You belong in hell, the teacher said
And people wonder why atheists get shirty. Or ‘arrogant’ as apparently Rod Liddle repeatedly said we are on his channel 4 encounter with Dawkins. Well maybe we don’t much want people saying everyone but Their Team is going to hell. Could that be it? We really just don’t want to hear from people who get their rocks off imagining their religious enemies being tortured to death forever. I don’t like people like that. In fact, I hate them. I think they’re disgusting, I think they’re rock bottom, I think they’re bad. Not as bad as people who make toddlers sleep in their own shit, not as bad as people who imprison small children in industrial schools and tell them their mothers are dead when they aren’t and force them to make rosaries and beat them and call them names – not as bad as that; but very bad. Morally bad. People who take pleasure in contemplating the suffering of other people are bad. I don’t want to hear from them, and I imagine that few atheists do. So we are ‘arrogant’ enough to resist. And then we get death threats.
And all this is ten miles from Manhattan. Err…
Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it. Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary. “If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,” Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. “He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell.”
‘You belong in hell.’ No, actually, I don’t think a history teacher should be telling students that. But ‘the larger community’ apparently does.
…students and the larger community have mostly lined up with Mr. Paszkiewicz, not with Matthew, who has received a death threat handled by the police, as well as critical comments from classmates.
They’re getting closer. I was at Safeway yesterday and I heard an announcement over the store’s pa system – ‘all available employees to the back for – ‘ what? – ‘afternoon service.’ For what? Did I just hear that? Did I just hear what I think I heard? I wasn’t absolutely sure, because I wasn’t paying attention until I thought I heard what I thought I heard – so maybe I didn’t hear it. That is what it sounded like though…and it was Sunday. If that is what I heard it just creeps the bejeezis out of me. We’ll all be in a Christian concentration camp soon at this rate.
The schools I went to as a child really sucked, but at least they didn’t shove god crap down my throat. I did find some brimstone-ish literature lying around in school one time at 10, and it then scared me just a little, but now it would only disgust me.
Seems to me you might want to carefully investigate the situation at the Safeway, and lend your voice to the help of any employees who don’t want to be “serviced”. Which Safeway was it, if I may be so curious? I have never heard anything like that in a food store, but I have seen kid vids on the impulse rack that have religious flavor.
ROFL.
This nutjob teacher is probably borderline mentally ill.
Christians, like all normal people, don’t spend their time ‘getting their rocks off’ on the idea that all others are going to hell. If they take this idea seriously, their position is more usually to blame themselves that they haven’t got the message out widely enough to prevent it.
And you imagine Safeway are forcing religious meetings on employees in working hours? If you check you may find ‘afternoon service’ is probably store jargon for a work team communication meeting. Of course I am 20,000 miles from there so I might be wrong.
BTW I have hinted my lovely wife to get me ‘Why Truth Matters’ for a certain religious festival which includes the tradition of giving gifts.
She liked the sound of TDOFN as well; as an art student over many years she has had plenty of pomo reading to frustrate her.
ChrisPer: Christians are not normal people. They might have been 110 years ago, or more, but not any longer.
We should have learnt better.
What really bother me about this (and it’s old news btw, it was on Pharyngula a month back – I think) is that every one is criticising the Student – uh?
Ranting religious claptrap in the middle of a history lesson is not part of the curriculum. In the US, making a positive religious statement, as a teacher to your class, and defining everyone else as wrong/damned is “making an establishment of religion” isn’t it?
You have to remember that (certainly for the monotheisms) all religion is a form of blackmail.
That is what happened here – the teacher was trying to blackmail his students.
“Afternnon service” at a big store, is probably jus sloppy English for “afternoon delivery” – so all hands to the doors, to help with unload/stacking, probably.
