I am a militant Atheist.

There is no god, and if you are religious, I can say with confidence that I am more certain of that fact than you are to the contrary. What, you ask, informs this assertion? A lifetime of evidence. Neither I, nor anyone else in my experience, has ever been witness to a miracle, a supernatural event, or anything unclassifiable as either banal, or a hallucination.

Believe it or not, I used to be a devout Christian, but I grew weary of pretending – of finding ever smaller regions at the periphery of my rational mind for god to occupy. As I learned about the world, he retreated farther and farther into the dark recesses of improbability, until ultimately, the alternatives to the Unmoved Mover were sufficiently plausible that I jettisoned the remnants of my faith. As LaPlace famously said “I have no need of that hypothesis.” However, my independence was hard won, and I often wished I could have spared myself the torturous process of self-emancipation, and jumped right to the conclusion.

Even today, I wish there were something in the bible that was demonstrably false, so as to discredit the Judeo-Christian god in his own terms. If only we could catch the bible with its pants down, so to speak, making a claim that no sensible person could rationalize their way out of.

Well, as it turns out, there are indeed such passages. Matthew 4:8, for example:

“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor”

The obvious interpretation of this verse is that the earth is flat, and that there is a mountain somewhere on its surface that is sufficiently tall that anyone who stood at its summit could see the entire world. This is of course preposterous, as any 3rd grader could quickly point out, so Christians have to resort to rhetorical gymnastics to explain why their holy book would say something so patently false.

They usually begin by conceding that it is a metaphor, and then accusing you of misinterpreting it. But they shoot themselves in the foot admitting even that much, because the bible is supposedly the word of an omniscient god, who is unambiguous, and knows every tongue into which his word would ever be translated, and would presumably make it his highest order of business to make a universally interpretable work.

They also might try to invoke some backstory that is necessary to interpret the verse properly, like when rich Christians try to explain how they could get into heaven despite Jesus’ admonishment in Matthew 19:24:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”

They try to explain this away by saying that there was a gate somewhere in Jerusalem called “the eye of the needle,” and camels had to duck a bit to make it through. Nevermind the sheer pointlessness of the metaphor if that were indeed true, but if Jesus were god as they claim, he would surely be aware that this could never be more than a regionally understood analogy.

We don’t need to look far for these kinds of inconsistencies jump from the page. In fact, they are usually lurking right at the surface – to find them, you only have to make minimal investigation. In fact, the most earth-shattering evidence against biblical inerrancy comes from the very story of Jesus.

Matthew 1:1-17 does a nice “begat, begat, begat” tracing David’s lineage down to Joseph, in order to validate Jesus’ messianic status, since the anointed one must be of the line of David. But that means nothing if Jesus was born of a virgin. If that isn’t clear enough, let me spell it out: if you accept the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, then Jesus cannot be the messiah. Here, Christians do make some desperate flailings to explain that Jewish lineage is traced down the woman’s side, but that doesn’t explain away the fact that Matthew offers us the lineage of Joseph, not Mary, as proof of Jesus’ ‘Christhood’.

But even this argument glosses over the absurdity of the virgin birth itself. I forget who said it, and I am surely paraphrasing, but it’s harder to believe that a virgin can give birth than it is to believe a Jewish girl can tell a fib. The Immaculate Conception is a load of manure, as is immediately apparent if you believe in any sort of uniformitarianism.

People have been trying this excuse for centuries, I’m sure, and it has only worked once. Hell, I’m sure Bristol Palin tried it, but even Sarah (who is to MENSA what Gary Coleman is to the NBA) didn’t fall for it.

However, if you analyze the bible as the piece of historical fiction it is, it becomes apparent why the authors would take the risk of writing in such a contentious detail. As Richard Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, the authors were trying to “press the familiar hot buttons of pagan Hellenistic religions.” In other words, they were trying to gain converts. They were doing what later Christians did when they assimilated the unquestionably pagan celebrations of Easter and Christmas. Sorry kids, Christ didn’t give his life so you could get toys once a year under a tree with shiny shit hung all over it, or so a giant pastel colored were-rabbit could lay eggs with candy inside. These obviously pagan traditions date back to the time when Christians were making compromises in order to increase the appeal of their cult. And the same is true of the virgin birth. It was a deliberate and overt attempt to say to other religions of the time “hey, your dude was born of a virgin, so was ours, let’s hang out.”

