Apparently even Humanists can be sex-negative

This excerpt was meant to advertise Jennifer Hancock’s new book, The Humanist Approach to Happiness: Practical Wisdom. What it actually accomplished was making me think it was all a load of bullshit that I most definitely am not going to waste my money on.

The Costs and Consequences of Sex

“Sex always has consequences. When Hitler’s mother spread her legs that night, she effectively canceled out the spreading of fifteen to twenty million other pairs of legs.”

– George Carlin

Everything has a cost. Before you act, you really need to consider whether you can handle the consequences. And this is doubly true when it comes to sex.

Okay, sure, with you so far!

Anyone who tells you that sex is no big deal is either lying or isn’t doing it right.

And the alarm bells start flashing. This sounds like it’s about to set us up for some awesome “Sex is only safe and pleasurable when in a monogamous relationship!” bullshit typically used by Christians. Let’s see!

Sex is a big deal and it has emotional, physical, and sometimes financial consequences. Before you have sex with someone, make sure you are prepared for those consequences. This is where being responsible comes into play.

Your Heart

First and foremost is your heart. If you are having sex for the wrong reasons, you will regret it afterward, and that kind of ruins the experience.

Okay, sure. If you’re having casual sex but what you want and expect is a long term monogamous relationship, probably not going to end so well. And vice versa – if you want something casual but you’re trapped in a long term monogamous relationship, you’re probably not going to be very happy. That’s what you’re about to say, right?

Sex is best when it is a loving expression of your feelings for another person. When you are sharing a part of yourself in a very intimate way with someone you love, it can be magical.

JK. Sex is only supposed to be with someone you love. Except that many studies have shown that casual sex is not emotionally damaging and can actually lead to stable relationships.

If, however, you are having sex to keep your partner with you, then when (not if) they leave you, you will be miserable. The question you need to ask yourself is, if the worst that could happen happens and this person never calls you again, how will you feel about what you have done?

Your Health

Having sex with the wrong individual can kill you. Sexual transmitted diseases (STDs) are real, and if you have sex, you are at risk of contracting one. You can mitigate that risk by choosing your sexual partners very carefully, making sure that you are only having sex in mutually exclusive relationships, making sure each partner is tested for STDs before engaging in sex, and using protection anyway. If you think all this would kill the moment, consider how bad it would be if it actually killed you instead.

Sex can obviously lead to pregnancy, even if you use precautions. And if you aren’t prepared for that possibility, you might want to hold off on having sex until and unless you are ready to handle an unintended pregnancy. Also, if you don’t think your partner can handle that consequence, don’t have sex with him or her.

Wow, can you say sex-negative? This is reminiscent of a deep South’s high school’s sex education. OMG NEVER HAVE SEX BECAUSE YOU’LL DIIIEEEEE! Or worse, GET PREGNANT!!!!11!!one!!!

Look, people. Yes, STDs are a problem. Yes you should always use protection, get tested for STDs, and sleep with people you have at least some level of trust with. But the way to deal with them is not through fear mongering and omitting practical information (ironic given the title of the book). This is exactly what abstinence only education programs do, and they’ve actually been shown to increase the rates of STDs in teens. Knowledge is power.

Stuff like this contributes to society’s stigma about STDs. You know, most STDs really aren’t that bad. Chlamydia, Gonorrhea, and Syphilis can be cured with antibiotics. 65-90% of people have Herpes 1 (“oral” Herpes, though it’s not limited to the mouth), and 15% of people have Herpes 2. Symptoms can be reduced to practically nothing with medication. And about 80% of sexually active Americans have HPV, though it usually clears without any symptoms showing.

Does anyone want an STD? No, just like no one wants bronchitis or any other disease. The stigma is blown so out of proportion compared to the actual harm, and fear mongering adds to that. But people shouldn’t feel like getting an STD is the end of the world. That can have more consequences than the actual disease (source: read any sex advice column).

Your Money

Finally, there are sometimes financial consequences. Sex with prostitutes isn’t the only sort of sex that costs money. Having a child, even if you give it away, costs money. Contracting an STD costs money. Affairs can be very expensive. People have lost their jobs because of sex. Do you want sex badly enough to lose your job, or get extorted by a spurned lover who is threatening you? If not, then it is best to keep your pants on and pass on that offer of free sex. Nothing is ever free.

…

The Humanist Approach to Sex

“In all sexual encounters, commitment to humane and humanistic values should be present.”

