Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Meanwhile, the fun continues in New Zealand, as this article from Te Ao, which conveys Māori news, attests. In fact, there’s a video, so you can see the whole episode, as well as a transcript of the video.
Here’s what happened: A local district council met and one of the participants wanted to recite a Māori prayer—a karakia— to open the meeting. Here’s how Wikipedia characterizes the term:
Karakia are Māoriincantations and prayer used to invoke spiritual guidance and protection. They are generally used to increase the spiritual goodwill of a gathering, so as to increase the likelihood of a favourable outcome, such as at a court hearing. They are also considered a formal greeting when beginning a ceremony.
The new mayor said “no”, saying was running a “secular council” that “respects everyone”. The Māori prayer woman kept insisting on reciting the prayer and the mayor kept saying “no”. As you’ll see in the video below, some minutes later she finally flouted the mayor and burst out reciting her prayer in Māori, while other council members chimed in or gave an “amen”. Here’s the text:
Conflict has erupted at a council meeting over a mayor’s decision to shutdown a wahine Māori councillor wishing to recite karakia, before the opening of business.
Kaipara District Council met for the first time Wednesday, under new Mayor Craig Jepson, elected at October’s local elections.
As is customary in councils and at the opening of parliament, Māori Ward councillor Pera Paniora, of Te Moanaui o Kaipara, wanted to begin the meeting with a karakia.
“Excuse me, just before we start, through the chair may I say the karakia?” Paniora said.
Jepson charged on saying ‘you cannot interrupt, sorry’.
Paniora stated her case explaining the tikanga of karakia, which appeared to trigger Jepson.
“This is a council that’s full of people who are non-religious, religious, of different ethnicities and I intend to run a secular council here which respects everybody and I will not be veering from that. Thank you.” he rebuked.
“I don’t agree with that.” Paniora said.
“You cannot interject,” Jepson struck back.
Paniora tried a final time by saying ‘Excuse me for those who do practice…’ but was ultimately shut down.
“Councillor Paniora, you are not allowed to speak in this manner and we will continue with our meeting.” Jepson said.
“It doesn’t really feel like a meeting,” a third councillor interjected.
Paniora appeared to give up, however in a throw back 20 minutes later she said the karakia and members of her supporters sang Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi as part of her maiden speech.
“Seen as I wasn’t able to do the karakia this morning, it’s better late than never.” she said.
Fellow councillors and attendees in the public gallery could be heard closing the prayer in unison, with a collective ‘āmene’.
It’s clear that the article is written to show the hornéd secular mayor as the demon, even though New Zealand is a secular country. But of course the Māori must have special exemptions because they are indigenous. Note the repeated references that a karakia, which is in effect a verbal superstition (analogous to knocking on wood when you say something wishful) is customary. The mayor, whom I consider enlightened, wanted to change that. But he didn’t get away with it, and I’m betting he won’t be reelected! If this were in the U.S., also formally a secular country, the Freedom from Religion Foundation would be all over these councils, forcing them to stop saying their prayers.
The lesson: in New Zealand, when it comes to foisting superstition and religion on the public, the Māori always get their way. I hope to Ceiling Cat that they don’t suceeed in imbuing science education in schools with their superstitions, which they keep trying to do.
You can see the video and article by clicking below:
If I felt the need to go to a church, or belong to a Western religion, I suppose it would be a Unitarian Universalist church. Years ago I visited one in the South (I can’t remember if I spoke there), and was impressed that there was no cross on the wall, no fixed set of beliefs (many members are pretty much atheists); and I was impressed by their commitment to real social justice. UUs, as they’re called, have been tremendously active in fighting racism, raising awareness of LGBTQ+ activities, and helping immigrants. As far as I can see, the church exists not to foster any beliefs or creeds, and does no proselytizing, but aim—or, rather, aimed—to create a sense of community among their liberal and largely well-off members. (I don’t feel a need for that kind of community, but of all American churches, UU is probably the one that does the most net good, since up to recently it’s caused little harm.)
