• See also Mind articles on how our brains refuse to accept facts that contradict our world view
  

God didn't make man; man made gods

• In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's "DNA."
  
  Before John Lennon imagined "living life in peace," he conjured "no heaven .. / no hell below us ../ and no religion too."
  
  No religion: What was Lennon summoning? For starters, a world without "divine" messengers, like Osama bin Laden, sparking violence. A world where mistakes, like the avoidable loss of life in Hurricane Katrina, would be rectified rather than chalked up to "God's will." Where politicians no longer compete to prove who believes more strongly in the irrational and untenable. Where critical thinking is an ideal. In short, a world that makes sense.
  
  In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's "DNA." They have produced robust theories, backed by empirical evidence (including "imaging" studies of the brain at work), that support the conclusion that it was humans who created God, not the other way around. And the better we understand the science, the closer we can come to "no heaven .. no hell .. and no religion too." Like our physiological DNA, the psychological mechanisms behind faith evolved over the eons through natural selection. They helped our ancestors work effectively in small groups and survive and reproduce, traits developed long before recorded history, from foundations deep in our mammalian, primate and African hunter-gatherer past.
  
  For example, we are born with a powerful need for attachment, identified as long ago as the 1940s by psychiatrist John Bowlby and expanded on by psychologist Mary Ainsworth. Individual survival was enhanced by protectors, beginning with our mothers. Attachment is reinforced physiologically through brain chemistry, and we evolved and retain neural networks completely dedicated to it. We easily expand that inborn need for protectors to authority figures of any sort, including religious leaders and, more saliently, gods. God becomes a super parent, able to protect us and care for us even when our more corporeal support systems disappear, through death or distance.
  
  Scientists have so far identified about 20 hard-wired, evolved "adaptations" as the building blocks of religion. Like attachment, they are mechanisms that underlie human interactions: Brain-imaging studies at the National Institutes of Health showed that when test subjects were read statements about religion and asked to agree or disagree, the same brain networks that process human social behavior - our ability to negotiate relationships with others - were engaged.
  
  Among the psychological adaptations related to religion are our need for reciprocity, our tendency to attribute unknown events to human agency, our capacity for romantic love, our fierce "out-group" hatreds and just as fierce loyalties to the in groups of kin and allies. Religion hijacks these traits. The rivalry between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for example, or the doctrinal battles between Protestant and Catholic reflect our "groupish" tendencies.
  
  In addition to these adaptations, humans have developed the remarkable ability to think about what goes on in other people's minds and create and rehearse complex interactions with an unseen other. In our minds we can de-couple cognition from time, place and circumstance. We consider what someone else might do in our place; we project future scenarios; we replay past events. It's an easy jump to say, conversing with the dead or to conjuring gods and praying to them.
  
  Morality, which some see as imposed by gods or religion on savage humans, science sees as yet another adaptive strategy handed down to us by natural selection.
  
  Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom notes that "it is often beneficial for humans to work together ... which means it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals." In groundbreaking research, he and his team found that infants in their first year of life demonstrate aspects of an innate sense of right and wrong, good and bad, even fair and unfair. When shown a puppet climbing a mountain, either helped or hindered by a second puppet, the babies oriented toward the helpful puppet. They were able to make an evaluative social judgment, in a sense a moral response.
  
  Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist who co-directs the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has also done work related to morality and very young children. He and his colleagues have produced a wealth of research that demonstrates children's capacities for altruism. He argues that we are born altruists who then have to learn strategic self-interest.
  
  Beyond psychological adaptations and mechanisms, scientists have discovered neurological explanations for what many interpret as evidence of divine existence. Canadian psychologist Michael Persinger, who developed what he calls a "god helmet" that blocks sight and sound but stimulates the brain's temporal lobe, notes that many of his helmeted research subjects reported feeling the presence of "another." Depending on their personal and cultural history, they then interpreted the sensed presence as either a supernatural or religious figure. It is conceivable that St. Paul's dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus was, in reality, a seizure caused by temporal lobe epilepsy.
  
  The better we understand human psychology and neurology, the more we will uncover the underpinnings of religion. Some of them, like the attachment system, push us toward a belief in gods and make departing from it extraordinarily difficult. But it is possible.
  
  We can be better as a species if we recognize religion as a man-made construct. We owe it to ourselves to at least consider the real roots of religious belief, so we can deal with life as it is, taking advantage of perhaps our mind's greatest adaptation: our ability to use reason.
  
  Imagine that.

The Church of Copy and Paste

The First Church of Pirate Bay

The city of Uppsala has seen its share of religious congregations. In ancient times, it was the main pagan center of Sweden, famed for its temple to the Old Norse gods. In the Middle Ages, it became a Christian stronghold. Today, Uppsala is home to Isak Gerson, a bright, polite, twenty-year-old philosophy student and the spiritual leader of the Missionary Church of Kopimism, which last week became Sweden's newest registered religion.

Modern Sweden isn't known as a particularly religious place: in a recent poll, only seventeen per cent of Swedes said that faith is an important part of their lives. But Sweden is known, in recent years, as a hotbed of online piracy and anti-copyright activism. That's the tradition from which Kopimism arises.

The religion's history goes something like this: In 2001, a lobby group called the Antipiratbyran - the Anti-Piracy Bureau - was formed in Sweden to combat copyright infringement. In 2003, members of a growing free-information movement copied the lobby group's name, but removed the 'anti,' calling themselves Piratbyran - the Piracy Bureau. Later that same year, Piratbyran created a Web site called The Pirate Bay, which quickly became the world's most notorious source for downloading feature films, TV shows, and software.

In 2005, Ibrahim Botani, a Kurdish immigrant to Sweden and a central figure in Piratbyran, designed a kind of un-copyright logo called 'kopimi' (pronounced 'copy me'). Adding the kopimi mark to a work of intellectual property indicates that you not only give permission for it to be copied but actively encourage it.

After Botani died unexpectedly, in 2010, Piratbyran decided to disband. But The Pirate Bay still thrives, despite an ongoing criminal case against its operators. And in 2006, Rick Falkvinge founded Sweden's Pirate Party, a political party that runs on a pro-Internet platform, with special emphasis on copyright and patent reform. Gerson is an active member: "I've been managing local campaigns for the election," he told me. "And I've been working a lot with the Young Pirates Association - the youth wing of the Party."

The Missionary Church of Kopimism picks up where Piratbyran left off: it has taken the values of Swedish Pirate movement and codified them into a religion. They call their central sacrament 'kopyacting,' wherein believers copy information in communion with each other, most always online, and especially via file-sharing. Ibi Botani's kopimi mark - a stylized 'k' inside a pyramid - is their religious symbol, as are CTRL+C and CTRL+V. Where Christian clergy might sign a letter "yours in Christ," Kopimists write, "Copy and seed." They have no god.

"We see the world as built on copies," Gerson told me. "We often talk about originality; we don't believe there's any such thing. It's certainly that way with life - most parts of the world, from DNA to manufacturing, are built by copying." The highest form of worship, he said, is the remix: "You use other people's works to make something better."

Fittingly, it was exactly this kind of collaborative spirit that led to the founding of the Missionary Church of Kopimism. In a blog post last week, Peter Sunde, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, suggested that Kopimism as a religion had originated from a comment made by one of its opponents. Several years ago, he wrote, a Swedish lawyer for the M.P.A.A. was asked about file-sharing advocates. She replied, "It's just a few people, very loud. They're a cult. They call themselves Kopimists." Sunde thought this cult business sounded like a good idea, and looked into registering Kopimism as a religion, but never followed through. Gerson did. "This is one of the essential things with how the internet and kopimism works," Sunde wrote. "If you don't do it, someone else will."

In Sweden, the separation of church and state became law on January 1, 2000, the day that the Lutheran Church of Sweden stopped being the official state church. Since then, a government agency called the Kammarkollegiet has accepted applications for the legal recognition of religions. "They don't make any kind of assessment of what the beliefs are, and the association is not sanctioned by the state," Anders Backstrom, a professor of the sociology of religion at Uppsala University, told me. But the recognition of Kopimism, he said, is "a new situation. We haven't seen anything of its kind before."

The most comparable previous effort was in 2008, when Carlos Bebeacua, a Uruguayan artist living in Sweden, attempted to register the Church of the Madonna of the Orgasm. The Kammarkollegiet refused his application, and in 2010 the Administrative Court of Appeal upheld the rejection, arguing that the 'madonna' (but not the 'orgasm') part of the church's name would "cause offense not only in the broad groups of the population that have Christian roots, but also in society as a whole."

Kopimism apparently raised no such qualms. Or maybe the Kopimists are just better than the Orgasmists at filling out government paperwork. "It's exactly the same process as registering a business company," Professor Backstrom said. But he thinks it's unlikely that Kopimism's success will inspire a flood of new applications. "In Sweden, we have many small New Age groups, but most of them have made no effort to be recognized," he said. "Being recognized might mean they are opened to government scrutiny."

For the Missionary Church of Kopimism, which holds up privacy as one of its chief values, such scrutiny could be a big problem, and it's not clear what they'll gain from registration. "We don't really get any formal rights or benefits," Gerson said. "We can apply for the right to marry people. There is government aid we can apply for, but we have no such plans today. I don't, at least." Rick Falkvinge, the Pirate Party founder, speculated that if the Church incorporated the seal of confession into its rites, members could take advantage of the confidentiality that comes with certain privileged conversations. Generally, though, Sweden offers few legal exemptions for religious practice. No one, Gerson included, has any expectation that registration will exempt Church members from copyright law. "What the registration has done mostly is strengthen our identity," Gerson said. "I think it will be easier to find new members now that we're recognized."

I asked him if he'd seen a boost in converts since the news broke. "I actually haven't checked," he said. "If you want I could do it right now." There was a pause while he logged on to the registry: to join the Missionary Church of Kopimism simply requires filling out an online form, as easy as signing up for a mailing list. "Right now we have a little more than four thousand," he said, with no particular enthusiasm. "We got twelve hundred new members in the last week."

Gerson told me that religious persecution is a 'big concern' for the church's adherents. "We all fear going to court for copyright infringement," he said. This, of course, has been a worry for file-sharers long before it was formalized as a religion. What the Missionary Church of Kopimism has done is almost a reverse of how religious persecution usually works: whereas religions have often turned to protest because they feel persecuted, Gerson and his followers, feeling persecuted, turned to religion, in order to reframe and get attention for their protest. (It may sound silly to speak of file-sharing in terms of persecution, but when you think of the case of Thomas Drake, or of Bradley Manning, it seems a little less silly.) And Kopimism is hardly the only faith to have been inspired or shaped by a particular political cause. The Rastafari movement, for example, is as much an anti-colonial resistance movement as it is a religion.

When Gerson talks about Kopimism as a religion, his tone is good-humored, but he also comes off as disarmingly sincere. Even if this religious-registration business is just a bit of political theatre, there's no doubt that there’s an honestly and deeply held conviction at its core: the free exchange of information as a fundamental right. But is that enough to make it a genuine religion? When I asked Professor Backstrom, he hesitated. "Today you can believe in anything, so I suppose the idea of belief is a minor issue in a Northern European setting," he said. "Belief can be a very wide concept." He admitted, though, that he suspects that Kopimism is primarily an activist prank.

"I don't think it's a joke at all," Gerson told me. "I think that many religions have been ridiculed over the years. I don't think we're the first to experience it." The pirate movement's political arm, the Pirate Party, provides one possible future path for Kopimism. People didn't take the Pirate Party seriously at first, either. Then its membership exceeded that of the Green Party, and then the Liberal Party and the Christian Democrats, and then the Centre Party, and then the Young Pirates Association became the largest youth organization of any Swedish political party, and then several other parties and a number of prominent politicians shifted their stances on piracy in a more pirate-friendly direction, and then the Party spread to forty countries. Now the Pirate Party actually holds two seats in the European Parliament. These are early days for the Missionary Church of Kopimism. Who can say how far its gospel will spread?

Keep Religion Out of Public Life

It takes only a small spark to relight a smouldering fire. Such a spark was struck recently in Bideford town hall in north Devon: a few days ago a High Court judge ruled that it was unlawful for local councils to include Christian prayers in their formal meetings.

This was in response to a legal challenge from a former councillor and atheist, Clive Bone, in association with the campaigning National Secular Society. Bone had objected to the intrusion of Christianity into the corridors of power, humble though they might seem in Bideford.

This unimportant ruling was enough to rekindle the embers of Britain's faith wars. Eric Pickles, secretary of state for local government, blustered on the radio about this country's Christian heritage and how illiberal and intolerant this was and how the government would soon be changing it all.

Bishops and archbishops protested, predictably. Baroness Warsi, a Muslim, during a quasi official visit to the Pope, called on British society to resist the rising tide of 'militant secularism' and to fight for faith to have a place in public life. Quoting the Pope's fears regarding 'the increasing marginalisation of religion', she urged us to feel stronger in our religious identities, not least in Christianity.

The prime minister made his usual pro-faith noises. As the crackling of the fire grew louder, the Queen herself spoke out at Lambeth Palace in defence of all faiths, which would have surprised her forebear Henry VIII. She also said - with what anguish one can imagine - that Anglicanism has been commonly underappreciated and occasionally misunderstood.

Not only occasionally, according to Britain's most famous militant secularist, Richard Dawkins, who appeared again on the field of battle, or rather on the Today programme, arguing that most people who think they're Christians are wrong. Of those questioned in his Ipsos Mori poll, 54% said they considered themselves to be Christian but, when asked why, fewer than three in 10 said it was because they believed in the teachings of Christianity.

Rather than personal belief, the reasons of 72% were much more likely to be social, to do with the customs of their tribe - not that the poll used that phrase - surrounding birth, marriage, death and charity. Most hadn't looked at the Bible for a year or more and never prayed outside church at all. Predictably this caused an uproar.

Generations of unbelievers have not found it necessary to trash Christianity aggressively You get the impression, as usual, that Dawkins and the militant secularists all enjoy it hugely, although he himself was infuriated to be wrong-footed on air about the full title of Darwin's The Origin of Species.

All this is nasty and alarming. For generations in this tolerant country people of Christian background who are themselves unbelievers have not usually found it necessary, or polite, to trash Christianity aggressively in the inflammatory way of Dawkins and his supporters. I sense something mean-spirited in the extremes of his attacks, even though I agree with his views: he lacks something important that most people have or at least understand in others; 19th-century phrenologists would have called it the bump of religiosity.

A sense of the numinous, a longing for ceremony, a love of the religious punctuation of the year, a need for a regular time to examine one's conscience, a passion for church music - these are all things that appeal to Anglican unbelievers such as me and to unbelievers of all traditions. That is what lies behind Alain de Botton's grand schemes of cathedrals for the faithless, impossibly rational though they are.

Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, once expressed these feelings particularly well. An unbeliever who nonetheless goes to church, he said in an interview: "I share with religious people a concept of the mystery and wonder of the universe and even more of human life and therefore participate in religious services. Of course those I participate in are, as it were, the 'customs of my tribe' which happens to be the Church of England."

It is my tribe, too, and in many ways I have loved it, fearful of real religious faith though I am. Anglicanism is the tribe from which the highest ideals of modern, secular morality have evolved. So until recently I have been strongly against aggressive secularists in spirit, although I largely share their opinions. But things have changed rapidly. The terms of the conflict are quite different now. It is hardly an exaggeration to speak of faith wars.

It is a mystery to me why so many people in public life keep saying that faith is a good thing and we'd all be better off if we had more of it. That seems to me a very flabby-minded and sentimental assumption, arising from the limp-wristed Anglican tradition in which faith rarely amounted to anything remotely challenging to anyone.

Faith is not necessarily a good thing. Some faiths hold views that are repellent to most people and certainly to the indigenous Christian tribe. More importantly, faith itself is the problem. No one can argue with faith. If God or scripture says gays are wicked, or if someone believes her faith insists on a chador (even if she is mistaken), that is that.

Most faiths in Britain are actively competing for an acknowledged place in the public arena within the Establishment. If Anglicanism is an established part of the state, if this country is technically speaking a theocracy, why in the name of equality should not all other religions have a piece of the action too? That's the urgent but unspoken question. It is hard, however much one might fear the tenets of certain other faiths here, to think of any good reason why not.

That is what we are seeing. The growing number of sharia courts in this country is alarming. Yet the Archbishop of Canterbury has defended them. I can’t help suspecting his reason is that he is so anxious to insist that faith has a place in public life and so aware of the unfairness to other faiths of the status quo, that in logic he cannot help himself. Understandably this enrages the secularists and also the more moderate observers, who are alarmed by the incontrovertible tenets of certain faiths.

That is why, however obtuse and unattractive they may seem, the militant secularists are on the right side in the faith wars. It is why, however reluctantly, the polite and tolerant secularists will have to join them and win the war. There can be no place for faith anywhere at all within the political establishment, no privileged space within the public arena.

An Atheist Manifesto

• In recent years, we atheists have become more confident and outspoken in articulating and defending our godlessness in the public square. Much has been gained by this. There is now wider awareness of the reasonableness of a naturalist world view, and some of the unjustified deference to religion has been removed, exposing them to much needed critical scrutiny.
  
  Unfortunately, however, in a culture that tends to focus on the widest distinctions, the most extreme positions and the most strident advocates, the "moderate middle" has been sidelined by this debate. There is a perception of unbridgeable polarisation, and a sense that the debates have sunk into a stale impasse, with the same tired old arguments being rehearsed time and again by protagonists who are getting more and more entrenched.
  
  It is time, therefore, for those of us who are tired of the status quo to try to shift the focus of our public discussions of atheism into areas where more progress and genuine dialogue is possible. To achieve this, we need to rethink what atheism stands for and how to present it. The so-called "new atheism" may have put us on the map, but in the public imagination it amounts to little more than a caricature of Richard Dawkins, which is not an accurate representation of the terrain many of us occupy. We now need something else.
  
  This manifesto is an attempt to point towards the next phase of atheism's involvement in public discourse. It is not a list of doctrines that people are asked to sign up to but a set of suggestions to provide a focus for debate and discussion. Nor is it an attempt to accurately describe what all atheists have in common. Rather it is an attempt to prescribe what the best form of atheism should be like.
  
  1 Why we are heathens
  
  It has long been recognised that the term "atheist" has unhelpful connotations. It has too many dark associations and also defines itself negatively, against what it opposes, not what it stands for. "Humanist" is one alternative, but humanists are a subset of atheists who have a formal organisation and set of beliefs many atheists do not share. Whatever the intentions of those who adopt the labels, "rationalist" and "bright" both suffer from sounding too self-satisfied, too confident, implying that others are irrationalists or dim.
  
  If we want an alternative, we should look to other groups who have reclaimed mocking nicknames, such as gays, Methodists and Quakers. We need a name that shows that we do not think too highly of ourselves. This is no trivial point: atheism faces the human condition with honesty, and that requires acknowledging our absurdity, weakness and stupidity, not just our capacity for creativity, intelligence, love and compassion. "Heathen" fulfils this ambition. We are heathens because we have not been saved by God and because in the absence of divine revelation, we are in so many ways deeply unenlightened. The main difference between us and the religious is that we know this to be true of all of us, but they believe it is not true of them.
  
  2 Heathens are naturalists
  
  Heathens are not merely unbelievers: we believe many things too. Most importantly, we believe in naturalism: the natural world is all there is and there is no purposive, conscious agency that created or guides it. This natural world may contain many mysteries and even unseen dimensions, but we have no reason to believe that they are anything like the heavens, spirit worlds and deities that have characterised supernatural religious beliefs over history. Many religious believers deny the "supernatural" label, but unless they are willing to disavow such beliefs as in the reality of a divine person, miracles, resurrections or life after death, they are not naturalists.
  
  3 Our first commitment is to the truth
  
  Although we believe many things about what does and does not exist, these are the conclusions we come to, not the basis of our worldview. That basis is a commitment to see the world as truthfully as we can, using our rational faculties as best we can, based on the best evidence we have. That is where our primary commitment lies, not the conclusions we reach. Hence we are prepared to accept the possibility that we are wrong. It also means that we respect and have much in common with people who come to very different conclusions but have an equal respect for truth, reason and evidence. A heathen has more in common with a sincere, rational, religious truth-seeker than an atheist whose lack of belief is unquestioned, or has become unquestionable.
  
  4 We respect science, not scientism
  
  Heathens place science in high regard, being the most successful means humans have devised to come to a true understanding of the real nature of the world on the basis of reason and evidence. If a belief conflicts with science, then no matter how much we cherish it, science should prevail. That is why the religious beliefs we most oppose are those that defy scientific knowledge, such as young earth creationism.
  
  Nonetheless, this does not make us scientistic. Scientism is the belief that science provides the only means of gaining true knowledge of the world, and that everything has to be understood through the lens of science or not at all. There are scientistic atheists but heathens are not among them. Science is limited in what it can contribute to our understanding of who we are and how we should live because many of the most important facts of human life only emerge at a level of description on which science remains silent. History, for example, may ultimately depend on nothing more than the movements of atoms, but you cannot understand the battle of Hastings by examining interactions of fermions and bosons. Love may depend on nothing more than the physical firing of neurons, but anyone who tries to understand it solely in those terms just does not know what love means.
  
  Science may also make life uncomfortable for us. For example, it may undermine certain beliefs about free will that many atheists have relied on to give dignity and autonomy to our species.
  
  Heathens are therefore properly respectful of science but also mindful of its limits. Science is not our Bible: the last word on everything.
  
  5 We value reason as precious but fragile
  
  Heathens have a commitment to reason that fully acknowledges the limits of reason. Reason is itself a multi-faceted thing that cannot be reduced to pure logic. We use reason whenever we try to form true beliefs on the basis of the clearest thinking, using the best evidence. But reason almost always leaves us short of certain knowledge and very often leaves us with a need to make a judgment in order to come to a conclusion. We also need to accept that human beings are very imperfect users of reason, susceptible to biases, distortions and prejudices that lead even the most intelligent astray. In short, if we understand what reason is and how it works, we have very good reason to doubt those who claim rationality solely for those who accept their worldview and who deny the rationality of those who disagree.
  
  6 We are convinced, not dogmatic
  
  The heathen's modesty about the power of reason and the certainty of her conclusions should not be mistaken for a shoulder-shrugging agnosticism. We have a very high degree of confidence in the truth of our naturalistic worldview. But we do not dogmatically assert it. Being open to being wrong and to changing our minds does not mean we lack conviction that we are right. Strength of belief is not the same as rigidity of dogma.
  
  7 We have no illusions about life as a heathen
  
  Many people do not understand that it is possible to lead a meaningful, happy life as a heathen, but we maintain that it is and can point to any number of atheist philosophers and thinkers who have explained why this is so. But such meaning and contentment does not inevitably follow from becoming a heathen. Ours is a universe without guarantees of redemption or salvation and sometimes people have terrible lives or do terrible things and thrive. On such occasions, we have no consolation. That is the dark side of accepting the truth, and we are prepared to acknowledge it. We are heathens because we value living in the truth. But that does not mean that we pretend that always makes life easy or us happy. If the evidence were to show that religious people are happier and healthier than us, we would not see that as any reason to give up our convictions.
  
  8 We are secularists
  
  We support a state that is neutral as regards people's fundamental worldviews. It is not neutral when it comes to the shared values necessary for people of different conviction to live and thrive together. But it should not give any special privilege to any particular sect or group, or use their creeds as a basis for policy. Politics requires a coming together of people of different fundamental convictions to formulate and justify policy in terms that all understand, on the basis of principles that as many as possible can share.
  
  This secularism does not require that religion is banished from public life or that people may not be open as to how their faiths, or lack of one, motivate their values. As long as the core of the business of state is neutral as regards to comprehensive worldviews, we can be relaxed about expressions of these commitments in society at large. We want to maintain the state's neutrality on fundamental worldviews, not purge religion from society.
  
  9 Heathens can be religious
  
  There are a small minority of forms of religion that are entirely compatible with the heathen position. These are forms of religion that reject the real existence of supernatural entities and divinely authored texts, accept that science trumps dogma, and who see the essential core of religion in its values and practices. We have very little evidence that anything more than a small fraction of actual existent religion is like this, but when it does conform to this description, heathens have no reason to dismiss it as false.
  
  10 Religion is often our friend
  
  We believe in not being tone-deaf to religion and to understand it in the most charitable way possible. So we support religions when they work to promote values we share, including those of social justice and compassion. We are respectful and sympathetic to the religious when they arrive at their different conclusions on the basis of the same commitment to sincere, rational, undogmatic inquiry as us, without in any way denying that we believe them to be false and misguided. We are also sympathetic to religion when its effects are more benign than malign. We appreciate that commitment to truth is but one value and that a commitment to compassion and kindness to others is also of supreme importance. We are not prepared to insist that it is indubitably better to live guided by such values allied with false beliefs than it is to live without such values but also without false belief.
  
  11 We are critical of religion when necessary
  
  Our willingness to accept what is good in religion is balanced by an equally honest commitment to be critical of it when necessary. We object when religion invokes mystery to avoid difficult questions or to obfuscate when clarity is needed. We do not like the way in which "people of faith" tend to huddle together in an unprincipled coalition of self-interest, even when that means liberals getting into bed with homophobes and misogynists. We think it is disingenuous for religious people to talk about the reasonableness of their beliefs and the importance of values and practice, while drawing a veil over their embrace of superstitious beliefs. In these and other areas, we assert the right and need to make civil but acute criticisms.
  
  And although our general stance is not one of hostility towards religion, there are some occasions when this is exactly what is called for. When religions promote prejudice, division or discrimination, suppress truth or stand in the way of medical or social progress, a hostile response is an appropriate, principled one, just as it is when atheists are guilty of the same crimes.
  
  12 This manifesto is less concerned with distinguishing heathens from others than forging links between us and others
  
  Our commitment to independent thought and the provisionality of belief means that few heathens are likely to agree completely with this manifesto. It is therefore almost a precondition of supporting it that you do not entirely support it. At the same time, although very few people of faith can be heathens, many will find themselves in agreement with much of what heathens belief. This is what provides the common ground to make fruitful dialogue possible: we need to accept what we share in order to accept with civility and understanding what we most certainly do not. This is what the heathen manifesto is really about.

Christianity In Crisis

• Christianity has been destroyed by politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists.
  
  If you go to the second floor of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., you'll find a small room containing an 18th-century Bible whose pages are full of holes. They are carefully razor-cut empty spaces, so this was not an act of vandalism. It was, rather, a project begun by Thomas Jefferson when he was a mere 27 years old. Painstakingly removing those passages he thought reflected the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson literally cut and pasted them into a slimmer, different New Testament, and left behind the remnants (all on display until July 15). What did he edit out? He told us: "We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus." He removed what he felt were the 'misconceptions' of Jesus' followers, "expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves." And it wasn't hard for him. He described the difference between the real Jesus and the evangelists' embellishments as 'diamonds' in a 'dunghill,' glittering as "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man." Yes, he was calling vast parts of the Bible religious manure.
  
  When we think of Jefferson as the great architect of the separation of church and state, this, perhaps, was what he meant by 'church': the purest, simplest, apolitical Christianity, purged of the agendas of those who had sought to use Jesus to advance their own power decades and centuries after Jesus' death. If Jefferson's greatest political legacy was the Declaration of Independence, this pure, precious moral teaching was his religious legacy. "I am a real Christian," Jefferson insisted against the fundamentalists and clerics of his time. "That is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus."
  
  What were those doctrines? Not the supernatural claims that, fused with politics and power, gave successive generations wars, inquisitions, pogroms, reformations, and counterreformations. Jesus' doctrines were the practical commandments, the truly radical ideas that immediately leap out in the simple stories he told and which he exemplified in everything he did. Not simply love one another, but love your enemy and forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth; love the ineffable Being behind all things, and know that this Being is actually your truest Father, in whose image you were made. Above all: give up power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus' teaching. That's why, in his final apolitical act, Jesus never defended his innocence at trial, never resisted his crucifixion, and even turned to those nailing his hands to the wood on the cross and forgave them, and loved them.
  
  Politicized Faith
  
  Whether or not you believe, as I do, in Jesus' divinity and resurrection - and in the importance of celebrating both on Easter Sunday - Jefferson's point is crucially important. Because it was Jesus' point. What does it matter how strictly you proclaim your belief in various doctrines if you do not live as these doctrines demand? What is politics if not a dangerous temptation toward controlling others rather than reforming oneself? If we return to what Jesus actually asked us to do and to be - rather than the unknowable intricacies of what we believe he was - he actually emerges more powerfully and more purely.
  
  And more intensely relevant to our times. Jefferson's vision of a simpler, purer, apolitical Christianity couldn't be further from the 21st-century American reality. We inhabit a polity now saturated with religion. On one side, the Republican base is made up of evangelical Protestants who believe that religion must consume and influence every aspect of public life. On the other side, the last Democratic primary had candidates profess their faith in public forums, and more recently President Obama appeared at the National Prayer Breakfast, invoking Jesus to defend his plan for universal health care. The crisis of Christianity is perhaps best captured in the new meaning of the word 'secular.' It once meant belief in separating the spheres of faith and politics; it now means, for many, simply atheism. The ability to be faithful in a religious space and reasonable in a political one has atrophied before our eyes.
  
  Organized Religion in Decline
  
  Meanwhile, organized religion itself is in trouble. The Catholic Church's hierarchy lost much of its authority over the American flock with the unilateral prohibition of the pill in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. But in the last decade, whatever shred of moral authority that remained has evaporated. The hierarchy was exposed as enabling, and then covering up, an international conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youths and children. I don't know what greater indictment of a church's authority there can be - except the refusal, even now, of the entire leadership to face their responsibility and resign. Instead, they obsess about others' sex lives, about who is entitled to civil marriage, and about who pays for birth control in health insurance. Inequality, poverty, even the torture institutionalized by the government after 9/11: these issues attract far less of their public attention.
  
  For their part, the mainline Protestant churches, which long promoted religious moderation, have rapidly declined in the past 50 years. Evangelical Protestantism has stepped into the vacuum, but it has serious defects of its own. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explores in his unsparing new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, many suburban evangelicals embrace a gospel of prosperity, which teaches that living a Christian life will make you successful and rich. Others defend a rigid biblical literalism, adamantly wishing away a century and a half of scholarship that has clearly shown that the canonized Gospels were written decades after Jesus' ministry, and are copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory. Still others insist that the earth is merely 6,000 years old - something we now know by the light of reason and science is simply untrue. And what group of Americans have pollsters found to be most supportive of torturing terror suspects? Evangelical Christians. Something has gone very wrong. These are impulses born of panic in the face of modernity, and fear before an amorphous 'other.' This version of Christianity could not contrast more strongly with Jesus' constant refrain: "Be not afraid." It would make Jefferson shudder.
  
  It would also, one imagines, baffle Jesus of Nazareth. The issues that Christianity obsesses over today simply do not appear in either Jefferson's or the original New Testament. Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion, and his only remarks on marriage were a condemnation of divorce (now commonplace among American Christians) and forgiveness for adultery. The family? He disowned his parents in public as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to follow him. Sex? He was a celibate who, along with his followers, anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was completely irrelevant.
  
  The Crisis of Our Time
  
  All of which is to say something so obvious it is almost taboo: Christianity itself is in crisis. It seems no accident to me that so many Christians now embrace materialist self-help rather than ascetic self-denial - or that most Catholics, even regular churchgoers, have tuned out the hierarchy in embarrassment or disgust. Given this crisis, it is no surprise that the fastest-growing segment of belief among the young is atheism, which has leapt in popularity in the new millennium. Nor is it a shock that so many have turned away from organized Christianity and toward 'spirituality,' co-opting or adapting the practices of meditation or yoga, or wandering as lapsed Catholics in an inquisitive spiritual desert. The thirst for God is still there. How could it not be, when the profoundest human questions - Why does the universe exist rather than nothing? How did humanity come to be on this remote blue speck of a planet? What happens to us after death? - remain as pressing and mysterious as they've always been?
  
  That's why polls show a huge majority of Americans still believing in a Higher Power. But the need for new questioning - of Christian institutions as well as ideas and priorities—is as real as the crisis is deep.

The Jerusalem Syndrome

Why Some Religious Tourists Believe They Are the Messiah

Shortly after his 40th birthday, the life of a man we'll call Ronald Hodge took a strange turn. He still looked pretty good for his age. He had a well-paying job and a devoted wife. Or so he thought. Then, one morning, Hodge's wife told him she no longer loved him. She moved out the next day. A few weeks later, he was informed that his company was downsizing and that he would be let go. Not knowing where to turn, Hodge started going to church again.

Even though he'd been raised in an evangelical household, it had been years since Hodge had thought much about God. But now that everything seemed to be falling apart around him, he began attending services every week. Then every day. One night, while lying in bed, he opened the Bible and began reading. He'd been doing this every night since his wife left. And every time he did, he would see the same word staring back at him - the same four syllables that seemed to jump off the page as if they were printed in buzzing neon: Jerusalem. Hodge wasn't a superstitious man, he didn't believe in signs, but the frequency of it certainly felt like ... something. A week later, he was 30,000 feet over the Atlantic on an El Al jet to Israel.

When Hodge arrived in Jerusalem, he told the taxi driver to drop him off at the entrance to the Old City. He walked through the ancient, labyrinthine streets until he found a cheap hostel near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He had a feeling that this was important. Supposedly built on top of the spot where Jesus Christ was crucified and three days later rose from the dead, the domed cathedral is the holiest site in Christendom. And Hodge knew that whatever called him to the Holy Land was emanating from there.

During his first few days in Jerusalem, Hodge rose early and headed straight to the church to pray. He got so lost in meditation that morning would slip into afternoon, afternoon into evening, until one of the bearded priests tapped him on the shoulder and told him it was time to go home. When he returned to his hostel, he would lie in bed unable to sleep. Thoughts raced through his head. Holy thoughts. That's when Hodge first heard the Voice.

Actually, heard is the wrong word. He felt it, resonating in his chest. It was like his body had become a giant tuning fork or a dowsing rod. Taking a cue from the sign of the cross that Catholics make when they pray, Hodge decided that if the vibrations came from the right side of his chest, it was the Holy Ghost communicating with him. If he felt them farther down, near the base of his sternum, it was the voice of Jesus. And if he felt the voice humming inside his head, it was the Holy Father, God himself, calling.

Soon, the vibrations turned into words, commanding him to fast for 40 days and 40 nights. None of this scared him. If anything, he felt a warm, soothing peace wash over him because he was finally being guided.

Not eating or drinking came easily at first. But after a week or so, the other backpackers at his hostel began to grow concerned. With good reason: Hodge's clothes were dirty and falling off of him. He had begun to emit a pungent, off-putting funk. He was acting erratically, hallucinating and singing the word Jesus over and over in a high-pitched chirp.

"Jesus ... Jesus ... Jesus ..."

Hodge camped out in the hostel's lobby and began introducing himself to one and all as the Messiah. Eventually, the manager of the hostel couldn't take it anymore. He didn't think the American calling himself Jesus was dangerous, but the guy was scaring away customers. Plus, he'd seen this kind of thing before. And he knew there was a man who could help.

Herzog Hospital sits on a steep, sun-baked hill on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Its sprawling grounds are dotted with tall cedars and aromatic olive trees. Five floors below the main level is the office of Pesach Lichtenberg, head of the men's division of psychiatry at Herzog.

Lichtenberg is 52 years old and thin, with glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, he moved to Israel in 1986 after graduating from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and has worked at Herzog more or less ever since. It's here that he has become one of the world's leading experts on the peculiar form of madness that struck Ronald Hodge - a psychiatric phenomenon known as Jerusalem syndrome.

On a bright, late summer morning, Lichtenberg greets me in the chaotic lobby of the hospital, smiling and extending his hand. "You missed it!" he says. "We had a new Chosen One brought into the ward this morning." We go down to Lichtenberg's office; on top of a bookcase is a giant shofar, a curved ram's horn that religious Jews sound on the high holidays. A middle-aged British man under the doctor's care had used it to trumpet the Messiah's - that is to say, his own - coming. Lichtenberg explains that allowing me to meet his latest patient would violate hospital policy, and he can't discuss ongoing cases. He'll talk about past patients as long as I agree to de-identify them, as I did with Hodge. "But," he adds, "that doesn't mean we can't try to find a messiah of our own. In a few days, we'll take a walk around the Old City and maybe we'll find one for you there."

There's a joke in psychiatry: If you talk to God, it's called praying; if God talks to you, you're nuts. In Jerusalem, God seems to be particularly chatty around Easter, Passover, and Christmas - the peak seasons for the syndrome. It affects an estimated 50 to 100 tourists each year, the overwhelming majority of whom are evangelical Christians. Some of these cases simply involve tourists becoming momentarily overwhelmed by the religious history of the Holy City, finding themselves discombobulated after an afternoon at the Wailing Wall or experiencing a tsunami of obsessive thoughts after walking the Stations of the Cross. But more severe cases can lead otherwise normal housewives from Dallas or healthy tool-and-die manufacturers from Toledo to hear the voices of angels or fashion the bedsheets of their hotel rooms into makeshift togas and disappear into the Old City babbling prophecy.

Lichtenberg estimates that, in two decades at Herzog, the number of false prophets and self-appointed redeemers he has treated is in the low three figures. In other words, if and when the true Messiah does return (or show up for the first time, depending on what you believe), Lichtenberg is in an ideal spot to be the guy who greets Him.

"Jerusalem is an insane place," one anthropologist says. "It overwhelms people."

While it's tempting to blame the syndrome on Israel's holiest city, that wouldn't be fair. At least, not completely. "It's just the trigger," says Yoram Bilu, an Israeli psychological anthropologist at the University of Chicago Divinity School. "The majority of people who suffer from Jerusalem syndrome have some psychiatric history before they get here." The syndrome doesn't show up in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but it and its kissing cousins are well-known to clinicians. For example, there's Stendhal syndrome, in which visitors to Florence are overwhelmed by powerful works of art. First described in the early 19th century in Stendhal's Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio, the disorder can lead to spontaneous fainting, confusion, and hallucinations. Paris syndrome, first described in 1986, is characterized by acute delusions in visitors to the City of Light and for some reason seems to preferentially affect Japanese tourists. Place, it seems, can have a profound effect on the mind.

What's actually happening in the brain, though, isn't completely clear. Faith isn't easy to categorize or study. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, has conducted several brain-imaging studies of people in moments of extreme devotion. The limbic system, the center for our emotions, begins to show much higher activity, while the frontal lobes, which might ordinarily calm people, start to shut down. "In extreme cases, that can lead to hallucinations, where someone might believe they're seeing the face of God or hearing voices," Newberg says. "Your frontal lobe isn't there to say, 'Hey, this doesn't sound like a good idea.' And the person winds up engaging in behaviors that are not their norm."

The psychosis typical of Jerusalem syndrome develops gradually. At first the victim may begin to feel symptoms of anxiety, nervousness, and insomnia. The next day, there may be a compulsive urge to break away from the rest of the tour group and visit holy places like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Sufferers might follow this with a series of purification rituals such as shaving all of their body hair, clipping their nails, or washing themselves free of earthly impurities. The afflicted may then venture into the Old City to shout confused sermons claiming that redemption is at hand. In some cases, victims believe they are merely a cog in an ineffable process, helping to set the stage for the Messiah's return with some small task they've been given. In more extreme cases, they can be swept up by psychotic delusions so intense, so ornate, that they become convinced they are Jesus Christ. "Jerusalem is an insane place in some ways. It overwhelms people, and it has for centuries," Bilu says. "The city is seductive, and people who are highly suggestible can succumb to this seduction. I'm always envious of people who live in San Diego, where history barely exists."

In other words, what you can blame Jerusalem for is looking like, well, Jerusalem. The Old City is a mosaic of sacred spaces, from the al-Aqsa Mosque to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount to the well-trodden stones on which Jesus supposedly walked. Like every city, it's the combination of architecture and storytelling that makes Jerusalem more than just a crossroads. Great cities, the places that feel significant and important when you walk their streets, always rely on stagecraft - a deftly curving road, finely wrought facades, or a high concentration of light-up signage can all impart a sense of place, of significance. This architectural trickery can even instill a feeling of the sacred. The colonnades around St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, the rock garden at Ryoanji temple in Kyoto, and the pillars at the Jamarat Bridge near Mecca all shoot laser beams of transcendence into the brain of a properly primed visitor. "Part of the experience of going to these places is the interweaving of past and present," says Karla Britton, an architectural historian at the Yale School of Architecture. "There's a collapse of time. And for some people who visit these sacred sights and spaces, this collapse can be psychologically disorienting. The whole act of pilgrimage is deliberately intended as a kind of disorientation."

That in and of itself doesn't make someone crazy. "There are a lot of people who come to Israel and feel God's presence, and there's nothing wrong with that," Lichtenberg says. "That's called, at the very least, a good vacation. God forbid a psychiatrist sticks his nose into something like that." He smiles and rubs his beard. "But the question is, at what point is belief OK and at what point is it not OK? If someone says, 'I believe in God,' OK. And if they say, 'I believe the Messiah will come,' fine. And if they say, 'I believe His coming is imminent,' you think, well, that's a man of real faith. But if they then say, 'And I know who it is! I can name names!' you go, wait a second - hold on!"

When people with Jerusalem syndrome show up at the hospital, doctors often just let them unspool their stories, however strange the narratives may seem. If the people aren't dangerous, they are usually discharged. Violent patients might be medicated and kept under observation pending contact with their family or consulate. After all, the most effective treatment when it comes to Jerusalem syndrome is often pretty simple: Get the person the hell out of Jerusalem. "The syndrome is a brief but intense break with reality that is place-related," Bilu says. "When the person leaves Jerusalem, the symptoms subside."

Lichtenberg didn't know any of this when he started at Herzog. Then, shortly after he began his residency in the late 1980s, he met a 35-year-old Christian woman from Germany. She was single and traveling alone in Israel. He remembers her as being gaunt, prematurely gray, and highly educated. The police had picked her up in the Old City for badgering tourists about the Lord's return. "She arrived in a state of bliss because she believed the Messiah was coming," Lichtenberg says. "I probably thought, she's just meshuggeneh."

Over the next few days, Lichtenberg underwent a transformation of his own. He became obsessed with the German woman's case. He thought about how she would ricochet from periods of giddy rapture to moments of outright hostility and confusion. During her more manic moments, she wanted to share the Good News with the doctor. In her more depressive ones, she wandered the psychiatric ward desperately trying to hear the voices in her head that had gone momentarily silent. She would rub her temples as if she could dial in the voice of God, like someone trying to tune in a far-off radio station.

The woman stayed at the hospital for a month, until the doctor could arrange for her to be sent home. Lichtenberg has no idea what happened to her after she returned to Germany, but more than 20 years later he can still recall the smallest details of her case. "It was so interesting talking to her, but I was also a little embarrassed because there was no one at the hospital to encourage that sort of thing back then. At the time, the thinking here was more like, OK, what dosage is she getting? Should we increase it?"

This way of thinking is more sympathetic than many psychiatrists would call for. Actually, it wasn't that long ago that one respected Israeli physician put two patients who both claimed to be the Messiah in a room together just to see what would happen. Each rabidly accused the other of being an impostor, barking fire-and-brimstone threats.

Self-styled prophets have been journeying to Jerusalem on messianic vision quests for centuries. A certain Nazarene carpenter was merely the most charismatic and most written about. But it wasn't until the 1930s that an Israeli psychiatrist named Heinz Herman clinically described Jerusalem syndrome for the first time. One of his early cases involved an Englishwoman who was so convinced the Second Coming was at hand that she climbed to the top of Jerusalem's Mt. Scopus every morning with a cup of tea to welcome the Lord.

Most cases are harmless, but there have been disturbing exceptions. In 1969 an Australian tourist named Denis Michael Rohan was so overwhelmed by what he believed to be his God-given mission that he set fire to the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam's most sacred sites, which sits atop the Temple Mount directly above the Wailing Wall. The blaze led to rioting throughout the city. Rohan later said that he had to clear the site of "abominations" so it would be cleansed for the Second Coming. (The mosque was rebuilt by a Saudi construction company owned by Osama bin Laden's father.)

More recently, an American man became so convinced he was Samson that he tried - and failed - to move a block of the Wailing Wall. An American woman came to believe she was the Virgin Mary and went to nearby Bethlehem to search for her baby, Jesus. And a few years ago, the Israeli press reported on a 38-year-old American tourist who, after spending 10 days in Israel, began roaming the surrounding hills muttering about Jesus. Shortly after being hospitalized, he jumped off a 13-foot-high walkway near the emergency room, breaking several ribs and puncturing his lung.

Lichtenberg says that during times of uncertainty and conflict (not infrequent in Israel), admissions to his ward spike. For example, in late 1999, when the rest of the world quaintly panicked about the Y2K bug and whether they'd be able to use their ATMs on January 1, Israel was on high alert, afraid that deranged religious crazies would flock to Jerusalem in anticipation of a millennial apocalypse. At the peak, five patients a week were brought into Lichtenberg's ward. The country's defense forces were concerned that someone would try to blow up the al-Aqsa Mosque, finishing the job Rohan started 30 years earlier.

What The Daily Show Teaches About Religion

As difficult as it is to find good writing about religion, it is harder still to find good television about religion. Most televangelists do not do good (challenging, nuanced) religious television: one of their goals may be to educate, or win converts, but they have to raise money, and offering sophisticated portraits of religion is as likely to close people's wallets as open them. Religious television series tend to be unwatchable: no Touched by an Angel for me. And talk-show hosts are rarely any better when it comes to religion. The skepticism of Bill Maher can be as simplistic as the basest prosperity gospel, and we should all be glad that the eager gullibility of Oprah is now quarantined on her own network. Except for public television's Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, it is hard to find intelligent talk about religion on TV.

Except for Jon Stewart, that is. The secular Jewish comedian, host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, covers religion often, but more important, he covers it well. Stewart seems to genuinely enjoy interviewing religious figures, whether of the left (like Sojourners magazine's Jim Wallis) or the right (like pseudo-historian, political advisor and textbook consultant David Barton). Some of The Daily Show's best sketches deal with religion, and his writers and multi-ethnic cast - including one of the few recognizable Muslim comedians in America, Aasif Mandvi - frequently move beyond satire. They are often funny, but just as often smart.

Above all, however, Stewart and his writers do two things that make them unique on popular television. First, they cover - and yes, I would say "cover," not just satirize or mock - a wide range of religions. If you watched only The Daily Show, you would nonetheless learn, in time, about Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and a whole spectrum of smaller faiths, a category that I would argue includes atheism. And second, they pay attention to points of theology that more traditional news and talk shows skip over. Using chunks of time that would be unthinkable on a network newscast - six minutes for a segment on Mormonism! - The Daily Show teaches the finer points of belief, mining them for humor but at the same time serving a real educational function.

Stewart comes at religion with buckets of derision, but I do not find him offensive, nor should anyone who enjoys comedy. Like so many of the best comedians, he is an equal-opportunity hater. Sometimes it's atheists he cannot stand, as in his bit about the beams in a shape of the cross that survived the Ground Zero wreckage, which the American Atheists did not want displayed. Sometimes it's the Catholic church, which last November proved a useful point of comparison for the football culture at Penn State: "I get that it's probably hard for you to believe that this guy you think is infallible, and this program you think is sacred, could hide such heinous activities, but there is some precedent for that," Stewart said, referring to coach Joe Paterno and the sex-abuse scandal. "Yeah, and just like with the Catholic Church, no one is trying to take away your religion, in this case football. They're just trying to bring some accountability to a pope, and some of his cardinals." In both cases, it was the culture of certainty that Stewart was mocking, not the belief system itself. It was the human tendency toward hubris.

But of course belief systems are fair game, too. In fact, Stewart and his writers have realized that good theology - getting people's beliefs right - happens to make for good humor. Consider a bit that aired last October, in which Stewart interviewed cast members Samantha Bee and Wyatt Cenac on the differences between Mormonism and traditional Christianity. Bee, a fair-complected Canadian, was playing a Mormon, wearing a shirt that said "Team Mormon"; and Cenac, a black man of Haitian ancestry, was wearing a shirt that said "Team Normal." Bee began by complaining about the tee shirts they were made to wear: "Why is Wyatt 'Team Normal'? That implies that Mormons aren't normal ... We are not a cult. Mormonism is a proud religion founded by a great man who was guided by the Angel Moroni to golden plates buried in upstate New York that he placed in the bottom of a hat where he read them using a seer stone."

Matters devolved from there. Team Mormon and Team Normal began arguing about which group is crazier: the one that believes Jesus was born of a virgin and the Holy Ghost, and that he rose from the dead and ascended to Heaven, or the one that believes all that plus the story that he then returned to Missouri. Jon Stewart intercedes, saying that both Bee and Cenac seem happy to suspend disbelief when it comes to the basic tenets of the New Testament. Both Bee and Cenac then take license to turn on Stewart, for being an adherent to a religion in which "it's normal to hang out in someone's living room and watch a guy with a beard cut off a baby's penis while everyone eats pound cake!" (as Bee puts it). The bit is as comedically deft as it is religiously shrewd: how often do we catch ourselves rolling our eyes at someone else's belief system, only to realize at the last second that we believe some crazy things ourselves? In that regard, Stewart is a stand-in for all of us, enjoying some fun at the expense of other religions until the gods of dramatic irony hold a mirror to his face.

And except for the fact that circumcision doesn't involve the whole penis ("In my defense," Stewart says, "it's just the tip, and the cake is incredibly moist"), the dialogue is exceptionally accurate about all three religions: traditional Christianity, Latter-day Saint practices, and Judaism. The Mormons' special underwear is played for laughs, it's true - but the point is that Stewart and his writers convey more specifics about religious practice in less than four minutes than any documentary or nightly-news segment I've ever seen.

And the implicit message is one that religion scholars are always trying to convey: all religions have beliefs that seem bizarre to outsiders, and “cult” is often just a word to describe the other guy’s religion. The Daily Show approaches American religion in the spirit of tolerance, but not with the wimpy, eager-to-please hand-wringing that characterizes so much liberal dialogue in this country. Rather, religions are shown to be strange and possibly cringe-inducing: our job is to take an honest look, then tolerate them anyway. It’s a call to rigorous citizenship.

At some point, every one of Stewart’s regulars is called upon to represent a different religious group — Mandvi is often the Muslim, Cenac the Christian, and in one episode the Englishman John Oliver tries to claim Halifax, Nova Scotia, as a new holy site for Jews (“Challahfax” — although according to Mandvi, who is trying to claim the site for Muslims, it is pronounced “Halalifax”). The cast is like a merry band of religious satirists, with a joke for every faith playing in their repertory.

Stewart himself has said very little about his own Judaism, although he is clearly non-practicing by most any definition: he has gone to work, and recorded shows, on the High Holidays, for example. The writer Marty Kaplan tells the story of moderating a forum about why Jews who don’t believe go to synagogue on the holidays: “At one point, a congregant, without prompting, told the room that Stewart didn’t take the High Holy Days off,” Kaplan writes. “His tone was a mixture of anger and disappointment, the kind of sentiment someone might feel about a misguided family member.” And it so happens that I think Stewart’s humor might even be stronger, more durable, if it weren’t all quite so frivolous to him. For example, the writer Shalom Auslander, who was raised very religiously, is capable of a kind of enduring, deeply poignant satire that is beyond Stewart. Similarly, I suspect that Stephen Colbert, erstwhile Daily Show cast member and now host of The Colbert Report, has comedic hues that come from his Catholic religiosity, which he speaks openly about.

But if Stewart is himself indifferent to religion, he is clearly not bitter about it. There is no apparent ideology, either religious or skeptical, animating Stewart’s treatment of religion. More than anything, he and his writers have the scrupulosity of objective journalists. They win laughs without deforming, or even exaggerating, the religion’s actual beliefs. This is an extraordinary feat. Most religious humor, especially on television or in the movies, depends on stereotypes, which are by definition crude and reductive. Stewart’s writers, by contrast, find humor in the specifics of each faith. They would rather laugh at the finer points of belief than stick pins in some caricature. When they are especially fortunate, they can describe a faith through its antagonists — while making those antagonists look ridiculous. Here I am thinking of a segment from 2010, in which Wyatt Cenac interviewed a Muslim woman whose application to be a foster mother was rejected because she would not allow pork products in her house. He made the foster agency look absurd and bigoted, and he helped explain Muslim dietary practices to the audience.

Especially when taken out of context, disembedded from the civilizations and cultures in which they make sense, religious claims are frequently of the bizarre sort that no sane person ought to believe. Humor actually proves to be one of the best devices to help skeptics or the uninitiated talk about religion. And it offers a great litmus test for believers: how confident are you in your beliefs? After all, no confident believer should be afraid to chuckle about religion’s seeming absurdities — just as no mirthful human being should pass up the chance to laugh along with the unbeliever. The Daily Show has more fun with religion than any show on television — more fun, in fact, than many religious people have in their own observance. Jon Stewart may not be a believer —he did boast that he had a bacon croissanwich for Passover — but he is one hell of a teacher.

Absolutist Morality

• When President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage last week, he revealed a stance that had “evolved.” Those who oppose his position - usually on religious grounds - often insist that same-sex marriage is immoral, an affront to absolute, unchanging principles that simply don’t “evolve.” Marriage is between man and woman, period.
  
  Thus, once again we find a culture-war issue with social conservatives postured as defending moral absolutes, while liberals wander the treacherous landscape of relativism with a seemingly fluid sense of right and wrong. In a political environment - where "traditional values" have currency and complex ideas don't - the notion of moral absolutism often resonates, and “moral relativism” can be easily demonized by fear-mongering opportunists. If liberals have a problem with political posturing, few issues illustrate it better than the absolutism vs. relativism debate.
  
  As modernity moves forward, there are constant tensions over challenges to traditional morality. The most obvious area is sex, where the advance of science and technology (especially birth control) has prompted reconsideration of many longstanding norms and taboos, revolutionizing society and transforming life in numerous ways. Not surprisingly, despite much progress, we see frequent hesitation and even fierce resistance to change, especially from pockets of deep religious conservatism.
  
  When that resistance to modernity is vocalized, the rhetoric will often include references to moral absolutism, to unchanging dictates from God. In fact, religious conservatives exalt absolutism even when they fall far short of its standards. Caught in an adulterous affair in 2009, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford apologized by reflexively acknowledging, “I’ve been a person of faith all my life. There are moral absolutes.”
  
  For practical purposes in everyday life, the idea of moral absolutes can have understandable appeal. As we go about our business within a certain framework of place and time, there are actions and ideas that must be seen as good and evil, right and wrong. Politically, religious conservatives seize upon this need for certainty and exploit it for advantage, claiming that what seems certain in their lives today must be seen as eternally so, everywhere. This message can be powerful, especially in a society that is leaping forward technogically and thereby experiencing rapid social changes that many find troubling.
  
  Nevertheless, since racism, slavery, forced marriages, and the oppression of women - just a few examples of concepts that were once considered moral - are no longer acceptable in civilized society, there is really no debate about whether morality evolves: It most certainly does! But religious conservatives nevertheless recognize that many feel threatened by change and find great comfort in tradition and absolutes, so they get much mileage from touting old-time (and often outdated) values.
  
  Because of this, to argue against absolute morality in America can be political suicide. In an environment where the media and the public will entertain nothing but sound bites and simplistic thinking, there is little interest in complex philosophical analysis of right and wrong. Traditional, absolutist moral rhetoric will usually go unquestioned, while news coverage instead focuses on other critical issues, like which candidate we’d want to have a beer with.
  
  This is why Obama’s “evolved” view of same-sex marriage is not without risk: to succeed, he must convince the public that the idea of evolving morality is not sacrilege. And this is where we see the high cost of America's vilification of the secular demographic, which adamantly advocates for a naturalistic outlook that seriously and effectively challenges conservative religious moral absolutism.
  
  To the extent the public accepts that morality was not dictated by God to ancient men, the progressive (and secular) position will prevail; but because seculars are too often considered political outcasts, you probably won't see Obama reaching out to the secular community for support on this issue. Instead, he looks for allies who happen to agree with him on the issue, without challenging the underlying assumptions of absolutism emanating from conservative circles. Clearly, visible inclusion of seculars in politics would introduce a vociferous opponent to the righteous religious absolutists, but nobody seems interested in welcoming them to the table.
  
  Though a majority of Americans identify as at least marginally religious, the secular view of morality is hardly radical. After all, the most conservative Christian must concede that morality does change, that notions of right and wrong – even those that seem vitally important to the very fabric of society – will differ from place to place and from time to time.
  
  In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, Steven Pinker points out that evolving notions of morality, often arising from the Enlightenment humanism of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, have been the catalyst for much of the civility and nonviolence that has become more prevalent in modern society. (If you think society is more violent now than ever, by the way, Pinker will prove you wrong.)
  
  A few centuries ago, for example, typical Europeans would entertain themselves by torturing cats, public executions were festive events for the whole family, and wife beating, child beating, and racism were normal, hardly a sign of deep moral flaws. Even in modern America, until a generation ago, police would rarely intervene in matters of domestic violence.
  
  From a progressive, humanistic standpoint, it is important to recognize the public’s need for some degree of moral certainty and absolutism, of its general aversion to wishy-washy notions of relativism. But it is also important to circulate the idea that standards of morality can and often do change – and that this can be a good thing. After all, biblical morality would prohibit eating shellfish, touching a menstruating woman, or wearing clothes made from the mixed fabrics. Thank goodness we’ve evolved!
  
  By understanding that a changing social and technological environment can justify a rethinking of moral standards – and that this does not necessarily shake society at its foundations – we allow ourselves to “evolve” into a more humane, free, and decent culture. Such an evolution may threaten conservative theology, but it is no threat to the rest of us.

Nuns on the Frontier

• THE recent Vatican edict that reproached American nuns for their liberal views on social and political issues has put a spotlight on the practices of these Roman Catholic sisters. While the current debate has focused on the nuns’ progressive stances on birth control, abortion, homosexuality, the all-male priesthood and economic injustice, tension between American nuns and the church’s male hierarchy reaches much further back.
  
  In the 19th century, Catholic nuns literally built the church in the American West, braving hardship and grueling circumstances to establish missions, set up classrooms and lead lives of calm in a chaotic world marked by corruption, criminality and illness. Their determination in the face of a male hierarchy that, then as now, frequently exploited and disdained them was a demonstration of their resilient faith in a church struggling to adapt itself to change.
  
  Like other settlers in the West, Catholic nuns were mostly migrants from Europe or the American East; the church had turned to them to create a Catholic presence across a seemingly limitless frontier. The region’s rocky mining camps, grassy plains and arid deserts did not appeal to many ordained men. As one disenchanted European priest, lamenting the lack of a good cook and the discomfort of frontier travel, grumbled, “I hate the long, dreary winters of Iowa.”
  
  Bishops relentlessly recruited sisters for Western missions, enticing them with images of Christian conversions, helpful local clergymen and charming convent cottages. If the sisters hesitated, the bishops mocked their timidity, scorned their selfishness and threatened heavenly retribution.
  
  The sisters proved them wrong. By steamboat, train, stagecoach and canoe, on foot and on horseback, the nuns answered the call. In the 1840s, a half-dozen sisters from Notre Dame de Namur, a Belgian order, braved stormy seas and dense fog to reach Oregon. In 1852, seven Daughters of Charity struggled on the backs of donkeys across the rain-soaked Isthmus of Panama toward California. In 1884, six Ursuline nuns stepped from a train in Montana, only to be left by the bishop at a raucous public rooming house, its unheated loft furnished only with wind and drifting snow.
  
  These nuns lived in filthy dugouts, barns and stables, hoped for donations of furniture, and survived on a daily ration of one slice of bread or a bowl of onion soup along with a cup of tea. They made their own way, worked endless hours, often walked miles to a Catholic chapel for services, and endured daunting privations in housing and nutrition.
  
  There appeared to be no end to what was expected of the sisters. In 1874, two Sisters of the Holy Cross, at the direction of Edward Sorin, the founder of the University of Notre Dame, opened a Texas school and orphanage in a two-room shack with a leaky dormitory garret that the nuns affectionately labeled “The Ark.” The brother who managed the congregation’s large farm informed the sisters, who were barely able to feed and clothe the 80 boarders, that he could not give the school free produce — though they could buy it at a discount. The sisters also did 18 years of unpaid housekeeping work on a farm run by the men.
  
  Sisters adapted to these physical, spiritual and fiscal exploitations with amazingly good humor. Still, they chafed against their male superiors’ unreasonable restrictions and harsh dictates. When they directly questioned policy, bishops and priests moved to silence them. A single protest could draw draconian reprisals on an entire congregation.
  
  In 1886, four Texas priests demanded that Bishop John C. Néraz replace a superior, Mother St. Andrew Feltin, saying that she had “spread gossip” and warned her sisters “to beware of priests.”
  
  Bishop Néraz threatened the sisterhood with disbandment and removed Mother St. Andrew from office. He hounded her for years, disciplined other nuns she had befriended, suspended her right to the sacraments, warned other bishops not to grant her sanctuary, undercut her efforts to enter a California convent and even urged her deportation to Europe. Finally, Mother St. Andrew laid aside her religious clothing, returned to secular dress and cared for her widowed brother’s children.
  
  Six years after Bishop Néraz died, Mother St. Andrew petitioned her congregation for readmission. Donning her habit, she renewed her vows amid a warm welcome from sisters who understood too well what she had suffered.
  
  Then as now, not all priests and bishops treated sisters badly, though the priests who reached out to nuns in a spirit of appreciation, friendship and equality could not alter the church’s institutional commitment to gender discrimination. And, as now, some bishops, dismissive of the laity, underestimated the loyalty secular Catholics felt for their nuns.
  
  In the case of Mother St. Andrew, tenacity and spirituality triumphed over arrogance and misogyny. The Vatican would do well to bear this history in mind as it thinks through the consequences of its unjust attack on American sisters.

Bishops' World

• Church opponents of gay marriage live in a weird theme park divorced from real Anglicans.
  
  So “the Church of England cannot support the proposal to enable all couples, regardless of their gender, to have a civil marriage ceremony”. That’s odd, I thought that I was part of the Church of England and I can and do support the proposal. And I know quite a few other people who thought that they were part of the Church of England and they support it too.
  
  So what is this Church of England that doesn’t? It doesn’t actually sign its name to the 13-page public submission it has just made to the Government’s consultation on marriage equality, but it is not difficult to ferret out what it is.
  
  It is a curious theme park called Bishop World. This is a collection of middle-aged to elderly males, some gay (though they don’t like to say so in public), some heterosexual (and they remind us of that all the time in public). They have a penchant for wearing mitres, sitting on committees and talking to each other. They are ably assisted by a small group of lawyers and civil servants, again for the most part remarkably male. A high fence protects the environs of Bishop World, so none of the inmates are troubled by opinions from the distressing wilderness beyond its bounds. Within their defences, nevertheless, they are anxious, insecure creatures, who worry incessantly about the breakdown of society.
  
  Isn’t it odd? Some of these men must be part of families in which there are teenagers and other symptoms of everyday reality, yet none of that comes across in a Bishop World statement such as this. The present document is part of a wider pattern. Not so long ago, Bishop World tried to impose a peculiar doctrinal straitjacket on the Church of England called the “Anglican Covenant”. The good folk of the C of E saw through it: it failed to achieve even a simple majority in the English dioceses, despite all the emotional blackmail exerted by Bishop World.
  
  Then Bishop World tinkered with legislation for women bishops, after it had been approved by an emphatic 42 of 44 dioceses, so that there could be bishops for any chosen opinion, never tainted by contact with any other sort of bishop. In perpetuity we can have bishops exclusively for vegetarians or flat-Earthers (or more likely, for those not liking gays or women clergy). We will see what the Church of England, Reality Variety, makes of that.
  
  And now this submission on gay marriage. It tells downright fibs: for instance, that the majority of bishops in the Lords backed civil partnerships in 2004. The reverse is true: in the main debate, a majority spoke and voted in support of an amendment that would have wrecked the Civil Partnership Bill — and does anyone seriously think the UK would have an equal age of consent, let alone civil partnerships, if it had been left to the bishops?
  
  The submission makes much of “biological complementarity”: marriage is for a man and a woman, for the procreation of children. Evidently biology isn’t taught beyond the age of Aristotle in Bishop World.
  
  The bishops are rather evasive about the many things that marriage has been in its history and its present: between a man and several women, for instance. Marriage has been what human beings have made it to fit the reality of their lives, and express their deepest longings. Any deep relationship involves complementarity, whether or not sex is attached. There are medieval Orthodox liturgies to celebrate same-sex unions, complete with bridal crowns. Ancient tombs in Anglican churches commemorate two people of the same sex who couldn’t bear to be separated in death — several Oxford dons, of course, but even a gravestone for two Stuart gentlewomen in what is now the cathedral at Suffolk’s answer to Sodom and Gomorrah, Bury St Edmunds. I am unaware of any social breakdown in 17th-century East Anglia.
  
  More than half of Bishop World’s submission is taken up with legal complications to allowing same-sex marriage. None of these would be real if Bishop World wasn’t so opposed to the idea, but the document talks them up into a potential crisis for an established church. Perhaps Bishop World didn’t notice that last week, the Danish Parliament enabled another established church, the Lutheran Church of Denmark, to celebrate same-sex marriages in church, with suitable provisions for clergy who don’t want to do so. Apparently this doesn’t affect church establishment in Denmark at all. The Church of Denmark also has women bishops, another thing Bishop World finds very troublesome.

Is Free Will An Illusion

• Are you really in control, or is your every decision predetermined? Who's at the steering wheel: you, your genes, your upbringing, fate, karma, God?
  
  A hot topic for several thousand years, the question of whether free will exists may never be settled to everyone's satisfaction. But in a series of new articles for the Chronicles of Higher Education, six academics from diverse fields offer fresh perspectives from the standpoints of modern neuroscience and philosophy. Ultimately, they voted 4-2 in favor of the position that free will is merely an illusion.
  
  The four scientists on the panel denied the existence of free will, arguing that human behavior is governed by the brain, which is itself controlled by each person's genetic blueprint built upon by his or her life experiences. Meanwhile, the two philosophers cast the dissenting votes, arguing that free will is perfectly compatible with the discoveries of neuroscience.
  
  Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, defined free will as the possibility that, after making a decision, you could have chosen otherwise. But a "decision," Coyne argues, is merely a series of electrical and chemical impulses between molecules in the brain — molecules whose configuration is predetermined by genes and environment. Though each decision is the outcome of an immensely complicated series of chemical reactions, those reactions are governed by the laws of physics and could not possibly turn out differently. "Like the output of a programmed computer, only one choice is ever physically possible: the one you made," Coyne wrote.
  
  The three other scientists concurred with Coyne's viewpoint. As Owen Jones, a professor of law and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, put it in his essay: "Will is as free as lunch. (If you doubt, just try willing yourself out of love, lust, anger, or jealousy)."
  
  Though everyone must be held accountable for his or her actions, neuroscience and the nonexistence of free will should be factored into some criminal cases, the scholars argued.
  
  A counterargument came from Hilary Bok, a philosopher at the Johns Hopkins University, who said scientists misunderstand the question of free will when they argue that decisions are governed by the activity of brain cells. Free will, in her opinion, is being capable of stepping back from one's existing motivations and habits and making a reasoned decision among various alternatives. "The claim that a person chose her action does not conflict with the claim that some neural processes or states caused it; it simply redescribes it," she wrote.
  
  Alfred Mele, another philosopher at Florida State University, also believes the concept of free will is compatible with the findings of neuroscience. He cited a 2008 study in which volunteers were asked to push either of two buttons. According to the study, brain activity up to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously reached revealed which button the volunteer was more likely to press.
  
  Though the study is widely viewed as evidence against free will, Mele pointed out that the study participants' brain activity accurately predicted their eventual decision only 60 percent of the time. In his view, this suggests people can consciously choose to override their brains' predispositions.
  
  Therefore, he wrote, "I do not recommend betting the farm on the nonexistence of free will."

Why Cults Are Mindless

• Whenever some cult clashes with the law, the public is fascinated, and horrified, by the capacity of leaders to control members. Perhaps the members surrender all of their property. Or they are sworn to celibacy so that the leader has sexual access to all of the women after the manner of the David Koresh cult destroyed in a Waco, Texas, fire (1). Or they drink poison on command as in the Jonesboro, Guyana, tragedy.
  
  The secret recipe of all such cults may be in the members rather than the leaders. Social psychologists discovered that members get very attached to cults that ask a great deal of them.
  
  When a lot is asked …
  
  Research on U.S. communes suggests that organizations need to be quite demanding to get their members committed enough to stay the distance. When sociologists Richard Sosis and Eric Bressler (2) studied 83 19th-Century communes in the U.S they found two intriguing patterns. The first was that more demanding communes lasted longer. Bigger sacrifices engendered greater emotional commitment to the group.
  
  The communes could be extreme. Some required vegetarianism, or celibacy, or surrender of all worldly possessions to the collective. The more demanding a religious commune was, the greater the level of cooperation it elicited from members and the longer the community survived. Groups with fewer than two costly requirements lasted less than ten years, on average. Communes that had between 6 and 8 burdensome costs lasted for over 50 years and those with more than 11 were still in business after 60 years.
  
  Costly commitment helped groups stick together only in religious communities which offers a fascinating glimpse into the socially cohesive function of supernatural beliefs.
  
  Secular communities were particularly unstable, generally lasting less than ten years. Contrary to the pattern for religious communities, the more demanding secular communities folded more quickly. Indeed, the most demanding secular community closed its doors after only a year.
  
  Why was there such a difference between religious and non religious communes? Evidently, sacrifices made for the community are interpreted differently for members of religious communes compared to secular ones.
  
  Ratcheting up the costs of membership works well only for religious communities. A supernatural belief system can justify heavy membership costs in terms of a higher purpose. Without supernatural justification members might ask themselves why they are paying so much to be in the commune. Lacking a religious justification, they may conclude that they are being exploited, by the leadership. The logical solution is to leave.
  
  When they are backed up by a religious belief system, communes can tolerate considerable inequality. This may be illustrated by differences in permissible sexual behavior.
  
  Sexual inequality
  
  A secular commune requiring celibacy from all male initiates would be destabilized by the free sexual expression of the leader.
  
  Yet, that sort of inequality may work if members believe that the leader is a divine incarnation. Something close to this scenario played out in the David Koresh cult (the Branch Davidians), that was wiped out in a fire following a standoff with federal authorities near Waco, Texas, in 1993 (1). Evidently, Koresh had free sexual access to female members consistent with his divine status whereas other men were expected to be celibate (3).
  
  So religious cults that survive for more than a few years are characterized by blind obedience. The really difficult question for relatives, clinical psychologists, and researchers is why inductees are so willing to surrender their autonomy in the first place.
  
  Yet, cults are not unusual in this respect. Mindless obedience to authority figures is evident in many other settings. These include the army; Greek societies; sports organizations with their Byzantine rules; business corporations with their company men (and women); and the groupthink of political life. World religions can also be included, of course.
  
  Mindless obedience is good for the cult but it is generally not good for the member. The same principle applies to entire countries. The less inequality there is, the better the quality of life experienced by everyone (4).
  
  1. Barber, N. (2012). Why atheism will replace religion: The triumph of earthly pleasures over pie in the sky. E-book, available at: http://www.amazon.com/Atheism-Will-Replace-Religion-ebook/dp/B008...
  
  2. Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. (2003). Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research, 37, 211-239.
  
  3. Newport, K. G. C. (2006). The branch Davidians of Waco: The history and beliefs of an apolalyptic sect. New York: Oxford University Press.
  
  4. Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2010). The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

The Catholic Church and Money

• OF ALL the organisations that serve America’s poor, few do more good work than the Catholic church: its schools and hospitals provide a lifeline for millions. Yet even taking these virtues into account, the finances of the Catholic church in America are an unholy mess. The sins involved in its book-keeping are not as vivid or grotesque as those on display in the various sexual-abuse cases that have cost the American church more than $3 billion so far; but the financial mismanagement and questionable business practices would have seen widespread resignations at the top of any other public institution.
  
  The sexual-abuse scandals of the past 20 years have brought shame to the church around the world. In America they have also brought financial strains. By studying court documents in bankruptcy cases, examining public records, requesting documents from local, state and federal governments, as well as talking to priests and bishops confidentially, The Economist has sought to quantify the damage.
  
  The picture that emerges is not flattering. The church’s finances look poorly co-ordinated considering (or perhaps because of) their complexity. The management of money is often sloppy. And some parts of the church have indulged in ungainly financial contortions in some cases—it is alleged—both to divert funds away from uses intended by donors and to frustrate creditors with legitimate claims, including its own nuns and priests. The dioceses that have filed for bankruptcy may not be typical of the church as a whole. But given the overall lack of openness there is no way of knowing to what extent they are outliers.
  
  Thousands of claims for damages following sexual-abuse cases, which typically cost the church over $1m per victim, according to lawyers involved, have led to a liquidity crisis. This seems to have encouraged a pre-existing trend towards replacing dollars from the faithful with publicly raised debt as a way of financing church business. The church is also increasingly keen to defend its access to public health-care subsidies while claiming a right not to provide certain medical services to which it objects, such as contraception. This increased reliance on taxpayers has not been matched by increased openness and accountability. The church, like other religious groups in America, is not subject to the same disclosure requirements as other non-profits or private entities.
  
  Little is known about the Catholic church’s finances outside America. JPMorgan Chase recently closed the Vatican Bank’s accounts under pressure from the US Treasury. The Holy See has also struggled to get itself placed on lists of jurisdictions that are deemed to have strong anti-money laundering controls. This may reflect bad organisation rather than a concerted attempt to hide anything, though documents leaked by Pope Benedict XVI’s former butler to an Italian journalist suggest that maladministration in the Vatican goes beyond mere negligence. But America, not least thanks to its bankruptcy procedures, provides a slightly clearer window on the church’s finances. And America is so important to the church that it merits particular examination.
  
  Only three countries—Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines—have larger Catholic populations than America, and nowhere has a larger Catholic minority. Almost 100m Americans, a third of the nation, have been baptised into the faith and 74m identify themselves as Catholic. Discrimination against the Catholic minority, and strong leadership from Rome, encouraged American Catholics to create a sort of parallel society in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the result that there are now over 6,800 Catholic schools (5% of the national total); 630 hospitals (11%) plus a similar number of smaller health facilities; and 244 colleges and universities. Many of these institutions are known for excellence: seven of the leading 25 part-time law school programmes in America are Catholic (five are run by Jesuits). A quarter of the 100 top-ranked hospitals are Catholic. All these institutions are subject to the oversight of a bishop or a religious order.
  
  The Economist estimates that annual spending by the church and entities owned by the church was around $170 billion in 2010 (the church does not release such figures). We think 57% of this goes on health-care networks, followed by 28% on colleges, with parish and diocesan day-to-day operations accounting for just 6% and national charitable activities just 2.7% (see chart). In total, Catholic institutions employ over 1m people, reckons Fred Gluck, a former McKinsey managing partner and co-founder of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, a lay organisation seeking to improve the way the church is run. For purposes of secular comparison, in 2010 General Electric’s revenue was $150 billion and Walmart employed roughly 2m people.
  
  The church is the largest single charitable organisation in the country. Catholic Charities USA, its main charity, and its subsidiaries employ over 65,000 paid staff and serve over 10m people. These organisations distributed $4.7 billion to the poor in 2010, of which 62% came from local, state and federal government agencies.
  
  The American church may account for as much as 60% of the global institution’s wealth. Little surprise, then, that it is the biggest contributor to head office (ahead of Germany, Italy and France). Everything from renovations to St Peter’s Basilica in Rome to the Pontifical Gregorian University, the church’s version of West Point, is largely paid for with American money.
  
  Where that money comes from is hard to say (the church does not release numbers on this either). Some of it is from the offerings of the faithful. Anecdotal evidence suggests that America’s Catholics give about $10 per week on average. Assuming that one-third attend church regularly, that would put the annual offertory income at around $13 billion. More comes from elite groups of large donors such as the Papal Foundation, based in Pennsylvania, whose 138 members pledge to donate at least $1m annually, and Legatus, a group of more than 2,000 Catholic business leaders that was founded by Tom Monaghan of Domino’s Pizza.
  
  There is also income from investments. Timothy Dolan, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Cardinal-Archbishop of New York (a “corporation sole”, meaning a legal entity consisting of a single incorporated office, occupied by a single person), is believed to be Manhattan’s largest landowner, if one includes the parishes and organisations that come under his jurisdiction. Another source of revenue is local and federal government, which bankroll the Medicare and Medicaid of patients in Catholic hospitals, the cost of educating pupils in Catholic schools and loans to students attending Catholic universities.
  
  Wages and sin
  
  The molestation and rape of children by priests in America has resulted in more than $3.3 billion of settlements over the past 15 years, $1.3 billion of that in California. The total is likely to increase as more states follow California and Delaware in relaxing the statute of limitations on these crimes, most of which were reported long after they happened. For an organisation with revenues of $170 billion that might seem manageable. But settlements are made by individual dioceses and religious orders, whose pockets are less deep than those of the church as a whole.
  
  The fact that far fewer Catholics are answering the call to become nuns, monks and priests (the minor seminaries, once the first step of the recruitment process, are almost empty) adds to the pressure. It saves some current costs, but reduces in perpetuity the pool of very cheap labour that the church has relied on. Dioceses increasingly need to pay people market rates to get jobs done that were previously assigned to clergy and members of religious orders. This pushes running costs up.
  
  On the revenue side, donations from the faithful are thought to have declined by as much as 20%. The scandals probably played a part in this: few people want to donate money that will go to clearing up the damage done by predatory priests. But many in the church also feel that competition for charitable dollars has increased.
  
  Over the past eight years, a combination of these stresses has driven eight dioceses (including San Diego, Tucson and Milwaukee) to declare bankruptcy, as well as the American arm of the Irish Christian Brothers and a regional branch of the Jesuits. More of America’s 196 dioceses could be forced to do the same. Efforts are under way in the legislatures of Arizona, Illinois, New York, Florida, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio and California (again) to extend statutes of limitations, according to Jeff Anderson, a lawyer who represents many victims of abuse. If any of these efforts succeeds, the expectation among lawyers like Mr Anderson is that some of the affected dioceses would seek Chapter 11 protection while they attempt to settle the cases. (Troubled dioceses generally settle suits just before the bishop is due in court.) The diocese of Honolulu could be the next to go bankrupt. In May it was hit by a pair of new lawsuits after the extension of Hawaii’s statute of limitations for victims of abuse.
  
  Various sources say that Cardinal Dolan and other New York bishops are spending a substantial amount—estimates range from $100,000 a year to well over $1m—on lobbying the state assembly to keep the current statute of limitations in place. His office will not comment on these estimates. This is in addition to the soft lobbying of lawmakers by those with pulpits at their disposal. The USCCB, the highest Catholic body in America, also lobbies the federal government on the issue. In April the California Catholic Conference, an organisation that brings the state’s bishops together, sent a letter to California’s Assembly opposing a bill that would extend the statute and require more rigorous background checks on church workers.
  
  Some dioceses have, in effect, raided priests’ pension funds to cover settlements and other losses. The church regularly collects money in the name of priests’ retirement. But in the dioceses that have gone bust lawyers and judges confirm that those funds are commingled with other investments, which makes them easily diverted to other uses. Under Cardinal Bernard Law, the archdiocese of Boston contributed nothing to its clergy retirement fund between 1986 and 2002, despite receiving an estimated $70m-90m in Easter and Christmas offerings that many parishioners believed would benefit retired priests.
  
  Church officials denied the money it had collected was improperly diverted. By 2008 the unfunded liability had reached $114m. Joseph D’Arrigo, a benefits specialist, was brought in to turn things round. In 2010 the retirement fund was turned into an independent trust to ensure it could not be used for other purposes—a first for an American diocese, reckons Mr D’Arrigo.
  
  An uncertain route to financial salvation The retirement funds for Wilmington, Delaware, were largely lost when it settled sex-abuse claims for $77m in February 2011. Those funds had been tossed into a pooled investment account that also contained parish investments and funds for cemeteries and the education of seminarians. The Eastern United States province of the Passionists, a missionary order, has diverted retirement funds to cover operating expenses. In a bid to stave off bankruptcy it has sold off property, including a 14-acre piece of New York waterfront, and made an unorthodox investment in a Broadway show, “Leap of Faith”. It flopped.
  
