Comedian Doug Stanhope on atheism in Oklahoma and the NSA’s surveillance program

Comedian Doug Stanhope on atheism in Oklahoma and the NSA’s surveillance program

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Rafeal Cruz: ‘Atheism Leads To Molestation’ And 4 Other Crazy Things He Said

Rafeal Cruz: ‘Atheism Leads To Molestation’ And 4 Other Crazy Things He Said

Now that Teapublican Texas Senator Ted Cruz has officially tossed his clown hat in the 2016 presidential ring, examining this man’s extraordinarily insane background and comments is going to be easier than spearfishing out of a barrel.

Enter Ted Cruz’s Christian Taliban dad, Rafael Cruz.

Rafael Cruz, Ted Cruz’s father, is slowly proving my theory that bat shit can be entered into one’s DNA. The rabidly right-wing preacher often makes extremist comments in support of his moronic right-wing fundamentalism. Relying on wacky Dominionist teachings, the batshit whisperer and father of our newly anointed 2016 republican presidential candidate, previously described his son as being the “self-anointed king of society.” It’s quite interesting how these fundamentalists are so vigorously pro-life when you consider everything they say makes pro-choice the greatest argument.

Here are 5 of the Craziest Things Said by Rafael Cruz, Ted Cruz’s Preacher Daddy:

Giving a talk at OK2A, an Oklahoma Second Amendment advocacy group (Jesus loves AR-15s), Rafael Cruz said that atheism leads to sexual abuse of children:

1. There is no moral absolute, which means we operate by situational ethics, which unfortunately is something being taught in every high school in America. This means that right and wrong is dependent upon the circumstances. Of course, without God there is no value to life. That leads to immorality, that leads to sexual abuse, and there is no hope. They live without hope, because there is nothing more.”(Raw Story)

2. We have our work cut out for us,” Cruz said “We need to send Barack Obama back to Chicago. I’d like to send him back to Kenya, back to Indonesia.” He went on to say, “We have to unmask this man. This is a man that seeks to destroy all concept of God. And I will tell you what, this is classical Marxist philosophy. Karl Marx very clearly said Marxism requires that we destroy God because government must become God.” (MySanAntonio.com)

3. Cruz lying bout Obama on abortion: “Do you realize,” he asked a room of conservatives, “the first bill President Obama signed into law was to legalize third trimester abortions?” (The first law Obama signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, according to The New York Times.)(MySanAntonio.com)

4. “Socialism requires that government becomes your god. That’s why they have to destroy the concept of God. They have to destroy all loyalties except loyalty to the government. That’s what’s behind homosexual marriage. It’s really more about the destruction of the traditional family than about exalting homosexuality, because you need to destroy, also, loyalty to the family.” (MySanAntonio.com)

5. On anti-gay discrimination: “The left is trying to redefine the issue as a civil right, not as a personal choice. They have gone to the extent to even try to make it illegal for counselors to administer to these people that have certain sexual tendencies to try to work with them from the Christian, biblical standpoint,” Cruz said. (MySanAntonio.com)

Obama Is Correct; Christian Violence In The 20th Century

Despite Wingnut Freakout, Obama Is Right: Christian Violence Is Just as Bad as Muslim Violence

If anything, the president understated the case.

By Zaid Jilani

Photo Credit: Mykhaylo Palinchak/Shutterstock.com

This week, President Obama met with Muslim leaders in a private political meeting for the first time in his six-year presidency. The meeting set off predicatable angry reactions from the political right, with Fox News’ Sean Hannity even saying he wished Obama had demanded that the leaders publicly denounce radical Islam. Obama further raised the hackles of the Christian right when he said at the National Prayer Breakfast that no religion has a monopoly on violence, saying, “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. Slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

The reaction to these comments was apoplectic. Rush Limbaugh called it an “insult” to Christianity; the Tea Party News Network said Obama threw “Christians under the bus”; the Daily Caller surmised that Obama’s remarks were designed to “curb” criticism of Islam.

All of these critics failed to engage with the substance of what Obama was saying. The president was not attacking Christianity, he was simply noting that just as ISIS may be using the name of Islam to rally followers to its violent agenda, extremists within the Christian faith have done the same thing historically. Violence has been in the mainstream of Christianity throughout history.

If anything, Obama didn’t go far enough in his remarks. Christianist violence isn’t a relic of the Crusades; it continues today, and in many of its forms is just as violent as what we are seeing from ISIS.

Christian Violence in the Past Century

In the spring of 2013, Middle East historian Juan Cole decided to compare the body counts between violence committed by Christians and that committed by Muslims in the 20th century. He found that Muslim violence has claimed the lives of around 2 million people, mostly during the Iran-Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan, while violence by Christians claimed the lives of close to 100 million people. Here’s what that looks like on a pie graph:

Click to enlarge.

Some of this Christian-led violence is well-known: the World Wars, the Holocaust, the colonial wars in Southeast Asia and Africa. Critics of this analysis would be quick to say that this violence may have been by Christians, but it wasn’t in the name of Christianity. But in virtually every conflict Cole ticks off, the combatants were overtly religious, and often invoked their religion as part of their military campaigns, just as many of the Islamist militants today are not fighting solely due to a religious grievance, but are organized around groups that share a common religious and cultural background.

But religion has played a more explicit role in some of the 20th-century conflicts involving Christians. For example, the 1990 sectarian warfare in the Balkans culminated in an explicit genocide against Muslim Bosnians by Serbian Orthodox Christians. As Balkans researcher Keith Doubt explained in a 2007 paper, the Serbian Orthodox Church was one of the prime movers in the campaign to scapegoat Bosnian Muslims and justify the eventual ethnic cleansing and genocide that took place. He notes that the “role of the Church as protector of the Serbian nation gave the Church increasing social control, and with this power clergy fermented a xenophobic and bigoted attitude towards Muslims in former-Yugoslavia.”

The Church there was so involved in the eventual atrocities it actually dispatched Orthodox chaplins to bless “Serbian forces, such as the elite Panthers commando unit, which has been accused of committing numerous atrocities, before they set off on operations.” The Church would offer “Serb warriors communion without requiring confession,” giving them absolution for the crimes they were committing to create a “Greater Serbia.”

If the Serbian Orthodox Church’s role in the genocide in Bosnia has been forgotten by many, the role of Catholic churches in Rwanda’s genocide is likely even less known. During that mass slaughter, “Churches became sites of slaughter, carried out even at the altar.” One of the figures indicted in the genocide there was Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, who used to wear a gun on his hip and colluded with a Hutu militia who massacred hundreds of people seeking shelter in his church. After the genocide concluded, various Catholic clergy actually helped church ministers who were guilty of murder flee the country and re-settle elsewhere, including one who allowed all of the men, women, and children hiding in his church to be killed when the church was bulldozed. The BBC actually ran a story in 2004 of a Rwandan girl who converted to Islam after the genocide because churches actively participated in it but mosques did not.

Today’s Christian Violence

Months before ISIS’s brutal beheadings were turned into Western headlines, the Associated Press ran a single paragraph on a beheading that took place in the Central African Republic. The paragraph noted, dryly, that a Christian militia there beheaded a young Muslim man, one of the last Muslims left in the village his colleagues had fled. The story ended up in a blurb on page A11 of The New York Times.

Human Rights Watch goes deeper into the situation in a brief published in December 2014:

The vast majority of Muslims in western parts of the country fled brutal attacks by Christian and animist anti-balaka militia in late 2013 and early 2014. Those who were not able to reach Cameroon or Chad became trapped in the enclaves, where they have spent months living in difficult conditions. UN officials, as well as African Union (AU) MISCA and French Sangaris peacekeepers supported evacuations in late 2013  and early 2014, helping thousands of Muslims to seek safety, including in Cameroon. […] By December  2014, an estimated 415,000 people, most of them Muslim, had fled the country and another 10,500 were protected by peacekeepers in a handful of western enclaves – Carnot, Yaloké, Boda, and Berbérati, among others.

In other words, what ISIS is doing to Yazidis and other groups it has deemed the enemy, Christian militias in the Central African Republic are doing to Muslims. We just aren’t hearing about it, because the victims aren’t as easy to relate to as ISIS’s western captives.

Even the ISIS televised executions of journalists aren’t particularly unique to Islamist terrorism. They’re copying a technique pioneered by Christian-led Mexican cartels, who for years beheaded and otherwise assassinated journalists who objected to their agenda. We rarely identify the cartels as Christian in nature, but there are deep financial links between Mexican churches and the cartel organizations.

No Monopoly On Violence

None of this is to argue that Christians are uniquely violent; that would be as wrong-headed as the Fox News argument about Islam’s insidiousness. It is just to point out that any large organization with enough people in it is capable of succumbing to tribalism, to the idea that our group is “good” and other groups are “bad” and should be feared, or disenfranchised, or even killed. That’s as true of Christianity as it is Islam, or Judaism, or Buddhism, or any large-scale ideology or religion. President Obama wasn’t wrong; if anything, he understated his case.

Atheism explodes in Saudi Arabia, despite state-enforced ban

Atheism explodes in Saudi Arabia, despite state-enforced ban

In the “cradle of Islam,” a growing number of people are quietly declaring themselves nonbelievers
Caryle Murphy, GlobalPost

Atheism explodes in Saudi Arabia, despite state-enforced ban

Worshippers outside of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia (Credit: Associated Press)

Global Post JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — In this country known as the cradle of Islam, where religion gives legitimacy to the government and state-appointed clerics set rules for social behavior, a growing number of Saudis are privately declaring themselves atheists.

The evidence is anecdotal, but persistent.

“I know at least six atheists who confirmed that to me,” said Fahad AlFahad, 31, a marketing consultant and human rights activist. “Six or seven years ago, I wouldn’t even have heard one person say that. Not even a best friend would confess that to me.”

A Saudi journalist in Riyadh has observed the same trend.

“The idea of being irreligious and even atheist is spreading because of the contradiction between what Islamists say and what they do,” he said.

The perception that atheism is no longer a taboo subject — at least two Gulf-produced television talk shows recently discussed it — may explain why the government has made talk of atheism a terrorist offense. The March 7 decree from the Ministry of Interior prohibited, among other things, “calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based.”

The number of people willing to admit to friends to being atheist or to declare themselves atheist online, usually under aliases, is certainly not big enough to be a movement or threaten the government. A 2012 poll by WIN-Gallup International of about 500 Saudis found that 5 percent described themselves as “convinced atheist.” This was well below the global average of 13 percent.

But the greater willingness to privately admit to being atheist reflects a general disillusionment with religion and what one Saudi called “a growing notion” that religion is being misused by authorities to control the population. This disillusionment is seen in a number of ways, ranging from ignoring clerical pronouncements to challenging and even mocking religious leaders on social media.

“Because people are becoming more disillusioned with the government, they started looking at the government and its support groups as being in bed together and conspiring together against the good of the people,” said Bassim Alim, a lawyer in Jeddah.

“When they see the ulema [religious scholars] appeasing the government,” he added, “people become dismayed because they thought they were pious and straightforward and just. “

“I believe people started being fed up with how religion is really controlling their life and how only one interpretation of religion should be followed,” said activist Fahad AlFahad.

Together, the appearance of atheists, a growing wariness of religious controls on society, as well as the continuing lure of jihad and ultraconservatism signal a breakdown in the conformity and consensus that has marked the Saudi religious field in the recent past. It is becoming a more heterogenous and polarized faith scene.

“The mosques are full but society is losing its values. It’s more like a mechanical practice, like going church, you have to go on Sunday,” said a former employee of state media. “We no longer understand our religion, not because we don’t want to. But because our vision of it, our understanding of it, has been polluted by the monarchy…[and]…by the official religious establishment that only measures religion by what the monarchy wants and what pleases the monarchy.”

The growing skepticism about religion and clerics is more visible nowadays because of social media outlets, including tweets, blogs and Facebook pages.

Here are three illustrative tweets from Saudis:

— Prince Abdul Aziz bin Fahad has been tweeting nonstop abt God. I pity his disconnectedness from today’s public. It’s not the 1980′s. Pathetic

— Because our illusion that our version of Islam is the only correct one needs to be washed away

— Could the ulema issue a fatwa against domestic violence? I mean the fatwa committee has prohibited playing Resident Evil

At the same time, however, there is a countervailing trend in that some young Saudis are joining radical Islamist and jihadi movements, a trend reinforced by the war in Syria.

“When the Arab Spring started, young religious people were asking about Islam and democracy,” said Saud Al Sarhan, director of research at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. “But now they are just asking about Islam and jihad, after what is going on in Syria.”

This attraction towards militant ultraconservatism is also apparent in the activities of unregulated religious vigilantes. Even as the government’s own religious police have come under stricter controls, these bands of young religious “volunteers” attack social gatherings to stop what they deem as prohibited activities, including music, dancing and gender mixing. In one famous incident in 2012, these “volunteers” raided the annual government-sponsored cultural festival known as Janadriya, where they clashed with security forces.

It is still dangerous to publicly admit one is an atheist because of the dire punishment one can face from a court system based on sharia, which regards disbelief in God as a capital offense.

In addition, conservative clerics who have considerable sway among Saudis, use the label ‘atheist’ to discredit those who question their strict interpretations of Islamic scriptures or express doubts about the dominant version of Islam known as Wahhabism.

That is what happened with 25-year-old Hamza Kashgari who in 2012 tweeted some unconventional thoughts about Prophet Muhammad, none of which indicated he did not believe in God. Still, he was called ‘atheist’ and to appease the religious establishment, the government jailed him for 20 months.

Also, Raef Badawi, in his early 30s, was accused of being atheist because he called for freedom to discuss other versions of Islam besides Wahhabism on the website “Free Saudi Liberals.” Badawi was sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes in July 2013. His lawyer, Waleed Abu Alkhair, a human rights activist who also has been jailed, said Badawi told the court that he was a Muslim but added that “everyone has a choice to believe or not believe,” the BBC reported.

A Riyadh resident who has extensive contacts with young Saudis because of his job in higher education said that he “tries to warn young people that they are living according to an Islam constructed by the government, and not according to the Islam given us by God.”

