Via Sullivan:

If they want to spread their gospel, then, one might half-seriously conclude that atheists and agnostics ought to focus on having more children, to help overcome their demographic disadvantage. Unfortunately for secularists, this may not work even as a joke. Nobody knows exactly why religion and fertility tend to go together. Conventional wisdom says that female education, urbanisation, falling infant mortality, and the switch from agriculture to industry and services all tend to cause declines in both religiosity and birth rates. In other words, secularisation and smaller families are caused by the same things. Also, many religions enjoin believers to marry early, abjure abortion and sometimes even contraception, all of which leads to larger families. But there may be a quite different factor at work as well. Having a large family might itself sometimes make people more religious, or make them less likely to lose their religion. Perhaps religion and fertility are linked in several ways at the same time.

Or it could be that religion promises those who have nothing a lot more in the afterlife. Many people believe in it for much the same reasons they do in their chances of winning the lottery. Just coincidence that poor families tend toward larger numbers of offspring. Not cause and effect.

Just saying.

Want some rather stronger relation between cause and effect? Try secularism and critical thinking. Again, just saying.

Stumble it!

One of the things that we hated about Bush was his complete one-sidedness. Even in a purely symbolic way, he was unable to reach out to the other side. Even being in the same room with someone one the other side of the spectrum was not something you’d expect of him. His harsh partisanship was one of his worst points.

Now, with Obama choosing both Rick Warren and Joseph Lowery to give the invocation and the benediction at Obama’s inaugural, there is a huge uproar: liberals are livid that Obama invited Warren.

True: Warren’s views on homosexuality are galling. It is easy for one to think that Obama could have done better–and maybe he could have. But I think it is important to remember a few things, like the fact that choosing a religious figure from the other side of the social divide who hasn’t made some despicable remark about gays, Jews, women, Muslims, or whomever, would not be an easy task. You’d have to go to the B -list, or maybe even the C-list. Falwell is no longer with us, but he was the kind of person we’re talking about here. Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Rod Parsley, John Hagee… you get the idea.

Another thing to remember is that having Warren give the invocation is not anywhere near the same as agreeing with his policies. As Obama pointed out, Warren invited him to speak to his congregation despite Obama’s views; this did not signal Warren’s intent to change his views on abortion or homosexuality and more than Warren’s invitation signals a sea change for Obama. Though the Saddleback invitation is not the same as an inaugural role, it’s not like Obama’s inviting Warren to write his social policy.

This is what we knew Obama would do: reach out to the other side. It’s the kind of politics we used to see on Capitol Hill before the Republicans went rabid, where politicians from both sides were truly congenial and worked well together despite their differences. One thing to keep in mind was the strange relationship between Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt. At Falwell’s death, Flynt said:

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.

Don’t you think that says something?

Obama is trying to do this: recognize a human connection with people regardless of their views, and through that, building a bridge of understanding between them. You don’t change hearts and minds by shoving the opposition into a the corner, never showing them respect, never inviting them in.

Something that is going rather underreported is that Warren is not alone; Obama’s choice of Joseph Lowery is being almost completely ignored, as if he didn’t matter as much. Obama was expected to choose a liberal icon–just not a conservative icon as well. Wasn’t that the kind of one-sidedness we’ve been complaining about for the past eight years? Wouldn’t we have respected Bush a lot more had he done this kind of thing often? What if Jesse Jackson had been invited to give the invocation for Dubya, and not just for show? Would not that kind of behavior garnered Bush more respect, given that Jackson upsets many on the right as much as Warren upsets us on the left?

I think that what Obama did does not deserve the criticism that the left is heaping on him for it. Again, he could have chosen someone on the right with less controversy (though not without sacrificing cross-aisle cachet and credentials), but generally speaking, this is what Obama promised: to truly respect all sides as a means of winning hearts and minds, bringing them to a common ground that will have far more value, even though there will be far less visceral satisfaction than there would be if we just ran roughshod over the other side. Also remember that Obama’s skill is not in sacrificing his principles, but using this common-ground approach to being the other side over to ours.

If we want to make things like gay marriage a reality sooner rather than later, then you bring the opponents in from the cold and let them get used to sitting around the same fire.

Stumble it!

Would you be offended by this?

If you would be, the obvious question is “why?” Friendly Atheist points out that an atheistic organization tried to put up eleven such billboards, but two were not allowed to go through because of protests by Christians. They were offended by the message.

That’s right, offended. Offended by atheists reaching out to other atheists. Offended by a statement of belief which is different from their own. As was pointed out, the billboards did not reference Christians; they did not denigrate Christians, nor did they even deny the existence of god. They simply said, “Hey, you probably think you’re alone in your beliefs, but you’re not.”

This was given as at least one of the reasons some Christians got so mad:

John Matson, of Denver, was so mad after seeing the Santa Fe Drive sign that he dashed off an angry letter to the billboard’s owner.

“It is a despicable act to allow that sign,” the 60-year-old man said in an interview, “and for just a few pieces of silver.”

He went on COCORE’s [the organization putting up the billboards] Web site, and it made him even angrier, John Matson said. It is trying to gather, he said, “a constituency of what I call mob rule.”

“I know they’re atheists, and my opinion is they want others to believe the same thing. The billboard misrepresents their purpose,” he said. “Their agenda is wolf-in-sheep’s clothing political. Why don’t they just say it.”

As you can see, the entire tone is highly subjective. The “few pieces of silver” reference makes it clear that he believes that the owner of the billboard has betrayed the good guys because the bad guys paid them; that’s the exact meaning of the Judas reference. So we already have assumptions that religious people are good, atheists are bad, and the billboard owner is assumed to be a Christian.

But the last paragraph in that quote is a giveaway: he believes that the atheists are proselytizing. They’re not, not really (any more than a sign saying “Gay? You’re not alone” would turn a straight person gay), but here’s the thing: what if they were? What if the sign said, “You should become an atheist”? That’s essentially what the guy thought it was saying, so what if it did?

Then it would mean that a few atheists would be doing what scores of Christians have been doing since time immemorial: trying to convert others to their belief.

And that, to Mr. Matson, is unacceptable. Christians are allowed this; atheists are not.

Here’s another quote from Mr. Matson, a common refrain from religious people like him:

“I also understand free speech. And I can also stand up and tell them that they are wrong.”

People who say that kind of thing don’t understand what “free speech” means. You see this sentiment a lot, usually from religious organizations that have their panties up in a bunch about whatever strikes them as heinous that week. “Free speech means I can protest them.”

I would agree, if it were just protest. But there is a marked difference between protest and gagging others. If you say something that I don’t like on your blog, I can try to comment on your blog, or I can write on my blog, or I can go out on the street and picket. That’s my right to free speech, it means I can say something also. But if I get together a group of people and go directly to your web host and threaten to put them out of business of they don’t shut down your blog, then that is not “freedom” of speech, that is the antithesis of freedom of speech. It is censorship. It is gagging someone and trying to deprive them of the right you claim to be exercising.

