(Author's Note: The following review was solicited and is written in accordance with this site's policy for such reviews.)

Summary: A libertarian political tract disguised as a work of science.

Michael Shermer's The Mind of the Market concerns "evolutionary economics" - the way that evolutionary forces have shaped human instincts about trading, value and exchange, and how those tendencies have played out in creating the variety of economic systems in the world today. There's enough material on these topics for a good book. Unfortunately, Shermer didn't stop with presenting the science. Instead, he took a large step beyond it and presumed to make conclusions about which is the best economic system. Unsurprisingly, those conclusions lined up with the political views he holds, which appear to be an extreme form of libertarianism. (Even Timothy Sandefur, himself a libertarian, found Shermer's arguments unconvincing and lacking in scientific rigor.) I found it hard to believe that this was the same Michael Shermer who once wrote a biting expose of Ayn Rand titled "The Unlikeliest Cult". Evidently, he retains considerable sympathy for her ideas.

In this review, I'm not going to focus on the scientific studies Shermer discusses. The book covers topics like the evolutionary roots of fairness and reciprocity in primates, the parts of the brain involved in economic reasoning, and some common fallacies in human decision-making. For people who've read books like Blink or Stumbling on Happiness, most of this will not be new. At least in my eyes, Shermer's condescending political lectures drowned out the relatively uncontroversial scientific material. This review will likewise focus on those chapters.

The political moralizing begins in chapter 2, titled "Our Folk Economics". The analogy is to "folk science" - incorrect and superstitious ways of interpreting the world that result from our brains only being wired to comprehend the types of phenomena we encounter every day. Human beings originally lived in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, where food and goods were equally shared out of survival necessity, and where the accumulation of individual wealth was an outrage against the group. Shermer claims that this psychology survives today, and that it is for this reason and this reason only that people believe in redistributive taxation. If we could get past this primitive mentality, he says, we would understand that there is no injustice in having a few people be vastly wealthier than the majority, no matter how large the wealth gap is or how abject the poverty of the majority is.

As part of his argument, Shermer does something that many libertarian works do: he considers the potential worst-case scenarios of socialist policies, pronounces them undesirable and thereby asserts he has settled the issue - but he never attempts to examine the potential worst-case scenarios of the libertarian position.

For example, consider universal health care. Shermer expresses concern that this policy would lead to waste, inefficiency, and cost overruns. I quite agree - these are things that can go wrong with government-provided universal health insurance. Now, let's consider the alternative: what can go wrong with private health insurance? I can think of one obvious negative consequence: people die painfully from treatable conditions because they cannot afford medical care. This seems like an obvious followup point, but Shermer ignores it. In a similar passage, he discusses the phenomenon of confirmation bias as it applies to members of both American political parties - again, a serious and legitimate issue, I agree - but never shows any acknowledgment that this is a problem which might apply to him as well.

Shermer also discusses the creative power of free markets and their role in fostering efficiency and innovation. This is true, as far as it goes, but he then goes on to claim that fewer restrictions on markets are always better. He also argues that markets' ability to create innovation without top-down regulation is comparable to the way evolution creates novelty through random changes in individuals. As a consequence, he states explicitly that people who advocate any sort of regulation or restriction on markets - laws against collusion and monopoly, import duties and tariffs, even patent protections - are analogous to evolution deniers. (I hope you can see why this book raised my hackles.)

I'm not denying the power of markets. Directed to the right ends, they are potent tools for generating wealth and fostering innovation. They fully deserve the credit for the millionfold rise in the number of goods and services available to us as compared to what is available to hunter-gatherer tribes. But they are not panaceas to solve every problem, nor are they sources of omnipotent wisdom whose choices are always the best ones.

Shermer's analogy between markets and evolution is an excellent one in more ways than he realizes. Both processes emerge in a bottom-up fashion from the interaction of many local decisions; both can produce superbly adapted results directed toward their given ends; but both processes also tend to be short-sighted, concerned more with immediate gain than with long-term sustainability, which can lead to dead-ends in design space and catastrophe when the environment abruptly changes, and in both processes, the winners prosper while the losers suffer disastrous consequences. Contra Shermer, the reason many people advocate legal controls on markets is not because we do not understand their similarity to evolution, but because we understand it all too well.

Today I'm inaugurating a new series on Daylight Atheism, Strange and Curious Sects. The follies and fallacies of larger, mainstream religions are well known; this series will examine some of the smaller and lesser-known splinter groups, cults, and sects, both past and present, that are part of the vast diversity of religions imagined by human beings. By examining these frequently unique and bizarre belief systems, I find, we stand to gain a clearer perspective on various aspects of the larger and more influential faiths.

This installment will focus on the strange sect of John Frum. This religion, indigenous to the remote South Pacific island of Tanna, is one of the "cargo cults". Cargo cult religions sprang up across the Pacific during World War II, when thousands of American troops set up bases and airstrips on remote islands that previously had little or no external contact. The indigenous people of these islands, who lived in simple subsistence cultures, were amazed by the strange visitors and the technologies and gifts they brought: steel tools, canned food and chocolate bars, cigarettes, radios, motorcycles, airplanes, firearms, and many more novelties unlike anything in their experience. But when the war ended and the troops left, they took their cargo with them. The islanders, in many societies, responded by forming religions that mimic the American installations - down to carving "airstrips" out of the jungle, complete with bamboo control towers and mock planes made of straw - hoping to summon the strange visitors and their wonderful cargo back by sympathetic magic. It sounds almost too strange to be true, but the cargo cults have been widely studied and reported on. With time, many of them have faded; but on Tanna, the cult of John Frum survives to this day.

