Once upon a time, there was a little paingod attached to humanity. It was mostly benign and useful; it was there to warn people not to step into that patch of thorns, that that spearpoint was sharp, that fire was hot, that you’d regret drinking that whole skin of beer in the morning. It brought with it the gift of empathy and forethought, as well, so the people were mainly well-served by its presence.

Humanity prospered and grew, and the paingod got ever busier; as societies got larger, not only were there more people experiencing or avoiding pain, but the complexity of their lives created new opportunities for pain. New diseases erupted in the denser populations, wars flared up between competing city-states, social stratification created breeding grounds for envy and contempt. The paingod also grew.

Now this is the thing about gods of all types: they are ambitious. They all aspire to be the greatest manifestation of their gift that they can be. After all, people had been defining god as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”, so there was definitely pressure to escalate — if it wasn’t the greatest of all possible paingods, then it really wasn’t a god at all, now was it?

But now comes the tricky part. The paingod served humanity, and that was also an essential part of its existence. It could not simply lash out and promote death and suffering, like a cartoonish cult in a cheesy sword-and-sorcery novel; no, it had to convince people that their personal pain was a great boon, get them to revel in it, and also get them to willingy define their existence by their suffering. Then the paingod would be the the ultimate deity!

And so was hatched a cunning plan. The paingod would ask everyone to give it their pain as a gift; it would present itself as a savior to the world, telling everyone that they can find salvation from the suffering they experience by consecrating it to the paingod, that it loved them so much that it would accept their burdens and bear them for humanity. And it spread a story that claimed the paingod took on the form of a man and suffered heinous torture and died in agony, just to prove it was willing to take on the very worst that people could offer.

It was actually true. The man, though, was symbolic; it was the paingod, and it experienced every death and felt every person’s agony. There was no sudden change in the paingod’s role, only a clever semantic twist: now you metaphorically bestowed your unhappiness on the paingod as an offering, and it was no longer your fault or your responsibility, or anyone’s responsibility, really. It was the paingod’s will. Your duty was to bear up under it, and thank the paingod for sharing it with you.

And so it came to be that the people accepted the paingod’s rationale. When the inequities of their society bore them down, they wouldn’t rise up to change them — they’d go to the paingod’s church and praise it. When the paingod’s acolytes enthusiastically embraced their role in giving charity — after all, the poor and hurting were clearly the most blessed of the paingod’s subjects — they subverted that role into one of maintaining poverty and disease. They would provide a quiet place for people to die as slowly as possible, every moment one of redemption as you shared your pain with the paingod.

Every improvement that reduced the people’s suffering was shunned, and every social change that might make pariahs appreciated for who they were was discouraged. The paingod rules, and the only way the paingod can grow in power is if the misery of our existence were made the central focus of our lives.

And now we live in the world the paingod made, and true to form, it’s a world of pain.

We can’t end the pain, but we can kill the paingod and end the cycle of reinforcement. We can own our pain. It’s not the god’s, it’s ours — we don’t reduce it by pretending to share it with a supernatural being. We cause pain in others, and we don’t minimize it by claiming our sins are redeemed by the paingod — we accept the fault as our own, and struggle to change and repair and redeem ourselves. Tell the paingod that nobody died for your sins, they can’t…because they’re yours. The suffering we cause, the inequities we propagate, the unfairness and misery of a world split between those who have and those who don’t, those are all our responsibility, and no one else’s, especially not a paingod who feeds on grief and regret and sorrow and harm.

And it’s even worse than I expected. I had presentiments of failure: last night he tweeted this at me.

Talk about completely missing the point…he had previously written a post quoting Saul Bellow saying science was unsatisfying; I was baffled about why he thought Bellow was a particularly insightful contributor on this topic, especially since his comment was so banal and ignorant. I was NOT suggesting that he needed to get a better-ranked author to convince me; I’ve got nothing against Bellow’s literary contributions. But that seems to be the only thing he took away from my post.