– The American Humanist Association, Sexual Bill of Rights and Responsibilities

Sex is a big deal. There are consequences to having sex and you should be prepared for those consequences before engaging in sex with anyone. The Humanist approach to sexuality is that it should be pleasurable, loving, and free of guilt.

Free of guilt? …Does anyone see the irony in that statement compared to the guilt-filled paragraphs that proceeded it?

But that doesn’t mean that anything goes. With the freedom to express your sexuality comes responsibility. From a Humanist perspective, sexual morality cannot be separated from general morality. Both must include compassion, ethics, and responsibility.

Whether any given sex act is morally acceptable from a Humanist perspective really depends on whether it helps the people involved become happy or causes suffering. Sexual pleasure must not come at the expense of someone else’s happiness.

To make sure sex is a source of both pleasure and happiness for you, take precautions to keep yourself and your partners safe. Don’t develop unrealistic expectations for yourself or your partners through the irresponsible use of pornog
raphy or other forms of sexually fantasy. Choose your partners wisely. And always approach sex as a responsible, educated, compassionate, and ethical person.

I do agree with her closing remarks, mainly because I do consider myself a Humanist. But that just makes the previous paragraphs even more disappointing. Precautions, responsibility, and avoiding harm shouldn’t be connected to guilt trips about monogamy and fear mongering about STDs. Not to mention she provides no actual evidence for what she’s saying. Seriously, sex-positivity FAIL.

I wish there was The Atheist’s Guide to Sex to counter this. Featuring Greta Christina, Dan Savage, Heidi Anderson, Jen McCreight…

A Flying Spaghetti Monster Wedding

From formspring.me: What are the guidelines to a Flying Spagetti Monster wedding? Are the roles gender specific? Can they be substituted easily for gay/lesbian couples?

Pastafarians aren’t known for being particular devout, so I’m not sure if we have any strict wedding traditions. But here are somethings you can try to do:

1. It is preferred to have the officiator dressed in full pirate regala for an occasion blessed by His Noodliness. But if you want to be accomidating of non-Pastafarians in attendence (like confused in-laws), subtle touches will do:2. If you’re having a reception, you must serve at least one pasta dish. Marinara, alfredo, and pesto are all acceptable sects.

3. Don’t miss an opportunity to count how many times you’ve been blessed by his noodly appendage. Pay the FSM homage on your wedding cake too:Pastafarians are also very GLBT friendly, so these traditions need not be limited to heterosexual couples.

Are there any other Pastafarian wedding traditions I’m forgeting? I may be out of the loop because I’m one of those Talk Like a Pirate Day/Halloween Pastafarians (I know, lazy – don’t judge me for not worshipping every Friday).

Best atheist sex toy ever

I did leave out one highlight from my St. Louis trip because it was so awesome that it deserved a post of its own. I received what could very well be the Most Hilariously Creative Atheist Gift Ever:Me: *pulling gift out of bag* Oh, cute, a Flying Spaghetti Monster! …*thinking* Wait, what is it attached to? Is this a blind fold? …There’s more in the bag…
Me: …*look of confusion*
Everyone else: *looks of extreme amusement*

I’m now the proud owner of a Flying Spaghetti Monster bondage set.

Seriously, I’m not sure if this level of awesomeness can be topped. The St. Louis Skeptics have set the bar pretty damn high when it comes to creative godless gifts. I’m afraid to challenge future groups I visit to try and top this… but I’m not going to discourage them either.

Thanks for the awesome gift, St. Louis Skeptics, especially Claire, who I believe was the one who made it (if I’m wrong, please correct me! All your names started blurring together by 3am!). I think this is definitely a untapped niche market. Get cracking on that Atheist Sex Toy Etsy Shop!

“Having a baby made me an atheist”

There’s an excellent article at Offbeat Mama on how having a child spurred one mom into reevaluating her religious views. It’s a great read and a refreshing alternative to the typical “Witnessing the miracle of birth convinced me we had to be intelligently designed!” emotional nonsense I frequently hear. Here’s just a snippet:

“Everything changes when you have a baby,” our relatives and acquaintances said, but they missed the point: everything had changed already. It was the baby, that fuzzy blur on the sonogram screen, pushing us further and further from our old world view.

We were both raised and baptized Seventh-Day Adventists. We attended church, prayed and read the Bible. We had both had doubts about religion in the past, but we had put them aside, believing that what our faith gave us was more important than the answers it couldn’t provide. When our daughter was born, though, those elusive answers began to seem more important.

