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I have not been on youtube for awhile. Just look at all the good things I miss. :) Thanks Thunderfoot.
Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Anne Widdencombe MP speaking for the motion and speaking against the motion, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry.
Psst…America look! a civil debate. Try it sometime.
Update: Watch the edited 46 minute version at the Intelligence Squared site.
Update #2 – They went and moved stuff around – The debate in chapter format can be found at the intelligence squared site here.
Update #3 – They went pay site. – Go to ytube from the link and find it there.
One of the many tenets of Christianity that I strongly object to is the notion of Original Sin. Adam and Eve transgressed against the wishes of God, thus we (their descendants) are in need of saving, hence our reliance on Jesus and his crucifixion. It depends on the premise that responsibility and blame for evil acts are passed down from parent to child. For this post I will not focus on why such an idea is psychologically harmful (especially to children), although that would be a valid avenue of criticism. Instead, I think it would be more effective to just show why it is wrong.
Imagine that a man rapes and impregnates a woman. The rapist then escapes the authorities while the woman is left with child. Over the nine month gestation, the police hunt the rapist to no avail. As the mother gives birth to a son, the police get a lead on the infant’s biological father. Three weeks later the police raid the rapist’s hideout only to find that he had committed suicide via drug overdose mere hours before they arrived. At the scene they find a note where the rapist describes his life of murder, crime, and hedonism. Further, he wrote that after having committed all these atrocities, there were no more thrills left for him. And so he decided he best end his life pleasantly, lest someone else do it for him in a much less favorable manner.
What we have here is someone who has done many evil things, done nothing to make up for his misdeeds, and has escaped all punishment. He leaves behind two victims who are denied all forms of restitution, justice, and closure. This is, of course, one of the worst kinds of situations and I don’t pretend to know a good way to deal with it. But one way I know to be wrong would be to apply the principle of original sin.
If responsibility and blame are indeed passed from parent to child, then we need only go to the infant son to extract justice. If the sins of the father are the sins of the son, then the three week old baby is accountable for his mother’s rape. If original sin held true, the righteous thing to do would be to punish the newborn just as we would punish the rapist had he been caught.
If you agree with me that the previous paragraph’s conclusions are not only absurd, but monstrously unjust and immoral, then the same must be said of the Christian notion of original sin. No fair and just adjudicator would ever hold someone responsible for something that they did not do, let alone for something that happened before they came into existence. But that is what Christianity says that their god does. (a great reason to start indoctrinating your children early – ed. )
Here is another quick thought experiment. Think of the worst thing you have ever done in your life. Then categorize that misdeed with a word or short phrase like ‘neglect’ or ‘assault’, or ‘theft’, or ‘betrayal’. Now, would a just punishment for your category of transgression involve crucifixion? Do you think it would require someone to have their hands and feet nailed to planks of wood and then slowly, agonizingly asphyxiate to make up for any of the offences I just mentioned? Absolutely not. The fact is that no one human has ever done anything that deserved anything close to that kind of torture. Even if you believe that the absolute worst of history’s monsters deserve brutal punishment, those rare instances compose a negligible percentage of the population. The point being that humans, as a whole, are not evil beings and we certainly don’t deserve crucifixion or any other torturous punishment by default. But Christianity says that we are and that we do.
Of course, it has to. If we were not responsible for evil deeds done before our existence and we did not deserve a cruel fate, then we would have no need of a savior, no need for a messiah, and no need of Jesus or Christianity. If we are on the whole morally higher than rapists and child molestors (empirical evidence says we are), and if we are answerable only to our own deeds (reason and justice say we are) then the idea of original sin is aboration of truth, a mockery of rationality, and an assault on morality.
Ten minutes that you will not regret spending of your limited time here on earth :)
Today started poorly.
After a woefully insufficient amount of sleep, I dragged my body out of bed, ate something for breakfast (I think it was yogurt) and drove off to face the day. Half an hour later, through the cold and bitter morning air, I trudged groggily across the six blocks from my parking space to school. Then, something blog-worthy happened.
Halfway to my destination I was greeted by two ladies, one offering me a publication. “Would you like to read a bit about discrimination and racism? It’s an awareness piece, something you can read in your free time.” Now, even in my barely conscious state, a red flag went off inside my head. This was suspiciously close to the M.O. of religion panderers. My sluggish mind did its best to make a quick assessment. The messengers? Not in white tops with name-tags, no backpacks, no religious symbols. The media? Booklet covered with the faces of people from varying racial backgrounds and the headline “Prejudice and Discrimination: Why? How Can You Cope?” Again, no religious symbols in sight.
