NeedsEvidence

Why I don't need religion

2012-02-19T11:22:00.000-06:00

Why I don't need religion: By Paul So ~

Religion is a very difficult term to define in the field of sociology, anthropology, and comparative religion. But for the purpose of this essay I’ll try to define religion in ways that is relevant to the religions that we are familiar with: Religion is any world-view that tries to explain the natural world by positing supernatural agent(s) who are claimed to deserve worship from those who are created by them (or by him/her). Worshipping is servitude and devotion to the supernatural agents is a socialized practice indoctrinated through communities . Such forms of worship come in many varieties in respects to different rituals, doctrines, tradition, clergy-authorities, etc. Religions also socialize its members to follow certain norms that are said to be commanded by the supernatural agents.

Image by h.koppdelaney via Flickr

If this is what many religions are, then I do not need another religion in my life, and here is why. I am an agnostic naturalist who believes that Nature’s fundamental laws govern the natural worlds in impersonal matters, but I do not know exactly how these fundamental laws really came about. Cosmologists are finding answers such as the Grand Unified Theory which says that many of our natural laws were initially unified into one or two natural laws during the Big Bang. In this sense I am a believer that we can find an impersonal explanation of the natural laws without positing any supernatural agents to explain them to us.

While I am an agnostic naturalist, I am only agnostic in the sense that I admit that I do not know exactly why Nature is the way it is. However, I am an atheist in the sense that positing a supernatural agent as an explanation does not have sufficient justification. Since we cannot find any changes in Nature that has to be uniquely explained by supernatural agents, but rather we consistently find changes in Nature that are explained by the laws of Nature, it is not reasonable to conclude that there has to exist any Supernatural agents. As the Philosopher Jaegwon Kim once said, to posit something that has no clear causal role is virtually the same as being non-existent.

I also think that positing supernatural agents to explain how the world works is based on our anthropomorphic bias that is rooted in a useful yet fallacious cognitive ability called hyper-intentionality, in which we attribute agency everywhere when in many cases there is none. I personally think that hyper-intentionality is the best explanation as to why so many people are convinced that an agent has to be the cause of the natural world. They appeal to the intelligent design, but this is based on the assumption that complexity can only arise from an intelligent agent, but this is farther from the truth: complexity or order arises from chaos and the laws of nature. If you don’t believe me, go on Google to search for the term “Self-Organization”, which is a complex pattern or system that appears without a need for central authority. This concept is well supported in many independent fields of science, especially in evolutionary biology; Even Chaos theory explains how pattern is possible through randomness. It is because of some of a general understanding of these facts that I realized that the possibility of finding an explanation without positing a supernatural agent is very plausible and justified. What religions say is that many of the experiences and events in our lives have to be caused by someone out there, but as I watch documentaries and read some books pertaining scientific facts, I realize that such an appeal has lost its force on me.

hyper-intentionality is the best explanation as to why so many people are convinced that an agent has to be the cause of the natural world.I don’t need religion because it doesn’t bother me that the world is not created by some other person, or proto-person. It doesn’t bother me that we are a byproduct of impersonal forces called the laws of nature and randomness; Actually, I think it’s kind of cool that intelligent self-conscious beings like ourselves derive from something that isn’t intelligent and self-conscious. For me it doesn’t mean that my life lacks purpose, but rather my life is a kind of paradox that is counter-intuitive to the human mind. It doesn’t bother me that many of the things that are happening in my life are because of impersonal forces, because I already have enough personal agents involved in my life! I have a wonderful mother (though religious) who is already too much involved in my life. I have a father who is also involved in my life by paying for my tuition. I have professors who teach me on wonderful and interesting subjects. I have friends I like to hang out with in real person or online. I already have a malevolent government that has already taken away me freedom, and quite possibly would mark me a terrorist as much as it would mark you as a terrorist. I already have enough agents involved in my life, and putting God into the equation is just asking for too much. Occasionally, I would try to appreciate the impersonal things that are involved in my life: the dividing cells that are occurring constantly underneath my skin, the millions of photons bouncing from everywhere into my eyes, the millions of molecules from delicious foods entering into my nostril, and millions of oxygen entering into my lungs as I breathe, the immense amount of kinetic energy that transfers from my body into other objects (and vice versa), and to see that the appearance of the stars I am looking at are actually light of the stars that reached my eyes from millions of years ago, are already profound enough. When I do think about these things on occasion, I am amazed how there are so much more events happening behind the veil of my perception. I then come to this adage: Behind every person is Nature doing its works in secret.

I don’t need religion because I don’t like being told what to do unless there is good justification for it. I don’t like it when all my actions are simply based on the whims of another being who does not give any reasons for my actions; it seems that my actions are not based on any reasons including my reasons, but rather my actions is based on the elusive pseudo-reason of an ineffable being. I know that when I was a child, I had to obey my parents, but as I grow into an adult whose cognitive capacities mature as the brain grows the situation is no longer the same. If my actions are based on someone else's reasons, then I would really like to know what those reasons are if they are relevant to my interests and values. This doesn’t have to imply that I am selfish, but rather expecting someone to do whatever you want them to do regardless of their interest is unreasonable. If you want to change someone’s interest, try to have a mature rational discussion with them by presenting the facts and the arguments, instead of threatening them to change it or else they will punished. To do this is imperialistic and authoritarian, and if this is all religion can do then I am not interested. Also, appealing to the benevolence of another being is equally unconvincing because benevolence of another person does not explain what his or her reasons are. Just because that person is benevolent it doesn’t follow that whatever he or she wants me to do is justified. The benevolence of another person does not entail that my interests should be the same as that person, unless there is an independent justification for it. I do not need any appeal to emotions, but rather I need facts and reasons in which my emotions can make value judgments about it.

I don’t need a religion because I am not some instrument for someone else’s desire or purpose. I am a person with a personal interest that guides my actions, and if you want me to act in accordance with your desires, you should appeal to my personal interest, or at least my moral conscience.

I don’t need religion because I don’t need grace. I am not willing to take fault from a pseudo-ancestor who made a horrible mistake that I didn’t make. I am not a deprived or impoverished being, rather I consider myself very fortunate since I live a comfortable life. I am not perfect, I am quite fallible, but that does not mean that I am incapable of improving myself. I don’t need to be saved because I don’t deserve punishment. If I am being punished just because of my predispositions, beliefs (which are involuntary!), or lineage rather than because of my own moral merits or actions, then the evangelist, proselytizers and apologists can go fuck themselves for all I care.

I don’t need religion because I already have too much purpose in my life. I wake up because I want to go to school. I study because I want to get good grades so I can increase my chances to go to Princeton. I write this article because I like to share my opinions with like-minded people. I eat because I want to sustain and fuel my body. I am in the library so I can concentrate on my work. I philosophize because I enjoy it. I have purpose for many of the things I do, and I do not need one ultimate purpose to subsume them all. Don’t tell me that my life is without purpose if there is no God; I already have too much purpose in my life as much as the next door neighbor. Life is abundant with purpose, but the only problem is that everything (including those purposes) in nature is impermanent. The only difference between me and a believer is that I want to live my life by practicing acceptance of that impermanence and just enjoy the ride. I know that many of my purposes that I created in the context of my environment are impermanent; I have no delusions about it. But at the very least I can accept it and just live on. If there is no eternal purpose out there, then whining about it won’t do. Just use whatever time we have left to perform the purposes we set for ourselves, yet accept that many things in life is impermanent.

The last reason why I don’t need religion is because I think finding happiness and attaining a peaceful mind is possible without religion. I think spirituality is possible without religion, since all spirituality amounts to to understand that we are part of the cosmic web that weaves us together in the fabric of space and time. To be in brotherhood (and sisterhood!) with each other is possible without God, since we are social creatures capable of being cooperative. To attain a peaceful mind is to understand ourselves and other people around us the best way possible, to alleviate suffering. All this, I believe, can be done without religion.

Christianity is an Anachronism

2011-12-17T13:36:00.000-06:00

Christianity is an Anachronism: By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~

According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, anachronism means: a person or a thing that is chronologically out of place; especially : one from a former age that is incongruous in the present.

Christianity is an anachronism as it comes from the ancient world and does not fit the facts of modern science, morality, or politics. But, curiously, the majority of people in the Western World fail to recognize this easily established fact.

Christianity is based on a collection of scripture written 2,000-3,500 years ago by Iron Age primitives in a superstitious, pre-scientific age. This was an age when kings and emperors and their like, individuals of great power, ruled every nation. A nation’s laws, and its national, international, and military policy, were almost always decided by one man and reflected his beliefs and judgment alone.

The Enlightenment (also known as The Age of Reason), of the 18th century, brought the recognition that mankind benefits from questioning all authority. Enlightenment philosophy is the foundation of modern Western science, morality, and political structures. In a very real sense, Enlightenment philosophy IS modernity. And it’s here to stay, because it works.

Here is the key point. Over the past three centuries then, from kings to democracy, from priests to secularism, the tide of civilization has been away from authoritarianism and toward plurality. We have learned that we need all of us involved so we can cross-check one another and avoid extremism.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russians turned their government over to Joseph Stalin, and crackpot ideas supported by him led to the deaths of some 25 million or so. Mao doubled this in China. And when the Germans turned away from democracy between the world wars and put all power in Hitler’s hands, it took him just 12 years to destroy his nation, as well as much of the rest of Europe. There was no cross-checking on these men, and they followed their imaginations and emotions unfettered. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In the same vein, the Bible is filled with crackpot and extremist ideas because it was written by independent authors. There was little or no cross-checking. The result was a litany of outrageous tall tales that would be considered mythical and silly, even by Christians, if they were in any religion not based on that Bible.

Note also that religions, too, have drifted into extremism, because there is no cross-checking between them. There are thousands of religions, and thousands of Christian sects, since their leaders can’t agree on many important points. These leaders don’t seem to think it very important that most or all of them must have it wrong, since their foundational beliefs are contradictory. Clearly, in politics, science, or religion, where there is authoritarian rule, there is extremism and stubborn error.

