Freethought News

Habeas Corpus Gone

2006-10-31T18:08:00.000-05:00

Dawkins on the Colbert Report

2006-10-11T21:50:00.000-05:00

Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist and author of the new bestseller, The God Delusion, is scheduled to appear on The Colbert Report, on Comedy Central TV, at 11:30 pm. EST on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2006.

Check your local listing for viewing times.

Comedy Central

Find out what's behind Richard Dawkins' new best selling book The God Delusion

Be sure to tune in!

Jesus Camp, Say it ain't so.

2006-10-08T20:44:00.000-05:00

What do I think of Jesus Camp? Speechless, that was my first reaction. When Sam Harris talks about religious moderates, as part of the problem, this is a tiny example of the problem manifesting itself. The below ABC news story outlines the thinking of the group behind Jesus Camp, a documentary outlining an actual camp for children.

As I watched this I felt like it was some sort of spoof. For a moment it seemed as though they were paying the camp spokesperson to say things that would put her views way outside of the mainstream. This is no spoof; these people actually want to indoctrinate these children with the idea of giving up their lives for Jesus. She clearly makes a comparison between the children in the camp and the Islamic indoctrination that occurs in the Muslim world, the kind seen in great movies like Syriana.

This is so utterly disturbing.

After watching this, I found a good Bill Mayer video conversation that helped me feel much better about the atrocities seen in the above video. I for a long time, and still somewhat think that religion is the root of all evil and causes more trouble than its worth. An awesome quote by Reza Aslan, Author of No God but God near the end of the clip helps me to see that this might not always be the case.

This mythology that there are some religions that are religions of the sword and some are not, is bullshit. ... The fact of the matter is, it’s not religion that is violent or peaceful, its people who are violent or peaceful.
...
The thing about religion is it provides a powerful language through which you can justify any ideology, piece and tolerance or ideologies of fanaticism.

I understand this assessment and believe that religion is a dangerous weapon which not only allows justification, but a sort of brainwashing through lies and promise of unrealistic proportions.

Fast for me, won't you?

2006-10-03T20:45:00.000-05:00

I’m sure most of you know about the very special Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur that was just observed yesterday, technically nightfall Sunday to nightfall Monday. It is considered one of the most holy days of the year for them and is commemorated with a whopping 25-hour fast and intensive prayer.

Personally, I like Jews over Christians because generally speaking Jews seem to be closer to reality than your everyday Christian. I mean with the whole second coming of Jesus BS.

This short video goes into detail on why most religions ask their followers to fast and why there is such negative attention attached to sex in relation to religion. This video quickly explains why Sex and even eating on special days is considered sinful.

Watch the video and tell me it isn’t true.

The Pope Speaks Madness in Riddles of Faith

2006-10-02T20:20:00.000-05:00

Sam Harris is at it again, actually he writes very often on a site he is associated with, truthdig.com.

We all know the Pope recent speech raised some media and international hell. I read most of the Pope’s speech at the request of my semi-religious friend and found it wrongly touching up on the subject of reason in ways that simply doesn’t exist from the faith based perspective.

After talking to my semi-religious friend about it and doing some searches online, I found Sam Harris’s comments on the Pope’s speech, and, my goodness, the man said what I thought (lightly and naively) with great confidence and precision.

Source: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060916_sam_harris_rottweiler_barks/

Sam Harris: "God's Rottweiler" Barks
truthdig.com | 09.16.2006

The world is still talking about the pope’s recent speech—a speech so boring, convoluted and oblique to the real concerns of humanity that it could well have been intended as a weapon of war. It might start a war, in fact, given that it contained a stupendously derogatory appraisal of Islam. For some reason, the Holy Father found it necessary to quote the Emperor Manual II Paleologos, who said: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman....” Now the Muslim world is buzzing with pious rage. It’s a pity that Pope Benedict doesn’t also draw cartoons. Joining a craven chorus of terrified supplicants, The New York Times has urged him to muster a “deep and persuasive’’ apology. He now appears to be mincing his way toward the performance of just such a feat.

While the pope succeeded in enraging millions of Muslims, the main purpose of his speech was to chastise scientists and secularists for being, well, too reasonable. It seems that nonbelievers still (perversely) demand too much empirical evidence and logical support for their worldview. Believing that he was cutting to the quick of the human dilemma, the pope reminded an expectant world that science cannot pull itself up by its own bootstraps: It cannot, for instance, explain why the universe is comprehensible at all. It turns out that this is a job for… (wait for it) … Christianity. Why is the world susceptible to rational understanding? Because God made it that way. While the pope is not much of a conjurer, many intelligent and well-intentioned people imagined they actually glimpsed a rabbit in this old hat. Andrew Sullivan, for instance, praised the pope’s “deep and complicated” address for its “clarity and openness.” Here is the heart of the pope’s argument, excerpted from his concluding remarks. I have added my own commentary throughout.

“The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizon....”

The pope suggests that reason should be broadened to include the empirically unverifiable. And is there any question these new “vast horizons” will include the plump dogmas of the Catholic Church? Here, the pope gets the spirit of science exactly wrong. Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable). And it does mean to exclude the gratuitously stupid. With these distinctions in mind, consider one of the core dogmas of Catholicism, from the Profession of Faith of the Roman Catholic Church:

“I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice is offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the Body and the Blood, together with the soul and the divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and there is a change of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into Blood; and this change the Catholic Mass calls transubstantiation. I also profess that the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species.”

While one can always find a Catholic who is reluctant to admit that cannibalism lies at the heart of the faith, there is no question whatsoever that the Church intends the above passage to be read literally. The real presence of the body and blood of Christ at the Mass is to be understood as a material fact. As such, this is a claim about the physical world. It is, as it happens, a perfectly ludicrous claim about the physical world. (Unlike most religious claims, however, the doctrine of Transubstantiation is actually falsifiable. It just happens to be false.) Despite the pope’s solemn ruminations on the subject, reason is not so elastic as to encompass the favorite dogmas of Catholicism. Needless to say, the virgin birth of Jesus, the physical resurrection of the dead, the entrance of an immortal soul into the zygote at the moment of conception, and almost every other article of the Catholic faith will land in the same, ill-dignified bin. These are beliefs that Catholics hold without sufficient reason. They are, therefore, unreasonable. There is no broadening of the purview of 21st-century rationality that can, or should, embrace them.

“Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today....”

It is ironic that a man who has just disparaged Islam as “evil” and “inhuman” before 250,000 onlookers and the world press is now talking about a “genuine dialogue of cultures.” How much genuine dialogue can he hope for? The Koran says that anybody who believes that Jesus was divine—as all real Catholics must—will spend eternity in hell (Koran 5:71-75; 19:30-38). This appears to be a deal-breaker. The pope knows this. The Muslim world knows that he knows it. And he knows that the Muslim world knows that he knows it. This is not a good basis for interfaith dialogue.

“In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures....”

Astrologers don’t like “their most profound convictions” attacked either. Neither do people who believe that space aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Happily, these groups do not take to the streets and start killing people when their irrational beliefs are challenged. I suspect that the pope would be the first to admit that there are millions of people on this Earth who harbor “most profound convictions” that are neither profound nor compatible with real dialogue. Indeed, one doesn’t even need to read between the lines of his speech to glean that he would place the entire Muslim world beyond the “universality of reason.” He is surely right to be alarmed by Islam—particularly by its doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. He is right to find the treatment of Muslim women throughout the world abhorrent (if, indeed, he does find it abhorrent). He is right to be concerned that any Muslim who converts to Christianity (or to atheism) has put his life in jeopardy, as conversion away from the faith is punishable by death. These profundities are worthy objects of our derision. No apologies necessary, Your Holiness.

We might, however, note in passing that one of the pope’s “most profound convictions” is that contraception is a sin. His agents continue to preach this diabolical dogma in the developing world, and even in sub-Saharan Africa, where over 3 million people die from AIDS each year. This is unconscionable and irredeemably stupid. It is also a point on which the Church has not shown much of an intelligent capacity for dialogue. Despite their inclination to breed themselves into a state of world domination, Muslims tend to be far more reasonable on the subject of family planning. They do not consider the use of temporary forms of birth control to be a sin.

“Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought—to philosophy and theology....”

This may have been where Sullivan found the Holy Father to be particularly “deep and complicated” and “profound.” Granted, questions of epistemology can make one sweat, and there are many interesting and even controversial things to be said about the foundations of our knowledge. The pope has not said anything interesting or controversial here, however. He has merely insinuated that placing the God of Abraham at the back of every natural process will somehow reduce the quotient of mystery in the cosmos. It won’t. Nearly a billion Hindus place three gods—Brahma (the Creator), Vishnu (the Preserver) and Shiva (the Destroyer)—in the space provided. Just how intellectually illuminating should we find that?

“The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur—this is the program with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God”, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor....”

Please read that first sentence again. I hope it doesn’t seem peevish to point out that the West faces several dangers even greater than those posed by an incomplete epistemology. The West is endangered, primarily, by the religious fragmentation of the human community, by religious impediments to clear thinking, and by the religious willingness of millions to sacrifice the real possibility of happiness in this world for a fantasy of a world to come. We are living in a world where untold millions of grown men and women can rationalize the violent sacrifice of their own children by recourse to fairy tales. We are living in world where millions of Muslims believe that there is nothing better than to be killed in defense of Islam. We are living in a world in which millions of American Christians hope to soon be raptured into the sky by Jesus so that they can safely enjoy the holy genocide that will inaugurate the end of human history. We are living in a world in which a silly old priest, by merely giving voice to his religious inanities, could conceivably start a war with 1.4 billion Muslims who take their own inanities in deadly earnest. These are real dangers. And they are not dangers for which more “Biblical faith” is a remedy.

Touching

2006-09-28T00:05:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone, Antonio Here, I am aware this isn't much of a breakthrough video on scientific research or a heated debate between parties, but it brought me to tears, it reminded me of something most of us forget, on a daily basis.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did and I hope it inspires you to continue on your lifelong journey, whatever it might be.

Peace, Love and Respect.
Antonio.

Electronic Voting Machine, Exposed!

2006-09-24T14:53:00.000-05:00

Princeton University shows how electronic voting machines used in many states around the US can be tampered with stealing votes and impossible to track down.

This particular Diebold machine will be used for 10% of the U.S. electorate this November.

The makers of this video urge public officials to address these issues promptly. More details, including a full technical paper containing a more complete security analysis and discussion of mitigation strategies can be found on their website: http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting

Please pass this information on and keep the US as democratic as possible.

Atheist Video Rebuttal Comment

2006-09-10T20:35:00.000-05:00

Zachary Kroger (zakiechan) has created a new Atheist video. Check it out below. (Thanks to YouTube)

Another YouTube user (vulkanom) has created a video in response to Zak's Atheist Video. See response video here

This is my response to the video by vulkanom, left as a comment on the video's youtube page:

After writing this responce, I started to read the comments left behind for vulkanom. They are hallarious! I suggest you read them as well.

I patiently waited through the entire presentation to see what you would say about Carl Sagan's Words:

"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." -Carl Sagan

You didn't say anything about the above quote, you decided to comment on another quote from Carl Sagan:

"Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proves." -Carl Sagan

Your response: "Show me your proves!"

Ok...
First of all, you are the one making extraordinary claims. God, heaven, hell and all the other silly things you want to believe in is extraordinary. Scientists including Carl Sagan aren't making extraordinary claims, they only make claims based on what they observe and test through the scientific method. There is nothing observable or testable about a God.

To answer your question regarding proves:
We as a species, the human race, have expanded our knowledge and experience greatly in the general study that we call science. With the help of our recent technological revolution, computers and the Internet, we are making incredible scientific finds (through proof and experimentation).

Little can be said about a God because there is no proof and there is no experiment that can be done to test its existence.

No where in all this research have scientists come remotely close to finding some testable proof that an omnipotent being such as the god you claim to exist.

That's why you call it faith, and faith is belief without logical proof. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you're belief will always be only what you think and nothing else since there is nothing you can do to prove it.

This site isn't mine, but something you should consider looking into, its very informative. I'd like to see you create a video on some of the long premises spoken about in this site:http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/

Another point of interest is a short video spoken by Sam Harris an outspoken freethinker. Sam Harris at Idea City '05 (YouTube Video)

Leandro
Freethinker,
Fort Lauderdale, FL

This responce blogged at: http://www.freethoughtnews.com/blog/2006/09/atheist-video-rebuttal-comment.html

Why I Am Agnostic

2006-08-30T21:01:00.000-05:00

I found this wonderful publication by Robert G. Ingersoll, Why I Am Agnostic.

The title can lead to an interesting story, but if you read just a few paragraphs you’ll be seduced into reading more. I myself haven’t read the whole thing yet, about 20 paragraphs. I got so excited I had to post it on here.

Tell me what you think, Enjoy!

Source: http://www.atheism.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/why_i_am_agnostic.html

Why I Am Agnostic
by: Robert Green Ingersoll | 1896

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

Environment is a sculptor -- a painter.

If we had been born in Constantinople, the most of us would have said: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet." If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana.

As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them.

Most people love peace. They do not like to differ with their neighbors. They like company. They are social. They enjoy traveling on the highway with the multitude. They hate to walk alone.

The Scotch are Calvinists because their fathers were. The Irish are Catholics because their fathers were. The English are Episcopalians because their fathers were, and the Americans are divided in a hundred sects because their fathers were. This is the general rule, to which there are many exceptions. Children sometimes are superior to their parents, modify their ideas, change their customs, and arrive at different conclusions. But this is generally so gradual that the departure is scarcely noticed, and those who change usually insist that they are still following the fathers.

It is claimed by Christian historians that the religion of a nation was sometimes suddenly changed, and that millions of Pagans were made into Christians by the command of a king. Philosophers do not agree with these historians. Names have been changed, altars have been overthrown, but opinions, customs and beliefs remained the same. A Pagan, beneath the drawn sword of a Christian, would probably change his religious views, and a Christian, with a scimitar above his head, might suddenly become a Mohammedan, but as a matter of fact both would remain exactly as they were before -- except in speech.

Belief is not subject to the will. Men think as they must. Children do not, and cannot, believe exactly as they were taught. They are not exactly like their parents. They differ in temperament, in experience, in capacity, in surroundings. And so there is a continual, though almost imperceptible change. There is development, conscious and unconscious growth, and by comparing long periods of time we find that the old has been almost abandoned, almost lost in the new. Men cannot remain stationary. The mind cannot be securely anchored. If we do not advance, we go backward. If we do not grow, we decay. If we do not develop, we shrink and shrivel.

Like the most of you, I was raised among people who knew -- who were certain. They did not reason or investigate. They had no doubts. They knew that they had the truth. In their creed there was no guess -- no perhaps. They had a revelation from God. They knew the beginning of things. They knew that God commenced to create one Monday morning, four thousand and four years before Christ. They knew that in the eternity -- back of that morning, he had done nothing. They knew that it took him six days to make the earth -- all plants, all animals, all life, and all the globes that wheel in space. They knew exactly what he did each day and when he rested. They knew the origin, the cause of evil, of all crime, of all disease and death.

They not only knew the beginning, but they knew the end. They knew that life had one path and one road. They knew that the path, grass-grown and narrow, filled with thorns and nettles, infested with vipers, wet with tears, stained by bleeding feet, led to heaven, and that the road, broad and smooth, bordered with fruits and flowers, filled with laughter and song and all the happiness of human love, led straight to hell. They knew that God was doing his best to make you take the path and that the Devil used every art to keep you in the road.

They knew that there was a perpetual battle waged between the great Powers of good and evil for the possession of human souls. They knew that many centuries ago God had left his throne and had been born a babe into this poor world -- that he had suffered death for the sake of man -- for the sake of saving a few. They also knew that the human heart was utterly depraved, so that man by nature was in love with wrong and hated God with all his might.

At the same time they knew that God created man in his own image and was perfectly satisfied with his work. They also knew that he had been thwarted by the Devil, who with wiles and lies had deceived the first of human kind. They knew that in consequence of that, God cursed the man and woman; the man with toil, the woman with slavery and pain, and both with death; and that he cursed the earth itself with briers and thorns, brambles and thistles. All these blessed things they knew. They knew too all that God had done to purify and elevate the race. They knew all about the Flood -- knew that God, with the exception of eight, drowned all his children -- the old and young -- the bowed patriarch and the dimpled babe -- the young man and the merry maiden -- the loving mother and the laughing child -- because his mercy endureth forever. They knew too, that he drowned the beasts and birds -- everything that walked or crawled or flew -- because his loving kindness is over all his works. They knew that God, for the purpose of civilizing his children, had devoured some with earthquakes, destroyed some with storms of fire, killed some with his lightnings, millions with famine, with pestilence, and sacrificed countless thousands upon the fields of war. They knew that it was necessary to believe these things and to love God. They knew that there could be no salvation except by faith, and through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.

All who doubted or denied would be lost. To live a moral and honest life -- to keep your contracts, to take care of wife and child -- to make a happy home -- to be a good citizen, a patriot, a just and thoughtful man, was simply a respectable way of going to hell.

God did not reward men for being honest, generous and brave, but for the act of faith. Without faith, all the so-called virtues were sins. and the men who practiced these virtues, without faith, deserved to suffer eternal pain.

All of these comforting and reasonable things were taught by the ministers in their pulpits -- by teachers in Sunday schools and by parents at home. The children were victims. They were assaulted in the cradle -- in their mother's arms. Then, the schoolmaster carried on the war against their natural sense, and all the books they read were filled with the same impossible truths. The poor children were helpless. The atmosphere they breathed was filled with lies -- lies that mingled with their blood.

In those days ministers depended on revivals to save souls and reform the world.

In the winter, navigation having closed, business was mostly suspended. There were no railways and the only means of communication were wagons and boats. Generally the roads were so bad that the wagons were laid up with the boats. There were no operas, no theaters, no amusement except parties and balls. The parties were regarded as worldly and the balls as wicked. For real and virtuous enjoyment the good people depended on revivals.

The sermons were mostly about the pains and agonies of hell, the joys and ecstasies of heaven, salvation by faith, and the efficacy of the atonement. The little churches, in which the services were held, were generally small, badly ventilated, and exceedingly warm. The emotional sermons, the sad singing, the hysterical amens, the hope of heaven, the fear of hell, caused many to lose the little sense they had. They became substantially insane. In this condition they flocked to the "mourner's bench" -- asked for the prayers of the faithful -- had strange feelings, prayed and wept and thought they had been "born again." Then they would tell their experience -- how wicked they had been -- how evil had been their thoughts, their desires, and how good they had suddenly become.

They used to tell the story of an old woman who, in telling her experience, said: -- "Before I was converted, before I gave my heart to God, I used to lie and steal, but now, thanks to the grace and blood of Jesus Christ, I have quit 'em both, in a great measure."

Of course all the people were not exactly of one mind. There were some scoffers, and now and then some man had sense enough to laugh at the threats of priests and make a jest of hell. Some would tell of unbelievers who had lived and died in peace.

