Pink Ouija boards are tacky, but dangerous?

Only if you get clubbed in the head with one. Otherwise they’re just lame games that can freak out your friends during sleepovers. Still, Fox sees fit to make them news anyway.

It’s designed for young girls ages 8 and older, but some say the mysterious product is a “dangerous spiritual game” that opens up anyone, particularly Christians, to attacks on their soul.

The game continues to be sold at Toys R Us locations in the U.S. and Canada for $19.99, although it’s currently being “phased out,” company officials say.

“There’s a spiritual reality to it and Hasbro is treating it as if it’s just a game,” said Stephen Phelan, communications director for Human Life International, which bills itself as the largest international pro-life organization and missionary worldwide. “It’s not Monopoly. It really is a dangerous spiritual game and for [Hasbro] to treat it as just another game is quite dishonest.”

But it is just a game! That shit’s not real. Impressionable brains can make it feel real but Ouija boards aren’t soul stealers.

The pink edition is also available for $33.99 on Amazon.com, where some commenters likened the game to occult materials targeting “tween” girls.

“Just unbelievable,” one posting read. “Hasbro — you should be seriously ashamed — you have lost your way. Ouija boards are NOT ‘games’ and they certainly should not be marketing these to children.”

Toy expert and consultant Chris Byrne said he found “absolutely nothing” wrong with any version of the game.

“And if something doesn’t fit your value or belief system, you don’t have to buy it,” Byrne said. “There’s absolutely nothing remotely Christian or un-Christian about it. I think people are projecting their belief system on it.”

Byrne, who writes for timetoplaymag.com, said he was unclear of the origin of the notion that Ouija players can somehow communicate with spirits or the dead.

The history of the game is pretty tame, really, but there are some inconsistencies over who should get credit for it. Essortment suggests E.C. Reiche and Charles Kennard based their game on earlier “automatic writing” devices assumed to be capable of letting spirits get a word in edgewise.

While using this new invention, Reiche received a message to call the board Ouija after the Egyptian word for luck. Unfortunately, ouija is not the Egyptian word for luck but it is such a cool sounding word that it has remained the name of the most popular talking boards to this day.

Kennard marketed these talking boards through the Kennard Novelty Company, beginning in 1890. His advertisements claimed the Ouija board would “give an intelligent answer to any question”. Unfortunately for Kennard, his shop foreman orchestrated a hostile takeover by his financial backers and by 1892, the Ouija board was in the hands of William Fuld.

Mitch Horowitz offers a slightly different version.

The patent for a “Ouija or Egyptian luck-board” was filed on May 28, 1890 by Baltimore resident and patent attorney Elijah H. Bond, who assigned the rights to two city businessmen, Charles W. Kennard and William H.A. Maupin. The patent was granted on February 10, 1891, and so was born the Ouija-brand talking board.

And Reiche, or perhaps Reichie, had nothing to do with it.

this figure appears virtually nowhere else in Ouija history, including on the first patent. His name came up during a period of patent litigation about thirty years after Ouija’s inception. A 1920 account in New York’s World Magazine – widely disseminated that year in the popular weekly The Literary Digest – reports that one of Ouija’s early investors told a judge that E.C. Reichie had invented the board. But no reference to an E.C. Reichie – be he a cabinetmaker or coffin maker – appears in the court transcript, according to Ouija historian and talking-board manufacturer Robert Murch.

But maybe it doesn’t matter much anyway. Horowitz makes mention of the fact that a lot of people had homemade boards back then that did the same thing the “official” board does: passed the time and entertained people.

At his online Museum of Talking Boards, Ouija collector and chronicler Eugene Orlando posts an 1886 article from the New-York Daily Tribune (as reprinted that year in a Spiritualist monthly, The Carrier Dove) describing the breathless excitement around the new-fangled alphabet board and its message indicator. “I know of whole communities that are wild over the ‘talking board,’” says a man in the article. This was a full four years before the first Ouija patent was filed. Obviously Bond, Kennard, and their associates were capitalizing on an invention – not conceiving of one.

