Too Good To Be True

This is Bob, from Widget Industries—I work in personnel—
I’m just checking up on references for one Ignatius Shell,
Who assures us, as his manager, you really knew him well
So I’m hoping you can help us out a bit.
Yes, I’m looking at his resume, and he looks like quite a catch
Since it seems he built your company, and pretty much from scratch
You’d have bit the dust without him, so we’re hoping he’s a match
His experience implies he’ll really fit.

Now, there’s something I remember… just a minute… here we are:
How he saved the boss’s son, who’d been run over by a car,
When he lifted up the vehicle, then gave him CPR,
And a method he’d developed by himself!
When the papers heard the story, how he lifted up that Ford
And they offered him a medal, a parade, and a reward,
He refused it—every penny—‘cept a photo he adored
Of the rescued kid—he keeps it on his shelf

Did he really lead the office in their summer softball games?
Cos it isn’t in his letter (he would never make such claims)
But his fellow workers wrote it (though they would not give their names)
And it seems like such an “Iggy” thing to do.
This is mostly a formality—there isn’t any doubt
Shell’s the sort of dream employee that you only read about
So we’re hoping you’ll confirm that he’s too good to do without
Cos he really seems too perfect to be true

Via CNN, a story that sounds too good to be true–a company that, for a fee, will lie about your past.

“We can replace a supervisor with a fictitious one, alter your work history, provide you with a positive employment reputation, and give you the glowing reference that you need,” Paladin’s website states.

Mind you, there is some question as to whether the story itself (let alone the enthusiastic recommendations) is true:

The Better Business Bureau of Minnesota said it had never heard of Paladin Deception Services and will be “keeping an eye on them going forward.” The company isn’t registered in the state of Minnesota. Green claims it is registered in China instead and he declined to share any tax forms to prove the company’s legitimacy. Meanwhile, Facebook pulled Paladin’s ads from its site in May because it deemed the company inappropriate and misleading.

I am reminded that a post-rapture pet-sitting service that seemed too good to be true… was in fact, too good to be true. So this service may or may not turn out to be real.

Meanwhile, it could be fun, coming up with bogus items for a resume. I know I get called only very rarely to check up on recommendations I write. Maybe I should start claiming that my students are even more remarkable than they are…

The Wedding Of John And Jim

This is the story of John and Jim;
Jim loves John, and John loves him;
Twenty years, six months, and eleven days
Already married in many ways,
They finally got to say their vows
With every right the law allows

Just watch the story—don’t ask why…
And I fucking dare you not to cry.

I don’t always cry at weddings. The last wedding I went to, my nephew’s, I bawled like a baby–but that’s because this was my nephew, and every detail was perfect, and I just love him to death.

I don’t know Jim or John. Never heard of them before about an hour ago. But thanks to the internets, I cried at their wedding, too. It was another perfect day:

John Arthur’s been a patient of Crossroads since March, but it wasn’t until June 26 that he settled on his notion of a perfect day. That morning the U.S. Supreme Court struck down portions of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. As he watched the announcement from a medical bed in his Over-the-Rhine condo, Arthur and his partner of 20 years, Jim Obergefell, decided that they wanted to marry.

A wedding for the couple would not be easy. Because same-sex marriage is illegal in Ohio, and because the Supreme Court ruling left marriage bans at the state level intact, Arthur and Obergefell couldn’t marry here. The prospect of travel was difficult because Arthur is bedridden with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a progressive neurological disease that robs patients of their ability to walk, talk and eventually breathe. Within minutes of the Supreme Court decision, the couple started working the phones, email and social media to figure out how they might legally wed.

The full story is well worth reading, and it is a tear-jerker. I was going to write and tell you about it even before I saw the video.

But, oh. Watch the video (I’ll embed it just below, and if that isn’t working, it can be viewed at the link). It takes a while, but it’s just so beautiful. Yes, I cried. You will, too. I can only hope (vainly, I suspect) that Ohio will soon (sadly, they don’t have much time) allow them to renew their vows in the state they fell in love in, and did not want to leave.

