Thoughts from a Godless Heathen

I've moved!

2011-03-25T01:13:00.000-04:00

Thanks to hosting from the great folks at ThinkAtheist, I’ve moved my blog from its old place here at Blogspot into my new domain name (www.miketheinfidel.com). It’s all part of my Master Plan™ to start posting more regularly and to try to contribute more to the atheist ‘community’.

If you’re not already a member at ThinkAtheist, I’d definitely recommend signing up. It’s a great place to discuss just about anything with other freethinkers, from science and philosophy to politics and video games.

Getting over the messiah complex

2011-03-06T01:15:00.006-05:00

I have a confession to make: I want to fix everything.

Back when I was a Christian, I never really had to worry about injustice. The suffering we endured in our life here on earth wasn't all that meaningful, since we were guaranteed a happy and peaceful afterlife for our faithfulness. I figured that God would make everything work out for the good in the end.

Now, as an atheist, I have no such assurances. I look around at the amount of suffering in the world and I feel simultaneously motivated to do whatever I can to reduce it and impotent to actually accomplish anything meaningful in response to it.

Last Thanksgiving, I spent a week with my parents down in Mexico. On my second to last day there, while we sat comfortably in our condo watching people pass us by on the road, a homeless woman came along with her two children. While my parents commented about how amazing it was that she seemed so comfortable carrying her infant on her back in a sling fashioned from a scarf, I was watching her collect soda cans from trash cans along the street. All I could think of was that this woman was, because of purely random and meaningless circumstance, resigned to a life of struggle and hardship, scraping along with whatever she could manage just to be able to live to see another day. I desperately wanted to figure out what I could do to help her, and as soon as I started to think about it I realized that there must be tens of millions of people just like her all over the planet.

From my perspective as a person living in a first-world nation, this seems to be something that disappears all too quickly from view. There's no reason that I should have a better life than these people, and I shudder to think of all the potentially brilliant minds that fade into the background of the story of humanity simply because they're not wealthy enough to reach their potential.

So... what? Am I crazy to feel guilty about this? Is it wrong for me to willfully ignore these people so that I can get on with my life? What can I actually do to help fix the underlying roots of their suffering? Should I even worry about it?

What's To Hate?

2011-02-12T18:05:00.021-05:00

I just got the following bizarre/amusing comment from someone calling himself OJ Simpson on the first post I ever made on this blog (where I told the story of my deconversion). I figured it needed to be both dissected and shared.

A beautifull world,but beyond your mind,beyond your closed mind, beyond your reach,

Two things: 1. You really like commas! 2. My mind isn't closed. It's open to evidence. If there's another way to figure things out that doesn't require evidence, you'd need evidence to show that that method can produce real knowledge.

because you are just a slave a peon of this system,

Not anymore. Kinda broke out of the whole 'following a dogma' thing when I gave up my belief.

you are just dancing between two sides, two sides of one big lie,neither is real,nor neither is false,

Either gods exist or they don't. One side is false. Sorry. It's a dichotomy - that's how it works.

between two sides,carefully raised in order to keep you brainwashed,two extremes.

That's another problem. Y'see, by giving up on dogma and on uncritically accepting what I'm told, I'm sort of immune to being brainwashed now. But go on.

I feel sorry for your death of your uncle,

Thank you.

but that traumatic moment has darkened your mind, your hatred for god was very visible in your life story.

Now this, I just don't get. When I was a believer, I never hated God. I think my testimony makes that rather patently obvious. I even came right out and said it when I talked about my slide toward deistic agnosticism:

I was outraged – not at God, but by my fellow Christians who were so closed-minded about these things and what they meant about the truth of our beliefs. Why did so few of them care if what they believed was true or not?

And when my uncle died:

I returned to my car, where I wept like a lost child, screaming at God to come back into my life and tell me what to do. I poured my entire being into it. I wanted nothing more than for something solid and permanent to reassure me that everything would be okay. I wanted that old comforting certainty again. And for a while, I felt like I had it.

This is the only thing I can think of that even sounds like I was angry at God. What "OJ Simpson" seems to be overlooking is the context of what I used to believe. Calling out to god to come into your life and take control isn't anger at god - it's a desire to draw yourself closer to god than before. It's the whole "Jesus, take the wheel" thing.

Many people have worse lifes, have bigger problems, your problems are pitifull compared to others, insignificant, but who am I to judge.

In other words, "Quit whining." Sorry, I didn't realize that my life experiences weren't good enough reason for me to change the way I lived my life. I'll be sure to get your permission to change my mind from now on. Who are you to judge? That's a fantastic question. Maybe you shouldn't.

You must understand death isnt bad, death is a cycle of life, death brings life and vice versa.

Ahh, good old-fashioned theistic death denial. If you believe in an eternal life after death, then death isn't real to you. But I don't. I believe that when people die, they're gone. Saying "my uncle is dead" is not like saying "my uncle is in Mexico." If my uncle is in Mexico, he still is. If he's dead, he just isn't. Isn't anything. Death is not a part of life. It's the absolute end of it. It does not bring life.

For your uncle, if he had serious life problems, death was salvation, death is beautifull but scary.

My uncle didn't have serious life problems, and death wasn't salvation. He isn't there anymore. Not here, not in some magical fantasyland - nowhere. He doesn't exist. There is nothing beautiful about that, and you are delusional to think there is.

You started to hate god, because of your selfishness, because your uncle left your life

No. I never did. Sorry. Not that I actually give a damn whether you think I hated your imaginary friend or not - it's just really goddamn aggravating that you could get what I said so fractally wrong.

but question yourself, is it truly better to live in pain or die?

Honestly? I'd prefer to live in pain, because at least then I'd still exist.

If you truly loved your uncle, you should be happy that your uncle is free, free from mortality, free from the pain, not selfishly hate god for his death.

My uncle isn't anything anymore. Not free from anything, not trapped by anything, just not anything. And again, you seem to keep getting my reaction entirely wrong. I did not get angry at god for my uncle's death. At the time I didn't even believe in the god I'd believed in before. My reaction was to retreat into the belief I'd been indoctrinated in - to try to seek comfort from what I'd believed before. It wasn't hatred. It was desperation born from loneliness.

You tasted both sides of a lie, so you should be ready to break free, to open your eyes from this "grouping" from these doctrines, both crippling either mind or spirit.

What the hell are you even talking about? I don't have any doctrines.

Remember God loves you, he doesnt want you to worship him, he just wants you to live,be free and love everyone, nothing more.

Oh, yay! Soft, sappy, warm-fuzzy platitudes! Just the sort of thing to convince someone who gives a damn about reality to stop giving a damn and just believe! Not to mention that your concept of god is useless. If god just wants me to live, be free, and love everyone, then it sure as hell doesn't seem to matter if I believe in him or not. Whoops!

People wonder why atheists get angry - it's drivel like this. Just because you think you've come up with a happier kind of god doesn't mean I should give you any more credence than I give a fundamentalist. In fact, I think it makes less sense to believe what you believe, because it's patently obvious that you've just invented a deity that seems likable to you. Fortunately for the rest of us, reality is not subject to your whims and desires.

So, to answer the question posed in the title... What's to hate? Not god - I'm an atheist. There's nothing there to hate. A complete misunderstanding of my point of view, combined with self-important empty-headed reality denial thrown at me mixed in with an attack on my way of thinking? Sure, that's hateable.

Mike Huckabee Plays the Victim Card

2011-01-29T14:55:00.008-05:00

Over on The Atheist Experience blog there's a post with a link to a very ... interesting letter from Mike Huckabee, soliciting donations for a new organization he's involved with. In the letter - which I strongly urge you to read - he mentions the threat we face from Islamic radicals, but then warns his constituents of "an even greater menace [that] threatens to destroy us from the inside out" - "a re-energized Left here in our midst that is working harder than ever to drive out God and ALL MENTION of religious faith from America's public life."

That's right - Mike Huckabee, a Christian living in a majority Christian nation, wants to warn his fellow Christians that, somehow, evil godless liberal atheist scum are going to subvert their will and override the entire democratic system.

Huckabee blames "Big Government", Obama, and Pelosi for "liberal attacks on faith [that] are accelerating to a crisis point."

A few choice bits:

I'm sure you've followed the stories of how liberal judges have targeted our cherished "Pledge of Allegiance" because it contains the words "one nation, under God. [1]

You and I have watched for years as liberals [2] and atheists have systematically driven all [3] Christmas-season nativity scenes from public squares all across America. [4]

Prayer in schools is all but extinct... [5] public school children are barred from singing Christmas carols... [6] an invocation at a graduation ceremony is likely to generate a barrage of lawsuits from "offended" liberals and atheists. [7]
[...]
How long do you think it will be before the liberals and atheists are able to have the words "In God We Trust" stricken from our bills and coins? [8]

How long before the atheists and the ACLU [9] declare final victory in getting the entire "Pledge of Allegiance" banned from our schools? [10]
[...]
I am concerned that our children and grandchildren could inherit an America where ANY religious utterance is prohibited outside the walls of a private home or church, just because some liberal might be "offended!" [11]
[...]
Our liberal-leaning [12] courts have been outlawing God in all aspects [13] of our public lives.

And our left-dominated media [14] has mercilessly portrayed believers as either frightening fanatics or idiotic simpletons. [14]

Here's what I have to say about that.

[1] This has never happened. Judges can't "target" anything. People bring lawsuits, and judges make judgments.

[2] Notice how he paints all liberals as enemies of people of faith? Never mind the fact that the majority of liberals are people of faith themselves, and might actually agree with him about some of his complaints... let's paint them all with a broad brush! Discriminating between different people is hard!

[3] This is an interesting use of "all" to mean "practically none of the."

[4] Removing the promotion of religion is not the same as promoting atheism. A blank piece of paper is not an atheist pamphlet. A public square without a nativity scene is *a public square.*

[5] If you ignore, of course, the fact that children and teachers are fully allowed to pray in school - the teachers just aren't allowed to lead kids in prayer or make them pray.

[6] [citation needed]

[7] See, Mike, this is where you don't get it (again). We're not offended by your beliefs. We're offended that you're so eager to trample the Constitution by injecting your beliefs into our taxpayer-funded schools. You want your kids to learn about God and Jesus in school? Send them to private school. I don't want to pay for it.

[8] Oh noes! Not our money! How can we practice our faith freely if we can't put our deity on the coinage?

[9] The same ACLU which has fought for the rights of Christians several times.

[10] Who has ever suggested this?

[11] Again... it has nothing to be with being offended. But that's beside the point. Neither I nor any atheist I've ever known have wanted to legally prevent people from expressing their religious beliefs (though we would prefer they kept them to themselves). What we want is for the *government* to stop endorsing religion. There's a significant difference between "we won't let you say 'God'" and "we won't let the government promote a specific religion." Mike Huckabee is intentionally ignoring this.

[12] What's the composition of the Supreme Court, again? Oh, that's right... half and half, with a swing voter who leans conservative:

Ginsberg: very liberal, consistently votes against conservatives
Breyer: consistently liberal
Sotomayor: consistently votes progressive
Kagan: centrist-progressive
Kennedy: the swing vote; considered conservative; sometimes votes liberal
Alito: consistently conservative
Roberts: consistently conservative
Scalia: extremely conservative
Thomas: extremely conservative (more than Scalia)

In George W. Bush's eight years in office, he appointed 325 federal judges. In Barack Obama's three years so far, he's appointed 62. Extrapolate that out to eight years and you get 165 judges - barely half of those appointed by Bush. And yet we're supposed to believe that liberals have been taking over the court system. Hilarious!

[13] He's playing with "all" again... and I'd really like to know just what on earth he's talking about.

[14] The media so left-dominated that a milder, leftist, more reality-based version of Glenn Beck gets fired from the top-rated show on his network.

[15] Well, Mike, if the shoe fits...

But this mindless, factually-ignorant screed isn't even the best part. The best part is that he blames increases in crime, abortion, and drug use on godless liberals and atheists. Mike... atheists don't even make up 10% of the population of this country. You're in the majority; sounds to me like you're the one who needs to get his house in order here.

Huckabee's letter goes on to announce the formation (partnered with Newt Gingrich) of Renewing America's Leadership (ReAL), an organization "a new national non-profit organization that is working with ministers and lawyers" to fight the perceived threats to religious liberty from liberals and atheists.

Huckabee insists that "the Founding Fathers fully intended for expressions of religious belief to be incorporated into American life" - something I don't really have a problem with. I'm sure they did. What they didn't intend was for the government to be the one making those expressions. They intentionally set up a secular democracy, not a theocracy, no matter what Mike and his pals would like us to think.

The letter is a golden example of hyperbole, from the beginning down to the statement (next to the box you tick to indicate you want to donate) saying that the "Obama-Pelosi liberals [want] us all to worship at the altar of Big Government". It's also a golden example of historical ignorance, blind bigotry and hatred, and foamy-mouthed fear-mongering.

This smarmy little diatribe could be presented in schools as an example of the conservative mindset: fearful, hateful, pious, always looking for an enemy, bombastic, exuding a sense of helplessness even when part of the majority, perceiving nonexistent threats, and ignorant of reality.

But it's worse than that, really. Read the letter again, but substitute 'atheist' for any other minority group. Imagine a past and future presidential candidate attacking any other minority this way. Imagine, for example, a candidate blasting African Americans for wanting to remove segregation and anti-miscegenation laws from our government. That candidate would be laughed out of the race. And yet, with atheists (and, to be fair, with Muslims, since Huckabee attacked them too), it's still okay - in fact, you're practically expected to attack atheists if you want to be taken seriously by conservative voters.

Mike Huckabee should be ashamed, but you can bet he won't. He won't because we still live in a country where most people agree with his distorted view of reality. And that's why we can no longer afford to remain silent. We actually are victims to this wannabe theocrat and his ilk, and yet we're the ones painted as oppressors. If atheists remain silent - if we remain hidden away in the closet, out of view - we'll never change minds in our favor.

New year, new plans

2011-01-02T21:07:00.002-05:00

So, it's 2011. We've marked off another circuit of our journey around the sun, beginning at an arbitrary point in our orbit. Yippee!

My resolution for this year: Get through a first draft of a book. What does that entail? Well... I'm not sure yet. I'm not even sure what I want to write about. But I've got all sorts of ideas constantly floating around in my head that I'd love to commit to paper, and if I can contribute something to the evolving societal zeitgeist, that'd be nice, too.

My biggest stumbling block is that I have some weird obsession with trying to write about something nobody else has covered yet. My girlfriend (rightly) reminds me just how futile this is; the chances of an idea being actually original these days, with almost 7,000,000,000 people on the planet, are next to nil. So once I get over that block, I'm sure the writing will come more easily to me. I've got all sorts of themes I'd like to cover: why freedom of religion must necessarily include freedom from religion, why morality doesn't require an absolute source to be valid, why evidence-based belief is better than faith-based belief, why I dislike postmodernist thinking and its effects on pluralism, and so on. I'd also love to write in greater length than I already have about my deconversion, and how it affected my life, my thinking, my relationships with others, and my outlook on the world.

Fortunately, I won't have to go into this totally blind. We're fast entering an era where self-published books and books published by smaller publishing companies have a good chance of competing in the market, and Hank Fox, local author and member of our atheist Meetup group, has just come out with his own book, “Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist: Simple Thoughts About Reason, Gods and Faith”. I haven't read the book yet, but I really look forward to it, since folks like PZ Myers and Hemant Mehta have been promoting it (and my views tend to align with theirs on many issues). I'll have to chat up Hank and see just what he had to do to get published and promote himself... but that's far in the future for me. I've still got all that writing to do...

I guess that's my resolution for 2011: Write a book. Lofty goal, sure, but I know I can do it if I put in the effort. Wish me luck!

For-Profit Prophets

2010-12-02T20:12:00.018-05:00

There's a trend I've noticed, and I'm surely not the first: So often when a preacher makes some great declaration about the future, he seems to be in it for the money. Oh, he'll put on a good show of being earnest, declaring that God has spoken to him and given him a message that the big guy needs to get across to his True Believers.

Two recent examples come to mind.

First is a local pastor whose name I don't know. Occasionally at work, if I'm bored, I'll listen to a kooky little local Christian talk radio station. They boast a wide variety of content, from nationally syndicated 'bible study' programs to call-in marriage advice shows to whatever the local ministry has on its mind. Every Monday afternoon, the Australian-born (or New Zealand-born? Sorry, my Aussie and Kiwi friends - I'm not familiar with the accents) pastor will rant on about Obama, the New World Order, and whatever swims else through the water lining his brain.

About two months ago, he made some rather bold - and specific - predictions. Citing a supposed Obama official who said that the world population had to be reduced to about two billion, he said that while driving to the radio station he'd been given a vision. Blood would literally flow in the streets of America. The government would shut off the nation's electricity, and sick and elderly people would start to die horrible deaths as their sorely-needed medications went bad. The Obama administration would start rounding people up and sending them to death camps. (But true Christians would be saved!) All within the next four weeks. Clearly, if it's been almost two months, his deadline has come and gone, and (surprise, surprise) nothing happened. And yet there he is still, every Monday afternoon, ranting about the latest indignity committed by the "Obama regime", as transmitted to him by Glenn Beck.

His church flock is still just as full as ever, and he commented last week about what a "miracle" it'd been that the November church donations were bigger than they'd been the whole year. I can't imagine the sort of things he must've been saying to his faithful, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least to find out that he was saying they needed to give of their "financial gifts" to help God prevent such horrible things from happening.

The second example is one Hemant Mehta blogged about:

The fans of Family Radio Inc., a Christian radio network, have sponsored dozens of different billboards in select cities around the country proclaiming the exact date when Jesus is coming back.

May 21st, 2011.

You know, just like the Bible “predicted.”

They have a website about it, of course. It's a delightfully insane blend of numerology, Biblical contortionism, and general rectal extraction. They're giving away a bunch of stuff for free, though they're limiting how many copies each household can get. Weird... the world is going to end in less than half a year, and they're worried about spending all their money on shipping The Truth to The Lost?

I like Hemant's ideas:

If they are serious, let’s see them put their faith to the test.

I want to know now what these Christians are going to say/do when the Rapture doesn’t happen.

I want Family Radio to promise to go off the air if the Rapture doesn’t occur on the predicted date.

I want them to commit to giving a certain amount of money to Foundation Beyond Belief on May 22nd if they’re wrong. (I promise we’ll only ask them to honor their pledge if Jesus didn’t appear…)

I want a promise that they’ll film a video while saying, “My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?” while wearing banana costumes. It’ll be put up on YouTube on May 22nd… but only if they’re still around.

He's right, of course; they won't do any of this, because deep down they're just expecting to be let down again. What they will do, though, is continue to accept donations. Because nothing says "I really believe the end times are coming" like asking for financial support.

Just goes to show you. "Prophets": Con artists, the whole lot of them.

Live Blogging the Hitchens/Dembski Debate

2010-11-18T09:56:00.109-05:00

Famed anti-theist debater, columnist, and literary critic Christopher Hitchens is debating Intelligent Design proponent and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor William Dembski this morning at Prestonwood Christian Academy in Plano, Texas on the subject, "Does a good God exist?" The debate is streaming live at PCA's webcast site and I'll be updating this blog post as the debate goes with my impressions and observations.

It should be an interesting debate. Hitchens is known for his scathing wit and sharp rhetorical skills, and Dembski (while not exactly up to snuff on his science... if you ask me) is a well-trained theologian (whatever that might mean).

(Any times I mention will be Eastern Standard Time, and I'll largely be paraphrasing since I can't type fast enough to quote exactly.)

10:06
Bill Dembski's intro mentions his debating and lecture appearances... but Hitchens' doesn't, and they mess up the title of his book.

10:08
Hitchens gets out of the gate with an important distinction between deism and theism, mentioning Jefferson's deism. Outlines Paley's Watchmaker argument and how the deists embraced it. Points out that theism typically means belief in a god interested in human affairs, rather than an indifferent designer.

10:11
Hitchens points out our tiny, relatively unimportant place in the universe, and points out that we're made of the remnants of dead stars just like our own sun.

10:14
Hitchens: "The universe, in all its destructive power, doesn't seem as if it's the intended result of the hand of a divine, benign creator who loves us."..."It's a show of great hubris to think that the universe is focused on us."

10:16
Hitchens seems a little bit off his game. His illness is clearly getting to him.

10:17
Hitchens muses about the rabbis who claimed to see the will of God in the holocaust, then in the return to Palestine, contrasted to the strife in the region today.

10:18
Hitchens: "Our resemblance to other primates is not likely to be accidental." Human fetuses grow and then shed a coat of hair. We have an appendix. We have teeth that we no longer need for our diet. We all bear Darwin's "unmistakable stamp of our lowly origin." Primates are capable of doing great things. We're adapted to the African savanna, which we abandoned at a point where there were fewer than 2000-3000 people left and we needed to avoid the fate of 99.8% of all forms of life ever to appear on Earth: extinction. This doesn't give evidence of design, or a finger of a god of any kind, let alone one that wishes us well.

10:21
Hitchens suggests Francis Collins' "The Language of God" - a book about how DNA is evidence of the brilliance of God's design. Weird choice, but probably a strategically good choice for the audience full of Christians.

10:22
Hitchens: "I don't think it's healthy for people to want there to be a permanent, unalterable, unremoveable authority above them. I don't like the idea of a father above you who never goes away. You don't want a father who'll stick around and never die. The idea of a judge who doesn't allow a lawyer or a jury or an appeal. For hundreds of years, the struggle for freedom was against the worst type of dictatorship around - the theocracy of the divine right of kings. The totalitarian temptation has to be resisted, and I believe this is one of its core, origin points."

10:24
Hitchens: "It's not humble - rather, it's arrogant - to believe that you're the center of the universe. Free yourself from the idea that you're in thrall to the supernatural - a thrall interpreted by other mammals who claim access to the authority that gives them power over you."

10:25
Dembski says that the existence of God is the weightier question, and his goodness is much easier to explain. Yet he's going to spend 5 minutes on the former and 10 on the latter.

10:26
Dembski brings Dawkins into the debate and insists that atheism requires belief in evolution as our creation story.

10:27
Dembski claims that there is no such thing as junk DNA - that all DNA, even that which we call junk, has function.

10:28
Dembski claims that the Cambrian explosion is still a mystery today, and makes no mention of the fact that it happened over millions of years. Quotes someone claiming that there is no evidence of evolutionary ancestors of the animals in the explosion. Tells people to read his book.

10:29
Dembski claims that the inverted retina is actually beneficial. His argument is that it's not all bad because it ensures maximal sensitivity. His entire argument says nothing to explain away the blind spot in the eye. Couldn't God have made the eyes just efficient but without the blind spot?

10:31
Dembski complains that Hitchens, a non-scientist, doesn't provide a full, detailed explanation of the evolution of the eye. "It's not that Hitchens doesn't provide that - nobody provides that." Really? That's quite a claim.

10:32
Dembski regarding mathematical, computer models: "Unless you tether them to real, observable processes, you can use them to prove anything - in which case they prove nothing." Dembski is all about computer models.

10:33
Dembski: "Atheism demands evolution. ... If you're an atheist, that's your only option." Says that God could've put us here in a way that appears designed. (Nice untestable claim, Bill.)

10:35
Dembski: "Science is not a cumulative enterprise." Implies that evolution is just waiting to be overturned.

10:36
Dembski attacks Darwin's ignorance of modern biology, as if it were relevant.

10:37
It's been 12 minutes. Dembski has done absolutely nothing to discuss God's existence, nor has he discussed God's goodness. Oops.

10:38
Dembski claims that our language is not the result of unguided development, but design. What??

10:39
Dembski cites a movie written by Carl Sagan in an argument in favor of intelligent design.

10:40
Dembski says that we can tell something is designed if it meets a specified template. Do we have access to God's templates so that we can tell what he designed? No? Then your argument fails.

10:41
Dembski complains of being expelled from academia for flogging his IDiocy.

10:42
Dembski: "Richard Hitchens..." Who are you even debating here? Do you know who he is?

10:43
Dembski just made the utterly unjustified leap from deism to theism, claiming that the appearance of design is best explained by theism. Sorry... no. Deism would suffice, if a designer were really needed.

10:44
Dembski has now had 19 minutes to speak, compared to Hitchens' 15. The moderator shows no sign of stopping him.

10:45
Dembski: "I haven't argued for the full-blown deity, but I've gotten you into the ballpark of a deity." That's DEISM, not THEISM.

10:46
Hitchens: "An atheist does not have to be an evolutionist. Atheism long predates the revolutionary discoveries of Charles Darwin."

10:48
Hitchens: "Why does religion take discoveries about the nature of things so personally? De Rarum Natura was hated by the church for centuries. They didn't want you to know this. They didn't want Galileo to look through a telescope to see that the sun went around the Earth. Why would anyone care? Well, because it would mean we're not the center of the universe, which might make it fractionally more likely that we're not the meaning of the whole thing. This is such a solipsistic, self-important position."

10:50
Hitchens re: the eye: "Dembski said I was obsessed with it. That's not true. Darwin was at first stumped by its evolution, and it's often cited as an example against evolution."

10:51
Hitchens mentions cave animals with vestigial eye-shaped indentations where eyes would have been in evolutionary ancestors.

10:53
Hitchens: "Darwin said nothing about survival of the fittest; he spoke of adaptability."

10:53
Hitchens explains that evolution has nothing to do with the choice of the animals - it's a filter or sifting mechanism.

10:55
Hitchens: "Israeli archaeologists had ample opportunity, funding, and motive to find archaeological evidence in support of the exodus, but found absolutely nothing in favor. Rather, they found ample evidence in the Egyptian archives that showed it never happened."

10:56
Hitchens: "For me, the most important philosopher and moral teacher was Socrates, but there is little evidence of him - only second-hand accounts, no personal writings, etc. This is much like Jesus. The discrepancies between the gospels are extraordinary and are nothing like the evidence we have for known historical figures. But for Socrates, whether he existed or not is irrelevant, because we have his thoughts and his methods."

10:57
Hitchens: "Dembski seems to think that pointing out the disagreements and differences between scientists is somehow a blow to the practice of science, rather than something to be expected of people who make a career out of investigating the unknown."

10:59
Hitchens: "Science doesn't claim to prove there is no god - just that we have what we think are better explanations."

10:59
Dembski claims that he'll be focusing on the point of the debate this time. We'll see.

11:00
Dembski claims that the ANCIENT PHILOSOPHERS had a prototype of Darwinian evolution. What a crock.

11:01
Dembski actually claims that ancient creation myths begin with purely material origins and worked toward complexity - hence evolution. What the flaming fuck?

11:02
Dembski misuses the term "vestigial" to mean "useless" when no biologist would ever say that. Vestigial organs are not useless. They're organs which have evolved out of their original use.

