You’re absolutely wrong. Terrible example and you have apparently not read TIA nor understood that Duncan doesn’t even begin to rebut its arguments. He does not show that religion was involved as a pretext in more than 7 percent of the wars in recorded human history. Nor does he explain why no military tactician or strategist has EVER incorporated religion into their military tactics or strategy. His critique is totally invalid.

Now stop making groundless assertions and be specific. Precisely what about that his argument that religion causes war do you find persuasive?

Notice, the primary crime he accuses his critic of is a failure to read and understand the opposing point of view. He then insists that I failed to rebut his argument, and he demands to know what is so persuasive about my argument that religion causes war. Does he have a point? Does my argument—meaning the argument I actually made, not the one Vox attributes to me—fall apart when examined in the light of the evidence Vox cites?

Turning back to the post in question, what I originally wrote is this:

His main point is that religion is not the primary cause of most wars, which is perfectly reasonable and accurate. [Emphasis added.] Unfortunately, he pretends that Harris and Dawkins and company are claiming that eliminating religion would eliminate war, which is a pretty blatant straw man. (He even admits at one point that Harris and Dawkins “[never] state that they believe religion is the direct and primary cause of war.”)

Yep, as usual, Vox has not a clue what he is talking about. He claims that none of my posts rebutted anything he said, but has he even read what I wrote? Or is he the one who is failing to read and understand what the opposing side is saying? He’s so desperate to dismiss me as “unintelligent, ignorant, and intellectually dishonest” that he completely fails to notice the fact that I agree with him about religion as a false cause of war. In fact, I think Vox is overstating the influence of religion by about 7%.

Let’s ignore, for the time being, the issue of battlefield generals using or not using religion as a tactic or strategy. By the time the generals are on the field attacking the enemy, the war has already been caused. There’s clearly no point in seeking the cause of a war amongst the choices generals make after the war is already underway.

But aside from that, Vox and I are pretty much in agreement as regards the role of religion in the events leading up to the wars of history. My chief critique of Vox’s argument was that he failed to spend any time at all discussing the role(s) that religion did, could, or should play in times of national crisis leading up to possible war. I’m not saying that religion does have such a role or roles, I’m merely pointing out that Vox’s analysis failed to document some very important considerations, not to say the MOST important consideration, in determining what connection, if any, exists between religion and war.

If we do take this into account, though, we can begin to document how really impotent and useless religion is in matters of genuine significance. War is a pretty big deal, as far as the real world is concerned. It changes boundaries, destroys people and lands, changes customs and sometimes even languages. We would expect, if any world religions incorporated a deity Who genuinely cared about mankind (or about good and evil), that at least some religions ought to have an unmistakable or even supernatural influence on the course of events leading up to (or away from) a war.

Naturally, there are may roles that religion could play. For example, if there were a genuine deity to pray to, then national leaders would be able to pray for guidance. If divine wisdom were bestowed on them from above, advising them on whether or not their cause was just and their chance of victory secure, then this would indeed put religion in a highly influential role with respect to the circumstances leading up to (or away from) the war. Likewise if there were practical advice/wisdom to be gleaned from a study of the religion’s holy scriptures, either by the leaders or (in a democracy) by the voters.

Another role religion could play would be the very important role of uniting people into a common body, i.e. a united front with which to face the enemy. Religious faith could play a vital role in supplying manpower for the war effort, as people were led by their god to make personal sacrifices and commitments for the greater good of all. With a real god behind it, religion might influence wars by miraculous means, such as, oh, making the invading soldiers all go blind so that they couldn’t fight.

If religion did indeed have any substantial, real-world influence over the course of events, then (a) Vox would be wrong, but more importantly (b) it would matter which religion were the true religion. After all, if we’re going to fight wars over religion, we don’t want to fight for the wrong one, eh?

What Vox has discovered, though, is that in every real-world case, the true power lies, not in religion, but in purely secular, materialistic factors. Religion is a passive, empty symbol, which men invest with whatever meaning or interpretation suits the need of the moment. And, as Vox has shown, the need of the moment is dictated by secular factors, like politics, or economics, or sheer human cussedness. Casual observers might be fooled by the apparent role of religion in war, but to jump to that conclusion is to stop too soon and to fail to apprehend the purely secular factors that are driving and controlling the religious aspect. Religion is the passive puppet of greater, real-world forces.

Ironically, Vox concludes that Islam is the only religion with any significant influence over whether or not nations will go to war. I think it’s safe to say, however, that that’s more an emotional reaction against 9/11 than a serious historical analysis. In the 93% of wars he says were not caused by religion, he cites geopolitical, ethnic, economic and other secular factors as the real causes, yet if we look at the 7% of wars that are allegedly religious, we’ll find the same factors at work, with religion serving merely the same empty, symbolic role as the colors on the national flag.

It’s as foolish to insist that someone must be wrong all of the time as it is to insist that someone must be right all of the time. (I realize that in saying that, I’m rebutting the theme, if not the whole thesis, of TIA, but I digress.) Not everything Vox says is wrong, and in this case I think he’s a lot more correct than even he gives himself credit for.

The circumstances leading up to (away from?) international war are very momentous and vitally important circumstances. Vox is doing a great service both to believers and to unbelievers by documenting the fact that religion plays no role at all—”does not play a secondary contributory role in war. It does not play a tertiary contributory role in war,” as he says. Religion is utterly passive and irrelevant, a sock puppet that merely “speaks” whatever words it pleases men to put into its mouth.

And that goes for more than just war too. Thanks for the help, Vox.

Letters to the Editor, December 15, 2010So let me see if I understand this: The Defense Department is proposing to let people who choose to live a homosexual lifestyle serve “openly” in the armed forces (per the Dec. 2 article “DADT study group: Full integration is best”), but won’t allow Christians such as myself the freedom to “openly” share the good news of Christ with our co-workers — as the faith we’ve chosen requires?

DOD officials plan to tell servicemembers who have a problem with those living a homosexual lifestyle to “learn to deal with it,” but they are prepared to counsel and/or slap Christians with paperwork if someone feels “offended” by our witness? Wearing sexual lifestyle choices on your sleeve is OK, but not your faith?

Military chaplains who teach that homosexuality is antithetical to and incompatible with Christianity (which it is) can either muzzle their objections or “leave,” but gays will be permitted to parade their lifestyle choices in front of all?

Bottom line: So I’m free to express myself if I’m a homosexual, but not if I’m a Christian? What disgraceful hypocrisy.

Here’s the truth: I will continue to witness to who I want, when I want and where I want. My commitment to my God supersedes my commitment to the DOD and, if officials are upset about that, then I guess they can “learn to deal with it.”

Department of Defense? More like the Department of Double Standards.

Lt. Col. Stacy L. Maxey
Afghanistan

I feel like writing back to the good colonel and clarifying one or two matters about which there seems to be some confusion.

Dear Col. Maxey;

Regarding your letter of Dec. 15 to the Stars and Stripes, it seems you are offended by the double standard involved in repealing DADT. I’m sure you will be delighted to find out that a fair compromise is easily available that removes all of the issues of double standards between Christians and gays in the military. All we need to do is apply the same standard to both. With the repeal of DADT, the following will be possible:

• If someone asks whether you are a Christian, you will not have to lie and say that you are not, just as gays will no longer have to lie when asked if they are gay.
• If the military discovers that you are Christian, you will not automatically be discharged, just as gays will no longer face immediate discharge upon discovery that they are gay.
• If you are seen openly participating in casual Christian activities, such as going to church or carrying a bible, you will not need to fear immediate exposure and discharge, just as gays who are seen associating with others of the same sex will not need to fear immediate exposure and discharge.
• Any prayers, Bible studies, or other Christian activities which you engage in on your own time, in private, will not be any of the military’s business, just as it is none of the military’s business what homosexual soldiers do in private, on their own time.
• If you have a fellow soldier or superior officer who is pressuring you to engage in homosexual activities against your will, you will have the same freedom to file a complaint as a gay soldier has to complain about a fellow soldier who is pressuring them to engage in Christian activities against their will.
• If a superior officer unfairly penalizes you for failure to engage in homosexual activities, by giving you unfavorable performance reviews, withholding promotion, or giving you punitive work assignments, you will have the opportunity to apply for a redress of your grievances, just as gays will in the case of superior officers who penalize them similarly for failure to engage in Christian activities.
• Military chaplains who advocate Christian conduct, as well as those who advocate homosexual conduct, will be free to speak as their conscience demands when conducting designated services where attendance is voluntary, but may face pressure, reprimands, or even discharge if they abuse their position to advocate Christianity or homosexuality among those who do not wish to participate in such exchanges.

Granted, you may be required by regulations (if not by ordinary courtesy and professionalism) to make certain concessions. For example, to promote team cohesion and unit effectiveness, you may not be allowed to single out certain members of your team for public humiliation and harassment just because they are gay. But even here, the same standard works the other way: your team members will be required not to single you out for public humiliation and harassment just because you are a bigot and/or have chosen a bigoted religion.

You are right: there have been some serious and injurious double standards in the military. I’m sure that with your interest in justice, fairness, and service, you will be delighted now that these double standards are being ended, and the samel rules applied equally to all service members.

Sincerely,

Deacon Duncan.

My comments in the past have been along the lines of “they’re both partly right and partly wrong,” but I’ve been frustrated by my inability to express something that felt deeper and more important than that. It took me a while to put it together, but now I think I’m ready to go into more detail, and spell it out.

The basic problem is that neither the New Atheists nor the “framers” really get religion. Yes, I’m being deliberately provocative in hopes of stirring discussion—religion is a subject both groups are intensely interested in and familiar with, so neither side is exactly ignorant about it. But there’s a very important aspect to religion that they still don’t “get,” and without this understanding, neither side will never have anything more than rare and coincidental successes, at least in the public arena.

Religion functions on two levels. On the personal level, religion functions as a mental framework (aka a “worldview”) within which believers organize their perceptions of life and the world around them. For many people, superstitious myths function remarkably well as an approximation of what’s going on in real life. “Discovering God’s will,” turns out to mean learning by experience what works and what doesn’t, and that’s a process that benefits the participant even when there is no God. What scientists do by study and analysis, believers do (on a much rougher scale) by superstition and social instinct. Science is more accurate, but for most people, religion is much, much easier, and therefore preferable.

That’s the personal level. The personal level plays a small role in helping to determine what religious beliefs will seem plausible to the individual believer, but in practice this actually has very little to do with what the believer will end up believing, or with how they will act on the basis of their belief. Of far greater importance is how religion functions on a social level. On a personal level, believers use religion to make sense of the world, but on a social level, believers use religion to establish a dominant community within society, and to secure a good place for themselves within that community.

It works like this: religion is a subjective truth. No real God or gods ever show up in real life, to validate or falsify anybody’s theology. Religious dominance is therefore solely a function of—and a measure of—social dominance. Anything that weakens a religion in society necessarily weakens the community that preaches it, and conversely the more any particular religion has influence over society, the more influence the religious community has over society. Hence the emphasis on “America is a Christian nation,” for example.

Notice (as an aside) that this is possible only because religion is a subjective truth. If two people disagree over, say, whether it’s safe to mix ammonia and chlorine bleach while cleaning, that’s a disagreement with objectively real consequences. If you mix chlorine bleach with ammonia, toxic gases will be released, and you could possibly die. The question is a question of objective truth. Likewise if two people disagree about whether pi is more or less than the square root of two, it’s a question of objective truth. Do the math and find out who is right. Peer pressure is irrelevant.

If two people disagree about the Trinity, by contrast, there is no corresponding objectively-real consequence. Neither trinitarian nor non-trinitarian deities show up in real life, and therefore the real-world consequences are the same no matter which side wins. Objective reality does not favor one position over the other, and therefore the debate is entirely a contest of social influence (i.e. peer pressure). It’s a popularity contest of ideologies: whichever side can win the most votes (converts) becomes the dominant (subjective) truth.

Believers understand this on at least an instinctual level. The mistake atheists tend to fall into is to approach religion as though it were a question of objective truth. It is not. It is a question of which subjective truth has the political and social dominance to assert itself as The Truth. People do not embrace or reject religious doctrines on the basis of whether they are objectively true, they decide almost exclusively on the basis of the social implications. People will embrace and promote the beliefs that enhance the social dominance of their religious community, and will reject arguments, factual or not, that diminish their community’s influence and/or that would threaten their own individual standing within the community.

That’s a crucial point. What confuses the issue is the fact that people try to make their religion more dominant by asserting their beliefs as objective truth. This is where the average atheist steps into a trap, because it would seem like the way to address such beliefs is by showing that they are not objectively true. Reasonable, logical, and maddeningly ineffective. The arguments just seem to bounce off, no matter how logical, or well-documented, or noble they might be. Subjective truths, even when asserted as objective fact, are immune to real-world falsification.

What we need to understand is that people aren’t looking for genuine objective truths. Genuine objective truths can be complicated and uncomfortable, but what’s worse, they confer no particular social advantage on people who are not in the top 10% of intelligent and logical thinkers. And that’s not what people want. What people want are subjective “truths” that they can use to build dominant communities, unfettered by the arbitrary requirements of factual accuracy. It’s not a question of right or wrong, it’s a question of who’s winning.

So to go back to the “framing” debate, we can see that both sides are right and both are wrong. The New Atheists are right about the value of speaking plainly and honestly, but the framers are right that the New Atheists are offending people without necessarily advancing the cause of atheism in society. Naturally so: atheism threatens to weaken the Christian community, and Christians don’t want to lose their social dominance. Yet the framers are also wrong: speaking respectfully of Christian beliefs only reinforces the social dominance of the Christian community, and might be making the cause of atheism even more hopeless.

And yet, they’ve also got a valid point: people tune you out if they think you’re just disparaging them. Atheists need to gain the attention and interest of the majority audience in order to establish a viable, if not dominant, community within society. But the New Atheists are correct as well: you don’t win a popularity contest by being mealy-mouthed and wishy-washy about what you stand for (ask John McCain, or Obama for that matter).

To advance the cause of atheism/skepticism/liberalism/etc, here’s what we need to understand. Most people are not swayed by the objective facts, especially in domains, like religion, that are all about subjective truths. What people are looking for are worthwhile communities that have at least a viable and respectable position in society. More importantly, people are looking for worthwhile communities in which they themselves can comfortably fit in and be respected participants.

And yes, I know, there are people who care more about factual truth than about peer pressure, and these people will listen if you offer them rational, fact-based arguments. But most of those people are skeptics already—it’s not that hard to discover the truth about God! The rest of the population won’t change religion because of evidence; they’ll change when and if they find a community they like better.

This leaves us with two missions: (a) to create communities where ordinary people, not necessarily science-minded, can feel comfortable, welcome, and important, and (b) to put social pressure on believers to give them enough of a nudge that they can overcome their existing social ties and uproot themselves and become members of the new, non-superstitious communities. The framers have an advantage when it comes to mission (a), because they’re naturally more social and community-oriented, but they won’t succeed unless the New Atheists are successful at mission (b), which is where their strength lies. We need to make people uncomfortable where they are (as the New Atheists do), but we also need to offer them an inviting alternative (which the framers ought to be good at).

I’m leaving tons unsaid (sigh). Such is the plight of the blogger. Comments are open though, so there’s hope.

So, who’s going to put the bell on the cat?

Since gay people sin against us by falling in love differently than we do, we should punish them by falling in love differently than they do. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth! Let’s see how they like a taste of their own medicine, eh? They want to walk down the street with a same-sex lover? We’ll show them: we’ll walk down the street with opposite sex lovers. Hah! They want to marry same-sex partners? Let ‘em. But we’ll make ‘em pay. We’ll marry opposite sex partners. Legally! Take that, gays! You want to be different from us? Fine, then we’re gonna be different from you. And it serves you right.

Yeah, none of this merciful, New Testament, God-loves-sinners crap. Paul knew how to deal with sinners. Give ‘em old-fashioned Moses-brand justice, and do to them exactly what they’re doing to us, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. 100% Biblical justice, old school. Then everyone will be able to see just how much harm you can do to someone else by falling in love differently than they do.

Neither side should be lightly dismissed; each has something important to say, and a valid point to make. And of course, I have my own two cents to toss in.

My first penny is that I tend to agree with those who think this statistic is a telling point in favor of unbelief. Truth is consistent with itself, and the more you know about something that’s really true, the more you can see how well it fits with all the other facts. Conversely, of course, the more you know about something that isn’t true, the easier it is to find inconsistencies and contradictions. Since at most one of these religions can be The Truth, it makes sense that most religions would benefit from a higher degree of ignorance among their believers.

The second cent is this: faith is a belief, but you can’t just have a belief. You have to believe some thing. If most believers know little about what it is they’re believing, then what exactly does their faith consist of? They obviously don’t miss their beliefs if they don’t even know what they are, which implies that their faith is of little practical importance to them in their everyday lives. Oh, it’s important symbolically, as a kind of banner to rally around. But again, if it were really important enough to rally around, wouldn’t it be important enough for people to know what it is?

This is one of the things that greatly disturbed me when I was a believer, because I did believe that Christian beliefs were important, and I couldn’t understand why almost nobody, in any church, seemed to hold the faith in high enough regard to want to learn it. At least not in the pews. You could preach it, people expected you to preach it, but, well, tomorrow’s Monday, back to the real world, eh? That’s part of the reason I ultimately left my Christian faith behind. God doesn’t show up in real life, miracles are only rumors, exaggerations and superstitions, and the Holy Spirit doesn’t seem to be doing much in people’s hearts. If the faith is hollow too, if the beliefs have no practical, meaningful content, then what’s really left to hang around for?

The milder type spreads fear by saying “Someone else is going to hurt you.”

You know, like “liberals.” Or better yet, “socialists.” Or gays. Or whoever it’s convenient to demonize at the moment.

Our biggest problem isn’t that we’re being terrorized by the violent guys. It’s all the “milder” types jumping on the terrorist bandwagon, working to maintain a continuous state of fear and paranoia in the general public. If we really want to help America by fighting terrorism, we ought to start by recognizing where it’s really coming from. It’s not being smuggled in from some Middle Eastern territory. It’s 100% home grown.

Just two cents worth, in observance of 9/11.

I have a couple more substantial books coming in, but in the meantime I thought I’d take a quick look at Chuck Colson’s book The Faith. As some of you may recall, I bought this book in response to a request from a publicist at Zondervans, who invited me to submit questions to Colson, which the latter promised to respond to publicly in his blog. I sent him two rather simple ones (I thought), and never heard from him again. Go figure. So now I’ve got the book, and I’ve got a gap in the XFiles series, so it seems like it must be God’s will for me to review it now.

Here’s the Reader’s Digest ultra-condensed summary: What do Christian’s believe? A curious mixture of evangelical pop theology and contemporary conservative politics (what Colson calls “social holiness”). Why do Christians believe? Because great Christians demonstrate the power of God by the way they fearlessly face persecution and death for their beliefs. Why does it matter? Because if Christians don’t jump up and vote Republican every time Karl Rove says “family values,” they might end up following the example of the great Christians, and frankly that scares the shit out of them. The Church may love martyrs, but they love them best when they’re someone else.

This curious dissonance pervades much of The Faith, with Colson admiring and even gloating over the sufferings of Christians as though this were a noble and enviable witness, while at the same time superstitiously attributing these sufferings to a lack of faith, and suggesting that we could and should avoid suffering a similar fate by doing more to make our nation a Christian nation.

For example, the book opens with the story of the homicidal maniac who broke into an Amish schoolhouse and shot ten girls, five of whom died from their wounds. The last chapter features the story of the murder of Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist. Both stories are told in vivid, emotional detail, though slanted to make the victims’ desperation sound like noble piety in the girls’ case, and sheer futility in van Gogh’s case. Both stories are told to try and bring home the point that only “orthodox” Christianity can save us from having future generations praise us for the same reasons as Colson praises the Amish girls. God forbid.

In the introduction, Colson says that his goal is to lay out, in about 240 pages, the key points of Christian orthodoxy that Christians need to know. Obviously, if you’re going to summarize the key points of Christian doctrine in a mere 240 pages, there’s a substantial number important points you need to discuss. You need to be extremely focused and selective. Sensational stories, told in lavish and even lurid detail, would only waste space that could be spent discussing things like how Christians address the problems with the Trinity, or theodicy, or other vital doctrinal issues.

Colson, however, is not a theologian, he’s a politician. And make no mistake, The Faith is a political book rather than a theological one. Though the subject matter of the book is ostensibly religious and doctrinal, the primary goal of the book is to unite the largest possible body of voters believers around a core set of conservative doctrinal and political principles. Don’t expect this book to explore, in any depth, any of the issues that have divided Christians in the past and continue to divide them today.

Take the Protestant doctrine of sola fide (“[salvation] by faith alone”). If this idea is part of “the Faith once for all delivered to the saints,” then the Roman Catholics have clearly strayed from orthodoxy, but if not, then the Protestants are the heretics. What does The Faith have to say about these issues? Nothing much. He does affirm that sola fide—properly understood—is part of Christian orthodoxy. But look at how he says it.

The New Testament makes it clear that this gift of salvation, becoming righteous, or exchanging identities comes by faith—not works—or any merit of our own (Ephesians 2:8). I helped to organize a group called Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), which underlined the agreement of both communions on this central question in a remarkable 1997 document, affirming what the Reformers meant by sola fide—or faith alone!*

*[footnote:] “The Gift of Salvation,” First Things (January 1998), 20—23, also at www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3453&var_recherche=gift+of+salvation. “We agree that justification is not earned by any good works or merits of our own; it is entirely God’s gift, conferred though the Father’s sheer graciousness out of the love he bears us in his Son, who suffered on our behalf and rose from the dead for our justification…Faith is not merely intellectual assent but an act of the whole person, involving the mind, the will, and the affections, issuing in a changed life. We understand that what we here affirm is in agreement with what the Reformation traditions have meant by justification by faith alone (sola fide).”

