The ideological Turing test that was running at Unequally Yoked has concluded, and if you're like me, you couldn't wait to find out how we did. Well, the results are in: here's the answer key (some real surprises there!), and here's how the voting shook out for the atheist round and for the Christian round. Read those first, and then come back for my thoughts on the outcome.

First of all, I want to thank Leah for running this contest, and I especially want to commend her Christian participants. They did an outstanding job of posing as atheists, much better than I was expecting, and one or two of them had me completely fooled. I highly doubt that a random sample of Christians off the street would have done anywhere near as well. Not counting the one answer that I knew was mine, I got better than 50% right, but not much better - certainly not enough that I can plausibly claim my score wasn't just due to chance. I'm working on a followup post where I'll list how I voted on each entry and explain what my reasoning was.

But here's what I found most astonishing: Three Christians got higher atheist scores (i.e., were judged more likely to be atheists) than any of the real atheists! Conversely, if you look at the five people with the lowest atheist scores, two of them actually were atheists.

I've got to conclude that there's something else going on here, something I don't fully understand. If the Christians did an absolutely flawless job at passing themselves off as atheists, then we should have expected equal scores between the real and the fake atheists, because they would have been indistinguishable. Instead, it seems as if some of the Christians were judged to be "even more atheist" than some of the real atheists. (I'm happy, at least, to see that out of all the real atheists, I got the second highest atheist score, behind only Leah. She's good at this!)

The only explanation I can think of is that the Christian winners managed to distill all the diverse atheist viewpoints they've heard into a statistical composite - an "idealized" atheist viewpoint that would strike anyone who heard it as typical of an atheist. We real atheists, meanwhile, each have our own quirks and idiosyncrasies which make us diverge from that idealized average.

Something else I wanted to point out is that far more atheists than Christians participated in this contest. 1,133 total atheists voted, while only 123 total Christians did. I can't help but think this is a clue to why the results came out the way they did. It's plausible that there's a self-selection effect at work: atheists, in general, tend to be more interested in learning about different belief systems than Christians are, but that also means that there's more of a spread of ability among us. By contrast, fewer Christians make the effort to learn about atheism, but those who do are highly motivated, and thus likely to do better in a contest like this one. Of course, I welcome hearing alternative hypotheses.

As far as the Christian round goes, I've got to be just a bit smug: I got the fourth-highest Christian score, higher than 6 of the 8 real Christians. Out of all the atheists, I was the second most-convincing Christian. (Leah beat me again. Didn't I tell you she was good at this? Now you know why she's on my blogroll.)

Still, when all the numbers are taken into consideration, I think the Christians showed us up this time, and I give them full credit for that. Because of unusual cases like clergy who've lost their faith but are still in the pulpit, we know that atheists can successfully imitate believers, sometimes for months or years on end. But in this competition, we didn't do as well. I don't think it's necessary to be able to convincingly imitate an alternate viewpoint to be justified in rejecting it, but even so, I expected our side to do better than it did. There are clearly some atheists out there who need to hit the books!

In a 2008 post on the apocalyptic Millerite sect, I mentioned how several modern Christian denominations were formed from the Millerites' ruin, and how the infamous Branch Davidians originated as a splinter group from one of these. That story, I think, is already well-known: the way a charismatic preacher born as Vernon Wayne Howell changed his name to David Koresh and took control of the group; how he began to proclaim himself a prophet and the reincarnated Son of God; how he decreed that all female members of the group, including preteen girls, were to be his wives, and began stockpiling guns; how a gunfight broke out when the FBI heard these rumors and tried to execute a search warrant, leading to a botched 51-day siege which ended in the fiery destruction of the cult compound and the deaths of many Davidians, including Koresh.

All these tragic and ugly facts are part of the record of history. But the strangest thing about this very strange cult is that today, 18 years after David Koresh's death in the fiery end of the Waco compound, there are surviving Branch Davidians who continue to revere him as God incarnate!

Sheila Martin's children burned alive. God, she says, wanted it that way...

On Tuesday, Martin and a handful of other surviving Branch Davidians will gather at a hotel off a freeway in this dusty Central Texas town to remember the federal siege on their religious compound, an event that has become synonymous with the word Waco.

In my posts on strange and curious sects, we've seen over and over again that even massive disconfirmation usually fails to shake the beliefs of the faithful. When the failed messiah Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam, his followers explained it away as a sacrificial act of apostasy that redeemed humanity from punishment. The Millerites' Great Disappointment gave rise to a profusion of sects, each with their own explanation for why Jesus had failed to return on schedule. Chabad Lubavitchers believe that their messianic rabbi isn't dead, merely biding his time. But the fact that there are still surviving Branch Davidians must be the most stunning example.

