I am a theoretical physicist and currently Director of 
May 09, 2008
The end of god-8: Why even 'good' religion is not worth saving
(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
When all else fails, religious people sometimes resort to utilitarian arguments in favor of god, such as that some people would act worse if they did not believe in a god who would punish them for doing bad things. Other alleged benefits of 'good' religion are that it helps people cope with the stresses of life and deal with the fear of death, that it encourages people to do good acts, and to summon up courage in the face of adversity.
While some of these things may be true, they seem rather a weak foundation on which to base one's support for religion. The basic problem is that every one of these benefits is not unique to religion. As I have written before, every benefit claimed for religion can just as well be provided by other institutions.
Provides a sense of community? So do many other social groups. Do charitable works? So do secular charities. Work for social justice? So do political groups. Provide comfort and reassurance? So do friendships and even therapy. Provide a sense of personal meaning? So does science and philosophy. Provide a basis of morality and values? It has long been established that morals and values are antecedent to and independent of religion. (Does anyone seriously think that it was considered acceptable to murder before the Ten Commandments appeared?)
So by getting rid of religion we can still have all the benefits claimed for it while getting rid of the evils that are unique to it. Some try to argue for retaining religion by pointing out, correctly, that science also has been used for massively evil ends so why not call for the end of science? But the fact is that if we get rid of science, there are no alternative ways to obtain all the social benefits it provides, so the only alternative is to try to learn how to use it wisely. This is not the case with religion. It provides no social benefits that cannot be duplicated by purely secular institutions.
Christopher Hitchens says something similar in his introduction to The Portable Atheist (2007), p. xiii-xiv):
One is continually told, as an unbeliever, that it is old-fashioned to rail against the primitive stupidities and cruelties of religion because after all, in these enlightened times, the old superstitions have died away. Nine times out of ten, in debate with a cleric, one will be told not of some dogma of religious certitude but of some instance of charitable or humanitarian work undertaken by a religious person . . . My own response has been to issue a challenge: name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer. As yet, I have had no takers. (Whereas, oddly enough, if you ask an audience to name a wicked statement or action directly attributable to religious faith, nobody has any difficulty in finding an example.)
If the foundations of religion are false, then the alleged benefits it provides are merely placebos, devices to make people feel good in the short-run, to allay their fears about death, and to provide facile answers to deep questions of existence and meaning. It is not clear to me why making people feel good on the basis of a falsehood is better than them being able to see the truth clearly. Of course, this does not mean that one should go about destroying people's beliefs indiscriminately. I would not argue with someone in grief who finds consolation in some religious dogma. But that leave-well-alone policy does not extend to public discussions of religion, and the new atheists are perfectly justified and even to be commended in pointing out that religions are based on false foundations.
Religion also results in people being required to suspend rational thought and judgment and encourages passivity and tolerance for injustice since provides people with the dubious option of putting their faith in a higher power to redress injustices and looking towards justice in heaven rather than fighting for those goals here and now.
In the past I have shown clips of exorcists, mind readers, and people who claim the ability read the thoughts of animals. I argued that such charlatans (and others like faith healers) would not be able to ply their trade without the cover that religion gives them to persuade people that supernatural forces exist. For atheists to not attack religion in order to preserve some façade of coexistence with 'good' religion is to permanently leave ajar the door that enables those who use religion as weapons for evil ends or to exploit the gullible for profit to enter and ply their trade. As Christopher Hitchens says in God Is Not Great, (2007, p. 160):
It is not snobbish to notice the way in which people show their gullibility and their herd instinct, and their wish, or perhaps their need, to be credulous and to be fooled. This is an ancient problem. Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity's great vulnerabilities. No honest account of the growth and persistence of religion, or the reception of miracles and revelations, is possible without reference to this stubborn fact.
I believe that it is futile to try and separate bad religion from good religion and to try and eliminate the former while preserving the latter. In my interview in Machines Like Us, I say:
[W]hen one decides to not criticize the thinking of 'moderates', one has shut off the most powerful critiques one can make of extremists, which is that the whole edifice of thinking they adhere to has no evidentiary foundation and simply makes no sense. Trying to counter extremists without hurting the feelings of the 'moderates' is like agreeing to play chess while giving up the right to capture the opponent's queen. You are bound to lose, except against the most incompetent player.
