Category: Religion

The sacrifice of a virgin

I wrote a book report on a story about when a businessman bangs his daughter-in-law. Then I read another short story from the same collection that might be even crazier, so I decided to report on it too. Let’s see if you can recognize what book it’s from:

There once was a great warrior named Jephthah. His mother was a hooker, so his half-brothers didn’t want him to inherit any of their father’s wealth. They sent him into exile from Gilead so that he wouldn’t be able to make a claim on their father’s estate. While in exile, he built a gang and became their leader.

In the meantime, Jephthah’s father died. A rival gang called the Ammonites smelled weakness, so they attacked his father’s turf. Hearing of the might of Jephthah, the local elders begged him to return to Gilead and act as a commander in their fight against the Ammonites. Being understandably skeptical, Jephthah asked what would be in it for him. The elders swore to make him the chief over everybody in their turf if he returned to defend Gilead.

Jephthah returned to Gilead and parleyed with the Ammonite leader. The leader laid out his grievance with Gilead and told Jephthah that he would end his hostilities if they returned his turf to them. Jephthah claimed that Gilead was blameless and said the Ammonites had actually been in the wrong. So the turf war was on.

It turns out that there was a godfather character who was more powerful than both of the gangs. Jephthah went to the godfather and made a treaty with him. The terms were that, if the godfather backed him such that Jephthah could defeat the Ammonites, Jephthah would give the godfather a prize. He would kill and cook whatever came out first to greet Jephthah when he returned in victory.

With the godfather’s backing, Jephthah was able to soundly trounce the Ammonites. When he returned from battle in glory, the first to come out of Jephthah’s crib was his own daughter, dancing to music that was played in celebration. Because she was his only child, Jephthah was distraught considering the deal he had struck with the godfather.

Jephthah’s daughter was surprisingly understanding. She figured that a deal is a deal, so she gave Jephthah permission to do to her what he promised the godfather. She asked for just one accommodation since she would be dying a virgin. She wanted two months to wander through the hills visiting her friends and weep with them.

Jephthah agreed, so his daughter spent a couple of months visiting them, saying her goodbyes and having a good cry with all her friends. Then she returned to Jephthah, still a virgin. Upon her return, Jephthah proceeded to kill his daughter and cook her up, offering her to the godfather as promised.

Samuel. Judges 11. Holy Bible. 700 BCE

I promised you crazy—I think I delivered. Do you know what short story this is? It’s called Judges 11.

Evidence of a god

Today is Atheist Day. To observe it, I am answering a question I hear all the time:

What evidence would you need to believe a god exists?

I’ve given it some thought and my answer is what you would expect. All I would need is empirical evidence of the god that is not based on a logical fallacy. Ironically, most people would give the same answer if you simply changed the word “god” in the question to almost any other noun.

Before I could answer more explicitly, I would need you to describe the characteristics of the god about which you are asking. And please don’t tell me what the god is not. Tell me what its characteristics are. What is it composed of? Where can it be found? How does it affect its environment (or vice versa)? The answers to these questions inform my decision as to specifically what evidence I would look for.

However, for that evidence to be empirical, it must verifiable by observation or experience. So once I know how the god can be observed, measured, or otherwise detected objectively, I would know what kind of testing I could perform to demonstrate that the god exists. The key is that, whatever type of testing is done, any person conducting the test would get the same result.

For example, any person who weighs a liter of water will find that it weighs the same amount that it does for any other person who weighs any other liter of water—one kilogram. Or any person who checks the temperature of water when it begins to boil will find that it is 100 Celsius. Or anyone who observes a snowflake will say that it is six-sided. These are all objective measurements or observations.

On the other hand, some people would say that their evidence of a god is the personal relationship they have with their god. But this is a subjective observation. There is no way for any other person to experience that relationship. And any evidence that any person has ever given me for the existence of a god has been subjective. It is impossible for me to experience their evidence myself.

I also stated that the evidence must not be based on a logical fallacy. The fallacy I hear most commonly is something to the effect that humans (or other life form) are so incredibly complex that it’s impossible for them to exist as a result of natural processes. But this is the fallacy of personal incredulity (also known as an argument from ignorance). Just because you don’t understand how something occurred does not mean that a god doing it is the only explanation.

