Mano Singham's Web Journal

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Entries in "Religion"

January 07, 2012

Fighting over the baby Jesus's crib

Many Christians who belong to the Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas on or around January 6 because they follow the older Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar that the rest of the world uses. This gives them a huge advantage since they can do their Christmas shopping after December 25, thus not only avoiding the crowds but also taking advantage of the post-Christmas sales.

I came across this news report that said that priests of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Armenian Orthodox Church came to blows over who has the right to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the site that tradition says is where Jesus was born. Each side had come with cleaning materials to clean their assigned area but when one group encroached on the space of another, they used their brooms and mops to wage a pitched battle for supremacy. Watch.

What is extraordinary is that this apparently happens every year and police have to be called in to quell the disturbance but that no arrests are made because, as the police chief says, "all those involved were men of God". Of course they were. Who else would fight about something like that?

The intensity of feeling over cleaning a building made me curious as to what theological difference existed between these two religious traditions and discovered that the split dated back to 451 CE and the Council of Chalcedon that was convened to settle an important doctrinal issue known as the "Two Natures" controversy: Did the two natures of Jesus (divine and human) co-exist in his body or were the two natures fused into one? The verdict of the Council was in favor the former and believers of any other formulation were 'anathematized' or cursed.

As if often the case involving dogma, the final adjudication caused umbrage on the part of the losing side in the debate, causing them to take their ball and go home, which in this case meant forming the Oriental Orthodox churches of which the Armenian branch is one.

I myself am on the side of the Greek Orthodox Church in this dispute since they are obviously right. The idea that the two natures of Jesus were fused into one is preposterous and the Armenians will burn in hell forever for this monstrous heresy. As for them breaking away, all I can say is, "Good riddance, splitters."

January 05, 2012

Stoning in Iran

As a vivid example of the ghastliness that can ensue when religious people gain political power, we have the case of people who are condemned to death by stoning in Iran. According to an ACLU pamphlet that I received, at least 14 people are currently awaiting this form of execution.

Bound, wrapped in shrouds and buried in a pit with head and shoulders above ground, the victims are likely to survive for between 20 minutes and two hours from when the first stone draws blood. The reason they survive so long can be found in the chillingly clinical wording of Article 104 of the Iranian Penal Code:

'The size of the stone used in stoning shall not be too large to kill the convict by one or two throws and at the same time shall not be too small to be called a stone.'

As can be seen in this passage and in the instruments of torture and death developed during the Inquisition, religious people can be quite ingenious in the careful way they devise ways to prolong the agony of their victims.

One Iranian woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, is awaiting such an execution because of an adultery conviction. Maryam Namazie has been highlighting her case, hoping to win her freedom.

That's a relief

For all those people worried about the Mayan prediction that this will be the last year before the world is destroyed on December 21, it appears that a new reading of the Mayan calendar says that it did not predict that the world will end in 2012. It only predicted the return of the god Bolon Yokte, shown on the right.

So who is this Bolon Yokte? And does he/she come in peace or to smite us in the ways that gods seem to enjoy? The image suggests someone with a fierce attitude, which does not look promising. Some have suggested that he is in fact Jesus, but that seems a bit much. The concept of the trinity is mind-boggling enough without adding a fourth incarnation. As they say when it comes to gods, three's company, but four's a crowd.

December 23, 2011

Tebow or not Tebow

Although I have stopped following football, I have been intrigued by the story of Denver quarterback Tim Tebow who frequently drops to one knee in prayer during games (this act of genuflection has even acquired the label 'to Tebow' or 'Tebowing') and even has biblical verses painted on his face. So much for Jesus's admonition "When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you." (Matthew 6:5-6)

Of course, such ostentatious displays of piety cry out for parody and Saturday Night Live duly obliges.

December 20, 2011

Baby Jesus gets company

For fifty years, Loudon County courthouse in Leesburg, VA had just a crèche and a Christmas tree on the grounds.

[I]n 2009, a courthouse-grounds committee, concerned about a growing number of requests to use the public space, decided that Loudoun should ban all unattended displays on the property.

Public outcry was fierce and emotional. Residents poured into the county boardroom wearing Santa hats and religious pins, pleading with county leaders to respect their freedoms of speech and religion. The board ultimately decided to allow up to 10 holiday displays on a first-come, first-served basis. Applicants got in line.

You can imagine what happened. Similar to what happened in Santa Monica when public spaces were allotted by lottery, many people got into the spirit of the season.

Then came the atheists. And the Jedis. And the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- each with its own decorations. A skeleton Santa Claus was mounted on a cross, intended by its creator to portray society's obsession with consumerism. Nearby, a pine tree stood adorned with atheist testimonials.

Flying Spaghetti Monster devotees are scheduled to put up their contribution this weekend. It's a banner portraying a Nativity-style scene, but Jesus is nowhere to be found. Instead, the Virgin Mary cradles a stalk-eyed noodle-and-meatball creature, its manger surrounded by an army of pirates, a solemn gnome and barnyard animals. The message proclaims: "Touched by an Angelhair."

Will Christians fight back next year to regain exclusive rights to put up displays on public property? Stay tuned.

December 16, 2011

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

He finally succumbed to throat cancer. You can read a remembrance here.

Unlike in the olden days when religious people could (and would) make up stories about nonbelievers having deathbed conversions, nowadays such a fraud is hard to pull off. It is clear that Hitchens had no use for such fairy stories right up the end.

Here he is talking about the Jesus myth.

(Via Machines Like Us.)

December 15, 2011

Magic and religion

Via Jerry Coyne, I obtained this video of an amazing trick.

I love magic tricks. I enjoy them so much that I resist visiting sites that might reveal how they are done, preferring to try and figure it for myself, which is almost always a futile exercise. I enjoy the mystery of magic.

It struck me that my attitude is similar to that of religious people who also like to wallow in mystery and not seek natural explanations for the extraordinary claims of their religions.

There is one critical difference though. I know that the magic tricks I enjoy are just tricks and magicians never claim otherwise either. There is no fraud involved. If someone did claim that they had supernatural powers, then I would work diligently to understand how the trick was done in order to expose the fraud. With religious people and their beliefs, they seem to want supernatural explanations and resist natural explanations.

December 13, 2011

This is going to make Bill O'Reilly cry

Via Pharyngula I learn that the city of Santa Monica this year decided to have a lottery to see who gets to use 14 city park spaces for holiday decorations, instead of awarding them all to Christian groups as in previous years. The result? Christians got three, Jews got one, and atheists got 10.

Now the Christians are miffed, claiming they are being 'silenced' and their First Amendment rights are being violated.

Cue Fox News outrage!

Religion as belief vs practice

Sophisticated apologists for religion will discount almost all the supernatural beliefs of religions because they are incredible and so embarrassing that no one with any pretensions of rational thought can sign on to them. Talking snakes? People dying and coming back to life? Rebirth? Books dictated by god? A supernatural entity who overrides the laws of nature because an individual requests it?

This has led some to try to identify religion with a set of rituals and practices that provide people with a way of viewing the world that does not contradict science and thus can form the basis of common ground between religion and science. In discussions with colleagues, especially in the religious studies department, I am often told that my view of religion is too distorted by fundamentalist Christianity and that most religious people do not concern themselves much with the idea of god at all.

Is that possible? Via Jerry Coyne, I heard of the valiant effort by Julian Baggini in The Guardian to seek the minimal definition of religion would make "religion intellectually respectable, even to the hardest-nosed atheists." Here are what he calls the four articles of 21st century faith that he has come up with as a result of his search:

Preamble. We acknowledge that religion comes in many shapes and forms and that therefore any attempt to define what religion "really" is would be stipulation, not description. Nevertheless, we have a view of what religion should be, in its best form, and these four articles describe features that a religion fit for the contemporary world needs to have. These features are not meant to be exhaustive and nor do they necessarily capture what is most important for any given individual. They are rather a minimal set of features that we can agree on despite our differences, and believe others can agree on too.

1. To be religious is primarily to assent to a set of values, and/or practise a way of life, and/or belong to a community that shares these values and/or practices. Any creeds or factual assertions associated with these things, especially ones that make claims about the nature and origin of the natural universe, are at most secondary and often irrelevant.

2. Religious belief does not, and should not, require the belief that any supernatural events have occurred here on Earth, including miracles that bend or break natural laws, the resurrection of the dead, or visits by gods or angelic messengers.

3. Religions are not crypto- or proto-sciences. They should make no claims about the physical nature, origin or structure of the natural universe. That which science can study and explain empirically should be left to science, and if a religion makes a claim that is incompatible with our best science, the scientific claim, not the religious one, should prevail.

4. Religious texts are the creation of the human intellect and imagination. None need be taken as expressing the thoughts of a divine or supernatural mind that exists independently of humanity.

He points out, quite correctly, that one cannot be ambivalent about the choice of accepting or rejecting them. If you cannot sign on to any one of them, it means that you agree with its contradiction. He says:

So let us be plain that to reject these articles of faith would mean to maintain their contradictions, namely:

1. Religious creeds or factual assertions are neither secondary nor irrelevant to religion.

2. Religious belief requires the belief that any supernatural events have occurred here on Earth.

3. Religions can make claims about the physical nature, origin or structure of the natural universe. That which science can study and explain empirically should not be left to science, and if a religion makes a claim that is incompatible with our best science, the scientific claim need not prevail.

4. Human intellect and imagination are insufficient to explain the existence of religious texts.

The next task he set himself was to see whether atheists and religious people would sign up to them. While I would have no problem with religion as described by his four articles, I was frankly skeptical that religious people would agree. Most ordinary religious people would reject them outright because they rule out the supernatural while the sophisticated religious would be uncomfortable with being forced into accepting any concrete formulation since they like to live in a world of ambiguity where they never actually come out and say what the believe.

And sure enough, Baggini later reported general failure. A very few of the more sophisticated religious apologists were reluctant to reject his articles but were wary because of the absence of anything that could be described as transcendental. Some religious people, including those who are thought of as 'radicals', rejected them outright. As Baggini says:

If the articles of faith are to provide any hope of establishing the existence of the kind of reasonable faith I think should be possible, we need to get support for them from people who are actually actively and self-consciously religious.

So far, that has not been forthcoming. Theo Hobson, for example, a self-described "liberal" theologian, says: "I'm afraid I don't really sympathise with this. Christianity can't be reformed by the neat excision of the 'irrational'/supernatural. It is rooted in worship of Jesus as divine – the 'creed' side is an expression of this."

Nick Spencer, research director at the eminently reasonable public theology thinktank Theos, was even clearer in his rejection, saying, for instance: "Although religious texts are indeed created by human intellect and imagination, that doesn't mean they can't be taken as expressing the thoughts of the divine … I don't see what's left of the Abrahamics if you do take this out of the equation in this way". Spencer also provides little hope of finding too many other supporters out there, adding that "there would be precious few Christians I know … who could sign up to all your points. To take just the most obvious example: according to mainstream Christian thought, Christianity is founded on a belief in the physical resurrection."

Baggini concludes:

Hence the rejection of the articles suggests that either most liberal religious commentators and leaders are inconsistent or incoherent; or that they ultimately do believe that when it comes to religion, creeds and factual assertions matter; belief that supernatural events have occurred here on Earth is required; religion can make quasi-scientific claims; and that human intellect and imagination are not enough to explain the existence of religious texts. If that is indeed the case then DiscoveredJoys is right that when it comes to belief: the middle ground is virtual deserted.

Religious people, however sophisticated, are unable to break the grip of wanting to believe in some form of the supernatural, some ineffable mystical presence that transcends the material world. This is why there can be no accommodation between science and religion, and in that conflict religion will lose because there is no evidence that such a presence exists.

December 12, 2011

Australian to be lashed for blasphemy

A Saudi Arabian court has found an Australian Muslim guilty of committing blasphemy while he was on a pilgrimage to Mecca and sentenced him to 500 lashes for. He could die as a result. (Via Machines Like Us.)

What is the matter with these people? This case is just like the period of the inquisition where people were punished with even death for lack of sufficient piety. This illustrates the problem with religion. It is rigid and backward looking, holding on to medieval ideas and practices, and threatening people with dire punishments if they do not conform to them. Sometimes the punishment is threatened in this world, sometimes in the afterlife in the form of hell.

Religion has no place in the modern world but many people have not yet come to the realization.

December 11, 2011

Penn Jillette says reading the Bible made him an atheist

His story (of being part of a liberal Christian family and community and attending a church youth group with a minister who was modern and open to dialogue and questioning) is exactly like mine. The main difference is that I was not as smart and as well read in my teens as Jillette was and thus was not exposed to serious atheist thinkers. As a result, my own intellectual efforts at that time were directed towards finding ways to justify my belief in god, and this required me to gloss over all the problems in the Bible and rationalize its atrocities. My serious reading at that time consisted of the modern theologians who did not take the Bible literally (except for a few core elements) and instead focused their efforts on making belief in god intellectually respectable.

So my story is the same as Jillette's except for about a twenty-year gap in which I was seeking reasons to believe in a god before I reached his stage of understanding that the whole exercise was pointless

But better late than never, as they say.

December 10, 2011

Fewer atheists in prison

This article looks at the religious beliefs of prison inmates and finds that the fraction of those who are non-believers is almost negligible, far smaller than their numbers in the general population.

In "The New Criminology", Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith say that two generations of statisticians found that the ratio of convicts without religious training is about 1/10 of 1%. W. T. Root, professor of psychology at the Univ. of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners and said "Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character," adding that Unitarians, Agnostics, Atheists and Free-Thinkers are absent from penitentiaries or nearly so.

During 10 years in Sing-Sing, those executed for murder were 65% Catholics, 26% Protestants, 6% Hebrew, 2% Pagan, and less than 1/3 of 1% non-religious.

Interesting.

December 07, 2011

Being certain about god's existence

According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 64% of people in the age range 18-29 say they are 'absolutely certain' that god exists. This is lower than the 73% of people over 30, another sign of the decrease in religiosity of younger people.

What I find really curious is that the respondents say they are absolutely certain of something that they cannot possibly be certain about. Absolute certainty, as commonly understood, means that you have no doubt whatsoever and that is a very high threshold that cannot be met for something as lacking in evidence as the existence of god. I am about as hard-core an atheist as you are likely to meet and even I would never say that I am 'absolutely certain' that god does not exist and most of the atheists I am aware of are like me.

So why do religious people say such things? I suspect that such assertions of certainty are the means by which people try to convince themselves of their beliefs in spite of their misgivings, the equivalent of sticking one's fingers in the ears to shut out unpleasant sounds. Such emphatic assertions of certainty are really symptoms of doubt.

An interesting follow-up would be to ask those respondents what it is that makes them so certain.

December 06, 2011

More evidence of religion's decline

The Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society & Culture at Trinity College surveys the religious views of Americans and their latest ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) report done in 2008 found the following:

• 86% of American adults identified as Christians in 1990 and 76% in 2008.
• The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not come from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion.
• The "Nones" (no stated religious preference, atheist, or agnostic) continue to grow, though at a much slower pace than in the 1990s, from 8.2% in 1990, to 14.1% in 2001, to 15.0% in 2008.
• Based on their stated beliefs rather than their religious identification in 2008, 70% of Americans believe in a personal God, roughly 12% of Americans are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unknowable or unsure), and another 12% are deistic (a higher power but no personal God).
• In 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990.

The report finds that when looked at as a percentage of the population growth from 1990 to 2008, the 'nones' category captured 37% of this growth while the don't know/refused to answer category (which the report says shared many of the social profiles and beliefs of the 'nones') had 15% of the growth, leaving just 48% of the growth to religiously affiliated people.

There is a lot of data in the report. What I found particularly interesting is that 30% of married respondents did not have a religious ceremony and 27% do not expect to have a religious funeral or service when they die.

I am not sure when or if they will be doing another study to see if the decline continues as I expect it will.

December 05, 2011

Airbrushing the Bible

The Bible poses a real problem for Jews and Christians. In it, god commands the most awful things that we now would recoil in horror from doing. So what options do they have? The literalists say that god must have good reasons for making those commands, even if those reasons are elusive to us, and that we have to simply trust in his goodness.

Of course, that is a tough sell for the more sophisticated believers and some of them have taken the tack of trying to re-interpret the plain text of the Bible to suggest that it actually says things that are more benign or even good than what appears on the surface. One such apologia can be seen in the essay Are Biblical Laws About Homosexuality Eternal? by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky, based on their book The Bible Now, where they tackle the highly problematical attitude of god towards homosexuality, which is turning out to be the Achilles' heel for Christianity and Judaism in America.

The essay itself is a fine example of the contortions one has to go through to salvage the idea that the Bible contains some moral value. Adam Kirsch of The New Republic reviewed the book and Jason Rosenhouse analyzed the essay and both come away unimpressed.

As Kirsch says, the Bible seems pretty clear about god's views on homosexuality.

Just look at Leviticus 20:13: "And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death: their blood shall be upon them." The law as written does not apply to women, but for homosexual men it means death.

At this point, the twenty-first-century Jew—like the Protestant and the Catholic, anyone whose religion views the Bible as holy writ—has two simple choices, and one messy and unsatisfying one. The first simple choice is the one the Satmar Hasid would take: the Bible being God's word, homosexuality is ipso facto an abomination, Q.E.D. The second is the one any secular rationalist would take: the Bible is not God's word, and it has no more binding force than any other ancient Near Eastern law code. The Code of Hammurabi, for instance, holds that "If a man's wife be surprised with another man, both shall be tied and thrown into the water," but we are no more obligated to follow this law today than we are to follow Leviticus. Both reflect millennia-old views of gender and sexuality that now appear simply unjust.

The third choice is the one represented in The Bible Now, the new book by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky. They have set out to explain "what the Bible has to say about the major issues of our time," in particular "five current controversial matters: homosexuality, abortion, women's status, capital punishment, and the earth." Some people turn to the Bible for guidance, they observe early on, "because … the Bible is the final authority and one must do what it says." But as secular academics, Friedman and Dolansky recognize that the Bible was written by historically situated human beings, with various political and religious agendas. They belong to the other category of Bible-seekers, they say, those "who do not believe that the Bible is divinely revealed, [but] turn to the Bible because they believe it contains wisdom—wisdom that might help anyone, whatever his or her beliefs, make wise decisions about difficult matters."

Kirsch goes on to say that by using a tortured analysis, Friedman and Dolansky manage to turn that ghastly Leviticus passage into something positive.

This is a remarkable performance. Before you know it, a law that unambiguously prescribes death for gay men has been turned into an example of latent egalitarianism. Friedman and Dolansky imply that it was not homosexuality the Bible wanted to condemn, but the humiliation of the passive partner. And since we no longer think of consensual sex acts as humiliating, surely the logic of the Bible itself means that homosexuality is no longer culpable: "The prohibition in the Bible applies only so long as male homosexual acts are perceived to be offensive."
…
What licenses this kind of reading is the principle that "God is free to change," that is, to change his mind about what is offensive and inoffensive, good and evil—but only, it seems, in ways that bring him more in tune with the views of people like Friedman and Dolansky (and, I hasten to add, myself).

Rosenhouse points out another fact that makes all this convoluted argumentation seem pointless.

I would add that if we take the text seriously then it is not the authors of Leviticus who are issuing prohibitions, but God Himself. As Kirsch notes, Friedman and Dolansky do not accept the divine authorship of the Bible, so they are free to understand the text as the creation of an uninspired human writer. But in that case, what is the point of this exercise? Why would it even occur to anyone to think the author of this portion of Leviticus, writing thousands of years ago, had any particular insight into sexual morality?
…
I have no doubt that in the small community of Biblical scholars, this sort of analysis is considered very clever and highbrow. No doubt they endlessly pat each other on the backs for it and shake their heads sadly at those who think that when God personally describes something as an abomination, He actually intends to express His disapprobation for that something. But their arguments amount to nothing. To accept their conclusion we must believe that the Biblical authors once again (let us recall that the early chapters of Genesis come in for similar treatment at the hands of Biblical scholars) expressed themselves in ways that are most naturally understood in a manner almost precisely opposite to what they meant to say.

This is not reasonable. If you want to use the Bible as a moral guide then you are stuck with it. The text is not infinitely malleable, and you cannot reasonably interpret X to mean not X. Rather than try to twist the text to fit modern moral sensibilities, which despite their denials is precisely what Friedman and Dolansky are doing, why don't we simply discard this particular ancient book and move on to more promising approaches to morality?

This is a very important point that I wish to re-iterate. If a person believes that the Bible is of divine origin and thus infallible, then it makes sense that one would try to explain away the morality that is presently unacceptable. But few of the more sophisticated biblical apologists and theologians would claim that the words in the Bible were of divine origin and literally dictated by god. Almost all of them accept that they were the work of humans who lives thousands of years ago and were merely reflecting the morality of their times. Why don't they simply reject the obnoxious ideas in them just the way we would other old books?

What people like Friedman and Dolansky are seeking to do is to find a way to make the Bible less embarrassing to modern believers. It is another example of how modernity, and the sensibilities that come with it, are in direct conflict with the archaic attitudes of religions.

December 02, 2011

Non-religious Aussies

Jerry Coyne flags an interesting report that says that the level of disbelief in god and religion in Australia approaches the high level of Scandinavian countries.

The high level of religiosity of the US is becoming more and more of an outlier among developed countries. This kind of anachronism cannot last.

No wonder young people are leaving the church…

… when churches do things like this.

The national attention paid to a small church in a remote area disapproving of interracial couples is actually a sign of progress. Just a generation or two ago, such an action would have been seen as not being particularly noteworthy.

December 01, 2011

The difference between scientific and religious ways of thinking

(Via Pharyngula.)

Ask an Atheist panel discussion at 7:00 pm today

For more details, see here.

November 30, 2011

Womb raider

Oh that naughty Satan, always getting into mischief and going where he shouldn't.

Recently The Pilot, the official newspaper of the Roman Catholic diocese of Boston, published a column in which the author Daniel Avila alleged that homosexuality is caused by Satan, saying that "The scientific evidence of how same-sex attraction most likely may be created provides a credible basis for a spiritual explanation that indicts the devil" and "described homosexuality as a 'natural disaster' caused by Satan invading the wombs of mothers of LGBT children."

This is yet another example of religious people using 'scientific evidence' to support their crackpot theories. Unfortunately the article does not address the really interesting question of how sneaking into women's wombs helps Satan create gayness in children because that would help answer the age-old nature/nurture question. Does he do some pre-natal intervention and change the DNA? Or does he use subliminal messaging techniques on the embryonic mind?

The column caused a bit of a fuss with gay rights groups condemning it and the paper has since withdrawn the column saying that they did so because the church does not have a "definitive theory on the origins of same-sex attraction" and thus the speculation that Satan was behind it was a "theological error". This is no doubt the topic of a future doctoral dissertation in some theological seminary. Avila also apologized for his theological errors and later resigned from his position as Policy Advisor for Marriage and Family with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

I see progress here. When the Catholic Church has to withdraw, under pressure, an anti-gay column from its own official newspaper (whatever the excuse they give), that is a sign that human rights are advancing. Religion no longer gets a free pass on its crackpot theories to justify its bigotry.

It is quite extraordinary how much license religions are given. For example, some religious groups advocate beating children as young as six months in order to discipline them. A preacher named Michael Pearl has published a book To train up a child that advocates beatings, which he refers to as 'biblical chastisement'. He has a website where he recommends using a flexible plumbing line that can be bought for a dollar at any hardware store and can be carried in your pocket and so is handy whenever you think your child steps out of line and needs a thrashing.

Of course, the author realizes that some of us may not be as enlightened as he is in interpreting what Jesus meant when he said "suffer little children" and on seeing a small child being assaulted with a plastic tube may try to stop it or report it to the authorities, so he recommends "Don't be so indiscreet as to spank your children in public—including the church restroom." On the plus side, he says that you can also use the beatings as a means to help children practice arithmetic.

I have told a child I was going to give him 10 licks. I count out loud as I go… Pretending to forget the count, I would again stop at about eight and ask him the number. Have him subtract eight from ten, (a little homeschooling) and continue with the final two licks.

This book has sold 670,000 copies and was implicated in the death of a child.

Late one night in May this year, the adopted girl, Hana, was found face down, naked and emaciated in the backyard; her death was caused by hypothermia and malnutrition, officials determined. According to the sheriff’s report, the parents had deprived her of food for days at a time and had made her sleep in a cold barn or a closet and shower outside with a hose. And they often whipped her, leaving marks on her legs. The mother had praised the Pearls’ book and given a copy to a friend, the sheriff’s report said. Hana had been beaten the day of her death, the report said, with the 15-inch plastic tube recommended by Mr. Pearl.

The beating of children used to be common practice until we became more enlightened. In many countries corporal punishment is now banned entirely. But in the US, some religious people still think of it as a good, and even necessary, part of child rearing.

November 29, 2011

Ask an Atheist panel discussion

I will be on a panel Ask an Atheist, sponsored by the CWRU chapter of the Center for Inquiry. The event is free and open to everyone in the university and the wider community. Here is the announcement from the CFI president Lisa Viers:

Case Center for Inquiry would like to invite you to join us for our Ask an Atheist event. The Ask an Atheist event is designed to invite all members of campus to come and have an open dialogue with atheists, agnostics, and humanists who are willing to answer questions from the audience. Our goal for the event is to have people feel more comfortable having discussions about why and how nonbelievers came to their conclusions, and to foster an environment where we can all learn from each other as well as move beyond negative stereotypes that abound between believers and nonbelievers.

The event will be a panel/discussion with Dr. Mano Singham--director of UCITE, Dr. Bill Deal--from the Religious Studies department, Eric Pellish--president of Global Ethical Leaders Society, and Daniel Sprockett--a research assistant in the department of Dermatology.

We invite everyone to this event, and hope it will be a great success to be repeated by future CFI members.

And yes, pizza, snacks, and drinks will be provided.

Date: Thursday, December 1, 2011
Time: 7:00 pm
Location: Wickenden 322 on the Case quad

Bill Deal prefers to call himself a humanist rather than an atheist and perhaps the discussion will involve some exploration of the distinctions between the various labels for nonbelief in a god, including agnostic, freethinker, rationalist, secularist, etc.

