David Silverman toughing it out on Fox News again.

What follows is a discussion about findings that 54% of Americans would vote for an atheist president.

You can view the video here:

Now, one of my biggest problems with fox news has to be the unprofessional behavior of the "journalists" on the station.  Laura Ingraham repeatedly shouts Silverman down, and at one point says "God bless you" to him in an obviously condescending manner.   She never once shouts down the other guest Pastor Robert Jeffress.  Apparently Ingraham subscribes to the theory that somehow being a loud jackass makes your argument more correct.

There was much else that was absurd, like claims by both Ingraham and Jeffress that things like T.V. shows like Modern Family which portray gay people as normal is evidence of an attack on Christianity, and that the contraception mandate is an attack as well, you can read my thoughts on the contraception mandate here.

Jeffress goes on to explain that he has no problem with voting for an atheist president but only if they were pro life, against gay marriage and pro religious freedom.  Given the opinions both Ingraham and Jeffress are pushing though it seems clear to me that their version of religious freedom is to let Christians do whatever they want and screw anyone with other beliefs, so Jeffress standards are such that he is unlikely to ever find such an atheist.

To me this is an example of the privileged mentality of many Christians.  How deluded does one have to be to believe that the media not portraying homosexuals as immoral monsters amounts to an attack on your religious beliefs?

Christians not allowed special privileges choose to take ball and go home.

So this has been going on:

Santa Monica Nativity Scene Ban Results From Atheist Controversy 

To give a bit of background for many years Santa Monica has allowed Nativity scenes to be erected on public park space for a number of years.  To avoid possible church state separation issues they setup a lottery which any organization could put in for.

Last Christmas a lot of atheist groups won the lottery which didn't go over well with a lot of Christian groups.  Christians apparently defaced many of them.

In the end the city consul decided to simply get rid of the entire thing, apparently when they realized they had to allow people to use the system to publish views they did not agree with they simply decided to shut the whole thing down.

Personally I think that was the, whatever the reasons for decision, it was the right choice.  It is much easier for the government to maintain it's neutrality by simply not getting involved at all.

Christian salvation and why it makes no sense.

I'm sure it is no surprise to any regular readers that there are a lot of things I find disagreeable or downright immoral in the bible.  From the downright frightening way all of the Abrahamic religions advise we treat women to ludicrous insults hurled at unbelievers.  There is a lot more in the bible to dislike than there is to like, but one of the most troubling problems from a philosophical standpoint is the concept of salvation.

Now many of of my readers, specifically those who don't give a shit about religion or aren't huge history nerds like me, may not know that much about this topic, so let me give you a short primer into how Christian salvation works.  Christians all generally agree that salvation is a very important aspect of their religion, and they all agree that Jesus plays a part in that salvation.  What Christians sometimes disagree on is exactly how salvation actually works.  If you are not knowledgeable about Christian theology this might seem simple, but actually an entire category of theology known as soteriology is devoted to discuss this very question.

As it turns out Christians have come up with more than one answer to this question, Calvinism and Arminianism, for instance end up with very different answers to the question of whether or not humans play an active role in their own salvation.


Now, the specific thing I want to talk about is one aspect of the Christian salvation concept that is generally shared by all traditional theologies, substitutionary atonement.  There are a lot of liberal theologians who have rejected any form of substitutionary atonement, but most Christians sitting in a pew on Sunday believe in it. To be clear there are several different types of substitutionary atonement which you can read about here.  However, the two that are generally preached by most fundamentalists are called penal substitution and satisfaction theory. Anselm proposed satisfaction theory, and penal substitution was proposed by Calvin and other reformers as a modification of Anselm's model.  Both of them, however, suffer from a flaw I find rather problematic. 


To really understand these models work one has to go back to the old testament.  See, in the old testament God had a very strict set of rules, but he knew that people would mess up from time to time so he implemented another set rules governing how people could repent and get forgiveness for various breaches of the law.  The manner in which people were granted forgiveness almost always involved animal sacrifices.  For a good description of  these practices you can turn to a lot of places in the Pentateuch but Leviticus Chapter 1 is a good place to start, it pretty much continues on until chapter 9.  The rules were clear, if you committed a sin you killed an animal to atone.  The type of animal and the ritual involved depended on the sin and how wealthy the person in question was.

