So now I know. Like most people, I didn’t realize the people behind Rick Perry’s prayer party are weirder than other prayer police.

With tens, even hundreds of millions of followers worldwide, the NAR’s stress on Godlike prophetic and apostolic powers, its revisions of end-time prophecies, its methodology of “spiritual warfare,” and its agenda of theocratic dominion over all aspects of society are not just threatening to modern secular democracy and the religious pluralism it protects, they have been sharply criticized by other conservative Christians as unbiblical, deviant teachings, even a form of the very demonic practices they obsessively declare war against.

They’re not just messing around.

The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take “dominion” over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the “Seven Mountains” of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they’re intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an “army of God” to commandeer civilian government.

It’s working.

Sarah Palin’s church of over twenty years, Wasilla Assembly of God, is still part of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination.  However, the leadership embraced the ideology of the NAR years ago and and numerous national and international apostles have spoken there.Both Jim Garlow, head of Newt Gingrich’s Renewing American Leadership (ReAL), and ReAL board member David Barton, have been working with the apostles for years.  As described in books by Apostles Cindy Jacobs and Alice Patterson, Barton has been working with Texas apostles for over a decade.  Barton’s Christian Nationalist histories, in which he portrays Democrats as the ongoing source of racism, play a significant role in outreach to African American pastors.

Oh well, the glaciers will melt so the rivers will dry up so the crops will fail so we’ll all die in the famines before they take over completely. That’s a relief.

Here’s another one, this time by a man, the pastor of a Reformed Baptist church in Aberystwyth, laying down the law for women.

So the sentiment of our text, that a wife is to submit to her husband, is found
throughout the Spirit-breathed New Testament. It is not a curious message found in just one place – like the phrase in the letter to the Corinthians of being baptized for the dead, whatever the correct meaning of that may be. So rejection of this word by those who claim to reverence the Lord Christ, is plain disobedience.

Except that it wasn’t the Lord Christ who is supposed to have said any of it, it was Paul; why does reverence for Jesus entail obedience to Paul? Because them’s the roolz of Christianity, but why else? Never mind; that’s theology; call a professional. Meanwhile –

A wife’s conduct toward her husband always says something about the church’s response to Christ, either right or wrong. If a woman does not honour her husband and is not loving toward him, if she is independent and defiant toward him, she proclaims this as the church’s response to Christ and thus attacks God’s Word.

Yikes. She’d better not be independent then.

…the reason why wives are to submit to their husbands is not because they are wonderful guys who deserve it. Sometimes husbands deserve very little from their wives. The reason why you submit is because your Lord Jesus Christ deserves it. Out of gratitude to him, for all that he has done for you, you submit. It is not because you love your husband that much, but it is because you love the Lord Jesus more.

But why is it so important to Jesus? And if it’s so important to him, why didn’t he say it himself instead of leaving it for Paul to tidy up?

More theology. I can never make sense of this stuff.

Oh, Guardian, honestly. Really?

Conservative thinktanks are in a bit of a bind when it comes to responding to the rise of Islamophobia. On the one hand they want to condemn the BNP and the English Defence League for their racism and violence, but on the other they want to downplay the extent and existence of anti-Muslim racism because it might deflect attention from “Islamism” – the catch-all term for politically active Muslims, which they see as the main problem facing the UK.

“Islamism” is not the (or a) catch-all term for politically active Muslims; that is completely ridiculous. It’s a term for political Islam, which is a different thing.

The difficulty with their position is that they end up condemning the peaceful political activism of Muslim groups…

No; Islamist groups, which are a different thing.

The record of these thinktanks is that their publications at best exaggerate the threat posed by “Islamists” and the supposed Islamisation of public institutions. Their concern is not over the threat of terrorism or even of any illegality.

Right, because that’s not all there is to be concerned over. Theocracy is something to be concerned over even if it takes power without violence and within the law.

Reassuringly, the commenters understand that. It’s too bad the Guardian doesn’t.

I’ve been thinking about the Robber’s Cave experiment often lately. I hadn’t heard of the illusion of asymmetric insight though. It’s pretty dang interesting. We think other people are mostly on the surface and easy to understand, while we think we ourselves are mostly hidden and difficult to understand. Really – well that’s conceited. I’ll have to learn to stop thinking that right away.

