Happy news!

Look at what’s happening to the opinion on religion in our country:

Historically, the percentage of Americans who said they had no religious affiliation (pollsters refer to this group as the “nones”) has been very small — hovering between 5 percent and 10 percent.

However, Putnam says the percentage of “nones” has now skyrocketed to between 30 percent and 40 percent among younger Americans.

Putnam calls this a “stunning development.” He gave reporters a first glimpse of his data Tuesday at a conference on religion organized by the Pew Forum on Faith in Public Life.

It’s a poll, so it doesn’t say much about causes, but I can guess that two factors have been at work: that religion has become associated with the spectacular failure of reactionary conservative politics, and that at the same time, atheists have become more vocal and made the option of avoiding religion altogether viable. I suspect the former is more directly causal, but don’t discount the latter — young people aren’t leaving their obnoxious old church to find a new church, they are leaving the whole rotten shebang altogether.

Mormon ghoulishness exposed

Five months before the election, and thirteen years after her death, the Mormon Church posthumously baptized Barack Obama’s mother into their church. This is a common practice. It’s harmless and stupid, but it does highlight the fact that the church is a collection of ghouls. They’re also chronic liars about it all.

Mormon Church spokeswoman Kim Farah said that “the offering of baptism to our deceased ancestors is a sacred practice to us and it is counter to Church policy for a Church member to submit names for baptism for persons to whom they are not related. The Church is looking into the circumstances of how this happened and does not yet have all the facts. However, this is a serious matter and we are treating it as such.”

She’s lying. The church is slack about who submits the names — they maintain vast genealogical records, records that are continually growing as they scavenge the world for more information, and they rather freely toss the names into the baptismal font.

They only regard it as a serious matter because they’ve been caught at it. It’s one good sign: they have a little bit of shame left. But, you know, it’s kind of like visiting the graveyard and discovering that a ghoul has dug up your grandma; maybe he looks a bit abashed and quickly hides a gnawed-upon femur behind his back, but that wins him no sympathy and you still have to choke back your disgust and revulsion, and resist the urge to kick him until he is bruised and bloody.

The Eagleton Delusion

The other day, I read this fawning review by Andrew O’Hehir of Terry Eagleton’s new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, and was a little surprised. I’ve read a smattering of Eagleton before, and the words “brisk, funny and challenging” or “witty” never came to mind, and the review actually gave no evidence that these adjectives were applicable in this case. I felt like ripping into O’Hehir, but was held up by one awkward lack: I hadn’t read Eagleton’s book. Who knows? Maybe he had found some grain of sense and some literary imperative to write cleanly and plainly.

So I was in New York the other day, and was offered a copy of Eagleton’s book, and took the first step in my imminent doom by accepting it. Then I tried to fly home on Saturday, one of those flights that was plagued with mechanical errors that caused delays and long stretches locked in a tin can, and also flights that were packed tightly with travelers…so crammed with people that they actually took my computer and book bag away from me to pack in the cargo hold, and I had to quickly snatch something to read before the baggage handlers took it away. I grabbed the Eagleton book. Thus was my fate sealed.

I was trapped in a plane for 8 hours with nothing to read but Eagleton and the Sky Mall catalog.

This is an account of my day of misery.

[Read more…]

Why do we even have chaplains in the military?

They’re dangerous and destructive, and erode the mission of our soldiers — and they also seem to be remarkably stupid. In the latest incident, people in Afghanistan are unhappy with the Christian evangelism that accompanies the US military. I can’t blame them.

In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, tells soldiers that, as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him”.

“The special forces guys – they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says.

“Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”

I think it’s the business of the secular officer corps to hound these vermin with courts-martial.

BioLogos?

Oh, no…it’s an irresistible magnet. Francis Collins and Karl Giberson, with funding from the Templeton Foundation (who else?), have put together a whole website full of fluffy bunnies and pious weasels to reconcile science and faith. It’s a rich vein of the worst of pseudo-scientific apologetics, and I am stunned by it — not because I am impressed by the substance, but because it is such a target-rich environment. Having read both Collins’ Language of God, with it’s amazing conversion experience that had to have impressed all with its depth and majesty, and the equally wooly-minded Karl Giberson’s book, Saving Darwin, I can say I knew these two would have put together a web site exactly like this.

Like I say, I’m overwhelmed with the tripe available on that site, so I’ll just have to take a poke at one small example. They actually have a page to address the question of How does the evil and suffering in the world align with the idea of a loving God?. As one who often hears the atheists accused of being philosophically shallow, this page is a consolation: it’s a collection of tired cliches that don’t answer the question. There’s the usual “Free will!” blather, and the “god works in mysterious ways” nonsense, and as a special bonus, there’s the extra-special “We Christians are special because our god suffered, too” excuse (which answers nothing, but raises many more questions about this contradictory deity of theirs). One curious thing about the approach this site takes is that it is slathered with Jesus everywhere — if you aren’t already a New Testament lovin’ evangelical, you are not going to be at all impressed.