When I was a boy I heard them tell of an old farmer in Vermont. He was dying. The minister was at his bed-side -- asked him if he was a Christian -- if he was prepared to die. The old man answered that he had made no preparation, that he was not a Christian -- that he had never done anything but work. The preacher said that he could give him no hope unless he had faith in Christ, and that if he had no faith his soul would certainly be lost.

The old man was not frightened. He was perfectly calm. In a weak and broken voice he said: "Mr. Preacher, I suppose you noticed my farm. My wife and I came here more than fifty years ago. We were just married. It was a forest then and the land was covered with stones. I cut down the trees, burned the logs, picked up the stones and laid the walls. My wife spun and wove and worked every moment. We raised and educated our children -- denied ourselves. During all these years my wife never had a good dress, or a decent bonnet. I never had a good suit of clothes. We lived on the plainest food. Our hands, our bodies are deformed by toil. We never had a vacation. We loved each other and the children. That is the only luxury we ever had. Now I am about to die and you ask me if I am prepared. Mr. Preacher, I have no fear of the future, no terror of any other world. There may be such a place as hell -- but if there is, you never can make me believe that it's any worse than old Vermont."

So, they told of a man who compared himself with his dog. "My dog," he said, "just barks and plays -- has all he wants to eat. He never works -- has no trouble about business. In a little while he dies, and that is all. I work with all my strength. I have no time to play. I have trouble every day. In a little while I will die, and then I go to hell. I wish that I had been a dog."

Well, while the cold weather lasted, while the snows fell, the revival went on, but when the winter was over, when the steamboat's whistle was heard, when business started again, most of the converts "backslid" and fell again into their old ways. But the next winter they were on hand, ready to be "born again." They formed a kind of stock company, playing the same parts every winter and backsliding every spring.

The ministers, who preached at these revivals, were in earnest. They were zealous and sincere. They were not philosophers. To them science was the name of a vague dread -- a dangerous enemy. They did not know much, but they believed a great deal. To them hell was a burning reality -- they could see the smoke and flames. The Devil was no myth. He was an actual person. a rival of God, an enemy of mankind. They thought that the important business of this life was to save your soul -- that all should resist and scorn the pleasures of sense, and keep their eyes steadily fixed on the golden gate of the New Jerusalem. They were unbalanced, emotional, hysterical, bigoted, hateful, loving, and insane. They really believed the Bible to be the actual word of God -- a book without mistake or contradiction. They called its cruelties, justice -- its absurdities, mysteries -- its miracles, facts, and the idiotic passages were regarded as profoundly spiritual. They dwelt on the pangs, the regrets, the infinite agonies of the lost, and showed how easily they could be avoided, and how cheaply heaven could be obtained. They told their hearers to believe, to have faith, to give their hearts to God, their sins to Christ, who would bear their burdens and make their souls as white as snow.

All this the ministers really believed. They were absolutely certain. In their minds the Devil had tried in vain to sow the seeds of doubt.

I heard hundreds of these evangelical sermons -- heard hundreds of the most fearful and vivid descriptions of the tortures inflicted in hell, of the horrible state of the lost. I supposed that what I heard was true and yet I did not believe it. I said: "It is," and then I thought: "It cannot be."

These sermons made but faint impressions on my mind. I was not convinced.

I had no desire to be "converted," did not want a "new heart" and had no wish to be "born again."

But I heard one sermon that touched my heart, that left its mark, like a scar, on my brain.

One Sunday I went with my brother to hear a Free Will Baptist preacher. He was a large man, dressed like a farmer, but he was an orator. He could paint a picture with words.

He took for his text the parable of "the rich man and Lazarus." He described Dives, the rich man -- his manner of life, the excesses in which he indulged, his extravagance, his riotous nights, his purple and fine linen, his feasts, his wines, and his beautiful women.

Then he described Lazarus, his poverty, his rags and wretchedness, his poor body eaten by disease, the crusts and crumbs he devoured, the dogs that pitied him. He pictured his lonely life, his friendless death.

Then, changing his tone of pity to one of triumph -- leaping from tears to the heights of exultation -- from defeat to victory -- he described the glorious company of angels, who with white and outspread wings carried the soul of the despised pauper to Paradise -- to the bosom of Abraham.

Then, changing his voice to one of scorn and loathing, he told of the rich man's death. He was in his palace, on his costly couch, the air heavy with perfume, the room filled with servants and physicians. His gold was worthless then. He could not buy another breath. He died, and in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torment.

Then, assuming a dramatic attitude, putting his right hand to his ear, he whispered, "Hark! I hear the rich man's voice. What does he say? Hark! 'Father Abraham! Father Abraham! I pray thee send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my parched tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.'"

"Oh, my hearers, he has been making that request for more than eighteen hundred years. And millions of ages hence that wail will cross the gulf that lies between the saved and lost and still will be heard the cry: 'Father Abraham! Father Abraham! I pray thee send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger. in water and cool my parched tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.'"

For the first time I understood the dogma of eternal pain -- appreciated "the glad tidings of great joy." For the first time my imagination grasped the height and depth of the Christian horror. Then I said: "It is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God."

From that day I have had no fear, no doubt. For me, on that day, the flames of hell were quenched. From that day I have passionately hated every orthodox creed. That Sermon did some good.

From my childhood I had heard read, and read the Bible myself. Morning and evening the sacred volume was opened and prayers were said. The Bible was my first history, the Jews were the first people, and the events narrated by Moses and the other inspired writers, and those predicted by prophets were the all important things. In other books were found the thoughts and dreams of men, but in the Bible were the sacred truths of God.

Yet in spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no love for God. He was so saving of mercy, so extravagant in murder, so anxious to kill, so ready to assassinate, that I hated him with all my heart. At his command, babes were butchered, women violated, and the white hair of trembling age stained with blood. This God visited the people with pestilence -- filled the houses and covered the streets with the dying and the dead -- saw babes starving on the empty breasts of pallid mothers, heard the sobs, saw the tears, the sunken cheeks, the sightless eyes, the new made graves, and remained as pitiless as the pestilence.

This God withheld the rain -- caused the famine, saw the fierce eyes of hunger -- the wasted forms, the white lips, saw mothers eating babes, and remained ferocious as famine.

It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or worship, or respect the God of the Old Testament. A really civilized man, a really civilized woman, must hold such a God in abhorrence and contempt.

But in the old days the good people justified Jehovah in his treatment of the heathen. The wretches who were murdered were idolaters and therefore unfit to live.

According to the Bible, God had never revealed himself to these people and he knew that without a revelation they could not know that he was the true God. Whose fault was it then that they were heathen?

The Christians said that God had the right to destroy them because he created them. What did he create them for? He knew when he made them that they would be food for the sword. He knew that he would have the pleasure of seeing them murdered.

As a last answer, as a final excuse, the worshipers of Jehovah said that all these horrible things happened under the "old dispensation" of unyielding law, and absolute justice, but that now under the "new dispensation," all had been changed -- the sword of justice had been sheathed and love enthroned. In the Old Testament, they said. God is the judge -- but in the New, Christ is the merciful. As a matter of fact, the New Testament is infinitely worse than the Old. In the Old there is no threat of eternal pain. Jehovah had no eternal prison -- no everlasting fire. His hatred ended at the grave. His revenge was satisfied when his enemy was dead.

In the New Testament, death is not the end, but the beginning of punishment that has no end. In the New Testament the malice of God is infinite and the hunger of his revenge eternal.

The orthodox God, when clothed in human flesh, told his disciples not to resist evil, to love their enemies, and when smitten on one cheek to turn the other, and yet we are told that this same God, with the same loving lips, uttered these heartless, these fiendish words; "Depart ye cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels."

These are the words of "eternal love."

No human being has imagination enough to conceive of this infinite horror.

All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and famine, in fire and flood, -- all the pangs and pains of every disease and every death -- all this is as nothing compared with the agonies to be endured by one lost soul.

This is the consolation of the Christian religion. This is the justice of God -- the mercy of Christ.

This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, made me the implacable enemy of Christianity. The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor. It founded the Inquisition, forged the chains, and furnished the fagots. It has darkened the lives of many millions. It made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain.

Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox creed.

It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge.

Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God.

While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie.

Nothing gives me greater joy than to know that this belief in eternal pain is growing weaker every day -- that thousands of ministers are ashamed of it. It gives me joy to know that Christians are becoming merciful, so merciful that the fires of hell are burning low -- flickering, choked with ashes, destined in a few years to die out forever.

For centuries Christendom was a madhouse. Popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks and heretics were all insane.

Only a few -- four or five in a century were sound in heart and brain. Only a few, in spite of the roar and din, in spite of the savage cries, heard reason's voice. Only a few in the wild rage of ignorance, fear and zeal preserved the perfect calm that wisdom gives.

We have advanced. In a few years the Christians will become -- let us hope -- humane and sensible enough to deny the dogma that fills the endless years with pain. They ought to know now that this dogma is utterly inconsistent with the wisdom, the justice, the goodness of their God. They ought to know that their belief in hell, gives to the Holy Ghost -- the Dove -- the beak of a vulture, and fills the mouth of the Lamb of God with the fangs of a viper.

In my youth I read religious books -- books about God, about the atonement -- about salvation by faith, and about the other worlds. I became familiar with the commentators -- with Adam Clark, who thought that the serpent seduced our mother Eve, and was in fact the father of Cain. He also believed that the animals, while in the ark, had their natures' changed to that degree that they devoured straw together and enjoyed each other's society -- thus prefiguring the blessed millennium. I read Scott, who was such a natural theologian that he really thought the story of Phaeton -- of the wild steeds dashing across the sky -- corroborated the story of Joshua having stopped the sun and moon. So, I read Henry and MacKnight and found that God so loved the world that he made up his mind to damn a large majority of the human race. I read Cruden, who made the great Concordance, and made the miracles as small and probable as he could.

I remember that he explained the miracle of feeding the wandering Jews with quails, by saying that even at this day immense numbers of quails crossed the Red Sea, and that sometimes when tired, they settled on ships that sank beneath their weight. The fact that the explanation was as hard to believe as the miracle made no difference to the devout Cruden.

To while away the time I read Calvin's Institutes, a book calculated to produce, in any natural mind, considerable respect for the Devil.

I read Paley's Evidences and found that the evidence of ingenuity in producing the evil, in contriving the hurtful, was at least equal to the evidence tending to show the use of intelligence in the creation of what we call good.

You know the watch argument was Paley's greatest effort. A man finds a watch and it is so wonderful that he concludes that it must have had a maker. He finds the maker and he is so much more wonderful than the watch that he says he must have had a maker. Then he finds God, the maker of the man, and he is so much more wonderful than the man that he could not have had a maker. This is what the lawyers call a departure in pleading.

According to Paley there can be no design without a designer -- but there can be a designer without a design. The wonder of the watch suggested the watchmaker, and the wonder of the watchmaker, suggested the creator, and the wonder of the creator demonstrated that he was not created -- but was uncaused and eternal.

We had Edwards on The Will, in which the reverend author shows that necessity has no effect on accountability -- and that when God creates a human being, and at the same time determines and decrees exactly what that being shall do and be, the human being is responsible, and God in his justice and mercy has the right to torture the soul of that human being forever. Yet Edwards said that he loved God.

The fact is that if you believe in an infinite God, and also in eternal punishment, then you must admit that Edwards and Calvin were absolutely right. There is no escape from their conclusions if you admit their premises. They were infinitely cruel, their premises infinitely absurd, their God infinitely fiendish, and their logic perfect.

And yet I have kindness and candor enough to say that Calvin and Edwards were both insane.

We had plenty of theological literature. There was Jenkyn on the Atonement, who demonstrated the wisdom of God in devising a way in which the sufferings of innocence could justify the guilty. He tried to show that children could justly be punished for the sins of their ancestors, and that men could, if they had faith, be justly credited with the virtues of others. Nothing could be more devout, orthodox, and idiotic. But all of our theology was not in prose. We had Milton with his celestial militia with his great and blundering God, his proud and cunning Devil -- his wars between immortals, and all the sublime absurdities that religion wrought within the blind man's brain.

The theology taught by Milton was dear to the Puritan heart. It was accepted by New England and it poisoned the souls and ruined the lives of thousands. The genius of Shakespeare could not make the theology of Milton poetic. In the literature of the world there is nothing, outside of the "sacred books," more perfectly absurd.

We had Young's Night Thoughts, and I supposed that the author was an exceedingly devout and loving follower of the Lord. Yet Young had a great desire to be a bishop, and to accomplish that end he electioneered with the king's mistress. In other words, he was a fine old hypocrite. In the "Night Thoughts" there is scarcely a genuinely honest, natural line. It is pretence from beginning to end. He did not write what he felt, but what he thought he ought to feel.

We had Pollok's Course of Time, with its worm that never dies, its quenchless flames, its endless pangs, its leering devils, and its gloating God. This frightful poem should have been written in a madhouse. In it you find all the cries and groans and shrieks of maniacs, when they tear and rend each other's flesh. It is as heartless, as hideous, as hellish as the thirty-second chapter of Deuteronomy.

We all know the beautiful hymn commencing with the cheerful line: "Hark from the tombs, a doleful sound." Nothing could have been more appropriate for children. It is well to put a coffin where it can be seen from the cradle. When a mother nurses her child, an open grave should be at her feet. This would tend to make the babe serious, reflective, religious and miserable.

God hates laughter and despises mirth. To feel free, untrammeled, irresponsible, joyous, -- to forget care and death -- to be flooded with sunshine without a fear of night -- to forget the past, to have no thought of the future, no dream of God, or heaven, or hell -- to be intoxicated with the present -- to be conscious only of the clasp and kiss of the one you love -- this is the sin against the Holy Ghost.

But we had Cowper's poems. Cowper was sincere. He was the opposite of Young. He had an observing eye, a gentle heart and a sense of the artistic. He sympathized with all who suffered -- with the imprisoned, the enslaved, the outcasts. He loved the beautiful. No wonder that the belief in eternal punishment made this loving soul insane. No wonder that the "tidings of great Joy" quenched Hope's great star and left his broken heart in the darkness of despair.

We had many volumes of orthodox sermons, filled with wrath and the terrors of the judgment to come -- sermons that had been delivered by savage saints.

We had the Book of Martyrs, showing that Christians had for many centuries imitated the God they worshiped.

We had the history of the Waldenses -- of the reformation of the Church. We had Pilgrim's Progress, Baxter's Call and Butler's Analogy.

To use a Western phrase or saying, I found that Bishop Butler dug up more snakes than he killed -- suggested more difficulties than he explained -- more doubts than he dispelled.

Among such books my youth was passed. All the seeds of Christianity -- of superstition, were sown in my mind and cultivated with great diligence and care.

All that time I knew nothing of any science -- nothing about the other side -- nothing of the objections that had been urged against the blessed Scriptures, or against the perfect Congregational creed. Of course I had heard the ministers speak of blasphemers, of infidel wretches, of scoffers who laughed at holy things. They did not answer their arguments, but they tore their characters into shreds and demonstrated by the fury of assertion that they had done the Devil's work. And yet in spite of all I heard -- of all I read. I could not quite believe. My brain and heart said No.

For a time I left the dreams, the insanities, the illusions and delusions, the nightmares of theology. I studied astronomy, just a little -- I examined maps of the heavens -- learned the names of some of the constellations -- of some of the stars -- found something of their size and the velocity with which they wheeled in their orbits -- obtained a faint conception of astronomical spaces -- found that some of the known stars were so far away in the depths of space that their light, traveling at the rate of nearly two hundred thousand miles a second, required many years to reach this little world -- found that, compared with the great stars, our earth was but a grain of sand -- an atom -- found that the old belief that all the hosts of heaven had been created for the benefit of man, was infinitely absurd.

I compared what was really known about the stars with the account of creation as told in Genesis. I found that the writer of the inspired book had no knowledge of astronomy -- that he was as ignorant as a Choctaw chief -- as an Eskimo driver of dogs. Does any one imagine that the author of Genesis knew anything about the sun -- its size? that he was acquainted with Sirius, the North Star, with Capella, or that he knew anything of the clusters of stars so far away that their light, now visiting our eyes, has been traveling for two million years?

If he had known these facts would he have said that Jehovah worked nearly six days to make this world, and only a part of the afternoon of the fourth day to make the sun and moon and all the stars?

Yet millions of people insist that the writer of Genesis was inspired by the Creator of all worlds.

Now, intelligent men, who are not frightened, whose brains have not been paralyzed by fear, know that the sacred story of creation was written by an ignorant savage. The story is inconsistent with all known facts, and every star shining in the heavens testifies that its author was an uninspired barbarian.

I admit that this unknown writer was sincere, that he wrote what he believed to be true -- that he did the best he could. He did not claim to be inspired -- did not pretend that the story had been told to him by Jehovah. He simply stated the "facts" as he understood them.

After I had learned a little about the stars I concluded that this writer, this "inspired" scribe, had been misled by myth and legend, and that he knew no more about creation than the average theologian of my day. In other words, that he knew absolutely nothing.

And here, allow me to say that the ministers who are answering me are turning their guns in the wrong direction. These reverend gentlemen should attack the astronomers. They should malign and vilify Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, Herschel and Laplace. These men were the real destroyers of the sacred story. Then, after having disposed of them, they can wage a war against the stars, and against Jehovah himself for having furnished evidence against the truthfulness of his book.

Then I studied geology -- not much, just a little -- Just enough to find in a general way the principal facts that had been discovered, and some of the conclusions that had been reached. I learned something of the action of fire -- of water -- of the formation of islands and continents -- of the sedimentary and igneous rocks -- of the coal measures -- of the chalk cliffs, something about coral reefs -- about the deposits made by rivers, the effect of volcanoes, of glaciers, and of the all surrounding sea -- just enough to know that the Laurentian rocks were millions of years older than the grass beneath my feet -- just enough to feel certain that this world had been pursuing its flight about the sun, wheeling in light and shade, for hundreds of millions of years -- just enough to know that the "inspired" writer knew nothing of the history of the earth -- nothing of the great forces of nature -- of wind and wave and fire -- forces that have destroyed and built, wrecked and wrought through all the countless years.

And let me tell the ministers again that they should not waste their time in answering me. They should attack the geologists. They should deny the facts that have been discovered. They should launch their curses at the blaspheming seas, and dash their heads against the infidel rocks.

Then I studied biology -- not much -- just enough to know something of animal forms, enough to know that life existed when the Laurentian rocks were made -- just enough to know that implements of stone, implements that had been formed by human hands, had been found mingled with the bones of extinct animals, bones that had been split with these implements, and that these animals had ceased to exist hundreds of thousands of years before the manufacture of Adam and Eve.

Then I felt sure that the "inspired" record was false -- that many millions of people had been deceived and that all I had been taught about the origin of worlds and men was utterly untrue. I felt that I knew that the Old Testament was the work of ignorant men -- that it was a mingling of truth and mistake, of wisdom and foolishness, of cruelty and kindness, of philosophy and absurdity -- that it contained some elevated thoughts, some poetry, -- a good deal of the solemn and commonplace, -- some hysterical, some tender, some wicked prayers, some insane predictions, some delusions, and some chaotic dreams.

