Math….pffft why would we need that to understand global warming?

I’ve been reading different arguments about global warming lately and I ran across a claim on the sites of several people arguing against global warming.

Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

I’ll admit when I first read this I thought, is this really true? Doesn’t this hurt man made global warming arguments? Then I took a moment and considered the statement more carefully. the 0.00022 number provided is based upon a comparison of carbon dioxide for the entire geological history of the earth, which if you remember is 4.3 billion years. However, human cased global warming is a recent issue caused by high CO2 output by humans. Almost all of this CO2 output has happened in the last two to three hundred years, which means the real question is how much extra CO2 have we added to environment recently not in all of earths history.

Let’s not stop here though. Assuming this number is correct (I couldn’t verify anywhere) then lets calculate what percentage of of the earth’s CO2 has come from humans in the past couple of hundred years. Fair warning I have never considered math to be my strongest subject so feel free to point it out to me if I make a mistake in my calculations.

First we will base the calculations on the last 300 years.  So to find out what percentage of 4.3 billion 300 is we divide them.

300

divided by 4,300,000,000

= 6.9-8  or 0.000000069

 

So 300 is only 6.9^-8 of 4.3 billion, but man made carbon dioxide, most of which was caused in the last 300 years amounts to 2.2^-4 which is a much larger number. How much larger?

 

2.2-4

divided by 6.9-8

roughly 3,188.4

That’s right, the amount of CO2 produced by humans is almost thirty-two hundred times more than the amount of CO2 naturally produced by the earth in the same time frame, even based on the number provided by those arguing against man made global warming. So, this number, is actually strong support for man made global warming instead of evidence against it. Making the argument that it is a very small percentage of the CO2 produced through all of human history is like claiming a flood doesn’t exist because the amount the amount of rain that caused it is a very small percentage of the overall rain fall in that area in the last hundred years.

Video games made me a better person.

There is a pernicious idea that has worked it’s way into American culture particularly in the in the religious right, but in many other places as well. It’s the idea that video games are harming kids. I’ve written on my blog before about my time as a fundamentalist Christian in college, but believe it or not I was a gamer even back then, and I was often told I shouldn’t be by religious friends that I had. I was told that it was a waste of time and I was told I should spend that time sharing the gospel with people and other similar arguments.

Further in culture at large video games are blamed for even worse things including several of the school shootings which have happed in the last several decades, and the recent shooting in D.C.. Teaching people to be amoral murder machines in virtual worlds where there are no consequences will turn them into such things in real life eventually so the argument goes.

Most people reading this are probably familiar with some of the arguments gamers have made about these issues. Poor reporting by the media was responsible for people associating a false causative relationship between the violence perpetuated by these youths and the video games they played. So most people reading this are probably on board with the idea that video games don’t actually make people less moral. However, I’m going to argue that my so called misspent youth playing video games actually made me a better person today than I would have been other wise.

To explain let me give an example from a game I played years ago, Suikoden III. It’s an eleven year old game, but just in case there is anyone out there who hasn’t played it and plans on doing so there will be some plot spoilers here. The game has an original way of telling it’s story, it had three main characters. The game was divided into five chapters, the first three of which had to be played through by each of the main characters. What makes this particularly interesting is that each of these characters are leaders in a country which is at war with the other two.

There is an iconic scene in this game that involves two of the main characters. Chris, a Zexen Knight, and Hugo, son of the Karaya Clan Chief. While playing through Chris’s story your government orders you to attack the Karaya clan’s village after an attack on Zexen that you later find out was wrongly attributed to the Karaya clan. While Chris is leading the attack she sees a suit of Zexen armor in the village that she recognizes as belonging to her father who disappeared without a trace years before. She assumes that the Karaya must have killed her father and taken the suit as a trophy and in a moment of anger orders her knights to exterminate the village. She is unable to carry out the order because Hugo shows up with some others and drives her knights away, though she does kill one of Hugo’s friends in the process of retreating. While playing through her story her actions, while perhaps extreme, make sense. She isn’t a bad person, but she has spent her whole life wondering what happened to her father and thinks she has found his murders. She also regrets her order and later becomes angry at those who call her a hero for attacking the village.