It’s entertainment. If people want to believe there’s real spiritual connection going on, I guess they don’t have to buy the game.

People are so darn silly.

Church volunteers steal money in Canada, too

Even in Saskatchewan.

A woman who volunteered at a church is [sic] Gravelbourg, Sask., is accused of stealing more than $91,000.

RCMP say a woman who did financial and administrative work for the Assumption Catholic Church has been arrested over the writing of unauthorized cheques.

Paulette Dumont, 64, is charged with fraud and theft over $5,000.

What more can be said? Gravelbourg has around a thousand residents so a story like this is probably a big blow for the town and area.

I wonder why she did it.

Went to see Metropolis last night…

…and when I say “went” I mean I sat in the refurbished Roxy theater in downtown Saskatoon to watch the film as twenty members of the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra played the 1927 score for it. That was a very neat experience. The film was also a neat experience, as I’d never seen the whole thing before.

Michael Organ offers up a nice site about the film and its history and I’ll quote from that later.

The plot is simple enough. It takes place in a future world where a class division of labour has been taken to the extreme. Fredersen, the leader of the city, is a heartless man, feared by almost all who know him. His son, Freder, is happy and fun-loving and largely ignorant of the proletariat workforce toiling deep below the gardens and towers of the beautiful city who maintain all the machines that power the place. One day, his fun is interrupted by a strange woman with a passel of poorly dressed and dismal looking kids. He’s instantly love-struck by Maria and takes what she says to heart – that all men are brothers.

His desire to speak with her leads him to follow her into the depths below Metropolis and he arrives just in time to witness a terrible mechanical accident. He’s traumatized by the experience and scurries up to the highest tower to tell his father all about it. His father’s annoyed by the fact that he’s getting the news from his son rather than his aides, but Fredersen’s too worried about the possibility of revolt to really care what his son is going through.

Freder heads back down into the machines and trades clothes with a worker. After he finds a plan or map of some kind in the guy’s things, he gets invited to join the other men at a secret location where, lo and behold, Maria is there waiting to offer the solace of hope and dreams.

Meanwhile, Fredersen wanders over to the local mad scientist’s abode for reasons I didn’t really get. Maybe he was looking for suggestions on how to deal with the potential worker problem. Anyway, the scientist is excited about his own invention, a mechanical man, and proudly shows it off. I don’t know if they both loved the same woman, or what, but Rotwang figured he’d somehow make the machine take on the appearance of the dead woman, Freder’s mom. Fredersen gets a better idea – capture Maria and send the mechanical man back down to replace her and screw up whatever the workers are planning.

And that was where the show got interesting.

The Maria machine gets the workers into a tizzy and they’re driven so crazy with the desire to make the parable a reality that they wreck the machines. This causes the undercity to flood while all their kids are still down there, forgotten during the frenzy of payback. Fredersen later realizes that his own son is trapped down there, too. Freder and the real Maria get out with the kids, but by this time the workers have revolted against the machine Maria, thinking they were led astray by a witch. There’s some worry of mistaken identity, but it is the Maria machine that winds up on the pyre laughing as “she” burns, revealing the soulless metal core beneath that dumbfounds everyone.

The main point of the movie was to push the need for cooperation and a more fair society. Head and hands need a heart, Maria keeps saying. She tells the workers a parable related to the biblical tale of the tower of Babel but it’s told in such a way as to reflect and foreshadow the world she’s living in. Dreamers wished to build the highest tower possible but had no idea how to do it, so they hired thousands of men. The work was hard and what was a dream became a curse for the workers so the workers revolted and the tower fell to pieces. It was impossible for them to understand the big dream because of how things were organized. At the end of the film, the real Maria encourages Freder to become the intermediary between his father and the working class, the heart between the head and hands as it were.

