Moral assault

There is a speech by a public figure that I wonder if you've heard.

I won't present it here in full; but I will give a link to the complete text later, for those of you interested in reading the entire thing.  But here is a bit of it:

There is an effort today to disturb the established order.  Wait a minute.  Listen, I am talking straight to you....  Let me repeat, the Bible says as clearly as language can put it...   

Individually, Christian people... through the years have been able to work together and to understand each other.  But now a world of outside agitation has been started, and people are coming in the name of piety, but it is a false piety, and are endeavoring to disturb God’s established order; and we are having turmoil all over America.  This disturbing movement is not of God.  It is not in line with the Bible.  It is Satanic.  Now, listen and understand this.  Do not let people lead you astray.

These religious liberals are the worst infidels in many ways in the country; and some of them are filling pulpits...  They do not believe the Bible any longer; so it does not do any good to quote it to them.  They have gone over to modernism, and they are leading... people astray at the same time... But every good, substantial, Bible-believing, intelligent, orthodox Christian can read the Word of God and know that what is happening now is not of God...

Whenever you get a situation that rubs out the line that God has drawn... whenever that happens, you are going to have trouble.  That is what is happening today in this country.  All this agitation is... to overthrow the established order of God in this world...  Certain people are disturbing this situation.  They talk about the fact that we are going to have one world.  We will never really have one world until this world heads up in God.  We are not going to have one world by man’s rubbing out the line that God has established.  He is marking the lines, and you cannot rub them out and get away with it.

The established order cannot be overthrown without having trouble.  That is what wrecked Paradise.  God set up the order of Paradise.  He told Adam and Eve how to live and what food to eat and what not to eat.  He drew the lines around that Garden; and when Adam and Eve crossed over the lines of God, thorns grew on roses.  The first baby that was born was a murderer and killed his own brother.  So it has gone down through the ages.  It is man’s rebellion (due to the fall) against a Holy God to overthrow the established order of God in this world.

Sound like familiar rhetoric?  Contains a few more words, but basically the same sentiment as Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis's statement on being released from jail the day before yesterday: "I just want to give God the glory.  We serve a living God who knows exactly where each and everyone stands.  Keep pressing, don’t let down because he is here.  He is worthy."

And no one was more voluble about the jailing of Davis being an assault on the established order of god in the world than Mike Huckabee.  In an op-ed piece he wrote for Fox News, Huckabee said:

When I warned that the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage would lead to the criminalization of Christianity in America I was dismissed by many as an alarmist and my comments were mocked by the chattering class.  Now, just two months after the court's lawless ruling, an elected county clerk has been put in jail by an unelected judge for refusing to issue a “marriage" license to a same-sex couple, removing all doubts about criminalization of Christianity in this country. 

Kim's stand for religious liberty is a pivotal moment in our nation's history.  Will we continue to pretend as though the Supreme Court is the "Supreme Branch" with the authority and ability to make laws?  It most certainly is not.  The Supreme Court is one of three co-equal branches of government under our Constitution.  It is no more the "Supreme Branch" than it is the "Supreme Being" with the authority to redefine the laws of nature or of nature's God!

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the parallels between Huckabee's words and the opinions voiced in the speech from which I quoted in the beginning of this post.  God has delineated proper guidelines for behavior; the courts are attempting to force the abandonment of those guidelines; and right-thinking Christian folk are commanded to stand up against the tyranny of a judicial system determined to erase the divine order in the United States of America.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The only problem is, the first speech is one given by evangelical preacher Bob Jones in 1960 after the Supreme Court forced the segregation of public schools in the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.  He argued that the separation of races was a moral imperative, straight from the mouth of god via the bible.  The Supreme Court of the day was nicknamed "the nine dictators" and public employees were encouraged to flout the ruling -- resulting in the "Massive Resistance" movement that shut down schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia for nearly two years rather than see them integrated.