So now he’s put up a short post (promising more later) which consists of little more than a quotation from Margaret Atwood.

I think that the religious strand is probably part of human hard-wiring…by religious strand, I don’t mean any particular religion, I mean the part of human beings that feels that the seen world is not the only world, that the world you see is not the only world that there is and that it can become awestruck. If that is the case, religion was selected for in the Pleistocene by many, many millennia of human evolution.

Like the Bellow quote, I really have nothing against the source; in fact, I’ve enjoyed the writings of both Atwood and Bellow. My complaint is with the abysmal vacuity of the content, and the fact that Kloor seems to be playing a game of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. It doesn’t advance the argument to quote someone else saying something wrong. (Although he probably feels it gives him cover.)

I will congratulate him on dodging my accommodationist bingo card — there were so many possibilities to fit into a mere 25 boxes, and “religion is hardwired” didn’t make the cut, because I really didn’t think he’d be so stupid as to trot that one out.

“Awe” is probably hardwired as an emotional response. The effort to try to comprehend the world around us is probably hardwired into our brains. Religion isn’t. Religion is a parasitic phenomenon that short-circuits honest sensations, the desire to understand and our humility before the complexity of the universe, and plugs in a false belief that we do understand everything to resolve the two. That’s my objection: not that there are sincere and interesting questions about our place in the cosmos, but that religion lies and claims to have all the answers. Yet when we actually look at what religion focuses on, it’s all petty trivial dogma and weird justifications for tribal cosmetics.

What the New Atheists actually argue is that we aren’t giving up wonder, but that we focus on real paths to knowing and understanding, rather than the delusions of prophecy and pettifogging scriptural interpretation and blithe acceptance of the inanity of “god did it.”

And then this final gambit is ludicrous.

You’d that think the atheists who are evolutionary biologists would be able to process this with their super-rational minds. And that they (Myers, Coyne et al) would be smart enough to recognize that one-size-fits all denunciation is likely counterproductive to their goal.

There must be a name for this logical fallacy: “You accept [broad scientific discipline], therefore you ought to accept [my quirky and unfounded personal interpretation of it]!”

I have little hope that his continuation of this discussion will be any better.

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Sweet jebus, he’s continuing — and just when I can’t imagine him getting any dumber, he says this:

I don’t understand why he’s making such a big issue of me quoting writers like Saul Bellow and Margaret Atwood.

Aargh! No! I haven’t made a big issue of it — I was baffled by why he was making those quotes the centerpiece of his argument, and why he was making such a big issue of the quotes. But that’s all he sees.

I’m done with him. He’s too stupid to argue with further.

Keith Kloor, a journalist and blogger at Discover, really doesn’t like those fundamentalist atheists and he echoes those ridiculous comments by Peter Higgs.

The other big argument waged by a vocal group of prominent scientists involves the assertion that science is incompatible with religion. This insistence by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne is a puzzler. As someone who dislikes dogma of any kind and distrusts vested powers, I’m no fan of institutional religion. I’m also an atheist. But I see no value in making an enemy of virtually the whole world. What’s more, an argument that lumps together the Taliban, the Dali Lama, and Jesus strikes me as rather simplistic. The atheists who frequently disparage religion for all its faults don’t dare acknowledge that it has any redeeming value, or that it provides some meaning for those who can’t (or aren’t yet ready) to derive existential meaning from reason alone.

This sneering and strident approach by the religion haters is not just bad manners, it is puritanical. That’s what scientist Peter Higgs (of Higgs Boson fame) is getting at with his recent sharp criticism of Dawkins.

Jerry Coyne has already replied, but that comment was so appallingly dumb that I have to chime in.

This isn’t a matter of making an enemy of the whole world; it’s an issue of scientific integrity. Are you going to sit back and let people say things that are wrong simply because you’re afraid to annoy them? And yes, you can legitimately lump together the Taliban, the Dali Lama, and Jesus together on certain traits: they’re all three promoting superstition and falsehoods. That doesn’t mean you think the Dali Lama blows up statues, or that Jesus is crusading for Tibetan independence.