But it’s the “progressive” nature of the church, and the privilege of its members, that in recent years has propelled it from the realm of social justice to that of Social Justice, with the capital letters denoting wokeness. In the article below, published at the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) Substack site, Kate Rohde describes the creeping and destructive wokeness of the church, something I’ve heard about several times before. She’s now a defrocked (?) UU minister suing the UUs for defamation and for denying her her job; and she describes in detail how the church is crumbling. The cause, as you might expect, is accusations of racism, or rather accusations of white supremacy, Part of the controversy is described in the Wikipedia article on the church:
Racism:
Internal controversy over the hiring of the UUA’s Southern Region Lead (a white man from outside the region was hired rather than a Latina woman who resided within the region) led to resignations and apologies in 2017. UUA President Peter Morales, the denomination’s first Latino president, resigned amid criticism of his failure to address the diversity controversies. The three co-presidents who took over commissioned a “racism audit” to address white supremacy within the denomination. In April 2018, The Washington Post reported that the UUA “in the past year has been asked to help resolve 15 congregational conflicts involving religious professionals of color”.
Dr. Rohde is a graduate of Reed College, University of Chicago, and Meadville Lombard Theological School. From 1980 to 2014, she served as a UU Minister. She was active in women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, and the sanctuary movement.
Click below to read about how a decent church is going bad:
Rohde became a UU minister in 1980, and had a good 17-year run before things started to fall apart. It involved accusations of racism—in a church famous for being antiracist. I quote Rohde, and have bolded one part to show how woke the UUs have become: they’re policing language in a ridiculous way:
Things began to change dramatically six years ago, when a latina Sunday school director complained of discrimination after a white minister was chosen for a job that she wanted. The Unitarian Universalists’ first latino president resigned in the midst of an internet storm and accusations of racism against his administration. No concrete proof was offered for any of the accusations. In a closed-door meeting, the national Board of Trustees declared that Unitarian Universalism harbored “structures and patterns that foster racism, oppression, and white supremacy.” No evidence was given for this assertion. This was a surprising self-evaluation for a group with a strong civil rights record, including the highest percentage of clergy to participate in the Selma Civil Rights March.
A program of instruction in postmodern anti-racism was directed at ministers and laity. It allowed no modification or questioning of its precepts. Enlightenment values like reason, free speech, and diversity of opinion were characterized as part of the white supremacy culture. Any attempt to challenge someone else’s ideas is now frequently met not with evidence or reasoned defense, but by labeling the challenge (and often the challenger) as racist, ableist, transphobic, and the like. For example, at a national meeting of clergy in 2020 I argued in favor of allowing ministers to keep the right to legal representation in disciplinary matters, but my position was attacked as racist by a minister who more recently has become the leader of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). The successful slogan “Standing on the Side of Love” was junked because a few people complained that the word “standing” was offensive to those who couldn’t stand. In discussion groups at our national assembly, people were arbitrarily removed by facilitators because some person or persons objected to their opinions.
The ideological purge ramped up in 2019 when the new leadership condemned, defamed, persecuted, and ultimately removed from the ministry the Reverend Todd Eklof after he published three essays criticizing the UU’s rejection of liberal values. I joined with others to defend him. Then they came for me too—ultimately removing me from ministry for comments I made criticizing those who were enforcing ideological uniformity in UU spaces. They accused me of “gaslighting,” and making people feel “unsafe” with my words.Ironically, one of the accusations they made against me was that I had complained about “retaliation” and “persecution” within the church. They also came after me for my political opinions—claiming, for example, that because I had the audacity to question whether individuals with male genitalia could be lesbians, I had “caused UU spaces to actually be unsafe” for “trans congregants.”
Clearly, the freedom of speech and thought that was deeply embedded in the UU church is now gone: the authoritarian Left has taken over and has, in effect, now forced a creed on the church: the creed of woke antiracism. One more point:
Now, church officials regularly and without compunction defame someone and destroy their life’s work over ideological or political disagreements. When queried by lawyers about the UU’s violation of their own bylaws promising freedom of conscience and their lack of normal due process, the UUA replied that as a religious organization, they are legally entitled to contravene their own rules if they choose to do so.