Conversely, in most of the Western World today democracy is the norm. In this system, there are two or more parties which must compete for votes, so ideas are routinely hoisted up the flagpole to see how many will salute. Extremism is thus avoided, generally. In America, we have a system of checks and balances so that the President is kept in check, as is the Congress and the courts. All three establishments maintain checks on the power and influence of each other, and a free press holds them all up to public scrutiny. Free elections ensure that we never go to extremes of conservatism or liberalism; the pendulum swings back and forth between them, but far from the extremes of either.

The scientific method was developed only around 400 years ago, and also depends on checks and balances, experiment and peer review, the opposite of authoritarianism. Modern science demands that no description of a scientific principle be accepted without evidence from the real world. When it comes to knowing how the world works, we can only know what we can detect with certainty, and we cannot detect “miracles,” the supernatural, gods, heaven, hell, or souls. So called “miracles” underlie all Christian theology, and miracles have no place in modern science which claims that the laws of nature are inviolate in all places and at all times. Miracles are an anachronism.

Because of the trend of secularism since the Enlightenment, the religious don’t make the rules for most of us. And, because of this, we have not accepted the most pernicious of Biblical moral commands. We don’t allow slavery, or kill homosexuals, adulterers, or people who work on Sunday. These rules are anachronistic and only very backward cultures like the Taliban and conservative Islamic nations take their rules from their authoritarian religious works.

The Bible, Christianity’s foundation, is a story of the supernatural. God is supernatural, as is Jesus, the Holy Ghost, heaven, hell, angels, demons, Satan, and Jesus’ life story is full of supernatural miracles. Yet, the history of science provides a long, one-way record of discovery, in the opposite direction, away from the supernatural. Thousands of things once thought to have supernatural causes, like drought, fire, rain, thunder, lightning, disease, human birth, etc., have been shown to have purely natural causes. And how many things once thought to have natural causes have been shown to have supernatural causes? None, nada, zero. What do you think, is there a trend here? Could we make any dependable scientific predictions using this trend?

Think about it: science discovers, proves, and explains things for practical benefit, while several thousand contradictory religions and sects exist concurrently today BECAUSE none of them can prove anything. That’s right, no religion, Christianity included, can actually prove anything concerning the supernatural, because they can’t even produce any serious evidence that there is a supernatural. This is where the “leap of faith” proposition comes from. If you’re going to become a Christian, then you’re going to have to perform a leap of faith, because no one can actually prove any of the Jesus story is true. And that story, by any modern standard is bizarre. After all, Christianity is essentially a death cult, since it glorifies a human sacrifice to an angry god. It has to be accepted strictly on emotional grounds, or rejected.

The Bible is crammed full of magic, which perhaps made some sense in that primitive era of rampant superstition. There was hardly any knowledge of the laws of nature, so anything and everything was possible. Today, we know the world simply doesn’t work that way, despite the words of Jesus.

In Mark 16:17-18, Jesus unequivocally states that certain signs shall accompany a True Believer. A True Believer is one who can cast out demons, heal sick people just by touching them, and drink poison without injury. Neither you nor I have ever been able to do any of these magical things, and neither has anyone in the whole record of history; not the Pope, not Oral Roberts, and not Fred Phelps.

No one, in fact, has ever been able to do any of these things. The inescapable conclusion, based solidly on modern science, on the rules of logic, and on the words of the Bible itself, is that either there has never been a “True Believer,” at least since Jesus, or Jesus (or the author of Mark) was making stuff up.

Besides being false, this Biblical nonsense is anachronistic as it has no rightful place in our modern world. Now, when will the rest of us realize this?

Christopher Hitchens - The Best of the Hitchslap - Part Two

2011-12-16T23:25:00.000-06:00

Christopher Hitchens - The Best of the Hitchslap

2011-12-16T15:13:00.000-06:00

To those praying for Hitchens - from Freethought Blogs by Crommunist

2011-12-16T14:58:00.000-06:00

To those praying for Hitchens:

Predictably, the shrieking hordes of self-satisfied ghouls have crawled out of the woodwork and, smirking, announced their great love for the departed Christopher with promises to “pray for him”. I cannot help but be reminded of the Black Knight sequence in Monty Python’s Grail, where despite having his arms and legs chopped off by an expert swordsman, the knight continues to taunt Arthur as the king walks away. Hitchens devoted a portion of his writing (not his entire career, as many falsely claim) to utterly eviscerating not only the efficacy of prayer claims, but the superstitious nonsense and appalling evil that underlies the god claim. To say that you are “praying” for him serves as little more than a bold announcement that, even if you had bothered to read his work, you were too thick to understand it.

A friend of mine wrote this in response:

“Begging mercy and forgiveness from a vindictive, vengeful and tyrannical God who also commands love and worship from his ‘children’ whom he “created sick and commands to be well” is precisely the kind of self-imposed torturous mental bondage from which Christopher Hitchens fought to free humanity.

He is not at peace, for he is not. He requires neither mercy nor forgiveness; such thoughts are for the living, and it is only the living who are comforted by blessings and wishes bestowed on the dead. Christopher Hitchens, the man, the mind, the embodied set of beliefs and desires and feelings and memories, has ceased to be. We are the better for having shared time with him, and (only) through us will his beliefs, desires, feelings, memories, and his works live on.”

As I inexpertly attempted to articulate in the paragraphs accompanying this morning’s video, Hitchens’ legacy is far greater than simply the sum of his writings. This is not to minimize his writings, incidentally, which are a sumptuous treat that can be tasted as much as they can be read. Hitchens was an expert swordsman with his words, flourishing with elaborate descriptions, parrying with excruciatingly-chosen diction, and thrusting with cutting vernacular straight through the heart of whatever woebegotten position was foolish enough to ignite his ire. But his words did not simply defeat his chosen opponents – they were a flag waved proudly above the din of pitched combat, calling forth new and eager legions of burgeoning soldiers of freethought to enter the fray.

Those who snidely crow their intention to “pray” for Hitchens are nothing more than myopic fools, claiming victory as the conquering general retires from the battlefield, but failing to notice the approaching horde of approaching warriors made stronger and bolder by the leadership of the recently absent. Christopher Hitchens’ death is lamentable, to be sure, but like Obi-wan Kenobi, he has become more powerful in death than theists can possibly imagine. I suggest you reserve those prayers for yourself – not that they’ll help, but they might make you feel better as your position gets torn to ribbons by the next wave of anti-theist polemicists.

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h/t Jesse Brydle for the moving words

To XMAS And Beyond! | TheThinkingAtheist

2011-12-13T14:11:00.000-06:00

Merry Christmas! People would be amazed that 1) many non-Christians celebrate the holiday season and 2) many Christians unknowingly implement pagan traditions into their commemoration of the baby Jesus.

This video takes a quick glance at just a few beloved Christmas traditions and some of their origins.

Some other resources:
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/nazareth.html
http://www.atheists.org/Did_Jesus_Exist%3F
http://www.history.com/topics/christmas
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3958241.stm

A Scientist Goes Beyond the Evidence

2011-12-08T23:36:00.000-06:00

A Scientist Goes Beyond the Evidence: By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~

How does an eminent physician/scientist convince himself that there is a god and that Christianity makes sense? This is the kind of thing I think about a lot. It’s fairly easy to understand how the common man and woman is sucked into Christianity, since most are indoctrinated when they are small and primed by nature to believe authority figures. However, it’s not so easy to understand how a scientist, an atheist (or so he claims), trained in the critical thinking required by science, comes to be a believer as an adult. When confronted with such a case, one has to consider that perhaps there really are logical reasons for belief in gods and Christianity.

The life of Francis Collins presents us with an excellent case study. Collins is a physician and geneticist who headed the US Government’s National Center for Human Genome Research, which, along with Craig Venter’s private project, decoded the human genome into its 3 billion base pairs. He then was appointed Director of the National Institutes of Health in 2009. He is also the author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief” (2007).

I am currently reading, “Socrates in the City; Conversations on ‘Life, God, and Other Small Topics’” which is a collection of speeches by prominent theists in an ongoing New York City forum, edited by Eric Metaxas. In Collins’ speech, he says he was not raised in a family where faith was considered particularly important, and grew further from faith over time. As a grad student, he considered himself an atheist.

In studying medicine, he saw many who were facing death, some of whom seemed to be at peace. He decided that he wouldn’t be able to do that. He would be terrified and angry. This is the beginning of his emotional slide into Christianity.

One day, after telling him about her faith, a patient asked him what he believed. “I realized that my atheism had never really been based upon a real consideration of the evidence for and against the existence of god.” Remember this statement; he has said here, quite emphatically, that the evidence matters. Collins says he then embarked on a search to learn what believers believed, and why they believed it. “Over those two years, I discovered that I had missed out on a profoundly compelling series of arguments which indicate that atheism is, in fact, the least rational of all choices.”

I’m not kidding here, he really said that. He argues that science provides no answers to some very powerful, important questions, such as “Why am I here?” and “What does love mean?” Then there are, “What happens after I die?” and “Is there a god?” “So,” he says, “if you’re going to be an atheist, you basically have to decide those are irrelevant.” Now where in hell did he get that idea? We atheists think those questions are irrelevant? Did you know that? Did he ever actually ask one? Those questions are obviously as important to the average atheist as they are to the faithful. The difference is that we accept that there may be no answers to be found in the real world. Collins, however, was unwilling to accept this uncertainty. The questions do not become irrelevant just because they currently have no answers.

However, the fact that Collins could not accept the uncertainty surrounding these questions ultimately becomes the reason he turned to Christianity. It was not because he found strong intellectual arguments for the existence of god, or the Jesus as savior story, it was because he needed some sort of closure.

