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Word of the Day: Pareidolia

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Does Jesus exist?Pareidolia is perceiving meaning in something random, such as seeing a face in clouds or hearing speech in a recording played backwards. People have imagined a sculpture on Mars or ghost voices in random noise. And, of course, Jesus has been seen in food and ruder places. Mary has been seen in water stains on the side of a building and in the cheese sandwich shown here.
The familiar Rorschach test is a deliberate attempt to explore these patterns.
A similar word is apophenia, making connections in random or meaningless data (pareidolia is a type of apophenia).
Some people wonder if surprises such as the image of Mary are deliberate instead of random. But why, aside from a desire to support one’s presupposition, would you imagine a supernatural explanation when the natural explanation of pareidolia suffices?
If these images are deliberate, there’s much more reason to imagine that it was Photoshop rather than God behind it.
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And God isn’t Good, Either

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This post is an homage to Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011), the powerful speaker and eloquent author of God is not Great and much more.  Hitchens fought nonsense till the end, and he has been an inspiration to me and countless other atheists.  In my own small way, I hope I’m continuing the fight against nonsense. 
Thanks, Christopher.
The child’s blessing goes, “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.”  Hitchens’ God is not Great is an eloquent rebuttal to the first claim of this prayer.  Let’s consider here the second claim: God is good.  Indeed, the Bible makes this clear: “Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good” (Ps. 135:3).
But does the dictionary agree?  We must use words according to their meaning.
Here is what God commands about cities that refuse to submit to the Israelites: “Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you” (Deut. 20:17).
You and I know what “good” means.  If you were a king or general and you ordered the genocide of those tribes—over ten million people, according to the Bible1—would you be considered good?
But you might say that this was wartime, and the rules were different.  Yes it was wartime, but the Israelites were the invaders, displacing Canaanites from land they had occupied for centuries.  God tells the Israelites to destroy the Amalekites: “Attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.  Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants” (1 Sam. 15:3).
What could the infants have possibly done to deserve to die?
Moses tells the Israelites that they must kill all of the Midianites, with one exception: “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man” (Num. 31:17–18).
Who’s ever heard any of these verses made the subject of a sermon?
The immoral commands don’t stop with genocide.  Slavery wasn’t prohibited in the Bible; in fact, it was so much a part of everyday life that it was regulated.  In the same way that God told the merchants to sell using fair weights and measures (Deut. 25:15), he told the Israelites how to handle slaves—how to treat a fellow Israelite as a slave (Ex. 21:4–6 and Lev. 25:39), how to sell your daughter into slavery (Ex. 21:7), how to decide when a beating was too harsh (Ex. 21:20–21), and so on.
And this doesn’t even consider the Flood.  God may exist and he may be powerful, but can the word “good” be applied to a being who acts like this?
Let’s turn from God’s unsavory side to his attempts at encouraging good behavior.  It’s odd that the Ten Commandments has room for “don’t covet” but no prohibitions against slavery, rape, genocide, or infanticide.  Christopher Hitchens cuts through the problem:

It’s interesting to note that the tenth Commandment, do not covet, is given at a time when the Israelites wandering in the desert are kept alive with covetous dreams—of taking the land, livestock, and women from the people living in Palestine.  In fact, the reason why injunctions against rape, genocide, and slavery aren’t in the Ten Commandments is because they’ll be mandatory pretty soon when the conquest of Palestine takes place.2

