Thanks to the efforts of the officers of the CWRU branch of the Center for Inquiry, my talk tomorrow on Why Atheism is Winning (details here) will be recorded after all and uploaded later.
Of course, this means that I will have to dress better and comb my hair. The sacrifices I make for science and atheism…
It appears that many of the so-called ‘porno scanners’ are recording up to ten times the radiation emissions that they are advertised as providing.
Meanwhile the Department of Homeland Security claims that it can unilaterally implement a policy of strip searching all air travelers without any prior public comment or getting approval from any higher authority.
Under the guise of fighting terror, we have created an out-of-control monster in the DHS. All these abuses can be traced back to the odious USA PATRIOT Act that was rammed through after 9/11.
Authoritarians are quick to exploit any scare to further infringe on our rights and liberties under the guise of keeping us safe.
In an earlier post, I wondered how long it would take for religious nutters to say the recent earthquakes were due to god, who seems to be really cranky, getting ticked off about something or the other. I expected the usual suspects: gays, feminists, abortion, etc. But to my surprise it turns out that it is Japanese atheists who are the cause.
Senior pastor Cho Yong-gi of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest Christian church in the world [my italics], has faced vicious public condemnation as he called the catastrophic Japanese quakes and tsunamis “God’s warnings.”
“I fear that this disaster may be warnings from God against the Japanese people’s atheism and materialism,” an online Christian press quoted the elderly religious leader as saying Saturday.
“I hope that these series of events will drive the Japanese to turn their eyes towards God.”
Of course, in the midst of the massive death toll there was the usual praise for god for not killing people in an in-group.
Meanwhile, Gyeonggi Province Governor Kim Moon-soo also came close to facing similar public blame with his Twitter remarks.
“I thank God and my ancestors for keeping the Korean peninsula safe,” the Catholic governor wrote on his Twitter on Sunday. “The disaster left more than 2,500 dead or injured and 10,000 missing.”
How thoughtful of god to single the Korean in-group for preservation while slaughtering those in the Japanese out-group! This must prove that Korea is god’s chosen country. Take that, America!
The woman in the following video claims that the events in Japan were in response to her prayers at the beginning of Lent (which was last Wednesday) to teach all the atheists who are around her a lesson. She is thrilled that god responded within two days and says that if more people pray with her during Lent, she is sure that by the end of Lent god will similarly smite those other hotbeds of atheism, namely Europe and the US. (She must have been reading my series on why atheism is winning.)
This was so over the top that I watched closely to see if there was any indication that this was an Onion-type parody but it seems genuine. She is actually taking delight in the massive death and destruction in Japan as answers to her prayers.
It is sad what religion can do to people.
(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
In this post, I want to look at what is happening in the US and why. The US is the outlier nation in that it still maintains high levels of religiosity despite its modernity.
Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman in their article titled Why the gods are not winning say that this is likely a temporary phenomenon and that the US will eventually fall in line with the trends in other modern developed states. As I have discussed earlier, the data suggest that this is already taking place.
The authors suggest that one factor that will drive this increasing disbelief in the US is that men are less likely to go to church. “Women church goers greatly outnumber men, who find church too dull. Here’s the kicker. Children tend to pick up their beliefs from their fathers. So, despite a vibrant evangelical youth cohort, young Americans taken as a whole are the least religious and most culturally tolerant age group in the nation.”
Paul and Zuckerman point to another factor that distinguishes other developed societies from the US and that impinges on religiosity. The security of middle class life in those societies leads to less of a dependence on god.
Such circumstances dramatically reduces peoples’ need to believe in supernatural forces that protect them from life’s calamities, help them get what they don’t have, or at least make up for them with the ultimate Club Med of heaven. One of us (Zuckerman) interviewed secular Europeans and verified that the process of secularization is casual; most hardly think about the issue of God, not finding the concept relevant to their contented lives.
The result is plain to see. Not a single advanced democracy that enjoys benign, progressive socio-economic conditions retains a high level of popular religiosity. They all go material.
Compared to people in the rest of the industrialized developed world, Americans have little sense of security. For most Americans, they are only too aware that they are just a pink slip away from dropping out the middle class and one major illness away from bankruptcy and even homelessness. In that climate of anxiety, religion finds a welcoming niche, providing soothing, if fraudulent words of comfort.
Rather than religion being an integral part of the American character, the main reason the United States is the only prosperous democracy that retains a high level of religious belief and activity is because we have substandard socio-economic conditions and the highest level of disparity… To put it starkly, the level of popular religion is not a spiritual matter, it is actually the result of social, political and especially economic conditions (please note we are discussing large scale, long term population trends, not individual cases). Mass rejection of the gods invariably blossoms in the context of the equally distributed prosperity and education found in almost all 1st world democracies. There are no exceptions on a national basis. That is why only disbelief has proven able to grow via democratic conversion in the benign environment of education and egalitarian prosperity. Mass faith prospers solely in the context of the comparatively primitive social, economic and educational disparities and poverty still characteristic of the 2nd and 3rd worlds and the US.
Paul and Zuckerman conclude, “In the end what humanity chooses to believe will be more a matter of economics than of debate, deliberately considered choice, or reproduction. The more national societies that provide financial and physical security to the population, the fewer that will be religiously devout. The more that cannot provide their citizens with these high standards the more that will hope that supernatural forces will alleviate their anxieties. It is probable that there is little that can be done by either side to alter this fundamental pattern.”
