I'm very angry

[joreth]

 

There are two articles in the NYTimes that are making me very angry.  

One is about a guy named Fred Phelps.  He's a world-class asshole.  He founded a Baptist church that seems to have nothing better to do with its time than picket EVERYONE and proclaim that God hates you.  Their latest offense is picketing the funerals of soldiers who died in Iraq.  The reason is because God hates fags.  

Huh?

Yeah, they claim that the sole reason for all the world's evils is because God is pissed that America is so tolerant to fags.  And because of God's anger at homosexuality, God is raining down fire and brimstone and death from war on those countries that accept homosexuality (God especially hates Sweden, apparently, because of their anti-hate-speech laws).  Katrina was God hating fags.  The CA wildfires was God hating fags (try to explain that the wildfires left West Hollywood alone but hit the republican and wealthy neighborhoods!).  9/11 was because God hates fags.  And soldiers are dying in Iraq because God hates fags.  So this asshole pickets the funerals of soldiers with offensive signs and verbal slogans.

But this is not actually why I'm angry.

I'm angry because our lawmakers have put me in the position of defending this fuckwad.

A Baltimore jury awarded the family of one of these soldiers $11 million dollars because Phelps was "was too vulgar and offensive to be covered by the First Amendment".   Not because he was causing a disturbance or inciting a riot, which is against the law.  No, because Phelps was saying things that hurt someone's feelings.  The actual charges appear to be "invasion of privacy", yet they stood 1000 feet away from the funeral.  Phelps was not inside the church or even out in front with his protests.  He was across the street or down the street or somewhere not quite in their faces.  Unless he was on private property and the owner of the property has him arrested for trespassing (which is illegal), what Phelps did was not against the law.

I find this to be a very dangerous precedent.  The First Amendment was specifically designed to protect unpopular speech.  The writers of the Constitution had just fought a war against their previous ruler who had unlimited power and regularly censored the speech and even thought of his citizens.  The writers of the Constitution understood that the ability of the citizens to protect themselves against bad rulers was of paramount importance.  They understood that absolute power corrupts absolutely and the first defense is the ability for someone outside the situation to say "dude, this is fucked up!".  So they included, as the very first rule, that the citizens should not be punished for calling to light stuff the government might not want us to say or hear.  They intended to protect unpopular speech.  

We do not need a law protecting popular speech because, well, it's popular.  We *want* to hear it.  What we do need is protection for speech that is unpopular.  That's what helps keep the checks in place on those in power.  But it also allows such offensive asshats as this cretin to have his say.  I don't want to hear it, so I don't listen.  But if he can be censored because he's "too offensive", then anyone can be censored for being "too offensive".  Offensive is a subjective word and it all depends on who is in power and what the loudest portion of the population is claiming (not the majority, mind you, but the loudest).

While making Phelps pay an excessive amount of money makes me feel better, what happens is that others of his ilk now have a legitimate legal backing to their cause.  Instead of just being annoying, they can now tout out the Constitution as ammunition and add weight to their outrageous claims.  They have the right to be shitheads.  And we have the right to ignore them.  But, as the fundies keep finding out, trying to quiet a message only gives it more attention.  Now it's our turn to learn that lesson.  I had no idea who this barking moonbat was until this case.  I could have lived out my life happily in ignorance of his existence.  But now I know who he is.  And now millions of people know who he is.  His congregation of 70 has caught nationwide attention.  And those of us who fight for the rights of liberty for all people are now forced to acknowledge that he exists and he has the right to be the crazed barking moonbat.  The greatest justice would have been to have Phelps die in obscurity, his message quietly ignored as his congregation dies out over the years.  But no, we had to make him a celebrity and we had to give him the ammunition to make this a legal battle.

We are currently in a massive struggle between the religious conservatives and everyone else.  In this case, I may agree that Phelps deserves to be shut up, but I cannot advocate a legal precedence to do so just because I, personally, don't want to hear his message.  When he actually breaks the law and he actually infringes upon another person's rights (the right to not be offended is *not* a Constitutional right, btw), then I'll be first in line to throw my stones.  But he broke no law.  What he did is offend someone with his unpopular opinions.

I have unpopular opinions.  What happens the day I, or anyone else, has their LJ shut down because someone else doesn't like the content in our journals?  What happens the day I owe another individual several million dollars because I called them a name?  What happens the day I am no longer allowed to use a computer of any sort the way computer fraud prisoners are restricted?  What happens the day YOU are censored?

