the Godless Federation

[thanks to Hemant Mehta]

When I was growing up, I was -- I'll go ahead and admit it -- a Star Trek fan. I totally lost interest in all things Trek YEARS ago when it became rote and unwatchable (some might argue that happened about, oh, forty years ago, but for me it was about 1996).

Still, I can stand by some of the things Star Trek was all about: tolerance, acceptance, science, exploration and the triumph of human ingenuity. One thing Star Trek was always known for was its neutrality when it came to (human) religion. Rarely, VERY rarely was God or religion mentioned at all. It wasn't explicitly atheist, but it surely didn't drag religion into things at all...

Which is all fine and good, except for this guy:


WOW!!! Just... wow... The fundamentalist geekery! It's just all too much! Talk about getting worked up over nothing! My favorite part is that the first three minutes are him showing off all his cool Star Trek schwag! heheheh... I bet Wil Wheaton will be posting on this one soon enough. :)

Bill Maher has crossed the line!

I posted about Bill Maher's new documentary, Religulous, recently.

The studio releasing Religulous has just put up a new website, disbeliefnet.com, a reference to beliefnet.com.

Good stuff abounds here: lots of tongue-in-cheek (and not-so-tongue-in-cheek) criticism of the Big Important Religions; some fun being poked at the fun-poke-worthy Raelians; and meaningless polls (that you don't seem to be able to actually answer, but oh well).

Unfortunately, this site crosses a line! Check out the following image from the "Miscellaneous Faiths" section. What do you see:
Don't see it? Look closer...

That's right! Maher and his team of antireligious apologists have lumped the Flying Spaghetti Monster into "Miscellaneous Faiths." According to disbeliefnet.com, the world's one true faith is just as made up as Heavan's Gate, Scientology, Satanism and the Church of the Subgenius!

Can you believe this!? I hope that one day, Maher will see the light and be touched by His noodly appendage!

But anyway, my favorite is the list of links to REAL religious websites entitled "You won't believe what people believe."

I'm starting to get really excited about this movie...

------------------
BONUS: How many of the misc. faith symbols can you identify without looking it up? I got them all but the first two (though the first one, clearly, has something to do with THC).

[ht to Friendly Atheist]

Religiocity Survey

[via PZ and Richard Dawkins]
Do you have a spare 30 minutes? Go take this survey, part of honest-to-goodness scholarly scholarly research. I'll be curious to see what the end results of this study are.

Fox News: Officially a parody of itself

Right on the heels of Fox News implying that Barack Obama was showing off a his "terrorist fist jab"*, Fox News shows its true colors again.

I don't know the context of this screen capture, but the caption here pretty much speaks for itself. Can you imagine the outrage, OUTRAGE I TELL YOU, that we'd see on Fox News if, say, MSNBC had something equally rude about McCain's wife, how it was inappropriate, uncalled for and just plain rude?

Oh, and who can forget THIS wonderful piece of "fair and balanced" commentary, where she not only confuses Obama and Osama, but then says that we should assassinate them "both if we could." Sigh...


It's going to be a long election season, and I'll be both horrified and entertained with the follies of Fox News in the coming months.

* Here's the video of the terrorist fist jab, for anyone who's missed this story. First off, nice job with the sly little implication that the presidential frontrunner is a terrorist... Secondly, this whole segment is clearly a thinly-veiled scare piece about how OH MY GOD, OBAMA IS GOING TO BLACKIFY AMERICA!!!! And lastly, how out of touch can you be? "Is that sort of a symbol young people get ." Come on, it's 2008. What the hell kind of "body language expert" is unfamiliar with this COMPLETELY MAINSTREAM gesture?!!?! Good Christ.

Lots o' politics lately

Wow, that's a lot of politics posts lately. Coming up later this week: Part IV of my personal religious history series, plus a book review, review of the latest Doctor Who, and (let's be honest here) probably some more rants on politics.

Compare and Contrast: McCain and Religion

As I was writing that last post, my wife said I should read Obama's books before posting it. Surely, an excerpt of one speech is a remarkably incomplete picture of a presidential candidate's stance on religion. There is much more to the story than that, and she's right: I should read his books.

But for me it comes down to this: whatever a person's private prejudices may be, religion should not dictate policy, and I am DELIGHTED that Obama acknowledged this: even if God tells your neighbor Abraham to murder his kid doesn't mean you shouldn't call the police when you see a knife at poor Isaac's throat.

Let's contrast for a moment what Obama said with McCain's take on the role of religion in public policy.

But first, let's debunk the claim that McCain makes in this video. McCain claims that the "Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation."

This is simply FALSE. Indeed the Constitution makes no mention of Christianity, Jesus or anything vaguely Yahwistic. The Constitution does make a brief and oblique reference to a "creator," but there is zero exposition on the nature of that creator, which was surely an intentional choice on the part of the Deist drafters of the document.

Indeed, there is -- and this is important -- just one official government statement on the role of Christianity in the U.S. government made by the "Founding Fathers." The Treaty of Tripoli (whose main purpose it was to stop North African Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean from attacking U.S. ships) states the following:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

This treaty was signed into law by President John Adams in 1797. The treaty is not a founding document, but it far more powerful a sign of the intent of the founders of this nation than anything the "Chritian Nation" people have been able to dig up (which is to say, no supporting evidence).

Anyway, here's John McCain on the role of religion in making our public policy...

Obama and religion

Barrack Obama is clearly a man of faith. I am not. I do not believe that Obama is pretending religion for votes, something that I do feel other candidates do. My wife has criticized Obama for some of what he says in his one of his books about nonreligious people. I have not read his books, so I can't comment about those statements.

The video excerpt below [via PZ] is from an Obama speech in 2006, in which O speaks on faith and its place in American politics. This short clip does two things.

The first is that it shows exactly what O is good at: he takes complex, controversial issues (as he later did with race) in which most people have a vested personal interest. He acknowledges the difficulty of addressing the issues, not just by saying it's controversial, but by explaining the controversy, why both sides feel their side is justified. This is something I don't see any other major American politician do. Barrack Obama is just one hell of an eloquent, elucidating speaker, the kind of clear voice we have not had in a president during my lifetime.

The second thing he does here is that he tells, pretty conclusively, why people of faith, however deeply felt their religious convictions may be, should never base public policy on their religion. Obama expresses that the nonbelievers have a right to be heard. This is a big step up from George Bush Sr.'s "atheists shouldn't be considered citizens" statement. And Even if we were a "Christian nation," whose Christianity should we teach?

Anyway, I won't belabor the point. Here's the video.



BONUS!
Look who popped up in the latest This Modern World: