Speaking of the (non-existent) War on Christmas, the Daily Show took on this manufactured nonsense last night:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| The Gretch Who Saved the War on Christmas | ||||
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Archived entries for Jon Stewart
I was lucky enough to be able to attend Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington D.C. last weekend, and I took the opportunity to talk to people with signs pertaining to religion what their signs meant to them.
The Rally itself commented on the problems of religious dogma through the character of Father Guido Sarducci, who named off religions and asked God to indicate which is the correct faith by sending some sort of sign. Like the entire Rally, this was a great example of making an important point through comedy; but I have to admit, I felt a twinge of being left out – nonbelievers were not even mentioned.
There is still big tension in this country over the issue of abortion, and many politicians use the issue to polarize voters. There is not so much, however, a debate on the issue; most people seem pretty set in their ways about this issue. Let me turn, instead, to another issue of appropriateness when disagreeing. The Westboro Baptist Church, for example, protests funerals of soldiers holding signs saying ‘God Hates Fags’, and I would submit that this is an inappropriate means of disagreement. Likewise, many religious people hold signs in front of ‘abortion clinics’ to disagree with abortion. Except, the thing is, it would be incorrect to even call the places these people protest against ‘abortion clinics’. Below is a graph from the Planned Parenthood 2008 report depicting the total services they offer to people who come to them:
Secondly, I would direct you to a cell phone video and article that have been generating some buzz lately. Alternet.org posted this article of a husband who confronted protesters, holding a Jesus sign of course, about how they treated his wife who was getting an abortion for a baby that was guaranteed to die at birth. You can see one of his cell phone videos here:
Even if you disagree with a woman’s right to choose, or you are ‘pro-life’, this method of disagreement needs to stop. This does nothing but harass people who are looking after their own health and getting help. These protesters yell at anyone — the woman who is about to abort a still-born baby, the man who was just cheated on by his wife who is checking for an STD, and the woman who found a lump in her breast. These protesters might seem like an easy target to point a finger at and condemn, but society does not do enough to shun such behavior. Religious organizations, in their typical dogmatic way, prefer black and white and fail to see the real picture. This reminds me of a previous story we covered where a nun at a hospital authorized an abortion to save the life of a mother and the church still excommunicated her (Nun demoted for participating in a life saving abortion, Responses to excommunicated nun story). One can only hope that there is a greater movement towards reason and sanity in this country — if only I were more optimistic about Jon Stewart’s upcoming rally.
Last night, Sam Harris made an appearance on The Daily Show. He was mainly there to pitch his new book The Moral Landscape. Harris describes his new book as a way for science to look at moral questions, ultimately asserting that it is a myth that science and morality are distinct, separate, and incapable of unification. Harris is well known for his other works, perhaps most famously, Letter to a Christian Nation.
It is good to see more atheists on his show because Jon Stewart has been notoriously over sympathetic to religious claims in the past. One example of this is when Marilynne Robinson appeared on his show and he made the statement: “I’ve always been fascinated that the more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith.”
The scientific community typically refutes the idea that morality comes from science. This is especially because religious people often (especially Creationists) say that morality does come from science, and that it is evil. The claim is that, for example, Darwinism leads to social Darwinism, which leads to eugenics, which leads to an elite mutant class that eats Christians. Instead, Harris takes the view that science should stop claiming that we do not or cannot receive morals from science, but rather that science can provide a more objective standard for morality. Harris, in his interview, and certainly in his book, elaborates further on some of the ways science could go about determining a common morality. You can watch the entire interview here.
Marilynne Robinson appeared on July 8th on the Daily Show. The interchange greatly disappointed me. Here are some highlights:
Marilynne Robinson: I don’t think it’s frankly scientific to proceed from the study of ants to the nature of the cosmos.
[Some time later] …
Jon: I’ve always been fascinated that the more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith. You know, they start to speak about the universe. They say: well, most of the universe is anti-matter. Oh really, where’s that? It’s there. Well, can you measure it? We’re working on it… It’s a very similar argument to the argument: well God created everything. I’m always fascinated by the similarity of the arguments at their core.”
I assume that Marilynne is making the mistake that something like evolution has to do with cosmology. That’s an assumption on my part since she’s mostly vague and not really saying anything but it’s a popular misunderstanding from creationists and the like that evolution, the natural selection, ‘Darwinist’ version of the term, has something to do with cosmology. They aren’t the same and no ‘evolutionist’ is saying anything of the sort.
Secondly, really Jon? Just because you don’t understand why scientists come to a conclusion does not make it the same as faith. Talk to a physicist or cosmologist and they can readily explain that anti-matter has been created in a lab, that there are sound mathematical principles behind it, and that it is REQUIRED for our understanding of the formation of the universe. He could have at least picked something stranger like multiverse theories or string theory to use as an example, but even then ‘faith’ in science is not the same as ‘faith’ in religion.
You can see the full episode here.