Sounds like a great victory for ecumenism, doesn’t it? Particularly for the Protestant side of ecumenism? Colson certainly seems to think that he’s managed to convince the Catholics (or at least some Catholics) that the Reformers were right about sola fide, and that salvation is by faith alone. In actual fact, though, all he’s done is to get them to agree to redefine sola fide in Catholic terms, such that faith itself becomes a work (“an act of the whole person…issuing in a changed life). Notice that the core disagreement—whether works like baptism are required for salvation—is neither mentioned not discussed. All that has happened is that he’s gotten both sides to agree that works alone are not sufficient to earn justification. Since neither Catholics nor Protestants teach that good works can save you apart from the grace of God and the atonement of Christ, this was not a difficult compromise to reach.

Compromise, consensus, lowest common denominator—these are the tools of the politician’s craft, and Colson is using them with a rather cavalier disregard for the deeper doctrinal issues that he’s glossing over. The doctrine is actually less important, you see. What matters is getting more and more Christians to lower their standards, ignore their theological differences, and unite around a conservative social and political platform so that conservative Republicans can have a solid, monolithic, and multitudinous power base to draw on.

That’s why such a short book on doctrine has so many lengthy and tabloidesque digressions: they not only evoke manipulatable emotions, they also help fill in the gaps left by the important issues that he’s not going to touch, in the interests of political expediency.

This book is a (no pun intended) textbook example of why a failure to separate church and state inevitably does the church more harm than help. The important issues, the issues that define why your church is not some other church instead, are left behind, sacrificed on the altar of political necessity. Unity comes at the expense of doctrinal compromise, and the state religion is reduced to what little bit of vague nothing happens to be shared in common by all believers.

As you know, I like to dig into a book and see what makes it tick. That’s probably not going to happen this time, because Colson isn’t so much defending Christian doctrine as he is attempting to exploit it for conservative political ends. Besides, it’s not a terribly substantial book, and there’s just not a whole lot of depth to dig into. So as soon as the other books get here from Amazon, I’ll probably abandon The Faith.

After all, it won’t be the first time.

How can we help such people understand why America is not (and does not want to be) a Christian nation? The other day I though of a parallel that might be helpful: calling America a “Christian Nation” is like calling America a “White Nation.” Yes, there were quite a lot of Founding Fathers who espoused at least vaguely Christian rhetoric, just as there were quite a few who owned slaves. And yes, you can find a lot of early American policies and precedents that favored Christianity, just as you can find a lot that favored white men. And you can even argue that, by “freedom of religion,” the Fathers meant being free to choose whatever flavor of Christianity you like best, just as you can argue that when a slave owner like Thomas Jefferson writes “all men are created equal,” he really means only that all white males are equal, and not that women and/or other races are also equal.

If you’re a white supremacist, you may not see anything wrong with doing any of the above. If you’re a Christian supremacist, then you may see a problem only with the “White Nation” arguments (even though they’re the same as your own, slightly re-framed). And that’s the point. The Christian Nation arguments are Christian Supremacist arguments. They’re a bigoted demand that your religion be publicly and officially acknowledged as supreme above all other religions, just as white supremacists demand that whites be held superior to all other races. And that’s why sensible and fair-minded men and women should oppose all efforts to turn America into the kind of Christian nation that our Founding Fathers came here to get away from.

The first point in his presentation says that the New Atheists claim that religion causes war, and that Vox can prove statistically that it does not. As always, his refutation consists of ignoring the role of religion in war, and focusing instead on an oversimplification that distorts the data so badly he can make any claim he wants. Specifically, for each war in the Encyclopedia of Wars, he asks, “Is religion the cause of this war?” Not surprisingly, given his biases, he “discovers” that only 3.2% of wars are caused by non-Muslim religions, and fully 93% are allegedly “Non-Religious Wars.”

Wars, of course, are very complex phenomena with very complex causes. And religion is indeed a significant factor in quite a few of those wars,  It might be useful and informative to examine all the wars in recorded history to ask what role religion played in each. Was it provocative? supportive? indifferent? resistent? disruptive? Such a study, though, would produce results that would lend too much support to the New Atheists’ observations, at least if examined by an unbiased group of historians.

So instead of undertaking an unbiased and instructive approach to history, what Vox does is to take the binary approach of asking whether religion was THE cause of any given war, or not. In his argument, the mere existence of other factors, like economics or ethnicity or personal ambition, is sufficient to qualify religion as not being THE cause of the war. And thus he concludes that, by his standards, 93% of all wars were not caused by religion.

That’s hardly surprising. Indeed, the only surprising result from such an approach is that he ended up with any religious wars at all. A motivated historian could easily cite poverty, illiteracy, and socioeconomic factors behind Islamic aggression, for example, and by consistently applying the same approach, end up concluding that 100% of all wars are non-religious.

Vox doesn’t go quite that far. His weakness is that he secretly agrees with the New Atheists, at least as far as Islam is concerned. For example, he makes a consistent distinction between religious violence in general, and Islamic religious violence, which he admits is at least partially religiously driven. In his eyes, though, the New Atheists are a greater threat, and consequently he trumps up a straw-man argument and a bogus “statistical” refutation in order to declare victory and move on.

We’ve covered all this before, but today I wanted to look at one of the unique features of religion that make it particularly prone to aggravating our inherent tendency to wage war on one another. As I mentioned before, wars are complex and have complex causes, but (unlike Vox) I think it might be helpful to consider the actual role played by religion in important human endeavors like warfare.

The thing is, God does not show up in real life, or at least, the gods of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam don’t. This undeniable fact has an inescapable consequence: our only basis for what we believe about God is what men say and think and feel about Him. But men don’t all agree about Him, and therein lies the rub: because God does not show up in real life, how can you determine which men are teaching the “correct” doctrines about Him?

If it were a question about something that exists in the real world like, say, the diameter of the moon, the question could be settled by making careful real-world observations and measurements. No such mechanism exists for observing and verifying the qualities of deities that are consistently and universally absent from the real world, however. Theological arguments have to be won by force: either force of persuasion, or force of law, or force of arms. The only alternative is not to win at all.

Historically, this fact has had a tremendous impact on people’s willingness to conduct war, because even if religion is not the official “cause” of the war, a common and almost inevitable superstition says that God’s blessing determines who the good guys are and thus who will win the war (as witness the myriad “God Bless America” bumper stickers that popped up after 9/11). As the Bible itself teaches in numerous passages, victory in battle is a vindication of one’s religious belief and obedience.

Even Osama bin Ladin, as he watched the fall of the twin towers, can be heard on the video to be murmuring “Allah is great, Allah is great.” Military victory reinforced his belief that Islam was the true religion of God. And America responded in the same spirit, overthrowing the government of Iraq (who had nothing to do with 9/11) because they were Muslim. By defeating them (and their Allah), we validated our national belief that our Christian God was the true God.

After all, God does not show up in real life, so how else are you going to measure, in real-world terms, whose opinions about God are the most powerful? If you can’t superstitiously assume that material wars are merely the physical extension of a spiritual war between light and darkness, good and evil, truth and heresy, then how else can you know? If physical military strength isn’t the material manifestation of spiritual strength (i.e. righteousness), then how can you measure the true strength and power of someone’s spiritual beliefs?

This mechanism works for the whole spectrum of warfare, from the bomb-dropping, artillery-firing, fix-the-bayonets-and-charge of all out war to the subtler but no less devastating cultural warfare that tries to seize control school boards and that passes laws oppressing homosexuals. Believers lack real-world verification for their faith unless they can “prove” the superiority of their opinions by oppressing and defeating those who do not share their beliefs. Spiritual disputes extend into physical disputes in hopes that physical victory will serve as spiritual victory.

Reality-based conclusions don’t have this problem. This is why, for example, you can have literal bombs being thrown at mosques because of arguments about which branch of Islam correctly perpetuates the original teachings of Mohammed, but you don’t typically find one nation declaring war against another over the question of whether thorium decays into lead. Where real-world answers exist, we can get our answers from the real world. Everywhere else, we get whatever “answers” we’re strong enough to take by force.

In theory, we could avoid this problem if believers would insist on real-world proof of anyone’s doctrines before embracing them. But there’s two problems with this approach: (a) that would be “testing God,” which believers universally abhor, and (b) that’s exactly what the New Atheists are proposing. If you don’t want people using literal or figurative war to try and settle questions about non-real-world issues, then don’t embrace beliefs that have no real-world foundation. Stick to what can be confirmed and verified objectively and realistically, and there won’t be doctrinal issues that need to be settled by contests of strength.

I know, I know. That would make too much sense. Plus it wouldn’t satisfy the desire to believe. I know it will  never  happen. I’m just saying that, you know, the New Atheists have a valid point. War is the ultimate means by which believers conclusively “prove” the superiority of their superstitions over the beliefs of others.  So long as God fails to show up in real life, they really have no alternative.

So despite Vox Day’s over-simplified and hopelessly biased “statistics,” there is a religious component to needless human conflicts, whether these conflicts manifest as overt violence or as the lesser warfare of discrimination and oppression. It’s a problem we would do well to solve, though psychology and sociology offer us little hope of resolving it with our current abilities and understanding. Acknowledging that the New Atheists have a valid point, though, would at least be a step in the right direction.

According to Colson, the DC city council ought to be blamed for the decision freely (if intolerantly) made by the leadership of the Catholic Charities.

On March 3, same-sex “marriage” became legal in the District of Columbia. In connection with the new law, the D.C. Council insisted that, as a city contractor, Catholic Charities had to offer the same benefits to same-sex couples that it did to heterosexual ones.In other words, Catholic Charities had to choose between church teaching and ministering to the city’s neediest residents.

Really, Chuck? Respecting the equality and dignity of all men and women is against church teaching? Because the DC city council isn’t telling anyone in the Catholic Charities that they have to go out and engage in homosexual intercourse. Nor are they denying that the church is legally authorized to preach that homosexuality is a sin, bigoted as that doctrine may be. All they’re saying is that organizations that receive taxpayer dollars must not practice social injustice towards those whose taxes are paying to support them.

It’s really no different than the Biblical teaching of “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” and “Submit yourselves to those in authority over you”—words that were written in a culture that worshiped Caesar as a god and practiced both homosexual and heterosexual cult prostitution. Yes, you may live in a world whose moral standards are different from your own, but you still need to keep up with your social obligations, of which the first and foremost is your obligation to respect the rights of others.

Sadly, this New Testament attitude is once again completely ignored so that Colson and his fellow false martyrs can wallow in self-pity.

There’s no recognition that what the Washington Post called a “bitter debate” between the District and the Archdiocese was, in fact, a profound infringement of religious freedom–an infringement done at the behest of a tiny minority within a tiny minority.

And it’s so unfair to make people respect the human rights of minorities, isn’t it Chuck? After all, if you can’t oppress a tiny minority, who can you oppress?

Nor was there any acknowledgment that these kinds of infringements aren’t limited to government contractors. Ordinary people are being asked to choose between their livelihood and obedience to their faith-like photographers, landlords, and caterers.

You will also search in vain for mainstream media coverage of the indispensible role played by Christian institutions in caring for the vulnerable and marginalized. Almost 25 percent of the world’s AIDS patients are cared for in Catholic institutions alone. Christian hospitals in the U.S. serve a disproportionate percentage of the urban poor.

All we read about, however, is the Catholic Church’s “stubbornness” or “recalcitrance.”

That’s right, Chuck. Because you guys aren’t just being stubborn and recalcitrant, you’re being dishonest. It’s the Catholic Charities who are using their already underpaid workers as expendable pawns, deliberately mistreating them—voluntarily!—for mere propaganda purposes.

Nobody is denying that Catholic Charities has helped some of the DC area’s poor people. No one is even telling them they can’t continue to do so. The only “infringement” limiting the CC’s outreach is the same sort of “infringement” that disallows human sacrifice as a legal religious practice: our religious freedom is limited to those practices which do not cause material harm to others.

But no respectable religion should find that restriction inconvenient. There are plenty of good deeds that do not require us to practice social injustice, intolerance, or other human rights abuses. The Catholic Charities are perfectly free to continue serving the needy just as they always have. It’s their free choice whether to regard the needs of the poor above their desire for grandstanding and displaying their “righteousness” before men.

It may be that their religion does indeed insist that they display profound bigotry and prejudice towards certain minority groups. Shameful as that may be, it is protected by the Constitution, and they have the right to believe and preach that religion all they want. In many ways, it’s preferable that they do, so that the general public will plainly see the depths of their moral depravity. But should there be any sincere desire to do genuine good, the door remains open, as it always has. They are free to continue to serve.

It’s a black mark against Christianity that believers like Chuck Colson would treat basic respect for human rights as though it were such a terrible attack on the Christian faith. Yet that’s the substance of his long, petulant rant. Boo hoo, Christians aren’t being allowed to harm minorities they disapprove of, how unfair. That makes us so mad we’re going to harm our own people as well. So there.

Jesus must be rolling over in his grave.

The people most inconvenienced by the blizzards weren’t the residents of this region, or the senators-it was the proponents of man-made global warming. Scientists and activists insisted that people on this side of the Atlantic ignore the evidence in their driveways and, instead, trust their computer models.

According to Colson, you can disprove global warming just by pointing out that it’s still snowing.

10 years ago, they told us that, on account of the same global warming, “snow is starting to disappear from our lives.” We were told that, because of all that nasty CO2, British children “just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Ten years later, they most certainly do. Not only British children, but children in every state except Hawaii. All of Britain, much of the rest of Europe, and the United States have experienced snowfalls this winter. The data suggests, in fact, that “snow is coming earlier and heavier than it used to.”

Ah yes, “they” told us. Nice to have an unimpeachable source, isn’t it?

Well, first things first: what is global warming? Are we talking about the average temperature going so high that in a mere 10 years snow would stop falling in England entirely? No. Climatologists are concerned about changes in average global temperatures of only a few degrees over many years, not the tens of degrees it would take to prevent frozen precipitation from occurring during England’s winters.

Granted, the original quote seems to have been made by a Dr. David Viner of the University of East Anglia. Colson chose not to cite the article he’s quoting from (perhaps to avoid having people find out that Dr. Viner also predicted occasional heavy snows that “will probably cause chaos” in the next decade or so?), but he is probably right to suggest that such dire predictions are unlikely in the short term. Maybe Dr. Viner was exaggerating or misquoted, but it seems a bit much to claim that global warming will make the snow stop falling any time soon.

But consider what happens if the average global temperature rises only a few degrees, say 3°F. Around where I live that might mean a winter where the temperature hovered around 24°F instead of 21°F (i.e. -4°C instead of -6°C for you metric folks). Too warm to snow? Of course not. But increased warmth can have other consequences…

What Colson is forgetting is that we don’t all have the same seasons at the same time. It’s winter in the northern hemisphere right now, but it’s summer for the other half of the planet. And in the warmer parts of the planet, weather is being driven by a number of factors, including one we call “evaporation.”

Evaporation is what puts water into the atmosphere so that it can return to the surface again as rain or snow. Warmer global temperatures mean increased evaporation, which means more moisture in the atmosphere, which means greater precipitation. If Colson had been watching his weather maps, he might have noticed that these unusually heavy snowfalls did not blow down on the east coast from the frigid reaches of northern Canada. They blew up from warmer regions around the Gulf of Mexico.

Thus, it’s not climatologists who are ignoring the evidence in their driveways, it’s Colson. He even admits it, albeit indirectly and with exaggerated incredulity.

Not only did they tell us that this winter’s weather didn’t disprove their global warming data, they told us that the record snows were caused by global warming. Really!

Um, yes, Chuck, really. As amazing as it may sound to you, people whose experience and expertise lie in areas of science that you don’t understand might just know more about what they’re saying than you on the topic of climatology. One snowstorm doesn’t prove global warming of course, but it’s hardly the refutation of science that Colson makes it out to be!

But Colson’s not stopping there, not by a long shot.

If all of the white stuff hasn’t left you doubting those computer models, maybe Phil Jones can help you. That would be ironic since, until recently, Jones was the director of the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s East Anglia University. He was the keeper of the data upon which the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) based its predictions-data that has been, to put it mildly, called into question.

In an interview with the BBC, Jones acknowledged that there has been no significant warming since 1995. Let me repeat that. One of the world’s leading global warming advocates says there has been no significant warming since 1995. Fifteen years.

That sounds like a pretty damning admission if true. But notice that Colson once again omitted the citation that would let us track down the source of his quote. Could it be that he doesn’t want his readers to find out what Jones really said?

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Notice, the reason Dr. Jones is careful to say that there’s no “statistically significant” warming in the past 15 years is not because he failed to find a warming trend, but because in climatology a 15 year time span is too short. The temperature has been rising at a rate of about a tenth of a degree per decade, but in the interests of accuracy, he’s insisting that we ought to base our conclusions on trends measured over a longer period of time—trends which do show global warming.

That’s rather a different perspective than the spin Colson is trying to put on it, isn’t it? But he’s still not done yet. Here’s Colson’s next observation, based on Jones’ interview:

He also indicated that there is nothing exceptional about the warming the occurred between 1979 and 1995.

Compare this with what Jones actually said:

As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Here are the trends and significances for each period:

Period Length Trend (Degrees C per decade) Significance 1860-1880 21 0.163 Yes 1910-1940 31 0.15 Yes 1975-1998 24 0.166 Yes 1975-2009 35 0.161 Yes

So what Jones originally said was that there are four sizable time periods during which significant warming can be documented and that these trends are not significantly different from each other. Colson tries to make it sound like Jones is saying that there wasn’t any unusual warming between 1979 and 1998, but that’s not what Jones is saying at all.

One caveat: I’m assuming that Colson was making his claim in connection with the above quote from the original interview, though the dates don’t quite match. But perhaps he was referring to this question instead:

D – Do you agree that natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998, and, if so, please could you specify each natural influence and express its radiative forcing over the period in Watts per square metre.

This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system). Natural influences (from volcanoes and the Sun) over this period could have contributed to the change over this period. Volcanic influences from the two large eruptions (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991) would exert a negative influence. Solar influence was about flat over this period. Combining only these two natural influences, therefore, we might have expected some cooling over this period.

This, however, isn’t even remotely like the what Colson claims Jones is saying. Jones is saying that, if manmade causes were not contributing to global warming, we ought to have expected a cooling trend between 1975 and 1998, due to the shading effect of volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere from two major volcanic eruptions. That cooling did not happen. Instead we observed a net increase in average global temperature between 1975 and 2009, per the chart above. So what the hell is Colson talking about?

Colson does do something I’ve never heard a denialist do before. Or at least, he tries to. The one thing I’ve never understood about all this global warming denialism is why all these professional climatologists and researchers would allegedly lie about it. Outside of cartoon villains, people don’t just spontaneously do evil things that involve large amounts of time and effort for no tangible reward. So what’s supposed to be motivating the scientists? Here’s Colson’s slanderous guess:

Why? It’s a matter of worldview.

Activists and scientists have too much invested in human-caused global warming. For activists, it’s the threat by which they can create their version of a better world, and scientists have staked their careers and reputations on the accuracy of those computer models.

Um, right. Only the thing is, Chuck, that there are lots of eager young grad students (let alone all the know-it-all denialists) who would just love to kick-start their scientific careers by coming up with an even more accurate model. If the old scientists were, you know, lying about global warming, that would make it easier for someone to come up with a model that worked better. Almost any car will go faster than one that won’t even start.

Real scientists are always checking each other’s work, and engaging in vigorous, (mostly) friendly competition. Anybody who resorts to fudging his or her results in front of the experts is just setting themselves up for failure. If you’re staking your career and reputation on the accuracy of your computer model, the last thing you want to do is get yourself entrenched in defending an obsolete and inadequate model!

Colson isn’t going to understand this, of course. Defending obsolete and inadequate models is what Christian apologetics is all about, so naturally he assumes that scientists must be doing the same thing. He needs a “worldview” to insulate him from facts that might otherwise lead him to reassess his conclusions, so in his mind that’s what scientists must be doing too.

The result is that conservative Christians like Colson are among the foremost of those who boldly and ignorantly declare that the experts must be wrong and that we must not interfere in the profits of the wealthy merely to prevent environmental disaster. Like Bush ignoring repeated warnings about Saddam’s lack of WMD’s, they proudly and smugly turn their backs on the advice of those who know more about it than they do. Anything else would be a failure to walk by faith. Or something.

Sigh.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I still need to go do some more shoveling.

The study followed 662 African American sixth and seventh graders for two years. Some were placed in the abstinence program, others in a comprehensive course that included discussion of abstinence and condom use. Another group participated in a program that dealt only with safer sex, and a final group of control subjects did a workshop on nutrition…

Of 95 students who said they were virgins at the start of the abstinence training, 33 percent reported that they had sex within the next two years.

By comparison, 41 percent of the virgins in the comprehensive course went on to have sex in the two-year window. For the control group, the figure was 47 percent.

In a sample this size, the difference between the comprehensive class and the abstinence class – 33 percent vs. 41 percent – was not statistically significant, said Jemmott, so it is accurate to say they performed comparably.

And here’s Chuck Colson reporting the same story:

A landmark study on sex education draws a surprising conclusion. Well, you and I aren’t surprised, but the media and the educational establishments are. The study found that abstinence-based sex education works better than any other form of sex ed.

He’s right. I’m not surprised at all.

All right, I admit, what fails to surprise me is the disconnect between the facts of the story and the smugly triumphant way Colson tries to spin the story. But Colson wants to make it sound surprising that a scientific study actually produced evidence supporting (or allegedly supporting) abstinence-only sex education. And in a way he’s right: there have been a number of studies done, and they’ve all consistently failed to support the idea that abstinence-only sex ed does much good, if any. So it would be surprising if this study showed a result that was inconsistent with all the others.