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In the end, it is not that hard to knock a leg out from under Christianity, or at least point out that it is just another man-made scam – like Mormonism, Scientology, or Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. But there are so many of them. Couldn’t one be right? Not likely.

The most powerful evidence against the existence of any particular god, for me, is that so many exist all over the world and have throughout history, and that the people who (have) believe(d) in them do so just as earnestly as everyone else. Which brings us to another question: why is it the lamentable case that religion is so ubiquitous?

Well frankly, faith offers powerful solace against death, which is probably one reason it is so ineradicable from our primitive meat-machine brains. We, unlike other animals, who only know they are going to die when death is imminent, must find a way to cope with the knowledge that we will someday die. This is of highest priority to the perpetuity of our species, because if we couldn’t cope, we might well spend our entire (short) lives in a state of mortal fear.

While our consciousness evolved quickly, as evidenced by the poor fit between crania and hips, so did our coping mechanism. It arose from pre-existing instincts for superstition and it stuck. It began to manipulate sentience in order to ensure its own existence, and soon it came to hold dominion over the rationality it evolved to facilitate.

Some have hypothesized that religion’s stubborn persistence and imperviousness to rational scrutiny arises from what was once an evolutionarily advantageous trait, and that religion is therefore just a by-product of a useful adaptation. Faced with the dangers of everyday life, and a rather frail biology, early human children couldn’t have been afforded the luxury of trial and error in a hostile environment, and so they would have been selected to unquestioningly heed the cautionary advice of their elders when such advice was available. Important suggestions like “stay away from that cave, there is a bear inside,” or “don’t eat that berry, it will make you sick,” surely saved lives, but when the drive to obey got hijacked by “sacrifice a goat on the full moon, or the rains won’t come,” or “cut off the skin at the end of your male children’s penises, or suffer the wrath of Yahweh” we suddenly had a problem on our hands. The indelibility of today’s faith may be very well be because our brains still treat it as a life or death issue, regardless of how silly it is.

One of the odd facts of religious silliness is that the longer it stays around, the more legitimate it becomes. It builds up momentum, and like gonorrhea, if you don’t catch it early, your dick is forfeit. What we atheists need to do (I am assuming that I have successfully effaced any faith you may have had, and that you’re now with me on this one…), is build up sufficient momentum in the opposite direction. As Dawkins is frequent to point out, we already make up a respectable chunk of the population – in America, ten times the number of Jews – but we are as of yet an untapped demographic politically.

We need to call people out when the make stupid assertions, like that god should be put in charge of Homeland Security. This is the kind of thing that we should consider contemptible, dangerous, irrational, juvenile, and such irresponsible and inappropriate political behavior as to warrant the end of a person’s career. We need to practice Sam Harris’ “conversational intolerance,” and when George Bush says his foreign policy is dictated by god, we need to say, “why not Zeus, or Hadad, Osiris, Shiva, or, as your actions most often seem to indicate, Mars?”

We need to encourage a new kind of discourse – one of critical thought and challenging dogma: of science. Religious apologists are quick to point out that scientists are fundamentalists in their own right, but this is a fallacy. Science is necessarily the antithesis of fundamentalism because its characterized by ongoing self criticism and reevaluation, while religious fundamentalism thrives in the realm of dogma. The most fervent believers are always found in the most insular communities, and this isolation tends to foster religious solipsism.

I have made the observation from personally transformative experience that the more individuals learn about one another, and about one another’s beliefs, the less likely they are to subscribe exclusively to any one ideology or set of values. This is what is so alarming about the growing trend among evangelical Christians to home-school their children, and to insulate themselves against challenging viewpoints.

We need to open up a new dialogue in which nothing in sacred. Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines dogma as follows:

“ ‘Here is an idea or notion you are not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ ”

These are exactly the rules we must refuse to play by.

If we slowly chip away at this edifice, I am sure we can be done with it eventually, although I admit that we would still be left with that big question mark at the end. I am still looking hard for an answer to that, but I will leave you with the modicum of consolation to which I currently cling: whatever the end may bring, I have experienced it before, because there was a time when I was not.

