Luke 6:27-36

‘But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

‘If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

So let me get this straight…love your enemies, expect nothing in return, and you can expect a great reward later. In other words, you will be rewarded slavishly for your selflessness. Would Orwell have classified this as DoubleThink?

I can imagine Jesus’ followers discussing this among themselves:

“Hey, Jesus said that we will be rewarded if we do not seek any reward.”

“But doesn’t that mean by not seeking a reward we really are seeking a reward”

“Oh, crap. So how does this work again?”

So tell me. Why again do some people claim that Jesus was a “great moral teacher?”

The most significant layout change is the addition of a new home page format. The home page is more compact and can contain additional items besides just the list of blog posts. It features an excerpt from the latest post and a small list of the previous five. The “blog list” has thus been moved off of the front page and into the “Blog” page, which is accessible from the menubar. The menubar also features a sub-menu of blog categories. Clicking on one of these categories will show a list of all blog posts filed under that category.

Finally, I have also added the capability to leave comment karma. You can now vote individual comments up or down with the thumbs up and thumbs down icons. Maybe this will encourage people to leave more comments - or maybe not. Perhaps in the future I will add the ability to sort by karma rating so that high ranking comments are moved towards the top - unless nobody uses it! Or maybe by that time the Wordpress plugin for Intense Debate will finally be available.

I think that about says it all. Leave any feedback in the comments section!

36% of 16-24 year old British Muslims “believe if a Muslim converts to another religion they should be punished by death, compared to 19% of 55+ year olds.”

Believing that one should be punished by death for changing religions is troubling enough, but the fact is this sort of appalling thing actually happens:

Saudi man kills daughter for converting to Christianity

Riyadh: A Saudi man working with the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice recently killed his daughter for converting to Christianity.

According to sources close to the victim, the religious police member had cut the tongue of the girl and burned her to death following a heated debate on religion

(Read More…)

Thanks to Samuel Skinner for alerting me to this story in a comment.

If anyone still harbors any doubt about whether or not religion should be criticized, this news story alone should be sufficient.

To learn more about how apostasy fits into Islam, check out this excellent resource.

Abrahamic religion refers to the three prevalent monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that claim prophet Abraham as a part of their sacred history. There are approximately 3.8 billion people in the world that belong to an Abrahamic religion. (Source is the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia.)

Throughout history all three religions have used their holy texts to systematically enforce strong sanctions against their opposition. Whether called non-believers, free thinkers, atheists, or agnostics, the punishments range all the way from tribal shunning to death by stoning. If you doubt this, pick up any King James Bible, the Hebrew Bible or the Koran and read carefully. You will find an appalling number of hateful, intolerant, barbaric instructions like these from the bible:

“Whosoever would not seek the LORD God of Israel should be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.-2 Chronicles 15:13

Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love them that hate the LORD? Therefore is wrath upon thee from before the LORD.- 2 Chronicles 19

If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known … thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwords the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die.-Deuteronomy 13:6-10″

An aside: does this mean that after you brutally murder your disloyal friend or relative the rest of your frowning band comes out to pelt the dead body with stones? Need we wonder long that atheists had little stomach for openly avowing their non-belief?

But what about Muslims, whose public relations machine widely trumpets them as “peaceful people?” Before you sign up to be a Muslim you better be sure that is what you want, because technically the Koran prescribes a barrage of stones should you subsequently convert to another religion. Apparently, Muslims have an unending supply of rocks they are eager to use. Doesn’t any religious person ask themselves why these barbarous iron age prohibitions and cruel punishments still grace the pages of their holy books?

In 2006 a vindictive Shariah court in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan imposed a death sentence on 41-year-old Abdul Rahman for converting to Christianity, 16 years earlier. Poor hapless Abdul was only saved

because of a worldwide outcry against the court’s backwardness. The eventual solution to this international crisis was to spirit Abdul out of the country by plane. And how did the court learn about Abdul? His loyal god-besotted family ratted him out, in accordance with the instructions in the Koran. Although Abdul was given the opportunity to return to Islam and all would be forgiven, he refused. He may be unwise, but Abdul Rahman has integrity to spare.

