I have recently been deeply pondering the relationship between morality and society. The question driving me is whether society defines its moral precepts, or whether morality exists independently. In the end, I think it’s some combination of the two: the trolley car tests point to a universal moral compass, but in other cases we have more liberty to define boundaries — sexuality and drug use, for example.

Anyway, the conclusion I am leaning towards leaves no room for morality from god, or other supernatural source. This flies in the face of those who think god’s law is a moral standard, and that without it, our world would be some frightening combination of The Garden of Earthly Delights and Mad Max. These religious types equate god with morality, and therefore maintain that a world without the former entails a world without the latter. However, I think their line of reasoning is fallacious.

The religious person first looks at the world around them, and sees it is governed by moral principles, and then looks for a source for these principles. However, unlike a sociologist, anthropologist, or biologist, they default to “goddidit” immediately, and say “mystery solved.” They then say, “if you don’t acknowledge my hypothesized source of morality, morality will cease to exist.” This is insane.

If you know anything about history, it is readily apparent that the so-called “moral absolutes” of religion are bent to the trends of the era. Things like slavery, which the bible permits, are thrown out and judged immoral when society says they are, and things like divorce get reclassified as permissible when the bible cleary says they aren’t. This is strong evidence that our morals do not derive from god.

Further evidence that morality is not indexed to religiosity is the atheist, like myself. I am not running through the streets raping children and stealing VCR’s, and neither are my buddies over at Unreasonable Faith. The atheist understands perfectly well that morality just is. You don’t kill and lie, because it’s a dick thing to do, not because your imaginary sky-papa told you not to.

I know that what it really comes down to is religious people are unsettled by the “just is” part. Morality has to come from somewhere, they’re right, but we don’t have to immediately identify the origin, and build it an altar to keep it from forsaking us. Leave it to the philosophers and social scientists, and in the meantime, just be happy I won’t steal your cookies.

I wish I could roll this out whenever I come across some creationist hater.

[Update 5/18: apparently, Billy Graham didn't write this. Blast! Foiled again by the e-mail forward goblins.]

Yet another silly e-mail. This time, a friend of mine got one entitled ‘Prayer for our Nation.’ It started with a huge black and white picture of a seated Billy Graham, staring stoically off into space. Following that was this prayer:

Billy Graham’s Prayer For Our Nation

‘Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, ‘Woe to those who call evil good,’ but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the earth with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and Set us free. Amen!’

I don’t even know where to begin, it’s just so wrong. I guess the worst part is that it just forgoes the debate as to whether or not these things are indeed wrong, calls them a loss, and beseeches the sky fairy for forgiveness.

I think the ridiculousness of the self-flagellatory judgment is evident enough, but there is one sentence that was particularly ridic. When Graham said “We have polluted the earth…” I was on the verge of conceding that he had at least one point, but then he went on to totally ruin it by specifying “with profanity and pornography.” Damn him.

–

It’s amazing how religion mutates with time. The ’sins’ it obsesses about are totally a product of the political climate of the era. Religious people ally themselves with a certain political group, and all of a sudden, the positions of their political opponents are listed among the religious transgressions, and the behaviors of their own party that are explicitly condemned in their holy-book are just swept under the rug.

Abortion? The bible says nothing about it, but it’s arguably one of the most egregious sins, according to fundies.

Usury? The bible condemns it repeatedly, but it’s a non-issue among religious conservatives, because the business world runs on interest, and Republicans love business.

Destroying the environment? I’m sure there are plenty of verses in the bible that could be used to condemn those who knowingly destroy that which god has given us. But conservatives pussyfoot around this topic, because environmental protection is the Democrats’ bit.

Slavery, subjugating women? The bible condones it throughout, but it’s not in vogue today so religious people just jump on the bandwagon.

Homosexuality? There are a few passages about it sprinkled through the bible, but there are far more about how it’s immoral to be rich. Nonetheless Christians fixate on gay marriage, and virtually ignore the socialistic implications of their holy-book.

Religion can a tool of political movements: it allows the difference between you and me to be more than a matter of opinion, but a matter of supernatural law. It’s a powerful weapon to wield against your ideological adversary, to call him/her damned. It’s even more powerful when you try to take some kind of moral high-ground — like Mr. Graham does above — by asking for forgiveness for your rival’s political positions.

