Reality/the natural world – Page 11

FEB 03, 2023

Reading Time: 8 MINUTES

Ten years ago, Psychology Professor Justin L. Barrett published a book called Born Believers, arguing that all humans are naturally wired to be religious—that we are literally born with an intrinsic propensity to believe in God. Religious faith for Barrett is therefore not only normal but deeply natural. And, thus, to be a nonbeliever is—you guessed it—abnormal and unnatural. According to Barrett, atheists and agnostics live in conflict with an innate predisposition that is an integral part of our humanity.

Barrett isn’t the only scholar to push this odd view. Leading sociologist of religion Christian Smith describes religion as “irrepressibly natural to being human.” Religious faith is so genuinely, naturally human, he says, that to live secularly is analogous to “crab-walk[ing] backwards.” Sure, it can be done, but it is awkward, untenable, if not downright idiotic. Smith even compares atheists and agnostics to individuals who choose to “repeatedly hit themselves in the head with sharp objects.” That is, we can choose to not believe in God if we really want to, but it is obviously inimical to natural, normal well-being.

Then there’s sociologist Peter Berger, who argued that the “religious impulse” is such a “perennial feature of humanity” that a lack of religiosity would entail a “mutation of the species.” Sociologist Paul Froese claims that “a religious sentiment is deeply ingrained in human nature” and that “a basic demand for a religious worldview is universal.” And economist Laurence Iannaccone recently insisted that religious faith is so naturally fundamental to being human that without it, people would “cease being recognizably human.”

And so forth.

The bottom line from this perspective is that religiosity is normal, irrepressible, and innate, while secularity is artificial, unnatural—almost unhuman.

Except it isn’t.

Religion is no more “natural” to humans than being nonreligious.

As I argue in my new book, Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society (co-authored with Isabella Kasselstrand and Ryan Cragun) evidence shows that: (1) there have always been nonreligious people throughout recorded history, (2) a large number of people today are not religious, (3) a growing number of societies are increasingly secular, and (4) when children are raised without religion, they tend to stay secular as adults. These facts debunk the claim that atheism and agnosticism are abnormal or unnatural.

Secularity in the past

First, there have always been secular people—at least as long as there have been religious people.

The earliest known documentation of irreligiosity comes from the Indian writings of the Carvaka —also referred to as the Lokayata—who lived in India during the 7th century BCE. The Carvaka expressed a naturalistic worldview and rejected the supernaturalism of primordial Hindu religion. They were atheistic materialists who saw no evidence for the existence of gods or karma or an afterlife. “Only the perceived exists,” they argued, and “there is no world other than this.” In ancient China, Xunzi, who lived in the 3^rd century BCE, taught that only this natural world exists and that morality is a social construct, with no divine component. Also in ancient China, both Wang Ch’ung and Hsun Tzu were nonbelievers who argued that there is nothing supernatural or spiritual out there. Only natural phenomena.

Early forms of atheism, agnosticism, anti-religiosity, and naturalistic orientations were abundant among the sages of ancient Greece and Rome, including Protagoras, Xenophanes, Carneades, Lucretius, Epicurus, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Prodicus, Critias, Anaximander, Hippo of Samos, Clitomachus, Celsus – and so many others. In ancient Israel, Psalms 14, written sometime around the 3^rd or 2^nd century BCE, explicitly attests to the existence of atheists, and the ancient Jewish philosopher known as Kohelet, from the 3^rd century BCE, voiced existential, skeptical doubt, claiming that all life is ultimately meaningless and that there is no life after death.

In early Islamic civilization, Muhammad Al-Warraq, of the 9^th century, doubted the existence of Allah and was skeptical of religious prophets; Muhammad al-Razi, of the 10^th century, was a freethinking man who criticized religion; Omar Khayyam, of the 11^th century, expressed a decidedly naturalistic worldview; and Averroes, of the 12^th century, was known for his secular skepticism.

In short, plenty of historical evidence exists of agnosticism, skepticism, atheism, naturalism, secularism, humanism, and irreligion throughout history, going back thousands of years. Such evidence illustrates that secularity has always been around, and as such, is just as much a normal, natural part of the human condition as religiosity.

High rates of secularity today

Granted, being openly secular was relatively rare in the ancient world. But it certainly isn’t anymore. Today, a massive proportion of humanity is openly secular. The existence of so many secular people in the world renders manifestly absurd the argument that secularity is unnatural.

If we totaled up all unaffiliated, non-practicing, and nonbelieving people in the world, the number of secular humans – according to Pew international data – would be around one billion. For some random global highlights: in China, over 500 million people are explicitly nonreligious, along with about 3.5 million Taiwanese individuals and at least 60 million people in Japan. In the Czech Republic, there are 6 million people alive today who are secular, 10 million in the Netherlands, 30 million in France, around 1.5 million in Argentina, and around 1 million in Uruguay. Given such demographic realities, it is irrational to characterize secularity as somehow unnatural.

To be sure, most humans the world over are religious, and only a minority are secular. No question about that. But just because a minority of humans are left-handed, or have perfect pitch, or are over six feet tall, or monolingual, or illiterate, or homosexual, or vegetarian, or colorblind, or have 20/20 vision, or are secular, does not make any of these traits, characteristics, or orientations unnatural.

And it is crucial to recognize that even though most people in the world are religious, there are now a handful of societies in which it is the other way around: secular people constitute the majority and religious people comprise the minority. The Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Japan, China, Estonia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, Uruguay, France, Hungary, and Australia – all have religiously unaffiliated majorities. Scotland bears emphasis: with a population of 5.5 million, at least 58% the population currently has no religion. How can such widespread secularity be described as unnatural, at least with a straight face? Or consider Estonia, a Baltic country of 1.3 million, where widespread indifference towards religious beliefs and practices reigns: only 46% of adults believe in God; only 17% claim that religion is important in their life; nearly 90% never talk about religion with their friends or family; nearly 80% never think about religion; 75% never pray; only 4% engage in daily prayer. Is it accurate to describe the majority of this country as somehow unnatural? No. Their widespread secularity is simply a natural part of human cultural variation.

But haven’t these highly secular nations only had a nonreligious majority in recent years? Isn’t their explosive secularity a new historical phenomenon? Yes and yes. Yet even this indicates that religion is not irrepressibly natural and secularity artificially unnatural. For if religion can be widely abandoned and secularity widely emergent in such a short time period, then this speaks to the former not being so intrinsic to humanity after all, and secularity not being some unnatural beast.

Socialization

But how is religion widely abandoned in society? One clear mechanism: parents stop socializing their children to be religious.

Socialization is the process whereby we passively, informally, and often unconsciously internalize the norms and values of our culture. Our experience of socialization is most profound and powerful when we are young, as we are growing up. And the people who most potently socialize us are those who raise us, keeping us fed and safe – usually our parents and other immediate family members. But any humans we come into contact with – either in-person or virtually – can socialize us, to varying degrees: neighbors, friends, teachers, coaches, nurses, or those we see in TV shows, movies, on TikTok and on Instagram.

Socialization is fundamental to religion’s maintenance and reproduction. Contrary to Justin Barrett’s claims, babies do not start out religious; they have to be taught religion. The process, in short, goes like this: small children are raised by religious people, who teach them the norms, beliefs, and rituals of their religion. Those children internalize that religious socialization and go on to be religious themselves as they grow up. They accept as true the religious beliefs that have been presented to them as such by their loved ones; they come to practice and value the religious rituals they have been socialized to perform; they come to personally identify with the religious group in which they were raised. And when these kids grow up and have kids of their own, the cycle is repeated.

In 2016, the Pew Research Center found that parents’ religiosity within the United States is a very strong predictor of people’s religiosity. Of Americans who identify as Protestant Christians, 80 percent of them were raised by two Protestant Christian parents; however, if one parent was a Protestant Christian and the other identified with no religion (“none”), then only 56 percent identify as Protestant Christian, with 34 percent being religiously unaffiliated. Among those who were raised by a Protestant parent and a Catholic parent, 38 percent now identify as Protestant, 29 percent as Catholic, and 26 percent as non-religious. We see similar correlations within Catholicism: of people who were raised by two Catholic parents, 62 percent are Catholic today, but of those who had one parent who was Catholic and one parent who was not, only 32 percent are Catholic today. As for people raised by two non-religious parents, 63 percent are non-religious themselves.

There are more permutations within this Pew study, but the primary finding is obvious: our parents strongly shape our religiosity, or lack thereof. Numerous studies spanning over a century bear these assertions out: people generally adhere to the religion in which they were raised; such is the unparalleled power of religious socialization.