So they’re not crimes—they’re tools!
Christians respond in several ways.
1. But things were different back then.  We can’t judge Jews in Palestine 2500 years ago with today’s standards.
Can we assent to these crimes at any time in history?  I agree that standards of morality have changed, but I thought Christians were supposed to reject moral relativism.  They’re the ones who imagine an unchanging, objective morality.  If slavery is wrong now, they must insist that it was wrong then.
2. But God’s actions are good—they just are.  His actions are the very definition of good.  That’s as fundamental a truth as we have.
Shouldn’t God follow his own rules?  If God is the standard for goodness (Matt. 5:48), what else can this mean but that we should look to God’s actions as examples for us to follow?
Abraham made clear that God was held to the same moral standards as Man.  He said, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” as he argued against God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.  And God agreed (see Gen. 18:20–33).
If Christians modify the dictionary so that no action of God’s could ever be bad, assigning the word “good” to God’s actions says nothing.  They hope to make an important statement with “God is good,” but debasing the dictionary has made the word meaningless.
Playing games with the dictionary causes other problems.  If there are two supernatural agents, God and Satan, how do you tell which is which?  If the one that controls our realm is “good” by definition, maybe we’re stuck with Satan and have simply convinced ourselves to call him good.  That’s not a crazy idea, given the world’s natural disasters, disease, war, and other horrors.  Imagine Satan ruling this world and convincing us that the death of an innocent child is part of a greater plan, if you can believe such a thing.  And yet that’s the world we live in!  People look at all the bad in the world and dismiss it, giving Satan a pass.  (… or are we giving God a pass?  I can’t tell which.)
If this thinking is getting a bit bizarre, that’s the point.  That’s what happens if you declare God’s actions good by definition.
3. But the Canaanites were terrible, immoral people!  They sacrificed babies! 
How reliable are these summaries of the Canaanites’ morals?  If these tales come from their enemies, how objective are these accounts?  And even if the Canaanites did sacrifice babies, isn’t solving this with genocide like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly?  Couldn’t an omniscient guy like God figure out a better way than genocide to encourage a tribe to improve their behavior?
4. C’mon—can’t you recognize hyperbole when you see it?  This is just soldiers bragging around the campfire that grew until it was incorporated into Israelite lore.  You don’t really believe the genocide stories, do you?  Indeed, archeologists show no evidence of this mass slaughter.
Take your pick—is the Bible reliable history or not?  I disagree with the Bible literalists, but at least they wouldn’t be so hypocritical as to abandon the Bible when it embarrasses them.
Christians who label some Bible passages exaggerations and others as history are using their own judgment to figure this out.  I’m not complaining—that’s what I do myself—but they can’t then turn around and say that they get their guidance from the Bible.  No, my friend—the interpretation comes from you, not the Bible!
5. A bad thing today sets us up for a greater good in the future.
This is no more plausible than the reverse: “a good thing today sets us up for a greater bad in the future.”  Why imagine one over the other?  Only because we presuppose God’s existence, the thing we’re trying to prove.  And it’s ridiculous to imagine an omniscient God deliberately causing the Haiti earthquake (in which 300,000 people died) because he can act no more precisely than this.
6. But God is unjudgeable.  God said, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Is. 55:9).  It’s presumptuous of us to judge God.  If God says that the Amalekites deserved to die, that’s good enough for me.
Okay, let’s not judge God then.  Let’s avoid labeling him.  But then not only can we not label his shocking actions “bad,” we can’t label his pleasing actions “good.”  The good God is no more.
And there’s more fallout from the “we imperfect humans can’t judge God” argument.  Consider this from Bob Price:

[The ultimate certainty in your mind, the believer’s mind, is] the guarantee that [God] will honor that ticket to heaven he supposedly issued you.  Here’s a troublesome thought.  Suppose you get to the Day of Judgment and God cancels the ticket.  No explanation.  No appeal.  You’re just screwed.  Won’t you have to allow that God must have reasons for it that you, a mere mortal, are not privy to?  Who are you, like Job, to call God to account?

Of course many Christians want it both ways.  They want to judge God’s noble actions as “good” but withhold judgment for actions that any thoughtful person would find hideous.  But if you can’t understand God’s actions when they look bad, why flatter yourself that you understand them when they look good?
I think of this as the Word Hygiene argument.  You can either call a spade a spade and acknowledge God’s cruelty or say that he’s unjudgeable.  Take your pick—either way, you can’t call him “good.”
Photo credit: Church Sign Maker
1 Here’s the math behind that figure: Israel had 600,000 men before entering Canaan (Ex. 12:37), or about two million people total.  These six tribes are all larger than Israel (Deut. 7:1).  That makes well over ten million people in the tribes God orders exterminated.
2 Hitchens makes this point in videos here and here.
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  • About the Ten Commandments, Hitchens concludes: “Don’t swallow your moral code in tablet form” (video).

Word of the Day: Poe’s Law

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About a month ago, I wrote a post titled, “A Powerful Defense of Reason … or Maybe Not.”  It was a letter from a pastor arguing both sides of the question of reason—that reason is a gift from God … but that it steers the honest Christian man or woman away from faith.  That reason eliminated disease like smallpox … but that Martin Luther called it “the greatest enemy of faith.”
The pastor who wrote it was Rev. Phineas P. Stopgauge—a made-up name for a made-up letter.  Though it was a parody (and had decent clues that it was), I received feedback from someone who seemed to have thought it real.
And this brings up Poe’s Law:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.