Rohde was fired (and lost her pension) for opposing the creeping wokeness of the Church. For one thing, she criticized junking the “standing on the side of love” slogan on the grounds that it’s ableist. I wish her luck in her lawsuit. But as for the church itself, I’m afraid you can kiss it goodbye. Maybe it will fragment into several moieties, at least one of which will embrace the UU’s original principles. But as for me, if forced to pick a faith I’d now take Buddhism over Unitarian Universalism.
You can read more about her lawsuit at the New York Post, where this photo of Rohde appears:
It’s been a year since the NYT has been publishing Sunday columns on religion by the Anglican minister Tish Harrison Warren. She seems like a nice person, and is a compassionate rather than a hard-line Christian, but still, week after week, I was forced to read her lucubrations about what I see as society’s religious delusions. (Don’t ask me why I didn’t ignore them: it’s the laws of physics.) A column on God each week is like a column on Bigfoot: we’re supposed to take seriously something that doesn’t exist. Sure, you can draw moral lessons from God if you want, but too often Warren’s moral lessons tallied more with secular humanism than with Christianity.
She says her farewells, none too soon, in the piece below (click to read):
At first I thought she’d signed on for a year—as it’s been about that long—and her contract had expired. But she says instead that she decided to stop writing, and gives her reasons. Did the Times gently nudge her out the door? Who knows, but I won’t miss her. Now can we have a secular humanist or an atheist for the next year?
Warren:
For this and many other reasons, it was a tough decision to leave. And as with any tough decision, my reasons are varied and complex, but one is that writing publicly about God each week can do a number on one’s soul. Thomas Wingfold, a character in a novel by the Scottish minister and poet George MacDonald, said, “Nothing is so deadening to the divine as an habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things.” Holy things, sacred topics, spiritual ideas, I believe, have power. Dealing with them is a privilege and a joy, but habitually dealing with the outside of them is inherently dangerous.
The “outsides” of holy things, to me, describes the difference between speaking about divine or sacred things and encountering the divine or the sacred directly. To be sure, we need more and better religious discourse in America. In my very first newsletter for The Times, I wrote that “we need to start talking about God,” and I still believe that. I believe that religion and, more broadly, the biggest questions in life are the driving forces behind much that is beautiful, divisive, unifying, controversial and perplexing about our culture and society.
And also behind much that is divisive and bad! But why talk about the good of religion when you can’t even prove that God exists? Why not just talk about ethics? The thing is, Warren’s columns, without her dragging in her deity, were often mawkish laden with bromides. She was the Krista Tippett of the New York Times. Nobody would be given such a column unless there was a religious angle to it (Tippett also got her start on an NPR show called “On Faith”).
In her peroration she once again tries to imbue us with the power of faith:
We become like Linus in the old “Peanuts” cartoons who famously said: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.” True community, however, is made of real people with names, of friends with true faults, of congregations with faces, of the local, the small. Don’t get me wrong: Global and national news is important and I will continue to read news and opinion pieces nearly every day. But for me, as for most of us, the places we meet God — the places we become human — are not primarily in abstract debates about culture wars or the role of religion in society, but in worship on a Sunday morning or in dropping off soup for a grieving friend, in a vulnerable conversation or in making breakfast at the homeless shelter down the street, in celebration with a neighbor or in the drowsy prayers uttered while rocking a feverish toddler in the middle of the night.
I used to work in a soup kitchen on the South Side of Chicago, but I never met God. But I did meet Milton, a 90-year-old man who told me, over Thanksgiving dinner, how he used to wait to see Billie Holiday outside the jazz clubs that used to line the area. And that’s what kindled my investigation of jazz that became a passion. I’d say that’s better than meeting God any day, for at least Milton was real.
Every Sunday we get a paean to Christianity by Tish Harrison Warren, and yesterday we read Conservative Rabbi David Wolpetouting the advantages of Judaism—and of religion in general. Wolpe isn’t as irritating as the smarmy Warren, who provides only bromides. Wolpe seems like a nice and caring guy, and I’m sure he’s brought solace to many in his rabbinical duties. He’s also had his own tribulations: two surgeries for a brain tumor as well as lymphoma. But can’t the NYT occasionally produce columns in praise of atheism and humanism? After all, there’s no good evidence for a God, and yet that viewpoint is resolutely ignored by the paper, which publishes piece after piece by people who think not only that there is a God, but a specific kind of God, like the Christian one (e.g., Warren).