Ah, found the reference – there’s a lot more about this incident HERE …
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/paszkiewicz_is_famous_now.php#comments
Ophelia:
>And people wonder why atheists get shirty. Or ‘arrogant’ as apparently Rod Liddle repeatedly said we are on his channel 4 encounter with Dawkins. Well maybe we don’t much want people saying everyone but Their Team is going to hell. Could that be it? We really just don’t want to hear from people who get their rocks off imagining their religious enemies being tortured to death forever. < ChrisPer:
>Christians, like all normal people, don’t spend their time ‘getting their rocks off’ on the idea that all others are going to hell.< I’m with ChrisPer on this. Writing from the UK, I’ve avoided reading most of the N&C threads on religion (well, the Christian angle, anyway) because I really can’t get worked up about it. I emphasise again, I’m talking about the UK – I’m really not au fait with the situation in the States religionwise (to adopt the American vernacular – :) ). There just ain’t many people in the UK (outside of fringe groups who give out leaflets in the streets warning of Armageddon, or Jehovah’s witnesses saying we’re all going to Hell if we don’t repent) putting about the kind of message. Okay, there’s the important issue of “faith” schools, but most people who’ve been through a C of E school say that religion is not thrust down their throats and mostly it’s just like any other State school – which is why non-practising parents not infrequently get their kids into such schools, where discipline and exam results tend to be better than average. I went to a Grammar school where, unlike most schools nowadays, we had a nominally religious assembly *every* morning, with hymns, and one lesson per week of what we used to call RI (Religious Instruction). And I’m really glad I got to know some of the great hymns from the English Hymnal – if I had a decent voice I’d love to sing them now – “Who would a pilgrim be, let him come hither, etc”, great tune! And no one, but no one, took the words seriously, or even thought about their meaning. Kids just don’t. The idea that the RI was some kind of insidious religious propaganda in any malevolent sense bears little relation to the reality. I didn’t see any sign that the kids took it particularly seriously (and, of course, non-believing parents had the option of opting out their kids from RI). As for the vaporous utterances of the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury (where *did* he get that reputation we used to hear about that he is something of an intellectual?), they’re best just ignored as the musings of a rather silly old geezer. Yes, I know there’s a bit more to it than what I’ve written above, but as far as the *UK* is concerned I keep feeling I want to say “lighten up!”. And I’d rather have “Merry Christmas” than the US-inspired ‘inclusive’ “Happy Holidays” (ughhh). “Season’s Greetings” is fine (it refers to this season of the year in the sense of the winter break) and what I usually choose to have on cards I send at Christmas – there, I’ve said the dread word, how awful, as if more than a small minority in Britain treat “Christmas” as anything more than a winter’s break where people get to exchange presents and have family rows. But given that “Holidays” is completely unspecific to the time of year, “Happy Holidays” is an anodyne greeting designed to offend absolutely no one (as if people are going to be offended) and makes me cringe.
Funnily enough, I was in a supermarket on Saturday when the PA announced ‘all available staff to the warehouse for happy hour.’ Then did it again 5 minutes later in case I’d misheard. Either it’s a secret code for ‘help, there’s a maniac loose in here!’, or they have much more fun in British supermarkets than US ones….
I watched the Liddle programme and not for the first time I wondered how all these oh-so-moral people could make such a dishonest programme.
I agree with Allen Esterson that the situation in the UK is a lot better for the non-religious that in the US. Atheism isn’t synonymous with evil or unelectability. Also, I agree that the term “Merry Christmas” isn’t considered an insult to non-Christians. An atheist teacher friend of mine quite happily receives Christmas cards from the children of Muslims.
With regard to faith schools, the troubles in Northern Ireland and, more recently, the riots in Oldham have given us reason to be concerned about how schools can reinforce social divisions. Blair’s promotion of faith schools under the guise of parent choice could create a divisive trend, and his tolerance of creationism in the Vardy school sets a precedent for the spread of anti-scientific nonsense. In short, the concern with such schools is both about where we are and where we could be.
Well said Andy, and Allen, but as a Brit atheist try telling the UK broadsheets or the BBC this currently. I do feel a tad suffocated by the amount of largely pro-religious blether. Editors clearly see it as a hot topic. Perhaps I should curtail my habit of reading newspaper columnists, listening to a good portion of Radio 4 factual prgrammes, and visiting Comments are Frenzied…
For a 100-year-old (plus) take on this see HERE and look at the bit about Mark Twain & the Eiffel Tower.
Very refreshing.
ChrisPer, I didn’t say Christians did “spend their time ‘getting their rocks off’ on the idea that all others are going to hell.” I said we don’t want people doing that. That is what the teacher said, after all.
But your generalization is too broad. Some Christians do relish that thought. If they didn’t, the ‘Left Behind’ series couldn’t possibly be as popular as it is.
“And you imagine Safeway are forcing religious meetings on employees in working hours?”