Of course the theologians fought the facts found by the geologists, the scientists, and sought to sustain the sacred Scriptures. They mistook the bones of the mastodon for those of human beings, and by them proudly proved that "there were giants in those days." They accounted for the fossils by saying that God had made them to try our faith, or that the Devil had imitated the works of the Creator.

They answered the geologists by saying that the "days" in Genesis were long periods of time, and that after all the flood might have been local. They told the astronomers that the sun and moon were not actually, but only apparently, stopped. And that the appearance was produced by the reflection and refraction of light.

They excused the slavery and polygamy, the robbery and murder upheld in the Old Testament by saying that the people were so degraded that Jehovah was compelled to pander to their ignorance and prejudice.

In every way the clergy sought to evade the facts, to dodge the truth, to preserve the creed.

At first they flatly denied the facts -- then they belittled them -- then they harmonized them -- then they denied that they had denied them. Then they changed the meaning of the "inspired" book to fit the facts. At first they said that if the facts, as claimed, were true, the Bible was false and Christianity itself a superstition. Afterward they said the facts, as claimed, were true and that they established beyond all doubt the inspiration of the Bible and the divine origin of orthodox religion.

Anything they could not dodge, they swallowed and anything they could not swallow, they dodged.

I gave up the Old Testament on account of its mistakes, its absurdities, its ignorance and its cruelty. I gave up the New because it vouched for the truth of the Old. I gave it up on account of its miracles, its contradictions, because Christ and his disciples believe in the existence of devils -- talked and made bargains with them. expelled them from people and animals.

This, of itself, is enough. We know, if we know anything, that devils do not exist -- that Christ never cast them out, and that if he pretended to, he was either ignorant, dishonest or insane.

These stories about devils demonstrate the human, the ignorant origin of the New Testament. I gave up the New Testament because it rewards credulity, and curses brave and honest men, and because it teaches the infinite horror of eternal pain.

Having spent my youth in reading books about religion -- about the "new birth" -- the disobedience of our first parents, the atonement, salvation by faith, the wickedness of pleasure, the degrading consequences of love, and the impossibility of getting to heaven by being honest and generous, and having become somewhat weary of the frayed and raveled thoughts, you can imagine my surprise, my delight when I read the poems of Robert Burns.

I was familiar with the writings of the devout and insincere, the pious and petrified, the pure and heartless. Here was a natural honest man. I knew the works of those who regarded all nature as depraved, and looked upon love as the legacy and perpetual witness of original sin. Here was a man who plucked joy from the mire, made goddesses of peasant girls, and enthroned the honest man. One whose sympathy, with loving arms, embraced all forms of suffering life, who hated slavery of every kind, who was as natural as heaven's blue, with humor kindly as an autumn day, with wit as sharp as Ithuriel's spear, and scorn that blasted like the simoon's breath. A man who loved this world, this life, the things of every day, and placed above all else the thrilling ecstasies of human love.

I read and read again with rapture, tears and smiles, feeling that a great heart was throbbing in the lines.

The religious, the lugubrious, the artificial, the spiritual poets were forgotten or remained only as the fragments, the half remembered horrors of monstrous and distorted dreams.

I had found at last a natural man, one who despised his country's cruel creed, and was brave and sensible enough to say: "All religions are auld wives' fables, but an honest man has nothing to fear, either in this world or the world to come."

One who had the genius to write Holy Willie's Prayer -- a poem that crucified Calvinism and through its bloodless heart thrust the spear of common sense -- a poem that made every orthodox creed the food of scorn -- of inextinguishable laughter.

Burns had his faults, his frailties. He was intensely human. Still, I would rather appear at the "Judgment Seat" drunk, and be able to say that I was the author of "A man's a man for 'a that," than to be perfectly sober and admit that I had lived and died a Scotch Presbyterian.

I read Byron -- read his Cain, in which, as in Paradise Lost, the Devil seems to be the better god -- read his beautiful, sublime and bitter lines -- read his prisoner of Chillon -- his best -- a poem that filled my heart with tenderness, with pity, and with an eternal hatred of tyranny.

I read Shelley's Queen Mab -- a poem filled with beauty, courage, thought, sympathy, tears and scorn, in which a brave soul tears down the prison walls and floods the cells with light. I read his Skylark -- a winged flame -- passionate as blood -- tender as tears -- pure as light.

I read Keats, "whose name was writ in water" -- read St. Agnes Eve, a story told with such an artless art that this poor common world is changed to fairy land -- the Grecian Urn, that fills the soul with ever eager love, with all the rapture of imagined song -- the Nightingale -- a melody in which there is the memory of morn -- a melody that dies away in dusk and tears, paining the senses with its perfectness.

And then I read Shakespeare, the plays, the sonnets, the poems -- read all. I beheld a new heaven and a new earth; Shakespeare, who knew the brain and heart of man -- the hopes and fears, the loves and hatreds, the vices and the virtues of the human race: whose imagination read the tear-blurred records, the blood-stained pages of all the past, and saw falling athwart the outspread scroll the light of hope and love; Shakespeare, who sounded every depth -- while on the loftiest peak there fell the shadow of his wings.

I compared the Plays with the "inspired" books -- Romeo and Juliet with the Song of Solomon, Lear with Job, and the Sonnets with the Psalms, and I found that Jehovah did not understand the art of speech. I compared Shakespeare's women -- his perfect women -- with the women of the Bible. I found that Jehovah was not a sculptor, not a painter -- not an artist -- that he lacked the power that changes clay to flesh -- the art, the plastic touch, that molds the perfect form -- the breath that gives it free and joyous life -- the genius that creates the faultless.

The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare's glittering gold and gleaming gems. VI

Up to this time I had read nothing against our blessed religion except what I had found in Burns, Byron and Shelley. By some accident I read Volney, who shows that all religions are, and have been, established in the same way -- that all had their Christs, their apostles, miracles and sacred books, and then asked how it is possible to decide which is the true one. A question that is still waiting for an answer.

I read Gibbon, the greatest of historians, who marshaled his facts as skillfully as Caesar did his legions, and I learned that Christianity is only a name for Paganism -- for the old religion, shorn of its beauty -- that some absurdities had been exchanged for others -- that some gods had been killed -- a vast multitude of devils created, and that hell had been enlarged.

And then I read the Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. Let me tell you something about this sublime and slandered man. He came to this country just before the Revolution. He brought a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, at that time the greatest American.

In Philadelphia, Paine was employed to write for the Pennsylvania Magazine. We know that he wrote at least five articles. The first was against slavery, the second against duelling, the third on the treatment of prisoners -- showing that the object should be to reform, not to punish and degrade -- the fourth on the rights of woman, and the fifth in favor of forming societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and animals.

From this you see that he suggested the great reforms of our century.

The truth is that he labored all his life for the good of his fellow-men, and did as much to found the Great Republic as any man who ever stood beneath our flag.

He gave his thoughts about religion -- bout the blessed Scriptures, about the superstitions of his time. He was perfectly sincere and what he said was kind and fair.

The Age of Reason filled with hatred the hearts of those who loved their enemies, and the occupant of every orthodox pulpit became, and still is, a passionate malinger of Thomas Paine.

No one has answered -- no one will answer, his argument against the dogma of inspiration -- his objections to the Bible.

He did not rise above all the superstitions of his day. While he hated Jehovah, he praised the God of Nature, the creator and preserver of all. In this he was wrong, because, as Watson said in his Reply to Paine, the God of Nature is as heartless, as cruel as the God of the Bible.

But Paine was one of the pioneers -- one of the Titans, one of the heroes, who gladly gave his life, his every thought and act, to free and civilize mankind.

I read Voltaire -- Voltaire, the greatest man of his century, and who did more for liberty of thought and speech than any other being, human or "divine." Voltaire, who tore the mask from hypocrisy and found behind the painted smile the fangs of hate. Voltaire, who attacked the savagery of the law, the cruel decisions of venal courts, and rescued victims from the wheel and rack. Voltaire, who waged war against the tyranny of thrones, the greed and heartlessness of power. Voltaire, who filled the flesh of priests with the barbed and poisoned arrows of his wit and made the pious jugglers, who cursed him in public, laugh at themselves in private. Voltaire, who sided with the oppressed, rescued the unfortunate, championed the obscure and weak, civilized judges, repealed laws and abolished torture in his native land.

In every direction this tireless man fought the absurd, the miraculous, the supernatural, the idiotic, the unjust. He had no reverence for the ancient. He was not awed by pageantry and pomp, by crowned Crime or mitered Pretence. Beneath the crown he saw the criminal, under the miter, the hypocrite.

To the bar of his conscience, his reason, he summoned the barbarism and the barbarians of his time. He pronounced judgment against them all, and that judgment has been affirmed by the intelligent world. Voltaire lighted a torch and gave to others the sacred flame. The light still shines and will as long as man loves liberty and seeks for truth.

I read Zeno, the man who said, centuries before our Christ was born, that man could not own his fellow-man.

"No matter whether you claim a slave by purchase or capture, the title is bad. They who claim to own their fellow-men, look down into the pit and forget the justice that should rule the world."

I became acquainted with Epicurus, who taught the religion of usefulness, of temperance, of courage and wisdom, and who said: "Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is. I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?"

I read about Socrates, who when on trial for his life, said, among other things, to his judges, these wondrous words: "I have not sought during my life to amass wealth and to adorn my body, but I have sought to adorn my soul with the jewels of wisdom, patience, and above all with a love of liberty."

So, I read about Diogenes, the philosopher who hated the superfluous -- the enemy of waste and greed, and who one day entered the temple, reverently approached the altar, crushed a louse between the nails of his thumbs, and solemnly said: "The sacrifice of Diogenes to all the gods." This parodied the worship of the world -- satirized all creeds, and in one act put the essence of religion.

Diogenes must have know of this "inspired" passage -- "Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins."

I compared Zeno, Epicures and Socrates, three heathen wretches who had never heard of the Old Testament or the Ten Commandments, with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, three favorites of Jehovah, and I was depraved enough to think that the Pagans were superior to the Patriarchs -- and to Jehovah himself.

My attention was turned to other religions, to the sacred books, the creeds and ceremonies of other lands -- of India, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, of the dead and dying nations.

I concluded that all religions had the same foundation -- a belief in the supernatural -- a power above nature that man could influence by worship -- by sacrifice and prayer.

I found that all religions rested on a mistaken conception of nature -- that the religion of a people was the science of that people, that is to say, their explanation of the world -- of life and death -- of origin and destiny.

I concluded that all religions had substantially the same origin, and that in fact there has never been but one religion in the world. The twigs and leaves may differ, but the trunk is the same.

The poor African that pours out his heart to deity of stone is on an exact religious level with the robed priest who supplicates his God. The same mistake, the same superstition, bends the knees and shuts the eyes of both. Both ask for supernatural aid, and neither has the slightest thought of the absolute uniformity of nature.

It seems probable to me that the first organized ceremonial religion was the worship of the sun. The sun was the "Sky Father," the "All Seeing," the source of life -- the fireside of the world. The sun was regarded as a god who fought the darkness, the power of evil, the enemy of man.

There have been many sun-gods, and they seem to have been the chief deities in the ancient religions. They have been worshiped in many lands, by many nations that have passed to death and dust.

Apollo was a sun-god and he fought and conquered the serpent of night. Baldur was a sun-god. He was in love with the Dawn -- a maiden. Chrishna was a sun-god. At his birth the Ganges was thrilled from its source to the sea, and all the trees, the dead as well as the living, burst into leaf and bud and flower. Hercules was a sun-god and so was Samson, whose strength was in his hair -- that is to say, in his beams. He was shorn of his strength by Delilah, the shadow -- the darkness. Osiris, Bacchus, and Mithra, Hermes, Buddha, and Quetzalcoatl, Prometheus, Zoroaster, and Perseus, Cadom, Lao-tsze, Fo-hi, Horus and Rameses, were all sun- gods.

All of these gods had gods for fathers and their mothers were virgins. The births of nearly all were announced by stars, celebrated by celestial music, and voices declared that a blessing had come to the poor world. All of these gods were born in humble places -- in caves, under trees, in common inns, and tyrants sought to kill them all when they were babes. All of these sun-gods were born at the winter solstice -- on Christmas. Nearly all were worshiped by "wise men." All of them fasted for forty days -- all of them taught in parables -- all of them wrought miracles -- all met with a violent death, and all rose from the dead.

The history of these gods is the exact history of our Christ.

This is not a coincidence -- an accident. Christ was a sun- god. Christ was a new name for an old biography -- a survival -- the last of the sun-gods. Christ was not a man, but a myth -- not a life, but a legend.

I found that we had not only borrowed our Christ -- but that all our sacraments, symbols and ceremonies were legacies that we received from the buried past. There is nothing original in Christianity.

The cross was a symbol thousands of years before our era. It was a symbol of life, of immortality -- of the god Agni, and it was chiseled upon tombs many ages before a line of our Bible was written.

Baptism is far older than Christianity -- than Judaism. The Hindus, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans had Holy Water long before a Catholic lived. The eucharist was borrowed from the Pagans. Ceres was the goddess of the fields -- Bacchus of the vine. At the harvest festival they made cakes of wheat and said: "This is the flesh of the goddess." They drank wine and cried: "This is the blood of our god."

The Egyptians had a Trinity. They worshiped Osiris, Isis and Horus, thousands of years before the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were known.

The Tree of Life grew in India, in China, and among the Aztecs, long before the Garden of Eden was planted.

Long before our Bible was known, other nations had their sacred books.

The dogmas of the Fall of Man, the Atonement and Salvation by Faith, are far older than our religion.

In our blessed gospel, -- in our "divine scheme," -- there is nothing new -- nothing original. All old -- all borrowed, pieced and patched.

Then I concluded that all religions had been naturally produced, and that all were variation, modifications of one, -- then I felt that I knew that all were the work of man.

THE theologians had always insisted that their God was the creator of all living things -- that the forms, parts, functions, colors and varieties of animals were the expressions of his fancy, taste and wisdom -- that he made them all precisely as they are to-day -- that he invented fins and legs and wings -- that he furnished them with the weapons of attack, the shields of defence -- that he formed them with reference to food and climate, taking into consideration all facts affecting life.

They insisted that man was a special creation, not related in any way to the animals below him. They also asserted that all the forms of vegetation, from mosses to forests, were just the same to-day as the moment they were made.

Men of genius, who were for the most part free from religious prejudice, were examining these things -- were looking for facts. They were examining the fossils of animals and plants -- studying the forms of animals -- their bones and muscles -- the effect of climate and food -- the strange modifications through which they had passed.

Humboldt had published his lectures -- filled with great thoughts -- with splendid generalizations -- with suggestions that stimulated the spirit of investigation, and with conclusions that satisfied the mind. He demonstrated the uniformity of Nature -- the kinship of all that lives and grows -- that breathes and thinks.

Darwin, with his Origin of Species, his theories about Natural Selection, the Survival of the Fittest, and the influence of environment, shed a flood of light upon the great problems of plant and animal life.

These things had been guessed, prophesied, asserted, hinted by many others, but Darwin, with infinite patience, with perfect care and candor, found the facts, fulfilled the prophecies, and demonstrated the truth of the guesses, hints and assertions. He was, in my judgment, the keenest observer, the best judge of the meaning and value of a fact, the greatest Naturalist the world has produced.

The theological view began to look small and mean.

Spencer gave his theory of evolution and sustained it by countless facts. He stood at a great height, and with the eyes of a philosopher, a profound thinker, surveyed the world. He has influenced the thought of the wisest.

Theology looked more absurd than ever.

Huxley entered the lists for Darwin. No man ever had a sharper sword -- a better shield. He challenged the world. The great theologians and the small scientists -- those who had more courage than sense, accepted the challenge. Their poor bodies were carried away by their friends.

Huxley had intelligence, industry, genius, and the courage to express his thought. He was absolutely loyal to what he thought was truth. Without prejudice and without fear, he followed the footsteps of life front the lowest to the highest forms.

Theology looked smaller still.

Haeckel began at the simplest cell, went from change to change -- from form to form -- followed the line of development, the path of life, until he reached the human race. It was all natural. There had been no interference from without.

I read the works of these great men -- of many others -- and became convinced that they were right, and that all the theologians -- all the believers in "special creation" were absolutely wrong.

The Garden of Eden faded away, Adam and Eve fell back to dust, the snake crawled into the grass, and Jehovah became a miserable myth.

I took another step. What is matter -- substance? Can it be destroyed -- annihilated? Is it possible to conceive of the destruction of the smallest atom of substance? It can be ground to powder -- changed from a solid to a liquid -- from a liquid to a gas -- but it all remains. Nothing is lost -- nothing destroyed.

Let an infinite God, if there be one, attack a grain of sand -- attack it with infinite power. It cannot be destroyed. It cannot surrender. It defies all force. Substance cannot be destroyed.

Then I took another step.

If matter cannot be destroyed, cannot be annihilated, it could not have been created.

The indestructible must be uncreateable.

And then I asked myself: What is force?

We cannot conceive of the creation of force, or of its destruction. Force may be changed from one form to another -- from motion to heat -- but it cannot be destroyed -- annihilated.

If force cannot be destroyed it could not have been created. It is eternal.

Another thing -- matter cannot exist apart from force. Force cannot exist apart from matter. Matter could not have existed before force. Force could not have existed before matter. Matter and force can only be conceived of together. This has been shown by several scientists, but most clearly, most forcibly by Buchner.

Thought is a form of force, consequently it could not have caused or created matter. Intelligence is a form of force and could not have existed without or apart from matter. Without substance there could have been no mind, no will, no force in any form, and there could have been no substance without force.

Matter and force were not created. They have existed from eternity. They cannot be destroyed.

There was, there is, no creator. Then came the question; Is there a God? Is there a being of infinite intelligence, power and goodness, who governs the world?

There can he goodness without much intelligence -- but it seems to me that perfect intelligence and perfect goodness must go together.

In nature I see, or seem to see, good and evil -- intelligence and ignorance -- goodness and cruelty -- care and carelessness -- economy and waste. I see means that do not accomplish the ends -- designs that seem to fail.

To me it seems infinitely cruel for life to feed on life -- to create animals that devour others.

The teeth and beaks, the claws and fangs, that tear and rend, fill me with horror. What can be more frightful than a world at war? Every leaf a battle-field -- every flower a Golgotha -- in every drop of water pursuit, capture and death. Under every piece of bark, life lying in wait for life. On every blade of grass, something that kills, -- something that suffers. Everywhere the strong living on the weak -- the superior on the inferior. Everywhere the weak, the insignificant, living on the strong -- the inferior on the superior -- the highest food for the lowest -- man sacrificed for the sake of microbes.

Murder universal. Everywhere pain, disease and death -- death that does not wait for bent forms and gray hairs, but clutches babes and happy youths. Death that takes the mother from her helpless, dimpled child -- death that fills the world with grief and tears.

How can the orthodox Christian explain these things?