According to Wikipedia, Wolpe is infamous among conservative Jews for questioning the historicity of the Old Testament:
On Passover 2001, Wolpe told his congregation that “the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.” Casting doubt on the historicity of the Exodus during the holiday that commemorates it brought condemnation from congregants and several rabbis (especially Orthodox Rabbis). The ensuing theological debate included whole issues of Jewish newspapers such as The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and editorials in The Jerusalem Post, as well as an article in the Los Angeles Times. Critics asserted that Wolpe was attacking Jewish oral history, the significance of Passover and even the First Commandment. Orthodox Rabbi Ari Hier wrote that “Rabbi Wolpe has chosen Aristotle over Maimonides, theories and scientific method over facts”. Wolpe, on the other hand, was defended by Reform Rabbi Steven Leder from the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, who argued that “defending a rabbi in the 21st century for saying the Exodus story isn’t factual is like defending him for saying the earth isn’t flat. It’s neither new nor shocking to most of us that the earth is round or that the Torah isn’t a history book dictated to Moses by God on Mount Sinai.”
Wolpe asserted that he was arguing that the historicity of the events should not matter, since he believes faith is not determined by the same criteria as empirical truth. Wolpe argues that his views are based on the fact that no archeological digs have produced evidence of the Jews wandering the Sinai Desert for forty years, and that excavations in Israel consistently show settlement patterns at variance with the Biblical account of a sudden influx of Jews from Egypt.
In March 2010, Wolpe expounded on his views saying that it was possible that a small group of people left Egypt, came to Canaan, and influenced the native Canaanites with their traditions. This opinion is, in fact, shared by the majority of historians and biblical scholars. He added that the controversy of 2001 stemmed from the fact that Conservative Jewish congregations have been slow to accept and embrace biblical criticism. Conservative rabbis, on the other hand, are taught biblical criticism in rabbinical school.
It’s to Wolpe’s credit that he accepts the historical and archaeological evidence against the Exodus. As he says below, he thinks that religion isn’t really about “a set of beliefs to one assents.” He’s wrong, of course. Maybe that’s true for Wolpe, but why would there have been a controversy about the Exodus if some people didn’t adhere to the Old Testament claims? But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll just add that you may know Wolpe from his several debates about religion with Christopher Hitchens. Here’s one about the existence of God. (Note: it’s 90 minutes long.)
Click on the headline below to read, and you can find the piece archived here
This column seems to serve as Wolpe’s swan song: his retirement thoughts on the human condition and how it’s ameliorated by religion, which to him serves as a kind of social glue. (Wolpe’s statements are indented.)
For over a quarter century now, I have listened to people’s stories, sat by their bedsides as life slipped away, buried their parents, spouses and sometimes their children. Marriages have ended in my office, as have engagements.
I have watched families as they say cruel, cutting things to one another or, just as devastating, refuse to say anything at all. I have seen the iron claw of grief scrape out the insides of mourners, grip their windpipes, blind their eyes so that they cannot accept the mercy of people or of God.
After 26 years in the rabbinate, as I approach retirement, I have come to several realizations. All of us are wounded and broken in one way or another; those who do not recognize it in themselves or in others are more likely to cause damage than those who realize and try to rise through the brokenness.
This is what binds together a faith community. No religious tradition, certainly not my own, looks at an individual and says: “There. You are perfect.” It is humility and sadness and striving that raises us, doing good that proves the tractability of the world and its openness to improvement, and faith that allows us to continue through the shared valleys.
Well, I’ve never been a member of a “faith community,” even a Jewish one, but it seems to me that what binds a faith community together is a desire to belong to a tribe which whose members care for each other. That, plus the factors that make a tribe a tribe: shared beliefs. Jews can never be members of a Christian faith community because they don’t think the Messiah ever came back. Nor can Muslims be members of either community because they think the Qur’an is the final and correct faith, and Muhammad is the prophet. And that brings us to Wolpe’s misguided claim about religion not being about a “set of beliefs”:
I have had a privileged view of the human condition, and the essential place of religion on that hard road. Sometimes it seems, for those outside of faith communities, that religion is simply about a set of beliefs to which one assents. But I know that from the inside it is about relationships and shared vision. Where else do people sing together week after week? Where else does the past come alive to remind us how much has been learned before the sliver of time we are granted in this world?
