Amazement at Tax Evasion in God's Creation

(((Dinosaur Adventure Land Creation Science theme park; tax evasion; is God a good employer?)))

Via BoingBoing, the Dinosaur Adventure Land theme park promoting so-called "creation science" is to be seized by the government in partial compensation for back taxes owed by its proprietor, Kent Hovind, who never paid nearly half a million dollars in taxes.

He was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators.The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property.

Hovind insists his park is not for "amusement," but "amazement":

Our funny and experienced guides will lead your family or group on the tour, declaring the works of the Lord and the words of the Lord.

DAL is not an amusement park, for “amuse” means “to not think,” and we want people to think. Rather, it is an amazement park. Come and stand amazed at the truths of the Creator and Savior of the world, Jesus Christ.

Personally, I'm amazed that God, as his employer, didn't get him a better lawyer, the best money (or eternal salvation) could buy. Maybe hovind didn't get that in his contract? Maybe it was a lawyer from Regent. But if God can't (or won't?) get you off the hook, maybe that says more about you and your pious crap than it does about any god there might (or might not) be?

I'm not sayin'. I'm just sayin'.

QOTD: Some of My Best Friends Are Godless

(((Mike Huckabee talking to Tim Russert; religion, atheism, and public life; being human "deeper" than being Christian? rights and the distinction between animals and humans.)))

Mike Huckabee, responding to questions from Tim Russert about where his understanding of faith leaves American atheists:

No, I wouldn't have any problem at all appointing atheists. I probably had some working for me as governor.

Probably? Hey, I don't know, but I'm betting there were some atheists somewhere in my administration. I mean, if there are any in Arkansas. On the other hand, to be fair, this might be a reasonable indication that the guy applied no litmus test. That is, it at least looks like he at least didn't make an effort to exclude non-religious people from positions. Which would, of course, be discrimination.

But still, you know he was just one second thought away from claiming to have atheist best friends as evidence that he's not bigoted. I suppose we can say for him that he stopped short of that.

More interestingly, though, there's something else to be said for him. Maybe. When Russert in the same interview corners him on abortion and claims that Huckabee's position stems entirely from his Christian faith, here's how Huck replies:

But, no. It's not a faith belief. It's deeper than that. It's a human belief. It goes to the heart of who we are as a civilization. If I believe that your intrinsic worth is not changed by your ancestry, your last name, by your IQ, by your abilities or disabilities, if I value your life and respect it with dignity and worth because it is human, then that's what draws me to the inescapable conclusion that I should be for the sanctity of every and each human life.

Two things. First, it's very interesting that he makes the claim that his belief is "a human belief" that is "deeper than" his "faith belief," on two counts. Not only does it imply that if you're human, you ought to believe it, and one wonders what could count as the content of any such "belief," it also positions "human" as more central than "Christian." Mixed, but on balance this is positive. It's a ground for tolerance of other religious beliefs, including atheism, even if it's not at all clear what "human belief" could really mean.

But this leads to the second point, which is that "human belief" seems to mean something like a belief that human life as such is especially special, even unique. So, as is often the case with frameworks for fairly progressive human rights positions, at bottom his case is about the privilege of being human. You can't miss the irony in his argument, though, if you look closely. He says that when you're human, your ancestry doesn't matter. But of course, being human is precisely an ancestry. And if you're a Christian like Mike Huckabee, your understanding of human ancestry is that it goes back to Adam, who was created by God.

So, when you run it through the wash, Huck's pseudo- (or maybe quasi- is better)humanist position turns out to be thoroughly religious after all. And speciesist (which is not the same thing, but which follows in Huck's case).

There's a reason, after all, that he uses that word, "sanctity."

Quote of the Day: Not the Same as Believing It

(((Bible; Bible is really, really important, whether you believe it or not; does that mean understanding it is important? I don't know . . . is it important that we understand Hitler or Stalin? And yes I actually think there's way more interesting stuff going on in the Bible than in, say, Mein Kampf)))

The problem of not having the originals of the New Testament, though, is a problem for everyone, not simply for those who believe that the Bible is inspired by God. For all of us, I think, the Bible is the most important book in the history of Western civilization. It continues to be cited in public debates over gay rights, abortion, over whether to go to war with foreign countries, over how to organize and run our society. But how do we interpret the New Testament? It's hard to know what the words of the New Testament mean if we don't know what the words were.