  In a public company, this type of thing would attract regulatory scrutiny. In the church, retirement is still largely in the gift of the bishop. Retirement plans for priests are typically set up as diocesan trusts rather than proper pension funds with structured benefits. They do not fall under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, the law that establishes standards for plan trustees and remedies for beneficiaries, including access to federal courts. Priests thus have no recourse to law if they are hard done by. Nor, as a matter of course, can they take their pensions with them if they leave for another diocese.
  
  Richard Vega, who recently stepped down as president of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, estimates that 75-80% of clergy pension schemes in America are underfunded. He says that only a small minority of priests will have set aside enough of their net average salary of $25,000 a year to cover themselves. Others will be less fortunate.
  
  The clergy and its creditors
  
  The principle of separation between church and state in America means that religious groups are not required to file tax returns, list their assets or disclose basic facts about their finances. Some dioceses do publish accounts, but these tend to provide an incomplete picture. Though lawyers for dioceses facing bankruptcy have fought to keep most financially sensitive documents sealed, the process has forced the church to let in unaccustomed light.
  
  The documents that have been disclosed reveal that some bishops in the bankrupt dioceses presented the diocesan funds of parishes, schools, hospitals and retirement accounts as separate when they were really simply book-keeping entries in the same pooled investment account. The diocese of San Diego, for instance, reported to the bankruptcy court that it had over 500 accounts. But these were merely entries in a “Parish, School Diocese Loan Trust Account”, maintained in a single bank account at Union Bank of California.
  
  Such pooling saves on administrative costs and allows dioceses to use a surplus in one area to cover shortfalls in another, often a legitimate course of action. But it has presented problems when it comes to working out which assets belong to whom in bankruptcy proceedings.
  
  The vast majority of parishes that commingled their funds with those dioceses now in bankruptcy lost all their investments. In some cases they were misled into believing that the money would be kept separate from the main diocesan funds, and thus safe in the event of bankruptcy. The judge in the Wilmington bankruptcy, Christopher Sontchi, said parishes that had suffered this fate had grounds to sue the diocese for breach of fiduciary duty. None has—but that is hardly surprising, given that the bishop and the chancellor of the diocese sit on the five-member board of trustees of each parish.
  
  Some parishes were more careful than others in ensuring their funds were handled properly. According to a document in The Economist’s possession, a parish priest in Wilmington wrote to the diocese: “Find enclosed a cheque for $1,000,000 to be invested in [the parish of] St Thomas’s name in the diocesan account. It is my understanding that if the need arises, this is and always will be available for parish use. If this is not the case, please return it and I will put it under my mattress for safe keeping.” The diocese cashed the cheque, apparently depositing it in a general cash account. The parish lost the money when the diocese struck a sexual-abuse settlement. By contrast St Ann’s parish, also in the Wilmington diocese, wired its deposits directly into a segregated investment account at Mellon Bank rather than to the diocesan cash account at Citizen’s Bank. Its trustees also insisted on drafting a special agreement stipulating that funds provided to the diocese were held in trust.
  
  Plaintiffs’ lawyers have raised questions about financial transfers in dioceses threatened with bankruptcy. These tend to go the other way—moving money out of diocesan accounts and into parish accounts, trusts of various sorts and any other receptacle at hand. According to an independent report commissioned by a bankruptcy judge, at one point priests in San Diego were taking cash out of accounts and putting it in safes in the rectories because they wanted to keep it out of reach of plaintiffs. Nobody becomes a priest, monk or nun in order to spend their professional life as a financial manager, so no doubt part of this money shuffling is down to innocent incompetence. But the church does shift between considering all assets as part of a single pool when that suits, and claiming that funds have always been separate and ring-fenced when they are exposed to claims.
  
  Creditors in the Milwaukee bankruptcy case, which is still in progress, have questioned the motives behind a $35m transfer to a trust and a $55.6m transfer from archdiocese coffers to a fund for cemeteries. Cardinal Dolan, who was Archbishop of Milwaukee at the time, authorised both transactions. The creditors think the movement of such large amounts had more to do with shielding cash from sexual-abuse victims than with the maintenance of graves, calling the manoeuvre fraudulent. Cardinal Dolan’s office responded to questions about these allegations by pointing to blog posts in which he described them as “baloney” and defended the transfers as “virtuous, open and in accord with the clear directives of the professionals on our finance council and outside auditors”.
  
  As “debtors in possession”—entities that have filed for bankruptcy yet retain their assets—bust dioceses have an obligation to enlarge their assets to satisfy their creditors. On the contrary, “we have seen a consistent tactic of Catholic bishops to shrink the size of their assets, which is not only wrong morally but in violation of state and federal law,” says Ken Brown of Pachulski Stang, a California law firm that has represented creditors in eight of the ten Catholic bankruptcy cases.
  
  In a particularly striking example, the diocese of San Diego listed the value of a whole city block in downtown San Diego at $40,000, the price at which it had been acquired in the 1940s, rather than trying to estimate the current market value, as required. Worse, it altered the forms in which assets had to be listed. The judge in the case, Louise Adler, was so vexed by this and other shenanigans on the part of the diocese that she ordered a special investigation into church finances which was led by Todd Neilson, a former FBI agent and renowned forensic accountant. The diocese ended up settling its sexual-abuse cases for almost $200m. If it had not done so, the bankruptcy would have been thrown out of court and the bishop and chancellor of the diocese and its lawyers might have faced contempt charges.
  
  Some assets are not listed at all. In a corporate bankruptcy, if insurance is relevant to the reason for the company’s failure then its insurance policy has to be listed as an asset. Not so those of the Catholic Mutual Group (CMG), which stepped up its help for Catholic dioceses in the mid-1980s—a time when liability insurance became too expensive as a result of the increase in sexual-abuse claims. Since the CMG is technically not an insurance company but a voluntary religious “mutual benefit society”, its policies do not have to be disclosed as assets in a bankruptcy proceeding, even though it contributes substantial funds towards settlements.
  
  One way to reduce costs is to reduce the number of parishes. There are two ways to do this. The first is to merge one parish with another parish and combine their buildings, congregations and finances. The second, more controversial way is to “suppress” the parish, which involves the transfer of all of the assets to the bishop, who reassigns parish priests as he sees fit. The funds in the parish bank accounts are placed in the general treasury of the diocese, as are the proceeds of land sales, none of which is subject to disclosure. Faced with shortfalls in Boston (where he was a temporary administrator) and later in Cleveland, Bishop Richard Lennon suppressed dozens of parishes as part of reorganisation plans for each of the two archdioceses; given the pervasive commingling of accounts, some of the money thus accumulated could have gone to pay operating expenses and, at least in Boston, court settlements.
  
  The parishioners were unimpressed. Some heckled the bishop when he visited their parish to celebrate mass. One of the Boston parishes, St Frances Cabrini in Scituate, Massachusetts, has been occupied for the past eight years by parishioners who have refused to accept its closure. They have a roster chart to ensure at least one person is at the church at any time, so that the archdiocese can’t change the locks. Some parishes have filed appeals to Rome. In an unusual move in March, the Vatican reversed the closing of 13 of the parishes that Bishop Lennon had suppressed.
  
  As well as questionable financial management, the church also suffers from fraud and embezzlement, according to Jason Berry, an expert in Catholic finance and author of “Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church”. In March the former chief financial officer of the archdiocese of Philadelphia was arrested and charged with embezzling more than $900,000 between 2005 and 2011. Hundreds of priests have been disciplined for taking more than a little “walking around money” from the collection basket.
  
  In the corporate world, those who witnessed such malfeasance might alert a higher authority. But priests make unlikely whistle-blowers. It is often hard for them to imagine a life outside holy orders, which could be their fate if they alienated the bishop who has a hold over their salary, pension and private life. Would-be whistle-blowers will also be aware that local and federal authorities are loth to investigate mainstream religious groups for fear of the political consequences. Assistant United States attorneys in two different federal districts have pushed the FBI to investigate concealment, coercion and financial mismanagement in parts of the church but have got nowhere.
  
  The taxpayer as good Samaritan
  
  Growing financial pressures have encouraged the church to replace donations from the faithful with debt. According to figures from the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board over the past decade, state and local authorities have issued municipal bonds for the benefit of at least 50 dioceses in almost 30 states to pay for the expansion and renovation of facilities that would previously have been largely paid for through donations. Overall church muni debt has increased by an estimated 80% over that period. At least 736 bond issues are currently outstanding.
  
  California is the biggest borrower. Although funding for religious groups is prohibited under the state’s constitution, a series of court rulings has opened the door to bond issues. Catholic groups there have raised at least $12 billion through muni bonds over the past decade. Of that, some $9 billion went to hospitals. In one case, in San Jose, the money went to buy chancery offices for the bishop.
  
  The dioceses back their bonds with letters of credit from banks. Among the most active guarantors are Allied Irish Banks (AIB), US Bancorp and Wells Fargo. None of the banks was prepared to discuss the financial terms of these contracts.
  
  Muni bonds are generally tax-free for investors, so the cost of borrowing is lower than it would be for a taxable investment. In other words, the church enjoys a subsidy more commonly associated with local governments and public-sector projects. If the church has issued more debt in part to meet the financial strains caused by the scandals, then the American taxpayer has indirectly helped mitigate the church’s losses from its settlements. Taxpayers may end up on the hook for other costs, too. For example, settlement of the hundreds of possible abuse cases in New York might cause the closure of Catholic schools across the city.
  
  Manhattan’s largest landowner It is not wrong for churches to issue bonds. But, like many other aspects of the Catholic church’s finances, this should be more transparent. It is quite possible that church finances are, taken as a whole, not as bad as the details coming out in bankruptcy cases suggest. Dioceses and religious orders that go bankrupt cannot be assumed to be representative. If so, then showing better management in the rest of the church would do a lot to allay concern. And increased openness might have the added benefit of bringing in the acumen of a knowledgeable and concerned laity.
  
  Some influential Catholics are keen to see better management and more openness and accountability. Leon Panetta, America’s defence secretary, called for outside oversight of church finances when he was a director of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, a position he relinquished in 2009 to become director of the CIA. Faced with competition from other churches and disgrace from the behaviour of some of its priests, there has never been a more important time to listen to such calls, and to invite in the help and scrutiny that the church’s finances seem so clearly to need.

God Loves Misery

God's Fanatics Are Back

• Eleven years to the day after the September 11 atrocities of 2001, religious fundamentalism showed its ugly face again. In Libya angry crowds killed four American diplomats, including the ambassador, Christopher Stevens. In Egypt, they contented themselves with laying siege to the embassy. The protests have spread in a great arc across the Muslim world. Everywhere they are accompanied by the same disconcerting chant — “Allahu akbar”, or “God is great”.
  
  The return of God to international affairs is one of the most astonishing developments of the past decades.
  
  In Europe we decided to put restrictions on God in the 17th century. The wars of religion proved to be so bloody, killing perhaps 10% of the European population, that the continent’s leaders devised rules to keep faith out of politics. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia announced the principle of cuius regio eius religio — essentially, the king decided what his country’s faith would be — and the alliances that had once united fellow believers across borders and torn nation states apart became things of the past.
  
  What followed was the secularisation of European life. A succession of thinkers said religion was dying. Marx dismissed it as a tool of class oppression. Max Weber, one of the fathers of sociology, announced the “disenchantment of the world”. Freud dismissed religion as a collective neurosis. People followed these advanced thinkers with unseemly haste. The masses abandoned the churches for the music hall and the cinema. The churches abandoned fire and brimstone for social work. Politicians gave up on God.
  
  Today most Europeans regard a taste for religion rather like a taste for outré sex acts — something that should be practised only in private between consenting adults. I grew up as a militant secularist and remain a non- militant atheist. But 13 years of living in the United States and numerous visits to the Middle East, Latin America and Africa have convinced me the European secular mindset is hopelessly parochial. Religion is on display across the non-European world — in the overflowing mega-churches of American suburbs, in the millions who perform the hajj every year, in daily headlines in every newspaper.
  
  The return of God to international affairs is one of the most astonishing developments of the past decades Scott Thomas, a religious writer, remarks that “we live in a world that is not supposed to exist”. Modernity has had an astonishing effect — astonishing, that is, if you regard secular Europe as the measure of all things — of stimulating religion rather than smothering it. Modern communication tools such as television and the internet have given people high-tech megaphones. The Sturm und Drang of modern life — the whirlwind of new products and ideas — has reinforced old certainties. People regard religion not as a constraint on their freedom but as a storm shelter in a hostile world.
  
  There is every reason to believe the trend is gathering pace. The armies of God have fortified their territories. The Islamic republic of Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
  
  The Muslim Brotherhood has completed its slow motion coup d’état in Egypt. Hamas and its Hasidic opposite numbers have succeeded in turning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a secular battle over land into a religious battle over God’s kingdom. The Pentecostal churches have put down deep roots across Latin America and Africa.
  
  Look closely at the most unstable regions of the world and you can see hot religions competing for people’s souls. Nigeria is one of many African countries in which dozens of Christians have been slaughtered at the hands of Muslim mobs. Look closely at China and you can see a religious revival teeming just under the surface. By 2050 the People’s Republic will be the world’s largest Christian country and the largest Muslim country. What can we do about the return of these turbulent priests to the public square?
  
  We need to avoid three errors. The first is the idea that the religious revival is an illusion, that religious anger is a distorted expression of something deeper or just a passing madness. Secular-minded people like to look for the “real” causes of religious riots in lack of opportunities or injustice. But “reality” lies in the eye of the believer. Many religious fanatics come from the most privileged, educated strata of society — Al-Qaeda was so deadly because it had many engineers in its ranks. Holy warriors do not blow themselves up because they worry that the Arab world’s GDP is lower than Sweden’s but because they are exercised about ultimate things.
  
  Secular-minded people are always hoping that religion is about to resume its “natural” place in the scheme of things. The western media’s response to the Egyptian spring was an egregious example. Reporters focused exclusively on the twitterati in Tahrir Square while ignoring the chador-wearing crowds elsewhere. They rushed to tell us the Muslim Brothers were no more Muslim than the Christian Democrats were Christian. Even after 9/11 had supposedly shaken us out of our complacency we succeeded in getting the Arab spring completely wrong.
  
  The second error is the reducing of religion to a caricature. The caricaturists can be found on all sides of the political divide. American conservatives reduce Muslims to a bunch of weird-beard fanatics. European liberals reduce American Christians to warmongering, homophobic anthropoids. But the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims span five continents — only one in five Muslims lives in the Arab world. They are deeply divided between Shi’ites and Sunnis, the vast majority, who are in turn subdivided by ethnicity, sect and language. There is a world of difference between fierce Wahhabi fundamentalists and languid Indonesian fellow travellers.
  
  It is not only bigoted to think of believers in terms of stereotypes. It is also counter- productive. The best way to defeat militant Islam is to recognise that it represents a tiny minority — most Muslims regard the protests as embarrassing and repulsive. The best way to strengthen militancy is to tar all Muslims with the same brush.
  
  The third error is to compromise our core values to appease the fanatics. It is one thing to be considerate about reasonable people’s feelings about God. The Obama administration was right to express its disapproval of the anti-Islamic film that sparked last week’s riots — a film that is, in reality, nothing more than a poorly made trailer — and to reaffirm its belief that Islam is a religion of peace.
  
  It is quite another to allow unreasonable people to compromise our most basic values. Issuing apologies will not appease fanatics who harbour visions of converting the entire world to their narrow view of Islam. It will also imply we share the mob’s belief that western governments are responsible for what is being said about religion within their borders. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, needs to tell the Islamic world that western politicians have no jurisdiction over what free people say about God.
  
  The revival of religion should force liberals to take a look at their core beliefs and revise some while reinforcing others. They need to recognise that religion is a vital force in the world, rather than a mere epiphenomenon.
  
  At the same time they need to strengthen their belief in core liberal doctrines such as the separation of church, or mosque, and state and the inviolability of free speech. The West has prospered because it has embraced those principles. It is time to stop apologising for our values and start telling the Islamic world that if it also wants to prosper, then it needs to embrace the same values.

The Problem With Hell

• Is it any coincidence that the latest war of religion that started on September 11, 2001, is being fought primarily between the United States and the Islamic world? It just so happens that no subgroups of humanity are more ingrained with the doctrine of hell than conservative Muslims and conservative Christians.
  
  And nowhere on earth have conservative Christians been closer to controlling foreign policy than here in the United States. And nowhere on earth have conservative Muslims been more dominant than in the countries from which the 9/11 extremists originated – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
  
  What a pair George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden made! On the one hand, an American president who was a born-again evangelical with a special "heart" for the state of Israel and its importance to the so-called end times, and on the other hand a terrorist leader who believed that he was serving God by ridding the Arabian Peninsula of an American presence and cleansing the "defiled" land of Palestine of what he believed were “invader Jews.”
  
  So whether you're an atheist or not, the issue of who's going to hell or not matters because there are a lot of folks on this planet – many of them extraordinarily well-armed - from born-again American military personnel to Muslim fanatics, who seriously believe that God smiles upon them when they send their enemies to hell.
  
  And so my view of "hell" encompasses two things: First, the theological question about whether a land of eternal suffering exists as God's "great plan" for most of humanity.
  
  Second, the question of the political implications of having a huge chunk of humanity believe in damnation for those who disagree with their theology, politics and culture, as if somehow simply killing one's enemies is not enough.
  
  What most people don't know is that there's another thread running through both Christianity and Islam that is far more merciful than the fundamentalists’ take on salvation, judgment and damnation.
  
  Paradise, which Muslims believe is the final destination of the society of God’s choice, is referred to in the Quran as "the home of peace". “Our God,” Muslims are asked to recite, “You are peace, and peace is from You.”
  
  Since Christianity is my tradition, I can say more about it. One view of God - the more fundamentalist view - is of a retributive God just itching to punish those who "stray."
  
  The other equally ancient view, going right back into the New Testament era, is of an all-forgiving God who in the person of Jesus Christ ended the era of scapegoat sacrifice, retribution and punishment forever.
  
  As Jesus said on the cross: "Forgive them for they know not what they do."
  
  That redemptive view holds that far from God being a retributive God seeking justice, God is a merciful father who loves all his children equally. This is the less-known view today because fundamentalists - through televangelists and others - have been so loud and dominant in North American culture.
  
  But for all that, this redemptive view is no less real.
  
  Why does our view of hell matter? Because believers in hell believe in revenge. And according to brain chemistry studies, taking revenge and nurturing resentment is a major source of life-destroying stress.
  
  For a profound exploration of the madness caused by embracing the “justice” of “godly” revenge and retribution, watch the film “Hellbound?” The film shows how the "hell" of revenge thinking, and the resulting unhinging of some people’s brains through their denial of human empathy, leads them to relish the violent future of suffering that they predict awaits the “lost” in hell.
  
  Do we really want to go back to a time of literalistic religion. Wasn’t 9/11 enough of an argument against retributive religion? We need “hell” like a hole in the head. It’s time for the alternative of empathetic merciful religion to be understood.

Creationist Education

• WHAT can it be like inside the heads of creationists? They want to believe that their deity made all the species at once and kept them that way, yet Earth is teeming with fossils of extinct species. So what gives?
  
  If the deity's a trickster, the answer is easy: she, he or it put the fossils there to cause interminable arguments. But it appears that the authors of the US Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme, designed for parents who want their children to believe in a literal reading of the Bible, insist that their deity did not waste all that creative effort.
  
  According to Scotland-based newspaper The Herald on 24 June, the ACE textbook Biology 1099 asks "are dinosaurs alive today?" and claims that "scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence" (bit.ly/HeraldNessie). It asks students whether they have heard of the "Loch Ness Monster" in Scotland. "Nessie," it asserts, "has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses and photographed by others... Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur." (Yes, we know, plesiosaurs weren't dinosaurs.)
  
  Reader John Toner, who alerted us to the article in The Herald and who hails from Scotland himself, says: "The good citizens of Brigadoon remember dinosaurs very well." But we are obliged to point out that Brigadoon was a Hollywood rendering of an utterly fictitious Scottish past.
  
  RESEARCHING this Nessie nonsense, Feedback wondered why it has popped up again now. The story appeared in July 2009 in a Times Educational Supplement article about ACE materials being used in faith schools in the UK (bit.ly/TESACE). We found more in a video made in June 2011 by Rachel Tabachnick and Thomas Vinciguerra (bit.ly/textbookvid). Then, even while we were drafting a sentence about this video, we saw the August issue of the San Francisco-based news magazine Mother Jones and a piece entitled "14 wacky 'facts' kids will learn in Louisiana's voucher schools" (bit.ly/MJtextbooks). It's about fundamentalist school textbooks that Tabachnick and Vinciguerra "have thankfully pored over so the rest of world doesn't have to".
  
  These books come from the Bob Jones University (BJU) Press and from a publisher called A Beka Book. They are used in faith schools, which Mother Jones says are funded from taxes under "voucher schemes" in several US states.
  
  The Nessie weirdness, it seems, goes right through the curriculum. United States History (BJU Press) gives us a flavour of the world view the books promote. Apparently, "the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality". And, according to America: Land I Love, an A Beka Book: "God used the 'Trail of Tears' to bring many Indians to Christ" - presumably the tears were mostly among the thousands who died on the long marches west.
  
  Even mathematics has its ideology, it seems. An A Beka Book promises "traditional mathematics texts that are not burdened with modern theories such as set theory". This, apparently, is because "the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute".
  
  It's a sobering thought that faith schools are putting this kind of stuff into children's heads.

Science vs Rel Time Mag 2006

• Link

5 Biblical Misconceptions

• When it comes to the Bible, modern Americans are at a distinct disadvantage. They know both too much and too little.
  
  They know too much because they live in a society in which references to the Bible -- positive and negative -- are frequent, creating a false sense of familiarity. They know too little because they have not read it, or have read only selected portions of it, or have allowed others to read it for them through the filtering lens of later theological doctrines or political opportunism. And that's a pity because the Bible, by which I mean the 24 basic books common to all Bibles (equivalent to the Jewish Tanakh or Hebrew Bible and to the Protestant Old Testament) is deserving of the same careful attention and close reading that we regularly bestow upon other classic texts.
  
  It has been my experience teaching a university course on the Bible, that a close reading of the Bible is often hampered by several misconceptions. I ask my students -- as I ask readers of the book based on the course -- to correct five common misconceptions in order to encounter the Bible as if for the first time.
  
  Correction #1
  
  The Hebrew Bible is not a book. It was not produced by a single author in one time and place. It is a small library of books composed and edited over nearly a millennium by people responding to a wide range of issues and historical circumstances. Because it is not a book (the name "Bible" derives from the plural Greek form ta biblia, meaning "the books") it does not have a uniform style or message.
  
  From narrative texts to legal texts, from cultic instruction to erotic love poetry, this library contains works of diverse genres each of which sounds its own distinctive note in the symphony of reflection that we call the Bible. As is true of any collection of books by different authors in different centuries, the books in this collection contradict one another. Indeed, they sometimes contradict themselves because multiple strands of tradition were woven together in the creation of some of the books. The compiler of Genesis placed, side by side, two creation stories that differ dramatically in vocabulary, literary style and detail (who is created first -- humans or animals?). A few chapters later, two flood stories are interwoven into a single story despite their many contradictions and tensions (does Noah really take the animals on board two by two?). Proverbs extols wisdom, but Ecclesiastes scoffs at its folly and urges existential pleasure. Deuteronomy harps on God's retributive justice, but Job arrives at the bittersweet conclusion that despite the lack of divine justice (in this world or any other), we are not excused from the thankless and perhaps ultimately meaningless task of moral living. That such dissonant voices were preserved in the canon of the Bible, their tensions and contradictions unresolved, says something important about the conception of canon in antiquity. Ancient readers viewed this anthology as a collection of culturally significant writings worthy of preservation without the expectation or requirement that they agree with one another. Just as an attempt to impose harmony and consistency on the short stories collected in the Norton Anthology of English Literature would do great violence to those stories, any attempt to impose harmony and consistency on the diverse books collected in the Bible -- to extract a single message or truth -- does great violence to those books.
  
  Correction #2
  
  The Hebrew Bible is not a book of systematic theology (i.e., an account of the divine) delivering eternally true pronouncements on theological issues, despite the fact that at a much later time, complex systems of theology would be spun from particular interpretations of biblical passages. Its narrative materials provide an account of the odyssey of a people, the ancient Israelites, as they struggled to make sense of their history and their relationship to their deity. Certainly the Bible sometimes addresses moral and existential questions that would become central to the later discipline of theology but then so do Shakespeare and Frost and that doesn't make them theologians. The Bible's treatment of these questions is often indirect and implicit, conducted in the language of story and song, poetry, paradox and metaphor quite distinct from the language and tenets of the post-biblical discipline of theology. To impose the theological doctrines of a later time that not only do not appear in the Bible but are contradicted by it -- creation ex nihilo, the doctrine of original sin, the belief in life after death -- does another kind of violence to the text.
  
  Correction #3
  
  The Hebrew Bible is not a timeless or eternal work that stands outside the normal processes of literary production. Its books emerged from specific times and places. Reading the Bible alongside parallel materials from the many cultures of the Ancient Near East shows the deep indebtedness of the biblical authors to the literary heritage of the Ancient Near East. The ancient Israelites borrowed and adapted literary motifs and conventions from their larger cultural context and an awareness of those motifs and conventions produces richer, more coherent readings of the biblical text than are otherwise possible.
  
  Correction #4
  
  The narratives of the Hebrew Bible are not pious parables about saints, nor are they G-rated tales easily understood by children. Biblical narratives are psychologically real stories about very human beings whose behavior can be scandalous, violent, rebellious, outrageous, lewd and vicious. At the same time, like real people, biblical characters can change and act with justice and compassion. Nevertheless, many readers are shocked and disgusted to discover that Jacob is a deceiver, Joseph is an arrogant, spoiled brat and Judah sleeps with his daughter-in-law when she is disguised as a prostitute!
  
  The unfounded expectation that biblical characters are perfectly pious models for our own conduct causes many readers to work to vindicate biblical characters, just because they are biblical characters. But if we attribute to these characters the reputation for piety manufactured by later religious traditions, if we whitewash their flaws, then we miss the moral complexities and the deep psychological insights that have made these (often R-rated) stories of timeless interest. Biblical narratives place serious demands on their readers. The stories rarely moralize. They explore moral issues and situations by placing biblical characters in moral dilemmas -- but they usually leave the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.
  
  Correction #5
  
  The character "Yahweh" in the Hebrew Bible should not be confused with the god of western theological speculation (generally referred to as "God"). The attributes assigned to "God" by post-biblical theologians -- such as omniscience and immutability -- are simply not attributes possessed by the character Yahweh as drawn in biblical narratives. Indeed, on several occasions Yahweh is explicitly described as changing his mind, because when it comes to human beings his learning curve is steep. Humans have free will; they act in ways that surprise him and he must change tack and respond. One of the greatest challenges for modern readers of the Hebrew Bible is to allow the text to mean what it says, when what is says flies in the face of doctrines that emerged centuries later from philosophical debates about the abstract category "God."
  
  Setting aside these misconceptions enables readers to encounter and struggle with the biblical text in all its rich complexity -- its grandeur and its banality, its sophistication and its self-contradiction, its pathos and its humor -- and to arrive at a more profound appreciation of its multi-faceted and multi-vocal messiness.

Doomsday Thinking

• With the end of the world behind us and another soon to come this October 21st, I thought it would be fun to write about dear old Harold Camping and his erroneous end-of-the-world theories. This topic fascinates me as I am a Biology and Religious Studies double major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. However, even I have to wonder how so many people could be fooled into thinking that the world was going to end back in May when the Bible does not even so much as hint toward an exact date. Quite to the contrary, the book itself clearly states that “only God in heaven knows” Matthew 24:36 and “let no one deceive you, for that day will not come” (2 Thessalonians 2:3). It is my humble opinion that the “Camping Incident” was the result of a mass brainwashing performed by an affluent speaker who happened to be in a position of authority, like the average politician.
  
  As much as one would like to write the whole thing off as an obvious scam, in that Camping accumulated a substantial amount of money from his followers, there may be more to the story. What happened last spring was most likely a cult following of a religious fanatic who sincerely believed in his own theories. A large portion of the money was used to advertise the rapture and petition people to repent. In other words, the money collected was being recycled back into the group in order to expand the following and spread its propaganda. History shows no shortage of misguided leaders that sincerely believed their own lies, and Mr. Camping appears to be one of them. On the other hand, what about the rest of the bunch? What kind of person would readily accept an apocalypse message without any scientific cause or evidence?
  
  Many neurologists have proposed the existence of a “God Spot”, a region of the brain linked to belief in the supernatural. Even though no such neural pathways were found that differed from those of non-believers, there is still much debate as to the origin of religion and its evolutionary significance. Several studies designed to determine the parts of the brain responsible for spirituality have had interesting results. In one such study, researchers scanned the brains of a group of devout nuns. The nuns were asked to recall an intense religious experience while their brains were monitored for any special activity (Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns, Belief and the Brain’s ‘God Spot’). It was discovered that thinking about religious experiences and God activates several areas in the brain, instead of just one. Even more fascinating, one of the many areas activated was a section that is typically associated with happiness and love. This could be why many people feel that they can enter into a “relationship” with God.
  
  In addition to determining the source of religious belief in the present day, there is also a debate among scientists as to the evolutionary origin of belief. One hypothesis is that faith in God could have acted as a coping mechanism which enabled the primitive human to endure hardships that non-believers could not. Another theory posits that religion provided a way for our ancestors to explain natural phenomenon (Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief, No ‘God Spot’ in the Human Brain). Still a third possibility is that spirituality is a form of evolutionary baggage. It could have been the result of biochemical pathways that were once used in the primitive brain to establish rules and customs of early culture, but wreak havoc on society when their resulting ideas are taken too far.
  
  Is it possible that religious individuals have developed their beliefs throughout life as a way to fulfill some psychological necessity? Spirituality is thus the manifestation of one’s need for a parental figure, guidance, hope, preservation of consciousness, and so on. With this in mind, a stunt like that of Mr. Camping would shock its victims on a much deeper, more personal level, unlike a pyramid scheme or email scam. In a sense, this is a manipulation of peoples’ hope and faith, intentional or otherwise.
  
  It is easy to see why so many people sincerely believed that the world would end in May, but it is just as important to realize that the vast number of Christian believers do not accept apocalypse theories. Judaism, the foundation for Christianity, does not even have an afterlife in its doctrine. Consequently, it was really only the outliers of the religion that followed the false prophet; they may have been very desperate.
  
  So what does the future really hold? Every generation of Jesus’s followers has claimed that they would be the last generation on Earth, and they have all been wrong. As for our own generation, we are facing environmental catastrophe, population increase, and potential epidemics the likes of which this planet has never seen before. Are we dooming ourselves into extinction by our own destructive habits? Or is this another example of the human tendency to only see the worst possible scenario?
  
  Humankind has been obsessed with the end times for thousands of years, and it possibly began when we originally realized our own mortality. I can imagine the first thinking human to be asking himself “I will eventually die, does that mean everything around me will eventually die?” And the more advanced we become, the more we are able to postulate the exact methods employed by our bodies, our planet, and the universe around us to eventually decay into nothingness. But when will it happen? God only knows!

The Decline of Evangelical America

• IT hasn’t been a good year for evangelicals. I should know. I’m one of them.
  
  In 2012 we witnessed a collapse in American evangelicalism. The old religious right largely failed to affect the Republican primaries, much less the presidential election. Last month, Americans voted in favor of same-sex marriage in four states, while Florida voters rejected an amendment to restrict abortion.
  
  Much has been said about conservative Christians and their need to retool politically. But that is a smaller story, riding on the back of a larger reality: Evangelicalism as we knew it in the 20th century is disintegrating.
  
  In 2011 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life polled church leaders from around the world. Evangelical ministers from the United States reported a greater loss of influence than church leaders from any other country — with some 82 percent indicating that their movement was losing ground.
  
  I grew up hearing tales of my grandfather, a pastor, praying with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. My father, also a pastor, prayed with George W. Bush in 2000. I now minister to my own congregation, which has grown to about 500, a tenfold increase, in the last four years (by God’s favor and grace, I believe). But, like most young evangelical ministers, I am less concerned with politics than with the exodus of my generation from the church.
  
  Studies from established evangelical polling organizations — LifeWay Research, an affiliate of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Barna Group — have found that a majority of young people raised as evangelicals are quitting church, and often the faith, entirely.
  
  As a contemporary of this generation (I’m 30), I embarked three years ago on a project to document the health of evangelical Christianity in the United States. I did this research not only as an insider, but also as a former investigative journalist for an alt weekly.
  
  I found that the structural supports of evangelicalism are quivering as a result of ground-shaking changes in American culture. Strategies that served evangelicals well just 15 years ago are now self- destructive. The more that evangelicals attempt to correct course, the more they splinter their movement. In coming years we will see the old evangelicalism whimper and wane.
  
  First, evangelicals, while still perceived as a majority, have become a shrinking minority in the United States. In the 1980s heyday of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, some estimates accounted evangelicals as a third or even close to half of the population, but research by the Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith recently found that Christians who call themselves evangelicals account for just 7 percent of Americans. (Other research has reported that some 25 percent of Americans belong to evangelical denominations, though they may not, in fact, consider themselves evangelicals.) Dr. Smith’s findings are derived from a three-year national study of evangelical identity and influence, financed by the Pew Research Center. They suggest that American evangelicals now number around 20 million, about the population of New York State. The global outlook is more optimistic, as evangelical congregations flourish in places like China, Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa.
  
  But while America’s population grows by roughly two million a year, attendance across evangelical churches — from the Southern Baptists to Assembles of God and nondenominational churches — has gradually declined, according to surveys of more than 200,000 congregations by the American Church Research Project.
  
  The movement also faces a donation crisis as older evangelicals, who give a disproportionately large share, age. Unless younger evangelicals radically increase their giving, the movement will be further strained.
  
  Evangelicals have not adapted well to rapid shifts in the culture — including, notably, the move toward support for same-sex marriage. The result is that evangelicals are increasingly typecast as angry and repressed bigots. In 2007, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, in a survey of 1,300 college professors, found that 3 percent held “unfavorable feelings” toward Jews, 22 percent toward Muslims and 53 percent toward evangelical Christians.
  
  To be sure, college professors are not representative of the population, and, despite national trends of decline, evangelicals have many exceptional ministries. Most metropolitan areas in the United States have at least one thriving megachurch. In New York City, Redeemer Presbyterian and the Brooklyn Tabernacle pack multiple services every weekend. A handful of other churches, like North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., and Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., see more than 20,000 worshipers each weekend. Savvy ministers like the Rev. Craig Groeschel, founder of LifeChurch.tv, are using new technologies to deliver the “good news.”
  
  The pulse of evangelicalism is also shifting, in many ways for the good, from American politics to aid for the global poor, as evidenced in books by the Rev. David Platt, the Rev. Max Lucado and the Rev. Timothy Keller. Evangelicals are still a sophisticated lot, with billions in assets, millions of adherents and a constellation of congregations, radio stations, universities and international aid groups. But all this machinery distracts from the historical vital signs of evangelicalism: to make converts and point to Jesus Christ. By those measures this former juggernaut is coasting, at best, if not stalled or in reverse.
  
  How can evangelicalism right itself? I don’t believe it can — at least, not back to the politically muscular force it was as recently as 2004, when white evangelicals gave President George W. Bush his narrow re-election. Evangelicals can, however, use the economic, social and spiritual crises facing America to refashion themselves into a more sensitive, spiritual and humble movement.
  
  We evangelicals must accept that our beliefs are now in conflict with the mainstream culture. We cannot change ancient doctrines to adapt to the currents of the day. But we can, and must, adapt the way we hold our beliefs — with grace and humility instead of superior hostility. The core evangelical belief is that love and forgiveness are freely available to all who trust in Jesus Christ. This is the “good news” from which the evangelical name originates (“euangelion” is a Greek word meaning “glad tidings” or “good news”). Instead of offering hope, many evangelicals have claimed the role of moral gatekeeper, judge and jury. If we continue in that posture, we will continue to invite opposition and obscure the “good news” we are called to proclaim.
  
  I believe the cultural backlash against evangelical Christianity has less to do with our views — many observant Muslims and Jews, for example, also view homosexual sex as wrong, while Catholics have been at the vanguard of the movement to protect the lives of the unborn — and more to do with our posture. The Scripture calls us “aliens and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11), but American evangelicals have not acted with the humility and homesickness of aliens. The proper response to our sexualized and hedonistic culture is not to chastise, but to “conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God” (1 Peter 2:12).
  
  This does not mean we whitewash unpopular doctrines like the belief that we are all sinners but that we re-emphasize the free forgiveness available to all who believe in Jesus Christ.
  
  Some evangelical leaders are embarrassed by our movement’s present paralysis. I am not. Weakness is a potent purifier. As Paul wrote, “I am content with weaknesses ... for the sake of Christ” (2 Corinthians 12:10). For me, the deterioration and disarray of the movement is a source of hope: hope that churches will stop angling for human power and start proclaiming the power of Christ.
  
  Simple faith in Christ’s sacrifice will march on, unchallenged by empires and eras. As the English writer G. K. Chesterton put it, “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”
  
  (and letters to NYT in response)
  
  Re “The Decline of Evangelical America” (Sunday Review, Dec. 16):
  
  The declining political influence of evangelicals as lamented by John S. Dickerson is not surprising. As the Republican Party promoted its image of opposing abortion and supporting fundamentalist Christian practices, it naturally attracted the overwhelming majority of evangelicals.
  
  But by also embracing Republican policies that support the very wealthy, oppose health care reform, deny evolution and global warming, and oppose gay rights, evangelicals are increasingly seen by many as proponents of greed, ignorance and bigotry. In their quest for political power, evangelicals seem to have abandoned Jesus’ admonition to help the poor and the downtrodden, and their claim to moral leadership has suffered accordingly.
  
  To the Editor:
  
  John S. Dickerson rightly observes the decline in cultural and political influence of evangelicals in America and the lack of interest among younger evangelicals in their religious heritage. Yet his measures of bright spots for evangelicalism — megachurches, large ministries and the “billions” of dollars evangelicals purportedly have — are precisely the things that lead to indifference.
  
  Our research has consistently shown that younger Christians, including evangelicals, seek faith communities where they can be known and where they can serve one another and the broader community. If evangelicalism is to have a future, it must examine why younger people are leaving and construct congregations and ministries within which they can be active participants.
  
  If Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and the other forefathers of the evangelical right have done anything for evangelicals, they have made large segments of a generation embarrassed to call themselves evangelicals, leading many to head out the church doors.
  
  To the Editor:
  
  John S. Dickerson would have us believe that the decline of evangelicalism is primarily due to the obscurantism of its social and political agenda. This may be true superficially, but a deeper cause of the decline of what must accurately be called fundamentalism has to do with the fact that it is tone deaf to science, and as a result, it refuses to engage modern culture on credible intellectual, let alone moral, grounds.
  
  Hearty evangelicals of a century ago would have joined this engagement, even relished it, but the current pale imitation has chosen to shun the main event.
  
  To the Editor:
  
  I am an atheist. But I was profoundly moved by John S. Dickerson’s thoughtful understanding of the value religion brings to humanity and how it must move with us through time.
  
  I have a deep respect for people who have a deep faith, but not for scolds or bigots. This teacher says his faith need not be either. Bless him.

Why Priests Quit

• Tomorrow, 115 cardinals will begin formal talks in Rome about the election of the next pope.
  
  While they make one of the most momentous decisions in the recent history of the Catholic church, back in their dioceses some clerical colleagues are grappling with a more basic dilemma: belief in God.
  
  Atheist clergy are not a phenomenon only within the Catholic church — they are found in other big religions too.
  
  The difficulty arises when they keep on ministering, usually because they feel trapped: financially, personally and professionally.
  
  Typical is Adam, an atheist clergyman interviewed for an American television documentary using a pseudonym, a disguised voice and being shown on film in heavy shadow lest he be identified.
  
  These measures emphasised the huge risks atheist clergy take in going public: job, livelihood, security, home, community, friends and even marriage can be at stake.
  
  A long-time cleric untrained for any secular job, Adam doesn’t want to risk his family’s financial security. “I wear a mask every day,” he said. “I am trapped. My greatest fear is doing nothing and pretending to be someone I am not for the rest of my life.”
  
  He is one of the founders of the Clergy Project, an online community of more than 400 atheist clergy, Catholic and Protestant, a quarter of whom remain in active ministry. Several of its members live in Ireland.
  
  IN HIS bestselling 1980s book Help My Unbelief, Michael Paul Gallagher, a Jesuit priest, included a chapter entitled Saying Mass an Atheist. “Perhaps I would choose a different term now, because ‘atheism’ usually implies a steady stance of denial and I was talking about a temporary mood of doubt, an eclipse that did not last,” Gallagher said. “I have never become an atheist but I have run into times where God seems painfully unreal. I don’t think this is surprising.” As proof, Gallagher even cites the former Pope Benedict, who once admitted to having been threatened by the “oppressive strength of unbelief”.
  
  Too often, priests give the impression that faith is a fortress of security, Gallagher believes. “That’s not the usual personal experience,” he said.“There are many big reasons for unbelief: the suffering of the world; the painful silence of God — God’s strange shyness, one might say. A priest runs into all these.”
  
  Kevin Hegarty, sacked as editor of church magazine Intercom in 1994 after publishing an article about clerical child abuse, also admits to doubt. “I’ve had an experience of saying mass when my faith was very fragile. It can be very fragile,” he said. “Faith ebbs and flows. At times I preach something and wonder, is it really true? I don’t expect exactitude. I’m prepared to work through doubt, bit by bit. There are times when I have my doubts about the doctrinal teachings of the church — but they’ve never been overwhelming.”
  
  For Tom Rastrelli, a US-based member of the Clergy Project who was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 2002, the doubts were overwhelming. “As the abuse scandal worsened and more bishops denied the crimes they’d committed, my belief in church as a divine institution faded,” he said.“In the confessional, I saw the damage that abusive priests and bullying bishops had done to people. There was nothing of divine inspiration in that. In the trenches of ministry, I saw how harmful particular teachings and actions of the church were to people.” During the final months of his ministry, Rastrelli said, he no longer believed in the authority of the Catholic church, the Pope or the bishops. “I didn’t believe in the Marian teachings — the virgin birth, the preservation of Mary’s hymen during childbirth, the immaculate conception, and the assumption.” He even stopped believing in the “real presence” of the eucharist and could no longer say the creed in good conscience.
  
  He questioned everything he’d been taught. “Your life and sexuality are a gift, but since you’re gay, if you act on that gift you’re sinning,” he said. “The god in which I’d been taught to believe was vindictive not loving, a human construct to justify atrocious human behaviour, prejudices, and fears. “No longer believing in the inspiration of the scriptures, I became a fully-fledged agnostic. Within another few months, I was comfortable saying that I didn’t believe in a god. “I was no longer afraid of what people thought of me, of the negative stigma surrounding the word ‘atheist’. I felt free to be a fully realised human being. Thousands of years of canonised fear, loathing, shame, and distrust vanished. I owned being an atheist.” Rastrelli would say he didn’t “lose” his faith. “I evolved beyond it,” he said. “Having witnessed first-hand the damage that people do in the names of their gods, I’m thankful I did evolve beyond it. Now I’m free to be who I am. I’ve seen how disgustingly judgmental people can be when armed with their gods. I wouldn’t give my integrity in exchange for the coddled security of priestly life.” UNLIKE most atheist clergy, John Shuck, a Presbyterian clergyman in good standing in America, is openly atheistic. He doesn’t believe in the existence of God, the divinity of Christ or the resurrection of Jesus — all of which he regards as useful metaphors created by the human imagination. Asked how fellow ministers see him, Shuck said: “Many appreciate what I am doing, as they have many of the same convictions. Others think I represent everything that is wrong with my denomination.”
  
  He rejects the charge of hypocrisy. “I am about the most open person I know with regard to what I believe and don’t believe. I have publicly blogged about this for seven years and preached openly for 20. “The real charge of hypocrisy should be levelled at those who confuse truth with power; self-appointed gate-keepers of traditional belief who say they are about affirming the truth on one hand, then put up fences of dogma around their cherished beliefs on the other. They are unwilling to look at truth and then threaten with excommunication and loss of employment those who do. That is hypocrisy.”
  
  Shuck does not now believe in an afterlife. “The core belief has been, in the words of the catechism, ‘to love God and to enjoy God forever’. If you take the supernaturalism out of that and substitute ‘life’ for ‘God’ and ‘my whole life long’ for ‘forever’ you get the real point of religion.“It is about how to live a good life. The supernatural elements are excess baggage of an age that is fading away.”
  
  Iain and Kyle — not their real names — are two members of the Clergy Project, both atheist ministers within a mainstream Protestant denomination in Ireland. They envy Shuck’s “coming out” as an atheist and his congregation’s acceptance. Iain and Kyle say their whole worlds would fall apart if their atheism became known.
  
  “I knew I was an atheist from the early 1990s,” said Iain. “My wife knows. She finds it hard to accept. I don’t look at her while I’m preaching.”
  
  His dilemma is that if he told people, his income would stop immediately. “I don’t think I’d be eligible for a pension. I’d have no job. I’d lose my home,” he said. He has worked in the church all his life, but finds it increasingly difficult to keep up the pretence. “I don’t see how I can keep going to retirement.” Iain feels worst about deluding children because he agrees with Richard Dawkins, the biologist and atheist campaigner, that inculcating religious faith in minors is a form of child abuse.
  
  “I’d love to stand up and tell my congregation the truth,” he said. “But I don’t have the courage, even though many of them know there is no God. My call is just like anyone else’s, [it’s] total and absolute nonsense. A delusion.” Kyle says he is torn over his unbelief. He tries to carry out all his religious duties without the supernatural background. Funerals can be especially difficult, however, since he is expected to preach about an afterlife.
  
  Although a Protestant minister, Kyle’s atheism was triggered by Catholic clerical child abuse. “I couldn’t believe a god could permit child abuse. It’s impossible,” he said. “The systematic concealing of it doesn’t get God off the hook. Prayers for the sick are never answered. So for me there’s no way I could believe in God any more.”
  
  Iain feels trapped and would like to leave the ministry. “I feel guilty. I’m taking their money. I’m living in their house,” he said. But Kyle doesn’t want to leave. “I can influence people for the good as a minister. [The church] is a place where the community gathers and has a sing. We support each other and children are safeguarded against drugs. We don’t take religion too seriously. It’s like inventing our own surreal world.”
  
  Matthew (not his real name) is a Roman Catholic priest affiliated to a diocese in America. He became troubled by the theology that a newborn child carried the stain of original sin and needed baptism. When he realised he didn’t believe this, saying mass became a chore he dreaded. “I felt like a fraud and wondered how long before someone found me out. I worried that I might slip and reveal my lack of belief,” he said. “I felt sorry for the people who came to mass, which I considered empty and meaningless. I wondered, couldn’t their time be better spent?”
  
  He became disgusted by the theological undertones of the eucharist. “The notion of a god demanding a blood sacrifice — from his own son no less — repelled me. I could not believe in a god who would demand a violent death as reparation for the supposed wrongs of humans.
  
  “The sanctuary’s large crucifix with its bloodied and bruised Jesus became a horrible and disgusting sight. Each morning, as I put on my clerical band collar, it felt like I was putting a heavy metal shackle around my neck.
  
  “I realised that my doubts about every line in the creed, including the very existence of God, were not going away, no matter how much I tried. Once I accepted my unbelief, I was not nearly as bothered by it as I had imagined. Unbelief felt natural in a way religion never had.”
  
  For Patrick Semple, a former Church of Ireland rector, being an atheist is simply a way of trying to make sense of the mystery around us. “People are genuinely atheist. It’s not a badness or a perversity,” he said.As a priest Semple accepted doctrines rather than believed them, and was never convinced about life after death. He sees a lot of religious security as a regression to childhood. “I abhor the expression ‘lost the faith’ — it sounds like culpable negligence,” he said. “It was a positive decision that I no longer believed. I realised I was not a Christian agnostic — I was atheist.”
  
  Upon realising his atheism, Semple talked to his bishop, who was not shocked and simply told him to get back to work. When Semple told another Church of Ireland clergyman about his atheism, his fellow cleric replied: “Join the gang.”

Atheist Church

• Echoing with joyful song and with a congregation bent on leading better lives, this London church is like any other -- except there's no mention of God.
  
  Britain's atheist church is barely three months old but it already has more "worshippers" than can fit into its services, while more than 200 non-believers worldwide have contacted organisers to ask how they can set up their own branch.
  
  Officially named The Sunday Assembly, the church was the brainchild of Pippa Evans and Sanderson Jones, two comedians who suspected there might be an appetite for atheist gatherings that borrowed a few aspects of religious worship.
  
  Held in an airy, ramshackle former church in north London, their quirky monthly meetings combine music, speeches and moral pondering with large doses of humour.
  
  "There's so much about Church that has nothing to do with God -- it's about meeting people, it's about thinking about improving your life," said Jones, a gregarious 32-year-old with a bushy beard and a laugh like a thunderclap.
  
  The Sunday Assembly's central tenets are to "help often, live better and wonder more" -- themes that would not be out of keeping with the teachings of any major world religion.
  
  At last Sunday's service, which had a volunteering theme, songs included "Help" by the Beatles and "Holding Out For A Hero" by Bonnie Tyler.
  
  The "sermon" was given by the founder of an education charity, while in a section called Pippa Is Trying Her Best, Evans had the congregation in stitches as she reported on her attempts at voluntary work. The service ended with big cheers and -- this is Britain, after all -- shouts of "Who would like a cup of tea?"
  
  Like many Western countries, Britain is becoming an increasingly faithless nation.
  
  While a majority still consider themselves Christians, census data revealed in December that their numbers plummeted from 72 percent in 2001 to 59 percent in 2011.
  
  The proportion of Britons with no religion, meanwhile, shot up from 15 percent to 25 percent over the same period.
  
  But the Sunday Assembly's success -- 400 Londoners packed into last week's two services, while 60 had to be turned away at the door -- suggests many urban atheists crave the sense of community that comes with joining a church.
  
  "You can spend all day in London not talking to anyone," said Evans. "I think people really want somewhere they can go and meet other people, which doesn't involve drinking and which you don't have to pay to get into."
  
  It's an idea that is catching the attention of atheists further field.
  
  Jones reels off the locations of would-be atheist "vicars" who have asked to set up new branches. "Colombia, Bali, Mexico, Houston, Silicon Valley, Philadelphia, Ohio, Calgary, all across Britain, The Hague, Vienna... It's so ludicrously exciting that my head occasionally -- literally -- spins round."
  
  The pair cheerfully admit that they have "ripped off" many elements of their services from the Christian Church. "You're asking people to do new things, so it makes sense for it to be familiar," said Jones. Religious people have been broadly supportive of the aims of the atheist church. "The only thing is, they've said they'll have to think about what to do if it gets bigger," Evans laughed.
  
  "Actually, the biggest aggression towards us has probably been from atheists saying that we're ruining atheism and not not believing in God properly. So that's quite funny."
  
  The assembly met the approval of local vicar Dave Tomlinson, who came from his church two miles away to see what his new rivals were up to.
  
  "Being here, I felt there was as much of what I call 'God' as there was in my own church this morning," he said. "Everything we've said here would be completely at home in my church. I hope it grows and sustains."
  
  The second Sunday Assembly launches in the Scottish city of Glasgow at the end of March, while Evans will open an Australian branch in April.
  
  She and Jones say they don't want to exert too much control over any new assemblies -- but they will keep a watchful eye over them.
  
  "We only need one child sacrifice at a Sunday Assembly to spoil it for everyone," Jones joked. As for how far the idea could eventually spread, the pair are in the dark.
  
  "Who knows?" said Evans. "We have no idea. We're just enjoying finding out what it is."

What Atheists Can Learn From Religion

• Jonathan Derbyshire writes: Jeremy Bentham, his disciple John Stuart Mill once wrote, would always ask of a proposition or belief, “Is it true?” By contrast, Bentham’s contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mill observed, thought “What is the meaning of it?” was a much more interesting question.
  
  Today’s New Atheists –Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens principal among them – are the heirs of Bentham, rather than Coleridge. For them, religion – or the great monotheistic faiths, at any rate – are bundles of beliefs (about the existence of a supernatural being, the origins of the universe and so on) whose claims to truth don’t stand up to rational scrutiny. And once the falsity of those beliefs has been established, they imply, there is nothing much left to say.
  
  The New Atheists remind one of Edward Gibbon, who said of a visit to the cathedral at Chartres: “I paused only to dart a look at the stately pile of superstition and passed on.” They glance at the stately pile of story and myth bequeathed to humanity by religion and quickly move on, pausing only to ask of the benighted millions who continue to profess one faith or another that they keep their beliefs to themselves and don’t demand that they be heard in the public square.
  
  Lately, however, we have begun to hear from atheists or non-believers who strike a rather different, less belligerent tone. These “New, New Atheists”, to borrow the physicist Jim Al-Khalili’s phrase, are the inheritors of Coleridge. They separate their atheism from their secularism and argue that a secular state need not demand of the religious that they put their most cherished beliefs to one side when they enter public debate; only that they shouldn’t expect those beliefs to be accepted without scepticism.
  
  They treat religious stories differently, too – as a treasure trove to be plundered, in the case of Alain de Botton, or, in the case of the self-described “after-religionist” Richard Holloway, as myths that continue to speak to the human condition.
  
  We have too often secularised badly
  Alain de Botton
  
  There is so much talk of the god-shaped hole, it is easy to forget that the challenge of our times is not to measure it, but to try to fill it – by which I mean, to import a range of ideas and practices from religion into the secular realm. Atheists should learn to rescue some of what is beautiful, touching and wise from all that no longer seems true. What is good within the faiths belongs to all of mankind, even the most rational among us, and deserves to be reabsorbed selectively by the supernatural’s greatest enemies. Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone.
  
  There are three elements of religion in particular that I believe we should “steal” from religion and reinvent for our times:
  
  1. New priest
  
  For centuries in the west, there was a figure in society who fulfilled a function that is likely to sound very odd to secular ears. The priest didn’t fulfil any material need; he was there to take care of that part of you called, rather unusually, “the soul”, by which we would understand the seat of our emotions and of our deep self.
  
  Where have our soul-related needs gone? What are we doing with the material we used to go to a priest for? The deep self has naturally not given up its complexities and vulnerabilities simply because some scientific inaccuracies have been found in the tales of the five loaves and two fishes.
  
  The most sophisticated response we have yet come up with is psychotherapy. It is to psychotherapists that we bring the same kind of problems as we would previously have directed at a priest: emotional confusion, loss of meaning, temptations of one kind or another and anxiety about mortality.
  
  From a distance, psychotherapists look like they are already well settled in priestlike roles and that there is nothing further to be done or asked for. Yet there are a number of ways in which contemporary psychotherapy has failed to learn the right lessons from the priesthood and might benefit from a more direct comparison with it. For a start, therapy remains a minority activity, out of reach of most people: too expensive or simply not available. There have been laudable efforts to introduce therapy into the medical system, but progress is slow and vulnerable. The issue isn’t just economic. It is one of attitudes. Whereas Christian societies would imagine there was something wrong with you if you didn’t visit a priest, we usually assume that therapists are there solely for moments of extreme crisis – and are a sign that the visiting client might be a little unbalanced, rather than just human.
  
  There is also, in a serious sense, an issue of branding. Therapy is hidden, unbranded, depressing in its outward appearance. The priests had far better clothes, and infinitely better architecture.
  
  Modern psychotherapists’ understanding of how human beings work is immensely more sophisticated than that of priests. Nevertheless, religions have been expert at creating a proper role for the priest, as a person to talk to at all important moments of life, without this seeming like an unhinged minority activity. There is a long way to go before therapy fully plugs the gap opened up by the decline in the priesthood.
  
  2. New gospels
  
  When religious belief began to fracture in Europe in the early 19th century, the hope was that culture could replace religion as a tool to guide, humanise and console.
  
  Claims that culture could stand in for scripture – that Middlemarch could take up the responsibilities previously handled by the Psalms, or the essays of Schopenhauer satisfy needs once catered to by Saint Augustine’s City of God – still have a way of sounding eccentric or insane in their combination of impiety and ambition.
  
  Nevertheless, the proposition is not so much absurd as it is unfamiliar. The very qualities that the religious locate in their holy texts can often just as well be discovered in works of culture. Novels and historical narratives can adeptly impart moral instruction and edification. Great paintings do make suggestions about our requirements for happiness. Philosophy can usefully probe our anxieties and offer consolation. Literature can change our lives. Equivalents to the ethical lessons of religion lie scattered across the cultural canon.
  
  So, why does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers live according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? The fault lies with academia. Universities are entirely uninterested in training students to use culture as a repertoire of wisdom – a source that can prove of solace to us when confronted by the infinite challenges of existence, from a tyrannical employer to a fatal lesion on our liver.
  
  We are by no means lacking in material that we might call into service to replace the holy texts; we are simply treating the material in a non-instrumental way. In other words, we are unwilling to consider secular culture religiously enough, in this sense, as a source of guidance.
  
  3. New churches
  
  You sometimes hear it said that art museums are our new churches. But, in practice, art museums abdicate much of their potential to function as new churches (places of consolation, meaning, community and redemption) through the way they handle the collections entrusted to them. While exposing us to objects of importance, they nevertheless seem unable to frame these in a way that links them powerfully to our inner needs.
  
  What if modern museums of art kept in mind the example of the didactic function of Christian art? A walk through a museum of art should amount to a structured encounter with the ideas that it is easiest for us to forget but which are most essential and life-enhancing to remember. The challenge is to rewrite the agendas for our art museums so that collections can begin to serve the needs of psychology as effectively as they served those of theology, for centuries. Curators should attempt to put aside their deepseated fears of instrumentalism and once in a while co-opt works of art to an ambition of helping us to get through life. Only then would museums be able to claim that they had fulfilled completely the excellent but as yet elusive ambition of becoming substitutes for churches in a secularising society.
  
  The challenge facing atheists is how to separate many ideas and rituals from the religious institutions that have laid claim to them but don’t truly own them. Many of our soul-related needs are ready to be freed from the particular tint given to them by religions – even if, paradoxically, it is the study of religions which often holds the key to their rediscovery and rearticulation. Secularism is not wrong. It is just that we have too often secularised badly – inasmuch as, in the course of ridding ourselves of unfeasible ideas, we have surrendered unnecessarily many of the most useful and attractive parts of the faiths.
  
  Our age has properly defined what the godshaped hole is. We now need to fill it. This means no longer adding to the already daunting pile of books about atheism, but starting instead to try to make some practical things happen in the world.
  
  Alain de Botton is the author of “Religion for Atheists” (Penguin, £9.99)
  
  The world cannot be disenchanted
  
  Francis Spufford
  
  When Thomas Paine was dying in Greenwich Village in June 1809, two Presbyterian ministers popped by to suggest that he would be damned if he didn’t affirm his faith in Jesus Christ. “Let me have none of your popish stuff,” he said firmly. “Good morning.” Score one to Paine for exiting the world without compromising his convictions, yet what he said had made, on the face of it, no sense.
  
  Faith in Christ as the path to salvation isn’t “popish” in the sense of being particular to Roman Catholicism. Paine was speaking to a pair of impeccable Protestants. What he was doing here was to act as a very early adopter of a perception that would influence later atheist understandings of the world enormously. He was suggesting, in one charged and revealing insult, that the original Protestant critique of Catholicism should be extended to the whole of historic Christianity. All of it should be reformed away; all of it, absolutely all of it, deserved the contempt that zealous Puritans had once felt for indulgences and prayer beads and “priestcraft”.
  
  This post-Christian puritanism, largely oblivious now of its history, is highly visible in the New Atheism of the 1990s and 2000s, and especially in Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Strange indifference (except at the margins) to all religions except Christianity? Check. Sense of being locked in righteous combat with the powers of darkness? Check. Puritanism, it turns out, can float free of faith and still preserve a vehement world-view, a core of characteristic judgements. The world, it says, is afflicted by a layer of corrupting gunk, a gluey mass of lies and mistakes that purports to offer mediation between us and meaning but actually obscures it and hides the plain outlines of that truth we so urgently need. Moreover, this hiding, this obscuring, is wilful and culpable, maintained on purpose for the benefit of hierarchs, bullies, men in golden hats everywhere. It is our duty to take up the wire wool of reason and to scrub, scrub, scrub the lies away. For no mediation is necessary. We may have –we must have – a direct vision of the essential state of things. We must see the world as if through pure, clear water, or empty air.
  
  It is reassuring, in a way, to find this ancient continuity at work in the sensibility of Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Jerry Coyne. It kind of makes up for their willed ignorance of all the emotional and intellectual structures of faith (as opposed to the will-o’-the-wisp “popery” in their heads). Dawkins may be showing indifference to every word ever written about the differences between polytheism and monotheism when he declares that Yahweh is the same as Odin, and that all he wants “is one god less” – but he is also keeping up a 400-year-old campaign against idolatry. That distant sound you hear is Oliver Cromwell applauding.
  
  However, the project is impossible – as impossible for the New Atheists as for every previous builder of a purified New Jerusalem. Direct, unmediated apprehension of truth is not available, except in the effortful special case of science. That gunk the New Atheists scrub at so assiduously is the inevitable matter of human culture, of imagination. People secrete it, necessarily, faster than it can be removed. Metaphors solidify into stories wherever the reformers’ backs are turned. We’ll never arrive at the Year Zero where everything means only what science says it should. Religion being a thing that humans as a species do continuously, it seems unlikely that we’ll stop, any more than we’ll stop making music, laws, poetry or non-utilitarian clothes to wear. Imagination grows as fast as bamboo in the rain. The world cannot be disenchanted. Even advocacy for disenchantment becomes, inexorably, comically, an enchantment of its own, with prophets, with heresies and with its own pious mythography.
  
  I think our recent, tentative turn away from the burning simplicities of The God Delusion (and the like) represents a recognition of this. Alain de Botton’s discovery in religion of virtues and beauties that an atheist might want is an anti-puritan move, a reconciliation of unbelief with the sprouting, curling, twining fecundity of culture. I don’t expect the puritan call will lose its appeal to the young and the zealous, but maybe we are entering a phase of greater tolerance in which, having abandoned the impossible task of trying to abolish religion, atheists might be able to apply themselves to the rather more useful task of distinguishing between kinds that want to damn you and kinds that don’t.
  
  Francis Spufford is the author of “Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense” (Faber & Faber, £8.99)
  
  Believing in a god is fine by me
  
  Jim Al-Khalili
  
  As a scientist, I have an unshakeable rationalist conviction that our universe is comprehensible; that mysteries are mysteries only because we have yet to figure them out. There is no need for a supernatural being to occupy the gaps in our understanding, because we will eventually fill them with new knowledge based on objective scientific truths: answers that are not based on mythologies, or cultural/historical whims, or personal biases, but arrived at by examining hypotheses, testing our theories to destruction and being prepared to abandon them if they conflict with empirical data. Scientists are constantly subjecting our world-view to scrutiny. This is the opposite of blind faith.
  
  Such a sweeping statement is a little unfair, given that not all scientists are so prepared to abandon a dogmatic stance when proved wrong, and not everyone with religious faith follows it blindly – to think that they do is naive and insulting to the many people who constantly question their faith. If you hold a strong conviction that there is some deeper significance to the universe or a spiritual meaning to your life that is important to you, who am I to try to convince you otherwise?
  
  Believing in a god is fine by me, if it is important to you. If you firmly believe this as an ontological truth, then it is rather pointless having a theological debate about it. But what I, and many other atheists, take issue with is the arrogant attitude that religious faith is the only means of providing us with a moral compass – that society dissolves without faith into a hedonistic, anarchic, amoral, self-gratifying decadence. This is not only nonsense, but intellectually lazy.
  
  We still have a long way to go if we are to rid the world of the bigoted attitudes held and injustices carried out in the name of religion. But the tide is turning. I would argue that to be an atheist in Britain today is so mainstream that we can afford to become less strident in our criticism and more tolerant of those with a faith. I say this not because I am less committed to my secular views or because I have weaker conviction than others, but because I believe we are winning the argument. We should not have to defend our atheism any longer.
  
  Don’t get the impression that I am arguing for complacency. It is just that here in the west we are now in a stronger position to change attitudes, to correct discriminatory laws and to make for a fairer society in which religion does not give one group an advantage or special privileges.
  
  Our society is no longer predominantly religious. Atheists are the mainstream. This is precisely why we should set out our stall to be more tolerant and inclusive. There are many issues on which we cannot afford to be complacent or conciliatory, such as the evil intent of religious fanatics, the wrong-headedness of creationists or the many injustices carried out against women or minority groups in the name of barbaric medieval laws, but we can often be more effective in getting our message across with a softer approach. The New Atheists have laid the foundations; maybe it is time now for the “New, New Atheists”.
  
  I am well aware that some other atheists would call me an accommodationist. However, this patronising term needs to be replaced, so I have thought long and hard in search of an alternative – a more appropriate one to define my brand of atheism – until I realised it has been under my nose all the time: it is called being a humanist.
  
  Jim Al-Khalili is the president of theHumanist Association and the author of “Quantum: a Guide for the Perplexed” (Phoenix, £10.99)
  
  The biblical God is a starter kit
  
  Karen Armstrong
  
  Most of us are introduced to God at about the same time as we hear about Santa Claus, but over the years our views of Santa mature and change, while our notion of God often gets stuck at an infantile level.
  
  As a result, “God” becomes incredible. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking in the west is often remarkably undeveloped, even primitive, and would make Maimonides and Aquinas turn in their graves. They both insisted that God was not another being and that you could not even say that He (ridiculous pronoun!) existed, because our experience of existence is too limited. God, said Aquinas, is Being itself (esse se ipsum).
  
  The biblical God is a “starter kit”; if we have the inclination and ability, we are meant to move on. Throughout history, however, many people have been content with a personalized deity, yet not because they “believed” in it but because they learned to behave – ritually and ethically – in a way that made it a reality. Religion is a form of practical knowledge, like driving or dancing. You cannot learn to drive by reading the car manual or the Highway Code; you have to get into the vehicle and learn to manipulate the brakes. The rules of a board game sound obscure and dull until you start to play, and then everything falls into place. There are some things that can be learned only by constant, dedicated practice. You may learn to jump higher and with more grace than seems humanly possible or to dance with unearthly beauty. Some of these activities bring indescribable joy –what the Greeks called ekstasis, a “stepping outside” the norm.
  
  Religion, too, is a practical discipline in which we learn new capacities of mind and heart. Like premodern philosophy, it was not the quest for an abstract truth but a practical way of life. Usually religion is about doing things and it is hard work. Classical yoga was not an aerobic exercise but a full-time job, in which a practitioner learned to transcend the ego that impeded the ekstasis of enlightenment. The five “pillars” or essential practices of Islam are all activities: prayer, pilgrimage, almsgiving, fasting and a continual giving of “witness” (shahada) in everything you do that God (not the “gods” of ambition and selfishness) is your chief priority.
  
  The same was once true of Christianity. The Trinity was not a “mystery” because it was irrational mumbo-jumbo. It was an “initiation” (musterion), which introduced Greek-speaking early Christians to a new way of thinking about the divine, a meditative exercise in which the mind swung in a disciplined way from what you thought you knew about God to the ineffable reality. If performed correctly it led to ekstasis. As Gregory of Nazianzus (329-90) explained to his Christian initiates: “My eyes are filled and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me.” Trinity was, therefore, an activity rather than a metaphysical truth in which one credulously “believed”. It is probably because most western Christians have not been instructed in this exercise that the Trinity remains pointless, incomprehensible, and even absurd.
  
  If you don’t do religion, you don’t get it. In the modern period, however, we have turned faith into a head-trip. Originally, the English word “belief”, like the Greek pistis and the Latin credo, meant “commitment”. When Jesus asked his followers to have “faith”, he was not asking them to accept him blindly as the Second Person of the Trinity (an idea he would have found puzzling). Instead, he was asking his disciples to give all they had to the poor, live rough and work selflessly for the coming of a kingdom in which rich and poor would sit together at the same table.
  
  “Credo ut intellegam – I commit myself in order that I may understand,” said Saint Anselm (1033-1109). In the late 17th century, the English word “belief” changed its meaning and became the intellectual acceptance of a somewhat dubious proposition. Religious people now think that they have to “believe” a set of incomprehensible doctrines before embarking on a religious way of life. This makes no sense. On the contrary, faith demands a disciplined and practical transcendence of egotism, a “stepping outside” the self which brings intimations of transcendent meaning that makes sense of our flawed and tragic world.
  
  Karen Armstrong is the author of “The Case for God: What Religion Really Means” (Vintage, £9.99)
  
  The word to grasp here is myth
  
  Richard Holloway
  
  No matter how they answer the God question, generous-minded people could profit from adopting an attitude of critical sympathy towards religion and maybe even taking the odd dip into it – provided they heed Canon William Vanstone’s warning that the Church is like a public swimming pool, where most of the noise comes from the shallow end.
  
  Most religions have two main departments of thought. The first calls itself “natural” theology because it recognises that it is in the nature of human beings to ask ultimate questions about the universe in which they find themselves.
  
  Apart from being more hopeful about finding positive answers to these questions than less committed searchers, natural theologians go over the same ground as philosophers and are no better at arriving at absolutely convincing conclusions than the philosophers are, which is why the exercise usually ends up at a kind of graded agnosticism that stretches from almost-atheism to almost-theism but never absolutely nails down either.
  
  If you need personalities to define the gradations, Richard Dawkins fits the almostatheism end and Roger Scruton fits the almost-theism end. Incidentally, it is worth remembering that both of these thinkers are subtler in the positions they hold on these complex matters than most people give them credit for.
  
  So far, so inconclusive. It is the next move in the religious enterprise that gets interesting. This is where theologians introduce the idea of revelation. “Revealed” theology is the department where we try not to figure out whether there is a god, but to work out the meaning of the messages that the god has sent us from beyond to answer the questions we are unable to answer. This is where sacred texts come into play, as well as the institutions that accrete round them to protect and promote them. Revelation is what you get when you go to the synagogue or church or the mosque – all those instructions from God to do this or abjure that – and it is where things can get both frustrating and interesting for unbelievers.
  
  The big frustration is how to deal with the circularity of the claims that are made by the exponents of revealed theology. If you ask them how they know that the words they quote came from God and not just another human being, the answer comes back, “Because the Bible or the Quran or the Whatever tells us so” – and we are no further on.
  
  A good approach here is not to try to stop the revelation argument from going round and round but to ask a different question, thus: given that there probably is no God, where did all this stuff come from? To which the obvious answer is that it came from us. All these sacred texts are creations of the human imagination, works of art crafted by us to convey meaning through story.
  
  So it’s a mistake to do what most unbelievers usually do at this point, which is to dismiss them as fairy tales and thereby deprive themselves of a rich resource for exploring the heights and depths of the human condition. The word to grasp here is myth: a myth is a story that encodes but does not necessarily explain a universal human experience.
  
  The wrong question to ask of a myth is whether it is true or false. The right question is whether it is living or dead, whether it still speaks to our condition. That is why, among all the true believers in church this Easter, there will be thousands of others who are there because they need, yet again, to express the hope that good need not always be defeated by evil.
  
  Richard Holloway was the bishop of Edinburgh from 1986 to 2000. He is the author of “Leaving Alexandria: a Memoir of Faith and Doubt”

Organ Donors and Religion

• We should end our irrational reverence for dead bodies. It would free our spirits and help the sick to live.
  
  The day my father died was cold, grey and wet. We and our mother sat by his bed as rain dripped from trees outside. We could tell it was over even before Dad’s hands grew cold. A doctor came in to ask (in Catalan) if they could have his eyes, which were healthy and might be useful. The hospital would supply glass replacements for the corpse.
  
  There was no need for family consultation. None of us looked inquiringly around to gauge the others’ response. I can’t recall we’d even bothered discussing this with him. “Why are you even asking me?” he would have said: “Obviously, anything that might be useful — take it. It won’t be me.” Dad would have attached no significance, no sanctity and no further purpose to a corpse.
  
  I think of him now, smiling at how un-Dad-like his body looked with glass eyes (as if he would have cared!) now that debate returns this week on the status of bodily organs. The news on Wednesday was that good progress is being made expanding the national organ donor list. Numbers of those donating organs have risen by 50 per cent in the past five years.
  
  Nevertheless, three people a day are dying for want of a donor and the figures came with a disturbing footnote: the UK’s “family refusal rate” remains among the highest in Europe. Surviving relatives may override the express wishes of the deceased and withdraw permission; and often do. I don’t myself see why, if I can bequeath my house to a donkey sanctuary without fear of countermand, I cannot bequeath my kidneys to a hospital; but that’s for lawyers. No, what baffles me is that in the 21st century so many modern, educated people should still attach this mysterious reverence to what the Bible itself variously calls dust, ashes and grass. So why the remarkable, irrational persistence of primitive ideas of the sacrosanct nature of human remains? Why the reverence for dead flesh?
  
  Why (and only relatively recently, since 2003) have we started bringing back the bodies of all service personnel killed in conflicts abroad? We never used to. Have we become more pious as a people? Or more pagan?
  
  It was cool and wet, too, on the day I descended an open shaft to visit one of the (probably) thousands of underground chambers in the Tierradentro region of Colombia. Rain dripped from the trees on to the fearsome man-bird stone sculptures that guard these funeral halls. In the first eight centuries AD there existed a civilisation of which little survives except the extraordinary preparations it made (as with the Ancient Egyptians) for the next life of the dead. Only skin and bones now remain in these richly decorated giant burrows, surrounded by pots, pans, jewellery ... everything necessary for the world to come.
  
  The day I went to see the relics of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux was just as cold and grey. Not as a pilgrim but as a curious journalist I took my place early in the morning in the queue outside Westminster Cathedral. Then, to what I suspect was our mutual horror, I saw Tony Blair. He must have preceded me and was leaving the forecourt carrying the rose that pilgrims bought for £1 to be blessed (I suppose) by being touched against the glass case surrounding the elaborate closed casket containing (it was said) bits of the thigh and foot of the deceased Catholic saint. It was a sort of holy roadshow, touring Britain.
  
  I am still reeling from the experience: not of seeing a box containing a few old bones, but of seeing a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and one of the leaders of the Western world, whose beliefs have helped to shape our age, as the captive of something for which I can find no word but “superstition”. Having no belief in God I cannot be a Christian so it will sound perverse to say this: but the sanctification of relics offends me as a Christian.
  
  I hope you’re interested — I am — in the roots of a belief that, even in godless Britain, stubbornly refuses to succumb to science, common sense and reason, and is now killing three of our fellow citizens a day. Is reverence for human remains the fault of religion?
  
  Over the past two millennia, the Church has been profoundly confused about its attitude. The story of the Resurrection, of course, and of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, point unambiguously towards a literal belief that we die with our bodies and will live again with our bodies.
  
  Judaism is not so sure. Islam is very sure: the body is from Allah and cremation is, therefore, haraam (sinful); though some Muslims believe there is an indestructible bone from which even a cremated body will be reassembled at Judgment Day. An English nurse working in a Baghdad hospital where the uncle of Saddam Hussein had had his leg amputated told me of the doctors’ terror when the severed leg was temporarily mislaid: they knew that the family would want it preserved so the uncle could be buried in one piece, ready for the resurrection. The early Christians preached burial rather than cremation for the same reason: the Greeks and Romans were cremating commoners, believing that eternal life was only for gods and the top brass.
  
  Jesus’s own utterances are ambiguous. The New Testament says that He told an astonished audience that “at the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven”. This account, more spirit-based than flesh-based, is most uncompromisingly expressed by St Paul, chastising the Corinthians: “Some will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ Fool! ... it is sown a physical body, [but] it is raised a spiritual body.”
  
  St Paul’s view is reflected in the approach of most nonconformist and Protestant churches: among the first to accept cremation, having rationalised that if God can resurrect the dead, He can surely do it from ash or grave. But Roman Catholicism banned cremation until 1963; and even in Britain it was a crime until 1884, when a court had refused to convict poor, eccentric Dr Price, almost lynched by a Welsh mob because he had tried to cremate his dead infant son.
  
  I have concluded that, with the massive exception of Eastern religions such as Hinduism, the world’s modern religions have not led, but been led by, primitive beliefs in the essential inseparability of body and soul. These beliefs are far older than, for instance, Christianity. The suspicion lingers, and has lingered right down from prehistory, that in some deep, mysterious manner, a corpse is inextricably tied to the human spirit that once animated it. So long as you believe, therefore, that the person persists in some way, on some plane, after death, his or her actual remains become sacred for you, special, without price.
  
  The irony is that it is Christianity that contains within itself (as that quote from St Paul suggests) the seeds of thinking that could break those chains, releasing the spirit from the flesh and consigning the corpse to insignificance and corpse-reverence to paganism. But the Church has not been brave enough to follow through. As we shall be reminded next week, an awful lot has been invested in funeral rites.

Fundies

• America has an infection. Whether it is terminal remains to be seen. The infection is that of anti-intellectualism, a steadfast refusal to acknowledge that one’s worldview is mutable, a worldview in which facts are only facts if they fit that worldview, and that anyone who disagrees with a Christian fundamentalist worldview is an “enemy” of God. The infection has taken hold in conservative politics, where it has spread to a significant portion of the American population, and even into a significant amount of the Canadian population. In Katherine Stewart’s article in the Guardian entitled “How Christian Fundamentalism Feeds Into the Toxic Partisanship of US Politics,” Stewart notes:
  
  I don’t believe for a moment that this hysterical voice [Christian fundamentalism] that screeches in America’s political sphere is the authentic voice of religion in America. Most religious Americans want to mix it up at lunch! They want to make friends across party lines, and they want to help people who are less fortunate. A survey by the Public Religious Research Institute, released on 24 October, reveals that 60% of Catholics believe the Church should place a greater emphasis on social justice issues and their obligation to the poor, even if that means focusing less on culture war issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Earlier this year, in response to the Ryan budget, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops joined other Christian leaders in insisting that a “circle of protection” be drawn around “essential programs that serve poor and vulnerable people”. So why is it that the so-called “values voters” are urged to vote against the politician who supports choice, not the politician who wants to shred that “circle of protection” for the poor and vulnerable? Why is it that when politicians want to demonstrate just how religiously righteous they are, they talk about banning same-sex marriage and making contraceptives hard to get, instead of showing what they have done to protect the weak?
  
  There is an obvious answer, and it is, in a sense, staring you in the face every time you watch a political debate or read about the latest antics of Focus on the Family and the AFA. The kind of religion that succeeds in politics tends to focus on the divisive element of religion. If you want to use religion to advance a partisan political agenda, the main objective you use it for is to divide people between us and them, between the in-group and the out-group, the believers and the infidels.
  
  The result is a reduction of religion to a small handful of wedge issues. According to the religious leaders and policy organizations urging Americans to vote with their “Biblical values”, to be Christian now means to support one or, at most, a small handful of policy positions. And it means voting for the Republican party.
  
  Christian fundamentalists are not to be confused with mainstream evangelical Christians. While Christian fundamentalists may be evangelical, not every evangelical Christian is necessarily a fundamentalist. The symptoms of the infection of anti-intellectualism are as follows:
  
  1. Erosion of education — escalating attacks on teachers as bad citizens, teachers’ unions as greedy “takers”, the evolution vs. creationism debate, resistance to stem cell research (or any kind of scientific research that conflicts with their Biblical worldview), fundamentalist emphasis on voucher system to create taxpayer funded fundamentalist schools, fear of a changing, increasingly pluralistic society (the current face of which is the extraordinary power fundamentalists give to the LGBT community as the force eroding American morality and bringing down the entire nation), and a negative economy which is generating public support by those who consider themselves members of the Religious Right by demonizing public education as a “liberal conspiracy” to take their children away from God.
  
  2. Biblical Literalism: The Bible is the foundation of “truth,” from science to social interactions, and anything that disagrees with a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible is a product of Satanic manipulation, of which the by-product of Satan is secularism.
  
