I didn't draw Mohammed -- this time.

May 20th was 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day', part 2. It went nearly unnoticed, what with all the excitement over God's latest mistake.

I didn't draw Mohammed this year. For one thing, I did it last year, and I didn't think I could improve on it. But the main reason is that the conditions are a little different this year.

I don't have a problem with blasphemy, mockery, or confrontation. I think these tools can be valid and justifiable responses in cases where believers are making threats of violence or unreasonable demands for complicity or respect. But I do make decisions as to when I'm going to use such tools.

Last year, Muslims were making unreasonable demands that non-Muslims obey the rules of their religion, and some individuals were making specific threats of violence against Molly Norris (originator of 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day') and against the creators of South Park. Under these circumstances, I decided that it was appropriate to join a concerted effort in direct confrontation to these demands.

This year, though, the issue hasn't been on my radar. If there have been any credible threats made, I haven't heard of them. Good. That's how I like it.

Maybe not much has changed since last year. Many Muslims are still hypersensitive to criticism -- witness their attempts to influence the UN to outlaw criticism of Islam -- and this needs to be addressed until they learn that their religious views are no more entitled to respect than anyone else's. However, I'm content to let the cartoon issue rest until such time as believers -- Muslim or otherwise -- try to use coercion or threats to curtail freedom of expression. When they do, it will once again be time to protest with pen or keyboard.

Better hurry and watch this.

Here's a presentation I made last week for the UWA Atheist and Skeptic Society. It's called "End of the World... Again" and it's about the Family Radio 21 May Non-Rapture. If you're one of the saved, you'll need to hurry and watch it before you go up, but I guess you won't really need it. If you're one of the doomed souls, then you get about five months.

Unfortunately, the video didn't come through on the feed. All you get is the sound.


The End of the World... Again (Audio) from UWA Atheist & Skeptic Society on Vimeo.

So play the audio, and while that's going, sort through this PDF for the slides. It's a bit more work, but what did you expect during the Tribulation?

By the way, what are we going to call this failed prophecy? How about 'Apocalypse Not'?

UPDATE: I muffed that scripture. It didn't say 'Two women will be in a bed.' It said 'Two women shall be grinding together'. Which I suppose you could take how you wanted.

Faith Fair at UWA!

Yesterday, UWA held a Faith Fair. You could argue that any fair where you don't know who assembled the Ferris wheel is a faith fair, but this was a real Faith Fair, and the UWA Atheist and Skeptic Society was invited. What's a university doing promoting faith, anyway? We're supposed to be helping people learn to think better, not worse. But we wanted to provide a balance, and I think it's cool that we were invited, even though we're not a religion and have no faith.

Our contribution was 'Ask an Atheist", which consisted of a bunch of us sitting at a table, waiting for questions. In the first few hours, one guy asked us about the Illuminati, and another couple asked us directions to some other building on campus. Pleasingly, another student signed up with us. That was about it.

Pretty soon, the UWA Christian Union set up their own table next to us, and together we all sat, not being asked questions, and being completely ignored by the studentry.

Here's a picture of all of us.

Notice the extremely large zone of no people around us.

In short, the Faith Fair was a total bust, and I couldn't be happier. Students at UWA don't give a fart for faith, and that's the way I like it.

There was one interesting bit though, where we asked Scott, the president of Christian Union, about what happens to people who died before Jesus. I know different religions answer this in different ways -- and the Mormons have an innovative, if resource-intensive, solution -- but I wanted to hear his response.

I think Scott answered this in a thoughtful and careful way. He named a few different ideas people have had over the years -- like, the Atonement applies to them retroactively, or if they were 'good' they get a pass, and so on -- but in the end, he said plainly and honestly that they didn't know.

"How would you find out, if you wanted to?" I asked.

The only way he could come up with was by... interpreting scripture! Of course, that approach has worked wonders over the years at providing clear, unambiguous, and well-agreed upon answers to great religious questions.

The whole conversation made me feel quite impatient and irked with religion. There's a question there, and everyone agrees it's a good question that really should have an answer. But there's no agreed-upon answer, and even worse, there's no agreed-upon way of getting an answer.

Wouldn't that drive you mad? What if we had to work that way in the sciences? Sure there's a lot we don't know, but we have an established way of getting the kind of answers that people can agree on. If we had a lot of scientists from different countries and different backgrounds, and we had some scientific question that we wanted to find out about, we may not have an answer right away, but we could at least come up with a research program to work towards an answer.

With religion, you can't even start. All the answers come from a god who never speaks directly, but has (allegedly) left a lot of mutually incompatible, multiply contradicting (and self-contradicting) holy books whose contents need to be massaged into a comprehensible answer. Even then, the various practitioners won't agree. You start hitting insurmountable limits just about as soon as you start asking questions.

The religious metaphysical approach is a recipe for stuckness.

Access Ministries: "We need to go and make disciples"

The state of Victoria allows Christian group Access Ministries to have unfettered access (hence the name) to high schoolers. This allows them to evangelise what is essentially a captive audience.

