In February, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris debated rabbis David Wolpe and Shavit Artson on the topic “Is there an Afterlife?” The moderator was Rob Eshman. The 97-minute debate can be seen in its entirety here and a summary by Landon Ross who attended it can be read here.

It was an interesting debate. Hitchens and Harris are seasoned debaters and seemed very much at ease. Wolpe is quick-witted and has a good sense of humor and an engaging manner but Artson had a pouty expression that is off-putting and he seemed to not be happy at being there at all but made a couple of good points. Although the two rabbis (especially Wolpe) got some applause, most of it was reserved for sallies by Hitchens and Harris, despite the fact that the venue of the debate was the American Jewish University, which should have given home field advantage to the rabbis.
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I attended the talk by John W. Loftus on Saturday. There was a crowd of around 35-40 which was very good considering that the event was organized at very short notice and Saturday evenings at 6:00 pm is not the best time to draw a student audience. The officers of the CWRU Center for Inquiry did a terrific job in arranging everything.

Loftus’s talk was very interesting for me in that he presents an insider’s view of how American evangelical Christians see the world. One has to understand that world view if one is to engage effectively with religious people in the US. As a former evangelical preacher, he is aware of what kinds of arguments might reach them. He presents believers with what he calls the ‘Outsider Test for Faith’, asking them to apply to their own faith the same criteria that they use to reject competing faiths.

I think that the alliance of people like Loftus, who were once committed Christians and are now atheists, and atheists who come from a scientific background could be very fruitful since we bring complementary knowledge to bear on the problem of how to deal with religion and can learn a lot from each other.

He and I were able to spend some time together before and after his talk and I found him to be as engaging in private as he is as a public speaker. He and I shared books and ideas and I will report on his book The Christian Delusion once I’ve had a chance to read it.

Meanwhile, his blog Debunking Christianity is lively and well worth visiting.

The Catholic Church has complained to the UN Human Rights Council that “People who criticise gay sexual relations for religious or moral reasons are increasingly being attacked and vilified for their views.”

I had not realized that bigots had such sensitive feelings. No doubt the Catholic Church will next complain about criticisms aimed at those who support pedophilic priests.

It is amazing how people think that saying that one’s views originate from one’s religion automatically confers immunity from the normal rough and tumble of public political discourse.

(via Machines Like Us)

That’s what a new Northwestern University study seems to find.

The study, which tracked 2,433 men and women for 18 years, found normal weight young adults ages 20 to 32 years with a high frequency of religious participation were 50 percent more likely to be obese by middle age after adjusting for differences in age, race, sex, education, income and baseline body mass index. High frequency of religious participation was defined as attending a religious function at least once a week.

While the result seems pretty conclusive, the causal connection between god and obesity is not clear. Matthew Feinstein, the study’s lead investigator suggests, “It’s possible that getting together once a week and associating good works and happiness with eating unhealthy foods could lead to the development of habits that are associated with greater body weight and obesity.”

I find that unconvincing. Is the food at these religious get-togethers that bad? In my experience, they are usually potluck events, with home-cooked dishes that are actually pretty good. Even if it is bad for you, eating it just once a week seems hardly sufficient to produce this effect. It seems more likely to me that that the desire for food and the desire for god both spring from the same source, a neediness that is never satiated.

Given Americans’ obsession with their weight and their propensity to rush out and adopt any and all kinds of diet programs, perhaps atheist organizations should adopt a new recruiting slogan: “Lose god and lose weight!”

The BBC reports on a new paper presented this week at the annual March meeting of the American Physical Society (of all places) that used mathematical modeling on religious affiliation trends over the last century and arrived at a conclusion that supports my thesis in the recent series on Why Atheism is Winning that religion is in a state of rapid decline.

