Zoe’s Journal

CONYERS, Ga. - A man has been arrested after allegedly trying to force his estranged wife into an oven on Thanksgiving in front of their five children.

Martin Luther Jackson, 31, of Decatur, has been charged with aggravated assault, aggravated battery, cruelty to children and possession of marijuana after the Nov. 23 incident, said Sgt. Jodi Shupe of the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office.

Jackson and his 29-year-old wife, who have been separated since July, have five children ranging in age from 1 to 13 years old, Shupe said. Jackson apparently started fighting with his wife after she and the children returned to their Conyers home on Thanksgiving.

At one point during the fight, Jackson allegedly attempted to stuff his wife inside the kitchen oven, which had been left on to heat the house, Shupe said. The woman escaped and went to the sheriff’s office with visible head injuries, Shupe said.

Investigators found Jackson hiding under a bed at his mother’s house in Decatur, where he had been living since the separation, Shupe said.

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Information from: The Rockdale Citizen

I particularly like the part about his hiding under a bed at his mother’s house…

This is a series of posts discussing The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

Now that we’ve gone over the Deserved Respect of religion, it’s time to move on to the respect that we give religion - that, quite frankly, (and I whole-heartedly agree with Dawkins on this subject) is overboard. Why should we give religious people more leniency than non-religious persons? You may say that this is not the case, but in this section of the chapter, Dawkins sets forth numerous examples. I also have personal experiences with this situation, as I’m sure most people in the world do - whether or not they realize it at the time.

Let’s get started.

It is possible that religious readers will be offended by what I have to say, and will find in these pages insufficient respect for their own particular beliefs (if not the beliefs that others treasure). It would be a shame if such offence prevented them from reading on…

A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts - the non-religious included - is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other.

What I think Dawkins is getting at is the fact that one can not freely say ‘You’re stupid for believing in god‘, when it is perfectly acceptable to say ‘You’re stupid to vote for Bush‘. He then quotes an impromptu speech by Douglas Adams:

Religion… has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? - because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if someone says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’.

Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows - but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe… no, that’s holy?… Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these thing. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.

Growing up as a child in a very conservative Christian household and a very Christian school, I often questioned the things that I was taught.

‘Why can’t Christians dance - David danced before the lord, and he was naked!?‘

This question was usually followed by ‘David also had many wives - we don’t do that anymore, and we don’t dance anymore‘ (they usually inserted a verse which I can’t remember any longer).

‘Then, why do we have to sing to the Lord? David did that and we still do it too…’

‘The Bible tells us to sing.’

‘But, the Bible tells us to dance too!’

**silence**

‘You can’t dance because I tell you you can’t dance, and I’m your parent, you have to obey me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the Bible says so!‘

‘But… the Bible says I can dance too!‘

‘Do you know what they used to do to children who back-talked to their parents? They STONED them.’

**end of discussion**

The above was merely to illustrate the point that Dawkins and Adams put so well into words. One can not argue logic with a religious person about religion. Indeed, the two terms do not even fit together. They are complete antonyms.

In the next part of section 2 - UN-deserved respect, Dawkins gives modern-day examples of how religion is amazingly over-privileged - to the point of being allowed exceptions to the federal law.

A nice alternative to World of Warcraft or other games is Guild Wars… I don’t play often, but this afternoon, after printing out all of my homework assignments, I played for a little bit.

I started new character - a Mesmer (basically a mage with healing qualities) and also picked up some Necromancer skills.

There is some great scenery in the game…

Inside town, I found that there was also a sort of dungeon:

The graphics are awesome in Guild Wars, but I’m still kind of confused as to the world in general. Where to learn new skills? How to equip better armor? I supposed I could read the manual…

In the previous posts, we talked about Einstein vs. Religion. We read quotes from both famous scientists and religious people. We saw the replies that Einstein received for his papers stating his views on a ‘personal God.’

At any rate, we’re now stuck trying to decide exactly what religion Einstein was. He said he does not believe in a personal God, so does that make him a Deist? Perhaps a Theist? Pantheistic, maybe?