Increasingly, he said, some youths “are going to ignore religion and become atheist, while others are going to understand the game.”

Kiss me, I’m an atheist

Kiss me, I’m an atheist

by  Matthew Hutson@SilverJacket

Nonbelievers need a new PR campaign, one that emphasizes their civic engagement

Brochures and bumper stickers at the LA chapter of the Sunday Assembly, which calls itself a “godless congregation.”

Jae C. Hong/AP

In Pope Francis’ Christmas address, he extended a surprise olive branch to atheists. But the reach was backhanded. “I invite even nonbelievers to desire peace,” he offered. Even nonbelievers? How magnanimous.

Religious tolerance has increased dramatically over the last few decades, at least in the United States. But one group remains behind the pack: atheists. A 2012 Gallup poll asked Americans if they would vote for a well-qualified presidential candidate nominated by their party if the person happened to be “X.” Catholic? Ninety-four percent said yes. Jewish? Ninety-one percent. Mormon? Eighty percent. Muslim? Fifty-eight percent. Trailing them all — and well behind blacks, women, Hispanics, and gays and lesbians — were atheists, at 54 percent.

Dislike of atheists might be surprising, given that we are a small and largely invisible demographic, making up less than 5 percent of the U.S. We are not known for terrorist attacks, secret cabals or any particular pageantry — we are not even a particularly cohesive group. As the comedian Ricky Gervais once wrote, “Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby.” But recent research has identified the primary source of prejudice against atheists: It is the distrust of those who are not scared of a watchful God. And the research suggests that current attempts to give atheists a PR makeover are severely misguided.

The source of prejudice

A 2006 paper by the sociologist Penny Edgell and her colleagues began to outline the nature of the anti-atheist bias. They found that people associate atheists with either the low end of the social hierarchy (common criminals) or the high end (cultural elitists). What these two groups purportedly share is extreme self-interest and lack of concern for the common good.

A couple of years later, the economists Jonathan Tan and Claudia Vogel published a paper supporting the notion that dislike of atheists is based at least partly on distrust. They found that, in an investment game, players handed less money to partners they thought were less religious. (The English philosopher John Locke gave voice to such behavior in 1689 when he wrote that “those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God.” The title of the book, “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” was not ironic by design.)

But why such suspicion? Two psychologists, Will Gervais of the University of Kentucky and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia, hypothesize that people see atheists as not fearing punishment from a monitoring deity. And in the last few years they have demonstrated this belief to be the core of anti-atheist bias.

The logic makes sense: People are better behaved when they feel watched by others, or even by a photo of eyes. We also conceive of God as a personlike entity, someone who cares about our behavior. Gervais and Norenzayan have shown that cuing religious people with thoughts of God makes them more self-conscious, and numerous experiments have shown that priming believers with notions of supernatural beings makes them more honest and charitable. It is as if he is watching.

In one of their experiments (conducted with Azim Shariff, a psychologist at the University of Oregon), subjects read about a man who bumped a van while parking and did not leave a note, then stole money from a found wallet. They found this untrustworthy character to be more representative of an atheist than a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew or a feminist — which indicates that distrust of atheists is not just a matter of seeing them as outsiders. In fact, subjects were just as inclined to assume the character was an atheist as they were to think he was a rapist.

American Atheists has created billboards that read ‘Reason > prayer,’ but messages like these only increase distrust of atheists.

In their most telling experiment, subjects rated their own religiosity, evaluated the trustworthiness of atheists and rated the degree to which “people behave better when they feel that God is monitoring their behavior.” Agreement with this statement fully accounted for the connection between religiosity and distrust of atheists. In other words, if you believe in God, you think fear of God’s wrath is what keeps people in line, and this belief causes you to be wary of atheists.

Nothing to fear

How fair is this distrust of atheists? If reminders of religion prompt believers to be better behaved, are they generally more moral than atheists? Some evidence suggests that religious people are more generous than nonreligious people — but only in nonindustrialized societies, or when prompted to think about God. In one recent study, those who regularly attended Sunday religious services were more likely to respond to a request for charity than those who attended them irregularly or attended no services, but only if the request came on a Sunday. Strong evidence for goodness without God comes from Denmark and Sweden, according to the sociologist Phil Zuckerman. One in four Danes does not believe in a god, spirit or life force, and neither does one in three Swedes. These are two of the world’s least religious countries (PDF), yet they also have two of the world’s lowest homicide rates. Even if there were a small difference in the trustworthiness of atheists, are we really comparable to rapists?

Empathy does not require belief in God. Atheists feel just as much pain seeing the misery of others; it comes from a simple mammalian mechanism. A conscience does not rely on superstition either. We all like to do things that make us feel we are good people, even if it is simply to convince others that we are good.

What is more, God is not the only entity that can watch you and punish misdeeds. There is also the state. Shariff and Norenzayan found in a study that presenting people with words recalling secular sources of authority — “civic,” “jury,” “court,” “police,” “contract” — increased prosocial behavior almost as much as religious reminders did.

The fact that the government’s presence keeps people in line suggests one way to reduce distrust of atheists: Remind people that atheists are not in fact free to do as they please. Gervais and Norenzayan found that showing believers a video on the effectiveness of the Vancouver police department decreased their distrust of nonbelievers.

Taking these results from the lab to the real world, Norenzayan and Gervais report in an upcoming paper that wariness of nonbelievers is reduced in countries with a strong rule of law. Looking at data from dozens of countries, they found that where contracts, property rights, the police and the courts were formidable, religious citizens were less likely to agree that “people who do not believe in God are unfit for public office.”

One wonders, then, if the spreading purview of the state, with its panopticon-style wiretapping, drones, surveillance cameras and Internet snooping, will increase good behavior, as the philosopher Peter Singer and others have argued. And if so, perhaps it will also boost trust of atheists. Norenzayan, in his book “Big Gods,” argues that fear of disciplinary deities enabled humans to trust each other enough for civilization to gain a foothold, but that with big government to regulate human affairs, big gods are no longer necessary to hold strangers together. “You don’t have to lean on religion anymore to decide whom to trust,” he told me, “if you think there are other reasons people can be trusted.”

If such surveillance still does not help boost the reputation of atheists, what might a brand manager do for the godless? Let us look at what has been done. The British Humanist Association has run bus ads that say “There’s probably no God.” The Freedom From Religion Foundation has a billboard that says, “I am free from the slavery of religion.” And American Atheists has created billboards that read “Reason > prayer.” But these messages only increase distrust of atheists. Most people do not see reason as the root of virtue. Loyalty and generosity are not typically understood as the output of calculations but as the abandonment of them. And attacking another’s faith does not open lines of communication. Norenzayan added, “Instead of the angry, confrontational kind of atheism that gets all the attention, how about a kinder, gentler, funnier atheism?”

A successful campaign might paint pictures of atheists doing good in the world. Clips of John Lennon singing “Imagine,” Daniel Radcliffe reading “Harry Potter” to kids, Angelina Jolie saving Africa one baby at a time. They do not even have to be celebrities or saints (or Swedes) — just, as Will Gervais suggested, standup citizens who take out their garbage and pay their taxes, like anyone else. Norenzayan also recommended that more nonreligious people come out of the closet: “I think positive social contact in general helps a lot,” he said. “It has done wonders in reducing other prejudices.”

In modern society, there is no reason not to trust atheists. So to do my part in a world where religious intolerance plays a role in so many conflicts, I invite you all to join me in desiring tolerance and peace. Yes, even you Catholics.

Matthew Hutson is a science writer and the author of “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking,” about the psychology of superstition and religion.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America’s editorial policy.

Huckster of Woo Deepak Chopra Cocks Leg at Skepticism and Pisses on Self

Chopra Shoots at Skepticism and Misses

      Published by Steven Novella

Deepak Chopra apparently has no love for organized skepticism. This is not surprising and his particular brand of spiritual pseudoscience has been a favorite target of skeptical analysis. He is also not the only one who has decided to fight back against the skeptics – if you cannot defend yourself against legitimate criticism, then shoot the messenger.

In a recent article Chopra renews his attack against what he calls “militant skepticism.” This is a blatant attempt, of course, to portray skeptics as extremist and on the fringe, a strategy that has been used against “militant atheists.” Chopra also uses his article to conflate skepticism with atheism, almost as if he is completely unaware of the internal discourse that has been taking place for decades within the skeptical movement.

Chopra writes:

The rise of militant skepticism clouded the picture, however, beginning with its popular attack on religion. The aim of Richard Dawkins, as stated in his best seller, The God Delusion, was to subject “the God hypothesis” to scientific scrutiny, the way one would subject anti-matter or black holes to scrutiny. In fact he did no such thing with God, for the scientific method requires experiments that can be replicated and facts that can be verified. Dawkins offered no experiments to prove or disprove the existence of God. What he actually did was to subject religion to a barrage of scorn and ridicule, attacking it on the rational improbability – as he sees it – that a deity could possibly exist.

This is an interesting bit of historical revisionism, although I think it probably just reflects Chopra’s complete unfamiliarity with his subject matter. The modern skeptical movement predates Dawkins by decades. We have had a clear philosophy and scope long before Dawkins appeared on the scene.

Dawkins is a highly respected figure among skeptics because of his powerful writing, his popularizing of science, and his unflinching criticism of pseudoscience. Most skeptics are atheists, and we also respect his defending science from the intrusion of religion and spirituality.

Where many skeptics, myself included, disagree with Dawkins is precisely in treating “the God hypothesis” as if it were only a scientific question. I say “only” because certainly it is possible to treat any supernatural hypothesis as if it were in the realm of methodological naturalism, and there is general agreement among skeptics when approached in this way the only reasonable conclusion is that there is no credible evidence to support the conclusion that any god exists, or that the laws of the material universe need to be extended to account for any alleged supernatural phenomena. If you frame God as a scientific hypothesis, it can be scientifically refuted. Looked at another way, the psychocultural hypothesis is a far better and more parsimonious explanation for belief in God than the actual existence of such a being.

The big “but” is that not everyone believes in God as a scientific fact. Some people choose to have faith in an unfalsifiable god, one that resides outside the realm of science. Once someone’s faith has retreated outside the realm of science, then science is no longer the tool by which one should address such faith. Logic and philosophy are now more appropriate, but you cannot say, by definition, that an unfalsifiable God can be scientifically proven to not exist.

In practice most people blur the line between an empirical God and an unfalsifiable God, in which case I believe the best approach is to point out the self-contradiction, and force them squarely either inside or outside the arena of science. Once completely outside the arena, they must surrender any pretense to actual knowledge and admit their beliefs are solely personal faith. If any part of their belief dips into the arena of science, however, then it is scientific fair game.

This is the debate, at least, that has been raging ever since there has been a modern skeptical movement. There are two basic camps, loosely referred to as the atheists and the skeptics (yes, there are lots of permutations and subtleties, but that’s the basic picture). Over time the relationship between these two camps has waxed and waned. At times we predominantly celebrate our intellectual overlap and common cause, at others our philosophical differences come home to roost.

Chopra appears to be aware of none of this. This would not be a problem as he is not part of the skeptical movement, but then he should not presume to write on a subject about which he apparently has such complete ignorance (not typically an obstacle for Chopra).

After setting up and knocking down a couple more straw men, Chopra writes:

The God Delusion, aided by a handful of other best sellers attacking religion in the same vein, did have one decisive effect, however. Science became yoked to the tools of rhetoric and demagoguery, going so far as to lose any trace of objectivity.

I have no idea what Chopra is referring to here, but I can guess, based on his previous writing. Now that he has conflated skepticism and atheism, and then falsely accused atheism of demagoguery, he concludes that scientific skepticism is also about demagoguery. Every link in that chain of thought is incorrect. This all serves Chopra’s purpose of attacking skepticism – which really is nothing more than a scientific and logical criticism of his nonsense.

Chopra, however, does not want to have a war with science, because he wants to pretend that his new age spiritualism is science. So he needs a villain, something to blame other than the complete scientific bankruptcy of his ideas. Skeptics are his convenient villain, but skeptics are just scientists or science promoters who are bothering to apply scientific reasoning to his claims. This is something with which most mainstream scientists will not sully themselves (which I think is a mistake, but that’s another post). So he conflates skepticism with atheism, and he has created his villain.

Chopra’s skeptical villain is a complete fiction, but that is a realm in which Chopra apparently feels comfortable.

Chopra finally gets to the specifics of his current boogeyman:

A distressing example has been occurring at Wikipedia, where a band of committed skeptics have focused their efforts to discredit anyone whom they judge an enemy.

He is correct in that there is a project within skeptical circles to keep Wikipedia scientifically accurate. Chopra would like his readers to think this is “militants” attacking their “enemies.” From the skeptical point of view, of course, this is simply a project for Wikipedia to accurately present scientific information about controversial topics. The goal is to prevent promoters of nonsense and pseudoscience from using Wikipedia for free advertising and spreading propaganda.

The more neutral perspective is that Wikipedia is a common battle ground for ideological opponents. This is a serious issue for Wikipedia, as they have to deal with editing wars. They partly deal with this by labeling certain entries as controversial, and also allowing different sections within an entry for the various perspectives. I guess Chopra would like to have free reign in Wikipedia without any opposing opinions being expressed.

For example:

You can see the results at the Wikipedia entry for Rupert Sheldrake, the British biologist who has served as a lightning rod for militant skeptics for several decades. Intelligent, highly trained, an impeccable thinker, and a true advocate for experimentation and validation, Sheldrake had the temerity to be skeptical about the everyday way that science is conducted.

Chopra would have you believe that Sheldrake in an “impeccable thinker” wrongly targeted by “militant skeptics.” The most generous characterization, rather, is that Sheldrake is a highly controversial figure. He is trying to actually change the nature and scope of science. He should not be shocked that there is pushback. Sheldrake is also, in my opinion, completely wrong, and is a very sloppy thinker who is trying to erode scientific standards in order to admit his particular brand of supernaturalism.

Of course, that is the debate. Let’s have it.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the big picture here is that Chopra is desperately trying to avoid actually engaging with science and skepticism. If he thinks he and Sheldrake and others he would consider his intellectual allies have a point, then make it. Bring it on.

