Someone Suggested That We "Ban The Cross"

The more I think about that rallying cry, "Let's ban the cross!" the more aggravated I get.

Unless the dude was just satirizing things like "Let's ban burkas," in which case, good one, he got me! Or if he means that crucifixion should be banned. I'm down with that, because crucifixion is a particularly cruel method of execution. But I don't think that's what he means.

I'm afraid this guy really meant it, but what exactly does he have in mind -- confiscating things, smashing them up because they don't coincide with his world view? I'm assuming that this, unfortunately, isn't a joke. New Atheists, not all of them, but a few of the more excitable ones, do say things like this now and then. When the Taliban or ISIS actually do things like that, they're first in line to denounce it, but they rarely if ever seem to see how much their words have in common with some of the deeds they denounce.

And they're also first in line, whenever Islamist extremist make headlines, to demand things like "banning Islam," which of course is about as stupid as trying to "ban the cross."

Are we talking about crosses on government property, or everywhere? I assume the crosses on rosaries would be included -- how many millions of those crosses are there? Plus all the non-rosary crucifixes on necklaces, earrings, bracelets, etc.

does this maniac want to destroy only 3-D crosses, or is he also going after depictions of crosses in paintings, and in books about art which have reproductions of those paintings?

I can't imagine that this guy has thought this through.

It's clear that I'm against the suggestion of banning the cross, right? I think it's a completely cuckoo-bananas idea. And even most New Atheists, I believe, would not go along with it.

Well -- maybe most of them would. It's not as if they ever do anything practical or meaningful, in their capacities as New Atheists.

There are pictures of crosses on this blog, does this bozo want to come after my blog? You know what, there's a picture of a cross in one of his online avatars as well. I wonder whether he'd make an exception for satirical and/or obscene or scatological anti-religious pictures. If not, he'd not only have to destroy his own avatar somehow, he'd have to go after a lot of images made by and for other New Atheists.

When someone suggests destroying every copy of the Koran, New Atheists don't generally get upset and say Sit down and shut up you idiot. As a matter a fact, although, obviously, they're incapable of destroying every Koran, they have destroyed a few, and acted very proud of themselves, like they think they accomplished something. At least one of the leaders of New Atheism, PZ Myers, piled garbage and excrement onto a copy of the Koran and took pictures of it and put them on the Internet.

Often New Atheists claim that they're against all religions equally, and that may actually be true in some cases. Often they'll come right out and say that they're more against Islam than any other religion. Typically, they'll add that Islamophobia doesn't exist.

And, they often look at public opinion polls saying so-and-so-many percent of Amurrkins would never vote for an atheist for President, and they wonder why. The atheists who are currently most famous for being atheists are fanatically, stupidly Islamophobic, and generally crude and clueless on other religions too. They don't go around demanding that the cross be banned, but they're not that far from such stupid public statements either. They've bred the subculture where a call to ban the cross generates hardly a batted eye or a Hey what do you mean you moron. They don't denounce stupid anti-religious statements, they make constant excuses for them. And they are, for worse, for much worse, currently the public face of atheism. Vote for Myers or Sam Harris for President? Neither one could get elected dog-catcher of Portland. If either of them ran against a jihadist for POTUS, the jihadist's chances would be good.

Atheists who aren't idiots need to stand up to the idiots. For our own good. Having the answer to one question in common with them isn't enough to overlook their stupid, hare-filled fanaticism.

Will We Ever Have Any Idea How Widespread Medieval Atheism Was?

I've long wondered whether atheism has not become much more widespread in Christendom since the 17th century, as it sometimes seems, but whether what has changed has been first and foremost the acceptability of publicly expressing doubts about God's existence, doubts which were there all along. Sometimes people don't see something, not because it's hidden, but because it's been there in plain sight for so long that they no longer think about it. The fact that "early" atheism, from the 17th century on into the 18th, seems not to have developed so much as to have suddenly appeared, fully formed, without a long process of individual people wrestling with the issue, being torn between faith and atheism and going back and forth between the two, and atheist positions gradually developing theough this process, suggests that atheism was there all along and waited only for permission to record its existence in published writing. Who knows how much it had previously circulated in private letters and conversation.

But just recently some other things have struck me, things not at all hidden, facing me the whole time in plain sight, just waiting for me to notice: medieval proofs of God. For instance, the Quinque viæ or Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas in his magnum opus Summa Theologiae.

The argument of the unmoved mover, the argument of the first cause, the argument from contingency, the argument from degree, and the teleological argument: Aquinas' five proofs of God, as beloved today as ever among many theologians and as tedious as ever to the rest of us.

In Aquinas' day Latin was the primary written language from Iceland, to Lithuania, to Hungary, to the non-Muslim half of of Spain, and everywhere in that Latin-writing region Catholicism was firmly in control, and from Aquinas' time no piece of Latin writing has survived containing anything even remotely resembling something which could even be misconstrued as an atheistic sentiment. Among the Catholics were a few Jews, as monotheistic as they were. And on the borders of this Latin world were territories controlled by Greek Orthodox Christians and Muslims who were all every bit as monotheistic as the Catholics and Jews. And Aquinas wasn't writing for an audience in China or southern Africa.