But here’s one special case of their problem of evil logic, of interest to us non-Jebusites.

Suffering is Also a Problem for Atheists

Evil also poses problems for the nonbeliever. Claims that torture is wrong even though the victims of torture might be terrorists with useful information appeal to some external standard. But what is this standard? Such claims need to be grounded in something if they are to be asserted with such confidence. So, while some naturalistic philosophers have developed ethical systems without God, many other naturalists acknowledge this doesn’t work and that such ethical systems are entirely arbitrary. If God does not exist and there is no grounding for how things ought to be, then moral — as opposed to emotional — outrage at horrendous evil has no basis. The fact that we cannot escape our sense of horror and outrage at evil actually points us to God’s existence.

Um, no. This is all wrong. Evil is not a problem for us. I believe that we are a rare cosmic accident in an impersonal and hostile universe — the natural state is one which is largely inimical to our existence. I also don’t think human beings are designed at all, but evolved by natural mechanisms, and that we are not by any means optimized for anything, let alone any kind of local definition of goodness. That bad things happen, that accidents occur, that many normal events can lead to our death or suffering, that humans are flawed and can harm one another…all of that is to be expected. We atheists certainly do not have the kind of problem with evil that a believer in a universal benignity would have, so this is a bit of a dodge.

Now you could turn it around and say that atheists have a problem with goodness, which is ultimately what Collins/Giberson are trying to say. But once again, Collins makes the same mistake he did in his book — he can’t imagine any source of morality other than an external imposition by a moral entity, and reveals again that he doesn’t actually have any understanding of evolution.

We are social animals. We are the children of a particular kind of animal that improved their chances of survival and reproduction by cooperation, working together as a family/tribe/nation. We have an operational, working definition of what is good and evil that is defined by our history: goodness is that which has promoted the survival of our community and ourselves. Anyone who has a reasonable grasp of Darwinian logic ought to be able to see that this is the kind of property that can emerge from forces entirely within a group’s history, with no exogenous agent required.

I certainly do have grounds to be outraged at the use of torture. Those are fellow human beings who are experiencing pain: I empathize with them, I see them as fellow members of the greater community of humanity, and I can rationally see that a society that allows torture is one in which I and my family are less safe. I do not need a little god sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, “Oh, PZ, you aren’t supposed to enjoy that person’s suffering”.

My sense of horror and outrage points me to a common humanity, not some invisible magic man who wills it because he works in mysterious ways.

Oh, and by the way, any rationalization that claims that “if god doesn’t exist, then you have no reason to be moral” is making the fallacy of arguing from consequences. It does not imply the truth of the statement. You’d think a couple of high-powered Christian apologists flying high on buckets of money from a billionaire might have been able to avoid errors in logic 101, but nah…these are guys with brain-poisoning from an overdose of faith.

Also by the way, Jerry Coyne has his own favorite parts of the site. Maybe you do too!

Not enough Christians read books, I guess

In a promising sign of the decline of some forms of Christianity, a major Christian book show has been cancelled.

The show won’t go on in Dallas. The Christian Book Expo, an innovative consumer-focused book show, won’t be repeated next year. The board of Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, show sponsor, decided not to stage another event in 2010. Attendance at this year’s show, held March 20-22 at the Dallas Convention Center, was 1,500; organizers had hoped for 10,000 to 15,000. The show left the organization with a $250,000 shortfall, according to ECPA president and CEO Mark Kuyper. “We want to clean up the debt before we consider future options,” Kuyper told PW in an e-mail.

Once you’ve got your Bible and your copies of the Left Behind books, your good evangelical doesn’t need much more. And most of ’em won’t even read those.

Making Florida highways that much more scenic

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Aren’t you looking forward to seeing a tortured corpse adorning cars in your neighborhood?

That hideous plate is one of the options railroaded through the Florida legislature.

Religious specialty plates offered by Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Valrico, and Sen. Gary Siplin, D-Orlando, made it onto a bill Friday even though many members had not seen images of those plates and none was produced for the debate.

Siplin didn’t mince words when asked what his “Trinity” plate looks like, saying, “It has a picture of my Lord and savior Jesus Christ.” It, along with a “Preserving the Past” plate offered by Siplin, would benefit the Toomey Foundation for the Natural Sciences.

Storms’ “I Believe” plate would benefit Faith in Teaching, an Orlando company that funds faith-based programs at schools. Its design features a cross over a stained-glass window.

It’s not just the hideous design and offensive obeisance to religion by the state…it’s that the money from these idols will be siphoned off to dubious organizations. “Faith in Teaching” is obviously non-secular; the Toomey Foundation might be a bit better, but I’m immediately suspicious of purported science organizations that plaster bible verses on all of their web pages.

Religion as byproduct of useful cognitive processes

This is an excellent talk by Andy Thomson on the biological and psychological origins of religion.

