Bay of Fundie

When I was growing up, my family would sometimes go back to my grandfather’s farm in South Dakota for a couple of weeks in the summer. I loved that place. It was so different from the world I knew. It was so alien, in fact, that my grandparents didn’t even own a television.

In 1976, when I was in my early teens, we somehow managed to go back for six weeks (I’m not sure, but that might have been the summer of the spreader.). Interestingly, the prospect of spending a summer without a television didn’t bother me at all—except for one thing…

That was summer that NASA landed Viking 1 on Mars. That was a big event. It was NASA’s first robotic probe to land on Mars. Among the various scientific equipment aboard, it had a biology lab. They were looking for life on Mars! Microbial life seemed a very real possibility back then. This was our best chance to find it. And I was stuck in the middle of Buttsuck, South Dakota, miles from a television.

We drove there and back in our 1969 Chevy station wagon. It was decadent! It had air conditioning and seat belts. Our prior car, a 1965 Ford Mustang, had neither (Actually, I think the Mustang had seat belts in the front. I guess the rear passengers, like rabbits, were expendable.).

We’d stop for gas and food at the wonderful truck stops and tourist traps along the interstate. I loved to buy their postcards of giant grasshoppers:

… jack rabbits:

… fur-bearing trout:

… and, the most famous of all, of course, the jackalope:

A lot of the gift shops also sold this book:

It was filled with all sorts of fun trivia about U.S. history. It was a good book to read on the trip, so I bought it. Here are the titles of some of the short articles:

• The last man to invade U.S. ended up as a guest at a banquet
• She was first woman in United States to wear pants—by an act of Congress!
• Five presidents have had beards and all five were Republicans
• Famous ghosts still walk halls of White House
• The day president U.S. Grant was arrested for speeding

Some of this book’s trivia I later confirmed in other books. One or two I’ve found were common myths. But overall, it was a fun read.

I have a good memory. Looking through this book today, I see that I have actually retained most of these stories in my massive brain.

One of those articles that I always remembered was the story of the Millerites, which I have reproduced below. I remembered it during the recent Harold Camping laugh-fest.

Reading this article back then in the summer of ’76 was my first exposure to the concept of the doomsday cult. I had always known that there were crazy fundies perpetually predicting the end of the world. Until that point, I never knew that some of them were insane enough to actually abandon work, leave their fields unplanted, and sit on a hillside waiting to be raptured.

Welcome to the real America, kid. Ugly, isn’t it? (I wonder what I would have thought if I had known that 30 years later, I’d embark upon a 5+ year quest to document and expose the dangers of this insanity.)

So for your enlightenment, here is the article that I read that summer 35 years ago:

I love the last two words of that title: “It Didn’t!” Really? I would have thought he wouldn’t have needed to tell us. (At the very least, he should have preceded it with the words “Spoiler Alert!”)

That article doesn’t tell the entire story, though (and it gets a few of the minor details wrong). Those people didn’t just “[start] life all over again”. Nor did they learn their lesson. They became the Seventh Day Adventists.

Thinking back now on that article, I see a similarity between what I wanted to do that summer in 1976 and what the Millerites wanted to do in their day. Yet in that similarity I see an even bigger difference.

Both of us looked to the heavens.

The Millerites, though, were looking to a delusion of the past and hoping for the demise of mankind.

I was looking to man-made robot on Mars and dreaming of our future.

The “normal” right wing crazies are distancing themselves as much as they can from Anders Breivik. The truth is, he’s a right-wing crazy, and he’s a Christian. Deal with it.

This week’s On the Media had a segment on Breivik’s religious beliefs. Give it a listen. They play a clip from Bill O’Reilly, who desperately tries to convince us that “No true Christian” would do what Breivik did.

OTM interviews Jeff Sharlet (who frequently writes about the dangers of Christian fundamentalism), who actually sat down and read Breivik’s entire 1500-page manifesto. Sharlet says that Breivik starts out “not particularly religious” in the beginning of the document but slowly becomes a full-bore Christian by the end of the manuscript.

I’m not going to lay the bulk of the blame for his behavior on Christianity. The impression I get from this report and other things I’ve read is that he was already an intolerant xenophobe. The Christianity is just something he picked up along the way. He probably found things within Christianity that reinforced his bigotries, just like you can find things within the Bible that back up any preconceived notions you’re looking to support. The Christian fanaticism was probably just a byproduct of his existing conservative fanaticism.