So who was Aquinas arguing with?

Can it be that he and the many other Medieval theologians who constructed proofs of the existence of God were arguing above all with themselves, because subconsciously even they knew how ridiculous religion was?

Seriously, At This Point, What Is NOT Wrong With Kansas?

Let's give the smart people remaining in Kansas some time to move, and subsidize their moving expenses if need be, then just let Kansas secede and build a big high fence around the fucker. In 20 years all human life will have disappeared, and we can take down the fence, annex the territory again and start from scratch.

Okay, I don't really mean that. But it's alarming and confounding. I wish I had a real suggestion for what to do about things like this.

Over-Optimistic Tolerant Christians, Today And In Earlier Eras

There was a time in Europe when homosexuality was considered neither a sin nor a crime nor a perversion nor a shame. Top politicians, including some Roman Emperors, indulged in it without feeling any need to hide it for fear of scandal. The most popular philosopher in ancient Europeeven asserted that every man should engage in it, and people didn't condemn him for it, they barely batted an eye. (He's still the most popular philosopher in Europe, and in the Western Hemisphere, too, but back then more people actually read his works, and his views on sexuality were better known and less liable to startle anyone.)

Then all that changed: Christians took over, and among many other sweeping changes made homosexuality a sin and a shame and a perversion. Gay life, along with many other perfectly normal things, went underground.

Then beginning in the 12th century there was a big thaw in European prohibitions of love -- in Europe itself that is, because many of the Europeans who took Christianity most seriously were in the Middle East, giving grief to other people, and the gay -- by gay I mean happy, but they were happy because of the increase in freedom -- the gay courtiers had a heyday, the "shocking" troubadours sang their songs and even dared to write some of them down, so that we today can read them. It must've seemed to some Europeans as if all of that stern intolerant Christianity was over. Not that any of the goyim dared to go so far as to declare that he was no longer a Christian at all. Not on paper, anyway.

But no, of course, the grim sternness was not gone for good. Around the end of the 13th century the Crusades fizzled out, the Crusaders returned home, gay court life and troubadour songs declined and the Inquisition began. Suddenly, many parties were over in a very big way. But the forces of tolerance and freedom -- of LIFE, as Nietzsche nicely puts it --fought back again in the Renaissance. Not only were some tendencies asserting themselves in culture which were quite un-Christian in their sensuality and openness of philosophical speculation: such tendencies were promoted, even embodied, by many churchmen -- even by some Popes. The Popes who in later eras have commonly been referred to as the "bad" Popes.

Then came the Reformation, a period of great confusion which shows that the confusion of SBNR is nothing new. Luther, the greatest of the Protestants, was protesting against the un-Christian character of Rome and the Vatican in that era, which Nietzsche and I admire so much. But some people thought at the time, and for a long time afterward, and apparently many still do today, that Luther, rather than objecting that certain traditional Christian rules seemed not to be applied any more, was himself overturning all of society's rules. Somehow they mistook, and even now mistake this grim authoritarian fundy who insisted on stricter Bible interpretation -- his own interpretation and not the Vatican's, and that was the whole essence of his conflict with the Vatican -- who saw ghosts and witches and told noblemen to put down rebelling peasants with the greatest possible severity, peasants who thought they'd been following him -- somehow people mistook and mistake this Bible-thumper for Leon Trotsky.

But things happen they way they do and not always in a way which makes sense, and so some freedoms Luther never wanted to say were achieved in his name, while on the other hand we got things which were more his speed, such as Puritanism.

And the Catholics, unfortunately, instead of strengthening the un-Christian tendencies to which Luther objected, and which many overly-optimistic Renaissance artists and philosophers must've thought were here to stay, went 180 degrees the other way and attempted to out-Christian him with the Counter-Reformation.

And now many progressive Christians are celebrating their recent turn toward tolerance and pro-gay-rights positions and are acting as if they think these changes are somehow guaranteed to be permanent, and that there's no cognitive dissonance involved in being a progressive Christian. They've been so pleased with themselves and the way that they've pruned a few branches of intolerance off of some of Christianity that they're giving no thought to the roots from which that intolerance grows, again and again. If the core intolerance is not dealt with -- and ignoring or denying the history of Christian intolerance is not dealing with it -- then it has not been eradicated.

An Open Letter to Eliot Daley

Mr Daley, you've told us a thing or two about us, now I'm going to return the favor:

You say you want to understand us better, you say you're motivated by curiosity, and you may well believe what you say, but I don't believe it. I think if you wanted to understand atheism, you would understand it much better than you do. The same goes for several other HP authors who have written articles which they say are friendly attempts to reach out to atheists, but which the atheists tend to find more condescending and insulting than friendly. I think that what you really want, deep down, like any true Christian, is not to understand us but to convert us. The core mission of all Christians has been to go forth and teach the whole world. Teach them to be Christians. The smug intolerance has always been part and parcel of Christianity. I think those in our society who really want to understand religion and atheism become atheists, and have for a few centuries now.

Perhaps you find that incorrect, unfair and insulting. If so, we're about even.