Is Landover Baptist Church a parody?  Apparently so.  How about Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps?  Apparently not.  It’s hard to tell.  This shows the versatility of the (supposedly) immutable religion that it can morph into any form, even as parody, and still be mistaken for earnest Christianity.
We see an early example in the Cardiff Giant, a giant petrified man discovered by well diggers near Syracuse, NY in 1869.  But the entire thing was a hoax, commissioned by atheist George Hull and planted where it would be accidentally “discovered.”  Hull’s goal was to show how easy it was to fool Americans, especially Christians who believed that “There were giants in the earth in those days” (Gen. 6:4).
Even after scientists rejected the find and Hull admitted to the hoax, the Giant was still a popular tourist attraction.  P.T. Barnum offered the modern equivalent of millions of dollars, but the owners wouldn’t sell.  He created his own Giant to display and argued that his was the real fake and the other one was the fake fake.  Barnum’s conclusion: “The American people love to be humbugged.”
A recent example was the “GOD IS SO GOOD!!!!” video by TamTamPamela, an earnest 20-something woman from Florida talking about how fantastic it was that, in the lead-up to Easter, God showed himself to atheists through the March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami (find more details about this event at the ThinkAtheist blog).
A few days later, after her address and phone number had been publicized and she received the obligatory delivery of unwanted pizza, she publicly stated that the whole thing had been just a provocation.
That this wasn’t obvious to begin with, and that a Christian could plausibly make this statement, makes this a classic example of Poe’s Law.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
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Jesus and Santa Claus

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What is Christianity? And how does Santa Claus help?Harriett Hall (the SkepDoc) wrote a clever story about two kids trying to figure out whether the tooth fairy really exists or not.  Inspired by that, and in keeping with the season, I’d like to imagine two kids arguing about Santa.

It was early December, and little Jerry had begun to doubt the existence of Santa Claus.  He made his case to his younger brother Kyle.
“I don’t think Santa is real.  I think it’s just Mom and Dad buying us presents,” Jerry said.
“Prove it,” Kyle said.
“Okay, why are there all those Santas on the street corners ringing for money?  How can Santa be at all those stores at once?”
“They’re not the real Santa, just his helpers,” Kyle said.  “And maybe they’re just testing us to see if we’ll still believe.  I’m going to believe, because if you don’t, you don’t get presents.”
“But I recognized one of them—it was the father of one of my friends.”
“Then those are just ordinary people imitating Santa, raising money for a good cause.  Anyway, I’ve seen Santa on TV at Thanksgiving—everyone has.”
Jerry sees that he’s not making any progress, so he gives up.  On Christmas afternoon, he’s alone with Kyle and tries again.  “Remember that video game that you told Mom about and then you forgot to tell Santa?” Jerry said.  “But you got it anyway.  Mom must’ve bought it and written on the package that it came from Santa.” 
“Mom just told Santa,” Kyle said. 
“But how can Santa get around the world in one night?”
“My friends all say that Santa is real.  Anyway, Santa has magic.  And the cookie plate we leave out for Santa always has just crumbs on Christmas morning.”
“With the Junior Detective kit that I got this morning, I dusted the cookie plate for fingerprints, and they were Mom’s.”
“Mom set out the plate, and Santa wears gloves.”
Jerry gives up for the year.  On Christmas afternoon the next year, he tries again.  “Lots of the older kids don’t believe in Santa.  They say that their presents only come from their parents.”
“Sure,” Kyle said.  “Santa only gives presents to those who still believe in him.”
“A few months ago, I was snooping in Dad’s sock drawer, and I found every letter we ever wrote to Santa.”
“Why not?  Santa didn’t need them anymore and each year just gives them to Mom and Dad for keepsakes.”
“The only fingerprints on our presents are Mom’s or Dad’s.” 
“Mom and Dad always get up early on Christmas.  They could’ve rearranged them.”
“Last week, I found all our presents hidden in a corner in the attic.”  Jerry pawed through some of the torn wrapping paper.  “I wrote my initials on the bottom of each package.  And look—here they are.  That proves that Santa didn’t bring them here last night.”
“I asked Mom, and she said that Santa is real.  Anyway, how do I know you didn’t write your initials on the wrapping paper this morning?”

Like little Kyle, if you’re determined to believe something, you can rationalize away any unwelcome evidence.  (By rationalize, I mean taking an idea as fact and then selecting or interpreting all relevant evidence to make it support that idea.)
It’s tempting to list the many ways Christians rationalize.  They rationalize away contradictions in the Bible, the oddity of a hidden God, or why so much bad happens to the people God loves.  They can find a dozen reasons why a particular prayer wasn’t answered, even though the Bible promises, “Ask and ye shall receive.”  But the Christian says that he’s simply defending the truth: “I’m not rationalizing; I’m right.”
In five minutes we can see flaws in others that we don’t see in ourselves in a lifetime.  Perhaps this episode with Jerry and Kyle will encourage us to see our own rationalizations.
I recently came across the Galileo Was Wrong; The Church Was Right blog.  That’s right, it argues for geocentrism, an earth-centered universe.  With a little work, even the nuttiest theory can be given a scholarly sheen, so imagine what a few thousand years of scholarly work can do to a religion.  Any Christian can point to centuries of scholarship to give a patina of credibility to their position (but, of course, so can Muslims, Hindus, and those in many other religions).
I can’t prove Santa doesn’t exist.  Nor can I disprove the existence of leprechauns, Russell’s Flying Teapot, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or God.  The thoughtful person goes where the evidence points rather than accepting only the evidence that supports his preconception.
And Jesus is Santa Claus for adults.
Photo credit: Robot Nine