I know that life is good. I remember the sunshine and rain. Then I think of the earthquake and flood. I do not forget health and harvest, home and love -- but what of pestilence and famine? I cannot harmonize all these contradictions -- these blessings and agonies -- with the existence of an infinitely good, wise and powerful God.

The theologian says that what we call evil is for our benefit -- that we are placed in this world of sin and sorrow to develop character. If this is true I ask why the infant dies? Millions and millions draw a few breaths and fade away in the arms of their mothers. They are not allowed to develop character.

The theologian says that serpents were given fangs to protect themselves from their enemies. Why did the God who made them, make enemies? Why is it that many species of serpents have no fangs?

The theologian says that God armored the hippopotamus, covered his body, except the under part, with scales and plates, that other animals could not pierce with tooth or tusk. But the same God made the rhinoceros and supplied him with a horn on his nose, with which he disembowels the hippopotamus.

The same God made the eagle, the vulture, the hawk, and their helpless prey.

On every hand there seems to be design to defeat design.

If God created man -- if he is the father of us all, why did he make the criminals, the insane, the deformed and idiotic?

Should the inferior man thank God? Should the mother, who clasps to her breast an idiot child, thank God? Should the slave thank God?

The theologian says that God governs the wind, the rain, the lightning. How then can we account for the cyclone, the flood, the drought, the glittering bolt that kills?

Suppose we had a man in this country who could control the wind, the rain and lightning, and suppose we elected him to govern these things, and suppose that he allowed whole States to dry and wither, and at the same time wasted the rain in the sea. Suppose that he allowed the winds to destroy cities and to crush to shapelessness thousands of men and women, and allowed the lightnings to strike the life out of mothers and babes. What would we say? What would we think of such a savage?

And yet, according to the theologians, this is exactly the course pursued by God.

What do we think of a man, who will not, when he has the power, protect his friends? Yet the Christian's God allowed his enemies to torture and burn his friends, his worshipers.

Who has ingenuity enough to explain this?

What good man, having the power to prevent it, would allow the innocent to be imprisoned, chained in dungeons, and sigh against the dripping walls their weary lives away?

If God governs the world, why is innocence not a perfect shield? Why does injustice triumph?

Who can answer these questions?

In answer, the intelligent, honest man must say: I do not know.

This God must be, if he exists, a person -- a conscious being. Who can imagine an infinite personality? This God must have force, and we cannot conceive of force apart from matter. This God must be material. He must have the means by which he changes force to what we call thought. When he thinks he uses force, force that must be replaced. Yet we are told that he is infinitely wise. If he is, he does not think. Thought is a ladder -- a process by which we reach a conclusion. He who knows all conclusions cannot think. He cannot hope or fear. When knowledge is perfect there can be no passion, no emotion. If God is infinite he does not want. He has all. He who does not want does not act. The infinite must dwell in eternal calm.

It is as impossible to conceive of such a being as to imagine a square triangle, or to think of a circle without a diameter.

Yet we are told that it is our duty to love this God. Can we love the unknown, the inconceivable? Can it be our duty to love anybody? It is our duty to act justly, honestly, but it cannot be our duty to love. We cannot be under obligation to admire a painting -- to be charmed with a poem -- or thrilled with music. Admiration cannot be controlled. Taste and love are not the servants of the will. Love is, and must be free. It rises from the heart like perfume from a flower.

For thousands of ages men and women have been trying to love the gods -- trying to soften their hearts -- trying to get their aid.

I see them all. The panorama passes before me. I see them with outstretched hands -- with reverently closed eyes -- worshiping the sun. I see them bowing, in their fear and need, to meteoric stones -- imploring serpents, beasts and sacred trees -- praying to idols wrought of wood and stone. I see them building altars to the unseen powers, staining them with blood of child and beast. I see the countless priests and hear their solemn chants. I see the dying victims, the smoking altars, the swinging censers, and the rising clouds. I see the half-god men -- the mournful Christs, in many lands. I see the common things of life change to miracles as they speed from mouth to mouth. I see the insane prophets reading the secret book of fate by signs and dreams. I see them all -- the Assyrians chanting the praises of Asshur and Ishtar -- the Hindus worshiping Brahma, Vishnu and Draupadi, the whitearmed -- the Chaldeans sacrificing to Bel and Hea -- the Egyptians bowing to Ptah and Fta, Osiris and Isis -- the Medes placating the storm, worshiping the fire -- the Babylonians supplicating Bel and Murodach -- I see them all by the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Ganges and the Nile. I see the Greeks building temples for Zeus, Neptune and Venus. I see the Romans kneeling to a hundred gods. I see others spurning idols and pouring out their hopes and fears to a vague image in the mind. I see the multitudes, with open mouths, receive as truths the myths and fables of the vanished years. I see them give their toil, their wealth to robe the priests, to build the vaulted roofs, the spacious aisles, the glittering domes. I see them clad in rags, huddled in dens and huts, devouring crusts and scraps, that they may give the more to ghosts and gods. I see them make their cruel creeds and fill the world with hatred, war, and death. I see them with their faces in the dust in the dark days of plague and sudden death, when cheeks are wan and lips are white for lack of bread. I hear their prayers, their sighs, their sobs. I see them kiss the unconscious lips as their hot tears fall on the pallid faces of the dead. I see the nations as they fade and fail. I see them captured and enslaved. I see their altars mingle with the common earth, their temples crumble slowly back to dust. I see their gods grow old and weak, infirm and faint. I see them fall from vague and misty thrones, helpless and dead. The worshipers receive no help. Injustice triumphs. Toilers are paid with the lash, -- babes are sold, -- the innocent stand on scaffolds, and the heroic perish in flames. I see the earthquakes devour, the volcanoes overwhelm, the cyclones wreck, the floods destroy, and the lightnings kill.

The nations perished. The gods died. The toil and wealth were lost. The temples were built in vain, and all the prayers died unanswered in the heedless air.

Then I asked myself the question: Is there a supernatural power -- an arbitrary mind -- an enthroned God -- a supreme will that sways the tides and currents of the world -- to which all causes bow?

I do not deny. I do not know -- but I do not believe. I believe that the natural is supreme -- that from the infinite chain no link can be lost or broken -- that there is no supernatural power that can answer prayer -- no power that worship can persuade or change -- no power that cares for man.

I believe that with infinite arms Nature embraces the all -- that there is no interference -- no chance -- that behind every event are the necessary and countless causes, and that beyond every event will be and must be the necessary and countless effects.

Man must protect himself. He cannot depend upon the supernatural -- upon an imaginary father in the skies. He must protect himself by finding the facts in Nature, by developing his brain, to the end that he may overcome the obstructions and take advantage of the forces of Nature.

Is there a God?

I do not know.

Is man immortal?

I do not know.

One thing I do know, and that is, that neither hope, nor fear, belief, nor denial, can change the fact. It is as it is, and it will be as it must be.

We wait and hope.

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural -- that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world -- not even in infinite space. I was free -- free to think, to express my thoughts -- free to live to my own ideal -- free to live for myself and those I loved -- free to use all my faculties, all my senses -- free to spread imagination's wings -- free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope -- free to judge and determine for myself -- free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past -- free from popes and priests -- free from all the "called" and "set apart" -- free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies -- free from the fear of eternal pain -- free from the winged monsters of the night -- free from devils, ghosts and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought -- no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings -- no chains for my limbs -- no lashes for my back -- no fires for my flesh -- no master's frown or threat -- no following another's steps -- no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.

And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain -- for the freedom of labor and thought -- to those who fell on the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains -- to those who proudly mounted scaffold's stairs -- to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn -- to those by fire consumed -- to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.

Let us be true to ourselves -- true to the facts we know, and let us, above all things, preserve the veracity of our souls.

If there be gods we cannot help them, but we can assist our fellow-men. We cannot love the inconceivable, but we can love wife and child and friend.

We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know. We can tell the truth, and we can enjoy the blessed freedom that the brave have won. We can destroy the monsters of superstition, the hissing snakes of ignorance and fear. We can drive from our minds the frightful things that tear and wound with beak and fang. We can civilize our fellow-men. We can fill our lives with generous deeds, with loving words, with art and song, and all the ecstasies of love. We can flood our years with sunshine -- with the divine climate of kindness, and we can drain to the last drop the golden cup of joy.

This publication is public thanks to The Secular Web Library, atheism.org

Sam Harris: The Language of Ignorance

2006-08-25T17:16:00.000-05:00

The question is, what are people truly scared of? That is the question I ask myself when it comes to the mindset of seriously religious people. They fear the idea of a reality without God. Death, I think it all comes down to death, the ultimate end we are so easily reminded of.

I have friends that are in no way atheists, but I believe their belief in a god is limited to the culture rather than their belief in the dogmas that surround religion and everlasting life in heaven or hell.

Sam Harris "reveals that a stellar career in science offers no guarantee of a scientific frame of mind."

Source: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060815_sam_harris_language_ignorance/

Sam Harris: The Language of Ignorance
truthdig.com | 08.15.2006

Francis Collins—physical chemist, medical geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project—has written a book entitled “The Language of God.” In it, he attempts to demonstrate that there is “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and evangelical Christianity. To say that he fails at his task does not quite get at the inadequacy of his efforts. He fails the way a surgeon would fail if he attempted to operate using only his toes. His failure is predictable, spectacular and vile. “The Language of God” reads like a hoax text, and the knowledge that it is not a hoax should be disturbing to anyone who cares about the future of intellectual and political discourse in the United States

Most reviewers of “The Language of God” seem quite overawed by its author’s scientific credentials. This is understandable. As director of the Human Genome Project, Collins participated in one of the greatest scientific achievements in human history. His book, however, reveals that a stellar career in science offers no guarantee of a scientific frame of mind. Lest we think that one man can do no lasting harm to our discourse, consider the fact that the year is 2006, half of the American population believes that the universe is 6,000 years old, our president has just used his first veto to block federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research on religious grounds, and one of the foremost scientists in the land has this to say, straight from the heart (if not the brain):

As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted...

God, who is not limited to space and time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law.

According to Collins, belief in the God of Abraham is the most rational response to the data of physics and biology, while “of all the possible worldviews, atheism is the least rational.” Taken at face value, these claims suggest that “The Language of God” will mark an unprecedented breakthrough in the history of ideas. Once Collins gets going, however, we realize that the book represents a breakthrough of another kind.

After finding himself powerless to detect any errors in the philosophizing of C.S. Lewis (a truly ominous sign), Collins describes the moment that he, as a scientist, finally became convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ:

On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains … the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ:

If this account of field research seems a little thin, don’t worry—a recent profile of Collins in Time magazine offers supplementary data. Here, we learn that the waterfall was frozen in three streams, which put the good doctor in mind of the Trinity...

It is at this point that thoughts of suicide might occur to any reader who has placed undue trust in the intellectual integrity of his fellow human beings. One would hope that it would be immediately obvious to Collins that there is nothing about seeing a frozen waterfall (no matter how frozen) that offers the slightest corroboration of the doctrine of Christianity. But it was not obvious to him as he “knelt in the dewy grass,” and it is not obvious to him now. Indeed, I fear that it will not be obvious to many of his readers.

If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus really is the son of God, then anything can mean anything. Let us say that I saw the same waterfall, and its three streams reminded me of Romulus, Remus and the She-wolf, the mythical founders of Rome. How reasonable would it be for me to know, from that moment forward, that Italy would one day win the World Cup? This epiphany, while perfectly psychotic, would actually put me on firmer ground than Collins—because Italy did win the World Cup. Collins’ alpine conversion would be a ludicrous non sequitur even if Jesus does return to Earth trailing clouds of glory.

While the mere sighting of a waterfall appears to have been sufficient to answer all important questions of theology for Collins, he imagines himself to be in possession of further evidence attesting to the divinity of Jesus, the omnipotence of God and the divine origin of the Bible. The most compelling of these data, in his view, is the fact that human beings have a sense of right and wrong. Collins follows Lewis here, as faithfully as if he were on a leash, and declares that the “moral law” is so inscrutable a thing as to admit of only a supernatural explanation. According to Collins, the moral law applies exclusively to human beings:

Though other animals may at times appear to show glimmerings of a moral sense, they are certainly not widespread, and in many instances other species’ behavior seems to be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal rightness

One wonders if the author has ever read a newspaper. The behavior of humans offers no such “dramatic contrast.” How badly must human beings behave to put this “sense of universal rightness” in doubt? And just how widespread must “glimmerings” of morality be among other animals before Collins—who, after all, knows a thing or two about genes—begins to wonder whether our moral sense has evolutionary precursors in the natural world? What if mice showed greater distress at the suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar ones? (They do.) What if monkeys will starve themselves to prevent their cage-mates from receiving painful shocks? (They will.) What if chimps have a demonstrable sense of fairness when receiving food rewards? (They have.) Wouldn’t these be precisely the sorts of findings one would expect if our morality were the product of evolution?

Collins’ case for the supernatural origin of morality rests on the further assertion that there can be no evolutionary explanation for genuine altruism. Because self-sacrifice cannot increase the likelihood that an individual creature will survive and reproduce, truly self-sacrificing behavior stands as a primordial rejoinder to any biological account of morality. In Collins’ view, therefore, the mere existence of altruism offers compelling evidence of a personal God. (Here, Collins performs a risible sprint past ideas in biology like “kin selection” that plausibly explain altruism and self-sacrifice in evolutionary terms.) A moment’s thought reveals, however, that if we were to accept this neutered biology, almost everything about us would be bathed in the warm glow of religious mystery. Forget morality—how did nature select for the ability to write sonnets, solder circuit boards or swing a golf club? Clearly, such abilities could never be the product of evolution. Might they have been placed in us by God? Smoking cigarettes isn’t a healthy habit and is unlikely to offer an adaptive advantage—and there were no cigarettes in the Paleolithic—but this habit is very widespread and compelling. Is God, by any chance, a tobacco farmer? Collins can’t seem to see that human morality and selfless love may be derivative of more basic biological and psychological traits, which were themselves products of evolution. It is hard to interpret this oversight in light of his scientific training. If one didn’t know better, one might be tempted to conclude that religious dogmatism presents an obstacle to scientific reasoning.

Having established that our moral sensitivities are God-given, Collins finds himself in a position to infer the nature of our Creator:

And if that were so, what kind of God would this be? Would this be a deist God, who invented physics and mathematics and started the universe in motion about 14 billion years ago, then wandered off to deal with other, more important matters, as Einstein thought? No, this God, if I was perceiving him at all, must be a theist God, who desires some kind of relationship with those special creatures called human beings, and has therefore instilled this special glimpse of Himself into each one of us. This might be the God of Abraham, but it was certainly not the God of Einstein…. Judging by the incredibly high standards of the Moral Law … this was a God who was holy and righteous. He would have to be the embodiment of goodness…. Faith in God now seemed more rational than disbelief.

I hope the reader will share my amazement that passages like this have come from one of the most celebrated scientists in the United States. I find that my own sense of the moral law requires that I provide a few more examples of Collins’ skill as a philosopher and theologian...

On the question of why God simply doesn’t provide better evidence for his existence:

If the case in favor of belief in God were utterly airtight, then the world would be full of confident practitioners of a single faith. But imagine such a world, where the opportunity to make a free choice about belief was taken away by the certainty of the evidence. How interesting would that be?

One is tempted to say that it might be more “interesting” than a world unnecessarily shattered by competing religious orthodoxies and religious war, only to be followed by an eternity in hell for all those who believe the wrong things about God. But, to each his own.

How does Collins settle the problem of theodicy—the mystery of why there is evil and misfortune in a world created by an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly benevolent God? He takes it very much in stride:

Science reveals that the universe, our own planet, and life itself are engaged in an evolutionary process. The consequences of that can include the unpredictability of the weather, the slippage of a tectonic plate, or the misspelling of a cancer gene in the normal process of cell division. If at the beginning of time God chose to use these forces to create human beings, then the inevitability of these other painful consequences was also assured. Frequent miraculous interventions would be at least as chaotic in the physical realm as they would be in interfering with human acts of free will.

But why was God obliged to make cell division susceptible to the perversity of cancer? And why couldn’t an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly benevolent God perform as many miracles as He wanted? There isn’t time to entertain such questions, however, as Collins must solve all outstanding problems in the science of cosmology:

The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation. It forces the conclusion that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could have created itself. Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that.

It is worth pointing out the term “supernatural,” which Collins uses freely throughout his book, is semantically indistinguishable from the term “magical.” Reading his text with this substitution in mind is rather instructive. In any case, even if we accepted that our universe simply had to be created by an intelligent being, this would not suggest that this being is the God of the Bible, or even particularly magical. If intelligently designed, our universe could be running as a simulation on an alien supercomputer. As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a Creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To insert an inscrutable God at the origin of the universe explains absolutely nothing. And to say that God, by definition, is uncreated, simply begs the question. (Why can’t I say that the universe, by definition, is uncreated?) Any being capable of creating our world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed with untiring eloquence, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

Any intellectually honest person must admit that he does not know why the universe exists. Secular scientists, of course, readily admit their ignorance on this point. Believers like Collins do not.

The major and inescapable flaw of … [the] claim that science demands of atheism is that it goes beyond the evidence. If God is outside of nature, then science can neither prove nor disprove His existence. Atheism itself must therefore be considered a form of blind faith, in that it adopts a belief system that cannot be defended on the basis of pure reason

Is disbelief in Zeus or Thor also a form of “blind faith”? Must we really “disprove” the existence of every imaginary friend? The burden of producing evidence falls on those making extravagant claims about miracles and invisible realities. What is more, there is an enormous difference between acquiring a picture of the world through dispassionate, scientific study and acquiring it through patent emotionality and wishful thinking—and only then looking to see if it can survive contact with science.

Consider the following fact: Ninety-nine percent of the species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. There are two very different questions one could ask about a fact of this sort, if one wanted to assess the reasonableness of believing in God. One could ask, “Is this fact compatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God?” Or, one could ask, “Does this fact, alone or in combination with other facts, suggest that an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God exists?” The answer to the first question is always, “Well, yes—provided you add that God’s will is utterly mysterious.” (In the present case, He may have wanted to destroy 99% of his creatures for some very good reason that surpasses our understanding.) The answer to the second question is “absolutely not.” The problem for Collins is that only the second question is relevant to our arriving at a rational understanding of the universe. The fact that a bowdlerized evangelical Christianity can still be rendered compatible with science (because of the gaps in science and the elasticity of religious thinking) does not mean that there are scientific reasons for being an evangelical Christian.

Collins’ sins against reasonableness do not end here. Somewhere during the course of his scientific career, he acquired the revolting habit of quoting eminent scientists out of context to give an entirely false impression of their religious beliefs. Misappropriation of Einstein and Hawking, while common enough in popular religious discourse, rises to level of intellectual misconduct when perpetrated by a scientist like Collins. Where either of these physicists uses the term “God”—as in Einstein’s famous “God does not play dice…”—he uses it metaphorically. Any honest engagement with their work reveals that both Einstein and Hawking reject the notion of Collins’ God as fully as any atheist. Collins suggests otherwise at every opportunity.

