Saucy savagery

Kids these days, ya know what I mean?

Wiser heads than mine have commented on the laziness, disrespectfulness, and general dissipation of youth.  Here's a sampler:

• Parents themselves were often the cause of many difficulties.  They frequently failed in their obvious duty to teach self-control and discipline to their own children.

• We defy anyone who goes about with his eyes open to deny that there is, as never before, an attitude on the part of young folk which is best described as grossly thoughtless, rude, and utterly selfish.

• The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.  Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households.  They no longer rise when elders enter the room.  They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

• Never has youth been exposed to such dangers of both perversion and arrest as in our own land and day.  Increasing urban life with its temptations, prematurities, sedentary occupations, and passive stimuli just when an active life is most needed, early emancipation and a lessening sense for both duty and discipline, the haste to know and do all befitting man's estate before its time, the mad rush for sudden wealth and the reckless fashions set by its gilded youth--all these lack some of the regulatives they still have in older lands with more conservative conditions.

• Youth were never more saucy -- never more savagely saucy -- as now... the ancient are scorned, the honourable are condemned, and the magistrate is not dreaded.

• Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'.  We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.

• [Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances…  They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.

Of course, I haven't told you where these quotes come from. In order:

• from an editorial in the Leeds Mercury, 1938

• from an editorial in the Hull Daily Mail, 1925

• Kenneth John Freeman, Cambridge University, 1907

• Granville Stanley Hall, The Psychology of Adolescence, 1904

• Thomas Barnes, The Wise Man's Forecast Against the Evil Time, 1624

• Horace, Odes, Book III, 20 B.C.E.

• Aristotle, 4th century B.C.E.

So yeah.  Adults saying "kids these days" has a long, inglorious history.  (Nota bene: the third quote, from Kenneth Freeman, has often been misattributed to Socrates, but it seems pretty unequivocal that Freeman was the originator.)

Jan Miense Molenaar, Children Making Music (ca. 1630) [Image is in the Public Domain]

I can say from my admitted sample-size-of-one that "kids these days" are pretty much the same as they were when I first started teaching 35 long years ago.  Throughout my career there were kind ones and bullies, intelligent and not-so-much, hard-working and not-so-much, readers and non-readers, honest and dishonest.  Yes, a lot of the context has changed; just the access to, and sophistication of, technology has solved a whole host of problems and created a whole host of other ones, but isn't that always the way?  In my far-off and misspent youth, adults railed against rock music and long hair in much the same way that they do today about cellphones and social media, and with about as much justification.  Yes, there are kids who misuse social media and have their noses in their SmartPhones 24/7, but the vast majority handle themselves around these devices just fine -- same as most of my generation didn't turn out to be drug-abusing, illiterate, disrespectful dropouts.

This comes up because of a study in Science Advances by John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler, called "Kids These Days: Why the Youth of Today Seem Lacking."  And its unfortunate conclusion -- unfortunate for us adults, that is -- is that the sense of today's young people being irresponsible, disrespectful, and lazy is mostly because we don't remember how irresponsible, disrespectful, and lazy we were when we were teenagers.  And before you say, "Wait a moment, I was a respectful and hard-working teenager" -- okay, maybe.  But so are many of today's teenagers.  If you want me to buy that we're in a downward spiral, you'll have to convince me that more teenagers back then were hard-working and responsible, and that I simply don't believe.

And neither do Protzko and Schooler.

So the whole thing hinges more on idealization of the past, and our own poor memories, than on anything real.  I also suspect that a good many of the older adults who roll their eyes about "kids these days" don't have any actual substantive contact with young people, and are getting their impressions of teenagers from the media -- which certainly doesn't have a vested interest in portraying anyone as ordinary, honest, and law-abiding.

Oh, and another thing.  What really gets my blood boiling is the adults who on the one hand snarl about how complacent and selfish young people are -- and then when young people rise up and try to change things, such as Greta Thunberg and the activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, they say, "Wait, not like that."  What, you only accept youth activism if it supports the status quo?

All well and good for kids to have opinions, until they start contradicting the opinions of adults, seems like.

Anyhow, I'm an optimist about today's youth.  I saw way too many positive things in my years as a high school teacher to feel like this is going to be the generation that trashes everything through irresponsibility and disrespect for tradition.  And if after reading this, you're still in any doubt about that, I want you to think back on your own teenage years, and ask yourself honestly if you were as squeaky-clean as you'd like people to believe.

Or were you -- like the youth in Aristotle's day -- guilty of thinking you knew everything, and being quite sure about it?

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The justification merry-go-round

Today's post is about several links that all appeared in my inbox more or less simultaneously, and are even more interesting in juxtaposition.

First, let's look at the study that appeared this week in the European Journal of Social Psychology called "'They've Conspired against Us': Understanding the Role of Social Identification and Conspiracy Beliefs in Justification of Ingroup Collective Behaviour," authored by Maria Chayinska and Anca Minescu.  The gist of the research is that people jump into belief in conspiracy theories with the greatest of ease -- as long as such belief reinforces the behaviors of the social groups they already belonged to.