On the other hand while playing through the same sequence as Hugo, he returns to find his village in flames and a Zexen knight ordering the death of everyone in his village. From his perspective she looks downright evil. Further, you know from his story that the suit of armor belongs to someone who lives in the village. It turns out Chris’ father is actually alive and living in with the Karaya. It turns out he left Zexen to protect Chris from assassins that were perusing him.

 

I know, this plot probably seems super typical of high fantasy novels like Lord of the Ring and such, but this story confronted the young 20 something me with an idea that has stuck with me to this day. In this story both Chris and Hugo held a perspective about the events going on around them that made sense given their world view and the facts that they had available to them. It is undeniable that both of them, while right about some things, were incredibly wrong about others, yet from their perspective the choices they made seemed totally rational. Now some might say that you could talk about this idea in a movie or a book ,but I think this idea was actually far better communicated in game form than it could have been in those ways. See in a book or a movie you are passively watching other take action, but in a game you are taking action, you feel as if you are influencing the world the game exists in and in effect you become the character. While playing a game I often come to identify with and understand the main characters motivation in a way that I don’t with movies or books because I feel as if I take on the role of that character. With this game it meant that I could actually understand and empathize with both the feelings and motivations of two people who hated each other in the first chapter of the game. In short it this game encouraged to me to think about complicated philosophical questions like epistemology and ethics, It also forced me to conceder the notion that an idea can seem reasonable from one perspective but still ultimately be untrue.

These ideas helped me grow as a person, and probably contributed to my willingness to abandon my religious beliefs, but this is hardly the only game out there that encourages people to think about complex moral issues. For instance games like Skyrim which allow you to make opened ended choices to resolve quests make people think about ethical dilemmas. I find it absurd that video games are often billed as a special type of cultural phenomenon that only wastes time or even worse is dangerous and causes people to become killers. Yet I’ve seen people who watch 40 hours a week of TV claim that people shouldn’t play video games because it is a “waste of time.” I’ve also seen news casters immediately ask after a school shooting if the shooter played video games (and sometimes if they were an atheist) which is an absurd question because in this day an age almost everyone under forty has played a video game. They wouldn’t assume that someone’s TV watching or book reading habits caused them to go on a shooting spree so why video games?

Another blogger who thinks evolution is an atheist conspiracy…

Recently the Kentucky Board of Education updated their science standards, and surprisingly enough I don’t have much of a complaint about that. Usually when when I pickup a story about science standards being changed, particularly in highly religious states like Kentucky, it’s because some creationist group is trying to insert creationist propaganda into the science curriculum. Surprisingly, this time the Kentucky board actually backed reasonable standards. On evolution the board stated

the fundamental, unifying theory that underlies all the life sciences…“there is no significant ongoing debate within the scientific community regarding the legitimacy of evolution as a scientific idea.

They also rejected the idea of pulling information about climate change out of science text books. They point out that the standards do not advocate for a particular political response, but do present climate change scientifically supported which seems to be exactly the way a science class should handle the issue.

Unsurprisingly many creationists and unhappy with these standards. While looking up information on this story I ran across a particularly irrational screed on The Matt Walsh Blog.

Christianity has done more for science than atheism ever could

Of course he makes an error right in the title of the post by assuming that evolution and atheism are synonymous. Considering Kentucky's religious background is is quite likely that that the school board is made up mostly of Christians. They are promoting evolution in the science curriculum because it is good science not because they are secretly atheist agitators as Matt seems to think. He gives two reasons that he thinks “progressives” are celebrating this decision.

1) It will put us in line with many other states, which is great because we all know a diverse and enriching education must be in utter uniformity with the national collective and in compliance with the federal agenda.