But what is most relevant for our discussion, is that when children are raised secularly, without religion, they generally don’t become religious as adults. For example, Hart Nelsen found – looking at American families back in the 1980s – that if both parents were secular, then about 85 percent of children raised in such homes grew up to be secular themselves. These findings were confirmed in a British context by Steve Bruce and Tony Glendinning, who also found that children raised without religion rarely grow up to become religious themselves; only about 5 percent of people raised in secular homes by nonreligious parents ended up being religious themselves later in life.

Clearly, we have an innate, natural propensity to believe what our parents teach us, to accept the reality presented to us by those who care for us, to internalize the worldview of our immediate culture, and to enjoy, value, and despise what we have been socialized to enjoy, value, and despise. If religion is part of our socialization, we will most likely be religious. If it is not, then we will most likely be secular. And thus, if religiosity can evaporate in just one generation – as a result of secular socialization – it is quite erroneous to speak of it as irrepressibly innate. Barrett is mistaken to characterize humans as “born believers,” given the evidence showing that children’s religiosity is something that they get socialized into, and when that socialization is secular, children tend to remain secular.

Golden delicious

Secularity is just as normal, natural, and innate to humanity as is religiosity. While it is true that religious beliefs are popular, deep, and widespread, they are no more inborn to us than their absence. Religious faith is no more rooted in our nature than skepticism and rationalism. Maintaining a supernatural worldview is no more inherently human than maintaining a naturalistic worldview. In the strong words of historian Tim Whitmarsh:

“The notion that a human is an essential religious being…is no more cogent than the notion that apples are essentially red. When most of us think of an apple we imagine a rosy glow, because that is the stereotype that we have grown up with…and indeed it is true enough that many apples are tinctured with red. But it would be ludicrous to see a Golden Delicious as any less ‘appley’ just because it is pure green. Yet this is in effect what we do to atheists…we treat them as human beings who are not somehow complete in their humanity, even though they are genetically indistinct from their peers.”

Amen.

Er, I mean: Hear! Hear!

The busiest abortionist

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photo by DR. ABBY HAFER

JUL 06, 2022

Reading Time: 5 MINUTES

“They took it out in pieces,” she told me.

My friend was discussing a pregnancy that she had very much wanted as a married woman in her 20s. It had failed inside her and had to be removed, as she said, in pieces. Otherwise, she would have died of sepsis. She was devastated by this loss. Whether this is what led to the failure of her marriage a year or so later is anybody’s guess.

Women often feel guilty if their pregnancy miscarries. Religious women are often told that their bodies are the result of “Intelligent Design,” and the expectation is that their bodies are the perfect retorts for growing and continuing a pregnancy. Even those who are not religious tend to think that our bodies, having evolved over millions of years, must be nearly perfectly adapted for the process of carrying a pregnancy and giving birth.

Yes, our bodies did evolve. But evolution’s standard for the success of a system is not perfection, or even near-perfection. The standard for success in an evolved system is, “It doesn’t cause death before reproduction too often.” That’s a pretty low standard. It takes no account of human suffering, and it certainly takes no account of the occasional unsuccessful embryo. So long as enough people survive to reproduce, the species keeps going. Deaths or disfigurements in individual conceptuses don’t matter, so long as the population itself continues.

As a result, a human pregnancy is actually a pretty tenuous affair. One thing that would help women in general—and men as well—would be an understanding of just how tenuous a situation a human pregnancy actually is.

When does the soul enter the body?

We are not helped by the fact that anti-abortionists often claim that “life” begins at conception, especially since what is formed at conception is a cell with a new combination of DNA. The life that allows that DNA molecule to replicate is the woman’s life.

However, when anti-abortionists talk about life “beginning” at conception, what they actually mean is that they believe a divine soul is actively placed into a fertilized egg at the exact moment that egg and sperm fuse. This imagined process of God turning it from meat into a human being by inserting a soul is called “ensoulment.”

The life that allows that DNA molecule to replicate is the woman’s life.

The issue of ensoulment is a matter that religious philosophers have discussed for many hundreds of years.

In earlier eras, ensoulment was thought to happen at quickening, which was when movements inside the uterus were first experienced. Others have argued that ensoulment doesn’t take place until a baby, outside of the mother’s body, draws its first breath.

Fertilization was only discovered after the invention of the microscope

What earlier thinkers did not think was that ensoulment took place at conception. Why didn’t they think that? Because prior to the advent of modern science, nobody knew what conception actually was. In Biblical times, nobody knew what happens at fertilization.

What actually happens at fertilization could only be discovered after the invention of the microscope. And following that invention, it still took a great deal of painstaking scientific research to figure out that sperm and egg have to meet and fuse for fertilization to take place. This painstaking research involved, among other things, putting pants on frogs. I am not kidding.

How do you draw the line for the existence of something that doesn’t exist?

Since there is no evidence of a non-corporeal soul, and certainly no way of measuring its presence or absence, religious philosophers have always been at a loss for telling when a soul enters a body. Because a soul is immeasurable and indeed undetectable, once science discovered the fertilization of eggs, religious-philosophical cowards decided that the winking into existence of a human soul took place right at the moment of fertilization.

Why? Because they were unable to figure out where or how to draw a line. A fertilized egg changes into a born baby gradually through a continuous process. But the naïve religious concept of a binary “soul” insists that the soul either exists fully complete or does not exist at all. Further, it switches from one to the other in an instant—a serious mismatch with the reality of gestation and birth.

Faced with a difficult decision, many religious philosophers wimped out. They were actively unwilling to think about evidence of prenatal development.

They were also unwilling to make hard decisions. There is no evidence for a soul existing at the moment of conception or any other. However, the entire religious belief in a binary on-or-off soul depends on drawing a line someplace. So they decided to play it safe, drawing the line right at the moment of conception. It’s a lazy, cowardly person’s choice.

What does this have to do with miscarriages?

But we were talking about miscarriages, and about a divine soul being placed into a fertilized egg by God himself, at the moment of conception. Of these two ideas, only one is a fact. And the fact is that pregnancies miscarry at an alarming rate. Further, these two ideas—ensoulment and miscarriage—stand in direct contradiction to one another.

The other term for miscarriage is “spontaneous abortion.” Conservative religions go out of their way to ignore the fact that women’s bodies are hives of spontaneous abortions. These happen routinely in humans.

Conservative religions go out of their way to ignore the fact that women’s bodies are hives of spontaneous abortions.

Where human women are concerned, the bald fact is that over 31 percent of all fertilized eggs fail to result in living babies—a conservative estimate based on careful research.

I am not now talking about human-induced abortions but spontaneous miscarriages.

What’s more, according to careful research reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, about 25 percent of all fertilized eggs do not even manage to implant on the lining of the uterus, which is just the first step in a pregnancy after fertilization.

Twenty-five percent of all fertilized eggs live for only about ten days, then fail to implant. They die and pass out of the body along with menstrual fluid. This in turn means that every year many millions of fertilized eggs come into existence and then die about ten days later as undifferentiated clumps of cells. The remaining six percent of spontaneous abortions happen after implantation.

All this is supposedly God’s work.

This means that for every 100 live births, there were at least 45 spontaneous abortions.

So we must ask ourselves: Why, if God creates these souls at conception, does he then destroy so many of them before they even have a chance to breathe? Before they ever experience life outside the womb? Before they can ever have the experience of being human? Before they can ever have an interaction with the world, which we are told, is necessary in order to find their way to God?

These numbers show that the human female reproductive system is far from perfect. In fact, anyone who argues that the human body is the result of intelligent design has clearly never taken a close look at the female reproductive system, or for that matter the male one.

In human females, gestation is frequently incomplete and often results in a naturally aborted fetus.

There were approximately 130 million babies born worldwide in 2018, which means approximately 58.5 million spontaneous, natural abortions in that year alone.

If God gives life to each embryo at the exact moment when egg meets sperm as conservative Christians claim, then God subsequently kills tens of millions of little unborn babies every year. Put another way, God performs tens of millions of abortions every year.

God, if he exists, is by far the world’s busiest abortionist.

What I’m reading

I encourage all my Southern Baptist friends (and others) to read this excellent book.

Here’s a quote:

Personal feelings about your relationship with any deity — no matter how deep — are not proof that what you believe is true.
Madison, David; Sledge, Tim. GUESSING ABOUT GOD (Ten Tough Problems in Christian Belief Book 1) (p. 34). Insighting Growth Publications Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Amazon abstract

In this first book of his Ten Tough Problems series, David Madison shares three critical problems in Christian belief.

