What organization rakes in the cash by exploiting the poor and making extravagant claims that never come true? What business is built entirely on mass marketing and dishonest advertising, and yet is never called into account for its failure? It isn’t the tobacco companies or the makers of penis enlargement drugs — it’s religion.

I have no idea whether this is a brilliant idea or just the daydream of an ambulance-chasing shyster, but someone is pursuing Earths Greatest Lawsuit — an effort to gather a swarm of plaintiffs to slam various religious organizations with numerous lawsuits.

It’s an interesting idea. I’m not a fan of the sue-them-into-compliance strategy for social issues myself (I want people to change their ideas, not bankrupt them and make them powerless), but I do like the idea of making religious organizations accountable for their real-world claims.

Besides, God is a ripe fruit ready for plucking — everyone knows the Devil has all the lawyers.

The German Family Ministry (does anyone know if inclusion of the word “family” in an organization title is as ominous auf Deutsch as it is in English?) wants to ban a children’s book. The book is about two little animals on a pilgrimage to find god, and in the end they don’t find him anywhere, and conclude that they haven’t been missing anything. There’s a good reason to ban it, I’m sure…

“The three large religions of the world, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, are slurred in the book,” the ministry wrote in a December memo. “The distinctive characteristics of each religion are made ridiculous.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. If that were grounds for banning, the Bible has to be the next book on their hit list.

A little further on, they do hit on a more legitimate reason, if it were true: the argument that the illustrations of the book are hateful stereotypes, of the sort that Germany has good reason to be sensitive about: you know, the old anti-semitic caricatures of Jews as hook-nosed and greedy. If they’d taken that ugly shortcut, yeah, I’d agree — it would be just more hate literature. However, they include several images from the book, and they don’t look like that: the rabbi looks like any of the ordinary orthodox Jews you’d see walking around New York, so it’s a bit of a stretch.

Maybe it’s badly written. Maybe other illustrations are more overtly hateful. Just don’t try to tell me it’s a bad book because it makes ridiculous religions look ridiculous.

I have my suspicions about the source of the problem, though. The book is titled “How Do I Get to God, Asked the Small Piglet” — Ken Ham must be trying to suppress it.

Oxford University is getting $4 million from — who else? — the Templeton Foundation to study “why mankind embraces god”. I hope that what I’m seeing is mere journalistic sloppy truncation, but knowing the Templeton Foundation and the usual crap I read from theologians, I fear that this does reflect their starting premise:

He [Roger Trigg, director of the program] said anthropological and philosophical research suggests that faith in God is a universal human impulse found in most cultures around the world, even though it has been waning in Britain and western Europe.

“One implication that comes from this is that religion is the default position, and atheism is perhaps more in need of explanation,” he said.

“Universal human impulse,” my left butt cheek. There are a lot of us who find ourselves quite content once we’ve shed religious indoctrination, and feel not one iota of desire to participate in supernatural foolishness. We happen to be human; there hasn’t been a wave of X-Man-style mutations sweeping the globe, transforming a subset of the human race into trans-human beings with the super-power of being able to see through lies. “Faith in God” is also a peculiarly Abrahamic view of religion — I’m surprised that any anthropologists behind this scheme haven’t been jumping up and down, trying to explain that there are many cultures in this world other than the Islamo-Judea-Christian axis of monotheistic intolerance, and the concept of a domineering paternalistic sky daddy is not universal.

There are human universals. We are curious or concerned about the world around us; we look for causal explanations for events; we like explanatory narratives that link sequences of events together; we tend to anthropomorphize and project our motivations and our expectation of agency on objects in our environment. That’s human nature, and religion isn’t at all intrinsic to it. Far from being the default, religion is a pathologic parasite that rides along on those human desires by promoting the illusion of agency as an all-encompassing explanation for everything, and by providing a framework for story-telling. Basically, it’s a nice collection of lies that makes for a self-serving story — it’s the original Mary Sue. Religion is like badly written fan fiction (in the case of the Abrahamic religions, in the fantasy/horror genre), and is no more an intrinsic component of human nature than is Star Trek slash, although it certainly is a warped reflection of human tendencies.

Maybe someone ought to stop and think that any universal explanation of human nature must include both theists and atheists, rather than treating the latter as a mere exception to be disregarded. Maybe they ought to notice that one good reason for rising godlessness is that entirely secular explanations succeed in providing a satisfying causal narrative, and have the added virtue that they’re actually true. Science works, quite unlike prayer.

Starting with the assumption that “religion,” that chaotic potpourri of diverse false starts in comprehending the universe, is a natural element of humanity and that it is the default position, whatever that is, was probably a necessary bit of pandering to milk money out of that blithely ideological promoter of happy lies called the Templeton Foundation, but it sounds to me like a proposal to build a research program on a false foundation. Maybe they’ll surprise me (and horrify Templeton), but I don’t expect anything but useless noise from such a proposal.

Maybe they should just give me the $4 million. It would help me get this damn book done.

What should me make of this ugly story from Turkey?

A high school senior and an elementary school student were attacked in the Mediterranean town of Mersin with strong acid spray. In two separate incidents within the same hour both girls were approached from behind by a group of young men who commented on the length of their skirts and told them it was too short. The girls were sprayed with acidic substance that burnt and melted their stockings and caused deep lacerations on the back of their legs. The girls were treated in the hospital. The police is searching for the culprits that are believed to be the same ones, in both incidents.

According to media reports, uncovered women in Mersin, who wear shorter length skirts, are in fear of similar attacks.

I understand this kind of thing is done to ‘protect’ the honor of women with a religious justification, but does anyone ever ask where the honor is in a group of men coming up behind young girls and scarring them with acid? Shouldn’t there be some kind of deep cultural shame that their young men are being indoctrinated into growing up as bullying cowards?

Perhaps you thought that glossolalic freak I highlighted the other day is unrepresentative of religious attitudes in America. How about these people, though?

They’re probably good, decent people who care about their families, but listen to what they are saying — they are picking a president on the basis of his dedication to the Bible. They are advocating a foreign policy based on biblical prophecy. They measure patriotism by whether someone “worships” (interesting slip, there) the flag and Jesus. They parrot lies, such as that Obama is planning to be sworn in on the Koran.

Like I said, probably good people…but the whole problem here is that their brains have been poisoned by religion, a lying, dishonest, corrupting religion that has turned them into deluded fools. Lay the blame for this criminal distortion of human minds right at the feet of religious belief.

Oh, and lest anyone think I’m not an equal opportunity rejecter of religion—be entertained by this Iraqi kook who thinks the earth is flat. Blame that idiocy on religion, too.

One of the most common arguments against the New Atheists is to claim that they’re railing against a straw man — that religion is benign and thoughful and rational. I’ll agree that some individuals within religion are like that, but religion itself is a poisonous nest that encourages lunacy. Here’s one example: take a look at Steve Foss Ministries. In particular, watch the video titled “I-55 Revival explostion of POWER “, which has it all. Babbling idiots talking in tongues, people spazzing out in a frenzy, and worst of all, the minister and parents urging children to join in the insanity.

This crap is going on everywhere in this country. Maybe most moderate Christians aren’t joining in directly, but they sure are good about closing their eyes to it.

I-55 Revival explostion of POWER

One thing I worry about that is a potential major barrier to secularism is this: a “pernicious pattern and practice” of infringement of religious liberties in the military.

I’m not the violent sort, and I think we need to achieve an enlightened society through reason and education … but that’s all futile when the other side is busily gathering the guns.