Good religion and bad religion are two sides of the same coin. The only way to end bad religion is to end religion altogether, and the way to do that is to advance as publicly as possible all the powerful arguments and evidence we now have that there is no reason whatsoever to assume that god exists in any form or that any of the supernatural doctrines of any religion have any validity.
This is the 'new atheism' and I am proud to be a part of that movement.
POST SCRIPT: Baxter again
Because you can never have too many photos of a terrific dog. . .
May 08, 2008
The end of god-7: How 'good religion' corrupts people
(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
One major problem with religion is that it tends to dull the moral sensibilities of otherwise decent people, causing them to justify acts by 'their' people that they would unhesitatingly condemn if done by anyone else. The process starts in childhood. Take for example the study of Israeli children done by George Tamarin. When told the Biblical story of how Joshua and the Israelites ruthlessly massacred every living thing (men, women, young, old, animals) in a battle against their enemies, the children justified this atrocity using appallingly racist reasoning. When the same story was modified to make the perpetrator of the outrages be an obscure ancient Chinese warlord, the children responded the way that one would hope they would do, saying that the massacre was wrong.
As Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, p. 255) says:
[W]hen their loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation, the majority of the children agreed with the moral judgments that most modern humans would share. Joshua's action was a deed of barbaric genocide. But it all looks different from a religious point of view. And the difference starts early in life. It was religion that made the difference between children condemning genocide and condoning it.
Another example can be seen in the PBS Frontline documentary on the Mormons, available online. Episode #9 deals with the 1857 massacre by Mormons of 120 men, women and children from Arkansas who were passing through Mormon territory in southern Utah, at a place called Mountain Meadows, on their way to California.
Judith Freeman (who is a descendent of the Mormons) says that she is sympathetic to the 75 Mormon men who committed the massacre. "I think I became more sympathetic to their plight because of this idea, this Mormon principle of perfect obedience. These men were ordered to appear at Mountain Meadows, so in a way they were victims of their own devotion and obedience."
This highlights perfectly the danger of religion. It causes people to sympathize with and even excuse appalling actions simply because the people who committ them sincerely believe they are doing god's work. The idea that one should view the perpetrators of atrocities as somehow victims of their own upbringing and conditioning is not, in principle, an unreasonable proposition. The problem is that people tend to extend this charitable view only to people who share their own faith, and refuse to consider this for actions done by others against them, thus leading to an endless downward spiral of self-righteous justifications of actions done by one's own tribe and condemnations of the actions of the perceived enemy, even though both actions are objectively the same.
As Richard Dawkins says:
Religion changes, for people, the definition of good. Atheists and humanists tend to define good and bad deeds in terms of the welfare and suffering of others. Murder, torture, and cruelty are bad because they cause people to suffer. Most religious people think them bad, too, but some religions (for example the religion of the Taliban) sanction all of them under some circumstances. For non-religious people, the behavior of consenting adults in a private bedroom is the business of nobody else, and is not bad unless it causes suffering – for example by breaking up a happy family. But many religions arrogate to themselves the right to decide that certain kinds of sexual behavior, even if they do no harm to anyone, are wrong.
The actions of the Taliban, their vile bullying of women, their sanctimonious hatred of all that might lead to enjoyment, their violence, their ignorant bigotry, their hatred of education, their cruelty, seem to me to be as close to pure evil as anything I can imagine. Yet, by the lights of their own religion they are supremely righteous – really good people.
. . .
It is easy for religious faith, even if it is irrational in itself, to lead a sane and decent person, by rational, logical steps, to do terrible things. There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds.
While Dawkins gives the example of Islam and the Taliban, the same kinds of examples can be multiplied many times over for any of the other religions. The problem is not any particular religion, or version of religion, it is belief in god that is the problem. The danger is, as Freeman says, "If you can get people to believe they are doing god's will, you can get them to do anything."