11:02
Dembski distinguishes between adaptation within a species and evolution of species. This is an utterly baseless distinction to make and can only possibly be taken seriously if he doesn't believe in an old earth.

11:03
Dembski: "Last time I argued that God exists, this time I'll focus on his goodness." Well, no, you didn't. You rambled about irrelevant things for 4 minutes past the end of your time.

11:04
Dembski asserts that a universe without a god could not allow for good.

11:05
Dembski: "Denying God's existence is irrational and logically incoherent. It's absurd." God is definitionally good because he's the source of all being and purpose and no objective moral standard can come from God. Dr. Dembski, have you ever heard of the Euthyphro dilemma? "This may seem like a cheat, but it's not." Yes, it is. If morality is derived from God, God can change his mind at any time and define good as something else.

11:07
Dembski: "Once you have God, it's incoherent to affirm that God isn't good." You haven't gotten God yet, Bill. You have, at best, a deist god, not the Christian one, and you certainly don't have any of the theological attributes you just threw at it.

11:09
Dembski quotes Ingersoll regarding materialist morality: "no reward or punishment, only consequences." Well, DUH. That's right. And consequences are enough to build a moral system.

11:10
Dembski asserts that morality without an objective standard is all relativist and baseless. This is not an argument for God's existence or God's goodness. This is totally unrelated to the topic of the debate.

11:12
Dembski says that materialism can't provide an objective morality and thus can't determine one behavior as better than another - equating genital mutilation to the objection to it. "The atheist is cheating whenever he makes a moral judgment - acting as if it has an objective standard."

11:13
Dembski cites Hitchens' famous challenge (name a moral action taken by a religious person that could not be taken by an atheist) and DISMISSES IT AS THE WRONG QUESTION.

11:15
Hitchens: "I imagine that Christians should object to Dembski's position. If the existence of god can be proved scientifically, what is the need for faith? There'd be no need for faith if there were evidence, would there?

11:17
Hitchens: "Dembski is right - if I were a Christian, I wouldn't think God owed me an answer. But then, why the discussion of questions of suffering? Are we expecting an answer?"

11:18
Hitchens: "If we didn't have a social dimension - a bonding one - we wouldn't survive. We'd have gone by now. We wouldn't have made it out of Africa. The question is self-answering. You could call this morality if you want, but it's only really necessary to recognize that we have a kinship and solidarity and without it we're gone. Morality can't be dictated to us. It doesn't come in tablet form that we can swallow. It has to come from the Socratic method - discussion of why something is moral. The ten commandments say nothing about genocide, slavery, child abuse, and innumerable other things we consider evil. If you base your morality on this, you miss out on a lot."

11:20
Hitchens: "You can be an atheist and have any number of political options as you'd like. It dictates nothing."

11:21
Dembski's last period was 14 minutes long. Hitchens' was 5 minutes. What's going on here, moderator??

11:22
Dembski denies that humanity was ever proud of being the center of the universe. References Sagan's Pale Blue Dot and claims that the ancients didn't regard being the center of universe as being in a place of privilege.

11:23
Hitchens interrupts Dembski: "I'm not arguing with the ancients, I'm arguing with you."

11:24
Dembski insists that human exceptionalism is morally important and that we therefore must have a special place - otherwise it leads to abortion, euthanasia, and eugenics.

11:25
Dembski thinks he's very clever for having bought the domain name 'overwhelmingevidence.com' in response to hearing about the overwhelming evidence for evolution.

11:26
Dembski: "Having intelligent design is not proof of the Christian god. It doesn't get you the gospel, the tomb, or the resurrection." And yet you spent almost 20 minutes arguing that it did!

11:27
Dembski quotes Romans 1:20 as evidence that God's existence is self-evident.

11:28
Question time!
Question 1
Using the evolutionary process, where does the concept of human thought and the ability to reason come in, especially in light of things that appear to go against evolution, e.g. self-sacrifice? How does that promote the species?

Hitchens: It's a good speculation - why do people get pleasure for doing things that aren't necessarily in their self-interest? We do have that along with our predatory, selfish, and other attributes. I like giving blood - the feeling that I'm giving someone else a life-giving fluid, though I'm not really losing anything. You haven't lost a pint, but you've given one. I have a very rare blood group, and I hope that there's enough for me when I need it. It doesn't require a divine spark, design, or programming. The existence of sociopaths and psychopaths is explained quite well by evolution, but not so well by claiming that their minds were the design of a good god.

Dembski: The idea that evolution has given us bonding and group solidarity is possible, but not necessarily exclusive to evolution. If you're going to take the bonding from evolution, you can take other things as well, e.g. the 'great battle for life.' Rape and infanticide have been called an evolutionary adaptation. (The problem, Bill, is that these are SCIENTIFICALLY LINKED to evolution - evolution can't be used to MORALLY justify them one way or the other.)

(Dembski's entire argument appears to be the fallacy of the argument from final consequences - evolution means we can't have an objective standard! Bad stuff happens if evolution is true! Well... yes. And?)

Hitchens: Just a few verses away from the ten commandments is an order to commit genocide, rape, and slavery. I don't object to what people do in the name of religion - I'm objecting to the scripture itself.

11:37
Dembski: "The debate is about the goodness of God, not Christian theism." But now he's going to argue from Christian theology, as he has been the whole time when describing the logic of God's goodness. Defends the use of the atomic bomb as a moral quandary.

11:38
Dembski: "God is a just god. He's not bound by the same rules we are - he makes the rules." EUTHYPHRO, MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU SPEAK IT?

11:39
Dembski creates a false dichotomy between atheism and formal theism - ignores deism, pantheism, etc.

11:39
Dembski objects to Hitchens' atheism because his worldview isn't perfect. Seriously?

11:40
Hitchens calls Dembski on his argument from final consequences - "it may be bleak and nihilistic, but is it true?" Points out that believing God allowed the world to break at the fall doesn't provide any less nihilistic or alienating of a worldview. "You have to consider yourself created incurably sick, and then ordered on pain of death and eternal torture to be well. This is not morality."

11:42
Dembski: "We're not incurably sick. The cure is Jesus Christ." Aww, how sweet. Human sacrifice.

11:43
Dembski: "I was raised a Roman Catholic. I had no belief that Jesus was God." Rambles about how he used to be a nonbeliever and a new-age kind of guy. I have no idea what the hell he's talking about or how it's even vaguely related.

11:46
Dembski: "Life here may suck and the scriptures may be harsh, but would you like a sanitized Bible where you had nothing like this?" Actually, yes. If it's meant to be a moral guide, absolutely.

11:47
Hitchens: Christianity has saddled itself with an unbelievable and wicked religion by forcing acceptance of the old testament atrocities.

11:48
Hitchens: "The sheer number of accounts of Jesus' life makes it likely that some such figure existed, though we can't discern his attributes. It does not prove or even suggest that his birth was divine, that his father was God, or that his mother was a virgin. Suppose that they are true. I did not ask for Jesus' torture and human sacrifice, and were I there, I'd have done whatever I could to prevent it. It's not bad for a person to take the punishment for your debts. But it's ridiculous to suggest that they can take away your culpability. It's scapegoating. It's an old, primitive practice from the middle east that doesn't deserve the consideration of modern people. This sacrifice is not being offered - you refuse on pain of death. Is that a threat? 'Well, that means an eternity of torture, you know. You better take that into account.' This is North Korea. This is a celestial dictatorship. This is the sort of worship that it takes a slave to accept."

11:51
Dembski points out that it's not offered on pain of death because scripture says we're dead in our sin. Hitchens laughs.

11:52
Another Dembski straw man: bringing up other people's arguments against free will and then charging Hitchens to explain the idea of responsibility in light of them.

11:55
Question 2
Where did the matter of the Big Bang come from? How about the fossil record - do you find it convincing/confounding?

Dembski: "Biblical creation ex nihilo [which doesn't exist, btw - there wasn't "nothing" in Genesis 1:1] mirrors the Big Bang. The Big Bang opens the door to theism [Deism at best - sorry Bill.] The Big Bang hasn't been alive/the way to go for 40 years." Big Bang cosmology has "theistic" implications? What? "I think there's a fair amount of common ancestry, but not universal." He's speaking of the Biblical "kinds" here - good old baraminology.

Hitchens: "There was a time when a natural philosopher like Newton or Kant could speculate about the natural world and do better than many professionals could. Hawking's statement that science has killed philosophy, I believe, means that we're approaching a point where you might not be able to say anything useful as a philosopher unless you're also a scientist."

12:00
Hitchens cites Lawrence Krauss' "A Universe From Nothing" lecture on YouTube regarding creation ex nihilo.

12:02
Hitchens: "A lot of 'nothing' is coming our way to destroy us. What kind of design does this evoke? A fantastic waste of energy. Makes God into a tinkerer or a profligate. Just like how 99.8% of all species have become extinct - what a waste! What a cruelty! That's the kind of tinkerer - the capricious, incompetent tyrant God is. Man did not create God. Man and women created many, many gods, and we continue to do so. Either all of them are false, one or more of them are true, or all of them are true. And the evidence seems to point that none of them are true. They're the creation of something that is so obviously half a chromosome away from a chimpanzee."

12:04
Dembski reveals that his closing remarks are prepared. Sigh. That's not a debate.

12:05
Dembski: Quote saying that any man who strives to bring everyone over to his ideology is dangerous. HELLO! Romans 14:11 ring a bell? "For it is written, [As] I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God."

12:07
WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED that Dembski thought bringing up Hitler, Kim Jong Il, and Stalin would be a KILLER conclusion? And why does Dembski dismiss the fact that most of the SS were Christians? Does he excuse the mostly Christian people of Germany because Hitler was (supposedly) an atheist?

12:09
Dembski flails about trying to defend Mother Teresa. Thinks that's a good conclusion. Meta-babbling about how his rhetoric courses taught him to wrap up quickly.

12:10
Hitchens: "Mother Teresa spent her entire life struggling against the empowerment of women, the only thing that has been proved to combat poverty. She did much to increase suffering, poverty, disease, and filth. These were and are the metier of the Catholic church."

12:13
Hitchens: "I'm not going to allow Nazism to be called secularism. I'm a prisoner of my knowledge; I know too much about it. Mein Kampf speaks greatly to the idea of an obligation to God. Nazi soldiers swore fealty by God and wore the Gott Mit Uns belt buckle. Nazism was the Christian right in Germany subsumed into a political party."

12:15
Hitchens: "I don't have to wait to die to meet Shakespeare; the Shakespeare we know lives immortally in his writing. If we were to meet the man, we'd likely be disappointed."

12:16
Hitchens: "To me, the offer of certainty, complete security, and an impermeable faith that can't go away is an offer I don't want to take. I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of knowledge and wisdom, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I'd look at the people who tell you - at your age! - that you're dead already and that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don't take that as a gift; look at it as the poison chalice that it is. Much more truth and beauty and wisdom will come your way if you do."

And that's it. Whew. Good fun. Hitchens may have been flagging early on, but he certainly picked up the pace along the way and got back in his stride.

Hitchens has to leave to go take care of his health, but Dembski is sticking around. I wonder if he'll be licking his wounds.

12:21
They're closing with a prayer. How nice. The guy doing the prayer says he doesn't have all the answers, and the debate confused him, but since 1978 he's never been convinced of the atheist worldview and he's been convinced of the truth of the Bible. How nice - get in there right away to reaffirm your beliefs and wash away some of that doubt that was starting to take root.

In summary...
Hitchens was Hitchens, as we've come to know and love. Polite and at times deferential, showing great respect for and camaraderie with the audience. His barbed tongue and eloquence were just as I expected. Dembski rambled incessantly, going over his time by several minutes at every occasion, asserting that he'd established things he never established, contradicting himself, claiming not to be arguing from Christian theology, and arguing against quotes from people who were not at the debate nor with whom Hitchens agreed.

Hitchens made an effort to connect emotionally with the kids and their desire for freedom. The only connection Dembski built with them was over scripture and dogma. He seemed to see them as fellow Christians only, not as individuals with their own desires.

Am I biased? Yeah. But seriously, if anyone sees this debate and thinks Dembski came out on top, I'll wonder about their sanity.

I'd love to be able to sit in on the lunchroom conversations going on at this school right now!

New on the bookshelf: "The Atheist's Guide to Christmas" and "The Moral Landscape"

2010-11-10T20:40:00.006-05:00

Just recently, I spoke over twitter with Jen McCreight (she of 'Boobquake' fame). With minimal effort, she talked me into buying a copy of The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, a compilation of factual and fictional writings on the Christmas holiday and its trappings by a wide variety of atheists (well-known and little-known) from around the world. I got in the mail yesterday, just in time to share it with my fellow heathens from my local atheist meetup at our happy hour. It sparked a lovely discussion about our own experiences with Christmas, how we first realized that there was no Santa Claus, what Christmas can be like as an atheist in a house full of Christians, and so on.

Now I just have to read the book...

I also picked up a copy of Sam Harris' new book, The Moral Landscape. Our group is setting up a book club-style event with this book (probably... we've yet to decide) as the subject, and I've heard it's really quite a dense read, so it'll be ... interesting ... trying to balance the sweet lightheartedness of the first book with the meaty, intellectually challenging richness of this one. I think I'm up for the challenge, though.

How to Build a Well-Stuffed Straw Man

2010-09-26T23:18:00.009-04:00

John Shook, director of education and a senior research fellow for the Center for Inquiry - an organization that is typically friendly toward skepticism, critical thinking, and atheism - has written a scathing attack on ... someone, I'm not entirely sure who, exactly ... in the good ol' HuffPo.

In his article, pithily titled "For Atheists and Believers, Ignorance Is No Excuse", Shook states:

Astonished that intellectual defenses of religion are still maintained, many prominent atheists disparage theology. They either dismiss the subject as irrelevant, or, if they do bother to acknowledge it, slim refutations of outdated arguments for a medieval God seem enough. ... Challenging religion's immunity from criticism is one thing; perpetuating contempt for religion's intellectual side is another. ... The "know-nothing" wing of the so-called New Atheism really lives up to that label. Nonbelievers reveling in their ignorance are an embarrassing betrayal of the freethought legacy.

When I read this, I blinked. Just who is he talking about, anyways? Is he making the (baseless and almost certainly false) assumption that the "new" (ugh) atheists are unfamiliar with more complex forms of theology? Is he saying that we only dismiss it because we don't understand it? Who is this "'know-nothing wing' of the so-called New Atheism"?

Yes, there are plenty of fools who claim that religion is false because they've accepted simple (and wrong) explanations such as those offered by idiocy like Zeitgeist, but... does he think that most of us are like this?

I didn't become an atheist because it was the easy answer. There's nothing easy about giving up indoctrination. I gave up my faith because I was familiar with the more 'complex' theology, and I found it just as empty and intellectually unsatisfying as its simpler cousins. Yes, theologians have become very good in the past few thousand years at ducking and weaving around good questions, but their arguments, no matter how complicated, are still centered upon assertions of knowledge about things they couldn't possibly know. Any defenses of gods they have are based on asserted attributes of gods; in essence, they've become very good at defining God into existence, in the absence of any actual evidence of said existence.

Are most of the more vocal atheists ignorant of theology? Hardly! In my experience, the people who are less familiar with theology are the atheists who go along quietly, not making a fuss out of their disbelief. They don't find the subject of god meaningful, so they don't bother talking about it. But those of us who do understand theology tend to recognize that it's a subject in which expertise can't be demonstrated! If the gods are inscrutable, no one can claim to be more knowledgeable than anyone else, and we have no reason to accept a person's authority.

If Shook wants to criticize people who dismiss theology as meaningless because they're not familiar with the more complex thoughts of theologians, he's asserting that there's some basis for assuming those theologians actually have something authoritative to say on the subject! What sort of freethinker assumes that a person who is good at disguising sophistry with flowery language actually has the inside scoop on a subject?

Shook continues:

How did know-nothing atheism and lazy theology grab the spotlight? This dead-end trap of mutually assured ignorance was not inevitable. Ironically, better educated classes of believers and freethinkers had emerged over the past 200 years.

Again... what is an educated believer? When you say that a believer is familiar with complex theology, are you actually saying that they know something about reality, or just that they've become better able to spin nonsense into gold?

Shook goes on:

Christian theology has come a long way since St. Thomas Aquinas. Under stress from modern science and Enlightenment philosophy, it has explored cosmological, ethical, emotional, and existential dimensions of religious life. Many kinds of theology have emerged, replacing a handful of traditional arguments for God with robust methods of defending religious viewpoints.

In other words: Religion has consistently ceded ground to rational thought. The gaps in which God can be shoved have consistently shrunk, until God can only be described as a mystery. Why, then, should we be concerned with theology, if it's constantly having to remold itself to fit the reality that science is revealing to us every day? Theology is a discipline in search of a field to explore.

Why is Shook spouting such silliness? Well, you shouldn't be surprised at all, really...

I expand on these observations from the front lines of the God debates in my new book, The God Debates: A 21st Century Guide for Atheists, Believers, and Everyone in Between. All of the major traditional and contemporary arguments for God are reorganized by these five categories: Theology From The Scripture (can we trust its accounts of Jesus?); Theology From The World (should we supplement science with acts of God?); Theology Beyond The World (does cosmology need supernaturalism to explain the universe?); Theology In The Know (placing religious certainties before any other knowledge); and Theology Into The Myst (letting religious experiences of God take priority over creeds). The final chapter on Faith and Reason evaluates the competition among Western worldviews struggling to balance reason and faith, including fundamentalism, liberal Christianity, panentheism, mysticism, religious humanism, and secular humanism.

Oh, so he has a book to sell! And thus, all of his nonsense can be excused as an attempt to stir up controversy and increase his sales.

If atheists are going to produce a rational worldview capable of replacing religion, they must take religion and theology more seriously.

These are the words of a man who has done very little reading and a whole lot of pontificating lately. How sad. Plenty of atheist writers have taken religion and theology seriously - as natural phenomena. Playing on the theists' own court is a surefire way to lose at their game. Deny that they have a right to make the rules, and you'll be better off. This is the Courtier's Reply writ large.

Shook's entire article is one big angry-old-man-fist-shaking at a group who supposedly exists, but for which he is apparently unable to cite a single example. Were he able to do so, it would lend quite a bit of credence to his point. As it stands, he seems to be adept only at attacking scarecrows.

------

Something else I've just realized about Dr. Shook's article: Underlying it seems to be the assumption that atheists, rather than simply being people who don't believe in a god or gods, instead somehow bear a responsibility for addressing the evidence-free claims made by religious people. Where does this come from? Why does disbelief require us to examine all the claims made by the religious? And which complex theologies should we be prepared to rebut - just those of the mainstream religions, or those of the more obscure sects as well? What if the most convincing and complicated theological position is that of a single person nobody has ever heard of - should we be embarrassed to call ourselves rationalists or freethinkers if we can't debate that one person on all her finer points and on her terms? Why do atheists need to be philosophers at all?

You Don't Have to Think, Either

2010-08-22T15:44:00.040-04:00

My mother thought it would be a good idea to forward on a rather vacuous little article from someone writing on her church's website. The article, I Don't Have to Prove It, is a celebration by UCC minister Lillian Daniel of that oft-quoted passage from the Bible:

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."

That's from Hebrews 11:1-3. Never you mind that the book then goes on to explain how the ancients of Judaism performed great acts of faith after receiving direct proof of the existence of God, either through visions or by hearing God's voice; no - it's much better to ignore all that and just interpret the passage to mean "faith is the ability to believe without evidence."

To quote the article:

I can't prove to you that Jesus lived, died and was resurrected, nor that he healed people on the sabbath or that he forgave his tormentors. I can't prove to you that one God can also be three in one, and that together that force has parted the waters, burned bushes and fed thousands on short rations. None of this can I prove. But I can tell you that I have faith in it.

Well, that's fantastic. But it's utterly meaningless to me that you have faith in it. It gives me no reason at all to consider your position. This is the kind of thing that a believer will e-mail around to other believers so that they can reassure each other that they're fine believing whatever they want, regardless of evidence for or against it. It's certainly not the sort of thing you send to your atheist son, expecting it to convince him that faith is really a good thing after all.

I can hope and believe in what is not before my eyes. I don't have to be logical, and most of all, I don't have to prove it. Not to you, not to anyone.

Not to yourself, either, as you go on to demonstrate. And I get a kick out of people who say they don't have to be logical. Aren't they just admitting that their position is illogical, and that they don't care?

In our culture, it seems like people of faith are always on the witness stand being asked to prove things, and we Christians tend to cooperate. We come up with the search for the historical Jesus and scholars who vote on whether Jesus said this or that. Or archaeological studies that will finally prove whether or not Jesus was resurrected. Documentaries on/* the history channel draw us in, as if finally, we might look reasonable to the viewing public, as though finally we will get our proof.

I'm tired of playing by that dull and pedestrian set of rules, which has everything to do with a litigious, factoid-hungry culture and nothing to do with following Jesus.

Dull and pedestrian? You're talking about people who actually care about whether or not their beliefs are true, and calling their attempts and desire to verify their beliefs dull and pedestrian. What patronizing, silly nonsense. Where's all the Christian humility we're always hearing about? What I see is a smug, self-satisfied, pompous pseudo-intellectual.

Here's the clincher:

I don't come to church for evidence or for a closing argument. I come to experience the presence of God, to sense the mystery of things eternal and to learn a way of life that makes no sense to those stuck sniffing around for proof.

And this is where Daniel reveals just how completely wrongheaded her approach is: Not only does she believe in the absence of evidence (which is perfectly common among people of faith), but she sees evidence as wholly unnecessary and shows contempt for the idea that she should care whether or not reality bears out her dogmas. She turns up her nose at those of us who would first require the merest bit of proof, declaring not just with contentment but with abject pride that she's far above the need for "dull and pedestrian" things like facts. Were it the case that every single thing she believes were absolutely, demonstrably false, still she would hold fast to her belief, sneering at the people who proved her wrong for how they just don't understand how strong her faith is or how great is "the mystery of things eternal." (Remind me to blog later on how stupid it is that people idolize mystery for mystery's sake.)

Needless to say, the strength of a person's faith has no bearing on reality. People can believe nearly anything at all with all of their being. But when evidence shows them to be wrong and they persist in their beliefs, this is no longer mere ignorance but in fact a form of insanity. It is no more rational (or admirable) than believing very strongly that gravity does not affect you and pooh-poohing people who warn you about stepping into elevator shafts because you draw strength and comfort from the idea that, if you decided to do so, you would float about unharmed in midair.

Such seems to be the case with Daniel. She doesn't care to investigate her beliefs. Moreover, she doesn't even seem to want to hear anything from people who have done the investigations she's far too clever to need to do. She decries logic, reason, and evidence, the only tools that we know actually work for making change in the world or for learning about how reality works. I can almost imagine that, were someone to try to teach her the things she doesn't want to know about, she would stick her fingers in her ears and sing loudly to mask out their voice.

So you don't think you need evidence for your beliefs. Bully for you. But you don't even want to have to consider whether or not they're true; you don't even think it's a worthwhile question. And that's pathetic. This is a person who revels in her ignorance and holds a smarmy, self-important sense of superiority over those of us who want to know what is and isn't actually true. And I can't help but scratch my head at the fact that my mother thought I would be interested in reading this...

My last days as a believer

2010-08-10T20:23:00.007-04:00

I've managed to dig up an almost four-year-old discussion on a web forum where I argued (with cringeworthy levels of smarm and fake logic) for the existence of God (of the generic Deistic variety) against a few atheists.

Worthy of note is the fact that I was a college senior and most of the people I was talking to were high school students or younger college students, and yet they tend to come off sounding more rational than I do.

Here are some choice quotes of myself from that thread:

Quite simply put, all physical events have a cause. The Big Bang was a physical event. Now, as to its cause, we have two primary competing theories:

1. It is either a) impossible to know the cause, since observation of anything within the singularity is by definition impossible, or b) it was caused something that defies every rule of physics and mathematics that we have, and
2. It was caused by a supernatural being, force, or event.

I prefer to follow option 2. Regardless of the fact that it's a cop-out explanation, at least it's an explanation.

So I was happy to stick with a cop-out, just because I could pretend it was an explanation.

I mentioned the cosmological constants before. I'm not going to be a proponent for intelligent design, but I think that the fact that the constants came out to be exactly the values that would support life is pretty good evidence that SOMETHING made them that way intentionally. If any of the constants had been slightly different - somewhere on the order of 1*10^-60 - life of any form would be a physical impossibility. In fact, the universe as we know it might not exist. It could be a sparse cloud of free-floating hydrogen atoms, or an unstable, dense, decaying nuclear universe devoid of anything much lighter than solid matter.

Ahh, the good old 'fine tuning' argument, complete with numbers pulled out of thin air! Always a classic.

The very definition of 'supernatural' is 'something outside of natural existence.' The laws of physics just don't apply to it. It could be a physically-detached intelligence, some underlying force within the fabric of spacetime, I don't know. Supernatural entities are not necessarily bound by physical constraints. Their existence is something nearly inconceivable to a natural entity.

No evidence? No problem! Define your concept as unexplorable, then assert, assert, assert!

Personally, I think a life devoid of faith in a higher being would be a life I wouldn't want to experience. I can't see why you would continue to live if your future consists of being forgotten in the passage of time and eventual cataclysmic destruction of the universe that will erase all traces of human existence from... well, existence. I mean... how can you derive any meaningful purpose from life if your life is, in the long run, utterly without meaning or merit?...
My point was that since the universe will eventually be destroyed, there is no reason for life to be here in the first place. The entire concept of life is meaningless, and intelligent life is just a cruel joke fate plays on us. Unless, of course, there's something out there greater than life itself.

In other words, "I don't like the idea that the universe has no ultimate purpose, therefore I will simply believe that it doesn't, even though I really don't have any good reason to do so."

I believe in evolution, too. I'm not blindly ignorant of scientific fact :) I just don't think it's plausible to say that the universe is set up the way it is by random chance.

Besides... how does something create itself?

Nothing can create itself. It's a logical impossibility caused by the fact that every physical event has a cause other than itself -_-

I said, with precisely zero sense of irony.

God doesn't hate anyone. He hates things. Like war. And killing.

Says the guy who hadn't yet read the Bible all the way.

You really think God ought to micromanage the weather?

In response to "Would God allow something like the Hurricane Katrina to happen if he existed?" Yes, I really was that trite and thoughtless about it.

... why does God have to prove Himself to you the way you want Him to? I'd say that the fact that humans exist at all is pretty good evidence of the existence of divinity.

... who would be a better person to judge what's right and wrong than the one who INVENTED "right?" You?

I'm not saying that the Bible tells you what is right, but there's certainly nobody with a higher level of cognitive function than the being who created cognitive function -_-

Seriously, I was a moron.

There's more gold in the rest of the thread. Enjoy.

An atheist godfather?