What's even stranger is that none of them even seem to regard David Koresh as a particularly virtuous man. The CNN article recounts stories from former Davidians like Kiri Jewel, who testified that Koresh was having sex with her before she started menstruating. And the other survivors are fully aware of this - some of them experienced it in their own families:

[Clive] Doyle says his daughter started having sex with Koresh when she was 14. Koresh fathered at least 13 children with sect followers and engaged in sexual acts with underage Davidian girls, according to the Justice Department, numerous affidavits of Davidians and interviews CNN conducted...

Doyle knows that trying to justify Koresh having sex with underage girls incites nothing but outrage from nonbelievers. And, initially, when David began preaching a message that his holy seed must be spread to any girl he preferred, married or in pigtails, Doyle admits he was bothered by it.

"I wondered, I asked, 'Is this God or is this horny old David?'"

But even this doubt was blocked by the ultimate conversation-stopper:

But Doyle's concern didn't last long.

"I couldn't argue because he'd show you where it was in the Bible."

Whatever the Bible says - and it's true that it says nothing about a minimum age of consent for marriage or sex - it's obvious that the real reason for the Davidians' continued devotion to their dead leader is the enormous personal cost they'd incur if they were to walk away this late in the game.

Having devoted their entire lives to Koresh's teaching, having been drawn in step by step to the point where they were even willing to give up their daughters' lives to his lust, if they were to admit now that he was a fraud, they'd have to confront the fact that all they lost was for nothing. And that would clearly be a blow too enormous for their ego, their very sense of identity, to countenance. It's no surprise that clinging to their beliefs, retreating behind a wall of denial, is the psychologically easier course.

In coldly economic terms, it's the religious version of the fallacy of the sunk cost, the stubborn and illogical urge to persevere rather than give up and accept a loss. For these poor, benighted souls trapped in it, there's no easy way out. But this ultimate example of the costs of irrationality can, at least, be an example to the rest of us of the perils of becoming entangled in cultish delusion.

Other posts in this series:

• Strange and Curious Sects

"And the Lord said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go. And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son, even my firstborn: And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn.

And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the Lord met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision."

—Exodus 4:21-26, another wonderful and not at all baffling example of biblical morals

In the next election, San Francisco may vote on a referendum to ban circumcisions within the city limits. Predictably, some Jewish groups are calling this anti-Semitic. A little more puzzlingly, the National Association of Evangelicals is against the idea as well. (I suppose they believe that prophecy about the 144,000 converted Jewish evangelists can't come true if they aren't circumcised.)

In the past, I was noncommittal about circumcision because I'd read that it offers partial protection against the spread of some STIs, especially HIV. If that were true, then it could be justified on the ground of health benefits, just as we could defend a policy of preemptively removing every baby's appendix. But then I found out that the evidence for this claim is flimsy at best. One much-hyped study which claimed to find a dramatic protective effect from circumcision actually showed only a 2% absolute difference in transmission rates between the experimental and control groups.

That said, circumcision isn't nearly as harmful as female genital cutting, the express purpose of which is to prevent women from taking pleasure in sex. Still, the moral principle that opposes one works equally well against the other. Absent a medical reason, there's no justification for cutting off healthy, functional, innervated tissue from any baby, regardless of gender. No parent should have the right to surgically remove body parts from their child just to make their appearance comply with cultural or religious norms. (How does this weigh on the rare cases of babies born with vestigial tails? I'm still thinking about that.)

There's a simple and obvious solution which it seems San Francisco's Jewish community won't even consider: If circumcision is so important, why not just wait to have it done until boys are old enough to volunteer for it? Why is it so important to do it before a child can possibly give informed consent? I can't help but wonder if the real worry is that, if children of Jewish parents were allowed to make the decision for themselves, they wouldn't want it. There may well be some people who think that the only way to ensure the survival of this, frankly, primitive and barbaric custom is by doing it to children before they can object.

What is society's interest here? Consider this thought experiment: Imagine there was a religious sect that makes it their practice to chop off the little finger on the left hand of every boy that's born. When outsiders propose that finger-removal should be banned, they react vehemently, claiming it's a vital part of their cultural identity and a visible sign of God's covenant with them and their ancestors, and since you don't need that finger, it does no harm to the boys. Furthermore, they say, the procedure has health benefits: little fingers often get cut, bruised or broken, and by removing them, we significantly reduce the risk of that happening. They say that banning finger-removal would trample on their religious freedom and was obviously an unjust and racist persecution aimed specifically at them.

In this case, I'd hope it was obvious that society's interest in protecting the health and bodily integrity of all its citizens, including children, outweighs the right of parents to bring up their children as they see fit. I see no reason why we should reach any different conclusion just because the ritual in question is more familiar and affects a different body part.

