Last month's post on the morality of abortion generated - as one might have expected - a wide variety of impassioned responses. Happily, the debate remained mostly civil, which is a rarity when it comes to this issue and one that's entirely due to the thoughtful, rational commenters here at Daylight Atheism.

There were several issues I didn't get into in that post, since I wanted to focus on the core issue of whether and under what circumstances obtaining an abortion can be judged a moral or immoral act. Some of those other issues were explored in the comments in that thread. But there are a few others that didn't come up, and in this post I want to write some more about them.

One of the most remarkable facts about the abortion debate is that the groups which say they want to stop abortion are overlooking one of the most effective ways to achieve this. Namely, most groups which oppose abortion also oppose comprehensive sex education and the distribution of contraception, two measures which have proven to be highly effective at reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, and therefore the number of abortions. If the conservatives' goal was to prevent abortion to the greatest extent possible, why wouldn't they be all in favor of these measures? Why wouldn't they be eager participants in the effort to make contraception as widely available as possible?

If anything, we find the opposite. Most religious groups which oppose abortion are also against contraception. They oppose the teaching of responsible sexual practice in schools, favoring abstinence-only programs which have been repeatedly shown to be ineffective. They favor putting as many obstacles and roadblocks as possible in the way of men and women who want to use contraception; some of them want to ban it altogether. In short, they favor the policies that are certain to lead to a greater number of unwanted pregnancies - which means a greater number of abortions - not to mention a greater number of STDs, unmarried mothers, and all the other ills that come with that.

A related, astonishing phenomenon is the surprising number of self-avowed pro-lifers who come in for abortions themselves. In some cases, women who go in to a clinic for an abortion one day are back the next day to picket that same clinic. Many of them insist that they are "different" from the other women in the waiting room with them, that their case is somehow special and justifies an exception.

One morning, a woman who had been a regular "sidewalk counselor" went into the clinic with a young woman who looked like she was 16-17, and obviously her daughter. When the mother came out about an hour later, I had to go up and ask her if her daughter's situation had caused her to change her mind. "I don't expect you to understand my daughter's situation!" she angrily replied. The following Saturday, she was back, pleading with women entering the clinic not to "murder their babies."

And a similar story from Dan Barker's Losing Faith in Faith, in which Barker relates a conversation with a Catholic attorney:

"Well, I was raised to respect the sanctity of life," he said, "and I will always vote with my church."

...He looked at me for a moment, and in hushed tones said, "But you know what? I don't know what I would do if my fourteen-year-old-daughter got pregnant."

"You would get her a quick, quiet abortion and worry about the morality later," I offered. With a guilty grin, he nodded his head in agreement. "You have the money and you have the contacts," I continued, "but if you keep voting wrong you may not have the option." He didn't know what to say, the big hypocrite.

These bizarre-seeming actions, I believe, fall cleanly into place when one understands the mission of the anti-choice movement through the correct lens. Any large political movement will have a diversity of opinion among its members, and I have no doubt that some people oppose abortion because they genuinely (though mistakenly, in my view) believe that a human life exists from the moment of conception. But among the politically organized wing of the religious anti-choice movement, I believe there is one primary, overriding motive - and it is not concern for the fetus' life, but desire to control and oversee the woman's.

Subjugating women's bodies to the state has always been part and parcel of every theocratic movement. It's an outgrowth of the misogynistic belief common to nearly every major world religion that women are inferior to men and must be controlled by them. This spirit of bigotry is why the Catholic church does not permit women to be clergy and why the Southern Baptist Convention expects wives to pledge to obey their husbands. It's why Islamic mullahs forbid the education of women and allow men to marry multiple wives, but never wives to marry multiple husbands. It's why Orthodox Jews pray to God every day to express their gratitude for not being born female, and why Mormon women are taught that they can only reach Heaven if they're married so that their husbands can pull them through.

Naturally, the members of this movement tend to grant exemptions to the principle of female inferiority on a case-by-case basis - for themselves and for their loved ones, as necessary - which explains why they don't oppose abortion for themselves or for their daughters. It's only those other women, those untrustworthy outsiders, who need to be controlled for their own good. In these people's minds, enforced pregnancy is an appropriate punishment for women who choose to have sex in unapproved ways. This neatly explains opposition to contraception and abortion alike: in their minds, both these are things are ways for sinful women to avoid the natural and deserved consequences of immoral sex.