2010-08-08T21:06:00.004-04:00

My cousin is an Episcopalian, which he describes as "the American version of Anglicanism, which is the British version of Catholicism." He has a beautiful new baby son, who will be baptized in just over a month. And he's asked me to be my new cousin's godfather.

Being raised a protestant, I really had no idea what this meant. The whole godfather/godmother thing was totally foreign to me. So I decided I'd ask around at work. I'm surrounded by Catholics here in New York, something else that was foreign while I was growing up in the Midwest.

Apparently, to be a godfather means several things:

That you're expected to give the biggest gifts at birthday parties, graduation, etc.,

That you'll take responsibility for being a parent for the child if anything happens to his real parents, and

That you'll help with the spiritual upbringing of the child.

Oh, dear.

You see, my cousin asked me over the phone, and I pretty much said yes right away without bothering to find out what it meant. And the vast majority of my family - namely, anyone who isn't my parents or doesn't look too closely at my Facebook profile - doesn't know I'm an atheist.

So… what do I do now? How do I let my cousin down easy? I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable helping to raise his son as an Episcopalian, but still - the fact that he'd consider me for such a job tells me that there's something about me that he respects, and I want to show him that I'm grateful that he'd consider me for such a role. Not to mention that telling him I'm an atheist would likely mean that I'd be outed to that entire half of my family… which is something I'm probably due for at this point.

Part of being named as a godfather also means that I'd have to attend the kid's baptism, which is (in my mind) inextricably tied with the beginning of an indoctrination into Christian dogma… sigh.

Regarding the 'Left Behind' prequels

2010-07-26T23:42:00.004-04:00

For reasons I can't really explain, I've just listened to all three of the 'Left Behind' prequels in audiobook form.

These books hold a strange fascination for me. I'll freely admit that it's largely because I was reading the original series when I became a born-again Christian. These stories are deeply embedded in my memory. But when I first read them, I was just thinking about how glorious the future was going to be - as if the books were not just fictional descriptions of future events, but actual works of prophecy. The lines between fiction and prophecy were totally blurred for me.

Now, when I listen to them as a nonbeliever, I can't help but be struck by how trite and silly they seem. The characters are totally unrealistic, the plot lines are predictable and full of pointless delays, and the dialogue is stilted and utterly unlike any kind of dialogue that real people have. Everyone seems to speak the same way, eschewing contractions for the full versions of words (in what seems like an attempt to conform with the formal, Victorian English of the KJV of the Bible).

The whole thing is ridiculous, and it's packed with straw man versions of the arguments that atheists actually use. It's amazing that I was ever so drawn into something like this...

And that doesn't even begin to describe just how stereotypical the non-white characters are in this series. Jenkins and LaHaye actually portray the only explicitly African American characters as being stereotypically 'sassy' and obsessed with barbecued ribs. They could really only have been more racist if they'd gotten into a discussion of watermelon and chitlins... I mean, come on! Their straw man black people even started talking about how white people don't know how to cook ribs! What the fuck?

Can Child Indoctrination Be Child Abuse?

2010-07-04T16:56:00.005-04:00

Recently this video popped up over on Hemant Mehta's blog:

Hemant polled his readers:

I know the poll question is simplistic, but the idea is a broad one: What do you think about the use of the child in the video? Is this a form of child abuse?

Essentially, the question is whether or not it's abusive to involve a child in the act of indoctrinating others, as a part of the process of raising them to believe the parents' dogma. It's a sticky question. Without a doubt, there are certain lies that parents can tell their kids without it being considered child abuse.

But religious dogma - especially that of the woman in this video - is entirely different. When you teach a child that the world works in an entirely different way than it actually does… and teach them social skills with the intent of getting them to make friends in order to get people saved… and teach them to fear and be repulsed by their human nature… and teach them that their body is shameful and can lead then to eternal damnation… and teach them that it’s a virtue to believe in fantastic things on little to no evidence… and set them up for a future where they’ll either never really think for themselves or spend many painful years getting over the various mental blocks their indoctrination put in place… yes, I would call that child abuse.

It's especially insidious when these people take their children along as props to disarm their marks. The kids are being told that they have to spread their beliefs to others, and I doubt they've been given much opportunity to determine whether or not they actually want to believe those things.

I indoctrinated myself into fundamentalism, and I’m still digging the poisonous nonsense I learned out of my brain. I can only imagine with horror just how much more difficult that would be if you spent your entire life being told it was true and being encouraged to constantly express your belief in it.

People at Hemant's blog compared this to telling kids that there's a Santa Claus, or raising them with an atheist worldview (whatever that may mean; it's about as meaningful as the term "gay agenda").

It does not compare with telling kids about Santa Claus, because eventually you tell them it was a myth. It also doesn’t compare with raising them as atheists, because you don’t have to lie to them to do that. Some atheists do tell their kids things that aren’t true about what other people believe, but you won’t find them telling their kids that they’ll suffer an eternity of burning torture if they dare disbelieve their parents.

This woman is raising her daughter under a belief system that tells her that she and every other human being on the planet is deserving of eternal punishment for the crime of being born human, and that we have to submit our will and give up much of ourselves to the control of the very being threatening us with said torment. And she's raising her daughter to believe that it's not only good, but admirable to spread those beliefs to other people. She is raising the poor girl in a dogma that teaches that no degree of work that you do to help people live more comfortable or satisfying lives can ever amount to anything meaningful if you don't believe that you're doing it at the command of an eternal judge who finds your essential nature unworthy of redemption.

Yes, this form of evangelicalism is, in fact, abusive. It denigrates everything that makes human beings human and spins it as sinful and offensive to their god. Certainly there are other forms of Christianity that are less damaging to a child's ability to function as a rational member of society, but only inasmuch as they have taken on secular values such as critical thinking and the rejection of eternal punishment for finite crimes. Moderate Christianity is more palatable because it has seen and removed the worm at the center of the rotten apple that is the dogma, but by and large it still attempts to sell you a rotten apple, polished and painted to look more appealing.

Can child indoctrination not be child abuse? Sure - when the dogma is as watered-down as it possibly can be, and everything that impugns the value of humanity (i.e., the entire concept of original sin, sinful thoughts, sinful natural behavior, the need for redemption, etc.) has been removed. This is essentially what I was raised with, and looking back on it I'm struck by just how little I actually bothered to think about God when I was a kid. Yes; when indoctrination is basically content-free, I don't consider it abusive. I just consider it an odd use of time.

Fun with UPS

2010-06-09T20:21:00.003-04:00

This is completely unrelated to atheism... but hey, it's my blog. I can vent.

When I left work today I discovered that I had a voice mail from UPS, saying that they'd attempted to make a delivery of a package that required my signature. Since I wasn't home, they would leave a note on my door with information and instructions for picking it up.

I got home to discover that the note was curiously absent.

The package having been sent from the UK, I only had a Royal Mail reference number to track the package - I had no UPS tracking number. After an hour or so of frustration at trying (to no avail) to determine my tracking number through the UPS website, I received another automated call from UPS. It gave me a menu of options, one of which was to be reminded of my tracking number! Aha!

But my luck being as it is, I was in the middle of a thunderstorm, and I'm lucky to get two bars at best when the weather isn't so oppressive. After three digits of the tracking number, the call cut out. I redialed the number of the automated message, only to be informed that I had received a call from that number because a delivery attempt had failed. (Wow, really? I had no idea!) I haven't been called by that number again since.

Next I decided to check with the local UPS store, which is only about five minutes from my apartment. No luck. In fact, the store employee told me rather curtly, regarding the automated message, that "that's got nothing to do with us."

I called the international shipping customer service number. They took my name, address, and phone number, typed merrily away into their system, and lo and behold, nothing came up for me. I can only assume that this is because it was before the trucks checked in for the evening, though it seems like they should be able to submit delivery attempts remotely... In any case, they couldn't help me. They told me they'd check with the local UPS store. Hooray!

Maybe I'll get the package eventually...

Dear Muslims: It's not you - it's me.

2010-05-25T22:18:00.013-04:00

So there's been fuss in the atheist community about how a message was conveyed. (Shock, amazement, surprise!) And I've got an opinion about it. (Further astonishment!)

Everybody Draw Muhammed Day was met with mixed results. Commenters on several blogs have tried to compare the activities to throwing around racist slurs - an analogy which falls flat when one considers the fact that religious belief is something that can be consciously chosen, and that death and violence were threatened as a means of intimidating the participants.

I've even been told (by a fellow atheist!) that, since I supported this expression of free speech, I must therefore endorse all expressions of free speech, including the history-denying insanity of Everybody Research the Holocaust Day, a reaction by a Muslim user of Facebook that invites people to deny the Holocaust as a way that we're "being emotionally blackmailed by Hollywood tales and holocaust museums which legitimize the war crimes and crimes against humanity of the extremist Atheist regime of Tel-Aviv." I'll leave it to you to determine which logical fallacies are employed in this argument.

Worst of all, those of use who participated in EDMD are being scolded, as usual, for our "tone." Ignore for the moment that we had a legitimate message to send; the mere fact that we'd dare to send a message that might offend someone means that the Niceness Police can step in and tell us, as the same person above did, that we "completely lack empathy."

What these hand-wringers don't seem to realize is that this wasn't about offending Muslims. Muslims abide by a doctrine that commands them to be offended at depictions of their prophet. (This doctrine is relatively new, by the way; there are plenty of historical depictions of Muhammed painted by Muslim artists.) For some reason, the more vocal Muslims seem to think that we should be forced to abide by this dogma as well, and must therefore forgo any attempts to draw Muhammed, lest we offend anyone. This is similar to a fundamentalist Christian insisting that since they find it offensive to claim that homosexuality is natural, we non-Christians must never make that claim, lest they be offended.

But in this case, it goes beyond that. Muslims of all stripes, including liberals and moderates, all seem to follow this doctrine. Even Aasif Mandvi of uber-liberal faux news show The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was offended:

Mandvi addressed the issue after a Muslim Web site sent "South Park," another Comedy Central show, a warning after it depicted the Prophet Muhammed in a bear suit.
A self-described liberal Muslim, Mandvi said on the "Daily Show" that he would be upset to see the prophet depicted in a cartoon, but not as upset as he was to find out someone of his faith was threatening people who did so.

When we're told that we mustn't make pictures of Muhammed because a dogma teaches that it's offensive to do so, we're being told that we should be willing to let another person's dogma control our lives. This, for me, was the core of this exercise. It is not about whether or not someone else was offended. It was about rejecting the intrusion of someone else's dogma into my life. I am not a Muslim. I reject the dogma that teaches that drawing Muhammed is offensive. I don't feel that I need to empathize with a dogma that commands people to be offended on a completely irrational, unreasonable basis. This exercise proved that it doesn't even matter what the content of the message is. Some people were obscene. Some people drew stick figures. Some people were even more abstract:

This was my contribution. It really doesn't matter what the drawing was - you were guaranteed to upset someone. The dogma doesn't say that positive depictions are acceptable; it teaches that all are offensive and must be forbidden.

To those who say we should take a different tack with this: How would you suggest we do that? Should we promise to respect people's dogmas, no matter how ridiculous they are or how they intrude into our lives? Should we engage in a pointless interfaith dialogue with a group that would never allow themselves not to be offended? Should we simply accept that things like the censorship of the South Park episode are part of being a multicultural nation, and that the religious freedoms of others are allowed to infringe upon our rights? What message could you possibly send to Muslims, other than the message that we don't want to be controlled by a dogma that we have not chosen for ourselves? And how would you send that message, if not by ignoring that dogma?

If not by drawing Muhammad, how would you assert that we won't stand to be threatened into censorship? And how is it anything but cowardice to allow yourself to be controlled by threats?

It's Meowhammad!

2010-05-20T21:38:00.004-04:00

Happy Draw Muhammad Day, everybody.

What's it about? I'll let Wikipedia explain it.

Ex-Christians have it easy...

2010-05-11T21:28:00.005-04:00

Thoughts from a Godless Heathen has been added to The Atheist Blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information. That said, let's continue!

If you've got some time, I recommend perusing The Lens, a blog by my twitter friend Ali. Ali, a former Muslim, lends an interesting perspective on the intersection of religion and culture that I and many former Christians have likely never seen.

From what I've seen, Islam seems to be more deeply embedded in the culture of its followers than the beliefs of most Christians are embedded in theirs. This is something I'm only just coming to recognize, but it's an important point. When I tell people I'm an atheist, they tend to get a little freaked out by it, but it doesn't shake their world off of its foundations. When an ex-Muslim tells other Muslims that they're an atheist, it's not so simple. The Godless Monster related it this way over on Hemant Mehta's blog:

I get sick and tired of running into other Arabs and have them ask me if I am Muslim and then hear them respond to my declaration of non-belief by saying, “No!!! Once a Muslim, always a Muslim! You can NEVER go back! Never say that!”
I had to fake I was a believer at a cousin’s funeral when I was in southern Lebanon last month. How humiliating. It just wears you down emotionally after awhile. The entire culture and religion is obsessed with compliance and subordination and woe be to those who rock the boat or betray their own kind as I have. You former Christians and Jews have no idea how lucky you are.

I agree, and the more horror stories I read from former Muslims, the more I realize how smoothly my 'coming out' has gone.

Subliminal Christianity and Racism

2010-04-09T18:28:00.008-04:00

According to the latest post on Hemant's blog,

a study published by Baylor University researchers finds that “Priming Christian Religious Concepts Increases Racial Prejudice” (PDF).

Basically, the researchers presented subjects with subliminal flashes of words, purportedly to test their ability to detect and differentiate between words versus non-word letter groups seen for only a brief period of time (less than 100ms). Some subjects saw neutral words, like butter or house, while others saw words associated with Christianity, such as Christ, faith, Bible and gospel. They then ran the subjects through a battery of situational questions designed to determine their degree of hostility towards the African Americans in the situations.

Kate Shellnutt summarized the conclusions quite nicely on HoustonBelief:

Researchers offer some possible explanations for why these Christian terms have such negative effects. They can cue fundamentalism or political conservatism, which can isolate “out-groups,” or echo the notion of the Protestant work ethic, which has been connected with anti-Black attitudes, the study said.

The researchers didn't draw any larger conclusions from this (i.e., that most Christians are racist or anything quite so extreme), though they did insist it was causal rather than correlational.

The demographics were a little weird:

A total of 73 college students (57 women and 16 men; M = 19.6 years) were recruited from introductory psychology classes to participate in a personality and language usage study. Participants were somewhat ethnically diverse (37 Whites, 13 Asians or Pacific Islanders, 13 Hispanics, and 10 African Americans) but predominantly Protestant or Catholic (n = 43, n = 17, respectively). A few participants were of other religions (Muslim n = 1, Buddhist n = 1, “other” religion n = 8 ) or had no religious group at all (n = 3).

78.1% female? That’s an awfully small male sample size. That's an awfully small overall sample size, for that matter.

However, I think the study is fundamentally flawed. To quote the abstract:

Participants subliminally primed with Christian words displayed more covert racial prejudice against African-Americans (Study 1) and more general negative affect toward African-Americans (Study 2) than did persons primed with neutral words.

The problem is pretty obvious: What’s the overlap? Which of the participants who responded with prejudice and/or negative affect after hearing the Christian words would have responded the same way to the neutral words?

Prior to arrival at the lab, participants were randomly assigned to either the Christian or the neutral prime condition.

This means there was zero overlap. How seriously should we take the claim that, within a specific individual, Christian conceptual language is tied to racial prejudice? There’s no control on an individual basis. They say they pre-screened people on their religiosity and spirituality; what about their possible existing racist tendencies?

Not to mention: They specifically picked African Americans because of the historical racism toward them in America. Couldn’t this create an exaggerated effect?

(On a side note, this concept seems to be a theme for Wade C. Rowatt (one of the researchers). He has been involved in two studies with similar conclusions in the past, according to one of his webpages which mentions that he focuses on “the psychology of religion (e.g., religion and prejudice).”)

Their conclusion:

Consistent with the Christian-racial-prejudice hypothesis, people who were subliminally primed with Christian words reported significantly more covert racial prejudice than did people primed with neutral words. Participants subliminally primed with Christian words did not self-report more cold feelings toward African Americans on the thermometer item than did people primed with neutral words. This experiment reveals an influence of Christian religion on subtle racial prejudice. Priming Christian concepts in American college students caused a slight (but significant) negative shift in attitudes toward African Americans on a covert measure. This effect remained when controlling for preexisting levels of religiosity and spirituality.

My objections:

There was no control for existing racial prejudice, only for religiosity and spirituality.

There was no method used to determine whether priming with Christian words would increase a particular individual’s racial prejudices.

The second experiment was done to “replicate and expand the effects of priming Christian concepts on racial prejudice found in Experiment 1.” However, if you’re going to replicate the effects of an experiment, you don’t modify the experiment – you just repeat it. Otherwise you’re doing a different experiment, and its results have to be taken on their own. For example:
Participants were asked to complete measures of general negative affect and specific negative emotions (i.e., fear and disgust …) toward African Americans. Including these measures allowed us to determine whether the slight but significant increase in covert racial prejudice observed in Experiment 1 was because of a change in a specific affective or emotional response.
This is not the same as the original hypothesis: “activation of Christian concepts in Americans increases racial prejudice.” The new experiment tests a hypothesis based on the assumption that the first hypothesis is true, rather than attempting to confirm the original results.

Do these mean that the hypothesis is false? No; I think it's a worthwhile hypothesis to explore, but I think that a much more carefully crafted study would have to be performed. This one just doesn't cut it, in my opinion.

Others on Hemant's blog have pointed out some weaknesses in my objections. For #1:

The very fact that the subjects were randomly assigned to either the neutral-word group or the Christian-word group controls for these two factors. That is, if it were merely a matter of existing racial prejudice, then that prejudice would be just as likely to occur regardless of which words were shown.

I'll concede this. Considering that the study took place in the south, which has historically had a higher baseline of racism, I don't think the degree of pre-existing racism could be the sole decider. The population randomization would also lead to less 'clustering' of people with particular views.

For #2:

By splitting the people randomly into the two groups, and still seeing a measurable difference, doesn’t that clearly indicate the causal effect of the Christian words in individuals? Even without testing anybody more than once, the study shows that, on average, flashing the Christian words will tend to make a typical individual act more racist.

I still disagree with this part. If you only test somebody once, you don't have a baseline for that individual to determine whether or not the priming with Christian words actually did increase their level of racism. You can draw a correlation between higher levels of racism and Christian word priming over the entire sample population, but you can't say with reasonable certainty that it was a causal connection for each member.

I would be interested to see the study repeated with different ideologically tied language and with other ethnic/minority groups as the 'target' of the discrimination. I can understand the idea of ideological language being linked to in-group vs. out-group thinking, but whether subliminal cues can cause an increase in that sort of thinking isn't clear to me. It's worth a further look.

Happy Pastel Eggs and Bunnies Day!

2010-04-04T14:16:00.006-04:00

Today, Christians celebrate Easter, the biggest day on their holy calendar. It's the day that Jesus is supposed to have risen from the dead, having completed his victory over death and offering absolution from sin to all who accepted his sacrifice and followed him.

The reason for the sacrifice was to stand in the stead of all mankind to pay for their sins, which they had inherited by virtue of the sinful nature of mankind caused by the fall in Eden. On a side note, it's debatable whether or not being dead for three days and then becoming God could really be called a sacrifice, but let's leave that alone for now.

For those who believe in the literal version of Genesis, Adam and Eve were created perfectly, but some way or another, their free will managed to screw that pooch. Their disobedience (apparently God figured it was a good idea to build that in) led to sin, which led to death, decay, suffering, and struggling in life. I can't even begin to understand how a perfect being could do anything wrong, especially when it was built to be incapable of understanding right and wrong. In fact, the whole point of the fall is that Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thus giving them insight into things that they could do wrong. They were punished for not knowing it was wrong to want to know right from wrong. Amazing.

For those who don't take Genesis literally, this presents a problem. If you accept evolution, for example, then there was no fall of man. There was no original sin. This could only mean that it was part of God's plan for mankind to have a sinful nature - after all, where else could it come from? Either we always had it, or we never had it at all (since there was no fall). That means that Jesus was sacrificed to pay the price for the way God made us. It's just God covering his ass, in the most ham-handed and irrational way possible - through human torture and sacrifice. Good one, Jehovah!

And if you believe in both evolution and hell, it's even worse! Not only do you think we always had a sinful nature, but you think God has a special place lined up for everybody! So God had to sacrifice himself... to himself... to make a loophole... for his own creation to escape the punishment he assigned... for behaving the way he intended us to behave from the beginning.

Ta da! Christianity makes so much sense. Good thing so few Christians actually buy into the whole 'hell' thing these days, or they might have some explaining to do - like, why their God is allowed any sort of moral authority when he punishes things for being broken that he broke himself.

The Horror of Eternity

2010-04-02T22:32:00.005-04:00

One of my Facebook friends just asked her 'followers' if the idea of the afterlife ever brought comfort to us. It was interesting to see some of the responses:

"The stress of wondering where I would go in the afterlife did not bring me any comfort. I don't remember when I first learned about Hell, but when I was a child, I was so afraid of it that I repeated the thought "I love God" over and over and over again in my mind."

"I never, even as a Christian, completely accepted the concept of Heaven and Hell because my dad was an atheist and I knew it. I tried my best to rationalize, though. I just couldn't understand the point of us being created only to be tortured. So no, it never brought me comfort."

"Absolutely not. I remember thinking who would want to live FOREVER? And I was maybe 7 or 8 years old."

"I was always terrified of the afterlife, particularly heaven. At a very young age, I was terrified of the thought of NEVER dying. I did not want to live forever, and worse with god. I was terrified about constantly being criticized by him. I did not truly understand what acts were sins and did not want to upset god."

Until a few years ago, the idea of the afterlife was nothing BUT comfort to me. I was raised in a liberal Christian family, and was taught that everyone was saved by grace at birth, meaning that nobody went to hell. The idea of people suffering forever wasn't even an issue for me. Everyone would go to heaven, where they could do whatever they wanted, be whoever or whatever they wanted, etc. It would just be a magical world where anything was possible. Definitely not the Biblical image of heaven, with the constant singing of praises to God.

It wasn't until I was 'saved' at age 17 that I began to think about the more orthodox idea of the Christian afterlife. it was at that moment that the idea of the afterlife ceased to be entirely comforting, and became a driving force for me to try to get other people to accept Jesus.

I think that, had I never become an evangelical, I'd still be a believer. Much of what triggered my disillusionment with Christianity was the realization that what I believed was a far cry from what the Bible actually teaches, and that what it taught was often things I found reprehensible. Had I not been 'saved', I would probably still believe.

I can't help but wonder if most Christians even consider what eternity really means. We're not talking about living for a long, long time here, folks; we're talking about forever. If you got bored, you could go and learn the properties of every fundamental particle of matter in the universe, give them names, and write a series of novels about them. Then you could scale up - name all of the quarks, the muons, the gluons, etc. Name all the atoms. Name all the molecules. And so on.

And you would still have eternity left.

You could learn the life story of every human being, alive or dead, through to the extinction of the human species.

And you would still have eternity left.

You could watch the heat death of the universe, unimaginably distant into our future.

And you would still have eternity left.

You could reach a point where there is nothing left to know; nothing left to do; nothing left to see. You could experience everything that could possibly (or even IMpossibly) be experienced.

And you would still have eternity left.

You could, as does Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, travel throughout time and space and insult every intelligent being in alphabetical order.

And you would still have eternity left.

It would never end.

And yet, according to orthodox Christianity, the result of a meager 70 years or so here on earth is meant to determine our outcome for eternity. According to any religion with an afterlife, this is what we're supposed to desire.

I can envision the result of achieving eternal life: Madness. Unfeeling, unthinking madness. An existence with no end and a desperate desire for an end. And yet the evangelical Christian is meant to believe that this isn't a possible outcome; that we'll be content to live forever, on our knees before the throne of God, singing praise to his name.

Any being that could be content with that is not something that we could call human. That's not to say evangelicals are inhuman, but rather that I don't think they've really thought it through. The only thing that could make me desire an eternity of praise and grovelling would be a complete removal of my personality and a replacement with something else.

I'm just glad it's not true.

The Friendly Atheist - Hemant Mehta at RPI

2010-04-02T15:35:00.002-04:00

Hemant Mehta, best known as The Friendly Atheist or The eBay Atheist, recently paid a visit to the Secular Student Alliance at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New Yok. Hemant's original claim to fame was an eBay auction where he offered to go to the religious service of the buyer's choice for one day per $10 spent. The media spun this as Hemant "selling his soul," and after he tipped off a few key blogs and local media organizations, his auction quickly made the international news. Atheists and Christians squared off in a bidding war over the deal, and Hemant fielded dozens of questions in response, both off-the-wall and serious.

The winner of the auction, a former evangelical minister from Seattle named Jim Henderson, tweaked the deal a bit and offered to send Hemant to several different churches around the country, from tiny home churches to Ted Haggard's massive megachurch. Henderson runs an organization called Off the Map which (at the time - the focus has now changed) hired non-churchgoers to attend local churches and write up critiques of their experiences. Jim asked Hemant to do the same, and to post them online. The result surprised both Jim and Hemant: People from all along the religious/irreligious spectrum responded almost entirely positively, often finding common ground in their recognition of parts of what Hemant articulated.

In his talk at RPI, Hemant went into great detail about this project, its aftermath, and what he has been doing since then. Hemant is now chair of the Board of Directors for the SSA, a role which lets him play an active role in supporting secular student groups across the country. He is also a math teacher in the Chicago suburbs, a role which led to his coming under attack as a "dangerous influence" for kids from a extreme conservative Christian group called the Illinois Family Institute. Hemant described how that came about and how his life has changed (or not) as a result of it.

I recorded the entirety of Hemant's talk and posted it to YouTube here. The first seven minutes or so are audio-only, but the rest is both video and audio. Several members of our local atheist/agnostic meetup group attended the talk. I got a photo with Hemant, which was met on his website with shock at our size differences :)

We're Not Alone

2010-03-06T21:25:00.005-05:00

One thing I hear a lot from my fellow nonbelievers is that it seems like Christian extremists are constantly pushing for an American theocracy. While I'm convinced that this is true - that is, that fundamentalists would love to take over the country and turn us "back to the Bible" (whatever that means to them) - I'm not sure just how successful they would be. After all, they would have to deal with all the non-Christians, not to mention the other Christians who disagree with them. That's no small number of people, either; regardless of how noisy and obnoxious the extremists are, they're still technically a fringe. And they're not without their detractors inside the faith community, either. Anomaly100, one of the few Christians I follow on Twitter, wrote (among a lot of other stuff that makes good sense):

The Family at 133 C Street, infamous for their stifling and oppression, behind closed doors, [and for] deeming who is and who isn’t moral, are the very ones showing support to Uganda for giving homosexuals the death sentence.
The protesters in Iran are determined to topple their government due to the oppressive dictatorship they’ve had to endure from a forced theocracy.
Are we becoming them? So much is done in the name of God but do you think God needs their help?

