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Pain and Healing: Rotten Charities and Wonderful Puppetry

Couple of things caught my attention this morning.

One is a list of America’s Worst Charities — thanks to the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Imagine a “charity” that takes in tens of millions and gives out nothing — zero — in direct cash aid to the cause it supposedly champions. It’s on the list: Project Cure of Bradenton, Florida.

Since 1998, Florida-based Project Cure has raised $65 million to lobby Congress and educate the public about alternative treatments for cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.

But its office off Interstate 75 south of Tampa is little more than a storage unit filled with plastic bins, unused furniture and Christmas decorations.

Percentages of direct aid range from 10.8 percent on the high end to zero on the low … and Project Cure is not the lone zero. Missing children, sick children, children with AIDS, burned firefighters, diabetes, cancer, disabled police officers, they’re all represented here … by parasites who bleed off our warmest feelings for the less fortunate, stealing-by-misrepresentation millions, over the years billions, in scarce money and resources.

Project Cure’s longtime president, Michael S. Evers, is paid about $200,000 a year.

[… ] Reached at the house he rents about five miles away from his group’s office, Evers, 60, said he frequently works from home. “It’s not necessary to go into the office,” he said.

When asked for details about how he spends his time, Evers ended a phone interview, saying he was “in the middle of editing a new report on Alzheimer’s disease.”

Oh shit. Is there enough pain in the world for someone who does something like that? But Evers and others like him sleep well every night, I’m sure of it.

On the other hand, there’s this. King Kong the musical, with a giant gorilla puppet that you just fall in love with.

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Neuroscientist: Fundamentalism As Mental Illness

A HuffPo article from yesterday (Friday, May 31) says:

Kathleen Taylor, Neuroscientist, Says Religious Fundamentalism Could Be Treated As A Mental Illness

An Oxford University researcher and author specializing in neuroscience has suggested that one day religious fundamentalism may be treated as a curable mental illness.

Kathleen Taylor, who describes herself as a “science writer affiliated to the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics,” made the suggestion during a presentation on brain research at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday.

In response to a question about the future of neuroscience, Taylor said that “One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated,” The Times of London notes.

“Someone who has for example become radicalised to a cult ideology — we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance,” Taylor said. “In many ways it could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage.”

Though in this story she’s quoted as saying she’s not speaking of “obvious candidates” such as radical Islam, another story on the subject is titled Science ‘may one day cure Islamic radicals’.

Muslim fundamentalism may one day be seen in the same way as mental illness is today and be “curable”, according to a leading neuroscientist.

Heh, that’s gonna go over really well in the middle East.

But it’s an idea I’d like to see propagated. I’ve long said I think it’s a shame there’s no category of mental illness named “religious illness” (as far as I know, anyway). I mean, look at some of the more obvious examples in the U.S. — the Phelps clan, Pat Robertson, Ken Ham — some of those people are crazy as hell. I couldn’t say whether it’s that mentally ill people frequently model religious memes, or whether religion drives people bonkers. Either way, it should be addressed, don’t you think?

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Time for Serious Outreach into Islam?

Here’s a story from the United Kingdom’s online news site Mail Online, the heated subtext of which is “OMG MUSLIMS!!!”

One country, two religions and three very telling pictures: The empty pews at churches just yards from an overcrowded mosque

It’s a story in pictures, with a small amount of text:

What they show are three acts of worship performed in the East End of London within a few hundred yards of each other at the end of last month.

Two of the photos show Sunday morning services in the churches of St George-in-the-East on Cannon Street Road, and St Mary’s on Cable Street.

The third shows worshippers gathered for Friday midday prayers outside the nearby mosque on the Brune Street Estate in Spitalfields.

The difference in numbers could hardly be more dramatic. At St George’s, some 12 people have congregated to celebrate Holy Communion.

When the church was built in the early 18th century, it was designed to seat 1,230.

Numbers are similar at St Mary’s, opened in October 1849. Then, it could boast a congregation of 1,000. Today, as shown in the picture, the worshippers total just 20.