In the morning heat on a tropical island halfway across the world from the United States, several dark-skinned men — clad in what look to be U.S. Army uniforms — appear on a mound overlooking a bamboo-hut village. One reverently carries Old Glory, precisely folded to reveal only the stars. On the command of a bearded "drill sergeant," the flag is raised on a pole hacked from a tall tree trunk. As the huge banner billows in the wind, hundreds of watching villagers clap and cheer.

...Some 40 barefoot "G.I.'s" suddenly emerge from behind the huts to more cheering, marching in perfect step and ranks of two past Chief Isaac. They tote bamboo "rifles" on their shoulders, the scarlet tips sharpened to represent bloody bayonets, and sport the letters "USA," painted in red on their bare chests and backs.

..."John promised he'll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him," a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. "Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things."

John Frum's cult is a recognizable microcosm of larger religions, right down to the miracles:

...Jessel tells me that he is the brother-in-law of one of the cult's most important leaders, Prophet Fred — who, he adds proudly, "raised his wife from the dead two weeks ago."

as well as the relevatory visions and belief in answered prayer:

"Have you ever seen him?"

"Yes, John comes very often from Yasur [the local volcano] to advise me, or I go there to speak with John."

"What does he look like?"

"An American!"

and even the dissension and factioning into sects:

When I mention Prophet Fred, anger flares in Chief Isaac's eyes. "He's a devil," he snarls. "I won't talk about him."

...two years ago, Prophet Fred's rivalry with Chief Isaac exploded. More than 400 young men from the competing camps clashed with axes, bows and arrows and slingshots, burning down a thatched church and several houses. Twenty-five men were seriously injured.

When the reporter raises the obvious point that, several decades after the war, John Frum and his cargo have not made their promised return, the chief has an unanswerable reply:

"John promised you much cargo more than 60 years ago, and none has come," I point out. "So why do you keep faith with him? Why do you still believe in him?"

Chief Isaac shoots me an amused look. "You Christians have been waiting 2,000 years for Jesus to return to earth," he says, "and you haven't given up hope."

So who is this mysterious American, John Frum? Why did he, out of all the soldiers, inspire the natives' reverence? Was he a commander of some renown who particularly impressed them? The answer, it turns out, may be more complicated.

In the early 20th century, Scotch Presbyterian missionaries came to Tanna and took over by force, establishing their own government and banning traditional cultural practices such as dancing and the drinking of the intoxicant kava. They also forbade work or play on Sundays and began the forcible conversion of the natives to Christianity. For several decades the islanders struggled under the burden of colonial rule.

Then, in the 1930s, John Frum first appeared. According to the islanders' traditions, he told them he had come to liberate them from their oppressive foreign rulers. Fired to devotion by their strange messiah, the people of Tanna joined the new religion en masse, revolting against the colonialists and throwing their missionary-provided clothing and goods into the sea. The following year, 1941, saw the arrival of American troops in the Pacific theater. Their presence provided a measure of stability, as well as the aforementioned cargo, and it seems to be then that John Frum began to be specifically identified as an American.

It's uncertain whether John Frum was a real person, or even whether he was based on a real person. No American soldier by that name is known, and while the islanders call him an American and a white man, they also speak of him as a "spirit" or use other mystical terms. One intriguing theory is that "frum" is the pronunciation of "broom" in the local pidgin, making "John Broom" the one who would "sweep" the hated colonial rulers off the island. An alternative theory holds that his name is a mispronunciation of "John from (America)". But whether he was person or myth, the islanders still fervently believe in him. Every year they celebrate February 15 as John Frum Day, which they believe will be the date of his promised return.

Each Friday afternoon, hundreds of believers stream across the ash plain below Yasur, coming to Lamaraka from villages all over Tanna. After the sun goes down and the men have drunk kava, the congregation gathers in and around an open hut on the ceremonial ground. As light from kerosene lamps flickers across their faces, they strum guitars and homemade ukuleles, singing hymns of John Frum's prophecies and the struggles of the cult's martyrs. Many carry the same plea: "We're waiting in our village for you, John. When are you coming with all the cargo you promised us?"

In many respects, John Frum's cult bears a striking similarity to mythicist theories about what the origin of Christianity would have looked like: a supernatural messiah, invented to serve the needs of an oppressed group of humans, who gradually acquired the characteristics of a recently living human being. The messiah is given a symbolic name (Jesus, or Yeshua, is Aramaic for "Yahweh saves"), works miracles among the people, then disappears after promising to return in the near future to establish an earthly kingdom.

And, in contradiction to those Christian apologists who claim that historians of the time would have investigated and refuted the cult's claims if they were not true: in 1943, the U.S. government sent the USS Echo and its commander, Maj. Samuel Patten, back to the island to tell the people that John Frum had no connection to them. This apparently had no effect on the growth of the cult. The obvious ridiculousness of the cargo-cult belief gives us confidence that this particular faith is not true, but aside from the intrusion of a far more technologically advanced culture which altered things somewhat, the cult of John Frum is an insight into how some major modern religions might have gotten a similar start.

Last month, in "An Impoverished Infinity", I wrote about the strange limitations that many Christian believers impose on God. These theists believe that God was not wise or powerful enough to create a world with intelligent beings that did not also include earthquakes, diseases and other disasters - as if the infinite space of possible worlds was somehow foreclosed.