In his role as Christian apologist, Collins also makes the repellent claim that “the traditional lore about Galileo’s persecutions by the Church is overblown.” Lest we forget: Galileo, the greatest scientist of his time, was forced to his knees under threat of torture and death, obliged to recant his understanding of the Earth’s motion, and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life by steely-eyed religious maniacs. He worked at a time when every European intellectual lived in the grip of a Church that thought nothing of burning scholars alive for merely speculating about the nature of the stars. As Collins notes, this is the same Church that did not absolve Galileo of heresy for 350 years (in 1992). When it did, it ascribed his genius to God, “who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions.” Collins clearly approves of this sordid appropriation, and goes on to say that all the fuss about Galileo was, in the end, unnecessary, because “the claims that heliocentricity contradicted the Bible are now seen to have been overstated….” (And what if they weren’t overstated? What then?) It is simply astonishing that a scientist has produced such a pious glossing of the centuries of religious barbarism that were visited upon generations of other scientists.

If one wonders how beguiled, self-deceived and carefree in the service of fallacy a scientist can be in the United States in the 21st century, “The Language of God” provides the answer. The only thing that mitigates the harm this book will do to the stature of science in the United States is that it will be mostly read by people for whom science has little stature already. Viewed from abroad, “The Language of God” will be seen as another reason to wonder about the fate of American society. Indeed, it is rare that one sees the thumbprint of historical contingency so visible on the lens of intellectual discourse. This is an American book, attesting to American ignorance, written for Americans who believe that ignorance is stronger than death. Reading it should provoke feelings of collective guilt in any sensitive secularist. We should be ashamed that this book was written in our own time.

Salon Interview With Sam Harris

2006-07-27T12:15:00.000-05:00

Salon.com’s Steve Paulson interviews Sam Harris author of the New York Times bestseller “The End of Faith”.

Source: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/07/07/harris/

The disbeliever
Steve Paulson | Published: 07.07.2006

Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith," on why religious moderates are worse than fundamentalists, 9/11 led us into a deranged holy war, and believers should be treated like alien-abduction kooks.

By Steve Paulson

Jul. 07, 2006 | Three-quarters of all Americans believe the Bible is God's word, according to a recent Pew poll. Numbers like that make an outspoken atheist like Sam Harris seem either foolhardy or uncommonly brave.

Two years ago, when the 39-year-old launched a full-scale attack on religious belief in his provocative book "The End of Faith," he was an unknown. That changed overnight when his book shot up the New York Times bestseller list and later went on to win the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Since then, "The End of Faith" has earned an avid following among atheists and lapsed churchgoers; it's the kind of book that gets passed around from one friend to another to another. Here, finally, was someone willing to do the unthinkable: to denounce religious faith as irrational -- murderous, even.

The heart of Harris' book is a frontal assault on Islam and Christianity, carrying both pages and pages of quotations from the Quran imploring the faithful to kill infidels, and a chilling history of how Christian leaders have brutally punished heretics. Harris argues that much of the violence in today's world stems directly from people willing to live and die by these sacred texts.

In perhaps his most daring rhetorical gambit, Harris seeks to undermine religion by denouncing not just jihadis and fundamentalists, but moderates. "Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world," he writes, "because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed." Harris especially chastises moderates for refusing to criticize scripture-quoting extremists; for him, they are basically guilty of legitimizing fundamentalism.

All this would seem to make Harris a hero among atheists. And, to a large degree, it has. Yet some atheists can't stomach the end of Harris' book, where he plays up the virtues of spirituality and mysticism, as well as serious meditation. Harris is a longtime practitioner of Buddhist meditation -- an outgrowth of the many years he spent studying the contemplative traditions of both the East and West. So while he's scathing about monotheism, he's far gentler in his assessment of Eastern religions. And for all his insistence on reason and scientific study, Harris is surprisingly open -- as I discovered in my interview -- to paranormal experiences like telepathy, and even to the possibility of consciousness existing outside the human brain.

Harris is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience, studying the neural basis of belief and disbelief. He keeps most of the details of his personal life vague. When I asked about his doctorate, he said he prefers not to say where he's working on it "to keep the scary people away from the lab." Now, it appears that Harris' academic future will have to compete with his writing career. In September, Knopf will publish his next book, "Letter to a Christian Nation" -- Harris' response to the thousands of angry letters he received from devout Christians about his last book. We spoke by phone about the dangers of religion and his own search for the sacred.

From what I can tell, your book "The End of Faith" has become the touchstone for atheists across America. Because you don't seem to have any qualms about denouncing the Bible or the Quran, you've almost emerged as America's critic-in-chief of religious faith. Is that a role you willingly embrace?

Well, I did not embrace it consciously. In fact, it's ironic that some of the most vituperative criticism I've gotten has come from atheists because, in the last chapter of my book, I talk about meditation and mystical experience. While I'm a very strident critic of religious faith, my argument doesn't totally line up with the biases that atheists tend to have.

But 90 percent of your book is a rather strident attack on religion. One reviewer described it as a "nuclear assault" on religion. I'm wondering why you chose to write this way. Maybe this is just how you feel. Or was it a strategic decision to write such a polemical attack on religion?

No, it was not in any sense strategic. It was really my immediate response to the events of Sept. 11 -- the moment it became apparent to me that we were meandering into a religious war with the Muslim world and were not going to call it as such, and paradoxically, in our efforts to console ourselves, we were becoming increasingly deranged by our own religious certainty. We have a society in which 44 percent of the people claim to be either certain or confident that Jesus is going to come back out of the clouds and judge the living and the dead sometime in the next 50 years. It just seems to me transparently obvious that this is a belief that will do nothing to create a durable civilization. And I think it's time someone spoke about it.

Is that what especially worries you -- the apocalyptic thinking that crops up in certain religions, whether we're talking about Islam or Christianity? Or is it much broader than that -- what you see to be the intellectual dishonesty in a lot of religious discussions?

My concern can be parsed out on many levels. The most basic is that our world has really been shattered unnecessarily by competing religious certainties. People who believe their religious propositions strongly are doing so for bad reasons and on insufficient evidence. There's just nothing that a fundamentalist Christian and a fundamentalist Muslim can say to one other to revise their mutual understanding of the world because they do not have a mutual understanding of the world. Their core beliefs have been taken off the table and have become resistant to conversation. So now we have Muslims tending to side with other Muslims in geopolitical conflicts, and Christians tending to side with other Christians. And this breeds conflict that would not otherwise occur. I think it is a profoundly widespread and disempowering myth, particularly among secularists and religious moderates, that these people would be killing each other anyway. They're killing each other over land or scarce resources.

That certainly is the other argument -- what we're seeing in the Middle East is more political than religious. Religion may be used to buttress certain political arguments. But ultimately, if you take, say, Hamas, the anger there is against Israel. It's not an argument about faith.

I think that's misreading the situation. When you ask why these people cannot live happily together on the same piece of land, the answer is a religious one. Muslims and Jews see the world differently because of their incompatible religious claims -- literally, claims upon certain real estate. And they view the disposition of this real estate in biblical or Quranic terms. That's a deal breaker. More specifically, when you look at the style of violence on the Muslim side -- the suicide bombing -- that can really only be made sense of in religious terms. Once you accept some of the core propositions of Islam -- once you accept the metaphysics of martyrdom and the principle of jihad -- then it becomes perfectly reasonable that a mother could celebrate the suicidal atrocities committed by her son because she thinks he's gone to paradise and he's killed infidels in the process. And he's paved the way for the whole family to get to paradise. If you actually believe these things, this behavior becomes quite understandable.

You really go after Islam and Christianity and Judaism. Why are you especially critical of monotheistic religions?

Part of that is just a matter of how much mad work is being done in the name of those faiths at this moment. I would rank them in order of Islam and Christianity and then Judaism coming up a distant third. But there's also something intrinsic to monotheism itself which is problematic. Monotheism tends to be far more rigid than other approaches to faith and far less able to incorporate the incompatible religious certainties of other groups. The Hindus, worshiping a dizzying profusion of gods, can accept an extra god when they come upon it. And so there are Hindus who talk about Jesus being an avatar of Vishnu, for instance.

You're saying with monotheism, the whole notion of the heretic or the infidel is much more of an issue than it would be in other religions where there is not just one god.

Yeah. When you look at the doctrine of Islam, and you consider the state of Muslim discourse in the 21st century, it is hard to imagine a doctrine that is less susceptible to modernity and pluralism. There are many apologists for Islam saying it's a religion of peace and Muslims are tolerant of other religions. I really think we owe it to ourselves and to future generations to be very clear and rigorous about what is actually believed by mainstream Muslims. What we recently saw in Afghanistan -- this man who converted to Christianity and was up for execution, and then got spirited away to Italy as the only accommodation that could be made -- that really is the true face of Islam. It really is punishable by death to wake up one morning and decide you no longer want to be a Muslim. The crime of apostasy, the disavowal of your religion, is a capital offense. We're not waging a war of ideas that's even addressing issues like this.

But doesn't it matter where we're talking about? I mean, Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, for the most part doesn't have this more extreme version of Islam.

For the most part. There are cells in Indonesia that are considered al Qaida affiliates. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a Muslim country, even Turkey, that does not have elements that should be troublesome to us. But it's true, the character of Islam is different in different societies. And that's a good thing. I think we can attribute that to the fact that most people do not take their religion as seriously as they might. But when you look at the theology, the truth is, the Quran really does nothing more eloquently than vilify the infidel. It's absolutely plain in the pages of the Quran that the responsibility of Muslims is to convert, subjugate or kill the infidel. This is not a document that's well designed for a pluralistic world or a global civil society. Unless the Muslim world can find some way of reforming this theology, or find some rationale by which to ignore the better part of it -- as Christians have tended to do, albeit imperfectly -- we have a recipe for disaster on our hands.

What about the Bible? Do you see this as a recipe for religious intolerance?

Oh, I do. There's no document that I know of that is more despicable in its morality than the first few books of the Hebrew Bible. Books like Exodus and Deuteronomy and Leviticus, these are diabolical books. The killing never stops. The reasons to kill your neighbor for theological crimes are explicit and preposterous. You have to kill people for worshiping foreign gods, for working on the Sabbath, for wizardry, for adultery. You kill your children for talking back to you. It's there and it's not a matter of metaphors. It is exactly what God expects us to do to rein in the free thought of our neighbors.

Now, it just so happens, however, that most Christians think there's something in the New Testament that fully and finally repudiates all of that. And therefore, we do not have to kill homosexuals. We don't have to kill adulterers. And that's a very good thing that most Christians think it. Now, most Christians actually are not on very firm ground theologically to think that. It's not an accident that St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine thought we should kill or torture heretics. Aquinas thought we should kill them, Augustine thought we should torture them. And Augustine's argument for the use of torture actually laid the foundations for the Inquisition. So it's not an accident that we were burning heretics and witches and other people in Europe for five centuries under the aegis of Christianity. But Christianity is at a different moment in its history.

But isn't this a problem mainly when you read the Bible or the Quran literally? Doesn't the conversation change once you stop reading sacred scriptures literally? If you understand, for instance, the historical context -- when Judaism or Christianity were first emerging, they were religions competing with other religions. Doesn't that free you up to appreciate their spiritual teachings?

I'd be the first to agree that it's better not to read these books literally. The problem is, the books never tell you that you're free not to read them literally. In fact, they tell you otherwise, explicitly so. Therefore, the fundamentalist is always on firmer ground theologically and -- I would argue -- intellectually than the moderate or the progressive. When you consult the books, you do not find more reasons to be a moderate or a liberal. You find more reasons to be a fundamentalist. I agree, it is a good thing to be cherry-picking these books and ignoring the bad parts. But we should have a 21st century conversation about morality and spiritual experience and public policy that is not constrained by superstition and taboo. In order to see how preposterous our situation really is, you need only imagine what our world would be like if we had people believing in the literal existence of Zeus. I defy anyone to come forward with the evidence that puts the Biblical God or the Quranic God on fundamentally different footing than the gods of Mt. Olympus. There are historical reasons why Zeus is no longer worshiped and the God of Abraham is. But there are not sound epistemological or philosophical or empirical reasons.

There's no doubt many awful things have been done in the name of religion over the centuries. But, of course, there have also been many wonderful religious people. I would argue, for instance, that Martin Luther King has been the most important moral leader in America over the last century. And I think it would be impossible to make sense of what he did without talking about his faith. It seems to me his Christian faith compelled him to be an activist and it's what gave him strength in very difficult times. What do you make of those kinds of people who've been inspired because of their faith?

I agree, King was an incredible person who did heroic and necessary work. A couple of answers here. There's no evidence that those things can only be done in the name of faith, whereas there is considerable evidence that really terrible acts of violence are being done only because of what people believe about God. For instance, while there are Christian missionaries working in sub-Saharan Africa doing heroic work to relieve famine, there are also secular people, like Doctors Without Borders, who work alongside them, doing the same kind of work and not doing it because they think Jesus was born of a virgin. They're not preaching the sinfulness of condom use the way Catholics and Christian ministers tend to do. So while Christian missionaries are helping people, they're also helping to spread AIDS with their sexual taboos and their prudery. So that's one issue.

I'm also breaking a taboo. I'm rejecting the idea that all of our religions are equally wise and emphasize compassion to the same degree. This is just clearly not true. Martin Luther King, to some significant degree, was animated by Christianity. But when you look at why he preached nonviolence to the degree that he did, he didn't get that from Christianity. He got it from Gandhi. And Gandhi got it from the Jains. Jainism is a religion of India that preaches this doctrine of nonviolence. To argue that that's the true face of Christianity is really misleading. Christianity also gives you the Jesus of the "Left Behind" novels who's going to come back and just hurl sinners into the pit. And the God who's going to punish homosexuals for eternity.

That's highly debatable, though. If you're a Christian and you look at the figure of Jesus, you can easily read his core message as being about love and compassion and caring, particularly for the outcasts of society.

That is Jesus in half his moods speaking that way. But there's another Jesus in there. There's a Jesus who's just paradoxical and difficult to interpret, a Jesus who tells people to hate their parents. And then there is the Jesus -- while he may not be as plausible given how we want to think about Jesus -- but he's there in scripture, coming back amid a host of angels, destined to deal out justice to the sinners of the world. That is the Jesus that fully half of the American electorate is most enamored of at this moment.

Let me follow up on that because a lot of people say the problem is that religion has been hijacked by the extremists -- people who've distorted the basic religious teachings of peace and love. But this, as far as I can tell, is not your view. You say religious moderates are largely responsible for religious conflict.

Well, I think religious moderation is a politically correct discourse about all religions truly being benign in their essence and just being hijacked by people who are psychologically unstable or political megalomaniacs. This is a false view. And it's giving cover to religious extremists. This respect for faith, this taboo against criticizing faith, prevents us from saying the necessary things that we must say against religious fundamentalism.

But wouldn't it make more sense to support the religious moderates, the people who really do not support those fundamentalists? Otherwise, you are removing the middle ground. In essence, if you take away the moderates, you're pitting fundamentalists against secularists. And a lot of people don't buy that dichotomy. I'm thinking of all the people in the U.S. who've rejected the dogmas of the churches they grew up in, but who still believe there is some transcendent reality out there.

It depends on what you mean by transcendent reality. I believe there's a transcendent reality out there, but that belief doesn't give me the slightest inclination to pay lip service to the God of the Bible or to deny the immoral message that comes through in many books of the Bible. I just think it's a myth we finally have to put to rest that our morality is necessarily linked to these scriptural traditions. The Bible is just not a good lens through which to view our present circumstance, given all that we've learned in the last 2,000 years. So questions of stem cell research, questions of social equity are not best processed through a reading of the Bible, however liberal you want to be.

We've been talking about how intolerant so many religious people can be. But aren't you asking us to be very intolerant of religion?

It may sound paradoxical but it's not. I'm advocating a kind of conversational intolerance. It's really the same intolerance we express everywhere in our society when someone claims that Elvis is still alive, or that aliens are abducting ranchers and molesting them. These are beliefs that many people have. But these beliefs systematically exclude them from holding positions of responsibility. The person who's sure that Elvis is still alive and expresses this belief candidly does not wind up in the Oval Office or in our nation's boardrooms. And that's a very good thing. But when the conversation changes to Jesus being born of a virgin or Mohammed flying to heaven on a winged horse, then these beliefs not only do not exclude you from holding power in society; you could not possibly hold power, in a political sense, without endorsing this kind of thinking.

It should be terrifying to us because many of these beliefs are not just quaint and curious, like beliefs in Elvis. These are beliefs about the end of history, about the utility of trying to create a sustainable civilization for ourselves -- specifically, beliefs in eschatology. These are maladaptive. For instance, if a mushroom cloud replaced the city of New York tomorrow morning, something like half the American people would see a silver lining in that cloud because it would presage to them that the end of days are upon us.

I want to step back for a moment and talk about your own background. Did religion play any part in your childhood?

Not really. I had a very secular upbringing. But when I became about 16 or 17, I got very interested in spiritual experience and the possibilities of seeing the world in a fundamentally different sense.

Did you pursue those spiritual interests?

Yeah, I've spent a lot of time studying meditation and sitting on meditation retreats where you're in silence for the entire duration, whether it's one month or three months, just practicing meditation for sometimes 18 hours a day. I've done this mostly in a Buddhist context, but not exclusively. And I've spent a lot of time studying religion and the contemplative traditions within Christianity and Judaism and Islam.

So you don't see Buddhism as being limiting in the same way as the monotheistic religions you've been criticizing?

Well, I certainly see it as limiting insofar as it's a religion. You can make the argument that Buddhism, specifically, is not best thought of as a religion. And certainly many Western Buddhists say that Buddhism is not a religion. But that doesn't change the fact that something like 99 percent of the Buddhists in this world practice Buddhism as a religion in the same superstitious way that most religions are practiced. Now, it doesn't have the same liabilities of Islam or Christianity. You can't get the same kind of death cult brewing in Buddhism, or at least not as readily. And that's why we don't see Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers.

You know, the Tibetans have suffered a terrible occupation under the Chinese. Many people estimate that 1.1 or 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a result of that occupation. We should see Tibetan Buddhists blowing themselves up on Chinese buses, if all religions are equivalent. But we don't see that. What we do see in Tibetan Buddhism -- which is impossible to even imagine in Islam at the moment -- we see Tibetans who have been tortured for decades in Chinese prisons, coming out and saying things like, "My greatest fear while I was in prison was that I would lose the strength of my compassion and come to hate my torturers." Now, that said, there's nothing in Buddhism that's held dogmatically that I would support. It's just that all dogmas are not equal and don't have equal behavioral consequences.

It sounds like you've been meditating for years and often quite seriously. Have you ever felt bliss or rapture while you've meditated?

