Fast Track For A Sacred Cow

Agnes is part of a larger problem, though a prominent fang in the snake.

We were all treated this week, among the detritus of political campaign and megaphonic hairpieces, to the news that Pope Francis had officially recognized a second intercessory miracle attributed to the ghoulish figure of Mother Theresa. It startled me, as I had forced my knowledge of this dreary procession into the fog only to have it snapped back forefront by the fawning and wholly supportive litany of our news outlets.

Mother Theresa, whom I shall now be properly referring to as Agnes, is known to us as a benign and beatific figure. She has “Mother” in her self-granted title, affecting an elevated and benevolent position, and her relentless PR machine has done nothing for the last fifty years but embellish that persona while trying to keep her cruelty and hypocrisy a secret from us.

She has also been on the fast track to sainthood essentially since the moment of her death. The organization which bears her name, the Missionaries of Charity, continues to take in obscene amounts of cash from around the world while operating little more than death hotels. Claiming over four thousand nuns and nineteen of these horror show hospices in Calcutta alone, the last benevolent thing the sisters have done was to shut down adoption centers in India due to overwhelming religious intolerance. The intolerance, of course, originating with the sisters and directed at India's adoption laws, which do not exclude un- or formerly-married individuals.

Between then and now, the doddering form of Pope John Paul II claimed as authentic the story related by a woman healed of her cancer by intercession from Agnes's picture. The woman's doctors and husband told a very different story, but what need have we of doctors when glowing snapshots are among us? It comes as no surprise to read that the benevolent Missionaries of Charity are accused of illegally retaining the woman's medical records which document her year-long course of professional treatment, as well as pressuring the hospital staff to endorse this nonsense about miracles. The miracle that has just been recognized by the current Pope dates to 2008, and involved the same kind of nonsense around a Brazilian man's brain tumors. I unfortunately haven't been able to find any substantive article regarding actual details, but the Vatican Insider described it as “scientifically impossible.” The same Vatican, I remind you, that has never accepted or understood anything scientific until it was force fed to them. These things are on record, you can read as much about them as you can stomach. I describe them only to sketch out for you exactly what it is this dead woman is being credited with, and that these insulting and obviously delusional lies are what puts Agnes at the right hand of the creator she didn't believe in.

Agnes's personal documents reflected that she had no faith in the existence of God. The man responsible for examining those documents as part of the first step in canonization, Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, argues she was only having a half-decade “dark night of the soul” and that the cynical analysis of people like myself fails to properly understand her intent. But what other explanation could come from a representative of the nation-state responsible for both promoting and profiting from the never-ending victory lap Agnes seemed to be on? Incidentally, it's remarkable to me that the Vatican would not only allow her non-belief to become public, but that the clear contradiction between being a non-believer and a candidate for canonization seems to mean nothing.

Before the fourth century, the only saints were martyrs. If you wanted a seat in the VIP box, you had to die for your faith, preferably in a very public and painful way. Regional religious heroes, now including holy men who were conspicuously dead of natural causes, began to become venerated with approval of local bishops. This went on until 1170, when Pope Alexander the Stylish claimed any and all rights to canonization, because why the hell not. Three years later, it became actively illegal to venerate outside the Church's authority, with real-world laws to punish people for liking a dead guy just a little too much. Nothing particularly interesting to this conversation happens for quite a long time, until 1983 when JP II starts hacking bits off Alexander's game plan to streamline the process. One of the best bits to go was the dedicated position of opposition, someone responsible for the argument that the candidate for sainthood didn't deserve it. Arguments against can still be suggested, but to the best of my knowledge the Vatican no longer finds it necessary to challenge itself from within in almost any fashion.

The process begins with the potential saint's death, and before the first bureaucratic papers are shuffled a period of five years is supposed to elapse. This is to allow for fervor to die down, ostensibly to ensure that mob rule combined with the observable uptick in popular people's esteem after they die does not overwhelm what passes for reason at the Vatican. Agnes was not held to this tradition, as the examination of her writings – the first official step toward sainthood – began well before and was concluded by the time of her death. Following the examination and approval of the candidate's personal papers, their corpse is to be exhumed and examined. This is to ensure that no wacko cults have been messing around with the remains or using the tomb as a site for bizarre rituals, as well as the ritual lopping off of choice bits of the corpse to save as relics. You can almost swim in the irony, as well as feel a little sadness we never got to see the Pope chasing Agnes through the Vatican waving a pair of golden garden shears.

