The Problem With Bibles

In case you missed it, here's the story

"Governor Nathan Deal says the state plans to return Bibles to guest cabins and lodge rooms at Georgia parks.

"Department of Natural Resources managers recently ordered the removal of Bibles while a final decision was made on the response to a citizen complaint about the presence of Bibles on state property."

[snip]

"The governor said that he expected the Bibles to be returned quickly. Deal said that he and the state attorney general have agreed that the state is on firm legal footing returning the Bibles to state lodges and cabin"

So what's the problem? The state isn't paying for the bibles - the Gideons are. If Christians want to read the bible in their state-owned cabins and lodge rooms, why should anyone care? Non-Christians aren't being forced to read them, after all. Isn't removing the bibles from the rooms the real violation  of religious freedom?

Um, no. See, the bibles aren't there for deeply devout bible-reading Christians. I've never met one of them who didn't have his or her own bible. Usually several of them. Almost always including a pocket-sized New Testament, often a traveling paperback in a protective zippered cover and nowadays a Kindle or online link stored on their iPhones. They are welcome to bring their bibles and read them, and they don't need the Gideons.

So who are the bibles for? In a word, non-believers. A little gift the missionaries at Gideon leaves to help show the light to the damned.

Proselytizing.

If that isn't a clear violation of the Establishment clause, I don't know what is. Whether the state pays for it or not. Even if they allow the lost souls a choice between the Bible, the Koran and Dianetics.

The state has NO business promoting, directly or indirectly, any religion. For all the right wing yammering about slippery slopes, this is the ONE slope down which we are actually in danger of sliding. No one has ever suggested that men should be allowed to marry the box-turtle of choice, but many, many times a government - even our government - has shown real and dangerous preference for a particular set of dogmatic beliefs.

Get rid of the bibles, Governor Deal. The only public building in which they should be housed is a library, on the shelf in the comparative literature section.

Force Churches To Perform Gay Marriages

I think we should. Hear me out:

See, I'm perfectly fine with churches refusing to perform gay weddings. But a marriage is recognition by a state license. Anyone who is authorized to issue a state license should be required to do so for anyone who legally applies for it, regardless of religious or personal beliefs. You don't see some podunk DMV being allowed to refuse to issue driver's licenses to gays, Jews, or African Americans do you? It's the same issue as a pharmacist being allowed to refuse dispensing legally prescribed drugs because he doesn't think they are being used in accordance with his particular moral view. With authority comes responsibility; acting as a government entity should require acting for all of the citizens of that government.

Otherwise, go ahead and have the weddings and let the couple have their license issued and signed by the county office.

Pascal's Wager, or What Are The Odds?

Blaise Pascal

I was involved in a discussion on Facebook a couple of days ago in which someone said this:

I support gay rights and gun control, but I'm still a Christian. If Christians are wrong then when we die nothing happens, but meanwhile we'll have lived a good, morally guided  life and have been good people. But if atheists are wrong they will go to hell. 

I didn't put it in quotes because I can't find the exact conversation, but those are the salient points. Most of you will recognize this as Pascal's Wager, with a rider.

Here's the problem: If you support gay rights and gun control and the Tea-Party-type fundamentalists are right (and therefore you are wrong,) then you aren't living a good life and will probably go to hell with me. See? There are more than two choices. Swap Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Baptist and whatever else you can think of for either side of the argument. Mix and match. It's fun and educational.

So that's one of the most common objections to the wager, and there are counter objections and debates that that have been bandied about for the last 103 years over it. Now I may not be an expert, but I do know something about probability theory and I can assure you that the wager is a losing one - especially when one considers what coin is being wagered. Betting on God is not without cost and the house always wins. But it isn't really the wager I'm bothered by.

Ir's the rider.

 ... meanwhile we'll have lived a good, morally guided  life and have been good people. 

This phrase, this highly insulting, despicable, judgmental, asinine fucking phrase on one side of the wager equation means that rational atheists like myself aren't  "living good, morally guided" lives or, indeed,  being "good people." Because we don't believe in God. It's far too commonly expressed.

Allow me to retort:

I am perfectly capable of determining right from wrong without being told what it is in some ancient self-contradictory and often misinterpreted tome whose rules were significantly predated by other even more ancient tomes, and act on those decisions independently of fear of divine eternal retribution or hope of an eternal reward from some imaginary but still admittedly jealous, vengeful bogeyman invented to explain whatever primitive man couldn't readily understand and to control the masses when it seemed they might get out of control.

In fact, I'd venture that the moral decisions I make are more likely to be correct when based on rational thought with the resources of millennia of accumulated knowledge and observation of immediate circumstances than those based on cherry picked interpretations of translations of texts that generalized rules behavior  for uneducated, illiterate mobs of pre-civilized man.

For example, I realize that while the choice between being a vegan and an omnivore may be a moral one, the choice between eating chicken and pork can be safely obliterated just by cooking the pork enough to eliminate the possibility of trichinosis.

It's not up to me to tell anyone not to hold their honest religious beliefs (thank god.) Make your own wagers, live your own life. But live yours. Not mine. I know religious people who are wonderful folks, leading "good and morally driven" lives. But they don't have a monopoly on it, and they certainly don't all fall into that category.