And the golden rule of rights is, “your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins,” meaning that your rights do not extend to depriving me of mine.

But people like Mr. Matson believes that it’s perfectly okay to shut others up by getting large groups of people together and making threats.

I think that’s called “mob rule.” Another term Mr. Matson apparently does not understand.

Stumble it!

Wow. Reading this editorial from the WSJ had me sitting there for a while trying to figure out if it was clever satire. After the third or fifth paragraph, however, the article leaned more toward technical market stuff, and the possibility of satire eased. Still, had the beginning and end been published in The Onion, word for word, I would have accepted it as rank satire without a second thought. In essence, the editorial blames the recent economic collapse on secularism. Yep, we’re back to the golden oldie: if something bad happens, it’s because we aren’t being religious enough. Let’s begin with a canard that the piece uses as a theme:

And so it will come to pass once again that many people will spend four weeks biting on tongues lest they say “Merry Christmas” and perchance, give offense. Christmas, the holiday that dare not speak its name.

Here we go again. First of all, I know of no one who is reluctant to say “Merry Christmas”–it is repeated endlessly during the holiday season, just like the endless loops of Christmas carols that play on so many radio stations. This is pure fiction. It arose when some businesses, in order to include all of their customers, started giving the generic “Happy Holidays” greeting.

“Happy Holidays” is not anti-Christian, any more than “people” is anti-male. The whole “War on Christmas” attitude is intentionally blind to the distinction between inclusiveness and exclusiveness. “Happy Holidays” includes Christmas, as well as all other religious celebrations. Pressuring people to say “Merry Christmas” instead, on the other hand, is exclusive–it specifically shuts out all other belief systems except for Christianity. When speaking person-to-person, there’s nothing wrong with any specific greeting–but when addressing a large number of people, one must be general. One would not call a crowd of men and women “gentlemen.” Similarly, you say “Happy Holidays” to address everyone during the holiday seasons. Christians who are offended by this are effectively saying that no other belief system deserves recognition.

The very people who whine about the “War on Christmas” are the ones who are shutting people out, waging a war on non-Christians. The rest of us are just sitting here, rolling our eyes at their thinly-veiled bigotry.

While the “War on Christmas” is a theme of the opinion piece, the central thesis is that secularism causes moral and therefore systemic collapse:

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of “Merry Christmas.”

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Of course, the author’s primary error here is to assume that the collapse happened because the ones responsible for the collapse had lost god and therefore their morality. They provide no evidence for this aside from the claim that using “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” was somehow related. They apparently assume that at some point in time in the past, a market full of people defined primarily by their lust for money and not at all for their religion was god-fearing and therefore restrained and responsible, and that the subsequent loss of their religious ways (apparently brought on by a few scattered advertisements which said “Happy Holidays!” instead of “Merry Christmas!”) caused them to instead go after risk-and-reward. Um, yeah, right. That’s what caused it all.

All of this comes back to a recurring sermon: religion equals morality, and you can’t even have morality if you’re not religious–you can only pretend to, by mimicking Christians. The solution, as it is often expressed, is simply to make religion present where the problem exists, which is why you get people saying that the answer to moral decay in youth is to introduce classroom prayer and post the ten commandments on the schoolroom walls. This kind of superficial application of morality reminds me of the time I worked for a religion-backed organization which required it’s managers to be Christian. The idea was, theoretically, to assure the moral tenor of the management. My immediate boss, as a result, converted to Christianity–despite the fact that he was not in the least interested in the church–while at the same time maintaining an adulterous affair and doing other immoral stuff I won’t go into here. In other words, it was all about appearance, not actual practice. Oh, sure, the organization’s intent for morality was sincere–they simply failed to recognize what morality was and how it works with people. They made the same error as the writer quoted above, believing that the mere presence of religion induces moral behavior.

While religion can be used to stimulate moral behavior, it does not do so automatically nor exclusively. Religion can just as easily stimulate immoral behavior as it can moral behavior; it depends upon the examples chosen and the themes and applications of the lesson. Similarly, non-religious teaching can have an equal effect: it depends upon the examples you choose and how you teach the lesson. The two are equal–both tools, neither one a magical cloak that bestows morality. The key is in the lesson, not the example. Sounds simple, but the writer quoted misses it completely: you get moral behavior by teaching morality; religion is simply one vehicle for that, and can lead people in the wrong direction just as easily as any other vehicle.

Now, the author, like many religious people, is probably working from a central assumption: that fear of god and damnation sets people on the right track. This is what often what religious people are thinking when they say that introducing god stimulates morality; they may overtly talk about learning lessons and so forth, but what they’re feeling in their gut is related more to punishment; when talking about remorse, it is fear of paying the price down the line. In short, “if I think about god when I’m doing something wrong, I become fearful and change my ways.”

There are several problems with this “moralizing” quality of religion. First, it is a sense born not of compassion for others, but instead of fear for one’s self. It is a morality forced upon the individual from the outside–much weaker intrinsically than a decision to act rightly despite believing that there would be no adverse consequences for acting wrongly. But so long as one believes that god is watching, then what difference does it make? Well, first there is the fact that it is fear-based and not compassion-based; those feelings will spill out into other areas of the person’s behavior. But the larger hazard here is the assumption that everyone will react to this outward pressure in the same way. I can see several ways that ‘god-fearing’ Christians could get around this.

For example, many rationalize their immoral behavior. In economics, one does so by passing the buck–for me alone, this would be wrong, but it is my responsibility to do this for the company. In life in general, people do this all the time in a variety of ways, one very common version being “they deserve this.” As when the death penalty, where we feel we are entitled to take life because of the actions of others. In short, we can do something immoral because someone else did something immoral; this can even be extended through the concept of pre-emptive strike: I can do something immoral because I expect that someone else will do it. Another common rationalization is “I’m not really doing that,” using semantics as moral cover. I’m not stealing, I’m delivering a well-deserved lesson, or I’m getting back what I think I deserve, so forth and so on. There are any number of ways to do immoral things but rationalize that they are somehow all right.

You may notice something: none of the above are specific to religion, anyone can use them to skirt morality. And that’s part of the point: Christians aren’t immune to the same rationalizations used by everyone else.

There are, however, other ways related to religion-as-morality-teacher where the application of the fear-god principle won’t work. There’s the brand of Christian who has learned that they can do something wrong, but make up for it later and be forgiven. And there is the interpretation-of-scripture excuse, where you can take whatever passage you like from the bible and read it any way you like. Or the religious person who believes they cannot be forgiven and are already going to hell, so why not? Then there are people who are not strongly religious, who rely only on religion for morality but don’t really believe that god is watching or will punish them in hell. Reminders of Christianity won’t have an effect on them.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Introducing religion is far from a guarantee that people will act morally.

I have written on this kind of things before, but this WSJ author dredged up all of that and a lot more. Prior writings include the source of morality (religion is not the source), the weakness of the ten commandments as a moral guide, The ability to use scripture to justify immoral acts, and the view that there is a war against religion when, if anything, the war is against atheism, fought by the religious.