This is something I've wondered about quite often. Why do religious extremists feel that they need to enforce their God's rules? Do they honestly think that an omnipotent, omniscient being wouldn't be able to handle things on its own? That they're so ready to take action in defense of their deity seems to directly counter the idea that they are devout in their faith. After all, were they truly of the opinion that their God's will would always be done, they would see no reason to act on his behalf. And if their God were omnipotent, how could anything possibly go any way but his? The idea of something going against the will of God would be a logical impossibility.

Anomaly100 and I definitely don't agree on the basic theological argument - that is, she argues against religious extremists on the basis that they distort Christianity, while I argue against them on the basis that their actions belie doubts that their words deny (and think that their stance is more in keeping with a fundamentalist tradition). But her viewpoint is a good reminder that nonbelievers aren't the only ones who are loath to allow dangerous religious ideas to take a solid root.

Uncomfortable Gift Requests at Work

2010-03-01T21:46:00.000-05:00

Recently, one of my coworkers lost her father after a long battle with a terminal illness. She took the last week off from work to grieve and deal with family business. Today, she came back to work, and one of my other coworkers passed around an envelope containing a sympathy card.

The catch? There was a note on the envelope asking for cash to be given in her father's name as a gift to a local church.

Being the nonconfrontational person I am, I was a little irritated at first, but not enough to raise a stink about it. I simply signed the card with my condolences and an offer to lend her an ear if she needed someone to talk to, then passed the card off to the next person on the list. I considered the idea of asking her if there was anything else I could do in her father's memory, but quickly dismissed the idea as (obviously) a little insensitive.

I'd like to make up for not chipping in on this gift, but I'm not quite sure what to do. Most of my coworkers are Catholic, and asking them for alternatives would almost certainly lead to an uncomfortable discussion about religion that I really don't need to have in the middle of my workday. I'd talk to my parents, except that they seem to be confusing "I'm an atheist" with "I'm a nontraditional Christian who is struggling with his faith." I figure my best bet is to toss the question out onto the web, and hope something comes up in the net: What could I do to honor her father's memory without offending her and bringing up subjects that aren't really appropriate for work?

I can't WAIT to read the letters to the editor about this one!

2010-02-16T19:03:00.005-05:00

The Schenectady Daily Gazette occasionally has a column by Carl Strock called "The View From Here." It's often inflammatory and a bit mixed-up on the various flavors of Christianity, but his column from today was pretty interesting. If you're a Gazette subscriber, you can read it here, but everybody else who doesn't want to shell out a few bucks to read it is out of luck. Fortunately, I have a physical copy of the Gazette on hand, so I'll quote rather liberally from it...

Disorders are updated, but one is missing

A forthcoming new edition of my favorite book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, has gotten publicity recently with the disclosure of some of the changes it will contain, but frankly, ladies and gentlemen, the changes are nothing to get excited about. A tweak here, a tweak there.
...
Just fine-tuning, which is quite meaningless since all the definitions are arbitrary anyway, simply made up by the American Psychiatric Association. It's not as if they are based on new scientific discoveries. [well... somewhat yes, somewhat no. but that's another issue.]
...
What really strikes me is what is NOT in this supposedly comprehensive manual of derangement, with its hundreds of "dissociative disorders," "mood disorders," and "somatoform disorders," and what I especially have in mind is the religious disorder, which is not included nor is any hint of it included.
But think about it, ladies and gentlemen: What is the main type of lunacy afflicting the world right now? Is it not the conviction that one is serving an all-powerful invisible being by using one's own body as a bomb to blow up other people who do not share one's devotion to that invisible being?
Certainly that's the type of lunacy I'm most aware of, and I'm aware of it every time I go through airport security or even courthouse security.
Then below the level of suicide bombers devoted to Allah and his Prophet, who must be the purest exemplars of the religious disorder, we have other religious fanatics - Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Hindu - who are so convinced of their mandate from higher invisible beings that they feel fully justified in hacking, burning, torturing, shooting, dispossessing or just disdaining people who swear allegiance to different invisible beings.
Now, the definition of a mental disorder ... is that it must not be merely cultural but must be associated with distress, disability, or with "a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom." It must be "a manifestation of a behavioral, psychological, or biological dysfunction in the individual."
Doesn't the religious disorder fit that definition? ... I think it [does]. The trouble is, too many people are afflicted with it, and they and their sympathizers have too much clout for American psychiatrists to dare call them nuts.

I could go on and on about how Carl needs to mitigate his tone and take note of the difference between religious extremism and generic religion, but I don't feel like it, and you've probably heard it all before. Besides, he's right - the people who follow the more gentle, generic religious track would be up in arms if any kind of religious belief was labeled a mental disorder.

Mainstream newspapers airing atheistic viewpoints! What is the world coming to?

If a response is beneath you, don't respond!

2010-01-07T23:19:00.008-05:00

A few months ago, a pretty ridiculous anti-atheist article was published in Portland State University's student-run newspaper, the Daily Vanguard. The same article was just reprinted by the student newspaper at the University of Oregon, the Daily Emerald. It's a real gem, for sure:

Hmm, let’s see…I could either listen to someone pushing their religion on me, or listen to you aggressively espouse how not to believe. Either way, guilt is involved and, sadly, you come off a hell of a lot more like a pompous and arrogant bastard!

I can just bet that the author is so busy patting himself on his hypocritical back that he hasn't seen the furor this has raised. But that's not what this post is about. The article is practically a parody of itself, and can essentially be summed up as "I don't want to hear you, so shut up".

This post is about the response by the University of Oregon's campus atheist group, the Alliance of Happy Atheists. The official response was fine (if dismissive), characterizing the article as being of little more intellectual value than an angry YouTube comment. Later on, however, the following was posted over at Hemant Mehta's Friendly Atheist blog:

As a member and committee chair of UO’s Alliance of Happy Atheists, I would like to ask the FriendlyAtheist readers to please contact The Daily Emerald to let them know that re-printing this rant was a blatant attempt to intimidate and harass the non-religious students on campus, especially those who are members in AHA! Our group is not so much upset at the author of the article, but are offended and confused as to why our newspaper would pick this 3 month old hateful rant and print it now. AHA! supports the free speech, even of those who disagree with atheism or our group. But this was not an attempt at an intelligent, respectful debate between the religious and secular; rather it was a deliberate attempt to insult a group of students at this school. If any of you have the time and motivation, we would really appreciate if you could go to the Daily Emerald’s website and send them an email letting them know that this was extremely discriminatory and unprofessional. Please don’t waste anytime trying to counter the illogical statements made by Dick Richards (that would be beneath us). We don’t care about some obnoxious douche who can’t write or argue; we do care about whether our campus newspaper respects their students enough to print good-quality and tasteful articles.

Thanks!
AHA! Education Committee Chair,
Shireen Noroozi

All the responses I've seen so far seem to fall into two categories - either they follow Shireen's line of thinking above and call for people to take action and get in touch with the Daily Emerald's editorial staff, or they follow the strict free speech line and say that we shouldn't be engaging in censorship. For the most part, I don't have any problems with either of these.

There are a few things in Shireen's post that I feel need to be addressed. First:

AHA! supports the free speech, even of those who disagree with atheism or our group. But this was not an attempt at an intelligent, respectful debate between the religious and secular; rather it was a deliberate attempt to insult a group of students at this school.

I hate to say it, but they’re not supporting free speech through their actions. We really don’t have a right to be free from being offended. We can’t demand that theists allow us to be heard to say things they find offensive, then turn around and cry foul when they do the same. We’re all giving him what he wants by paying any attention to him at all. He’s an idiot; let his own words speak for him.

Next:

We don’t care about some obnoxious douche who can’t write or argue;...

Except that you clearly do. Your response has said so, and loudly. If you don’t care, don’t respond.

Essentially, Shireen's response, as I read it, is “we don’t think he should be canned, but we do think he shouldn’t be allowed to speak his mind if it offends anyone.” Being politically correct isn’t going to help. Saying that his language is discriminatory and unprofessional really isn’t saying anything about whether or not he’s wrong. Much better to respond by countering what he says with a level-headed tone than by calling the PC police, I’d say.

If it’s beneath you to respond, let it be beneath you, because going around telling everyone just how beneath you it is is a sign that it actually does matter to you. Plus, you're feeding the troll. DON'T FEED THE TROLLS!

If it matters to AHA!, then they shouldn’t be ashamed of saying so. But it should matter that he’s wrong, not that he’s a fool. Even a fool can occasionally be right, if he’s lucky. Dismissing him as a bigot won’t do anything to convince the people who might even slightly agree with him that his positions are unwarranted.

I understand that it’s not even a free speech issue. It’s not unconstitutional for a student-run paper to censor a rabid viewpoint. But it’s still censorship, and I’m deeply committed to preventing that whenever possible. Yes, do contact the Daily Emerald’s staff. Let your complaints be heard. But also:

Don’t act like it doesn’t matter. It mattered enough for you to respond and send out a call to action.

Don’t refuse to refute simply because he made an ass of himself. His diatribe might be convincing to someone. After all, we do have people like Glenn Beck with millions of followers…

If we really feel that it matters and we mount any kind of response at all, we can't afford to be dismissive of idiots just because they're idiots. Plenty of people will see the bits they agree with and ignore the idiocy for convenience's sake. But for goodness' sake, don't feed the trolls... pick your battles!

If God be for us, what is forbidden?

2010-01-01T18:25:00.006-05:00

Romans 8:31-33 says:

What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?

Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth.

I've often thought of these verses whenever I hear about the latest hypocrisy and theocratic nonsense to emerge from the fundamentalist Christian set. To believers and to atheists, they have two very different meanings. For most of the believers I know, it's a source of comfort. It means that no matter what the world throws at them, God will be on their side, offering defense and protection. It's reassurance that God is obviously willing to do anything to help them out, since he's willing to sacrifice his son (himself) for our sake.

As an atheist, I read it differently. It's essentially saying that anything a believer does is justified and above repute; that since God is the one who justifies actions, non-believers have no right to question anything a believer does. I'm pretty sure that some believers see it this way, too - specifically, the kind of hardcore fundamentalists who are just slightly closer to the sane end of the spectrum than Fred Phelps.

Take, for example, Mission:America, an organization with a focus of reforming America according to Biblical principles - part of what is known as the Dominionist movement. On their "To Christians" page, in the middle of a lengthy screed denouncing American Christians for their tolerance of homosexuality (and feminism, and paganism, and pornography, and violent media, and......), they say the following:

And the big question is: why do you let the world define what's right to do? What will be "accepted" or not? What is "hate" or not? This defense of inaction completely undermines who Christ is and what God is able to do. Such cowardice should make us tremble. For God would not only be with us if we tried to talk some sense into the world, He is just as able to judge each Christian and the society we live in for our disloyalty and cold-heartedness. I believe right now, He is doing just exactly that.

Emphasis added. By the way, when you see this kind of Christian talking about "the world", they're not just talking about the people of the world. They're speaking in the Biblical sense - that the world is materialistic, sinful, fallen, and disgraced; that it is in the grip of Satan, which is the justification for disregarding its opinion.

They believe that God must approve of what they're doing, and as a result, they simply don't care what anyone thinks of them. This is an incredibly dangerous mindset. Not only are they dismissive of anyone who disagrees, but they almost seem eager to redefine hate to be "whatever we don't like". Nowhere in this message is even the barest semblance of Christian humility. These people believe that they know the mind and the will of an omnipotent, omniscient being, and that it agrees with them and will justify any action they take.

Recently Linda Harvey, the founder of Mission:America, posted an article called "The Top 10 Ways to Make Kids Truly Safe in 2010". The list begins somewhat well:

Let’s teach our children to refrain from honoring oppressive, liberty-denying practices and beliefs. Children should be civil to all, but refuse to be manipulated...

Which I think is fantastic. But, of course, it continues.

...into “respecting” Islam, praying to Allah, etc., no matter how many points it counts on the social studies/diversity unit test. They should urge every girl they know wearing a hijab to remove it and no longer submit to a system of subtle bondage. They should share the Gospel of Jesus Christ deliberately with every Muslim they know— and make sure these lost kids know that Christians believe in a loving God who gives us free will.

Sigh. The rest of the list isn't much better. It's a full menu of shameless bigotry, hatred, and intolerance, all in the name of "what's right". And, of course, since they think God is on their side, nothing is off the table.

But how can we deal with this? Nothing we say will change their minds; they've already made that perfectly clear by saying that they won't let the world define things for them. Even other Christians likely won't be able to reach them, since they think that most Christians have lost their way and should conform to their example. We're talking about people who are infinitely immune to criticism. Essentially, their dogma is a religious conspiracy theory. They're the only Enlightened Ones who see the Truth Behind Everything and have to strive to bring the Blinded Dupes into their fold. Any argument against their position is seen as evidence that they're right.

The best approach that I can think of is to forget working directly with them and work on bringing around anyone who might be tempted to buy into what they're saying. Over on Hemant Mehta's fantastic blog, Friendly Atheist, a commenter said:

Don’t hold your breath. People who think of their god as a “shepherd” are going to act like sheep.

I wouldn't paint with such a broad brush, honestly. Unless we make them aware of people like this vile woman, they likely won’t even know this sort of thing is going on. Her viewpoint is not mainstream in Christianity, from what I can tell. Most people have never heard of her or the damnable things she’s said, so it’s not exactly fair to condemn them for their ignorance.

The problem for us isn’t that they’re not speaking out – the problem is that we have to figure out a way to make them aware without being dismissed as anti-Christian. I’d bet that the vast majority of Christians, being the silent moderate majority, would likely vilify her as well. I know that when I was a believer, people like this made me just as sick as they do now, only for different reasons (e.g., they were misrepresenting Christianity). I just didn’t think they were significant enough to bother with; either that, or I just had an abstract idea that people like this existed, rather than concrete examples.

But this kind of apathy isn't acceptable to me now. I can't silently sit by and let bigotry go on unchallenged. This is a war for the minds of the world, and the less we do, the more minds they'll win. The bottom line is this: Mission:America is a hypocritical, bigoted organization that distorts the book it claims to revere to make it work for their purposes (moreso than most believers). They simultaneously claim moral superiority and an immunity to judgment. As a result, they have no moral basis for anything they claim, and reasonable people everywhere should be insulted that such people think they know what's best for our children.

What Should Atheists Evangelize?

2009-12-07T23:27:00.002-05:00

Something I've noticed about myself since getting involved with atheist social groups is that I have an insistent desire to "spread the word." The dilemma I find myself facing is simple on its face, but leads to much bigger questions: what word should I be spreading?

Maybe it's something hanging over from when I evangelized the Christian gospel. I feel like I want to grab someone by the shoulders, shake them, and say, "Listen, have you heard this? Isn't this amazing? Don't you feel like you should do something?" The problem is that there's just so much to address; our world is in dangerously short supply of rational thinkers, especially in positions of authority, and credulity is practically being bred into us. Unreasoning, unskeptical thinking is encouraged, even promoted as a value under the guise of faith – and thus expected to receive some inherent level of respect from all and sundry.

The major problem with the idea of "atheist evangelism" is that atheism really isn't something that can be promoted, per se. It's not a product; it doesn't offer any benefits; it's not a quick and dirty solution to difficult problems. These are the sorts of things people tend to be looking for. Atheism is typically defined as either a lack of belief in gods or rejection of claims made about gods. That's basically it; it's a conclusion drawn about a single subject. Pure atheism doesn't really give us much to work with. There's also the problem that the fact that someone is an atheist doesn't necessarily mean that they've got their head on straight. Atheists aren't always rational, any more than religious people are. Rational thought goes well with atheism, but atheism certainly doesn't require it. (Just look at the Raelians, for example...)

So what should atheists evangelize, if anything? I'd put my money on critical thinking, skepticism, reason, the scientific method, and open-mindedness. From what I've seen, these things tend to lead people to become atheists more than anything else, especially when they're applied to concepts that believers take for granted. Properly applied, these tools can help us find the best solutions for just about any problems we face. If, in the process of using them, a believer becomes an atheist, so be it; in my mind, it's more important just to get them using the tools in the first place. Better to be religious and a critical thinker than an atheist and gullible.

I don't think atheists should evangelize simple doubt or disbelief in claims made by religion. Any fool can doubt religious beliefs; it takes reasoning and critical thinking to figure out why something should be doubted. Simply going around telling people that religious claims probably aren't true isn't good enough. For one thing, it's very difficult to reason people out of positions that they didn't arrive at through reason; for another, it doesn't really address the core of the problem, which is a lack of critical thinking. Let's say you manage to dissuade a devout believer of all their supernatural beliefs. Does this really accomplish anything? Instilling disbelief isn't the same as planting the seeds of analytical thinking and skepticism about faith-based claims. You can believe a lot of true things for the wrong reasons; you can also disbelieve a lot of false things for the wrong reasons as well.

The ability to critically analyze claims based on their evidential merits is one of the central strengths of freethought. By employing the contents of a basic skeptical toolbox – a better knowledge of logic and fallacies, an understanding of the scientific method, and other parts of Carl Sagan's "baloney detection kit" – we're able to figure out whether or not something is true, typically with a better likelihood of being right than if we had just gone with our gut or accepted what we were told. I believe that, if we help people build their own toolboxes, we'll stand a better chance of turning the tide in reason's favor.

Now that we've got an idea of what to promote, the big question is how we promote it. Faith and unscientific credulity are strong forces to contend with, and it's easy for a believer to block out any skepticism about their sacred cows if the skeptics come about the discussion in the wrong way. Popular culture also has a tendency to promote bad science, through TV shows that promote pseudoscience, news reports that give an undue amount of respect to fringe claims (in the name of "balance"), celebrity endorsements of new-age mysticism, and so on. The "woo" has a long head start in this race, but there are a few ways we can fight back.

First, get vocal. If you see something you think is fishy (in the news, on a TV show, etc.), do a little investigation. If you can, find out what the scientific consensus on the subject is. Write a letter to the editor in response to sketchy journalism, or pen an opinion piece critiquing the scientific or logical flaws in the rhetoric of pseudoscientists. If you think someone is using good science to promote bad ideas or bad politics, make your voice heard. If you feel it's necessary, contact your congressional representatives and speak your mind.

Second, get excited. Part of what's so fantastic about science is that there's so much awe-inspiring mystery in the natural world alone that we don't really need all the mystical supernatural stuff. Share your love of science and your fascination with science news with your friends and family. Let them know why it's important to you and why you're so hyped up about it. Promote the idea that science is open to everybody. Unlike what we see on some TV shows and in movies, science isn't some arcane, mystical process that is inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have an inborn special talent for it. Anyone can be a scientist, as long as they keep asking questions. If you've got kids, encourage their curiosity; if they keep asking "why, why, why," don't just give up when you don't know the answer – look for the answers with them, and help them learn how to find things out for themselves (rather than just accept it "because we said so"). Lighting the spark of investigative curiosity and critical thinking is essential for helping make the next generation more freethinking than the current one.

Third, get invested in the future. When it comes to science and critical thinking, much of the American educational system is in dire need of an overhaul. Kids are taught to memorize formulas and to try to get predetermined results for their science experiments. Find out what can be done locally to influence the science curriculum. Demand that kids get the education they deserve. For example, you could suggest that, rather than follow a strict plan for doing an experiment, the kids are told to design their own experiments and justify their methods by explaining why the science supports their ideas. Anything we can do to promote "teaching to understand" rather than "teaching to memorize" is worth pursuing.

Fourth, get suggestive (rather than combative). There's no better way to push away a believer in any irrational claim than to just tell them that they're wrong. Instead, get them to question their presuppositions in a way that makes it seem like it was their idea in the first place. If you hear someone talking about a pseudoscientific belief, ask loaded questions that are intended to guide them into critically examining their ideas. For example, if you're talking to someone who suddenly brings up astrology and how their horoscope said that such-and-such a thing would happen today, ask them if it doesn't sound like a pretty safe guess, or if it makes sense to think that it would happen to everyone born during the same period of time (and nobody else). In other words, rather than throwing a brick wall up in front of them, quietly slip in a roadblock that makes them pause and reflect upon what it is they've accepted as true. Passively planting seeds of doubt this way is a sort of kinder, gentler skepticism that usually doesn't come of as dismissive or disrespectful.

Finally, get skeptical! Skeptics are a major part of our front line in the battle against nonsense, no matter where it comes from. The more positive we are as skeptics, the more likely other people will be to pick it up as well. Get familiar with logical fallacies, the scientific method, and the flaws in human judgment (faulty memories, sensory misinterpretation, cognitive biases, etc). Familiarize yourself with common rhetorical techniques that the woo crowd will use to trick people into credulity, and try to figure out their potential ulterior motives. Most importantly, don't jump to conclusions. Just because you're a skeptic and a claim sounds unbelievable doesn't mean you're necessarily right; you've still got some hard work to do to find out what's most likely to be true. After all, skepticism of a claim is just the beginning of the investigation, not the conclusion. Besides, human beings are often self-deceived about their abilities or the depth and validity of their understanding of a subject (something called the Dunning-Kruger effect).

I'm sure some people will disagree with my analysis. They're welcome to do so; after all, what kind of freethinker would I be if I demanded that everyone agree with me? Regardless, I hope that at least something I've said here will inspire all freethinkers to evangelize what really matters: science, reason, critical thinking, and skepticism. Given time, I'm sure that these will do more to fight against the old dogmas than anything else.

Science may be hard to understand. It may challenge cherished beliefs. When its products are placed at the disposal of politicians or industrialists, it may lead to weapons of mass destruction and grave threats to the environment. But one thing you have to say about it: It delivers the goods.

-- Carl Sagan, from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

A Daily Dose of Reason

2009-11-08T23:22:00.004-05:00

The more I look around, the more I see pseudoscience and anti-science attitudes flooding our popular culture. Whether it's a new fad diet (just drink this mega-fruit juice and the pounds will melt away!), a TV show that uncritically swallows supernatural claims (ghosts make the room get cold, so that's how we know they're around!), or a news report that encourages people to make up their own minds on an issue that isn't a matter of opinion (some say that the mercury in the MMR vaccine causes autism, while doctors say the MMR vaccine doesn't contain mercury at all - you decide!), there's always some new bit of woo-woo cropping up that can set your teeth on edge.

As a skeptic, it's easy to become discouraged and cynical when you see that most people don't seem to care. Critical thinking is time-consuming, and most people tend to only give it a brief pass before following their intuition or their wishful thinking to accept whatever sounds best to them. Sloppy thinking is easy and comfortable, and doesn't make people reassess their worldview all that often.

So what can we do to combat this? Clearly, taking people aside and going step-by-step with them through every claim they've heard to point out the problems isn't a very time-effective method. Something I've been trying lately is just planting the seeds of skepticism - dropping little hints into the conversation that might make people reconsider their preconceptions. The idea is that when these seeds germinate, it'll be because the person decided to think things through themselves, rather than having a lecture forced on them. I'd wager that they would be more receptive to their own logic than to mine.

When I last received a haircut, my haircutter (stylist? hairdresser? what's the right word for that, when it's not a barber?) was talking to her coworker about a 'psychic' who was coming to give a performance in town. I wasn't familiar with the person she named, so I couldn't say anything specific about what she should expect, but I did manage to come up with some generic ideas. For example, I asked if, in anything the haircutter had heard about her, the psychic had ever told somebody something they didn't want to hear, and she said no. I said, "That's a little weird, isn't it? Why doesn't she ever hear any bad news?" My haircutter thought about it some more, then mentioned that the psychic had, in fact, told some people that job, money, or health trouble was in their future. I responded by asking "Well, who doesn't have that? Especially with the economy the way it is, and all these flu bugs floating around. That sounds like a pretty safe bet to me." She agreed. And maybe it wasn't enough to convince her completely that the psychic wasn't legitimate, but at the very least it got her thinking about why the only bad news people get from the psychic is about generic things that happen to almost everyone.

She also got into a discussion about astrology. She made some offhand comment about there being too many Capricorns in the room (after asking a few people when they were born). Being a Christmas eve kid, I mentioned that I was a Capricorn, too. She perked up, and listed off a few personality traits that she seemed sure I'd have. One of them was that I like to keep to a strict schedule. She was a little dismayed by my response that I only really have a schedule when I'm at work, but she brushed it aside by saying it's not accurate for everyone. I mentioned that I'd be surprised if those attributes only applied to people born during my zodiac sign, and that I'd be even more surprised if one in every twelve people I met really did have pretty much the same personality I did. I said that it was almost like saying that anyone from New York would behave the same way, or anyone with brown eyes would behave the same way. She seemed to agree with that. So, another seed planted.

These are just two examples. What's most important about these is that I absolutely didn't have to adjust my life at all to inject a little reason into an otherwise woo-filled conversation! Almost every day, I run into a situation where I have an opportunity to correct someone's misconceptions, or at least point them in a more productive (and accurate) direction on some subject of skeptical interest. It's a sort of "death by a thousand cuts" approach at leading people away from nonsense and toward reason, and it comes with the side benefit that it helps people begin to critically analyze their own views rather than just being told they're wrong.

I'm sure that most skeptics encounter stuff like this in their everyday lives. It's important not to let these opportunities pass us by. Growing ever more cynical isn't a method for fighting superstition and pseudoscience; it's just a tacit sign of permission. We need to be more assertive, and take a proactive approach in the promotion of logic, critical thinking, and good science. It might be slow; it might not garner the sort of quick, obvious results that we really want; but it will insert a wedge of reason into the growing wall of nonsense.

This is, of course, a necessarily small-scale approach. There's much more we can do to further the cause of critical thinking and skeptical inquiry, but I believe this is an important bit of groundwork to lay before we can make the larger societal changes - improvements to our school system, higher standards of scientific evidence for medicine, and so on. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and a revolutionary change in the way people think can begin with the smallest seeds of skepticism.

Dealing with Loss as a Nonbeliever

2009-10-23T18:26:00.005-04:00

I've never really been good at dealing with loss. It's bad enough when it's my own loss, but I never know how to handle helping people I know through their own loss. Basically every coping mechanism I had for dealing with death is based on my theistic upbringing.

Now, as a nonbeliever, I'm left without those options. I could say "they're in a better place," but it would be an empty sentiment since I don't really believe that. I could say "their pain is over now," but again, if they don't exist anymore, I don't think that's really much consolation.

This all comes up now because a friend of mine recently lost her husband of many, many years, who I'd never actually met. When I lose someone myself, I know that I can take solace in the memories I have of them. I can remember the time we spent together, the laughter and tears we shared, the good times and the bad. But when it's someone I only have a vicarious relationship with, I can't really relate to anything but the raw emotion of loss, and I don't handle that very well. I react awkwardly and tend to feel uncomfortable.