Once the Vatican ensures the candidate's corpse will stay where it is told and the choice cuts are securely pickled, the Pope publicly declares you a hero. It's really only an honorary thing at this point, as the candidate still doesn't get any feasts or churches named after them. It's worth noting that, at this point, the church will not acknowledge that the candidate is, in fact, in heaven at all. It seems counterintuitive, I know, to think that a person could be in line for sainthood without being in heaven, but nothing is so ironclad as a rule open to interpretation. There's some good news, though. The candidate can have their image graven across all kind of prayer-themed merchandise – probably nothing wrong with worshipping a graven image, after all – and use that merchandise to build a fanbase, thereby increasing the probability that some delusional person will credit their hallucinatory fantasy to the candidate's intercession. One could be forgiven at this point for thinking that this is less a somber and spiritual separation of the wheat from the chaff, more a brutally arrogant and solipsistic swimsuit contest judged on hysterical fervency and theocratic cheerleading.

We now reach the point Agnes had attained by the time of her death, attribution of miracles. Agnes shouldn't have even been considered for another half-decade, I remind you, but instead the Pope could not have thrown the miracle flag faster. It is at this third step in the canonization process that the church will finally publicly claim that the candidate's eternal being is ensconced firmly in the heavenly hereafter. Everything they preached from childhood indoctrination or adult conversion about how to get to heaven and avoid death was only the first part of the story. They withheld that not everyone would actually be getting MVP status, class warfare evidently being a problem in the afterlife as well, and that the path would involve years in whatever waiting room the Vatican prefers now – having renounced the horrific idea of limbo years ago – while guys in bathrobes read diaries and fiddle with corpses. Sounds fun to me, I don't know why they would bury the lead like that, but there you have it.

Beatification is attributed one of two ways, both on equally shaky rhetorical ground, I would say. Firstly, the candidate can be a martyr, meaning they died for their faith or as an act of heroic charity, presumably the bearing of another's mortal wound. Alternatively, they can be a confessor, the default position for saints these days. To be a confessor, it must be proven – for whatever that word is worth coming from the lips of a Pope – that the creator of the universe interceded directly to benefit a person who offered a prayer through the saint-elect, kind of like clicking through to Amazon from a website you like. These fraudulent miracle cures are well know to you, and they only proliferate due to the Catholic construct's unwillingness to repair the damage they have done in destitute countries without proper health care.

The final step before being fitted for a heavenly letterman's jacket is an encore miracle, which is why the ghoulish Agnes is currently in our public consciousness again. As part of JP II's streamlining process I mentioned earlier, part of the 800-year-old process left on the cutting room floor was the requirement of three intercessions. Currently only one additional conspiracy is required – the unfortunate man from Brazil – and the news is filled with fawning and completely complicit endorsement of the current Pope's thumbs up. No news outlet appears willing to state what is painfully obvious to honest thought: none of this is true, and it matters even less.

Despite the chorus to the contrary, the current Pope has done little to nothing regarding advancing the church into the 21^st century or guiding it to better mesh with modern society. Before Francis, Pope Benedict the Nazi-Faced threw open the pearly back door by validating locally venerated cult leaders at an unheard of pace; fanatics long dead, supported by the church, and with a large booster club who weren't waiting on the Vatican's approval or a cleared-up runny nose. Making a saint out of a monstrous woman who should be properly known for inflicting horrific dying conditions and absolutely no medical care whatsoever, in addition to being a well-known seller of indulgences to the most foul people you can imagine, will hopefully prove to be an unremovable nail in the Vatican's long-overdue coffin.

Render Unto Caesar

The road from “congress shall make no law” to tax-free churches, congressional chaplains, and currency sanctioned by Christianity is marked by complacency and conciliation on the part of the non-believers.