I always find it funny that a group of people who believe that everyone who doesn’t believe in their religion will suffer eternally in hell start criticizing atheists for our lack of “diversity,” but in the end they don’t actually understand what diversity is all about. I’m all in favor of diversity in regards to individuals personalities, likes and dislikes, etc. However, facts are still facts and to promote a version of diversity that allows people to have their own facts is to promote a relativist notion of truth. The odd thing is that I know for a fact that most Christians would regard this notion as false. Even Matt here wants Christianity taught in science class, not other religious beliefs just Christianity. How positively uniform of him.

2) The criteria calls for a renewed emphasis on man-caused climate change and, of course, evolution. Evolution — atheistic, nihilistic, materialistic, mindless evolution — must be taught as fact, without other ideas presented to compete with the theory.

All good science is technically materialistic because science is involved in measuring things it can actually measure. As soon as Matt, or anyone else, can propose a way for science to empirically measure supernatural entities and events then the supernatural can qualify as science. The thing is most Christians reject the notion that one can empirically measure such things. Christians often don’t want their beliefs to be potentially falsifiable the way scientific claims are so they reject the standards of science from the start and then demand that science respect their beliefs. It is not unreasonable to suggest that people like Matt pick one or the other. Evolution, on the other hand, is falsifiable and does meet scientific standards. If Matt thinks that those standards should be changed that is another discussion, but it is a philosophical one not a scientific one.

He then goes on to say that “members of the church of atheism” are the one really hostile to science, history, and philosophy. While I will admit that there are plenty of atheists out there who are ignorant on those topics, this is really entirely irrelevant to science standards since ideally those setting such standards should be knowledgeable about science regardless of their beliefs. The real irony, however, is that one sentence after he extols the Christians ability to properly value philosophy he uses the following quote from the apologist G.K. Chesterton

a multiplicity and subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far beyond the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modern philosophy

So he claims Christians are better and philosophy while simultaneously saying that philosophy is nothing but breezy platitudes?

He then tries answer the question of how science and religion are compatible with a litany of completely irrational arguments and biased ethnocentrism. He claims that Christians have the scientific high ground because:

As a Christian, you aren’t just a member of a religion — you’re a member of a rich intellectual tradition unmatched by any group, anywhere in the world.

It’s like he is just completely unaware of all of the rich intellectual traditions around the world that are unrelated to Christianity. He continues in this vein later on in his post so I’ll comment further there.

He then claims that an atheist recently told him that “Christians have always hated science.” I’ll actually agree with him that this is a rather bizarre thing to say. However, he metaphorically shoots himself in the foot when he calls atheists “historically illiterate fools,” and then later on in the post he complains that atheists are mean and insulting to Christians. He also claims that Modern science wouldn’t exist without religion which to me seems like an equally bizarre statement, as well as un-provable,

He claims that Christianity is the major driving force for science and he tries to demonstrate it by listing scientists who are Christian. In this he subtlety engages in a correlation vs. causation fallacy. He assumes that because these scientists were Christian that Christianity was the cause of their scientific achievements. However the pertinent question in the evolution vs. creationism debate is not whether or not Christians can be good scientists, I will happily acknowledge that they can.

The question is whether or not modern Christian fundamentalism is philosophically compatible with science. Anyone who knows history well, as Matt claims he does, would know that Christian fundamentalism is a movement that started in the 19th century in part as a reaction to what some people viewed as an encroachment into religious questions by science. This is important because beliefs like the scientific inerrancy of scripture, which are common to modern evangelical Christians in the U.S., were popularized if not outright developed by fundamentalism.  This is why it is particularly interesting that all of the scientists that Matt lists, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Newton, Kelvin, Mendel, Boyle, lived before the 19th century. It is undeniable that their version of Christianity differed from the modern fundamentalism that informs Matt’s views is some significant ways.