Yes, religion is about the solace of being a member of a community. But, for most, it’s also about shared beliefs, something I discuss in Faith versus Fact. Does a Christian community have any meaning if the members don’t accept the fact that Jesus came to earth as God/son of God, was crucified, and thereby gave us the possibility of eternal life? Are Muslims not a community because they all accept the tenets of the Qur’an, dictated to Mohamed by an angel? In fact, Islam is not just a religion, but a way of life—a way of life based on shared beliefs about empirical circumstances. And so it goes for many religions: without accepting at least the existence of a divine being, most religions—and all Abrahamic religions—center largely on “a set of beliefs to one assents.”
Now as a heterodox rabbi Wolpe may indeed reject a conventional god. As he says in the debate below, he defines his god as something quite nebulous:
“God is the source of everything that exists, and God is someone, something, with whom a human being can have a relationship, and that you can live your life in alignment with a godly purpose. That any definition that is greater than that is in some ways to traduce God.”
But he has no right to pronounce on what religion is about for everyone else! And there’s ample evidence that he’s wrong.
In some ways, Wolpe’s claims are a final defense against the increasing secularization of America, which he mentions twice. Pushing back against that, he sees religion as, without question, a net good:
I know the percentage of those who not only call themselves religious but also find themselves in religious communities declines each year. The cost of this ebbing of social cohesion is multifaceted. At the most basic, it tears away at the social fabric. Many charities rely solely on religious institutions. People in churches and synagogues and mosques reliably contribute more to charities — religious and nonreligious — than their secular counterparts do. The disunity that plagues us in each political cycle is also partly because of a loss of shared moral purpose which people once found each week in the pews.
If lack of religion “tears away at the social fabric,” especially because religions promote charities, then you’d expect that atheistic countries would have a badly torn social fabric. The evidence is against that—at least the evidence from Scandinavia, where government has simply taken over the care of sick people, old people, disabled people, and poor people. There is no lack of charity in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, or other countries. (And virtually every European country has government-provided health care.)
Of course Wolpe doesn’t mention the bad things that religion does—things that Hitchens eloquently mentions in the debate above. Why are Jews demonized by many in the U.S., something mentioned by Wolpe in this article? It’s because they’ve inherited the legacy of being “Christ killers.” Why do Muslims and Jews battle each other to the death? Religion. Why did Hindus and Muslims kill each other during India’s partition in 1947, and continue to do so today? Religion, of course. Now you can say that without religion people would find other reasons to kill each other and form tribes. That may be true, but religion is perhaps the greatest cause of tribalism in the history of the world, and I’m pretty sure that, had it never arisen, the world would be a better place.
Wolpe paints the Old Testament, even if it be fictitious, as a source of solace:
I still believe the synagogue is a refuge for the bereaved and provides a road map for the seeker. I have been moved by how powerful the teachings of tradition prove to be in people’s lives, helping them sort out grievances from griefs, focusing on what matters, giving poignancy to celebrations. The stories of the Torah, read year after year, wear grooves in our souls, so that patterns of life that might escape us become clear. Sibling rivalries and their costs are clear in the story of Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. The consequences of kindness emanate from the book of Ruth. We share unanswerable questions with Job and passion with the Song of Songs. The Torah acts as a spur and a salve.
But so do many other nonreligious works! If the Torah is more efficacious than these works, it’s because people believe those stories, something Wolpe says they don’t do. Otherwise, sibling rivalries, kindness, and questioning can be found in gazillions of nonreligious works of fiction and nonfiction. And, as reader Leo (who sent me this link) noted, “I guess he wants us to ignore the Bible stories about slavery, war, genocide, etc.”
In his last paragraph, Wolpe again claims that religion is a bulwark against creeping secularism and the social damage it apparently causes:
Religion may be on the decline in this country and in the West, but if you wish to see the full panoply of a human life, moments of ecstatic joy and deepest sorrow, the summit of hopes and the connections of community, they exist concentrated in one place: your local house of worship.
