Humans are evolution’s only experiment with higher intelligence, as is evidenced by our mastery of mathematics, language, engineering, space travel, medicine, and many other fields in which we have visibly demonstrated command of the world around us. Sure, dolphins and octopodes may have highly developed brains, but they don’t print books or manufacture nuclear bombs. We’re clearly the smartest things on the planet.

Many people believe that this makes us special; that we are evolution’s end product, the creator’s chosen race, or simply that we are the “highest” form of life. But I mostly reject that idea.

Intelligence is just what we do. Birds fly, sharks have sharp teeth, and humans build cities. This in no way makes us “higher” than any other organism, it just makes us the best at being smart. Nature is full of “best at”s. Cheetahs are the best at running, and if they were capable of designating a “highest” form of life, it would surely be themselves, because the metric they would use would be the one most useful to them as an organism: speed.

An obvious counterpoint is that intelligence makes us “best at” anything we want. Cheetahs can admire our high-speed trains, sharks our knives, and birds our jets. However, it’s useful to remember that despite our intelligence, we are not the most successful earth creatures by any measure. That honor goes to the most inconspicuous of our neighbors: microorganisms. To any objective observer, humans–along with most species of animal–are a fragile lot, perpetually on the verge of extinction. The best way to gauge the “highest” life-form may simply be its ability to perpetuate itself. If that’s the case, the nuclear bomb puts us far lower on the ladder.

I often reflect on my sentiments towards religion, and wonder why I hate it so much. I ask myself why I dedicate so much time to railing against an institution that has done me no more harm than a few shattered delusions and wasted Sundays. I even feel ashamed of this seemingly puerile obsession with denigrating faith, despite a lack of any ostensible wrongdoing on the part of the religious.

However, I’m reminded that there is one grave disservice that religion has done me which I cannot bring myself to forgive. It mutilated my genitals.

Yes, that may seem a hyperbole; even writing it I feel I am being deliberately provocative. But I have to stop and ask myself, am I? Is there any sense in which surgically modifying an unconsenting child’s genitals is not a reproachable human rights violation? Due to its cultural normativity, circumcision may fail to arouse our sense of disgust in the same way footbinding or female genital mutilation do. However, just because we don’t have a gutteral aversion to it does not mean it’s not an egregious act. We tend to look on other cultures’ barbaric rituals with a smug superiority, reassuring ourselves that we’re civilized, but maybe we should turn the lens inward.

Circumcision, is at its root a religious export, and it’s in religion that it takes refuge and perpetuates itself. When a mohel in New York was responsible for the death of a child, no one spoke up against practice of circumcision as a Jewish ritual. Instead, we pussyfooted around the topic, saying that it was merely a problem with the orthodox techniques, or that proper precautions were not taken. No one considered that cutting off part of a child’s penis was inherently wrong. They dare not denounce the religious practice itself, either for fear of being culturally insensitive, or because most of us live in glass houses.

And therein lies the problem. No one will stand up and call this atrocity that it is, because if we don’t respect everyone’s right to have irrational beliefs, then someone may come after our own. Well I won’t feel ashamed for being strident anymore, because we should all have the right to savagely critique one another’s irrationalities; to lay them bare and hack away at them, just like they did to my newborn privates.

I have recently been repeatedly confronted with the philosophical quandary of whether or not our perceptions of reality can be trusted, or if our internal models of the world around us are bound to be riddled with flaws and misrepresentations. A fellow blogger has spurred be to put down my thoughts in writing.

I think you have to begin by admitting that we can never know if our senses do justice to reality, because we have no other way to gauge their efficacy than by our senses themselves. However, ultimately, I think they do a pretty damn good job.

I’ve found evidence for this in the fact that a brain is, in its most basic form, an input-output system. Input stimulus: output response to stimulus. Evolution tunes the system to give the proper response to the proper stimulus, and therefore to be faithful to reality. For example, we have a vermicompost box, and when we want to get the worms to move in a certain direction, we expose them to light. They promptly wriggle in the direction of the nearest shade. If their flee response weren’t faithful to reality, they’d fry to death, or waste valuable energy wriggling when there was no sun.

Granted, the human brain is more sophisticated than that, because it has a complex intermediate step of model building based on memory. This apparatus allows synchronic tuning of responses to stimuli, as opposed to letting natural selection tune them. However it’s still just an elaborate version of “when the world is this way, respond in that way.”