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

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It is a well-known phenomenon that people overestimate their capacities on traits that are deemed to be socially desirable. In the US, since being religious is seen as a good thing, people seem to feel obliged to put on a facade.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that Americans are less religious that they claim to be. The Pew survey of religious knowledge in the US says that 4/7 (about 55%) attend church once a week but a University of Michigan examination of actual time diaries kept by people indicate that the figure is only about 25%, much like many European countries, while self reports were about 35-45%. The gap between self-perception and reality in the US was around 18% whereas the highest gaps elsewhere in the world were only about 4-8%, and these were in Catholic countries.

Given that fact, should we believe the Pew results that say that “more than a third (37%) say they read the Bible or other Holy Scriptures at least once a week, not counting worship services”? I find that really hard to believe. The Bible is not a great read, frankly. There are a few occasional well written and poetic passages but most of it consists of turgid prose dealing with dreary lists of rules.

My guess is that even if we use the same inflation factor of two that exists for church attendance to arrive at about 20% for weekly Bible reading, that would still be too high.

A survey of 1900 people in England and Wales found the interesting result that while 61% of respondents said they belonged to a religion, 65% also replied “no” when asked if they were religious.

The British Humanist Association conducted this survey to illustrate the fact that the British census, which is due to be carried out soon, gives a misleading impression by asking only the first question and thereby suggesting that people are more religious than they really are. They say that people check off the boxes of belonging to religious institutions for cultural, rather than religious, reasons but that the government uses this inflated data to advocate for funding of things like faith-based schools. They are urging people who are not religious to tick the ‘none’ box when asked which religion they belong to.

Another interesting result was that “Among respondents who identified themselves as Christian, fewer than half said they believed Jesus Christ was a real person who died, came back to life and was the son of God.” That alone would explain the above difference.

It would be really interesting to have a similar survey done in the US. I think the religiosity figures are inflated here too, though maybe not as much.

When I argue that science and belief in god are basically incompatible, religious people often respond by pointing to the fact that there are religious scientists. The evangelical Christian Francis Collins, who headed one team of scientists that mapped the human genome and is now head of the National Institutes of Health, is the poster child for this group.

Other scientists like Craig Venter, who headed the other team that mapped the human genome, is dismissive of religious people like Collins. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Venter was asked about this:

SPIEGEL: Some scientist don’t rule out a belief in God. Francis Collins, for example …

Venter: … That’s his issue to reconcile, not mine. For me, it’s either faith or science – you can’t have both.

SPIEGEL: So you don’t consider Collins to be a true scientist?

Venter: Let’s just say he’s a government administrator.

The idea that science and religion must be compatible because there are religious scientists is not an argument since it is quite possible for people to hold contradictory ideas in their heads and all of us are good at compartmentalizing our minds in order to do so.

As Jesus and Mo point out, that argument can be taken to argue for the compatibility of almost anything.

New polls confirm earlier results that for the first time in the US, those who favor same sex marriage now outnumber those who oppose it. “A whopping 68% of Americans under 30 now support marriage equality, but the percentage is nearly as high, 65%, for Americans in their 30s. A majority of folks in their 40s are on board, too.”

Recall that in the earlier poll, there was a drop from 73% opposition in 1988 to 56% in 2004, to only 40% opposition in 2010. So the rate of decline in the opposition has increased by a factor of 2.5 from 2004 to 2010 over that of the earlier period. I predict that opposition will stabilize to about 25%, which is usually the size of hardcore people on any issue.

These results are significant in ways other than the welcome one that the rights of gays for equality are now being recognized. Opposition to homosexuality has no rational basis but is almost entirely religion-based. It is religion that has locked itself into opposition to gay rights and same sex marriage, so this new acceptance is really bad news for religion as well, since it signifies that its hold on people, especially the young, is disintegrating as they reject its intolerance. And once again, as I said in my series on Why Atheism is Winning, it is young people who are leading the way.

It is not only Christians that have the headache of deciding which parts of their holy book they should follow and which parts they should reject. Jesus and Mo point out the same problem that Muslims have with the Koran.

For more examples of the intolerance and cruelty in the Koran, see here. It amazes me that people can claim that their god is a merciful and loving god when their very own holy books have such hateful passages.