The same researchers asked people to describe a time when they feel most like themselves. Most subjects, 78 percent, described something internal and unobservable like the feeling of seeing their child excel or the rush of applause after playing for an audience. When asked to describe when they believed friends or relatives were most illustrative of their personalities, they described internal feelings only 28 percent of the time. Instead, they tended to describe actions. Tom is most like Tom when he is telling a dirty joke. Jill is most like Jill when she is rock climbing. You can’t see internal states of others, so you generally don’t use those states to describe their personalities.

Hmm. I can’t see them, but I’m certainly aware of them. I wonder if I’m a little non-average here, not because I’m wiser or better but because I’m more nerdy – or because I’m just more interested in the difference between inner and outer than the average. I wonder, but I’m sure not going to claim it, because what could be more hopeless than to look at the findings of a psych experiment and say “yes but I’m not like that.” Only only only…it seems to me I do often have the iceberg thought about people. But maybe everybody does, yet still answers the questions that way.

Anyway – the point is, you can always be confident that you’re giving yourself and your friends a lot more credit than you’re giving the other team, and you should keep that at the front of your mind.

I’m reading Kathryn Joyce’s book Quiverfull, and finding interesting things in the process. Like A Virtuous Woman (for her price, as you no doubt recall, is far above rubies – no not Ruby’s, stop that at once, 40 lashes).

A Virtuous Woman tells women how to be virtuous.

Can your husband know that if he needs to bring a co-worker home that the house will be reasonably neat? We will be looking at this in depth in a few days, but for now simply think about it. If your husband goes to work each day, can he trust that you will take care of your duties to the best of your ability?

If your husband asks you to make a phone call, do you forget? Do you think ahead and make plans to iron his shirts before they are needed?

Can he trust that your moods will remain relatively even most of the time and that he knows what to expect when he comes home? Or must he wonder what is in store for his arrival?

And so on and so on and so on, for a lot of words. What every servant shud kno.

This is a bad thing that happened, a very bad thing – an employee of a state department of public health was forced to close down his very useful, admired, educational blog because a guy who disagreed with him complained to his employers, and they said close it down or be fired.

Social media in health care are here to stay, and as Mr. Najera’s work has shown, can advance the lay person’s understanding of  public health and epidemiology.  But being a strong public advocate can invite push-back from people who disagree — say, over the value, safety, and efficacy of vaccines. Not all of those who disagree are civil or even rational.  Some of those who disagree elect to cause trouble in the advocate’s place of employment…

And sometimes they win. It’s a very bad thing.

An Irish bank loaned huge sums to Catholic dioceses in the US with the result that the dioceses in question were able to stay out of court.

Of the deals, by far the largest line of credit was for Los Angeles, for $256m. The diocese avoided going into court with abuse victims by reaching a settlement in advance.

It emerged afterwards that AIB loans and guarantees accounted for almost half of total settlement.

The deal included $175m in cash and another $25m to pay the interest, and helped Los Angeles avoid selling the bulk of its properties or reveal the true value of its total assets.

Which was very kind of the bank…which is odd, given that banks aren’t usually in the kindness business.

An AIB spokesman said: ‘AIB’s business focus in America was in the ‘Not for Profit’ areas and this included churches.

‘Any loans advanced were approved in accordance with AIBGroup policy.’

An AIB source said they were ‘standard commercial loans’.

Not for profit, but commercial? What does that mean?

Only after the revelations in the Boston diocese in 2002 did [one victim] set off on the long road to forcing the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to reveal what it knew. Esther’s case was one of hundreds, which were finally settled in mid 2007 for $660m.

…

And she had no idea until this week that Allied Irish Bank had helpfully stepped in with guarantees of hundreds of millions.

The deal allowed the Archdiocese to avoid going to court and opening all its documents to scrutiny.

What a very kind bank.

Missouri is recapitulating recent history in Ireland. It has these “faith-based” institutions – or prisons, to be blunt – for teenage girls, which go in for ferocious discipline coupled with secrecy, and Missouri…looks intently in the other direction.

