Life Under Secularism

Pick any nation that is not secular or industrialized and compare it to one that is.

http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries

While you may find exceptions, practically speaking every nation that falls under the categories of both “secular” and “industrialized” will rank higher in terms of human progress. That means not just gross GDP but civil rights, quality of life, opportunities and so forth. Human progress means individuals are free to pursue whatever they feel makes them happy in such a way that they’re not in constant strife with their neighbors. While religion may have been a prominent part of their past it no longer has the power to compel people in these nations to be religious or to behave according to religious values. Religion is a choice, not an obligation. The most respected people in these societies are not those who wear their religion on their sleeve but people who contribute the most to their societies without needing to broadcast their religious affiliation. Religion has a largely ceremonial function in these societies and as a consequence a growing percentage of those societies identify with no religion.

People in these nations aren’t desperate. They’re not worried about where their next meal is going to come from or how they’re going to pay the bills coming due. They’re generally not worried about getting sick and losing everything because they can’t work or having to toil in a menial job until they die because there’s no way to pay the cost of living otherwise. What we’ve learned is that there’s a demonstrated correlation between inequality and religion.

https://www.russellsage.org/awarded-project/relationship-between-inequality-and-religion

The more inequality people perceive in their societies the more religious they tend to be. High inequality makes it hard for people to ignore their own plight. They can’t help but face the fact that they don’t have security in their daily lives, that a bad accident or an unexpected bill can tip them over the edge of hanging on into destitution. So they turn to anything that offers hope, even if it’s a lie. Religion feeds on fear and insecurity.

If you wish to nitpick the HDI rankings then look at others.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/quality-of-life-rankings

https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.jsp

https://worldinfigures.com/rankings

You may find exceptions where highly religious societies rank higher in specific indexes, but by and large the vast majority of places where it’s good to be alive are secular. That doesn’t mean religion is forbidden in these places, it means religion doesn’t dominate people’s lives. If civil rights is even remotely a concern for you then secularism is the way.

We also have contemporary research showing that religious indoctrination doesn’t promote progress:

This paper studies when religion can hamper diffusion of knowledge and economic development, and through which mechanism. I examine Catholicism in France during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914). In this period, technology became skill-intensive, leading to the introduction of technical education in primary schools. I find that more religious locations had lower economic development after 1870. Schooling appears to be the key mechanism: more religious areas saw a slower adoption of the technical curriculum and a push for religious education. In turn, religious education was negatively associated with industrial development 10 to 15 years later, when schoolchildren entered the labor market.

So why does the world work this way? In part, it's because modern governments are held accountable by the people they govern. When they're not then abuses and atrocities escalate. But it's also because people have the ability to compare promises made against promises kept. When governments make promises that they don't keep, those governments ultimately fall. But religions make promises [that can't be checked, let alone kept which is what makes them uniquely harmful in ways that governments aren't.

Here is independently verifiable evidence that human progress happens in spite of religion, not because of it. The goal is not to turn the world atheist; that's a choice everyone should be free to make for themselves. The goal is to turn the world secular, so no one is coerced into a choice they don't agree with. The end result is that the demand for religion diminishes with each generation as people discover they simply don't need it.

Labels and Semantics

Stop me if you've heard this before: "You can't be an atheist because atheists believe there is no God!" Maybe you've said it yourself, I don't know. Whether you've said it or simply heard it, I would like to explain why this statement is pointless no matter what definitions you've embraced.

Labels aren't important. They're really not. We use them as mental shortcuts to help us decide how to respond at a glance. You may be aware of my previous comments on mental scripting if you want a more in-depth examination on the topic, but the point here is that these shortcuts don't tell the whole story. Labels are descriptions of things, they're not prisons.

I am a liberal. To you that may mean I want to steal all your money so I can redistribute it around to make everyone poor. It may mean you think that I support killing babies to slake my lust for blood. If you're stuck in the Nineteenth Century you might think it means I support unregulated capitalism to cure all societal ills. To me it means I support progressive economic and social policies for the good of all. As a liberal I don't object to people being rich, but I do object to rich people using their wealth and influence to block the wellbeing of others. Identifying as a liberal is a label that I use as shorthand to describe my political positions, but any assumptions you make on specific positions are unlikely to be accurate unless you know me well enough.

Likewise with atheism. Atheism means I don't believe in any gods. This doesn't mean I claim to know there are no gods. If you insist that I can't be an atheist unless I stoutly deny the existence of gods then good for you, but that has nothing to do with me. I will continue to use the label of atheist as shorthand and I will not accept your authority to insist I must stop using it. I can tell you precisely what atheism means to me as well as why I identify that way and if you don't understand me after that then your insistence on playing semantic games will make me lose any interest in talking with you.

You can't pin me down with a label. You can't force beliefs on me simply because you think your definition of something is better than mine. I'm not going to stop being a liberal just because you think liberals drink the blood of the unborn, nor am I going to stop being an atheist because you think atheists can only say there are no gods. I understand why you'd prefer if I conform to your expectations, but I have no interest in complying. You can either choose to understand me or you can stick with your misconceptions. Either way, I accept no obligation from your assumptions.

The God Quality

I have previously addressed the Problem of Evil in a another post but I'm not sure I really addressed the Christian apologetic of divine command theory. In its most simplified form, Yahweh can never be evil or immoral because he's the god. This god quality automatically makes everything he says or does automatically moral because of who he is. Because we do not have this god quality we have no right to pass moral judgment on anything he says or does. No matter how evil or immoral any action (or inaction!) he takes it is automatically made moral by dint of his authority as the god. If we do the same evil, immoral thing citing Yahweh's action as precedent we are still evil and immoral because we do not possess the god quality. The Profit of the Church of the Fridge wrote an incredible essay comparing the morals of Superman against the morals of Yahweh and I highly recommend it.