That’s the important part of this story. Breivik is a dangerous conservative fanatic. It’s his rabid adherence to and belief in the terrified and hateful views of the far-right conservative movement that drove him to mass murder.

Sure, something is probably wrong inside his head. Most extreme conservatives, who hate everyone different, don’t go on murderous rampages. But there are quite a few right-wing extremists who are just barely restraining themselves, and that’s only due to social pressure. They know they’d go to jail. Most of them would even agree that randomly killing other people is “wrong” by most definitions, including by their own personal moral code. But they also would claim that killing in self defense is justified. And killing to protect your home is justified. And killing to defend your country is justified.

So you see, there is almost nothing stopping the hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of the most right-wing of the right-wingers from killing one (or two or a hundred) non-white non-Christians, if given a plausible excuse or if they feel sufficiently threatened.

Look at the epidemic of lynchings we had (mostly in the South) between the end of the Civil War and the 1960s. Some lynchings were perpetrated by just a few people. Other lynchings were perpetrated by large crowds. All told, thousands (or tens of thousands) of ordinary non-crazy, non-sociopathic, church-going white people murdered over 3400 black people (and 1200 white people!). Most of these lynchers would probably begrudgingly admit that the black guy they just killed actually was a human being. Most of them would probably admit that killing human being is immoral. Yet every single one of them justified their actions. How? Because they felt threatened. They were acting in self defense.

It’s very easy to turn a normal person into a killer. Just make him feel threatened enough.

The current tone of political “debate” in this country (in the town halls and at the teabagging rallies and on Fox News and on countless radio stations) is too toxic and too inflammatory. Don’t throw gasoline on a smoldering fire. Norway isn’t as far away as you think.

I was all set for my big comeback article tonight. It was going to be good. I was going to write about a high-pressure fundie recruitment ploy that utilizes intensive sales techniques, a la the dreaded timeshare sales pitch.

It turns out that isn’t quite what they do, and it was a rather sucky documentary to boot.

The film I watched is episode one of an 8-part U.K. documentary series on religion, titled Revelations (That page at the IMDb is like the documentary: Not really worth your time.).

The series was actually made back in 2009. Apparently it’s in the process of being rebroadcast right now. Depending on where you live, you can watch a few of the episodes online, but not episode one.

That first episode is titled “How to Find God”. It’s about a Christian recruitment program called The Alpha Course. Alpha was developed by a reverend in the Church of England, but it’s used by churches of many denominations. According to the documentary, “there are 30,000 Alpha courses running… in 168 countries.”

The whole shtick here is that churches know they’re losing members. They don’t want the golden goose (that allows them to avoid getting real jobs) to die, so they have to bring in fresh bodies. Like the tobacco industry, they don’t want to steal parishioners away from some other church. That just means they’d be squabbling over the crumbs of a smaller and smaller pie. They need brand new bodies! They’ve had schemes running for centuries to suck in the kids (just like the tobacco industry). That used to be sufficient. Sadly, not even that will stave off irrelevance. They need some other source of bodies. How about atheists? No, that really wouldn’t work. Here’s an idea! Why don’t they harvest some agnostics? Brilliant!

So they developed this course that runs one night per week for eight weeks, plus a weekend getaway (ironic, since “getaway” is the one thing they don’t want you to do). The documentary tells us that more than two million agnostics in Britain have done the Alpha course. One in eight converts. Multiply that by all of the other Alpha courses running around the world. Yow! That’s a lot of very weak agnostics.

The documentary was produced by a chap named Jon Ronson. I guess I haven’t been paying attention, because I didn’t know who he is. It turns out that this is the guy who wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats. If you go to his Wikipedia page, the first thing you’ll see is a picture of him speaking at TAM London in 2009. (If I had actually been able to score a ticket to TAM London like I wanted, then maybe I wouldn’t have been so clueless on who he is.)

The documentary itself was somewhat amateurish. It follows eight agnostics as they go through this course, yet Ronson doesn’t even bother to get all their names. One agnostic bails after the first night. We watch her walk away while Ronson narrates “…one of them, I never know her name, says it isn’t for her.” Then in a later scene, his video tape runs out, and he misses a dramatic moment. Later in the documentary, he forgets to turn off the camera. He catches an important scene merely through ineptitude! Despite this, the program did hold my interest, but maybe only because I was taking notes for this article.