For the last couple weeks, I have been reading the book “End of Faith” by Sam Harris. Besides artfully derobing religious faith that we might gawk at its naked and unflattering truth, he provides a compelling argument about torture. It unfolds as follows.

If we are willing to accept “collateral damage,” which is a euphemism for the unintentional murder or maiming of non-targets in military operations as an inevitable consequence of modern warfare, then we should similarly be willing to accept torture. We accept collateral damage because we believe that the suffering or death of one is acceptable if it saves many from harm, and this is exactly the line of justification that could apply by extension to torture. In fact, Harris goes on to say that torture should actually be more acceptable for the following reasons:

• In a torture situation, the subject is guaranteed to be an enemy, but in collateral damage, the victim may well be an innocent, such as a child or non-combatant.
• Even if they are only suspected to be an enemy, torturees can at least be subjected to ’selection criteria’ that increase the likelihood that they are a desired target, while collateral damage is by nature indiscriminate.
• Torture can be controlled in such a way as to minimize or eliminate permanent bodily harm, whereas collateral damage will always be, well, damage.
• From a callously utilitarian standpoint, there is potentially something to be gained from torture. Collateral damage is, frankly, wasteful killing.

If this is true, why do we have such a visceral aversion to torture, but not to accidentally killing innocents? The reason is probably because the latter is something of a hypothetical. Our minds are in part removed from the end result, while torture is all too easily envisioned. It’s really the same reason we know intuitively that it takes a different kind of person to drop a bomb from 40,000 feet than it does to beat someone to death with a shovel, although the results are similar. It seems our minds have developed a knee-jerk negative reaction to killing, but the further we remove ourselves from the stimulus that induces the shock reflex, the easier it becomes to make the decision to kill. So, even though torture and collateral damage could both be seen as “inflicting harm on someone who may not deserve it, in order that we may further the cause of protecting the multitudes,” only one of them seems atrocious.

Whether you agree or not, the moral equivalence is worth noting.

This is the kind of nonsense that really gets my goat:

But in reality, the scientific community is extremely bias [sic] on issues that bring to question the validity of evolution, which so much of their work is based off of.

To be perfectly honest, I am very biased: I would jump for joy if there were the slightest bit of evidence for creationism, because it is still on some level a deeply gratifying (albeit scientifically messy and uninteresting) prospect that the universe was designed by a creator fairy, and that I might get to meet him/her when I die.

The problem is, there really is no evidence. I was actually forced out of belief for exactly this reason. It was a hard realization to come to, but let me make it clear: I believe there is no creator because I have to; because I hold reason as a virtue, and in the interest of consistency, I have to apply it to every facet of my awareness.

So yes, I am naturally biased: biased in the favor of irrationality and wish-thinking. But the difference between a religious person and me is that they let their bias get the best of them.

h/t Pharyngula

Mr. Warren, you are testing my patience:

“I could not vote for an atheist because an atheist says, ‘I don’t need God,’” Warren preached, according to the Los Angeles Times. “They’re saying, ‘I’m totally self-sufficient by [myself].’ And nobody is self-sufficient to be president by themselves. It’s too big a job.”

What he is ostensibly saying here is that god provides special assistance, or guidance, or insight to Christians that he withholds from the non-religious. We should be sincerely worried if our leaders are making policy decisions based on divine revelation. Even if you are religious, and believe that god does talk to people, there is no guarantee that it would be Yahweh whispering you his secrets, and not the early stages of dementia.

We should seriously consider whether being religious makes you a better decision maker, as Warren would suggest — if the evidence bears out that fact — because I have a sneaking suspicion that it doesn’t. There are all those well attested statistics about religious states having higher divorce rates, higher violent crime rates, more spousal abuse, and so on and so forth.

Another thing worth noting, is that in the population at large, around 10% are atheists, while among the educated (academia, doctors, lawyers) only 10% are not. What that means is that if we exclude atheists from consideration, we are excluding precisely the people who are most likely to be qualified for the job.

