Atheists Break Out New Ritual Tool: The Blow-Dryer (Dan Harris, Eric Johnson, and Mary Flynn/ABC News Nightline; July 16)

Nonbelievers Adopt Provocative Ceremony to Make a Point About Baptism

Wielding a blow-dryer, a leading atheist conducted a mass “de-baptism” of fellow non-believers and symbolically dried up the offending waters that were sprinkled on their foreheads as young children.

At the annual American Atheists Convention, one of atheism’s premier provocateurs, Edwin Kagin, faced the crowd and raised high a hairdryer labeled “Reason and Truth.”

Said one woman who travelled from Cincinnati to undergo the de-baptism, “I was baptized Catholic. I don’t remember any of it at all.” The woman, Cambridge Boxterman, 24, added, “According to my mother I screamed like a banshee, and those are her words, so you can see that even as a young child I didn’t want to be baptized. It’s not fair. I was born atheist and they were forcing me to become Catholic.”

Kagin, who is American Atheists’ national legal director, firmly believes that regardless of one’s religious beliefs, each person has the right to say or do what he or she wants, provided it is within the law. In the past, he has reportedly called out parents who subject their children to strict fundamentalist religious education, referring to it as child abuse.

“It is teaching children that the world works in other ways than it does,” he said. “This can be extremely dangerous.”

“They are practicing child abuse in teaching that the world operates in ways other than it does,” he told the convention crowd. “And in my opinion, they are engaged in terrorism by weakening our nation and our understanding of science and things with which we can defend ourselves and progress. If it had not been for these fools we could have been at the stars 2,000 years ago.”

Kagin, author of Baubles of Blasphemy, has a history of behaving in ways that elicit a rise from God-fearing people. He’s known to have asked female atheists to dress in burqas and perform a song, “Back in their Burquas Again,” he’s referred to Mary Magdalene as a deranged hooker and he’s called the Holy Eucharist “Swallow the Leader.”

Kagin said religion should not be used to determine how people ought to live their lives. “They’re doing harm to women who want to control their own bodies and their own reproductive rights,” he said. “They’re doing harm to a great number of people and they’re saying that ‘what we’re doing is sacred and inviolate. We can do whatever we want to your rights, and you can not react.’ That’s what they’re doing.”

It is in this same spirit that Kagin performs the de-baptism.

Standing at a podium wearing a long brown monk’s robe, Kagin read with the oratorical skill of a preacher from a set of pages in his hand and invited participants to come forward to be de-baptized.

He recited a few mock-Latin syllables, to the audience’s amusement. An assistant produced a large hairdryer, labeled “Reason and Truth,” and handed it to Kagin. The man who’d elected himself to be de-baptized stood before him. Kagin turned on the hairdryer, blowing the hot air in his face in an attempt to symbolically dry up his baptismal waters.

“Come forward now and receive the spirit of hot air that taketh away the stigma and taketh away the remnants of the stain of baptismal water,” Kagin shouts.

Atheists poke fun at baptisms in this ceremony, saying they believe their waving around a hairdryer holds the same level of magical and spiritual powers as does the baptismal ceremony.

Kagin said that many people have undergone de-baptism.”Many have taken it as somewhat of a joke, but some have found it truly, if you will, a spiritually cleansing experience,” he said.

Kagin has said he doesn’t particularly care who he’s offending with his actions, and that he is acting completely within his rights. “You can mock anything you want because you have the right to,” he said. “Humor is humor and what types of humor are you going to outlaw?” he said.

He conceded that although it may not be good manners to continually take a mocking stance toward religion, “in many cases, it is the only real response.”

Kagin said he thought some people might get overly offended by his poking fun at religion. “If someone is so secure in their faith, why are they the least bit concerned about some little atheist mocking them?” he asked. “I think the reason they are worried and concerned is the very deep fear that if everyone doesn’t believe it, maybe it isn’t so.”

For Kagin, this struggle between godless and god-fearing hits very close to home: his son, Steve Kagin, is a fundamentalist minister in Kansas.

He founded Camp Quest, a secular summer camp for young nonbelievers, many of whom, he says, have been harrassed or hounded for their lack of faith.

And then there’s this interesting twist. His own son, Steve Kagin, is a fundamentalist minister in Kansas.

Kagin said that his son claims to have a personal revelation in Jesus Christ. “I am totally unable to say that’s not true,” he said. “There are examples all through history of quite sane people who have had such experiences. I don’t think it is but I’m not going to say it isn’t.”

When asked if he is pained by their opposing views on this issue, Kagin chuckled. “Oh, one wonders where they went wrong,” he said. He and his son, Steven, have an excellent relationship, Kagin said, but they do have their limits.

“We just understand there are certain things we really can’t, at this point, talk about,” he said.

“I don’t lose much sleep over (it) because everyone has the right to do what they want to do within the law,” he said. “That’s what I believe in.”

As Cambridge completed her de-baptism, she expressed no qualms about how it might be perceived. “Sometimes you’ve got to have shock value,” she said. “There’s some times where you just have to shock people into getting attention and from there, they ask questions… And maybe they learn a bit.”

Kagin said that he saw the conflict between atheists and believers as America’s religious civil war. He said bad manners are a reasonable weapon in that war, but he said it was unlikely that atheists would emerge as the victors.

“Atheists have no chance whatsoever of prevailing in a direct confrontation with believers,” he said. “There are far too many (believers).”

Comments?

There’s a lot I could say, but – for now, at least – I’ll just share this:

It seems that a lot of this story was written with an “How dare they!” attitude in mind (which might be more obvious if you watch the video version). I think Kagin and the others did a good job responding to that attitude and the questions it prompted, but… a straight news piece that just laid out the facts would have been preferable.

As usual, I found a great deal of irony in the way that the reporter (in this case, Dan Harris) seemed shocked by Kagin’s “rudeness” and the very idea of hair dryer-driven de-baptisms while no where acknowledging the fact that these are the sorts of things atheists usually have to resort to in order to attract media attention. There are, after all, many, many atheists who have been quietly writing impressive critiques of theism and religion for many, many years, but how often do you see ABC News going out and interviewing them?

In some ways, atheism today seems to me to be somewhat like what homosexuality was in the early 1970s. It’s a subject that the mass media generally refuses to cover until an especially flamboyant representative stands up and does something the average person perceives to be outrageous. Only after some time has passed and it becomes clear that that flamboyant representative is not only harmless but actually supported by millions of people do reporters get around to asking if it’s the average person who is deserving of more examination and perhaps even criticism.

Alas, it seems that it’s still a rare member of the mainstream media who is willing to subject the basic beliefs of theists to the scrutiny that they deserve. In the meantime, I suppose any coverage of atheists like Kagan represents something of a step forward, however snide and shallow that coverage may be….

What do you think?

(Or are you still laughing too hard over “Swallow the Leader” to type?)

Related posts:

1. Are Atheists Second-Class Citizens?
2. Why a Mormon Likes Atheists
3. Is Obama “Bad News” for Atheists?

Although it might be tempting for us atheists to look at the data and boil it all down to “Theists are stupid and atheists aren’t!” I think that would be a mistake.

Does intelligence really matter?

Yes, I think it does.

But… I’m not at all convinced that it’s the thing that matters most.

Consider: The paper I cited two entries back quoted one study that allegedly revealed that the IQs of agnostics in the Netherlands were 4 points higher than that of believers. It cited another study that allegedly revealed that non-religious American adolescents had an average IQ of about 103 while very religious American adolescents had an average IQ of about 97. Now, really – can a difference of 4 or 6 IQ points really make that much of a difference? 103 is far from being a genius, and 97 is far from being developmentally disabled. And I would bet that the variation among atheists and among theists is far greater than the variation between atheists and theists. So… yeah, the findings I quoted are interesting and suggestive, but they hardly seem determinative. If they were determinative, knowing someone’s IQ would allow us to know with certainty what someone believed about gOd. As things stand, the religion of the people who raise us might be more important….