The discussion in the comments thread centered largely around the issue of free will, which is the most common example of these theological limitations. Several theists showed up to argue that God could have created human beings such that we never chose to sin, but believe that he could only have done so by making us into automata who lack meaningful freedom.

I believe this argument is wrong, and I'll explain why. As I wrote some time ago, what it means to have free will is that you can choose from the options available to you in accordance with your desires. The "automata" claim overlooks the fact that there are three things which free will does not require.

First, free will does not require infinite choice, where every imaginable course of action is a realistic possibility. Even if the laws of nature and logic restrict our options to a limited set, we can still choose freely from among the members of that set. Free will is not a total absence of constraint, but rather the ability to select among the options that are available.

Free will also does not require a mental blank slate, where every possible course of action seems equally attractive and compelling. On the contrary, a free person can have dispositions, desires and character traits that incline them to choose a certain way in a given situation. This must be so, for a person who had no desires or inclinations would never act at all. Having a certain set of unchosen desires is a precondition for having a will in the first place. Just as with the previous point, we are still free because we can still choose among the options open to us. What makes a person unfree is not acting in accordance with their desires, but being compelled to act against their desires.

Finally, free will does not require randomness. Granted, a free person can choose to inject a kind of "radical choice" into their decision-making, permitting their decisions to be controlled by some external source of random input - whether it be a coin-flip or quantum noise in the synapses of the brain. But a random component is not required for an act to be free. Even a decision that involves no quality of randomness, one that is entirely determined by the facts and reasons available to the decision-maker, can be a free choice.

After all, wouldn't the freest possible agent be one who is perfectly responsive to reason, who is perfectly aware of all the facts relevant to any decision, and who decides on that basis? Such a person would always make the decisions that were best for them without ever needing to choose randomly, and surely that is the purest and most desirable form of free will. Anything less would be inferior, because being unaware of facts relevant to our choices diminishes, not increases, our freedom; it causes us to overlook possibilities we would otherwise have considered.

All three of these points should be uncontroversial, even among theists. To deny either of the first two is to deny that humans have free will, because obviously we do have built-in inclinations and do not have infinite choice. To deny the third, meanwhile, is to deny that God has free will; or at the very least, it is to suggest that our free will is more perfect than his, because we are blessed with ignorance and he, presumably, is not. Since I doubt that most theists would want to make either of those claims, I figure they would agree with me.

Now see where these conclusions lead. Free will does not require unlimited choice, absence of desire, or randomness. A person whose choices are constrained by physical law and their own desires, and who chooses in accordance with those desires and with the relevant facts, still can be and is free in a way that is genuine, significant, and worth wanting. (In fact, each of us is such a person.)

Given all this, why couldn't an omnipotent deity have done things differently? Such a being could have created a world where evil was a literal impossibility, where physical law is constituted by God's will and it is not possible to act in contravention to that will. Or God could have created a world in which evil acts were physically possible, but in which human psychology would be different than it actually is, such that we only desire to choose the good. To truly rule out evil in this world, our decisions would also have to be non-random, so that chance would not occasionally intervene and cause us to do evil despite our desires. In either of these worlds, human beings would truly be morally perfect.

None of these options, as we've seen, would turn humans into puppets or automata. We would still be truly and legitimately free. But in these worlds, there would be no sin or wrongdoing at all, and thus no evil, no suffering, no need to create an afterlife of torture or send earthly catastrophes as punishment. Why wouldn't God, if he exists, have created a world like this? It would have been superior to our own in every way.

The force of this argument should be undeniable. In fact, in worldviews like the Christian one, God conferred on human beings a positive attraction to sin - a set of psychological inclinations that frequently bias our decisions toward disobedience. If that isn't seen as taking away our free will, why couldn't he have done the opposite and instead given human beings an equally strong set of inclinations toward obedience? In short, instead of original sin, why not original virtue? If God hates sin so much, why would he create a world that would all but ensure the maximum amount of it?

A rational deity would not demand moral perfection unless he created beings capable of supplying it. To say otherwise contradicts a basic point of morality: that you cannot blame someone for not doing what they are not capable of doing. This is why, for example, we don't hold mentally ill people criminally responsible. We understand that their capacity to tell right from wrong is impaired, and that it wouldn't be just to treat them as we treat people who possess that capacity. But God, if we believe the Christian logic, rejects this reasoning - he created human beings imperfect and then punishes them harshly for their imperfection. If, as the Bible says, God is "not willing that any should perish", then I am unable to see why he would not have created a world where that will could be realized.

One of the most common tenets of Christian faith, believed by denominations across the spectrum, is that Jesus Christ taught and displayed some kind of unique, superlative moral virtue, unmatched by any other individual from myth or history. I've also heard this belief advanced as a counter to the argument from religious confusion, claiming that we should consider Christianity to stand out from all other religions because of the obvious superiority of its founder's moral teachings.

I do grant that the teachings attributed to Jesus in the New Testament are morally superior to the rules of the Old Testament. This is not, in and of itself, high praise; it's rather like saying that someone is nicer than Stalin. And, if you're inclined to believe the dogma of the Trinity, it raises the obvious point that it was Jesus who instituted those cruel rules in the first place. But leave that aside for now.