There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like ‘God is subtle but he is not malicious’ or ‘He does not play dice’ or ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic. ‘God does not play dice’ should be translated as ‘Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.’ ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ means ‘Could the universe have begun in any other way?’ Einstein was using ‘God’ in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor. ….

Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: ‘To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.’

Dawkins continues:

But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for the vast majority of people, ‘religion’ implies ’supernatural’. Carl Sagan put it well: ‘… if by ‘God’ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such as God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying… it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.’

The ‘Deserved Respect’ of this chapter concludes:

The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

In summary, I agree that, yes, there is a set of scientific laws that allow the universe to run fairly stably. Whether or not one decides to call that set of laws ‘God’ or not is up to them. The difference between ‘religious’ and non-religious people is whether or not they believe in the ’supernatural’. This would, in essence, be a personal god. One that knows what you are thinking, who can control everything, and allows to be only what he deems to be ‘good’.

We’ll get into this later. I read some other articles earlier this week (unrelated to Dawkins or his book) that have certain compelling arguments on this case.

At any rate, now that we have gone over the deserved respect of religion, we’ll next go over the next section of Chapter One - Un-deserved Respect. Just how far do we go to accomodate religion, and is it too far?

Now we move on to a fun part in the chapter - Einstein vs. Religion.

Dawkins has some great content here…

Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply. This is certainly true of Einstein and Hawking. … One of Einstein’s most eagerly quoted remarks is ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.‘ But Einstein also said ‘It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is systematically being repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.’

It seems, at the casual glance, that Einstein contradicted himself. What’s going on there? Dawkins explains:

By ‘religion’ Einstein meant something entirely different from what is conventially meant. As I continue to clarify the distinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that am calling only supernatural gods delusional.

He goes on to quote Einstein some more:

I am a deeply religious non-believer. This is a somewhat new kind of religion….

The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.

Since his death (Einstein’s), religious apologists try to claim him as one their own - as being religious. However, during his time, some of his contemporaries saw him quite differently. Einstein wrote a paper in 1940 stating that ‘I do not believe in a personal god’. He received many harsh replies to these papers, many of which alluded to his Jewish heritage. I’ll quote some below.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Kansas City said: It is sad to see a man, who comes from the race of the Old Testament and its teachings, deny the great tradition of that race.’ Other Catholic clergymen chimed in: ‘There is no other God but a personal God… Einstein does not know what he is talking about. He is all wrong. Some men think that because they have achieved a high degree of learning in some field, that they are qualified to express opinions in all.’

Dawkins immediately refutes this statement.

The notion that religion is a proper field, in which one might claim expertise, is one that should not go unquestioned. That clergyman presumably would not have deferred to the expertise of a claimed ‘fairyologist’ on the exact shape and colour of fairy wings. Both he and the bishop thought that Einstein, being theologically untrained, had misunderstood the nature of God. On the contrary, Einstein knew very well exactly what he was denying.

I also have something to say about the above quotes from the Catholic clergymen. When he talks about how sad it was that Einstein should deny the traditions of his ‘great race’, I wonder just how sad it would be if a headhunter denied the traditions of his tribe and gave up the act of hunting heads! Surely there are people who will agree with whatever choice one makes. And, indeed, why carry on a tradition that one can not believe in or even explain? Also, every human being is entitled to opinions. It seems now, that one must be qualified to express them. On we forge.

A New York rabbi said: ‘Einstein is unquestionably a great scientist, but his religious views are diametrically opposed to Judaism.’

‘But’? ‘But‘? Why not ‘and’?

And here is my favorite reply of all those that Einstein received for his papers:

Professor Einstein, I believe that every Christian in America will answer you, ‘We will not give up our belief in our God and his son Jesus Christ, but we invite you, if you do not believe in the God of the people of this nation, to go back where you came from.‘ … Professor Einstein, every Christian in America will immediately reply to you, ‘Take your crazy, fallacious theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you came from, or stop trying to break down the faith of a people who gave you a welcome when you were forced to flee your native land.’

*shock* And here, Christians are supposed to have the most loving and forgiving religion on Earth!

… continued tomorrow…