Deathbed unconversions

In "Laughing at the angel of death" I wrote about the stupid slander levelled at so many rationalists, that when in fear of death we suddenly believe in the afterlife and any god that promises salvation. This nonsensical statement has been made about many famously nonreligious people, notably Charles Darwin.

It turns out that this offensive lie isn't limited to the West. Basava Premanand, published of Indian Skeptic, is dying of cancer. God-peddlers there have been circulating the atrocious falsehood that on his deathbed, he has suddenly become religious, forcing a man too weak to sign his name to take the effort to issue a declaration that:

I do not believe in any supernatural power. All the powers that we encounter are in the realm of nature and nothing exists beyond that.

I do not believe in the existence of the soul or rebirth.

I have not turned to any religion, god, or any sort of spiritual pursuits.

It's funny, but I don't recall rationalists claiming that on his deathbed, Pope John Paul II suddenly became an atheist. Why do the religious feel this strange need to lie about unbelievers?

Bill Maher = Ben Stein?

Last year I blogged very briefly about Ben Stein's travesty of a documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. As a science type and a skeptic, I'm offended by many aspects of this movie: the lies about science, the implication that Darwin caused the Holocaust, and the deliberate distortion of historical truth to support the film's position. As a person and occasional journalist, I'm disgusted by the tactics of the film's makers, namely lying to their interview subjects about the type of film they were making, including giving them a false company name and false title. Then they edited their interviews in a misleading way to make the interview subjects look stupid or evil.

As an agnostic, I was inclined to be a fan of Bill Maher's Religulous. After all, it's a pop culture vehicle to support my own beliefs, right? But then I discovered that Maher is not a philosophical skeptic or a scientific thinker: he's a promoter of pseudomedical nonsense. And today I found out that when making Religulous, he and his producers, um, lied to their interview subjects about the type of film they were making (including giving them a false title), and deliberately concealed Maher's involvement to get interviews which they then edited in a misleading way to make the interview subjects look stupid or evil.

So I hereby declare Bill Maher to be the exact mirror image of Ben Stein. Both professional entertainers who tried to influence the public discourse by lying and deceiving. A pox on both their houses.

Cultural Relativism, or, I find it strange what people find strange

I see an occasional story classified as "Weird News" that isn't weird to me. Here's one: Nepal's capital suffers festival goat shortage. Here's another: Camel Sacrifice at Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport Gets Turkish Airlines Worker Fired.

What's weird to me is, this is not weird. In every region of the world, religious practice for millennia included animal sacrifice. The Jewish holy writings often consist of rules for animal sacrifice, or accounts of various people performing the ritual. (This is just a small sampling.) For all you Christians, there is a quote in one of the Gospels of Jesus ordering a follower to perform (or rather pay for) the ritual sacrifices: Luke 5:14.

So why is it so strange to someone who theoretically believes the Bible to be a historical account, and the rules there to be divinely mandated, when people in another part of the world practice animal sacrifice? I mean, is it really not taught in school in the USA that Muslims still sacrifice animals as God commanded?

What I find interesting is more subtle questions. For instance, in India Hindus have mostly stopped sacrificing animals and now often deny that they ever did (despite the clear words of the Rig Veda), while in Nepal the older custom continues. It's a nice parallel to the fact that modern Jews no longer perform the sacrifices, while our cousins and fellow Hebrews the Samaritans still obey the Lord's orders and kill animals on the mountaintop altar.