The Christian answer to the Problem of Evil is that there's no problem at all. Just ignore it until the problem goes away. I think that sounds perfectly reasonable when you don't think about it.

Why do I care if religion mixes with politics?

I truly believe that religion is a personal matter, a decision we all make about what reality is and how it works. As an atheist I don't believe religion has anything valid to say on the matter based on my observations of reality versus claims religions make. But I can't force anyone to agree with me and refuse to support public policy that would criminalize religious belief or worship.

When someone tells me that they approach politics with a religious mindset I can't help but roll my eyes. This is an example of what we're talking about when we refer to beliefs informing actions: how do you expect to formulate good public policy if your foundation of truth is a fantasy? I can't stop people from voting that way but I can uphold secularism in which people are entitled to believe whatever they choose but can't use our laws to coerce compliance with religious belief.

I draw the line when people try to inject religion directly into politics. It is a direct violation of our highest laws and a bad idea in general. Politics and government are subjects that require deep analysis and careful consideration of the consequences of policy whereas religion requires you to take your brain off the hook and do as you're told. Consider for the moment the way religious belief mimics drug use. Would you trust a politician who constantly nods off on morphine or freaks out on LSD? Would you trust a drug dealer to faithfully represent the interests of his addicted customers? If not, then why would you trust a religious fanatic with the intimate workings of our government?

When Roy Moore gave a religious sermon explaining why he refused to concede his electoral loss he used religion as a weapon against his opponent and our nation. His religious language was designed to bypass his viewers' cognition and appeal directly to their id and get them to respond on instinct rather than rationality. I can't respond to that in any way except as a threat.

There are many examples of how religion is a threat to modern society and human progress but I think this is fundamental: religion encourages us to bliss out in a dopamine haze and leave the driving to someone else. I can't stop someone from choosing to partake but I can help them recover from addiction.

Flying On Autopilot

What I'm about to discuss here is not ground-breaking. Many people will already be aware of the topic but I feel it worth exploring.

Working in IT I have necessarily learned a little bit about automation. Learning to write computer scripts to automate common tasks has been a significant boon to my life in computer support like when someone is constantly losing their network mappings or there's a folder that constantly fills up with old, unused temp files but never gets cleaned up and ultimately slows down the operating system. Yes, I'm looking at you Microsoft. The point being is that scripts are labor-saving devices, tools we can launch to automate a process that would take more time and energy to do by hand. What's interesting is how we do this in our daily lives in ways that have nothing to do with computers. Did you ever drive somewhere familiar to you but with the mental note that you need to make an extra stop, then miss it? You were driving on autopilot. Did you find yourself talking about something with someone only to discover that neither of you were talking about the same thing?

We all develop strategies for dealing with everyday life, like taking one route over another on our way to work or navigating potentially hazardous social settings. We come by these strategies through observation, imitation and experimentation. At some point in our lives we were taught strategies on various topics and tried them out, learning for ourselves what works or doesn't work. We then took those strategies and created mental scripts for ourselves to use them without wasting much time thinking about it. Once a situation matches a pattern in our scripts we automatically launch into the behavior we think is most appropriate to the situation we think we're in. But we don't always get it right; we sometimes fall back on our behavioral scripts when we ought to be paying closer attention to what's going on. It's something everyone does to some degree.

Why am I talking about this? For a couple of reasons really. One is because most of us aren't aware that we're doing this or really think about what it implies. Another is because we can get lazy and avoid change because that would require more energy than we're willing to commit. We often call this "getting stuck in a rut." Sometimes we get frustrated because we recognize we're in a rut but we're not willing to spend the energy necessary to climb out of it.

One of the most egregious examples of this behavior involves religion. There are a number of reasons why so many religions focus on ritual and repetition and one of them exploits the human tendency toward scripted behavior. The more you do it the less you think about it, and we find that comforting. It relaxes us and allows us to fly on autopilot. It becomes habit-forming and we get locked into following the script we're taught to follow. Religion encourages this, particularly on religious matters. Don't think about it, just do as you're expected. Which means when religion gets things wrong its followers don't notice or don't want to think about it. They can get angry when confronted with it.

I've spoken before about the need to shock believers out of their complacency but I never really explored what I mean by it before. This is it. This is the nature of religious complacency: the human tendency to develop scripts for ourselves so we don't have to spend much energy thinking about what we're doing. Faith, in the religious context, means you're not supposed to take yourself off autopilot when it comes to religious matters. Anything that deviates from the script is a bad thing and might be punished severely. This is how loving, compassionate parents can turn into monsters who beat their children or harass them, even kick them out of their homes when it turns out the child doesn't share their beliefs. This is how good people do bad things: because they're following the script that's been ingrained into their behavior since infancy.

How do you break the script? It depends on the person. Some people cling to their scripts, too insecure to ever deviate from them. Some people are just too complacent, uninterested in putting forth the effort necessary to examine or modify their scripts. Some people just aren't aware that they're following a script and, once it's pointed out to them, will make them willing to take a closer look. Some people are frustrated because they recognize they're stuck in a rut and are open to change. You never know until you talk to them and find out.

I've spent the last three decades examining my scripts and adjusting them to the best of my ability. I still make mistakes and I still fly on autopilot far too often than is good for me. But I know I'm prone to it and I'm willing to change. Sometimes I just need help figuring out how.

Revisiting the Existential Threat to Western Society

I've argued this before but the topic is still hot so I'm going to approach it from a different perspective.