Lately, my housemate and I have been having a heated debate about religious inclusion. He takes the position that governments should have an inclusionary stance towards religious groups in the interest of getting them on your side, and eventually liberalizing them out of their fundamentalist beliefs. Furthermore, he maintains that the benefits of this bridge building outweigh the risks to our separation of church and state. While he very cogently points out that secular government is not a mutually shared ideal, and therefore cannot be used as a nucleation point for reconciliation, I still believe that we can’t give these people any leeway: an inch of theocratic encroachment eventually amounts to a mile. He says I’m stonewalling religious people.

What initially ignited the debate was the the Israel-Palestine situation. He says that if Israel has any chance of ousting Hamas, it needs to beat Hamas at its own game; that is, move into Palestine, provide social services, and build mosques. His plan is essentially for Israel to appoint more liberal imams to run the mosques, and shepherd the masses to a more moderate interpretation of Islam.

I think this is a terrible idea, because it doesn’t address the core dispute between the people: the holy-land. Muslims want Jerusalem back, and while it’s true that the mutual antagonism over the years has obscured the root of the problem, it’s really a religiously motivated land dispute. Period.

Take for example the Sinai war. Soon after the creation of Israel, the entire Muslim world lined up at the side of Palestine, and basically attempted to choke Israel to death. They refused to let Israeli planes into their airspace, and wouldn’t let any ship coming from or bound for Israel dock at their ports. This ultimately culminated in Israel lashing out and invading the Sinai Peninsula, but it’s a good indicator of the importance of Jerusalem to the Muslim faith: it transcends borders. Any solution that does not take this into account will ultimately fail.

This is why if you went in and supplanted Hamas with Israeli funded religious and social programs, you could only get rid of suicide bombers and extremists temporarily. If there is anything we have learned from the existence Israel, it’s that you can deny a people their religious holy-land for a very long time, but they will continue to stew about it.

It’s clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at its core a religious problem, and as long as people are allowed to confound religious political issues, it will remain a political problem too. This is why regardless of the side you support, the values you should espouse should be separation of faith from government. I don’t see how demanding reasoned, secular diplomacy is stonewalling when your opponents are religious nutjobs refusing to even sit down and discuss diplomatic solutions with an ‘illegitimate state.’ Having qualifications for what should be considered rational discourse is not stonewalling.

Anyway, our debate moved on to Obama’s new ‘faith-based office,’ which I believe is an absolute waste of time. I know it’s in the interest of everyone to move forward together, but I don’t understand why we have to kowtow to people who unabashedly admit that the US would be better off as a theocracy. We have standards for rational discourse, and just like we would have a hot fire under our asses to shut down Nazi talk in Congress (sorry…Godwin’s law…), we can’t tolerate people telling us that their invisible sky fairy opposes stem cell research. Or that some holy book written by some bronze age desert people offers genuine insight on gay marriage and abortion. I’m sorry, that just isn’t the kind of reasoning I expect from the governing body of the most powerful nation in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t seek to confront their beliefs — telling them that they’re idiots would be unproductive. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to base their political convictions on empirical evidence, and therefore keep god out of government. The problem is that if you place any limitation on these people they take it as an affront.

Take senator Jim DeMint, who is claiming that this stimulus package is actually an attack on people of faith because it specifies that any school facilities that receive federal funds for renovation may not subsequently be used for religious activities. He claims this is an infringement on existing liberties, because the activities are currently permitted, and may not be in the future.

Well no, not exactly. If you were getting free fruit from your neighbor’s tree, it wouldn’t be an infringement on your rights if that neighbor decided to cut you off. He would just be exercising his prerogative to keep his own fruit. In the case of the federal government, they aren’t supposed to be giving funds to religious institutions anyway, so this is really just enforcement of a previously ignored stipulations.

If you give Christianists an inch of political ground, they are bound to take a mile. They say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That’s why I think faith needs to keep its place.

An Illinois court has ruled that a ‘moment of silence’ statute is unconstitutional. The law mandated that public school students observe a daily moment of silence, for “silent prayer or for silent reflection on the anticipated activities of the day.”

Naturally, Christianists are up in arms, saying that this is another attempt by a minority of secular-progressives to push their radical separation of church and state agenda on the embattled theist majority. However, the judge had a very interesting take on the statute:

The Statute violates this [the second prong of the Lemon test] because it prefers some religions over others. It is firmly established that “[n]either a state nor the Federal Government . . . can pass laws that aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.”