Believe it or not, secularism is not the root of all evil, or even most of it.

⊄ Religion"> Stumble it!

A lot of non-theistic or theo-phobic Democrats have been kind of worried about Obama and his religion; some felt that he was putting on a show, and others were concerned that his support of faith-based organizations signaled that he was a closet Christian waiting to continue Bush’s legacy of merging church and state. I think both were wrong.

From an interview Obama gave in March 2004, before his famous speech at the Democratic convention–this is pretty much what I want to hear from a Christian President of the United States:

Alongside my own deep personal faith, I am a follower, as well, of our civic religion. I am a big believer in the separation of church and state. I am a big believer in our constitutional structure. I mean, I’m a law professor at the University of Chicago teaching constitutional law. I am a great admirer of our founding charter, and its resolve to prevent theocracies from forming, and its resolve to prevent disruptive strains of fundamentalism from taking root ion this country.

As I said before, in my own public policy, I’m very suspicious of religious certainty expressing itself in politics.

Now, that’s different from a belief that values have to inform our public policy. I think it’s perfectly consistent to say that I want my government to be operating for all faiths and all peoples, including atheists and agnostics, while also insisting that there are values that inform my politics that are appropriate to talk about.

A standard line in my stump speech during this campaign is that my politics are informed by a belief that we’re all connected. That if there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago that can’t read, that makes a difference in my life even if it’s not my own child. If there’s a senior citizen in downstate Illinois that’s struggling to pay for their medicine and having to chose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer even if it’s not my grandparent. And if there’s an Arab American family that’s being rounded up by John Ashcroft without the benefit of due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

I can give religious expression to that. I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, we are all children of God. Or I can express it in secular terms. But the basic premise remains the same. I think sometimes Democrats have made the mistake of shying away from a conversation about values for fear that they sacrifice the important value of tolerance. And I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive.

This is not someone who says that god told him to invade Iraq; this is not someone who is trying to make religious dogma into law, whether it comes from true belief or pandering to a constituency. This is not someone who believes that you can only be moral if you are religious. This is someone who understands and upholds the Separation of Church and State.

Bush, I would be suspicious of, precisely because of his record: he was unabashedly willing to turn Christian law into U.S. law, Christian dogma into federal policy. When conservative Christian politicians talk about faith and religious values “informing” their official actions, they usually mean something else. Even when they pretend that religion is just showing them a moral way, the end result is usually an unacceptable intrusion of religious rules into public law. That’s how we get the whole abortion debate; that’s how we get bad family planning rules; that’s how we get judges willing to allow courtrooms to become display rooms for religious ornamentation. This is more than religion “informing” policy and law, it is religion dictating policy and law.

But what Obama is talking about is something else. He’s not talking about transferring the end product of religious faith into public policy and law; he’s talking about using the basic moral lessons, the beginning of religious faith–not the church doctrine–acting as a guide to making decisions. There’s a huge difference there.

For example, “love thy neighbor” is a moral principle; it tells us to show compassion to others, a general rule which addresses our own actions and from where our moral direction should come. But “homosexuality is bad” is something completely different: it is not a moral principle directing our own actions, it is a political interpretation of scripture written in primitive times, which proscribes the actions of others. Not a direction, but a conclusion. What Obama refers to as “religious certainty.” Night and day.

Obama’s take is the former: to learn lessons from the Christian faith which set a moral compass, which speak to our own feelings and compassion, which guide our hearts. This is completely different from someone taking the end product of organized religion and its political process and trying to implement it as the law which all must obey. Night and day.

I am an agnostic with leanings toward Deism, and I fear the marriage of church and state as a prelude to theocratic fascism. This is not to say that I hate Christianity or even dislike it. Nor that I need to see organized religion banned from the Earth. I simply have seen too much of the worst of Christianity applied to public policy and law and know that the consequences can only get worse if such continues.

What I do not fear are Christian principles–if they are indeed Christian principles; but not old-testament principles excused by a profession of the love of Christ. Yes, if they are a call to self-discipline and spiritual growth; but no, not the application of the political will of a stagnant “religious” body more intent on enforcing rigid dogma based on fear and hate than it is on nurturing spiritual growth and compassion. There are people who follow the teachings and traditions of Christ, and then there are people who dress themselves in the splendor of his clothing and then go out with picket signs saying “God Hates Fags.”

As I have said before, if Christianity lived up to its name and held above all else the words and actions of Christ, the world would be a lot better place. But too many Christians do nothing of the sort; despite professing Christ as their redeemer, their lord and savior, or their favorite philosopher, they base their moral compass and their corporeal actions upon the more primitive and even feral guidelines of the old testament. Instead of turning the other cheek, they want an eye for an eye; instead of “he who is without sin,” they prefer to smite the wicked, with themselves being the judge of who is wicked and who is righteous. But it need not even be new vs. old testament–but rather simply following the spirit, the true philosophy, that being one of morality turned inward instead of outward, of showing compassion and assuming spiritual responsibility for one’s own self. You just don’t see that too often.

I suppose that this dovetails with the Republican mindset, where you have people professing an undying love of America but who clearly hate the people living in it; these “Christians” profess a love of Christ but turn away from him when it comes to his clearly expressed words and actions. It’s about professing love for something but rejecting it in fact, professing humility but acting arrogantly.

That is why, despite Obama’s history, despite his late decision to become a churchgoer, despite his exposure to other faiths and his tolerance for them, Obama strikes me as more of a genuine Christian than any of the fundamentalists of the religious right who praise Jesus but self-righteously practice intolerance, suspicion, and hate.

Obama, however–he’s a Christian I can believe in. And, I believe, a model for those who think faith should be a part of the political arena. As with all my other beliefs, my agnostic side tells me that I have to wait and see what the facts bear out. But as much as I can have faith, in this matter I do.

Stumble it!

Here we go: Churches want full power to play in politics and still maintain their tax-free status:

Declaring that clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to do just that on Sept. 28, in defiance of Internal Revenue Service rules.

The effort by the Arizona-based legal consortium is designed to trigger an IRS investigation that ADF lawyers would then challenge in federal court. The ultimate goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship.

“For so long, there has been this cloud of intimidation over the church,” ADF attorney Erik Stanley said. “It is the job of the pastors of America to debate the proper role of church in society. It’s not for the government to mandate the role of church in society.”

Once can only suppose that these churches have become so used to their tax-free status that they believe it is a gift from god, and not part and parcel of the separation of church and state; that the whole reason for being tax-exempt is not because churches just naturally deserve it, but because paying taxes is inextricably tied to representation. Churches already get away with so much–they have powerful lobbies, they get mentioned far more than is comfortable in places of legislative and executive power, and candidates bow and scrape before their leaders and covet their endorsements, all this without being taxed. Now they wish to tear down the last remnants of the wall separating church from state and become fully, openly political, completing the transformation they have been fighting to achieve, merging the church with government, while still claiming as their inalienable right freedom from being taxed–setting them up as a special, elevated group which gets full political privileges without having to pay the cover charge everyone else does.