Looking at history dispassionately, god-sanctioned bigotry and intolerance has accounted for untold hardship, misery and death over the centuries. In modern times, shunning may not sound like a severe punishment, but because humans are social animals and throughout history have organized themselves in tribal fashion, being shunned by your tribe can wreak emotional devastation. Believers, take this stuff seriously notwithstanding that the average person who attends smiling Joel Osteen’s Lakewood megachurch probably would stop short of stoning their family members. One hopes.

In Europe where the enlightenment has been more strongly embraced, atheism is now cheerfully accepted. Historians and those who study such matters believe Europeans turned away from religion in droves because of their long history of religious wars that created so much misery. People finally wised up. Why kill each other and destroy property over improbable, unproven, and might we suggest - improvable beliefs? Thankfully, in Northern Ireland, the last vestige of a hateful, religiously sanctioned war has finally sputtered to a close.

On this side of the Atlantic our awakening has only recently come about. In large part, we can thank the brilliant writing of atheists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, A. C. Grayling and others who have recently produced seminal books, broadly and forcefully attacking organized religion. Their books have become a publishing phenomenon that has left apologists gasping and sputtering for replies. So far, the best they can come up with is to accuse Pol Pot and Stalin of atheism, so there! Sometimes the more rabid among them include Hitler, but there is reasonable doubt about his exact standing as a Christian.

In addition, the strident, backward, fundamental Christians, who insist the entire country must follow their mean spirited, narrow way of thinking, are now in disarray. The cycle of dying religious fervor on this side of the Atlantic is finally coinciding with the progress of our enlightened European neighbors.

The horrors of September 11, 2001 signaled the beginning of the end of the spell cast by religion; and not a moment too soon. Religion is indubitably the enemy of civilization when an atomic bomb can be fit into a briefcase or airplanes can be blown from the sky with liquid ingredients commonly available at your local Wal-mart and hardware store. Likewise, fertilizer and diesel fuel are easily acquired in this age of do-it-yourself bomb factories. Truck rental businesses scrutinize customers far more carefully these days you may be sure.

So what about fanatics? Ultimately, all religions are structured in a way that almost invites fanaticism because there are no effective counter controls. If your Abrahamic religion veers off into fanaticism, you cannot protest. It says right in the book you will be cast out or worse. Enough, is enough. Humanity must outgrow childish fantasies if we are to progress in the twenty-first century.

Atheism versus religion is no longer simply an academic exercise in philosophy. Atheism may offer our only sane hope for survival.

Some of these people are of the opinion that we should just tolerate the fact that different people have different beliefs. What’s the point in criticizing someone’s religion if he or she wants to believe it? Maybe if offers a modicum of comfort in that persons life? Others are of the opinion that debating religion or challenging religious claims is simply a waste of time. No argument will ever change the mind of a person who has faith in what cannot be proven anyway. This point of view is summed up nicely by the following comments that I came across online recently:

Who in their right mind has time to waste ‘arguing’ with a deluded person?

You will NEVER get anywhere with logical arguments. The whole point of believing is to mentally and emotionally FORCE yourself to ignore glaring, unexplainable and obvious contradictions because doing so is considered unwavering FAITH and VIRTUE.

Only the believer can free themselves at the right time with the correct input from the world.

Curiously, this person states that a religious believer can move away from his or her religion only with the correct input from the world. Why can’t discussions with non-believers or reading the arguments of non-believers be a significant part of this “input from the world?” Would this same person argue that anti-smoking campaigns are a waste of time because only the smoker can free him or herself at the right time? I hardly think so.

The more atheists and other non-believers are willing to publicly challenge religious claims the more pressure we can put on believers to confront what they believe. Imagine walking into a social event and striking up a conversation with a stranger by explaining how you believe that the resurrected spirit of Elvis was responsible for helping you come out unscathed from a recent car crash. No doubt, the conversation would quickly become uncomfortable and you would soon feel slightly embarrassed by bringing it up in the first place. That’s because a belief in the intervening powers of a resurrected spirit of Elvis is absurd bordering on insane. However, if instead you mentioned how you believe that Jesus saved you from injury, at worst others would simply shrug this off as your religious belief.

Why aren’t some non-believers willing to treat a belief about the resurrected spirit of Elvis on the same level as a belief in the resurrected spirit of Jesus in a conversation? Fear of offense? Convinced that it truly is a hopeless endeavor? Or maybe you are already a conversational atheist - or in other words, a non-believer that seeks to engage religious people in conversations, discussions, and debate.

