Mr. Deity and the Awkwardness

Mr. Deity and Larry lunch with a very disgruntled John the Baptist.

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Mr. Deity Tries To Find Time To Make Time

Mr. Deity discovers the whole physics, time, space, location thing... kind of complicated.

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Mr. Deity's Crazy Logic

Some very biting satire from the folks at Mr. Deity, addressing the violence and total absurdity of the Old Testament God. Watching this episode, I can't help but think of John Lash's correlation of Jehovah with the deluded, psychotic Demiurge Yaldabaoth described by the Gnostics. Look at it through that lens and the whole thing starts make a crazy sort of sense.

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Mr. Deity Takes On NBC Fracas

And deals with the devil.

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Mr. Deity: More Fun with Gender Roles

Shortly after getting pounded for trafficking in female stereotypes, Mr. Deity is back and exploiting gender role humor to its fullest. I note that Brian Dalton preemptively apologizes for his hatred of women, in the commentary. Very, very funny.

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Pat Robertson on Haiti's Pact with the Devil

I've been cataloging a number of recent, arrogant, public pronouncements, offered in the name of Christianity. More to come on that, but Pat Robertson's latest hateful outburst requires a stand alone post.

In the aftermath of this horrific tragedy in Haiti, one which may have caused as many as 100,000 deaths, Pat Robertson is, once again, blaming the victims, and citing their sinful nature. What's the problem in Haiti? A pact with the devil, according to Robertson. Citing no source for the information -- perhaps God has been bending his ear again -- he announces that Haiti turned to Satan, in hopes of ending the tyranny of French Imperialsm. He's not so certain about what French leader was oppressing the Haitians, but he's quite certain about the whole deal with the devil thing.

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it," he said on Christian Broadcasting Network's "The 700 Club." "They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal."

In Pat Robertson's world view, it's God's curse that's causing Haiti's poverty, oppression, and what most of us call a natural disaster. Proof? The Dominican Republic: No pact with the devil and today a thriving resort area. Haiti: Pact with the devil and today under a pile of rubble. So there ya go.

This is what we call the just world fallacy. Bad things just don't happen to good people. They only happen to the bad people, so when bad things happen, we should always look to see what they've done wrong, and know that as long as we stay in God's good books, nothing bad will happen to us. Versions can be found in our underlying cultural belief that poverty is a result of moral failure, The Secret (wherein our positive thoughts bring positive experiences and our negative thoughts bring negative experiences), and the belief that causes many women to find for the defendent in rape cases. The just world fallacy allows people an illusion of safety in an uncertain world, but I just call it blame the victim idiocy.

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Mr. Deity and the Apology

The last episode of Mr. Deity introduced Eve. I posted it here. I thought it was cute, but I thought, at the time, it might tweak some people. Apparently, it did. In fact, it seems to have really pissed some viewers off enough that Brian Keith Dalton has come out with an apology. It's at the end of this most recent episode, "Mr. Deity and the Wrong Number." Like all things Mr. Deity, the apology is quite amusing, and straddles that fine line between the satirical and the offensive. Dalton makes the rather significant point that Mr. Deity lampoons a variety of stereotypes, and yet, it is only when a stereotype of a woman comes in to play, that all hell breaks loose. And, like so many stereotypes, there is some truth in Mr. Deity's Eve, and in the communication breakdown that ensues. I say this as a woman and a feminist. There are differences between men and women. There are differences in the way we communicate. Women can be indirect and, even, passive aggressive. Men can be obtuse and oblivious to metacommunication. John Gray built an entire cottage industry around these differences, and the trouble they can cause in male/female relationships. So, I thought Mr. Deity's depictions of an extremely yin Eve, and yang Adam, were clever. His conversation with Pat Robertson is also amusing, so enjoy!

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Mr. Deity Discovers that Eve is From Venus

The newest from Mr. Deity introduces the newly created Eve. (Adam is in post op, after losing a rib.) The deity and Larry rapidly discover the differences between female and male communication styles. Earlier we met Adam, (see below) and he is most definitely from Mars. Aah, fun with gender roles!

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A Christian Prayer for Obama

"Pray for Obama." At first glance it seems well meaning. After all, there were many such admonitions, from the Christian Right, to pray for President Bush. Prayer cards were even distributed to some deployed troops, committing them to pray for their Commander in Chief. Then we read the verse in question, Psalm 109:8. It isn't well meaning at all. And the Psalm gets worse from there. It is one of those dark passages in the Old Testament that belies idealized notions of Christanity as a religion of love and peace.

8. Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
9. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
10. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
11. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour.
12. Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.
13. Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
14. Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
15. Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

There is a very dark undercurrent to the Bible. Like most eruptions of the shadow, our first impulse is to split it off and deny it. As Diana Butler Bass explains on Beliefnet, Psalm 109 is a tough one for theologians to reconcile.

Psalm 109 belongs to a special category of the psalms known as "imprecatory" prayers--it is a lament in the form of petition to destroy one's enemies.  It is the personal prayer of an individual, someone who has been dealt an injustice by another--and usually more powerful--person.  The words of Psalm 109 are those of deep agony, the longings of a victim for retribution and justice.  This psalm is considered one of the most difficult of all the psalms--full of violent images of vengeance and death.   Many a biblical critic has struggled with its words--and not a few--including Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant theologians--recommend that it not be used in public worship, much less as a bumper-sticker political slogan.

I keep coming back to one of my favorite quotes from Joseph Campbell, who was no fan of the Bible, nor of Abrahamic religions, in general.

[The Bible is] the most over-advertised book in the world. It's very pretentious to claim it to be the word of God, or accept it as such and perpetuate this tribal mythology, justifying all kinds of violence to people who are not members of the tribe.

The thing I see about the Bible that's unfortunate is that it's a tribally circumscribed mythology. It deals with a certain people at a certain time. The Christians magnified it to include them. It then turns this society against all others, whereas the condition of the world today is that this particular society that's presented in the Bible isn't even the most important. This thing is like a dead weight. It's pulling us back because it belongs to an earlier period. We can't break loose and move into a modern theology.

One of the great promises of mythology is, with what social group do you identify? How about the planet? To say that the members of this particular social group are the elite of God's world is a good way to keep that group together, but look at the consequences! I think that what might be called the sanctified chauvinism of the Bible is one of the curses of the planet today.

For me, the poignancy of Campbell's observation has never been so stunningly clear. The use of this piece of scripture comes against the backdrop of a campaign to make Barack Obama an "other," a member of a foreign tribe, and not a "real American." Some continue to insist that he was born in Kenya, despite repeated verification of his Hawaii birth certificate. Some of this rhetoric is downright frightening, with ominous hints at potential violence. Former evangelical Frank Schaeffer explains the urgency of concern in this interview on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow." (A complete transcript of the show can be found here.)





It may well be that use of Psalm 109:8 was not intended to be read beyond that line, by people who simply wanted him out of office; not dead. There is enough ambiguity to grant plausible deniability.

Deborah Lauter, director of civil rights at the Anti-Defamation League agrees that the bumper sticker falls within acceptable political discourse.

For it to be considered hate speech, it “would advocate actual violence or cite scripture that was more clear in its message.”

But that doesn’t mean that it’s completely innocent.

“Are we concerned about real hostility towards [President Obama]? Absolutely,” says Ms. Lauter. “Is this a part of that movement? It may be, but in terms of this message itself, we would not criticize it.”

“The problem is you don’t know if people who are donning that message in a shirt or on a bumper sticker are fully aware of the quote or what follows. Obviously that message makes the ambiguity disappear. If they’re just referring to him being out of office, that’s one thing. If they’re referring to him being dead, that’s so offensive. It’s protected speech, but it’s clearly offensive.”

It is hard to miss the subtext, however, or to separate the one verse from its scriptural context. A good segment of the target demographic are fundamentalist Christians. They know the Bible far better than much of the populace.

The larger issue, which Campbell calls on us to consider, is how our core mythologies shape our culture. While this is not a theocracy, or a "Christian nation," there is no denying that the United States is underpinned by the Judeo-Christian beliefs that held sway at its inception. More to the point, we are still largely shaped by the rigid, Calvinist beliefs of our earliest settlers. This goes a long way to explaining the punitive, moral authority that permeates our social institutions, from our schools to our judicial system. The "Pray for Obama" campaign is a painful reminder of just how pressing this issue has become. Can we overcome the divisiveness, tribalism, and violence, inherent in our Judeo-Christian mythology?

Diane Butler Bass  turns to C.S. Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms for a viable answer; one which invites us to face the dark underbelly of these beliefs and bring them out into the light.

Lewis suspects that it may be best to leave such psalms alone. But then he says that we must face "facts squarely."