How do we deal with loss, ours and that of others?

The Invention of Lying

2009-10-08T21:42:00.011-04:00

Last night I went out with some friends to see this movie. In case you haven't heard of it, it's essentially a vastly amusing thought experiment put together by Ricky Gervais. The premise: Imagine a world where humanity never evolved the ability to deceive. Not only are people incapable of telling a lie, but they can't even lie by omission - they basically say whatever's on their mind. There aren't even white lies, told to save someone's feelings. The truth is just brutal and honest. And everyone believes everything everyone else says, since they can't even conceive of the idea of "false."

Now, introduce Gervais' character, Mark Bellison, a screenwriter for Lecture Films, a hit movie company that makes... lectures about history, since fiction doesn't exist. Bellison is basically a loser on his way down to the bottom, when in a moment of desperation he suddenly develops the ability to lie. Astonished at his ability to say "things that aren't..." - never finishing this phrase, since "true" is meaningless in this world - he attempts to demonstrate his ability to his friends, but they simply accept all the lies he says as true, no matter how ridiculous, because they can't even begin to detect that they aren't true.

Eventually, Bellison uses his newfound talent to get rich and famous, after making the first fictional screenplay in the history of mankind (which everyone believes without hesitation). But when his ailing mother is close to death, he rushes to the hospital, and out of the anguish of hearing his mother speak of the eternity of nothingness to come, he invents heaven. He forgets that he's not alone with his mother, and the hospital staff overhears.

Soon, the word spreads of this amazing news that there is something more after you die, and the entire world is literally waiting for Mark to reveal more of what he knows. In due course he invents God (the "man in the sky who controls everything"), religious doctrines about morality, and the ideas of prayer and hell.

That's all I'll give away. I strongly encourage you to watch this film.

Though it's clearly fictional, this movie gives an interesting glimpse into some of the more biting criticisms of religion.

When Mark tells everyone that everything that happens, good and bad, are all because of the man in the sky, the crowd becomes enraged that he could be so callous, calling the man in the sky a prick and shouting that they should find him and stop him before it's too late. But Mark quickly pacifies them by reminding them that there's an eternity of good stuff waiting after a short life of bad stuff. I see this justification all the time from evangelical Christians; that we shouldn't question why bad things happen in this life, because there's an eternal reward afterward. Ignore the fact that any other being that did the things their god does would be considered a monster; since heaven is there waiting, God could be as much of a prick as he wants to be, and it would be inconsequential; the ends justify the means.

Two of Mark's friends also decide that they're going to spend the rest of their lives being self-destructive, since that would get them to their eternal happy place even faster. I've always thought this was odd: if Christians think that an eternity of bliss waits for them after death, why are they so eager to live as long as they possibly can? Could it be that there's a kernel of doubt hidden away inside? Like comedian Doug Stanhope said, "If you really believe that death leads to eternal bliss, then why are you wearing a seatbelt?" Eternal life makes this temporary life nothing but a speed bump.

All in all, I really liked this movie. It's equal parts sweet, funny, and thought-provoking. Needless to say, it's raised a bit of a furor among religious circles. I've seen Christian movie reviewing sites who call it "anti-Christian" regardless of the fact that it's about a generic deity (though to be fair, some of the sight gags are specifically related to aspects of Christian mythology). Many people are showing their aggravatingly typical fatwa envy: "Just imagine - if he did the same type of film regarding Islamist religion - he'd be marked for death!" (What is it about these people that makes them wish that their religion allowed for the murder of anyone who made something they find offensive?) I can understand the hurt feelings; I don't think I would've liked this movie as a believer, and I'm sure I'd have been angry if not at least uncomfortable. But as an ex-believer, I found this movie intriguing. It's not exactly Sartre or Nietzsche, but it's a nice bit of pop philosophy nonetheless, and it made me think more than most movies do nowadays.

Should the Boy Scouts be allowed to recruit in public schools?

2009-09-20T12:13:00.006-04:00

It's always interesting to me when I run into a situation that I have to reconsider for the first time since becoming an atheist.

A mother in King, North Carolina recently wrote a letter to the editor in the Winston-Salem Journal:

On the second day of school, a representative from the Boy Scouts of America came to my son's school to recruit new members. My son came home so excited, and cried when I had to tell him no. I feel he is too young to understand BSA's homophobic and discriminatory policies, so I told him we already had too much on our plate. The BSA is prejudicial (it doesn't accept atheists or agnostics) and homophobic (no gays allowed). My son will never be a Boy Scout and I wish that I had been notified that valuable learning time was going to be spent promoting a homophobic hate group.

Recently President Obama made a 15-minute speech to children about working hard and staying in school. I got a verbal message from the teacher, a note and two calls letting me know about the speech.

Is the president's message that scary? Why does a positive message from the president require so much parental warning, while a discriminatory organization gets free rein to recruit during the school day with zero parental notification?

From now on, I expect notifications of future speakers at my son's school and the topic of discussion. I expect a verbal message from his teacher, a letter from the principal and two auto calls. I would also like the opportunity to send in a signed note to excuse him from said speaker.

The BSA, in case you didn't know, has official anti-LGBT and anti-nontheist policies, which have led to Eagle scouts being stripped of their awards and scout leaders being removed from their positions.

I'm an Eagle scout. I received my award from a scout troop where religion and sexuality were never discussed. Maybe there was an undercurrent of religion in some of the things we said (like the Scout Oath, which mentions doing duty to god and my country), but apart from the routine recitations it was never really raised as an issue. (Come to think of it, that's kind of surprising, considering that I grew up in a pretty conservative area of Michigan...)

But I know that troops do exist where just believing in the wrong god (e.g. being a Hindu) is enough to keep you out. And I've seen dozens of cases of scouts and scoutmasters having their awards and positions stripped away after publicly coming out of the closet.

So it's clearly not enough for me to apply my own personal experiences to this issue. If I say that it's okay to allow some scout troops into schools since not every scout troop discriminates on the basis of sexuality or religion, it would be equivalent to saying that since not all Christians are like Fred Phelps we should allow the more accepting groups to recruit in schools.

I can see the mother coming at this question with two different approaches:

She doesn't want her kids to be potentially indoctrinated into anti-LGBT, anti-nontheist beliefs.
She doesn't want to support an organization that discriminates the way the BSA does.

From the first viewpoint, it would seem a bit hasty to prejudge the practices of a local troop based on the policies of the national troop. The second viewpoint recognizes that things like membership dues and subscriptions to the Boy's Life magazine would be giving financial backing to a group with an official policy of hate, and I absolutely agree that such discriminatory groups shouldn't be given the platform of the classroom to seek new sources of income and new members.

Now I'm torn between turning in my Eagle badge to officially renounce the BSA and keeping it to pad my résumé...

The Ultimate Post

2009-08-26T20:11:00.005-04:00

No, not ultimate as in "last." Ultimate as in "this post is about the idea of an ultimate [insert concept here]."

So often in my discussions/arguments online with theists of various stripes I run into one of the following statements:

"If there's no God, then there's no ultimate source of morality. Everything would be subjective."
"If there's no God, then there's no ultimate meaning to life."

I find these arguments more than a bit bizarre. For one thing, they seem to assert that we absolutely, 100% know that there is an ultimate source of morality, or an ultimate meaning to life. For another, they seem to be a strange use of "ultimate." When did "ultimate" come to mean "given to us by a supernatural creator?"

Yes, if there's no God, then there's no ultimate source of morality. But this does absolutely nothing to support either the existence of God or the existence of an ultimate source of morality! It's essentially an argument based on the idea that there is some self-evident objective moral standard. But if were objective and self-evident, there wouldn't be any argument. People who disagreed with it would be viewed with the same uneasy suspicion as people who disagreed with gravity. Instead, we live on a planet where people are constantly arguing over morality, and while we often find common ground, it's rarely beyond the bare minimum standards we need to maintain social cohesion.

As for an ultimate meaning to life: Why would the meaning have to be ultimate? Why isn't it enough for life to have current meaning? And what sort of value would the "meaning" have if it were dictated to us? If life's meaning came only from some sort of ever-present quasi-benevolent universal dictator, then it would no longer be meaning - it would be purpose. And when you have a purpose, you're not free - you're a tool to be used for the desired ends of some other being. (Cue Rick Warren.)

I have absolutely no problem with the idea that ultimate morality and ultimate meaning don't actually exist. To argue that God must exist because these things are self-evidently real is to do nothing but beg the question. I'm not a nihilist; I just think it's silly to assume that something exists because its existence would support your preconceived beliefs.

Charlie Crist, Defender of Florida

2009-08-22T16:13:00.006-04:00

Apparently Florida governor Charlie Crist stuck a written prayer into the Western Wall in Jersualem asking God to protect Florida from hurricanes.

Crist said he isn't trying to take credit, but he told a group of real estate agents Friday that he's had prayer notes placed in the Western Wall in Jerusalem each year and no major storms have hit Florida.

Crist noted that just before his election in 2006, Florida had been affected by a total of eight hurricanes in 2004 and 2005.

"Do you know the last time it was we had a hurricane in Florida? It's been awhile. In 2007, I took my first trade mission. Do you know where I went?" said Crist, a Methodist, referring to a trip to Israel.

He then told of going to the Western Wall and inserting a note with a prayer. He said it read, "Dear God, please protect our Florida from storms and other difficulties. Charlie."

"Time goes on — May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December — no hurricanes," Crist said. "Thank God."

Maybe Charlie could expand a bit and ask God to keep hurricanes away from the entire country. Wouldn't that be nice?

Wonder what he's going to say when Florida is inevitably hit by a hurricane, considering that the years 2000 to 2008 have had more recorded tropical or subtropical cyclones than any decade on record. I'm sure he'll come up with some sort of rationalization...

The Friendly Atheist Under Attack

2009-08-22T12:06:00.013-04:00

Hemant Mehta, one of the most tolerant, genial, and patient atheists I've ever seen, is currently under attack from a thinly-veiled far-right Christian hate group calling itself the Illinois Family Institute, which has a history of saying some pretty nutty stuff. And I'm not just calling them a hate group, either; for a while, the Southern Poverty Law Center had them listed as one, specifically for their strident anti-gay stance, comments, and leadership. Here's a sample:

The conference boiled down to a veritable jihad against gay rights. No fewer than 18 presenters railed against homosexuals and the "gay agenda." It seemed that the speakers, many of whom were ostensibly there to talk about the virtues of a Christian nation, just couldn't help but take repeated swipes at gays and lesbians.
...
Peter LaBarbera, head of the Illinois Family Institute and a discredited "researcher" whose work has been denounced by the American Psychological Association for producing bogus data "proving" homosexual behavior is deleterious to health and welfare, called homosexuality "disgusting." LaBarbera, who "investigates" this lifestyle by hanging out in gay chat rooms, insisted that good Christians must "stand up to homosexual aggression" and stop using "that hoary euphemism" -- "sexual orientation." He called for the repeal of all "sexual orientation laws" -- laws that ban discrimination against gays -- because they violate religious freedom. He demanded the closing down of all "homosexual establishments." And he spoke of the "need to find ways to bring back shame to those practicing homosexual behavior."

(Researching homosexual behavior by hanging out in gay chat rooms? Wow. Yeah. Not that there's anything wrong with that...)

Back to the main story. Primarily at issue is a sarcastic remark from Hemant regarding comments made by Laurie Higgins, director of the Division of School Advocacy (read: anti-church/state separation) for IFI.

The story really begins with the arrest of two gay men (for trespassing, apparently) who - GASP! - kissed each other in front of a Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, and the subsequent nationwide kiss-in protests. One of the protests took place in Chicago, and the IFI certainly wasn't happy about that. Higgins said:

An adult kissing a pre-pubescent child or a high school-age adolescent in a sexual or romantic manner is both obscene and inappropriate despite the protestations of the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) to the contrary.

Romantic or sexual kissing between two consenting adults who are in love and who are closely related by blood is both obscene and inappropriate despite the protestations of defenders of incest to the contrary.

Romantic or sexual kissing among “multi-partner” unions, like those profiled in a recent Newsweek article, are both obscene and inappropriate despite the protests of polyamorists to the contrary.

Romantic or sexual kissing between two people of the same biological sex is both obscene and inappropriate despite the voluble, vigorous, and often vitriolic protests of homosexuals to the contrary.

To which Hemant said:

The only thing that could make this kiss-in even better is if it took place just outside Higgins’ house.

So terrible, I know! Of course, to everyone but Higgins, this is obvious sarcasm. He was not seriously endorsing the idea of holding a kiss-in protest in front of her house. Regardless, it's time to cue the Christian persecution complex:

... Mr. Mehta doesn't merely expatiate philosophically, he gets personal too.

Last week, Mr. Mehta made an unfriendly comment on his Friendly Atheist blog that I found troubling enough that I shared it with some of the District 204's administrators and the members of the school board--something I have not done on the other occasions he has written about me.

He wrote the following in response to my IFI article about the homosexual kiss-in: "The only thing that could make this kiss-in even better is if it took place just outside Higgins' house."

In my email, I expressed my disappointment that a role model for students would make such a vindictive, irresponsible, and unprofessional public statement. My hope was that someone in the administration would have a conversation with Mr. Mehta regarding his influential role in students' lives and his inappropriate comment.

That's right; she e-mailed the people who sign his paycheck. She's applying a little pressure. Heaven forbid that anyone should think she's trying to get him fired! Just because she sent the e-mail to everyone but him and specifically to the folks who could decide whether or not his employment should be terminated, that doesn't mean she wants him gone. His higher-ups have his back, anyways:

Not surprisingly, everything is fine at work. My superiors respect my right to free speech and their concern is with my professional work, not my private life. For what it’s worth, my teaching evaluations over the past couple years have been excellent, thank you very much.

Anyway, school officially begins tomorrow. And I still have my job.

But that's not enough for Ms. Higgins. She has since posted at least two other articles on the IFI's home page attacking Hemant:

District 204 parents really should spend some time perusing Neuqua Valley math teacher, Hemant Mehta's website to determine whether he is the kind of man with whom they want their children to spend a school year. He absolutely has a First Amendment right to promote any feckless, destructive, and offensive ideas he wants via his blog, but, as I mentioned in my earlier article, parents have the right not to have him as a teacher and a role model for their children.

Okay, it's time to cut the sarcasm. Combine this with another of her spewings:

... Parents have every right not to have their children in the classroom under the tutelage of someone whose publicly articulated views they find fallacious and deeply troubling.

What Higgins is really saying is that anyone with a lifestyle or viewpoint that any parent considers factually or morally wrong shouldn’t have the right to teach. Her e-mail to Hemant’s administrators proved that much. Were she simply worried about parents’ choices, she would have e-mailed the parents and left it at that. Instead, she attempted to pressure Hemant's bosses into reprimanding or firing him. She doesn’t think he should be allowed to teach.

Since there has been such a response to her comments (with several hundred comments on Hemant's blog, calls coming in from the local media, and numerous e-mails to the IFI), she attempted to clarify her "true" intentions:

I want to be very clear about what I’m suggesting: I am suggesting that parents who have serious concerns about Mr. Mehta’s potential influence on their children’s beliefs politely insist that their children be placed in another teacher’s class.

It bears repeating that this is a transparent lie. If this were all she was concerned about, she would have left the school administration out of this entirely. Her goal is to get Hemant fired, because she thinks anyone with views she disagrees with is dangerous and shouldn’t have the right to teach children. She did not contact the parents to "warn" them about Hemant. She contacted his superiors and her mailing list. The choices of the parents did not enter into it.

You fail to acknowledge a central point that I addressed in my articles, which is many teens are unduly influenced by emotion or the cult of personality and are therefore predisposed to look favorably on the ideas of teachers whom they find cool or charismatic or funny or kind or iconoclastic.

...
If students have you as their teacher, like you, and develop a relationship with you—as happens often in high school—they will be more likely to look favorably on and be influenced by your ideas than those students who have no connection with you. This is the reason that many parents care deeply about role models.

Yes, Ms. Higgins, let’s warn those parents about the terribly dangerous and potentially harmful different ideas that people have. Different ideas are inherently bad and should be quashed as subversive. Parents should be terrified that such things are allowed in schools. Through all this bluster all I can see is her continued assertion that since Hemant is an atheist, he must be actively promoting atheism in his classroom. Care to give us some proof? Something we can sink our teeth into? Something more than just scare tactics?

Of course not. Ms. Higgins isn't about reality here. She's about dogma and rhetoric. We're talking about a woman who endorsed the bullying of gay students on the basis that homosexuality is wrong and immoral and shouldn't be coddled, so no insult is too strong.

Ms. Higgins is so terrified of the idea that children might learn about different lifestyles and beliefs that normal standards of morality and decency have no bearing on what she's willing to do to stop Hemant's oh-so-dangerous actions and speech. She's not pro-censorship, oh no! She just wants parents to know what teachers do in their private lives:

Those parents are entitled to sufficient information to make informed choices about the very public activities of their children’s teachers–something that for some odd reason seems to offend you.

No, Miss Higgins, they are not entitled to know what goes on in teachers' personal time, no matter how public it is. Parents are entitled to know what teachers do in school. Outside of school is none of their damn business.

This sort of behavior is the double-edged sword to the phrase "If God be with us, who can be against us?". On the one hand, it is saying that nobody can oppress you if God is on your side. On the other hand, it is also saying that if God is on your side, nobody can possibly have any real or valid objections to anything you do, since you've got divine endorsement. Higgins thinks that anything she does, no matter how venomous or slimy, is justified in the promotion of her beliefs.

What's absolutely insane about this is that she was removed from her job at a high school because of anti-gay comments she made on her personal time on talk radio:

If students have you as their teacher, like you, and develop a relationship with you--as happens often in high school--they will be more likely to look favorably on and be influenced by your ideas than those students who have little or no personal connection to you. This is the reason that many parents care deeply about role models.
...
It's probably the same reason that three years ago a well-known homosexual blogger informed my former superintendent that I had been interviewed on Moody Radio on the topic of homosexuality. During my last three years at Deerfield High School, there were more than a few supporters of the normalization of homosexuality who wrote publicly and contacted my administration about what they believed was my unfitness as a role model for students--and I worked in the writing center where I had no classes.

So, clearly, she's an utter hypocrite. She's out for revenge. Two wrongs make a right, in her mind. She's turning the tables, rather than turning the other cheek. What a Christlike thing to do.

I'm sure the story isn't over yet. To get the full perspective straight from the source, keep up with Hemant's blog: Friendly Atheist by Hemant Mehta

His previous posts on this subject:

His excellent book: I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith through an Atheist's Eyes

Church Visit: Trinity Baptist Church

2009-08-02T16:38:00.045-04:00

Today I managed to wrangle a couple of co-heathens from my atheist/agnostic meetup group into going to church with me. We went to Trinity Baptist, which is affiliated with (among other groups) the extremely conservative Southern Baptist Convention. It was quite an experience.

Though the congregants had a wide range of ages and ethnicities, the church was also very, very conservative, and it appeared that they took the Bible literally. What I find fascinating about this is that, despite that fact that I took it literally at one point, the conclusions they reached about a lot of things were entirely different. I suppose this isn't really all that surprising; Christians have been debating the finer points of doctrinal differences for centuries. But the differences weren't entirely minor. For example, in the church I attended in college, we were taught that this was a fallen world that God had turned his back on, and that our only chance of salvation was to turn toward Jesus and away from worldly needs. "Mission work" had nothing to do with going to impoverished countries and helping people; it was entirely focused on spreading the gospel and 'winning souls for Christ'. In this church, however, they felt it was important to nourish both body and soul. And though they do emphasize the idea that spiritual needs trump material needs, they recognize that material needs can be important as well. Their approach is to say that God will provide for any material needs, going so far as to say that they don't need to worry about the recession because God will get us through. (Remind me not to hire one of them as a financial consultant.)

They seemed to be a congregation of global warming deniers. The minister made a joke about how this was "the year without summer," and asked where Al Gore was this year. It was nice not to be the only one rolling my eyes at that; bringing friends along has its benefits.

The minister said a lot about what people should be praying about. He said that "God is not a go-fer", and that our "external, felt needs" aren't the sort of things we should be praying for - rather, that we should pray for increased faith and spiritual knowledge. That's pretty convenient, really; if we don't pray for tangible things, there's no way anyone can say our prayers weren't answered.

Honestly, the service itself didn't intrigue me all that much. Their theology was your basic evangelical Christianity: Jesus is the only way to escape punishment in hell for your sins, all other faiths (they specifically mentioned Buddhism and Islam) are false and futile, and anyone who doesn't know Jesus is 'lost'. There were a couple of high points. For example, someone must've seen my 'Atheist' bumper sticker, and reported it to the higher-ups. They spent about five minutes praying for "anyone out there who doesn't know the Lord", asking them (me) to recite a Sinner's Prayer (i.e. the whole "I admit I'm a sinner and I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior" bit), to give up my religion for a relationship with Jesus, and to empty the anger out of my hateful heart. He asked that the whole congregation pray for this, which was an interesting test of scripture, since Matthew 18:19-20 says:

Again I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.

Apparently the combined prayers of the entire congregation don't count as either two or three gathered together in Jesus' name, or as "anything that they ask," because... lo and behold... still an atheist.

The minister, in this little bit of targeted prayer, made mention of the idea that "[I] never knew anything about a relationship like [one with Jesus]." I couldn't help but shake my head; the assumptions that they make in this sort of statement are mind-boggling. Behind the friendly, inviting faces we saw in the church was the idea that anyone who isn't a Christian is still somehow afraid of their hell, knows absolutely nothing about Christianity, is angry and hateful, and believes in their God and his authority over things. What a weird mindset to work from.

Another high point was when a girl came up and told a story about how her parents, who had separated, got together again because of events in their lives that brought them back to Jesus. Her parents weren't present; they apparently go to another church. Most interestingly, she mentioned that her mother was an alcoholic who was attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and that that's where she had her moment of 'revelation'. (AA, of course, is a strongly evangelical Christian - or, at least, evangelically theistic - organization, promoting the idea that the only way to overcome alcoholism is through submission to a higher power.) I was shocked that this girl was willing to say something so personal and embarrassing in front of this group of people, including (obviously) some people she didn't know. It reminded me of the way the Church of Scientology keeps records on all the confessions people make during their 'auditing' sessions, so they can use them to coerce anyone who wants to leave. I was also unsurprised to hear the girl say that God had been behind the whole chain of events that led to her parents' reunion; is she saying that she thinks it's what God planned all along, or that God intervened and controlled people in a way such that things would work out? Neither sounds very appealing to me; it's predestination versus the suspension of free will. One thing that gave me a chuckle was that she talked about how her dad was worrying for a long time about a lot of things, and then he heard a sermon about worry, and saw it as a sign. What a surprise! A sermon about one of the most prevalent elements of the common human experience. Must be divinely inspired.

After the service, my friends and I did a little "post-mortem" discussion of our experiences. Of the three of us, I was the only one who'd ever been deeply religious, so it was interesting to hear their perspectives on things. I'd spent much of the service thinking about their interpretations of scripture, and constantly coming up with other parts of the Bible that went almost directly opposite of what they were saying. For example, they talked about how you should love your life, but John 12:25 says that if you love your life in this world, you'll lose it - you have to hate your life here to gain eternal life. My accomplices, on the other hand, were considering much broader concepts. One brought up that the friendly exterior they put up reminded them of grizzlies - they may seem cuddly and playful, but if you step out of line even the slightest bit they'll disembowel you. She found it odd that in one breath they were condemning people for having a judgmental spirit and not being loving of their fellow man, and then in the next they were talking about how anyone who isn't a Christian has a futile faith and will spend eternity roasting in hell. Our discussion turned to the subject of our various religious backgrounds, the influence of supernatural thinking on rational inquiry, ways we can work to promote reason and logic in society, why we think science is losing ground in America, and dozens of other things.

Then I went home, and I opened the 'goodie bag' the church had given us as visitors. It's really pretty bizarre stuff. There's a booklet about Awana, which I'd never heard of before, but from the sounds of it it seems to be a hardcore evangelical fundamentalist "camp" for kids. From the back of the booklet:

"[Awana] is built on rock-solid ministry principles: clearly presenting the gospel, focusing on Scripture memory, and applying the unchanging truth of the Bible to the changes and challenges of life."

Some of the things the booklet mentions make me very uneasy; mostly the fact that it targets kids as young as two years old, but also that they play on a child's need for positive reinforcement by rewarding different levels of indoctrination with trophies and awards. It talks about teaching kids about "God's love," which isn't surprising. If you teach a kid that God's love is really a sacrifice aimed at saving them from eternal torture, you're going to lose them, but if you just give them the candy-coated, feel-good theology, you've got them in the palm of your hand. Hit them with the soft, nice, warm and fuzzy stuff when they're young, then gradually dial up the crazy-nasty, and they'll never notice. It'll all seem like a natural progression.

The goodie bag also included a directory of local Christian businesses (the Shepherd's Guide). It contains some absolutely hilarious ads, such as one for "Biblical Hygine [sic] for Health & Protection," a Christian chiropractor ("Gentle Chiropractic Using Activator Technique"), some company selling "Earth-frindly [sic] cleaning products" (which is apparently a multi-level marketing scheme), and a "Christ-Centered Internet Network Data Center (Guaranteed pornography-free web hosting!):"

Nehemiah had a burden to rebuild the walls and post watchmen at the gates of Jerusalem to control invaders, prevent attacks on God's people and provide security. The Christian Interactive Network has followed that vision to secure God's data and ministry networks. Protecting God's people and the Gospel from the digital warfare that we face today.

They also included a couple of daily devotional books, a list of church service opportunities, a bookmark listing (some) of the names used for God and Jesus in the Bible, a pen with their church's name and address on it, a notepad and pen with a Bible verse on them, a booklet describing the plan of salvation ("How to Live Forever," which I can't seem to find anywhere online), and a votive candle.

All in all, the whole visit went really well, and our discussion afterward was easily as long as the service. I'll have to plan this earlier next time, so more than just three of us can go.

Francis Collins, Evangelical Christianity, and the NIH

2009-08-01T22:19:00.007-04:00

So President Obama nominated Francis Collins as Director of the National Institutes of Health. I've been debating whether or not to blog about this, because I'm ambivalent about the decision and because it's been so heavily covered already by other atheist bloggers and writers. But I read this story in Newsweek and felt that I should speak my peace about the subject.

On the one hand, we have a man who, through his passionate dedication to the study of evolution, puts the lie to the claim that 'Darwinism' draws a direct line to atheism. His attitude could give some creationists (ID supporters and otherwise) pause; in fact, it was partly through reading his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief that I was forced to (re-)recognize the validity of evolution and give up being a young-earth creationist. And his views on certain key issues are promising; for example, he supports the use of discarded embryonic tissue from fertility clinics for stem cell research, a practice which many Christians view as tantamount to murder (regardless of the fact that the tissue was already on its way to an incinerator).