  3. Oversimplification: The idea that there is a clear right and wrong (based on Biblical laws, or cherry-picked verses), the universe is either moral or immoral, and that so-called “assaults” on religious “freedom” of fundamentalists signify an invisible war between the forces of God (or “good”) and the forces of Satan (or “evil”).
  
  4. Assertion of the patriarchal right to control women: To fundamentalists, women are second-class citizens, subject to a strict social hierarchy. This hierarchy can be observed in every stripe of fundamentalism, from Islamic fundamentalism to Christian fundamentalism and it goes like this:
  
  God/Jesus is the head of the man
  
  Man is the head of the woman, subject only to God
  
  Woman is subjugated to a status which is wholly reliant on having “faith” that her husband will do the right thing because he is specially influenced by God by special decree of the Bible. Fundamentalist website after website counsels women that if her husband does wrong that the only thing she can do is pray that God will guide him to a different decision, that she is not to disagree with him publicly (or in front of children). She is free (sometimes) to give an opinion, but the ultimate decision is the man’s, because he has special dispensation by God to be in that position. The equal status of women is a threat to this hierarchy, and thus, a threat to God.
  
  This is why America is seeing so many attacks on women, from trying to pass laws that undermine Roe v. Wade (personhood laws, restrictions on abortions, waiting periods, attempts to push laws to punish abortion doctors, restrictions on being able to get birth control, etc), to going to the trouble of redefining rape as being the woman’s fault, even part of God’s plan, while pushing to give rapists parental rights, to the unfortunate proclamations of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, et. Al, that babies born of rape are blessings from God, that the female body shuts down its reproductive system when a woman is being raped, etc.). Controlling women’s bodies while at the same time denouncing “big government” is the popular meme of the fundamentalist mind. Women are simply not meant to destroy that Godly hierarchy set up by the Bible, and in their minds if you can control women, you’ve got half the populace conquered for God.
  
  Fundamentalist anti-intellectualism often manifests itself in a sort of “pseudo-intellectualism” by which those with little or no educational background read a few articles or watch a few videos about a particular subject (usually published by their own religious compatriots, particularly about what a scientific theory is and evolution), and consider themselves “educated” because what they read agreed with their worldview, or, if being highly educated, usually get that education in a fundamentalist educational setting. They will then take that “evidence” and proceed to use it against empirical evidence that directly contests and even eviscerates the arguments they have carefully set up around what they have read or seen, and the argument invariably ends with ad hominem attacks against reason, facts, and education — because they have no actual evidence outside of the Bible to use to “win” the argument. A favorite tactic is to call the opposition an “atheist” (or a “liberal”) if someone disagrees with their worldview.
  
  Education is then “demonized” as being a covert movement to “indoctrinate” the masses in the secular worldview, and thus, part of the forces of Satan. Rick Santorum demonstrates this principle admirably. Although he himself is highly educated, with a bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree and JD from Penn State, his Biblical worldview clearly trumps his empirical education and allows him to disregard it as a fly in the ointment in the “light of Biblical truth,” which is, of course, only empirical in that it is in print, in black and white, not empirical that it can actually be proven. Faith is evidence enough, and reason becomes a threat to faith, thus, reason is from Satan, not God. A good case in point is the persecution of Copernicus and Galileo by the Catholic Church, regarding the revolution of the Earth around the sun. This old argument, which has been proven in favor of Copernicus and Galileo, has arisen once again to haunt us.
  
  According to a recent National Science Foundation survey, over twenty percent of the respondents believed in the geocentric model popular during the 1500s, that the sun revolves around the earth instead of the other way around. This is old, disproven thinking that comes from the idea that since humanity is God’s creation, naturally, everything revolves around humanity, with humanity at the center of creation. Humanity is thus, special. Anything that challenges the idea that humanity is special is thus a threat against God. After all, you can’t feel the earth move, so it must be stationary. You can’t see the stars move (well, you can with a telescope, something called parallax), but you can’t see it with the naked eye, so thus, the earth must be stationary with the sun moving around it. This is an example of pseudo-intellectualism. You know what you see, but you don’t investigate to see if your assertions are valid under close scrutiny. Fundamentalists cannot afford to indulge in close scrutiny of their ideas, because close scrutiny would most certainly disprove most of what they believe, and they fear, more than anything else, of the erosion of their own faith.
  
  In 1982, forty-four per cent of Americans held strictly creationist views, a statistically insignificant difference from 2012. Furthermore, the percentage of Americans that believe in biological evolution has only increased by four percentage points over the last twenty years. Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason” and “Freethinkers” sums up the problem of fundamentalist anti-intellectualism succintly:
  
  This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
  
  Copernicus and Galileo were persecuted by the Catholic Church for suggesting that humanity on earth was indeed not the center of the universe. Copernicus did not suffer much persecution while he was alive, but after he was dead, his hypothesis that the earth revolved around the sun certainly did. Galileo dared to revive Copernicus’ idea, and packaged it in a mock debate between characters in a book he wrote called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo) in 1632. The Catholic Church’s militaristic arm, the Inquisition, caught wind of what he had written, and banned his book, and placed Galileo under house arrest.
  
  Now, the Catholic Church’s disagreement with Galileo and Copernicus did not make their ideas less true, which the idea certainly was, and revealed to be true through empirical scientific investigation over a period of years. Instead, the Church deflected the facts as “heresy,” which is something fundamentalists are particularly adept at doing. Ken Ham’s Creation Museum is a testament to this deflection of scientific facts as heresy. By dismissing evolution as nothing more than a “theory,” (which goes to show pure, deliberate ignorance of what exactly a scientific theory is), we see again the application of the ad hominem attack Christian fundamentalists so love to employ when inconvenient facts get in the way.
  
  The fundamentalists of today are a hardy lot, and they will use anything to win this battle for God — the Bible, which is the ultimate authority, the Constitution, revisionist science textbooks, and revisionist American history (a la David Barton) that “proves” America was a nation founded to be their brand of a “Christian nation.” Never mind they are not Constitutional scholars. The Constitutional scholars are a threat to them because even though scholars have differing opinions about interpretation of the Constitution, any opinion that differs from the fundamentalist worldview is a direct attack on God. Never mind that the fundamentalist that lives in the general population is not a scientist. They know better, because Ken Ham and the Bible tell them that there is NO WAY God would use evolution to create (even though the Bible says nothing on the subject of evolution. The Bible is black and white. God created the world as it is now in six days, and rested on the seventh.
  
  You will rarely see a fundamentalist in a secular college or university because secular universities and colleges do not agree with their worldview. This is why for the most part they are homeschooled, and go straight from homeschool to fundamentalist universities that teach their worldview. These universities and colleges churn out fundamentalists who are schooled in law, but only an interpretation of law that fits their Biblical worldview. Lawyers or judges who disagree with them, particularly in Supreme Court cases are dismissed ad hominem as “activist lawyers” and “activist judges” (i.e. enemies of God). This lack of empirical education is changing American society into one that has eroded science education, particularly with their attempts to force the school voucher issue, which is nothing but a bid to get taxpayers to fund fundamentalist education, yet they object to taxpayer funded public education because “secularism” is persecuting them for their beliefs by simply disagreeing with them (because again, nothing they believe is based on empirical evidence).
  
  The lack of empirical education is eroding American society in favor of a “faith based” education that has nothing whatsoever to do with facts that threaten their worldview. Liberty is something they interpret as the freedom to live in a society based solely on their Biblical worldview. Freedom of religion for others in an inclusive society is anathema to them, because such freedom threatens to sideline them to the fringes. Individual liberty does not exist except for them, because they have an inherent distrust of the individual to make reasonable decisions, unless those decisions are based on their interpretation of Scripture. Thus, mainstream Christians are not their brethren; mainstream Christians are simply misinformed individuals who have deluded themselves into believing they are of the family of Christ, and only the clear lens of fundamentalism can see that mainstream Christians have been deceived by the enemy of God which is secular society.
  
  The sole aim of fundamentalists is to “obey” God in creating conditions favorable to the return of Christ–and this one thought, this one design drives American foreign policy with Israel (they believe that when the Jews all return to Israel and the 3rd temple is rebuilt that Christ will return, (but not without sacrificing 2/3 of the Jewish people in the process), then all the remaining Jews will become Christians. American fundamentalists are only interested in Jewish people and Israel insofar as it furthers the return of Jesus Christ. That is all.
  
  Because fundamentalists are engaged in the idea that they are warriors in a fight for God, (something Christian fundamentalists hold in common with Islamic fundamentalists), they have the sort of mindset that if it came to it (which it has not yet, I do not think), they would not afraid to die for their faith. Proof of this idea was given a disturbing form by a video game “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” which advocates killing anyone who doesn’t agree with them (i.e. can’t be converted to their idea of Christ):
  
  Aimed at conservative Christians, the game’s story line begins in a time after the “rapture”, when fundamentalist dogma contends that Christians will go to heaven. The remaining population on earth must then choose between surrendering to or resisting “the Antichrist”, which the game describes as the “Global Community Peacekeepers” whose objective is the imposition of “one-world government”. “Part of the object is to kill or convert the opposing forces,” Simpson said. This is “antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” he said, adding that he was dismayed by the concept in “Eternal Forces” of using prayer to restore a player’s “spirit points” after killing the enemy. In the game, combatants on one side pause for prayer, intoning, “Praise the Lord”. A player can lose points for “unnecessary killing” but regain them through prayer.
  
  But Simpson counters, “The idea that you could pray, and the deleterious effects of one’s foul deeds would simply be wiped away, is a horrible thing to be teaching Christian young people here at Christmas time.”
  
  Troy Lyndon, CEO of Left Behind Games Inc., which is promoting the new video, has defended the game as “inspirational entertainment” and said its critics were exaggerating. The game is based on the popular “Left Behind” novels, a Bible-based end-of-the-world-saga that has sold more than 63 million copies.
  
  Now, while this is a disturbing element, and the Left Behind books have genocidal scenes that seem to justify killing masses of unbelievers because they are incorrigible (not ever going to convert to the fundamentalist mindset), it should be reiterated that fundamentalists are not yet at the point in the US where they want to kill people, so let us not be alarmist. However, that being said, the way some fundamentalists are choosing to portray institutional racism and genocide (as punishment for sin and disbelief) to school age children is disturbing, and it is the belief of this scholar that the elements for radical action portrayed in the video game are there–but would need utter desperation in order to explode into being. It is the opinion of this writer that fundamentalists are not yet this desperate, but attempts to normalize killing for God are disturbing, to say the least. The Guardian had this to say about the subject in May of 2012:
  
  The story of the Amalekites has been used to justify genocide throughout the ages. According to Pennsylvania State University Professor Philip Jenkins, a contributing editor for the American Conservative, the Puritans used this passage when they wanted to get rid of the Native American tribes. Catholics used it against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics. “In Rwanda in 1994, Hutu preachers invoked King Saul’s memory to justify the total slaughter of their Tutsi neighbors,” writes Jenkins in his 2011 book, Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (HarperCollins).
  
  This fall, more than 100,000 American public school children, ranging in age from four to 12, are scheduled to receive instruction in the lessons of Saul and the Amalekites in the comfort of their own public school classrooms. The instruction, which features in the second week of a weekly “Bible study” course, will come from the Good News Club, an after-school program sponsored by a group called the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF). The aim of the CEF is to convert young children to a fundamentalist form of the Christian faith and recruit their peers to the club.
  
  There are now over 3,200 clubs in public elementary schools, up more than sevenfold since the 2001 supreme court decision, Good News Club v Milford Central School, effectively required schools to include such clubs in their after-school programing.
  
  The CEF has been teaching the story of the Amalekites at least since 1973. In its earlier curriculum materials, CEF was euphemistic about the bloodshed, saying simply that “the Amalekites were completely defeated.” In the most recent version of the curriculum, however, the group is quite eager to drive the message home to its elementary school students. The first thing the curriculum makes clear is that if God gives instructions to kill a group of people, you must kill every last one:
  
  “You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) – people, animals, every living thing. Nothing shall be left.”
  
  “That was pretty clear, wasn’t it?” the manual tells the teachers to say to the kids. Even more important, the Good News Club wants the children to know, the Amalakites were targeted for destruction on account of their religion, or lack of it. The instruction manual reads:
  
  “The Amalekites had heard about Israel’s true and living God many years before, but they refused to believe in him. The Amalekites refused to believe in God and God had promised punishment.” The instruction manual goes on to champion obedience in all things. In fact, pretty much every lesson that the Good News Club gives involves reminding children that they must, at all costs, obey. If God tells you to kill nonbelievers, he really wants you to kill them all. No questions asked, no exceptions allowed.
  
  Educating Christian fundamentalists simply doesn’t work. They do not accept any education that is in direct conflict with their worldview. What remains is to educate the rest of the American populace about Christian fundamentalism and dominionism, educating the American populace about the David Bartons of the world, so that when elections occur, an educated populace can reject the infiltration of fundamentalism on the rest of American society, which will, given the right opportunity (usually in a climate of fear like 9/11), erode American democracy entirely and push our nation into the fringes of the world into irrelevance.

Heaven or Hallucinations?

• In Eben Alexander's best-selling book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster), he recounts his near-death experience (NDE) during a meningitis-induced coma. When I first read that Alexander's heaven includes “a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes” who offered him unconditional love, I thought, “Yeah, sure, dude. I've had that fantasy, too.” Yet when I met him on the set of Larry King's new streaming-live talk show on Hulu, I realized that he genuinely believes he went to heaven. Did he?
  
  Not likely. First, Alexander claims that his “cortex was completely shut down” and that his “near-death experience ... took place not while [his] cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off.” In King's green room, I asked him how, if his brain was really nonfunctional, he could have any memory of these experiences, given that memories are a product of neural activity? He responded that he believes the mind can exist separately from the brain. How, where, I inquired? That we don't yet know, he rejoined. The fact that mind and consciousness are not fully explained by natural forces, however, is not proof of the supernatural. In any case, there is a reason they are called near-death experiences: the people who have them are not actually dead.
  
  Second, we now know of a number of factors that produce such fantastical hallucinations, which are masterfully explained by the great neurologist Oliver Sacks in his 2012 book Hallucinations (Knopf). For example, Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke and his colleagues produced a “shadow person” in a patient by electrically stimulating her left temporoparietal junction. “When the woman was lying down,” Sacks reports, “a mild stimulation of this area gave her the impression that someone was behind her; a stronger stimulation allowed her to define the ‘someone’ as young but of indeterminate sex.”
  
  Sacks recalls his experience treating 80 deeply parkinsonian postencephalitic patients (as seen in the 1990 film Awakenings, which starred Robin Williams in a role based on Sacks), and notes, “I found that perhaps a third of them had experienced visual hallucinations for years before l-dopa was introduced—hallucinations of a predominantly benign and sociable sort.” He speculates that “it might be related to their isolation and social deprivation, their longing for the world—an attempt to provide a virtual reality, a hallucinatory substitute for the real world which had been taken from them.”
  
  Migraine headaches also produce hallucinations, which Sacks himself has experienced as a longtime sufferer, including a “shimmering light” that was “dazzlingly bright”: “It expanded, becoming an enormous arc stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp, glittering, zigazgging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors.” Compare Sacks's experience with that of Alexander's trip to heaven, where he was “in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them.”
  
  In an article in the Atlantic last December, Sacks explains that the reason hallucinations seem so real “is that they deploy the very same systems in the brain that actual perceptions do. When one hallucinates voices, the auditory pathways are activated; when one hallucinates a face, the fusiform face area, normally used to perceive and identify faces in the environment, is stimulated.” Sacks concludes that “the one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander's case, then, is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation, but instead insists on a supernatural one.”
  
  The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void. But what is more likely: That Alexander's NDE was a real trip to heaven and all these other hallucinations are the product of neural activity only? Or that all such experiences are mediated by the brain but seem real to each experiencer? To me, this evidence is proof of hallucination, not heaven.

Violent Fanatics

• There are several things we cannot confidently say about the motives of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in bombing the crowd at the finish of the Boston marathon.
  
  We do not know all the details of his psychological profile; we do not know the identity of a figure called Misha, who was apparently instrumental in Tsarnaev’s radicalisation; we do not know why he chose the marathon as his target; we do not fully know the role of his younger brother or his wife, who claims total surprise at the events.
  
  Any act as violent as his is “multi-determined”, as my shrink unhelpfully puts it. Every individual is a unique blend of DNA, experience and psychological complexity. It’s worth keeping that in mind before we reduce someone to a caricature.
  
  But we do know this: Tsarnaev was a fanatical, extremist Muslim — and his brother has testified that “defending Islam” was the motive. Tsarnaev’s YouTube page is crammed with Islamist conspiracy theories, apocalyptic myths and violent Islamist imagery. He disrupted his own mosque’s services by ranting that it was wrong to honour Martin Luther King Jr because he wasn’t a Muslim.
  
  The Russian intelligence services alerted the CIA and FBI to what they detected as dangerous Islamist extremism — even before he had spent six months in the country. His uncle described Tsarnaev’s shift toward extreme devotion: “I was shocked when I heard his words, his phrases, when every other word he starts sticking in words of God.”
  
  Tsarnaev gave up the sport he won prizes in — boxing — because of Islam. He gave up drinking. He complained about the loss of values in modern society. He hit his girlfriend and persuaded his American wife to become a Muslim — now covered from head to toe.
  
  Of course the Boston bombings were an act of jihad. To read writers such as The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald desperately searching for some other motive — “some combination of mental illness, societal alienation, or other form of internal instability and rage that is apolitical in nature” — is to despair of some left-liberals’ naivety.
  
  History is crammed with violence committed in the name of God. From the Crusades to the Reformation to the religious conflicts of the 17th century in Europe, we have seen how Christianity — although founded by a radically non-violent guru — can become murderous. How much more plausible is the idea of violence coming from a religion founded by an explicitly political conqueror.
  
  The motive for the bombing was religion, stupid. But it was also, of course, only one strain of religion — the most extreme and total form.
  
  Over the centuries Christianity largely tamed itself. For many centuries Islam was more peaceable than Christianity, especially when it commanded an imperial presence over infidels in the Ottoman empire. The tendency to take religion to its extreme, even violent, form is not the exclusive province of any faith. But what it is important to grasp is that this is not a deviation from or perversion of faith; it is its ultimate, most impassioned form, often seized on by an individual to appease personal conflicts and overcome confusion and bewilderment.
  
  It is faith without doubt and without humility. It is past reason. It is a form of total surrender of the self to something other and greater. It knows no restraint.
  
  So do Tsarnaev a favour and take him at his word. He was not crazy. He was just terrifyingly consistent. If this life is but a blip compared with eternity, if God controls everything and if you believe your adopted country and culture are at war with that God, why is it not your duty to defend God’s law?
  
  Yes, there also seem to be strains of modernity in Tsarnaev: a penchant for driving a Mercedes, a macho swagger, possible drug-dealing, all-American branded baseball caps and a very modern lust for celebrity. But that helps to explain the recourse to extremism. The 9/11 murderers, after all, were not without internal conflicts. They went to a strip bar before preparing themselves for eternity. Osama bin Laden was once a trust-fund kid cavorting around the West.
  
  This is emphatically not to say that Islam is the core problem. As you can see from Tsarnaev’s mosque, from the disgusted reaction of his Muslim relatives, from the 99% of American Muslims who share a faith of non-violence and humility and charity, Tsarnaev is an extreme exception, not the rule. But it is also true, it seems to me, that Islam has an acutely difficult relationship with modernity. It cannot moderate doctrinally because its founding text is believed to be literally the word of God speaking through his prophet and can never be altered or reinterpreted in the light of history or reason, let alone be subject to objective scholarship. Whereas Christianity became imperial under Constantine, Islam began as imperialist and thereby political. Unlike Judaism it also claims universality.
  
  Which is why the Tsarnaev brothers are in some ways more frightening than organised terrorist groups. All you need is a sense of bewilderment and alienation in the modern world, a need for total certainty and an internet connection . . . and you have a religious motive for violence.
  
  As the modern world increasingly defies all the constraints that ancient religion imposed, some will find a reason to strike back. Returning the favour, as in the invasion of Afghanistan or the occupation of a Muslim country such as Iraq, doesn’t help. It only threatens to intensify the blowback from online loner fanatics.
  
  Stigmatising the 99% of US Muslims who are appalled by terrorism and far better integrated than in Europe is another way to turn a tragedy into a catastrophe. We are stuck with hoping that some day Islam will relearn what Christianity finally learnt: non-violence is the better path.
  
  In other words, to describe this terrorist act as religiously based does not mean one is a bigot; just a realist. Fanaticism is as old as humanity — and now empowered on a global, internet stage.
  
  The only answer is stoicism, vigilance and religious humility. And time.

Autistic children are atheists

• That’s the opinion of Fehmi Kaya, head of the Health and Education Associations for Autistic Children in Adana, Turkey. Autistic children are atheists, he said, “due to a lack of a section for faith in their brains.”
  
  “Autistic children do not know believing in God because they do not have a section of faith in their brains,” Kaya said, according to daily Milliyet.
  
  Kaya said the underdevelopment of faith sections in the brain caused autistic children to not believe in God.
  
  “That is why they don’t know how to pray, how to believe in God. It is needed to create awareness in these children through methods of therapy.”
  
  Kaya added that autistic children should undergo treatment to “create areas of faith in their brain.”
  
  Apparently, it’s not the children’s fault. According to Kaya whose degree is in sociology, they are born atheists because of the missing faith section. “Research,” he adds, “says atheism and autistic children are linked. Researchers in the USA and Canada say that atheism is a different form of autism.”
  
  A backlash from individuals and autism associations throughout Turkey has caused Kaya to complain that his remarks were taken out of context by news reports.
  
  On a personal note, my own background leads me to wonder if there’s some truth to at least one of Fehmi Kaya’s claims; the one involving problems wth the brain's "faith sections."
  
  You see, I was a believer from a very young age and remained one until suffering a tragic injury (involving experience, reading and thinking) to the faith section of my brain. The injury occurred, I suspect, somewhere between the cerebellum, the pons and the I-Like-Fox-News center (another underdeveloped area in many atheist brains).
  
  (This came from a Fark thread - some comments:)
  
  He has a point. When you remove emotion from the equation and let logic take charge, belief in deities seems weird and incongruent with a universe predicated on examinable physical laws.
  
  But humans are not purely logical creatures. Along with our logical minds, we are burdened with our emotional mind as well. Except in the case of autistic children, of course. They are emotionally crippled, for better or worse. As far as atheism goes, for the better, obviously.

William Lane Craig

• Well-publicized atheists like Dawkins and Harris are closer to being household names than William Lane Craig is, but within the subculture of evangelical Christians interested in defending their faith rationally, he has had a devoted following for decades. Many professional philosophers know about him only vaguely, but in the field of philosophy of religion, his books and articles are among the most cited. And though he works mainly from his home, in suburban Marietta, Ga., he holds a faculty appointment at Biola University, an evangelical stronghold on the southeastern edge of Los Angeles County and home to one of the largest philosophy graduate programs in the world.
  
  Surveys suggest that the philosophy professoriate is among the most atheistic subpopulations in the United States; even those philosophers who specialize in religion believe in God at a somewhat lower rate than the general public does. Philosophers have also lately been in a habit of humility, as their profession's scope seems to shrink before the advance of science and the modern university's preference for research that wins corporate contracts. But it is partly because of William Lane Craig that one can hear certain stripes of evangelicals whispering to one another lately that "God is working something" in the discipline. And through the discipline, they see a way of working something in society as a whole.
  
  The enormous kinds of questions that speculative-minded college students obsess over—life, death, the universe - are taken unusually seriously by philosophers who also happen to be evangelical Christians. To them, after all, what one believes matters infinitely for one's eternal soul. They therefore tend to care less about disciplinary minutiae and terms of art than about big-picture "worldviews," every aspect of which should be compatible with a particular way of thinking about the fraught love affair between God and humanity - or else.
  
  The debates for which Craig is most famous live on long after the crowds are gone from the campus auditoriums or megachurch sanctuaries where they take place. On YouTube, they garner tens or hundreds of thousands of views as they're dissected and fact-checked by bloggers and hobbyists and apologists-in-training. Such debates have an appealing absence of gray area: There are only two sides, and one or the other has to win. By the time it's over, you have the impression that your intelligence has been respected—you get to hear both sides make their cases, after all. The winner? You decide.
  
  "I believe that debate is the forum for sharing the gospel on college campuses," Craig told an audience of several thousand at a seminar about "Unpacking Atheism" in a suburban Denver church last October, simulcast at other churches around the country. Compared with the rancorous presidential debates happening at the time, he added, "these are respectable academic events conducted with civility and Christian charity."
  
  Craig generally insists on the same format: opening statements, then two rounds of rebuttals, then closing statements, then audience. He prepares extensively beforehand, sometimes for months at a time, with research assistants poring over the writings of the opponent in search of objections that Craig should anticipate. He amasses a well-organized file of notes that he can draw on during the debate for a choice quotation or a statistic.
  
  In the opening statement he pummels the opponent with five or so concise arguments - for instance, the origins of the universe, the basis of morality, the testimony of religious experience, and perhaps an addendum of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Over the course of the rebuttals he makes sure to respond to every point that the opponent has brought up, which usually sends the opponent off on a series of tangents. Then, at the end, he reminds the audience how many of his arguments stated at the outset the opponent couldn't manage to address, much less refute. He declares himself and his message the winner. Onlookers can't help agreeing.
  
  This line of questioning - about whether William Lane Craig is merely persuasive or actually correct, an honest philosopher or a snake-oil evangelist - arises every time another one of his bouts hits the Internet. Anyone can see that he is good, but is he for real?.................
  
  Most outsiders are familiar with the caricatures of evangelical anti-intellectualism, from the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in 1925 to televangelists and the faux-folksiness of George W. Bush. So are evangelicals themselves. Almost 20 years ago, the evangelical historian (and historian of evangelicals) Mark Noll warned, at book length, about The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. This, as much as secularism itself, is an ill that Craig and others at Biola have set out to cure.
  
  "Biblical Christianity retreated into the intellectual closet of Fundamentalism," he writes in the introduction to Reasonable Faith. "Satan deceives us into voluntarily laying aside our best weapons of logic and evidence, thereby ensuring unawares modernism's triumph over us."
  
  Craig Hazen, who directs the apologetics department at Biola, calls the problem "blind-leaping." He told me, "The idea that we're blind-leaping into faith is actually reinforced by evangelical churches all the time." ................
  
  The students in Craig's classes at Biola, it's true, bear a kind of battle scar. A common story among them goes something like this: When they were teenage boys, growing up in evangelical households, their childhood faith began to buckle. Their classes in school and their classmates and the Internet posed questions they didn't know how to answer. Their parents and pastors couldn't help; they only recommended more prayer and faith, more blind-leaping. It didn't work...........
  
  Craig's muscular arguments lend them the confidence to delve into areas of inquiry that might have previously seemed closed, from historical criticism of the Bible to theistic interpretations of evolution.

Christian Atheism

• Professor Anthea Butler has caught much flack recently for arguing in a post here on RD that the George Zimmerman verdict exposes that a god-complex, tied to and articulated as white supremacy, remains powerfully at work within U.S. society. She’s right, of course. In putting on the table the question of how religion relates to the verdict, how religion has been operative under the radar, so to speak, inside of the verdict, and how religion is the larger horizon of the shooting and subsequent trial, Dr. Butler has done us all a profound service.
  
  But as a theologian or a Christian intellectual, I want to up the ante on her provocative and important analysis and propose that the only moral, ethical, and religious response worth its salt to the Zimmerman verdict is to be atheist.
  
  Now before you shut me down, hear me out.
  
  On that fateful night a year and a half ago, George Zimmerman did not see Trayvon Martin, the human being. He did not see Trayvon Martin, a young, 17-year-old child on his way home from the convenience store with Skittles and a soft-drink and talking on his cell phone with his friend. Instead, all that Zimmerman could see was a hooded threat. And so, he deputized himself to be the police, and in that capacity shot Trayvon Martin dead.
  
  But more than just deputizing himself to act with police power (and this is the crucial point of Dr. Butler’s reflections), he deputized himself to stand in the place of god, to act in god’s name and with divine or sovereign power (remember Zimmerman’s words to Sean Hannity that shooting Trayvon Martin was “God’s will”), and finally, not just to act as god but to be a god, a god who could judge and act with the power of life and death—or more accurately, with the power of death and under the protection of law.
  
  But who is this god in whose name Zimmerman acted under the cover of law on that dusky Florida night? This is the question Dr. Butler rightly—and to the discomfort of many—is raising. Her answer: it’s the “American god,” who is nothing less than “a white racist god . . . carrying a gun and stalking young black men.”
  
  This edgy reference to a “white racist god,” drawn from Dr. William R. Jones’s book Is God a White Racist?, is what seems to have stuck in some people’s craw and found its way into much of the conservative media. What could such a phrase mean? As my colleague Professor Willie James Jennings outlines beautifully in a recent follow up piece, this book, written in 1973 in the wake of the social transformations of the 1960s, forces a question back upon the intellectuals of the black theology project—particularly back upon Dr. James Hal Cone and Dr. Deotis Roberts.
  
  Dr. Jones raised what in the history of philosophy and theology has come to be called the “theodicy” question: How do we hold onto God’s goodness in the face of ongoing suffering, suffering that God should be able to stop but doesn’t stop? What does it mean that God doesn’t stop suffering, though God is supposed to be good? There’s only one conclusion: in Dr. Butler’s words, “God ain’t good all the time.”
  
  Where is God for Trayvon Martin and his family? Where is the goodness and justice of God for Marissa Alexander, the African-American woman who is presently serving a 20-year prison sentence for shooting a warning shot to ward off her abusive husband from attacking her? She “stood her ground,” shoots and kills no one, but gets 20 years in prison (we’re still waiting to see if Florida’s governor will commute her sentence or if this will remain a travesty of justice); Zimmerman shoots and in fact kills Trayvon Martin and is acquitted.
  
  While neither of these cases was legally argued under the “Stand Your Ground” statute, they both were operating in a “Stand Your Ground” cultural context that cannot be uncoupled from race. Indeed, juror B37’s comments in her interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper reveals that “Stand Your Ground,” if not legally then certainly culturally, was operative in her deliberations to support her exoneration of Zimmerman. The cases of Marissa Alexander and George Zimmerman, both individually and together, force the question: Where is liberation in this and where is the good God?
  
  This is Dr. Butler’s question. But there’s also an implied question here that I’m trying to smoke out and that Dr. Jennings was trying to get at as well. Who is the god behind U.S. society; behind its system of laws, behind a criminal justice system that in effect tried Trayvon Martin from the grave for his own murder and found him guilty even as it found Zimmerman not guilty? Who is the god that stands religiously and symbolically behind the historic association of blackness—and especially black men—with criminality. Toni Morrison talked about this in a different context but her words echo powerfully here: “Blackness and criminality are merged in the minds of most white Americans.”
  
  In forcing these uncomfortable questions on us, Professor Butler is saying that we must reckon with the legal, social, historical, and finally the religious, entanglements of Christianity with whiteness. So entwined has the racial imagination, the imaginary of whiteness, become with Christianity in the religious underwriting of U.S. society that the question is no longer the question Why god? It is now, Which god? Which god is being talked about and enacted when the word “god” is invoked? Which god was Zimmerman invoking to Sean Hannity?
  
  Dr. Butler’s answer, with which I agree, is clear. The Zimmerman acquittal exposed the workings and the crushing weight of the “American god” (to be distinguished from God with a capital “G”) on black bodies.
  
  Whiteness is Not About Being White
  
  And now to up the ante. If Dr. Butler is right that the Zimmerman acquittal displays a particular kind of god, the “American god,” then the only response to the problem of (this) god is atheism.
  
  I’m not talking about the atheism of the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, or the late Christopher Hitchens. The atheism I’m talking about entails social, political, and intellectual struggle, not against some god-in-the-abstract, but rather against a specific or particular god: the “American god.” What I hear in Dr. Butler’s term the “American god”—and what, I think, we all must hear—is not a condemnation of America as such, but rather the courage to name its idolatries so that we can be a different, more just United States of America, “not a perfect, but a more perfect union,” as President Barack Obama said last week in his most poignant comments to-date on race in America.
  
  And just as we cannot talk about god-in-the-abstract, nor can we speak of idolatry-in-the-abstract. The white, western god-man is an idol that seeks to determine what is normal. It is a norm by which society governs the body politic or regulates, measures, evaluates, and indeed judges what is proper or improper, what is acceptable or suspicious citizenship. It is this idol, the idol of the “American god,” that is the symbolic figure Zimmerman identified himself with and in relationship to which he judged Trayvon Martin as, in effect, religiously wanting—wanting in proper citizenship, and ultimately wanting in humanity.
  
  That Zimmerman is Latino should not distract us, for in fact it reinforces the point inasmuch as whiteness (and therefore the notion of the white, western god-man at its heart) is not a biological notion; it is narrative or a story, which is what Professor Brian Bantum was getting at in his commentary on the Zimmerman verdict. Whiteness is that story that one must aspire toward if one is to be deemed a proper citizen, a proper American. Rather than being biological, then, whiteness is better understood as a kind of discipline, something one must be disciplined into and thus something one must achieve and continually accomplish within oneself.
  
  Understood in this way whiteness is a story of assimilation, a story that hails or calls out to us—especially to immigrant families. It awaits our answer to its call and through our answers (which can take the form of everyday practices like neighborhood watching, for example) we establish ourselves inside of or relate ourselves to the narrative of the proper citizen, to proper Americanness. Indeed, immigrant history in this country is the (very often violent) history of the achievement for some (and the failed achievement for others) of assimilation into the national narrative of the proper citizen.
  
  This is the broader matrix for understanding Zimmerman as Latino and his profiling or policing of Trayvon Martin. On that fateful night, between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin stood the ghost of whiteness, the narrative of proper or improper Americanness, or the specter of the “American god,” whose “will” Zimmerman saw himself as carrying out in protecting his neighborhood from the suspicious citizen or the out-of-place, hoodie-wearing “black boy,” to use that loaded phrase of the African-American writer Richard Wright.
  
  We must struggle against this “American god” or the idol of the white, western god-man. Indeed, we must struggle against this god with an eye toward a different social order and under the realization that things don’t have to be this way—and that they must change.
  
  What I’m in effect calling for is a Christianity uncoupled from this nation-state project, from the project of social purity or “proper” Americanness, with its (racially inflected) legal protocols and its vision of racialized criminality and institutions of incarceration. I’m calling for a Christianity that no longer provides religious sanction or the cloak of righteousness to the political project of U.S. sovereignty and its vision of who is normal (and in the right place) and who is abnormal (and thus out of place). I’m calling for a Christianity whose animating logic is no longer tied to that false “god-man.” The “god” of (or that is) whiteness is a god toward which we must be thoroughgoing atheists and religionless.
  
  If Christianity in this country and in our times is to have a future, it must be a Christianity beyond (the reigning) Christianity (and its god of anti-blackness). It must be a Christianity no longer centered in a normalizing whiteness. It must be a Christianity of a Not-Yet social order that is emerging right now in our midst (which is why there’s so much racial backlash in our so-called “postracial” moment).
  
  It will be a Christianity of that “terrible beauty” that Professor Imani Perry speaks of in her improvisation on James Baldwin. In short, what is needed is a Christian atheism, a Christianity-after-Christianity, a Christianity beyond itself, a Christianity that plays out on the ground as struggle, that in fact is struggle under what Edouard Glissant, when crossing the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary, called “the consent not to be a single being,” to be more than one.
  
  For it may be that struggle in solidarity with others, the struggle to be for and with others, the struggle of the multitude, the struggle that is blackness, is the new ecclesiology. This is the struggle to get rid of these “Stand Your Ground” laws that are in place in many states besides Florida, struggle against state legislatures (such as North Carolina’s) that are enacting draconian laws of various sorts, struggle in the name of the protection of women’s agency about their own bodies—in short, struggle to imagine a new politics of social belonging, or what Dietrich Bonhoeffer once called “life together.”
  
  Christian atheism: This is the only moral, ethical, and alas Christian response worth its salt to the Zimmerman verdict.

Conservatives Try To Deal With Gay Marriage

• Faced with a growing acceptance of gay and lesbian people in both society and the church, the religious right is rolling out its new sales pitch for heterosexuality: "Married heterosexuals have the best sex!"
  
  After failing to sell the younger generation on the intrinsic value of marriage as the best way to raise children, they've decided to back up a few steps and instead pitch the great baby-making sex that straight married couples apparently have.
  
  "Those who worship God weekly have the best sex," asserted Patrick F. Fagan, Senior Fellow and Director of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) at the Family Research Council.
  
  Interestingly, however, the Christian Post article fails to mention that the National Health and Social Life Survey, from which FRC pulled their data, says that it's actually devout Catholics who have the best sex—not Evangelical Christians. (As my good Southern Baptist momma will tell you straight up: "Catholics are not Christians.") But, let's not dwell on such unimportant details. Instead, let's look at perhaps why the typically sex-averse FRC is now using sex to sell the straight lifestyle.
  
  Could the urgency be linked to the new report by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, which Peter Montgomery wrote about earlier, which reveals that the white evangelical conservative base is shrinking with each successive generation?
  
  The report, dubbed the "Economic Values Survey," uses respondents' views on everything -- from God to the Bible to the role of government in the economy -- to create a new scale of religiosity that divides Americans into four groups: religious conservatives (28 percent), religious moderates (38 percent), religious progressives (19 percent) and the nonreligious (15 percent.)
  
  Moderate and progressive religious people make up a strong 57% of the population. Something you would never guess if you listened to the base of the Republican Party or the religious right talking heads like FRC leader Tony Perkins that the media insists on inviting to give the "Christian" perspective on the day's events - especially if they include gays and lesbians.
  
  Although, if you think about it, it's not really a shock that the popular idea of a "Christian" these days is someone like Perkins, since so many have dedicated themselves to being both vocal and visible while moderate to progressive Christians tend to view faith as a personal issue. Certainly more centrist and left-leaning religious organizations like Sojourners and People for the American Way are pushing for more moderate and liberal voices to be heard from the media stage, but Perkins and his ilk often make for far more controversial sound bites and viral videos being circulated through social media. Nuanced arguments from the left don't translate well in our ADHD-afflicted media, social or otherwise.
  
  What the more liberal Christians need to pay attention to here, and challenge through that media megaphone - if you can stop thinking about sex for just one minute—is the FRC's absolute and total hypocrisy on the issue of welfare.
  
  In this presentation, they point out that welfare recipients are the most productive workers, the "heavy lifters of the economy." FRC praises these families that have more mouths to feed, for their Protestant work ethic. Which begs the question about why FRC and other conservative organizations, like the Heritage Foundation, enthusiastically advocate for welfare reforms that would shrink the rolls of the working poor. You would think they'd want to increase social safety nets so these sacred "intact" families could continue to be "the core strength of the country."
  
  Perhaps they're hoping that the great sex will make up for the lack of food and shelter these heroes of family values will experience when conservative policymakers get their way.
  
  In the end, though, the FRC prefers to turn its sex-fevered brain from public policy to debauchery as they make the case for hot-sex-based heterosexual marriage: "Abortion, homosexuality, infidelity, pornography, euthanasia, infanticide, all of these things were just the common sexual practice of Pagan Rome, and Christians were noted for being very, very different – monogamous, faithful, struggling for chastity," said Fagan.
  
  The anti-gay brain seems to have a habit of feverishly imagining the hot, sweaty and ... oh, yeah ... terrible, awful and sinful sex that their gay and lesbian (and anyone else not straight, white and "naturally" married) counterparts must be having. Sadly, the facts of gay and lesbian life—as well as straight married life—may prove too much of a challenge for their sales pitch.
  
  As writer and Soulforce founder Mel White once told talk show host Larry King when asked what he and his husband did in bed, Mel replied, "We do what every couple whose been married for over 20 years does. We sleep."

Fundamentalists and Scholarship

• Over the weekend, Reza Aslan went on Fox News to discuss his new book Zealot (which I covered and discussed here before the fooferaw). Lauren Green spent the entire segment interrogating Aslan, a Christian-turned-Muslim, as to why a follower of Islam would dare write about Jesus, while never actually dealing with the specific arguments of the book.
  
  What strikes me about this tactic is how it exposes the weakness of fundamentalist Christianity when it comes to dealing with historical scholarship that may challenge some aspects of Christian orthodoxy. Christian fundamentalists often simply have no way to respond to the facts – because empirical inquiry is anathema to fundamentalists. They refuse to acknowledge the extraordinary insights into the origins of the Gospels that historical research has unearthed; they cannot tolerate any dissent from Biblical literalism (itself an inherent contradiction, since the Bible repeatedly contradicts itself if taken literally); they have to blind themselves to the science of our time in a way someone like Aquinas did not in his; they even have to insist on a literal interpretation of Genesis, for goodness’ sake.
  
  So what are they to do when someone pops up with some actual research and arguments and challenges to received dogma? The only thing they can do is attack the messenger. That’s how intellectually bankrupt Christianism is. It cannot relate its own dogmas to the truths about the world we have discovered outside of faith. Christianists do not seem to understand that if something is demonstrably true, it cannot be counter to God, who is the ultimate Truth. They are terrified of using their minds because their faith is so often mindless – and any engagement with contemporary scholarship on Christianity is a threat to their faith, rather than, as it should be, a spur to see it in a new light.
  
  What you see above, in other words, is an expression of fear and unreason. Which is roughly all that Christianism has in its rigid quiver.
  
  Of course, you cannot truly blame a Foxbot interviewer who hasn’t read the book for following the script laid out for her by Roger Ailes or one of his lower-level propagandists. Or maybe you can. David Graham has a great idea:
  
  I find myself wishing [Aslan had] flipped the argument around on Green: After all, isn’t any Christian too hopelessly biased to write a serious book on Jesus? Most folks would say no; it’s as spurious as the attack against Aslan. But for a network that defines itself against a liberal media it insists is too biased to offer a clearheaded, fair interpretation of current events, there’s a glaring double standard.
  
  Aslan might also have mentioned the many non-Muslims who have written books about Muhammad and Islam. Fox has happily given a platform to Christians and Jews who have been critical of the prophet and the religion, from the scholarly (Bernard Lewis) to the hysterical (Frank Gaffney) to the … also hysterical (Andrew McCarthy). In addition, although Aslan noted his conclusions conflicted with Islamic positions on Jesus — for example, he argues that the crucifixion, which Islam denies, actually happened — it might have been helpful to point out that Muslims revere Jesus as an important prophet, though refuting his divinity.
  
  Waldman views the interview as symptomatic of the way the media covers religion, Islam in particular:
  
  Green came pretty close to saying that as a Muslim, Aslan must by definition be hostile to Christianity in general and Jesus in particular and therefore incapable of writing a measured piece of history. This gets back to something I wrote about last week on the privilege associated with being the default racial setting, although here it’s the default religious setting. If you’re in the majority, it’s your privilege to be whatever you want and speak to whatever you want, and you can be treated as an authority on anything. But those in the minority are much more likely, when they come into this kind of realm, to be allowed only to speak to the experience and history of their particular demographic group.
  
  So Fox has no trouble treating Reza Aslan as an authority on Islam, but if he claims to also be an authority on Christianity, those Christians react with incredulity.
  
  They’re so hermetically sealed in their bubble, they cannot see their bigotry. Which is why, of course, they react so strongly whenever they are accused of such. And so the beat goes on.

Superman and Saints

• Viewing superheroes as Christ figures is less cringe-making than the Vatican’s canonisation-by-miracle of dead Popes The Vatican has spoken: Superman is not Jesus. American Christian propagandists and Warner Brothers have been putting out the idea of using the new movie Man of Steel as sermon-fodder. After all, Clark Kent/Superman is sent by his father in the sky, Jor-El, to live on Earth anonymously and humbly (he’s a downtrodden newspaper desk man. That figures). He is ordered to use his special powers to help mankind, must resist temptations, gets wrongly accused, suffers and revives from a three-day coma. Well, you see where they’re coming from. I have been enjoying the film’s Pastor Resource Site a lot: I only wish I was eligible for a “free pastor screening”, since a cinema full of American clergy might be less rowdy with the popcorn fights and snogging than the usual company in which one finds oneself dutifully absorbing these cultural landmarks.
  
  But L’Osservatore Romano, mouthpiece of the Vatican, doesn’t accept the Jesus idea. Superman, it objects, never turns the other cheek, but fights violence with violence and even allies himself with the US Army (in, to be fair, a fictional crisis rather than a hawkish Middle East intervention, but still unacceptable to the Curia). Moreover, in a separate article (“la Fede dei Supereroi”) the Osservatore points out that Superman is a Methodist. Presumably John Wesley took a detour to convert planet Krypton on that suspiciously long sea-voyage to Savannah.
  
  The paper also reveals, from scholarly examination of certain brightly coloured texts, that Batman is Episcopalian and the Incredible Hulk keeps rosary beads and is therefore Catholic. So is Catwoman, though they throw stern doubt on the feline superheroine’s degree of devoutness. Clothes too tight, presumably. Ben Grimm (the Thing of the Fantastic Four) is Jewish, it seems. Spiderman and Captain America are Protestants.
  
  But L’Osservatore is not happy with a violent American Methodist in blue tights being presented as a Christ figure (even though his Lois Lane is Catholic and virtuous). It seems shortsighted of the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, as it is surely a tribute to the power of the New Testament that from Beowulf to Batman fiction has always been full of Christ figures and redemption allegories. There are those who aver that Babette in Babette’s Feast is Jesus; ditto someone called Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Others find them in John Updike’s Couples and in Hemingway, in Lord of the Flies (Simon), in Spartacus and in Jean Valjean of Les Misérables.
  
  An earnest cadre even finds echoes in the film Scarface: they say that self-sacrificing Tony Montana’s assassin is called the Skull, thus symbolising Golgotha, and that there are the same number of letters between the initials J and C and between T and M.
  
  More overt allegories have always been created by Christian writers. We all know about Aslan in Narnia, although fewer have read C. S. Lewis’s other fiction, a gripping but progressively more preposterous science-fiction trilogy. Here, the cosmic overlord Maleldil gives each planet an “eldil” guardian identified with classical mythology: Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn and the rest are called down to Earth by a golden-bearded Christ-figure professor to defeat our own eldil, who unfortunately seems to be Satan. They enrol to their cause an undead Merlin disinterred from beneath a Midlands university.
  
  We also spot plenty of Christian allegories in Tolkien, and Harry Potter was shaping up nicely (as J. K. Rowling has admitted) as the latest ultimate sacrificial saviour of mankind until the author somewhat lost her bottle. She has him not only resurrected but prosaically married off to Ginny Weasley, doing the school-train run years later rather than ascending into heaven.
  
  But I digress. We began with the Vatican and the rather more troubling news that while Superman doesn’t cut the mustard, Pope John Paul II is to be canonised; made a saint less than ten years after his death at the same time as Pope John XXIII, who died 50 years ago.
  
  To a widespread Catholic cringe, this lifts once again the veil on the process of canonisation and the requirement for official “miracles” to be ascribed to the virtuous dead. The Church used to demand two, but Pope John XXIII, the Vatican II reformer, has been let off without “attested cures” merely because his body was found uncorrupted when exhumed, although a Professor Gennaro Goglia has reportedly claimed that he was asked to embalm him secretly hours after death.
  
  As for the Polish John Paul II, his “miracles” consist of curing a French nun of Parkinson’s disease and a Costa Rican mother of an aneurysm. The latter woke up to find a magazine with his picture on it by her bed and heard a voice saying: “Get up, do not be afraid.”
  
  I spoke just now of a Catholic cringe because, although I personally am an even less devout figure than Catwoman, long and grumpily alienated from Mother Church by its hierarchical corruptions and obsessive sexual narrowness, I was a cradle Catholic. I still have great affection for its better aspects and people, and know how painful it is for them to contemplate the gruesome superstitious primitivism of canonisation-by-miracle.
  
  It is a relic of a distant time, a device more akin to myth than to living faith or even theology. Before medicine grew up and began to reverse ancient ills, and long before we accepted the power of the hysterical brain over the body, these miracle stories were useful metaphors and inspirations. Outdated now, they no longer help any but the most dangerously credulous. Yet other myths and metaphors are alive and burn bright in the imaginations of all age groups and nations. They can inspire ideas of altruism and sacrifice and goodness, even as we happily accept that they are pure fictions. Churches would do better to accept and use these stories rather than courting dodgy affidavits from pious South American doctors or devout, but not necessarily well-balanced, former invalids to whom Popes are magazine-cover celebrities.
  
  No. Let John Paul II rest in peace and be judged by his God, and let’s have no more of these artfully spun “saints”. There is healthier inspiration to be found in Aslan and Gandalf, Superman and Spartacus. And, OK, if you insist, Harry Potter.

• Why looking backwards is not the way to meet today’s problems.
  
  “There was noticeable hostility to the view of the Churches,” the Archbishop of Canterbury told the General Synod on Friday. He was referring to the debate in the House of Lords on same-sex marriage. He added that there had been an “overwhelming change of cultural hinterland” in social attitudes.
  
  He’s right. Gay marriage will become established and there will come a time when few of its current opponents (including Archbishop Welby) will be exercised by the issue. The same was true of civil partnerships and of decriminalising homosexuality. It was also true of legislation in 1882 to enable married women to own property independently — a reform that the purported defenders of marriage likewise denounced as contrary to the natural order.
  
  Most voters see this. The Church predominantly can’t. Why does it so reliably lag social attitudes? Consider Archbishop Welby’s predecessors. William Temple was influential in debates over the postwar welfare state. But his predecessor, Cosmo Lang, supported the disastrous foreign policies of Neville Chamberlain. Michael Ramsey forcefully opposed racism. But his predecessor, Geoffrey Fisher, foolishly remarked — in Africa — that “all men are not equal in the sight of God though they are equal in the love of God”. Rowan Williams bizarrely declared that adoption of Sharia in some parts of Britain was unavoidable.
  
  The Church eventually acclimatises itself to intellectual discoveries, such as Darwinism, or the expansion of liberty, such as opening civic and military office to non-Anglicans in the 19th century. There are rare scholars who have drawn wisdom from theological reflection, such as the great Protestant ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr. But modern secular culture is wiser than the Church. Science and liberalism are critical, whereas religion aims to uncover the true meaning of sacred texts and revelations. Always looking backward, the Church is late in catching up.

Woo Woo Thinking

• In a flat expanse of southwest Las Vegas, six miles from the gaudiness and glitz of the Strip, sits the massive South Point Hotel, Casino & Spa. Enter its cavernous “gaming floor” and one is immediately pulled into a world of middle-aged waitresses in skimpy costumes, geriatric gamblers, and men in tanktops - arms invariably graffitied with tattoos—scanning The Racing Form.
  
  But during a four-day stretch in mid-July, these stereotypical Vegas denizens shared the hotel with a very different, very un-Vegas crowd. On the far end of the casino and up an escalator, in a windowless conference center, there was an annual convention taking place called The Amazing Meeting—a gathering known to attendees simply as TAM.
  
  TAM is organized by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), a group devoted to a philosophy called skepticism: the debunking of psychics, mediums, pseudoscientists, faith-healers, homeopaths, and anyone else who makes claims that defy the known laws of science. Skepticism has a wide following—the Internet is littered with self-proclaimed skeptic blogs, podcasts, and forums—and JREF is widely acknowledged to be the movement’s hub. Over 1,000 people attended this year’s conference, which featured an array of panelists and speakers, from magician Penn Jillette to comedian Father Guido Sarducci to Steven Novella, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. (And yes, it was ironic that this militantly rational group decided to hold its annual meeting in a casino.)
  
  The activists of TAM see themselves as waging a broad, multifront battle to drag American culture, inch by inch, away from the nonscientific and the nonlogical. This turns out to be a surprisingly uphill struggle. Probably the majority of Americans believe in some degree of what JREF’s founder, James Randi, calls “woo-woo.” (“Please use woo-woo,” he instructs me. “I’m trying to get it into extensive use.”) In 2005, for instance, Gallup found that 73 percent of Americans subscribed to at least one paranormal belief. Television personalities like John Edward earn huge audiences by purporting to commune with the dead. Numerous Americans swear by homeopathy, ingest supplements with no proven medical benefit, or believe, against all available evidence, that genetically modified organisms might transform humans into tumor-covered golems.
  
  Indeed, whether it’s feng shui consultants rearranging your apartment’s “energies” or alternative medicine advocates pushing dubious internal “cleanses,” woo-woo is very big business in the United States. “People like the flavor of bullshit, the aroma,” Randi says. “It’s very rare that people will stand for a complete lack of bullshit in anything.”
  
  During a 2010 address to TAM, Slate science writer Phil Plait conceded that he “sometimes wonders” if the goals of skepticism are “reasonable.” Not because the arguments themselves are deficient, but because most people aren’t predisposed to question extraordinary claims. “Our brains don’t work that way,” Plait argued, because they “aren’t wired for skeptical thinking. They’re wired for faith.” And therein lies the central challenge for the skeptic movement: if we’re genetically predisposed to magical thinking, if we desire a certain amount of bullshit in our everyday lives, can a group of people ardently opposed to superstition ever really win?
  
  RANDI, A.K.A. James “the Amazing” Randi, is the closest thing the movement—almost everyone I talked to called it “the movement”—has to a leader. Now an energetic 84 years old, his face swathed in a wild, white Charles Darwin beard and eyebrows crawling up his forehead like albino caterpillars, Randi was once one of America’s most recognizable illusionists and escape artists. But in the 1970s, his career took a more serious turn. Like Harry Houdini, who late in life focused his talents on debunking mediums and psychics, Randi turned his attention from performing magic to exposing magic masquerading as the supernatural. (In his bestselling book Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday, Penn Jillette writes, “James Randi is my hero. James Randi is the modern Houdini, except better.”)
  
  In the course of numerous appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Randi introduced Americans to skepticism without labeling it as such. It was on The Tonight Show that he famously assisted Carson, an amateur magician himself, in exposing the popular—and widely believed—spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller. He later replicated Geller’s supposed ability to mind-read for Barbara Walters, who had previously been convinced that his trickery was genuine psychic ability. Carson also gave Randi a platform to expose the television faith healer Peter Popoff, whose divine messages revealing private details of his congregants’ lives were in fact worldly messages from his wife, delivered via a wireless earpiece.
  
  Randi proved to be a relentless proselytizer and prosecutor, attacking a wide range of targets—from the homeopathy industry, which he mocked by consuming an entire bottle of homeopathic “sleeping pills” on stage, to Sniffex, a nonfunctioning bomb-detecting device used by the Iraqi military. When I called him a “debunker,” he replied that he prefers to think of himself as an “investigator” of supernatural claims. But when I asked him if he had ever investigated a psychic phenomenon without debunking it, he chuckled, and said, “That has not happened, no.”
  
  One gets the feeling that he doesn’t expect it to: JREF has long offered a million-dollar prize—officially known as the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge—to anyone who can demonstrate, under strict test conditions, psychic ability. The money still sits untouched in a New York City bank account.
  
  AS SOMEONE largely on board with Randi’s worldview, I nevertheless came to Las Vegas with some questions about the movement. For starters: what does it actually mean to be a skeptic?
  
  “The word is not defined well enough,” Richard Saunders, president of Australian Skeptics, told me. “And it’s used by everybody. The best definition I can give you about where we come from is, we are skeptical of any claim that contradicts the known laws of physics.” Jamy Ian Swiss—another key player in the movement who is, like Randi, a magician—says that skeptics are constantly debating the utility of the label. “I’ve never been involved in a local skeptic group that didn’t get around to saying, ‘Can’t we think of a better word that’s not so negative?’ I’ve never not heard that question.”
  
  JREF’s goal, according to its website, is to “expose paranormal and pseudoscientific frauds in the media, and hold media organizations accountable for promoting dangerous nonsense.” The Skeptics Society, publisher of Skeptic magazine, describes its mission as an effort “to engage leading experts in investigating the paranormal, fringe science, pseudoscience, and extraordinary claims of all kinds, promote critical thinking, and serve as an educational tool for those seeking a sound scientific viewpoint.”
  
  But aren’t these merely descriptions of plain old science? Saunders says there is an important distinction. “We especially go after these claims that are against the laws of physics, while generally science is the study of nature,” he explains. In other words, science tends to ignore ghosts, goblins, levitating yogis, and mind-reading mediums claiming an ability to commune with the dead. “We’re not doing science. We’re advocating for it,” Swiss explains. “We’re advocating for using science as a way to view the world and solve the problems of the world.”
  
  One of the challenges facing skepticism is that any number of different groups have appropriated the word. Holocaust deniers call themselves “Holocaust skeptics.” Those who claim that the MMR vaccine is behind an increase in autism among children are often labeled “vaccine skeptics” in the media.
  
  Such fringe views are clearly rejected by the skeptic movement. The issue of climate change, however, has proven a bit more complicated, and has caused something of an internal rift. Conservatives who doubt that global warming is taking place have labeled themselves “global-warming skeptics,” and their point of view—though very much at odds with the scientific consensus—has made some inroads among skeptics themselves. Randi, for instance, says that while he is “seeing the evidence more in favor of anthropogenically caused global warming,” he is “not totally convinced.” “I’m skeptical of it,” he adds, “and that is a healthy attitude.”
  
  This year’s TAM hosted an address by Michael Mann, a renowned climate scientist and adamant defender of the scientific consensus that global warming is real. His selection as a speaker angered some participants; TAM speaker Robert Sheaffer compared him with a “creationist.” After Mann’s talk, I asked him why people who are skeptical of man-made global warming shouldn’t be considered skeptics. “They reject accepted science based on the flimsiest of arguments that don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny,” he replied. “They are not being skeptical, because their arguments are silly.”
  
  BUT THE arguments over climate change are nothing compared with the biggest rift in the skeptic movement: the rift over God. The debate is not over the existence of God—almost all the skeptics I met at the conference were nonbelievers. Rather, the argument is over whether skepticism should be synonymous with atheism, or whether the two movements should stay separate.
  
  Jamy Ian Swiss, a close-up magician by trade, is one of the chief advocates for the latter view. Swiss lives in Southern California but is New York through and through. He’s voluble and opinionated, delivering withering judgments with the kind of lilting Brooklyn accent that one rarely hears in today’s Brooklyn. He’s a left-wing Jew who disdains religion (“The rabbi and the cantor were such assholes that they turned me into an atheist by the day of my bar mitzvah”) and is obsessed with science. He isn’t an academic, but his references to radical journalist I.F. Stone and knowledge of scientific history might persuade you that he should have been.
  
  Addressing a group of California atheists in 2010, Swiss delivered a barbed speech on the relationship between skepticism and atheism. “Read my lips: there is no fucking God,” he roared. “But that is my personal belief, it’s not my public cause. My cause is scientific skepticism.” After the speech, PZ Myers, a widely read—and notoriously prickly—academic and science blogger, denounced “asshole” Swiss’s “incredibly repellent talk” and announced that he would “no longer consider myself a ‘skeptic.’ ” The skeptic world, as it so frequently does, convulsed with charges, countercharges, ad hominem, and endless debates over whether God is a “testable scientific claim” or whether guys like Swiss were selling out atheism in an effort to expand the movement’s popularity.
  
  At the conference in Las Vegas, I spoke to Daniel Loxton, author of a children’s book on evolution and co-author of the recently released Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids. He said that internal debates over atheism were relatively new to the skeptic movement. “After 9/11, some people started thinking tolerance [of religion] is dangerous,” he explained. “And around 2005, with the emergence of podcasts and blogs, a bunch of entry-level skeptics came on the scene, attracted to the ethos of skepticism but their primary concern was atheism.”
  
  These strident atheists had beliefs similar to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and other writers who, in recent years, brought new energy to the atheist cause. The overlap between skepticism and the worldviews of these so-called new atheists was undeniable—and so it was no surprise that many of them gravitated toward JREF and TAM.
  
  Yet not all skeptics were comfortable with new atheism’s growing influence on the movement. Saunders of Australian Skeptics drew a distinction between traditional skepticism and atheism. “I’m what they label a Bigfoot skeptic,” he explains, “which is the old school. I’m interested in looking at proof of paranormal claims, weird creatures, medical healings, spoon bending, talking to the dead—that’s my game.”
  
  Richard Saunders drew a distinction between traditional skepticism and atheism: “I’m interested in looking at proof of paranormal claims, weird creatures, medical healings, spoon bending, talking to the dead—that’s my game.”
  
  At TAM, the old school seemed to be winning the internal fight. Most of the people I met argued that religious believers should be welcome in the movement, as long as they didn’t push ideas like creationism. “I know many religious skeptics, but we stay away from religion—except if someone has a bleeding idol statue,” says Dale Roy, a former science teacher from New Hampshire and founder, with her husband, Travis, of the Granite State Skeptics. Saunders takes a similar position: “In Australian Skeptics, we don’t care if you have a religious outlook.”
  
  Moreover, if not all skeptics must be atheists, it’s also true that not all atheists are skeptics. It was frequently pointed out to me at TAM that comedian Bill Maher, a strident atheist, is dubious about vaccines. Swiss recalls that when he objected to his children reciting the pledge of allegiance in school—with its religious stipulation that ours was a “nation under God”—his wife, also a nonbeliever, created an Atheist Parent Meetup. “One of the parents showed up to the meeting and the first thing she asked one of the other parents was, ‘What’s your sign?’”
  
  Still, no one would deny that skepticism and atheism are, at the very least, closely linked. “Can you be a skeptic and a believer in God? I find it almost impossible to believe,” Randi told me. “As a skeptic, I have to be an atheist as well.” One of Randi’s heroes, the mathematician and ur-skeptic Martin Gardner, identified as a deist. “He said to me, ‘I don’t have any evidence whatsoever for being a deist. I can’t beat you in an argument, but I do it because it makes me feel more comfortable.’ That’s the honest approach.”
  
  SPEND TOO much time amid this infighting and factionalism, and the skeptic movement can start to resemble a meeting of Occupy Wall Street, with its interminable debates over ideological deviation and philosophical purity. But I was reminded of the movement’s value once I was back in the real world—and started noticing just how much woo-woo intrudes upon our daily lives. One night while in Vegas, I met up with a group of friends—who were in town at another, unrelated conference—and I struck up a conversation with a woman who seemed reasonably intelligent and decently informed. Interrupting her soliloquy on the importance of eating natural foods, I mentioned that I was afflicted with type 1 diabetes. Her eyes widened, savoring the opportunity to help. She offered something that no endocrinologist previously had: a possible cure. “Switch to a raw-food diet,” she advised. Now my eyes widened. “You mean that raw food would help lower blood sugar?” I asked. “No, no,” she said with exasperation. “It can cure diabetes.” When I doubted that chewing on uncooked yams would kick-start my crippled pancreas, she accused me of lacking an “open mind.”
  
  Perhaps the best example of the skeptic movement’s tenacious real-world influence has been its battle with a California-based company called Power Balance—manufacturers of wristbands that, when worn, were supposed to improve strength, balance, and flexibility, “safely restoring and optimizing the electro-magnetic balance within the human body,” the company at one point claimed on its website. In 2010 alone, an estimated 2.5 million people wore them. Among those who sported the wristbands were Bill Clinton, David Beckham, Kate Middleton, Shaquille O’Neal, and countless professional athletes. Power Balance was making so much money that, in 2011, it purchased the naming rights to the Sacramento Kings’ arena.
  
  But Saunders smelled a rat. “I saw a report on a news program that said, ‘Look at these amazing wristbands,’ and they did the demonstration. So I wrote to the reporter and said, ‘Look, I know how the tricks work.’ ” The reporter arranged for Saunders and Tom O’Dowd, who owned the right to distribute Power Balance in Australia, to test the bands on national television. “He failed five out of five tests. And that started the avalanche that led to Power Balance’s downfall.” Australian regulators intervened, issuing a finding that forced Power Balance to admit that it was selling a product that didn’t work as it claimed. “In our advertising we stated that Power Balance wristbands improved your strength, balance and flexibility. We admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims,” the company conceded. Soon after, it filed for bankruptcy.
  
  Today, visitors to Power Balance’s website—which is now under new ownership—are met with vague and confusing claims. The bracelet’s hologram sticker, it says, is “designed based on Eastern philosophies” and “many Eastern philosophies contain ideas related to energy ... There are a number of well known practices like acupuncture, meditation and Feng Shu [sic], which are believed to affect these energies. The hologram is based on some of these same ideologies.”
  
  But what was the trick that customers found so convincing? Scroll through YouTube and you’ll find countless videos of people standing on one leg, arms outstretched, being toppled by tanned and toothy pitchmen applying a small bit of pressure above a test subject’s elbow. With the bracelet on, the demonstrator, up against the Power Balance ionic force field, pushes and grunts. The subject remains standing.
  
  At TAM, Liam Jones, a young Australian skeptic, showed me how to do this trick. (Simply put, it involves pushing on subjects’ arms in a slightly different way, depending on whether or not they are wearing the bracelet.) The following day, walking through Las Vegas’s Miracle Mile Mall, I met a fast-talking salesman who offered to sell me something called a T-Band, which looked to me like a Power Balance competitor. For $35, he claimed, this wristband could make me—a reedy writer—stronger, more balanced, and more alert.
  
  Like Power Balance’s website, the T-Band site makes a number of head-scratching claims. “From cell phone towers to mircowaves [sic], these items can emit harmful emissions that can have detrimental effects to our overall health.” “Relevantly, the energy factories within the cells called mitochondria can then produce at its optimum performance level.” And so on. According to his LinkedIn biography, the company’s owner has a “B.S. in Entrepreneurship,” which seemed appropriate. (He didn’t respond to an email request for comment.)
  
  After swatting away my question about the claims against Power Balance (this bit of gummy rubber was “different”), the T-Band salesman had me teetering on one leg, my arms parallel to the ground, and soon plummeting toward the floor. When it was time to test T-Band’s efficacy, my wife, having heard me explain the trick earlier in the day, helpfully intervened: “Let me push.” She toppled me with ease—while the salesman nervously offered to “help” apply pressure in the proper way. Why did the T-Band fail the test? “Sometimes the conditions aren’t right,” he explained. When I returned an hour later, a crowd of credulous—and possibly drunk—tourists was gathered around the T-Band cart, oohing and aahing at the power of this little magical piece of rubber and reaching for their wallets.
  
  VICTORIES LIKE the one over Power Balance give the skeptic movement confidence that impassioned argument can translate into quantifiable, real-world success. “For instance, we have the anti-vaccination people on the ropes in Australia,” says Saunders. “That’s because of our unrelenting pressure.” Indeed, when asked if things are getting better or worse for their enemies, most skeptics I met were cautiously optimistic, citing the rapid growth of their movement and the slight decline in belief in God.
  
  But as Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, observes, “Skeptics, atheists, and militant anti-religionists, in their attempts to undermine belief in a higher power, life after death, and divine providence, are butting up against ten thousand years of history and possibly one hundred thousand years of evolution.” Perhaps this explains why polls measuring the percentage of Americans who believe in ghosts, ESP, and other psychic phenomena show skeptics making at best partial progress. (Some of the numbers seem to be moving in skeptics’ direction, but some don’t: according to a Pew poll, for instance, the number of Americans who believe they have encountered a ghost doubled from 9 percent to 18 percent between 1990 and 2009.)
  
  Many believe that the movement’s insularity and self-confidence is damaging its ability to broaden its impact. In his 2010 speech at TAM, Slate’s Phil Plait offered his allies a harsh bit of advice: if you want to gain converts, he said, “don’t be a dick.” “The tone of what we are doing is decaying,” he admonished, and “vitriol and venom are on the rise.” It was certainly something I noticed in talking to TAM attendees—skeptical questions about skepticism were often met with dramatic eye rolls and you-can’t-be-serious stares. It’s easy to understand why this hubris might not be the best way to win converts.
  
  Randi is mixed in his assessment of whether his movement is winning. “It’s better in many ways,” he says. “We have many good people, well-educated people, on our side who never really bothered about it before. But I think the numbers are going the other way in the regular populace, because of the media.” Both Randi and Swiss accuse the media—specifically the talk-show industry—of spreading junk science. “Generally speaking, they don’t care very much if what they are reporting is absolutely true, nor do they care if it harms other people—either emotionally or financially,” Randi says.
  
  “We have many good people,” Randi says, “well-educated people, on our side that never really bothered about it before. But I think the numbers are going the other way in the regular populace, because of the media.”
  
  But it isn’t just TV, or even mainly TV, that has proved to be a key factor in the struggle between skepticism and its adversaries. The Internet has also had an enormous impact. On the one hand, it has strengthened the skepticism movement by allowing it to reach more and more people. Yet it has simultaneously strengthened the anti-vaccination crowd, the homeopathy industry, and any number of similar movements. By breaking elite monopolies on information, the Internet has allowed pseudoscience to access ever-larger audiences.
  
  Meanwhile, many of the people and ideas once discredited by skeptics keep coming back. A recent softball BBC documentary on the psychic Uri Geller shows him living in a stately English country house, a Brideshead built on bent spoons. He now tours as a motivational speaker and hosts various Geller-branded television programs. TV medium John Edward refuses to be tested by JREF, according to Randi, but still sells out major venues all over the country (a $160 ticket includes “question-and-answer sessions and messages from the other side”). Power Balance might have gone bankrupt, but it’s back in business with new owners and new celebrity pitchmen. Peter Popoff, the faith healer Randi long ago exposed on Johnny Carson’s show, is currently separating the sick from their savings by selling packets of “Miracle Spring Water.”
  
  But the intractability of woo-woo and religious belief hasn’t dented Randi’s spirit. His war against bullshit continues, even if it sometimes feels like a series of World War I–style battles—a little ground gained, a little ground lost, and it’s impossible to tell who is winning. When we talk of the future, he grins and lifts up his hand, displaying a new wedding ring. “Shhh,” he says, “I’m going to announce it at the conference.” Last month, at age 84, Randi traveled from Florida—where gay marriages aren’t legal—to Washington, D.C., in order to marry his partner, a pony-tailed Venezuelan national named Deyvi Pena. And it occurs to me that Randi’s marriage, long prevented by a legal adherence to religious dogma and superstition, is something of a victory for skepticism.

Tax Churches

• Amelia Thomson-Deveaux has a great piece about religious groups that are trying to remove restrictions on church-based electioneering. She suggests that rather than gutting the rules, there's a simple fix, "Religious leaders who want the liberty to endorse candidates can give up their churches’ tax deduction."
  
  I would go one further. Let's tax churches! All of them, in a non-discriminatory way that doesn't consider faith or creed or level of political engagement. There's simply no good reason to be giving large tax subsidies to the Church of Scientology or the Diocese of San Diego or Temple Rodef Shalom in Virginia or the John Wesley African Methodist Episcopal Zion church around the corner from me. Whichever faith you think is the one true faith, it's undeniable that the majority of this church-spending is going to support false doctrines. Under the circumstances, tax subsidies for religion are highly inefficient.
  
  What's more, even insofar as tax subsidies do target the true faith they're still a pretty bad idea. The basic problem with subsidized religion is that there's no reason to believe that religion-related expenditures enhance productivity. When a factory spends more money on plant and equipment then it can produce more goods per worker. But soul-saving doesn't really work this way. Upgrading a church's physical plant doesn't enhance the soul-saving capacity of its clergy. You just get a nicer building or a grander Christmas pageant. There's nothing wrong with that. When I was young I always enjoyed the Grace Church Christmas pageant. But this is just a kind of private entertainment (comparable to spending money on snacks for your book club—and indeed what are Bible study groups but the original book clubs?) that doesn't need an implicit subsidiy.
  
  Meanwhile, nobody thinks churches and other religious institutions should silence themselves on the important issues of the day. On the contrary, discussing moral action is at the heart of many religious enterprises. And much moral action plays itself out in the arena of politics. So trying to say that churches should get subsidy when they don't endorse candidates is de facto a kind of subsidy to religious doctrines whose views happen to lack strong partisan implications. So if your faith says "abortion should be illegal and spending on the poor should be increased and it's too bad neither candidate supports that" you're golden, but if your faith says "abortion should be legal and spending on the poor should be increased so good for Barack Obama" suddenly you're in trouble. That's perverse. Just make everyone pay taxes.
     

Conservative Christians and Trans-Genders

• One of the most frustrating, and often infuriating things about religious conservatives is their stubborn penchant for dividing the world into either/or categories. People are either straight or gay, white or black, male or female, religious or atheist. And of course if you're on the right side of the dichotomy, you're on the right side of God. Anyone else is at best inferior and at worst, a sinner damned to hell.
  
  We see this kind of thinking in a Washington Post On Faith post by Russell D. Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Moore tackles California's new law protecting the rights of transgender students, allowing them to freely use bathrooms or locker rooms they feel fits their gender identity.
  
  Moore emphasizes that Jesus tells us we are born "male and female" and the existence of transgender people "who feel alienated from their identities as men or as women" is simply the result of the "fallen" nature of our world—since we, as humans, are alienated from God because of our sinfulness that we inherited from Adam.
  
  Really, it's enough to make you scream. Instead of, oh, I don't know, turning to science to explain why one person's brain feels differently about gender than another person's brain, evangelical Christians keep referencing an unscientific book that knows absolutely nothing about gender variance and modern discoveries about biology and the brain.
  
  Honestly, it's not an affront to God to look for sources written later than 3,000 years ago by a bunch of guys who were mostly concerned with proving and spreading their own religious view of the world. God does, indeed, intend for us to use our brains, and when modern science can clearly show that transgenderism has biological origins (and isn't caused by a "fall" or "sin"), it must gall God for us to keep referring to ancient texts to deny the findings.
  
  But, male and female (and the supremacy of the male part) is the dichotomy that underpins the entire conservative Christian worldview. What most on the religious right don't understand, and frankly are most offended by, are male-to-female transgender people. I mean, who would want to give up the right (and privileged) side of the dichotomy to enter into the left (and clearly inferior) side? To want that must indeed be "sinful" since you're going further away from God than closer. (This, by the way, is why the religious right is most offended by gay men whom they see as playing a "female" role, while lesbians are of little concern.)
  
  The fact is, we are not all born into that male/female dichotomy. Science is continuing to discover that differences in the brain can account for why someone feels like they are "trapped in the body of the wrong sex." Spanish researchers have found differences in the white matter of the brain between transgender people and those who are not. Patricia Churchland, in her new book Touching a Nerve, takes the reader on a short tour of neurological differences that can occur during fetal development. She points to differences found, at autopsy, in the subcortical area of the thalamus called the "bed nucleus of the stria terminalis," or BNST, which is usually twice as large in males as in females. For female-to-male transgender people who have been studied, "the BNST looks like that of a typical male," she writes.
  
  But, the religious right could never be accused of letting scientific facts get in the way of that "you're a sinner going to hell" story.
  
  "The transgender question means that conservative Christian congregations such as mine must teach what's been handed down to us, that our maleness and femaleness points us to an even deeper reality, to the unity and complementarity of Christ and the church," Moore writes.
  
  Which gets it completely wrong. The conservative church has been teaching "what's been handed down to us" for far too long. They taught "what was handed down to us" about people of color, about women, about gays and lesbians, heck, even about left-handed people being "of the devil."
  
  Here's an idea for my conservative brothers and sisters: Instead of teaching "what's been handed down" to you—namely the condemnation of people of which you disapprove (like people of color, women, gays and transgender people)—how about:
  
  "Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater ..."
     

Evangelicals and End Times

• I'm starting to think evangelicals should be barred from holding public office. If your religious cult thinks an apocalyptic war is a great way to honor your gods, then you shouldn't be making foreign policy decisions for the rest of us who don't follow your bloody handed deity of choice.
  
  This is just what this debacle needs....Evangelical nonsense based on Revelations and a deathwish for global war in the mistaken belief that this is what God wants.
  
  ******
  
  Why do people believe nonsense like this? I'm seriously asking...it just doesn't make sense to me.
  
  It feels good to believe it. (if you can).
  
  * The end is coming and this life doesn't matter. (aka, so what if you are a fark up. This life doesn't count and you get a do-over)
  
  * We True Believers (TM) are special so are you as long as you are with us! We have a magic sky wizard and for us the end times is a BLESSING!
  
  * You don't have to work your ass off or try to make the world better, just pray really hard and don't bother your pretty little head about reality.
  
  It's a pretty sweet belief if you can swallow it. Lack of responsibility, no burden to succeed or think critically. Just "believe" and carry on and everything will be awesome for you.
     

Noah's Ark Was Unpossible

• Today we're going to have a bit of fun and shine the light of science on an ancient story. It is said that a gigantic wooden ship once carried a family and two of every kind of animal to safety, when the entire world was flooded. Noah's Ark sailed for five months, then rested aground, sheltering its multitudinous crew for more than a year.
  
  The elephant in the room here is that it's virtually impossible to do an episode on this subject without having it sound like an attack on Christianity. I argue that it's not at all; the majority of Christians, when you combine the numerous denominations, don't insist that the Noah story is a literal true account. And, as has been pointed out many times, the Bible is hardly the only place where various versions of the Noah story are found. The most famous parallel, of course, is the Epic of Gilgamesh, wherein one of the many Babylonian gods charged the man Utnapishtim to build an ark, in a story that parallels Noah's in all the major details and most of the minor ones. It is perfectly plausible that all such stories stem from an actual event, the details of which are lost to history, but that might well account for the stories we have today of a boat and a flood. But regardless, in this episode I'm not going to address any issues of faith, but only of science. We want to look at the engineering plausibility of Noah's great ship.
  
  Noah's Ark was a great rectangular box of gopherwood, or perhaps some combination of other woods colloquially referred to as gopherwood. Its dimensions are given as 137 meters long, 23 meters wide, and 14 meters high. This is very, very big; it would have been the longest wooden ship ever built. These dimensions rank it as one of history's greatest engineering achievements; but they also mark the start of our sea trials, our test of whether or not it's possible for this ship to have ever sailed, or indeed, been built at all.
  
  Would it have been possible to find enough material to build Noah's Ark? When another early supership was built, the Great Michael (completed in Scotland in 1511) it was said to have consumed "all the woods of Fife". Fife was a county in Scotland famous for its shipbuilding. The Great Michael's timber had to be purchased and imported not only from other parts of Scotland, but also from France, the Baltic Sea, and from a large number of cargo ships from Norway. Yet at 73 meters, she was only about half the length of Noah's Ark. Clearly a ship twice the length of the Great Michael, and larger in all other dimensions, would have required many times as much timber. It's never been clearly stated exactly where Noah's Ark is said to have been built, but it would have been somewhere in Mesopotamia, probably along either the Tigris or Euphrates rivers. This area is now Iraq, which has never been known for its abundance of shipbuilding timber.
  
  In 2003, a doctoral candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Jose Solis, created a proposal to build the Ark for Noah based on sound naval architecture. He proposed a dead weight — the weight of the wooden structure alone minus cargo and ballast — as 3,676 tons. Fully loaded, it would have displaced 13,000 tons, as compared to the Great Michael's 1,000 that consumed "all the wood of Fife". Where would all that wood have come from? In his proposal, Solis simply skipped this detail, and assumed the wood was commercially available at a cost of $16,472,040 in 2003 dollars. Tens of thousands of massive timber-quality trees would have to have been imported into the middle of what's now Iraq. Did Noah have the resources to import from France, Norway, or anywhere else?
  
  But if the Ark did get built, it would be necessary to overcome its extraordinary fragility. Recall that when the Titanic sank, that massive steel structure tore completely in half simply because one end was heavier than the other. Just that difference in weight was sufficient to tear open many decks of reinforced steel that had been engineered to the day's toughest standards. Were Titanic a wooden box instead of rigid steel, you (as a giant) could destroy it just by swishing your finger in the water next to it.
  
  Allow me to explain. What's known as the square-cube law is pretty familiar: increase an object's dimensions, and its surface area increases by the square of the multiplier, and its weight increases by the cube of the multiplier. But one extension of this law is less familiar. When we scale up an object — take a wooden structural beam as an example — the strength of the beam does not increase as fast as its weight. Applied mechanics and material sciences give us all the tools we need to compute this. In summary, the tensile strength of a beam is a function of its moment and its section modulus. No need to go into the complicated details here — you can look up beam theory on Wikipedia if you want to learn the equations. Scale up a simple wooden beam large enough, the weight will exceed its strength, and it will break from its own weight alone. Scaled up to the immense size of Noah's Ark, a stout wooden box would be unspeakably fragile.
  
