The Real Nightmare Future

The Matrix films got one thing very wrong: no hacker would have a username like Neo or Trinity or Morpheus.  Our salvation would rely instead on someone calling themselves something like Princess Fuckbarf.¹

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1 Actual Twitter handle!

How They COPE

Recently a federal court dismissed a complaint brought by Citizens for Objective Public Education (or COPE) against the Kansas State Board of Education; COPE claimed that new science standards the board had voted to adopt back in 2013 were in fact a form of non-theistic/atheistic religious indoctrination, and thus a violation of students' and parents' First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The court dismissed the case on the basis that COPE had no standing to bring a suit in the first place, and thus did not particularly comment on the merits of the complaint.¹ This is a shame, since COPE's strategy involves preemptively defining what they call “ultimate” questions, such as those asked in origins studies - what is the cause of life, how did the universe begin, and so forth. COPE cites a 1961 decision (McGowen v. Maryland) in which the nature of religion is defined as “an aspect of human thought and action which profoundly relates the life of man to the world in which he lives.” COPE borrows this entire definition in order to explain what they mean by “ultimate” questions: “These questions are ultimate religious questions because answers to them profoundly relate the life of man to the world in which he lives.”

How is it that these questions are inherently religious? Because, they say, the answers to other religious questions, questions about “the purpose of life and how it should be lived ethically and morally,” are wholly dependent on how one answers the “ultimate” questions, namely, “whether one relates his life to the world through a creator or considers it to be a mere physical occurrence that ends on death per the laws of entropy.”²

COPE's use of the world “ultimate” put me in mind of Tillich's definition of religion: “Religion, in the largest and most basic sense of the word, is ultimate concern.”³ I am, however, more familiar with Baird's understanding of ultimate concern, as he says, “By 'ultimate' I am referring to a concern which is more important than anything else in the universe for the person involved.”⁴ COPE, I think, would combine the two definitions, only leaving off the last four words of Baird's understanding, thereby making religion more important than anything else in the universe. Their basic premise, the assumption from which their whole argument begins, is that questions about the nature of life and the universe are inherently religious questions. For COPE these are also normative questions, in the sense they cannot be subject to any debate or disagreement.

COPE's argument universalizes religion to encompass all aspects of life, as they explicitly state when they claim the new science standards would require students to accept

a non-theistic Worldview. As used herein, "worldview" means a religious view that is "an aspect of human thought and action which profoundly relates the life of man to the world in which he lives" (McGowan v. Maryland, supra).

If that paragraph sounds familiar, it's because it's the same definition from the same decision COPE cites at the beginning of their complaint. For COPE, religion and worldview are the same thing - it is impossible to have a view of reality that is not religious, because religion is nothing but one's view of reality. This is how they can make the apparently contradictory statement that the science standards represent a “non-theistic” worldview: non-theism, or atheism, is religion because it is a worldview, and all worldviews are religion.

But there are really only two worldviews, which COPE already hinted at earlier in their complaint when they assert there are two ways a person can relate their life to the world, either “through a creator” or as “a mere physical occurrence that ends on death per the laws of entropy.”⁵ If the court had examined the merits of COPE's complaint, they would find it stumbling over itself at this point, because of what COPE says is the real agenda behind the new science standards:

The purpose of the indoctrination [i.e., the science standards] is to establish the religious worldview, not to deliver to an age appropriate audience an objective and religiously neutral origins science education that seeks to inform. [emphasis mine]

This is the constitutional problem that creationists and intelligent design proponents always run up against, seemingly without realizing it. They cannot possibly demonstrate what a “religiously neutral” position looks like because all worldviews are religion. For them, religion is ultimate concern, and they believe this is the normative definition of religion, applicable to everyone throughout all time. This being the case, they cannot ever claim to represent a non-religious position, and their legal argument falls apart. This is a real pity for COPE's legal team, since they composed an 80-some page complaint, and no judge really needs to read beyond the first dozen or so paragraphs to dismiss it.