See the problem here?  When someone claims to know what god wants, almost always (what a coincidence!) god's will agrees perfectly with the person's own biases and beliefs.  Cherry-picking scripture to back up those biases and beliefs is easy enough; as we've seen over and over, you can find support for damn near anything you want in the bible if you pick and choose, up to and including stoning disobedient children to death.

And each time some bigoted cultural practice is presented as divine utterance, dire predictions are made of what will happen to our society if it's legislated into well-deserved oblivion.  Just yesterday, Glenn Beck said that the Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage was going to lead to our abandonment by god:

This is it.  I'm telling you this is the last call.  Within a year, America will be so divided that we literally will not even be able to understand one another.  I am telling you, please, Dear God, listen to me, please.  Please!  We are here.  This is the moment that historians will look back and say, 'They would have survived, but they chose death instead.'  He can no longer be our God.  He has to withdraw...  We're going to feel the full ramifications of what it feels like to choose death.

How is this any different from Bob Jones's claiming that ending segregation was "rebellion... against a Holy God to overthrow the established order of God in this world?"  Both are motivated by the narrow-minded, self-righteous bigotry of men and women who believe that the law of god demands the denial of basic human rights -- and both are justified using scripture and the language of hellfire and damnation.

And both, fortunately, are destined to the scrap-heap of history, along with countless other evils that have been put into the mouth of god by pious hypocrites -- slavery, the subjugation of women, anti-semitism, the torture of heretics, the burning of witches.

The target changes each time.

The basic inhumanity of moral assault, however, always remains the same, regardless of how it's justified.

Creative neurosis

A few days ago, a friend of mine posted this gem:

To say I relate to this sentiment is a monstrous understatement.  I have for as long as I can remember been capable of keeping myself awake at night worrying about various possibilities of how the near future could go terribly, terribly wrong.  Many of these possibilities are mutually exclusive.  Some are so wildly unlikely that I would accomplish just as much by fretting over whether Cornell University was secretly creating genetically engineered flying dinosaur super-predators, and they were gonna get loose and eat my home town for brunch.

Doesn't matter.  My brain apparently prefers tossing such hypotheses around than it does getting a good night's sleep.  And every single time, when nothing bad happens, when no airborne T-rexes descend from the sky, my brain doesn't do the logical thing, which is to say, "Wow, what a goober I am.  Next time I won't worry so much."

No, my brain says, "All this does is make it more likely that next time, I'll be correct.  So I should worry even more."

Yes, I know this may sound odd coming from a guy who plays the trumpet of rationalism on a daily basis.  It's entirely possible that I developed my skeptical outlook in order to have a weapon with which to beat my limbic system, which seems determined to make me miserable.

But there's another upside to being a neurotic mess, apparently.  A team of researchers led by Adam Perkins, of the Department of Psychological Medicine in King's College of London, has found that there is a connection between being neurotic and being highly creative.

In the paper "Thinking Too Much: Self-generated Thought as the Engine of Neuroticism," Perkins and his collaborators, Danilo Amone, Jonathan Smallwood, and Dean Mobbs, found that the driver for neurotic modes of thought was the tendency toward self-generated thought regarding threats.  And while this increase in threat sensitivity can be pretty unpleasant, it is also the source of the creative urge.

"Why should having a magnified view of threat make you good at coming up with solutions to difficult problems?" Perkins said, in an interview in TIME magazine.  "It doesn’t add up.  On one hand, it’s a clever theory—it shows the difficulty of holding down a dangerous job, for example—but on the other hand, it doesn’t explain why [neurotic people] tend to feel unhappy or why they’re more creative."

Perkins says he had his epiphany about the nature of the connection when he was attending a presentation by his collaborator, Jonathan Smallwood.  Smallwood studies the neuroscience of daydreaming -- and had just done an experiment where he placed subjects in an fMRI tube with no distractions or instructions.  Naturally, the subjects began daydreaming.  Afterwards, Smallwood asked the volunteers about the nature of their thoughts while they were in the tube.  The ones that had experienced more negative thoughts showed higher levels of activity in the medial prefrontal cortex -- a part of the brain related to imagination, memory, and creative thought.

