Archive for June 1, 2008

“Amen”

This guide to right-wing religious clichés is golden. It’s horrifying to see spin permeating religion, but great fun to watch it get unwound.

Scientific “Foreknowledge” from the Bible

One of the stranger creationist talking points I have come across is the argument that the Bible got science right, before science did – they call it “Biblical scientific foreknowledge.”

The thrust of the argument is that some Biblical stories change upon scientific truth, coming to the right answer by the wrong way. In arguing that the Biblical arrival at truth through fables is “science,” these Biblical “scholars” show just how poorly they understand science in the first place. In science, it’s how you get there, and what that means, that’s important. Like any high-school algebra student knows, one must “show their work” – getting the conclusion right is less than half the battle. In the long run, the creationist assertion that the Bible is an almanac of scientific facts – albeit without explanation – proves the Bible’s limited application as a factual guide to today’s world.

Take the explanation of the common origin of language. Linguists can now trace most languages to their ancestral languages, and prove that languages evolve, diverge, and branch in a fashion similar to – but not identical to (so shut up, Answers in Genesis!) – biological evolution. CreationWiki suggests that the Tower of Babel myth, by positing a common, pre-Babel, unified language, from which all others descend, is therefore identical to and a substitute for modern linguistics. But it’s not. It comes to a similar result, but a result of only sound byte-length. Modern linguistics tells us infinitely more than that all languages descend from a common one – it identifies how, and why. The Biblical shortcut around science, to the “same” conclusion, thus cuts out the real meat of linguistics, and the real value and meaning of science. Creationists imagine that science is a sound byte, to be summed up by a fable – any fable! – and a conclusion. It’s not. Add this to the list of “things creationists don’t understand about science.”

Furthermore, apparently, to make scientific sense of the Bible, one must read the Bible very generously.  According to CreationWiki, the phrase used in Isaiah 40:22, referring to God as “He who sits above the circle of the Earth,” proves that the Bible “foretells” a spherical Earth. But the phrase could just as easily suggest a flat, circular earth or, more likely, have been intended to mean nothing at all. In short, these examples of “foreknowledge” require a little bit of a stretch, almost to the point that one must already know the truth scientifically to know whether the phrase is to be taken seriously.

Before we go into the next section, a little fun…

Now, creationists don’t always make a scientific mountain out of a rhetorical molehill. When the inspired Word of God tells us in I Kings 7:23-26 that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter (a.k.a., Pi) is precisely 3, instead of 3.14159…, they argue that the story is not intended to be a strictly accurate or scientific statement. Clearly. Double standard, much.

Not only does the Biblical view of science require a stretch, but it shows us exactly how little fundamentalist Christians think of science. They imagine science as an “almanac” – a practical, bare-bones summary of sound-byte facts about the world. Thus the Bible, which seems, if stretched to the breaking point, to state facts without reasons, is the perfect scientific text for them. But to equate science with the result and not the process, and to ignore the value of knowledge gained along the way, is to fundamentally misunderstand science.

At most, the Bible represents a compilation of statements about poorly understood natural phenomena, reduced to practical “tips,” and lacking in explanation. Don’t eat raw shellfish, for example. Far from elevating the Bible to the level of a scientific text, this approach exposes many of the Bible’s teachings as mere tips-for-life, compiled by a provincial desert people, and thus lacking moral force and relevance to today’s world. I don’t doubt that the Bible contains many valuable moral lessons, but this examination proves all the more the need to get a “second opinion” on many of the Bible’s teachings before applying them today. For example, while “love thy neighbor” never goes out of style, maybe “stone thy gay neighbor” does.

How funny that creationists remember the petty scientific “lessons,” and force upon an unwilling populace the out-of-date moral lessons, but conveniently forget the important ones. I wonder if anyone ever mentioned this one – “a new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” – to Jerry Falwell.

Rename the Lester and Virginia Maddox Bridge

In a recent post, I talked about Lester Maddox, the pistol-armed, self-styled “Southern segregationist,” who closed his famous restaurant in downtown Atlanta rather than de-segregate it. This veritable personification of violent bigotry, of hatred, of everything wrong with the South, later went on to be the governor of my home state.

Now, that’s a fact of history, and a cautionary example, and I can’t change it. But I can change this: the bridge on I-75 over the Chattahoochee, right near my family’s house, is still named after this demon. It should be changed.

Public monuments are valuable and important markers of where we’ve been, and where we’re going. Of course, I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest damnatio memoriae – the Roman practice by which an unpopular leader’s name was stricken from every public memorial and record book (obviously unsuccessfully!). We have to balance the need for our monuments to accurately reflect our public values against the need for permanence in the historical record, and the need for institutional memory. Applied to this case, I would never suggest destroying Maddox’s statue in the Georgia Capitol: the proper response to things like that is more often to recontextualize and repurpose them (although Sanford Levinson might disagree).