On the other hand, he adopts a distinctly anti-scientific approach to investigation of the universe. He has declared that certain realms of inquiry, such as those involving human emotion and morality, are definitionally inaccessible to naturalistic science - that they can only be made sense of by referring to God. Because Collins' worldview is based on the supernatural, it will color any discoveries or decisions he makes. If we allow for the existence of an omnipotent being as an explanation for phenomena, we put unnecessary and damaging limitations on scientific inquiry. In fact, by asserting that the supernatural could be an explanation, we run into a situation where we can never prove that something supernatural wasn't involved, at which point we can't ever truly claim to have explained a phenomenon. After all, angels might be involved somewhere, perhaps holding our feet fast to the ground or pushing the planets about in their orbits. We'd never be able to show that they weren't. Science has to work within a purely naturalistic framework, or it can't get anything done.

The Newsweek story claims that "there is no evidence that Collins has ever shied from the pursuit of scientific truth" as a result of his religious beliefs. This doesn't seem entirely accurate. In a debate with Richard Dawkins, he said that God is the explanation of those features of the universe that science finds difficult to explain (such as the values of certain physical constants favoring life), and that God himself does not need an explanation since he is beyond the universe. (This is just a cop-out, of course; Collins simply defines God as 'a being beyond the universe' and never bothers to explain why we should ever assume such a being exists since we have no evidence that there is anything 'beyond the universe'. But I digress.) Essentially, Collins is claiming that we will never be able to find a purely natural explanation for the origin of the universe. Whether or not this means that he thinks investigation into the origin is worthwhile or not is unclear; it's always possible that he'll say that whatever explanation we discover is just "how God did it."

I'm not sure how I feel about Francis Collins as director of the NIH. He's certainly qualified for the position, and he's made important contributions to the progress of the study of genetics and genomics, but he's approaching science as a means of coming to understand the mind of God rather than simply learning about how the world naturally works.

A comment on the Newsweek article makes an interesting point:

[The] premise, that Collins should be judged by his work and not his faith, is a good one. But [the] conclusion is simply wrong: If we judge Collins' work, INCLUDING his book about religion, "The Language of God," then his credentials as a scientist are not so impressive. Collins reputation as a scientist is only impressive if you divide his works into scientific / non-scientific and judge him only on his scientific achievements. But that is hardly fair, because his book uses his scientific credentials to bolster his religious agenda. In "Language of God," Collins makes so many logical errors and rationalizations masquerading as rational arguments, it's an embarrassment to scientists everywhere.

Replace Collins' Christianity with Wicca, or Voodoo, Greek Mythology, or any other non-mainstream religion, and imagine the peals of laughter that would follow his book everywhere, or the howls of outrage if he were appointed to head the NIH! Imagine the ridicule Collins would suffer at the hands of his fellow scientists, and of Christians! Yet, by espousing one particular brand of mythology, the Christian religion, Collins remains untouchable, and opinions from the likes of respected journalists ... gloss over the glaring flaws in Collins' philosophy. (Comments continued on Craig A. James' blog.)

The second paragraph seems true enough. In a nation where the majority of the population embraces some flavor of Christianity, being a Christian counts in your favor, regardless of what position you're nominated for. The public would view a person of any other faith (or no faith) askance and would pay much more attention to how their superstitions affect their behavior and their choices. Only Christianity (and perhaps Judaism) gets this free pass.

I think it's this that really bothers me. Collins' faith gives him an undue extra bit of respect and consideration that his atheist colleagues don't get. Sure, he's a decent scientist, but it's hard to imagine that President Obama's nomination of a man of sincere faith to an influential science-related post isn't a mostly political move. It smells to me like the decision was made mostly to assuage the fears of the religious right. I'm willing to withhold judgment until we see what sort of decisions Collins makes, but I'm not too optimistic that he's not going to use his scientific bona fides to promote Christianity.

(For an interesting review/dissection of Collins' book The Language of God, check out this review from evolutionary biologist/philosopher Gert Korthof. There's another rather scathing review from Sam Harris as well.)

Why Science Will Always Beat Religion (an extended metaphor)

2009-07-22T21:14:00.005-04:00

I thought of this while listening to The Atheist Experience at work today.

Many religious people love to promote the idea that religion and science are just two different ways of gaining knowledge about the world. They say that since science can't give us all the answers we want right away, the only way we can find answers to the unanswered questions is to seek some sort of spiritual enlightenment.

Honestly, I think this is just silly. Imagine that there are two subsistence farmers - let's call them Rick and Steve - plowing the same field, who agree to split the field between the two of them (so each can farm as he wishes) but they will then share whatever they grow. The field is rocky and has poor soil, so at first, growing anything in it is difficult.

The first growing season, Rick and Steve both plant exactly the same way. They sow seeds into the rocks and just hope that nature will take its course and give them a bounty. The first year is rough; not a lot grows. But Rick doesn't lose faith; he figures that if he sticks to his guns, he'll get rewarded for his patience eventually. Meanwhile, Steve has decided to go through and dig up some of the rocks. Rick chides Steve for trying something different. He thinks Steve is doing a lot of hard work for nothing; after all, the ground will give up whatever it'll give up.

Not surprisingly, in the second season, Rick's crop is just about the same size. Steve's crop, grown in soil that had more room for strong roots, is a little bigger than Rick's. Steve gladly shares his crop with Rick per their agreement, and sits quietly while Rick talks about how Steve just got lucky and how Rick really knows all the best ways to get a good crop.

This goes on for a long time. Rick keeps using the same methods, year after year, and turns up the same crop each year. Steve, meanwhile, keeps refining his technique - he tills the soil, fertilizes his plants, and applies pesticides to keep the insects at bay. Compared to Rick's paltry offering, Steve's crop is huge!

Nevertheless, Rick mocks Steve for breaking from tradition. He says that everything Steve is doing is just going to doom his part of the field eventually, and that Rick's half will go on producing long after he is gone. Rick congratulates himself over how fantastically trustworthy and consistent his techniques are, and pokes fun at how since Steve is always changing things around all the time, he must not know what he's doing at all.

Throughout the years, Steve's half of the field constantly improves, and Rick constantly warns him that he's just destroying any chance he has of the field lasting. Meanwhile, Rick enjoys the bounty of Steve's crop, which is not only larger, but more hearty, nutritious, and delicious.

Without Rick, Steve would be just fine. Without Steve, Rick would be dead.

Rick - Religion - sticks to the same ideas over and over again, without learning. Steve - Science - gets a more and more robust understanding of how things work, improves its own conditions, and shares its benefits even with those who would mock its methods.

How, exactly, does rigid, unchanging dogma allow for an increase in knowledge? How does it give us the goods, in the same way science does? The answer is simple, of course: It doesn't. Science learns. Religion stunts learning.

Good Ol' Family Values

2009-07-04T08:35:00.005-04:00

I can't say that I take pleasure in seeing a prominent religious public figure crash and burn under the weight of their own hypocrisy.

Wait a minute... yes I can!

Poor Sarah Palin. Everything seemed to be going so well for her. She was living a truly Christian life - getting pregnant out of wedlock and (likely) rushing into marriage to try to cover it up, promoting abstinence while living with proof that it doesn't work (and teaching her kids to do the same), inspiring fear and hatred in the 'Other' who was running for president, attacking liberal comedians as pedophiles who shouldn't be trusted around children because she couldn't figure out a joke, firing public safety commissioners out of personal vendettas, and sparking rumors of federal indictments for embezzlement.

You know... the sort of pious moral superiority that can only come with a proper religious background. Oh, well; at least she'll soon be mostly out of the limelight and won't have to face that darn liberal media for a while.

This isn't anything new. Religious leaders and religious politicians who tout their values as a sign of just how gosh-darn genuinely religious they are have a bad habit of violating their values in a very, very public way. Larry Craig, anti-homosexuality polemicist; Ted Haggard, megachurch preacher and moral role model; John Ensign, who said Bill Clinton had "no integrity left" after the whole Lewinsky deal; Mark Sanford, who loves to hike the Appalachian trail; Mark Foley, outspoken opponent of child pornography and the exploitation of children and part-time pen pal of underage Congressional pages; Jimmy Swaggart, who made a habit of exposing the indiscretions of his fellow evangelical leaders; and many other religious and political leaders.

Must be very convenient that you can go out and sin all throughout the week, then come back to church on Sunday and get saved all over again!

Glad I'm not in Oklahoma.

2009-06-27T10:36:00.005-04:00

Oklahoma state representative Sally Kern has proposed what she calls the "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality." The proposition, which can be read in its entirety here, is truly comedy gold. She claims that "our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis," which (of course) can be blamed entirely on abortion, same-sex marriage, pornography, divorce, illegitimate births, and other favorite canards of the fanatically-religious right.

She whines and moans about how President Obama didn't officially recognize the National Day of Prayer, but he did recognize a month of tolerance for the LGBT community.

But the real juicy idiocy is at the very end:

NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that we the undersigned elected officials of the people of Oklahoma, religious leaders and citizens of the State of Oklahoma, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world, solemnly declare that the HOPE of the great State of Oklahoma and of these United States, rests upon the Principles of Religion and Morality as put forth in the HOLY BIBLE; and

BE IT RESOLVED that we, the undersigned, believers in the One True God and His only Son, call upon all to join with us in recognizing that “Blessed is the Nation whose God is the Lord,” and humbly implore all who love Truth and Virtue to live above reproach in the sight of God and man with a firm reliance on the leadership and protection of Almighty God; and

BE IT RESOLVED that we, the undersigned, humbly call upon Holy God, our Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer, to have mercy on this nation, to stay His hand of judgment, and grant a national awakening of righteousness and Christian renewal as we repent of our great sin.

Signed on the second day of July in the year of our Lord Christ Two Thousand and Nine.

Yowza. This from a woman who says she understands separation of church and state... and who has, in the past, said that homosexuals were a worse threat to America than terrorists. Does anything really need to be said here? She needs to be gone. Fast.

This kind of stuff needs to be shoved forcibly into the light of day. Thanks to the folks at Right Wing Watch for this one.

So I had my first face-to-face theist/atheist discussion...

2009-06-26T22:46:00.029-04:00

A few days ago at Starbucks I had a friendly discussion about atheism and skepticism with a barrista. She noticed that I was reading Dan Barker's Godless, which tells the story about how Barker, a former fundamentalist/evangelical Christian preacher, gradually lost his faith and became an atheist (and is now co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation). The book's subject prompted her to ask if I was an atheist, and when I told her that I was, her reaction was reassuringly nonchalant.

She seemed genuinely interested; I'm not sure if she had ever met someone who 'admitted' their atheism before. She asked whether I'd been raised in a religious home, what lead to me becoming an atheist, and so on. She told me that she had been raised Catholic herself, but had grown into a generic kind of theism where she was happy to let people believe what they wanted to so long as it made them happy and didn't hurt anyone else. I gave her a quick two-minute summary of my story, and interestingly, she had literally never heard of fundamentalism or evangelicalism before. She thought they were some sort of Eastern religion... that's a new one!

At one point, she asked me if I thought that billions of people could really be wrong. I said yes, and went on to mention one of my favorite facts about religion - that they can't all be right, but they could all be wrong. If there really were only one religion that was actually true, then yes, billions of people could be wrong. I just no longer see any particularly good reasons for believing in any one over the alternatives and I even see really good reasons to disbelieve some.

She asked me what I thought about people having spiritual experiences, or just generic personal experiences that they couldn't explain. I told her that I don't doubt that they have unexplained experiences; it's part of being human and not knowing everything about everything, after all. I stressed that the fact that something can't be explained right now or hasn't been explained to us doesn't mean that something supernatural has happened. I briefly touched on how our perceptions can be flawed, and how our memories of an event can get blown out of proportion over time if the event stuck out in our minds shortly after it happened.

From here, she mentioned some experiences she'd had as a kid that she was sure were the result of some kind of ghost activity. We got into a discussion about how our concepts of what ghosts are and how they would manifest come largely from our understanding of science and the cultures we grow up in; I mentioned that in some Asian cultures, ghosts manifest as physical beings that look similar to how Westerners might imagine demons to appear. She mentioned that she was once in a "haunted" cemetery, and that she took photographs that she was sure were ghosts - clouds of what appeared to be specks of light. When she told me that they had appeared in one photograph but not in another taken a few seconds later, I felt a kind of surge of skeptical excitement; I pointed out that, if she was using a flash, specks of dust hanging in the air could show up in the first photo because of the flash, but if the second photo were taken quickly enough after, the flash wouldn't have charged yet, which would result in the dust being mostly invisible. She seemed skeptical of my skepticism :) From there we talked about ghost hunter TV shows, and about how goofy they were walking around with their electronic gadgets that they were SO SURE were capable of magically detecting ghosts. She dared me to spend the night in a local cemetery that she was sure was haunted, but unfortunately they don't allow you to be in there at night... Oh well. I would've enjoyed that.

By this time the other barrista had joined us; it was kind of a slow night for Starbucks, and they didn't have anything better to do. We shifted gears into the subject of aliens and UFOs. Barrista #1 asked me if I thought that aliens exist. I said that it'd be pretty disappointing if there weren't life anywhere else in the universe, but so far as the evidence is concerned, it hasn't made any contact with us yet. Barrista #2 (who seems to be a skeptic herself, from other discussions we've had) pointed out that it was a bit silly to think that a species capable of achieving interstellar travel, surviving decades in transit, and overcoming the problems of deadly levels of ambient radiation could make it all the way to Earth - only to crash disastrously into the planet.

All in all, I really enjoyed discussing these things - finally - with someone who didn't completely agree with me. I'd like to think that I planted some seeds for critical and skeptical thinking. I was surprised to learn that there are Christians who are unaware of fundamentalism or the evangelical movement. I suppose this reflects the worldview I've developed through my experiences. Because those two flavors of Christianity featured so largely in my history, I just assume that Christians are familiar with them. Her unfamiliarity with them also makes me wonder if most mainstream Christians don't see what the fringes are doing, simply because they don't know the fringes even exist. This could help to explain why Christians respond so negatively to so-called "militant" atheism: If all they see is moderation and a quiet, peaceful religious tradition, they're oblivious to what the more outspoken, pernicious members of their community are up to. From this I think we can draw two important points to consider: First, that we should tailor our message in such a way that we're not painting the target of our complaints with a broad brush, and second, that we should make sure that people are aware of just what is going on that they might not even be aware of.

Most Christians I've met are good, decent, hard-working people who just want to provide their families with comfort, safety, and a secure future. The dialogue I had with the barrista gives me hope that the more moderate/liberal believers out there are willing to engage us politely and to allow their misconceptions to be corrected.

Video: Religious indoctrination is a poison.

2009-06-18T20:43:00.003-04:00

Just recorded myself with a few thoughts on religious indoctrination, and the persistent effects it can have on you later in life.

Lying for Jesus, Catholic style

2009-06-06T19:03:00.005-04:00

I just briefly skimmed over an article called Atheism: a threat to civilization from Father Alphonse de Valk of Catholic Insight. It's your typical anti-Atheist scare piece, calling up the specters of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and ...

Wait a minute, they mentioned Hitler? As an atheist? Wow, that's a surprise. I'm sure it would surprise him, too, seeing how he was a devout Catholic. Not that his religious beliefs are even relevant. Most of the atrocities carried out in the Holocaust were done by thousands of other good old-fashioned, God-fearing German citizens. Unless, of course, de Valk is insinuating that each and every person in Germany at the time was an atheist, I think he would do well to avoid mention of Hitler.

(On another note, what's up with this obsession over comparing body counts? You'd think that, if a religious belief lead to a blameless moral standard, there would not be any kills under the Catholic church's column in the ledger.)

The author of this article would do well to attend to the results of a study performed by his fellow Catholics at Creighton: the one called Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look. The study examined the varieties of religious belief in much of the first world, as well as the degree of devotion of the religious people, and compared them to various quantifiable variables - infant mortality, abortion, murder rates, et cetera.

Contrary to the thesis of Father de Valk's article, the conclusion of the study was comprised of two major points:

Increased levels of religious belief and increased religious fervor correlate to increases in the negative measures of societal health. To wit:
In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional ... The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill” to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly religious U.S. is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developed democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, sometimes outstandingly so.

If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted. Contradicting these conclusions requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data - a doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends.

Ouch. So much for atheism being dangerous, eh? Oh, and also...
There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms.

I think this nicely refutes the entire article from Father de Valk, papal quotes, scriptural references, and all.

But don't expect a retraction from someone like this. He's not interested in facts, only in the promotion of fearmongering.

Ray Comfort pisses me right the hell off.

2009-06-05T21:13:00.005-04:00

This is from an excerpt (PDF) from a book written by Crocoduck enthusiast and creationist troll Ray Comfort, entitled Evolution: A Fairy Tale for Grownups.

This book will no doubt be seen by some as “quote mining.” This is the practice of taking a quote (often out of its context), and using it in a way that was never intended by the author. However, every gold nugget is legitimately mined out of its context. No one seriously values the earth that encases the gold. So, when I uncover an evolutionary expert quietly admitting that he has no evidence to back up his theory, I don’t see any value in the soil of his surrounding words. I merely extract what I believe is of value for those who want to discover the truth about the theory of evolution.

That's right, Ray, rationalize your deceptive behavior. After all, it's okay to lie for Jesus, like when you introduce Charles Darwin as "a man who became disillusioned about God [and] formed a theory that all this amazing order and complexity came from nothing and randomly evolved over time."

For a quick overview of the kind of idiocy Ray Comfort considers 'evidence' that evolution is a fairy tale, check out his blog post about the book. Skip right over mass of the nonsense and look for some comments by a user named 'Carl' where he shows precisely why Ray is such a fan of quote mining (or just making quotes up from whole cloth).

I almost wish there were a hell so that there could be special places reserved in it for people like Ray who fill other people's heads with misinformation and who promote the "values" of gullibility and credulity.

Video: Open-mindedness - what it is and what it isn't

2009-06-05T19:17:00.005-04:00

I ran into this video a while ago and I really liked it. I bumped into it again while browsing Skeptoid and decided to share it. It gives a fantastic overview of the difference between the uncritical 'believer' definition of open-mindedness and what open-mindedness really should mean to skeptics and freethinkers.

I've been a bit lax on posting here lately. I hope to have something more substantive later tonight or tomorrow; I'm working on a video that gives a layman's explanation of evolution and transitional forms, which rebuffs some common complaints made by creationists.

How do we approach the debate?

2009-05-22T01:14:00.008-04:00

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like most atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, etc. approach theological debate as a hobby, while theists approach it as the driving force behind their entire worldview. It's strange; when I was a believer, everything I did was influenced by what I believed. The debate was the most important thing in my life. Now that I'm not a believer, I approach the discussion as entertainment and an intellectual exercise. I could take it or leave it; it's just something to pass the time.

Am I alone in this view?

That's not to minimize the larger issues behind the influence of religion on our society; I'm talking about just the debating here.

Church Visit: Schenectady Church of Christ

2009-05-21T20:44:00.042-04:00

On March 15, I visited Schenectady Church of Christ. I've been in a Church of Christ before; my longtime ex-girlfriend was born and raised in one, and we went together several times. For those of you not familiar with their theology: Read the Bible. Take it literally. That's all there is to it. From their own web site:

The original autographs of the sixty six books which make up the Bible are considered to have been divinely inspired, by which it is meant that they are infallible and authoritative. Reference to the scriptures is made in settling every religious question. A pronouncement from the scripture is considered the final word. The basic textbook of the church and the basis for all preaching is the Bible.

Even having been prepped by my previous experience, this was something entirely new for me. At my ex's church, despite the fact that they were insanely conservative and literalist, it still had the feeling of a bunch of old folks who were using the church as a social meeting place. At SCoC, there wasn't anyone there who wasn't there for worship.

Before the service even began, I was approached by two people who talked about how the church stuck strictly to the Bible - one in the parking lot and one in the pews. This was out of a congregation of maybe 25 to 30 people, mostly middle aged and older but no younger than maybe 15 or 16. The church itself looked like it could probably hold around 150, and the congregation mostly clustered up at the front, while I sat in the back. Most people wore dress casual outfits; only a couple of people wore suits.

As opposed to Niskayuna Wesleyan, the music here was entirely unaccompanied, not even going so far as to use a piano or organ. The minister (worship leader? whatever he was) shouted the lyrics out in a forceful baritone, eyes screwed shut, and the congregation droned along. Everything was very mechanical; the beat was either hard and plodding or tumbling and almost panicky, with no inflection.

There was little structure to the service (hence the lack of a bulletin). Mostly, they just sang song after song with brief interruptions. There was no sense of the "holy spirit" here; the service was entirely unemotional, almost cold, and thoroughly uninspiring. It was almost gloomy. (I have this in my notes: "There is an utter lack of the feeling of 'spiritual satisfaction.' most seem to be going through the motions.")

The minister offered up a prayer of thanks and supplication, mentioning that we were in the end times. I've never been in a church that brought that up in the service before. He also prayed for an end to "the slaughter of innocents". Wonder what that was about...

More songs, followed by a reading of the story of the first communion. Communion with unleavened, nasty little crackers and grape juice. (So much for taking the scripture literally...) Collection of the offering, more songs.

(In my notes: "I get the feeling that the minister has no formal training and instead relies on singing constantly to make up for his ignorance of church service tradition..." Now, I'm not so sure. I think he might find the traditional services to be heretical.)

The sermon, given by the church's token black guy, began with a recap of last week's subject, "The Family Under Attack." He talked about how the family was under attack by the devil, who wants to destroy the church and keep them from worshipping; that there was a time people sinned in the closet, but nobody hides their sin anymore; that society is degenerating because of foul language and unmodest dress; that the people are becoming like the world, and forgetting how god designed the family.

He went on a long rant about how we should thank god for women, since they're leading people to the church, but that this isn't how it should be; that women are supposed to be subservient, and the men are supposed to be leading the spiritual life of the family; that Adam was in charge, not Eve; and that if god had meant for women to take the lead in the church, he wouldn't have cursed them.

He said that snakes were literally the descendents of the devil, and actually used the "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" line like he thought he was being witty and clever.

He promoted the idea that women and children should submit to authoritarian thought control on punishment of being kicked out of the house.

He talked about how people had "gotten away from the Biblical things of the Bible," just to be repetitively redundant. He talked about how "sex was never intended for single folk; it was designed for married folk," and quoted Hebrews 13:4 :

Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.

He said that every family problem results from the failure of men to lead the family Biblically; that "the world is tearing our family apart," and that we should worry more about our family than the economy, because "our Lord is bigger than the economy."

At this point, he was literally shouting at us.

He talked about the roles the Bible gives for men and women, in 1 Timothy 5:14 :

I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully.

and in 1 Timothy 5:8 (which is irrelevant) :

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.

He said that we should consider a working wife a double blessing, but we should chastise her for taking on a man's role and encourage her to return home to clean and teach girls to be ladies. He said that if the men can't work, we should do everything we can to keep our wives from working, up to and including taking social services like welfare. (Thanks a ton.) He said that a man should be more eager to work two jobs than to let his wife even have one.

He made a remark about a mother making sure to hit her children hard enough that they mind, and people laughed.

He said that there was never any excuse not to come to a worship service, no matter where you are, even if you're traveling abroad, and that you have to go to a church that worships based on the New Testament, where the focus was on worship, prayer, singing, communion, and scriptural teaching.

(In my notes: "Job's endless faith is what we should have. So if there's nothing that can shake it, how is that not delusional? ... THIS SERMON IS BORDERING ON INSANELY LONG. 45 minutes so far...")

After that was all wrapped up (about 20 minutes later), one of the church elders came up to discuss the church's attempts to reach out to the community. He mentioned that they were working on a commercial for the church, they were looking for a free advertising outlet, and they were making business cards for the church. He and the others seemed to be desperate for new members. He called on the entire church to give a second offering just for that.

The Lord's Prayer was never read, oddly enough. When we were finally dismissed, the minister's benediction included (in a deep monotone) "and oh, Lord, it's been uplifting." I begged to differ. It had been terribly disconcerting and alienating. I'd never felt more like I was in hostile territory, and I got out of there as quickly as I could before having to talk to anyone.

The Insanity of the "Angry Atheist" Stereotype

2009-05-20T01:17:00.035-04:00

[time to play theist's advocate, briefly.]

Boy, those atheists sure are angry. They're always mocking religious people, degrading their deeply-held beliefs and sniping at them with pompous, elitist remarks.

Who are they to tell us what to believe? Our beliefs give our lives hope and meaning. They help guide us to behave in the ways we should behave and stand up for what's right.

Not to mention how many smart people there are who believe what we do, and how many contributions have been made to the arts, culture, and society by the teachings of our various faiths. Where would we be without religion?

[OK, that's enough.]

When a child who believes in Santa Claus is in the company of other children who know he doesn't exist, mockery is acceptable. Expected, even. Yet somehow, when a theist's myth of choice is the subject under discussion, you'd better not dare mock it; in fact, somehow it is deserving of your respectful silence, if anything.

When we do get the courage to speak out about things we consider to be patently ridiculous, we're labeled as angry, intolerant, bigoted, and hateful. How does this make sense to people? If I think you believe in something silly, why on earth should I respect what it is that you believe? If, for example, you believed that the universe was powered by a hamster spinning in his wheel, and you called this a deeply-held and personal religious belief, should I treat this in the same fashion as I'd treat someone whose worldview was based on reason and evidence?

What is it that makes faith some unassailable target that demands respect? It's as though we're expected to consider virtuous those among us who are more willing than others to simply believe for the sake of believing. Worse still, we're supposed to give their opinions on any subject a good deal of respect if they manage to bring the subject of their faith up as part of the discussions on that subject, as though the mere fact of their having faith makes their viewpoint more respectable.

Whenever I find myself pointing out the silliness of what some people believe, they take my criticisms personally. They see an attack on their beliefs as an attack on them, and I can't help but wonder if this is because they've made their belief such a major part of their lives that they can no longer determine who they are without it.

Worse still are the people who believe in belief - those who don't hold to any particular religion themselves, but who will quickly rush to the defense of the religious whenever a religious belief is under attack, seeing the act of irrational belief as a positive aspect of character without really giving much consideration to what it is they're defending.

I would hope that responding to insipid blather with scorn and mockery would be embraced by reasonable people. When someone believes in UFOs, conspiracy theories, or anything else most people consider "kooky", we as a people tend to be quick to joke about their foolishness. But when someone believes in a mostly undefined/indescribable being who does things in ways that can't be explained or demonstrated, whoa now - step back! This is sacred territory, and if you talk badly about that belief, you're angry, bitter, a crashing bore, a whiner, and a wide litany of other such juvenile insults.

