Bye bye, RA

I suspect that soon there will be at least one religious person who will claim he converted from atheism who I will believe. The Raving Atheist is getting ripe: he’s been ramping up the irrationality for some time now, precessing like a top slowing down, and I expect that soon enough he’ll flop over for Jesus. I’m not questioning his sincerity—he is an atheist, all right, and there is no doubt about it—but his sympathies are getting weirder and weirder.

This is not a new development. I’ve discussed his radical pro-life position before, and now Punkassblog and Amanda bring to my attention his latest post, in which he foreswears saying an unkind word about Christianity ever again, and in which I learn that he’s been actively working with one of those ghastly dishonest “crisis pregnancy centers” that offer no services other than propaganda (and, apparently, free teddy bears) and exist only to mislead women worried about pregnancy.

You know, I think I’d forgive an open conversion to Christianity far more easily than I can his irresponsible affiliation with those charlatans and fanatics.

His rationalizations for pro-life extremism simply don’t make sense: he seems to think something special happens at fertilization that unambiguously and unarbitrarily defines a human being. Diploidy is not the scientific term for ensoulment. Genetic specification is not sufficient to specify an individual. Potential is not a synonym for actuality. Fertilization is not a switch that triggers an ineluctable program towards individuality. The combinatorial uniqueness of an individual’s genome is inadequate to define the individual. Amanda notes that most opposition to abortion comes from either religious convictions, a commitment to a sexist social order, or I’d add, a rather primitive and unthinking desire to tightly control reproduction in potential mates and kin. I don’t know which of these apply to RA, but his weak excuses clearly rule out that it might have been an intellectual decision on his part.

He’s welcome to his convictions about abortion, but he needs to face it: they aren’t reasonable, and they’re as batty as Dawn Eden.

Dershowitz vs. Keyes

A reader sent me a link to this highly entertaining debate between Alan Keyes and Alan Dershowitz on religion. You can download the mp3 and have the two Alans shouting at each other on the stereo while you fix your bowl of oatmeal in the morning, like I did. I think Dershowitz kicked butt—if nothing else, he got Keyes to admit that if he’d been president, he wouldn’t have allowed any atheists to have positions of responsibility in the government—and there’s a lot of good, healthy shouting going on. My only reservation is that, well, it’s Dershowitz, who has supported torture, vs. Keyes, who is simply insane.

I thought this was good:

In North America today, according to a recent census, there are 27 million people who are not religious and a million and a half avowed atheists. There is no evidence to suggest they are less moral than those who go to synagogue, mosque, and church everyday. Indeed, it is my contention that a truly moral person, who acts morally–not out of fear of damnation or out of promise of reward, but because it’s the right thing–if anything, is more moral. More moral. The atheist or the agnostic who throws himself in front of an oncoming bus to save a child, knowing that there is no eternal promise, that there is nothing but the grave that awaits him, is more moral than Sir Thomas More who made a cost/benefit analysis as to whether or not to face eternal damnation by disobeying the pope or face instantaneous death by disobeying the king.

The Episcopalians do something impressive

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They’ve elected a new presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori. You have to look at her biography to see why I’m even mentioning a new religious leader:

As a scientist and an Episcopalian, I cherish the prayer that follows a baptism, that the newly baptized may receive “the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.” I spent the early years of my adulthood as an oceanographer, studying squid and octopuses, including their evolutionary relationships. I have always found that God’s creation is “strange and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139). …

The vast preponderance of scientific evidence, including geology, paleontology, archaeology, genetics and natural history, indicates that Darwin was in large part correct in his original hypothesis.

I simply find it a rejection of the goodness of God’s gifts to say that all of this evidence is to be refused because it does not seem to accord with a literal reading of one of the stories in Genesis. Making any kind of faith decision is based on accumulating the best evidence one can find what one’s senses and reason indicate, what the rest of the community has believed over time, and what the community judges most accurate today.

It’s a good thing that article is loaded with Bible quotes and other religious nonsense, or I’d be tempted to become an Episcopalian. Oh, well, even with all the wacky mythological stuff, she still looks like one of the good ones. Congratulations, Dr Jefferts Schori! While I’m not about to join a church, you do exhibit the kind of sensible perspective on the real world I’d like to see much, much more of in religious leaders…although, looking at the comments here, some Christianists are less than thrilled with the election of a rationalist to head a church, while others seem to be enthusiastic.

(via Kynos)

Fear of the godless

That’s what it all boils down to, isn’t it? People are afraid of reason, because they know it erodes faith—better to foster ignorance than risk encouraging people to think. Brian Flemming, of The God Who Wasn’t There, links to an interesting account of what happened when an ‘open-minded’ church offered to screen his movie: they only showed two clips and bracketed them with lots of apologetic padding. I think they know what would happen if they let that bomb go off in the minds of their faithful congregants.

This stuff is going to get out there, though. Dawkins’ series, The Root of All Evil? is available online right now: here are links to the two parts, The God Delusion and The Virus of Faith. Dangerous stuff, that. Expose a child to the Enlightenment today!

Ann Coulter believes every Democrat is an atheist

One more thing about the odious Coulter…Amanda takes note of the bigotry lurking under her schtick in the way she uses “Jew” like it was a dirty word. But look at her book: her weird attitude is right there in the title, Godless. I really thought nothing of it except, well, she’s at least acknowledging us irreligious people, until I saw her on Leno where she made this same point, and read this Townhall column, Party of rapist proud to be godless.

My book makes a stark assertion: Liberalism is a godless religion. Hello! Anyone there? I’ve leapt beyond calling you traitors and am now calling you GODLESS. Apparently, everybody’s cool with that. The fact that liberals are godless is not even a controversial point anymore.

I suddenly realized that she intended the title as some kind of ghastly, unforgivable insult, and she’s disappointed that no one was taking it that way. When someone calls me godless, I scratch my head, wonder what the big deal is, and agree…I sure am, and proud of it. I may argue with my fellow liberal/progressives who call themselves the Christian left, but I can guess how they would react. They’d scratch their heads, think that was absurdly wrong, and wonder what the insult was supposed to be. Sort of like if someone called me a Jew; I’d just think they were wrong, wouldn’t be bothered at all, and wonder what the heck was wrong with someone who thought it was powerful slander. Everybody’s cool with it because it’s revealing the slimy nature of Coulter’s character, not ours. So I’m not complaining; I think it’s bizarre that someone believes everyone in the Democratic party is an atheist.

Since GODLESS didn’t have the effect she wanted, I guess she’s going to have to ramp up the hysteria further in her next title. Maybe it will be JEW or GAY, or maybe she’ll go all the way and drop the TOLERANT bomb on us…and we’ll all be scratching our heads again.

By the way, the “rapist” in “party of rapist”? Bill Clinton, of course.

Coulter is simply certifiable.

Francis, I’m very disappointed in you

Francis Collins is a very smart, very disciplined, very hardworking man. He was the head of the Human Genome Project, and now he has written a book, The Language of God : A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I have to tell you, it doesn’t look promising.

He talks about his ideas in an interview. It’s the usual dreary stuff we get from the god-botherers, and it’s clear that this is a subject on which he willingly turns his intellect to off.

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Now we have to import the godless

This is very good news, but don’t you wish we had a few more prominent American secularists to put on this advisory board? Welcome, Richard. Help us out!

Famed Scientist Richard Dawkins Joins the Advisory Board of the Secular
Coalition for America

Washington, DC — The Secular Coalition for America is
pleased to announce the addition of Richard Dawkins to its Advisory Board.
The Secular Coalition for America is the first lobbying organization
representing the interests of atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other
nontheists in the nation’s capitol.

[Read more…]