The way the Alpha course is structured, everybody piles into the church some evening for the weekly meeting. The head of that church gives a low-pressure lecture about Jesus, what he taught, how we “know” he was real (they claim to have evidence, but it’s just Josephus, who wrote about Jesus years later), and how God loves you so much he’s going to send you to hell to burn and writhe in agony for eternity for not clapping your hands and believing in Tinkerbell.

After the lecture, the congregation of agnostics breaks up into small discussion groups. In the documentary, we follow one of these groups, which consists of eight agnostics (seven after the first night) plus two discussion leaders. In the group, they discuss where everybody is coming from regarding their thoughts on whether God & Jesus exist and if there is any chance in hell of any of them converting.

During these discussion groups, the agnostics raise all sorts of logical objections. Those clever Alpha people can’t be stumped, though! The head office publishes a set of pamphlets that refutes (or so they think) all of the common logical proofs that God & Son are unlikely to exist.

It’s clear that the agnostics in this documentary are not buying any of it at that first meeting. For whatever reason, all seven come back in subsequent weeks and continue to subject themselves to this low-grade sales pitch. Ultimately, some of them falter and find themselves getting drawn in. Don’t these people read science fiction? Never go into orbit around a black hole!

I would surmise that the reason this course works on so many agnostics is because it isn’t hardcore fundie. Supposedly the content is evangelical. It is anti-gay. They even speak in tongues at one point (or fail to in this documentary, thanks to a convention of sports car enthusiasts). But I didn’t see any of the fire and brimstone that we normally associate with fundiegelicalism.

Maybe that’s something that varies by church. Of the thousands of churches around the world that use this course, perhaps some of them whip themselves into a frenzy of Jesus-praising and gay-bashing and porn-hating. I’d be very curious to see what their conversion rate is. As counterintuitive as it might seem, I’d be willing to bet that those fundie churches actually have a much higher conversion rate than one in eight. After all, look how many people buy timeshares.

[If you are unable to find this documentary through your cable system or however else you acquire content, I did find a watchable copy on YouTube. It’s apparently from German TV, because it’s full of German subtitles (or maybe the video is speaking in tongues). Here are part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.]

Don’t panic about that last post. That went up by mistake. I was having too much fun at the Regional Atheist Meeting to run home and stop the post. I figured if Harold Camping was wrong about his rapture, I could be wrong about mine.

When I first arrived (a bit late), I was surprised to see the place crawling with reporters. There were multiple news outlets there, both print/internet and television. I watched one of the 11:00 PM news broadcasts that night, but we weren’t on it. I also barely found any references to us in the papers/online. It seems odd that they’d go through the effort of sending reporters and then not use any of it. Maybe we just aren’t interesting or colorful enough for them.

The San Jose Calif. Mercury News gave us two short paragraphs in their larger rapture-is-a-bust article, although they did give us a few photographs. But of the five photographs, two were of the looney-tune who stood out front all day trying to convert us. So 40% of the news photographs devoted to our event actually covered the religious opposition to our event.

(To be fair, the San Francisco Chronicle gave us more coverage, but they only covered Sunday, which wasn’t the day of the rapture (of course, neither was Saturday!). I didn’t go on Sunday. I had run off to the Maker Faire to see, among other things, Adam Savage stand in a Faraday cage between two arcing Tesla coils.)

Speaking of the fundie out front, I passed him several times, going to & fro lunch and dinner. He was always engaged in a civil, non-emotional debate with one or several atheists. Mostly, he was giving the standard arguments you’ve heard from them before. The one exception was how he justified genocide.

I know that fundies have no problem with murder as long as God does it, but I guess I’ve never heard them articulate it in the flesh before. It’s one thing to read it waved off abstractly on an apologetics website. It’s another thing to have one tell it to your face.

An atheist was telling the fundie that God is an immoral brute, because he killed millions of men, women, and children in the Flood. The fundie said “That’s not murder. That’s not immoral, because God did it. God is the source of morality. If he did it, it can’t be immoral.” (I’m paraphrasing here.)

That is why these people are so dangerous. You would think we would have not just a consensus but a unanimity of opinion in this country that murder, especially genocide, is immoral.

Nope!

The apocalypse was scheduled for 6:00 PM. As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, it didn’t happen. But here’s the funny thing. At 7:04 PM, the Earth shook. It didn’t exactly open up and swallow us all, but it was an actual, honest-to-dog earthquake with a magnitude of 3.6! It not only shook our building, but also the Family Radio building, which was just a couple of miles away. And if you take away Daylight Saving Time, the quake actually struck at 6:04 PM, just four minutes behind Harold Camping’s prediction!

