What is wrong with these people that they can shout such invective even at small children walking with parents?

Thanks to Machines Like Us I learned about a cable access call-in TV show in Austin, TX called The Atheist Experience. The hosts of this show take exactly the right approach. In this clip, a Christian caller gets stumped (as so many tend to do) when asked to explain why he believes in god and the Christian god in particular.

You would think that this is the question for believers and that they would have thought deeply about it. And yet when you ask them directly, they act as if the question had never occurred to them and flounder around.

Taking pity on the caller’s inability to articulate any reason, the hosts of the show then very eloquently explain why they themselves became atheists.

Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman in a long article titled Why the gods are not winning say that, “Women church goers greatly outnumber men, who find church too dull. Here’s the kicker. Children tend to pick up their beliefs from their fathers. So, despite a vibrant evangelical youth cohort, young Americans taken as a whole are the least religious and most culturally tolerant age group in the nation.” (My italics)

The paper does not provide citations, unfortunately, though I did find a little support in the literature for the claim. For example, in a paper titled On the Relative Influence of Mothers and Fathers: A Covariance Analysis of Political and Religious Socialization (August 1978, JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY, vol. 40, no. 3, p. 519-530) authors Alan C. Acock and Vern L. Bengtson say that “The mother consistently appears more predictive in most areas we examined and is often the dominant parent in terms of prediction. The only areas in which the fathers had a slight edge were in Religious Behavior, Religiosity, and Tolerance of Deviance.”

My parents had similar religious beliefs so I cannot tell who influenced me more. I had not been aware of the greater influence of fathers on children’s religious beliefs and am curious if this statement is consistent with the experiences of readers of this blog.

So are your religious views closer to your father or your mother?

I have never understood how modern societies permit male circumcision while they rightly condemns the female variants. It seems like as long as some practice is old and stamped with the word ‘approved by religious authorities’, it is exempt from the usual protections we give children.

I am glad to see that the creator of Jesus and Mo shares my concern.

This long article by Lawrence Wright goes into great detail on the abusive practices of this creepy organization, using the defection after thirty-five years of Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Paul Haggis as a focus.

It seems like the widespread ridicule that O’Reilly got for his ‘argument’ that the tides proved god’s existence has got under his skin. He tries to explain and hilariously exposes his ignorance even more.

So basically god is for those who do not know any science. Glad you cleared that up, Bill!

(via Machines Like Us)

I’m at a conference and the moderator at a session that I attended gave us an anecdote during which she said “I’m a good Catholic girl”. Was I offended at her injecting religion into a secular meeting? Of course not. She wasn’t preaching to us, it was just a passing comment, inserted for humorous purposes and we all laughed.

But what if she had said, “I’m a good atheist girl”? I bet you that that there would have been sharp intakes of breaths and some mutterings that she had delivered a gratuitous slap at religion. This is the protective shield that religion has built around itself that has to be dismantled.

It turns out that about 200 cows suddenly died in Wisconsin, which, along with other recent reports of mass deaths of birds and fish, are taken as signs that the end times are near.

Such mass deaths are not uncommon and only seem so because the media’s interest is triggered by one unusual event and they then report every subsequent similar event as if they are mysteriously connected, until it gets bored and moves on to a new pseudo-trend. But religious folk, ever eager for a sign that their god is still around, desperately seize upon these natural events as evidence of the supernatural.

Apparently the willingness of people to be duped by hucksters into believing that inanimate objects wield magical powers that can improve their lives has resulted in the popularity of something called ‘Power Balance’ bands, a silicone band containing a hologram. It seems like all it takes is for some celebrity to endorse some nonsense for others to rush out and buy them, even if there is zero evidence in its favor. Articles about these things never seem to include people who buy these things and then have their lives take a turn for the worse.

I blame religion for this kind of idiocy. It encourages people to believe in magic, and once you go down that anti-science road, you become a sucker just waiting to be taken in by hucksters.

(via Machines Like Us)