Well, they also exist concentrated in a better place: your local library.
News is slow today, and I’m not feeling great, as my insomnia has returned. Let’s look at a new reader’s comment, which was meant to be put up after the post below but of course was trashed by moi. If you reply, though, I’ll alert the religious Paul Polster to your comments.
Think about this, and pass it along to all your fellow atheists: if you are right, you die, it is all over, no harm, but if God does exist, and the Bible is true, when you die, you will appear at the great white throne as a lost soul. You will hear a list of sins that you have committed since you were aware of right and wrong, you will bow a knee to Jesus Christ, however, it will be too late to repent and you will be cast into Hell for eternity. You evolutionists are thinkers, think that one through in your quiet time and add this to it: have I lied? stolen?looked at the opposite sex with lust? Cheated on a test? Give some thought as to why these things happen as well as why good and evil exist. Evolution has no answer to these questions. One final thought: are you willing to risk possibly going to hell in order to hold to your faith in evolution? (it requires faith to believe it). Or are you willing to give true science ( discovery of the truth) a chance with an open mind? I hope you can ,your eternity depends on it.
Well, we’re all going to hell, including Jimmy Carter, who has looked on women with lust. He’s close to the end, and I bet he can feel the flames now. . .
A few comments:
Why is “believing in evolution” a sin? Did God put the evidence for evolution everywhere to deceive us? (And if you think it takes “faith” to believe in evolution, read my article dispelling that bit of stupidity.)
Which moral dictates are we supposed to believe? If we’re Jews, we can’t mix meat and milk in one meal. If we’re Catholics, we have to go to confession. If we’re Muslims, we have to observe Ramadan. I presume that Mr. Polster somehow knows that the Christian god is the REAL god. But how does he know?
What kind of God would send someone to hell who has lived a good life even if he didn’t accept the existence of God.’
The absolute certainty of Polster—about the falsity of evolution, about God being the Christian god, and about liars and the lustful going to hell—is breathtaking.
The kind of God that Polster paints is the ruler, as Hitchens used to say, of a celestial North Korea. He’ll toss into the fire anybody who doesn’t accept Jesus Christ (even those who were faithful before the time of Jesus Christ), he burn anybody who accept the evidence for evolution that God supposedly put all around us, and he’s not in the least merciful. Why did he design our bodies to lust after members of the opposite sex if you’re going to hell for it?
UPDATE: Adam Rutherford reminded me that it was the now-demonized Francis Galton who did statistical tests on the efficacy of prayer. His most famous is finding out that British Royals, who are prayed for constantly, didn’t live any longer than non-royals at a similar level of well being. Galton did related studies of the success of sea voyages accompanied by prayer versus those with no prayer. Again, no effect. And, more recently, I’ve written about the Templeton-funded study of intercessory prayer that found no effect of such prayer on the rate of recovery from cardiac surgery (in fact, those who were prayed for did marginally but not significantly worse). This constitutes direct evidence against Brown’s implicit thesis. (But read the last paragraph of the NYT story I’ve linked to so you can see how the faith try to rescue God.)
________________
Of course not! The ubiquity of a belief doesn’t tell us anything about the truth of that belief. Several hundred years ago the whole world believed that infectious diseases were caused by things like God’s will, or miasmas, or the Jews.
They were wrong.
Our species has grown up since then, because science, and science alone, has told us why those earlier beliefs were wrong. The problem is that science can’t disprove an equally unfounded belief in a deity. God is slippery, and smart theologians are paid to make him slippery, because they’d be out of a job if everyone was an atheist.
But that’s what the evidence says, so far as it exists, for we can make plenty of arguments against certain conceptions of God. The Abrahamic omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving deity, for instance, is disproven by the many innocent people who die of physical factors like earthquakes or cancer. (Theologians have a number of magic tricks to get out of that argument.) As the late Victor Stenger said, “The absence of evidence is evidence for absence—if the evidence should be there.” And certainly any god worthy of its name, who wanted people to obey and worship him, would make his presence unequivocally known. The evidence should be there.
It isn’t. Using Bayesian analysis, the priors for an Abrahamic god are low.