What’s “landmark” about this study, then, is the fact that it’s the first time Christians like Colson have found one they can actually twist to suit their own purposes. The sample size is small enough, the margin of error large enough, and the difference in scores has the appearance, at least, of making abstinence ed look better. These days Christians like Colson are desperate enough that they’ll take any excuse they can get, jumping to the conclusions they favor, and ignoring the caveats of the professionals.

And that’s not all they’re ignoring. The author of the study, Penn sociologist John Jemmott, reports that what made his abstinence-ed program unique was that he deliberately removed the sect-friendly elements found in the abstinence programs pushed by evangelicals. According to Jemmott, the abstinence program he followed

would not have qualified for federal funding during the Bush administration. Those programs required an emphasis on abstaining until marriage, whereas Jemmott’s involved no preaching and no denigrating the effectiveness of contraception…

The abstinence class included a number of interactive exercises, Jemmott said. For example, the students were asked to think about their hopes five and 10 years in the future. Then they had to consider the consequences of a pregnancy on their plans.”It’s designed to be fun,” Jemmott said. “There are games where they can win points, and role-playing and other upbeat activities. There’s no preaching, and it’s not moralistic.”

Wow, a reality-based abstinence program? I like it myself (as long as it’s not the only material offered). The program wisely avoids the common evangelical trap of trying to persuade kids that they have to wait for marriage, and focuses instead on the much more realistic goal of convincing kids to merely delay sexual involvement. Not because sex is “sinful” or because some spoilsport deity wants to hold it just out of reach, but because the kids know what the consequences are, and decide for themselves that waiting will make them happier.

Of course, you’ll never hear Colson report that the study found a significant improvement in abstinence classes that eliminate Christian moral preaching! That may be one of the “landmark” distinctives of this particular study, but that’s not anything Colson is going to want just anyone to notice.

The Christian agenda for abstinence-only sex education is part of a bigger agenda for sexual control. Conservative Christians are trying to produce a government-enforced monopoly on sex, with Christians in control of who is and is not allowed to participate. God has decreed that there will be no sex outside of marriage, and He’s the only one Who can bestow the blessing of marriage on those He favors (as determined by…guess who).

The result is that, in the hopes and dreams of conservative Christians, people who want sex will have to submit to Christianity in order to obtain it. Christians control the supply by eliminating the competition of extramarital sex and by maintaining a monopoly on marriage. After all, since their God does not show up in real life, they have to have some motivation for people to turn to their religion!

Chuck Colson’s deceitful promotion of abstinence-only education is in no way motivated by any kind of concern for kids. What he and his cohorts are after is to harness the power of sex, and to use it as a tool to convert people. It may not be a conscious conspiracy, and in fact it’s highly likely that simple greed and selfishness are what motivate believers to want to monopolize sexual power. But there’s no question that they are seeking this monopoly, or that they consider themselves legitimately entitled to decide how, when, and with whom, everybody else is allowed to have sex.

Seventeen years ago, General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, helped formulate the policy that has come to be known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It allows women to serve in the armed forces, provided that they keep their gender to themselves.Today, Powell is in favor of repealing the policy he crafted and advocated. Well, he was right then, but wrong now.

According to Powell, “attitudes and circumstances have changed” since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was adopted.

Sure, attitudes toward women have changed in the culture at large. But what hasn’t changed is the need for “order and discipline in the ranks,” to use Powell’s own phrase, and the possible impact of allowing openly female people to serve in the armed forces.

That impact was the subject of a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Mackubin Thomas Owens, a “marine infantry veteran of Vietnam.” Owens begins by stating what should be obvious: “Military organizations exist to win wars.”

I say “should be,” because the arguments for repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are all about the status of women in American society and have nothing to do with military necessity.

A big part of winning wars, as Owens writes, is overcoming “the paralyzing effects of fear on the individual soldier.” Military organizations accomplish this through an “ethos that stresses discipline, morale, good order and unit cohesion.” He’s right. These are the things I learned firsthand as a Marine platoon commander myself.

The “cohesion” Owens refers to is strictly non-sexual. Owens says it is the product of what the New Testament calls philia, friendship. In the military, it is the bond “among disparate individuals who have nothing in common but facing death and misery together.”

I might go a step beyond Owens. The bond between men in a sound military unit is more like agape—the love that moves men to sacrifice their lives for their buddies.

When you read accounts of heroism and bravery, what motivated men wasn’t abstract ideals but their love for the man in the next foxhole. They didn’t want to let him down. This bond was beautifully captured in the book Joker One by Donovan Campbell. Campbell, a Christian and a Marine officer, served three tours in Iraq and captured the essential role of philia and agape on the battlefield. He wrote what I discovered when I was a platoon commander: What holds men together is love.

Allowing openly female women threatens this cohesion by raising the possibility of a different kind of love—eros—which is “individual and exclusive.” “All for one and one for all” could give way to “sexual competition, protectiveness and favoritism,” with disastrous military consequences.

Nothing has happened in the last 17 years that makes this less possible or the possible consequences less dire. All that has changed is that many Americans now see everything through the prism of “rights.” For them, sexual rights and personal autonomy trump everything else. Thus, any opposition to changing military policy must be the result of “bigotry” or “misogyny.”

I suspect I’m not alone when I say a military unit which openly celebrates the female lifestyle in the trenches is not a military unit I want to serve in.

Ultimately, the change in circumstances behind the proposed repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” isn’t military necessity, but the weakening of our moral will.

That’s the real difference between then and now.

Well said, Chuck. Clearly, if we want a military that can win wars, we cannot allow openly female soldiers to serve, because once women are admitted into military service (at least, without disguising their gender), then that opens up the possibility that (gasp) eros might taint the pure love that exists between men in a foxhole. And that possibility, of course, will destroy military cohesion and render all soldiers helpless victims to the paralyzing effects of fear.

Of course. Why didn’t I see that before?

Or for that matter, why haven’t we seen it throughout all the decades in which “openly female” women have served in the armed forces?

The thing that bothered me the most was the emphasis on Christianity. Not that I objected to the faith, of course. I joined in the prayers and the hymns as enthusiastically as anyone else. But I couldn’t help but notice the atmosphere of possessiveness and exclusivity with which the pro-life position was being linked to the religion. It was as if there were a sub-text hiding in the signs and banners people were carrying: “Pro-life is for CHRISTIANS ONLY.”

It bothered me at the time, because the pro-life movement was unlikely to win without the support of a large number of other groups, and yet there was a tangible attitude of not wanting those other groups to join in. There was a certain amount of tolerance for Christian-like religions (Rabbis For Life could be openly accepted for instance), but I didn’t see too many Mormons for Life or (God forbid!) Gays for Life. I even had one pro-lifer tell me frankly and honestly that the only terms on which he would be willing to see America outlaw abortion again would be if the nation first turned to Jesus, so that Jesus could take the credit. Dead babies were something to shout about, but they came in a firm and distant second to the goal of using the pro-life movement to establish the political clout of believers.

Nowadays I see that as a rather more positive aspect of the pro-life movement: their self-righteous exclusivism makes them naturally self-limiting and self-defeating. Considering that they are crusading to dehumanize women, that’s a good thing. And not just women, because if you look at the philosophical basis of the pro-life movement, they’re really dehumanizing us all.

Before I get into that, though, let me just point out in passing that one of the big problems with trying to worship and serve a non-existent God is that you leave yourself open to the political influence of anyone who can do a convincing imitation of what you think the voice of God would sound like if He could talk. And there are any number of people who want your labor, your money, your vote, your military service, and on and on, who are more than willing to tell you what God is urging you to do.

The pro-life movement is a classic example. Back in the early 70′s, Republican strategists hit on the idea of using abortion as a political wedge to drive conservative Christians into the ranks (and coffers) of the party. It was not a particularly Christian issue, but it was a popular superstition, and Christian leaders like Pat Robertson and James Dobson were only to happy to enlist in the Republican crusade and make it a religious issue. In effect, they sold the American Christian church to the Republican party in exchange for some political influence, not realizing that most of the influence was actually flowing the wrong way. (As usual.)

The result is that we have a major Judeo-Christian political movement that manipulates believers into obeying the directives of Republican strategists, and that incidentally dehumanizes humankind in general and women in particular. It’s an unbiblical position, and flows contrary to a lot of what we might call the “spirit” of Christianity, but because God does not show up in real life and the Republicans are willing to take the lead in “relaying” God’s voice in His absence, Christians willingly embrace it as a part of their faith.

Ok, let’s get into the details. The root of the problem here, as in so many other cases, is that we all know that murder is wrong and surgery is ok, but it’s not clear at what point abortion switches from being the latter to being the former. That kind of ambiguity is not the sort of banner the average Joe can rally around. If you’re going to draw a line in the sand, it needs to be a clear, definite line, not a bunch of people sitting around wondering who, if anyone, might have crossed it. So how do you turn this into a black-and-white issue to use as a political tool?

Well, that’s easy, we’ll just say that “life begins at conception.” Sperm + egg = human life and therefore it’s murder if you take that life. The Bible never says anything about life beginning at conception (and in fact declares in Genesis 2 that Man first became “a living soul” when God breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, so there’s reason to believe that breathing marks the point at which God regards us as human souls). But modern Republican leaders of the pro-life movement have declared that conception is what makes us people, and that’s good enough for the rank-and-file pro-lifer.

Notice what we’re saying, though. The nucleic acids of the sperm penetrate the cell wall of the egg, migrate to the nucleus, and recombine in an mundane biochemical reaction just like in every other organism from bacteria on up. There are as yet none of the attributes we normally associate with “soul,” like mind or emotion or will or perception. Nature has just begun construction of the physical, material housing into which these human (and dare I say “spiritual”) characteristics will later take root. But they’re not present yet, at conception.

What we have here, in other words, is an extremely materialistic reduction of what it means to be a person. We’re not beings of soul or spirit, let alone any image of God. We’re fundamentally a mere collection of proteins and amino acids and other materialistic chemicals. Kudos to pro-lifers for acknowledging the materialistic nature of man, and the fact that our true essence and worth is rooted in the physical and material substances of which we are composed. But this takes materialism too far.

The material universe is not just a universe of substances, it is a universe of substances and processes—nouns and verbs. And the verbs are no less important than the nouns. The reason human beings have value and dignity is not just because of the bare physical substances that interact biochemically at conception, as they do in all species. What makes us truly human, in the personal and spiritual sense, are the unique material processes that develop within our bodies once development advances beyond a certain point, the thoughts and emotions and goals and, yes, even the temptations.

These post-conception attributes are what make us human, not the mere substances of the single-celled organism. Philosophically, the pro-life movement is based on a heartless materialism that ignores the verbs and reduces people in general and women in particular to mere nouns. The fertilized egg lacks the processes and capacities that make us uniquely human persons—no mind, no thought, no feeling, no will, no perception, no desire, nothing more than a lowly bacterium would have. And that, pro-lifers tell us, is what it means to be a real, true human being.

This New Materialism flies in the face of the spirituality that pro-lifers allegedly believe in. Ok, not allegedly, they really do believe in it. It’s just that they’re following political leaders who don’t believe, and who could care less about the contradictions you produce in a believer’s testimony when you force him to reduce humanity to a mere chemical formula, and to call that “the whole person.”

But that’s what happen when you try to obey the voice of a God Who isn’t there, and is easily imitated. You become a pawn, a tool, to be deployed and used at will by whoever has the ambition and lack of scruples to pull it off.

• Non-Believers Giving Aid
• Doctors Without Borders
• International Red Cross

Thank you.

But wait. Didn’t Jesus voluntarily lay down his life, in a heroic self-sacrifice to save the souls of sinners? Didn’t he freely give all to save all, and doesn’t the moral virtue of that humble service outweigh the moral liabilities of the negotiable guilt system?

Well, no, though I can understand the powerful emotional appeal that makes people think the answer ought to be “yes.” We admire the drama, the heroics, the self-sacrifice (and of course the ultimate vindication and happy ending when, the story says, Jesus triumphed over death). But having warm feelings about an idea is not the same as “examining everything carefully” so that we can “hold fast to what is good.” So let’s consider this aspect of the Christian moral system.

First of all, let’s notice that even if Jesus did voluntarily lay down his life for the benefit of the wicked, we’re still making the assumption that the suffering of the innocent does indeed have some kind of magic mojo to make the sinner’s guilt disappear. In other words, we’re still basing our moral values on the kind of bizarre voodoo in which the suffering of the innocent creates some kind of force or power that can be applied to the benefit of the wicked.

This is a rather nasty, black-magic sort of concept, but it’s absolutely essential to make the Gospel work. If the sufferings of the innocent are merely an injustice or an evil turn of events, with no magical benefits for the wicked, then when Jesus goads the Sanhedrin into a lethal fury, all he’s really accomplishing is a rather exotic and elaborate form of suicide.

Technically, of course, suicide is itself a sin, so had Jesus deliberately and intentionally created the circumstances of his own death, he would be sinning, and thus would lose the innocence that is supposed to make the mojo happen. The Gospels, however, portray Jesus as submitting—reluctantly—to the will of the Father. “Not my will but Thine be done” means it was not Jesus’ will to die, but someone else put him in a situation where he could not refuse. As Hebrews tells us, he “learned obedience” through what he suffered. His Dad made him do it.

This kind of coerced submission puts Jesus into rather a grey area, under any moral system. Did he really seek his own death, or was he just obeying with a gun, as it were, pointed at his head? It’s an interesting question, but it’s a moot point. The benefit his death supposedly creates for sinners is not drawn in any sense from his willingness to die, but merely from the fact that he suffered and shed his blood, as the New Testament emphasizes over and over again. For example, in Hebrews 9 we read:

In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. It was necessary, then, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ did not enter a man-made sanctuary that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence. Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own. Then Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But now he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Notice, it’s the blood—the emblem of the suffering and death of the innocent victim—that produces the magical benefits for the wicked. Much as we might admire Jesus for being willing to go to his death for the benefit of sinners, the whole premise of such a “benefit” is that guilt can be transferred from the wicked to the innocent, such that the subsequent abuse of the innocent somehow rewards the wicked. Voluntary or not, what Jesus was pursuing was not noble. Though our feelings may say otherwise after the relentless indoctrination of countless hymns and sermons, there’s a nasty bit of blood magic at the core of the Cross.

I’m not saying, of course, that mercy is immoral, or that it’s never right to forgive sin. If you’re going to forgive sin, though, then just forgive it. Making innocent people suffer for things they never did is injustice, not forgiveness. If it’s your intention for the truly guilty to escape the consequences of their offenses, then just don’t punish anyone at all, duh! That would be a moral form of forgiveness.

Notice that the “negotiable guilt” system of morality actually makes mercy impossible. Under the classical Christian system of transactional morals, it’s not that sin was ever forgiven, or ever could be forgiven. Over and over the New Testament writers inform us that all sin was punished. The punishment was diverted onto Jesus instead of onto those who were actually guilty, but the full punishment was meted out. No sin was ever actually forgiven. Our “merciful” heavenly Father has never actually shown any real mercy. Under the Christian moral system, He can’t.

You see what I mean when I say the Christian moral system is hopelessly corrupt. Christians sing God’s praises for His alleged grace and mercy, yet the Gospel itself is founded on the premise that God never has and never could show any real mercy. A truly forgiven sin is a sin for which no punishment is ever meted out, which means no innocent sacrificial victim is needed to endure the suffering and death that the punishment requires. If God is capable of that kind of forgiveness, then the whole Gospel falls apart.

Unfortunately, that leaves us with a moral system in which God cannot ever actually forgive sin. He must necessarily pour out retribution on someone, even if (or rather, especially if) they never actually committed the sin He’s punishing. That’s what it means to be “forgiven” in the New Testament. But a system in which you say, “I forgive you,” and then dish out the punishment anyway, is a very perverse and immoral system!

Imagine for a moment if real people actually practiced such a system. Let’s say we show up at a party, and the host greets us at the door, holding a small, cute, adorable puppy. “Oh how cute,” we say, “you’ve adopted a new pet?”

“Oh no,” says the host, “I’m just borrowing this puppy so that if any guest says or does anything that offends me, I can just torture this puppy until I’m satisfied that the guest is forgiven.”

Superior moral system or batshit crazy?

It’s the same principle of negotiable guilt that the Judeo-Christian sacrificial system is built on, and it’s no more moral or admirable there than it is at the party of our puppy-punishing host. That Jesus would volunteer to perpetuate such a system is hardly a demonstration of virtue, and is evidence of a seriously flawed sense of moral judgment.

My first point, that Christians do not actually get their morality from the ancient moral codes of the Jews and early Christians, can be easily demonstrated by comparing the moral standards of today to the moral standards that were normal and normative in the major Biblical periods. Despite denouncing moral relativism, and claiming to have an eternal and absolute standard of morality in the Bible, we can see from Scripture itself that believers’ moral standards have changed quite a bit over the years.

In the days of Moses, for instance, not only was it morally acceptable to own slaves and beat them, God’s Law even provided for the sale of one’s daughters as sexual slaves that the buyer could keep for himself and/or pass on to his son. Though God’s Law speaks of the girl’s “conjugal rights” being protected, this is not a marriage: if the man tires of the slave, he needs no writ of divorce, he needs only to emancipate her free of charge.

And speaking of divorce, the Law of Moses not only permitted divorce, but actually called for the death of the wife if she could not prove she was a virgin on her wedding night. Similarly lethal punishments were stipulated for sins like blasphemy, working on Saturday (even if it’s just gathering firewood), hitting your parents, and worshiping other gods. Christians don’t live according to those standards of right and wrong any more, and few of them would even call such standards morally acceptable in any enduring and absolute sense.

Judeo-Christian morality is not an eternal moral absolute. It has changed over the years. Even in the Bible itself, the morality of divorce changed from being acceptable in Moses’ day to being questionable and even unacceptable in New Testament times. Jesus went so far as to make divorce the moral equivalent of adultery (thus inadvertently putting the Law of Moses, aka “God’s Perfect Law,” in the position of legalizing the equivalent of adultery!). And the changes in moral standards didn’t stop there, as can be seen by comparing today’s attitudes towards slavery and polygamy with the corresponding attitudes of Biblical patriarchs, prophets, and kings.

That’s a good thing, because Biblical morality, at its heart, is built on a moral framework that is both flawed and barbaric.

” ‘If a member of the community sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the LORD’s commands, he is guilty. When he is made aware of the sin he committed, he must bring as his offering for the sin he committed a female goat without defect. He is to lay his hand on the head of the sin offering and slaughter it at the place of the burnt offering. Then the priest is to take some of the blood with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering and pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar. He shall remove all the fat, just as the fat is removed from the fellowship offering, and the priest shall burn it on the altar as an aroma pleasing to the LORD. In this way the priest will make atonement for him, and he will be forgiven. (Lev. 4:27-31)

There’s no one single place where this moral flaw resides, but the above passage is a fair sample of the kind of corruption that permeates the Old Testament Law and the Gospel that springs from it. The problem lies in the concept of sin as something that exists as an independent entity, almost a commodity, that can be materially transferred from one being to another.

If you’ve been raised in a Christian culture, as I was, you may be so accustomed to this principle that it seems natural and unremarkable. Habit, however, is no justification for moral turpitude, and this idea of sin as negotiable commodity is an appallingly bad principle on which to base a moral system. Think about it: if you have done something wrong, if you’ve committed some crime that demands retribution or at least accountability, the doctrine of negotiable guilt says that you can morally get off scott free by transferring your guilt to some other party. And then they have to suffer the consequences for what you did!

In other words, it is moral, under this system, for the innocent to be punished for sins they did not commit, so that the guilty can sin with impunity. Not only is this doubly unjust (for punishing the innocent and for leaving the guilty unpunished), it’s an open invitation to abuse. It’s bad enough that the rich and powerful exploit and neglect the poor and weak, but under this kind of moral system, it’s even possible for the wicked to add to the trials of the saints by transferring to them the guilt for sins they did not commit.

If that seems a bit extreme, just re-read the quote from Leviticus 4 above. If the goat were somehow guilty of a sin deserving of death, that goat would not be an acceptable sin offering to the Lord. The innocence (and helplessness) of the animal are what make it a suitable recipient onto which the guilt of the sinner can be transferred. The suffering and death of the innocent is what magically puts the sinner back into a state in which he needs never again fear any retribution for his misdeeds.

And that, my friends, is the heart of the Christian Gospel: that Jesus Christ, the innocent lamb of God, received all the guilt for all of our sins past, present and future, that we committed and that he did not; he was punished for those sins so that we would not be. Negotiable guilt, freely transferable from the wicked to any weak and/or innocent victim who can be cajoled, coerced or otherwise induced to assume it.

This. Is. Not. Moral.

If someone wants to debate whether morality demands punishment and retribution for evil deeds, then we can have that discussion another time. What cannot be disputed is that if punishment is to be meted out for evil deeds, then genuine, valid, uncorrupted morality demands that the punishment fall on the person who committed the deed. The question of guilt is not a question of transactions or of the power of the wicked over the innocent, it’s a question of historical fact. “Guilty” means “at such and such a point in time, when the evil deed was done, this is the person that did it.” No subsequent “transaction” will alter the true historical facts of what happened in the past.

The doctrine of negotiable guilt lies at the heart of the Old Testament sacrifices and the New Testament Gospel, and it’s a poisonously immoral doctrine that explicitly provides for the punishment of the innocent and the impunity of the wicked. It is the very opposite of what a sound moral system ought to be based on. It is not, and cannot be, the source of any modern morals worthy of our respect and endorsement. We do not obtain our modern moral values from such a corrupt source, and nobody with a conscience should ever want to.