Therefore, if you’re not building an accurate model of the world around you, then your brain isn’t performing its function. Evolution should then select for brains that make increasingly accurate models of the surrounding environment, or at least as accurate as any given organism needs (a human needs no sense for surface tension, but a water strider needs no sense for vertical orientation). Sure, there are glitches in the system, and they give rise to models that belie reality, but only in trivial ways: like optical illusions, pareidolia, and religion.

And there’s my daily epiphany: religion belies reality only in trivial ways. The belief that there is an invisible man in the sky who sees everything you do fits neatly into the gaps in our perception in such a way that it cannot be disproven, and it does not (often) dictate our reactions to stimuli. If it interfered with our model-building apparatus in either of these ways, evolution would have–and modern science could have–disposed of it quickly.

In closing, I’d like to analogize the brain to a house; the function of the brain is to construct models of the world, and the function of a house is to protect its inhabitants. You can build a house out of all kinds of things (aluminum, bricks, adobe etc.), and while you’ll have different engineering strategies based on the materials you are using–and different drawbacks with each–the end goal is still to create shelter (in the case of the brain, to build faithful models). Evolution set us on a particular path, with a particular set of materials–namely, the more basic reptilian and mammalian brains–and the drawbacks inherent thereto. The evolutionary history of the brain presents a unique set of obstacles to building a functional model-building apparatus, and has crucially informed its eventual architecture, in the same way selecting Play-Doh as the building material for your house would present a unique set of obstacles to its construction. Surely, it’d be better to choose bricks than Play-Doh, but evolution won’t let you switch materials mid-build, but we got as close as we could. Obviously, the materials we got stuck with weren’t that bad, because we’re still here. And our model building apparatus can’t be that bad either.

Lock up your daughters, shoot your sons!

Note the source: Christian alarmists. If they knew anything about population demographics, they’d know that first generation immigrants have a sky-high birth rate, but that after the first round makes it through the established public school system, they assimilate pretty nicely. They lose their culture, and they stop breeding like rabbits. I wouldn’t worry about this too much.

It is, however, one reason to adopt conversational intolerance to irrational faith. If we keep playing the “my faith is off limits” card, guess who’s going to be using that line of defense in the near future: Muslims. The new Muslim majority. Therefore, it’s actually in the interest of Christians to have a secular state well separated from the church. We should use this video as a reminder of that.

This essay is in response to an article found at Plasma Pool, and is cross posted.

I’d like to thank Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke for their willingness to have this exchange. As much as our opinions may differ, I believe it’s important that we keep them open to discussion; I have encountered far too many people who would avoid topics of import for fear of confrontation.

From their response to my essay, it is apparent that their respective faiths are more nuanced and malleable than many today. Their appreciation for science is admirable, and their brand of belief is almost entirely unobjectionable to me. To be sure, if every believer comported himself as they do, I would likely not be complaining. However most believers do not. Moreover, I firmly believe that most believers cannot and will not. So the question becomes: knowing that a certain amount of extremism invariably accompanies any system of religious irrationalism, do the handful of benefits we gain from religion outweigh its negative aspects? I submit that they do not.

While I reject the claim that “lead[ing] fulfilled lives with only an awe of the natural universe … is not a realistic vision for everyone,” I do not seek to provide a manifesto for the abolition of religion, or even advocate it per se. It is my goal to explore the issue at hand, and at most, propose a new standard of discourse to which rationalists can hold themselves.

I shall begin by addressing the contention that religion and science are exclusive spheres of inquiry, which can peacefully coexist. Steven Jay Gould, in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, provides a name for this line of argument: the Non-Overlapping Magisteria principle, or NOMA. Gould is of the view that science and religion occupy different realms of human experience — what he calls magisteria — the former being primarily concerned with material observation, and the latter, with the immaterial. He maintains that they do not in principle, and therefore should not in practice, say anything about each other.

For the discerning believer, it is quite possible that these magisteria do not overlap. However, for most people, they do — quite frequently in fact. Practical Christian doctrine* makes many material claims about the world, which science can test. For example, that a man could live inside a whale, that rabbits chew cud, that placing striped sticks in front of breeding livestock will cause them to bear striped young, that the world was flooded 5000 years ago, and that we are all descended from one family who survived that flood. Central to Christian doctrine is the belief that a virgin can conceive, that the sick can be healed by sorcery, and that a cold corpse can spring to life. Material claims, all. So excuse me, but it appears your magisterium is overlapping.

