Looks Like HP Isn't Going To Publish This Comment

Actually, this is my 2nd, toned-down attempt to reply. Unfortunately, I didn't save the 1st attempt. (In that attempt I pointed out that Hitler was never on the Index.)

Below, the stuff in italics was put online by HP, the 2nd, apparently unsuccessful attempt to reply is in bold italics:

COMMENTER A: I'd just like to point out that the Catholics have never taught in the literalism of the creation story, and have never been against evolution!

COMMENTER B: Correct, except where it comes to what the soul, which Catholics are taught is created separately by god and that the Adam and Eve story is about this creation of the soul and the division this created between animal and human.

Second, is that Catholicism still teaches that man is god's pinnacle, ie the end game of evolution, which evolution clearly states is hogwash.

But, at least theistic evolution is better than creationism and ID.

ME: Hold on a minute, B -- A said Catholics were NEVER "against evolution." Are you going along with that? Has the Church actually been on the scientific cutting edge here -- since Darwin? since Lamarck? I think A is the victim of a Catholic PR campaign. I could be wrong, but I think Catholicism's official embrace of evolution actually goes all the way back to 2009, and still contains a few thoroughly unscientific if's and but's. But you covered some of that by pointing out "that Catholicism still teaches that man is god's pinnacle."

COMMENTER B: Actually it goes back to 1950 which is a surprisingly long time and an encyclical entitled Humani generis. And, let's not forget that Mendel was an Augustinian monk and Lamark was Jesuit educated.

While the RCC didn't exactly accept evolutionary theory until 1950, they never placed On the Origin of Species on their list of prohibited books list, so while there was no official acceptance, there was also no official denial. So, technically A is correct with the caveats I mentioned previously.

ME: The moderation doesn't seem to have liked my first attempt to reply to this, let me try again:

1950, not 2009, I stand corrected. But 1950 still isn't anywhere near the scientific cutting edge. It's more than 20 years after a large segment of the population was dismayed by the result of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. And it seems that as late as 2009 the position taken in 1950 was still unclear enough to the average Catholic that another official Vatican statement on the matter was necessary. And as you point out, the Catholic characterization of man as the pinnacle of creation is unscientific and in complete disharmony with evolutionary theory. And finally, it is absurd to claim that the Church was never in opposition to an author merely because that author was never on the Index. There are many famous authors who never made it to the Index whom the Church in no way embraces: Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, to name just three.

Pub Theology

A ridiculous person named Bryan Berghoef has published a few ridiculous articles on that ridiculous presence (on which I spend a ridiculous amount of time), the Huffington Post, plugging his ridiculous career, pub theology. His latest ridiculous effort is entitled "Pub Theology Is a Waste of Time," and he's right, or, that is to say, he would be right except that he is speaking ironically. In this article he erects an amazing number of small flimsy straw men, a collection of objections to his calling of pub theology which I simply don't believe exists apart from his imagination and this article, in order to deftly knock each one down.

Except that he's not really so deft. Take the following example, with which I wouldn't even be bothering you if the Huffington Post moderation had not rejected several perfectly reasonable and mild attempts of mine (Over there, I didn't even use the word "ridiculous"! Not once!) to address it. As my regular readers well know, I WON'T be IGNORED:

"I've heard some criticism along these lines, and I've had some of these thoughts myself. Pub theology -- gathering with folks to talk about life over beer -- is nice. But isn't it time to start doing some things that really matter? Isn't it just dressing up a relic without really changing anything?"

Hæc locutus est Atriummontem! Leaving aside for the moment the imaginary nature of this criticism -- which Mountaincourt advances in order to distract from real critics. Like me. With the craven assistance of his tools, the Huffington Post moderation -- Corte de Montaña here clumsily attempts to disguise his ware, theology.

Mmwahaha! Nice try, Corte de la Montagna, not! Gathering to talk about life is not theology. Theology is the study of God. Life exists. God doesn't. By defending all sorts of things in this article, normal, everyday, healthy, non-ridiculous things, falsely defending them because no one has assailed them, you are attempting to smuggle theology, theological nonsense and doubletalk and confusion, in among all of these normal everyday inoffensive things. And you're fooling me about as much as those green night-vision filters on the camera lenses make me think there really are ghosts on "Ghost Adventures," and about as much as I've been swindled into thinking that the talking heads on "Ancient Aliens" are world-renowned scientists. And if I ever meet you in a pub, Cour de la Montagne, I'll say so to your ridiculous face, in which I might also just laugh, and your big strong moderators won't be there to muzzle me!

They Put It Back

I've never seen anything like this: yesterday a comment of mine on Huffington Post was deleted for "violating Huffington Post's guidelines," and this morning it has re-appeared. In the meantime the replies to my comment, and the replies to those replies, remained on the website, which was also a bit strange. In a blog post yesterday I attempted to give the gist of my offending comment from memory. The comment which prompted one reader to call me "as bad as the fundies[...]a jerk, as ugly as a fundy[...]as repulsive as a fundy[...]You hurt, not help the liberal cause[...]You are an embarrassment to our side. My wish is for you and Pat Dobson to be stranded on a remote island together for the rest of your lives." and another to declare, "[...]how dare you tell me what to think and what to feel. If I wanted that, I'd go to a fundamentalist church." Now that my original comment is back, I can give it to you word-for-word in all of its gruesome, unbearable ruthlessness, or whatever it was which upset some people -- which I wrote in response to this article by David Michael McFarlane, whose gist is summed up very well in its title, "Christians, Can We Drop This 'Creationism' Thing Already?" Here comes my deleted and now resurrected comment. Clutch your pearls:

"How about if you just drop the whole "Christianity" thing, already? You religious moderates spend so much time and energy insisting how completely different you are from the fundies, but you still believe in God, a God who sent his Son to Earth to be a human sacrifice to save the world from Himself. As long as people believe all of that, some of them will still go the rest of the way and believe the parts you don't like anymore. It's not such a long distance from your beliefs to theirs. It's NOT."

That sort of talk, apparently, is repulsive, a disastrous disgrace to liberalism, an attempt to control the thoughts and feelings of others, and who the Hell is Pat Dobson anyway? The only Pat Dobson I can find was a Major Laegue Baseball player decades ago, has been dead for a few years and didn't seem to be well-known for either his religious views or his views on religion. You know what? I bet the guy meant to say "Pat Robertson," and was in such a towering rage that he typo'd "Robertson" down to "Dobson."

I'm biased, of course, but I don't think my comment is extraordinarily atrocious or repulsive. I think what happened is that I hit a nail on a head, hit a few religious moderates square athwart a big subconscious blind spot. Having some denial deftly ripped away can be quite traumatic.