The study looked at 315 people in Ukraine, split between people who were supporters of the anti-Russian "Euromaidan" movement and ones who were against it. The researchers presented them with (false) conspiracy theories about the annexation of the Crimea by Russia, and looked at the degree to which they believed it without question.  The Euromaidan supporters were far more likely to accept the conspiracy theory that secret societies and evil plots were at work to sabotage the Ukrainian resistance movement.

Study co-author Maria Chayinska writes:

We found that supporters of a particular cause not only were prone to endorse specific conspiracy beliefs but also to use them in a blame game, thus justifying collective behavior of the group they identified with.  Contrarily, the opponents of the same cause were found not to endorse those beliefs at all.  Thus, we found how ideologically charged social identities align with the tendency to believe in particular conspiracy theories surrounding acute political and societal issues that commonly cause a divide in a public. 

Conspiracy theories are ideological in nature, so people who either strongly endorse or oppose them have a reason to do so.  This reason is oftentimes rooted in their psychological commitment and loyalty to particular social groups that advocate a certain ideology.

Which is an interesting, if not especially surprising, result.

The same day as a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me the above story, I received five -- count 'em, five -- links addressing the current practice of indefinite separation of children from parents who are attempting to immigrate to the United States.  Let's take them in order of least-to-most egregious:

First, Fox News's Tucker Carlson:

This is one of those moments that tells you everything about our ruling class.  They care far more about foreigners than about their own people.  You probably suspected that already.  [The Left's] only solution is immediate amnesty for anyone who crosses our borders with a minor in tow.  And of course, that's the same as no borders at all.

Well, if you think that everyone objecting to the horrid treatment of these children is a member of "the Left," you're including Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Laura Bush, Bill Kristol, Ted Cruz, John McCain, and (for fuck's sake) Reverend Franklin Graham.  And Carlson's blatant straw man argument -- that Democrats are, one and all, for completely opening the borders to anyone -- is so idiotic it hardly deserves refutation.  (Allow me to say only that I defy you to find one elected official, left or right, who has proposed allowing unrestricted immigration.  Just one.)

Then there's Laura Ingraham, also (surprise!) of Fox News:

As more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents.  And temporarily housed at what are, essentially, summer camps.

Lady, I don't know what kind of summer camp you attended as a kid, but I'm guessing it didn't require sleeping inside a locked cage.

Speaking of cages, there's Steve Doocy, of... guess where?:

While some have likened it to — them to concentration camps or cages, you do see that they have those thermal blankets, you do see some fencing, but keep in mind — some have referred to them as ‘cages,’ but, keep in mind, this is a great, big warehouse facility where they built walls out of chain link fences.

So not cages!  Just nice guest rooms!  With chain-link walls and cement floors!

Working our way up the nausea-induction scale, we have none other than Ann Coulter, who I honestly thought had decided she had better things to do than to vie for the 2018 Eva Braun Award, but I guess I was mistaken.  Here's what she said:

I get very nervous about the president getting his news from TV...  I would also say one other thing, these child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now — do not fall for it, Mr. President...  A New Yorker article, the New Yorker is not a conservative publication, they describe how these kids, these kids are being coached.  They’re given scripts to read by liberals, according to the New Yorker.  Don’t fall for the actor children.

No worries!  The screams are all scripted!  Says so right in a non-existent article in the New Yorker!  (Maybe the kids are the same "crisis actors" the Deep State got to portray the victims of the Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Boston Marathon massacres.  May as well reuse them, since it worked so well.)

But, if you can believe it, one person went beyond Ann Coulter, which I didn't even think was possible.  So if we can take one more turn on the justification merry-go-round, let's look at Christian television host and moderator of the podcast Faith & Freedom, Leigh Valentine.  The kids aren't actors, Valentine said; they're actually -- evil:

Immigrants crossing the border are committing rape after rape after rape.  Children below ten years old engaging in sexual activity — all kinds of sin and disgrace and darkness; the pit of the pits...  So we’re not getting the top-of-the-line echelon people coming over this border.  We’re getting criminals.  I mean, total criminals that are so debased and their minds are just gone.  They’re unclean, they’re murderers, they’re treacherous, they’re God-haters.

 Yup, that's a pretty sketchy bunch of debased, mindless criminal God-haters, right there.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Linda Hess Miller, Mesa Grande refugee camp 1987 116, CC BY 3.0]

Look, I'm not claiming I have an easy answer.  As I said earlier, I -- like damn near every left-leaning person in the United States -- am not proposing opening the borders and letting anyone in who wants to.  But the vast majority of these people are not criminals (and they fucking sure aren't actors, Ann Coulter).  They're people who are desperate because of awful conditions in their home countries, who want what all of us want -- a clean, comfortable place to live, enough food and water, and opportunities for their children.  Whatever the answer is, it is not demonizing them, dehumanizing them, and/or claiming that what they're going through is not so bad.

If you think a while, you might come up with a few instances in history where the people in power had precisely the same response to the plight of children being held in involuntary captivity.