Granted, one who is committed to the principle of NOMA, as Finley and Hilke may be, should be willing to reject these intrusions, or admit that they are figurative or allegorical stories. However, if you surrender the only substantive claims a religion makes, you must also admit that you are only left with the issues for which you can offer no more insight than I: the existence of an afterlife and/or universal morality. Here we are on equal footing, so I find it wildly and offensively presumptuous that the religious would declare knowledge of the unknowable. Frankly, there is no reason any one of these fantasies should trump another — they are all at their core masturbatory, self-aggrandizing hallucinations. But if it feels good, and it isn’t hurting anyone, why can’t I do it? My reflexive response is that you can’t build a healthy worldview on a platform of lies and delusions, but why not, if it engenders no palpable menace?

This leads me to a question Finley and Hilke raise, a rebuttal commonly heard from apologists: if I keep it to myself, who does it hurt? I tend to agree with this position; I have no right to tell you what you may believe on the most personal level. But my concern is that religion isn’t content to remain personal, it inevitably jumps the boundary from personal to interpersonal. Before their essay is through, Finley and Hilke manage to praise religion as a “source of simple but crucial rules for societal interaction.” Tell me, of what use is a rule if it others cannot be held to it?

Religion as Moral Code is a common criticism thrown in the face of atheists, and it needs refutation. Morality is a societal construct, and it exists regardless of spiritual dangling carrots, or threats of eternal punishment. Ethical codes are arguably the most remarkable development of human society, but there is no need to build them an altar, so to speak. This seems to me as nonsensical as an obsessive compulsive who believes unspeakable harm will befall him if he fails to turn the doorknob thrice before leaving the house. We know his ritual has nothing to do with his continuing safety, yet he is too afraid to break free of the habit. Allow me to rephrase this argument as a question, if god were disproved tomorrow, would you take to stealing VCRs and raping indiscriminately? If yes, please stop reading this and head to the nearest psychiatrist. If no, fear of god is not the root of morality.

In fact, those who believe are usually less well behaved than those who do not. It is well attested that, besides drug or alcohol abuse, religiosity is the best indicator that a father will abuse his children, that prison populations are more or less entirely composed of believers, that conservative Christians are more likely to divorce than atheists, and that religious states generally consume more pornography; the state with the biggest appetite being Utah. If “moralizing force” is to be entered as evidence in a debate about the benefit of religious belief, it would seem to fall squarely in the stack of reasons not to believe.

Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke will be reminded that their understanding of religion is privileged. Liberal theology is acquired, appreciation for science and evidence, instilled. It’s only through education and higher thought that fundamentalism is beaten back^†. Again, if all the religious believed as they do, I would have nothing to protest — I’m not in principle opposed to people stoking warm fantasies about what happens after death; even less so should they admit readily that their beliefs are indeed such. However, delusion, like fire, is not easily contained: some of us may be able to admire it safely behind the hearth, but others will surely be less vigilant, and it will consume them.

Exemplifying such imminently dangerous delusion is the fact that a majority in the US believes that Jesus will return within their lifetimes. As Sam Harris says, there are people in this country who, upon turning on the television and seeing Israel replaced by ball of fire, could not help but see a silver lining. Is this fatalism not dangerous? Is not the belief that this world will be destroyed and most of its inhabitants incinerated for eternity a severe impediment to forging respect for nature and human life? This is not a perversion of the Christian faith, this is an outgrowth of the irrationalism inherent to it. Finley and Hilke may try to distance themselves from this manifestation of belief, but I ask: if so much effort must be spent on getting the right interpretation of religion, why bother at all? Are murder, genocide, racial/sexual oppression, or, worst of all, a self-fulfilled prophesy of global annihilation acceptable risks to take to maintain a gelt belief in the supernatural?

This is all, admittedly, grossly hyperbolic, but in the last century alone we have seen numerous atrocities spring forth from the fetid loins of faith: suicide bombings, abortion clinic murders, Muslim sectarians drilling holes in one another’s heads, mass suicides, armed standoffs, continuing genital mutilation of infant boys and young girls, car bombings in Ireland, a protracted bloodbath in Kashmir, to name a few. All of these issue directly from religious conflict. If we should be so daring as to frame larger issues, like the Western conflict with the Middle East, or the holocaust — arguably the culmination of a millennium of ecclesiastically endorsed anti-Semitism — in religious terms, the cost we have paid for these fantasies becomes staggering.