He devotes a great deal of his article to just repeating the claim that Christianity is responsible for science because by listing a number of Christians who influenced western scientific development while simultaneously ignoring the fact that many of the Christians were maligned by other Christians from their time for undermining religious beliefs. I suppose Matt thinks those people weren’t real Christians like the scientists were.

He then criticizes an atheist who sent him an email full of personal attacks and insults. As I have said before I actually agree that this is a bad way for atheists to present themselves in these debates, but no one can prove their own position correct by simply pointing out that some people who disagree with them are doing so in an insulting manner. Further Matt made a point of being insulting towards atheists at multiple points in this post so all I have to say is this:

He does expand on his earlier ethnocentric statements with this gem.

When western scientific knowledge came to places like China and India in the 1600′s, it came by way of Christians and their science-hating Christianity

I’m not sure what to make of this. If I take this statement at face value he sounds like an 18th century imperialist who thinks the only good ideas come from western civilization. Perhaps he only said this because wrote himself into a corner by trying to claim that science owes Christianity everything.

Just so we know this is not true, other civilizations have invented great pieces of technology and advanced science in myriads of ways. China invented gun powder. The first blood transfusions were done by the Incas. The list could go on for days. However, it’s even a mistake to think that Christianity was around for all of the scientific developments even in the western world. Galileo may have proved the heliocentric universe, but Greek Mathematicians proved the earth was round using geometry (which they also invented) hundreds of years before Christianity existed. Last I checked both of these discoveries were instrumental in the development of western science, so by Matt’s logic we should still be worshiping Greek god’s for teaching us Geometry.

At this point he makes the most bizarre statement this entire post.

But are we Christians all “idiots”? Well, I don’t mind if you say that about me, but was Da Vinci an idiot? Aquinas? Shakespeare? Mozart? Washington? Locke? Martin Luther King Jr? Edison? Tesla? Alexandar Graham Bell? Adam Smith? Marconi? Chesterton? Lewis? MacDonald? Dickens? Faulkner? Tolkein? Marco Polo? Neil Armstrong? Magellan? Columbus? Henry Ford? All of these guys are idiots, along with the scientific pioneers I mentioned earlier?

His statement here clearly implies that everyone he just listed here is Christian, but this is untrue, at least by the these people’s accounts of themselves.. Edison was a deist. Tesla’s views are debated by historians, but he seemed to be some kind of universalist or possibly deist. Neil Armstrong was, again, a Deist. Adam Smith was at most a deist, and may have been an agnostic or an atheist. He was certainly close friends with David Hume who many consider an atheist, and smith never evokes god as an explanation in his any of his philosophy. Alexander Graham Bell considered himself agnostic.

Columbus I will give him, but also point out that Columbus was kind of an awful human being. Columbus wrote in his log when he first met the Arawak Indians that, “They would make fine servants,” and “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” Also, he discovered America, not because he was brilliant, but because he reached a foolish conclusion and got lucky. That is he badly underestimated the size of our planet. The only reason he and his crew didn’t die in on a boat in the middle of the ocean due to his miscalculation was because there was a giant undiscovered continent half way between Europe and India.

Certainly, while most of the others were likely Christian the fact that he clearly got so many wrong makes me wonder how much he actually knows about history. He claims atheists are rewriting history to suit their narrative, but given his lack of knowledge about these well known historical figures how would he know?

Towards the end he says we should not teach atheism in school, which is one of the few things he says which I actually agree with. I don’t want public schools teachers telling students god doesn’t exist anymore than I want them telling students he does. Where he gets it wrong is assuming that teaching evolution is equal to teaching atheism. This should be obviously wrong given that fully half of the U.S. believes in evolution while less than 10% of us are atheists.

His last paragraph really wraps all of his biases about atheists up into a nice package.

Really, we must get atheism away from education before we all end up like the modern atheist’s greatest prophet, Nietchsze, who died insane and naked, eating his own feces in a mental institution. This is not the sort of fate we should wish upon our children.

Think of the children, for goodness sake.