None of those ended well.

What we are doing right now is wrong.  Pure and simple.  Separating children from their parents is immoral.  And don't start with me about under whose administration the practice started; that's entirely irrelevant.  It's happening now, and it's happening on a scale the likes of which we have never seen.

You stand up against it, or you have abandoned all claim to the moral high ground.

But it does make a weird sort of sense, in light of the Chayinska and Minescu paper we started with.  If you already believe that we're under siege, that immigrants are a threat to everything we hold dear, it's only a small leap to believing that the immigrant children themselves are to blame, or that the whole thing is some kind of grand conspiracy to destroy The American Way.

And all I can say is, if this is The American Way, I'm horrified at what our country has become.

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This week's recommended read is Wait, What? And Life's Other Essential Questions by James E. Ryan.  Ryan frames the whole of critical thinking in a fascinating way.  He says we can avoid most of the pitfalls in logic by asking five questions: "What?"  "I wonder..." "Couldn't we at least...?" "How can I help?" and "What truly matters?"  Along the way, he considers examples from history, politics, and science, and encourages you to think about the deep issues -- and not to take anything for granted.

Alien press release

People who are in the know about artificial intelligence research have quipped that true AI is "twenty years in the future -- and always will be."  I'm beginning to think that the same is true for the discovery of extraterrestrial life.  Every time something has seemed promising -- from the experiments designed to find microbial life on Mars conducted by the Viking landers in the 1970s, to the peculiar "Wow!" signal, to anomalies like the weird intensity fluctuations of "Tabby's Star" -- the results have all been labeled "inconclusive."  The fact is, we don't have any good evidence for extraterrestrial life besides the purely probabilistic argument of the Drake equation, and even that doesn't come close to answering physicist Enrico Fermi's question, "Where is everyone?"

So when the worldwide hacking group that goes by the sobriquet "Anonymous" announced a couple of days ago that they had intelligence that NASA was about to announce the discovery of clear proof of extraterrestrial life, I didn't exactly jump for joy.  In fact, my first thought was, "Boy, either Anonymous got hoodwinked, or their standards are slipping.  Or both."

But as usual in the world of skepticism, judge for yourself.  Here's what they said:

Latest Anonymous message in 2017 just arrived with a huge announcement about the Intelligent Alien Life! NASA says aliens are coming! 

There are many who claim that unofficially, mankind has already made contact with aliens and not just little micro-organisms floating around inside a massive alien ocean, but advanced space-faring civilizations.

Twenty-five years ago, we didn't know that planets existed beyond our solar system. Today we have confirmed the existence of over 3,400 exoplanets that orbit other suns, and we continue to make new discoveries. We are on the verge of making one of the most profound, unprecedented, discoveries in history.

Along the way they cite Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate as evidence, ending with an exhortation to watch for an upcoming press release.

No one would be as excited as me if this turned out to be true.  I've been pining away for hard evidence of extraterrestrial life since I was a kid.  But my feeling is that if NASA had evidence, they wouldn't be playing coy, and they wouldn't have let themselves get scooped by Anonymous.

So just a hunch, but I think this'll turn out to be a bust.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

On the other hand, maybe it's just that NASA has had other fires to put out since last week, when noted raving loony Alex Jones had a guest named Robert David Steele on his radio show InfoWars.  It may well that Jones got Steele on his show so that he would look sane by comparison, because what Steele claims is that NASA is holding a colony of human children on Mars for the purposes of slave labor:

We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride.  So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.

And instead of guffawing directly into Steele's face, which is what I would have done, Jones responded as if what he'd said made perfect sense:

Clearly they don’t want us looking into what is happening.  Every time probes go over they turn them off...  Look, I know that 90 percent of the NASA missions are secret and I’ve been told by high level NASA engineers that you have no idea.  There is so much stuff going on.

Steele, encouraged by this, zoomed off even further into CrazyTown by saying that the children weren't just being used for slave labor:

Pedophilia does not stop with sodomizing children.  It goes straight into terrorizing them to adrenalize their blood and then murdering them.  It also includes murdering them so that they can have their bone marrow harvested as well as body parts.

Yup.  "Adrenalizing their blood."  Whatever the fuck that means.  Maybe Alex Jones does, because he responded, "Yes.  It's the original growth hormone."

So NASA figured they'd better respond.  Guy Webster, spokesperson for the Mars exploration program, answered the allegations a couple of days ago, and you can almost hear the long-suffering sigh in his voice:

There are no humans on Mars.  There are active rovers on Mars.  There was a rumor going around last week that there weren’t.  There are.  But there are no humans.

He stopped short of saying, "So will you people go back to your previous occupation, which was probably pulling at the straps of your straitjackets with your teeth, and let us get back to doing actual science?"

Anyhow, that's what's new from the world of astronomy.  As far as the Anonymous announcement, I hope like hell I'm wrong.  Maybe NASA is gearing up to tell us they've finally found evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.  That'd be awesome, especially considering that Alex Jones is pretty good evidence that ordinary terrestrial intelligence is in short supply.

