Confusing Terrorists with Terrorist Victims

The rebels killed her father when they raided her home in Liberia. She was held prisoner, beaten and raped, even forced to wash the clothing of the men who raped her. Fortunately she was able to escape after a few weeks and became a refugee. The UN determined that she is “particularly vulnerable to attack” in Liberia and recommended her for the US refugee resettlement program, which allows her to take refuge in the United States.

However, the Department of Homeland Security won’t let her in. Why? Because when she was forced to do the washing for rebels who had raped her and killed her father she was in effect providing “material support” to terrorists. By law, no one who has provided material support to terrorists can be allowed into the US. Under the Homeland Security’s interpretation of the law “it does not matter whether the support provided was given willingly or under duress”.*

Apparently this is not an isolated case. Continue reading

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Templeton Prayer Study Flawed

Touted as the largest scientific examination of prayer’s effect on hospital patients, the Templeton Foundation arranged for Christians to pray for 1800 heart patients and tracked the results. Prayer was not effective. According to CNN, “[t]he patients . . . were split into three groups of about 600 apiece: those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren’t prayed for but were told it was a possibility.” Arrangements were made for 3 different Christian groups to pray “starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks”.

But the study was flawed. And it was flawed in a way which reveals the underlying absurdity of prayer itself. Continue reading

Posted in Christianity, Christinsanity, Prayer | 12 Comments

Evolution — the Dividing Line

It’s not surprising that the issue of teaching evolution (or not — or countering it with intelligent design) keeps cropping up around the country.

For practical purposes, evolution is the dividing line between theism and atheism.

Evolution points the way to a naturalistic explanation for the design we see in the world around us. If evolution is false, a naturalistic explanation for design becomes extremely difficult to hold, so that for all practical purposes we can say that if evolution is false atheism is probably false. Conversely we can say that if evolution is true, then theism is probably false.

Only probably.

But that’s enough to make evolution into a continental divide. Continue reading

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Atheists Disliked

Two recent studies, one by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the other by the University of Minnesota, reveal a continuing lack of tolerance for atheists on the part of the American public. “American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god,” the U of Minn. study authors conclude. Their survey found that atheists “are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public” and are “the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry”. Lead researcher Penny Edgell believes that “today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past”. The Pew Forum study, which focused primarily on American attitudes about Islam, reported that “Muslim-Americans are viewed much more favorably by the public than are atheists, about whom Americans express a particularly high level of discomfort.” Indeed, their study showed that while 25% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Muslims, a full 50% view atheists unfavorably.

Americans consider atheism a threat to their religious values and, according to the Minnesota study, respondents “associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.”

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In Praise of Folly

Where is Erasmus when you need him? The Catholic divine might have thought he chased this sort of folly out of Christianity 500 years ago, but it appears not.

. . . three Christian ministers today blessed the doors of the hearing room where Senate Judiciary Committee members will begin considering the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito on Monday.

Capitol Hill police barred them from entering the room to continue what they called a consecration service. But in a bit of one-upsmanship, the three announced that they had let themselves in a day earlier, touching holy oil to the seats where Judge Alito, the senators, witnesses, Senate staffers and the press will sit, and praying for each of the 13 committee members by name.

“We did adequately apply oil to all the seats,” said the Rev. Rob Schenck, who identified himself as an evangelical Christian and as president of the National Clergy Council in Washington.
. . .
The two men, along with Grace Nwachukwu, general manager of a group called Faith and Action, read three Psalms outside the committee room, knelt to say the Lord’s Prayer and marked a cross in oil on the committee door before leaving. –Wall Street Journal, Jan 5, 2006

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Agnosticism Revisited & the Case for Atheism

It is easy to understand how one can be undecided about the existence of God. I’m often undecided myself, since doubting my convictions is the first step in any serious analysis; yet I am as atheist as they come.

Agnosticism generally takes three forms today. There is the traditional agnostic who maintains that no one can prove or disprove God’s existence and therefore the only intelligent position is to say “we can’t know”. The second sees agnosticism as a beginning point, a method of skepticism or doubt from which to proceed. The third type says withholding belief in God because of insufficient evidence is identical to being atheist (generally called weak atheism).

Today a great many atheists are actually agnostic-atheists of this last sort. For an example of the 2nd group, see David Eller’s essay “Agnosticism: the basis for atheism not an alternative to it”. (Eller argues that agnosticism is a method that if properly followed leads directly to atheism.)

But my focus now is agnosticism of the first sort. Advocates of this position claim to know basicly two things:

(a) there are no logically sound proofs or disproofs of God’s existence

(b) therefore there is insufficient reason to adapt either theism or atheism

I have no doubt that to the agnostic’s best knowledge, both claims are true. He or she isn’t aware of a convincing case for belief or disbelief.

But maybe that’s because our agnostic simply hasn’t been exposed to strong atheist arguments. Which would not be surprising. Most atheists are actually weak atheists, our group three above who disbelieve because of insufficient evidence. Weak atheists, it seems to me, are often unaware of the best arguments for atheism.

The strongest philosophical argument for atheism, the Argument from Perfection, is rarely presented anywhere in full (often it has to be extrapolated from discussions of “the Problem of Evil”); likewise for the other arguments that constitute specific atheism. Continue reading

Posted in Agnosticism, Articles Highlighted, Atheology, Non-Existence Arguments | 14 Comments

Here or Elsewhere?

