I’ll take a leaf from Chris Ho-Stuart’s book and urge you to read this post on Positive Liberty before I tackle his post. Jonathan Rowe is making the useful point that we have an interest in shaping religions, even religions with which we do not agree, to make them compatible with a civil, democratic society. He points out that the US founding fathers put an Enlightenment twist on the Christianity they favored, rejecting old notions of exclusivity and intolerance to promote a more benign form of religion — without actually establishing a state religion, they at least exemplified some broader-minded principles against which other religions had to compete, and it had the result of at least temporarily softening the hard-liners.

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Alistair McGrath came out with a book called The Dawkins Delusion? a while back, in response to The God Delusion, obviously. It seems to have sank without much of a trace, and what I’ve read of McGrath on the net has been tediously unimpressive — he’s another believer who mistakes criticizing Dawkins for a positive step in defending his faith — so I haven’t bothered to read it, especially since right now we’re flooded with good books on unbelief. I was sent a scathing critique of McGrath that I’ll cite here, though; it looks like his book is nothing but a long tirade against a straw Dawkins.

If anyone has any positive reviews of McGrath’s book, go ahead and post a link. As it stands, it’s a book I don’t have to add to my summer reading list.

Jason Rennie interviewed me for the Sci Phi podcast, and now you can listen to me babble about religion and science. I have got to do something about my office phone, though — the sound quality is terrible, and I’ve gotten the same complaint from others.

Or maybe that’s what I actually sound like, with a staticky hiss and the occasional feedback ringing. That would be kind of cool. It would almost make up for my mild manner.

Looking for some ungodly inspiration? Here are some possibilities:

• Revere optimistically sees atheism as becoming mainstream. I think this is the virtue of the open and aggressive discussions about atheism going on — there are more freethinkers out there than polls reveal, and they are silent because of the oppression of the majority. We are demolishing the societal avoidance of considering atheism; the goal isn’t exactly evangelical, since I don’t think we’re necessarily “converting” people, but more a matter of giving people the freedom to reject gods.

• It’s time for the Carnival of the Godless #66. 600 more, and we launch the Apocalypse.

• Richard Dawkins has assembled some succinct rebuttals to criticisms of The God Delusion. I particularly liked his response to the claim that “people need religion”. No, they do not. I don’t, Dawkins doesn’t—and it’s not as if we are weird mutants. You could say that people need stories, people need reconciliation, people need consonance with their world, and religion tries to provide those things…but the message we need to get across is that religion is a flawed, illusory, and erroneous strategy for providing for human needs, and we can do better.

• The Paszkiewicz/LaClair case has been settled. No blame was attached to either side, but the settlement does make it clear that teaching Biblical superstition as history is not to be permitted, so it’s an implicit rebuke, although Paszkiewicz still gets off scot-free.

Quick, listen to this realaudio talk by Mark Steel on Thomas Paine while it’s still available on the BBC site. It’s both hysterically funny and informative. One revelation for me was that America’s early fervently godless rabble-rouser began his career by signing on to a ship called the Terrible, under Captain Death, and also sailed as a privateer. I tell you, there’s a mystic connection between atheists and pirates!

Nicole Smalkowski, the young woman discriminated against because she is an atheist, was in the news again on Friday. She was interviewed by John Stossel (who is a colossal douche) for 20/20 and a story about disbelief in America. Stossel makes much of the fact that atheists are a minority and that this is a “Christian nation”, but no matter how smarmy he gets, the sincerity of the Smalkowski family and the injustice of Nicole‘s situation comes through loud and clear.

If you missed the broadcast like I did, have no fear, Norm comes through: it’s available at onegoodmove.