In an interview for Focus on Film in 1975, Fritz Lang had this to say about the film’s message:

after I finished the film I personally didn’t much care for it, though I loved it while I was making it. When I looked at it after it was completed I said to myself, you can’t change the social climate of a country with a message like “The heart must be the go-between of the head (capital) and the hands (labour).” I was convinced that you cannot solve social problems by such a message. Many years later, in the Fifites [sic], an industrialist wrote in The Washington Post that he had seen the film and that he very much agreed with that statement about the heart as the go-between. But that didn’t change my mind about the picture.

It’s still a sentiment that plays out today in film and fiction and life – that industry and technology are just as heartless as they ever were and the world would be better off if more people cared about the people.

In the later years of my life I have made it a point to speak with a lot of young people in order to try to understand their point of view. They all hate the establishment and when I asked them what they dislike so intensely about our computerised society they said: “It has no heart.” So now I wonder if Mrs. von Harbou was not right all the time when she wrote that line in Metropolis a half century ago. Personally I still think the idea is too idealistic. How can a man who has everything really understand a man who has very little?

It’s a good question and the answer seems to always be, “Throw some money around.” But raising money for a cause doesn’t solve the problems that caused the need for fund raising in the first place. Rules are made that penalize the needy but don’t seem to apply to or affect anyone else. People are written off and given up on just on the basis of where they live, or whatever. The rich get more because they’ve grown accustomed to expecting more, even if it means less for everyone else. It’s a messed up world we’ve made for ourselves, but if changes can be made, who’s really prepared to make them? Who’s really fit to make them? Businessmen? Celebrities? Politicians? The Everyman? Who really decides what’s most important?

“God wants me in prison” (and I’m sure the police do, too)

Lil Wayne got caught with a gun in his possession and is set to spend up to a year in jail. Rolling Stone Magazine put him on the cover and interviewed him but I get this from People:

He says his prison term is God’s will for him and everything happens for a reason.”I look at things as ‘Everything is meant to be.’ I know it’s an experience that I need to have if God’s putting me through it.”

It’s an experience he wouldn’t have to have if he’d stayed on the right side of the law in the first place. I wonder how god fearing he actually is, or if he just throws the god stuff in to make it sound like he’s really not a bad guy. He was on The View last April discussing his new album, Rebirth, his addiction to cough syrup and his life as a role model for fans everywhere. From The BoomBox:

“I depend on God and motivation,” he said. “I don’t depend on cough syrup and marijuana. I never have.” He did, however, note that he enjoys smoking marijuana and that he is aware of his role model status. “I know that I have a lot of youth following me and I think the best way is to lead by example. I keep that in my head.”

So where was his head in October, when they found the gun in his vehicle? He also told The View girls about his attempts to get a degree and how important higher education is but Urban Daily has a quote worth quoting:

Lil’ Wayne says he doesn’t bother with books because he doesn’t believe what’s written in most of them. He tells G-Q magazine, “I don’t believe the Bible, nothing that’s written, because nothing that’s written is to be believed.”

Well, I guess believing the bible is truth isn’t a prerequisite to god-belief, but still. GQ also asked him who he prayed to and he replied, “Whoever’s listening.”

I just question the sincerity, I guess. Is he a real believer or does he just toss this stuff out because he’s smart enough to know that people like to hear other people claim God’s part of the process? Smart enough to know people believe it matters. Smart enough to know people will forgive his transgressions if they think God will.

If grumpy people are more evolved people, then my mother…

I don’t know what to make of this new evolutionary theory. There was a study recently done of chimps and bonobos (our closest relatives) to see which species could learn quicker.

The two types of ape are very close to each other, genetically, but the clear differences are believed to be down to simple evolution, said lead researcher Victoria Wobber.

Her team put both chimps and bonobos through a variety of skill tests with rewards for those who completed various tasks the quickest.

They included a sharing exercise and a begging exercise in which they had to work out which of their keepers was most generous. In all cases the chimps learnt the tasks fastest and to their better advantage.

She believes that the ability to “restrain” their sociability was one of the reasons they were more intelligent and more civilised.