This is Bart Ehrman, of UNC-Chapel Hill, in a lecture at Stanford. The part I'm quoting begins at about 7:25.

Briefly, two points from this. First, however much one might detest religion in general, and Christianity in particular, this antipathy is no excuse for ignorance (although many will claim their antipathy arises precisely from being smart and informed); the only ways to beat Bible-thumpers (so to speak) are to fight them on their own ground (the Bible) or to shift the ground in an effective way (which requires, if you ask me, knowing the ground they want). All this requires a reasonably nuanced understanding of what's going on in the Bible. It's why I have more perplexing but also (I suspect) more fruitful conversations with religious opponents than some of my more religio-phobic friends. I know how to talk the talk, and I know the Bible better than many believers I argue with.

Second, Ehrman notes that we don't really know very well what "the Bible" actually says. Which makes it hard to know what it means. This is actually worse news for believers than for the rest of us. I don't believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, or anyway certainly not in the way a Baptist does, or even in the way progressive Catholics might. So, that we can't settle on the text doesn't matter to me. And if your opponent settles on a text, you can bet it's a translation, which is already one step removed from the problem of establishing a text.

Because, you know, if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.

Thanks to my compañero for the pointer to this lecture, which is a great example of accessible religion scholarship.

Quote of the Day: O, God, You Are Soooooooo Big!

(((More Alfred North Whitehead; nonsense is nonsense, as Lewis said, even when you talk it about God; maybe there's a reason the "God of the philosophers" doesn't make any sense at all to people who aren't philosophers)))

Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying to Him metaphysical compliments. (Science and the Modern World, 179)

So, yeah, God must be able to do anything, and God must at the same time be infinitely good, and so both desire to stop evil and be able to stop evil. So, what you think is "evil" actually isn't.

Yeah, that's intuitive.

God knows everything, even what hasn't happened, yet, and what might happen but won't, etc. etc., so God can know that you will do something that results in, say, the deaths of millions of people, but won't stop you. Also, God hereby knows non-existent things (things you haven't yet done aren't yet real; things you never do are never real). He doesn't have an opinion about them, mind you. He knows them.

Poppycock.

How To: Not Be a Scientist

(((Evolution vs. creation; science vs. religious belief; (anti-)religious discrimination; "persecution" of believers for not abandoning their beliefs in the face of scientific evidence . . . even when they're scientists.)))

A certain self-described "Bible-believing Christian" is suing the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for dismissing him because he refused to subscribe to "Darwin's theory of evolution" (as if he might have been okay with, say, Lamarckian evolution). This is a little bit like saying it's discriminatory to not hire an Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christian to perform abortions at a clinic. Or to not hire me to preach at your church. I can read the Bible with the best of them, and speak better than most. But you might say I'm missing a crucial piece of the overall weltanschauung.

The fundamental discriminatory issue is whether Abraham, the man in question, could reasonably have performed his duties absent at least some general assent to evolution as the central reigning biological paradigm, one with broad, indeed, nearly unanimous, scientific assent. The Massachusetts agency that dismissed the case ruled that he could not.

But there are also other ways to consider it, namely, a general sense of basic scientific competence. Abraham complains that this condition, subscribing to "Darwinian evolution," was not in the job advertisement. But why should it be? If I advertise for a physicist, I don't ask them if they believe the earth revolves around the sun.

Oh, you say, but there's dispute about evolution as a "fact." No, there's not. Not from anyone who has any idea what they're talking about. The best traditional-theistic answer so far, "intelligent design," essentially argues that evolution is not "random" (which is not what evolutionary theory says, anyway), nor does it advance by way of natural selection, but that it was planned out by God like a series of dominoes lined up to fall in order. Never mind that this doesn't actually say very much, or that it's flawed for a variety of reasons. Notice instead that it essentially assents to the fundamental idea of evolution. The rest is all gobbledy-gook: bad undergraduate philosophizing masquerading as science, sounding enough like creationism to pull in "Bible-believers," and enough like science to piss the rest of us off.

