Cyde Weys Musings

I am hardly a fan of Scientology, yet I find some humor in the fact that Scientology’s “holy book”, Dianetics, is better than the Bible in nearly every way. Here is my reasoning.

First of all, Dianetics is much more self-consistent than the Bible. One need only to examine a brief list of contradictions in the Bible to see what I’m getting at. This isn’t even a fair comparison for the Bible, really, as it was written by dozens of authors over hundreds of years. Dianetics, by comparison, was written by one author in a few years. Dianetics would have to be pretty terrible to lose out in this comparison, and the truth is, it’s not that bad. The ideas it espouses, while wrong and dangerous, are at least coherent and consistent. You can’t say the same for the Bible.

Dianetics was written long after the invention of the modern printing press, which gives it a huge advantage. It has been faithfully reproduced, word-for-word, since it was originally penned by L. Ron Hubbard. By contrast, the Bible was written long before the invention of the printing press, and it was savaged by over a millennium of hand-copying and translation between multiple languages. The end result is no one can really even be sure about what any specific passage in the Bible is even supposed to say, let alone what it means. Schisms between branches of Christianity have broken out over little more than which copy or translation should be considered canon and which is heresy.

Dianetics was written in modern English, and as such requires no translation for comprehension by a modern audience. Each word in it that you read is exactly what L. Ron Hubbard had intended. The Bible, on the other hand, has been pieced together from works written in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. Any translation is inherently inaccurate, and multiple translations even moreso. Even worse, the ancient translations were done by people with an agenda, and for many of the books in the Bible, these are all we have left. They didn’t have any concept of modern scholarship, where the goal is to translate the work as accurately and true to the original as possible. So it’s really hard to even say what the messages in the Bible are supposed to be, whereas Dianetics, written originally in modern English and still readable in its original form, has no such ambiguity.

There isn’t even any agreement on which books the Bible is supposed to be composed of. Compare Catholicism and their Apocrypha, or the Eastern Orthodox Church. And that’s not even considering Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Dianetics, at least, has a single canonical version. There are no schisms about which text is supposed to be in it and which isn’t.

Face it, the comparison between the Bible and Dianetics is completely stacked against the Bible. Although, to be fair, the same would be true of any comparison between a modern book and an ancient one (this is why my arguments so far are thus more of a criticism on the Bible than a booster for Dianetics). The difference is that most ancient books are only the object of inquiry for scholarly study; no one is trying to base an entire belief system around them. Hopefully now you have a bit more insight into why I, and my fellow atheists, find religions based on ancient books so confounding.

You too can do your part in fighting for science by linking to the Expelled Exposed website on whatever blog or personal site you happen to run. Expelled is a dishonest intelligent design creationism propaganda film, and Expelled Exposed is a site that gives the viewpoints of actual scientists (you know, the people you should look to for answers when it comes to biology). The idea, obviously, is to increase exposure to a great source debunking that film, and also to get the counter website more highly ranked in Google.

And if you don’t quite know what I’m talking about, reading up on some more background information might be in order.

An investigative reporter out in Minnesota has uncovered a publicly funded Muslim charter school that is promoting the religion of Islam on the publics dime. The charter school is collocated with a mosque, and all students go over for “voluntary” prayer and Islamic education immediately after school, after the ritual washing of hands and feet, of course. As if all this didn’t make the religious nature of the school obvious enough, the building the school is located in is also the headquarters of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is to “establish Islam in Minnesota.”

This is a clear violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. No public funds should be going towards promoting any particular religion, especially not to a captive child audience. It doesn’t matter that attending the school is entirely voluntary (for the parents, anyway; the children likely have no say in the matter). It’s entirely unconstitutional. Minnesota hasn’t been doing a good job of regulating this school, having only visited it thrice in the past five years. All manner of illegal things have been going on right under their noses.

It is the state’s duty to provide a secular education. Any promotion of religion should not take place in public schools. I wonder what in the world Minnesota was thinking when they established a separate public school just for Muslims; how is this justified or appropriate?! America has always been a melting pot. Our strategy is to assimilate immigrants into our culture, and schools are the best way to do that. So establishing a separate school to prevent that assimilation, and then promote religion on top of that, is absurd. Just like we have no public schools that promote Christianity, there should be none that promote any other religion.

