My Thoughts on Religion |
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The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Thomas Paine Pray tell, just how does one have a personal relationship with an invisible, intangible, weightless, soundless, and scentless critter devoid of any heat signature detectable by NASA? I've said it before and I'll say it again: Having a PhD in Theology is like having a Doctorate of Teletubbie Anatomy or a Masters in Warp-Core Engineering. It's a fancy title for knowing a lot of "facts" about a subject that at its core is completely and utterly fictional. If I were asked to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth over a Holy Bible, I would immediately say "Yes, I will tell you the same amount of truth as I found in the Holy Bible". Religion is merely a neurological disorder and religious fanatics are just delusional psychotics and ignorant fools.! Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. Makes perfect sense to me! Ho! Ho! Ho! Religion must go. George Carlin # The most important image ever taken http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcBV-cXVWFw # We're all just monkeys http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXBX24 # Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWL1ZMH3-54 # Richard Dawkins: The Virus of Faith http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teV4b6iB7P0 # Why do aetheists care about religion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4fQA9mt-Mg Ricky Gervais on religion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaEj3g5GOYA&feature=related # Atheists http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdVucvo-kDU http://booskovski.blogspot.com/2006/11/richard-dawkins-some-great-clips.html # Dawkins and Lynchburg students http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR_z85O0P2M&source=rss Are you going to breathe the same air as atheists? http://www.videosift.com/video/Don-t-let-your-kids-become-infected-with-the-atheism # The Evil Bible http://www.evilbible.com/ http://www.evilbible.com/Top_Ten_List.htm Humorous look at creationism Did you know that God created the Heavens and the Earth in total darkness? Only one talking snake throughout history. http://www.atheistmind.com/atheist-humor-4-a-look-at-creationism The idea and belief that there exists an unseen, cognitive, non-corporal being that either intercedes in human affairs or abstains, is a neural process which does not operate in my mind. Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived Isaac Asinov We live in a galaxy that has 500 billion stars. Hubble's ultra-deep-field view shows us that there are billions of such galaxies. So why do God's creatures only live on the "Third Rock from the Sun"? If God created the Universe, he must be omnipotent. If he reads reads our thoughts, he must be omnipresent. If light is carried by photons and gravity by gravitons, is this thought reading done by spiritons? If God created the Universe, why is evidence of this creation so scant. He might have left Maxwell's equations in Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Ten Commandments might have been engraved on the moon. A hundred-kilometer crucifix could have been placed in Earth orbit. Why can't God spell out my name in the starfields? Why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world? #---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well. Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)? Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following: ------------ First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different Religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added. This gives two possibilities: 1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose. 2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it? If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct...leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God." THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A" #--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Does the bible evolve? Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a US radio personality who dispenses advice to people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a US resident, Jim, which was posted on the Internet. It's funny, as well as informative: Dear Dr. Laura: Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific laws and how to follow them. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them? I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her? I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual cleanliness - Lev.15:19-24. The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians? I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself? A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here? Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die? I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves? My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14) I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging. Your devoted fan, Jim #----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Who created us? Don't ask David Holahan February 23, 2005 INTELLIGENT DESIGN, or creationism in sheep's clothing, goes something like this: If you examine a finely crafted Swiss watch, you immediately assume someone smart made it (presumably someone Swiss, but don't rule out the Chinese). Now you apply this premise to human beings and the known universe. How could entities so intricate and marvelous as you and I -- and the other heavenly bodies -- have just happened along without the deft hands of Intelligent Design, who shall henceforth be referred to as Mr. ID? I have been mulling over this wholly speculative hypothesis lately, and the first thing that comes to mind is "American Idol." Have you caught an episode of that hit television show, with its parade of grating contestants and that repugnant trio of catty judges? Try to square those primetime monkeyshines with intelligent anything -- or evolution, for that matter. Next, my thoughts wandered wistfully to summer vacation and the "clothes optional" beach that my family frequents. You can walk along the shimmering sands for quite a spell without spying a body that you'd want to take credit for creating. Sadly, several miles of sightseeing induce this inescapable revelation: If human beings were automobiles, there'd be one hell of a massive recall. I don't need to go into particulars, do I? Of course, that's just on the surface. Once you slice us open, you'll find as many design flaws as there are in a new Pentagon weapons system. Take my appendix -- please! The atavistic organ is totally useless, as its name connotes. It's an evolutionary time bomb waiting to rupture, probably in the middle of my next vacation. Or what's up with gallbladders, our superfluous repository of excess bile? It's as necessary as heated car seats and SUVs the size of three-bedroom apartments. And why do we have two kidneys but only one liver? Perhaps our alleged creator, Mr. ID, is so elusive for fear of divine litigation. But enough about us. Let's move on to the virtually infinite universe, our Manifest Interplanetary Destiny. It's humongous and getting bigger every time we gaze skyward. Yet in all that unexplored, inaccessible space, scientists can't identify, with their exquisitely sophisticated telescopes, any planet near or far that is likely to support life forms comparable to us. Even if intelligent beings exist out there in the void thousands of light years away, it's unlikely we'll ever get to palaver with our cosmic cousins. Now I enjoy my personal space as much as the next person, but doesn't that lifeless expanse -- with its black holes, supernovas, nebulae, pulsars and white dwarfs -- strike you as over the top? After infinite space, let's check the time. How long did it take Mr. ID to "perfect" you and me, we darlings of the unfathomable ether? Scientists estimate -- I know, what do scientists know, but let's humor them, OK? -- that the universe is 15 billion years old. A mere 14 billion, 999 million, 500,000 years later along we come, homo sapiens, staggering out of the jungles onto the African savannas. Yikes, what took Mr. ID so long? Was it to make sure we didn't take ourselves too seriously? If so, it didn't work. We humans tend to think we're the bees' knees, the cat's pajamas. It's all about us. The