But forget that. This article, from the conservative site WND, tries to argue that because most people pray (even atheists, they say!), it’s evidence for God’s existence, and atheists are out of luck. Click to read:
Michael Brown uses injured football player Damar Hamlin, who is recovering (though I doubt he’ll play ball again) as an example of the ubiquity of prayer. I saw this many times on television, even with news anchors on local news who send out “thoughts and prayers”:
Around the nation, in response to the life-threatening injury to Buffalo Bills football player Damar Hamlin, people prayed. Hamlin’s teammates and coaches prayed. Millions of fans joined in prayer, tweeting their support. Even on live TV, sports commentators stopped in the middle of their broadcast to pray.
But this is only natural. During times of crisis, especially life and death crisis, people turn to God.
We know the situation is grave, we know we cannot change things ourselves, and we know that only God – an all-powerful being who cares – can turn the tide.
That’s why, at such times, people do not turn to atheism. They turn to God.
Even non-religious people pray. In fact, many agnostics and soft atheists even turn to prayer.
It continues, showing that the God they are talking about is, of course, the God of Christianity:
As expressed by Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, “It is interesting to me as a person of faith that we tend to go to that core place [at moments of tragedy], that we start talking to God and talking about talking to God.”
He added, “I just find that rather refreshing in an affluent culture that has so much that we tend to ignore God that something like this happens and it reminds us of our own mortality, and we begin to talk about praying and talking about God. … It speaks to the yearning deep inside of us.”
But to ask again, what about Orlovsky’s sports and media colleagues? Were they also happy with him praying on live sports TV?
Yes, many of them were positive on this as well. As one headline announced, “Dan Orlovsky Praised After ‘Beautiful’ Prayer for Damar Hamlin Live on Air.”
Among those quoted in the article were ESPN presenter Ashley Brewer and Super Bowl champion Ryan Clark.
In Brewer’s words, “This is amazing, I teared up watching this in my living room today. Proud to call you my teammate & brother in Christ.”
This is what happens when, as a nation, we are drawn into a life-and-death crisis.
This is what happens when, suddenly and unexpectedly, in front of our eyes on TV, the health and well-being of a relative stranger now becomes our personal concern.
This is what happens when we realize that we need help outside of ourselves.
People pray, and prayer is welcomed rather than ridiculed.
It’s not all that welcome on this website, because, being an atheist, I think prayer is useless. If it makes you feel better, or helps you meditate, go for it. But don’t think that anybody up there is listening and will help you. For if he was and did, there wouldn’t be kids dying of cancer all the time.
Now I don’t think author Brown is trying to convince himself of anything; he’s already lost to the delusion. Nor is he trying to convince his fellow religionists, who have also drunk the Kool-Aid. I think he’s making fun of atheists by showing that we’re trumped by the ubiquity of prayer. And that wouldn’t bother us, he thinks, unless he thought that prayer’s ubiquity was evidence for God. People wouldn’t be praying all the time if they didn’t think there was really a god to pray to! Checkmate, you heathens!:
The reality is that we always need God. It’s just that, when all is well, we often forget about Him, putting our trust in ourselves and leaving Him out of our thoughts entirely. Many of us even become hostile to faith, doing our best to keep it excluded from public life. And then a crisis wakes us up as we recognize our own frailty and remember that death could be near at any time.
May we not forget these realities as life gets back to normal and, we hope and pray, Damar Hamlin makes a full and even miraculous recovery.
And may those who ignore or even scorn the idea of God think again. Eternity is always just one step away. Then what?
If the Bible is true – which I am 100% sure it is, personally – one day we will actually give account of our lives to God.
That is a sobering thought.
The sobering thought is that people who can actually think can be so deluded that they give their lives up to a belief that is totally lacking in evidence. (Brown even has a Ph.D.!) Another sobering thought is that people like Brown think that somehow the fact that lots of people pray means that God is up there listening. A third sobering thought is that Brown has not a scintilla of evidence that the God he’s so sure we’ll meet is the God of the Bible rather than the God of the Qur’an—or any other god. As for the possibility that there are no gods, well, fuggedaboutit!