School board theocrats

I ran into two stories yesterday that were interesting primarily in juxtaposition.

In the first one, we hear that evangelical minister Franklin Graham thinks that all school boards need to be run by (surprise!) evangelical Christians.

In an interview with Fox News's Todd Starnes, Graham said:

I want Christians running the school boards.  I want the school boards of America in the hands of evangelical Christians within the next four to six years.  And it can happen and that will have a huge impact because so many school districts now are controlled by wicked, evil people, and the gays and lesbians, and I keep bringing their name up, but they are at the forefront of this attack against Christianity in America.

Implying, of course, that the "implosion of the morality in the United States" (Graham's words) comes, in part, from evil amoral secular people running the schools, and indoctrinating young people's minds in concepts like tolerance and keeping your damned nose out of what other people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

Franklin Graham [image courtesy of photographer Paul M. Walsh and the Wikimedia Commons]

But what places this into even starker relief is another story that appeared over at Patheos yesterday.  In this bit of news, we hear about an upcoming evangelical conference in Wichita, Kansas, sponsored by the Christian patriarchy movement Quiverfull, which is devoted to the topic of how parents can arrange marriages between their teenage children.

If this sounds too ridiculous to be real, here are direct quotes from Quiverfull's FAQ page:

Courtship denies the authority of the father over the marriage of their virgin children. While they often give a veto to the parents of the woman, they specifically deny the authority of the father of the groom or the bride to choose a spouse for their children. 

We believe that Scripture teaches quite clearly that the father does have the power to choose a spouse for their virgin child; and we see this in several Scriptural examples.

But isn't this a forced marriage?  Amazingly enough, in their minds apparently it isn't:

Emphatically, an “arranged marriage” (fathers binding their children in the covenant of betrothal) is NOT synonymous with “a forced marriage”, and sadly, secular sources are often more honest in this matter to recognize this clear distinction than other Christians are.  Unfortunately, this idea is far too common in our modern notions, and far too often we are accused of promoting this, either explicitly or implicitly.  When the “liberty” that moderns value (especially Americans) is contrasted with the type of authority and submissiveness that the Bible teaches and demonstrates, it is challenging to us, and this sharp contrast often leads people to jump to the idea of “forced” compliance.  It is difficult for the modern (again, especially Americanized cultures) to come to grips with the idea of willful, joyful submission.

So young ladies, submit to what we're ordering you to do joyfully, and it won't have to be "forced."

Anyway, how young are we talking about, here?

The ‘youth’ ready for marriage has breasts. A woman who is to be married is one who has breasts; breasts which signal her readiness for marriage, and breasts who promise enjoyment for her husband.  (We believe that ‘breasts’ here stand as a symbol for all forms of full secondary sexual characteristics.) 

Lest you think that these people aren't really doing the whole "biblical marriage" thing, here -- yes, they are even requiring that parents of boys pay a "bride price" to the parents of the girl:

A “bride price” is anything paid or given by the man or his representative at the time of his betrothal or receiving his bride. 

Scripture certainly teaches about it… The law concerning bride price (Exodus 22:16-17)
indicates that . . . the bride price was a normal part of the marriage process.  

The bride price plays a significant function: It shows the woman’s value, and the point isn’t that the father gets the money but that he keeps it for his daughter, if her husband should ever abandon her.

And if that's not twisted enough for you, they also go on and on about "The continuing authority of the father over the couple after marriage."

What struck me after reading all this (once I recovered from my nausea) is, "these are the sort of people Franklin Graham wants running our school boards."  In other words, the people he wants to be in charge of protecting the interest of America's youth.  The people into whose trust we should place the well-being of our children.

Who unfortunately are also the people who believe that Deuteronomy 21:18-21 should be followed to the letter:

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’  Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

And, ironically, who the same people who are having a complete meltdown worrying about how children might be damaged by a transgendered person looking for a quiet place to pee.

So as far as agendas go, I'll take the LGBT agenda over this fuckery any day.  As far as I can tell, the LGBT agenda mostly is about making sure that people aren't discriminated against by bigots.  The evangelical agenda seems more to do with turning the United States into an Iranian-style bloodthirsty theocracy run on rules set down by a bunch of illiterate Bronze-Age sheepherders who thought god's first priority was making sure that damn near every natural human impulse was punishable by death.

And I know which one I'd want my own children living in.

The least among us

In Ava Norwood's gripping novel If I Make My Bed in Hell, we read about the ordeal of Annabeth Showers, who has spent her seventeen years on Earth under the control of parents who belong to a cult called the Tabernacle of the Living Word.  She is forbidden to cut her hair, read any outside literature, listen to music.  Transgressions are punished by beatings and public humiliation.  Annabeth's journey from repression and fear to peace, freedom, and the right to self-determination is impossible to put down -- and should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the role of religion in the oppression of women and children.

It is also a true story.

I don't mean in the details; there is no such person as Annabeth Showers.  The other characters in the story are equally fictional.  But for those who get to the last page of Norwood's book and heave a sigh, and say, "Well, at least none of this is real," I have news for you.

