Jesus and Mo pick up on a peculiar way of arguing by Christians who will quote the Bible to argue why the Bible is true.

It is not only Christians who do this, though. I have heard Jews argue that their religion must be true because it is the only one in which god spoke to a huge number of people at the same time and thus they could not all be lying or deluded. Their source for this claim? The Old Testament.

I also had a discussion with two Mormon evangelists who came to my door. They claimed that the Book of Mormon must be true because it correctly predicted things. When I pointed out that the book was written after the events that it allegedly ‘predicted’, they disagreed saying that the book was written before the events but was discovered by Joseph Smith after. Their evidence? The Book of Mormon itself.

It is kind of amusing demonstration of how the desperate desire to believe can result in people abandoning their reasoning skills.

The call-in radio program on the Pew survey on religious knowledge (in which atheists and agnostics turned out to know the most about religion) was interesting. The other members of the panel were Tim Beal, a professor of religious studies at my own university (whose field of specialization is the Old Testament), and Reverend Marvin McMickle, the pastor of a Baptist church in Cleveland. (You can listen to the program here and it is also available as a downloadable podcast.)

The discussion got quite interesting around the 21-minute mark when Beal pointed out that many professors of religious studies are, in fact, atheists. I followed up by pointing out that the more one knew what was in the Bible or the more one learned about the background to the Bible, the more likely one was to become an unbeliever. Most people’s knowledge of religion is what they learned as stories when they were children in Sunday school and does not get much more sophisticated than that. I pointed out that almost anyone who went to seminary and studied the Bible learned that much of what they believed had no basis and that this came as a shock to many, moving them towards unbelief. I quoted the study by Daniel Dennett and Linda La Scola on unbelieving priests where they said that a common joke they heard from them was that “If you emerge from seminary still believing in God, you haven’t been paying attention.”
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There is a move to dump the present speaker of the Texas house of representatives because he is a Jew, with some saying “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it.”

But of course they resent any suggestion that they are bigoted towards Jews. As one of them said, “My favorite person that’s ever been on this earth is a Jew… How can they possibly think that [I am a bigot] if Jesus Christ is a Jew, and he’s my favorite person that’s ever been on this earth?”

Who can argue with logic like that?

As one who sang in a choir for the annual Christmas carol service during my college days, I think that the best thing about Christmas is the music. (I am talking about the carols only, not the cheesy Christmas ‘songs’, almost all of which I detest with a passion.) I do not agree with the theology implicit in the carols, but the music is great and the general sentiments of peace and goodwill are worthy.

Some people in a shopping mall food court get an unexpected treat, courtesy of a flash mob.

Yes, boys and girls, Thanksgiving is over and you know what that means. It’s time to start the War on Christmas! So let the games begin!

First off, the New York Times reports on the unveiling of a new billboard ad campaign by four different secular groups to encourage atheists and even just doubters to realize that there are a lot of unbelievers out there and that it is safe to come out and join them.

Right on cue, we have religious believers begin to whine about how atheists are being mean to believers by spreading such messages during the Christmas season. In my local paper the Plain Dealer, columnist Regina Brett gets the ball rolling, criticizing the ad campaign. To be fair to her, she tries to be even-handed, also decrying the demonization of atheists. Hers is a “Why can’t we all be nice to each other during this holiday season?” kind of column.

This is fair enough but her message is confused. As with most believers, she sees statements about disbelief as aggressive while statements of belief are taken as the norm. So being nice to one another means that atheists should either shut up or use gentle humor or word things carefully so as not to cause cognitive dissonance among believers.

For example, Brett condemns as ‘just mean’ one billboard which has an image of Santa saying “Yes Virginia … there is no God”. She does not seem to get the humor of one imaginary entity parodying a well-known quote to assert that another imaginary entity does not exist.

She also puzzlingly says that “God is love. It says that in the Bible. But I doubt that will end up on a billboard to recruit atheists.” She’s right, it won’t, but what’s her point? Why would an atheist campaign even consider advertising that god is love when we don’t believe that god exists in the first place? Religious people are the ones who, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, claim that god is love, and they put that message up all over the place

What believers don’t seem to get is that many atheists enjoy Christmas as a secular holiday (which is its actual origin), a good excuse to relax with friends and family. If religious people want to overlay the holiday with all kinds of god messages, they are welcome to do so. What we don’t enjoy is being told that we have to accept the whole god package as well.

If we want to secularize the holiday and greet each other with “Seasons’ Greetings” or “Happy Holidays” or even “Heathen’s Greetings” or “Reason’s Greetings”, then religious people will just have to learn to live with it, just the way we atheists and non-Christians live with overtly religious symbolism all around us, especially during December. Many of us even say “Merry Christmas” and refer to it as the Christmas season. It really does not bother us because Christmas has, thanks to the relentless merchandizing of businesses, become a secular holiday.

