Signs of the Times

Temple of Reason in London

So there's talk of erecting an atheist temple in London. Why? Well, it's supposed to be seen as a more positive way to get the message out about atheism, as opposed to the favored methods of the prominent atheists (methods such as shaming, mocking, and belittling). So just what does the famous atheist Richard Dawkins think about the temple idea?

“Atheists don’t need temples,” the author of The God Delusion said. “I think there are better things to spend this kind of money on. If you are going to spend money on atheism you could improve secular education and build non-religious schools which teach rational, sceptical critical thinking.”

Sure, something like a bus ad is probably the more brilliant way to go.

I don't really care what they do (as long as there is such a thing as real freedom of religion), but I would like to point out what Dawkins considers rational. From his article "Why There is Almost Certainly No God.":

Physicists already have reason to suspect that our universe - everything we can see - is only one universe among perhaps billions. Some theorists postulate a multiverse of foam, where the universe we know is just one bubble. Each bubble has its own laws and constants. Our familiar laws of physics are parochial bylaws. Of all the universes in the foam, only a minority has what it takes to generate life. And, with anthropic hindsight, we obviously have to be sitting in a member of that minority, because, well, here we are, aren't we?

Here is the basic thought process: We are here >>> There is no god >>> Odds of life are infinitesimal >>> Multiverse.

Now, I enjoy a good debate about these issues, but I also believe that one can employ critical thinking and rationality to statements like the above and end up being skeptical.

RELATED SALVO FAKE ADS: Skeptical Requirer, The God Gene, Universal Lottery, Anything But Design.

HT: Strange Herring (recommended reading for those who enjoy Dawkins getting poo-pooed).

 

 

Porn Is Not Free

This article from Salvo issue 16 has recently been made available for reading online.

Porn Is Not Free

The High Social & Personal Costs of Pornography
by Regis Nicoll

Porn is big business. With annual revenues exceeding $13 billion in the United States and $97 billion worldwide, the porn industry is bigger than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix, and EarthLink combined. Clearly, the appetite for smut is voracious.

But is that a bad thing? Many would argue no.

According to a 2003 survey by the Barna Group, 38 percent of adults believe that there is nothing morally wrong with viewing sexually explicit material. What's more, a 2005 Harris poll showed that 23 percent believe that there should be no restrictions on porn or its access, despite its increasingly graphic content and under-age subjects.

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It'll Get Worse

A Salvo fake ad. It's a little hard to read on screen so the text is below.

 

IT’LL GET WORSE CAMPAIGN

Many brainwashed Christian kids aren’t getting a clear picture of what their lives will be like as openly conservative religious adults. They don’t fully realize that their objections and concerns will be shouted down and that they’ll be ridiculed and bullied in the public square—called hater and bigot and anti-science no matter what they say or do. So let’s show them what their parents’ lives are like now, so they know what the future has in store for them if they remain Christians.

::: THE PLEDGE :::
No one deserves to be respected for having a Christian point of view or any other perspective that doesn’t fully embrace the gay ideology and abortion rights. To this end, I pledge to squash any religious ideas in children by giving them a taste of the public shaming and vitriol they will receive as God-fearing adults. I’ll shout down anyone who tries to stand up for traditional morals at school and at work—and I’ll encourage my friends, family, and neighbors to do the same. I’ll provide hopelessness
to religiously minded youth by letting them know at a young age that “It’ll Get Worse.”

Relativism in Action

We hear a lot these days about the dangers of moral relativism, or about what happens in a society that has abandoned its commitment to objective morals.This emphasis on objective morals is important, but it is equally important to remind ourselves what moral relativism looks like on ground level.

Last week for his Breakpoint program, Chuck Colson told about the recent experience of Dr. Stephen Anderson, who teaches philosophy at A.B. Lucas Secondary School in Ontario, Canada. His students had just finished a unit on metaphysics and were about to start one on ethics. Colson writes about Dr. Anderson's plan for getting the conversation about ethics going.

To jump start the discussion and to “form a baseline from which they could begin to ask questions about the legitimacy of moral judgments of all kinds,” Anderson shared with them a gruesome photo of Bibi Aisha, a teenage wife of a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan. When Bibi tried to get away from her abusive husband, her family caught her, cut off her nose and ears, and left her to die in the mountains. Only Bibi didn’t die. Somehow she crawled to her grandfather’s house, and was saved in an American hospital.

Writing in Education Journal magazine, Anderson relates how he was sure that his students, “seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, [they] would have a clear ethical reaction,” one they could talk about “more difficult cases.”

But their response shocked Anderson. “[He] expected strong aversion [to it], … but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused . . . afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize,” as he said, “any situation originating in a different culture. They said, ‘Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.’”

Anderson calls their confusion and refusal to judge such child mutilation a moment of startling clarity, and indeed it is. He wonders if it stems not from too little education, but from too much multiculturalism and so-called “values education,” which is really just an excuse for moral relativism.