  If there was even the gentlest of currents, sufficient pressure would be put on the hull to open its seams. Currents are not a complete, perfectly even flow. They consist of eddies and slow-moving turbulence. This puts uneven pressure on the hull, and Noah's Ark would bend with those eddies like a snake. Even if the water itself was perfectly still, wind would expose the flat-sided Ark's tremendous windage, exerting a shearing force that might well crumple it.
  
  Whether a wooden ship the size of Noah's Ark could be made seaworthy is in grave doubt. At 137 meters (450 feet), Noah's Ark would be the largest wooden vessel ever confirmed to have been built. In recorded history, some dozen or so wooden ships have been constructed over 90 meters; few have been successful. Even so, these wooden ships had a great advantage over Noah's Ark: their curved hull shapes. Stress loads are distributed much more efficiently over three dimensionally curved surfaces than they are over flat surfaces. But even with this advantage, real-world large wooden ships have had severe problems. The sailing ships the 100 meter Wyoming (sunk in 1924) and 99 meter Santiago (sunk in 1918) were so large that they flexed in the water, opening up seams in the hull and leaking. The 102 meter British warships HMS Orlando and HMS Mersey had such bad structural problems that they were scrapped in 1871 and 1875 after only a few years in service. Most of the largest wooden ships were, like Noah's Ark, unpowered barges. Yet even those built in modern times, such as the 103 meter Pretoria in 1901, required substantial amounts of steel reinforcement; and even then needed steam-powered pumps to fight the constant flex-induced leaking.
  
  Even in the world of legend, only two other ships are said to have approached the size claimed for Noah's Ark. One was the Greek trireme Tessarakonteres at 127 meters, the length and existence of which is known only by the accounts of Plutarch and Athenaeus. Plutarch said of her:
  
  But this ship was merely for show; and since she differed little from a stationary edifice on land, being meant for exhibition and not for use, she was moved only with difficulty and danger.
  
  The other example is the largest of the Chinese treasure ships built by the admiral Zheng He in the 15th century, matching Noah's 137 meters, but only in the highest estimates. Many believe the biggest ships Zheng took with him on his seven voyages were no bigger than half that size, and moreover, that they remained behind in rivers and were not suitably seaworthy for ocean travels.
  
  The long and the short of it is that there's no precedent for a wooden ship the size of Noah's Ark being seaworthy, and plenty of naval engineering experience telling us that it wouldn't be expected to work. Even if pumps had been installed and all hands worked round the clock pumping, the Ark certainly would have leaked catastrophically, filled with water, and capsized.
  
  There's another elephant in the room, too, that is necessary to address. Many of the problems with the Noah story are often answered, by those who regard it as a literal true account, with a special pleading. A special pleading is when any question is answered with "It was done by a higher power that you and I are not qualified to understand or question." Obviously, every point that science might raise regarding the Noah story can be fully answered with a special pleading. Superman, Underdog, and The Jetsons can shown to be literal true accounts if we allow special pleadings to be admissable. If the special pleading of divine intervention did indeed come into play during the Great Flood, then it was the most flagrant Rube Goldberg solution I've ever heard of. If divine intervention was needed to give Noah knowledge of how to build the Ark, or to provide the wood for its construction; then why not just provide an already-completed ark? Why bring the animals on board to be fed for a year or more, when divine intervention could have provided them an island? For that matter, why have the entire flood at all, when divine intervention could have simply struck down the evil humans with a plague? Why construct this most elaborate of all disaster and survival scenarios, some part of which was dependent on divine intervention; when divine intervention could have easily made the entire ordeal unnecessary? Special pleadings dismiss the true sciences that have allowed us to build real ships and conquer the world. Looking at the reality of what's possible and how things are done is always more interesting than imagining what's possible when anything is possible.
     

When did the church accept that the Earth moves around the sun?

• We know that the Catholic church has a troubled history with the idea of heliocentrism, but when did this history become history? What year would Galileo have gotten away with publishing his book?
  
  In 1632, Galileo and the Catholic Church had a little spat. You may have heard about it. It was partly because he had evidence that contradicted the prevailing geocentric worldview, and partly because, while presenting that evidence, he called the pope a dummy. While it's doubtful that any pope would have warmed to the second offense, few people know when the church changed its opinion on the first offense.
  
  The answer is, 'when it had to,' which turned out to be in 1822. For the centuries beforehand, heliocentrism became a battle ground for different religions and religious factions. As Protestantism and Catholicism battled it out for religious supremacy, whichever religion gave ground on the geocentric model of the universe was accused by the other of turning away from the scriptures. As a result, both stood firm on an immobile Earth.
  
  In schools, things made a bit more progress. For much of the 1700s, people insisted that both models should be taught to students. (Sound familiar?) Once both models were being taught, with both professional and amateur astronomers proliferating, the geocentric model continuously lost ground. It simply didn't support the growing body of data that scientists were accumulating. As astronomers stopped believing in geocentrism, schools stopped teaching it, and it was good and dead, academically, by the 1800s.
  
  So when the Catholic church convened a college of cardinals and let people know that the books about the heliocentric model of the universe would now be "permitted," there was some public amusement. Amazingly, there were still strict Protestant sects that forbade the teaching of the heliocentric model. The dates on which they relented (if they ever did) are unrecorded.
     

Beliefs Always Trump Facts

Yale law school professor Dan Kahan's new research paper is called "Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government," but for me a better title is the headline on science writer Chris Mooney's piece about it in Grist: "Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math."

Kahan conducted some ingenious experiments about the impact of political passion on people's ability to think clearly. His conclusion, in Mooney's words: partisanship "can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills.... [People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs."

In other words, say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions. It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn't the real problem. The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are. We want to believe we're rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.

For years my go-to source for downer studies of how our hard-wiring makes democracy hopeless has been Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.

Nyan and his collaborators have been running experiments trying to answer this terrifying question about American voters: Do facts matter?

The answer, basically, is no. When people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.

Here's some of what Nyhan found:

People who thought WMDs were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting it.

People who thought George W. Bush banned all stem cell research kept thinking he did that even after they were shown an article saying that only some federally funded stem cell work was stopped.

People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Obama's economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year - a rising line, adding about a million jobs. They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down or stayed about the same. Many, looking straight at the graph, said down.

But if, before they were shown the graph, they were asked to write a few sentences about an experience that made them feel good about themselves, a significant number of them changed their minds about the economy. If you spend a few minutes affirming your self-worth, you're more likely to say that the number of jobs increased. In Kahan's experiment, some people were asked to interpret a table of numbers about whether a skin cream reduced rashes, and some people were asked to interpret a different table -- containing the same numbers -- about whether a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns reduced crime.

Kahan found that when the numbers in the table conflicted with people's positions on gun control, they couldn't do the math right, though they could when the subject was skin cream. The bleakest finding was that the more advanced that people's math skills were, the more likely it was that their political views, whether liberal or conservative, made them less able to solve the math problem.

I hate what this implies -- not only about gun control, but also about other contentious issues, like climate change. I'm not completely ready to give up on the idea that disputes over facts can be resolved by evidence, but you have to admit that things aren't looking so good for reason. I keep hoping that one more photo of an iceberg the size of Manhattan calving off of Greenland, one more stretch of record-breaking heat and drought and fires, one more graph of how atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen in the past century, will do the trick. But what these studies of how our minds work suggest is that the political judgments we've already made are impervious to facts that contradict us.

Maybe climate change denial isn't the right term; it implies a psychological disorder. Denial is business-as-usual for our brains. More and better facts don't turn low-information voters into well-equipped citizens. It just makes them more committed to their misperceptions. In the entire history of the universe, no Fox News viewers ever changed their minds because some new data upended their thinking. When there's a conflict between partisan beliefs and plain evidence, it's the beliefs that win. The power of emotion over reason isn't a bug in our human operating systems, it's a feature.

The Problem With Religious Rules

• Two Orthodox Rabbis and eight of their affiliates were arrested last week in New Jersey and New York. Their crime? They intended to kidnap an Orthodox man who refused to grant his wife a divorce, torture him, and obtain a get – basically, a statement from the man that approves the divorce. For this they were reportedly paid at least $60,000 (though in fairness $10K was used to pass a rabbinical decree permitting violence against the husband).
  
  And Rabbi Epstein's prolific career (he had at least two dozen victims, probably more) raises a profound question about religion. Namely: why is it easier to subvert and disrespect religious rules than simply change them? Why is it easier to kidnap and torture husbands into granting a divorce than to simply institute egalitarian divorce?
  
  Perhaps it’s because changing divorce laws could theoretically challenge other patriarchal Orthodox theological principles. Additionally, change always threatens the very premise of many conservative religious groups: that they are manifestations of original, true religion, distinct from the turbulent, sinful modern world. Adopting the divorce laws of the outside world could potentially undermine the very legitimacy of the community. Because of this, it’s often easier to find work-arounds to rules and traditions than to change them - even if the work-around is violent or bizarre.
  
  In this environment, updating divorce laws is practically necessary but politically and ideologically impossible. Pressuring men into granting divorces becomes an option that does not challenge the legitimacy of Orthodox Judaism while allowing women in exceptional circumstances (and, critically, with financial resources) to get a divorce.
  
  Which is why the explanation that Epstein simply did this “for the money”, as the prosecutor said, misses the point. Epstein did something crucial: he made a religious rule that wasn’t working function. Sure, he profited personally out of it. Sure, his method was repugnant. But he also helped those suffering under the Orthodox Jewish divorce system. He made the system work. That, you might argue, is itself a religious duty.
  
  Of course, Orthodox Judaism isn’t the only religion with “work-arounds”; all communities, religious and non-, have rules that no longer function but, for whatever reason, haven't been changed. These rules thus require complex solutions to simultaneously maintain and subvert the rule.
     

Richard Dawkins

• An Appetite For Wonder: The Making of a Scientist Richard Dawkins interview
  
  
     

Matthew Parris on Richard Dawkins

• Some religions in some ages, including Islam, divide people and hinder free expression between them.
  
  Richard Dawkins’s autobiography has attracted venemous reaction. I have to interview him next month and so have been reading An Appetite for Wonder carefully and listening to the famous atheist’s detractors too. The same criticisms keep cropping up: “conceited”, “aggressive”, “intolerant”, “rude”.
  
  Is it fair for an unbeliever to attack the faiths of others when he has nothing to recommend in their place? It is this, and not Dawkins’s supposed vanity nor even his beliefs, or lack of them, that really riles his critics. I know so after decades of hearing readers’ reactions to my own writing. What infuriates believers is the impression that an unbeliever is actually preaching unbelief. People hate this in Dawkins.
  
  Their objection has apparent force. “Atheism” implies only an absence, they say. Why crusade for a blank? Atheism should be a shrug of the shoulders, not a raised fist. Why go on about it? This is the first and central charge against Dawkins. Rasher critics make a second charge, and one I’m also used to hearing: that atheism is a logical impossibility because you cannot know that something does not exist: you can only doubt. You might be missing something that believers can see. To this view, the only appropriate alternative to belief is doubt.
  
  I can answer that briskly. It’s true we cannot wholly “know” anything; apparently solid objects may be mirages; seemingly empty spaces may contain things invisible; but we cannot so much as throw off our duvets without proceeding on a series of working assumptions. The Pope’s is that God exists. Dawkins’s is that He doesn’t. Both are within their rights. So Dawkins is entitled to his atheism. But is he right to preach it? And is his animus against Christianity appropriate? I answer “possibly not” to the second and “yes” to the first.
  
  The objection that faith alone is entitled to crusade ignores an important truth about human nature. Ideas need sponsors. Atheism is not just the absence of an idea; it is itself an idea, a belief, as much a belief as our modern belief that mad people are not possessed by demons. We are all ademonists even though we remain largely ignorant as to what does cause madness. In some communities ademonists have to struggle against a prevailing demonism with no alternative science of their own to offer. May they not crusade against the casting out of demons?
  
  A God would be the most important thing in the world. His absence would be of equally huge significance: an absence that atheists would have a duty to proclaim. Faith makes enormous claims and does its best to order the world accordingly; it follows that disbelief has profound consequences too.
  
  The atheist must rethink the world and the structure of his ideas; he must find new footholds for moral knowledge. The day when he concludes that he can see no God is not, for him, an admission of blindness but an opening of his eyes in new directions.
  
  Throughout the history of ideas, Denial has often required Assertion. When it occurred to women that the theory of male superiority was empty, when it occurred to slaves that there was no case for their subjection, when it occurred to doctors that the bodily humours did not exist . . . these conversions represented more than the death of old ideas; and ended in the birth of new ones.
  
  However, old ideas are sticky, and humans cling. Belief systems do not form and flow, rise and fall on their inherent properties alone and according to the laws of logic, like blobs in a lava-lamp with the frictionless automaticity of a GCSE physics demonstration of convection. Wrong ideas that should sink can rise, propelled by the sword; right ideas that should rise can fall, victims of their sponsors’ complacency. Believers are right to evangelise; and non-believers to evangelise our unbelief.
  
  How stridently? Whenever as a columnist I overdo the impertinence, I feel ashamed later if nice people have felt wounded. I doubt Dawkins cares too much. I myself would not have approved of the militant suffragettes’ stunts; as a Tory proponent of homosexual equality I found Peter Tatchell’s antics embarrassing; my two sisters’ campaign against bullfighting seems obsessive to me. But truths need sword-bearers as well as diplomats and I’m steadily coming to respect firebrands more.
  
  So why would I now argue that atheists should go easy on the Church? Because Christianity is mankind’s most serviceable road to atheism — a road that Dawkins’s memoir reveals he himself once trod.
  
  I’ve been spending time recently in offshore Malaysia, a nation where Islam has been steadily gaining ground. Driving in Sabah on Borneo, I note the advance of the veil — not the full veil, but the complete covering of a woman’s head apart from her face. I cannot pretend this does not sadden me. We round a bend in the road and reach a community with churches, where pork and beer are advertised by the roadside, and something in my spirits rises, though I crave neither pork, alcohol nor prayer. A veil has lifted.
  
  With some religions in some ages — and I think that Islam today is one — the veil is truly symbolic because a kind of curtain comes down between you and another individual, as individuals. The other human being is in thrall to something, blocking frank communication. I don’t like the screening off of a human’s individuality, blurring her or him to you, veiling their spirit. I don’t like the veil and I don’t like the religion that makes it. I have the same reaction to Jewish Hassidim in their excluding black garb in North London. I feel these people have been captured by something, and I want to tell their children that it isn’t compulsory and that they can choose. I hate to see free spirits in thrall.
  
  So to my question. Free spirits or thraldom: which side is Christianity on? Here I think Dawkins may miss something. Very, very broadly, with a thousand exceptions, after making every kind of qualification, taking a global view, and allowing for some ghastly counter-examples, I think Christianity is on the side of the free spirit. In teaching a direct and unmediated link between the individual and God, it can liberate, releasing people from fear (as I’ve seen missionaries do), freeing people from the weight of their own culture, empowering them to stand up for themselves, to love and to respect themselves. Christianity can smash the metaphysics that entrap cultures.
  
  It does this (I would concede to Dawkins) by substituting its own metaphysics in the form of a single, all-powerful, personal, loving God. Dawkins and I believe that God to be a fiction, but like a gateway you pass through, like the learner-wheels that first enabled us to balance alone on a bicycle, the Christian God can equip the individual with a kind of cosmic confidence. Later the wheels can be removed and the deity withdrawn.
  
  As he reveals in his autobiography, Dawkins went through an adolescent stage of religious enthusiasm. He should ask himself whether this acted to dull his appetite for the truth. I submit that the very hymns he loved to sing may have sharpened his appetite for meaning, even though, in time, he shed the truths they offered him. Right at its heart, Christianity gives the individual the opportunity to reject God. To be taught that we are the masters of our own souls is of the most colossal importance.
     

Britain: Religion and the Law

• Christianity no longer holds sway in the legal system, one of the country’s most senior judges said yesterday, declaring that courts must serve a multicultural community of many faiths.
  
  Sir James Munby, the President of the Family Division, said that judges should not “weigh one religion against another”, or pass judgment on their tenets and beliefs. He added: “Happily for us, the days are past when the business of judges was the enforcement of morals or religious beliefs.”
  
  Sir James, addressing family lawyers, was outlining the “enormous changes in the social and religious life of our country”. Victorian judges were expected to promote virtue and discourage vice with “a very narrow view of sexual morality”, he said. The Christian Church also had a dominant influence.
  
  Today judges had rightly abandoned their claims to be “guardians of public morality”, just as Christian clerics had “by and large moderated their claims to speak as the defining voices of morality and of the law of marriage and the family”. Sir James said: “We live in this country in a democratic and pluralistic society, in a secular state, not a theocracy. Although this country is part of the Christian West, and although it has an Established Church, which is Christian, we sit as secular judges serving a multicultural community of many faiths, sworn to do justice to all manner of people.” Courts these days recognised no religious distinctions and, generally, passed no judgment on religious beliefs or on the tenets, doctrines or rules of any particular section of society.
  
  “All are entitled to respect, so long as they are ‘legally and socially acceptable’ and not ‘immoral or socially obnoxious’ or ‘pernicious’.”
  
  Sir James’s comments are the latest by a senior member of the Establishment to underline that multiculturalism has ousted Britain’s once-prevailing ethos of a Christian-dominated society.
  
  Dr Rowan Williams, who until last year was the Archbishop of Canterbury, provoked a political and religious row when, in 2008, he tried to argue that the adoption of aspects of Sharia was “inevitable”.
  
  The 2011 Census showed that 33.2 million people, or 59.3 per cent, in England and Wales said that they were Christian, down from 71.1 per cent in 2001. The next largest faith group were Muslims, at 2.7 million, or 4.8 per cent, but there was a rise from 14.8 per cent to 25 per cent of those with “no religion”.
  
  Sir James, speaking at a conference organised by the Law Society, said that family law, within limits, would also tolerate things that “society as a whole may find undesirable”. Where the line should be drawn could be a matter of controversy, he said. “There is no ‘bright-line’ test that the law can set.”
  
  He identified as “beyond the pale”, forced marriage (to be distinguished from arranged marriage); female genital mutilation and “so-called, if grotesquely misnamed, ‘honour-based’ domestic violence”.
  
  Some aspects of even mainstream religious belief might also fall foul of public policy, he said, such as a Court of Appeal ruling that a “marriage” valid under Sharia was not entitled to recognition in English law.
  
  The courts would give effect to manifestations of religious belief only if in accordance with a child’s best interests, Sir James added. “In matters of religion, as in all other aspects of a child’s upbringing, the interests of the child are the paramount consideration.”
  
  He said that religious belief, however conscientious and ancient and respectable the religion, could never “immunise the believer from the reach of the secular law”.
  
  Recent years had seen “enormous changes in the social and religious life or our country”, Sir James said. “We live in a largely secular society which, insofar as it remains religious at all, is now increasingly diverse in religious affiliation.”
  
  Whatever the particular believer’s faith was not the “business of government or of the secular courts”, he said, “although, of course, the courts will pay every respect to the individual’s or family’s religious principles”.
     

What They Do, Not What They Believe

• The conservative National Catholic Register worries not just about the contraception mandate, but also about cases such as that of the Christian baker or caterer who must equally serve gay and straight couples—not because legalized same sex marriage requires it, but because state anti-discrimination laws do. One person's discrimination is another person's religious freedom, apparently. From the Register:
  
  Those with vision understand that all this has been orchestrated for the purpose of driving religion from the public square entirely. This has always been the goal. Gay marriage? Who cares really? At most, gays represent 2% of the population and those who actually wish to be married are only a small subset of that already small subset. So why has this gay marriage push been the main focus of secularists and progressives for the last 20 years? Simply to push religion out of public policy entirely.
  
  The panic embedded in that account of the gay rights movement is driving Republican lawmakers to try to make laws prohibiting actions that haven't happened, and won't. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), introduced legislation this week, the Marriage and Religious Freedom Act, which would prevent the Internal Revenue Service from revoking the tax-exempt status of churches who oppose same-sex marriage. (A similar bill was already introduced in the House.)
  
  "We need not just statements, but we need legislation to protect religious liberty from this kind of potential threat," Lee told the Examiner. "What I would like to do is make sure that we go out of our way to protect churches from adverse action that could be taken against them as a result of their doctrinal views of the definition of marriage," he added, in response to a non-existent threat that the Obama administration will retaliate against opponents of marriage equality.
  
  "This basic freedom is under attack by the current administration. This bill will protect groups from administrative attacks, such as additional hurdles with taxes or obtaining federal grants or contracts," said Sen. David Vitter (R-LA).
  
  The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says the bill would "bar the federal government from discriminating against individuals and organizations based upon their religiously-motivated belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman or that sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage. The Act provides broad protections against adverse federal actions directed toward individuals and organizations that act on such beliefs."
  
  This panic builds on the one from last spring, in which evangelical groups charged the IRS was subjecting them to "viewpoint discrimination." But the historical issue driving this—the revocation of Bob Jones University's tax exempt status in the 1970s, because of its ban on interracial dating—became an issue because the University was discriminating against non-white students, not because it believed the Bible prohibited interracial dating. Similarly, the government is entitled to enforce anti-discrimination laws if an institution is actually discriminating against a protected person, such as a caterer discriminating against a gay person in a state whose civil rights laws consider sexual orientation a protected class. They're not prosecuted for their beliefs, they are prosecuted for their actions. What's more, the government does not inquire into a church's beliefs when considering whether to grant or revoke tax exempt status.
  
  It serves the interests of the religious freedom panic squad to portray a danger of squelching their religious beliefs, and pretend the government is against them solely because of what they believe, not because of what they do. It almost makes you forget other people are involved.
     

Scientology

• The Supreme Court in Britain has ruled that Scientologists can marry in their own church because their practices amount to “worship”. This overturns a 1970 ruling that religions must have a “supreme being”, such as Ralph Richardson in the film Time Bandits, or God. What to say, beyond the observation that Scientology is clearly the world’s silliest religion? (Scientologists dislike the word “cult”, so I will not call it “the world’s silliest cult”.)
  
  They believe, among other things, that 75m years ago a galactic dictator called Xenu killed large numbers of people to reduce the population of the planets and brought their frozen souls, known as Thetans, to Earth, which was then called Teegeeack. He then placed them near volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. These souls loiter and make us crabby unless we know how to deal with them — which is, obviously, by joining Tom Cruise and John Travolta in becoming a Scientologist.
  
  Not that we should know about Xenu. He is hidden in the church’s “advanced technology”, which is supposed to be viewed only by sophisticated believers. Mention “space aliens” and Scientologists get angry and walk out of interviews. The religion’s founder, L Ron Hubbard — who was also, not coincidentally, a successful science fiction writer — reportedly said that he wanted to found a religion because it was profitable. Scientologists also deny this — who wouldn’t?
  
  Do we care? It’s difficult for an agnostic to resist one improbable creation myth and not another. We must ignore the seniority that older religions demand and have equality in lunacy. Xenu and the frozen alien souls is so fantastical that it makes the resurrection, and even a burning bush that talks oddly like a Jewish mother, sound dull. (“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals.”)
  
  The delight, as ever, is in the detail. Ask the Mormons, who have an angel called Moroni. Even so, can one say that Xenu is less probable than Yahweh? Or that there is more evidence for the resurrection than there is for Moroni and his golden testaments buried in the earth? (Inevitably, they got lost.)
  
  Last week I watched women kiss the tomb of Christ in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem until they were pulled away by a priest for monopolising the shrine; is this really less weird than thinking that Hubbard, of all people, was the one who saw the truth? As Martin Amis observed in his novel Money, “practically every human activity has its fans by now”.
  
  Critics of Scientology will say let us stick with Jesus, a known quantity. I disagree: the law must be fair. Far more troubling, and less amusing, than Scientology’s creation myth are the alleged bullying of apostates; the purported demands that believers must sometimes separate themselves from their families; the expense of discovering Xenu. And why all the celebrities? Is Scientology the religious wing of Hello! magazine?
  
  What now — will there be free schools, charitable status, tax benefits? This must all be pondered, but meanwhile let Scientologist wed Scientologist under a canopy of loon and let me laugh at them.
     

Separation of Church and State

• Not being allowed governmental favoritism doesn’t take away your rights. It simply keeps your rights where they are and doesn’t take away the rights of others. Former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin recently made disparaging remarks about "atheists armed with lawyers." She apparently has an issue with court rulings that keep government from endorsing a specific religion. But for everyone who respects the secular foundations of the United States, it’s not the lawyers they are armed with, it’s the United States Constitution. It’s the will of the Founding Fathers.
  
  There are three tyrannies that the Founding Fathers wanted to protect us from.
  1. The tyranny of a tyrant
  2. The tyranny of the majority
  3. The tyranny of the church
  
  They established three solutions:
  1. Separation of powers between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government and a Presidency that is an elected position with terms for re-election.
  2. A Bill of Rights that grants certain rights and liberties to all citizens.
  3. The part of the First Amendment that contains “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” which is formally referred to as the Establishment Clause.
  
  Combine this with the words that begins the U.S. Constitution, “We the People.”
  
  The “Establishment Clause” was intended to prevent any government endorsement or support of religion. This means no governmental favoritism of one religion over another or none. Just as there is no governmental favoritism for a Christian, there is to be no governmental favoritism for an atheist. This is called religious liberty.
  
  What specifically does the “Establishment Clause” mean? There have been court rulings to provide additional guidance.
  
  Does a state action violate the Establishment Clause? The following is prohibited per guidance by Everson v. Board of Education.
  
  -setting up a state church
  
  -passing laws which specifically aid one religion or aid religions generally
  
  -forcing or otherwise influencing individuals to attend or not attend church
  
  -punishing people for ascribing to certain beliefs or disbeliefs or for attending or not attending church
  
  -taxes levied to support religious institutions or activities
  
  -governmental participation in religious organizations or participation by religious organizations in governmental activities
  
  Why have separation of church and state when this country was founded on Judeo Christian values? The answer is simple. The United States was not founded on Judeo Christian values. Freedom of religion is not Biblical. A republic is not Biblical. The pagan Romans established a Republic long before they adopted Christianity. The ancient Zeus worshiping Greeks established the first democracy in Athens before Jesus Christ was born. So what was the United States founded on?
  
  The United States was founded on the collected wisdom of philosophers, sages and legislatures over a long period of time. Don’t take it from me, take it from General George Washington, the first President of the United States of America.
  
  “The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period, the researches of the human mind, after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, the Treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislatures, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the Establishment of our forms of Government” George Washington, Circular to the States, June 8, 1783
  
  Government institutions should not have giant crosses. Government institutions should not look like churches. A hierarchy of the church should not dictate policy. There should not be a ban on education that doesn’t correspond with the Bible. People should not be punished who don’t attend church. Public funds should not support a church. The United States should not be a theocracy.
  
  Believing in these things doesn't make you an atheist with a lawyer. It makes you a patriot.
  
  It’s understandable why so many are confused regarding separation of church and state with the motto of “In God we Trust.” But people need to remember this had absolutely nothing to do with the Founding Fathers. The heroes of World War II didn’t have nor need “Under God” in their Pledge or “In God we Trust” on their paper currency.
  
  Religious liberty suffered under the fear, ignorance and superstition of the 1950s. We the people need to restore the glory of “an Epoch when the rights of mankind are better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.” “We the People,” not "We the religious" or "we the non-religious" is the Constitutional motto of the United States of America.
     

Declining Evangelicalism

• The Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California, is one of America’s largest and most celebrated ecclesiastical buildings. At 60,000 square feet and designed by architect Philip Johnson, it was until recently the sanctuary of Robert H. Schuller, once one of the country’s most prominent and influential Christian ministers. In September 1980, when he dedicated the cathedral at an opening ceremony (“To the glory of man for the greater glory of God”), Schuller was at the height of his influence, preaching to a congregation of thousands in Orange County and reaching millions more worldwide via the Hour of Power, a weekly televised ministry program. Among the show’s annual highlights were “The Glory of Easter” and its companion production, “The Glory of Christmas,” multimillion-dollar dramatic extravaganzas staged inside the cathedral with a cast of professional actors, Hollywood-grade costumes, and live animals. The setting for the spectacles was a striking, soaring, light-filled structure justly praised by architecture critics. But it was not a cathedral. It was never consecrated by a religious denomination. The building is not even made of crystal, but rather 10,000 rectangular panes of glass. Like the much beloved, much pilloried Disneyland three miles to the northwest, the Crystal Cathedral is a monument to Americans’ inveterate ability to transform dominant cultural impulses—in this case, Christianity itself—into moneymaking enterprises that conquer the world.
  
  But 2013 marked the end of an era. In June, Schuller’s evangelical Christian ministry, founded almost 60 years ago amid the suburbs of postwar Southern California, conducted its last worship service and filmed its last Hour of Power in the Crystal Cathedral. Hounded by creditors (including some of those Hollywood-grade costume and livestock suppliers), the ministry had declared bankruptcy three years earlier and last year sold the cathedral for $58 million to Orange County’s Catholic diocese. The diocese promptly announced plans to transform the 34-acre campus, which also includes notable ministry buildings by other name-brand architects, into Christ Cathedral, a spiritual home and civic showplace for the county’s surging population of more than 1.2 million Catholics, many of them immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia. The equipment facilitating Schuller’s elaborate stagecraft—lights, cameras, below-stage elevators, theater-style seating, an indoor reflecting pool—will be ripped out and replaced with a consecrated altar, bishop’s cathedra, baptismal font, and votive chapels dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe and other saints prominent in immigrant Catholics’ devotional lives. When the building reopens for worship in 2016, it will embody a transformation in the nation’s spiritual landscape that is only now beginning to be felt.
  
  Just 10 years ago, evangelical Christianity appeared to be America’s dominant religious movement. Evangelicals, more theologically diverse and open to the secular world than their fundamentalist brethren, with whom they’re often confused, were on the march toward political power and cultural prominence. They had the largest churches, the most money, influential government lobbyists, and in the person of President George W. Bush, leadership of the free world itself. Indeed, even today most people continue to regard the United States as the great spiritual exception among developed nations: a country where advances in science and technology coexist with stubborn, and stubbornly conservative, religiosity. But the reality, largely unnoticed outside church circles, is that evangelicalism is not only in gradual decline but today stands poised at the edge of a demographic and cultural cliff. The most recent Pew Research Center survey of the nation’s religious attitudes, taken in 2012, found that just 19 percent of Americans identified themselves as white evangelical Protestants—five years earlier, 21 percent of Americans did so. Slightly more (19.6 percent) self-identified as unaffiliated with any religion at all, the first time that group has surpassed evangelicals. (It should be noted that surveying Americans’ faith lives is notoriously difficult, since answers vary according to how questions are phrased, and respondents often exaggerate their level of religious commitment. Pew is a nonpartisan research organization with a track record of producing reliable, in-depth studies of religion. Other equally respected surveys—Gallup, the General Social Survey—have reached conclusions about Christianity’s status in present-day America that agree with Pew’s in some respects and diverge in others.)
  
  Secularization alone is not to blame for this change in American religiosity. Even half of those Americans who claim no religious affiliation profess belief in God or claim some sort of spiritual orientation. Other faiths, like Islam, perhaps the country’s fastest-growing religion, have had no problem attracting and maintaining worshippers. No, evangelicalism’s dilemma stems more from a change in American Christianity itself, a sense of creeping exhaustion with the popularizing, simplifying impulse evangelical luminaries such as Schuller once rode to success.
  
  Prominent figures in the evangelical establishment have already begun sounding alarms. In particular, the Barna Group, an evangelical market research organization, has been issuing a steady stream of books and white papers documenting the erosion of support for evangelicalism, especially among young people. Contributions from worshippers 55 and older now account for almost two-thirds of evangelical churches’ income in the United States. A mere three percent of non-Christian Americans under 30 have a positive impression of evangelical Christianity, according to David Kinnaman, the Barna Group’s president. That’s down from 25 percent of baby boomers at a similar age. At present rates of attrition, two-thirds of evangelicals in their 20s will abandon church before they turn 30. “It’s the melting of the icebergs,” Kinnaman told me. Young people’s most common complaint, he said, is that churches are too focused on sexual issues and preoccupied with their own institutional development—in other words, he explained, “Christianity no longer looks like Jesus.”
  
  A book making the rounds among evangelical pastors these days is called The Great Evangelical Recession. Written by John S. Dickerson, a former investigative journalist turned evangelical pastor, it chronicles in unsparing statistical detail how evangelical Christianity is hemorrhaging members, money, and influence. “The United States has shifted into a … post-Christian age,” he writes. “No one disputes this.”
  
  Visible from nearby freeways, the 128-foot-tall Crystal Cathedral looms over Orange County’s landscape of low-rise tract houses, shopping centers, and manicured office parks. Up close, it resembles a giant, angular greenhouse. Glass panes, affixed to steel trusses by silicone-based glue, cover the entire exterior, glinting in the hazy Southern California sunshine and reflecting the landscaped grounds. Across a paved plaza from the cathedral are an older church sanctuary and an office tower designed in the 1960s by celebrated modernist architect Richard Neutra, and the so-called Welcoming Center, a performance and exhibition space completed in 2003 by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Richard Meier, known for his design of the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Adjacent to these buildings are a memorial garden and columbarium sunk like an amphitheater into the ground, and a 236-foot-tall mirrored glass bell tower, also designed by Philip Johnson.
  
  The cathedral complex is an odd, sometimes startling juxtaposition of high and low culture. The three main buildings, though architecturally distinguished, bear no stylistic relation to one another and thus resemble ships from different eras run aground on a shoal. The light-filled interior of the cathedral, seen from ground level, feels more like a corporate convention hall than a religious sanctuary. Before the Catholic diocese began renovation in 2013, potted palms and ferns surrounded a raised stage. A reflecting pool ran the length of an aisle between rows of folding, padded theater seats. Banks of stage lights hung from the roof. Giant speakers flanked the stage. Outside, gaudy statues (“The Smiling Jesus,” “Christ With the Lost Sheep”) adorned the plaza, including a bronze replica of Jesus striding across a reflecting pool at the base of Neutra’s exacting, 13-story Tower of Hope. Amateur religious art donated by members of Schuller’s congregation hung in an exhibition gallery adjacent to the reflecting pool.
  
  On a recent tour of the cathedral, Father Christopher Smith, the Catholic priest charged with supervising transformation of the complex into a Catholic worship space, did his best, but frequently failed, to be diplomatic about Schuller’s design sensibilities. “It was a beautiful campus,” he said. “It’s still beautiful. But it’s tired.” He pointed up toward the cathedral’s sloping glass roof. “We recaulked 1,500 panes of glass. We’re really trying to fix the leaks.” In its final years, Schuller’s cash-strapped ministry skimped on building maintenance.
  
  Outside, on the plaza, the priest stopped beside a statue of children surrounding a beneficent Jesus. “Some of these are awful,” he remarked. Most, he said, would be removed during the diocese’s $53 million renovation. The diocese, taking its inspiration from the historic cathedrals of Europe, envisions the structure as something wholly different from Schuller’s ministerial showplace. “Traditionally, cathedrals are centers of art and culture,” Smith said. “We want it to be that.” He spoke of touring symphony orchestras playing in the sanctuary, academic and theological conferences in the Welcoming Center’s exquisitely spare meeting spaces, ecumenical worship services, art exhibits, the bustling cultural activity of a civic gathering place—something Orange County, built over decades with little central planning in car-mad Southern California, simply doesn’t have.
  
  Born in Iowa in 1926 and educated at an evangelical seminary in Michigan, Schuller arrived in rapidly suburbanizing Orange County in 1955, the year Disneyland opened. Like other successful evangelical ministers before and after him, he quickly grasped the direction American society was moving and molded his ministry accordingly. He established a church not in a building but at a drive-in movie theater in the town of Garden Grove, which, following World War II, was rapidly transforming from an expanse of orange, walnut, and strawberry farms 30 miles south of Los Angeles into a grid of suburban neighborhoods home to 44,000 people. Five years after Schuller’s arrival, the newly incorporated city’s population had doubled. Many of those new residents attended Schuller’s church, where he preached atop a snack bar to rows of worshippers in their cars. In 1958, Schuller bought a parcel of land a few miles from the drive-in and commissioned Neutra, an émigré Austrian who had made his name designing glass-walled houses for wealthy Los Angelenos, to build a permanent home for what was then called the Garden Grove Community Church. Neutra’s modernist, rectangular worship hall was dedicated in 1961. Seven years later, the architect added the equally severe Tower of Hope. In 1980, by this time a pastoral celebrity known around the world, Schuller began preaching in the $18 million Crystal Cathedral.
  
  Schuller, like Billy Graham and other name-brand evangelical ministers, led a mid-20th-century spiritual resurgence that corresponded with the birth and subsequent coming of age of America’s baby-boom generation. Even as older, inner-city mainline Protestant congregations withered in postwar America, suburban evangelical churches gained members when boomers, now having children of their own, began showing up in the late 1970s. A decade later, evangelical megachurches—some of the largest of which were in Orange County—were the dominant trend in American Christianity, growing in lockstep with the suburbs that gave them birth and set their spiritual tone.
  
  The Christianity practiced in these suburban churches was not of the fire-and-brimstone variety. Evangelicals are far looser and more theologically diverse than Christian fundamentalists, who emerged in the late 19th century in reaction to the destabilizing effects of industrialization, the Civil War, and advances in science. Fundamentalism, especially the view that the Bible is inerrant in all of its teachings, has been steadily declining as a force in American Christianity for decades. Recent Barna Group research shows that just 38 percent of Christians—down from close to half two decades ago—regard the Bible as “totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches.” Evangelicals, by contrast, while acknowledging the authority of scripture, place greater emphasis on the believer’s personal relationship with Christ. They trace their roots in America to Jonathan Edwards, an 18th-century Massachusetts divine who paired Calvinistic theology with scholarship, evangelism, and spiritual conversion. The preeminence of conversion has produced huge variety and creativity in their outreach to nonbelievers. For nearly a century, evangelicals have been at the forefront of innovations in church music, worship style, architecture, and use of media to engage the non-Christian world.
  
  Schuller was one of those innovators. His embrace of California car culture, his commissioning of high-profile architects, and his focus on televised spectacle were all efforts to wow, and woo, secular audiences. (Those approaches also fed Schuller’s ego, and their success his pocketbook.) The suburban style of evangelicalism Schuller pioneered was showmanlike and inspirational, emphasizing feel-good messages and entertaining worship services rather than liturgical tradition and theological complexity. Most other large evangelical churches have followed this pattern, with greater or lesser doses of commitment required of their worshippers. Christian traditionalists often assailed popular evangelical ministers for watering down the faith. But their flocks grew as baby boomers, accustomed to television and American plenitude, sought churches that matched their upwardly mobile, entertainment-oriented life styles.
  
  Only with the social turbulence of the late 1960s—and particularly after the Supreme Court’s 1973 legalization of abortion—did evangelicals begin moving to the political right, merging with fundamentalists in a conservative Christian voting bloc—a rightward tilt that tracked with larger shifts in American culture. As the boomers’ youthful political activism evolved into the suburban libertarianism and mistrust of government that propelled Ronald Reagan into office, evangelical megachurches offered their own spiritual blend of social conservatism and entrepreneurial innovation. Pastors emulated the corporate managers who often filled their pews. They researched their audience, introduced new products, marketed their offerings, and measured success by growth in membership and budgets.
  
  Schuller’s own Orange County was at the forefront of America’s plunge into entrepreneurial suburbanization. Explosive growth in the county during the 1950s and ’60s led in subsequent decades to the construction of sprawling planned communities. Heavily capitalized developers transformed the landscape into a manicured rebuke to America’s troubled inner cities. Their plans excluded the prevailing elements of urban design: high-rise buildings, mixed-use commercial districts, multifamily housing, and straight streets, which were thought to be easier for criminals to navigate. The county lured corporations with plush but safely bland office parks, and local governments kept taxes low and business regulations light. The result was a resounding success. Today, Orange County is an economic colossus with a 2012 GDP of $195 billion; per capita, its GDP is roughly the size of Singapore’s. Over the years, some portion of that wealth flowed into the evangelical churches, which molded themselves to suit the county’s mostly white-collar, affluent population.
  
  But just as Orange County pioneered a new form of low-rise urbanism, it was also among the first places to experience the demographic consequences. All those planned communities—their well-paid inhabitants liked to eat out, their houses needed cleaning, and their lawns needed trimming. Beginning in the 1970s, migrants, mostly from Mexico, Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and Korea, began arriving to cook, clean, and mow. These immigrants and their families began taking over formerly all-white neighborhoods, principally in northern parts of the county, transforming the look and cultural fabric of those areas. Today, Orange County is one of the most ethnically, politically, and economically diverse places on the planet. Only 43 percent of its more than three million residents are white, and almost a third were born abroad.
  
  Nowhere is this more visible than in the neighborhoods surrounding the Crystal Cathedral. Garden Grove, where Schuller once preached to young white homeowners in their cars, is now inhabited almost entirely by immigrants and their descendants. The adjacent city of Westminster is home to the world’s largest population of Vietnamese outside Vietnam. In another neighboring city, Santa Ana, 82 percent of the families speak at home a language other than English, primarily Spanish. These mostly poor residents cram several families into tract houses, work low-wage jobs, and reliably vote Democratic (the county’s registered voters are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans; Barack Obama won in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012). They also gravitate not to evangelical megachurches like Schuller’s but to Catholic parishes, Buddhist temples, mosques, and storefront Pentecostal churches. The Islamic Society of Orange County, which owns a mosque, school, and mortuary five miles from the Crystal Cathedral, is one of America’s largest centers of Islamic worship. The Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, a few miles north of Orange County, is the largest Buddhist temple in the United States. Orange County’s Catholic diocese is one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing.
  
  This demographic shift, which experts predict will make the United States’ majority population nonwhite in roughly three decades, has not been kind to suburban evangelicalism. Young people in Orange County, no matter their ethnic or economic background, no longer view themselves as living in a suburban appendage of urban Los Angeles. The county is dense with Vietnamese pho joints, boba tea shops, Asian shopping malls, halal markets, Mexican swap meets, punk-rock nightclubs, and art galleries. Corporate-style megachurches seem bland by comparison. Several of them remain in Orange County, including the Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, Mariners Church in the planned community of Irvine, and First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton. But these are clustered in the county’s most affluent areas. None are growing rapidly anymore.
  
  These days, young Christians in Orange County attend very different kinds of churches, some unrecognizable as churches at all. Laundry Love, a ministry in Santa Ana, is an ad hoc community of young Christians who gather monthly at various inner-city, coin-operated laundries and wash patrons’ clothes for free. The ministry is an offshoot of Newsong Church, a mostly Asian evangelical congregation founded nearly three decades ago by a pastor named Dave Gibbons, who sought to reach people like himself, mixed-race descendants of immigrants (his parents are white and Asian) who felt out of place in mainstream American society. Newsong now has branches in Thailand, England, Mexico, and India—all of which function like self-sustaining Christian communes oriented around humanitarian relief initiatives. Gibbons has emerged as one of a growing number of in-house critics of evangelical Christianity’s wholesale adoption of corporate American values. “The church has become involved in big business,” he told me by phone. “That’s why artists and creatives don’t want anything to do with church. What’s unique about how we’re trying to do things is we focus on people who aren’t like us. We don’t have to build our own brand.”
  
  A decade ago, Newsong, with 4,000 members, was on its way to becoming America’s latest Asian megachurch. Unsettled by its relentless focus on growth, Gibbons abruptly changed course, rededicating Newsong to ministering in low-income neighborhoods and providing a haven for artists. More than a quarter of the congregation left. But now Gibbons’s move seems prescient. In the past decade, evangelical churches, especially in culturally diverse urban areas, have been forced to choose between adopting urban cultural values and extinction. “The megachurch was a baby-boomer suburban phenomenon that folks under 45 typically aren’t perpetuating,” says Ryan Bolger, who teaches contemporary Christianity at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. Young evangelicals “want to start communities in cafés, and this isn’t just whites. We’re starting to see with Koreans and Latinos a desire to move away from the churchiness of church, to be multicultural and in an urban context, church in the profane areas of life.”
  
  At Epic Church, a 200-member, decade-old congregation in a northern part of Orange County populated mostly by Koreans and Hispanics, members gather for weekly worship in a rented office building but spend much of their time together working as tutors to low-income students at a nearby neighborhood center. “We haven’t been a church that understands ourselves as goods and services,” said Kevin Doi, Epic’s founder and pastor. The church welcomes gays, makes no overt effort to raise money from members, and regularly invites residents at a neighboring homeless shelter to its services. Doi said he has no long-range plan for his church and wouldn’t mind if it ceased functioning as an institution altogether. “We didn’t feel like our goal was to get people to come to our church,” he said. “We wanted to be present in the neighborhood, where we’re the guests.”
  
  In a few years, perhaps a decade or two, religious America will catch up to Orange County’s present. There will be a shrinking number of evangelical megachurches, gradually aging and waning in influence. There will be numerous small, eclectic, multiethnic evangelical congregations whose emphasis on spiritual commitment and social service is unlikely to attract a large, mainstream following. And there will be surging numbers of immigrant Catholics, Pentecostals, and Muslims. The political influence of evangelicalism will decline. America will not become like Europe, where ossified state churches proved unable to compete against the inherently secularizing forces of market capitalism—and where immigrants’ faith expressions are often met with hostility. America will remain exceptionally religious. But traditional evangelical Christianity will no longer be a dominant presence in that religiosity.
  
  Two years ago, in December 2011, yet another immigrant arrived in Orange County. Rob Bell migrated not from abroad but from Michigan, where he was a megachurch pastor and author who’d recently made the cover of Time and was about to be profiled in The New Yorker. Bell’s arrival, with his wife and three children, in the oceanfront city of Laguna Beach was tantamount to an escape. His spring 2011 book, Love Wins, the catalyst for the magazine stories, had ignited a firestorm in the world of evangelical Christianity. The book questioned the existence of hell and raised the possibility that all people, not just Christians, will be redeemed by God. Nothing in the book was theologically new; indeed, Bell never denied outright the reality of hell. But his book became a flashpoint in the ongoing debate over evangelicalism’s future. Younger, liberal evangelicals were for the book. Older, conservative evangelicals rejected it. In the midst of the debate, Bell, who had already tired of the institutional responsibilities of running his 10,000-member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, stepped down from leadership and lit out in semi-anonymity for the beach.
  
  When I spoke to Bell earlier this year, he was still in the first flush of California love, waxing lyrical about the spirituality of surfing (he owns seven surfboards and arranges his schedule around the daily surf report). He was also at work on plans for a television talk show. Bell represents the new breed of young evangelicals who are, with gathering speed, reshaping and in some respects dissolving their movement. A decade ago, Bell was lionized in the evangelical world for blending the movement’s age-old formula (conservative theology; rapid, corporate-style growth) with hip new brains and style (sermons larded with quantum physics; a YouTube video series). Yet, like so many younger evangelicals, Bell grew disenchanted with church. By the time he wrote Love Wins, he was already fantasizing about Southern California, where he had attended graduate school. Bell doesn’t go to church in Laguna Beach. He and some friends from college have formed a quasi-intentional spiritual community, gathering in one anothers’ homes to worship and talk about faith.
  
  “Evangelicals are good at whipping people up into a frenzy, and then you’re like, ‘What was that?’ ” Bell told me. “I was the pastor of a megachurch, and lots of people came, and I did book tours and interviews and films. That’s fine. But I’ll take seeing God every day, which is washing dishes with my kids and walking my dog and interacting with someone I just met.”
  
  In other words, the future of the evangelical church as glimpsed from Orange County might be no church at all. Robert Schuller’s brand of worship might just turn out to be nothing more than a spiritual fad. As the generation that embraced it—middle-class, baby-boomer whites flocking to car-based suburbs—dies off, their spirituality dies with them. This is not to say that the church will go away. The Crystal Cathedral still stands. But its name is now Christ Cathedral. And Schuller’s vision of a glittery surface reflecting himself and the suburbs where he preached is gone.
     

What Is The Religious Argument Against Atheism?

• recall precisely the first time I thought Christian theology might be doomed. It was when I found myself in a hotel room near Heathrow Airport, being drowned out by the sound of planes taking off, trying to explain why Martin Buber’s idea of “I-Thou” could help a man from Aberdeen be better at civil engineering. I had the same thought in the pews watching the Nativity on Christmas Eve.
  
  I was there, as I always am, for the music and the whiff of myrrh. Even in the strained voices of the congregation, the last verse of O Come All Ye Faithful conjured the memory of the descant of the choristers of King’s College, Cambridge. I do not for a second recognise the presence of the divine. It is just music, but what music. I was there too as a Christmas addict. I love the story but as I watched the familiar tale unfold I was troubled by an argument best put in Mary Warnock’s Dishonest to God and Larkin’s first great poem, Church Going. What happens when the annual tourists in the congregation outnumber the believers? Will Christmas just be late shopping?
  
  Because there is no doubt that the Church of England is in serious strife. Between 1971 and 2007 the population of the UK grew 10 per cent. Membership of the Anglican Church fell 43 per cent. No more than 2 per cent of people attend a Church of England service each week and the average age of the parishioner is 61. In 1950 two thirds of us were baptised, but today it is less than a fifth. Marriage has moved out of church and even most of the dead have a better date these days. Churches are being turned into badminton courts and bingo halls.
  
  On Christmas day the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, exhibited the Church’s usual response to decline with an exercise in what his predecessor Rowan Williams called Faith in the Public Square. Archbishop Welby’s Christmas sermon was a lament about greed and the persistence of poverty. There is a theological basis, notably in the Gospel of James, for the Church to be a player in temporal affairs and a nation with an established Church can hardly expect its principal to refrain from comment. I also, as it happens, agreed with Archbishop Welby’s every word.
  
  I am not altogether sure, though, that he was wise to say them. Sitting in the frowsty barn on Christmas Eve, I needed no persuasion that food banks are a disgrace. It is not obvious to me that the Church of England has any future as a cross between the Association of Credit Unions and the Child Poverty Action Group. As I watched the Nativity play I was seized, as I always am, with an inability to suspend disbelief. It wasn’t the poor acting but the script. The story doesn’t ever withstand the probing question of an inquisitive seven-year-old and I mean the whole story, not just the lovely Christmas bit. Rather than tell me some social policy, wouldn’t Archbishop Welby have been better served trying to find some plain language to mount the argument for faith?
  
  The recent theological efforts of the Church of England lie on a spectrum from apologetic to lamentable. Most believers seem content to whinge that the attack from Richard Dawkins has been “too aggressive”, as if in the game of metaphysics the meek shall inherit the truth. Religious believers are making eternal claims about the origins of the Universe. It is not surprising that these claims encounter some tough-minded resistance. Rather than moaning about the etiquette, theologians should concentrate on devising retorts that didn’t collapse under the weight of their own evasions.
  
  The Bishop of Oxford provided a good example on these pages on Christmas Eve. The Bishop recounted the parable told by Yann Martell in Life of Pi in which the hero of the book offers two explanations for his survival in a storm. One is a straight narrative account, the other is a fantastic tale of the friendship he forged with a Bengal tiger. The Bishop finds an allegory for the Christian story of Christmas in Pi’s killer line: “Which story do you prefer?” Note the question is not about which story shows the greater fidelity to the facts. It is just that one is enchanting and the other is dull.
  
  As an answer to one of the great metaphysical questions of all eternity this leaves rather a lot to be discussed. In The Case For God the former nun Karen Armstrong ends up with nothing to say for herself. Armstrong concludes that something as sublime as God cannot be expressed in language. In the beginning was the Word but the rest, she says, is silence. Having struggled through her latest book I rather wish Armstrong had taken her own advice.
  
  Roger Scruton has also made a serious attempt to recuperate what he calls The Face of God. Scruton finds the problem in our failure to understand that the gift of God is immanent in what we see around us when, for example, we glimpse the eternal in a beautiful landscape. To put it in more modern Christmas terms, the hills are alive with the sound of meaning.
  
  Scruton ends up, though, with me in the Nativity. His claim that participation in the Eucharist renews the bonds of community may be true but it doesn’t make a fact out of transubstantiation. It may well be true (although I hope not for the sake of the Church) that the Eucharist is best explained by listening to Wagner’s Parsifal, but this is just Scruton’s version of the descant in O Come All Ye Faithful.
  
  This is all difficult stuff and it needs an Anglican translator. It needs to be spoken in plain language for the lay floating voter. Unless the Anglican Church finds and expresses some better arguments for belief it is doomed. The Church used to be the place you went to for great writing. Thomas Cranmer’s Prayer Book is one of the glories of English literature. To cite two phrases minted by Cranmer, the Anglican Church is at death’s door, given up for lost. That is because, ceding all the ground to the eloquent and learned atheists, the Church of England has not spoken yet.
     

Atheist Survived Tornado

• When Wolf Blitzer asked Moore tornado survivor Rebecca Vitsmun if she thanked the lord, many expected her to answer "yes." Instead she replied "I'm actually an atheist."
  
  "Saying 'I'm an atheist' in Oklahoma is like screaming 'Jihad' at airport security," says Doug Stanhope in a clip from Charlie Brooker's 2013 Wipe. "That took some nuts."
  
  The blue comedy specialist decided to show his appreciation for Vitsmun's candidness by starting an IndieGogo campaign on her behalf.
  
  "If you watch the footage, all the other victims are on the news thanking Jesus for only killing their neighbors and not them, while a crawler is on the screen telling me where I can text money to help them out," Stanhope goes on to say. "Fuck them. I don't want Jesus getting credit for my $50. I'll help that other girl out."
  
  By the end of the two-month funding duration, Stanhope's campaign had raised nearly $126,000 for Vitsmun.
  
  In the Brooker clip, Stanhope explains that he didn't do it for the sake of helping out the victim of a natural disaster — he did it for the sake of not helping out her Lord-thanking neighbors.
  
  "I didn't do it because I felt sympathy because she got all her shit destroyed by a tornado," he said. "I did it simply to be a prick to her Okie-Christian neighbors, hoping that they were still eating off of FEMA trucks when someone drove up and presented Rebecca with a giant cardboard check."
     

Cargo Cults

• What happens when you mix native populations with modern visitors? In some cases, what's happened has been a curious religious phenomenon known as "cargo cults".
  
  If you've heard of cargo cults before — and a lot of people have not — the version that you heard probably goes something like this. During WWII in the Pacific theater, Allied troops landed on islands throughout the South Pacific, bringing with them food, medicine, Jeeps, aircraft, housing, electricity, refrigeration, and all manner of modern wonders that the native populations had never seen before. But then the war ended and the troops went home, leaving just a few scraps behind. The natives, in a demonstration of Arthur C. Clarke's third law which states "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," concluded that such a windfall must have come from the gods. They wanted this wealth of cargo to return. And so they did what seems logical from a stone-age perspective: they set about to recreate the conditions under which the gods and their cargo had come. They cleared paths in the jungle to resemble airfields. They wore scraps of military uniforms. They made "rifles" out of bamboo and marched as they had seen the soldiers march. And always they kept their eye on the sky, hopeful that the gods observed their preparations and would soon return with more cargo.
  
  On some islands, particularly the New Hebrides (now called Vanuatu), these gods were personified in John Frum, an apocryphal American serviceman, according to the most popular version of the tale. John Frum is symbolized by a red cross, probably inspired by that painted on the sides of ambulances during the war. To this day, a surviving core of the John Frum Movement dresses in imitation WWII uniforms and celebrates February 15 as John Frum Day, in a plaza marked with a red cross and an American flag. They predict that on this day, John Frum will eventually return, bringing all the material goods of the modern world with him. In the words of one village elder:
  
  John promised he'll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him. Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.
  
  The story of John Frum is sometimes erroneously confused with Tom Navy. Tom Navy was probably an actual person, possibly Tom Beatty of Mississippi, who served in the New Hebrides both as a missionary, and as a Navy Seabee during the war. Tom Navy is more of a beloved historical character associated with peace and service, whereas John Frum is regarded as an actual messiah who will bring wealth and prosperity.
  
  The popular version of the John Frum story may seem a little whimsical. It's actually quite oversimplified and misstates the actual causes and motivations behind what happened. This particular cargo cult has deeper roots that have pulled directly on the heartstrings of much of the population. It goes all the way back to the early 18th century, long before anyone thought of WWII or American servicemen. At that time, the New Hebrides were an unusual type of colony called a condominium, jointly administered by both the British and the French. Among the early colonists were Scottish Presbyterian missionaries, who took a dim view of the uninhibited native lifestyle. On the island of Tanna beginning around 1900, at which time there was no meaningful colonial government, the missionaries imposed their own penal system upon the natives, a period called Tanna Law. Many of the traditional practices were banned, including ritual dancing, polygamy, swearing, and adultery. They also required observation of the Sabbath. But perhaps their most inflammatory prohibition was that of the traditional practice of drinking kava by the men. Those who violated these rules were convicted by the missionaries and sentenced to hard labor.
  
  So it was a population in dire need of a saviour to whom John Frum first appeared, and he did so in the 1930's. By most contemporary accounts, John Frum was a native named Manehivi who donned Western clothes; only in later versions of the story did he become an American serviceman. John Frum advocated a new lifestyle that was a curious mixture of having your cake and eating it too. He promised that if the people followed him, they could return to their traditional ways, but he would also reward them with all the material goods that the missionaries had brought. And so this is what the majority of the islanders did: The missionaries were suddenly ignored and found themselves vastly outnumbered by a population who took renewed interest in all their previous freedoms. Colonial authorities were summoned and leaders of the movement, including several chiefs, were arrested and imprisoned in 1941, introducing a new and culturally powerful element into the situation: martyrdom.
  
  And then, an extraordinary thing happened. World War II descended upon the Pacific. The New Hebrides were flooded with Westerners. Food, medicine, Coca-Cola, and money were showered upon the natives. Many islanders were recruited as laborers and paid (relatively) lavishly. Life was rich with both traditional freedoms and material wealth. John Frum's promise had been miraculously fulfilled.
  
  And so it's clear that the John Frum Movement has more to it than just a silly superstition that if you build something that looks like a dock out of bamboo, supply ships will come streaming in. That's how cargo cults are often portrayed, and it's really not a fair description. The people were going through genuine oppression, a man stepped up and promised freedom, and he delivered in spades. That actual fulfillment of prophecy, though it was merely a fortuitous coincidence, is still more than a lot of other religions can claim. So it does make a certain amount of sense that today's members of the John Frum Movement still look out to sea, and to the sky, waiting for their bounty. As one modern chief explained:
  
  John was dressed in all white, like American Navy men, and it was then we knew John was an American. John said that when the war was over, he’d come to us in Tanna with ships and planes bringing much cargo, like the Americans had in Vila.
  
  Historians have not made much progress trying to find the origins of the name John Frum. One interesting explanation is that "frum" happens to be the pijin pronunciation of broom, as in sweeping the white people off the island. It's also likely that there was an actual person in the islands with a German last name of Fromme or Frumm, and Manehivi could have adopted his name. Another possibility is that it's a simple contraction of "John from America".
  
  Cargo cults have appeared many, many times, and were not all centered around WWII. One of the earliest known cargo cults grew on the Madang Coast of Papua New Guinea, when the pioneering Russian anthropologist Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay stayed there for some time in the 1870's, bringing with him gifts of fabric and steel tools. A hundred years later, a group formed on the island of New Hanover, and believed that if they could acquire American president Lyndon Johnson and install him as their king, cargo would come along with him. They rebelled against the Australian authorities, formed their own government, put together a budget, and offered to purchase Lyndon Johnson from the United States for $1,000. Their price was probably naïve, but just think what would have happened had Johnson accepted: Their plan probably would have worked better than they ever imagined.
  
  The blending of Christianity with native superstitions sometimes caused some interesting problems. During WWII, some Australian groups grew concerned with what they saw as the sacrilegious inclusion of cargo cult principles with Jesus in Papua New Guinea. An educated New Guinean official named Yali, who had been on good terms with the missionaries, was employed by the Australians to travel around and try to dispel cargo cult mythology. After the war, Yali was rewarded with a trip to the Australian mainland, where he saw three things that greatly disturbed him, and caused him to rethink his work of the past few years. The first was the obvious wealth of the Australians compared to New Guinea. The second was a collection of sacred New Guinea artifacts on display at the Queensland Museum, which he began to suspect had been stolen by the Australians and resulted in their great accumulation of material goods. The third, and perhaps most influential, was exposure to the theory of evolution. This led Yali to conclude that the Australian missionaries, who had promoted the story of Adam and Eve, had been lying to him. Taken altogether, Yali reflected that he had been right to preach the separation of Christianity and cargo cults, but that he'd been on the wrong side.
  
  And so while cargo cults may seem, at first glance, like quaint stone age ignorance, they're actually not entirely irrational. They're certainly naïve and based on a fallacious confusion of correlation and causation, but to give their believers some credit, they're doing their best to make sense of what they've been given. Where this belief system fails them, quite obviously, is that it replaces the need to work hard to achieve goals with the belief that faith will provide. This is the lesson that would best serve the believers, and it's the same lesson that missionaries and social workers should pay the most attention to. Rather than smiling at their funny little religion, or trying to replace it with another, we should instead give them the tools they need to create their own wealth of cargo.
  
  (from Skeptoid)
     

The Lessons of the Flood Stories

• That faint humming sound you’ve heard recently is the scholarly world of the Bible and archaeology abuzz over the discovery of the oldest known Mesopotamian version of the famous Flood story.
  
  A British scholar has found that a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet from what is now Iraq contains a story similar to the biblical account of Noah’s Ark. The newly decoded cuneiform tells of a divinely sent flood and a sole survivor on an ark, who takes all the animals on board to preserve them. It even includes the famous phrase “two by two,” describing how the animals came onto the ark. But there is one apparently major difference: The ark in this version is round.
  
  We have known for well over a century that there are flood stories from the ancient Near East that long predate the biblical account (even the most conservative biblical scholars wouldn’t date any earlier than the ninth century B.C).
  
  What’s really intriguing scholars is the description of the ark itself.
  
  The Bible presents a standard boat shape – long and narrow. The length being six times the measure of the width, with three decks and an entrance on the side.
  
  The newly discovered Mesopotamian text describes a large round vessel, made of woven rope, and coated (like the biblical ark) in pitch to keep it waterproof.
  
  Archaeologists are planning to design a prototype of the ark, built to the specifications of this text, to see if it would actually float. Good luck to them in trying to estimate the weight of its cargo.
  
  So, why does this new discovery matter? It matters because it serves as a reminder that the story of the Flood wasn’t set in stone from its earliest version all the way through to its latest incarnation.
  
  The people who wrote down the Flood narrative, in any of its manifestations, weren’t reporting on a historical event for which they had to get their facts straight (like what shape the ark was).
  
  Everyone reshapes the Flood story, and the ark itself, according to the norms of their own time and place.
  
  In ancient Mesopotamia, a round vessel would have been perfectly reasonable – in fact, we know that this type of boat was in use, though perhaps not to such a gigantic scale, on the Mesopotamian rivers.
  
  The ancient Israelites, on the other hand, would naturally have pictured a boat like those they were familiar with: which is to say, the boats that navigated not the rivers of Mesopotamia but the Mediterranean Sea.
  
  This detail of engineering can and should stand for a larger array of themes and features in the flood stories. The Mesopotamian versions feature many gods; the biblical account, of course, only one.
  
  The Mesopotamian versions tell us that the Flood came because humans were too noisy for the gods; the biblical account says it was because violence had spread over the Earth.
  
  Neither version is right or wrong; they are, rather, both appropriate to the culture that produced them. Neither is history; both are theology.
  
  What, then, of the most striking parallel between this newly discovered text and Genesis: the phrase “two by two”? Here, it would seem, we have an identical conception of the animals entering the ark. But not so fast.
  
  Although most people, steeped in Sunday school tradition, will tell you without even thinking about it that “the animals, they came on, they came on by twosies twosies,” that’s not exactly what the Bible says.
  
  More accurately, it’s one thing that the Bible says – but a few verses later, Noah is instructed to bring not one pair of each species, but seven pairs of all the “clean” animals and the birds, and one pair of the “unclean” animals.
  
  (This is important because at the end of the story, Noah offers sacrifices – which, if he only brought one pair of each animal, would mean that, after saving them all from the Flood, he then proceeded to relegate some of those species to extinction immediately thereafter.)
  
  This isn’t news – already in the 17th century scholars recognized that there must be two versions of the Flood intertwined in the canonical Bible. There are plenty of significant differences between the two Flood stories in the Bible, which are easily spotted if you try to read the narrative as it stands.
  
  One version says the Flood lasted 40 days; the other says 150. One says the waters came from rain. Another says it came from the opening of primordial floodgates both above and below the Earth. One version says Noah sent out a dove, three times. The other says he sent out a raven, once. And yes: In one of those stories, the animals come on “two by two.”
  
  Does this mean that the author of that version was following the ancient Mesopotamian account that was just discovered? Certainly not.
  
  If the goal of the ark is the preservation of the animals, then having a male and female of each is just common sense. And, of course, it’s a quite reasonable space-saving measure.
  
  Likewise, the relative age of the Mesopotamian and biblical accounts tells us nothing about their relative authority.
  
  Even if we acknowledge, as we probably should, that the biblical authors learned the Flood story from their neighbors – after all, flooding isn’t, and never was, really a pressing concern in Israel – this doesn’t make the Bible any less authoritative.
  
  The Bible gets its authority from us, who treat it as such, not from it being either the first or the most reliable witness to history.
  
  There is no doubt that the discovery of this new ancient Mesopotamian text is important. But from a biblical perspective, its importance resides mostly in the way it serves to remind us that the Flood story is a malleable one.
  
  There are multiple different Mesopotamian versions, and there are multiple different biblical versions. They share a basic outline, and some central themes. But they each relate the story in their own way.
  
  The power of the Flood story, for us the canonical biblical version, is in what it tells us about humanity’s relationship with God. But, as always, the devil is in the details.
     

DIY - Invent Your Own

• "Isn't it blasphemy to invent a religion?" my student asked with concern.
  
  Every semester, in the comparative religion class I teach at a local community college, I ask my students to divide into groups and create a religion from whole cloth.
  
  "All religions were invented at some point," I offered, reminding him that while Jesus may have assigned Peter to be the rock upon which the church would be built, it was up to everyone else to determine the details.
  
  It's fascinating to watch the young (with a smattering of older) students invent a new belief system. I give them some guidelines: their religions must include some common elements such as doctrine, dogma, symbols, music, rituals—and most importantly, reformers.
  
  A few of the groups have had fun with the assignment, coming up with religions like The Church of Charlie Sheen, that could rival anything the Pastafarians have come up with.
  
  But last semester emerged as a perfect case study of millennial religion—a portrait of this generation (those between the ages of 18 and 30) in which one in four call themselves "atheist" or "agnostic" or "nothing in particular."
  
  Most of the religions my class invented incorporated Eastern religious ideas like meditation— especially meditation used for psychological growth or personal fulfillment—as well as ideas like reincarnation and karma. When Western religions were included, the pieces taken from them were such things as pilgrimage, like the hajj to Mecca required by Muslims, or rituals like prayer. But the prayer was of a particular stripe, always centering on personal—or even material—enrichment.
  
  There were several components of religion that were glaringly absent. Not one of them had career clergy who were in charge of services, rituals, or care of the congregation. There were, for the most part, no regular meetings of the faithful. Some had monthly or annual gatherings, like conferences, but most were very individualized religions, centering on personal growth and enrichment away from a physical community.
  
  So, right off the bat, this generation has dumped its religious leaders, its priests or gurus, and has dispensed with the obligation of coming together each week as a community. I guess, if there's no one there to deliver a sermon or wisdom talk, what's the point of gathering together once a week?
  
  The most intriguing thing for me, however, was the fact that not one of the religions crafted by the student groups included a concept of hell, or any form of punishment for not following the prescriptions of the religion.
  
  "What happens if somebody transgresses from the beliefs of your religion?" I asked after one presentation.
  
  "They can find another religion," was the answer.
  
  "You mean you would excommunicate them from your religion?" I asked.
  
  "No," they said, "they're always welcome to come back."
  
  The tales of their "reformers" were not much more forceful. Other than tinkering with one or two doctrines or ideas, the reformers they imagined for the assignment were just as "feel good" about the religion as the original founders.
  
  I asked the class after the presentations why they all chose to eschew the idea of hell.
  
  "Religion today is so ... judgmental," one student offered.
  
  "Yeah," another agreed. "We don't need some church telling us what to do when they don't practice what they preach."
  
  Here they were utterly consistent with an oft-cited poll of a few years ago, in which many millennials said they found the church too judgmental or hypocritical.
  
  Ultimately, what the class presentations revealed most clearly to me, as a teacher, is how distant this generation is from a full-featured understanding of religion.
  
  These students held a romantic view of the idea of meditation, reincarnation, pilgrimage and other elements of major world religions. They like the idea of quiet meditation, especially if it can make their lives less chaotic and more balanced. They like the idea of reincarnation—you get another chance even if you mess this one up! Pilgrimage sounds fun, too. Road trip!
  
  But, what they miss about all of these religious practices is that deep within each of them lie the core ideas of human suffering, the concept of discipline, and the very real threat of punishment.
  
  For Buddhists and Hindus, meditation is not just a way to calm the mind, it's a vehicle for enlightenment. Meditation, and other yogic/ascetic practices, are not meant to make you simply feel good.
  
  Similarly, reincarnation isn't an invitation to take another ride through life. You must go back around to learn the lessons you didn't learn the last time. In that sense, reincarnation is not something to seek out, it is something to avoid.
  
  Pilgrimage, too, is a way of seeking a way out of suffering. Christians walk the Via Dolorosa, for example, not to revel in Jesus' sacrifice, but to understand, in a deeper, embodied sense, his suffering.
  
  By ignoring the question of suffering of humanity, and role of religion in addressing that suffering, I am afraid that this new generation is denying itself the opportunity to truly connect not just with the divine, if that's their thing, but with each other.
  
  Unless they can acknowledge suffering—either their own or that of others—all the feel-good religion in the world will not be much good.
  
  Which brings us right back to what all these millennial religions lacked: leadership, community, discipline and a sense of a larger mission for their invented sect. It would be unfair to say that millennials do not appreciate discipline or that their actions have consequences; I found many of my students to be smart, industrious and willing to work hard.
  
  The problem, as I see it, is not with the lack of imagination of this new generation, but with religious institutions themselves—many of which have allowed their leaders to become rock stars, their communities to become clubs of like-minded believers, and their doctrines to become rigid, with an over-emphasis on discipline and damnation for things (like homosexuality) that millennials see as simply judgmental and unfair.
  
  If organized religion can't renew itself from the inside, this new generation will switch to a new platform—even if they have to invent it for themselves.
     

Why is it so hard for Christians to understand evolution?

• I find that many writers on Quora assume that such Christians are stupid or crazy for rejecting the theory of evolution. But a good methodological principle of social science is that if a belief or practice seems bizarre to you, you probably don't understand the context.
  
  It's not that these Christians are incapable of understanding evolution. Some do, and many don't but could if they tried. It's that the costs, to them, of believing it are extremely high.
  
  The divine inspiration and infallibility of the Bible is absolutely central to Christianity, especially Protestantism. And contrary to what others have said, it is impossible to harmonize the Bible with Darwinism. There have been many attempts to line up the evolutionary sequence with the days in Genesis, for example, or to argue that the "days" really represent eras, but they are not convincing. The text says that birds came before land animals, all animals were originally herbivores, no animals died before the Fall, humans were created directly from dust rather than descended from other species, and so on.
  
  Yet the fact that thousands of different ways of reconciling biology and the Bible have been tried shows that most Christians really would like to incorporate as much science into their beliefs as possible. There is nothing in their belief system that is opposed to science per se. They believe that, since the Bible is an inerrant text authored by an omniscient being, science should confirm it. If it doesn't, you must be doing it wrong.
  
  You can be a Christian AND accept evolutionary theory (and there are many who do), but there is a high price to pay. You have to interpret the creation stories as myths or allegories, although they seem to present themselves as facts. Then you have to wonder how to interpret the other passages in the Bible, both Testaments, that refer to them. It becomes hard to formulate a criterion to distinguish myth from history in the rest of the Bible, and scriptural interpretation becomes a complex and uncertain endeavor. You can't take the text at face value anymore. You have to try to explain why God would write his book in such a strange and confusing way. And worse, why a God described as all powerful and perfectly loving would create the world by such a strange process, long and slow and wasteful and full of pain and death. It's hard to still believe that humans are a special creation, made in the "image of God," categorically and ontologically distinct from all other life forms. It's hard to decide what to make of the doctrines of original sin and "fallenness" if we inherited our tendencies from apes rather than Adam.
  
  It gets very complicated and confusing. And perhaps you have to experience it to understand it, but cognitive dissonance at the level of your core beliefs can be agonizing. It's lonely and alienating. It's paralyzing. It can drive you to madness.
  
  In short, if you want to be a Christian, you really want the theory of evolution to be false. And many people really want to be Christians. Being right about science (that is, having beliefs that are consistent with the scientific evidence) is not most people's strongest psychological need. If you can believe it wholeheartedly, without reservation, Christianity offers psychological benefits--identity, belonging, community, value, empowerment, safety, comfort, hope, certainty--that are pretty hard to beat.
     

Richard Dawkins Interview

• You have just published part one of your memoir. Is it intended as a humanising exercise, to show you're not a mean, nasty baddie? I don't know how many people think I'm mean. I'm certainly not and I didn't consciously set out to do any image-cleaning or anything. I like to think it's an honest portrayal of how I really am. And I hope it is human, yes.
  
  Nevertheless, there's a gulf between the real you and the caricature Richard Dawkins. How has that come about?
  
  I have two theories which are not mutually exclusive. One is the religion business. People really, really hate their religion being criticised. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face, they seem to identify personally with it. There is a historical attitude that religion is off limits to criticism. Also, some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.
  
  You definitely polarise people. How do you feel about the hate mail you get?
  
  I did a film that's on YouTube of me reading hate mail with a woman playing the cello in the background. Sweet strains to contrast with this awful, "you fucking wanker Dawkins" and so on. Making comedy of it is a pretty good way of absorbing it.
  
  Do you still get fan mail too?
  
  Yes. The hate mail is illiterate but the opposite is actually very moving and I get very, very gratifying responses. I just got back from a tour of the US promoting this book and I noticed even more forcibly than before the enormous numbers of people who come into the book-signing queue, and they nearly always say something like, I became a scientist because of you, you've changed my life.
  
  Has what drives you changed over the years?
  
  It hasn't changed: a love of truth, a love of clarity, a love of the poetry of science. Insofar as I show hostility to alternatives, superstition and so on, it's because they are sapping education and depriving young people of the true glory of the scientific world view – I care especially about children in this case. It's tragic to see children being led into dark, pokey little corners of medieval superstition.
  
  Would you rather be remembered for explaining science or taking on religion?
  
  To me they amount to the same thing – they are different sides of the same coin. But I suppose I'd rather be remembered for explaining science. I would be upset if people dismissed my science because of the religion.
  
  You have turned your attention to Islam recently. Why is that?
  
  I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned. It's stymied by the conflict between being against misogyny and discrimination against women on the one hand, and on the other by the terror of being thought racist – driven by misunderstanding Islam as though it were a race. So people who would normally speak out against the maltreatment of women don't do it. I do fret about what I see as a betrayal by my own people, the nice liberals.
  
  Another battle of yours has been against group selection – the idea that evolution works by selecting traits that benefit groups, not genes. You destroyed that paradigm, but then it came back again.
  
  Something else came back under the same name. If you look carefully it turns out to be things like kin selection rebranded as group selection. That irritates me because I think it is wantonly obscuring something that was actually rather clear.
  
  I think part of why it came back is political. Sociologists love group selection, I think because they are more influenced by emotive evaluations of human impulses. I think people want altruism to be a kind of driving force; there's no such thing as a driving force. They want altruism to be fundamental whereas I want it to be explained. Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals and to me that's crystal clear.
  
  What subjects currently interest you in evolutionary biology?
  
  I'm fascinated by the way molecular genetics has become a branch of information technology. I wonder with hindsight whether it had to be that way, whether natural selection couldn't really work unless genetics was digital, high-fidelity, a kind of computer science. In other words, can we predict that, if there's life elsewhere in the universe, it will have the same kind of high-fidelity digital genetics as we do?
  
  When we are able to muck around with our own genes more, where do you think it will take us?
  
  The funny thing is that if you take the two parts of the Darwinian formula, mutation and selection, we've been messing around with the selection part with just about every species – except our own. We have been distorting wolves to Pekineses and wild cabbages to cauliflowers, and making huge revolutions in agricultural science. And yet with a few exceptions, there have been no attempts to breed human Pekineses or human greyhounds.
  
  Now the mutation half of the Darwinian algorithm is becoming amenable to human manipulation, people have jumped to asking questions – what's going to happen when we start tinkering with genes? – while sort of forgetting that we could have been tinkering with selection for thousands of years and haven't done it. Maybe whatever has inhibited us from doing it with selection will do the same with mutation.
  
  Do you believe there is a genetic basis to irrationality?
  
  It would be very surprising if there wasn't a genetic basis to the psychological predispositions which make people vulnerable to religion.
  
  One idea about irrationality that I and various other people have put forward is that the risks we faced in our natural state often came from evolved agents like leopards and snakes. So with a natural phenomenon like a storm, the prudent thing might have been to attribute it to an agent rather than to forces of physics. It's the proverbial rustle in the long grass: it's probably not a leopard, but if it is, you're for it. So a bias towards seeing agency rather than boring old natural forces may have been built into us.
  
  That may take quite a lot of overcoming. Even though we no longer need to fear leopards, we inherit the instincts of those who did. Seeing agency where there isn't any is something that may have been programmed into our brains.
  
  If we are irrational, perhaps one of the reasons people bristle at you is they feel their nature is under attack.
  
  We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.
     

When Can Society Overrule Religion?

• As the row over ritual slaughter shows, when articles of faith clash with society’s values they can’t always be defended.
  
  Religions grow from many roots. There is a profound intuition that life is more than squalid mortality, a desire for ethical order and ultimate justice, and a proto-scientific need to explain how the world works — whether your answer is in the Book of Genesis or a conviction that it is balanced on a giant turtle. Some faiths pare themselves down to a spiritual essence, most develop florid appendages of legend and ritual. Leaders, being human, like to bolster their authority. Many religions feel a need to differentiate themselves by imposing detailed rules of life. (Christianity, oddly, has fewer than most. Ten commandments, and “the greatest of these is Love”. )
  
  All are valid to their adherents and deserve reasonable respect: there are many ways up the holy mountain. The tricky bit comes when man-made rules, interpretations and observances rub up awkwardly against surrounding society. For everyone’s good, including that of believers, good societies have values too: liberty, democracy, free speech, human rights and — increasingly today — environmental concern and humane treatment of animals.
  
  Well, you see where I am heading. The Danish Government has followed Sweden and Norway in banning one important element in Muslim and Jewish slaughter of animals for halal and kosher food. Denmark says that the animal must first be stunned, but that it remains conscious is one of the six rules of halal slaughter. The other five say that the slaughterer must be of faith, pronounce the name of Allah, use a sharp knife, bleed the carcass dry and ensure that the animal was fed a natural diet. Judaism has similar prescriptions.
  
  Some Muslims call it a limitation on religious freedom; Jewish leaders have cried anti-Semitism. It inevitably raises the historical spectre: Hitler and Mussolini banned shechita in the 1930s. But the Danish agriculture minister, Dan Jørgensen, says flatly: “Animal rights come before religion.” Believers can, of course, still freely import halal or kosher meat. And interestingly, Imam Khalil Jaffar, in Copenhagen, has said on al-Jazeera that actually, Danish Islamic leaders issued a religious decree years ago saying that animals stunned before slaughter can be considered halal. Since stunning is technically reversible, the creature is alive. Just not conscious.
  
  Over here, with a typically British flinch, politicians continue to allow unstunned ritual slaughter, despite campaigning from the RSPCA, Compassion in World Farming and the Farm Animal Welfare Council. Some argue that, correctly done, slitting a conscious animal’s throat causes no more distress than the stun-gun. They also point out that crowded abattoirs are horrible anyway and that Danish industrial pig farming makes a nonsense of this “principled” humane stand, and therefore conclude that it may be fuelled by religious intolerance.
  