While the two churches are nearly empty, the Brune Street Estate mosque has a different problem — overcrowding.

The mosque itself is little more than a small room rented in a  community centre, and it can hold only 100.

However, on Fridays, those numbers swell to three to four times the room’s capacity, so the worshippers spill out onto the street, where they take up around the same amount of space as the size of the near-empty St Mary’s down the road.

 The overheated punchline:

What these pictures suggest is that, on current trends, Christianity in this country is becoming a religion of the past, and Islam is one of the future.

Yes! Christianity is becoming a thing of the past! But ooh, scary Islam is the one of the future.

Maybe, maybe not. Not a big fan of Islam here, definitely don’t think it’s a good thing. But … the people caught up in it are just people. And people’s minds can be changed.

The newfound visibility of atheism alone, as one of the many choices young people will be presented with, can make a difference. But making an actual effort to outreach into the community of young Muslims — that could make a BIG difference.

Seems to me we need to do a lot more atheist proselytizing.

 

 

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Finding the Real Villain in [Churches Hate Gay Boy Scouts]

Thinking about this story, Some Churches Say They’ll Cut Ties to Boy Scouts Following Its Lifting Ban on Gay Scouts, a first reaction might lead you to lambaste the people who’d do such a thing.

“If the Boy Scouts are going to support gays, we’re not going to support the Boy Scouts.” Of course they have every right to say that, to act that way, but it’s not a decent reaction, not a reaction that recognizes equality and fairness. You’d be prone to blame the people who’d do such a thing.

On the other hand, they’re not acting, they’re REacting. There’s something in their heads that causes them to do so. And it’s THAT, the thing that drives their behavior, their actions and thoughts, that’s the real villain.

Our real enemy is religion itself, the poisonous-fantasy-group-think that drives the actions of the people who do these things.

Yes, we have to fight these social justice battles in the arena of human flesh, human acts. The wars of civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, atheist rights, face real human adversaries who — with muscle and words and acts — work to oppose our goals and values.

But the real enemy, the enemy that serves as the foundation of all this strife, is not strictly people. The real enemy is ideas.

That realization is making me rethink Daniel Fincke’s Civility Pledge.  (I was never opposed to it, but I wanted to think about it at length before committing.)

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Followup 1:

Interesting. Google “civility pledge” and you get a variety of hits, including this one from Chris Clarke:

The Desert Tortoises With Boltcutters Civility Pledge

We’re all still working on it.

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Followup 2:

Lest we forget, the Boy Scout Oath says:

On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.

That second line is interesting, isn’t it? In this quintessentially American organization, God comes before country.

 

 

 

 

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Helping A Tornado Survivor, Atheist-Style

There’s a rather amazing story coming out of the Oklahoma tornado-aftermath.

Moore, Oklahoma, resident and mother Rebecca Vitsmun, being interviewed by  CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, responded to a spray of goddy rhetoric:

Blitzer: “Well, you’re blessed, Brian your husband is blessed, Anders is blessed. […] I guess you gotta thank the Lord, huh? Do you thank the Lord, for that split-second decision (to leave her home and get to safety)?”

Vitsmun: “I uh, I am actually an atheist.”

Amid general good feelings at finding a spectacular role model, a bright, cheerful woman standing amid the destruction of her town and her home, Doug Stanhope of Atheists Unite has created an Indiegogo fund-raiser.

What We Need & What You Get

We don’t know the exact cost of putting a family back together when you don’t even have a toothbrush anymore so we randomly chose 50,000 dollars as a goal. And that’s probably low-ball.

The Impact

The impact of getting Rebecca and her family properly housed by the atheist community will do far more good than sitting in bars or chat rooms mocking people of faith. Like religion, free-thinking will be more easily spread through compassion and decency.