More fundamentally, it bears asking “What does IQ really measure?” Our ability to take IQ tests? Our interest in taking tests? Certain sorts of intelligence and talents rather than others or intelligence in the abstract?

Brief Digression: I have an elderly relative who seems to be losing her ability to think straight. In an attempt to understand this loss better, I recently went online and found a simple test. It involves having someone count from 1 to 20, then recite the alphabet, and then alternate between the two – i.e., 1A, 2B, 3C, etc. Your score is determined by how many correct number-letter combinations you can give in 30 seconds (without the aid of pencil and paper). My elderly relative did very poorly, but… I found that my own performance varied quite a bit. I find that I really have to be motivated to do well on these sorts of “monkey tests” and… usually I just don’t give a damn. It’s like asking me to recite the alphabet backwards. It’s a talent that seems so pointless to me, I don’t want to have it.

For what it’s worth, a somewhat similar point is made in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories. In that story, Watson refers to the fact that the earth circles the sun. Holmes is surprised to hear this. Watson is surprised that someone as smart as Holmes is so ignorant. Holmes says that as far as he’s concerned, it makes no difference which circles which. And if it ever does, he can look it up. As it is, the brain is like an attic and it behooves us to store in it only what we can’t find or store elsewhere. So, perhaps one key to being very intelligent (or at least thinking efficiently in your chosen line of work) is to know what areas it’s OK to be very stupid about. If that results in your scoring low on tests of general knowledge (or in your not developing certain mental skills that IQ tests measure), well, perhaps so much worse for the test and those who perhaps place too much value on them….

All of which is merely a prelude to that I really want to say, which is this: It’s long seemed to me that it’s not so much the ability to think that distinguishes atheists from theists but the way they think.

Raw, natural intelligence may be a factor, but even if it is, it seems to me to be swamped by something else.

Emotional maturity, maybe? The ability to live with uncertainty and unanswered questions? The ability to control one’s natural fear of death without resorting to comfortable myths? The ability to resist social pressure and/or to derive meaning and comfort from within yourself or from nature/ideas, etc., rather than from other people? The ability to tell the difference between the subjective and the objective – that is to say, the difference between General Reality and Personal Reality?

Whatever the thing (or combination of things) may be, it seems more important than raw intelligence – just as it seems more important in separating alcoholics from non-alcoholics, say, or chauvinists from non-chauvinists, or gamblers from non-gamblers. High intelligence – far from leading us to the right course of action – can often be used to rationalize the wrong course of action instead….

So: Here are two items I recently came across that perhaps point the way towards a better understanding of what *really* separates the atheists from the theists. Imperfect though they are, I hope you enjoy the glimmers of insight and the food for thought that they provide as much as I enjoyed them.

People With Asperger’s Less Likely To See Purpose Behind The Events In Their Lives (Karen Schrock/Scientific American/May 29)

BOSTON: Why do we often attribute events in our lives to a higher power or supernatural force? Some psychologists believe this kind of thinking, called teleological thinking, is a by-product of social cognition. As our ancestors evolved, we developed the ability to understand one anothers’ ideas and intentions. As a result of this “theory of mind,” some experts figure, we also tend to see intention or purpose – a conscious mind – behind random or naturally occurring events. A new study presented here in a poster at the 22nd annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science supports this idea, showing that people who may have an impaired theory of mind are less likely to think in a teleological way.

Bethany T. Heywood, a graduate student at Queens University Belfast, asked 27 people with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild type of autism that involves impaired social cognition, about significant events in their lives. Working with experimental psychologist Jesse M. Bering (author of the “Bering in Mind” blog and a frequent contributor to Scientific American MIND), she asked them to speculate about why these important events happened – for instance, why they had gone through an illness or why they met a significant other. As compared with 34 neurotypical people, those with Asperger’s syndrome were significantly less likely to invoke a teleological response – for example, saying the event was meant to unfold in a particular way or explaining that God had a hand in it. They were more likely to invoke a natural cause (such as blaming an illness on a virus they thought they were exposed to) or to give a descriptive response, explaining the event again in a different way.

In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)

These results support the idea that seeing purpose behind life events is a result of our mind’s focus on social thinking. People whose social cognition is impaired – those with Asperger’s, in this case – are less likely to see the events in their lives as having happened for a reason. Heywood would like to test the hypothesis further by working with people who have schizophrenia or schizoid personalities. Some experts theorize that certain schizophrenia symptoms (for instance, paranoia) arise in part from a hyperactive sense of social reasoning. “I’d guess that they’d give lots of teleological answers; more than neurotypical people, and certainly far more than people with Asperger’s,” Heywood says.

What Atheism And Asperger’s Syndrome Share In Common And A Look At Purpose Driven Answers (Tucker Phelps/Examiner.com; June 3)

A recent post over at the Scientific American Mind and Brain blog [see above] has been getting a lot of attention in the past few days and not without reason. According to the column’s author a graduate student from Belfast has found a correlation between those diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of Autism known for poor sociality and narrow interests, and Atheism.

Specifically, this researcher asked participants to given open answers to questions regarding significant events in their lives and both groups – the atheists and those with Asperger’s – ranked high in non-teleological answers. What this suggests on the surface is a similarity in thinking, some sort of shared cognitive process. I for one, have my doubts.

First, definitions.

Teleology is the study of purpose, from the Greek telos. If I were to show you long handled object with a blunt head and two rounded hooks protruding from the tip and ask you what it did, you would probably infer that it was meant to hammer nails – this is teleology, deciphering purpose.

When anthropologists attempt to determine whether a stone they found is a Oldowan stone-axe or a irregularly shaped rock, they must engage in teleological reasoning to reach an informed conclusion. At the same time when you ask a child “Why are rocks pointy?” their answer will invariably be along the lines of “so they can cut things.”

Where things get interesting in psychology is where the developmental line between “Rocks are pointy so they can cut things” and “Rocks are pointy because, as mineral formations, they fracture along sharp divides, forming narrow ridges and points.” Generally speaking, children are more likely to give a teleological answer to a question than an adult.

Where this is not true or at least not as true is areas of personal experience or importance. Ask an adult why they were the sole survivor of that car accident and you will rarely find someone who says it was luck, or gives some other “mundane” answer. More often you’ll find them searching for purpose – telos. They were thrown clear of that accident because God has a plan for them, or they were supposed to survive because they had something left to accomplish, etc.

What this means for the study.

First of all, a warning: I write this based off my reading of a blog post which in turn was based off the memory of a talk delivered at a conference. Parity is not going to be high here. Hopefully we get some juicier details from the authors themselves in the near future, but in the meantime…

Finding that Asperger’s patients engage in far less teleological reasoning than their “neurotypical” counterparts is very interesting. Drawing the connection from that to Atheism is a stretch. While true that both groups responded to questions in similarly non-purpose driven manners, one detail shears this tenuous connection.

“The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as ‘there is no reason why; things just happen.’ The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)”

Those with Asperger’s may in some way simply not be conceiving of things teleologically (and a study between adult Asperger’s and children Asperger’s against neurotypical peers would be great to investigate this further) the Atheists in the study clearly do possess that function. Rather, they have made a conscious choice to disregard it in favor of more mechanical or naturalistic explanations.