The argument, which you have no doubt heard plenty of times, that America was founded by people who worshipped the washboard-stomached Jesus seen in Pat Robertson's dusty sexual fantasies and who desired to build a new nation devoted to the glorification of that filthy hippie and his bizarre and thoughtless teachings is still pressed into service today, trotted out like a moth-eaten shawl to be draped over any number of the debates we face.

Despite the obvious unconstitutionality of the entire premise, to this very day the United States military pays official chaplains to serve in every branch out of taxpayer-funded government coffers, and has had authorization to do so since 1791. There is no interpretation of the establishment or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment that allows for a government-sanctioned chaplain of any denomination to minister to the armed forces, which is self-evident without the authority of Madison or Jefferson and their arguments to back it up. Despite being challenged in the United States Court of Appeals, no willingness has been shown to risk displeasing America's religious theocrats by forcing the position to be filled by a non-combat volunteer. The irony of a paid military chaplain swearing to uphold the Constitution should be obvious without me having to elaborate on it. Fortunately, those of us who would have no idea how to approach addressing the problem are shored up by the efforts of organizations like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Military Association of Atheists, both of whom work not only to defend the rights of the non-religious in both private and military life, but to re-establish the secular values our country was, evidentially speaking, established on.

We were pretty into Egyptian and Grecian style, though. Kind of our "Joy Division" phase.

Deism was, to be profoundly generous, still defensible at the time of America's establishment. Collectively, we were unfamiliar with microbiology and the Beagle's monumental voyage was still half a century away. It could be forgiven, knowing what the best scientific information was, for a thinking person to come to the conclusion that the intrinsic order in the universe – “the way of things” – was so impossibly clockwork and perfect as to necessitate, at the very least, an unimaginable force to establish the observable laws things operated by. This is the “unmoved mover” you may have heard of, a current favorite of the creationist cults to explain away their utter mindless arrogance in the face of an utter paucity of any evidence. It may not only have been defensible or forgivable, it may have been the only logical and rational conclusion one could come to based on the evidence at hand. Theism, with its nonsense based on an intervening wrathful creator who performs miracles and picks favorites, was already in decline among the population possessed of the luxury of free time to participate in Enlightenment thinking. People understood that a prime mover argument can and does only lead you to an infinitely regressing repetition of the same question: “Who made the maker?” These volleys of logic were met by the church, then as now, with vehement retaliation and dismissals based on arguments from ignorance. Unfortunately for us but incredibly beneficial for the religious, the tools with which the notion of a creator could be abolished entirely were still generations off.

The Presidents

George Washington appears to have been that most rare (and personally valuable to myself) of all religious people: the private one. While it is public record that he purchased pews in several churches and attended services regularly while in Philadelphia, Washington chose to spend his time at Mount Vernon more wisely. He attended services sparsely there, according to biographer Paul Ford, and later anecdotes seeking to discredit him publicly did so by reporting that cards and drinking were engaged in by Washington and visitors to his home most vigorously on Sundays. Washington almost never mentioned God by name in public speeches, referring instead to the ideas of Providence and a Grand Architect. His farewell address, which is most commonly referenced as concrete proof of Washington's Christian faith, was not written by him but by Alexander Hamilton, and Washington in fact deliberately removed passages connecting morality with divinity and avoided entirely addressing any particulars of his belief. As for his behavior in solitude, both Hamilton and Washington's staff write of interrupting his morning prayer, which was evidently a regular and solitary-by-preference practice. It is still contended that Washington introduced the oath of fealty to God in the presidential inauguration, despite refutations from the Library of Congress and Mount Vernon. People far more educated on Washington's life than myself continue to argue from both sides of the aisle exactly where on the spectrum from deism to Christianity he actually lied, but insofar as this subject is concerned his exact disposition is irrelevant. What matters is that if he was a devout and practicing Christian, he kept it to himself.

And we revere him to this day...