The sad truth that emerges from the rise of religious extremism is that once you have got people to accept the existence of god, it seems all too easy to convince them that they should do evil actions as part of god's mandate. Or as Voltaire put it, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
I think it is time for the so-called 'moderate' religious people to abandon their belief in god and join the atheists. That would be the best way to combat the negative effects of religion.
POST SCRIPT: Pat Condell on the curse of faith
He talks about the evil of indoctrinating children in religious faith when they are too young to realize what is going on.
May 07, 2008
The end of god-6: The biggest menace of religion: faith
(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
The most basic problem with almost any religion is the fact that they raise 'faith', which is the irrational acceptance of things in the absence of, or even counter to, credible evidence and reason, to the level of a virtue. This is simply asking for trouble. Once you have said that you believe something just because some book says so or some inner voice tells you to do so, you have lost all standing to condemn others whose own inner voices (or the voices of their priests, rabbis, or imams) tell them to do unspeakable acts in the name of obeying god's will.
As Daniel Dennett says:
If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges - mixed blessings, in fact - has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.
. . .
Not just rationality and scientific progress, but just about everything else we hold dear could be laid waste by a single massively deluded "sacramental" act. True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things. And - this is the worst of it - religious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic confidence, an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be unthinkable.This imperviousness to reason is, I think, the property that we should most fear in religion. Other institutions or traditions may encourage a certain amount of irrationality - think of the wild abandon that is often appreciated in sports or art - but only religion demands it as a sacred duty.
In his Letter to A Christian Nation (p. 66-68) Sam Harris says:
The conflict between science and religion is reducible to simple fact of human cognition and discourse; either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Everyone recognizes that to rely upon "faith" to decide specific questions of historical fact is ridiculous—that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the Bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad's conversation with the archangel Gabriel, or to any other religious dogma. It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still has immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.
As a footnote, Poseidon-worshippers (yes, they exist!) were incensed at Harris's apparent slight towards them. Harris adds that "Truth be told, I now receive e-mails of protest from people who claim, in all apparent earnestness, to believe that Poseidon and the other gods from Greek mythology are real." Poseidon worshippers have a point. Why should their belief be accorded any less respect than belief in Jesus or Yahweh or Allah, just because their numbers are smaller? Once you have opened the gates of such irrationality, all bets are off.
The idea that religions are fundamentally good and that those who do evil in its name are misguided and have misinterpreted their respective religious texts simply cannot be sustained. The new atheists might concede that while certain versions of religion might inspire people to do good things, the overall influence of religion is so bad that it is not worth salvaging.
Even 'good' religion is bad in that it allows the enabling of bad religion. Once you have allowed irrationality to go unchallenged, you have lost the main argument against fanatics who think that murdering and otherwise acting against commonly accepted human values is doing the work of their god. In many ways, those whom we label as 'religious fanatics' are those who have taken their religious texts and doctrines seriously, at their face value, and have obediently sought to follow them.
For example, people whose children die because they prayed for them instead of taking them to the doctor are those who took seriously their religion's claim that if they had faith, god would heal them. After all, it was Jesus who gave this promise (Mark 16:17-18):
"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."
Most mainstream religious people cynically hedge their bets by seeking medical treatment when they fall ill, in addition to praying. But according to Jesus, it is those whom we would consider to be religious fanatics, the exorcists, the hallucinators, the snake handlers, the poison drinkers, and the faith healers who should be considered truly religious.
It is precisely because religious people bring up children to believe unquestioningly in absurd religious dogmas that some of those children grow up taking such things more seriously than their parents might like. It is then disingenuous to argue that they have gone too far. The people who do evil things in the name of religion are presumably convinced that they are doing god's work. Bin Laden holds himself up as a true Muslim, upholding his religion's highest traditions. John Hagee and Pat Robertson are similarly convinced that they are the true Christians. And one can find similar examples in other religions.
The best way to counter them is to argue that there is no god and that their holy books are merely the work of human minds that carry no more intrinsic authority than today's newspaper. At least that is a position that can be backed up overwhelmingly by evidence, science, and reason.
To argue instead, as 'good' religionists try to do, that your idea of god is better than their idea of god is a proposition that is purely religious-text based and can be easily countered by pointing to different sections of the same religious texts. As such, it can never be conclusive and can be easily dismissed by those whom we usually label as 'fanatics' but are better described as 'true believers'.