The best way to promote your ideas, especially if you have the hubris to think they are revolutionary, is to engage with your critics. There are many careful and thoughtful public intellectuals (Dawkins included) who have put forward very cogent philosophical and scientific arguments against what Chopra is selling. If Chopra wants to promote his ideas he should try to understand and engage with those critics.

Instead, Chopra is building a cardboard villain to rail against. In so doing he is exposing his intellectual shallowness.

You will notice what Chopra has not done is address any of the actual intellectual pillars of scientific skepticism. If he wishes to do so, I would be happy to engage with him on this issue.

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• Chopra Shoots at Skepticism and Misses (skepticblog.org)
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American Atheists’ Dave Muscato: Christians don’t want equality, they want supremacy

American Atheists’ Dave Muscato: Christians don’t want equality, they want supremacy  

By David Ferguson

Dave Muscato, director of media relations for American Atheists, Inc., said that Christians who complain about persecution in the public square don’t actually want equality with other viewpoints, they want supremacy over them.

In an interview with Raw Story, Muscato responded to avowals by Louisiana public officials that prayer will continue in public forums by saying that Christian officials who foist their views on private citizens are in violation of the some of this country’s most sacred founding beliefs and of the U.S. Constitution.

“These Christians,” he continued, “they’ve had a monopoly for so long. They don’t want equality, they want privilege. And when they don’t get special rights, they cry that they’re being persecuted.”

On Wednesday, the Monroe News-Star published an article in which local public officials vowed that whatever the outcome of the current Supreme Court case involving public prayer by government officials, Ouachita Parish will continue to open public proceedings with a Christian prayer.

The men were discussing a case currently before the Supreme Court, Town of Greece v. Galloway, in which non-Christian plaintiffs are suing the city of Greece, NY to stop Christian prayers at the outset of city council meetings, public hearings and other government events.

Ouachita Parish Police Jury President Shane Smiley told the News-Star, “I will always vote for prayer. More important than it being a tradition, we make decisions that affect a lot of lives in the parish and need that guidance.”

“I don’t believe it’s inappropriate. I believe the jury as a whole believes an open invocation followed with the pledge of allegiance tells people who we are,” Smiley continued.

Jerry Hicks, president of the parish school board said, “Jesus Christ is our Lord. In the U.S., our god is God. I think prayer is essential. As a board, we’ll go after that if they try to take it away.”

Calling the Louisiana officials’ stance “a slap in the face to the Constitution,” Muscato said, “The United States does not have a ‘God.’ This is not a theocracy and we have freedom or religion here. People believe in all sorts of things.”

“If a public official feels like they need to pray in order to do their job, there’s no reason that they cannot do this before the meeting,” he said. “There’s nothing stopping them from doing that.”

If that official feels they need to impress upon the jurors or members of the public the importance and possible ramifications of their decisions, Muscato proposed, they can bring in experts in jury outcomes, budget ramifications or other issues. It would be infinitely preferable, he said, to approach the public business in a way that “doesn’t involve the supernatural.”

Muscato appeared on Fox News on Wednesday alongside Rabbi Aryeh Spero and Bill Donohue of The Catholic League. He told Raw Story that while appearances by his group on Fox often result in a torrent of angry, anti-atheist emails, “Every time we go on Fox, we get new members and we get new people donating to us because people see us and they hear the crazy things that people actually believe. They see how dangerous it is that these people have a national stage.”

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Seth Andrews Interviews Richard Dawkins

Seth Andrews Interviews Richard Dawkins   

On September 24th, Richard Dawkins’ new book, “An Appetite For Wonder: the Making of a Scientist” released worldwide.

Four days later in Washington DC, Dawkins sat down for a one-hour conversation with Seth Andrews, host of the online community and radio show “The Thinking Atheist,” to talk about a variety of subjects…including childhood, music, evolution, apologist “fleas,” Christopher Hitchens and the memoir itself.

Thanks to The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science for making this interview possible.  (http://www.richarddawkins.net)

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Atheists can’t be Republicans | The secular have no place in today’s GOP — and libertarian atheists should realize that now

Atheists can’t be Republicans

The secular have no place in today’s GOP — and libertarian atheists should realize that now

By CJ Werleman

Enlarge (Credit: AP/Reuters/J. Scott Applewhite/Manuel Balce Ceneta/Jonathan Ernst/Stacy Bengs/WDG Photo via Shutterstock/Salon)

We atheists like to chastise the religious for their child-like belief in an imaginary friend, but, equally, the time has come for the atheist movement to grow up. It’s understood that the so-called new atheist movement began at the start of the new millennium with the mainstream emergence of luminaries Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others.

For much of the first decade of the new century, the atheist movement behaved like a curious child in search of meaning to its own existence. Now that the child is a teenager on its way to adulthood, it needs to start acting like a grown up. The atheist movement comprises more than 2,000 groups and organizations in the U.S. today, but the movement, in composition and purpose, has failed to establish a coherent cause outside of validating non-belief and offering platitudes towards protecting the separation of church and state. Another thing one notices with the atheist movement is the fact it is predominantly upwardly middle-class, white and male. Sikivu Hutchinson writes, in her essay “Prayer Warriors and Freethinkers”: “If mainstream freethought and humanism continue to reflect the narrow cultural interests of white elites who have disposable income to go to conferences then the secular movement is destined to remain marginal and insular.”

The movement has an image problem. An image that isn’t helped by the ceaseless and over-simplified fear-mongering over Islamic terrorism from the likes of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins — rhetoric that not only ignores our long history of foreign policy blunders in the Middle East, but also echoes the neo-conservatives, the Israel lobby and the entire right-wing echo chamber. Nathan Lean, author of “The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims,” writes, “The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason.”

It’s time for the movement to address bigger and real issues, and the biggest issue of our time is income inequality. Of all the developed nations, the U.S. has the most unequal distribution of income. In the past decade, 95 percent of all economic gains have gone to the top 1 percent. A mere 400 individuals own one-half of the entire nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, median household income keeps falling, and our poverty levels resemble that of the Great Depression era. In other words, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is being decimated. Atheists like to talk about building a better world, one that is absent of religiosity in the public square, but where are the atheist groups on helping tackle the single biggest tear in the fabric of our society — wealth disparity?

They are nowhere. Its absence on the most pressing moral issue of our time makes it difficult for the movement to establish meaningful partnerships with other moral communities. To remain white, middle class, intellectually smug and mostly apolitical will not only serve to alienate atheism from minorities and the poor, but will also ensure it remains a politically impotent movement that is incapable of building a better America. Growing up means less time and money spent on self-righteous billboard campaigns, and, instead, more resources allocated to fighting the political conditions that have caused this nation’s middle class and infrastructure to resemble that of a hyper-religious Third World nation.

Christopher Hitchens wrote that the intellectual advantage of atheism is its ability to reject unprovable assertions on face value. It’s why we don’t believe in the supernatural. Equally, it’s why we shouldn’t believe in a myth that is causing greater harm than creationism — the myth of trickle-down economics, which remains the economic blueprint for today’s Republican Party, despite the world’s leading economists lampooning it as an abject failure. In the four decades that followed FDR’s New Deal, our middle class became the envy of the world. In an op-ed titled “Abject Failure of Reaganomics,” Robert Parry writes, “It was the federal government that essentially created the Great American Middle Class — from the New Deal policies of the 1930s through other reforms of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, from Social Security to Wall Street regulation to labor rights to the GI Bill to the Interstate Highway System to the space program’s technological advances to Medicare and Medicaid to the minimum wage to civil rights.” But then came the period of Reagan’s holy trinity — privatization, deregulation, and free trade. Now here we are today — facing the largest economic crisis since the 1930s. Atheists are secularists, and a secularist cannot be a member of today’s Republican Party. You’re either one or the other.

You cannot be both. Now, I am acutely aware that a great number of atheists identify with the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, but this is comical. A lack of evidence is why atheists don’t believe in God. But to believe in libertarianism is in itself an act of faith, because libertarianism has not only never been tried anywhere, but an overwhelming number of economists reject the philosophy as little more than “capitalism with the gloves off” — a condition that would only exacerbate the winner-takes-all society we have today. If an atheist is looking for political evidence, the evidence we have is that not only is today’s Republican Party a theocratic sponsor, it’s also a party that has been proven wrong on just about everything in the past three decades or more: from evolution to climate change, trickle-down economics, that the Iraqis would greet us as liberators, that the Bush tax cuts would lead to jobs. It didn’t. It added $3 trillion to the debt.

They were wrong that the stimulus would trigger inflation, that austerity stimulates an economy and that universal healthcare is worse than slavery. It’s time for the atheist movement to get off the political sidelines. It’s time to truly help this country become a better place to live for all its citizens. The recent Values Voter Summit demonstrated that the likely 2016 GOP frontrunners and its base wish to transform America’s secular state into a tyrannical theocracy — a nirvana absent gays, liberals, immigrants, Muslims and science books. If the atheist movement doesn’t evolve into a politically agitated, unified and mobilized Secular Left, then the Christian Right might just get its way. In fighting for truly meaningful social justice, such as income equality and the rights of minorities, the movement can form partnerships with communities that share common causes. For instance, building a bridge with certain religious communities that are equally concerned with fighting against class inequality and social injustice.

This would broaden the appeal of the atheism movement, and might just get people to like us a little more. Walter Bristol, an atheist interfaith activist, wrote, “Economic inequality is one of the most imminent issues facing Western society today. Any progressive movement that chooses to dismiss it is and will be rightfully dismissed themselves.” Atheists are the fastest growing minority in the country. We now have the critical mass to shape elections and policy. Either we seize our potential political power, thus acting like the grown up in the room, or we can continue to focus on the ‘pettier’ or issues, thus continuing to act like a petulant child.
CJ Werleman is the author of Crucifying America, and God Hates You. Hate Him Back. You can follow him on Twitter:  @cjwerleman

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Priest Condemns Homophobia as Anti-Christ, Religious Right Freaks Out

Religious Right calls priest who condemns homophobia anti-Christ

Last week when Gary Hall, an Episcopalian priest and dean of Washington’s National Cathedral, labeled homophobia “a sin” during a sermon marking the 15th anniversary of the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay man, he raised a storm of howls from the Religious Right… and received plenty of condemnations from them himself.

Jennifer LeClaire, who writes for the conservative Christian magazine Charisma, quotes Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center), as saying “Gary Hall of the National Cathedral is sinning when he claims that opposition to homosexuality is a sin. This is counterfeit Christianity in action—transferring the guilt before God from those who are committing sins (of which homosexuality is one) to those who oppose those sins.” LaBarbera calls this an example of a new heretical ‘sin-affirming Christianity’ that poses a danger of spreading within the evangelical Church. Jennifer LeClaire adds that she thinks LaBarbera is “spot-on” and declares she is shocked by the kind of deception the Very Reverend Hall is perpetrating.

Yesterday (Oct. 22), Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (another hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center) added his two cents worth in the FRC’s Washington Watch Daily Commentary. He compared the Very Rev. Hall to one of the “false prophets” from the biblical Book of Jeremiah: “they encourage those who do evil, and as a result, no one turns from doing evil.”

So what did Gary Hall say that has the Religious Right so upset? Here’s a sample:

“We must now have the courage to take the final step and call homophobia and heterosexism what they are. They are sin. Homophobia is a sin. Heterosexism is a sin. Shaming people for whom they love is a sin. Only when all our churches say that clearly and boldly and courageously will our LGBT youth be free to grow up in a culture that totally embraces them fully as they are.”

“It’s more than tragic—in fact it’s shameful–that faith communities, especially Christian ones, continue to be complicit in putting our children at risk and abetting the attitudes that oppress them, thereby encouraging the aggressors who would subject our children to pain, humiliation, and violence.”

And after same-sex marriages became legal in Washington DC earlier this year, Hall announced that the National Cathedral would begin to perform the wedding ceremonies.

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Uber Idiot Pat Robertson Predicts ‘Nazis’ and ‘Guillotines’ Because of Atheists ‘Rejecting God’

Robertson predicts ‘Nazis’ and ‘guillotines’ because of atheists ‘rejecting God’                                

By David Edwards

Televangelist Pat Robertson started the week off by predicting that Europe could be returning to the days of “Nazis” and “guillotines” because of humanists, atheists and other liberals who reject God.

During a Monday report about a bill in Belgium that would expand the country’s euthanasia law to terminally-ill children, Robertson said that the Nazi Germany “spirit of death” still existed in Europe today.

“You know the liberals, the so called socialists, the progressives, they’ve moved away from God and when you move away from God then you say, ‘were humanists,’” he explained. “Then as a result of humanity and rejecting God, you have the orgy of the French Revolution, you have the guillotine cutting off the heads of thousands of people.

“You have the same thing going on now in Europe,” Robertson added. “You had it under the Nazis.”

“Why can’t we come back to the fact that God loves people?”

Watch this video from CBN’s 700 Club, broadcast Oct. 21, 2013.

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

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Perversions

Perversions

Atheists and homosexuals were called perverts once. Why do we still see perversion where no harm is done?

by  Jesse Bering

Reclining Boy (1913) by Egon Schiele. Leopold Foundation, Vienna. Photo by Corbis

Jesse Bering is a former academic in psychology whose writing has appeared in Scientific American, Slate and The Guardian, among others. His latest book is Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (2013).

Perverts weren’t always the libidinous bogeymen we imagine when we think of the term today. Sexual mores have certainly shifted dramatically over the course of history and across societies, but the very word ‘pervert’ once literally meant something else entirely to what it does now. For example, the peculiar discovery that some peasant during the reign of Charles II used conch shells for anal gratification or inhaled a stolen batch of ladies’ corsets while touching himself in the town square would have been merely coincidental to any accusations of his being perverted (though it wouldn’t have helped his case). Seventeenth-century terms such as ‘skellum’ (scoundrel) or reference to his ‘mundungus’ (smelly entrails) might have applied, but calling this man a ‘pervert’ for his peccadilloes would have made little sense at the time.