Oh yeah. The problem with those states, however, is that they are transitory. They are conditioned by concentration. And when your mind is no longer concentrated on your object of meditation -- whether you're focusing on Jesus or a mantra or the state of rapture itself -- when thoughts again intervene and you're no longer concentrated in the same way, the state goes. And one of the real pitfalls of the contemplative life is to crave those states. You can become a kind of drug addict of your own meditative process where you mistake those states as being the goal of meditation.

One thing I find so fascinating about your book is that you're out there as an atheist. And yet you also say life has a sacred dimension. You talk about the value of spirituality and mystical experiences. It's interesting that you put all that in the same pot.

Yeah, many atheists felt it should not have been in the same pot. But I think it's necessary to just be honest. These are some of the most beautiful and most profound experiences that human beings can have. And therefore we're right to want to understand them and to explore that landscape.

But it does raise the question, what do you mean by spiritual? And what do you mean by mystical?

By spiritual and mystical -- I use them interchangeably -- I mean any effort to understand and explore happiness and well-being itself through deliberate uses of attention. Specifically, to break the spell of discursive thought. We wake up each morning, and we're chased out of bed by our thoughts, and then we think, think, think, think all day long. And very few of us spend any significant amount of time breaking that train of thought. Meditation is one technique by which to do that. The sense that you are an ego, busy thinking, disappears. And its disappearance is quite a relief.

Well, it's interesting to hear this description of mysticism because I don't think that's how most people would see it. I mean, most people would play up the more irrational side. Yes, you're losing yourself, but you're plunged into some larger sea of oneness, of perhaps transcendent presence. Obviously, you're staying away from that whole supernatural way of thinking.

Well, it's very Buddhist of me to do that. The Buddhists tend to talk in terms of what it's not. They talk about it being no self, they talk in terms of emptiness. But the theistic traditions talk in terms of what the experience is like. There, you get descriptions of fullness and rapture and love and oneness. And to some degree, I've had experiences that can be characterized that way. But there are pitfalls in using that language. People tend to reify these states and make metaphysics out of it. It's not like you learn about physics by being a mystic.

I want to ask you about one sentence from your book "The End of Faith." You say, "Whatever is true now should be discoverable now." It sounds like you're putting inordinate faith in science. Are you willing to acknowledge that there might be plenty of things we still don't understand scientifically that could very well be true?

There's no scientist who would hesitate to acknowledge that. This is one of the ironies of religious discourse. Religious people talk in terms of their own humility and talk of the intellectual arrogance of science, whereas the situation is totally reversed. Every scientist worth his Ph.D. will admit that we have no idea how the universe, or why the universe, came into existence. We have no idea why there is everything rather than nothing. And most of what is there to be discovered has not been discovered.

Let me mention one case in point. There is a wealth of anthropological literature about sorcery in Africa and Latin America, and there are plenty of personal testimonies about the power of witchcraft. From the scientific world view, this looks like sheer nonsense. Yet I'm wondering if it might be possible that science some day will be able to explain what now seems supernatural.

Oh yeah, I think the only way to explain it is with a scientific frame of mind. Now, scientists tend to be dogmatically opposed to looking at this kind of phenomenon -- at telepathy, for instance, because there's been so much fraud and wishful thinking. Science generally has been eager to divest itself of the spookiness of this area. But I think that kind of phenomenon is fascinating and worth looking into. And it may be that minds have some effect upon the physical world that we currently can't explain. But the way we will explain it is scientifically.

It sounds like you're open-minded to the possibility of telepathy -- things that we might classify as psychic. You're saying it's entirely possible that they might be true and science at some point will be able to prove them.

Yeah, and there's a lot of data out there that's treated in most circles like intellectual pornography that attests to there being a real phenomenon here. I just don't know. But I've had the kinds of experiences that everyone has had that seem to confirm telepathy or the fact that minds can influence other minds.

Tell me about one of those experiences.

Oh, just knowing who's calling when that person hasn't called you in years. The phone rings and you know who it is and it's not your mother or your wife or someone who calls you every day. I've had many experiences like that. I know many people who've had even more bizarre experiences. But that does not rise to the level of scientific evidence. The only way to determine if it really exists is to look in a disinterested and sustained way at all of the evidence.

You are a neuroscientist. Do you think there's any chance that human consciousness can survive after death?

I just don't know. One thing I can tell you is that we don't know what the actual relationship between consciousness and the physical world is. There are good reasons to be skeptical of the naive conception of a soul. We know that almost everything we take ourselves to be subjectively -- all of our cognitive powers, our ability to understand language, our ability to acknowledge anything in our physical environment through our senses -- this is mediated by the brain. So the idea that a brain can die and a soul that still speaks English and recognizes Granny is going to float away into the afterlife, that seems to be profoundly implausible. And yet we do not know what the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity ultimately is. For instance, we could be living in a universe where consciousness goes all the way down to the bedrock so that there is some interior subjective dimension to an electron. So I'm actually quite skeptical of our ever being able to resolve that question -- what the real relationship between consciousness and matter ultimately is.

That's interesting. Most evolutionary biologists would say consciousness is rooted in the brain. It will not survive death. You are not willing to make that claim.

I just don't know. I'm trying to be honest about my gradations of certainty. I think consciousness poses a unique problem. If we were living in a universe where consciousness survived death, or transcended the brain so that single neurons were conscious -- or subatomic particles had an interior dimension -- we would not expect to see it by our present techniques of neuro-imaging or cellular neuroscience. And we would never expect to see it. And so we have a problem. There are profound philosophical and epistemological problems that anyone must confront who's trying to reduce consciousness to the workings of the brain. This discourse is in its infancy, and who knows where it's going to go?

Macroevolution

2006-07-26T21:56:00.000-05:00

Every now and then, Perry Mann writes an interesting freethought article. Below he points out the failures of Paul Kuharich III’s criticism of secularism.

Source: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/060706-mann-comment.html

MANN TALK: Macroevolution
Perry Mann huntingtonnews.net | 07.06.2006

Hinton, WV (Special to HNN) – I [Perry Mann] search for a journalistic subject as a hawk scans the landscape for a mouse. This week I have a mouse. Paul Kuharich III of Huntington, WV has written a letter to the editor and excerpts from the letter are my mouse.

“The choice between religion and secularism, however, is an illusion. Secularism is merely another belief taken on faith, just as atheism is a belief taken on faith: unprovable, undisprovable, and every bit as opinionated as the most Bible-thumping sermon.

“Atheists and secularists often base their worldview on macroevolution, and there is no more opinionated, unscientific, religious belief than macroevolution. They try to keep valid criticism of it out of classrooms, bring pressure to bear on teachers and professors who don’t toe the macroevolutionist line, and refuse to publish valid criticisms of macroevolution in their so-called ‘scientific’ journals. The media helps out by not questioning unscientific assertions regarding ‘millions of years’ dating estimates and constantly accepting the false line that macroevolution is ‘the central organizing principle of science.’” There you have the full scope of the conspiracy to denigrate Creationism and inculcate children with evolution.

Kuharich asserts that “there is no more opinionated, unscientific, religious belief than macroevolution.” It’s difficult for one to include in so few words so many inaccuracies and fallacies. He uses macroevolution instead of microevolution or just evolution, because not even the most dogmatic creationist can deny microevolution. Barnyards are full of examples of it: a cow that gives three gallons of milk a day is the bred descendant of a beast that gave a pint or so and the chicken that lays an egg a day is the bred descendant of a bird that probably laid eggs twice a year. The wolf has by microevolution evolved into hundreds of breeds from attack dogs to lap dogs. And within my lifetime, potato beetles have become immune to insecticides through microevolution.

Mr. Kuharich’s problem with macroevolution is that it refutes the belief that God created every species from viruses to dinosaurs, including, of course, Adam and Eve, in a week 8 thousand years ago and that since then there have been no new species but only microevolutionary changes in the species God created eight millennia ago. He cannot abide the theory that all life originated a billion or so years ago and evolved from a common ancestor over millions of years. As Richard Dawkins observes in “The Ancestor’s Tale, A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution”: “There are those who think Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection explains microevolution, but is in principle impotent to explain macroevolution, which consequently needs an extra ingredient---in extreme cases a divine extra ingredient.”

Dawkins also writes this: “I have never seen any good reason to doubt the following proposition: macroevolution is lots of little bits of microevolution joined end to end over geological time, and detected by fossils instead of genetic sampling.”

Kuharich says secularism is a belief based on faith. Not so. Faith is an implausible hypothesis irrationally held. Secular belief is a plausible hypothesis rationally held. There is no god or church or holy hierarchy or divinely revealed truth associated with secularism. The foundations of its beliefs are conscience, science, reason, imagination, knowledge and intuition. The religionists, knowing how weak is the basis of their faith and how substantial is the scientific basis of secularism, seek to weaken secularism not by reason and facts but by disparaging its theories and those who believe them. How can anyone who has read Darwin’s The Origin of Species with an open mind characterize it as opinionated, unscientific and religious? Or a better question is how many creationists have read The Origin of Species?

Kuharich is disturbed because, as he sees it, atheists and secularists “try to keep valid criticism of it out of classrooms, bring employment pressures to bear on teachers and professors who don’t toe the macroevolutionist line, and refuse to publish valid criticisms of macroevolution in their so-called ‘scientific’ journals.”

I doubt that there is in this land a court in which an atheist judge presides. Yet, the courts of the land have without exception banned the teaching of Creationism in schools on the ground that it is tantamount to teaching religion and thus violates the First Amendment, but no court has ever banned the teaching of evolution on the ground that it is the teaching of religion. The reason is that evolution or macroevolution is not a belief based on faith but is based upon reasoned opinion, scientific fact and mountains of evidence.

The basic text to prove Creationism is found in the first two chapters of Genesis, comprised of two pages of very large print in my Bible. My copy of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man” comprises exactly 1000 pages of very small print, 75 pages of which are index. The difference in the number of pages between Genesis and Darwin is not offset by the allegation that the former is God’s word and the latter is man’s word. At least, it is not to secularists.

The burden of proof that there is a God is on those who believe there is, a burden that to secularists appears to be a Sisyphean task. There is no burden on secularists because there is no probative evidence that there is a God in the sense that He or She or It is in the image of man or woman or whatever. And that that entity hears prays, answers them, suspends nature’s laws, creates miracles and keeps books on the good and the bad one does as evidence to be considered on Judgment Day.

Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville and Huntington News Network. Born in Charleston, WV, in 1921, he lives in Hinton.

"Under God" in the courts

2006-07-11T21:50:00.000-05:00

The words “Under God” is in the courts again. This all started when Michael Newdow, a physician and atheist, sued the Sacramento County, California, school district his daughter attended, claiming public recitation by students violates the 10-year-old child's religious liberty. While legal precedent makes reciting the pledge a voluntary act, Newdow says it becomes unconstitutional for students to be forced to hear it, arguing the teacher-led recitations carry the stamp of government approval.

To spruce things up Justice Antonin Scalia, recused himself from the case at Newdow’s request. At a Religious Freedom Day rally in January 2003, the conservative Scalia reportedly said any changes to the pledge should be done "democratically," through the legislatures, not the courts. He also reportedly said removing references to God from public forums would be "contrary to our whole tradition."

That leaves the potential for a contentious 4-4 split among the remaining justices when it comes time to issue a ruling. A tie vote would mean the pledge would be banned in schools in the 9th Circuit, and potentially could apply to all public schools in the United States.

A ruling in the case is expected by early July.

This has come at a very sensitive time for this country. If they rule the phrase unconstitutional it will create an enormous public reaction I’m anxious to see. This with the hopeful democratic majority in November will create quiet an impact from the average religious right American.

CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/03/24/scotus.pledge/index.html

Related Posting: Religious Oppression Continues

Religious Oppression Continues

2006-07-22T15:19:00.000-05:00

I have a hard time understanding how things within the political sphere could have gotten so ugly, so despicable so fast. I will never deny that I am bias when it comes to some of the religious connections related to the direction we are moving in. All my bias doesn’t take away from the facts.

Source: http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7004265453

House Of Representatives Debate Pledge Of Allegiance Bill
AHN | 07.19.2006

On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives debated on a bill to protect the Pledge of Allegiance from legal challenges.
...
The pledge bill would deny jurisdiction to federal courts, and appellate jurisdiction to the Supreme Court, to decide questions pertaining to the interpretation or constitutionality of the Pledge. State courts could still decide whether the pledge is valid within their state.

Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said, "We are making an all-out assault on the Constitution of the United States which, thank God, will fail."

Representative Patrick Kennedy said, "This is a joke that this majority would talk about God and yet not even work to raise the wages of the very people that are taking care of the children of God."

The bill's sponsor, Republican Todd Akins, said, "America was a nation of God-given inalienable rights and that's why the country is in a war against radical Islamists."

Religion oppresses in so many different ways. The Republican Right Wing is now trying to oppress our government. It is happening more and more everyday, I hope in November things change for the best.

Bald is a Hair Color

2006-07-18T20:10:00.000-05:00

In my almost daily search for news I came across An Interview with J.C. Hallman on his books, The Devil is a Gentleman and The Chess Artist. As part of his research he visited an atheist convention he attended outside of Chicago.

An excellently funny quote from the interview I absolutely had to share

A big debate in atheism is whether or not it should be classified as a religion. Some atheists are willing to accept it, but the ones I visited were vehemently against it. At one point, they were looking for slogans to express this point and one woman came up with, “If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color.”

I don’t consider atheism a religion. Apparently this analogy is popular among atheists, now its popular among me, LOL.

Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason

2006-07-16T19:30:00.000-05:00

A new PBS show, “Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason” talks openly about the Faith & Reason in our culture. I watched my first episode today. Great show!

Below is an excerpt on Bill’s interview with Anne Provoost, author of “In the Shadow of the Ark” a book that shows the other perspective in the famous story of Noah and his ark before the great flood. Anne attempts to show us the other side of the story. I haven’t read the book but understand her some of her passion in writing the book.

Watch a short introduction of Bill’s show

Watch previous episodes online

Bible Becoming Unpopular

2006-07-11T19:04:00.000-05:00

It seems that slowly but surly the teachings of the Bible are becoming unpopular within cultures around the world. Societies are realizing that the Bible is intolerant to many realities, in this example homosexuality.

Source: http://www.gcn.ie/content/templates/newsupdate.aspx?articleid=1011&zoneid=4

Anti-Gay Christians Kicked Out Of Uk Prison
GNC.ie | 07.07.2006

A so-called Christian "discipleship" course has been axed from Dartmoor Prison after it was adjudged to be homophobic and not in line with "diversity policies".

The Inner Change programme - based on an American idea - has been closed down by the Prison Service after one year of operation. Lady Georgie Wates, of the Prison Fellowship, who helped to set up the course in Dartmoor, told the Church of England Newspaper: "There are two reasons for the closure. First we don't comply with the diversity policy of the Prison Service because we teach the sanctity of heterosexual marriage as the Bible says, which is seen as homophobic. And secondly, because we don't fit in with the multi-faith agenda. They think we should be teaching a bit of every religion and that what we're teaching offends other faiths."

The Inner Change programme, is based on the Alpha Course (pioneered by Rev Nicky Gumbel who makes no secret of his homophobia) and it aims to create a Christian community in the prison and includes follow-up and Christian mentoring after release. The course's proponents claim that in some American states recidivism has been reduced to eight per cent by the programme.

The British Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA's) secretary, George Broadhead, said: "We are very pleased to hear that this outfit has been booted out of Dartmoor prison.

“There are dozens of similar courses running in other prisons - all of them fundamentalist in nature and, of course, homophobic. They should all be cleared out - including the Alpha Course. Why should these groups be allowed to proselytise among people who are at an extremely vulnerable time in their life?

“Why should they be permitted to go into prisons - already extremely dangerous places for gay people - and reinforce the homophobia that is rampant already? The Prison Service should take a much tougher line and ban all these extremists."

More From Sam Harris

2006-07-10T21:34:00.000-05:00

I’ve read Sam Harris’, The End of Faith. I couldn’t put the book down. Sam really puts our need for the end of faith. Every now and then he publishes pieces of his book on the web. Below is a great excerpt.

Source: http://beliefnet.com/story/153/story_15332_1.html

The Problem with Religious Moderates
We can no longer afford the luxury of political correctness.
When religion causes violence, its root claims must be challenged.
Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason

People of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. However, religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance-born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God-is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.

We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man. This is not surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally: (i) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith (e.g., strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser natures-forces like greed, hatred, and fear-for which religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy. Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse.

Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of judgment, he cannot possibly "respect" the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.

...

While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God.

Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question-i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us-religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.

The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance, nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities.

Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience.

Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is flat, or that trepanning constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach. There are two explanations for this: either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago-while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate-or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We will see that there is much to recommend the latter view.

With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes that have come over us-culturally, technologically, and even ethically. Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will survive it.

Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word "God" as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world-to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish-is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.

Cross Victory

2006-07-09T20:47:00.000-05:00

Yes, Yes, Yes! The San Diego Mayor's office is conceding the city will move the cross rather than pay a $5,000 a day fine.

The cross, a religious symbol is on public city property.

Read my previous post on the subject, Cross to be taken down.

Article: Cross legal battle may soon be over

The Rise of Christian Nationalism

2006-06-17T20:55:00.000-05:00

An intriguing BuzzFlash Interview with Michelle Goldberg, author of, “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism” reveals some of the fundamentalist views currently plaguing our society.

Source: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20902

Christian nationalism inside America's mega-churches
BuzzFlash interview: Michelle Goldberg | Published: 06.02.2006

BuzzFlash: In his remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Stephen Colbert said, "Though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior." How would you take that quotation and apply it to Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism?

Michelle Goldberg: As always, reality keeps sneaking up behind Stephen Colbert’s satire. The Christian nationalists, which is a term that I use to describe people from various denominations, but who believe that the United States needs to be remade as a specifically Christian nation, includes most of the leadership of the religious right's huge swaths of the Republican Party. The vast majority of these people will say that everyone has a right to practice their own religion. But they’ll say, as long as they recognize that this is a Christian nation. You can do what you want as long as you know your place.

There’s one quote in this book that was really, really telling about this. The Congress was going to have the first-ever Hindu priest give an invocation. The Family Research Council issued a really angry statement, which says: "While it is true that the United States of America was founded on the sacred principle of religious freedom for all, that liberty was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our nation’s heritage. Our founders expected that Christianity and no other religion would receive support from the government, as long as that support did not violate people's consciences and their right to worship. They would have found utterly incredible the idea that all religions, including paganism, be treated with equal deference." That’s from the Family Research Council, which is a spin-off of Focus on the Family.

BuzzFlash: Dobson’s group.

Michelle Goldberg: Right. This is Tony Perkins' group now.

BuzzFlash: I listen to that statement and I think, one, it’s a historically inaccurate one. The debates over the Constitution clearly indicated that the intention was to separate church and state, and there were even those who felt very strongly that if any church became involved in the state, it would corrupt the church and not necessarily the other way around. Second of all, the statement just doesn’t make any sense. The Constitution said we could support a religion, but only Christianity? Where does the Constitution say any of this?