"If you have a high level of activity in this particular brain area, then your mind wandering tends to be threat-related," Perkins said.  "[Smallwood] started describing how people whose minds wander are better at things like creativity, delaying gratification and planning.  He also talked about the way that daydreamers’ minds wander when they’re feeling kind of blue.  And my ears perked up."

So the capacity of the neurotic brain to dream up various scenarios that could result in tragedy is also apparently correlated with its ability to dream up ideas for art, writing, music, and other creative endeavors.  Makes sense, doesn't it?

All of which gives me some solace.  I just wish I could convince my brain that it's perfectly okay to come up with horrid ideas, but that (1) it'd be preferable if we could confine said horrid ideas to plot points for my next novel, and (2) there are better times to engage in such behavior than 2 AM.

The dolphin midwife

Okay, I'm willing to admit that I take a fairly prosaic, practical view of the world at times.

That's not to say that I can't be awestruck by nature.  I've been many places that are breathtakingly gorgeous, most recently coastal Cornwall and Devon.  And the stunning beauty of many plants and animals is what led me to study biology, and ultimately, to share that joy with 29 years' worth of high school students (and counting).

But fer cryin' in the sink, let's keep in mind that however beautiful nature can be, it's not called "wild" for nothing.  When I was in Yellowstone in summer of 2014, my enjoyment of watching elk, bison, and bears was tempered by the knowledge that if I were to approach any of them too closely, those lovely and majestic animals would have without hesitation turned me into Hamburger Helper.

This is an awareness that many people apparently lack.  Not only is there the bizarre attitude that we saw all too often in Yellowstone -- that nature is some kind of Global Petting Zoo created for the entertainment of humanity -- there is a weird quasi-pagan belief system that is experiencing a resurgence lately, and which is leading people to do things that are, in a word, idiotic.

This all comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia in which we find out that an Atlanta, Georgia woman is planning on having a "dolphin-assisted birth," an idea that stupidity-wise, ranks right up there with the guy who put his two-year-old on the back of an elk in Yellowstone two weeks before we arrived for a cute photo-op.  The elk bucked and kicked the man, killing him instantly.  (The child, fortunately, was unharmed.)

But such pragmatic reasons for treating wild animals as what they are seem to have no impact on "spiritual healer" Donna Rosin and her partner, Maika Suneagle.  "Dolphins are kind and healing creatures," Rosin said.  "In 2011 and 2014 I had the privilege to learn from and with wild and free dolphins and humpback whales in Hawaii who transformed and healed me in a very profound way.  I felt deeply called to spend two times three months in nature – mostly by myself – and to deeply connect to this magical place of beauty and transformation inside and outside which called me home."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is all lovely and spiritual, but ignores the reality that dolphins, like many large mammals, can kill.  They have not only been recorded as killing other animals -- not, apparently, for food or defense, but because of an innate drive to attack -- but there is good evidence that they sometimes kill infants of their own species.  Such behavior appalls many humans, especially those of us who like to anthropomorphize animals and give them something like human motives, but it is by no means limited to dolphins.  Male lions will unhesitatingly kill cubs fathered by their competitors, the probable evolutionary driver being that such actions trigger the females to go into estrus again, increasing the likelihood of the killer male passing along his own genes to the next generation.

So Rosin's idea of having a dolphin "help her give birth" is one of those ideas that could go severely wrong in any number of ways.

Oh, and did I mention that Rosin and Suneagle believe that if their baby is born this way, it will know how to "speak dolphin?"

Fortunately, I'm not the only one who thinks this is ridiculous.  "This has to be, hands down, one of the worst natural birthing ideas anyone has ever had," wrote science journalist Christie Wilcox in a 2013 article on the practice in Discover.  "Dolphins have been known to toss, beat, and kill other mammals for no apparent reason despite enjoyment.  Is this an animal you want to have at your side when you’re completely vulnerable?"