In his speech, Collins says that C.S. Lewis’ argument in “Mere Christianity” of the “inexplicable” presence of the knowledge of right and wrong in humans was a clincher for him. He says, “I was compelled by that argument at age twenty-six. I am compelled by it today.” This is despite the fact that primatologists, evolution researchers, psychologists, and others have established beyond a reasonable doubt that right and wrong, or basic morality, can be found in many higher animals, as well as humans, and has been shown to be evolution’s answer to the problem of how basically selfish individuals can learn to work together for greater species efficiency.

While Collins acknowledges this to some extent, he claims that it doesn’t explain why someone would risk his life for another who was not related. Simple answer: if one lives day after day with a concern for and sympathy for others, why should we expect him to stop and compute whether he is related before making a split decision to aid someone, whatever the risk. Soldiers commonly perform such acts of heroism for non-relatives. And some of us commonly feel ourselves to be linked at a deep level with all of humanity.

Collins also toys with scientific indicators that there must be a god. For example, he goes on at some length with the “fine-tuning of the universe” argument. Of course, like all other proponents of that argument, that I’m aware of, he totally ignores the question that if the universe is too complex to exist without a creator, then why doesn’t the creator, likewise, need a creator? His cure for the complex universe problem is to assume something of even greater complexity did it. This reminds me of the puddle who looked about at his surroundings and said, “Wow! This hole in the ground fits me exactly! It’s just deep enough, and long enough, and wide enough, and with every curve just right to fit me. This can’t be chance. Someone must have created this perfect hole for me!”

Collins accepts the big bang and evolution as scientifically sound theories. However, he makes some mighty big assumptions. He says, “Almighty god, who is not limited in space and time, created our universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity . . . “ So, how does he know that god is not limited by space and time? Well, because god must be outside nature in order to have created it. But this seems to be saying that the creator must be outside space and time, therefore the universe could have been created by a god, because he is outside space and time. He uses one assumption as evidence for another, so to speak.

So, Collins likes to argue that science can point to god, but he admits that that is not how he got there. In an interview with Steve Paulson for Salon.com in 2006, Collins said:

“Nobody gets argued all the way into becoming a believer on the sheer basis of logic and reason. That requires a leap of faith. And that leap of faith seemed very scary to me. After I had struggled with this for a couple of years, I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains on a beautiful fall afternoon. I turned the corner and saw in front of me this frozen waterfall, a couple of hundred feet high. Actually, a waterfall that had three parts to it — also the symbolic three in one. At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The next morning, in the dewy grass in the shadow of the Cascades, I fell on my knees and accepted this truth — that God is God, that Christ is his son and that I am giving my life to that belief.”

Well, how can you argue with a “revelation” like that? Frozen waterfalls are beautiful, so there is a god, and Christ is his son. I wonder what he would have thought if he had turned that corner and seen the ravaged, dismembered dead body of a rape victim. Would this have convinced him that there was no god? I don’t think so. He would have found such “evidence” irrelevant, because it did not support what he wanted to believe.

Here we have the ultimate admission. Collins didn’t come to Christianity through reason, but despite it. His decision was first, last, and always, emotional.

Remember, this is a man who said that he knew of arguments which showed atheism to be the “least rational of all choices.” Yet, when he gets to the end of the road of reason, he sees that it doesn’t go any farther, so he just leaps. He simply decides that if he can’t get to where he wants to be with logic, then he will go with wishful thinking. And he is convinced that’s a more rational choice! He claims atheists think the big questions are irrelevant. Yet, here he makes a bald-faced admission that he thinks the truth is irrelevant. He simply decides to assume to be true that which he wishes to be true, and makes his leap. To one standing on the outside looking in, this borders on insanity.

Collins came to Christianity via a leap of faith. He never talks about why he didn’t take a leap into Islam or Hinduism. Since the facts can’t prove any one of these religions over another, we must assume that it was only because he knows less about those religions. And this, of course, is why there is such an excellent correlation of geography and religion in this world. This is what most theists do; they take a leap of faith into the family religion, or the most common local religion.

In reading Collins’ speech, and reading about him, I have come to the conclusion that honest, intelligent believers generally know why they believe. They believe for emotional reasons, because they needed answers to life’s most difficult questions and their religion provided them.

In ancient times, just as today, religion filled a need for those who don’t deal well with uncertainty. Ancient man had no science and lived in a brutal, dangerous world, and the uncertainties of it were just too much to bear. He needed answers, and they were not forthcoming from the world, so he made them up. The world exists because an invisible, all-knowing and all-powerful god made it. Humans exist because that god needed someone to worship him. Humans needed to obey god’s wishes because if they did, their god would protect them, and if they didn’t, they would be severely punished.

Ah, now we have reasons for why the world is as it is. Of course those reasons are all purely hypothetical and untestable, but they are reasons just the same. For many, this is enough. It seems there are only a small percentage of us who are even more uncomfortable with answers which just don’t add up. For us, that’s worse than no answers.

The Francis Collins story suggests to me that Christianity is a dim nightlight for the emotionally immature. It helps many to cope with the darkness of those ultimate questions, “Why are we here?” and “What comes after this?“

Sean Carroll on free will

2011-12-06T13:44:00.000-06:00

Sean Carroll on free will:

Physicist Sean Carroll has picked up the gauntlet dropped by Massimo and me, and has a nice post up on Cosmic Variance about determinism and its connection with free will: “On determinism.” Sean, of course, knows a ton more about physics than either of us, and his take is well worth reading. Here are some of the points he makes:

All of our actions must obey the laws of physics. All of us agree with that, of course, but he realizes that this raises a question, “What room, then, for free choice?”

Some people assert that classical mechanics may not be deterministic, though Sean says, “I personally don’t find the examples that impressive.”

Conversely, quantum mechanics (QM) may be deterministic. It’s not deterministic under the bizarre Copenhagen interpretation, but is deterministic under the even more bizarre many-worlds hypothesis, in which all possible outcomes of quantum “indeterminacy” are actually realized in different universes (so there may be an infinite number of universes!). I was surprised to learn that Carroll adheres to the many-worlds interpretation of QM, which is a form of physical determinism.

Carroll isn’t clear about whether “the lack of determinism in QM [if it's indeed probabilistic] plays any role at all in our everyday lives.” I, too, was dubious about that, although I can see how, as some readers have suggested, indeterminacy could have real effects on us, for example in creating mutations that affect our heredity or, somatically, causing cancer.

The idea of chaos is irrelevant to this discussion, because, as I’ve pointed out as well, chaos theory is not probabilistic but deterministic. It affects predictability, since we can’t know things to such a precise level, but still allows results to be completely predetermined by initial conditions.

Of course, whether the laws of physics are deterministic or probabilistic is, to me, irrelevant to whether there’s free will, which in my take means that we can override the laws of physics with some intangible “will” that allows us to make different decisions given identical configurations of the molecules of the universe. That kind of dualism is palpable nonsense, of course, which is why I think the commonsense notion of free will is wrong. As Carroll notes:

We can imagine four different possibilities: determinism + free will, indeterminism + free will, determinism + no free will, and indeterminism + no free will. All of these are logically possible, and in fact beliefs that some people actually hold! Bringing determinism into discussions of free will is a red herring . . .

A better question is, if we choose to think of human beings as collections of atoms and particles evolving according to the laws of physics, is such a description accurate and complete? Or is there something about human consciousness — some strong sense of “free will” — that allows us to deviate from the predictions that such a purely mechanistic model would make?

If that’s your definition of free will, then it doesn’t matter whether the laws of physics are deterministic or not — all that matters is that there are laws. If the atoms and particles that make up human beings obey those laws, there is no free will in this strong sense; if there is such a notion of free will, the laws are violated. In particular, if you want to use the lack of determinism in quantum mechanics to make room for supra-physical human volition (or, for that matter, occasional interventions by God in the course of biological evolution, as Francis Collins believes), then let’s be clear: you are not making use of the rules of quantum mechanics, you are simply violating them. Quantum mechanics doesn’t say “we don’t know what’s going to happen, but maybe our ineffable spirit energies are secretly making the choices”; it says “the probability of an outcome is the modulus squared of the quantum amplitude,” full stop. Just because there are probabilities doesn’t mean there is room for free will in that sense.

But Carroll himself doesn’t adhere to this form of incompatibilism. He opts instead to redefine free will so it’s compatible with the laws of physics:

On the other hand, if you use a weak sense of free will, along the lines of “a useful theory of macroscopic human behavior models people as rational agents capable of making choices,” then free will is completely compatible with the underlying laws of physics, whether they are deterministic or not. That is the (fairly standard) compatibilist position, as defended by me in Free Will is as Real as Baseball. I would argue that this is the most useful notion of free will, the one people have in mind as they contemplate whether to go right to law school or spend a year hiking through Europe. It is not so weak as to be tautological: we could imagine a universe in which there were simple robust future boundary conditions, such that a model of rational agents would not be sufficient to describe the world. E.g. a world in which there were accurate prophesies of the future: “You will grow up to marry a handsome prince.” (Like it or not.) For better or for worse, that’s not the world we live in. What happens to you in the future is a combination of choices you make and forces well beyond your control — make the best of it!

With all due respect to Sean, whom I like a lot, I think this is a bit of a cop-out. What he seems to mean here is that “we can act as if we and others have choices, though we really don’t, because what we ‘choose’ is determined not by our will but by the laws of physics.” Yes, that’s useful, I suppose, but I think he’s wrong in saying that “a model of rational agents” accurately describes our world. What does that mean? Do people always act rationally? That depends on your definition of “rational,” I think, and he doesn’t define it. If by “rational,” Sean means “according to the laws of physics,” then his conception does become tautological. But of course one can make useful models, as do economists, assuming that most people act rationally—given that you specify the meaning of “rational.”

Finally, it may be irrelevant whether or not determinism affects our conception of “free will,” for we—as did Carroll—can always define free will so that it’s independent of determinism. But the question of how deterministic our actions really are remains vitally important. It’s important in our conception of how we dispense justice and hold people responsible for their actions. It’s important for many religious people as well, for whom the absence of determinism is pivotal for issues about salvation. Maybe philosophers and scientists know that there’s no dualism, but it’s important for us to get that message out to the general public, if for no other reason than it dispels the idea that there are supernatural forces like ESP and “souls” that can affect our fate.