The timing of all of this is also clearly opportunistic; coming just two months before the election, they want to have the full impact of supporting McCain, and they are probably hoping that they can use the Supreme Court challenge for cover–that if they lose, they can claim that they were shielded by the blanket protection of that challenge and can keep their tax-exempt status afterwards. And with the Bush administration covering things at least until January, they might be safe in that assumption.

But there is a very good chance they will not lose, or at least that they will make some gains; the new Bush court leans somewhat in that direction. You know that the Wingnut Four will always vote as a block for anything the right wing wants them to, so it’s a matter of getting Kennedy to agree with them just enough. And even if they don’t get that, they might be able to use this to energize the base–kind of a reverse Roe v. Wade, a way of telling Christian conservatives that if McCain wins, they get even more influence.

It’s very good political strategy, which should scare you, unless you like the prospect of religion gaining more power in politics–which many religious people probably think is a spiffy idea. But if you are religious, you should be afraid of religion marrying into politics. Very afraid.

I will now step aside and let Tim continue in the comments.

Stumble it!

Hmm… Obama gets clear weather and a huge, unprecedented crowd to watch his Democratic Party star-studded convention, despite some conservative Christians praying for rain in Denver.

Now that the Republican convention is starting, a huge storm approaches, and Bush, Cheney, and several others cancel their visit to McCain’s party. (Though it seemed Bush & Cheney seemed almost too ready to cancel…)

If the storm gathers up steam and news coverage right through the convention… then stops short of land and does no one any harm… well, I might start believing a little bit more than I used to.

Stumble it!

Nancy Pelosi got into trouble when she pointed out that abortion has not always been the sin in Christianity that it has been painted to be. She pointed to the works of St. Augustine in the 4th century, who subscribed to “delayed hominization,” and wrote, “the law does not provide that the act [abortion] pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation.” That was Saint Augustine on Exodus 21:22, the source of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”–but also specifies (in a far less quoted preamble) that if one hits a woman so as to cause her unborn child to die, only a monetary fee is required.

Pelosi was quite right–the church has been all over on the matter of abortion, and for most of its history did not frown on abortion itself early in pregnancy. If one is to be perfectly honest, it is a matter which is less ordained by god and more of a detail that church leaders have arbitrarily decided upon–with life beginning at conception being a relatively modern invention (1869, to be exact). What Pelosi was saying is that life-at-conception is not the sure thing that some Christians try to claim it is, and in this, she was right.

The right wing is jumping all over this, with Fox leading the charge saying that “Pelosi blew it” (and that she “committed a major gaff,” which I can only presume is Fox’s bad spelling and not to mean that Pelosi committed a barbed stick) and the Washington Times warning Pelosi that she should not cross the bishops, or else. Much of the media is following their lead.

So, why is Pelosi wrong? Because a bunch of religious authorities decided to interpret biblical works differently than she did, even if Pelosi’s interpretation is closer to how the church has judged abortion for about 90% of its history. But the texts could be read either way, in that biblical texts can say just about anything you want them to say if you stretch and generalize them as much as church scholars and officials have. If you remain more strict to original writings, then interpretation favors Pelosi’s views. Doing it otherwise strays into the territory of letting the church have it both ways–give unequal weight to identical dictums in scripture, or allowing rationalizations about how the “ovum wasn’t discovered until 1827” but we’re supposed to base science on what the bible says.

But hey, with the only thing in the balance being the Catholic Church refusing to give Pelosi Communion and therefore damaging her politically as well as personally, we can at least be grateful that religion is not dictating law. It is only trying really hard, and won’t fully succeed until McCain gets elected. So relax.

Stumble it!

Florida tried to get this license plate approved for public use a while ago, and now South Carolina is trying to pick it up and run with it:

I say fine, so long as they also allow this one to be sold:

Fair is fair.

Stumble it!

Hello. This is the first time I have ever met you. Have you ever done anything that is even remotely interpretable as a bad thing? If so, you will suffer in great agony for all eternity unless you come to me begging for mercy, and do what I tell you to do.

Fair enough?

As crazy as this sounds, this is the message some religious people will send you. Go ahead, take this simple test. It’s an advertisement for a religion, where they simply refuse to believe that you are a good person–at least three times in this “test” you are given only the choice of “admitting” that you are a bad person, and so you must repent and accept Jesus as your savior or else burn in hell forever. (Red text shows links; h/t to Pharyngula.)

If you take the test a second time, it lets you “lie” for a while, but eventually scolds you, saying “Unfortunately, you don’t see yourself as God sees you. The Bible says all men are sinners, until you’re ready to admit that you can’t continue this test.” Then it urges you to take the test again. (Interestingly, it does the same thing even if you switch browsers–meaning that god depends on IP address recognition to see if you’ve taken the test before.)

Whatever you say or do, you wind up being a miserable sinner in the religion’s mortal debt. This is what you could call a “fixed” game–no matter what, you lose and I win.

And that’s what some religious people see life as being: a fixed game where you owe “god”–which in immediate terms means their church, and by proxy, them–everything, because you are a lying, stealing bastard, and your only hope is to admit that you are debased before them so you can receive god’s (their) forgiveness, so that despite being a lying, stealing bastard, you at least have a chance not to be tortured for all eternity. Most religious people are not like that, so understand that I do not address them, but rather those who bear this message I speak of.

For those people, I have a different idea: pack up your snake oil caravan, you hypocritical, arrogant, self-righteous morons. I’m not the idiot that you think I am, so apparently I do not belong in your church. Thank god for that much. So go away and stop giving the majority of spiritual people such a bad name.

Stumble it!

Last December, Mitt Romney made a speech addressing concerns about his Mormonism, in which he said:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone. …

It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it’s usually a sound rule to focus on the latter - on the great moral principles that urge us all on a common course. Whether it was the cause of abolition, or civil rights, or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people.

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust.

We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders - in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places. Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from ‘the God who gave us liberty.’

Throughout the speech, Romney kept referring to America as a nation of Christians, making no reference to anyone who was not a believer–you get the feeling that such Americans either don’t exist, or else that they are the shadowy someones that Romney suggests are trying to steal god away from the real Americans.

After the speech, it was pointed out to him that he had excluded atheists from his speech; Romney reacted as if he didn’t understand what was being said. And it may be exactly like that–that people with such strong religious beliefs are blind to the exclusion they impose on the non-religious.

Surprisingly, Romney is now expressing a small degree of regret for that exclusion, though a close look at the statement and Romney’s overall opinions makes one wonder exactly what he means by it:

Upon reflection, I came to understand that while I could defend their absence from my address, I had missed an opportunity . . . an opportunity to clearly assert that non-believers have just as great a stake as believers in defending religious liberty. If a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief — to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience — it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned. A coercive monopoly of belief threatens everyone, whether we are talking about those who search the philosophies of men or follow the words of God.