Clearly we don't disbelieve the nonsense because it's irrational and unsupported by evidence. Deep down, we must really still believe it, but because of some bad experience we had involving the church or an authority figure; or we just want to play the victim; or we justify the venomous stereotypes people have about us.

This is madness. I'm sitting here thinking of how to best phrase this, and I just can't. Basically, we're being told that we should shut up and just let people continue to believe nonsense, regardless of the fact that it is demonstrably nonsensical, and if we should dare to speak up and tell the emperor that he has no clothes, we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Let me put it bluntly: If you believe something not because it's true, but because it makes you feel better, I do think you're irrational and a bit foolish. Reality doesn't care what makes you feel better; reality works with what's real, and is more than happy to steamroll right over you while you lock yourself into your delusions.

I'm not an angry atheist. I'm frustrated that people think it's normal and right to believe things about the world that aren't justified and that lead to real harm, or at the very least detract from the capacity for real help.

This whole Daniel Hauser issue is just another example. Daniel Hauser, a young teenage boy with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, is now most likely going die despite the fact that medical treatment would've given him a 90% or higher chance of recovery in the early stages of the disease.

Why?

Because Daniel's parents are members of a sect of the Native American Church called the Nemenha Band, which advocates for "natural" and "alternative" medicine. (For those of you who are unaware, the Native American Church is one of the few groups in America legally allowed to use the hallucinogenic drug peyote, chiefly because they claim that it allows them to commune with god.)

Without actual medical treatment, Daniel's chances of survival drop to about 10%. Upon refusal to provide the treatment, a judge determined that Daniel's parents were being medically neglectful to him and ordered him to receive chemotherapy. That was within the last couple of days.

Yesterday, Daniel's mother disappeared. With him. Thus practically guaranteeing that he will die.

This is hardly the first time this has happened and it certainly won't be the last. And it's all because of religion. It's a piece of the Hausers' superstitious nonsense beliefs that are killing their son. (To his credit, Mr. Hauser now wants to seek actual medical attention.)

So when this story hit the mainstream news outlets, what did we hear? Well, Headline News had an 'audience interaction' segment where they took phone calls and e-mails about the story. Nearly all of them spoke out in support of Daniel's parents, saying that the government had no right to tell people how to treat their kids if it was against their religion.

Let me stress this one more time. People are willing to support medically neglectful parents whose decision almost certainly will kill their children as long as those decisions are based on some sort of religious belief. The type of belief and the details of the belief aren't even relevant. It's enough that they have beliefs, and that makes them special.

Am I angry? No. I'm sickened and disappointed. I'm tired of running into this kind of constant nonsense time and time again. And I'm disgusted by people who will call me an angry, vitriolic bigot for crying foul when I see this sort of insanity being perpetrated in the name of fairy tales or magic.

I Doeth Good

2009-05-17T20:10:00.006-04:00

There are two nearly identical sections of the Bible (in the book of Psalms) that say that atheists cannot possibly do good - in fact, that we do works of abominable iniquity and that we are filthy.

Yesterday, I spent seven hours working with Habitat for Humanity, both working on a couple of new houses and helping gut an old house that's set for renovation.

By Christian doctrine, what I did was a terrible thing and is not worthy of praise. By my own judgment, I did something that helped provide a real, material benefit to real people with real needs. I did a good thing. And I'll be looking into getting my atheist group to join me next time.

So much for Psalms...

Hating Gays for Jesus (also, they're icky)

2009-05-16T00:25:00.003-04:00

The following is from a letter to the editor in my local newspaper:

Bible clear in opposition to homosexuality

Re May 7 letter, “Don’t use Bible to oppose gay marriage”: Mr. Hunt’s ideology is exactly what is wrong with our country today.

First and foremost, our country was built on Christian values. Second, Mr. Hunt mentions how we should keep the Bible out of our lawmaking. This is where our country has been misguided in the worst way. Without God in our lives, there are no laws, morals or family values. What we would then have is a type of society in which there are no consequences.

Whether or not Mr. Hunt or Bill Maher want to accept it, there is a God, and there are rules he wants us to follow. One may interpret some things differently, but without any reasonable doubt, in no way is gay marriage an acceptable lifestyle. It is not normal or acceptable behavior for two of the same sex to be engaged in a sexual relationship. To be honest, it is flat-out disgusting.

This does not make me a bigot, hatemonger or bad person.

The opposition for gay marriage is a force to be reckoned with. I, for one, strongly support a normal marriage, which is between a man and a woman.

Sean Dufresne

Amsterdam

Mr. Dufresne is, of course, entirely wrong. Let me explain how.

First and foremost, our country was built on Christian values.

Our country was not built on Christian values. It was built on thoroughly secular values, which is why, despite much debate on the subject, no mention of God, the Bible, Jesus, or Christianity exists in our Constitution, the founding document of our nation which laid out the framework for our democracy. This platitude is nothing more than an appeal to the popularity of Christianity among Americans. The personal faith of many of our founders is not relevant - the Constitution is.

Second, Mr. Hunt mentions how we should keep the Bible out of our lawmaking. This is where our country has been misguided in the worst way.

I'm afraid you're going to have to demonstrate how this is true. The Bible has not been in our lawmaking except in the dumbest of our laws (e.g. the infamous "blue laws" which provided religion-based limitations on the ability to buy things like alcohol or pornography). The Bible is far from a good source of morality or laws anyways, considering its excessive inclination towards the death penalty and its apparent love of slavery.

Without God in our lives, there are no laws, morals or family values. What we would then have is a type of society in which there are no consequences.

On the contrary, Mr. Dufresne, if you base your morality not on reason, logic, and the common good but instead on the dictates of a being whose moral authority comes from being the biggest, baddest kid on the block, and you obey them not out of true moral discernment but instead merely out of fear of his terrible, overeager wrath, your morality is shaky at best and juvenile at worst. Law, as well, does not come from God; it comes from the secular investigation and judgment of what is best for society, and how we should deal with those who violate our rights and safety. As for the nonsense about family values, to which god should we attribute them? To your god? Why? Why not Zeus? Family values come out of the kin bonds we evolved over millions of years, not a deity who capriciously orders the murders of millions because they're in the way of his favored people. Certainly not from a deity who murdered all of mankind in favor of a drunkard who so embarrassed his sons that they couldn't bear to look at him as they covered up his naked, passed-out body.

Whether or not Mr. Hunt or Bill Maher want to accept it, there is a God, and there are rules he wants us to follow.

The assertion that there is a god is not evidence that there is. It is simply your (poorly-thought-out) opinion. As for god... oddly enough, of course, his rules just so happen to coincide with your personal preferences, right? Assuming that we are discussing the Biblical god, you're promoting the ideals of a group of bronze age shepherds. Not only are the rules your god gave them puerile and simplistic, they are often conveniently waved off as “not applicable” because of some obscure point of doctrine – poorly interpreted doctrine, if I may say so, as it is instantly contradicted in the next verse of the text.

One may interpret some things differently,

This, of course, is true. And one person may interpret different parts of the Bible differently, even going so far as to hold two mutually exclusive positions on the same subject based on different parts of the book.

but without any reasonable doubt, in no way is gay marriage an acceptable lifestyle.

Millions of Christians (whom you so gladly welcome into your fold for the purposes of head counts) would vastly differ with you on this subject.

It is not normal or acceptable behavior for two of the same sex to be engaged in a sexual relationship.

Based on whose authority? That of your holy book? Clearly not. The book itself could be used to argue either way. This is simply a reflection of your personal position, and can be dismissed as such.

To be honest, it is flat-out disgusting.

And here we get to the true purpose behind your position: The ick factor. Your theological hand-waving is nothing but a paltry smokescreen for the truth: Homosexuality disturbs your fragile concept of 'normal' and makes you uncomfortable, and you think you should be able to legislate your discomfort on the rest of the world.

This does not make me a bigot, hatemonger or bad person.

To put it bluntly, yes, it does. You are saying that people whose behavior makes you squirm with distaste should not be able to have the same legal rights that you do in a loving, committed relationship.

The opposition for gay marriage is a force to be reckoned with. I, for one, strongly support a normal marriage, which is between a man and a woman.

“Normal marriage” in that Bible you hold so dear was, more often than not, polygamous. And if we're going to go by what's “normal” (i.e. most popular worldwide) today, arranged marriage would be the rule. You're so terrified of people “redefining marriage” that you're oblivious to the fact that your church did it already.

Mr. Dufresne, if you are so intimately worried with the defense of marriage, perhaps you could take steps toward encouraging others to work through their difficulties rather than seek a divorce, and leave gay people alone. Unless you can provide evidence that their right to get married somehow infringes upon your rights or detriments your marriage, kindly keep your Biblical nonsense out of public policy decisions.

Betraying the Lie

2009-05-14T21:40:00.013-04:00

Advocates of the non-science of Intelligent Design often respond indignantly to the claim that ID is really nothing more than a religious claim dressed in a thin garment of scientific-looking language.

We know, definitively, that this is the case, and the words of Michael Egnor of the Discovery Institute - the major pro-ID group - demonstrate this repeatedly.

A recent post on the Discovery Institute's "Evolution News and Views" blog offered a rebuttal to a blog post by Dr. Jeffrey Shallit. Dr. Shallit was reviewing

a piece by McGill philosopher Margaret Somerville in the OCUFA publication Academic Matters. (OCUFA is the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations.)

I haven't bothered to read the whole piece yet; it seems to be the typical drivel about how universities are becoming "intolerant" of "alternative ideas" and that anyone the author doesn't agree with or whose position the author doesn't understand is a "fundamentalist" scientist.

In his review, Dr. Shallit said:

With respect to religion, why should religious dogma, which maintains ridiculous and unverifiable claims, be treated in the same way as science and rational thinking?

The following is quoted verbatim from the Discovery Institute's post:

The existence of God is not a “ridiculous and unverifiable claim;” it's the conclusion reached by the vast majority of human beings living today and who have ever lived, and is a viewpoint held by most of the best philosophers, ethicists and scientists in history. While there are thoughtful arguments that can be made for atheism, the arguments advanced by Shallit and his comrades like Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Myers, and Hitchens are puerile. For example, the assertion that Christianity is disproven by assertions such as ‘If God created the universe, who made God?’ or ‘some bad things have been done by Christians, therefore Christianity is untrue’ would get a failing grade in any respectable introductory philosophy course. You'll get more genuine insight from a paragraph of Aristotle or Aquinas than from a library of Dawkins and Dennett.
Subtle arguments about God being the ground for existence and about the role of Christianity in Western politics and culture aren't "ridiculous and unverifiable;" these arguments are central to philosophy and to any informed understanding of history. New Atheist boilerplate trivializes the profound issues that religious belief raises, and the New Atheist contribution to meaningful discussion of these fundamental issues is ...well... nil. For New Atheists, ‘rational thinking’ takes a backseat to ideological spittle.

There it is, folks. Now, for sure, there's nothing particularly inflammatory about this response, apart from the blatant straw men, dismissal of theological problems as non-issues, etc.

But that's not the real issue here, which is in fact twofold. First, this is a blog hosted by a site that is supposed to be about a scientific claim, and yet it's discussing theological issues. If this were a purely scientific institution, this post wouldn't even be there. It wouldn't be relevant. Science is indifferent and impartial on the subject of eugenics, which is fleetingly referenced in the original piece. In other words, this is word straight from the mouth of the Discovery Institute that they consider religious claims relevant to science. They are not, and should not factor into scientific discovery one bit. Ethics, yes; religion, absolutely not.

The second issue is the aforementioned discussion of eugenics. In the original piece, the word 'eugenics' and its variations appear twice. In Dr. Shallit's response, three times.

In the Discovery Institute's blog post, it is mentioned forty three times, even appearing in the title of the post:

Dr. Jeffery Shallit on Eugenic Morality: "Why, exactly, would the world be better off with more Down's syndrome children?”

The implication here could not be any clearer: The DI blog wants to make its readers believe that Dr. Shallit is a proponent of eugenics. This is in keeping with the DI's (and by extension the ID creationists') theme of "evolution led to the Holocaust". I'm not simply fear-mongering here; they explicitly mention the Nazis in the post:

In the 1950's, Fredrick Osborn, the president of the American Eugenics Society, advocated a shift away from the more explicit negative eugenics that had been discredited by the Nazi's uncommonly skillful implementation of eugenic theory.

This is also directly in keeping with the theme of "evolution is atheism" as explicitly stated in the post:

In the atheist/Darwinian view, eugenics is moral, even virtuous. The Darwinian understanding of man’s origins is that man arose through a struggle for survival. Our highest traits are the result of Natural Selection. The kindness and charity that are inherent to civilization threaten mankind, because it impairs Natural Selection, which is the source of our humanity.

There you go. According to the Discovery Institute, evolution equals eugenics, Nazism, holocausts, praise for the destruction of the weak, atheism, and basically all that is wrong with the world. And Dr. Shallit is their unfortunate victim. Clearly their interest in intellectual honesty is minimal, in comparison to their affinity for character assassination.

P.S.: Notice that they don't even bother to spell his name properly. They're too busy building their case against the "evilutionist" straw man to care who it is they're talking about.

Facing "Harsh" Realities

2009-05-12T21:49:00.027-04:00

When I was a kid I used to be obsessed with the idea of psychic phenomena - ESP, psychokinesis, astral projection, et cetera. I even did a "research project" in elementary school on the subject of paranormal investigations. I was an entirely credulous person; if something had even the slightest shred of 'evidence' to it, I was likely to dive into it head first, assuming it was true until I was proven wrong (which I never was, of course, since I basically only looked into the 'evidence' provided by believers).

Since becoming a skeptic, I think the hardest thing for me has been to force myself to take an objective look at the evidence presented and weigh its merits. It's much easier to simply uncritically accept what you're told, with a "where there's smoke, there's fire" kind of mentality. Developing a skeptical instinct has been an intellectually satisfying pursuit, though part of me is still attracted to the idea that wishful thinking isn't a fruitless exercise. I like the idea of magical, supernatural things. They would certainly make reality much more interesting. But reality isn't a fantasy novel, and we're not part of some sort of grand plotline in a world full of adventure and mystery.

That's not to say that reality is devoid of adventure or mystery. On the contrary, there's a lot of that in the real world; it's just more mundane. There probably isn't some secret quasi-magical power locked within the human brain that would allow us to do things in ways science is incapable of explaining. But there is a lot to learn about the universe, and the more we learn, the more we learn that there is left to learn.

Today at work I was listening to an old time radio drama called X Minus One, which featured half-hour-long science fiction stories. One episode was about a couple of children of incredible intelligence who discovered a way to shift between universes by using ESP to fold the fabric of reality around them in a sort of five-dimensional Möbius strip. I used to believe that things like this might actually be possible. Now that I've learned more about how the universe works, I know that the probability of things like this is astronomically low.

In becoming a skeptic, I've stripped off layers of delusion and irrationality that, strangely, comforted me and gave me hope in the sense that the universe was a magical place. But I realize now that I don't really need to feel any sort of sense of loss about this. After all, the delusions have been replaced with real mysteries and a sense of real wonder about what actually exists. While I once feared that a purely scientific worldview would just "make sense", and that'd be the end of it - no joy, no hope, just cold, hard facts - I'm constantly encountering new information that forces me to adjust my understanding. Often-counter-intuitive disciplines like quantum mechanics and particle physics constantly astound me with their discoveries, and with every new fact I learn I feel like a doorway has been opened into an entirely new world of knowledge.

Reality may not be a magical fantasy land, but there's still plenty of mystery to explore, and I'm eager to get into the thick of it.

Atheism and U.S. Politics

2009-05-11T17:52:00.009-04:00

I've been wondering lately if the problems atheists have in getting our voices heard in the political arena is less related to having the numbers and more related to having a consistent message. I think part of the problem with gaining consistency is that, as a group that's more of a common label than an actual group, we don't really have a message to get across, other than "leave your religion out of my politics".

There are a few atheist-friendly lobbying/political action groups, among them the Secular Coalition for America and Enlighten the Vote, though I can't begin to imagine how difficult it must be for them to agree on an agenda. Typically, atheists tend to lean more to the left, but I do know a few conservative atheists myself. This creates an interesting problem: atheist lobbyists and PACs wind up having to focus almost solely on issues of church-state separation and freedom of speech, limiting not only the scope of their message, but the base of talent that they draw to themselves and their chances of getting publicity.

There is also, of course, a great deal of hostility towards out atheists in this country. As a candidate for office, announcing that you're an atheist is almost guaranteed to kill your campaign. You face attacks from the hyper-religious right, not to mention the fear of atheists indoctrinated into even the more liberal Christians. We're one of the few remaining groups for whom stereotyping is still kosher in America. So not only do you have a smaller "automatic" support base, but you have to fight against lies told to defame your character - and any resistance you offer to defend yourself is usually seen as verification of the claims. (After all, if it's not true, why are you getting so defensive about it?)

I get the feeling that an increased atheist population wouldn't be enough to get us past these problems. After all, there are more women than men in the country, but we're still largely an androcentric culture. So how do we make our wishes known, despite the oppression of religious groups and the permeating fear of the 'godless heathen'? And as was noted in a comment to my previous post, how can we be public about our positions in places like the deep south, where an admission of atheism can be a social (or literal) death sentence?

I don't have any of the answers. I've got ideas, but again, I can't speak for all atheists any more than I can speak for all males. It's a conundrum...

Getting the Word Out

2009-05-10T19:05:00.004-04:00

One thing I've heard from a lot of other atheists is that it's hard to make your views public, because you feel like you're surrounded by people who would instantly break off any social contact with you if they knew what you believed (and what you didn't). We can often feel isolated, as if there are no like-minded people around us.

This is why I think it's important for us to self-identify. With the atheist population in America growing in numbers and becoming increasingly vocal, we can be nearly guaranteed to meet another atheist every day, though the likelihood of us recognizing each other is pretty low. That's one thing the religious have on us - they have common symbols they can use to tell each other apart.

I've recently put a few bumper stickers on my car that make it quite plain what my theology is:

and
Today as I was leaving Starbucks I noticed a couple looking at the back of my car and writing something down. At first I was afraid that they were going to deface my stickers, but as I walked out they moved away from my car. I walked past them, opened my car door, and got ready to get in, when I noticed the woman coming back to me.

As it turns out, they were atheists, too. They mentioned that they liked my stickers and wondered where I got them from. They told me that they often felt like they were alone in a world full of people who disagreed with them, and it was a relief to finally see that they weren't. I told them that they'd be surprised how many atheists were in the area, and mentioned our Meetup group.

This, I think, is vital to getting the sort of recognition that atheism needs in America. People need to be exposed to us. It's not enough for us to just speak out online anymore; we need to be willing to be public with our disbelief, so that we can start to disassemble the myths that theists (especially Christians) have built up about us. The world needs to realize that a disbelief in the supernatural is a perfectly respectable and rational position, and that we shouldn't be ashamed to stand out.

I encourage anyone who reads this to seriously consider coming out of the atheist closet. The more of us that are willing to stand up and be counted, the more we'll be accepted by the mainstream of society.

Church visit: Niskayuna Wesleyan

2009-05-09T12:28:00.006-04:00

On March 8, I visited Niskayuna Wesleyan Church. This was my first time in a Wesleyan church, so I wasn't sure what to expect.

The first thing I noticed was the style - very "new evangelical", complete with the praise band (including guitars and a drum kit), the progressive songs, the clapping and dancing, the raising of hands to heaven, the moderate-conservative message, and the big projection screen that displays the scripture and song lyrics. There was a response card in the bulletin that asked you to let them know if you've been saved, as well as a guide to the "ABCs of Salvation" (admit you're a sinner, believe in Christ, confess your sins).

There was a very relaxed atmosphere. Most people were in jeans and polos, though a few people were dressed up. The congregation of about 70-80 people was relatively ethnically diverse, and very vocal - lots of people would speak up in response to scripture, saying "amen", "yes lord", "thank you jesus", et cetera. They were very warm and friendly to newcomers. It was definitely not a fundamentalist church. The service was pretty open-ended; though the bulletin gave an outline of what was going to happen, the details weren't set in stone, and they did a lot more than just what was written.

Near the beginning of the service, they spent about ten minutes discussing an upcoming mission to the Dominican Republic, ending with a laying-on-of-hands prayer for the people who would be going and lots of requests for the ongoing prayers of the congregation.

The scripture reading was the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery, which I found incredibly ironic as it's widely agreed to be nothing more than a forgery added after the original text was written. The entire sermon, in fact, was based on this story, and the minister talked about how Jesus had to preach "A simple sermon for a hostile audience" (the name of the sermon). He tried to allude to modern Christians having to give the gospel to people who want to hear it, but he didn't really make that point, instead spending a lot of his time talking about an apocryphal myth about how Charles Wesley brought the gospel to a hostile crowd (complete with the throwing of tomatoes) by changing the lyrics to bar songs so they talked about Jesus - making it a point to say "That's true! It's a true story!" (Oops.) He also talked a lot about the situations Christians live in around the world, never really drawing any parallels to modern America - apart from saying that a city with a big gay and lesbian community was a hostile environment.

Here's a note I took while listening to the sermon, on the subject of the forged story which the minister took as a good guide for moral judgment:

John 8:1-11 talks of Jesus ignoring people's accusations against a sinner, then acting like the people were never there! How does ignoring a problem solve it? Where, in this, is justice? The person who was wronged has no satisfaction. How do people accept a moral standard based on ignoring the real victims and forgiving the sinner?

Also, in the story, Jesus stoops twice to write in the dirt. Why was this important enough to mention, but not what he wrote? A bunch of pointless speculation on what Jesus drew - twice suggesting that they were depictions of miracles.

The minister actually had the gall to say that "Jesus was willing to address the tough questions." Sorry, no. Jesus avoided them completely, or just made something up that sounded wise. The minister also said that, when it came to Jesus and his message of forgiveness and love, "his whole life was an illustration of his message." Does this guy even know anything about the Bible? There are several years of Jesus' life that are eerily absent. How can he claim to know anything about them? Also, how did Jesus' attack on the moneychangers in the temple show forgiveness and love? How about his order that his disciples go out and buy swords?

The sermon was a mixture of shallow thinking on the concept of morality and a bunch of platitudes, such as "leave your burdens at the cross" - which is nice and all, but it doesn't get anything done and doesn't solve anyone's real problems.

He mentioned seeing a kid with an "Outlaw Straight Marriage" sign and said some silly thing about how his heart broke for the kid. (Why are these people incapable of recognizing humor?) This led into a discussion of the recent appearance of Fred Phelps' crew in a nearby town. The projection screen displayed some photos - one of Phelps' signs reading "God Hates Fags" and another reading "God Hates Hateful Christians." The minister equated the two, and made a point of calling Westboro Baptist Church a cult. How ironic. He also talked about how the New Testament means Christians don't have to follow the laws of the Old Testament, quoting the verse about Jesus not coming to abolish the law but to fulfill it. He conveniently left out the very next verse, in which Jesus says - surprise, surprise - the old laws still apply, and will apply until the second coming.

The minister said something to the effect of "Before you go around saying God hates someone, you better make sure he doesn't hate you." Then he later claimed that anyone accusing Christians of un-Christian behavior is doing the devil's work. Clearly he doesn't think the WBC are Christians, but who is he to judge?

Here's a bunch of other notes I took, which I can't form into any kind of coherent narrative...

Said that a sermon is successful if just one life is changed - "Just one more... at any cost!" So what's the limit of "at any cost"?

"they are all sinners, and they are all dying in their sin, and they are all going to spend an eternity away from God if they're not born again." They think ANYONE would find this positive??

(speaking of kids on a college campus) "Look in their faces, and they're empty, and you can see the lostness." Wonder how many of those kids were Christians? He said this about college kids in general because of the trend toward liberalism in college. Nothing like good old fashioned Christian prejudice.

Conscience is evidence of the knowledge of the truth of your sin? i.e. Feeling guilty is evidence of being worthy of eternal separation from unconditional love? Wow.

He compared natural gay tendencies to "natural" tendencies to drive off the road or try to jump off a building and fly. *What*? "I have a desire to sin. But I know that breaking that law of God has consequences." More whispered prayer - yes yes, that's right, yes it does, amen, praise god, etc.

We're all sinners, so we're no better than anyone else (... you just called WBC a cult.)

Some inane comment about how the three crosses of Calvary were symbols of the three step salvation process (ABC)

I'm simply astonished that these people don't realize how polarizing their message is, and how utterly incapable it is of attracting nonbelievers How many times must they try to convince me that I'm a terrible, evil, sinful, unworthy person? Have they never heard the adage about attracting flies with honey instead of vinegar?

What I found most interesting about this service was that people didn't really seem all that into it unless they were singing. They were most "praiseful" when the music was playing, which makes me wonder if they equated the singing and dancing with worship, and if it isn't just the beat and rhythm making them move instead of the "holy spirit".

I also couldn't get over the feeling that, if they knew I was an atheist, the "friendly neighbor" mode I saw the congregation in would quickly devolve into a "convert the infidel" mode. Part of me felt the old indoctrination stirring, but now that I'm able to recognize it for what it is I can ignore it.

After the service, I couldn't help but think about how much more I knew about the Bible and Christian traditions than even the minister appeared to. They truly, deeply believe, but they clearly don't give any serious critical thought to their beliefs (nor do I think they would ever want to). Though the service was invigorating (inasmuch as the music made me want to dance and the people were warm), I don't see any reason to return. The message was nothing but how disgustingly unworthy of God's love we are, but how he's such a nice guy that he's going to love us anyways.

I'm not a fan of that kind of emotional abuse.

A Thought Experiment on Consciousness

2009-05-06T21:06:00.004-04:00

When I was a Christian I had no problem with the concept of the soul, despite the fact that I'd never really figured out exactly what a soul was. Now, as an atheist, I recognize my consciousness as the result of emergent properties of the network of neurons in my brain, rather than a manifestation of a vague supernatural entity.

This presents some interesting possibilities. For example: Let's suspend disbelief for a minute and imagine that, after our death, our brains could be reconstructed into an exact replica of its form at any point in our lives - completely intact with its electrical activity and such - and placed into a matching body.

Is the consciousness of this brain ours?

As a Christian I would have definitely answered this with "of course not," since what made me "me" wasn't just my brain, but my soul. I suppose, in essence, that's what I defined the soul to be - a metaphysical aspect of my existence that made me "me". It was something that wasn't permanently attached to the body.

As an atheist I'm not entirely sure. It depends on how I define "me". Is continuity of consciousness a requirement? If so, my answer would again be "of course not", because my consciousness would be undeniably discontinuous. Let's not pick nits about whether or not sleep counts as a discontinuity; technically, I could be partially conscious while I sleep, inasmuch as my brain continues to function.

But if what defines "me" is really nothing more than the state of a neural network, I suppose the reconstructed brain technically could be me. (Interestingly enough, as I was typing that sentence I had to struggle to keep from ending it with "but not really me". That's the old dualistic impulse showing through - the idea that we're composed of both physical brain and non-physical mind.)