Problem One: God is invisible and silent. This fact forces humanity to rely on ineffective ways of knowing God — common knowledge, sacred books, visions, prayer, personal feelings, and theologians. But all these sources of God knowledge fall short as evidenced by a world of disagreement, not just between Christians and other religions, but within Christianity itself.

Problem Two: The Bible disproves itself. In Chapter 2, Madison narrows his focus down to the world’s most famous book. He shows how two hundred years of critical scholarship — something most Christians know nothing about — have revealed the Bible to be full of archaic ideas, moral failures, and contradictions. He makes a convincing case that all these flaws rob us of any confidence that claims of biblical revelation can be taken seriously.

Problem Three: We can only guess who Jesus was. In Chapter 3, Madison turns his magnifying glass on the four Gospels and finds them severely lacking in their attempts to provide a clear understanding of who Jesus was and what he had to say. These Gospels not only contradict one another, but when reviewed under Madison’s guidance, prompt the honest reader to request, “Will the real Jesus please stand up?”

Combining rigorous scholarship with engaging personal reflections, this book offers understanding and help for individuals struggling with tough questions about belief. And the most pressing question it provides for the reader is: How could a deity competent enough to create this Universe be such a massively poor communicator who leaves humanity Guessing about God.

A biologist explains why ‘heartbeat laws’ are nonsensical

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photo by DR. ABBY HAFER

MAY 06, 2022

a biologist explains why heartbeat laws are nonsensical | heart cell and pulse line — Shutterstock/YouTube screenshot

Overview

The proliferation of anti-abortion ‘heartbeat laws’ cynically conflate the spontaneous pulsing of cardiac cells with the beating of a heart, and the beating of a heart with the presence of a soul. Such magical thinking belongs nowhere near the laws of a secular democracy

Reading Time: 5 MINUTES

A scientist is working in her lab, quietly culturing heart cells. She puts Petri dishes full of them into an incubator to grow. A few days later, she takes them out and inspects them under a microscope to see if they have multiplied as she wanted.

As she innocently adjusts her scope, she sees—they are beating. What’s more, when she puts two of them near each other, they beat together! When she moves all of them together, they still beat together, in one great throbbing mass! “IT’S ALIIIIVE!” she shrieks.

That scientist would be me. I didn’t really shriek, “It’s alive!” But I did see individual heart cells beating, cells that I had cultured, beating with no brain, nerves, organism, or even heart around them. They just contracted rhythmically—that is to say, they beat—all by themselves.

Because that’s what heart cells do.

Biologists sometimes have weird jobs. One summer, I worked in a lab that looked at how embryonic heart cells take up various chemicals. One of my jobs was to culture the heart cells— that is to say, grow them. I dissected embryonic chickens, took out the hearts, dissolved the connective tissue between the cells, and spread the cells out in Petri dishes along with the food and fluids they would need to be happy. Then I put them into incubators, hoping they would multiply.

After a few days, I took them out and checked them under a microscope to see if they were multiplying. And sometimes, when I looked at them, they were beating. The individual heart cells kind of looked like they were twinkling, with their little, individual contractions.

As for putting them together to see if they beat together, I didn’t actually do that. But other scientists have done so, and that’s exactly what they found: when cardiac muscle cells are placed together, they will beat together. It’s so well established that it’s common knowledge, written into textbooks. We know that they do it, and we know why they do it. Here’s a paragraph about this from the textbook Anatomy and Physiology:

If embryonic heart cells are separated into a Petri dish and kept alive, each is capable of generating its own electrical impulse followed by contraction.

It goes on to say:

When two independently beating embryonic cardiac muscle cells are placed together, the cell with the higher inherent rate sets the pace, and the impulse spreads from the faster to the slower cell to trigger a contraction.

In short, it is not mysterious, it is not magic. It’s biology doing what biology has evolved to do.

The anti-abortion movement’s cynical “heartbeat laws” are all manipulation, no science

There are many so-called “heartbeat laws” on the books in the United States at this time, laws that outlaw abortion after an embryonic “heartbeat” has been detected. Many others have been proposed. The most egregious current example is the law in Texas that states that a woman may not get an abortion after she has been pregnant for six weeks. Specifically, it bans abortion after cardiac activity is detectable. Other states are following suit as of this writing.

To most people, “cardiac activity” and “heartbeat” sound synonymous, and this mistaken assumption has been exploited by those who wish to deny women their right to an abortion.

The assumption may be easy to make, but it is glaringly incorrect, as is illustrated by the narrative that began this article. It’s simple: heart cells beat all by themselves, entirely on their own. If an individual heart cell is alive, it contracts in a rhythmic manner—that is to say, it beats. “Cardiac activity” means that a few heart cells are alive and beating, not that a heart actually exists. A true heartbeat, on the other hand, is, technically speaking, the beating of a heart. An actual complete heart, not a few cardiac muscle cells. A complete heart does not exist at six weeks’ gestation.

To further illustrate just how independent a heart cell’s beating is from there being an actual living organism, consider the following two facts:

1) Beating heart cells need not come from an embryo. At Vienna University of Technology, descendants of stem cells called progenitor cells were induced to become heart cells in a laboratory, and they too beat on their own, in a Petri dish.

2) It is also possible for a person who is brain dead to still have a beating heart.

Heart and soul

If all of this seems spooky, it is largely because we incorrectly but understandably associate a beating heart with an intrinsic, even mystical life force; it is associated with the presence of a soul itself.

Ancient Egyptians and some ancient Greeks believed that the heart housed the soul, as well as our ability to think. Christianity adopted the idea that the heart is the seat of consciousness, intelligence, free personality, intrinsic knowledge of right and wrong, and a place over which God could have direct influence. These feelings continue in our culture to this day.

But what we know, through science, is that the heart is a muscle that pumps blood throughout the body. We know that a heart can be transplanted from a dead person to someone else, and that a soul is not transplanted at the same time. We know that cardiac muscle cells will contract in a rhythmic manner, regardless of the state of the body around it, or even the existence of a body around it, or even the existence of a heart around it.

The religious idea that the heart is the seat of the soul stalks the subject of abortion. In fact, in general, the religious concept of “ensoulment” has been the unspoken underpinning of the anti-abortion movement for decades.

The religious idea that the heart is the seat of the soul stalks the subject of abortion.

“Ensoulment” is the idea that there is a specific moment when a developing embryo is endowed with a soul. Once a divine soul is placed in an embryo, terminating that embryo is thought to constitute the murder of a divine soul.

The laws of a secular democracy should offer no place for magical thinking of this kind. When anti-abortionists ask “When does life begin?”, they are really asking, “When does life with a soul begin?” It should be noted that no one is arguing about whether or not the organism created through conception is alive.

The egg and sperm were alive. The parents were alive. All the ancestors back to the dawn of life on the planet were alive. Life is involved at every juncture before, during, and after conception. So the question “When does life begin?” regarding pregnancy is a nonsensical one. Once you realize this, you see that the question is a stand-in for ensoulment.

“Cardiac activity” is likewise a stand-in for ensoulment. When such activity begins, it only means that some individual heart cells are alive. The sound is nothing more than the greatly-amplified rhythmic contracting of a collection of muscle cells that do not form a heart.

It needs to be stated in plain English: All anti-abortion fetal “heartbeat laws” are based on unscientific nonsense and should be abrogated. Cardiac muscle cells will contract on their own, even in a Petri dish, with no brain, no nervous system, no organism, and no heart attached to these cells. A “heartbeat” at six weeks’ gestation does not involve an actual heart. Further, muscle cells contracting are not the sign of a soul.

And regardless of the beliefs in the individual minds of citizens, the concept of a soul has no place in the laws of a secular democracy.

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”

Here’s the link to this article.

STEVE SCHMIDT

JUL 23, 2023

The “Gadget,” the first atomic bomb, explodes in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945 (Corbis via Getty Images)

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” — J. Robert Oppenheimer

‘Oppenheimer’ is an extraordinary and stunning movie. Seventy-eight years have passed since the Trinity test site outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico. It marked the beginning of a new epoch in history, where mankind harnessed the powers of the gods and became capable of triggering Armageddon.

Matt Damon plays General Leslie Groves, the architect of the Manhattan Project. He perfectly captures 2023 America’s lassitude towards the weapons that remain poised to destroy human civilization. Here is what Damon said:

How did I forget about this? It’s like the Cold War ended and my brain played a trick on me and said, ‘OK, let’s put that away, you don’t have to worry about that anymore’ — which is absurd.

But as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine “suddenly overnight it became the most important thing for us all to think about again.

