Lay Theism

I really enjoy listening to NPR and This American Life… I actually pick up TAL from the free podcast most of the time.  I am currently listening to the latest episode where this poor woman named Trisha was moved by the good works of a decent man (who happens to be a Christian):

This past Christmas a story swept the internet about a football coach at a Christian high school in Texas who inspired his team’s fans to root for the opposition: a team from the local juvenile correctional facility. Among the thousands of emails that the coach received in response to his actions, one stood out to him. Trisha Sebastian mentioned her loss of faith, and coach Hogan got a message from God that he was meant to bring her back. We eavesdrop on their phone calls.

Problem is, she sent him an e-mail.  She was not just moved, but moved to action.  She had a friend that had died of colon cancer a few years earlier and never could reconcile this with her Catholic faith (”very lapsed Catholic”).  She also made the mistake of saying that she is “borderline agnostic”… a big mistake.  After this admission, there was a protracted exchange where God “moved his spirit” repeatedly to witness to her about “the idea of God”.  His first e-mail response to her even included the admonishment “I expect to hear back from you, young lady”.

They spoke on the phone and with permission Trisha recorded the call.  It really went off the rails when Coach Hogan dragged Hitler into the conversation in the context of “objective good” and “objective evil”:

Hogan: If you say “Good” is only people’s opinion it stems from our own… [stammer]… you define true for you and I define true for me then how do you reconcile that with Hitler saying it is true that if we can eliminate Jews and other people on the planet then it will be a better planet because we are a superior race?  And he of course he gets his world view from Charles Darwin.

Sebastian: Right.. Wait. Wait Wait…

And that’s where he pretty much lost her.  I’m sure there was plenty of nonsense and weirdness before this, but she took a GIANT step away from him when he went there.  There are so many issues with that asinine statement, it’s difficult to know where to begin.

1. The concept of “race” to Darwin, Hilter, and modern science are very different.
2. Hilter was a Christian (aka, Hitler was not an Atheist)
3. Darwin was correct about Evolution (it’s a fact)

 
It’s a shame that we have to live with the legacy of Darwin’s relative ignorance about the similarities of men.  At the time (150 years ago), class, geographic isolation, religion, and extreme differences in culture and skin pigment contributed to the classification of people as coming from different races.  While evolution certainly was responsible for the genetic variations Darwin and others observed, we know now that there is common ancestry of ALL humans less than 8,000 generations ago.  It certainly wasn’t the Tower of Babel, The Great Flood, or some other cataclysm that caused our differences.

I wish I had more time, more energy, and more knowledge (I am only a laytheist, after all) with which to explain and debunk Christian bullshit, but there are so many angles… if you aren’t happy with scientific comparisons, just compare to other religions.  That should be enough to convince anyone that religion was made up solely by men at different, overlapping times all over the world.

Why would one be better than the next?

Trisha, I’m so sorry about your friend.  The truth is that she had a groups of cells in her colon malfunction and go bad.  In what sounds like a fairly serious cell breakdown, the cancer was virilent enough to cause the rest of her body to ultimately lose. Now, do you really think that this is a mechanism that God put in place to eliminate some people for reasons we can’t know? If so, why are there so goddammed many mysterious ways for the body to break down and die?  Wouldn’t two or three be adequate? Is suffering necessary?  Why have we been able to permanently eliminate some previously fatal diseases and maladies?  Doesn’t it make more sense that it’s a product of millions of years of evolution and change…?  And that sometimes the shit just breaks?

Agnostic, Atheism, History, Religion, Science belief, bible, Catholic, Christian, darwin, evolution, faith, turd burgers

This piece ran in my local paper over the weekend, but I like this version better because it’s not as heavily edited.  Please to enjoy:

Story of evolution can be seen as comedy of errors –

Scientists say intelligent design doesn’t account for amusing anatomical quirks

By FAYE FLAM
Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA — “Oh what a piece of work is man,” wrote Shakespeare, long before Darwin suggested just how little work went into us. Somehow, that same process that gave us reason, language and art also left us with hernias, flatulence and hiccups.

One argument scientists often make against so-called intelligent design — the idea that evolution cannot by itself explain life — is that on closer inspection, we look like we’ve been put together by someone who didn’t read the manual, or at least did a somewhat sloppy job of things.

Viewed as products of evolution, however, our anatomical quirks start to make sense, says University of Chicago fossil hunter and anatomy professor Neil Shubin, author of the recent book Your Inner Fish. And by focusing on our less lofty traits, evolutionary biology can help dispel one of the most egregious and even tragic fallacies surrounding Darwinian evolution — that it moves toward perfection, with man at the apex of some towering ladder.

Evolution of hiccups

That misreading of evolution has been connected to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, with the Nazis extending the man-as-ideal notion to blue-eyed blond German-man-as-ideal notion.”Darwin didn’t believe it, but some, who saw it through a more religious light, tended to want to interpret evolution as a steady march toward the pinnacle of humanity,” says University of Pennsylvania ethicist Art Caplan, who has written extensively on the eugenics movement.

By today’s understanding, evolution by natural selection doesn’t march toward anything — it just modifies existing creatures to better compete in ever-shifting environments.

Understanding something as seemingly trivial as the evolution of hiccups can help clear up some profound misperceptions on the nature of life and humanity.

The sound of a hiccup echoes back to our very distant past as fish and amphibians some 375 million years ago, says Shubin. It’s really just a spasm that causes a sharp intake of breath followed by a quick partial closing of our upper airway with that flap of skin known as the glottis. It’s best if you can nip it in the first couple of hics, he says.

It’s much harder to stop once you’ve let yourself get up to 10. By that point you’ve reverted to an ancient breathing pattern orchestrated by the brain stem that once helped amphibians breath, letting water pass the gills without leaking into the lungs.

“Tadpoles normally breathe with something like a hiccup,” Shubin says.

The theme of his book is that we owe much of our anatomy to our animal ancestors. “Parts that evolved in one setting are now jury-rigged to work in another,” he says. “When you look at the human body, you see layer after layer of history inside of us.”

The first layer is what we share with chimpanzees and gorillas. The next goes back to mice and cows, while further down, you get to the relatively underappreciated layers we share with fish — which include the backbone and basic layout of the body.

More at the Houston Chronicle -

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5732109.html

Pick up the book on Amazon -

Your Inner Fish

Atheism, Religion darwin, evolution, fish, intelligent design