Immoderate Huffington Post Moderation

As I have mentioned before, I suspect that some HP readers have attained Community Moderator status, with the power to remove comments by other readers, and are busily demonstrating that Community Moderators are a bad idea, because they have attained that status by spending all of their time on HP, and not by being possessed of moderation or good judgement. (Indeed, spending all day every day on HP is a much surer indication that someone is NOT particularly well-balanced or wise.) (Yes, I am aware that I'm venturing into throwing-stones-in-my-glass-house territory here. But it's really not all day every day in my case.)

A comment of mine appeared this morning, in response to this article by David Michael McFarlane, entitled "Christians, Can We Drop This 'Creationism' Thing Already?" In the removed comment I took McFarlane and other moderate Christians to task for the absurdity of his attack on fundamentalists for their creationism, while they still believe in God, and Jesus, and the Immaculate conception, and the Resurrection, and so forth. I know, not all moderate Christians believe in the Immaculate conception or the Resurrection, but those whose do are not assailed for these beliefs by their fellow moderates, while the fundies are constantly assailed for rejecting evolution. My contention in the removed comment was that the moderates believe much of the superstitious nonsense in the Bible and are attacking the literalists for believing other superstitious nonsense, and that the distance between them and the fundies is not so great at all. I also said that I reject their portrayal of themselves, of the religiously moderate, as the true enlightened sages of our time, and of atheists and fundies as closely resembling each other, raving fanatics on either side of the calm, wise, moderate middle. Why not just drop Christianity altogether? I asked them, and bringing it to such a fine point seems to have enraged a few people. I wonder whether they were thrown into a similar rage by Rev Lovejoy talking about a cult, and saying something to the effect that it was

"[...] a bunch of mumbo-jumbo designed to separate fools from their money. And now, let's sing the 'Doxology' twenty-three times while we pass the collection plate."

And now my comment has been disappeared for "violating Huffington Post's comments guidelines."

Perhaps I should just be grateful. It may be slightly less pointless for me to write here in my blog than to write comments on HP, even if I'm writing here about the little goldfish-bowl world of HP comments. The removal made me angry, and as the Clash sang, "anger can be power." It can energize you.

James Tabor Continues To Make A Fool Of Himself

Another sensationalistic headline in Huffington Post Religion: Bathtub Unearthed In Jerusalem May Have Belonged To One Of Jesus' Enemies (PHOTOS). Another headshake-inducing interview with Professor James Tabor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, infamous for suggesting that the "James Ossuary" once held the bones of the brother of Jesus Christ and giving some undeserved appearance of credibility to that charlatan and non-archaeologist, the Naked Archaeologist.

You really ought to expect this sort of thing from HP. It is what it is and its standards are what they are: pretty low. More, quite a bit more is usually to be expected from a full professor and department head at a major university, even if it is only the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Charlotte.

(Did Tabor very simply agree to say a certain amount of nonsensical things in exchange for a suitcase full of cash from the Naked Archaeologist? It wouldn't surprise me, and in a way it would be much less sad than if he really has lost his grip on certain realities.)

If HP didn't put "Jesus" in the headline they wouldn't get all these clicks from people who don't know or care about archaeology or ancient history and just want to argue about religion. ("Jesus is a myth." "Stay tuned... rumor has it Pontius Pilates' toilet has been excavated in the neighboring house." "I thought Jesus didn't have any enemies. You know, because he loved everybody right?" 3 actual posts, 3 of the 1st ones, quoted in their entirety. Oh, ha ha ha. Hee hee heee. Ho. Ho. Ho.) Tabor, a professor of Religious Studies, ought to be a bit more disciplined with his statements, but his own words give him away: ""From what we get in the Gospel, the Sadducees, or the aristocratic priestly class, they were [...]" etc etc. He begins by assuming the accuracy of Bible passages, and then trying to make the archaeological evidence for them. It should be closer to the other way around. I'm not saying that the Bible should be disregarded altogether when investigating history. Of course not. People who declare, "The Bible is fiction," and then stand there like they think they've said something profound which is all that needs to be said on the subject of the Bible and history, are clowns, every bit as silly as anyone else.

We possess a few different written sources on the history of Western Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries. Not very many, but more than one, from independent sources, and so we can compare them with each other. If the Nibelungenlied were the only one we had, it would be tremendously important for the study of that history. (It's not entirely without importance as it is.) Analogously, the Bible, because it is the only written source we now possess for many episodes of history, is of tremendous historical significance.

But of course we can't read any piece of writing uncritically, whether it's the Iliad or Genesis or the Gospels or Gregory of Tours or Beowulf or the Nibelungenlied or Edward Gibbon or even The Wrong Monkey. It may be that the Gospel portrait of the Sadducees is accurate. But Tabor well knows that the Gospels were written by enemies of the Sadducees, and that enemies in all times and places have had a tendency to be unfair to one another, and that in ancient writings, by and large, this tendency was quite strong, and that the authors of the Gospels were not an exception to this rule.

Or at least he ought to know all of this very well, and constantly keep it in mind when sifting through texts such as the Gospels and wondering what parts of them might be true or partly true.

And he ought to make all of this especially crystal-clear when talking in an interview to be used in a piece of news presented to a lay audience. When referring to Gospel accounts of the Sadducees, a warning to take possible bias into account ought to be the first thing out of an expert's mouth. Communicating things like that are a very important part of Tabor's job, and he hasn't been doing it. His standards should be much higher than those of some outlets like the Huffington Post, and lately, they haven't been. Great for sensationalism, terrible for the advancement of learning. In a typical piece about archaeology in the Huffington Post or USA Today, it can be pointed out that the sensationalistic headline doesn't actually reflect what the expert is quoted as saying. Tabor is supposed to be the expert here. The grown-up, the authority. He's anything but these days, but he worked his way up to his current position by behaving in quite a different manner, and tenure is a bitch.

Just In Case Some Of You Haven't Noticed Yet: Theologians Don't Play Fair

Here are just a few of a countless number of instances:

I think maybe every single one of my comments on Nathan Schneider's non-mind-blowing essay 10 Proofs That Will Change How You Think About God on Huffington Post Religion may have been removed, because of "violations of our guidelines," ie because some holy roller has achieved Community Moderator status. A time-honored Christian approach to inconvenient criticism is to pretend it never existed.

From Aristotle's prime mover to the "endgueltigem Beweis Gottes" Schneider says Hegel was working on at the time of his death -- perhaps it's very good for Hegel's rep that he died when he did -- Schneider's 10-point stroll through thousands of years of Western philosophy resembles a walk through a minefield which the perambulator survives, in that not one of the many bombs of skepticism in Western philosophy was set off by the merest hint of a mention. If one's only source of info about Western philosophy has been Huffington Post Religion -- and I fear that it is some people's only source, and that many have only seen Western philosophy through similarly-filtered lenses -- then one definitely could get the impression that philosophy and theology are synonymous to a great extent.

