Tying God's hands

Today, for the umpteenth time, I saw the following image posted on social media:

The people who posted it apparently think that it's entirely appropriate to use the deaths of innocent people in school shootings to lob some snark at the atheists, secularists, and others who believe in the separation of church and state.  But what I want to address here is the toxicity of the mindset behind the message -- apart from what would spur someone to think that it was ever a reasonable thing to post.

First, I thought y'all were the ones who believed that God is everywhere, is omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient and omni-what-have-you.  What you're implying here is that a handful of people who think religion has no place in a public, taxpayer-funded institution have somehow overpowered an all-powerful God's ability to do anything to stop a crazed gunman.  Probably explaining why both Oklahoma and Texas are currently poised to approve and implement new laws requiring public school teachers to work lessons from the Bible into their curricula; it's easier than doing anything to actually improve education and keep children safe, and leaves the powers-that-be with a nice smug feeling of holiness afterward. 

It's basically "Thoughts & Prayers" v. 2.0, with a side order of Showing All The Other Religions Who's Boss.

So we're already on some shaky theological grounds, but it gets worse.  What the above message suggests is that somehow, God's attitude is, "if you won't pray in schools, innocent children deserve to die."  That given the choice of using his Miraculous God Powers to stop a massacre, he just stands there smirking, and afterwards says, "See?  Told you something like this would happen if you didn't worship me all the time and everywhere.  Sorry, but my hands were tied."

Me, I think any deity that acts like this is a monster, not an all-loving beneficent creator.  That said, it's entirely consistent with the depiction of the Lord of Hosts in the Old Testament.  The Old Testament God was constantly smiting people left and right for such heinous crimes as gathering firewood on the sabbath, and when the Chosen People of Israel conquered a place, the word from above was "kill everyone, including children."

Don't believe me?  There are plenty of instances, but my favorite is 1 Samuel 15:

This is what the Lord Almighty says: "I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.  Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.  Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."  So Saul summoned the men and mustered them at Telaim—two hundred thousand foot soldiers and ten thousand from Judah.

Long story short, Saul did as told, killing everyone up to and including the donkeys, but the Lord was still pissed off for some reason, and the Prophet Samuel told Saul so.  Apparently it had to do with the fact that Saul had spared the Amalekite King, Agag (like I said before, to hell with the children).  So Saul executed Agag, but the Lord still wasn't happy with him.

There's no impressing all-powerful deities, some days.

Anyhow, what this shows is that people who post bullshit like the above image are simply describing how the Old Testament God does, in fact, behave.

The whole thing brings to memory a quote from Richard Dawkins.  I know his very name justifiably raises pretty much everyone's hackles, but it's so germane to this topic that I would be remiss in not including it:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

To which I can only say: touché.

The deepest problem, though, is the one that the people who post this nonsense would be the least likely to admit; when they advocate tearing down the wall between church and state, they're absolutely adamant that it can only be for the benefit of one particular church.  Start talking about having Jewish prayers or quotes from the Qu'ran or some of the Ten Thousand Sayings of Buddha festooned about the walls of classrooms, and you'll have these same people screaming bloody murder.  Hell, I bet they'd even get their knickers in a twist over which flavor of Christianity you're allowed to promote.

Hey, teachers in Oklahoma or Texas: maybe you should try posting quotes and sermons and whatnot from the Patriarch Bartholomew of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and see what happens.  Maybe even insist that the children put up Christmas decorations on January 7, when the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas.

Could be an interesting experiment to run.

So as usual, what we're talking about is a combination of ugly theology and smug hypocrisy.  And it would be hardly worth commenting on if it weren't for the power that these attitudes still have, and the increasing degree to which they still influence policy in the United States -- something that is only going to extend further with the incoming administration, especially if more Christofascists like Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee get confirmed in high-level positions.

Other than railing about it here on Skeptophilia, though, I'm not sure what to do.  Anyone who really believes this -- anyone, in other words, who wasn't just trying to score some points off the nonbelievers -- has subscribed to a belief system that is very close to the definition of moral bankruptcy, so trying to reach them via argument is probably a forlorn hope.

