Grim Rhapsody

No doubt you are familiar with world-renowed book series Harry Potter, seven books detailing the teenage years of Harry Potter, a boy who discovers he is a wizard and is pitched against the Dark Lord Voldemort. The success of the bildungsroman fantasy novels has made author J.K. Rowling the highest-earning novelist in history, and with fair reason: the novels are extremely enthralling and unique and lead the reader on a twisting journey from start to finish.

As a “children’s series”, Harry Potter has drawn considerable attention to its aspects of evil: the villains of the series are not your bumbling, evil-laughing, constantly-thwarted typical children’s villains, but are truly cruel, violent and cunning, symbolised in the murderous main antagonist Lord Voldemort. Notable, the books’ violent content increases from first to seventh book, and with obvious reason: with ten years between the first and last instalments, Potter’s original readers have matured, and Rowling has emphasised that it is this associated journey and maturing of her original audience along with Harry that leads to the latter books’ bloodshed.

As part of that original audience, I was a true follower of Harry Potter from its beginning in 1997 to its end almost two months ago, and my gratitude to Rowling extends likewise. Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, more religious segments of the world have heavily criticised the series, for not only its themes of death and scenes of horror but for the mere presence of magic.

Harry Potter is set in a magical world. Harry attends Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for six of the seven books, and the school remains the main setting for the whole series. This won’t settle for hardcore Christians: in their eyes, Harry is “desensitizing children to the Occult” and “leading children to be fascinated by magic, however ‘white’ or ‘dark’ it may be”. This article by typical fundamentalist website ChristianAnswers is a fine example of such a response.

Of course, Christians have long condemned witchcraft. I need not remind you that Christians were responsibly for the medieval burnings of innocent people who had been fanatically identified as “making pacts with the Devil”. Their justification was as such:

When you enter the land the LORD your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of the nations there. Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD, and because of these detestable practices the LORD your God will drive out those nations before you. You must be blameless before the LORD your God. The nations you will dispossess listen to those who practice sorcery or divination. But as for you, the LORD your God has not permitted you to do so. [Deuteronomy 18:10-14]

Naturally, the fact that God detests these practices yet is unable to do anything about them is evidence against God himself, but putting this aside, it seems that Christians believe that the Bible not only applies to people, but also to works of fiction. The aforementioned article claims: “Furthermore, if one were to use the reasoning that such objectionable material can be included in fantasy literature, then ‘that line of reasoning would tell you that you could include in fantasy any violence, pornography, whatever you wanted, and still defend those books by that very same statement’.” This asserts that practices that offend religion (notably, practices that don’t actually function) are on the same level as practices that offend human nature (of which pornography can barely be classified, offending Christians for the same religious reasons).

This is the sole basis of Christian dislike of Harry Potter: the supposed presence and promotion of Occult practices, moral relativism, violence and fascination in “witchcraft”. This seems to hinge upon their belief, which ironically originates from God’s belief, that the Occult is actually a functional practice and actually allows the participant to use Potter-like magic. The fact that Harry Potter is fundamentally a magic-infused reflection of society is ironic in this sense, and thankfully the majority of Christians can accept the series for what it is — a fantasy series. (Maybe the real reason fundies despise Harry is because he’s challenged the Bible as the world’s highest-selling book.)

To finish on a different note, ChristianAnswers’ article concludes with this:

Parents, whether Christian or not, must take an active role in what their children are being exposed to and determine what is appropriate. Christians especially should be guided by God’s Word, the Bible.

I doubt this article’s author has read the Bible. If so, he would be urging parents to keep it hidden and read only from verses based around the love of Jesus (otherwise known as the one-verse doctrine, John 3:16). Isaac Asimov says it best: “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”

Consider this list of websites.

• AllAboutArchaelogy.org
  AllAboutHistory.org
  AllAboutLifeChallenges.org
  AllAboutLiving.org
  AllAboutLove.org
  AllAboutParenting.org
  AllAboutPhilosophy.org
  AllAboutPopularIssues.org
  AllAboutReflections.org
  AllAboutScience.org
  AllAboutSpirituality.org
  AllAboutTruth.org
  AllAboutWorldview.org

Seems fair enough, doesn’t it? An About.com-like chain of websites dealing with various contemporary issues? How about this list?