Anderson writes, “While we may hope some [students] are capable of bridging the gap between principled morality and this ethically vacuous relativism, it is evident that a good many are not. For them, the overriding message is ‘never judge, never criticize, never take a position.’” Anderson wonders whether in our current educational system, we’re not producing ethical paralytics? Well, if the horrifying example of the students’ reaction in this case is any indication, Anderson already knows the answer.

Bill's New Frock

One of the things we find here at Salvo is that our Fake Ads, designed to parody aspects of contemporary foolishness, sometimes come incredibly close to depicting the reality. The same thing happened with my feature in Salvo 11, 'Gender Benders: Is My Sexual Identity an Accident Just Waiting to Happen?'.

In the article I quoted various scholars who have argued for a more fluid concept of gender, and then I suggested (in jest, of course) that I worried I might wake up one morning to find I had slipped into a state of womanhood.

I didn't know it at the time I wrote the article, but the children's book Bill's New Frock had already explored the concept of a male waking up to discover he was female. According to an LGBT organization that uses the book in schools, the story is about a boy who “wakes up one day as a girl and is horrified to be sent to school in a frilly pink frock with fiddly shell buttons.” It doesn’t take Bill long for his gender stereotypes to be undermined, not least because boys begin flirting with him (who is now called 'her') instead of bullying him. As the day progresses he finds that being a girl isn’t so bad after all.

Bill's New Frock was made into a children's movie in 1998.

It would be nice to say that cross-dressing is limited to fictional school children like Bill. However, in a Stonewall teacher training DVD, teachers have shared their experiences encouraging boys to dress up as girls. A class teacher for St. Matthew's Primary School in Cambridgeshire boasted that "I had a group of boys last year and every day they came into school they wanted to wear the dressing up dresses. And they really loved wearing dressing up dresses and it went on for several weeks, and within the culture of the classroom I wanted to say that that was ok." The teacher went on to explain how she reprimanded other boys who criticized the cross-dressers. Tony Davies, the head teacher of the same school, explained how the school had a cheer-leading club in which boys dressed themselves in pom-poms and put in “I think that is absolutely wonderful.”

The Lost Art of Self-Preservation

I stumbled upon this blog and think it deserves some attention. It's called The Lost Art of Self-Preservation (for women). Here's the description from the blog:

If you were born female in the mid-1960's or later, you were probably fed all sorts of erroneous information about how life works, what women deserve, what men want, and what the future will be like. Here's some actually useful advice to help you survive in this increasingly chaotic post-Sexual Revolution world.

I recommend first browsing the "best of" post. Some entries will undoubtedly ruffle some feathers, but it's hard to deny that it is actually good advice. Whether or not one feels that it is "fair" is another story. Don't let the utilitarian title fool you, this blog is actually about living a more full and happy life. Here's a list of some of the more popular posts she has done (links jump to the bottom of the page, so scroll up!). Topics include:

On relationships:

• Don't volunteer for single motherhood
• Stay married
• Encourage your child's relationship with his father
• Realize the clock is already ticking on your fertility
• Be your kid's parent
• Reinforce the authority of your children's father

On developing your best self and being attractive to the opposite sex:

• Cook
• Take a good hard look in the mirror
• Lose the weight
• Hold off on the inking and piercing
• Soften
• Listen
• Cut the drama
• Do not embrace your inner slut
• Aim higher than prostitution
• Do not confuse being difficult with being strong
• Endeavor to be useful rather than just pretty
• Don't sign up to be part of his harem

On money:

• Realize that debt = slavery 
• Opt out of consumerism
• Expect and prepare for your standard of living to decline

On unplugging:

• Ditch the TV
• Toss your women's magazines

And advice and counsel for men can be found at The Art of Manliness. Good stuff. I'll have more to write about that website when I finish their book (Manvotionals: Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues).

Evolution Dismantled in 5 Minutes

Normalizing Sex

In the latest edition of Salvo Magazine (which you can subscribe to by clicking here), I pointed out that one of the subversive features of the over-sexualized environment our children are growing up in is that they are becoming desensitized. In a society where sex is used to sell everything from shoes to vegetables, the danger is that children become so used to it that they cease to consider things to be sexual which clearly are.
 
This struck me when the BBC did a documentary on the sexualization of children and Sophie Raworth visited 13-year old Chloe. Dressed skimpily and imitating the erotic dancers she had seen on television, Chloe’s dream is to go all over world as a dancer. Raworth asked Chloe if she was trying to be sexual. Chloe confessed that there was nothing sexual in her mind when she was dancing. Moreover, she said, as long as she kept her clothes on, there was nothing inappropriate about her moves.
 
Certainly the self-evaluation of a 13-year old girl should be taken with a heavy pinch of salt. Yet as I point out in my Salvo article 'Sex & the Kiddies: The Sexualization of Children & How Advertising & Entertainment Change Their Brains', I think there is an important lesson to be learned from the fact that Chloe failed to acknowledge the obvious eroticism of her behaviour. As our children are bombarded with more and more sexual stimuli, one effect is that they cease to even see certain things as sexual, with the consequence that important barriers are lowered.