First of all Nietzsche (he misspelled his name) went insane because he had syphilis. Matt’s blasé dismissal of a serious illness which would cause insanity in anyone regardless of their religious predilections is both offensive and scientifically duplicitous. To assert that being an atheist will cause people to eat their own feces is not only factually inaccurate, it is blatant fear mongering. This is not the scientific and rational thought he claims to be arguing for. Earlier in the article he claimed that atheists have to twist facts to justify their position but what is he doing here if not blatantly twisting facts?

So Matt Walsh I assert that I am thinking of the children. I will be a father soon my self, and it is my devotion to objective moral ideals, scientific curiosity, and intellectual honesty that leads me to my atheism, my skepticism, and notions of social justice. I feel strongly about these things precisely because I want to leave this world a better place than I found it…you know, for the kids.

David Barton’s grasp of statistics is just as bad as his grasp of history.

So Barton gives a smug little speech in which he references a passage is Proverbs 1:7 that says “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” Of course he uses this to claim that our educational system is failing because we removed compulsive prayer. You can watch the whole video below.

If you watch this you will notice that one of his key points is that the U.S. literacy rates have fallen from 1st in the world to 68th. It turns out this is a problematic claim on multiple levels. One it seems to be a bald face lie or at least a demonstration that he is unable to do a Google search. The reason I say this is that every set of world literacy figures I can find places the United States in the 20’s, quite a bit higher than the number he offers. Figures placed in numbered order here, and here.

The second problem is that, even if he was correct, he confuses correlation with causation. There are plenty of other possible causes for the U.S. to have changes in it’s world literacy placement. For one, it isn’t like these other countries are just sitting around existing to make us look good. Many other countries have been working on improving their literacy rates; so our position could have fallen without our literacy rates dropping at all.

The main question he should be asking if he were actually concerned with whether or not his claims are true is if there is any evidence that a lack of prayer is schools actually causes literacy to decline. This isn’t a hard question to answer. We only need to go back to tables I previously linked to and see if there is any correlation between the religiosity of a country and literacy. It turns out there is, however unfortunately for Barton, it is a negative correlation. The countries with the highest literacy rates, countries like Finland and Greenland, are by and large not filled with religious people. Further the countries at the bottom of the list, countries like Somalia and Afghanistan, are typically very religious. In any case all of the first half of these lists are above 90% and it turns out that the United States, as a highly religious culture with high literacy, is actually one of the few exceptions. It turns out there is no evidence to suggest that prayer or “fear of god” has a positive effect on literacy. However, there is quite a bit of evidence that Barton does not care if the claims he makes are actually true.

Video games, Atheists and insults…

I’ve been playing the rerelease of Final Fantasy XIV since it came out, which explains why I haven’t been blogging lately. There are a lot of things I enjoy about playing MMO’s, not the least of which is the personal interactions. There is something I find interesting about joining a group of people from around the world that I may have never met and working together to to accomplish a goal, even if the goal is imaginary.

However, I often find myself in a love/hate relationship with the social aspects of MMO’s, as I happened to find myself last night. I was in a party I joined through “duty finder,” which is a queue system for the dungeons in the game. Since the dungeons cannot be completed by yourself the queue will put random players looking to complete the same dungeon in a party together. You can meet some cool people this way, but you can also meet some not so cool people as I did last night.

Within ten minutes one of the players made a mistake which made another person in the group angry. What followed was 20 minutes of listening to the two people complain and name call, including homophobic slurs like “faggot.” I kept my mouth shut and just finished the dungeon. Perhaps I should have said something, but I usually find that asking people to not use such language causes them to simply start going after me under the false assumption that I’m thin skinned. I also know I only have to listen to them for a bit and then they are gone for good. Of course, it disappoints me when I see gamers behave this way. As a large group of nerds we have plenty of reasons to be more sensitive to the other humans hanging out on this tiny ball in space we call earth, so it disappoints me when I see people fail badly at it.