Yes, some of the teachings attributed to Jesus are superb, even beautiful. There's no doubt that they're advancements over what came before. However, we have advanced further. In the two thousand or so years since the gospels were written, we've made considerable moral progress, and many beliefs which were widely held in Jesus' day we now recognize to be gravely immoral. The New Testament, being a product of its times, attributes many of those same beliefs to its founder. Far from being an unmatched moral exemplar, Jesus (if he was a real person) was actually far behind where many of us are today in terms of moral development. His character shows no evidence of unique or unmatchable virtue. Consider some of the following deficiencies:

Slavery. Not only does Jesus not condemn slavery, he speaks favorably of it, comparing God to a slaveowner who beats his slaves for not obeying:

"And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes."

—Luke 12:47

Unless one is a moral relativist, a label most Christians would fiercely deny, the moral conclusion must be that if slavery was ever wrong, it was always wrong. That being the case, we would expect a divine being not bound by the culture and prejudices of the time of his incarnation to have condemned it unequivocally. Instead, he speaks of it and works it into his teachings as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Racism and favoritism. In one incident from the synoptic gospels, a Gentile woman comes to Jesus and begs him to heal her sick daughter. At first he ignores her. When she persists, he says, "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matthew 15:24), and, "It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs" (15:26). He does eventually heal the woman's daughter, but only after she submits to his degrading analogy and agrees that she is like a dog. Shouldn't the Son of God treat all human beings as equals?

Breaking up families. Jesus' teaching that "I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother" (Matthew 10:35) could be interpreted as a simple statement that his new, exclusivist religion will cause argument and dissension. But the next passage is not so easily explained away:

"He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."

—Matthew 10:37

and even more bluntly:

"If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."

—Luke 14:26

This cannot be sugarcoated. It's the classic cult teaching that, to be a member of the cult, you must forsake all external attachments and love and trust in the cult leader above even your own friends and family members. This is an evil teaching which has been exploited to brainwash people throughout history, and it is not worthy of inclusion in a religion based on love.

Sexist treatment of women. Granted, the gospels, as opposed to the rest of the New Testament, contains relatively few explicitly sexist teachings. (There are exceptions: such as when Jesus teaches that men can divorce their wives for adultery, while apparently making no similar exception for women, or when the resurrected Jesus tells Mary Magdalene to "touch me not", but allows Thomas to literally put a finger into the nail holes in his hands.)

However, what's notable is what Jesus does not say. Although the gospels have him nullify some of the Old Testament rules, such as the provisions about ritual hand-washing or not working on the Sabbath, he never abrogates cruel laws such as the one mandating that rape victims marry their rapists (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), or the one that values women's lives as worth half as much as men's (Leviticus 27:3-7). He does not even contradict the rampant sexism elsewhere in the New Testament, including many of the letters of Paul. Like slavery, the devaluation of women is another cultural prejudice about which Jesus has nothing to say. Just imagine how much suffering and misogyny could have been prevented with one single, unambiguous statement that women deserve to be the equals of men in all things!

Hell. Bertrand Russell once said that Jesus' most serious moral flaw was that he believed in Hell. On this point, I'm in complete agreement. For all its cruelties, the Old Testament never envisioned further torment in the afterlife. It was Jesus who introduced that innovation to Western religions.

As Robert Ingersoll eloquently put it:

It was reserved for the New Testament to make known the frightful doctrine of eternal pain. It was the teacher of universal benevolence who rent the veil between time and eternity, and fixed the horrified gaze of man on the lurid gulfs of hell. Within the breast of non-resistance was coiled the worm that never dies.

If this seems like an exaggeration, consider some of the more bloodcurdling gospel verses on the subject. In one of the most infamous teachings of the New Testament, Jesus tells us that we should be afraid of God because he has the power to send us there:

"But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him."

—Luke 12:5

Hell is such a terrible place, in fact, that we should mutilate ourselves if necessary to avoid it - a teaching which scarcely seems less gruesome if it's meant metaphorically.

"And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell."

—Matthew 5:29

But it gets worse than that. Jesus also teaches that Hell is not just a place of punishment for the handful of incorrigible sinners, but is in fact the destination of most of humankind:

"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."

—Matthew 7:13-14

And in a final sadistic twist, Jesus explains that he often speaks in parables because many people are predestined to damnation, and so he deliberately seeks to confuse them so they won't understand and repent:

"And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them."

—Mark 4:11-12

In fact, Jesus says, God supernaturally prevents people from understanding so that they will remain damned:

"He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them."

—John 12:40

Not only are these teachings wrong, they are obviously wrong. There is no unapproachably superior morality to be found in the teachings or the character of Jesus - merely another moral philosophy of a primitive era, which, like all past moral systems, was advanced over its predecessors in some ways and deficient in others.

In Christian theology, God is presented as the omnipotent creator, able to bring about literally any world it is possible to imagine. His power has no limits, he never suffers from weakness or fatigue, and he possesses the omniscient knowledge necessary to shape the world according to his overarching plan.

Or so Christian apologists say, anyway. Yet when we atheists challenge them with the problem of evil, asking why a benevolent creator would bring about a world where disease and disaster wreak havoc on the innocent, these same apologists often fall back on a very strange defense. They insist that this is the best world God could possibly have created, that natural evil is a regrettable necessity, and that not even infinite power could have made a world where conscious beings like us could exist without also including these undesirable elements.

In the past few weeks, I've had two Christian correspondents make the same argument to me in e-mail. First, one visitor said this:

Take earthquakes, for example. Earthquakes are almost exclusively caused as a result of plate tectonics. Plates move, grind, slip - and the earth shakes as a result. The only alternative is to have a fixed, unmoving crust - plates that cannot move. But scientists have proven that plate tectonics are, in essence, a "necessary evil." Without the movement of the plates, life on earth as we know it could not exist. Therefore, in order to have life, one must accept plate tectonics - and the earthquakes that come with it.