COPE has not given up, as they filed a petition for a hearing en banc,⁶ mostly based on the assertion that the Tenth Circuit misread their complaint in the first place:

The Decision [by the Court] erroneously states that the Complaint alleges that the Standards promote a "non-religious worldview" without "condemn[ing] any religion." In fact the Complaint does the opposite, as it alleges in detail how the Standards seek to replace the Children's theistic beliefs with a "non-theistic religious worldview that is materialistic/atheistic."

This is where the courts and the creationists talk past each other: the courts have long since decided that there is the religious, and there is the secular, and that much of life and society and government is taken up with the latter, not the former, while for the creationists there is only the religious, and there can never be anything else. COPE will never be able to cope.

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1 In a single footnote the court does “note that COPE asks the court to implement a requirement identical to the one imposed by the statute in Edwards. COPE frames the materialism of evolutionary theory as a religious belief competing with COPE’s own teleological religion, and demands that if evolution is taught, teleological origins theories must also be taught. The Edwards Court expressly held such a requirement unconstitutional.”
2 This odd phrasing is due to an old creationist/intelligent design understanding of the second law of thermodynamics, that a closed system will always tend toward disorder and chaos. If this is true, they say, then how could molecules ever spontaneously self-organize and self-replicate? How can new and more complex forms of life ever evolve? But they have a limited view of how the second law works, and fail to take into account that nothing in thermodynamics says there cannot be local areas of increased order within closed systems, as long as the entropy of the entire system is increasing rather than decreasing. Given that the closed system we're talking about when it comes to the evolution of life is the whole of the known universe, it is not only possible that there could be local pockets of order, it is virtually certain.
3 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (1959), pp. 7-8, quoted in Baird, p. 18.
4 Robert Baird, Category Formation and the History of Religions, 2nd Ed., (1991), p. 18, emphasis in original.
5 There is an unstated implication to this either/or choice, in that if one relates to life through a creator, then life is not something that “ends on death per the laws of entropy.”
6 A petition which the court denied; COPE now plans to file a petition for writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court.

When Does a Parody Become a Religion?

Recently, a prisoner in the Nebraska State Penitentiary, Stephen Cavanaugh, filed a lawsuit against prison officials for discriminating against him and failing to recognize his chosen religious beliefs and practices, to wit: Cavanaugh claims to follow the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The judge in the case, John Gerrard, recently dismissed Cavanaugh's claim, on the basis that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (or FSMism) is in fact a parody and not an authentic religion.[1]

There is quite a bit that is valid in Judge Gerrard's decision; it seems clear that FSMism began as a protest against the Kansas State Board of Education when that august body was seriously considering introducing intelligent design theory into public school science classes. After all, intelligent design deliberately does not posit the nature of the designer, and Bobby Henderson, the founder of the Church of the FSM, wrote a letter to the KS BOE urging their acceptance of the FSM as the designer.

Additionally, and perhaps more damningly for Cavanaugh, the judge notes that, while “the Court does not ultimately address whether Cavanaugh's beliefs are sincere, it bears noting that his pleading strategy is not entirely consistent with authentic religious convictions . . . His vagueness [regarding the tenets and practices of FSMism] looks less like inadvertent omission and more like an attempt to prevent the Court from recognizing FSMism for what it is.” I also imagine Cavanaugh's request for relief, including $5 million for “deep emotional, psychological, and spiritual pain resulting from not being allowed to practice” his religion did not help his case.[2]

Judge Gerrard is also careful to note that -

It bears emphasizing that the Court is not engaged in — and has been careful to avoid — questioning the validity of Cavanaugh's beliefs. The Court is well aware that it "should not undertake to dissect religious beliefs because the believer admits that he is struggling with his position or because his beliefs are not articulated with clarity and precision that a more sophisticated person might employ." United States v. Ali 682 F.3d 705, 710 (8th Cir. 2012)

He goes on to state that “to read [the FSM Gospel] as religious doctrine would be little different from grounding a "religious exercise" on any other work of fiction,” for example, claiming that Vonnegut's or Heinlein's works could be read as scripture for Bokononism or the Church of All Worlds, respectively. But this begs the question of when is a text fiction and when is it scripture? The Epic of Gilgamesh is a smashing good read, but most readers today would be more likely to categorize it as a fictional narrative from an ancient time, rather than religious scripture, even though 3000+ years ago it was, in fact, scriptural. And Judge Gerrard does note that using fiction as a source for actual religion is not impossible, given that there is an actual movement based on Heinlein's work.