A blogger at passionateamerica.com has a bit of Monday Morning “humor” that (perhaps without meaning to) gives us a good hard look at how God really “works”:

A United States Marine was attending some college courses between assignments. He had completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan . One of the courses had a professor who was a vowed atheist and a member of the ACLU.

One day the professor shocked the class when he came in. He looked to the ceiling and flatly stated, “God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you exactly 15 minutes.” The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop.

Ten minutes went by and the professor proclaimed, “Here I am God. I’m still waiting.” It got down to the last couple of minutes when the Marine got out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him; knocking him off the platform.

The professor was out cold. The Marine went back to his seat and sat there, silently. The other students were shocked and stunned and sat there looking on in silence. The professor eventually came to, noticeably shaken, looked at the Marine and asked, “What the hell is the matter with you? Why did you do that?”

The Marine calmly replied, “God was too busy today protecting America ’s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid stuff and act like an a$$. So, He sent me.”

Funny stuff, eh? I mean, what’s not to love? The assault victim was not only a college professor (i.e. educated and thus automatically evil), he was also a “vowed atheist” (gasp!) and if that weren’t bad enough, he was even a member of the ACLU (swoon!). The author left out “Darwinist,” but that was probably just an oversight. Wouldn’t every passionate American just love to go around punching out liberals, atheists, and educated people? This isn’t just a joke, it’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Like all good fantasy, this one draws its power from making the setting seem as realistic as possible. What makes the joke really work, especially on the wish-fulfillment level, is the faithfulness with which it reproduces the way God behaves in the real world. Notice, for example, that at no point does God ever actually show up anywhere in the real world. He does not show up in response to the professor’s challenge, nor does He show up to tell the Marine, in the sight and hearing of the other students, to go up and punch out the professor.

Nor, in fact, does He show up in the war zone to genuinely protect the soldiers. If God did show up in Iraq, for example, to point out where the insurgents were hiding and where the IED’s were planted, not only would our troops be in a lot less danger, but the Marine would be able to point to God’s visible and verifiable activity in Iraq as a satisfactory answer to the professor’s challenge.

But God does not, in fact, show up in the real world, an absence that the Marine finds frustrating and infuriating. He seethes with inner rage and helplessness, because God consistently fails to behave as though He believed the same things the Marine does, and yet the Marine cannot confront God about this nor can he admit, even to himself, that there’s anything wrong with God’s behavior. To do so would be to cast doubts on his own faith and his own personal sense of salvation.

This frustrated and impotent inner tension is what drives the joke, of course. The author, and his intended readers, all know first-hand how the Marine feels. God’s behavior is clearly inconsistent with what they believe about Him, and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it. They can’t even complain about it, because to complain about it, they’d first have to admit that it’s true, and that would be a denial of their faith. So they’ve got all this anger and frustration building up, and nowhere for it to go. What are they to do?

The Marine, in the story, takes the only available outlet: he makes the poor professor the scapegoat for his own inner turmoil, and lashes out violently against him. Many Christians feel the same way, though most of them (fortunately) are more self-restrained than the Marine in this story, contenting themselves with name-calling and nasty jokes (like this one) directed against whoever they decide should be the scapegoat this week. Ironically, after violently assaulting the professor for what he said, the Marine then self-righteously admits that the professor has a legitimate right to free speech, which his fellow troops are fighting to protect even as he, the Marine, is busy violating it.

But I digress. The main point is that the professor gets knocked off his platform–but notice, it took a real person do actually do it. Had the Marine not acted, the “work” (knocking off the professor) would not have gotten done. The real person did the work, and then tried to claim that God deserved credit for what was done.

This is the secret. This is how God really “works” in the real world: somebody thinks they know what God ought to be doing, then they sit there stewing about it because God’s obviously not taking care of the matter, then they jump up and do it themselves, then they claim that God ought to be given credit for having gotten the job done. A classic case of sock-puppet deity. Rather pitiful, really, but so long as God persists in failing to show up in the real world it’s the best Christians have to offer.

Mr. Anonymous And Probably Fictitious Marine, I salute you. You may have acted violently, ignorantly, and unjustly, but you at least gave us a clear demonstration of how Christians perpetuate the delusion that God actually does things in the real world.

The Heckler’s Defense has two goals: disruptive censorship, and scapegoating. The heckler’s primary goal is to silence criticisms of his beliefs, and he accomplishes this by using whatever means he can to divert the discussion onto tangential or irrelevant topics. For example, he might make an argument with an obvious fallacy, to divert the discussion into an argument over whether or not his statement was fallacious. Or he might try and goad other people into personal attacks, and then make a few attacks of his own, in order to drag everyone into a big flame fest. He might even contradict himself and then deny the contradiction, in order to keep everyone talking about himself and whether or not he really said what he said.

The beauty (if that’s the term) of the Heckler’s Defense is that it really doesn’t matter what the heckler says as long as he shuts down the main discussion by saying it. It doesn’t matter if what he says is wrong, and it doesn’t matter if other people can document that what he says is wrong, because the goal is to get people talking about himself, and thus not talking about the things that are wrong with his beliefs.

A telltale sign of the Heckler’s Defense is that the heckler will be very cagy about revealing what his own beliefs are. He’s not in the discussion to let his beliefs go head-to-head with a competing conclusion in the kind of debate that forces both parties to put up or shut up. He already knows he’s the one that would end up having to shut up, due to the lack of factual support for his beliefs. So he plays mind games with his critics instead, offering tantalizing hints about what his beliefs might be, in order to be able to say, “That’s not what I said!” whenever anyone points out the flaws in the belief he’s suggesting.

Thus, instead of an honest debate over honestly-expressed ideas and the evidence that supports them, the heckler merely creates another diversion, baiting his opponents with the implication that this time he might just commit to a direct expression of his true beliefs, only to dance away at the last minute, laughing at them—which naturally frustrates his opponents, tempting them to question his motives, and opening the gates to yet another diversionary flamefest.

Such flamefests also serve to promote the secondary goal of the Heckler’s Defense, which is to provide the heckler with a pretext for rejecting his critics. By provoking accusations and insults, the heckler makes it possible to view his critics as enemies, and thus naturally inferior folk. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle, because the heckler can fill his comments with all sorts of explicit and implicit accusations and insinuations, thus directly attacking the character of his opponents and taunting them to respond in kind, which in turn diverts the discussion into a flamefest, which reinforces the heckler’s conviction that his enemies are unfair, unkind, and by implication, wrong, etc., etc.

It’s a rather nasty maladaptive response to finding out the facts aren’t consistent with your beliefs, promoting divisions and strife, and driving the heckler deeper and deeper into rationalizations and self-justifications based on hostility and defensiveness. I have a particularly hard time dealing with this particular defense because I tend to feel sorry for the person who has been driven to such desperate measures (not that I don’t also find them every bit as annoying as they’re trying to be, of course).

It’s interesting to indulge Hecklers once in a while, just to see how they twist and distort things. It’s a fascinating, if macabre, glimpse into human psychology and maladaptive responses. But ultimately, we have to admit that there’s no real hope the Heckler will ever make an honest and sincere contribution to the discussion. That’s not his goal. His goal is to disrupt any discussion of the evidence, and to slander everyone who disagrees with him. There’s no point in encouraging or enabling him to achieve those goals.

One of those consequences is the perpetual friction between world and worldview. Believers will feel pressure on their worldview because their dealings with reality will continually confront them with facts that are inconsistent with their beliefs, producing friction and even erosion of the Christian worldview. This in turn will produce the need to find some way to counteract the erosive effects of contact with the world and reinforce the worldview. Believers will experience a need to take their faith in for frequent “scheduled maintenance” by meeting together to encourage one another in the faith, and to exhort and admonish one another. Unmaintained faith will tend to weaken over time, and produce backsliding.

They will also need to actively defend their worldview in the broader arena of cultural perception. And once again, the Myth Hypothesis imposes distinctive restrictions on the form this defense will be able to take. They won’t be able to reinforce their worldview by pointing to how God Himself shows up in the real world, because His non-existence will prevent Him from showing up. They won’t be able to provide verifiable, objective, real-world evidence consistent with their worldview, because the chief difference between world and worldview will be the fact that God only exists in the latter. Consequently, their worldview defense will need to resort to techniques that have less to do with science, and more to do with politics and indoctrination in the beliefs and worldviews of men.

Notice, and let me emphasize once again, that this is not an arbitrary, ad hoc imputation of known “predictions” based merely on knowing what Christianity is like today. These consequences are necessarily driven by God’s absence, as proposed by the Myth Hypothesis. If God is indeed non-existent, then His lack of reality will inevitably impact the Christian worldview as described above. God’s failure to exist outside of a Christian worldview will force Christians to give their worldview preeminence above the world, or risk losing their worldview—and thus their God, Who depends on worldview for His “existence”—through the constant erosion of credibility produced by the conflict between world and worldview.

This constant tension, continually threatening God’s existence, will necessarily have another consequence: Christians will need to respond to this threat in some way, but will have difficulty confronting it directly. When we propose that our God is real, it becomes rather awkward to admit that reality is the chief antagonist against our belief. We need a scapegoat, a stand-in that we can accuse of fomenting rebellion against God and of attempting to subvert the worldview in which He has His existence and power. Who we blame isn’t really that important, except of course that it will be easier to get away with if we blame an unpopular minority (Jews, witches, atheists, scientists, “Darwinists,” etc.).

There are other ways the Myth Hypothesis would impact the world v. worldview situation, but the above are some of the most obvious and inevitable consequences. So let’s turn now to the Gospel Hypothesis and see what consequences would naturally and logically proceed from its assumptions.

If there were to exist an all-wise, all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful deity Who loved us enough to become one of us and to die for us in order to achieve His supreme goal of drawing each of us into a saving, personal, faith-based relationship with Him, what consequences would this have for the question of world versus worldview? As with the Myth Hypothesis, there would be many consequences indeed, though they would be markedly different. God’s existence in the real world would effectively erase the conflict and inconsistency between world and worldview, and would render the worldview almost irrelevant.

For example, it would be possible to teach the truth about God without violating the First Amendment: just present the objective, verifiable, real-world facts about Him without expressing or endorsing any particular worldview in which He played a significant role. The teaching of verifiable fact is not a violation of anyone’s freedom of speech, conscience, or religion, it’s just accurate information. And since God’s supreme goal is for each of us to know the real-world truth about Himself, He is both willing and able to show up in real life so that we can have access to objective and unbiased information about Him, independent of the fallible worldviews of men.

Thus, we would expect the Gospel Hypothesis to produce an obvious and unmistakably different set of consequences from the Myth Hypothesis, due to the tremendous and undeniable difference in God’s real-world status. God’s existence or non-existence necessarily forces a different manifestation of the relationship between world and worldview, and of the conflict (or lack of conflict) between them.

I’m running short on time today, so I’ll let Chuck Colson explain which of these two sets of consequences correspond to what we actually find in the real world. But you can probably guess: Christians do give worldview a preeminent position over the world, and feel pressured, by real-world facts, to defend and promote their worldview, through careful indoctrination and political influence, which they see as a defense against liberals, atheists, and other real-world scapegoats. And thus, once again, they demonstrate how consistent their own beliefs and actions are with the consequences predicted by the Myth Hypothesis.

“Let us pray. Almighty God, today we pray imprecatory prayers from Psalm 109 against the enemies of religious liberty, including Barry Lynn and Mikey Weinstein, who recently issued a press release attacking me personally. God, do not remain silent, for wicked men surround me and tell lies about me. We bless them, but they curse us. Therefore find them guilty, not me. Let their days be few, and replace them with Godly people. Plunder their fields, and seize their assets. Cut off their descendants, and remember their sins, in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

That’s ex-chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt, solemnly and piously asking God to please kill Mikey Weinstein and Barry Lynn and their children (if any), and send them all to hell, unforgiven, for the offense of having published a press release critical of Klingenschmitt.

Yes, that’s right. Daring to criticize Klingenschmitt, and voicing opinions he does not agree with, makes them ENEMIES OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY!!!1!one!

My first thought was that this was an Onion-esque spoof of a self-righteous blowhard, but no, it’s hosted on Klingenschmitt’s own sanctuary of spiritual narcissism, prayinjesusname.org.

Hat tip to Dispatches from the Culture Wars—be sure and scroll down to read the comment from Klingenschmitt’s former supervisor about what it was like working with this guy.

This, too, had unintended consequences. Because sola scriptura effectively isolated the interpretation of the Bible from the centuries of Church Tradition that had previously dictated the intended meaning of the Gospel, Protestants ended up practicing, not just the priesthood of all believers, but the virtual papacy of each individual believer. Any man could tell you that you were wrong, based on his own understanding of the Bible, but as a believer in sola scriptura, you need not listen to him. Your own understanding of God’s Word took precedence, because after all, which are you going to believe: what man tells you, or what God tells you? And this, too, had unintended consequences.

Protestantism began to splinter. Those who were more scholarly interpreted the Bible in terms of grammar and history. The more mystical believers rejected scholasticism and relied instead on the illumination of the Holy Spirit to convey the true meaning of Scripture. Some put more emphasis on divine law, others on divine grace; some on free will and others on divine sovereignty. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Without a God around to resolve the issue of whose interpretation was correct, the various groups had to rely on the force of their own arguments to try and establish what God’s will really was. All too soon, these arguments turned ugly, and began to resort to force of arms as well as force of words. Protestant enclaves formed, minorities were persecuted (even within Protestantism), and full-scale wars broke out. People died, people fled, and no consensus was reached about the true meaning of Scripture.

Exhausted by bloody wars, and enlightened somewhat by humanistic ideals, the West (including the newly-founded United States of America) adopted the principle of religious tolerance, the idea that freedom of religion was a virtue, not a heresy. But this, too, is an idea that has unintended consequences. It’s a good idea, mind you, but it has some subtle implications that have been making themselves increasingly obvious of late.

Implicit in the idea of religious tolerance is the idea that everyone has the right to believe whatever they like. This, in turn, tends to imply that all ideas are of equal worth, and therein lies the rub. If all religions are of equal worth, that means they are all equally false. They can’t all be true, because they contradict each other. And yet we value them and protect them anyway, which implies that they are worthy and meaningful despite their failure to be true. And that implies that truth itself doesn’t really matter as much.

We see this in the rise of postmodernism, and in the peculiarly American approach to evangelical politics. Gay marriage is banned in California through the cooperative efforts of Focus on the Family (a conservative Christian group) and the Mormon church, an unholy alliance that would have been anathema a century ago. We insert “under God” into the pledge of allegiance on the grounds that it’s part of a great “Judeo-Christian” tradition of government reverence, despite the historic conflict between the Jewish idea of God and the Christian concept of Trinity. People band together and cast their votes based on lowest-common-denominator appeals to “universal” religious principles, in blind disregard for the religious differences that led past generations to fight to the death for what they regarded as essential and uncompromising principles.

All this has the unintended consequence of changing America from a democracy to a mediocracy (as in “mediocre”). If all ideas are of equal worth, why shouldn’t I vote for Sarah Palin, or whoever else I feel is the same kind of person as me, with my kind of interests, values, and qualities? Who cares what her actual qualifications are? And conversely, if people are going to vote based on a desire to see their own, “equally-valid” ideas represented in government, why shouldn’t I, as a politician, run a campaign based on appeal to the lowest common denominators, in order to attract the widest basis of support? Who cares what my qualifications are, if all ideas are equally valid.

The result is that we no longer value—and even actively disdain—any kind of superiority of ideas and understanding. “Elite,” which means “superior, and of rare excellence and quality,” becomes a nasty word, hurled at one’s enemies to discredit them. We don’t want good leaders, we want leaders who are just like us. After all, all ideas are of equal worth, so who cares whether anyone is actually right or not?

Religious freedom is an important principle, and needs to be preserved and protected. At the same time, however, we need to address the problem of people’s naive assumption that all ideas are of equal worth. We need to be free to criticize bad ideas, and to point out why they are wrong. We need to value those whose opinions are informed and educated and experienced. We need to pursue “elite” standards of excellence, in politics, and in science, and in all areas of life.

This is not just a question of respecting other people’s beliefs. We need to respect their right to believe what they want, but the price we must pay for religious freedom is that we must also support the freedom of speech that lets us squarely address the flaws in those beliefs when they are unrealistic, wrong-headed, and poorly-reasoned. Yes, it can make us uncomfortable, but the alternative is to endure the relentless degradation and collapse of our society, as people refuse to face the facts, and make political, economic, and military decisions based on wrong assumptions.

All men are created equal, but not all ideas are. We can believe in stupid things if we want, but the price we pay for this freedom is that people can tell us our ideas are stupid, and we have to let them.

A new exhibit at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum argues that natural selection — Darwin’s explanation for how species develop new traits over time — can coexist with the creationist assertion that all living things were created by God just a few thousand years ago.

“We wanted to show people that creationists believe in natural selection,” said Ken Ham, founder of the Christian ministry Answers in Genesis and frequent Darwin critic.

What makes this story particularly interesting is the fact that natural selection, popularly known as “survival of the fittest,” was featured as the centerpiece of Ben Stein’s argument blaming Darwin for the Holocaust. According to Stein, Hitler’s justification for trying to wipe out the Jews was that nature itself allegedly teaches us that weaker kinds don’t deserve to survive. Evolutionists (aka “Darwinists”) obviously disagree with this particular interpretation of natural selection, but Stein sided with Hitler. According to Stein, natural selection implies a justification for genocide, and therefore anyone who says natural selection is true is supporting genocide.

And now the Creation Museum is saying natural selection is compatible with creationism. Fun times, eh?

What Stein and Hitler have overlooked is the fact that natural selection is only part of evolutionary theory. Without genetic variation, natural selection becomes merely a road to extinction, not a mechanism for originating new species. And even if natural selection did teach us that only the strong deserved to survive, genetic variation would teach us the complementary proposition that diversity is what makes us strong. A full and objective understanding of evolution leads us to reject genocide and other forms of mutually destructive behaviors, not to embrace them.

Truth, as I always say, is consistent with itself, and whenever you try to spread a lie (as Expelled! did), you shoot yourself in the foot. Sooner or later the truth is going to come back around to haunt you. Natural selection is part of real life, and even creationists can’t successfully deny it. So when creationists like Ben Stein agree with Nazis about natural selection justifying genocide, they only make themselves look anti-Semitic.

The non-racist alternative is to agree with the “Darwinists” that natural selection, though true, does not justify genocide, nor even present the whole story. And if you can’t understand the truth well enough to agree with that, then maybe you deserve to be expelled, because you’re flunking out.

The irony is that Christians themselves are among the leading proponents of postmodernism. For example, PZ Myers had a post a while back in which this illustration appeared, copied from the Answers in Genesis web site.

The illustration’s intent is to show that the Christian and the scientist live in two different worlds, despite observing the same facts. This is postmodernism: facts are not the truth, because “truth” is something you create for yourself based on how you choose to interpret the facts. AiG would like to be able to prove that Darwin was factually wrong, but failing that, they at least want to sell you the alternate reality of the Christian “worldview.”

It’s this concept of “worldview” that sneaks postmodernism in through the back door of Christian thinking. You don’t hear about “worldview” from someone who thinks the raw, unmanipulated facts prove his position. “Worldview” is a defense, an excuse, for why the facts need to be “interpreted” in order to become “truth” (as defined by some set of preconceived ideas and preferences). It’s ordinary denialism, dressed in a philosopher’s robes.

Worldview postmodernism transforms Christianity from being an ordinary superstition into a powerful force for evil. For example, here‘s Chuck Colson invoking “worldview” as an excuse for the current economic crisis.

Our nation is in this crisis precisely because we’ve traded in a Christian worldview of work, thrift, savings, and prudence, and instead have embraced the false worldview of consumerism—of leisure, debt, and instant gratification.

That’s a false worldview, and it leads to the worst kind of idolatries. And it will also lead to our self-destruction.

And insofar as we Christians have abandoned our heritage and have bought into the idolatry of consumerism, we have betrayed not only our God, but the nation we love.

In point of fact, expert economists were sounding dire warnings years ago about the predictable and disastrous consequences that must inevitably result from the unrestrained predatory banking practices that were raising red flags even then. But “evil corporate profits” and “respect for expert testimony” aren’t really part of the conservative Christian worldview, and so rather than heed these warnings, Fox news and the Bush administration brought in specialists to basically re-interpret the facts in terms of a worldview that was more in keeping with what they wanted to believe. Result: a preventable but unprevented economic collapse.

Or consider abstinence-only sex (non-)education. According to a conservative Christian worldview, premarital sex is so bad that you shouldn’t even talk about it, except to condemn it. Rather than give kids the facts they need in order to get through singlehood healthy and childless, conservative Christians want to give them the Christian worldview only. Result? “Virginity-pledged” teens are no less likely to have sex, but they are less likely to be protected against STD’s (including AIDS) and unintended pregnancy.

Examples abound. Once upon a time, Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction were firmly embedded in the conservative Christian worldview of George W. Bush and his minions. Facts were only relevant insofar as they could be used to buttress the worldview that supported what Bush wanted to do: take revenge on some bunch of Arabs—any Arabs—in retaliation for 9/11. (And possibly for embarrassing the Bush family by burning oil wells at the end of the Persian Gulf war, but I digress.)

The thing that’s so dangerous about worldview postmodernism is that Christians see “worldview” not just as something that defines their interpretation of the facts, but as a kind of banner, a battle standard, that is to be defended against all hostile opponents, even when those opponents are the facts themselves. In worldview postmodernism, the facts are not the truth: worldview is, and if it comes to a conflict between fact and worldview, then the facts must either be assimilated or neutralized. (*cough*globalwarming*cough*)

This is the kind of thinking that makes someone like Sarah Palin into a kind of Christian folk hero. Who better to defend a worldview than someone whose success owes nothing to expertise, experience or insight? The real experts, the people who know the facts and what the facts mean, are the enemy, the source of these hostile attacks on the Christian worldview. Christians want leaders who will be worldview champions, not reality champions, and hence their disdainful dismissal of ordinary talent and expertise as “elitism.”