To illustrate this with real events, consider two situations. Several months ago I was having a conversation with my sister while walking to the store. Just as we reach the corner of the street we need to cross, the light turned green and the walk sign lit up. Turning to me she said “Don’t you just love that? I always feel like the light turns green just for me when that happens.”

As a matter of fact I do love that, and I have often felt the same way. Now of course it isn’t true, the light simply happened to turn green at that moment. In some deep recess in our minds however, we both saw an action – the light changing color – and derived a purpose – it wanted to, so we wouldn’t have to slow our step. Not being idiots and having a basic understanding of how our local traffic lights work, we didn’t believe this teleological answer and instead favored the mechanical explanation. We’re traffic-light atheists you might say.

Religious people, along with other forms of magical thinking, are more often the ones who really do believe the traffic light changed for them – though not with quite such mundane events. (Which is why, I’m sure, the study this is all about asked people about significant events in their lives.)

Since we covered atheism with a real world example, we have another real world event that demonstrates precisely the opposite. In one of my earliest articles, Imagining Divinity, we looked at two very different cultures worlds apart, where two religious groups came to supernatural conclusions about the purpose of two natural events.

At the time the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) was struggling with whether or not to allow homosexual men to serve as pastors in their churches. During one of the days this debate was being had a tornado swept through the town damaging several buildings – including the conference center hosting the ELCA. One conservative pastor was quoted saying “The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction.”

In other words the purpose of the tornado of the tornado was to send a warning. Examples of this can be found everywhere in religion, so it comes as absolutely no surprise that those who consciously reject religion also consciously reject the forms of thinking religion exemplifies – with the vast majority of the worlds population some manner of theist, the average “amount” of teleological thinking is going to be skewed in that direction.

Another way to look at it is, perhaps I’m putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps I should be saying the “amount” of teleological thinking is responsible for the high percentage of religious persons.

Either way, atheism and Asperger’s may share an affinity for the mechanical and naturalistic, but an affinity is all it probably is.

Comments?

Related posts:

1. Atheism & Intelligence Revisited
2. Theist Minds & Atheist Minds: Another Difference
3. Theist Intelligence At Work

Here now are a few thoughts of my own…

As you might recall, Dr. Biali began her essay by saying this:

“First, this isn’t about slamming atheists, as I believe that every human being has a right to believe (or not believe) whatever they choose, and it’s not my place to judge anyone.”

I have several objections to this.

First (and perhaps most trivially), I’m bothered by the use of the word “right” in this context. “Right” seems to me to be a legal concept that only makes sense when applied to the observable behavior of a member of a society. It seems silly to say that someone all alone on an island has the right to free speech or the right to keep and bear arms or that someone has the right to pick his or her nose while all alone in the privacy of their own home. Saying that someone has the right to believe or not believe whatever they want seems equally weird since virtually nobody knows but us what’s going on inside our heads (the private residence of our beliefs). Being able/permitted to believe whatever we believe isn’t a right bestowed or agreed upon by a culture or a society (or asserted by an individual) but an inescapable fact of life. (And those who claim the ability to deny us this “right” might as well claim the ability to deny a dog the “right” to feel hungry or the sun the “right” to shine.)

Second (and perhaps somewhat less trivially), I’m bothered by the assumption/assertion that people “choose” whatever they believe. As I’ve noted before, brain research reveals that the moment we perceive to be our moment of choice is actually (and apparently always) preceded by unconscious brain activity of the sort that apparently reveals our “choice” to be an effect rather than a cause – the result of factors that have nothing to do with consciousness or volition rather than a self-created impulse. Free will thus appears to be little more than a cognitive illusion.

This brain research merely supports earlier philosophical lines of thinking that go something like this: “It has been proposed that I choose my beliefs. But on what basis am I alleged to make this choice? If pure whim, my choice is reduced to little more than a coin toss or a leaf blowing in the wind and of no more significance. If, on the other hand, I have reasons for my choice – well, did I in turn choose those reasons? Did I will into being the facts and the laws of logic that form the basis of ‘my’ reasoning? No – I am little more than an adding machine that takes whatever data is typed on my keys and then spits out whatever is dictated by internal mechanisms I am scarcely aware of let alone in any position to choose. One may as well speak of a piece of paper choosing to burst into flame when thrust into a candle, or of a bullet choosing to fly through and air and kill someone when the trigger is pulled. Between whim and determinancy, there is simply no room for choice to squeeze in. ‘Choice’ is nothing more than a sophisticated reflex that the unsophisticated mistake for something else – the brother of magic, perhaps, or the cousin of telepathy, ghosts, or perpetual motion.”

Of course even if one cannot resist assuming that such reasoning is wrong and insists that humans must have free will, it is clear that there are severe restrictions and limits to that free will. Just as we cannot choose to be invisible, or fly by flapping our arms, or be in two places at the same time, neither can we choose to believe in a religion that we’ve never heard of or follow saviors yet unborn. Even a cursory examination of the obvious patterns of belief among humans, however, reveals that the “choices” of most people are in practice far more limited than this. As I detailed in an entry I posted way back on Oct 4, 2002, religious beliefs strongly correlate with who your parents happen to have been, what gender and race you may be, how much education you’ve received, and what your socio-economic status is. (One key passage from that entry: “Detailed studies spanning many decades indicate that if you’re a young adult and your parents are Catholic, there’s an 85% chance you are, too. Are your parents Protestant or Jewish? There’s about a 65% chance your beliefs match that of Mom and Dad.”) There’s a reason the overwhelming majority of people born in Saudi Arabia grow up to be Muslims while Hinduism is the predominate religion in India and virtually no place else – and it has little if anything to do with millions of people coincidentally exercising their free will in a way that just happens to correspond with national or cultural or tribal borders.

The fact that Dr. Biali herself allegedly just happened to have a real and true revelatory experience that basically confirmed the religion of her culture, her childhood, and her missionary sister similarly strains credulity. Consider how much more startling and worthy of attention it would be had she had a revelation which confirmed the truth of an existing religion she’d never, ever heard of before! Why have I never heard of such a thing ever happening to anybody? Certainly an all-powerful Biblical gOd could just as easily send visions of Jesus to remote Chinese Taoists and Iranian Islamic clerics and Tibetan Buddhist mystics just as easily as he could send them to those raised Baptist in oh-so-Christian America. The fact that he never does – that he instead seems severely limited to sending these revelations to precisely those places on this earth in least need of them – does little to support the extravagant claims Christians make regarding his mercy, wisdom, and omnipotence but much to support psycho-social explanations for the nature and dissemination of religious belief.

Third (and perhaps least trivially of all), I am bothered by Dr. Bialti’s assertion that “it’s not my place to judge anyone.” As with many Unitarians I’ve met, she seems to be confusing beliefs and people and then assuming that any attempt to judge a belief boils down to an improper attempt to judge the human being who just happens to hold it. IMHO, that’s sloppy and bullshit. And it’s bullshit that I doubt Bialti can really embrace because it would seem to render her equally accepting of Gandhi and Hitler, Einstein and Charles Manson, Leonardo da Vinci and the Unibomber, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Osama bin Laden, and so on without end.

As I’ve said here many times before, beliefs matter. Among other things, they guide behavior. And beliefs that are based on fact and derived from logic (and are therefore more firmly rooted in reality) are more likely to result in appropriate behavior than beliefs divorced from reality and instead based on fantasy, delusion, or wishful thinking. People who fail to recognize this, people who promote the idea that all beliefs are equally true and valid and acceptable are playing with fire. Even if they don’t end up burning themselves, there’s always the very real risk that they’ll end up burn others (intentionally or not).