incalculable space and time of existence has but one purpose. Religious fundamentalists will never forgive Nicolaus Copernicus for pointing out five centuries ago that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, wasn't even close. And if it had been left up to the zealots, the scientific discoveries of Galileo and his ilk wouldn't have seen the light of day. We need to gain some perspective as a species. Our thoroughly modest planet revolves around a rather undistinguished star, of which there are 70 sextillion -- that's a 7 followed by 22 zeros, or about 10 times the grains of sand in all the world's beaches and deserts. We can trace our iffy evolutionary tree back 20 million years. The cockroach, by comparison, has a pedigree of 250 million years and will almost certainly survive us at the rate we're abusing our habitat. Is this any way to design a universe? #--------------------------------------------------------------------------- A devout Christian friend of mine says atheists have no hope because they do not believe in life everlasting given by the Lord. I'd have to say the opposite. Believers have no need to live good lives here, accomplish anything or even care about others. I'm not saying they feel this way. I'm just saying they have no NEED to. They can just pray for forgiveness, confess their sins and pledge to the Lord and they'll get their reward. It is well known that most atheists will eat their children. #--------------------------------------------------------------------------- My Thoughts on Religion Most of this material is from: http://www.dynopower.freeserve.co.uk/homepages/ Some of it has been modified... Let's grant the general creationist assumptions (correct me if I'm wrong): God is male; men are made "in [His] image" in only a general way (maybe even Adam didn't look exactly like Him); and women were made with necessary differences to enable reproduction. Still a load of embarrassing questions arise. Much has been made of Adam's navel, and why he would have one, having never been attached to a placenta. I want to know if God has one. Does He have nipples? What are they used for? I want to know if He has a digestive tract. If so, why? Does He eat? If so, what, and why would He need to? Does He excrete? Where? What happens to it? Does He have lungs? Why would He need them? Does He have sweat glands? And naughty stuff: does He have genitals? Why would He need those? Does He even have two legs, and feet, and toes? Why would He need them, unless He's bound by gravity, as we are? Lower Back Pain Kate Harrop-Allin asks the perceptive question: Why should this condition afflict such a huge percentage of the adult population (I read somewhere that more working days were lost for this than for almost any other reason) when we were supposedly "created" in our present bipedal form? Our Founding Fathers ...because they make creationists appear, shall we say, less than intellectually competent when they toss out a howler like, "George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were creationists!" It makes one want to knock on their heads and call out derisively, "Helllooo! Anybody home in there? In what year did Washington die? When was Origin of Species published?" Old George didn't know about germs, either. (Even Charles Darwin accepted the standard creation model of his day--until he learned better.) Fruit Flies Many species, including fruit flies, have very short lives, and the original pair would not have survived the trip, making it necessary for reproduction while on the ark in order for the species to survive. If you have ever bred fruit flies (as I have for genetics class) you will know that a fruit fly is sexually active within 5 hours of hatching. Their generation times are very short. By the end of the 40 days and 40 nights (not to mention the time waiting for the waters to recede), the ark would have been filled from one end to the other with annoying fruit flies. Therefore, either they routinely sprayed insecticide around the ark to keep these, and other similar species, in control; put up fly paper; or else these species evolved quickly after departure from the ark. Cute Little Bunny Rabbits ... because they give the lie to the creationist "proof" that there are just the number of people alive today that there would be if we had started repopulating the Earth after the Flood. The short answer is, if you hold to the creationist logic, the whole visible universe would be one squirming mass of rabbit flesh by now. Ted Krapkat has improved upon my argument by applying the creationist logic directly to the human population: If we create a simple formula using today's (2001) population of ~6 billion, and figure in the starting population (8 individuals), and the starting time (4360 YBP), we get an annual growth rate of about 0.0047. Since that IS what happened, according to creationists, and it IS the only possible explanation for today's human population then... (a) At Christ's death there were only about half a million people in the whole world! (b) At the time the Israelites entered Canaan, (about 1180 BCE) we get a world population of 2024! By the time you divide that up between Egypt, Canaan, the rest of the world, and Israel, that leaves maybe 6 or 7 people for the Israelite army! (c) If we go back to the time that the Jews were expelled from Egypt, in 1560 BCE, we get a world population of only 340 people! (d) In 2300 BCE there were only about 10 people on Earth! How did fewer than a dozen people build the pyramids? If there are multiple levels of hell, can it be said that there is a temperature gradient between levels? If so, heat pumps can be used to air condition the lower levels. If God is omnipotent and omnipresent, then why does he not reveal himself to his minions, the people of Earth? I have no problems revealing myself (in my birthday suit) to ants. What's his problem? #----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The God Delusion Richard Dawkins ---------------- A picture of the Manhattan skyline with the twin towers having a caption... Imagine the World Without Religion Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about. On the contrary, it something to be proud of, standing tall to face the horizon, for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind, and indeed a healthy mind.. The lawyer Wendy Kaminer was exaggerating only slightly when she remarked that making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion Hall. The status of atheists in America today is on par with that of homosexuals fifty years ago. John Stuart Mill said "The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion. Organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to "come out", thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can't be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored. Such free spirits need only a little encouragment to break free of the vice of religion. When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion. Einstein: I am a deeply religious non-believer. The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misognistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. The God Hypothesis ------------------ There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. Alternative View ---------------- Any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes to existence as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Mystery of the Holy Trinity --------------------------- Do we have one God in three parts, or three Gods in one. The Catholic Encyclopedia clears up the matter for us, in a masterpiece of theological close reasoning. In the unity of the Godhead, there are three Persons, the father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these Three persons being truly distinct one from another. Thus, in the words of the Athanasian Creed: 'the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God.' To cite the old cliches, science gets the age of rocks and religion gets the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven. Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition. Creationism is just a symptom of what they see as the greater enemy: religion. While religion can exist without creationism, creationism cannot exist without religion. The only difference between "The Da Vinci Code" and the gospels is that the gospels are ancient fiction while "The Da Vinci Code" is modern fiction. The immense majority of intellectuals eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes. The French mathematician reckoned that however long the odds against God's existence might be, there is even a larger asymmetry in the penalty for guessing wrong. You'd better believe in God, becaue if you're right, you stand to gain eternal bliss and if you're wrong, it won't make any difference anyway. On the other hand, if you don't believe in God and you turn out to be wrong, you get eternal damnation, whereas if you're right, it makes no difference. On the face of it, the decision is a no-brainer. Believe in God. The only problem with this argument is that believing and feigning belief are two different things. If God is omniscient, the feigning believers will be picked off and sent to eternal damnation. Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be true. Fred Hoyle's said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane sweeping through a scrap yard would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. The scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennet pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. Call it the "trickle down theory" of creationism. You'll never see a spear making a spear-maker, a horse-shoe making a blacksmith or a pot making a potter. Darwin's discovery of a workable process that does that very counter-intuitive thing is what makes his contribution to human thought so revolutionary, and so loaded with the power to raise consciousness. Creationists who attempt to deploy the argument from improbability in their favour always assume that biological adaptation is a question of jackpot or nothing. Another name for the jackpot is "irreducible complexity". Either the eye sees or it doesn't. Either the wing flies or it doesn't. What is the use of half an eye or half a wing. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. A cataract patient whose eye lens has been removed can still see enough to avoid bumping into a tree or falling over a cliff. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree. In essence, there is a smooth gradient of wing like structures in various animals Darwin stated "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed but none have stood up to analysis. Saint Augustine said "There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiousity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn." God is merely an unreachable, unknowable sky-fairy. Around a typical star like our sun, there is a so-called Goldilocks zone - not to hot, not too cold, but just right for planets with liquid water. A thin band of orbits lies between those that are too far from the star, where water freezes, and too close where it boils. Presumable, a life friendly orbit has to be nearly circular. A fiercely elliptical orbit would only allow the planet ot whiz thru the Goldilocks zone every few (Earth) decades or centuries. The size of our moon and its rotation around the Earth helps to stabilize the Earth's rotation around its own axis. The moon's distance from the Earth is another factor that provides for smaller tidal forces. The massive gravitational vacuum cleaner of Jupiter is well placed to intercept asteroids that would otherwise threaten us with a lethal collision. Earth's single relatively large moon serves to stabilize our axis of rotation. It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy and 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Knocking off a few noughts for reasons of ordinary prodence, a bilion billion is a conservative estimate of available planets in our universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a quite staggering event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. And yet ... even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets -- of which Earth of course is one. 1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises. 2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artifact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye, a spider or a person. 3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who desigmed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a crane, not a "skyhook", for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity. 4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown hows living creatures with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say the the illusion of design in living creatures is just that - an illusion. 5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinisn does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postilate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with. 6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a stromgly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better the self-defeating shyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer. Everyone has their own pet theory of where religion comes from and why all human cultures have it. It gives consolation and comfort. It fosters togetherness in groups. It satisfies our yearning to understand why we exist. Is religion a placebo that prolongs life by reducing stress? A tribe with a stirringly belligerent "god of battles" win wars against rival tribes whose gods urge peace and harmony, or tribes with no gods at all. Warriors who unshakeably believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to paradise fight bravely and willingly give up their lives. So tribes with this kind of religion are more likely to survive in inter-tribal warfare, steal the conquered tribes livestock and seize their women as concubines. Assuming that the Cambridge theologian was a mainstream Christian, he probably believed some combination of the following: - In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved. - The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life. - The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three days. - Forty days later, the fatherless man went up to the top of a hill and disappeared bodily into the sky. - If you murmur thought privately in your head, the fatherless man, and his "father" (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and may act uopn them. He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody else in the world. - If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man sees all, even if no one else does. You may be punished accordingly, including after your death. - The fatherless man's virgin mother never died but "ascended" bodily into heaven. - Bread and wine, if blessed by a priest (who must have testicles), "become" the body and blood of the fatherless man. Tit-for-Tat Retaliator and Recipricator As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents argument that if the government ever laid down it's arms, all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to a test at 8:00 a.m. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 a.m., the first bank was robbed. By noon, most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and of course the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters..... Yoctosecond - One septillionth (10-24) of a second The American Taliban A recovering Christian.... a sustained transgenerational vendetta. Homogamy: marrying someone of the same religion. Heterogamy: marrying someone of a different religion. Apostasy: abandoning one's religion or faith A God who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously cannot be simple and is so statistically improbable. Imagine the bandwidth requirements. To be fair, nuch of the Bible is not systematically evil, but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and "improved" by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. Yet, this book is what most religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living. The story of Noah is appalling. God took a dim view of humans, so he (with the exception of one family) drowned the lot of them including the children and also for good measure, the rest of the (presumably blameless) animals as well. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity in mind, care a fig for petty human malefactions (crime). We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little sins to the levels of cosmic significance! You'd think that an omnipotent God would adopt a slightly more targetted approach to zapping sinners, a judicious heart attack here perhaps, rather than the wholesale destruction of an entire city. Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it? Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg said "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things." Blaise Pascal said "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction". The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty and rape. many ancient works do that - The Illiad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans for example. But no one is selling the Illiad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The Bible is sold and bought, as a guide to how people should live their lives. And it is, by far, the world's all-time best seller. The Moral Zeitgeist ------------------- - Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. - In all things, strive to cause no harm. - Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness, and respect. - Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted. - Live life with a sense of joy and wonder. - Always seek to be learning something new. - Test all things; check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them. - Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you. - Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others. - Question everything. - Enjoy your sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business. - Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species. - Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence and how to disagree with you. The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still beseiged by the armies of the preposterous. We are now even killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible. George Carlin said: "Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man - living in the sky - who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anquish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time.... But he loves you!" In 2006 in Afghanistan, Abdul Rahman was sentenced to death for converting to Christianity. Did he kill anyone, hurt anybody, steal anything or damage anything? No! All he did was change his mind. Internally, and privately, he changed his mind. He entertained certain thoughts which were not to the the liking of the ruling party of the country. And this, remember, is not Afghanistan of the Taliban but the liberated Afghanistan of Hamid Karzai, set up by the American led coalition. Mr. Rahman finally escaped execution but only on a plea of insanity, and only after intense international pressure. He has sought asylum in Italy, to avoid being murdered by zealots eager to do their Islamic duty. It is still an article of the constitution of "liberated" Afghanistan that the penalty of apostasy is death. Apostasy, remember doesn't mean actual harm to persons or property. It is pure thoughtcrime, to use George Orwell's 1984 terminology, and the official punishment for it under Islamic law is death. On September 3, 1992, to take one example, where it was actually carried out, Sadiq Abdul Karim Malallah was publicly beheaded in Saudi Arabia after being lawfully convicted of apostasy and blasphemy. The Vatican finally apologized to Galileo after only five hundred years for his transgressions. Any Muslim that denies terror is a part of Islam is kafir. A kafir is n unbeliever (i.e. a non-Muslim), a term of gross insult. Victor Hugo said "There is in every village a torch - the teacher: and an extinguisher - the clergyman." Amazingly for a rite that could have such monumental significance for a whole extended family, the Catholic church allowed (and still allows) anybody to baptize anyone else. The baptizer doesn't have to be a priest. Neither the child, nor the parents, nor anyone else has to consent to the baptism. Nothing need be signed. Nothing need be officially witnessed. All that is necessary is a splash of water, a few words, a helpless child, and a superstitious and catechistically brainwashed babysitter. Actually, only the last of these is needed because assuming the child is too young to be a witness, who is even to know. An American colleage who was brought up Catholic writes to me as follows: We used to baptize our dolls. I don't remember any of us baptizing our little Protestant friends but no doubt that has happened and happens today. We made little Catholics of our dolls, taking them to church, giving them Holy Communion, etc. We were brainwashed to be good Catholic mothers early on. All three boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affection for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. This was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even as the victim of one of the (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience). The Magdalene Asylums were run by sadastically cruel nuns who ran many of Ireland's girls schools. The Magdalene Sisters was a movie about these schools. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" The adage is true as lomg as you don't really believe the words. But if you're whole upbringing, and everything you have ever been told by parents, teachers and priests, has led you to believe, really believe, utterly and completely, that sinners burn in hell (or some other obnoxious article of doctrine such as that a woman is the property of her husband), it is entirely plausible that words could have a more long-lasting and damaging effects than deeds. I am persuaded that the term "child abuse" is no exageration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell. We stand firm upon the bare proposition that God has spoken authoritatively and inerrantly in the pages of the holy Scripture. Religion's power to console doesn't make it true. Even if we make huge concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that belief in God's existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well being, even if all the atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst, none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or title of evidence that religious belief is true. Mark Twain dismissed death by saying: "I do not fear my death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slighest inconvenience from it." The doctrine of purgatory offers a preposterous revelation of the way the theological mind works. Purgatory is a sort of divine Ellis Island, a Hadean waiting room where dead souls go if their sins aren't bad enough to send them to hell, but they still need a bit of remedial checking out and purifying before they can be admitted to the sin-free zone of heaven. In medieval times, the Church used to sell "indulgences" for money. This amounted to paying for some number of days remission from purgatory, and the Church literally (and with breathtaking presumption) issued signed certificates specifying the number of days off that had been purchased. This selling of indulgences was one of the greatest con tricks in history. An Australian friend coined a wonderful phrase to describe the tendency for religiousity to increase in old age: Cramming for the final. What really fascinates me about the doctrine of purgatory is the evidence that theologians have advanced for it: evidence so spectaularly weak that it renders even more comical the airy confidence with which it was asserted. The entry on purgatory in the Catholic Encyclopedia has a section called "proofs". The essential evidence for the existence of purgatory is this. If the dead simply went to heaven or hell on the basis of their sins while on Earth, there would be no point in praying for them. "For why pray for the dead, if there be no belief in the power of prayer to afford solace to those who as of yet are excluded from the sight of God." And we do pray for the dead, don't we? Therefore purgatory must exist, otherwise, our prayers would be pointless! Q.E.D. This is what passes for reasoning in the theological mind. #----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Dawkins: Why There Almost Certainly Is No God Richard Dawkins Mon Oct 23, 2:25 PM ET America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the 'Armageddon' that is to presage the Second Coming. Sam Harris, in his new short book, Letter to a Christian Nation, hits the bull's-eye as usual: placed by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ . . .Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency. Does Bush check the Rapture Index daily, as Reagan did his stars? We don't know, but would anyone be surprised? My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare emergency. Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education and hence the whole future of science in this country - is under threat. Temporarily beaten back in a Pennsylvania court, the 'breathtaking inanity' (Judge John Jones's immortal phrase) of 'intelligent design' continually flares up in local bush-fires. Dowsing them is a time-consuming but important responsibility, and scientists are finally being jolted out of their complacency. For years they quietly got on with their science, lamentably underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent nor interested in science, attended to the serious political business of subverting local school boards. Scientists, and intellectuals generally, are now waking up to the threat from the American Taliban. Scientists divide into two schools of thought over the best tactics with which to face the threat. The Neville Chamberlain 'appeasement' school focuses on the battle for evolution. Consequently, its members identify fundamentalism as the enemy, and they bend over backwards to appease 'moderate' or 'sensible' religion (not a difficult task, for bishops and theologians despise fundamentalists as much as scientists do). Scientists of the Winston Churchill school, by contrast, see the fight for evolution as only one battle in a larger war: a looming war between supernaturalism on the one side and rationality on the other. For them, bishops and theologians belong with creationists in the supernatural camp, and are not to be appeased. The Chamberlain school accuses Churchillians of rocking the boat to the point of muddying the waters. The philosopher of science Michael Ruse wrote: We who love science must realize that the enemy of our enemies is our friend. Too often evolutionists spend time insulting would-be allies. This is especially true of secular evolutionists. Atheists spend more time running down sympathetic Christians than they do countering ¬creationists. When John Paul II wrote a letter endorsing Darwinism, Richard Dawkins's response was simply that the pope was a hypocrite, that he could not be genuine about science and that Dawkins himself simply preferred an honest fundamentalist. A recent article in the New York Times by Cornelia Dean quotes the astronomer Owen Gingerich as saying that, by simultaneously advocating evolution and atheism, 'Dr Dawkins "probably single-handedly makes more converts to intelligent design than any of the leading intelligent design theorists".' This is not the first, not the second, not even the third time this plonkingly witless point has been made (and more than one reply has aptly cited Uncle Remus: "Oh please please Brer Fox, don't throw me in that awful briar patch"). Chamberlainites are apt to quote the late Stephen Jay Gould's 'NOMA' - 'non-overlapping magisteria'. Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse: To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists. This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment's thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference. God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science. Even the infamous Templeton Foundation recognized that God is a scientific hypothesis - by funding double-blind trials to test whether remote prayer would speed the recovery of heart patients. It didn't, of course, although a control group who knew they had been prayed for tended to get worse (how about a class action suit against the Templeton Foundation?) Despite such well-financed efforts, no evidence for God's existence has yet appeared. To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA, imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. If NOMA enthusiasts were sincere, they should dismiss the archeologists' DNA out of hand: "Irrelevant. Scientific evidence has no bearing on theological questions. Wrong magisterium." Does anyone seriously imagine that they would say anything remotely like that? You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but every professor of theology and every bishop in the land would trumpet the archeological evidence to the skies. Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle - and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it - an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today. The Chamberlain tactic of snuggling up to 'sensible' religion, in order to present a united front against ('intelligent design') creationists, is fine if your central concern is the battle for evolution. That is a valid central concern, and I salute those who press it, such as Eugenie Scott in Evolution versus Creationism. But if you are concerned with the stupendous scientific question of whether the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence or not, the lines are drawn completely differently. On this larger issue, fundamentalists are united with 'moderate' religion on one side, and I find myself on the other. Of course, this all presupposes that the God we are talking about is a personal intelligence such as Yahweh, Allah, Baal, Wotan, Zeus or Lord Krishna. If, by 'God', you mean love, nature, goodness, the universe, the laws of physics, the spirit of humanity, or Planck's constant, none of the above applies. An American student asked her professor whether he had a view about me. 'Sure,' he replied. 'He's positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the universe. To me, that is ¬religion!' Well, if that's what you choose to mean by religion, fine, that makes me a religious man. But if your God is a being who designs universes, listens to prayers, forgives sins, wreaks miracles, reads your thoughts, cares about your welfare and raises you from the dead, you are unlikely to be satisfied. As the distinguished American physicist Steven Weinberg said, "If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal." But don't expect congregations to flock to your church. When Einstein said 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?' he meant 'Could the universe have begun in more than one way?' 'God does not play dice' was Einstein's poetic way of doubting Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle. Einstein was famously irritated when theists misunderstood him to mean a personal God. But what did he expect? The hunger to misunderstand should have been palpable to him. 'Religious' physicists usually turn out to be so only in the Einsteinian sense: they are atheists of a poetic disposition. So am I. But, given the widespread yearning for that great misunderstanding, deliberately to confuse Einsteinian pantheism with supernatural religion is an act of intellectual high treason. Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here's why. First, most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished. Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer - a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it - it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been an intelligence - let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. Another of Aquinas' efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum: Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God. That's an argument? You might as well say that people vary in smelliness but we can make the judgment only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion. That's theology. The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used today is the teleological argument, sometimes called the Argument from Design although - since the name begs the question of its validity - it should better be called the Argument for Design. It is the familiar 'watchmaker' argument, which is surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered - and it is rediscovered by just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and Darwin's brilliant alternative. In the familiar world of human artifacts, complicated things that look designed are designed. To naïve observers, it seems to follow that similarly complicated things in the natural world that look designed - things like eyes and hearts - are designed too. It isn't just an argument by analogy. There is a semblance of statistical reasoning here too - fallacious, but carrying an illusion of plausibility. If you randomly scramble the fragments of an eye or a leg or a heart a million times, you'd be lucky to hit even one combination that could see, walk or pump. This demonstrates that such devices could not have been put together by chance. And of course, no sensible scientist ever said they could. Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design. Even before Darwin's time, the illogicality was glaring: how could it ever have been a good idea to postulate, in explanation for the existence of improbable things, a designer who would have to be even more improbable? The entire argument is a logical non-starter, as David Hume realized before Darwin was born. What Hume didn't know was the supremely elegant alternative to both chance and design that Darwin was to give us. Natural selection is so stunningly powerful and elegant, it not only explains the whole of life, it raises our consciousness and boosts our confidence in science's future ability to explain everything else. Natural selection is not just an alternative to chance. It is the only ultimate alternative ever suggested. Design is a workable explanation for organized complexity only in the short term. It is not an ultimate explanation, because designers themselves demand an explanation. If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket. Ultimately they must have evolved by gradual degrees from simpler beginnings. Only evolution, or some kind of gradualistic 'crane' (to use Daniel Dennett's neat term), is capable of terminating the regress. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain - a device whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the gentle ramp that leads up to it. Whether my conjecture is right that evolution is the only explanation for life in the universe, there is no doubt that it is the explanation for life on this planet. Evolution is a fact, and it is among the more secure facts known to science. But it had to get started somehow. Natural selection cannot work its wonders until certain minimal conditions are in place, of which the most important is an accurate system of replication - DNA, or something that works like DNA. The origin of life on this planet - which means the origin of the first self-replicating molecule - is hard to study, because it (probably) only happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions from those with which we are familiar. We may never know how it happened. Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed, it must have been a genuinely very improbable - in the sense of unpredictable - event: too improbable, perhaps, for chemists to reproduce it in the laboratory or even devise a plausible theory for what happened. This weirdly paradoxical conclusion - that a chemical account of the origin of life, in order to be plausible, has to be implausible - would follow if it were the case that life is extremely rare in the universe. And indeed we have never encountered any hint of extraterrestrial life, not even by radio - the circumstance that prompted Enrico Fermi's cry: "Where is everybody?" Suppose life's origin on a planet took place through a hugely improbable stroke of luck, so improbable that it happens on only one in a billion planets. The National Science Foundation would laugh at any chemist whose proposed research had only a one in a hundred chance of succeeding, let alone one in a billion. Yet, given that there are at least a billion billion planets in the universe, even such absurdly low odds as these will yield life on a billion planets. And - this is where the famous anthropic principle comes in - Earth has to be one of them, because here we are. If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible. But if you are alive (as you manifestly are if you are about to step into a spaceship) you needn't bother to go looking for that one planet because, by definition, you are already standing on it. The anthropic principle really is rather elegant. By the way, I don't actually think the origin of life was as improbable as all that. I think the galaxy has plenty of islands of life dotted about, even if the islands are too spaced out for any one to hope for a meeting with any other. My point is only that, given the number of planets in the universe, the origin of life could in theory be as lucky as a blindfolded golfer scoring a hole in one. The beauty of the anthropic principle is that, even in the teeth of such stupefying odds against, it still gives us a perfectly satisfying explanation for life's presence on our own planet. The anthropic principle is usually applied not to planets but to universes. Physicists have suggested that the laws and constants of physics are too good - as if the universe were set up to favour our eventual evolution. It is as though there were, say, half a dozen dials representing the major constants of physics. Each of the dials could in principle be tuned to any of a wide range of values. Almost all of these knob-twiddlings would yield a universe in which life would be impossible. Some universes would fizzle out within the first picosecond. Others would contain no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In yet others, matter would never condense into stars (and you need stars in order to forge the elements of chemistry and hence life). You can estimate the very low odds against the six knobs all just happening to be correctly tuned, and conclude that a divine knob-twiddler must have been at work. But, as we have already seen, that explanation is vacuous because it begs the biggest question of all. The divine knob twiddler would himself have to have been at least as improbable as the settings of his knobs. Again, the anthropic principle delivers its devastatingly neat solution. Physicists already have reason to suspect that our universe - everything we can see - is only one universe among perhaps billions. Some theorists postulate a multiverse of foam, where the universe we know is just one bubble. Each bubble has its own laws and constants. Our familiar laws of physics are parochial bylaws. Of all the universes in the foam, only a minority has what it takes to generate life. And, with anthropic hindsight, we obviously have to be sitting in a member of that minority, because, well, here we are, aren't we? As physicists have said, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for a universe without stars would also lack the chemical elements necessary for life. There may be universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to notice the lack. Similarly, it is no accident that we see a rich diversity of living species: for an evolutionary process that is capable of yielding a species that can see things and reflect on them cannot help producing lots of other species at the same time. The reflective species must be surrounded by an ecosystem, as it must be surrounded by stars. The anthropic principle entitles us to postulate a massive dose of luck in accounting for the existence of life on our planet. But there are limits. We are allowed one stroke of luck for the origin of evolution, and perhaps for a couple of other unique events like the origin of the eukaryotic cell and the origin of consciousness. But that's the end of our entitlement to large-scale luck. We emphatically cannot invoke major strokes of luck to account for the illusion of design that glows from each of the billion species of living creature that have ever lived on Earth. The evolution of life is a general and continuing process, producing essentially the same result in all species, however different the details. Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, evolution is a predictive science. If you pick any hitherto unstudied species and subject it to minute scrutiny, any evolutionist will confidently predict that each individual will be observed to do everything in its power, in the particular way of the species - plant, herbivore, carnivore, nectivore or whatever it is - to survive and propagate the DNA that rides inside it. We won't be around long enough to test the prediction but we can say, with great confidence, that if a comet strikes Earth and wipes out the mammals, a new fauna will rise to fill their shoes, just as the mammals filled those of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And the range of parts played by the new cast of life's drama will be similar in broad outline, though not in detail, to the roles played by the mammals, and the dinosaurs before them, and the mammal-like reptiles before the dinosaurs. The same rules are predictably being followed, in millions of species all over the globe, and for hundreds of millions of years. Such a general observation requires an entirely different explanatory principle from the anthropic principle that explains one-off events like the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, by luck. That entirely different principle is natural selection. We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable. Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the author of nine books, including The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The Ancestor's Tale. His new book, The God Delusion, published last week by Houghton Mifflin, is already a NEW YORK TIMES bestseller, and his Foundation for Reason and Science launched at the same time (see RichardDawkins.net). #---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why I Am Hostile Toward Religion I oppose fundamentalist religion because it is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless eager minds. By Richard Dawkins Despite my dislike of gladiatorial contests, I seem somehow to have acquired a reputation for pugnacity toward religion. Colleagues who agree that there is no God, who agree that we do not need religion to be moral, and agree that we can explain the roots of religion and of morality in non-religious terms, nevertheless come back at me in gentle puzzlement. Why are you so hostile? What is actually wrong with religion? Does it really do so much harm that we should actively fight against it? Why not live and let live, as one does with Taurus and Scorpio, crystal energy and ley lines? Isn't it all just harmless nonsense? I might retort that such hostility as I or other atheists occasionally voice toward religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement. But my interlocutor usually doesn’t leave it at that. He may go on to say something like this: "Doesn’t your hostility mark you out as a fundamentalist atheist, just as fundamentalist in your own way as the wingnuts of the Bible Belt in theirs?" I need to dispose of this accusation of fundamentalism, for it is distressingly common. Holy Books vs. Evidence Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book. By contrast, what I, as a scientist, believe (for example, evolution) I believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence. It really is a very different matter. Books about evolution are believed not because they are holy. They are believed because they present overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence. In principle, any reader can go and check that evidence. When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn’t happen with holy books. Philosophers, especially amateurs with a little philosophical learning, and even more especially those infected with "cultural relativism," may raise a tiresome red herring at this point a scientist’s belief in evidence is itself a matter of fundamentalist faith. I have dealt with this elsewhere, and will only briefly repeat myself here. All of us believe in evidence in our own lives, whatever we may profess with our amateur philosophical hats on. ******* I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalist would ever say anything like that. It is all too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion. I may well appear passionate when I defend evolution against a fundamentalist creationist, but this is not because of a rival fundamentalism of my own. It is because the evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly strong and I am passionately distressed that my opponent can’t see it--or, more usually, refuses to look at it because it contradicts his holy book. My passion is increased when I think about how much the poor fundamentalists, and those whom they influence, are missing. The truths of evolution, along with many other scientific truths, are so engrossingly fascinating and beautiful; how truly tragic to die having missed out on all that! Of course that makes me passionate. How could it not? But my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming. It does happen. I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artifact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said--with passion--"My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal -unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat. Fundamentalist Religion Saps the Intellect As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect. The saddest example I know is that of the American geologist Kurt Wise, who now directs the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee. It is no accident that Bryan College is named after William Jennings Bryan, prosecutor of the science teacher John Scopes in the Dayton "Monkey Trial" of 1923. Wise could have fulfilled his boyhood ambition to become a professor of geology at a real university, a university whose motto might have been "Think critically" rather than the oxymoronic one displayed on the Bryan website: "Think critically and biblically." Indeed, he obtained a real degree in geology at the University of Chicago, followed by two higher degrees in geology and paleontology at Harvard (no less) where he studied under Stephen Jay Gould (no less). He was a highly qualified and genuinely promising young scientist, well on his way to achieving his dream of teaching science and doing research at a proper university. Then tragedy struck. It came, not from outside but from within his own mind, a mind fatally subverted and weakened by a fundamentalist religious upbringing that required him to believe that the Earth--the subject of his Chicago and Harvard geological education--was less than ten thousand years old. He was too intelligent not to recognize the head-on collision between his religion and his science, and the conflict in his mind made him increasingly uneasy. One day, he could hear the strain no more, and he clinched the matter with a pair of scissors. He took a bible and went right through it, literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific world-view were true. At the end of this ruthlessly honest labor-intensive exercise, there was so little left of his bible that try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible pick up the Bible without it being rent in two. I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science. I find that terribly sad; but whereas the Golgi Apparatus moved me to tears of admiration and exultation, the Kurt Wise story is just plain pathetic--pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career and his life’s happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to escape. All he had to do was toss out the bible. Or interpret it symbolically, or allegorically, as the theologians do. Instead, he did the fundamentalist thing and tossed out evidence and reason, along with all his dreams and hopes. Perhaps uniquely among fundamentalists, Kurt Wise is honest--devastatingly, painfully, shockingly honest. Give him the Templeton Prize; he might be the first really sincere recipient. Wise brings to the surface what is secretly going on underneath, in the minds of fundamentalists generally, when they encounter scientific evidence that contradicts their beliefs. The Doublethink of Religious Faith Poor Kurt Wise reminds me more of Winston Smith in ‘1984’--struggling desperately to believe that two plus two equals five if Big Brother says it does. Winston, however, was being tortured. Wise’s doublethink comes not from the imperative of physical torture but from the imperative--apparently just as undeniable to some people--of religious faith: arguably a form of mental torture. I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard-educated geologist, just think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed. Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, "sensible" religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue. The more faith you have, the less thinking you actually do. poverty stricken arsenals of the religious imagination Karl Marx state that "religion is the opiate of the masses". Religion is an anesthetic that makes you immune to rational thought. Religion turns people into hateful lemmings and should be banned. Ho! Ho! Ho! Religion must go. "Me, I'm examining the major Western religions. I'm looking for something that's very soft on morality, extremely generous with holidays, and has a very short initiation period." Religious zealots, fundamentalists and your average, everyday churchgoer will flip out on you for questioning their faith and are completely content in believing in something that can’t be understood or even proved. Religion is detrimental to the progress of humanity and is a neurological disorder. I guess humanity was started through incest (Adam and Eve's children) or did Eve have some of her grandchildren? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Thou shall have no other Gods before me. Blatantly unconstitutional. The free exercise clause of the first amendment guarantees that we each have the right to follow any God and any religious belief system we wish. 2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. Also unconstitutional on free exercise grounds. Americans can make any graven image they wish to make, and bow down to whatever god or idol they wish. 3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain Unconstitutional on both freedom of religion and free speech grounds. 4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy Again, unconstitutional on free exercise grounds. 5. Honour thy father and thy mother A good idea, in most cases, but a law requiring it would be unconstitutional and outside the purview of government. You can't legally enforce an individual's feelings toward their parents. 6. Thou shalt not kill This one is obviously constitutional, and is a part of our legal system. But it's also found in EVERY legal system, even those that have nothing to do with the bible or Christianity. No society can condone murder of each other and survive, so this is simply a survival imperative. 7. Thou shalt not commit adultery Another one that is a good idea, but not constitutional if legally enforced. Adultery is a moral wrong, but it's a private matter between individuals. 8. Thou shalt not steal This is the second one that is obviously constitutional, but also found in every legal system regardless of the religious system that may have initially spawned it. A universal imperative that would be part of the law even if the bible never existed. 9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour Some have interpreted this to be analagous to our perjury laws, but nothing in the text indicates that. It's talking about lying in general, not in a legal sense during court proceedings. And while lying may be wrong, it's not legally wrong except in specific circumstances - perjury and libel/slander. Under our system, most instances of lying would be covered by the first amendment free speech clause. 10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's Not only unconstitutional, it would require the ability to read minds. If coveting what your neighbor has was against the law in the US, there would be no "keeping up with the Joneses". You cannot, under our system, legislate against thoughts or feelings. The "basis of most of our laws"? Not even close. --------------------------------------------------------------------- If there are multiple levels of hell, can it be said that there is a temperature gradient between levels? If so, heat pumps can be used to air condition the lower levels. Religions -------- polytheism monotheism olympianism (Greek gods) Catholic Methodists Baptists Presbyterian Hindu Sikh Bhuddism Islam/Muslim Sunni Shiite Wahibism Lutherans Mormon Russian Orthodox Greek Orthodox Eastern Orthodox Jewish Episcopalian Anglican Shakers Quakers Shinto Scientology Unitarian Trinitarian Paganisn Satanism Allah God Jesus Mohammed The Immaculate Conception The Holy Trinity Darwin will crush them all over time as we experience the slow illumination of the human mind. It took the Catholic church 500 years to forgive Galileo. Mithras http://www.near-death.com/experiences/origen048.html ============================================================================ Schopenhauer contrasts the peaceable historical record of the Hindus and the Buddhists with the wickedness and cruelty of the monotheists and then concludes: Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature a jealous God who will never allow another to live. On the other hand, polytheistic gods are naturally tolerant; they live and let live. In the first place, they gladly tolerate their colleagues, the gods of the same religion, and this tolerance is afterwards extended even to foreign gods who are accordingly, hospitably received and later admitted, in some cases, even to an equality of rights. An instance of this is seen in the Romans who willingly admited and respected Phrygian, Egyptian and other foreign gods. Thus it is only the monotheistic religions that furnish us with the spectacle of religious wars, religious persecutions, courts for trying heretics, and also with that of iconoclasm, the destruction of the images of foreign gods, the demolition of Indian temples and Egyptian colossi that had looked at the sun for three thousand years; all this because their jealous God has said: "Thou shall make no graven image" and so on. Monotheism has been criticized for suppressing human freedom. Many scholars have argued that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism whereas more and mmore modern philosophers see polytheism as a possible source of pluralism, creeativity, and human freedom. Feminists have also criticized the monotheistic God as a male chauvinist who is unwilling to change and is insensitive to "femininity" The omnipotence of God is asserted everywhere in the Koran: man's will is totally subordinate to God's will to the extent that man cannot be said to have a free will of his own. Even those who disbelieve in Him, disbelieve because it is God who wills them to disbelieve. This leads to the Muslim doctrine of predestination that prevails over the doctrine of man's free will. Under the Koranic system of predestination, "men" are no more than automata created by a capricious deity who amuses himself by watching his creations burning in hell. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Religion should be treated as a neurological disorder. http://uniformvelocity.com/2009/03/18/the-intellectual-dishonesty-is-astounding/ The simple fact that a seemingly intelligent and scientifically educated person can parse their intellect into compartments and completely insulate portions of their cognition from the same critical thought that science demands is quite befuddling. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let's look at some of the Gods mentioned in the Bible: Adrammelech II Kings 17:31 Sepharvite God. Anammelech II Kings 17:31 Sepharvite God. Ashima II Kings 17:30 Samaritan Moon Goddess. Ashtoreth I Kings 11:05 Canaanite Goddess. Baal I Kings 18:19 Canaanite God ("Lord") of fertility, vegitation, and storms. Baal-berith Judges 8:33 A regional variation/aspect of Baal. Baal-peor Numbers 25:03 Moabite regional variation/aspect of Baal. Baal-zebub Luke 11:19 Philistine/Ekronian regional variation/aspect of Baal. Baalim I Kings 18:18 Canaanite Gods ("Lords"), a collective of the different aspects of Baa. Bel Isiah 46:01 Assyrian/Babylonian/Sumerian God ("Lord"). Chemosh I Kings 11:07 Moabite war God. Dagon I Samuel 05:02 Philistine/Ekronian/Babylonian God of agriculture. Diana of the Ephesians Acts 19:35 Ephesian moon and nature Goddess, ("Divine/Brilliant"). Jehovah Exodus 6:03 Hebrew God Jupiter Acts 14:12 Roman God (possibly derived from 'Zeus-pater', Father Zeus). Lucifer Isiah 14:12 ("Light-Bearer") Mercurius Acts 14:12 Otherwise known as the Roman God Mercury, God of communication and travel, and messenger of the Gods...which is probably why Paul was called this at Lystra. Milcom I Kings 11:05 Ammonite God Molech I Kings 11:07 Ammonite God, also called Moloch, most probably Baal-Hammon of Carthage. Nebo Isiah 46:01 Assyrian/Babylonian/Chaldean God of wisdom and writing, also called Nabu. Nergal II Kings 17:30 Cuth/Assyrian/Babylonian war and underworld God, also called Meshlamthea. Nibhaz II Kings 17:31 Avites God Nisroch II Kings 19:37 Assyrian God Rimmon II Kings 05:18 Babylonian/Syrian storm God involved (as Ramman) with the Deluge, according to Hebrew texts; also known as Ramman/Rammon. Succoth-benoth II Kings 17:30 Babylonian fertility Goddess ("She Who Produces Seed"), also known as Zarpanitu/Zerpanitum. Tammuz Ezekial 8:14 Assyrian/Babylonian God Tartak II Kings 17:31 Avites God |
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