In the end, everything must obey the laws of physics, whether they be deterministic or probabilistic. All else is commentary.

Transcript: Dear Christian | Freethought Blogs | JT Eberhard (Mirror)

2011-12-04T23:37:00.000-06:00

Transcript: Dear Christian:

Tonight I’ll be giving my talk Dear Christian at Grand Valley State University. I first wrote the talk for Skepticon III and ages ago I posted the transcript at Atheism Resource. Here is the transcript from the talk in full.

Dear Christian,

We have had several talks over the years and in every one of them I ask you why I should believe the things you believe. These often seem to go the same way, and so I think we need to have a little chat so that we can move forward.

Respect

First we need to cover the issue of respect, since when I explain why the reasons you give are unconvincing, you frequently insist that I respect you in response. This has always puzzled me. If an atheist believes in something for bad reasons, I immediately consider them to be gullible, since that is exactly what gullible people do. If the gullible atheist is someone I respect, I immediately apprise them to why I think their reasons are inadequate. If they are a respectable person, then they do not need me to placate them, catering to potential hurt feelings and allowing them to march into tomorrow with inaccurate beliefs. That would be the very definition of disrespect and, barring any other relevant information about you, I clearly respect you just as much as I respect atheists, or any human being for that matter. Because I respect you, I will not coddle you. It is well-meaning people that should be respected, not ideas. And frankly, respecting bad ideas is far too close to affirming them for my tastes.

Confusing Questions

Faith’s non-reliance on reason is part of the reason our conversations seldom go anywhere, but there are others. For starters, you often do not answer the questions I have asked. When I ask you why you believe the things you believe you often proceed to tell me what you believe.

Why do you believe in god?

Well, we believe that mankind is born in sin…

What you believe does not concern me so much as why you believe it (which is presumably why I should believe). That is why I asked that question.

You will also argue for something’s possibility, asking me “Isn’t it possible that a god created everything?” Often you will cite that I don’t know everything, so isn’t it at least possible? Sure. But let’s not confuse possibility with plausibility.

Virtually all ideas are distantly possible – gods who drowned the Earth and left no evidence, unicorns are possible too – maybe we haven’t looked in the right forests, maybe leprechauns hiding on Mars or there might be microscopic smurfs hiding under your seats – but conceding their possibility is not the same as conceding that they are remotely likely or that anybody has any evidence for any of it, and you’re still gullible if you believe things without evidence, even if I admit there’s a non-zero possibility that it’s true. Outside of religion, who but an absolute imbecile believes something simply because it’s possible rather than because it is the best supported explanation?

Read the Bible!

When speaking to church-goers I am always sure to ask one very specific question: why should I believe the things you believe? Most frequently I am then told to read the bible. I am told that it is an amazing book that pulls you in and contains wisdom that contributes to humanity’s collective understanding to this very day.

I can only respond that I have read the bible – more than once. I stopped being a Christian because I read the bible.

But I am not an isolated case! The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released a survey not even two months ago which indicated that atheists, on the whole, generally are more informed about the tenets of the various religions than religious people.

The survey revealed some interesting things…

Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics who participated in the study didn’t know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in Holy Communion is not just a symbol, but becomes literally the body and blood of Christ. (But I’ll bet that PZ Myers sure-as-hell knows that)

More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Protestant Reformation.

More atheists were aware of these things. We’ve read the book.

But how many of you have read the book? According to Bill Keller Ministries, a Christian group, statistical research shows that less than 10% of Christians have read the bible. Ironically, a survey conducted by Knowledge Network at the behest of Christianity Today found that 74% of professing Christians believe the bible to be the authoritative guide to faith. If only there were a commandment forbidding people from pretending to know things they didn’t. Not that you would have read it.

Perhaps this biblical illiteracy is understandable. The bible is a hulking read at about 1,200 pages long after all. However, I can’t help but wonder how many Christians have read at least two Harry Potter books, which should say something about god’s abilities as a communicator.

I also wonder just how it is you determine that the witches in Harry Potter are obviously fiction, while the witches in Leviticus were real.

Science and the Bible

You will often tell me how science and the bible are compatible. It seems clear to me that the science of biology has quite a bit to say about people rising from the dead or being born of virgins; I think physics may have a bone to pick with someone walking on water; I think chemists may shit a brick at the notion that a human body could be converted to a pillar of salt; and I think astronomers may just have a problem with the Earth’s rotation coming to a halt as it does in Joshua 10. These things are called miracles because they violate science – and the bible is chock full of them.

If you still think science and the bible are compatible, let’s look at what would happen if the Earth stopped spinning. For this to happen would violate the conservation of angular momentum. As the Earth spins, it has kinetic energy that must be altered in some way in order to stop the rotation – this variable would have had to come from somewhere, and good luck in peer review saying it was magic.

Even if a mechanism existed to stop the Earth’s rotation, the atmosphere would continue to rotate at a speed of 1,100 mph, which is enough to produce sufficient force to rip even buildings and trees into the atmosphere if the Earth’s rotation were to cease. Were this to happen, no human being would live including Joshua and the Israelites.

Likewise, the water in the oceans would continue to rotate at those speeds, even if the planet itself stopped. For this to be avoided would require a violation of the law of inertia. It would also result in largely catastrophic events that would leave a wellspring of evidence. We have found none.

In response you will often say absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If something didn’t happen, what more evidence could we possibly have than the lack of any evidence?

For the cherry on top, the book of Joshua also says that the moon’s motion was halted. If this happened, the moon would crash into the Earth.

Take a moment and compare the likelihood that the Earth stopped spinning against the fact that it’s easy to make shit up.

Deference to Experts

So you cannot believe the bible gives an accurate account of these things while simultaneously believing that science is consistent. Forgetting the examples I previously mentioned, you will frequently counter the bible’s contempt for science by setting up a binary situation, usually by asking a question like “If there’s no god, then how do you explain the origin of life?”

Simple: A self-replicating molecule formed when a series of fatty acids congealed into vesicles which, made permeable by convection cycles in a prebiotic Earth, trapped nucleotide monomers which self-ligated via hydrogen bonds and covalent bond ligation, polymerizing within the vesicle to form a primitive cell after which the surrounding ions increased the osmotic pressure allowing the cell to acquire lipids from other vesicles, which catalyzed competition and, thus, evolution. See? Simple.

It’s entirely possible that that explanation registers as little more than word soup. There was a time when I didn’t understand it myself. I fixed that by making an appointment with biologists (who then sent me over to chemists) at my university and asked them to explain it. What I did not do is walk up to any layman on the street and ask them to explain it to me. That you elect to do the latter is suspicious, and leads me to believe you’re not really looking for an answer. It doesn’t matter if the layman has no clue whatsoever how life began – that is not evidence that a god exists. Just because someone doesn’t know how life began does not mean that you do. “I don’t know” is a perfectly viable answer.

Even you, dear Christian, have no issue deferring to scientists on a host of things you don’t understand. You will eat our abundant food, drink our clean water, fly on airplanes, and communicate by phone, almost universally with no idea how science has given us those things. But when it comes to evolution or abiogenesis, all of a sudden suspicion seems so sneak in. Why? Do you think this is the greatest coup in the history of the planet? That scientists have laid low for the last thousand years unveiling the mysteries of the world and rapidly improving our quality of life to gain our trust so that only now they can deceive us into thinking there are natural explanations (and thus, more probable explanations) for the diversity of life?

There ARE Religious Scientists!

But wait, you will often say. There are religious scientists out there. Yes, there are, though the percentage of them that are religious is significantly lower, such as with the National Academy of Science where only 7% believe in god. But for those scientists who do believe in a god, they do not believe in god for scientific reasons – otherwise they would be publishing papers in peer-review and engaging in scientific research into the matter.

But wait, you will often say again. There are scientists with groups like the Discovery Institute doing such work. Then why is their work not represented in the scientific literature, if not for science spending the last thousand years setting up a dastardly conspiracy? Here, let me explain how academics, including academic science, works…

The Poincaré conjecture is a century-old math problem. It is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems for which one of the world’s most prestigious mathematics organizations has offered a $1,000,000 prize to anybody who can solve one of them. It is also the only one that has ever been solved. It was solved in 2006 by a Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman. The journal Science called it the scientific breakthrough of the year. This was the first time the honor had been bestowed in the area of mathematics. So complicated was the problem that it took a team of world-class mathematicians four years to confirm Grigori’s proof as correct. When they attempted to award him the prize money, Perelman refused. Repeated attempts were made to get Perelman to accept the prize, and each time he rejected it. For his accomplishment he would later win the Fields Medal, which is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. Again, Perelman declined.

So here we have a man who is not asking for accolades for his work (in fact, he’s flat out refusing them), and yet the academic and scientific community is trying repeatedly to award him his just due. On the other hand we have the Discovery Institute incessantly whining that they are not being given the proper accolades, and scientists are just brushing them off. Why do you think this is?

The dichotomy between academia and the way creationists work is even more pronounced than that. When Perelman came up with his answer, do you think he wrote a book attempting to convince plumbers, secretaries, restaurant managers, and all other manner of laymen that he was correct? Do you think he launched a political campaign to try and get his work into the public school curriculum? Or do you think he did the responsible thing and went first to professional mathematicians to make sure that his work was sound, laying it before the judgment of people who have spent their lives studying mathematics?

It should worry you that groups like the Discovery Institute are more concerned with the minds of the non-scientists. It’s how they get away with getting you to repeat a positively idiotic line like, “Evolution is just a theory” or that the second law of thermodynamics invalidates evolution or confirms god’s existence. It’s not that science is an anti-god coup. The fact of the matter is that scientists would catch them lying, but maybe not you. They’re counting on you not doing your homework. Not only are they depending on you to swallow the misinformation, they’re hoping you will help them to spread it further. Sadly, most of you have not disappointed them. In short, they’ve played you like a cheap fiddle. In the future I hope you will remember who they are and how they operate.