That’s the way I see things, anyway – given the facts as I’ve received them and the particular neuronal processing mechanisms I happen to have in my head.

If your internal neuronal processing mechanisms are now coming to a different conclusion, my mechanisms hope you’ll take the time to share it with them to the extent that time and your mechanisms allow.

(If you can also share your understanding of the causes that prompted that alternate conclusion, I have reason to believe that my mechanisms would appreciate that, too.)

Related posts:

1. Dr. Susan Biali Explains Her Theism
2. Free Will Revisited
3. Susan Jacoby’s Interesting Question

Why Atheism Will Replace Religion (Nigel Barber/The Human Beast blog/Psychology Today; May 18)

Atheists are heavily concentrated in economically developed countries, particularly the social democracies of Europe. In underdeveloped countries, there are virtually no atheists. Atheism is thus a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Why do modern conditions produce atheism?

First, as to the distribution of atheism in the world, a clear pattern can be discerned. In sub-Saharan Africa there is almost no atheism (Zuckerman, 2007). Belief in God declines in more developed countries and is concentrated in Europe in countries such as Sweden (64% nonbelievers), Denmark (48%), France (44%) and Germany (42%). In contrast, the incidence of atheism in most sub-Saharan countries is below 1%.

(Hailing from Ireland, Nigel Barber received his Ph.D. in Biopsychology from Hunter College, CUNY, and taught psychology at Bemidji State University and Birmingham Southern College. A prolific cross-national researcher, Barber accounts for societal differences in sexual and reproductive behavior using an evolutionary approach. Books include Why Parents Matter, The Science of Romance, Kindness in a Cruel World, and The Myth of Culture. Interests include finance, organic gardening, and hiking.)

Nigel makes a number of interesting points – but do they hold up to closer examination?

Consider:

—– Although Nigel makes much of the apparent correlation between economic development and atheism, he doesn’t clearly explain why one of the most economically advanced countries (the US) is relatively more religious. He also doesn’t explain why many relatively well-off Muslims become terrorists rather than atheists (as detailed here).

—– Nigel also doesn’t address the fact that religion has experienced something of a resurgence over the course of the last 100 years despite great economic and scientific advances. (Apparently many 19th centuries thinkers expected just the opposite to occur.)

—– Although Nigel says “In underdeveloped countries, there are virtually no atheists,” might it not be more accurate to say “In underdeveloped countries, there are few people willing to admit to being atheists”?

—– Is the correlation between atheism and wealth stronger or weaker than the correlation between atheism and a strong democratic government that protects and promotes freedom of speech and freedom of conscience and respect for the individual?

—– Does it make more sense to say that atheism (or freethought) leads to freedom and economic development rather than the reverse? Does it make the most sense of all to say that atheism and democracy and economic development often reinforce each other to such an extent that a positive feedback cycle ensues and all three spiral upward as a result? (Conversely, does a decrease in atheism or in democratic freedoms or in economic wealth tend to lead to a decrease in all three? Are more religious countries less likely to value personal freedom and more likely to inspire stagnant economies? Are restrictions on democratic freedoms likely to lead to economic stagnation and a turn to religion? Do economic recessions and depressions tend to inspire calls for strongman rule and a return to old fashioned religious values? It seems to me that the connections between these three areas of life are quite deep and complex, but undeniable. Picking out one as the cause of the others seems overly simplistic.)

—– Might one make the case that atheism actually correlates best with cold weather climates? (Do scientific-minded people have a survival advantage during brutal winters? Do pleasant tropical climates promote belief in a perfectly designed world or a loving gOd? Do hot areas slow thinking or promote mind-altering parasites and/or disease?)

—– Nigel says that “Atheism is… a peculiarly modern phenomenon.” Do you agree? As near as I can tell, the members of virtually all other species seem to be atheists. Theism seems to be a rather recent development in the vast scheme of things and in the evolution of human life. The ancient Greeks seem to have had their atheist thinkers (e.g., Anaxagoras, Diagoras, and Theodorus). Neither Buddha nor Confucius (circa 500 BCE) seem to have had much use for theism. Psalm 14’s infamous assertion that “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” only makes sense if some people way back then actually were saying there is no gOd. Determining exactly how many people may have embraced atheism in the past is problematic, to say the least, given the lack of accurate polling and the often severe penalties that might be levied. Suffice it to say that Nigel’s claim here is less than convincing as it stands.

—– Was Karl Marx’s famous phrase “religion is the opium of the people” actually born of contempt for religion? Read in context, it seems that he might well have meant it in an objective, clinical sense – or even sympathetically.

—– Nigel says that religion promotes large families – which does indeed often seem to be the case. But since most people seem to adopt the religious beliefs of their parents, shouldn’t this be leading to an increase in religion even in northern Europe? Shouldn’t the slower-reproducing atheists be quickly swamped? It’s a situation I think we’ve talked about here before (perhaps with regard to Mormons and Catholics and the Quiverfull movement). I’m not sure that the economic argument as presented by Nigel is adequate to explain atheism’s relative success.

—– Do sports actually serve as a substitute for religion? I’m skeptical. For one thing, the two are hardly mutually exclusive – many Southerners, for example, are both ardent Baptists and NASCAR fans. For another, it seems to me that my atheist friends are actually less likely to be sports fans than the average person. But perhaps the biggest problem I have with the claim is that some of the most important functions of religion – the answers it provides to the Big Questions, the way it reduces the fear of death, the moral guidance it gives – simply aren’t served very well by baseball or football games. Instead, it seems to me that sports and religion are two basically non-logical (and often complementary) ways people have of stoking and satisfying certain emotional needs (such as the need for clear rules, membership in a herd, clear identification of the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, an unequivocal and just resolution of conflict, etc.). Am I missing something?

As much as I want to like Nigel and his essay, I’m afraid he inspires more questions and doubts in me than praise….

Related posts:

1. The Straw Man that Endures
2. Atheism 3.0?
3. Oh my god – atheists want to speak out?

Newer readers might recall the entry I posted two days ago about Jean Meslier, the Catholic priest who was discovered after his death in 1729 to have secretly been an ardent atheist.

Yesterday’s entry about Rabbi Sherwin Wine focused on the atheism of some Jewish religious leaders.

Today I’d like to build on all that by sharing a few details from a recent study of five Christian ministers who secretly reject the religious dogmas they’re being paid to preach to their congregations.

Maybe you’ve already heard about this study. It first hit the news some weeks ago at a time when I didn’t have the time to say much about it. Whether you’ve already heard about it or not, it seems to me to constitute another piece of the puzzle that bears frequent handling as we ponder the nature and prevalence of religious beliefs in the US and try to formulate ways to improve them.

The study I’m refering to is “Preachers Who Are Not Believers” by our old friend Daniel C. Dennett (about whom you can learn much more here, here, and here) and Linda LaScola of Tufts University.

You can read the study for yourself here in PDF form.

Terry Mattingly posted a good summary for knoxnews.com on May 8.

Erin Roach’s interesting account for Baptist Press was posted April 30 and contains these intriguing passages:

“‘Preachers Who Are Not Believers’ is a stunning and revealing report that lays bare a level of heresy, apostasy and hypocrisy that staggers the mind,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote on his blog in March.

“In 1739, Gilbert Tennett preached his famous sermon, ‘On the Danger of an Unconverted Ministry.’ In that sermon, Tennett described unbelieving pastors as a curse upon the church. They prey upon the faith and the faithful. ‘These caterpillars labor to devour every green thing.’

