There’s an interesting Gallup poll that compares religious fervor between nations. Here’s a quick summary:

• Religiosity is correlated with poverty — the poorer you are, the more godly you are. I guess God really does like that poverty thing.

• The US is not the most religious nation, not by a long shot — we are well below the median. It is, however, an outlier, as the most religious wealthy nation.

• There is wide regional variation within the US. Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina are like poor Middle Eastern or African countries; Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are like middle-of-the-road European nations, in terms of their religiosity.

I suspect there has to be a dangerous cycle imbedded in these relationships. Poverty leads to more religiosity as people reach for desperate hope; and religion does nothing to solve real problems, leading to worsening poverty.

Would you believe that indulgences are back? Do a little dance, say a little mumbo-jumbo, and the Catholic church will declare that you will get time off from your sentence in purgatory after death.

How do they know?

And what if they’re wrong?

I’d be very annoyed if I juggled beads for hours and hours and then found out that the High Supreme Cosmic Jailer only gave time off for life minutes spent smelling flowers or something.

Oh, well, at least they aren’t selling get-out-of-purgatory-free cards just yet. When that happens, we’ll have to go through another 30 Years War, and once was enough.

They just don’t get it. Here’s a beautiful example: Kurt Warner, the hyper-pious quarterback for some football team, has a number 13 on his jersey. Why?

“A lot of people believe 13 is an unlucky number,” Warner said, “but I’ve kind of embraced it.”

He added: “A lot of negative things come with the No. 13. My life is never dictated by superstitions. My faith is first and foremost. If you believe that God’s in control, there is no reason to believe in superstitions.”

Believing in bad luck is superstition, but thinking that rituals dedicated to a great hairy ju-ju in the sky will let you carry a football across a chalk line in the grass is not? Bwahahahahaha!

Man, I’m glad the magic space man made him lose his big ball game on Sunday.

Doesn’t it just make you feel so darned good when you hear stories of megachurches and televangelists in decline?

Once one of the nation’s most popular televangelists, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller is watching his life’s work crumble.
 

His son and recent successor, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller, has abruptly resigned as senior pastor of the Crystal Cathedral. The shimmering, glass-walled megachurch is home to the “Hour of Power” broadcast, an evangelism staple that’s been on the air for more than three decades.
 

The church is in financial turmoil: It plans to sell more than $65 million worth of its Orange County property to pay off debt. Revenue dropped by nearly $5 million last year, according to a recent letter from the elder Schuller to elite donors. In the letter, Schuller Sr. implored the Eagle’s Club members – who supply 30 percent of the church’s revenue – for donations and hinted that the show might go off the air without their support.

It’s not just Schuller!

Today’s increasingly fragmented media landscape is also to blame, said Quentin Schultze, a Calvin College professor who specializes in Christian media.
Church-based televangelism led by powerful personalities filled TV in the 1980s, but now only a handful of shows remain, he said. Among the struggling ministries are those of Oral Roberts and the late D. James Kennedy of “The Coral Ridge Hour” TV show.

Ah, I dream of a day when all of the churches are in collapse. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t say that the loss of attendees is because of growing enlightenment: it’s because these organizations are dependent on the personal charisma of their leaders, and when they go, people just go searching for another happy sheep-fleecer. It’s still a start, though.

Aren’t you excited? The Superbowl is tomorrow!

OK, I know, most of you probably don’t care. I know I don’t; tomorrow is a lab prep day for me, and I’ll be setting up fly stocks all afternoon. I don’t even know who is playing, and I don’t really care. Some of you might, and that’s all right — my father was a big football fan, although he couldn’t abide the Superbowl since, for all the hype, they were usually poor games — so if you choose to relax with friends and beer and watch the show, it is fine by me.

Here’s something I do find interesting, though. One of the petty annoyances of American sports is their ridiculous religiosity. There are always these showboating athletes who piously announce that their greatest triumphs are due to divine intervention (strangely, when they fumble, they don’t afterwards shake their fists at the heavens and curse their gods). It’s absurd that they believe their omnipotent deity is at all concerned about whether one team wins or another loses, but it’s common background noise at these events.

For the first time, though, I’m encountering media articles that are critical of these god-wallopers.

Does God care who wins? There are few things regarding religion that approach consensus, but it’s fair to say that most of us concur with FoxSports.com columnist Mark Kriegel, who recently wrote, “I refuse to believe that God –anyone’s God — has a rooting interest in the outcome of something as secular and perverse as a (football) game.”

And here’s an editorial where the writer just wishes they’d knock off the public god talk.

Forget the arrogance of that assumption for a moment — God is with only me. There’s something else. I assume some Pittsburgh Steelers are God-fearing men. They can’t all be heathens. So whom does God root for in the Super Bowl, the Cardinals or the Steelers?