(ok, it’s embedded below the fold–the video is on autoplay, and I don’t know how to fix that, so be aware before you click through. It’s still very much worth your time, though Ok, I’ve deleted the video until such time as I am able to embed it without autoplay. Again, here’s the link to the video, and you do want to watch the video!.)

Anyway… Here’s to John and Jim, or Jim and John, husband and husband. Congratulations!

The Effing Ineffable

We need a sort of language
To describe the indescribable—
To build a firm foundation
To discuss what no one’s seen

A light to shine on empty space
To highlight shared experience
So others of my tribe will know
Exactly what I mean

We’ll say it’s all quite cryptic
But that faith will make it knowable
That hearts perceive reality
Our eyes can never see

Since none can quite describe it
Why, it matches to a T…
This effing the ineffable
Sounds effing strange to me

So I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR (This story in particular), and the guest author said something along the lines of (the full transcript is not yet up, as of this writing) “the language of religion, by definition, attempts to describe the indescribable, to give a common language to speak about the ineffable”.

Which is quite an interesting feat. If we all agree that something we experienced was “indescribable”, that does not mean we agree. I mean, two of us could call the same dish “indescribable” and yet disagree whether it was good or bad!

Mind you, having faith that your words mean the same as someone else’s is relatively small potatoes when compared with having faith that [insert religious belief here].

Not Guilty

The verdict is in; they found, of course,
With many tears and much remorse,
We have the right to deadly force
Provided it’s with a gun.
If someone stalks you with their car—
Without a gun, you start to spar—
The law is clear (though quite bizarre)
He’s clear to shoot you, son.

It happened in the dark of night
You both were in a state of fright;
The jury found, he simply might
Have shot while fighting back
You stood your ground, and tempers flared
He had a gun; he came prepared
He had to shoot—the man was scared….
It’s just too bad you’re black.

Not guilty. No surprise, really; black men are scary, apparently, and when you are afraid, and can legally stand your ground, and have a gun, there’s really no other course. But when you are afraid because someone is following you with their car, and you are afraid, and can legally stand your ground, and don’t have a gun–only your hands–you need to know that the rules are different.

Deadly force, or nothing.

Replacing Prayer

What should I do, when I used to be praying,
When now I no longer believe?
No longer a god who can hear what I’m saying,
No heaven that I can perceive.

There’s really no need; there’s no formal injunction,
You simply don’t pray any more
But should you desire, just examine the function
Of just what your praying was for:

Some prayers are a message directly to god
Singing praise, or a note of thanksgiving
Such notes may, of course, though at first it feels odd,
Be directed at those who are living—

The doctors, the farmers, the builders, the teachers
Society’s helpers, too many to name;
Your coach and your teammates; your mom in the bleachers
Who, much more than god, helped you out in the game

Some prayers are intended to say you’re repenting,
And humbly requesting forgiveness for sin
If you’ve done someone wrong, perhaps prayer is preventing
Your focus from where the real damage has been—

If you’ve done someone wrong, and need some forgiving,
Not god, but that person, is whom you should ask
It’s harder to ask of a person who’s living
But you’re in the wrong, and so that is your task

Some prayers are petitions, for health or protection,
For knowledge, or favor, or rain, or success
To make the world good (since we can’t have perfection)
Without too much work, or a whole lot of stress

There are things you can do to prepare and be ready
To limit your loss when the world goes berserk
When disaster might hit, you can keep your hand steady,
Then you—and not god—can just get down to work.

So, yeah… one of the search terms that led someone to my blog today was “what to replace prayer with now that i’m an atheist”. And I have to admit, my first thought was “what? why? I just found out I’ve been doing something useless–what should I replace it with?” And of course, there is no need to do any particular thing instead of praying; anything at all, from walking the dog to writing poetry to trimming your toenails, will be at least as useful as prayer.

But of course, that’s a pretty shallow analysis–my faithful friends all tell me that prayer is very meaningful to them. That is, it has a purpose, or rather, it may have several purposes. And so, the real answer is to analyze the function of prayer, and to see if you can accomplish the same function (or even more) in an alternative fashion.

It is not difficult to find multiple different functions of prayer, given the number of faith communities on the internet. I looked at a few functions; the same analysis can be done for any more.