Psychologically, though, worldview postmodernism does make a lot of sense. Christians live in a world where God does not show up in real life, even indirectly. Colson’s article, quoted above, begins and ends with a plea for Christians to pray that God will revitalize the Church and intervene to have some kind of substantial, positive influence on the world. It’s a plea that’s 2,000 years old, and it isn’t any closer to being answered today than it ever was. This pains believers like Colson, but such are the facts—the cold, cruel, relentless facts.

Worldview postmodernism offers believers an irresistible lure: the chance to define truth in terms of whatever seems right in their own eyes. Inside a Christian worldview, everything is just the way it ought to be, and that’s unbelievably satisfying. I remember when I was a devout Christian, my favorite books, even into adulthood, were The Chronicles of Narnia, because the divine Jesus character, Aslan, behaved the way a loving God ought to behave: showing up to help when needed, interacting in person with those he loved, and in general behaving like he really did care enough for his creatures to want to spend time with them. So much better than anything real-world facts had to offer!

The other big appeal of worldview postmodernism is that it’s difficult to become an expert in real-world facts, which is why we have to divide it up into smaller areas of specialization, whereas it’s trivially easy to create a selfishly satisfying worldview, which is why nobody offers a PhD program in “The Way I Think Things Oughta Be, Dammit.” Let’s face it, not everybody can learn all the stuff you need to know to be a Nobel-prize-winning economist, and physicist, and biologist, and so on. But everybody can have a worldview. You don’t even need to be right about what you believe, you just need to be willing to argue in favor of it. And at that, you don’t even need good arguments, as long as you cling to them stubbornly and self-righteously.

Is there a cure for worldview postmodernism? I hope so, but it won’t be easy. Postmodernism is much more addictive than any mere pharmaceutical, because if you demonstrate to the postmodernist that his worldview is wrong, he’ll just decline to incorporate your facts into his worldview.

Our best bet is to try and educate the young, to teach them the difference between facts and worldview, and to demonstrate why it is important to equate “truth” with the former rather than the latter. Unfortunately, a lot of parents won’t want their kids to learn this kind of critical thinking. They’ll want to pass on their own worldview, like a legacy (or a family curse). If we try to make this part of the public school curriculum, expect resistance.

Where there’s Internet, there’s hope, though. At the very least, we can make this information available, and fight efforts to regulate and restrain the free exchange of ideas. Worldview postmodernism is self-destructive in the long term, so there’s some hope that the survivors will learn from their ancestors’ mistakes. Assuming there are survivors.

Like I said, it won’t be easy. But we do need to try.

It began with shouts—foul and violent verbal attacks. Then the assaults became physical. Rioters threw hot coffee on people and began shoving them. One thug yanked a cross out of a woman’s arms and stomped on it. Another grabbed a woman’s Bible, struck her on the head with it, knocked her to the ground, and kicked her. Others engaged in sexual exhibitionism.

This was the vicious aftermath of the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which outlawed same-sex “marriage.” The attacks were perpetrated by homosexuals angry that voters had passed the measure. They directed the worst of their venom at Mormons, who played an active role in passing the law. It was thug politics at its worst—and believe me, I’ve seen the worst.

The nearest antecedent for the pronoun “it” is “the law,” i.e. Proposition 8, and I would have to agree that it is indeed thug politics at its worst—a bunch of Christians ganging up on an unpopular minority to impose cruel and inhuman punishments on them just because they don’t like them. But Chuck isn’t telling the whole story about the “attacks” this bigoted injustice provoked.

Where did this all take place? When did it occur? Nov. 14th, just 10 days after Prop. H8, a group of about a dozen Christian young people decided to descend on a street corner in a heavily gay neighborhood in San Francisco to sing hymns and worship the God Who, with their help, had just robbed gays of their right to choose their own spouses. It wasn’t enough, you see, to use the law against gays. They had to go right into the gays’ home neighborhoods and rub their faces in it.

You can watch a video of the confrontation here. The Christians are the ones hiding behind the police, looking scared. None of them, you will notice, are singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” or making any other confident boasts about how their faith protects them from their enemies. They look like they’re seriously worried they might end up meeting their Savior. Deep down, they know that “divine protection” only happens in the stories you tell from the pulpit.

And yet, for all the Christian’s fears and outrage, the response by the gays is remarkably self-restrained for the most part. They are loud, certainly, and they make it clear that their oppressors are not welcome in their neighborhood, and there might even have been an isolated incident or three where someone went a bit too far. But there are no burning cars, no bloodshed, no looting. Compared to the reaction when Rodney King’s civil rights were violated, the gays’ response is exemplary for its civilized and largely self-controlled reaction to such grave injustice.

Colson, of course, tries to make it sound like the gay reaction was all out of proportion to the wrong they suffered. (It was: it was far less than the offense that provoked it.) According to Colson, “It began with shouts—foul and violent verbal attacks.” Isn’t that clever? “Violent verbal attacks.” In other words, violent non-violent attacks. And what few incidents there were that actually did get physical were both isolated and relatively mild. In the six weeks since Prop H8 passed, Colson still only has those 3 examples: hot coffee was allegedly thrown, a cross stomped on, and a girl knocked down and kicked (and rescued, Colson fails to mention, by nearby gays, who apologized for the attacker’s behavior).

What we’ve got going on here is plain old ordinary guilt. Colson’s conscience won’t let him rest, because he knows that he and his fellow believers have been party to unprovoked cruelty and oppression of a minority that has done him no harm beyond merely existing, in defiance of his own prejudice and bigotry. So he tries to project his guilt onto them, to exaggerate their “provocation” in order to try and justify the belligerence of Prop H8, even though Prop H8 happened first.

And despite his guilt, he is still unrepentant, as were those “brave” Christian crusaders who tried to put de Jeebus on the Castro district just as though they’d done nothing wrong and had nothing to worry about.

When I watched the violence on television, memories came back of earlier generations of thugs: Bull Conner, who, with the help of brutal cops, used violence and intimidation to chase African Americans out of the public square. Or roving gangs of Nazi brownshirts who ruled the streets of Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. Do opponents of Proposition 8 who attacked Mormons and their churches think they’re any better than Bull Conner, or nicer than Nazi thugs? I don’t.

Colson’s conscience is working against him in subtle ways. The Nazis rose to power the same way Prop H8 came to power: by democratic vote. And when the Nazis came to power, they passed laws against gays, just like Colson and his minions. Perhaps this fact is motivating Colson to continue his shameful confession.

When it became clear that Mormons were being singled out for punishment, religious leaders of every stripe, including me, signed our names to a full-page ad in the New York Times sponsored by the esteemed Becket Fund. It was titled “No Mob Veto.” The signatories included Nathan Diament, Alveda King, William Donahue, and Roger Scruton.

“Mob veto.” I like that. It’s hard to think of a phrase that better describes the act of a bunch of Christians getting together to use mob law to veto gay couple’s choice of life partner—which is none of Colson’s business anyway. If he’s really serious about ending the mob veto, he ought to work to repeal Prop H8. But he’s not, of course.

We also are committed to “exposing and publicly shaming anyone who resorts to the rhetoric of anti-religious bigotry against any faith, on any side of any cause, for any reason.”

I hope others will join us—especially those who claim to support civil rights. Will they condemn the attacks, will they remain silent, or—ugliest of all—will they excuse the violence?

There is no excuse for what Christians have done to gays, and to abuse the law to turn it into an instrument of oppression is itself an act of violence, a robbery of civil rights and an institution of persecution. You don’t get to claim to be the good guys when you’re acting out the bad guy’s script, Chuck. Gays, for the most part, have done nothing more than to expose and publicly shame those who are resorting to the rhetoric of anti-minority bigotry AND anti-minority activism and oppression. They gay example, with few exceptions, is one that Christians like Colson would have a hard time living up to.

Vox begins with an attempt to twist the facts to make atheists sound both conceited and overly obsessed with reason.

[F]orty-three commenters at the militantly atheist science blog Pharyngula reported the results of an online personality test they had taken. Similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator survey, the test was hopelessly transparent and subjective, but provided a useful means of examining how these predominantly atheist individuals view themselves. They reported an average Rational rating of 94 out of 100, compared to an Extroverted rating of 32 and an Arrogance rating of 49. They do not see themselves so much as champions of reason, but paragons!

Sarah Palin be proud, Vox Day is jumping on the anti-elite band-wagon right beside you. At the risk of making a “paragon” of myself, I’m going to try something Vox apparently disdains: I’m going to think logically and reasonably about what the test actually said (as opposed to the fanciful and slanderous interpretation Vox chooses to give to it).

First of all, if you’ve taken an MBTI-style personality inventory like the ones Vox mentions, you’ll know that seeing yourself “as a paragon of reason” is neither a question on the test nor an indicator reported by the test. The test instead measures your personal “style” across four axes: Introvert versus Extrovert, Sensing (i.e. 5 senses) vs. Intuition, Thinking (using analysis to arrive at conclusions) vs Feeling (drawing conclusions based on how you feel about the people/circumstances), and Judging (getting answers now) vs Perceiving (wait and see what develops).

Notice that this has nothing whatsoever to do with atheists holding exaggerated and egotistical views about their rationality being supposedly superior to everyone else’s. What the MBTI tells you is that if a person scores closer to the Thinking end of the axis than the Feeling end, you’re going to have better luck convincing them with verifiable facts and non-fallacious reasoning than you are with appeals to emotional bonds like “if you disagree, you’re only helping the terrorists.” It’s just their personality type. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re better at reasoning and logic than others, it just means that they trust facts and logic more than they trust appeals to emotion and social connections.

Vox’s goal, of course, is not to try and understand what the MBTI really means. He just wants to set up a straw man atheist who is a goddamn-elitist-convinced-of-his-own-intellectual-superiority-and-wouldn’t-you-just-love-to-see-Vox-take-him-down-a-notch. But stand clear folks, Vox has Occam’s Chainsaw fully revved up at this point, and he don’t care where it swings.

His first swipe is to confuse being rational with being analytical, so that he can try and chop an arm or two off of science. The beauty of science, of course, is that it draws its answers from reality itself, which is the truth, so no matter how complicated science gets, or how much increasing specialization tends to create new and more difficult niches of scientific knowledge, it’s all consistent with itself and with the real world. There’s nothing unreasonable or irrational about having confidence in an approach that yields coherent, practical, and beneficial results on such a consistent basis. But Vox, in his crusade to blemish the atheists, tries to make it sound insane.

[The atheist] is not without faith, because he puts his trust in the scientific method and those who use it whether he understands their conclusions with regards to any given application or not. But because there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, for example, let alone understanding their implications, and because specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in any of the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he himself neither knows nor understands.

What Vox overlooks is the fact that the atheist, in many cases, does understand how science works and why it is reliable. There may be increasingly specialized subdomains to which the scientific method is applied, but it remains fundamentally the same scientific method, and its answers are reliable for the same reasons. Vox is confusing the detailed researches to which science is applied, with the rationality and reliability of the method itself. It’s a blatant appeal to ignorance: “Everyone must be ignorant about a lot of the knowledge that’s available, therefore no one has any reason to believe the answers.” Please, O Mighty Ignorance, protect us from science! But we do have a reason to trust the answers: we know that they were obtained using reliable scientific technique.

Vox argues that the atheist can “be legitimately criticized when he fails to admit that he is not actually operating on reason in most circumstances, but is instead exercising a faith that is every bit as blind and childlike as that of the most thoughtless, Bible-thumping fundamentalist.” But in fact, Vox is not being what you would call truthful here. It is reasonable to trust that a reliable scientific method, repeatedly demonstrated to be both useful and accurate, would return valid answers when deployed on real-world evidence and facts. The thoughtless, Bible-thumping fundamentalist, by contrast, bases his faith on the fact that somebody told him what to believe, and he believed it, even though (in contrast to science) his approach consistently yields answers that contradict themselves, other fundamentalists, and the real world.

By the way, if there are any “thoughtless fundamentalists” out there with chainsaw wounds, don’t feel too bad. You are by no means Vox’s only intended victims here. Morality is next on the hit-list.

The fundamental irrationality of the atheist can primarily be seen in his actions, and it is here that his general lack of intellectual conviction is also exposed. Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have rational reasons for attempting to live by their various moral systems, the atheist does not. Both ethics and morals based on religion are nothing more than man-made myth to the atheist, he is therefore required to reject them on rational materialist grounds.

As we’ve pointed out before, Vox’s worldview apparently interferes with his ability to understand where morality really comes from. It comes from the consequences of the behaviors that people learn to categorize as “good” or “bad.” If a religious man decides to refrain from saying “hell” because he believes that God will punish him for it, he is deriving his morals from a consideration of the consequences of his actions, just like the atheist does. The only difference is that the believer has a superstitious and gullible expectation of what those consequences will be. But real-world morality, where actions have real-world consequences, work for both believer and unbeliever, and in fact work better for the unbeliever, since the gullible and superstitious notions don’t garble the unbeliever’s ability to correctly distinguish between real consequences and imaginary/paranoid ones.

Believers, watch out, here comes that chainsaw again!

So the atheist seeks to live by the dominant morality whenever it is convenient for him, and there are even those who, despite their faithlessness, do a better job of living by the tenets of religion than those who actually subscribe to them. But even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics.

Ooo, nasty cut there. Vox was aiming at the atheists, but unfortunately he missed. Morality comes from one of two places: either it comes from secular consequences (valid morality) or it comes from superstitions (invalid morality). When believers excuse genocide on the grounds that God wants certain ethnic groups wiped out, that’s superstition, invalid morality. When believers want to mutilate their babies’ genitals because they think God will like their babies better after they’ve lost certain parts of their body, that’s superstition, invalid morality. The valid morality happens when believers borrow the atheists’ secular consequences as the basis for judging right and wrong. I wouldn’t use the term “moral parasite” myself, but if Vox wants to chuck that chainsaw at the people who are borrowing someone else’s basis of morality, believers ought to be the ones to duck. Especially since, as Vox admits, unbelievers can and do live morally better lives than believers in some cases.

It’s really a very poorly-thought-out argument, and a rather silly attempt to make atheists look bad, but Vox can sink lower, and does so by citing two atheists, Dawkins and Hitchens, as proof that atheism is “childish” because the two became atheists when they were nine years old. I kid you not, he really tries to argue that:

Hitchens and Dawkins became atheists after long and exhaustive rational inquiries into the existence of God, both at the age of nine. The idea that there is any rational basis for atheism is further damaged due to the way in which so many atheists become atheists during adolescence, an age which combines a tendency towards mindless rebellion as well as the onset of sexual desires which collide with religious strictures on their satisfaction.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to note that intelligent men of intellectual repute such as Francis Collins and Anthony Flew should have rejected atheism at the tender ages of twenty-seven and eighty-one, respectively. Atheism is not only irrational, it is quite literally childish in many instances.

So based on the ages of a sample population of four individuals who were specifically chosen to serve as examples of atheists being young and believers being older, Vox uses his own unique brand of statistical analysis to conclude that atheism is both irrational and childish. And just in case there was even a shred of credibility left in his little screed, he tops it off with a footnote which reads, “Is there any doubt that most college-age atheists would have no problem believing in a God who permitted them to get laid at will? This is why even the most idiotic forms of paganism compete so favorably with atheism.” Yes, he’s really suggesting that college-age atheists are all secret worshipers of Aphrodite, Venus, and their sisters.

I dunno, clearly atheism is the intended target here, but it looks to me like most of the blood on that chainsaw is Vox’s own, this time. Fear not, though, the chainsaws reign of errorterror is not over yet. Next on the hit list: all mankind.

But the ultimate atheist irrationality is the idea that Man himself is rational. Despite the fact that many of our behavioral sciences are founded on this principle, including the dismal science so dear to me, almost all of the observable evidence, scientific and casual, forces one to conclude otherwise. Consider how the way in which the educated Western voting class manages to combine total ignorance with fundamental misconceptions to achieve a higher state of irrational consciousness that is breathtaking in its delusionary confidence, the miracle of aggregation notwithstanding.

Vox, being human himself, would no doubt cheerfully agree that his own writings give us a fair sample of “a higher state of irrational consciousness that is breathtaking in its delusionary confidence,” given his misconceptions and ignorance about such topics as the secular basis for morality, etc. Nevertheless, he’s committing a fallacy here by arguing that, because people sometimes behave irrationally, therefore Man is never capable of being rational. It’s the old false dichotomy: either Man is 100% rational 100% of the time, or Man is not capable of rationality, and therefore atheists are irrational when they think that it’s even possible for anyone (e.g. themselves) to be rational.

Predicated on an unreliable human attribute that may not even exist, rejecting the foundation of Man’s most successful civilization, trusting a notoriously quixotic institution for a miracle as a means of replacing that foundation and refusing to learn from its past disasters, atheism is not so much the basis for an irrational philosophy as for an insane one. Attempting to build a society on reason is like waging a war on terror; the effort is doomed to failure because it’s a category error.

So let’s all just reject reason, and build our society on a solid foundation of irrationality! Hooray! Thinking was hard anyway.

Let’s see, so far the chainsaw has chopped down fundamentalists, believers with morals, Vox himself, all mankind, and Western civilization. What else can he hack? Maybe take another whack at himself? He prides himself on his expertise in history, so it’s kind of fun to watch him take a swipe at the alleged hypocrisy of ancient unbelievers, especially after having identified some obscure 18th century author as “History’s first confirmed atheist.”

This irrational, if pragmatic, compromise between a public nod to morality and its private dismissal is an ancient one. When Socrates taught his students that knowledge is the only good and ignorance the only evil more than 2,000 years ago, he was fully aware of the potentially dangerous repercussions of this teaching and argued in The Republic that it was necessary to keep such virtuous knowledge to the ruling elite. The knowledge of the nonexistence of morality was the great secret to which only the rulers were to be privy and the justification for keeping their subjects in ignorance for their own good, lest the herd break out into rebellion.

The ever-practical Romans understood this too. Seneca the Younger described religion as being regarded as true by the common folk, false by the wise, and useful by the rulers. But as an aristocrat in a cruel and brutal culture, he may have understated religion’s importance to social stability, because it is more than useful for the peaceful maintenance of a civilized society, it is a downright necessity.

I dunno, saying that “religion is…false to the wise” sounds pretty atheistic to me. Not sure what Jean Meslier could have said in the 1700′s to “confirm” his atheism any more clearly, especially since Vox seems to want to accuse Seneca and Socrates of having that same lack of moral foundation that he attributes to atheism.

Anyway, we’re done. As I said, a longish section, and yet for all the sound and fury, still no substance. It was a waste of Vox’s time to have written it, and a waste of any else’s time to read it.

[W]hile the world becomes increasingly scrupulous to all sorts of rights, including the “rights” of animals and even plants (I’m not kidding), it largely ignores the ongoing assault on the most fundamental human right: religious freedom, freedom of conscience.

So while commentators were consumed with the results of California’s Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, they missed what was going at a special assembly of the UN. There, Islamic nations led by Saudi Arabia made progress toward criminalizing blasphemy.

Bit of unconscious irony there: being “consumed” with the results of Proposition Hate is hardly the best example one could find for a world “ignoring the ongoing assault on freedom of conscience.” But he is right to be alarmed by the UN Resolution condemning free speech about religion.

Colson seems particularly concerned with this resolution’s impact on Christianity.

While the declaration urging “respect” for religion, places of worship, and symbols sounds good, Donald Argue and Leonard Leo remind us that appearances are deceiving. These members of the Commission on International Religious Freedom called the declaration a “cleverly coded way of granting religious leaders the right to criminalize speech and activities that they deem to insult religion”—say, like prohibiting conversion from Islam to Christianity.

Given Saudi Arabia’s role in promoting the declaration and the regime’s abysmal record concerning religious freedom, it’s hard to disagree with that assessment. It’s difficult to imagine the Saudis making it easier for individuals to convert to and practice Christianity in their and other Islamic countries.

But while Colson doesn’t mention it, the same could be said for non-Christians seeking freedom of religious conscience in countries with predominantly Christian populations like, oh, say, the USA. One could, for example, take Proposition Hate, or the religious language inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, or the religious motto inscribed on American currency, or any number of state-supported displays of the Ten Commandments, or nativity scenes, or the so-called “war on Christmas,” and conclude that “it’s difficult to imagine America’s Christians making it easier for individuals to convert to and practice non-Christian beliefs in America.”

Substitute “Christian” for “Saudi” and “evangelical” for “Hindu” in Colson’s observation below:

What Saudi clerics and Hindu activists call “respect” is more properly called “religious persecution.” This confusion is the result of what scholar Thomas Farr describes as the failure “to advance religious freedom in any political or cultural sense” around the world.

Sounds familiar, don’t it? Particularly over the past 8 years or so, but going back a lot longer, we’ve had quite a bit of government sponsorship for the notion that “religious freedom” means freedom to submit to Christ as your Savior whenever you want, and for the notion that “respect for religion” means declaring the Christian faith to be superior to all other belief systems, including reality-based beliefs.

Let’s have a look at some of the best stuff Colson has ever written:

What’s needed, as Farr writes in his new book World of Faith and Freedom, is the message that religious freedom is a “precondition for stable self-government.” Government doesn’t give it; government can’t take it away. It “lies at the heart of human dignity” because it recognizes that there are areas where government has no place intruding.

Beams, motes and eyes, Chuck. Let’s start by repealing Proposition Hate and the other Mandatory Fornication Amendments, and move on from there to a government that is truly religiously neutral and which does not endorse or promote Christianity above all else. Then maybe we can presume to lecture other nations on their shoddy support for religious liberty.