Now, as much as it disappoints me when my fellow gamers behave like this, it disappoints me even more when fellow atheists do so. As with gamers we are a group of people who ought to recognize the need for respect but often do not. Take this recent story in which a bakery who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding is now closing down as an example.

Now, let me be clear about a few things. I am not on the side of the bakery in regards to their choice not to serve their customers. They were running a secular business and thus are subject to civil discrimination laws. Nor do I accept the owners argument that they were not discriminating.

It’s definitely not discrimination at all. We don't have anything against lesbians or homosexuals, It has to do with our morals and beliefs.

This argument doesn’t work because discrimination is an act not a belief. I accept that their religious beliefs were the cause of the refusal to serve these homosexual customers, but it doesn’t change the fact that they refused to serve them because they were gay. This is pretty much the dictionary definition of discrimination. You can argue that companies should be allowed to discriminate if you wish, but don’t pretend it isn’t discrimination.

I am also not particularly sad that they are closing down. Ideally this is how capitalism works. If your company does something that makes people not want to shop there then you go out of business. It’s tough luck for you that you are on the wrong side of history and you went out of business because of it.

However, there is a part of this story that I do have a problem with. Due to this story the owners have reported receiving abusive/threatening communication from fellow atheists and supporters of LBGT rights. Including, according to the Blaze, threats that they be raped, and shot.

One quote from an email they received:

You stupid bible-thumping, hypocritical bitch.  I hope your kids get really, really, sick and you go out of business

Such behavior should be unacceptable, these people, despite their discriminatory attitudes, are still human beings, and their children are innocent of any wrong doing in this so they should not be a target in any of this. We really ought to aim to be better people than this and to treat people with more respect.

This certainly isn’t to say the other side does any better, the article on the blaze about this story is full of comments declaring that anyone who thinks the bakery should have served the lesbian couple are secretly communists who want to turn America into a fascist police state, while simultaneously failing to notice their behavior is no better than those they are criticizing. However, our opponents irrational behavior should not be treated as an excuse to behave irrationally ourselves.

Whether you are playing a video game or trying to enact social change we should at least start the conversation with the assumption that people can be reasoned with. We certainly do not know these owners well enough to conclude that they are beyond reasoning with about these issues. We might be able to reason them out of the prejudices, however, insults and rape threats are most certainly not going to change their minds.

Mike Huckabee has really gone off the deep end on this one.

So Mike Huckabee is really concerned about the state of education in this country, so am I, but this is where the similarities end. Huckabee wants to help kids learn about history, and he thinks he understands why kids aren’t interested in it anymore. Get this, the reason kids aren’t interested is because we aren’t selling American exceptionalism as hard as we used too.

America's youth aren't excited about our past because they're being taught history in a way that minimizes what has made America a beacon of hope around the world for over 200 years. Instead, history lessons today often focus on America's faults," said Governor Huckabee.  "It's impossible to overestimate the importance of giving our children a historically accurate and unbiased education that allows kids today to enjoy and understand our history, and build their pride in our great nation.

I suppose he has never heard the old saying, “those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” It gives us a good reason to learn about our countries faults along with it’s successes. However, people like Huckabee seem to want us to forget our faults. It is ironic that he continues to speak about providing people historically accurate education after flat out admitting that his goal is to white wash history of any mistakes America might have made. And by what logic does one claim that kids base their interest in American history on whether or not we did good or bad things? I fail to see how that is something they even consider.

Lets take a look at one of these videos, a preview that talks about Regan’s rise to the white house.

Here is Huckabee's own description of the videos.

"Each video we produce is developed in cooperation with a respected team of educators and leading historians to ensure both historical accuracy and a learning experience that children will love.