• AllAboutCreation.org
  AllAboutCults.org
  AllAboutFollowing Jesus.org
  AllAboutHeart.org
  AllAboutJesusChrist.org
  AllAboutPrayer.org
  AllAboutReligion.org
  AllAboutTheJourney.org
  AllAboutTheOccult.org

As part of the same web chain, this leads to the absolutely correct conclusion that this is a Christian chain of websites, operating under the major domain of AllAboutGod.com, and proselytising fundamentalist, Young-Earth creationist, Christian faith on every page. Most amusing of all is the link at the bottom of each page, “Learn More Now!”, leading on to the next chapter (usually cross-site) in the reader’s journey. The end of all of these paths? A page aptly titled “Become A Christian”, which no longer offers a “Learn More Now” link at the bottom but instead displays “Did you become a Christian today? YES or NO?”

The pro-creation, pro-Christianity, anti-evolution arguments posed on this All About God chain of websites are, of course, nothing new. Every single page on AllAboutScience.org discusses why evolution is false, why creationism is science, and why we should all convert immediately to Christianity. Some despicable pages on AllAboutWorldview.org promote the old Christian vendetta against homosexuality, pre-marital sex and atheism. And look no further than AllAboutParenting.org for raising obedient, unquestioning Christian children.

One would imagine the calm, matter-of-fact manner in which All About God poses fundamentalist Christian values (guess what’s on AllAboutTruth.org) would be less disturbing than the vocal discrimination employed by groups such as Westboro Baptist Church. However, in its own way, All About God is an atheist’s nightmare, promoting creationism as science whilst twisting facts to remove evolution to the back stage; beginning in questioning, appealing tones but quickly shifting into blatant evangelism; ignoring the Bible’s violent cruelty and promoting one-verse doctrine (John 3:16) ; and enforcing some of the more ridiculous Christian notions such as Young Earth creationism and absolute literal (albeit selective) Bible interpretation.

All About God (or perhaps more accurately “Christian Wiki”) is a classic example of modern online proselytisation (indeed, I have yet to come across a more deceptive instance), but, as per usual, twists the most basic principles of science to its own will and defaces both real science and any non-Christian belief, atheism most of all. I urge anyone reading any of its websites to look to less biased sources for the information AAG presents. 

In the first post in this series, I gave an introduction to infamous YouTube Christian evangelist Shawn, otherwise known as “VenomFangX”, and explained why his dishonest censorship tactics have given him an image of notoriety and dislike across YouTube. In this article, I’ll be dealing with Shawn’s core arguments from three of his videos that continue to infuriate atheists and indeed, any non-creationist. Let’s get straight to it, starting from common arguments Shawn uses to prove the existence of a creator. [All of Shawn's arguments on both God and evolution can be debunked by reading their respective essay at Ebon Musings, thanks to Ebon's extensive writings.]

Time must have started a finite amount of time ago, or we never would have reached this moment in time.

The very first argument of Shawn’s very first video, “A simple way to prove the existence of God”, is based upon the common and natural misconception of time: the illusion that time is a flowing line, made up of absolute points in time, constantly moving past us. Time is not consistent among observers; it is relative, and it is not a series of defined points rushing past us. The notion that there must be a “first point” of time disintegrates with this illusion.

In addition, Shawn denies that an infinite can exist in reality, and at first this seems appealing. However, the fact that the human mind finds it difficult and indeed, absurb to comprehend an actual infinity does not mean it is impossible. An infinite things could have happened before now, if there was an infinite amount of time to do it in. As theists can say God has existed forever, scientists can postulate that spacetime itself has existed forever, requiring no further explanation. Of course, robbed of his argument of time, the rest of Shawn’s “point of creation” argument falls apart. (He moves on to the old “the universe is too good to have not been created” argument, which I won’t even bother wasting words on.)

Do you believe you came from goo, then to the zoo, then to you?