I don’t know! And in fact I find it quite hard to believe. I did say I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.
Anyway I like the suggestion that it was just some management-speak for filling out time cards or something. I hope so! And that’s more plausible. Really, the idea of amateur church at the back of a supermarket is very hard to believe.
Excellent about Pagan Festival suggestion!
“I went to a Grammar school where, unlike most schools nowadays, we had a nominally religious assembly *every* morning, with hymns”
So did I. And, hilariously enough (or perhaps just predictably) I too am glad I got the hymns, and the First Corinthians 13, and the bit out of Luke we said in unison every year at Xmas and I can still recite it with the exact rhythm we were taught by the drama teacher.
Angiportus, it was the Safeway at the top of Queen Anne Hill.
How I love the idea of staff at the back of the store either knocking back the brandy or chasing the maniac with cleavers; or perhaps both.
I’m not sure whether the popularity of the Left Behind series really reflects widespread desires to torture people in Hell, though I would regard the excerpts you posted as somewhat pornographic in this regard. But my father (who doesn’t believe in Hell) was reading it until he got bored with it (too predictable, in his opinion). Similarly, I used to read Tom Clancy as literary junk food and every now and feel the need to watch movies with lots of shoot-outs and explosions every now and then. Which doesn’t mean I like the idea of shooting people. To an extent, the Left Behind books are perhaps mainly the gory war novel for the Christian readership. And the darker sides of the human mind to which it appeals are surely not unique to Christians.
In any event, I would agree with ChrisPer and Allen about this. The vast majority of Dutch Christians probably has a very vague picture of Hell, if they even believe it exists – and still fewer would see unbelievers burn in it.
But I didn’t say ‘widespread desires to torture people in Hell’ – I said ‘imagining their religious enemies being tortured to death forever’ and ‘take pleasure in contemplating the suffering of other people’. Those are different.
“and every now and feel the need to watch movies with lots of shoot-outs and explosions every now and then. Which doesn’t mean I like the idea of shooting people.”
Wait. What kind of need is this that you feel? And when you say ‘it doesn’t mean I like the idea of shooting people’ do you mean it doesn’t mean you like the idea of doing the shooting yourself? Or do you mean it doesn’t mean you like watching the shooting being done (fictionally) by other people? I can accept the first, but the second seems to be implied by your feeling a need to watch movies of that kind – unless the need you feel is for something else about such movies, for which the shooting is necessary yet is not the part you enjoy or need – which is a complicated but possible thought.
Anyway, about the Left Behind books, I don’t believe it. I think if people found the eternal torment thing as repulsive as they ought to, the books would be far less popular than they are.
And you agree with ChrisPer and Allen about what? I didn’t say all Christians revel in the thought of hell, or anything like that, so what is all this rushing to agree with corrections of what I didn’t say?
To repeat. I’m not saying all Christians love the thought of eternal torture, but I am saying that some do, and they make a point of it, and that’s morally revolting. What is this impulse to say ‘No they don’t.’ Yes they damn well do. The students at Patrick Henry College sign a written statement to that effect, remember?
What have Dutch Christians got to do with anything? The vast majority of Chilean Buddhists are probably very sweet too, but I wasn’t talking about Chilean Buddhists.
Really, what is all this about? I don’t get it. I comment on one guy who did say what he said, and on people who think the way he does (who are unfortunately not a tiny minority in the US) – and I’m apparently read as saying that all Christians think that way? But I don’t see where I said anything that even resembles that. Unless it’s the concentration camp remark. Well, the reaction of the people in New Jersey alarms me; it does seem that Christianity is becoming mandatory in many places in the US. The student got a death threat.
The fact that things are not so bad in other places is good news, but I don’t see why it’s supposed to be a counter-argument to what I’ve said. Things are so bad here, and I’m talking about here – not Australia, not the UK, not the Netherlands. I live here; I talk about it once in awhile.
Gotcha.
I wonder if the ‘most’ is actually true now. I don’t know that it’s not; I just wonder. There is a trend in the other direction – in the US but in other places too; parts of Africa for instance. I’m curious as to what the actual statistics are.
Liberal Christians think people like me underestimate the value of consolation in religion, but I think liberal Christians tend to underestimate the power of fear in religion. The power and the horribleness. I think liberal Christians lose track of how real and how horrible it can be. I think it’s worth any amount of arrogance and non-moderation to convince people that eternal torture is not on the menu.
