I find much to admire in the teachings of Jesus—his embracing of the downtrodden and his inveighing against hypocrisy resonate particularly—but I find many flaws as well. If you approach Jesus as the infallible Son of God, these flaws seem perplexing, and the most common strategy amongst believers is to ignore them or, worse, embrace them. My object today is to highlight a few of them.

A couple aspects of Jesus’ moral philosophy give me pause. Most famous is the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Luke 6:31). The flaws of this are well-known but little-discussed. The Golden Rule makes no allowances for individual differences; it essentially assumes a common set of wants for all people. It also doesn’t address the possibility that people might want things that aren’t good for them. Finally, the Golden Rule has no dynamic component; it can’t cope with behavior that deserves to be punished. This isn’t to say that the Golden Rule isn’t a useful rule of thumb, but it’s a shaky foundation for a general philosophy of morals. (In modern game theory, “tit for tat” appears to work much better.)

Jesus is also famous for advocating that you “turn the other cheek” in response to evil men (Matthew 5:38–40):

³⁸“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ ³⁹But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. ⁴⁰And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.

While this idea was used effectively by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., they had unusual opponents. It’s hard to imagine “turn the other cheek” going very far against Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, or indeed the Roman Empire. (It didn’t work out too well for Jesus, after all.) Perhaps to their credit, many Christians ignore this idea, but that’s a bit troubling as well.

Apart from some dubious moral ideas, Jesus also seems to support the rather naïve “everything will work out” philosophy espoused by countless televangelists. I’m thinking in particular of a passage in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:25-28):

²⁵“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? ²⁶Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? ²⁷Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? ²⁸And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.”

This idea that God will take care of you takes a beating in the real world, of course, but Jesus’ analogy is also broken. The birds of the air are in a constant struggle for survival—against predation, disease, starvation—and their mortality rates reflect this. So too the lilies of the field, who labor mightily to grow so as to shade their rivals and spread their seed. Indeed, these biological analogies point in the opposite direction: “Life is hard—just look at the birds and the lilies!”

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t expect Jesus to have a strong understanding of population ecology. Nor do I expect him to have a subtle approach to morality informed by modern game theory. But that’s because I don’t believe him infallible. If anything, placing him in context—the son of a woodworker living in an oppressed outpost on the fringes of the Roman Empire—makes his achievements that much more impressive, warts and all.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Prominent atheists/agnostics/unbelievers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are sometimes accused of attacking a strawman version of religion. Most religious people, it is claimed, hold much subtler beliefs than the broad big-man-in-the-sky belittled by atheists.

Maybe so. But there seems to be no shortage of people whose beliefs deserve the derision heaped on them by the infidels. Three sources seem particularly rich—war, sports, and near-tragedy. I’d wager God has been on the side of the combatants in most wars, at least according to the combatants; athletes apparently should both practice and pray, if we are to believe all the stud sports stars who credit God with their success; and any time people survive a shooting, or a tornado, or three days trapped in the snow, God always seems to have a hand in it.

When asked how he and his three children survived being trapped in the snow for three days, Richard Dominguez replied “Jesus Christ”. Now, I’m happy for Mr. Dominguez and his family, but his improbable survival doesn’t excuse this sort of sloppy thinking. Doesn’t he notice that some people trapped outdoors—some Christians, even—don’t make it back alive? That the helicopter pilot who saw him maybe deserves some of the credit? That he and his kids were out looking for a Christmas tree, so, of all the people to get credit for his survival, Jesus Christ should be last on the list?

I’ll tell you this much: precious few atheists get trapped outdoors for three days looking for Christmas trees. And thank God for that.

I realized recently that I am a Pastafarian—a follower of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I have been touched by His Noodly Appendage.

The FSM (as he’s known to the cognoscenti) is the invention of a physics grad student named Bobby Henderson, which he created to ridicule the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. Asking that Flying Spaghetti Monsterism be given equal time with evolution and intelligent design cleverly exposes the flaw in the “teach-the-controversy” attitude of many evolution-wafflers by showing that “evolution vs. creationism” is a false dichotomy. If you require “intelligent design” to be taught in public schools, why not Flying Spaghetti Monsterism as well? (Of course, this all misses the underlying issue: the conflict arises only because the government runs the schools. But that’s a subject for a different post.)

I don’t really believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, of course, but I’m serious when I say I’m a Pastafarian—not because of the narrow evolution-in-schools issue, but because I believe that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster treats religion with the proper level of absurd lightheartedness. It’s hard to take the Pastafarian religion seriously—but, when you take a close look at their beliefs, it’s hard to take any religion seriously. (The distrust many conservative Evangelical Christians show toward the Mormon Mitt Romney is a source of constant amusement. Something about black pots and kettles springs to mind…)

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is, to my knowledge, the only religion that fully embraces the absurdity of all religion. That is why I am a Pastafarian.

RAmen.

Tonight, the movie “Air Force One” was on TNT, and I watched a little as I ate dinner. In addition to confirming my recollection that the script was formulaic and manipulative, the few minutes I watched included the one scene I actually remembered from seeing it in the theater, in which the vice president (played by Glenn Close) asks “all the American people” to pray for the safety of the president and the other people on board the hijacked Air Force One.

The sort of plea—which seems, alas, quite realistic—brings up a question that has always confused me: what is the deal with intercessory prayer? Even if you do believe in God, what makes you think that praying will influence God’s actions? It seems to be at best a psychological crutch—since you can’t do anything, you might as well pray. And yet, implicit in the practice is the belief that it does at least some good. But what sort of bizarre God would alter the course of events based on a straw poll of believers? It just doesn’t make any sense.

Even if I did believe in God, I find it hard to imagine that I could ever believe in prayer. Clearly, prayer can be valuable to the person praying, in the same way that meditation can benefit the meditator. But, as far as I can tell, the hypothesis that prayer affects the external universe in any way has scant evidentiary support; indeed, it seems overwhelmingly contradicted by the evidence. Why, then, is belief in the power of prayer so common? And why are belief in God and belief in prayer so often conflated?

In the Bible, the Third Commandment proscribes taking the Lord’s name in vain—but, judging from the profusion of sound-alike euphemisms in circulation, the impulse must be nigh irrepressible. The canonical pornographic and scatological swears have only a few such euphemisms: “fuck” has “fudge”, while “fucking” has “fricking”, “frigging”, and “freaking” (and even these are questionable in polite company); “shit” has “shoot” and not much else. But just look at all the euphemisms for blasphemy:

Gosh, golly, darn, dang, gadzooks, egad, doggone, dadgum, dagnabbit, goodness, goodness gracious, good grief, gee, geez, gee whiz, gee willikers, jeepers, jeepers creepers, jeez Louise, crikey, criminy, cripes, crying out loud

One thing I love about some of these euphemisms is that you can almost hear their origins. Some father somewhere, within earshot of his kids, starts one way and ends another: “Oh, for Ch[rist’s sake]rying out loud!” or “Je[sus Christ]eez Louise!”

I have a cousin who once invented his own euphemism—“geez o’flippies”—for a particular sacrilegious swear. Being quite young when I first heard it, I asked him why he used such a strange exclamation. “It’s nicer than saying ‘Jesus Fucking Christ’,” he replied. I have to admit that’s true.