Southern Baptist sexual abuses by pastors quietly unfolding. Vewy, vewy, quiet.

Georgia (the US state) governor leads group and prays for rain. Not, of course, performing a rain dance, nor sacrificing to Zeus, or spending money to, I don't know, pump water up into the reservoir.[1]

Greta Christina on the "trendiness" of atheism.

"Atheists just need a Hallmark card.". Later notes that you don't find Christians in the US having to post under pseudonyms, lest their families find out their beliefs and ostracize them, nor expressing concern for their jobs or personal safety.

[1] To be fair, an article like that probably wouldn't tell everything. Apparently Georgia is trying to retain water normally released to Florida and Alabama; of course, that would then just pass on the water shortage.

Sign that the US has a rather privileged place in the Internet: drought.gov.

I'm still reading Ancient Engineers, and de Camp's raised the question in chapter 7 of why science came to a halt in the Roman Empire. He refuses to blame slavery, tyrannical emperors, or Christianity per se, as the timings are wrong, or the lack of instrumentation, since they actually had a lot of techniques, and even observation of magnification effects, though not application thereof. Instead he blames the rise of supernaturalism in general, not for being openly hostile to science but for taking energy away from it.

( quotation )

Regardless of whether he got all the historical details exactly right, the general story, published in 1960, is very similar to post-Selfish Gene memetic analyses of Western religion. One difference is that de Camp, writing as an engineer, seems to assume conscious invention and intelligent design of the new religions. A memeticist could relax that constraint, remaining agnostic as to what anyone thought they were doing, but noting that 'mutations', changes, in the directions he describes would have the adaptive effects he describes, whether such changes were planned for that purpose or not.

It also reminds me that a friend of mine said once that -- if I understood and remember her correctly -- she thought the remarkable success of Christianity indicated that something special and weird must have happened back then. de Camp expresses the rejoinder I didn't make at the time, which was that I thought the special circumstances were that of a remarkable period of vigorous religious experimentation, with Christianity emerging as the religion most suited to sweeping a population and stomping out its rivals -- plus some element of luck in that the Emperors took it up, and not some other cult, to unify their domains.

Pantheons seem to imitate their societies, from the brawling barbarian gods of the Norse and Greeks to the Celestial Bureaucracy of China, with household gods filing reports on their families to the Jade Emperor. I was wondering what religion a democratic society might develop after a couple thousand years, say if Athens had avoided being crushed by the Macedonians, Romans, or Christians. Data points I can think of are the relative egalitarianism of forager societies, coupled with animism, and, in a way more "exotic", my mother's favorite set of plays, the Oresteia, which culminate in Apollo and Athena defending Orestes against the Erinyes in a court of law. You also have a few hundred years of small-scale democracy in Switzerland and New England, but in a much larger Christian matrix. I don't know if the 400 years of the Roman Republic have anything interesting to contribute here.

I miss my parents; they'd have found this pretty interesting.

Analysis of the famous UFO trip of Betty and Barney Hill. Conclusion: an aircraft warning light combined with deprivation of sleep and sensation, and an already-stopped watch.

Kowloon Walled City, an organically developed micro-arcology. Wow. Probably a good setting for a pulp game, too.

Parody of reviews of The God Delusion.

Anthony Flew: converted ex-atheist or confused old man?

Non-theist billboards

L. Ron Hubbard wikiquotes.

* "There is no more ethical group on this planet than ourselves."

o L. Ron Hubbard, KEEPING SCIENTOLOGY WORKING. 7 February 1965, reissued 27 August 1980

* "If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace."

o L. Ron Hubbard, Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter, 15 August 1960, Dept. of Govt. Affairs

Greta Christina takes on Lewis's Lord, Liar, or Lunatic? trilemma. A commenter rejoins with the Riddle of Epicurus: "God:weak, wicked, or non-existent?"

In my experience, most agnostics are practically atheist. They don't believe in god or afterlife, they're not praying, they're not worrying about it all. There are exceptions, from the occasional "agnostic theist" to a more common agnostic who is "seeking", or struggling, or wistfully wishing X was true, or on their way from being Christian to being atheist. But even those could largely be seen as functionally not-theist.