I would like to introduce to you, which ever the above you are, to a new website that is seeking to promote conversational atheism: http://www.conversationalatheist.com/

As of now, there is an essay posted defending the author’s decision to engage in religious debate. He gives three main reasons:

1. If people are loudly proclaiming their false beliefs, they should not be encouraged or go unchallenged.
2. (Religion) wastes the time, money, and resources of well-meaning people.
3. Religion teaches inappropriate responses to real world problems.

He then responds to four challenges,  a couple of which I outlined above:

1. “Religious people don’t think that they’re lying, they think they’re telling the truth!”
2. “We should respect their beliefs.”
3. “You won’t change anyone’s mind.”
4. “Let believers have their false beliefs, it only harms them…”

Read the essay, “Why do I argue, debate, discuss, and converse about religion?” for more details.

Additionally, the author is working on a book - about which I am very excited - that outlines various strategies for engaging in religious debate. If you would like to receive e-mail alerts concerning the status of this project, you can sign up to the Conversational Atheist mailing list:

Conversational Atheist

E-mail:

Well, wouldn’t you know it - Rocky Twyman and company are now trying to take credit for this downtrend. From the BBC:

Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April. Since then, the average price of what the US calls gasoline has fallen from more than $4 a gallon to $3.80.

That is not entirely accurate. As I pointed out, the average price of gasoline has not fallen “since” April. It actually soared between April and the middle of July $3.33 a gallon to $4.12 a gallon - 23.72% - before heading back down to around $3.80 where it now stands as of this writing. Keep in mind that $3.80 is still well above the national average of $3.33 as it was in April (14.11%), when the movement began.

To summarize:

(1) The national average gas price did not start coming down until three months after the Pray at the Pump  movement began - a long time for a deity to react - but not before soaring up 23.72% as a part of a ferocious climb.

(2) The Pray at the Pumpers have still not acheived what they set out to do in April - lower gas prices - as the average price of gas is still 14.11% higher than it was when they began!

That certainly seems like a failure to me. But let’s go back to this recent downtrend. Anyone who closely follows economic news understands what market forces have contributed to this decline. But not Twyman. According to the BBC:

Mr Twyman is sceptical that market forces might be responsible for the lower prices. But he and his prayer warriors have changed their motoring habits.

He might be skeptical but he is clearly not putting all of his eggs in the faith basket:

“We believe not just in prayer - because we believe that faith without works is dead. So we’ve encouraged people to car-pool more and organise their days more, because it’s a combination of faith with these other factors.”

Or it might just be these other factors, as the BBC also reported earlier. In particular, as the price of oil is measured in dollars, a stronger dollar relative to other currencies means lower prices. But maybe they were praying for that, too.

Here’s the deal, though. While there clearly doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the price of gasoline and the actions of the prayer groups, even if there was, correlation does not equal causation. In science, claims are tested by controlling for other factors.  And such a test is deemed successful if the results are consistently repeatable. Twyman and company are, at best, indulging in a deluded form of wishful thinking.

Here I would like to take the opportunity to comment on some of these responses:

you can’t understand people who are religious because you were never religious and they can’t understand you… sometimes, there’s not right or wrong but what’s practical to the person.

This is hardly a response but this kind of thinking seems to come up often enough that it is worth addressing again. The claim seems to be that there are elements of religion that don’t matter if they are true or not, rather, what matters is how those elements helps a person in life. But here I am not arguing about what is practical or not - I am arguing about what is likely to be true or not given the available evidence. Whether or not someone finds false beliefs practical to his or her daily life and whether or not that is useful or even desirable is an entirely different question. It’s also one that Daniel Dennet tackles head on in his book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

Here, though, I think that it is enough to say this: Responses like this only serve to further the immunity from criticism that religion has long enjoyed, and it does so by deflecting the more important question of the truth content of religions to the less important question of in what sense can religoius beliefs comfort the lives of believers.

As a person who works in science, I know that empirical evidence only takes the ‘truth’ so far. For example, people were CONVINCED that the functions of T cells were limited to TH1 and TH2 up until the year 2000… now I’m working on TH17 cells which are still completely controversial. So com’on, while science is based on empirical evidence that ‘withstand the test of time’, it’s only relative to what sort of ‘test’ you keep doing to prove yourself correct or not.