But naming highways is different. Naming a highway is less an expressive act than a minimal-effort honorarium, and naming highways after such historically dubious figures as Maddox doesn’t serve the value of historical permanence. Maddox’s name should be stripped from the highway, and replaced with the name of someone who deserves the honor.

Contra Human Events #4: Mandating Equality, and Townhall.com on the Objective Harm of Gay Marriage

Nothing boils up the blood quite so nicely as a read through Human Events, or its partner in evil, Townhall.com. Then again, it could be my fever (still).

No, it was the websites.

Ever so rarely, opposition to gay marriage rises above the level of name-calling and discourses on Deuteronomy/Leviticus, to address the question of whether gay marriage is actually bad in an objectively cognizable fashion. I’m pleased to see that people are willing to rise above bigotry to discuss the merits. But even then, Townhall.com gets it wrong. Marriage, the author argues, is about raising children, not about solemnizing love, and gay marriage is bad for children, since children need a mother and a father. The author claims that that’s something even liberals can get behind.

Maybe some liberals would find that compelling, if they haven’t thought the matter through. First, if marriage is about childrearing, restricting marriage to heterosexual couples is not narrowly tailored to that objective. It’s both underinclusive, in that it fails to support those gay couples that seek marriage to raise children, and overinclusive, in that it supports those straight couples that get married just because they love each other, and don’t intend to raise children. That justification – which bases part of its logic on the argument that children need married parents – inexplicably harms the children of gay couples who would get married, thus bringing about the very evil it purports to protect

Second, arguments like this are only logical if one assumes, before beginning, that children need to be raised by a mother and a father as defined by biological sex, and that any heterosexual mother/father couple is preferable to any homosexual couple. That assumption ought to fail on its face. The comparison to Norway, in an attempt to prove this point, is inapt: different culture means different results.

Next we have Human Events arguing that legalizing gay marriage will force employers and institutions to not only tolerate but also support gay marriage, since they’ll be legally obligated to grant spousal benefits to all married employees, gay or straight.

Right. So? While one certainly ought not be fired for expressing their viewpoints against a particular political or social issue in their capacity as a private citizen, part of the liberty one loses when joining a civilization is the liberty to discriminate against one’s employees. Using the economy and employment as a tool to oppress has the effect of potentially “freezing out” those members of society undesirable to the majority, creating the kind of caste system that can never exist in a putative democracy. What seems like private action, then, is a systemic problem that, if we truly believe that gay men and women are equal, must be solved.

This fact is often hard to handle. When restaurants were desegregated in the mid-20th century, some fought it, violently: for example, Lester Maddox of Atlanta (seen in the picture to the right, all the way on the right), wielded an ax-handle and a pistol (look closely at his hand in that picture) to fight off African-Americans who just wanted to eat at his restaurant. Maddox missed the same point then that Human Events misses now: the personal cost of living in a civil society is that one sometimes has to deal politely in the public sphere with people you don’t like. The majority doesn’t get the right to use economic power to create a caste system, and those that try to do so will, like Maddox, be remembered in time as the bigoted, hate-filled monsters that they truly were.

When equal protection rules change, employment rules change. While this may be another thing for conservatives not to like about extending gay rights, it was also something they didn’t like when civil rights expanded to protect African-Americans and women. But they learned to deal with it. If we as a society come to realize, as we should, that there is no just cause to think less of gay men and women, they’ll have to deal with this too. When it comes to civil rights, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

Holy Country Club, Batman! Carnival of the Elitist Bastards, #1

Thanks to Dana Hunter of En Tequila Es Verdad for dreaming up, soliciting entries for, hosting, and preparing the first Carnival of the Elitist Bastards, wherein our little site is, again, featured! Among my favorites – other than my own entry, hmm hmm – is an attack on anti-elitism itself, a veritable plague on our democracy, and a perversion of the myth of the humble beginnings. I look forward to future carnivals, and I promise I’ll have a badge for it soon, too.

In other news, I’m just now feeling better, and I hope to be posting more regularly again soon. I had the chance to visit the Met today – although the mere act of walking there made me dizzy (sad, huh?) – and I snapped a shot of this “wall text,” describing a piece made by one of the art world’s bad boys, Damien Hirst.

I’ll let you all decide whether you want to see the actual piece: click here if you’re up to it. But I warn you, the piece is exactly what the text describes. A discussion on art and elitism tomorrow. I’m already gunning for inclusion in Carnival #2!