Good for the Godless Party

The Secular Coalition for America has put together a Secular Scorecard for our representatives in both houses of congress, evaluating them for how they voted on issues of importance (separation of church and state, science, funding religious organizations, that sort of thing) in the past year. It’s interesting in a sad way in how it’s split along party lines: the lesson is that the godless should never, ever vote Republican, but that Democrats are only mostly safe. There are a few screwballs like Salazar and Nelson of Nebraska that throw off the general rule that you can divide them neatly by party, but generally you see disparities like this, for Minnesota.

MINNESOTA Party RC130 RC131 RC132 RC133 RC1 RC2 RC158 RC159 RC163 RC206 Score

Coleman, N

 R – – – – – – – – – – 0

Dayton, M

 D + + + + + + + + + + 100

Even if Democrats aren’t godless themselves, they’re mostly on our side on the issues that count.

Sadly, I suspect that rather than being proud of their voting record, this is one endorsement they’ll struggle to hide.

Infidels

There are plenty of outspoken atheists in the United States—read the latest Carnival of the Godless #48 for a small sampling—but you can still find many mainstream journalists writing about them as if they were peculiar aliens living under a log with other unsavory and oddly constructed organisms. Today, it’s Newsweek that exclaims in surprise that there are godless people among us.

It’s not a very deep or thoughtful article, and what I found most noticeable about it is the obliviousness of the author. Here’s how it starts:

Americans answered the atrocities of September 11, overwhelmingly, with faith. Attacked in the name of God, they turned to God for comfort; in the week after the attacks, nearly 70 percent said they were praying more than usual. Confronted by a hatred that seemed inexplicable, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson proclaimed that God was mad at America because it harbored feminists, gays and civil libertarians.

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Scienceblogs snipe-back!

Two can play this game—Chad Orzel, who sometimes likes to blame his insufficient popularity on his off-puttingly deep wisdom and excessive sense of moderation and fair play, notes approvingly that “All the world’s stupidest people are either zealots or atheists,” and that “certainty only comes from dogma,” both rather interesting statements coming from a scientist. My certainty that I shouldn’t step out of my second-story window, or that I shouldn’t eat a large cake of rat poison, don’t come from personal experience, but they aren’t dogmatic, either—although I’m awfully darn certain that warfarin and high velocity impacts with solid surfaces would probably be lethal. I can think of many examples and experiments that demonstrate these facts without actually having to experience mortality personally, or requiring blind adherence to unsupported dogma.

Similarly, I am sensible enough to see that religion is an irrational course, without having to actually meet God face-to-face, and without having to comb through every particle of the universe looking for him. Waffling is not a virtue, nor is an absence of conviction a signifier of open-mindedness—not when the evidence all points one way.

Neither is traffic to a weblog a measure of its accuracy, whether inversely or otherwise, and heck, I don’t get fifty thousand visitors a day, either. I hope he’ll forgive me for adding to his damning tally of visitors with this link.

Come back, Henry Louis!

I’ve been prodded by Marcus to mention a recent article by Brian Leiter, Could Mencken Write for a Newspaper Today? I think I just assumed everyone was already reading the Leiter Reports regularly.

Anyway, where are our modern Menckens—the acerbic, secular critics of the culture of the mindless? It’s amazing what he could write in the early years of the last century; I’ll also point out that Ingersoll got away with scathing criticisms of religion in the 19th century. Nowadays, though, people are actually shocked that anyone would question religious belief.

Shermer on Salon

Don’t let the first paragraph stop you—it’s awful. Once the reporter gets out of the way and lets Shermer get going, though, it’s a good interview.

Here’s the bad part of the opening:

Some of Shermer’s ivory towerish science pals, like Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, told him not to bother with the I.D. boosters, that acknowledging them meant going along for their political ride, where the integrity of science was being run into the ground.

Gould and Dawkins have both said we shouldn’t debate creationists—we shouldn’t elevate them to the same status that science holds. But both certainly have ripped into ID; the argument isn’t that we shouldn’t criticize them forcefully, but that we shouldn’t give them the opportunity to pretend their dogmatic foolishness is the equal of science.

After that, though, the article is good godless fare.

God of fear

Newsweek has a short article on military atheists and the discrimination they face.

“There are no atheists in foxholes,” the old saw goes. The line, attributed to a WWII chaplain, has since been uttered countless times by grunts, chaplains and news anchors. But an increasingly vocal group of activists and soldiers–atheist soldiers–disagrees. “It’s a denial of our contributions,” says Master Sgt. Kathleen Johnson, who founded the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers and who will be deployed to Iraq this fall. “A lot of people manage to serve without having to call on a higher power.”

It has always seemed to me that that old myth is actually an admission: an admission that religion is driven by fear. Just crank up the terror on people, it’s saying, and we can get ’em to believe anything. There might be some truth to that, but if anything, it’s an adage that is damning to religion, saying that faith is an exploitation of human weakness.

Sinners in the hands of an angry phantasm

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Hank Fox just dropped me a line mentioning an older article he’d found, as something I might want to blog about. Yes, it was—I wrote about it sometime ago, and here it is again. The article Hank found is also worth reading, with a strong conclusion:

Despite all its fine words, religion has brought in its wake little more than violence, prejudice and sexual disease. True morality is found elsewhere. As UK Guardian columnist George Monbiot concluded in his review of Gregory Paul’s study, “if you want people to behave as Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not exist.”

It’s a very cool article—it had the religious up in arms, because it flat out demonstrates that belief in God does not confer any social advantages, and is actually a net detriment to a culture.

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