“There is a good reason why there is a clear consensus among physicists concerning Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.” Sure, for now… until the next genius comes and ‘proves’ that it’s incomplete…

This is true. However, I would submit that empirical evidence of the kind that science regularly deals with takes us much, much further than any strictly religious claims can. Indeed, among some believers it is considered a virtue to believe a religious claim without any evidence at all!

By the way, we already know that General Relativity is incomplete because it is incompatible with quantum mechanics. But no physicist would deny that the theory works extremely well on larger scales. Now if we could only have that level of confidence about say, the virgin birth…

PEOPLE WHO CANNOT waive beyond their own understanding and experience of their own world is what breeds intolerance… and what do you think you’ve been speaking of when you cannot accept that people can have a different belief system than you… INTOLERANCE! Com’on!

… and keep telling yourselves that you are the only ones who thinks and anyone who belief in anything else is just an idiot… tell me how that works out for you

This is another diversionary tactic. Rather than facing the tough questions head on, like, do any religions make true claims that can be verified, this person suggests that we should just accept different beliefs simply because they are different. I might be willing to do that with harmless beliefs, but religious beliefs, in general, are not harmless. This should require no further explanation.

What I and other atheists are advocating here is what Sam Harris calls conversational intolerance. In other words, when a person makes unsubstantiated claims in a conversation we feel that we must challenge that claim. This is about being intolerant towards bad and unsupported ideas, not about being intolerant towards people. I am not saying that people shouldn’t have the right to believe what they want. I am only saying that they should not expect to be immune from criticism when they assert those beliefs without evidence.

Besides, the post was not about my own beliefs. I am not sitting here proclaiming to have the truth. On the contrary, I am simply calling out religious claims as being baseless.

That’s a pretty narrow argument and not one consistent with human behavior or not as it applies to large groups of people. I mean would you say the same thing about politics, governing bodies? That if one were compelling enough that the world would move to some kind of consensus?

No, I wouldn’t. The point is this. Religions make truth claims about the nature of reality and another “reality” that is supposedly beyond this one. Science also makes truth claims about the nature of reality. Believing these claims requires some kind of evidence, and the better the evidence the more people should be compelled to believe them. Governments do not make truth claims about the nature of reality. They are merely different ways in which humans can organize our society. There is no sense in which a particular government is “right” or “wrong” beyond some arbitrary criteria.

The argument about converging beliefs needs work. Having a splintering of religions doesn’t imply a weakness in the concept of God, but instead that people have accepted belief in God and adopted it to their own experiences and culture, as most of the world apparently does. Not that this means any Deism is necessarily right, but it is widely adopted, which is the criterion Tracy uses here.

Here is another variation:

I am drawing a distinction between religion and God. Just because religions may be wrong does not disprove the existence of God by any means; that is my point. Any religion worth it’s merit has no proof of its own, that would be a lie since it would be taking something humanly made and ascribing it’s existence to the divine.

I said nothing about the concept of God but was rather careful to say “religions”. There could be a god that actually doesn’t care what we believe about it and this would be quite consistent with the smattering and splintering of religions.

However, most if not all of the worlds major religions that include a supreme god claim that god has communicated a set of special instructions to humanity and that our fates after death depend on how well we carry out those instructions or even just what we believe about them. I am arguing that this is clearly false, because any supreme god would have communicated such a message much, much more efficiently than what we actually observe.

Lack of coherence among doctrine in the major religions arises from interpretations or applications of the basic assumptions of each. Christianity has hundreds (thousands?) of denominations that vary and sometimes disagree with one another, but they all hold to the basic assumptions of an all-powerful God who created the universe and man; man’s sinful nature; and Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection as God’s way to redeem man back to him because he loves us.

These are the core claims of Christianity, yes. But what about between religions? This goes back to my point. 2,000 years later, the majority of the worlds population are not Christians. Islam and Mormonism (Christian, but only loosely) appear to be gaining converts at a faster rate. If Christianity is true, then that’s a terrible PR job for a supreme being.

Frequently Tracy writes with the assumption that if God existed, his logic would be intuitive to us, his creation. I see absolutely no reason to believe this. Humans have trouble understanding the complex systems of their own creation and those of our physical world - how are all of God’s actions supposed to make sense to us? Many holy books say that God’s ways are more advanced than ours - this statement is more than a copout, it’s inherently true if God is who he says he is. Rejecting the idea of God because he’s hard to understand doesn’t make sense.