Chloe found this out in a rather disturbing way when she was eleven. A stranger who had seen some of the dance moves Chloe posted online contacted her to tell her how sexy she was. Chloe panicked and immediately removed all the videos.
 
Yet the question remains: how have young people like Chloe managed to convince themselves that all but the most explicit displays (in Chloe’s case, taking off her clothes) are non-sexual and benign? And do the products and media that girls like her are able to so easily access have anything to do with this?

The answer to this question may lay in the thought of one of the early pioneers of the sex education movement. In his book The Sexual Revolution, Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) described the means for achieving a society that would not put any obstacles in the path of sexual gratification. I have discussed Reich in my Salvo article, in which I point out that

For all his moral anarchism, Reich was perceptive. He realized that in order to achieve the type of sexual utopia he desired, he must first move society away from the shyness and embarrassment surrounding sex. In particular, he argued, people must lose their reluctance to expose erotically important parts of their bodies. Reich attempted to facilitate this by having psychotherapy sessions in which he would require his clients to remove all their clothes.

Reich would be pleased if he could see a European summer today, which is more in keeping with his ideal than what we find in brothels. In a brothel, women have overcome the natural shyness surrounding erotically important parts of their bodies in order to advertise sex; on a sunny beach, scores of women can be seen who have overcome this natural shyness with no thought of sex at all. Indeed, by refusing to explicitly acknowledge the erotic implications of minimalistic attire, we are fast approaching Reich’s goal of a society in which shyness has been overcome and sex is flattened of its inherent potency. “Profane” best describes Reich’s ideal and its realization in the contemporary situation, given that the term originally meant “to treat as common.”

The current debate about the sexualization of children needs to be charted within this same rubric. Certainly when low-cut blouses are marketed for 13-year olds, when music videos for children are saturated with sexual imagery and when sex is constantly used to sell products to young teens, the result is going to be that many girls will become hyper-sexualized. However, such saturation can equally have a desensitizing effect since it unconsciously orients youth to treat their sexuality as something trivial, benign and commonplace. Either way, it primes girls for perverts like Reich: the former because hyper-sexualized girls will want to have sex; the latter because girls are less likely to guard and protect that which they have been oriented to treat as being merely common.

To read more about this, subscribe to Salvo magazine and turn to my article, 'Sex & the Kiddies: The Sexualization of Children & How Advertising & Entertainment Change Their Brains.'

Defending Life

A colorful--yet entirely appropriate and called for--response by a Live Action bloger named Kristen Walker to a recent Jezebel post. Definitely worth a read:

Jezebel’s Dishonest, Stupid “Year In Your Uterus”

The idiotic blog Jezebel is a Gawker-powered hipster-feminist look at celebrities, gossip, sex, and politics. They want you to know they’ve had it up to here with your patriarchal rules, and they’re going to show you with their liberal use of the F-word and refreshing disregard for facts.

“The Year In Your Uterus,” a feature written by Erin Gloria Ryan, kicks off the first sentence with a swear word, to show you she is cool and snarky, and then jumps right into lying in the second paragraph. Here we go:

A strange and terrible group took interest in your uterus this year. They call themselves Personhood USA, and they want to redefine “person” to include all human tissue, starting at the moment of conception. Mass legal acceptance of this scientifically inaccurate principle would make it completely illegal for anyone to have an abortion, receive many forms of IVF, or take the morning after pill on account of the fact that, according to magic, a fetus becomes a grown ass human being at the moment the sperm decides it is.

Untruth #1:  No one is suggesting that all “human tissue” is a person. This is a stupid argument I hear all the time. “Well, okay, if an embryo is a human than I guess an ear or a nose is a human, too, huh?” No, genius. An embryo is a human because it is a whole, entire, separate human person. An ear and a nose are a piece of a human. I know it’s hard to wrap your tiny brain around the concept that an embryo is a human because it is really, really small, but we all start out that way. Infants are really small, too, compared to full-grown people. In our earliest stages of development, we are microscopic. . . .

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Ms Walker then goes on to lampoon the accusation that the Personhod USA stance is "scientifically inaccurate" in like manner,* and concludes with some earnest concerns about her taxes funding other people's ill advised sexual conduct.

And more from Salvo:

Look! A Baby! The Argument Against Abortion by Thomas Teacher

Youth Uprising: Young Pro-Lifers on the Rise by Darci N. Hill

Mad About Babies: What’s Sex Got to Do with It? by Jennifer Fulwiler

*See also the Salvo DECODE'S of the hi-jacked words Fetus and Science

You Pay For What You Get

The Salvo website has been loaded up with some material new to the online archives. The articles are swapped out regularly, so check back often to see what's there. For example, scroll down a bit on the homepage and you will see some new additions to the online archives: My Very Costly College Education by Kelli Space (issue 17) and another article titled Hollowed Halls by Paul J. Maurer (issue 12). You can probably guess (and also relate to) what these articles are about . . .