I read the gospels while breastfeeding, feeling safer in the New Testament with Jesus’s reassuring compassion than in the Old Testament with its endless wars and wrath of God, but I was not reassured. Had the Bible always been so inconsistent, so violent, so sexist? Had it always needed so much adjustment to fit with my own sense of right and wrong? I tried to stretch my faith, twisting it like the rubber band I had looped through my buttonhole to give me a few more weeks in my pre-maternity jeans, but it didn’t fit. I tried to ignore my questions and doubts as I had in the past, but there was a new question I could not ignore: What am I going to teach my daughter?

For those of you who are parents, did you have similar experiences? Or general religious issues that arose when having children?

Atheist donates $5,600,000 to NY Catholic schools

From Bloomberg.org:

Retired hedge fund titan Robert W. Wilson lost his faith in God years ago, yet he believes in Catholic schools and gave $5.6 million to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York this summer.

It’s the latest of many gifts from Wilson to the city’s Catholic hierarchy and educators, this one aimed at funding the Catholic Alumni Partnership, a program he founded that helps elementary schools track down their 750,000 alumni and recruit them as donors.

“Most of what the Catholic schools teach are the three Rs,” said Wilson, 83, in a phone interview, referring to reading, writing and arithmetic. “And they do it better than the union-controlled inner-city schools.”

You know what would help make those union-controlled inner-city schools do just as good of job? Giving them $5.6 million dollars. He may be concerned with the three Rs, but Catholic schools have a forth R he’s forgetting about: Religious indoctrination. Gah.

Over at Friendly Atheist, Hemant asks what everyone thinks about this. I’m going to have to side with the “FFFFUUUUUUUU” option.

My super secret spy mission to a Focus on the Family event

Friday night I embarked on a top secret mission with Hemant of Friendly Atheist (who has his thoughts on our adventure here). Hemant brought the event to my attention. Because I like him so much and I’m a bit of a masochist, I agreed to tag along. We headed to Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL for the Focus on the Family Celebrate Family Tour:If you’re not familiar with FotF, you should be tipped off by the fact that “Family” is in their name. I’ve ranted about them here before – about them calling Harry Potter witchcraft, spreading misinformation about gay parenting, and wasting money on misleading pro-life Super Bowl ads. I’m not exactly a fan of this conservative Christian organization, but I was willing to listen for a night out of curiosity and the desire for blog fodder.

Hemant and I had some fun hyping this up in our minds. …Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a spy mission since anyone could attend and when we signed up we used our real names. Yeah, awesome spies. But I still had the Mission Impossible theme song playing through my head, and we even made up aliases. I was his wife (woo, take that fangirls!) who was trying to show my heathen husband why Christianity was so awesome. We picked 3/14 as our anniversary because we’re nerds and that’s the only date we could remember.

We later discovered we were terrible spies because 1) A good Christian woman would have taken her husband’s last name, 2) We didn’t have wedding rings, and 3) I know diddly poop about acting like a Christian. I also tried to fit in by wearing my Sunday’s best, but I later realized the new Christian fashion is all about capris. Seriously, every woman there was wearing capris. I think this was just a ploy to get me into a skirt for the first time in years.

Proof for the skeptical. Also, yay Christ and his kingdom.

Hey, at least we were smart enough to take Hemant’s car. My Darwin Fish, Obama sticker, and Republicans for Voldemort sticker probably would have given us away.

Anyway.

I’m not going to spend time discussing certain Christian tropes that you hear all the time (“It’s not about you, it’s about God,” “God saved me from death! …but not from breaking my legs,” etc). 1) I’ve discussed them before, and 2) I can discuss them later – they’re not exactly specific to this particular event. So even though many things had me facepalming, I’ll save them.

The event had about 1,000 people in attendance. It opened with FotF President Jim Daly sharing some personal stories and explaining the different programs that FotF organizes. FotF is known for its rabid pro-life and anti-gay marriage stances, so I was impressed by how much good they actually are doing (or at least attempting to do). I wasn’t aware that FotF was so active in encouraging adoption* or providing marriage counseling (though we could debate how useful Christian counseling is over getting counseling from a psychologist…).

*(An aside on the adoption thing. Apparently one of the higher-up officials with the Colorado adoption agency, a Dr. Sharon (missed her last name), told FotF that “The best homes for these kids are Christian homes” and wished there were more of them. This may have been said in confidence, but wow. Kind of not a good thing if a government employee is viewing a certain religion as superior when deciding who gets to adopt children.)