Damon is one of the greatest actors of his generation, and among the most thoughtful as well. His comments aren’t an expression of vapidity or disinterest, but rather a spot-on assessment of how the overwhelming number of Americans think about the weapons that can destroy 10,000 years of human civilization and history in an instant.

I’ve written about this subject before. General Douglas MacArthur was the first person to speak directly to the existential issues raised by the dawn of the nuclear weapons age. They remain dire and true 78 years later.

The winds of catastrophe are stirring

STEVE SCHMIDT

JAN 31

There are a confluence of dangerous events occurring that have the potential to trigger global catastrophe at the end of the lifespans of the generation that endured human civilization’s greatest one. They are nearly all gone. Eleven years from now, it is estimated that there will be less than 1,000 American veterans left out of 16 million that served in the Second World War. Today, there are slightly more than 100,000 alive from a war that killed 400,000 Americans, and defined an era that came to be known as the “American century.”

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Even though nuclear weapons have not been deployed in combat since 1945 does not mean that they no longer exist. There are thousands of them under the control of the following nations: United States, Russia, China, UK, France, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and India. The most nuclear arsenal in the world belongs to the United States, and it consists of three elements. The United States can deliver its nuclear weapons to any spot on Earth via airplane, land-based intercontinental ballistic missile and submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile. The weapons are under the command and control of the US Armed Forces, and can be launched on orders from the president of the United States. Since Harry Truman, the following Americans have held the unilateral power to destroy the world: Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. One of these men is unlike the others.

Upgrade to paid

During the hectic days after January 6, Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously queried Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley about the security of America’s nuclear arsenal. Milley responded that he had everything under control. Overwhelmingly, the American media and people yawned at the news, and believed what Milley told Pelosi — which is absolutely not true. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff isn’t part of the decision-making process when it comes to Armageddon. The president alone has that authority.

Everything in the American government is designed to move slowly — except one thing. The launch of the nuclear weapons are the exception. Should the president give the order, it will be carried out by highly-trained professionals who will not hesitate to execute it. In fact, right now, in this second, they are at their duty posts at the bottom of a silo, under the seas or in the air, awaiting the order.

What Matt Damon said is true for most of us in 2023 because no sane society would choose Donald Trump as the person to hold the power of extinction. Yet, we did.

The world came extremely close to nuclear war in October of 1962. Perhaps the only reason it didn’t was the profound wisdom, steeliness and courage of John Kennedy. Today, we have replaced wisdom with a deluded moral infancy and addlement that makes a mockery of the life and death issues that rest on the president’s desk.

We live in a cynical time in which there is so much evil operating in plain sight all over the world. Yet, after 78 years of having the power to destroy the planet, mankind has not pulled the trigger. It is a blink of an eye and an eternity all at once. What lies ahead is unknown, but it will be dangerous and deadly. What keeps us safe is judgement and morality. When that disappears all that is left is the mushroom cloud.

Why have we stopped believing these weapons exist — like all weapons — to be used?

‘Oppenheimer’ helps us remember the world in which we live. I recommend that you go to see it.

The Morale of Christian Clergy Is Taking a Big Hit

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 6/30/2023

No surprise, given the mess their religion is in

1. Christians can’t agree on who is right, what god wants

When Christians are off to church on a Sunday morning, they might have to drive past a few churches of other denominations. Apparently it never crosses their minds to stop at one of these—after all, “We’re all Christians, aren’t we?” But that’s exactly the problem: Christians have never been able to agree on what Christianity is. They’ve been fighting about this for centuries; the Catholic/Protestant divide is especially pronounced. We can be sure Catholics won’t stop at Protestant churches, and Protestants—with contempt and ridicule for the Vatican—wouldn’t think of stopping at a Catholic church.

There’s a lot of confidence about who is right, based on…what exactly? Based on what authority figures—parents, priests, preachers—have taught the devout from their earliest years. These religious truths become part of life; they constitute the comfort of believing, and, as I heard a Catholic women remark recently, “We were told not to think about it.” Because, when people do think about it, there’s likely to be pushback. It’s no surprise that church membership has been declining, because the world we live in provides so much information that undermines, contradicts, basic Christian beliefs. Professional apologists, in a panic, attempt to rise to this considerable challenge: “We’ve got to show that our brand of the Christian faith is the one true religion!”

2. The devout can’t explain exactly why their beliefs are true

“We were told not to think about it.” Of course, there are so many things that shouldn’t be thought about. For example: “Why am I a devout Baptist or Catholic—instead of something else?” That depends on family and geography. It’s pretty likely, if you were born in Poland, you’ll be Catholic. If you were born in rural Alabama, no surprise if you’re evangelical. If you were born in Egypt, the odds are overwhelming you’d be Muslim. Yet those who have been carefully groomed to believe in the truth of these religions seldom seem to wonder if they’re right, after all—and how to prove it. That’s precisely the danger of thinking about it. “We can’t all be right”—maybe that’s a clue we’re all wrong. Maybe we’ve been misled, deceived by your parents and clergy, who were also carefully groomed. Christians especially, when they look around at so many different brands of the own religion, should realize that something is terribly wrong: the faulty grooming has gone on for hundreds of years.

Many years ago, when I was a Methodist minister in small towns, it was not unusual for the clergy to arrange ecumenical services. That is, there would be a grand mixing of the congregations of the various denominations, Catholic and several Protestant. This was done to show how much the followers of Jesus loved each other, and got along. It was show business, because, in truth, the clergy who presided, and the parishioners who showed up, held very different ideas about god and Jesus. The clergy were always very cordial with each other, but we dared not actually discuss theology!

Nor did we dare to wonder how to demonstrate which of the various Christian brands was actually the right one—the one that Jesus or the apostle Paul would have said, “Yes, that’s it!” Not that this could ever happen: there is so much theological incoherence in the New Testament; Paul’s theology, which we read in his letters, was hopelessly messed up—and we have no way of verifying anything attributed to Jesus in the gospels.

It would be many years later—in 2013—that John Loftus published his book, The Outsider Test of Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True. It’s really not rocket science: step back from your faith and evaluate it the same way you would other religions you deem to the faulty, inferior.

But Christians have been trained not to think about it. Hence when Mormon missionaries or Jehovah’s Witnesses come knocking at the door, most Christians send them on their way, giving no thought whatever to how they could show conclusively that these religions are wrong—while their own brand of faith is the right one. This would require a grasp of epistemology: that is, how can you verify that your ways of knowing about god are reliable? “Well, I’m sure my parents and clergy told me the truth” doesn’t work at all. Did these authority figures make any effort at all to verify that their ways of knowing about god were reliable? It’s vital to break the endless cycle of “someone else told me.” All the claimed ways for knowing about god are, in fact, unreliable and defective: revelations (e.g. scripture), visions, prayers, meditations. Most religions rely on these various mediums—and come up with vastly different understandings of god.

If the outsider test of faith is applied rigorously to one’s own faith, there is little hope that this faith will measure up. Note that we’re not looking for proof: we’re asking the devout to provide reliable, verifiable, objective data about god(s).

3. In recent years, the Christian mess has become an even bigger mess

John Loftus’ 2013 book, mentioned above—and about a dozen of his other books—is part of a much larger phenomenon. Since the year 2000, well more than 500 books have been published explaining, in detail, the falsification of theism, Christianity especially. Books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), and Sam Harris (The End of Faith) were instrumental in launching, or at least stimulating, this surge in atheist publishing. But books are only part of a much bigger picture: “The Internet is where religion comes to die” —I’ve seen this attributed to various people—but it means that information about the harmful impact religion, and its feeble foundations, is so easily accessible. There are countless blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels devoted to explaining just how bad and faulty religion is. Of course, apologists have risen to this challenge; they have their own blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels. But atheism has found its voice as never before.

So the clergy have to make their way in this new, hostile, environment. It’s no surprise they’re not doing all that well. This recent headline caught my attention—where else, on the Internet:

‘Exhausted’ pastors suffering decline in overall health, respect, friendship: study

Here are four excerpts:

“The overall health of pastors in the U.S. has declined markedly since 2015, with increasing numbers who say that they face declining respect from their community and a lack of true friends, according to a recent study.”

“Data collected by faith-based organization Barna Group as part of its Resilient Pastor research showed a significant decrease in pastors’ spiritual, mental and emotional well-being, as well as their overall quality of life, between 2015 and 2022, the group announced last week.”

“Pastors who reported that their mental and emotional health was below average spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excellent mental and emotional health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.”