Believe it or not, Muslims are not inherently bad or evil. It's one thing to challenge their claims and criticize their actions when they behave badly, but that's not what a lot of the criticism is doing. I don't like vilifying Muslims as a group for a number of reasons. One is because they're not a majority in my society the way Christians are, so it's not as easy to punch up. Were I living in Iran or Saudi Arabia that would be a different story, but that would carry its own set of problems worthy of criticism in their own right. Vilifying Muslims in a Christian-dominated society doesn't promote secularism or anti-theism so much as give shade to Christian agendas. Even if you're not intending to promote Christian supremacy, unintended consequences are still a thing. If we want a post-religious society then I strongly believe that secularism needs to be our goal, not anti-theism. When enforced correctly secularism can't be so easily subverted to promote a sectarian agenda. Anti-theists can get so caught up in focusing on a particular threat that we ignore all others.

Another reason I don't support vilifying Muslims or other minority groups is because in spite of our recent gains atheists are still a minority. If there's anything that Christians and Muslims agree on is that atheists are a threat to religion. If you think that Christian society is a valid defense against Islamic aggression what you're doing is empowering Christians to fight against ideological threats. That necessarily includes us. Speaking as an atheist, if you think that Christians won't use the power we give them to shut us down with the same zealotry they'll use against Muslims you're sorely mistaken. We are the original Other, the true existential threat to all religious agendas. We may not use violence to achieve our ends the way Christians and Muslims do, but we are no less dangerous to their goals.

Christian extremists have been looking for ways to roll back the clock on the Enlightenment, to overturn secularism and restore their religious power in Western society. We should not help them achieve their goals by undermining secularism in our zeal to oppose Muslim terrorism. It will not stop with Muslims.

So think again before you share a post from Breitbart, World Net Daily and other right-wing sources. Look to see what else they have to say about religion in general; are they just anti-Islamic in particular or do they promote secularism in general? If the latter then go ahead and share it and I'll support it when I see it. But if it's just the former then most likely they're promoting a Christian agenda and no matter how much you may hate Islam or Muslims, that's not going to help anyone who isn't a Christian. Like me.

The Cat and the Cave: Plato's Cave versus Schroedinger's Cat.

Plato's Cave is a famous philosophical construct wherein hypothetical prisoners are tied down facing one wall of a cave so they can't move their heads and look around. Behind them is a fire providing light for the cave, and between the fire and the prisoners are puppeteers moving back and forth holding various objects that cast shadows on the wall for the prisoners to observe. It's a hideously contrived scenario, but Plato used it to demonstrate the difficulty of expressing concepts through language when we don't have a concrete experience with those concepts. A prisoner might say "I see a book" based on a projection, but there's no book on the wall only shadow. It's only when they're released and can look around that they can see the real objects casting shadows. True understanding, Plato argues, isn't possible until then.

What I find curious is how many Christians love to inject Jesus into Plato's Cave. Plato wrote passionately about mistaking an image for the real thing, then Christians try to tie their invisible, intangible god as the fire lighting the wall. The mind boggles.

There are lots of ways to examine this religious hubris, but I found my thoughts moving in the direction of Schrödinger's cat. Like Plato's Cave it's a thought experiment, not meant to be taken literally. He made it to argue against the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum superposition, but like the Christian version of Plato's Cave I would like to borrow it to make a point.

Schrödinger supposed that if you took a solid metal box, a cat, poison, a geiger counter, a hammer and a tiny amount of radioactive material you could construct a situation where the geiger counter is set to possibly detect the radioactive material, but it's not reliable because there's so little radioactivity. If it does, the geiger goes off which releases the hammer to smash the vial of poison. The poison kills the cat, whose only crime was to be imprisoned in the stupid box by silly humans. Does the geiger counter go off and doom the cat, or does the geiger counter miss the radiation and let the cat live? Under the Copenhagen Interpretation, Schrödinger argued, the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened and the quantum superposition is observed.

Where am I going with this? Both Plato's Cave and Schrödinger's Cat address knowledge. We can't know things until we observe them, we can only speculate. Speculation is not knowledge. The best guess in the world is still just a guess until the answer is revealed. It's important to remember not to declare victory until we actually achieve victory conditions.

Remember Jesus in Plato's Cave? The Christians who borrow this allegory are doing violence to Plato's philosophy. In their cave all shadows are imperfect reflections of their god, which is why everybody has a different idea of what they're looking at. Plato himself asked why the prisoners wouldn't discuss the images between themselves and work out agreement on what they were supposed to be looking at, which is something we've been doing about gods for thousands of years. Of course, we're no closer to an answer today than we were ten thousand years ago. Christians agree that we're all prisoners in the cave, but they're the ones who actually know what those shadows represent! How? Because they feel it. Because they fake it until they believe. Because the Bible says so. Because...they just know, okay? Because shut up, that's why!

I'm constantly confronted with claims of knowledge in my daily life. Living in the age of information makes it a challenge to parse all those claims to separate the ones that are true from the ones that are false. Until I do, each one remains in a quantum superposition of being both true and false until it can be unpacked and examined. The shadows on the wall don't represent knowledge, they represent what we think is knowledge until our assumptions can be tested against the real thing. Always remains skeptical of people who are confident of the truth without being able to demonstrate how they know it. In the end, if you know you're right but can't explain it you should reconsider the possibility that you're actually wrong.

Argument By Moderation

There's a curious trend in social media that simultaneously amuses and disgusts me. I call it "argument by moderation." Moderation in this case doesn't refer to a moderate or nuanced position, but rather the people responsible for performing administration on a forum. They don't have an easy job, and once the forum gets big enough they don't even try. They'll ban or lock you if anyone complains about you whether or not it's warranted.

