In her regular column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on September 15, 2010, Connie Schultz demonstrated once again the curious sense of entitlement that religious people have. She began as follows: “Years ago, I criticized atheists who wanted to dissuade believers of their faith. My argument was always the same: Why don’t you just leave us alone?”

In response, I wrote her a personal email:

Dear Ms. Schultz,

I read with interest your column today that started by saying that years ago you criticized atheists who did not leave you alone but wanted to dissuade you from your faith.

What exactly were these atheists doing to bother you? Were they coming to your door? Were they stopping you on the street to hand out their literature? Do they have TV and radio shows that preach their viewpoint and warn of dire consequences if you do not convert to their point of view?

As an atheist myself, it doesn’t bother me when people express their ideas in the public sphere, or even in the private sphere. Those people think they have the truth and want to convince me and that’s their right. Similarly atheists think that they are right and seek to convince others of it. These kinds of exchanges are no different from debates over politics or anything else, where the goal is to win hearts and minds.

It also does not bother me that your newspaper provides almost saturation coverage of religious matters, especially concerning the recent closing of Catholic churches or religious festivals and parades in Little Italy. In fact, after an initial swipe at a few religious people, your entire column today was a paean to the virtues of religion. Despite the cutbacks in the size of the paper, it still has a Saturday page devoted to religious matters, with a column dedicated to advancing religious views. Do you think atheist views get anywhere near that level of coverage? Would they even consider allowing an atheist regular use of that Saturday column space?

So I find it a little odd that when atheists speak out about their disbelief, religious people feel as if they are being imposed upon, as if they have the right to be shielded from opposing views. Are they so insecure of what they believe that they need to be surrounded only by affirming views?

There is no reason why religious beliefs should be privileged and shielded from criticism. Surely we all benefit from a full airing of a wide diversity of views on issues?

Sincerely,

Mano Singham

No response yet.

When I need a good laugh, the folks from the Westboro Baptist Church never let me down. Their message is so absurdly anti-gay, so over the top, that I have long suspected that they are really a performance art troupe trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records by pulling off the longest-running prank in history.

Now they have decided to create a music video to spread their message. Check out the result.

Frankly, I think it needs work and so here’s some advice, Westboro folks. No need to thank me.

First ditch the tune. “We are the world’? Please. Find something that is not so hackneyed and has a decent beat. Also ditch the keyboardist, and get some decent guitarists and drummer.

You also need to rewrite the lyrics to make it more catchy, cut the length in half, and get a better film editor. It would also help to have less mean-looking people as lead singers. Having people who can sing would also be a good idea. And what, your people couldn’t take the trouble to memorize those cheesy words and had to read every one? That shows lack of commitment. And what is the deal with that guy waving a Canadian flag at the end?

The present music video is not going to achieve your goal of making people angry. It will make them fall asleep.

The CFINO (Center for Inquiry Northeast Ohio) conference is on September 25 from 9:00am – 4:00pm at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Independence, Ohio

The theme is Religion Under Examination and the program and speakers look really interesting. More information and registration details can be found here.

Now that the Florida church has decided against its Koran cookout, there is a question that I have not seen asked, and that is what the pastor Terry Jones plans to do with the 200 reprieved Korans now in his possession.

He can’t give them away or put them alongside the Bible in motel rooms because that might seem like proselytizing for Islam. He can’t simply toss them in the trash, which would seem almost as incendiary as burning them. I presume he does not want to hang on to them and risk being struck by a thunderbolt from his god, because these gods get really jealous when they think you are flirting with other religions. His options are really limited.

Anyone know what he is going to do with them?

As The Daily Show points out, this episode illustrates that the religious loonies have taken over the national discourse…

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Islamophobiapalooza

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

… so may the best god win!

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Team Mohammed vs. Team Jesus – Religious Conflict

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

When one discusses the science-religion conflict with sophisticated religious apologists, one has to be alert to two things in order to avoid finding yourself in a fog where unsure of what you are talking about.