Michelle Goldberg: The Virginia religious liberty statute was written by Jefferson and is widely seen as the basis for the First Amendment. As Jefferson wrote in his autobiography, some had wanted to put an amendment into that statute saying that Jesus Christ was a source of religious liberty. Jefferson said, "It was rejected by the great majority in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and infidel of every denomination." So where do they get this from? Part of what I seek to do in my book is show that this is not just a political movement, but an entire parallel reality. It has its own revisionist history, including its own revisionist American history. There are volumes upon volumes that essentially rewrite the history of America, cherry picking various quotes and taking things out of context to try to show that the founders intended to create an Evangelical Christian America, and that separation of church and state is something that they never intended, and indeed would have been appalled by.

One of the crucial figures in spreading this kind of Christian revisionist history is a figure named David Barton, who’s actually the Vice Chairman of the Texas Republican Party, which I think shows you how much this ideology, which has departed so far from rationality or scholarship, is rooted and intertwined now with the Republican Party.

BuzzFlash: I have an issue that I’ve brought up before with the books we’ve carried about the attempt to turn America into a theocracy. A rather small item appeared in the paper, and we posted it on BuzzFlash, having to do with Antonin Scalia. He is a proponent of theocracy. He’s an Opus Dei Catholic, which is very close to the Evangelical movement, and when he was speaking at a synagogue in Alabama last year, he told the members of the synagogue that they shouldn’t fear a Christian nation because Jews have always been safe in a Christian nation. I’m thinking, how can this man be "brilliant" when Adolph Hitler ran what he very much celebrated as a Christian nation?

Michelle Goldberg: Hitler’s relationship to Christianity is complicated because he also had all this kind of pagan, Arian mythology. But, absolutely yes, it’s a preposterous statement. The entire history of Europe bears that out. But at the same time, even if you said, okay, if America’s a Christian nation, they won’t persecute you, I would say that that is still not good enough. You know, prior to the creation of Israel, Jews were by and large safe in Muslim countries. They kind of had their place, and it was understood that they weren’t weren’t quite citizens, but they were protected. So I would say that being a tolerated, protected minority whose rights are granted at the pleasure of the majority is a very different thing than being a full and equal citizen.

BuzzFlash: To carry that a bit further, Scalia himself says that he’s a strict constructionist – only what’s in the Constitution. Where in the Constitution does it say that this is a Christian country?

Michelle Goldberg: The Constitution was very consciously the only founding national document that does not mention God. There’s an excellent book that looks at this, called The Godless Constitution. That wasn’t an oversight. It was a remarkable thing for the time, and it shows the Enlightenment values of the founders. One of the things that some of the Christian nationalists have tried to do is to say that, in the end of the Constitution, when it says “in the year of our Lord,” that that was an attempt to give it the imprimatur of Christianity.

BuzzFlash: You mean merely the dating of it, basically?

Michelle Goldberg: Right. It kind of reminds you of another Stephen Colbert routine, when he’s talking to an atheist, and he’s saying, well, what about the money – "in God we trust" - don’t use money.

BuzzFlash: One more question, because it just flabbergasts me that he is on the Supreme Court. Everyone says, oh, I may disagree with him, but he’s just so brilliant and scholarly. So it’s not in the Constitution, yet he says he’s a strict constructionist. Where in the world does he get this? Is he just a liar?

Michelle Goldberg: Obviously, I can’t speak for Antonin Scalia. I will say that there is a very conservative school of Constitutional interpretation which is actually adhered to, I think, by a lot of Bush’s judicial appointees, which essentially holds the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to the states. They’ll say what is to stop each state from declaring themselves to be a Christian state? I don’t know where Scalia falls on that. But there is on the right this kind of radically circumscribed understanding of First Amendment freedoms that I think would shock a lot of people. Most people take for granted the fact that your rights are protected on the local level as well as the national level.

BuzzFlash: It’s what people like Ashcroft and Scalia bring to the Constitution. It ’s just not in there that the Constitution is a divinely given document. But they believe, because democracy is such a gift, that it must be divinely inspired. Therefore, since God is Christian, it must be a Christian document. That is why Ashcroft says Jesus is our king in America. And Scalia and Bush are in the same camp, even though there is nothing in the document that signifies that, and the founders explicitly excluded God from the Constitution and made the decision to keep church and state separate for a variety of reasons.

We talked with Stephanie Hendricks a little bit about dominionism. Can you explain what that term means?

Michelle Goldberg: Let me start by explaining Christian reconstructionism, because dominionism flows from that. Christian reconstructionism is a very small sect that actually has a quite different eschatology than most Evangelical Protestants. Most Evangelical Protestants in America are what is called pre-millennial dispensationalists , which basically means that they believe that the rapture and Armageddon will come, that Christ will return to earth, and then there will be a thousand years of peace.

The post-millennialists believe that they first have to build the kingdom of Christ on earth, and it has to rule for a thousand years, and then Christ will return. They’re much more activist because there’s much more of a role for humans to play in bringing about the Second Coming. Their philosophy of government is very, very harsh. It’s the closest that anyone comes to envisioning a real Taliban-style theocracy – the execution of homosexuals, the execution of women who are unchaste before marriage. But they’re a minority.

Their political philosophy, dominionism, basically holds that God gave the saints dominion over all aspects of life and creation, and that Christians need to retake their proper place and control every aspect of human society. That’s become very, very influential, and it’s something that’s spread to a number of thinkers. Some of the most influential are probably Tim LaHaye and James Dobson. Tim LaHaye is pretty explicitly a dominionist. With James Dobson, it’s implicit in much of what he writes. It’s basically an idea that’s central to a lot of what Pat Robertson has done in building the Christian Coalition. It’s central to a lot of these reformation projects, like the Ohio Restoration Project. They’re basically saying we need Evangelical Christians to take over every aspect of the state political machinery. This idea has kind of filtered down – it’s a part of Christian reconstructionism that has become popularized.

The post-millennialists are trying to facilitate the arrival of Christ. But for the most part, pre-millennialism has bred a certain kind of passivity. If you really believe that we’re in the end times and the rapture is imminent, then really all you need to kind of do is sit back.

What’s happened is that, through people like LaHaye, pre-millennialism in the 1980s was really politicized. The ideal is that you might only have a generation or two more, but during those generations, we have to make this a godly country. It’s part of your responsibility as Christians to spread the gospel and spread righteousness.

BuzzFlash: Kind of clean house before the Second Coming.

Michelle Goldberg: Exactly.

BuzzFlash: Okay, now let’s look at a specific advocacy/think-tank that’s facilitating this. Can you explain the significance of the Seattle based Center for Science and Culture? It’s played a very pivotal role in the development of this euphemism for creationism, "intelligent design."

Michelle Goldberg: The Center for Science and Culture is housed within the Discovery Institute, which is a conservative think tank in Seattle. It’s funded in part by Howard Ahmanson, who actually is a Christian reconstructionist. We said before that most people weren’t, but he actually is a pretty forthright theocrat. And the Center for Science and Culture takes creationism and tries to legitimize it in scientific terms, and make it sound as if it’s really just a competing scientific theory. It hires people with a lot of impressive degrees, although, in many cases, they got the degrees specifically with the idea of using them to discredit Darwinism for religious reasons. It’ll put someone forward like Jonathan Wells, who has a Ph.D. from Berkeley, and yet here he is, defending intelligent design. So they’ve given a lot of thought to packaging intelligent design to make it seem like legitimate science. And they’ve given a lot of thought to how to try to infiltrate their ideas into the culture.

One of the most interesting and clearest statements of their intentions comes from a leaked document called "The Wedge Strategy." It’s a 1999 fund-raising proposal that shows very, very clearly that they want to use intelligent design as a way to replace the foundations of modern Western thought. They say they want to do away with "the materialistic conception of reality." That would be replaced with a supernatural conception of reality. In the scientific method, you observe things. You test things. You build on knowledge. When something is discredited, you move on. You find other hypotheses. This is how most of us understand reality. It’s why, when people found dinosaur bones or discovered carbon dating, they said, oh, the Biblical account must be wrong. Or at least it must be symbolic or metaphorical. It’s clearly not scientifically correct.

What they would essentially say is that you have to start with the Biblical account as the foundation of truth, and if you find something in the world that contradicts that, then there’s something wrong with your findings basically. You’re either seeing it wrong, or you’re interpreting it wrong. Basically, how do you know what truth is? You have to start with the word of God. This would mean a huge revolution in the very structure of our thought and our society.

BuzzFlash: As Mark Crispin Miller has said, they don’t want to take us back just to before the revolution. They want to take us back to before the Enlightenment.

Michelle Goldberg: One thing that is important to realize is that, if you read the words of, say, televangelist D. James Kennedy, who’s very influential, his books very specifically attack the Enlightenment. Not only does he attack the Enlightenment, he attacks the Renaissance. They see this battle between the Renaissance and the Reformation, and they believe that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are corrupted by the influence of the paganism of the ancients. They reject all classical knowledge and see, as opposed to that, a reformation as the closest thing to the kind of society they would like to create - either a kind of theocracy, such as in the Calvinist theocracy in Geneva, or the Puritan theocracy in the colonies.

BuzzFlash: I just want to make an observation about what you described as creationism/intelligent design. It reminds me of the political parallel about fixing the facts - when going into the war with Iraq. In other words, you find contradictory facts. You somehow make them fit into the game plan, no matter what.

Michelle Goldberg: I kind of show in my book that the reason this debate is important is because it’s part of a more general contempt for the truth and contempt for empirical reality.

I describe the movement as proto-totalitarian, not totalitarian. I don’t think that we’re anywhere close to the kind of horrors that we’ve seen in other countries in the 20th Century. But I think some tendencies are at least nascent in this movement.

One of the things Hannah Arendt talks about is the way totalitarian movements construct an entire parallel reality, and then insist that that reality be substituted for the actual reality. You see this with everything from what’s going on in the science class, to the construction of foreign policy, to the promotion of abstinence education to the kind of fictitious numbers that are given for the Bush tax cuts. It’s something quite new in American politics – this idea almost of radical relativism – the idea that truth is determined by the person who has the power to impose it.

BuzzFlash: And to quote our friend again, Stephen Colbert, about Bush’s low poll numbers. He said Bush, "my hero," doesn’t need to worry about this because these poll numbers merely reflect reality. And, as we all know, reality has a liberal bias. And one of Colbert's opening schticks was about, "I feel it in my gut. I only do what I feel in my gut. There’s a lot of nerve endings there, they tell me." The facts don’t matter. All that matters is what’s in his gut. If he believed that Christ is leading him or God is talking to him, empirical facts don’t matter. And they don’t matter to some of the people he appoints to scientific committees or boards.

Michelle Goldberg: You essentially have this idea that truth has to be balanced with falsehood.

BuzzFlash: Yes, that’s certainly true. You bring up the interesting and rather distasteful case of David Hager, who opposed the morning-after pill and persuaded the FDA to overrule a majority recommendation to make the pill available over the counter. Then it turned out that his former wife told a reporter for The Nation that he was – what shall I say?

Michelle Goldberg: Well, that he had been raping her.

BuzzFlash: And he quietly resigned from his position.

Michelle Goldberg: He resigned, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that there are a lot of figures like him within the federal health bureaucracy. It’s not as if he resigned and now all is right. He’s an example in terms of his approach to science and evidence, and his desire to impose what is often called a Christian world view on the country. There are a lot of people who have the same backgrounds that are in the federal bureaucracy. I think it’s often very hard for people who don’t do this for a living, or pay attention to politics, to understand the influence that somebody who’s relatively obscure, on a relatively obscure subcommittee, can have on their actual day-to-day lives.

BuzzFlash: A person we haven’t really discussed a lot before, is Marvin Olasky, a former Jew who became a convert and is a professor at the University of Texas, Austin. What is his role in the rise of Christian nationalism?

Michelle Goldberg: I’m not sure whether he actually identifies himself as a Christian reconstructionist, but he’s very close to Christian reconstructionism. Basically, Marvin Olasky is like David Barton – a kind of revisionist historian. According to his revisionist history, the welfare state and the end of church-based charity have led to a decline in America throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase "compassionate conservatism." That’s a phrase that comes from the title of one of Marvin Olasky’s books that George W. Bush actually read the introduction to. And Olasky was an advisor on Bush’s first Presidential campaign. He definitely influenced not just Bush’s thinking, but the thinking of a lot of the Republican Party.

BuzzFlash: Olasky was Jewish and a Marxist at one point, and then found Jesus. He ended up as sort of Bush’s Billy Graham. As you say, Olasky is the godfather of many of his ideas, particularly the phrase "compassionate conservatism" and the whole faith-based approach that Bush has adopted.

Michelle Goldberg: I’m not sure if he is still close to Bush. He was clearly the impetus behind the creation of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, which is something that’s gotten billions of dollars. But he’s not a Bush advisor any more. He’s now the editor of an Evangelical magazine, The World. He’s still very influential in that world, but I don’t know what his relationship to Bush is.

BuzzFlash: Let me ask you about the growth of the mega-church. What is that phenomenon? I read about churches getting bigger and bigger in size.

Michelle Goldberg: It’s not just that they’re getting bigger and bigger in size. They’re also getting bigger and bigger in function. A lot of these churches look more like suburban megaplexes or shopping malls than any traditional idea of what a church looked like. They’re these massive suburban structures that encompass not just these amphitheatre-type chapels, but also day care, gyms, coffee shops, dinner places. They tend to sprout up in these very new suburbs and exurbs that have virtually no organic community or public space, and where you have the situation where the people who live there aren’t usually from there.

A lot of these places didn’t even exist ten or fifteen years ago. You have all of these people who don’t have roots, and don’t have any kind of community, and the church comes, and it’s this instant social world. It’s there to provide everything that you need. Certainly that could be a positive thing for people. Clearly they are incredibly welcoming. You go in there and sometimes you almost feel like you’re being love- bombed. But the thing is, often these megachurches also are giving people a very specific and detailed political ideology. When there’s nothing else challenging that, it takes hold all the more. If there’s nothing to contradict them, you have people living in an almost total parallel reality.

Under the IRS rules, churches aren’t allowed to campaign for a Republican candidate. But they are allowed to campaign for ostensibly non-partisan issues like a gay marriage amendment. And so, through the use of things like the gay marriage amendment, these churches can basically be enlisted as massive auxiliaries of the Republican get-out-the-vote machine. In 2004 in Ohio, they just moved the phone banks and voter registration into the megachurches. I remember there were stories in 2004 that liberals and progressive Democrats felt pretty confident because they were out on the streets, and they weren’t seeing the Republican get-out-the-vote machine. That’s because a lot of it was taking place in the churches.

BuzzFlash: A good example of this in the 2004 election is the activity of the current Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, Ken Blackwell, who championed the anti-gay marriage amendment in Ohio. There were questions about the propriety of that. He was and still is Secretary of State. But as you say, that was a de facto get-out-the-Republican-vote drive.

Michelle Goldberg: Yes. Before the election, I went to the megachurches. There was lots of dancing, lots of lights, and then this incredibly impassioned sermon. They were all about you need to form a mighty army and march on the ballot box, and everything was about the homosexuals, and the decadence and depravity, and they’re coming for your children. It would just go on and on and on, but it was all entirely political.

BuzzFlash: From what you just described, they have an entertainment component to them.

Michelle Goldberg: Absolutely. The music sounds much more like soft rock – it’s not hymns. It’s kind of soft rock, but with "baby" replaced by "Jesus." And big screens, and these kind of psychedelic swirling patterns all over the place – it’s a really impressive light show.

BuzzFlash: When you were covering the court case on intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania – which was eventually defeated – did you find these people amiable, nice, pleasant?

Michelle Goldberg: Sure. But my experiences of most people everywhere on a one-on-one basis are amiable, and kind. Having reported a little bit in the Middle East – it’s useful to realize that somebody’s ideology can be violently opposed to you, and they might support politics that would actually lead to your destruction. But that doesn’t mean they won’t have you over for lunch and be a totally gracious host. So on a one-on-one basis, I met people all the time who were charming and generous.

So they’re good people. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t support policies that would make this country unlivable, or that would destroy everything that people like me value in this country. It doesn’t mean that when they’re in groups and being fired up, and being told that homosexuals and secularists and atheists and feminists are a menace to their family – that they’re not capable of getting caught up in that kind of hysteria. That was something I saw as well. People, totally sweet on a one-to-one basis, but in the megachurch cheering about we’re going to defeat the homosexuals. And you see the gay people in the areas, where these anti-gay measures were used to get out their vote, and what they’re feeling is real terror. They’re looking around and thinking, these are my neighbors. They’ve always been nice to me. We’ve always smiled at each other. Who are these people?

BuzzFlash: For many years, progressives and cosmopolitan people, contemporary post-Enlightenment people, saw America as this great country and society that seemed to be moving forward. Maybe there were people of different ideological stripes, the Archie Bunkers, the middle America Nixon saw, and there might be some morality differences. But as you write in the Preface to your book, we really have two different societies now. We have this alternative reality and then we have like contemporary America that’s like contemporary Europe in many ways. It’s part of the modern world. Then we have a parallel society in America which is really, in its religious extremism, not that different than Islamic fundamentalists. They both reject contemporary society and resent contemporary morality. They both reject the Enlightenment. What happened?

Michelle Goldberg: My feeling is that they were always there – they just weren’t organized. There have always been fundamentalists in America, although I think this kind of Evangelical upsurge is something different. But the fundamentalists that were there kind of withdrew after the Scopes monkey trial, where they felt that they were humiliated. So they organized their parallel society in a way that made it easy for people on the Coast or in the cities to completely overlook it. Then, starting in the late seventies, with the creation of the Moral Majority, going into the Christian Coalition, and now into this much more dispersed Christian nationalist movement, they’ve just gotten much, much more organized, while Democrats and the left have become completely disorganized. Increasingly, people are no longer part of any civic or trade organizations. The unions fell apart and the megachurches bloomed. It’s been abetted by population shifts and redistricting, which really electorally disempowered people in big cities, which tend to be located in the most progressive states. Redistricting has kind of crowded urbanites together into single districts and spread out conservatives more so that they have vastly more electoral power. That’s part of it.

Another part of it is just existential. I think a lot of people feel despair or find modern life meaningless. Somebody said to me at one of these school board meetings, if evolution is true, then life has no meaning. If God hasn’t put you on this earth for a purpose, and if He doesn’t love you and think you’re special – if you’re just a product of random chance, some people see that as intolerable meaninglessness.

BuzzFlash: Has technology contributed to this?

Michelle Goldberg: Technology has had two roles, I think. On the one hand, it undermines the sense of traditional community. A lot of the people that I talk to seem to have this incredible nostalgia for their towns. They’re just living in these kind of suburban nodes. So there’s a sense of something profound that has been lost, and they feel kind of adrift. Then the megachurch fills that need that nobody else is filling. That’s part of it.

Technology has also allowed for the creation of this entire parallel media. It used to be that most people got pretty much the same news. People had access to pretty much the same entertainment. Technology has allowed this completely fictitious world to become an all-encompassing bubble.