Thomas Jefferson, as a retirement hobby to kill the time not spent founding the University of Virginia as a bastion of higher learning unsullied by religious influence, engaged himself by taking a scalpel to the New Testament, removing any and all passages which he thought to be unfounded, magical, or otherwise insulting to the intelligence of a reasoned person. The resulting extant text, which is available to all, is an impossibly-thin tome which tells a rather uninteresting story of a young man who says things that irritate some while endearing him to others. The final page of this story, which I find the most edifying, is three paragraphs long and consists of Jesus dying, being buried, and everyone leaving. No resurrection, no fanciful rays of sunshine to be recreated in hideous oil paintings for the next two millenia, but the relating of a man's death. Furthermore, in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (one of the three things included on his obelisk as worth remembering him for, his time as President notably absent) Jefferson writes clearly on the errancy of religious faction having any influence in civil discourse whatsoever. In dissolving any affiliation between the colonies and the Church of England, Jefferson sought to prevent the cudgel of a state church from being wielded against the citizens of the new republic. The worst accusation that could be leveled at him would be the aforementioned label of deist, as he describes a creator of the mind and “departure from the plan” enforced on the populace by religious leaders who sought – then as now – to prevent the free exchange of ideas while lining their own pockets. However, nowhere does he mention any thought that the universe was created for him or anyone else, or that an intervening creator answered prayers, affected the outcome of events, or had a preferred sexual style. The personification of this deistic creator by Jefferson in the Statute, sometimes feebly pointed to as support for accusations of theism, can also be accurately dismissed as a poetic device, seeing as he later gives the concept of truth the same embodiment, albeit feminine.

Again, super respectful reverence is all we know how to do.

The Treaty of Tripoli & The First Barbary War

Securing our independence brought the need to ensure our own security. The treaties enacted by England to protect trade routes and crew obviously no longer applied to our nation, and in 1797 John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli into law. This treaty was to establish our business and cautiously peaceful relationship with the Muslim empire in the Barbary States, who consistently had great success in seizing both our ships and their crew for their own use. The second article of the Treaty, which I argue is second only to the First Amendment in clarity and intent of purpose, states as follows:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

It's a rather beautiful passage, I think, especially when compared to the soul-crushingly indigestible language of our current legislation. But beyond beauty, the most important thing about this passage is that it clearly shows the intention of our nation to hold no brook with religion. Adams may have been far too naive and trusting when concerned with the Muslim theocracy and the ability of its adherents to be trusted, and he was completely mistaken in implying that our non-starter status meant we would never declare war against a religious state, but it couldn't be more obvious that our founding and principles are established as those of a secular nation founded on the rule of law, not a terrifying theocratic nightmare based on deluded religious texts.

It really is everything Hitchens warned us about.

Proving Adams' trust was wildly misplaced, the forces of Tripoli continued to hijack and make slaves of American ships. Seeking explanation, Adams and Jefferson traveled to Tripoli, where their only response was passages in the Qur’an commanding “all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.” Jefferson fought with Congress, arguing that any money paid would only encourage repeated offense. Upon Jefferson's election, Tripoli vastly increased the amount of their demands, which Jefferson finally had the power to refuse. The Navy, recently reconstructed, was at Jefferson's disposal with the caveat to do no more than necessary to defend. Without consulting Congress Jefferson sent the Navy to attack Tripoli, beginning the four year conflict that would end with General Eaton's marines and mercenaries brought the city of Derna to the ground in 1805. This is, by the way, the first time the American flag was flown over a military victory in a foreign land, and the reason Tripoli is in the second line of the Marine Corps Hymn.

The Money

When the time came, as it must in any successful fledgling rebellion, to design a national seal representative of the ideals of the new republic, Samuel Adams appointed an artist in Philadelphia called William Barton. The now-familiar thirteen-layer pyramid crowned with the Eye of Providence was what Barton delivered, with the wholly unfamiliar-to-us latin phrases Deo Favente (“With God's Favor”) and Perennis (“Everlasting”). There was no attempt on Barton's behalf to obfuscate his intentions and belief that the Providential Eye belonged to an intervening Christian god, which was clearly not good enough for Adams.

It rocks your very world, doesn't it?