In any case, the assumption that they are in harmony seems to be very widespread among both theists and atheists. The former love to trot out their favorite quotes from Augustine and Aquinas, they often assume that Spinoza and Einstein were on their side. The atheists generally dispute the subject of Einstein's religious view much too much -- his religious views are unclear, that's about all there is to say about it -- and the case of Spinoza not nearly enough. If they have looked at all at the actual words of Spinoza, they immediately notice all the theological-looking phrases, up to and including the 2nd word in the title of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,
and often they discard Spinoza long before they have begun to suspect that what looked at first glance like theology could have been camouflage for atheist arguments in the 17th century when plain spoken atheism was not allowed. (The same may also have been true for Descartes, whom Spinoza regarded as the greatest of his immediate predecessors in philosophy, although to assume atheism in Descartes' case is a bit more of a stretch. But even a century after Spinoza, even the plainly-atheist Hume never actually said in so many plain words that he doubted the existence of God.) Just as I myself discarded Spinoza after my first contact with him, and only returned because Nietzsche praises him so often and so highly.

But of course the theists (especially those tedious 21st-century pantheists) cite Spinoza as if he had been perfectly free to say plainly and literally whatever it was that he really thought about the idea of God.

Among other absurdities which theists present with maddening smug stupidity as fact, such as that Biblical literalism was invented in 19th-century America, that fundies have much more in common with atheists than with them, the religious moderates, the truly enlightened, and that the "conflict thesis" has been thoroughly refuted and discredited among historians (How many people who have not read much more theology than is good for anyone have ever even heard of the "conflict thesis"?) is this version of the Western philosophy absent its religious skepticism. Democritus, Lucretius, Seneca (Seneca was an idiot but even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then), Boethius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Even worse than behaving as if all of these people had never existed, the theists, the theologians often go one disgusting shameless step further and cherry-pick them for quotations to take out of context and make these thinkers seem quite different than the critics of religion (/spirituality, po-TAY-to/po-TAH-to) which they were, just as they cherry-pick Augustine and Aquinas to make them look tolerant and urbane and not like the bloodthirsty Bible-thumpers they were. If you want to learn about the integrity and reliability of a philosopher or theologian, read an entire book by someone they've quoted, and compare the impression you've gotten from that entire book with the impression you got from the citation.

Abraham And Isaac And Religion And Sanity

In HP Religion, James Goodman addresses the Biblical story in which Abraham is commanded by God to make a human sacrifice of his son Isaace, and almost goes through with it, and at the last minute God says, Okay, stop, I was just testing your obedience, we're cool. Goodman reacts with horror to this story -- but not with enough horror. He draws parallels between Abraham's painful situation and tough decisions which must be made in war. He mentions people who have wrestled with this Bible passage (chapter 22 of Genesis), including Kierkegaardand, according to Goodman, Bob Dylan.

"The ritual sacrifice of a child should and would be universally condemned," Goodman states. (Not really going very far out on a limb there.) But he continues: "But[...]"

But nothing. Goodman's trying to have his cake and eat it too. For one thing, as we can see from many of the comments on Goodman's story, prattling on in a quite unbearable manner about how this horror story of Abraham being commanded to tie his son up, slit his throat and burn his body demonstrates God's perfect and infinite love, anything at all will be far from universally condemned, if it's seen as "God's will." For another thing, there is a difference between human sacrifice and war. Sometimes war is waged in an injust way which is indefensible; and sometimes it is a tragic choice which must be made to oppose injustice. For a third thing, Kierkegaard was sometimes brilliant and sometimes Christian, but never both at the same time. And for a forth thing, in "Highway 61 Revisited" Dylan doesn't portray the story of Abraham and Isaac as a deep and awesome mystery, he doesn't "wrestle" with it. He reacts to it with appropriately unambiguous horror and disgust. He portrays god as a cosmic bully and Abraham as a coward who almost instantly knuckles under to a bully in the most despicable way imaginable. In Dylan's song Abraham is just one more scoundrel in a row of jerks who are described about 1 every 15 seconds.

If Sir James Gearge Frazerwas correct, then nearly every single human civilization has passed through a stage of human sacrifice, and that stage was much more recent in the case of Frazer's beloved Romans than he or other Classicists had thought. He reacted with horror to his discovery that polished and urbane Classical Latin poets lived at the same time as priests and priestesses who made ritual sacrifices of people. I can only think of one way to see Genesis 22 in a positive light: as a story of a people leaving human sacrifice in the past, and in fact in a far more remote past than did, among many others, the Romans.

But of course it is interpreted in quite another way by many practicing Jews and Christians and Muslims. Nauseatingly, they twist the story until it looks (to them) like an illustration of pure perfect cosmic infinite Love. If a head of state demanded that one of his subjects kill his own son to prove his loyalty, no sane person would call it an act of love on the part of the ruler. It would be considered an act of extreme tyranny and grounds to overthrow the ruler. If I were married and my wife demanded that I kill our son to prove my love for her, as long as I could prove she made that demand, not only would I have absolutely no trouble getting a divorce, and custody, and a very strongly-enforced restraining order, but my ex-wife would very likely also spend some time in prison or a hospital for the criminally insane. Not to mention the utter contempt and horror, and criminal prosecution, which that hypothetical subject of a tyrant, or I in that hypothetical marriage, would deserve, if we showed the slightest sign of complying with that despicable request, which Abraham was willing to do. Believers are making ridiculous excuses for their imaginary friend who rules the universe, excuses which they would never make for a real human being. Oh the mental gymnastic believers go through to defend their god.

Imagine if people expended a fraction of that energy to protect other real living breathing human beings.

A Fresh Look At Science And Religion (Actually There's Nothing Fresh About It)

Huffington Post has reprinted something written by 14-year-old Nimai Agarwal for the "God" issue of the magazine KidSpirit:

Thinking about these topics has not only strengthened my faith in God, but has also helped me find connections between science and religion, whose seeming opposition [...]

I'm trying to visualize the editors of Huffington Post's Religion section at work. It can't be easy to be them:

"Yes, that "seeming" opposition is so Gosh-darn persistent and omnipresent. What or whom can we blame it on this time? Uhh... Umm... Okay, I got nothin. Oh, wait! I know! We'll publish an essay by a 14-year-old Hindu kid who's into science, and when the usual pains in our euphemisms come around with their usual snark we can accuse them of both picking on kids and being prejudiced against Hindus! 2 for 1! It's brilliant!"