November 26, 2011

ChristWire parody site

As readers have pointed out many times before, the claims of creationists are so bizarre that it is hard to distinguish the sites of genuine believers from parody sites. One site that has puzzled many people and media outlets is ChristWire. One item that gave tips to women on how to find out if their husbands were gay, went viral, with many news organizations not realizing that they had been had. Some genuine Christian writers allowed their material to be reposted on the site, not realizing that their work was embedded amongst parody items.

Interestingly, the creators of this particular parody site are themselves believers, one calling himself an observant Catholic and the other a religious Protestant.

November 23, 2011

Is this billboard offensive?

Apparently that's what a billboard company in north central Ohio said in refusing to put it up. However the company is quite willing to post religious billboards.

The whole story is quite bizarre. (Via Pharyngula)

This illustrates once again that religious people resort to the strategy of 'taking offense' because they have no rational arguments to counter those of the atheists.

[Update: For some reason, this post has attracted an enormous number of spam comments and so I have regretfully closed it for new comments.]

November 22, 2011

Young people becoming less religious

The evidence that religion is losing the battle of ideas keeps coming in from all sides. A new Pew survey compares the attitudes of the various generational age cohorts that it identifies by the years in which they were born and labels as the Greatest (before 1926), the Silents (1927-1944), the Baby Boomers (1945-1964), the Gen Xers (1965-1979), and the Millennials (1980-1992), and finds that:

Younger generations also are significantly less likely than older ones to affiliate with a religious tradition. This pattern began in the 1970s when 13% of Baby Boomers were unaffiliated with any particular religion, according to the General Social Survey. That compared with just 6% among the Silent generation and 3% among the Greatest generation.

In the most recent General Social Survey, 26% of Millennial generation respondents said they were unaffiliated, as did 21% of Gen Xers. Among Baby Boomers, 15% were unaffiliated – not significantly different from when they were first measured in the 1970s. And just 10% of the Silent Generation said that they were unaffiliated.

The report goes on to say that "Fewer than half of Millennials (46%) say religious faith and values have been very important in America's success. This compares with 64% of Xers, 69% of Boomers and 78% of Silents."

Meanwhile the Barna group, an outfit that regularly conducts religious surveys, finds six reasons "why nearly three out of every five young Christians (59%) disconnect either permanently or for an extended period of time from church life after age 15."

1. Churches seem overprotective
   
2. Teens' and twentysomethings' experience of Christianity is shallow
   
3. Churches come across as antagonistic to science
   
4. Young Christians' church experiences related to sexuality are often simplistic, judgmental
   
5. They wrestle with the exclusive nature of Christianity
   
6. The church feels unfriendly to those who doubt

I found items #3 and #6 particularly interesting. On item #3, the report found:

One of the reasons young adults feel disconnected from church or from faith is the tension they feel between Christianity and science. The most common of the perceptions in this arena is "Christians are too confident they know all the answers" (35%). Three out of ten young adults with a Christian background feel that "churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in" (29%). Another one-quarter embrace the perception that "Christianity is anti-science" (25%). And nearly the same proportion (23%) said they have "been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate." Furthermore, the research shows that many science-minded young Christians are struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their professional calling in science-related industries.

As regards item #6, the report said:

Young adults with Christian experience say the church is not a place that allows them to express doubts. They do not feel safe admitting that sometimes Christianity does not make sense. In addition, many feel that the church's response to doubt is trivial. Some of the perceptions in this regard include not being able "to ask my most pressing life questions in church" (36%) and having "significant intellectual doubts about my faith" (23%).

It should be clear that this survey looked at disengagement from church life, not necessarily from belief in god. But once people get disengaged from the groupthink of their churches that gives them the illusion that believing in fantasies is reasonable since everyone around them believes in the same fantasies, many of them will shift to unbelief.

What this survey reinforces is what I have been saying for some time, that the forces of modernity are in opposition to those of religion. Religion is backward looking and opposed to the growth of knowledge in general, science in particular, and to increasingly liberal attitudes towards sexuality. Modernity is an unstoppable force and religion cannot hold it back.

November 14, 2011

Schuller's chutzpah

Robert Schuller is of these typical televangelists, a servant of god who managed to persuade enough suckers to fund his high lifestyle and build his vanity project, the Crystal Cathedral. The church has fallen on hard times and filed for bankruptcy and court documents allege that Schuller family raided the endowment to the tune of $10 million.

But that has not stopped the greed of Schuller. Recently his wife fell ill with pneumonia and he asked the congregation to provide meals. Why someone with all his money needs food donations at all is unclear but what has outraged some members is the extraordinary sense of entitlement embedded in the request. The Schullers asked "that the meals be low in sodium and include items such as fruit, meats, soup and egg dishes such as quiches" and that the meals be dropped off in the cathedral's tower lobby at 4:30 pm each day so the Schuller's limo driver could pick them up and take to their home.

Presumably this arrangement was so that the Schullers are not disturbed by the riff-raff actually coming to their home. I don't know why this would be a problem, since his butler could have sent the people around to the servant's entrance where the footmen or the kitchen maids could have accepted the food donations and checked to see if they met their standards.

November 07, 2011

The role of religion in a secular university

Last Friday, I took part in a panel discussion on the topic: "What is the role of religion at a secular university? Should we support it, promote it, accommodate it, respect it, or just ignore it?"

The event was moderated by a professor in the department of religious studies who specializes in Buddhism and the panel consisted of the chair of that same department (whose area is Judaism), the director of student activities program that oversees student organizations, and myself. The session began with each of us speaking for about five minutes and then the floor was opened up for discussions. It was a lively session with a sizeable number of faculty, students, and staff present. I am not going to try and summarize the entire discussion since I did not take any notes but just focus on my own impressionistic views, paraphrasing some of what people said.

I went first and trotted out my usual Salman Rushdie quote in order to frame my remarks: "At Cambridge University I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalize, but you have absolutely no respect for people's opinions. You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction: You cannot ring-fence their ideas. The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible."

My point of view on the topic was quite simple. Religion should not receive any special treatment. It should be treated like any other subject or aspect of student life. It is undoubtedly an important topic of historical and social importance and deserves academic study so a department of religious studies is perfectly appropriate. (As the chair of religious studies pointed out in his opening remarks, their department does not get involved in the sacred aspects of religion but looks at religion academically.) The role of their faculty does not require them to be religious leaders or to even be believers in the religions they teach, just as in the language department, the professor of Japanese need not to be Japanese.

I also drew two distinctions: (1) that the norms of speech and behavior are different for private versus public spheres and people should learn to appreciate that; and (2) that we should treat the sacred and secular aspects of religion differently. The secular aspects are those that the university can get involved in while we should steer clear of the sacred aspects.

I said that in order to navigate this difficult terrain, secular organizations such as my university would do well to study and apply the guidelines that the US Supreme Court has developed over time for the Establishment Clause of the constitution, which calls for strict neutrality between religion and non-religion and forbids any governmental action that endorses or has the primary purpose or effect of advancing or inhibiting religion or excessively entangling itself with religion. While the Establishment Clause applies only to the government, it provides an excellent template for any secular organization that is looking for ways to deal with religion. So, for example, student religious groups should meet the same standards as (say) the chess club for recognition and support by the university. If they receive less support, they are being discriminated against because of their belief. If they receive more, then the university is endorsing religion. Both those extremes should be avoided.

I found it interesting that some people in the audience kept trying to find ways to argue that religion is somehow special, that it occupies a niche in society that nothing else can occupy, which is the usual precursor to asking that it receive special consideration. The suggestions took the form:

1. Religion is very important to a person's sense of identity;
   
2. Religion is necessary in order to inculcate ethical behavior; and
   
3. Religion is needed to come to terms with the mysteries of life.

My comments during the discussion were largely spent in batting down such attempts.

On the first point, I argued that a person has more than just a religious identity. For example, science may be as important to a scientist (or history to a historian or law to a lawyer) as religious identity may be to a religious person. But we would think it absurd for scientists to get upset if someone treated iconic figures like Einstein disrespectfully by (say) drawing cartoons that made fun of him. But do the same thing with a religious figure and people get offended and, in the case of Islam, can even lead to death warrants. I said that the reason that religious people get so easily offended is because religion has been given a privileged place and not treated like any other belief system. I said that if students spent four years at the university and were not challenged by something that offended the very core of their identity and forced them to confront their beliefs, then we were not doing our job.

On the second point, I pointed out that over two millennia of religious domination of society resulted in the most horrendous atrocities and discrimination. The supposedly divinely inspired religious texts are riddled with god's commands to commit genocide, murder, and rape. Misogyny and homophobia are rampant in the texts and are still part of the official doctrines of major religious groups. The growth of ethical values and human rights and the expansion of humane treatment of people is a late development and is the result of the spread of Enlightenment values and science which has led to what is effectively a humanitarian revolution. Religions gradually and often reluctantly adapted to them, though even now certain religions' attitudes towards women and gays can only be described as appalling. It is a bit much for religion now, at this late stage, to claim credit for the advance of humanitarian values.

On the third point, I said that the purpose of the university is to seek truth using evidence and reason. That steady search has steadily transformed mysteries (things that seemed completely inexplicable) into puzzles (things we know how to investigate, what questions we need to pose, and what tools are necessary to obtain answers) and to eventually be able to solve the puzzles. The steady march of knowledge is to replace mysteries with puzzles and solutions. But religions want to keep mysteries as mysteries forever as things that are impervious to evidence and reason, and can only be understood by revelation. As the TV character House puts it, "You know, I get it that people are just looking for a way to fill the holes. But they want the holes. They want to live in the holes. And they go nuts when someone else pours dirt in their holes. Climb out of your holes, people!" The growth of knowledge in general and science in particular has resulted in us being able to steadily fill in the holes. To want to stay in the holes is antithetical to the search for truth that is the major purpose of the university.

In these forums, I take on the persona of the 'bad atheist', the one who is not willing to go along with the traditional pieties that religion has been allowed to wallow in that go unquestioned. I challenge the idea that the privileged position of religion should be allowed to continue simply because that is the way things have always been. This makes for more sharply focused discussions in which basic assumptions get questioned.

I find it interesting that at the end of these sessions, people often come up to me and quietly confide that they are atheists too but cannot say so openly because they fear discrimination. For far too long, people have tiptoed around religion, avoiding pointing out its uselessness or negative aspects for fear of offending religious people. Having the atheist view articulated openly and unapologetically helps to create a wider space for discussion so that those who would not go as far as me can now see themselves as in the middle somewhere and thus more comfortable. I see my role as analogous to a blocker in football, making forceful remarks that can create space for others to be able to go through.

November 03, 2011

The Haught-Coyne debate video

[UPDATE2: The Q/A session following the debate has been added below the debate video.]

[UPDATE: I have now watched the video and I think I know why Haught was upset and did not want the video released. Coyne was direct and uncompromising (which anyone who has read his stuff should have expected) but I don't think that that was the problem. It was because Coyne used direct quotes from Haught to make his argument that theology can only make science and religion seem compatible by using a fog of language and metaphor. By quoting all those passages from Haught's books, Coyne essentially provided a template and all the ammunition anyone needs to effectively debate Haught in the future.]

The much talked about video of the debate between theologian John Haught and scientist Jerry Coyne is now available. I have not had time to watch it yet but Coyne says that it consists of the two 25-minute talks. The PowerPoint slides that accompanied the talks can be downloaded separately and he recommends that you do that and follow along.

The Q/A that followed is not shown and that's a pity. I find that the Q/A sessions are sometimes the best part of the talk. They enable the speakers to clarify and sharpen their ideas. In fact, when I give talks I often encourage the audience to jump in with questions at any time and even build in time during the talk for such exchanges.

Haught and Coyne's talks:

2011 Bale Boone Symposium - Science & Religion: Are They Compatible? from UK Gaines Center on Vimeo.

Q/A session:

Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? October 12, 2011 Q+A with Jerry Coyne and John Haught from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

November 02, 2011

Still Haughty

Yesterday I wrote about the bizarre situation where Catholic theologian John Haught had objected to the release of the video of the debate that he had with Jerry Coyne. That refusal caused quite a furor in the blog world and as a result, Haught has relented.

You can read Haught's explanation for his initial refusal and subsequent reversal, and Coyne's response follows immediately after. What I want to highlight is Haught's extraordinarily patronizing claim that he was trying to protect our delicate sensibilities from being offended by having to listen to what Coyne had to say.

But let me come to the main reason why I have been reluctant to give permission to release the video. It is not for anything that I said during our encounter, but for a reason that I have never witnessed in public academic discussion before.

I'm still in shock at how your presentation ended up. I was so offended both personally and as an academic by the vulgarity of it all that I did not want other people to have to share what I witnessed that night in October. I still don't.
…
You should be grateful that I have tried to protect the public from such a preposterous and logic-offending way of bringing your presentation to a close.

It is preposterous to think that the kinds of people who would take the trouble to watch a debate between a theologian and a scientist are like stereotypical Victorian ladies who might swoon and have to reach for their smelling salts. We can judge perfectly well for ourselves who comported themselves well and who didn't.

All Haught has done is vastly increase the interest in watching the debate. He may want to buy stock in companies that sell smelling salts.

November 01, 2011

More evidence that religion has lost the argument

I have said many times before, especially in my series on Why atheism is winning, that religion has lost the argument. Modern science has revealed the poverty of even the most sophisticated arguments for god. As further evidence, Jerry Coyne shares the extraordinary events that followed his debate with theologian John Haught.

On October 12 at the University of Kentucky, I debated Catholic theologian John Haught from Georgetown University on the topic of "Are science and religion compatible?" It was a lively debate, and I believe I got the better of the man (see my post-debate report here). Haught didn't seem to have prepared for the debate, merely rolling out his tired old trope of a "layered" universe, with the layer of God and Jesus underlying the reality of the cosmos, life, and evolution. I prepared pretty thoroughly, reading half a dozen of Haught's books (you need read only one: they're all the same), and watching all his previous debates on YouTube. (Note that he's sanctioned release of those videos.)

Haught seemed to have admitted his loss, at least judging by the audience reaction, but blamed it on the presence of "Jerry's groupies," an explanation I found offensive. I'm not aware of any groupies anywhere, much less in Kentucky!

The debate, including half an hour of audience questions, was videotaped. Both John and I had given our permission in advance for the taping. I looked forward to the release of the tape because, of course, I wanted a wider audience for my views than just the people in the audience in Lexington. I put a lot of work into my 25-minute talk, and was eager for others to see why I found science and religion to be at odds.

Well, you're not going to see that tape—ever. After agreeing to be taped, Haught decided that he didn't want the video released.
…
I am deeply angry about this stand, and can see only one reason for what Haught has done: cowardice. He lost the debate; his ideas were exposed for the mindless theological fluff that they were; and I used his words against him, showing that even "sophisticated" theology, when examined under the microscope of reason, is just a bunch of made-up stuff, tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
…
The only good thing to come from this affair is that it exposes not only the follies of "sophisticated" theology, but the cowardice of a famous theologian. (Haught is the most prominent American theologian who writes about evolution and its comity with religion.) If Haught can't win a debate, then he'll use all his God-given powers to prevent anyone from seeing his weaknesses. I've written to other well-known atheists who have debated theologians, and not one of them is aware of anything like this ever happening.

This is shameful behavior by Haught.

October 28, 2011

Non-believing clergy

Thanks to reader Jeff, I learned that The Clergy Project, designed to provide a safe place for non-believing clergy to make the transition from living a secret life to becoming open, is now operational. I wrote five years ago that I suspected that many clergy, even high-ranking ones like the pope and bishops, are atheists.

ABC News had an interview with some of the non-believing priests. Other interviews can be found on the website.

October 22, 2011

The case against circumcision

PZ Myers makes the strong argument that this practice is nothing but ritualized child abuse.

It is quite amazing how we accept as normal long-standing practices that, if they were not covered by the protective umbrella of old religions, we would reject with horror otherwise as the actions of cults or barbarians.

The Daily Show has more on the bizarre things that religious people believe and do.

October 17, 2011

Disgusting behavior by religious people

Some time ago I wrote about ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel raining big gobs of spit on a reporter because she was using a tape recorder on the Sabbath and thus violating one of the numerous rules prohibiting work on that day.

Now we have another disgusting story of Ultra-Orthodox Jews throwing eggs and feces at young girls on their way to and from their school, accusing them of sluttishness. What makes this even more noteworthy is that the targets of this abuse, the girls and their families, are themselves Orthodox Jews but they are considered not conservative enough for these god-fearing people.

I am sure that the people indulging in this appalling behavior are convinced that they are doing the will of god. This is what religious devotion can lead to. Deeply religious people can act like jerks or criminals or thugs or even murderers and actually feel virtuous about doing so, because they think that god commanded them to act in this way.

October 14, 2011

Five signs that Americans are moving away from religion

Tana Ganeva points to various data that support this idea.

1. American religious belief is becoming more fractured.
   
2. Non-belief -- and acceptance of non-belief -- on the rise
   
3. Growing numbers of young people who do not identify as religious
   
4. Hate group that exploited religion to bash gays hemorrhaging funds
   
5. Getting married by friends

What the last item refers to is that more and more people are not getting married with the trappings of religion, choosing instead more informal, secular wedding ceremonies.

October 06, 2011

No salvation for Klingons

Via reader G. I received this report of a paper that was presented at a DARPA conference on whether, if extra-terrestrial life exists, Jesus would have gone and tried to save them too. The answer seems to be no, partly because it would require multiple incarnations of god and that might be awkward, apparently.

Mind you, this was discussed at a conference sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense.

It is good to know that the US government is keeping up with important theological issues.

October 03, 2011

People who don't think carefully are more likely to believe in a god

I came across this interesting report of a study that says that people who 'go by their gut' when solving a problem are more likely to believe in god than people who reason their way to a conclusion.

They correlated religious belief with the way people approached simple problems like: "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" People who go with their gut tend to say (erroneously) that it costs 10 cents while those who think it through arrive at the correct answer. The former type was more likely to believe in god than the latter.

One could conclude that this suggests that belief in god depends on people not thinking things through, which is not really surprising. But the authors of the study downplayed this aspect and instead went out of their way to make the results palatable to religious believers, calling the gut-thinkers 'intuitive' and saying that intuition and reflection are equally important.

Intuition is undoubtedly important. But it is not the same thing as not thinking things through.

October 01, 2011

Religious vetoes

A town clerk won't sign same-sex marriage licenses because such marriages violate her religious beliefs.

I can understand people trying to get laws passed that enshrine their religious beliefs. But it is strange to me that people think that their religious beliefs let them pick and choose which laws to follow. If you allow a personal religious exemption, then you have to allow every individual's personal religious exemptions. Are they willing to extend that right to any religious beliefs at all?

The danger of allowing that should be obvious to anyone who thinks it through. Would you allow an employee to not follow a law because it contradicts (say) Sharia law or Wiccan beliefs? Where would that end? Can a Muslim or Jewish employee in a cafeteria refuse to give a ham sandwich to a customer? Can a Catholic checkout clerk in a supermarket or drug store refuse to process the sale of condoms?

I strongly doubt that people would want to open up that mess. The people who ask for these exemptions are effectively requesting the right to nullify beliefs based only on the religion that they belong to.

Parenthetically, I found this pie chart from Balloon Juice to be amusing.

September 27, 2011

Five minutes with Philip Pullman

The popular BBC series probes the author's views on writing and religion.

Interfaith dialogues and projects

Religions view each other with either condescension or suspicion. This can make for contentious public discourse and, as we all know, frequently escalates into open hostilities. In order to avoid having things get out of hand, one periodically finds attempts by well-meaning people who think that the problem is due to religious people being ignorant of other religions, and that if they understood each other better they would recognize enough similarities and deep commonalities to defuse the antagonisms. And so we have the emergence of 'interfaith' movements.

In the past, such movements brought together only people from different religions but in recent years, there is growing recognition that skeptics are a significant part of the population and so the umbrella has on occasion been extended to include them as well. But the label 'interfaith' poses a bit of a problem because once you include skeptics, you are no longer talking about faith-based organizations anymore. Atheists shun the word faith because its most common usage is associated with religious faith, which is the acceptance of beliefs that lack any evidentiary support and are even counter to evidence. In fact, the less the evidence in support of a religious belief, the supposedly more admirable that belief is. This is absolutely counter to the rational evidence-based approach promoted by skeptics. But I cannot think of a good word that would accommodate both faith and anti-faith groups.

These interfaith programs usually take two forms. One consists of dialogues to get different religious groups together to share information about what they believe and to clear up any misconceptions that others may have about them. I am all for increasing the general awareness about religious people's beliefs. In fact, I think that the academic study of the world's religions (as opposed to religious education that seeks to indoctrinate children about one particular religion) is a proper part of a school curriculum. I think skepticism and skeptic organizations can play an important role in such discussions, once we overcome the problematic 'faith' label.

The other kinds of programs often involve getting different religious organizations to work together on some community projects. Although well-meant, there is something fundamentally odd about such interfaith projects. Let's face it, each religion thinks that it alone is true and all the others false. They are incompatible at a fundamental level. You cannot have real equality between religions simply because of their divergent truth claims.

These kinds of interfaith projects basically involve asking religious groups to set aside their religious beliefs in order to do worthwhile projects that have nothing to do with religion. So unlike in the case of interfaith dialogues where talk about religious beliefs is explicitly encouraged, when it comes to interfaith projects, people are expected to suppress their differing beliefs but simply work for the common good.

There is nothing at all wrong with that except why bring in the faith aspect at all if you are asking people to then suppress it? Why not invite people to take part in community service and challenge projects for their own sake simply because they are good things? You can send the invitation out to all organized groups (including religious ones) to publicize to their members or to even take part as a group but leave the issue of faith entirely out of it. The goal of getting differing religious groups to stop fighting and killing each other is surely a good thing but that does not have to be coupled with worthwhile non-religious projects.

What does religion add to such community projects, unless religious groups are taking part to show how virtuous they are because of their religion? (In my college days, I was a member of a Christian student group that used to get involved in community service projects and some of the more evangelical members of the group used the occasion to proselytize, basically telling the poor non-Christian people we helped "Look at us! We are doing good works because we are Christians so why don't you become Christians too!" Even though I was a devout Christian in those days, this would drive me up the wall.)

My concerns apply only to the interfaith part of such projects. The other diversity elements such as including intercultural or interethnic groups suffer from no such contradiction since being a member of one ethnic or cultural group does not necessarily imply that one thinks that other ethnic or cultural groups are inferior. It is understood that these are mere accidents of one's birth and thus not obstacles to true equality amongst them. In fact, secular democracies are based on that idea.

September 25, 2011

Abusing the minds of children in the name of god

You may recognize Becky Fischer from the 2006 documentary Jesus Camp as the camp leader who thinks that her mission is to indoctrinate young children into being soldiers for Jesus. Here is a trailer for that film. (Note the appearance by Ted Haggard when he was an evangelical in good standing and a major player in the movement, shortly before his drug-taking gay hijinks were revealed. He is now trying to make a comeback.)

Fischer has now taken her show on the road. In this clip she seems to be bringing her creepy death cult thinking to little children in Singapore, getting them to pretend to die and then 'praying' them back to life. The children are told that since Jesus could do that, they can too.

She even tells them near the end that she actually knows of children who prayed and brought their dead pets back to life. The death of a beloved pet is heartbreaking. To increase the pain by giving them such false hopes is exceedingly cruel because the children will think that the reason their own pet did not revive is because they and their prayers were unworthy.

This woman is a menace who should not be allowed anywhere near young children.

(Via Boing Boing.)

September 23, 2011

'Poor, ignorant atheists'

Recent results revealed by the US Census Bureau show that the ranks of the poor have increased to record levels in the US.

This should really come as no surprise to any thoughtful observer, given the relentless drive by the oligarchy to squeeze everyone else in order to enrich itself. But Walter Russell Mead, one of those so-called 'centrist' establishment pundits so beloved in the media who can be relied upon to deliver conventional wisdom on any topic, has come up with his own explanation as to the reasons why. He says that the growing inequality in the US is due to the rise in numbers of poor, ignorant atheists. Why? Because when people leave religion, they also leave religious institutions that promote the virtues that could lead them out of poverty.

He bases his argument on a study that suggests that "While religious service attendance has decreased for all white Americans since the early 1970s, the rate of decline has been more than twice as high for those without college degrees compared to those who graduated from college."

Someone named David French over at the National Review comments favorably on Mead's musings that atheism and poverty are closely correlated.

Earlier this week, Walter Russell Mead highlighted disturbing research showing that the poor — far more than the rich — are disconnected from church and religion. While church attendance is dropping among all social classes, it’s falling off a cliff for the poorest and least-educated Americans. In other words, the deeper a person slides into poverty, the more they’re disconnected from the very values that can save them and their families.

French then raised the ante, saying that "It is simply a fact that our social problems are increasingly connected to the depravity of the poor" (my emphasis). Ergo, since the numbers of the poor are increasing, so is depravity.

This astounding statement aroused such a hostile reaction even in the comments section of the same magazine (where one might expect the readership to be sympathetic) that French hastened to write a new post saying that what he said was not what he meant. He used a variation on the old "Some of my best friends are Jews/blacks/Muslims/whatever" defense, dropping various hints that he is a Good and Virtuous Person who Loves the Poor (within a short post he manages to inform us that he is a Calvinist Christian, volunteered to fight in Iraq, adopted a daughter "who was born into absolute poverty in Ethiopia", and mentors at-risk youth) and that therefore he cannot have meant anything bad.

For some reason, people like Mead (and French) seem to think that we atheists won't like the idea that the poor and uneducated are falling away from religion and joining us. Here's Mead again:

Atheists and agnostics like to think of themselves as smarter than the God-bothering trailer trash on Tobacco Road, and deeply dislike the thought that they are losing the argument among the most intellectually qualified and best prepared; religious people have to be concerned for the future of religion when whole social classes are dropping away.

It is a curious argument. The idea that atheists view with disdain the poor and uneducated and do not want them swelling their ranks is absurd. I have felt that it would be harder to dissuade poor people from religion not because they are less smart but because ideas of heaven become more appealing if your life on Earth is hellish. If poor and less-educated people are breaking free from the shackles of religious indoctrination, then religion is heading for irrelevancy even faster than I anticipated. I don't see how this study is anything but unqualified good news for atheism.