Another common fallacy concerns the question of why the universe exists. Believers will say that “something cannot come from nothing,” therefore, a god must have created it. But this is a black-or-white fallacy. Maybe something simply always existed or maybe something other than a god started the universe. But nobody really knows how the universe came into existence.

I’m sure most people would consider the standard of evidence I seek for the existence of a god a completely reasonable standard for them to use to evidence most other things in life. I simply expect the same standard to be used for a god. When someone brings me empirical evidence of a god that is not fallacious, I will believe that it exists.

A businessman bangs his daughter-in-law

I was reading some short story literature when I came upon this wack story. Tell me if you can guess from which collection of short stories it is. It goes like this:

Once upon a time, there was a married guy named Jude. He named his firstborn son (perhaps prophetically) Er, his second Onan (not a barbarian), and his last son—with his wife, at least—Shelah (which is what Australians call a girl).

When Er became a man, Jude got a girl named Tamar. He gave her as a wife to Er. There was a godfather character who thought Er was a gangsta, so the godfather capped his ass.

Then Jude told Onan to bang Tamar and fulfill his duty to her as a brother-in-law to “raise up offspring for your brother.” Onan thought that was a weird ask, so he pulled out every time he banged Tamar. But the godfather was pissed that Onan pulled out, so he capped his ass too.

By now, Jude is getting wise to the godfather putting out a contract on his sons. Not wanting his last surviving son to get capped, Jude invited Tamar to shack up with him “until my son Shelah grows up.” So she did.

A long time later, Jude’s wife died. After Jude finished grieving, he planned a business trip to Timnah. Tamar, who had moved to Timnah by that time, heard that her father-in-law would be in town. Being pissed off that Jude never gave her to Shelah, Tamar dressed up like a whore and went plying her trade on the main strip into town.

Sure enough, Jude spotted her when he came to town and liked what he saw. Not recognizing her as his daughter-in-law, he pulled over and asked her to come now and bang him. Tamar replied, “And what will you give me?”

Jude wasn’t ballin, so he offered to send her a goat if she banged him. Not impressed, Tamar asked for his bling and the staff in his hand for collateral until Jude sent the goat. Jude was horny, so he gave them to her so he could get laid. It turned out that he knocked her up.

Jude realized that he would be a laughingstock if people recognized his personal bling, so Jude had a friend bring to who he thought was just a common whore the goat he had offered her. His friend asked around Tinmah where he could find the “shrine prostitute.” When he got back, he reported to Jude that, “I didn’t find her. Besides, the men who lived there said, ‘There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here.’”

By the time Tamar was in the second trimester of her pregnancy, Jude heard that his daughter-in-law was pregnant and guilty of prostitution. Jude said, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!” When she was brought out, Tamar flashed Jude’s bling and said, “I am pregnant by the man who owns these.” Recognizing the bling, Jude proclaimed that Tamar was innocent because he didn’t give her to Shelah. Then he decided not to bang Tamar again.

Moses. Genesis 38. Holy Bible. 1950 BCE

I know it’s an awkward ending but I didn’t write it. I’m just relaying it. Have you figured out what it’s from? I’ll give you a clue: the story is called Genesis 38. Meanwhile, at Sunday School…

I was born this way

It’s Christmas Eve and I’m home alone. There is no Christmas tree—or any other Noel decoration, for that matter—in my home. I’m rocking out right now, not listening to Christmas carols. And I don’t even feel bad that I won’t be celebrating Christmas tomorrow.

Some people think that I’m making a choice to not celebrate Christmas every year. But I know I was born this way. It’s nature that leads someone to not celebrate Christmas, not nurture.

I never celebrated Christmas when I was a kid. I was raised on the Jewish holidays, so there never was a Christmas tree in my family’s home. My family never exchanged Christmas gifts.

As an adult, I gave up the Jewish holidays. But I never took on the Christian ones to replace them. It turns out that, if your parents don’t teach and otherwise enculturate you to celebrate Christmas when you’re young, the Yuletide remains unimportant to you as an adult.

So please don’t accuse me of choosing to be a Scrooge. I can’t help it. I was born not celebrating Christmas.