But Colson is right about so-called “respect” laws. They’re mega-bad juju, and we need to speak out against them, while we still can.

Voters’ economic status and religious convictions played a greater role than race and age in determining whether they supported the Nov. 4 ballot measure outlawing same-sex marriage in California, a new poll shows.

The ban drew its strongest support from both evangelical Christians and voters who didn’t attend college, according to results released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.

I’m a bit pressed for time today, so I’ll just mention this in passing, but it does confirm what people have been saying all along: Christianity is leading the oppression of gays. It’s not just a harmless, personal belief. It causes people to inflict deep and enduring suffering on others, just to satisfy their own selfish bigotry.

Well, some atheists took that advice to heart, and Dinesh D’Souza would like to give them the “thanks” they deserve.

The central argument of these scientific atheists is that modern science has refuted traditional religious conceptions of a divine creator.

But of late atheism seems to be losing its scientific confidence. One sign of this is the public advertisements that are appearing in billboards from London to Washington DC. Dawkins helped pay for a London campaign to put signs on city buses saying, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Humanist groups in America have launched a similar campaign in the nation’s capital. “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake.” And in Colorado atheists are sporting billboards apparently inspired by John Lennon: “Imagine…no religion…”

There is no claim here that God fails to satisfy some criterion of scientific validation. We hear nothing about how evolution has undermined the traditional “argument from design.” There’s not even a whisper about how science is based on reason while Christianity is based on faith…

[A]theists seem to have given up the scientific card.

Congratulations, framers. You’ve made Christians much happier, now that they can claim you’ve conceded defeat in the scientific realm.

Mind you, D’Souza’s argument itself is nothing new. It’s the same old “privileged planet” superstition that ID creationists have been circulating for years. D’Souza simply takes the opportunity provided by the milder pro-atheistic marketing to pretend that there’s been some new development on the IDC front.

If you want to know why atheists seem to have given up the scientific card, the current issue of Discover magazine provides part of the answer. The magazine has an interesting story by Tim Folger which is titled “Science’s Alternative to an Intelligent Creator.” The article begins by noting “an extraordinary fact about the universe: its basic properties are uncannily suited for life.” As physicist Andrei Linde puts it, “We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible.”

Too many “coincidences,” however, imply a plot. Folger’s article shows that if the numerical values of the universe, from the speed of light to the strength of gravity, were even slightly different, there would be no universe and no life.

Yes, yes, we’ve been hearing this one for years. It’s the puddle in a rocky depression, marveling at how perfectly the depression has been carved out to be exactly the right shape for the puddle to fit in. But it’s still mere superstition, and not science, to arbitrarily attribute all these so-called “coincidences” to a magical, invisible power when you can neither demonstrate any connection between this alleged Designer and the cosmos, nor can you even describe, in non-magical terms, what such a connection would consist of. Describe for us an objectively verifiable chain of causality from your alleged Cause to the observed effect, and then we’ll talk science.

But the point I want to focus on here is the role of milder atheism in helping to promote this superstitious mish-mash. Truth, especially scientific truth, is not a matter of compromise. If Einsteinian physics seems to contradict Newtonian physics, you don’t settle for answers that are halfway between what Einstein predicts and what Newton predicts. That only additional wrong answers. Instead, you need to understand why Einstein and Newton got different answers, and then present the truth—singular and uncompromising—about how physics really works.

Trying to meet creationists halfway on the question of scientific evidence (whether about creation or Creator) only introduces new wrong answers. Like D’Souza’s closing paragraph:

No wonder atheists are sporting billboards asking us to “imagine…no religion.” When science, far from disproving God, seems to be pointing with ever-greater precision toward transcendence, imagination and wishful thinking seem all that is left for the atheists to count on.

That’s right, framers, your polite approach merely proves that you are indulging in imagination and wishful thinking, that you have no actual evidence for your atheism or your Darwinism or your reality-based approach to science at all. The believers gleefully embrace your approach, even as they sneer at you for being such feeble losers. And in the end, you’ve helped them make the credulous, superstitious, creationist position even stronger. They’re placated all right, because they’re winning thanks to you.

Personally, I’d rather tell the truth straight up. And if somebody calls me “shrill” or “harsh,” so be it. I’d rather have the integrity of the truth than the patronizing approval of people like Dinesh D’Souza.

“I do not consider (gays) to be a minority in legal and adjudicated terms, the same way people who only like to eat broccoli with butter aren’t a minority,” said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. “We can’t categorize things according to behavior. It’s based on ethnicity, on who we are rather than what we do.”

Hmm, let’s try that again, shall we?

“I do not consider (Christians) to be a minority in legal and adjudicated terms, the same way people who only like to eat broccoli with butter aren’t a minority,” said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. “We can’t categorize things according to behavior. It’s based on ethnicity, on who we are rather than what we do.”

Time for an amendment defining marriage as a union of two non-Christians?

One of the hallmarks of injustice and oppression is when you have to resort to obvious lies in order to rationalize your behavior. Rodriguez says minorities ought to be defined and protected based “on who we are rather than what we do.” How, then, does he justify discriminating against people who ARE gay? Homosexuality is not a behavior, it is a condition, which is why we say someone IS homosexual instead of saying someone DOES homosexual. Lie Number One, then, is a denial of the fact that homosexuals are being targeted because of what they are. Gays are gay in AND out of the bedroom.

Rodriguez continues by conceding that homosexuality may indeed a matter of what you are rather than what you do:

“Who am I to say that you weren’t born that way … (but) sexual activity, what you do, who you sleep with, is your business,” Rodriguez said. “That’s between you, your lover, and the good God Almighty in heaven. I don’t want to know. Let’s leave sexual activity in the bedroom. The government shouldn’t be legislating what we do behind closed doors between two consenting adults. And to compare it to the African-American struggle, to me that’s an abomination.”

If the government shouldn’t be legislating what we do behind closed doors between two consenting adults, then Rodriguez might have a good argument for why the government shouldn’t be licensing marriage for anyone, gay or straight. But that doesn’t explain why gays are being singled out and forced to choose between mandatory celibacy and mandatory fornication.

The hypocrisy drips off of every word coming out of Rodriguez’s mouth. Your sexual relationships are none of the government’s business, he says. Government shouldn’t be legislating what you do in the bedroom. Yet this is precisely what Proposition 8 and other mandatory fornication amendments do: pass laws designed to penalize people for being attracted to the “wrong” sexual partner—where “wrong” is defined in terms of the homophobic prejudices of some third party who has no business interfering. Lie Number Two: that this isn’t about government oppression of gays.

Lie Number Three is that this is not comparable to institutionalized discrimination against blacks. Answer me this: which would be more discriminatory, an amendment that defined citizenship as a relationship between a nation and a white man, or an amendment that defined marriage as a union of two white people? Would blacks today feel like they had achieved racial equality if they had to give up marriage in order to be accepted as equal members of society? Is it not clear that marital discrimination is just as oppressive as racial discrimination?

Of course, that’s not really a fair question. We shouldn’t be in a situation where we have to ask which form of discrimination is less evil, any more than we should have to decide whether to have an arm chopped off or a leg chopped off. We ought to live in a society where all citizens enjoy the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of the individual differences that may exist between us. It does not matter whether those differences are visible(race), behavioral (religion), or cultural (ethnic).

Christians like Rev. Rodriguez are promoting a dishonest, unprincipled, and pernicious form of self-righteous hypocrisy that goes beyond mere belief and trespasses into actual oppression and injustice. Mandatory Fornication Amendments like Proposition 8 need to be overturned by men and women of conscience and good will. Tolerance may mean we put up with your bigoted and selfish ideas, but it does not mean we should sit idly by and let you persecute those whose only “sin” is being the “wrong” kind of person.

Rise up America, and show the world you have a soul.

[T]he new President will surely need our prayers because he and his administration face huge, serious challenges to the health of our nation and to peace in the world—challenges that, in my opinion, neither he nor any government on earth will have the power to overcome without divine aid.

How has America come to this point? Why is our economy on the brink of disaster? Why is our culture so utterly depraved?

He forgot to add, “And why has it become this way after eight years of leadership by a conservative Christian administration and unprecedented Christian control over laws and constitutions at the state and local level?” But perhaps that question would have ended up being rhetorical.

Colson, of course, wants to blame all this on the atheists.

I can only think of what Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said about the catastrophic consequences of the Russian revolution. “I recall,” he said, “hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Solzhenitsyn was right. Indeed, I can’t find any better explanation for why we Americans find ourselves in the state we are in. We have forgotten God.

That’s true, if by “forgetting God” you mean “electing someone just because he claims to be a conservative Christian, and launching unconstitutional faith-based initiatives to divert taxpayer dollars into private ministries, and amending state constitutions to deny marriage rights to gays just because you’re afraid God won’t approve of something that’s none of your business, and suppressing any research that might be deemed ‘offensive’ to God, and letting your government trample the rights of both foreign and domestic citizens in the name of fighting Islamic terrorism, and so on and so on.”

Christians have been pretty much running the show for the past two presidential terms, and they’re not too happy with how God has “blessed” the results of their efforts. Naturally it’s going to be the atheists’ fault (and never mind that atheists can’t even get elected to office in most cases, let alone run the government).

One of the problems with letting Christians run government is that they always expect God to work with them somehow to produce positive results, and then are shocked and disappointed when He turns out to be unwilling or unable to contribute anything more than what an imaginary friend would. That in itself is a bad pattern, but then to make matters worse, they don’t acknowledge that there’s anything wrong with their approach, or that God has let them down in any way. They blame men for God’s failure to act AND they pretend that they are the real victims here.

The attacks on Christianity these days are only going to intensify in the months ahead. But we must press on all the more to make a winsome witness. Those who would banish Christianity from American life are risking the very survival of American society.

Three-fifths of the states in the US have passed amendments to ban gay marriage. NONE have passed, or even proposed, any amendments, laws, executive orders, or official memos, advocating that Christianity be abolished. There have been those who have recommended that we begin obeying the First Amendment prohibition against using government to establish religion, but that’s a clause that applies equally to all religions, and is not by any means an attempt to “banish Christianity from American life.”

If anything, Christianity has had too much influence on American life, and has enabled our leaders, emboldened by God’s grace and forgiveness, to lead us into torturing our illegally-detained prisoners, and conducting illegal, unwarranted wiretaps on innocent citizens, and paying churches to promote the RNC and its candidates, and suppressing important research that God might not approve of, and denying that God would allow man to so pollute the earth that global warming would be a significant problem, and so on. What we need right now more than anything is a bit more accountability and realism and a bit less self-bestowed divine forgiveness and “inspiration.”

Not that I’m recommending censoring Christianity in any way. In fact I think it would be healthy to let Christians tell us exactly what they believe. If you listen to what they’re saying, and contrast it with what we actually find in the real world, they dig their own graves. Give ‘em all the rope they want, sez I.

But what we need most right now is a bit of truth, honesty, liberty, and justice. Those are the qualities that will get us out of the mess we’re in, if they’re exercised by real people instead of being shuffled off onto some imaginary being to take care of. We’re responsible, individually and collectively, for the quality of our lives, and it’s time we started taking that responsibility and exercising it.

As part of my job, I am often expected to attend and participate in public meetings that are put on either by my employer or by community councils that are affiliated with it. My Canadian employer is considered to be a public organization and the council members are voted in by their respective communities. None are government bodies and none have any religious affiliation or mandate. However, most of these meetings begin and end with a Christian prayer for which all in attendance are asked to stand.

The atheist, not surprisingly, feels uncomfortable about being essentially coerced into assuming a prayer-like posture, as though he were also making superstitious appeals to an imaginary deity. At the same time, the social consequences of opposing the practice could be serious, especially in a small town. The writer asked for advice on what to do, and Ebonmuse turned it over to the commenters for suggestions. I’m a bit late in replying, but I’d like to toss in my tuppence worth.

There are two elements I’d like to focus on in my reply. The first is the importance of standing up for your individual rights and for religious liberty. These are vitally important concepts and absolutely must be protected and preserved, as even religious believers ought to agree. The second is the nature of society, and especially a free society, where individuals who follow different guiding principles need to work together in harmony and tolerance for the benefit of all.

As individuals, we need to demonstrate personal integrity and to be faithful to the principles which our conscience tells us are the right and true principles one needs to live by. Society, however, works best when individuals cooperate, despite differences in their fundamental principles. This means that we need a common set of principles that everyone can adhere to, in good conscience, for the harmonious working of the whole. For the sake of personal liberty, however, we want this set of required common principles to be minimal.

I would propose two principles as being the foundational, common principles that ought to govern our social interactions: mutual respect, and reasonable compromise. So far, I trust, I’m not saying anything that isn’t more or less obvious. Here’s how I would apply it to the situation above:

First of all, I take it this is in Canada, not the United States, so we’re not talking about a First Amendment issue. Let’s just get that out of the way so we don’t get distracted. My advice under the circumstances would be that if you are in a secular meeting that traditionally opens with people rising to pray, the atheist should stand, placing their right hand over their heart, keeping their eyes open and their head unbowed. If anyone notices this non-traditional posture and asks the atheist what it means, he or she should reply:

“I do not pray, and I do not believe it is appropriate to begin secular meetings with public prayer. Nevertheless, I have great respect for the people who do pray, and I stand to show that, despite my personal beliefs, I am willing to stand with my community and to demonstrate my respect for them. I place my hand over my heart as my pledge to do what I can to make this community a better place and to do what I can to make life better for myself and for those around me.”

We live in a polarized society, and that’s not healthy. Christians and other religious people need to learn to make allowances for those whose beliefs are different, but that can be hard to do, and many Christians see that as somehow betraying their faith. By standing during the prayer, and visibly pledging to support the community without sacrificing their personal principles, atheists can lead by example, demonstrating that tolerance can be helpful, non-violent, and principled.

There will, of course, be those who say that this in itself is a compromise (as in a betrayal). But I think that’s the wrong attitude. Society requires minimal compromise on the part of everyone, because that’s just the nature of society. Some people will say, though, that such gestures are futile, and that believers will never follow the good example of the atheists. For some believers, this may be true, but it’s still worth doing, both because it’s the right thing and because it’s the best way to influence the young and the undecided, so that future generations can grow up in a society where freedom is treasured and tolerance is popular.

Some will say that it’s wrong for atheists to surrender the battle for secularizing the secular, and I agree, that would be wrong. But the wise general engages the enemy at the time and place he chooses. We should fight for freedom from the top down, and work for popular support from the ground up. Sometimes it will be appropriate to take a stand and fight a battle, even at the cost of personal hardship and sacrifice, for the greater good. I applaud those who have had the courage to stand up against the tyranny of the majority and against popular injustice, especially when they’ve paid the price and not (yet) seen the fruit of their labor.

This is not going to be easy. It’s going to take many generations and much patience. But I think we can do it, and are doing it. Meanwhile, we need to set a good example and live upright and respectable lives among the believers, both for our own sakes and ultimately for theirs and their children’s. The free society we create for ourselves will be a blessing to us all.

We’re in the last section of Chapter 12 of TIA, in which Vox tries to deny the charge that Aztec human sacrifices is an example of religion leading to a needless loss of human life. Here he is giving us Step One of the three-step tactic.

If one looks at the history of the world, there are two facts which no reasonable man can deny: first, that people do bad things, and second, that religion has been central to people’s lives for as long as history has been recorded. The centrality of religion in past societies means that it has been a mechanism for an amount of these bad things people have done, which occasionally makes it appear that religion is the source of the evil behavior.

Despite the weasel-words (“occasionally makes it appear that religion is the source…”), this is a fair concession that religion and violence do go hand-in-hand at times, and that, far from being an irrelevant fantasy that has nothing to do with how people behave, religion is actually central to many people’s lives and how they live them. Halfway through the second sentence of this section, however, we’re already easing our way into Step Two.

The centrality of religion in past societies means that it has been a mechanism for an amount of these bad things people have done, which occasionally makes it appear that religion is the source of the evil behavior. And while it pains me to make use of a much overused expression, in this case, it is absolutely true that correlation is not causation.

The Unholy Trinity makes no effort to provide any evidence of a causal relationship between religion and the various evils they cite as proof of religion’s historically deadly and venomous nature.

You might think that, since Vox accuses the New Atheists of neglecting to take a detailed look at the relationship between religion and bad behavior, he would rectify the problem by exploring the relationship between religion and bad behavior, in order to see if it was indeed a causal relationship. Instead, what he does is to offer us the fallacious assumption that things only have one cause, and therefore if anything else exists which can be called “the cause,” then religion is not the cause. For example, he excuses Aztec religion from any responsibility for human sacrifice (that is, from causing the practice) by suggesting that it was necessary in order for the minority rulers to keep the majority subjects under control.

A ruling people surrounded and outnumbered by their subjects require a mechanism to enable them to maintain their position of primacy. There is a need to prevent the ratio of the population delta between rulers and ruled from getting out of hand as well as a necessity to inspire enough fear in the subjected populace to prevent it from rebelling on a regular basis.

As in Chapter 5 of TIA, he presents the secular aspects of the situation as though their mere existence proved that religion played no causative role in fact that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were ritually slain by priests in order to secure the favor of the gods. No mention is made of the influence exerted by the religious beliefs of the people (whether they were watching, performing, or being the sacrifices), nor is there any consideration of the question of whether the secular factors would have been sufficient, in the absence of religious support, to enable the deaths. Vox wants us to jump to the conclusion that complex sociological phenomena only have one cause, and that cause was, well, government.

There is an institution that has caused great harm to humanity, which is responsible for nearly all of the wars, all of the mass atrocities and untold human suffering throughout history, but it is not religion. That institution is government. And regardless of whether you consider government to be a necessary evil or the source of all that is good in society, it cannot be denied that it is the institution of government which bears the direct responsibility for every tangible evil that the New Atheists have accused religion of committing.

Forgive me, but I can’t help comparing Vox’s opinions to those of the Apostle Paul:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

This is one of those aspects of religion that Vox studiously ignores: the way religion encourages people to do what this allegedly evil government tells them. If it is true, as he has already conceded, that religion is central to most people’s lives, and if this central, influential religion is telling people to go along with the institution that Vox has identified as being responsible for the evils, then the causal relationship Vox is trying to obscure does indeed exist.

This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg, as far as religion’s political influence is concerned. How many states so far have passed democratically-engineered, Christian-sponsored laws and constitutional amendments designed to deny gays the right to marry their true loves? How many Christians based their presidential votes on their perception of God’s will (and the need to show the heathen God’s wrath on anyone who would dare attack a “Christian nation”?) How many terrorists turn to Allah for the strength and courage they need in order to risk and/or sacrifice their lives in the name of their brothers and sisters in the faith?

Even the most obvious modern example of religion-inspired harm is ultimately a matter of secular power. Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terrorists have attacked the West to achieve a specific military goal, the withdrawal of Western troops from Saudi Arabia and Iraq. And the Muslims now inhabiting the former Christendom are not agitating for the right to practice their religion, but rather to achieve greater political influence in those countries to which they have immigrated.

Once again, if bin Ladin stands to achieve any secular benefits, then Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with why he pursues terrorism, because complex sociological phenomena only have one cause. Or so Vox would have us believe, because he never bothers to explore the deeper question of why bin Ladin finds it so objectionable to have non-Muslim armies on Muslim soil. Bin Ladin is not a government, he is (pardon the expression) a crusader for Islam, and his goal is the glory of God. Even if he could achieve secular dominance in any particular area, he would be pursuing it in order to give Allah the dominion. Vox’s detailed exposition of all the secular aspects of the situation is merely a hand-waving exercise, attempting to distract attention from the religious factors driving bin Ladin’s agenda.

I’ve quoted you step one and step two, but I’m going to spare you the irrelevant details of step three. Vox jumps from the Aztecs to the Mongols to Caesar to the French Huguenots to Sargon II to Alexander the Great to Sherman’s March through Georgia, in a vain attempt to dazzle us with how many secular circumstances he can appeal to. And of course there are a good number, but it’s all a red herring, a way of not looking too closely at the real-world relationship between religion and loss of life. Religious and secular factors do often combine to produce a given result, and where those results are evil, it would be to our benefit to understand the real role religion has played, especially if religion is contributing that extra little something that makes it all happen.

Vox closes with a repetition of Step Two, the fallacious assumption that bad things only have one cause, and therefore that cause was not religion.

Whether God exists or not, whether people believe in the concept of a deity or not, religion is simply incapable of causing great harm to humanity. It can only be a scapegoat, because it does not provide the primary motivation or the means for crime, for war, or for repression and massacre. One might as reasonably blame plate tectonics for creating the physical geography that has played such a significant role in determining historical patterns of conflict. Even on the rare occasions when religion can be positively correlated with the incidence of great harm, a closer examination will usually show that it is neither the controlling nor the causal factor. The individual will to power does not exist because of religion, nor does the institution of government. In neither case is religious motivation required to inspire them to murderous action and there are more historical examples of religion acting as a mitigating force on their lethal proclivities than as an exacerbating one.

Just last week we were looking at Vox’s claim that the Crusades offer Western civilization its only hope of surviving the Muslim onslaught. Whether he meant that in military terms, or whether he meant that the West needs to change the religion of the Muslims, it’s clear that he really does know better than to pretend that “religion is simply incapable of causing great harm.” The existence of secular tools, and secular resources, and secular motivations, does not imply that all religious contributions are insignificant or non-existent. Vox is simply putting on his faith-based blinders, and not allowing himself to see the actual connections between religion and evil. And some would say that that sort of thing, in itself, is an example of religion “causing great harm.”

The discussion in the comments is particularly interesting as different people weigh in with their perspectives.

