I was driving through Connecticut recently and saw an anti-evolution billboard. Yet another reason to hate that state.
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More from George Carlin: Religion is bullshit
Here is a classic video from one of the most outspoken atheists in recent memory. Enjoy on this Saturday afternoon.
Can you lent me a few bucks?
Yesterday was shrove Tuesday (mardi gras), marking the beginning of lent on the christian calendar. It’s traditional to give up something during the forty days remaining until easter. I’ve decided to give up going to church.
You might think that’s not really fair, like a vegetarian deciding to give up meant, and you’re probably right, but hear me out. In the catholic church, Sundays don’t count as part of Lent, so it’s actually 46 days from shrove Tuesday until Easter. That means that on Sundays you can resume whatever it was that you had given up. If you gave up fried food for lent, you can have french fries and chicken nuggets on Sundays without fearing for your mortal soul.
So my decision to give up church for lent means that on Sundays I can actually go to church, therefore I will be making a statement by not doing something I said I wouldn’t do on the days when I can do it.
History
I got in a discussion with my mother this morning. She is what I would call a temperate christian: not a crazy evangelical, but sure that the bible is the one true faith. She and my dad go to church every week, and they’re a big part of the church community, but their faith doesn’t consume their lives. In other words, I can hang around with them without getting upset.
I was telling mom about a talk I gave on the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and in the process had to describe FSMism and how it came to be, starting with An Open Letter to the Kansas School Board. Here’s a bit of the conversation.
ME: In the letter, he said that if you’re going to teach creationism as described in the bible under the guise of being “fair and balanced,” then you have to teach my version, which is that the world was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. There is just as much evidence for biblical creation as there is for creation by the FSM.
MOM: But the bible has been around for centuries, millennia even, so how can there be more evidence for the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
ME: That’s a logical fallacy: appeal to antiquity. Just because it’s been around for a long time doesn’t mean it’s right.
MOM: But the bible has driven the course of history for centuries.
ME: Yes it has. Feudalism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, racism: is that a history you really want to be proud of?
MOM: You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Europeans spreading the bible west.
ME: That is true, I wouldn’t be here. But so many Native Americans would be.
MOM: But they were converted, not driven out.
ME: And after they converted do you think the white settlers suddenly saw them as equals? Ever hear of the Trail of Tears, where thousands of natives were relocated? Why did the government create reservations?
As usual, this discussion didn’t change either her mind or mine, but it was interesting. My mom is one of the people who learned the 50s version of American history, that this country was founded by religious people on religious principles, and we’re right. I see christianity as just another religion, the same as judaism, islam, buddhism, jainism, and Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology. Different generations I guess.
Reason prevails
Well, maybe. Since I so frequently go searching for things that I know will make me mad, I did a search on Facebook for Pat Robertson, just to see how many fans he had. What I found was wonderful:
Yep, more than 100 times as many people want him to shut the hell up and go away that actually like him. Makes my heart glad. And you can go ahead and change the number of the first group, because I’m a fan too. And so were 15 other people in the time it took me to type this post.
Like the person, hate the belief
Over the past few months I’ve found myself becoming more hostile toward the idea of religion as a whole. I look with disdain upon church buildings and those who work there, and I can’t help but wonder about the educated people I know who not only attend church, but sincerely and completely believe what is taught there. When describing my churchgoing friends, I find myself thinking something like “A nice person, a lot of fun, great to work with, but he goes to church.”
Is faith something that should count as a negative, a reason to not like someone? In some cases I think so, but maybe not generally. I’ve met many people of faith who are really good people, and believe the bible more from a rational perspective (or at least as rational as it can be while still believing in the bible). They tend to frown on the bad stuff and focus on having a relationship with god, realizing that a lot of the directives and laws were intended for people living in a different place a long time ago. (Picking what to believe and what not to believe is the subject of another post, but we’ll let it go for now.) These are decent folks who care about other people and want to make a difference in the world, and I can’t fault them for that.
One of my closest friends when I was a churchgoer was the pastor, and it was precisely because he wasn’t gung ho for god all the time that I liked him so much. He had an excellent DVD collection (“Clerks” was his favorite comedy movie, and he loved war movies too) and listened to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin; he actually despised christian rock. He was also big on philosophy, being an assertive person, and a man of integrity. I haven’t spoken to him in several years, but I still have a lot of respect for the man.
So I find myself trying to balance the line of not disliking someone simply because he or she believes in something and I do not. As christians are fond of saying, “Lover the sinner, hate the sin.”
Where there’s a will, there’s a crazy person
I came across a list of 10 Unbelievable Inheritance Stories the other day. Some are pretty amusing: homeless brothers and their sister who inherited millions from their grandmother, the wealthy Portuguese man who left his fortune to 70 strangers chosen at random from a phone book, or the man who left $500,000 to his regular waitress at the diner where he ate every day.
The problem with people wealthy enough to leave massive sums of money to people is that they are often far out, even eccentric. I cite hotel tycoon Leona Helmsley who left $12 million to a trust fund for her dog (though the sum was reduced to $2 million by a judge within a year).
The one that really made me smack my forehead was the rich Asian woman who changed her will to include her personal feng shui advisor, thus excluding her family and charitable interests from a will written four years previous. Why did she do this? She was persuaded, apparently by the feng shui master, that by performing certain feng shui rituals (like putting him in her will) would enable her to live forever, or at least a very long time. Immortality was on her mind because she had recently been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
Let’s take a step back here: feng shui is an ancient Chinese aesthetic art. The basic principle is that carefully arranging items can improve the quality of one’s life by enabling the flow of chi, or basic life force. It’s been heartily adopted by the new age movement and is used to control the flow of negative energies and such.
In other words, it’s complete bunk.
Now I’ll grant that there are ways of arranging things that can change one’s mood. I’ve been told that having your desk face the front of the room can reduce stress; the logic is that you don’t have to turn around to see who walks in your office. Seems reasonable to me. Basic arranging of furniture in your home can help a small space feel bigger or a large space seem more cozy, and that makes perfect sense to me. As far as controlling the flow of energies and life force and stuff, though, it’s as scientific as astrology.
So back to our wealthy woman and her feng shui advisor. She wrote him into her will, negating the previous one that included some family members and charities, and made the sole beneficiary of her $13 billion estate. Wow.
You can probably guess how much good it did too: she died in April 2007, at age 69, not two years after changing her will.
It makes me feel only slightly better that according to the Wikipedia entry, her estate was actually split among those listed in both her 2006 will and the 2004 version that included a charitable fund for medical development. That means that the feng shui guy only got $4 billion instead of the original estimate of $13 billion.
Sigh.
