SeanTerrill.com » religion

Science: It Works, Bitches

webmaster — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:18:17 +0000

Suffice it to say that I’m not so wild about religion. I have nothing against funny hats, and some of the music is very nice; it’s just that blind adherence gives me the willies. I fully acknowledge a continuum of harm, but psychologically, chemically speaking, there’s no difference between getting up earlier than you want on a Sunday and driving a bus into a coffee shop. What really bothers me, though, is the idea that there are inherent limits within which only religion can provide valid answers. If history has taught us nothing else, it’s that the contemporary monotheistic god is a god of the gaps. Every few years – sometimes spectacularly, but more often by fits and starts – science ratchets down the boundaries of the unknown and supposedly unknowable. Science works. Indeed, the scientific method is the only reliable means of problem-solving yet discovered, and quite possibly the only means there is.

So why are massive areas of human experience, arguably the most important ones, held to be outside its purview? Why do questions of right and wrong automatically default to answers based on musty tomes of poorly-understood, frequently-mistranslated non sequiturs? Can a rational, scientific approach instead give us a basis for morality? Of course it can.

Objectivism provides us with the crudest first-order approximation of this concept: the choice that minimizes harm is the right one. One can easily conjure up a decision for which it fails (there may be a logical case to be made for the death penalty over life imprisonment, for example, even though it requires one death instead of none) but in most day-to-day situations it holds up just fine. “Thou shalt not kill” isn’t going anywhere.

Anyway, it’s nice to see that I’m not alone in this. One of these years I really have to see if I can wrangle an invitation to TED.

It is the position, generally speaking, of our intellectual community that while we may not like this – we might think of this as wrong in Boston or Palo Alto – who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? Who are we to say even that they’re wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way?

Who are we NOT to say this?

Saturnalia Princeps

webmaster — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:50:38 +0000

‘Tis the season… I had forgotten all about this until I was poking around in my Amazon account settings: 77 of 84 people found the following review helpful.

I’ll be in St. Louis from December 26^th until January 1^st. To anyone I won’t see, happy holidays!

Things I Hate #48: Bill Donohue

webmaster — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 05:25:40 +0000

He's actually giving a thumbs-up to the slave trade.

I’m what people like to euphemistically call a lapsed Catholic. That means that my parents made me go to a bunch of boring ceremonies, roughly once a week, as a kid, and that, as is the case for most people, they proved utterly irrelevant to my adult life. It wasn’t until years later, after I realized the whole system is bullshit, that my mom told me it was because the public schools in our area sucked and she wanted me to fit in. So at least there was a reason.

I guess I led off with that as a way of hedging my bets re: eternal damnation. Just kidding! When you die, the chemical reactions that kept other things from eating you stop, and you decay into a puddle of organic sludge.

What I’m really talking about is this article, forwarded to me by Mazur. In it Bill Donohue, notorious dipshit and president of The Catholic League, takes time out from his busy schedule of defending child rapists and threatening Bill Maher with assault to bitch about how a lot of people don’t like him much.

It’s sort of hard to follow, frankly, but I think his central thesis is that blacks, Jews, gays, atheists, the liberal media, the ACLU, and Hollywood are quite literally carrying us all to hell in a hand basket. Why the Post would publish it, I don’t know, but whatever; I love the Bill of Rights and will defend to the death Bill Donohue’s right to publicly wipe his ass with six hundred years of social progress. Except that apparently we don’t agree on that either. Fuck free speech, Bull – oops, I mean Bill – Donohue says, I live in a bubble and it would be much more convenient if I didn’t have to deal with anything else. Rather than learning to live in peace with people who disagree with me, I will argue that they shouldn’t exist.

Which is just one good bowl of hash away from being a suicide bomber.

Secularists within Catholicism and Protestantism are so out of control that it makes one wonder how any serious-minded person would ever accuse these religions of being oppressive. Insubordination of the most flagrant kind is routinely tolerated in a way that would never be countenanced at the New York Times, yet the bad rap always goes to Christians. We’re not talking about those pushing for moderate reforms: we’re talking about termites eating away from within.

Asshats like Donohue would have you believe that atheists, agnostics, and people who just don’t take religion that seriously – all of us who live in the real world, in other words – are flushing the whole of society down the toilet. Sorry, Bill. You don’t get to decide what is and is not culture. Why is that hard to understand? Culture is, by definition, “the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior” – in other words, it’s whatever people are doing. You can disagree with anything and anyone you like, but to claim they’re interfering with culture just betrays the ignorance that forms the cornerstone of your entire outlook on life. Society is what it is, and we won’t let you and your friends on the lunatic fringe drag the whole spectrum down with you.

Back to hedging my bets. On balance, since World War Two, the Catholic Church has probably done more good than harm in the world. They’re full of shit, but their hearts are in the right place. And brainless, spineless, dickless, holier-than-thou douchebags like Bill Donohue are a perversion of all of that. The Catholic League can catho-lick my balls.

Fuck you, Bill Donohue.

God Doesn’t Care About Your Penis

webmaster — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:10:17 +0000

Lesbian and gay students kissing in front of protesters from Westboro Baptist Church at Oberlin College

Today I went out in the rain, carrying a sign that read “YOUR GOD IS A LITTLE GOD”, to counter-protest the Westboro “Baptist” Church, who apparently drove here from Kansas because a local high school is doing a play they don’t like. The more I read about these people, the more convinced I am that it has to be an elaborate hoax, but apparently they’re for real. Or at least they mean what they say; I shouldn’t assume any of them spend much time in or around “reality”. So there we were, the six WBC members (including a kid of about ten I couldn’t stop referring to as Damien) across the street, the two hundred or so of us in front of the school, the cops in the middle. I’m probably on the news.

On the one hand, you have to kind of admire their perverse doggedness (they apparently do this thousands of times a year, and always outnumbered); on the other hand, you can’t deny they give religion as a whole a bad name. Just think what a legitimate church could do with $250,000 a year. But can we be so sure religion doesn’t deserve it? After all, among the scores of counter-protesters in tie-dyed t-shirts and jeans and suits, there was no priest in cassock and collar, no minister waving a bible, no signs saying “I DON’T LIKE HOMOSEXUALITY EITHER, BUT I’M NOT A DICK ABOUT IT” – no religious response at all, in fact. Every single one of my fellow counter-protesters, so far as I could tell, was there to take a principled, secular stand in favor of gay rights.

It’s the same thing that happens when jihadists blow up a bus, or a doctor who performed abortions gets shot, or a high school kid gets dragged to death behind a pickup truck. There are memorials and wakes and tears and soul-searching, and condemnations of damn near everything, but somehow no one ever quite says it: religion itself is at fault. If the bible contradicts itself, and you choose to follow one passage while these asshats choose to follow another, how can you really say their interpretation is any less valid? Stop taking fairy tales seriously and I promise you’ll see a lot less of this crap.

Atheism: We may not have all the answers, but at least we don’t kill each other.