I think we’re heading down the very dangerous road of the British and the French who, in the name of “cultural diversity”, are allowing large segments of their population to remain isolated and cut off. In Britain they even allow Muslim men with multiple wives to get government benefits for each wife — so long as he married them before immigrating! And this is even though bigamy is illegal for all other British citizens. The results of this kind of appeasement of immigrants are devastating: witness the large Muslim immigrant riots in the banlieues of Paris in recent years, leaving thousands of cars torched, hundreds of police officers injured, and millions in damages. Or look at the extremist imams in Britain who actively preach hate and condone violence against “heathens”, providing the breeding grounds for such plots as the July 7 London bombings.

So far, America has done much better. We don’t have the problem of home-grown terrorists like the United Kingdom because we’ve purposefully liberalized and integrated our immigrants into our culture. Children who receive a secular modern education generally do not grow up to be extremists. So we shouldn’t be shooting ourselves in the foot here and using taxpayer money to subsidize non-secular education that only serves to actively prevent assimilation and could potentially foster more extremism down the line. Our current strategy is working; don’t deviate from it! Get rid of all public schools that segregate out children by religion. There’s absolutely no place for it in America.

After reading this excellent blog post about scientific versus religious world views by John Wilkins (who I know from talk.origins awhile back), I couldn’t help but sharing this most excellent passage. The next time you get harangued by a religious fellow claiming that reason and faith are equally valid ways of knowing things about the world, send them this:

So, science is universal, while religion is rather local. One relies on an epistemology everyone in the world has access to; the other relies on an epistemology that barely works for that religion. To say of all religions that “each is valid” is to assert an absurdity. If each religion is separately valid, and all religions contradict each other, we are way past postmodernist silliness and out the other side into pure fiction and flights of imagination. It basically causes the very idea of knowledge to be degraded to the point that it no longer has the slightest meaning.

Last month, PZ Myers, famous atheist blogger and evolutionary developmental biologist, was at the center of a bit of a furor when producers at a screening of the creationism propaganda film “Expelled” had armed thugs kick him out of the theater, while completely ignoring his guest Richard Dawkins, an even more famous atheist. My blog post attracted a bit of discussion in the comments. But now it looks like that favorite mouthpiece of the Intelligent Design Creationism movement, the blog Uncommon Descent, has commented on what I said. And, as creationists are wont to do, they did it in a thoroughly dishonest and misleading fashion. Here’s a piece-by-piece vivisection of their attempt at framing this incident as anything other than a complete embarrassment for the creationist movement.

To recap, thuggery or scams that have persisted for a long time and are endorsed at the highest levels of the establishment come to seem “normal.” So the “problem” is not the behavior of thugs and scammers but the attempted responses of those they attack.

Playing the victim card is a very common creationist tactic. “Oh no!”, they shriek, “The entire scientific establishment is out to get us!” And I guess they’re sort of right about that. But it’s not because of the reasons they claim — it’s not that they’re being persecuted, or “thugged” or “scammed”; it’s simply because they are using dishonest tactics to try to pervert real science and ruin students’ educations with non-reality-based nonsense. They claim some overarching conspiracy, as if all scientists “know” evolution is fake but just keep hush hush about it for their own reasons. I guess they’re just projecting?

That’s what the Expelled film is doing in the ID vs. unguided evolution (Darwinism) controversy. It shows both the evidence for intelligent design of life and the unconscionable lengths to which the Darwin fans are willing to go, to keep both students and the broad public from knowing why their ideas about the nature of life are probably wrong.

Actually, it’s the other way around. Expelled shows the lengths to which creationists are willing to go to distort the truth and resort to propagandist tactics to spread their false ideas. They even go so far as to compare scientists who believe in evolution with Stalin and Hitler, complete with a visit to an actual Nazi concentration camp. But yeah, it’s really the scientists who are going to unconscionable lengths for having the audacity to speak the simple truth about the world.

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The blogohedron was full of great vengeance and furious anger last week when PZ Myers, renowned atheist blogger, was expelled from a screening of the creationist propaganda movie Expelled. It was glaringly obvious that the movie’s promoters had pulled off a stunning act of shooting themselves in the foot for the ages, and then continued to make it worse by repeatedly changing their story about what had happened. Now they’re in full damage control mode, and it appears that they’ve shut down all upcoming screenings of the film.