It's really not. This horse has been dead for a long, long time. It's not going to get any fresher by posting something written by a 14-year-old who had been homeschooled until a year previously, for whom things like grade-school Astrophysics 101 and the scientific view of gravity are still new: " Gravity fascinates me very much -- the fact that planets are revolving around each other and that all objects in this world attract each other? Pretty mind-blowing stuff" and who hasn't yet lost his faith.

Ya gotta feel sorry for those editors sometimes. And for that kid too, caught between the rock of his religious home-school background and the hard place of editors for religious publications, obviously anxious to make him a poster boy, on the other. "Being born into a religious family has many advantages, but I've never been challenged to think about the existence of God. I have always taken it for granted." Oh, kid. Those weren't advantages.

Moderate THIS, Huffington Post!

Still in the wake of the latest Richard Dawkins-induced brouhaha, a friend of mine responded to someone's assertion that there probably wasn't a Muslim university in the world's top 200 universities. The person asserting this was perpetuating Dawkins' stubborn refusal to face the issue of who does things like hand out Nobel prizes and make lists of the world's best universities, and hey, let's not forget the problematic nature of the phrase "Muslim university." As I say, my friend responded to this assertion, and his comment was judged, by whoever the Hell moderates the comments at Huffington Post these days, to be beyond the pale. Too horrifying to appear on the website. My friend's comment was removed. Here it is, in its entirety. Brace yourselves:

"At least one Muslim country made the top 200."

Wow! I know, right? What a horrible, disgusting thing to say! Who can blame HP for deleting it?

The thing is, this wasn't a one-time glitch. Similar comments posted by this guy are removed so frequently that it doesn't even surprise me any more, just makes me angrier. So why don't I go complain to HP, you ask? I did, and my report that something was wrong got an error message several times in a row. And at least one comment of mine was deleted. (I don't know how many of my comments had been published in the meantime.)

Something is wrong. Another one of my friend's deleted comments reads as follows:

"There is no archaeological evidence of Jesus' existence. There is some historical evidence but it is biased evidence. Other than that there is the Josephus' mention of James. And there is the Pilate Stone with Pontius Pilate's name on it."

That's much, much milder, not to mention more accurate, than many atheist comments which are published every day on HP and which stay up. I copied-and-pasted that last comment into a comment of my own. Later, in a comment which included my entire comment which had included his earlier comment in its entirely, my friend informed me that my comment had also been deleted. They haven't gotten around to deleting that one yet. And the deletions of my friend's comments happen much, much too often to be a coincidence. It's so obviously not a coincidence that I have to wonder whether my comment or comments being deleted is a coincidence. Some childish person (or persons) has been given an HP moderator's buttons and is abusing them maliciously. And/or, those moderating functions have been hacked by trolls. My inability to report this to HP through normal channels would seem to suggest the latter. Whatever. I'm not going to be quiet about this. The thought of being banned from a forum as effed up as this doesn't bother me much. On the other hand the thought that some grown-up at HP might eventually hear me and look into this, the possibility that this might eventually be straightened out, the very thought is sweet.

My Opinion Of Myself And Some Others. An Advertisement For Myself

I feel pretty good about what I write. I think I'm a good writer.

And suddenly today that started to worry me, when I contrasted it with remarks about writing by two of my favorite writers. One is by Kurt Vonnegut,from the preface to one of his books. I don't remember it word-for-word but it went something like this: "How do I feel about this book? I feel lousy about it. I feel lousy about all my books." Seemed he felt somewhat embarrassed that he hadn't be able to do better. The other remark is by Samuel Beckettand is more concise: "To write is to fail."

That's what two writers whom I find to be excellent -- Beckett especially -- have to say for themselves. Pretty close to outright apologizing for doing what they did. What I'm worried about is that perhaps they were so good in significant part because they were profoundly dissatisfied with themselves, and therefore constantly striving mightily to do better, and that, conversely, my satisfaction with my own work keeps it relatively mediocre. But you know what? I still think I'm pretty good. And people whose opinions I value highly also have praised my work.

I wouldn't say that it's a widespread opinion that I'm a good writer, because I don't think enough people know anything at all about me for any opinion about me to legitimately be called widespread. I'm not good at marketing my work. I'm more sure about this negative opinion of my marketing skills than about my positive opinion of my writing, because marketing skills can be measured objectively, in terms of numbers, and the quality of writing cannot. I won't tell you how few clicks this blog gets, because 1) I don't want you to cry or feel sorry for me, and 2) it's basically nunya bidniss nohow. But I need an agent. I had an agent once, a good one, but I lost him again, because I never finished the novel which got him interested in working for me, and by the time I finished another novel he had moved on to another profession. I got that agent by the sheerest and dumbest of sheer dumb luck, and unfortunately for me, finding an agent, a skilled person to market one's work, is itself a kind of marketing. (*sigh*)

And because I am not (yet) so hugely successful that counting my money and turning down business offers occupies all of my free time, and also because I am a bit of a schmuck, let's face it, I spend some time commenting on articles on Huffingtom Post, where they keep us schmucks coming back and clicking on their site and making them money with dumb things including badges, yes badges, and what inspired me to write this post was that today I noticed that ________* had received the Community Pundit badge, which comes with the perk that some of yr comments are conspicuously placed above the others immediately below the text of an article. I'm pretty sure that the Pundits don't actually get PAID or anything, still it irks me mightily than an absolute dolt and moron like ________ has been named a Pundit, whilst I have not.

Then again, do I really want to be in a club which would have ________ as a member? And how are Pundits really chosen? HP says:

"HuffPost Pundits are our most engaged and thought-provoking commenters. Pundit Badges are awarded based on a strong history of insightful comments,"

which sounds as if HP would have us believe that some actual human beings working (as unpaid interns?) for HP found ________ to be insightful and thought-provoking. Can that really be? If that's true it would be quite discouraging, for it would mean that some real bozos are driving the bus over there. Or are Pundit badges actually awarded like the other badges: by a machine which counts clicks, counts things like fans and friends and faves? That too would be discouraging, but in a different way: it would be yet another indication that HP comments section is just another internet flame war trying to pass itself off as a moderated "community."

In any case, sad for me that my life's empty enough that I care. May that change soon, completely and forever. From your lips, gentle readers -- from both of you -- to Andrew Wylie's ears.

*I considered writing ________'s handle in this post, but why do that?

Worship God Or This Homeless Person Will Starve!

1. An article by a theologian lecturing atheists in HP? How refreshing! It's been literally days since I've seen such a thing!

2. In some countries, there are enough shelters and kitchens to house and feed all the homeless, courtesy of the government, as is universal health care, and it's been that way for decades. I'm just saying, some Amurrkins should look around more.