Perhaps these terrible consequences only arise when the religion is abused. However it remains true that religion is a powerfully addictive drug. Its method of action: hallucination. Symptoms of overdose: persistent delusion, accompanied by sadistic, homicidal, and/or suicidal impulses. Most users manage to curb their dependency — these are the ‘functionally religious.’ But as with any dangerous drug, we do not just leave it to the judicious to espouse moderate usage.

To be clear, I do not advocate anything so radical as the illegalization of religion, this is obviously not a practical solution. I am merely insistent that belief be stripped of its privileged place in our discourse. Automatic deference towards someone else’s worldview is dangerous. As history has demonstrated, faith often becomes infested by other delusions. If we allow it a bulwark against the forces of rationality, what sinister miscreants might amass therebehind, scheming to lay waste to the prosperity of the age of reason? Abominations that might otherwise be apprehended and extirpated.

It remains the case that we do not need religion to be happy or good to one another. Consequently, as long as we can point to a single instance of harm caused by this edifice — and there is no shortage — any moral supplement, sense of community, or impetus for charitability that it educes is simply not worth it. Our collective unwillingness to wean ourselves from the belesioned teat of this monster does not constitute an argument to continue suckling.

* I use Christianity as an example only because it is the religion with which I am most familiar.

† Interestingly, in the United States, the expansion of science over the past century has been paralleled by the expansion of biblical literalism, which before the turn of the 20th century was quite rare. I submit that this is a kind of defensive posturing on the part of the religious; as science encroaches on their turf, they push back full force, with ever more furious delusion. I suspect this tide of loony will retreat in time, as it has done in other developed societies.

This is a continuation of a previous post, in which I lay out my reasons for rejecting the a creationist god. Here I’d like to briefly address another problem I have with the concept of the Judeo-Christian God.

Scientific progress has sequestered modern Christians into a very narrow interpretation of god’s role in the universe — compared with the role he played in, let’s say, the first millennium. God is no longer the architect of the celestial spheres, he is a cosmic watchmaker, and he has stepped back to let his creation run its course. He rarely interferes.

However, the bible tells us of times when god did interact with man. What happened on these occasions? Well, in Genesis he is bested by a snake and two people successfully hide from him (3:5,3:9). Later on, he tells a man to build a boat, so he can flood the entire world, because he thinks that is the best way to destroy evil (Genesis 7:4). Some time after that, he gives us what are ostensibly the most important laws in the universe…carved on rocks (Exodus 20). Too bad the guy he gave them to lost his temper and broke them, so god made him carve them again (Exodus 32). Skip forward a bit, and he makes a wager with the devil about torturing a man (Job 1:9-12). Finally, the last time he really did anything of import, he nailed himself to cross, and cried out to himself “Why [have I] forsaken [myself]” (Matthew 27:46). And then he entreated himself to forgive us, because we know not what we do (Luke 23:34). Can you see where I am going with this?

These are supposedly the actions of the creator of the universe: the most powerful, intelligent entity we can conceive of. And these are the ways he chooses to interact with his creation. Why didn’t he just strike all the evildoers dead, instead of drowning the entire world? It was surely in his power. Why didn’t he carve his commandments in diamond, or titanium, or better still, burn them into the back of our hands? Why is his final redeeming act to mankind so morbid and nonsensical?

If these are the works of the Ultimate Creator, it’s tragic that they are not examples of divine perfection, supreme logic, mind-blowing power, and universal comprehensibility. Instead, his whole plan is foiled by two hungry naked fuckers, and in order to save them from the punishment he devised, he has to torture himself to death.

I’m sorry, I just can’t swallow that.

In Florida, a woman has slain her son, and then herself. In her suicide note, she says ‘I had to send my son to heaven and myself to Hell.’

I wonder if she didn’t believe in heaven or hell, if she would have done this anyway. She reportedly had a history of mental illness, but surely, the religious crap she was being fed did nothing but fan the flames.

Crazy breeds crazy. Religion is one form of crazy. ‘Nuff said.

The first thing we notice about the world around us is that it’s self sustaining. Every observable effect has an observable cause: babies are born because eggs are fertilized; rain comes from clouds, which form from evaporated water; the sun rises and sets because the earth is spinning. These processes are no longer miracles because at no point do we need to assume an interventionist deity to explain them.