“If they will not remove themselves from the ministry, they must be removed. If they lack the integrity to resign their pulpits, the churches must muster the integrity to eject them,” Mohler wrote at albertmohler.com. “If they will not ‘out’ themselves, it is the duty of faithful Christians to ‘out’ them. The caterpillars are hard at work. Will it take a report from an atheist to awaken the church to the danger?”

Apparently members of the clergy who don’t believe what they’re preaching not only are but long have been much more numerous than one might have suspected.

Here is how Dennett and LaScola introduce their study:

Are there clergy who don’t believe in God? Certainly there are former clergy who fall in this category. Before making their life-wrenching decisions, they were secret nonbelievers. Who knows how many like-minded pastors discover that they simply cannot take this mortal leap from the pulpit and then go on to live out their ministries in secret disbelief? What is it like to be a pastor who doesn’t believe in God? John Updike gave us a moving account in his brilliant novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, which begins with the story of Reverend Wilmot, a Lutheran minister whose life is shattered by his decision to renounce the pulpit in the face of his mounting disbelief. But that is fiction and Wilmot’s period of concealment is short-lived. What is it like to be a pastor who stays the course, in spite of sharing Wilmot’s disbelief?

With the help of a grant from a small foundation, administered through Tufts University, we set out to find some closeted nonbelievers who would agree to be intensively –and, of course, confidentially–interviewed. The interviews were all conducted by Linda LaScola, a clinical social worker with years of professional experience as a qualitative researcher and psychotherapist, and, until recently, a regular churchgoer. Like her co-author, philosopher Daniel Dennett, the author of Breaking the Spell, she is an atheist who is nevertheless a sympathetic and fascinated observer of religious practices and attitudes. For this pilot study we managed to identify five brave pastors, all still actively engaged with parishes, who were prepared to trust us with their stories. All five are Protestants, with master’s level seminary education. Three represented liberal denominations (the liberals) and two came from more conservative, evangelical traditions (the literals). (We decided to concentrate this first project on Christians, and we would have included a Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox priest, for instance–if we had encountered any, but we didn’t.) We initially had six participants, but one, a woman in the Episcopal church, had a change of heart as we were about to go to press and, at her request, all further references to her and quotations from her interviews have been removed.

Our sample is small and self-selected, and it is not surprising that all of our pastors think that they are the tip of an iceberg, but they are also utterly unable to confirm this belief. They might be deluding themselves, but in any case their isolation from others whom they suspect are in the same boat is a feature they all share, in spite of striking differences in their stories and attitudes. While we couldn’t draw any reliable generalizations from such a small sample of clergy, the very variety of their stories, as well as the patterns discernible in them, suggest fascinating avenues for further research on this all but invisible phenomenon.

I encourage you to read the stories of the five ministers they profile for yourself.

One common thread: More knowledge and education led to the evaporation of their religious beliefs even though they expected more knowledge and education to confirm them.

It’s a story I’ve heard many, many times before. Christian ministers are in effect being taught in many if not most seminaries that the Bible is a pack of myth and lies, and then they’re expected to go out act as if this wasn’t the case. In other words, Christian ministers are being taught one thing, and then are paid to teach their congregants something else. There seems to be a kind of uncoordinated conspiracy to keep the people in the pews from ever knowing what the people in the pulpit know.

Here is how Dennett and LaScola put it near the end of their report:

Even some conservative seminaries staff their courses on the Bible with professors who are trained in textual criticism, the historical methods of biblical scholarship, and what is taught in those courses is not what the young seminarians learned in Sunday school, even in the more liberal churches. In seminary they were introduced to many of the details that have been gleaned by centuries of painstaking research about how various ancient texts came to be written, copied, translated, and, after considerable jockeying and logrolling, eventually assembled into the Bible we read today. It is hard if not impossible to square these new facts with the idea that the Bible is in all its particulars a true account of actual events, let alone the inerrant word of God. It is interesting that all our pastors report the same pattern of response among their fellow students: some were fascinated, but others angrily rejected what their professors tried to teach them. Whatever their initial response to these unsettling revelations, the cat was out of the bag and both liberals and literals discerned the need to conceal their knowledge about the history of Christianity from their congregations.

A gulf opened up between what one says from the pulpit and what one has been taught in seminary. This gulf is well-known in religious circles…. The Dishonest Church (2003), by retired United Church of Christ minister, Jack Good, explores this “tragic divide” that poisons the relationship between the laity and the clergy. Every Christian minister, not just those in our little study, has to confront this awkwardness, and no doubt there are many more ways of responding to it than our small sample illustrates. How widespread is this phenomenon? When we asked one of the other pastors we talked with initially if he thought clergy with his views were rare in the church, he responded “Oh, you can’t go through seminary and come out believing in God!” Surely an overstatement, but a telling one.

Here are a few quotes from the profiled ministers, just to convey the flavor of the situation:

“I went to college thinking Adam and Eve were real people. And I can remember really wrestling with that when my Old Testament professor was pointing out the obvious myths and how they came to be. And I kind of joked at the time that I prayed my way all the way to atheism….” - Wes (Methodist pastor)

“…like many students, I became agnostic – I didn’t believe any of it. I wasn’t reacting against it; I wasn’t abused, as many I talk to are. But I just said, ‘there’s nothing much there.’… If not believing in a supernatural, theistic god is what distinguishes an atheist, then I am one too.” - Rick (United Church of Christ minister)

“I reject the virgin birth. I reject substitutionary atonement. I reject the divinity of Jesus. I reject heaven and hell in the traditional sense, and I am not alone…. [Bill Maher, maker of the movie Religulous, is] a genuine, honest guy who’s acknowledging the questions in his heart, and is fed up and passionate and angry about the religious violence in the world. And there’s a lot of justification for that. And I’m right there on 80-90% of the stuff, so we’d have a lot to talk about. You know, we’d go out and have a beer together. And I think we agree on a lot of stuff, and I think he would criticize me about just sticking with this right now.” - Darryl (Presbyterian minister)

“I hungered to continue learning; I felt like it was very applicable; I felt like it would prepare me more to minister…. If God is God, he’s big enough; he can handle any questions I’ve got. Well, he didn’t. He didn’t measure up! And that sounds, you know, so funny, because if I heard somebody else saying that a year ago, I’d have thought, ‘You are such a sacrilegious person. God’s going to strike you dead by lightning or something!’ I’ve actually thought and tried to pin-point, but I can honestly say that intellectually, from within the first few weeks of my studies, I thought, ‘Wow! Could this be true?’ So almost from that point on, it’s almost been downhill if you’re Christian; uphill if you’re a non-believer. Coming to the truth — and I always thought there was absolute truth out there. Now I’m a lot more relativistic…. I tell you, the book that just grabbed my mind and just twisted it around, was Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great. It was shocking, some of that stuff – the throws and jabs against faith and stuff. I would think, ‘He’s crazy.’ But then I’d say, ‘No. Step back and read it for what it is.’… Probably one of the most mind-opening things was listening to all these debates from top people of Christianity; or believers vs. non-believers. And I tried to do the same thing: be open and listen, and use my mind and reason, I guess. And almost undeniably, even being a believer and knowing the Christian claims and scripture, you know what? This guy won in the debate. He’s a non-believer. Why?… Here’s how I’m handling my job on Sunday mornings: I see it as play acting. I kind of see myself as taking on a role of a believer in a worship service, and performing. Because I know what to say. I know how to pray publicly. I can lead singing. I love singing. I don’t believe what I’m saying anymore in some of these songs. But I see it as taking on the role and performing. Maybe that’s what it takes for me to get myself through this, but that’s what I’m doing…. I’m where I am because I need the job still. If I had an alternative, a comfortable paying job, something I was interested in doing, and a move that wouldn’t destroy my family, that’s where I’d go.” - Adam (Church of Christ minister)