This statement is nice, but it is rather weak and tempered–not to mention that it still demonstrates a lack of understanding on Romney’s part. For example, “it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned”? It “may” be? Earth to Romney: it already is. In a country where no one without Christian beliefs has even the slimmest chance to approach a position of leadership, where religion is infused into the public debate to an enormous degree, where extremist religious forces are constantly trying to inject religious themes, practices, doctrine and monuments into courts, schools, and government offices as well as the public square, non-believers are constantly under a fire that represents such a natural state to many believers that they cannot see it any more than they can see the air around them.

In fact, the state constitutions or bills of rights in Maryland, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee all require a belief in god in order to hold political office in those states; Arkansas and Maryland constitutions both say that you cannot be a witness before a court unless you believe in god. These laws may be trumped by the 6th Article of and the First Amendment to the federal constitution, but if such a case were to be brought to today’s supreme court, I would not bet on such an outcome.

Does Romney really believe that non-believers are not condemned? Homosexuals and Muslims are heartily condemned in American society, and yet both of those hated groups are considered far more desirable than atheists. A recent survey showed that nearly half of all Americans view atheists as the most “dangerous or threatening” of all groups in the country, that atheists are the most distrusted and disapproved-of group. Atheists are excluded from many social organizations, including the Boy Scouts–excluded in a way that if you substituted the word “Christian” for the word “Atheist” in their charters, there would be a huge public outcry. This in a nation where the 80% majority cries persecution, claiming there is a “war” being waged against their religion because retailers say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

It is also questionable as to what Romney means by “religious liberty” in his recent statement; he obviously detests secularism, so does he mean that atheists and agnostics have a vital self-interest at stake which can only be protected by allowing the unfettered injection of religion into public and government arenas? I’d love to hear some clarification by Romney on this. But it seems to me that Romney is simply taking the opportunity to sound conciliatory, while in fact trying to tell non-believers that they’d better stop trying to defend secularism, or else their own belief systems could come under attack.

Stumble it!

Well, the ID’ers are at it again, trying to cram creationism into Science classes by way of sabotaging the teaching of Evolution theory. This time, their false-front is called “academic freedom,” as in “academic freedom bills” which creationist legislators are pushing to get passed now. It’s all about the name of the bill, isn’t it? This one is like the “Patriot Act,” suggesting you’re not a patriot if you vote against it. We all know that the more strongly a bill is so named, the more likely it is not to have any relation to the name, and this one certainly fits the bill.

The problem is this case, of course, is that it’s not about academic freedom. It is not “academic freedom,” for example, to teach that photosynthesis doesn’t happen, or that the Earth’s atmosphere is primarily made up of oxygen. Instead, that kind of stuff is more accurately termed as “being wrong.” Now, the ID’ers are not claiming that photosynthesis doesn’t happen or that the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t mostly consist of nitrogen. My point is that they would be arguing such drivel if they had happened to interpret the bible as having said so. They are not against Evolution because it’s wrong–after all, they have not argued against scientific theories that are far more likely to be wrong. They argue against it because it goes against the peculiar brand of science they have divined from scriptures written by people who knew even less about science than the least-educated people in the country today. They argue against Evolution because they want people to believe in their own product instead.

The argument is that these new laws don’t bring creationism into the classroom, but just like ID, that is a shallow pretense and is ultimately false. After all, what is being proposed is essentially to tear down Evolution in the classroom and teach that it is false–which is precisely the nature of the intelligent design scheme, which runs not on its own evidence but rather purely on the conjecture that Evolution is wrong–which they claim leads us to the conclusion that god created the universe.

They are, to their credit, becoming a lot more politically savvy about this. Creationism failed because it was a blatant attempt to implant one religion’s dogma into science classes. ID failed because it was a sloppy attempt to dress up creationism as a faux scientific theory; its origins were directly traced back to creationism, and as a “scientific” theory, it was laughable. This latest attempt is the creationists’ cleverest attempt yet, because it claims to do nothing but to allow teachers to challenge Evolution theory, which is what Science is supposed to do–challenge and test theories to see if they stand up.

That sounds legitimate, except for one small detail: it is even more a fraud than ID was. This is not about challenging Evolution theory in scientific venues to test its veracity; if it were, there would be no new laws necessary; anyone can challenge Evolution theory anytime they want, however often they want. ID’ers have been trying to for some time, and they came up against a teensy little problem: their challenges have to have the smallest shred of legitimacy or fact, and none of theirs have that. What these new “academic freedom” laws intend to do is not to challenge the theory, but to discredit it with false claims that have been disproved in that very peer review.

Here’s the Fox News argument presented by one creationist “Science” teacher:

Doug Cowan, a public-school biology teacher, said his colleagues are often afraid to speak out.

Mr. Cowan said he tells students: “I’m going to give you the evidence for Evolution and the evidence against, and let you decide.” For instance, he’ll mention Darwin’s observation that finches evolve different-shaped beaks to suit different ecosystems. Then he’ll add that you don’t see a finch changing into another species.

Asked what evidence he presents to bolster evolution, Mr. Cowan paused. “I don’t have any,” he said.

Mr. Cowan is obviously an idiot. First of all, if he has no evidence to bolster Evolution, then he clearly is not a Science teacher; that’s like a professor of Constitutional Law claiming he doesn’t have any evidence to bolster the concept of Freedom of Speech. Secondly, the claim that no one sees a finch spontaneously change into a giraffe in a sudden puff of smoke is just one of the many completely ludicrous “criticisms” of Evolution theory that has the honor of having been so plainly disproved that even creationists are loath to bring it up; Mr. Cowan apparently didn’t get the memo.

But even aside from that, Mr. Cowan is suggesting that it’s a good idea to have creationists masquerading as authorities representing Science in the classroom to follow a half-assed representation of a rock-solid theory upheld by a century and a half of testing and peer review with a rebuttal of plainly false creationist fabrications, and then “let the students decide.” Yes, let’s do this for all subjects. Let’s hire members of white supremacist groups to teach American History, give students a half-assed lecture about slavery, follow it with a rebuttal about how black people enjoyed slavery and were better off under it, and then “let the students decide.” Or let’s have Computer Science taught by Luddites who briefly introduce the Internet and follow it up with a scare lecture about how using the Internet will lead teenagers to be raped and killed by child molesters, and let the kids decide on that, too. Because this kind of teaching methodology will only lead students to make informed choices which are bound to be correct. Right?

Let’s not kid ourselves. This bill to introduce “academic freedom” is nothing less than a bald attempt to give creationists who have defrauded their way into becoming “science” teachers to sabotage the teaching of actual science so that the students will, they hope, be driven to accept creationism.

This new angle is building up to a regression of lies and scams, all leading back to creationist claims that what we see with our eyes contradicts the obvious reality of biblical stories. I mean, really, who could believe that science-fiction claptrap about the formation of proteins in a primordial soup, followed by the formation of cells grouping into colonies, which then progressed into more complex forms which survived by being the best-adapted to changing environments? Baloney! After looking at all of the abundance of fossils, the chemical analyses, the structure of DNA, and all the rest of the evidence, it is so obvious that man was formed when a big guy with a white beard breathed on a lump of clay! I mean, come on, how clear can it be? All you have is a century and a half of piercing peer review and mountains of evidence; we’ve got a guy who may or may not have been a sheep herder four thousand years ago who claims he spoke to god!! Beat that, science bitches!!