Further evidence that when it comes to religion, people can be so easily suckered to believe what they want to believe.

There is no question that factory farming treats animals inhumanely. Yet Johann Hari points out that in Britain at least, there is one redeeming feature in that system in that the animals are required to be stunned before they are slaughtered, thus making them numb and presumably sparing them considerable pain as they are killed.

Yet there is an exemption for even this minimal requirement, granted for (surprise!) religion:

You are allowed to skip all this and slash the throats of un-numbed, screaming animals if you say God told you to. If you are Muslim, you call it “halal”, and if you are Jewish you call it “kosher”.
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Atheists who criticise religion are constantly being told we have missed the point and religion is really about compassion and kindness. It is only a handful of extremists and fundamentalists who “misunderstand” faith and use it for cruel ends, we are told with a wagging finger. But here’s an example where most members of a religion choose to do something pointlessly cruel, and even the moderates demand “respect” for their “views”. Their faith makes them prioritise pleasing an invisible supernatural being over the screaming of actual living creatures. Doesn’t this suggest that faith itself – the choice to believe something in the total absence of evidence – is a danger that can lead you up needlessly nasty paths?

As has been said by many people many times, it takes religion to make otherwise good and reasonable people do bad things.

One positive sign about the impact of the rise of atheism is that pope Ratzinger feels the need to constantly warn against it on his travels. After doing so in England, he has felt obliged to do so in Spain as well, saying, “The clash between faith and modernity is happening again, and it is very strong today.” I love the fact that uses the word ‘modernity’ to contrast to faith, thus reinforcing the idea that religious faith is a medieval relic.

Spain is a country in which 73% identify themselves as Catholic although only about 14% attend mass regularly, has a socialist government that has pushed through some reforms such as ending obligatory religious education in state schools and legalizing abortion, divorce, and gay marriage.

One positive sign about the impact of the rise of atheism is that pope Ratzinger feels the need to constantly warn against it on his travels. After doing so in England, he has felt obliged to do so in Spain as well, saying, “The clash between faith and modernity is happening again, and it is very strong today.” I love the fact that uses the word ‘modernity’ to contrast to faith, thus reinforcing the idea that religious faith is a medieval relic.

Elsevier is a commercial publishing house that publishes scientific journals. Lat year there was a scandal when it was revealed that it had allowed the drug company Merck to fund a new and phony journal titled Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine under its name that essentially pushed Merck drugs to unsuspecting physicians by quoting the ‘journal’ in support of the claims for their drugs’ efficacy.

Now comes another story (via Jerry Coyne) that a real Elsevier journal called the International Journal of Cardiology has published an article that claims that the Koran and the Hadith were prescient in their knowledge of how the heart works. Reviews of the article were scathing. The article consists of taking parts of the religious texts and interpreting them as metaphors that are congruent with modern understandings of the heart. While this may be of interest to a journal of religion or religious textual analysis, it is not science.

But what caught my eye was that the article was received by the journal on May 7, 2009 and accepted just five days later, on May 12, 2009. This is highly unusual. The review process for scientific articles takes many months and can stretch to more than a year as the manuscripts are sent out to reviewers who send them back with comments which then go to the authors for revisions, then back to the reviewers, etc. before the journal editor finally makes a decision. What happened here is that the editor must have bypassed any outside review and summarily accepted it. But given the obviously controversial nature of the claims, you would have thought that such a paper would have merited more careful scrutiny, not less.

So why did the editor of the journal and Elsevier go out on a limb by publishing this pseudoscience?

Maybe I am getting old and cranky but I must say that my patience is wearing thin with religious fundamentalists and the shifty way they argue.

Recently I had an extended email exchange with someone (let’s call him Henry) from Sri Lanka whom I did not know before but who had heard about my switch to atheism from an old friend of mine. My friend is a religious fundamentalist member of a charismatic church with a sweet and gentle nature of whom I am very fond. For her sake, I showed more patience and spent more time responding to Henry than I would with a total stranger.

Henry clearly wanted to try and persuade me to change my mind and show me that his belief in god was based on science and reason. He wanted to argue that so-called ‘intelligent design’ (ID) and its associated ‘specified complexity’ were arguments for the existence of god. I have, of course, heard all these arguments before and they are nothing but the tired old ‘god of the gaps’, where people look for things that science has not explained yet or things that seem highly improbable, and insert god as an ad hoc solution. It is Paley’s watch repeated yet again. It seems like this same argument gets resurrected repeatedly, the only ‘new’ features being that they keep looking for new gaps as the old gaps get explained by science. It is quite extraordinary how believers can never come up with actual evidence but are very imaginative when it comes to inventing new metaphors to say the same old thing.
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