Other posts in this series:

• On the Morality Of...

The civil rights movement in America is often identified with Christianity. In large part this is because of the influence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was a Baptist minister and worked the language and cadence of sermons into his most famous speeches - especially the famous paraphrase of the Book of Amos, "We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

But the civil rights movement wasn't organized or led solely by Christians. As often happens in American history, there were prominent freethinkers in the vanguard of social progress, such as the person who's the subject of today's post.

Asa Philip Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida in 1889. He was the son of an ordained minister in the black Methodist church, but his family placed great value on education, and this may be part of the reason why Randolph himself never found any attraction in religion. He attended the Cookman Institute, a segregated high school in East Jacksonville, where he excelled academically despite pervasive racism and became the valedictorian of the class of 1907.

Despite graduating with honors, Randolph's skin color barred him from all but menial labor in the South, so in 1911 he moved to New York City, where he worked and took night courses at City College. Reading The Souls of Black Folk, by fellow freethinker W.E.B. DuBois, had a major influence on his nascent political consciousness. He joined the Socialist party, where he made union organizing among black workers his mission. Together with his friend Chandler Owen, he also founded The Messenger, a literary magazine whose masthead said in part:

"Our aim is to appeal to reason, to lift our pens above the cringing demagogy of the times... Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer as nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is."

According to an article by Sikivu Hutchinson, The Messenger lived up to its freethought theme by sponsoring essay contests with titles like "Is Christianity a Menace to the Negro?"

Randolph's work in labor organizing brought him into the fold of the burgeoning civil rights movement. One of his greatest successes was in 1925, when he successfully organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters for railroad employees, bringing improved salaries, job security and working conditions to mainly black workers in one of the few fields that was open to them.

Image via.

But as the country was drawn into World War II and black workers were excluded from jobs in the booming defense industry, Randolph set his sights on higher goals. He proposed a march of African-Americans on Washington, D.C. to demand jobs and an end to segregation in the military, and although the march never actually materialized, the threat of it was enough to persuade President Roosevelt to issue the milestone Executive Order 8802, ending segregation in the defense industry. (There's a famous story, possibly apocryphal, in which Randolph was introduced to FDR, who said he agreed with everything the civil rights movement was demanding but told Randolph to "make me do it".)

Randolph continued to pressure successive administrations in his role as an organizer and civil-rights spokesman. He was one of the founders of the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign which was influential in persuading President Truman to issue Executive Order 9981 in 1948, extending FDR's earlier declaration by ending segregation in the armed forces.

Later elected vice president of the AFL-CIO, Randolph served as one of the leaders of the civil rights movement. He helped to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, the famous event where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, and which was instrumental in building momentum for the subsequent passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Throughout his life, Randolph remained an unapologetic freethinker. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II, and was declared Humanist of the Year in 1970. This longer biography notes that he was unique in that "he made his reputation as a labor leader rather than by following the more traditional path to African-American leadership through the clergy", and that his philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience was a formative influence on some of the most successful civil rights leaders of the twentieth century.

Other posts in this series:

• The Contributions of Freethinkers

Summary: A hard-hitting and emotionally moving story of a religion reporter's deconversion, despite a few lingering blind spots.

Losing My Religion is the autobiography of William Lobdell, the religion reporter turned atheist whom I wrote about in 2007. I briefly mentioned the outline of his story in my previous post, but this book is a much more in-depth account of how he found, and then ultimately lost, his faith. Despite some significant weaknesses, which I'll get to, it's a powerful, honest story and definitely worth the time to read.

When Lobdell opens the story, his life was at a low point. By age 28, he was divorced and remarried, his career at a local magazine had stalled, he was in bad health and drinking too much, and he and his new wife were having a son whom he felt completely unprepared to parent. When he confessed his troubles to a colleague who told him, "You need God," he was willing to try anything that promised to change his situation for the better. (He wryly confesses that if his colleague had said, "You need crack cocaine," he'd probably have tried that too [p.4]).

He joined a nondenominational church, Mariners, near his home in Newport Beach. At first uncertain, he slowly warmed to its message of "unconditional love", which he "eagerly lapped up" [p.12]. But more important was his friendship with the right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, who persuaded him to attend an evangelical men's retreat in the San Bernardino Mountains. Lobdell initially resisted, mortified by the thought of sharing teary confessionals with complete strangers, but the exhausting schedule of singing, preaching, work and testimonials gradually wore down his defenses (as, he rightly notes, it's designed to do), and the weekend ended with him unexpectedly having a born-again experience:

When I repeated the line "I invite Jesus into my heart," I experienced what I can only call a vision. Time slowed. In my mind's eye, my heart opened into halves, and a warm, glowing light flowed right in... I felt instantly the light was Jesus, who now lived inside me. A tingling warmth spread across my chest. This, I thought - no, I knew - was what it meant to be born-again. [p.22]

With his conversion and newfound sense of purpose in life, both his career and his marriage improved. When he landed a coveted job on the religion beat at the Los Angeles Times, he took this as a sign that God was guiding him, and believed that he'd found his calling: using his journalistic talents to tell stories of how God worked in the lives of the faithful, the kind of story he felt was routinely overlooked in the media.