Two separate but related functions are praise and giving thanks–respectively, “attaboy, god!” and “thanks!”, both offered as a response to something about the real world (yes, you could offer these in response to the promise of heaven, but my assumption is that the new atheist won’t be missing this particular function). “All glory to god”, says the winning athlete, or the tornado survivor, or the rescued miner, or the hungry person looking at a bountiful table. What to do instead? Thank the actual people who have helped! Thank your teammates, coach, trainers… the parents who brought you to practices for years, and the organization (school or club) that made facilities available. Those people are actually there, and actually did something, and deserve every bit of the praise and thanks that you are giving to some invisible proxy figure.

You may pray for forgiveness. I’m told this is difficult. Frankly, what’s difficult is finding the actual person you have wronged, and asking that person’s forgiveness. They may not give it. You may have to earn it. You may have to undo the damage you have done. Asking forgiveness of an invisible proxy might make you feel better, but if that is what you miss and want to replace, honestly, you were doing prayer wrong.

Prayers of petition (intercessory prayers) plead with god for rain, or recovery from injury or illness, or guidance, or (frankly) money. I am told that these prayers are never (ha!) taking the place of actual action; to the extent that they are not said while actively working, they at least compete for valuable time. But rather than pray for rain, work for water conservation. Rather than pray for recovery, work for better 911 coverage, better training for trauma teams, regulations curbing ineffective quackery and promoting evidence-based treatment. Rather than praying for the hurricane not to hit, get your disaster kit ready. Rather than pray for good grades… study. Rather than… you get the idea.

So… what to do instead of praying? If there are real world things you were praying for, these are things you can work for. If you were praying just to keep from actually having to work for them… I dunno–try masturbation?

“Why I Don’t Believe In Atheism”

Atheists are a miserable lot—
Just horrid, each one that I’ve found;
They’re grumpy and angry and touchy and mean—
Or, they have been, while I’ve been around.

In an odd sort of editorial at the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, Dr. Joe McKeever (preacher and cartoonist) gives a lesson in caricature. That is, he writes a piece honestly, that serves as a caricature, so broadly sketched, distorted and unsubtle. He addresses the “atheistic peddlers”, who “are sure that we mindless theists have never considered the superior evidence for the positions they hold.” (Interestingly enough, I have never known any atheists who have actually gone door-to-door peddling their atheism, but just this past weekend some Jehovah’s Witnesses seemed surprised that I had, in fact, read the bible and considered the evidence they figured I, as a mindless atheist, had never considered. I’m sure my atheist readers will confess to their peripatetic atheism-peddling in the comments.)

Most of the solid believers I know have considered atheism at one time or other. I did, while in college. This is not to say I joined the humanist society of Birmingham or majored in skepticism at Birmingham-Southern. But I read some of the stuff, talked to a few of the people, thought about the ramifications of it all, and made my choice to take my stand with believers.

I’ve never regretted it.

Here’s why.

That is, here are seven incredibly bad, old, trite, and useless excuses. Each has been answered many times over; hell, each has been answered here, in verse.

1) As a rule, atheists tend to be a pretty miserable lot, while the best Christians I know are also the most put-together, positive, and effective people in the room.

Today’s verse is in response to this one. Dr McK has distilled a common factor–atheism–from his interactions with a bunch of miserable atheists. Now, I’m an atheist, but I am not miserable, as a rule. I do wonder, though, if I might not be pretty miserable around Dr. McK.

2) Since faith is required for either position, choosing to believe this amazing universe came together by chance and will go out the same way requires far more faith than this Alabama farm boy can muster. As has been said in the book by this title, “I don’t have faith enough to be an atheist.”

It takes more endurance *not* to run a marathon, you know.

3) While it’s true a large portion of Christians have probably not investigated various apologetic aspects–evidence for the resurrection, the historicity of Jesus, the integrity of Scriptures– a great many have. I sat in the room with Dr. Carl F. H. Henry in the summer of 1978 as he said to some of us, “Christianity is the only world religion that has come through the scientific revolution and emerged intact.” Some of the others are fighting tooth and claw to keep modern technology from taking a look at their authoritative writings.