What strikes me about this case is that evolution is perhaps a lot like global warming. We sat through years and years of obfuscatory pseudo-science funded mainly by the energy sector and other conservative hacks, and spewed out incessantly and self-righteously in the face of broad scientific consensus, and designed to prove that there was no consensus, or that such consensus as there was rested on mediocre and PC-motivated science. Now, however, we finally have none other than George W Bush admitting that there's a problem. What changed? Well, it wasn't that anyone proved the hacks were hacks. I don't know. Maybe it just became painfully obvious what bullshit it all was, but surely the urgency of the peril if global warming-naysayers were wrong played a role.

Evolution is like the weather, this way. The problem is that the reality of it is much less urgent, much less in our faces. What problems go unsolved if some people continue to not "believe in" evolution? But this reality does not change the other reality, that evolution, indeed natural selection, has achieved consensus, despite a bunch of confusing claptrap designed mainly to reassure those people who already want to believe in God instead of in evolution (as if this were not a false dilemma). This does not mean that we won't find something better to replace natural selection or even evolutionary theory as we now have it (although I suspect it's the Copernican revolution of biology).

But it does mean that anyone who considers themselves a scientist has to have something better to say than that they believe in God if they're going to reject evolution. It is simply not a scientific answer. And anyone who gives it as an answer casts doubt on the quality of their scientific thinking, and indeed on whether we ought to think of them as a scientist at all.

It's a little bit like trying to work for Newton and insisting that the earth rests immobile at the center of the universe, because that's clearly the implication of the passage in Joshua when the Sun stands still. Newton wouldn't just have fired you. He'd have laughed at you and smacked you all the way out the door. And Newton believed in God.

tags technorati : Nathaniel Abraham, Science, Religion, Philosophy, Biology, Evolution, Creation

Sean Taylor: Error or Irony?

(((Religious sports stars; Having your God cake and eating it (so to speak), too; What God does and doesn't do for us; Media and the use of celebrity religion)))

In the days since Sean Taylor was shot and killed in what appears to have been a burglary gone horribly wrong, I have noticed a trend at least in ESPN coverage. They really like to play the tape of him saying, "I've been blessed. God has looked out for me."

I suppose this is supposed to be poignant. And of course when any celebrity dies, every talking head trots out the religious platitudes, so I suppose this should be no different. Lots of Americans believe in God and believe in prayer. Fine.

What gets under my skin is this kind of crap—where the successful claim God's blessing has gotten them there. This is generally understood as humility, attributing to God what one could simply boast was the result of one's own skill or effort, and/or the skill and effort of other merely mortal beings (compare Lance Armstrong on overcoming cancer: it wasn't God; it was good doctors). But the end result is that you claim God's favor for yourself and your "side," whether that's a sports team (athletes who thank God when they win a game . . . what, the other side didn't offer enough sacrifices?), an ethnicity ("Gangs of New York" is great on this), or a nation-state (fighting in a foreign country, say, Iraq). Even if we thought they might be right, in what sense can this possibly be considered humble? God loves us because we are righteous, and we know that because we win. Otherwise, why would we win?

But then there are the backflips and other painful spiritual gymnastics forced on the faithful when they lose. God is testing them. Or, in its most radical version, God is simply asserting God's own authority. Because, as God, he occasionally has to prove he's God by being arbitrary and childish, instead of, I don't know, showing up and telling us not to be childish and arbitrary with each other.

So, God looked out for the 24-year-old Sean Taylor, until last weekend. But since God is ultimately responsible for everything, it has to have been part of God's plan. God blessed Sean Taylor, but then he didn't. He un-blessed him. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, as Job says.

I like the book of Job. There are many things to like about it, including God's assertion that only God is God, and Job's insistence that it still isn't fair (and God agrees). But the God of Job is in no sense a reassuring God. The God of Sean Taylor precisely is reassuring, despite his unpredictable behavior. But how are unpredictability and unreliability reassuring? The God of modern Christians is the reliable rock on which we are supposed to build the structure of our lives, but the God of Job goes to great lengths to remind us that, to put it in the terms of Ecclesiastes, the sun shines on both the wicked and the righteous.