And people talk about us atheists being amoral.

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The execution drill

We're taking a day off from our regularly scheduled programming because of a story that upset me so much I have to write about it.

I wrestled with whether I should address this here for over 24 hours, wondering what contributing my two-cents'-worth would accomplish, and then I decided I had to speak up.  My mind keeps coming back to the story, and that's a sign that I still need to process my thoughts and (especially) my emotions on the topic.

So here I am.

The story hit the news a couple of days ago.  Apparently, in Monticello, Indiana, part of the Twin Lakes School District, the powers-that-be staged an "active shooter drill."  We do this in my own school (although we call it a "lockdown drill") -- the principal calls a lockdown, we shut and lock our doors, turn the lights off, and everyone gets into a part of the classroom that can't be seen from the window in the door.  The idea is to get used to responding to any potential threats by making it look like the room is unoccupied.

The administrators in Monticello decided to push it one step further.  They had people posing as actual shooters, armed with Airsoft pellet guns, and they forced their way into one of the rooms, lined the teachers up four at a time, made them kneel, and shot them in the back, execution-style.  People out in the hall heard screams, and the Airsoft pellets raised welts and at least in one case, drew blood.

Neither the school district nor the law enforcement officials who conducted the drill were willing to comment on what happened.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The Indiana State Teachers' Association was understandably outraged.  "The teachers were terrified, but were told not to tell anyone what happened.  Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated," the Association said on Twitter.  "No one in education takes these drills lightly.  The risk of harming someone far outweighs whatever added realism one is trying to convey here."

Representative Wendy McNamara, who co-authored a bill requiring schools to hold shooter drills, expressed amazement that it was handled this way.  "I would never have thought in a million years that anybody would have thought that it made sense to use in an active shooter drill where teachers are unaware that they're going to be shot with a pellet gun," she said.  "That would have never crossed my mind as something we'd need to legislate."

Me neither, Representative McNamara.

It also brings up the question of who in the hell thought this was a good idea.  The principal?  The superintendent?  Was the district pushed by the sheriff's office to include this as part of the drill?  Of course, since all they'll say is "no comment," no one at this point knows for sure except the people who made the decision.

Being a teacher, of course what this brought up in my mind is how I'd respond if this happened in my school.  My first reaction is that when the guy with the pellet gun told me to kneel on the floor, I'd have told him, "Not just no, but fuck no."  But the people acting as the shooters were police officers who were armed with more than Airsoft guns.  What would have happened if I'd refused?  Is this (in a legal sense) refusing to cooperate with law enforcement?  What if I walked out?  What if I disobeyed what I was told, and yelled to the other teachers waiting to be executed that they needed to get the hell out of there?

I'd like to think if I refused to cooperate, and the policeman had said, "Do it or you're under arrest," I'd have said, "Go ahead, you asshole.  Arrest me.  I'll see you and the school district representatives in court."  But you never know how you'll react when you're in a highly emotional situation, and especially one you were not expecting.  Because -- if this wasn't clear enough -- none of the teachers were warned ahead of time that this would happen.

I do know that afterward, the first thing I'd do is to turn in my letter of resignation.  Along with a lengthy explanation of why.  If I can't trust the people in charge of my school to do whatever has the best interest of the students' and staff's emotional health in mind, I'll find other employment.

The second thing I would do is mail a copy of the letter to every news outlet I can think of.

But this doesn't alter the fundamental problems with this situation, which include:

• We are in a place as a nation where people have concluded that school shootings are likely enough that we need to conduct a realistic simulation of one.
• Somehow, conducting "realistic active shooter drills" is considered to be a better way of addressing school shootings than passing reasonable, common-sense gun laws.
• Whoever designed this drill thought that traumatizing teachers was an effective way to train them in how to respond in an emergency.
• No one is taking responsibility for this idiotic decision.