Lobdell's career was thriving, but he was growing disenchanted with the simplistic theology of Mariners. His wife had been raised Roman Catholic and wanted to rejoin the church, and he found himself drawn to Catholicism's long history and complex liturgy. But fate intervened dramatically: just as he was on the verge of converting, the Catholic child-rape scandal began to break in a big way. Lobdell himself reported on one of the earliest cases, Monsignor Michael Harris, who was so photogenic and beloved in his community that he was referred to as "Father Hollywood" - until the diocese reached an embarrassingly public settlement with a young man who claimed that Harris had molested him. At first, Lobdell dismissed it as an isolated case, but as more and more similar cases broke nationwide, and as he attended survivors' meetings and witnessed for himself how the church treated abuse victims, his mind was changed:

I discovered that as horrific as the abuse was, most survivors experienced the most lasting damage from church leaders whom they approached for help. Instead of receiving protection and justice, these children and their parents were vilified for coming forward, called liars or accused of being bad Catholics for trying to bring scandal upon the church. The victims and their families were routinely told that they were the first to complain about a priest's behavior, though it often wasn't true. [p.102]

At the very last minute, Lobdell decided not to convert to Catholicism after all. Doubt was whispering at the edges of his mind, but he tried to suppress it. Disillusioned by Catholicism, but still a theist, he decided he had a new mission: he would "rebuild the church", finding and exposing the hypocrites who claimed to speak in God's name, and cleanse the institution of Christianity of these evils so that it would emerge stronger.

Now that he was looking for it, he found that Christianity was rife with corruption - faith-healing con men, powerful pastors who were blatant hypocrites, televangelists who lived lavishly off their followers' donations. But the more exposés he reported, the more discouraged he got. He found that most believers didn't want to hear bad news; their usual reaction was to cling even more tightly to whoever was scamming them. The preachers he exposed, meanwhile, denounced him and used his name in fundraising appeals. And it wasn't just him: in one story he tells, a young evangelical named Jen Hubbard tried to blow the whistle on fishy expenditures by the apologist Hank Hanegraaff, who used followers' donations on sports cars and country club dues, only to end up fired from her job and shunned by the Christian community [p.72].

Under the pressure of these contradictions, the proof that Christians lived no more morally than everyone else, and growing fissures of doubt about the irreconcilable contradictions of faith, Lobdell's religious beliefs finally collapsed. "[A]s deeply as I missed my faith, as hard as I tried to keep it, my head could not command my gut... I just didn't believe in God anymore" [p.244]. In a moving epilogue, he writes of the profound relief he's experienced, the liberating feeling of freedom and the "tremendous sense of gratitude" [p.278] he now feels at being alive. (He's since written to tell Christians to stop trying to reconvert him.)

That's the summary, and I hope it shows what I liked best about the book: a painfully honest deconversion story, interwoven with devastating first-hand reporting about the Catholic child molestation scandal, as well as some hard-hitting takedowns of other Christian preachers. Lobdell chronicles both how he came to faith and how he ultimately left it in detail, with a reporter's practiced eye and an undeniable, disarming sincerity.

That said, there were a few passages in the book that irked me. One was his treatment of Rick Warren, whom he's met in person and whom he describes as a warm, friendly and genuinely sincere person who remains "grounded" [p.71] "different from most" Christian leaders and "careful to keep clear of controversy" [p.70]. This is the same Rick Warren who's rabidly anti-choice, anti-gay and doesn't think an atheist is qualified to be president. He even refused to denounce a Ugandan law, sponsored by one of his proteges, that would put gay people to death, relenting and offering a grudging condemnation only after an onslaught of bad press.

Second: I'm not sure Lobdell fully realizes the extent to which his former religious beliefs affected his coverage. He says that "My only agenda was to make religion as fascinating to others as it was to me... I didn't think my role was to promote the faith" [p.46]. But some of his old stories which he quotes with pride - including one in particular about an investment manager who says he uses the Bible as his financial guide - sound like they could have come from a Christian apologetics pamphlet. He writes that he still believes there's a "liberal slant" in the media, a long-debunked trope, but doesn't seem to notice how his own beliefs shaped the tone of his writing.

Third, and the one that piqued me the most: Lobdell has scornful words for the New Atheists, saying things like, "I am not as confident in my disbelief as [Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens] are. Their disbelief has a religious quality to it that I'm not ready to take on" [p.271].