First off from a simple measure of video quality, (animation, voice acting, presentation) I’m fairly certain that children will love the experience of watching these video’s about as much as they love dense tomes about macro economics. As a nerd I’m some what of a connoisseur of cartoons, both American and Japanese. I’ve seen less stiff animation from old episodes of He-Man, and Regan looks like a deformed Muppet’s reflection in a fun house mirror. It’s done with CG, but the texturing is awful and the shading…well who are we kidding there isn’t any shading at all. I guess no one casts shadows in their universe. The voice acting is painful to listen to, and none of the writing makes sense for children. “the downturn in the economy is killing us,” twelve year olds do not generally speak this way. Frankly on the production values alone I’m embarrassed for Huckabee.

Further, I don’t know which educators approved of the “history” in this video but whoever respected them clearly has no clue. It has clear racist overtones in at least one place. The mugger at 24 seconds is black. (and wearing a disco shirt for some inexplicable reason) Regan is promoted as some kind of divine savior who wanted to return us to godly values. There is also a separate video up dealing with the 9/11 attacks which paint Bush is essentially the same light. There is nothing even remotely like unbiased history here, it is blatant propaganda for Christianity and American exceptionalism.

Friendly atheist discussing millennials leaving the church on CNN.

Hemant Mehta from Friendly Atheist had a discussion on CNN with an evangelical blogger named Rachel Evens about why people are leaving the church.

What I found interesting about the evangelical’s statements is that I actually started out agreeing with her. She begins by saying that people are leaving the church by failing to stay relevant. She acknowledges that the church is loosing relevance to many people and it’s attempts to become more “hip” are generally not working. The church is failing to attract members by modernizing their services with worship bands and laid back dress codes etc. This is true enough.

The part where she looses the plot is that she seems to think the reason the church is loosing relevance is that people want a more “traditional faith.” She doesn’t explain exactly what she means by this but all I can assume is that she means they want church's are have more traditional liturgy, theology, or perhaps both. In this I think she engages in exactly the same flaw in thinking that caused the church to start trying to become more “hip.” to begin with. That is, she puts style before substance.

This isn’t a new thing, back when I was a believer back in the 90’s was when this tread really took of the ground. Christian music was just taking off and it was full of musicians who seemed to be copying the sounds of popular “secular” bands. The market was being flooded with Christian T-shirts that parodied popular logos. We though we were being funny and creative even though we were doing neither of those things. These trends still continues today.

The issue was that Christianity was already loosing relevance before this trend started. The thing is that evangelicals define their morality and their ideals about how the world works on the Bible, and that book isn’t changing, so they are caught between two opposing forces. Trying to stay relevant on the one hand and trying to stay true to their religious beliefs on the other.

They found only one way to balance these things, which was to change the style. There was a surge of churches that sprung up who used a worship band instead of a piano or organ. They had relaxed dress codes, and even the preachers would wear t-shirts and jeans. Maybe the youth minister even had an earing. These churches thought of themselves as “hip,” and thought surely the youth of today will take them seriously now. Unfortunately it hasn’t really happened that way. However, it’s not because the youth want a more traditional experience as Evens claims, but because the church is fundamentally the same traditional organization it’s always been just with some new windows dressing. It didn’t work for the same reason that you can’t repair a house with a rotten foundation by slapping on a new coat of paint. The church thought a couple of guitars and some blue jeans would convince us they had modernized while allowing them to continue doing business as usual. It didn’t work.

Nothing like listening to a sermon to remind me why I don’t go to church.

A book caught my eye today through a social media link called God Behaving Badly. It’s written by a pastor trying to explain some of the more “difficult” passages in the bible from the outlook of a conservative theologian. I’m always interested in this kind of stuff because I like to see if the other side is making any new or innovative arguments, but I really hated the idea of coughing up nine bucks for the book when I was fairly certain from the description that it was not going to have anything particularly original. Plus I always hate the idea of giving money to an evangelist, it makes me feel a bit dirty.

Since I couldn’t find a free copy online so I thought I’d look on YouTube to see if the guy had done any live talks that had been recorded. While looking I ran into a video where an unrelated pastor was doing a talk about the same subject. 