Conversely, most atheists are philosophically agnostic. Some do say that they've proved God can't exist, or think that has been proven, but most, if pressed, will disclaim certainty. They don't need it, being happy with implausibility rather than impossibility, because their (our) key argument is not "I know you're wrong" but "there's no evidence that you're right."

Urges pharmacists to claim and use a right of conscientious objection regarding Plan B. Assures that martyrdom is a realistic possibility for the entire Catholic people. This in the wake of the beatification of 498 martyrs from the Spanish Civil War -- something I hadn't known about, to be honest, the Republicans killing a bunch of priests and nuns. One of them has been indicted for torture in the Phillipines, and I'd bet some more of the priests had dirty hands relative to social conditions, but I won't try defending what plausibly sounds like expectable mass murder of clerics by revolutionary leftists. OTOH, the Church defended Franco's dictatorship for forty years, and that still has defenders.

Greta Christina


1. Why atheists are angry;
2. Why our anger is valid, valuable, and necessary;
And 3. Why it's completely fucked-up to try to take our anger away from us.

So let's start with why we're angry. Or rather -- because this is my blog and I don't presume to speak for all atheists -- why I'm angry.



And I'm angry that Christians still say smug, sanctimonious things like, "there are no atheists in foxholes." You know why you're not seeing atheists in foxholes? Because believers are threatening to shoot them if they come out.

She links here, with the quote [Highlights]: Hearing Chapman also say that for a woman to be religious, it was like "a freed slave still living on the plantation." Which is maybe *too* strong, but I think it's got something to it, especially for Western Abrahamic religions.


Greta again on religion as fan-fiction

Given the rough outline of a narrative, human beings are unbelievably good at filling in the gaps, fleshing out the characters. And if the basic outline of a narrative has flaws and inconsistencies, we are unbelievably good at creating explanations and rationalizations and apologetics. We are unbelievably good at making the inconsistent consistent, making the indefensible defensible.

And that's exactly what religion looks like to an outside observer. It doesn't look like an internally consistent, evidence-based description of a consistent, reasonably predictable world. It looks like an unbelievably complex -- brilliant, even -- attempt to make sense of a story. And while the stories it's trying to make sense of are often fascinating and compelling, they're still stories: made up by people, with the inherent inconsistencies and gaps, cultural blind spots and flat-out mistakes, that any story made up by people is going to have.

heron61 has collected links to a bunch of article on current religious attitudes.
http://heron61.livejournal.com/504583.html

A study saying that religiosity correlates with societal dysfunction (such as the high murder and STD rates of the US vs. less religious First World societies); the Barna group reporting that young Americans are increasingly non-Christian and skeptical of evangelicals, with 40% being "outsiders" (non-Christian), and criticizing Christianity for being anti-homosexual; a long report on religion in the UK, with specific mention of Jedis; an article on British attitudes; an article on world articles.

Bonus link: Barna on American atheists/agnostics.
http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=272

Observations on the latter: it calls 18-22 year old "Mosaics", vs. Busters, Boomers, and Elders above them.
It notes age differences when talking about technology and change attitudes, but drops it when saying that non-faith adults donate less to charities and are less obese. Yet the fact that non-faithness increases with youth might be relevant to both. (Also not clear if the "typical" adult means mean or median.)

Temperatures here have plunged from 80s to 50s overnight. Hello, autumn? I repeat my call for climate controlled cities; the environment is too important to be left to nature.

Pretending I'm akashiver (entertainment news): Warner's president of production says no more female leads.

Suburban blight

Zombies for Jesus. I don't know how this interacts with "God is a fairy".

Odd Republican sex death. Yes, this is the one with two wetsuits.

I just had this thought: space colonies not being obviously profitable, some people have fantasized about billionaire space fans building them for the hell of it. Others have imagined space hotels slowly expanding. Reading Richard Conniff's Natural History of the Rich I wondered if space mansions might not be a takeoff point. After all, the real question is not "what can colonies do for Earth" or "for humanity" but "for the people living in them."

Well, I guess "for Earth" is relevant for investment purposes. But "for the people" works for buying purposes, and people do buy weird shit.

ADDED: Mules occasionally foal despite normally being sterile due to odd chromosome number. I was alerted to this by a Usenet thread on books by Alan Dean Foster and Robert Heinlein where colonies on other planets lack amenities such as maps, as might be taken by a satellite, or even by a handheld camera from orbit. Time Enough For Love has mules, okay, rifles, okay, and no maps, not okay.

