All the mistakes of the godly are merely metaphor

Imagine you found a population in the US where the majority of the people believed that 2+2=5, and that attempts to correct them with the actual, correct result of adding two numbers were regarded as insults to their revered traditions. I think we’d all agree that they a) they were wrong; b) they were misled, misinformed, and miseducated; c) that they were ignorant of arithmetic; or d) might very well have been maliciously deceived by someone in their midst. Somehow, though, if the ridiculous error involves God, some people take a big step backwards and are appalled that anyone might criticize them. Those “revered traditions” become more than mere excuses, they are inviolate.

You guessed it, once again someone was aggravated that I have dared to call adherence to religious belief a case of being “ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed.” This time our indignant contestant is Mark A. R. Kleiman, who considers it atheistic bigotry to enumerate the reasons why people might come to absurd and erroneous conclusions. That 80-90% of this population, which is not hypothetical at all but is the entire US, believes that chanting their wishes into the sky might get them granted by a magic being, or that over half use the excuse of their religious dogma to reject the basic facts of modern biology, is something we must not question and especially must not criticize. Because it is religion, it must be respected.

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Another liar for Jesus

Speaking of looney, unbelievable opponents of the Evo-Atheist Hegemony, Jeffrey Shallit knocks the stuffing out of a blithering apologist for superstition, Peter Berkowitz. When an anti-atheist claims that people like Richard Dawkins are arguing that “we can now know, with finality and certainty, that God does not exist,” you know that they either haven’t even looked at any of our arguments or are simply cheerfully lying.

Recruiting the local unbelievers

It’s never too early to start advertising: Skatje is starting up a new campus organization next fall, with another student, Collin Tierney, as co-chair. The group is called the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists – Morris Chapter, and if you’re an interested UMM student, they’d like you to join the facebook group at that link. The plan is to start the fall term with a respectable number of potential members, have weekly meetings, and develop a plan for education and outreach and just plain having fun.

I think Skatje and Collin are planning to have open meetings, so you don’t even have to be a student to show up.

Spontaneous religion — that’s our test

The new burned-over district lies in the wreckage of Russia — take a look at the new weird cults flowering in Siberia. Jesus is hanging out on a hilltop there, even.

There’s something strange in the human brain that, when people are uncertain and stripped of security and bewildered by too much change, they try to find refuge in any nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it’s said confidently and is reinforced by social pressures. This is a real phenomenon that’s cropped up again and again in human history, and it’s sad to see it rising again.

People have been talking a lot about these “New Atheists” lately, and I haven’t liked the term at all. I don’t think we can call anyone a “New Atheist” yet, until they actually come up with something new…and I think the new thing, the Holy Grail of godlessness, ought to be the articulation of a framework for rational thought, ethics, and social organization that excludes reliance on divinity or revelation, and yet is strong enough to anchor human minds in the face of desolation. Not another cult like the brew fermenting in Russia, but a defense against cultish thinking that inoculates the mind against that kind of susceptibility.

Somebody figure that one out for me, willya?

In which the obnoxious atheist addresses his critics, and makes a polite suggestion to his fellow bloggers

This week, I tossed off a casual, flippant comment that launched a thousand ineffectual bastinados. I described a map that purported to show the frequency of religious adherents in the US this way:

It shows the concentration of ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed victims of obsolete mythologies in the United States, with the lighter colors being the most enlightened and the dark reds being the most repressed and misinformed

Fury, outrage, and massive snits ensued. Blogs were riven to their very foundations by anger — “How dare Myers insult me…I am offended!” — and the sun was darkened in the sky, while badgers gave birth to raccoons and other abominations occurred with alarmingly elevated frequency. Mostly, though, people wrote more blog posts pro and con, commenters were roused to furious typing, fora were inundated with tirades, and my in-box was overflowing.

I was much amused — man, wait until I really cut loose — but basically thought the to-do was far too much noise about nothing. Please try to get used to it, O Pious Ones: atheists think your beliefs are wacky. Just as wacky as you find idols to monkey gods or cargo cults or Mormonism or Seventh Day Adventists or Bratz dolls. But now that the bonfire is cooling to a few scattered glowing embers, I thought I’d offer a few general responses to the most common complaints.

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It’s good to be home, especially when welcomed by Natalie Angier

I’m home from our vacation, and our painfully tiring redeye flight from Seattle, and I get a treat right as I step through the door: a copy of Natalie Angier’s The Canon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) arrived in the mail while I was away. What did I do? Right after we got all the luggage into the house, I flopped down on the bed with it and read it until the lack of sleep caught up with me — and it’s good enough that I actually made it through the first two chapters before passing out. It’s a passionate and enthusiastic survey of basic principles in science, and it’s fun to read.

Then I discovered that onegoodmove had a video interview of Angier talking about her book. She’s very good; check it out. She’s the kind of science journalist I want to see more of, and everyone should go out and buy her book to encourage her to do more.

One annoyance: several of the commenters at onegoodmove seem to be of the concern troll variety. Here’s this smart, fluent, talented writer who is also a world-class science geek and atheist, and they start picking over her appearance and body language — it’s rather dismaying, in particular since her gestures are no more flamboyant than those of her (male) interviewer. I’ve long thought that Natalie Angier would make an excellent spokesperson for godless science, and wondered why we don’t see more of her … and I wonder if part of the reason is that the same troglodytes who grunt in disgust at the sight of someone who doesn’t respect their sky-god are also appalled at the sight of a woman speaking confidently about high geek factor subjects and also dismissing their primitive superstitions.

Although the idea of living in sin with my wife is deliciously tempting…

Here’s a curious poll: “If marriage is a sacred institution authored by God, should atheists be barred from marrying?”

One answer is sweeping the vote (and I don’t think sending the Pharynguloid horde over there will change the trend), but Austin is making an interesting point. If gay people can’t marry because their union violates some religious requirement, then shouldn’t atheist marriages also be invalid? It seems to me that if you are arguing that marriage is a divine sacrament — and obviously, I don’t think it is — then a consistent fundamentalist ought to be arguing for the denial of married status to unbelievers.

Thank God fundamentalists aren’t consistent.

Practicing information hygiene

A high school student loans a friend, another high school student, his copy of The God Delusion. Two things happen: the friend’s father loses his cool and complains to their school, and a school administrator suggests that this was an establishment clause violation. And this was at a school that allowed the Gideons to distribute bibles in the parking lot!

At least the lunatic father finally returned the book.

It’s ironic. I get accused of being some kind of deranged militant atheist, yet when my kids got handed tracts and evangelical comic books and were asked to attend church and sunday school with their friends (and all of those were reasonably common events), I just gave ’em the thumbs up, read the comics myself (they were uniformly terrible), and shooed ’em out the door on Sunday morning. Yet scrubbing the information their kids are allowed to see is common practice among the religious — it’s the primary reason for Christian home schooling, for instance.

I’ve always figured I was just boosting their intellectual immune system.

(via the Friendly Atheist)