Last week I posted this comment, making a general observation as I occasionally do and not addressing anyone in particular.

After a few days this sparked a conversation with another user trying to peddle his "spiritualist" business and everyone who knows me knows how gladly I suffer fools. The conversation ended fairly quickly once I made it clear to him that I'm not easily swayed by bullshit. It's not the first time I've had discussions like that on Twitter although it had been a while, and I feel that I was fairly restrained compared to other evangelicals I've interacted with. I thought the matter settled until today.

Okay, time to go to the mail account I registered for this, a one-shot I created expressly for stuff I don't care about. It turns out that Yahoo! really wants more information about me because they decided that while they recognize my password they won't let me continue without further validation. The validation account I used for that address is bogus because frankly, they don't need to know and I'd never needed it before. Today, it seems, I needed it. So I have a cascading failure of confirmation emails to accounts I can't access which is preventing me from verifying that I am who I say I am.

So, round one to the "spiritual" snake oil salesman for engaging in argument by moderation after he came to me with claims that I had the temerity to question and deride once he couldn't support them. But should the Twitter admins follow up on my support request they'll be able to see this short timeline of events and hopefully draw the conclusion that there was no unusual activity on my account, just someone tattling on me for failing to show them the respect they didn't earn.

Why Should This Offend You?

You need to eat bananas with creamy peanut butter.

Let's assume for a moment that people take this seriously. Imagine we live in a society where bananas and peanut butter have become part of our daily nutrition, specifically where they're eaten together. You cannot eat a banana without peanut butter, although you can eat peanut butter without a banana. No, it doesn't make much sense to make this a moral imperative, but bear with me a moment. In this thought experiment, the consumption of bananas with peanut butter is a cultural more and there's no quicker way to offend someone than to deviate from this behavior.

If you don't eat bananas with creamy peanut butter you deserve to be imprisoned and punished.

You can't not eat a banana every day. You can't not eat a banana without peanut butter. Neither can you eat a banana with anything but peanut butter, and if it's the chunky style you're in trouble. Imagine that you're told if you don't comply with this behavior you deserve to be locked away and punished. How does this make you feel? Annoyed? Perhaps even offended yourself? I happen to like a ripe banana and creamy peanut butter, but who am I to impose this preference on you? What gives me the right to pass judgment on you like this?

Now consider this argument:

It's not that I'm judging you for not eating bananas with creamy peanut butter, it's just the law that you have to. I'm simply letting you know what's going to happen to you.

That makes it all better, right? I mean, it's just about who is or isn't following the rules, right? Just because the rule is arbitrary and unreasonable doesn't make it my fault. Of course, I could reject the idea that the rule is justifiable or should be enforced given its very arbitrary and subjective nature. I could turn a blind eye to a bad law and avoid calling attention to the fact that you're not following it.

If you think this is a bad argument for imposing arbitrary morality on you, then don't try to pull it on me with your religion. I reject the assertion that I "send myself to Hell" or "deserve Hell" based on what you believe. I certainly don't appreciate you trying to convince me that I'm sick (read: sinful) so you can sell me the cure (of salvation).

Don't tell me I shouldn't be offended from being told I'm destined for Hell. You may think you're doing me a favor by warning me of my impending doom but I appreciate it about as much as you might appreciate being told you're headed to prison for failing to eat bananas with creamy peanut butter. My behavior suggests I endorse the law requiring you to be imprisoned for deviating from it, and that I have no interest in changing the status quo. Likewise, you're expressing your endorsement of Hell and everything it implies (like infinite punishment for finite crimes) by trying to sell me your beliefs.

I don't believe in Hell, and I don't appreciate the implication that I deserve punishment for the immorality you imagine of me. If that's really what you think, do us all a favor and keep it to yourself.

Failure of Faith

The incomparable Matt Dillahunty recently posted the video of his lecture at Baylor University regarding what he calls "the problem of Divine Hiddenness." It's an excellent talk and I highly recommend it.

At timestamp 13:59 he brings up the question "why create a world where you put thinking beings, give them a brain...where critical examination of what you see in the world is consistently the best way to find an accurate model of the world?...and then to say that the most important piece of information is one that doesn't fit that paradigm?" I've examined this before in my comparison of the conflict between faith and knowledge, but since Matt doesn't take much time to address the typical excuse of "faith" here I want to revisit the topic.

While he correctly points out that "faith" isn't an answer because it can be used to justify any claim, he's set up a question that invites more scrutiny. Whatever god allegedly created this universe has therefore put us in an environment where our survival as individuals and as a species relies on our ability to gather knowledge to form conclusions. Sometimes our conclusions aren't justified, like assuming that the vague shape we perceive in the bush is a predator which prompts us to run away. Such assumptions were helpful when predators were a constant threat, but better knowledge is more helpful. Waiting to confirm whether or not that shape is what we suspect it might be could result in an easy meal for a predator, but it could also reveal that it was just our imagination playing tricks and enable us to get at the berries in the bush. Our survival is better served when our conclusions are informed by knowledge. Running away on faith (or conversely pursuing the berries on faith) doesn't serve us nearly as well, it's hit-or-miss.

I frequently hear that faith is superior to knowledge, but our world doesn't reward faith as consistently as it rewards knowledge. If you consistently visit a casino because you have faith that eventually your luck is going to favor you and grant you a massive jackpot, you're likely to lose everything. If you close your eyes while crossing a busy street using faith to guide your steps you're likely to create an accident. People who reject medical care for serious illness like cancer tend to die quickly and painfully compared to those who follow a doctor's advice. And yet people continue to uphold faith as the gold standard of behavior, trying to muster sufficient faith to move mountains on nothing better than religious authority. This is what prompted Friedrich Nietzsche to observe that "a casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."