This line, which opens Shawn’s first real anti-evolution video (and inspired this post’s title), attempts to make evolution sound absurd. No doubt his viewers are at this point imagining a ball of slime turning into a monkey, then morphing into a human. This foreshadows the rest of his arguments, so I’ll explain why this absurd rhyme is incoherent: while you could feasibly describe the original amino acids of life as “goo”, this goo did not undergo a series of transformations that took it through every form of life ever known. It branched out. This is the equivalent of saying “Do you believe you came from your great-great-grandparents, then to your cousin, then to you?”

God flooded the world to kill evil giants, which have fossilised and are being discovered as we speak.

This hilarious segment uses modified images of giant skeletons to support Shawn’s claim of giants once roaming the Earth. The images he uses are known fakes. Just look them up on Google Images. The fact that Shawn must have known this is an insight into his malicious character; either that, or he’s just ridiculously gullible. If faked photographs of giant skeletons are the best evidence Shawn can muster for a global flood, he needs to have a serious self-evaluation.

The Sun consumes five million tonnes of hydrogen per second, meaning just a few million years ago it would have been large enough to swallow the Earth.

Here, I hope you’ll begin to understand this post’s title: Shawn sounds as though he has just learned of the Sun’s rate of nuclear fusion, and has drawn his own conclusions from that single piece of information. The change in the Sun’s mass since it entered its main sequence billions of years ago has been a small increase in size, not a huge decrease in size. The Sun doesn’t just convert hydrogen to energy and shrink: it fuses the hydrogen into helium, and the energy released from this fusion is what we feel here on Earth. The actual amount of matter inside the Sun doesn’t change during this process! Ironically, in a further several billion years, the Sun will grow large enough to swallow the Earth, as a red giant. [See here for more information.]

Moon dust was measured during lunar expeditions, and measurements pointed to the Moon being about 6,000 years old.

Correction: faulty and contaminated measurements of moon dust on the lunar expedition pointed to a much younger Moon. Peterrson, the man in question who measured the dust, didn’t used a correct measuring device and made other mistakes, placing his estimate at five million tons of dust per year. More recent, accurate measurements using satellite penetration have placed the number at around 20,000 tons per year. Perhaps Shawn chooses to use out-of-date and inaccurate measurements for his arguments, perhaps not, but either way, his second Young Earth argument has fallen apart.

The Moon is moving away from the Earth at a consistent rate, meaning more than a few thousand years ago it would have been too close for life to survive.

This laughable argument does indeed sound terrifying. What Shawn fails to take into account is that this consistent rate is 38 millimetres per year. So, because Shawn argues that a few thousand years ago the Moon would be dangerously close, let’s look at that distance: 6,000 years ago, the Moon would have been 228 metres closer. That’s 228 metres out of 384,403,000 metres. Horrifying indeed. Even 4.5 billion years ago, the distance would be more than half of that current distance (regardless, Shawn’s “consistent rate” is untrue, due to the Earth’s weakened gravitational field over a greater distance and its reduction in angular momentum).

Comets couldn’t have survived for billions of years, and couldn’t possibly form in outer space because there’s no water to freeze onto the rock.

Shawn’s half-right on this one: comets don’t survive billions of years. However, not only is it possible for comets to form in outer space — the majority of them do. Shawn’s main argument for the apparent impossibility of this is that you can’t mix ice and rock and have them stick together. Living under the gravitation influence of a planet, this is all very well, but in the freezing vacuum of space, if a particle of ice collides with a chunk of rock, they will most likely stay together, growing in size as more particles collide and adhere to the mass, which may eventually drift close enough to the Sun to fall into orbit.

Light from stars could be reaching us because God sped it up, or because the stars are hurtling through spacetime fast enough to allow us to see their light in the future.