Linguistically, the sexual connotation feels natural. The ring of it — purrrvert — is at once melodious and cloying, producing a noticeable snarl on the speaker’s face, while the image of a lecherous child molester, a trench-coated flasher in a park, a drooling pornographer, or perhaps a serial rapist pops into one’s head. Yet as Shakespeare might remind us, a pervert by any other name would smell as foul. For the longest time, in fact, to be a pervert wasn’t to be a sexual deviant; it was to be an atheist.

In 1656, the British lexicographer Thomas Blount included the following entry for the verb ‘pervert’ in his Glossographia (a book also known by the more cumbersome title A Dictionary Interpreting the Hard Words of Whatsoever Language Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue): ‘to turn upside down, to debauch, or seduce’. No doubt all of these activities occur in your typical suburban bedroom today. But it’s only by dint of our post-Victorian minds that we perceive these types of naughty winks in the definition of a term that was floating around the old English countryside. In Blount’s time, and for several hundred years after he was dead and buried, a pervert was simply a headstrong apostate who had turned his or her back on the draconian morality of the medieval Church, thereby ‘seducing’ others into a godless lifestyle.

If we applied this original definition to the present iconoclastic world of science, one of the most recognisable perverts in the world today would be the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. As the author of The God Delusion (2006) and an active proselytiser of atheism, Dawkins encourages his fellow rationalists to ‘turn away from’ canonical religious teachings. As I’ve written my own scientific atheistic screed, I’m not casting stones. I’m proudly in possession of a perverted nature that fits both the archaic use of the term, due to my atheism, and its more recent pejorative use, due to my homosexuality.

Only at the tail end of the 19th century did the word ‘pervert’ first leap from the histrionic sermons of fiery preachers into the heady, clinical discourses of stuffy European sexologists. Today, the term is more likely to be used less as a diagnosis and more as an insult, hurled at the likes of sex offenders. This gradual semantic migration of perverts, from the church pews to the psychiatric clinic to the online comments section of salacious news stories, hasn’t occurred without the clattering bones of medieval religious morality dragging behind. Notice that the suffix –vert means, generally, ‘to turn’: hence ‘to convert’ (to turn to another), ‘to revert’ (to return to a previous state), ‘to invert’ (to turn inside out), ‘to pervert’ (to turn away from the right course), and so on. Of those, ‘pervert’ alone has that devilishly malicious core ­— ‘a distinctive quality of obstinacy’, as the Australian psychoanalyst Jon Jureidini has called it in the paper ‘Perversion: An Erotic Form of Hatred or Exciting Avoidance of Reality?’(2001). He goes on: ‘petulance, peevishness … self-willed in a way that distinguishes it from more “innocent” deviations’.

A judge accusing someone of ‘perverting the course of justice’ is referring to a deliberate effort to thwart moral fairness. Similarly, since the modern noun form of ‘pervert’ is synonymous with ‘sex deviant’, the presumption is that the person thus described is a deviant by his (or her) own malicious design. In other words, he is presumed to have wilfully chosen to be sexually aberrant — that’s to say, to go against what is right.

It’s striking how such an emotionally loaded word, one that undergoes almost no change at all for the first 1,000 years of its use, can almost overnight come to mean something so very different, entirely eclipsing its original intent. Exactly how did this word ‘pervert’ go from being a perennial term for the ‘immoral religious heretic’ to referring to the ‘immoral sexual deviant’?

One key reason for this shift can be found in the work of the British scholar Havelock Ellis, who back in 1897 popularised the term ‘pervert’ in his descriptions of patients with atypical sexual desires. Earlier scholars, among them Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Austro-German psychiatrist regarded by many as the father of studies in deviant sexuality, had already sexualised the term, but Ellis’s accessible writing found a wider general audience and ultimately led to this meaning of ‘pervert’ becoming solidified in the common vernacular.

The provenance of the term in Ellis’s work is still a little hard to follow, because he initially uses ‘perverts’ and ‘perversions’ in the sense of sexual deviancy in a book confusingly titled Sexual Inversion (1897). Co-authored with the gay literary critic John Addington Symonds and published after Symonds’s death, the book was a landmark treatise on the psychological basis of homosexuality. In the authors’ view, ‘sexual inversion’ reflected homosexuality as an inside-out form of the standard erotic pattern. That part is easy enough to understand. Where the language of Ellis and Symonds gets tricky, however, is in their broader use of ‘sexual perversions’ to refer to socially prohibited sexual behaviours, of which ‘sexual inversion’ (or homosexuality) was just one. Other classic types of perversions included polygamy, bestiality, and prostitution. The authors adopted this religious language not because they personally believed homosexuality to be abnormal and therefore wrong (quite the opposite, since their naturalistic approach was among the first to identify such behaviours in other animals) but only to note that it was salient among the categories of sexuality frequently depicted as ‘against what is right’ or sinful. Theirs was merely an observation about how gays and lesbians (‘inverts’) were seen by most of society.

Curiously enough, Ellis, the scientist of the pair, and the one usually credited with christening homosexuals as sex ‘perverts’, had his own unique predilection. Ellis’s urophilia — a strong sexual attraction to urine, or to people who are in the process of urinating — is documented in his various notes and letters. In correspondence with a close female acquaintance, Ellis chided the woman for forgetting her purse at his house, adding saucily: ‘I’ve no objection to your leaving liquid gold behind.’ He gave in to these desires openly and even fancied himself a connoisseur of pisseuses, writing in his autobiography: ‘I may be regarded as a pioneer in the recognition of the beauty of the natural act in women when carried out in the erect attitude.’ In his later years, this ‘divine stream’, as he called it, proved the cure for Ellis’s impotence: the image of an upright, urinating woman was the only thing that could turn him on. And he was entirely unashamed of this sexual quirk: ‘It was never to me vulgar, but, rather, an ideal interest, a part of the yet unrecognised loveliness of the world.’ On attempting to analyse his own case (he was a sexologist, after all), Ellis concluded: ‘[It’s] not extremely uncommon … it has been noted of men of high intellectual distinction.’ He was also convinced that men with high-pitched voices were generally more intelligent than baritones. That Ellis himself was a rare high tenor might have had something to do with that curious hypothesis as well.

Ellis was among a handful of pioneering sexologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who had set out to tease apart the complicated strands of human sexuality. Other scholars, among them Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, as well as Freud’s early follower, the Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Stekel, were similarly committed to this newly objective, amoral empirical approach to sexual deviance. Their writings might seem tainted with bias to us today (and in fact they are) but they also display a genuine concern for those who found themselves, through no doing or choice of their own, feeling aroused in ways that posed major problems in the social conditions under which they lived.

With their inverted pattern of attraction, homosexuals became perverts in essence, not just louses dabbling in transgressive sex

The early sexologists found themselves confronted by angry purists who believed that their novel scientific endeavours would bring about the collapse of cherished institutions such as marriage, religion, and ‘the family’. Anxieties over such a ‘slippery slope effect’ have been around for a very long time and, in the eyes of these moralists, an objective approach to sexuality threatened all that was good and holy. Conservative scholars saw any neutral evaluation of sex deviants as dangerous, for it legitimised wicked things as ‘natural’ variants of behaviour and lead ‘normal’ people to embrace the unethical lifestyles of the degenerate. Merely giving ‘horrific’ tendencies such as same-sex desires their own proper scientific names made them that much more real to these moralists, and therefore much more threatening. To them, this was the reification of sexual evil. For instance, in 1897 William Noyes, a psychiatrist at the Boston Lunatic Hospital, wrote a scathing review of Ellis and Symonds’s Sexual Inversion in which he chastised the authors for ‘adding 300 more pages to a literature already too flourishing … Apart from its influence on the perverts [homosexuals] themselves no healthy person can read this literature without a lower opinion of human nature, and this result in itself should bid any writer pause.’

Looking back, it’s evident that Ellis and Symonds’s careful distinction between homosexual behaviour and homosexual orientation was an important step in the history of gay rights. It might seem like commonsense today, but these authors disentangled the two elements, which in turn informed our modern understanding of homosexuality as a psychosexual trait (or orientation), not just something that one ‘did’ with the same sex. Their contribution to the way psychiatrists’ think about homosexuality had long-lasting implications for gays and lesbians. On the positive side, homosexuals were no longer perceived (at least by experts) as fallen people who were simply so immoral and licentious that they’d even resort to doing that; instead, they were seen as having a psychological ‘nature’ that made them ‘naturally’ attracted to the same sex rather than to the opposite sex.

On the negative side, this newly recognised nature was also regarded as inherently abnormal or flawed. With their inverted pattern of attraction, homosexuals became perverts in essence, not just louses dabbling in transgressive sex. Whether or not they ever had homosexual sex, such individuals were now one of ‘those people’. Also, once homosexuality was understood to be an orientation and not just a criminal behaviour, it could be medicalised as a psychiatric condition. For almost a century afterwards, physicians saw gays and lesbians as quite obviously mentally ill. And just as one would treat the pathological symptoms of patients suffering from any mental illness, most clinicians believed that homosexuals should be treated for their unfortunate disorder. Needless to say, such ‘conversion’ treatments, in all their shameful forms, didn’t involve encouraging gays and lesbians to be themselves.

The die had also been cast for the disparaging term pervert and its enduring association with homosexuality. Not so long ago, some Neo-Freudian scholars were still interpreting anal sex among gay men as an unconscious desire in the recipient (or the ‘bottom’) to nip off the other’s penis with his tightened sphincter. ‘In this way, which is so characteristic of the pervert,’ mused the influential South African-born psychoanalyst Mervin Glasser in the paper ‘Identification and its Vicissitudes as Observed in the Perversions’ (1986), ‘he [is] trying to establish his father as an internal object with whom to identify, as an inner ally and bulwark against his powerful mother’. That might sound as scientific to us today as astrology or tarot cards, but considering that Glasser wrote this 13 years after the American Psychiatric Association formally removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, it shows how long the religious moral connotations stuck around, even in clinical circles. Glasser’s bizarre analysis of ‘perverts’ was the type of thing a gay man could expect to hear if he ever sought counselling for his inevitable woes from living in a world that couldn’t decide if he was sick or immoral, so simply saw him as both.

Today, the word pervert just sounds silly, or at least provincial, when used to refer to gays and lesbians. In a growing number of societies, homosexuals are slowly, begrudgingly, being allowed entry into the ranks of the culturally tolerated. But plenty of other sexual minorities remain firmly entrenched in the orientation blacklist. Although, happily, we’re increasingly using science to defend gays and lesbians, deep down most of us (religious or not) still appear to be suffering from the illusion of a creator who set moral limits on the acceptable sexual orientations. Our knee-jerk perception of individuals who similarly have no choice whatsoever over what arouses them sexually (be they paedophiles, exhibitionists, transvestites, or fetishists, to name but a few) is that they’ve wilfully, deliberately, and arrogantly strayed from the right course. In other words, we see them as ‘true perverts’. Whereas gays and lesbians are perceived by more and more people as ‘like normal heterosexuals’ because they didn’t choose to be the way they are, we assume that these others somehow did.

As a society we’ve become so focused on the question of whether a given sexual behaviour is ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ that we’ve lost sight of the more important question: Is it harmful? In many ways, it’s an even more challenging question, because although naturalness can be assessed by relatively straightforward queries about statistical averages — for example, ‘How frequently does it appear in other species?’ and ‘In what percentage of the human population does it occur?’ — the experience of harm is largely subjective. As such, it defies direct analyses and requires definitions that resonate with people in vastly different ways.

When it comes to sexual harm in particular, what’s harmful to one person could be not only completely harmless to another but might even, believe it or not, be helpful or positive. A gay Muslim who dies only to find himself in an afterlife thronged with 72 beautiful female virgins, as the Koran promises its faithful, will be in hell, not in heaven. One man’s angels are another’s demons.

Morally, all that matters is whether a person’s sexual deviancy is demonstrably harmful

And it’s not just overtly physical sexual acts that can be experienced differently in terms of harm but also entirely ethereal sexual desires. For the religiously devout, this whole conversation is a lost cause. Yet once one abandons the notion that one can ‘commit’ a sin by thinking a thought, it becomes quite clear that sexual desires — no matter how deviant — are intrinsically harmless to the subject of a person’s lust, at least in the physical sense. Mental states are ‘a mere breath on the air’ as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote. Sexual desires can, of course, be thought bubbles with thorns and wreak havoc on a person’s own well-being (especially when they occur in the heads of those convinced such thoughts come from the devil and yet they just can’t stop having them).

Still, it’s only when this ‘mere breath on the air’ is manifested in behaviour that harm to another person might or might not occur. Treating an individual as a pervert in essence, and hence with a purposefully immoral mind, because his or her brain conjures up atypical erotic ideas, or responds sexually to stimuli that others have deemed inappropriate objects of desire, then becomes medieval in both its stupidity and its cruelty. It’s also entirely counterproductive. For example, research in the 1980s on the ‘white bear effect’ by the social psychologist Daniel Wegner and colleagues at Trinity University in Texas has shown that forcing a person to suppress specific thoughts leads to those very thoughts invading the subject’s consciousness even more than they otherwise would. (Whatever you do, don’t — I repeat, do not — think about a white bear during the next 30 seconds.)

Our critical evaluations should fall upon harmful sexual actions with the heaviest of thuds, but not upon a pituitary excretion that happens to morph into an ethereal image in the private movie theatre of someone’s mind. Morally, all that matters is whether a person’s sexual deviancy is demonstrably harmful. If it’s not, and we reject the person anyway, then we’re not the good guys in this scenario: we’re the bad guys.

Excerpted from PERV: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us by Jesse Bering, to be published  October 8th by Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2013 by Jesse Bering. All rights reserved.

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Christian Right v Godless Liberalism: Why Do Christians Attack Godless Liberals?

Christian Right v Godless Liberalism: Why Do Christians Attack Godless Liberals?

By Austin Cline,

Growth of “Godless” as an Epithet for Liberals:

The nature of godless liberalism can be difficult to understand because of the misuse of the label by the Christian Right. According to them, all liberals are godless because they don’t adhere to conservative evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity. Only conservative political policies are seen as compatible with Christianity; therefore, all other policies are anti-Christian, anti-religious, and anti-God. Advocates are all thus godless liberals, but that misrepresents the nature of atheism.