Stumble it!

When I was a kid, my parents did not expose me to religion. I was not taken to church, temple, or shrine, nor presented with any religious text. I do not recall my parents acting hostile toward religion, certainly not faith or spirituality; my mother thanking god at the dinner table in a way that I found moving is not what I would call anti-religious. Never mind that it is a non-specific spirit-of-everything kind of god being thanked, we did not scoff at belief. Nor am I non-religious in the strictest sense; I am what some would call an atheist but what most would term an agnostic; I suspect there is something there but am unwilling to say that I know what it is. A fundamentalist might say I disbelieve in god; I would say that I refuse to disbelieve. I imagine various scenarios that I feel could be true, but always keep in mind that the context which gives sense to whatever might have created the universe is so far removed from my own context, that I probably cannot judge with any reliability what that truth might be. I can only imagine, and perhaps hope.

At best, you could say that I was raised fairly neutrally, never pressured one way or the other, and perhaps was even given a positive view of spirituality in general. So the reason I have such disrespect for so many religious organizations and people who call themselves “believers” comes from their own example.

I remember one of the first memorable exposures I had of religion–aside, of course, from the endless public displays that everyone takes for granted, from the ingrained linguistic quirks like bless-you-for-sneezing to the ubiquitous Christmas-related religiosity that permeates the culture toward the end of the year. That stuff is so thoroughly dissolved into American life that you can go through it almost without noticing. The first time religion ever smacked me in the forehead was when I was listening to the radio in my room one day. I stopped at a station, and stayed for a moment when I heard something bombastic-sounding. More than thirty years later, I can hardly recall it verbatim, but it went very much like this: after a minute of Jesus-this and god-that, the radio preacher stopped in mid-sentence, and said:

–Wait a minute! Wait, a, minute!! God is, yes, the lord is speaking to me right this second! God is speaking to me, he is telling me… that there are twenty people in the audience, twenty people… who have one hundred dollars apiece! And I am not going to stop talking until those twenty people have called in and….

I swear to god that’s what he was saying. I laughed. I wondered at the near-comic temerity of this joker, to think that anyone would seriously believe that the grand lord almighty was whispering facts about people’s wallets to some third-rate radio evangelist. But, perhaps not right then, but certainly over not too much more time, it struck me just as strongly that this guy would probably not be on the radio if some people didn’t believe and send him money, earnestly believing that he was indeed in contact with god and dutifully obeying the will of the creator by sending in a C-note to this Minister What’s-his-name.

And then images of people who always puzzled me came to my mind, about everyone from the followers of Jim Jones to the people who gave all their money and lived on some commune while their god-on-Earth messiah drove past in one of his many Rolls Royce sedans. These people always troubled me, because I could never wrap my head around what they were thinking. Give up everything and do what? Watch this obvious charlatan live in luxury while you labor in his fields, and you pay him for it? What a con! What rubes these people are!

It was not until some years later that a paradigm to help explain this crystallized in my mind. I was attending a junior college, and I could not fail to notice the large number of religions and cults that advertised, or tried to, on campus, more than almost any other venue I had witnessed. And it occurred to me that there was a reason, similar to the reason why the military was so intent on making their pitch to people of like age. It is an age ripe for shaping people to believe; a group perhaps more likely than almost any other to be filled with people trying to decide where to go in life, but more importantly, a group that was vulnerable emotionally, more easily gulled, often alienated and lost, looking for direction and guidance. In short, an audience ripe for predation. And religions were there, at the front lines.

I did not become so simple-mindedly iconoclastic that I believed all religion was like that. I saw enough good works being done to convince me that many religious people and even some institutions did indeed mean and do well for others, and stay true to good, core principles. It just depressed me that such institutions were so clearly in the minority, and such people were hard to find in pure form, or at least as pure as you would minimally expect from a philosophy that evidently preached something so far removed from what so many of it practitioners actually practiced in real life.

This was clarified somewhat for me when I came to know a young woman I worked with at a part-time job in college. The daughter of a fundamentalist minister, she was rather enthusiastic about her faith. I have mentioned her before in my writing; she was the one who calmly informed me that she knew science, evolution, and the countless people involved were wrong because she found a flaw in radioactive dating methods, divined after hearing a short lecture on the subject in her high school science class. She did not have bad intentions–far from it. But her conclusions were indicative of so many I have witnessed since, so overwhelmingly biased by her beliefs, so empty of reason or logic–and yet she firmly believed that she had used reason to find an independent truth that informed her of the nature of the universe.

I can very much respect those who see religion as a spiritual guide, gaining strength, inspiration, and wisdom from what it offers. I may not believe in what they believe in, and I can even actively disbelieve in specific beliefs of theirs while still maintaining respect for the person overall. Like I said at the start of this tirade, I realize I could very well be wrong (and even likely am) about what I suspect is the way the universe works.

But what I cannot respect is a person who allows themselves, intentionally or not, to abandon something so clearly as important as faith: reason. I can feel compassion for such a person, I can even like them in many if not most ways. But once a person abandons any semblance of reason, and claims that the unseen trumps the seen, that the word trumps the fact (all too often followed by the claim of compassion trumping the act of compassion), I find myself getting up to leave the room. Not to be flippant, but you simply cannot reason with such people, and it is almost always a waste of time to try. It is one of the few prejudices I have which I am proud of. For as nice and deserving of love as these people may be, they are loons that should not be allowed near social administration or heavy machinery.

I am not talking only about people who think the universe is only six thousand years old when any first-year science student can prove them wrong in any number of easily demonstrable and reproducible ways. I also refer to people who answer reasonable arguments with scripture where the scripture used clearly has no relation to the discussion at hand beyond that imagined by the person delivering it. I also refer to people who faithfully believe a religious speaker when he says that the world will end tomorrow, and then believes just as much if not more two days later when the preacher comes up with some half-assed excuse as to why the universe not ending proves he was right all along–this being an extreme example of a kind of spiritual fraud that happens on a smaller scale every day. I also refer to people who do not see clear contradictions within their own beliefs and actions–not small, iffy, or difficult-to-spot contradictions that anyone could miss, but huge glaring ones, like Jesus loves you with the greatest of all joyful love, and is the ultimate epitome of forgiveness and mercy, and died for your sins and is dying for your sins all the time–but will send you to suffer unimaginable agony for a literal eternity in the fires of hell if you say his name the wrong way or pray to a different god, even if you do nothing but selfless good works every moment of your life.

You know. The obvious contradictions.

