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I've Been Thinking About Renouncing My Christianity by Dean Rankine is funnier than sin.

Inspired by Ann Rice's recent faith testimony in the Washington Post, I wrote a lengthy response at my new blog.

And, yes, I am slowly making the switch to WordPress. It has less to do with the LJ strike than with wanting to eventually incorporate WP features in a comprehensive website of my work.

But I will cross-post at LJ even after, because I love my LJ friends (I wuv you, yes I do, yes I dooo!) and the community aspect of the service.

Salon interviews Chris Hedges about his latest book criticizing neo-con atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.

I think a lot of their popularity stems from a legitimate anger on the part of a lot of Americans toward the intolerance and chauvinism of the radical religious right in this country. Unfortunately, what they've done is offer a Utopian belief system that is as self-delusional as that offered by Christian fundamentalists. They adopt many of the foundational belief systems of fundamentalists. For example, they believe that the human species is marching forward, that there is an advancement toward some kind of collective moral progress -- that we are moving towards, if not a Utopian, certainly a better, more perfected human society. That's fundamental to the Christian right, and it's also fundamental to the New Atheists.

You know, there is nothing in human nature or in human history that points to the idea that we are moving anywhere. Technology and science, though they are cumulative and have improved, in many ways, the lives of people within the industrialized nations, have also unleashed the most horrific forms of violence and death, and let's not forget, environmental degradation, in human history. So, there's nothing intrinsically moral about science. Science is morally neutral. It serves the good and the bad. I mean, industrial killing is a product of technological advance, just as is penicillin and modern medicine. So I think that I find the faith that these people place in science and reason as a route toward human salvation to be as delusional as the faith the Christian right places in miracles and angels.

I've seen a few YouTubed lectures from Harris that I liked, but I was unaware of his suggestion that the West bomb the Arab-Muslim world. Does anyone else know about this? If true (and Hedges is a principled journalist, so it probably is), I'm pretty appalled.

As for Hitchens, well...he's a prick. What else is new?

I am recovering nicely, thank you. But during the times when I would have worked on the cartoon, I was in bed with a fever. It wasn't a total loss. I re-read Douglas Addams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which I discovered was much better than I had thought on my first read fifteen years ago.

Still marching my way through Richard Dawkins' The Ancestors' Tale, conceived a la Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales as a pilgrimage backwards through time toward several "rendesvous" with other species at points of common ancestry, or "concestors." Along the way, each species has a "tale" to tell: The Neanderthal's Tale, The Bonobo's Tale, etc. While my understanding of evolution deepens, occasionally I have to bring my head up for air.

On one such gasp, I youtubed Dawkins and came across a series of lectures he and other prominent scientists delivered a year or so ago on the conflicts between science and religion. You can watch the whole series at Beyond Belief 2006. Despite the high percentage of atheists among the speakers, don't expect total harmony of thought or "group think" among them - they are scientists, after all. Some, like Dawkins or Sam Harris, view religion as an enemy to be vanquished; others view religion as something to be accommodated as scientists seek to overcome public fears and ignorance regarding, say, the orbit of the earth around the sun; and still others argue that science and religion are, in Stephen Jay Gould's words, "non-overlapping magesteria." One thing everyone agrees on: intelligent design is bullshit. If you have the time, check it out.

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If I wanted to be really au courant, I would start picking on Huckabee. In fact, I am a bit surprised Murray Waas' Huffington Post piece has not gained more traction, despite a follow up by a former aide contradicting Huckabee's defense of his push for parole of a serial rapist-murderer. Oh, sorry - alleged serial rapist-murderer. Margaret Carlson anticipates Huckabee's candidacy is about to crash and burn, echoing every other left(ish) columnist (and the dubious company of Michelle Malkin) in calling it his "Willie Horton moment." Except that Michael Dukakis wasn't responsible for Horton's release and subsequent crimes, whereas Huckabee either used poor judgment in believing the story of redemption through Christ offered by the prisoner or cynically released a dangerous criminal because his victim had been distantly related to Bill Clinton. Either way, he shouldn't get a pass.

Joan Walsh on Mitt Romney's speech on religion and politics:

As she noted, Romney's speech laid out a vision of America with no place for atheists, doubters or nonbelievers, and it chilled me.

And:

But I wasn't reassured, I was alarmed. Romney blasted "the new religion of secularism," referring to those who continue to argue for strict separation of church and state, which apparently, like certain of the Geneva Conventions under the Bush administration, is becoming "quaint." I sometimes find the anti-God stridency of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens grating. Listening to Romney's speech I realized what a necessary corrective it is to corrosive political pandering. Calling secularism "religion" is a cheap shot worthy of Bill O'Reilly, not a major presidential candidate. I can't help hoping Romney's speech fails to soothe religious conservatives, because the sooner the Republican Party faces up to the destructive cost of its electoral dependence on religious extremists, the better off our country will be.

I can only say, "Ditto."

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Surely you knew this was coming.

From the Pope:

The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its origins and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world's suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world.

He goes on. It's interesting, worth reading and worth bookmarking for that much longer blog post in response to this wrong-headed conception of atheism that I might write one day when I'm not calling for the execution of school teachers whose teddy bears insult my faith.

Warning: if you do follow the link, the Vatican's web design will hit you in the eyes with suck.

A 54-year-old British school teacher could receive 40 lashes and 6 months in jail for allowing her Sudanese pupils to name a class Teddy bear "Mohammed," reports CNN. Perhaps not as egregious as the punishment sentenced to a Saudi gang rape victim for "embarrassing" the Saudi judges who had let her rapists off the hook, it is still a ridiculously disproportionate punishment to the crime, if there really is one at all. To me it is one more instance of religious stupidity compounded by warped concepts of "honor."

The irony is that Sudanese officials have charged the school teacher with "insulting" Islam, even though the Koran does not prohibit engraved images, people name their children after the prophet all the time, and, um, hello - it's a teddy bear! The name was chosen by school children, many of whom are probably named after the prophet, too, and have several family members who share the name. It wasn't meant as an insult, it was supposed to be an honor.

I acknowledge that there is a lot about the role of "honor" in other cultures that I do not understand. It could be my own limitations as a Westerner, as a neurotic self-denigrating humorist, as a post-modern ironist, or as a simple crank. Yet I find it horrific and sick that the concept of "honor" is used to justify a lot of brutality and killing, often in so-called "honor killings" against women who have somehow transgressed social expectations regarding their "proper place" as wives and daughters or have caused men to feel insulted. While much of the reporting on this phenomenon is concentrated on the Middle East and Central Asia, it would be unfair to disregard similar instances in Western culture - notably, "gay panic" or the more murderous instances of transphobia.

I don't get it, and honestly, I don't want to "get" it, because it seems more a disease than a point of cultural competency, a plague of the male psyche borne on carriers of religion, myth, historic oppression and warped definitions of sexual and gender identity.