The reason why this relates to Christ's death is that substitution atonement views his death as an extension of these animal sacrifice.  See, these little animal sacrifices could clear away one sin, but God taking human form and offering himself up as a human sacrifice as a being with no sin could pay the price once and for all.

In the new testament Hebrews Chapter 9 describes it this way:

And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission.  (Verse 22)

When I was a believer I found such things comforting, but as I began to doubt my religion I noticed something about this narrative that really began to disturb me.  This system seems rather like all the other religious systems in the middle east at the time, ritualistic sacrifices to appease a deity, rather like a magic spell when you think about it.  The descriptions of the old testament laws as well as the description in Hebrews seem to suggest that the power of forgiveness is contained in the blood.  One had to spill the blood in a particular way, and often sprinkle the blood on an altar.  It seemed very much like all sorts of practices from other religions that I would, and still do, dismiss as crazy.

Ritualistically killing animals to get the rain to return or to gain favor with a deity in an oncoming war.  These sorts of practices were exactly the sorts of things that Israel was doing, there was no major difference.  So if this system is so absurd, it is reasonable to conclude that even if there is a creator god he probably had nothing to do with it.  Finally since the system of sacrifices that Christs death is resting upon makes no sense, then the death itself makes no sense. 

The notion that the all powerful creator of the universe would require a ritualistic blood sacrifice to in order for us to find favor with him again is laughable.  Perhaps it was believable by people who genuinely thought that those same sacrifices could bring back the rain after a drought or help one country win a war with another, but scientific analysis has squashed those ideas long ago.  Cut open an animals throat and let it bleed out on an altar and all you have is a dead animal and a bloody altar.  No rain, no military victory, no favor with omnipotent beings, and no salvation.

There is just no nice way to say some things.

I ran across an interesting article over at skepchick today that I found interesting.

A Few Things To Stop Doing When You Find a Feminist Blog

The author poses several questions that she gets asked often and answers them, one question and answer in particular caught my eye.

Have you perhaps considered taking the oppressor’s face in your hands, gently smoothing back hir hair, softly and sweetly whispering your message in hir ears with lots of words like “maybe” “sort of” and “I’m not blaming you”? I think the people who treat you horribly would be very receptive to that. Just my two cents.

She answers this in the following way.  

I have considered this one! I have done this one. I have also tried not doing this. Funny thing: you get the same result either way. And that result is based on the person you are talking to. You know, based on the way they choose to react, instead of your tone of voice, kind smile, and Circadian rhythms at the time. Everybody has their own responsibility to choose how to approach the inequities of the world; many people choose to slough off that responsibility onto the messenger, because they can, because they have that privilege, because to listen to the messenger and agree with them means the immediate end of that privilege. 

Now, as a man I have to admit that in the past, even since becoming an atheist, I have said things that were rather ignorant on the topic of feminism.  Even in the last several years my views have evolved quite a bit, and I'm sure I am still less than perfect on this.  What made me realize I was wrong here was my own experiences as an atheist, and I think this answer is relevant to a lot of issues besides feminism.

As an I regularly hear much the same complaint from various people, not all of them are Christians or even religious, but they all say the same basic thing.  Perhaps people would listen if atheists were nicer.  In my experience, however, it rarely matters. I have written posts or had conversations where I have specifically said I am not saying something only to be accused of saying that very thing a few moments later, I have pointed out cases in society where religious people (often specifically Christians) are given special privilege or status in my country only to be told that by religious people that I'm wrong to complain or that this isn't a case of special privilege at all.  Any conversation about our national motto inevitably ends with Christians telling me that the national motto being "in god we trust" does not amount the government giving special status to the religious and I should simply stop complaining because my complaint is stupid.   This is often followed by complaints about how Christian rights are being trampled in the country because they no longer have the right to force children to pray in schools.

No matter how nice I am the reaction is mostly the same, and these aren't even conversations about beliefs.  These aren't conversations where I am trying to convince someone that their religious beliefs are wrong, only that having those beliefs result in special  privileges in much of our society.