I have to give them props for being aware of this problem – people not knowing about their good works. They mentioned it several times throughout the night, and stressed the idea that “If we want people to believe in Christianity’s message, we need to show them the actual good it’s doing.” Again, we could debate if that message is true or not, but I’m all for Christians being less hypocritical when it comes to being moral/doing good works.

Some of the stuff he said was definitely silly though. Apparently 9 year olds are never supposed to say “no” to their parents. Yep, train your children to be good little unthinking drones! Oh, and Nick at Night is horrible television for your child to be watching. That explains why I turned out the way I did. Thanks a lot, I Love Lucy.

The main part of the program was with Dr. Emerson Eggerichs of Love and Respect Ministries and his wife Sarah (…is it bad that this makes me think of the Ministry of Love from 1984?). They mostly discussed the following quote from Ephesians 5:22-33:

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything… 33However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Of course, when I say “they,” I mean Emerson did almost all of the talking while Sarah just sat there and looked pretty. I’m not sure why she was even there, other than so they can say “Look, we’re progressive and including women in our discussions!” …Except not really.

Emerson’s main message was that this passage wasn’t about submission, but about the different ways men and women communicate. He claimed women desire to be loved, and men desire to be respected. This claim was “supported” by a poll FotF did of its members – not exactly a scientific study of all men and women. During conflict, when women feel unloved they respond with disrespect, and when men feel disrespected they respond by being unloving. This starts what he refers to as the “crazy cycle” where a fight will just escalate until, apparently, someone realizes the Bible is telling them to stop.

While I appreciate the attempt to say this isn’t about submission (but not some of his pot shots at feminists), it’s still just replacing one stereotype about men and women with another. Great, women don’t have to “submit” to men – but we’re hyper emotional beings that communicate completely differently. He even referred to women as having “Pink glasses, pink hearing aids, and pink megaphones.” Next time someone doesn’t understand me, I’ll try to put away the pink megaphone, I guess.

This part of the program got kind of old after a while – Emerson just basically repeated the same thing for an hour. But then we got to see the comedian Jeff Allen perform. He was actually really funny – we were a bit doubtful at the beginning what a “Christian comedian” would be like. Some of his jokes were about God or religion, but they were ones anyone would find amusing, even a couple of atheists.

I should say, he was really funny most of the time. At the end of his act he felt the need to lay the evangelizing on thick, and tell a serious story about how finding Christ saved his life, etc etc. It wasn’t lame because it was about Jesus or Christianity – I was eating up the rest of his skit. It just…wasn’t funny. His job was to be a comedian, so it just came off as totally awkward to get up on his soap box. It would have been equally awkward if a comedian started going off on how awesome atheism is without actually making any jokes.

Not to mention this was the one moment of the night someone decided to take pot shots at atheists. I made sure to take some quick notes on what I learned about myself:Yep, the whole atheists are depressed canard. It never gets old, does it?! Hemant and I decided we weren’t living up to our atheist standards, and we needed to angst and shoot up heroine more. Or something like that.

There were a couple of general things that struck me as odd, from the perspective of an outsider looking in:

1. Well, feeling like such an outsider. Even though no one knew Hemant and I were a couple of atheists (I promise we were respectful through the whole thing), I still felt out of place. As someone who was not brought up in a Christian household, there are just so many cultural things I don’t know about. Certain phrases or ideas seemed to elicit unanimous mumbled praise from the audience… usually the phrases that I found particularly silly or contemptible. And the way all heads instantaneously snapped down when a prayer started was just odd to someone who hasn’t been trained to do those mannerisms.

Not to mention the inside Christian jokes. Apparently Lutherans are very “cerebral”, and this titillated the audience. Anyone care to explain this in-joke to me?

2. FotF seems to think that any sign of interest is equivalent to winning over supporters. They’ll probably love this blog post if they find it. I don’t know if this is wishful thinking or purposeful spin, but it popped up a lot. For example, Daly made a comment how the former President of the National Organization for Women supported FotF’s right to have a pro-life Super Bowl ad. Daly quipped with a grin, “You know something’s going on,” referring to her support. Yeah, an understanding of freedom of speech is going on.

Another example of this is when they mentioned how 27 non-Christian Comcast staff members were helping them film one of their events. The staff mentioned they had never heard religion discussed that way before, and asked for more information. More information does not automatically mean you converted all of those people – but that’s how FotF framed it. I often ask for more information from religious people when I think they’re particularly wacky, not correct.

3. The Christian Veneer. I can’t get over this phenomena. Most of what FotF was saying throughout the night in terms of families and relationships with your spouse was fairly relatable and sane. It was the same sort of advice you’d hear from many secular self-help books like the typical Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus idea (as untrue as that may be).

