Empty Handed

A new approach to high gas prices: pray them away!

Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer. Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas....

Twyman isn't begging the Lord for any specific act of intervention. He is not asking God to make OPEC pump more oil. Nor is he praying for all the speculative investors to be purged from the New York Mercantile Exchange, where crude oil is traded.

Instead, he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple.

"God, deliver us from these high gas prices," Twyman said. "That's all they have to say."

First, I have to say: Of all the stupid self-serving shit to pray for. Sure some people in the US are feeling the pinch a bit but what the fuck. Millions of children die of starvation-related causes every year. In Haiti, kids are eating dirt. Maybe the believers out there might want to pray about that. I mean, why not go straight for the big important stuff like helping some kids get food, medical care, and education?

No, instead, let's clasp our hands and cry "O Lordy, help us maintain our lifestyle of endless consumption and wretched excess! Jesus! We'll even carpool."

Second, folks, in case you haven't cottoned on to it yet, the American Gravy Train has reached the end of the line. It is about to derail. Gas prices are not going down long term. They are going to go up. Then we will have shortages. Why? We have passed peak oil production.



The way of life we've all become so accustomed to is about to end, and the debate is mostly about whether it will be a giant crash or a slow grind. If you have any means of getting out of the city and moving to a small town, now's the time. It's going to get ugly. Ain't no one going to pray this shit away.

True, the religious do not have a corner on magical and wishful thinking. But they do take it to a new level sometimes.

Bart Ehrman Interview

This is a bit old, but if you didn't already hear the NPR interview with author Bart Ehrman on the Problem of Evil, check it out.

Ehrman has a new book out entitled God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question

In an earlier book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, I have indicated that my strong commitment to the Bible began to wane the more I studied it. I began to realize that rather than being an inerrant revelation from God, inspired in its very words (the view I had at Moody Bible Institute), the Bible was a very human book with all the marks of having come from human hands: discrepancies, contradictions, errors, and different perspectives of different authors living at different times in different countries and writing for different reasons to different audiences with different needs. But the problems of the Bible are not what led me to leave the faith. These problems simply showed me that my evangelical beliefs about the Bible could not hold up, in my opinion, to critical scrutiny. I continued to be a Christian—a completely committed Christian—for many years after I left the evangelical fold.

Eventually, though, I felt compelled to leave Christianity altogether. I did not go easily. On the contrary, I left kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known since childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenaged years onward. But I came to a point where I could no longer believe. It's a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.

Why does God permit evil? It's a mystery.

What Does God Need With A Starship?

Joe Holman has a thought-provoking post on what I might call the Problem of Motivation, over at Debunking Christianity. He uses a example from an old Star Trek movie, The Final Frontier to set the stage:

Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Sybok are on the surface of a distant world called Nimbus III beyond “The Great Barrier,” where the ambitious Vulcan half-brother of Spock named Sybok has forcefully led them on a quest to find ultimate universal truth and meaning—a.k.a. the search for Eden and God. Moments after their arrival, they are met by a Father Time-ish being who, incidentally, couldn’t have looked more like Caucasian humanity’s version of God if all the artists in the world tried to get him to…but I digress.

This sagely-looking, incorporeal being of obviously great presence and power learns of the starship that brought them to his world. He informs them that he has been imprisoned in this distant world for an eternity, unable to reach the rest of the galaxy, and that the Enterprise would be his means of travel beyond it. But the red flag of skepticism had already been raised in the mind of Kirk, who boldly asked: “What does God need with a starship?”

"God" in this scenario punishes all who question him by zapping them with lightning bolts.

Joe goes on to say, "The question is priceless in that no matter what theistic concept is under investigation, it is the mere asking of the “need” question that leads to the unraveling of theism.....God doesn’t “need” anything. He can’t need anything, being that he’s omnipotent as the fully self-sufficient prime mover and sustainer of the cosmos."

Thinking about the possible answers to this question, why would an omnipotent god create anything? was one of the factors that led to my own deconversion from religion. I asked why (and/or how) can god need or want anything while I was still a believer taking religious classes, and I have asked it here as well. The teacher of my religious class said: "That's a good question!" No one has ever given me a meaningful or even remotely plausible answer. (The answer from fundamentalist Christians is generally: "Silence, infidel! Who are you to question God?")

It's logically incoherent to say that a perfect omnipotent, omnipresent god of the traditional sort would create anything out of desire or need. This seems difficult for some people to understand, but a "perfect" being cannot lack anything. This line of reasoning doesn't disprove god per se. It just makes the likelihood seem remote. It makes it clear that the god myths are simply holdovers from ancient times when we humans imagined ourselves to be the source of endless amusement and interest for sky-dwelling immortals.

Can't We Take A Joke?

Atheist bashing is alive and well in Shasta County. Here is the start of a real editorial that appeared in my local paper:

They can't be real Christians. They must be part of an atheist cabal.

Their goal? To undermine churches. To give religion a black eye. To plant in the minds of the young a twisted and evil view of Christianity.

How else to explain the perverse tactics of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, whose members travel the country to picket soldiers' funerals with a message of hate?

