link from an David S-J on an atheist mailing list

4/11 update: Rep. Davis apologized, sort of, after being excoriated in the media for days. [link from pharyngula]

An atheist’s creed

I believe in time,
matter, and energy,
which make up the whole of the world.

I believe in reason, evidence and the human mind,
the only tools we have;
they are the product of natural forces
in a majestic but impersonal universe,
grander and richer than we can imagine,
a source of endless opportunities for discovery.

I believe in the power of doubt;
I do not seek out reassurances,
but embrace the question,
and strive to challenge my own beliefs.v

I accept human mortality.

We have but one life,
brief and full of struggle,
leavened with love and community,
learning and exploration,
beauty and the creation of
new life, new art, and new ideas.

I rejoice in this life that I have,
and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me,
and an earth that will abide without me.

The post was in response to a sad illustration by someone who thinks that atheists are sad people and that atheism is depressing. In response, Myers titled his post: “Actually, it’s theists who believe in nothing, quite fervently”, which is a nice point that unfortunately didn’t get followed up on in the post itself. But it’s such an elegantly expressed truth: Theists believe in non-existent things, or no-things; theists believe in nothing, and that belief in nothing crowds out so much of what there is in the world.

And finally — new rule: just because the constitution doesn’t have a religious test for office, doesn’t mean i can’t.

This past monday was Constitution Day in the us, and while i was going over the constitution with my two adopted kids (laughter) — zackoano and mogadishu (laughter) i’m home-schooling them (laughter) — i was struck again by Article 6 section 3: it says no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office. and i agree. No one should ever be disqualified for their religion. even the funny ones. (laughter) like all of them. (applause)

But the problem is that there is a religious test in this country. According to a recent poll, 7 in 10 say it’s important to have a president with strong religious beliefs. The other three couldn’t take the poll because it was friday night and yahweh wouldn’t let them answer the phone. [laughter]

But fair is fair, so for myself and the other 15 to 20% of americans who the majority call non-believers but who i call rationalists (applause)

here is our religious test for office. if you believe in judgment day i have to seriously question your judgment. laughter if you believe you’re in a long-term relationship with an all-powerful space daddy (laughter) who will after you die party with your ghost forever (laughter) you can’t have my vote even for miss hawaiian tropic. (laughter) i can’t trust you with the levers of government because there’s an electrical fire going on in your head. (laughter)

maybe a president who didn’t believe our soldiers were going to heaven might be a little less willing to get them killed (applause)

candidate mitt romney, a mormon, believes in spiritually blessed underwear that can protect him. (small laughter) He seems like a nice man, and so do his sons, wally and the beav. (laughter) But i’m sorry, their religion is batshit. (laughter) It’s like scientology without the celebrity. (laughter) and he has every right to run for president while believing in magic underwear and believing that jesus survived his own death and will return during an osmonds concert in branson. (laughter) and i have every right to take that into consideration in the voting booth.

and at the end of the day is magic underwear really that much crazier than giant arks or virgin births or talking births? you’re either a rationalist or you’re not. and the good news is that a recent poll found 20% of adults under 30 say they are rationalists and have figured out that santa claus and jesus are really the same guy (applause)

now 20% is hardly a majority. but it’s a bigger minority than blacks, jews, homosexuals, NRA members, teachers, or seniors. and it’s certainly enough to stop being shy about expressing the opinion that we’re not the crazy ones. (applause)

just because the vote is 4 to 1 doesn’t believe the minority is wrong. people who were against this war from the start were a minority. the majority used to believe the world was flat. but if you believe that today you’d either be packed off to bellevue — or asked to co-host “View”. (applause)

all right — thank you very much.

Last week, I was told that I have a “god-shaped hole in my heart.” … I think I’d prefer to phrase it as he has a god-shaped figment jammed crosswise in his brain.

P.Z. Myers, Pharyngula, 2006/10/27, “A godless ramble against the ditherings of theologians“

The last couple of years I’ve been pleased to see an outbreak of out-and-out criticism of religion, not just for the bad things religious folks do in the name of religion, but for the silliness and harmfulness of religion itself.

For me, the charge has been led by Richard Dawkins (most recently, The God Delusion), Sam Harris (The End of Faith), and P.Z. Myers (Pharyngula). Dawkins, Harris and Myers aren’t truly leading a charge; they’re surfing the zeitgeist. A lot of folks are ticked off about religion, but until lately, one would rarely hear us talk about it. Despite the stereotype of the proselytizing atheist, most of us don’t bother. (If only the religious folks of the world would just stop flaunting their lifestyle.)