The first great question of life is: here or elsewhere?

All our hungers, emotions, fears, inclinations, perceptions, desires, urges, obsessions, wants, instincts and needs answer here. Yet the answer of all the great religions is elsewhere.

It is a remarkable dichotomy.  Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, even abandoned religions like Zoroastrianism, Mithraism or the Egyptian mythologies have a common message: our bodily life here on earth is not what really counts: what counts comes after we die. And yet our bodies themselves are incredibly insistent: eat sleep love, feel and do bodily things.

This disjunction between religious belief and bodily practice is perhaps greatest at death.

Religious people worldwide believe at death their loves ones leave the body and go to heaven (hopefully, at least). Then they purchase $8000 dollar caskets, expensive cemetery plots & engraved granite headstones, which they periodically visit and keep decorated with artificial flowers, all the while believing (as far as their religious beliefs go, at least) that the person is not located in the decaying corpse in the casket in the graveyard at all, but somewhere else: up in heaven.

It is perplexing to me, and always has been. The practice is to treat the dead as if they are a corpse under the ground, while the belief is that they are a spirit in heaven. Why doesn’t the practice conform to the belief?

Or, more to the point, why isn’t the belief strong enough to modify the practice? If we are not careful, this question spreads. Why do even the most religious people care so inordinately about the well-being of their bodies? Why such attention to food and shelter and sex and pleasure? Why such fear of dying when dying is the only way to get to the world that really matters? The answer is that our bodies insist on life. They insist on here and now.

Hunger, cold, wet, warmth, desire, satisfaction—this is the body’s reality. But the religious mind rejects what the body needs and loves for something after death.

It wasn’t always so. The earliest human religions were here religions. Though it’s true, as archaeologists point out, that the practice of burying the dead goes far back into human prehistory, it is nevertheless flawed to interpret ancient practice based on modern bias. Contrary to popular assumptions, there are strong practical and emotional reasons for burials, reasons which don’t themselves point to belief in afterlife. Dead bodies decompose and stink, and become extremely unsanitary. It is emotionally disturbing to see dead humans lying around—quadruply so when it is the body of a loved one. Imagine the emotional impact of seeing animals and vultures clawing and pecking at your dead mate or child.

It’s easy to understand the human desire for burial, quite apart from the question of afterlife. It is merely a modern bias to conclude that burying the dead demonstrates belief in afterlife. It demonstrates only the belief that the dead should be buried. Beyond that we must look for other clues.

And so I repeat: the earliest religions were here religions. Their spirits were nature spirits, their gods nature gods; their magic and shamanism were efforts to tap into the unknown powers of nature. Only later did the more sophisticated notion of a separate spiritual world, a world wholly other to everything we see around us, a world of elsewhere come into being. Continue reading

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Berkeley, Cohen & Materialism

I am a fan of Chapman Cohen, who about a century ago was a writer for Freethinker magazine and president of its parent organization in Great Britain, the National Secular Society. I have his Essays in Freethinking, Volume Two. I am not always in agreement with him, but his perspective is usually interesting.

His essay, The Ghost of Religion, is of particular interest — although in my opinion largely mistaken. Continue reading

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Relativism & the Pope

Ratzinger, the new Pope, wrote

“Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching’, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” – Pope Benedict XVI

Which is a very confused description of relativism. On the one hand it sounds like relativism = being open to “every wind of teaching”, that is to say it looks like our new Pope confuses relativism with open-mindedness — and opposes open-mindedness. The desire to be sure of the truth, to not be misled as a result of lack of exposure to ideas, which leads one to listen to “every wind of teaching” (the Pope says “swept along by” but that is mere hyperbole) he equates with being selfish.

It is selfish to want to know the truth, says our new Pope. It is selfish to listen to what reform Catholics — or God forbid non-Catholics — think. Relativism means simply “not bowing down to the wisdom of the Pope”. Continue reading

Posted in Christinsanity, Ethics & Morality | 2 Comments

Eve’s Breasts

With apologies to Christ (who I’m certain would have been as perplexed as I am), we have more evidence of the moral insanity of American Christians. An artist in Roseville, Michigan and an art gallery owner in Pilot Point, Texas have been arrested and convicted (Edward Stross of Roseville) or threatened with arrest (Dwight Miller of Pilot Point) for painting murals depicting God’s creation of Eve. Read about it here. Both artists had the apparently not-so-original idea of painting a variation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (the original graces the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) using Eve in place of Adam. The problem? Eve has breasts—naked breasts. God forgot to create her with clothing, it seems.

For that, the artists had to be charged with pornography.

These are the same Christians going apoplectic over breasts who don’t seem to have a problem in the world with torture.

The flaw with the Christian religion (and from my point of view it is an unforgivable flaw) is that it loves pain and hates bodily pleasure. Pleasures are “deadly sins” which God will, according to Christinsanity, punish with eternal pain. Sex, of course, is a horror, but so is the entirely innocent pleasure of being a body and having breasts—if you can be seen by anyone. Continue reading

Posted in Atheist Culture, Christinsanity | 2 Comments