Dear Mr. Chick,

You probably don't know me, but I'm writing to send you my thanks. I used to be a hardcore, evil, godless atheist, but after reading some of your wonderful Christian fundamentalist cartoon tracts, I've realized just how wrong I've been. Now I know that there is a God who loves me and who died for my sins, and that his name is Jesus Christ. I also now understand that playing Dungeons & Dragons too much will lead to you being initiated into a witches' coven and taught how to cast real spells; that Roman Catholicism is a Satanic cult and keeps its followers in line with demonic Egyptian death cookies; and that Jesus is the one who holds the protons together in atomic nuclei. (I always knew those godless physicists were just making it up when they talked about so-called "gluons"!)

Thanks to you, I'm ready to accept Jesus Christ's free gift of salvation and be washed clean by his precious blood. However, I can't do that just yet. There's one other thing I have to do first, but I'm having a problem. I thought I'd write to you in the hopes that you'd offer me some advice. Please allow me to explain.

One of your tracts which made the greatest impression on me was the one titled "The Contract". In this tract, an impoverished farmer makes a deal with the Devil to sell his soul in exchange for the money he needs to keep his farm. He receives the money, as promised, and uses it to do just that. Years later, he has a last-minute conversion to Christianity on his deathbed and goes to Heaven anyway.

I think this is a fantastic idea! Forget all those phony get-rich-quick schemes - here's one that really works. All I have to do is sign a contract with Satan, promising him my eternal soul in exchange for enormous worldly wealth and power, and then repent and turn to Jesus. That way, I can break the contract, get to enjoy eternal bliss when I die, and still get to keep all the cool stuff in the meantime! There's no downside! And I have you to thank for the inspiration. (That guy who told everyone not to "lay up treasures for yourselves upon the earth" was a real sucker! He went about this whole Christian thing all wrong. I guess he just wasn't as good at seeing these opportunities as us.)

Anyway, that's my foolproof plan - but it's hit just one snag. Namely, I can't get the Devil to show up and offer me the contract. I've tried everything I can think of to draw his attention - stamping my foot in public and audibly muttering, "I'd sell my soul for a billion dollars!"; listening to rock-and-roll music; reading demonic books like Harry Potter and The Origin of Species - but so far, I've had no luck.

Mr. Chick, I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this idea. I bet a great Christian evangelist like yourself has already thought of it - heck, you wrote the tract! I'm thinking you must know how to get the Devil's attention, and I bet you've already tricked him into giving you all kinds of free stuff. (Don't worry, I won't horn in your racket. I know the whole international, multimillion-dollar comic strip ministry was your idea. I'll ask him for something else!) Can you give me any tips? Pointers? What am I doing wrong?

If you get this letter, please rush your reply. As you can imagine, time is critical here - if I sign the Devil's contract but then die before accepting Jesus as my personal savior, I'll be eternally damned, and I don't want that. But I also don't want to get saved before getting my hands on all the worldly goods Satan can give me. The way I see it, Satan is God's enemy and I'd be cheating him out of all that stuff, so it has to be okay. I know I can't take it all with me, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy it while I'm here, right?

Thanks in advance for your anticipated assistance.

Sincerely,

Adam Lee
http://www.daylightatheism.org

This past Tuesday, a DC-9 jetliner crashed on takeoff in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After failing to lift off, the plane crashed and burst into flame on the ground. Among the passengers were the Mosiers, a family of Seventh-Day Adventist missionaries. With the help of other passengers, they forced open a door and escaped as smoke filled the stricken plane's cabin. The Mosiers' 3-year-old son Andrew suffered a broken leg, but other than that, they got out with only bruises. Surely, this was a miraculous escape - a tangible sign of God's supernatural protection - and the Mosiers didn't hesitate to affirm that belief:

"We couldn't believe that our family of four could all escape a plane that was crashed and on fire, but by God's mercy, we did," he said.

Mosier said he believes the family made it for a reason.

"I think the Lord has a plan for us, otherwise we wouldn't have survived," he said. "He still has work for us to do."

There's just one tiny little problem with this interpretation. After failing to lift off, the plane overshot the end of the runway and crashed through a fence, into a crowded marketplace. Most of those on board the plane got out, but the people on the ground had not been expecting a huge mass of tangled, flaming metal to suddenly come hurtling towards them. The market was decimated, and at least 40 people died.