What’s this? A pastor wearing jeans and sandals. A bare brick wall? A Mac Book on a table. Yeah this church has a bit of a hipster vibe. Thought to tell the truth this was the sort of church I tended to be attracted to when I was a believer. I was a college student for most of that time after all.

In any case, the preacher is speaking about sexism in the bible and trying to explain how it doesn’t really exist. Now, I will give the guy a bit of credit here, he actually seems to really work hard reinterpret the bible as non sexist. And he doesn’t skip out of dealing with the more difficult passages. As opposed to people like Pastor Steven Anderson who the Friendly Atheist has written about several times who seems to outright revel in the sexism of the bible this guy does actually work rather hard to clean up the Bible’s image.

Unfortunately he fails in this task quite spectacularly. The sermon starts out with him reading a pithy top 10 list of reasons god created Eve including things like “God was afraid Adam would get lost in Eden because he wouldn’t ask for directions,” I know he only intended this to be a funny opening, though it was absolutely not funny, but either way, starting out by making blatantly sexist jokes was probably a poor way to start this topic. He then goes through several passages. He explains the passage in Genesis 2:18-25 which refers to woman as man’s helper. He claims the word helper doesn’t imply secondary class since the term is used to refer to god as well in the Bible, but it seems like he misses the basic point that claiming women exist primarily to help men is inherently sexist.

He brings up several other verses, like the one is 1st Timothy 2 that is used by most churches as a justification to not allow women any positions of authority in the church. One of the things I’ve always found interesting about this verse is that it never specifies whether the writer believes this rule should apply in all situations or only in church, and some churches even read the statement in 2:15 about childbearing as a statement that only women who give birth can be saved. The passage is actually quite confusing even for fundamentalists, but he fails to bring up these problems at all.  Of course he acknowledges that his church does prevent women from having positions of authority over men, which should be a straight up admission that his church engages in sexism. He does not do this though, instead he makes several arguments to justify this interpretation as not actually being sexist.

The first thing he does is to essentially make a separate but equal argument. He does this by bringing up the old, “women are just different than men” canard. This argument is unfortunately pretty common even outside of the church circles, anyone remember “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus?” However, I’ve written several times (here for instance) about the shoddy pseudo-scientific nature these sorts of claims. Typically these arguments are built around questionable statistical inferences and anecdotal evidence. The pastor doesn’t surprise in this area as he brings up the differences between he and his wife as proof. Unfortunately for him it doesn’t get around the basic problem that his church is taking the position that women are not suited for certain types of jobs merely because of their gender. This is sexism, no matter how you spin it, no matter what bible passages justify the position.

Then he makes the argument that all people, including men, are called to be servants by the bible so rather than a put down of women these passages are good things. Basically he is saying that women should feel special because god has given them a special calling to be the servants of men. Now don’t all the women reading this feel special? It’s like they are saying everyone is called to service one another, but women are called a little bit more, and don’t be angry at men for this because it’s not us men who are being patriarchal, it’s God’s law. Convenient how that works right?

Interspersed in these arguments he brings up passages in the bible where women are given authority or power in some way as an argument that the bible is not sexist. I found this odd since this argument seems to actually contradict the others. Of course, I am happy to acknowledge that the bible contradicts itself on this issue, but he want’s to treat these passages as clarifications of passages like the one is 1st Timothy instead of contradictions. The thing is the passages don’t really support that kind of interpretation.

You know, when someone like Anderson, or James Dobson opens their mouth to speak on feminists issues I usually find myself getting angry at the outright unapologetic sexism in their attitudes, but with this I honestly feel pity. He seems like a decent guy who doesn’t want to be sexist, and therefore really wants the religion he believes in not to be sexist. He really does his best to preform a balancing act between this desire and his desire to maintain a fundamentalist approach to the bible. I feel for this guy precisely because I used to be this guy, but in the end we just have a fundamentalist who really wants to have his cake and eat it too, but unfortunately for him one can either believe the bible is morally inerrant or be a feminist, it is not possible to do both.