Next: How 'good religion' corrupts people.
POST SCRIPT: Those weird Arabs
As Matthew Yglesias points out:
It's really bizarre how, in the context of war, totally normal attributes of human behavior become transformed into mysterious cultural quirks of the elusive Arab. I recall having read in the past that because Arabs are horrified of shame, it's not a good idea to humiliate an innocent man by breaking down his door at night and handcuffing him in front of his wife and children before hauling him off to jail. Now it seems that Arabs are also so invested in honor that they don't like it when mercenaries kill their relatives.
It takes the Onion to really parody this way of thinking.
May 06, 2008
The end of god-5: The politics of 'good' and 'bad' religion
(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
Perhaps the biggest storm raised by the new atheists, and which has even caused a split within the atheist community about strategy, is that they have decided to ignore the polite fiction that there is 'good' religion and there is 'bad' religion. Supporters of this split (which includes even many non-religious people) believe that what should be done is to support the good religionists by aligning with them to combat the bad.
This has to be understood as being essentially a political strategy, designed to marginalize the so-called religious extremists and fundamentalists, the people whose religious beliefs lead them to reject all of modern science and to harbor repugnant views on issues of morality and social justice.
But while this strategy may generate some political benefits in the short term, its adoption has also resulted in religious beliefs as a whole being treated with kid gloves, by not subjecting them to the same close and withering scrutiny that is applied to other evidence-defying beliefs such as astrology and witchcraft. Although religious beliefs are as irrational as any of those things, this political strategy required that this inconvenient truth not be pointed out, and to maintain the façade that there is a 'true' religion which is essentially good, and that the evils committed in religion's name arise from distortions of the true religion by misguided or evil people.
This gentle treatment of mainstream religion was no doubt aided by the fact that many people that atheists were likely to know, even within their close circle of family and friends, are people who are otherwise rational and yet also believe in these religion-related absurdities. It is hard to criticize religion in a fundamental way without implicitly suggesting that belief in it is an irrational act. The desire not to ruffle feathers serves to muffle fundamental criticisms of religion as a whole and resulted in many atheists of previous generations carefully tailoring their arguments to only condemn those whose religion resulted in abhorrent views and actions. The views of such people were said to not represent 'true' religion, though why that is so is never made clear.
It is undoubtedly true that there are very many religious people who are decent and humane, even inspirational. It is also true that there are very many religious people who are bigoted, racist, and murderous. But the idea that the good that some religious people do is evidence of a loving god at work while the evil that other religious people do is not evidence of a vicious and hateful god is an argument that is highly self-serving and lacks coherence.
Take for example, evangelical (and John McCain supporter) John Hagee, who explains some of his beliefs below:
He quotes the Bible to justify his weird views and who has the standing to say he is wrong in his understanding? 'Good' religious believers have the unenviable task of trying to explain why their choice of Biblical passages and their interpretation should be given more weight than Hagee's. (For more of Hagee's ravings, courtesy of Matt Taibbi's new book The Great Derangement, see this excerpt (courtesy of Tbogg).)
The argument of mainstream religions that 'true' religion (i.e., the religious doctrines that they happen to subscribe to) is a force for good simply cannot be sustained. What the new atheists are saying is that rather than there being bad and good religion, there is only bad religion (that which makes people commit acts that go against accepted standards of morality and decency and justice) and the enabling of bad religion. After all, those religious extremists who commit appalling acts in the name of religion are as justified in arguing that they represent 'true' religion as anyone else. Religious texts and the history of religion are all over the place when it comes to prescriptions for behavior and one can pick and choose passages to justify almost anything.
The very fact that the 'good' religious people feel justified in dismissing or ignoring those parts of the Bible that support evil acts shows that they are not deriving their morality from the Bible but are instead imposing a morality derived elsewhere, from secular humanist values, onto the Bible.
The new atheists have a far more consistent argument. They say that it is far more coherent to argue that there is no god at all, that it is pointless to ascribe the actions of people to a god, and that we should reject the Bible or the Koran or any other religious text as authoritative documents in their entirety.