Godless Liberals are Communists:

Christian Right pundits often claim that atheism is essentially socialist or communist in nature – indeed, “godless” and “communist” are often used side-by-side as epithets. Communism is not, however, inherently atheistic. It’s possible to hold communist economic views while being a theist, and it isn’t uncommon to be an atheist who staunchly defends capitalism. Those who link the two as a smear simply haven’t gotten the message that the “war on godless communism” ended long ago. Read More…

Godless Liberals are Elitist & Arrogant:

Just as common as the use of “godless” and “communist” as political smears is the label “elitist.” Conservatives have long attacked liberals as “elitist” to convince average Americans that liberals have nothing in common with them. The truth is that the label “elitist” would apply equally to some conservatives as well as some liberals. There is nothing about being godless which makes a person is more elitist or arrogant; if anything, claiming to know what God wants is a sign of arrogance.

Godless Liberals are Secularists, Opposed to Religious Liberty:

The Christian Right opposes secularism and regards it as one of modernity’s greatest evils, so it’s only natural that they use it as a smear against liberals, godless or otherwise. Liberals are generally secularists, and godless liberals particularly so, because secularism is so important to modern society. Secularism simply means having civil institutions which are independent of ecclesiastical control. The opposite of secularism and secular government is some form of theocracy.

Godless Liberals are Anti-American:

A popular attack on godless atheists is that they are anti-American. This derives in part from the assumption that true American patriotism is impossible without also being a True Christian – America is a Christian Nation, after all – and in part from the traditional assumption that communists are also anti-American. If godless atheists are anti-America, then godless liberals must be as well. The falsehood of this is obvious given just how false all the premises necessarily are.

Godless Liberals are Anti-Christian:

Many atheists spend a great deal of time with the doctrines and beliefs which are specific to Christianity or, at the very least, to traditional forms of Western monotheism. Some atheists are indeed vehemently anti-Christian, but only insofar as they oppose religion generally – Christianity is simply the most relevant religion in their social context. This isn’t much of a complaint against atheists, though, unless it can be shown that Christianity should be exempted from such attacks.

Godless Liberals are Anti-Religion:

For people who see their god or their religion as the source of all order and morality, godless liberalism may be treated as impossible or even as a threat. The fact that godless liberals do not derive their political positions from religious doctrine does not make them anti-religious, though. They may personally be anti-religion, but politically they may not be – indeed, they may have no problem making common cause with religious liberals.

Godless Liberalism is an anti-Christian Religion:

Alongside accusing godless liberals of being anti-religion, conservatives accuse it of also being a religion that opposes Christianity. Being an atheist isn’t incompatible with belonging to a religion, but atheism itself doesn’t qualify as a religion. Liberalism is a political philosophy which lacks all the basic characteristics of a religion and is no more religious than conservatism – and possibly less so. Godless liberalism is not a religion and there is no church of godless liberalism.

Godless Liberals Undermine Moral Values with Godless Evolution:

A popular target for conservatives is evolutionary science, which they say undermines traditional religious faith and morality. They say evolution is incompatible with Christian beliefs and are convinced that teaching evolution will destroy Christianity. Liberals who support teaching science in public schools are accused of being godless and anti-Christian. The science of evolution is godless, but it’s not a religion, not incompatible with morality, and not anti-Christian. Read More…

Godless Liberalism, Traditional Bigotry, and Christian Privilege:

Atheists don’t exist in large numbers in America and aren’t a very powerful interest group in American politics. Atheists can be found in both liberal and conservative political movements; liberals overall are primarily theistic and Christian, not atheists. Neither the godless nor godless liberals have by themselves any significant impact on politics, culture, or society. Because of all this and more, we have to ask why conservatives have become so obsessed with attacking “godless liberals.”Conservative attacks on godless liberals make no sense if the target is really supposed to be godless liberals themselves; on the other hand, if godless liberals are merely a substitute for other targets, the attacks are more understandable. One likely point of the attacks is an indirect defense of traditional Christian privileges: if anything is indicative of the loss of Christian privileges in America, it’s the unapologetic presence of outspoken atheists – and especially the presence of atheists filing lawsuits to eliminate government favoritism towards and promotion of Christianity. Attacks on the godless are thus a means for expressing outrage that some feel because Christians and Christianity are not treated as special anymore.Another likely reason for the attacks on godless liberals is the fact that conservatives are finding it increasingly difficult to attack the minorities they have traditionally tried to attack in defense of other traditional privileges: male privilege, white privilege, and heterosexual privilege. Conservatives frequently attack gays, but it’s getting harder to be openly bigoted towards them without social consequences. Attacks on the equality of women and racial minorities are even more difficult and must be heavily veiled with code-words involving immigration, radical feminism, and so forth. If someone wants to vent their bigotry, they do so against liberalism generally because it’s largely responsible for the decline of traditional privileges.

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Atheism to Defeat Religion By 2038

Nigel Barber

Biopsychologist; Blogger, Psychology Today’s ‘The Human Beast’

Atheism to Defeat Religion By 2038

Countries with the best standard of living are turning atheist. That shift offers a glimpse into the world’s future.

Religious people are annoyed by claims that belief in God will go the way of horse transportation, and for much the same reason, specifically an improved standard of living.

The view that religious belief will give way to atheism is known as the secularization thesis.  The specific version that I favor (1) is known as the existential security hypothesis.  The basic idea is that as people become more affluent, they are less worried about lacking for basic necessities, or dying early from violence or disease.  In other words they are secure in their own existence.  They do not feel the need to appeal to supernatural entities to calm their fears and insecurities.

The notion that improving living conditions are associated with a decline in religion is supported by a mountain of evidence (1,2,3).

That does not prevent some serious scholars, like political scientist Eric Kaufmann (4), from making the opposite case that religious fundamentalists will outbreed the rest of us.  Yet, noisy as they can be, such groups are tiny minorities of the global population and they will become even more marginalized as global prosperity increases and standards of living improve.

Moreover, as religious fundamentalists become economically integrated, young women go to work and produce smaller families, as is currently happening for Utah’s Mormons.

The most obvious approach to estimating when the world will switch over to being majority atheist is based on economic growth.  This is logical because economic development is the key factor responsible for secularization.  In deriving this estimate, I used the nine most godless countries as my touchstone (excluding Estonia as a formerly communist country).

The countries were Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom.  These nine countries averaged out at the atheist transition in 2004 (5) with exactly half of the populations disbelieving in God.   Their gross domestic product (GDP) averaged $29,822 compared to $10,855 for the average country in the world.  How long will it take before the world economy has expanded sufficiently that the GDP of the average country has caught up to the average for the godless countries in 2004?
Using the average global growth rate of GDP for the past 30 years of 3.33 percent (based on International Monetary Fund data from their website), the atheist transition would occur in 2035.

Belief in God is not the only relevant measure of religion, of course.  A person might believe in God in a fairly superficial way without religion affecting his or her daily life.  One way of assessing the depth of religious commitment is to ask survey participants whether they think that religion is important in their daily lives as the Gallup Organization has done in worldwide nationally representative surveys.

If fewer than 50 percent of the population agreed that religion was important to them, then the country has effectively crossed over to a secular majority.  The godless countries by religiosity were Spain, South Korea, Canada, Switzerland, Uruguay, Germany and France.  At a growth rate of 3.33 percent per year it would be 2041 before the average country in the world would be at an equivalent level of affluence as these godless nations.

If national wealth drives secularization, the global population will cross an atheist threshold where the majority see religion as unimportant by 2041.

Averaging across the two measures of atheism, the entire world population would cross the atheist threshold by about 2038 (average of 2035 for disbelief and 2041 for religiosity).  Although 2038 may seem improbably fast, this requires only a shift of approximately 1 percent per year whether in religiosity or belief in God.  Using the Human Development Index as a clock suggests an even earlier arrival for the atheist transition (1).

Is the loss of religious belief something fear?  Contrary to the claims of religious leaders, Godless countries are highly moral nations with an unusual level of social trust, economic equality, low crime and a high level of civic engagement (5).  We could do with some of that.

Sources 1. Barber, N. (2012). Why atheism will replace religion: The triumph of earthly pleasures over pie in the sky. E-book, available at: http://www.amazon.com/Atheism-Will-Replace-Religion-ebook/dp/B00886ZSJ6/  2. Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3. Barber, N. (2011).  A Cross-National test of the uncertainty hypothesis of religious belief Cross-Cultural Research, 45, 318-333. 4. Kaufmann, E. (2010). Shall the religious inherit the earth? London: Profile books. 5. Zuckerman, P. (2008). Society without God: What the least religious nations can tell us about contentment. New York: New York University Press.

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Religion, Atheism And Secularism

Religion, Atheism And Secularism
By Ram Puniyani

 
Last three decades have seen an unprecedented presence of religion in social and political space. Somewhere the acts of terror, somewhere communal violence and somewhere the political influence of religious right on society and political processes, all these phenomenon have overshadowed the deeper inequities in the society, the aspirations of people for dignity and rights amongst others. Now comes a book which predicts that religions will become a minority vis a vis the practice of secularism in the decade of 2040s. The book is “Why Atheism will replace religion: The triumph of earthly pleasures over pie in the sky” written by Nigel Barber. This book relates the rise/fall of the religion with economic power and makes an observation that atheists are much more in developed countries.

 
The book is based on the study of 137 nations conducted by the author and concludes that in the countries; more developed the welfare system; higher is the number of atheists. The book’s crunch line is, in countries where distribution of income is even, lesser is the number of religious people. The author is a prominent psychologist. He makes a prediction that people will feel lesser need of supernatural beliefs when the tangible world is providing them for their real needs. Also in a survey conducted in America 20% people identified themselves as Atheists.

There is some terminological confusion here to begin with, while the study is a very reasoned one, and links the lack of security with the belief in god and practice of religiosity. Surely many a religions themselves have atheism as a component of their structure. Some streams of Hinduism like Charvak deny the existence of God. Jainism and Buddhism also do not talk of a supernatural power, but it’s another matter that followers of these religions converted the prophets of these religions themselves as Gods and are worshipping them. In the broad umbrella of Hinduism there are many traditions, Brahminism, Nath, Taantra, Bhakti, Siddh etc. In Hinduism itself the concept of God is also very diverse, from the polytheism with multiple Gods and Goddesses, tri-theism (Brahma Vishnu Mahesh) to the single God; Ishwar and then to the concept of formless power all these concepts are coexisting together merrily today.

In India thee atheist tradition starting from Charvak, in present times it found a strong articulation amongst communists the epitome of which has been Bhagat Singh with his famous tract, ‘Why I am an Athiest’. Also radical social reformers like Periyar Ramsamy Naicker gave the atheist movement a powerful lift. The rationalists association is nurturing the same to a great extent.

Other religions, where there is a single God, the concept of God keeps varying between the God with form and body to the formless power. Many decades ago a plethora of books debated about the existence of God. But last three decades in particular have seen a very different phenomenon i.e. gross abuse of religions’ identity by the political forces of status quo. Earlier to this, one saw in the beginning of 20th century, in the decade of 1920s, Christian Fundamentalism was a response of the conservative sections of society to the process of social change brought about by the process of industrialization and education due to which Africa-Americans and women started coming to social space. Islamic fundamentalism makes a political appearance with the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Here it was the politics related to oil and the high handed politics of Western powers which foiled the popular revolution and brought in a cleric as the head of the state. It was during this period that conservative versions of Islam were promoted by some of the rulers who were scared of popular urges for democracy. Salafi version of Islam is one such which was used in Saudi Arabia to keep a tight leash over the popular aspirations so that the Saudi oil can keep flowing in to the tankers of oil companies controlled by US-UK giants.

It is the same Salafi version of Islam which was brought in to the service of US hegemonic interest to control the oil in the region. This version was taught in the Madrassas in Pakistan. These Madrassas were set up with US instigation, money and syllabus, through which the Mujahedeen, Taliban Al Qaeda emerged and played into the hands of US designs of throwing away Soviet army from Afghanistan. In India, the insecurity of the section of middle classes in the face of rising presence of dalits and women in social space in the decade of 1980s led to the political abuse of religion’s identity by BJP when it took up the issue of Ram temple.

While the author of the book is talking about the release of the hold of religiosity and God with rising affluence, today sitting in South Asia the scenario seems to be the other way around. In Pakistan the hold of Mullahs on the social affairs is a big obstacle to the firm rooting of democracy there. In Sri Lanka again thousands of Tamils were butchered while attacking LTTE, lately one is seeing an attack on Christians and Muslims there. Not to be left behind, in Myanmar, the retrograde political forces are attacking poor Rohingya Muslims in the name of Buddhism.

One must add that there is no contradiction between secularism and religion. The author of this book is not clear on this. With secularization process, the role of clergy was relegated to the private sphere of society but religion as such was there. God was there. It’s now that with prosperity going above the critical levels that more people are feeling less need to call upon God to help them live a secure life. In South Asian countries a complex process had been witnessed all through. While people with great amount of religiosity and belief in God like Mahatma Gandhi and Mualan Abul Kalam Azad stood for secular state, the non practicing Muslim like Jinnah led the movement for a state in the name of Islam and an atheist Savarkar, was the ideologue of Hindu nation. Many a leaders of Hindu national politics may not be so religious but in the political arena, they create mass hysteria in the name of religion and God.

One wishes to agree with the authors’ prediction. Hope it is not restricted just to Western countries. What is more important is to realize is that mass spectacles of religiosity are an expression of deeper social insecurities, which are being cashed in by the politicians of ‘status quo’, who are deliberately using this religious identity to ensure that social distribution of resources to weaker sections is stalled. Today in India one can see a clear cut battle between those who stand for social welfare, and struggle to bring in measures go in that direction on one side. On the other are those political forces that resort to polarize the communities along religious lines, around identity issues. The latter have a social base amongst the socially insecure middle classes and the backing of section of big corporate houses. Seeing the pains of this battle between two paths, one turns pessimistic at times whether if at all, South Asia can get over the imposition of God-Religion in political arena and focus on improving prosperity with equitable distribution in society. In many a propaganda-claims being made for ‘development’ the factor of equitable growth is missing and that’s where the real definition of development lies. The bluff of development by communal forces has to be countered and the emphasis on the growth with concern for equity, affirmative action for the victim religious minorities and dalits-adivasis is the core around which the battle against the blind religiosity and assertions of politics in the name of religion has to be taken forward.