She said: “Bonobos took longer to develop the same skill level shown even among the youngest of the chimpanzees that were tested.

To paraphrase, chimps get ornery as they get older with more aggression and less desire to share their stuff. And their research suggests this could be a good thing.

Pity the poor bonobo who’s too laid back and easy going? Not quite yet. Instead of getting that aggressive, they just have lots of sex. And this is worth quoting:

Just imagine that we had never heard of chimpanzees or baboons and had known bonobos first. We would at present most likely believe that early hominids lived in female- centered societies, in which sex served important social functions and in which warfare was rare or absent. In the end, perhaps the most successful reconstruction of our past will be based not on chimpanzees or even on bonobos but on a three-way comparison of chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.

Maybe it looks like the chimps have an edge, but there are benefits to both types of lifestyle exhibited by our kin. No doubt more research will go into their findings to expand on or disprove what they discovered.

So while yoga poses leave you wide open for the devil, learning martial arts is A-OK?

Wasn’t Jesus Christ a pacifist? I’m amused by this story I found in the New York Times that pretty much contradicts whatever people claim Jesus talked about.

Down Tennessee way is something called Xtreme Ministries and they’re using martial arts as a way to demonstrate love for the Lord. The school/church motto is Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide.

Mr. Renken’s ministry is one of a small but growing number of evangelical churches that have embraced mixed martial arts — a sport with a reputation for violence and blood that combines kickboxing, wrestling and other fighting styles — to reach and convert young men, whose church attendance has been persistently low.

Sounds fun. I guess I’m too girly to see the thrill of making a sport out of kicking heads until they bleed.

Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events.

Going by all that was chosen to preserve, I think it’d be more true to say Christ fought with rhetoric, something which seems like a lost skill these days. He fought with words and deeds, not violence.

The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”

Maybe if they didn’t paint the man like a long haired hippie all the time and let the world know he had a penis they wouldn’t have this problem now.

The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility.

“The man should be the overall leader of the household,” said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group. “We’ve raised a generation of little boys.”

Sure, and blame single moms for that while you’re at it. Oh wait, they do:

“You have a lot of troubled young men who grew up without fathers, and they’re wandering and they’re hopeless and they’re lousy dads themselves and they’re just lost,” said Paul Robie, 54, a pastor at South Mountain Community Church in Draper, Utah.

Learning how to kick the crap out of someone makes them better parents? Somehow I doubt that one. Tennessee, Utah, Seattle – this mixed martial arts religious movement is all over the place, apparently.

Paul Burress, 35, a chaplain and fight coach at Victory Baptist Church in Rochester, said mixed martial arts had given his students a chance to work on body, soul and spirit. “Win or lose, we represent Jesus,” he said. “And we win most of the time.”

And of course winning is everything. Winning hearts and minds through violence. Can a nice message really be found under all that blood?

When helping Haitian children hurts – 10 child traffickers caught

Although they wouldn’t call themselves traffickers – they’d call themselves Good Christians.

“God wanted us to come here to help children, we are convinced of that,” Laura Silsby, one of 10 Americans accused of trafficking Haitian children, said Monday through the bars of a jail cell here. “Our hearts were in the right place.”

But brains obviously weren’t. They were detained at the Dominican border with 33 kids in their possession – some of which were not, in fact, orphans.

Although Ms. Silsby said the group did not intend to offer the children for adoption, the Web site said they would “strive” to “provide opportunities for adoption through partnership with New Life Adoption Foundation,” which subsidizes adoptions “for loving Christian parents who would otherwise not be able to afford to adopt.”

The status of New Life Adoption Foundation was not immediately clear. The group is not registered as an adoption agency in Idaho and does not appear to be registered as a federal nonprofit. The group also did not appear on a list of accredited international adoption agencies on the Web site of the State Department.

So basically they think having the right god on their side is all they need and they can do whatever the hell they want, wherever they happen to be. I’m glad they got caught and I hope sitting in a Haitian prison for a while will finally teach them that having god isn’t good enough to get around the laws of another country, no matter how good the intentions.