Charles Thompson, the Secretary of the Congress and a teacher of latin, was tasked with refining the design to bring it more in line with what Adams wanted. Thompson removed the religious references entirely, substituting the phrases Annuit Coeptis (“To/He Approve/s Our Undertaking”) and Novus Ordo Seclorum (“New Order of the Ages”) while retaining the thirteen-layer pyramid, Eye of Providence, and E Pluribus Unum (“One Out Of Many”). This adjustment fulfilled the requirements, changing the intended message from “God gave us this and it's ours forever” to “Can you guys fucking believe how lucky we were to pull this off?”

"I gotcha Deo Favente right here, pal."

The ridiculous motto of the United States since 1956 has been “In God We Trust,” a noxious phrase opposed by anyone who can recognize the meaninglessness of the words even without recognizing the direct contradiction to our nation's principles. This indelicate usurper is a holdover from the Civil War, where the phrase was used by both sides to claim divine support. Since at least 1873, this mindless affirmation has been on our coinage by order of the Congress, not appearing on the paper money until 1957. The same level of blind fervor for empty religious-themed patriotism wouldn't be seen again until the World Trade Center attack, when once again our Union claimed the backing of – for all anyone can tell – the same god who compelled our enemies.

The Congress

In examining religion's perfidious influence on democracy, specifically in our representative bodies, it is helpful to compare the original intent with the current reality. Given that, ideally, both the House and Senate would be filled with individuals selected by their communities as best suited to represent their interests and ideals, one would expect the resulting bodies to reflect the broad spectrum of ideas and attitudes seen nationwide. To examine that a little closer, we can apply that most tenuous of metrics: the public opinion poll. Opinion polls always make me wince the slightest bit, as there are so many clumsily simple ways their data becomes skewed. From convenience bias to acquiescence, these kinds of surveys have many obstacles to assembling data into information, but in many cases they are the best possible way to gauge what people say they think.

Which, unfortunately, assumes *they* know what they think.

Pew Research reported in 2012 that 16.1% of Americans who responded to their poll self-identified as having no religious affiliation. As mentioned, there is no reliable way to determine what percentage of people who respond in the affirmative are lying to the pollster to fulfill an imagined expectation, or claiming affiliation out of habit or guilt. As you can infer for yourself, it is improbable that there exist enough physical structures to house all the worshippers who claim to be such fervent practitioners.

There are 535 voting members of Congress, which would suggest that roughly 86 members of that august body should be atheist. If we further narrow the field by disregarding the 5.8% of Pew respondents who felt “religious unaffiliated” described their views (as opposed to the rather confusing group labeled “secular unaffiliated”) we are left with around 55 Congresspeople that should reliably be found doing something useful on Sunday morning. This is, self-evidently, at odds with the precisely zero (sometimes one, as of late, but not for long) representatives of the nation's public who profess to be unburdened by childish superstition, and flies in the face of the decidedly Christian-flavored political grandstanding we must constantly slog through.

It can only feed, never produce...

It may actually be fair and accurate to say that America is a Christian nation, not by design but through lazy arrogance or weakness on the part of those of us who knew better. To call it de facto is to give it too much credence, but the fact remains. To admit this is not to agree with the historically ignorant who claim a Christian founding for our nation, nor is it further concession or conciliation to theocracy with an enthusiastic allowance for it to reign. The fervor with which the cry of rationality and forced retreat for religion seems to keep growing can only suggest to us that the tide turns in our favor. We can perhaps now be said to be in recovery, a nation with a serious problem that we have just recently become mature enough to accept and fix.

Today's Example of Why Science Will Outlive Superstition

The refutation of Bicep2's announced discovery illustrates the ease and comfort with which the scientific community ingests and adapts to new information compared to religious organizations.

Just following the Ides of March of this year, researchers from the BICEP2 installation at the South Pole publicly announced the finding of a very specific variety of polarized light in the cosmic microwave background. This light is thought only to be produced by interaction with gravitational waves produced by the accelerating expansion of the universe in the slimmest subsection of time following the Big Bang. The announcement was quite monumental, ultimately suggesting that a previously-unexplored and incredibly exciting area of physics known as the idea of grand unification could be better understood in our lifetime. My clumsy and bearskin-clad effort to explain the unbelievable magnitude and majesty of what a unified theory and evidence of faster-than-light speeds would represent is profoundly and embarrassingly unrefined. I highly recommend individual understanding of this topic, as it is more awe-inspiring that any alternative I could list. Unassociated scientists were publicly optimistic, though all provided caveats regarding the need for peer-review and a confirmation of the findings. The staff of BICEP2 reportedly waited a year to announce their findings, in an effort to apply due diligence to their research, and finally felt comfortable when the Keck Array installation (a new post in the same spot) showed the same results. 