I am unimpressed with this constant claim that religion has redeeming value. What is it? That it provides dishonest answers to questions that trouble people? How is that a virtue? Only apologists for religion seem to think it is.

And now Kloor has doubled down with a reply to Coyne.

He quotes Saul Bellow. Seriously, dude: Saul Bellow? Why? He’s a good writer, but does he have some special authority on this matter?

What do you think happens at death?

This I don’t know, but I don’t think everything is resolved with the destruction of the body. What science has to say seems to me insufficient and unsatisfying.

Saul Bellow’s dissatisfaction with an honest truth is not an argument. It’d be like me saying I’m unsatisfied with astronomy because it doesn’t have enough squid in it, or that science education needs more parades and trumpets. Your personal expectation of what reality ought to deliver is not a valid criticism; I’m not going to claim that Islam fails because 72 virgins isn’t enough. (If only they promised 73, I’d convert in a flash.)

To wave away the persistent questions and yearnings that still drive the religious impulse as merely the last bastion of ignorant superstition is, as I wrote here, “inconsistent with the spirit of science.”

The assertion that religion and science are incompatible has become an article of faith for some–a kind of dogma that I recently discussed in this post. Aside from this being a form of fundamentalism, I also said that I saw no constructive use “in making an enemy of virtually the whole world” by broadly denigrating all religious believers.

I’m not waving away the yearnings, they’re real enough, and we all have them. I’m waving away the goddamned answers as inadequate, contradictory, and false.

You do realize, Mr Kloor, that that’s what religion promises? Not more questions (if that were the case, it would be philosophy), but deep cosmic truths, answers hallowed by nothing more than generations of prophets pulling stories out of their asses? It is “inconsistent with the spirit of science” to simply accept those claims unquestioned, to assume that there is some validity to them because you’re afraid that pointing out the flaws might be regarded as “denigrating all religious believers.”

If telling people that they are wrong is denigrating, then my profession of education is dedicated to denigration.

I guess it also makes me a fundamentalist, if your definition of fundamentalis is lacking in reverence for the unsupported authoritarian dogma of religion, and feeling no respect for faith at all.

Peter Higgs, the physicist, has spoken out against Richard Dawkins’ views.

“What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists,” Higgs said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. “Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind.”

You know, whenever I see people babbling ignorantly like this, I have this urge to strap them down Clockwork Orange style and force them to watch an hour of James Dobson or Tony Perkins or Ken Ham or Bryan Fischer, and then ask them, “Do you still think Dawkins is a fundamentalist?” The only way you can make this ridiculous comparison is by cultivating a near-total ignorance of what fundamentalists are actually like. But then I have to confess that forcing someone to correct their folly and putting them to the question is exactly what a fundamentalist would do, so I can’t. (I notice in the article that Dawkins simply refused to respond to Higgs.)

He agreed with some of Dawkins’ thoughts on the unfortunate consequences that have resulted from religious belief, but he was unhappy with the evolutionary biologist’s approach to dealing with believers and said he agreed with those who found Dawkins’ approach “embarrassing”.

Higgs is an atheist. He agrees with Dawkins that religion has lead to some ugly outcomes. But speaking out about them? Actually saying out loud in public that religion is wrong, faith is a delusion, and that there is no god? Oh dearie me, how embarrassing. Not the thing a proper gentleman would do at all.

And that’s really the problem. Society has so thoroughly beaten the default assumption of respect for religious lies into our heads that even many atheists are made deeply uncomfortable at the prospect of openly rejecting faith-based nonsense. But criticizing fellow atheists? That’s easy. That’s thoroughly sanctioned by culture. You can freely make stupid accusations against atheists without suffering the pushback you’d get if you made honest statements of fact about priests.

What I learned from this interview is mainly that Peter Higgs is an intellectual coward who retreats from his convictions in the face of potential social disapproval, and will cheerfully join in the mob in kicking a fellow atheist. He should be…embarrassed.