The hatred is there--festering, gloating, undisguised--and also we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves (p. 22).

Lewis refers to these psalms as horrible, devilish, cruel, hateful, and evil. He believes that Psalm 109--and the poetry of its kind in the psalter--should point us back to the evil we carry within and teach us each how to behave with goodness, humility, and love.

According then, to the venerable C.S. Lewis, a "Prayer for Obama" is really a prayer for ourselves to go beyond "festering, gloating, undisguised" hatred. "If the Divine does not call to make us better, it will make us very much worse," he reminded his readers, "Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst."

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Mr. Deity Tries to Understand the Trinity

I'm getting caught up on my Mr. Deity videos. The above is one of the funniest ever, as God and Jesse try to figure out how they're the same person... but aren't. My favorite episodes of this show are the one's with Jesse (aka, Jesus), in part because the guy who plays him is really hot. Ooh! Can I say that? Mmmmm... Sacrilicious!

And now a word on the new YouTube: It's awful. Everything that made YouTube videos the most smooth, flexible, customizable, videos on the web went to hell when the Google merger completed itself. The newer videos -- maybe because they allow for the possibility of high def (???) -- are really bandwidth and processor intensive. All I know is that they don't play smoothly on my machine. They stop and start, the video and audio tracking go out of sync... And no, I'm not trying to play them in high def. So, I've been very frustrated trying to get newer content, like the newest season of Mr. Deity. That is, until I discovered, while looking over the Mr. Deity site, that they are available for download on iTunes. Much better! So, if you're having trouble getting the above embed to play smoothly, I highly recommend opening iTunes and searching for Mr. Deity. The podcasts are free and they play really smoothly, at least for me.

I love this mug, by the way. And Christmas is around the corner... hint, hint.

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Was Jesus a Librul?

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It would appear that the frequent assertion that Jesus was a "dirty hippie" has finally pushed the Christian Right too far, and they're fighting back. The Conservative Bible Project has begun. Not satisfied to leave translation to linguists, Conservapedia is determined to take back ancient scripture and restore it to its 21st Century, conservative roots.

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
   
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
   
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
   
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".
   
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots";[5] using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
   
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
   
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
   
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
   
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
   
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."

Rod Dreher of Belief.net explains a bit of the absurdity.

"The liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio"? Hoo-wee! Elitists like to use words, and lots of 'em! "Unnecessary ambiguities"? But how are you going to abide by the conservative mandate to avoid "dumbing down" Holy Writ while at the same time avoiding big words liberals use?

It's not only the more modern translations that these conservative ideologues have in their sights. (Although, the New International Version really has them spinning, because it is so "liberal and feminist in outlook.") It seems liberalism infected the Bible from its earliest inceptions. The conservative version of the Bible would exclude the adultress story. True, the Periscopa de Adultera has been a bone of contention among Biblical scholars for some time. However, calling verses which appeared in the canon at least as early as 200 A.D a "later-inserted liberal passage," seems like something of a reach.

I'm left wondering how deep their edits will have to go. What to do with the Sermon on the Mount, for instance? Jesus comes across really squishy, what with all those blessings of the meek and merciful, and compassion for enemies. And, I don't know how well it comports with their desired "free-market" spin.

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." -- Matthew 6:19-21

Free marketeers may also bridle at this one:

So when Jesus heard these things, He said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”

But when he heard this, he became very sorrowful, for he was very rich.

And when Jesus saw that he became very sorrowful, He said, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” -- Luke 18:22-25

Squishy, squishy, squishy... and maybe even a little, dare I say it, "socialist." The Conservative Bible Project really hates socialism.

Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible, without justification. This improperly encourages the "social justice" movement among Christians.

For example, the conservative word "volunteer" is mentioned only once in the ESV, yet the socialistic word "comrade" is used three times, "laborer(s)" is used 13 times, "labored" 15 times, and "fellow" (as in "fellow worker") is used 55 times.

See if you can follow the logic, here. Socialist movements have used the words "comrade," "laborer," and "fellow." Therefore, those words are now the exclusive domain of socialists... so the Bible needs to be revised, to remove any appearance of socialist leanings. It seems to me, the larger problem is that Jesus went around telling rich people to redistribute their wealth to save their souls. I mean, how do you spin that, in a capitalist friendly way?