Science Can’t Go After the Supernatural

So it makes no sense to think that science is anti-god, but maybe science is incomplete. Next comes the claim that science is biased – it can only go after the natural, but it cannot go after the supernatural. Neither can you, because human beings can only go after the natural. The second you experience a sensation, whether it’s visual, auditory, emotional, whatever, that sensation is natural. Sure you may feel that god exists, but that feeling is produced by a litany of chemicals in the brain, and the catalyst for their release may or may not be god. Either way, you are naturally feeling them.

If god exists, he made us that way. It is a strange god indeed who would create us with only eyes, ears, taste, nothing but receptors to the natural world, and then cover all natural evidence of his existence. If such a god exists, the only reasonable conclusion is that he does not want any of us to believe in him.

We Do not Choose Our Beliefs

This is especially true because of the way he made our brains. So often, dear Christian, you talk about how we must choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. I counter that this is asking the impossible. Why? Simple. We do not choose our beliefs.

You may test this by climbing to the top of a tall building and then attempting, through force of will, to convince yourself that gravity doesn’t work (or that it’s just a theory). Or try choosing to believe that you open doors by doing a jig, rather than by turning the handle, and try to leave your house in the morning.

God made our brains this way. I’m not an atheist because I’ve chosen to be one. I’m an atheist because no religious person, to my satisfaction, has given me a legitimate reason to believe that they rightly possess knowledge of god’s existence and I am therefore powerless to believe otherwise. I contest that only a malicious god would make belief in the absurd the only means to escape eternal torment after making me with a brain incapable of doing so.

Your salvation can only be that you think you have a good reason to believe in god. And so we trudge forward…

Argument from Design

But god, you’ll tell me, is self-evident. Just look at that tree, that building. They’re so complex! Mustn’t they have had a designer?

No.

Lots of complex things are produced all the time in our universe by natural, mindless forces acting upon inanimate objects. Snowflakes, for instance, are always unique and they are highly ordered. Yet we do not need to invent a snowflake-making god, since we are fully aware of the processes that crystalize water in that fashion. The same can be said for exceedingly complex things like stars, which are formed when a large hydrogen cloud collapses into itself in a process called the Jeans instability. We do not need a god to explain the stars, and we especially don’t need a god who created the stars in the same day when stars are still being made throughout even our own galaxy.

Our personal complexity is explained perfectly soundly by evolution – unless the same science that gave us laptops and projectors is really out to get us.

Science is not Faith

But don’t I need faith to believe that science works?

Fuck. No.

Let’s get one thing straight: the universe operates on a set of rules, and this is the only assumption science makes. This is how we’ve been able to throw things to the edge of our solar system with uncanny accuracy and invent light bulbs, by counting on the consistency of the universe. And it works.

You already accept the universe is consistent. If you put your finger on a hot stove and burn yourself, then you pass the same stove a week later, you’re probably not going to put your finger on it again. Such inductive rules could not be formed without consistency. This is why you’d be shocked as hell if an animal spoke to you, but less shocked after it had happened twenty times.

And for all of us the assumption of consistency is confirmed every single day. At that point it really stops being a terribly problematic assumption. Our problem is that you use consistency to get about your daily lives, but then want to tell me that a Canaanite Jew rose from the dead.

Faith is NOT a Good Thing

While we’re on the subject of faith…

You’d think that the scientific discrepancies with the bible would be enough to confirm the bible, and thus the religion based upon it, as fiction – but you, dear Christian, always have a trump card. That trump card is faith, which you will no doubt hide behind once all other arguments are exhausted. When you do, I always ask you to distinguish faith from gullibility for me. After all, the word “gullible” was invented for people who believe things without adequate reasons. So why is belief for the sake of belief suddenly a virtue, rather than a point of embarrassment when it is applied to god?

Reasons allow us to elevate one truth claim over another in terms of their credibility. It’s the reason we think the Earth is round, rather than flat, for instance. But faith doesn’t seem to do this. I cannot help but think that you surely realize this, and that you see the hollowness of faith in the hands of non-Christians. A Muslim believing because faith is insufficient to convince the Christian, for instance. In the hands of religions incompatible with your Christianity, faith is merely the means by which people maintain a series of errors, errors that could cost them eternal paradise (and then some) – not a virtue at all.

At its very best faith, it seems, is an immeasurably poor means to separate one idea from another in terms of credibility. In fact I can only wonder if there is any idea so at odds with reality, so positively lunatic, that faith cannot be used in its defense. It seems to me there is not, which reduces faith in my eyes to nothing more than gullibility pursued, and that is something no respectable person should be proud of. If you are honest with yourself, can you really expect me to think you are justified in believing impossible things merely because you have faith?

Faith and Morality

So why have I elected to be so vocal about your religion? Because Christians are good people with good intentions. Sadly, good intentions are not enough. Almost all of us have good intentions and are trying our very best to be moral. The problem is that what is moral changes based upon what is true. I’ll give you an example.

Imagine for a moment you are the mayor of a city and one day a man bursts into your office screaming that an Earthquake of sufficient magnitude to level the city will strike tomorrow and that everybody needs to be evacuated. However, upon talking to the man you remain unconvinced. In this situation both parties agree that if such an Earthquake is imminent that leaving its inhabitants to die would be immoral. You simply disagree on the reality of the Earthquake.

And so it is with religion. If what an individual says about god is true, then I’d wager most of his moral judgments logically follow. The nub, what changes everything, is whether or not that god exists.

This is how Christianity and the bible are used by perfectly well-intentioned to engage in actions that are counter-productive to societal well-being. Can there be any doubt that Christians who engage in this behavior do so because they are well-intentioned people who simply believe god commands it?

That’s not MY Religion

At this point, many more moderate believers will respond that the Christians I’m speaking of are not true Christians and will assure me that god commands something else. I will counter that I don’t believe it is enough for you, dear Christian moderate, to simply assert that your theology is different. The villains of faith are trying to act in accordance with god’s will, as are you. You just believe god wishes something different. But both your reasons for believing you are privy to the will of a Creator equally suck, and I cannot criticize unreason on the one hand while giving it a free pass on the other just because it happens to line up with reasonable conclusions sometimes. Faith is the corrupting factor in our religious enemies, and I cannot allow you to keep it alive because you have survived its application. As Sam Harris concisely put it; we do not need bad reasons to be good, and I will not disrespect you enough to treat you like you do.

Bad ideas survive because of bad reasoning. It makes no sense then to advance the antithesis of bad reasoning as the best (or even as a good) antidote for them. If we do, then what you deem as ‘good’ is very much the enemy of our effort to be better.

It has not been faith that has cured illnesses over the year, but medicine. If god exists, he created a world in which finding enough food was a day-to-day challenge. Through the application of reason, we have conquered that hurdle. If god exists then when he created the world he constructed tropical storms, presumably in such a way that they do not give warning of their approach. But with our minds alone we have robbed hurricanes of the element of surprise. Throughout human history we have faced a plethora of challenges, all of which we have conquered by keeping reasonable ideas and by rejecting unreasonable ideas, based entirely upon the consistency of the universe – because it works. It works so well that our lives are a veritable Utopia compared to those of generations before us. Reason is clearly mankind’s salvation, not faith. Not Jesus.

Even if I lament that irrationality barricades itself within good-natured people, I see what irrationality can do to their good intentions. I see how often believing inaccurate things takes someone’s good intentions and twists them into evil in both religious and non-religious people. The problem, the enemy, is not human nature (as many Christians would have us believe), but irrationality, and nothing canonizes irrationality as a virtue like faith. Because of this I must continue to fight faith with all of the facts at my disposal. Because of that, dear Christian, I must continue to assault your cherished beliefs. How can you blame me?

It is not because I hate you, but because it would be immoral not to, and I don’t wish to live as an immoral person.

VIDEO PART ONE / VIDEO PART TWO / VIDEO PART THREE

Richard Carrier "Why Science is Better Than Religion and Always Has Been...

2011-12-03T15:59:00.000-06:00

Christianity in a Nutshell

2011-12-01T17:24:00.000-06:00

Dan Barker summarizes the "good news" message of the bible in less than two minutes.This is from his talk at Skepticon 4. The full video can be found here: http://youtu.be/dup6xkvj1S0Subscribe to Hambone Productions for more great videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/HamboneProductions

The Pale Blue Dot - A Tribute to Carl Sagan

2011-12-01T16:54:00.000-06:00

From TheThinkingAtheist:

As I rejected religion for the first time in my late 30s, I only recently discovered the power and poetry of Carl Sagan's work, and as I was no longer bound by the constraints of religious thinking, I couldn't help but experience a feeling of profound gratitude that, even after his death, he could help me feel awe and wonder at the universe.

Mine is just one of many visual translations of his words. But with it, I hope that a new audience will be introduced to Carl Sagan and can experience this amazing look at the cosmos through his eyes. -Seth

The Thinking Atheist at Disbelief Discourse November 22, 2011 "The Shell...

2011-12-01T16:01:00.000-06:00

Seth spent an hour with the members of Oklahoma Atheists as the evening's featured speaker. In his presentation entitled "The Shell Game," he addresses the doubles standards and parlor tricks Christianity and other religious use to justify often contradictory, immoral and often ridiculous behavior.

Twenty Years After "Darwin on Trial", ID is Dead - Jason Rosenhouse - Science Blogs

2011-11-30T18:39:00.000-06:00

Twenty Years After "Darwin on Trial", ID is Dead - Jason Rosenhouse - Science Blogs:

I just spent the last week working out of my New Jersey office, which is to say I was visiting the family for Thanksgiving. Before that I was spending a lot of time going over the page proofs and compiling the index for the BECB (the big evolution/creationism book, for those not up on the local slang). So it's nice to see that particular project work its way down the home stretch.