Read those sappy, self-congratulatory quotes again. The missionaries made it out by God's mercy. God has a plan for them. He miraculously saved them from this catastrophe.

Now read the accounts of people on the ground:

Hundreds of people gathered at the morgue in Goma. Annemarie Mulotwa, 19, leaned against a wall and wept for her young nephew, Kikuni.

"I saw his body inside, he is dead, he was burned," Mulotwa said, covering her face with her hands. "He was 12 years old, he was only in primary school. He wasn't even on the plane."

Mary Rose Kiza, 33, said she watched as her 15-year-old son ran out of a shop, his clothes and body on fire. She does not know if her three other sons were alive.

"What have I done to God to deserve this?" she wailed outside the morgue, after leaving a hospital bed where she was treated for back injuries.

Apparently, God's mercy protected the family of white American missionaries on board the plane, but God did not have mercy on the 12-year-old boy who was burned to death. Evidently, God had no particular plan for the lives of the dozens of people in the marketplace, nor did he have any reason for them to continue living, so there was no reason for him not to violently kill them in a sudden, unexpected disaster. This view makes us all out to be God's toys, to be used as he sees fit while we're useful and then thrown away without a second thought when we're no longer useful. Don't these missionaries see the grotesque arrogance and ugly narcissism of believing that they rated God's special protection, while the people burning and dying all around them did not?

In the real world, there are no demonstrable miracles, and in catastrophes like this one, blind chance rules the day. The lack of any tangible evidence that a deity is protecting his followers makes it even more offensive for people to claim that their survival was due to some special worthiness or virtue. A humbler, more ethical philosophy would refrain from drawing any conclusions about the relative moral worth of those who survived versus those who didn't, and simply express happiness to be alive without demeaning those who were not so fortunate.

In the book God?: A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist, William Lane Craig (debating Walter Sinnott-Armstrong) makes the following argument for why God chooses to remain hidden:

"Could God reveal himself more clearly?" Of course, He could: He could have inscribed the label "Made by God" on every atom or planted a neon cross in the heavens with the message "Jesus Saves." But why would He want to do such a thing?

...[T]here is no reason at all to think that if God were to make His existence more manifest, more people would come into a saving relationship with Him.

...In the Old Testament God is described as revealing Himself to His people in manifest wonders: the plagues upon Egypt, the pillar of fire and smoke, the parting of the Red Sea. But did such wonders produce lasting heart-change in the people? No, Israel fell into apostasy with tiresome repetitiveness. If God were to inscribe His name on every atom or place a neon cross in the sky, people might believe that He exists, all right, but what confidence could we have that after time they would not begin to chafe under the brazen advertisements of their Creator and even come to resent such effrontery? (p.109)

This argument, like many made by Christian apologists, displays a bizarre ignorance of human psychology. If God were to clearly show his existence, it would not cause more people to worship him? Really?

If anything, human beings are too willing to worship and to follow. The great number of cults and sects that have sprung up in every era testifies to this; most of them have followed leaders who made only the flimsiest, most easily debunked pretense of having supernatural powers. (Sathya Sai Baba and Uri Geller, for example, have attracted significant followings despite performing only "miracles" that could easily be duplicated by sleight of hand.) To claim that an actual god which manifested itself and displayed real supernatural powers would not attract a vast following is to speak in total contradiction to everything that history and psychology teaches about humans' gullibility and eagerness to be led.

Fanatically devoted followings sometimes spring up even around figures that make no explicit effort to attract them. I can give no better example than the cult of Elvis Presley, which among his most devoted fans has taken on many of the trappings of a latter-day religion. His Graceland estate is a major destination for pilgrimage to this day. Every year, his fans still hold a candlelight vigil on the anniversary of his death. The most hardcore fans, the ones who knew Elvis while he was alive, were called the "gate people" for their habit of sitting outside the gates of his mansion, every day, simply waiting for a chance to see him. The ones who met him, who saw him in person or got gifts or letters from him, treasure them to this day as if they were holy relics. (A lock of Elvis' hair once sold at auction for over $100,000.) And, to this day, there are people who pattern their entire lives around imitating him.