I am not making any claims as to god’s logic, I am merely taking what believers generally believe to be true about their god. Namely, that god exists and has a very important message for us but for some reason the world is hopelessly divided on what that message is, what book it can be found in, and how it should be interpreted. If this is what you consider to be “advanced” communication skills, then you need to re-consider.

I have at least one more response that I want to consider, but I will save that for another post.

Beginning a chapter on “Organic Evolution,” the author of this book writes:

“”There still exists a very widespread confusion as to the exact import of evolution…It was only when Darwin, by his masterly marshalling of an abundance of carefully collected facts, showed how the origin of species could be conceived to have actually taken place by means of Natural Selection, that the world accepted evolution as a fact. Indeed, the fight between Evolutionists and Anti-Evolutionists turned in the beginning exclusively upon the question whether the transformation of species advocated by Darwin for all living beings, including man, was true or not. It is Darwin’s merit to have established evolution as an irrefutable fact of science. ‘There is, however,’ as Romanes insisted, ‘a great distinction to be drawn between the fact of evolution and the manner of it, or between the evidence of evolution as having taken place somehow, and the evidence of the causes which have been concerned in the process.’ In other words, the facts of evolution are quite independent of any theory which may be brought forward to explain them. ‘Even if it be fully proved,’ says Romanes, ‘that the causes which they [the biologists] have hitherto discovered, or suggested, are inadequate to account for all the facts of organic nature, this would in no wise logically compel them to vacate their theory of evolution in favour of the theory of creation.’”

Unfortunately, there still exists a very widespread confusion today concerning the difference between biological evolution as a scientific fact and particular theories that describe how it happened and in what way or through what paths. Hence the old and mistaken comment, oft repeated, that Evolution is “just a theory.” But the fact that some kind of organic evolution has historically occurred has been widely accepted since as early as Darwin’s seminal work.

This passage certainly sounds like something that I might read today in a modern book on evolutionary theory, which has advanced quite a bit since Darwin’s day. Nonetheless, this particular book, titled The First Principles of Evolution and written by S. Herbert, was published in 1915. However, as you probably noticed, he uses quotations from a person named Romanes. This is actually George J. Romanes, and the quotations come from Romanes’ book Darwin and After Darwin, which was published in 1897!

So why is it that we have progressed so far since 1897 and yet so little? There really is no excuse anymore.

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

—Cardinal Robert Bellarmine / Trial of Galileo / 1615 (???)

I searched Google and found plenty of references to the quotation all over the internet, but it always appears either without attribution, or with just a date (1615), or with the mistaken claim that it was said “at the trial” of Galileo. I am wondering if anyone knows the exact source for this quotation, because there is something clearly wrong to me with it. Galileo was not put on trial until 1632 after Bellarmine was long since dead - not in 1615 or even 1616 when the Vatican released its decree against Copernicus and heliocentrism.

Having studied the Galileo affair in some depth, and having read much of Bellarmine’s words with regards to Galileo and Copernicus, I have never seen this quotation. The closest thing that I could find to this quotation comes from a letter that Bellarmine wrote in 1615:

Thus anyone who would say that Abraham did not have two sons and Jacob twelve would be just as much of a heretic as someone who would say that Christ was not born of a virgin, for the Holy Spirit has said both of these things through the mouths of the Prophets and the Apostles.

— Letter from Cardinal Bellarmine to Antonio Foscarini, 12 April 1615.

Bellarmine was responding to an argument that essentially goes like this: The portions of scripture that imply that the sun moves around the Earth are not a matter of faith (what’s necessary to believe to be redeemed) or morals, and therefore do not have to be taken in their literal meaning. This happened to also have been one of Galileo’s arguments. Just before the above quotation Bellarmine states that “Nor can one reply that this is not a matter of faith, because even if it is not a matter of faith because of the subject matter, it is still a matter of faith because of the speaker.” You can read much more about Bellarmine’s associations with Galileo and this affair in Richard Blackwell’s excellent book, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible (1991, University of Notre Dame Press).

My conclusion is that the quotation is likely bogus but nevertheless has somehow rapidly (and carelessly) spread all over the internet. If you are using this quotation on your website and are also equally unsure of the source, I would recommend that you remove it. The last thing that we need is to perpetuate a questionable, let alone bogus, quotation.

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