One final thing that bothers me about the Christian mindset (especially of people like Rick Warren, who has made a fortune telling people that “god has a plan for you“) is the inherent contradiction that lies in simultaneously maintaining that it is obscenely arrogant to be spiritually “self-sufficient,” and at the same time that god has mapped out your life from beginning to end because you are an agent of the creator of the universe. I mean, come on. Christians are so important that the person who created the vastness of space, and trillions of stars and galaxies, and the laws of quantum mechanics gets bent out of shape over the goings on in their bedrooms, but I am arrogant for believing in evolution? Get real. Presumably Warren wanted to say that the president should be humble — someone who doesn’t fancy themselves god. With that, I can agree, and by extension, I don’t want someone in office who thinks themselves a hand of the creator, because that is a slippery slope to divine right to rule. In that respect, atheists are more qualified for public office, because humanism is by nature humbling. We recognize that this life is a precious gift, because it is all we get. We also appreciate the sheer insignificance of life, when compared with the size of the universe, so I think we manage to pass the humility test.

I therefore think it unfair that Warren bars atheists from consideration for elected office, and I feel a little discriminated against. But I guess you can add me to the ever growing list.

h/t Andrew Sullivan

You know, I hate Rick Warren. I hate everything he stands for: his bigotry, his mega-church, his shitty books that unfailingly show up at any event considered remotely milestone-ish, his fat neck, and his religion. But the more I think about him speaking at the inauguration, the less I care.

When we were in the thick of the election, and there was all that business about Obama and Reverend Wright, and Bill Ayers, and the “clinging to guns and religion” comment, we liberals (I still have a bit of trouble calling myself that) got together and said “Listen, here is a guy who has some shady associations, and may have made some divisive, if not hateful remarks, but he can do some good, so let’s get behind him.” We did, and we asked his detractors to do the same. And now that guy is going to be the president.

But, as much as I hate Rick Warren, he is exactly that kind of person. He has Christianists eating out of his hand, and I think we can put aside the ideological differences long enough to let him have this speech. The unifying potential here is too great not to make the compromise.

I am anticipating that my 1.5 frequent commenters may say that we can’t negotiate with hate, but let me point out that we are not electing this scumbag as president. We are letting him make a speech. Believe me, if Warren were ever up for any position of authority, I would be right there with you protesting it every step of the way.

I will probably plug my ears when he gets up there and starts in with “Purpose Driven Life for the President,” and gets all mushy-wushy about the sky god, but you can’t win ‘em all. The important part is, I really don’t think there is anything to be gained on the secularization front, or on the gay rights front from making a row about this speech.

I have been thinking a lot lately about where I came from, and I realized there is a huge problem with Christianity. Where do people come from? I mean, our ’souls’? The obvious reason for the lack of explanation is that religion is entirely a construction of man, and men are far more preoccupied with where they are going when they die than where they were before they were born, but let’s just humor the idea for a moment.

It’s possible, I’m sure, to come up with some half-baked explanation that fits with the bible, but the fact remains that it just doesn’t say. That’s right, the book of infinite wisdom, and everything you would ever need to know, provides no answer. I think that we should let that sink in.

We could imagine, as I am sure Christians do, that souls are created at the moment of conception, but then where do all the spontaneously aborted fetuses go? Heaven, or hell? They surely haven’t had the chance to sin yet, so they must go to heaven, right? If so, abortion should be OK, right? Christian women should be happy to abort their babies if it guarantees that they will go to heaven. One sin, for which they can be forgiven, can be their child’s ticket to everlasting bliss. Seems like a worthy sacrifice to me.

The alternative to this is of course that the soul is created the body some time later in the pregnancy, but then their whole ‘moment of conception’ pro-life stand is bullshit.

The other explanation is that we exist before, and that god assigns us a body. If that is so, then our souls have to be somewhere, heaven or hell, before conception. Nothing leaves hell, and unless you are a Catholic, heaven is the only alternative, so we have all experienced heaven before. Following that line of logic, since god is omniscient, he knows before we are born if, at conception, he is sentencing a sinless being to hell. Which makes him a pretty cruel motherfucker to go through with it. If we all stop having kids, however, then they can’t go to hell, and when we die, every family member we would ever have would meet us graciously at the gates of heaven. We could forgo the apocalypse, and all join god’s army, and single-handedly destroy sin. You may argue that that would be tampering with the will of god, but if anything ever happens at all, it must be the will of god. God allowed Hitler. In fact, me saying this right now is the will of god.

Shit! How easy it is to slip into this nonsense.