In their rejection of the concept of a 'good' religion worth saving or even promoting, the new atheists have split with some scientists who argue for an alliance with the followers of 'good' religion and seek to find an accommodation of science with that religion. I call this latter group of scientists 'Templeton scientists' because the Templeton Foundation has for a long time tried to woo scientists to try and find ways to make religion and belief in god compatible with science. This is, in my view, a hopeless task but by dangling huge rewards, (the annual Templeton prize is larger than the Nobel prize) the foundation has tried to lure some scientists into trying to find ways of doing so.
Those who assert that the new atheists are pursuing a bad strategy say that by taking a tack that will antagonize those people who believe in 'good' religion, they are harming the common struggle against those whose religion drives them to words and actions that are manifestly evil by almost any yardstick.
This argument reveals a misunderstanding of the basic nature of coalition politics. In a coalition, people come together on one set of issues they agree upon while staying true to their positions on other issues where they could well differ strongly. So it should be quite possible for the 'good religion' group to join forces with the new atheists to combat the bad social and political influence of the 'bad religion' group, while at the same time disagreeing with each other as to whether the concept of 'good religion' is valid at all.
Asking the new atheists to not debunk the concept of 'good religion' for the sake of political expediency makes as little sense as asking the members of the 'good religion' group to stop talking about their belief in god in order to avoid offending atheists. Each group should come into the coalition for the sake of an articulated common good (in this case combating the immediate and manifest evils of 'bad' religion) while retaining the right to disagree on other issues.
The reason that this fairly obvious aspect of coalition politics is not understood is because for far too long, religion has been granted a privileged place in public discourse. There has been an exaggerated 'respect for religion', which has been interpreted as requiring that one should not critique those religious beliefs that are strongly and sincerely held by 'good' people. This tradition has shielded mainstream religion from the kinds of deep critiques received by other irrational belief structures, like astrology or witchcraft. Because of such criticisms, neither of those beliefs is deemed to be intellectually respectable anymore. But religion, which is no better, still retains its standing as something that reasonable and rational people can believe in.
The new atheists have ended that tradition and it is a good thing.
POST SCRIPT: Silly Superstitions
Sri Lanka is a country that is riddled with superstitions with many people, including political leaders, not doing anything significant until they have consulted their astrological charts and gotten the green light. It always seemed bizarre to me.
Now it appears that Republican presidential candidate John McCain is also extremely superstitious.
The reason that superstitions flourish is because we tolerate, even venerate, the biggest superstition of all, the belief in supernatural powers like god.
May 05, 2008
The end of god-4: The death of god due to other causes
(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
While developments in science have provided the most powerful arguments against the existence of god in any form, it is not only science that has led to the undermining of traditional religious beliefs. As far as Christianity and Judaism are concerned, other areas of scholarly work, such as modern textual scholarship in the form of the so-called 'higher criticism', coupled with careful archeological studies, have shown that the Bible is very much a human-created document and that there is little or no evidence for the validity of any of the knowledge contained in it.
It now seems clear that almost the entire history presented in the Bible (such as the stories of Abraham, Moses, the captivity and exodus from Egypt, David, Solomon, etc.), right up to the period when the Israelites were taken into exile by the Persians in about 650 BCE, is fiction. The present day Bible has been shown to be essentially a political document written in the centuries between 400 BCE and 100 CE, and consists of the codification of documents produced by priests beginning around 650 BCE, very long after almost all the events it purportedly claims to record. (See my earlier series of posts on this topic.)
Even for events reported in the New Testament, the evidence is very weak that some person named Jesus lived at the appropriate time claimed by Christians and, even if he did exist, there is no credible evidence for the claims of his followers about his virgin birth, resurrection, miracles, and other supposed clues to his divinity.
The idea that the Bible or the Koran or any other religious text is divinely inspired is hard to sustain. Religious people can and do cherry-pick passages from them to suggest that they contain information that could only have come from a divine entity but these arguments are laughably inadequate.