Western countries though far from the ideal in prosperity and growth, at least do not have the baggage of politics of religion’s identity in such a strong way as is prevalent in ‘post-colonial’ states; that is dogging South, West Asia in particular. This book gives the hope as far as prosperity and equity is concerned one hopes that this applies to the troubled countries where abuse of religion’s identity is playing havoc with the concept of human rights and survival of large sections of society.

Ram Puniyani was a professor in biomedical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and took voluntary retirement in December 2004 to work full time for communal harmony in India. He is involved with human rights activities from last two decades.He is associated with various secular and democratic initiatives like All India Secular Forum, Center for Study of Society and Secularism and ANHAD.

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Study Indicates Atheists Are Better People

Study Indicates Atheists Are Better People

“Numerous studies reveal that atheists and secular people most certainly maintain strong values, beliefs, and opinions. But more significantly, when we actually compare the values and beliefs of atheists and secular people to those of religious people, the former are markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian.”

See here:-

Atheism, Secularity, and Well-Being: How the Findings of Social Science Counter Negative Stereotypes and Assumptions

http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/zuckerman/Zuckerman_on_Atheism.pdf

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Atheism, Defined

Dave’s Mailbag: Atheism, defined

Yesterday, the Atheist Alliance tweeted:

What do you consider to be the exact definition of atheism?

There are many incorrect definitions of atheism floating around. It’s important for religious extremists, in their deliberate attempts to misinform (see my previous post about lying for Jesus), that atheism be depicted as nonsensical, demonic, or irrational. For example, this display:

It says: “Atheism: This is the belief that there is no god. This is a very common belief of those who do not wish to be responsible for their actions, as if there is no god there is no judgment. This belief was started by Charles Darwin, but has very recently (within the last 30 years) become a popular religion.”

I do a talk called “Atheism 101″ that covers the definition of atheism, among other things. In it, I discuss the difference between agnostic/gnostic and atheistic/theistic. The question should not be worded, “Are you an atheist or an agnostic?” but rather “Are you an atheist or a theist?” and independently, “Are you 100% certain that God does or does not exist (gnostic) or do you acknowledge a possibility that you are wrong (agnostic)?”

I tweeted back to the Atheist Alliance:

@atheistalliance Atheism can be defined precisely as “the lack of faith in the existence of a god or gods.”

I think this is the most precise and accurate definition I have come across. In my talk, I use this. For a thorough breakdown of the definition of atheism, with sources, I recommend this webpage.

This has been on my mind because I received the following message today:

Your professed “belief” in the religion of athiesm has everything to do with your selfish desire to continue in your favorite sins. You have a strong motive to hope that there isn’t a Holy God who will punish you for your sins. Those making a profession of faith in the religion of atheism hope that if they scream loud, long, and shrill enough, they will be able to convince themselves that God doesn’t exist. I don’t believe that your even an atheist Dave.

First off:

1. Atheism is not a religion. The definition of a religion is arguable, but the one I use and agree with comes from anthropologists Drs. Craig Palmer and Lyle Steadman in their excellent book, “Supernatural and Natural Selection: The Evolution of Religion.” They define religion as “a communicated acceptance by individuals of another individual’s ‘supernatural’ claim, a claim whose accuracy is not verifiable by the senses.” They continue: “The distinctive property of such acceptance is that it communicates a willingness to accept the influence of the speaker nonskeptically. While supernatural claims are not demonstrably true, they are asserted to be true” (pg ix). Since atheism makes no supernatural claims—in fact many atheists are metaphysical naturalists—it definitively is not a religion.
   –
2. My belief that atheism and science are the most likely contenders for an accurate description of the universe’s workings have nothing at all to do with sin. I don’t believe sin exists. I believe that some acts and behaviors are anti-social and, on ethical grounds, should not be committed. I believe that other acts and behaviors are pro-social and, on ethical grounds, should be encouraged. But I find the whole concept of sin—transgressions against divine law—to be ridiculous. I don’t believe there is any such thing as divine law, because I am an atheist.
   –
3. This entire statement is just a bare assertion. In no way does the sender attempt to provide reasons for the claims he is making, or explain on what basis exactly he is claiming to know these things about me and other atheists.

I think the sender is unable to see atheism for what it really is because doing so would make him insecure in his faith. It’s necessary for him to misunderstand atheism because atheism, understood, is the more rational position. So he builds a straw-man and uses it as a human shield. It’s really quite pathetic, pitiable even.

What’s really wrong with his message, though, is where he says “[atheists make] a profession of faith.” Atheists lack faith by definition. Faith comes from the Latin “fidere,” which means “to trust.” In the theological sense, this means trusting that God exists, or that God will provide, etc, even though the logical arguments and evidence are insufficient for belief in themselves.

I am proud to say that I do not have faith. I am a skeptic: I have an attitude of doubt, an inclination toward incredulity. I think faith is dangerous, irrational, archaic, and puerile. If you are a logical person, a good critical thinker, and you come across an argument that lacks evidentiary backing, contains fallacies, or is nonsensical, you do not [continue to] believe that argument. Faith is the admission that you are not being logical, that you are not a good critical thinker, continuing to believe something when the reasons you have to believe it aren’t good enough on their own. Saying you have faith is saying, “Here are the reasons I believe this. Here is the evidence supporting why I believe this. Oh, the reasons have logical problems? Oh, the evidence is not very strong? Well, I choose to believe it regardless.” Or even worse, sometimes people say, “I don’t need evidence. I don’t need logical arguments. I have faith.” Faith is the very model of a circular argument. As Mark Twain is credited with saying, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

I have never met a Christian who claims not to have faith. If you call yourself a Christian and do not have faith, I would really like to hear from you. Hebrews 11:6 says that “without faith, it is impossible to please God. Hebrews 11:1 says: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” This is directly at odds with skepticism. It is my position that if you are a skeptic, and you also claim faith in a god or gods, you are doing one or the other incorrectly.

I think my favorite part of this, though, is where he says, “I don’t believe your [sic] even an atheist, Dave.”

This is my license plate:

(Atheos is Greek for atheist). If I’m not an atheist, I don’t know who is.

Thanks for reading. Until next time,

Dave

Dave Muscato is the Kansas/Missouri-Area Volunteer Network Coordinator for the Secular Student Alliance. He is also a board member of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A non-traditional junior at Mizzou studying economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday and twice monthly for the Humanist Community at Harvard. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com

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Don’t Replace Religion; End It

Don’t Replace Religion; End It

Penn Jillette is the author of “Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!” and “God, No!”

Religion cannot and should not be replaced by atheism. Religion needs to go away and not be replaced by anything. Atheism is not a religion. It’s the absence of religion, and that’s a wonderful thing.

Religion is not morality. Theists ask me, “If there’s no god, what would stop me from raping and killing everyone I want to.” My answer is always: “I, myself, have raped and killed everyone I want to … and the number for both is zero.” Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality. Morality is not bribery or threats. Religion is bribery and threats. Humans have morality. We don’t need religion.

Atheism is the absence of religion. We don’t really need atheism. We just need to get rid of religion.

Religion is faith. Faith is belief without evidence. Belief without evidence cannot be shared. Faith is a feeling. Love is also a feeling, but love makes no universal claims. Love is pure. The lover reports on his or her feelings and needs nothing more. Faith claims knowledge of a world we share but without evidence we can share. Feeling love is beautiful. Feeling the earth is 6,000 years old is stupid.

Religion is often just tribalism: pride in a group one was born into, a group that is often believed to have “God” on its side. We don’t need to replace tribalism with anything other than love for all humanity. Let’s do that, okay?

Religion also includes fellowship, joy, compassion, service and great music, and those can be replaced by … fellowship, joy, compassion, service and great music.

Atheism is the absence of religion. We don’t really need atheism. We just need to get rid of religion.

Related articles

• Why Not Naturalism Instead of Atheism? (fluxandfire.wordpress.com)
• Dave’s Mailbag: Atheism, defined (musasha.wordpress.com)
• Penn Jillette: Let’s end religion (kottke.org)
• Heartening debate about atheism in the New York Times (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)
• Room for Debate: Is Atheism a Religion? (nytimes.com)
• Gods Swallow Our Humanity (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
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All Children are Born Atheists

All Children are Born Atheists

Anyone who understands the definition of atheism must acknowledge that all children are born atheists, including those born to Christian parents. Atheism is nothing more than the lack of acceptance of the theistic belief claim (i.e., some god or gods exist). A theist is one who believes that god(s) exist; an atheist is one who does not share this belief. The newborn child cannot even entertain such possibilities and thus lacks theistic belief. Atheism is the default position, and this is where we all begin.

In order for Christians to argue against the reality that all children are born atheists, they must distort the meaning of atheism. They must convince themselves and their audience that atheism is a religion, a philosophy, or a worldview. They claim that atheism is an explicit repudiation of religion and that it involves faith that no gods exist. Such distortions in the meaning of atheism allow them to claim that children cannot be born atheist because atheism requires the same sort of deliberate choice required by religious belief.Atheism is not a belief system but lack of acceptance of one particular belief. It requires no faith; it is the absence of faith. It is the null hypothesis, the default condition, the natural starting point for each of us.

But why must Christians distort the meaning of atheism at all? Why should they even care if their children are born atheists, especially when it is likely that they will begin brainwashing them at an early age? There are many reasons, ranging from a need to see the child as connected to them through the manner they consider most important (i.e., religion) to the harsh implications of infant mortality to their belief system.

To expand on this latter point, consider the Christian parent whose child dies before the child is capable of forming the cognitions necessary to comprehend theistic belief. According to this parent’s own Christian doctrine, this child is likely destined for hell. This is where non-believers go, and this child is clearly a non-believer. The Catholics toyed with limbo as a way out, but the evangelical Protestants now engaging in America’s “culture wars” never really warmed to this idea. Even theism will be insufficient for such a parent, as a personal relationship with Jesus is thought to be the only vehicle for salvation.

It should be remembered that Christians have created this doctrine for themselves and should be solely responsible for unraveling the many conundrums it presents. Distorting atheism is not an acceptable way out of the mess they have made.

http://www.atheistrev.com/2008/03/all-children-are-born-atheists.html

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The End Game: Taking the Bet of Pascal

The End Game: Taking the Bet of Pascal

Dr. Charles G. Cogan

In the Sunday Review section of the New York Times on Jan. 6, Susan Jacoby, a self-described atheist, secular humanist and freethinker, wrote an op-ed entitled, “The Blessings of Atheism: It is Here & It is Now.” In it she argues that atheists should be more assertive about spreading their point of view, and she makes the claim that “the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.”

The “blessing” of atheism, Jacoby seems to say, is that death puts an end to suffering: “atheism is rooted in empathy as well as intellect. Those we love suffer no more.” The author of a forthcoming book on Robert Ingersoll, the well-known American freethinker, she quotes from Ingersoll to reinforce her point: “The larger and the nobler faith … tells us that death, at its worst, is only perfect rest … the dead do not suffer.”

Those who lack the atheists’ certitude that there is no afterlife, and who have never seen, and never will see, proof of the existence of God, are the thousands of agnostics — those who do not “presume to know.” Some are tempted toward the notion that underlies the famous bet of Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French philosopher.

The reasoning of Pascal is the following: in the absence of any proof of the existence of God, reason does not indicate to us whether to believe in Him or not. Since the choice is free, it is reasonable to lean, by calculation, against agnosticism: in effect, to decide to believe in God and live in consequence of that decision. If one leads a life in conformity with a belief in God, this guarantees inestimable benefits if it is revealed, after death, that God exists — and costs nothing if he does not exist. Whereas agnosticism, in the latter case, does not bring any benefits, and on the other hand it is met with infernal punishment if God indeed does exist. Thus, it is rational to put faith in a belief in God and to lead a life that conforms to it.

Consequently, it is rational to act as though God exists and to decide to believe that he exists. But is this too deceptive, too “utilitarian”? Not really, given the fact that one is operating from a state of total ignorance as to what comes after life. In this regard, it is interesting to recall that Francois Mitterrand, a noted secularist, asked to be given the sacrament of extreme unction shortly before his death.

Richard Dawkins, one of the leading writers in the “new atheism” current, and the author of “The God Delusion,” brings an implacable reasoning to this dilemma that haunts the many — especially those approaching the end game:

“As long as there is no certitude either for or against the existence of God, a number of intelligent men will continue to believe in him, just as other intelligent men will believe in other things for which they do not have a convincing argument … What evidence could verify or falsify the hypothesis of God? … The only thing that can resolve the question is an experience beyond the grave … If the options after death are either a beatific vision (God) or nothingness (no God), it is therefore poignant to consider that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas atheists will never discover that they are right.”

Related articles

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• Why Atheists Are More Intelligent Than the Religious (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• ‘Black Atheists’ is Considered Segregation: O’RLY?! (blackatheists.wordpress.com)
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• Gods Swallow Our Humanity (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)

Gods Swallow Our Humanity

Gods swallow our humanity

Posted by Eric MacDonald

In the New York Times this morning there is a letter to the editor from Beverly Brewster, a Presbyterian minister, in response to Susan Jacoby’s article on atheism and empathy. Here are a few of her words:

The world’s enduring religions offer much more wisdom and meaning than a child’s idea of God as a superhero. As a Presbyterian minister, I often say to self-proclaimed atheists, “Tell me more about the God you don’t believe in; I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in that God either.”

Ms. Jacoby states that atheists “need to demonstrate that atheism is rooted in empathy as well as intellect,” but atheism is rooted in neither. A lack of belief in one concept of God is nothing more than that. Ms. Jacoby also presumes that faith in God necessarily includes belief in an afterlife, complete with angels in heaven. Here again, atheism ignores the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions.