Shawn starts to go downhill here. You’ll find a running theme throughout his videos that claims any evidence that opposes a created, young Earth has been either a trick of Satan or just a coincedental act by God. Now, we’re supposed to believe that distant stars’ light is reaching us because God sped it up, not wanting us to be bored here on Earth. This is a classic “God works in mysterious ways” argument that offers no real explanation or evidence, except that God, for some reason, made it that way. Shawn’s second theory says that if Harvard researchers can slow light down, there’s “no reason why it can’t be sped up”. This concept of “You can kill someone, so why can’t you resurrect them?” is so fallacious that it’s no wonder it leads Shawn to believe that we could be seeing stars in the future.

The world’s oldest tree, coral reef and desert came into being  4,400 years ago; oceans were freshwater 4,400 years ago; and Niagara Falls couldn’t have been subject to erosion more than 4,400 years ago.

 …The world’s oldest living organism is a bristlecone pine in California: 4,800 years old. There’s not even a tree on this list of oldest trees that’s close to 4,400 years. The world’s oldest desert is 80 million years old. Hovind’s thesis that the oldest coral reef is 4,200 years old was formed because he believes that it must have formed after the global flood, and is supported by no other evidence (indeed, he is suggesting that coral grows at more than twenty times the observable rate). The limit of the Niagara Falls’ recession is due to the upper limit placed upon its age by the last ice age. And oceans are having salt removed from them at a very inconsistent rate, making them in no way useful evidence for determining anything except a minimum age of the Earth. Here we see Shawn conjuring facts out of thin air.

I hope I’ve given you an insight into exactly what goes on in the mind of VenomFangX. All of his arguments are fallacious, and I assure you that, for most of them, he knows that. He relies on his (admittedly impressive) confidence and on the Christian audience’s predisposition to dislike evolution in order to present his arguments as truth.

In my next, final post on VenomFangX, I examine not Shawn but a wide selection of YouTube responses to his videos. Until then, keep an eye out for giant skeletons.

Greetings, and welcome to the first of a scattered, long-term series I plan on doing titled YouTube Tales, which chronicles the existence of religious and anti-religious videos on the popular amateur video website YouTube.

Let me start of by saying that I personally greatly enjoy YouTube. It gives people a chance to publically and effortlessly speak their mind, presents many opportunities for entertainment, and allows others to easily respond to peers’ videos. (Granted, there are a number of controversies involved, including copyright infringements and real-life ventures encouraging dangerous stunts in the pursuit of creating a popular video, but frankly I think the situation could be much worse.)

When it comes to videos on religion, there are thousands and thousands of montages, personal video blogs and evangelistic videos on YouTube. This is perfectly fine; it gives online users a means to demonstrate, discuss and debate. Regardless of how accurate a video is, how well-presented it is, and how acceptable it is, users can always present their own views on it…right?

Wrong.

Shawn, otherwise known as “VenomFangX”, has made himself one of the most controversial and highly-subscribed Christian evangelists on YouTube through his prevention of all the things that make YouTube a community; that is, the ability to discuss and present views on his videos’ topics. A Young-Earth Creationist who spends most of his ten-minute-strong videos using unfounded and twisted logic to debunk the evolutionary theory and prove the existence of God, Shawn uses a number of dishonest methods to keep himself in a good light — and simultaneously make himself one of the most disliked evangelists on YouTube.

A quick search for “VenomFangX” in YouTube’s search engine will quickly demonstrate my point: with only one or two exceptions, the entire first three pages of results are of videos ridiculing and expressing contempt for poor Shawn (sorting by the default category of relevance). Change the sort category to view count, and suddenly most of Shawn’s videos rise to the top (plus one or two of the most popular “Anti-VFX” videos).

So, why has Shawn induced such a negative reaction? There are many other YEC evangelistic videos on YouTube. However, an actual view of one of his videos leaves an atheist in little doubt as to the reason for his infamous name: Shawn delivers his arguments in an infuriatingly calm and mocking way, contemptuously describing anyone who believes in evolution as “stupid” and “unwilling to be held accountable for their actions to their creator”. Combined with the fact that he only accepts comments of appraisal, disallows ratings (so all his videos have five stars) and is extremely confident in himself, Shawn’s 30+ videos have drawn considerable attention. One particularly humourous segment has him attributing violence amongst teenagers to their “belief that they came from monkeys and therefore can act like monkeys”.