My threshold for suffering people like this is low enough when they are well-meaning. It only gets worse when they see their conclusions as not only so self-evident, but so overwhelmingly important that they feel the need to impose them on others. Fewer but more galling still are those who revel in the humble superiority all of this makes them feel, and you can see it going to their heads. Worse still are those who come from this supposedly loving state of holiness to espouse actions that will harm and even kill others. But it is difficult to judge if it is worst of all to see people who may or may not believe, but consciously use the emotional control inherent in the religious community to work believers in ways that allow for the gathering and use of influence and power, a use which seems to universally trend towards abuse as it is used in larger and larger contexts.

This is why I believe in what I call the inverse-square law of spirituality: just as the intensity of light falls off by the square of the distance, so does spirituality when removed from the individual. The farther spirituality is removed from being an individual’s journey through life and is used to influence others, the darker its effects become. I would include reason in the equation of spirituality as well: reason is not the antithesis of belief, it is integral to its healthy development.

So when I see people abandoning reason in their religion and then applying it to affect others, I start to get nervous.

Stumble it!

I was listening to the iTunes podcast of Bill Moyer’s Journal, and he was discussing the idea of separation of church and state, beginning by reporting on the Pope’s concern that the United States was becoming a “secularized” society, as if that were some form of evil, like creeping fascism. I griped internally that it never fails to tire me when religious people try to force religion into the public square and down our throats. But in an effort to see things from both sides, I then reflected on the idea that maybe they see people like me in the same light: trying to shove my secularism and science down their throats.

But when I got through, I came out with the conclusion that secularism and science are appropriate as a public standard whereas religion is not. The principle behind that is the ultimate fairness of the neutral starting point: we begin at zero, with no pre-standing biases or beliefs–a level playing field, in other words–and work from that point forward.

Secularism is very close to, if not the embodiment of, that fair and equal starting point; nobody gets an advantage, all are treated equally. In contrast, having religious faith be a public standard is far from that; it disrespects those who choose not to have a belief in religion. And let’s face it, in most cases, people who say they want “faith” or “belief” in general to be the standard really want their faith, to the exclusion of all others, to be that standard–which is why Christians became furious when a Hindu was allowed to give the invocation in the U.S. Senate. And it’s not just other religions; when it comes down to it, any other sect tends to become the enemy just as easily. In which case it is not just the atheists and agnostics who suffer, it is every religious sect aside from the dominant one who suffers. Not a level playing field, by far. Thus, secularism is the best safeguard for the freedom of all beliefs, including religious beliefs.

Resentment against such fairness comes from the propensity of individuals to consider their preferred state as the starting point, instead of a truly neutral environment. A person of faith might actually consider a state of religious faith to be the “neutral” or fair environment from which to build; their bias could preclude them from considering the idea that others may not share their views, or that such people are by nature evil or at least lacking any sense of morality. But intolerance is not a good benchmark for equality, and thus the “equal” or “fair” judgment of such people falls somewhat short.

It’s kind of like arguing with militant smokers, who will not accept that a room with clear air is a fair starting point, instead insisting that the starting point is that you do what you want and I do what I want, and if you want me to stop smoking, then we negotiate from there–if I even feel like negotiating.

Again, I have to consider the idea that maybe my starting point of a blank slate is unreasonable, and I have tried to work that out. The answer I come away with is that the blank slate can always be fairly applied, whereas the “everyone is doing whatever they want” starting point, or the “my way is the natural way” starting point can easily be shown as unfair by applying it to any number of situations you would naturally recognize as unfair (e.g., you want everyone to have privacy, but I want to photograph you in the shower; shall we start from there?).

The more reasonable approach to the injection of religion into public affairs is to say that “my religious faith is part of who I am, and I cannot leave it behind when I act in public.” The pope expressed this when he warned of the dangers of secularism:

“Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?”

This claim is reasonable only up to a certain point: when it stops being about what the person of faith does related to their own private lives, and starts being about what other people choose to do. When your faith begins to impede on the free choice, beliefs, and actions of others, you have crossed a line that cannot rightly or fairly be crossed.

The pope skimmed very close to the line of being objectionable (and crossed the line when he touched on abortion); he held back only by saying that it was wrong to promote actions or ethics the church found unreasonable, or to commit actions that could universally be regarded as wrong. Okay, as far as that goes, I agree; I would not expect a Christian opposed to abortion on religious moral grounds to promote abortion for the sake of secularism. It is, however, a completely different matter if that same person tries to ban abortion for those very same reasons. Not promoting is a personal choice; banning is interfering with the choice of others, which clearly crosses the line.

And that line is defined by a neutral starting point: neither one person’s Catholicism nor another person’s Atheism is the defining standard from which we must move forward, nor is anyone else’s belief system. It must be a neutral starting point. What likely ires many militant religious people is that a neutral starting point, to them, seems like Atheism. That’s why they tend to see Science as some Atheist plot; in order to stay true to scientific principles, you must begin from a neutral, objective starting point–which is also why Science is appropriate as a subject in public schools, free from interference by “faith” or religion: Science teaches us only what is observable and demonstrable. If the real, measurable, observable world comes across as an “attack” on your religious faith, then that shows up a problem in your religious beliefs, not a problem with the fairness of the science curriculum in our schools.

And it is no reason for me to surrender the precious and invaluable gift of secularism (a gift to those with religious faith as much as it is to everyone else) just because those with “faith” cannot bring themselves to play fair.

Stumble it!

For those of you who have not been following the story in P.Z. Myer’s blog Pharyngula, there is a “documentary” out called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed which is essentially a brazenly slanted and strongly dishonest “Intelligent Design” propaganda film, hosted by one of the “theory’s” most prominent proponents, Ben Stein. From the very start, the entire project was a sham. Contacting various scientists and others who are proponents of evolution, an organization calling itself “Rampart Films” asked them if they would like to be interviewed for a film titled Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion–a very reasonable-sounding title. A search on the organization’s web site at the time would have brought forth this blurb:

Crossroads - The Intersection of Science and Religion:

It’s been the central question of humanity throughout the ages: How in the world did we get here? In 1859 Charles Darwin provided the answer in his landmark book, “The Origin of Species.” In the century and a half since, biologists, geologists, physicists, astronomers and philosophers have contributed a vast amount of research and data in support of Darwin’s idea. And yet, millions of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other people of faith believe in a literal interpretation that humans were crafted by the hand of God. This conflict between science and religion has unleashed passions in school board meetings, courtrooms, and town halls across America and beyond.

Indeed, this sounds like a very reasonable presentation of the issue in a fair, unbiased way. The scientists agreed to be interviewed. However, once the interviews were procured, the name of the production company was switched, and the title of the movie and its summary changed to:

Ben Stein, in the new film EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed; His heroic and, at times, shocking journey confronting the world’s top scientists, educators and philosophers, regarding the persecution of the many by an elite few. Ben travels the world on his quest, and learns an awe-inspiring truth…that bewilders him, then angers him…and then spurs him to action! Ben realizes that he has been “Expelled,” and that educators and scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired – for the “crime” of merely believing that there might be evidence of “design” in nature, and that perhaps life is not just the result of accidental, random chance. To which Ben Says: “Enough!” And then gets busy. NOBODY messes with Ben.