For example, at a recent science-religion program sponsored by the Campus Freethought Alliance held at Case, a religious panelist suggested that the Bible must be true since it predicted some things that came to pass later. But the examples he gave were weak, consisting mainly of things that Jesus said or did that were supposedly predicted by the Old Testament prophets. This is the kind of argument that will only satisfy the already devout because even the Bible itself says that Jesus had studied the scriptures and actively sought to satisfy the prophecies. Thus the Bible itself undermined the speaker's case but he seemed to be unaware of this implication.
This willingness of believers to suspend rational analysis when it comes to their own beliefs is widely prevalent. Recently two young Mormon missionaries came to my home to try and convert me. They told me the story of Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon based on the golden plates that he supposedly discovered and which subsequently disappeared again after he had translated them using the magic stones. When I asked them why I should believe the writings in their holy book, they told me that it made predictions that had come true. When I asked them to name one, they said that the book had predicted Columbus's voyage to America. When I pointed out that Joseph Smith lived in the 19th century, long after that voyage, and that this could hardly be considered a prediction, they said that Golden Plates had been created long before Columbus. When I asked them how they knew this, they said that Joseph Smith had said so!
These Mormon missionaries were young, articulate, and seemingly intelligent people. The fact that they did not seem to realize that they were arguing in a circle and basically claiming authority for a text on the basis of nothing other than the claims of that same text shows just how much religion subverts people's most basic reasoning skills. I see the same thing with Christians who try to convince me about the reality of Jesus and god by quoting passages from the Bible. It does not seem to strike them that this makes little sense.
Even on the most basic of facts, the Bible falls short. For example, 1 Kings 7:23-26 and 2 Chronicles 4:2-5 gives the value of pi (as the ratio of circumference to diameter) as 3. As Sam Harris points out in his Letter to a Christian Nation (p. 61), "But the Egyptians and Babylonians both approximated pi to a few decimal places several centuries before the oldest books of the Bible were written. The Bible offers us an approximation that is terrible even by the standards of the ancient world." In other words, even by the standards of knowledge available elsewhere at that time, the Bible got it hopelessly wrong.
As for making predictions, the Bible is simply terrible. It makes no predictions worthy of the name. As Harris says, "If the Bible were such a book [of prophecy], it would make perfectly accurate predictions about human events. You would expect it to contain a passage such as "In the latter half of the twentieth century, humankind will develop a globally linked system of computers – the principles of which I set forth in Leviticus – and this system shall be called the Internet." The Bible contains nothing like this. In fact, it does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century." (Harris, p. 60, my italics)
The idea that the Bible (or the Koran) can form the basis of a moral life has also come under serious attack because the morality that is espoused in it can only be described as appalling. It is all too easy to find passages that indicate god's approval of slavery, prostitution, genocide, and rape, and to find punishment by death being advocated for such absurdities as working on the Sabbath, wearing garments made of different threads, planting different crops side by side, showing disrespect for parents, or for sundry sexual transgressions. As Richard Dawkins says in his narration in the British television documentary The Root of All Evil, "The god of the old testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic cleanser, urging his people on to acts of genocide."
Thus the Bible has an awful record when it comes to history, mathematics, science, morality, and predictions.
The problem for religious people of how to deal with theodicy (why a loving all-powerful god can allow evil to occur) is also one that will not go away, however much religious people might try to paper over its problems. How can anyone contemplate the unspeakable atrocities committed during the Holocaust, the Vietnam war, the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda and of Native Americans, slavery, (the list can go on almost indefinitely) and still believe in a kind and loving and providential god?
All these problems are well known to religious scholars but are not raised so much among the general public. And for a long time, the dubious argument of showing 'respect for religion' prevented even non-religious people from pointing out forcefully all these obvious weaknesses of religion, and that religious texts had had no scientific or historical or moral validity and should be viewed as little more than fiction.
But that has changed. The new atheists have not hesitated to highlight all these weaknesses of religion that have come to the fore because of advances in science and other disciplines.
Next: The politics of 'good' and 'bad' religion
POST SCRIPT: Zinn on the American empire
Historian Howard Zinn has a new cartoon book A People's History of American Empire, with voiceover by Viggo Mortensen.
(Thanks to TomDispatch.com.)
You can read Zinn's views on the American empire here.