“The pursuit of Christianity brought me to the point of not believing in God…. I didn’t plan to become an atheist. I didn’t even want to become an atheist. It’s just that I had no choice. If I’m being honest with myself…. It’s not like, I don’t want to believe in God. I don’t believe in God. And it’s because of all my pursuits of Christianity. I want to understand Christianity, and that’s what I’ve tried to do. And I’ve wanted to be a Christian. I’ve tried to be a Christian, and all the ways they say to do it. It just didn’t add up…. [T]he whole grand scheme of Christianity, for me, is just a bunch of bunk… I wanted it to be true. And I kept telling myself, ‘I don’t understand.’ And, you know, I devoted my whole life trying to understand. And finally I got to the point where — I’ve got to admit to myself this is how I feel. I can’t pretend any longer…. I’ve given it a good chance…. OK, this God created me. It’s a perfect God that knows everything; can do anything. And somehow it got messed up, and it’s my fault. So he had to send his son to die for me to fix it. And he does. And now I’m supposed to beat myself to death the rest of my life over it. It makes no sense to me. Don’t you think a God could come up with a better plan than that?… What kind of personality, what kind of being is this that had to create these other beings to worship and tell him how wonderful he is? That makes no sense, if this God is all-knowing and all-wise and all-wonderful. I can’t comprehend that that’s what kind of person God is…. Every church I’ve been in preached that the Jonah in the Whale story is literally true. And I’ve never believed that. You mean to tell me a human was in the belly of that whale? For three days? And then the whale spit him out on the shoreline? And, of course, their convenient logic is, ‘Well, God can do anything.’… Well, I think most Christians have to be in a state of denial to read the Bible and believe it. Because there are so many contradicting stories. You’re encouraged to be violent on one page, and you’re encouraged to give sacrificial love on another page. You’re encouraged to bash a baby’s head on one page, and there’s other pages that say, you know, give your brother your fair share of everything you have if they ask for it…. But if God was going to reveal himself to us, don’t you think it would be in a way that we wouldn’t question?… I mean, if I was wanting to have… people teach about the Bible… I would probably make sure they knew I existed…. I mean, I wouldn’t send them mysterious notes, encrypted in a way that it took a linguist to figure out.” - Jack (Southern Baptist minister)

It seems to me that, when all is said in done, the question isn’t “Why are some members of the clergy atheists?” but “Why isn’t everyone?”

If you have any good answers, please share.

Related posts:

1. Staks Rosch Speaks Out!
2. Maybe Clergy Ought To Have Warning Labels?
3. Is Your Religion True?

Ordinarily I’d let an essay like the following pass by without comment. As much as I might disagree with its perspective and conclusions, I would shrug it off. Critiquing someone else’s heart-felt personal beliefs while they’re down can easily come across as unseemly rather than as the appropriate use of a “teachable moment”. Even though this in effect often means that theists are excused from normal logical scrutiny out of respect and politeness as they present yet another highly subjective, emotion-based defense of their delusions, I tend to demur. One can win a debate on points but still lose the battle for public opinion if it seems as if one is unfairly beating up on a poor, suffering human being….

Recent events have leveled the playing field, however. The author of the essay and I seem to have experienced much the same thing at almost the exact same time. We are both poor, suffering human beings at this point. And since I myself forthrightly forfeit the right to play the Poor Suffering Human Being card to shield my comments from analysis or criticism, I feel justified at the moment in denying others the right to play that card.

Tragic events are not a legitimate reason to turn off our brains. If anything, they’re a reason to shift our brains into high.

If our emotions can’t withstand more thinking, well, so much the worse for our emotions….

My Dead Relatives In The Sky (Karl Giberson, Ph.D/The Huffington Post; May 3)

On Saturday my mother was laid to rest beneath the rural soil of her beloved New Brunswick countryside. It was a peaceful setting, with a drizzle of rain and some sunlight that finally got the upper hand as the ceremony ended. The wind whined a bit coming up the hill, and birds chirped in the background.

My mom loved nature and its many creatures; it was a special passion that she passed on to her children and grandchildren. When Mother Nature flexed her muscles with blizzards, great winds, or thunderstorms, my mom would often call me to the window, to sit on a chair and look out, as if a movie were playing on the glass. Our kitchen window held a homemade feeder where the birds of winter fed on suet and seeds. I remember on one bitterly cold day, Mom brought me to watch a chickadee stand on one leg as it pulled the other against its feathers for warmth.

My mom died four months ago in the bleak midwinter, when deep snow and ground as hard as iron made it impossible to dig a grave. Today’s late April burial is early by New Brunswick standards. About 25 people stood around the grave, some with umbrellas, all with warm coats. Mom’s great-grandson scampered about, happily oblivious. We sang four verses of “Amazing Grace,” and a country pastor read from the Bible. He made reference, as Christians always do, to the belief that such partings are temporary and that we would see my mother again in Heaven.

The pastor spoke these familiar words of hope with the same straightforward assurance as when he announced that my sister was providing lunch a bit later for everyone at her home not far from the graveside. In his mind, perhaps, both future events were equally straightforward, and he was untroubled affirming them.

The road that ran past the graveside had few cars on it, and I think two went by during the ceremony. My mother used to ski to school along a similar road, in the days before buses. She often told me, with great nostalgia, how the kids from up and down that road skied together to their one-room schoolhouse. The kids farthest from the school would start first and the closer ones would watch from their windows and join the group as it came into their yards. Gradually a parade of laughing children, wearing hand-knit scarves and mittens and breathing white clouds into the frosty air, would be lined up, skiing together to a school heated by a woodstove along a well-worn path through the snow. The younger children would sometimes fall behind and be rescued by a big boy at the front who would ski back and carry the straggler to the front of the line.

In my mind’s eye I picture my mother as a seven-year old straggler struggling to keep up on her hand-made wooden skis — eventually handed down to me — and then being rescued by a hero twice her age who would take her to the front of the line. To be Canadian is to love winter and stories of winter.

As I stared at the oak coffin about to be lowered into the ground, I wondered what it would be like to see my mother again and share once again our mutual affection for the glories of Canadian winters. For the last years of her life she fought a long war of attrition with Parkinson’s disease and died a little bit every day. The day she officially died was little different than the others; it was just the particular day that the cold winter wind pulls the last leaf from the tree.

The graveyard was surrounded by trees preparing their spring garb. The Christian belief in eternal life is often compared to the cycle of the seasons. We look ahead to new life in the spring even as we see the cold taking its toll in the fall. In faith we look ahead to new life in heaven.

Belief in eternal life, though, is hard for me. My mind has been largely taken over by science and has trouble getting itself around ideas so far outside the normal course of events. But I still believe…

In an exchange with a prominent “New Atheist,” I argued that belief in God provides a “richer and more complex view of reality” than the purely materialistic belief that the physical world is all there is. My affirmation, not surprisingly, was ridiculed as a fancy way of saying “after I die I’ll be able to meet my dead relatives in the sky.” This isn’t what I meant at the time, of course, but it came to mind, nonetheless, as I stood beside my mother’s coffin and wondered if I would someday “meet her in the sky.”

My atheist critic, speaking for so many of his materialistic brothers-in-arms, says that such a view does not enrich reality: “It’s impoverished,” he says, “by adherence to magic and superstition.” Perhaps he is right, but I don’t think so.

My belief in God grounds a hope that I might one day see the wonderful woman in that coffin again. This hope does seem magical to me, but it’s not superstitious. Standing at my mother’s graveside with that hope seems so much richer than standing there without it.

