Orson Scott Card's anti-atheist bigotry

Orson Scott Card has an article on Beliefnet called "Who Gets to Define 'Christian'?" It was written in response to Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr.'s "Mormonism Is Not Christianity."

Card's lies and anti-atheist bigotry are on full display in this single paragraph:

We Mormons don’t agree with you on many vital points of doctrine. But I hope we all agree with each other about this: In a time when a vigorous atheist movement is trying to exclude religious people from participating in American public life unless they promise never to mention or think about their religion while in office, why are we arguing with each other?

A vigorous atheist movement? I wish! We're only about 3 percent of the American population, 9 percent if you include everyone called "non-religious." We're the least trusted group according the polls. At best only 45 percent of the population would vote for an atheist, and that's the bigotry Mr. Card wants to plug into.

Sure, some atheist books have ascended to the top of national bestseller lists. Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything has, since its May 1 publication, sold 58,000 copies, according to this Publishers Weekly article. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, published last September, has sold 282,000 copies. The population of the United States is 301,139,947. Can you do the math Mr. Card? How do their sales compare with the sales of Tim LaHaye's and Jerry B. Jenkins' "Left Behind" books which have sold more than 62 million copies.

And according to Mr. Card this atheist movement is "trying to exclude religious people from participating in American public life unless they promise never to mention or think about their religion while in office." Where the hell does that even come from? How exactly are we trying to exclude religious people or silence them? By pointing out how crazy their statements are?

I'll admit that I'm a bit disgusted by all the god-blathering politicians have to do to get elected but there is a kind of god-blathering I consider "safe and sane enough" to vote for. For example, John Kerry's semi-quoting of Lincoln's "we pray that we are on God's side and not blaspheme and claim he is on our side," by saying: "I don't want to claim that God is on our side... I want to humbly pray that we are on God's side." Does Mr. Card think only a secretly crypto-atheist would say such a thing? John Kerry was accused of secretly being an atheist in addition to getting swift-boated.

There is, however, another kind of god-blathering I don't consider safe or sane, such as Kansas Senator and presidential candidate Sam Brownback's New York Times Op-Ed, "What I Think About Evolution," and Rep. Ben Bridges' and Rep. Warren Chisum's memo that called for the end of “tax-supported evolution science” because it has a religious agenda to name a few examples.

Does Mr. Card know the difference between safe and sane god-blathering and dangerously insane god-blathering? Or does the more god-blathering a candidate does make him a better candidate in my Mr. Card's mind? He doesn't seem like someone who would connect the Christian Right to the rise of American Fascism.

Then Mr. Card notes how "Christians" fight among themselves rather than defeat this dangerous atheist enemy. Like we atheists don't argue among ourselves?

Remarkably, Mr. Card inserts that paragraph just a few paragraphs after writing this:

We are as legitimate, as citizens and therefore as potential officeholders, as anybody else in America. Because there is no religious test for holding office in America.

And if you try to impose one, by saying that all persons belonging to this or that religion should never be elected president, then who is it who is rejecting the U.S. Constitution? Who is it who is saying that people with certain beliefs are second-class citizens, for no other reason than their religion?

You want to know who is it who is saying that people with certain beliefs are second-class citizens? How about the Democrat Mr. Card warning Republicans of a vigorous atheist movement that is trying to exclude religious people? Yea, right, 3 to 9 percent of the U.S. voters are going to exclude you Mr. Card. We can't even get most of the younger ones to vote at all they're so disgusted by politics.

If anyone is excluded as potential officeholders it's us atheists and it is in part because of liars like Mr. Card. Mr. Card who thinks he can make Mitt Romney acceptable to Republicans by repeating the magic word, "Jesus."

What if we define “Christians” the way most people would: “Believers in the divinity of Christ and in the necessity of the grace of Christ in order to be saved in the Kingdom of God.”

Or, “People who believe Christ is the Son of God and the only way to please God is by following Christ’s teachings as best you can all your life.”

Or how about, “People who believe that the New Testament is scripture and that its account of the life, death, resurrection, and teachings of Jesus is true and that we should act accordingly.”

We can come up with a lot of definitions that do a much better job of describing what most people mean when they use the word “Christian.”