I don't seem to be getting over the outrage I felt the first time I saw this story, two days ago.  The more I think about it, the madder I get.  I'm not a big fan of lawsuits, but I hope that the Indiana State Teachers' Association sues the absolute shit out of either Twin Lakes School District, the White County Sheriff's Department, or both, on behalf of the teachers who are probably still recovering from the emotional trauma of what they went through.

Beyond that, I can't think of anything more to say.  But maybe if enough people find out about this, it'll make it less likely that some trigger-happy administrator or policeman decides it'd be good to stage a mock shooting in the name of "realism."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a look at one of the most peculiar historical mysteries known: the unsolved puzzle of Kaspar Hauser.

In 1828, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into a military station in the city of Ansbach, Germany.  He was largely unable to communicate, but had a piece of paper that said he was being sent to join the cavalry -- and that if that wasn't possible, whoever was in charge should simply have him hanged.

The boy called himself Kaspar Hauser, and he was housed above the jail.  After months of coaxing and training, he became able to speak enough to tell a peculiar story.  He'd been kept captive, he said, in a small room where he was never allowed to see another human being.  He was fed by a man who sometimes talked to him through a slot in the door.  Sometimes, he said, the water he was given tasted bitter, and he would sleep soundly -- and wake up to find his hair and nails cut.

But locals began to question the story when it was found that Hauser was a pathological liar, and not to be trusted with anything.  No one was ever able to corroborate his story, and his death from a stab wound in 1833 in Ansbach was equally enigmatic -- he was found clutching a note that said he'd been killed so he couldn't identify his captor, who signed his name "M. L. O."  But from the angle of the wound, and the handwriting on the note, it seemed likely that both were the work of Hauser himself.

The mystery endures, and in the book Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson looks at the various guesses that people have made to explain the boy's origins and bizarre death.  It makes for a fascinating read -- even if truthfully, we may never be certain of the actual explanation.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Fighting the avalanche

Wednesday was the National Walk Out Day for the #NeverAgain movement, and it's estimated that over a million high school students walked out of their classes to protest the government's inaction on gun law reform -- and the fact that many elected officials are in the pockets of the NRA.  While some school districts were supportive of their right to protest, others chose to punish the ones who participated with penalties up to and including suspension or paddling.  (Yes, there are schools that still inflict corporal punishment on students.)

And of course, the backlash from the general public against the students who participated went full-bore almost immediately.  A quick perusal of social media was enough to gauge the vitriol being hurled at them.  One person I saw called them "lazy little snowflakes."  Others said they were only walking out so they could claim justification for skipping class (odd, then, that in our area -- where many schools were closed because of a snowstorm -- students showed up anyhow so they could stand in solidarity with the rest of the protesters).  They were called names (a politician from Maine called #NeverAgain leader Emma González "a skinhead lesbian").  They were accused of being tools of the radical left.  Most frustrating -- at least for me, looking at it from the outside -- is the level of condescension from adults, the implication that there's no way that these young adults could possibly have a relevant opinion, or one that the adults themselves should take seriously.

What this demonstration has proven, however, is that the adults who are misjudging and/or dismissing these teenagers are doing so at their own risk.  There is no sign of this movement going away, or being at all quelled by the snark being hurled their way, or how they are being portrayed in social media and (most of) the conservative press.  A banner was put up on a fence near Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday with a particularly trenchant quote from Douglas herself:

The last time I've seen an anti-establishment uprising this powerful was the anti-Vietnam-War protests of the 1960s and early 70s.  The same kind of insults were lobbed at protesters back then; they were ne'er-do-wells, hippies who just wanted to tear down the rule of law, stoners whose opinion didn't count and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Today's establishment should look at the results of that episode as the cautionary tale it is.

It's worth considering looking even further back in history, however, and recognizing that civil disobedience is how this country was founded.  And while we call the people who launched the American Revolution are called "the Founding Fathers," they were by and large young people.  In 1776, James Monroe (and French ally the Marquis de Lafayette) were 18, Aaron Burr 20, Nathan Hale 21, Robert Townsend 22, George Rodgers Clark 23, and James Madison 25.  While some of them were in their thirties and forties -- notably George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams -- the Revolution was not fought, or even led, by staid, dignified elder statesmen.