I think Conservapedia has its work cut out fixing this mess. Let's face it. Constantine was a real pansy, and Jesus just comes off looking soft. And, if the Bible is going to continue to use words like "government" -- check it: the word government is liberal -- there will be no restoring the Lord to his rightful place as a conservative hero.

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Ark of the Covenent Still a Mystery

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If you've been waiting, with bated breath, for the Ethiopian Church to unveil the Ark of the Covenant, prepare to be disappointed. It appears that reports last week were somewhat overblown.

"It is not going to happen so the world has to live with curiosity," said the statement, signed only "Webmaster" in response to the WND inquiry.

The webmaster statement described the tempest as being caused either because of a translation mistake or "a slip [of the] tongue from the patriarch."

I've never been one to get heavily invested in Biblical artifacts, but I was quite intrigued by this announcement. I was also stunned at the possibility that Ethiopian Church would even consider showing its most prized artifact, after all this time. I read Sign and the Seal a few years ago, more because I love Graham Hancock's writing, than any great interest in the mystery of the Ark. I came away from the book fairly convinced that whatever it is, it's in Ethiopia. Something is being fiercely guarded there. While the Ethiopian Church is very public about having the Ark in their possession -- and uses wooden copies in elaborate rituals -- no one sees the actual item, except those charged with its protection.

The guardians of the Ark are selected from among church monks, and spend the rest of their natural lives living with Ark night and day. It is both an honor and a curse. Hancock relates the story of one guardian who abandoned his post and fled to the hills, only to be dragged back to the temple and chained at his post. It also seems to take quite a toll on the body. As has been recorded in other historical texts, on the Ark, it is very "powerful" and causes people near it to have some health problems. The Ethiopians keep it wrapped to "protect the laity" from its effects. Hancock describes the guardians he met as having developed cataracts. I believe it's in this interview that Graham Hancock recently spoke about the toll guarding the Ark takes on the body. The symptoms are, of course, consistent with radiation poisoning, which adds some credence to the theory that it was really a technological device of some kind -- Zecharia Sitchin theorized a communicator -- and may be radioactive.



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More William Henry

UPDATE: I'm going to bump this back up to the top, because more videos have been added to this series, and I have updated the playlist accordingly. The newly posted material is mind-blowing. I think some of Strieber's comments need more explanation, so I have added some clarification. See below.



Hot off the... whatever YouTube videos are formatted on, an interview from 2005. Interviewed here by Whitley Streiber, he discusses his book Mary Magdalene: The Illuminator. On a note of sheer hilarity, if you want to view the videos on YouTube, you have to confirm that you are over 18. Apparently the graphic sexuality of 19th Century French painter Jules-Joseph Lefebvre's "Mary Magdalene in the Grotto" was just too much for YouTube users to bear, so the following warning comes up.

This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community.

By clicking "Confirm", you are agreeing that all videos or groups flagged by the YouTube community will be viewable by this account.

Yes, artistically rendered breasts are terrifying. Run away! Run away!

********

On Junk DNA: In the second segment of his interview with William Henry, Whitley Strieber makes reference to the discovery that junk DNA has been proven to be a language. He doesn't give a lot technical explanation, on that, and I think it requires more background. I read about this discovery in Graham Hancock's Supernatural (pp. 484-487).

All human languages have a strange and most unexpected secret in common. It is called Zipf's Law, after the linguist George Zipf, who discovered it in 1939. He studied texts in many different languages and ranked the words in order of frequency. What he found, which has since proved to be true whether the language is English or Inuit, Japanese or Xhosa, Arabic or Urdu, is that a direct, exact, unvarying and utterly counter-intuitive mathematical relationship exists between the rank of a word and the actual frequency of occurrence of that word. No matter which text he selected, when Zipf created a histogram that plotted word frequency against word rank, the surprising result was a straight line "with a slope of -I for every human language."

Researchers from Boston University and Harvard Medical School, in the 1990s, applied some linguistic tests to DNA strands. They found that our coding DNA, the 3-10 percent, whose purpose we basically understand, conformed to no known linguistic pattern. The "junk" DNA however...