In another example, I asked a Christian correspondent if he believes God could have avoided the need to create Hell by creating human beings who desired above all else to worship God as he requires. My correspondent's response: "There are 5 billion or so examples on this planet that show that what you propose is not possible."

Though neither of my correspondents seemed to notice, their argument effectively demotes God from omnipotence. What they're effectively saying is that God is not powerful enough, or wise enough, to create the world as other than it is. Not even an infinitely powerful, infinitely intelligent deity could have engineered a universe with different natural laws or conditions than ours, so as to permit self-aware living beings but exclude earthquakes caused by plate tectonics. This amounts to a claim that it is logically necessary that earthquakes accompany life, in the same way it is logically necessary that triangles have 180 degrees.

Similarly, the second argument amounts to a claim that it is logically impossible for human beings to be any different than we are. Not even God could have created us with different dispositions, different characters, different natures. Human beings as we are, with all our faults and contingent pecularities - our xenophobia, our emotional turmoil, our impulses to lust and violence, our often faulty grasp of cause and effect - are the only sentient creatures that exist anywhere in all the limitless space of possibility. Truly, the infinity of possible worlds must be an impoverished infinity indeed in the theist mind.

Even famous Christian apologists are willing to put sweeping limitations on God's power when theologically convenient. C.S. Lewis did the same thing in The Problem of Pain, claiming that this world is the only one God had the power to create, that he could not have made it any different, and that even God could not think of a way to allow life and free will without also allowing random disaster and catastrophe:

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself...

...With every advance in our thought the unity of the creative act, and the impossibility of tinkering with the creation as though this or that element of it could have been removed, will become more apparent.

For people who believe in God, these theists don't give him much credit. They presume that God has no more imagination or knowledge than they, and that since they can't think of any world better than our own, then he couldn't either. Like Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire's famous satire Candide, they blithely assume that this must be the best of all possible worlds, not subject to improvement in any way.

Admittedly this conclusion, absurd though it is, is a rational conclusion from their own strained premises. Since Christians start with the assumption that God is all-powerful and good, they logically infer that he would not have created anything less than the best world possible. But this conclusion runs smack into the manifest imperfection of the actual world.

By contrast, atheists who are not bound by theological preconceptions can readily imagine ways in which an omnipotent being could have crafted better worlds than our own. (I listed just a few possibilities last March in "Improving on God's Handiwork"). This may relate to the common theme of fundamentalists fearing sci-fi and fantasy writing - it may well be that the exercise of imagining worlds different from ours is a dangerous path for these believers' tightly circumscribed imaginations to start down.

(Author's Note: The following review was solicited and is written in accordance with this site's policy for such reviews.)

Summary: Not "essential" as its title claims, but a usefully broad sampling of atheist thought for the reader who wishes to be better versed in the voices of nonbelief.

The Portable Atheist, edited by Christopher Hitchens, is intended to serve as an introductory guide and perhaps an armamentarium for atheists. The book contains a wide variety of pieces, essays and poems - some original to this collection, most not - written by renowned freethinkers both modern and historical, all of them presenting the case for a godless cosmos in some fashion or another. Hitchens contributes a lengthy introduction, written with his usual brash flair, plus some brief remarks at the beginning of each chapter introducing us to the author featured therein. All in all, there are 47 different pieces, covering the history of dissenting thought from ancient writers like Lucretius, Spinoza and Hume to modern authors such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Of course, a writer of Hitchens' stature and contacts was able to secure the requisite permissions; his participation is very likely what made the book possible.

First, the good. One thing that made me especially happy was that, in addition to the prose, the book contained a fair number of freethought poems - some of which were written by authors whose atheist sympathies I had never known about. There's material in here to fill out at least a few more of my Poetry Sundays, and it's a wonderful and much-appreciated reminder that nonbelief can promote a flourishing art and culture, rather than just expressing itself in philosophical polemics.

In prose, there were many superb choices as well. To my mind, the standout pieces were:

• a firecracker of an essay by George Eliot (about which more later);
• a story of David Hume's last moments, written by a religious friend who hoped to see a deathbed conversion from the famous philosopher and went away disappointed;
• an autobiographical piece by the great John Stuart Mill explaining how his father raised him as a nonbeliever;
• a stinging, hilarious piece by Bertrand Russell satirizing the absurd beliefs of his day and of the past;
• an excerpt from Farewell to God, the book written by Charles Templeton, Billy Graham's one-time preaching partner, explaining how he became an agnostic;
• a lecture by Ian McEwan, "End of the World Blues", humorously and informatively lacerating the holders of apocalypse delusions through history;
• and a powerful essay by Salman Rushdie, taking the form of an open letter to the recently-born six billionth human being, stressing the necessity of independent, critical thought and the danger the human species faces from dogma.

All of these are well worth reading, and certainly have the potential to broaden any nonbeliever's mind and give rise to a solid, literate, well-grounded atheism.

Now, the bad. Although for the most part I have no objection to Hitchens' choices, there are a few things I think could have been improved upon.

First - and to my mind the single most glaring omission - there's nothing in this book by Robert Ingersoll! How could any compendium of atheist thought through the ages not include the nineteenth century's most famous and eloquent freethinker? Ingersoll was a prolific author and composed many pieces that would have been eminently suitable to include here, ranging in tone from cutting polemics to laugh-out-loud satirical discourses. He drew huge crowds everywhere he went, he was a friend of the famous and the powerful, and he was undoubtedly the driving force behind America's "golden age" of freethought. I can only imagine that he was overlooked somehow; I hope a future edition, if there is one, will remedy this deficit.