You can thank reader Pyers for the links to two—count them, two—articles about how a student at Cambridge claims that Jesus was a transsexual male, which of course caused a huge fracas. Pyers added this to his links:
And this one must be for the 5* treatment as being idiotic on just so so many levels. When I read it I just, to use a piece of internet shorthand, PML. [JAC: inquiry reveals that this stands for “pissed myself laughing”]. It is the craziest of the crazy, looniest of loons …
Just do what I was tempted to do and bash your head against a wall. It is at moments like this that you thank God you are an atheist! (Big grin for that one.)
It’s widely reported in the UK media:
The first article’s from the Torygraph:
A quote and picture (bolding is mine):
Jesus could have been transgender, according to a University of Cambridge dean.
Dr Michael Banner, the dean of Trinity College, said such a view was “legitimate” after a row over a sermon by a Cambridge research student that claimed Christ had a “trans body”, The Telegraph can disclose.
The “truly shocking” address at last Sunday’s evensong at Trinity College chapel, saw Joshua Heath, a junior research fellow, display Renaissance and Medieval paintings of the crucifixion that depicted a side wound that the guest preacher likened to a vagina.
Worshippers told The Telegraph they were left “in tears” and felt excluded from the church, with one shouting “heresy” at the Dean upon leaving.
The sermon displayed three paintings, including Jean Malouel’s 1400 work Pietà, with Mr Heath pointing out Jesus’s side wound and blood flowing to the groin. The order of service also showed French artist Henri Maccheroni’s 1990 work “Christs”.
Heath, whose PhD was supervised by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, also told worshippers that in the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, from the 14th century, this side wound was isolated and “takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance”.
Heath also drew on non-erotic depictions of Christ’s penis in historical art, which “urge a welcoming rather than hostile response towards the raised voices of trans people”.
“In Christ’s simultaneously masculine and feminine body in these works, if the body of Christ as these works suggest the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body,” the sermon concluded.
A congregation member, who wished to remain anonymous, told Dr Banner in a complaint letter: “I left the service in tears. You offered to speak with me afterwards, but I was too distressed. I am contemptuous of the idea that by cutting a hole in a man, through which he can be penetrated, he can become a woman.
“I am especially contemptuous of such imagery when it is applied to our Lord, from the pulpit, at Evensong. I am contemptuous of the notion that we should be invited to contemplate the martyrdom of a ‘trans Christ’, a new heresy for our age.”
Here is PROOF—one of the pictures shown during Heath’s sermon. You have to do a really logical stretch to see that as a vagina. It’s not even in the right place!
And here’s how Dean Banner defended the claim. Note that he often gives BBC Radio 4’s “Thought for the Day”, which is usually a religious homily. Dawkins did it once, and that was the last time they used an atheist!
Dr Banner’s response to the complaint, seen by The Telegraph, defended how the sermon “suggested that we might think about these images of Christ’s male/female body as providing us with ways of thinking about issues around transgender questions today”.
“For myself, I think that speculation was legitimate, whether or not you or I or anyone else disagrees with the interpretation, says something else about that artistic tradition, or resists its application to contemporary questions around transsexualism,” Dr Banner added.
Dr Banner, who frequents BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, said that while the views were the speaker’s own, he “would not issue an invitation to someone who I thought would deliberately seek to shock or offend a congregation or who could be expected to speak against the Christian faith”.
Click to read the more heated piece from the Daily Fail:
The Fail doesn’t add much to the above, but does give an official quote form the Uni:
A spokesperson for Trinity College said: The College would like to make clear the following:
‘Neither the Dean of Trinity College nor the researcher giving the sermon suggested Jesus was transgender.
‘The sermon addressed the image of Christ depicted in art and various interpretations of those artistic portrayals.
‘The sermon’s exploration of the nature of religious art, in the spirit of thought-provoking academic inquiry, was in keeping with open debate and dialogue at the University of Cambridge.’
Now it’s barely possible that some randy medieval artist deliberately painted Jesus’s wound to resemble a vagina. But since I’m not convinced that Jesus really existed as any real person, much less as a divine human/son of God/part of God, I can’t be bothered worrying about his gender. The whole fracas is simply hilarious, instantiating what happens when one religion, Christianity, collides with another—wokeness.