Of course, he predicted a quake of much larger size, actual destruction, and actual death, so we have to count this prediction as a bust. There were bigger quakes that day, including a 6.1 in New Zealand. In fact, there were at least nine earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or greater on Saturday. But, as the USGS points out, that’s about how many you get every day.

I’ve been looking at some of the coverage that failed-prophet Harold Camping’s rapture failure has received since it failed. A “news blog” (whatever the hell that is) on Yahoo reports:

Camping’s PR aide, Tom Evans, told the L.A. Times that the group is “disappointed” that 200 million true believers weren’t lifted up to heaven on Saturday while everyone else suffered and eventually died as a series of earthquakes and famine destroyed the Earth.

I can see how that would be disappointing (emphasis added). Maybe we can get some of them jobs torturing prisoners at Guantanamo. I think they might have an aptitude.

Finally, have you seen that Camping is sticking by his end-is-nigh story, but he’s changed the date? This is just too funny. His original prediction was that the so-called “good guys” (you know, the ones who think genociding an entire planet or watching billions writhe in agony is moral and proper) would rapture on May 21st, the rest of us would be tortured for five months, and then the Earth would kaboom on October 21st. Well now he’s saying that the beginning of the end did start on May 21st after all, but none of us can see it. Instead, the rapture and the torture and the destruction of the Earth are all going to happen on October 21st.

And when October 21st comes and goes, then what’s your new date going to be, Harold?

And for those who bothered to read (or scroll down) this far, here’s what you could have been doing on Sunday. Here’s Adam Savage at the Maker Faire:

Well this is embarrassing. It appears that I have just been raptured.

If you’re seeing this post, it means that God has taken me! (Or possibly I’ve just been run over by a drunk driver while trying to cross the street. Please check outside for a mangled body on the road. That’s probably me.)

I had this post scheduled to run automatically at 6:01 PM on May 21st. I figured that the rapture would run on time (God is like Mussolini, you know). If I hadn’t been raptured by 6:01, I was planning to intervene and prevent this post from publishing. The fact that you’re seeing it now means that I have been raptured!

Hallelujah!

This just shows what those fundies know. They claimed that I’d spend eternity in hell for being an atheist. I’m not going to hell! I’m going to heaven!

…Surrounded by fundies for eternity. Oh, shit!

This is an extremely occasional feature that I only run when I remember I have it, and when somebody posts an exceptionally insightful comment. I like to elevate that comment to the top, so everyone can see it.

Today I’m bringing two comments to your attention. Both are by anti_supernaturalist.

His first comment was in response to “Obama Aborts Osama”:

• Pro-birth ideology poses an international public health threat

Religious anti-abortion ranters are not pro-life. They are pro-birth. There’s a big difference.

By dismissing women’s rights over their own bodies, fundies expect to regain control over reproduction and birth in accord with pro-natalist dictates. Pro-natalism, a term from the 19th century, sells a poisonous nostrum of sexual customs which do not belong in a contemporary planet-wide ethos which must treat women equally.

Fundie pretensions to secular power over abortion are not pro-life. They demand enforcement of ancient (and modern) near-eastern cult practices which amount to total reproductive repression: that no impediment whatsoever on births be permitted by law.

No sexual practices which preclude conception, homosexuality foremost. No chemical contraception. No physical barriers to conception. No abortions, not even in cases of rape, incest.

What happens to mother and child after birth is irrelevant to the men who run right-wing political and religious institutions.

Pro-natalism is the sexual theory of “tea party” ignorati, myriad fundie sects, mormons, and the rc-church.

Pro-birth, a public health disaster, is pro-mass-death. It creates disease, poverty, and ignorance worldwide by fostering overpopulation, damning safe (and joyous) non-reproductive sex, forbidding responsible sex education, and blocking medical research.

His second comment was in response to “Planned Abortionhood”:

• The real issue — social control

Fundie xian males, like their fundie muslim and jewish brothers, shudder at a technological world in which mental agility has replaced physical strength as the core measure of economic utility.

This reordering of values strips away a ancient core faith-based lie: god-ordained male supremacy.

Unresolved to this day is a decades long struggle over gender equality — equal productive and reproductive rights.

Whom does The House and Senate back? The relevant group, women themselves, tens of millions of them?

Or white male second-hand-god salesmen? Spewing pro-birth at any price. One hundred year old social darwinism tarted up as “family values”.