So I am royally pissed off because I am being forced to align myself with this .... person, out of sheer self-interest and self-defense.  I hate the message this guy is sending and I hate his methods so much that I can't even think of a sufficiently bad cuss word to label him.  But rather than someone just not reading my journal, I could be fined for making that statement if it "offends" him or a member of his congregation (which is mostly made up of his family).  How dare you put me on the same side as him!  And how dare you set a precedent which chips away at my Freedom of Speech.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/us/02protest.html
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3812344&page=1

The other article deals with a man I had no idea existed but would have liked to have known about him before.  

This man is Antony Flew.

His most significant contribution appears to be a paper he wrote in the 50s called "Theology and Falsification", in which he claimed that the concept of God was too vague a concept to be meaningful.  "For if God’s greatness entails being invisible, intangible and inscrutable, then he can’t be disproved — but nor can he be proved".  

Held up as one of the forefathers of the current atheism movement and now in his late 80s, he is under attack.  He is being used as a pawn in the great battle between anti-atheist religious fundamentalists and science-based atheists.  

See, the religious groups are trying to play in the field of science.  They don't seem to understand how or why science is not the same as religion.  In religion, when someone claims to have the divine message, you have to take his word for it, sight unseen.  You also have to take EVERY word he says as true.  If anything he says is untrue, that immediately makes suspect everything else he ever said.

Science doesn't work like that.  Followers of science do not "believe" or "have faith" in the words of our so-called great men.  Science is based on people trying to prove everyone else WRONG.  It's only when we try to prove them wrong and FAIL that we accept the original theory (and "theory" does not mean "guess").  We also do not accept a scientist's word simply on the basis that he got something right before.  We do not take everything he says as gospel because we are not worshiping the man, we are accepting the evidence of his experiments only after several other people reached the same conclusions ... people whose agenda was not to have their experiments reach the same conclusion, but to have them reach something different.

So, the religious nuts who don't understand this, have begun this campaign to get our scientists (or anyone claiming to be a scientist) to change their minds and admit to some belief in a god.  Any possible mention of god, any possible hint of an "I don't know" is immediately broadcast in such a light as to claim that “even science believes in God” and therefore God must exist.

 

So, back to Flew.  This poor guy, who had some quite brilliant suppositions in his 20s and 30s, is now 87.  He has no television and admits to having no clue how these newfangled computer thingies work.  Let’s face it, he’s not the same sharp tack he used to be.

 

Several very prominent Christian men including the Orthodox Jewish physicist Gerald Schroeder, have, over the years, befriended Antony Flew, bombarding him with the guise of “friendship” in an attempt to slip in their Christian agenda.  They brought to him discussions and false references and pseudo-science papers as their “proof”.  Flew had no opportunity, or even interest, in researching the validity of the “proof” that was presented to him.  He admits he just assumed that a guy who claimed to be a professor at MIT and was now working at the Weizmann Institute would have all the latest research.  He just took their word for it. 

 

The Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese went and wrote a book and had Flew sign his name to it.  In this book, Flew appears to have recanted his atheism and now believes in God.  When a doctoral student named Richard Carrier found out about this, he wrote to Flew and shed some light on all the false information they fed him.  Once again, Flew recants after being presented with “evidence”.  He even makes statements like “the “so confident, atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins” tells him that Schroeder is wrong, he will admit that Schroeder is wrong.”  He goes on to say that since Dawkins didn’t happen to mention Schroeder in his book, he just assumes that Dawkins agrees with him.

 

These are not the statements of a scientist at the top of his game.  A scientist does not take anyone’s word for it.  He might lend weight to someone who has proven himself to be consistently correct in his findings, but at the very least, he would not take the ABSENCE of a statement to be evidence of positive findings. 

 

I am appalled at the treatment of this man.  The religious nuts believe that we follow men the way they to do.  That if they can just find someone we respect to renege on his previous atheistic statements, then we’ll say “Oh, well if Flew believes in God, it MUST be true!”.  That may be how religion works, but it’s not how science works.

 

So they pester this poor old man whose intellectual facilities are clearly fading.  They lure him in with friendly talks claiming to be his friend.  Then they USE his failing faculties as a TOOL to try and generate converts from the scientific community!  Because of Flew’s lack of media connections, he is completely unaware of how important he has become.  Not to the scientific community, because we know better.  But to the religious agenda and to pseudo-scientists and others who have no real understanding of science.  Flew is not just an old man having a chat around a coffee table with some lemonade or a game of checkers with his equally old buddies.  He’s being used and manipulated to further an agenda that has world-wide intentions.