Yes, I say humourous, because Shawn’s videos are not going to convert an atheist or believer of evolution to creationism unless the atheist in question knows nothing about evolution, is willing to take Shawn’s garbled word for it and can’t be bothered looking up the true facts for himself. Much, much more likely is for the responding atheist to feel some combination of frustration, amusement and even pity.

However, I am not writing this to refute all of Shawn’s arguments. Basic common sense combined with an hour alone with Google (or even just Wikipedia) are enough for anyone to accomplish that. I am instead going to point to specific examples in Shawn’s videos that demonstrate an almost malicious personality behind his motives (and unavoidably refute some of the more frequently-used arguments along the way).

First and foremost is Shawn’s censorship of discussion, his most prominent source of notoriety. Take a look at the list of VFX’s videos, and focus your attention on the ratings. Up until videos starting from a few weeks ago, they consistently have five-star ratings. And how many individual ratings have they received? Five or six (the minimum number of ratings for it to appear is five). His newest videos, which have at this time in the vicinity of 500-1000 ratings (one, a response to an atheist, has almost 2000) have no more than three-and-a-half star ratings.

This abuse of the rating system to give himself a good “five star” image is blatantly dishonest. Admittedly, Shawn would make a good advertising agent or politician, but on a community website rife with different viewpoints it suggests severe insecurities in Shawn’s character. Why he has stopped censoring ratings in recent times, I don’t know; perhaps he has decided he has received enough attention, or perhaps a new YouTube policy has prevented it.

The other, even worse part of Shawn’s censorship is that of comments. Try and comment one of his videos in even the slightest negative tone, and it will be rejected. This is the main point of frustration for other YouTube users, and partially explains the hundreds of anti-VFX videos across YouTube. Even in his latest video, which shows a minute of Shawn doing archery, has only comments praising him and his skill. This is further blatant dishonesty and demonstrates his reluctance to show any opposing viewpoints, even when they possess a vast majority. (The average number of accepted comments across his videos is only a fraction of the average number seen on other Christian videos with similar numbers of views, suggesting that a severe majority of comments written have been disapproved.)

The most recent response to this has been somewhat of a consensus across anti-VFX users to mark every single comment on his videos as spam, thereby allowing none to be seen. How successful this will be, I’ve yet to see. (In the third post in this series, I’ll be looking at responses to VFX, so I’ll leave it until then.)

That’s half of Shawn’s notoriety; the other half is, naturally, his video content. I won’t, of course, be refuting his five hours’ worth of videos, but it turns out that isn’t even necessary because he repeats his core arguments across multiple videos, the less ridiculous of which I’ll discuss in part two of this series.

You likely knew it was coming; any blog or website dealing with some combination of religion, current events and equality will at some point encounter the Westboro Baptist Church.

For those of you who haven’t yet come across this rather unique American church, here’s a quick run-down: Founded by Fred Phelps Sr. and based in Topeka, Kansas, WBC consists of around 100 members (primarily of the Phelps family), all of whom either believe or will be raised to believe these rather radical premises:

• Their God (Judeo-Christian) hates homosexual people beyond all other kinds of sinners.
• Any homosexual, anyone who likes homosexuals, anyone who tolerates homosexuals, anyone who doesn’t openly despise homosexuals, and anyone who lives in a country where homosexuality is not punished by death is going straight to Hell.
• Almost every tragedy or act of evil that occurs on Earth is God’s punishment for homosexuals, including American fatalities in Iraq (America, according to them, is the “land of the Sodomite damned”).

Notice a slight theme to these beliefs? Even the faintest trace of a pattern? Yes: Fred Phelps and his followers are homophobic with quite a passion, and they act on it by picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in war and other horrific disasters (simply because they occur in the same country).

Indeed, as Louis Theroux discovered, merely publishing a documentary on WBC is enough for Phelps to perform a sermon dedicated to your condemnation. Theroux’s hour-long program, “The Most Hated Family in America”, has him living with WBC for several weeks, and fully demonstrates the severity of the indoctrination forced upon the younger members of the Phelps family (indeed, one of them openly and casually tells Theroux that she enjoys the knowledge that he will suffer eternal torment after his death). [More on WBC can be found here, or indeed right at the source.]