The overall rise in modernity even in the face of increasing disparities within countries due to the growth of the transglobal oligarchy will lead to the inevitable decline of religion, even in those countries that are currently the most superstitious, such as the US and much of the Islamic world. The factors that favor religion’s continuance are the fecundity of some religious groups and fears of economic and social insecurity while what is working against religion is modernity.
The internet and ubiquitous global communication tends to increase levels of modernity while breaking down the isolation that results in people thinking that their own beliefs are the only ones that matter or even exist. When looked at dispassionately, religion is nothing more than ancient superstitions dressed up in modern dress. What it has going for it is the determined efforts of some people to make the superstitions seem to have some plausible basis. But it will go the way of other similar superstitions such as fear of black cats or the number 13 or walking under a ladder. A few people may take them seriously enough to take actions based on them while for most it will be at most a casual concern.
To be religious and believe in gods will increasingly be seen as anachronistic.
Next: Some concluding thoughts.
The BBC has posted new video of the moment when the water struck land.
Not all of the people were obvious to me. Try and guess who they are. I will provide the names in the comments.
I will be giving a talk on this topic on Wednesday, March 16 at 7:00 pm in the 1914 Lounge in Thwing student center on the CWRU campus. It is free and open to the public and free food is provided to compensate you for having to listen to me. The talk is sponsored by the Center for Inquiry.
In my talks, in addition to the tradition Q&A and discussion at the end, I also encourage people to question and comment during the presentation, so come along with your ideas.
While deficits and a large national debt are not good things in the long run, it is not the case that it is the greatest problem right now. What is clear is that they are being used as weapons by the oligarchy to strip people of their basic rights and benefits and destroy public services in order to further enrich the few obscenely wealthy people in this country.
Paul Craig Roberts looks at the numbers and argues that we are witnessing a great rip-off.
Rachel Maddow explains what is happening in Michigan as emblematic of what is going on nationwide, which is the wholesale assault on democracy itself. (Thanks to reader Norm.)
As is often the case, what I see happening in the US has precursors in Sri Lanka a few decades ago. In Sri Lanka, elections used to swing back and forth between left-of-center and right of-center political parties, with the range being much greater than in the US. As a result, the government’s economic and social policies would change every few years. Since we had a British parliamentary system, governments would sometimes get a landslide, which would later be reversed.
In 1977, the right-of-center party won by a huge landslide. Its autocratic leader decided that he wanted to play for keeps and create a new system that would entrench his party in power indefinitely so that his policies would not be reversed. Using his huge majority, he forced through major changes in the constitution and government and elections and the judiciary system to make it hard for another pendulum swing to occur and reverse his policies, and that even the judiciary would not be able to rein in the anti-democratic measures.
It worked, at least for a while. But eventually people got tired of the government and its corruption and voted in the opposition, despite the rigged system. And now the other party is using those very same powers to entrench itself and its cronies in power. But because of the weakened democratic system and the removal of safeguards, corruption is now endemic and political thuggery and intimidation commonplace.
The lesson in this? It is that we are entering a new phase in politics in the US. The people who are attacking unions and undermining the public sector and the watchdog role of government are playing for keeps. They too want to change the rules of the game so the oligarchy has total freedom to do what it likes and that there will be no going back. They are using the ignorant tea partiers as a wedge to claim popular legitimacy but the tea partiers will be tossed aside once they have served their purpose. The tea partiers will realize only too late that they vociferously cheered on the very people who will turn around and destroy them.
The Democratic Party is too feckless to vigorously fight this assault on democracy, because they are also, with a few rare exceptions, part of the oligarchy. The Democratic Party will only do the right thing if they are forced to do so by an angry public. This is why the mass demonstrations of ordinary people occurring around the country are so important. In the March 2011 issue of Z Magazine, Paul Street quotes the late, great historian Howard Zinn:
There’s hardly anything more important that people can learn than the fact that the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeteria, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that determine what happens.
Street also quotes C. Derber in his book Hidden Power (2005):
The leading agents of significant policy change in U. S. history have not been parties glued to the next election, but social movements that operate on the scale of decades rather than two- and four-year electoral cycles. Political parties have historically become agents of democratic change only when movements infuse the parties with their own long-term vision, moral conviction, and resources.
We have to support the demonstrations in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan and elsewhere that are opposing this attempt to radically reshape the democratic structure to allow total control by the oligarchy.
These before-and-after satellite photographs show the massive devastation wreaked by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
Commenter Matt alerts me to the fact that State Department spokesperson P. J. Crowley has been forced to resign following his criticism of Bradley Manning’s treatment.
Although I have strongly criticized Crowley in the past, I find it odd the reasons why people in high positions in government are fired. You can brazenly lie and torture and even kill people and yet escape punishment and even be commended as long as you faithfully espouse the party line. But say what you feel in an unguarded moment, even to a small group and in a private capacity like Crowley did, and you are done for.
In Crowley’s case, I wrote a few months ago that I wondered whether he ever looked in the mirror and wondered how he could have sunk so low. It looks like he did.
The abusive treatment of Manning is becoming a bigger and bigger millstone around Obama’s neck.
UPDATE: As I expected, Glenn Greenwald weighs in on the Crowley case.