What matters more at Crystal Cathedral, layoffs or Easter?

The once-prosperous megachurch has had to cut fifty jobs and wants to sell the property they worked on, the Rancho Capistrano retreat. From the L.A. Times:

Charles said the church’s revenue sank 27% from roughly $30 million in 2008 to $22 million in 2009. Anticipating a drop in 2010 revenue, he added, “If it maintains, that would be fine, but we don’t have a crystal ball, so we are cutting.”

Sorry, I can’t help but ask where their god is now. I just love the crystal ball reference, like they’d be willing to resort to magic and new age frippery to ascertain their chances of survival. Funny that he didn’t say they’d be praying for help instead. More proof that a church is just another business, I guess.

The church, founded by the Rev. Robert H. Schuller more than 50 years ago, lost members in the wake of a family feud after he retired. His son, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller, succeeded his father, but stepped down in 2008 after disagreements. His sister, [Sheila Schuller Coleman] is now the church’s leader.

Charles said the church surveyed its members last fall to see if the dispute had caused a drop in contributions. “We found out it had no effect. It is the economy. We have a lot of older, retired people,” he said.

Retired people who are perhaps more worried about their own future survivability to care about funding a glass castle of materialism? Money woes means cuts to the entertainment budget, too. The Glory of Easter pageant has been canceled for this year and the new leader appears to be heartbroken:

Coleman said she had tears in her eyes when she heard the board’s decision to temporarily suspend “The Glory of Easter,” the pageant that depicts the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ with flying angels, special effects and a live animal parade.

I wonder how much tickets were costing to attend that and I wonder how much money was required to make it fly in the first place.

Charles said suspending “The Glory of Easter” has been an “emotional issue” for staff and hundreds of volunteers who help put the show together.

“But it is a very costly production and advance sales were down,” he said. “It was a business decision that was extremely tough to make.”

Also according the O.C. Register, they’re having trouble unloading the property – the retreat office building and all the land it sits on.

The sale of the office building fell through, and selling the 150 acres in Rancho Capistrano is contingent on what happens to the retreat, he said.

“The city of San Juan Capistrano has imposed a lot of limitations on us regarding what we can do with that land,” Charles said. “That and the real estate market have posed a serious challenge in terms of selling the property. But we want to sell it. We’re not going to give it away.”

Philanthropist John Crean gave it to them in the first place, and more.

Dr. Robert H. Schuller officiated [his funeral] along with the Rev. Robert Richards, Crean’s Lutheran pastor for many years.

“The church you’re sitting in, the Crystal Cathedral, would not be here without John Crean,” Schuller said, recalling a $1 million donation that helped get the world-famous house of worship built.

I guess that’s the trouble with relying on generous people to get ahead. Maybe they got greedy. Maybe they got too big. Maybe they made some bad money decisions, bad management decisions. Why did that house of worship have to be world famous anyway? Anyone can pray to god in a field, so why fund the building of something like this in the first place?

I hope the people who are now out of work find replacement employment soon. It’s probably a terrible time to be looking for work. I hope for the best.

Desire for “Christian community” not fair to Muslim Americans

Or any other group, for that matter.

I don’t have the chops to do this story justice, I’ll admit (go see Paliban Daily’s take on it), but I thought it was interesting enough to write about anyway.

Lancaster residents were urged by Mayor R. Rex Parris in a state of the city speech to support a city ballot measure that would authorize daily prayers at city council meetings.

In his speech, Parris said “we are growing a Christian community, and don’t let anybody shy away from that,” according to the Antelope Valley Press.

Ideally, prayer shouldn’t be a part of any government business. God should not be in government. It’s divisive and unnecessary.

In a later interview with the Daily News, Parris expressed surprise that some religious leaders object to prayers to Jesus at city meetings, and blamed opposition on activists who “want a fight,” the newspaper reported. “They want their 15 minutes of fame.”