While their beliefs and actions may seem extreme (and without question are), inflicting emotional damage on the grieving attendants of American funerals isn’t the worst of it. The most severe damage is being done to Phelps’s own family — children raised in hate and bigotry, without the option of leaving. Theroux’s documentary reveals this in full, particularly in one disgusting scene where Shirley Phelps-Roper, leading spokesperson of the church, teaches the slanderous slogans to a Phelps toddler.

America’s response to WBC has been almost completely negative, which is at least an encouraging fact. However, I’ve noticed among the Christian responses several specific reasons: accusations that WBC is not a real church; that their beliefs are giving the Bible a bad name; and that they are wrongly preaching that the Judeo-Christian God is a god of hatred.

The first of these accusations is completely unfounded, as a church is defined as an association of people sharing the same belief system, and is more likely intended as an accusation that WBC gives churches a “bad name”. The second and third points, however, are examples of religion’s selective extraction. While it is odd that Fred Phelps has decided that of all the sins in the Bible, the one mentioned no more than twice is the one God despises the most, the fact remains that the Bible does, at the very least, frown upon homosexuality (Leviticus 20:13 does class it as a capital crime).

WBC may emphasise the bigotry and immoralism present within the Bible (and rightfully gives it a bad name in that fashion), but the real reason these Christians are making this accusation is because Phelps’s selective extraction of the Bible clashes with their selective extraction. In fact, rather ironically, WBC follows the Bible more accurately than most major Christian churches, and effectively proves that a literal interpretation of the Bible is downright bad and hate-mongering. And in this way, this Christian response is completely correct: WBC gives the Bible a bad name, and threatens Christianity because they are both hinging their beliefs on the same book; one literally and selectively, and the other not-so-literally but just as selectively.

Just as WBC draws a more accurate picture of the rules within the Bible, so do they draw a more accurate picture of its deity. Christians have responded that Phelps is wrongly presenting God as a hateful deity, but again, when it comes to examining the Bible, WBC have generally got the better jist of it. Unless, of course, we’re not referring to the God who decided that the best way to fix the problem he made was to crush almost every living thing on the planet under a wall of water; or the God who punished one monarch’s wrongdoing with the massacre of thousands of his innocent people; or the God who decides that things such as picking up sticks on a certain day or not listening to your parents are acts punishable by a particularly brutal death; or the God who created the Ebola virus…the list goes on. Of course, none of these cruel and hateful acts match his most immoral decision ever.

And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.

—2 Thessalonians 1:7-9

I refer, of course, to the creation of a realm of torment where he can send not only the people he already put to a gruesome death, but anyone who doesn’t fall into line under (one of the many variations of) him.

Of course, you could just keep these brutal Bible verses discreet, fabricate a twisted story that makes the eternal suffering of anyone who disagrees with you a “necessary” thing, and vaguely pass off God’s continuous inclination to commit genocide as the loving, mysterious methods of a benevolent deity. WBC does no such thing; they take the literal message of the Bible, choose one of the many death-worthy sins within it, and take it to extreme and vocal levels. Accusations that they are not working under the Bible, or indeed under God, are unfounded.

Do not misinterpret this as support for WBC; I have not yet encountered another church with comparable beliefs of ignorance, bigotry, immorality and defamanation. I have also not yet encountered another church who follows the Bible so devoutly, and I am glad of that.

The conclusion? Yes, the world would be better off without Westboro Baptist Church. However, unless God decides to come out of hibernation and remove it, the best thing for us to do is ignore it. Fred Phelps takes any and all opposition as further confirmation that he is being persecuted for spreading the truth, and can only aggravate him to acts worse than funeral picketing. Any satire or ridicule directed towards WBC is best done discreetly. Unanimous laws preventing the worst of the funeral picketing have already been passed as a result of WBC’s actions, and ignoring their beliefs as they ignore ours is, in my opinion, the best solution.