But what about love? I'm asked. You can't prove love is real, you have to take it on faith, right? I don't know where this silly trope came from but it's patently ridiculous. Unrequited love frequently depends on faith, but genuine love requires nothing of the sort. When someone loves me I can see it in their behavior toward me. When I love someone I don't expect them to rely on faith to know it, I assume the responsibility of demonstrating my love for them through word and deed.

So to return to Matt's point, you can't have a relationship with someone based on faith. Any relationship requires action that goes both ways; if all the effort is one-sided then someone is lying to you and you should consider the possibility that it's you.

God is intangible, unknowable and ineffable. Except when he isn't. (updated)

One of the fundamental flaws I often criticize about religious belief is when believers want their cake and eat it too. Specifically, I refer to when their arguments rely too heavily on special pleading. And no, adding caveats to the definition of a god does not bypass special pleading. I can redefine chocolate as the essential first cause of the universe, but that doesn't make the definition valid.

But other examples of special pleading include arguments like this: god is mysterious, unfathomable and uknowable but somehow believers are granted special knowledge of who this god is, what it is and what it demands. Believers typically justify this via "special revelation," that they or their religious founders have been granted special knowledge by that god to carry out the divine will. Each religion and sect claiming special revelation typically considers the special revelation other religions and sects as heresy or at least attributed to human error. But since there are so many special revelations, how does someone not raised or converted to one particular orthodoxy distinguish which are the truly divine revelations and which are heresy? This problem is informally called the argument from inconsistent revelations. One of the supporting criticisms against divine revelation is the way it tends to follow cultural and geographical boundaries.

A point I've made before is that no religion has any better argument or evidence to support it than any other. Believers aren't basing their claims on independently observable phenomenon, they're projecting what they think should be true rather than what they can demonstrate to be true. There's no common experience for believers to reference so revelations vary from culture and region and even among different believers. This leads us to the skeptical position that if a god does not leave any traces for us to observe, then we have no reason to assume that anything we see supports the existence of this god. If this god is unknowable and incomprehensible, then we have no reason to assume anyone understands anything about it and can accurately represent it.

So which is it? Is a god knowable or not? If not then the discussion is closed. If so then show us examples that clearly demonstrate how this knowledge is valid and not human bias. Excuses aren't enough.

Why Does the Chapel Hill Atrocity Matter?

It's only the second day since Craig Stephen Hicks and a lot of atheists are already tired of hearing about it. Although the police have been careful to avoid accusing Hicks of a hate crime, everyone else has been quick to leap to that judgment. Of course, rather than blame anti-Muslim sentiment everyone assumes that atheism itself acted as motivation for Hicks' crime.

We've been saying it for a while but it needs repeating: atheism doesn't inform our actions any more than not believing in unicorns informs yours. That doesn't mean religion can't be a factor in an atheist's behavior, it means that our non-belief isn't justification for action. Religion can still motivate us to react, to speak up or act in response to something that believers are doing. It can make us fear for our safety, and fearful people are more likely to lash out. History shows us several examples of this.

In 1793 French revolutionaries passed a law outlawing religion and religious belief. This anti-religious behavior added to the atrocities that history now calls the French Reign of Terror, as priests and devoutly religious people of all social and economic stations were tortured and murdered. In 1917 Russian revolutionaries formed the Soviet Union and seized all property and wealth of the elite including churches, beginning an era where religion was discouraged, suppressed or drafted to support the leadership depending on circumstances. In 1966 Mao Zedong duplicated the Soviet uprising through his "Cultural Revolution" with similar actions and results. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh and began a Communist dictatorship that oppressed religion and cultural minorities alike, classifying people into categories and starving or executing them as they saw fit.

Atheists will quickly point out that these actions were political, and they're correct. But the fact that religious followers were explicitly targeted can't be ignored. Atheism doesn't justify this, but humans can use any excuse to misbehave as long as we have reason to categorize people as "other." Why do I bring this up? Not to suggest that atheism is a religion or that it's just as guilty of promoting atrocities as any religion. It's to point out that even though we don't believe in any gods or follow any religion we can still rationalize our bad behavior, just as Craig Stephen Hicks did in Chapel Hill.

Human nature being what it is, we'll probably never completely excise our violent urges, and I'm not sure that we would be advised to do so. It's one thing to channel such urges into productive action, but another to remove them completely. It's not that these urges are bad in themselves, it's that allowing those urges to provoke us to bad behavior is the problem. What we need is not a lobotomy, we need to learn self-discipline. Atheism is not a cure for violence or any other bad behavior, it's just one less excuse for it. We can still find motivation through greed, fear, politics and so forth but we can't claim a divine mandate for it.

Given our tendency to rationalize our behavior I think it's in our best interests to police ourselves rigorously when someone suggests we need to kill all the Muslims or lock up all the Christians. No, it's not something that comes up often but I do see it from time to time. And when I do I'm quick to stomp on it. For one thing it's a deeply immoral thing to suggest, and for another it doesn't solve the problem. Religion spreads through indoctrination and justifies itself through fear. We can try to suppress indoctrination by force, but that simply aggravates the fear. Indoctrination goes underground and gets enhanced by fear of discovery and oppression. It didn't take long after the fall of the Soviet Union for the Russian people to return to their old religious habits, minus the aristocracy. Their reasons for clinging to religion for comfort were never taken away, in spite of the promises made by Communists. The Socialists of Western Europe offer a much better model by taking away the insecurities that drive both conflict and religious devotion.

Why Is Faith Bad?