And with wars going on all over the world and starvation and an economic collapse, with so much to attend to, does God have leisure to root at all?

Do we believe in a shallow, superficial God? God the Sports Fan?

None of these critics are saying this because they’re atheists who disbelieve this nonsense, don’t get me wrong; they all seem to be saying that these superficial attributions all trivialize faith. But they are at least doing us the favor of pointing out that these are secular games, and they’re a bit embarrassed at the silly piety. It’s a step forward, at least. Next step, point and laugh.

We’ve been seeing an amazing amount of press given to something as simple as atheist signs on public transport, and here’s another thing that makes the apologists for religion tear their hair out: Russell’s teapot. They don’t get it. They read the idea with dumb incomprehension, and when they do try to explain it, they just expose their own silly misinterpretations. Case in point, Ross Douthat, who puts a goofy gloss on it.

This analogy – like its modern descendant, the Flying Spaghetti Monster – makes a great deal of sense if you believe that the idea of God is an absurdity dreamed up by crafty clerics in darkest antiquity and subsequently imposed on the human mind by force and fear, and that it only survives for want of brave souls willing to note how inherently absurd the whole thing is. As you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience; and this intersection (along with, yes, the force of custom and tradition) has produced and sustained the religious traditions that seem to Richard Dawkins and company like so much teapot-worship. The story of our civilization, in particular, is a story in which an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God (here I do feel comfortable using the term), rather than merely being taught about Him in Sunday School.

Michael Drake has his own pithy reply:

Shorter Ross Douthat: Comparing belief in God to belief in the Celestial Teapot is absurd, because it’s like comparing a belief only some people know is absurd to a belief everyone knows is absurd.

I have my own version:

Shorter Ross Douthat: If enough of us imagine it, it must be real.

When I was about 10 years old, I went to see a late-night horror movie (Die, Monster, Die with Boris Karloff, if you must know; it had face-melty mutants produced by a weird meteorite kept in an old mansion), and afterwards my uncle drove me home in his old 50’s era Ford with the big bench seats high up off the floorboards. I vividly recall a terrible dread that there was something, a horrible monster, hiding under the seat, and if I let my legs dangle down, it was going to rip my feet off. I knew there wasn’t — the seats weren’t that high that Boris Karloff could fit under them — but my perfectly normal, non-insane mysterious agency perception was simply set tinglingly high by a few hours of jump-and-twitch at a monster movie, and I was imagining supernatural beings where there weren’t any.

Look. I was ten years old, high on Coca-Cola and jujubes, and I could figure that out. How old is Ross Douthat?

If you actually read Dawkins, or any of us other critics of religion, you will discover that we do not think the majority of humanity is insane, and we also don’t believe religion was cobbled up by a shadowy cabal of power-mad priests. Douthat almost has it: we know that human beings readily imagine agency even where there is none, and that it is extremely easy to feel a sensation of the existence of unseen entities, especially when you’ve been primed by an exercise in the imagination, whether it is a horror story or preacher in his pulpit. However, we do not have agency sensors, we have agency interpreters. Imagining a boogey man or a god is perfectly normal, but it does not make them real. Taking your boogey man and wrapping him up in layers and layers of ritual and tradition and over-reaching apologetics does not make him any more real.

That’s our message. It’s time to look under the car seat, gang, and see there’s nothing there. And don’t you feel silly, spending millennia going on and on about the all-powerful beastie, and finding it’s nothing but cobwebs and darkness and your own hyperactive imagination?

As for Russell’s Teapot, I have to add a little fillip to that tiny porcelain entity. As it goes trundling in its circuit about the sun, I must imagine that there is painted on its side a little sign: “There probably is no teapot. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” It definitely won’t make it any more real, but it will infuriate those who believe the manifestations of imagination must have some objective reality.

The ACLU is suing Union Public School Independent District No. 9 of Oklahoma. The reason is bizarre: administrators at the school have harrassed and violated the civil rights of a young woman named Brandi Blackbear because — and I’m a bit ashamed to admit this can go on in my country — they accused her of witchcraft. They say she used a magic spell to make one of her teachers sick. In retaliation, she has been subjected to searches and public humiliation, and the school has banned the wearing of non-Christian paraphernalia.

I’m pretty sure this is the 21st century, not the 17th. You would have a tough time noticing it if you relied on religious attitudes to tell.

The article mentions that they’d like to see the school show some evidence that Blackbear actually hexed anyone. This is not a good idea. From their track record so far, the Oklahoma school administrators might think the appropriate way to do that is to call in a witchfinder and throw Blackbear into a pond, or search her for witchmarks with a large needle. And if those don’t work, there are always thumbscrews and the rack. They’ll get a confession eventually.

The love just drips off the page in this story about how they handle irreligious teenagers. And look, Senator Chris Buttars is the concentration camp executive director!