Mead also seems to overlook the fact that the study clearly states that religious adherence is dropping for all, which suggests that the atheists are winning the argument on all fronts, not losing it in any. The drop is just faster for the poorer and less formally educated. So Mead's smug assertion that we atheists "are losing the argument among the most intellectually qualified and best prepared" is just flat out wrong.

Another revealing mistake that Mead makes is typical of elite Villager thinking: that more formal education necessarily implies that one is smarter or that material success is correlated with virtue. This is a typical conceit of the intelligentsia and the well-to-do, that they reached their state in life purely because of their intrinsic abilities and virtues. This is why it is so easy for people like Mead and French to associate poverty with depravity.

September 19, 2011

Voting for gay or atheist for president

Gallup released the results of a poll recently that said that the percentage of people who said that they would vote for a well-qualified homosexual candidate for president is 67% while the number who would vote for a well-qualified atheist was 49%. The number who would not vote for such people was 32% and 49% respectively. These were the two lowest ranked, coming in just behind Mormons, for whom 76% would vote for president and 22% would not vote.

It's always hard to know how to interpret these results because how people respond to such questions can be influenced by what people think is a socially acceptable response. What one can look at are trends. In 2007, the figures for gays were 55% yes and 45% no, while for atheists it was 45% yes and 53% no, so the trends are in the right direction.

Michael Nugent has looked at the trends over the long haul and has a graph that shows that in 1978, gays had only a 25% acceptance, even below that of atheists who hovered around 40%. But around 1990 gays overtook atheists in acceptability. One has to think that popular culture, with its mainstreaming of gay people in the media, has played an important role in the rapid rise. The rise of atheism has been slower.

What is also extraordinary and encouraging in Nugent's graph is the rapid rise in acceptability as president of blacks and females over the same time span.

September 18, 2011

More on the problem of original sin

Stephen Colbert discusses the profound problems created for Christianity and its fundamental doctrine of original sin if the Adam and Eve story is not literally true.

Jason Rosenhouse examines in some detail the attempts by Christian apologists to deal with these difficulties.

Of course, the real absurdity is that anyone in America in the 21st century is talking about Adam and Eve except as a joke.

September 16, 2011

Combating religion in politics

Part of the reason that the religious right has been able to achieve its current prominence in national politics is because even those who do not believe that god exists (at least in any personal form) have refrained from saying so openly in the hope that they will not alienate 'moderate' religionists. This accommodationist strategy of trying to isolate the religious extremists has not worked. All it has done is enable the religious extremists to advance their message under the protection of 'respect for religion' that has curtailed the ability to criticize these religious extremists in a fundamental way.

In the long run, the best way to combat the religious message of the Perrys and Bachmanns and Santorums is not to point out that they have the wrong idea about god's intentions, an argument which they can easily deflect, but to tell them that before we can take their religious claims seriously on public issues, they need to explain why they think that a god exists at all. We should not allow them to simply assume its existence and talk about what he/she/it wants.

What I find really revealing is that although politicians love to talk about their religion, no one in the media ever asks them why they believe in the existence of a god at all. This is the case even if the interviewer is unsympathetic to the politician and would like to pose difficult questions. I think it is because journalists know that no answer can be given that does not make you look gullible and that this would become immediately obvious and cause much embarrassment and would cause an outcry and accusations of anti-religious bias. So everyone colludes to maintain the façade that assertions about religion require no substantiation.

Via Jerry Coyne, I came across this interview of Richard Dawkins on BBC in which the interviewer, referring to the 40% or so of Americans who take the Bible literally and think the Earth is 6,000 years old, asks him flatly "Do you really care that there are a lot of stupid people around?" No interviewer in the US would dare ask such a question that so casually denigrates people who believe such things.

It is not necessary to be knowledgeable about science to be a political leader. But one has to be grounded in reality. To assume that religious texts such as the Bible or Koran are literally true and that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that evolution is not the process by which we got here, is to be so deluded that the speaker's grip on reality should be seriously questioned. Such a person is so wedded to dogma that he or she is unfit for any responsible position that requires the weighing of evidence and the integration of expert opinion. But in the US if some belief is based on religion then people still pretend that it is reasonable, however ridiculous it, however objectively absurd, and however much it flies in the face of reality.

If a politician said that they believed in fairies, it would be political suicide because fairies are not protected by the religious shield and people would look askance. Even claims of UFO sightings are treated with scorn and derision though there is nothing about extraterrestrial life and spacecraft that intrinsically violate the laws of science. They simply lack credible evidence. But say you believe in angels and you are asked no further questions, even though one would be hard pressed to explain the distinction between fairies and angels.

Most mainstream journalism in the US is so hopelessly degraded that their idea of good practice is to balance one politician's assertions with another person's opposite assertions. And even this is not done when it comes to religious assertions, which are almost always left unchallenged. One of the rare exceptions was when CBS News's Bob Schieffer asked Michele Bachmann whether she really believed that god used the weather to send people messages. She ducked the question and he allowed her to filibuster. It was clear that she was talking nonsense but US journalistic conventions prevented him from making it explicit.

Journalists should be always asking politicians to back up any assertions with evidence, whatever the topic, and then examine and report on the quality of the proffered evidence and the validity of the inferred conclusions. But I'm a dreamer.

September 14, 2011

Acceptance of equal rights for gays undermines religion

One reason that religious rhetoric in politics is on the rise these days is because of the uncertain economic outlook. When people are fearful of their future, they tend to lash out and seek others to blame and it is easy for politicians to direct their attention to scapegoats. Blaming economic and social problems as being due to god's dissatisfaction with our behavior has always been popular trope for a certain segment of the public, going back to biblical times. It is easy for politicians to take advantage of the vanity of people thinking that they have a good idea of what their god wants, which always conveniently happens to coincide with what they themselves want. But working against them is the general decline of religion itself. As I explained in my series Why atheism in winning, the signs of decline of religion are unmistakable and I strongly suspect that religious leaders know this and are desperately seeking ways to at least slow down the process.

The most telling sign is that surveys show that people are leaving religion in significant numbers, with the greatest drop being among young people. This is why the stakes have been raised, in a desperate attempt by religious leaders to regain ground by making hysterical claims that the lack of religion is causing America's problems. While they point to general moral decay that is supposedly bringing about god's wrath, one of their key signs is the increasing acceptance of gay people as deserving of the same rights enjoyed by others, including marriage.

The irony is that the more religious leaders decry the increasing acceptance of homosexuals, the more they alienate young people, the very group that they need to secure their future. As Adam Lee points out:

Over the last few decades, society in general, and young people in particular, have become increasingly tolerant of gays and other minorities. For the most part, this is a predictable result of familiarity: people who've grown up in an increasingly multicultural society see less problem with interracial relationships (89% of Generation Nexters approve of interracial marriage, compared to 70% of older age groups) and same-sex marriage (47% in favor among Nexters, compared to 30% in older groups). When it comes to issues like whether gays and lesbians should be protected from job discrimination or allowed to adopt, the age gap in support is even more dramatic (71% vs. 59% and 61% vs. 44%, respectively).

But while American society is moving forward on all these fronts, many churches not only refuse to go along, they're actively moving backward. Most large Christian sects, both Catholic and Protestant, have made fighting against gay rights and women's rights their all-consuming crusade. And young people have gotten this message loud and clear: polls find that the most common impressions of Christianity are that it's hostile, judgmental and hypocritical. In particular, an incredible 91% of young non-Christians say that Christianity is "anti-homosexual", and significant majorities say that Christianity treats being gay as a bigger sin than anything else.

This rise is similar to the way that acceptance of interracial dating and marriage among the young increased with time as more and more young people did not see any problems with it. Currently 86% of people approve of interracial marriages, up from just 4% in 1958. Again, young people are more accepting than old people, with senior citizens with 66% approval being the lowest group.

Many religious people and groups are locked into an anti-gay stance that they cannot free themselves from. While some are trying to soften their message with variations of the 'hate the sin, love the sinner' circumlocution of the Catholic church, this is widely seen as a sham. Most religious institutions simply cannot escape being seen as intolerant and hateful.

So instead of religion defeating homosexuality, the increasing acceptance of equal rights for gays will accelerate the decline of religion.

September 12, 2011

Advertising campaign to ban all religions

Reader Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write sent me this link to a Australian TV show that seems to have as its premise asking advertising agencies to come up with campaigns for extreme ideas. They usually get a good response but when they asked for campaigns to ban all religions, for the first time ad agencies declined to take part, even though earlier suggestions such as 'Invade New Zealand' or 'Bring back child labor' or 'Euthanize everyone over eighty' had not dissuaded them.

September 09, 2011

Pinning down opponents of same-sex marriage

One of the questions that opponents of same-sex marriage never satisfactorily answer is why it matters to them if gay couples have the same rights as heterosexual couples. Why do they care? What harm do they suffer? It is not as if marriage is some limited resource that allowing more people access to would reduce the general availability.

As far as I can see, the opposition to same-sex marriage seems to be almost entirely based on ancient religious texts and their associated homophobia but of course few, other than the religious nutters, want to concede that for fear of being seen as religious bigots. (That distancing from religion is a small sign of progress). Instead they dance around the issue with vague rationalizations that somehow marriage has always been between one man and one woman and has thus acquired the force of tradition or that the purpose of marriage is procreation or that changing the definition of marriage would open the door to polygamy, bestiality, or otherwise destroy civilization as we know it. Of course, none of these 'arguments' stand up to scrutiny but few people are willing to press opponents on this, usually out of the 'respect for religion' trope that assumes that people's faith-based speech and actions should not be questioned. But the legal case involving Proposition 8 in California may finally force them to put up or shut up.

If you recall, in May 2008 the California Supreme Court ruled that same sex couples have, under the state constitution, a right to marry. Opponents then brought Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage as a ballot initiative and, heavily backed by the Catholic and the Mormon churches and using lies that allowing same-sex marriage would lead to gay indoctrination of children in schools, they managed to narrowly pass it in November 2008 by a margin of less than 5%.

The constitutionality of Proposition 8 was challenged under the state constitution and its validity was upheld. But it was also challenged under the US constitution and in August 2010, a US District judge ruled that it violated the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment, but allowed the ban to stand while the case was appealed to the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Normally the governor and the attorney general of the state are the people who have the obligation to enforce the laws of California and they have the unquestioned right to appeal any verdict nullifying the laws. But opponents of the ruling were stymied because the then-governor of California (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and the then-attorney general (and now governor) Jerry Brown refused to appeal the district court ruling.

Because of this vacuum, various private parties who had sponsored Proposition 8 then appealed the verdict but this raised the question of whether they had standing to do so. In order to prevent an explosion of third-party lawsuits, one has to show that one has standing to bring about a legal case and one of the means by which standing is established by a private party is that the party has to show that they are directly affected by a law or a court ruling and would suffer direct harm if it were carried out.

The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in an unexpected move, ruled that before it could decide on the constitutionality of the issue, the issue of standing had to be resolved and they sent the case back to the California Supreme Court to rule on whether the challengers had standing. This has put the issue of what harm opponents of same-sex marriage suffer directly to the forefront. Ted Olson, one of the lead counsel opposing Proposition 8, puts the matters succinctly.

Olson will argue that to have legal standing the proponents have to show that they would suffer a direct harm if Prop. 8 is held to be unconstitutional.

"Here, the proponents were asked during the course of the trial, what damage would be done to heterosexual marriage if Proposition 8 was held to be unconstitutional and the lawyer for the Proposition 8 proponents said 'I don't know,'" Olson says. "You have to have a direct stake in the matter that's being litigated."

Court cases can very useful in clarifying issues because people have to answer specific questions that are narrowly focused and posed to them by people who have all the facts at their fingertips. They cannot make sweeping generalizations or filibuster or snow the listener the way they can in public debates or when answering reporters. This is what doomed so-called intelligent design. Its advocates managed to obfuscate the issue for quite some time but they came a cropper in 2005 in the US district court in Dover, PA because under cross-examination they were forced to admit many things they had tried to conceal, such as that under their definition of science, even astrology would have to be considered to be science.

So the question of standing that is going to be adjudicated by the California Supreme Court could be quite illuminating in pinning down exactly what harm opponents of same-sex marriage experience by allowing it. But unfortunately, unlike in lower courts where the merits of the case can be exhaustively examined, in superior courts the process is very brief and tends to be narrowly focused. At the hearing on Tuesday, the California Supreme Court judges seemed to be more concerned about allowing the governor and attorney general the sole right to decide what laws to defend rather than with the issue of what direct harm the sponsors of Proposition 8 suffer if same-sex marriage is allowed. Since they have ruled before that ballot initiative sponsors have the right to defend them in court, that seems likely to be the verdict here too, that they will be granted standing by virtue of being sponsors of the initiative rather than because they would suffer direct harm if same-sex marriage were allowed. You can see the full video of the hearing here.

It seems likely that both aspects of this case, the issue of standing as well as the constitutionality of same-sex marriage itself, will go all the way to the US Supreme Court.

But even if the opponents of same-sex marriage win this legal battle, they have lost the public relations war. It is only a matter of time, perhaps five years, before gay people win equal rights.

August 31, 2011

Samosas for Jesus?

In more samosa-related news, I learned from the latest issue of The New Humanist (with its provocative cover photo of comedian Ricky Gervais) that the Islamist group known as al-Shabaab has banned samosas in the regions of Somalia controlled by it.

Why, you ask? Because they feel that its triangular shape is suggestive of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

So there you have it. An Islamist group suspects that a food item originating in a Hindu culture is secretly promoting Christianity.

Who knew that people involved in a civil war in a country facing a famine still had time to ponder the subliminal religious messages embedded in food snacks?

Some entrepreneur should take advantage of this snack vacuum to make crescent-shaped samosas.

Samosas and the soul

Samosas are a triangular shaped Indian pastry that can have any filling but usually consists of a spicy mixture of potatoes, peas, and other vegetables. Quite improbably, they became the focus of a recent legal case in New Jersey.

As part of an India Day celebration in 2009, the plaintiffs placed an order at the Indo-Pak restaurant for vegetarian samosas, informing the restaurant that the food was being purchased for a group of strict vegetarians. The restaurant filled the order and assured the plaintiffs that the food did not contain meat. After consuming some of the samosas, the plaintiffs returned the remaining samosas to the restaurant and were advised that the food was, in fact, filled with meat. As a result, the plaintiffs claimed spiritual damage and asserted a number of causes of action against the restaurant, including product liability and breach of express warranty.

A lower court judge ruled against the vegetarians on all counts but an appellate court reversed part of that decision, saying that the restaurant had in fact violated a warranty. But they rejected the claim that the diners, by unwittingly eating meat, had experienced "negligent infliction of emotional distress" and "become involved in the sinful cycle of pain, injury and death on God's creatures, and that it affects the karma and dharma, or purity of the soul. Hindu scriptures teach that the souls of those who eat meat can never go to God after death, which is the ultimate goal for Hindus. The Hindu religion does not excuse accidental consumption of meat products. One who commits the religious violation of eating meat, knowingly or unknowingly, is required to participate in a religious ceremony at a site located along the Ganges River in Haridwar, Uttranchal, India, to purify himself. The damages sought by plaintiffs included compensation for the emotional distress they suffered, as well as economic damages they would incur by virtue of having to participate in the required religious cleansing ceremony in India."

The court ruled that they did "not find any evidence of an ascertainable loss on plaintiffs' part". The court said that while they may have not got what they asked for, the product itself was "safe, edible, and fit for human consumption."

This case raises some interesting points. One is how a restaurant that caters to an Indian clientele could make such a mistake, since vegetarian samosas are the norm. The answer to that was that on that same day there had been another order specifically for meat samosas and the two orders had got switched.

The more interesting one is whether one should be eligible for damages because of the harm that one believes one has done to one's soul. I have some sympathy for the diners because I know plenty of people who have strong religious proscriptions against certain foods and would be very upset if a similar thing had happened to them. But the court's ruling made some good arguments as to why the spiritual damage claim was unwarranted.

In the present matter, plaintiffs have not pled or provided evidence of any "loss of moneys or property." Indeed, it would be difficult for them to do so, since unrefuted evidence demonstrates that, following recognition by the restaurant of its mistake, Moghul Express furnished an order of conforming samosas to plaintiffs without cost.

Plaintiffs claim that they have sufficiently plead ascertainable loss by seeking damages in the amount of the cost of a trip to India to undergo a purification ritual. However, what they are seeking is the cost of cure for an alleged spiritual injury that cannot be categorized as either a loss of moneys or property.
…
Here, an underlying loss of the value of property cannot be demonstrated.

The court said that violations of religious dietary laws did not rise to the standard needed to meet the claim of serious emotional injury, which requires that there must be "an especial likelihood of genuine and serious mental distress, arising from special circumstances, which serves as a guarantee that the claim is not spurious."

How far should we go to accommodate people's religious beliefs? Should we take seriously the claims of religious people that their immortal souls have received damage and that as a result they will not go to heaven?

I don't think so. After all, there is no evidence to suggest that there is such a thing as an immortal soul let alone a heaven for it to go to or any consensus on what standards should be met to gain entry.

I am not denying the fact that the people who strongly believe in these kinds of dietary proscriptions may feel a deep sense of anguish at having broken them even inadvertently. But it seems to me that their beef (if you'll pardon the expression) is with god. The ultimate issue here is whether it is fair for god to punish them for such an infraction. If such people wish, they should plead their case in the heavenly courts or set up religious courts where they can argue their case before theologians and priests, and not use the secular ones which, rightly, have little use for evidence-free claims.

August 30, 2011

Godspeak from AI machines

What happens if you get two Artificial Intelligence chatbots to talk to each other? Cornell Creative Machines Lab tried it out and a theological discussion broke out.

August 28, 2011

What do atheists do in a crisis?

David Silverman, president of American Atheists, was brought on to some Fox news show to address this question in the context of hurricane Irene. His advice to everyone: Act like atheists and prepare, without wasting your time appealing to some deity to save you.

In the process he showed up the host and one other guest as total idiots.

Way to go, David!

(Via Pharyngula)

Rabbi Yehuda Levin should get an R-rating

It looks like Judaism has its own share of anti-gay crazies who claim that there is a direct connection between earthquakes (like the one last week that touched DC) and homosexuality. That is the message from a rabbi named Yehuda Levin who quotes god saying in the Talmud thusly: "You have shaken your male member in a place where it doesn't belong. I too, will shake the earth."

Really? The Talmud has our old buddy Yahweh actually saying things like that?

I wonder what nifty quote he will dig out to explain Hurricane Irene, especially since it is hitting New York City, home to many ultra-Orthodox communities.

I still don't get why god metes out these crude and indiscriminate punishments that affect gays and non-gays alike. God seems to be somewhat scatterbrained and lack focus. Why not simply send in some divine drones to kill just the people he hates?

August 26, 2011

Dead pope's blood to reduce crime?

Catholic theologians tend to be a pretty sophisticated bunch. How can they possibly reconcile themselves to their church when the Vatican does things like this?

A vial containing the late pope John Paul II's blood will soon be winging its way to Mexico in a bid to help bring down crimes rates in the largely Catholic country, Vatican Radio reported Wednesday.
…
Several vials of blood were taken from Pope John Paul II during the last days of his life in 2005. They have since taken on the aura of holy relics, with Catholic faithful invited to venerate them.

That's not all. The Vatican is also going to display vials of his blood for people to venerate.

There's something truly creepy about the Catholic church's obsession with the actual flesh and blood of dead people.

When the US government takes advantage of Sharia law

Sharia law is a system of justice based on Islam as defined in that religion's sacred texts. Like any system of justice based on religion, it is intolerant, cruel, obsessed with sex, and incompatible with our modern understanding of what makes for a humane society. For example, "Within Sharia law, there are a group of "Haram" offenses which carry severe punishments. These include pre-marital sexual intercourse, sex by divorced persons, post-marital sex, adultery, false accusation of unlawful intercourse, drinking alcohol, theft, and highway robbery. Haram sexual offenses can carry a sentence of stoning to death or severe flogging."

There has been some hysteria in the US about the creeping threat of Sharia law being imposed in the US, and the claims that Barack Obama may be a secret Muslim are part of this paranoia. Twelve states have even proposed legislation to ban it, although the First Amendment would make these superfluous since it would rule out any laws that seek to advance the interests of any one religion.

But despite this anti-Sharia feeling, what people may not be aware of is that Sharia law is what the US used to enable CIA agent Ray Davis to escape trial and punishment for murder in Pakistan.

You may recall the case in which Davis was captured after gunning down two men in a crowded city. The US demanded that he be released immediately while the Pakistan government said that he had no alternative but to go through the legal process. The US government and the media kept the public in the dark about the facts of the case.

Then to everyone's surprise, Davis was suddenly released and quickly spirited out of the country. How did that happen? Because the US took advantage of Sharia law in which a person accused of a murder can be released if the family members of the victim pardon him in exchange for 'blood money', which is what happened in the Davis case. The Pakistani government has confirmed this.

Shaukat Qadir, a retired senior Pakistani military officer, explains the deal that was struck.

It appears, therefore, that the deal struck between the military leadership included a shut down of CIA’s HUMINT operations in Pakistan, retaining only ELINT, Davis would ‘sing’, within limits, of course, and only then could Blood Money be negotiated for his release. And the US would be bled in that final deal also so as to ensure the safety and the future of the immediate families of both Davis’s victims.

At the height of the debate on the question of Raymond Davis’ immunity from trial for murder, this writer emphasized that Pakistan could not release him without a trial. A trial took duly place and, in accordance with prevalent law in Pakistan, the next of kin of the deceased young men, pardoned Davis in return for ‘Blood Money’. However outlandish this law might seem to those peoples whose countries have their based on Anglo-Saxon principles, such is the law in Pakistan and so there was nothing underhand in what transpired.

Alexander Cockburn says that reports have emerged that "a price tag of about $1.5 million per family was been paid, with US citizenship for a dozen or more members of each family, with job guarantees for those of age and education opportunities guaranteed for children - more than they could ever dream of and sufficiently tempting for them to pardon Davis. Money in sufficient quantity rarely loses its persuasive powers."

So there you have it. Sharia law was used by the US government to enable Ray Davis to escape punishment for his crime. But don't expect the wingnuts to make a fuss about it.

August 22, 2011

Debunking the cosmological argument for god

One of the curious features of modern religious apologists is how they try to use the latest scientific research to argue for the existence of god. Of course, science makes the traditional idea of a personal god who intervenes in the world utterly preposterous and few religious intellectuals outside the evangelical community argue in favor of it. So sophisticated religious apologists have resorted to arguing for the existence of a highly abstract form of god that has no practical consequence whatsoever but for some reason seems to meet some sort of emotional or psychological need. But in order to make their case, they have to cherry-pick scientific research and hope that their audience is not aware of the full science.

The latest attempt is in the area of cosmology. The following very nice video (via Skepchick) exposes how some Christian and Muslim apologists try to use the latest cosmology research in selective ways to make their case.

If the latest developments in cosmology comprise the best arguments for god, then you might expect that cosmologists might be the most religious of all scientists. And yet, as the above video shows, even the scientists quoted by the religious apologists are nonbelievers, suggesting that the cosmological arguments for god are a distortion of the actual science. This paper by cosmologist Sean Carroll titled Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists explains why.

He first addresses what it would take to require a god hypothesis to be taken seriously.

There are several possible ways in which this could happen. Most direct would be straightforward observation of miraculous events that would be most easily explained by invoking God. Since such events seem hard to come by, we need to be more subtle. Yet there are still at least two ways in which a theist worldview could be judged more compelling than a materialist one. First, we could find that our best materialist conception was somehow incomplete --- there was some aspect of the universe which could not possibly be explained within a completely formal framework. This would be like a ''God of the gaps,'' if there were good reason to believe that a certain kind of ''gap'' were truly inexplicable by formal rules alone. Second, we could find that invoking the workings of God actually worked to simplify the description, by providing explanations for some of the observed patterns. An example would be an argument from design, if we could establish convincingly that certain aspects of the universe were designed rather than assembled by chance. Let's examine each of these possibilities in turn.

He examines both these possibilities and weighs their merits using the normal ways that scientists use to compare theories and finds the god hypothesis wanting, arriving at the following conclusion:

Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description. In the various ways in which God might have been judged to be a helpful hypothesis --- such as explaining the initial conditions for the universe, or the particular set of fields and couplings discovered by particle physics --- there are alternative explanations which do not require anything outside a completely formal, materialist description. I am therefore led to conclude that adding God would just make things more complicated, and this hypothesis should be rejected by scientific standards. It's a venerable conclusion, brought up to date by modern cosmology; but the dialogue between people who feel differently will undoubtedly last a good while longer.

I for one am glad that people religious apologists are advancing these sophisticated cosmological arguments for god. While they may think they are rescuing religion from science, they are the ones, not atheist scientists, who are going to ultimately destroy religion because in order to salvage the idea of god, they have made it so abstract and remote that it will not appeal in the least to most religious people who want a father figure who listens to them when they talk and who will answer their requests at least some of the time. The idea of god persists because children are indoctrinated at an early age with the idea of a Santa Claus-like figure who will both look after them and punish them if they are bad. That basic childlike idea is what gives god its appeal. The cosmological god is unlikely to have much appeal to a child.

If the cosmological view of god gains ground, it will become the sole preserve of a few intellectuals who will comfort themselves with the idea that a disengaged god exists somewhere out of reach of science. But such a god is a far cry from the warm and fuzzy invisible friend that can command mass appeal.

August 21, 2011

Why does god hate the pope?

It looks like he hates his most devoted followers too.

August 19, 2011

Why does god hate Rick Perry?

God seems to go out of his way to do the opposite of whatever Rick Perry prays for.

August 17, 2011

The secret life of L. Ron Hubbard

British television had a series in 1997 called Secret Lives and one program was about L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. It is quite fascinating.

Some supporters of religion argue that the very fact that their religion has lasted so long and spread so widely must mean that there must be something to it. But if people now, with all the information at their disposal, can be suckered by an obvious conman like Hubbard into following his religion, it should not be surprising that people a couple of thousand years ago fell for it too. Joseph Smith and the Mormons is another good example of how modernity does not inoculate the gullible against hucksters.