Authorities in the state are  barred from inspecting the homes or even keeping track of them. (New  Beginnings has operated under multiple names in Florida, Mississippi,  and Texas.) “It’s hard to understand it, but faith-based is just taboo  for regulation,” says Matthew Franck, an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who authored an investigative series on the state’s homes in the mid-2000s. “It took decades of work to get  just the most minimal standards of regulation at faith-based child-care  centers,” he adds. “I just knew that when certain lobbyists would stand  up to say, ‘We have a concern about how this affects faith-based  institutions,’ the bill was immediately amended—it was a very Republican  legislature—or it would immediately die. That’s still true.”

That is terrifying, especially when you read about what goes on there.

The girls’ behavior was micromanaged down to the number of squares of  toilet paper each was allowed; potential infractions ranged from making  eye contact with another girl to not finishing a meal. Roxy, who  suffered from urinary tract infections and menstrual complications, told  me she was frequently put on redshirt, sometimes dripping blood as she  stood. She was also punished with cold showers, she said, and endless  sets of calisthenics after meals.

There are a lot of these places, though it’s unclear exactly how many.

New Beginnings is emblematic of an unknown number of  “troubled teen” homes catering to the Independent Fundamental Baptist  community—a web of thousands of autonomous churches linked by doctrine,  overlapping leadership, and affiliations with Bible colleges like Bob Jones University.  IFB churches emphasize strict obedience and consider teen rebellion an  invention of worldly society, so it’s little surprise that families  faced with teenage drinking, smoking, or truancy might turn to programs  promising a tough-love fix. Fear of government intrusion—particularly on  account of the community’s “spare the rod, spoil the child”  worldview—is so pervasive that IFB congregations are primed to dismiss regulatory actions against abusive facilities as religious persecution.

Well quite – they’re afraid the gummint will tell them to stop hitting the child with the rod, so they paint themselves as martyrs to religious persecution. The teenagers they’re torturing, on the other hand, are just sinners.

Small bizarre item. I was innocently half-watching a dopy tv show about lawyers last night and was suddenly jolted to notice that on the wall behind the judge hearing that episode’s case there were large metal letters prominently spelling out “In God We Trust.” What?! In a courtroom? In Chicago? Is this supposed to reflect reality? Do courts actually do this?

So I Googled and found out about In God We Trust America, whose mission (you won’t be surprised to learn) is to force that ridiculous, childish, like hell I do motto on everyone everywhere by nagging public officials into sticking it in prominent places, like on walls behind judges.

85 “yes vote” cities in California. 75 in Arkansas. Apparently none in Illinois. Yet.

From James Wood’s review of The Joy of Secularism:

…many religionists assume that life without God would be life without meaning. Where secularists cherish autonomy and choice as qualities that make life meaningful, religionists often emphasize self-abnegation and submission to a higher power.

Yes, but the trouble with that is, how do they know what higher power to submit to? How do they go about submitting to it when they can’t know what it is? What exactly is it that they’re submitting to?

In reality of course it’s either the god of tradition and holy books, or the idea of god they work out for themselves. It’s never an actual higher power that communicates with them in such a way that they have reliable knowledge of how to submit to it.

Robert Bellah has a new book on religion in human evolution (called, aptly, just that). He talks to the Atlantic.

You mention play as a way of getting out of normal working consciousness, and religion emerging from the play instinct, a mammalian characteristic common to sparring puppies and humans experiencing art.

That’s the one way I can see religion as something interesting about human beings as opposed to something depressing or tiresome or unhelpful about them. (I mean honestly – going without water from dawn to dusk in a hot climate?) It’s something gratuitous and extra, ornamental and elaborate; it’s good that humans can do that. (Though only from a human point of view. Humpback whales don’t think it’s good that humans can do that, and neither does any other species.)

The idea of utopia is always a kind of play, because we know it’s not real – it’s just what we can imagine. But it has the serious possibility of saying, “Look, the world the way it is didn’t have to be that way. It could be different.”

And so does the idea of god – it could be a way of thinking about a better way to be a person. It doesn’t seem to work out that way very much though.

