Yeah, so THIS is disturbing.

Americans Learn To Stop Worrying And Love Torture « The Dish.

Apparently no one actually READ the report, and saw how completely ineffective torture was. And even if they did (which… no, no they didn’t), a vast majority can somehow reconcile their religious beliefs with the torture of other human beings, including acts that resulted in the deaths of innocent people.

Let me repeat that: innocent people were tortured TO DEATH. And for nothing: no credible, actionable facts ever came from that torture. It was useless. No one being tortured has any incentive to tell the truth: their only incentive is to try to figure out what the person torturing them wants to hear, what they already believe, and tell them that as quickly as possible before they DIE.

This isn’t even a debate on whether what the CIA did should be considered “torture” or not: apparently we (for the most part) agree that it was. But by a WIDE margin, those with religious beliefs taken from a peacenik retro-hippie (whose own torture and death led to centuries of hatred, oppression and atrocities committed against Jews) seem to agree that torture is just okee dokee and a fine core value for Americans to support.

Torture destroys the humanity of two people: the person being tortured, and the person doing the torturing. How so many can reconcile that with their religion is just another example of how the “moral absolute truth” that religion claims as its own private domain is nothing more than the world’s most flexible form of self-serving justification for whatever you already want to believe.

And yet those of us on the right side of that chart are the ones with no moral compass.

Religion Stencil (Photo credit: murdelta)

An interesting summary of current biblical scholarship. Not from atheist scientists intent on destroying Christianity, but from the historical theologians within the religious traditions who are experts in these matters.

“The mainstream scholarly view is that the Gospels are anonymous works, written in a different language than that of Jesus, in distant lands, after a substantial gap of time, by unknown persons, compiling, redacting, and inventing various traditions in order to provide a narrative of Christianity’s central figure, Jesus Christ, to confirm the faith of their communities.”

That’s the mainstream religious scholarly view, mind: not the secular unbeliever scholarly view.

By all means: take the moral lessons, parables and teachings of the Bible and extract the ones that are good and make sense to you, and use them in your life. There are some good ones in there. But there are some pretty terrible ones too, and every reader parses them through their own worldview, cherry-picking what your morality already agrees with and discarding what it does not. It’s why the Bible was used for centuries to justify slavery, and at the same time was eventually one of the texts use to justify emancipation.

Just don’t take it as gospel (pun definitely intended). Since we lack the original texts (we only have copies of copies of copies, with each subsequent copier changing the text, introducing errors, adding clarifications so that their personal religious opinion issued forth from the mouths of the apostles in order to give them historical weight they didn’t deserve), we aren’t even really certain what they first said.

Is this a call for everyone to be non-religious? No. I’ve obviously made my choice on that matter, and this is only one of the many factors in my worldview. But what I do hope to get from posting this type of information is a counterpoint to those who center their perspective on major issues (same-sex marriage, bullying, abortion, contraception, the role of women in the church and in society, our role as men in society, what morality is and what it means, how we determine what is right and what is wrong, what is ethical or unethical, or what role ANY religious text should have in determining the laws that govern all of us) on what they believe are firsthand witness accounts of real events that are accepted as historical fact. They are, unfortunately, nothing of the sort: it’s up to you to bring morality to the table and make a case for your position on these issues, independently of what these texts say. They are not, in any sense of the word, definitive; regardless of what religious tradition you belong to, your focus should be on humanity and morality today, not what it was thousands of years ago.

The world and the things we know about it today are orders of magnitude different from what people knew back then. We know that common practices and beliefs from back in those days are today considered completely unacceptable, in some cases even immoral; we also know that no matter which particular one of the thousands of sub-sects of religion you belong to, your practice and beliefs today would be unrecognizable (perhaps even heretical) to people back then. Heck, there wasn’t even a common set of books recognized as part of the New Testament until hundreds of years CE. I’d love to hear someone debate a 3rd century religious believer and explain to them why the gnostic traditions in the Book of Thomas or the Book of Judas no longer apply, especially considering that authorship and provenance of those gospels is no less murky as those of Luke, Matthew or John.

Live a good life. Let others live theirs. Love thy neighbor, treat him/her the way you would like to be treated. Let him who has never sinned cast the first stone, all that good stuff. And accept that your interpretation of your religious texts is very likely quite different from those of members of your religion from a century ago, and completely different from those that were alive two or three or four millennia before that, so don’t get too attached to them as the only possible interpretation of how to live a good life. They are your interpretation, one out of thousands, and just that: nothing more. The odds that they are wrong are far from zero, a fact that we should all accept with vast helpings of humility regarding any perception of unquestioned and unquestionable veracity.

This article just makes me sad: read the full statement here.

I would suggest that a bigger threat to humanity’s future and human dignity is probably blind adherence to a rich, totalitarian authority figure who claims to be THE inerrant spokesperson for God… but @whatdoIknow.

I would also note that someone who claims that contraception is not permitted based on his interpretation of a 2500-year old myth is far more of a threat to humanity (see: AIDS and poverty in the third world) than anyone who just wants to commit the rest of their lives to a loving partner.

You know what, Benedict? There are billions of people who disagree with you, and there are a lot of them who are gay. They ARE humanity. What they are a threat to is not “human dignity and the future of humanity”, but to your power, as well as your position as official interpreter of your particular warped brand of God-ese.

Check out that sexy, sexy beard.

Fun fact of the day! Provo is the 3rd-largest city in Utah, and home to Brigham Young University, which is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In 2000, Larry Peterman of Provo, Utah was charged with selling obscene material at his “Movie Buff” chain of video stores. A jury found him not guilty: his defense demonstrated that in Utah County, a place that often boasts of being the most conservative area in the nation, the amount of porn being viewed on pay-per-view and at local hotels was “disproportionately large” compared to the rest of the country. Since obscenity is generally legally defined by local community standards, what Peterman was selling could not be classified as “obscene”, because local residents were watching METRIC CRAPLOADS of the stuff. This led to the word “Pornmons” being coined, which I just did.

That’s what I think of when I see Mitt Romney on TV. And now you will too.