Sam Harris suggests avoiding 'atheist'. It's too negative and distracting. Note he's all for aggressively criticizing religious claims, but not from a clear anti-religious label. Kind of asymmetrical ideological warfare.


PZ Meyers responds. They'll label you anyway. And negative labels can be worn proudly, like Abolitionist. I'd note 'atheist' got slapped even on Epicureans and Deists.

Meera Nanda, an ex-Hindu, rips into Sam Harris's defense of mysticism.

Unrelatedly, Skatje Meyers thinks about bestiality.

First off, The Pain: Christianity and Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism.
As often, the Artist's Statements are often as good as the cartoon ("any belief system that proscribes bacon is clearly discredited").  And I could contemplate whether Catholic schoolgirls or tasty food is a better contribution (one's cheaper, at any rate), but I want to move on.  Like many, I'm intrigued by "Eastern religions", not so much because I start out thinking they have some special truths but because I like seeing the wacky differences in human societies.  I'm still hesitant about asserting actual knowledge, since with older histories and (historically) larger populations than Western religions, plus apparently real lower levels of persecution, there's at least as much variety in say Hinduism as there is in Christianity, and I haven't read the Vedas while I've read much of the Bible.  Still, I think I've picked up something, and, provoked by yesterday's reading on what Hindus think about Jesus, I wanted to dump out a caricatured view.

Judaism: the universe was created 6000 years ago (don't tell me Adam having an age of 963.4722 years was originally meant as a metaphor), and, after some bumpy periods where God tried to kill every man, woman, and child alive, the Jews were selected to be God's light unto the nations.  The Jews actually made it to major nations such as China and India, but AFAIK were never significantly noticed.  Nations such as the Mayas or Japan had to do without.

Christianity: building on the above, God then incarnates himself to go around healing a rather small number of sick people before getting crucified and resurrection, as a way of sending a "salvation or else!" message of barely-avoidable eternal torment to all of humanity living in a small province on the edge of the second biggest empire of the time.  Early Christians did make it to China and India where they were, again, ignored as one more wacky religious minority.  And again, people such as the Mayas, Japan, or the aborigines had to go without, at least for a millennium or so.

Islam: as above, but Jesus wasn't the son of God, just a great prophet, second only to Muhammad, who had the *real* Final Word of God, This Time We Mean It. 

Mormons: as above, only different.

So far, old hat, and standard atheist caricatures of religions -- often extended to all religions.  Which is actually my point, because a little learning suggest something else (after repeating caveats about how saying "what Hindus believe" is fairly risky):

Hinduism: there is no single point of creation; rather, the universe has always existed, as is vast if not infinite extent, with many worlds, and many cycles.  The Epicureans would be happy so far.  In inverted Epicurean logic, the Hindus argue that anything created must have an end and so an immortal soul must have an eternal history.  The current world is billions of years old (this is why I picked on the 6000 number; as far as I know, Hindus don't have to resort to "metaphor" in getting along with science here.)  With all this scale, the notion of any single or final revelation of God to Man is absurd: Hindus believe Krishna was a divine incarnation, but also so was Buddha, and Jesus, and Sri Ramakrishna in the 19th century.  All equal, all God.  Conversely, other Hindus don't say Jesus was an incarnation, but a Yogi -- not God come to Earth, but a man who touched Godhead.  Again, nothing unique about it, and it's only the ignorance of the West which makes it think so.  The oldest Veda, the Rig Veda, apparently has "there are many roads to God" right in it -- a marked contrast to the Judaic family.  India isn't the uniquely chosen holy land (though it has holy lands) but the country which has the most advanced Yogic science.  Instead of a finite lifetime leading to infinite reward and punishment you have karma and reincarnation, with multiple tries to re-achieving union with God.  (To the question of why souls got separated from God, one webpage simply said "we don't know".