Thanks to Terry Glavin, I saw this postmodernist article on postmodernism, by one Edward Docx. Now there’s a postmodern nym. Let’s all change our names to App.

It’s too stinking long (shouldn’t pomo articles on pomo be wittily short? or do I mean ironically short?) so I might cut it up into bits. Or I might just say one bitty thing and leave it at that. Who knows. That’s postmodern.

Postmodernism was a high-energy revolt, an attack, a strategy for destruction. It was a set of critical and rhetorical practices that sought to destabilise the modernist touchstones of identity, historical progress and epistemic certainty.

Or, to put it another way, it was a set of conceited goons in literature departments who thought they had invented everything simply because they didn’t know very much. Like, for instance, that “epistemic certainty” was not a “modernist touchstone.”

Philosophical skepticism has been around for a good deal longer than postmodernism, and the difficulties of “epistemic certainty” were not discovered in 1960.

So, let’s now turn with a little more confidence to the quagmire of sociology, politics and philosophy—Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault and so on…There are two important points. First, that postmodernism is really an attack not just on the dominant narrative or art forms but rather an attack on the dominant social discourse. All art is philosophy and all philosophy is political. And the epistemic confrontation of postmodernism, this idea of de-privileging any one meaning, this idea that all discourses are equally valid, has therefore lead to some real-world gains for humankind. Because once you are in the business of challenging the dominant discourse, you are also in the business of giving hitherto marginalised and subordinate groups their voice.

Like the Taliban. Like al-Shabaab. Like child-raping priests. Like the BJP. Like the Tea Party. Once you think that “all discourses are equally valid,” you’ve relinquished the tools you need to argue that some discourses are wrong and bad and harmful. Hooray; rejoice in the play of the signifier.

This is a new style of con game – setting up a journal that sounds as if it’s a specialist journal when it’s actually just some undergraduates writing essays.

Orac read the latest issue and pointed out some of the raving nonsense in it, presumably because it’s called the Yale Journal of Medicine & Law and so should be expected to know better. It sounds like an actual journal, doesn’t it, written by and for specialists in medicine and law. It turns out (according to commenters) it’s no such thing. Well then why call it that? Besides to deceive and trick people, that is.

Kids today. Phooey.

Hooray for William Raillant-Clark and his article about Dennis Markuze.

Considering the number of death threats and abuse researchers in Montreal
receive from around the world, it is appalling and shameful that our own police service is not acting rapidly and decisively to protect their international colleagues. It is appalling and shameful that our police react promptly to threats to Quebec journalists but not to those based abroad.

Thank you. That’s what we’ve been thinking.

Tim Farley’s History of Mabus is terrifically useful, and naturally rather shocking.

But let me assure you, Mabus’ threats go way beyond the norm, both in content and sheer volume.  I talked about the volume above, so let’s see some of the content.

He tells people they are going to die that day or “cease to exist”. He threatens executions. He uses offensive terms starting with “bitch” and getting far worse. He threatens people’s loved ones…He threatens to cut off people’s heads and tells them they are “finished.” He asks people if they think they “deserve to live”. He says he is going to “pound you into the dust” and that you will suffer the “worst form of torture.”

But the Montreal police did nothing.

Phil Plait gave a report to a sheriff by telephone. Michael Shermer told me he obtained a restraining order to ensure Mabus would stay clear of him. Canadian skeptic Steve Thoms and blogger Greg Laden also filed reports. There are no doubt others.

On February 10, 2011 I was finally able to get a copy of my report from yet another Atlanta Police office across town. I quickly took it to a local print shop and faxed it to the Montreal Police.

And nothing happened. For me or for anyone else.

Farley tweeted some journalists, which was the right idea, but he picked the wrong journalists.

Montrealer William Raillant-Clark (@wraillantclark) is a press atttaché for the University of Montreal. He would have been the right journalist, had I found him.

On the morning of August 8 he was monitoring Twitter as part of his job. He noticed this retweet by science writer Carl Zimmer…

And the rest is history. Then there was that petition…

Meanwhile, the retweets of the Tumblr post were working their magic. At some point on Tuesday, they caught the eye of Kyle VanderBeek, a skeptic who works for change.org in San Francisco.