So far so predictable, and so reassuring. Of course our DNA doesn't contain intelligent messages and isn't trying to communicate them to us in a language! If it did, all the basic principles of modern evolutionary science would be turned head over heels! Still, what happened next was most unexpected -- "really remarkable," in Eugene Stanley's appraisal: "There's no rhyme or reason why that should be true." This really remarkable and totally unexpected discovery was that in every case where non-coding regions of DNA have been evaluated, they turned out to demonstrate a perfect Zipf Law linear plot. If these DNA sequences had been books filled with pages of indecipherable printed letters, then this result would oblige us to conclude that the letters were not random alphabet soup but words in an organized language. Stanley didn't shy away from the implications of this. In his opinion, the non-coding DNA sequences do contain "a structured language fundamentally unlike the coding in genes." Even though it doesn't code for proteins, we therefore need to consider the possibility that "the 'junk' DNA may carry some kind of message."

Such a daring proposition receives further support from the second linguistic test that the team also applied to the DNA sequences. Developed in the 1950s by information theorist Claude Shannon, this test distinguishes texts written in true languages from texts written in alphabet soup by quantifying the "redundancy" of any string of characters. The test works, and is universal, because "languages are redundant sequences... You can fill in a typographical error by noting nearby characters. A random sequence, in contrast, has no redundancy."

Again, when the test was applied to coding regions of the DNA, these were shown not to have the properties of a human language -- as we would predict. The genetic code is not, and cannot be, a redundant sequence in which errors can be corrected with reference to the general context; on the contrary, geneticists are well aware that even a single mistake involving a single base pair on a single gene can scramble the code and produce catastrophic abnormalities. By contrast, the researchers found that the non-coding sections of DNA "revealed a surprising amount of redundancy -- another sign that something was written in these mysterious stretches."

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Frequent Churchgoers Pro-Torture

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A while ago I asked if we need God to moral. Perhaps a more appropriate question would be, does religion make us immoral? I have to ask, in light of this Pew poll, which found that very observant Christians are more likely than their more secular countrymen to support the use of torture. Staunch Catholic Andrew Sullivan bemoans the startling news:

So Christian devotion correlates with approval for absolute evil in America. And people wonder why atheism is gaining in this country. Notice the poll does not even use a euphemism like "coercive interrogation" - forcing Allahpundit to substitute it. (Even HotAir, it seems, finds it difficult to write the sentence: "Evangelicals are more likely to be conservative and conservatives are more likely to support torture.") But it remains a fact that white evangelicals are the most pro-torture of any grouping. Mainline Protestant groups were the most opposed. A mere 20 percent of non-Hispanic Catholics believe that torture is never justified.

He also points out that in another recent poll, Southern Evangelicals turn to expediency over scripture when it comes to questions of torture. Personally, I don't think scripture would help much, as the Bible condones a wide range of violent, even genocidal, behavior against enemies. Still, you'd think a few of our most devout might ask themselves, "Whom would Jesus torture?"

I think the worst news coming out of this poll is that nearly half the country, overall, thinks the use of torture can be often or sometimes justified, with only 25% opposing torture in all circumstances. In addition to exposing flagrant immorality, it points to a disturbing, underlying ignorance. Part of the problem may be the question asked: "Can torture be justified?" The implication is that it may be a necessary evil. What an appalling number of Americans fail to understand, as they struggle with moral implications, is that TORTURE DOES NOT WORK. So the question would be better phrased, can terrorizing and degrading people into false confessions and bad intelligence ever be justified?

This seminal point has been made over and over by military, CIA, and FBI interrogation specialists, to stunningly deaf ears.

In November of 2007, U.S Army Brigadier General Finnegan took time away from his duties as dean of West Point Academy and flew to Southern California to plead with the brain trust behind the Keifer Sutherland vehicle "24," to stop glorifying torture, because it was confusing recruits. He was accompanied by both military and F.B.I. interrogators. Their overall point: While it may make good television, torture is not legal, not moral, and not effective.

Finnegan told the producers that “24,” by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country’s image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors — cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions [stet] spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about “24”?’ ” He continued, “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”

Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, told me that he had similar arguments with his students. He said that, under both U.S. and international law, “Jack Bauer is a criminal. In real life, he would be prosecuted.” Yet the motto of many of his students was identical to Jack Bauer’s: “Whatever it takes.” His students were particularly impressed by a scene in which Bauer barges into a room where a stubborn suspect is being held, shoots him in one leg, and threatens to shoot the other if he doesn’t talk. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense. Solis told me, “I tried to impress on them that this technique would open the wrong doors, but it was like trying to stomp out an anthill.”

. . .