That’s why Lucretius wrote his poem, come to think of it. At least he said it was. He wanted to show that the fear was unnecessary.
On an only marginally related note, I just saw the Liddle documentary and it was dreadful. I agree with ian that it seemed pretty dishonest (or else he is genuinely as foolish as he seems – although to say this would surely be arrogance). If he wasn’t fretting about the ‘worrying certainty’ that atheists show, he was sneering at their ‘tentative’ view of morality. It was an utterly confused argument, and that held for almost everything argument he proposed. It was pretty annoying.
On an only marginally related note, I just saw the Liddle documentary and it was dreadful. I agree with ian that it seemed pretty dishonest (or else he is genuinely as foolish as he seems – although to say this would surely be arrogance). If he wasn’t fretting about the ‘worrying certainty’ that atheists show, he was sneering at their ‘tentative’ view of morality. It was an utterly confused argument, and that held for almost everything argument he proposed. It was pretty annoying.
Agh, sorry about that double post.
There is a trend in the other direction – in the US but in other places too; parts of Africa for instance. I’m curious as to what the actual statistics are.
Yeah, and this is worrying – particularly with regards to how the Catholic Church is going to develop in coming decades.
I think we would agree that the consolatory value of religion is technically taken irrelevant: that a discomforting truth is preferable to a consoling lie. Which brings me to there actually being two kinds of critics of Dawkins/”militant atheism” – those who agree there is something true or false to the central tenets of religion but disagree with the actual analysis (most religious critics, as well as Thomas Nagel), and those who believe that the main point about religion is totally missed: that religion is a form of art, or poetry, more than anything else (Jonathan Derbyshire – perhaps also sometime N&C commenter George Sz.?). I’m resolutely in the first camp.
At the same time, obviously the idea of Heaven is used to comfort people, and Hell to instill fear into them – and the latter especially deserves all your immoderate and trigger-happy criticism.
I find the issue quite vexing at times. Because I do think there is something to fear in a totally materialist world-picture: the eventual non-being to which we all are headed. I agree it’s better than Hell, but I can’t quite get myself to be a Stoic about mortality. At the same time, I need to keep this out of my religious reasoning to keep a clear head and keep myself from wishful thinking. So nothingness, at least for as far as we are subjectively concerned, is still it.
Oh well, I’m not a bit Stoic about mortality. I’m not at all fond of the idea of nothingness. It pisses me off. But it’s preferable to eternal torture! (One may think it isn’t, one may think one could read or chat for a few minutes between bouts, but I really doubt that they allow that. I think when they say eternal torture they mean the whole time.)
(No problem about double post, Thomas)
I think the Liddle documentary is more than marginally related; both of these seem to be related to the truculent, aggrieved, how dare they attitude to atheism that is splashing around the place.
Stoic, shmoic.
When I’m dead it will probably feel just like it felt before I was conceived. So I’m not too worried about that, I’m more worried about not doing all the things I want to before my mind ends, and the process of falling apart.
“That is what it sounded like though…and it was Sunday.”
In that case, god will have told them that they’re going to go to hell for working on the Sabbath, so I shouldn’t worry.
“When I’m dead it will probably feel just like it felt before I was conceived.”
Just what Lucretius said. We didn’t worry about it then, he said, so why worry about it now? So did Hume after him.
But yes, it’s all the stuff one wants to do first. Go away, come back in a century or two, I’m busy.
Here I was thinking it was from my mate Al. Bloody plagiarist.
“he was sneering at their ‘tentative’ view of morality”
For some odd reason this really gets under my skin more than anything else the religious say/do. I generally get spitting angry in two seconds flat when someone tries that one me.
How moral are you if you are only being “good” because of a bribe of eternal bliss and the threat of eternal torment.
And some of the things that the Big-Man-In-The-Sky tells you are “good” are pretty repulsive.
But you all know this already.
How moral are you if you are only being “good” because of a bribe of eternal bliss and the threat of eternal torment.
Which was, as I understand, pretty much Luther and Calvin’s criticism of the Catholic view of salvation through good deeds. Though what they supplanted it with is not necessarily superior.
OB:
Just what Lucretius said. We didn’t worry about it then, he said, so why worry about it now? So did Hume after him.
I know! As did Seneca. How I wish the reasoning would work for me.