A slight change in tone, one should admit. When Myers and others’ interviews were put into the film, they were presented not only out of context, but in a completely new one: their filmed answers (shot in a style as if they had to be filmed with a hidden camera) were intercut with footage of goose-stepping Nazi storm troopers. You can guess where things went from there.

Basically, the film does what ID’ers generally do: present no actual evidence for their own argument (not possible, because there is none), but instead attempt to expose the “fallacies” in evolutionary theory (all such claims are demonstrably false) whilst trying to cast evolution and “Darwinists” (are the filmmakers “Yahwehists”?) as responsible for every reprehensible person, organization, and event in history.

A recent development is the lengthy review by Scientific American which, predictably, rips the filmmakers a new hole in their space-time continuum. A short excerpt:

Like the decision to call evolution Darwinism, the omission of science from Expelled was a deliberate choice. In fact, it was crucial to the film’s strategy. Because they know Americans revere freedom of speech and fairness, the producers cast the conflict between evolution and ID as purely a struggle between worldviews—a difference of opinions, a battle of ideologies—in which one side is censoring the other. They know that the public will instinctively want to defend the underdog, especially when that opinion aligns with the religious beliefs many of them already share.

It is a terrific strategy, but with one caveat: that airy skirmish of opinions must never, ever touch the ground of solid evidence. Because if it does, if viewers are ever allowed to notice that evolution is supported by mountains of tangible, peer-reviewed evidence gathered by generations of scientists, whereas ID has little more than a smattering of vanity-press pamphlets from a handful of cranks… the bubble pops.

Expelled is all about how science should not reject people with ID “theories.” The filmmakers must therefore stop you from ever asking, Why?—because even children understand that in science, two ideas are not equally good if one of them is wrong. Some of the ideas fluffing up ID are demonstrably wrong; the rest are often described as “not even wrong” because they are so untestable or irreconcilable with the rest of science.

It was hard to choose just that one snippet because the entire review is excellent, going to great lengths to show how completely full of BS the film and its creators are, with Scientific American using as much evidence to prove their point as the filmmakers do not use to not prop up their own.

For more on the general subject, check out the Index to Creationist Claims, which exhaustively shoots down every creationist and ID myth and lie; the PBS documentary Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial (the entire documentary is viewable online, and it is excellent); my discussion of the reactions to that documentary; the site Expelled: Exposed, which covers reviews and other coverage of the “documentary”; and (again) P.Z. Myers’ blog, Pharyngula.

Stumble it!

On last week’s Bill Maher, the conservative guest on the show made the old “ten commandments” argument: “Who’s gonna argue [against the idea] that the ten commandments are a pretty good way to lead your life, and if more people did do that, the world would be a better place?” Indeed, many Christians talk about the ten commandments like they are morality embodied in ten lines. If children’s moral are lagging, then post the ten commandments in their school room, and it’ll make a difference. Our entire legal and moral codes are based upon the ten commandments, we are told.

However, the ten commandments don’t really live up to their billing–not if you take a closer look at them and think about it a little.

The first five commandments are very simple to summarize: respect and obey authority, especially the church. The first four in particular are all about establishing the church as the ultimate authority, none others, and you better take them seriously:

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; Do not have any other gods before Me

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God

Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy

Honor your father and your mother

The first four are, in short, “we represent god, the only god, so don’t disrespect us in word or action.” The last is about obeying parents, which in essence says to respect authority–and let’s not forget the form of address required when addressing church authorities.

Still, how do any of these address morality? The first four simply establish the authority of the church; that’s no moral guide. At best, it tells the user to follow the church, and obey it. The fifth commandment says to obey your real parents or the church-as-parents. It is, in essence, suggesting simply to replace your own moral judgment with that of another. This is not morality, it is submission. It does not teach you about right and wrong; on the contrary, it tells you to leave those matters to someone else.

The last five commandments are where the more “morality-based” directives lie:

You shall not murder.

You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not steal.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

So what moral directives are there here? Don’t kill, commit adultery, steal, lie, or covet.

Look at the first four of those: don’t kill, sleep with another man’s wife, steal, or lie. What kind of moral guides are these? Sound ones, most would agree–but general ones, to be sure. Here’s the question, though: do they serve as a special moral guidance, one which you can base an entire moral system upon, as people claim they do?

I would argue not, based upon the fact that these four things would be so obvious to member of almost any society of any time period that they would go without saying (though many societies would have their usual exceptions). In other words, the ten commandments are wholly unnecessary to establish these moral rules. I mean, think about it: before Moses came down the mountain, did people think these things were moral? Upon seeing Moses come down, did everyone peer at the tablets and exclaim, “Oh, thou shalt not steal! Dang, all these years I thought that stealing was moral!”

So how do these commandments set down a moral code by “establishing” rules that are already apparent and obvious?

The real cutting edge of morality lies not with the obvious rules, it lies in the complex moral situations. If killing one innocent person will save the lives of twenty other innocent persons, is it moral to kill the one? Is it moral to steal food if it is the only way to feed a starving child? May one lie if it saves a life?

These commandments are far too blunt and dull a tool to address the questions with which people truly need moral guidance.

That leaves the last one: coveting. This is the one which makes the most sense to me–it essentially warns one not to envy others, which is good moral advice, and something which is not so obvious.

Of course, this particular commandment is soiled by the reference to a neighbor’s slaves, which essentially puts god’s seal of approval on the ownership of human beings. Something which, in my opinion, does far more damage than suppressing envy could help.

In the end, I think the ten commandments are really a lot less valuable as a moral guide than they are cracked up to be. In fact, I would point more to a passage from the Qur’an as a far better moral guide, though it too has its limitations:

Worship only God

Be kind, honorable and humble to one’s parents

Be neither miserly nor wasteful in one’s expenditure

Do not engage in ‘mercy killings’ [of children] for fear of starvation

Do not commit adultery

Do not kill unjustly

Care for orphaned children

Keep one’s promises

Be honest and fair in one’s interactions

Do not be arrogant in one’s claims or beliefs

Here, we get the “worship god” directive, and the mercy killings of children which addresses a different time and culture (well, admittedly, some places on Earth today might still need to address this, but hopefully not many). But the other commandments set rules and principles that are much more far-reaching in terms of what moral situations they cover. Certainly, a lot of Christian fundamentalists could learn from the last one on that list.

One might argue that the ten commandments simply are the standard-bearer for the morality expressed in the entire bible; that, to find one’s moral guidance, read the whole bible and take value from all the lessons enclosed.

The problem with that is that one could extract a lot of very bad moral guidance from reading all the bible. What should one make, for example, of these passages?

Happy shall they be who take your little ones
And dash them against the rock! –Psalms 137:8-9

Their infants also will be dashed in pieces before their eyes.
Their houses will be ransacked, and their wives raped. …
Their bows will dash the young men in pieces;
and they shall have no pity on the fruit