Cochran, who has a law degree, listened politely to the delegation’s complaints. He told me that he supports the use of torture “in narrow circumstances” and believes that it can be justified under the Constitution. “The Doctrine of Necessity says you can occasionally break the law to prevent greater harm,” he said. “I think that could supersede the Convention Against Torture.” (Few legal scholars agree with this argument.) At the meeting, Cochran demanded to know what the interrogators would do if they faced the imminent threat of a nuclear blast in New York City, and had custody of a suspect who knew how to stop it. One interrogator said that he would apply physical coercion only if he received a personal directive from the President. But Navarro, who estimates that he has conducted some twelve thousand interrogations, replied that torture was not an effective response. “These are very determined people, and they won’t turn just because you pull a fingernail out,” he told me. And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. “They almost welcome torture,” he said. “They expect it. They want to be martyred.” A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. “They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory—the ticking time bomb will go off!”

. . .

“In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence,” [former Army interrogator Tony] Lagouranis told me. “I worked with someone who used waterboarding”—an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. “I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee’s hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened.” Some people, he said, “gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information.” If anything, he said, “physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up.”

Lagouranis also detailed his Iraq war experiences in a book, and numerous media appearances. His life lesson was a hard one. He compromised his moral compass and put himself in legal jeopardy... for nothing.

In some of the discussion I've read of the poll, I think the wrong conclusion has been reached, correlating Christianity with this appalling ethical lapse. The poll, itself, says otherwise. The largest percentage of those opposed to all torture was among mainline Protestants. (31%) The defining factor seemed to be religious fervor, as indicated by church attendance. This, of course, skews the overall result towards Evangelicals, and it is among Christian Evangelicals that torture was indicated to be the most popular. How much of this has to do with Christian teaching and how much to do with the political leanings, is a key question. Personally, I think it may have a good deal to do with an attraction to fundamentalism in authoritiarian personalities, but that's pure conjecture.

Of course, it wouldn't be the first time religious fervor, grafted to imperial aspirations, was fueled by torture and false confessions.

It appears that the Franciscans participated in the witch trials in a supporting or facilitating function by gathering or manufacturing evidence such as for the Logroño witch tribunal (in Euskadi), for which they interrupted their preaching crusade to present a "dressed toad" and pots of "witches' salve" as evidence of witchcraft (Henningson p.345). They were deeply involved in spying out potential witches and reporting them to the authorities. The Franciscans even tortured women extracting false confessions such as the one done by the monk Fray Juan de Ladron. He took part in the witch-hunt in Alava as one of the Inquisition's special emissaries. Three women were reported by him after the priest at Larrea, Martin Lopez de Lazarraga, had tied them by the hands and neck, assisted by de Ladron, who then threatened to take the women to the Logroño showcase witch-trial if they did not confess. They did confess but later told Salazar what happened. Lazarraga had been appointed inquisitorial commissioner and put into the head of one of the women the idea of accusing six uncooperative locals priests of witchcraft. At Logroño many people were tortured into admitting anything the monks told them to say. One of the women, Mariquita de Atauri, felt so bad after denouncing so many innocent people under torture that she drowned herself in the river near her house.

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Do We Need God to be Moral?

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Some years ago, I watched an episode of "Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher," that has always stuck with me. The topic was the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, which was erupting dramatically into the headlines. I don't remember who all was on the show, but I vividly remember a collision between Sandra Bernhard and some right wing fundamentalist. His point was that the Catholic Church was doing all these sinful things because they were not following scripture strictly enough. They were religious, but not religious enough, and needed to get right with God. It got pretty ugly from there. I was utterly struck by the absurdity. How is it, I thought, that the openly atheistic Bill Maher and a bisexual, secular Jew like Bernhard had managed to figure out that sexually abusing children is wrong, when a disturbing number of Catholic priests had not. How, then, is more religion the answer?

Sex abuse, of all things, does not really seem to be inhibited by religion or any strictly enforced moral code. Louise DeSalvo explains, for instance, that it was epidemic during the straight-laced Victorian era, in Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. There have been several high profile cases in Amish communities, where by some measures, it is rampant. Some of the most heinous crimes do not seem to be deterred by religious piety.

This issue came to mind as I was reading an article in Slate, this morning, which addresses the question of kindness and generosity in the religious vs. the atheistic.