And if they can’t have fame, can they at least feel some equality?

Kamal Al-Khatob, head of the Islamic Institute of the Antelope Valley, told the Daily News that the mayor’s belief that Lancaster is a Christian community alienates Muslims. “This is not what America is all about. America is for everybody.”

He’s as big an idealist as me, I think. I also think he’s right to remind people of that. America might have been founded by theists and religious pilgrims but “We the People” shouldn’t be read as, “We the Christian people” and mayors who encourage communities to play favourites based on what god they love best should get a slap down.

One week ago, Lancaster city council member Sherry Marquez wrote on her Facebook page that the beheading murder of an Islamic woman by her husband in New York shows that vicious murders are what Muslims embrace.

“This is what the Muslim religion is all about — the beheadings, honor killings are just the beginning of what is about to come to the USA,” she reportedly wrote on the Web Jan. 23. “We are told this is a small minority of Muslim’s (sic) in America, but it is truly what they are all about.”

You know what else they’re about? They’re about 400 years or so behind Christianity. Christians did their share of beheadings too, and it wasn’t just kings. It really isn’t fair to judge the whole pile of them based on what a few do. Would local Muslims feel comfortable running for council seats knowing Jesus is the only god allowed in the room? Is this going to make them proud to be a part of that community? Or is the mayor ultimately hoping that they’ll pack up like unwanted gypsies and bugger off to someone else’s property?

I wonder if this is happening in other places. American Christians love to claim they’re facing persecution in their schools and workplaces just because they can’t wear a necklace but then stories like this pop up. How is this not worse?

—
edit Feb. 2 to add Paliban Daily link. It really is a good post.

Freethinker Book Club – faith, reason, and the religious experience

My Freethinker club started a book discussion group and we had the first meet yesterday. The book we’re reading is called Reason & Religious Belief: an introduction to the philosophy of religion. Our book group leader, a philosophy professor at the university, suggested it as a good place to start. We had to read the chapters on religious experience and the relationship between faith and reason.

Religious experiences first:

In order for an experience to fit the criteria, the person has to come out of the experience feeling like some supreme being had a hand in it. One of the fellows in our group had been in seminary school as a younger man and gave us an example out of his own life. He and a good friend had spent a nice evening out walking and talking about the any and the all, as good friends do. They paused to watch a spectacular show of northern lights and that’s when he thought he saw a sign – tendrils of light forming themselves into the shape of a man kneeling before a giant fish. His friend claimed to have witnessed the same, but friends and family who were later told about this amazing event were skeptical.

Apparently a lot of people claim they’ve seen signs and they’re never verifiable. Now that he’s an atheist, he wonders if it was a hallucination. The two of them had been talking about where to go in the future and the man kneeling by the fish could easily have been a “message” for him to head for missionary work like Job was trying to avoid and couldn’t. That was certainly the way he wanted to rationalize and justify his vision at the time, when he wasn’t questioning it.

In the book, the writers give an example from Augustine’s Confessions. It seems he was at a crossroads in his life, questioning purpose or something, when he heard some kid singing or hollering the words to a game. Whether it was the actual phrase of the game or not, he thought he heard the kid say, “Take it and read, take it and read.” This he took as a sign to open his bible and read the first passage he saw.

It was important enough to this great Christian philosopher that he just had to write down what happened. Did anyone ever question him? Did no one tell him he must have imagined it? Apparently not, if people still quote the guy’s so-called religious experience.

How is Augustine’s experience any different from, say, people who think they hear messages in white noise, or a mishmash of garbled syllables that become a mantra about not getting dinner or some damn thing? He heard a completely random thing and attributed meaning to it that would fit what he thought he needed at the time.

Like that hasn’t happened to just about everyone at some point. The difference is, most of us attribute those experiences to chance or coincidence rather than assuming it was a message meant only for us from some greater being being subtle instead of obvious.