Here’s the amazing part:

As of Friday 24th May we have cleared the initial $50,000 target. In truth, we had no idea how generous and giving our community would prove to be. We reached our goal within 17 hours of starting.  An Indiegogo deadline cannot be changed once it has been set. So this campaign will continue until July 22 2013. At that point the financial cogs will turn and the moneys raised will be delivered to Rebecca Vitsmun. There is no reason for us to stop raising funds. The median cost of a home in Moore, OK is $125, 250, and that was back when they had homes. More importantly, the more money we raise the better the example we set.

At the moment I write this, the campaign has raised $80, 232.

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Annnd … there’s this from Glenn Beck:  ‘Forces of spiritual darkness’ at CNN plotted Blitzer’s atheist gaffe

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Beta Culture: Bridges and War and All Things Daft

I know there are people who don’t like driving across long, high bridges. I’m one of them, I guess, but my job requires me to gird my loins and cross the huge, 3-mile-long, almost-60-year-old  Tappan Zee Bridge across the Hudson River near New York City twice a day.

The collapse of the Interstate 5 highway bridge in Mount Vernon, Wash., on Thursday, brought that roaring to mind over the past few days.

On days when traffic is slow and you’re standing still on the Tappan Zee — like yesterday evening during rush hour, with the roadway packed with the multitude fleeing the City for the Memorial Day holiday weekend — you can feel the thing flex and rumble under you. Not a day passes that I don’t think about what it would be like to fall 150 feet into the deep river, with deadly beams collapsing all around me.

Wikipedia says the Tappan Zee “was constructed during material shortages during the Korean War and designed to last only 50 years.” The really freaky thing about the Tappan Zee is that the roadway sometimes develops holes THROUGH WHICH YOU CAN SEE THE RIVER BELOW. They even have a name for the holes: punch-throughs. Sheee-it. Maintenance and repair crews work on the thing pretty much 24/7, but the beams overhead are covered with rust.

Wikipedia again (bold emphasis mine):

In 2009, the Tappan Zee Bridge was featured on The History Channel “The Crumbling of America” showing the infrastructure crisis in the United States. Many factors contribute to the precarious infrastructure of the bridge, which has been called “one of the most decrepit and potentially dangerous bridges” in the US. Engineering assessments have determined that “everything from steel corrosion to earthquakes to maritime accidents could cause major, perhaps catastrophic, damage to the span,” prompting one of the top aides in the New York state governor’s office to refer to the Tappan Zee as the “hold-your-breath bridge.” A 2009 state report noted that the bridge was not built with a plan that was “conducive to long-term durability” and that the Tappan Zee’s engineers designed it to be “nonredundant,” meaning that one “critical fracture could make the bridge fail completely because its supports couldn’t transfer the structure’s load to other supports.”

You catch all that? THE GOVERNMENT KNOWS IT’S DANGEROUS.  They haven’t fixed it. Just as so many bridges and overpasses in the U.S. haven’t been fixed.

But meanwhile, the United States spent close to a trillion dollars in destroying civilization in Iraq, at the orders of that brainless, gutless little shit George W. Bush. While our own infrastructure here at home was known to be crumbling, corporations that make weapons and military goods toddled off home with enough gold to make a pharaoh look like a filthy street beggar.

War has a price. Aside from the thousands of needless deaths of American’s young men and women, there’s the actual cost of war, and it is dramatically non-trivial. Estimates of the cost of the Vietnam War range from $150 billion to $584 billion. The cost of the combined Iraq-Afghanistan wars is upwards of $1.5 trillion. (Here’s a PDF with more on the cost of wars.)

Kids, if we’re counting the things we could’ve had if we hadn’t spent the  money on recent wars, that’s a FUCK of a lot of new bridges. High-speed rail routes and trains. Schools and teachers. Libraries. Parks and playgrounds. Hell, we could have thrown in free college educations for a million young Americans. So much, much more.

The reasons for this are way-hell more complicated than anything I can winkle out, but down at the most basic level, it seems to me it’s a failing of intellect, of the understanding of facts, of the desire to know true things and live in the real world. It’s the poison cranked every day out of a vast well of fantasy, wishful thinking and studied ignorance — plus the by-no-means-minor  willingness to be commanded, even owned — bequeathed to us by our thousands of years of religion.