My first impulse is to say, “No, atheists should not build churches to atheism.” Atheism is a religion the same way not believing in Santa is a religion, and not being Republican is a political party, and not having a job is a career. Trying to force atheism into a religious framework is not going to work; there are going to be conflicts and inconsistencies as people find that they need to define what “atheistic beliefs” are, when atheism is fundamentally a variety of unbelief. If you’ve ever gotten into a discussion over the difference between atheism and agnosticism, you’ll know what I’m talking about here.

On the other hand, I can think of a variety of religions that would be perfectly consistent with atheism, and that would be a great idea. For example, why not worship Alethea? If you want a real God, you can’t beat Alethea. She has all the real power of the gods, She exists at all times and in all places, all wisdom and knowledge reside within Her, She is greater than or equal to any other god AND—unlike so many other gods—She actually shows up in real life. Alethea is the only God you can have evidence-based faith in, and is the God who actually performs all the wondrous works attributed to other gods (or at least the works that actually happened). If you want to build a church that atheists can support, build a temple to Alethea.

The thing is, religion is fundamentally a social mechanism, a way of using natural, social instincts to compensate for the uncertainties and information overload that routinely inundate us. There are too many real-life situations where we can’t hope to think our way through all the myriad and poorly-understood variables; we need to respond based on a feel for things, an approximate, probabilistic pattern-recognition.

Religion taps into our social instincts, which have evolved to cope with the myriad, poorly-understood variables of human social interactions and are thus uniquely adapted to address this particular need. By casting the complexities of life as a metaphorical relationship with a personified “higher power,” we can apply our predictive and adaptive social habits to the problem of coming up with timely and relatively reliable solutions to real-world problems with a large number of factors that are unknown and/or out of our control. And (speaking from experience here) this approach works just as well even if you know it’s just a metaphor.

I’ve prayed to Alethea and had Alethea “answer” my prayers, and it works just as well as praying to Jesus ever did. The personal trust that used to get me through trying times with Jesus’ help still gets me through similar circumstances with Alethea’s help. In fact, Alethea is even better, because I can see Her and I know She’s real, and that I have a solid foundation of real-world experience of Her as the basis for my faith. It’s not something you can analyze or reduce to an algorithm because the whole point of having a God named Alethea is to address the circumstances that cannot be analyzed and reduced to an algorithm. But it works. It’s a myth, not in the sense of being untrue, but in the sense of being a limited approximation of an incomprehensibly greater reality, made more accessible to humans.

This is why a church that tries to build itself around some impersonal concept, like science or freethought or “the cosmos,” will never thrive. It will never be more than an exercise in believer envy, because impersonal religion misses the whole point of having a religion. Without the social approach to analytically intractable problems, the religion has no advantages over non-religious disciplines like math and engineering. What people need and want is a system that takes their natural talent (social instincts) and harnesses it to solve real-world problems, without the difficult and time-consuming calculations and research and experimental testing. To do that, you need a personal deity, even if it’s a frankly mythical one.

I can’t support an atheistic church, but I can support a church that worships reality itself. Religion in and of itself is a healthy and adaptive solution to a genuine psychological problem. (It’s the superstitions and prejudices that taint common religions and inject them with poisonous beliefs and practices.) A practical, open-eyed religion based on reality itself would be a good thing and a positive contribution to society in general and freethought in particular. But it has to have a personal God, or it will never work.

You write that one of the main things motivating your atheism is the fact that you cannot see any compelling reason to believe in God, and you cannot regard faith as reliably as you can empirical evidence in discerning truth.  I suspect you’ve come under the influence of the fact-value distinction, which modernity introduced, largely influenced by the teachings of Immanuel Kant.  I would strongly recommend that you read Pope Benedict’s lecture at Regensburg…  In a relatively short speech, he summarized the great shift that has taken place in western thinking as a result of the Enlightenment and now postmodernism.  Benedict’s case is the same one I would make, and that is that reason always has to rest on faith.  That’s what gives it the objective standards to appeal to.  What happened in the Enlightenment and what we call modernity was the abandonment of the faith presuppositions, leaving reason naked, cold, and ultimately without a foundation.  It was this rejection of sterile reason that has led us to the postmodern era, which rejects both faith and reason.

But the fact-value distinction is false.  All thought begins with faith.  All intellectual inquiry begins with certain presuppositions.  These by necessity are made without evidence and have to be taken on faith.  The idea that evidence is superior to faith as a root to knowledge is one of those presuppositions: it is unproven and non-provable.  So it must be taken as a priori; that is, prior to experience, or in other words, on faith.

In his book, The Faith, Colson expands on this current evangelical fad of bashing postmodernism. Which is not, in itself, a bad thing. Postmodernism claims to have discovered the truth that there is no truth to discover. All that matters is what you believe about something. There is no right or wrong, there is only faith. But is Colson really saying that postmodernism is wrong, or is he advocating the postmodern idea that faith is all that matters?

Let’s take Colson’s claim that all thought begins with faith, and compare it to the principle that the truth is consistent with itself. Is it possible to know what the truth is? If all thought begins with faith, and if reason always has to rest on faith, then the answer is “No, we can never really know the truth.” A conclusion is only as reliable as its premises, and if our premises necessarily are things we believe just because we believe them—if there’s no objective means of determining whose faith corresponds to absolute, objective truth— then there is no such thing as knowledge of the truth. There’s not even partial or approximate knowledge of the truth. The most we can do is to build up a “worldview” in which our conclusions are reasonably consistent with some arbitrary set of premises, without any assurance that any of it has anything to do with real life.

Now, contrast that with the principle that truth is consistent with itself. Is this a principle we have to take on faith alone? No, because both experience and reason teach us that this must be the case: if the truth is not consistent with itself, if truth contradicts itself and has conclusions that have no predictable relationship to the premises, then reason itself is impossible. The fact that we can reason effectively, and that correct reasoning produces reliable results in real-world experience, confirms that we have a premise that is both valid and relevant to the real world.

From this premise of self-consistency, all other conclusions can be derived. We know that “evidence” (i.e. the truth that we discover in the real world) is superior to faith alone (i.e. things we believe even though we can’t find any real-world evidence to support them) because the evidence already is part of the real-world truth, whereas the faith is defined by its failure to show up in real life, or in other words, by its failure to be consistent with the truth. If we could find that real-world connection, the true evidence that was consistent with what we believe, we wouldn’t be calling it faith, we’d call it the conclusion that was most consistent with the evidence.

Colson is therefore quite wrong. Reliable knowledge does have real-world roots that are superior to just making arbitrary presuppositions. Christians, especially in recent times, have begun to outwardly reject the postmodern idea that the truth cannot be known. Like Colson, however, they are quick to embrace it whenever they need to explain why their beliefs fail to be consistent with the available evidence. Science has repeatedly demonstrated its superior accuracy and reliability as a means of knowledge, and only by rejecting the very possibility of reliable knowledge can Christians put faith and fact back on an allegedly equal footing. In so doing, Christians and other believers make themselves the greatest agnostics of all.

I have on two previous occasions written in my blog about the principle of health care provider conscience. Federal law is explicit and unwavering in protecting federally funded medical practitioners from being coerced into providing treatments they find morally objectionable…Today, HHS will file a rule in the Federal Register aimed at increasing compliance with existing federal laws protecting provider conscience. The proposed rule clarifies that non-discrimination rules apply to institutional health care providers as well as to individual employees working for recipients of certain funds from HHS. It requires recipients of certain HHS funds to certify their compliance with laws protecting provider conscience rights. The HHS Office for Civil Rights is designated as the entity to receive complaints of discrimination addressed by the statute or the proposed regulation.

Now, this sounds good to the Religious Right. All the code words are there: this is supposed to be a law designed to allow doctors to deny medical care to women seeking abortions, to gays and lesbians, and to whoever else might be contrary to conservative Christian approval. The problem is, this proposal opens the door to all kinds of abuses that might not be what the Christian supremacists want.

For example, a doctor could decide that diseases are caused by sin and demons, and could legally deny people legitimate medical care in favor of more “spiritual” alternatives like prayer and confession. Or a doctor could uphold an extreme quality-of-life ethic by denying life support to a critically-ill patient. Leavitt’s Loophole could, in fact, open the legal doors for a particularly nasty form of passive euthanasia, by protecting the doctor’s “right” to let a patient die of starvation, dehydration, and oxygen deprivation, with or without the patient’s consent, if in the physician’s personal opinion it would be immoral to allow the patient to continue a pain-filled and hopeless existence.

Leavitt’s Loophole would conclusively settle the Terry Schiavo case, not just for patients as bad off as Terry, but for those who are a lot better off than she was. Passive euthanasia could be effectively legalized, by removing the penalties for doctors denying care, in all 50 states, without a referendum. And the Religious Right is solidly (and blindly) supportive of Leavitt’s Loophole anyway.

Reality-based policies are your best insurance for making sure the laws you pass really serve your best interests. Faith-based government is just a wish and a sigh, and an eventual, inevitable, “oops.”

Jackson’s wardrobe is not the only thing that malfunctioned; so did the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Last Monday the court threw out a $550,000 fine the Federal Communications Commission assessed against CBS. The three-judge panel ruled that the FCC fine was “arbitrary” and “capricious.” Apparently, exposing oneself no longer qualifies as broadcast indecency.

That’s right: the proper function of our criminal justice system is to protect Americans from seeing other people nude. Or partially nude.

In Colson’s eyes, the human body is “filthy” and unwholesome, especially if it’s a female body.

While many Americans are angry at the court, they ought to understand this story is not just about activist judges second guessing the FCC: It is also about a willingness to corrupt. It is not enough, it seems, to make strippers available to those who seek them out in seedy clubs. It is about a desire to expose everyone to filth, whether they want to be exposed to it or not—even innocent children.

In this case, pop performers considered shocking adults and corrupting kids an acceptable price to pay for the publicity and career enhancement. And, indeed, if it did not enhance their careers, it must have amused them to force vulgarity before millions of innocent eyes.

Yep, nothing corrupts a kid like seeing a breast.

Well, frankly, I think Chuck is overreacting just a tad, and so did the people who tried to make CBS pay a half-million-dollar-plus fine just because they were the ones running the cameras at the time. Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” was more an issue of poor taste than some nefarious scheme to “corrupt” innocent children. And “career enhancement”? Please. Jackson and Timberlake have spent a good deal of time and effort since then on damage control and career rescue. If anything, the reaction to the halftime show has made it less likely that we’ll see future repeats of that kind of performance. It’s a self-punishing embarrassment, no legal or judicial penalties needed.

In fact, Colson’s reaction is more likely to corrupt America’s youth than Jackson’s original offense. By portraying the female body as “filth,” and suggesting that the mere sight of a breast is bad for children, Colson is sending a message of rejection and inferiority to women everywhere. Get out your burkas, ladies, some man might be corrupted by the sight of your skin!

Oh, and did I mention? Colson wants his minions to do something:

First, call Senator Harry Reid and ask him to schedule a vote now on Senate Bill 1780, the Protecting Children from Indecent Programming Act. It would cover instances of “fleeting nudity” like the one that so disgusted Super Bowl fans, and caused the Muslim world to mock Western decadence. Then call Senator Jay Rockefeller. He authored the bill, but has showed no willingness to move it. Third, call your own two senators and ask them not only to support the bill, but to urge Senators Reid and Rockefeller to move the bill. It has been passed out of committee; they could vote on it today if they wanted to! We need to let senators know that lip service to traditional values is not enough. Lastly, email FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, and thank him for his strong stand; urge him to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Isn’t that nice? I especially like the part where he links Janet Jackson to 9/11. “You know, the Muslims think our women are too loose, so really 9/11 is the ladies fault for not wearing their burkas.”  Yeah, and they’re not circumcised either. But let me ask this: why would we want American women to have to live up to Muslim standards for “proper” handling of females? Is Saudi Arabia really the moral standard that Colson wants Senators Reid and Rockefeller to establish in this country?

This is America, a Judeo-Christian nation. Why should any employer accommodate the religious preferences of Muslims? Where is the call for separation of church and state in this situation? If these Muslims are not content with the American holidays that their employers offer, they are free to go back to whatever Muslim nation they came from. And you know what, we won’t miss them or their whining for Islamic religious rights or all their lawsuits.

If you were wondering why it’s important to stand up against Christian Supremacists and to fight for our First Amendment freedoms, this is why. All this nonsense about “respecting America’s historical heritage” and such, is just a smoke screen. The real, practical intent of making America a “Christian nation” is so that the power of government can be used to discriminate against those deemed to be non-Christians. Like Muslims, for instance. Or gays.

The problem with this sort of Christian nation is that it turns democracy into a kind of mob rule, and if you belong to a minority, then brother, it sucks to be you. Except that we’re all members of some minority or other. There are more non-Catholics than Catholics, more non-Baptists than Baptists, more non-charismatics than charismatics. Ultimately, every individual is a minority of one.

Besides, if the government is really going to promote Christian supremacy over other religions, it must first decide what Christianity is so that it knows what to promote. Do conservatives really want the Christian faith to be defined for them by Congress? By Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank?

Christians have been toying with spiritualizing their government for 2,000 years, and in 2,000 years the attempt has never succeeded in improving the spirituality of the state and never failed to corrupt and secularize the religion behind the effort. According to the Pentateuch, it took the Israelites 40 years to catch on to God’s will well enough that they were fit to enter the Promised Land and become His chosen nation. Those ancient Jews were downright prodigies compared to those who still haven’t caught on, despite 2,000 years experience of God refusing to bless the mingling of church and state.

Our founding fathers did catch on, fortunately, which is why the very first amendment to the Constitution is an amendment telling the government to make no law either for or against religion. America has a pretty spotty track record as far as actually respecting that prohibition (as witness the motto on our currency and the theistic interpolation into the Pledge). But that commitment to liberty and to religious neutrality, even though only partially enforced, has enabled us to benefit from the talent and hard work of people from all cultures, faiths, and ethnic backgrounds, and thus to become a great nation.

Sadly, that neutrality has been seriously eroded lately, and we’re paying the price. But we can recover, provided we speak up and stand up to oppose the Christian Supremacy movement wherever it rears its ugly head. State-sponsored (and thus state-defined) religion is a great detriment to any nation, and even believers ought to be eager to keep themselves unstained by it.

In a friend-of-the-court brief filed today, Americans United and allied religious leaders and organizations take issue with a federal court decision allowing Utah officials to place crosses along highways to memorialize state highway patrol officers who have died in the line of duty.

State officials insisted that the Christian symbol is a secular symbol and can be used regardless of the personal religious beliefs of the officer being honored.

Did you catch that? The state of Utah is telling mainstream Christians that the Cross is no longer their symbol. Nope, it’s been secularized. It has nothing to do with the Gospel, or with paying the penalty for sin, or even with anticipating the Resurrection. All a cross means is death. You walk into a Christian church, you see a big cross up front, and according to the state of Utah, all it means is that someone died in church.

We saw this earlier with the Supreme Court decision upholding the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. According to Justice O’Connor, the reference to America as “one nation under God” is mere “ceremonial deism.” Officially, by declaration of the U. S. Supreme Court, the God we are all under is an absentee God, completely irrelevant to our lives except to the degree that we make Him relevant by constructing patriotic ceremonies that refer to Him in some way. There is no heaven, nor any hell to be saved from, thus no need for a savior or for forgiveness of sins.

It’s easy to tear down the wall of separation between church and state. All you need to do is abandon your religious beliefs, and turn your faith into a hollow and meaningless fossil. If you think that’s a bad thing, then you should remember that, based on 2,000 years of experience mingling church and state, our founding fathers thought we needed that wall. It’s there to protect the church.

It is all about equal rights, the gay “marriage” lobby keeps telling us. We just want the right to marry, like everyone else.

That is what they are telling us. But that is not what they mean. If same-sex “marriage” becomes the law of the land, we can expect massive persecution of the Church.

And therefore the oppression of gays must be allowed to continue unopposed.

Remember how they used to tell us that gays weren’t really being persecuted, and that separate-but-equal “civil unions” were a fair compromise that gave gays the same domestic benefits as an official marriage? Well that was a lie, as Colson explains to us now. Civil unions are not even close to being marriage, and upgrading gay relationships from civil unions to full marriages is going to involve some major and significant differences. Quoting his friend Jennifer Roback Morse, Colson writes:

“Legalizing same-sex ‘marriage’ is not a stand-alone policy . . . Once governments assert that same-sex unions are the equivalent of marriage, those governments must defend and enforce a whole host of other social changes.”

The bad news is these changes affect other liberties we take for granted, such as religious freedom and private property rights. Several recent cases give us a sobering picture of what we can expect if we do not actively embrace—and even promote—same-sex “marriage.”

Clearly, civil unions are nowhere near what legal marriage is, and Christians like Colson want to keep it that way. They’re afraid that if we ever stop discriminating against gays, Christians will lose liberties they’ve been taking for granted. Like the freedom to discriminate against gays. And, according to Colson, these liberties are already under assault.

For instance, a Methodist retreat center recently refused to allow two lesbian couples to use a campground pavilion for a civil union ceremony. The state of New Jersey punished the Methodists by revoking the center’s tax-exempt status—a vindictive attack on the Methodists’ religious liberty.

Hmm, the state revoking a church’s tax exempt status for refusing to allow a lesbian civil union? Oh wait, it wasn’t a church, it was a Methodist “retreat center”—a separate institution affiliated with the Methodists, but not a church in and of itself. And, as the NY Times reports, Colson isn’t telling the whole story here.

Since 1989, Ocean Grove’s beach, boardwalk and oceanfront road have received tax-exempt status under the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Green Acres Program, which was created to encourage use of privately owned space for public recreation and conservation. In its original application for the exemption — which saves the group about $500,000 a year and is up for renewal on Sept. 15, according to Bernard Haney, the Neptune Township tax assessor — the association noted that the properties were open to the public and that the pavilion had been used by outside groups.

Some see an inherent conflict between the association seeking tax-exempt status as a public open space with one state agency while suing another state agency for violating its rights as a private religious group.

Gee, ya think? So here’s a cherished Christian liberty that is being threatened by gay rights: the freedom to defraud the government by claiming to provide open, public access to facilities while simultaneously denying access to groups they disapprove of for religious reasons. Let’s look at the next outrage being perpetrated against those poor, docile believers.

In Massachusetts, where judges imposed gay marriage a few years ago, Catholic Charities was ordered to accept homosexual couples as candidates for adoption. Rather than comply with an order that would be harmful to children, Catholic Charities closed down its adoption program.

Seriously, he said that Massachusetts judges imposed gay marriage. He doesn’t mention exactly which men were forced to marry each other against their will, or which women were ordered to take each other to bed, but perhaps that’s because nothing like that ever happened. And meanwhile, what does this have to do with adoption? Again, Colson fails to tell the whole story.

In compliance with the commonwealth’s so-called antidiscrimination laws, the Catholic adoption agency, Catholic Charities of Boston, has already placed children with same-sex couples over the past 20 years.

The above quote, from a pro-Christian, anti-gay web site (notice the “so-called” in front of the word “antidiscrimination”), shows quite clearly that the Catholic Charities decision had nothing to do with the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts. They have been legally obligated to provide non-discriminatory adoption services for two decades, because of laws passed long before gay marriage was legalized there.

So Christian liberty number two, the freedom to make innocent children pay for Christian bigotry, and to use them as mere pawns in a political struggle over the right to discriminate, is also at risk. Christian liberty number three, the freedom to promote anti-gay prejudice in public schools, is also under attack, in California. Colson, however, mentions this only briefly on his way to Canada, where the next example of anti-Christian “persecution” comes from. (Evidently he ran out of American examples and had to import some from other countries.)

Just north of the border in Quebec, the government told a Mennonite school that it must conform to provincial law regarding curriculum—a curriculum that teaches children that homosexuality is a valid lifestyle. How long will it be before the U.S. government goes after private schools?

Yeah, imagine the government telling a private Muslim school it wasn’t allowed to teach that God wants Jews and Christians to be converted to Islam by force, or killed if they refuse. Christian liberty number four, the freedom to promote intolerance and discrimination through private education, is definitely in danger in America, because of what Quebec is telling Mennonite schools. Next?

Even speaking out against homosexuality can get you fired. Crystal Dixon, an associate vice president at the University of Toledo, was fired after writing an opinion piece in the Toledo Free Press in support of traditional marriage . . . Fired—for exercising her First Amendment rights!

Um, yeah, “support of traditional marriage.” What she actually wrote was that she could never wake up one morning and decide not to be black, but gays (she claimed) can stop being gay any time they want, and therefore do not deserve to have their civil rights protected. If that’s “traditional marriage” then traditional marriage is just a code phrase for discrimination, intolerance, and outright lying.

Now, as to whether this did indeed violate her First Amendment rights, I can’t say. People say stupid stuff all the time, and (as Don Imus found out) sometimes have to bear the consequences of intolerant speech. But as a general, liberal principle, I have to say that Colson finally got one right: the Christian freedom to say hateful and untrue things against gays is indeed at risk and deserves to be protected. What it needs to be protected from, however, is not gay rights, but a more general disdain for individual liberty, as expressed in the First Amendment and as threatened by anti-gay Christians like Dixon (and Colson).

Promoters of same-sex “marriage” seem to go out of their way to target Christian businesses and churches. Their goal, it seems, is not the right to “marry,” but to punish anyone who disagrees with them.

No, Chuck, they’re targeting those who are actively engaged in practicing discrimination and oppression against them. The only “rights” that are being threatened are the “right” to be bigoted, oppressive, and intransigent. If you feel punished whenever anybody won’t let you deny others the same freedoms you yourself enjoy, then perhaps you should be punished. If you can’t take it, then don’t dish it out.

After the California Supreme Court’s infamous ruling that approved gay “marriage” two months ago, pro-family advocates talked endlessly for the need to strengthen the institution of marriage at the national level with a federal amendment.