I was asked by a self-described "traditional Catholic" why faith is a bad thing. It's a good question that deserves an answer, and here's mine. Since so many of us are most familiar with it, let's examine Christianity. Over two billion people currently have faith that Christianity is the One True Religion/Belief/Faith/Whatever. Millions of Christians believe that Jesus is their god and savior, while millions of others just believe that Jesus is just their savior but not god while still others just believe that Jesus was a good man with a good message that they try to follow.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Billions of Christians believe that Heaven and angels are real. Many of them believe that Hell is also real, but not all. Many of the people who believe in Hell believe that anyone who have not explicitly sought salvation go to Hell, while others claim that all good people go to Heaven and only the truly wicked go to Hell. Still others believe that no one goes to Hell, it's only a place for Satan and his demons. Some believe that Hell isn't real at all, that it's a misinterpretation or mistranslation or outright forgery in the Bible.

These are just a handful of disagreements over the dogma of the largest religion in the world. Whoever is right -- if any of them -- can have profound implications for belief and humanity as a whole. Every one who believes whatever variation of dogma has a strong foundation for what they believe and why they believe it. They can quote scripture, cite authorities and argue endlessly about why their belief is the correct one. The only thing they have in common is faith. They all have faith that their beliefs are correct, even though their beliefs can't possibly be all correct.

Yes, faith does interfere with reason. In an argument with me over my atheism a family member declared that I have to abandon what I know to embrace faith, because faith is superior to knowledge. If my eyes observe something that contradicts my faith, I should reject what my eyes see and embrace faith. Ken Ham echoed this in his debate with Bill Nye last year when both were asked what would change their minds, if anything. Ham said "nothing." Faith is his bedrock and he will not be moved, no matter what facts may contradict it.

Faith does not bring us closer to the truth. When we use the scientific method to explore a question, understanding converges. When we explore a question through faith, understanding diverges. The end result is that we add confusion to already complex topics and hinder our efforts to arrive at real, practical answers.

So I have to go with Mark Twain on this one: faith is believing what you know ain't so.

Abusers and Victims

In psychology there's a concept developed in the late seventies called the cycle of abuse in which domestic violence follows a continual pattern of tension, explosion, reconciliation and then back again. Those three were later broken down further into fourteen identifiable stages, but that's not the worst of it. Children who witness or suffer such abuse are more likely to become abusers themselves. They learn that this sort of behavior is correct and even necessary and they propagate it to other people in their lives as they grow up. It's tragic, but it doesn't end there.

For the most part throughout history atheists have been the abused more than the abuser. People really don't like it when you don't share their beliefs. But as I've previously explored atheists are just as human as believers and subject to the same human foibles. Believers like counter our criticism by bringing up abuses wrought by atheists, and it would be dishonest to deny it. There are atheists who have been monsters just as much as believers, and the fact that atheism doesn't inform our actions is another topic altogether. The simple truth is that atheism doesn't make us immune to violent attitudes. However, in the last few generations we've learned there are more effective ways to promote our agenda, ways that don't require violence or coercion beyond making sure everyone behaves themselves, believer and nonbeliever alike.

We can't help but be influenced by our experiences and a lot of former believers who have rejected their religions come away with the impression that religion is a bad thing. Even nonbelievers who were never religion get this impression when they look at the world around them. Of course, those are the more extreme examples of religious behavior and we're scolded for cherry-picking the bad and ignoring the good that religious people do. But even at its best religion causes problems because it takes claims we don't know are true and demands we must treat them as truth. The result is that people have trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality. It's a pattern that gets propagated with each new generation of believers raised to assume that there are some things we just have to accept no matter what the evidence supports. They're taught that even when they should follow the evidence in all other aspects of their lives they should do what they're told where this issue is concerned. This would be less of a problem if religion didn't bleed over into so many parts of our lives, from our personal interactions to our assumptions about how the universe works. Every believer does this to greater or lesser degrees.

This is why I consider believers victims of religion. That they dole out abuse as required by their religious beliefs doesn't make them any less victims of that abuse themselves. They are the children of abusers, who were themselves children of abusers and so forth. Whenever this cycle began it behooves us to recognize it and figure out how to break it. I become a victim of religion whenever a believer learns I'm an atheist and assumes the worst about me. I'm a victim whenever religious privilege is promoted over people's rights or needs. I'm a victim when justice becomes subverted by religious principles. But all these things that make me a victim apply equally to believers as well. Religious violence is just as often inflicted on other believers, religiously motivated injustice is just as often inflicted on the faithful. When a Muslim woman forces a female relative to suffer the same genital mutilation that she received, they're both victims. When a Christian woman suffers humiliation and violence without complaint because she's been taught that it's her place, she is also a victim.

We often feel a sense of moral outrage when the guilty are allowed to get away with their crimes, and this is a good thing. Our desire for justice motivates us to take action and create change to make a better world for us to live in. But it's so very easy to fall into the trap of confusing justice for vengeance. We must hold the guilty accountable for their deeds, but we shouldn't forget that in many cases the guilty are also victims themselves. Justice isn't served by simply dismissing them as animals, evil and beyond redemption. They should be made to atone for what they've done, but they should also be helped to realize why atonement is necessary in the first place. Otherwise we'll never break the generational cycle of abuse.

What Does It Mean To Say I'm An Atheist?

So many people have so many misconceptions about atheism and nonbelief. Many people have made up their minds and will not be moved. So be it. But just because you have an image in your head about what an atheist is or purports to be doesn't obligate me to conform to your expectations. So here's what atheism means to me.