Word of the Day: Apologetics

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Dictionary or Bible, we can ask: Does God exist?Apologetics is the discipline of defending a position using reason.  The word is so tied to the defense of Christianity that “Christian apologetics” is almost redundant.  An apologetic is a specific argument (the Design Argument or Pascal’s Wager, for example).
Though “apologetics” has its origin in common with the word “apology,” the apologist does not apologize.  The original Greek work apologia meant to make a spoken defense, such as you’d give if you were the defendant in court.
A Christian could argue for Christianity in an emotional way, but that wouldn’t be apologetics.  These nonapologetic claims might be “Christianity makes me feel good” or “I just like the worldview” or “You’ll love the community.”
Counter-apologetics uses reason to rebut specific Christian apologetic arguments.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
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Churches and the Corporate Org Chart

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(Today, I’m pleased to have a guest post from Richard S. Russell, an atheist from Wisconsin and commenter at this blog.)
In these difficult economic times, you may have heard more than usual about GDP. It’s short for “Gross Domestic Product” and is the dollar value of all the goods and services produced within a given country (or state or region) in a year. “Goods” are products, material objects that customers want; “services” are procedures, actions performed to help customers. Together, these products and procedures reflect the wealth generated by the economy.
In the U.S., a lot of goods and services are produced by big corporations, which are organized to do so effectively and efficiently, using those techniques much beloved of Econ 101 courses, division of labor and specialization.
Here’s an organization chart for a typical manufacturing corporation, one that produces material goods:

And here’s what goes on inside each of those little boxes:

(1) Management makes decisions, tells everyone else what to do, and handles investor relations.
(2) Internal Services support the rest of the company in general; the category includes accounting, info tech, personnel (human resources), labor relations (employment relations or ER), safety, maintenance, regulatory compliance, and legal.
(3) Research and Development (R&D) investigates new ways of doing things and tests them out.
(4) Purchasing acquires raw materials, equipment, and property.
(5) Manufacturing (the biggest part of the company, employing the most people) generates actual useful products.
(6) Inventory Control deals with both raw materials and finished products and includes transportation, warehousing, shipping, delivery, and quality assurance.
(7) Marketing uses media to spread the word that people should buy the company’s products.
(8) Sales works directly with individual customers to get them the products they want in exchange for their money.
(9) Customer Service works directly with customers who are having problems with a product.
The chart gets slimmed down a little if we’re talking about services instead of goods. Here’s an org chart for a typical service corporation:

Notice that manufacturing has vanished altogether (no goods being produced), and that the bulk of the people working for the company are the ones directly helping customers. You still have Purchasing and Inventory Control, but these are much smaller operations (since they now deal mainly with furniture and office supplies instead of heavy machinery and raw materials) and so are generally subsumed under Internal Services.

Finally we have the kind of organizations that produce neither goods nor services, namely churches. Here’s how they work:

There are still lots of entries under Management (bishops, archbishops, abbots, cardinals, popes, etc.), since these guys (by which I mean “men”) are really into hierarchy.

There’s the normal array of Internal Services, with the diminished activity under ER (no unions, heavy emphasis on conformity and obedience) and regulatory compliance more than offset by the need for lots of work under legal (discrimination, pedophilia, etc.).
Nothing under R&D. (Create something new?!)
Nothing under Purchasing. (Spend? Contribute to the economy?!)
Nothing under Manufacturing. (Useful products!?)
Nothing under Inventory Control.
But tons and tons o’ time is devoted to (or, more properly, “wasted on”) Marketing and Sales. In fact, in the absence of goods and services, it’s the only thing religion does at all. In other words, the priest class spends all its time pushing companionship with themselves, in return for nothing useful or even (as in the case of more traditional prostitutes) pleasurable.
The most telling part of the chart, though, is Customer “Service,” where the ironic quotation marks emphasize the difference between what a church does and what an actual contributor to GDP does. A responsible, reputable company assumes that, if you’ve got a problem, it’s their own product’s fault, or the result of shoddy service from one of the company’s representatives. But in the case of religion, any counseling they provide for people with problems is designed to show, first and foremost, how the religion itself is never, ever at fault, that the problem is entirely the customer’s, because he or she didn’t follow directions properly. In short, the motto of Customer “Service” for a church is “The customer is always wrong.”
In effect, since religion never solves any problems (not even those of its own making), Customer “Service” is just another mechanism under Sales and Marketing, which is why it’s shown as subsidiary to those activities on the skeletal org chart above.
You know the short word for any activity that’s all talk and no walk (or, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle)? Scam!
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