Brewster is responding in particular to Jacoby’s realisation, as a child, that there is evil in the world, and finding it difficult to believe in a god which would allow such evil things to happen. Brewster’s response is that her god is not like that; it is not a superhero who comes to rescue us in need. She has a different concept of god, and so she comes out with that old chestnut:

Tell me more about the God you don’t believe in; I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in that God either.

This is so tired and worn out that I wonder at the person who could have repeated it and thought that she was saying something profound. Once this has been said, however, it needs to be noticed how very little has been said.

Atheism, says Ms. Brewster, “ignores the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions.” This is simply not true. What atheism does not give the religious believer room to do is to skate away over the surface of things with statements like this which subvert themselves. If the gods people believe in are simply the consequence of a bit of conceptual jiggery-pokery, as Ms. Brewster’s god appears to be, then there is simply no reason to believe in them at all. For how, after all, are gods to be identified? The great diversity of the world’s religions points out the problem. The only way to identify gods is to describe them. Whereas the god of Genesis is depicted anthropomorphically, as someone walking in the Garden in the cool of the day, from whom Adam and Eve have hidden in shame at their disobedience, so that God has to call out to them, “Where art thou?” (Genesis 3.8-9), very few believers think of their gods in this simplistic way. But if gods are not like that, then identifying them will be a problem. We cannot identify them by their works, for the only works of a god that might be considered godlike would be something supernatural or miraculous. Anything else we can account for in immanent ways, as the products of human action or activity, or the normal results of the workings of the natural world.

There is an old story that illustrates this point. There is a big storm, and as the flood waters rise, the people in the house first of all abandon the first floor and move to the second; then they move into the attic, and then, finally, they get out onto the roof which is even now being lapped by the rising floodwaters. But the floodwaters continue to rise, threatening their shrinking island. In desperation the the stranded family cries out to God for mercy. Soon, a rescue worker in a boat comes by, but the desperate people, full of faith in the mercy and goodness of their god, do not see the need of a boat, which continues on its mission of mercy. The flood waters inch up the incline of the roof, and, realising that soon there will be nowhere for them stand, they pray more earnestly, beating their breasts and promising, if they are spared, a change of life. Soon after, a rescue helicopter chances by and lets down a rope ladder, but for those who believe in God’s goodness, helicopters are merely human contrivances, and unnecessary. Not unreasonably thinking them a bit mad, the rescue crew goes on its way in search of other people endangered by the storm. The people on the roof cry out with even greater passion, begging their god to come and save them, lest they drown. At this, an exasperated voice cries out from heaven: “I sent you a man in a boat, and then a rescue team in a helicopter. What more did you expect?”

 

This story is told in all seriousness by religious believers, and some people, who think that prayer and anointing with oil is all that is necessary for the recovery of their sick children, actually behave this way, and rebuff offers to help with all the marvels of modern scientific medicine can provide. But this is not, Ms. Brewster would say, the god she believes in. The god she believes in, she is convinced, will not be the one upon whom atheists lavish their disbelief. Atheists, she thinks, simply ignore “the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions.” But this, of course, is precisely the wrong answer, for the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions is an argument against belief, not an argument that supports belief in gods or other supernatural or transcendent entities. Philip Kitcher calls it the symmetry argument (see page 5). As he points out, there is a perfect symmetry between believers in one religious tradition and those in another. They are born into it, taught it, learn its scriptures and its practices, and yet when confronted with each other, they do not agree. The tension between beliefs, and their lack of grounding in any objective criteria, suggests that religious beliefs are, one and all, simply constructs of the human imagination working on peripheral aspects of evolved human psychology.

Here are Kitcher’s words:

Most Christians have adopted their doctrines much as the polytheists and the ancestor-worshippers have acquired theirs, through early teaching and socialization. Had the Christians been born among the aboriginal Australians, they would believe, in just the same ways, on just the same bases, and with just the same convictions, doctrines about the Dreamtime instead of about the Resurrection. The symmetry is complete. None of the processes of socialization, none of the chains of transmission of sacred lore across the generations, has any special justificatory force. Because of the widespread inconsistency in religious doctrine, it is clear that not all of these traditions can yield true beliefs about the supernatural. Given that they are all on a par, we should trust none of them.

So, even if the god that atheists disbelieve is not the one that Ms. Brewster believes in, there is no reason we should take her word for it either. If it is simply a matter of reconceptualising God so as to escape one particular set of criticisms — say, Susan Jacoby’s childhood experience of having a friend contract polio and die young, with no apparent care or concern from a loving God — saying, rather blandly that she doesn’t believe in such a god either, the most appropriate response is that such reconceptualisations are cheap. Anyone can dream up a concept that escapes particular criticisms. The question is whether the concept so derived actually picks out some reality, whether something that exists, or, conscious of Tillich wagging an admonitory finger, some “thing” that is beyond existence, the Ground of Being, or ultimate reality as such. Reconceive God any way you like, it still will not solve the problem of justification. And, besides, if God is not some kind of superhero, then what, pray, is God like? And what reason can you give why we should believe in such a god?

In a remarkable chapter in her book Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, entitled “Divine Agency, Remodeled,” Marilyn McCord Adams, one time Regius Professor of Theology at the University of Oxford, rehearses in detail various suggestions as to how to account for God’s agency in the world, which both protects God’s function as creator, while at the same time preserving God’s nature as loving and caring. Reading this chapter in the context of studying the Holocaust, I wondered what significance such a conceptual exercise could possibly have, and how reasonable or reassuring the victims of so much callous violence would have found exercises of this sort. I came away from the chapter feeling bruised and violated. Whether the gods so conceived satisfy the theological problems that lie at the heart of the existence of so much incomprehensible suffering in the world, they neither relieve the suffering nor do they provide any basis for the conviction that the beings variously described stand a chance of being real in any of the various senses in which reality may be attributed to things. Nor is it clear what value belief in such reconceptualised beings could possibly have.

The problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is that our conceptions of God tend to swallow up the human. As in the story of the flood-stranded family on the roof of their house, human goodness is turned into God’s love and mercy. Once acknowledge that God does not act, in his own person, as it were, but acts in and through things that naturally occur, or that are done by other people, it comes to seem as though God is exhaustively described by the totality of things that occur, much in the same way that Spinoza spoke of Deus sive Natura (viz. God or Nature).

In general, of course, this is not how religious believers conceive of God, and this is the problem that I have spent the last fifteen hundred words approaching. For the religions, God tends to be the supreme person (in very much the same way as you and I, dear reader, are persons). All that is quintessentially human is vested in God. Justice, loving kindness, mercy, compassion, long-suffering, slow to anger, quick to forgive, generosity, nobility, gentleness, an ever present help in trouble, trustworthy – well, we could go on laying down superlatives with a trowel, a veritable infinity of them. The problem with this is that, once we have shifted all these good things onto God, and imagine them to be, there, raised to the highest power, we must inevitably think of ourselves as correspondingly inadequate in all the same respects, in need of God’s mercy for our failures, and quick to judge others who fail to measure up to the divine goodness which judges us. And, of course, since there is a diversity of religious traditions, the divine goodness that judges us, if we are Christian, say, is bound to be different from the divine goodness which judges others, since religions tend to adopt the ethical project as it manifested itself at the time and place where the religious traditions began, which has every chance of expressing a very different ideal of humanity along at least some of its dimensions.

The problem is that gods are forever (at least in believer’s minds), and so the values that are vested in them come to be seen as moral absolutes, and while morality has tended to function, traditionally, in this way, based as it has been in systems of religious belief, morality is seldom best understood in so marmoreal and intransigent a form. The pope tends to dismiss those who question the Roman Catholic Church’s unyielding moral laws as relativists without noting that the field is not divided, as he seems to think, into absolutes and relatives, but into principles and their application to complex and nuanced human circumstances in which there is no role for absolutes to play. Of course, the pope thinks that all values derive, in the end, from the absoluteness and infinite wisdom of his god, without noticing that it was he and his forebears who vested those values in their god in the first place. For, despite everything that he can say about moral value, he cannot provide evidence for the proposition that these values are either commanded by his god, or inscribed by his god into the very fabric of human nature. The values are purely human. They have a history.

The biggest problem the pope faces is providing an explanation as to why we should stop that history at some point in the past, and accept, as eternal, human values as understood at that point, instead of recognising that the ethical project has much of its history yet to run. Even people like Beverly Brewster recognise that many conceptions of god are now no longer useful — may even be morally repugnant, as the gods of Jesus or Muhammad often are – and need to be discarded. There is not one conception of god that has stood the test of time. Isn’t it about time that we recognised that gods are human creations, and that, in the end, we are responsible for what we do with them? It is simply untrue to say that

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. [James 1.17]

This belief in unchanging perfection has haunted humanity almost from the beginning. It is a will-o-the-wisp. It does not exist, but belief in its existence has set humanity, time after time, chasing after shadows and rainbows. Quite contrary to Beverly Brewster’s shopworn charge, that “atheism  ignores the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions,” not only do we recognise the diversity, but we conclude from it that all the world’s religions are human creations, and none should be allowed to have final or supreme authority over us. They are images of perfection frozen in time, and all the worse for being so. The poison of religion consists precisely in this, that religions have stopped looking, when there is much that we still do not know, about our world, ourselves, and about how best to live. The gods swallow our humanity. We should ask for it back.

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It’s Irrational To Be Religious

Jared Diamond: It’s irrational to be religious

Supernatural beliefs might not make sense, but they endure because they’re so emotionally satisfying

BY JARED DIAMOND

(Credit: Reuters/Enny Nuraheni)

Excerpted from “The World Until Yesterday”

Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefs specific to that religion. That is, a religion’s adherents firmly hold beliefs that conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural world, and that appear implausible to people other than the adherents of that particular religion. For example, Hindus believe there is a monkey god who travels thousands of kilometers at a single somersault. Catholics believe a woman who had not yet been fertilized by a man became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy, whose body eventually after his death was carried up to a place called heaven, often represented as being located in the sky. The Jewish faith believes that a supernatural being gave a chunk of desert in the Middle East to the being’s favorite people, as their home forever.

No other feature of religion creates a bigger divide between religious believers and modern secular people, to whom it staggers the imagination that anyone could entertain such beliefs. No other feature creates a bigger divide between believers in two different religions, each of whom firmly believes its own beliefs but considers it absurd that the other religion’s believers believe those other beliefs. Why, nevertheless, are supernatural beliefs such universal features of religions?

One suggested answer is that supernatural religious beliefs are just ignorant superstitions similar to supernatural non-religious beliefs, illustrating only that the human brain is capable of deceiving itself into believing anything. We can all think of supernatural non-religious beliefs whose implausibility should be obvious. Many Europeans believe that the sight of a black cat heralds misfortune, but black cats are actually rather common. By repeatedly tallying whether or not a one-hour period following or not following your observation of a black cat in an area with high cat density did or did not bring you some specified level of misfortune, and by applying the statistician’s chi-square test, you can quickly convince yourself that the black-cat hypothesis has a probability of less than 1 out of 1,000 of being true. Some groups of New Guinea lowlanders believe that hearing the beautiful whistled song of the little bird known as the Lowland Mouse-Babbler warns us that someone has recently died, but this bird is among the most common species and most frequent singers in New Guinea lowland forests. If the belief about it were true, the local human population would be dead within a few days, yet my New Guinea friends are as convinced of the babbler’s ill omens as Europeans are afraid of black cats.

A more striking non-religious superstition, because people today still invest money in their mistaken belief, is water-witching, also variously known as dowsing, divining, or rhabdomancy. Already established in Europe over 400 years ago and possibly also reported before the time of Christ, this belief maintains that rotation of a forked twig carried by a practitioner called a dowser, walking over terrain whose owner wants to know where to dig a well, indicates the location and sometimes the depth of an invisible underground water supply. Control tests show that dowsers’ success at locating underground water is no better than random, but many land-owners in areas where geologists also have difficulty at predicting the location of underground water nevertheless pay dowsers for their search, then spend even more money to dig a well unlikely to yield water. The psychology behind such beliefs is that we remember the hits and forget the misses, so that whatever superstitious beliefs we hold become confirmed by even the flimsiest of evidence through the remembered hits. Such anecdotal thinking comes naturally; controlled experiments and scientific methods to distinguish between random and non-random phenomena are counterintuitive and unnatural, and thus not found in traditional societies.

Perhaps, then, religious superstitions are just further evidence of human fallibility, like belief in black cats and other non-religious superstitions. But it’s suspicious that costly commitments to belief in implausible-to-others religious superstitions are such a consistent feature of religions. The investments that many religious adherents make to their beliefs are far more burdensome, time-consuming, and heavy in consequences to them than are the actions of black-cat-phobics in occasionally avoiding black cats. This suggests that religious superstitions aren’t just an accidental by-product of human reasoning powers but possess some deeper meaning. What might that be?

A recent interpretation among some scholars of religion is that belief in religious superstitions serves to display one’s commitment to one’s religion. All long-lasting human groups — Boston Red Sox fans (like me), devoted Catholics, patriotic Japanese, and others — face the same basic problem of identifying who can be trusted to remain as a group member. The more of one’s life is wrapped up with one’s group, the more crucial it is to be able to identify group members correctly and not to be deceived by someone who seeks temporary advantage by claiming to share your ideals but who really doesn’t. If that man carrying a Boston Red Sox banner, whom you had accepted as a fellow Red Sox fan, suddenly cheers when the New York Yankees hit a home run, you’ll find it humiliating but not life-threatening. But if he’s a soldier next to you in the front line and he drops his gun (or turns it on you) when the enemy attacks, your misreading of him may cost you your life.

That’s why religious affiliation involves so many overt displays to demonstrate the sincerity of your commitment: sacrifices of time and resources, enduring of hardships, and other costly displays that I’ll discuss later. One such display might be to espouse some irrational belief that contradicts the evidence of our senses, and that people outside our religion would never believe. If you claim that the founder of your church had been conceived by normal sexual intercourse between his mother and father, anyone else would believe that too, and you’ve done nothing to demonstrate your commitment to your church. But if you insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he was born of a virgin birth, and nobody has been able to shake you of that irrational belief after many decades of your life, then your fellow believers will feel much more confident that you’ll persist in your belief and can be trusted not to abandon your group.