Atheism does not mean I'm a scientist. I am not an expert on biology, chemistry, cosmology, geology, physics or anything else that people care to invoke as proof that their god is real. I am a science enthusiast, meaning that scientific discoveries fascinate me and I try to keep abreast of current trends and discoveries made by the scientific community but that doesn't make me a scientist. I am at best a layman on scientific matters and am necessarily limited in my understanding. I don't have the answers to every question in the universe, but I do understand one thing about human knowledge: the fewer assumptions we hold as default the less likely we are to mislead ourselves about what we know. Consequently, if you demand to know what started the universe or how life arose from nonliving matter the only answer I can give is "I don't know." "God did it" is not the automatic default just because that's the traditional answer from religion, it still must be validated as true before it can be accepted. It will be held to the same standards of evidence as any other claim, and if it can't meet that standard I will not accept excuses for why that standard should not apply.

Atheism does not mean I'm a philosopher. In truth I'm less impressed by philosophy than I probably should be, but I've seen some really bad rationalizations trying to justify belief without looking like they're justifying belief. The near-universal admiration of Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways springs immediately to mind. The thing is that religion isn't philosophy, and belief in gods isn't founded in rational thought. It's not taught through rational discourse but an emotional one. People don't wait for their children to learn critical thinking skills before they drill religious beliefs into their heads, and for a very good reason. They're teaching their children to accept religious teachings as a default assumption before they can examine the validity of those assumptions, and most children live their lives without ever considering why they should question them. You can't tell me this isn't deliberate. So I don't need to be a philosopher to be an atheist and I don't pretend to be one.

Atheism doesn't mean I'm automatically a better person. Atheism isn't a magic spell that makes me smarter, stronger, faster, more moral or ethical than someone who believes in a god. Atheism challenges me to reconsider questions that I used to consider sufficiently answered by religion such as science, morality and ethics but that doesn't guarantee I'm going to do a good job with it. I am still the same person I was when I was standing behind the podium leading the church congregation in singing religious hymns, I just no longer believe what religions claim about reality and I don't participate in church any longer. Nor have I become a thieving, raping, murdering monster because I no longer fear divine retribution because my morality is not and never was based on fear of punishment. My morality has always been based on doing what I understand to be right, not about avoiding what I understand to be wrong.

Atheism doesn't mean I know there are no gods. I suspect there aren't, because religious claims about gods and reality don't stand up to scrutiny. The more excuses you have to make for why reality doesn't work the way you insist it should, the less inclined I am to believe you know what you're talking about. Arguing for a prime mover or appealing to consequences doesn't convince me either. I'm intellectually honest enough to say that I don't have concrete knowledge that there are no gods the way I know there's no money in my wallet, but not being able to prove there are no gods isn't enough for me to believe that there are. Wanting to believe there are gods is no more useful than wanting there to be money in my wallet. It's still a claim that requires validation, not a default assumption.

Atheism doesn't mean I worship the devil. I shouldn't even have to say this, but it's still a popular thing to say. If I don't believe in your god, why would I take your devil seriously?

Atheists can be liberal or conservative, intelligent or ignorant, friendly or hostile, moral or immoral. We can be good people or bad people just like everyone else. When you learn that someone is an atheist the only thing you can safely assume from this is that they don't believe in any gods. If you want to know why they don't believe, what kind of person they are and what they know (or think they know) you'll have to dig a little deeper and ask them. Nothing else is implied from atheism but that one thing.

All the gods I don't believe in.

One of the problems frequently encountered in religious debate is that everyone has a different definition of the god(s) they believe in. This creates a moving target for the atheist expressing skepticism regarding those beliefs. There are at last count something on the order of three thousand different gods that humans have worshiped; here's a non-canonical list of them. In addition, there are thousands of sects within various religions all claiming to worship the same god but attributing different personalities to them effectively creating new gods in the process. Then there are Deist gods who are undefined but nevertheless divine by nature and pantheism which holds that the universe and everything in it is some sort of manifestation of godhood. It's exhausting. So here I will go through a top-level list of gods I don't believe are real.

     1. I don't believe in any gods that are responsible for the creation or function of the universe.

If you have evidence to demonstrate that your god is the author of all and that nothing can exist without your god then show me the evidence. Your personal conviction is not evidence of anything except that you're convinced. I need more than words to believe, I need independently verified peer reviewed observation. That then brings me to my next point:

     2. I don't believe in any of the gods that must be argued into existence.

Philosophical arguments from Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways through to the modern modal ontological argument are not evidence, they're speculation. Speculation only ceases to be speculation when you can present evidence that can be independently reproduced and does not depend on a desire to believe before it can be observed. Claiming that life is dark and ugly without your god doesn't show me your god is real, it shows me you have no imagination. Invoking love and beauty doesn't prove your god is real, it proves you view life through a very narrow lens and I have no reason to limit myself like that. Threatening me with dire consequences doesn't convince me of anything except that you have no argument. Arguing for your god doesn't impress me, evidence does.

     3. I don't believe in any gods that are interested or interceding in our lives.

Gods have been depicted as everything from humans or familiar animals with super powers to a single omnimax entity greater than the whole of our universe. I could see how people might think the super-powered gods might take an interest in our affairs but the omnimax god doesn't make much sense. It would be like us focusing on a small batch of mitochondria within our bodies and declaring that everything revolves around them. But regardless of power level, I just don't see any reason to believe there are gods intervening in our lives. I get the same results praying to Zeus, Wotan, Jesus and Ganesh as I do to a jug of milk. Repeated studies find no effective change in outcomes from prayer except those corresponding with the placebo effect and you can replicate that result just by letting people know you're wishing them well.

