Dear Bethel Missionary Baptist Church of Creswell, Oregon:

If you're going to send your moral entrepreneurs to knock on my front door and proselytize to me about the Bible, you simply must bring your 'A' game next time! The two young men you sent over were cutting and running in less than 10 minutes. I thought my eternal salvation deserved a bit more of their attention, especially given that they thought it wise to spend a Saturday evening knocking on my door to begin with.

Yes, I gave them a warm up act of reading a few very brief Bible passages and accepted that these claims may even be internally consistent... but then I pointed out that they failed to establish even the basic pretext of authority that the Bible would have for the metaphysical claims they were making about the universe, the epistemology of conscious experience, and the ability for non-physical beings of immense power to sometimes author specific books - but not films or computer software.

They presented an interesting theory about how they were the "real Jews" - which certainly surprised my upstairs neighbors who are of Jewish ancestry and watched with a mix of horror and amusement at this exchange. The two young men with Bibles in hand also seemed quite certain that The Book of Mormon was a "fraud" even though it contains claims of the same deficient evidentiary qualities as their own religious literature.

And this notion that I should want to go to Heaven even though they claimed my pets and non-believer friends won't be waiting for me is a really tough sell. If you're going to fabricate eternal promises, at least make them reasonably appealing to convey.

In any case... upon your Bible hucksters' next visit, please plan to stay for at least an hour because we have many basic logical and factual premises to establish before we can take on authority the claims you are making to be true. And if they could become less visibly agitated and defeated when their statements are challenged, that would be great!

You know where I live and I know your arguments better than you do.

Sincerely,
Danny Ledonne
atheist with respect to the ≈10,000 gods which humans have believed in at one time or another

The Religious Lottery

Imagine I told you that I believe I won the lottery.

That's a specific, provable claim.  There are a number of pieces of evidence that could do this: the winning lottery ticket, a news report from a verifiable source that I won the lottery, a screenshot of my bank account after depositing the check, photos of my lavish new purchases with my lottery winnings.  That's all good evidence.  But just telling you that I know I've won the lottery and my faith assures me of it is not enough evidence for you to believe my claim that I won the lottery.

Also notice what happens when I tell you why I believe I won the lottery.  If I told you:  "I believe I won the lottery because it cheers me up when I'm sad, it gives me hope for the future, my friends and family enjoy talking about what we will do with my lottery winnings, and anyway... I don't want to live in a world where I didn't win the lottery!"

What would you think about this?

You probably wouldn't believe that I won the lottery.  You might find it very strange that I believe I won the lottery in an apparent effort to make myself feel better.  You also might feel concerned or even somewhat sorry for me, wondering how I will adjust if I no longer engage in self-deception about winning the lottery.  Should you try to explain to me that there's no evidence that I won the lottery, that it's possible for me to win the lottery but it hasn't yet happened to me?  Should you respect my belief that I won the lottery even though it now seems clear I hold this believe not based on evidence but based on faith?

Now imagine that no one has ever won the lottery.

We tell ourselves, "we have people who play the lottery every day, so surely there must be some lottery winnings out there!  People have been playing this lottery for thousands of years.  They take their family to play the lottery every Sunday.  Billions of people play the lottery.  While no one has been able to produce evidence that they won the lottery, we have to have faith that they will."

At what point does a rational person, with more inquiry into the nature of this lottery, simply conclude it is very unlikely anyone will win this lottery... and that perhaps it may not be the best use of our time and attention to play the lottery without compelling evidence that it yields winners?

At what point does it no longer appear reasonable to play a lottery for which there is no evidence that anyone wins?  And with billions of people playing very different versions of this lottery, we don't know - without evidence - that any of them are more likely to produce a winning ticket than any other.

That's the dilemma of religious faith and the limits of its pragmatism.

Too Nice - a true story

It was my junior year of high school and the colored lights were twirling overhead in the typical fashion.  It was a slow song - the kind that obligated every timid teenage boy to find a shy teenage girl and awkwardly maneuver onto the dance floor.  Luckily for me, I found a friend of mine to dance with and she and I were enjoying ourselves, making polite conversation to the music.  It was during this time that she invited me to another dance the following night at her church.

"You should really come" she said.

"It's at your church?" I asked.  This seemed mildly disquieting to me already, but I kept my feet shuffling to the rhythm.

"Yeah, what church do you go to?" she asked.  That, of course, was the question I grew up finding creative ways to answer in America's Bible Belt.

"Well, I don't go to church" I replied.  She seemed to take this thoughtfully but given that we were cheek-to-cheek, it is anyone's guess what her facial expression actually was.

"Don't you believe in God?" she asked.

"No, I'm an atheist."  That was probably one of the first times I responded so directly with that answer.  I had been using the word "atheist" since I learned it in fourth grade but it was only now that I could comfortably identify myself as such.  She stopped dancing and held me at arms length.

