Civil Commotion

At just about the same time yesterday that I was ridiculing all the things that might be construed as blasphemy in different parts of the world, the story was breaking that an Indian mob had beaten to death a Muslim man on the suspicion that he had beef in his refrigerator.

The attack allegedly came moments after an announcement at a nearby Hindu temple that Mohammad Akhlaq had slaughtered a calf. The calf had gone missing several weeks earlier, according to the Indian Express. Rumors quickly spread around the neighborhood that Akhlaq was the culprit.

Incited by the announcement, the mob broke down Akhlaq’s door and dragged him into the street, where 100 men beat him to death with bricks, his family members told the Express. The invaders also dragged Akhlaq’s 22-year-old son, Danish, outside, beating him until he was close to death as well.

“They accused us of keeping cow meat …”

Because, you know, cows are sacred.

Again, then: Faith — belief without, or even in spite of, evidence, the unreasoning belief that pastors demand — is a moral error. The Holy Men are the great engine of human misery, and the sooner humanity comes to its senses and rids itself of their influence the better off we’ll all be.

Here’s a traveling evangelist who claims he has prayed-over and resurrected 35-people.

Think how much easier it must have been to peddle a claim like this 2000-years ago.

This is International Blasphemy Rights Day, and y’all will probably not be surprised to learn that I am a strong supporter of blasphemy rights. The more blaspheming the merrier, I always say.

I favor speaking ill of the supersized-human god of the Old Testament, the smarmy god of the New Testament, and Alvin Plantinga’s “ground of all being” — whatever that is supposed to mean. I’m fine, too, with people who speak ill of cows (beloved by Hindus), rats (beloved by other Hindus), vultures (beloved by some Zoroastrians), and magic crystals and incense (beloved by New Age nutjobs).

I don’t have a problem, either, with people who wonder what sort of deformed human being would want to spend eternity with the inventor of Hell. I’m cool, also, with people who frankly acknowledge the incontestable fact that Joseph Smith was a con artist, and that those who don’t know it are mor[m]ons. I’m allright with ridiculing Jehovah’s Witnesses, too, because they’re still trying to puzzle-out why the godly weren’t whisked to their reward in 1917. Provided you’re armed, have a good giggle at the idea that Muhammad galloped off to heaven on a white horse. And while you’re at it, flick your nose at Valhalla, where Norse warriors go after their career of carnage and mayhem down here on earth.

Just don’t make fun of the Great Pumpkin. I’ll kick your ass, you do a thing like that.

The unconfirmed rumor du jour is that Pope Francis’ staff arranged for him to meet privately for about 15-minutes with Kim Davis, telling her to “stay strong” at the end of the meeting.

If true — and I have a difficult time imagining even a goony like she or her odious lawyer, Matt Staver, making-up such a story — it is wildly inappropriate meddling in our affairs on his part, and betrays a very serious misunderstanding of how things work in America. For all the interminable yak-yak-yak about this matter, it is quite simple. According to our Constitution, the state of Kentucky may not have a religion; neither, then, may its agents when acting on Kentucky’s behalf. If she has an objection to the law she must hold her nose and carry it out, or she must resign. If she accepts pay for the work and refuses to do it, she commits fraud.

What on earth would provoke the Pope, while a guest in our country, to encourage somebody to break its laws? Here, I imagine, we are getting to the nub of it … the moral law! The higher law! What Our Invisible Friend said to some Bronze Age anonymities!

You cannot, of course, reason with people who are guided by such fantasies, people who delude themselves into imagining they operate in some ethereal realm beyond humdrum corporeal concerns — they have rejected reason. And they have rejected the ideals of the Declaration of Independence — that thinking, two-legged adults can give direction to, and regulate, their own lives. They have rejected adulthood itself, as well, for they wish to be children who are told what to do.

They must be defeated and pushed aside and ignored; that is all that can be done.

Philosopher Robert Paul Woolff reprises a point I made a few days ago: Engineers, lawyers, doctors, medical reasearchers … all make profoundly consequential judgments every single day, judgments that can cost millions of dollars or, even, lives. Retreating into gallows humor is a commonplace way of dealing with the pressure.

It is often said that in the first year of Medical School, the students must start to think of themselves as doctors, just as the first year of Law School is devoted to getting the students to think like lawyers. Thinking of oneself as a doctor means, among many other things, adopting an utterly unnatural attitude toward the human body — an objectifying, de-sensitizing attitude that enables the newly formed doctor to engage in such activities as physical examinations and invasive operations calmly, routinely, scientifically, and without gagging or throwing up. One of the ways in which medical schools accomplish this is by setting the student to work, right at the beginning of the very first semester, dissecting a cadaver. If you can even allow yourself to think about it, there is something profoundly unnatural and unsettling about picking up a scalpel and cutting into a corpse. Those first cuts are bad enough, even with the rest of your cadaver team there to cheer you on, but imagine what it feels like to dissect a liver, a penis, an eyeball, a brain.

Doctors steel themselves for these experiences by breathing deeply, gritting their teeth, making crude locker room or funeral parlor jokes, and in every way they can denying the appalling reality of what they are doing.

At this exact moment in time there are people driving across bridges whose foundations I helped design, visiting parks downstream of earth-fill dams I designed, relying on critical infrastructure I helped design — sometimes with a chorus of yammering ignoramuses in the background. So I don’t begrudge professionals their insider sarcasms.

I do wonder, sometimes, why Joe Sixpack and Betty Homemaker, without benefit of any more education than a struggle with high school algebra, are so sure they know how professional people ought to do their jobs.

If this be elitism, make the most of it.