Regarding the first part… so, does the good doctor agree that children are believing for the wrong reasons? As for the second… wow. If by “intact”, you mean “splintered into tens of thousands of sects”, and by “only” you mean “one of many”, and you ignore the clash between science and christianity in schools across the nation, he might have a point.

4) I do like the old line of reasoning that goes: “If the atheist is true and after death, we all disappear into nothingness, then as a Christian I have lost nothing. But if Jesus Christ is true and after death life just begins to get interesting, then the atheist is in a lot of trouble.” What about that can they not see?

Ah, Pascal’s Wager. I used to keep running tallies of a) people who used Pascal’s Wager as a serious argument, and b) people who sincerely argued that no Christian ever used Pascal’s Wager as a serious argument anymore. Here’s one response. Here’s another.

5) If we know people by their fruits, then philosophies should identify themselves the same way. So, does anyone know any charitable ministry ever started by the atheists? Show me one and I can show you a hundred hospitals and colleges, children’s homes and crisis centers begun by Christ-followers.

I wrote this before what’s-his-name noted that there were no atheist groups helping Oklahoma (and, obviously, before he got roundly spanked for making the same mistake Dr. McK makes. I wrote some after Katrina as well (and yes, donated both money and blood–but there is no way in Cuttletown to have my money marked as an atheist contribution), and contrasted the church response at the time.

6) There are the miracles, such as the existence of Holy Scriptures (the uniformity of them, the prophecies, the clarity, and a thousand other aspects), the existence of the Man of Galilee (His birth, life, death, and resurrection; His teachings and promises, etc), the existence of the Church (so flawed, without its divine nature, surely it would have vanished long ago), and the existence of honest inquiry among believers (a sure sign, if you ask me, that God’s people are into Truth and nothing else).

Yes, the evidence leads directly to Jesus. Except when it is simply too bizarre and unbelievable to be false.

7) My testimony–and yours–on the power of Jesus Christ who changed our lives. And, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, if a skeptic scoffs that my life is so far inferior to what a true Christian should look like, I do not argue with that, but reply that my life is still so far beyond what it would have been without Christ.

Ok, I actually have quite a bit on this, but I’ve chosen a bit of musing on special pleading–Dr. McK has exceedingly high standards for atheists to meet, but when it comes to sufficient evidence for his own beliefs, his own testimony trumps all. Just because.

There is more to his essay, but nothing you haven’t heard a thousand times. I don’t think they are taking comments at the NOLA site, so I’m afraid you can’t let the good doctor know what you think of his reasoning. But hey, you can vent here.

Woof!

Thinkingly, winkingly,
Internet videos
Promise us puppies who
Patently plan;

Claim that it isn’t just
Anthropomorphism—
Clearly, these canines are
Thinking like Man

Over at NPR’s 13.7:Cosmos And Culture blog, Barbara J. King has another of her pieces on animal cognition. I very much enjoy these, even when I fundamentally disagree…like today.

The post is “Do Dogs Think?” (don’t jump too quickly–she explains her title very early on, and it is justified)–clearly, King is on the side of Yea. Which is fine–I also think dogs think… but I suspect that King and I differ on our conceptions of “thinking”. (I did comment at the article–I won’t reproduce those here.)

The trick is, the videos she uses to exemplify complex thought in dogs (at the link) are far too easily explained more “simply” in terms of conditioning (operant, in this case). Which gets me thinking, myself. First (as I say in my first comment, though not in these words), the videos necessarily narrow our focus onto an artificially brief segment of time; we cannot see the history of learning behind each performance. The segments end when the photographer wants them to, so we cannot see what happens next. Any editing of a segment of film may cut out important information; in this case, any trial and error, any shaping and differential reinforcement, that preceded the filmed incident.

(As an aside, the dear departed Cuttledog very cleverly put her paw on a plate to hold it still while she licked it clean. Very cleverly… until you realize that it took her 7 years to stumble on that little trick.)