And how does Access Ministries feel about this? They can't believe their luck! Listen to the CEO crow about it:

''In Australia, we have a God-given open door to children and young people with the Gospel, our federal and state governments allow us to take the Christian faith into our schools and share it. We need to go and make disciples,'' she told the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion national conference in Melbourne. ''What really matters is seizing the God-given opportunity we have to reach kids in schools.''

Now can we agree that this is an evangelical conversion campaign that has no place in secular schools?

Maybe I shouldn't get too worked up about it though. Danny Katz sees a silver lining to religious education.

Thank God Almighty! This is really good news: I heard the Victorian Education Department has started forcing public primary schools to host non-compulsory Christian education classes during school hours and all I can say is HALLELUJAH, PRAISE THE LORD. Because, as we all know, religious education is the ONLY way to turn our young children into decent, moral, compassionate, lifelong despisers of anything to do with religion.

Seems perfectly obvious to me: if you want to create an instant atheist, just add holy water. Everyone I know who is a committed non-believer had been saturated with religious education at an early age, either through school or Sunday school or youth groups - I'm telling you, it works.

UPDATE: There's a Facebook group: Get Access Ministries out of our schools. Like it.

Hardly getting over it

I saw an LDS friend from long ago, and had an enjoyable catching-up session, talking about work and kids.

"What else are you doing?" she asked.

"Well, still blogging," I said.

"Oh, what do you blog about?"

"Actually," I said, "being an ex-Mormon! Among other things."

She wasn't put off at all -- she asked a few questions about it, and then said, "So, that's something you're still interested in?"

My answer is still an enthusiastic yes! I don't know why. Some people never want to talk about their deconversion at all. And other people initially do, but then they find that they run dry, they've said it all, and they 'get over it'. They 'move on'. I think there's even some kind of expectation that ex-Mormons (maybe even ex-whatevers) will eventually 'get over it'. If you don't, then you're stuck in some phase of your development. There you will stay, not progressing, until you no longer feel the need to discuss 'it' anymore.

Not me. It's been over five years, and I'm still here, but I don't see my development as arrested. It's become another one of my interests. I still find Mormonism and issues relating to faith and un-faith fascinating. What is it that makes people believe things just because of 'faith'? How could I have devoted years of my life to something that had no evidentiary basis? Why do we, as humans, have cognitive blind spots that keep us from examining our beliefs critically? Can we be certain that gods don't exist? This is a fascinating area that involves psychology, philosophy, and the sciences. How could I not be interested? There's enough here to play around with forever.

There's another aspect. As a skeptical rationalist and as an educator, I'm against superstition and ignorance, and I intend to challenge it wherever it may appear. That includes religions. They're still out there indoctrinating children, filling people up with sexual guilt, worming falsehoods into the educational system, and taking a hefty chunk of people's money for the pleasure. In some cases, their members advocate violence and try to control the choices of people who don't believe. As long as religions are operating, I want to be hoisting the banner of reason, as quixotic as that sounds.

I think I owe it to myself not to forget what I learned in my experience with religion. That means not putting it in a box and leaving it there. At this stage, I'm very pleased to not be 'getting over it', and I hope I never do.

Talk the Talk: Now on iTunes!

This is exciting: my podcast "Talk the Talk" is now on iTunes! Yes, you can now hear a fresh dose of linguistics news every week, in convenient podcast form.

Head over to the link by clicking on the nifty graphic below. Subscribing is free, of course.



While I'm thinking about iTunes -- I'm still trying to figure out the profanity guidelines for their titles. I noticed that 'shit' turns into 'sh*t', which is fine. But 'WTF' comes out 'W*F'. They starred the T? Shouldn't they have starred the F?

WT*?

The Mormon 'Plan of Happiness'

Hey, who remembers this from church? I think I got all the details right.

Really puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

Of course, it might make more sense if you've seen the real chart, or had a missionary draw it for you.

UPDATE: I wrote this as a comment on r/exmormon, and decided to paste it here:

If I had to name the most odious and evil LDS doctrine, I wouldn't hesitate to say 'eternal families'.

That may seem like a strange answer, but that's the thing that allows all the emotional hijacking, even more than heaven and hell. If you don't keep in line, your family will be broken up and you'll be in isolation for eternity.

It uses the natural feelings of love we have for our family, and subverts them for its own ends.

Unintentional MLK quote mangling on Facebook

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

Mark Twain was supposed to have said that. But I can't be sure -- Mark Twain has been credited with all kinds of sayings that he may not have said. (Note the lazy "attributed" appendage to that last link.) But it's true that with the increased speed of communication on the Internet, a mistake can spread worldwide and not get picked up.

A case of misattribution might have popped up on your Facebook wall, in light of a recent assassination.

Jessica Dovey did not intend to become the epicenter of an Internet-wide discussion about the nature of quotation, attribution, and Osama bin Laden. Yet that's exactly what happened when Dovey's Facebook-status sentiment -- "I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy" -- became entangled with a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote she also posted. Within a day and through no fault of her own, Dovey's words had gone viral, misattributed to King.

Since I'm the language guy, I got a call from RTRfm 92.1 to comment. Here's the playback.



If you're serious about avoiding the misattribution trap, don't believe a quote unless it's accompanied by a source, and then follow the source. It's the only way to be sure.