The relationship between faith and reason:

The prof talked about the Platonic approach to thinking of perfect forms from which all lesser forms are a flawed copy. Christianity in particular borrows a lot from Plato’s divisive world view – perfect heaven and an imperfect earth. The perfect god and imperfect humans made in His image and left to strive for what is impossible to achieve.

He also mentioned Hegel and the revamped dialectic – a method of arguing to prove a point of view, or at least persuade people to agree with it. It starts with a thesis, the opposing argument is the antithesis, and the end result should be a synthesis where both points of view have reached an agreement. The more this is done, the closer we get to the Truth, I suppose, whatever it is. Closer to that perfect, virtuous level of knowledge. I’ll borrow from Wikipedia for an example here.

In the Logic, for instance, Hegel describes a dialectic of existence: first, existence must be posited as pure Being (Sein); but pure Being, upon examination, is found to be indistinguishable from Nothing (Nichts). When it is realized that what is coming into being is, at the same time, also returning to nothing (in life, for example, one’s living is also a dying), both Being and Nothing are united as Becoming.[21]

Sounds like pure hokum to me, but I suspect philosophers live for that kind of esoteric Idea behind the idea stuff. That’s high falutin’ rootin’ tootin’ thinkin’ when they’re thinkin’ like that.

They think that reasoning things out can get you closer to the ideal. Faith, on the other hand, often seems to require no reasoning at all. Take the leap of faith. No proof is required in order to believe what you do and often no proof seems to be wanted.

A mathematician named W.K. Clifford was mentioned in the book. He was of the opinion that belief needs to be questioned, needs to be challenged. It’s not good enough to just believe something is true without proof, without good reason. Since religions so rarely offer evidence that proves beyond a doubt, religions should be taken to task for that and discarded – or at least be willing to discard what isn’t provably true. Since that would probably be everything.. well, so be it. Fideism, on the other hand, rejects that very idea. It rejects the need to use reason or rationalize beliefs at all. They take God as a given, basically, and work from there.

Kierkegaard was a fideist. He’s mentioned in the book as heaping scorn on people who seek evidence in the face of faith. Since rationalizing is only an approximation, there is always more evidence that must be measured. He sees this is as a colossal waste of time, apparently. He’s quoted as saying, “every moment is wasted in which he does not have God.” There’s a concern that proof would negate the need for faith. Personally, I don’t see that as a bad thing, but Kierkegaard thinks that this quest of objectivity stands in the way of truly knowing God. You don’t have to Know; you have to Believe. Faith is a commitment to a risk and a lot of people like it that way.

Of course then the question becomes, which faith is worth the risk? As an atheist, it’s a non-argument. They’re all equally invalid and pointless and offer me nothing I desire. For someone who feels they need a faith in order to be whole, it can be a big deal. But the catch-22 of fideism means that a person can’t really weigh and measure which faith is best because that means having to question each faith and make critical, positive/negative decisions about each one. A fideist is solidly against measuring faith in any way, shape or form.

If they do have to measure, they measure with their beliefs as the given – the thing that doesn’t need proving. The book gives an example from Martin Luther who’d heard of the earth revolving around the sun even though the bible clearly states the opposite. Martin Luther had no trouble believing the bible had it right by using Joshua 10:12-14 as his proof – the fight where God held the sun in the sky for a whole day. The sun had to be circling the earth in order for that to work…

There are people today who argue for biblical truth that way. You show them a contradiction between the Word and reality and they’ll try and show you the truth of the Word anyway. Their faith in the Word cannot be shaken no matter how much evidence to the contrary you have in front of you. It’s evidence of commitment to the risk and they revel in the solidity of their faith every time.

It’s amazing, really. It’s amazing how people can trick their minds into believing all kinds of bizarre things. And about mind tricks: after this meeting we decided we ought to see if we can hire a hypnotist to come to a meet up and show us how that works so we can talk about how much of church ritual resembles hypnosis.

Next time around we’ll be reading from the chapters on evidentialism, religious language and whether or not science and religion are compatible.