Not only does the world exist independently, but we don’t even expect god to intervene when we want him to. When I drop my toast, I don’t expect a little chariot of cherubim to intercept it before it hits the ground. I shouldn’t expect to wake up with straighter teeth if go to church enough. Alleged instances of god intervening on someone’s behalf can always just as easily be attributed to fortuitous chance. For example, he only cures diseases that might have gotten better anyway — he never heals amputees. If there is a god, he has apparently made the universe in such a way that it can exist independently, and without his continued tinkering.

This is why intelligent design is so unappealing to me. It admits that that natural systems are pretty much self contained, but at the same time, invokes a creator to explain certain special cases, like the bacterial flagellum, the bombardier beetle, or the blood clotting cascade. It’s inconsistent. I mean, if an omniscient, omnipontent god went to all this trouble to create a world that functioned without him, he could have accomplished it, right?

Presumably he could have, but creationists and design proponents seem to think we would be able to catch this guy with his finger in the pudding if we find examples of ‘irreducible complexity.’ These are places where conventional evolutionary explanations are purported to break down. One of their favorite examples is the bombardier beetle, an animal with a very strange defense mechanism. The beetle ejects two chemicals from its body to create a boiling hot spray that drives away predators. Design proponents say that since neither of the chemical components is of any use to the beetle without the other — the system could not be simplified and still be functional, hence irreducible complexity — this constitutes evidence for an all-in-one-go biological creation. Come on!

We have natural explanations for the hand, the eye, goosebumps, canine teeth, the spinal cord, mammary glands, feathers, flippers, egg laying, and camouflage, why wouldn’t evolution or physics explain a chemical reaction that happens on the back of a beetle?* If that were the case, we’d have to assume god stopped short of creating a pristine universe free of all supernatural influences, and just bitched out in a few places. This doesn’t really say much for god’s alleged omnipotence.

Imagine god, in the process of creation, working himself into a corner. “Shucks, I did all that work laying out the evidence for evolution — working in all of those details about common descent, features shared in lineages, the fossil record – but now I have to find a way for this bacterium to locomote. Oh well, they’ll never be able to see anything this small, so they won’t mind if I cheat a bit.” This is totally unsatisfying from both a scientific, and theological standpoint.

It makes no sense why god would make a clockwork this intricate, carefully avoiding leaving evidence of his agency, and then in handful of places, slip up or get lazy. However, a creationist/design proponent may come back with the old ‘god works in mysterious ways, that we may not understand.’ If they want to play it that way, then they should admit that they aren’t actually in the business of explaining things.

Personally, I think life is wondrous mainly because of things like the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting cascade, which are so remarkably unlikely they must give you pause. That these seemingly irreducibly complex things have an explanation within the bounds of physics and evolution should be something to marvel at.

*Hint: It does.

Last night I attended a talk at UC Berkeley put on by Students for a Non-Religious Ethos (SANE), and the speaker was Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist fame. The talk was primarily about his eBay story — he is the ‘man who sold his soul on eBay’ —  but his overall message was that non-believers shouldn’t be so quick to throw up a wall and alienate moderate theists. Not only because the eucharist-in-the-garbage-bin approach is detrimental to our image as atheists, but  if we really want to work for the common good, we can’t erect imaginary barriers between ourselves and others who are essentially on our side.

I really dug that. I mean, I’ll admit that I gravitate to the more militant end of the spectrum, and it’s fun watching PZ Myers go at it. However, you can’t make it an all out culture war, and that kind of resonated with me. On the other hand, I could tell that some of the other people at the talk were just expecting more ammunition for their anti-theist rhetorical arsenal.

I’m all for inclusiveness, but there is one important caveat. We shouldn’t be afraid to stand our ground when the stakes are high. Abstinence-only education and creationism aren’t equally valid opinions, they are straight up wrong, and we have evidence for it. They shouldn’t even be granted consideration in rational discourse. In contrast, the morality of abortion and stem cell research should probably be open for discussion. These are hard questions.

Lately, I have stumbled across some weird people calling themselves Christians. First it was the Christian Atheists, who believe worship and ritual are beneficial for the psyche, but that there is no god. Yeah, real good for the soul, just like plopping down in front of an empty fireplace with a hot cup of nothing, and cozying up inside a lack of blanket to read your favorite air novel.

Then there’s this guy Justin Cannon, who set up a Christian dating site … for gays. They call themselves, ‘Rainbow Christians’. Why do these people go through such odd contortions to keep hold of their faith?

I suppose the latter example is at least encouraging evidence that,  in some circles,  the bible is gaining a more moderate and tolerant interpretation. But in my opinion, they should go for the gold and call it the fairytale that it is.