I don’t believe it

Everyone has been sending me this story about how a researcher has deduced from the crazy talk in the bible that Moses was high on drugs. I don’t believe it. Sure, it’s possible, but the information is insufficient, and the hypothesis is unnecessary.

Look at Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Robert Tilton, Billy Graham, Kathryn Kuhlman, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker, Ted Haggard, Kent Hovind, Oral Roberts, Aimee Semple McPherson, Peter Popoff, Benny Hinn, Fulton Sheen, Charles Coughlin, and every single little podunk charismatic and fundamentalist preacher you can find in any town in the country. They all report visions and conversations with a god, and get ’em going and they’ll start babbling apocalyptic nonsense ala Revelation … and they aren’t all high on psychedelic drugs. Human beings have a phenomenal capacity for self-delusion and fantasy; we don’t need to postulate strange drugs in the absence of evidence to explain lunatic religious behavior, and it’s actually a bit of a cop-out.

Disappointed again

Somewhere south of San Francisco, there is a billboard that declares that there is physical proof of the existence of a god, and which suggests that you read their website. A reader sent it to me, and being the sort of open minded fellow who doesn’t believe in any gods but is happy to look at any evidence someone might find, I looked.

I’m still an atheist. You can stop here if you want.

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Too little, too late, too cheesy

The Vatican wants to erect a statue to Galileo, which is ironic enough. But to put the cherry on top, they plan to place it near the cell where he was held during his heresy trial. Do you think they’re doing this as a sign of papal humility, a sort of grand, ornate slap to the forehead and admission that “boy, did we make a boner”? Somehow, I suspect arrogance plays a bigger role.

And they call us arrogant

The premise of evangelical atheism is that you can introduce people to the importance of reason and they will come to a reasonable conclusion on their own. The premise of evangelical faith is that people must accept an arbitrary belief because an arbitrary judge, who the convert may not query, demands it. The former kind of proselytizer ought to be called a teacher, but is more often called an arrogant asshole; the latter ought to be considered a liar, a fraud, and an arrogant asshole in fact, but they actually believe they are humble servants of the lord.

Here’s a beautiful example of oblivious faith in a story of an encounter with a Mormon missionary.

His position was that there are NO righteous people absent baptism into the Mormon faith; that no one enters heaven without it.

Since it had recently come to public attention that Elie Wiesel’s name was on a list for future baptism, I asked him if Wiesel would qualify as a “righteous man”.

No, replied the Mormon, Wiesel would not qualify.

“But you would, being a Mormon?” I asked.

Yes, replied the Mormon.

Well, I told the kid, any belief system that makes you righteous over Elie Wiesel seems pretty obviously fucked.

But it does make the kid feel all noble and important for putting on a white polyester shirt and riding a bicycle, which I think is the point of the appeal of religion: all the righteousness, none of the sacrifice or hard work.

The snakes are probably a confirming sign

Sorry, California. After the plague of migratory, mammal-eating pythons, we now have independent testimony that God doesn’t like you.

God is disgusted with California legislators – at least some of them, according to an evangelical chaplain who ruffled feathers this week in the same Capitol where he leads Bible studies for lawmakers.

No, I don’t accept his personal claims about the desires of the Great Cosmic Poobah, but the evidence from the situation that 1) this bozo gets paid $120,000/year to evangelize to politicians, and 2) weepy-eyed politicians are stumbling all over themselves to reassure the electorate that God does too like them. You lose whether this god exists or not.

I’m sure there’s a paradox in here somewhere

The Colorado NPR station KUNC recently ran a credulous fluff piece by some guy named Marc Ringel, touting “healing at a distance”, some sort of magic handwaving that he claims is “scientifically” supported. The Colorado skeptical community, of course, has expressed their scorn in email to the station, and also brought it to my attention. They also mentioned an excellent website reviewing the evidence for intercessory prayer.

The most interesting revelation to me: I’ve heard of tests of intercessory prayer, where people pray or don’t pray for a patient and then the outcomes are evaluated to see if it helped (it never does), but there’s another weird version of these improbable experiments.