None of this is anything we can afford for very much longer.

Nothing will stop it except sane, conscious effort.

By, you know, SOMEONE.

 

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Hawking T-Shirts at Funerals (More or Less)

If I die and somebody shows up to sell “Hug Me – I’m an Atheist!” T-shirts at my service, it would tickle me to death. (If I wasn’t already dead, I mean, and was, you know, capable of being tickled.)

[ Note: If you do this, you have to donate the money in my name — all of it — to a black bear rescue operation or sanctuary. ]

But if it happened at any other funeral, I would expect the family to be furious.

I feel the same way about selling religion at funerals. Even at second hand, it offends me. I mean, if people are religious, and it’s a family member, I have no problem with the local pastor comforting them in religious terms. But to USE the funeral to SELL religion to the other attendees, that bothers me more than a bit.

Rev. Randy Campbell apparently did just that, using the funeral of Buckwild star Shain Gandee to hawk God to the younger crowd.

The Rev. Randy Campbell told the many young people in the crowd he understands that life bombards them with difficult choices. But he urged them to follow Shain Gandee’s lead and embrace their faith now, while they are energetic and engaged.

“This life will hand you a lot of things and call it pleasure, but there is nothing that brings greater joy to a person’s heart than serving the Lord,” Campbell said. “You may think at this point, you’re having fun, but those days will pass.”

When they do, he said, God is all that matters.

I could give you half a dozen reasons this irritates me, but mainly it’s the bullying nature of selling religion in this way. Campbell is preying on Gandee’s young friends and neighbors at their weakest, using the death of a good buddy as a lever to pry open their heads and pour in his religion.  Already shocked by his death, they’re getting a big heaping serving of “If you don’t go to church and believe in God, this could happen to you. You’ll also be betraying the memory of your friend.”

I’d rather see T-shirts.

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Atheism In The News

Columnist Lee Dye made the front page at ABCNews.com yesterday, with a book review titled

Do We Need God to Be Moral?

Are we moral because we believe in God, or do we believe in God because we are moral?

Frans de Waal argues in his latest book that the answer is clearly the latter. The seeds for moral behavior preceded the emergence of our species by millions of years, and the need to codify that behavior so that all would have a clear blueprint for morality led to the creation of religion, he argues.

Most religious leaders would argue it’s the other way around: Our sense of what’s moral came from God, and without God there would be no morality.

But this is a column about science, not religion, so it’s worth asking if de Waal’s own research supports his provocative conclusions, documented in the newly released book, “The Bonobo and the Atheist.”

Only a year ago you would not have seen such a story, and certainly not worded in this “we’re sure it’s not God” way.

Much as I detest ABCNEWS.com for their Freak of the Week stories, this was a nice sign that atheism, the open doubting of god-belief, is no longer off-limits to mainstream media.

This bit also caught my attention:

[de Waal] is an atheist, although he disparages the efforts of other atheists to convince the public to abandon all beliefs in the supernatural. Religion serves its purpose, he argues, especially through the rituals and body of beliefs that help strengthen community bonds.

“Religion serves its purpose” — if it does — only because most people throughout history haven’t had a choice. My own thinking on Beta Culture convinces me there’s another way to strengthen community bonds — or at least there’s going to be — and one that doesn’t require you to give up your critical mind by giving in to religion.

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The Infiltration Makes Progress, Comrades

Saw this story on ABCNews.com today:praying

Is Religion Good for Your Health?

… and got the shock of my life.

Okay, well, it wasn’t the shock of my life, but it was surprising, and more than a little pleasing.

What would you expect from a story with that headline in any mainstream news medium in America? They wouldn’t dare answer anything but –> YESYESYES!! <–, right?

But this writer, Dr. Richard Besser, sort of DID answer something other than yes. Continue reading “The Infiltration Makes Progress, Comrades”