It was probably sometime during 2006 when I first started thinking seriously about writing a book about my experiences at creationist conferences. When I first started mentally outlining the book I honestly thought ID would be the focus. That's not how things worked out. Among the five major sections of the book only one is devoted exclusively to ID. Once I started writing, it simply became clear that ID just isn't that isn't that interesting anymore.

When I first became aware of ID in the late nineties, I worried that evolution might have met its match. Not because of ID's scientific merits, of course. Even as a novice creationism-fighter first learning the relevant science it was clear to me that the ID arguments didn't hold up at all. Behe's arguments about irreducible complexity were logically fallacious, something that is clear even before you peruse the professional literature and discover that Behe's summaries of it were inaccurate. Dembski's probabilistic arguments were an even bigger disaster, since your average freshman math major could tell you there is no reasonable way of calculating the probability of evolving a flagellum or whatnot.

No, I worried because ID seemed to be providing something that a lot of people wanted. You see, many folks just flat don't like evolution. They have some vague notion that it's hostile to religion, and it does seem to lower the status of humanity within The Big Picture. But for many of those same people, YEC is just a bridge too far. They're not going to take their Bible literally or dismiss out of hand huge swaths of modern science.

Then here comes ID to provide what seems like a scientifically plausible form of anti-evolutionism. You could apparently oppose evolution without descending into outright religious obscurantism. I worried that people would find that sufficiently appealing to avoid looking too carefully at the details, rather like it's easier to just enjoy a chocolate covered Oreo than it is to think about what it's doing to your innards.

But that's not what happened. Even leaving aside the blow of Dover v. Kitzmiller, ID has simply collapsed under the weight of its own vacuity. In the nineties and early 2000s, ID seemed to be producing one novel argument after another. They were variations on familiar themes, of course, but books like Darwin on Trial, Darwin's Black Box, No Free Lunch and even Icons of Evolution, written by people with serious credentials and written with far more skill than the YEC's could muster, seemed to advance the discussion in original ways. These books attracted enormous interest among scientists, if only in the sense that they were promoting bad ideas that needed be countered. Many books were written to counter the ID's pretensions, and major science periodicals took notice of them.

Not so today. Consider the two biggest ID books of recent years. Michael Behe's follow-up book, The Edge of Evolution, dropped like a stone. It got a few perfunctory reviews written by scientists who perked up just long enough to note its many errors, and then everyone ignored it. Frankly, even the ID folks don't seem to talk about it very much. Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell was likewise met with crickets. It briefly seemed like a big deal, a big book released by a mainstream publisher, but scientists gave it a scan, saw nothing remotely new, and yawned.

Read more

Jason Rosenhouse received
his PhD in mathematics
from Dartmouth College in 2000.
He subsequently spent three years as a post-doc at
Kansas State University.
Observing the machinations of the Kansas Board of Education
led to his unhealthy obsession with issues related
to evolution and creationism.
Currently he is an Associate Professor of
Mathematics at James Madison University,
in Harrisonburg, VA.

Top 1% Tax Cut Bigger Than 99% Income

2011-11-30T16:50:00.000-06:00

If you're reading this odds are the richest 1% of Americans had a 2011 tax cut that was bigger than your entire 2011 salary. The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur explains.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/11/23/375654/bush-t...

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Religious trauma in ex-Muslims

2011-11-30T02:18:00.000-06:00

Religious trauma in ex-Muslims:

CBT Today, the magazine of the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies, recently published a feature on the psychological effects (fear of hell and guilt) in ex-Christians. Ed is writing an article on the effects in ex-Muslims. In response, Hassan Radwan writes: ‘Hell is one of the main reasons I left Islam and it is still an issue that I keep coming back to and have made videos about it on Youtube.

‘I was a devout Muslim for 48 years and the fear of Hell is something that runs deep amongst most Muslims – though they will never admit it.

‘The Qur’an is even more graphic than the Bible about Hell. Describing the tortures awaiting unbelievers in great detail. One can barely turn a page in the Qur’an without finding a reference to Hell.

‘It is nothing more than eternal torture.

‘I still find it hard to understand why in all the years I was a Muslim I could not see the absurd and impassable contradiction between a God who calls himself (in the Qur’an) “The Most Merciful of those who show Mercy” and eternal torture.

‘I used to make excuses – as I suppose many Christians do – that it was “metaphorical” and was in some way just a symbolic description of the pain one will suffer as a result of hurting others.

‘But it’s hard to maintain such a view in light of the graphic depictions of torture – even if one takes it as a metaphor – since it clearly indicates an unimaginably long period of unbearable pain and suffering for merely failing to believe in something that is open to reasonable doubt.’

If you want to make a contribution to the piece, email me at exmuslimcouncil@gmail.com and I can forward to Ed.

Alan Grayson: Trillions in bank bailouts by the Federal Reserve

2011-11-29T14:44:00.000-06:00

Former U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) tells Keith how an audit of the Federal Reserve shows that the agency "play[ed] Russian roulette" with the U.S. dollar over the course of more than $26 trillion worth of bank bailouts.

Tune in Weeknights at 8:00/7:00c on Current TV

Go to Countdown with Keith Olbermann on Current TV for more:
http://www.current.com/shows/countdown

Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson at Montclair Kimberley Academy - 01/29/2010

2011-11-28T20:03:00.000-06:00

A discussion about science, society, and the universe with Stephen Colbert, who is out of character, at the Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey.

Why Are You Atheists So Angry? Greta Christina Skepticon 4

2011-11-26T15:54:00.000-06:00

Comedian Christian Finnegan on why watching no news is better than watch...

2011-11-25T11:43:00.000-06:00

Comedian Christian Finnegan provides "Countdown" guest host David Shuster with perspective on why a new Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found that, on average, Fox News viewers know less about news and current events than people who do not follow the news at all. Finnegan concedes that regardless of its value as a source of news, Fox News will continue to dominate: "In a debate between a smart person and a stupid person, stupid will always win."

Proof That Fox News Viewers are Dumber Than People Who Don't Watch News ...

2011-11-25T11:40:00.000-06:00

Thanks A Lot. Really. I Mean It.

2011-11-24T08:03:00.000-06:00

Thanks A Lot. Really. I Mean It.:

So, Thanksgiving in America. I’m finding myself thankful for a lot of things today. I’m thankful that once I finish today’s shift, I’m free for four days. So, thank you, Sarah Josepha Hale. Thank you for not giving up until we had ourselves a holiday, and for so much else besides.

Thank you, Tree Lobsters, for combining two outrages into something that pokes a sharp bit of fun at the offending idiots:

Tree Lobsters: A Very Megyn Kelly Thanksgiving

Thank you, my amazing, incredible, and deeply appreciated readers, for being the best damned group of readers on the internet. Thank you for making all this worthwhile.

Thank you, my fellow Freethought Bloggers, for bringing me on board, and making me a part of the best damned atheist and freethought collective anywhere.

Thank you, all you writers who taught me how to string a useful sentence together, and ignited me.

Thank you, my dear friends, for joining me in adventure and pulling my irons out of the fire when such becomes necessary. There are far too many of you to call out by name in this short little post, but there will be a roll call in my first book.

Thank you, denizens and creators of the internet, for all the info, without which I couldn’t find things like tasty restaurants and reliable mechanics and science blogs and those weird factoids that suddenly become essential to a scene in the wee hours of the morning when the poor research librarians are trying to sleep.

Thank you, bloggers, for pouring out your passion in prose and podcasts and pictures and video.

Thank you, OWS folks, for taking a stand.

Thank you, scientists, for figuring out how life, the universe and everything works: a journey of discovery that will probably never finish, and which has been one hell of a fun ride.

Thank you, teachers, for giving me the foundation necessary to understand what the scientists are saying, and introducing me to so very many worlds.

Thank you, Mom, Mom and Dad, for giving me this life and then helping me navigate the sometimes wickedly complicated and frequently surprising thing.

Thank you, parents and people and places and pets and all the things in this wide, wild and wonderful universe, for everything that makes this life both possible and worth the living.

Gracias y salud.

The Virus of GOP Ignorance: Why Don't Media Protect Us From the Lies Spewed in the Republican Primary?

2011-11-24T04:22:00.000-06:00

The Virus of GOP Ignorance: Why Don't Media Protect Us From the Lies Spewed in the Republican Primary?:

Reporters representing reliable media outlets are supposed to defend the discourse from the virus of this ignorance.

Humanists launch “Naughty” awareness campaign

2011-11-24T04:06:00.000-06:00

Humanists launch “Naughty” awareness campaign: This week, the American Humanist Association announced the launch of their holiday advertisement campaign aimed to raise awareness of discrimination against nonbelievers in America.

Related articles:

Humanists Launch Largest National Advertising Campaign Critical of Religious Scripture

British Humanists lend support to the ‘Equal Love’ campaign

Evangelical chaplain endorser shows ignorance, hostility toward military humanists and atheists

Flying Saucers and Gospels

2011-11-23T18:44:00.000-06:00

Flying Saucers and Gospels: By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~

I watched a very interesting TV program recently on the Military Channel titled, “Unsolved History: Roswell.” It dealt with three of the earliest UFO stories of the late 1940s. The show’s approach was to recreate the conditions of the original sightings as closely as possible in order to produce plausible explanations for what actually happened, what the people involved actually saw, without the flying saucers.

One segment of the show dealt with the famous Roswell incident of 1947. In it, a farmer in Roswell, NM discovers what appears to be wreckage. The debris includes what looks like large sheets of aluminum foil and other metallic pieces and parts. The farmer reported the wreckage to the local police, who in turn notified the military at the local Air Force base. The incident was on the local and national news for about a week and then nothing was heard about it for another 30 years or so. At the time, the military claimed the wreckage was from a radar-tracking balloon (and, later, a new type of top secret surveillance balloon).