(Thanks to Norm)

August 16, 2011

What to do about the salvation of non-Christians?

Jerry Coyne discusses some recent attempts to address a troubling problem for Christians: How do you treat those believers in other faiths who seem to be perfectly nice people or who existed in times and places that your brand of religion did not reach?

Consigning them to the fires of everlasting hell seems a tad unfair, no? But saying that all good people go to heaven removes the sense of being special in god's eyes which is, after all, the main recruiting tool that religions have.

Coyne makes the point that all 'solutions' to this problem that tend to universalize salvation will appeal only to theologians and academics. Most religious believers will prefer to think that they are fortunate enough to believe in the one true god, and the rest will simply have to hope that their eventual fate is not too horrendous.

August 12, 2011

Do atheists reject god?

From reader John, I received a link to this interesting video combating the notion that atheists are 'rejecting' god.

Escaping the suffocating embrace of religion

NPR had a couple of interesting religious stories recently.

One of them was about how more and more evangelicals are deciding that the Genesis story of Adam and Eve simply cannot be true in the light of modern science and how this is tearing the community apart.

Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University and a senior fellow at the BioLogos Foundation, and John Schneider who taught theology at Calvin College are just two evangelical Christians who say that "it's time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence."

This is viewed as heresy by the traditionalists who insist that those beliefs form an indispensable part of being Christian.

"From my viewpoint, a historical Adam and Eve is absolutely central to the truth claims of the Christian faith," says Fazale Rana, vice president of Reasons To Believe, an evangelical think tank that questions evolution. Rana, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Ohio University, readily admits that small details of Scripture could be wrong.

"But if the parts of Scripture that you are claiming to be false, in effect, are responsible for creating the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, then you've got a problem," Rana says.

Rana and others believe in a literal, historical Adam and Eve for many reasons. One is that the Genesis account makes man unique, created in the image of God — not a descendant of lower primates. Second, it tells a story of how evil came into the world, and it's not a story in which God introduced evil through the process of evolution, but one in which Adam and Eve decided to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit.

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, says that rebellious choice infected all of humankind.

"When Adam sinned, he sinned for us," Mohler says. "And it's that very sinfulness that sets up our understanding of our need for a savior.

Mohler says the Adam and Eve story is not just about a fall from paradise: It goes to the heart of Christianity. He notes that the Apostle Paul (in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15) argued that the whole point of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection was to undo Adam's original sin.

"Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul's description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament," Mohler says.

The other story is a more poignant personal one from a very different religious world, that of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Sam Katz was a member of such a community in New York who discovered science and lost his faith. What started the slide was when he started going to the library that was next door to his house and started reading secular books for the first time, beginning with Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And then he went to a Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History and pondered the implications of the story of evolution, saying "I studied God's law all my life. And you're a Jewish male. I mean, you're the pinnacle of creation. And suddenly, you're not the pinnacle of creation. You're the endpoint at this moment in time, and something else will happen soon. It's hard to explain what that was like, but it was beautiful."

At the age of 16, Katz was sent to a prestigious religious school in Israel where he confided his interest in these secular matters to the dean, who was a respected scholar. Rather than engage with him, the dean responded by trying to isolate him so that he would not corrupt the other students. So Katz left and returned to New York where, with the aid of an organization known as Footsteps, he has managed to break free of the tight embrace of his community and is now a junior in college studying science.

These stories shed an interesting light on the relationship of religious beliefs to knowledge. For example, note that the only things that Rana is willing to give up in the Bible are those things that do not contradict fundamental doctrines. So he is admitting that he first decides what his beliefs should be, and then accepts only the evidence that conforms to it. This is the typical mode of thinking of religious people.

Mohler is right. Without the story of Adam and Eve's fall from grace, the whole premise of Christianity that Christ died for us as a sacrifice to atone for that original sin falls apart. The original sin doctrine is incoherent anyway but eliminating it makes Christianity inconsistent is a way that even its own tortured logic cannot repair. Mainstream Christians who do not take the Genesis story literally have a real problem explaining why Jesus had to die, because the idea that we are born sinful is central to Christian dogma. If you accept that humans evolved, when did the fall from grace occur that created the evil that Jesus had to atone for? If humans are part of the tree of life, then why is original sin only an issue for humans? Most liberal Christians tend to ignore the question, leaving it as an exercise for theologians.

Mohler and others realize, quite correctly, that once you start accepting the theories of science in your worldview, you are on the road to disbelief. They are holding firmly onto Genesis and feel that "if other Protestants want to accommodate science, fine. But they shouldn't be surprised if their faith unravels", because religion and science are ultimately incompatible.

Sam Katz's dean who tried to isolate him must have also realized that religious views will always lose when confronted with scientific ones. Otherwise why would he fear that one student would corrupt the many others, and not the other way around?

August 09, 2011

And now for something completely different

This blog has had as one focus showing why belief in god makes no sense. In the interests of fairness, here is a video clip of twenty intellectuals (academics and theologians) explaining their beliefs. The contortions some of them get into are quite hilarious.

Via Jerry Coyne, who provides some commentary on each person's arguments.

August 08, 2011

How geography shapes religion

The short book Why we Believe in God(s) by J. Anderson Thomson with Clare Aukofer (2011) marshals the evidence that god is a creation of human beings.

In the book, the authors discuss the work of Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, who has "extracted information showing that religious ideas actually can be shaped by geography and ecology. Historically, rain forest dwellers, with nature's abundance all around, tended to be polytheists, believing in spirits based on nature and less likely to assume that gods intervene in their lives. Desert dwellers, living in a monotonous, harsh, and unforgiving environment, were more likely to believe in a single, sometimes harsh, misogynistic, interventionist god." (p. 137)

Just our luck that the unpleasant desert version of god has become dominant.

This work supports the ideas of primatologist Frans de Waal that I discussed earlier.

August 07, 2011

It's a miracle!

It looks like Rick Perry was able to rustle up a decent crowd of 20,000-30,000 people for his prayerfest in Texas, though still well below the 71,000 stadium capacity. One other governor, Sam Brownback of Kansas, also showed up. The event "was Perry's idea and was financed by the American Family Association, a Tupelo, Miss., group that opposes abortion and gay rights and believes that the First Amendment freedom of religion applies only to Christians."

No doubt Perry will look for signs from god whether he should run for president. The fact that the crowd beat early expectations could be taken as a sign that god wants him to run. Or the less-than-capacity crowd might be a sign that god wants him to merely stick to praying. Religious people are good at finding signs from god that tell them to do what they had decided to do anyway.

August 06, 2011

Atheist clergy

I have speculated before that a lot of clergy may be closet atheists and that over time more and more will emerge. This article says that, "A study by the Free University of Amsterdam found that one-in-six clergy in the PKN and six other smaller denominations was either agnostic or atheist."

The pastor of a mainstream Protestant church in the Netherlands is one such clergyman. (See the interesting short interview with him in the link. The BBC interviewer sounds incredulous at what he is hearing.) The Rev. Klaas Hendrikse's view on life after death is, "Make the most of life on earth, because it will probably be the only one you get".

He does not view god exists as a supernatural being: "God is not a being at all... it's a word for experience, or human experience."

As for the life of Jesus, he thinks that it is "a mythological story about a man who may never have existed, even if it is a valuable source of wisdom about how to lead a good life" and "You don't have to believe that Jesus was physically resurrected".

It seems that some churches are beginning to recognize that many of their clergy simply don't believe. Although Hendrikse has written a book Believing in a Non-Existent God that led traditionalist Christians to call for him to be removed from the church, "a special church meeting decided his views were too widely shared among church thinkers for him to be singled out." (My italics)

The times they are a changing, alright.

Rick Perry's day of prayer

So today is Texas governor and putative Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry's big day of prayer and fasting where he and a motley collection of evangelical religious bigots get together to pray for Jesus to save the nation. One of his key allies in this event is IHOP (no, not that one, this is the International House of Prayer) whose theology is based on the Book of Revelation, the nuttiest book of the Bible which is highly popular with the rapturites.

The signs so far are that the response has been less that overwhelming with only about 8,000 reservations (as of Thursday) for a stadium that can accommodate 71,000. What is worse for Perry, he invited all his fellow governors to attend and it looks like none will, since even the most bigoted politician has enough sense to not want to be associated with what promises to be a hate-fest.

In addition to the evangelicals' open hatred of homosexuality, one of the interesting features is what lurks beneath the surface, a dislike of everyone who is not 'born again'. And that includes Catholics and Jews. For example, the church that Michele Bachmann attended was vehemently anti-Catholic. She formally left it this summer and says that she has not attended for two years though it is not clear what church she has been going to, since she refuses to answer.

August 03, 2011

Short cut to salvation

One of the selling points that evangelical proselytizers use to win converts amongst those who are wracked with guilt for past transgressions is to tell them that if only they would accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior, their past sins will be forgiven and that no other religion can promise them such quick absolution. It is a strategy that seems to be somewhat effective (as one might expect) in prisons with some hardened criminals.

The Onion had an article by a mass murderer on how he found this feature of Christianity quite appealing.

It was a stroke of unbelievable luck. Here I thought I'd spend the rest of my life agonizing over that night I broke into a random house and methodically tortured all five of its residents, but Jesus was like, "Nah, you're good." He took all those years I expected to wallow in suffocating guilt for having forced a mother to choose the order in which I strangled her children and wiped them away in a jiff.

Which is ironic because the family I murdered in cold blood was praying to Jesus like crazy the whole time.

If it weren't for the Savior, I'd still be living with a horribly tormented conscience like some chump. I used to think that maybe, just maybe, I could ease some of the unrelenting pain after a lifetime of good works and contrition. But once God's grace washed over me—and that took, what, maybe 15 minutes at most?—I knew I was in the clear.

Bing, bang, boom. Salvation.

I mean, it's too bad I'll never get back those days I squandered on unbearable guilt, but Jesus bailed me out big time, so I'm not going to complain. No sense in living in the past. The man who took five innocent lives in brutal fashion and made himself a glass of chocolate milk afterward might as well be a totally different person. I walk in the Lord now.
…
Of course, the laws of man will keep me physically behind bars for the rest of my life. But my soul has been set free by the Lord and by the sacrifice of His only son. Despite all my earthly sins, He has redeemed me. He always does.

Had I known that sooner, I would've killed way more people.

It would not surprise me in the least if Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, claims after a few years to have seen the light and found Jesus. He may even become an evangelical preacher, using his own life as an example of how Jesus saves.

Incidentally, via reader Jeff, I received this interesting article by neuroscientist David Eagleman speculating on what might motivate killers like Breivik and how our increasing understanding of how brains work might affect legal proceedings involving such people.

What it takes to be a Christian

The attempt by some Christians to distance their religion from Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, is laughable since he proudly proclaimed his religion in his writings, but it does raise the interesting question of what it takes to be considered a Christian.

For mainstream Christians, if one is baptized, usually as a newborn infant, you are considered a Christian. As far as evangelical Christians are concerned, all you have to do is say that you accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior, and you are home free, with a direct non-stop ticket to heaven when you die.

What is noticeable is that there is no real intellectual effort needed to become a Christian. During religious services, worshippers proclaim belief in all manner of extraordinary things in the creeds they recite but few pay any attention to the words and would be surprised if the enormity of what they affirm is pointed out to them, let alone be asked to explain why they believe what they say they believe.

But is it that simple to be a Christian? Not everyone thinks so. Via Jason Rosenhouse, I stumbled across a blog by a philosopher named Edward Feser, who seems to be a Roman Catholic because in his profile, he describes himself thusly: "I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective."

In the course of a discussion about the cosmological argument, he posted a comment to his own post (scroll down) where he outlined what would be needed to believe in Christianity. (All italics are in the original.)

For starters, he says:

I would say that as a preliminary to arguing for Christianity, one has to establish first, through independent and purely philosophical arguments: 



1. The existence of God

2. Such attributes as the unity, simplicity, power, intellect, and will of God

3. God's conservation of the world in being and providence

4. The immortality of the soul

5. The possibility of miracles

That's pretty heavy duty stuff. I would have thought that would have been formidable enough to cause any rational Christian to immediately throw in the towel. Note also that you are expected to show all these through independent and purely philosophical arguments. You don't need no stinking evidence, which is probably just as well since there isn’t any for any of those claims.

But wait, there's more! He then says that to be a Christian, you also have to be able to show why all the other religions are false. This is actually an important point that a lot of religious people ignore because all the reasons they give for why other religions are false can be used against their own too. Feser helps them out, starting first with how to eliminate all polytheistic religions, though I am not sure why he includes a nontheistic religion like Buddhism in the mix.

These are just the sorts of topics one finds treated in old-fashioned manuals of natural theology written in the Scholastic tradition. And once one has established this much, religions like Buddhism, Taoism, most forms of Hinduism, etc. are ruled out already. Only some form of monotheism can be true IF any form is true at all.

With those out of the way, he turns to competing major monotheistic religions, though he seems to deal only with Islam, ignoring Judaism altogether. That is typical. Christians in the US tend to tread gingerly around Judaism, believing it to be a false religion but rarely coming out and saying so.

The next step is to show that IF any allegedly revealed religion is true, it has to be backed by miracles in the strict sense -- events that could not in principle happen naturally and that could only have had a divine cause. There is no other way one could have rational grounds for confirming the claim that some message really came from God.

That much pretty much rules out Islam. Muhammad never even claimed any miracle other than the Koran itself. But the Koran is clearly not miraculous in principle even if one believed that it was so extraordinary that Muhammad could not have written it. By contrast, everyone agrees that Christ's resurrection would be impossible by purely natural causes, IF it really occurred.

The next step is to defend the historicity of Christ's resurrection itself. In my view, it is foolish to do this until one has already independently established points 1-5 above. For only in light of 1-5 is the evidence for the resurrection going to have its full power. Apart from 1-5 a skeptic could always say "Who knows what really happened, but we know it couldn't have been a miracle" etc. That won't wash if one has already established 1-5, though.

If one establishes that too, though, and if one grants (what I think there is no reasonable doubt about) that Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be divine, then the fact that He was resurrected, that only God could have resurrected Him, and that this happened despite His saying something which would (if false) be blasphemous in the extreme, all would confirm that it was not false. In other words, it would show that there is a divine "seal of approval" on what He said and that what He said is therefore true. But if He is divine, and yet He is a different Person from the Father and Holy Spirit, etc., then we've got the essence of the doctrine of the Trinity. And then from there a Thomistic theologian works out the rest by inferring from what natural theology tells us together with what Christ's revelation tells us. And that takes us beyond natural or philosophical theology and into sacred theology.

That's nothing more than a sketch, but that's the framework that a sound Christian theology would begin by fleshing out. It's the sort of thing Aquinas and other Scholastics do, and the sort of thing that has to be done before the more detailed stuff (law and grace, sin and salvation, Eucharistic theology, etc. etc.) can properly be treated.

So there you go, Christians. None of that wishy-washy "If you accept Jesus as your savior, you are a Christian" short cut. That's for slackers. Get to work meeting all of Feser's requirements before calling yourself a Christian.

August 01, 2011

Morality without god

Jerry Coyne has a nice opinion piece in USA TODAY on the above topic.

July 31, 2011

Murderous people serving 'peace-loving' religions

Some of you may have heard about the 'World Trade Center cross'. Extracted from the wreckage of the WTC buildings were two steel girders in the form of a cross. Girders are usually welded at right angles to each other so discovering wreckage in this shape was not surprising but for a nation that is remarkably good at seeing Jesus even in pieces of toast, this was taken as some sort of miraculous sign from god, though it beats me what possible positive message could be extracted from the carnage. Maybe it is supposed to be like the rainbow after Noah's flood which symbolized god saying, "Hey, my bad" after he killed almost every living thing of the planet.

Some religious people have elevated this piece of wreckage into a religious icon, blessing it, praying around it, worshipping it, doing the usual things that religious people do, and they now want to make it part of the official 9/11 memorial. Since the memorial is a public institution funded by the government, American Atheists have sued to stop it, arguing that inserting something that has been made into a religious symbol violates the separation of church and state.

Fox News had a segment about this in which a spokesperson for American Atheists and a first responder at 9/11 debated the merits of the case.

Notice the program host badgering the atheist spokesperson but that is not unusual for a network that has an overt Christian ideology. What was interesting was that the news program's bulletin board was flooded with over 8,000 messages, many urging that the atheist spokesperson, and indeed all atheists, should be killed! Although the moderators are trying to remove these posts as fast as they come in, screen shots give a fascinating glimpse into the minds of religious people.

So let's take stock. A bunch of Muslims decided that killing nearly 3,000 people is what their god would approve of while a bunch of Christians call for the killing of all atheists as something they think their god would approve of. They see no contradiction between their religion and what they advocate.

And we are repeatedly told that religions advocate peace.

July 30, 2011

Why I am an atheist

This nice graphic puts it quite succinctly, and is consistent with my series of posts on the logic of science.

(Via Pharyngula).

July 29, 2011

Religious killers

It is interesting how mainstream religions react when one of their followers goes on a murderous rampage because of their religious beliefs. The religions immediately disavow such people because they claim, despite the historical record and the very words in their religious texts, that their religion is one of peace and anyone who commits such atrocities cannot be a true believer.

We have seen this absurd argument advanced repeatedly with members of all religions and the Christian killer in Norway is now being subject to the same shunning by his co-religionists, as The Daily Show illustrates.

It is part of the general pattern of whining as a response to criticisms of your views.

July 28, 2011

Flowchart with rules for debating religious people

In a comment to a previous post, G provided a link to an excellent flowchart that creates ground rules for debating Christians (though indeed it applies to all topics, not just Christianity or even religions in general) that should prevent fruitless discussions.

July 27, 2011

The pathetic cosmological argument for god

It has become increasingly clear that cosmology has become the last refuge of those religious people eager to find some place where god can still have done something while remaining undetectable. But those arguments are clearly pretty desperate.

Jason Rosenhouse provides an excellent summary of the debate over cosmological arguments and concludes:

If the cosmological argument is the best theology has to offer then we atheists do not need to worry that we have overlooked a good argument for God's existence.
…
As for the cosmological argument itself, I make no apology for being dismissive. Depending on what version you are considering, you can expect to find concepts like causality or probability being used in domains where they do not clearly apply, or dubious arguments for why an actual infinity cannot exist, or highly questionable premises about the beginnings of the universe or about how everything that began to exist must have had a cause, or groundless invocations of the principle of sufficient reason. You inevitably come so perilously close to assuming what you are trying to prove that you may as well just assume God exists and be done with it.

That's my reaction to proponents of the cosmological arguments as well. They work so hard at finding implausible reasoning to support their pre-ordained conclusion that they might as well just say that believe in god because they want to or need to, even if it is unsupported by evidence.

July 26, 2011

Religious nuts' greatest hits

Rachel Maddow has compiled the great thoughts of the religious people invited to Texas governor Rick Perry's day of prayer on August 6 to which he has invited all his fellow state governors. (Via Pharyngula.)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

There is an outfit called 'The International House of Prayer'? Who knew? Why isn't IHOP suing for trademark infringement?

July 25, 2011

The Internet: Where religions come to die

Even evangelical Christians agree with this assessment that the internet poses a real threat to religion's survival. Listen to Josh McDowell of Cru, the organization formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ.

Atheists and skeptics now have equal access to our children as we have, which is why the number of Christian youth who believe in the fundamentals of Christianity is decreasing and sexual immorality is growing, apologist Josh McDowell said.
…
"The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not," said McDowell, who is author of two books on Christian apologetics, More than a Carpenter and New Evidence that Demands Verdict.
…
"Now here is the problem," said McDowell, "going all the way back, when Al Gore invented the Internet [he said jokingly], I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to certainty; it will lead to pervasive skepticism. And, folks, that's exactly what has happened. It's like this. How do you really know, there is so much out there… This abundance [of information] has led to skepticism. And then the Internet has leveled the playing field [giving equal access to skeptics]."

McDowell, who lives in southern California with his wife Dottie and four children, said atheists, agnostics and skeptics didn't have access to kids earlier. "If they wrote books, not many people read it. If they gave a talk, not many people went. They would normally get to kids maybe in the last couple of years of the university." But that has changed now.

Jesus and Mo pick up on McDowell's comments.

Daniel Dennett once said that arguing with religious people is like playing tennis with someone who raises the net when you make your shot and lowers it for theirs. The internet is like a more impartial person who has taken over umpiring duties.

July 24, 2011

How to talk like Deepak Chopra

It's easy!

A commenter named marius at the Calamities of Nature site where I saw this had a go at using the template and came up with the following:

The mind is like a quark. In both cases, when tunneling occurs, the physical reality of the void becomes apparent. It is only due to the field that surrounds us all that we can participate in consciousness. From this we know that the grand theory of unity exists. Amazingly, nature is the perfect analog to this phenomenon. The deep connection is the result of the earth. It is revealing that there is a fundamental link between us and the higher plane of existence and that consciousness is always found in the dark energy surrounding the stars.

Pretty good, no? Actually, a lot of so-called sophisticated theology that tries to meld science with god is like this so I suspect that many modern theologians are working off the same template.

July 23, 2011

Rebranding Christ

Via Pharyngula, I learn that Campus Crusade for Christ, the evangelical organization, has decided to change its name. The new one? Cru. Yes, really. Apparently college affiliates had been referring to themselves this way for a while.

I don't know about this. Cru sounds more like the stage name a rapper would adopt, as in 'DJ Cru'. Furthermore, the university where I work at has the acronym CWRU that is spoken as 'crew' which sounds the same as 'cru'. So the members of the campus affiliate of this organization will become known as the 'CWRU Cru crew', which when vocalized will sound like you are doing bird imitations.

The reason for the change is that apparently the words 'Campus' and 'Crusade' had negative connotations. More interestingly, they found that even 'Christ' was off-putting because people "might initially be turned off by a more overtly Christian name". They seem to think that having a name that gave no hint of being Christian would enable their members to sneak their religious message into conversations with people who were unaware that they were targets of a proselytization effort.

This is of course the kind of sneaky tactics religious people use. But despite that, I took it to be a very encouraging sign that the brand 'Christ' is seen by even evangelical Christians as being tarnished.

July 22, 2011

Religion and inequality

Jerry Coyne has a very interesting post discussing a new study by F. Solt, P. Habel, and J. T. Grant, J. T. titled Economic inequality, relative power, and religiosity that appeared in the journal Social Science Quarterly, 92: 447–465 (2011), that finds that economic inequality is positively correlated with religious belief, and looks at theories that might account for this.

The most common theory is called "deprivation theory" which says that in economically unequal societies, poorer folks turn to religion for reassurance and comfort. The authors of the paper introduce something called "relative power theory" that says that "many wealthy individuals, rather than simply allowing redistribution to be decided through the democratic process as such median-voter models assume, respond to higher levels of inequality by adopting religious beliefs and spreading them among their poorer fellow citizens. Religion then works to discourage interest in mere material well-being in favor of eternal spiritual rewards, preserving the privileges of the rich and allowing unequal conditions to continue."

Coyne summarizes the conclusions of the paper.

Their findings thus suggest that both the deprivation and relative power theories are needed to explain the data. In economically unequal societies, rich people promulgate religion to keep their own place in the hierarchy, and, rather than fighting for more equality, poor people accept religion as an easy form of solace.
…
The authors also note that the relative power theory explains why the U.S. is so religious despite the fact that its citizens are generally well off. It is, they say, because the U.S. shows considerably more economic inequality than other developed countries (and that is true).

The authors also did a time-study and found that “Increases in inequality in one year predict substantial gains in religiosity in the next,” while “past values of religiosity do not predict future values of inequality” clearly indicating that it is inequality that influences religiosity and not the other way around.

A heartening sign is the trend of declining religiosity in America over the last half century.

Of course, this predicts that the recent rise in inequality in the US will see an uptick in religiosity. But it seems that the overall tendency is for religion to decline.

Both the original paper and Coyne's summary make for fascinating reading.

What appealed to me is the inference that the fights for economic justice and the elimination of religion are related, since those are two of my personal goals.

July 19, 2011

Reviews of the Bible

Amazon allows readers to post reviews of their books. Jerry Coyne has made a nice compilation of some of the reviews of the Bible by people who treat is as a work of fiction. It's pretty funny. Here's a sample:

There is little plot to this book, save for in the second half, much of which revolves around God's son, Jesus, an interesting fellow. Definitely, the story has finally hit a stride, so the New Testament reads like a novella. Everywhere this Jesus guy goes, he travels with his posse of "Apostles," who aren't your standard yes men. Although they all sing his praises when the going's good, one gives a great "I don't know about no Jesus" performance (Peter) worthy of a scruffy rat like Steve Buscemi. Another (Judas) sells out Jesus for a bunch of dead presidents, like Sean Penn did in "Carlito's Way." Unfortunately, Jesus gets rubbed out by an Italian gang, "The Romans," who torture him and nail him to a cross in revenge for representing on their turf. Lots of high drama here. "Revelations" was pretty weird, sort of like watching "Fantasia" while doing mushrooms, only a lot scarier. Altogether, an excellent read.

July 03, 2011

Dutch ban on the ritual slaughter of animals

The Dutch government has taken the first steps towards banning the slaughter of animals without stunning them first. This means that the way Jews and Muslims produce kosher and halal meat is no longer allowed since that requires the slitting of the animal's throat while it is still alive.

These two religious groups are upset and joining together to claim (surprise!) religious persecution. As one might have predicted, the specter of Hitler is being invoked, with the chief rabbi of the Netherlands comparing this action to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. On the Muslim side, one imam told Reuters, "This is a political decision. Who has the authority to determine whether the way of killing animals is good or not?"

Well, duh. When a country's parliament passes a law, it goes without saying that it is a political decision. And surely that same body has the authority to pass laws governing its food supply?

Religious people cannot seem to get it into their heads that just because some obscure and anonymous desert nomads wrote something a couple of thousand years ago, that is not a basis for deciding policies in the 21st century. You need to make the case based on contemporary knowledge and mores.

The selectivity of religions on such issues is glaringly obvious. They would not dare make the same arguments for their other religious rules such as the killing of people for various transgressions because that would show how barbaric their religious books are. But because the humane killing of animals is still not a universal value, they think they can get away with asking for religious exemptions for their practices.