3. Not all atheists are New Atheists. I'd never heard of the capitalized variety before I started hanging around HP Religion, and by sometime last year I realized I'm not one. (I don't say "bronze age" or give anachronistic and inaccurate depictions of ancient and Medieval history often enough.)

4. Much as I would like to believe that religion is sharply declining, I think many people, both atheists and non-, are making much too much of certain polls alleging a sharp decline in religion, because these polls are not distinguishing between atheists, agnostics, and the allegedly "spiritual but not religious," who of course are religious, but currently somewhat disorganized.

5. Schwartz claims that most of the world's religions are based on the "fight for the oppressed and the impoverished." Actually, they're based on theistic beliefs. That fight has always been optional. Articles like yours are manipulative appeals of the send-money-or-this-puppy-will-die variety: "Worship God or this homeless person will starve!" If the priorities of the billions of the world's Christians and Muslims were as Schwartz claims they are, human homelessness would've been thoroughly eradicated long, long ago.

Does The Huffington Post WANT Stupid Readers' Comments From Atheists?

Why would anyone want stupid comments all over their website? Well, it could be that they want to reinforce a stereotype of a certain group -- in this case, the stereotype of atheists making disparaging remarks about the history of religion without knowing that religion well.

The question in the title of this post occurred to me today when I saw that a comment on HP from a friend of mine had been deleted. He's pretty brainy, and regularly points out historical inaccuracies in other readers' comments. As do I. A couple of regular obnoxious know-it-alls we are, if you don't enjoy learning things. And clearly, stupid people don't. (That's why they're stupid.) Sometimes, when my friend or I point out that Constantine actually didn't revise the Bible, or that the development, written or oral, of the Old Testament has not as yet been traced back in time earlier than the Iron Age into the Bronze Age, or that many of the earliest Popes wrote in Greek instead of Latin, or that the status of dhimmi was offered to Zoroastrians as well as to Christians and Jews in Islamic states in earlier eras, or what have you, the person we're addressing, or a third party, will actually thank us, or even ask if we have reading tips for further information on the subject at hand. (Of course we do. How d'you think we got so friggin' smart?) Often, however, the person we're addressing (or a third party) reacts with hostility to our attempt to help. If they are atheists, they often (mistakenly) assume that I and my friends are believers. A couple of hardcore cases don't believe us if we happen to correct them and say that we're atheists. That's right -- they think we're Christians posing as atheists in order to trick them. (Or maybe it's just one, whom I encountered on more than one separate occasion, and whose handle I had not lovingly memorized the first time. I hope it's only one. That this would be a pattern would be quite discouraging.)

Yesterday I corrected one of the popular ahistorical memes concerning the history of religion in another reader's comment. That reader responded by asking me whether I was planning to sacrifice an animal or my first-born child. I said I was commenting in the interest of historical accuracy, with no religious belief and ergo no attempt to proselytize. The other reader only became more hostile and more bizarrely imaginative about me and my intentions, and after a brief to-and-fro I gave up.

Then today I learned of the above-mentioned deleted comment by my learned friend: he had not given up when I had, but replied to the last reply to me by the reader who got very angry at me and my fancy-pants book larnin'. I was very surprised that my friend's comment was deleted, both because it contained information which was, you know -- accurate; and because it was not one bit harsher in tone than the other person's comments, none of which were deleted.

Then I saw this HP article: Too Simple to Be Wrong: Atheism's Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit. And that's when I started to wonder whether some individuals who decide what sort of readers' comments on articles in HP Religion will appear on the website, and which won't, have a preference -- maybe subconscious. Maybe not. Maybe the one in certain individuals and the other in others -- for those comments by atheists which reek more of jackassery, all the better to portray atheists as jackasses. I was very disappointed, as soon as I saw the article's headline and read its first paragraph, a quote from Sam Harris, that the time when comments on this particular article were being accepted for consideration had passed, because I wanted to point out that I had repeatedly pointed out in my comments that I realized that the Bible had not been written in the Bronze Age, and that I had never been the slightest bit impressed by Sam Harris, indeed that I cringe when I think that Harris is a leader of the current atheist movement. Then I read the rest of the article and saw that its author also did not seem to realize that the Bible was not a Bronze-Age artifact, but more disappointing that that was the presentation of certain simpleminded attitudes bundled together as "Atheism's Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit" and not attributed specifically to certain simpledminded atheist individuals. Those of you who have seen Philadelphia,please recite along with me:

This is the essence of discrimination: formulating opinions about others not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in a group with assumed characteristics.

That's right, Dawg: that's what the Federal Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973 says. I don't ignore the individual merits of religious believers based on their membership in the group of believers. I don't assume that certain characteristics belong to the group of believers. I don't appreciate it when someone formulates an opinion about me based on assumptions they make about a whole group of people. Of course I don't. Nobody appreciates that sort of thing, and nobody should have to put up with it.

And hopefully it goes without saying that I hope that this suspicion that hit me today like a chill down my spine, about HP wanting certain sorts of dumb comments from me because I'm an atheist, so that they can say Hey look how dumb those atheists are, is dead wrong.

PS, May 30: This morning, in a Huffington Post reader's comment, I called another reader "a retard." I'm not at all proud of having said that, and to my great surprise, HP published it. Yet another HP reader commented on this Wrong Monkey blog post by insisting that I'm thinking way too hard about all this, and that the HP moderation is simply "arbitrary and capricious," a phrase which apparently is often used by lawyers.

Trust Me, There Are Trees in Forests

The Huffington Post is at it again, attacking "the idea that there is a conflict between religion and science." Alan Lurie, in his usual passive-aggressive way, admits the idea that such a conflict exists "is often presented by well-intended, educated individuals;" nevertheless, "the idea that religion has historically been opposed to science is simply an erroneous and unsupported construct that was created in the late 19th century, primarily as an anti-Catholic polemic. And it is an idea that all (yes, all) knowledgeable historians categorically reject."

I'll just bet that Lurie has a foolproof method for determining just exactly who is and who is not a "knowledgeable historian."