The problem with this scenario (apart from its implausibility) is that, given this sort of technology, we could just as easily reconstruct the brain while we're still alive. A dualist body-soul worldview would maintain that there's only one "me" here - that the rest would be missing a soul, a vital essence, a spirit, etc., and thus wouldn't be "me". But a purely naturalistic, material worldview would be utterly incapable of distinguishing between the various copies. They would each be utterly convinced that their experience had been continuous, apart from the moment where they were first "booted up" (since they would remember being in one place in one instant and in another in the next). The only difference between the various copies would be the physical continuity.

Which brings me to an interesting conclusion, which you may or may not agree with: Regardless of whether we believe or don't believe in a dualistic worldview, what we define as "me" would not be threatened by the production of identical copies of our bodies and minds. A dualist would likely see "me" to be "that which has the soul", while a materialist would see "me" as "the one with continuity of physical presence and consciousness".

That's enough for now... this "me" is ready for bed.

The Problem with Prayer

2009-05-04T22:37:00.007-04:00

One of the strongest evidences I've seen against the existence of God is the problem of the unreliability of prayer. The basic problem is this: every Sunday, in all the Christian churches in all the cities in all the states of this country, there are millions (if not tens of millions) of people praying - most likely, for many of the same things. An end to war, an end to hunger, healing of the sick, and so on; these are consistent themes for prayer in most moderate-to-liberal churches. More conservative and fundamentalist churches will pray for the return of Jesus, the spreading of the gospel, God's protection over the nation, et cetera.

It seems that the only "answered" prayers are those that are ambiguous - basically, praying that God's will be done (isn't it always?) or that God will protect our loved ones (in which case "nobody in my family died" means my prayers were answered). We still have plenty of war, hunger, and sickness. When I ask apologists why we don't see prayers about these things answered, I tend to get one of a few responses:

God moves in mysterious ways. We aren't meant to know the mind of God, simply to accept that he knows what needs to be done.
God isn't a genie. That's not how prayer works. You don't get everything you want just by asking.
If God wants it to happen, it will happen. God has a plan, and sometimes we just have to wait.
God answers all prayers. The answer is either "Yes", "No", or "Wait".
(Matthew 7:21) "Not everyone who says to Me, "Lord, Lord," shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. In other words, just because you cry out, that doesn't mean you get what you want.

There are, of course, serious problems with these defenses.

All well and good, but couldn't God be mysterious without being unnecessarily cruel and indifferent to the suffering of the people he "fathered"? I'd say it's much more mysterious for all sickness to be instantly healed than for it to just keep on going. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why on earth can't he figure out a way to work out his plan that doesn't leave us high and dry?
This is despite Jesus supposedly saying, repeatedly, that it is precisely how prayer works - Mark 11:24, John 15:7, John 14:13-14, and so on. I bring this up often, and the response I tend to get is that, even though he literally says you'll get whatever you want, that's not really what the words mean. Plus, even if it were, you're only supposed to ask for things that glorify God. How convenient; if you ask for something practical, and you don't get it, clearly it wasn't going to glorify God anyways.
Fine. He has a plan. But this is nothing more than Stockholm syndrome. We're told that despite being in the grip of horrifying, needless suffering and being victims to the whim of a being that set our fate at our birth, it's really okay, because we can just trust that he knows what he's doing. Forgive me if I'm not convinced that we should blindly trust and love a person who doesn't explain himself - and, what's more, who tells us that we're wrong to expect him to.
These are the only three options. This is not specific to any sort of real being. You can pray to a brick and get the same results. It's a matter of postdiction rather than prediction. You just have to massage the results to fit into one of the "answers". This isn't proof of prayer being answered; it's an exercise in intellectual flexibility.
(Romans 10:13) "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." In other words, just because you cry out, that means you do get what you want. Also see Joel 2:32. The Bible is, after all the Big Book of Multiple Choice. Of course, this all only applies to the Christian god. Other gods might catch a break for not matching up with all of his personality traits. Somehow, though, I doubt that any (personal) god's existence would fare better, considering that the failure rate is so huge.

Behind all five objections is one larger objection: If God doesn't answer every prayer, and in fact he only answers those which align with his plan, why on earth would he want us to pray at all? He's already got his mind made up; is our prayer nothing more than a symbolic-only, non-functional, groveling appeal to his vanity?

It seems to me that the fact that our prayers aren't answered the way we expect them to be shows that God is a bit short-sighted, seeing how it leads to reasonable doubt. It also makes him appear capricious, unreliable, uncaring, and irrational. Seems better to me to just say he's not there at all than to continue to make up nonsensical excuses for his lack of action.

Atheist survey meme

2009-05-03T12:43:00.001-04:00

Stolen from Hemant Mehta. In boldface is the stuff I’ve done…

1. Participated in the Blasphemy Challenge.
2. Met at least one of the “Four Horsemen” (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris) in person.
3. Created an atheist blog.
4. Used the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a religious debate with someone.
5. Gotten offended when someone called you an agnostic.
6. Been unable to watch Growing Pains reruns because of Kirk Cameron.
7. Own more Bibles than most Christians you know.
8. Have at least one Bible with your personal annotations regarding contradictions, disturbing parts, etc.
9. Have come out as an atheist to your family.
10. Attended a campus or off-campus atheist gathering.
11. Are a member of an organized atheist/Humanist/etc. organization.
12. Had a Humanist wedding ceremony.
13. Donated money to an atheist organization.
14. Have a bookshelf dedicated solely to Richard Dawkins. (not exactly, but I do have a shelf full of atheist books.)
15. Lost the friendship of someone you know because of your non-theism.
16. Tried to argue or have a discussion with someone who stopped you on the street to proselytize.
17. Had to hide your atheist beliefs on a first date because you didn’t want to scare him/her away.
18. Own a stockpile of atheist paraphernalia (bumper stickers, buttons, shirts, etc).
19. Attended a protest that involved religion.
20. Attended an atheist conference.
21. Subscribe to Pat Condell’s YouTube channel.
22. Started an atheist group in your area or school.
23. Successfully “de-converted” someone to atheism.
24. Have already made plans to donate your body to science after you die.
25. Told someone you’re an atheist only because you wanted to see the person’s reaction.
26. Had to think twice before screaming “Oh God!” during sex. Or you said something else in its place.
27. Lost a job because of your atheism.
28. Formed a bond with someone specifically because of your mutual atheism (meeting this person at a local gathering or conference doesn’t count).
29. Have crossed “In God We Trust” off of — or put a pro-church-state-separation stamp on — dollar bills.
30. Refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. (haven’t had the opportunity, but I would.)
31. Said “Gesundheit!” (or nothing at all) after someone sneezed because you didn’t want to say “Bless you!”
32. Have ever chosen not to clasp your hands together out of fear someone might think you’re praying.
33. Have turned on Christian TV because you needed something entertaining to watch.
34. Are a 2nd or 3rd (or more) generation atheist.
35. Have “atheism” listed on your Facebook or dating profile — and not a euphemistic variant.
36. Attended an atheist’s funeral (i.e. a non-religious service).
37. Subscribe to an freethought magazine (e.g. Free Inquiry, Skeptic)
38. Have been interviewed by a reporter because of your atheism.
39. Written a letter-to-the-editor about an issue related to your non-belief in God.
40. Gave a friend or acquaintance a New Atheist book as a gift.
41. Wear pro-atheist clothing in public.
42. Have invited Mormons/Jehovah’s Witnesses into your house specifically because you wanted to argue with them.
43. Have been physically threatened (or beaten up) because you didn’t believe in God.
44. Receive Google Alerts on “atheism” (or variants).
45. Received fewer Christmas presents than expected because people assumed you didn’t celebrate it.
46. Visited The Creation Museum or saw Ben Stein’s Expelled just so you could keep tabs on the “enemy.”
47. Refuse to tell anyone what your “sign” is… because it doesn’t matter at all.
48. Are on a mailing list for a Christian organization just so you can see what they’re up to…
49. Have kept your eyes open while you watched others around you pray.
50. Avoid even Unitarian churches because they’re too close to religion for you.

That’s 28 out of 50… which ranks me thusly:

21-30: You are an atheist, but babies aren’t running away from you. Yet.

Breaking it in

2009-05-03T12:30:00.005-04:00

I've finally decided to put together a serious blog about atheism, skepticism, and the like. I've been blogging occasionally on another site, but it was never about any consistent theme and I tended to get a bit silly about things.

I'll start this one off by reposting an essay I posted on my other blog, which details my progress from "cafeteria" Christian to door-knocking street preaching fundamentalist Evangelical biblical literalist to skeptical generic theist to atheist.

I've also been touring local churches and taking notes about their services and their theology. Expect a few of those soon.

-- Mike

Why I Am an Atheist
Life has a tendency of throwing us curveballs. For me, the biggest was realizing that I no longer believed in God.

All my life I was raised to believe in a soft variety of the Christian god. He was an all-powerful, all-knowing being living off in some indescribably wonderful place who loved me and listened intently to even the quietest whisper of a prayer. He was a comfort when times were rough and gave me confidence when my spirit sagged.

I never gave much thought to why I believed as I did. It’s just what I was raised to be; in our family, we were Christians. We were members of the United Church of Christ, a church that tends to be liberal and open to anyone’s interpretations – basically a step away from being Unitarian. We knew there was a God. And that was enough for me, at first; just to believe. I didn’t think He needed anything from me other than that simple belief. That is, until I reached high school.

In high school, I idolized my brother. He was everything I wasn’t – strong, tall, athletic, sociable, confident. I was a shy, weird little kid with a severe lack of confidence and a tiny social circle. I looked at my brother as the perfect example of what I could be. And so when he joined Young Life, a Christian evangelist group that doubled as a sort of social club for high school kids, I had to join, too.

It was fun. I met a lot of really great, friendly people. We sang songs, had parties, played icebreaker games to get to know each other; that sort of thing. I learned a lot about what other people believed about God, about life, about the afterlife, and about Jesus. My eyes were opened to a lot of things I’d never seen before, growing up in a mild church where a sense of community and kindness seemed more common than a deep and abiding faith.

Until then, my religious beliefs hadn’t been all that important. I basically made things up as I went, and occasionally I’d read bits and pieces of the Bible to learn about what other people might think about God. My education in traditional Christian doctrine was essentially nonexistent. I could never make myself pay much attention during the church services, and Sunday school was all about the same old Bible stories kids learn about. Junior high Bible study was interesting, because we looked into more of the New Testament than I’d read before. But it was never much more than a baseline pseudo-Christian form of theism – there’s a God, he loves you, he made everything (some way or another), and he’ll heap rewards upon you when you die. Heaven was a chance to get back together with all the loved ones who went before you. There wasn’t much theology to it at all. It was just a simple, comforting, unquestioned belief.

It was in the Young Life meetings that I was presented with a kind of “soft evangelism”. Looking back on it, I can identify it as a sort of love bombing – everyone was accepting of you, regardless of your faults; they were eager to tell you what a great person you were; they sang happy songs (both religious and secular); they encouraged you to agree with what the leaders told you was right; and they really pushed for you to come to their week-long summer camp. So, of course, I went. I liked the people, I liked the atmosphere, and I liked feeling like I was accepted. I’d always been the social outcast before, and I craved that wonderful feeling of being a part of something where people accepted me despite all my quirks and insecurities.

The camp was a blast. There was a lake, a pool, a rock climbing wall – all sorts of great activities. Plenty of stuff to keep us busy and keep reinforcing the positive, warm, euphoric atmosphere. Every now and then, we’d gather in the main lodge for a series of skits or games. It was at the lodge that they hit us with the standard evangelical positions – that we all sin, that we all need redemption because God is a just and righteous judge who cannot abide with sin, and that Jesus was persecuted and slain so that we could enter into the presence of God. They told it to us gently, but in a way that still managed to impress upon us that we should feel guilty and ashamed if we rejected God’s gift after all the pain and suffering he went through just because he loved us so completely and perfectly.

During the week I discovered the Left Behind series. The camp store had all of the books in paperback, and I blazed through them one by one, fascinated by the stories and by what people believed God was going to do for his people eventually. Combining that with the “plan for salvation” that the skits drilled into us, and by the fourth or fifth day I was really hurting to be saved. I felt like the fact that I hadn’t accepted Christ into my heart as my lord and savior was no better than if I had spat in God’s face. Forget the fact that, before all this, my religious beliefs had been a comfort to me; now, I knew I had been incredibly wrong about God. Just being a good person wasn’t enough. I had to develop a stronger faith, accept Christ’s sacrifice for my sin, to repent, and follow the Bible.

I honestly don’t know what year it was when this happened. It was important to me at the time, but these things fade as time passes. In any case, I came away from Young Life camp feeling like a whole new person. I threw myself into my faith harder than ever, diving into the Bible with gusto and wondering at the glory of God’s creation. I was sure that I was saved; that my sins were forgiven and I was free of my past.

During my first year in college, I lived in what was called the Healthy Living House – a part of our dorm set off for young men and women to live away from drugs and alcohol, where some students volunteered to be counselors who would help us keep each other in check. One of our counselors was a girl named A. who lived across the hall from me. A. and I became fast friends; she was a polite, friendly, cheerful girl, who also happened to be a Christian. She and I talked about God and Jesus all the time, and eventually she introduced me to Campus Crusade for Christ.

Crusade was like a more serious form of Young Life; we met once a week to watch skits, sing, pray, etc. Being among a community of believers only reinforced my faith, and it drew me more and more toward the Biblical literalist position that so many of the other members held. After all, the more I learned about God and the plans he had for me, the more I felt like I was on the right path. I was proud to hold my head high and proclaim the gospel to everyone.

There were only two things that troubled me. The first was that many of my other friends were either atheists or members of some other religion. It worried me terribly that they were putting their immortal souls in peril by turning their backs on God and Jesus. I tried as best as I could to understand why they didn’t believe, but it all seemed so obvious to me. Of course God was real; how else could we be here?

The second was my love of science and my literal mind. As I read the Bible I of course ran into things that were problematic – why would God punish Adam and Eve if they didn’t know the difference between right and wrong? Of course, as I spent more and more time with A. and other Crusade members, I learned all the “right” answers to these and other problems. (Adam and Eve may not have had knowledge about good and evil, but after all, God put his morality in our hearts from the very beginning!)

But I still ran into things that I couldn’t so easily accept. The idea of the Earth being less than 10,000 years old, for example, or that evolution was really a lie that scientists told to lead people away from God. My mind told me that it didn’t make sense. But my fellow Christians told me not to rely so much on my mind, since I’m only a human and I’m fallible; instead, I should rely on God’s immutable, perfect word. After all, it was right about so many other things; it must be right about these, too.

So I became a believer through and through. The Bible was literally true – after all, God wouldn’t lie or try to mislead us. (Disregard the verses that say God lies; I hadn’t read those yet, of course.) Science didn’t really know anything for sure; the only way we could ever be certain about what was real was to rely on God through prayer, meditation, and proper reading of the Bible.

At some point I began to wonder if my faith was true. Not if it was correct; just if I was believing the way I was supposed to, or if somehow I hadn’t quite gotten the formula right. I felt the joy and the presence of God, the reassurance in hard times, and all the things I was told I should feel. But I never really felt like God spoke to me. I spoke to him all the time. I almost always had a prayer in my mind, if not on my lips. But I never got that strong impression that he was giving me any kind of answer – the sort of certainty I heard of people who said things like “God has put it into my heart that X” or “When Y happened, I knew that it was God telling me Z”. I never had this sort of feeling! Was I doing something wrong? It tortured me. I was in fear of my soul all over again. So I pushed even harder to learn about God and the Bible. I read The Case for Christ, Darwin On Trial, More than a Carpenter, anything I could sink my teeth into. I devoured the Bible cover to cover. I took notes. I kept a journal. I prayed more fervently than ever.

I knew I was saved. I loved Jesus more than anything. I’d throw myself on the floor, weeping, thanking him through my tears for all that he’d sacrificed for someone as unworthy of grace as myself. I begged him to take over my life and guide me in whatever ways he desired. At some point, I considered leaving school to take up the seminary. I felt like I had to tell the world about what I knew about Jesus and salvation. I had to let them know about the joy that comes with a certainty that you’ll spend eternity with the loving, mighty God who made the universe and all within it. I wanted to be a beacon to them, to guide them to the hope that dwelt within me.

It was during this time that I was credulous to essentially everything – aliens, ghosts, psychic phenomena, conspiracies, alternative medicine; you name it, I probably believed in it. It never really struck me until years later that much of what I believed contradicted my religious beliefs, but that’s primarily because I never thought too long or hard about what it would mean if they were all true. Thinking deeply about things wasn’t promoted as useful by my fellow Crusaders – it was enough to trust that things were the way God wanted them to be, and leave it at that. Nothing beyond that was really important, anyways.

I spent the first two years of my college career in the Healthy Living House. The third year, I moved into an apartment with my friend J., who I’d met through some of my classes and who I really got along with. The subject of God and religion seldom arose, and when it did he tended to change it quickly. He knew what I believed, and I could tell that he didn’t believe it. Once we moved in together, things changed somewhat. I learned that he was an atheist (or at least an agnostic, I’m not sure), which in my mind put him just a step or two up from Satan himself. I was aghast. But I was also interested. I wanted to learn why he didn’t believe what I did. After all, I thought, it was so obviously true, and it brought great peace, comfort, and reassurance. Why wouldn’t everyone want that?

And so I asked him questions. He seemed eager to answer them, and to pose questions to me in return. Often I couldn’t answer him, or when I did, he pointed out the flaws in the answers I’d been taught. I tended to brush his objections aside; after all, I was basing my beliefs on something that absolutely had to be true. It was perfect, complete, immutable, infallible, and unchanging.

The thing that finally stuck with me was his accusation that the Bible wasn’t everything that had been written about God and Jesus. What a thing to say! After all, I knew that God wanted us to know everything we could about him; why would there be anything left out? I really got upset about it. I demanded that he prove what he’d said. And, of course, he did. He introduced me to the Catholic Apocrypha, pointed out the differences between their version of the Ten Commandments and ours, and introduced me to the Gnostic texts that had been left out of the Bible.

I was staggered. How could I not have learned about all this? Surely the other Crusade members had to know about these things, too; why didn’t they ever talk about them? I told A. about what J. had showed me, and she seemed nervous. She seemed to think I’d been spending too much time with him, and that it might not be a good thing for me to be living with a nonbeliever. I was shocked that she didn’t want to learn about these things! After all, if these writings were made about God and Jesus and had survived just as long as all the Biblical texts, why didn’t we ever learn about them? How did we know they weren’t God’s word, too?

The more I read the Gnostic texts, the more I was amazed. Everything I’d learned about the origins of modern Christianity was wrong. The Bible wasn’t the complete word of God; the beliefs I held weren’t the same ones people had held over the centuries; for goodness sake, the Bible as I knew it was just the result of a vote on what was and wasn’t going to be part of the canon! What was going on here? Why wasn’t there any other Christian I knew who had read these things? Why were they so violently rejected or scoffed at by any believer I mentioned them to?

I began to do more and more research into the origins of my faith. I learned about the Gnostic ideas of God – that God manifests in the universe in several forms called “aeons”, which could be principles, physical beings, attributes, and so on. I learned that so much of what we believed to be Christianity was really just stuff tacked on centuries after Jesus died, and that there were hundreds of competing early forms that were snuffed out by that which would eventually become what we know today.

I was outraged – not at God, but by my fellow Christians who were so closed-minded about these things and what they meant about the truth of our beliefs. Why did so few of them care if what they believed was true or not? Why was it more important for them to hold onto modern teachings and to abandon the truer, ancient ones?

Eventually I began to question all the things I’d been told in Crusade. After all, they were arguments based on a distorted, limited, chopped up and shuffled version of God’s word. Why should I simply accept them? The Bible was hardly a representation of what the early church was really like – rather, it was a representation of what had dominated and eliminated other early competing sects. I thought of it in much the same way as what would happen if the Lutherans (or any other modern sect) managed to eliminate the competition and rewrite the holy text to take out the bits they don’t like and add bits that sound more appealing to them. I wanted to get back to the earliest, purest roots I could find.

Worse still was when I discovered that for all my belief, there was nothing outside the Bible to confirm that Jesus had ever done anything at all that the Bible said. The only record we had of Jesus’ words was the Bible itself, and even that wasn’t good enough, because nobody who ever met him actually wrote anything that’s in the Bible today. I just basically assumed uncritically that people wouldn’t believe all these things if there weren’t evidence somewhere to back it all up, and that this assumption was enough to justify my faith. Of course, it’s not true; seldom will you find something in the Bible that has been confirmed by archaeology, and never has anything miraculous or supernatural been reinforced by any kind of discovery.

By the time I finally learned about who had really written the gospels and just how shaky the veracity of the Bible was, I wasn’t sure what to call myself anymore. I couldn’t call myself a Christian; after all, for most people, that would mean I believed (or at least believed in) the Bible. And I didn’t. I wanted to get back to what God really was, not what man had twisted him and voted him into being, and not all the unsupported mythology. I began to resent Christian apologists, because I saw in them the sort of short-sighted ignorance I had embraced myself just a short while before. Science, reason, critical thinking, and logic became more and more important as I sifted through the evidence to try to find out the truth. And when it came to my faith, these four things would become the four horsemen of the apocalypse, uprooting everything that remained of what I’d believed.

I was out of college and living on my own now, and I was close to being a Deist. I believed that God had, at the very least, made the universe. I figured that God was the spark that ignited the Big Bang, that he had perhaps guided evolution to lead it toward where we are today, and that maybe – just maybe – he was actually still around to listen to me when I prayed. Even if he didn’t bother to respond.

After a long period of consideration I began to question God even further. Could we ever really know the difference between God not answering prayer and God not being there at all? What evidence do we have that there is a soul, let alone an afterlife? Isn’t it possible that when we see something we think is unexplainable and that it must be a miracle, that instead it’s really just something we don’t understand yet that could be entirely natural? If a purely natural explanation can solve just as many problems, why do we need to tack on the supernatural? How can we possibly claim to know anything about God at all, especially when you discard the Bible as a book of fairy tales?

And so I became an agnostic. I spent hours debating on the Internet with Christians about the bible, about god, about anything. I tried to get them to give me some sort of rational reason to believe any of it, and time after time I heard the same tired, old, and worn-out apologetics that I’d heard from my fellow Crusade members. Nobody was able to tell me why their particular flavor of mythology should be considered any different from that of the Greek, Norse, and Roman mythology I’d learned about in school. And nobody could give me a reasonable answer to the problem of evil – that is, if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why does evil exist, unless he allows it to?

Then my uncle died. Numb from emotional pain and confusion, and hours away from anyone I loved, I went out to a bar the night I found out to try to shift my focus from mourning to just trying to cope. And after a little while at the bar, I returned to my car, where I wept like a lost child, screaming at God to come back into my life and tell me what to do. I poured my entire being into it. I wanted nothing more than for something solid and permanent to reassure me that everything would be okay. I wanted that old comforting certainty again. And for a while, I felt like I had it. I started praying again, if not quite so fervently as before. And, of course, I noticed that the prayers continued to go unanswered beyond the realm of sheer chance and coincidence. The more obvious the result I prayed for, the less likely I would get what I needed. I had re-entered the echo chamber of prayer, and this time I realized right away that the voice I heard bouncing back was mine and mine alone.

So I lapsed back into agnosticism again. I truly wanted to believe that there was a God out there somewhere. But I was unconvinced. Through a proper application of skeptical and critical reasoning, Occam’s Razor slowly sliced bit after bit off of my faith, until there was nothing left of it but “God exists.” And I’m not entirely sure when it happened, but at some point, that fell away too. Likely it disappeared around the time I realized that I was using “God” as nothing more than a catch-all term to describe the things I didn’t know, and I convinced myself that if I didn’t know the right answer to a question, that it didn’t make any sense to just make one up. It slowly became acceptable to me to say “I don’t know” in response to the biggest questions.

I was an atheist. I no longer believed that there was any sort of god. The universe was what it was; nothing was certain or guaranteed, and we were all stuck here on our own to figure things out and make things better for each other. Prayer was just a way to try to make yourself feel good about doing nothing of real value. Rather than take comfort in the delusion that some invisible, inaudible, intangible, unknowable being was watching out for me – after all, if his eye were on the sparrow, why all the strife in the world? – instead I took comfort in the realization that I didn’t have to know everything. Not having the answers to all the deepest questions didn’t make me shallow or lost; it meant that I was being intellectually honest and open to change.

Since then I’ve been seeking out guidance from people who’ve been where I am now. I meet regularly with a nice-sized local atheist/agnostic group for coffee or beer; I read books on humanist philosophy and ethics; I devour science and politics. I’ve gone to church a few times, though it feels like an alien world to me now, and I do it mainly to see it all as an outsider looking in.

I don’t resent my parents for bringing me up the way they did. How could I? They only did it because it was how they were raised themselves. The depth my faith went to was far beyond what they’d ingrained in me. To them, God is very generic. They believe Jesus’ death saved everyone, no matter what; that everyone goes to heaven; that our dead relatives watch over us as some sort of guardian angels; that God cares more about what we do in our lives than what we believe; things like that. It’s a very liberal form of Christianity, and it gives them peace and comfort and a way to socialize with politically and theologically like-minded people. I can’t fault them for it; our minds are wired to receive pleasure from hearing people say things we agree with or we already believe. It’s all a part of being a social species. I won’t say that I want them become atheists, too, because I don’t have any right to try to take away something that gives them hope (even if I think it’s false hope).

So, what now? If there’s no God, what hope can I possibly have? Well, if this is the only life I have, I have to do everything I can to enjoy it and make it useful to myself and others while I have it. I have true moral responsibility – if I wrong someone, I have to make it right myself; I can’t just ask some uninvolved third party to forgive me. I take great pride and joy in my ability to determine what is and isn’t likely to be real or correct. Reason, logic, critical thinking, and skepticism help me understand the world and what is and isn’t worth my time.

When I was a Christian, life was just a waiting room for something better when I died. I didn’t need to involve myself in anything worldly, because I knew that nothing in this life really meant anything, apart from worshiping God. Eternity cheapens a temporary life. Now, I know that there’s no guarantee. There’s no big payoff at the end of the game; it’s the game itself that has to be meaningful. Life is precious because it’s short, and because once it’s gone we can’t get it back. There’s no do-overs. We get one shot to make a difference to the world. And yes, the world itself will eventually be gone, and everything we do is ultimately meaningless. But I think that it’s enough to try to make life a little easier, a little brighter, and a little more enlightened for the people who will come after me, and that maybe someday we as a species will reach the point where we can throw off our security blankets. After all, there’s no monster in the closet or under the bed; there’s just the big, scary, wonderful, real world out there.