June 29, 2011

Test your Bible knowledge

Reader Chris sent me this link to 50 questions about the Bible. He got 26 right and he thought I would do better. Alas, I got only 25 right.

Where I think I went wrong was with my method of guessing for those questions that I did not know the answers to. I followed the recommended strategy for answering any multiple-choice tests and avoided the outlier options. But it often turned out that what I thought was too crazy to be true (even for the Bible) was in fact the right answer. So I was punished for giving the Bible the benefit of the doubt

June 28, 2011

New article

The latest issue (July/August 2011) of the British magazine New Humanist has an article by me that tries to clear up the confusion about the distinction between atheist and agnostic. I received my print copy today and my article may be available online next week.

New Humanist is published by The Rationalist Association and is a highly entertaining mix of short and long form articles, cartoons, columns, and interviews, written in a cheeky, lively, and exuberant style, with plenty of eye-catching graphics.

June 24, 2011

Fears of religious vandalism limit free speech

A bus company in Little Rock, Arkansas asked for prohibitively expensive insurance against vandalism from an atheist group that wanted to place an ad on its buses. Apparently they feared that the ad's message "Are you good without God? Millions are" would inflame Christians enough that they would attack the buses.

A spokesperson for the atheist group draws the obvious conclusion, "The insurance money needed from us basically says CATA [the bus company] and On The Move [the bus company's ad agency] trust the atheists in this community more so than the religious, otherwise the churches that advertise would have that extra insurance premium added to their total cost."

June 18, 2011

More religious cruelty and stupidity

Blog reader FuDaYi sent me this news item about a Jewish rabbinical court that sentenced to death by stoning a dog that wandered into premises because they thought it was the reincarnation of a secular lawyer who had antagonized the court 20 years earlier and had been cursed by the judges to have his spirit passed to a dog when he died, which happened a few years ago. Fortunately the dog escaped.

What is it about religion that destroys people's minds?

June 15, 2011

Dick Goddard on religion and war

The well-known and long-standing Cleveland TV weatherman is an avuncular person, widely known for being an animal lover. In this radio interview on WCPN 90.3, he turns out to be quite outspoken about his anti-war views and his disbelief in god.

This 12-minutes portion of the interview begins at the 36:00 minute mark. (Thanks to Jeff.)

June 11, 2011

Sources of religious belief

Jerry Coyne discusses an interesting article that suggests that religious faith in countries is positively correlated with insecurity, as measured by income inequality.

Another interesting article supports the idea that fear of death can lead to greater religious belief. This study does not strike me as very rigorous in how it was done but it is suggestive.

June 01, 2011

News flash: Jesus wore pants!

One of the image problems that prevents Christianity from attracting men in America is that Jesus, with his long flowing hair that seems out of a shampoo commercial and wearing a robe that could be easily confused with a dress, seems effeminate and this can be off-putting to manly men.

But the undoubtedly manly Jesus' General (who scores an 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender) points out that evangelical pastor Steven L. Anderson has revealed the heretofore hidden truth that Jesus actually had short hair and wore pants and that the mistaken image people have of what Jesus looked like is the result of deliberately misleading depictions of him by homosexual artists like Michelangelo who were covertly seeking to advance their gay agenda. As Anderson says, "Sodomite homosexuals such as Michelangelo painted Jesus to look effeminate and to have long hair in order to make him fit their own queer image… Anyone who has not had their mind warped by a so-called theologian or historian knows that a dress is a woman’s garment. The only men I have seen wearing dresses in 2010 are homosexuals, Catholic priests (sorry to be redundant), Islamic clerics, and Buddhist monks. These men are an abomination according to the Bible." You can't argue with that logic.

We are lucky that we have people like pastor Anderson to tell the truth and stand up for what it means to be a man. And talking of standing up, Jesus' General highlights another important feature that pastor Anderson has cleverly deduced from the Bible that can tell you if someone is a manly man or not.

May 31, 2011

The plight of evangelical ministers

"Half of pastors would leave the ministry tomorrow if they could. Seventy percent are fighting depression and 90 percent can't cope with the challenge of ministry… 1,500 pastors walk away from ministry every month because of moral failure, burnout, conflict, discouragement or depression… 80 percent of seminary and Bible school graduates will leave the ministry within their first five years."

Who is saying this? Not some atheist gloating over the demise of religion. These were the figures quoted by Jonathan Falwell, who took over the ministry of his well-known evangelical father Jerry Falwell.

Ken Pulliam, a former fundamentalist preacher, provides additional statistics on the rampant dissatisfaction of evangelical preachers with their lives:

• 89% considered leaving the ministry at one time.
  
• 57% said they would leave if they had a better place to go—including secular work
  
• 71% stated they were burned out, and they battle depression beyond fatigue on a weekly and even a daily basis.

Pulliam makes the point that these statistics are telling all by themselves and that it is not relevant to compare them with other professions to see if they are better or worse. Evangelical pastors consist of people who are supposedly sure that they are doing god's work and thus should be immune from the usual problems that the rest of us suffer from. What this data suggest is that many of these preachers think they are living a lie, that the beliefs they share with their flock is not true

While the media focus on a few high profile mega-church pastors to suggest that evangelical Christianity is flourishing, the reality is different. No thinking person today can believe that the Bible is literally true the way that these people say it is. Modernity cannot be shut out and it is taking its toll on many of them. It is really very sad.

May 30, 2011

Dog getting communion

An Anglican church in Canada welcomed pets to attend their services and Donald Keith, a new parishioner, took his dog Trapper with him. Since he was a newcomer, the vicar singled Keith out and invited him up in person to receive what is known as Holy Communion where you receive and wafer (and sometimes some wine or other beverage) to symbolize the body and blood of Jesus. (Catholics are told that the wafer and the wine actually become transformed into the body and blood of Jesus, but I am not getting into that here.)

When Keith went up, Trapper naturally followed him and the interim vicar said a small prayer and gave communion to Trapper too.

I thought that this was a nice story about a spontaneous friendly gesture on the vicar's part. When you are handing out what seems like treats to everyone and there is a dog waiting expectantly in line, it is hard to say no. Apparently almost every member of the congregation found the gesture to be heartwarming. But one person took umbrage and went straight to the archbishop and as a result Trapper has been banned from receiving communion. And of course, the Jesus lovers are incensed. Former Watergate felon and now crazy-for-Jesus evangelical Chuck Colson says that this is the result of the dangerous trend of thinking that humans are not special in the eyes of his god.

If I believed in heaven, my guess would be that Trapper is more worthy of going there than the parishioner who complained about him.

May 21, 2011

So long, and thanks for all the kitsch

This will be my last post. I expect to be taken up to heaven shortly at 6:00 pm eastern time with all the other true believers.

Some of you will be surprised that I will be among the select few, since I have been making the case for atheism and making fun of all religions, including Christianity, and thus would have seemed a sure bet for hell. It is time to reveal the truth. This was all a ruse on my part. I was deliberately trying to drive people away from Jesus because I was working as a double agent for the CIA (Christ Indoctrination Agency). Jesus wanted to weed out all those whose faith was weak enough that they could be swayed by atheist arguments. Jesus wanted only the truest of the true believers, those who are willing to completely abandon all evidence and reason and logic, and instead put their complete trust in the words in an old book of dubious origin and so he and Melvin and Harvey created this agency to carry out this task. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and most other atheists also work for the CIA and are in the top ranks of the organization, so you will have the seeming paradox that heaven is going to filled with people who were considered dyed-in-the-wool atheists on Earth. Life is full of these little ironies.

Some people say that 2% of the world's population, or about 130 million, will be saved but they are wrong. There aren't that many true Jesus lovers and heaven would not want to admit any riff-raff. We are a pretty exclusive community and only 144,000 people will be saved in the Rapture.

So I will soon be off to get my wings and harp and enjoy the delights of heaven, such as singing hosannas and hanging out with the Cherubim and Seraphim, whatever the hell they are, because the Rapture manual they gave all CIA agents doesn't say. I am guessing that they are a comedy duo like Laurel and Hardy who perform their act between the hosanna sessions.

So goodbye and remember that the world actually ends on October 21. Until then you will experience five month of tribulation, which is not going to be a walk in the park. But cheer up. However bad the tribulation period is, remember that when it ends, it will be even worse in hell. And don't forget to wear clean underwear for the underworld, ha, ha! (Just a little Rapture humor.)

God and the US constitution

There is a person named David Barton who has been pushing the idea that the US was founded as a Christian country and that the separation of church and state was not intended to be a guiding principle. He is widely quoted in evangelical circles as an authority on this topic and has been influential in setting guidelines for high school textbooks.

In early May, Jon Stewart invited him to The Daily Show which is where I first saw him. Barton struck me as a fast talking snake oil salesman who knows how to impress people with seemingly erudite knowledge and to my irritation managed to steamroll Stewart.

To his credit, Stewart realized that he had been snowed so last week he brought on a genuine constitutional historian, Richard Beeman of the University of Pennsylvania, author of the book Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, to set the record straight. (The book is on my list of things to read.)

You can see all the interviews.

David Barton part 1:

David Barton part 2:

Richard Beeman part 1:

Richard Beeman part 2:

May 20, 2011

Rapture update

Today's Doonesbury cartoon continues his series on the Rapture

I also received this link from reader FuDaYi about people having fun with the Rapture with parties planned for the big day tomorrow. One person (an atheist, of course) is even offering pet care insurance for people who want to make sure that the pets that are left behind when their owners get taken to heaven will be looked after. This raises the serious theological question: Why don't pets get to go to heaven? What kind of god would deny people the company of their beloved pets? I personally wouldn't want to spend eternity without Baxter.

Not everyone is enjoying the publicity this event is garnering. "When we engage in this kind of wild speculation, it's irresponsible," said the Rev. Daniel Akin, president of the Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. "It can do damage to naive believers who can be easily caught up and it runs the risk of causing the church to receive sort of a black eye."

Of course it does. The church deserves to get a black eye because they are the enablers of these people. His concern about 'naïve believers' being misled is hilarious since that group constitutes his entire base. If you encourage people to believe in nonsense, you shouldn't complain if they believe in nonsense that is different from the nonsense that you believe in.

May 17, 2011

New documentary The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today

One of the key cases involving church-state separation (discussed in my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom) was McCollum v. Board of Education (1948) which involved a challenge to the practice of public schools granting "release time" for the teaching of religion in school buildings during the school day to those students and parents who agreed to it. The U.S. Supreme Court by an 8-1 vote ruled the policy unconstitutional. This was the first time that religious instruction in public schools had been explicitly ruled to be unconstitutional under the U.S. constitution.

It turns out that Vashti McCollum, the feisty mother who brought the case objecting to this practice and braved the wrath of the religious people in her small town in Illinois, is still alive died only in 2006 (thanks to reader George for pointing out the error) and some PBS stations will be broadcasting a new award-winning documentary The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today that deals with her case. Here is a preview.

If your local PBS station is not listed on that site, you can call them and ask them to consider showing it.

The dark side of the Rapture

I have heard reports that a caravan of vehicles with billboards announcing the end of the world on May 21 passed through Cleveland a couple of weeks ago. When May 22 dawns and no Rapture has occurred, there will be a lot of disappointed people. This will not be the first time that such hopes have been dashed. There was a major event actually called The Great Disappointment that occurred on October 22, 1844 [date corrected thanks to commenter Robert] when a widely believed end times prophesy failed to materialize.

While Christianity has always had its end-times fanatics, it was the creation of the state of Israel that spawned a huge amount of end-times theorizing because these people believe that Jesus will only return to Earth after the Jews returned to Israel. This is also why there is such a weird symbiotic relationship between Christian and Jewish extremist groups. The expansionist policies of Israel that have ruined the lives of so many Palestinians is supported by the Christian end-timers because they think it is a sign that Jesus has packed his bags and is about to make the return trip to Earth.

I have been having some fun with the whole Rapture thing, because the idea is so absurd. But there is a dark side to it, in that many of the people who take it seriously are making foolish decisions and could ruin their lives. NPR ran a story on some of the people who are waiting to be raptured. One couple with an infant daughter and another baby due in June have abandoned plans for the mother to go to medical school and are spending all their money down so that they will be left with nothing on May 21, arguing that there is no point since it will all come to an end. In another story, NPR described a person who sold off his house and gave up his job to await the event. A colleague of mine described how her former sister-in-law believed in an earlier rapture prediction of 1994 and ran up huge credit card bills that then took a long time to pay off. These people refuse to consider that they might be wrong because to do so would be a sign of lack of faith and cause god to not select them for heaven.

If no Rapture occurs, the people responsible for the predictions will use the standard excuse that the calculations were faulty and go back to the drawing board. This is what current Rapture predictor Harold Camping said in 1994 when his earlier prediction did not pan out. He said it was because he had not read the book of Jeremiah that contained some important clues. That seems a little irresponsible to me. If you are basing a major prediction such as the end of the world on the Bible, and people are taking you seriously, you should at least have had the decency to do your homework and read the whole thing.

In a comment to a previous post, Scott jokingly suggested that it might be fun on May 21 to leave little piles of clothes around because that would be a sign to the believers that people have been suddenly raptured up to heaven. That would be funny except that we have to remember that we are dealing with seriously deluded people who do not think rationally. If these people think that the Rapture had actually occurred and they were not selected and were headed for hell, there is no saying what they will do and it is quite possible that they will go berserk.

Richard Dawkins was asked by the Washington Post to comment on the latest Rapture frenzy and said: "Why is a serious newspaper like the Washington Post giving space to a raving loon?" He then has a good discussion of how the word 'tradition' used as in 'religious tradition' tends to bestow respectability on a set of nonsensical myths that have no foundation.

I disagree with Dawkins. We should publicize as widely as possible the crazy and evil things that religions cause people to do. Mainstream religions provide the soil in which the crazies can take root and flourish. We need more and more people to realize that these deluded people are deeply misguided because they are connected organically to mainstream religion, not separate from it. Having a public relations fiasco like the Rapture can only help the cause of skepticism.

May 16, 2011

How many people has the Judeo-Christian god killed?

Someone has had the fortitude to go through the Bible and tabulate all the people killed by this particular god. The problem is that while sometimes the numbers are given precisely, on other occasions the figures have to be estimated.

The result? 2,476,636 if you count up the actual numbers and, if you include those killings for which no precise numbers are provided, an estimated 25 million.

(via Jerry Coyne.)

May 14, 2011

NJ governor won't say if he believes in evolution or creationism

Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, was asked at a press conference if he believes in evolution or creationism and he replied with his characteristic rudeness and arrogance "That's none of your business".

While I would not have said it the way he did, I do agree with him on the substance. There is no reason why elected officials should have to publicly state what they privately believe on any issue that a reporter might be interested in. We are only entitled to know what they do in their official capacities and the reasons they advance for doing it. Issues should be debated on the merits of the competing proposals and on publicly stated arguments in favor of the options and their underlying beliefs are not a necessary part of the discussion.

Having said all that, I was curious as to the implications Christie's reluctance to answer the question. If he truly believes it is none of the reporter's business, I agree with him. But what if he instead felt that giving an honest answer might cause him embarrassment or political difficulties? There are two options here. One is that he believes in evolution but felt that saying so would alienate a major bloc of his supporters. The other option is that he believes in creationism but felt that denying the fact of evolution would make him look like an anachronism in this modern scientific age.

The former represents crass political calculation, the latter demonstrates that to deny evolution is no longer something that is intellectually respectable. Both options are signs of science's progress.

May 12, 2011

Update on the Rapture

Remember, there are only nine more days until the Rapture! Get your forgiveness from Jesus now and avoid long lines in the last minute rush.

Salon has an article on the latest Rapture prophesy and the 89-year old radio host named Harold Camping who is behind it.

Violence and religion

Take a look at this image.

Did you notice that the synagogue has been made out of bullets and guns and other weaponry? It is one example of the work of sculptor Al Farrow, in which he uses the tools of violence to create religious buildings in order to make the point that religion and violence are so closely intertwined.

The link where you can see many other works by Farrow was sent to me by blog reader John. The multiple close up views of a bombed mosque are quite exquisite.

Joking about god not welcome on American TV?

I don't watch much TV but I have noticed that there are no YouTube clips of American broadcast TV shows having atheist comedians making fun of god or religion, the way one finds in the UK or Australia. The closest I have seen is House, where the atheist title character tosses off the occasional barb aimed at religion.

An article in The Australian suggests that as a result foreign comedians who are used to making jokes about religion and getting a good laugh in other countries are sometimes surprised at the hostile reaction they get here, as with Ricky Gervais's performance as host of the Golden Globes awards.

What caused real grief at NBC, the network that broadcasts the Globes, and among those of the organisers who leaked that Gervais had "crossed a line" was the presenter's final quip as he exited.

"Thanks for everyone in the room for being good sports, to NBC and the Hollywood foreign press, thank you for watching at home," he said. "And thank you, God, for making me an atheist."

The US has 210 television market areas, or regions. By the Monday morning NBC bosses had had their ears bent by managers from dozens, ranging from the liberal Bangor, in Maine, to the deeply conservative Corpus Christi, in Texas. The problem was Gervais's final flourish, and they questioned why NBC had not "bleeped" it out as it would swearing. The truth was, NBC did not see it coming.
…
Gervais is not the first British comic to run into this invisible wall. Last year Eddie Izzard hosted the Independent Spirit awards for non-studio filmmakers in Los Angeles. He experienced unusual moments of silence and audience disconnection. The next morning, bloggers crowed that his "attacks on organised religion" cost him the audience.
…
NBC is now seeking to put the 2011 Globes behind it, although its "standards and practices" lawyers are likely to crush any religious jokes scripted in advance next year. Not that that would stop a runaway Gervais.

Early reports suggest that in 2012 the microphone may be handed to Joel McHale, a half-Italian comedian who mocks teary reality-show contestants and bumbling news announcers on a weekly cable TV show called The Soup. Picking on the hapless is rewarding fun, the smirking comic has found.

More critically, in seven years on The Soup, the host, a Catholic, has never challenged a powerful deity of any stripe.

God, apparently, cannot take a joke in America.

The demand that NBC should have bleeped out the god comment reveals how insecure religious people are. They cannot tolerate the idea that anyone should publicly declare their disbelief. People thank god all the time on TV for all manner of things from winning awards to scoring touchdowns and I suspect that most atheists are like me and find it merely ridiculous and amusing. I suspect that no atheist has been converted to religious belief by hearing such expressions of devotion. And yet believers fear that hearing people say that they are atheists is dangerous and offensive and worthy of censorship

What is interesting is that comedians like Gervais and Izzard get enthusiastic responses for their standup comedy routines before live audiences in the US. One obvious reason is of course that the people who go to a live show already have some inkling of what they are going to get, unlike the people who watch TV at home. But it is also the case that the audience for standup shows consists of younger people, and their acceptance of god-mocking humor may be another signal of the generational shift that is going on, with younger people not taking religion nearly as seriously as their elders.

The problem that religion faces is that it is such a ripe target for humor because it is so self-contradictory and makes such absurd claims, the exact diet that comedians feast on, and so they cannot resist using it as the butt of jokes. As the taboos against it slowly crumble, as they surely will, we can expect to see more and more mocking of the absurdities of religious beliefs.

The upcoming Rapture on May 21 is a case in point. Expect to see a lot of jokes about it as the day gets closer.

May 11, 2011

Judgment Day is almost upon us but don't worry, be happy

There are only 10 more days until May 21, which is Judgment Day when the Rapture happens! What, you didn't know this? You don't even know what the Rapture is? Let me fill you in.

The Rapture is the name given to the occasion when all the true believers in Jesus will be suddenly taken up to heaven, prior to him coming back to Earth in all his glory to smite all the sinners who are left behind and then destroys the world. Or something like that. It is all a bit confusing but the main thing to bear in mind is that it is definitely not a good sign if you are still here on May 22 because that means you are not among the chosen few. You are going to be in for a rough time for the next five months before the world comes to a final end on October 21, 2011, totally messing up the baseball World Series that starts on October 19. If the currently hot Cleveland Indians make it to the World Series and the Earth is destroyed before they win, it will confirm the dark suspicions in the minds of Cleveland sports fans that god hates Cleveland, probably because of their repulsive Chief Wahoo symbol.

How do we know that Judgment Day will fall on May 21? This website tells you how they calculated the date. They say that a close reading of all the clues in the Bible says it will occur exactly 7,000 years after Noah's flood. Even some Rapturists may be surprised that this implies that the Rapture will occur in 2011 CE since according to Bishop Ussher's famous calculation, the Earth was supposed to have been created in 4004 BCE and Noah's flood occurred on 2348 BCE. So, according to Ussher's chronology, 7,000 years after the flood would mean that the Rapture would occur in the year 4653 CE, which gives us plenty of time to destroy the world in other ways, such as with global warming or nuclear wars, and save Jesus the trouble of coming back to do it himself, since I am sure he has lots of other demands on his time.

There have been other predictions of the end of the world that failed to materialize. But the authors of these new calculations say that, although based on the same Bible as the earlier ones, this time they have got it right. Their new dates are as follows.

• 11,013 BC—Creation. God created the world and man (Adam and Eve).
  
• 4990 BC—The flood of Noah’s day. All perished in a worldwide flood. Only Noah, his wife, and his 3 sons and their wives survived in the ark (6023 years from creation).
  
• 7 BC—The year Jesus Christ was born (11,006 years from creation).
  
• 33 AD—The year Jesus Christ was crucified and the church age began (11,045 years from creation; 5023 calendar years from the flood).
  
• 1988 AD—This year ended the church age and began the great tribulation period of 23 years (13,000 years from creation).
  
• 1994 AD—On September 7th, the first 2300-day period of the great tribulation came to an end and the latter rain began, commencing God’s plan to save a great multitude of people outside of the churches (13,006 years from creation).
  
• 2011 AD—On May 21st, Judgment Day will begin and the rapture (the taking up into heaven of God’s elect people) will occur at the end of the 23-year great tribulation. On October 21st, the world will be destroyed by fire (7000 years from the flood; 13,023 years from creation).

Don't confuse this end of the world with that predicted by the Mayans. Because their calendar only went up to 2012, some people interpreted it to mean that they somehow knew that the world would end that year. But since the Mayans were heathens who did not know Jesus and their calendar was not based on the Bible, they obviously cannot be trusted.

Notice that we are supposed to have gone through a period of 'great tribulation' that began in 1988 but frankly I had not noticed anything particularly different happening that year or since. But in hindsight, the signs were all there. In 1988 Bobby McFerrin's song Don't Worry, Be Happy won a Grammy award for best song (as well as awards for best album and best male vocalist) which we should have recognized as the sign of the Apocalypse. The title itself was likely code to reassure anxious true believers that they would be saved. Another missed clue was that at 1:15 in this music video (which includes Christopher Reeve and Robin Williams), McFerrin is suddenly whisked up out of his shoes and socks to heaven. People disappearing suddenly and leaving their clothes behind is a dead giveaway that the Rapture is occurring.

I think the evidence is overwhelming that May 21 is the day, so basically we have just ten days left to shape up and get on god's good side or have to evade slaughter in the following five months, which would be pointless since we would end up in hell on October 21 anyway.

Where presumably our punishment will be that we will have to listen to Don't Worry, Be Happy on an endless loop.

May 10, 2011

The 'religions of peace' keep on killing

The Sunni rulers of Bahrain are destroying Shia mosques and attacking demonstrators in this majority Shia country. There are deadly clashes between Christians and Muslims in Egypt.

Religious apologists are always telling us that their religions are peaceful and that those who perpetrate violence are not being true to it. But it does not seem to strike them as odd that nothing seems to rouse people to a murderous fury more easily than to feel that their god of peace and love has been slighted.

Education and religious belief

There is an interesting relationship between education and religious belief. It is often assumed that increased education leads to greater levels of disbelief in god. The fact that religion is in rapid decline (as I tried to document in my series Why Atheism is Winning) and heading towards extinction in the developed world, where levels of education are highest, suggests such a correlation.

But it would be wrong to infer that this implies a direct causal relationship between education and lack of religion. The stronger causal relationship is that increased modernity leads to decline in religion, and modernity involves more than just education. Religion thrives on fear of death and the afterlife, and it could be that improved standards of living and a lowering of fears and insecurity about living life in this world are what undermine its appeal. The negative effect on religion may thus be indirect, by enabling greater levels of modernity and higher standards of living.

Even if one infers a direct link between education and disbelief, the relationship need not be monotonic in that people with lower levels of education are necessarily greater believers. I wrote about four years ago that "a longitudinal study of 10,000 adolescents actually found the opposite effect, that those who did not go on to college had greater declines in attending services, in the importance or religion, and in disaffiliation from religion" and that there is some evidence that religious belief can actually increase when people go to college. Why? Because they learn how to better find rationalizations for the beliefs they were indoctrinated with as children. Thus up to a point, an increased amount of formal education can actually lead to greater belief because it suppresses people's natural curiosity and makes them more accepting of the verdicts of 'authorities' (such as 'experts' and the authors of textbooks), while not being able to distinguish between reliable authorities who use good evidence and closely reasoned arguments to arrive at judgments, and unreliable authorities (like priests and theologians) who simply assert dogma as if they were deep truths, without providing any evidence to back them up.

It seems as if belief in religion follows the pattern described in the poem An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) that goes:

So by false Learning is good Sense defac'd.
Some are bewilder'd in the Maze of Schools,
And some made Coxcombs Nature meant but Fools.
In search of Wit these lose their common Sense,
And then turn Criticks in their own Defence.

Many of the arguments for god by theologians and philosophers are so incredible that one finds it hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously, unless one has surrendered logic and common sense and substituted for them a rudimentary skill at rationalization that blinds one to the flaws in the arguments. As Michael Shermer says in his book Why People Believe Weird Things (2002, p. 283): "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." Or, as George Orwell put it even more acidly in his Notes on Nationalism (1945) in the context of people willing to believe in political absurdities, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

But while some learning can increase religious belief, still deeper learning usually leads to a decline again. This widely quoted passage from Pope's poem makes this point:

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

The evidence is quite convincing, for example, that very high levels of education, especially in the sciences, are strongly correlated with disbelief in a god. The Pew survey of religious knowledge in the US found that "academics in the natural and social sciences at elite research universities are significantly less religious than the general population. Almost 52 percent of scientists surveyed identified themselves as having no current religious affiliation compared with only 14 percent of the general population" and "In a poll taken in 1998, only 7 percent of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the elite of American scientists said they believed in a personal God."