But in response to the front-lash of religion, Dawkins/Harris/Myers have put themselves on the frontlines. They’re engaging in public dialogs that help individuals, like me, engage in personal dialogs. Out of their work, I’ve gotten great conversational segues: “No, I haven’t read X, but I’ve been really enjoying Sam Harris’ The End of Faith — it really is time for a resurgent anti-clericalism!” We’ve got pithy quotes: “omg, please check out P.Z. Myers’ “god-shaped figment” quote!” We’ve got war-on-xmas gifts.

Anyway, I woke up this morning, thinking (again) how happy I am to have finally seen people articulating, publicly, three of my favorite and most deeply-held sentiments about religion:

• Religious education is child abuse. (Dawkins) Religious education is indoctrination by another name. It’s indoctrination into a fictional belief that, unlike the belief in Santa Claus, isn’t widely dispelled by peer mockery early in life. And, unlike beliefs in Santa Claus, religious beliefs generally carry a lot of really harmful baggage in the guise of “moral” training — foremost among them, sex is bad; which leads to sexism, homophobia, mandatory “modesty” (it’s not just for Muslims, by the way–plenty of Christian sects require headcoverings for women, special underwear, and other weird manifestations of discomfort with the human body), and lots of tweaked sexual behavior by adults who learned, as children, to confuse a natural biological urge with something that inherently poses ethical questions.
• Religious beliefs make you stupid. (Dawkins, Harris) Shoring up one’s faith by mustering shoddy arguments in defense of it models sloppy thinking. Rationalizing belief in the irrational is not just a waste of time, and an exercise in pointlessness — it’s dangerous, because it’s limitless and it’s habit-forming. The “leap of faith” is a jump off a cliff into darkness — a tunnel with no light at the end of it. There’s no telling where you’ll go: Once you’ve made the leap of faith that God exists, there’s no reason to not make hops of faith about anything else — unicorns, the Easter bunny, the soul, reincarnation, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, the effectiveness of prayer, a tripartite God, God’s desire to impose Mosaic law, God’s voice in your head telling you to do something, Jesus entering your opened heart and lurking there like a genii in a bottle, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum. People’s ability to believe in, well, just about anything, is bounded, apparently, only by their imaginations, their childhood religious indoctrinations, their adulthood exposures to charismatic manipulators at times of personal crisis, and neurochemistry (internal, illegal, or prescription). Which is to say, once unmoored from reason, beliefs are not bounded at all, except by personal chance.
• Religious faith should not be respected. (Dawkins, Harris, Myers) People are worthy of respect, and religious beliefs — like any other freedom of thought — are, inalienably, an individual’s right. But respect? No. You respect an individual person, and you can do so by arguing with them as if they were intelligent, capable of reason and understanding and growth, and able to argue intelligently about ideas. (As opposed to hearing your ideas and then, say, killing you or ordering your torture or impugning your personal character.) Religious beliefs should not be singled out for special treatment, as if inviolable. It’s dangerous and irrational to let religious belief pass without inquiry. People should argue about religion — the religious should argue with each other, and the irreligious should argue with the religious. Arguing is communication, it’s sharing information and perspectives and opinions. Open argument, dissent, disagreement, is the first step towards toleration and understanding. And it’s my “belief” that toleration and understanding and interfaith dialog are steps along a path towards atheism, with stops at comparative religion and understanding the role religion plays in human life and understanding the neurochemistry behind mystical experiences.

To me, these are obvious emperors-have-no-clothes statements. But until Dawkins, Harris and Myers got their atheist on out in public, it was rare to hear them said. So my Saturday morning celebration of outspoken atheism is dedicated to Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and P.Z. Myers.

• fourth carnival of the feminists (#1 – #2 – #3)
• carnival of the liberals #1
• and i wonder where is the anarchist carnival?
• carnival of the godless is looking for postings for #29 (12/11)
• a copyright carnival has been proposed (although when I google “copyright carnival” i note that the first two entries are Carnival Cruise Lines’ copyright notices).
• The Tangled Bank keeps rolling along — #42 is now ready to delight.
• i and the bird – #12 is up
• 24th skeptics circle is coming

for more … blog carnival index and the über carnival site

I’d like to make an argument, only semi-playfully:

Devout religious faith renders one’s analytical and observational skills slightly suspect if not outright dubious.

People who are devoutly religious are accustomed to lying to themselves. They lie about reality, most obviously, but they also lie about what they believe and why they believe it. Most theists of course believe that their faith is reasoned, and at the same time believe that most other theists’ faith is a result of unquestioned upbringing. They’re half right, anyway.