Gerrard believes that “to read the FSM Gospel literally would be to misrepresent it — and, indeed, to do it a disservice in the process. That would present the FSM Gospel as precisely the sort of Fundamentalist dogma that it was meant to rebut.” The key question, though, is when does a parody cease to be a parody and to become something else, to become a living faith? The Discordian Society was deliberately created to refute the idea that deity had to be both male and serious [3] – perhaps not exactly a parody in the way that FSMism could be called a parody, but a protest movement against the religious and social straitjacketing of the '50s, '60s, and '70s.

However, a cogent argument can be made that the Discordian Society has become a robust faith. Gerrard cites Africa v. Pennsylvania, (1981):

First, a religion addresses fundamental and ultimate questions having to do with deep and imponderable matters. Second, a religion is comprehensive in nature; it consists of a belief-system as opposed to an isolated teaching. Third, a religion often can be recognized by the presence of certain formal and external signs.

Those “deep and imponderable matters” include issues that are existential, teleological, and cosmological in nature. An examination of the forums at principiadiscordia.com reveals serious discussion and debate on all these issues, and Discordians continue to create thoughtful (if humorous – and why can't a real religion include humor?) new scriptures, such as the Chao Te Ching, which, while a parody of the Tao Te Ching, is also a reasoned examination of consensus reality and one's conscious and unconscious behaviors and attitudes toward that reality.

The same could be said for the Church of the Subgenius, which also started as a parody of religion, in this case of the over-the-top Christianity as represented by 20^th century televangelists like Robert Tilton, but progressed to become something more for those who are engaged with the Church. The Church of the Subgenius posited July 5, 1998, as “X-Day,” the day when aliens would come to “rapture” up all the Subgenii and destroy everyone else. They held a large gathering at a campground in New York state, and after X-Day, when no one had been raptured and nothing destroyed, a series of posts on Subgenius internet groups revealed a sense of shared community and personal meaning – dare I say, even spirituality – on the part of those who had been there.

One could also point to Jediism, and the fact that 390k+ people reported Jediism as their religion on 2001 census forms in England and Wales, which prompted the UK Office for National Statistics to grant Jediism its own code for processing purposes, though they were quick to note that this did not convey upon Jediism any official status as a protected religion. It must also be granted that many of those 390k+ people probably listed Jediism as a joke; however, there are those who do not consider it a joke, based on the time and thought put into the development of Jedi doctrinal statements.

When does a parody become a religion, then? When does a text become sacred, become scripture? It may be true that to take the Gospel of the FSM and treat it as gospel would be to pervert or subvert the author's intent, but once an author writes a text they have little to no say in how that text gets used. The Apostle Paul, for example, certainly never intended his occasional letters to become scripture, and yet, here we are. While I do understand Gerrard's decision (and I can't help but feel I would have decided against Cavanaugh myself), I do worry about the precedent this decision may set with regard to future cases involving small, new, or “funny” religious movements.

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[1] Reading the decision, Judge Gerrard seems to have taken pleasure in writing it, since he got to read and cite the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster extensively.

[2] I mean, really, what's a guy in prison going to spend $5 million on – all the cigarettes?

[3] See the interview with Greg Hill in the Loompanics edition of the Principia Discordia, in which Hill states, “I set out to do what my society told me is impossible – make a real religion from a patently absurd deity.”

Why I Wrote The Testament Of Judas, Part I

Because when I read this:

The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.

It immediately led me to think of this:

Welcome

Welcome to the new blog.  Thanks for stopping by.

In case you're wondering what you might come across, here's a recent example of my thinking:

Driving out to my father's place a couple of weeks ago, I saw an official-looking sign that read, "Drown Campers."  That seemed to me like an odd thing for the Forest Service to recommend; whoever put up that sign must be fed up with their job and all the people traipsing around the wilderness day in and day out.

Then I realized it actually read, "Drown Campfires," which made a good deal more sense.

Still, I thought, if you did the former, you wouldn't have to worry about the latter, would you?