God is teaching Job a lesson. God is undermining Job's pride, and Job's experience is of hubris, the pride of understanding that goes before a fall. But who pays for Job's lesson? This has also always bugged me, like an itch I can't scratch. Why is it that Job's children die to teach him this lesson? And why does this have to happen to Job to teach us the lesson?

And then, well, why does it have to happen to Sean Taylor to teach us the lesson? I wish I could with confidence argue that it doesn't, but in any case I'm pretty well convinced that if there's a God as smart and as powerful as most religious people (and even most theologians) like to think, that God could come up with better, less devastating and costly ways to teach lessons.

So what are we to make of the incessant repetition of Sean Taylor's pious, Job-like utterance? The only thing I can figure is that we're supposed to think that Sean Taylor was a pious man who lived a full life and was loved by God even though God "took him home" at age 24 in a pretty nasty way. Or, as Joe Gibbs would seem to have it, we're supposed to learn from it: the world, even—or perhaps especially—with a Christian God running it, is unpredictable, unreliable, and a special gift that many humans in the world get a lot less of than others.

Perhaps this is even true, but how is it different from a Godless world?

tags technorati : Sean Taylor, religion

"Arab-Israeli Tensions" Go Back to . . . Nebuchadnezzar?

At first this just seemed a funny, but stupid little mistake, but the more I thought about it, the more problematic it became. In the middle of an article about an interesting little find in Biblical archaeology—an actual dated receipt for a payment to the temple in Babylon—our author drops in a bizarre zinger, the sort of thing you would expect out of a high school or college term paper.

During the course of this struggle [between the Babylonians and the Egyptians], Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem. Zedekiah, a Babylonian-appointed king of Judah, later rebelled, which led to yet another Jerusalem siege [by the Babylonians] in 587-586 B.C., during which a large segment of the population was deported. Arab-Israeli tensions in the region have continued until the present day.

Wait a second . . . where are the Arabs in this story, again? Babylonians are not Arabs, and it's the Babylonians the Israelites (NB: not Israelis) are fighting. Not even the Egyptians are Arabs.

That's right: there are no Arabs in this story.

But maybe she meant Muslim-Israeli rather than Arab-Israeli? Well, sorry, but we're some 1200 years before Muhammad, so there were no Muslims, either.

No, what's happening is that our author anachronistically projects the very modern "Arab-Israeli conflict," which already problematically labels all Middle-Eastern Muslims "Arab," back onto the ancient world in order to establish a continuity that doesn't exist. Now, why would she do that? Two reasons, I think.

Here's one. The article continues:

In fact, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein made links between himself and King Nebuchadnezzar in speeches and by use of billboards that showed Hussein shaking hands with a drawing of the ancient king, according to Aaron Brody, assistant professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion and director of the Badè Museum.

"Nebuchadnezzar vanquished surrounding nations, so Hussein wanted to draw parallels with his own reign and that of the former Mesopotamian leader," Brody told Discovery News.

So, much the same way many modern leaders attempt to establish continuities between themselves and some ancient culture, especially some ancient leader, Saddam was working to show how he's a modern Nebuchadnezzar, the great Babylonian (not Arab) king. And our author continues to help him—however, I'm going to guess, unwittingly—by throwing in the phrase "Arab-Israeli tensions" with reference to the Babylonian conquest of the Israelite kingdom.

But this leads to the second part of what's going on here. Hooking Saddam up with Nebuchadnezzar suits her purposes because it also hooks up the modern state of Israel with the ancient kingdom of Israel, and indeed appears to establish that the roots of the modern conflict go all the way back to ancient Israel, which was already, 2700 years ago, defending itself from hostile "Arab" neighbors wanting to "push her into the sea." It reinforces the modern understanding of Biblical mythology, that Israel was on the land in the beginning and so the establishment of the modern state of Israel is only re-establishing what was there a long time ago. At the same time, it conveniently ignores the Biblical story of the Hebrews conquering Canaan (=Palestine), so the Bible in fact never claims that the Israelites were always and originally living in the disputed territory. It claims, rather differently, that God gave it to his people, the Israelites, and helped them conquer it. So, in order to buy that, you have to believe that the Bible is, in fact, historically accurate, and, further, that its historical accuracy includes certain statements by a certain God, in whom you will also have to believe.