Second: This book could have used more pieces by female authors. Out of forty-seven chapters, only four feature women: a cutting refutation of an evangelical author by George Eliot, a discourse on the philosophy of atheism by Emma Goldman, an essay on non-religious morality by Elizabeth Anderson, and a personal account of deconversion, original to this book, contributed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

All four are excellent choices - in particular, Eliot's razor-sharp dissection of the fallacies of a militant evangelical preacher would have made her right at home on Pharyngula or any of the other well-known blogs of today staffed by no-nonsense atheists, and in my mind was one of the highlights of the book. (The preacher's arguments themselves were almost identical to the ones we encounter all the time today from Christian apologists - it's sad to see how little has changed, but good to know that there have always been freethinkers ready to point up the flaws in orthodoxy.) And Hirsi Ali's account of her deconversion, though brief, was incredibly moving and was a perfect way to close out the book.

Still, there are many more female freethinkers who could have been featured here to offset this gross gender imbalance. How about historical authors such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (like a selection from her "Woman's Bible"), Ernestine Rose, Margaret Sanger, or Madalyn Murray O'Hair? On the modern side, how about Susan Jacoby, Anne Laurie Gaylor, Taslima Nasrin, or Julia Sweeney?

Third: A few of the pieces here could have stood to be edited or removed altogether. The one that comes most prominently to mind is an excerpt from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. Admittedly, it does contain some suggestive arguments, but Hobbes strongly claimed to be a believer and we have no definite evidence to the contrary. The book could have stood to go without this one.

Also, by far the longest piece was an excerpt from Ibn Warraq's The Koran. The piece itself was fine, and it's a valuable thing that Hitchens prominently featured the writings of some ex-Muslims as well as nonbelievers coming from more Christian societies. However, much of this piece concentrated on critiquing the Old and New Testaments (to undercut the basis of Islamic belief), which made it seem somewhat out of place. It would have been better edited down to focus on the parts dealing with Islam, which many readers may be less familiar with.

In sum, this book was an imperfect but well-conceived and useful guide to the many voices of nonbelief throughout history. It's not essential reading for an atheist, if only because the arguments made by theists have changed little in hundreds of years, and so our replies haven't needed to change either. Any well-informed nonbeliever will already know how to deal with the religious fallacies challenged and criticized in this book. But it is a welcome introduction to some of history's most famous nonbelievers, including some who deserve to be better known. I look forward to seeing the few omissions in selection repaired in a revised edition (or maybe "The Portable Atheist, volume 2")?

In today's post on atheist morality, I'll consider the permissibility of two types of human cloning, therapeutic and reproductive. Both types involve implanting a person's genes into an egg cell and stimulating it to grow. If the resulting embryo is allowed to grow to maturity and be born as a person, that is reproductive cloning; if the embryo is used to harvest stem cells and destroyed before it can grow into anything like a conscious being, that is therapeutic cloning.

I see no intrinsic problem with reproductive cloning. The fear that it would somehow detract from our individuality is baseless. Human beings are far more than just genes - at best, they can give us dispositions or tendencies to act in certain ways. The personality, the essence of a human comes from the countless interactions between genes and environment during development, which can never be recreated perfectly. An individual with the same genes as you will most certainly not be a carbon copy of you. (I note that there already are natural clones - they're called identical twins - and even when raised in the same home, they do not turn out to be exact duplicates of each other.)

That said, I see a strong reason to outlaw reproductive cloning: not because it would produce exact copies of human beings, but because so many people erroneously think it would. Grieving parents who've had a child die, for example, might be tempted to use cloning in an attempt to recreate the deceased person. This is not how cloning works, and anyone who attempts to use it for this purpose is bound to be disappointed. It would only create more misery in the long run - both for the parents who would inevitably have their hopes dashed, and especially for the cloned individual, who'd be subject to an impossible and autonomy-defying set of expectations. As part of respecting the right of all individuals to choose their own course in life, we should forbear from using cloning for this purpose. There is no problem that reproductive cloning solves that could not also be solved through adoption or artificial insemination.

Therapeutic cloning is a different matter. Assuming it remains infeasible to reprogram a person's own somatic cells to yield stem cells that can be used to treat injury or disease, I see no fundamental problem with creating embryos to extract stem cells for this purpose. Atheists, who do not believe in imaginary supernatural appendages called souls that attach to fertilized eggs, should know that a microscopic embryo with no capacity for thought or feeling does not have the same moral status as a fully grown human being. It has, at best, a potential for individual life, but it is not a human being just as a seed is not a flower. When weighed against the rights of an actual human being who is conscious and is suffering, there should be no comparison.

This conclusion highlights what I see as an important point in the moral system of universal utilitarianism: merely potential people, people who do not yet exist, can exert no moral claim on us. It must be this way; otherwise, we'd be paralyzed by the conflicting demands of the limitless number of possible people who have yet to come into existence. The potential happiness or suffering of an actual person is something that should be factored into any utilitarian calculus, however, since the intent and likely consequences of our actions in the long run matter at least as much as their actual effects in the short term. Considered in this light, embryos without minds or brains can have no moral claim on us. However, as soon as there is any reasonable ground for believing that an embryo has crossed the threshold to being a human with a functioning brain, then it should be considered a person deserving of all the same rights and protections as anyone else.