It's so absurd. Lurie is in effect categorically denying that there are any trees in forests, and claiming that all competent specialists in such matters agree with him. I think it's time to take a survey of tenured professors in History departments at leading universities and ask what they think of this. I think many of them might be quite surprised that people publishing in such a prominent outlet of the Huffington Post are asserting that "the idea" of a conflict between science and religion is "an erroneous and unsupported construct." As opposed to a fact of life known to just about everyone who's half-educated or better. How to go about proving that there are trees in forests? One obvious response to Lurie didn't occur to me for a while: the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. For many people -- for instance, me -- the very existence of the Index is a refutation of Lurie's thesis, as if a refutation were necessary. Forbidding people to read certain texts is the opposite of the freedom of thought which is an essential part of the conditions necessary in order for science to thrive. (But who even needs to be told such things? Well, Lurie needs to have such things pointed out to him, apparently, as do many of his colleague at Huffington Post Religion. Many, or most, or actually all of them. Can you imagine such a state of affairs?) In case some people actually need a little more, let me just provide the names of some people who have been on the Index: Maimonides. Johannes Scotus Eriugena. Copernicus. Bruno. Kepler. Francis Bacon. Galileo. Descartes. Hume. Kant. Erasmus Darwin. Comte.

Of course, I'm not actually addressing Lurie or his colleagues. I've pretty much given up on them on this point. In order to have arrived at such a position, they have had to be thoroughly immune to reason or plain fact concerning this point. I don't know how to debate such belief. All I can do is denounce it to third parties who might have been in danger of taking these guys seriously. Lurie writes:

"Over most of its existence, in fact, the Catholic Church was the center of open scientific investigation, supporting mathematicians, physicists, botanists and astronomers."

That's one way of putting it. Another way, of course, would be: between late antiquity and the Reformation, all Western European institutions of learning were controlled by the Catholic Church, and anyone who wanted to be a mathematician, physicist, botanist or astronomer had to do it on the Church's terms. Not that Protestants and Protestant institutions of learning have been consistently more pro-science: they've been sometimes more pro-science, sometimes less than Catholics, and they've always presented much less of a unity in this regard, as in others, than the Catholics. And of course the assertion that stating that religion and science are in conflict reflects anti-Catholic bigotry is another red herring: there are anti-Catholic bigots, and they may chime in against the picture of the Catholic Church in harmony with science, but that doesn't mean you have to be a bigot in order to point out that the picture is inaccurate.

And speaking of inaccurate pictues: Lurie writes: "the popular image of Galileo brought to trial in chains to face a sadistic Inquisition, where he uttered his defiant statement 'but it moves,' before being thrown into the papal dungeon, is a dramatic 19th century fabrication" This is not the first time I've read this business about chains and a dungeon in an article in Huffington Post Religion. Only problem is, I don't know who's asserting that Galileo was put in chains and thrown into a dungeon. I thought most everybody knew that Galileo was politely threatened with torture (which Lurie doesn't mention), recanted some of his scientific theories (which Lurie doesn't mention), spent the rest of his life under house arrest, during which time he wrote his magnum opus, which reversed the recantations (which Lurie doesn't mention) and was smuggled into Holland after his death, where, unlike in Italy at the time, it could be published (which Lurie doesn't mention).

This article is a perfect example of why you need to know your sources, know how reliable they are, and not simply trust someone because they're published in the Huffington Post, or TIME magazine -- or anywhere at all -- or because they're on PBS talking to Bill Moyers, and why ideally you'll familiarize yourself with the primary documants in the original languages, as well as knowing something about the people who edited those documents -- if you don't bypass the editions and go straight to the manuscripts.

Or, of course, if that's too much bother, you could simply trust me, hehe.

PC Language Rules Are Wrong

American Congregationalist church communities tend today to be very liberal. Which is very good. It may surprise some people -- perhaps even some Congregationalists -- to learn that the 17th century English Puritans were Congregationalists. Including the Pilgrims. Including the authorities who presided over the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 and 1693. As far as I know, no Congregationalists today will try to kill you for being a witch. But many of them are strong advocates of PC speech, which to my thinking demonstrates an unfortunate persistence of self-righteousness and the desire to control the actions and speech and, yes, thought of their neighbors. Yes, there has been definite improvement in the progress from killing witches to advocating PC speech, but, yes, there is significant room for improvement still.

What got me thinking about this today is that I have been attempting to debate against a pronounced advocate of PC speech in the Readers' Comments at Huffington Post. I say "attempting," because, ironically, it seems to me, HP, whose moderation is very PC, has no intention of publishing anywhere near all of my comments about PC speech, even though I carefully avoided all non-PC terminology in those comments.

But, of course, if PC is not actually about avoiding bad words, but is an attempt to restrict the free exchange of ideas, then there's nothing ironic about it at all. It's not about being kind or caring, because, as we all know, PC speech can be thoroughly unkind and prejudiced, while spectacularly un-PC speech can be thoroughly kind and bravely loving. If we don't actually all know this yet, that's what this movie is for, which I very frequently recommend: Bob Fosse's Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffmann as Lenny Bruce. Watch it while you still can.

I Am A Remora Fish --

-- metaphorically speaking, of course. I'm referring to my blog, and the relatively small ripples it makes in the currents of Internet traffic, compared to the big sharks, the popular media outlets. I swim along in the sharks' wakes, too small for them to take much notice, and feed off of the crud that gets stuck in their gills; that is to say, while they rarely have occasion to pay much attention to someone like me, if they post a reader's comment of mine which includes a link to my blog, just that one link can be a big thing from my point of view. Unlike an actual remora fish, I could grow into a shark someday. Don't laugh, it's possible.

The Huffington Post posts some of my comments which contain such links, but not all. They decline to publish some of my comments which don't contain links. Their Religion section seems to be more closely moderated than most, and comments from atheists on articles by HP's most frequent atheist contributor, Chris Stedman, seem to have a particularly hard time seeing the light of day. There are many, many atheist readers who comment regularly in the HP Religion section, and you'd expect to see a lot of their comments under articles by their main atheist writers, but no, they're scarce.

I think that's because a lot of the comments atheists make on Stedman's articles are somewhat similar to one I posted this morning on his latest contribution, a comment which HP has yet to post, and I'm not holding my breath that it ever will be. A total of 7 comments have been posted after the article has been up for over 24 hours, a very small number of comments for any HP article, and none are currently showing as pending moderation. A Christian college has recently given permission for a secular student group to operate on campus, and Stedman is jubilant about it, that's the big news in his latest article. My comment, which I'm not optimistic will ever appear, says that I was instantly reminded of a line from Blazing Saddles.Cleavon Little, the new black sheriff of the Western town of Rock Ridge, has just been secretly thanked in the middle of the night for services rendered by one of the citizens who reacted in a severely negative and racist way when he first showed up. After thanking him and giving him a homemade pie, she asks him not to mention that they spoke. Little is pleased at the progress his reputation in town seems to be making, but Gene Wilder, the sheriff's sidekick, puts things in a cynical perspective with the line Stedman's article reminded me of: "Another twenty-five years and you'll be able to shake their hands in broad daylight."