In a review published in Science last month, psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss several experiments that lean pro-[Dr. Laura] Schlessinger. In one of their own studies, they primed half the participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants $10 each and told them that they could either keep it or share their cash reward with another (anonymous) subject. Ultimately, the spiritual-jumble group parted with more than twice as much money as the control. Norenzayan and Shariff suggest that this lopsided outcome is the result of an evolutionary imperative to care about one's reputation. If you think about God, you believe someone is watching. This argument is bolstered by other research that they review showing that people are more generous and less likely to cheat when others are around. More surprisingly, people also behave better when exposed to posters with eyes on them.

So, it's not, so much, God, who keeps us on the straight and narrow. It's eyes. All of which seems to point to the notion that our moral compass is entirely externally imposed and motivated. If the research is accurate, that would seem to be the answer, at least in the United States. And, there's the rub. It seems that when we look beyond our own borders, this argument runs into trouble.

It is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

Denmark and Sweden aren't exceptions. A 2005 study by Gregory Paul looking at 18 democracies found that the more atheist societies tended to have relatively low murder and suicide rates and relatively low incidence of abortion and teen pregnancy.

Slate's Paul Bloom postulates that it is not so much "God" or, even, religious doctrine that moderates our behavior, but a strong sense of community.

The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. In fact, Zuckerman points out that most Danes and Swedes identify themselves as Christian. They get married in church, have their babies baptized, give some of their income to the church, and feel attached to their religious community—they just don't believe in God. Zuckerman suggests that Scandinavian Christians are a lot like American Jews, who are also highly secularized in belief and practice, have strong communal feelings, and tend to be well-behaved.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, "[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them."

Although, even extremely cohesive community doesn't seem to prevent some of the more hideous abuses I discussed above, the idea does have a certain resonance. The key seems to be in our shared experience and empathy. And, empathy appears to be a natural part of our human development. Children who are raised in safe, nurturing environments become increasingly empathetic throughout their early development. Those who do not, develop with varying degrees of attachment disorder, with some abused and neglected children demonstrating a complete incapacity for empathy. Some of those start abusing others when they are still children. Religion seems irrelevant, when we view it through that prism. In fact, some religious constructs, such as "Spare the rod, spoil the child," would appear to run directly contrary to healthy development of an innate moral compass. If our only impediment to antisocial behavior is fear of judgment and punishment, something is just horribly wrong. It is also less likely to be consistent, inclining people towards secrecy and shame.

I am always somewhat amused when people say, "You can't legislate morality." In point of fact, we legislate morality all the time. Prohibitions against murder, theft, rape, and a litany of other crimes are based on fairly universal taboos, that seem to arise pretty naturally. We don't need the Ten Commandments to tell us that murder is wrong. I have yet to meet the atheist who disagrees.

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Flowers and Bones

In my last post, Drunvalo Melchizedek's presentation explores the appearance of the "flower of life" in ancient ruins and artifacts all over the world. His discussion of its use in the Essene community and ancient Greece brought to mind something I noticed amidst the buzz about the possible discovery of The Jesus Family Tomb. Much remains unsettled regarding the tomb, and the ossuaries, with their intriguing inscriptions. But, in watching the Discovery Channel documentaries, what struck me was the vividly inscribed symbology. The flower of life appears repeatedly on these ancient Jewish "bone boxes," no matter whose remains are actually in them.

This ossuary is purported to be that of Mary Magdelene, or Mariamne, and a representation of the flower of life is clearly evident. The inscribed name is also Greek, which could point the migration of the symbology, but perhaps not.




There were other ossuaries visible in the documentaries, some that had nothing to with the any Jesus tomb theory. Many of them displayed flower of life imagery. Here, for instance, is an ossuary belonging to the Israeli Antiquities collection.




This incredibly ornate ossuary is believed by many experts to contain the bones of the Biblical figure Caiaphas. (Iosef Bar-Caiapha)




As I was rummaging around the web for images, this morning, I noticed another curious parallel. One of the images from the archaeological excavation of the Talpiot Tomb, which is believed by some experts to be the long, lost tomb of Jesus and his family, brought to mind another image.

This is from the interior of the Talpiot Tomb:




This is a shot of Neo and Trinity in The Matrix: Reloaded:




Coincidence?

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Mr. Deity

I only just stumbled on this incredibly brilliant show. It used to appear on YouTube, but now has an exclusive deal with Crackle. This is unfortunate because Crackle's players are not nearly as user-friendly or functional as YouTube. For the second season, though, you have to go here.

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