The point is, where we come from says a lot more about metaphysics than where we are going, and we are left to imagine. The bible explains nothing — not like we didn’t already know that — , but the only explanations we have are sheer fantasy, concocted on the spot to fill in the gaps that the religion has left, and if you are religious, you know damn good and well that, as you were reading this, you were trying desperately to fill in the gaps.

I have the answer for you though: religion is fake. There is no reason to believe in any of it, other than being indoctrinated at a young age, and having a mind so weak that you cannot cope with death, so that you have to make believe you are going to live forever. Where do we come from? Nowhere. And we are soon to be going back. If you can’t wrap your head around the impermanence and inconsequentiality of your life, then you are arrogant indeed.

Merry Christmas.

I don’t normally consider my colorblindness a handicap, because there are far more serious disabilities, but from time to time it really gets to me that I can’t tell when meat is done, or what color a highlighter is.

One recent incident that really got on my nerves was at a dinner for an SFSU orientation. When we signed in, they gave us survey cards to fill out. Since there were so many people, they had to split the dinner service between two floors, and guess how we were supposed to tell which floor we got to eat on? That’s right, the color of our survey cards. Problem was, the cards were fluorescent pink and purple: two of the colors I can’t easily distinguish. So, I was left with a choice between potentially showing up at the wrong dinner line, and asking a complete stranger what color my card was. I went with the latter because I thought it would be less embarassing.

Again, I know that this isn’t that serious of a disability, but it is really frustrating sometimes. One of the worst things is color-coded topographical features. Like this map of France, which supposedly shows a geographical feature called the ‘Massif Central.’ Not like I could ever tell.

(Keep in mind that I have the most difficulty with orange, red, green, and yellow, because I see them all as the same color: your yellow)

It’s true that it isn’t colorblindness per se, rather a color deficiency in the warm end of the spectrum, so I can usually tell what is going on if I look hard enough, but for some reason, neon colors are near impossible. This means that for all these color-keyed things, like maps and diagrams, I usually have to resign myself to not getting it.

I just wish people could be a little more sensitive to my kind. I feel bad comparing colorblindness to a real disability, but there are surely more of us than, let’s say, wheelchair bound people, and they seem to get accommodated at great expense. All it would take for us is using different colors for color coding. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of them.

I keep getting these terrible headaches lately. I don’t know where they come from, because there is no common denominator between their occurrences. They happen when I drink, or when I abstain from drinking; when I am stressed or relaxed; tired or awake; when I have had coffee, and when I haven’t; when I am dehydrated, or not. It’s really bothersome.

Usually I don’t tell anyone about it, because they go away on their own, and I already have a bit of a reputation as a hypochondriac, but twice in the last couple months they have been so bad that I thought I was going to die. The last time I went to the emergency room, and I thought it was a reaction to some medicine I was taking. They gave me a Cat Scan, and sent me home, and I felt better.

Last night I had another bad one though. It set in around 9 PM, and I tried to sleep it off, but I woke up within an hour of going to bed, and I was really disoriented. It felt a little like being high on pot, you know, that fractured reality feeling. The best way I can describe it is like my whole world was cardboard cutouts, like the ocean waves they use in theater. Plus there was this tickly feeling like the one you get in your throat when you are eating a cold hot dog. The whole world felt tickly that way. The pain was only on the left side of my head, radiating down into my left ear and neck.

Anyway, it eventually went away, but only after I wandered around in the street for an hour at 2 AM. I didn’t get back to sleep until probably 330 or 4, so naturally I am a little tired today.

I don’t really worry about them because I had that brain scan, but it is still disruptive to my routine, and a little unnerving.

Stewart takes on Huckabee

Huckabee still gripes me a bit, but I dig his borderline anarchism. Plus, this episode is nice, because it has two people really drilling down to the core of their arguments for/against gay marriage. Civilly.

However, someday, I want to see a conservative sit down with a liberal to discuss gay marriage, and say “I won’t use the word ‘definition’ if you don’t use the term ’segregation’,” and see the debate go from there. Both sides get hung up on these token arguments, and they never get anywhere.

Some guys took the liberty of tracing place names back etymologically, and the result is fascinating:

While some names are unsurprising, like ‘Sibling Love’ for Philadelphia, some are intiriguing like ‘Home Ruler’ for America, or downright bizarre like ‘Moon Navel’ for Mexico.

h/t Strange Maps