Apparently, the answer is yes, if you believe in the whole Spirit Animal thing and have zero actual understanding of biology.  After all, even Tennyson, who often waxed rhapsodic about the beauty of the natural world, penned the line, "Nature is red in tooth and claw."

So, there you have it.  The latest in the Truly Awful Ideas department.  But I guess it could be worse.  At least Rosin doesn't want to have a grizzly-bear-assisted birth.  Here, at least there's the chance that the dolphins will go, "Oh, man, another stupid human.  Let's blow this popsicle stand and go find some fish to eat, okay?" and take off.  Because Spirit Animal or no, deliberately approaching a grizzly bear is just asking to have your name put in for a Darwin Award.

Fast forward

Can I plead with you on bended knee about something?

Will you all promise that if you forward something, or post it on Facebook or Twitter, you'll do three minutes of research and figure out if what you're sending along is correct?

Because I'm sick unto death of seeing stuff like this over and over:

Look, we get it, okay?  You hate President Obama.  If President Obama simultaneously figured out how to erase the national debt, end all war, and cure cancer, you'd complain that he had only done it to distract you from the fact that he failed to stop the Benghazi attack in 2012 that killed four Americans.

But you are not helping your case any by lying.  Let's start with the fact that there is no "Kenyan language"; there are 68 languages spoken in Kenya, of which Swahili, Kikuyu, Kalenjin, and Kamba are the most common.  "Denali" comes from the Koyukon Athabaskan language of (Guess where?  You'll never guess) Alaska, from a word that means "high" or "tall."  The Swahili words for "black" and "power" are "nyeusi" and "nguvu;" in Kikuyu it's "iru" and "thitma;" in Kalenjin, "oosek" and "lugumek;" and so on.

Do you see anything that looks the least bit like "Denali" in there?

No, me neither.

Then there's this thing, that has been circulated so much that it makes me want to scream:

I started out responding every time I saw this with, "Oh, you mean like we still do in damn near every school in America?", but I've seen it so many times that I've kind of given up.  It would take you less than the aforementioned three minutes -- something like fifteen seconds, even with a slow connection -- to verify that the Pledge is still recited in every public school in the United States, and a great many private ones, every single morning.  But the people who this one appeals to seem to be unhappy if they're not embattled, so it's much easier to thump their chests and say, "Let me pass along something that conforms to my preconceived notions of how the world is!  That's how staunchly 'Murikan I am!" than it is to find out if what they're angry about is actually true.

But it's not only the conservatives that do this.  How about this one?

This one circulated around the channels of "Everything the US Does Sucks" for ages.  You'd think that it'd be easy enough to check -- after all, whoever created this image kindly listed all of the countries we allegedly invaded -- but again, it's easier just to get outraged and say, "hell yes!" and post it to your Facebook than it is to see if it's true.

Turns out, some political scientists fact-checked the list, and by the generally accepted definition of "invasion," only three qualify (Grenada, Panama, and Iraq).  Another seven are possibilities, if you stretch the definition to include sending troops to help fighters already battling with the government (Libya, Kuwait, Kosovo, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Bosnia).  But this list includes Liberia -- where US troops acted as peacekeepers to stop the citizens from slaughtering each other -- and Congo, where they were sent in for humanitarian aid after refugees from the Rwandan genocide started pouring across the border!

Outrage is easy.  The trouble is, making sure you're not passing along a falsehood is easy, too, in these days where information is available at the touch of a keyboard.  There is no excuse for the fast-forward-finger.

The bottom line is: truth matters.  As Daniel Patrick Moynihan so eloquently put it, you are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.  If you want to argue your position, that's fine and dandy, whether or not I agree with you.  But supporting your cause with lies helps nothing and no one.

All it does is make it look like you don't know how to do a Google search.

Come as you were

There's a Reincarnation Conference at the end of this month in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I can't go.