The reality is that human psychology is to blame for quite a bit of this.  None of us want to admit our failings, or admit that we benefit from a system that is biased in our favor.  For a very long time when some feminist came along and pointed some example of sexism I often reacted by denying it in some way.

My rationalization usually worked like this:

1. Sexism is bad.
2. If I supported sexism, or even indirectly benefited from it in some way I would be bad.
3. I'm a good person.
4. Therefore whatever you are talking about couldn't be sexist.

It took me a long time to get over that line of thinking, I can't even say I totally am over it, but I can't help but think that many theists are reacting with the same line of reasoning, and insisting they socially privileged because of their belief sounds to them like I am saying they are a bad person.  I'm not of course, most people are generally pretty decent irregardless of their religious beliefs.  People usually support a system biased in their favor because they are so used to the privilege they are unaware they even have it, instead of special favor it is just the way things are.  Usually the hardest part of change is admitting to being part of the problem.

Pastor Charles Worley says that we should lock gay people in an electric fence.

Standing ovation greets Pastor Charles Worley, who made anti-gay statements

I don't even know what to say about this.  

Worley is met with cheers and claps when he says:

I figured a way out, a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers but I couldn’t get it pass the Congress – build a great big large fence, 50 or a hundred mile long. Put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. And have that fence electrified so they can’t get out.

He seriously just advocated for concentration camps...and people wonder why the idea of a Christian theocracy scares the hell out of me.

He went on to say:

I tell ya right now, somebody said, 'Who you gonna vote for?' I ain’t gonna vote for a baby killer and a homosexual lover! You said, ‘Did you mean to say that?’ You better believe I did!

Clearly a reference to President Obama, which may, ironically, be the statement that gets him in trouble since churches as 501c3 organizations are allowed to lobby for causes but not allowed to directly support any particular political figures.

Complaints have been filed, so they may loose their tax exempt status over this, but we will just have to wait and see.

Going to ComiCon today.

Going to be out at ComiCon today so no detailed post but I'll leave you with a video some friends showed me the other night:

Shit Skeptics say:

I think I have easily said almost everything on this list.

I might post a few photos from comicon later.

New Facebook page.

Just a heads up.

I created a Facebook page for this blog which I'm sure everyone will want to run over and "like" immediately. 

www.facebook.com/skeptimusprimeblog

It'll be a good way to get notifications of blog updates if you don't use twitter, which you can also follow if you want, just look me up as skeptimusprime on twitter.

Atheists are having an effect, even if theists like to deny it.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post detailing a review of one of the chapters in a book entitled "True Reason." This was put out by a Christian ministry in an attempt to argue that Christianity is actually more reasonable than non-belief.  Now, the arguments in the book were pretty far from rational, the entire book did nothing but rip on logical failures of atheists.  Some of those failures were real, some were imagined, but in either case the book failed to make strong argument for how Christianity was rational on its own merits.

Reading through this made me start mulling over something interesting.  Irregardless of how much of a failure this book actually was in terms of rational argument, I realized this is a book that would never have even been published a decade ago.  The reason is that Christians were not, by and large, concerned with being the most rational.

I spent a number of years as a fundamentalist and involved specifically in a student ministry called Student Mobilization.  We were not generally concerned with our beliefs being rational, in fact I can think of several examples of people speaking highly of our willingness to be irrational for our beliefs.

Once in a bible study the topic of the trinity came up and we all had to admit that would could not really explain or understand it and our leader spoke about how great is was that we were willing to believe in something that made no logical sense.

In another instance I was told by several leaders, including the one in the previous story, that when evangelizing someone I should avoid speaking about evidence and should instead focus on my own personal conversion story because people cannot argue with personal experiences.

These stories were hardly a-typical, in fact that were quite common, we generally accepted that our beliefs would appear to be crazy to anyone who rationally thought through them.

Fast forward to today, the atheist movement is growing and garnering attention, it is getting better organized, and many people point to various books written by atheists as catalyst that finally tipped them into non-belief.  It seems to me that Christians are becoming more concerned with arguing their beliefs are rational precisely because of the impact that our arguments have had on the discourse, suddenly religion is no longer being viewed as being beyond rational inquiry and debate, and what's more it is loosing that debate.