It is not increasing education alone but what kind of education that also matters. After all, many theologians have great amounts of formal education but that does not prevent them from putting forward the most absurd question-begging claims for religion. I think that two kinds of attitudes towards knowledge lead to greater disbelief.

One is when people begin to take a skeptical attitude towards their most cherished beliefs and begin to ask for evidence and reason in support those assertions that they had previously taken for granted as self-evidently true. This tends to naturally occur in the highest levels of scientific education where one needs to do this to be taken seriously by one's peers.

But this can also happen without much formal education for people who simply have a thirst for knowledge and an inquiring mind and a critical bent. Some of the sharpest minds I have encountered have belonged to people who did not go to college at all or dropped out and simply educated themselves. But to be able to do that more effectively, they need access to the literature. It used to be that serious thinkers used to write books aimed at the general public but with the advent of modern universities and technical journals, scholars started writing for other scholars and this changed the nature of their output, making them fairly opaque to the general reader, and thus resulted in a very small readership.

For a long time self-educated people were limited in the availability of accessible books and articles on science or atheism or critiques of religion. The recent spate of serious books aimed at the general public and written by the new/unapologetic atheists has changed all that. Suddenly all that powerful but hitherto esoteric knowledge has been made accessible to anyone interested, and the fact that these books are selling by the millions is evidence that many people have long sought such knowledge about religion and how advances in science have undermined belief in god.

The other attitude that leads to skepticism is when people go more deeply into their religion and religious texts and I will look at this in a subsequent post.

May 09, 2011

More billboards!

The godless heathen are spreading their message everywhere. I got an email from blog reader David about a billboard that he and fellow members of the NCW Freethinkers Meetup in eastern Washington state have put up.

David says that the region is very reactionary and religious and so this was quite a bold move on their part, even though the billboard does not directly undermine belief in god but only asks for the separation of church and state to be maintained. But I suspect that there are a lot of closet skeptics in that region as well, and this billboard will hearten them that they are not alone.

So well done David and the NCW Freethinkers!

May 07, 2011

Steroid Jesus

An odd problem that Christianity faces in the US is that Jesus is seen as basically a wuss. All that turning-the-other-cheek stuff does not sit well with a country that has a Chuck Norris mindset. This may be partly the reason that churches tend to be predominantly elderly and female.

To appeal to men, I have written before about how some Christian groups have developed worship services that involve all manner of manly activities.

But this may not be enough. What Jesus additionally needs is a physical makeover to make him less effeminate and more appealing to the testosterone-heavy crowd and this billboard that purportedly appeared in Myrtle Beach, SC may be one strategy.

Reports of this billboard date back to the mid-2000 period but I have not been able to confirm that it is real.

Of course, no post on manliness is complete without a video of the Village People singing their hit song Macho Man.

May 04, 2011

Surprising, unsurprising, and amusing facts about US religious knowledge

The recent Pew survey of US religious knowledge that I discussed on the radio and on this blog, had some features that I want to discuss further.

The things that surprised me about the Pew study were:

• That 45% of Catholics did not understand what transubstantiation meant. You would think that this would be a big part of their preparation for first communion and subsequent devotional activities. That the number of unaware people is so high suggests that this part of their doctrine is viewed as so absurd that it is downplayed. I mean, really, the idea that the wafer and the wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus because of a prayer and are then consumed seems outlandish and even macabre. It is likely that although the words "This is the body" and "This is the blood" are said during the service, it is not emphasized that people should take it literally.
  
• 43% of Jews did not recognize Maimonides as being Jewish. I thought that Maimonides was for Jews what Aquinas is for Catholics, someone they admire as a religious intellectual, whom they can point to when their religion is described as a childish superstition.
  
• High level of knowledge about Mormonism. "Around four-in-ten Americans know that the Mormon religion was founded sometime after 1800 (44%) and that the Book of Mormon tells the story of Jesus appearing to people in the Americas (40%). About half (51%) correctly identify Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as a Mormon." This really surprised me. Why would people know so much about this tiny religious group? Is it because of Mitt Romney's run for the presidency? The South Park shows?

The thing that did not surprise me was that atheists knew more about religion than Christians. In general minorities in any community tend to be more knowledgeable than majorities because they need that knowledge to navigate the majority culture. Furthermore, atheists usually grew up in religious homes. People who leave a belief structure usually first try to reconcile the conflicts by looking deeper into it to see if it can be made acceptable and only leave when the effort seems futile. So it is not surprising that atheists know more about religions since they usually know what they are walking away from.

The thing that amused me was "Respondents who say the Bible was written by man and is not the word of God get 18 questions right, on average. Those who say the Bible is the word of God but should not be taken literally get an average of 16.3 questions right. And those who say the Bible is the word of God and should be taken literally, word for word, get an average of 14.5 questions right… Holding other factors constant, people who say Scripture was written by men answer nearly three additional questions correctly, compared with those who say Scripture is the word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word." Note that the overall average score was 16 questions right out of 32.

Wouldn't you think that people who believed that god was directly talking to them through the Bible would read it voraciously and be intimately familiar with what is says? I mean, we are talking about the same god who they say can take them into heaven or thrown them into hell for eternity. This should be a big deal. The fact that they are the ones who know the least suggests to me that one should treat the assertions of biblical literalists with some skepticism. Many of them say they think the Bible is literally true because their religious leaders tell them so but deep in their hearts I don't think they buy it.

May 02, 2011

When theologians justify atrocities

Since there no credible evidence to back up the idea of god, believers essentially have to resort to debating tricks to try and justify their beliefs. Theologians are quite good at this because they have a lot of practice. After all, it takes considerable rhetorical and logical skill to debate questions like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But debating tricks are just that, tricks, and any reasonably good debater can quickly identify the ones used by an opponent and neutralize them.

In a comment to an earlier post, Mike Haubrich gives a link to a post on his own blog where he takes apart one of theologian William Lane Craig's favorite debating tactics. What arouses Mike's ire is a post by Craig in which he justifies the most appalling acts by god simply because they are commanded by his particular god.

There is a trap that believers in a god simply cannot avoid. The only way to maintain the idea of a loving god who acts in accordance with our present beliefs about what constitutes humane values and morality is to be erratic and inconsistent, picking and choosing from religious texts which events to take at face value and which to ignore and making assumptions as needed to overcome problems, even if a new assumption should contradict an earlier one.

Intellectuals like Craig find this beneath them because it is so obviously cherry picking and ad hoc and so they try to build an intellectually consistent system. His approach comes under the heading of the fancy name 'divine command theory' in which something is good if god commands it. Here it is in a nutshell:

I think that a good start at this problem is to enunciate our ethical theory that underlies our moral judgements. According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses.
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On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command.

Of course it is only your god's command that gets this absolution, not somebody else's stray god. In pursuing this logic, as Mike so clearly shows in his post, Lane is forced to conclusions that justify monstrous and barbaric acts such as genocide, the murder of children, and rape.

Ophelia Benson and Greta Christina also weigh in on the horrific implications of Craig's line of reasoning. Christina makes an important point:

I want to make something very clear before I go on: William Lane Craig is not some drooling wingnut. He's not some extremist Fred Phelps type, ranting about how God's hateful vengeance is upon us for tolerating homosexuality. He's not some itinerant street preacher, railing on college campuses about premarital holding hands. He's an extensively educated, widely published, widely read theological scholar and debater. When believers accuse atheists of ignoring sophisticated modern theology, Craig is one of the people they're talking about. [My italics]

And he said that as long as God gives the thumbs-up, it's okay to kill pretty much anybody. It's okay to kill bad people, because they're bad and they deserve it... and it's okay to kill good people, because they wind up in Heaven. As long as God gives the thumbs-up, it's okay to systematically wipe out entire races. As long as God gives the thumbs-up, it's okay to slaughter babies and children. Craig said -- not essentially, not as a paraphrase, but literally, in quotable words -- "the death of these children was actually their salvation."

She then poses an excellent question:

So why did this story not make headlines? Why was there not an appalled outcry from the Christian world? Why didn't Christian leaders from all sects take to the pulpits to disavow Craig, and to express their utter repugnance with his views, and to explain in no uncertain terms that their religion does not, and will not, defend the extermination of races or the slaughter of children?

Because the things he said are not that unusual.

Because lots of people share his views.

Because these kinds of contortions are far too common in religious morality. Because all too often, religion twists even the most fundamental human morality into positions that, in any other circumstance, most people would see as repulsive, monstrous, and entirely indefensible.

The post by Craig that Mike and Ophelia Benson and Greta Christina take apart has to be read to be believed. If I had set out to create a parody of biblical morality to discredit the idea of god, I could not have done a better job. It is a perfect example of a superficially clever argument that only a person who values belief in god over basic morality, or even decency, could construct.

Craig embodies the type George Orwell spoke of in his Notes on Nationalism (1945): "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

April 29, 2011

The creationists' dinosaur problem

Dinosaurs are a headache for biblical literalists. Since religion has no rational basis, you have to build your base of believers by indoctrinating children at a young age. And because children are fascinated by dinosaurs and can't seem to get enough of them, you need to work them into the story somehow. The fact that dinosaurs existed at one time and are now extinct is an unquestioned fact and must be faced. The catch is that dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Bible. It is no good for creationist adults to deny their existence the way they deny other inconvenient scientific facts because even the most trusting and naïve child is going to balk at such a counterfactual statement.

Young Earth creationists cannot accept the most common scientific explanation of dinosaur extinction as a result of an asteroid collision with the Earth 65 million years ago that changed the climate, because that explanation is too deeply integrated into an old Earth model in which dinosaurs lived long before humans. Biblical literalists believe in a 6,000 year old Earth in which humans existed from the beginning and hence were contemporaneous with all animals so it would be hard to explain why the catastrophic event that wiped out the dinosaurs did not destroy humans as well. Besides asteroids are not mentioned in the Bible either.

As a result, there has developed an entire creationist cottage industry devoted to (a) arguing that the Bible does indeed talk about dinosaurs, and (b) providing explanations as to why they are no longer around.

Blog reader David sent along a little cartoon booklet titled There Go the Dinosaurs! that gives one such attempt. As he said it is at the same time both hilarious and sad.

The booklet says that the reason dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Bible is that they used to be called dragons, which are mentioned extensively in the Bible, and that they were 'renamed' as dinosaurs in 1841. It is true that the name dinosaur was only coined in 1842 by the naturalist Richard Owen after the discovery of the fossils. But this 'renaming' gambit that makes dragons and dinosaurs the same is quite a neat trick because it solves two embarrassing problems at once. One is that dinosaurs existed but the Bible does not mention them and the other is that dragons are widely accepted to be mythical creatures that never existed but the Bible and other fables repeatedly refer to them. Of course, since god knows the future, it does not explain why he did not tell the authors of the Bible to use the term dinosaur. But we'll let that go.

So why did the dinosaurs go extinct, if it was not due to a catastrophic event? The booklet said that humans hunted them for their meat. During the great flood, a pair of dinosaurs was saved in the ark by Noah and after the flood subsided they reproduced like other animals. But because the flood wiped out all the vegetation, the air in the immediate post-flood era was oxygen poor. Apparently dinosaurs need more oxygen-rich air and as a result they got tired easily and couldn't run as fast (like what happens to humans in high altitudes, I suppose) and so were much more easily caught and killed. Hence they went extinct.

What is interesting about this scenario is the attempt to provide a scientific-sounding explanation for an accepted fact that picks and chooses from the scientific universe. What creationists do is mix as much standard science as possible with evidence-free assertions. Creationists tend to use science only when it consists of either those things that are common knowledge and cannot be disputed or things that people experience in their everyday lives and seem commonsensical or it provides results that they agree with. Any science that is not common knowledge and contradicts the Bible is rejected. Radiometric dating, for example, requires esoteric and technical knowledge and thus can be dismissed and its conclusions breezily cast aside.

The way that creationists operate is to accept just those scientific facts that 'every one knows' (continents drift, during photosynthesis trees take in carbon dioxide and emit oxygen, the Earth moves around the Sun, the universe is vast) and then weave elaborate stories around these anchors to create 'explanations'. The catch is that as time goes by, more and more things that once could be dismissed as esoteric start to enter the world of 'everyone knows' knowledge, creating more headaches for creationists, requiring more ad hoc additions. For example, creationists realize that it is futile to deny that the continents once formed a single large land mass that drifted apart. But in order to explain how that could have happened in 6,000 years, they say that they moved really fast until just recently.

The idea that trees are producers of oxygen (true) and that low oxygen content in air can more easily lead to fatigue (true) is thrown in with a purely ad hoc assertion (that dinosaurs need more oxygen-rich air than humans) to arrive at the desired result. As Rudyard Kipling showed with his Just So Stories once you are allowed this freedom to be evidence-free, you can explain anything, a point reinforced by the cartoon strip Jesus and Mo.

What is really going to destroy contemporary creationism is the age of the Earth and evolution. The idea that the Earth is really old, of the order of billions of years, is now so widely accepted that creationists will come to rue the day that they decided that a young Earth and special creation of species had to be bedrock beliefs. Even the mainstream media, ever solicitous of not offending people's religious beliefs, no longer bother to provide 'balance' when it talks of the age of the Earth being 13.7 4.5 billion years old. The same is true that species have evolved.

At some point, young people will peel away from creationism because just so stories that argue for a young Earth and special creation of species will be just too far fetched for them to take.

April 28, 2011

Atheism's morality

In his regular New York Times column, David Brooks trots out his usual banalities, this time about how without god we cannot have a timeless morality.

That’s because people are not gods. No matter how special some individuals may think they are, they don’t have the ability to understand the world on their own, establish rules of good conduct on their own, impose the highest standards of conduct on their own, or avoid the temptations of laziness on their own.
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Rigorous theology helps people avoid mindless conformity. Without timeless rules, we all have a tendency to be swept up in the temper of the moment. But tough-minded theologies are countercultural. They insist on principles and practices that provide an antidote to mere fashion.

How can people write such nonsense? Does he really think that how we understand what the Bible says about morality has not changed from Biblical times?

The book The Christian Delusion edited by John W. Loftus has a chapter titled Yahweh is a Moral Monster by Hector Avalos that lists the horrendous morality that is found in the Bible. (The essay is largely a refutation of a defense of god offered by Christian apologist Paul Copan in an essay titled Is Yahweh a Moral Monster? The New Atheists and Old Testament Ethics that can be read here. )

In his chapter, Avalos ends (p. 232) with a section titled Atheism's Morality that is worth quoting at length:

Copan fundamentally misunderstands the New Atheism insofar as he believes that it cannot provide a sound moral ground for its judgments. For a Christian apologist to think he or she has triumphed by pointing out the moral relativism of the New Atheism is to miss the entire point. As an atheist, I don't deny that I am a moral relativist. Rather, my aim is to expose the fact that Christians are also moral relativists. Indeed, when it comes to ethics, there are only two types of people in this world:

1. Those who admit they are moral relativists; and
2. Those who do not admit they are moral relativists.

Copan fails because he cannot admit that he is a moral relativist, and he thinks that God will solve the problem of moral relativism. But having a God in a moral system only creates a tautology. All we end up saying is: "X is bad because X is bad." Thus, if we say that we believe in God, and he says idolatry is evil, then that is a tautology: "God says idolatry is bad and so idolatry is bad because God says it is bad." Or we end up using this tautology: "Whatever God says is good because whatever God says is good."

As Kai Nielsen deftly argues, human beings are always the ultimate judges of morality even if we believe in God. After all, the very judgment that God is good is a human judgment. The judgment that what God commands is good is also a human judgment. So Christians are not doing anything different except mystifying and complicating morality. Christians are simply projecting what they call "good" onto a supernatural being. They offer us no evidence that their notion of good comes from outside of themselves [My italics]. And that is where the danger lies. Basing a moral system on unverifiable supernatural beings only creates more violence and endangers our species. I have already discussed this at length in my book, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence.

Copan cites Dinesh D'Souza who repeats the oft-cited anecdote that atheists have killed more people than religionists. Again, this is based on the false idea that Nazis were atheistic Darwinists, and that Stalinist genocide was due to atheism rather than to forced collectivism (something I discuss in detail in chapter 14 of this book). Speaking only for myself here, I can say that atheism offers a much better way to construct moral rules. We can construct them on the basis of verifiable common interests, known causes, and known consequences. There is an ironclad difference between secular and faith-based morality, and we can illustrate it very simply with these propositions:

A. I have to kill person X because Allah said so.
B. I have to kill person X because he is pointing a gun at me.

In case A, we commit violence on the basis of unverifiable premises. In case B, we might commit violence on the basis of verifiable premises (I can verify a gun exists, and that it is pointed at me). If I am going to kill or be killed, I want it to be for a reason that I can verify to be true. If the word "moral" describes the set of practices that accord with our values, and if our highest value is life, then it is always immoral to trade real human lives for something that does not exist or cannot be verified to exist.

What does not exist has no value relative to what does exist. What cannot be proven to exist should never be placed above what does exist. If we value life, then you should never trade something that exists, especially life, for something that does not exist or cannot be proven to exist. That is why it would always be immoral to ever take a life based on faith claims. It is that simple.

Avalos captures quite succinctly my views on this topic. I am a moral relativist because I simply cannot see how a moral framework can be constructed that is independent of human input and judgments. The reason that Brooks thinks the rules are timeless is because a human being told him that one particular holy book's rules (out of the many holy books with their own rules) are given by a god and are thus timeless. He chose (or was indoctrinated) to believe that claim. How is that not a product of human judgment?

If a god were to suddenly appear to me, even then I would not unhesitatingly accept those moral commands. If this god said, for example, that I should murder my children (as the Bible says he told Abraham to do with his son Isaac) or indeed that I should murder anyone at all, I simply would not do it and I am confident that these days most people would do the same. None but the most fanatical god believers would comply and we would consider such people to be either insane or moral monsters.

If a god issued commands that we now consider immoral, he/she/it would face a revolt on his hands because all thinking people are, in the end, moral relativists and reject moral commands that are not congruent with their own moral sensibilities or based on agreed-upon humane principles.

April 26, 2011

Silly superstitions

Jonathan Turley writes about legislators in Kyrgyzstan who sacrificed seven sheep in order to get rid of evil spirits in the parliamentary chamber and about chickens that are sacrificed as part of the Jewish Kapparot ritual.

He ends his post by saying "What is astonishing is that some nations remain in the control of such superstitious throwbacks." I couldn't tell if he had his tongue in cheek because, apart from details like animal sacrifice, how is this more of a superstitious throwback than Congress starting its day with a prayer or priests blessing houses and the like?

April 23, 2011

Betting on a sure thing

Texas is experiencing a drought and so the governor has decided to proclaim "the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life."

Since no time frame is specified for when the rain should fall, such prayers are bound to be answered, at which point everyone can thank god for his mercy and blessings.

Next, people in Texas are asked to pray for the sun to rise tomorrow.

(Via Pharyngula.)

April 21, 2011

Imagine there's no hell

The latest issue of Time magazine has as its cover story the question "What if there's no hell?" which focuses on a 40-year old evangelical preacher named Rob Bell who is head of a megachurch in Michigan called Mars Hill Bible Church that boasts 7,000 members attending its services each Sunday. He is described as a 'rock star' in the evangelical movement and has just published a book titled Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived that is causing consternation in evangelical circles by arguing that hell may not exist and that heaven may be open to everyone, not just those who accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior, the usual standard for admission among evangelicals.

To be quite frank, I had never heard of Bell or his church or his book before I came across this article but I thought it interesting that yet another evangelical is finding the concept of hell problematic enough that he wants to abandon it. Hell has always been a thorn in the side of more thoughtful believers. As I have written before, its existence as a place of permanent and indescribable torment is simply incompatible with any concept of a good god.

I grew up in the liberal Protestant tradition where there was very little talk about hell from our ministers. They were too humane to preach that all unbelievers would suffer unbelievable torments. What they did was instead emphasize that heaven was a wonderful place because you got to hang out with god and hell was being denied this interaction. In this view, heaven was like a wonderful party that you would enjoy going to and at which there would be this person that you had really, really wanted to meet all your life. Hell was what you would feel if you were not invited and thus missing out on a great time. Basically it was what we might call 'hell lite', where you would feel kind of sad, but would not suffer physically.

But many Christians really like the old-fashioned idea of hell and seem to relish the thought of unbelievers suffering torments. The sainted Thomas Aquinas said in his Summa Theologica "That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell." How nice for them. And this prospect of future gloating is common today as evidenced by the popularity of the Left Behind series of books and Ann Coulter's statement "I defy any of my co-religionists to tell me that they do not laugh at the idea of [Richard] Dawkins burning in hell."(Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), p. 320-1.) If you, as an atheist, ever engage in conversation with such people, it is not long before they warn you that your unbelief is going to cost you big time when you die, so that you are foolish not to accept Jesus as your savior right now. In fact, for such people, fear of hell seems to be a more powerful motivator for allegiance to god than the attractions of heaven.

It is easy to see why fear of hell is a more potent weapon in the religious arsenal for recruiting and retaining believers than the lure of heaven. Try this exercise. Imagine heaven as the most wonderful place you can conceive of where you experience all the things that make you happy or content. Then think about that experience continuing forever. I simply cannot do so without it becoming crushingly boring. Even children would get bored with Disney World if they were stuck there forever.

This clip from the film Bedazzled (1967), in which Lucifer (Peter Cook) acts as the fallen angel who comes down to Earth for the soul of a short-order cook (Dudley Moore), provides a good illustration.

On the other hand, it is easy to imagine the unpleasantness of eternal torment because even if the same torture is done over and over again, you can easily imagine that it would still be painful. Unlike heaven, hell never gets old. Take away hell, and the appeal of belief is greatly reduced.

The evangelical traditionalists are aware of this danger and are appalled by Bell's apostasy. R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, says that Bell's message is "theologically disastrous. Any of us should be concerned when a matter of theological importance is played with in a subversive way." Mohler is right for the wrong reasons. Eliminating hell is subversive to religion because stoking fear of what happens after death is religion's main recruiting strategy.

In 2005, This American Life ran the story of Carlton Pearson, the head of a successful Pentecostal megachurch in Tulsa, Oklahoma with Sunday attendance of 5,000 who, like Bell, began to question the idea of hell. Pearson just could not reconcile the idea of a loving god with one who consigns people to writhe and burn in the fires of hell for eternity, and started preaching as if hell did not exist. His assistant pastors were dismayed and broke away and formed their own church, taking much of the congregation with them so that it dwindled down to a few hundred, though Pearson started getting some new converts. You can listen to the episode.

Will this happen to Bell and his church too? It will be interesting to watch.

April 19, 2011

That god, such a kidder

Michele Bachman recently said that back in 2003 when she was a Minnesota state senator and heard that the Massachusetts Supreme Court had ruled that bans on same-sex marriages were unconstitutional, she prayed to her god asking what she should do and her god told her to introduce an amendment in the state legislature defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

But for some inexplicable reason, after telling her this her god did not use his omnipotency to get enough other legislators to support the measure and it failed, showing once again that her god is such a tease. Either that or he is simply disorganized and lacks follow through. As Woody Allen once said, "If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."

April 15, 2011

Morals without god

Where do our morals come from? Primatologist Frans de Waal has a fascinating article titled Morals Without God? where he poses the questions: Can we envision a world without God? Would this world be good? The article is long but well worth reading and here I will outline his main thesis.

He begins by saying that evolution poses a direct challenge to the idea of a god-given morality, which is why so many religious people react negatively to it.

Don't think for one moment that the current battle lines between biology and fundamentalist Christianity turn around evidence. One has to be pretty immune to data to doubt evolution, which is why books and documentaries aimed at convincing the skeptics are a waste of effort. They are helpful for those prepared to listen, but fail to reach their target audience. The debate is less about the truth than about how to handle it. For those who believe that morality comes straight from God the creator, acceptance of evolution would open a moral abyss.

Like me, de Waal finds quite repellant (and counter to the evidence) the idea that we can only have morality if there is a god.

Perhaps it is just me, but I am wary of anyone whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago.

Of course, religious people can counter that god had placed these moral impulses in us even before religions came about. When you are unconstrained by evidence and can simply make up stuff to suit your needs, there is no challenge that is insurmountable.

Religious people seem to feel the need to claim some distinct and special place in nature that is not biological and thus provides evidence of some special relationship to god. But all past efforts to find things that make us unique among species have fallen by the wayside.

In the field of cognition, the march towards continuity between human and animal has been inexorable… True, humanity never runs out of claims of what sets it apart, but it is a rare uniqueness claim that holds up for over a decade. This is why we don't hear anymore that only humans make tools, imitate, think ahead, have culture, are self-aware, or adopt another's point of view.

If we consider our species without letting ourselves be blinded by the technical advances of the last few millennia, we see a creature of flesh and blood with a brain that, albeit three times larger than a chimpanzee's, doesn't contain any new parts. Even our vaunted prefrontal cortex turns out to be of typical size: recent neuron-counting techniques classify the human brain as a linearly scaled-up monkey brain. No one doubts the superiority of our intellect, but we have no basic wants or needs that are not also present in our close relatives.

He points out that this commonality with other species is not a new idea, that Charles Darwin himself felt that there was nothing unique that separated humans from other species, that we were simply more developed in some areas.

Charles Darwin was interested in how morality fits the human-animal continuum, proposing in "The Descent of Man": "Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts … would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed … as in man."

It is this that so troubles religious believers because it undermines the crux of the religious arguments for god based on a supposedly innate moral sense shared by all humans but not shared by other species. One way of arguing that is to claim that the primal impulse in nature is selfishness, partly arising from a misunderstanding of 'the selfish gene' meme that also was the title of Richard Dawkins's famous book.