  Let the Danes sort that out. A more universal interest lies in that line about animal welfare trumping religion. In the age of the multicultural melting pot we are all forced to examine our priorities. Most religious observances are no problem: if individuals eat fish on Fridays, speak in tongues, let their hair grow or gather to sing and pray peaceably together, it is no business whatsoever of the law or wider society. Nor is it a government’s right to silence those who prefer to laugh at believers. In 2005, before the passing of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, there was a risk of us losing that last freedom until the Lords insisted that to be criminal, there must be a clear intention to stir up hatred, rather than just a vague charge of “insulting” religion.
  
  Nonetheless, there comes a point when we have to decide which values really do override sincere religious belief. In the case of female genital mutilation it is not too difficult: this horrid cruelty predates Islam and is not required by any mainstream part of it. Some primitive non-Muslim sects do it and it is clearly more cultural than religious. So the law can get tough, and at last we seem to be doing so after decades of pathetic cultural cringe. The law has never had too much trouble, either, in condemning the torture and killing of children under certain African “witchcraft” beliefs. And Jehovah’s Witnesses are overruled when they refuse lifesaving blood transfusions for children too young to decide.
  
  As views about children’s rights become ever subtler, other decisions loom. Male circumcision, vitally important to observant Jews, is challenged from time to time in the US and Scandinavia; dramatically, the German Social Democrat MP Marlene Rupprecht put forward a resolution to the Council of Europe last year decrying “violation of the physical integrity of children”. She included male infant circumcision and withdrew after furious protests. But there it is: in modern terms that is an irreversible physical intervention without consent. Sometime, the issue will arise again.
  
  We also have a strengthening sense that “emotional abuse” of children is actionable. Richard Dawkins called bringing a child up as a Roman Catholic “mental abuse”; now John Cornwell’s new book about the Confessional, The Dark Box, throws a grim implication over the 1910 papal decree that said this private, intimate whispered confession of sins should begin at the age of seven. Is confession itself potentially abusive? Not in my memory, but it’s a question worth asking after recent clerical scandals.
  
  What trumps what? The question is not only for states and societies but for honest believers. Religions, too, should ask, how much is non-negotiable? What truly relates to the vital spiritual core and how much is barnacled cultural accretion, outdated and unnecessary to the essential flame you tend?
     

The Religious Right and Birth Control

• What do religious fundamentalists have against birth control? In challenging the Obamacare rule that employers must provide contraception coverage as part of their health care plans, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, the companies whose suits the Supreme Court will hear later this month, have been careful to frame their objections narrowly. They’re not refusing to pay for all birth control. They just don’t want to fund “items” like the morning-after pill and the IUD, which they say effectively cause abortion by preventing a fertilized embryo from implanting in the uterus. Many scientists say that’s not true. But the companies are trying to take a limited, reasonable-minds-may-differ position.
  
  The government has medical heavyweights on its side, including the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. But Hobby Lobby has more briefs—the majority of a total of more than 80 briefs, by my count, were filed by conservative groups—and their allies have written the sentences that jump off the page. Despite how the companies themselves have carefully crafted their case, the briefs from their supporters provide a refresher course in how fundamentalists get from here to there. They are full of revelations.
  
  Before we get to those, a brief recap of why contraception coverage matters. The Department of Health and Human Services decided to include contraception as part of comprehensive preventive health care for women—and thus a service employers must cover under the Affordable Care Act—based on recommendations by the Institute of Medicine. The IOM looked at the outcomes associated with getting pregnant unintentionally and found connections to delayed prenatal care, premature delivery, low birth weight, maternal depression, and family violence. Getting pregnant without intending to also can prevent women from getting a degree or a job they aspire to. Birth control, in other words, helps women in wide-ranging ways. It’s pretty simple, really: Women are better off when they get to choose if and when to have babies. When birth control is part of the health insurance package, as opposed to an expense women foot on their own, their health literally benefits.
  
  That’s the consensus position of the mainstream experts at the IOM, among others. But the American Freedom Law Center, which says it “defends America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and moral values,” sees contraception, instead, as Pope Paul VI did in 1968. In its brief, AFLC quotes the former pope like so:
  
  It has come to pass that the widespread use of contraceptives has indeed harmed women physically, emotionally, morally, and spiritually — and has, in many respects, reduced her to the “mere instrument for the satisfaction of [man’s] own desires.” Consequently, the promotion of contraceptive services — the very goal of the challenged mandate — harms not only women, but it harms society in general by “open[ing] wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards.”
  
  The Beverly LaHaye Institute, the research arm of Concerned Women for America, drives home this point, arguing that the government should have considered:
  
  the documented negative effects the widespread availability of contraceptives has on women’s ability to enter into and maintain desired marital relationships. This in turn leads to decreased emotional wellbeing and economic stability (out-of-wedlock childbearing being a chief predictor of female poverty), as well as deleterious physical health consequences arising from, inter alia, sexually transmitted infections and domestic violence. And so, as the AFLC argues, contraceptives of all kinds aren’t medical or related to health care at all. They are “procedures involving gravely immoral practices.” Protected sex demeans women by making men disrespect them. (Just as Pope Paul VI did decades ago, the AFLC presents this as true inside marriage as well as out.) By separating sex from childbearing, birth control is to blame for the erosion of marriage, for the economic difficulties of single motherhood, and even for the rotten behavior of men who beat their girlfriends and wives. Birth control is the original sin of modernity. Its widespread availability changed everything, for the worse.
  
  Birth control is to blame for the erosion of marriage and even for the rotten behavior of men who beat their girlfriends and wives. If it sounds like I’m describing a 1960s enraged sermon about the pill, I guess that’s the point: I could be. The Hobby Lobby case has given the groups that want to go back to prepill days a chance to air their nostalgia. And they want the Supreme Court to know that all women don’t share the view that controlling one’s body, with regard to the deep, life-altering question of when to be pregnant, is helpful and freeing. There are plenty of women who don’t “value free abortion drugs above public goods such as religious freedom and limited government,” as the brief from conservative women’s groups, including Concerned Women for America and the Susan B. Anthony List, puts it. And they are on the straight-and-narrow conservative path to sanctified motherhood. “It is demeaning to women to suggest that women’s fertility and the bearing and rearing of children are ‘barriers,’ ” the group Women Speak for Themselves argues. “Most women aspire to and do bear and rear children.”
  
  Most women who have abortions bear and rear children, too, actually. And it goes without saying that women who have used birth control have kids, too, since “women who use contraceptives” means practically every woman in the country. And yet there are still people willing to say that “well-woman preventive care visits” are about minimizing “the risk and consequence of a sexually licentious lifestyle,” as yet another brief insists.
  
  Make no mistake: If Hobby Lobby wins, the fundamentalist views I’ve been detailing (and despairing) win, too. Here’s the cherished ideal that will have its moment of ascendance: Women should welcome pregnancy at any time. Because if that blessing comes, it was divinely intended, and any other goal, at any moment, must yield.
  
  These Supreme Court cases are ostensibly about a few lines in the many pages of Obamacare regulations, but really, they’re about sex and power. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins pointed out last week, “The war on abortion is often grounded in a simple aversion to sex that does not lead to procreation.” The same is true of the war on birth control. It’s supposed to be over, but it’s not. Because according to the segment of the religious right that signed on to these briefs, there is only one way for true women to wield power: by giving it up to become God’s (and their husband’s) handmaidens.
     

Bill Gates on Religion

• You're a technologist, but a lot of your work now with the foundation has a moral dimension. Has your thinking about the value of religion changed over the years?
  
  The moral systems of religion, I think, are superimportant. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.
  
  Do you believe in God?
  
  I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view [laughs]. I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know.
     

Noah and Fundamentalists

• If you only half paid attention to the Noah hullabaloo, trust me, you’ve heard it all million times before: conservative Christians are howling mad at [insert something popular]. Whether it’s the Grammys, the A&E Network, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the holiday season, yoga, Harry Potter, the purple teletubby, or now Noah, media headlines tell us that religious conservatives are furious, and they’re not taking it sitting down.
  
  No matter what direction the conversation about the film takes, the flashy news headlines always seem to steer it back to religious conservative anger at the “anti-biblical, pagan film,” to quote that ever-bubbling fount of conservative Christian outrage, Ken Ham.
  
  To be fair, one can find numerous thoughtfully written blog entries and op-ed pieces that explore Noah’s important moral and religious dimensions; and news agencies do report the odd story here and there of religious appreciation of the film, including somewhat surprising (given the other headlines) religious conservative praise of the film. Indeed, as I’ve read many times in Facebook discussions, the statement that all Christians—even all conservative Christians—are opposed to Noah (or the A&E Network or Neil DeGrasse Tyson or the purple teletubby) is wildly irresponsible; Christian responses to all of these vary wildly, despite what the headlines may lead one to believe.
  
  What tends to get buried beneath the landslide of coverage of religious conservative outrage—and outrage over the outrage—is meaningful analysis of what, exactly, the religious critics of the film find so objectionable.
  
  Ostensibly, the main issue, which comes up in virtually every religious conservative screed, is the liberties that Aronofsky has taken with the biblical account of Noah: he has both failed to depict certain key details properly and has added objectionable details to the sacred account. While some Aronofsky supporters refute these charges of biblical infidelity, what is notable is that both the detractors and supporters agree that the controversy hinges to a great degree on whether or not the film is true to the biblical account, as Annette Yishiko Reed so persuasively discussed recently on RD.
  
  “Being faithful to the bible” or “reading the bible literally” are the catchphrases for this kind of biblical controversy. For many religious conservatives the phrases seem to function as sacred passwords: speak them at the right time, and you are one of us. Critics, however, hear the same phrases and roll their eyes at the presumed intellectual naivety and moral stricture they suggest.
  
  The catchphrases, however, only beg the question about why religious conservatives object to the film, for Christians of all stripes—conservatives, progressive, and everything in between—attempt to be faithful to the bible as they understand it; and it is utterly impossible to read all parts of the bible literally, as is so often gleefully pointed out by religious conservatism’s freethinking opponents, as though they’ve cinched the argument in a Palin-esque gotcha moment.
  
  Nor will anyone win over a religious conservative critic of Noah by arguing that the film is actually quite true to the biblical text, no matter how learned the apologist or how persuasive the arguments. For “being faithful to the bible” or “reading the bible literally” are not the main sources of controversy surrounding the film, despite what the film’s detractors or supporters explicitly say. A comparison to the religious conservative reception of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ provides an interesting case in point.
  
  Like Noah, that film was criticized for deviating from the biblical account, for injecting into the story a heavy-handed dose of the director’s editorial pizzazz, and for inserting a spiritual message foreign to the biblical text (Anne Catherine Emmerich’s 18th Century mysticism for Gibson, rather than Aronofsky’s 21st Century environmentalism). The glaring difference between the two was that criticism of The Passion came from everyone but religious conservatives (mainline Christians, Jews, progressives, scholars of religion, film critics) while religious conservatives jumped to defend the film as being true to the biblical text.
  
  In both cases—religious conservative approval of The Passion and rejection of Noah—there is something much deeper going on than a simple evaluation of whether or not a film is faithful to the biblical text or whether the director is reading the bible literally. The films ignite impassioned responses because they touch on an issue that lies at the very core of religious conservative piety: namely, the distinctive understanding of the role and function of the biblical text in the formation of one’s religious identity.
  
  “Biblicism” is the now popular scholarly term to designate this particular approach to biblical authority within conservative Christian circles; to explain it more fully, it’s important to consider the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the early part of the twentieth century (a controversy that emerged initially within the Presbyterian Church, but which quickly spilled over to virtually all other denominations).
  
  The heart of the controversy revolved around the cultural, intellectual, and technological changes that were sweeping through American society at the turn of the century, and how these changes impacted traditional Protestant modes of faith. Religious conservatives, in particular, felt threatened by what they saw. Darwinism offered an account of the origins of the universe at odds with the biblical account of creation, while the German model of higher criticism treated the bible as a collection of ancient myths and folklore, enabling biblical scholars to read the sacred text, like any other ancient writing, against the backdrop of its own social and literary context.
  
  For liberals like Harry Emerson Fosdick, the proper Christian response to these new discoveries in science, history, and literature was to combine them with received Christian truth—exactly, according to Fosdick, as Christians had always done in the past when they encountered new truths. “The new knowledge and the old faith [have] to be blended in a new combination,” Fosdick argued in his famous 1922 sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”—a new combination that for Fosdick demanded a Christianity without a virgin birth or literal second coming of Christ (among other things), which, he argued, were impossible to believe in, in this new scientific age. Conservatives, on the other hand, viewed the new discoveries in science and higher criticism as attacks on traditional truth of the bible; where the former conflicted with the latter, it was the Christian’s duty to place him or herself under the authority of received biblical truth, most especially those truths directly assailed by the secular forces of Modernism. Five “fundamentals” of biblical truth were initially proposed in 1910 to which all Christians should assent (the inerrancy of the bible; the virgin birth; the substitutionary atonement; the historicity of the miracles; the second coming). Others would soon follow.
  
  What’s important to understand about the Fundamentalist response to the rising tide of Modernism at the turn of the twentieth century, is not that this variety of religious conservatism was construed as a system of blind assent to a handful of propositions, but rather, as Kevin R. Kragenbrink wrote, that the Fundamentalist response had to do with, “the ways America was changing and … the ways that some Protestant conservatives chose to respond to those changes.” Fundamentalists opted for Biblicism: a particular attitude of reverence for the bible as a bastion of stability amid all the fluctuation of modern life, a conscious decision to place oneself under its authority, no matter the consequences.
  
  Today, the familiar religious conservative media figures are the ones who make the case for Biblicism most vocally, oftentimes in remarkably similar terms as the Fundamentalists from a century ago. Ken Ham, for example, who is president of Answers In Genesis and the Creation Museum—and vocal critic of Aronofsky’s Noah—is a case in point. His oft-repeated, outspoken defense of a young-earth creationist position rests on a Biblicist epistemology: evolution, he argues, represents “man's fallible beliefs of [what took place] billions of years ago” since it directly contradicts “the authority of God's Word,” which, in his mind, describes a literal seven-day creation about 6000 years ago. It’s evolution that must be discarded.
  
  Of course, Ken Ham represents the far extreme wing of religious conservative views on evolution today; many other conservative Christians find ways of reconciling the findings of evolutionary science with traditional biblical truth, distressing to Ham as this may be. What unites Ham with the other religious conservatives today is the same kind of Biblicism that united the religious conservatives a century ago: since the bible is indeed the Word of God, the refuge amid life’s storm, then we ought to read it with complete sincerity, from a position of faith, submitting ourselves to its authority.
  
  Though couched in terms of how faithfully the film follows the biblical text, the Noah controversy has more to do with whether or not Aronofsky approached the sacred text with the proper reverential attitude, placing himself under the authority of scriptural truth; Biblicism is the issue, not biblical literalism. Religious conservative critics did not even need to see the film to judge Aronofsky, an avowed atheist, wanting. And Aronofsky himself confirmed their worst fears by describing Noah as “the least biblical film ever made” and by referring to the Genesis account as “mythical,” to be read like any other ancient legend—echoing the very arguments of the higher critics during the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. For religious conservative critics, however, the bible isn’t any other text to be handled according to the individual whim of the reader; treat it this way, and you will add to the sacred text an impious, even anti-biblical agenda.
  
  Given this perspective, conservative religious outrage at Noah is quite a bit easier to understand. No matter which religious tradition they belong to, no matter what religious space they inhabit, all people of faith cherish some sacred kernel. They nourish this kernel tenderly, and guard it fiercely from assailants. For conservative Christians, this kernel is Biblicism; and in Aronofsky’s Noah, many sense attack.
     

Mormon Teaching

• While the church got headlines for dropping its much-mocked ‘Mormons get their own planets’ doctrine, it quietly reaffirmed a far more important, and more radical, tenet of the faith.
  
  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently backpedaled on a key tenet of Mormon theology: that after death, righteous Mormons will become gods, with the capacity to create planets of their own. But while press coverage of the walk-back has focused on the “Mormons get their own planets” doctrine, already ridiculed on Broadway and TV, what’s remarkable is what the LDS church left in.
  
  Indeed, the church doubled down on the core Mormon teaching that God had a physical/human body, and that, in turn, we will have spiritual/divine ones. In other words, that we are just like God and will later be “exalted” to God’s divine state. This despite a half-century of attempting to become more and more Christian, and less and less weird.
  
  That campaign is why the former standard-bearer of polygamy, a practice the church argued all the way to the Supreme Court on several occasions, has stood up as the defender of “traditional marriage” by funding anti-gay marriage campaigns in California and across the country. And why a formerly segregated church, which until 1978 barred African-Americans from the priesthood and still has in its scripture the teaching that people with black skin are “stained” that way because of sin, has now launched a multicultural ad campaign and waffled on what those verses really mean.
  
  Unfortunately, rather like Scientology’s efforts to rebrand itself as an alternative form of psychotherapy, the LDS church’s doctrinal whitewashing has been undermined by fractious ex-believers, pranksters just out to tease (or defame), and the Internet. The wackiest of Mormon teachings—many unknown to practicing Mormons today—have been dredged up and held to ridicule.
  
  But unlike Scientology, Mormonism also has a hit musical to contend with.
  
  Indeed, some believe the latest “Well, Not Really” letter from the LDS leadership is in response to the song “I Believe” from The Book of Mormon, which includes the lines:
  
  I believe that God has a plan for all of us
  
  I believe that plan involves me getting my own planet
  
  And I believe that the current President of the Church, Thomas Monson, speaks directly to God
  
  I am a Mormon
  
  And dangit, a Mormon just believes
  
  And also:
  
  I believe that in 1978 God changed His mind about black people
  
  I believe that God lives on a planet called Kolob
  
  I believe that Jesus has His own planet as well
  
  And I believe that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri
  
  Yes, all of these claims have been made by authoritative Mormons over the years. And yes, Mormonism does place an exceptionally high value on belief. You can be a pretty good Jew and still doubt that God flooded the world in 2034 B.C. But you can’t be a good Mormon if you don’t believe that ancient Jews sailed to America and founded a civilization here.
  
  Yet the wackier doctrines in “I Believe” are not as central as the satire suggests. The planet Kolob, for example, appears not in the Book of Mormon itself but in a text published (or “translated”) by Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. (SF geeks may also recall that it appears in Battlestar Galactica, written by a Mormon.)
  
  The real doctrine here, affirmed rather than rejected by “Becoming Like God,” is that Joan Osborne was right: God was one of us.
  
  Still, the criticisms have stung, particularly in the age of post-Mitt Romney Mormon mainstreaming. And so we have the church’s recent backpedaling encyclical, “Becoming Like God,” and its ilk. On the subject of special planets, the text says it’s all just a metaphor:
  
  “A cloud and harp are hardly a satisfying image for eternal joy, although most Christians would agree that inspired music can be a tiny foretaste of the joy of eternal salvation. Likewise, while few Latter-day Saints would identify with caricatures of having their own planet, most would agree that the awe inspired by creation hints at our creative potential in the eternities.”
  
  That view is quite different, though, from what Brigham Young said in 1874—and in many other texts as well—that after death:
  
  “We shall go on from one step to another, reaching forth into the eternities until we become like the Gods, and shall be able to frame for ourselves, by the behest and command of the Almighty. All those who are counted worthy to be exalted and to become Gods, even the sons of God, will go forth and have earths and worlds like those who framed this and millions on millions of others.”
  
  That is not a metaphor. After death, the “Saints”—i.e., righteous Mormons—will become Gods with the ability to “frame” new worlds and will indeed have them to themselves, just as God has this one.
  
  The de-literalization of this belief is a significant “correction” in Mormon dogma. But rather than hedge on the core Mormon teaching that we are just like God and will later be “exalted” to God’s divine state, “Becoming Like God” doubles down. It argues that some passages in the Bible “intimate that humans can become like God,” and that these are amplified by early church fathers such as Irenaeus and pseudo-Dionysius. Not like God in the sense of attributes—like God in the sense of, like God. “[H]uman beings are actually God’s children,” the text says.
  
  One reason today’s leaders couldn’t get away from this view is that, unlike Planet Kolob, it has been central for more than 100 years and reaffirmed quite recently. In 1994, Mormon president Gordon Hinckley affirmed that “as God now is, man may become!” Let’s look at the whole passage from the 1994 speech:
  
  “[T]he whole design of the gospel is to lead us onward and upward to greater achievement, even, eventually, to godhood. This great possibility was enunciated by the Prophet Joseph Smith in the King Follet sermon (see Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pp. 342—62; and emphasized by President Lorenzo Snow. It is this grand and incomparable concept: As God now is, man may become! (See The Teachings of Lorenzo Snow, comp. Clyde J. Williams, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1984, p. 1.)
  
  “Our enemies have criticized us for believing in this. Our reply is that this lofty concept in no way diminishes God the Eternal Father. He is the Almighty. He is the Creator and Governor of the universe. He is the greatest of all and will always be so. But just as any earthly father wishes for his sons and daughters every success in life, so I believe our Father in Heaven wishes for his children that they might approach him in stature and stand beside him resplendent in godly strength and wisdom.”
  
  Special planets are just the tip of the galactic iceberg. The real doctrine here, affirmed rather than rejected by “Becoming Like God,” is that Joan Osborne was right: God was one of us, not merely through the Incarnation, but in essence. God was a dude who became a God—just like you.
  
  That was not really a Mormon innovation. Mormon theology developed in the 19th century, under the strong influence of Western Esoteric doctrines such as those of Freemasonry. This family of doctrines held that human beings had the potential to attain immortality through their own agency. They also understood the world in material, albeit magical, terms. If God exists, then God has (or had) a body and a dwelling place. If the Temple in Jerusalem was Divine, then it had certain physical properties (architecture, materials) that were quasi-technological in nature. The “spirit world” was a real world.
  
  Today is a very different time. Post-Darwin, Post-Hubble telescope, religions these days confine themselves to the “spiritual,” but in quite another sense: not some parallel dimension, but a plane defined by its immateriality. The spiritual is basically the imaginary. Thus the interpenetration of the spiritual and the physical, once central to esoteric teachings including early Mormonism, is now seen as bizarre.
  
  Likewise, while we live in a more religiously pluralistic society than ever before, our band of tolerance is really quite narrow. Wearing special underwear is one thing, but making planets? The more exotic Mormonism appears, the less Christian it seems to believers, and the less reasonable it seems to skeptics. Ironically, conservative evangelicals and secular liberals are likely in agreement here.
  
  Perhaps, then, “Becoming Like God” was the perfect fudge. It got headlines for jettisoning the wacky detail, but beneath our collective notice, it reaffirmed the far more important, and more radical, tenet of the faith: that human beings can become Gods.
     

What Is A 'Christian' Nation?

• I am sure that David Cameron’s remarks about our being a “Christian nation” were well-intentioned; he wished to draw upon those magnanimous and liberal characteristics once connoted by the term “Christian”, as when people talked of “the Christian thing to do” to mean being tolerant, forgiving, considerate and kind.
  
  No doubt he also meant to refer to the historical fact that from the early seventh century, after Augustine’s visit in 597, Christianity was the dominant religious outlook of England, and eventually the entire British Isles. That hegemony over thought and belief lasted until the 18th century, when a more ambiguous attitude increased among educated minds. But it is important in a pluralistic society such as ours that we should not think that uses of “Christian” to suggest kindly attitudes entail that we are a nation of believers in the dogmas and legends of the religion.
  
  For, first, Christianity not only has no monopoly on tolerance, kindness, and generosity — characteristics that people of any religion or none can and should have — but it has in a bloody past often exhibited the opposite: the crusades, the Inquisition, wars of religion and persecutions trouble the world’s history with too much suffering to be ignored.
  
  Second, “being Christian” was enforced for many centuries, on pain of punishment up to and including death. Church attendance, tithes and adherence to doctrine were legal requirements. Does enforcement make us a Christian nation?
  
  Until the repeal of the Test Act in 1824 only those prepared to subscribe the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England were allowed to go to university or hold public office. The dissenting communities of Britain — comprising the most vigorous, innovative and entrepreneurial of all Britons — were excluded from these fiefdoms of privilege.
  
  In the Christian church’s early dominance — from the 4th century CE — much of the effort of church fathers such as Jerome, Ambrose and Augustine was devoted to “apologetics”, the explanation and justification of Christian teachings in an attempt to persuade a sceptical world. By the time of the church’s greatest temporal power and influence, the late Middle Ages, apologetics was an outdated genre, for it was no longer necessary to persuade people of Christianity: it was a capital crime not to believe it.
  
  Third, for most of the time since the 17th century, Britain and its empire were run by graduates of the ancient universities, where the main studies were the classics. So the British governing class was brought up on the literature, philosophy and history of classical Greece and Rome. This was a fine education in government, military strategy, ethics, political theory, management of an empire, social conditions, education, law and much besides. Aristotle and Cicero, Homer, Aeschylus and Virgil, the ancient myths and legends, the examples of Horatio and Mucius Scaevola, had as much if not more influence on ruling-class minds as Christianity, which provides little instruction — beyond a few bland generalisations about being nice — for dealing with life’s complexities.
  
  And this is not surprising: if you go to the New Testament for instruction on how to live, you are told to give away all your possessions, make no plans for the future, reject your family if they disagree with you and stay celibate if you can (see Matthew xix, 21, Matthew vi, 25, Matthew xii, 48, and I Corinthians vii). This is the outlook of people who sincerely believed the Messiah would return very soon, within weeks or months. It is an unlivable ethic and when, after several centuries, hope of the second coming had been deferred indefinitely, more was needed. Where did it come from? From Greek philosophy, not least from the Stoics, and the Roman republican virtues of probity, honour, duty, restraint, respect, friendship and generosity that Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Horace and others wrote about. “Christian values” are largely Greek and Roman secular values. So Christianity is not even Christianity.
  
  The early Christians, like St Paul, were Jews. They believed that when you die, your body sleeps in the grave until the last trump, at which point the graves open and the dead rise to be judged. St Paul said that the faithful will “see no corruption”, that is, their bodies will not rot in the grave. But when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, new needs arose. Churches were being built apace, all wanting relics of the saints. But when the saints were dug up, they were found to have rotted in their graves. This embarrassing problem was quickly solved by importing another idea from Greek philosophy — Plato’s doctrine of the immortal soul. That is how, starting several centuries after the lifetime of Jesus, Christians came to believe such a thing. Once again, Christianity is not Christianity but borrowed Greek philosophy.
  
  Mr Cameron would have been more right to say that “we are Greeks and Romans”, meaning that we are defined by the following words, and therefore concepts, of classical Greek and Latin origin: democracy, liberalism, values, history, morality, comedy, tragedy, literature, music, academy, alphabet, memory, politics, ethics, populace, geography, energy, exploration, hegemony, theory, mathematics, science, theatre, medicine, gymnasium, climate, clone, bureaucracy, dialect, analogy, psychology, method, nostalgia, organ, encyclopaedia, education, paradox, empiricism, polemic, rhetoric, dinosaur, telescope, system, school, trophy, type, fantasy, photography . . . take almost any word denoting political and social institutions, ideas, learning, science and technology, medicine and culture, and it derives from the language — and therefore the ideas and the history — of Ancient Greece and Rome.
  
  Christianity attempted to suppress all this heritage, and for a time succeeded. The Emperor Justinian in 529 closed the Athenian schools founded by Plato, Aristotle and others because they taught “pagan” philosophy (“philosophy” then meant all inquiry including science).
  
  There was little learning worth the name in the first seven centuries of Christian dominance because it had suppressed inquiry; later it persecuted those who advocated ideas in conflict with scripture: Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake, and Galileo nearly so, for not accepting that the Earth is fixed at the centre of the Universe as claimed by Psalm 104 and Joshua xx, 12. If the list of words just given provides us with the terminology that we use to describe ourselves today, then Christianity’s attempt to obliterate those words and what they mean makes us anything but a Christian nation.
  
  In our letter to the press last weekend we who had protested against the description had in mind also that we are a highly pluralistic nation, with many faiths and none, and that the “nones” are net contributors to our society and culture in major ways. They do not deserve to be overlooked.
  
  But the description of us as a “Christian nation” is deeply misleading if taken to imply that we are a nation of believers in Christian doctrines and legends. I hope and trust Mr Cameron meant something different and better: that we are a tolerant, generous, kindly nation. And I hope and trust he is right.
     

11 reasons why Jesus is not coming back...

• 1. There are enough Jesus tribute acts doing the rounds as it is and he would not be that enthusiastic about the competition. How could he possibly prove to people he really is the guy they have hanging on their living-room walls and as a bobble-head figure on their dashboards? I think that's a lot to take on for a guy well into his 2000s.
  
  2. He would be pressured into proving he really was the messiah by being humiliatingly forced to carry out tasks in front of a live audience. He would definitely not want to be put on the spot and perform a miracle under that heat. Besides, we already have enough cures and miraculous things going on in the modern world today, like: David Blaine, Dynamo, David Copperfield, homeopathy... and... dare I say? sliced bread.
  
  3. Starting up a Facebook fan page and an official Twitter account would be simple enough, even for a humble man, whose face is disheveled in archeological wrinkles; but he would have trouble trying to work out Twitter. He'd struggle like the rest of us mere social network mortals. Plus, he would have trouble trying to comprehend why he could get millions of followers in under an hour then moments later 2billion would unfollow him.
  
  4. People would harass him for his dad's address. It is not clear how much tolerance Jesus would have but after two thousand years it's pretty safe to say people would piss him off very easily. No guy wants to wait two millennium, make a paraded entrance, only to be badgered for his father's details. He's not Bradley Cooper's son.
  
  5. He would have to wear shoes. God, that would kill him. Due to health and safety there's no way he would be allowed into establishments in his bare feet or tattered sandals. This would mean he would have to stay at home and turn water into wine but then - he would have to prove he wasn't using a homemade brewer's kit anyone can buy on the internet.
  
  6. There's every chance nobody will take him seriously because back then men were tiny in proportion to today's male. Standing at an estimated 5ft 2" it is extraordinarily unlikely his followers will feel safe looking up to him. I think he would feel a little inadequate trying to muscle his way past other larger-than-life icons like basketball stars and superhero figures.
  
  7. Deep down I think Jesus doesn't want to comeback for fear of letting down half the world's population. I sense the feeling Jesus Christ loves the 'mysteriousness' of his existence. It's a bit like the Loch Ness Monster. If both Jesus and Nessie turned up at a police station to hand themselves in, and DNA proves both exist, the world's population of believers would be shattered beyond repair. Jesus knows he has the amount of followers he has because of the mystery surrounding him. If he turns up announced...heaven forbid...his credibility would be fried.
  
  8. Marketing-wise there is at least another two thousand years worth of economic value to be had with the whole Jesus thing. This is why I am certain Jesus has waited until now then checked back realizing the church has profited hugely from his name; so he will want to keep the church happy by prolonging his return. Also, Jesus' share issue keeps increasing.
  
  The very second his popularity starts to feel a slump he might think about using a doppelganger to take the fall. That would be difficult because the brand of Jesus isn't like McDonald's. At least McDonald's has one logo. Jesus looks completely different in every single picture. Long hair, beard, sad eyes, long hair, beard, sad eyes...get the picture? He looks like a different Argentine football player from every generation; and a failed discarded Spanish tennis hopeful whose parents couldn't afford any more lessons.
  
  9. Jesus is a bit miffed by no-one reporting him missing on a Facebook meme. Somehow a pot-bellied bespectacled loner in his late 50s who has not been seen since last Thursday - please share - is more believable than a long-haired bearded man in a linen frock; who claims to give sight to the blind and mobility to the crippled and hasn't been seen for over 2000 years - please share.
  
  10. It's that beard! Jesus' beard just isn't cutting it anymore; what with all those neatly-trimmed second-rated footballer's goatees on show. Okay, his beard is not that bad but he's stuck in the middle of a Kenny Rodgers and that guy we all know who lives under a bridge. I'm not sure how adventurous Jesus is but does he have the courage to go Catweazle? Nah, I didn't think so.
  
  And, finally...
  
  11. Maybe, just maybe, Jesus has never existed at all and it is a fictional tale used for control and manipulation. Forget his fear of social network sites, facial grooming and manly competition - Jesus has been dead for 2000 years and he's had plenty of time throughout history to make his long-awaited comeback. Why come back now just to get found out? If I was him I would just keep rolling that rock a little further outward from his cell cave each hundred years or so; revealing just a little bit more cloth each time - teasing - but not enough to give the game away. Well, maybe just a little thigh.
  
  Yeah I know, it's poor taste isn't it? But what is worse, 11 believable reasons that have every chance of proving beyond any reasonable doubt or sitting waiting on a guy to turn up who promised two thousand years ago and hasn't shown up yet?
  
  I rest my case, your honour. .
     

Biblical Marriage

• We must tell the whole story about the treatment of women and biblical marriage, one which hardly resembles the rosy picture religious conservatives seek to invoke with that phrase.
  
  We must tell the truth that the bible says that fathers can sell their daughters into sexual slavery (Ex 21:7)—given that enslaved women were used to breed slaves and for sexual gratification; there was no slavery for women in the bible that was not sexual slavery. (An argument can be made for the sexual abuse of male slaves as well.)
  
  We must tell the truth that the bible says soldiers can take virgin girls home with them as the spoils of war (Num 31:17).
  
  We must tell the truth that the bible says cut the nails off the woman you take home as your war prize (Deut 21:11)— making the rape easier on the rapist.
  
  We must tell the truth that the bible says that Israelite identity does not protect women from wholesale rape as a tool of war; Judges 21:10-23 details repeated kidnappings of girls for rape marriage within Israel by other Israelites.
  
  We must tell the truth that the bible says Ruth and Orpah were abducted into rape marriages just like the Nigerian schoolgirls. In Ruth 1:4, the verb used for their union is not the verb for marriage (l-q-ch) but the verb n-s-’, to “lift,” “abduct,” as in “throw her over your shoulder and run off with her.” It is the same verb used in the Judges text detailing the abduction and rape of the girls in Shiloh.
  
  We must tell the truth that what is biblical is not always godly, holy or even right.
     

The Onion: 9/11 Hijackers In Hell

• JAHANNEM, OUTER DARKNESS—The hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon expressed confusion and surprise Monday to find themselves in the lowest plane of Na'ar, Islam's Hell.
  
  "I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise, being fed honeyed cakes by 67 virgins in a tree-lined garden, if only I would fly the airplane into one of the Twin Towers," said Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, between attempts to vomit up the wasps, hornets, and live coals infesting his stomach. "But instead, I am fed the boiling feces of traitors by malicious, laughing Ifrit. Is this to be my reward for destroying the enemies of my faith?"
  
  The rest of Atta's words turned to raw-throated shrieks, as a tusked, asp-tongued demon burst his eyeballs and drank the fluid that ran down his face.
  
  According to Hell sources, the 19 eternally damned terrorists have struggled to understand why they have been subjected to soul-withering, infernal torture ever since their Sept. 11 arrival.
  
  "There was a tumultuous conflagration of burning steel and fuel at our gates, and from it stepped forth these hijackers, the blessed name of the Lord already turning to molten brass on their accursed lips," said Iblis The Thrice-Damned, the cacodemon charged with conscripting new arrivals into the ranks of the forgotten. "Indeed, I do not know what they were expecting, but they certainly didn't seem prepared to be skewered from eye socket to bunghole and then placed on a spit so that their flesh could be roasted by the searing gale of flatus which issues forth from the haunches of Asmoday."
  
  "Which is strange when you consider the evil with which they ended their lives and those of so many others," added Iblis, absentmindedly twisting the limbs of hijacker Abdul Aziz Alomari into unspeakably obscene shapes.
  
  "I was told that these Americans were enemies of the one true religion, and that Heaven would be my reward for my noble sacrifice," said Alomari, moments before his jaw was sheared away by faceless homunculi. "But now I am forced to suckle from the 16 poisoned leathern teats of Gophahmet, Whore of Betrayal, until I burst from an unwholesome engorgement of curdled bile. This must be some sort of terrible mistake."
  
  Exacerbating the terrorists' tortures, which include being hollowed out and used as prophylactics by thorn-cocked Gulbuth The Rampant, is the fact that they will be forced to endure such suffering in sight of the Paradise they were expecting.
  
  "It might actually be the most painful thing we can do, to show these murderers the untold pleasures that would have awaited them in Paradise, if only they had lived pious lives," said Praxitas, Duke of Those Willingly Led Astray. "I mean, it's tough enough being forced through a wire screen by the callused palms of Halcorym and then having your entrails wound onto a stick and fed to the toothless, foul-breathed swine of Gehenna. But to endure that while watching the righteous drink from a river of wine? That can't be fun."
  
  Underworld officials said they have not yet decided on a permanent punishment for the terrorists.
  
  "Eventually, we'll settle on an eternal and unending task for them," said Lord Androalphus, High Praetor of Excruciations. "But for now, everyone down here wants a crack at them. The legions of fang-wombed hags will take their pleasure on their shattered carcasses for most of this afternoon. Tomorrow, their flesh will be melted from their bones like wax in the burning embrace of the Mother of Cowards. The day after that, they'll be sodomized by the Fallen and their bowels shredded by a demonic ejaculate of burning sand. Then, on Sunday, Satan gets them all day. I can't even imagine what he's got cooked up for them."
  
  (Background and other related stories here
     

Old Earth Is Heresy

• Many Christians believe that the world is very old based on fossil records that are presumably dated at millions of years. Indeed the dispute between an old earth and a young earth is hotly debated within the Christian community. Unfortunately, those who subscribe to an old earth theory do not realize the enormity of their compromise.
  
  The compromise is that as soon as one allows for an earth millions of years old, then one has accepted death, bloodshed, disease and suffering before Adam’s sin. In other words, the Garden of Eden would have been seated upon a mountain of dead animal bones. This doesn’t sound much like paradise.
  
  Now if the world were millions of years old as suggested by evolutionists, blood was shed and death occurred before Adam's original sin. This would destroy the foundation of the atonement brought by the death of Christ on the cross. According to 1 Corinthians 15:54, sin and death have been swallowed up in victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus the enormity of compromise is revealed. To believe in evolution undermines the entire gospel message of Jesus Christ. All Christians believe that Jesus Christ suffered physical death and shed His blood because death was the penalty for sin. Therefore, teaching millions of years of death, disease and suffering before Adam sinned, is a direct attack on the foundation and message of the Cross.
     

Losing Our Religion

• The human mind is primed to believe in god, so why are so many people abandoning religion – and should we be worried about living in an atheist world?
  
  ON AN unseasonably warm Sunday morning in London, I do something I haven't done for more than 30 years: get up and go to church. For an hour and a half, I sing, listen to readings, enjoy moments of quiet contemplation and throw a few coins into a collection. At the end there is tea and cake, and a warm feeling in what I guess must be my soul.
  
  This is like hundreds of congregations taking place across the city this morning, but with one notable exception: there is no god.
  
  Welcome to the Sunday Assembly, a "godless congregation" held every other week in Conway Hall, home of the world's oldest free-thought organisation. On the day I went there were at least 200 people in the hall; sometimes as many as 600 turn up.
  
  Founded by comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans in 2013, the Sunday Assembly aims to supply some of the uplifting features of a religious service without any of the supernatural stuff. Atheism is also off the agenda: the Assembly is simply about celebrating being alive. "Our mission is to help people live this one life as fully as possible," says Jones.
  
  The Assembly's wider goal is "a godless congregation in every town, city and village that wants one". And many do: from a humble start in a deconsecrated church in London, there are now 28 active assemblies in the UK, Ireland, US and Australia. Jones now works full-time to fulfil the demand for more; he expects to have 100 by the end of this year.
  
  The people I joined on that sunny Sunday are a small part of the world's fastest-growing religious identity – the "nones". Comprising non-believers of all stripes, from convinced atheists like me to people who simply don't care about religion, they now number more than some major world religions.
  
  In London, admittedly, they are nothing special. The UK is one of the least religious countries in the world, with around half of the population saying they don't belong to any religion.
  
  But elsewhere, their rise is both rapid and remarkable. A decade ago, more than three-quarters of the world's population identified themselves as religious. Today, less than 60 per cent do, and in about a quarter of countries the nones are now a majority. Some of the biggest declines have been seen in countries where religion once seemed part of the furniture, such as Ireland. In 2005, 69 per cent of people there said they were religious; now only 47 per cent do.
  
  "We have a powerful secularisation trend worldwide," says Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "There are places where secularisation is making huge inroads: western and northern Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and China."
  
  Even in the US – a deeply Christian country – the number of people expressing "no religious affiliation" has risen from 5 per cent in 1972 to 20 per cent today; among people under 30, that number is closer to a third.
  
  That's not to say that they have all explicitly rejected religion; only 13 per cent of people around the world say they are "committed" atheists. Even so, it means there are almost a billion atheists globally. Only Christianity and Islam can claim more adherents. And alongside them are another billion and a half who, for whatever reason, don't see themselves as religious.
  
  A century ago, these trends would have seemed inevitable. The founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, expected scientific thinking to lead to the gradual erosion and eventual demise of religion. They saw the rise of humanist, rationalist and free thought organisations in western Europe as the start of a secular revolution.
  
  Born to believe
  
  It didn't quite work out that way. Although parts of western Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand did secularise after the second world war, the rest of the world remained resolutely god-fearing. Even the official atheism of the communist bloc didn't really take hold at grass-roots level.
  
  If anything, at the end of the 20th century, religion seemed to be resurgent. Fundamentalist movements were gaining ground around the world; Islam was becoming a powerful political force; the US remained stubbornly religious. Increasingly, secular Europe looked like an outlier.
  
  Now, though, secularisation is back in business. "The past 20 years has seen a precipitous decline in religiosity in all societies," says Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. "We are seeing religion withering across the board. Yes, there are pockets of increased fundamentalism, but overall we are seeing rising rates of secularism in societies where we have never seen it before – places like Brazil, Ireland, even in Africa."
  
  So is the 19th century prediction of a godless world finally coming true? Is it possible that one day the majority of people will see themselves as non-religious? And if that happens, will the world be a better place?
  
  To answer these questions, we need to know why people believe in god in the first place.
  
  For many, the answer is obvious: because god exists. Whether or not that is the case, it illustrates something very interesting about the nature of religious belief. To most people, probably the vast majority who have ever lived, belief in god is effortless. Like being able to breathe or learning one's native language, faith in god is one of those things that comes naturally.
  
  Why is that? In recent years, cognitive scientists have produced a comprehensive account of the human mind's receptivity to religious ideas. Called cognitive by-product theory, it holds that certain features of human psychology that evolved for non-religious reasons also create fertile ground for god. As a result, when people encounter religious stories and claims, they find them intuitively appealing and plausible.
  
  For example, our early ancestors were regularly on the dinner menu of predators, and so evolved a "hypersensitive agency detection device" – a fancy name for an assumption that events in the environment are caused by sentient beings, or agents. That makes evolutionary sense: when any rustle in the bushes might be a prowling predator it is better to err on the side of caution. But it also primes us to assume agency where there is none. That, of course, is a central claim of most religions: that an unseen agent is responsible for doing and creating things in the world.
  
  Existential comfort
  
  Humans have evolved other quirks that encourage the spread of religious beliefs. Notions of a benevolent personal god, higher purpose and an afterlife, for example, help people to manage the existential dread and uncertainty that are part of being human.
  
  We also have a tendency to imitate high-status individuals – think of modern celebrity culture – and to conform to social norms, both of which promote the spread and maintenance of belief. We are especially impressed by what social scientists call CREDs or "credibility-enhancing displays" – costly and extravagant acts of faith such as fasting, self-flagellation or martyrdom.
  
  Finally, people who think they are being watched tend to behave themselves and cooperate more. Societies that chanced on the idea of supernatural surveillance were likely to have been more successful than those that didn't, further spreading religious ideas.
  
  Taken together, the way our minds work makes us naturally receptive to religious ideas and extremely likely to acquire them when we encounter them. Once humans stumbled on the idea of god, it spread like wildfire.
  
  Cognitive by-product theory is a very successful account of why humans gravitate towards religious ideas. However, it has also been turned on the opposite problem: if belief in god comes so easily, why are there atheists?
  
  Until quite recently, it was widely assumed that people had to reason their way to atheism: they analysed the claims of religion and rejected them on the grounds of implausibility. This explained why atheism was a minority pursuit largely practised by more educated people, and why religion was so prevalent and durable. Overcoming all of those evolved biases, and continuing to do so, requires hard cognitive work.
  
  This "analytical atheism" is clearly an important route to irreligion and might explain some of the recent increase in secularity. It certainly flourishes in places where people are exposed to science and other analytical systems of thought. But it is by no means the only flavour of irreligion. In the US, for example, among the 20 per cent of people who say they have no religious affiliation, only about 1 in 10 say they are atheists; the vast majority, 71 per cent, are "nothing in particular".
  
  "There are many pathways and motivations for becoming atheist," says Norenzayan. "Disbelief does not always require hard cognitive effort."
  
  So if people aren't explicitly rejecting religious claims, what is causing them to abandon god? To Norenzayan, the answer lies in some of the other psychological biases that make religious ideas so easy to digest.
  
  One of the main motivations for abandoning god is that people increasingly don't need the comfort that belief in god brings. Religion thrives on existential angst: where people feel insecure and uncertain, religion provides succour. But as societies become more prosperous and stable, this security blanket becomes less important.
  
  By this reckoning it is no coincidence that the world's least religious countries also tend to be the most secure. Denmark, Sweden and Norway, for example, are consistently rated as among the most irreligious. They are also among the most prosperous, stable and safe, with universal healthcare and generous social security.
  
  Conversely, the world's most religious countries are among its poorest. And within countries, poorer segments of society tend to be more religious, according to the Global Index of Religion and Atheism.
  
  The link is supported by laboratory studies showing that making people aware of existential threats such as pain, randomness and death temporarily strengthens their belief in god. It seems to hold in the real world too: after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand – normally a stable and safe country with corresponding low levels of religiosity – religious commitment in the area increased.
  
  Norenzayan refers to the kind of atheism that exists in these places as "apatheism". "This is not so much doubting or being sceptical, but more about not caring," he says. "They simply don't think about religion."
  
  Counter-intuitively, he adds, apatheism could also explain the strength of religion in the US. In comparison to other rich nations, the US has high levels of existential angst. A lack of universal healthcare, widespread job insecurity and a feeble social safety net create fertile conditions for religion to flourish.
  
  Another important source of irreligion is "inCREDulous atheism". That doesn't mean incredulous as in unbelieving, but as in not being exposed to CREDs, those dramatic displays of faith. "These have a powerful effect on how religion is transmitted," says Norenzayan. "Where people are willing to die for their beliefs, for example, those beliefs become more contagious. When people don't see extravagant displays, even if they are surrounded by people who claim to believe, then there is some evidence that this leads to decline of religion."
  
  Norenzayan has yet to work out the relative importance of these different routes to atheism, partly because they are mutually reinforcing. But he says his hunch is that apatheism is the most important. "That is probably surprising to a lot of people who think you get atheism by analytical thinking. But I see striking evidence that as societies become more equal and there are social safety nets, secularisation follows," he says.
  
  To some religious proponents, this is evidence that most of the "nones" aren't really atheists at all – a claim that is backed by a recent survey from UK-based Christian think tank Theos. It found that even as formal religion is waning in the UK, spiritual beliefs are not. Almost 60 per cent of adults questioned said they believed in some form of higher power or spiritual being; a mere 13 per cent agreed with the line "humans are purely material beings with no spiritual element".
  
  Some scientists – notably Pascal Boyer at Washington University in St Louis – have even claimed that atheism is psychologically impossible because of the way humans think. They point to studies showing, for example, that even people who claim to be committed atheists tacitly hold religious beliefs, such as the existence of an immortal soul.
  
  To Norenzayan, this is all semantics. "Labels don't concern me as much as psychology and behaviour. Do people say they believe in god? Do they go to a church or synagogue or mosque? Do they pray? Do they find meaning in religion? These are the variables that should interest us." By these measures, most of the nones really are irreligious, meaning atheism is much more durable and widespread than would be the case if the only route to atheism was actively rejecting religious ideas.
  
  Nones on the run
  
  Will the trend continue? On the face of it, it looks unlikely. If godlessness flourishes where there is stability and prosperity, then climate change and environmental degradation could seriously slow the spread of atheism. "If there was a massive natural disaster I would expect a resurgence of religion, even in societies that are secularised," says Norenzayan. The Christchurch earthquake is a case in point.
  
  It is also not clear that European secularisation will be replicated elsewhere. "The path that countries take is historically contingent and there are exceptions," says Stephen Bullivant, a theologian at St Mary's University in the UK and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Atheism.
  
  Nonetheless, he says, there is widespread agreement that if prosperity, security and democracy continue to advance, secularisation will probably follow. Ireland's shift towards irreligion coincided with its economic boom, says Michael Nugent, chairperson of Atheist Ireland. Interestingly, Ireland is showing no signs of a religious revival despite its recent economic woes, suggesting that once secularisation gets going it is hard to stop.
  
  Ireland's experience also suggests that the most unlikely of places can begin to turn their back on long-held beliefs. "Ireland was always one of Europe's exceptions. If it can happen there it can happen elsewhere – Poland, or even the Philippines," says Bullivant.
  
  And then there's the fact that the US seems to be moving away from god. The "nones" have been the fastest growing religious group there for the past 20 years, especially among young adults. One explanation for this is one of those historical contingencies: the cold war. For decades, Americans defined themselves in opposition to godless communists and atheism was seen as unpatriotic. The generation that grew up after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 are the most irreligious since records began.
  
  Interestingly, after the cold war Russia rebounded in the other direction. In 1991, 61 per cent of Russians identified as nones; by 2008, that had dropped to just 18 per cent. But even the Russians now seem to have joined the recent secularisation trend: according to the Global Index of Religion and Atheism, only 55 per cent of people polled there in 2012 regard themselves as religious.
  
  Bullivant thinks the secularisation trend will continue for another reason: the way religion is passed down the generations. "The strongest predictor of whether a person grows up to be religious is whether their parents are," he says. A child whose parents are actively religious has about a 50 per cent chance of following them. A child whose parents are not has only about a 3 per cent chance of becoming religious.
  
  "In terms of keeping people, the non-religious are doing very well indeed," says Bullivant. "It is extremely unusual for somebody brought up in a non-religious household to join a religion, but it is not at all unusual for somebody brought up with a religious affiliation to end up as non-religious." In the UK, for every 10 people who leave the Catholic church, only one joins – usually from another Christian denomination.
  
  Bullivant also points out that religiosity tends to be fixed by the time people reach their mid-20s. So the 30 per cent or so of young people in the US who don't identify with any religion are unlikely to change their minds as they get older, and are likely to pass their irreligion on to their own children. "The very fact that there is such a group, that it is quite big and that there wasn't such a group before is an indicator of secularisation," says Bullivant.
  
  So can the world really give up on god? "I think it is possible," says Norenzayan, "because we are seeing it happen already."
  
  What would a world without god actually look like? One oft-voiced concern is that religion is the moral glue that holds society together, and that if you get rid of it, everything collapses. "That position is constantly articulated in the US – even secular people buy into it," says Zuckerman.
  
  The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. In 2009, Zuckerman ran a global analysis comparing levels of religiosity in various countries with measures of societal health: wealth, equality, women's rights, educational attainment, life expectancy, infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, STI rates, crime rates, suicide rates and murder rates. "On just about every measure of societal health, the more secular a country or a state, the better it does." The same holds for the 50 US states.
  
  That, of course, doesn't necessarily mean that secularism creates a healthy society: perhaps the rise of apatheists is a consequence rather than a cause. "But it allows us to debunk the notion that religion is necessary for a healthy society," says Zuckerman.
  
  He goes further, however, arguing that secularisation can lead to social improvements. "I now believe there are aspects of the secular world view that contribute to healthy societies," he says. "First, if you believe that this is the only world and there is no afterlife, that's going to motivate you to make it as good a place as possible. Number two is the emphasis on science, education and rational problem-solving that seems to come with the secular orientation – for example, are we going to pray to end crime in our city or are we going to look at the root causes?"
  
  It is also hard to discuss mass atheism without invoking the spectre of the Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge, North Korea and many other regimes that suppressed or banned religion. Is there a risk that a majority secular world will be more like Stalingrad than Stockholm?
  
  To Zuckerman, there is a very good reason to think not. "I distinguish between coercive atheism that is imposed from above by a dictatorial regime, and organic atheism that emerges in free societies. It is in the latter that we see positive societal health outcomes."
  
  Perhaps a more credible worry is what would happen to our physical and mental health. The past 20 years have seen a great deal of research into the benefits of being religious, and most studies claim to find a small association between religiosity, health and happiness. This is usually explained by religious people leading healthier lifestyles and having strong social support networks.
  
  Some researchers have therefore jumped to the conclusion that if religion brings health and happiness, then atheism must come at a corresponding cost. Yet the link between religion and health is nowhere near as well established as is often claimed. A meta-analysis of 226 such studies, for example, found a litany of methodological problems and erroneous conclusions. What's more, the little research that has been done on atheists' physical and psychological health found no difference between them and religious people. And at a societal level, of course, a greater proportion of atheism is associated with better public health.
  
  But if you think an atheist world would be a paradise of rationality and reason, think again. "When people no longer believe in god, it doesn't mean they don't have intuitions that are powerfully connected to the supernatural," says Norenzayan. "Even in societies that are majority atheist, you find a lot of paranormal belief – astrology, karma, extraterrestrial life, things that don't have any scientific evidence but are intuitively obvious to people."
  
  That, however, isn't necessarily a bad thing. "It is important to appreciate that there are powerful psychological reasons why we have religion," says Norenzayan. "We can't just say 'it is a superstition, we need to get rid of it'. We need to find alternative solutions to the deep and perennial problems of life that religion tries to solve. If societies can do that I think atheism is a viable alternative."
  
  Godless congregations like the Sunday Assembly can help, by serving the needs of nones who yearn for a sense of community and a common moral vision. They also articulate secular values and get the message across that godless societies can be healthy ones. If that means accepting a certain level of new-agey irrationality, then so be it.
  
  All of which adds up to a vision of an atheist future rather different from the coldly rational one that Weber and Durkheim – and more recently Richard Dawkins and the other New Atheists – envisaged. A bit happy-clappy, a bit spiritual, driven more by indifference to religion rather than hostility to it – but a good society nonetheless. In fact, a society not unlike modern Britain. And as I walk back to my car on a sunny Sunday morning, I can't help feeling that wouldn't be so bad.
     

Religious Apathy

• Across the developed world, people are losing interest in god without becoming atheists. That's a good thing
  
  RELIGIOUS belief is usually a no-go area for British prime ministers. As Tony Blair's media advisor Alastair Campbell once put it: "we don't do God".
  
  The current occupant of No. 10 seems to have decided otherwise. In widely reported comments made over Easter, David Cameron said that people in the UK should be "more evangelical" and "more confident about our status as a Christian country".
  
  That provoked a chorus of dissent – some of it, rather unexpectedly, from the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Describing the UK as a "post-Christian country", Rowan Williams said that the era of widespread worship was over.
  
  Williams is right. It is clear that the UK's past was dominated by Christianity – with a strong streak of paganism – but its present is non-religious. Just under half of British adults profess no religious affiliation; Christians of all denominations are in a minority.
  
  That drift away from religion is an interesting phenomenon. The UK isn't becoming a country of committed atheists. Most of the unaffiliated neither accept nor reject religion: they simply don't care about it. In that respect, the UK looks a lot like much of the developed world. Even the US is heading that way
  
  Much as there ever was a contest between strident religion and militant atheism, it seems there was no winner. In practice, however, indifference to religion looks very much like atheism, and even more like secularism.
  
  That may alarm those who fear that the decline of state-endorsed religion will lead to social decay – a fear Cameron invoked when he said secularists "fail to grasp... the role that faith can play in helping people have a moral code".
  
  But that fear is groundless. As the prime minister said in his next breath: "faith is neither necessary nor sufficient for morality" – a position many biologists would agree with. Morality arises from the workings of our social brains. And our exploration of the world around us helps us frame moral codes that reflect the world as it is, not as we imagine it to be.
  
  Personal faith remains a private matter. But those passionate about religion's role in public life – whether to elevate or expunge it – should recognise they are in the minority. Increasingly, none of us "do God".
     

Religious Extremism

• The charge of hypocrisy can, however, be convenient for the religious community itself, in that it enables those believers to disavow and dismiss the actions of an errant individual or group. Although seldom stated in these terms we often find the religious equivalent of the no true Scotsman fallacy: since no true Christian would force others into labor, Miller must, if the charge is true, not really be a Christian. Or, to use another example, the Westboro Baptist Church must not really be Christians because true Christians would never protest at funerals.
  
  It’s an effective strategy, insofar as it appears to protect the integrity of mainstream religious belief against what appear as more extreme elements. Indeed, sometimes it’s appropriate and necessary to do so. But it can also be lazy and disingenuous, to the extent that it functions as a defense mechanism that fails to acknowledge the complicity of mainstream beliefs in their extreme counterparts.
  
  A belief or action is “extreme” not because of its putative disconnection from the mainstream; rather, it is “extreme” because of the way it pushes or takes the logic of a “mainstream” belief. The difference between the two, then, is one of degree, not kind, which also means that what we label as “extreme” finds its origin to an extent in the “mainstream.”
  
  Masters and servants
  
  Displayed prominently on Cathedral Bible College’s homepage is a brief statement of its mission, which contains a reference to II Timothy 2:21: “Cathedral Bible College is the college where you not only learn in the classroom, but experience what you are learning through the various programs of student ministry. The key to our producing servants ‘meet for the Masters [sic] use’ is the training that comes from the teaching.”
  
  Of course this passage doesn't explicitly provide some sort of justification for Miller’s action, but the language of “servant” and “Master” does, perhaps, function as part of a social-linguistic horizon that, when pushed, makes the notion of forced labor legitimate to those doing the forcing. Most Christians today (though not necessarily in the past) would likely denounce that logic as abhorrent, as an illegitimate extension of the language involved—and rightly so. But the problem lies in the language itself—servant, master, lord, and so on—and the types of relationships that that language implies and reinforces, rather than its extension. That is, the continued use of such language and what it implies in mainstream, relatively benign contexts unwittingly enables its use in more problematic—and, in the case of Miller, dehumanizing—contexts.
  
  Or take the case of the late Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. One would be hard-pressed to find many Christians lending support to the group's rhetoric and activities. But, I would suggest, this has more to do with the tactics it deploys rather than the basic substance of its rhetoric and actions, specifically as they relate to homosexuality. Although most will be quick to denounce Westboro Baptist Church’s vehement anti-gay tactics and rhetoric, it remains the case that a significant number of Americans unproblematically consider homosexuality to be a sin. The Westboro Baptist Church’s position remains, in this sense, a more extreme extension of this core belief—but an extension of it nonetheless.
  
  So, although abhorrent, the actions of Westboro Baptist Church are not surprising from a religious perspective. Neither are the alleged actions of the president of Cathedral Bible College. If we can get past the knee-jerk reactions, we may often find that such actions are more “mainstream” than we first thought.
  
  In saying this, however, we must also be careful to avoid another potential trap, the one that takes the relationship between the mainstream and its extreme extensions in terms of necessity. This is the problem, for instance, with many right-wing attacks on Islam. In suggesting that extreme elements (i.e. terrorism) are but a manifestation of “true” Islamic belief, such attacks may at first glance appear to adopt the position that I’ve been arguing for. The problem, however, is that such extremism is painted as inevitable, as a forgone conclusion, which is then used to paint Islam as a whole as extreme.
  
  Moreover, rather than adopting the position that I’ve been arguing for, I would suggest that, ironically, it adopts the position I’ve been arguing against—though in an inverse and malign fashion. That is, in equating the core of Islamic belief with terrorism, such attacks isolate a “true” Islam over against any hypocritical deviations, although here the position of the deviant is reversed: a “good”, “peaceful” Muslim must not really be a Muslim, since all Muslims are terrorists. The ethical and political problems with such a position should be obvious.
  
  So, in saying that we must seek to understand the relationship between what I’ve referred to as mainstream elements and extreme elements, I’m not suggesting that the latter necessarily flows out of the former; nor am I suggesting the construction of an ideological tool that can be used against religious believers. I am suggesting, rather, that part of understanding religion involves understanding the different forms that it takes, which means paying attention to the way that “extreme” elements are often related to the seemingly more benign, “mainstream” elements, without dismissing the former as necessarily outside the purview of “true” religion.
     

Catholics and Contraceptives

• Years later, when the remembrance of so many other things had faded, the memory still remained crisp in her mind. She saw herself lying in the hospital bed, bleeding, writhing in agony. She remembered clawing at the curtain surrounding the bed, trying get help, certain she was going to die. Finally she managed to cry out, “God dammit, I can’t die. I have five children.”
  
  Her cries roused her roommate, who summoned a doctor. The doctor managed to staunch the bleeding from the hematoma that had resulted from the birth of her fifth child. It was not an unexpected complication. She had hemorrhaged after giving birth to her fourth child. The doctors had warned her against any more pregnancies, but she was a devout Catholic and the church said that using birth control was a sin. So another pregnancy had followed quickly on the heels of the last, and a little over a year later she was again in danger of dying and leaving her children motherless. As she lay helpless on her bed, Jane Furlong-Cahill made a decision. “I decided that the pope can have all the kids he wanted. I was through,” she said.
  
  After that she used the Pill, which had only just become available, and eventually she got a tubal ligation to permanently end her childbearing ability. It was a controversial choice for a Catholic woman in 1964, but especially so for Cahill, who was one of the first women formally trained in Roman Catholic theology and knew that the church made no exception to its teaching that Catholics could never use artificial methods of contraception. The only acceptable form of birth control for Catholics, both then and now, is natural family planning, which relies on calculating a women’s infertile period during her menstrual cycle and only having sex on those days. The “rhythm method,” as natural family planning was called in the early 1960s, was notoriously unreliable, however, which made it a poor option for women like Cahill who really, really didn’t want another child.
  
  The Catholic Church’s absolute ban on modern methods of contraception is inextricably linked to its views on sex and marriage. The church fathers who laid out the founding doctrine of the religion were always squeamish about the idea of sexual intercourse; they considered chastity a holier state. But at the same time, they recognized that it was neither possible nor practical to suggest that most people abstain from sex. Corralling sex within marriage was better than unbridled fornication. Hence, it was “better to marry than to burn with passion,” according to the apostle Paul.
  
  But even within marriage, the Christian fathers’ acceptance of sex was grudging. Influenced by the Stoics, they looked to nature to determine the purpose and moral limits of bodily functions like sex. Therefore, sex within marriage was only moral if it was used for its “natural” purpose of procreation. They taught that Christians were not to have sex for pleasure or when pregnancy was impossible, such as when a woman was already pregnant. The belief that procreation sanctified sex automatically excluded the possibility of using withdrawal, contraceptive potions, or crude devices—all of which were common and widely used in the early Christian world—to frustrate conception.
  
  The first formal theological condemnation of contraception was made by St. Augustine in the early 400s, when he declared that it is “a procreative purpose which makes good an act in which lust is present” and that married people who contracept “are not married.” It was a proclamation that would guide Catholic thinking about contraception for the next 1,500 years as the Augustinian doctrine was gradually codified by the church.
  
  In 590, Pope Gregory the Great decreed that married couples who mixed pleasure with procreation in sexual intercourse “transgressed the law.” The first church legislation forbidding contraception appeared in the 600s in a canon that specified a penance of ten years for any woman who took “steps so that she may not conceive.” The church’s reaction to the distinctly non-procreative ethic of courtly love in medieval Europe and Catharism, a Christian sect that rejected the Catholic sacraments, including marriage, further hardened its insistence on the procreative purpose of sex. By 1400, Augustine’s doctrine on contraception was the rule within the church.
  
  Despite its longevity, Cahill wasn’t the only Catholic woman questioning the teaching on birth control. In 1964, another budding theologian named Rosemary Radford Ruether published an article entitled “A Catholic Mother Tells: ‘Why I Believe in Birth Control’” in the Saturday Evening Post, bringing the issue straight into the living rooms of Main Street America.
  
  Ruether took the church to task for failing to acknowledge that in modern marriages couples didn’t have sex just for the purpose of having children. She also revealed what many Catholic couples were saying privately: the rhythm method not only didn’t work, but put extraordinary strain on otherwise happy marriages. “A man and a wife may follow all the current methods for predicting the time of ovulation, they may be armed with an arsenal of slide rules, thermometers, glucose tests, they may abstain for the proscribed period with dogged perseverance, and they may still find that the method has failed. . . . The rhythm method keeps couples in a constant state of tension and insecurity,” she wrote.
  
  Ruether, who was just embarking on a promising career as a theologian and already had three young children, wrote of her own failure with the method and the desperation of other women who found themselves pregnant when they didn’t want to be, including a friend who was in despair after finding herself pregnant for the sixth time in seven years. Like many women of her day, Ruether realized that controlling her fertility with a fairly high degree of certainty was essential to her ability to steer her own life. “I see very clearly that I cannot entrust my destiny just to biological chance. As a woman who is trying to create a happy balance of work and family, I know effective family planning is essential. A woman who cannot control her own fertility, who must remain vulnerable to chance conception, is a woman who cannot hope to be much more than a baby-machine,” she wrote.
  
  Cahill and Ruether were not alone in concluding that the church’s dictum on contraception was an anachronism. Catholic theologians and bishops were also suggesting it was time to revisit the teaching. Two developments spurred their willingness to question the ban. One was a change in how the church viewed the purpose of marital sex. The church had held since Augustine’s time that the primary purpose of sex within marriage was procreation. But gradually a more positive view of sex crept in that allowed that pleasure and the expression of conjugal love could be part of the equation. In 1951, Pope Pius XII formally admitted that it was okay for married couples to enjoy sex: “In seeking and enjoying this pleasure, therefore, couples do nothing wrong.”
  
  The church’s view of marriage was evolving in tandem. Increasingly it viewed marriage as having two ends: procreation and the “ontological completion of the person” within the union of marriage. This meant that many of the old prohibitions against “sterile” sex within marriage—that is, sex that could not produce offspring—such as sex during pregnancy, no longer held. If some limited forms of non-procreative sex within marriage were now considered licit and sex was acknowledged to have more than one purpose in marriage, this raised the question of whether in general each and every act of intercourse within marriage necessarily had to be procreative.
  
  The second reason many theologians believed that the church could approve modern contraceptives was because it had already approved the idea of family planning when it approved the rhythm method. As Ruether noted in her Saturday Evening Post article, the church’s distinction between “natural” family planning and contraceptives was “theologically meaningless.”
  
  The church’s incongruence on the issue of family planning dated back to 1930 and the papal encyclical Casti Connubi (On Christian Marriage), which was written to address the growing acceptance of birth control throughout the Western world. The tipping point was reached in 1930, when the Anglican Church officially approved the use of birth control by married couples. Other Protestant denominations soon followed, signaling that contraceptives had gained moral and social legitimacy. The Catholic Church had to respond. On the very last day of 1930, Pope Pius XI issued Casti connubii, in which he firmly restated the absolute Augustinian prohibition on contraception and denounced the idea that the primary purpose of marriage was anything other than producing and raising children. He condemned contraception as “base and intrinsically indecent” and said that it “violates the law of God and nature, and those who do such a thing are stained by a grave and mortal flaw.”
  
  The encyclical was read to ban all known forms of contraception: withdrawal, the use of condoms or diaphragms, douching after intercourse, and folk contraceptive potions. However, the pope appeared to give approval to a birth control method that had been rattling around since the ancient Greeks but had seen a spike in interest since the discovery of female ovulation in the mid-1800s: timing sexual intercourse to coincide with a woman’s naturally occurring sterile period. The method had limited practical application at the time because science had yet to figure out exactly when during the menstrual cycle women ovulated.
  
  But all that changed in the early 1930s when scientists finally determined when ovulation typically occurred, allowing for the development of the rhythm method. It was far from perfect, but it did offer a way to at least slow the growth of a family without resorting to contraceptives. The Vatican earlier had indicated preliminary acceptance of rhythm, but growing interest in the method elevated the question of whether it was acceptable under Catholic doctrine to a pressing theological concern.
  
  The question was not definitively answered until 1951 by Pope Pius XI’s successor, Pius XII. In an address to the Italian Catholic Society of Midwives, he declared that the “observance of the sterile period can be licit” if done for serious reasons. He said, however, that serious indications for limiting births included “medical, eugenic, economic, and social” reasons, which went far beyond the reasons traditionally accepted by even the most liberal of Catholic theologians for refraining from sex to limit family size: extreme poverty or a serious threat to the woman’s health. In doing so he gave the Catholic Church’s stamp of approval to the idea of couples purposely manipulating the size of their family for the sake of the family’s overall well-being.
  
  So by 1960 the church had made three key admissions: that sexual intercourse within marriage played a role that was not limited to procreation; that it was acceptable to limit family size for a number of reasons; and that it was licit to use the naturally occurring sterile period to do so. Enter Catholic physician John Rock. By designing a contraceptive that used hormones already present in a woman’s body to mimic the natural infertility of a pregnant woman, he hoped the Vatican would find a theological basis to approve the method.
  
  In 1958, when the Pill was already being tested on human populations, Pius XII said its use would be acceptable “as a necessary remedy because of a disease of the uterus or the organism” even if it had the secondary effect of causing sterility. This meant women could use the Pill to treat painful periods or excessive bleeding, which became a popular early theological work-around for Catholic women who wanted to use it.
  
  Theologians also speculated that the Pill could be used to regulate irregular menstrual periods to make the rhythm method work more effectively. Of course, that raised the question why not just permit the use of the Pill?
  
  The debate over contraception emerged as the major issue facing the Catholic Church. Popular publications wrote about the “Catholic Revolution” and the “Growing Unrest in the Catholic Church” as the controversy became the subject of widespread discussion. In 1963, Pope John XXIII, who had succeeded Pius XII, appointed a commission that would eventually comprise fifty-five members, including five married Catholic women, theologians, priests, and physicians, to study the question of whether the church’s teaching on artificial contraception should be changed. There is some indication that he created the commission as a way to isolate the incendiary issue of birth control from the Vatican II proceedings, which were already dealing with a number of controversial doctrinal issues, and had no real intention of changing the policy on birth control.
  
  Originally there were no lay members on the commission, but when they were added they were all married Catholic couples drawn from conservative Catholic family organizations who could be expected to mirror the hierarchy’s position on contraception. The commission studied Catholic teachings on contraception and marriage and heard from its lay members on the realities of using the rhythm method. Contrary to the assertions of the hierarchy that the rhythm method, with its continual obsession with fertile periods and the timing of sexual intercourse, was a way to bring couples closer together and strengthen marriages, they heard that it stressed marriages and drove couples apart.
  
  They also heard from the women on the commission about the importance of sex in marriage beyond procreation and the burdens of repeated or poorly timed pregnancies. After a series of hearings, the commission voted overwhelmingly to recommend that the ban against artificial means of birth control be lifted. After all, the church had accepted the idea of birth control, so why not give couples a better way to practice it if it would strengthen marriages and families?
  
  Unhappy with the direction of the commission, the Vatican packed the last commission meetings with fifteen bishops to formulate the final recommendation to the pope. But even the bishops voted nine to three (three abstained from voting) to change the teaching, concluding that the popes’ previous teaching on birth control were not infallible and that the traditional theological basis for the prohibition of contraception was invalid. They declared that responsible parenthood was an essential part of modern marriage and that the morality of sexual acts between married couples was not dependent “upon the direct fecundity of each and every particular act” but must be viewed within the totality of the marriage relationship.
  
  Despite the commission’s years of work and theologically unassailable conclusion that the church’s teaching on birth control was neither infallible nor irreversible, Pope Paul VI stunned the world on July 29, 1968, when he reaffirmed the church’s ban on modern contraceptives in Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life). He declared that “each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.”
  
  The pope had deferred to a dissenting minority report prepared by four conservative theologian priests on the commission that maintained contraception was a “sin against nature” and a “shameful and intrinsically vicious act.” These theologians said that church could not change its teaching on birth control because admitting the church had been wrong about the issue for centuries would raise questions about the moral authority of the pope, especially on matters of sexuality, and the belief that the Holy Spirit guided his pronouncements. “The Church cannot change her answer because this answer is true. . . . It is true because the Catholic Church, instituted by Christ . . . could not have so wrongly erred during all those centuries of its history,” they wrote.
  
  As one of the conservative theologians famously asked one of the female members of the commission, what would happen to “the millions we have sent to hell” for using contraception if the teaching were suddenly changed?
  
  But another reason lurked behind the official explanation about why the teaching could not be changed: maintaining the link between sex and procreation was essential to the maintenance of the traditional, subordinate role of women. Maintaining the traditional family, in which men were leaders in the world outside the home and women were confined to the domestic realm by the demands of young children and repeated pregnancies, was a key concern of the Catholic Church. In the mid-1950s the Catholic bishops made headlines when they condemned married working mothers for deserting their children and helping to destroy the home. Allowing women to regulate their fertility was dangerous to what the church considered the natural order of things: women as receptors of God’s will as expressed through the acceptance of pregnancy.
  
  Stanislas De Lestapis, a Jesuit sociologist who was one of the four authors of the minority report, first warned against what he termed the “contraceptive mentality” a couple of years earlier in his 1961 book, Family Planning. He said allowing women the freedom to regulate when they got pregnant would lead to a decline in women’s maternal instinct and a hostility toward children, increased female promiscuity, and “confusion between the sexes.”
  
  Humanae Vitae came as a shock to Catholics, who had seen other aspects of the church—like the Latin mass and the teaching that Catholicism was the only road to salvation—change as a result of Vatican II and widely expected the contraception ban to be lifted. It seemed that the church was perfectly willing to evolve doctrine - except when it affected women.
  
  The day following the encyclical’s release, eighty-seven leading Catholic theologians released a statement condemning it, saying it relied on outmoded conceptions of papal authority and natural law. They said the encyclical was not infallible and because it was “common teaching in the Church that Catholics may dissent from authoritative teachings of the magisterium when sufficient reasons for doing so exist,” Catholics couples “may reasonably decide according to their conscience that artificial contraception in some circumstances is permissible.”
  
  The outcry over Humanae Vitae only further reinforced the belief of Catholic feminists that the church’s teaching regarding sexuality had little to do with theology. To Ruether and Cahill it was just one more piece of evidence that nothing would change in the church unless women made their voices heard. Eventually these pioneering women would bring their work to bear in an area that no one in the church was talking about: abortion.
     

Tea Party Is A Religious Movement

• Obama is the Antichrist, Republicans are heretics, and compromise is unholy. Politics can’t explain how the right acts. America has long been the incubator of many spiritual creeds going back to the Great Awakening and even earlier. Only one of them, Mormonism, has taken root and flourished as a true religion sprung from our own native ground. Today, however, we have a new faith growing from this nation’s soil: the Tea Party. Despite its secular trappings and “taxed enough already” motto, it is a religious movement, one grounded in the traditions of American spiritual revival. This religiosity explains the Tea Party’s political zealotry.
  
  The mark of a national political party in a democracy is its pluralistic quality, i.e. the ability to be inclusive enough to appeal to the broadest number of voters who may have differing interests on a variety of issues. While it may stand for certain basic principles, a party is often flexible in applying them, as are its representatives in fulfilling them. Despite the heated rhetoric of elections and the bombast of elected representatives, they generally seek consensus with the minority in order to achieve their legislative goals.
  
  But when religion is thrown into the mix, all that is lost. Religion here doesn’t mean theology but a distinct belief system which, in totality, provides basic answers regarding how to live one’s life, how society should function, how to deal with social and political issues, what is right and wrong, who should lead us, and who should not. It does so in ways that fulfill deep-seated emotional needs that, at their profoundest level, are devotional. Given the confusions of a secular world being rapidly transformed by technology, demography, and globalization, this movement has assumed a spiritual aspect whose adepts have undergone a religious experience which, if not in name, then in virtually every other aspect, can be considered a faith.
  
  This Antichrist in the White House is an illegitimate ruler who must be opposed at every turn, along with his lesser demons, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.
  
  Seen in this light, the behavior of Tea Party adherents makes sense. Their zeal is not the mercurial enthusiasm of a traditional Republican or Democrat that waxes and wanes with the party’s fortunes, much less the average voter who may not exercise the franchise at every election. These people are true believers who turn out faithfully at the primaries, giving them political clout in great excess to their actual numbers. Collectively, this can make it appear as if they are preponderant, enabling their tribunes to declare that they represent the will of the American people.
  
  While a traditional political party may have a line that it won’t cross,the Tea Party has a stone-engraved set of principles, all of which are sacrosanct. This is not a political platform to be negotiated but a catechism with only a single answer. It is now a commonplace for Tea Party candidates to vow they won’t sacrifice an iota of their principles. In this light, shutting down the Government rather than bending on legislation becomes a moral imperative. While critics may decry such a tactic as “rule or ruin,” Tea Party brethren celebrate it, rather, as the act of a defiant Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple. For them, this is not demolition but reclamation, cleansing the sanctuary that has been profaned by liberals. They see themselves engaged in nothing less than a project of national salvation. The refusal to compromise is a watchword of their candidates who wear it as a badge of pride. This would seem disastrous in the give-and-take of politics but it is in keeping with sectarian religious doctrine. One doesn’t compromise on an article of faith.
  
  This explains why the Tea Party faithful often appear to be so bellicose. You and I can have a reasonable disagreement about fiscal policy or foreign policy but if I attack your religious beliefs you will become understandably outraged. And if I challenge the credibility of your doctrine you will respond with righteous indignation. To question the validity of Moses parting the Red Sea or the Virgin Birth or Mohammed ascending to heaven on a flying horse is to confront the basis of a believer’s deepest values.
  
  Consequently, on the issues of government, economics, race, and sex, the Tea Party promulgates a doctrine to which the faithful must subscribe. Democrats and independents who oppose their dogma are infidels. Republicans who don’t obey all the tenants are heretics, who are primaried rather than burned at the stake.
  
  Like all revealed religions this one has its own Devil in the form of Barack Obama. This Antichrist in the White House is an illegitimate ruler who must be opposed at every turn, along with his lesser demons, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. They are responsible for everything that has gone wrong with the country in the last six years and indeed, they represent a liberal legacy that has betrayed America’s ideals for the better part of a century. Washington is seen in the same way Protestant fire-breathers once saw Rome: a seat of corruption that has betrayed the pillars of the faith. The only way to save America’s sanctity is to take control of Washington and undermine the federal government while affecting to repair it. Critical to this endeavor is the drumroll of hell-fire sermons from the tub-thumpers of talk radio and Fox News. This national revival tent not only exhorts the faithful but its radio preachers have ultimately become the arbiters of doctrinal legitimacy, determining which candidates are worthy of their anointment and which lack purity.
  
  Having created a picture of Hell, the Tea Party priesthood must furnish the faithful with an image of Paradise. This Eden is not located in space but in time: the Republic in the decades after the Civil War when the plantocracy ruled in the South and plutocrats reigned in the North. Blacks knew their place in Dixie through the beneficence of states’ rights, and the robber barons of the North had a cozy relationship with the government prior to the advent of labor laws, unions, and the income tax. Immigrants were not yet at high tide. It was still a white, male, Christian country and proudly so. When Tea Party stalwarts cry “Take back America!” we must ask from whom, and to what? They seek to take it back to the Gilded Age, and retrieve it from the lower orders: immigrants, minorities the “takers” of the “47 percent,” and their liberal enablers.
  
  Most critical to any religious movement is a holy text, and the Right has appropriated nothing less than the Constitution to be its Bible. The Tea Party, its acolytes in Congress and its allies on the Supreme Court have allocated to themselves the sole interpretation of the Constitution with the ethos of “Originalism.” Legal minds look to the text to read the thoughts of the Framers as a high priest would study entrails at the Forum. The focus is on text rather than context and authors; the writing rather than the reality in which the words were written. This sort of thinking is a form of literalism that is kindred in spirit to the religious fundamentalism and literal, Biblical truth that rose as bulwarks against modernity.
  