There are people now, in our modern society, who use the threats of god and hell and sin, and sometimes physical punishment as well, to control children through fear.

Coppo di Marcovaldo, Hell (ca. 1301) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start with the Fort Wayne, Indiana elementary school teacher who shamed a seven-year-old boy and gave him three days' worth of detention for telling another child he didn't believe in god.

Second-grade teacher Michelle Meyer found out that the boy -- who is referred to only as "A.B." -- was asked by another child if he went to church.  He said no, and allegedly, the other child "started to cry."  This brought the situation to Meyer's attention, who instead of using it as a teachable moment about tolerance of differences, proceeded to tell A.B.  that she was "very concerned" about his disbelief in god and about "what he'd done," and that she was going to call his mom.

She never did.  Probably realized that if A.B. doesn't go to church, neither does mom, and so a call home would be a losing proposition.  So Meyer came up with her own way of dealing with the situation.  According to the news story:

Ms. Meyer required that A.B. sit by himself during lunch and told him he should not talk to the other students and stated that this was because he had offended them.  This served to reinforce A.B.’s feeling that he had committed some transgression that justified his exclusion.

And to make matters worse, Meyer had A.B. and the girl whose religious sensibilities he'd offended talk to another adult, who also apparently believes in the Bring Children To God Through Humiliation approach:

Upon hearing [the story], the adult employee looked at A.B.’s classmate and stated that she should not be worried and should be happy she has faith and that she should not listen to A.B.’s bad ideas. She then patted the little girl’s hand.

A.B., who used to love school, is now afraid to go there because "everyone hates him," and frequently comes home crying.

Praise Jesus and hallelujah.

Of course, this is mild.  There's only so much you can get away with in a public school.  But take away the protection conferred upon children by the eyes of outsiders, and you end up with the Twelve Tribes -- a group that sounds so much like Norwood's Tabernacle of the Living Word that the phrase "art imitates life" barely suffices.

In an exposé of this repressive cult by The Pacific Standard, I read with an increasing sense of horror about what these people do to their children out of a false belief based in fear -- the beatings, the terror talk about hell and the fiery furnace, the prohibition against play, the compulsory work starting as early as age five.  Like the Tabernacle, the Twelve Tribes is good at putting on a pleasant public face, running places such as the Blue Blinds Bakery in Plymouth, Massachusetts and the Maté Factor Restaurant in Ithaca, New York.  Their shops have a cool, back-to-the-earth vibe, and their food is high quality.

But you don't see what's behind the scenes.  Children being whipped with bamboo canes on their naked posteriors for minor offenses.  The oppression of women, who are forbidden to use painkillers during childbirth to "atone for Eve's sin."  The message that any doubt, any questioning, any hesitation is of Satan, and will result in eternal damnation.

The article I linked -- which is as hard to read, but as necessary, as Norwood's If I Make My Bed in Hell -- tells about a few children who successfully escaped from the cult's grip.  One girl was so perpetually terrified of punishment that her jaw would lock shut, preventing her from talking or eating, for hours or days at a time.

"If one is overly concerned about his son receiving blue marks," wrote cult founder Gene Spriggs in 1973, "you know that he hates his son and hates the word of God."

"Blue marks," by the way, are bruises.

Freedom of religion, like any freedom, has its limits; when you use your freedom of belief to oppress others, there is something seriously wrong.  As my mother put it, "My rights end where your nose begins."  And the situation stands out in even starker relief when the exercise of freedom of religion involves putting the powerless in a situation that amounts to physical and psychological torture.

It makes you wonder why the ultra-religious are so focused on the reality of hell in the afterlife, doesn't it?  They've already created something very like hell, here on Earth, for their own children.

Battling the witch hunters

In the latest news from the Unparalleled Chutzpah department, we have a witch hunter from Nigeria who is suing the British Humanist Association for half a billion pounds.

Helen Ukpabio, founder of Christian Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries, calls herself "Lady Apostle."  She claims to fight the "spirits of evil," including "gnomes, the witchcraft spirits in charge of the earth."  Ukpabio was targeted by the BHA especially for her exorcisms performed on little children.  "A child under the age of two," she writes, "possessed with black, red and vampire witchcraft spirits... screams at night, cries, is always feverish, suddenly deteriorates in health, puts up an attitude of fear, and may not feed very well."

And such a child, Ukpabio says, may be a witch.  Not, apparently, just a sick toddler, behaving as sick toddlers do, and (most importantly) needing help from a qualified doctor.