In memory of my mother, Ursula Giberson (1929-2009).

(Karl Giberson is vice president of the BioLogos Foundation)

I’m sorry for Dr. Giberson’s loss and extend my condolences.

I assume he’d be equally sorry for my loss and would extend his condolences to me as well if he could.

The funeral I attended was held outside, too. I could tell you in some detail what the weather was like (very nice) and what memories it may have sparked about my recently deceased relative (an avid golfer), but I don’t know what the point would be beyond emotional manipulation, so I’ll refrain.

The funeral I attended attracted about the same number of people – maybe a few fewer. I don’t suppose either of us took the time to take a precise head count….

Like Dr. Giberson’s mother, my recently deceased relative suffered from Parkinson’s (among other things) and can be said to have died a little bit more every day. It was not a fun process to witness, but I can think of few such processes that are. Sudden death can be even more traumatic to witness. Such is the nature of the world we find ourselves trapped in. If I could change that, I would. But I can’t.

A Christian minister spoke at the funeral I attended, too. He also read from the Bible and expressed the belief that we would one day all be reunited in heaven. But that just touches the surface. This minister – as has been the case at every funeral I’ve attended – did not know the deceased well. He had only been the minister of my deceased relative’s church since September. Because of my relative’s illness, they had barely met. Listening to the pastor tell me and the others at the graveside about the fine Christian qualities and ultimate fate of someone we knew much better than he did seemed absurd. It was like listening to a random stranger pulled in off the street tell you about your spouse of 30 years. To say that the words rang hollow is an understatement. To say that a society that thinks this is an appropriate way to honor the dead is crazy seems to hit the nail right on the head.

I readily admit that the minister was kind, compassionate, and sincere – a real sweetheart. Those personal qualities did little to erase the basic absurdity of his being there at all, however. The formulaic service – as individualized as a restaurant menu – seemed to cheapen the event rather than raise it to a higher level.

Somewhere in the course of my life (perhaps at a garage sale) I acquired a standard minister’s book of prayers and services. It was stunning to see the words in it the first time I opened it up – words meant to be delivered hundreds or thousands or millions of times by those servants of the lOrd willing to fill in the blanks with the appropriate name(s). Cookbook religion without regard to the eater’s tastes, preferences, or medical condition. In the case of funerals it seemed to be an example of old dead words spoken over the newly dead in an attempt to deaden the grief of those living in the past. Assembly line theology. Factory processing of the dearly departed soul. Utter silence would have been infinitely more dignified and edifying at the funeral I most recently attended (or any of the others, for that matter). As it was, I ended up grieving more for the kind minister who was mouthing such inane platitudes than I did for the relative who mercifully no longer had to listen to such regurgitated claptrap.

It didn’t help that the minister was probably younger than I am (and apparently much less knowledgeable about the Bible he was quoting from).

And – sad to say – it didn’t help that he was Korean. Not because I’m in any way prejudiced against Koreans, mind you, but because I believe my deceased relative was. If that relative ever had a non-white friend, I didn’t know about it. Christians may claim that the fact that a Korean can preside over the funeral of a non-Korean is proof of Paul’s words that Christianity erases all the normal barriers between people – that everyone is one in Christ. I’m more inclined to suspect that if my relative’s consciousness really did somehow manage to survive the death of the body, that consciousness would have been steaming and frowning. It all reminded me of that old “All in the Family” episode in which Archie secretly whisks Little Joey away to the church to be baptized and he encounters an Oriental minister (whom I think he mistakes for the janitor). Or the episode in which Archie is trapped in the basement, gets drunk, thinks he’s being rescued by gOd, and discovers that gOd is a black man.

The bottom line is that what should have been a solemn event ended up playing like a practical joke on the star player.

And how, you might ask, did a Korean minister end up in charge of a church in a small town in Ohio? Well, I’m not sure – I’m not privy to the inner workings of the church denomination in question – but it seems certain that the fact that two previous (white) ministers were dismissed as the result of sex scandals had something to do with it.

The exact Bible verses that were read at the funeral only made matters worse. Something from the Book of Revelation about eternal life in Christ; something from 1 Kings about the advice a dying David gave his son Solomon. Given that the Book of Revelation is a series of wild (and often extremely violent) ravings generously described as metaphorical, was probably written by a madman, and barely made it into the Bible, it seemed an extremely poor choice to quote from. Given that my deceased relative had little respect for Jewish people, quoting one of the most famous Jews of all seemed an even poorer choice. Plus it was hard enough to get this relative to ever share anything of much importance with us beyond the latest sports scores; the idea of that relative sharing dying words of wisdom seemed about as likely and true as a $3 bill….

Lest I belabor the point anything further, let me quickly sum it up this way: Even though my recently deceased relative was a devout, lifelong Christian, the Christian funeral service was wildly out of synch with the person I had known. So out of synch that it struck me as a farce, a parody, a cruel joke. It didn’t succeed in celebrating the life or easing the grief inspired by the death of that relative; all it did was further reduce my ability to take ministers and churches and religion seriously. The funeral service revealed all three to be even further out of touch with reality than I’d thought they were – no easy task!

The most important difference between the funeral service I attended and the one Dr. Giberson attended, however, was this: His mind pondered the possibility of meeting his loved one again in heaven; mine did not.

Further, he thought such a meeting would be a good thing – something to be hoped for; I did not. He embraced that possibility as true because it gave him comfort; I did not. He ended up still believing that his belief in gOd and an afterlife is richer and more complex than the beliefs of atheists like me; I ended up believing more than ever that the views of people like Dr. Giberson are painfully illogical, unsupported by the evidence, and based solely on immature emotional needs.

Believing something is true just because it gives us comfort is foolish for many reasons.

There is obviously no connection between what’s true and what gives us comfort. Deriving the former from the latter is unjustified and unreasonable.

It can also be very dangerous.

If you believe that wearing your lucky rabbit’s foot means that you’re immune to misfortune, does that make it more or less likely that you’ll engage in risky behavior?

And if you believe that this life is a brief stepping stone on the path to an eternity in heaven where all problems are solved and all injustices are rectified, does that make you more or less likely to value this life and work to solve its problems and promote justice in the here and now?

Even if one grants for the sake of argument that there is an afterlife, there’s no obvious reason why that ought to bring us comfort. Perhaps my dead relative is actually in *more* pain now. Given the shitty way we’re treated in this life, why should we believe that the gOd who allegedly created it and everything else will treat us any better just because our soul has changed addresses?

Perhaps my dead relative is being condemned to hell by Mithras or Osiris or Quetzalcoatl or any of the thousands of other gOds my relative rejected in favor of Jesus. Perhaps my dead relative is being tortured by spider gOds or other supernatural entities and forces none of us have ever heard of, dreamt about, or can begin to imagine. Once we start speculating about the possible nature of the afterlife without logic and evidence to limit our thinking, anything goes – no matter how horrid. Only non-existence guarantees certain escape from eternal torment.

Now suppose – just for the sake of argument – some sort of Christian afterlife does indeed exist. There are many varieties of Christianity. Many of these varieties have historically condemned to hell those who embrace any other variety. Ergo, even if you’re a Christian, the odds of you actually getting into the One True Christian heaven and escaping a Christian hell seem rather low. On what basis might Christianity in general then be seen as a reason for hope or happiness rather than sadness and despair?

Now let’s assume that your variety of Christianity just happens to indeed be the right one. But your beloved dead relative happened to pick the wrong one. Instead of a happy reunion in heaven, you’re greeted by nobody and suddenly discover that you have an eternity ahead of you in which to ponder your loved one’s endless sufferings in hell.