This tiresome, patronizing rhetoric is especially strange because, from reading the book, it's clear that he agrees with every argument they make: the moral culpability of an all-powerful god who permits evil, the way believers rationalize the failure of prayer as God's ineffable will, the abundant harm caused by religious beliefs which Lobdell himself has exhaustively chronicled. But even though there's nothing he disagrees with the New Atheists about, he still doesn't feel as comfortable as they do saying so in public. I think this is a remnant of his past theism: the idea that religious beliefs deserve "respect" even when they're patently false and harmful. But despite this lingering blind spot, Losing My Religion was a hard-hitting and emotionally moving story, and well worth my recommendation and endorsement.

I've been reading Bob Curran's book Unholy Popes, an extremely amusing chronicle of papal misbehavior over the centuries and the more infamous scandals and shenanigans attributed to the various men who've held the seat. There have been periods of decades when Rome was rife with corruption, nepotism, bribery, and at times, open warfare and murder over the papal succession. There have been times when no one was pope and times when there were multiple contenders, each one claiming to be the true pope and threatening the others with excommunication. There have been popes who were so depraved that the Catholic Church itself has retroactively denounced them, declared them antipopes or attempted to erase them from the history books.

It's one of these stories that lies at the root of a bizarre but true fact: The current pope is misnumbered. By the church's own reckoning, Benedict XVI has the wrong number - and by so titling himself, he's tacitly acknowledged the reign of a heretic!

The explanation of this dates back to the 11th century. At that time, the German emperor Henry III had the power of choosing the pope and had installed a series of German bishops in the office. In 1057, his previous pick, Pope Victor II, died. Under the terms of a treaty, Rome was obliged to consult with Henry to nominate a successor, but they failed to do this. Several powerful Roman families instead chose their own candidate for the papacy, Stephen IX, who reigned less than a year before dying of illness. Before his death, he expressed a wish that one of his advisers, Hildebrand, should select the next pope.

But the Roman noble families ignored this wish. They chose another candidate: John Mincius, the cardinal-bishop of Valletri, who took the title Benedict X. A number of cardinals claimed the election was unjust and had been determined by bribery; they were forced to flee Rome by Benedict X and his supporters.

When word reached Hildebrand, who was at the German imperial court, he decided to take action. Together with the cardinals who'd fled Rome, they met and chose Gerhard of Burgundy, bishop of Florence, as the next pope. Taking the name Nicholas II, the new pope pronounced Benedict X an antipope, declared him to be excommunicated, and proceeded to Rome backed by an army organized by sympathetic noblemen. After several inconclusive battles with Benedict's supporters, Nicholas was victorious in a 1059 clash at Campagna, and Benedict surrendered and renounced the papacy. Nicholas allowed him to go free, but when Hildebrand returned from Germany in 1060, he had Benedict arrested and imprisoned until his death sometime between 1070 and 1080.

Hildebrand himself became pope in 1073, taking the name Pope Gregory VII. During his reign, he declared that Benedict X was not only excommunicated but had never been pope, and that any acknowledgment of him as such would be treated as heresy and punished with automatic excommunication. But the next pope who took the name Benedict, in 1303, declared himself to be Benedict XI - implicitly acknowledging his predecessor, despite the pleas of the Curia - and all subsequent Benedicts, including the current one, have followed suit.

If you look at official records, it's obvious that the church is embarrassed by the whole affair. The New Advent Catholic encyclopedia's entry for Benedict X says in its entirety, "The bearer of this name was an antipope in the days of Nicholas II, 1056-61." But this terse note can't disguise the problem: If Benedict X was an antipope, why is it that the next pope who took the name was Benedict XI? Shouldn't he have been Benedict X, since the "first" Benedict X was an illegitimate pretender to the throne? And doesn't this mean that every Benedict since, including the one that's now pope, have perpetuated this error and acknowledged the legitimacy of a man earlier denounced as a usurper, an antipope and a heretic?

This is a guest post by Leah of Unequally Yoked.  Adam is on vacation.

When in argument with Christians, it can be hard to find a good way to explain why you doubt their precepts.  John Loftus has a good idea with his Outsider's Test for Faith, but most Christians believe that their faith can pass the test; it's hard to show them how their faith looks if you haven't been steeped in it.

Sometimes I've tried comparing and contrasting with other, conflicting denominations and asking why I should find one compelling over the other, but it's easy for Christians to escape that maneuver by claiming that they do agree on the most important aspects of God's nature.  According to them, I should be convinced by what binds them together.  It's also easy to end up in an endless cycle of counter-citations and courtier's replies if you try to get technical with objections and apologetics.