Nevertheless, it’s not the case that there are no limits to what can be accepted as a religious supernatural belief. Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer have independently pointed out that actual religious superstitions over the whole world constitute a narrow subset of all the arbitrary random superstitions that one could theoretically invent. To quote Pascal Boyer, there is no religion proclaiming anything like the following tenet: “There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But he exists only on Wednesdays.” Instead, the religious supernatural beings in which we believe are surprisingly similar to humans, animals, or other natural objects, except for having superior powers. They are more far-sighted, longer-lived, and stronger, travel faster, can predict the future, can change shape, can pass through walls, and so on. In other respects, gods and ghosts behave like people. The god of the Old Testament got angry, while Greek gods and goddesses became jealous, ate, drank, and had sex. Their powers surpassing human powers are projections of our own personal power fantasies; they can do what we wish we could do ourselves. I do have fantasies of hurling thunderbolts that destroy evil people, and probably many other people share those fantasies of mine, but I have never fantasized about existing only on Wednesdays. Hence it doesn’t surprise me that gods in many religions are pictured as smiting evil-doers, but that no religion holds out the dream of existing just on Wednesdays. Thus, religious supernatural beliefs are irrational, but emotionally plausible and satisfying. That’s why they’re so believable, despite at the same time being rationally implausible.

Printed by arrangement with Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. from “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?”by Jared Diamond. Copyright © Jared Diamond, 2012.

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Why Atheists Are More Intelligent Than the Religious

Why Atheists Are More Intelligent Than the Religious

Humans are designed by evolution to believe in God

Published by Satoshi Kanazawa

It is natural to believe in God, so more intelligent individuals are more likely to be atheists.

Religion is a cultural universal, and its practice is observed in every known human society.  However, as I explain in earlier posts (Why do we believe in God?  Part I, Part II), recent evolutionary psychological theories suggest that religiosity may not be an adaptation in itself but may be a byproduct of other evolved psychological mechanisms variously called the “animistic bias” or the “agency-detector mechanisms.”

These theories contend that the human brain has been selected to overinfer agency – personal, animate, and intentional forces – behind otherwise natural phenomena whose exact causes cannot be known.  This is because overinferring agency – and making a Type I error of false positive – makes you a bit paranoid, but being paranoid is often conducive to survival.  In contrast, underinferring agency – and making a Type II error of false negative – can result in being killed and maimed by predators and enemies that were incorrectly assumed not to exist.  So, evolutionarily speaking, it’s good to be a bit paranoid, because being paranoid can often save your life.  Religiosity – belief in higher powers – may be a byproduct of such overinference of agency and intentional forces behind natural phenomena.

If these theories are correct, then it means that religiosity – belief in higher powers – may have an evolutionary origin.  It is evolutionarily familiar and natural to believe in God, and evolutionarily novel not to be religious.  Consistent with this reasoning, out of more than 1,500 distinct cultures throughout the world documented in The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, only 19 contain any reference to atheism.  Not only do these 19 cultures exist far outside of our ancestral home in the African savanna, but all 19 of them without an exception are former Communist societies.  There are no non-former-Communist cultures described in The Encyclopedia as containing any significant segment of atheists.  Nor is there any reference to any individuals who do not subscribe to the local religion in any of the ethnographies of traditional societies.

It may therefore be reasonable to conclude that atheism may not be part of the universal human nature, and widespread practice of atheism may have been a recent product of Communism in the 20th century.  So belief in higher powers is evolutionarily familiar and natural, and atheism is evolutionarily novel.  The Hypothesis would therefore predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to be atheist than less intelligent individuals.

Once again, analyses of large representative samples from both the United States and the United Kingdom support this prediction of the Hypothesis.  Net of a large number of social and demographic factors, including education, more intelligent individuals are more likely to be atheistic than less intelligent individuals.  For example, among the American sample, those who identify themselves as “not at all religious” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 103.09, whereas those who identify themselves as “very religious” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 97.14.

Even though past studies have shown that women are more religious than men, the analyses show that the effect of childhood intelligence on adult religiosity is twice as large as that of sex.  Remarkably, childhood intelligence has a significant and large effect on adult religiosity even when religion itself is statistically controlled for.  So it appears that more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be atheists than less intelligent individuals, and the Hypothesis provides one explanation as to why.

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Calm Atheist Versus Crazy, Shrieking Catholic Theist Harpy

Watch the video!

Calm Atheist Versus Crazy, Shrieking Catholic Theist Harpy

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Christian Guest Calls Rape Victim “Evil,” Gets Reamed Out by Atheist Host

Christian Guest Calls Rape Victim “Evil,” Gets Reamed Out by Atheist Host

“Goodbye, you piece of shit!” host says to caller.

The below confrontation between an atheist host, Matt Dillahunty (who co-hosts “The Atheist Experince with Tracie Harris,) and his fundamentalist Christian caller revolved around the caller’s belief that everyone–because of the concept of universal sinfulness–is “evil” including a young rape victim.

The caller objected to the host’s calling a young rape victim “innocent” and declared her to be as evil as all humans, at which point Dillahunty excalimed “Goodbye, you piece of shit! You know what? I was a better Christian than you when I was a Christian, and still am.”

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Atheists Face Death In 7 Countries

Punishment for Atheism in 7 Countries: Death

And atheists don’t enjoy full rights in Arkansas: report

Posted By Kate Seamons

            Choosing not to believe can be a deadly choice in seven of the world’s countries, according to a new report out today. It found that atheists can be executed for their views in Afghanistan, Iran, Maldives, Mauritania, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. Reuters notes that the report didn’t actually catalog any recent executions for atheism; but that’s likely because the charge is typically absorbed by other charges, say the researchers. Denial of “the right to exist” isn’t the only woe suffered by atheists per the report, which outlines other persecution and challenges they face around the world:

• In countries like Bangladesh, Egypt, and Kuwait, it’s illegal (and dubbed “blasphemous”) to publish atheist views.
• A number of countries, including Malaysia, force all citizens to register as a member of an officially recognized religion in order to obtain documents necessary for accessing everything from education to medical treatment.
• The West doesn’t get off scot-free, with the report noting that many secular countries give deferential treatment to Christian churches. It cites the “pride of place” given to the Orthodox Church on state occasions in Greece, and Britain’s automatic bestowal of seats in parliament’s upper house on bishops of the Church of England.
• Closer to home, atheists are actually barred from holding public office in seven US states; in Arkansas, atheists are prohibited from serving as a witness at a trial.

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‘Happy Atheist’ Ricky Gervais Rewrites Pat Robertson

‘Happy atheist’ Ricky Gervais rewrites Pat Robertson

By Nick Ramsey

Video here:-

http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/27/happy-atheist-ricky-gervais-rewrites-pat-robertson/

On the latest edition of MSNBC’s The Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell relied on some wise words from comedian Ricky Gervais to rewrite some less-than-wise words from religious television host Pat Robertson.

In a recent edition of his show, The 700 Club, Robertson accused atheists of trying to ruin the Christmas holiday:

“Well, it’s Christmas all over again. Uh, the Grinch is trying to steal our holiday… Atheists don’t like our happiness. They don’t want you to be happy, they want you to be miserable. They’re miserable so they want you to be miserable. So they want to steal your holiday away from you.”

That flies in the face of something comedian Ricky Gervais, a vocal atheist, wrote about Christmas two years back. Just before Christmas in 2010, Gervais wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal explaining his atheism.

Gervais also wrote a follow-up three days later taking questions from Wall Street Journal readers. It is from that second post that O’Donnell found the right words to rewrite Pat Robertson’s claims on atheists who “want to steal” Christmas from Christians. Gervais wrote that he celebrates Christmas in the following way:

Celebrating life and remembering those that did, but can no longer… They are not looking down on me but they live in my mind and heart more than they ever did probably. Some, I was lucky enough to bump into on this planet of six billion people. Others shared much of my genetic material. One selflessly did her best for me all my life. That’s what mums do though. They do it for no other reason than love.

Gervais ended his piece by wishing “Peace to all mankind. Christian, Jew, Muslim and Atheist.” That led to O’Donnell’s conclusion, “the happy atheist Ricky Gervais is actually more Christ-like than the Reverend Pat Robertson.”

Related articles

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Theist Writes | What Kind of People are Atheists? Behind The Scenes At an Atheist Conference

What kind of people are atheists? Behind the scenes at an atheist conference

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Posted by Derek Murphy

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I got up early the second day of the conference, took a coffee and a pastry from the hotel lobby, and headed to the convention hall in Springfield Missouri. There was a large crowd outside today. I smiled, eager to meet new friends – until I realized they were Christian protesters.

Skepticon describes itself as the “Largest Free Conference on Skepticism” in the nation, and it has been a well-known atheist convention for several years.

I’d flown in the day before and driven down from Kansas City, passing through pleasant countryside, old white houses, and lots of bible colleges.

As someone with a background in theology and comparative literature, my writing and art focuses on religious themes without actually being reverent; in fact my playful paintings and research into historical religious literature and mystery cult traditions inevitably comes across as blasphemous.

It’s difficult to share my work with theists, who get uncomfortable, and so I’ve begun to make connections with atheists communities. But this was my first time actually participating in an atheist event. As somewhat of an outsider, I surveyed the gathering with the detached eye of a social scientist.

From the protesters outside, you would think atheists were dangerous, or evil, or violent, or somehow harmful to the moral fabric of America. But were they really?

What kind of people are atheists?

Here are some of the things I noticed about the people attending Skepticon:

• They talk a lot, use big words and speak quickly. They mostly talk about becoming more rational, science and science fiction.
• They have a lot of tattoos.
• They dress casually, almost defiantly unstylish.
• A lot of guys have long hair.
• A lot of girls have died their hair bright colors.
• They have piercings.
• They are eloquent, and opinionated, and well informed.
• They know a lot of stuff.

Here is a social hypothesis: they are a group of misfits. They were nerds before it became cool and fashionable to be a nerd, meaning they probably got picked on. They didn’t wear cool clothes and probably had trouble making friends. They were ignored – which pushed them further into isolation activities like reading books.

When they grew up they became anti-establishment, anti-ordinary. This was a move based in part on the social ostricization at the hands of the herd, but also the natural effect of education and the evolution of rationality and skepticism from anyone who does enough research. They celebrate their uniqueness and individuality by dying their hair and getting tattoos – proud of their nonconformity.

Interestingly, because they are full of self-motivation, self-empowerment, deliberate and conscientious with a sense of responsibility for their actions, they are more trustworthy: one vendor told me he doesn’t ever have trouble with credit cards or checks at an atheist conference, whereas at a normal conference he wouldn’t be able to trust people.

It was interesting to contrast this group with the crowd of protesters – well dressed, fashionable teens, many Asian-Americans, all huddled into themselves passive-aggressively standing up against a perceived enemy they knew nothing about, obviously sharing a group mentality about what they were doing there.

If I wanted to be mean, I could say that they just looked young, immature, and lacking intelligence. 18 years ago, I could have been one of them.

What do atheists stand for?

“If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything” says the fortune cookie wisdom of the religious. And atheists often argue that atheism is not a belief or movement or anything except the absence of belief in a deity. But it simply isn’t true that atheists stand for nothing.

In particular, atheists want people to get educated and make smarter decisions. They want to have the freedom to make their own decisions about what they can do with their lives and their bodies, and they want to share that same freedom with others. Hemant Mehta highlighted the discrimination against young atheists in American Culture; how simply choosing not to pray a long with a high school sports team can make a teenage girl supreme villain of the community.

Atheists aren’t fighting against God or religion. They are simply fighting for their right to respectively not participate without serious social repercussions and abuse. Another speaker, I forget which one, brought up the issue of speaking with Christians.

Some atheists, he said, think the religious “aren’t worth talking to” because they can’t listen. But how many of us were religious at one point in our lives? (A majority raise their hands). “I think we were worth talking to!” he concludes. And he’s right – part of the value of having an organized community of non-believers is to help transition those people who have begun to question their beliefs but are afraid to stop going to church or voice their opinions and ideas.

My favorite speaker at the conference, James Croft, really put all of this into perspective. Atheists are being called “Nones” – having no beliefs and nothing to stand for. They are empty, meaningless, and can be ignored. But the “non-religious” segment of the USA is growing exponentially, and with increasing swiftness. (As it does in every advanced society with open communication and technology and freedom).

James talked about the necessity of building a positive moral community, because atheists DO have things that they are willing to fight for. Important issues include:

• Climate change issue
• Equal sex marriage
• Reproductive rights, right to choose
• Honesty and accountability
• A moral constituency that is politically engaged

The interesting thing is that most of my friends and family, being Democrats, agree with with atheist values. Are these the evil ethics of Satanists trying to bring our country into evil? Yes, say the conservative republicans and religious right.

These political issues won’t be easily solved in the USA anytime soon.

As for myself, I’d much rather live in an America dominated by intelligent, scientifically progressive atheists who care about things like health care and climate change, than in an America led by Christians who determine political laws based on a book written a few thousand years ago.

Related articles

• Thoughts on Chris Stedman’s Faitheist (skepticblog.org)
• Skepticon 5: Science, Atheism, and Doctor Who? (skepticalseeker.com)
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Dire Warning! | Frothing Religious Lunatic Pat Robertson Accuses Atheists!

Dire Warning! | Frothing Religious Lunatic Pat Robertson Accuses Atheists!

Robertson: ‘Miserable’ Atheists Trying to ‘Steal’ Christmas

SUBMITTED BY Brian Tashman

The “War on Christmas” has arrived and the 700 Club is doing all it can to stoke fears that Christmas may cease to exist. Host Pat Robertson warned that “the Grinch is trying to steal our holiday” as “miserable” atheists “want to steal your holiday away from you” simply because they can’t stand the joy of Christmas. “Atheists don’t like our happiness, they don’t want you to be happy, they want you to be miserable,” he said. “They’re miserable so they want you to be miserable.”

Watch:

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Ricky Gervais On Religion and Atheism

Ricky Gervais On Religion and Atheism

 

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