Now, at the end of the day, I'm guessing that the author of this article wasn't even really thinking about what she was saying in terms of the ways it reinforces all the wrong ideas about Arabs, Muslims, the state of Israel, and the (poorly-named) Arab-Israeli conflict. I'm guessing it was a ham-fisted transition to the story of Saddam trying to deploy ancient Babylonian history as part of his self-aggrandizement campaign. But it's damaging nonetheless. It's bad writing, but it's even worse politics, so why not work just a little bit harder and avoid both?

tags technorati : Bible, Archaeology, Israel, Iraq, Discovery, Jeremiah, Nebuchadnezzar

Could They Just Handle Iraq for Us?

In a hilarious spat between England and the conservative Muslim world that reads like it would be a great Monty Python sketch, "leading Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Ahmad Khatami said during his Friday prayers sermon in Tehran [that] 'The old and decrepit government of Great Britain should know that the era of their empire is over and today they are a valet in the service of the United States.'"

Zing!

Apparently, this is supposed to provoke the UK into revoking Sir Salman's knighthood and turning him over, because, apparently, that old fatwa is still in effect.

In Karachi more than 1,000 people chanted their support for comments made on Monday by Religious Affairs Minister Ijaz-ul Haq, that Rushdie's knighthood justified suicide bombings.

You have got to be fucking kidding. Right?

This one is stupid, but it's at least funny. Keep thinking Monty Python -- Eric Idle doing a BBC News report:

Pakistani traders offered a reward of 10 million rupees (165,000 dollars) late Thursday for anyone who beheads Rushdie, while a group of Islamic scholars awarded Osama bin Laden their highest honour in a tit-for-tat move.

Nyah-nyah.

Technorati Tags: Iran UK Rushdie Fatwa Pakistan Knighthood

It must be God!

Black holes exist, but they don't. Just like God!

Technorati Tags: Religion, Science, Black Holes

Haggard Not Gay! At All!

What bullshit.

What I really want to know is what "completely heterosexual" actually means.

No Child Left Behind: The Game

So, there's about to be a "Left Behind" computer game. It looks totally awesome -- surely there will be some serious (but entirely spiritual and uplifting) kicking of Antichrist ass.

Conduct physical & spiritual warfare : using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world.

The power of prayer! Totally uplilfting!

Recover ancient scriptures and witness spectacular Angelic and Demonic activity as a direct consequence of your choices.

I can witness activity as a result of my choices! Kewl! It's, like, just like a game, except I get to, like, witness! Awe-some!

Control more than 30 units types - from Prayer Warrior and Hellraiser to Spies, Special Forces and Battle Tanks!

Wow. War with people shooting prayers at each other! It sure ain't like Berserk Warrior, and that's the point, right? But what is this "Hellraiser," thing? Surely the forces of God don't, you know, raise hell?

Play multiplayer games as Tribulation Force or the AntiChrist's Global Community Peacekeepers with up to eight players via LAN or over the internet!

Wait a minute! Does this mean I can play the bad guys? WTF?

Well, let's see. Since it's not about pointless violence, which is why you lose spirit points for unnecessary killing, that would mean that as the bad guys, I would not engage in unnecessary killing if I wanted to win the game. But if I'm the bad guys, why am I not about killing anything that moves? Because I want to win them over? Fuck that. "Take my mark or I'll blow your Jesus-loving head off." I mean, that's not me; just if I were the bad guys. So I don't know. And how could the bad guys ever win when they're fighting against God? That seems wrong.

The trailer looks totally sweet, though, and scary as hell (well, almost). I sure know *I* don't want to be left behind. And with the help of this game, I can home school my children.

And then no child of mine will be left behind.

First of All

I'd just like to thank God for putting me in a position to post on this blog. God is our re-insurer. Bitches.

Beyond that, isn't it awesome when we just kick people's asses? It's all God. And when we don't, that's because we haven't prayed enough. Or offered the right (number of?) sacrifices. So we're gettin' on that. Watch yer back.