Given the number of loved ones the average Christian seems to have and the extremely low probability that all of them just happen to have embraced the “right” version of Christianity, it seems most Christians in heaven will have to contemplate at least one loved one in hell. Exactly how much harp music and candy do you think YOU would have to experience before you forgot the flames that are permanently roasting dear old Grandma’s legs? (If you’re a Christian who easily can forget such things, do you really deserve to be in heaven at all? Explain.)

Ok, now let’s put all that aside. Let’s assume NO one goes to hell and EVERYONE goes to heaven. We’ll all indeed one day be reunited with all our loved ones. Exactly how is that gonna work with people who married several times? Exactly how heavenly is it gonna be for your first spouse to have to share you with your second? Your third? Your fourth?

And what happens in those cases where you loved X but X loved Y and Y loved only himself? How can loving reunions occur unless they’re mutual? And how many loving relationships are ever truly mutual?

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that the idea of heaven creates far more problems than it solves.

Just like the idea of an afterlife does.

Even if you just assume such things exist in the absence of all logic and evidence, it seems impossible to jiggle all the elements just right in order to avoid ending up with an unholy mess.

Or to put it another way: I went to a high school reunion once. It was a crushing bore and disappointment. No one was who they used to be. No one was any longer much interested in anybody else. And that was a mere 10 years after graduation…. Can you really expect a happier outcome meeting up with people who have been dead 15 years? 25 years? 60 years?

Relationships – especially good, loving relationships – seem to me to be very much the product of a given time and place – the delicate, fleeting intersection of one mind and another, both of which are what they are because of certain genes and experiences more or less unique to a given locale and era.

Yanking those minds (or “souls” if you insist) out of a very specific earthly time and place and throwing them into some heavenly fantasyland and expecting them to relate to each other as they did on earth seems to me to reveal a childish understanding of life, human psychology, and much else. It isn’t “richer” or “more complex” – it’s goofy and inane.

And those who take serious comfort from the goofy and inane seriously worry me.

Instead of continuing to try to fend off the pain and nastiness of life with the paper swords and cardboard shields of a fairyland theology, I suggest that Dr. Giberson and those like him grow up, face facts, and start dealing with the world as it is and not as the scared little child lurking inside them would like it to be.

Related posts:

1. What do people DO in heaven?
2. Where I’ve Been
3. My Discussion With Chess83 (Part 1)

I’m still here.

I’ve just been spending the last month or so dealing with the illness and death of a close member of my family.

I won’t burden you with the gory details. Suffice it to say that it was the sort of departure from this life that I wouldn’t wish on the most rabid hound from hell let alone a fellow human being.

And I certainly wouldn’t have wished it on anyone whom I had created in my own image.

Neither would I have stood by and done nothing to hasten the end or otherwise alleviate the suffering….

If you’re an atheist like I am, you probably have had at least one Christian in your life smugly assure you that your views about gOd and Jesus will miraculously change once you’ve been brought face to face with death and your own demise or the demise of a loved one. I’ve always thought such Christians were full of shit. I can now say that this hypothesis of mine has been put to the test and confirmed.

The events of the last month are completely consistent with a gOd-free universe that operates according to the unconscious and uncaring laws of nature. If one insists on assuming the existence of a supreme supernatural force that created and controls everything, then the events of the last month are consistent with that supreme supernatural force being sadistic, demonic, and evil. As with so many of the events we see unfolding all around the world every day, the events I witnessed are simply not consistent with the assumption of a supreme supernatural force that is kind, loving, or good.

Many people apparently see this as a reason for despair. As I indicated in one of my very first entries, however, it might better be seen as a reason for hope.

Here’s one of the key sentences from that entry: “If the (apparently insane) God of the Bible actually exists, there is no escape from his irrational wrath. My atheism, in contrast, accepts the possibility that current people and conditions might evolve into something better with time – with no obvious upper limit.”

The illness and suffering of my relative isn’t to be understood as the result of the first man’s eating a bit of forbidden fruit 6000 years ago. It’s to be understood as the consequence of natural, physiological processes. Those processes aren’t inevitable or irresistible or pre-ordained to be a permanent part of life but can be better understood and ultimately controlled by science-based medical research (which has a truly remarkable track record). They are not the sort of processes that are ever going to be accurately understood or controlled by the embrace of ancient superstitious nonsense or ardent prayers to imaginary friends in the sky.

The fact that my relative was the most religious and most Christian member of my family only serves to underscore this point. (The fact that the worst doctor we had to deal with also happened to be the most gOdly underscores it again. Sad to say, one of my relative’s favorite neighbors also recently died after being treated by this doctor. Her family intends to file a formal complaint about his behavior with the hospital.)

Once again it seems that Jesus decided to torment and snuff out the life of one of his most devout followers while sparing the lives of countless non-Christians.

To say that Jesus now and forever has a PR problem worse than that of Toyota and BP combined is something of an understatement.

If you’re a Christian who happens to disagree and would like to take a shot at salvaging your personal savior’s reputation, go for it.

I humbly suggest that your time might be much better spent learning more about proven life changers such as the National Institutes of Health or helping to win the worm war.

Related posts:

1. What Atheists Assume about Christianity
2. My Discussion With Chess83 (Part 1)
3. Is Your Religion True?

Myth Of Religious Coexistence (Austin Cline; March 25)

There are a lot of people who dream hopefully of a future of peaceful coexistence among all religions. They hope for a time when adherents of various religions cease persecuting each other and fighting one another in the name of their gods and religious beliefs. They work to help religious believers learn to “live and let live,” to “agree to disagree.” It’s a nice idea, but it’s just not an idea that has a lot of traction in the real world.

The problem with this dream lies with religion itself, which means that it’s a problem that these people are unlikely to recognize or acknowledge because they tend to start out from the assumption that religion is necessarily a good thing which is sometimes hijacked by bad people. In fact, a major factor in the religious violence they would like to overcome is exactly what will undermine their dreams of peaceful religious coexistence. And they don’t even see it.

Related posts:

1. Oh my god – atheists want to speak out?
2. Black Female Atheists Speak Out!
3. Goodman & Mueller Speak Out!

At long last, one has apparently come out of the closet and admitted it.

Atheist Barbie (Jen McCreight/Blag Hag; April 8)

Related posts:

1. Alleged ‘Pro-Atheist’ Bias in the Media
2. The faith of the atheist
3. What kind of (atheist/theist) are YOU?

Beyond aggressive atheism

Five years ago, atheism was all aggression. From Christopher Hitchens to Richard Dawkins, the best selling atheists advanced a particular discourse – one that was both antagonistic and destructive. The question they always answered was, “How many ways can I find to offend religious people?” But the question we always wanted to ask them was different: “How do you bring together people from all backgrounds around equal dignity and mutual loyalty?”

This entire paragraph is just sheer caricature. Having a strong opinion against religion and religious claims, for whatever reason (it doesn’t really matter), somehow makes you “aggressive” or “militant” and out to do nothing more than “offend religious people” (rather than engaging in criticism and debate). Sure, some individuals are more aggressive than others – like Hitchens – but these descriptions are just laughably (if it were not so unfunny) simplistic and mostly false.

But then again, this is in some way what Harris probably had in mind when he spoke about the conversational taboo afforded to criticizing religion. If your goal is to foster inter-superstitious dialog, then you are an innovative person deserving of utmost respect. If your goal, rather, is to critique religion and religious claims then you must be a heartless monster.

What do you think? Why does this straw man endure?

Related posts:

1. Victor Stenger Speaks Out!
2. How Young Is Too Young?
3. The Optimistic Psychologist