Of course, tickets are $225 a pop, and I suspect Carol would have words with me if I blew that kind of money on such a thing.  But still.  It features talks, workshops, and opportunities for hypnosis sessions in which you are guided through "past life regression."  There's a presentation by a psychic lawyer and an "acclaimed materialization medium."  Workshops include:

• People Stuck Who Need to Be Rescued
• How Earthbound Spirits, Ghosts, Demons and ETs Can Affect You and Your Clients and the Six Steps to Take to Release Them
• Why We Know Our Pets Live on with Us in the Next Realm
• What Happens to Babies Lost Before Birth by Miscarriages and Other Events
• Why We Know Jesus Taught Reincarnation
• Your Soul's Plan: Why You Chose This Life
• Heaven and Hell As They Really Are: What "the Dead" Are Telling Us

So I think we can all agree that it's gonna be good times.  I wonder how many of the participants in past life regressions will find out that they were Babylonian princesses?  You always seem to have Babylonian princesses, somehow.

The Dazu Wheel of Reincarnation [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

A recent poll indicated that one in five Americans believes in reincarnation.  One in ten claims actually to recall a past life. This is grist to the mill of Dr. Brian Weiss, a prominent psychologist who specializes in past life regression.  "I define [reincarnation] as when we die physically, a part of us goes on," Weiss said, "and that we have lessons to learn here.  And that if you haven't learned all of these lessons, then that soul, that consciousness, that spirit comes back into a baby's body."

Well, that all sounds just nifty.  But the difficulty, of course, is the usual one; there's no evidence whatsoever that this actually happens.  The human mind, as I've mentioned before, is a remarkably plastic, and scarily unreliable, processing device.  Experiments have conclusively shown that given enough emotional charge, an imagined scene can actually become a memory, and thereafter be "remembered" as if it had actually happened.  In a context where a subject was being hypnotized by a professional-looking individual with "Dr." in front of his/her name, and perhaps was even being given subtle suggestions of what to "recall," that impression, and its retention as a memory afterwards, would become even more powerful.

So what gets told to someone, how (s)he remembers it, and how that memory is conflated with what else has happened make all of these stories of people who remember past lives questionable at best.  (Here's a well-publicized one about a little boy who supposedly recalls events that happened to him in a past life in which he was a woman named Pam.)  Add to that the possibility of hoaxes and outright lies, and you can see why few skeptics accept what anecdotal evidence we have as convincing.

And then, there's just the statistical argument, that because there are more people alive today than at any time in the past, not all of us can be reincarnated.  Some believers solve this problem by allowing reincarnation from "lower animals."  In that case, it's funny how no one seems to remember being, say, a bug.  "Boy, life sure was boring, as a bug," is something I'd bet you rarely hear anyone say in a past life regression.

Not only does no one remember being a bug, few of them, it seems, were even just ordinary humans.  "The skeptical part of me about the past life thing is that, just statistically, the odds are that in my past life, I was a Chinese peasant, right?" says Dr. Stephen Prothero, a professor of theology at Boston University.  "But hardly anybody ever is a Chinese peasant.  Everybody is Cleopatra or Mark Antony or Jesus, you know?"

Even Dr. Weiss has to admit this is a problem.   "We're not going to be able to extract a blood sample and get DNA and say, 'Oh, I see you were alive in the 11th century,' no," he stated.  "It's people remembering it, so it's clinical proof."

So, once again, we have someone whose definition of "proof" differs considerably from mine.  And I'd be willing to say, "Well, what harm if these people believe that they were once Eleanor of Aquitaine?" except that the past life regressors and the rest of them are bilking the gullible out of large quantities of money.   On one level, perhaps people who are that credulous deserve bilking, but the compassionate side of my personality feels like it's just wrong to take advantage.

In any case, I rather regret that I'll have to miss this month's "Come As You Were" party.  It would have been fun.  I would have loved to see what they'd have made out of trying to do a past-life regression with me.  I think I'd have said... "I'm...  I'm flying through the air.  Free.  Wild.  I'm... well, fuck.  I just got splatted on a windshield."

So it's kind of a pity I can't go.  Oh, well, as the reincarnated are wont to say, there's always next time.