The BHA, and a superstition watchdog agency, the Witchcraft and Human Rights Information Network, have been urging the British government to ban Ukpabio and others like her from entering the United Kingdom.  Gary Foxcroft, executive director of the WHRIN, says:

This latest court case is the latest in a long line of unsuccessful legal actions that Helen Ukpabio has pursued against me and other human rights activists.  Previous cases were thrown out of court in Nigeria but this time she is looking to take action in a UK court.  I have no doubt that a judge in the UK will reach the same conclusion as those in Nigeria.  Of course, the real question here is whether our government should allow hate preachers such as Helen Ukpabio to enter the UK.  Since her teachings have been linked to widespread child abuse in reports by the UN and various other bodies it would appear that this may not be in the public interest.  This case also therefore provides the Home Secretary and the National Working Group to Tackle Child Abuse Linked to Faith and Belief with a great opportunity to condemn the practices of such pastors, take concrete action and ensure that justice is served.

Which is exactly the right approach.  But now Ukpabio is dragging the BHA into court, claiming that they have committed libel and defamation, and have damaged her reputation by making false claims about her beliefs.  And even if she loses her lawsuit, the BHA will be saddled with the legal costs of defending itself against her claims, costs it can ill afford to bear.

But the case also brings up the awkward question of where to draw the line regarding the religious indoctrination of children in other venues.  Consider, for example, "Jesus Camp," the documentary film about a Charismatic Christian children's summer camp near Devil's Lake, North Dakota.  If you haven't seen the film, you should; it's simultaneously fascinating and highly disturbing.  After watching it, it's hard to think of this sort of thing as anything other than brainwashing.

In other words, emotional abuse.  Which accusation should also be leveled at the Muslims for their practices of child marriage and female genital mutilation.

The threat to "identified witches" in Nigeria, however, is most serious of all, because these children are often killed outright for their "witchcraft."  Leonardo Rocha dos Santos, director of the human rights organization Way to the Nations, says:

Over the past four years, since I've been involved in the rescue mission of the falsely branded children as witches, the number of tortured and killed children has not decreased.  I've seen many cases, and some very dramatic ones.  We are present with our rescue work only in one of the three Nigerian states, the one with the Christian population.  The so-called witch children are tortured and killed also in Cameroon and Angola, and the UNICEF report calls the situation in Congo as critical.  Some international organizations are talking about thousands of stigmatized children. I have met at least 400 cases of tortured, abandoned or killed children.  Only two months ago we rescued four children who were to be murdered together, at the same time.

And about Helen Ukpabio, he minces no words:

The problem has really escalated since 1999 when Helen Ukpabio produced a horror movie, End of the Wicked.  The movie and her exorcism "ministry" have provided a leading inspiration for many deaths of children in Nigeria and surrounding countries.  She is at this time visiting the U.K.  If I were to speak publicly, or in churches in the U.K. or U.S. teaching how to make bombs I would be arrested immediately because bombs kill people.  Yet this woman, whose public work is turning parents into murderers of their own children, has been allowed to visit the U.K. where she is performing her deliverance séances and exorcisms on children at this moment.

Precisely.  The time has come to call out dangerous superstitions for what they are, and to stop these people from hiding behind "it's my religion."  I'm sorry: if your religion is prompting you to victimize children, you need to be stopped.  Period.

I'll end with a quote from the brilliant Nigerian Nobel laureate Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka:

The activities of self-styled exorcists who stigmatize children as witches, vampires, or whatever, and subject them to sadistic rites of demonic expulsion, are criminal, and constitute a deep embarassment to the nation.  That their activities are carried out under a religious banner expose them as heartless cynics, playing on the irrational fears of the gullible.

To which I can only say: Amen.

Failures of compassion

If I was asked, "What is the most important rule to follow in every situation in which you interact with your fellow humans?", I would respond, "Always be more compassionate than you think you need to be."

The inward emotion of empathy, and its outward expression of compassion, are what keep us from acting on our baser instincts -- anger, envy, lust, greed.  And compassion starts with "what would I feel in his/her place?"

However I rail against the religious at times, this principle is foundational to most of the world's religions.  Consider the passage from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 12:

And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?  And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:  And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.  And the second is like, namely this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.  There is none other commandment greater than these.

Which is pretty unequivocal.  And while I (understandably) question the first part, I think the second is spot on.  The Muslim tradition says likewise, in the hadith (collected stories of Mohammed).  Check out this passage from Kitab al-Kafi, volume 2:

A Bedouin came to the prophet, grabbed the stirrup of his camel and said: O the messenger of God!  Teach me something to go to heaven with it.  Prophet said: “As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don't do to them.  Now let the stirrup go!  This maxim is enough for you; go and act in accordance with it!”

I find it curious how so many of the hyperreligious remember the first bit -- about loving god -- and conveniently forget about the second.  In Islam, it is that spirit that drives the homicidal madmen in ISIS, who in Iraq are currently butchering anyone who doesn't meet their standards of holiness.  Likewise Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Nearer to home, the inability to feel empathy and act with compassion takes a different and subtler guise, but still often cloaked under a veneer of piety.  Take, for example, what Rick Wiles, host of End Times Radio, said about the Ebola epidemic:

Now this Ebola epidemic can become a global pandemic and that’s another name for plague.  It may be the great attitude adjustment that I believe is coming.  Ebola could solve America’s problems with atheism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, pornography and abortion. 