I have a couple standard questions, but, after seeing The Book of Mormon on Broadway, I've got an idea for a different opening gambit.  As we heard during Romney's first campaign, Mormonism has a lot of mind-boggling propositions embedded in its theology.  According to data from the Pew Research Center, over a third of Americans do not believe Mormons are Christians, and that proportion is higher among white evangelicals.  In other words, most Christians have no emotional ties to Mormonism and are less likely to get defensive when talking about it.

So the question to pose is: what evidence should compel me to believe in your faith rather than Mormonism?  There are plenty of parallels to push on.  Apologist Lee Strobel makes much of the fact that early Christians were willing to be martyred for their faith and that, despite persecution, the Church grew and thrived.  The same is true of the Church of Latter Day Saints.  The Mormons were persecuted and threatened as them moved west.  According to standard Christian apologetic logic, we should give them more credence for persisting and creating new converts.

Of course, the problem for Christians is that they find Mormon theology to be false prima facie.  If you're a little shaky on Mormon theology, take a listen to the ballad "I Believe" from the musical.  In the song, one of the missionary leads sings a song that encapsulates parts of Mormon dogma.  It starts off mainstream ("I believe that the Lord God created the Universe / I believe that he sent his only son to die for my sin") but it quickly gets stranger:

I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America...

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

Except, according to some Christian apologists, the implausibility of beliefs can be proof of the certainty of the believer.  After all, they say, no one would profess such a ridiculous seeming belief if they didn't have good reason to think it were true.   (Though the Mormons are certainly proof that widespread ridicule is insufficient to kill off a religion or halt its expansion).

Try turning the old defenses around and asking Christians how they account for the extremely rapid expansion of a church they regard as false.  They can't take the out they do when questioned about Islam; Mormonism didn't convert by conquest.  Framing the question more pleasantly ("I don't understand how...." rather than "Bet you can't explain...") could get you more a more considered response and a more charitable hearing once you try to pick their answer apart.

By Richard Hollis (aka Ritchie)

Being a documentary fanboy, I've lately stumbled across a couple of interesting histories on the topic of sex, which have set me thinking about what shape our attitudes to it, so forgive me coming over all Carrie Bradshaw.

Many early European cultures had a decidedly celebratory attitude to sex. Ancient Egyptians practised public fertility rituals which included open masturbation. The homes of ancient Romans were liberally adorned with explicit images of sexual activity and body parts. And this was not pornography, erotic images to enjoy in private; these were lawn ornaments, architectural features, frescos and trinkets to be viewed shamelessly and openly - much to the discomfort of the stuffy Victorians who excavated Pompeii.

Sexuality too was a different concept to the gay/straight/bisexual one we commonly use today. What mattered for the ancient Romans was not who your partner was or who you found attractive, but what role you played. A man was still behaving in a respectable, manly way when he had sex with either a man or a woman, as long as he was the active partner. For men, the only shame to be found in gay sex was that of the passive partner - the man who had taken the 'female' role. The Greeks, meanwhile, openly encouraged gay relationships for their (male) citizens, rationalising that soldiers fighting alongside their lovers would be disinclined to show cowardice, and would fight more fiercely to protect each other.

Many seem to attribute the birth and spread of sexual shame to the rise of Christianity, though I'm not totally convinced it's a fair accusation. I'm no historian, but for my money, social attitudes rarely have such simple and singular causes. But in any case, one of the many oddities that sets Christianity apart from so many of its contemporary religions is the fact that Yahweh apparently fundamentally disapproves of sex and sees nakedness as shameful, rather than entirely natural and (shock, horror) enjoyable! For the Pagan religions, sex was a fundamental, even semi-divine, part of life. For Christianity, it was a barrier, a temptation that led you away from the divine. Early church fathers seemed to only grudgingly permit sex within marriage if people find themselves unable to keep to the nobler state of chastity. In St Paul's words:

I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn. (1 Corinthians 7:8-9, KJV)

Paul's letters to the Corinthians took on an interesting twist when I learned that in Roman times, Corinth, with it's temple to the goddess of beauty and love Aphrodite, was rather notoriously for sexual conduct. 'A Corinthian girl' was an expression for a prostitute, while 'a Corinthian businessman' was a pimp. For me, it makes St Paul's letters sound like an outraged viewer writing in to a television network to complain about the disgraceful scenes of debauchery they've had the nerve to broadcast.

It also surprised me to learn that the church officially opposed not only sex, but marriage too for being a vehicle for sex, until as late as the 12th century. Previously, marriage was not really a religious institution at all, more a personal, business arrangement. But here the church took over the business of marriage and controlled it (and by extension, sex), rather than simply oppose it. Though there remained many prohibitions on sex even within marriage - never on a Sunday or religious holiday, missionary position only (man on top), and never naked. And it was only in the sixteenth century that the marriage oath was made a sacrament that had to be performed by a priest.