“The recent report dovetails with another poll that Barna released last March that showed the rates of burnout among pastors had risen dramatically within the past year, with a staggering 42% of ministers wondering if they should abandon their vocation altogether amid unsustainable stress and loneliness.”

“…declining respect from their community…” “…amid unsustainable stress and loneliness.”

This should surprise no one. Mainline Protestant denominations have been declining for years, and the most conservative brands of Christianity have brought no end of embarrassment. Who could have imagined the evangelical embrace of Donald Trump? How does it possibly make sense that the folks most devoted to god—well, they would have us believe it—turned this corrupt, evil person into a hero of the faith? Some have given up on him, but he still commands a large following. Moreover American democracy is under threat from these fanatics who want to abolish separation of church and state, who are eager to institute a theocracy. Because, you know, they are the only ones who are right about god. How could Pat Robertson be wrong when he blamed 9/11 on homosexuality and abortion?

How can Catholic clergy maintain morale in the face of the ongoing scandal of child-rape? The headlines about new cases keep coming. Most priests are not pedophiles—well, we certainly hope not—but the reputation of their church has been tarnished beyond repair. The church has paid out billions of dollars in legal settlements. Even worse—if that’s possible—are the theological implications: is it not within the power of their god to intervene somehow when a priest is about to rape a child? How can the good clergy face their congregations? Trying to maintain holy celibacy must contribute to unsustainable stress and loneliness.

Yet another example of the Christian mess: the Catholic church is evil enough because it champions misogyny—female priests? No, never! —is okay with homophobia, condemns contraception and abortion in the poorest of countries, and sits on enormous wealth. But in many parts of the world, it has been losing ground—no doubt because of the clergy-rape outrage—to an even more evil brand, Pentecostalism, which fully embraces ancient superstitions: the last thing the world needs. This can only bring grief to well-educated clergy.

I wonder how many folks in the pews really pay attention to the sermons. Do they wonder: Is the preacher right about that point? Are they encouraged to get right on their cell-phone—before church is even over—and see if Google can provide them with answers? If people did that, and discovered that theobabble from the pulpit cannot be trusted at all, I suspect that the clergy would feel even more declining respect from their community.

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith (2016; 2018 Foreword by John Loftus) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available.

His YouTube channel is here. He has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.

The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.

What Would Convince Us Christianity is True?

Here’s the link to this article.

By John W. Loftus at 6/30/2023

We atheists are asked to imagine what would convince us that Christianity is true. The short answer is this: We need sufficient objective evidence that can transform the negligible amount of human testimony found in the Bible into verified eyewitness testimony. But it does not exist. Given the extraordinary nature of the miracle tales in the Bible, this requirement means the past has to be changed and that can’t be done. Let’s explore this.

Consider the Christian belief in the virgin-birthed deity. Just ask for the objective evidence. There is no objective evidence to corroborate the Virgin Mary’s story. We hear nothing about her wearing a misogynistic chastity belt to prove her virginity. No one checked for an intact hymen before she gave birth, either. After Jesus was born, Maury Povich wasn’t there with a DNA test to verify Joseph was not the baby daddy. We don’t even have first-hand testimonial evidence for it since the story is related to us by others, not by Mary or Joseph. At best, all we have is second-hand testimony by one person, Mary, as reported in two later anonymous gospels, or two people if we include Joseph, who was incredulously convinced Mary was a virgin because of a dream–yes, a dream (see Matthew 1:19-24).[1] We never get to independently cross-examine Mary and Joseph, or the people who knew them, which we would need to do since they may have a very good reason for lying (pregnancy out of wedlock, anyone?).

Now one might simply trust the anonymous Gospel writers who wrote down this miraculous tale, but why? How is it possible they could find out that a virgin named Mary gave birth to a deity? Think about how they would go about researching that. No reasonable investigation could take Mary’s word for it, or Joseph’s word. With regard to Joseph’s dream, Thomas Hobbes tells us, “For a man to say God hath spoken to him in a Dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win belief from any man” (Leviathan, chap. 32.6). So the testimonial evidence is down to one person, Mary, which is still second-hand testimony at best. Why should we believe that testimony?

Christian believers accept ancient 2nd 3rd 4th 5th handed-down testimony to the virgin birth of Jesus, but they would never believe two people who claimed to see a virgin give birth to an incarnate god in today’s world!

On this fact, Christian believers are faced with a serious dilemma. If this is the kind of research that went into writing the Gospel of Matthew–by taking Mary’s word and Joseph’s dream as evidence–then we shouldn’t believe anything else we find in that Gospel without corroborating objective evidence. The lack of evidence for Mary’s story speaks directly to the credibility of the Gospel narrative as a whole. There’s no good reason to believe the virgin birth myth, so there’s no good reason to believe the resurrection myth either, since the claim of Jesus’ bodily resurrection is first told in that Gospel.[2]

In a recent online discussion fundamentalist apologist Lydia McGrew suggested I got it wrong. Her knee jerk reaction to me was that the author of Matthew’s gospel merely reported that Joseph’s dream convinced him Mary’s tale was true, and nothing more. But if so, why is Joseph’s dream included in Matthew’s gospel at all? It doesn’t do anything to lead reasonable people to accept Mary’s story, as her testimony would still stand alone without any support. It would be tantamount to showing that Joseph was incredulously convinced by less than what a reasonable person should accept. So what? It would also encourage readers to consider their own dreams as convincing on other issues.

So let us imagine what could have been…

If an overwhelming number of Jews in first-century Palestine had become Christians that would’ve helped. They believed in their God. They believed their God did miracles. They knew their Old Testament prophecies. They hoped for a Messiah/King based on these prophecies.[3] We’re even told they were beloved by their God! Yet the overwhelming majority of those first-century Jews did not believe Jesus was raised from the dead.[4] They were there and they didn’t believe. So why should we?

If I could go back in time to watch Jesus coming out of a tomb that would work. But I can’t travel back in time. If someone recently found some convincing objective evidence dating to the days of Jesus, that would work. But I can’t imagine what kind of evidence that could be. As I’ve argued, uncorroborated testimonial evidence alone wouldn’t work, so an authenticated handwritten letter from the mother of Jesus would be insufficient. If a cell phone was discovered and dated to the time of Jesus containing videos of him doing miracles, that would work. But this is just as unlikely as his resurrection. If Jesus, God, or Mary were to appear to me, that would work. But that has never happened even in my believing days, and there’s nothing I can do to make it happen either. Several atheists have suggested other scenarios that would work, but none of them have panned out.[5]

Believers will cry foul, complaining that the kind of objective evidence needed to believe cannot be found, as if we concocted this need precisely to deny miracles. But this is simply what reasonable people need. If that’s the case, then that’s the case. Bite the bullet. It’s not our fault it doesn’t exist. Once honest inquirers admit the objective evidence doesn’t exist, they should stop complaining and be honest about its absence. It’s that simple. Since reasonable people need this evidence, God is to be blamed for not providing it. Why would a God create us as reasonable people and then not provide what reasonable people need? Reasonable people should always think about these matters in accordance to the probabilities based on the strength of the objective evidence.

Believers will object that I haven’t stated any criteria for identifying what qualifies as extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary miraculous claim. But I know what does not count. Second-, third-, or fourth-hand hearsay testimony doesn’t count. Nor does circumstantial evidence. Nor does anecdotal evidence as reported in documents that are centuries later than the supposed events, which were copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries. I also know that subjective feelings, private experiences, or inner voices don’t count as extraordinary evidence. Neither do claims that one’s writings are inspired, divinely communicated through dreams, or were seen in visions. That should be good enough. Chasing the definitional demand for specific criteria sidetracks us away from that which matters. Concrete suggestions matter. But if Christians want more they should learn to examine the miracle claims in the Bible from the perspective of a historian.[6]

If nothing else, a God who desired our belief could have waited until our present technological age to perform miracles, because people in this scientific age of ours need to see the evidence. If a God can send the savior Jesus in the first century, whose death supposedly atoned for our sins and atoned for all the sins of the people in the past, prior to his day, then that same God could have waited to send Jesus to die in the year 2023. Doing so would bring salvation to every person born before this year, too, which just adds twenty centuries of people to save.

In today’s world it would be easy to provide objective evidence of the Gospel miracles. Magicians and mentalists would watch Jesus to see if he could fool them, like what Penn & Teller do on their show. There would be thousands of cell phones that could document his birth, life, death, and resurrection. The raising of Lazarus out of his tomb would go viral. We could set up a watch party as Jesus was being put into his grave to document everything all weekend, especially his resurrection. We could ask the resurrected Jesus to tell us things that only the real Jesus could have known or said before he died. Photos could be compared. DNA tests could be conducted on the resurrected body of Jesus, which could prove his resurrection, if we first snatched the foreskin of the baby Jesus long before his death. Plus, everyone in the world could watch as his body ascended back into the heavenly sky above, from where it was believed he came down to earth.