BuzzFlash: Thank you, Michelle. It’s a wonderful book.

Michelle Goldberg: Thank you so much.

Life and Liberty for All Who Believe

2006-06-17T20:14:00.000-05:00

It scares me, the religious movement. It scares me because there are so many people that follow its cause, blindly. There are millions of insecure human beings that feel safe by the propaganda offered by the radical movement.

These are the same people that teach intolerance and inequality. All this can easily be seen in an old video available for watching through www.theocracywatch.org. I just saw an old video, "Life and Liberty for All Who Believe" in Real Video or Windows Media Video.

The video displays such concepts:

Preaching politics from the pulpit.
Their goal of Christianizing America.
Opposition of nuclear arms control in the name of religion.
Claims that Social Security is inconstant with the Bible.
Their attempt to make their views, the law of the land.
Campaigns against schoolbooks that mention women’s rights.
Demonizing equality between a man in a woman in marriage.
Support for Capital punishment.
Criminalizing Homosexuality with death penalty.
Claims that laws against child abuse are not compatible with the Bible.
Claims that public education is the single most dangerous force in a child’s life.
The radical right says, “Children shouldn’t have opinions, shouldn’t be taught how to think, but what to think”
Lobbying against the mention of slavery, poverty, evolution, even computers.
Book burning in the name of Jesus

Anti-gay Marriage Amendment

2006-06-10T12:30:00.000-05:00

David Walsh writes a great piece on the latest attempts by the religious right to add discrimination to the US Constitution.

Source: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/gay-j09.shtml

Republicans' anti-gay marriage amendment: a cynical and reactionary maneuver
David Walsh | Published: 06.09.2006

The attempt to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, which failed in the US Senate on Wednesday, was an exercise in political cynicism and reaction organized by the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress. It was aimed at shoring up political support for the Republicans within the party’s ‘base,’ i.e., the most backward elements of the American population.

In the end, the move to cut off debate in the Senate and bring the measure to a final vote, which required a two-thirds majority to pass, fell 11 votes short of the 60 needed. The outcome, give or take a vote or two, was a foregone conclusion.

The decision to bring the amendment before the Senate shows that the Bush administration hopes to alleviate its current political woes and avert a Republican debacle in the November mid-term elections by playing on the insecurity and prejudices of one section of the population at the expense of the basic rights of another.

Even sections of the American media acknowledged the anti-gay measure was a sop to social layers whose support for the current administration has cooled. Polls indicate declining support for Bush both among moderate Republicans (from 81 to 56 percent since December 2004) and conservatives (from 93 to 78 percent).

The New York Times spelled out the political calculations rather bluntly: “There are multiple reasons why Congress is taking up the issues now. The legislative calendar is relatively thin. The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, who controls the Senate’s schedule, has been trying to convince social conservatives that he is one of them in advance of a potential presidential bid. And while the leadership wants election-year votes on social issues, they do not want them too close to November in case they backfire.”

The arguments of the right-wing Christian elements are largely delusional. In their version of things, homosexuals, by asking for equal treatment, are waging war on America’s ‘traditional family values,’ with the help of the ‘liberal media’ and ‘activist judges.’

“We have been left with no other choice for the defense of marriage than an amendment to the US Constitution,” declared Tony Perkins, president of the ultra-right Family Research Council, at a recent press conference. “This is not about gay marriage, it is an assault on traditional marriage,” claimed Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr., chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, an organization of black clergy, at the same event. “Gays are aggressive, gays declared war, gays are attacking traditional marriage, and we’re saying stop it now.”

The debate over the gay marriage measure also served to divert attention, at least for a few days, from the mounting crisis of the Bush administration in both domestic and foreign policy. The White House and the congressional Republican leadership welcomed a chance to change the subject from US atrocities in Iraq and the deteriorating condition of the American economy.

While the issue was brought before the Senate as a transparent political maneuver, the campaign for an anti-gay marriage amendment is itself deeply anti-democratic.

The amendment would add the following language to the Constitution: “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.”

If this were implemented, it would alter the Constitution in an unprecedented manner to restrict, not expand, the rights of American citizens. A specific group, gay men and women, would be singled out for discriminatory treatment, in violation of the constitutional principle of “equal protection of the laws.”

The “legal incidents thereof” language is intended, moreover, to bar not only same-sex marriages, but also civil unions, which might give gay couples equivalent rights to married heterosexuals in such areas as child custody and adoption, property distribution and healthcare benefits. According to one account, the amendment would strip gay married citizens of access to more than 1,138 federal rights, protections, and responsibilities automatically granted to married heterosexual couples.

The Constitution provides absolutely no basis for defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. That is a religious definition. As one of the anti-gay bigots, the Rev. William Owens, founder of the Coalition of African-American Pastors, explained recently: “Our position is based on Scripture, not political parties or persuasion or opposition.” The enshrinement of such a religious attitude in the Constitution would be a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.”

The effort to prohibit same-sex marriages goes hand in hand with campaigns to enshrine school prayer in the Constitution, promote the public display of the Ten Commandments and similar measures which target the separation of church and state, a bulwark of democratic rights. These are part of a larger, ongoing effort to eviscerate the Bill of Rights.

While Republican leaders like Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas have ignorantly denied that the separation of church and state was a principle of the framers of the Constitution, the more brazen of the religious fanatics openly call for a repudiation of the Constitution’s secular and humanist underpinnings. One of them, according to a sympathetic commentator, “points a finger at the framers of the Constitution of the United States, who self-consciously broke with 1000 + years of Western heritage by not referring to the Trinity and to Christ as King. This was the hole in the dike... through which modern secularism has poured.”

The goal of these types, with the open or tacit encouragement of the leadership of the Republican Party, is to transform the US into a theocratic state, in which the principles of the 13th century would prevail.

Such views run counter to the democratic instincts and history of the American people. This is not to deny that, under conditions of growing economic insecurity for tens of millions and the political confusion that prevails in the US, appeals to ‘traditional values’ and the need to prevent the ‘moral ruin of the nation’ have had their impact. The Democratic Party, including its liberal wing, has shown itself unwilling and unable to seriously oppose such reactionary appeals.

Nonetheless, the clear trend is for increased popular tolerance about sexual orientation. While 58 percent of the population opposes gay marriage, according to recent polls, only 42 percent supports a constitutional amendment prohibiting it.

As columnist Margaret Carlson notes: “Every year millions of people watch “Will & Grace” and Ellen DeGeneres with no effect on their morals, and slowly make friends with the gay couple who moved in next door. For every homophobe who passes on, a young person grows up comfortable with the lesbians at work fussing over bridesmaids and wedding cakes. And then they register to vote.

“In 1977, a third of Americans opposed equal employment rights for homosexuals. That’s down to 9 percent. On gays in the military, that explosive precursor to gay marriage that almost derailed the infant Clinton administration, the Pew Research Center finds that by 2-to-1 people now believe gays should serve openly.”

According to Pew, opposition to gay marriage has dropped from 65 percent to 51 percent in 2006. One commentator (religioustolerance.org) observes, “The most recent three surveys show a fairly constant trend towards greater acceptance of same-sex marriage [SSM]. By extrapolating the data forwards in time, one might predict that equal numbers of American adults will support and oppose SSM by February of 2007. After that, one might predict that more adults will support than oppose SSM.”

The Bush administration and Republicans like Frist are openly seeking to deprive a considerable portion of the American population of its basic rights. The Urban Institute estimates the gay and lesbian population at 5 percent of the total US population over 18 years old, or some 10.5 million people. It calculates that some 3.1 million gay or lesbian people are living in “committed relationships in the same residence.”

The US is a massively complex and diverse society of nearly 300 million people whose demographics have undergone a dramatic transformation. The attempt by the Christian right to squeeze the American population into some largely mythical ‘traditional’ framework is as reactionary as it is doomed.

A few statistics will suffice. Some 11 million people are currently living with an unmarried partner, a figure that is probably an undercount. Forty-one percent of American women ages 15-44 have “cohabited” (lived with an unmarried different-sex partner) at some point, 33 percent of all births are to unmarried women, and the number of unmarried couples living together increased 72 percent between 1990 and 2000—that number has increased tenfold since 1960.

As of 2000, the most typical household in the US was an individual living alone. Twenty-seven million American households consisted of one person, compared to 25 million with a husband, wife and child. Only a quarter of households in the US now conform to the “traditional family” notion, a married couple and their children.

The average American now spends the majority of his or her life unmarried. In 2000, 44 percent of US adults were single, compared to 36 percent in 1970. There are 100 million single and unmarried adults in the US (some living alone, some living with partners, families, roommates, etc.).

In any event, the professions of concern for ‘family values’ and the sanctity of marriage on the part of the American political and media establishment are utterly hypocritical. The social policies of both parties are making life intolerable for millions, tearing families and marriages apart, guaranteeing increases in divorce or separation, domestic violence and child abuse.

In many cases in the US, partners—married or unmarried, same- or opposite sex—hardly see one another, as millions are forced to worked longer and longer hours, often in two or three jobs, simply to make ends meet. The absence of affordable daycare, the high cost of medical insurance (entirely out of the reach of some 50 million people), increasing attacks on reproductive rights, the slashing of social programs for working class women and families, the soaring cost of housing—this is the actual program, as opposed to the fantasized version offered up by campaign advertisements, that the Republicans and Democrats alike carry out on behalf of America’s families.

The social fabric of the country is being torn apart primarily so that a disproportionate share of society’s wealth will continue to flow to the 0.1 percent of the population that has enriched itself beyond imagination over the past several decades.

Religious Double Standards

2006-06-10T12:04:00.000-05:00

The double standard set by some Christian groups in this country and around the world is extremely hypocritical. It seems that the moment a certain group gains some momentum of power over politics it immediately starts to set a double standard in hopes their power will protect them from their own immoralities.

Take for example:

"The theme of a PG-rated film may itself call for parental guidance," the MPAA says of its rating system. "There may be some profanity in these films. There may be some violence or brief nudity. ... The PG rating, suggesting parental guidance, is thus an alert for examination of a film by parents before deciding on its viewing by their children. Obviously such a line is difficult to draw."

"It is kind of interesting that faith has joined that list of deadly sins that the MPAA board wants to warn parents to worry about," film spokesman Kris Fuhr told the Scripps Howard News Service.

Fuhr noted the association "decided that the movie was heavily laden with messages from one religion and that this might offend people from other religions. It's important that they used the word 'proselytizing' when they talked about giving this movie a PG."

...

The plot includes numerous prayers being answered, a medical miracle, and a mystic who delivers a message from God.

I simply can’t believe some Christians are offended by the PG rating. They think their perspective is so perfectly moral that they can’t think straight.

The PG rating for the film is already sparking discussion on Internet messageboards. Among the postings:

· "This is just another example of trying to 'ghetto-ize' Christians. No other group is treated as such. Whoever is on that board needs to hear that this is not going to be tolerated unless the religious beliefs of every other group – including New Age, atheist, Wiccan, etc., are treated the same way. How sad that we have descended to this. Make no mistake, this is a very disturbing sign of a sick and potentially dangerous culture."

· "It is demonizing Christians and that is no different from the demonizing that was going on in Germany before the Holocaust. First, there is the laughing at, then the demonizing, then blaming and finally, punishment that everyone accepts as normal and good. Sit and allow this to happen and that is the road we are going down."

· "Nowadays, a PG movie means it's family friendly! Heck, 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' is PG. No one complains about its PG rating when the family's Greek Orthodox religion is explicitly shown. So why should people complain that 'Facing the Giants' is PG? It might get people to take it seriously. If it had a G rating, people might be likely to think it's a cute little kid's movie."

· "I think it kind of makes sense. Look at it this way. If a movie is based on proselytizing atheism and promoting atheism, wouldn't you like it to have a PG rating? As a parent, you don't want children taught ideas that you don't feel are appropriate. If a movie is pushing the idea that God doesn't exist, even if it is the cleanest movie in the world, many Christian parents would want to guide their children regarding that film. The same might be said about Muslim or Buddhist families not wanting their children to have instruction that they do not agree with."

· "I'd like to see the rating system really be put to serious use if movies about the Bible are going to come out. I, for one, would not want to go to a G-rated movie based on Scripture and then have to watch as actresses playing Lot's daughters get busy with their dad. That is an NR [Not Rated] movie if there ever was one."

Source: http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50556

Religious Right, Happier on the Land

2006-06-10T11:30:00.000-05:00

Perry Mann writes an interesting piece that really captures the possible connection between the values of the Religious Right and rural country life.

Most people have heard the term “Middle America”, the area’s of the country, mostly in the center of the continental 48 states where family and conservative values are strong. Perry helped me to understand why Middle America has those tendencies.

Source: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/060605-mann-comment.html

The Religious Right Would be Happier on the Land
Perry Mann | Published: 06.05.2006

The Religious Ultra-Right members claim that they are oppressed by secular humanists, which constitute just fourteen percent of the population. They further claim that this country is going to hell on a sled slicked by the sins of that fourteen percent. They really would, I suspect, like to eliminate all secular humanists in the manner that Torquemada eliminated thousands of them and other apostates during the Inquisition.

But this is not the Fourteenth Century. So to alleviate the frustration of their not being able to eliminate humanists in the manner of that century, I suggest, in view of their concern over the sins of humanism--- namely, abortion and divorce; abolition of prayer in schools; toleration of same-sex marriage; teaching sexual education and evolution; advocating contraception, stem-cell research and euthanasia; violating the sanctity of the Sabbath and committing with cavalier nonchalance most of the deadly sins---that they leave the cities, where most of them and everyone else in this country live, and return to the land where few of the sins that they abhor flourish now or have flourished or, if committed, done so covertly and less often---owing more to constricting circumstances than to innate virtue. The faithful need to be reminded of the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Thomas Jefferson, a deist, that is, one who believed that a First Cause created the world and all that is in it, set it in motion and then retired, and one who believed not in the divinity of Jesus --- envisioned for America a land where everyone owned a piece of it and thus would never be unemployed and could with work and sweat provide a living for his family and enjoy the fruits of his labor. And since independent of everyone but his neighbors and nature, he could vote his conscience and knowledge and thus help maintain a democracy. But Jefferson’s utopian dream died with the advent and monumental growth of the cities where now 90 percent or more of this nation’s citizens reside. In fact, cities are where one half of the world’s inhabitants reside, or to put it more accurately, where most of the one half of them barely exists---rather than resides.

The city is man’s response to his eviction from Eden and the penalty for his disobedience, to wit: The earning of his bread by the sweat of his brow. There were those evicted who in the heat of day in the field, or in frustration after an unsuccessful hunt, decided that there was a better way to earn their bread, to wit: To figure a way to acquire, without sweat, a portion of bread and meat of those who produced or caught it. Thus, from that dream of a scheme grew a crossroads into a metropolis, where nothing happens that is not a repeat of the getting a bit of someone’s bread, or whatever he has, without sweat or, at least, attempting to do so. The name of the scheme was capitalism.

Capitalism is a game of competition instead of cooperation. It produces enormous wealth for the predatory type and produces crumbs for the cooperative type. Wealth corrupts and great wealth corrupts greatly. The city’s wealth corrupts the wealthy, who have it, and corrupts the proletarians, who have too little of it. The city’s wealth corrupts all within its jurisdiction. The hinterland is poor relative to the city and poorness on the land is less corruptive. Never was there a rich saint. Poverty is a prerequisite to sainthood. Christ was aware of the corruptibility of riches. A rich man had the obstacle, he taught, of threading himself through the eye of needle to enter the Kingdom.

So in view of all of the above, I suggest to the Religious Ultra-Right that the members thereof migrant from the city and take up quarters on the land, where they can escape the modern trends that disgust them and infuriate them and where they can live free of all the sinful life-styles of the urban types.

I can attest to the virtue of those who lived on the land, even though their virtue was probably more the result of a lack of time, money and opportunity to live other than virtuously. I know that on the land the righteous will be relatively free of the sins of humanism; for I lived there and I know the culture of it. If the righteous would return to it and thus to the culture of a century or more ago, they would be more at home than, say, at Las Vegas. Infinitely so.

There would be no abortion because every child would be wanted and needed. There would be no idleness for anyone for the Devil to exploit---thus drugs and alcohol would be absent---because everyone would be always employed, would become tired, know rest and sound sleep, from the time he or she could walk and talk until he or she died. There would be no divorce because the cost of one and the disruption of the family enterprise would be such that everyone involve would become a beggar in months. There would be no promiscuity because there would be no time or energy or opportunity for such an excursion into the short-lived bliss and the long-lived remorse of an affair.

There would be no need for sexual education or contraception because unprotected sex would be sanctioned as necessary to produce children, the sine qua non of rural existence. Prayer would be needed, even if sterile, and used extensively because one on the land is naked before nature with only neighbors as insurance. Homosexuality would be a non-issue because if one did not wish to or could not produce children, he would be pitied not scorned. Euthanasia would also be a non-issue because the aged would remain in their homes and die attended tenderly by loved ones. Violating the Sabbath would be unheard of, because the occasion of going to church would be the social event of the week. Evolution wouldn’t even be defined in their dictionaries.

There would be no radio, TV or internet to seduce; no telephone, daily paper, art museum or symphony hall to capture attention and divert one from his duties. Music would be the birds and the wind; art would be all that nature has created; news would be the signs of the weather; communications would be with oneself mostly and confidants; and the outside world would intrude only when some city slicker arrived hawking an elixir that cured everything from warts to fallen arches. Wars and talk of wars would never break the peace except when a youth would have to go to serve the nation and, if sent to Paris, would never return to the farm.

But the routine of living on the land---planting, cultivating, harvesting, preserving, procreating; celebrating birth, marriage and grandchildren; enjoying the satisfaction of the day’s work and the day itself; watching the sun from up to down, the night from darkness to dawn, and the seasons from summer to spring; with sweet air to breathe, clean water to drink, rain to refresh; no trash to bag, no taxes to pay, and the coming of the end of life with a confident feeling of having lived it as nature, and perhaps God, would have wanted one to live it ---would be the rewards and the happiness of returning.

Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville and Huntington News Network. Born in Charleston, WV, in 1921, he lives in Hinton. The portrait accompanying this column is by Robert Shetterley from his book “Americans Who Tell The Truth.”

Modern Sexuality

2006-06-07T20:46:00.000-05:00

Just last week I was telling a co-worker at work that the mentality of mankind must change overtime when it comes to the childbearing. Even with widespread birth control women are having children everywhere, whether they want them or not. I myself was not a planned pregnancy. Thankfully my parent’s were able to wed and were financially stable to raise my brother and I well.

Not everyone is as fortunate as my brother and I. Some children are born into poverty stricken situations with parents that are not prepared emotionally or financially for the task of raising a child. I believe we all should make more of an effort to only have children when we want them.

Germany is leading the way in a more progressive outlook in sex. They are having sex without the kids. The LATimes has written an interesting Opinion piece on the subject. Of course religious fundamentalists are freaking out. It is unthinkable for adults to have sex for reasons outside of reproduction.

Sex is essential, kids aren't, LATimes Opinion