  One thing that Tea Partiers and liberals alike both recognize is that the Constitution forbids the establishment of religion. The prohibition was erected for good reason: to prevent the religious wars that wracked Europe in the previous century. The Enlightenment was to transcend such sectarian violence inimical to the social order together with the concomitant religious oppression that burdened individual conscience. By investing a political faction with a religious dimension the Tea Party presents a challenge to both religion and democracy.
     

Glasshouses

• Have you heard the news about Archbishop John C. Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis? It seems he's been accused of conducting numerous sexual affairs with men while also leading his archdiocese's fight against same-sex marriage and regularly denouncing homosexuality in the most uncompromising terms possible. Nienstedt and his predecessor, Archbishop Harry Flynn, have also been credibly accused of covering up and showing indifference toward the sexual abuse of children by priests in the archdiocese.
  
  I heard about both charges from blog posts by Rod Dreher, a conservative Christian friend, who learned of the first scandal from an article on the website of Commonweal, the liberal Catholic magazine, and was tipped off about the second one by a loyal reader who sent Dreher (in PDF form) the text of a sworn affidavit by Jennifer Haselberger, the former chief canon lawyer for the archdiocese, who gave her damning testimony in a civil lawsuit. The day after Dreher's post on the testimony appeared, The New York Times ran a substantial story about both scandals and the rising calls for Nienstedt's resignation.
  
  So let's just say that if you hadn't heard the news before you started reading this column, you would have heard about it elsewhere before long.
  
  And that is a big problem for the churches, especially the conservative churches that seek to uphold and promulgate traditionalist views of morality and doctrine. Indeed, it's a far bigger and potentially more ruinous problem than the one posed by dogmatic liberals using government regulations to impinge on the freedom of certain believers to practice and live their faith.
  
  Stated simply, the problem is this: Traditionalist churches preach a moral outlook that diverges sharply (especially in sexual matters) from the latitudinarian and egalitarian ethic of liberalism that increasingly dominates the lives of 21st-century Americans. When a scandal reveals that those who preach the stringent traditionalist view of morality fall far short of the standards they publicly demand of others, it makes them look like hypocrites and the church's teachings look like a cruel sham concocted by psychologically unbalanced clerics.
  
  But that's not even the heart of the problem. To become a potentially church-destroying trend, which is what I think it could develop into over the coming decades, it must be mixed with one additional ingredient: The technologies of publicity (email, instant messaging, social media, news sites greedy for clicks) that have proliferated in the past generation.
  
  Clerical hypocrisy and corruption are, after all, nothing new. They're as old as the church itself — because the church is run by human beings, and human beings find it extremely difficult to live up to what the church holds out as right behavior. The norm for much of the past 2,000 years has therefore been for ecclesiastical institutions — from the Vatican on down through denominationally unaligned Protestant parishes — to conceal their dirty laundry. When a priest, bishop, pope, or pastor was accused of impropriety, sexual or otherwise, the instinct was to cover it up, for the good of the institution.
  
  That instinct naturally prevailed within the institutions themselves, but it also permeated the culture of the laity. I saw this in action within the past decade or so when I worked as an editor at the conservative religious magazine First Things. To his credit, the magazine's editor-in-chief (a priest) wrote regularly and at length about the Catholic sex-abuse scandal, and he was also willing to publish essays (moderately) critical of Pope Pius XII, whose response to the Holocaust during World War II was being fiercely debated at the time.
  
  But that didn't keep certain people within the First Thing orbit from objecting strongly to us running such articles. As a magazine produced (primarily) by and for faithful Christians, our role, we were told, was to publicly defend the church, not to add fuel to the fires lit and stoked by its enemies. We needed to circle the wagons and stop making such a public fuss about ugly facts that would only do damage to the institution.
  
  Such arguments struck me at the time as expressions of a morally obscene craving for spiritual (and perhaps political) authoritarianism.
  
  But let's leave that evaluation aside. What matters is that, regardless of whether faithful members of traditionalist churches should be working to conceal scandalous facts, today's technologies of publicity render such efforts effectively impossible.
  
  Someone somewhere inevitably learns the scandalous truth and either publicizes the information directly or passes it along to someone who will. And the next thing you know, everyone's heard the foul and filthy news. A nasty story now and then wouldn't do any lasting harm to the churches. But a seemingly endless string of scandals, especially when each new outrage seems to confirm a consistent pattern of hypocrisy, cruelty, and corruption among the men (always men) who run more traditionalist churches? That can do serious, even fatal damage.
  
  Consider: Church attendance is already in decline. How long will the remaining parishioners keep returning to the pews when they're confronted by a persistent drip of scandal implicating people at all levels of the institution?
  
  Then consider that liberalism's ethic of equality — including its embrace of same-sex marriage — seems in some ways to conform with, or at least plausibly follow from, the most subversive moral teachings of Jesus Christ. Why wouldn't a believer disillusioned by scandal just choose to be vaguely Christian — a "moralistic therapeutic deist," "spiritual but not religious" — while skipping the dogmatic and doctrinal trappings of institutional Christianity?
  
  That is already a big part of our present. But it is going to be a much larger part of our future.
  
  Many traditionalist Christians are terrified of precisely this prospect. But they tend to blame external influences, including a rising tide of secular liberalism (and sexual liberation) in the culture.
  
  That's part of the story, but just a part.
  
  Once we recognize the crucially important role of publicity in driving a mass exodus from the churches, something far more troubling becomes obvious — namely, that more than anything else it is the truth, and not some external cultural or political force, that may ultimately destroy the churches.
  
  Not the indemonstrable "truth" that God doesn't exist. But rather the ultimately undeniable truth that, despite what they might say about themselves and what many of us would fervently like to believe about them, the churches are all too human. All the way down.
     

Intolerance

• The excesses of the Trojan Horse scandal would be allowed in faith schools. Religious practice has no place in education.
  
  We now know from Peter Clarke’s report, published today but leaked last week, that there was indeed “co-ordinated, deliberate and sustained action to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamist ethos into some schools” in Birmingham.
  
  Whistleblowers first approached the British Humanist Association in January with such allegations, weeks before the appearance of the Trojan Horse letter. The BHA properly passed on the information to the Department for Education.
  
  Pavan Dhaliwal, of the BHA, has made the awkward point that much of what went on in the Park View Trust schools would have been permissible if the schools had been designated “faith schools”. The BHA campaigns against the very existence of state-funded faith schools, pointing out that Britain is one of only four countries in the world to allow religious selection in admissions to state-funded schools. The others are Estonia, Ireland and Israel.
  
  In short, we can hardly be shocked to find religious indoctrination going on in some schools if we encourage segregation on the basis of faith. Since 2000 the proportion of secondary schools that are legally religious has increased by 20 per cent, and their freedom of action has greatly increased. The best way to prevent young girls in Birmingham being told that “if a woman said no to sex with her husband then angels would punish her from dusk till dawn”, as happened in Birmingham, is to leave religious practice — though not education about religion — out of school altogether.
  
  I know such a view is considered intolerant, even bigoted — a charge frequently levelled at non-believers. “The trouble with that Richard Dawkins”, a lay preacher said to me some years ago, “is that he’s welcome to his views, but I don’t like him forcing them on others.” Passing up the temptation to point out his own hypocrisy as a preacher, I gently reminded him that, whereas I had to go to prayers or chapel every day at my school, nobody has ever been forced to read Richard Dawkins on atheism.
  
  August sees a great global gathering of atheists and humanists in Oxford for the World Humanist Congress, the first time this body has met in Britain since 1978. Professor Dawkins will be on the stage, along with a galaxy of infidel stars, including the Nobel prizewinner Wole Soyinka, Philip Pullman, Jim al-Khalili, Nick Clegg and the Bangladeshi blogger Asif Mohiddun, who was attacked and stabbed in the back, shoulder and chest by a group of radical religious fundamentalists because of his criticism of Islam.
  
  Not there in person will be Mubarak Bala, the Nigerian detained on a psychiatric ward for being an atheist, whose case has been highlighted by the International Humanist Ethical Union. His father had Mr Bala sectioned for expressing doubts about religion and he got out, two weeks ago, only because of a strike at the hospital. Nor will Alexander Aan— the scientist in Indonesia who was arrested and imprisoned for two years for expressing doubts about God — be present. But many similar activists from Africa and Asia will be there, including Gululai Ismail, who runs the Aware Girls project in northwest Pakistan, challenging patriarchy and religious extremism, and under constant threat of violence. It was her organisation that Malala Yousafzai was working for when shot by the Taliban.
  
  It is clear that the kind of rational scepticism that we British have been tolerating for three centuries is resulting in terrible persecution throughout the Muslim world, and it is getting worse. I say we tolerate atheism here, and we do, but still grudgingly. Atheists lose count of the number of times we are told we are lacking in imagination and wonder, or that we just don’t see the human need for spirituality, or that we must have trouble justifying morality.
  
  British Christians are generally prepared to be much ruder about atheism than they are about Islam. Some of the stuff Professor Dawkins has to read about himself would be condemned as hate speech if said about a Muslim. This is partly because atheists do not threaten our critics with violence, whereas any “Islamophobic” remark or cartoon leads to death threats. It is also because Christians are continually trying to make common cause with other religions in defence of “faith” as a source of morality and harmony in the world. Did I dream it, or did a recent archbishop muse about the virtues of Sharia?
  
  Anglicanism is a mild and attenuated form of the faith virus and may even act as a vaccine against more virulent infections, but Christianity is becoming more evangelical in response to its global competition with Islam. This has always happened in religious history: where religions compete, they become more extreme — the crusades, the 30-years war, Ulster.
  
  So for all the pious talk of “faith communities”, the two religions are not on the same side. To combat the rise of radical Islam and radical Christianity, we should try the secular, free-thinking approach. Mild Anglicanism should make common cause with humanists in defence of tolerance.
  
  The experience of the past three centuries is that if lots of people stop believing in gods, they do not become less moral. On the contrary, the number of people attending church has gone down at about the same rate as the number of people who commit violent crimes. I am not suggesting a causal connection — though I suspect religious people would if the trends were different — but these facts give the lie to the idea that godlessness leads to immorality. (And don’t tell me that communist regimes were irreligious — they enforced a worship of their leaders with all the techniques and fervour of religion.)
  
  Unlike the almost triumphalist mood among atheists in the 1960s, when Francis Crick foresaw the end of religion and started a competition for what to do with the college chapels in Cambridge, rationalists no longer expect to get rid of religion altogether by explaining life and matter: they aim only to tame it instead, and to protect children from it. Nonetheless, they are slowly winning: witness the fact that more than 12 per cent of funerals in this country are now humanist in some form. And humanists are showing no signs of turning intolerant, let alone violent.
     

Bible Literalists

• What I find most troubling in Ham’s claims, though, is not so much their content. Sure, most of what Ham says about science, the origins of the universe, the origins of life, and theology doesn’t stand up to even the lightest scrutiny, but even more problematic is his lack of curiosity. For Ham, the question of whether or not there’s life elsewhere in the universe isn’t even worth asking—precisely because we already have the answer.
  
  It’s this lack of curiosity that makes biblical literalism so damaging, scientifically, socially, and politically speaking, for once we have all the answers there’s really no need to explore, discover, or create.
  
  It’s also what makes biblical literalism so damaging for religion. Many of my students are curious about why I study religion and what I get from it. I always tell them that for me, religion isn’t finally about providing answers but spurring questions; it isn’t about telling us what to think and do but about providing resources and spaces for our thinking and doing. That’s, unfortunately, something for which Ham’s approach, and biblical literalism more generally, doesn’t allow.
     

The Church of War

• The God of peace invoked by clergy marking the centenary of the First World War could scarcely be more different from the belligerent deity of 1914. Before we look down too much on “primitive” societies where religion lies at the heart of conflict, it is worth remembering how similar Europe was once — and how Christian extremism in our neighbourhood is far from over.
  
  God was more ubiquitous in Europe a hundred years ago and He had a warlike countenance. As JC Squire wrote at the time:
  
  “God heard the embattled nations sing and shout,
  ‘Gott strafe England!’ and ‘God save the King!’
  God this, God that, and God the other thing,
  “Good God!” said God, “I’ve got my work cut out!”
  
  Nowadays, Christian churches are saturated with moralising pacifism, often selectively confining their historical reflections to the heroic sacrifices of military chaplains. This summer the Union of Welsh Independent Churches broke ranks by publicly apologising for the role of their ministers in actively soliciting recruits for the Great War. Were that stance to be generalised, state churches such as the Anglicans and Lutherans of Britain and Germany, not to mention the Russian Orthodox or American Episcopalians, might have much apologising to do too.
  
  Belligerence was not exclusively Christian, either. Imperial Germany’s slogan “Gott strafe England” (may God punish England) was coined by Ernst Lissauer, the German-Jewish poet who also wrote The Hate Song against England. Lest we forget, in 1914 the last Ottoman Sultan endorsed a fatwa declaring the fight against Britain and France a jihad.
  
  Many of the things that politicians such as Tony Blair proclaim do not reflect the “true” Islam were all too apparent among Christians a century ago. The Church of England could reflect on Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of London, who in a notorious sermon urged our troops to “kill Germans — do kill them; not for the sake of killing, but to save the world, to kill the good as well as bad, to kill the young as well as the old, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded, as well as those friends . . . I look upon it as a war for purity, I look upon everyone who died in it as a martyr”.
  
  Transformation of the war dead into “martyrs” was one of several points where our great-great grandparents’ generation espoused the pious fervour of present-day Islamists, which we regard as medieval.
  
  Churches played a major part on both sides in demonising the enemy, no small feat given that the war was primarily fought between Christian powers. One solution was to declare the enemy something akin to takfiri in Islamic doctrine: deviants who had abandoned the true faith. Allied Christians claimed that Germany’s Protestant and Catholic soldiers had reverted to worshipping Odin, or at least the wooden idols into which patriotic Germans paid to hammer gold, silver and iron nails. German propagandists from the land of Luther had a field day with the imperial troops that Britain deployed: “It is England that has let loose the wild lust of conquest of heathen Asiatics against the people of the Reformation.” This was despite the Kaiser’s Turkish allies wiping out half the Armenian Christian population.
  
  No wonder so many Arab Christians — often better educated and more prosperous — made a smart shift to Arab nationalism. The roll-call would include Greek Orthodox Michel Aflaq, the co-founder of national socialist Baathism, and such Palestinian militants as George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Saddam Hussein’s Christian foreign minister used to sing Onward Christian Solders in Aramaic. We can see in Gaza and Iraq today the grim reality they were seeking to avoid.
  
  The war also had some hidden bonuses for European Christianity. In countries where aggressive secularism had propelled reactionary Catholics into proto-Fascism, they rediscovered a love of country that saw 32,000 French monks and priests fight for a republic that was dextrous enough to swap Marianne for Joan of Arc, while highlighting the Boche shelling Reims cathedral. Similar rapprochements occurred in Germany and Italy. Patriotic Jews rushed to the colours in Britain and Germany, though in 1916 the German war ministry began counting them in response to antisemitic insinuations of shirking. At the end of the war, it failed to highlight that 11,000 Jews had given their lives for the Fatherland.
  
  Such apocalyptic times also witnessed an upsurge in occultism, spiritualism and superstition. The term “New Age” took off from 1915 onwards. Soldiers laden down with lucky talismans “saw” ghost armies coming to their rescue, as fictional bowmen from Agincourt mutated into “angels” in soldiers’ rumours. One wartime bestseller was Raymond by the physicist Oliver Lodge, in which his eponymous son reported via mediums from the afterlife, having been killed at Hooge in 1915.
  
  Attempts to reduce the spiritual impact of the war to the heroism of military chaplains called Tubby are a travesty of the pervasive unreality, on a par with the popular conceit that Tommy and Fritz would have preferred to play football in no man’s land rather than bayonet each other.
  
  While every school pupil is taught how the unresolved business of war one led to war two, we are not so quick to recognise how the brutalising effects of barbed wire, machineguns and poisoned gas crushed the spirituality of junior officers who, as commanders, were responsible for the even greater slaughter of 1939-45. Angry war veterans were a core constituency of all European Fascist movements. Along with the “innocents” cut off in their prime, across our continent many deeply brutalised men emerged from the Great War whose spiritual needs were met by all-too-human redeemers called Duce or Führer. No wonder the Germans are keen to pass quickly over this year of commemoration, and why claims of Europe sleepwalking to war have found such resonance there.
     

Tribes

• Intermarriage has always been a problem, all the way back to Romeo and Juliet (and West Side Story, of course). Intermarriage de-demonizes the ‘other’, and the insecure tribe member sees this as an existential threat, the beginning of the end of tribal cohesion.
  
  Gangs in LA view high school as a threat. A kid who graduates from high school has options, can see a way up, which decreases the power of the gang and its leaders. Public school is seen as a threat by some tribes, a secular indoctrination and an exposure to other cultures and points of view that might destabilize what has been built over generations. And digital audio is a threat to those in the vinyl tribe, because at some point, some members may decide they’ve had enough of the old school.
  
  Lately, two significant threats seen by some tribes are the scientific method and the power of a government (secular, or worse, representing a majority tribe). One fear is that once someone understands the power of inquiry, theory, testing and informed criticism, they will be unwilling to embrace traditional top-down mythology. The other is that increased government power will enforce standards and rituals that undermine the otherness that makes each tribe distinct.
  
  If a tribe requires its members to utter loyalty oaths to be welcomed [“the president is always right, carbon pollution is a myth, no ____ allowed (take your pick)”] they will bump into reality more and more often. I had a music teacher in elementary school who forbade students to listen to pop music, using a valiant but doomed-to-fail tactic of raising classical music lovers.
  
  Tribes started as self-defending groups of wanderers. It didn't take long, though, for them to claim a special truth, for them to insulate themselves from an ever-changing world.
  
  In a modern, connected era, successful tribes can’t thrive for long by cutting themselves off from the engines that drive our culture and economy. What they can do is engage with and attract members who aren’t there because the tribe is right and everyone else is wrong, but instead, the modern tribe quite simply says, “you are welcome here, we like you, people like us are part of a thing like this, we'll watch your back.” It turns out that this is enough.
  
  ( more good ideas from Seth Godin)
     

Surrogacy To Split The Religious Right

• Surrogacy has always seemed to me to be perfectly compatible with conservative values. It involves a carefully planned pregnancy designed to deliver a baby to two loving parents. There is very little chance the fetus will be aborted. Its soon-to-be parents are almost certain to be well off and won’t need to lean on the welfare state while raising their child. Surrogacy is, in other words, the least risky way to approach the inherently risky endeavor of reproduction.
  
  But a cri de coeur published in the National Review on Monday reminds me exactly how wrong my assumptions are. For a certain subset of conservatives—most of them orthodox Catholics—surrogacy is a chief evil of modern sexual liberty, lagging behind abortion but keeping pace with gay marriage. Intriguingly, principled opposition to surrogacy isn’t even about homosexuality—though those who oppose surrogacy generally oppose gay parenthood as well. It’s about fidelity to relatively esoteric Catholic notions of natural law. And the larger question of surrogacy is poised to cause a catastrophic rift within the conservative movement as a whole.
  
  To understand the deep ideological divisions surrounding surrogacy, you need only look to Louisiana, where the surrogacy debate has thrown conservative Republicans into a complex intra-party debate. In 2013, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal vetoed a Republican-sponsored bill that would have legalized surrogacy contracts throughout the state, following pressure from conservative Christian groups. The bill’s sponsor then overhauled the bill, affixing amendments that satisfied conservatives’ concerns. But at the last minute, these groups decided the new bill was still fundamentally immoral, and Jindal vetoed the revised bill earlier this year. (Overcome by zeal, anti-gay activist Robert P. George promptly suggested Jindal would make a great president.)
  
  Why do some Republicans want to legalize surrogacy contracts? Easy: Straight people, including straight men, need surrogates. Although some surrogacy opponents try to frame their argument as a fundamentally anti-gay one, this is a bit of a ruse. Gay couples represent only a fraction of all potential surrogacy clients; most people in need of a surrogate are infertile straight couples. Surrogacy opponents, then, may try to capitalize on existing anti-gay animus to further their cause—but really, their hostility to the practice is tethered to their broader enmity toward modern conceptions of sexual autonomy.
  
  This animosity toward sexual liberty is the barely stifled undercurrent of pretty much every anti-surrogacy article out there. For a fringe group of conservatives, gay marriage and abortion are just the tip of the iceberg. What truly disgusts them is the whole array of modern sexual and reproductive practices, from egg donation and IVF to divorce and remarriage. To orthodox Catholics, the widespread acceptance of assisted reproductive technologies and non-traditional families is a grotesque violation of natural law and the start of a horrifying brave new world in which technology trumps humanity.
  
  These terrors, of course, aren’t novel; they’re just a repackaged version of the same old anti-modern crusade conservatives have been waging since time immemorial. By capitalizing on our natural fear of the new, the right wing has been able to beat back advances in gay rights and women’s sexual autonomy for decades. But the anti-surrogacy campaign goes one startling step farther, catching straight couples in its net and castigating them for making deeply personal decisions that would seem to be nobody else’s business.
  
  What we’re seeing here, then, is the beginning of the end of a hoary coalition, the hardcore Christian right. For a time, this righteous alliance was completely united in its opposition to various aspects of modern sexuality—but now that it’s setting its sights on something that plenty of straight couples need, that unity is about to crumble. The rift that recently developed in Louisiana is about to run through the rest of the country, splintering off the orthodox religious right from their more mainstream brethren. Thanks to the surrogacy debate, conservatives are beginning to realize how awful it feels to have your moral and sexual choices censured and restricted by the state. It’s a nasty revelation—but also an inevitable one. The Christian right has been maligning gays and women for long enough. It was only a matter of time before their holy hypocrisy boomeranged on their own self-interests.
     

A Game for Good Christians

• If any game has more potential to offend than Cards Against Humanity, A Game for Good Christians just might be it.
  
  Inspired by the R-rated “party game for horrible people” in which players pair cards like “Hospice care,” “An endless stream of diarrhea,” or “A defective condom” with fill-in-the-blank statements like “I got 99 problems but ________ ain’t one,” A Game for Good Christians, released earlier this year, offers a scriptural twist: most of the material from its 300-card deck has been lifted directly from the Bible, with chapter and verse to prove it.
  
  The results fall somewhere between playful irreverence and flat-out blasphemy. For example, if the card “A woman must quietly receive ________ with full submission” is played, it could be paired with response cards that include “Crotch-less pants (2 Samuel 10:4),” “The forbidden fruit (Genesis 3),” and “Altar sex (Amos 2:8).”
  
  (For the curious, the biblical answer is “instruction,” drawn from 1 Timothy 2:11, a controversial verse stating: “A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness.”)
  
  Critics of the game have called it “completely vile,” in “bad taste,” and an attempt to “denigrate and mock the Bible.” Or as one member of BoardGameGeek.com explained through the site’s “Geek Mail,” “I simply want nothing to do with a game that ridicules and makes fun of personal, deeply held beliefs, no matter how much the game’s designer claims ‘it’s all in fun.’”
  
  But not everyone had scruples. George Juillerat found out about the game six months before its release and was immediately smitten. “Pretty much anything blasphemous or satirical about religion is going to catch my attention,” he explained. Juillerat, who is a board member of Seattle Atheists, contributed to the game’s $8000 Indiegogo campaign and was pleased when the game arrived in the mail several months later. “I was looking for a comical skewering of [religion] and that’s what it was,” he said.
  
  A Game for Good Christians has become a favorite at the monthly Seattle Atheist game night,but Juillerat doubted it would be a hit with the churchgoing crowd. “If people were truly devout and pious Christians, I suspect they couldn’t even be coaxed into picking up the game,” he said.
  
  We can either engage [instances of abuse, rape, and domestic violence in the Bible] and figure out ways to acknowledge the ways it’s been used to hurt through the centuries, or we can completely disregard it and pretend it’s not there.”Au contraire. It turns out that some pious Christians are the game’s most vocal fans, including students at Christian colleges, seminarians, clergy members, and folks with Twitter handles like @Swaggospel or @Tatted_Pastor. Though these mostly-20-and-30-something Christians do relish the game’s heretical humor, they also praise A Game for Good Christians for acknowledging the uncomfortable, often-overlooked parts of the Bible.
  
  “If people really dug into the Bible, I think they would see that A Game for Good Christians is merely honest, rather than offensive,” explained Kathryn Watts, a technology intern for a large, non-denominational, multi-site church in northeast Texas.
  
  Watts describes herself as a “Christ-lover” and admits the Bible is “not a pretty book.” For Watts, the “uncomfortable or controversial” parts in scripture are reminders God “understands that our fallen world is a gritty, violent, and sometimes disgusting place.” She even credits the game for giving her an opportunity to talk with an agnostic friend about the Bible.
  
  Jeremy Smith, an elder in the United Methodist Church serving a church in Portland, likened A Game for Good Christians to a Bible study. “When you really read the Bible, you find all sorts of problematic passages and challenging depictions of God,” said Smith, who first played A Game for Good Christians at a clergy conference earlier this year and blogged about the game on HackingChristianity.net. “And yet you keep playing—and keep reading—to make sense of things in your community.”
  
  “Controversial” and “problematic” are hardly exaggerations; sandwiched between Sunday-school standbys like David and Goliath, Mary and Joseph, and Psalm 23 are plenty of stories that aren’t often preached from the pulpit. These stories, featured on the cards of A Game for Good Christians, range from bizarre (“Death by hungry worms, Acts 12:21-23”), to disgusting (“Bread freshly baked with human dung, Ezekiel 4:12”), to truly horrifying (“God-sanctioned gang rape, Ezekiel 23”).
  
  To Chris Davies, a United Church of Christ minister in Connecticut who played the game with other mainline Protestant pastors, believes talking about the “messy bits” of the Bible is a key component of faith. She explained that this includes the instances of abuse, rape, and domestic violence highlighted by A Game for Good Christians: “We can either engage it and figure out ways to acknowledge the ways it’s been used to hurt through the centuries, or we can completely disregard it and pretend it’s not there.” She added drily, “And we all know that works out real well.”
  
  Although A Game for Good Christian will force players to acknowledge the existence of these Bible passages and perhaps strike up a thoughtful conversation, it’s hard to overlook the game’s ironic humor. On the box, a haloed Christ smacks one nail-scarred hand to his forehead, as if groaning at a bad joke. Many of the verses have been paraphrased to maximize comedic potential so that “Jesus had disappeared in the crowd” in the Bible becomes “Houdini Jesus” on its card. Double entendres abound and there are swear words. Lots of them.
  
  But believe it or not, most religious games - Alef-Bet Bingo, Buddha Wheel, Episcopopoly, Who Wants to Be a Celestial Heir?, Race to the Kaba, Settlers of Canaan, Krishnaland, Kosherland, and even Missionary Conquest (“One giant game of laughter and strategy,” boasts the box)—weren’t designed as jokes. Bad puns notwithstanding most are earnest, creative efforts to impart religious truth and wholesome fun to youngsters and, occasionally, adults.
  
  Yet godly games are often mistaken for godless satire, admit Nikki Bado-Fralick and Rebecca Sachs Norris, religion professors who have studied the bizarre realm of pious playthings. “If religion addresses some of the deepest concerns of humanity, it may be hard to see how fun and play can be reconciled with the serious business of saving souls or reaching enlightenment without mocking religion,” they write in Toying With God: The World of Religious Games and Dolls.
  
  Citing examples like ancient dice games, the original Olympics, the costumed Jewish festival-carnival of Purim, and the Hindu ritual of Holi, in which participants throw colored paint at each other, Bado-Fralick and Norris point out that religion and play are often inseparable. Throughout this long history, religious games and toys are “evidence of the ways in which religious institutions and practioners use cultural trends to breathe new life back into their traditions.”
  
  Via phone, Norris explained that one of the ways play revives religion is through humor, an omnipresent way of dealing with the contradictions inherent in any institution. “When you bring two things together and you don’t know exactly how to reconcile them, that’s when you laugh,” said Norris.
  
  “Laughter” doesn’t always mean “mockery,” she continued. More often, laughter is a way of “allowing those contradictions in” which can lead “to a deeper understanding.” She likened it to a relationship: “It’s like loving somebody because you think they’re perfect and wonderful and you don’t want to see any of their faults or loving them and knowing that they have those faults.”
  
  The creators of A Game for Good Christians might agree. “We love the Bible,” they claim on the game’s website, “we just have a funny way of showing it.”
  
  THE NAMES of the game’s creators are not listed on its website, Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook. The only name affiliated with A Game for Good Christians is a pseudonym - “Ben Christian” - which a June 6 Tumblr post explains is a pun on the Latin word bene: “good.
  
  As it turns out, the game’s creators are two guys in their early thirties who met at a Christian summer camp in 1996. They returned to the camp as teenage summer staffers, once wiring their stereos to speakers in the female staffers’ cabin and blasting the girls with music late at night (they were never caught). After high school, they attended rival Christian colleges, eventually found wives, and now live an hour apart.
  
  Caleb and Thomas—not their real names—only agreed to talk to me if I kept them anonymous. Caleb, now a professor at a Christian college, didn’t think the administration would react favorably if they found out he created a game that mentioned “angel rape.” Thomas, a software engineer, hasn’t told his conservative in-laws and doesn’t plan to, a strategy he describes as “self-preservation.” Both men remain involved in churches they love, but whose theological convictions—and humor—no longer match their own.
  
  I talked with Caleb and Thomas as they were finalizing their plans for two expansion packs for A Game for Good Christians, to be released later this year. Several minutes into our conversation two things become clear: they are super goofy and they really do love the Bible.
  
  Their Bible geekery begins as they recount the seven months it took to draft the first round of cards. This length of time was due, in part, to their insistence on reviewing each passage in its original Hebrew or Greek before creating their own snarky summary. Then they cross-referenced their work with commentaries and dictionaries for accuracy, often editing their shared Google Doc while talking together on the phone, editing, adjusting, and “sometimes stopping for 45 minutes to argue about one particular passage,” says Caleb.
  
  “Or a word in the passage,” corrects Thomas.
  
  “Yeah, we nerded out quite a bit,” Caleb admits.
  
  Despite their diligence, when they tested the cards with friends and family last July, it flopped.
  
  “We initially did not censor ourselves,” confessed Thomas after describing how players balked at their liberal use of four-letter words. This prompted the pair to create what they call a “theology of swearing.”
  
  “If something was a direct translation of something in the Hebrew or the Greek where the modern corollary would be a swear, we kept it,” explains Caleb.
  
  He cites the example of 1 Kings 18:27. “That passage in the Hebrew is saying to them: ‘Your God can’t hear you. He’s off taking a crap in the bushes.’ So we kept ‘shit’ there. But there were other places where we had ‘shit’ because a swear would make it funnier and then we decided to cut that out in those places.”
  
  I later consult the Oxford Annotated Bible where a tiny footnote confirms: the Hebrew phrase used in that verse is “a disrespectful euphemism meaning that Baal has to relieve himself.” In other words, they know their Bible shit.
  
  CALEB AND THOMAS’ deep, nerdy love for the good book also means they have little patience for Christians who don’t actually read the Bible in its entirety. Thomas describes this as their “biggest frustration.”
  
  He imagines a hypothetical player: “They read the card. They look at the passage. They look it up in the Bible. And they say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know this existed.’ That level of, um…” Thomas searches for the right word and slowly clenches his fist, as if crushing invisible cans.
  
  “Ignorance?” suggests Caleb.
  
  “We didn’t try to make a nasty situation humorous. We just said, ‘This is a nasty situation.’ And put it on a card.”“Yeah, biblical ignorance,” says Thomas. “Someone who says ‘I haven’t read through the Old Testament, but I’m a Christian, and I believe all the red words that Jesus says.’ That level of relationship to the living word of God is so shallow and frustrating to us. Or when someone skips the middle books of the Old Testament because they’re long and boring…” Here pauses. “Granted, Numbers is like…” “I like Numbers, but anyway…” mumbles Caleb.
  
  “The real impetus for the game,” Thomas resumes, “is to get people to engage in Scripture and read stories they’ve never read before. When a concubine is cut up into twelve pieces, that imagery is really offensive. But a lot of people didn’t even know that story existed in the Bible.”
  
  I suspect they’re right; reading Judges 19:29 in church might shock parishoners out of their pews. But I press Caleb and Thomas on their use of humor; after all, when confronted with many of the gruesome or violent Bible passages on the game’s cards, laughter hardly seems like an appropriate response.
  
  “Then why are you laughing at it?” counters Caleb. “Not all the cards are humorous,” he explains. “We didn’t try to make a nasty situation humorous. We just said, ‘This is a nasty situation.’ And put it on a card.”
  
  I’m skeptical. Maybe all of the cards aren’t intended to be humorous, but some of them definitely are. I ask Caleb and Thomas when it’s okay to laugh at the Bible.
  
  Their response is simple: some parts of the Bible are funny, others aren’t. “I think God is happy when we laugh at certain things in the Bible,” says Caleb. “I would also think that there’s probably things that if we are laughing at God would be thinking ‘No, that’s bad. That’s sin, that’s evil, that’s people doing bad things to each other—don’t laugh at that.”
  
  Thomas notes that God often uses humor and sarcasm in the Bible to get people’s attention. “There’s a sense of God’s interaction with us that is funny, humorous, lighthearted, and serious,” he says, “joking around with us while, like”—Thomas puts Caleb in a headlock—“grabbing us by the neck and strangling us to foster that familiarity with him.” Thomas releases Caleb. “I think that’s really important and often missed.”
  
  In creating the game, the duo drew inspiration from the crazy antics of the Hebrew prophets and late-night talk shows hosts like Jimmy Fallon, two examples of cultural critique that mix seriousness with satire.
  
  “The game tries to operate in that space of ‘this is serious and deep and somber,’” says Caleb. “But getting to that somber deepness sometimes requires a smack in the back of the head.”
  
  “I think that resonates a lot with our peers,” said Thomas. “Being able to hold something extremely serious in sort of a light-hearted sort of way.”
  
  Caleb and Thomas don’t claim to have it all figured out. They admit there are parts of the Bible that are still difficult to them: questions about God’s agency, the contradictions between different parts of scripture, and questions of theodicy—how there could be evil in a world loved by an all-powerful God.
  
  Eventually, I ask Caleb and Thomas what keeps them from just tossing out the Bible and all its problems altogether. They respond with characteristic sarcasm:
  
  “Money,” says Thomas.
  
  “Crowns in heaven,” says Caleb.
  
  “Yeah, we’re hoping for the big diadems,” Thomas adds.
  
  Then they get quiet. “In my heart of hearts, I’ll give the personal experience argument,” offers Caleb. “I’ve experienced God. At the end of the day when I wrestle with a particular passage of Scripture, I still have my faith and my trust in this Being who pisses me off to no end sometimes, but also loves and cares for and holds and shelters.”
  
  Thomas agrees. “It’s not necessarily a thing you can explain,” he says. “It’s supernatural.”
  
  PLAYERS NEED NOT be familiar with the Bible to play A Game for Good Christians, yet most fans of Caleb and Thomas’ game are a lot like the game’s inventors: younger-ish Christians with a considerable amount of biblical literacy, whose enthusiasm for exploring the Bible’s contradictions emerges out of their reverence, not disdain, for God’s word. It is unclear whether the game holds much appeal for a wider audience—Christian or otherwise—on whom these subtle strains of sincerity and levity might be lost.
  
  At least one reviewer who describes himself as “a little on the sacrilegious side” seems to get it. Standing in front of a china cabinet covered in a white sheet, Ron Preisach offers his review of the game to YouTube viewers. Though he imagines some Christians might “get a little angry, a little pissed” when they see what’s on the cards, he cites recent polls that chart growing biblical illiteracy among Christians. He eventually recommends the game to Bible-believers because he thinks the game will be a good way “to actually get in there and actually learn these things that a lot of them just don’t know.”
     

Exodus - a myth

• Was there a mass Exodus of Jewish slaves out of Egypt? There is no record of any such thing ever happening, and the simple reason is that there is no time in which it could have happened. No Egyptian record contains a single reference to anything in Exodus; and by the time there were enough Jews living in Egypt to constitute an Exodus, the time of the pyramids was long over. And Pharaoh Ramesses can be let off the hook as well: With apologies to Yul Brynner, no documentary or archaeological evidence links any of the Pharaohs bearing this name with plagues or Jewish slaves or edicts to kill babies. Indeed, the earliest, Ramesses I, wasn't even born until more than a thousand years after the Great Pyramid was completed. His grandson, the great Ramesses II, lived even later.
  
  Some historians have attempted to rationalize the Exodus by drawing parallels to certain cities and trade centers that grew and shrank over the centuries for various reasons. Perhaps one of these economic shifts inspired the story of Exodus. Well, perhaps it did, but the nature of such a migration is, quite obviously, fundamentally different than that depicted in Exodus.
  
  The pseudohistory of ancient Egypt is disrespectful to both Jews and Egyptians. It depicts the Jews as helpless slaves whose only contribution was sweat and broken backs, when in fact the earliest Jewish immigrants were respected allies to the Pharaoh and provided Egypt with a valuable service of both trade and defense. The pseudohistory also takes away from the Egyptians their due credit for construction of humanity's greatest architectural achievement, and portrays them as evil, bloodthirsty slavemasters. Pretty much every culture in the world at that period in history included slavery and conflict, and the Egyptians probably weren't any better or worse than most peoples.
  
  Understanding history is essential to understanding ourselves. Although a story like Exodus is profoundly important to so many people throughout the world, the history it describes is false; and the faithful are best advised to seek value in it other than as a mere list of events. Doing so opens the door to a better comprehension of who we are as humans, and it's that shared history that will always unite us — no matter our race, color, or culture. It's just one little more service provided by good science.
  
  (From Brian Dunning's Skeptoid )
     

Religion and The Rich In America

• Joerg Rieger, a leading theological thinker in relation to economic injustice, is also a principal presenter at a forthcoming conference in Houston that seeks to galvanize a stronger and religiously-infused bottom-up justice movement.
  
  RD’s Peter Laarman, who has been working with the D.L. Dykes, Jr. Foundation to shape this week’s event, asked Rieger, the Wendland-Cook Endowed Professor of Constructive Theology at the Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, to unpack structural poverty and to address religion’s stake in the dramatic growth of economic inequality in American society.
  
  RD: You are a major participant in and architect of the forthcoming conference in Houston that will address the issue of structural poverty within a religious frame. Tell me what you think is significant about such a convocation?
  
  Rieger: Religion is not something that has an existence of its own apart from everyday life, and neither can religion be limited to the private realm or to the life of the mind. Those who use religion to support their private quest for money and/or power already know this very well and make the most of it.
  
  Radical inequality will not self-correct.
  
  Those of us who have alternative visions and are linked to alternative movements need consciously to come together to challenge all religion that valorizes - literally - a deeply unjust system. This is what we will be doing in Houston. We will draw upon potent if sometimes neglected strands within our religious inheritance, and because we know that we cannot change the world by ourselves, we will bring together all those who make positive contributions in their own ways: intellectuals, activists, community organizers, labor leaders, and religious leaders.
  
  These collaborations are still fairly new, but we should not underestimate what can happen when progressive people with new visions join forces.
  
  In the U.S. poverty is most often explained in terms of personal moral failure, an “explanation” deeply rooted in the American religious tradition. Can you say more about the difference between framing poverty as the personal moral failure of the poor and framing it as a different kind of moral failure—one that gives a prominent role to what (former U.S. Labor Secretary) Robert Reich has called “rot at the top”?
  
  An early working title for the Houston gathering asked Why are so many poor? And why do we hate them so much? Only in this radically individualistic culture do we hear it proclaimed that people who are not able to make ends meet are not working hard enough. Do we even realize how odd that is?
  
  The opposite is usually the case: low-income workers often work more than one job and are among the hardest-working people in the country. Add to that the fact that most of these workers never had the opportunity to attend elite schools and colleges and that they do not have the social networks that provide business opportunities, and it should become clear that their predicament has nothing to do with their moral shortcomings.
  
  What still shocks the mind is how the majority of America’s religious people also accept the God helps those who helps themselves ethic and simply ignore what is plain enough from the biblical testimony: that Jesus, like the Hebrew prophets before him, consistently supports the “least of these,” declares that he is bringing good news to the poor, and warns against wealth as a dangerous trap.
  
  Like Isaiah thundering about those who “join house to house and field to field” so as to squeeze out everyone else, Jesus directly links suffering at the bottom to greed at the top. Jesus says very clearly that it is not the poor who are failing morally but the rich who are flunking the morality test by extracting wealth at the expense of the poor.
  
  And of course this is exactly what is going on in the current economy, where we see an economic “recovery” that mainly benefits the 1 percent even as compensation, benefits, and job quality for the majority of working people continue to get worse. You don’t have to take my word for this; you can ask Janet Yellen, the new chair of the Federal Reserve, or you can ask Thomas Piketty.
  
  You recently reviewed Piketty’s best-selling book, Capital. Why exactly is economic inequality accelerating, not moderating, and why is the so-called “trickle down” theory being discredited? I recall that you address these issues in your own book, No Rising Tide.
  
  The old proverb that “a rising tide lifts all boats” has never been more than an unfounded hope and is also something very convenient for those in power to toss off. While more and more everyday people have awakened to this, the spurious rising tide ideology nevertheless still rules the way the economy is managed: taxes are still being reduced at the top, corporations and their shareholders still gorge themselves on government support, and we are still being asked to believe that as the rich take an ever-larger share, everyone else will somehow also do better.
  
  The great value in what Piketty and his colleagues have done is to marshal overwhelming evidence to show that the gap between rich and poor has grown and will continue to grow, absent an intervention. Radical inequality will not self-correct. This is exactly what I discussed in No Rising Tide, written at the beginning of the so-called Great Recession and published in 2009. I wrote that while the economy goes in cycles, the wealth surge bypasses more and more people, including most of the middle class.
  
  It is essential for us to see wealth not only in terms of money but also in terms of power. Have progressives really understood that yet? As wealth keeps growing at the top, the social power of those at the top grows by leaps and bounds as well. This dynamic assures that inequality deepens and that what little wealth and power may have dripped down in the past has now dried up.
  
  If bad religion has both absorbed and contributed to an unhelpful ideology in relation to structural poverty, is there any possibility for raising a different religious voice to help turn this around?
  
  Before we can talk about alternative religious voices, we must first acknowledge that religion has, for the most part, been a huge contributor to the problem. Not only has our colonized religion demonized those at the bottom, but it has also been happy to heap praise upon those at the top.
  
  Our images of God are part of the problem: even many progressives still assume that God is somehow found at the top of the system, which implies by default that those at the top are closer to God. This is one of the key distortions that alternative religious voices need to address. Fortunately, there are other and far more compelling images in our religious traditions that correct this distortion.
  
  In the Exodus tradition, which is shared by Christians, Muslims, and Jews, God is found not on the side of the Pharaoh—as one boss standing with another, so to speak—but God joins the side of the Hebrew slaves and even sinks Pharoah’s army. In the Jesus tradition, God becomes human in the person of someone who is referred to as a “carpenter” but who is really more like a day laborer in construction: not the guy driving the pickup but one of the guys riding in the back. And this Jesus chooses to remain in solidarity with the poor; he is no Horatio Alger type trying to claw his way upward.
  
  We need to preach and teach these other traditions and narratives because these exodus and liberation currents all deliver the unambiguous message that God’s vision for how people should live is diametrically opposed to Pharoah’s. The two orientations cannot be reconciled, meaning that people of various faiths have to choose sides. You cannot serve God and Mammon.
  
  You said earlier, and you often discuss, how savage inequality also poisons representative democracy itself. Can you say a bit more about this?
  
  I said earlier that wealth is about power and not just about money. What is worst about this is that we have now created a culture in which the wealthiest are seen as the role models and the leaders, and in which the goal is to please them and to follow their wishes.
  
  Regrettably, we can detect the same servility and deference to the rich in the university and in religious life that we see in our corrupted politics. We can see it also within the so-called Left. And because this deference and servility has now become normalized and can take place with hardly anyone taking notice, resistance is only gradually developing (in contrast to, say, resistance to current corrupt campaign finance practices).
  
  While most of my friends agree that big money needs to be kept out of politics, far fewer of them realize how the power of money shapes us all the way to the core—shapes the way we think, shapes our innermost hopes and dreams, shapes even our faith. That’s where the ultimate power of money rests, and that is where an awakened resistance has yet to develop.
     

God and Philosophy

• The interviewee for this installment is Daniel Garber, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, specializing in philosophy and science in the period of Galileo and Newton. In a week or two, I’ll conclude with a wrap-up column on the series.
  
  Gary Gutting: In the 17th century most philosophers were religious believers, whereas today most seem to be atheists. What explains this reversal?
  
  I’m already convinced that I should want to believe. But there is a step from there to actual belief, and that’s a step I cannot personally negotiate.
  
  Daniel Garber: I think that it is fair to say that in the 17th century most people, not just philosophers, were believers and that it was simply taken for granted that people of ordinary intelligence would believe in God, in just the way that people today take it for granted that people of ordinary intelligence have faith in the authority of science. Many important scientists and mathematicians in the period were also believers, including Bacon, Descartes, Boyle, Pascal and Newton. Not that there weren’t atheists in the period, but atheism was something that in many circles needed a special explanation in a way in which belief didn’t.
  
  In many circumstances, atheism was considered so obviously contrary to evident reason that there had to be a special explanation for why atheists denied what was so obvious to most of their contemporaries, in much the way that today we might wonder about those who deny science. What changed? I hesitate even to speculate. There was the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, political revolutions, Darwinism, the wars of the 20th century, a lot. As a result science and religious faith have, in a way, exchanged places, and a general and widespread faith in science has replaced the earlier general and widespread faith in God. But even so, God is not dead among the philosophers. There is still a very significant community of believers among philosophers. I’m personally not one of them, I should say, and I would doubt that they constitute a majority. But even so, I think they cannot be ignored.
  
  G.G.: What you’ve described could be taken as a social and cultural change that says nothing about the truth of religious claims. Contemporary atheists often say that the development of science since the 17th century has undermined the intellectual basis of theism. What do you think?
  
  D.G.: Unlike some, I would hesitate to say that modern science has refuted religion in any strong sense. Religion and theology are complicated and subtle; they cannot easily be refuted. In the past religion has confronted a variety of scientific challenges, from the rediscovery of ancient scientific systems like Aristotle’s in the 12th and 13th centuries, to Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton in the 16th and 17th centuries, to Darwin in the 19th and beyond. These discoveries have forced religion to adapt in various ways, but those contemporary advocates of religion who are, in my opinion, the most sophisticated don’t feel that they have to oppose science in order to keep their faith.
  
  For some this adaptability is a sign that religion is empty, on the assumption that to be meaningful religion must be falsifiable. But I don’t agree. Philosophers of science have rightly rejected naïve falsificationism, and it shouldn’t be accepted in the philosophy of religion. Again, I am not a believer. But even so, I don’t underestimate how difficult it is to refute theism.
  
  G.G.: “Naïve falsification” is the idea that a theory should be rejected as soon as one of its implications is shown to be false. In fact scientists rightly allow revising a theory to avoid falsifications, but only if the revised theory eventually makes new predictions that might be falsified. What science doesn’t allow is continual revision to avoid any and every refutation. But isn’t that just what religious believers do, resulting in what the 20th-century English philosopher Anthony Flew called religion’s “death by a thousand qualifications”? Is there any evidence that believers would accept as refuting their position?
  
  D.G.: I’m not a believer, so I’m not in a position to say. First of all, it’s worth noting that some of the biggest empirical challenges don’t come from science but from common features of life. Perhaps the hardest case for believers is the Problem of Evil: The question of how a benevolent God could allow the existence of evil in the world, both natural evils like devastating earthquakes and human evils like the Holocaust, has always been a great challenge to faith in God. There is, of course, a long history of responses to that problem that goes back to Job. While nonbelievers (like me) consider this a major problem, believers have, for the most part, figured out how to accommodate themselves to it.
  
  But science offers challenges as well. For some who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, for example, discovering that the Bible contains claims that are literally false would have to lead to a crisis of faith, or, perhaps more likely, to a rejection of scientific claims. But for more sophisticated believers I suspect that the claims of religion are more like broad structural principles that can be reinterpreted as we learn more about the world. In physics, one might be reluctant to give up broad structural ideas like the existence of general conservation principles, even when some localized experimental evidence may seem to go against them. In that circumstance one might choose to keep the broad and well-entrenched principles and figure out how to reinterpret them so as to fit with experience. I think that some believers may consider the existence of God in something of the same way. But, again, I don’t say any of this with a lot of confidence since I am not a member of the community of believers.
  
  G.G.: What do you see as the current status of traditional metaphysical arguments for God’s existence? Are they of merely historical interest?
  
  D.G.: Good question. It is, in fact, a good question why they were so widespread in the history of philosophy. Not every theist — then or now — would necessarily think that arguments for the existence of God are necessary, or even possible. And if belief in God were generally taken for granted, as it was in the 17th century, then trying to prove the existence of God would seem to be an unnecessary exercise. But at various times and places in that century there were genuine anxieties about the existence of these mythical atheists, and perhaps we should understand the arguments in that context.
  
  Marin Mersenne, Descartes’s close friend and sponsor, and an important mathematician and scientific thinker in his own right, claimed that there were over 50,000 atheists living in Paris in 1623. In his massive commentary on Genesis, where he advanced that claim, he offered 35 arguments for the existence of God. For Mersenne and his contemporaries, the idea of the atheist was terrifying. Many thought that, without the threat of divine punishment, there was no reason for people to act morally. Establishing the rationality of belief in God had high stakes for them.
  
  Today, those who don’t believe, philosophers and others, don’t seem to pay much attention to the contemporary literature on proofs for the existence of God. Proofs for the existence of God have become something of an empty intellectual enterprise, I’m afraid.
  
  G.G.: So are you saying that the philosophical books are closed on the traditional theistic arguments? Have atheistic philosophers decisively shown that the arguments fail, or have they merely ceased thinking seriously about them?
  
  Proofs for the existence of God have become something of an empty intellectual enterprise.
  
  D.G.: Certainly there are serious philosophers who would deny that the arguments for the existence of God have been decisively refuted. But even so, my impression is that proofs for the existence of God have ceased to be a matter of serious discussion outside of the domain of professional philosophy of religion. And even there, my sense is that the discussions are largely a matter of academic interest: The real passion has gone out of the question.
  
  G.G.: I wonder if the lack of passion reflects the fact that centuries of discussion have not yielded any decisive conclusion about whether the arguments work. That, I think, would support an agnostic rather than an atheistic conclusion. On the other hand, many contemporary atheists reject theism on the grounds that there is simply no serious case that has been made for God’s existence. As an historian of philosophy (and an atheist), what’s your view on this issue?
  
  D.G.: Centuries of discussion have certainly not led to a consensus about the arguments. But we cannot forget that at some times in the past, there was a general consensus that God exists, and, perhaps, a general (though not universal) consensus that some of the arguments, for example the argument from a first cause, are correct. The question is really why arguments that were once convincing have lost their power, something that is true of many arguments from the history of philosophy.
  
  I think, though, that the lack of passion reflects more than anything else the cultural change that has made faith and religion less central to our lives, since at least the Enlightenment. This has left the concern to prove the existence of God to people of faith who are concerned with the intellectual grounds of faith, that is, largely philosophers who are believers, philosophers of religion and theologians. You are right to say that many contemporary atheists reject theism because they see no convincing reason to believe. While I am by no means dismissive of religion, that’s where I would place myself.
  
  G.G.: In your essay in Louise Antony’s collection “Philosophers Without Gods,” you say, “Much as I try, much as I may want to, I cannot be a believer.” Why can’t you — and why would you want to?
  
  D.G.: I can’t believe because I’m not convinced that it is true that God exists. It is as simple as that. Belief is not voluntary, and there are no (rational) considerations that move me to believe that God exists. In all honesty, I will admit that I don’t have a definitive argument that God doesn’t exist either. Which is to say that I refuse to make the judgment that some make that it is positively irrational to believe in God in an objective sense. But without convincing affirmative reasons to believe, I’m stuck. If others find reasons that convince them, I’m willing to discuss them and consider them. Who knows? There might be a convincing argument out there, or at least one that convinces me.
  
  On the other hand, it is easy say why I might want to believe. I see people around me — often very smart and thoughtful people — who get great comfort from believing that God exists. Why wouldn’t I want to be like them? It’s just that I can’t.
  
  G.G.: Wanting to believe in God suggests Pascal’s wager argument, which remains for many the most appealing case for religious belief. What do you think about it?
  
  D.G.: Formally, the argument has many well-known flaws, though it also has its friends. Even knowing the flaws, I do find myself somewhat moved by it. The reason is that at the core of the argument there are some very compelling intuitions. Basically, the argument turns on the idea that if there is a God, and we believe in him, we then have a shot at eternal happiness. If God doesn’t exist, then we are stuck in this very finite and imperfect life, whether we believe in him or not. So, it would seem, for all sorts of reasons, we should want to believe in him. The problem (perhaps insuperable) is taking these plausible considerations and turning them into a genuine argument.
  
  But the real worry about the argument comes at a later moment, I think. It is important to remember that Pascal’s wager it isn’t an argument for the truth of the proposition that God exists, but an argument for why we should want to believe that God exists: It only tells us that it is to our advantage to believe, and in this way makes us want to believe, but it doesn’t give us any reasons to think that God actually exists. In a way, I’m already convinced that I should want to believe. But there is a step from there to actual belief, and that’s a step I cannot personally negotiate. Pascal tells us, roughly, that we should adopt the life of the believer and eventually the belief will come. And maybe it will. But that seems too much like self-deception to me. G.G.: You seem to be ignoring what is often taken as the heart of Pascal’s argument: a cost-benefit calculation that you should believe in God because the likely benefits of belief are greater than the likely benefits of nonbelief. Put that way, the argument seems morally dubious, leading to William James’s comment that God would likely exclude from heaven precisely the sorts of people who believe because of such an argument. Is this a misreading of Pascal?
  
  D.G.: That objection doesn’t really move me. Pascal’s wager is certainly a cost-benefit argument. But, as I noted earlier, the important thing is what happens afterward. If behaving like a believer transforms you and causes the scales to fall from your eyes, and allows you to appreciate the existence of God in a way that you couldn’t before, when you resisted belief, then why should God complain? In any case, we are not in a very good position to figure out what God might judge on such an issue — if, indeed, there is a God. But what worries me more than what God might think is the possibility that I may corrupt my soul by deceiving myself into believing something, just because I want it to be true. For a philosopher, that’s a kind of damnation in this life.
     

Cain and Abel and Justice

• Journalist Wesley Lowery, who recently tweeted his own arrest in Ferguson, Missouri, commented this week that Americans do not have a “good track record when it comes to recognizing systemic disadvantages from which they benefit.” The NY Times‘ Nicholas Kristof has referred, in the same context, to “smug white delusion” about race, and racism, in this country.
  
  How much is our view of justice determined by how we ourselves have been treated?
  
  This question is as old as the Bible, it turns out.
  
  In Genesis, the story of Cain and Abel is not only the first account of human violence. It is also the first story that forces us to face the problem of unfair treatment, of outcomes not directly related to a person’s own choices. Here, it is not a question of unjust social structures, but inexplicable divine choice. In the biblical story, both brothers make an offering to God, but only one is accepted:
  
  “In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” (Genesis 4:3-5)
  
  This is the first of many moments in the Bible where God plays favorites. We are never told why God rejects Cain’s offering, just as we are never told why the younger brother Jacob—not his older twin Esau—is chosen to become the father of a nation. Indeed, the Bible does not clearly explain why Israel itself is God’s chosen people. None of these moments of favor or rejection seem to be deserved, or related to the deeds or character of the chosen or unchosen.
  
  This is hard to swallow. Since antiquity, readers of the Bible have struggled to explain these troubling accounts—to discern some coherent, morally explicable reason for apparently arbitrary differences in fortune, and to redraw the world as a fair place after all.
  
  In one account, the Talmud relates that God offered the Torah to all the nations, but only the Jews accepted it. This reversal has two effects: it keeps God unimpeachably even-handed, and it returns agency to the people—that is, it suggests it was the Jews who chose God, not the other way around.
  
  As for Jacob and Esau, later interpretations embellish their characters to make sense of Jacob’s seemingly unmerited divine election: Esau becomes a bloodthirsty, violent savage, while Jacob becomes a morally upright and studious young man, worthy of both his father’s and God’s blessings.
  
  Likewise, in many ancient retellings, God rejects Cain’s offering not because of divine caprice, but because of Cain’s reprehensible character—the first century Jewish historian Josephus, for example, adds that Abel was a lover of righteousness, while Cain was altogether wicked and greedy.
  
  Some contemporary Christian preachers, for their part, have explained that God preferred Abel’s offering because it was better: surely the firstlings of a flock are a more impressive offering than mere plants! Cain had no right to be upset when Abel gave a superior gift.
  
  These readings fulfill a deep need to believe that it is people’s characters and choices, their hard work, that determines their way in the world. If meritocracy is a myth people want to believe about American society, how important it is to see it confirmed in the Bible! But to retell the Cain and Abel story to fit this scheme is a tough sell. As with many biblical texts, easy moralizing does violence to the story, which presents us with a series of bewildering problems it does not solve.
  
  One such problem is a gap in the Hebrew text—an unfinished sentence that probably resulted from a scribal error. After God inexplicably rejects Cain, the brothers go into a field, and we read, “Then Cain said to Abel.” But nothing follows. Instead, we read next that Cain rose up against his brother and killed him—a sudden display of violence, disproportionate and unprovoked.
  
  Ancient translations into Greek, Syriac, and Latin include Cain’s speech, but only up to: “Let us go into the field.” We still don’t know why, in the next breath, we suddenly face the world’s first murder. Didn’t there have to be more to the story? As it stands, the act is shocking and extreme, and, it seems, premeditated.
  
  Was Cain rejected by God because he was by nature a cold-blooded killer? That interpretation is difficult to support with the text. And here is the next problem with the story—God does not punish Cain the way we might expect. To be sure, Abel’s killing is squarely condemned: his blood “cries out from the ground,” and Cain is sentenced to a lifetime of exile. But when he protests that this punishment is too great to bear, and that he is afraid he will be killed when others find out what he did, God listens. Cain will be protected from harm. If anyone kills him, God says, he shall be avenged sevenfold.
  
  Here again, a strange imbalance between deeds and divine response: typical ancient law demanded a life for a life, but the life of the first murderer would demand seven. God places a mark on Cain—we are not told any more about it—and he goes on his way to found cities and beget children.
  
  Arbitrary divine choice, a sudden murder, a killer under God’s protection, a strange mark—all of this comes together into a bewildering sixteen verses. Attempts to tease a sanctimonious moral lesson out of the story fly in the face of its inexplicable twists and the things it leaves unsaid. Some ancient readers have tried to tie up some loose ends, not only painting Cain and Abel as righteous and wicked from the start, but also giving Cain the kind of ignoble death they felt the world’s first killer deserved: an early Jewish tradition claims his house fell on him and killed him, and a rabbinic midrash has him mistaken for an animal and killed in a hunting accident.
  
  But other ancient interpretations amplify the story’s darker, more troubling notes, refusing to grant the reader an easy resolution.
  
  One such tradition is the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew text that dates from late antiquity or the early middle ages, but includes much earlier material.*
  
  The first thing to notice about the way the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan retells the story begins with Cain’s conception: here he is not the son of Adam and Eve, but the result of a union between Eve and the fallen angel Sammael. From the beginning, then, Cain is half-demonic, which goes a long way to explaining some of the baffling aspects of the biblical story. (This may be a very old interpretive motif that the creator of this Targum has woven into his composition.)
  
  But the motif is quickly dropped, and does not play a part in the rest of the story. The translator is not satisfied with dehumanizing Cain. In fact, the Targum presents us with a very human character, and actually deepens the story’s themes of injustice and violent anger. In fact, while the story has often been read as a warning against anger—condemning Cain’s anger, of course—the translator has added something remarkable: he has included Abel’s anger as well.
  
  Why would Abel be angry? In this text, Abel’s anger flares when Cain suggests the divine favor he has experienced is unmerited.
  
  At Genesis 4:8—“And Cain said to his brother”—the translator adds a long section of new material, an entire debate between the brothers:
  
  And Cain said to his brother Abel: “Come! Let us go into the field!”
  
  So they went into the field and Cain again said to Abel:
  “I see that the world was created in love;
  but it is not ordered by the effect of good deeds.
  For there is partiality in judgment,
  because your offering was accepted with favor.”
  Abel answered and said: “The world was indeed created in love
  and it is ordered by the effect of good deeds
  and there is not partiality in judgment!
  My offering was accepted with favor before yours
  because the effect of my deeds was better than yours!”
  
  In this first part of the conversation, Cain speaks for his own experience: he recognizes the goodness of creation, but observes that the world is not ordered according to good and bad deeds. “There is partiality in judgment,” he argues; God’s choice of Abel does not seem to be based on merit. But Abel rejects the idea that he has benefited from partiality. Outraged, he insists it is not so: the world is just, without bias. One’s lot in life is based on character and good deeds; Abel’s offering was chosen because it was better. Cain has no right to be upset.
  
  At this point, the rhetoric escalates. Cain, whose complaint of injustice had at first recognized that “the world was created in love,” now responds with more radical claims:
  
  Cain answered and said to Abel:
  
  “There is no judgment and no Judge and no world to come!
  No reward will be given to the righteous
  nor any account given of the wicked!”
  Abel answered and said:
  “There is indeed a judgment and a Judge and a world to come!
  The righteous will be given a good reward
  and the wicked will be called to account!”
  And because of these words, they fell to quarreling in the open field.
  
  And Cain rose up against his brother Abel
  and drove a stone into his head, killing him.
  
  Cain and Abel’s remarkable argument is little known today, but it is not a mere blip on the radar of biblical interpretation. It exists in different versions in other Targum manuscripts, including fragments found in the Cairo Geniza, showing that it was discussed, revised, and transmitted across Jewish communities.
  
  And it is representative of a concern with justice we can see in many other texts where Jewish interpreters grapple with the story—and usually refuse to give a neatly moralistic tale about a good brother and a bad one.
  
  In this version, it is “because of these words” that they begin to fight, and that Cain finally kills Abel. Here Cain is not a cold-blooded murder who lures Abel into a field to kill him. Instead, we have a crime of passion, violence that erupts from a heated argument.
  
  But it is important to pay attention to how the argument plays out, and to notice where the anger is born—not only Cain’s anger, but Abel’s as well.
  
  The fight does not break out because of a philosophical disagreement about the nature of the world. The brothers argue because Cain has challenged the basis for Abel’s good fortune, and, Abel, in his anger, wishes to silence Cain’s experience. Cain is saying that God favored Abel for reasons unrelated to merit—in essence, that Abel benefited from injustice. Abel’s repeated insistence that he did deserve God’s favor also, of course, paints Cain’s efforts as unworthy.
  
  Whether we read it as smug, defensive, or outraged, Abel’s rejection of the idea that the world might be unjust — that his own good fortune might be at least partly the result of a stacked deck—sounds very familiar to contemporary ears.
  
  ***
  
  As we see every day, social and economic oppression can go unrecognized if it does not hurt us directly—and especially if we benefit from it. And when a person is confronted with the uncomfortable idea that they are the beneficiaries of an unjust system, even if it is not of their own making, they often become defensively angry.
  
  People who have their privilege challenged often respond, in fact, like Abel in the Targum.
  
  Those present injustices are not a matter of capricious divine choice. They are social structures, which are perhaps more long-lasting and less merciful. Surely the writer of the Targum was not predicting 21st century America, but perhaps we can read his words as a comment about privilege, and how the privileged interact with the marginalized. In this centuries-old text, we can see an uncomfortably familiar pattern where denying that injustice exists deepens and amplifies that injustice.
  
  This is where the translator is far more than a pious interpreter—he refuses to rehabilitate baffling biblical narratives into edifying morality tales, where heroes, villains, and victims all perform their expected roles under a just God. Rather than tidying up a problem, he magnifies its scope and zeroes in on its most profound aspects.
  
  One of the Targum’s innovations is to give Abel a voice, something he does not have in the biblical text. But this is not the voice we expect from Abel, if we are used to thinking of him as a paragon of meek virtue, killed by a ruthless murderer. Cain is angry when Abel repeatedly shuts down his grievance, and he is the one who strikes the final blow. But here Abel is angry as well, and he rejects his already-rejected brother all over again.
  
  Abel, too, refuses to be his brother’s keeper.
  
  We can read this double rejection—rejection by an unfair God, and then rejection by his more fortunate brother, who refuses to take his experience seriously—as the root of the tragedy. Cain’s frustration mounts to the point that he despairs of any justice at all, on earth or in heaven.
  
  He kills Abel, whose blood cries out from the ground, and he is condemned.
  
  But the translator isn’t quite finished with this striking portrait of a murderer he couldn’t bring himself to condemn entirely. In the final part of the story—when God promises to protect Cain from harm, and places a mark on him—the Targum identifies the mark: Cain is to carry inscribed on his face the holiest sign of all, the “great and honorable name of the LORD.”
  
  ______________
  
  *Aramaic had replaced Hebrew as the more commonly spoken vernacular after the Babylonian Exile, and scholars think that the practice of creating Targum—the Aramaic word for translation—began soon after, with new versions and additions continuing to appear for centuries. In the synagogue, scriptural readings in Hebrew would be followed by recitation of an Aramaic Targum, a practice that still continues today among Yemenite Jews. But many of the Targums are not straight translations. Instead, they contain changes, omissions, and embellishments—sometimes entire paragraphs of added material.
     

Leaving Closed Communities

• The first time Lynn Davidman bit into a cheeseburger, she was worried for her life. “I was afraid some punishment by God might be imminent,” she recalls. She wasn’t sure what form his retribution for eating a non-kosher burger would take; she probably wouldn’t be hit by lighting in a restaurant, she figured, but perhaps she would be struck to the ground.
  
  A junior at Ramaz, a modern Orthodox Jewish day school in New York, Davidman had begun questioning the strict laws she’d been raised with years earlier. Davidman, now a (secular) professor of sociology at the University of Kansas, has spent much of her career studying communities like the one she grew up in. In her first book, Tradition in a Rootless World, she profiled American Jewish women who grew up irreligious and chose Orthodoxy as adults. For her latest book, Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews, Davidman got to know a very different group of people: 40 men and women born into ultra-Orthodox Hasidic communities who had, against all odds, broken away and joined the secular world.
  
  What sets Hasidic communities apart, other than the way they dress?
  
  They’re taught to be modest: Aside from dressing in an unrevealing way, this means not talking in a loud voice, not wearing gaudy colors, generally not calling attention to yourself. Men, when walking down the street, will look down so they don’t catch a woman’s eye. Before marriageable age, there is complete and utter separation of the sexes. Inside the Satmar community, there are Yiddish signs indicating which side of the street men walk on and which side of the street women walk on.
  
  The entire day is filled with ritual. When you wake up, you are not allowed to walk more than three steps from your bed before you encounter a big bowl of water that was placed on the floor the night before. There’s a cup with two handles; you pick it up and pour it over each hand three times. Then you say a prayer thanking God for returning you from sleep. Then you go to the bathroom. There’s a special blessing to say after you go to the bathroom — you thank God that all your organs are functioning. Then there are more prayers, especially for the men. The men are obligated to pray every morning by a certain time. If you go to breakfast, you’re supposed to say a blessing over each food. There’s an order in which you say the blessings. If you have a fruit salad, but you have granola too, which do you bless first? One idea is that if the fruit’s grown in Israel, you bless that one first. There’s a whole system.
  
  How unusual it is for people to leave these communities?
  
  Very. It takes an enormous amount of guts, savvy, and bravery. The general idea in the community is to keep people as far away from the secular world as possible — it’s seen as polluting. They are taught that the outside world is dangerous, that they have to stick together because God chose them, and if they don’t follow God’s commandments, they will be punished terribly. They grow up with a tremendous fear.
  
  I’ll take the most extreme example. The Satmar Hasidic group lives in a place called Kiryas Joel in [Orange County] New York. They are ideologically encapsulated, they are socially encapsulated, and they are physically encapsulated.
  
  They’re afraid of being disowned by their family and shunned by their community. They also know that if they defect, their family loses status; the marriage chances of the siblings are down. They are risking an enormous amount.
  
  They don’t have skills to get a job. The men are taught in Yiddish. The women don’t go to college. They are aware that they have no way to support themselves outside the enclave. [Kiryas Joel has a higher proportion of people living in poverty than any other village or town in America.]
  
  So who are these people who choose to leave?
  
  They generally have had some childhood experience that doesn’t fit with the ideal Hasidic way. They’re taught that this is the ideal life — but if they’re subject to un-ideal conditions, they start to question what’s wrong. Sometimes there’s verbal or physical or sexual abuse. Perhaps they have two parents whose levels of religiosity differ. This is confusing for a kid, because [they’re taught that] there’s one right way. If their parents disagree, they start to wonder: Is there really one truth? Other people may have cousins or relatives who are secular. One woman said [of her cousins], “They go skiing, they have such a great time — and nobody’s punishing them.” People who leave are mostly young, up to around 25 years old. If you’re married and starting to have kids, it’s much harder to get out.
  
  What happens when they start questioning things or breaking commandments?
  
  They generally do their first “transgressions” far away from their community. There’s a sociological term: They do it in the “backstage,” instead of the “frontstage,” where they could be seen and reported and disciplined. And they find that nothing happens. And that shrimp tastes good. And they keep doing it. That's the phase I call “passing”: They’re moving back and forth between the two worlds. Women might buy a pair of pants, put them on when they get to the bar at the corner of the neighborhood, and put their skirt back on when they go home. Guys might put their curly locks behind their ears if they’re in a dance club, which of course they shouldn’t be at.
  
  How do they go from secretly putting on pants to actually leaving the community?
  
  Some start going to Manhattan more, trying to make some contacts. Eventually they find a place to live and start supporting themselves, but it’s a huge struggle.
  
  In some ways, it’s even harder for women to leave. A few of the women married men who they knew were on the way out, so they would leave together. Men have a few more degrees of freedom. A man’s supposed to be studying at yeshiva all day, but if he goes out for a couple hours, it’s sort of overlooked. What did the people you profiled end up doing once they left the community?
  
  Some of them did computer work. Some became professionals and took themselves through college, with a scholarship or through the city college system. One woman started working at Laura Ashley as a saleswoman. Many went to college and learned some kind of skill — accounting, or one became a social worker. Doctors, lawyers.
  
  Did they maintain links with their old communities?
  
  Yes, which was shocking to me. None of them were disowned. It’s very tense, often — there are hard periods — but there’s contact. One woman is a lesbian; her mother calls her a whore. One woman married a non-Jew. Usually parents are supposed to sit shiva [a mourning ritual] when someone marries outside the religion. I don’t think her parents did that, but they didn’t talk to her or her husband or acknowledge him. But then when they had a baby, her parents were interested in meeting the baby.
  
  Did they keep up any kind of Jewish practice in their new lives?
  
  Most did not. But when they started to have children, for many, it became a different story. Here’s one example: One man and his wife had a child who was 4. They had to put the child in some kind of school. The man wanted to put the kid in a Hebrew day school. The woman was really opposed: She said, "He’s gonna learn things that contradict what we do at home." The man won, and they started sending their kid to a Hebrew day school. When people have children, some of them rethink whether they want to be totally free of any relationship to Judaism.
     

Evangelicals and Pop Culture

• I grew up in the evangelical Christian subculture, among the people on whom Ned Flanders and the Veals on Arrested Development were patterned. So the infamous bonfires where conservative Christian teenagers would gather up their “sinful” media, throw it in a pile, and burn it while singing hymns were a part of my childhood lore.
  
  And, of course, I condemn the right-wing cultural paranoia that leads to people supporting such nonsense (even if all the kids re-buying their sinful albums two years later when they went to college probably boosted net profits). I condemn them for burning heavy metal albums in the 1970s, for burning Harry Potter books in the 2000s, and for supporting Jack Thompson’s moral crusade to get all game designers thrown in jail for “causing school shootings” before he got disbarred in 2008.
  
  I’m against all of that crap. But it doesn’t particularly worry me. The Maude Flanderses were never going to win. The idea that religious conservatives could take down Black Sabbath or take down J.K. Rowling or that Jack Thompson could take down EA and Take Two Interactive was always ridiculous.
  
  Because they knew even as they succeeded in hogging the spotlight people were snickering at them. They knew that as much as they tried to make up for it with brute force, their cultural power was nil. They knew that preachy “Think of the children” types weren’t cool, and the more they attacked Ozzy Osbourne the cooler Ozzy got and the less cool they became.
     

Crackpot But Irrefutable

• From Omni Aug 1983
  
  
     

Did Jesus Save the Klingons?

• The discovery of life beyond Earth would be a triumph for science but might wreak havoc on certain religions. Some faiths, such as evangelical Christianity, have long held that we are God’s favorite children and would not easily accommodate the notion that we would have to share the attention; others, such as Roman Catholicism, struggle with thorny questions such as whether aliens have original sin.
  
  Now that researchers have discovered more than 1,500 exoplanets beyond the solar system, the day when scientists detect signs of life on one of them may be near at hand. Given this new urgency, Vanderbilt University astronomer David Weintraub decided to find out what the world’s religions had to say on the question of aliens. In his new book, Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal with It? (Springer Praxis Books, 2014), Weintraub investigates the implications of life beyond Earth on more than two dozen faiths. Scientific American spoke to him about his findings, including whether Jesus saved the Klingons as well as humanity.
  
  [An edited transcript of the conversation follows.]
  
  Which religion will have the toughest time reconciling aliens with its beliefs?
  
  The ones that have decided that we humans are the sole focus of God’s attention. The religions that see the world through that viewpoint tend to be some of the Christian evangelicals. The Eastern Orthodox Church, a branch of Catholicism, also has that view.
  
  There are some people who claim that if God had created extraterrestrials, then there clearly would be words in the Old and New testaments, which we would have already found, that would have said explicitly that God created extraterrestrials—and since those words don’t exist, there can’t be. Well, there’s nothing in the Old and New testaments that talks about telephones either, and telephones do seem to exist.
  
  Which religions are more open to the idea of alien life?
  
  Asian religions for the most part are easily accommodating. In Buddhism, for example, there are lots of worlds. Reincarnation is an important part of that view of life. I could be reincarnated in principle anywhere in the universe. There’s nothing that says I could only be reincarnated on this planet. For Buddhism, there’s no single holy book, no single holy figure who wrote anything down. There are so many big ideas and so many sacred writings, the volume of ideas is almost limitless. A Buddhist wouldn’t be surprised to find life existing in other places.
  
  You write that the Roman Catholics have a particular issue when it comes to extraterrestrials. What is their viewpoint? Original sin is an important idea in Roman Catholicism. The idea that Adam and Eve shouldn’t have eaten the apple—they committed a sin and that’s how sin entered the lives of humans. Jesus’s act of dying on the cross was to redeem all humans from that original sin, to allow us to get to heaven.
  
  Let’s say you discover some aliens on some other planets and you decide that you should convert them to Christianity. A reasonable question should be why? If they live on planet Earth, they could be descendants of Adam and Eve but if they are Klingons living on planet whatever, they couldn’t suffer from original sin because they’re not descendants of Adam and Eve. Christianity would make no sense for these creatures, unless our understanding of original sin makes no sense.
  
  Roman Catholic theologians are starting to rethink that in light of the possibility that there could be living beings on other worlds. The idea of original sin may be recast not as sin that comes directly from a literal Garden of Eden and a literal Adam and Eve but that original sin somehow simply exists in the fabric of the universe.
  
  Then you’ve also got to rethink some other ideas. If the redemption by the son of God who was incarnated in human form on the Plains of Galilee 2,000 years ago provides redemption for human beings on Earth, does that also provide salvation for Klingons?
  
  Or does Jesus have to separately visit their planet?
  
  Right. That’s a serious theological problem. Most theologians are pretty seriously averse to the idea that the son of God will have to visit every planet and get crucified on every planet.
  
  What if there’s another planet that’s been in existence for 100 million years before us? Do all of those creatures not get to go to heaven because the Jesus event didn’t happen until 2,000 years ago? Is that fair? It’s not for me to say.
  
  Some Catholic theologians are wiling to wave their hands and say it’s simply not a problem; God will take care of it. Some say it’s a serious problem. But theologically it’s a pretty interesting problem. These questions have been sitting out there for several hundred years. Two hundred years ago [American revolutionary and political philosopher] Thomas Paine put these questions out there very eloquently, and theologians started to address this and decided, yeah, this is a problem.
  
  Do any religions explicitly discuss the possibility of life beyond Earth in scripture?
  
  The middle of the 19th century is when a whole bunch of new religions were born, and many of those religions had something to say about extraterrestrials. In Seventh-Day Adventism, for example, the founder had visions of extraterrestrials—Saturnians—in which she saw them and saw that they were pure; they had not sinned. The only sinful beings in the universe were humans on Earth. That was her solution to the Thomas Paine problem, the original sin problem. The Saturnians didn’t need Christianity because they didn’t suffer original sin.
  
  What about other religions, such as Quakers or Jews?
  
  Quakers don’t really care if there are extraterrestrials. In Judaism it doesn’t matter—there’s very little in Hebrew scripture that relates to the question.
  
  Mormonism is pretty interesting. There is a clear belief in Mormonism in extraterrestrial life. All Mormons have as a goal to become exalted, to become a god. To become a god you effectively get your own planet with your own creatures on it and you’ll take good care of them. The only place in the universe where you have the opportunity to become exalted is Earth. Those Mormons that receive the highest level of exaltation will be equals with God and have their own worlds, occupied with living beings seeking their own salvation and immortality. The prophet Joseph Smith taught that these worlds are or will be inhabited by sentient beings. It is everywhere taken for granted. They’re not vague at all. There’s no doubt that the Mormons are comfortable about the idea that there are others on other worlds. They’d be unhappy if we didn’t find anybody. But they’d just say we haven’t looked hard enough.
  
  From all your research, does it seem like the discovery of extraterrestrial life is likely to have a dramatic effect on people’s religious beliefs?
  
  I can’t think of anything that would be bigger. I think at bottom most people have this idea that we humans are pretty special creatures and that God is paying attention to us. If we find somebody else, then there are lots of somebodies, most likely. And if there are lots of somebodies, that somehow would seem to make us less important. I think that is, psychologically, what has happened a number of times in human history. When Copernicus first said the Earth goes around the sun, theologically that meant we’re not the center of the universe anymore. Later on when astronomers said the sun isn’t the center of the universe, it’s just a silly star out in the suburbs of the galaxy, that threatened our well-being again. Suddenly if there are other beings out there, I think it changes completely the way we think about our place in the universe. I think it would be truly profound to know that.
     

Jerusalem

• So far the usual reasons all the misconceptions of the conflict taking place in Jerusalem are part of religious folklore. But this image would not have gained such great momentum now if there were not certain players that have a vested interest in imposing it as the exclusive interpretative framework for recent events. Chief among those are the leaders and rabbis of the religious right in Israel; lending their vocal encouragement to that group are evangelical Christians in the United States. The latter are looking forward to the last war of Armageddon, in which the Jews have, according to a certain Messianic tradition, a central role. The former, however, wish to bring about the final redemption and the coming of the messiah. This will happen only with the rebuilding of the Temple Mount.
     

Adam and Eve

• At a lovely carol service on Sunday in our village church of All Saints in Elton, Derbyshire, I learnt something new — a surprising twist to my understanding. I thought I knew the story of the Fall. But on Sunday, during the reading from Genesis iii, I realised that I’d missed a central point.
  
  Brought up on the Bible, I’ve never revisited the account: an allegory about good and evil, with God representing good and the serpent evil. One side stands for truth and innocence, the other deception and complicity. I’ve always thought that the serpent tricked Eve into trying an apple. I thought that the serpent misled her.
  
  So the reading came as a shock. The serpent told the truth!
  
  It was God who had tried to trick the couple. He told Adam that “on the day you eat [an apple] you will certainly die”. When Eve repeated this the serpent replied: “Of course you will not die. God knows that as soon as you eat it you will be like gods, knowing both good and evil.”
  
  Eve and Adam did then eat the apple. They did not die. No wonder God was furious: He’d lost the special hold that he had on the couple.
  
  The story seemed to be less about morality and more about a struggle for mastery. God does not have the moral high ground here; both sides behave unscrupulously. It’s about obedience, tactics and command.
  