Tantrums over Kim Davis

I told myself that I wouldn't comment on the whole Kim Davis thing, that other and better voices had already said what needed to be said.  The Rowan County, Kentucky county clerk who refused to follow the law of the land and issue marriage licenses to LGBT couples on the grounds that it was inconsistent with her Christian beliefs has been jailed for contempt of court, and there you are.

But of course the whole kerfuffle has resulted in the Christian Persecution Party roaring back with a vengeance.  This movement was started a few years ago by evangelicals who think that (1) not getting your way is the same as being oppressed, (2) it's persecution if you're not allowed to visit your own beliefs on every other citizen in the United States, and (3) the 74% of Americans who self-identify as Christians represent an embattled minority.

Think I'm exaggerating?  Let's start with online loudmouth Joshua Feuerstein, who had the following to say:

I told you a long time ago, ladies and gentlemen, that the LGBT community has one agenda and that is to come after Christians.  That has been the agenda all along. They want to put the clamp on Christianity in America, and you either back them and support them or you’re going to jail… 

… I challenge you to get there, to Rowan County, and let’s make sure that Kim is let out of jail.  It’s not fair that a Christian is persecuted and thrown in jail simply for not endorsing gay marriage.

Sorry, Josh, but that's a lie.  Kim Davis isn't in jail because she is a Christian.  She's in jail because she is an elected official who refused to follow a federal law even after being ordered to do so by the court.

Then we had the ever-baffling Mike Huckabee weighing in:

Kim Davis in federal custody removes all doubts about the criminalization of Christianity in this country.  We must defend Religious Liberty!...  Look, you would have hated Lincoln, because he disregarded the Dred Scott 1857 decision that said black people aren’t fully human.  [Lincoln] disregarded [Dred Scott] because he knew it was not operative, that it was not logical.

Wait a moment.  You are... you are seriously saying that Kim Davis is like Lincoln because she's denying rights to a group of American citizens?  And then defending that comparison by showing how Lincoln did the exact opposite?

And finally, no BizarroFest would be complete without a contribution from Ted Cruz:

Those who are persecuting Kim Davis believe that Christians should not serve in public office. [...] Or, if Christians do serve in public office, they must disregard their religious faith–or be sent to jail. 

Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny.  Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith.  This is wrong.  This is not America. 

I stand with Kim Davis.  Unequivocally. I stand with every American that the Obama Administration is trying to force to chose [sic] between honoring his or her faith or complying with a lawless court opinion.

No, Ted, we think Kim Davis belongs in jail because she refused to do her fucking job.

But you know, the whole thing smacks of hypocrisy anyway.  What do you think these same braying wingnuts would say in the following situations?

• A Muslim food store checkout clerk who refused to ring up a customer because he was purchasing pork.
• A Quaker who worked for the sheriff's office and refused to issue an adult a handgun license.
• A vegan who worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service and refused to issue a hunter a deer hunting permit.
• A Christian Scientist clerk in a pharmacy who refused to sell customers any drugs at all.

Think they'd support any of those?

Yeah, right.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Martyrs' Last Prayer (1883) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

How about calling it like it is?  You are perfectly within your rights to refuse to do a job that interferes with your religious beliefs.  But in that case, you should not hold that job.  If Kim Davis had resigned because she wasn't comfortable issuing marriage licenses to LGBT individuals, that would have been intolerant of her, but at least the honorable way to follow her religious precepts.  That she expects to keep a job, while using her religion to get out of doing it, is ridiculous.

The Religious Right positively relishes the opportunity to cast themselves as this century's Christians being eaten by lions in the Colosseum, when exactly the opposite is true; they are the ones attempting to use their position to force their belief system on everyone else.  So instead of deriding Kim Davis as a shirker who is getting paid for a job she refuses to do, or a scofflaw who sticks up her middle finger at the law of the land, she's given shouts of acclamation for being a staunch True Believer in the face of dreadful persecution.

So it's time to say it to their faces: throwing a tantrum because you'd like to force everyone to dance to your music, and no one's cooperating, is what toddlers do.