Unfortunately, modern popularizers have strayed from these insights. Like Robert Wright in "The Moral Animal," they argue that true moral tendencies cannot exist — not in humans and even less in other animals — since nature is one hundred percent selfish.
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Fortunately, there has been a resurgence of the Darwinian view that morality grew out of the social instincts. Psychologists stress the intuitive way we arrive at moral judgments while activating emotional brain areas, and economists and anthropologists have shown humanity to be far more cooperative, altruistic, and fair than predicted by self-interest models. Similarly, the latest experiments in primatology reveal that our close relatives will do each other favors even if there's nothing in it for themselves.

He provides many nice examples of the way that other species exhibit many of the qualities that we once ascribed solely to humans, such as kindness, concern, cooperation, and sensitivity to others' emotions.

Such observations fit the emerging field of animal empathy, which deals not only with primates, but also with canines, elephants, even rodents. A typical example is how chimpanzees console distressed parties, hugging and kissing them, which behavior is so predictable that scientists have analyzed thousands of cases. Mammals are sensitive to each other’s emotions, and react to others in need. The whole reason people fill their homes with furry carnivores and not with, say, iguanas and turtles, is because mammals offer something no reptile ever will. They give affection, they want affection, and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs.

Mammals may derive pleasure from helping others in the same way that humans feel good doing good.

Evangelical Christian and scientist Francis Collins in his book The Language of God (p. 264) also argues that human beings are possessed of a "Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history" and that could only have come from god. But de Waals says that although we do have some innate moral sense, we do not have to appeal to god to explain them because at their elemental level, they have a biological basis, and it is this basis that allows us to build on them and create the moral structures we now have.

[W]ould it be realistic to ask people to be considerate of others if we had not already a natural inclination to be so? Would it make sense to appeal to fairness and justice in the absence of powerful reactions to their absence? Imagine the cognitive burden if every decision we took needed to be vetted against handed-down principles. I am a firm believer in the Humean position that reason is the slave of the passions. We started out with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is also where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. Rather than having developed morality from scratch, we received a huge helping hand from our background as social animals.

This does not mean that there are no differences at all between humans and other species. What humans have done is use culture to build upon those primal instincts.

At the same time, however, I am reluctant to call a chimpanzee a "moral being." This is because sentiments do not suffice. We strive for a logically coherent system, and have debates about how the death penalty fits arguments for the sanctity of life, or whether an unchosen sexual orientation can be wrong. These debates are uniquely human… This is what sets human morality apart: a move towards universal standards combined with an elaborate system of justification, monitoring and punishment. [My italics]
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For example, female chimpanzees have been seen to drag reluctant males towards each other to make up after a fight, removing weapons from their hands, and high-ranking males regularly act as impartial arbiters to settle disputes in the community. I take these hints of community concern as yet another sign that the building blocks of morality are older than humanity, and that we do not need God to explain how we got where we are today.

It should be increasingly obvious that a god is unnecessary as an explanatory concept for morality or indeed for anything.

April 14, 2011

Arguments against a god-given morality

The idea that there is an objective morality founders on the fact that our moral standards have changed dramatically over time. An objective god-given morality is one that presumably should be both universal and unchanging with time since god is presumably omnipresent and unchanging. And yet that is obviously at odds with history, where most moral judgments have varied from place to place and over time. Many of the most appallingly evil actions are condoned and even encouraged in religious texts as coming from god, though such actions are now disowned. If there is an objective morality, why was it not obvious to people before and why were there different standards for different communities?

What we do see, though, is a pleasing convergence in moral standards as time goes by, even though we still have far to go. This is almost entirely due to cultural awareness spreading. In just a couple of centuries we have decided that slavery is evil and that discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual preference, disability, race and ethnicity, and age is wrong. We no longer tolerate human sacrifices or child labor. We find torture abhorrent, which forces governments that still practice it to do it in secret or resort to euphemisms to hide their shame. We are less tolerant of wanton cruelty to animals, though we still eat them. Except for a few countries like Saudi Arabia, we no longer punish people for offences by amputating limbs or stoning or beheading.

These recent advances in our moral sensibilities are largely or entirely cultural developments that had nothing to do with god. In fact, they are counter to god's supposed commands since many of these cruel practices originate in the allegedly holy books and are supposed to be god's recommended policies. The importance of culture in advancing the idea of what is good is tremendous. We have made great strides in this area without appealing to god so those who argue that without god we would be morally worse off are fighting a losing battle.

This excellent video clip from QualiaSoup will give you, in less than ten minutes, all the arguments you need to debate anyone who claims that morality can only come from god.

The argument is summarized in the slide at the 8:10 minute mark where he says:

• NO ONE can claim to KNOW that any god exists
• Even if god does exist:
  • NO evidence there is only one god
  • NO evidence it is a personal god
  • NO evidence its nature is perfect
• NO reliable source of divine values
• NO consistent morality among theists
• VIOLENT moral disagreement among theists
• NO objective method for deciding whose interpretation of divine values is correct

NO CONSISTENT INFALLBLE THEISTIC MORALITY

I find the idea that we can only have morality because of religion quite repellent. What does it say about someone that the only reason they don't murder, rape, or steal is because they think god will punish them?

In this video clip, Edward Current imagines what would happen if god disappeared.

The idea that we need a god in order to arrive at moral principles on which to base our lives and societies seems to me to be so self-evidently absurd that I really cannot take seriously anyone who advocates it.

April 13, 2011

Can you be good without god?

Yes.

It is a simple answer to a simple question. It should be quite self-evident to anyone. And yet, religious people manage to get some atheists to actually debate it. P. Z. Myers has posted all the YouTube links to a recent debate between Sam Harris and theologian William Lane Craig on the topic "Does Good Come From God?" I watched about half of it and although it was mildly interesting, I tuned out because I have little patience for discussions based on unexamined and unsubstantiated premises.

Craig was trying to make the case that without a god, there can be no objective morality or standards for what is good. My response to that argument is "So what?" What makes people think that the universe ought to have objective morality? All these discussions about how there must be a god because without a god people would go berserk and murder everyone else and life would be awful and not worth living seems to me to be missing the point. We cannot will god into existence just because we can't bear the thought of life without god.

Whether god exists or doesn't exist is a purely empirical question that can only be determined by evidence. In the absence of evidence for god's existence, we have to conclude that there is no god and must learn to deal with the consequences. That's it. The level of angst that may be produced by taking away the idea of an objective morality (or a god to specify it) is immaterial, unless you are going down the road of the 'noble lie', where the masses of people are deliberately fed falsehoods in order to maintain social order, while only the elite are aware of the truth. (For those who raise the false counter-argument that in the absence of proof that god doesn't exist, we can conclude that god exists, I refer them to this post.)

It seems pretty obvious that we can explain our morality and ethics as derived from biology (things that emerged as a result of our evolutionary history and the propensities for which are genetically and environmentally based) and culture (behaviors that we as a society have consciously decided are desirable or not desirable). The only debate is over the relative weight that we assign to these two causes and that can vary depending on the particular moral issue we are focusing on. However much people may want to include god as a third cause, the truth is that we no longer need god to understand the existence of morality.

Religious people have to walk a fine line. On the one hand, they have to argue that only humans perceive this objective morality. If all species seemed to have the same moral compass, then that would argue convincingly that it has a biological origin derived from our common evolutionary history. To allow for the assertion of a god-given objective morality, they have to argue that humans have at least some unique moral sensibilities not possessed by other species and that these could only have come from god. On the other hand, they have to show that this moral sense is shared among all humans. If moral standards varied widely for different populations, that would argue for a cultural source.

The philosopher David Hume articulated the 'is-ought problem' (which is related to, but is not identical with, what is called the naturalistic fallacy) where he warned about making claims about what ought to be based on what is. For example, just because we find some property occurring in nature does not mean that that property is necessarily desirable. So we cannot argue that some action is moral simply because it seems to be part of nature.

For example, some people use the presence of homosexual behavior in other species to argue that such behavior is natural and thus should be accepted in humans. While I am fully supportive of equal rights for gay people, I disagree with this particular line of biological reasoning. We can and should uphold equal rights for gay people because there are good cultural reasons for doing so based on general human rights principles, irrespective of whether we can find support for them in biology

Most people understand that we cannot usually infer ought from is. But what religious people like Craig seem to be doing is committing the even worse offense of what one might call the 'ought-is fallacy', where because they think that we need an objective morality in order to keep our barbaric impulses under control, therefore it must exist. And since they also think that only a god can supply such a morality, therefore a god must exist also.

No.

Believers in god have to first establish using empirical evidence that god exists before they can use god in arguments about morality or anything else. You cannot argue for the existence of god on the basis of some property that you arbitrarily assert must exist (for whatever reason) and that could have only come from god.

The source of morals is a question of interest and worth investigating. As the human race progresses and science advances, we are going to be confronted with trickier issues of morality and so determining the bases of such decisions is a worthwhile activity. But introducing god not only does not help in elucidating this question, it makes things even murkier by introducing purely arbitrary and non-empirical elements into the discussion.

April 12, 2011

Know when to fold 'em

Commenter Peter alerted me to a story on This American Life about a gung-ho evangelical who went through the process that I have described before, where he goes to seminary and on learning Biblical history and scholarship becomes an atheist.

Filled with all the new information he now has as to why Christianity is false, he becomes zealous for atheism and tries to convert his family members, before he realizes that people join religious groups for a lot of benefits that have little to do with belief in god and that sometimes, on a personal level in the private sphere, it may be better to leave them alone.

The story starts at the 8:20 minute mark and goes until the 20:00 mark.

April 11, 2011

Evangelicals and fundamentalists

In the American Christian religious landscape one finds Catholics, mainline Protestant religious denominations, and the rest that one can describe as evangelicals and fundamentalists. While the Catholics form a distinct group, there is a great deal of overlap between the other three categories and it is not often easy to see what distinguishes them. In particular, people tend to use the words fundamentalists and evangelicals interchangeably.

John Green of the University of Akron describes four cardinal beliefs of evangelicals that distinguishes them from mainline Protestants:

One belief is that the Bible is inerrant. It was without error in all of its claims about the nature of the world and the nature of God. A second belief is that the only way to salvation is through belief in Jesus Christ. A third belief, and one that is most well known, is the idea that individuals must accept salvation for themselves. They must become converted. Sometimes that's referred to as a born-again experience, sometimes a little different language. Then the fourth cardinal belief of evangelicals is the need to proselytize, or in their case, to spread the evangel, to evangelize.

Now different members of the evangelical community have slightly different takes on those four cardinal beliefs. But what distinguishes the evangelicals from other Protestants and other Christians is these four central beliefs that set them apart.

Mainline Protestant Christians on the other hand have a slightly looser set of beliefs.

Mainline Protestants have a different perspective. They have a more modernist theology. So, for instance, they would read the Bible, not as the inerrant word of God, but as a historical document, which has God's word in it and a lot of very important truths, but that needs to be interpreted in every age by individuals of that time and that place.

Mainline Protestants tend to also believe that Jesus is the way to salvation. But many mainline Protestants would believe that perhaps there are other ways to salvation as well. People in other religious traditions, even outside of Christianity, may have access to God's grace and to salvation as well, on their own terms, and through their own means.

Mainline Protestants are much less concerned with personal conversion. Although they do talk about spiritual transformation, they'll often discuss a spiritual journey from one's youth to old age, leading on into eternity. So there is a sense of transformation, but there isn't that emphasis on conversion -- on that one moment or series of moments in which one's life is dramatically changed.

So mainline Protestants don't discount conversion, but they simply don't regard it as a central feature of their beliefs. Finally, mainline Protestants are somewhat less concerned with proselytizing than evangelicals. Certainly, proselytizing is something they believe in. They believe in sharing their beliefs with others, but not for the purposes of conversion necessarily. The idea of spreading the word in the mainline tradition is much broader than simply preaching the good news. It also involves economic development. It involves personal assistance, charity, a whole number of other activities.

Fundamentalists tend to have the most well defined belief structure as this article points out.

The first formulation of American fundamentalist beliefs can be traced to the Niagara Bible Conference and, in 1910, to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church which distilled these into what became known as the "five fundamentals":

• The inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit and the inerrancy of Scripture as a result of this.
  
• The virgin birth of Christ.
  
• The belief that Christ's death was the atonement for sin.
  
• The bodily resurrection of Christ.
  
• The historical reality of Christ's miracles.

By the late 1910s, theological conservatives rallying around the Five Fundamentals came to be known as "fundamentalists."

Steve Waldman, editor-in chief of Beliefnet, said (back in 2003):

Evangelicals are a very broad group. It's probably a third or 40 percent of the population of the United States. Fundamentalists are a subset of that. They are very conservative politically. Have a literalist view of the Bible.

Evangelicals have a much wider range of political views. A lot of them are conservatives, but not all of them. About a third of evangelicals voted for Al Gore. So it's a pretty broad range.

And you tend to think of evangelicals as being fundamentalists because the most well known evangelicals are people like Jerry Falwell who are fundamentalists and are very conservative.

I am a little puzzled by the fundamentals. It would seem that if you believe in the first fundamental principle about the inerrancy of the Bible, then three of the other four fundamentals would follow as a direct consequence since they deal with supposedly factual events. Only the one about Jesus's death being atonement for sin is doctrinal and would need to be separately spelled out. Perhaps the fundamentalists realized even back then that despite their followers' claims to believe that the Bible was god's inerrant word, very few people actually bothered to read it since the Bible is a big book and many Christians (as the Pew survey recently pointed out) have only the haziest of ideas of what it contains. So they emphasized those facts that their followers must be explicitly aware of and commit to.

April 10, 2011

Searching for the mind of the Lord

Via Pharyngula I learned about an internal fight amongst the so-called Young Earth Christians that resulted in Ken Ham (The head of Answers in Genesis and the person behind the creationist museum in Kentucky) being disinvited from a conference on home schooling. What struck me was how the other creationists decided that Ham should be kicked out. In their letter to him, they said, "The Board believes this to be the Lord's will for our convention and searched the Scriptures for the mind of the Lord and the leadership of the Holy Spirit before arriving at this decision." (My italics)

I became curious about how they did this. What exactly were they looking for? Where in the Bible would you find something about your god's policy on home schooling conventions? What keywords would you use? Or do you randomly pick verses from the Bible, like a lottery, and then try to divine its meaning, like you would the entrails of a chicken in former times?

I suspect that although such Christians routinely use the language of 'searching for the mind of god', they arrive at their policy decisions based on more mundane considerations just the way other people do and throw in god as an afterthought to give them added weight.

April 08, 2011

There is no conservation law for human conflict

I have often made the claim that the world would be a better place without religion. This seems to me to be self-evidently true for many reasons, the most immediate one being that religion causes so many deaths. Even the most cursory look at the history of the world would reveal the vast number of wars, deaths, injuries, and other forms of suffering committed by one group of people on another because of religious differences. One does not have to even look at history but just look at the world today.

I sometimes get the response that conflict between people is inevitable and if religions do disappear, that people would find some other issue to fight over. The inference that my critics seem to draw from this is that there is no point trying to get rid of religion because there is some sort of conservation law for conflicts.

This seems to me to be somewhat disingenuous. It is like saying that since we are all going to die of something eventually, there is no point in finding cures for diseases since all that will do is shift the cause of death to something else. But eliminating one disease does not create new diseases and does have the effect of increasing life expectancy.

No one is saying that religion is the only cause of conflict and so we would not expect all conflict to cease if religion disappeared. But it is a major source of conflict and eliminating it would undoubtedly help, just as eliminating or finding cures for some diseases have improved the quality of life immensely.

Steven Pinker argues that despite all the wars and genocide that have occurred fairly recently, there has been a steady decline in violence from Biblical times and that the present era is the least violent in history (via Machines Like Us). He points out that the Bible encourages the most appalling violence and cruelty against others.

While there is obviously no natural conservation law for conflicts, there is one sense in which that idea can be partly salvaged. There is no question that having groups of people fight over things like religion or race or tribe or nationality or other divisive issues diverts them from seeing the more structural causes of their plight such as rule of the oligarchy, by the oligarchy, for the oligarchy. So these conflicts serve the interests of the ruling classes. If religion, one of the easiest of ways of creating conflict, were to disappear, those who benefit from conflict would actively seek to find other ways to ignite strife.

But that still does not imply that we should not seek the elimination of religion. Religious beliefs seem to be the most combustible and the easiest to use to get people to adopt a we/them attitude and to look at people just like them as their enemies. Look at the fights between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland and between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. In both conflicts, both sides share enormous similarities but what should be a unifying glue is easily overcome by their absurd obsession with religious differences.

Nothing seems to fire up people more than the thought that they are fighting for their god and that he will reward them for their murderous acts. Look at how easy it was to incite religious people to brutally murder innocent people in Afghanistan, simply by burning a book halfway around the world. The idea that a powerful god would even need puny humans to avenge his honor is ridiculous on its face and the fact that believers actually think like that shows how religion robs people of basic common sense and encourages irrational thinking.

Taking the divisive tool of religion away would make it harder to foment discord.

April 07, 2011

Countering atheist arguments

It should be impossible to lose a debate with a religious person because the facts, logic and reason are all on the side of atheism. However Edward Current shows religious people ten ways to checkmate atheists.

April 06, 2011

Review: America's Most Hated Family IN CRISIS

In 2007, Louis Theroux from BBC2 spent some time with the people of the Westboro Baptist Church who gave him considerable access to talk with all their members. The resulting documentary called America's Most Hated Family provided for some absorbing and informative television that I wrote about earlier.

Most revealing to me was that the church consists almost entirely of one family descended from its leader Fred Phelps (he has 13 children, 11 are lawyers, four are estranged of whom one is a gay rights activist), many of whom are college-educated professionals earning a good living (the Phelps family runs a successful law practice in Topeka, Kansas) and whose contributions from their outside income seem to be the entire means of support for the group. What I found disturbing was the indoctrination of the children of the family from a very young age, who seemed to be able to turn on the famed Westboro rhetoric on cue.

It turns out that since that time there have been a considerable number of defections from the church, especially of young adults, two of whom had been featured in the original program. So this year Theroux visited the church again for a sequel to find out what was happening and especially how the parents were dealing with their children leaving. The result is an hour-long documentary that was aired on BBC2 on Sunday and that you can see in four parts. Here's the first part

and you can see part 2, part 3, and part 4.

It quickly becomes clear that the church is in a state of serious decline. In the 2007 documentary, there was a rambunctious energy and vitality in the group, a sense of purpose and mission in getting in the face of those who disagreed with them. Now they seem just sad and pathetic, an older group trying to keep up the momentum but not having the sharpness and edge they had before and largely going through the motions. There was an air of weariness and resignation and I got the sense that the aging church was on the ropes. The parents of the defecting children maintained a façade that it is good when apostates leave and that they did not care that they had lost all contact with their own children but it was unconvincing, except for a couple of true believers. It was also clear that they are worried that even more children will defect as they reach adulthood and discover the appeal of modernity via the contacts that they make on the internet, promising a freedom that is too alluring to resist compared to the tight embrace of the church.

There was one scene where some of the girls (who are not allowed to date) seemed to be fantasizing about a young Scandinavian TV crew that had come to film them. This scene was poignant because the girls seemed to sense that while such crushes were normal, yet they were told that it was wrong and they realized that it was hopeless to dream of a real relationship with young men as long as they were part of the church.

What is happening to the Westboro church is what is happening to religion everywhere, as my series on Why Atheism is Winning argued. The lure of modernity is taking young people away from religion, leaving religion with an older (and largely female) constituency, plus young children who are not old enough to leave. Religion continues largely because of inheritance. Children have to be indoctrinated while they are young and stay indoctrinated to keep the institutions going, because few people convert into religion from nonbelief. Once you have young people defecting from religion in significant numbers, it is over. Such defections are increasingly likely these days where you cannot keep them insulated within their closed world, and those who have escaped to freedom can still communicate easily with those left behind.

Seeing this documentary, coupled with the larger trends I have written about before about the impact of modernity on religion, tells me that the days of the Westboro church are numbered. It could well be that the church's recent Supreme Court victory will be their swan song and that within a decade or less, it will implode. Patriarch Fred is 81 and looks feeble and his death without a clear successor may trigger further dissension.

At the very end of the documentary (at the 12:20 mark of part 4), Theroux speaks again with Shirley Phelps-Roper, one of the founder's daughters and the most visible spokesperson, and she admits her fear that more of her remaining children (she has 11) might also defect. For a fleeting moment the brash confident persona disappears and she looks vulnerable, with the worried look of a mother who might lose her children. I actually found myself feeling sorry for her. Despite all her crazy and deliberately inflammatory rhetoric and air of arrogant certainty, I think she is too smart not to have her own secret doubts and it cannot be easy for her to see the tight world that she has constructed and controlled start to fall apart and be able to do little about it.

April 05, 2011

The barbaric killings in Afghanistan

People who choose not to be affiliated with any religion are the fastest growing segment of the population in the world. In contrast, all religions are in decline except for Islam which seems to be in a growth mode largely because of its high birth rates. When Islam goes into decline, as it surely will like all the other religions, it will in large part be due to actions like those of the murderous fanatics who rampaged in Afghanistan and killed over 20 people (even beheading some) in retaliation for the burning of a Koran in the US.

Such an atrocity cannot help but cause acute discomfort to any Muslim who likes to see himself or herself as part of the modern world. While murdering people (like blasphemers or apostates) who commit an act that is offensive to your religious beliefs has a barbaric logic to it that presumably makes sense to the appropriately insane, killing innocent people who just happen to be nearby because you cannot lay hands on the people who did the offensive act is so outside the bounds of reason that no one who has any pretence to being part of the modern world will even try to find justifications for it. Doing so immediately brands one as being outside the pale of normal human society.

And this is what Muslims who aspire to modernity have to confront. The people in Afghanistan who committed that atrocity claim to be acting in the service of their god. It is no good for so-called 'moderate' Muslims to say that these people are misguided and that 'true' Islam (i.e., their own version) would frown on such acts. People will be forced to ask themselves what it is about their religion that makes people even consider the possibility that killing innocent people for the actions of others is noble and that their god will look favorably on them for doing so.

Gods and snakes

I have noticed recently that religious believers no longer try to argue that belief in god is justified in itself but have settled for trying to put religion on a par with disbelief, as purely a matter of choice.

For example, religious believers who are disturbed by the argument made by atheists that belief in god is irrational sometimes respond by saying that since we cannot prove that there is no god, then atheism involves as much a 'belief' religion, and thus both are equally rational or irrational. Ricky Gervais provides a good response to that by pointing out that "Atheism isn't a belief system. I have a belief system but it's not "based on" atheism, it's just not based on the existence of a god. I make none of my moral, social, or artistic decisions based on any god or superstitions. Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby. I've never been skiing. It's my biggest hobby. I literally do it all the time."

He is right but I want to expand on that idea a bit in my more pedestrian style.

Atheism does not automatically provide one with a philosophy or a system of ethics or morals. But that does not mean that atheists have none of those things or that there are no behavioral consequences for being an atheist. They just come from sources other than a belief in a god.

Here is an example. Suppose someone moves into a house and for whatever reason believes that there is a poisonous snake somewhere in it that has somehow managed to evade all attempts to detect, locate, or remove it. Such people will consciously adopt a lifestyle that takes the possible existence of a snake into account. They will turn on the lights in the room before going in, will look down as they walk, they will open cupboards, drawers, and closets gingerly and be ready to jump back if they see a snake, they will examine their shoes and clothes before wearing them, and so on. They will look for signs of the snake's presence and be alert for snake-like sounds. After awhile, these behaviors will become routine and done unthinkingly. Furthermore, the behavior of all people of who believe that there are snakes in their houses will be quite similar.

Now take someone who does not believe there are any poisonous snakes in the house. Such a person will behave quite differently from the believer, not doing any of the precautionary things that the snake-believer does. But unlike the snake-believer whose behavior is based on that belief, the behavior of the nonbeliever is not based on that nonbelief. She does not act as any part of a conscious or planned strategy based on the absence of snakes. She does not go around sticking her hands into sock drawers simply because no harm will come from doing so. The nonbeliever does not say to herself, "I will stick my hand into the sock drawer without looking first because I believe there is no snake there" or "I will put on my shoes without first checking inside because I believe there are no snakes." Snakes simply do not enter her consciousness.

So while the behavior of a believer in the snake derives from that belief, the behavior of the non-believer does not derive from that non-belief, even though the behavior of the nonbeliever will be quite different from that of a believer. Non-belief does not prescribe behavior. As a result, there will be no consistent pattern of behavior among non-believers, unlike the much more uniform behavior of believers. Some non-believers may look down when they walk, others may not. There is no way of predicting.

The analogy with religion holds pretty closely. A person who believes in a god will behave in ways that are guided by their religious belief. On a practical level, if you are a Hindu, you are likely to not eat beef. If a Muslim or Jew you will avoid pork. But if you are an atheist, there is no predicting what you will eat. Atheists can be found in the entire spectrum of diets, from vegans to fast-food addicts. Those decisions will be idiosyncratic and depend on personal choices based on a multitude of sources since non-belief does not provide a unifying principle or idea.

More significantly, the idea that there is a god who can punish you with eternal hellfire if you disobey him or reward you with heaven if you do obey results in people trying to figure out what god wants from them and acting accordingly. Since their belief significantly influences their behavior, they make the mistake in thinking that non-belief drives atheists' behavior. Religious people seem to think that atheists decide how to behave by reasoning along the lines of "Since there is no god to judge and punish me, I can lie and cheat and steal."

This is false. If you don't believe that god exists, you simply do not factor the absence of god into one's behavior or one's moral and ethical makeup, just the way the behavior of the non-believer in snakes is not driven by the absence of snakes.

It must be hard for believers in god, for whom that belief is so important, to appreciate that we atheists simply do not factor it into our daily lives. The absence of god is simply taken for granted.

April 04, 2011

God-men, faith healers, and other frauds

While India is emerging as a powerful and modern economy based on science and technology, it still suffers from religious superstition, especially the phenomenon of 'god-men', frauds who prey on the gullible to fool them into thinking that they are avatars of god. It seems like all you need to do is wear orange robes, grow your hair long, utter some religious mumbo-jumbo, and perform some cheap magic tricks for people to start worshipping you and, more importantly, give you money that they can ill-afford to part with.

This video shows a heartening effort to counter these frauds, by the Indian equivalents of James Randi.