…[T]he ACLU has identified a number of religious practices that are neither silent nor still…

…These includes [sic] certain Jewish traditions, Muslim prayers that require a variety of postures and gestures including bowing and prostration, Native American religions and Krishna Hinduism.

Practitioners of these religions would, apparently, be excluded from praying according to their faith during the “period of silence.”

In other words, a moment of silence could be utilized by Christian children for prayer in school, but would by definition preclude the prayer rituals of other religions, and is therefore a ‘religious preference’ of the state — Christian children may participate in semi-organized prayer during school hours, while others may not.

What’s interesting to me is how the defenders of the statute want to portray its opponents: as bloodthirsty secularists who will attack something as simple as a moment of silence if there are intimations of religiosity associated therewith.

Well, it’s very telling that the people who are most outraged by this ruling are … Christians. If it were an innocuous ‘moment of silence’ as they claim, they would have as much to lose as an atheist. The reality, which the judge was apt to point out, is that the statute was a deliberately underhanded attempt to surreptitiously slip prayer back into the public school system — and surprise, surprise somebody finally caught on.

So now we get to listen to Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh drone on and on about how this is a Christian nation*, and how our morals come from god because the forefathers wrote in the Constititution that god endowed us with inalienable rights^†, and that they wrote his name on our money and into the Pledge of Allegiance^‡, and blah, blah blah.

Well you know what, I don’t in principle have a problem with god’s name popping up everywhere — he’s kind of our mascot, like the San Diego Chicken — but the moment these things are used as evidence that we have a national religion, or that I am less of a patriot because I am an atheist, then I want it off the money, and out of the schools and courtrooms, and stricken from the Pledge.

*See the Treaty of Tripoli, article 11.

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen…”

† Actually, that was in the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution is an explicitly secular document by design.

‡ There was no ‘In God We Trust’ on our money, or ‘under god’ in the Pledge until the 50’s. Look it up.

h/t Pharyngula

Here, I thought Rick Warren was going to be nothing but an embarrassment at the invocation. Turns out, his prayer was a great addition to the ceremony: classy, elegant, touching. Reminiscent of the Christians of old.

What was I worried about? Silly me.

h/t Pharyngula

Quick observation about the nature of god.

In his divine plan, he has condemned mankind to a life of hardship, misery, disease, heartbreak, loss, and ultimately death. But he/Jesus someday plans to ride in to the rescue (on a white horse, pulling a sword out of his throat, wearing a bunch of crowns, with his name written on the inside of his leg in invisible ink, and all the rest of that bad acid trip bullshit in Revelation), and he will make everything better.

Well, if you were watching a kitten suffer with a thorn in its paw, would you pull it out? I would.

But would you consider me a bad person if I waited a while, letting the poor little guy mew and squeal, knowing full well that I could help it at any time, but refusing to? I think, and you would probably agree that the virtuous thing to do would be to put an end to the cat’s suffering. Apparently though, that virtue is not a godly one, and although we generally equate godliness with virtue, this is one instance where the two don’t match up: the godly thing to do is to prolong the suffering of the innocent.

The only retort I can see Christians making, is the whole “god has a plan” cop-out.

What this amounts to is saying “we can not apply the rules of logic to the goings on of the universe, because what god does makes no sense to human minds.”

I would like to point out two problems with this argument. The first is that it directly contradicts one motivation for being faithful, which is that believing in god actually explains something. Creationists simultaneously claim that observing the natural world provides us with incontrovertible evidence of his existence, and that human rationality cannot be applied to the movements of the creator. WTF STFU?

The second problem is that if there’s anything that history has taught us, it’s that humans are impressively adept at figuring out how god’s hand influences the universe. Today we are nailing down the details of quantum mechanics, molecular biology, multi-dimensional calculus etc. In fact, over the ages, god has become progressively feebler, as we have learned that germs cause disease, not evil-spirits or divine punishment. We have learned that the universe as it stands today pretty much takes care of itself, and that we don’t need an invisible scarab to roll the sun across the sky, or a series of animals standing on each others’ backs to carry the earth through the cosmos. It’s painfully obvious that the god of today is impotent compared with the god of old, because the things he was invoked to explain have been sufficiently explained without him. He is vestigial: once useful, but now merely a reminder of how far we’ve come.

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.”

–

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.

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