…But then they had to go and slap Jesus all over it. Is it not enough to just love your spouse, respect their feelings, and compromise a little with them without having a Bible verse telling you to do it? Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists have the same problems and the same solutions. It’s not the Bible that’s giving you the answers – you’re just cherry picking things from the Bible that happen to fit your solution… after you’ve come to it.

4. They didn’t mention gay marriage at all. Hemant and I were both really disappointed. We figured with their fervent anti-gay marriage stance and the recent Prop 8 ruling that they’d be sure to say something. Nada. I guess it just wasn’t the topic of the night. But if anything, I’m now convinced we need more gay marriages because of this event. I mean, the whole thing was about how marital strife comes from men and women inherently communicating differently. If it was a man communicating with a man or a woman communicating with a woman, no problem, right?!

5. All the speakers seemed genuinely nice. This shouldn’t be shocking, but FotF has some platforms that are so nasty that it’s sometimes hard to separate the people from the ideas. I constantly have to remind myself that Christians go out of their way to evangelize and fight for their specific morals because they truly believe in them and care about people. It may be misguided and ultimately harmful, but they’re really doing it with good intentions. I’m sure any of the speakers would be great to chat with over tea… I just don’t want them making any sort of laws. Nor will I stop criticizing their viewpoints just because they’re trying to be nice – it just helps to know where these people are coming from when you do have to debate them.

I’m still no fan of FotF. While they’ve become a bit humanized to me, I still can’t support most of what their organization is doing. Adoption is awesome, but not when you only think heterosexual Christians make good homes. Marriage counseling is great, but not when you assume all other religions are doomed to have failed relationships. Continuing to perpetuate myths about atheists is…well, not so hot. And hell, one of their college programs focuses on teaching students about creationism and intelligent design – it was difficult for this evolutionary biologist to not start facepalming in the middle of the event.

You know, it would be nice if people from FotF would attend some of our godless events. Maybe we could become a bit more humanized, instead of representing depression and debauchery.

…As much as I do like debauchery.

The New Atheists: Why do they want to erase faith?

LS has been kind enough to transcribe the cover story of “The Catholic Answers” magazine, volume 24 number 3, July/August 2010, which arrived at his parents’ house for our enjoyment. And by enjoyment, I mean facepalming. Yes folks, it’s another game of…

Count The Fallacies!

There’s everything from logical fallacies to outright factual errors. Can you find them all? Or better yet, can you read the whole article without vocalizing your annoyance? Grunts count!

The New Atheists,
Why do they want to erase faith?

By Robert P. Lockwood

(Shutterstock: Robert Lockwood is an award-winning Catholic columnist, editor and author. He serves currently as the communications director for the Diocese of Pittsburgh and was president of Our Sunday Visitor Publishing from 1990 to 1999)

“You even throw like an atheist.” –Father Chuck O’Malley (Bing Crosby) to a self-described atheist who threw away the neighborhood kids’ baseball in “Going My Way” 1944

They have emerged on The New York Times best-seller list spreading the cause of scientism while try try to rid society of what they describe as “idiots” who carry on the “poison” of professed religious belief. Who are these “New Atheists” and how do we reply to their accusations against believers?

-SIDEBAR-

What is Scientism?

The roots of the New Atheists are found in “scientism,” a philosophy or worldview that teaches that there is no knowledge save that derived through science. Scientism attempts to explain “the meaning of life” based on alleged purely scientific principles.

Scientism grew out of the fascination with science and explaining the functioning of the world during the European Renaissance of the 15th century. It spread during the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries and reached its zenith in the 19th century.

Scientism, however, is not science. It is how Charles Darwin’s observations of sea tortoises on the Galapagos Islands becomes a philosophy of “survival of the fittest”; and Karl Marx’s screwball economic theory based on alleged scientific principles of history becomes communism.

Scientism wielded its greatest influence in the late 19th century when it proclaimed everything from phrenology to communism as rational and offered scientific solutions to the difficulties that plague humanity. Science was to replace religious beliefs and liberate humanity from the shackles of faith. Instead, scientism introduced the world to virulent racism, communism, fascism, and genocide. Scientism laid the philosophical groundwork for the horrors of the 20th century. And it is far from dead.

-END SIDEBAR-

Several notable authors offer a basic sampling of the best-selling catechisms of the New Atheists: Sam Harris in “The End of Faith,” Christopher Hitchens in “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” and Richard Dawkins in “The God Delusion.” Together, they claim to represent the inevitable future—the ultimate progress of rational and scientific man over irrational and religious humanity—and in recent years their actions have grown decidedly more provocative.

