain that if knowing how the trick is done makes it any less amazing, then the trick wasn’t all that amazing to begin with.  They are famous, for example, for doing a version of the common Cups and Balls illusion with clear plastic cups–the trick is, at least to these eyes, no less amazing.  Indeed, knowing precisely how they’re doing it makes it all the more interesting: your brain knows what’s going on, but the speed and precision with which they execute the trick leaves you still gaping in wonder.  For my money, that’s better magic than a hidden (and often mundane) prop.  On “Bullshit!” they take this skepticism and general hostility to mysterious pretension public (as it were) by presenting a series of short episodes (they’re in their seventh season now) dedicated to debunking various ideas, movements, organizations, or practices that they find to be, well, bullshitty.  They’ve taken aim at organized religion before, but have also had episodes attacking astrology, alternative medicine, recycling, the anti-war movement, and probably at least one bit of ideology that you, dear reader, hold sacred.  That’s just how they roll, and they’re spectacularly entertaining while they do it.

Now, it seems rather clear that some attacks on bullshitty (I rather like that adjective) beliefs, while they might be amusing, do little to actually advance the cause of skepticism and rational thought: the recent 4Chan (note the distinct lack of a hyperlink there) attacks on Christian Facebookers comes to mind as a prime example.  While the defacements might be good for a cheap chuckle from the atheist crowd (yeah, I giggled a little bit), I think most of us can agree that this is not the sort of thing that the community as a whole ought to take ownership of–indeed, it’s something that ought to be condemned.  If our goal is to convince believers that not only are atheists generally nice people (or at least no less nice than any other arbitrary group) but that there’s a good chance that we’re right on the metaphysical questions, then this sort of deliberately inflammatory route is probably not the one that we want to take.  Where, though, does “Bullshit!” fall on the spectrum?  Is it closer to the 4Chan end, or closer to (say) the thoughtful, reasoned, articulate criticisms of Dan Dennett?  Should the atheist community stand behind Penn & Teller as agents of change, or should we decry them as the televised equivalent of 4chan?

Let’s explore this question a little bit.  We’ve admitted the 4chan attacks as a paradigm case of the sort of thing we want to avoid, so let’s start by enumerating the qualities that we want to eschew here.  First (and perhaps most importantly), we might notice that the 4chan attacks were directed at individuals, not at any particular set of principles or ideas: the Facebook pages that got defaced were the private pages of actual people, not the ideological charters of some organization.  That certainly counts for something: these were the digital equivalent of ad hominem attacks on religion: personal attacks on the believers rather than on the belief itself.  That’s something we ought to avoid, both on rhetorical grounds and on moral grounds–it won’t win us any converts, and (that point aside) it’s just the wrong thing to do.  What else?  The 4chan attacks were all entirely negative in nature: at no point–at least, no point that I’m aware of–was a positive point made during the attacks; the purpose was just to deface, not to put forward a constructive solution or make a constructive argument.  Note that the first and second points are not necessarily mutually entailed: it would have been entirely possible (for instance) for the 4chaners to deface personal Facebook profiles and replace them with long, well-reasoned treatises on the philosophical problems of supernaturalism.  Doing so still wouldn’t have been right–it still would have constituted a kind of ad hominem, it seems to me–but it at least would have lessened their sins.  Anything else?  Well, we might also take issue with the fact that these attacks were conducted anonymously–no individuals took ownership for any of the actions.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; there are times when anonymity and group action can be good for intellectual discourse (e.g. as when anonymous groups function as industry whistle-blowers), but this is not one of those times.  Indeed, the anonymity of the group only seems to underscore their lack of desire to advance the discourse with their actions; they wanted to cause chaos, nothing more.

OK, so we have a few criteria here.  The most noteworthy respects in which the 4chan attacks are to be decried at: (1) their ad hominem style, (2) their lack of positive intellectual contribution, and (3) their anonymity.  How do Penn & Teller fare?  The results, it seems to me, are mixed.  The show’s tone is certainly somewhat ad hominem in tone: there are copious uses of words like ‘moron,’ ‘idiot,’ ‘fuck-tard,’ and virtually any other iteration of that sort of thing you can come up with; Penn & Teller aren’t shy about attacking individuals with whom they disagree.  However, their attacks don’t stop there: they continue on to deal with the concepts, ideas, and belief-systems driving the individuals they attack–they’re not just aiming at individuals, but also at the belief systems that–they argue–actually make the people “fuck-tards” in the first place.  That criticism–of intellectual principles–is of varying quality, but it is at least present.  What about (2)?  P&T fare a bit better here–they’re never shy about presenting their own ideas about how to fix the systems they critique, or about what beliefs they think would make the world a better place.  They’re not presenting detailed arguments for their positions, but in a 30-minute television show, I’m not sure we ought to expect them to–they are, at least, presenting the positions they hold and making some semblance of a positive argument.  (3) is clearest of all: appearing on a television show with your name in the title is about as far from being anonymous as one can get.  They very loudly and proudly take ownership of their ideas and actions–both for good and for ill.  They’ve admitted bias in the past, and at least make a cursory effort to revise their opinions when they’re shown to be in error.  More importantly (at least for this criterion), they’re putting themselves out there and acknowledging the opinions being expressed as their own.  They have at least some of the courage of their convictions.

Are P&T perfect?  Certainly not–they’d be the first to admit that, most likely.  Is the show perfect?  Again, I think they’d be among the first to say that it isn’t.  Are they biased, sometimes one-sided, crude, prone to ad hominems, and generally academically suspect?  Sure, but they’re running a TV show, not a university lecture series.  At the very least, they are exposing people to the controversy surrounding some of these issues, and they’re doing it in an entertaining and eminently watchable way.  They’re also equal opportunity in their attacks: contrary to what the Catholic League would have you think, only a small minority of the show’s content as been directed at Catholicism, or even religion in general; the vast majority has been spent on other instances of so-called bullshit, including some bullshit that I happen to agree with.  They are, I think, doing more good than harm.

What do you think?  Where should the line be drawn on this issue?  What’s productive, and what’s not?  How low can we sink in trying to make these ideas public before we’re guilty of doing something wrong?