Christian believers say their God wouldn’t make his existence that obvious. But if their God had wanted to save more people, as we read he did (2 Peter 3:9), then it’s obvious he should’ve waited until our modern era to do so. For the evidence could be massive. If nothing else, their God had all of this evidence available to him, but chose not to use any of it, even though with the addition of each unit of evidence, more people would be saved.

It’s equally obvious that if a perfectly good, omnipotent God wanted to be hidden, for some hidden reason, we should see some evidence of this. But outside the apologetical need to explain away the lack of objective evidence for faith, we don’t find it. For there are a number of events taking place daily in which such a God could alleviate horrendous suffering without being detected. God could’ve stopped the underwater earthquake that caused the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami before it happened, thus saving a quarter of a million lives. Then, with a perpetual miracle God could’ve kept it from ever happening in the future. If God did this, none of us would ever know that he did. Yet he didn’t do it. Since there are millions of clear instances like this one, where a theistic God didn’t alleviate horrendous suffering even though he could do so without being detected, we can reasonably conclude that a God who hides himself doesn’t exist. If nothing else, a God who doesn’t do anything about the most horrendous cases of suffering doesn’t do anything about the lesser cases of suffering either, or involve himself in our lives.[7]

In any case, imagining some nonexistent evidence that could convince us Mary gave birth to a divine son sired by a male god in the ancient superstitious world is a futile exercise, since we already know there’s no objective evidence for it. One might as well imagine what would convince us that Marshall Applewhite, of the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult, was telling the truth in 1997 that an extraterrestrial spacecraft following the comet Hale-Bopp was going to beam their souls up to it, if they would commit suicide with him. One might even go further to imagine what would convince us that he and his followers are flying around the universe today! Such an exercise would be utter tomfoolery, because faith is tomfoolery.

Anthropology professor James T. Houk has said, “Virtually anything and everything, no matter how absurd, inane, or ridiculous, has been believed or claimed to be true at one time or another by somebody, somewhere in the name of faith.”[8] This is exactly what we find when Christians believe on less than sufficient objective evidence.

——–

[1] Joseph’s dream is used in the Gospel of Matthew’s narrative to help explain why Mary was not put to death for dishonoring him because of adultery. There are five other dreams in this gospel account which were all intended to save someone’s life. So, Joseph’s dream was probably meant to save Mary’s life too (Matthew 1:19-23; 2:12; 2:19-23; & 27:19). Matthew J. Marohl shows in Joseph’s Dilemma: “Honor Killing” in the Birth Narrative of Matthew (Wipf & Stock Publisher, 2008), that “Joseph’s dilemma involves the possibility of an honor killing. If Joseph reveals that Mary is pregnant, she will be killed. If Joseph conceals Mary’s pregnancy, he will be opposing the law of the Lord. What is a ‘righteous’ man to do?” Marohl: “Early Christ-followers understood Joseph’s dilemma to involve an assumption of adultery and the subsequent possibility of the killing of Mary.” This was part of their culture. Honor killings were justified in both the Old and New Testaments. Jesus even agreed with the Mosaic Law (Exodus 21:17; Leviticus 20:9) against his opponents on behalf of honor killings of children who dishonored their parents (Mark 7:8-13). The tale of the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of her accusers, doesn’t change what Jesus thinks of the law either (John 8; Matthew 5:18).

Don’t be surprised by the possibility of honor killings. Jesus affirmed their legitimacy. The Pharisees accused Jesus of being too lenient in his observance of the law. So Jesus counterpunches them in Mark 7:9-12: “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God) then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother.” (NIV) Corban is an Aramaic word that refers to a sacrifice, oath, or gift to God. The Pharisees allowed for this loophole so someone could make an oath to offer a gift to the temple, like one would set up a trust fund, in order to avoid giving it for the care of one’s aging parents.

Jesus’ first scriptural quote to “Honor your father and mother” is one of the Ten Commandments. Jesus’ second scriptural quote that “Anyone who curses (literally dishonors) their father or mother is to be put to death”, is found in Ex. 21:17 and Lev. 20:9. Jesus says the Corban loophole sets aside these two commands of God. For such a son would be disobeying a direct command of God by dishonoring his parents, while the Pharisees would be disobeying God’s command by not putting him to death. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 elaborates (i.e., the second law): “If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death.”

In this Jesus is affirming the Old Testament law of honor killings by stoning, for only if both of the laws Jesus cites are to be obeyed can his analogy succeed, that the Pharisees have set aside the laws of God in order to observe their traditions. For more on the harms of Christianity see my anthology, Christianity is not Great (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2014).

[2] On the resurrection, see Loftus, The Case against Miracles (United Kingdom: Hypatia Press, 2019), chapter 17.

[3] To see how early Christian’s misused Old Testament prophecy, see Robert J. Miller’s excellent book, Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015).

[4] The most plausible estimate of the first-century Jewish population comes from a census of the Roman Empire during the reign of Claudius (48 CE) that counted nearly 7 million Jews. See the entry “Population” in Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 13. In Palestine there may have been as many as 2.5 million Jews. See Magen Broshi, “Estimating the Population of Ancient Jerusalem.” Biblical Archaeological Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 1978): 10-15. Despite these numbers, Catholic New Testament scholar David C. Sim shows that “Throughout the first century the total number of Jews in the Christian movement probably never exceeded 1,000.” See How Many Jews Became Christians in the First Century: The Failure of the Christian Mission to the Jews.Hervormde Teologiese Studies Vol. 61, No. 1/2 (2005): 417-440.

[5] Loftus, What Would Convince Atheists To Become Christians? The Definitive Answers! (April 4, 2017).

[6] See Bart D. Ehrman on the Historian and the Resurrection of Jesus.

[7] See my anthology, God and Horrendous Suffering for more.

[8] James T. Houk, The Illusion of Certainty (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2017), p. 16.

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John W. Loftus is a philosopher and counter-apologist credited with 12 critically acclaimed books, including The Case against Miracles, God and Horrendous Suffering, and Varieties of Jesus Mythicism. Please support DC by sharing our posts, or by subscribing,donating, or buying our books at Amazon. As an Amazon Associate John earns a small amount of money from any purchases made there. Buying anything through them helps fund the work here, and is greatly appreciated!

This is Why I Don’t Believe in God

Anselm “Faith Seeking Confirmation”

Here’s the link to this article.

By John W. Loftus at 5/18/2020

I think Anselm’s dictum “faith seeking understanding” is to be understood in the history of theology and philosophy to be equivalent to “Faith Seeking Confirmation.” If that’s how it’s historically used then that’s what it means. Below is an updated edit from chapter 2 of my my book, Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End.

There is a common theme among St. Anselm’s work and the work of other obfuscationist theologians and philosophers that needs to be highlighted. It’s called faith seeking confirmation. We see this in Anselm with regard to his new atonement theory and his ontological argument.

Anselm therefore is exhibit “A” in defense of what atheist philosopher Stephen Law said: “Anything based on faith, no matter how ludicrous, can be made to be consistent with the available evidence, given a little patience and ingenuity.”1 If I could pick one sentence, one aphorism, one proverb that highlights the main reason philosophy of religion (PoR) must end, it’s Law’s. I’ll call it Law’s law of faith.–Begin Excerpt:

Faith Seeking Confirmation

Anselm’s most enduring legacy just might be his statement, credo ut intelligam (“I believe in order that I may understand”), or in its most famous form, Fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”).26 While others have expressed this idea, the point is that people first believe then seek to understand. First they believe then they seek data. First they believe then they seek to confirm their beliefs. No one in the history of the confessional church probably said anything different, or if they did, faith was surreptitiously smuggled in the back door. Few if any Christian intellectuals ever said “understanding seeks faith,” because the obvious sequitur is that if they achieved understanding they wouldn’t need faith. Seeking confirmation of one’s religious faith rather than truth reverses what reasonable people should do with one’s religious faith. In fact, it goes against science since science is based on the search for truth. So in this sense, faith should be recognized as a known cognitive bias sure to distort any honest inquiry into the truth, confirmation bias.