 

I find it just appalling.  I find their use of manipulation to be an offensive attack.  I find their lack of scientific understanding and their application of religious rules to sway the scientific community a pathetic attempt to further their agenda.

 

I feel pity for Flew, a man who made great contributions to the world of academic philosophy who should be allowed to live out his life in peace and quiet but who is, instead, being thrust once again into the limelight … that light that does not show us the brilliant mind of yesteryear, but instead highlights the very sad fading of his previous brilliance and intellect.  We should not be thrust naked into the harsh light, to have the whole world witness our intellectual decay.

 

I would have preferred to have discovered Flew’s works where I could admire and respect him.  Instead, my introduction to him garners pity for a once-intelligent man who is now a pawn in the religious groups’ personal agendas.  And it garners a new hatred for the unethical tactics wielded by men who claim to have the highest set of ethics as being set down from on high.

 

And they claim people like me are unethical and not capable of having moral standards without God to guide me.  Yet I would never take advantage of someone like this.  This is just cruel.

 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew-t.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1194455527-LUVjybqUq5nHNpGa48rMKQ

Comments

[datan0de.livejournal.com]

Agreed on both counts. As much as I despise Fred Phelps and nearly everything he stands for, he and his droogies were following the law. It's very likely that the decision will be overturned on appeal, at which point Phelps and Co. can countersue for legal costs.

Fun bit of trivia: Fred Phelps and many of his followers are lawyers, and from what I hear surprisingly sharp ones (stunning as it may seem, Phelps did a lot of genuinely good work in the courtroom back in the day). They'll have no trouble representing themselves, but can still "bill themselves" for it. Thus, if they win their countersuit they'll stand to make a tidy sum.

From your second article: Unless you are a professional philosopher or a committed atheist, you probably have not heard of Antony Flew." I guess that means I'm in the second category. Antony Flew is a tragic story; an example of why one should never stop thinking critically as well as a reminder of why appeals to authority are unsound. The Christian side loves to use him as a poster boy, and claims that fickle atheists turned their back on him once he "saw the light". The fact is that skepticism demands that one evaluate concepts on their own merit, regardless of who is espousing them. The idea that the moon is made out of cheese wouldn't suddenly be taken seriously if Stephen Hawking started claiming that it was so, unless he provided some staggeringly compelling evidence. Since religions are generally based on appeals to authority it doesn't surprise me that the religious don't understand this.

Christians often (I'm stating this from personal observation) claim that atheists "worship" Richard Dawkins due to his popularity. I freely admit that I'm a huge fan of his, and that I have yet to hear him make a point with which I strongly disagree, but everything he says must pass through the same bullshit filter that Fred Phelps' words must pass. Conversely, there are a couple of points where I disagree strongly with Penn Jillette, but that doesn't prevent me from applauding the many, many times when I've agreed with him wholeheartedly.

[joreth]

Yes, zen_shooter refers to this as the Cult of Personality, the phenomenon of groups of people to worship a person, rather than the message or the job title. Since they themselves follow this cult of personality, they try to "convert" athiests believing that we also follow the same cult.

It's like the way tacit always talks about how many of these people's objections to things like science and atheism speak more about the person with the objections than anything else. If you believe that, without God, people will run amok because there is nothing to stop them, that really means that the objector would run amok without his God to make him toe the line. Their use of this tactic shows us how they think about their leaders and emphasizes their lack of critical thinking and cultish behaviour.

I agree with you on both points about Richard Dawkins and Penn Jilette. There are several points in his TV show Bullshit that I know are incorrect and a couple of points where I feel differently than he does, but I love that show and show it (including the "wrong" episodes) to everyone I can because of the very many times it has a message I agree with. When I share episodes of the show, it's not because I'm trying to get more Penn-worshipers, it's because I'm trying to pass along the message ... or I just think it's funny.

I list both men (among a very few others) as "heroes" of mine, but they are not infallible. They are my "heroes" because *most* of what they say, I agree with (based on my own independent research of the subject) and they are elevated to "hero" status because of their highly public position and their gumption for speaking out the truth, based on critical thinking and evidence-based research, in an anti-intellectual world that is terrified of "truth" and has to rely upon fairy tales to fill the void left by removing all trace of fact.