King welcomed my skepticism, and asked whether it might be hypocritical (not her words!) to explain non-human behavior through conditioning, but not human. And she’d be right, except that a) I fully accept that human behavior (including thinking) is the product of our environmental histories, in a selectionist process many call “conditioning”, and b) I further assert that much of what our current view of human thought is, is utter balderdash. We are not able to feel ourselves thinking (no sensory neurons in the brain), so our introspective accounts are not a measure of our actual thinking, but rather a measure of the influence of our verbal community. For centuries, we have used a dualistic, mentalistic vocabulary (how often do you find the words “mind” or “mental” or “mentally” creeping into your sentences?), which does not correspond to what we know of the nervous system, let alone the interaction of our behavior with a dynamic environment.

So… Do animals think the way we think? I suspect that, very probably, they do. Do animals think the way that we think that we think? Almost certainly not. Do we think the way we think that we think? Again, almost certainly not. How do we think? Ah… an excellent question.

Believers, Uniting

The religions of the world, it seems, are largely in agreement;
They’re seeing different facets of one God
Not long ago, faiths disagreed on what, exactly, “we” meant
So this putative agreement just seems odd.

Religions had their enemies (and likely always will)
But their foes are vastly different now (we checked)
While interfaith “believers” have one message to instill
Through their histories, they’ve battled other sects!

Why, the Catholic’s bitter enemies were Methodists, at first,
Till the Baptists formed a bigger, badder foe
While today we see the atheists among the very worst
Were the godless problematic then? Well, no.

Cos the Christians fought the Christians (and the Muslims and the Jews)
And the atheists were folks you never met
But what could hammer unity from once-opposing views?
Is it possible the godless are a threat?

I’ve written before of my personal experience with what once appeared to be a bunch of separate religious views seeming to change over time to come together in a common cause (whether for political gain or to oppose atheism, I can’t say). Today, my aggregator throws at me an essay describing the same phenomenon over the past centuries of American religions. The essay speaks of the phenomenon as the effect of a religious free market, where competition among producers of religion for the limited consumers of religion was fierce:

The nineteenth century saw a fervor of religious inspiration, entrepreneurship, and frantic competition. In 1800, most Americans belonged to no church or denomination; many others were only nominally committed to the stuffy and stern established churches of several states.

But now, a host of young, energetic, and plain-speaking preachers evangelized all across the country for new denominations like the Methodist Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ, and dissident Baptists.

The Catholic Church, rooted in a continent where people were born into a faith and never left it, was shocked by the competition. One priest dispatched to Maryland complained in 1821, “There are Swarms of false teachers [Methodist preachers] all through the Country, in every School house, in every private house—you hear nothing but night meetings, Class meetings, love feasts &c &c.”

Historian of religion Martin Marty described “a competition in which the fittest survived,” one in which backwoods ministers found that their “first enemy was neither the devil nor the woman but the Baptist” – or any number of evangelists. (Later in the century, even atheists came together in formal association.)

I won’t quote more–it’s a really nice read, though, and while not a huge surprise (given the Bartonian mythology of America’s early years, though, it’s probably a huge surprise to someone), it’s refreshing to see.

Only just last week I was reading something about “the overall message of all religions”, which seemed a bit of a desperate attempt to gather allies, at the expense of historical accuracy. I guess it always seemed to me a bit of an insult, to have the Jehovah’s Witnesses at my door claim common ground with other Christians, with Muslims, Jews, and others, when trying to show how reasonable and commonplace belief is. I mean, if there is such agreement, why the various sects? These are differences that once merited banishment from a state, or discrimination in the workplace, or war–how is it that now you all believe the same warm, fuzzy things?

I don’t have an answer. If wishing worked, I’d find indisputable evidence that the great coming-together was a reaction to the growing threat of atheism. But it could be simple political pragmatism, and the functional equivalent of coalition-building. Or maybe each religion is evolving… Nah.

“Reality Beyond The Material”

“All of human experience, over millennia, suggests a richness and complexity of reality beyond the material.”

I’ve heard there’s a heaven, its streets paved with gold,
Where diamonds and platinum gleams
It’s as real as my hand is, or so I’ve been told,
Though it might just be Swedenborg’s dreams.

I’ve heard I have angels who watch what I do
And act, if I do something rash
The lady who told me, she swore it was true
Then she charged me a whole lot of cash

I’ve heard I can heal any ailment at all
But first, I just have to believe
No matter what problem, how big or how small,
But science just cannot perceive!