Then, in 1978 a ufologist interviewed an Air Force major who had been involved in the original recovery of the debris in 1947. The major expressed his belief that the military had actually recovered an alien spacecraft and covered it up. This, of course, was not part of his original story. Later, a couple other alleged witnesses became involved and conspiracy theorists began claiming that the military had found a flying saucer and, possibly, even aliens, and were covering it up.

On the TV show, they took 6 people to a similar area for what they called a short nature walk. They fitted each with a helmet containing a camera. The experiment, designed by a psychologist who specialized in human memory, was intended to compare what the people later said they saw with what they actually saw, as verified by the cameras.

During their 20 minute walk through hilly, desert scrub terrain, they walked past a scene created by the designers of the experiment. In the scene, there was a uniformed soldier with a rifle walking around an area of wreckage, with standard yellow police tape cordoning off the area. The leader of the nature walk group explained very briefly to the 6 experimental subjects that something had crashed and the military was protecting the evidence and telling people to just pass quickly and pay it no attention.

A month later, the psychologist gathered the subjects together again and asked them to describe what they had seen on their nature walk. One woman said she had seen 2 soldiers who pointed their rifles at the party as they neared the wreckage. She said she was quite frightened. She was asked to rate her confidence that the story she related was factual on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 signifying little confidence and 5 signifying certainty. She chose 5.

When the experimenters examined the film from that woman’s helmet cam, they found that she had actually never seen any soldiers, and there actually was only one at the site anyway. Obviously, she couldn’t have seen 2 soldiers point rifles at the party since she never saw a soldier at all.

The key here, as the psychologist explained, is that the woman absolutely believed the story she told. She was not lying. She knew she had worn a helmet cam so that her story could be verified, yet she related that she was certain of the facts of her story.

Our memories do not work like computer memories. Each time we call up a memory, it is changed at least slightly, before we put it away again. Also, anything we have learned from others relating to a memory can change that memory, and we are prone to accepting suggestions, unconsciously, from others concerning that memory. Over time, the memory deteriorates more and more until, in some cases, as in the case of this woman, the memory bears little or no resemblance to what actually happened. There is no doubt that we all carry around thousands of false memories in our heads. This has been proved repeatedly in court cases, of child abuse especially. During interrogations, the suggestions implied in the questions can begin to get integrated into the memory.

In the case of the experiment described above. It appears that the subjects discussed with each other, if only briefly, what they had seen, perhaps suggesting to each other further details of what they might or might not have seen – or even what they expected to see. These discussions, and the witnesses repeated retellings of their stories over the month, led to major changes in the memories of the subjects.
I read of an interesting incident by a memory researcher illustrating how much a memory can be changed. He said he was talking with his brother one day about some of their childhood experiences and mentioned when his bicycle had been stolen. His brother corrected him. It was the brother’s bicycle which had been stolen. Apparently, in telling and retelling the story over the years, his memory of it had been dramatically altered.

Another illustration of the lack of accuracy of our memories concerns viewpoint. As you recall some past incident in your mind’s eye, notice that you see it as if you were watching yourself in the recreated scene from some distance away, and often from above, as though you were watching a movie of it. This is obviously not at all what you actually saw through your eyes as the event was taking place. You could not have seen yourself in the actual event because your eyes were not on yourself, but on the other actors and scenery of the event.

So what does all this have to do with the Gospels? Well, consider first how that woman in the TV experiment had her memory altered considerably while believing that she remembered perfectly. Now consider how that change in her memory was over just one month’s time. Now recall that the earliest Gospel is believed to date from at least 30 years after the death of Jesus (if there ever was a real Jesus), even by Christian scholars. If 30 days can do that much to a memory, what do you suppose 30 years can do? And recall that the Gospel authors must have been hearing many stories concerning Jesus’ life and retelling those stories over a 30 year span. Now, even if they had witnessed some of the events of Jesus’ life, their memories would doubtless have been drastically changed by the time they wrote down their stories. And, after 30 years of thousands of people telling and retelling the stories, there would be many different versions in the air by the time they were written down, much the same as there are many versions of popular urban legends today.

Clearly, we have solid scientific reasons for doubting the details of the Gospels. This is especially true since so much of the Gospels entail what purport to be direct quotes from Jesus. In fact, some of them are very long quotes, and, in places, there are long strings of quotes. What prodigious memories these authors must have had! (Although few scholars believe the authors were actual witnesses to begin with.) And, the disciples were all illiterate, not note-takers, so how accurate could their stories have been, years after the fact?

Now, the poorly informed believer might object here that all this memory failure and cross-pollination of stories is irrelevant because the Gospel stories are really revelations from god, and the authors were merely his instruments. Unfortunately, the many, many contradictions between the Gospels put the lie to this theory. For example, in the matter of who sees Jesus first after his alleged resurrection:

Mark - Jesus appears first to Mary Magdalena then later to “the eleven”
Matthew - Jesus appears first to Mary Magdalena, then to the other Mary, and finally to ”the eleven”
Luke - Jesus appears first to “two,” then to Simon, then to “the eleven”
John - Jesus appears first to Mary Magdalena, then the disciples without Thomas, then the disciples with Thomas

Obviously, at least 3 of these accounts are wrong, and more likely, all 4 are wrong.

But, shouldn’t their recollections of the most extraordinary events of Jesus life have been more accurate – or, wouldn’t the stories they heard from others be more likely to be accurate if they contained such events? Not necessarily. The following statement was posted on a Christian web site. “A missionary I know watched a bullet headed for him do a RIGHT ANGLE before it got to him.” This was posted with no apparent fear of dispute or mockery. Clearly, the author of this extraordinary event believed it and expects the reader to believe it as well. Now consider that this fellow was writing in the 21st century, and that perfectly formed, correctly spelled sentence suggests a reasonable level of formal education. Now consider that the Gospel writers were writing in a pre-scientific age of rampant superstition, when magic was practically a part of everyday life.

If a Middle Eastern man of the 1st century heard a wild story about a man who was dead several days and then just woke up, how likely was he to believe it and repeat it? I would say extremely likely, especially since billions of people in our century have heard the same story and believe it.

All in all, given the wide acceptance of superstition and magic in the 1st century, coupled with an almost complete lack of scientific knowledge, and the known distortions wrought by time on human memory, it would be a miracle if the Gospels contained more than the slightest shadow of factual accuracy. In fact, I am confident that we can safely file them alongside more modern flying saucer stories as tall tales.

The Ultimate Story

2011-11-23T18:29:00.000-06:00

The Ultimate Story: By Xrayman ~

What follows is the ultimate story of failed prayer that unfolded at my workplace recently. It was a terrible tragedy that happened to the family of a wonderful friend and coworker...

I am an x-ray tech at a Level One Trauma center in Lansing Michigan which is the go to place for the victims of horrific car accidents and other mishaps causing life threatening bodily injury. When an ambulance or chopper arrives on site, our x-ray department responds to the ER with a portable x-ray machine to the trauma room. In my 17 years I’ve seen it all, and early on you learn to put up a huge emotional wall to protect your sanity, but from time to time that emotional wall can break down as it did in the story that follows.

As my shift was nearing its conclusion late last Friday evening around 11pm, the trauma pager sounded with the print out reading..”M.V.A.(motor vehicle accident) high speed 18 Y.O. male ejected from vehicle. Neck injuries vital signs stable.” Soon after this alert one of my coworkers Michelle is a dear friend, frantically called and informed us that her 18 year old nephew Robert had been involved in a serious car accident and was in route to our facility. When the kid arrived in the ER he was assessed, stabilized, and immediately sent to Cat Scan. The news was not good. This strapping, athletic young man had suffered a broken neck at two levels. ER doctors were unsure whether this injury would result in paralysis or permanent disability of any kind, but thankfully there appeared to be no life threatening injuries including any brain trauma.

My coworker Michelle, the aunt of the victim comes from a wonderful, extremely close Catholic family. She is one of five siblings who all live within a few miles of their parents, and are all the very best of friends. They live in a small farming community where the lives of its members often revolve around activities of the local Catholic Church. When the word spread of the terrible accident, calls to prayer were fast and furious in this tightly knit village of 800. The Facebook pages were alive with prayer for Robert as well. Michelle set up an update web page for her nephew reporting his condition and progress. 99% of the comments on this page included the mention of prayers for Robert’s recovery. There is no other group like the Catholics who can live their lives no differently than this atheist, yet can turn hyper religious in a heartbeat as seen in this situation as my coworker was posting scripture.

Robert was very stable Friday night, but was put on a ventilator to keep him well sedated. Saturday he was sent to surgery for a lengthy operation in which plates and screws where inserted to repair and stabilize his neck. After he came out of the O.R. the family had a meeting with the veteran neurosurgeon and asked the question on everyone’s mind: “Will Robert ever walk again?” The surgeon was frank, “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.” This type of injury has seen results varying from complete below the neck paralysis, to a complete full recovery. It was a very indecisive type of spinal cord injury that could also leave this youth somewhere in the middle with partial paralysis, but Robert had youth and great health on his side, which is huge as well as his dedicated family who never left his side for support.

Three days after the accident I punched into work on Monday and immediately found my dear friend Michelle. I asked her as to the progress of her nephew. Michelle said he was moving his hands and wrists which was a very good sign of ruling out below the neck paralysis, but he still was unable to wiggle his toes. Robert was giving thumbs up to his family and friends and he was almost ready to have his breathing tube removed.

Michelle said to me, “Bill I know you are an atheist and don’t believe in them, but I truly think God performs miracles and I am confident my nephew will walk again.” But even after her statement of faith in her “all mighty” God and healer, she knew her nephew may be spending his life in a wheelchair which was just breaking her heart.

Now for the grandest of ironies: this young man went into cardiac arrest exactly when the community was gathered in the church praying for him.Robert had made it past the point in his recovery where his life was out of danger so his parents finally went home for a while to get showered and tend to their other two children. They needed to start making arrangements for Robert’s transfer to a rehab hospital for he faced months of intense rehabilitation. The support this family received from the friends, family, and community was overwhelming; besides the multitude of prayers people were coming together offering real tangible assistance as well. A special mass was planned at the Catholic church Monday night so all those who could come, could gather together and pray for this star player of the High School’s baseball team. All the religion aside this was one of the greatest displays of human love, action and support I have ever seen.