The biggest such fraud is, of course, the man who calls himself Sai Baba, who is famous in that part of the world. He has devotees from all walks of life, including politically powerful people. Three families of my own acquaintance are devotees of his, making pilgrimages to his place and, most important, giving money. When I expressed skepticism, one of them gave me a book that she claimed would convince me of his authenticity. It did not.

This video exposes the tricks he uses to impress his followers.

Exposing god-men in India is not without risk because religious nutters hate having their faith exposed as worthless and can resort to violence, so these debunkers have to be commended for their courage.

In the west we do not have god-men but we do have our equivalent frauds, evangelists and faith healers who claim to be channels for god's actions. To be successful in this con seems to require fast-talking, ostentatious living, and a TV or radio outlet.

But while all these frauds differ superficially, the goal is the same, to separate fools and their money.

April 01, 2011

Religious insanity

There are reports that at least eight UN workers were murdered in Afghanistan in retaliation for the burning of a Koran in a US church last month.

Taking the lives of eight people for the burning of a book? This is the type of insanity that exists in religions' most devoted followers.

March 30, 2011

Protecting sacred books

Apparently the British government is thinking about granting certain books protected status that can result in the prosecution of people for the burning defacement or disrespect of such books, after a 15-year old girl in England was arrested for 'inciting religious hatred' after burning the Koran. It is wonderful that in the US we have the First Amendment to protect us from this kind of legislative foolishness, at least so far.

One wag has decided to seek protection under this proposed law for the book Classical Electrodynamics by J. D. Jackson and gives very cogent reasons why it deserves it.

I totally agree. In the first year of physics graduate school, taking a course in which 'Jackson' (as it was informally and affectionatley known) was the required textbook was a rite of passage for every student. We all struggled with its difficult problems in order to understand the laws of electrodynamics. After that ordeal, we all ended up revering that book and instinctively go back to it when we encounter any problem in that area of physics. What Jackson says on any issue is considered definitive.

If that does not make it a sacred book, I don't know what does.

The god of the apps

A rabbi named Adam Jacobs has offered what he says is "A Reasonable Argument for God's Existence." And what would that be?

It is that because we have not explained (as yet) how life originated, it can only be due to god. Yes, that same old stale argument, the god of the gaps, gets recycled yet again, this time in the form of the mysterious and supposedly inexplicable appearance of DNA and RNA.

This is pathetic. Even Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian who is now head of the National Institutes of Health, rejects that argument because he has a sufficiently good knowledge of biology to realize that we are making great progress in solving that problem and that any religious person who bases his or her faith on that particular piece of contemporary ignorance is just asking for trouble.

In his book The Language of God, Collins says:

Given the inability of science thus far to explain the profound question of life's origins, some theists have identified the appearance of RNA and DNA as a possible opportunity for divine creative action . . . Faith that places God in the gaps of current understanding about the natural world may be headed for crisis if advances in science subsequently fill those gaps. Faced with incomplete understanding of the natural world, believers should be cautious about invoking the divine in areas of current mystery, lest they build an unnecessary theological argument that is doomed for later destruction… [While] the question of the origin of life is a fascinating one, and the inability of modern science to develop a statistically probable mechanism is intriguing, this is not the place for a thoughtful person to wager his faith. (p. 127-129)

Despite Collins's plea, the god of the gaps will never go away because it is only argument that religion has, since there is no positive evidence for god and every other argument for god has been shot down. In fact, Collins himself is being disingenuous because he too resorts to using the god of the gaps argument except his gaps are different from those of Jacobs'.

Most skeptics now know how to effectively deal with the god of the gaps argument, using the recent advances in science. A recent article in the New York Times says that in order to help believers deal with the strong criticisms they are now facing, some people have developed apps to help believers with rejoinders. Yes, really.

Sean McDowell, the editor of "Fast Facts" and some textbooks for Bible students, said he has become increasingly aware of a skill gap between believers and nonbelievers, who he feels tend to be instinctively more savvy at arguing. "Christians who believe, but cannot explain why they believe, become 'Bible-thumpers' who seem dogmatic and insecure about their convictions," he said. "We have to deal with that."

"Nowadays, atheists are coming to the forefront at every level of society — from the top of academia all the way down to the level of the average Joe," added Mr. McDowell, a seminary Ph.D. candidate whose phone app was produced by the B&H Publishing Group, one of the country's largest distributors of Bibles and religious textbooks.

I don't think that atheists are 'instinctively more savvy at arguing' as McDowell claims. It is that atheists have all the facts, evidence, reason, and logic on their side so that arguing with a religious believer should be a slam-dunk, once you have grasped the basic ideas. What the new atheists have done is put all those things in the hands of the general public. Religious believers' arguments, by contrast, are based on ignorance (the god of the gaps) or involve plays on words, such as trying to exploit the ambiguity of the word 'theory' or whether atheism is a 'belief' like religion and thus requires just as much 'faith' as belief in god.

So if you are debating religion with a believer and he keeps looking at his smart phone, it may not be that he is checking his text messages. He may be seeking rejoinders.

The article says that atheists are also developing apps to counter the religious apps. So let the app wars begin!

March 29, 2011

The death of the afterlife

In February, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris debated rabbis David Wolpe and Shavit Artson on the topic "Is there an Afterlife?" The moderator was Rob Eshman. The 97-minute debate can be seen in its entirety here and a summary by Landon Ross who attended it can be read here.

It was an interesting debate. Hitchens and Harris are seasoned debaters and seemed very much at ease. Wolpe is quick-witted and has a good sense of humor and an engaging manner but Artson had a pouty expression that is off-putting and he seemed to not be happy at being there at all but made a couple of good points. Although the two rabbis (especially Wolpe) got some applause, most of it was reserved for sallies by Hitchens and Harris, despite the fact that the venue of the debate was the American Jewish University, which should have given home field advantage to the rabbis.

Ross's summary captures the main points and I want to focus on a couple of things. Harris pointed out that the idea that we have some form of consciousness that separates from our bodies and floats off intact after we die is simply not tenable in the light of modern science. We know from studying people who suffer brain damage that different types of damage to different parts of the brain result in changes in people's personalities. Apart from the normal changes in brains (and thus personalities) as we age, brain tumors or diseases like Alzheimers can dramatically accelerate that process. So when we die, what exactly is it that continues into the afterlife? The personality/soul that we had at the moment of death, even if it is terribly debilitated? Or some earlier form of it? And if the latter, how does the soul reconstruct itself at the point of death into another earlier, and presumably better, form? At what age does this soul decide, "OK, that's it. I am going to stay this way and make my escape when the body dies." Or does it mean we have two souls, one that grows along with us and dies with us, and the other that at some point reaches perfection and goes into hibernation and awakes just when we die?

In fact, if you believe that life begins at conception and the soul enters the body at that time, then the afterlife is going to consist mostly of the souls of miscarriages, which occurs in about 15-20% of recognized pregnancies, or the souls of fertilized eggs that didn't even get implanted, which occurs about 30-50% of the time.

The same problem arises for those who believe that our physical bodies are resurrected after death, either immediately or at the second coming of Jesus. Which body? If it is the body at the point of death, then the afterlife is going to have a bipolar distribution in ages, with almost everyone being either very old or very young, mingling with lots of fertilized eggs. The remaining few bodies will likely be ravaged by disease or mutilated because of some terrible catastrophe. When evangelist Billy Graham was asked what we will look like in heaven, he said that when we are resurrected we will have glorious bodies that never grow sick or old. Does this mean that heaven looks like Fort Lauderdale during spring break? This hardly solves the problem since it is not clear when we were at our best. Is it when we were children? Young adults? Older adults? Who gets to choose how we look? (I should add that Harris did not go into nearly as much detail as I am on this question.)

The two rabbis are sophisticated people so the approach they took was quite predictable. They disavowed all aspects of religion that most people believe in, effectively becoming what I call 'religious atheists', insisting that they believe in something supernatural while rejecting any concrete form of that belief. Whenever Hitchens and Harris dissected some religious belief, the two rabbis would immediately respond by saying that "That is not what I believe" and that they agreed with the criticisms, while at the same time avoiding stating clearly what they actually do believe. They wandered around in what I have called the fog of religious language. Artson went so far as to say that his god was not omnipotent and was powerless to overturn the laws of science and only had the power of persuasion! Judaism seems to be particularly malleable when it comes to beliefs about god and the afterlife, allowing for far more official disavowal of what we commonly understand than Christianity or Islam. It reminds me of the joke that so many Jews are secular that the Judaic creed seems to be "There is but one god and we don't believe in him."

For example, Artson said how the thought of seeing his grandmother again in the afterlife gave him great comfort. Then a little while later, when he was asked whether he believed in an afterlife in which he and his grandmother would exist as recognizable people, he backtracked, saying that after death we would exist as packets of energy and of course, no one could deny that energy exists! How he, as one packet of energy, would recognize another packet of energy as his grandmother was the key question left unexplained. I think that Hitchens and Harris either did not want to skewer him or felt that his absurdity was self-evident. I must say, though, that I get annoyed when people invoke scientific concepts in such a facile way to gloss over the problems with religion. At least no one brought up that perennial favorite, the uncertainty principle as the loophole by which god evades detection, for which I was thankful.

This debate illustrates why religion is faltering so badly. Its most sophisticated apologists are on the ropes. They know enough of science to realize that the traditional beliefs of their faith traditions are completely incoherent and simply do not stand up to scrutiny. They are thus forced to abandon the concrete core beliefs of the vast majority of their fellow believers while being unable to offer anything in return except content-free metaphors that are meant to parry the criticisms of atheists while presented to the gullible religious folk as deep insights. The creator of Jesus and Mo accurately captures the deliberate ambiguity that is being explopited.

Religion is now brain dead. It has lost any intellectual power that it may have had in pre-modern days. Its body, in the form of religious institutions, is still functioning but just barely and is on life support. And it has no soul that will live on after its death.

March 28, 2011

John W. Loftus talk on The Christian Delusion

I attended the talk by John W. Loftus on Saturday. There was a crowd of around 35-40 which was very good considering that the event was organized at very short notice and Saturday evenings at 6:00 pm is not the best time to draw a student audience. The officers of the CWRU Center for Inquiry did a terrific job in arranging everything.

Loftus's talk was very interesting for me in that he presents an insider's view of how American evangelical Christians see the world. One has to understand that world view if one is to engage effectively with religious people in the US. As a former evangelical preacher, he is aware of what kinds of arguments might reach them. He presents believers with what he calls the 'Outsider Test for Faith', asking them to apply to their own faith the same criteria that they use to reject competing faiths.

I think that the alliance of people like Loftus, who were once committed Christians and are now atheists, and atheists who come from a scientific background could be very fruitful since we bring complementary knowledge to bear on the problem of how to deal with religion and can learn a lot from each other.

He and I were able to spend some time together before and after his talk and I found him to be as engaging in private as he is as a public speaker. He and I shared books and ideas and I will report on his book The Christian Delusion once I've had a chance to read it.

Meanwhile, his blog Debunking Christianity is lively and well worth visiting.

March 26, 2011

Those poor persecuted bigots

The Catholic Church has complained to the UN Human Rights Council that "People who criticise gay sexual relations for religious or moral reasons are increasingly being attacked and vilified for their views."

I had not realized that bigots had such sensitive feelings. No doubt the Catholic Church will next complain about criticisms aimed at those who support pedophilic priests.

It is amazing how people think that saying that one's views originate from one's religion automatically confers immunity from the normal rough and tumble of public political discourse.

(via Machines Like Us)

March 25, 2011

God makes you obese

That's what a new Northwestern University study seems to find.

The study, which tracked 2,433 men and women for 18 years, found normal weight young adults ages 20 to 32 years with a high frequency of religious participation were 50 percent more likely to be obese by middle age after adjusting for differences in age, race, sex, education, income and baseline body mass index. High frequency of religious participation was defined as attending a religious function at least once a week.

While the result seems pretty conclusive, the causal connection between god and obesity is not clear. Matthew Feinstein, the study's lead investigator suggests, "It's possible that getting together once a week and associating good works and happiness with eating unhealthy foods could lead to the development of habits that are associated with greater body weight and obesity."

I find that unconvincing. Is the food at these religious get-togethers that bad? In my experience, they are usually potluck events, with home-cooked dishes that are actually pretty good. Even if it is bad for you, eating it just once a week seems hardly sufficient to produce this effect. It seems more likely to me that that the desire for food and the desire for god both spring from the same source, a neediness that is never satiated.

Given Americans' obsession with their weight and their propensity to rush out and adopt any and all kinds of diet programs, perhaps atheist organizations should adopt a new recruiting slogan: "Lose god and lose weight!"

March 23, 2011

Religion headed for extinction

The BBC reports on a new paper presented this week at the annual March meeting of the American Physical Society (of all places) that used mathematical modeling on religious affiliation trends over the last century and arrived at a conclusion that supports my thesis in the recent series on Why Atheism is Winning that religion is in a state of rapid decline.

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team's mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

I looked up the actual paper which can be read here and its abstract outlines the methodology.

When groups compete for members, the resulting dynamics of human social activity may be understandable with simple mathematical models. Here, we apply techniques from dynamical systems and perturbation theory to analyze a theoretical framework for the growth and decline of competing social groups. We present a new treatment of the competition for adherents between religious and irreligious segments of modern secular societies and compile a new international data set tracking the growth of religious non-affiliation. Data suggest a particular case of our general growth law, leading to clear predictions about possible future trends in society.

The basic idea behind the model is as follows:

We begin by idealizing a society as partitioned into two mutually exclusive social groups, X and Y, the unaffiliated and those who adhere to a religion. We assume the attractiveness of a group increases with the number of members, which is consistent with research on social conformity. We further assume that attractiveness also increases with the perceived utility of the group, a quantity encompassing many factors including the social, economic, political and security benefits derived from membership as well as spiritual or moral consonance with a group.

This leads them to a nonlinear coupled differential equation for the proportion of people in X.

So what is their conclusion?

People claiming no religious affiliation constitute the fastest growing religious minority in many countries throughout the world. Americans without religious affiliation comprise the only religious group growing in all 50 states; in 2008 those claiming no religion rose to 15 percent nationwide, with a maximum in Vermont at 34 percent. In the Netherlands nearly half the population is religiously unaffiliated. Here we use a minimal model of competition for members between social groups to explain historical census data on the growth of religious non-affiliation in 85 regions around the world. According to the model, a single parameter quantifying the perceived utility of adhering to a religion determines whether the unaffiliated group will grow in a society. The model predicts that for societies in which the perceived utility of not adhering is greater than the utility of adhering, religion will be driven toward extinction. [My italics]

Of course, this is mathematical modeling but the models seem to fit the existing data very well. The graphs in the paper support my contention that the rate of collapse of religion increases with time.

For decades, authors have commented on the surprisingly rapid decline of organized religion in many regions of the world. The work we have presented does not exclude previous models, but provides a new framework for the understanding of different models of human behavior in majority/minority social systems in which groups compete for members.[My italics]

My reasoning was that this was due to the lack of any rational basis for believing in god and that once that became more widely recognized and the collective delusion undermined, that the decline would be rapid.

March 22, 2011

Lying about religiosity

It is a well-known phenomenon that people overestimate their capacities on traits that are deemed to be socially desirable. In the US, since being religious is seen as a good thing, people seem to feel obliged to put on a facade.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that Americans are less religious that they claim to be. The Pew survey of religious knowledge in the US says that 4/7 (about 55%) attend church once a week but a University of Michigan examination of actual time diaries kept by people indicate that the figure is only about 25%, much like many European countries, while self reports were about 35-45%. The gap between self-perception and reality in the US was around 18% whereas the highest gaps elsewhere in the world were only about 4-8%, and these were in Catholic countries.

Given that fact, should we believe the Pew results that say that "more than a third (37%) say they read the Bible or other Holy Scriptures at least once a week, not counting worship services"? I find that really hard to believe. The Bible is not a great read, frankly. There are a few occasional well written and poetic passages but most of it consists of turgid prose dealing with dreary lists of rules.

My guess is that even if we use the same inflation factor of two that exists for church attendance to arrive at about 20% for weekly Bible reading, that would still be too high.

March 21, 2011

Belonging to a religion but not religious

A survey of 1900 people in England and Wales found the interesting result that while 61% of respondents said they belonged to a religion, 65% also replied "no" when asked if they were religious.

The British Humanist Association conducted this survey to illustrate the fact that the British census, which is due to be carried out soon, gives a misleading impression by asking only the first question and thereby suggesting that people are more religious than they really are. They say that people check off the boxes of belonging to religious institutions for cultural, rather than religious, reasons but that the government uses this inflated data to advocate for funding of things like faith-based schools. They are urging people who are not religious to tick the 'none' box when asked which religion they belong to.

Another interesting result was that "Among respondents who identified themselves as Christian, fewer than half said they believed Jesus Christ was a real person who died, came back to life and was the son of God." That alone would explain the above difference.

It would be really interesting to have a similar survey done in the US. I think the religiosity figures are inflated here too, though maybe not as much.

March 20, 2011

Religious scientists

When I argue that science and belief in god are basically incompatible, religious people often respond by pointing to the fact that there are religious scientists. The evangelical Christian Francis Collins, who headed one team of scientists that mapped the human genome and is now head of the National Institutes of Health, is the poster child for this group.

Other scientists like Craig Venter, who headed the other team that mapped the human genome, is dismissive of religious people like Collins. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Venter was asked about this:

SPIEGEL: Some scientist don't rule out a belief in God. Francis Collins, for example …

Venter: … That's his issue to reconcile, not mine. For me, it's either faith or science - you can't have both.

SPIEGEL: So you don't consider Collins to be a true scientist?

Venter: Let's just say he's a government administrator.

The idea that science and religion must be compatible because there are religious scientists is not an argument since it is quite possible for people to hold contradictory ideas in their heads and all of us are good at compartmentalizing our minds in order to do so.

As Jesus and Mo point out, that argument can be taken to argue for the compatibility of almost anything.

March 19, 2011

Opposition to same sex marriage plunges

New polls confirm earlier results that for the first time in the US, those who favor same sex marriage now outnumber those who oppose it. "A whopping 68% of Americans under 30 now support marriage equality, but the percentage is nearly as high, 65%, for Americans in their 30s. A majority of folks in their 40s are on board, too."

Recall that in the earlier poll, there was a drop from 73% opposition in 1988 to 56% in 2004, to only 40% opposition in 2010. So the rate of decline in the opposition has increased by a factor of 2.5 from 2004 to 2010 over that of the earlier period. I predict that opposition will stabilize to about 25%, which is usually the size of hardcore people on any issue.

These results are significant in ways other than the welcome one that the rights of gays for equality are now being recognized. Opposition to homosexuality has no rational basis but is almost entirely religion-based. It is religion that has locked itself into opposition to gay rights and same sex marriage, so this new acceptance is really bad news for religion as well, since it signifies that its hold on people, especially the young, is disintegrating as they reject its intolerance. And once again, as I said in my series on Why Atheism is Winning, it is young people who are leading the way.

March 18, 2011

Contradictions in the Koran

It is not only Christians that have the headache of deciding which parts of their holy book they should follow and which parts they should reject. Jesus and Mo point out the same problem that Muslims have with the Koran.

For more examples of the intolerance and cruelty in the Koran, see here. It amazes me that people can claim that their god is a merciful and loving god when their very own holy books have such hateful passages.

March 17, 2011

CFI talk on Why Atheism is Winning

The talk I gave at to the CWRU chapter of the Center for Inquiry on Why Atheism is Winning produced a lively discussion. The talk lasted for about an hour and was followed by a Q&A that lasted for almost 90 minutes with most people sticking around for the full period.

Both the talk and the Q&A will be posted soon for viewing.

UPDATE: The hour-long talk is now up on YouTube.

I will upload later the lively Q&A that followed the talk.

March 15, 2011

I did not see that coming

In an earlier post, I wondered how long it would take for religious nutters to say the recent earthquakes were due to god, who seems to be really cranky, getting ticked off about something or the other. I expected the usual suspects: gays, feminists, abortion, etc. But to my surprise it turns out that it is Japanese atheists who are the cause.

Senior pastor Cho Yong-gi of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest Christian church in the world [my italics], has faced vicious public condemnation as he called the catastrophic Japanese quakes and tsunamis "God’s warnings."

"I fear that this disaster may be warnings from God against the Japanese people’s atheism and materialism," an online Christian press quoted the elderly religious leader as saying Saturday.

"I hope that these series of events will drive the Japanese to turn their eyes towards God."

Of course, in the midst of the massive death toll there was the usual praise for god for not killing people in an in-group.

Meanwhile, Gyeonggi Province Governor Kim Moon-soo also came close to facing similar public blame with his Twitter remarks.

"I thank God and my ancestors for keeping the Korean peninsula safe," the Catholic governor wrote on his Twitter on Sunday. "The disaster left more than 2,500 dead or injured and 10,000 missing."

How thoughtful of god to single the Korean in-group for preservation while slaughtering those in the Japanese out-group! This must prove that Korea is god's chosen country. Take that, America!

The woman in the following video claims that the events in Japan were in response to her prayers at the beginning of Lent (which was last Wednesday) to teach all the atheists who are around her a lesson. She is thrilled that god responded within two days and says that if more people pray with her during Lent, she is sure that by the end of Lent god will similarly smite those other hotbeds of atheism, namely Europe and the US. (She must have been reading my series on why atheism is winning.)

This was so over the top that I watched closely to see if there was any indication that this was an Onion-type parody but it seems genuine. She is actually taking delight in the massive death and destruction in Japan as answers to her prayers.

It is sad what religion can do to people.

(Via Pharyngula.)

March 14, 2011

Talk on Why Atheism is Winning

I will be giving a talk on this topic on Wednesday, March 16 at 7:00 pm in the 1914 Lounge in Thwing student center on the CWRU campus. It is free and open to the public and free food is provided to compensate you for having to listen to me. The talk is sponsored by the Center for Inquiry.

In my talks, in addition to the tradition Q&A and discussion at the end, I also encourage people to question and comment during the presentation, so come along with your ideas.

March 12, 2011

Cue the religious nutters

We have had two natural disasters in quick succession that have killed and injured a lot of people and inflicted considerable damage: The earthquake in New Zealand and the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan.

I am wondering how long it will take before the religious nutters (and I am looking at you Pat Robertson) come out and say that this must be because god is angry with us about something. I am not sure what god could be angry about in these cases but you can be sure that it contravened something in the book of Leviticus or some surah in the Koran.

Since god tends to use very blunt instruments as punishments, indulging in mass killings and wanton destruction that destroy men, women, children, and the elderly indiscriminately, what ticked him off in these cases need not be due to anything that happened in those countries. It could well be that he was angry that 'don't ask, don't tell' was repealed in the US, but didn't want to hurt people here because as his chosen people and country, we are special in his eyes.

March 11, 2011

The evangelical Christian paradox

In an article titled Why evangelicals hate Jesus, Phil Zuckerman says:

White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus. It is perhaps one of the strangest, most dumb-founding ironies in contemporary American culture. Evangelical Christians, who most fiercely proclaim to have a personal relationship with Christ, who most confidently declare their belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, who go to church on a regular basis, pray daily, listen to Christian music, and place God and His Only Begotten Son at the center of their lives, are simultaneously the very people most likely to reject his teachings and despise his radical message.

March 10, 2011

"Darwin is blasphemy"

A British university scientist who is also an imam of his mosque received death threats for saying in a lecture that Darwin's theory of evolution is consistent with Islam.

Masjid Tawhid is a prominent mosque which also runs one of the country's largest sharia courts, the Islamic Sharia Council. In January, Dr Hasan delivered a lecture there detailing why he felt the theory of evolution and Islam were compatible – a position that is not unusual among many Islamic scholars with scientific backgrounds. But the lecture was interrupted by men he described as "fanatics" who distributed leaflets claiming that "Darwin is blasphemy".

"One man came up to me during the lecture and said 'You are an apostate and should be killed'," Dr Hasan told The Independent.

You would think that he would leave such an intolerant mosque and join another but such is the hold that religion has on people that he preferred to apologize and say he was wrong.

Instead his father, Suhaib, head of the mosque's committee of trustees, posted a notice on his behalf expressing regret over his comments. "I seek Allah's forgiveness for my mistakes and apologise for any offence caused," the statement read.
…
"I want to go back – I've been going to the mosque for 25 years. It is my favourite mosque in London, and I have been active in the community for a long time. I hope my positive contribution will outweigh their feelings towards me."

(via Machines Like Us)

March 04, 2011

Truly ugly anti-Muslim bigotry

What is wrong with these people that they can shout such invective even at small children walking with parents?

February 26, 2011

Asking the right questions of religious believers

Thanks to Machines Like Us I learned about a cable access call-in TV show in Austin, TX called The Atheist Experience. The hosts of this show take exactly the right approach. In this clip, a Christian caller gets stumped (as so many tend to do) when asked to explain why he believes in god and the Christian god in particular.

You would think that this is the question for believers and that they would have thought deeply about it. And yet when you ask them directly, they act as if the question had never occurred to them and flounder around.

Taking pity on the caller's inability to articulate any reason, the hosts of the show then very eloquently explain why they themselves became atheists.

February 25, 2011

Do children pick up their religious views from their fathers?

Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman in a long article titled Why the gods are not winning say that, "Women church goers greatly outnumber men, who find church too dull. Here's the kicker. Children tend to pick up their beliefs from their fathers. So, despite a vibrant evangelical youth cohort, young Americans taken as a whole are the least religious and most culturally tolerant age group in the nation." (My italics)

The paper does not provide citations, unfortunately, though I did find a little support in the literature for the claim. For example, in a paper titled On the Relative Influence of Mothers and Fathers: A Covariance Analysis of Political and Religious Socialization (August 1978, JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY, vol. 40, no. 3, p. 519-530) authors Alan C. Acock and Vern L. Bengtson say that "The mother consistently appears more predictive in most areas we examined and is often the dominant parent in terms of prediction. The only areas in which the fathers had a slight edge were in Religious Behavior, Religiosity, and Tolerance of Deviance."

My parents had similar religious beliefs so I cannot tell who influenced me more. I had not been aware of the greater influence of fathers on children's religious beliefs and am curious if this statement is consistent with the experiences of readers of this blog.

So are your religious views closer to your father or your mother?