It’s also precisely my position on the matter. There are many people who argue that religion provides a direct evolutionary advantage — I find them unconvincing. Thomson is explaining how religion’s origin is indirect, as a byproduct of properties of the brain that we find useful in modeling our world and social interactions…and religion is a parasite that hijacks these traits to promote a caricature of these properties.

(via Richard Dawkins)

Moral DNA?

Please, someone, tell the priests to go tend to their rituals and quit pretending to ha have any understanding of reality. A new archbishop has tried to use biology to argue for his archaic moral position, and I just want to slap him.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan yesterday said advocates of gay marriage “are asking for trouble,” arguing that traditional, one-man/one-woman marriage is rooted in people’s moral DNA.

“There’s an in-built code of right and wrong that’s embedded in the human DNA,” Dolan told The Post in an exclusive, wide-ranging interview, a week after becoming the New York Archdiocese’s new leader.

“Hard-wired into us is a dictionary, and the dictionary defines marriage as between one man, one woman for life, please God, leading to the procreation of human life.

Every word an ignorant lie. There is no genetic basis for a moral code except, perhaps, in the broadest sense of intrinsic rewards for social behavior — Catholicism is not biologically heritable. There is nothing in us that hardwires simplistic monogamy — human cultures have had a wide range of different patterns of sexual behavior. And gay people do not have desires in defiance of their biological impulses, but as consequences of them.

Ah, well, I’m sure Timmy Dolan will go far in the Catholic hierarchy — it doesn’t reward intelligence or knowledge, and he’s got neither.

Catholic geezers deny biology in Louisiana

Legislators in Louisiana are considering a bill to prohibit human-animal hybrids. We’ve been all over this subject before — it’s ridiculous and founded on complete incomprehension of what the research is all about. How ridiculous is it? SB 115 bans the “mixing of human and animal cells in a petri dish”!

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Guess who is pushing this ban? The Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, a collection of professional ignoramuses, like this guy, Archbishop Alfred Hughes: old, white celibates with clerical collars and heads stuffed full of decaying dogma.

Look, Hughes, let’s face up to reality. You aren’t promoting this ban because you have any knowledge of the science; if you knew anything about the subject, you’d know that culturing cells of different species is common. Those cell lines to which George W Bush limited government-funded research? Many of them are grown on beds of mouse feeder cells. We could grow specific human cell lines on human feeder cells, but you’d freak out over that, too. There are gene mapping procedures that use fused rodent/human cells to produce cell lines with partial chromosomal losses. Monoclonal antibodies are made by combining immune system cells with immortalized cancer cell lines. And then there’s the ultimate miscegenation: bacterial cells made with copies of human genes, to make human gene products, like insulin. You look old enough that if you aren’t diabetic yourself, you probably have friends who are…and they’re shooting up the product of a human-non-human hybrid. Are you going to ban those next?

Let’s not pretend this is a decision based on morality, either. People are not harmed in the production of these hybrid cell lines, the work is biomedical in intent and produces knowledge and treatments that help people. The decrees of the Catholic church seem to have little to do with human values any more; they’re all about enforcing a rigid dogma and regimenting people, not in mutual cooperation to help one another, but instead to perpetuate your authoritarian hierarchy.

You aren’t promoting this silly because it’s good science or good morality: it’s simpler than that. You’re doing this because biology disgusts you. This isn’t unusual at all — many people are squeamish about the oozy, squishy, squirty, gooey, slimy, sloppy, messy wet business of what goes on beneath their skins. That it makes you feel icky is not grounds for demanding that others unburdened by that bias must follow your taboos. Your personal sense of revulsion is not an argument for your position.

Worse, this is a topic all tied up in your, umm, issues with sex. Your priesthood is just plain weird in its denial of a basic and healthy human urge and its obsession with regulating the private behavior of others. You are not normal. You are the wrong people to be taking on the responsibility of dictating anything about human sexuality — you’re just too far out on the fringe of perversity. There are a lot of weird sexual practices out there, but I’m afraid denial and repression and the kind of self-loathing that characterizes the professional celibates of the Catholic church are among the weirdest. That doesn’t mean you have to stop, of course — your kinks are your kinks, and I will defend your right to not do whatever you want in the privacy of your bedroom — but you have to realize that in the face of the riotous diversity of human sexual behavior, no one gets to use their personal preferences to instruct others on what they may do in private and between mutually consenting adults.

And that includes using a little polyethylene glycol on an assortment of cells in a dish to encourage a bit of fusion. As long as no aware, autonomous individuals are slithering out of the dish, you don’t get to argue that it is wicked and hurting people.

You’re being a sour old prude trying to impose your quaint morality on situations in which you are probably among the least qualified people on the planet to judge, and I have no sympathy with your position at all. But I’ll make you a deal. If you grim old white male virgins leave sex and science alone, I won’t suggest that your sexual pathologies could be treated with regular exposure to the soft and slippery bits of living, squirming human women (or, if you prefer, the flesh and fluids of human men)…you know, all that biology you deny. Even if it would be good for you.