     4. I don't believe in any gods that have the power to suspend natural laws to perform miracles.

Miracles are tricky things. They never happen when anyone can test or verify them. A discouraging number of them have been debunked, even the "official" ones. They're always held up by the faithful as evidence of their gods' power but they're rarely convincing to anyone else. I rarely hear of devout Hindus experiencing a miracle from the Christian god or devout Christians experiencing miracles performed by the Muslim god. But let's assume for the sake of argument that these miracles really did happen as claimed; where's the evidence? Even an ethereal, extra-temporal omnimax god would necessarily leave traces when interacting with our universe, also known as "evidence." The evidence presented for these miracles is always subjective and typically anecdotal. There's never any evidence that skeptical researchers can point to and say "that must be of supernatural origin, because it violates causality."

     5. I don't believe in any of the gods that have been presented to me because I've not been given convincing evidence that any of them exist.

I've said it before and I'll continue to say it as long as it continues to be applicable: I'll believe anything you tell me as long as you show me evidence appropriate to the claim. Nothing else will do, and you're only wasting your time if you think you've come up with a new argument or example for why I should believe. If your evidence wouldn't win you the Randi Foundation Million Dollar Prize then it won't move me, either.

My Atheist Agenda Revealed

I was recently accused of harboring an agenda when I talk to people about atheism. I'm not quite sure where this accusation came from; it seems that outspoken atheists are perceived as being no different from the evangelical missionaries who knock on your door or the street preachers who accost you at intersections as you go about your daily business. And yes, I do speak up about atheism, primarily when someone else brings up the topic first. Ask me a question and I'll answer. Ask me for advice and I'll show you resources that I think will help. But the thing is, I've never heard of atheists going on a door-to-door campaign to preach the good news of no gods, nor have I heard of atheist street preachers shouting their message and harassing people in public.

However, as an atheist I concede to having an agenda: it's called secularism. In a secular state everyone is free to believe or not. There is no coercion one way or another. No one is told what to believe or how to think, because everyone is free to choose their own path. If that weren't true, if I weren't willing to let people cling to god belief then I wouldn't tell them the truth. I'd tell them whatever I thought would get the job done to shatter their faith. On the religious side that's known as lying for Jesus.

I know a lot of religious activists are threatened by secularism so they misrepresent it and fight to remove it from our laws. My old church used to wax eloquent about how secularism and humanism are against God's Will and open the door to Satan's evil. As godless people, atheists become the face of the secular movement, communists who want to take away your freedoms and burn your churches. It is not and has not been true. The military dictatorships that impose communism are not secular because they take away your choice, and that is not a secular agenda.

Personally, my agenda is that I want to see the end of religion but not by force. No one should abandon religion because they have to. The Soviet-model Communists tried that and it doesn't work, as well as being an indefensible violation of human rights. I want to see people abandon religion of their own free will simply because they don't need it any longer. I want to end the inequality and ignorance that breeds the fear religion depends on to bring in followers and keep them. I want critical thinking to be at the core of the education we give our children. My agenda scares them to death because they know what will happen if we succeed. We've seen it happen peacefully in other developed countries. They don't want it to happen here in the US, not without a fight.

That's fine with me. Religious believers brought this fight and I'll finish it; not with guns, knives or fists, but with words, passion and genuine concern for my fellow human beings. They can bring their gods and I'll bring my compassion. Let's see who is left standing.

I'll tell you what you did with atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive.

And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you.

The Immorality of Divine Command Theory

The story of Abraham binding Isaac from Genesis was brought up as one of several examples why the god of Abraham, if real, is an evil god. Someone then replied to complain how this story shouldn't qualify because "the whole point of the fucking story was to differentiate the God of Abraham from other gods that required human sacrifices." This is the same logic that tells us Biblical slavery is okay because it wasn't as bad as other slavery, but it prompted me to examine the story a little closer.

• We have a god who orders Abraham to sacrifice his son. No winky-face emoticons to indicate Poe's Law, just an outright command that Abraham has no reason to assume isn't sincere. This is okay because this is Yahweh, the source of all morality who therefore has the moral authority to order immoral actions and still have them be moral.
• Abraham, rather than telling his god to shove it, dutifully obeys and goes through with the preparations, right up to the point where he's holding the knife over his beloved son's chest. He doesn't bargain the way he did for Sodom, a city synonymous with moral depravity. He doesn't say anything other than "okay." Remember that Isaac is supposed to be Abraham's beloved son by Sarah, the only child she was able to bear him long after she was supposed to be barren.
• Isaac, once he learns that he is to be the sacrificial victim, doesn't utter a word of protest. According to the story he just meekly goes along with it the same as his father.
• Only then does Yahweh say, "just kidding! Go kill that ram caught in the bushes instead." Why? Because it was a test to see if Abraham would obey.
• And then we're told that the moral of this story is that obedience to authority is the greatest virtue and will be rewarded. This idea is so pernicious in human thinking it's listed as a formal fallacy in logic.

No, I think that the story of Abraham binding Isaac still qualifies to be on the list of Yahweh's dick moves.

The Path of Least Resistance

I'm always jealous when better people than I formulate a thought I'd been circling around for years. In this case it's Michael Sherlock's tweet sporting this image. I'm impressed by his succinct description of the consequences of non-skeptical thought.

Critical thinking and scientific skepticism are the filters required for producing rational statements of probable truth. Without these filters our brains will inevitably follow the path of least resistance and succumb to credulity, supernaturalism and all manner of magical thinking.

I'm unable to find a source for this on the web, leading me to believe that this is taken from Sherlock's new book. I don't yet have confirmation.

Sacrilicious

Sacrilicious: adjective

: a description of something so sacrilegious that it's delicious to behold.

Portmanteau of sacrilege and delicious.

example: The Loophole by Garfunkel and Oates is positively sacrilicious!

What I want to know is this: why is this not a thing? Come on, Oxford! It's time to step up!