On Monday night I was coming down the last hour of my shift at the hospital when the unthinkable happened. It was the most horrible thing as I heard the hospital wide overhead announcement: “Code Blue NCU-02..Code Blue NCU-02” I knew this was Robert’s room. For reasons completely unknown, with his life seemingly out of danger, Robert went into cardiac arrest and died. They worked on this kid for 45 minutes with everything they had to bring him back, but finally pronounced him dead at 7:45pm. As I drove home from work that night I was sick to my stomach and feeling so much sorrow for this family. It was just an awful helpless feeling. What makes this situation worse is the fact that a seat belt would have absolutely saved his life for he was ejected from the vehicle. Also it was discovered that alcohol was a factor so one of Robert’s best friends, the driver, will now face vehicular manslaughter charges.

Now for the grandest of ironies: this young man went into cardiac arrest exactly when the community was gathered in the church praying for him.

I’ve never seen a situation where prayer had proven itself to fail so miserably. I’ve never seen a situation in which I have been this close where so many people were joined in prayer and where those prayers were absolutely futile. Michelle was devastated obviously and I have only spoken to her for a brief moment since Robert’s death but one thing she did say to me..”I truly believe God took Robert like this because he knew this active athlete and outdoors-man could not go on living the rest of his life in a wheelchair.”

Michelle’s statement disturbed me at many levels, but exposed the instant game of mental gymnastics a Christian can play when the desired outcome of their intense prayers fail. I bit my tongue and instantly thought to myself, “Why the fuck did God have to take his life? Why instead didn’t God just allow Robert to make a full recovery and go on the live a full productive life instead of sending him into a fatal cardiac arrest?”

What else was really disconcerting as the atheist looking in on this terrible tragedy is the fact, despite this kid’s demise and horrifying end to this story, God still remains the hero worthy of worship. He gets no blame in this untimely death. Now his job is to comfort the family and help them carry on. “Pray for the family.” “God never gives us anything we can’t handle.” In addition if one or both of the parents go through a period of doubting or hating God, more than likely they will give their testimony that while they once were mad at God, they now realize that He is the one who carried them through.

In conclusion, working at a large busy hospital one message is abundantly clear: Life isn’t fair and never will be. Terrible things happen to wonderful undeserving people through causation, chance, and coincidence. To invoke a grand plan of a divine creator in a situation like this makes absolutely no sense and it makes absolutely no sense that people like this wonderful family can't see things as we do. The world operates exactly as a Godless world would operate.

Pepper Spray Video is an 'Iconic Moment' of OWS (Occupy Wall Street) Mov...

2011-11-23T06:01:00.000-06:00

'Political Sociopath' Newt Gingrich Spends The Weekend Pandering To The ...

2011-11-23T05:41:00.000-06:00

A Christian Reaction to ‘We Are Atheism’ Article: Not Enough Christianity In It

2011-11-23T05:19:00.000-06:00

A Christian Reaction to ‘We Are Atheism’ Article: Not Enough Christianity In It:

There’s a nice article making the rounds by Kimberly Winston of the Religion News Service about the “We Are Atheism” campaign:

“It’s time for us to all stand up, speak out and be counted,” said Amanda Brown, 25, one of the co-founders. “It is time for us to put up our videos and change the face of atheism. We want people to see we are normal people who have children and lives and do good in the community.”
Brown was inspired to start the campaign with her husband and a friend when she attended a talk by Jessica Ahlquist, a teenage atheist who was taunted and bullied after she objected to a “school prayer” banner hung in her Rhode Island high school.

I posted about the campaign when it launched and even contributed a video for it. I know what this campaign is about.

It’s about letting other atheists know that they’re not alone, that they have support from the larger secular community, that we know what they’re going through, that it gets better.

Bobby Ross Jr. at Get Religion misses that point completely. He’s upset because this article about “evangelical atheists” (his words) doesn’t fact check the stories of the atheists or feature any religion scholars:

… while the heroes in the story are quoted by name, the villains — those God-believers out there allegedly persecuting atheists — are left vague and nameless. No one who believes in a higher power get to react to the atheists. No one gets to debate the facts in any of these clashes. No one engages in dialogue. No traditional theologians are enlisted to discuss whether, in fact, the atheists are becoming a religious group. Minus the F-word (faith), that is.
Maybe I’m alone, but I read this type of story and want to scream: Wait a minute! I believe in God, and I think atheists are wrong, but this is a free country and they have every right not to believe. Is it asking too much to want to see that point of view reflected?
My point is this: If we’re going to keep reading evangelical atheist stories, wouldn’t it be nice to see journalists approach this topic from a wider, more diverse, perspective? Wouldn’t it be nice to see some believers and scholars quoted? Wouldn’t it be nice to see some actual journalistic skepticism brought to the atheists’ publicity campaigns?

Yes, Bobby, you’re alone on this.

As I wrote on his site, this story doesn’t deserve a Christian reaction. It’s not about them. It’s about the atheists who have been treated badly as a result of things that are said by Christians/pastors/etc. It about letting other atheists know that we can be out and proud and it doesn’t always hurt us — even in conservative areas.

There’s no need for a Christian perspective. There’s no argument being made where we need to hear a dissenting view. There’s nothing they can offer to shine more light on this piece. You want to know more about the Jessica Ahlquist case? Read the dozens of articles that have already been written about her. Those articles name names and point out exactly who the ignorant bigots are. Ditto with Damon Fowler and everybody else who has suffered at the hands of some Christians.

We also don’t need a Christian to tell us that not all Christians are bad people. We know that. We know many Christians are good, kind people who would never condone bullying. The “We Are Atheism” videos don’t suggest otherwise.

Ross says he wants a “scholar” quoted in the piece. Why? To point out that atheists are a growing demographic? It wouldn’t matter even if we weren’t.

He also asks for “journalistic skepticism” without pointing out what we ought to be skeptical of… I didn’t see any glaring errors, but feel free to point out the dubious facts to me, and I’ll get answers.

This is the kind of response one would expect from a Christian who gets defensive because he read an article portraying atheists in a positive light.

Can’t have that happening now, can we?

Child Rape, Penn State and the Catholic Church: Is Religion Especially Bad?

2011-11-23T04:46:00.000-06:00

Child Rape, Penn State and the Catholic Church: Is Religion Especially Bad?:

The child rape scandal at Penn State raises inevitable comparisons with the Catholic Church. Does religion make these kinds of abuses worse?

Solar Eclipse on Friday Could Wow Small Audience

2011-11-23T04:32:00.000-06:00

Solar Eclipse on Friday Could Wow Small Audience:

This Friday (Nov. 25), a rather large partial eclipse of the sun will be on view -- but only for a relatively small audience.

[More]

Lind Media Billboard Company: If you are not religious, you are “obscene, unnecessarily offensive and/or not in the best interests of the community at large”

2011-11-23T04:12:00.000-06:00

Lind Media Billboard Company: If you are not religious, you are “obscene, unnecessarily offensive and/or not in the best interests of the community at large”:

Short version of the story: Some Ohio Atheists had arranged to have a couple of “god is not real” billboards put up, raised the money, got the artwork and mockups done, the whole nine yards. Then, at the last second Lind Media company decided that Atheistic Billboards would be wrong, so they pulled out.

Documentation, including an admission from Maura Siegenthaler, Vice President of Lind Media Company, which is on North Main Street in Mansfield, Ohio, that they felt “… the inflammatory nature of the proposed displays would no doubt be considered offensive to much of the community and would be harmful to Lind’s community reputation and goodwill” is HERE on the Mid Ohio Atheists site.

If you are a company that uses billboards, consider the possibility that using Lind Media is not a good idea. I for on, if I see a Lind Media tag on a billboard, will instantly launch a personal boycott of that product no matter what it is. If you own or work in a decision making capacity for a company that uses billboards, and you are a free thinker or simply believe in free speech and open dialog rather than crushing opinions you don’t agree with and silencing those that think differently than you do, then you might consider avoiding Lind Media Company entirely.

If you live in the region where Lind Media Company works, and you know of any of their billboards, have a look and let us know what companies are advertising on them! We can write some letters, raise a little dust.

Afghan woman's choice: 12 years in jail or marry her rapist and risk death - Nick Paton Walsh and Masoud Popalza - CNN

2011-11-23T03:10:00.000-06:00

Afghan woman's choice: 12 years in jail or marry her rapist and risk death - Nick Paton Walsh and Masoud Popalza - CNN:

The ordeal of Gulnaz did not simply begin and end with the physical attack of her rape. The rape began a years-long nightmare of further pain, culminating in an awful choice she must now make.

Even two years later, Gulnaz remembers the smell and state of her rapist's clothes when he came into the house when her mother left for a brief visit to the hospital.

"He had filthy clothes on as he does metal and construction work. When my mother went out, he came into my house and he closed doors and windows. I started screaming, but he shut me up by putting his hands on my mouth," she said.

The rapist was her cousin's husband.

After the attack, she hid what happened as long as she could. But soon she began vomiting in the mornings and showing signs of pregnancy. It was her attacker's child.

In Afghanistan, this brought her not sympathy, but prosecution. Aged just 19, she was found guilty by the courts of sex outside of marriage -- adultery -- and sentenced to twelve years in jail.

Now inside Kabul's Badam Bagh jail, she and her child are serving her sentence together.

Sitting with the baby in her lap, her face carefully covered, she explains the only choice she has that would end her incarceration.

The only way around the dishonor of rape, or adultery in the eyes of Afghans, is to marry her attacker. This will, in the eyes of some, give her child a family and restore her honor.

Excusing the Old Testament

2011-11-23T02:49:00.000-06:00