How many ordinary Christians actually know or care about the “historic creeds and doctrinal affirmations” that form Dr. Mohler’s definition-of-choice?

That's what I would call mumbo-jumbo. Mr. Card repeatedly uses the magic, saving words, "Jesus," "Christ," "Christian," "New Testament," "God" and "Son of God" while being vague about the underlying details of what is believed about Jesus. Does he believe that Jesus cast demons out of a man and put them in pigs? Does he believe his faith can literally move mountains? Does he think Jesus came from a planet near a star called Kolob? Does he think "Christians" should establish an American theocracy? (Well, he probably doesn't but a number of the Republicans Mr. Card wants to reach probably do.)

Does Mr. Card care what some Christians he might vote for believe? If religious faith is so important would he vote for Osama bin Laden before he voted for an atheist? Interestingly, Mr. Card, a Democrat, decided to contrast Bill Clinton with George Bush:

How then would we find out what he really believes? What his standards are? How well he keeps his commitments? It’s not impossible to determine that even with people whose religious commitments are, shall we say, skin deep. It wasn’t hard to find out what Bill Clinton’s standards of truth-telling and word-keeping were before he was elected; he absolutely performed exactly as his past behavior had given us reason to expect. We got what we voted for.

So, Bill Clinton's god-blathering wasn't good enough for the Democrat Mr. Card? Did he vote for George Bush of whom he says:

Think about it. How often has President Bush been mocked because he believes he was born again? How often have his critics ridiculed him because he believes that when he prays, God hears him and even, sometimes, answers?

You mean that guy who got elected president twice in spite of being mocked and whom many people would now like to see impeached?

The president who just recently commuted Scooter Libby's sentence after saying this about the commutation process? Yea, right, Georgie has been a great example of a faithful president.

His profession of membership in a Church gives us a way to find out about the standards of good and evil, of right and wrong, that his religion teaches.

Umm... like we learned about George Bush's standards of good and evil, of right and wrong, that his religion teaches?

What I'd like to know about a presidential candidate is how they define the difference between good and evil because that's how you tell if they've fallen victim to the Manichean delusion. The Manichean delusion is the self-anointing of "us" as good and "them" as evil. Everything you do is good, everything your proclaimed enemy does is evil.

Just using the words Mr. Card does here, their paring, "good and evil," is a clue to his having become a victim of the Manichean delusion himself, because the opposite of "good" is not "evil" -- the opposite of "good" is "bad." Good is something that fulfills its role well, a sharp knife is a good knife, a dull knife is a bad knife. The opposite of "evil" is "love." Love is nurturing and caring and helping while evil wants to kill and cause pain, cause damage, halt plans.

The problem with such a non-Manichean definition is that doing evil can be a necessity in war.

Where I would be worried is when we have a candidate who does not profess any religion, or does not live up to the standards of the religion he professes.

In other words, Mr. Card is one of those many people who would not vote for an atheist and just might prefer Osama bin Laden as our president. Well, that might not be fair, but he sure doesn't seem to be warning those Republicans away from the Pat Robertsons, the James Dobsons and others.

TV review: "The Lost Tomb of Jesus"

I have to say that "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," which just ended on the Discovery Channel as I write this, was a lot more interesting than Mr. Cameron and Mr. Jacobovichi's first documentary that claimed to have "proved" the Exodus. But, please, don't take that to mean this was a good show or that Mr. Cameron and Mr. Jacobovichi have gained much credibility in my eyes. They did make a fairly nice detective story out of it instead of the naked claims and argument that made up the old Exodus show. But how much of that detective story is fictional? It was all a little too neat, too lined up like an argument with one bit of evidence after another making a neat chain of "facts." A chain of evidence that says 10 small limestone ossuaries, discovered in 1980 in a Jerusalem suburb may have held the bones of the New Testament's Jesus and his family and that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a son.

There were also odd things that were not done that damaged the program's credibility in my eyes. For example, they got DNA from the Jesus and Mary ossuaries, but why not all of them? It might have been a tomb full of unrelated people. They just assumed it was a family tomb and if Jesus and Mary were not related, then they therefore had to be married. And it was only mitochondrial DNA which can only tell if they had the same mother.