In 1987 a large-scale US antinarcotics campaign by Partnership for a Drug-Free America launched. It featured two televised public service announcements (PSAs) and a related poster campaign. The original thirty-second ad showed a man who held up an egg and said, “This is your brain.” Then he showed a hot frying pan and said, “This is drugs.” Then he cracked the egg and put it in the pan. It immediately began to cook. He brought the pan closer to the camera and said, “This is your brain on drugs.” He ended the PSA by saying, “Any questions?” It was a very powerful commercial.

I want people to consider the drug metaphor for faith, taking our cue from Karl Marx, who described religious faith as the opiate of the people. When you think of the commercial you need to hear the actor say, “This is your brain on faith.” That’s what I think. Here then are five ways faith makes the brain stupid:

1. Faith causes the believer to denigrate or deny science.
2. Faith causes the believer to think objective evidence is not needed to believe.
3.Faith causes the believer to deny the need to think exclusively in terms of the probabilities.
4. Faith causes the believer to accept private subjective experiences over the objective evidence.
5. Faith causes the believer to think faith has an equal or better method for arriving at the truth than scientifically based reasoning.

Any questions?

Christian, before you mindlessly quote mine from the Bible or the theology based on it, consider what you think of other brains on faith, like those of Scientologists, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, pantheists, and so on. Clearly you think their brains are on the opiate of faith just as I do. Watch some videos about these other faiths. Study them. Talk to practitioners of them. Try to argue with the best representatives of them and see if you can penetrate their brains with reason and science. Can’t do it? Why? Why do you think their faith makes them impervious to reason and your faith does not make you impervious to reason?

I had a discussion with a person of faith not long ago where she said there was nothing I could ever say to change her mind. I simply replied that no scientist would ever say such a thing. I went on to say she should think like a scientist and recommended that she read Guy Harrison’s chapter in my anthology, Christianity in the Light of Science, titled, “How to Think Like a Scientist: Why Every Christian Can and Should Embrace Good Thinking.” I recommended it because thinking like a scientist is the antithesis of thinking with the drug of faith on one’s brain.

Scientifically minded people argue we should reason like a scientist. Believers in different faiths will demur, saying we cannot justify our own reasoning capabilities, since we accept the fact of evolution. I think my evolved brain can make reliable (though not perfect) judgments based on the evidence of course, and that should be good enough. But ignoring this for the moment, what if these believers are correct? Then what? It gets them nowhere as in no-where. They still cannot settle their differences because they are left with no method to do so. They will argue for faith over reason, which leaves them all back at the starting gate, with faith. They are special pleading and that’s it, thinking that if they can deny reason in favor of their particular faith then it follows their particular faith ends up being the correct one. No, if they deny reason in favor of faith the result is there’s no way to settle these disputes between people of different faiths. My claim is that religions debunk themselves and because this is clearly the case, the only alternative to know the truth about the world is through scientifically based reasoning.

The fact that I can say nothing to convince most of them of this is maddening. They are impervious to reason, almost all of them. This is what faith does to their brains.

Randal Rauser is an associate professor of historical theology at Taylor Seminary, Edmonton, Canada. He and I coauthored a debate-style book together titled “God or Godless?”27 He is a Christian believer. I cowrote the book to reach any honest believers since I consider him impervious to reason. I could say it of any Christian pseudo-intellectual to some degree, depending on how close he or she is to the truth (liberals are closer than progressive evangelicals who are closer than fundamentalists). I admit Rauser reasons well in other areas of his life unrelated to his faith. He could even teach a critical thinking class. So he’s rational, very much so. But like all believers his brain must basically shut down when it comes to faith. When it comes to faith his brain must disengage. It cannot connect the dots. It refuses to connect them. Faith stops the brain from working properly. Faith is a cognitive bias that causes believers to overestimate any confirming evidence and underestimate any disconfirming evidence. So his brain will not let reason penetrate it, given his faith bias. Some people have even described faith as a virus of the brain (or mind). It makes the brain sick. Maybe Marx said it best though. It’s an opiate, a deadening drug.

Alvin Plantinga has argued that what’s essential to have a “warranted belief” is “the proper functioning of one’s cognitive faculties in the right kind of cognitive environment.” I actually think he’s right. But faith, like an opiate, causes the brain to stop functioning properly in matters related to faith. Christian apologetics is predicated on a host of logical fallacies. Take away the logical fallacies they use in defense of their faith and they wouldn’t have any arguments left at all. They certainly don’t have good objective sufficient evidence for what they believe. A critical thinker like Rauser, who thinks more rationally than most others in every area unrelated to his faith, cannot see this, but it is the case. Now why can’t Rauser see this? Why can’t he come to the correct religious conclusions? Why can’t he think rationally about his faith? Because his faith, like an opiate, will not let him. The opiate of faith deadens those areas in his brain that are related to his faith. Rauser surely sees this with regard to other believers in different religious faiths. He will say the same things about them that I say about him. But he refuses to see the same drug deadening his own brain. Once again, faith is a cognitive bias, a virus of the mind, an opiate. It prevents people of faith from connecting the dots.

Rauser admits that like everyone else he depends on “motivated reasoning” to some degree. Well then, why won’t he apply the antidote, which is to require sufficient objective evidence for what he believes? That’s the only way to overcome the cognitive bias of faith, the only way to kill that virus in his mind, the only way to nullify the opiate of faith, and the only way to stop being swayed by his own motivated reasoning. Yet he questions the need for sufficient objective evidence apart from a private subjective ineffable feeling. Who in their right mind would do this after admitting he depends on “motivated reasoning” to some degree? No reasonable person, that’s who.

Subjective private ineffable religious experiences offer believers the most psychologically certain basis for believing in a particular divine being or religion. When believers have a religious experience it’s really hard, if not psychologically impossible, to argue them away from their faith. How is it possible then for believers who claim to have had such experiences to look at those experiences as an outsider might? We can point out the mind often deceives us and provide many examples of this phenomenon (brainwashing, wish-fulfillment, cognitive dissonance). But believers will maintain their particular religious experience is real because it was experienced, despite the odds their brain is deceiving them. We can point out that countless others of different faiths all claim to have the same type of religious experiences, whether they are Mormon, Muslim, Catholic, or Jew, but believers will still say their experiences are true ones (or veridical), despite the odds that what others believe as a result of their experiences makes it seem obvious they could be wrong too (and vice versa).

Sometimes in the face of such an experiential argument I simply say to the believer, “If I had that same experience I might believe too. But I haven’t. So why not? Why doesn’t your God give me that same religious experience?” At this point the believer must blame me and every living person on the planet for not being open to such a sect-specific religious experience. Depending on the religious sect in question that might include most every person, 7.4 billion of us and counting. But even this realization doesn’t affect believers who claim to have had such religious experiences. Calvinists among them will simply say, “God doesn’t want various people to have a saving religious experience.” It never dawns on any of these believers what this means about the God they worship, that only a mean-spirited barbaric God would send people to an eternal punishment because that same God did not allow them a certain type of religious experience.

Believers will always argue in such a fashion in order to stay as believers. No matter what we say they always seem to have an answer. What they never produce is any cold hard objective evidence, convincing evidence, for their faith claims. Ever. They are not only impervious to reason. They are also impervious to the evidence. They even see evidence where it doesn’t exist because they take the lack of evidence as evidence for their faith. When it comes to prayer they count the hits and discount the misses.

There is only so much a person can take when dealing with people who have lost touch with reality. Must we always maintain a patient attitude when we already know their arguments? Must we always respond in a dispassionate manner to people who are persuaded against reason to believe something delusional? We know this about them based on everything we know (i.e., our background knowledge). They are pretending to know that which they don’t know when they pretend to know with some degree of certainty their faith is true. If it’s faith, how then can something be known with any degree of probability at all, much less certainty? Faith by definition always concerns itself with that which is unsure. Something unsure involves lower probabilities. So faith is always about that which has lower probabilities to it. So again, how can something based on faith be known with any degree of certainty? It can’t, and only deluded minds think otherwise, minds that are impervious to reason and evidence. We can only hope they can function in life. It can be quite surprising they can.

Concluding Thoughts

Anselm of Canterbury’s key theological contributions in philosophy of religion highlight what reasonable people see as the need for philosophy of religion to end. He holds a preeminent place among the best philosophical theologians the Church ever produced. And yet, as we’ve seen, even among the best of the best there’s nothing here but rhetoric without substance based on his faith and the social climate of his day. His best contributions didn’t solve anything. Almost no one accepts his atonement theory today. His idiosyncratic perfect-being conception was based on nothing more than special pleading on behalf of his parochial Western concept of god. His ontological argument does not work either. Further, we’ve found that when Anselm’s perfect being is compared to the biblical god Yahweh and his supposed son, it doesn’t make any sense nor can it be reconciled. So the only reason to study Anselm seems to be one of historical curiosity. Anselm’s key contributions did not advance anything since we are no closer at getting to objective knowledge about anything than we would be if he never wrote a thing. When it comes to the history of philosophy he made no contributions that furthered understanding, the very thing he sought to do.