I’ve heard there are miracles, wonders, and more,
Overflowing reality’s cup
And I’m thinking it’s something I ought to ignore…
Cos it looks like just making shit up

So yeah… my aggregator threw this at me today. From the Jamaica Gleaner, it’s “Science and Religion: a clash of two faiths”. The title alone tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the author’s position. The only additional info you might need is to note that this article is a response to a previous article… or, as the present author puts it:

Every now and again, some of the puff-chested doctors-cum-priests of science and a wide variety of coat-tail-hanging quacks emerge to advise us that religion, and particularly Christianity, is terminally ill. This is especially strange since modern science is irrefutably a product of Christian faith, more particularly of Protestant Christian faith.

So here comes another one, Dr Patrick White, who holds a doctorate in engineering and has led research groups at Bell Labs, puffingly announcing ‘Christianity losing race against science’ (Gleaner, July 1, 2013).

Initially, I was a bit confused as to whether science or puffery was the enemy. Turns out it’s science.

Science is replete with its own pet prejudices, bigotry and religious zealotry. At its epistemological core, science, as preached by many practitioners and bandwagon believers, operates on two weak assumptions: The reductionist view that reality is purely material, the interplay of matter and energy; and that the only way of truly knowing is by ‘scientific method’.

All of human experience, over millennia, suggests a richness and complexity of reality beyond the material. Science has been quite glibly willing to dismiss the mountain of evidence of non-material reality in defence of its own pet prejudice and in a deliberate and concerted effort to get rid of ‘god’ and the supernatural, which might be more properly described as the ‘othernatural’ rather than the ‘supernatural’.

Go ahead and read it… look for the critique of religion that matches the critique of science. Science is critiqued, and by virtue of a version of special pleading, religion is there to pick up the pieces.

Taking science on its own ground, no hypothesis of origins can be established by scientific method because it simply cannot be tested, a key requirement of validating hypotheses. Origin, whether of matter or of life, is a unique, one-off, non-replicable event of the distant past without human witnesses. Scientific method proceeds by examining replicable phenomena for attaining reliable and valid results. In matters of origins, we all ultimately stand on a platform of faith.

The only rational, purely natural ‘scientific’ position is that we, conscious and self-reflective human beings, find ourselves here. We do not know where we came from. We do not know why we are here. We do not know where we are going.

Science can answer none of these critical existential questions. And science can assign no value to human life. The object cannot value itself. Value is derived from being valuable to another.

Sure, religion can’t answer scientific questions, but that’s not its fault:

Religion, and Christianity in particular, has often been its own worst enemy in the contrived conflict with science. The Bible is not a science text and was not intended to be. The pronouncements of the mediaeval Roman Catholic Church upon cosmology which led to its ‘routing’ by Copernicus and Galileo, over which Patrick White now gloats, had no warrant in data sources available to the Church.

The article concludes

As powerful and productive as they have been, science and scientific method are not without boundaries of competence to define and to examine reality. Trespassing outside those boundaries is definitely not scientific, and bluff and bluster by the doctors, priests and quacks of science cannot change that simple fact.

which the casual observer will note does not advance the cause of religion one inch. The argument is, roughly, “if it is not the 4th of July, it must necessarily be Christmas.” Sorry, but knocking down science (worse, knocking down science based on your inadequate understanding of it) does not strengthen religion.

Tearing down my neighbor’s house does not strengthen my own. Pretending to tear down my neighbor’s house is just as futile, with the added benefit of making me look like a fool.

What Type Of Atheist Are You?

While atheists are privative (defined by what we’re not),
That doesn’t mean we’re all the same—the whole ungodly lot—
Analysis finds atheists of many different stripes;
Most recently, the factors give us six distinctive types.

They found them scientifically; the factors loaded well
But because the subject’s atheists, there’s one thing I can tell:
While others might be sortable—these groups are there to see—
I’ve looked at all the labels, and there’s not a one fits me!