Seneca? Did he? Where, do you know?
Stoics disapproved of Epicureans. Rather too much like atheists, they were.
OB: “If that is what I heard it just creeps the bejeezis out of me. We’ll all be in a Christian concentration camp soon at this rate.”
:-)
As for death threats, I have started to get cynical since I learned that some create them themselves, or someone independent does it to show what evil guys the opponents are. I would LOVE to trace down the person who inspired ‘I’m not ready to make nice’ by the Dixe Chicks. Absolute truthiness, Republikkkans are like that.
Is there any way (at this late date) to get to (Channel 4?) and Liddle on his ghastly collection of strawmen, untrue statements and fake philosophy?
Do they have a feedback route?
Is it worth it, anyway – I don’t HAVE a TV, since I’m convinced most of the programmes have negative information-content …….
Seneca? Did he? Where, do you know?
He makes the point in the one letter where he complains about his asthma, if I recall.
Re Safeway, maybe it is just an afternoon meeting. Dunno. But when I was a reporter I’d go off to Dyfed Powys police HQ now and again on a job, and the press officer there, Dai Press (actually Davies, but this is how the Welsh do names) would say that so-and-so would be available ‘after prayers’. For a while I actually thought these cops met in the HQ and said prayers together. It sounded creepy. Turns out it was nothing more than the routine meeting of senior officers to discuss the day! Cops do irony.
So whoever led the meeting was called Dai Prayers. At least I hope so.
pretty much Luther and Calvin’s criticism of the Catholic view of salvation through good deeds.
I didn’t know that. I knew about the predestination thing, but didn’t realise it was a rejection of the good works thing. As you say, still sucks.
A quick bit of wiki-ism also reveals a link between Calvin and Seneca, John Boy’s first published work was a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia.
You do indeed recall, Merlijn.
“Death is non-existence, and I know already what that means. What was before me will happen again after me. If there is any suffering in this state, there must have been such suffering also in the past, before we entered the light of day. As a matter of fact, however, we felt no discomfort then. And I ask you, would you not say that one was the greatest of fools who believed that a lamp was worse off when it was extinguished than before it was lighted? We mortals also are lighted and extinguished; the period of suffering comes in between, but on either side there is a deep peace. For, unless I am very much mistaken, my dear Lucilius, we go astray in thinking that death only follows, when in reality it has both preceded us and will in turn follow us. Whatever condition existed before our birth, is death. For what does it matter whether you do not begin at all, or whether you leave off, inasmuch as the result of both these states is non-existence?”
http://www.geocities.com/stoicvoice/journal/0202/ls0202e1.htm
Makes sense about Jean Cauvin and Seneca – Senners was red hot in the Renaissance. Montaigne was devoted to him.
…and to think that I felt insulted today when a clerk wished me “Merry Christmas.” At least she didn’t add “or else, Burn in Hell!”
Feedback on Liddle to http://www.channel4.com/belief
You have to register before you can post however.
I was just past the halfway mark watching Liddle via the Dawkins site when a houseguest returned in time to hear me groan upon seeing Steve Fuller being consulted for his expertise. Asked why I had groaned, I clicked on the top left-hand corner of B&W’s home page…
If I had been shown Liddle’s programme and told it was just a weak parody of “The Root of All Evil?” I fear I might have believed it and laughed at all the bits that made me groan, knowing it was intended seriously.
Stewart – I don’t think Liddle quite knew whether to go for straight parody or get in depth with it, so it came out a bit of a train-wreck. Which is all the more irritating when you consider his rapid and estimable ascent as a journalist / producer / broadcaster.
Much of it was just snide.
I’m puzzled enough about what it was – to start speculating about what he wanted it to be is something I think I’d rather not get into…
Without watching it again to get it word for word, it seemed to me that one of his tactics was to present two opposing views and then “settle” it by saying “I think…”
I must admit to having to bail about half way through… I felt he was consistently failing to present an honest or representative view. As in (paraphrasing )”Atheists do have their version of the bible – Origin of the Species !” That’s Sixth-Form stuff.
Well, just for your info, at the end he closes with a plea that goes something like “Maybe there is a god, maybe there isn’t. Can’t we just leave it at that?”
If only the other side had ever done so …
Feeble. And yeah. “We’ll let you off, we’re not sure.” Doesn’t exactly fill the history books.