H. Allen Orr and Daniel Dennett are tearing into each other something fierce over at Edge, and it’s all over Orr’s dismissive review of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. It’s a bit splintery and sharp, but the core of Orr’s complaint, I think, is that he’s unimpressed with Dawkins’ ‘Ultimate 747’ argument, which is basically that postulating an immensely complicated being to explain the creation of an immensely complicated universe doesn’t actually explain anything and is self-refuting — if you need an intelligent superbeing to create anything complex, then the superbeing itself is an even greater problem for your explanation.

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Have you ever noticed that just about any atheist article will get labeled as a “rant”, no matter how thoughtful it might be? I guess that means you’ll find the Carnival of the Godless #62 loaded to the gills with howling, savage, unbridled ranting.

I like it.

Here’s a good interview with Brian Flemming, the documentarian behind The God Who Wasn’t There, who also irritated a lot of prissy reactionaries who have too-tight pants with his blasphemy challenge on youtube.

Simon Owens: Do you think the “blasphemy project” is an effective way for atheists to come out of the closet?

Brian Flemming: The Blasphemy Challenge has certainly encouraged quite a few godless folks to unequivocally state that they aren’t afraid of Satan. I think it’s hilarious that this is actually a controversial statement to make — as if Satan were not a purely mythological character. The Blasphemy Challenge is radical compared to how we normally talk about superstitions such as Christianity, but it shouldn’t be. It should always be acceptable to declare one’s independence from Bronze Age myths. In fact, it shouldn’t really be news at all.

I must say I’ve laughed and laughed at all the shrill indignation those little videos stirred up. He’s exactly right — the whole rationale behind the challenge was to highlight the misplaced reverence even liberal, self-professed non-Christians have for the paraphernalia of religion, and it accomplished that goal wonderfully.

So today we learn that Rep. Pete Stark admits to being godless.

There is only one member of Congress who is on record as not holding a god-belief.

Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), a senior member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, Chair of the Health Subcommittee, and member of Congress since 1973, acknowledged his nontheism in response to an inquiry by the Secular Coalition for America.

Although the Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office, the Coalition’s research reveals that Rep. Stark is the first open nontheist in the history of the Congress. Recent polls show that Americans without a god-belief are, as a group, more distrusted than any other minority in America. Surveys show that the majority of Americans would not vote for an atheist for president even if he or she were the most qualified for the office.

Herb Silverman, president of the Secular Coalition for America, attributes these attitudes to the demonization of people who don’t believe in God. “The truth is,” says Silverman, “the vast majority of us follow the Golden Rule and are as likely to be good citizens, just like Rep. Stark with over 30 years of exemplary public service. The only way to counter the prejudice against nontheists is for more people to publicly identify as nontheists. Rep. Stark shows remarkable courage in being the first member of Congress to do so.”

In November, 2006 the Secular Coalition for America, a national lobby representing the interests of atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other nontheists, announced a contest. At the time, few if any elected officials, even at the lowest level, would self-identify as a nontheist. So the Coalition offered $1,000 to the person who could identify the highest level atheist, humanist, freethinker or any other kind of nontheist currently holding elected public office in the United States.

In addition to Rep. Stark only three other elected officials agreed to do so: Terry S. Doran, president of the School Board in Berkeley, Calif.; Nancy Glista on the School Committee in Franklin, Maine; and Michael Cerone, a Town Meeting Member from Arlington, Mass.

Surveys vary in the percentage of atheists, humanists, freethinkers and other nontheists in the U.S, with about 10% (30 million people) a fair middle point. “If the number of nontheists in Congress reflected the percentage of nontheists in the population,” Lori Lipman Brown, director of the Secular Coalition, observes, “there would be 53-54 nontheistic Congress members instead of one.”

I’m a bit amused that after Stark, the next highest elected officials who aren’t afraid to admit their unbelief are three (count ’em, three) school board members scattered across the country. Is there active discrimination to exclude non-believers from the democratic process? You know there is.

Oh, and I don’t know a thing about Stark’s politics, other than that he’s a Democrat. Any of his constituents out there who want to let us know if he’s a representative we should be proud of?

Here’s another special interest wiki: Athpedia, die säkulare Enzyklopädie. It’s a wikipedia for secularists, and as you might guess from the description, it’s so far all in German. There isn’t a lot there right now, so make it grow; a moment’s browse with my slow and clumsy recollections of German suggests that it isn’t a bad site—at least the articles don’t read like they were scribbled by third-graders and cribbed from some bottom-tier homeschool rag—but it clearly needs more contributors. More English would be helpful, too, but I mustn’t be a language imperialist, I know.

I got a request for a children’s book on atheism—something to counter the usual sunday school tripe kids are fed, a version of The God Delusion for the younger set. Offhand, I couldn’t think of a thing. So, I thought, I’d turn to the collective wisdom and see if anyone out there knows of one or two.

You know, there is a niche here—all of us who have raised kids have wished that somewhere there was a primer on skeptical thinking, the scientific method, and religious criticism that was appropriate for early readers or junior high school kids. If you can’t think of one that’s already been done, who’s willing to volunteer to write one?

Robert M. Sapolsky is one of my favorite science writers — if you haven’t read Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, A Primate’s Memoir^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, or Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals ^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, I suggest you get off your butt right now and visit your library or bookstore. He’s a primatologist who studies the endocrinology and behavior of baboons, but he always presents his work in terms of the human condition. We aren’t so different, we primates.

If you don’t feel like getting up right this instant, though, at least click on this link to his speech to the Freedom From Religion Foundation. You’ll get a taste of that Sapolsky humanism that will get you wanting more, and he also has an interesting message: that religion is a kind of controlled psychosis.

It’s also a message that I’m surprised is not getting targeted by the creationists more. They are so hung up on godless evilutionism that they mostly don’t seem to realized that there is another, equally ferocious wolf coming up their flank, the neurosciences. Evolution is shredding their preconceptions about history and their origins, but neuroscience is going to rip out a different, but even more central concept: the soul. Minds are the products of electrochemical and molecular/physiological activity, not spirits or souls or extradimensional magical forces — brains are meat and thoughts are the product of ions and small molecules bubbling about in coordinated patterns. That doesn’t demean us and I think it makes us just as interesting and wonderful, but it is another case where the religious guesswork is proving wrong.

I’ve rarely seen it so starkly said:

“We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism,” says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. “Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England. Most of them would regard each other as destined to fry in hell.

“You have a triangle with fundamentalist secularists in one corner, fundamentalist faith people in another, and then the intelligent, thinking liberals of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, baptism, methodism, other faiths – and, indeed, thinking atheists – in the other corner. ” says Slee. Why does he think the other two groups are so vociferous? “When there was a cold war, we knew who the enemy was. Now it could be anybody. From this feeling of vulnerability comes hysteria.”

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