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As the holiday season approaches, the partisans of the religious right are ramping up their annual "war on Christmas" rhetoric, which seems to grow more disproportionate with every passing year. The latest example is this absurdly ignorant column, whose author apparently has never heard of separation of church and state (she wonders if the reason government buildings do not display Christian symbols is to punish Christianity for the Inquisition). She seems to think that banning religious endorsements by government is just one short step away from banning Christmas altogether:

Many families spend hundreds of dollars and hundreds more hours making their homes remind their neighbors and passers-by that they celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and are not in the least ashamed of that fact. Will this ultimately be outlawed?

...Don't even try to put [a nativity scene] near the city hall or on any government plot of ground. Currently, such displays can be had on your own lawn but don't count on that trend continuing.

This writer would doubtless benefit from having someone contact her by e-mail and patiently explain the meaning of the First Amendment. However, as it happens, there is one occasion in American history where the celebration of Christmas was banned by law, with stern penalties imposed on any Christian believers who tried to carry on the practice secretly. And, wouldn't you know it, this assault on religious freedom happened in that most anti-God of states, the liberal hotbed of Massachusetts.

Who were the perpetrators of this anti-Christian outrage? Liberal activist judges, no doubt? God-hating secular legislators? The ACLU?

Well, no. Actually, it was the Puritans.

In May of 1659, the explicitly theocratic Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the following law:

For preventing disorders, arising in several places within this jurisdiction by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other communities, to the great dishonor of God and offense of others: it is therefore ordered by this court and the authority thereof that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county.

Why would a Christian sect outlaw the celebration of Christmas? There were multiple reasons, most of them having to do with the Puritans' ferociously austere worldview. Elaborate festivities on Christmas were associated with Catholicism and the Church of England, both of which the Puritans despised and sought to rid themselves of. The Puritans disapproved in principle of all forms of merry-making, including drinking, feasting, dancing and playing games, believing instead that only a life of hard labor and continual self-denial would be looked on with favor by God. Finally, they noticed that the Bible nowhere established December 25th as the date of Jesus' birth and suspected the holiday of having pagan origins and associations (an absolutely true charge, as I discuss in Ebon Musings' "An Essay on Christmas").

After massive popular resistance, the anti-Christmas law was finally withdrawn in 1681. Still, there's a lesson here for the would-be theocrats who insist that secularists are on an anti-Christmas jihad. Despite the religious right's overheated rhetoric, the reality is that they have little to fear from atheists. No prominent atheist individual or organization is calling for the outlawing of religion or laws that deny believers the right to practice their own faith. Then, as now, that danger comes only from other believers who are hellbent on imposing their particular notion of God on all of society and using the machinery of government as an instrument of oppression. That is why theists, as well as atheists, should defend a robust separation of church and state. In the end, it benefits all of us.

Last night I saw The Golden Compass, the movie adaptation of the first book in Philip Pullman's acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. The movie, like the book, is set in a fantastic and richly imagined parallel universe, similar to our own world but different in many important ways. In Pullman's steampunk world, human beings' souls live outside their bodies, in the form of talking animal familiars called daemons; the icy north is ruled by fearsome armored bears and clans of flying witches; and an evil church that extends its grip over the world battles the defenders of freethought to suppress the truth about a mysterious particle called Dust. The church views Dust as the physical evidence of original sin and wants to stamp out all knowledge of it, but a few brave scholars believe it is the gateway to a limitless infinity of possibilities.

The heroine of the movie, Lyra Belacqua, is an orphan girl raised by the masters of Jordan College in a parallel London. A shadowy organization known as the Gobblers has been kidnapping children for unknown purposes, and when one of Lyra's friends is snatched, she vows to set out and rescue him. In her quest she finds allies, including a band of traveling Gyptians seeking to recover their own lost sons and daughters; the Texan aeronaut Lee Scoresby, and a loyal armored bear, Iorek Byrnison. But her greatest help may be the instrument of the movie's title: an "alethiometer", a clockwork device given to her by the master of Jordan College which, if read and interpreted correctly, can give the true answer to any question. Ultimately, Lyra's quest takes her to the frozen wastelands of the North Pole, where she faces the sinister Magisterium and its chief agent, the poison-sweet Mrs. Coulter, and learns the truth about the evil experiments it's been conducting on the stolen children.

At least in America, there's been a minor uproar over this movie, because the book's author, Philip Pullman, is an avowed atheist who's salted the novels with anti-religious and freethought themes. (The second two books of the trilogy, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, pick up the plot of a literal war against God - although in the books he's called "the Authority", and depicted as an aged pretender rather than the true creator of everything.) Fulminating bigots like William Donohue of the Catholic League have demanded a boycott, and newspaper columnists have fretted that this movie's intent is to "teach atheism to children". (I don't remember hearing any complaints about how the movie adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was intended to "teach Christianity to children".)

Predictably, the movie's producers tried to head off this criticism by watering down the anti-religious themes from the book. The evil organization, which as I recall is explicitly depicted as the Church in the original novels, is here only called the "Magisterium". Rather than an explicit struggle against religion, the heroes' opposition is depicted more as a struggle against authoritarianism. Also predictably, these changes had no effect on the self-appointed guardians of dogma, who only need to catch the merest whiff of dissent to thunder about "disrespect" and demand that the offender be censored and punished to make them feel better. Nevertheless, more of Pullman's theme was left in than I had expected, including the equation of Dust with original sin. Mrs. Coulter gives a speech in which she claims Dust came about because the first people disobeyed the Authority, although the movie does not go into any detail on who or what the Authority is. I also thought it was more than a little heavy-handed to depict all the top officials of the Magisterium as having daemons that were serpents or preying mantises (although Mrs. Coulter's golden monkey is a wonderfully evil creation).