Retroactive intercessory prayer.

It’s what it sounds like. The investigators took old hospital records, from patients who had been treated 4-10 years before, and asked subjects to pray for one group, and not pray for the other group. They then looked again at the old records to see if the patients that were prayed for now had gotten better then … and they did.

Think that through for a moment. It really is that insane.

So if ever you learn that I’ve gone into the hospital and died, I want you all to get together and pray really, really hard and change the past so I come back to life.

Oh, wait. I’m talking to the wrong people, aren’t I? I need to get a more devout readership who will have the true magic ju-ju to pull off time travel.

America: slouching towards the Enlightenment

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So…have you all read the latest Pew report on American religion? It’s been reported in the NY Times, too, and I heard that it was the lead story on CBS News (which, unfortunately, said something about a “secular, morally empty America” — did anyone catch it, or better yet, record it?).

It’s mostly good news. We’ve got a fragmented, shrinking Protestant population, Catholics are abandoning ship in droves and what’s keeping it afloat is Catholic immigration from the south, and the “unaffiliateds” are growing fast, especially among young adults.

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

16.1% is still a minority, but keep in mind that Catholics are 24% of the population — we could pass them by in a few years. Look at that table on the right. We’re huge (but not at all organized or unified, of course) and growing fast. It’s worth looking at past assesments: in 1990, the nonreligious were about 7.5% of the population; in 2001, 13.2%; now, 16.1%.

The Pew people break down the “unaffiliateds” a bit more, and it looks like a significant number of them do still have considerable affection or perhaps dependency on religion — they just don’t seem to like the existing sects. I suspect we can blame that not on the attraction of atheism, but the repulsion from overreaching, grasping American religion.

Like the other major groups, people who are unaffiliated with any particular religion (16.1%) also exhibit remarkable internal diversity. Although one-quarter of this group consists of those who describe themselves as either atheist or agnostic (1.6% and 2.4% of the adult population overall, respectively), the majority of the unaffiliated population (12.1% of the adult population overall) is made up of people who simply describe their religion as “nothing in particular.” This group, in turn, is fairly evenly divided between the “secular unaffiliated,” that is, those who say that religion is not important in their lives (6.3% of the adult population), and the “religious unaffiliated,” that is, those who say that religion is either somewhat important or very important in their lives (5.8% of the overall adult population).

But don’t try to argue that this “new” muscular atheism is driving people away. 1.6% self-identifying as atheists is a big leap forward: in 2001, that number was 0.4%.

It’s not all good news, though, and this one point here is something we must address.

To illustrate this point, one need only look at the biggest gainer in this religious competition — the unaffiliated group. People moving into the unaffiliated category outnumber those moving out of the unaffiliated group by more than a three-to-one margin. At the same time, however, a substantial number of people (nearly 4% of the overall adult population) say that as children they were unaffiliated with any particular religion but have since come to identify with a religious group. This means that more than half of people who were unaffiliated with any particular religion as a child now say that they are associated with a religious group. In short, the Landscape Survey shows that the unaffiliated population has grown despite having one of the lowest retention rates of all “religious” groups.

So we’re growing fast, but our children have a significant chance of ‘backsliding’ into some religion later in life. I suspect that is a consequence of the fact that most non-religious households will not provide any specific training in beliefs (I know I didn’t!) and godlessness is often presented as simple disbelief without a body of associated positive values. We need to change that.

Although there is also an alternative interpretation: how often have you heard the theistic testimonial that begins “Once I was an atheist…”? It’s practically a cliche. Another possibility is that a lot of born-agains will report their childhood as being unaffiliated with any religion, when what they really mean is that there was religion, it was just less fervent than their current zealotry. I’m not entirely convinced that the supposed low retention rate is real.

Anyway, we have something to feel good about — the trends are running towards a return to a more secular America, although obviously we have a ways to go yet. And of course, when the Rapture comes and all the charismafundagelical loonies vanish in a puff of incense, we’ll have an even greater forward lurch in the percentages.