Of course, they also have a caste system and burning widows alive on funeral pyres, and when I read about the putative infinite powers accessible to Yogis I immediately imagined what I or many friends would do with infinite power and a spark of compassion, like cure *all* disease victims, not just the ones I could touch.  (I alluded to this under Jesus, too: healing the sick and blind is apparently a PR or calling card thing, not an ongoing activity for the God of Infinite Love.)  But leaving aside the good old standby of theodicy, Hinduism just feels far less ridiculous in the sense of theological scale, with a big and old world, multiple revelations, no divinely favored center of or final time for revelations, a proportionate reward system.  There's probably still stuff to ridicule, stuff perhaps fixed in Buddhisms (plural deliberate), but some of the most egregious problems of scale and locality I have with the Abrahamic family aren't there.

And, woo, the melatonin is kicking in.  I hope this is somewhat coherent...

Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA) admits to being non-theist.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/03/should_we_be_happy_about_this.php

http://www.issues2000.org/CA/Pete_Stark.htm
has his voting record, which looks pretty solidly liberal. I don't know why he voted against small business associations buying health insurance.

Many Christians say they *know* that God and Jesus exist. So I guess it's natural that when an atheist says she doesn't believe in God, they assume she's saying something similar, hearing "I *know* God doesn't exist". And many agnostics seem to assume that as well, thus statements such as "I'm not certain, so I'm not an atheist". But in my experience, almost all self-labelled atheists will admit potential uncertainty, that they could die and find themselves facing Odin, or Jesus, or being reincarnated. What we usually mean when we call ourselves atheist is simply that we do not believe. We don't have faith, we see no evidence, and we often find the religious beliefs absurd (whether due to internal contradictions, such as an all-loving Father who sends people to eternal torment for not loving him enough, or external ones such as the sheer profligacy of other religions.) Technically we could be agnostics, and many in fact call themselves atheist agnostics, or agnostic atheists, but others go for the simple label, emphasizing not the potential for doubt but the real fact of not being a theist.

Because I imagine that when an agnostic calls himself such, he thinks he's sending the message "I'm open-minded, I'm not claiming certainty or Truth". But the atheist often hears "I'm a wuss afraid to tell religious people I think their beliefs are a crock" or "I don't believe it's true but wish it were" or "I think there's something special about religious doubt, as opposed to the doubt a good scientist or empiricist has about any and all truth claims". And also hears "I think atheists are being just as dogmatic as religionists."

After all, no one can prove when we won't find ourselves being judged by Hades or Odin or Anubis when we die, but almost everyone alive would be rather surprised to find this the case. The atheist feels she's just saying that she'd be equally surprised to find Jesus when she dies -- why should this be considered particularly dogmatic, or unwarranted?

Gingrich had an affair during the impeachment talks. This on top of divorcing his first wife while she was in the hospital.

brett_dunbar pointed me to Gillick competence, a recent English common law decision that minors can consent to medical care on their own. No parental notifications for abortion there!

( F-list mercy cut: )

Nothing like reading long discussions about Dawkins's book, by people who end up admitting they haven't and probably won't read it.

[EDIT: For clarity, I should say what provoked this, which was a discussion I ran across elsewhere in the blogosphere.]

John Allen Paulos summarizes a survey by Penny Edgell at the University of Minnesota:

Asked whether they would disapprove of a child's wish to marry an atheist, 47.6 percent of those interviewed said yes. Asked the same question about Muslims and African-Americans, the yes responses fell to 33.5 percent and 27.2 percent, respectively. The yes responses for Asian-Americans, Hispanics, Jews and conservative Christians were 18.5 percent, 18.5 percent, 11.8 percent and 6.9 percent, respectively.

When asked which groups did not share their vision of American society, 39.5 percent of those interviewed mentioned atheists. Asked the same question about Muslims and homosexuals, the figures dropped to a slightly less depressing 26.3 percent and 22.6 percent, respectively. For Hispanics, Jews, Asian-Americans and African-Americans, they fell further to 7.6 percent, 7.4 percent, 7.0 percent and 4.6 percent, respectively.

The study will appear in the April issue of the American Sociological Review and is co-written by assistant professor Joseph Gerteis and associate professor Doug Hartmann.

A dramatic rendition of a devoutly religious person (or couple) coming to grips with the realization of his (their) disbelief may be eye-opening for many.

A movie version of the science writer Martin Gardner's novel "The Flight of Peter Fromm" may do the trick. In the book, Gardner tells the story of a young fundamentalist and his somewhat torturous journey to free-thinking skepticism.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1786422&page=1