If Ebola becomes a global plague, you better make sure the blood of Jesus is upon you, you better make sure you have been marked by the angels so that you are protected by God.  If not, you may be a candidate to meet the Grim Reaper.

Really?  Your God of Mercy is going to visit a plague upon us, wherein we die in agony while bleeding from every orifice, just to teach us a lesson about sexual purity?

And lest you think that this is just one lone voice with no credibility, Wiles said this immediately before interviewing Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA).

Then there's John Hagee, founder and senior pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, who says that it's "god's position" that if you don't work, you should starve to death:

To those of you who are sick, to those of you who are elderly, to those of you who are disabled, we gladly support you.  To the healthy who can work but won’t work, get your nasty self off the couch and go get a job! 

America has rewarded laziness and we’ve called it welfare.  God’s position is that the man who does not work shall not eat.

Interesting.  I thought it was "god's position" that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it was for a rich man to enter heaven (Matthew 19:24).  Oh, and there's the whole "give everything you have to the poor and follow me" thing, too.  (Luke 12:33).

Inconvenient, that.  Much easier to cherry-pick passages you'd rather rant about, such as the ones about homosexuality, and forget about the ones that might force you to change your lifestyle.  (Hagee's net worth, by the way, is estimated at five million dollars.)

It doesn't stop there, however.  Ultra-religious Texas Representative Louie Gohmert, who self-righteously shoves his Christian beliefs down people's throats at every turn, showed his true colors with regards to the refugee children from Central America now in camps on the US/Mexico border:

I’m hoping that my governor will utilize Article 1, Section 10, that allows a state that is being invaded — in our case more than twice as many just in recent months, more than twice as many than invaded France on D-Day with a doubling of that coming en route, on their way here now under Article 1, Section 10, the state of Texas would appear to have the right, not only to use whatever means, whether it’s troops, even using ships of war... they’d be entitled in order to stop the invasion... 

Many of the children who are coming across the border also lack basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles... we don't know what diseases they could be bringing in.

And that brings up yet another bible quote, from Matthew Chapter 25, which these people also conveniently forget:

Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.’  Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’  Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.

I try not to be self-righteous myself.  I know I'm not as compassionate as I could be, that I fail, like all human beings fail, to reach the standards I set for myself.  And I need no god to tell me how to act, nor to let me know when I've fallen short.  But I do know that I am not a hypocrite, wielding a Bible or a Qu'ran in one hand and using the other to strike out at minorities, refugees, the oppressed, and people who don't believe as I do.

The whole thing brings to mind another quote, this time from Stephen Colbert, and it seems a fitting way to end:

Unbearable

I remembering going to visit my parents during the Christmas season in the mid-1980s, and there was this new thing on the market for kids called "Teddy Ruxpin."  Teddy Ruxpin was a talking teddy bear that would move his eyes and mouth while "saying" pre-recorded lines, first on a cassette tape, and (in later models) on a digital device.

Teddy Ruxpin was a massive hit, largely due to an equally massive advertising campaign.  They flew off the shelves.  Toy stores couldn't keep them in stock.  Desperate parents of spoiled children paid huge amounts for black market Teddies Ruxpin.

I remember this primarily, though, for a different reason than crass commercialism, a phenomenon so deeply entrenched in American culture that it'd be hardly worth commenting on.  What I mostly remember about Teddy Ruxpin was that during the height of the craze, a batch of the toys went out that had defective playback devices.  They played the recordings slowly, with a lower pitch, with the result that Teddy Ruxpin's voice sounded like a cross between Morgan Freeman and Satan.

I still recall the news broadcast where a reporter, trying heroically to keep a straight face, talked about the recall, and activated one of the defective bears.  "I WANT TO PLAY WITH YOU," Teddy said in a sepulchral voice, all the while smiling cheerfully.  "HA HA HA HA HA HA."  Apparently the voice was scary enough that several children had already been traumatized when they activated their bear, expecting a cheerful cartoon-character voice, and instead got something that sounded like the soundtrack from The Exorcist.

My dad and I took about 45 minutes to stop laughing.  Over dinner, one of us would say, "PASS THE KETCHUP," in a Darth Vader voice, adding, "HA HA HA HA HA."  And then we'd both crack up again, much to the chagrin of my poor, long-suffering mother, who had many fine qualities but was born without a sense of humor.

This all comes up because of a new talking teddy bear, also designed for children, but with a special twist.

This teddy bear is supposed to be appealing to dead children.

I wish I was kidding about this, but I'm not.  I heard about it on the Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News, and she has an excellent reputation for veracity.  Apparently the idea is that the bear, who is named (I kid you not) "Boo Buddy," says things that might be attractive or interesting to the spirits of dead children, who then will approach the bear and activate an EMF detector, making LEDs on his paws light up.

Here's the sales pitch, from Ghost Stop, the site that is selling Boo Buddy:

Not your average bear! BooBuddy is cute as a button and so much more. This ghost hunting trigger object responds to environmental changes and even asks EVP questions to initiate interaction and potential evidence. 

BooBuddy is not a toy - he's an investigator! 