Yes, I understand the author of this intended it humorously. Think I'm being hypersensitive? Imagine using another group in place of "atheist." Would they write "Jewish cabal"? Of course not.

The thing is, they knew damned well this would play to their audience here in the conservative, fundamentalist Christian "North State."

Feel free to write the editor. I did.

Opium For Everyone

I'm reading a great little book of Vonnegut's miscellaneous writings (posthumously published), Armageddon in Retrospect.

The following is an excerpt from a speech written by Kurt Vonnegut and given at Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, in April 27, 2007 by his son Mark. This is a take on Marx's quotation I had not previously heard, and it's an interesting interpretation.

I might as well clinch my reputation as a world-class nutcase by saying something good about Karl Marx, commonly believed in this country...to have been one of the most evil people who ever lived.

He did invent Communism, which we have long been taught to hate, because we are so in love with Capitalism, which is what we call the casinos on Wall Street.

Communism is what Karl Marx hoped could be an economic scheme for making industrialized nations take good care of people, and especially of children and the old and disabled, as tribes and extended families used to do, before they were dispersed by the Industrial Revolution....

But there are still plenty of people who will tell you that the most evil thing about Karl Marx was what he said about religion. He said it was the opium of the lower classes, as though he thought religion was bad for people, and he wanted to get rid of it.

But when Marx said that, back in the 1840s, his use of the word "opium" wasn't simply metaphorical. Back then, real opium was the only painkiller available, for toothaches or cancer of the throat, or whatever. He himself had used it.

As a sincere friend of the downtrodden, he was saying he was glad they had something which could ease their pain at least a little bit, which was religion. He liked religion for doing that, and certainly didn't want to abolish it. OK?

He might have said today as I say tonight, "Religion can be Tylenol for a lot of unhappy people, and I'm so glad it works."

So Vonnegut thought Marx was in favor of religion, or maybe sympathetic to it, and it seems that Vonnegut himself thought religion was good for some people at least. Particularly the black community, as he went on to say. As someone pointed out, at the time Marx wrote those words, America had not yet freed its slaves.

But is there still a real need for religion for most people nowadays? I wonder about this a lot. While most Christians imagine that atheists reject gods to make their lives easier and more self-determined, the reality is that it's often more difficult to be an atheist, without any imaginary friend who loves you no matter how much of an asshole you are, and to face the reality of death rather than harbor fantasies about life everlasting.

I'm no student of Marx, but I do find that he goes on to say this:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Which is to say: The blue pill, or the red pill?

Praying On the Weak

Recently, the parents in the Worthington case have pleaded "not guilty" to charges of manslaughter for praying for their daughter's healing from pneumonia and sepsis, rather than obtaining medical care. Police were considering whether to charge the Neumans, parents of the diabetic girl in Wisconsin who died last week.

There's already been a lot of discussion about these cases. But I have to ask, what decent Christian could, in good conscience, convict these people of any wrongdoing? Clearly it was God's will that these girls die. What right have Christians to question God's will?

There has been a debate about these case over at Debunking Christianity, in which the Christians argued the modern point of view, which is: God works through doctors/modern medicine/science. The parents should have taken advantage of the benefits of modern medicine in addition to praying. As it was, they were culpable in her death.

I have a couple of questions about this point of view.

First, modern medicine didn't exist until about 100 years ago and is still available only in Westernized countries. While these cases were both easily treatable with modern drugs, if these cases had occurred in 1708, or out in the African bush, prayer would have been the parents' only recourse. Prayer would not have worked then either, but no one would have condemned the parents. They would have chalked the death up to "god's will." Does god's will change in direct response to modern medicine?

Second, an omnipotent god surely knew the girls would die but did not intervene. He knew the parents would not seek medical treatment because of their religious beliefs, but he did not answer their prayers for healing. So clearly the deaths were God's will according to the Christian belief. Why blame and punish the parents?

Third, why would an omnipotent god need to work through an intermediary such as medicine or doctors? Don't Christians, pretty much by definition, believe in miracles?

Modern Christians treat people like the Neumanns and the Worthingtons as being part of the lunatic fringe because of their deeply held religious convictions. But I really don't understand where they're coming from - especially the Bible literalists. The current teaching in most churches, I gather, is that we should take advantage of all the benefits of modern science which god has provided. That was what my own church taught. "God helps those who help themselves" is the current thinking. Unfortunately, this quotation comes from Ben Franklin, not the Bible. And that prayer is primarily to get us in synch with God's will.

So where is the Biblical support for this position? When Jesus heals people in the Bible, he doesn't say "By the way, once modern science has provided cures for these diseases, then everyone will be healed (and don't forget to pray while taking treatment)." He said "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go to the Father. And whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son" (John 14:12,13). In Matthew 10:8, Jesus sends his disciples out to "Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils..." Later he says, "if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you." (Matthew 17:20).

Either prayer works as Jesus claimed, or it doesn't. Which is it? If prayer works, then you cannot hold anyone other than God liable for these deaths.

Unless, of course, the parents just didn't have enough faith. Think the DA might charge the families with "insufficient faith while praying"?