That's exactly the sort of snark HP's moderation apparently does not want to see under articles by Stedman, who, although claiming to represent atheists, is always criticizing them as aggressive, in-your-face, confrontational, angry, critical -- in short they seem to be just too darn atheist to Stedman, who on the other hand always has lots of nice things to say about his religious friends. I have religious friends too. But when I talk about religion versus atheism, you can almost always tell which side I'm on. When Stedman writes or talks about religion and atheism, he seems constantly at pains to avoid suggesting that there is any conflict between the two, and to distance himself from anyone who ever would suggest such an awful things. I've said it before and I'll say it again: with "representatives" of atheism like Stedman, who needs saboteurs? He represents us just about exactly as well as Uncle Tom represented discontented slaves. (Ironically, the HP moderation often declines to post critical comments of mine, which has often prompted me to come here instead and really let it rip, as I have done today, and then they have posted a link to the Wrong Monkey blog post which goes much further than the initial comment which went too far. We'll see whether that happens again today.)

The Cognitive Dissonance of Mother Teresa's Defenders

Celeste Owen-Jones has written a ridiculous response to some criticisms of Mother Teresa. The very end of her article contains the jist of the whole: [...]if Mother Teresa did such a bad job helping others, why not save that time spent criticizing her to instead try to make a difference in this world?

I really wonder, would Ms Owen-Jones respond thusly to criticism of anyone else? Would even a publication as silly as her employer, The Huffington Post, publish such a defense of anyone else? It's absurd in several different ways.

Perhaps most obviously, Mother Teresa's critics ARE trying to improve the lot of the sick and destitute in Calcutta -- by shining a bright light on the shortcomings of Mother Teresa's clinics, they're trying to improve the chances that these people will receive competent medical care, in sanitary conditions, by people with enough compassion to give pain medication to someone who's in agony.

The author seems to think that the last sentence of her article is somehow more than an attempt to change the subject and impune the character of the critics. But how does she know how much money and time Mother Teresa's critics give to charity and to the support of more humane governmental policies, and other efforts to help mankind? She doesn't know, obviously. Rather than even attempt a substantive response to the criticism, she hurls ridiculous, childish insults. When has it ever made sense to respond to criticism of an historical figure by asking the critics to shut up and go forth and do good works (and assume that they don't do good works already)? But perhaps the final words of Ms Owen-Jones' article actually are more than a change of subject and a silly insult. More, and not in a good way. If you look around through the readers' comments under this article in The Huffington Post, it seems that "Why doncha try ta do better n Muddah Teresa, huh? Ya ijit, ya!" combined with a complete obliviousness to the substance of the criticisms -- that the clinics were filthy breeding grounds for disease, that hypodermic needles were rinsed in cold water before being used again, instead of being properly sterilized and instead of accepting abundant numbers of clean needles which people tried to give to the clinics, that doctors and nurses who volunteered to treat the patients were turned away and the patients attended to by nuns without medical training instead, among other accusation which are even more chilling -- is the rallying cry of a veritable horde of pious fools blind and deaf to the faults of saints and soon-to-be-saints. It's obvious that Hindus aren't the only ones with sacred cows. How do we reason with people determined to remain unreasonable? 

PS, 5 March 2024: I wrote this 11 years ago entirely on the say-so on Christopher Hitchens: he had denounced Mother Teresa, and I had assumed he must be right. I no longer consider Christopher Hitchens to have been infallible. I no longer consider him to have been particularly bright, nor do I assume that he was well-informed on any given topic. So what do I think of Mother Teresa now? I know next to nothing about her. The difference between now and when I wrote this essay is that now, I KNOW that I know next to nothing about her.

When Are "Angry Atheists" Actually Angry, And Why?

In this Wrong Monkey blog post, I took Max Tegmark to task for this Huffington post article in which he insists that there is no inherent conflict between science and religion. A week after that article, Tegmark followed up with this brief piece in which he professes to be amazed by all the negative responses to the first piece by "angry atheists," whom he proceeds to condescendingly lecture, and blame for religious fundamentalism.

Several stages of this process so far have been very familiar to any regular reader of Huffington Post's Religion section: a scientist with some credentials appears on the Huffington Post, says that there is no reason why science and religion should be in conflict, gets a strong negative response, calls his critics "angry atheists," and proceeds to blame allegedly angry atheists for religious fundamentalism.

A bizarre accusation of atheists, you say? Well of course it is. A bizarre description of the history and present relationship of science and religion? You don't have to tell me. But that's the sort of hooey they're selling these days on HP Religion. It's also what the Templeton Foundation is selling. If you examine the bios of the contributors to the Religion section and note the number of recipients of grants from Templeton, you must surely agree that to call the relationship between HP Religion and Templeton "cozy" would be a great understatement, and that to call it "cordial" would be a bigger understatement still.

What makes Tegmark's case stand out as particularly strange is the combination of his professed amazement at the negative response he gets when he posts the standard Templeton nonsense, and the fact that from 2006 to 2009, he awarded grants on behalf of Templeton. He's not merely one of the usual suspects -- he funded many of the usual suspects.

I suppose that it's somehow possible that Teagmark was completely insulated, until a week ago, from the public response the sort of "moderate and enlightened religious" propaganda which he pushes, and which is funded by neocons like Templeton, tends to get. It reminds me more than a little of Renault being "shocked, shocked!" to discover that gambling was going on at Rick's, but I suppose that it's possible that Tegmark's intellectual cocoon was that solid until last week. And I suppose that it's possible that many of the responses he's gotten are angry. I have to guess, Tegmark doesn't quote a one of them. I would guess that the typical atheist response he's gotten is similar to the typical reader's comment on these two pieces on HP. I wouldn't call them "angry" as much as "very, very unimpressed." Tegmark complains about "ad hominem" attacks. Well jeepers, Professor, I don't know what to say to that except that if you're going to discuss science and religion in public, you really ought to be wearing your big boy pants and shrug it off if some responses get personal.

But can we believe Tegmark when he says he's shocked by the response to his nonsense? Or is he worse than clueless: pretending to be clueless and deliberately stirring shit? Arianna must love the huge volume of clicks he's generating.

But if he really is sincere, and if "angry" really is a better description of the response he's getting than "unimpressed," still I think that he and purveyors of similar simplistic malarkey should ask themselves: is it more precise to call these people "angry atheists," or atheists who are angry when they're around, atheists who are angry at them? And perhaps with perfectly good cause?

Conflict?! Ha! What Conflict! (Shut Up! I Said There's No Conflict!)