These kids have stood up to politicians all they way up to the president of the United States; they are not going to be silenced by disdain.  And it bears mention that a significant portion of the teenagers who are participating will be of voting age by the November elections; virtually all of them will be voting by November 2020.  And trust me, they are not going to forget the elected officials who have ridiculed them and dismissed their opinions.

Whether you agree with them or disagree with them, this movement is not going to be stopped.  The wise among us will at least engage in an honest dialogue with them.  The foolish will discount their power and try to stand in their way, or even pretend they don't exist.

If these young adults are snowflakes, prepare for an avalanche.

Mass shooters and broken homes

One of the hardest things to get past is the natural tendency to accept something unquestioningly simply because it sounds like it should be true.

It's a special form of confirmation bias -- which is using scanty or questionable evidence to support a claim we already believed.  Here, it's more that we hear something, and think, "Okay, that sounds reasonable" -- and never stop to ask if the evidence supports it.

Or, actually, that the evidence presented is even correct.  I ran into an example of that a few days ago at the site Dr. Rich Swier.  It's a video by Warren Farrell, social activist and spokesperson for the "men's rights movement," in which he makes the contention that there is a single factor that unites all the school shooters -- growing up in a home without a father.

Farrell says:

The single biggest problem that creates school shootings is fatherlessness.  Either minimal involvement with dads, or no involvement with dads.  This often comes after divorce, and the 51% of women over the age of thirty who are raising children without father involvement.  Sometimes it starts with fathers being involved, but after two years of not being married, 40% of fathers drop out completely.  That combination accounts for 100% of school shooters.  Adam Lanza, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz, Dylan Roof.  They're all dad-deprived boys.  We don't see this among girls; we don't see this among dad-involved boys.  The solution is father involvement.  We can start that in school.  We can start that with fathers being involved in PTAs.  Changing the culture, letting men know that the most important single thing they can do in their life is not to be a warrior, outside in the killing fields, but to be a father-warrior.  Be involved not just in PTAs but in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, coaching, in giving up high-paying jobs to spend more time with your children.  

Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it?  Moreover, it's hard to think of a reason why we wouldn't want fathers to spend more positive interactive time with their children.  So it's easy just to say, "Oh, okay, that makes sense," and not to question the underlying claim.

Because it turns out that what he's saying -- school shooters are created by fatherless homes -- is simply untrue.  The contention seems to have originated with a Fox News story, and the whole thing took off, despite its simply being factually incorrect.

[image is in the Public Domain]

Now, mind you, there are cases of mass shooters who grew up in dysfunctional, fatherless homes.  Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, was the son of a bank robber who spent most of his son's childhood in prison.  The father of Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland school shooter, died when his son was five, and he was left with a mother who apparently was abusive, and eventually he was farmed out to relatives and friends.  Dylann Roof, the Charleston church shooter, was the product of divorce, and his father was allegedly physically abusive not only to his son but to his second wife.

But consider some of the others.  Adam Lanza, the Newtown school shooter, was the child of a couple who divorced when he was in fifth grade, but his father remained involved.  When Lanza's anxiety and apparent obsessive-compulsive disorder made it impossible for him to attend high school, he was taken out and jointly homeschool by his mother and father.  Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2007, was the son of a pair of hard-working Korean immigrants who were "strong Christians" and had sought help for their son, who had shown signs of sociopathy and withdrawal all the way back in first grade.   Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was not the product of divorce, and if anything, his father sounds more stable than his mother.  Neither Eric Harris nor Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School shooters, were the products of broken families, or even dysfunctional ones; nothing I could find (and there are thousands of sites out there dedicated to the tragedy) indicated that either boy grew up in anything but a perfectly ordinary upper middle class home.

So it's not sufficient to say, "Okay, that seems reasonable."  If you have a claim, it better be supported by all the evidence, or it's time to look elsewhere.  I'm certain that the awful home situations of Paddock, Cruz, and Roof contributed to their anger and eventual violent attacks; but clearly this isn't (as Farrell claims) proof that "the cause of mass shootings is fatherlessness," and his contention that 100% of mass shooters were functionally fatherless is simply wrong.