Within the ghost hunting and paranormal investigations field, some theories suggest that using an object familiar and attractive to an entity may entice them to interact. This is called a 'trigger object'. BooBuddy is just that and more allowing us the ability to 'see' changes in the environment and initiate communication on it's [sic] own. 

Set BooBuddy and turn it on to detect environment changes and start asking questions. Make sure to set a recorder or camcorder near the doll to document any potential responses. That, and BooBuddy loves being on camera!

Sure he does.

I'm not at all sure what I could say about this, other than that I would buy one for the novelty value alone, if they weren't $99.95.  I guess if you believe all of this stuff about trigger objects and EMF fluctuations and so on, Boo Buddy is as sensible as anything else out there.  And if anyone does conduct any... um, empirical research using the teddy bear, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know the results.

Unless it says something like "HEY CHILDREN...  DO YOU WANT TO PLAY WITH ME?  HA HA HA HA HA HA."  And then winks at you.  Because that would be scary as hell.

Charlie Fuqua and the implications of biblical literalism

I wonder how many folks outside of the state of Arkansas have heard of Charlie Fuqua.  Fuqua is a former state representative, and is seeking reelection to that position this year.  He is also, much to the chagrin of some of his supporters, the author of a book released this year called God's Law.

The reason that Fuqua's book has provoked such a fury of facepalming amongst his fellow Republicans is not, technically, that they don't agree with his views, which basically follow the conservative Christian, fundamentalist, biblical literalist pattern that so many of them espouse.  It's more that Fuqua did what you should never, ever, ever do  as a politician:

He told the truth regarding what those views imply.

Fuqua first landed himself in Huffington Post last week, when writer John Celock gave national exposure to a story from the Arkansas Times that had quoted Fuqua's book.  Fuqua wrote a nice long passage in his book that suggests creating laws in the US based on Deuteronomy 21:18-21:  "If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear."

Yes, people, you are understanding correctly: Fuqua wrote in his book that the USA should have laws that provide for the execution of rebellious children.

Now, wait, Fuqua says: it's not that I think it should happen all the time, fer Pete's sake:

This passage does not give parents blanket authority to kill their children. They must follow the proper procedure in order to have the death penalty executed against their children. I cannot think of one instance in the Scripture where parents had their child put to death. Why is this so? Other than the love Christ has for us, there is no greater love then [sic] that of a parent for their child. The last people who would want to see a child put to death would be the parents of the child. Even so, the Scrpture [sic] provides a safe guard to protect children from parents who would wrongly exercise the death penalty against them. Parents are required to bring their children to the gate of the city. The gate of the city was the place where the elders of the city met and made judicial pronouncements. In other words, the parents were required to take their children to a court of law and lay out their case before the proper judicial authority, and let the judicial authority determine if the child should be put to death. I know of many cases of rebellious children, however, I cannot think of one case where I believe that a parent had given up on their child to the point that they would have taken their child to a court of law and asked the court to rule that the child be put to death. Even though this procedure would rarely be used, if it were the law of land, it would give parents authority. Children would know that their parents had authority and it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents. 

Yup, Rep. Fuqua, that it would.  Respect through fear.  That's just the kind of relationship a parent should shoot for.  No wonder he won a "Friend of the Family" award from the Arkansas Christian Coalition, is it?

Of course, that's not the only repellent thing Fuqua said in his book.  Here are a few other gems:

• American citizens who are Muslims should all be deported.  To where isn't specified.
• Liberals are trying to overthrow the US government via "bloody revolution."
• Anyone who cannot support their children should be surgically sterilized.
• Anyone in the US who is not a Christian is, by definition, against the government, and they should be considered "conspirators" and "traitors" and dealt with accordingly.

What I find most interesting about this is not that Fuqua believes this (and has stated, for the record, "I think my views are fairly well-accepted by most people.").  It's that more people don't see that his views are simply the logical end result of biblical literalism.  Biblical literalists are usually quite good at cherry-picking a few of their favorite passages to support whatever cause they happen to be in the mood to rant about -- prohibitions on homosexuality, and the young-earth, anti-evolution stuff being two favorites.  They conveniently gloss over more dicey passages, such as the ones prohibiting anyone from eating shrimp or pork, the ones forbidding you to wear clothes made of cloth woven from two different kinds of thread, the ones expressly permitting slavery (as long as the slaves come from another country, which makes me wonder if I can own a Canadian), the one requiring that rape victims marry the rapist -- and the one mandating the stoning of rebellious children.  Fuqua isn't being crazy, as some people have said about him; he's merely being consistent.

It is mighty convenient, the way the vast majority of people who claim that the bible is the 100% true, literal word and law of god just ignore the passages that are unpleasant or troubling.  If anyone needed further proof that literalist Christianity demands an ethical code that is repulsive, bizarre, and inherently immoral, Fuqua and his ilk are it.  And as for the supposed fundamentalists who are squirming in their seats as they read the bits of Fuqua's book that aren't nice... well, I think you're the ones who have a bit of explaining to do.