I was going to go see a local screening of Expelled here in Maryland on April 1 (quite the fitting date, actually) with my friend Andrew, but it was canceled. Andrew registered his name to attend and everything, but now the screening has simply vanished. I think Andrew and I just have a certain effect on creationists. In 2005 we went to go see Kent Hovind rail against science at a local church, and not a year later, he was serving ten years in prison on federal tax evasion charges. Whoopsies. Guess the promoters of Expelled didn’t want to take a chance of something similar happening to them if we managed to attend a screening?

I just got back from my family’s annual Easter holiday meal at my aunt and uncle’s house. That in itself is very average, but the strictly secular nature of it isn’t. Allow me to explain.

As far back as I can remember, we’ve gone to my aunt and uncle’s house for Easter. My aunt is the only Christian in the family (and barely at that?), so this is one of the two times of the year she can relive the traditions from her youth. She rather likes having the family together and eating the classic Easter foods. Everyone else in the family is pretty much Jewish, lapsed Jewish, or full-on atheist. As such, it’s not exactly a very religious occasion. Yeah, we have all the usual Easter foods, including the smoked ham which everyone ate (so much for keeping kosher). And we used to do the Easter egg hunt thing every year, but we “kids” have grown out of it. We watched March Madness basketball games on the television before and after the meal instead.

But the religious nature of it was completely missing. I only heard one reference to God the whole time, and that was when my dad made one of his usual faux pas comments, asking “Nobody here really believes Jesus died for our sins, right?” I didn’t hear anyone with an affirmative answer. I suppose that could be incredibly offensive at other people’s Easter celebrations, but we just sort of groaned at him a bit and continued eating.

To all those out there who don’t believe but are saddled with a family who does, just know that there is hope. The religious aspects can be cleanly excised from traditional celebrations such as Christmas and Easter, leaving in all of the fun parts while losing nothing of worth. After all, those two are based on Pagan holidays anyway. You can have as many chocolate eggs and Easter rabbits as your heart desires without any of the Christ.

Notable atheist blogger and professor PZ Myers was prohibited from attending a screening of the movie Expelled tonight. Expelled is a piece of abominable dishonest creationist propaganda dreck produced by Ben “Bueller” Stein that plays the “Ohh, big bad science is persecuting us poor little honest religious folk!” card. Naturally, they’ve been hypocritical about it at every turn, excluding people from commenting or seeing their work much like they accuse the scientific establishment of (really, it’s just a case of projection). They secured an interview with PZ Myers by completely lying about who they were and what the movie was about, then carefully edited what he said to put science in the most negative light possible. Yes, that’s right, they prohibited PZ Myers from attending a movie that he appears in! So much for creationist honesty.

Oh, but that’s not the best part of the tale, not by a long shot. You really have to read PZ’s account for the punchline. It had me laughing out loud. Talk about shooting oneself in the foot!

Oh, this is going to be so much fun! Scientology is giving free publicity to Anonymous in a meatspace variant of the Streisand Effect (whereby trying to prohibit or censor something brings a lot more attention to it instead). The Church of Scientology is seeking a restraining order against Anonymous (all of it?) to prevent the planned protests against Scientology centers on March 15 in honor of L Ron Hubbard’s birthday.

Man, where to begin. First of all, Anonymous is a Stand Alone Complex, so it has no real leaders. Its members are faceless and anonymous, as the name kind of implies. Who exactly would you sue? And how can you sue to prevent a peaceful public protest? That goes against the right to assembly and right to free speech parts of the First Amendment. I remarked previously on this blog that Scientology’s tried-and-true tactics of intimidation and lawsuits will find no purchase against a numerous and faceless foe. They’re about to find out how ineffectual they truly are against Anonymous.

The funniest part of the St. Petersburg Times article was this snippet: “Representatives of Anonymous could not be reached for comment.” Indeed, St. Petersburg Times, indeed. That’s kind of the point. At least you can say you tried.

I was talking with a friend recently and she brought up the concept of resting in Jesus, which has something to do with easing your troubles by taking comfort in knowing that Jesus will take care of them for you. It’s a perfectly vacuous concept, of course, except I had never heard it called by that name. So my first response when I heard her say “resting in Jesus” was, and I kid you not:

“Oh, you mean like a tauntaun?”

I am:

• A. Incredibly glad she’s not religious, because:
• B. She got the Star Wars reference

I’m hard-pressed to conjure up another spur of the moment thought that’s quite as offensive as the thought of slitting open the belly of the Christ and resting inside his corpse.