  I see in this strange story an early warning of a conflict that still troubles Christianity. Dualism sets up good and evil as equal and opposed forces, each with its leaders, rewarding its foot soldiers, locked in eternal struggle.
  
  Christians are supposed to believe that love is all and God is all. But beneath the surface of Christianity there has always been a popular strain of inchoate satanism. A kind of dualism — an idea that evil is an enemy army, combated by exterminating people — now inhabits much western thinking on fundamentalist Islam, and Islamist thinking about the west. This influences political and military policy. In my Genesis, nobody would be trying to recruit Adam or Eve and the story would be about truth, not obedience. As it stands, and on the issues, I’m with the serpent.
     

Religious Fatties

• There may be fasting during Lent, but Christianity also lends itself to plenty of feasting, what with the carbladen Last Supper, sticky hot cross buns and Easter eggs, generous Sunday lunches and of course Christmas with all the trimmings. Research has found that people with a religious faith tend to be fatter than atheists, with Christians the most likely to be overweight when compared with non-believers.
  
  The study, by a team at Coventry University, took data from the health survey for England and compared body-mass index and waist-to-hip ratios for those who professed an “affiliation” with a particular religion against those who declared no religious faith.
  
  Looking at the figures for 7,414 adults, the study found that religious people tended to be more overweight. Studies have previously found that spiritual wellbeing can lead to a reduction in anxiety and stress-related conditions, but the research has found a link between religion and obesity, with religious people scoring almost a unit higher on the BMI scale.
  
  “There had been research looking at people who are more religious tending to have better health in terms of mental wellbeing and also physical things related to that, like blood pressure,” said Deborah Lycett, a lecturer in dietetics at Coventry University. “But it hadn’t been looked at in terms of weight. Most did tend to show that people who were more religious tended to be more overweight.”
  
  Male Sikhs came second behind Christians as the most likely to suffer weight problems. However, the study also estimated that Buddhists have a lower BMI than non-religious people.
  
  “In religious communities, food is celebrated a lot and that might be a factor,” Dr Lycett said. “There is the idea that religious people don’t smoke and drink as much, but are celebrating more with food.”
  
  She stressed that being religious was not necessarily the cause of weight problems and said that it was possible that some people who were overweight could turn to religion for “comfort”.
  
  “Those who are in religious communities — and particularly church-going Christians — might be the population that needs to be targeted more for health promotion initiatives,” she said.
  
  It is not the first time that religion has been associated with extra girth.
  
  A study tracking 3,433 men and women for 18 years, carried out by Northwestern University in the United States, found that young adults who attended church or a Bible study once a week were 50 per cent more likely to be obese.
  
  In 2006, research by Purdue University in Indiana found that fundamental Christians were the heaviest of all religious groups, led by Baptists, with a 30 per cent obesity rate, compared with Jews at one per cent.
     

Religions Will Die Out

• Religious people in many developed countries will be a minority by 2041, according to one Irish biopsychologist.
  
  A study into the beliefs of people living in 137 countries, which forms the basis for a new book, found atheism increases in more developed places as people become increasingly materially rich.
  
  The book also debunks the popular belief that religious groups will dominate atheistic ones because they collectively have more children. Biopsychologist Dr Nigel Barber has based his book, 'Why atheism will replace religion,' on the findings to draw his controversial conclusions.
  
  Biopsychologists examine the application of the principles of biology to the study of physiological, genetic and developmental mechanisms of behaviour in humans.
  
  In an article in Psychology Today, Dr Barber explains that in his book he questions how long it would take for the average country in the world to reach a similar level of wealth and development as countries that already have secular minorities.
  
  This transition was defined as a minority of the population believing in a god, or a minority considering that a god is important to their lives.
  
  This was measured in terms of a country's GDP, local prices and Human Development Index (HDI) and allowed Mr Barber to come to the conclusion the average country will transform into a secular society in 2041.
  
  He said atheists are heavily concentrated in economically developed countries and religion will decrease as individuals' personal wealth increases.
  
  The book proposes that people do not have to rely on supernatural influences when material possessions are catering to their needs, according to Science World Report.
  
  Religion declines not only because people are becoming richer, but also due to the increasing quality of life, decline of serious diseases, better education and welfare states, the author said.
  
  He believes there is less demand for religion in societies such as Japan and Sweden where normal people are relatively comfortable and consequently the majority of the populations are already secular.
  
  Dr Barber concentrates on the emotional benefits of religion that favored its evolution amongst our ancestors, who faced many different challenges to their daily lives.
  
  The book links the cause of religion’s emergence with reasons for its potential decline and the Amazon description for the book likens organised religion to a Dodo.
  
  DISTRIBUTION OF ATHEISTS
  
  There is almost no Atheism in Sub-Saharan Africa
  
  But there are more atheists in Europe:
  
  64% of people are non-believers in Sweden
  
  48% of individuals are atheist in Denmark
  
  44% of French citizens do not subscribe to a religion
  
  42% of Germans do not believe in a god.
  
  The figures come from a 2007 report by Zuckerman via Psychology Today
  
  The description says: 'Religion evolved to help our ancestors cope with anxiety and insecurity.
  
  'Supernatural belief is in decline everywhere that ordinary people enjoy a decent standard of living and are secure in their health and finances.
  
  'The market for formal religion is also being squeezed by modern substitutes such as sports and entertainment.
  
  'Even Facebook is killing religion because it provides answers for peculiarly modern narcissistic anxieties for which religion has no answer.'
  
  Dr Barber also said it is unlikely religious communities will continue to dominate atheistic groups as they have children more frequently, as has been previously suggested.
  
  Dr Barber said: 'Noisy as they can be, such groups are tiny minorities of the global population and they will become even more marginalized as global prosperity increases and standards of living improve.'
  
  He believes as women become more integrated into the workplace they will have less children, whether they are religious or atheist.
     

Pope Francis and Doorways

• Peace, Pope Francis told an audience in St Peter’s Square in May, is not massproduced, but handcrafted by individual artisans. That is his own genius: building relationships of trust that create spaces for the Holy Spirit to break through what seems humanly impossible.
  
  Pope Francis at the Vatican at Christmas. His has an ability to build bridges and reach out to different Christians Mostly this doesn’t pay off at once; when Francis brought together the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to pray at the Vatican in June — in itself an extraordinary coup — it was followed, if anything, by an increase in violence between the two sides. But it unveiled a doorway to peace that the smoke of bombs had obscured. At other times there are spectacular results, as with the extraordinary news that the US and Cuba had resumed dialogue after decades of mutual rejection. The key factor, both sides acknowledged, was Francis’s trustbuilding and patient hospitality.
  
  Can Francis similarly break through the walls between Christians? The post-Reformation fission is there but the longing for a lost unity is never far from the surface, as shown by the reaction of Pentecostal leaders in Texas to a video message to them last year from Pope Francis. The message was introduced to the Kenneth Copeland Ministries conference in Fort Worth by an old friend of the Pope’s, a South African evangelical bishop called Tony Palmer, who had known Jorge Mario Bergoglio from his days as cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires. (On a visit to Francis in January, Palmer had asked him for a message; Francis suggested recording it on Palmer’s iPhone.) In the video Francis, seated in a green felt chair with a pointsettia plant in the background, spoke of his yearning for the separation of Christians to end, how a “miracle of unity” — the work of the Holy Spirit — had begun. There were about 300 church leaders there that day and they were ecstatic. Later, the video went viral and Palmer’s Ark Community was overwhelmed with messages from evangelical leaders: how could they be part of this? How could they accept the Pope’s Spirit-filled invitation to be one?
  
  Francis is a Jesuit whose Ignatian spirituality developed in a new direction through his contact with Catholic charismatics in Argentina. After he became archbishop in 1998, they introduced Cardinal Bergoglio to evangelical Protestant pastors. From 2006 until he left for Rome in 2013, he met them most months to pray together in the charismatic style: asking for a “Word” from Scripture, invoking the Holy Spirit, and praising. Francis, in short, is the first Pope deeply at ease among evangelicals.
  
  For their part, the evangelicals have spotted in him a pope who has been baptised in the Spirit.
  
  In a doctorate he began but never finished in the 1980s, Father Bergoglio set out to understand how differing views in the Church, freely expressed and properly channelled, opened spaces for the Holy Spirit to bring about new resolutions, just as it had in the early-church councils; yet how that path to convergence can be destroyed by temptations that turn disagreements into contradictions. Reform has a mixed history in the Church: for every movement restoring the Church to dependence on Christ there was a wild card that ended by splitting the body. What leads one to end up in the other? That was the question he set himself, reading Romano Guardini through Yves Congar.
  
  But rather than write a thesis, he put its insights into practice — in the Jesuits, as the leading figure in thet Argentine and laterl the Latin-American Churches, and now as Pope. At the end of November in Istanbul, at Mass in the presence of the Orthodox ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomew, and the other eastern Christian leaders, Francis gave a stunning homily on how the Spirit acts within the body. “When we try to create unity through our own human designs,” he warned, “we end up with uniformity and homogenisation”: views turn into closed human constructs, or ideologies, and rivalry, conflict and schism follow. Yet “if we let ourselves be led by the Spirit, richness, variety and diversity will never create conflict, because the Spirit spurs us to experience variety in the communion of the Church.” That is the post-post Reformation story Francis believes the Christian Church is called to, one that depends above all on docility to the Spirit. He believes that evangelicals — who now make up three quarters of the world’s Protestants — are able to respond to this call both institutionally and spiritually in a way that the historic churches cannot.
  
  When Palmer met Francis again, some weeks after the megachurch meeting, he told him of the reaction the message had generated. “So what should we do now?” the Pope asked him. Palmer organised a meeting with the Pope, on June 24, of evangelical leaders (Joel Olsteen, James Robison and Kenneth Copeland, as well as the head of the World Evangelical Alliance, Geoff Tunicliffe, and the pioneers of the “Toronto blessing”, John and Carol Arnott) who together represent some 800 million Christians. They talked, prayed and ate together; there were high-fives and laughter. (Francis had been “one of the boys”, Palmer told me. “It was beautiful.”)
  
  This is not theological, or institutional, dialogue of the sort that has dominated ecumenism since the 1960s, but spiritual friendship: building bridges of trust and reciprocity that open up new spaces for God to act. Francis told them that their shared baptism, and openness to the Holy Spirit, are enough; that they shouldn’t wait for theologians to agree before acting and witnessing together.
  
  \ That and other meetings have been preparing the ground for an historic agreement between Catholics and evangelicals that will renounce rivalry, profess a shared baptism and core belief, and commit Catholics and evangelicals to mission together.
     

Religion Is No Sacred Cow

• Let’s be clear: there is no justification for limiting what people say or express unless serious damage would result
  
  Of course we are not all Charlie. Many of us never were. So much so that in the days since the great Paris march a Venusian, scanning newspaper letter and comment pages, might be excused for imagining that last week a gang of armed cartoonists had stormed a houseful of slightly combustible Muslims and shot themselves. When the new Charlie Hebdo front-page cartoon appeared on Monday, an assistant editor at The Guardian wrote that in depicting Muhammad holding a “Je suis Charlie” placard the magazine was “adding insult to injury by claiming the prophet would support the values of the magazine”.
  
  Not all the various ways that people found not to defend free speech were quite so inane. But find them they did and it is now time to strangle some weasels. They were to be spotted in the familiar red-brick rectory insistence, which found several niches on our own letters page, that (lamentably) the cartoonists had brought this upon themselves by being impolite to people whose capacity to withstand such robustness was not great.
  
  This strand was familiar from the Rushdie days. Poke a hornet’s nest with a stick and what do you expect? I’ve written here before that we British do quite a line in victimblaming: she must have said something, he must have provoked her and so on. My thought is that such a form of apologism makes the apologists feel safer, because they would never be so provocative, so under-dressed, so drunk. Therefore no one would kill or rape them.
  
  The BBC reporter’s phrase du jour on Tuesday, much repeated, was that the new cartoon was “fanning the flames”, a suggestion that was a provocation in itself. Wouldn’t you, if you were a bit flamy, consider this an invitation to be fanned? An unconsidered possibility was that people might be sensible, look at the cartoon of someone supposed to be Muhammad saying “All is forgiven” and think “OK. Fair enough.”
  
  In her column on this subject yesterday my colleague Alice Thomson referred the matter to the court of good manners. Just because you can say something, she wrote, doesn’t mean you should. Some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons had been crude and a bit insulting. “There is a difference,” she pointed out, “between being informative, challenging and provocative and simply being offensive.” The leap over complexity in that sentence is the word “simply”. What are we to do where a play or an artwork, say, is informative, challenging, provocative and offensive. Or where I say it’s offensive and you say it’s challenging?
  
  Or where she says it’s offensive in one way, when she really means it’s offensive in another. On Tuesday I found myself on Radio 4 debating the latest cartoon with a Muslim commentator. I set out to discover what specifically she found offensive about the cartoon. She talked about other cartoons being racist stereotypes. She referred to Nazi era cartoons of Jews. She talked about how other people out there would be angry. It was one obfuscation after another, until finally she said: “As a deeply spiritual and religious person I cannot, I do not accept that the Prophet is depicted on the front page of a cartoon magazine.”
  
  And that was it — the rest had all been like different tinted concealers applied with a mop. No matter how you dressed it up, you couldn’t draw something and call it Muhammad. Perhaps she knew and perhaps she didn’t that the origin of the proscription was a fear of the Prophet being over-exalted, not of his being insulted, and that — in any case — perfectly spiritual Persians had depicted him for centuries.
  
  Part of the rectory response was an assertion that people’s deep “beliefs” are not to be mocked. But when people say this they always mean religious beliefs. They accord religion a special status of protection that does not apply to politics. But Stalin was genuinely venerated, as was Mao. Kim still is. If we are talking offence to belief, should we have held off satirising the Great Leaders of Humanity because of the sensibilities of their followers?
  
  I have little time to discuss the proposal that Islam is not a fair target for lampooning because its adherents in the west are a powerless minority. Even if that were a good reason (and it is actually a condescension) there are five Islamic republics and 21 other countries where Islam is the official religion and where mighty and usually despotic governments lay claim to legitimacy based on Islamic precepts.
  
  Possibly the grubbiest and most disreputable of the weasels used to justify or offset threats to free speech concerns the hypocrisy of those who are defending it. This one runs thus: X who wants freedom for Y doesn’t support it for Z, therefore we shouldn’t worry about Y. Ugh.
  
  But the greatest and most common weasel is what I would now call the Hasan formulation, laid down by the Muslim commentator Mehdi Hasan in the New Statesman this week. After the usual light-footed trip round the outhouses he stayed still long enough to deliver this oh-soplausible proposition. “None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.”
  
  The Hasan formulation (which is to be found everywhere) is pernicious because it is both superficially true and utterly untrue. I shouldn’t have to rehearse why freedom of speech is a good, and why, consequently, there has never been a tyrant or despot in history who hasn’t tried to restrict it. An absence of freedom of speech distorts and terrorises. It creates ignorant, cowed people and vile, unaccountable government.
  
  It follows from this that the test for limiting speech or expression would have to be a stringent one. Only if you could show that people would suffer significant damage as a direct and intentional result of this expression do I think bans can be justified.
  
  So when someone says “we differ only in where those lines should be drawn” — the critical word being “only” as in “just” or “merely” or “in the insignificant matter of” — they are engaging in an intellectual fraud. Mehdi Hasan, for whom freedom of speech may be significantly less important than, say, community cohesion or order or his idea of his prophet, does not differ with me only about lines. He differs with me — and, I hope many of you — about principles. Essential principles.
     

Scientology

• .... there is a bait-and-switch that goes on with the Church. You enter and they tell you, “Look, this is an applied philosophy. Take what you want and leave the rest,” and you start this “auditing,” which is a kind of therapy, really. It’s like Freud’s talking cure. You start to feel better. Well, would you like to feel more better? How about paying a little bit more money? The next thing you know, you’re in, and then when you get to a certain level, you start to see the theology and the wild cosmology of the religion. That happens a long way down the road, and after many, many, many thousands of dollars.
     

Religious Exemptions

• In case you haven’t heard, the measles are back. In a big way. Cases of measles have been on the increase in the last few years, and this month an outbreak now reaching at least 94 patients has been tied to an exposure at Disneyland.
  
  It appears that the source of this latest infection was likely either a foreign tourist or an American who returned carrying the disease from abroad, but the outbreak has brought renewed attention to the anti-vaccination movement (like this RNS commentary arguing that “Parents who do not vaccinate their children should go to jail”). What hasn’t been highlighted is the fact that the increased instances of measles and other previously-eradicated diseases in this country over the last decade are actually a cautionary tale about religious exemptions.
  
  All states have mandatory vaccine laws for public school students, but almost all states (48 to be precise) allow exemptions for those who have a religious objection to vaccines. And 19 states allow exemptions for those with philosophical/conscientious objections that are not explicitly religious in nature. Although I haven’t delved into the legislative history of each of these laws, I think it’s a fair bet that when they were passed the religious exemptions were intended to protect a very small percentage of the population with religious objections to vaccination, like Christian Scientists or some parts of the Amish community.
  
  It’s unlikely that the exemptions were intended to be used by the growing number of well-educated and well-off parents whose version of a “natural”/”organic” lifestyle has metastasized into vaccine science denial. There is a debate about whether the purpose of religious exemptions is to give religion special privileges or simply to protect religious people from discrimination, especially people of minority religions who may be disproportionately impacted by general laws that are made by people of a majority religion. But regardless of the reason, most religious exemption laws are, as the name suggests, only for religious believers. (In the military conscientious objector context, the set of protected beliefs was expanded to include a philosophical opposition to war that was of a similar scope and gravity to a religious objection.)
  
  But a belief that vaccines cause autism (which is contrary to all scientific evidence) is not the kind of life philosophy that exemption laws are generally designed to protect. And in fact, there have been recent calls to remove the “personal belief” exemption from California’s vaccine law on the grounds that it is being abused and is destroying the herd immunity that is required to protect people who actually cannot be safely vaccinated, like young babies, or immuno-compromised individuals. (“Herd immunity” refers to the idea that a population can support a small percentage of unvaccinated individuals as long as the proportion of vaccinated individuals remains above a certain threshold – in that context herd immunity will protect most of the unvaccinated individuals because outbreaks will be thwarted by the high level of vaccinated individuals).
  
  The irony is that if there were no such exemptions in a vaccine law, it is unlikely that a plaintiff would be able to win a Religious Freedom Restoration Act claim (under a state RFRA or similar statute). A plaintiff with a “personal belief” claim would certainly not be able to obtain a judicial exemption, since RFRAs protect only religious belief.
  
  But even a plaintiff with a religious belief against vaccination would have an uphill battle. The government’s compelling interest in public health and the eradication of fatal diseases, particularly in the population of young children, seems very hard to overcome – especially in a situation where herd immunity is required for successful eradication of the disease.
  
  Further, it’s hard to imagine a case in which you could have stronger third-party interests than this one. For those children who cannot be safely vaccinated, the presence of an unvaccinated child who might transmit the disease is literally a question of life or death.
  
  And the fact that there might be more than one child who cannot be vaccinated in a given school isn’t fatal – that’s the narrow tailoring inquiry, which asks whether the government has designed the law being challenged as narrowly as it can in order to achieve the goal that law is after without unnecessary infringement on people’s rights. The law requiring vaccination of all children who can be safely vaccinated in order to protect both those children and the few children who cannot be safely vaccinated is as narrowly tailored as it can get.
  
  All in all, these vaccination exemptions should remind us of the dangers of including overly broad exemptions in generally applicable laws, especially those protecting public health and access to civil rights like education. Once the exemptions are in, they are hard to get out and very difficult to control.
     

Offending Religions

• Charlie Hebdo and friends may not be to your taste but they have a duty to challenge pernicious, self-perpetuating laws.
  
  Oy! You! Yes, you, big nose, the one reading this article right now! You are fat. You are stupid. And you are ugly.
  
  It doesn’t take much sophisticated argument to demonstrate that just because one is allowed legally to say something, it doesn’t mean that it is right, or acceptable, just to go ahead and say it. While I am sure that your second thought is of Voltaire, your first thought was who the hell is he calling big nose? It doesn’t take much delicate reasoning either to make the case that there are some ideas that are my right to express but that The Times wouldn’t wish to me to put in print. And to prove it, I am not going to.
  
  It is just good manners to understand and show some respect for the sensitivities of others, and to pay little or no heed to what your interlocutor might find offensive is often unpleasant and generally unnecessary. This is even the case when one wishes to say something that is true and obvious. You, for instance, may actually be fat. Yet I don’t need to say so. A little tact can go a long way (like your nose).
  
  These fairly simple points — surely impossible to dispute — were made often in the days after the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and apply equally to the attack on the free speech meeting in Denmark, set to feature the artist Lars Vilks. Just because we must defend absolutely the right of these cartoonists to express themselves, does not mean we have to approve of them exercising their right.
  
  Their work, often (although by no means always) childish and crude, caused offence and they knew it would. Such provocative behaviour deserves criticism. As I say, this view seems irresistible. It is certainly widely held. I also believe it to be profoundly wrong.
  
  It is not merely the right to free expression that should be defended in the cartoonist’s case. It is the publication of the cartoons themselves. A misunderstanding about the Danish caricatures of Muhammad has persisted ever since Jyllands- Posten published them almost ten years ago. It is that the issue at stake is one of ordinary offence and tactfulness. The reaction — bombing, rioting, assassination — may be a little, how does one put it, over the top. But in other ways the insult is comparable to any other.
  
  This is totally to misunderstand what is at stake. In their invaluable book Silenced, Paul Marshall and Nina Shea explain how blasphemy law has risen to become one of the main tools of control used by oppressive elites across the Muslim world. It provides secret police, unaccountable regimes and arbitrary courts with an open-ended, vaguely defined law that you can offend against even without knowing that you are doing so.
  
  Silenced gives dozens of examples: the man arrested for playing music when the religious police said he should have been listening to the Koran was sentenced to eight years in prison and 2,000 lashes for insulting Islam; the teacher jailed for ridiculing bearded men (which he almost certainly hadn’t as he was bearded himself); the man executed for “using black magic”, placing the Koran in the bathroom and abandoning Islam.
  
  In countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, the line between the dictates of the regime and the dictates of Islam are blurred so that it is not obvious which is being offended against. Criticism of ministers is prosecuted as an insult to all Muslims. In other places, Nigeria for instance, accusations of blasphemy can be used as an excuse for mob violence and murder.
  
  Naturally, blasphemy is used as a weapon of oppression against minority ethnic groups and religions — Christians, Jews, and Shias and Sunnis against each other. These laws are also self-perpetuating. It has become common for western liberals to argue that what is needed is a reformed Islam that reflects the reality of the lives and views of millions of ordinary Muslims. Blasphemy laws are perhaps the most important reason why such an Islam struggles to be born. Any departure from orthodoxy can be portrayed as blasphemous, the work of an apostate. Even to begin the journey to reform is dangerous.
  
  The attraction to religious authorities of making some forms of expression about Islam taboo is obvious. It allows them to prevent challenges to their power. Twenty six years ago this week in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini took a bold step. He called on “all zealous Muslims to execute quickly wherever they find them” the author Salman Rushdie and all connected with his book The Satanic Verses.
  
  It was a move designed to shore up his political position after Iran’s unsuccessful war with Iraq. Rushdie had no connection with Iran and nor, naturally, did his Japanese translator, who was murdered, or his Norwegian and Italian translators who were seriously assaulted. Khomeini was arguing for the first time that the restriction against blasphemy should apply internationally, to people living in non-Islamic countries under quite different legal systems.
  
  And, of course, he was claiming to himself the right to determine what blasphemy was, just as Stalin claimed the same right over communism.
  
  ' Khomeini’s power grab met with much the same reaction from many western liberals as the cartoonists did. Yes, Rushdie must be protected, but what a nuisance that he chose to be so provocative. His book wasn’t even any good. Just stirring a hornet’s nest is all it was.
  
  Just as this view of Rushdie was naive and incorrect, so is the same view of Charlie Hebdo and the Danish cartoons. Declaring that something is blasphemy against Islam is not an ordinary claim that something is offensive. It is asserting the right of oppressive authorities to determine the boundaries of debate and free exchange. It is supporting the power grab of these oppressors as they seek to extend their rule internationally.
  
  The most important thing to understand is that the blasphemy claim is self-perpetuating. The only people who can decide what is blasphemous are the religious and political authorities who already hold power in Islam and the Islamic world. And it is impossible to join that select group without accepting the rules, interpretations and control of those who are already on the inside. To offer an alternative interpretation is to be assured of exclusion and to risk punishment. So the challenge — vivid, taboo- breaking, colourful, bracing, even tasteless — has to come from outside. It is not just the rights of the Danish and French cartoonists that must be defended, but the content of their work, too.
     

The Violence of Religious Reformations

• 11 On August 10th 1566 an enraged crowd of Huguenots burst into the Chapel of St. Lawrence in Steenvorde France and proceeded to destroy with hammers and picks any ecclesiastical art that they came across. They toppled statues of Mary and the saints, destroyed crucifixes, smashed stain glassed windows, and defaced tombs. It was not an isolated incident, indeed it triggered a wave of iconoclastic fury that radiated north from France into the Low Countries, with cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and hospitals all targeted for destruction.
  
  One witness wrote: “They tore the curtains, dashed in pieces the carved work of brass and stone, brake the altars, … [they] burned and rent not only all kind of Church books, but, moreover, destroyed whole libraries of books…”
  
  Inspired by the theology of Calvin and Zwingli who taught a literal interpretation of the Decalogue’s prohibition on graven images, the enraged crowd targeted all art which they saw as blasphemous and contrary to their new order. In short they wished to erase all vestiges of the past.
  
  For one versed in early modern European history the events of this past week in Mosul seem eerily familiar. On February 26th the Guardian reported that “Islamic State militants ransacked Mosul’s central museum, destroying priceless artefacts that are thousands of years old, in the group’s latest rampage…”
  
  As is the case in the Guardian‘s coverage, the story is often accompanied by Islamic State video showing black-clad, bearded extremists taking power tools to ancient Assyrian and Akkadian statues. We watch in horror as ancient statues of massive winged bulls have their faces erased by jack-hammers and we see statues being toppled over. According to the Guardian, an ISIS representative declares that, “These statues and idols, these artifacts, if God has ordered its removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars.” Another article in the Guardian reported that the Islamic State has bragged about the burning of over 100,000 books – some going back thousands of years – in Mosul’s central library.
  
  Which is why there’s such irony in articles like Raza Rumi’s “Islam Needs Reformation from Within” in the Huffington Post, or books like Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. These are far from isolated examples; indeed it has become a truism in our political discourse that Islam “needs a reformation.” But if historical parallels are at all useful, it indeed seems that a reformation is precisely what we are getting right now. Our political pundits, as inheritors of a triumphalist Anglo-American Protestant historiography, often embrace a fallacy that conflates the tremendously complicated reformation (and I am using this word to mean both the various Protestant reformations as well as the Catholic Counter-Reformation) with the likewise tremendously complicated Enlightenment.
  
  But while reformation may signal modernity – and this is important in the context of any discussion about the Islamic State – it doesn’t always signal progress, liberalism, or democracy. It’s often presented as a given that the existence of modern democracy, capitalism, and science grow purely out of the reformation, but John Calvin was not Thomas Jefferson (arguably Thomas Jefferson wasn’t even Thomas Jefferson). It’s a reductionist understanding of history, and it becomes dangerous when misapplied to current events.
  
  Our educations have tended to gloss over the brutal violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries that was perpetrated by both Catholics and Protestants. Millions of Europeans were killed on a scale unimaginable during the medieval era (even though our common parlance has us believe that that the Middle Ages were a particularly brutal period). From the French wars of religion, to the English civil wars, to the Thirty Years’ War (where possibly 30% of German civilians perished) the arrival of modernity signaled terror and horror in many corners.
  
  How we use words like “medieval,” “reformation,” and “modern” must be exact if we’re to make any sense out of what the Islamic State is, and how we are to defeat it. Graeme Wood’s controversial Atlantic cover essay “What ISIS Really Wants” has opened discussion in the press about what language we use to describe the Islamic State. It may be politically expedient to deny that the Islamic State is Islamic (and of course the majority of the world’s Muslims find it reprehensible) but it’s also to commit the “No True Scotsmen Fallacy.”
  
  Where Wood’s analysis falters is when he claims that there is a “dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature.” The fact is that when other pundits declare a need for an Islamic reformation that is exactly what the Islamic State is delivering. Far from medieval they’re eminently modern, they are simply an example of the worst grotesqueries that modernity has to offer.
  
  And they’re not early modern as my previous historical examples have it, they’re as modern as we are. They may wish to return to their own fantasy version of an ancient past (and Wood even notes that ISIS recruitment videos utilize scenes of medieval warfare skillfully edited from contemporary movies) but no group, liberal or reactionary, can escape their own time period. To designate them as “medieval” is to merely engage in an outmoded school of historical critique that has more to do with our own constructed pasts and our own prejudices than it does reality.
  
  The modern world has never been devoid of religion and the presence of religion does not mean we are in the medieval. We are not fighting a medieval army for the simple reason that it is not the middle ages. It is to buy into that old “war of civilizations” idea that eliminates complex historical contingencies in favor of a narrative every bit as mythic as what the Islamic State believes about itself. Indeed it is a formidable and evil army, but it is a modern army. The Islamic State, as Haroon Moghul notes in Salon, was born out of the catastrophic US invasion of Iraq. From the debris of that incredible mistake they have taken the technology of modernity and the rhetoric of the Hollywood action film to claim they’re building a caliphate.
  
  The crowd at Steenvorde and the subsequent fury of destruction they unleashed was not an isolated incident. Explosions of image destruction started in the 1530s and included cities like Basel, Augsburg, Copenhagen, Munster, Geneva, and Zurich.
  
  In Britain it was state policy under Henry VIII with his dissolution of the monasteries. The Worcester Priory which had a respectable library of 600 books was reduced to only six, while an abbey in Yorkshire with 646 books was reduced to three. The Henrician Reformation resulted in an unfathomable destruction of England’s medieval culture every bit comparable to what may have been lost this week in Mosul.
  
  And this isn’t just an issue of cultural vandalism. Indeed, the religious wars of early modern Europe were marked by barbarity as fervent as that occurring now in the Iraqi and Syrian deserts. We associate the Islamic State with decapitation and defenestration, but this sort of violence marked the sixteenth and seventeenth century every bit as much.
  
  Historian Marc Lilla has argued in his book The Stillborn God that contemporary secularism emerged not out of the reformation but rather in response to the new and horrific violence that modern religion had unleashed on Europe. He claims that the modern western political order, far from being an intellectually inevitable result of ideological currents of the time, was actually a pragmatic necessity when religious violence had made Europe ungovernable.
  
  In other words, reformation didn’t produce liberalism, liberalism was the cure for reformation. Once you familiarize yourself with the brutality on all denominational sides, from the Peasant’s Rebellion, to the Siege at Munster, to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, to the Thirty Years’ War, to the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands, to Cromwell’s brutal invasion of Ireland, it becomes hard to see the word “reformation” as a simple and positive force.
  
  If Lilla’s thesis is correct, then the reformation led to political liberalism and the Enlightenment only because the ground was so bloody and the populace so exhausted they had expended their lust for war – a peace built on a pile of bones. So, when wishing for a reformation in Islam it behooves us to understand what it is that we are wishing for.
     

Evangelicals For Israel

• HE was almost lost in the whirl of lawmakers, pundits, plutocrats and other boldface names who showed up for Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress last week. But the presence of Pat Boone was a key to understanding why John Boehner was playing a smart game of party politics to stand so solidly with the Israeli prime minister.
  
  I’m referring to Boone the singer. But I really mean Boone the churchman. He’s a prominent figure among, and megaphone for, American’s evangelical Christians, who listened to Netanyahu’s remarks as closely and adoringly as any constituency in this country.
  
  For the speech, Boone wore a tie on which the flag of Israel, with its Star of David, was conspicuous. Just afterward, he told David Weigel of Bloomberg Politics that he’d known Netanyahu personally for years and had held some hope that the prime minister would give him a special shout-out during the remarks.
  
  And days earlier, on a radio show, Boone described Netanyahu as a friend who was well aware that evangelical Christians constitute some of “Israel’s most staunch supporters,” numbering “in the tens of millions in the United States.”
  
  He’s correct in that analysis, which was strangely missing from much of the media coverage of and commentary about the Netanyahu-Boehner alliance.
  
  Yes, Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu, rendered independently of the White House, was a way to get under President Obama’s skin and in President Obama’s way. And, yes, that provocation was manna to the most conservative House Republicans, who sometimes chafe under Boehner’s leadership.
  
  But they loved what Boehner did for an additional reason: It catered to the evangelical Christians who are an integral part of the party’s base, especially for lawmakers from the reddest states or districts. In fact, as Ashley Parker reported in The Times, Boehner’s caucus gave him a standing ovation last week even though he was bucking them by linking arms with Nancy Pelosi to pass a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security.
  
  The prompt for all that clapping? Representative Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Republican, spoke up to thank Boehner for weathering attacks from the White House in order to make Netanyahu’s speech happen.
  
  What part of Colorado does Lamborn represent? Colorado Springs, which is a Republican stronghold, famous for its concentration of evangelical Christians.
  
  JEWS in the Democratic Party are more divided on the actions that conservative Israeli leaders like Netanyahu have taken in defense of Israel than evangelical Christians in the Republican Party are.
  
  And that helps to explain the tightened bond between Israel and Republicans over the last few decades.
  
  We in the media often look past that to focus on the influence of a handful of rich Jewish Republican donors for whom Israel is a priority. Foremost among them is Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate. He almost single-handedly kept Newt Gingrich’s 2012 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination financed and alive.
  
  And a year ago, when Chris Christie joined other potential Republican presidential candidates to give speeches to the Republican Jewish Coalition, he had to ask Adelson’s forgiveness after using the phrase “occupied territories” in reference to land where Palestinians live but Israel maintains a military presence.
  
  But the bigger story is Israel’s importance to evangelical Christians.
  
  “Christian Zionism as a sentiment is not new,” said Dan Senor, a Republican foreign policy adviser who has traveled to Israel with Mitt Romney, Chris Christie and other Republican candidates. “But as a movement, it has grown exponentially in size and political sophistication over the past 15 years.”
  
  In early 2013, when Obama nominated Chuck Hagel, a Republican, to become the next defense secretary, and Hagel’s support for Israel was called into question, one of the groups lobbying against him in greatest number and at greatest volume was Christians United for Israel.
  
  Its founder and chairman, John Hagee, was in Washington, D.C., with his wife last week at Netanyahu’s speech. They were Adelson’s guests.
  
  Some evangelical Christians’ interest in Israel reflects an interpretation of the Bible’s prophetic passages that’s known as premillennial dispensationalism. It maintains that the End of Days can play out as God intends only if Jews govern Israel and have reconstructed a temple on the Temple Mount, where there’s now a mosque.
  
  But just a subset of evangelicals subscribe to that. Others are motivated by their belief, rooted in scripture, that God always intended Israel for Jews and that honoring that and keeping Israel safe is a way of honoring God. God’s blessing of America, they feel, cannot be divorced from America’s backing of Israel.
  
  The conservative Christian television preacher Pat Robertson once publicly suggested that Ariel Sharon had suffered a stroke and that Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated because both of these former Israeli prime ministers had pursued policies of “dividing God’s land.”
  
  “There are evangelical connections to the land,” said Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
  
  It’s common for large evangelical congregations in the United States to organize tours of Israel for their members. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist pastor and probable candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, has been running something of a side business as a guide for American evangelicals with Galilee and the Garden of Gethsemane in their sights. “The man is just nuts about Israel,” William Booth wrote in a Washington Post story two weeks ago about Huckabee’s tours. Huckabee told Booth that he visits Israel as often as four times a year.
  
  The attacks of 9/11 and the spreading threat of Islamic extremists have further strengthened American evangelicals’ sense of kinship with Jews in Israel, whom they see as crucial partners in fighting butchers who have recently singled out Christians for slaughter.
  
  Moore told me that American evangelical leaders are routinely trying to get American lawmakers to focus on anti-Semitism around the globe. He said that when he joined the prominent evangelical pastor Rick Warren and the lawyer (and Clinton adversary) Ken Starr last week on a panel at Georgetown University to discuss religious issues, anti-Semitism came up immediately.
  
  That’s a climate and a context that are essential to understanding fully the bear hug in which Boehner wrapped Bibi. He wasn’t merely welcoming a world leader. He was doing in the arena of foreign policy what he tries and sometimes fails to do with domestic issues: keeping the base in buoyant spirits.
     

How Scientology Fights Critics

• The HBO documentary Going Clear, an investigation inside the Church of Scientology, premieres on March 29. Unsurprisingly, the organization refused to cooperate with the film’s directors. Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary Films told the Hollywood Reporter that the network had 160 lawyers look at the film due to fears of backlash from the church (which some consider a cult). Her concern is well-founded given that Scientology has always used fear tactics to squash critics.
  
  The Church’s modus operandi stems from a policy called “fair game,” which states: An enemy of Scientology, referred to as a suppressive person (SP), “may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.”
  
  Back in the day before the Internet publicized the secrets of Planet Xenu, Scientology relied on lawsuits to intimidate its detractors. Between 1991 and 1996, John Travolta’s religion filed more than 50 lawsuits against the Cult Awareness Network (CAN),eventually forcing it into bankruptcy. The Church then bought its name and assets in bankruptcy proceedings and used CAN as the title of an unrelated organization.
  
  These tactics trickle down from L. Ron Hubbard. In a 1966 policy letter, the author and founder of Scientology instructed his followers on the proper procedure for handling investigations.
  
  1. Spot who is attacking us.
  2. Start investigating them promptly for FELONIES or worse using own professionals, not outside agencies.
  3. Double curve our reply by saying we welcome an investigation of them.
  4. Start feeding lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press.
  5. Don’t ever tamely submit to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way.
  
  Vicki Aznaran, a former church leader, stated in an affidavit that: “throughout my presidency of RTC, fair game actions against enemies were commonplace. In addition to the litigation tactics described below, fair game activities included burglaries, assaults, disruptions of enemies’ businesses, spying, harassive [sic] investigations, abuse of confidential communications in parishioner files and so on.”
  
  As Aznaran’s testimony suggests, the organization routinely uses legal action and its immense financial resources to harass and cause professional ruin. We can only imagine what its reaction will be to HBO’s Going Clear. Until then, here is a brief history of some of the shocking fear tactics the church has used against its critics.
  
  1. Scientology vs. South Park
  
  In the classic 2005 South Park episode “Trapped in a Closet,” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker take on Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and the entire philosophy behind the Planet Xenu cult. The South Park creators became targets of Corporate Scientology’s OSA Operations as they attempted to squash the episode and ruin the creative duo. The results of their investigation, which involved extensive surveillance of Stone and Parker, were leaked to the Village Voice. Through informants, private investigators, and public records, the organization searched for “vulnerabilities” in the pair’s personal and business lives.
  
  Scientologist Isaac Hayes, who played the character Chef on the show, promptly quit over the controversy. In his parting statement, Hayes said, “There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins. Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored. As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices.”
  
  In true South Park fashion, Matt and Trey responded by brutally killing off Hayes’ character.
  
  2. Scientology vs. Los Angeles Times
  
  In 1990, Joel Sappell and Robert Welkos wrote a groundbreaking series on Scientology for the Los Angeles Times. After the series appeared, the church struck back. The Sea Org-ers purchased space on 120 billboards and 1,000 bus placards around Los Angeles, publishing ads featuring the journalists’ bylines, the newspaper’s name, and context-free quotes from their articles that made it seem as if their series was actually endorsing Scientology.
  
  On a personal front, private investigators were hired by the church to obtain Sappell and Welkos’ financial records, phone records, and other data. Welkos received an envelope at his home from a mortuary; inside was a brochure trumpeting the benefits of arranging your funeral before you die that read, “Investigate the pre-arrangement program at our memorial park now. You’ll be glad you did, and so will your family.”
  
  Welkos telephoned the mortuary, which assured him it never sends out unsolicited material. A few days later, more funeral brochures were delivered to Welkos’ home.
  
  3. Scientology vs. Time magazine
  
  In 1991, Time magazine published a cover story about Scientology called “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power.” According to associate editor Richard Behar, “At least 10 attorneys and six private detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an effort to threaten, harass, and discredit me.”
  
  Private investigators contacted Behar’s acquaintances and neighbors in an effort to dig up dirt on him. A copy of his personal credit report, detailed bank information, home mortgage, credit card payments, home address, and Social Security number were illegally retrieved from a national credit bureau.
  
  The organization went even further, spending over $3 million to run daily ads in USA Today. One Scientology-sponsored ad claimed that Time once supported Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. The church also used a tactic called “dead agenting,” mailing out thousands of copies of an 80-page booklet titled “Fact vs. Fiction” in an attempt to correct the “falsehoods” in the Time article.
  
  4. Scientology vs. St. Petersburg Times
  
  Stephen Koff investigated L. Ron Hubbard’s church in 1988 for Florida’s St. Petersburg Times. While working on his story in Los Angeles, Koff began receiving calls from people who claimed to work for credit card companies, asking for his personal information. He was led to believe that a private investigator had accessed his credit report. His wife began receiving obscene late-night calls from strangers. Then the creepiness really took hold: one week after his series appeared, Koff noticed a man in a parked car was watching his home. Through police sources, Koff learned that the car had been rented by a private investigator.
  
  When the St. Petersburg Times planned to run a review of a biography critical of Hubbard, it received a letter from a church attorney threatening a lawsuit that read: “We have evidence that your paper has a deep-seated bias against the Church and that you intend to hit the Church hard with this review. If you forward one of his lies you will find yourself in court facing not only libel and slander charges, but also charges for conspiracy to violate civil rights. If you publish anything at all on it, you may still find yourself defending charges in court in light of what we know about your intentions. We know a whole lot more about your institution and motives than you think.”
  
  The newspaper published both the review and the attorney’s letter.
  
  5. Scientology vs. Newkirk Herald Journal
  
  From 1989 to 1992, theNewkirk Herald Journal, a small weekly paper in Oklahoma, began publishing biting editorials criticizing Scientology. At the time, the church was building a huge drug rehab center on a nearby Indian reservation. Soon after, publisher Robert W. Lobsinger began receiving visits by private investigators.
  
  Lobsinger recalled that one investigator “went to the sheriff’s office poking around wanting all the terrible bad criminal history on me, my wife, and kids. Of course, there isn’t any. He wandered around town talking to everybody else trying to get the goods on me. They sent him down with a full-page ad to run in my paper and a handful of hundred dollar bills to buy this ad. Of course, the ad was a condemnation of me for exposing Scientology and insinuating that I was obviously a drug dealer and was a terrible bad guy.”
  
  Instead of putting an ad in Lobsinger’s paper, Scientologists took out an ad in a daily paper 15 miles away and mailed the ad to Newkirk’s 2,500 residents.
  
  6. Scientology vs. Paulette Cooper
  
  In 1972, New York author Paulette Cooper wrote a scathing book on the church called The Scandal of Scientology. Cooper became the target of lawsuits and the victim of an intensive harassment campaign known as Operation Freakout. The end goal of the campaign was to have Cooper institutionalized, or at the very least to ruin her reputation and force her to retract her critiques.
  
  The church sent itself forged bomb threats using Cooper’s typewriter and paper with her fingerprints on it, insisting to authorities that Cooper was behind them. On May 9, 1973, she was indicted on charges of making bomb threats against the church. The scheme was exposed when the FBI raided the church’s offices and recovered documents relating to the operation. In 1985, the church finally agreed to an out-of-court settlement.
     

Sabbath Rules Kill Kids

• In the hours after a malfunctioning hot plate started a fast-moving blaze that killed seven brothers and sisters in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn on Saturday, a Fire Department official went door to door at nearby homes handing out pamphlets titled “Fire Safety for Jewish Observances.”
  
  “Stay in the kitchen — don’t leave cooking food unattended,” warned the first item on the list of precautions.
  
  For observant Jews, that admonition is hard to reconcile with the religious tenets that govern how they are to behave on the Sabbath, the weekly day of rest. From sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday, those who observe the Sabbath do not work, write, use electricity — or cook. If they want a hot meal during that time, they must prepare their food — often a popular stew called cholent — ahead of time and leave it warming overnight.
  
  While the household sleeps, the Saturday meal is kept warm either on an electric hot plate or atop what is known in Yiddish as a blech, a metal plate that sits on a gas burner set to low. Fire Department officials said the fatal fire in Midwood, Brooklyn, in an observant Jewish household, had started with a malfunctioning hot plate sitting on a first-floor kitchen counter.
  
  On Saturday, Lt. Bruce Silas of the Fire Department’s fire safety education unit manned a sidewalk table up the street from scene of the deadly blaze, passing out fire-safety literature and 9-volt batteries for smoke detectors. He said many people from the neighborhood had approached to ask him about the safety of using hot plates. (Sabbath rules, however, prohibited those who were observant from taking the literature or batteries until after sundown.)
  
  Orthodox Jews are forbidden to cook on the Sabbath, and lighting a flame is also prohibited on the day of rest. Using a blech or a hot plate is just one of many customs the observant follow in order to adhere to Sabbath rules: Because they cannot alter the temperature of food, they cannot stir a stew, cover a pot or change the amount of water in it.
     

Zodiac Signs Out Of Whack

• Almost nobody was born under the sign they think they are, as the astrological calendar has failed to be updated as our position in relation to the stars has changed.
  
  The constellations have drifted out by a whole month, it was revealed on the BBC's Stargazing Live. Since the zodiac was created more than 2000 years ago, the wobbling effect of the Earth caused by the moon and the sun has meant that the stars that are above us have shifted.
  
  If, for example, someone was born towards the end of January, they might think they were born under Aquarius. But in fact they'd have been born under Capricorn, Dr Radmilla Topalovic, an astronomer from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich pointed out on the programme.
  
  When the zodiac was devised by the ancient Greeks, people were assigned star signs based on the constellation that was behind the sun at that time. But the constellations are now out by about a month.
  
  The wobbling process is called precession - it has been likened to the Earth behaving like a spinning top - and takes about 26,000 years to happen.
  
  That means that 86 per cent of people are now living under the wrong sign, according to the BBC. Stargazing Live created an interactive graphic that allows people to work out what their star sign really is.
  
  The programme also points out that there is a 13th star sign, describing a lesser-known one called Ophiuchus. It is thought that ancient astrologers perhaps left out the sign so that the 360-degree path of the sun could be divided into 12 neat parts, each of 30 degrees.
  
  But the constellation, known as the serpent bearer, actually passes behind the sun between November 30 and December 18 - so while some people might have their star sign wrong, some people might be an entirely new one altogether.
     

Scientology Losing Control

• For most of its existence the Church of Scientology grew and prospered by protecting its secrets. But it’s been tough holding on to that model in the 21st century, a notoriously bad era for powerful institutions in the secret-keeping business. That point has been amply made in recent years by top church officials turned whistleblowers, a high-profile book by Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker, and now a lacerating new HBO documentary based on Wright’s exposé. The new voices in the Scientology debate have both testified to the church’s efforts to silence its critics and, by speaking out, shown the limits of that approach. Their accounts seem to show the church losing its grip on the public narrative it once aggressively controlled.
  
  “The history of Scientology’s attempts to scuttle critical stories goes back decades,” said Stephen Kent, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta who has studied and written about the church.
  
  In 1970, Paulette Cooper, a Harvard graduate in comparative religion with a master’s degree in psychology, began publishing work about Scientology. When’s her book The Scandal of Scientology came out in 1971, it drew the church’s attention.
  
  Internal Scientology documents (revealed in later court documents) described the church’s plan for Cooper, a child of parents killed in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, which was to have her “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit her so hard she drops her attacks.”
  
  Less extreme examples of Scientology’s reported pressure tactics abound. Former high-ranking Scientologists and experts on the group describe an approach that relies on the threat of legal action and implied negative consequences to dissuade reporters and entertainers from using the church as a subject.
  
  “I know for a fact that some media individuals, media organizations and even academics were scared off from doing stories about Scientology for fear of being sued or otherwise harassed,” Kent said. The professor related a story about being interviewed for a Canadian television production exploring Scientology when, he said, “one of the shows announcers got cold feet” and it never aired.
  
  “Even The Daily Beast knows we do not ‘harass’ the media,” Scientology spokeswoman Karin Pouw wrote in response to a list of questions submitted by The Daily Beast. “This is a myth spread by those who produce one-sided hatchet jobs like Alex Gibney [Academy Award-winning director of the HBO documentary Going Clear] and Lawrence Wright did, but whine when we exercise free speech by pointing out their bias and shoddy methods.”
  
  Mike Rinder knows about Scientology’s approach to dealing with media criticism from experience. Rinder, who’s featured in Going Clear, was a senior executive in the church who spent time in its public affairs division before leaving Scientology.
  
  “I know for a fact that some media individuals, media organizations, and even academics were scared off from doing stories about Scientology for fear of being sued or otherwise harassed.”
  
  In 2007 the BBC’s Panorama program began producing a feature, “Scientology and Me.” “The church sent private investigators to follow the BBC’s reporter, John Sweeney,” said Rinder. “The people involved in the production, from Sweeney and his producer all the way up to the top of the BBC, were investigated.”
  
  Pouw, the Scientology spokeswoman, did not address specific claims about the BBC show but wrote in her statement: “The Church does not hire private investigators to follow journalists.”
  
  Rinder, a top official in the church at the time of the BBC program, said he was involved in the operation and saw it firsthand. “I know the church hired [private investigators] to follow Sweeney, as I was there,” he said. “I also saw the reports from them. And John Sweeney video’d them and showed them in his Panorama documentary!”
  
  “That’s basically the tactic the church uses,” Rinder said. Scientology’s approach with its critics, he said, is to “silence them by finding out something that they’re seeking to protect that will either cost them their job or the threat of exposure will cause them to back away.” And “of course, there were also legal threats,” Rinder said.
  
  “Basically that’s the playbook,” Rinder said of the BBC show, “that gets used for every perceived media piece on Scientology.”
  
  At some point, though, that alleged tactic, which left a trail of gaps in the public’s understanding of Scientology where stories were left on the cutting-room floor or never written at all out of fear, apparently began losing its effectiveness.
  
  Ex-Scientologists and experts differ on when exactly they believe the church’s hold on the story of Scientology first started to slip, but they agree on the cause. “The simple answer is the Internet,” said Kent, the University of Alberta sociology professor.
  
  “The ’Net changed everything and from all accounts has had a major impact on membership,” said Mark Bunker, a TV journalist and longtime anti-Scientology activist.
  
  Still, it’s a bit more complicated than that, Kent said. “It’s not just the Internet,” he said. Much of the momentum in the anti-Scientology movement that has culminated in the new HBO documentary comes from ex-members of the church, he said. The Internet gave them a chance to meet each other and trade stories, creating an echo effect that amplified their voices. “Former members became emboldened enough to start speaking on the Internet” about abuses they had allegedly witnessed and, Kent said, that in turn led to more defections and more ex-members speaking out.
  
  “The big change came around 2005, when South Park did their episode on Scientology and ended it with ‘Sue Me,’ and they didn’t get sued,” said Bunker. That lessened the fear among commentators of being sued and, in a dangerous turn for any official piety, opened the group to wider ridicule. Said Kent, “The gravitas of Scientology diminishes rapidly as comedians start picking it apart.”
  
  “The fallout from the first airing of that South Park episode was pretty stunning,” said Bunker. According to Rinder, it led Scientology to scramble to use Tom Cruise’s weight in Hollywood to get the episode quashed.
  
  “When South Park did their program, I went to CAA,” said Rinder, using the abbreviation for Creative Artists Agency, a top Hollywood talent agency that represented Cruise.
  
  Rinder said this is what happened next: “The Tom Cruise card was played with CAA to get them to put pressure on Comedy Central and Viacom. Ultimately, it really backfired.
  
  After the South Park dustup came other public bruises for Scientology. In 2008, the church found itself in a war with the Internet collective Anonymous. The dispute began over Scientology’s attempts to remove a video from the web that showed Tom Cruise praising the group at an internal church event. That roused an impassioned defense of free speech in a growing online culture that considered the Internet inviolable ground. The back-and-forth ended up generating publicity for Anonymous, which seemed to relish the audience, and exposing Scientology to added and sometimes harsh media attention.
  
  At the same time, Scientology experienced a number of defections by high-level members. Some said they were leaving the church over disputes with its current leader, David Miscavige. And some of those former Scientologists then went public with sharp criticisms of the church and detailed allegations of abuses they claim were carried out by Miscavige or under his authority. In turn those defections supplied some of the critical source material for Wright’s book, which became the basis for Gibney’s new film. And now, coming out on the heels of all the developments that preceded it, the film is generating a wave of press attention that has made it easier to cover Scientology without fear of standing out.
  
  Rinder has another reason he believes the church’s old tactics aren’t as useful as they once were. Litigation as a default response is no longer as effective. That’s because “the first notice of deposition is going to be to [Scientology leader] David Miscavige,” according to Rinder, “and the second note is going to be to Tom Cruise. And that is something that they can’t deal with.”
  
  “They’ve got too many skeletons in their closet and too much they can’t answer to, so their response is to just say everyone’s a liar,” he said.
  
  The church has run an ad campaign attacking the new HBO film that does call nearly everyone involved a liar, criminal, violent psychopath, or some combination of the three.
  
  Scientology’s secrets fill a space both in and outside the organization.
  
  Former Scientologists say that even loyal followers don’t learn about key tenets of church doctrine until they’ve spent years in the church and spent considerable sums for the privilege.
  
  It’s only gotten harder to control the narrative now that HBO’s new documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, has been touring film festivals before its premiere on March 29. The film illustrates the church’s heavy-handed approach to outsiders, but its most harrowing scenes are the ones that purport to show what happens to church insiders who run afoul of Scientology’s leaders.
     

(Pro) Wrestling and Religion (They're both fake)

• Last week, filmmaker Max Landis posted a wildly popular digital short on YouTube entitled Wrestling Isn’t Wrestling. The premise of this “somewhat-mostly-accurate educational parody film,” as he calls it, is that what people think professional wrestling is, it’s not. Its rich storytelling and epic, almost mythological, canon is generally obscured by that ever present question from baffled non-fans, “You know it’s all fake, right?”
  
  georgiawrestlingI’m not going to lie – I absolutely love professional wrestling. Since I first laid my adolescent eyes upon the masked Mr. Wrestling II on Georgia Championship Wrestling in the 1970s, I became a dyed in the wool fan of the unique blend of physicality and scripted performance that has come to be known as “sports entertainment.” From the cultural impact of Hulkamania in the 1980s, through the downturn of the industry in the mid-1990s, to the explosion in popularity of the WWF vs. WCW Monday night wars, I excitedly ordered the pay-per-views, attended the live events, and fantasy booked storylines as any self-respecting fan should.
  
  Despite whatever you might think about pro wrestling, it possesses an undeniable cultural currency. In the past several weeks alone, World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE) flagship television show Monday Night Raw has welcomed a series of celebrities, including The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart who continued his verbal feud with smarmy villain Seth Rollins, in the buildup to Wrestlemania 31, where 70,000 fans will gather this Sunday at Levi Stadium in Santa Clara, CA.
  
  Professional wrestling, much like organized religion, operates within its own system of internal logic and rules. To the uninitiated outsider, the inability of a wrestler to prevent himself from bouncing off of the ropes (perhaps gravity operates differently within the squared circle) or a suplex inflicting damage only on an opponent despite both bodies slamming into the mat, might appear as strange as, say, walking in on the ceremony of holy communion (without the chair shots, of course) with no understanding of the purpose or meaning behind the ritual.
  
  Max Landis points out that the bizarre internal logic of the sport is incidental to fans because, ultimately, wrestling isn’t about wrestling—it’s about constructing mythology and meaning. We know it’s fake, and we really don’t care. The often strange and peculiar logic of religion serves the same function, I’d argue, and the catcalls of unbelievers—“You know it’s fake, right?”—miss the point entirely.
  
  And then there are those who do think it’s real, who can’t separate fantasy from reality. Those fans who believe that The Undertaker is an actual undead wizard who conjures lightning (or those faithful who agree that God wants Creflo Dollar to have a $65 million jet.)
  
  A week doesn’t pass that I don’t see a viral Facebook post regarding a seriously ill child who is sure to die from cancer unless thousands of people pray for healing (It’s difficult not to imagine God in heaven, watching the prayer ticker anxiously while muttering, “Come on, folks, just ten-thousand more prayers and I can save that little girl!”) This is often accompanied by an inspirational credo, something like: “Faith may move mountains, but prayer moves God.”
  
  This view of prayer breeds some seriously twisted theology, one that gives God credit for the rain, but no blame for the drought. Meaning, if our fictional sick child happens to be cured, then praise be to God. If not, well, the church just needs to be sure to pray more.
  
  In the 1993 film Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis, played by Anthony Hopkins, is being comforted by his friend Harry after his wife, Joy, has died from cancer. Harry says, “I know how hard you’ve been praying; and now God is answering your prayers.” Lewis responds,
  
  “That’s not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me.”
  
  Lewis gets that a Creator swayed by every request from the created (petty or otherwise) is worthy of neither worship nor petition. God is not a cosmic gumball machine, dispensing tasty treats when prayerful coins are inserted into a magic slot.
  
  So yes, wrestling isn’t wrestling, it’s a meaning machine.
  
  Similarly, what is considered prayer by a lot of Americans is actually not prayer at all. The admonition of Jesus to “go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret” is a Stone Cold Steve Austin double-barreled middle finger to misguided social media prayer-a-thons that seek viral ‘likes’ in the hopes of manipulating God, rather than the kind of sincere introspection that, as C.S. Lewis knew, changes us at a fundamental level.
     

Neil deGrasse Tyson

• I’m curious what your take on Scientology is, because the intergalactic story of Xenu does encroach on your territory a bit.
  
  So, you have people who are certain that a man in a robe transforms a cracker into the literal body of Jesus saying that what goes on in Scientology is crazy? Let’s realize this: What matters is not who says who’s crazy, what matters is we live in a free country. You can believe whatever you want, otherwise it’s not a free country—it’s something else. If we start controlling what people think and why they think it, we have case studies where that became the norm. I don’t care what the tenets are of Scientology. They don’t distract me. I don’t judge them, and I don’t criticize them.
  
  Now, where the rubber hits the road is, since we are a free country where belief systems are constitutionally protected—provided they don’t infringe on the rights of others—then how do you have governance over “all” when you have belief systems for the “some”? It seems to me that the way you govern people is you base governance on things that are objectively true; that are true regardless of your belief system, or no matter what the tenets are of your holy documents. And then they should base it on objective truths that apply to everyone. So the issue comes about not that there are religious people in the world that have one view over another, it’s if you have one view or another based on faith and you want to legislate that in a way that affects everyone. That’s no longer a free democracy. That’s a country where the few who have a belief system that’s not based in objective reality want to control the behavior of everyone else.
  
  Should Scientology be a religion?
  
  But why aren’t they a religion? What is it that makes them a religion and others are religions? If you attend a Seder, there’s an empty chair sitting right there and the door is unlocked because Elijah might walk in. OK. These are educated people who do this. Now, some will say it’s ritual, some will say it could literally happen. But religions, if you analyze them, who is to say that one religion is rational and another isn’t? It looks like the older those thoughts have been around, the likelier it is to be declared a religion. If you’ve been around 1,000 years you’re a religion, and if you’ve been around 100 years, you’re a cult. That’s how people want to divide the kingdom. Religions have edited themselves over the years to fit the times, so I’m not going to sit here and say Scientology is an illegitimate religion and other religions are legitimate religions. They’re all based on belief systems. Look at Mormonism! There are ideas that are as space-exotic within Mormonism as there are within Scientology, and it’s more accepted because it’s a little older than Scientology is, so are we just more accepting of something that’s older?
  
  The line I’m drawing is that there are religions and belief systems, and objective truths. And if we’re going to govern a country, we need to base that governance on objective truths—not your personal belief system.
  
  The separation of church and state—which we’re not too great at practicing in this country.
  
  Yeah. The Constitution makes no mention of Jesus, God, or anything. The Constitution is religion-free on purpose, which I’ve read was controversial. They were smart. They said, “Well, if we mention god, then it establishes a religion, and that would give the government power to influence your belief system, and you would no longer have a free country.”
  
  As a scientist, does homophobia strike you as particularly odd? There are many species within the animal kingdom that are attracted to the same sex, and perhaps if people were more educated in the sciences instead of religious dogma, then there would be less homophobia.
  
  Well, it almost always entirely stems from religion. But the point here is that if you’re religious, and your religion tells you that being gay is bad, then don’t be gay. But you have to remind yourself that that’s your belief system, and there are other belief systems that don’t agree with that, so you should not be in the position to make legislation that affects other people.
     

Religion Based Bigotry

• So our debate about religious freedom should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.
  
  “Human understanding of what is sinful has changed over time,” said David Gushee, an evangelical Christian who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University. He openly challenges his faith’s censure of same-sex relationships, to which he no longer subscribes.
  
  For a very long time, he noted, “Many Christians thought slavery wasn’t sinful, until we finally concluded that it was. People thought contraception was sinful when it began to be developed, and now very few Protestants and not that many Catholics would say that.” They hold an evolved sense of right and wrong, even though, he added, “You could find scriptural support for the idea that all sex should be procreative.”
  
  Christians have also moved far beyond Scripture when it comes to gender roles.
  
  “In the United States, we have abandoned the idea that women are second-class, inferior and subordinate to men, but the Bible clearly teaches that,” said Jimmy Creech, a former United Methodist pastor who was removed from ministry in the church after he performed a same-sex marriage ceremony in 1999. “We have said: That’s a part of the culture and history of the Bible. That is not appropriate for us today.”
  
  Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story And we could say the same about the idea that men and women in loving same-sex relationships are doing something wrong. In fact the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have said that. So have most American Catholics, in defiance of their church’s teaching.
  
  And it’s a vital message because of something that Indiana demonstrated anew: Religion is going to be the final holdout and most stubborn refuge for homophobia. It will give license to discrimination. It will cause gay and lesbian teenagers in fundamentalist households to agonize needlessly: Am I broken? Am I damned?
  
  “Conservative Christian religion is the last bulwark against full acceptance of L.G.B.T. people,” Gushee said.
  
  And as I’ve written before, these evangelical Protestants wield considerable power in the Republican primaries, thus speaking in a loud voice on the political stage. It’s no accident that none of the most prominent Republicans believed to be contending for the presidency favor same-sex marriage and that none of them joined the broad chorus of outrage over Indiana’s discriminatory religious freedom law. They had the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary to worry about.
  
  Could this change? There’s a rapidly growing body of impressive, persuasive literature that looks at the very traditions and texts that inform many Christians’ denunciation of same-sex relationships and demonstrates how easily those points of reference can be understood in a different way.
  
  Gushee’s take on the topic, “Changing Our Mind,” was published late last year. It joined Jeff Chu’s “Does Jesus Really Love Me?” published in 2013, and “Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships,” by James Brownson, which was published in 2013.
  
  And Vines said that the New Testament, like the Old Testament, outlines bad and good behaviors that almost everyone deems archaic and irrelevant today. Why deem the descriptions of homosexual behavior any differently?
  
  Creech and Mitchell Gold, a prominent furniture maker and gay philanthropist, founded an advocacy group, Faith in America, which aims to mitigate the damage done to L.G.B.T. people by what it calls “religion-based bigotry.”
  
  Gold told me that church leaders must be made “to take homosexuality off the sin list.”
  
  His commandment is worthy — and warranted. All of us, no matter our religious traditions, should know better than to tell gay people that they’re an offense. And that’s precisely what the florists and bakers who want to turn them away are saying to them.
     

Heaven Visit Literature

• The LifeWay Christian bookstore chain sells some of the most popular books in the genre of spiritual faith. The store, however, will no longer sell any book about contemporary people returning from heaven after a near-death experience.
  
  Executives with the chain decided to pull from their shelves the entire category of so-called “experiential testimonies,” such as the popular “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven,” which was recently recalled by the publisher after the co-author recanted his story.
  
  The bookstore has stopped ordering any similar titles from publishers and “the remaining heaven visitation items have been removed from our stores and website and will not be replenished,” according to company spokesman Marty King.
  
  Nashville, Tennessee-based LifeWay is among the largest faith-based bookstore chains, founded in 1891, with more than 180 locations, including two in the Tampa Bay area.
  
  It’s a significant move for any bookstore to remove an entire category of titles, but particularly so for a Christian-themed organization.
  
  Heaven and the topic of resurrection play a vital role in Christian theology. The Bible includes St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, saying “if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”
  
  The bookstore did not take its decision lightly, King wrote in an email.
  
  “Last summer, as we began developing LifeWay’s new structure and direction ... the role of heaven visitation resources was included in our considerations,” he wrote. “We decided these experiential testimonies about heaven would not be a part of our new direction.”
  
  The Southern Baptist Convention last summer adopted a resolution acknowledging “numerous books and movies purporting to explain or describe the afterlife experience” that “cannot be corroborated.” Furthermore, many of the titles “are not unified and contain details that are antithetical to Scripture.”
  
  The issue, the convention found, was that “many devout and well-meaning people allow these to become their source and basis for an understanding of the afterlife rather than scriptural truth.” The convention noted the Bible recounts several instances (besides Jesus) of “persons raised from the dead” such as Jairus’ daughter, the widow of Nain’s son, and Lazarus, whom Scripture says Jesus raised from the dead.
  
  With that in mind, the convention found the Bible is sufficient, “over subjective experiential explanations” as a guide for anyone’s understanding of “the truth about heaven and hell.”
  
  King notes that the bookstore chain was not mentioned in the convention resolution, but noted “the resolution was approved overwhelmingly and was considered during our process.”
  
  Though the move by LifeWay was decided months ago, it only recently has started to make waves in the publishing world, and it came just days before Easter.
  
  One book at the center of this topic is “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven,” which made best-seller lists five years ago and helped build the popularity of heaven-visitation titles. A similar title, “Heaven Is for Real,” has been turned into a movie.
  
  “The Boy” title debuted as Alex Malarkey’s testimonial of suffering a horrific car crash at age 6, visiting heaven, and returning to life to tell the story. More recently, his mother has sharply criticized how the story was handled.
  
  In January, Malarkey said he made up the story and issued a statement, saying in part, “I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. ... People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough.”
  
  Faith-oriented Tyndale House Publishers said it would pull the title and all its ancillary products from shelves.
     

The Patriarchy and The Role of Women

• While most observers wait for evangelicals to shift on marriage, the more salient debates taking place within conservative Protestantism concern women’s roles in church, family, and society.
  
  Polling data reveal growing acceptance of same sex marriage, particularly among young evangelicals, though relatively few evangelical leaders who were not already supportive of progressive political causes have come out for same sex marriage.
  
  Yet, even within institutions and sectors where views on homosexuality are fairly uniform, when it comes to gender roles there exists considerable variation in beliefs about what the Bible requires, what institutions will allow, and what women themselves should prefer.
  
  Acceptance of homosexuality is often an excommunicable offense, but evangelical leaders may have to accommodate more egalitarian gender roles. Women are challenging entrenched notions of patriarchy, but as long as they agree that homosexual expression is a vile sin they can remain comfortably within the conservative evangelical fold.
  
  The Rev. Christine Caine, a popular Australian evangelist and anti-human-trafficking advocate, has launched a “Lean In”-type program and Propel, a magazine for women who lead in the professions. Liberty University hosted Propel Women’s inaugural event this winter on its Lynchburg, VA campus.
  
  Founded by Jerry Falwell as a fundamentalist Bible academy, Liberty has grown into an evangelical mega-college with more than 12,000 students in residence and nearly 100,000 enrolled online. A bastion of cultural conservatism, Liberty seems an unlikely place to celebrate women reaching for the heights of influence in business and government.
  
  But unless Propel aims to convince women to quit their careers, stop taking birth control, and homeschool their children, it will be in direct conflict with some evangelical elites’ expressed preferences.
  
  Liberty’s vice president, the father of an “audacious and passionate daughter,” enthusiastically affirmed Propel’s mission. One can only imagine that many other leaders, who no doubt want their daughters to be passionate about homemaking, will look on in horror. How many of The Gospel Coalition’s council members (52 men, 0 women), for example, support Propel, the brainchild of a woman pastor?
  
  Beth Moore, a prominent Bible teacher whose speeches would be called sermons were she a man, also spoke at the Liberty event. Her presence conferred a degree of legitimacy on Propel Women, since most conservative evangelical leaders endorse Moore’s books and conferences, which are wildly popular among their female congregants.
  
  Evangelicals also are divided over women’s roles in parachurch organizations and denominational institutions, where women’s leadership lags behind the general marketplace.
  
  Last year, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission—the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy agency—named 72 fellows to its Research Institute. (“Fellows” is an apt name as only three were women.)
  
  Some evangelical colleges and seminaries perennially debate whether women professors are qualified to teach male students in theological disciplines. In one prong of a thoroughgoing administrative crackdown, Cedarville University in Ohio, for example, forced out a tenured female Bible professor. The new female religion instructor is only permitted to teach women.
  
  One notable exception to the institutionalization of Christian patriarchy is evangelicalism’s flagship magazine, Christianity Today. Its women’s blog has a number of writers with diverse perspectives on women’s roles and many other issues.
  
  Ridiculing stay-at-home dads as “man fails,” the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood encourages evangelicals to live by the tenets of patriarchy (now rebranded as “complementarianism.”) Still many evangelical women often prefer egalitarian marriages, and they don’t seem to believe that puts them in defiant rebellion against God.
  
  Of course, there is great variation among those who employ the term “complementarity.” It figures prominently in Catholic teaching and was the subject of a major conference Pope Francis convened last fall at the Vatican, one attended by prominent American evangelical and Mormon as well as Catholic leaders.
  
  The controversy revolves around whether and how complementarity should inform modern marriage and family life. Under the current pope at least, Catholic vive la différence complementarity is flexible enough to accommodate women’s educational and professional aspirations, whereas conservative evangelical complementarity more strongly idealizes housewifery and stay-at-home motherhood.
  
  Some evangelicals’ complementarian commitments appear to be influenced more deeply by nostalgia for 1950s suburbia than by the Bible itself. The gulf between leaders’ wishes and women’s lives reveals how tone-deaf, incomprehensible, and inconsistent elite preferences have become.
  
  The complementarian leaders behind the Danvers Statement, drafted in 1987, point out that it doesn’t explicitly forbid women from working and leading in professional settings as long as they view their responsibilities as wives and mothers as paramount. But this sentiment is largely betrayed by conservative evangelical elites’ evident preferences and rhetoric.
  
  Traditionalist evangelical elites may have overreached. Now, in light of the preferences and necessities that undergird evangelicals’ egalitarian family arrangements, leaders will have to concede that people can interpret scripture according to shifting cultural realities. Of course, this interpretive malleability and liberty of conscience isn’t extended to people who think differently about homosexuality.
  
  At the Liberty University event, Caine, the Australian clergywoman, expounded on her belief that Christ “affirms and acknowledges every woman’s gifts, passions, and leadership potential.” Given Propel’s fundamental disagreement with key tenets of Christian patriarchy, it will be interesting to see which complementarian leaders speak out against it.
  
  There doesn’t appear to be much middle ground here; either complementarian wives and daughters can be MBAs and CEOs or they cannot.
  
  Conservative evangelical elites are expending a great deal of energy to keep acceptance of homosexuality out of their churches and institutions. But when it comes to enforcing patriarchy, they simply aren’t fighting as hard. As they battle on two fronts - often against their own people - evangelical leaders may have to decide whether homosexuality or egalitarianism is the greater evil.
  
  They will struggle to argue that marriage is non-negotiable as they concede that gender roles are very much up for debate.
     

Hard-Wired For Supernatural Explanations?

• Reports of God’s death may have been greatly exaggerated. Even hardened atheists instinctively believe that supernatural forces fashioned the world, according to a study.
  
  Psychologists claim to have found a “naked intuition” among religious believers and determined freethinkers alike, that natural objects such as rabbits and volcanoes are created by a higher power.
  
  People who reject the idea of God are more prone to personify the workings of random chance and the laws of science when they are given less than a second to assess them, the researchers found.
  
  A group of 148 members of atheist and secularist organisations in the US and Canada were shown pictures of living and inanimate features of the natural world such as a giraffe, a stalagmite and a tiger’s paw, and asked to say whether they had been deliberately created by some “being” or not. The photographs were mixed up with geometrical shapes and images of man-made objects such as scissors and balloons.
  
  Half of the atheists had several seconds to think about their answers, and typically said only 3 per cent of the natural phenomena had been purposefully created. The other half, who had just 0.87 seconds to choose, said so 16 per cent of the time, a fourfold increase.
  
  Similar but less dramatic effects were found in a mixed group of 352 religious, agnostic and non-religious Americans and another set of 151 atheists in Finland, where there is much less of an entrenched Christian culture.
  
  The academics said their experiments suggested that there was “a deep-seated automatic tendency to see intentional causation in nature”. Most people could be hard-wired to think the natural world was put there by some greater force, they argued.
  
  “The results show that the increased tendency to see creation in nature is not simply reduced to Abrahamic god beliefs,” they wrote in the journal Cognition.
  
  “Beliefs in nature’s and the Earth’s intrinsic agency, which are generally overlooked, also play a significant and independent role. Notably, this was the case even among US atheists.”
  
  Elisa Jarnefelt, who led the research while she was at Boston University but who is now based at Newman University in Birmingham, said her team was now investigating whether the same held true in China.
  
  “Although China is often dubbed as the most atheistic country in the world, we are finding adults have a variety of beliefs in supernatural agents,” she said. Dr Jarnefelt and her colleagues suggested that the effect could help to explain why non-religious people often described evolution as shaping different species for a purpose.
  
  “It has long been known that most people misunderstand natural selection, absorbing newly learnt scientific information into existing intuitive and scientifically inaccurate explanatory belief systems,” they wrote.
  
  “Natural selection is often understood as a quasi-intentional designing force that gives animals the functional traits they need in order to survive.”
     

Conservatives think there's a global war against Xity

• An amicus brief filed by conservatives opposing gay marriage is ridiculous, but there is a link between same-sex nuptials and abortion—it’s just not what you think.
  
  On April 2, a group of 100 conservative lawyers and university professors filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing, in part, that marriage equality will cause 900,000 abortions over the next 30 years. The claim may come as a shock to those who completed seventh grade and are under the impression that pregnancy was the result of sex between a man and a woman.
  
  The argument, as summarized by former Antonin Scalia clerk Gene Schaerr, who served as the brief’s author, is that “a reduction in the opposite-sex marriage rate means an increase in the percentage of women who are unmarried and who, according to all available data, have much higher abortion rates than married women.”
  
  The brief is accompanied by swaths of empirical evidence demonstrating that, in fact, in countries where same-sex marriage is legal, opposite-sex marriage declines. The problem, Christopher Ingraham points out in a piece in The Washington Post, is that the “chain of logic does not prove causality.” The decline in marriage rates in states where same-sex marriage is legal, which is adduced as proof that it is harmful, ignores the fact that marriage rates are on the decline everywhere and have been for decades.
  
  Even if the statistics were indisputable (and Ingraham points us in the direction of some important counter-evidence), there’s no real way to link the legitimization of same-sex marriage and abortion. Correlation, as everybody’s high school history teacher used to say, is not causation.
  
  It’s easy to dismantle the faulty logic in the brief. And, shucks, the jokes write themselves. I mean, I guess when you believe in the Virgin Birth it seems reasonable that same-sex marriage could lead to unplanned pregnancies. (Full disclosure: I’m a Papist myself.)
  
  All the same, the signatories on the brief are academics and lawyers. One signatory on the brief, John Cavadini (professor of theology and director of the Institute for Church Life), is my colleague at the University of Notre Dame. While I strongly disagree with his argument here and the spirited manner in which he tries to make his vision of the world a reality, I know him to be intelligent and sincere. So how does this argument hold together for smart people? Why assume that marriage equality and abortion are necessarily linked?
  
  Part of what ties them together in the minds of the signatories is the idea that both are part of what Catholics call the “culture of death.” For conservatives the historical impetus for this new cultural movement was the 1960s and the birth of the sexual revolution, feminism, and gender theory. And liberal academics would likely agree that these movements did generate social change, even if they would not evaluate that change negatively.
  
  I guess when you believe in the Virgin Birth it seems reasonable that same-sex marriage could lead to unplanned pregnancies. But the relationship between feminism, gay rights, and other parts of the “liberal agenda” is not just a question of historical impetus for conservatives. It also has a systematic, almost cosmic, quality.
  
  We can see this if we look at the way that conservatives talk about the relationship between the horrifying religious persecution that takes place around the world and the so-called “war on Christianity” and religious freedom in the U.S. The two phenomena are linked in the language and rhetoric of right-wing media pundits and clerics.
  
  For example, I recently attended an Association for a Better New York breakfast at the Mandarin Oriental, where Cardinal Timothy Dolan rightly expressed concern about the devastating persecution of Christians by Boko Haram and ISIS. He commendably referred to the persecution of members of other religious groups around the globe—and then added that there was an “organized” and “systematic” attack on Christianity in the world. These are words that imply agency and deliberation. To this we can add the slew of books talking about widespread Christianophobia, a Global War on Christians, and the Global Assault on Christians.
  
  The underlying worldview is that of an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. There is the culture of life and there is the culture of death, and if you’re not with us, you’re against us. It’s a biblically-based take on the world.
  
  But who is behind this global war? Who is organizing the attack on Christianity? Satan? The Illuminati? The Gay Rights Lobby? Even if liberals did have it in for Christians, something, probably this, tells me ISIS and gay-rights advocates don’t have a lot in common when it comes to definitions of marriage. There’s no global war on Christianity, and there’s no causal or inherent relationship between marriage equality and abortions.
  
  The problem isn’t just that the division of the world into two organized and warring parties vying for control of social norms and spiritual destiny leads to ill-conceived arguments like this one. It’s also that it mischaracterizes and polarizes the world. We need to deal with ISIS as a specific terrorist organization, not as part of some larger, all-encompassing conspiracy. Similarly, conservative groups would have a more convincing case if they could keep marriage equality and abortion separate, rather than lumping them together into an incoherent jumble.
  
  This Supreme Court brief sounds like a story in The Onion, but it’s paradigmatic of an internally consistent worldview among conservative Christians. We have to understand their overarching position if we are to have any hope of understanding what they’re doing here.
     

Miracle-Busting Science

• Today’s reading is taken from Acts ix, 3-19, as amended by Bill Hartmann of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona: “As Saul approached Damascus on his journey, suddenly a colossal fireball meteor came streaking through the sky. He fell to the ground and heard voices. Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So his travelling companions led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything.
  
  “In Damascus there was a disciple of Christ called Ananias. Ananias went to the house of Judas on the Street Called Straight where Saul was praying for his sight to be restored. ‘Don’t worry, old chap,’ said Ananias. ‘That’s just a temporary blindness brought on by intense ultraviolet radiation. The photokeratitis should clear up in no time.’
  
  “Immediately, the scale-like crusts fell from Saul’s corneal epithelium, and he could see again. ‘Now then,’ said Ananias. ‘Have I told you about this carpenter from Nazareth?’”
  
  It is anybody’s guess whether Dr Hartmann’s mischievous theory that St Paul’s Damascene conversion was caused by a burning space rock will stick or not. It’s certainly a tough claim to verify. But the paper comes straight out of one of the finest and longest traditions in the history of science: miracle-busting.
  
  As early as 400BC Democritus of Abdera, one of the first thinkers to postulate that the world was composed of atoms, suggested that early man had invented the gods because he struggled to explain the weather. One of the best things the Greeks did for us was to challenge mythos — myths and received wisdom — with logos, the conclusions of rational inquiry. Not necessarily the truth, but a better and stronger story.
  
  But this is not a column about the itchy fandango of science and religion. It is about you. There is as much mythos around today as there has ever been. Christianity may be waning in Britain, but most people’s instinct for taking narrative shortcuts through difficult facts is undiminished. We are what the late Sir Terry Pratchett once called Pan narrans, story-telling chimpanzees.
  
  In 1944 two Austrian psychologists showed volunteers an 80-second film in which a large triangle pursues a smaller triangle around a box while a small circle lurks inside (search YouTube for Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel if you want to watch it). The people who saw the film overwhelmingly reported that the big triangle was bullying the little one and the circle was hiding because it was scared. Better a patently silly explanation than no explanation at all.
  
  If you think this doesn’t apply to you, think again. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman describes going through seven years’ worth of data on the performance of 25 star wealth advisers at a Wall Street firm. It turned out there was no such thing as a consistent gift for stock-picking. The advisers might as well have chosen their investments by tossing a coin. When Kahneman and his colleagues presented their findings to the company’s executives, they were roundly ignored.
  
  Call it innumeracy, magical thinking or intrinsic mental laziness, but even intelligent members of the public struggle, through no fault of their own, to deal with statistics and probability. This is a problem. People put inordinate amounts of trust in politicians, chief executives, football managers and pundits whose judgment is often little better than that of a psychic octopus. Short of making all schoolchildren study applied mathematics to A level, the only thing scientists can do about this is stick to their results and tell more persuasive stories about them.
  
  And so to Dr Hartmann’s cheerfully speculative study on the conversion of St Paul. The paper may be short on falsifiable evidence, but its provocative spirit harks back to one of the oldest and most important jobs of science: to swap a good yarn for a better one. Counter-intuition is a powerful medicine. As Pratchett and his co-authors, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, wrote in The Science of the Discworld II: “If you understand the power of the story, and learn to detect abuses of it, you might actually deserve the appellation Homo sapiens.”
     

Irish Catholic Church

• One cannot expect the Catholic Church in Ireland to some how act as a renegade and disobey Roman Catholicism’s teaching when it comes to gay people and marriage, but while the church wrings its hands, society at large is moving on.
  
  The moral and political authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland has been shattered, and for good reasons.
  
  New generations of Irish people did not grow up in towns where the priest was the ultimate, infallible authority figure. They did not grow up in cities where people had to emigrate just to live openly gay lives. They now know about the terror of the Magdalene Laundries, they know about the torture, rape and abuse of children, they know about the cover-ups. The moral and political authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland has been shattered, and for good reasons. Irish people are tolerant, fair, generous, and welcoming. You can be a Catholic and be all of those things, or not.
  
  Ireland is not a theocratic backwater. We are a cosmopolitan society with righteous and progressive aspirations. We want to lead. And it’s about time we were the shepherd, not just part of the flock. The Irish clergy members who have called for a "yes" vote are examples of people with deep religious convictions who understand tolerance in a complex society. Fair play to them. Real life isn’t black or white, it's grey.
  
  Religious freedom is extraordinarily important, and while the Catholic Church is entitled to hold the views that it has, and to preach and teach those views, it is unacceptable in a republic to use particular views as leverage in discriminating against one’s fellow citizens. Legislation should not be influenced by those who seek to discriminate. This is a diverse, shared republic where everyone should be treated equally and with respect. The Catholic Church cast plenty of dark shadows throughout Ireland’s past. Many people aren’t interested in hiding in them anymore. There’s light to be enjoyed elsewhere.
     

Questioning Mohammed

• Tom Holland, who produced Islam: the Untold Story for Channel 4, said that the “moral perfection” of Muhammad had to be questioned and to do so required non-Muslims to break the “unspoken blasphemy taboo that has taken hold in the West”.
  
  Holland, who was giving the inaugural Christopher Hitchens Lecture at the Hay Festival, said that in the past 30 years the “one thing that people seem to have learnt is that to question the moral perfection of Muhammad is akin to poking a hornets’ nest with a stick”.
  
  Muslims seemed to take more offence at insults to Muhammad than insults directed at God, he said.
  
  Holland said that this silence from non-Muslims allowed Islamic State to draw inspiration from the Prophet’s example, despite Muhammad’s actions remaining largely unexamined.
  
  The destruction by Isis of antiquities was drawn from Muhammad’s destruction of idols in Mecca, while the taking of slaves by jihadists was inspired by Muhammad having a slave girl as a concubine, Holland said.
  
  He added that the “sanction for what they do is within the various biographies and traditions associated with the Prophet . . . when beheading an infidel seems to have been enshrined within what every jihadi aspires to do, it is surely not irrelevant that Muhammad owned a sword that can be translated as the ‘cleaver of vertebrae’.
  
  “Not examining these claims [about Muhammad] leaves free those who want to put the most hostile spin on it. Jihadists cannot possibly be deradicalised unless the Prophet is deradicalised as well,” he said.
  
  Holland said that it was dangerous of politicians to argue that atrocities committed by Muslims were nothing to do with Islam. He said the British government’s deradicalisation policy was based on this. “Jihadists see themselves as models of righteous behaviour doing God’s will. They see themselves as following the example of Muhammad,” he said. “The Koran is absolutely explicit about this, ‘In the messenger of God you have a beautiful example, an example to follow’.”
  
  After the lecture Mr Holland said that unlike Hitchens he “admired the traditions of monotheism”, but said: “I just think there are certain things within them that have turned septic and there are aspects of Islam that are highly septic and need to be drained. But we can’t do that unless we acknowledge there is a problem.”
  
  He admitted apprehension about having delivered a provocative lecture, but said he did not think there would be a backlash. “People talk about Islamophobia; the real Islamophobia thing is to assume that if you say anything that might be controversial or upsetting to Muslims, they might come and kill you,” he said. “So I am operating on the presumption that that won’t happen.”
     

Christian Terrorists

• “I know that not all Christians are right-wing extremist terrorists, but why are all right-wing extremist terrorists Christians?”
  
  This is the question I’m never asked. But as somebody who actually knows something about Islam and about the complex history of Muslim relations with Jews and Christians, I am often asked the following: “I know that not all Muslims are terrorists, but why are all terrorists Muslim?”
  
  Last week, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, a member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Columbia, walked into a study session at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. After sitting for an hour he shot nearly everybody at the meeting. That was an act of terror. He was not a Muslim. As far as we know he was acting alone, like the Tsarnaev brothers, though both were undoubtedly influenced by organized groups through social media and other electronic sources. Was Christianity the motivation for Roof’s brutal violence?
  
  One could make the case. The Christian Crusades were a violent European military movement directed not only against infidels, but against people of color living outside the boundaries of Europe. That’s a parallel to the argument that I often hear among non-Muslims that Muslims were bent on a violent conquest against all infidels. But more to the point, many of the white supremacist groups in the US are united under the banner of “Christian Unity,” while the Ku Klux Klan website claims that its “better way” is “the Christian way.”
  
  Of course one could easily argue that Christian white supremacist terrorists claim they are acting on Christian principles while they are actually acting against them. It’s the same argument that most Muslims make in reference to Muslim terrorists.
  
  According to David Schanzer and Charles Kurzman’s recent article in the New York Times, a study produced by the US Military Academy’s “Combating Terrorism Center” at West Point counted an average of 6 terrorism-related plots per year carried out by Muslims since 9/11. These resulted in a total of 50 fatalities. The same study found that right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year, causing a total of 254 fatalities.
  
  If you were to try to remember all the terrorist attacks in America since 9/11, which would come to mind? Probably many more perpetrated by Muslims than by Christians. That’s because our memory stores our perceptions in mental categories that are formed and organized by our experience. And our experience comprises more than the interactions we have with other people in the flesh. It includes what we read and see and hear via the media.
  
  And it’s influenced by the repetition and excitement that our media—from newspapers and magazines, to TV and Twitter—associate with terrorism. Since 9/11, the media has associated terrorism far more with Muslims and Islam than with any other means of identifying communities, despite the fact that they comprise only a relatively small minority of incidents.
  
  The truth is that neither of the two questions posed at the beginning of this article makes sense. That’s because terrorism is a tactic, not a religious tenet. As a tactic, terrorism has been used by religions. But the reality is that terrorism has been used by most human communities at one time or another, communities defined by religion, politics, class, race and gender. You name the organizing principle, at one point or another, that community used tactics that we define today as terrorist.
  
  Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and all other religious communities that I have studied in my research on religious violence have engaged in brutal and ruthless aggression: massacres, cruel torture and many other types of violent carnage.
  
  All religions have vectors of religious thinking that justify extreme violence against people defined as threatening, just as they all have vectors stressing peaceful reconciliation and harmony with adversaries. We can find sacred texts, creedal statements and other authoritative sources in all our traditions to justify both standpoints.
  
  It was the late Bishop of Sweden, Krister Stendahl, who noted that believers, like members of any human group, have the tendency to see themselves in reference to the “other” by comparing the best of one’s own community with the worst of the other community.
  
  And it was Jesus who said, “Hypocrite! First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your fellow’s eye” (Matt.7:5).
     

The First Church of Cannabis

• When Indiana’s newest church held its first service this week, police surrounded the building as pastors and congregants from two other churches staged a protest on the lawn outside.
  
  Bill Levin, the self-declared Grand Poobah of the First Church of Cannabis, was delighted. “We had fifty cops outside. This is brutal intimidation! This is religious persecution, brother! This is a lawyer’s wet dream.”
  
  Mr Levin founded the church in the spring, in the midst of a national outcry over a law declaring that the state of Indiana should not interfere with the “free exercise of religion”. Same-sex marriage had become legal in Indiana in October and critics alleged that the new law would entrench discrimination against gay people.
  
  “It was an anti-gay law, I fought it tooth and nail,” said Mr Levin, 59. He began to wonder, however, whether the law could help him to achieve an ambition of his own: the legalisation of marijuana. “Then I had a deeply religious experience.”
  
  Mr Levin announced on Facebook that he had applied for, and received, permission from the state to found the First Church of Cannabis. By the following Monday, “I had a couple of thousand dollars in the bank and hundreds of members. I was as surprised as everyone else.”
  
  Rick Hite, Indianapolis’s chief of police, held a press conference on the Friday before the first service in which he compared Mr Levin to Jim Jones, the Indiana pastor who led hundreds of followers to Jonestown, Guyana, where they died in a mass murder suicide in 1978. “He led a group of people into a place of no return,” said Mr Hite. “We don't want that to happen ever again.
  
  “We want to send a message: this is not the way to challenge a law. And you certainly can’t expect the police to stand by and watch it happen and not do something.”
  
  Mr Levin originally planned to lead his congregation in smoking the sacrament of his church. They would be arrested and the church would seek to fight in the criminal court for the right to smoke marijuana. He believes the comments by Mr Hite, and the policing of the service, provide grounds to launch a civil suit. During his first service, he smoked a cigar instead.
     

Christians are just too gullible

• Christians are just too gullible. That’s the message from Ed Stetzer, writing at Christianity Today, about internet hoaxes masquerading as news that duped Christian readers who then shared them widely.
  
  Believing these stories, Stetzer wrote, and sharing them via social networks, is just embarrassing.
  
  Yet these “news stories” play into fears the religious right has been stoking for years, and with more intensity since the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges two and a half weeks ago. One piece of “news” that Stetzer said many Christians fell for was about a Vermont pastor who was jailed for refusing to marry a gay couple. The story came from a fake news site. Not like Jon Stewart fake news. Or even Onion fake news. Actual fake news.
  
  “By the way,” Stetzer added, “if you are a pastor you should already know that no one can make you officiate anything. In fact, you can refuse to officiate an interracial marriage. You’d be an idiot and a racist, but you wouldn’t be arrested.”
  
  The other “story” Stetzer highlighted claimed “a sodomite ex-con turned author, Bradley La Shawn Fowler” sued two Bible publishers, charging that certain verses were homophobic. Scoping out the facts, Stetzer finds this lawsuit was indeed filed, but back in 2008, at which time “the courts quickly dismissed it as a ridiculous lawsuit. At five different points in the ruling, the court asserts that Fowler’s claims fail and should be dismissed and rejected.”
  
  Stetzer lamented, “That didn’t stop Christians from sharing this story as if it were new and potentially dangerous.”
  
  But religious right figures have been raising fears of jailed pastors and tyranny and worse before and since Obergefell came down. Richard Land, the former chief lobbyist for the Southern Baptist Convention, raised the prospect of pastors going to jail days after Obergefell (even though just a couple of weeks before the case was decided, the denomination’s Albert Mohler admitted “there’s not really a danger that the sheriff’s gonna show up and say, ‘you have to do this.'”) Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee warned that pro-LGBT activists could “threaten the foundation of religious liberty, criminalize Christianity, and demand that Americans abandon Biblical principles of natural marriage.” That panicked advisory itself was widely shared.
  
  So when people who themselves believe marriage equality is a threat to their religion, or to their culture, or to their pastor are primed with hysterical scenarios from their leaders, is it surprising that a bit of fake viral news serves as confirmation bias?
  
  Stetzer urges his readers to post explicit retractions for sharing these fake stories. “If our friends and families cannot trust us with this type of news,” he warns, “many will not listen when we seek to share the good news of the gospel.
     

Why Christians Feel Persecuted

• A recent Pew study found that white American Evangelical Christians think they experience more discrimination than Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Atheists or Jews.
  
  Really?!
  
  Christianity is the majority religion in the U.S. and many kinds of legally ensconced religious privilege are on the rise including the right to woo converts in public grade schools, speculate in real estate tax-free, repair religious facilities with public dollars, or opt out of civil rights laws and civic responsibilities that otherwise apply to all. By contrast atheists are less electable than even philanderers, weed smokers or gays; Hispanics and Muslims are being told to leave; Jews get accused of everything from secret economic cabals to destroying America’s military; and unarmed Black youth continue to die at the hands of vigilantes.
  
  Given the reality of other people’s lives, a widespread Evangelical perception of their group as mass victims reveals a lack of empathy that should give thoughtful believers reason to cringe. And indeed, Alan Nobel, managing editor of Christ and Pop Culture, and a professor at Oklahoma Baptist University, wrote a thoughtful, pained analysis this summer of what he called Evangelical persecution complex. Nobel contrasted the privileged position of American Christians with the real and serious persecution Christian minorities experience under ISIS, for example, and he examined the ways in which victimization can become a part of Christian identity and culture to the detriment of Christians and outsiders alike. What he neglected to spell out clearly was the extent to which the Bible itself sets up this problem.
  
  Christianity, born in harsh the desert cultures of the Middle East, got its start by defining itself in opposition to both Judaism and the surrounding pagan religions of the Roman empire. Consequently, from the get-go teachings emerged that helped believers deal with the inevitable conflict, by both predicting and glorifying suffering at the hands of outsiders. Indeed, persecution was framed as making believers more righteous, more like their suffering savior. Long before the Catholic Church made saints out of martyrs, a myriad of texts encouraged believers to embrace suffering or persecution, or even to bring it on.
  
  This sample from a much longer list of New Testament verses about persecution (over 100), gives a sense of how endemic persecution is to the biblical world view.
  
  I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard; you will be handed over to the local councils and be flogged in the synagogues. . . Matthew 10:16-17
  Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. Matthew 10:21-23
  You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. Mark 13:9
  Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Luke 6:22
  If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. John 15:19-20
  Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. Acts 4:27
  Then the high priest and all his associates, who were members of the party of the Sadducees, were filled with jealousy. They arrested the apostles and put them in the public jail. . . . They called the apostles in and had them flogged. Then they ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. Acts 5:17-18,40
  On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him. But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison. Acts 8:1
  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? Romans 8:35
  That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:10
  For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him. Philippians 1:29
  Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. Colossians 1:24 For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone. 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15
  In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. 2 Timothy 3:12
  Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. Hebrews 12:3
  But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. “Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.” 1 Peter 3:14
  Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you. 1 Peter 4:12-14
  Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. 1 John 3:13
  Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as your victor’s crown. Revelation 2:10
  I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. Revelation 20:4
  
  As any squabbling pair of siblings can tell you, claiming to be a victim is powerful stuff, even if you actually struck first. He started it! yells one kid. No, she started it! yells the other. Parental resolve waivers in the face of uncertainty, and both kids get an exasperated lecture.
  
  When I was in college, I had a friend who grew up in a rough low income neighborhood. One day we got started talking about car accidents and he said, “My father told me that if you ever get in an accident, you should immediately get out and start yelling at the other driver. Even if it was your fault, it will put them on the defensive and keep them from making wild claims. And maybe the police will believe you.” Amoral, perhaps but brilliant.
  
  If claiming to be a victim is powerful, believing you are a victim is far more so, again regardless of the actual facts - which, at any rate, we all are prone to interpret through a self-serving lens. Have you ever noticed that when your friends tell you about conflict with co-workers or lovers, you almost always feel like they got wronged? What are the odds, really? Seeing ourselves and our tribe as innocent victims draws sympathy and support, and it protects self-esteem.
  
  But at a price:
  
  When we cultivate the sense that we have been wronged, we can’t see the wrong that we ourselves are doing. We also give up our power to make things better. If people keep being mean to us through no fault of our own, then we’re helpless as well as victims, at least in our own minds. You can’t fix what you can’t see.
  
  In the case of Christianity, the theology of persecution serves to give the faithful hope. It inspires persistence in the face of hardship, including the many hardships that life brings on all of us through no fault of our own. But it has also blinded generations of believers to the possibility that sometimes the hardships they face are due not to their faith or evildoers hating Jesus, but to the fact that they hit first. And sometimes the bewildering hostility they perceive may simply be something that the theology of persecution set them up to expect, whether it is there or not.
     

Kim Davis and Need For Militant Atheism

• As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared more broadly. Sometimes, I refer to the fact that religion and science are often in conflict; from time to time, I ridicule religious dogma. When I do, I sometimes get accused in public of being a “militant atheist.” Even a surprising number of my colleagues politely ask if it wouldn’t be better to avoid alienating religious people. Shouldn’t we respect religious sensibilities, masking potential conflicts and building common ground with religious groups so as to create a better, more equitable world?
  
  I found myself thinking about those questions this week as I followed the story of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who directly disobeyed a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and, as a result, was jailed for contempt of court. (She was released earlier today.) Davis’s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is “absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties,” Paul said, on CNN.
  
  The Kim Davis story raises a basic question: To what extent should we allow people to break the law if their religious views are in conflict with it? It’s possible to take that question to an extreme that even Senator Paul might find absurd: imagine, for example, a jihadist whose interpretation of the Koran suggested that he should be allowed to behead infidels and apostates. Should he be allowed to break the law? Or - to consider a less extreme case - imagine an Islamic-fundamentalist county clerk who would not let unmarried men and women enter the courthouse together, or grant marriage licenses to unveiled women. For Rand Paul, what separates these cases from Kim Davis’s? The biggest difference, I suspect, is that Senator Paul agrees with Kim Davis’s religious views but disagrees with those of the hypothetical Islamic fundamentalist.
  
  The problem, obviously, is that what is sacred to one person can be meaningless (or repugnant) to another. That’s one of the reasons why a modern secular society generally legislates against actions, not ideas. No idea or belief should be illegal; conversely, no idea should be so sacred that it legally justifies actions that would otherwise be illegal. Davis is free to believe whatever she wants, just as the jihadist is free to believe whatever he wants; in both cases, the law constrains not what they believe but what they do.
  
  In recent years, this territory has grown murkier. Under the banner of religious freedom, individuals, states, and even—in the case of Hobby Lobby—corporations have been arguing that they should be exempt from the law on religious grounds. (The laws from which they wish to claim exemption do not focus on religion; instead, they have to do with social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage.) The government has a compelling interest in insuring that all citizens are treated equally. But “religious freedom” advocates argue that religious ideals should be elevated above all others as a rationale for action. In a secular society, this is inappropriate.
  
  The Kim Davis controversy exists because, as a culture, we have elevated respect for religious sensibilities to an inappropriate level that makes society less free, not more. Religious liberty should mean that no set of religious ideals are treated differently from other ideals. Laws should not be enacted whose sole purpose is to denigrate them, but, by the same token, the law shouldn’t elevate them, either.
  
  In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking. This commitment to open questioning is deeply tied to the fact that science is an atheistic enterprise. “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote, in 1934. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career.” It’s ironic, really, that so many people are fixated on the relationship between science and religion: basically, there isn’t one. In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word “God” mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature—just as it’s irrelevant to the question of whether or not citizens are obligated to follow the law.
  
  Because science holds that no idea is sacred, it’s inevitable that it draws people away from religion. The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems. Scientists have an obligation not to lie about the natural world. Even so, to avoid offense, they sometimes misleadingly imply that today’s discoveries exist in easy harmony with preëxisting religious doctrines, or remain silent rather than pointing out contradictions between science and religious doctrine. It’s a strange inconsistency, since scientists often happily disagree with other kinds of beliefs. Astronomers have no problem ridiculing the claims of astrologists, even though a significant fraction of the public believes these claims. Doctors have no problem condemning the actions of anti-vaccine activists who endanger children. And yet, for reasons of decorum, many scientists worry that ridiculing certain religious claims alienates the public from science. When they do so, they are being condescending at best and hypocritical at worst.
  
  This reticence can have significant consequences. Consider the example of Planned Parenthood. Lawmakers are calling for a government shutdown unless federal funds for Planned Parenthood are stripped from spending bills for the fiscal year starting October 1st. Why? Because Planned Parenthood provides fetal tissue samples from abortions to scientific researchers hoping to cure diseases, from Alzheimer’s to cancer. (Storing and safeguarding that tissue requires resources, and Planned Parenthood charges researchers for the costs.) It’s clear that many of the people protesting Planned Parenthood are opposed to abortion on religious grounds and are, to varying degrees, anti-science. Should this cause scientists to clam up at the risk of further offending or alienating them? Or should we speak out loudly to point out that, independent of one’s beliefs about what is sacred, this tissue would otherwise be thrown away, even though it could help improve and save lives?
  
  Ultimately, when we hesitate to openly question beliefs because we don’t want to risk offense, questioning itself becomes taboo. It is here that the imperative for scientists to speak out seems to me to be most urgent. As a result of speaking out on issues of science and religion, I have heard from many young people about the shame and ostracism they experience after merely questioning their family’s faith. Sometimes, they find themselves denied rights and privileges because their actions confront the faith of others. Scientists need to be prepared to demonstrate by example that questioning perceived truth, especially “sacred truth,” is an essential part of living in a free country.
  
  I see a direct link, in short, between the ethics that guide science and those that guide civic life. Cosmology, my specialty, may appear to be far removed from Kim Davis’s refusal to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, but in fact the same values apply in both realms. Whenever scientific claims are presented as unquestionable, they undermine science. Similarly, when religious actions or claims about sanctity can be made with impunity in our society, we undermine the very basis of modern secular democracy. We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.
  
  If that is what causes someone to be called a militant atheist, then no scientist should be ashamed of the label.
     

Searching For Meaning

• IT has been a bad decade for God, at least so far. Despite the rising popularity of Pope Francis, who was elected in 2013, Google searches for churches are 15 percent lower in the first half of this decade than they were during the last half of the previous one. Searches questioning God’s existence are up. Many behaviors that he supposedly abhors have skyrocketed. Porn searches are up 83 percent. For heroin, it’s 32 percent.
  
  How are the Ten Commandments doing? Not well. “Love thy neighbor” is the most common search with the word “neighbor” in it, but right behind at No. 2 is “neighbor porn.” The top Google search including the word “God” is “God of War,” a video game, with more than 700,000 searches per year. The No. 1 search that includes “how to” and “Walmart” is “how to steal from Walmart,” beating all questions related to coupons, price-matching or applying for a job.
  
  Of course, we should be careful not to draw overarching conclusions about religion from what people search for on Google. Even decades-long search trends might not reflect real developments, and the composition of people making searches changes over time. Although I think it is pretty clear that various trends are pointing away from God, the best evidence is probably not the search data I started with but long-term polling data, which has consistently shown an increase in the number of people who identify as atheists or agnostics. While the usual sources are biased in favor of wholesome activities, Internet data is probably biased in favor of debauched activities.
  
  That said, search data is illuminating. In fact, the patterns we see reflected there are much stronger than just about anybody expected when researchers first started looking into it.
  
  If people somewhere are searching a lot about a topic, it is overwhelming evidence those people are very interested in that topic. Jambalaya recipes are searched mostly in Louisiana; Lakers statistics are searched mostly in Los Angeles; “Seth Stephens-Davidowitz” is searched mostly on my computer.
  
  In a way, these examples are surprising because you might think that people who know the most would have the least reason to search. But that’s not the way it actually plays out. A high volume of searches by people who already have the most information holds true for religious searches, too. Searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.
  
  Sometimes Google search data, because of Google’s status as a kind of universal question service, is perfectly suited to give us fresh insights into our offline lives. Consider this one: What questions do people have when they are questioning God?
  
  Average monthly U.S. searches for the following:
  
  who created god? 142 why does god allow suffering?769 why does god hate me? 442 why does god want us to worship him? 258 why doesn’t god answer my prayers? 119 why does god not show himself? 77
  
  These include variations of the same question. For example, searches for "who created god?" include "where does god come from?" and "where was god created?" People may not share their doubts with friends, relatives, rabbis, pastors or imams. They inevitably share them with Google. Every year, in the United States, there are hundreds of thousands of pointed questions, most of them coming from the Bible Belt. The No. 1 question in the country is “who created God?” Second is why God allows suffering. This is the famous problem of evil. If God is all powerful and all good, how could he allow suffering? The third most-asked question is why does God hate me? The fourth is why God needs so much praise.
  
  This struck home. Here’s a quick story from Stephens family lore to explain why. At the age of 11, my father’s father asked his rabbi, “If God is so special, why does he need so much praise?” Disappointed with the answer, he stood up, walked out of shul and never returned. Thus began a three-generation male Stephens tradition of making elaborate, over-the-top gestures, having these gestures quickly forgotten by the outside world, and proudly telling these stories over and over again at the dinner table, to eye-rolling girlfriends and wives.
  
  We can correlate religious doubts to the geography of suffering. Where there is more pain and unhappiness, are people more likely to ask why God allows suffering? The answer is no. Places with lower life expectancies and more poverty are more religious and thus have more questions about religion in general. But the questions in hard-luck places are not tilted toward the problem of evil, relative to other concerns searchers have about religion. The proportions are the same. Not only is “who created God?” the top question nationally, it is also the top question in every state.
  
  Some religious people, most famously Job, have asked why God has made their lives so difficult. Now we have evidence on what challenges elicit such questions.
  
  What is the most common word to complete the following question: Why did God make me ___? No. 1, by far, is “ugly.” The other sad answers in the top three are “gay” and “black.”
  
  Why Me, God?
  
  Average monthly U.S. searches for the question: “Why did God make me ... ... ugly?” 422 ... gay?” 145 ... black?” 103 ... short?” 33 ... stupid?” 27 ... fat?” 21
  
  In the United States, there is more interest in heaven than in hell, at least based on searches. There are 1.5 times more searches for “heaven” than “hell,” 2.8 times as many searches asking what heaven looks like than what hell looks like, and 2.75 times as many searches asking whether heaven is real than whether hell is real.
  
  Things get really interesting when we look at these patterns among people closer to death.
  
  Take the 10 cities with at least 10,000 inhabitants with the largest populations over 65. In these cities, the census tells us that an average of 65 percent of the population is over 65; Facebook tells us that an average of 30 percent of its members in these cities are over 65; and Google tells us the most common word in a search for “diapers” is “adult.” So a significant fraction of Internet searches in these places is from the elderly.
  
  Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell. In retirement communities, there are a similar number of searches asking to see visuals of hell as visuals of heaven.
  
  What happened to religious searches during the four harrowing days in Boston after the marathon bombing in April of 2013? Searches related to “prayer” went up fourfold. I found this very natural and obvious: When tragedy strikes, people turn to prayer. No surprise there, right?
  
  One problem: Almost all these searches were of a very specific kind, “pray for Boston,” a phrase created for the occasion, and many people were curious about what this meant. Search rates for the Bible and God were slightly lower during these days. In Boston, total searches for news went up 50 to 160 percent over these tense days. Total searches for religion dropped a bit
  
  THIS appears to be a strikingly robust result, and is not limited to liberal cities like Boston. When very bad things happen around the world, people search for news; they do not search for prayers, the Bible, the Quran or anything related to religion.
  
  I looked at the war in Ukraine, the civil war in Syria, the tsunami in Japan, and the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. In every instance, in the affected country, searches for news increased by between 90 and 280 percent. The top religious searches, be they the “Bible,” “Quran,” “God,” “Allah” or “prayer,” tended to drop or stay about the same.
  
  Does this mean that when tragedies strike, people focus on getting information and spend little time praying? I have to believe this is a limitation of search data, that actual prayers rise during tragedies, and that searches just do not capture this behavior. If nothing else, it is a puzzle, as everything I thought I knew about the world and search data led me to expect the opposite.
  
  In the era before digital data, there were debates about the relative popularity of celebrities and deities, most famously when John Lennon claimed that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Lennon didn’t live long enough to compare Google search counts. Today, it is pretty clear that Jesus does not get the most attention, at least online. There are 4.7 million searches every year for Jesus Christ. The pope gets 2.95 million. There are 49 million for Kim Kardashian.
  
  Even if you add searches for crosses and related topics, Ms. Kardashian is still ahead. On social media, it’s the same story. Ms. Kardashian has 26.3 million likes on Facebook; Jesus has 5.6 million; the pope, 1.7 million. This is hardly definitive proof that Kim Kardashian is more popular than Jesus or Pope Francis, or that this country now worships at the altar of the Kardashians, but the differences are nonetheless striking.
     

Disappearing MidEast Religions

• Yazidis, Mandaeans, Zoroastrians and Druze are in danger of becoming extinct in the region owing to continuing persecution.
  
  For thousands of years they have clung to their ancient religions and customs, isolated in remote valleys, secretive about their beliefs, fiercely resisting all attempts at conversion or assimilation.
  
  Now they are continuing to stream out of their ancestral homelands in Iraq, Syria and across the Middle East, fleeing for their lives from Islamic State killers who are hunting down Yazidis and all those considered to be enemies of Islam. Their plight, with an estimated 40,000 stranded on Mount Sinjar in Iraq over the summer, has dramatically brought home the dangers facing these littleknown minorities. Earlier this month, two Yazidi sisters told the Women in the World summit in London that 5,800 Yazidi women and children are still being held by Islamic State. However, few people in the West know anything about the religion. What do they believe? Where did they come from?
  
  They are not the only minority religion in the region. Hidden in the marshes of southern Iraq are the Mandaeans, whose customs and beliefs go back to the days of ancient Babylon. Across the border in Iran, dwindling groups of Zoroastrians still follow the traditions that were once the mainstream faith of the ancient Persian empire. And among the mountains of southern Lebanon live the Druze, a sect that appears to be an offshoot of Islam but whose origins and beliefs remain deliberately shrouded in protective secrecy.
  
  What these faiths have in common is that almost all predate Christianity and Islam, tracing their origins to the Greek philosophers, the religions of India or ancient central Asian tribes. They are extremely secretive. They ban marriage with anyone not of their faith. They cling to strict rules and taboos, ignoring encroaching modernity. And most are now staring extinction in the face, with new waves of massacres, forced conversions or the mass emigration to America and the West of all those who can get out in time.
  
  Gerard Russell, a British diplomat who speaks Farsi and Arabic, has spent some 20 years researching these little known faiths, and in his book, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, tells the stories of seven religions isolated within the sea of Islam: Mandaeans, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Druze, Samaritans, Copts and Kalasha. He says of their continuing existence: “Imagine that the worship of the goddess Aphrodite was still continuing on a remote Greek island, that worshippers of Wotan and Thor had only just given up building longboats on the coasts of Scandinavia, or that followers of the god Mithras were still exchanging ceremonial handshakes in Roman chapels.”
  
  Christianity was brutally efficient in eliminating all pagan communities and extirpating all ceremonies dedicated to other gods. However, in the Middle East some of these cults have lingered on. Inevitably, they have been denounced not only by Muslims but also by the various rulers holding sway in the region. The Yazidis, who claim a lineage going back some 3,000 years, say 72 massacres have been committed against them in their history; the Mandaeans shared the suffering of all the “marsh Arabs” when Saddam Hussein drained the marshes in an attempt to root out potential opponents.
  
  The Yazidis, who speak Kurdish, are often mistaken for Kurds. However, they believe in reincarnation, sacrifice bulls and revere an angel who takes the form of a peacock. Their traditions forbid them to eat lettuce or wear blue; men must grow a moustache though few have beards. They are also victims of an ancient calumny — the accusation that they worship the devil. The Ottomans hunted them down as heretics because they evaded military conscription and paid no tax. Even when forced to convert to Islam, they would go back to their own religious practices as soon as the outsiders had gone.
  
  Their religion, like that of the Mandaeans, is a mystery, and only its elders, known as sheikhs, are entitled to know its tenets. Yazidis expect to be reincarnated, as men or possibly as animals. And there are clear historical connections with the dominant culture of the Romans, centuries ago, especially the cult of Mithras. Both religions involved praying three times a day, and they use the gesture of the handshake to establish connections with each other — perhaps the only element of their religion that has become widespread in today’s world.
  
  The association with devil-worship is also connected with the Druze. Both believed it was the peacock, rather than the serpent, which was the tempter in the Garden of Eden. Its name was Satan, but no Yazidi is permitted to mention this word. In Ottoman times any Yazidi who heard the name was obliged to kill anyone who uttered it and then to kill themselves for having heard it. As one Yazidi told Russell, both evil and good come from God. “They are not two struggling powers that fight each other for dominance of the universe.” Far from worshipping the devil, Yazidis believe there is no such thing.
  
  Their holy day is Wednesday, when they do not work in the fields, travel, bath or wash their clothes. There are parallels with the Mandaeans, who also do not wear blue, a colour associated with the evil spirit, Ruha. And many of their rules can be traced farther back to the influence of the Greek philosopher and man of mystery, Pythagoras, who enjoined a strict system of taboos on his followers, and whose ideas survived in the East long after they had been forgotten in the West.
  
  The Mandaeans’ religious texts date back to the third century AD, but the roots can be traced much farther back to Babylon, 4,000 years ago. They honour figures who feature in the Hebrew bible, such as Noah and Seth. Above all, they revere John the Baptist. Immersion in the Tigris, the Mandaean baptism, is one of the religion’s most sacred rites. However, they reject Abraham and have their own holy books, quite separate from the Bible or the Koran.
  
  These ancient cults have virtually disappeared from the Middle East. Amazingly, however, they survive in a very different world — America and particularly in Detroit, where there has been a lot emigration from the Middle East. Here, their followers are still determined to preserve their separateness, forbidding intermarriage and celebrating their customs, which today’s young adherents, by now Americans, are usually unable or unwilling to explain.
  
  They face a second challenge: absorption into the melting pot of America. Many are unsure whether they should now be sad if a community becomes rich and abandons its customs and its beliefs. “What does it matter if we become extinct?” one man asked Russell.
  
  He had no answer to the question but concluded: “It does seem to me that we are all enriched by encounters with religions which have attracted the loyalty of their followers for so long.” Bill Clinton, who endorsed his book as “fascinating”, is one of many who would agree.
     

The War On Religion

• Why try to understand complicated things like demographics for the decline of your faith when you can blame gays and liberals for waging a “war on religion?”
  
  Among the Christian Right, and most Republican presidential candidates, it’s now an article of faith that the United States is persecuting Christians and Christian-owned businesses—that religion itself is under attack.
  
  “We have seen a war on faith,” Ted Cruz has said to pick one example. “His policies and this administration’s animosity to religious liberty and, in fact, antagonism to Christians, has been one of the most troubling aspects of the Obama administration,” he said.
  
  Why has this bizarre myth that Christianity is under assault in the most religious developed country on Earth been so successful? Because, in a way, it’s true. American Christianity is in decline—not because of a “war on faith” but because of a host of demographic and social trends. The gays and liberals are just scapegoats.
  
  The idea that Christians are being persecuted resonates with millennia-old self-conceptions of Christian martyrdom. Even when the church controlled half the wealth in Europe, it styled itself as the flock of the poor and the marginalized. Whether true or not as a matter of fact, it is absolutely true as a matter of myth. Christ himself was persecuted and even crucified, after all. So it’s natural that Christianity losing ground in America would be seen by many Christians as the result of persecution.
  
  According to a Pew Research Report released earlier this year, the percentage of the U.S. population that identifies as Christian has dropped from 78.4 percent in 2007 to 70.6 percent in 2014. Evangelical, Catholic, and mainline Protestant affiliations have all declined.
  
  Meanwhile, 30 percent of Americans ages 18-29 list “none” as their religious affiliation (the figure for all ages is about 23 percent). Nearly 40 percent of Americans who have married since 2010 report that they are in “religiously mixed” marriages, which means that many individuals who profess Christianity are in families where not everyone does.
  
  These changes are taking place for a constellation of reasons: greater secular education (college degrees), multiculturalism, shifting social mores, the secular space of consumer capitalism and celebrity culture, the sexual revolution (including feminism and LGBT equality), legal and constitutional changes (like the banning of prayer in public school, and the finding of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage), the breakdown of the nuclear family, the decline of certain forms of family and group identification, and the association of religion in general with nonsensical and outdated dogmas. The Pew report noted Americans are also changing religions more than in the past, and when they do so, they are more likely to move away from Christianity than toward it.
  
  So while changes in public morals regarding women and LGBT people (and how the law treats them) are part of the overall shift, they are only one part of an immensely complicated set of factors—and I’m quite sure I’ve left out some of the most important ones. Probably the never-ending stream of sex scandals, from the Catholic clergy to the Duggar mess, haven’t helped either.
  
  But no one likes a “constellation of reasons” to explain why the world they grew up in, and the values they cherish, seem to be slipping away. Enter the scapegoat: the war on religion, and the persecution of Christianity.
  
  It’s much easier to explain changes by referring to a single, malevolent cause than by having to understand a dozen complex demographic trends. Plus, if Christianity is declining because it’s being attacked, then that decline could be reversed if the attack were successfully repelled. Unlike what is actually happening—a slow, seemingly irrevocable decline in American Christianity—the right’s argument that “religious liberty” is under assault mixes truth and fantasy to provide a simpler, and more palatable, explanation for believers.
  
  Take, as an example, Christmas. The weird idea that there is a “War on Christmas” orchestrated by liberal elites—Starbucks cups in hand—is, on its face, ridiculous, even if it is widely held on the right. Shop clerks saying “Happy Holidays” aren’t causing the de-Christianization of Christmas—they’re effects of it. Roughly half of Americans celebrate Christmas as a cultural, not a religious, holiday: Santa Claus and Christmas trees, not baby Jesus in a manger. So that’s what businesses celebrate. It’s capitalism, not conspiracy.
  
  Unfortunately, even if the war on religion is fictive, the “defense” against it is very real and very harmful. This year alone, 17 states introduced legislation to protect “religious freedom” by exempting not just churches and religious organizations (including bogus ones set up to evade the law) from civil rights laws, domestic violence laws, even the Hippocratic Oath, but also but private individuals and for-profit businesses. Already, we’ve seen pediatricians turn children away because their parents are gay, and wife-abusers argue that it’s their religious duty to beat their spouses, and most notoriously that multimillion-dollar corporations like Hobby Lobby can have religious beliefs that permit them to refuse to provide health insurance to their employees on that basis.
  
  We shouldn’t think of Kim Davis and her ilk as motivated by hate. Actually, they are motivated by fear.
  
  Meanwhile, the “war on religion” narrative appears to be gaining ground. According to data from the Public Religion Research Institute, 61 percent of white evangelicals believe that religious liberty is being threatened today. (Only 37 percent of non-white Christians believe this, suggesting that what’s really happening is an erosion of white Christian hegemony; the “browning of America” goes hand in hand with the de-Christianizing of America.) They believe they have lost the culture war, and even that LGBT people should now pity them.
  
  In other words, “religious liberty” is not merely a tactic: it is a sincerely held belief among the religious right, which, not coincidentally, feeds into the belief that we are living in the End Times—something an astonishing 77 percent of American evangelicals believe.
  
  We shouldn’t think of Kim Davis and her ilk as motivated by hate. Actually, they are motivated by fear, which is based in reality but expressed in fantasy. Christianity is, in a sense, losing the war—but the fighters on the other side aren’t gay activists or ACLU liberals but faceless social forces of secularization, urbanization, and diversification.
  
  here’s not really a villain pulling the strings of social change, but like the God concept itself, mythic thinking creates a personification of evil who is fighting the war on religious liberty, the war on Christmas, the war on Christianity. These malevolent evildoers are like a contemporary Satan: a fictive embodiment of all of the chaotic, complex forces that threaten the stability of religious order.
     

Why Radical Islam Appeals

• We are at war in Syria. And one of the terrible things about wars is that they shrivel the imagination: warring peoples must caricature and exaggerate the idiocy and misdeeds of their enemies, while pumping their own virtues. Cool analysis chokes in the sand. This is not a bad moment, then, to ask what the West can learn from its Islamist enemies.
  
  Cue bulging HM Bateman eyes; fanning of hot cheeks; flutterings of empurpled outrage. Learn from the fanatics? Learn from the fascist “death cult”? Jeepers, there must be something in this bloody paper about Charles Dickens and snow . . .
  
  Well, to be clear, there are plenty of things we don’t need to learn from the self-described Islamic State. We don’t need to learn about roasting captives alive, or beheading the innocent, or the oppression of women, or the fanatical pursuit of religious orthodoxy, or the public murder of homosexuals, or obedient grovelling to demented old men.
  
  We don’t need to learn because we did it all ourselves just a few centuries ago. Do you know why women in Tudor times were burnt at the stake? Because the alternative punishment — disembowelling and hacking apart while still alive — required the victim to be naked and this, not the disembowelling, was ruled unseemly for women. It sounds just the kind of mad thing they’d be debating in the coffee houses of Raqqa.
  
  In medieval France, the punishment for homosexuals was, for the first offence, castration, which clearly didn’t work since it was to be followed for later offences by dismemberment and then burning to death.
  
  We did it all — not just the British, but across Europe. Everything from public murder on the basis of small textual differences to sectarian warfare, the slaughter of “the wrong” civilians and state terror justified in the name of love and peace belongs first to the Christian wars of the early modern period.
  
  Like the Muslim version now, those wars provoked vast, history changing migrations of desperate refugees. These transformed Britain for the better, because we got the Huguenots with their technical and mercantile skills; and on a rather larger scale, it provoked the first great European migration to North America, leading eventually to Donald Trump.
  
  It sometimes seems to me that Britons of the 21st century are being attacked not by something “out there” but by our earlier selves, the angriest Scots and English of the 17th century — as if, ghostlike, our own persecuting, fanatical forebears had returned to modern streets. We went through the Enlightenment, of course, but in key ways this is less a war between parts of the Middle East and parts of the West than a war between 2015 and, say, 1536 (the year William Tyndale went to the stake).
  
  Which is where the learning might come in handy. What is the possible appeal of a return to the values of what most of us would consider the moral Dark Ages? Why do relatively well-educated, often articulate people brought up in the West today fall under the spell of clerics who resemble Luther at his most furious, or John Knox having a spectacularly bad afternoon?
  
  When I was endeavouring to tell the story of the British through our poetry, again and again it struck me that the biggest gap between the British today and the previous thousand years or so was religious belief. For those of us who are atheist, agnostic or merely watery believers, it’s impossible to cross the boundary to understand literal belief. Shakespeare, Donne, Dunbar, Herbert and Milton all took for granted that there was heaven and hell, and that our brief spell on this damp, seasonal, difficult but delightful territory was only one episode in a much larger and more meaningful story.
  
  Surely, that’s why people killed each other and burnt each other to death over what seemed to us to be the vanity of small differences. If you really believe it’s between everlasting damnation and eternal bliss, the pain of a knife can come to seem almost trivial. If the devil’s children are going to burn for ever, the difference between cutting their heads off in their forties and allowing them to die of dementia four decades later isn’t existential.
  
  Go back to the poets, however, and you see again what enchanted, brightly coloured, highly dramatic, imaginative lives they led. For a medieval Christian, everything had meaning — plants and trees had symbolic meanings; the lives of animals told exemplary stories; saints haunted the wildwood; and the turning year was itself a daily parable of death and resurrection.
  
  Our culture is often glibly described as essentially Christian. It really isn’t, not in any serious sense. We have been freed from that enchanted world and scattered out into an almost wholly material civilisation, a city centre in which the only thing left standing is the market. Individually, we aren’t going anywhere except the “care homes” that are anything but homes.
  
  It’s too thin gruel. Material satisfaction matters. A lot. If you are lucky enough to be close to the top of the tree, then ever-better skiing holidays, larger second homes, whatever takes your fancy . . . well, life’s pretty good. But as Niall Ferguson pointed out on these pages, even white, male, middle-class Americans are going through a period of angry disillusion. And for the vast numbers of people for whom material improvement is small-scale, slow in coming and never as lavish as advertised, then the gruel is cruel.
  
  Islamism can seem to offer a bigger, more dramatic, more meaningful narrative. We simply see the blood and screaming. They see the world throwing up brighter colours and harsher, desert shadows. This excitement is what, to many, the Reformation, and indeed the Counter-Reformation, must have brought. But this is coming at us just as we in the West are scrabbling around for new stories that make more sense than frantic consumption — and mostly, failing.
  
  Some will say, particularly at Christmas, that an obvious answer is to return to our own Christian heritage. Yet for millions of us, putting the faith genie back in the bottle seems impossible: you can’t unwrite Darwin, you can’t unthink Einstein or forget Galileo.
  
  Meanwhile, our wonderful science races ahead in blinkers. It doesn’t stop to look around, explain itself or cheer us up.
  
  There are rare examples, such as Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow and The Magic of Reality, but he’s a relatively lonely voice. So millions turn to daft fantasy — turning the Star Wars films into a digitally enhanced Manichaean belief system. Or we cast around for conspiracy theories and extreme politics to explain the world. It’s funny — except that we really are at war. With all its revolting brutality, fascist Islamism knows the blindspots and weaknesses in western culture. There is a sleazy, materialistic shallowness about it that we don’t much enjoy, either. Those bastards really are medieval — that’s the point — but they have found us out.

Christians and Porn

• Last week, the evangelical-influenced Barna Group released findings from its new study, “The Porn Phenomenon,” based on a survey commissioned by Josh McDowell Ministries. The study, which poses a wide range of questions about pornography use, is unique in its scope, which includes a nationally representative sample of teens, young adults and Christian pastors. Not surprisingly, the findings support the story evangelicals like McDowell have long been telling: that the sexual morality of Americans—including many self-proclaimed Christians—is going down the drain.
  
  According to the study, Americans are not bothered by pornography and pornography use (although the survey’s wording implies they should be, describing it as a “struggle” throughout the report):
  
  Ninety percent of teens and 96 percent of young adults talk about pornography in either neutral, accepting, or encouraging ways. Only 32 percent of teens and young adults report that viewing pornography is “usually or always wrong.”
  
  Teenage and young adult men are the group most likely to view porn at least weekly with 51 percent reporting that they do. (Adult women are least likely at just 6 percent).
  
  About one in five youth pastors admit they currently use porn at least monthly. The vast majority (87 percent) of pastors who use porn “feel a great sense of shame about it,” compared to other adults who are much less likely to care.
  
  The problem with pornography, according to the evangelicals who write about it, is that porn causes lust. Biblical passages like Matthew 5:28 (NIV)—“But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart”—suggest that extramarital sexual thoughts and fantasies count as forbidden sexual activity. While the secular world may view this as a fairly prudish perspective, many evangelicals view it as sinful because God wants Christians to enjoy sex as he created it: in the confines of monogamous, heterosexual matrimony. Watching porn gets in the way of Christians fully experiencing what God designed.
  
  But while evangelicals may believe that God designed sex to be pleasurable for married couples, they may not know how to achieve that pleasure. I call this an inhibition paradox: evangelicals who grow up hearing a constant refrain of negative messages about sex are suddenly expected to enjoy it come their wedding night.
  
  In my new book, Christians Under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet, I explore how evangelicals attempt to bridge secular attitudes and religious values about who is allowed to experience sexual pleasure. This evangelical effort has produced a booming industry: books, conferences, and websites that offer tools for achieving good, godly sex. In order to be practically useful, Christian sex advice must frankly discuss and sometimes visually represent the act of sex. To be sure, there are plenty of euphemisms in evangelical conversations about sex (like calling men microwaves and women crockpots when describing stereotypical sexual responses), but there’s also plenty of candid talk about sex acts—especially online.
  
  On blogs, message boards and online stores, evangelicals receive answers to a wide array of incredibly detailed questions about sex. These websites, unsurprisingly, are strictly porn-free: no videos of intercourse, no nude images. Even terms like “cock” and “pussy” are swiftly deleted by moderators. If websites include images, they are stick figures, line drawings, or photographs of toy people [see image right].
  
  Despite these precautions, writing about sex is, well, still writing about sex. Online discussions become stories about sexual bodies, desires and pleasures. For example, a man gives instructions to women on how to strip-tease:
  
  He likes to see you touch where he wants to touch, so rubbing and touching your breasts and crotch is good. Do this over your clothes, under your clothes, and when you get rid of your clothes. You can accentuate these things by making a face that says, “that feels good.” The magic word is: tease. Tease with what you say. Play with your nipples and ask if he likes it. Touch yourself under your panties and tell him what you feel.
  
  The author of this post—a self-identified conservative Christian—firmly believes that sexual experimentation can and should be a part of a godly marriage. He chooses his words carefully, using “breast” and “crotch” instead of more vulgar alternatives. There are no images to accompany his instructions, but none are needed to imagine the sexual scene he sets.
  
  I interviewed creators and users of Christian sexuality websites and asked whether the sexual nature of the content worried them. Surprisingly, no one seemed very concerned. How are they so confident that these websites are wholesome rather than obscene? The Barna Group has its answer, based on the “Porn Phenomenon” data: “Turns out, it’s more a question of function than form. If it’s used for sexual arousal, it’s porn. Simple as that.”
  
  Ultimately, the issue of obscenity on these sites comes down to a question of faith. Website creators told me they felt called by God to launch their blogs, message boards and online stores. They see their sites as ministries, helping fellow married Christians enjoy what God created for them.
  
  They believe that married couples can use the sites because they can keep their sexual thoughts within the confines of marriage, imagining only their spouse as they read and contribute to discussions. These evangelicals have faith that if anyone uses the sites as porn then God will hold them accountable. As one online store owner explained to me, “It’s not my job to be the Holy Spirit and convict people.”
  
  Evangelical leaders will undoubtedly use the Barna report to fuel their claims that pornography is an epidemic in America. As Josh McDowell noted in the study’s press release, It is vital to raise awareness about the threat of Internet pornography. Pornography violates ... the unity of our families and our moral fabric and fiber as a nation.
  
  This is a familiar “culture wars” refrain—moral versus immoral; us versus them. But whatever the report reveals about pornography it obscures about evangelical Christianity and the larger sexual landscape, which is a much more complicated story. Evangelicals find creative ways indeed to be in the world, but not of it.
     

Evangelicals and Trump

• The best thing about Donald Trump during his weeklong nosedive in the polls? He may be dragging down the Republican Party and evangelical Christianity in the process. (Hey, look! He’s finally Making America Great Again!)
  
  Trump’s lack of support in the GOP is well-documented. But if you want to know why even some evangelicals are running away from him, Exhibit A is an article by Wayne Grudem, the founder of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He made the case for Trump last week, suggesting that it was okay to elect a President who is incompetent, unfit, and willing to run the nation into the ground as long as he’ll do whatever conservative Christians want
  
  . … I think voting for Trump is a morally good choice.
  
  … I do not think that voting for Donald Trump is a morally evil choice because there is nothing morally wrong with voting for a flawed candidate if you think he will do more good for the nation than his opponent. In fact, it is the morally right thing to do.
  
  How flawed do your own morals have to be to consider Donald Trump a “morally good choice” for President…?
  
  Grudem is also making a rather large assumption that Trump gives a damn about what evangelicals want. Selecting Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate was a way to shore up his conservative base, but does anyone really believe he’d take advice from someone he didn’t even want to choose in the first place? He’ll say whatever evangelicals want to hear so he can get elected, then he’ll do whatever he wants.
  
  In any case, it’s this screw-everyone-else-except-Christians mentality that’s turning off other evangelicals. Not only do they not want to support the unstable narcissist, it makes them less likely to want to be associated with evangelicals altogether.
  
  Amy Gannett, a Christian blogger, writes: What Grudem effectively does, then, is sets up a hierarchy of morality. He is willing to hold some moral values (religious rights for Christian schools and businesses, support of traditional marriage, and pro-life notions) above others (the equality of races, genders, and ethnicities). All are moral concepts, all require a moral stance, and Grudem has chosen which he prefers over others.
  
  … We cannot call a candidate “good,” as Grudem does with Trump, who has made racist remarks. We will not call a candidate “good” who has demoralized and dehumanized women on national television. We will not buy into the hierarchy of Grudem’s proposed morals over others. Because Grudem (and others) are making this hierarchy of morality intrinsically related to the Christian life and theology, we will not stand with them. She’s not alone. There are several prominent Christians who agree that Trump doesn’t represent their values even if they typically support the Republican Party.
  
  Author Rachel Held Evans took a different approach, arguing that pro-life Christians who are one-issue voters would be better off supporting Hillary Clinton:
  
  Data suggests progressive social policies that make healthcare and childcare more affordable, make contraception more accessible, alleviate poverty, and support a living wage do the most to create such a culture [with fewer unwanted pregnancies], while countries where abortion is simply illegal see no change in the abortion rate.
  
  By focusing exclusively on the legal components of abortion while simultaneously opposing these family-friendly social policies, the Republican Party has managed to hold pro-life voters hostage with the promise of outlawing abortion, (which has yet to happen under any Republican administrations since Roe v. Wade), while actively working against the very policies that would lead to a significant reduction in unwanted pregnancies.
  
  She adds that evangelicals who support Trump will have to live with that stigma regardless of how the election turns out: According to Pew Research Center, white evangelical Christians overwhelmingly support Donald Trump for president. A solid 78 percent plan to vote for him… If these numbers hold, and on election night a reporter looks into a camera and says evangelical Christians proved Trump’s most faithful supporters, the reputation of the evangelical movement will be tied to Trump for years to come.
  
  … As Richard Rohr said, “the evangelical support of Trump will be an indictment against its validity as a Christian movement for generations to come.”
  
  I would only take issue with one part of that: Evangelicals lost their credibility beyond the bubble a long time ago. They don’t need Trump to expose just how despicable their values are. We’ve known it for a long time. The Trump support merely confirms it.
  
  On the whole, evangelicals didn’t stand up for LGBT people when pastors were acting like they were ruining American society; walk into any megachurch today and you’ll still hear the same anti-gay rhetoric. They didn’t fight back during all those sermons about how Christians are supposedly being persecuted; they’re going to see God’s Not Dead in record numbers as if it’s a documentary. They continue to support abstinence-only sex education and fact-free science curricula and so many other objectively harmful policies.
  
  But if white evangelicals continue to overwhelmingly support Trump as the polls show, you won’t hear any complaints from me (assuming he loses). By all means, let’s link up Donald Trump and evangelical Christians to the point where you can’t say one without the other. It’s damage that never dissipates. Just ask John McCain, the war hero who will forever be remembered for his irresponsible selection of Sarah Palin as Vice President.
  
  Long after the spotlight fades on Trump, evangelicals will have to deal with the stain on their image. Good. They deserve it. If it hastens the decline of their power and influence in this country, we’ll all benefit.

8 ways the religious right wins converts – to atheism

• If the Catholic Bishops, their Evangelical Protestant allies, and other Right-wing fundamentalists had the sole objective of decimating religious belief, they couldn’t be doing a better job of it.
  
  Testimonials at sites like ExChristian.net show that people leave religion for a number of reasons, many of which religious leaders have very little control over. Sometimes, for example, people take one too many science classes. Sometimes they find their faith shattered by the suffering in the world – either because of a devastating injury or loss in their own lives or because they experience the realities of another person’s pain in a new way. Sometimes a believer gets intrigued by archaeology or symbology or the study of religion itself. Sometimes a believer simply picks up a copy of the Bible or Koran and discovers faith-shaking contradictions or immoralities there.
  
  But if you read ExChristian testimonials you will notice that quite often church leaders or members do things that either trigger the deconversion process or help it along. They may turn a doubter into a skeptic or a quiet skeptic into an outspoken anti-theist, or as one former Christian calls himself, a de-vangelist.
  
  Here are some top ways Christians push people out the Church door or shove secret skeptics out of the closet. Looking at the list, you can’t help but wonder if the Catholic Bishops, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachman and their fundamentalist allies are working for the devil.
  
  Gay Baiting. Because of sheer demographics, most gay people are born into religious families. In this country almost half are born into Bible-believing families, many of whom see homosexuality as an abomination. The condemnation (and self-condemnation) can be excruciating, as we all know from the suicide rate. Some emotionally battered gays spend their lives fighting or denying who they are, but many eventually find their way to open and affirming congregations or non-religious communities.
  
  Ignorant and mean-spirited attitudes about homosexuality don’t drive just gays out of the Church, they are a huge deconversion issue for straight friends and family members. When Christians indulge in slurs, devout moms and dads who also love their gay kids find themselves less comfortable in their church home. Young people, many of whom think of the gay rights issue as a no-brainer, put anti-gay churches in the “archaic” category. Since most people Gen X and younger recognize equal rights for gays as a matter of common humanity, gay baiting is a wedge issue that wedges young people right out of the church. That makes Fred Phelps a far better evangelist for atheism than for his own gay-hating Westborough Baptist Church.
  
  Prooftexting. People who think of the Bible as the literally perfect word of God love to quote excerpts to argue their points. They often start with a verse in 1 Timothy: All scripture is given by inspiration of God. (As if this circular argument would convince anyone but a true believer.) They then proceed to quote whatever authoritarian, anti-gay, or anti-woman verse makes their point, like, Whoever spares the rod hates their children . . . Blows and wounds cleanse away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being. or Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination or Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. In doing so, they call into question biblical authority, because the Bible writers so obviously got these issues wrong. Literalists who prooftext are a tremendous asset to those who would like to see Bible worship fade away – because prooftexting on one side of an argument invites the same in return, and it is easy to find quotes from the Bible that are either scientifically absurd or morally repugnant.
  
  Many liberal or modernist Christians see the Bible as a human document, an attempt by our spiritual ancestors to articulate their best understanding of God through the lens of imperfect human cultures and minds. Suppose such a Christian gets confronted with a verse that says, for example, Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man (Numbers 31:17-18), or No man who has any defect may come near [to God in the temple]: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, . . . (Leviticus 21:17-23). He or she can simply shrug and say, “Yeah, that’s ugly.” A couple of years ago a group of liberal Christians even kicked off an internet competition to vote on the worst verse in the Bible. Their faith doesn’t stand or fall with the perfection of the Bible. Biblical literalists, on the other hand give someone like me an excuse to talk about sexual slavery or bias against handicapped people in the Bible – in front of an audience who have been taught that the good book is uniformly good. For a wavering believer, the dissonance can be too much.
  
  Misogyny. For psychological and social reasons females are more inclined toward religious belief than males. They are more likely to attend church services and to insist on raising their children in a faith community. They also appear more indifferent than males to rational critique of religion, like debates about theology or evolutionary biology. I was interested to notice recently that my YouTube channel, Life After Christianity, which focuses on the psychology of religion gets about eighty percent male viewers. Women are the Church’s base constituency, but fortunately for atheists, this fact hasn’t caused conservative Christians to back off of sexism that is justified by – you got it – prooftexting from the Old and New Testaments.
  
  Evangelical minister, Jim Henderson, recently published a book, The Resignation of Eve, in which he urges his fellow Christians to take a hard look at the consequences of sexism in the church. According to Henderson, old school sexism has driven some women out of Christianity permanently, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. For those who stay, it means that many are less enthusiastic and engaged than they would be. Churches rely on women to volunteer in roles that range from secretary to director of Children’s programs to missionaries. That takes a high level of confidence in Church doctrines and also a strong sense of belonging. Biblical sexism cultivates neither. Between 1991 and 2011 the percent of women attending church in a typical week dropped by eleven points, from 55 to 44 percent.
  
  Hypocrisy. Christians are taught – and many believe—that thanks to the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit they are a moral beacon for society. The writer of Matthew told his audience, “You are the light of the world.” That’s a high bar, and yet decent believers (along with many other decent people) try earnestly to meet it. But the added pressure on those who call themselves “the righteous” means that believers also are prone to hiding, pretending, posing, and turning a blind eye to their own very human, very normal faults and flaws. People who desperately want to be sanctified and righteous, “cleansed by the blood of the lamb” – who need to believe that they now merit heaven but that other people’s smallest transgressions merit eternal torture—have a lot of motivation to engage in self-deception and hypocrisy. High profile hypocrites like Ted Haggard or Rush Limbaugh may be loved by their acolytes, but for people who are teetering, they help to build a gut aversion to whatever they espouse. But often as not, the hypocrisies that pose a threat to faith are small and internal to a single Bible-study or youth group. Backbiting and social shunning are part of the church-lady stereotype for a reason. They also leave a bitter taste that makes some church members stop drinking the Kool-aid.
  
  Disgusting and Immoral Behavior. The priest abuse scandal did more for the New Atheist movement than outspoken anti-theists like Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (The End of Faith) or Bill Maher (Religulous) ever could. To make matters worse—or better, depending on your point of view– Bill Donohue of the Catholic League seems to be doing everything possible to fan those flames: On top of the abuse itself, followed by cover-ups, he is now insisting that the best defense of Church property is a good offense against the victims, and has vowed to fight them “one by one.” The Freedom from Religion Foundation publishes a bi-monthly newspaper that includes a regular feature: The Black Collar Crime Blotter. It features fraud, drug abuse, sex crimes and more by Protestant as well as Catholic clergy. The obvious purpose is to move readers from Religion isn’t true to Religion isn’t benign to Religion is abhorrent and needs fighting. Moral outrage is a powerful emotion.
  
  Science denial. One of my former youth group friends had his faith done in by a conversation with a Bible study leader who explained that dinosaur skeletons actually are the bones of the giants described in early books of the Bible. Uh huh. Christians have come up with dozens of squishier, less falsifiable ways to explain the geological record: The ‘days’ in Genesis 1 were really ‘ages.’ Or God created the world with the fossils already in place to test our faith. Or the biblical creation story is really sacred metaphor. But young earth creationists who believe the world appeared in its present form 6- 10,000 years ago are stuck. And since almost half of the American public believes some version of this young earth story, there are ample opportunities for inquiring minds to trip across proto-scientific nonsense.
  
  Like other factors I’ve mentioned, science denial doesn’t just move believers to nonbelief. It also rallies opposition ranging from cantankerous bloggers to legal advocates. It provides fodder for comedians and critics: “If the world was created 6000 years ago, what’s fueling your car?” It may produce some of the most far reaching opposition to religious belief, because science advocates argue that faith, even socially benign faith, is a fundamentally flawed way of knowing. The Catholic Church, perhaps still licking wounds about Galileo (they apologized finally in the 20th Century), has managed to avoid embarrassing and easily disproven positions on evolutionary biology. But one could argue that their atheism-fostering positions on conception and contraception similarly rely on ignorance about or denial of biological science –in this case embryology and the basic fact that most embryos never become persons.
  
  Political meddling. If you look at religion-bashing quote-quip-photo-clip-links that circulate Facebook and Twitter, most of them are prompted by church incursions into the political sphere. A spat between two atheists erupted on my home page yesterday. “Why can’t ex-Christians just shut up about religion and get on with building a better world?” asked one. “Why can’t we shut up?!” screeched the other. “Because of shit like this!” He posted a link about Kansas giving doctors permission to deny contraception and accurate medical information to patients.
  
  I myself give George W. Bush credit for transforming me from a politically indifferent, digging-in-the-garden agnostic into a culture warrior. He casually implied that, when going to war, he didn’t need to consult with his own father because he had consulted the big guy in the sky, and my evangelical relatives backed him up on that, and I thought, oh my God, the beliefs I was raised on are killing people. The Religious Right, and now the Catholic Bishops, have brought religion into politics in the ugliest possible way short of holy war, and people who care about the greater good have taken notice. Lists of ugly Bible verses, articles about the psychology of religion, investigative exposes about Christian machinations in D.C. or rampant proselytizing in the military and public schools –all of these are popular among political progressives because it is impossible to drive progressive change without confronting religious fundamentalism.
  
  Intrusion. Australian comedian and atheist John Safran, flew to Salt Lake City for a round of door-to-door devangelism after Mormons rang his doorbell one too many times on Saturday morning. More serious intrusions, in deeply personal beginning- and end-of-life decisions, for example, generate reactive anti-theism in people who mostly just want to live and let live.
  
  Catholic and Evangelical conservatives have made a high stakes gamble that they can regain authoritarian control over their flocks and hold onto the next generation of believers (and tithers) by asserting orthodox dogmas, making Christian belief an all or nothing proposition. Their goal is a level of theological purity that will produce another Great Awakening based largely on the same dogmas as the last one. They hope to cleanse their membership of theological diversity, and assert top down control of conscience questions, replenishing their membership with anti-feminist, pro-natalist policies and proselytizing in the Southern hemisphere. But the more they resort to strict authoritarianism, insularity and strict interpretation of Iron Age texts, the more people are wounded in the name of God and the more people are outraged. By making Christian belief an all-or-nothing proposition – they force at least some would-be believers to choose “nothing.” Anti-theists are all too glad to help.

Trashing The Brand

• Christianity has a brand problem. If it were a corporation, brand managers would be scrambling to scrub public image—maybe by greenwashing or with corporate diversity trainings or by renaming their product, say natural gas instead of methane, or by coming up with a new catchy slogan. Or they might actually do something substantive, like ceasing to “gift” baby formula to poor moms or to use child labor in their factories. There are many ways to polish brand.
  
  Christianity’s recently launched He Gets US campaign—millions of people got a dose during the Superbowl—tells us two things: 1. Conservative Evangelical Christians care about their brand problem. 2. Some major Christian donors have decided, to the tune of $100 million apparently, to go with the greenwashing strategy rather than substantive change. And that combination provides a possible avenue for fighting back against some of the ugly objectives and tactics of the Religious Right.
  
  The people paying for this ad campaign are the same ones promoting homophobia, advocating against reproductive healthcare for women, and funding politicians to protect the good old pecking orders: rich over poor, men over women, white people over everyone with more melanin.
  
  Back when the world and I were young, Evangelical Christians were a politically diverse group. But Republican strategists recognized them as a potential political voting block. Hierarchical social structures within churches meant the strategists had to recruit only Church leaders, and those leaders would bring along their congregations. It worked for the Republican party, but at an enormous cost to Christianity as an institution. That is because right wing operatives were spending down Christianity’s good name by merging its brand with their own. The more Christianity came to be associated with ugly political priorities—and then crass power grab-‘em-by-the-pussies—the more young people fled the Church. By the millions. (Tangentially, Islam faces a similar brand problem and deconversion pattern wherever the Mullahs wield political force. Almost half of Iranians say they used to be religious.)
  
  Losing customers by the millions would be a problem for any corporate body—especially one with a product that people realize they don’t need when they actually take a good look. When there are better options, in this case secularism, people rarely go back to the same-old-same-old. The financial impact of deconversion is potentially huge. The Mormon Church may coerce tithes with visits from elders who review a family’s finances, but most protestant and Catholic sects rely on more subtle social and emotional pressures. Either way, market share requires mindshare. You have to get people in the door before you can pass the basket.
  
  But this isn’t merely a financial calculus. At some point, brand damage becomes a threat to identity. Evangelicals are evangelical. It’s part of the ideology. Go into all the world and make disciples of every creature. Unlike Judaism or Hinduism, Christianity is a proselytizing religion. Proselytizing (ok, coupled with colonization and holy wars) has been the strategy that allowed Christianity to spread across the planet. Missionaries may not explicitly recognize that they are recruiting paying customers who will trade cash for club benefits and afterlife services, but they do recognize that “harvesting souls” is a central commandment of their faith. For many, this mandate—called the Great Commission—is their version of praying five times facing Mecca. For some, it becomes an underlying feature in virtually every relationship: All non-Christians are potential converts; friendliness becomes friendship missions; feeding the poor becomes first-and-foremost a path to winning their souls. Evangelicals are a sales force, and as their brand becomes more and more soiled, it gets harder to do their job.
  
  Having spent down Christianity’s brand, the patriarchs of the religious right are uncomfortable with how far that has gone—the image, that is, not the substance. Most Americans used to think of the Bible as The Good Book, but not anymore. Most Americans used to think of Christianity (and religion more broadly) as benign, but not anymore. Jesus, though—the image of Jesus is relatively untainted. Even those who don’t buy into the idea of him being the perfect human sacrifice who saves our souls (Are you washed in the blood?) tend to believe that he was a good, wise, loving man. They think we know a lot more about him than we do, and what they think we know is positive. So, it totally makes sense that a $100 million rebranding and recruiting effort would center on the person of Jesus. Much of Christian theology is nasty, and the Iron Age texts in the Bible contradict what we now know about science, anthropology and—well, pretty much every other field of modern scholarship. This iconic personal Jesus is all they have left.
  
  The fact that conservative Christians are spending $100 million on marketing Jesus means they are bad off and know it. It means they recognize the deterioration in their brand, and they feel desperate to turn it around. They have made the mistake of letting that desperation slip out, and those of us who would rather not return to the good old dark ages when the Church ruled the world can exploit that vulnerability. Their product sucks, and we need to keep saying so in every way possible. We need to make sure the general public keeps associating Christianity with what Christians are doing, not what they are saying: Those anti-abortion centers that dupe women into keeping pregnancies aren’t Crisis Pregnancy Centers, they are Church Pregnancy Centers. Fetal personhood isn’t a philosophical debate, it’s theology. Denying rights to queer folks and women isn’t conservative, it’s theocracy.
  
  When people do ugly things that are motivated by religious dogma, we should name what’s going on. Conservative Christians are telling us that they can’t afford more brand damage. And maybe if their bad works keep getting exposed they will realize that the answer isn’t Jesus-washing; it’s substantive change.

Christian Pseudo-Science

• Before the campaign to end gender-affirming care, anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience was cultivated and disseminated in campaigns to discourage funding for HIV/AIDS programs, limit access to comprehensive sex education curricula, prevent marriage equality and recognition of LGBTQ+ families, institute and maintain the U.S. military’s ban on openly gay and lesbian troops known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” defend the conversion therapy industry, and attack gender identity protections in public schools.
  
  Anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience must also be understood as part of the historical legacy of white supremacy and the political aims of the religious right. First, as we detail in Chapter 1, pseudoscience has been wielded by white supremacists and eugenicists to substantiate false claims about their racial superiority for centuries. A component of that mythical racial superiority has always been a supposed sexual purity – the idea that sexual immorality dilutes white power. Pseudoscientific justifications for pathologizing LGBTQ+ identities, then, help “diagnose” and “cure” threats to whiteness, specifically threats to the perpetuation of the so-called white race through the heteronormative white family.
  
  Secondly, 20th and 21st century anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience emerged from a movement to provide scientific justification for the political priorities of conservative Christians. Proponents of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience cannot divorce it from the white Christian nationalist political movement that seeks to tear down the separation of church and state and ultimately encode their conservative interpretation of Christian scripture into American law. There are numerous examples of this throughout American history, including:
  
  The creationist and intelligent design movements that encourage public schools to undermine the scientific consensus of evolutionary biology by “teaching the controversy” of creationism cloaked in the rhetoric of so-called intelligent design. Contemporary anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience draws heavily on the essentialist “biblical binary” notion of male and female sex and gender “complementarity.”[1]
  
  The anti-abortion movement and opponents of stem cell research, who share organizational and philosophical ties to the anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscientific movement, and similarly seek to replace medical science with conservative religious policy positions.[2]
  
  The climate denial movement, which, at its most extreme, draws a connection between a millenarian theology and disregard for the climate crisis, but also borrows from the creationist movement in seeking to undermine scientific consensus about the history and causes of global climate change.[3]
  
  As the most prominent research topics fluctuate over time, each iteration of this pseudoscientific industry overlaps with the next. The institutions established to wage war on secular science in previous decades pass on their knowledge, networks, and organizational strategies to their ideological progeny.
  
  These institutions take the form of conservative Christian colleges, universities and law programs with parallel legal organizations which train and produce science skeptics, future litigators and policymakers; far-right think tanks and political strategists who help bridge institutions and ideologies by forging connections to political parties, most notably the Republican Party in the United States; and they help build fundraising and media operations that develop donors and disseminate the message.[4] This history of capacity-building is, without doubt, the primary reason anti-LGBTQ+ activists were able to quickly stoke and capitalize on anti-transgender sentiment and diffuse anti-transgender, pseudoscience-based policy across the United States with record effectiveness between 2020 and 2023.
  
  While new organizations with missions tied to the specific focus of an emerging pseudoscience movement may arise, their work is intellectually, institutionally, and often financially subsidized by leaders of previous iterations of the movement. Anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience and the false narratives about LGBTQ+ people it perpetuates, then, are cogs in a machine that attempt to churn out litigation, legislation, and relatable narratives to encode white supremacy and conservative Christian beliefs into American law and society.

Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals

• Every four years, voters are asked, “Are you a white evangelical or born-again Christian?” And every time, voters from a broad range of Protestant Christian traditions say yes, compressing a diverse religious community into a single, unified mass.
  
  It’s not that the question is misleading. People who answer yes do represent a coherent political movement. Not only do they vote overwhelmingly for Republicans; they’re also quite distinct from other American political groups in their views on a host of issues, including on disputes regarding race, immigration and the Covid vaccines.
  
  But in other ways, this exit poll identity misleads us about the nature and character of American evangelicalism as a whole. It’s far more diverse and divided than the exit poll results imply. There are the rather crucial facts that not all evangelicals are white and evangelicals of color vote substantially differently from their white brothers and sisters. Evangelicals of color are far more likely to vote Democratic, and their positions on many issues are more closely aligned with the American political mainstream. But the differences go well beyond race.
  
  In reality, American evangelicalism is best understood as a combination of three religious traditions: fundamentalism, evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. These different traditions have different beliefs, different cultures and different effects on our nation.
  
  The distinction between fundamentalism and evangelicalism can be the hardest to parse, especially since we now use the term “evangelical” to describe both branches of the movement. The conflict between evangelicalism and fundamentalism emerged most sharply in the years following World War II, when so-called neo-evangelicals arose as a biblically conservative response to traditional fundamentalism’s separatism and fighting spirit. I say “biblically conservative” because neo-evangelicals had the same high view of Scripture as the inerrant word of God that fundamentalists did, but their temperament and approach were quite different.
  
  The difference between fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism can be summed up in two men, Bob Jones and Billy Graham. In a 2011 piece about the relationship between Jones and Graham, the Gospel Coalition’s Justin Taylor called them the “exemplars of fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism.” Jones was the founder of the university that bears his name in Greenville, S.C., one of the most influential fundamentalist colleges in America. Bob Jones University barred Black students from attending until 1971, then banned interracial dating until 2000. The racism that plagued Southern American fundamentalism is a key reason for the segregation of American religious life. It’s also one reason the historically Black Protestant church is distinct from the evangelical tradition, despite its similar views of the authority of Scripture.
  
  Graham attended Bob Jones University for a semester, but soon left and took a different path. He went on to become known as “America’s pastor,” the man who ministered to presidents of both parties and led gigantic evangelistic crusades in stadiums across the nation and the world. While Jones segregated his school, Graham removed the red segregation rope dividing white and Black attendees at his crusades in the South — before Brown v. Board of Education — and shared a stage with Martin Luther King Jr. at Madison Square Garden in 1957.
  
  But since that keen Jones/Graham divide, the lines between evangelicalism and fundamentalism have blurred. Now the two camps often go to the same churches, attend the same colleges, listen to the same Christian musicians and read the same books. To compound the confusion, they’re both quite likely to call themselves evangelical. While the theological differences between fundamentalists and evangelicals can be difficult to describe, the temperamental differences are not.
  
  “Fundamentalism,” Richard Land, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “is far more a psychology than a theology.” That psychology is defined by an extreme sense of certainty, along with extreme ferocity.
  
  Roughly speaking, fundamentalists are intolerant of dissent. Evangelicals are much more accepting of theological differences. Fundamentalists place a greater emphasis on confrontation and domination. Evangelicals are more interested in pluralism and persuasion. Fundamentalists focus more on God’s law. Evangelicals tend to emphasize God’s grace. While many evangelicals are certainly enthusiastic Trump supporters, they are more likely to be reluctant (and even embarrassed) Trump voters, or Never Trumpers, or Democrats. Fundamentalists tend to march much more in lock step with the MAGA movement. Donald Trump’s combative psychology in many ways merges with their own.
  
  A Christian politics dominated by fundamentalism is going to look very different from a Christian politics dominated by evangelicalism. Think of the difference between Trump and George W. Bush. Bush is conservative. He’s anti-abortion. He’s committed to religious liberty. These are all values that millions of MAGA Republicans would claim to uphold, but there’s a yawning character gap between the two presidents, and their cultural influence is profoundly different.
  
  While the difference between evangelicalism and fundamentalism can be difficult to discern, Pentecostalism is something else entirely. American evangelicals can trace their roots to the Reformation; the Pentecostal movement began a little over 100 years ago, during the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles in 1906. The movement was started by a Black pastor named William Seymour, and it is far more supernatural in its focus than, say, the Southern Baptist or Presbyterian church down the street.
  
  At its heart, Pentecostalism believes that all of the gifts and miracles you read about in the Bible can and do happen today. That means prophecy, speaking in tongues and gifts of healing. Pentecostalism is more working class than the rest of the evangelical world, and Pentecostal churches are often more diverse — far more diverse — than older American denominations. Hispanics in particular have embraced the Pentecostal faith, both in the United States and in Latin America, and Pentecostalism has exploded in the global south.
  
  When I lived in Manhattan, my wife and I attended Times Square Church, a Pentecostal congregation in the heart of the city, and every Sunday felt like a scene from the book of Revelation, with people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” gathered together to worship with great joy.
  
  Pentecostalism is arguably the most promising and the most perilous religious movement in America. At its best, the sheer exuberance and radical love of a good Pentecostal church is transformative. At its worst, the quest for miraculous experience can lead to a kind of frenzied superstition, where carnival barker pastors and faux apostles con their congregations with false prophecies and fake miracles, milking them for donations and then wielding their abundant wealth as proof of God’s favor.
  
  The Pentecostal church, for example, is the primary home of one of the most toxic and dangerous Christian nationalist ideas in America — the Seven Mountain Mandate, which holds that God has ordained Christians to dominate the seven “mountains” of cultural influence: the family, the church, education, media, arts, the economy and government. This is an extreme form of Christian supremacy, one that would relegate all other Americans to second-class status.
  
  Pentecostalism is also the primary source for the surge in prophecies about Trump that I’ve described before. It’s mostly Pentecostal pastors and leaders who have told their flocks that God has ordained Trump to rule — and to rule again. Combine the Seven Mountain Mandate with Trump prophecies, and you can see the potential for a kind of fervent radicalism that is immune to rational argument. After all, how can you argue a person out of the idea that God told him to vote for Trump? Or that God told him that Christians are destined to reign over the United States?
  
  When I look at the divisions in American evangelicalism, I’m reminded of the Homer Simpson toast: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” The American church has been the cause of much heartache and division. It is also the source of tremendous healing and love. We saw both the love and the division most vividly in the civil rights movement, when Black Christians and their allies faced the dogs and hoses all too often unleashed by members of the white Southern church. We saw this on Jan. 6, when violent Christians attacked the Capitol, only to see their plans foiled by an evangelical vice president who broke with Trump at long last to uphold his constitutional oath and spare the nation a far worse catastrophe.
  
  I’ve lived and worshiped in every major branch of American evangelicalism. I was raised in a more fundamentalist church, left it for evangelicalism and spent a decade of my life worshiping in Pentecostal churches. Now I attend a multiethnic church that is rooted in both evangelicalism and the Black church tradition. I’ve seen great good, and I’ve seen terrible evil.
  
  That long experience has taught me that the future of our nation isn’t just decided in the halls of secular power; it’s also decided in the pulpits and sanctuaries of American churches. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line between good and evil “cuts through the heart of every human being.” That same line also cuts through the heart of the church.

Other Resources

• Books About Religion
• Anecdotes About Religion
• Quotations About Religion