Grow up.

Allahu akbar!... or maybe not.

Once again, the fervently religious of our world have shown themselves capable of following the Red Queen's dictum of holding several contradictory thoughts in their heads at once.  In this case, it's Egyptian Muslims, who have jailed yet another person for "blasphemy" and "criticizing Islam."

The radical Muslim element in Egypt has been quick to speak out against the sentence.  It was too lenient, they say -- the man should have been executed.

It's a little perplexing how these folks, and their spiritual brethren the Fundamentalist Christians, can't see the contradiction implicit in their stance.  On the one hand, they are continuously chanting, singing, and shouting from the rooftops about how God is Great and All-Powerful and Omnipotent and Omniscient and Omnipresent and Omni-Various-Other-Stuff, and on the other hand they are so terrified that a brief passage written by a guy on Facebook will destroy Allah's kingdom on earth that they are ready to hang him from the nearest flagpole.

[image courtesy of photographer David Lisbona and the Wikimedia Commons]

The same was true of the witch-hunters in the 17th century, who seemed to believe that the unshakable, self-evident, rock-solid truth of god's word was under serious threat from illiterate, eccentric little old ladies.

Come on, people.  You can't have it both ways.  Either god is powerful, or he's not.  If he's powerful, you have no reason to persecute people for bad-mouthing him; presumably god is capable of handling his own battles, and doesn't need patriarchal, humorless, puritanical bastards like the Shari'a judges to deal with his enemies.  If he's not so powerful -- if, in fact, his revealed truth could be demolished by a couple of paragraphs of mild criticism -- then I have to wonder why you think he's worthy of worship.  Either way, both can't be true simultaneously.

Oh, wait, perhaps there's a third option?  Maybe all of this stuff was made up by power-hungry patriarchs to keep the power structure intact, the money flowing in, and the women in line, and in actuality there is no god!  Gotta wonder.

In any case, you also have to wonder why so few people are willing to stand up and say this. Lots of folks are willing to address the human rights aspects (torturing and executing people isn't nice) but very few people are willing to deal with the larger issue, which is that these people are morally bankrupt.  A religion or a system of ethics which is based upon coercion (mental or physical), is simply an excuse for the powerful to remain powerful.  It isn't true, it isn't worthy of respect, and it isn't a reflection of the divine.  It is simply an embodiment of all that is bad about human nature -- the desire to dominate solely because we're in a position where we can.

It's the same with a lot of the issues between the Christians and politicians these days, isn't it?  You hear from people who aren't happy that the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage that heterosexual marriage is "under attack".  The ranting you hear from the pulpits seems to claim that now that gay marriage is legal, all of these straight people are going to run right out and tie the knot with someone of the same sex, and that will open the door for heaven knows what.  In a year or two we'll probably have people marrying various marine invertebrates.  You know, if you think that sexual preference is really that fluid, you have to question why your god would have made it that way.  Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that if your worldview is based upon fear, then any amount of rationality won't get in the way of your adopting moronic stances to shore up your beliefs.

Of course, some people believe that there's god's evil twin, Satan or Lucifer or whatever, who is actively trying to corrupt people by using others to spread wrong belief.  Even if you think that's true, however, isn't it still supposedly the case that god is stronger than Satan, and correct beliefs are inherently more attractive and virtuous than incorrect ones?  If so, then once again, what the hell are you so worried about?

So once more, we have the devoutly religious of the world adopting a stance which is so patently ridiculous that if it were fiction, no one would believe it was plausible; and most of the world's political leaders doing nothing but tsk-tsking in their direction for "not being nice."  It would be wonderful if one, just one, of them would stand up and say, "You know what, Egyptian leaders?  We are no longer in the Middle Ages.  We stopped burning witches three hundred years ago.  That's because doing that sort of thing was based upon stupid, backward superstition.  Grow up, you idiotic bastards, and join the 21st century.  If criticism is really such a threat to your beliefs, it probably means that your beliefs are simply wrong."

But no one will, of course.