Hitchens and Dawson announced plans to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested when he visits England in September 2010. They claim that he is responsible for “crimes against humanity” because of the Church’s handling of clergy sexual abuse. It is a nonsensical charge when one considers that Pope Benedict has provided dramatic leadership in addressing this tragedy. But the real world and the New Atheists often part company.

In July 2008, Paul Z. Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota, desecrated on his blog what he claimed to be a consecrated host and announced: “Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything, God is not great. Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet”

The New Atheists are not satisfied with simply harboring their own beliefs, or even challenging religious belief. Rather, they now present an aggressive, in-your-face agenda with events such as “Blasphemy Day” in 2009, where they offered to trade pornography for Bibles or to “de-baptize” people with hair dryers.

Such sophomoric antics get them quite a bit of attention, but it is disproportionate to the actual number of their followers. The Pew Center estimates that 93 percent of Americans believe in God, and that even in Europe religious belief is on the upswing after years of decline following world war II.

Responding to them does not require a degree in theology, philosophy, or science. Plain old common sense suffices.

The understandable tendency among believers has been to view the New Atheists as pseudo-intellectual elitists arguing warmed-over 19th-century European anti-clerical tirades. It can be added that, for the most part, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris produce material almost solely for the enjoyment of their fellow atheists.

Hitchens, for example, stakes out four essential positions: First, religious faith misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos (by believing that a creator exists who created the universe and life); second, this belief compounds its “poison” by defining humanity as “servile” to this creator; third, religious belief is the cause and result of dangerous sex-ual [Not a typo, wtf?] repression; and, fourth, religion is grounded in wishful thinking about life after death. Hitchens uses these points to argue that Religion is simply a man-made construct created by individuals who exercise authority over others. He supports the claim with an unending series of horror stories where so-called religious people have done evil and violent acts throughout history.

Most of the New Atheists reflect these positions, but add their own twists. Richard Dawkins argues that since religious thinking is virtually universal, it is the result of faulty “memes”–cultural ideas that are somehow naturally transmitted from one mind to the other. In the case of religious views, he compares this transmission to a virus.

Like Hitchens, Dawkins sees religion as a faulty and unnecessary prop to morality and suggests that faith has done nothing but subvert science, foster fanaticism, and encourage bigotry.

Dawkin’s reference to “memes” is simply taking one unproven postulated theory and presenting it as scientific fact. And, as Dawkins admits, the universality of religious faith in the human experience is an unavoidable fact. The difficulty for his position is that this universality defines humanity and the human experience. To call it a “virus” is to define human nature as a virus.

The New Atheists can claim that religious faith is man-made, but the very universality of such faith argues that it is intrinsic to humanity, rather than created under false pretenses. You would have to envision a universal con job devised by a surprisingly smart fellow in prehistory, incessantly imposed eons after eons on all of humanity, generation after generation, culture after culture, over hundreds and thousands of years.

Hitchens’ listing of historical barbarities allegedly committed in the name of religion is simply non-sense. It would be the equivalent of denying the truths of science because certain scientists invented chemical weapons or beat their spouses.

To state that religious faith subverts science is equally preposterous. Science grew under the auspices of faith, and many scientists past and present have been men and women of deep religious belief.

As to dangerous sexual repression, with a sky-high divorce rate, out-of-wedlock births, a worldwide epidemic of STDs, pornography, sexual violence, and rampant abuse, let’s put it this way, sexual repression is hardly the problem in contemporary culture.

To claim that religion fosters fanaticism and encourages bigotry flies in the face of historical fact. The genocidal history of the 20th century—ev3erything from the Holocaust to Stalin’s decimation of the peasants, to the slaughter in Cambodia by the Kjmer Rogue—had its collective roots in rejection of religious belief. But dismissing the word games of the New Atheists does not mean that they should be treated cavalierly.

The New Atheists all share a religious expression and religious principles from anywhere but the sacristy. This is not just a matter of removing God from the Pledge of Allegiance. They would forcibly expunge the very idea of God from public life. This has been seen before in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Dawkins, for example, would forbid parents to raise their children in a religious faith. Hitchens argues that any kind of role for religion in public life is a dangerous voice that he wants silenced.

And that’s why they simply cannot be ignored. A response is needed to their claims by believers. No matter how badly they throw a baseball.

This is post 45 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.