Now, the human capacity for self-deception is unparalleled. And religious faith is only one small piece of that. But religious faith has a high degree of acceptance among the population as a “good thing to have”, and consequently, a large number of people lie to other people about their religious practices. Many of these folks may know they’re lying, of course. But I generally find that most folks don’t like to outright lie, and if they do, they do it quickly, justify it, and don’t think about it much after that. So I’m guessing that most people who say they’re going to church regularly, even though they’re not, are deceiving themselves, more than they’re trying to deceive the questioner.

And let’s not forget that folks who really are devout are somehow capable of lying to themselves on a regular basis about the nature of reality and the world around them. Maybe because, as my grandmother wisely noted, when you get older and closer to death, you want to believe. (She was happy about that, because she thought it meant I would eventually return to the church.) Ultimately it doesn’t matter why people engage in this bizarre self-deception — it just matters that they do it.

So it boggles my mind how, if people maintain such wildly inconsistent & incoherent views of the world, their role in it, and odd mythical creatures like deities or, god forbid, angels & demons — how one is supposed to fully trust such a person. At any point their religion could be tampering with their views. At all points, their inability to root out the illogic & the huge masses of self-deception has to make you question their other conclusions.

It’s not that religious people will lie all the time or that they’ll be wrong all the time, or even that they can never be trusted. It’s more that, with anything you hear from such a person, you have to give it that extra few seconds of evaluation. You can’t just take what they say, ahem, on faith.

Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you—if you don’t believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory, and so you must abdicate all critical thinking, and accept a simple but logical system of belief that is dangerous to question. A corollary to this point is that they make sure you understand that Satan resides in the toils and snares of complex thought and so it is best not try it.

— Jane Smiley, “Why Americans Hate Democrats — A Dialogue: The Unteachable Ignorance of the Red States”, Slate.com, 2004-11-05

update 2005/8/13:

I wrote the above just after the 2004 election, and de-published it fairly quickly. Atheist, anti-clerical, I may be, but I am respectful of people’s rights to believe what they like. So I’ve been thinking about this issue off & on for the past year, trying to figure out what is my core concern, and how to express it. I recently started reading The End of Faith by Sam Harris, who hits these ideas too. My critical responses to his work let me think a bit more clearly about what I wanted to do with this post.

In the real world of course it would make no sense to stereotype religious people as terminally confused. Acting on such a stereotype would, first, be every bit as foolish as acting on any other group stereotype.

First of all, the stereotype itself falls apart. What is religious belief? It’s vastly different for different people. For most people, religious belief is comprised of a number of somewhat interlocking ideas: the desire for and belief in an ethical systems; the relation of ethical systems to established frameworks; certain unquestioned assumptions & childhood indoctrination; spiritual yearnings; emotional needs; wishful thinking; neurological pattern-seeking behaviors; honest efforts to wrestle with philosophical conundrums (“what is the meaning of life?” “why is there evil?” “why is good better than evil?”); etc. I would wager that relatively few religious adherents have engaged seriously with all the specifics of whatever particular religious doctrine they claim as their own. Firebreathing atheists (like myself, at times) like to trot out the most blatantly absurd beliefs: old men in the sky, angels, demons, virgin births, virgins with fans in heaven, etc. Couple those absurd images with logical fallacies like ‘omnipotent and omniscient’ and you can have a full-time job poking at religious beliefs. But relatively few actual religius adherents have in the fullness of rational evaluation concluded that they believe in the literal interpretation of both Genesis creation stories, all the Levitican rules, and Archbishop Ussher’s totting up of the genealogies in the Bible to arrive at 4,004 B.C. as the creation date. So defining any one person’s religious “beliefs” is an almost hopeless task; to go from there to ascribing a set of such beliefs to a group of people is even more hopeless.

Second, even if one was able to establish what we mean by “religious beliefs”, and define even one person by that belief, it would be meaningless as a way of determining how to interact with that person. Unfortunately, because religious belief is but one species if irrationality, and each and every human being has their full huge and unmeasured share of irrational and unfounded beliefs.

Despite these problems, though, there is a little nugget of something serious in my little argument (some might call it a hateful rant but why be particular). Religious belief is an area in which we as a society permit to pass unquestioned — even condone — large quantities of irrational, unquestioned thought. I find the practical and political impacts of religious belief troubling. But I also find troubling the fact that we treat religion with such kid gloves. What are the implications of turning off critical thinking in some major subset of one’s life? Reinhold Niebuhr made his leap of faith thoughtfully, no doubt, but I suspect that most such leaps of faith are not so conscientiously undertaken.

I’ve long been a proponent of fostering critical thinking, for instance, media literacy. It might be time to think about the problems caused by a lack of critical thinking.