Jihadis are Muslim

Over the years, I’ve taken the position that Jihadis are not representative of Islam because they comprise such a small percentage of all Muslims. While I know little about Islam, I believe that most Muslims are peace-loving and condemn the militant actions of Jihad. It seemed unfair to me that 1.6-billion Muslims who are predominantly moderate should be painted with the brush of the few extremists.

But I had a recent epiphany that has me rethinking that position. Ironically, it came out of conversations I’ve had correcting people who claim that Barack Obama is Muslim. When I mention to a Christian woman I know that he is Christian, she counters that, no, Obama is not Christian. This woman does not believe that Obama is Muslim (as 29% of Americans do) and she knows that he proclaims himself to be Christian. She bases her assertion that he is not Christian on the fact that the Christian doctrine he believes in differs significantly from the doctrine in which her Christian sect believes (she is a Messianic Jew).

The problem with establishing someone’s faith this way is that there could never be universal agreement about a person’s faith. I explained to the woman—who considers herself to be a devout Christian—that Obama might claim that she is not a “true” Christian because she does not celebrate Christmas or Easter (and if Obama wouldn’t contest it, there are millions of other professed Christians who would). Since there is such great potential for disagreement among purported authorities in a faith that a given person is a true believer in the faith, it’s not possible to effectively communicate about a person’s faith based on some “authority’s” determination. The only way you can unambiguously communicate about someone’s faith is by conceding—at least for the sake of that conversation—that the person’s faith is the one he (or she) himself proclaims it to be.

Getting back to Jihadis, I realized that I was doing the same thing that this woman was doing. Even though most Jihadis strongly believe that they are practicing true Islam when making a terrorist attack, I was countering that, no, Jihadis are not “true” Muslims. Well, I can no longer have my cake and eat it too. If a Jihadi professes to be Muslim, I have to concede that they are Muslim. I must accept that the Jihadi is Muslim to fully understand the motivations behind their actions, even if it is to discuss whether or not Jihad is permitted by Islam.

The right way for USA to deal with ISIS aggression

The Islamic State of Iraq & Syria, more commonly known by its acronym ISIS, has recently begun attacking western targets. It bombed a Russian passenger airliner flying over Egypt last month, killing everyone on board, then staged a multi-point attack in Paris, killing well over a hundred civilians last week. How should the USA respond now that ISIS is expanding its attacks outside the territory it currently occupies? It should end all military activity against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

That is neither a retreat nor a defeat. It’s the smart move to stop throwing good money after bad. The USA has been leading a costly aerial bombing campaign against ISIS for over a year but has not significantly impacted the situation on the ground. There’s no evidence that a continued or even a stepped-up air campaign would substantially degrade ISIS’s power but every indication that it would result in the deaths of non-ISIS residents in the region via collateral damage.

ISIS does not pose an impending threat in America, so the USA should definitely not deploy any American troops on the ground in Iraq or Syria. If we learned anything from the Vietnam War, it should be that putting small numbers of special forces on the ground in another country’s civil war is likely to escalate to a large presence. In that case, ISIS could simply blend into the community, requiring the USA to occupy the territory indefinitely to maintain security, just as occurred during the Iraq War. It’s often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

ISIS will only be defeated when people on the ground rise up against them. The people under occupation by ISIS are more likely to rise up if they believe that the USA will not get involved in the conflict. The USA should even leave the air campaign because there are already Muslim nations in the region with sufficient air strike capability to support a ground campaign. The neighboring Muslim countries should also put boots on the ground fighting ISIS.

I’m not confident that ISIS would be more effectively defeated without the USA involved but I don’t think the situation would get substantially worse, either, without the USA in the war. And there’s no indication that ISIS would be defeated if the USA were to continue its air campaign as it has been the past year. Pulling out of the war on ISIS would be neither a victory by nor a defeat of the USA but sometimes a victory is not the best alternative. A victory of the USA over ISIS is well within the capacity of the American military but it would result in substantial negative and costly consequences, including the loss of many American lives and another protracted occupation in the Middle East.

The conflict with ISIS is not the USA’s fight. The USA does not always have to be the world’s police. To be the caliph, Sunni law requires Abu Musa’b al Zarqawi (ISIS’s leader) to have ’amr, or authority. This requires that the caliph have territory in which he can enforce sharia. However, the first amendment of the constitution prevents the USA from qualifying as a territory of the caliphate. That’s why ISIS is attempting to establish the caliphate among Muslim population and that’s why Muslim people need to be the ones to put a stop to ISIS. If Muslims resist al Zarqawi’s authority, he would not think it would be easier to establish his authority in secular lands.