I've read Pullman's original books, and I can definitely recommend them. They're wonderfully detailed and richly imaginative creations. Unfortunately, the movie suffers from the comparison. It wasn't bad, but the script did feel rushed and obligatory, as if the writers were trying to cram in as many events from the novel as possible. On a purely numerical level they succeeded, but the result was a plot that careened from one event to the next, dumping loads of exposition on the viewer at every turn, rather than giving the characters time to breathe. Nevertheless, some of Pullman's ideas do shine through. Lyra in particular was a great heroine, capturing the fiercely independent, defiant spirit of the books.

That said, anyone who's expecting the books or especially the movie to serve as the standard-bearer for atheism is likely to be let down. For all the great freethought ideas contained in them, they're not tightly reasoned anti-religious polemics. The books are a story, an imaginative fiction. In our world, there is no literal Authority to kill, no Dust to tell us the truth the church has tried to cover up. The story should be judged on its own merits, not pressed into service to support a real-life cause. The most we can expect from this or any other story is to encourage children to ask questions and consider new possibilities, which is all to the good. It's to be expected that even this little hint of freethinking will provoke roars of outrage from the pompous pretenders who fear alternative stories, and who can all too easily recognize themselves in the corrupt and tyrannical authority figures skewered therein.

Today's installment of "On the Morality Of" concerns the topic of prostitution, and whether it should be legal. Would a perfect society permit this practice, or would it be banned under the law?

As I've said before, universal utilitarianism was intended to promote the happiness of all human beings, and no person can decide what makes you happy with more knowledge or authority than you yourself. Consistent with this conclusion, any society that follows UU should place the highest value on freedom, autonomy and self-direction. Unless a practice harms someone against their will, there can be no justification for banning it. In particular, we shouldn't ban something because someone else has decided that no one could possibly find happiness in doing it. No person has a right to make that decision on behalf of all of humanity.

For that reason, it seems - at least at first glance - that rational, consenting adults should be able to engage in any kind of economic transaction they see fit, including the exchange of sex for money. If entered into freely, I see no reason why such an exchange should be degrading to either party.

If the objection is that it's wrong to pay a person for sexual gratification because it treats them as an object to serve our needs, I answer that many other kinds of economic transactions do the same thing. We pay others to cook for us, to clean for us, to oversee our health, to give us vicarious thrills and excitement, and no one seems to find anything at all unsavory or disturbing about any of these. Sex is a basic human drive the same as all the others. Why should sex be the only one it's forbidden to sell?

However, these neat, simple theoretical arguments always encounter the complications of the real world. In the real world, it's true, we find prostitution almost invariably associated with a range of social ills - drug abuse, kidnapping, STDs, physical abuse, and many more. Unquestionably, these are evils that we should prevent. The issues are twofold: first, whether banning prostitution will prevent the problems that accompany it, and if so, whether these practical reasons outweigh the considerations of economic and personal liberty that argue for permitting it.

First consider the issue of whether to ban prostitution entirely. The problem is that, self-evidently, there's a strong demand for this service, and that demand can't be done away with by fiat simply by passing a law. Like it or not, the exchange of sex for material gifts (even if done through a more indirect route) has been a part of human society since the beginning. Not for nothing is prostitution called "the oldest profession". Outlawing prostitution doesn't stop it from happening; it just drives the practice underground, and when this happens, there's reason to believe that abuse will become more prevalent.

If prostitution is illegal, prostitutes who are cheated or suffer abuse at the hands of pimps or customers can't bring their complaints to the police, and there's little incentive for them to submit to testing for drugs or disease. Similarly, the lack of oversight makes possible the kidnapping and sexual slavery of women. In fact, there's a strong case that many of the social ills surrounding prostitution arise not despite but because of its illegality. If this is true, it would do more good to bring it into the light, where it can be overseen and regulated.

And yet, again, real-world concerns complicate simple abstract arguments. One of these concerns is that, even in areas that have experimented with legalizing prostitution, the problems haven't gone away. Horrifying articles like this expose from the Guardian show that, even in Nevada where prostitution is legal, many of the women who work in brothels suffer in conditions of abuse and near-slavery. If legalized prostitution is the means to do away with the exploitation of women, we must answer the question of why legalizing it hasn't improved the situation in Nevada. I can suggest one potential answer.

I doubt that most people who are prostitutes turn to that career out of enthusiastic choice. Far more often, it's a last resort for the desperate. By this argument, most of the people - most of the women, I should say - who turn to prostitution would not be doing so if they had other options. Banning the practice would not solve this underlying problem. But here's the important point: permitting it doesn't solve that problem either.

People who are in dire straits, people who are desperate, are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. This is just as true for legal professions as it is for illegal ones. As long as women turn to prostitution out of desperation, these problems will likely persist. But in a society with a strong social safety net, where the necessities of life were guaranteed to all citizens, no one would be forced to turn to prostitution. Anyone who chose to engage in it would do so out of legitimate desire, not desperation.

This step, I think, would truly eliminate most of the social ills that come with prostitution. These ills are not an intrinsic part of the career, but rather a reflection of the fact that many women who choose prostitution lack alternatives and are vulnerable to those who would mistreat and take advantage of them. In a world where it was a career of choice, these problems would be greatly reduced if not eliminated.

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