Last week, pro-family groups finally saw their prayers answered when Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi re-introduced the Federal Marriage Act in the Senate for the first time since it stalled in the House nearly two years ago.

The measure, which reads, “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman,” would effectively outlaw gay “marriage” if it reaches a two-thirds majority approval in Congress.

It would also mark the second time in US history that a Christian-led political movement modified the Constitution to diminish its protection of individual liberty, contrary to the core principles on which this great nation was founded.

Pro-family groups said they were upbeat about the bill, while emphasizing its importance in protecting families.

Notice, they never seem to explain what it is that families are being protected from.

“Children are best served by having both a mother and a father,” said Tom McClusky, vice president for government affairs at the Family Research Council, in a statement.

“To deprive a child of [that] is something that no government should be trying to push,” he added.

Children are also best served by having parents who don’t feed them full of superstitious bunkum about God. If we’re going to amend the Constitution to outlaw sub-optimal child-rearing, let’s start by banning Christianity. But since when do parents have to be perfect in order to have kids?

Not that this has anything at all to do with whether or not homosexuals should be allowed to pick their own spouses, of course. Homosexuals already adopt children, legally, and allowing them to marry would not change this. This is pure smoke-and-mirrors intended to distract attention from the fact that the Anti-Marriage Act is simply spite: an attempt to punish gays for being the wrong thing.

As I’ve said before, the difference between justice and oppression is that justice punishes you for doing the wrong thing and oppression punishes you for being the wrong thing. If you murder someone and go to jail, you’re being punished for doing the wrong thing. This new Anti-Marriage Amendment is a punishment against gays for simply being something that Christians don’t approve of. Our Constitution was designed to protect minorities against just such instances of mob tyranny, and people like Roger Wicker ought to be invited to emigrate to Iran or some other place where God’s law is the law of the land. If you can’t stand freedom, you’re free to leave. Sez I.

Here, for example, is Chuck Colson, fantasizing about What McCain Could Have Said to Ellen Degeneres on the subject of gay marriage.

McCain’s response? “I just believe in the status of a marriage between a man and a woman . . . We just have a disagreement.”

Maybe, given the sensitivity of the situation, that was the best answer Senator McCain could come up with. But suppose the senator and Ms. DeGeneres could talk backstage, away from the glare of TV lights. What could he say to seize the moral high ground? To start, he could discuss the true meaning and purpose of marriage.

Degeneres, of course, should have pointed out that she was not using her disagreement with McCain to try and deprive McCain of the freedom to marry the one he loves. But back to Colson. What is this “moral high ground” he wants to conquer? Quoting Princeton professor Robert George, he says:

[M]atrimonial law reflects a moral judgment. That judgment is that marriage is inherently heterosexual, monogamous, and permanent—a union of one man and one woman. This judgment is based on both the biblical and natural law understandings—that marriage is a two-in-one flesh communion of persons. This communion is consummated and actualized sexually.

If Colson thinks the Bible teaches monogamous marriage, he has not read the Old Testament! King Solomon, for instance, had enough wives and concubines to keep him meeting new people in bed for going on three years. And nowhere does the Bible say anything about polygamy being immoral. Polygamy just went out of fashion. But I digress…

Colson tries to seize the moral high ground by arguing for traditional, heterosexual monogamy, but he soon lapses into confused self-contradiction.

[M]arriage is made real by acts that are reproductive, whether or not these acts result in children. They unite the spouses as a single procreative unit. This organic unity is achieved even by infertile couples. Only a mated pair can be a complete organism capable of human procreation.

So what makes a marriage into a “marriage” is procreation, or at least the physical possibility of procreation, which even infertile couples have even though they lack the physical possibility of procreation. Wait, what? Colson seems to be saying that what makes a sexual experience “reproductive” is not whether it involves any actual reproduction, but whether it involves heterosexual partners. So in other words, his argument is claiming that true marriage requires heterosexual union because only heterosexual union is true marriage. This is called “assuming your conclusion” in Intro to Logical Fallacies class.

I can already hear the arguments your secular neighbors will make: “Okay,” they will say, “that’s your definition of marriage. But why should your views be imposed on everybody else?”

That is when we have to be ready with additional, non-religious arguments for traditional marriage.

Translation: that is why we need to be ready to blow smoke out our posteriors and try and confuse people with secular-sounding goobledy-gook.

For instance, if we expand the meaning of marriage to include same-sex partnerships, on what grounds could we legitimately oppose marriages between three or more people? Or weddings between siblings?

God forbid people today should participate in the kind of marital relationships the Old Testament saints enjoyed, eh? Do tell, let’s hear more about how those so-called Bible heroes were actually promoting immorality and corruption. Hey Mr. Colson, have you ever considered the possibility that it just might not be any of your damn business who someone else marries? You can disapprove of it all you want, but you have no right to oppose (i.e. pass laws against) how someone else chooses to live their life, or whom they choose to live it with. “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” remember? “Inalienable rights,” it says. Look it up.

Since the beginning of recorded history, virtually every society and every major religion has revered and protected traditional marriage. Why? It is the institution that produces, nurtures, protects, and civilizes children. And marriage is the cornerstone of society’s foundational institution: the family.

And therefore we need to pass laws preventing two people from uniting into a married couple, and thus a family. Wait, what? If marriage is the cornerstone of the family, and the family is the foundation of society, why is Colson trying to prevent marriages?

It all goes back to cultural greed. Colson can’t be satisfied with his own religious liberty; his faith demands that he rob other people of theirs. Only by hoarding all the religious freedom to themselves can Christians like Colson reassure themselves that their erratic and vengeful deity isn’t going to pop off a few judgments that—oops, sorry!—blow away True Believers along with the infidels. Having lived so long with faith, and experienced so much of what they piously refer to as God’s “mysterious ways,” they don’t dare entrust their well-being into His care. So they have to be greedy.

The problem is, greed like this can never be satisfied. Success just makes the greedy greedier. Once gays have nothing left to steal, do you think your rights and liberties will be safe?

As Barack Obama broadens his outreach to evangelical voters, one of the movement’s biggest names, James Dobson, accuses the likely Democratic presidential nominee of distorting the Bible and pushing a “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution.

JERUSALEM – Some have been taking issue with largely unnoticed comments made last year by Sen. Barack Obama declaring the U.S. is “no longer a Christian nation” but is also a nation of others, including Muslims and nonbelievers.

The comments have been recently recirculating on Internet blogs.

Don’t you just love that dateline? “And now the latest from JERUSALEM, the land where Jesus once walked…” Is that supposed to lend some kind of special anointing to the story, or what?

Despite whatever special magic you get by reporting from Jerusalem, it’s apparent that the reporter isn’t too good at reading comprehension.

At the speech, Obama also seemingly blasted the “Christian Right” for hijacking religion and using it to divide the nation:

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked. Part of it’s because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us,” he said.

Notice: Obama’s remarks concern a relative handful of men, the leaders of the Christian Right, but the reporter tries to make it sound like Obama is attacking all conservative Christians.

Not to belabor the obvious, but the way you become a leader of the Christian Right is by becoming a leader who mingles religion and politics, i.e. by making religion a political issue and politics a religious issue—in short, by making “sectarian” equal “partisan.” And that’s what has actually happened: a relatively small number of religious leaders have politicized their faith and exploited it to create partisan divisions in the church and in society. So Obama is making a very clear, targeted reference to the specific (and unchristian) actions of a small group of men.

Obama’s remarks actually echo the Biblical injunctions of the Apostle Paul. “If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil. 2:-14). “I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought” (I Cor. 1:10).

Now granted, the Christian faith has always had its divisions and internal struggles, but still, is it really so bad for Obama to aspire to the same kind of unity and cooperation as Paul once endorsed? Christians certainly should not think so, but there’s just one problem. Obama is one of “them,” you see. Whenever one of “them” calls on Christians to follow Biblical injunctions, it’s got to be some kind of trick.

“This won’t play well in the Bible Belt,” commented the [Gateway Pundit] blog in a recent posting.

Still, WND deserves some credit for reporting at least some of the truth about what Obama actually said.

“Whatever we once were, we’re no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers,” Obama wrote in an e-mail to CBN News senior national correspondent David Brody.

“We should acknowledge this and realize that when we’re formulating policies from the state house to the Senate floor to the White House, we’ve got to work to translate our reasoning into values that are accessible to every one of our citizens, not just members of our own faith community,” wrote Obama.

That is pure genius. In pointing out this irreducible foundation of free and civilized society, Sen. Obama has highlighted the active ingredient that once made America great, and might—potentially—make us a decent nation once again.

[B]uying stocks is essentially betting on the future of the economy, and the best guide to that future is the actions of policymakers and financial markets. Correct?

Well, not necessarily. There is another—arguably more reliable—predictor of economic health: demographics…

In other words, future prosperity is determined, to a significant degree, by the number of children being born today.

In hindsight, this ought to be obvious: Consumer spending drives the economy. The more people you have in their peak spending years, the more spending you have on everything from housing, to travel, and taxes paid. As a population ages, it spends less.

The ultimate cause of this problem? An amazingly simple one.

But, as Spengler and others have pointed out, the root of the problem is “the decline of religious faith.” Loss of faith in the world to come leaves us grasping for everything we can get in this one, even at the expense of future generations.

Myself, I’m going to reserve judgment on whether or not the problem even exists. Clearly, the movie that Colson saw impressed him very much, and gave him enough material for 3 separate blog posts. The “facts” he cites, however, seem a bit inconsistent. First of all, it’s hard to pinpoint “lack of faith” as the root cause when you’ve got religious leaders like Jesus telling us, “do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” Religious people aren’t any better than any other group in terms of anticipating future problems and making sacrifices today in order to forestall them. If the response to global warming is any indication, they might even be worse.

Secondly, it’s hard to take “declining population” as a serious threat when the other big “problem” conservatives are ranting on about is the “inundation” of Mexicans and other would-be immigrants just barely being kept at bay by our Homeland-defending Border Patrol. Colson’s answer is that Mexico, too, and other 3rd-world countries, are also facing a declining birth rate.

In 1965, the average Mexican woman gave birth to seven children. Today, it is 2.1—the same as their American counterparts. It is estimated that, within the next several decades, Mexico’s population will be older than ours.

This is part of a worldwide trend. We usually associate low birth rates with the industrialized nations. But according to Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, up to half of the world’s population lives in countries with below-replacement level fertility.

Thus, it is not only Japan; it is Korea, China, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka . . .

In other parts of the world, the threat may be graver. In 1980, Iran’s birth rate was 6.5 births per woman. Today, it is 1.7 births per woman—well below replacement level.

The problem with these statistics (aside from the lack of documentation) is that they rather contradict Colson’s claim that the problem is loss of religious faith. Mexico, for example, is still pretty heavily Roman Catholic, and Iran is not exactly famous as a hotbed of atheism.

Birth rates are influenced by a number of factors, of which the economic environment is a major influence. Who wants to give birth to a baby that’s just going to starve to death after depleting a family’s already-strained resources? Hope, and not selfishness, is the major criterion by which people decide whether or not to have children. You have kids because you hope they will do well and bring you happiness.

And let’s not dismiss hope as just another form of selfishness. You can be just as selfish in deciding to bless yourself with a “quiver full” of offspring as in deciding to forego the chance to have someone to take care of you in your old age. Is it selfishness which leads priests and nuns to pursue a vow of chastity? (Ok, maybe it is, but would Colson admit it? Either way, it doesn’t look like the “loss” of religious faith is the real problem here.)

Ultimately, Colson’s fear-mongering is just another thinly-veiled excuse to insinuate that Christians (i.e. his kind of Christians) are better people than everybody else. People who “lose” his religious values and faith-based worldview are people who become selfish, and who throw away the future for the sake of materialistic indulgence. Never mind that the true causes are complex and that the “religious values” only change how people justify their selfish behavior. If it hypes the faith and disses the doubter, it’s all good.

If this were indeed a problem, I personally would be more inclined to follow the advice of someone who wasn’t quite so sure that some deus ex machina necessarily has to get us out of any jam we might bring upon ourselves. Let’s see this “problem” show up on the real-world radar, and not just as a self-congratulatory smear against non-believers. If Colson is right, and this is a genuine problem, then it’s going to affect all of us, and we ought to be working together to understand it and resolve it. Merely exploiting it for faith-based propaganda, however is counter-productive. And selfish.

Christians often say “love the sinner, hate the sin” when expressing their stance on homosexuality. But the new leader of the Southern Baptist Convention wants to offer something different.

“Why don’t we love the homosexual and hate OUR sin?” said Georgia pastor Johnny M. Hunt as he cited Jay Strack, founder of Student Leadership University.

Why that would be like admitting that nobody’s perfect and that we ought to be tolerant of other people’s differences! Can this really be coming out of the Southern Baptist Convention?

Hunt was elected last week to lead the largest Protestant denomination in the country. His election by nearly 53 percent of the votes of Southern Baptist messengers, or delegates, reflected a tide-turning moment for the denomination as it has begun to move away from bantering and toward encouragement.

(Aside: “away from bantering“? The SBC is cutting back on light, playful repartee?)

“There seemed to be … less of what we’re fighting against and more of what we all stand for,” said Sam Rainer, a pastor and president of Rainer Research, in his latest blog post, as he reflected on last week’s annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The 16-million member convention is growing its ministry to help those in the gay and lesbian lifestyle and train churches in how to respond to homosexuality. Bob Stith, who heads SBC’s Ministry to Homosexuals Task Force, says the ministry has received “tremendous support” from the denominational leadership. But he’s having some trouble with the local SBC churches.

This is a common problem among Bible-believing institutions. In order to cope effectively with the real world, you have to make certain accommodations to reality itself. This inevitably turns out to involve increasing liberalism and tolerance, and less reliance on superstition and dogma. Unfortunately, that tends to provoke the yokels the institution needs for its financial and material support. In this case, however, the SBC shouldn’t have too much to worry about, as their newfound “tolerance” is merely bait to lure in gays so they can be converted and convicted about their “sinful lifestyle.”

“I think the Christian faith has not done as good a job as we ought to of reacting redemptively toward people who are caught in the web of the homosexual lifestyle,” said Dr. Richard Land, president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, during an informal dialogue at the annual meeting. “These people are not beyond the grace of God and they need the grace of God. We need to reach out to them.”

While reaching out, Southern Baptists continue to stand firm on the stance that homosexual behavior is a sin.

A recent survey by LifeWay Research showed that 100 percent of SBC pastors said they believe homosexual behavior is sinful. Among a small sample of SBC messengers at the annual meeting in Indianapolis, 91 percent agreed.

So while the SBC is making a teensy step in the right direction, this isn’t really good news for gays. The SBC is responding to news that homophobic Christians are giving Christianity a bad name, and they’re trying to change their packaging to make themselves look more appealing. Inside the box, however, the contents are still just the same.

Their unified stance was also reflected when they overwhelmingly adopted a resolution that rejected the California Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex “marriage.” The resolution calls Southern Baptists to support a ballot initiative defending traditional marriage, encourages pastors to speak “strongly, prophetically and redemptively concerning the sinful nature of homosexuality,” and reaffirms the denomination’s “consistent support of the biblical definition of marriage as an exclusive union between a man and a woman.”

Bottom line: they want people to think they’re more loving and tolerant of gays, even as they work behind the scenes to pass laws and constitutional amendments intended to prevent gays (Christian or not) from having the freedoms that are such a vital part of the “life, liberty, and pursuite of happiness” our founding fathers hailed as “inalienable rights.”

And they wonder why outsiders question their sincerity and honesty.

More than 6,000 Christians have met for an evening of prayer focusing on gang crime in Greater Manchester.

Police chiefs, community leaders and politicians attended the event at Manchester Velodrome, organised by church group City Links.

They were asked to pray for police forces and the reduction of gang crime.

…Chief Superintendent Neil Wain [said] “…By working and praying together to reduce crime and disorder we not only change the physical circumstances that affect people’s everyday lives but we change the spiritual circumstances.

“As a police officer and a Christian I know that this work can and will impact on our communities.”

Just keep watching those crime rate charts: the gang violence rate is going to plunge dramatically any minute now.

…

Aaaaannnnnny minute now….

…

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnny minute….

…

Christians are more likely than atheists to oppose abortion. This is because we have always been more outspoken against racism than our atheist counterparts.

Oh, yes, ending racial discrimination is exactly what the pro-life movement is all about.

But wait, there’s more!

I have never met a Christian who opposed stem cell research. Every Christian I know supports adult stem cell research because it has produced 73 clinically proven applications – many of which are outright cures of known diseases.

And more!

It is very difficult to take Sam Harris seriously when he declares that “both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with Nazi genocide.” Obviously, whatever sins of omission the churches may have committed in the past with regard to Nazi genocide are now being atoned for by Christian opposition to Planned Parenthood’s genocide against black America.

Um, no, sorry, “genocide” does not mean “affirming that women of every race have a right to sovereign control over what happens to their own bodies.” Even if it did, stifling women’s rights today is not a valid way to atone for having “patriotically” supported government-sponsored atrocities in the past (especially when American Christians today are still supporting government suppression/violation of human rights in the name of so-called patriotism).

Of course, both relevant concepts – the “sin of omission” and “racial equality” – are derived from the New Testament (James and Galatians, respectively).

Well, no again, sorry. James didn’t invent the idea that it was sinful to fail to do good things; even in the Bible he was preceded by the prophet Amos, among others. And the idea of owing good behavior to the gods and to one another is a notion that dates back to prehistoric times. Nor did Paul invent the idea of racial equality. Galatians does not even mention the topic, anachronistic reinterpretations of Gal. 3 notwithstanding.

Let me digress a moment because this is an oft-misrepresented passage. Gal. 3:28 says “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Christian apologists like to present this in as though it were written in the context of our modern, more humanistic ideals, as though Paul were obliquely hinting that slaves (and women) had equal rights. Notice, however, that if we look at the historical context in which these words were written, Paul was not denying that differences and inequalities existed, he was merely denying that these differences ought to be seen as important in the light of the Gospel plan of salvation. “There is neither slave nor free,” but he still commanded slaves to obey their masters (Eph. 6:5-8). And if indeed there is “neither male nor female,” then why all the fuss over the definition of marriage? And why do Christians still teach, as Paul taught, that wives are to submit to their husbands, and are not to exercise authority over a man? Equal, yes, but in Paul’s day some Christians were clearly more equal than others. He was not laying the foundation for modern humanism. He was just trying to sell the gospel to a bigger market.

Back to Adams. He’s upset because other, less overtly-Christian nations, have better government programs for health and welfare (i.e. charitable works). No fair! he cries.

Socialist nations obtain funding for large social welfare programs not through “devotion” that could be deemed “charitable.” They obtain funds through taxation enforced at the point of a gun. Those who do not contribute are not deemed to be “uncharitable” but, instead, “criminal.”

Never mind that this results in much more reliable funding for urgently needed programs. That would benefit the needy, but all Adams cares about is who gets the credit for doing “good works.” (Didn’t Jesus have something to say about that?) And notice the implication that the government is robbing its citizens (at gunpoint, no less!) by providing these benefits at taxpayer expense. No fair! Adams wants needy people to have to depend on his personal generosity. That way, he has the power, muahahahaha! Bow before me and grovel, you sick and elderly! Ha!

Adams started off by complaining about not being able to tell the difference between dishonesty and ignorance, but that won’t stop him from using ignorance as a rebuttal to Harris’s observation that Christians use natural disasters (like the Christmas tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands) to claim that God is judging people for sins like homosexuality and abortion.

I don’t know any Christians who thought God was sending a coded message when the tsunami struck. Perhaps some televangelist said something to the effect but, if so, I am not aware of it. Like most Christians, I ignore televangelists.

That’s a good plan, except it doesn’t go far enough The people making the God->Tsunami connection, however, were more likely to be ordinary rank and file believers. Maybe a few televangelists did pile on, but let’s face it, people don’t need to be led to that kind of superstitious conclusion. They jump to it, so much so that if you search for “god tsunami” you’re likely to find remarks by more liberal preachers trying to argue against it rather than for it.

But what I do know is that my church took up an offering for the victims. And several members of our church went overseas to help the victims. I have no recollection of any help coming from any atheists I know. And I know a lot of atheists – most of them giving only when the government forces them to do so.

Some Christians like to do the kind of good works they can brag about, but just because atheists don’t work that way doesn’t mean that there aren’t compassionate secular individuals and organizations involved in meeting the needs of the victims. Not to denigrate believers, of course—believers do make a tremendous contribution (and are able to do so because, unlike God, they actually show up to help). They don’t even have to be Christians. Muslims, Jews, and Hindus all respond similarly. But Adams does unbelievers an injustice by implicitly discounting their involvement.

Of course, Adams has a familiar trump card up his sleeve, just in case. The old “I was once an atheist” card.

During that dark time of my life I gave nothing to charity. I did no volunteer work. Instead, I railed against the political establishment and demanded radical changes that would move the country drastically further to the left. I demanded radical leftist tax and welfare schemes that I knew would never be accepted by a majority of the American people. But by making those arguments I was able to deceive myself into thinking I was a superior moral being. There was no real chance I would have to deal with the consequences of my ideas.

And how awful those consequences would have been, right? You know, really bad stuff like affordable health care and reliable revenue streams for charitable work. Fortunately that awful fate was averted and we can enjoy the pleasant tones of people in need begging for help and living from day to day on the uncertain benevolence of others. Not too pleasant for them, of course, but after all, they deserve it, right? If they were good people, God would be blessing them instead of making them suffer. Stands to reason.

I see a similar self-deceit and narcissism in the writings of Sam Harris. And I know there is only One solution.

And that solution is to agree with whatever superstitions Adams happens to believe in. Yeah, yeah, we got that, thanks.