So I was on the road Monday when the news broke on this–some more data-crunching has been done on the Non-Belief in America Research data. Earlier, a factor analysis on data from interviews yielded six types of atheists: the Intellectual Atheist/Agnostic, the Activist Atheist/Agnostic, the Seeker-Agnostic, the Anti-Theist, the Non-Theist, and the Ritual Atheist/Agnostic. Follow the link for fairly detailed descriptions of each type (here it is again).

Monday’s numbers show the percentages of atheists (in a sample of just over a thousand) who self-identify with each category, as described at the link. They also, briefly, present some of the relationships between atheist type and various personality measures. It’s interesting, if still in the very early stages.

My favorite bit, though, comes at the end. This report is addressed to the public, not to a peer-reviewed journal, so the authors take pains to put their findings in context:

If prejudice continues to exist towards atheists in general, one source may stem from the perceived negative experiences by religious people interacting with a very small sub-segment of the overall population of non-believers, mainly the Anti-Theists. In other words, our research showed over 85% of the non-believers sampled to be more or less your “average Joe” when it came to being “angry, argumentative and dogmatic”, they fall right in line with current societal norms, nothing strange here – sorry non-believers, you’re pretty normal when it comes to being psychologically well-adjusted.

It is also important to recognize that the “angry, argumentative and dogmatic” vignette,as used here, does not mean that these Anti-Theists don’t have a right to be any of these things or that they are not even proper psychological responses when recontextualized in light of the Anti-Theists’ life experiences to date. For example, many of the Antitheist typology had responded as recently deconverted from religious belief or socially displeased with the status quo, especially in high social tension-based geographies such as the Southeastern United States. If we engage in a small thought experiment by taking on the perspective of a recent deconvert from a religious tradition (many times a very conservative one) to atheism, it may be easy to see how this small sub segment is, and perhaps deserves to be, angry and argumentative after having previously accepted a worldview at odds with their current beliefs, or lack there-of, especially in areas of the country where high social tension exists between believers and non-believers in general.

It is very important to recognize that these comparisons are being made only within “non-belief”. In other words, these results are not juxtaposed alongside “believers” or any subset of population that identifies as “religious” and therefore no conclusions or empirical inferences can be currently draw as to how the two groups, or rather sub segments of the two groups might stack up against each other. Certainly additional research should explore these typologies in relation to believers to see if such conclusions can hold true for outside perceptions.

And then, even further down, a little bit on the limitations of labels in scientific research. Factor analysis may show us which traits load together, but labeling that cluster of traits is up to the person doing the analysis. That person, as the researchers here, does their best to come up with a name that captures the feel of that subset of the data, aware that any one label must be incomplete, but needing one label. In this case, the label is supposed to represent a type of atheist–so good luck finding a label to please people, many of whom (like the crab in the William James quote they present) proudly reject labels of any sort:

As we finish writing this brief synopsis, Coleman is actually sitting across the table from a good friend (who we will call Bob which is not his real name but allows a reference point for this conversation) who self identifies as an “Anti-Theist” however, he says he does not consider what he, labels himself as, to be a reflection of our very specific research description of a typology we call “Antitheist”. To the readers’ credit, no doubt many of “you” might also share our friend’s sentiments as they speak directly to any social scientific construction of every typology.

As social scientists we are forced to label, yet at the same time, we recognize qualitatively the limits inherent in any label. Certainly this was a research challenge for the project, one that almost derailed our process. Many of the participants disagreed about common use of terms of nonbelief but there was common agreement related to definitions of nonbelief. With this said Bob is not alone. Many of the participants were concerned with issues of social agendas and the separation of church and state. Furthermore, individuals like Bob were in many respects critical of the religious institutions and their agendas. The differences here in typology relate to the mode and value each participant places on how they engage issues of ontology. In other words, what is their preference for debating and considering the place religion and secularity play in our society? For many participants they question such social structures and are critical (antitheist) but their mode of behavior and belief may be different from the group we label antitheist. These labels were chosen by the research team to be reflective of the emotional, personality, and cognitive structures of value these people place on their worldviews (types).

So… take a look at their types. Which type are you? Are you, perhaps, a sub-type? (They are actively looking for subtypes at least within their first category.) Do you defy type? Myself, I suppose I mostly fit in the first category, but I see bits of me in the others as well.