With my suspicions abated and my interest in social justice piqued, I accepted the magazine, muttered a clumsy farewell, and continued my gloomy trek towards campus. It was not until this evening that I found out that I had been duped. I opened up the booklet to find that it was indeed religious propaganda, though it did not fully reveal itself as such until the fourth page. As I read those first four pages and the reality of the situation bore down on me, my initial disappointment was surprisingly short lived. Indeed, it was quickly replaced with mirth as I considered the implications of this ordeal.
Let’s break it down. We had two believers handing out pamphlets designed to keep other believers believing and to help non-believers to start believing. That’s an old story that’s been done billions of times over. What was novel, and the cause of my amusement, was the guile of it all. It used to be that ‘Bringers of The Word’ adorned attention grabbing robes, stood atop platforms, and called out their proclamation with fever. These messengers, on the other hand, wore non-descript, commonplace clothing, did not mention God or any religious affiliation, and quickly walked away once their media was distributed. The booklet itself was similarly shrouded. The cover lent itself to the assumption that the publication’s sole concern was the issue of prejudice. As I mentioned earlier, it took three pages of warming up before the religious slant fully made itself known.
This level of duplicity is reserved for actions we consider amoral, shameful, or just plain wrong. It was like a child who doesn’t lie, but artfully avoids telling the whole truth, then runs away while the adults are left to discover the facts of the matter. It brought me joy to see believers (not to mention their publications) displaying this kind of abashed behaviour. It means that somewhere, deep within their subconscious, the realization of wrongdoing is starting to take hold. Sure, they are very far from consciously being aware of and admitting their erroneous ways of delusion and misanthropy, but the point is that they have at least started down that path.
Sooner or later, they will ask themselves “If what I’m doing is good, then why must I be deceptive about it and why does it make me feel bad?” And suddenly they will understand. They will know that what they are doing can’t be good. They will see that “It says so in the Bible ->Why believe the Bible?->It’s the word of god->How do you know?->It says so in the Bible” is circular and cannot support any belief system. They will recognize that their previous distinctions of ‘saved vs damned’, ‘righteous vs blasphemous’, ‘believers vs heathens’, ‘saints vs infidels’, and ‘chosen vs forsaken’ were all false. They will drop their delusions and the world will enter an era of rationality and prosperity. And when that happens, they will truly be ready and mentally equipped to fight social injustices like discrimination.
One of the top hits for my blog is people looking for information about Evolution. Evolution when examined in depth is an amazing process with many levels of complexity and nuance. I’m thinking though that people are not looking for all the details, perhaps just an overview of what it is all about. In that vein, I found a short little post from Brain Dunning, and the next excerpt is from his site.
Myth #1: Men evolved from modern apes.
This is the oldest and wrongest misconception about evolution. Nobody has ever suggested that one living species changes into a different living species. Some criticisms of evolution show illustrations that fraudulently purport to show what evolutionists claim: that a salmon changed into a turtle, which changed into an alligator, which changed into a hippo, which changed into a lion, and then into a monkey, and then into a human being. Of course such a theory would seem ludicrous. But it’s pure fantasy and has nothing in common with real evolution.
The diversification of species is like a forest of trees, sprouting from the proverbial primordial soup. Many trees die out. Some don’t grow very tall. Some have grown a lot over the eons and are still growing today. Trees branch out, and branches branch out themselves, but branches never come back together or combine from two different trees. The path of a species’ evolution is shaped like the branch of a tree, not a donut, not a figure 8, not a ladder. To embrace evolution, you need not — must not — think that a salmon turns into a zebra, or that an ape turns into a man. It’s simply not genetically possible.
We’ve all seen the other famous illustration, where a monkey morphs into an ape, that morphs into a caveman, that morphs into homo sapiens. If you climb back down the tree branch, you will indeed find earlier versions of man where he was smaller, hairier, and dumber, but it won’t be a modern ape. To find a modern ape, you’d need to go even further down the tree, millions and millions of years, find an entirely different branch, and then follow that branch through different genetic variants, past numerous other dead-end branches, past other branches leading to other modern species, and then you’ll find the modern ape. Never the twain shall meet.
Myth #2: Evolution is like a tornado in a junkyard forming a perfect 747.
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