Attitudes to sex in the Christian west have remained on the rather prudish end of the scale since. Until today where it seems, if anything, rather commercial. Perhaps it is understandable in societies built on capitalism, where selling is the order of the day. After all, nothing sells like sex, and a sexually enticing advertisement cannot help being instinctively arresting. But though we are surrounded by the PROMISE of sex, sex itself is still largely conspicuously absent from our public culture. There's hardly a film made these days without a sex scene, and though it seems like film-makers are constantly testing the boundary of how much of the sex act they show, actually graphically showing it is still confined to our top shelves, our private cinemas in seedy districts, our secret 'bedroom stashes' and behind proof-of-age paywalls. Public displays of affection are often viewed as rude to others, and nakedness a thing for which there is 'a time and a place' - neither of which seem to be in the public arena. For all its promoting and selling of sex, our modern society still seems to have far more in common with the Christian mindset of sex as something naughty, than with the pre-Christian cultures who were literally shameless about it.

Now even though we atheists hold no belief in God, we cannot help being products of our culture, and our culture is steeped in Christianity. So where does that leave an atheist drawing their own sexual boundaries? Where once I promised myself I would only ever sleep with the one and only man I would ever fall in love with (oh for those innocent days of youth again), I've since found myself in bed with men mere hours after meeting them. Is that something for which I should be ashamed? Is there anything wrong with being a slut?

Certainly there are health aspects to consider. Then again there are precautions we can take which make sex a relatively safe experience. Accidents, of course, happen even when everyone is being responsible, but that is true of practically any activity. We wouldn't consider cooking a meal shameful just because someone might have an accident.

Perhaps I shouldn't have come at this from a religious angle. Perhaps our notions of sex come as much from the 'one true love' fantasies of Disney and fairy stories? But in any case, where do you, as an atheist (or not...?) draw your own sexual boundaries? Are you comfortable with your naked body? Can you look at yourself naked in a mirror without the urge to cover up? Who are you comfortable being naked around? Do you kiss your partner in public? Do you mind when others do? How long do you like to know someone before you have sex with them? And what would you think of someone who would do it in half the time? Share your thoughts.

By Richard Hollis (aka Ritchie)

Just over two years ago, DaylightAtheism featured an essay discussing vegetarianism - though coming at it largely as an environmental issue. Seeing as so many faces on here seem new, I thought I'd tackle it again and hit the moral question head-on: can we justify eating meat?

Many religions include restrictions on consuming meat, from total abstention to restrictions on eating certain animals, considered either sacred or unclean. Even the Christian Bible contains a passage prohibiting eating shellfish (Leviticus 11:10-12), though I think the number of Christians who observe this is small.

Nevertheless, in the west, religion has often been used to justify eating meat. Did God not put animals on Earth for our convenience? Are we humans not specially created by God in his image? Do we not to hold dominion over animals?

Hopefully we atheists can see this for the arrogant nonsense it is. We humans were not specifically created at all. We are animals ourselves; descended from the same ancestors as every animal alive today. Animals are, albeit distantly, our cousins. That is not to say that there is nothing that sets we humans apart. Every species is unique, and it seems humans have achieved heights of awareness, intelligence and civilisation unmatched on Earth. But does this difference justify killing animals to eat?

Certainly it is important to get all the nutrients to keep ourselves healthy, but in an age and society where our supermarkets are kept stocked with food from all round the world, sustaining a meat-free diet which includes everything we need to stay optimally healthy is easy. The myth that a vegetarian diet is often lacking in protein – or any other dietary necessity - is just that, as millions of perfectly healthy vegetarians across the world can attest to.

In fact, insisting that humans are, by nature, meat-eaters very quickly sounds remarkably like something a Creationist might come out with. 'Humans were designed to eat meat' might be changed to 'Humans have evolved to eat meat', but the argument is essentially the same. We cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. The fact that humans can eat meat says nothing at all about whether they should. Yes, we can eat meat, but we can also survive perfectly well without it. Our ability to eat meat carries no moral obligation to do so.

Nor can meat-eating be sufficiently defended by insisting that we would be overrun with animals in a world of vegetarians. Battery farms have hugely inflated the numbers of animals kept as livestock over the past century to meet the demand for meat, and if that demand was reduced, the numbers of animals kept for meat would inevitably follow.

Meat is, of course, tasty. That I won’t deny. When I ate meat, I loved it. But how much weight does that carry morally? I’m sure it’s nice to be pampered and have your every whim attended to by your own personal slave, but I don’t think that justifies the institution. Exploiting others may bring material rewards, but surely a moral person will be troubled by the fact that others have paid a dear price for their convenience.