Once again, the situation is that we need to question our own biases.  The cause of mass murders in our society is multifaceted, and admits no easy solution: bullying and the resultant sense of powerlessness that engenders, the difficulty of obtaining consistent mental health services, poverty, child abuse, split families, radicalization/racism/fascist rhetoric, the easy availability of guns, and the culture of glorifying violence undoubtedly all play a role.

Certainly, we should all commit ourselves to doing what we can to remedy any of those problems; but claiming that one of them is responsible for a complex issue is facile thinking.  And as tempting as it is, such oversimplification never leads to a real solution.

Tying god's hands

Today, for what must be the tenth time, I saw the following image posted on social media:

The people who posted it apparently decided for some reason that it was acceptable to use the tragic murder of seventeen innocent people to lob some snark at the atheists, secularists, and others who believe in the separation of church and state.  But what I want to address here is the toxicity of the mindset behind the message -- apart from what would spur someone to think that this is an appropriate time to post it (and truthfully, I can't think of an appropriate time to post it).

First, I thought y'all were the ones who believed that god was everywhere, was omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient and omni-what-have-you.  What you're implying here is that a handful of people who think religion has no place in a public, taxpayer-funded institution have somehow overpowered an all-powerful god's ability to do anything to stop a crazed gunman.  (Probably explaining why the Florida State Legislature, having decided to do fuck-all about gun law reform, has decided instead to pursue a bill requiring "In God We Trust" to be posted in public schools statewide.)

So we're already on some shaky theological grounds, but it gets worse.  What the above message suggests is that somehow, god's attitude is, "if you won't pray in schools, innocent children deserve to die."  That given the choice of using his Miraculous God Powers to stop a massacre, he just stood there smirking and afterwards said, "See?  Told you something like this would happen if you didn't worship me all the time and everywhere.  Sorry, but my hands were tied."

Me, I think any deity that acts like this is a monster, not an all-loving beneficent creator.  That said, it's entirely consistent with the depiction of the Lord of Hosts in the Old Testament.  The Old Testament God was constantly smiting people left and right for such heinous crimes as gathering firewood on the sabbath, and when the Chosen People of Israel conquered a place, the word from above was "kill everyone, including children."

Don't believe me?  There are plenty of instances, but my favorite is 1 Samuel 15:

This is what the Lord Almighty says: "I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.  Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.  Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."  So Saul summoned the men and mustered them at Telaim—two hundred thousand foot soldiers and ten thousand from Judah.

Long story short, Saul did as told, killing everyone up to and including the donkeys, but the Lord was still pissed off for some reason, and the Prophet Samuel told him so.  Apparently it had to do with the fact that Saul had spared the Amalekite King, Agag (like I said before, to hell with the children).  So Saul executed Agag, but the Lord still wasn't happy with him.

So what this shows is by posting bullshit like the above image, the people who think this kind of deity deserves worship are simply walking their talk.

The whole thing brings to memory a quote from Richard Dawkins.  I know his very name raises hackles, but it's so germane to this topic that I would be remiss in not including it:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

To which I can only say: touché.

The deepest problem, though, is the one the people who post this nonsense would be the least likely to admit; when they advocate tearing down the wall between church and state, they're absolutely adamant that it can only be for the benefit of one church.  Start talking about having Jewish prayers or quotes from the Qu'ran or some of the Ten Thousand Sayings of Buddha festooned about the walls of classrooms, and you'll have these same people screaming bloody murder.

So as usual, what we're talking about is a combination of ugly theology and complete hypocrisy.  And it would be hardly worth commenting on if it weren't for the power that these attitudes still have, and the degree to which they still influence policy in the United States.

Other than railing about it here on Skeptophilia, I'm not sure what to do.  Anyone who really believes this -- anyone, in other words, who wasn't just trying to score some points off the atheists -- has subscribed to a belief system that is very close to the definition of evil.

And people talk about us atheists being amoral.