Once again, the Huffington Post has dug up a prominent scientist to laughingly poo-poo the notion of a conflict between science and religion. Max Tegmark, in this case, an astrophysicist at MIT. Dixit Tegmark:

"So is there a conflict between science and religion? The religious organizations representing most Americans clearly don't think so. Interestingly, the science organizations representing most American scientists don't think so either"

Kudos, Professor Tegmark, a lot of people agree with you. However, the soundness of a proposition is not a matter of popular vote. If you had always settled questions about physics by popular vote, your career as a legitimate physicist never would've gotten very far. (Although who knows how far you might have gone as a Christian clergyman and apologist.) If you'd asked the same question 500 years ago, the agreement would have been unanimous or nearly so. At least publicly. But then, you might have gotten killed just for posing such a question publicly, depending on how you phrased it and how clear it was that you were not going to accept any answer except "No, there is no conflict." The fact that such questions could be fatal could conceivably have meant that people's private opinions about them were much different than their public statements. We may never know how great such differences between public and private were. And never mind 500 years ago, 321 years ago Puritans killed some witches in Salem. And I think it was about 263 years ago that Hume was denied a chair in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh because of his positions on religion. (And Hume never publicly admitted to being an atheist.) And the Spanish Inquisition wasn't shut down until 177 years ago. And never mind all of that -- go to Texas or Mississippi or Pakistan today and talk to some scientists there -- off the record, for their sake -- and ask them what they think of the relationship between religion and science right now.

I have a feeling that Tegmark either doesn't want to hear any of that, or that he would laugh in an infuriating way and tell me that I have a twisted and inaccurate conception of history, somehow. But wait a minute, is Tegmark's assertion about organizations representing most Americans and most scientists even correct to begin with? It's not impressively presented. He continues:

"For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science states that science and religion 'live together quite comfortably, including in the minds of many scientists.'"

Presumably some person affiliated with the Association said that. Which person? Where, when? What reason have we to believe that this statement reflects some sort of popular vote conducted within the Association, or its leadership, or sumpin? If Tegmark knows, he doesn't seem to care. And that's the only example he gives of scientists seeing a conflict-free relationship between religion and science. And as far as the the religious organizations representing "most Americans" are concerned, he provides more unsourced quotes. For a physicist? Not so much with the details!

But he continues, and this is why his article is in the Huffington Post, because this is the Huffington Post party line:

"This shows that the main divide in the U.S. origins debate isn't between science and religion, but between a small fundamentalist minority and mainstream religious communities who embrace science."

All is well! Pay no attention to those fanatical atheists trying to tell you that science and religion are in conflict! (How can you tell which ones are fanatical? They're the ones saying that there is such a conflict!) There is no typhus in Moscow! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

For a conflict which doesn't exist, and which furthermore only a small fringe group of wild-eyed fanatics believe exist, some people spend an extraordinary amount of time and energy insisting that it doesn't exist. For a handful of people at the Huffington Post, and some of their favorite contributors, and the Templeton Foundation, for example, it seems to be their full-time job.

PS, February 19: ThinkCreeps, an HP reader, informs me that Tegmark ran a grants program for Templeton for several years. So strictly speaking it was perhaps not that Tegmark reminded me of Templeton so much as that Templeton has closely resembled Tegmark for a while. Thanks for the tip, ThinkCreeps!

"McBain To Base: Under Attack From Commie Nazis!"

The Huffington Post showed this photograph of a billboard in Iowa as an example of right-wing nutjobs comparong Obama to Hitler:

The Huffington Post clearly takes issue with such comparisons. It's not at all clear, however, whether they mind a bit when someone compares Lenin to Hitler. Well, I object to it. And I think Stalin was much, much worse than Lenin, but I also object when someone compares Stalin, or Mao, to Hitler. (Comparisons of Pol Pot and Hitler are valid. If you can find a Marxist or a Leninist who thinks Pol Pot was just great, please let me know. If you know of any Stalinists still living, that also would be news to me.) If you think Stalin was as bad, or worse, than Hitler, I've said it before, I'll very likely say it again: get Stalin: A Political Biography by Isaac Deutscher, the 2nd edition from 1966, read pages 566 through 569and then get back to us, and if you haven't changed your mind, tell us where you think Deutscher is wrong. (Go ahead and read the whole book while you're at it, and other things by Deutscher, it will do you no harm.) If you think either I or Deutscher is praising Stalin as a glorious hero and role-model, well, you just haven't been paying attention, and I'm mostly likely going to shift my attention to people who are paying attention.

And if you're one of those people who believe that Communist regimes have murdered 100 million people -- or if you believed it a decade ago and have revised that round number upward since then -- read this.

Real-Life Bigotry, And My Too-Hot-For-Huffpo Response!

I don't know whether this is particularly brilliant, but it's okay, and I haven't been posting a lot lately, and frigging lame-ass Huffington Post didn't post my first attempt to reply to “I can tell you how the catholics[...]" and that was almost 24 hours ago so it looks like they're not going to post it, and below is my 2nd attempt, and who knows when or if they'll post that. (The moderation on HP Religion continues to be messed up. As you can see, in this exchange I'm not even the anti-religion party. But I think I may have ticked off some unbalanced obsessive ueber-troll who's gotten herself the position of HP Community Moderator and hangs around the Religion section and has made a project of me. Or maybe it's just messed-up business as usual.)

The Rev. James Martin, S.J., wrote the first HP piece of his which I like, a satire of the religious views of today's GOP, and a Bigoted Nimrod responded:

FIRST BN: Oh, this is rich coming from a Jesuit. They practically invented money-grubbing. Say "Father," why don't you tell us about the Jesuits and the slave trade?

ME: Why don't you tell us about a religion that never was involved in the slave trade?

SECOND BN: I can tell you how the Catholics got all up in bed with the Nazis if you wanna hear that one...

ME: I've heard that one. And you didn't answer my question: what religion was never involved in the slave trade? Even some Quakers owned slaves, although Quakers were a very strong force in the political movement which finally abolished slavery in the US. Have you heard about Maximilian Kolbe? Or Bernhard Lichtenberg? How about Kurt Gerstein? Ever read any Heinrich Böll? Joseph Roth?Franz Werfel? Alfred Döblin?How about regarding people as individuals instead of as members of a group? And while I'm at it --

"[The Jesuits] practically invented money-grubbing."

-- are you KIDDING me? Money was around for thousands of years before there were Jesuits, does FIRST BN really think the people who invented the first money didn't rig their cool new system in their own favor, the way rich people have rigged the US tax code? Does he really think something very similar to money-grubbing wasn't going on long before there was money, when trade was mostly barter? I think I'm going to disagree with just about any statement in the form of: "Everything is the ______ fault," whether you fill in the blank with "Catholics'," "Muslims'," "rich people's," "Mormons'," "Jews'," "Germans'," "Devil's," or whatever else. The world is actually more complicated that that.