We usually called places like Hardesty, Oklahoma “small town America”, but I think we have to rephrase that to “small mind America.” What Nicole really needs to do is hang tough for a little longer and get away to an open-minded university—they’re everywhere, and there she’ll find a community of people who think unbelief is just fine (one reason going to college erodes faith isn’t just that students get smarter—finding out that you don’t have to believe in nonsense to be a good person and that you can be accepted socially if you don’t go to church every Sunday can be very liberating). I can vouch for Minnesota’s Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists organization as a very welcoming group — I’ll be their faculty advisor in the coming year, and we’re planning to start a chapter here at my campus this fall (and my campus has an American Indian tuition waver, by the way, encourages participation in sports, has a lively music program, has excellent academic standards, and is set in a very low stress small town environment. Hint, hint. I’d love to see more rural Americans getting enlightened at universities and returning to their communities to open those tight and puckered minds.)

Next week, the Humanists of Minnesota are having their annual banquet and fundraiser. You should all go! It’s at the Doubletree Hotel, 1500 Park Place Boulevard, in St Louis Park, at 6:00 on 19 May. Tickets are $37.

Here! A flyer and ticket order form!

The featured speaker at the dinner is, umm, me, but don’t let that put you off, there will be lots of opportunity to converse with your fellow freethinkers. There is a kind of generic title for the talk that was invented way back when I was first invited, “Evolution, the Web and Freethought,” but I’m not actually going to say much about the web — instead, I’m going to talk a bit about the “new” atheism (which isn’t really new at all), and why scientists are suddenly getting so assertive, and how evolution is central to the erosion of religion.

It should be fun. If you want to come to heckle and throw tomatoes, that’s good, too…as long as you cough up some cash for the Humanists of Minnesota.

Fox News happily reports that a scientific study has found that Religion is Good for Kids!

Jean Mercer scrutinizes the study, finds it dubious at best, and Dale McGowan suggests that a better title would have been Religion May Make Some First Graders Marginally Easier to Manage.

Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with making first graders more docile—it would make them less likely to turn their priest in to the police, for instance. The paper is making its conclusions from some rather shaky and selective analysis of subjective observations, though, so it isn’t even particularly reassuring about that.

I am a little concerned about the way the data was sampled, though. There’s this one bit:

Because of their dependence on Early Childhood Longitudinal Study information, Bartkowski et al. were restricted to some very simple measures of religious participation, with stress on the congruence of fathers’ and mothers’ religious attendance. The measures included the question, “Do you and your [current partner] often, sometimes, hardly ever, or never have arguments about religion?”

Um, in my family, we’d answer “never” — we rarely even discuss religion. Congruence was high, there was little conflict in our family; does this mean that if we’d participated, we’d have been one of the data points supporting the conclusion that religion is good for kids?

I’ve been trying to see the Dawkins interview on CBC for the last few days, but it’s always in that horrible wmv format, which only seems to work about half the time on my laptop. Cosmic Afterthoughts has the youtube version — it’s pretty good. It’s a pleasant, relaxed conversation where each side has the opportunity to talk, and the interviewer isn’t too intrusive.

The Rational Response Squad has released an amateur video of their debate with Cameron and Comfort.

I didn’t care for the argument that the universe might be infinite, but otherwise, not bad. Not great, either, but then they were just presenting the sensible position. Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron were terrible. They quickly abandoned the pretense of providing scientific evidence, and instead reached for the bible and simply asserted its truth.

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I just have to expand on something in the face of a lot of criticism of the Rational Response Squad in the comments. I agree that they weren’t as polished as we might have wanted, some of their arguments weren’t very sharp, and there were missed opportunities…but the important thing is that they stepped up to the challenge and confronted those creationist kooks. Maybe deGrasse Tyson would have done a much better job, but so what? He’s one guy.

We aren’t going to win this conflict when a few of our very best speakers give an eloquent speech. We are going to win when every average Jane and Joe in the country realizes that they are smarter and better informed than clowns like Comfort and Cameron, and when half the audience at these kinds of events rises out of their seat to confidently argue with them…and the other half are sitting there laughing at the creationists.

So sure, we can and should quibble with their presentation—that’s how it will get better—but keep in mind the last time you got up to confront a creationist in public.