Fundies are obvious offenders, but RCs run a close second.

Women’s aspirations, self realization, reproductive self-determination must be crushed by direct force.

Xian domestic terrorism, like muslim domestic terrorism, humiliates, intimidates, and batters women back to submission.

Protected by complicit federal and state officials, cells of xian thugs have been targeting women and their humane values for decades.

Fundie irrationality drives scientific knowledge about sex from America’s schools just as it drives medical research abroad.

Xian political ideologues must eventually embrace state totalitarianism. Their “truths” can never win popular support. An open society will repudiate their nihilism composed of literalist lies, morally repugnant beliefs, and puritanical rules.

The president the fundies hate so much has done what they’ve wanted for the last ten years: Kill Osama bin Laden.

So how is a proper fundie supposed to react?

That’s right, by blaming Obama for “murdering babies”!

One of the most extreme fundies I’ve encountered in five years of doing this blog is disbarred-Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt. I discovered him only two months ago, when I came across his get-rich-quick scheme.

I subscribed to his emails, and they’ve been doozies. Every other fundie talks about how bad this or that thing is and, by the way, could you throw a couple of dollars my way. Klingenschmitt talks about whatever he’s offended by, then requests that you pay him gobs of money to fax Congress. He makes sure you understand just how important it is that you (pay him lots of money to) fax Congress right now, if you want your voice to be heard! Emails and letters and phone calls aren’t nearly as effective as (paying him tons of money to) fax Congress right now!

This morning I received a typical email from Chaplain Money Grubber. I couldn’t find a copy on his website, so it looks like you won’t be able to follow along at home. I’m sure if you paid him, he’d be happy to fax you a copy right now!

He writes:

Obama kills Osama, but will he stop killing unborn American children?

We all grieved when 2,966 innocent civilians were killed on 9/11/2001.  But who grieved yesterday when 3,821 innocent unborn Americans were killed in abortion clinics across America?  Or the day before that?  Since 1973, more children are killed every day by abortion than were killed on 9/11, now totaling 53,000,000 deaths over 38 years.
…
I am proud of our military today.

But I am not proud of our President.  Mr. Obama claims credit for “justice” provided by the sacrifice of our military heroes, who killed the murderer Osama Bin Ladin.  But when will Obama provide equal “justice” for the 3,821 children murdered every day by abortion?   When will he budget $700 Billion dollars (equal to the Pentagon) to fight domestic terrorism that slaughters Americans in the womb?  Instead Obama funds domestic terrorism, paying the baby’s executioners with our tax dollars, to repeat 9/11 every day in abortion clinics across America.  Let Mr. Obama’s real war on “terror” begin in his tax policies. Sorry, Mr. President, you don’t get credit for winning one war, until you stop funding the other.

No. There is no “war on babies”, but there is a war on women’s civil rights. Let’s stop that war instead.

(I know what I wrote yesterday about scaling back the blog, which I am doing, but this is a quickie.)

Over the last few months, I’ve received a barrage of fundie emails about Planned Parenthood. The puppetmasters were trying to get all of their followers to barrage Congress with demands to stop all federal funding of Planned Parenthood. The House Republicans proudly showed us all how much power the Jihadist branch of Christianity still has over the GOP by voting last week to defund Planned Parenthood. Fortunately, there was enough rationality (and Democrats) in the Senate, and the attempt failed for now.

Many of the emails I received have been overly dramatic:

Planned Parenthood takes trillions of your tax dollars every year to murder billions of babies!

OK, maybe not quite that hyperbolic, but that’s really not too much of an exaggeration.

P-1000 Pregnancy Terminator

The fundies like to portray Planned Parenthood as a ravenous abortion machine, whose sole purpose is to wander loose among the general population, scanning all women it encounters. Any woman found to be pregnant is immediately be subjected to a forced liquid-metal abortion. And all of this is just to make the Planned Parenthood abortion doctors filthy, stinking rich.

I wrote an article three years ago about the true economics of abortion and what Planned Parenthood really does with the money. Today I found an article in the Washington Post titled “Five Myths about Planned Parenthood”. Here they are:

1. Planned Parenthood’s federal funding frees up other money to pay for abortions
2. Ninety percent of what Planned Parenthood does is provide abortions
3. Defunding Planned Parenthood will reduce abortions
4. Planned Parenthood serves only teenagers and prostitutes
5. People don’t really need Planned Parenthood

You should go read the article for the details.