"You're not an atheist!" she exclaimed.  I laughed in mild disbelief.

"Oh, I'm not?"

"No" she continued.  "You're too... nice."

It was at that moment that I realized she not only knew what an "atheist" was but also that she had been told what kind of people atheists are.  They are not nice.  And that stigma was the first of many manifestations I would come to experience.  I would learn that the phrase "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 to distinguish the USA from the "godless communists" during the Cold War - the very same phrase I grew so uncomfortable repeating during mandatory incantations that I simply kept quiet for two words out of every Pledge.

I would later learn that polling results of the American electorate frequently rank atheists as the "least trusted" group - lower than Muslims, homosexuals, convicted criminals, and about as little as rapists (source).  Parents frequently state during polling data that atheists are the people they would least like their own children to marry (source) - despite other data that shows atheist couples have the lowest divorce rates of any religious affiliation (source).

But on that evening, during that slow dance, I learned exactly what assumptions many theists hold about atheists: they are not nice.

Happy Atheist Easter!

Penn Jillette on Atheism and Libertarianism

A great interview with Penn Jillette on atheism and libertarianism:

Sam Harris' Moral Landscape

For far too long, non-believers and religious skeptics have been dogged by questions not of fact but of value.  Most religious fundamentalists, and certainly religious moderates, claim that their faith is born not out of factual claims about their (outdated) religious texts but rather out of the ethical guidance their religion gives them.  Atheists, many religious practitioners allege, have no "moral compass" as they have no basis on which to substantiate their values.  While secular societies tend to be the least violent in the world, a common assumption remains that without an objective framework by which to evaluate ethical problems, atheists are lost in a sea of moral relativism.

source: 2009 Global Peace Index

And for far too long, scientists have taken explicit exception to the notion that their fields of study have normative implications.  Science, as Hume would argue, can only tell us what is - not what ought.  As a result, the public has rightly perceived moral questions as being outside the bounds of objective, secular inquiry - leaving only religious zealots to questions of good and evil.  While moral relativism may comfort many atop the ivory towers of academia, the intellectual battle for civilization fought on the grounds far below demands greater than the nuanced, subjective posturing of effete liberalism.

Along comes Sam Harris, a favorite author and lecturer of mine.  Having had the pleasure of meeting him and attending his presentation in person recently, I can say with sincere conviction that his new work addresses the problem of science and human values in a compelling, lucid way.  Have a quick glimpse at Harris' summary of his new book, The Moral Landscape, just released this month:

Of course, Harris' previous books - The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation - have become bestsellers and powerful manifestos of "The New Atheism" - a term applied to a handful of non-believers who have made it their stated mission to refrain from adhering to the social taboos and sacred cows of religious dogmatism any longer.  Recounting his experiences upon completing his previous books, Harris notes that few religious practitioners are eager to engage in evidentiary debates with him about the existence of Noah's Ark, Muhammad's ascension into heaven on a winged horse, or the specific whereabouts of Vishnu.  Rather, theists contend that these stories and the allegorical meaning behind them inform their lives and give them a sense of right and wrong.  Further, Harris discovered, most Americans in particular believe that atheists are the least trustworthy minority (source) because they have no singular source for their ethical intuitions.

With his newest book, Harris asks readers to imagine that all of human experience exists on a moral landscape - one in which peaks of happiness and valleys of suffering express individual and societal consciousness.  Utilizing a variety of academic and scientific disciplines, ranging as widely as physics and neurobiology to sociology and even philosophy, Harris argues that objective answers can be discovered to questions of morality.  Further, without such a framework, secular society will continue to be held hostage to the claims of religious superstition.

The beginnings of
a universal morality?

I believe Harris is suggesting a way forward in a globalized society, one in which the tribalism of religious belief can no longer stand for the best insights into human livelihood.  While too many ecumenical liberals are eager to concede their own convictions to the moral relativism of "every culture is defensible in its own way," Pakistanis are having their mosques bombed and population killed or maimed for being Shia or Sufi (source), Afghan girls are having their faces burned by battery acid for learning to read under Taliban rule (source), and the Catholic Church continues to believe that condom use in HIV-infested Africa is a greater moral problem than the institutional protection of their pedophilic priests (source and source). With The Moral Landscape, Harris outlines a rational system by which questions of value can be answered.  It is the tip of the secular morality iceberg, no doubt, but such a model is urgently needed in a world of increasing cultural confrontation.

It is easy for me to understand why Sam Harris is among the most important intellectuals of our time - and conversely why he is so widely threatened and harassed by religious fundamentalists and moderates alike.  Yet until the separate moral communities of religious tribalism - making genuinely incompatible claims about the nature and purpose of human identity - can be bridged through scientific reasoning and secular common ground, the moral landscape remains daunting and distant.  Harris' book is indeed a start.