Note that I am not arguing that animals should enjoy the same rights as a human being. I am not saying the life of an animal is more, or equally, valuable than the life of a human being. Faced with an angry bear, I would indeed shoot it. But this is simply not the situation we face with the meat industry. We are not locked into a them-or-us conflict. The question is whether the life of an animal is worth more than whatever preferential pleasure we might get from eating them as opposed to a vegetarian meal.

Atheists are, by definition, not united by any common belief, merely by a common lack of belief in something specific. However, most atheists I know claim to follow a broadly humanitarian code of ethics – seek to maximise happiness and minimise suffering. But why should only human happiness or suffering be taken into consideration? Anyone who has ever owned a pet will, I am sure, agree that their animal could suffer and feel a range of emotions. Is the pain a pig feels less important than the pain a human feels?

Not that I think meat-eaters are indifferent to animal suffering. I’m sure I don’t know a single person who would happily watch anything suffer for fun, and many of my meat-eating friends purposefully seek out products of ‘free range’ animals, wanting their meat to have had as pleasant a life as possible. But surely this is a good argument for eating our pets - something many meat-eaters would, I suspect, find repulsive? And even then, is a painless killer blow justified? Is murder acceptable if it is done painlessly? And if not, why is the killing of an animal different?

In our mainstream society, vegetarians tend to get a rather bad reputation. All too often they are portrayed as irrational and outraged militants, and their opinions mocked rather than honestly addressed. In that, they share something in common with atheists. But atheists, I hope, know what it is like to swim against the tide of popular opinion and think for themselves. We know what it is like to take a stand and hold to our convictions against a herd mentality.

And so I ask, can we justify eating meat?

I haven't written a post on morality in a while, and this one's a little different than past entries. This is an issue where I haven't made up my mind, and I'm hoping that people's comments can illuminate the issues and help me reach a final decision.

Through the economic chaos of the past two years, I have to admit I've been more fortunate than a lot of Americans. I have a high-yield savings account with ING Direct - that is to say, I had one. I still have the account, but since the subprime market crash and economic depression, the interest rate has dropped so low that it's scarcely worth bothering with. I'd have transferred the money elsewhere, but all the other high-yield savings accounts have done the same. Even the rates on CDs are pathetically low, to the point where I think I'd be better off not buying one because there's a reasonable chance of the economy recovering and interest rates rising again before they mature.

Money should work for its owner, and the money in my savings account wasn't doing that, so I decided to take it elsewhere. Since my 401(k) has done fairly well through the downturn, it was a natural step to put some of this money into the market as well. I'm not confident of my own ability as a trader, and I don't believe that anyone can consistently beat the market, since that would imply an ability to predict the future. (Granted, I could be wrong - there's an ongoing million-dollar wager between Warren Buffett and a group of hedge fund managers over this question.) So I decided to do the next best thing and invest in an index fund, a basket of stocks chosen to track the performance of a major market index. In my case, I went with the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, which tracks the S&P 500. The fees are minimal, since there's very little active management required.

However, it wasn't long before I had an unsettling realization. The fund that I invested in includes stock in oil companies like Exxon Mobil, whose activities I consider unethical and destructive to the planet, financial companies like Goldman Sachs which promote the ever-greater accumulation of wealth at the very top, and defense companies like Lockheed Martin, which have profited massively from America's swollen defense budget and sprawling military-industrial complex. Am I doing wrong by investing in a fund that includes these companies?

I haven't fully made up my mind about this, and I'm open to persuasion. However, I see one consideration to counterbalance the obvious argument against: Buying or selling stock is different from boycotting the company, since it doesn't directly either aid or impede that company's ability to operate.

In fact, buying stock in a company whose actions I disagree with is arguably a good thing. I see two main reasons for thinking this: First, if I buy a company's stock, I become one of its owners, and I gain a voice in how it operates. (Even if it's only a small voice - a few shares of stock out of millions.) It makes me more influential, not less, when I exert pressure on that company to cease environmentally destructive practices, clean up its carbon emissions, respect the rights of local people, or behave in more socially responsible ways.

Second, if the stock pays dividends, I gain a share of that company's profits, which I can redirect to better ends. Rather than further enriching the already wealthy, I can donate it to advocacy groups, reinvest it in needy communities, or otherwise use it for good. That said, I have to acknowledge that owning a dividend-paying stock would also give me an incentive to do the wrong thing: to encourage the company I own to do whatever makes the most profit, rather than what's the most ethical.

Despite that, does investing in a company also make me complicit in the harm they do? An honest answer surely would have to be yes. Granted, the degree of complicity is small, but the degree of influence it gives me is also small. Which one outweighs the other?

Other posts in this series:

• On the Morality Of...