Test for colorblindness or a picture of gravity waves? Only my hairdresser knows for sure.

Attention faded, as it does, and soon the excitement of a Unified Theory receded to a tiny table in the back corner to drink coffee and catch up on Stephen King. The plausibility of the findings and their revolutionary potential was still a topic of debate, and I had the pleasure of listening to a group of people much smarter than myself discuss the subject. One person in the group was very convinced, and his attitude could best be described as "proceed as if true," but even he happily provided caveats regarding the ultimate need for more information.

Today the Washington Post carried an article quoting Uros Seljak, a physics and astronomy professor at UC Berkeley, as saying there is still a question regarding the source of the detected polarized light. There is a chance, Seljak contends, that the received signal could have been produced by the interference of dust in space situated much, much closer to Earth than the edge of perceivable light. This is similar (again, in a clumsy and indelicate fashion) to taking a flash picture outside at night and seeing a pinpoint light source in the picture as if someone was standing fifty meters away with a flashlight. The light source is actually a particle in front of the camera, reflecting light from the flash back into the lens, but one could be forgiven for the confusion. The question should be decided later this year, when the Planck Space Telescope takes a more refined "picture" of the visible sky in multiple frequencies and with a much finer tolerance for differentiation between dust and a physics revolution. 

There is no tolerance for seeing this and thinking "ZOMG, ghost orbs!" Idiot.

The finest point to take away from BICEP2's announcement and the associated debate is the overall world view that allows for such an effortless and non-defensive incorporation of newly-discovered information tempered by the need for independent verification, the closest thing to a chiseled-in-stone commandment you're likely to find in this community. There may be personal embarrassment involved in working diligently on a world-changing project, then having to face the idea that you may have been so excited you were tricked by space dust, but regardless of the outcome there will be no honor killings. There will be no excommuncations from the church of rational thought, no proclamations of heresy leveled by both sides, no resulting schismatic split leaving us with Fundamentalist Science and Hip Young Reformed Science. The information will be measured on its merits, the evidence considered with multiple sets of sober eyes, the results based on fact. Science and the secular community around it is the only game in town if you prefer facts over superstition and reasoning over faith, which is exactly the set of tools best suited to aid us in understanding the actual universe of which we are a very real part. 

That would be us, on the right.

Since beginning to slog and wade its way out of the thickly-encrusted Augean stables that is religion, a labor which has yet to reach completion due to no conveniently diverted rivers in the area, science has repeatedly shamed and outpaced religion when both are confronted with a new development in our primitive understanding. Unable to simply wait around until flaccid holy men can get drunk enough to have a serious argument about nothing at all, science regularly and without undue stress has undergone reformation, using the process of discovery and reason to incorporate verifiable knowledge such as the effects of gravitation and heliocentrism. Religion responded to this approach to the world with condemnation and death sentences, a childish and ignorant recitation of their primitive and phenomenally wrong holy books, and an arms-crossed refusal to embrace logic which persists and has regrown immense strength in our time. 

Again, pictured on the right.

BICEP2's reported findings and their detractors are, quite literally, discovering and debating over what may be the single most important astronomical discovery in our lifetimes, with incomprehensible ramifications to every single aspect of our tiny little lives. And they are doing it without the vitriol one would expect if exposed to what we laughably call modern news and religious debate, with absolutely zero danger that the debate will result in any kind of split in the community. There is, quite literally, no way for an evidence-based community such as the one I describe to have a fault wherein these kinds of schisms have their genesis. Differences of opinion or of conclusion are resolved by the presentation of fact, those facts being the result of experiments and evidence and peer-review, none of which any religious community has the slightest time for.