ISIS explicitly stated that the reason for bombing the airliner and attacking Paris is because Russia and France are currently bombing them in the Middle East. If the USA left the fight, ISIS would not have any more justification or motivation to attack it on American soil, thereby making Americans safer from ISIS.

Ha ha Hajj

More than 700 pilgrims were killed near Mecca in a stampede during Hajj today. As tragic as this was, it was the seventh (but far from the most deadly) such catastrophe at the annual pilgrimage in a quarter century. According to the Saudi Arabian health minister Khalid al Falih, “this is God’s will.” It makes me wonder, is Hajj—a mandatory religious duty for Muslims—God’s idea of a cruel joke?

An actual Muslim president

Today on Meet the Press, Dr. Ben Carson said “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.”
http://player.theplatform.com/p/2E2eJC/nbcNewsOffsite?guid=a_mtp_carsonfaith_150920

I would have liked Chuck Todd to follow-up with the question, “what attributes common to all Muslims make them unfit to occupy the Oval Office?” What is there about Islam that is inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution, Dr. Carson? Do you think a Muslim president would be a Manchurian candidate?

I would also have been curious to know how Carson would feel about an atheist president. If the Constitution requires the separation of church and state, why would a president’s religion (or lack of one) matter?

Congress passes law establishing the Christian religion

The Establishment Clause is one reason why the USA has remained one nation, indivisible for so long. Now the House of Representatives is trying to tear Americans apart by religion. They have passed the House Resolution 847, Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith.

How is it possible that congress did not recognize something even more important? HR 847 is unquestionably a direct violation of the Constitution. The very first amendment of the Bill of Rights says unequivocally that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.? Yet HR 847 does just that, establishing the “Christian faith.”

And where does this leave Muslim and Jewish Americans or, for that matter, any American of any faith other than Christianity? Congress is implying that they’re unimportant.

Then there are atheist Americans: since atheism is the absence of any faith, including Christianity, should they infer that they, too, are unimportant to congress? Ironically, many atheists ‘celebrate’ Christmas, albeit secularly. Since HR 847 also establishes the importance of Christmas, does that mean congress considers atheists who observe Christmas halfway important?

One nation, indivisible

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. One of the reasons I am allegiant to it is because of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Likewise, Judge Karlton in a California US District Court today found that it is unconstitutional to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools with the words “under God” in it. Call me a strict constitutionalist, but I believe that it does not matter what Thomas Jefferson wrote in his letter to the Danbury Baptists regarding the wall of separation between church and state. All that matters is what it says in our Constitution. Therefore, Judge Karlton was bound to uphold the Federal appeals court’s 2002 finding that reciting the Pledge in a public school is an unconstitutional “endorsement of religion.” Agreeing with them, I too omit the religious endorsement whenever I pledge allegiance to this republic.

Furthermore, the words “under God” were not part of the Pledge for most of its history anyway. It wasn’t until 1954, when Congress made a law adding the words to the Pledge (and again in 2002 when Congress made another law ratifying it) that they became part of the pledge. The key here is that Congress had to make a law for the religious establishment to come into effect. It seems there could be no more clear-cut violation of the Establishment Clause.

Thus, it was disappointing that the Supreme Court, in effect, punted when a decision on this matter was brought before them. Rather than settling the matter last year, the Court sent it back to the lower courts on a technicality. Five justices said that the father who brought the case on behalf of his daughter could not do so simply because the mother (not the father) had custody of the girl. Could it be that the real reason they shied away from the decision was because the only one they could reasonably reach would be so wildly unpopular with their conservative counterparts?

The case is sure to return to the Supreme Court, but the next time without the technicality to get out of making a decision. However, it’s unclear which way the Court will find because two of the three justices who previously stated their opinions on the merits of the case will not be sitting on the bench. The confirmation hearings also going on today made it no less clear how Judge Roberts will find (and few would argue that he will not be part of that decision). This is one nation that will have to wait a while longer to find out what the Pledge of Allegiance will sound like in your child’s class next school year.