Kyle saw those tweets with the emails in them, and knew he had a potential tool right at his fingertips. He created a petition titled “Montreal Police: Take “Mabus” death threats seriously” and configured it to send responses directly to the SPVM public email address (which we saw above).

Yup. I linked to it here (and signed it of course). Some of you will have signed it. And it worked. Yes, Virginia, petitions actually work (some do). Whaddya know.

Best case scenario: Markuze has a Thing askew inside his head, which can be fixed with a little tug and pull and suture. He is released to live a sane and happy life, volunteering for the local CFI by way of reparations.

Update: apparently I didn’t link to it here; at least I can’t find it, so I must not have. I suppose I posted it at Facebook and Twitter and meant to post it here but forgot. Bad priorities. First duty is here.

A tweet from Melody Hensley this afternoon:

Free Inquiry Announces Two New Columnists: @pzmyers and @OpheliaBenson

It’s true. See for yourself. There I am right on the front page, along with Christopher Hitchens and Wendy Kaminer. (What? Yes really. Two of your top faves? Yes really. Hitchens and Kaminer? I know.) There I am under OP-EDS.

End of smirk.

Yes, an invitation. Get your party clothes ready, because here it is.

I’m inviting some lucky guy to do a dialogue with me, which I will publish as an article here at B&W in the articles section. The dialogue will be on sexist epithets. Are they a bad thing, or are they a good thing? How bad are they, are some worse than others, if they are bad then in what way are they bad, does it really matter, is it reasonable to think they are a bad thing, if so why?

We’ve been told lately that “we’ve been getting totally unnuanced discussions of insults like ‘twat'” and that “not everything is the same, and it’s possible to tease out the distinctions analytically and dispassionately.” We’ve been told that

the idea it isn’t possible to look at why everything isn’t the same, the idea it isn’t possible to take a different view about how a word such as “twat” functions, without being immediately dismissed as a misogynist by a mob is ridiculous (and the antithesis of anything that could be considered free enquiry).

So ok, let’s try it. Let’s have that nuanced discussion. Let’s tease out the distinctions analytically and dispassionately. I’ll take my side, and the invitation is for someone to take the other side.

The idea is to do a back and forth, say about 300 words each. It won’t go on until the end of time, but I think I won’t declare a limit now.

There are some conditions. You’ll have noticed I said a guy. I want a guy, for the same reason I would want a white if the discussion were about racist epithets as opposed to sexist ones.

It has to be under a real name.

It has to be somebody with something at stake – reputation, friends, standing as a liberal; that kind of thing. That narrows the field a lot, but it can’t be helped. It means I don’t really want someone who is already known as a proud reactionary or anti-feminist. I might settle for that if no one else takes up the offer, but I would much prefer people who don’t fit that description, because they’re the people who have been surprising those of us on the “what, are you kidding, of course sexist epithets aren’t ok” side of this disagreement. We want to understand what they’re thinking, and this will be the way to find out.

Another condition: I have editorial control. However I won’t do anything the other party disagrees with. If there’s something we can’t agree on and we can’t start over or move to a new entry, I’ll just end the exchange at that point. (I also don’t plan to edit the other party’s entries. I plan not to. I just want to make it clear that I have that option but also that I won’t abuse it; either we agree on an edit or the discussion shifts or ends.)

So there you are. Sound like fun? Email me if you have my address, use the contact form if you don’t.

I should say I doubt that anyone will take up the offer. I think the conditions will make the offer too unattractive. And that, frankly, is part of my point.

So go ahead, prove me wrong!

Update: here is that discussion.

PZ is in Oslo for a Humanist thingy. (Do you know, the Norwegian Humanists get state money. For reals. The churches get it and so they get it too. The Swedish humanists told me this when I was in Stockholm a year ago. The Swedish Humanists do not get state money. They are envious of their Norwegian colleagues.) He has won an international humanist award.

Ya! You go PZ.

PZ is one of the non-sexist male atheists. Such people are not the overwhelming majority I had thought.