One fog generator is that sophisticated apologists tend to shift without warning between metaphor and the concrete, something that I have written about before. In order to stay on firm ground, it is good to keep clear what the discussion is about.

The first thing is to ask believers whether the god they believe in exists as a separate material entity, just like a photon or electron. If the answer is yes, then the question of god’s existence becomes an empirical question, like the existence of a photon or electron, and they are obliged to provide evidence for why we should believe in its existence. If the answer is no, and their god is some kind of metaphor, then we can stop the discussion right there. The usefulness of metaphors is not something that the methods of science are designed to investigate.

What usually happens though is that they refuse to be pinned down. They assert that god is not material and exists outside of space and time but then proceed to ascribe properties and actions to god that can only be true if god is a material entity existing within our space and time. You should press them as to how they can possibly know that their conception of god exists at all, let alone its properties, if it ‘exists outside of space and time’, since the speaker obviously lives within our space and time.

What one should be alert for is the sleight of hand that speaks of god as a metaphor in order to avoid having to provide evidence when it is requested and then, when the discussion has moved on, to make assertions (‘God wants us to do this’ and ‘God is like this’) that treats god as if it has a material existence.

As an example of the kind of woolly thinking that permeates religion-speak, consider this disappointing interview that Jon Stewart of The Daily Show had with religious apologist Marilynne Robinson. The problem with the interview was not that Stewart made some trivial errors like confusing dark matter with anti-matter. It is that the whole conversation was highly vacuous, reducing Stewart to making absurd statements that science is like faith.

While watching the interview, I felt there was something familiar about Robinson’s name and then I remembered. She had written a review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion for Harpers magazine back in November 2006. She did not like the book but that is fair enough. Reviewers are not obliged to give positive reviews. What was bad about the review was that it gave the reader little idea of what the main argument of Dawkins’ book was, because of the fog of religion-speak that she generates.

POST SCRIPT: Richard Dawkins on clarity

He makes a good point in that what religious people object to about the new atheists is that we are shunning complicated theological/philosophical circumlocutions about god and stating clearly why there is no reason to believe in him/her/it. Clarity is the enemy of religious apologetics.

As science has advanced, religious believers have been increasingly threatened by the fact that religion may become irrelevant in the sense that god is not actually required for anything, other than to provide comfort to those people who fear death and feel the need to believe in some powerful deity. The response has been to assert that religion and science do not conflict because they provide answers to different kinds of questions. In effect, they are said to occupy different niches in knowledge space. Over time, a cottage industry has grown up devoted to finding different ways to state this single idea. So now we have statements such as that science addresses ‘how’ questions while religion addresses ‘why’ questions or that science deals with questions that have a material basis while religion deals with non-material moral and ethical questions, questions of meaning, etc.
[Read more…]

(This article of mine was published on May 19, 2010 in The Chronicle of Higher Education.)

There is a new war between science and religion, rising from the ashes of the old one, which ended with the defeat of the antievolution forces in the 2005 “intelligent design” trial. The new war concerns questions that are more profound than whether or not to teach evolution. Unlike the old science-religion war, this battle is going to be fought not in the courts but in the arena of public opinion. The new war pits those who argue that science and “moderate” forms of religion are compatible worldviews against those who think they are not.
[Read more…]

As usual, I agree with the cartoon strip Jesus and Mo . Note the headline in the newspaper.

An evangelical church in Florida is threatening to burn 200 copies of the Koran on September 11, “to honor those who were murdered” in 2001. The priest behind this effort says that the goal is “to send a message to al-Qaida.” Of course, the ‘message’ that will be received is that there really is a war between Christians and Muslims.

We will be lucky if the only retaliation is that some equally crazy Muslims somewhere in the world burn 200 copies of the Bible. But if the Muslims up the ante and burn more than 200 Bibles, we may have an escalation that results in all religious books being burned.

What is it about religion that inspires crazy behavior on the part of its most ardent devotees?