Later, when Ted Koppel interviewed Simcha Jacobovichi in a special extra program that came after the Tomb show, Mr. Jacobovichi claimed that he couldn't get DNA from the other ossuaries. That claim I hope will be put to the test and only if others prove him honest on that will I believe him. We have yet to learn how much fiction got into the program and some of Koppel's first two experts suggested a lot did.

Amazingly, to me, none of Simcha Jacobovichi's critics brought up the fact that Jesus' tomb had supposedly been found hundreds of years ago. They built a church on the site called "The Church of the Holy Sepulchre," the "holiest" Christian site in Jerusalem and Israel. It was supposedly built on the location where Christ was crucified and buried. A church originally built by Constantine I the Great in 333 AD, after he supposedly became Christian, and then turned Christianity to the official religion of the Roman empire.

I had a lot more sympathy for Mr. Jacobovichi when he had to face Ted Koppel's theologians at the end. The program got absurd for me when hearing one of the theologians arguing for the bodily ascension of Jesus into the sky. I mean, dude, where did his body go? You think heaven is up in the sky? What's up there is 350,000 feet worth of atmosphere and then the vacuum of space and the Van Allen radiation belts. Where did Jesus' body go? To the Moon? Is Heaven hiding behind a cloud? If it all weren't so tragically insane it would be funny.

Mr. Jacobovichi offered an alternative to the dogma of standard Christianity about Jesus rising into the sky and he suggested it was only Jesus' spirit or soul that ascended into heaven. And they called it Christian Realism.

Okay, if he didn't rise up into the sky as described in the Bible what about all the other miracles? Do Christian Realists believe Jesus cast demons into pigs, walked on water, did he change water into wine, curse a fig tree and make it wither or heal blind people by spitting? I don't know what Christian Realism entails about other supernatural events except for Jesus' body not rising up into the sky. So, I Googled "Christian Realism" and got a Wikipedia note on it but it didn't make things much clearer for me:

Christian Realism is a philosophy advocated by Reinhold Niebuhr. Christian Realists believe that the "kingdom of heaven" ideal is one's supreme concern. Unfortunately, according to Niebuhr, the kingdom of heaven can not be realized on Earth because of the innately corrupt tendencies of society. Due to the natural injustices that arise on Earth, a person is therefore forced to compromise the reality of the kingdom of heaven on Earth.

Well, at least they didn't make Christian Realism up to cover their asses, I'll give them that.

In the end, after Koppel was through trying to tear Mr. Jacobovichi's show apart, it wasn't as compelling as they claimed, but it was still an interesting, though doubtful, possibility. I would like to see more archeological work done on this. And I also think Mr. Jacobovichi made a few good points about this possibility being overlooked for more than a decade because Christians can't accept Jesus leaving bones behind. What was clear after hearing those theologians was that if they ever did find Jesus' bones and proved it many Christans still wouldn't accept it.

Mr. Jacobovichi also argued how his own evidence was better than that of an archeologist who believed that back in 1990 the tomb of the "Caiaphas" family had been discovered and that this tomb had the bones of the very "Joseph, son of Caiaphas" that was the Jewish high priest who organized the plot to kill Jesus. The Caiaphas who convinced the Sanhedrin that Jesus should die and was also involved in the trial of Jesus after his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane.

If this Jesus isn't the Jesus of the New Testament, then why believe that their Caiaphas is the Caiaphas of the New Testament? Did anything in their tomb suggest any of that Caiaphas family had been high priests? Well, if that archeologist had anything it was edited out. It was a point that didn't boost Jacobovichi's own credibility but rather one that gave me less confidence in biblical archeology overall, which was pretty low to begin with.

For me, the interesting stuff wasn't the program's core theory about Jesus' bones and family, but the little surprising details like the fact that in Jerusalem they have these superstitious beliefs that make them put pipes into the tombs that stick up through the ground so spirits can rise up out of the ancient tombs. And there's also the fact that there are these ancient tombs under these apartment complexes in Jerusalem and there are only concrete slabs over them keeping you from getting in. Nice set up for a Poltergeist type movie.

PZ Myers has a review up now which gives a more detailed timeline on the show. Check it out if you want to know more.