It does no good to say we’ve learned from Anselm what is false and cannot be defended, as if by learning what isn’t the case he advanced our understanding. He sidetracked our understanding for a millennium. He was doing obfuscationist puzzle-solving theology unrelated to the honest desire to understand. If we proportioned our intellectual assent to the probabilities based on sufficient evidence (per Hume), we would know all we need to know to know that Anselm and many other unevidenced beliefs are false and cannot be defended.

Karl Barth, considered one of the greatest theologians of the last century, who rejected natural theology with a big fat “Nein,” argued Anselm’s ontological argument was an example of his faith seeking understanding, rather than an argument proving God exists. Anselm did not seek to “prove” the truth of the Christian faith, Barth argued, but to understand it.28 Anselm’s ontological argument in chapter 2 of the Proslogion comes after asking God for help to understand his faith in chapter 1. There he prays, “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, — that unless I believed, I should not understand.” Then just before developing the argument in chapter 2, Anselm prays, “Lord, do you, who do give understanding to faith, give me, so far as you know it to be profitable, to understand that you are as we believe; and that you are that which we believe.” So while there is disagreement about what he was doing, Anselm at least tacitly acknowledges his argument comes from faith rather than leading to faith. And that’s exactly what we find. The ontological argument depends on his Christian faith, which subsequently seeks to confirm his faith, what he already believes about his parochial god. There’s a recognized informal fallacy here I’ve mentioned a time or two. It’s called special pleading. It’s also the mother of all cognitive biases, something to avoid if we want to know the truth.

Philosophers of religion who have dealt with Anselm’s argument and developed their own versions of it, such as Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinga, should take note. They don’t know their own theology. Or, perhaps more correctly and importantly, they fail to realize they’re doing the same thing Anselm did. He sought after arguments that confirmed his faith rather that seeking out sufficient objective evidence for his God.

What we’re led to conclude is that the problem of philosophy of religion stems from faith. If faith is trust then there is no reason to trust faith. Anything based on faith has lower probabilities to it by definition. Christian pseudo-philosophers do no more than build intellectual castles in the sky without any solid grounding to them. There doesn’t seem to be any good principled reason for not getting fed up with the pretend game of faith with its ever-receding theology.

–End Excerpt

The Secular Seven

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photo by PHIL ZUCKERMAN

MAR 24, 2023

There have always been non-believers. But for the first time in recorded history, there are now numerous societies with a majority of people who don’t believe in God.

According to an analysis of the best internationally-available data by Isabella Kasselstrand, Ryan T. Cragun, and me, published in our new book Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society, the seven democratic countries in the world today with more atheists, agnostics, and assorted nontheists than God-believers are Estonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic.

Of course, not every nonbeliever in these nations actively or personally identifies as an atheist or agnostic, per se—the former label is heavily stigmatized, while the latter is relatively obscure in certain cultures. But the percentage of the population in each country that answers “no” when asked if they believe in God is as follows:

Sweden – 63.9%
Czech Republic – 61.6%
South Korea – 59.4%
Netherlands – 56.3%
Estonia – 54.3%
Norway – 52.7%
United Kingdom – 51.6%

While there may be similar or even higher percentages of nonbelievers in other nations such as China or Vietnam, we ought not consider them because they are unfree dictatorships where the atheistic government actively polices, prohibits, and represses religion; in such societies, people have a fear of expressing their true religious beliefs, and thus, survey data is suspect. But in open, free democracies where being neither openly religious nor openly secular provokes the government’s wrath, answers to surveys are much more valid and reliable.

Why these seven?

Why are these seven nations so secular?

Each country has its own unique history that contributes to low levels of theism. For example, the UK is the birthplace of Charles Darwin, whose ideas regarding evolution have been detrimental to Christian faith. Anti-clericalism has been a significant strain of Czech nationalism going all the way to the Hussite Wars of the 15^th century. Estonia experienced 50 years of Soviet occupation, during which time religion was squelched, and it never rebounded, even after the fall of the USSR. In South Korea, the educational system places a strong emphasis on scientific knowledge and technology, with little attention paid to religion.

But regardless of each country’s idiosyncrasies that may have contributed towards their high degree of irreligion, they have all experienced some combination of the following: greatly improved levels of social welfare, societal well-being, and existential security; increased degrees of wealth and prosperity; increased levels of educational attainment; a significant transition from a traditional, rural, non-industrial society to a contemporary, urban, industrial (or post-industrial) society; increased rationalization, whereby the ordering of society based on technological efficiency, bureaucratic impersonality, and scientific and empirical evidence. As our research shows, these factors are all strongly conducive to increased secularization in society.

How are they faring?

It has long been a staple of conservative propaganda that if a society loses its religion, things will go to shyte. And even some on the left buy into this nonsense; earlier this month, New York mayor Eric Adams blamed America’s never-ending school shooting epidemic on a lack of religion. “When we took prayers out of schools,” he proclaimed, “guns came into schools.”

Of course, as I have been arguing for over a decade now, if godlessness led to national depravity or high rates of violence, then we would expect to find those countries that are the least religious to be the most horrible, impoverished, unhealthy, and crime-ridden. But we find exactly the opposite correlation. These seven most godless democracies provide excellent examples, as they all boast high levels of societal health and well-being, high GDPs, extremely low rates of violent crime, almost no school shootings, superior healthcare, and more. Consider Norway, where Christianity has plummeted in the last half-century, with rates of belief in God, church attendance, and church membership at all-time lows – and yet Norwegian society is simultaneously characterized by fantastic schools, health care, elder care, access for the disabled, gender equality, economic prosperity, as well as very low rates if murder.

Indeed, five of these seven highly secular nations rank in the top 20 on the United Nations’ Human Development Index. The remaining two, Estonia and the Czech Republic, come in at 31 and 32, respectively.

It is not that these majority-non-believing nations are thriving because of their godlessness; there are too many variables at play to establish such causation. But as to the right-wing article of faith that godlessness leads to social depravity – that thesis can be flatly rejected.

Also, it should be noted that these societies are not utopias. They all have their problems. The northernmost nation of the UK, Scotland, is currently struggling with a dangerous drug epidemic. South Korea’s birth rate is shockingly low. Sweden is struggling with immigration issues. Affordable housing is in relatively short supply in the Netherlands. And so on. But compared to the vast majority of countries in the world, when looking at nearly every single indicator of societal well-being, these secular seven are doing extremely well, overall. Heck, according to the US News and World Reports rankings of top countries with the best quality of life, Sweden ranks at #1, Norway #5, Netherlands #8, the UK #12, South Korea #24, Czech Republic at #27, and Estonia at #42. Clearly, going godless does not result in national dystopia.

Godlessness goes global

Our analysis found that there are many other countries where almost half of the population does not believe in God, such as France, Denmark, Australia, Finland, and New Zealand. Given current trends, we expect these nations to join the pack of majority-godless nations in the next decade or so. And while the US is quite far from such a state of irreligiosity, belief in God has nonetheless been dropping significantly: the percentage of Americans who believe in God has dropped from 98% in the 1950s to 81% today. Among Americans under 30, it is down to an unprecedented 68%.

The term “village atheist” was common parlance a while back, suggesting that in every village, there was always some single curmudgeon who didn’t believe in god. Well today, we can longer accurately speak of the village atheist. Rather, we must accept the increasing reality of villages with many atheists. And not just villages, but towns, cities, and countries all around the globe.

Category: Reality/the natural world

Is atheism unnatural?

Secularity in the past

High rates of secularity today

Socialization

Golden delicious

The busiest abortionist

When does the soul enter the body?

Fertilization was only discovered after the invention of the microscope

How do you draw the line for the existence of something that doesn’t exist?

What does this have to do with miscarriages?

What I’m reading

Amazon abstract

A biologist explains why ‘heartbeat laws’ are nonsensical

Overview

The anti-abortion movement’s cynical “heartbeat laws” are all manipulation, no science

Heart and soul

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”

The winds of catastrophe are stirring

The Morale of Christian Clergy Is Taking a Big Hit

What Would Convince Us Christianity is True?

This is Why I Don’t Believe in God

Anselm “Faith Seeking Confirmation”

The Secular Seven

Why these seven?

How are they faring?

Godlessness goes global