In fact, during his lifetime Elvis claimed to have paranormal - even miraculous - powers:

His stepbrother and bodyguard, David Stanley, wrote a chapter 'My Brother the Mystic' in his book Life with Elvis, in which he alleges that Elvis could heal by touch and move clouds in the sky. When threatened with a violent thunderstorm during a car journey 'Elvis stuck his right hand out of the sunroof and started talking to the clouds. "I order you to let us pass through"... and the amazing thing was that the clouds did exactly as he asked them to. They split right down the middle.

And, of course, to this day there's widespread speculation that he didn't really die. I can readily imagine that if Elvis during his lifetime had ever said, "I am the Son of God," by now he'd have a following that would easily equal some of the established churches, and people would be busily inventing posthumous miracles to attribute to him. (Similar stories have already begun to pop up around the late Pope John Paul II.) In time, as these stories became diffused and exaggerated, Elvis worship could well blossom into a bona fide religion.

If a mere singer could attract this kind of devotion - and still does, decades after his death - then it surpasses belief to claim, as Craig does, that an actual appearance of God in the flesh would not attract a far larger following and worship. People do not become jaded and disenchanted by being able to see and touch their idols; it only inspires them to greater heights of devotion. Craig's assertions to the contrary are in total conflict with reality.

Of course, the real reason he must maintain such risible assertions is that there are no manifestations. Thus, Craig must find a post-hoc means of rationalizing this to be consistent with his preexisting belief in God. Given those constraints, the solution he comes up with seems like the only feasible one. But it still fails to accord with well-known facts about reality and human nature.

One of the recurring fantasies of Christian end-times believers is that, after the Rapture, the world will be united into a single government which will be presided over by the Antichrist. As such, these believers view any sign of increased global peace or cooperation as an ominous sign of growing Satanic influence. (Oddly, increased war is also taken to be a sign of the approaching Rapture - go figure.) Hence, Rapture Ready's Rapture Index tracks "Globalism" as one component of its prophetic stock market. The European Union was initially thought to be the first bellwether of one-world government (a different page explains, "Many prophecy students see the European Union as the prophesied kingdom of the Antichrist"), but most paranoid speculation has now shifted to the United Nations.

End-times Christians typically believe that this global hegemony, when it arrives, will be enthusiastically accepted by everyone except the believers who recognize its danger. Slacktivist, in one installment of his ongoing deconstruction of the Left Behind series, quotes how the characters in that book respond to this event:

"There is no guarantee, of course, that even member nations will unanimously go along with the move to destroy 90 percent of their military strength and turn over the remaining 10 percent to the U.N. But several ambassadors expressed their confidence 'in equipping and arming an international peacekeeping body with a thoroughgoing pacifist and committed disarmament activist as its head.'"

Another added, "...We're supposed to be objective and cynical, but how can you not like this? It'll take years to effect all this stuff, but someday, somewhere down the line, we're going to see world peace. No more weapons, no more wars, no more border disputes or bigotry based on language or religion. Whew! Who'd have believed it would come to this?"

As Slacktivist notes, the characters in LB are "Imaginary Liberals", downright eager to surrender their sovereignty at the first sign of a global dictatorship. End-times believers seem to think all us non-Christians are just itching for this to happen.

I'd like to disabuse them of this notion. To all theists who believe this, I say: Are you insane? A one-world government would be a horrible idea.

Until it was abolished in 2005, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights included such well-known violators of human rights as Sudan and Saudi Arabia. Its replacement, the United Nations Human Rights Council, still counts as members rogue states and repressive dictatorships such as Cuba and Saudi Arabia (again), and still has refused to take even symbolic action against many brutal regimes worldwide.

This deplorable situation showcases a basic problem: there are still far too many places around the world that lack fundamental protection for human rights, and far too many people willing to accede to such. As long as situations like this persist, a global government would be a horrendous idea - it would simply allow devotees of tyranny and autocracy to outvote and overrule the defenders of liberty.

Granted, democracy is spreading. Between the Americas, Europe and India, we citizens of democracies certainly constitute a plurality, if not a majority, of the world's population. This bodes well for global cooperation in the future. But democracy alone is not a guarantee of human rights. Unless democracy is backed by strong legal protections for the rights of minorities - and more importantly, widespread understanding by the majority of why such protections are needed - then it can simply become tyranny of another form.

Examples abound. In countries like Canada and many European nations, free speech is still a conditional right, often contingent on the speaker's not offending any powerful identity group. Even the progressive, First World democracy of Australia has recently announced plans to censor the Internet. The U.S., too, has gotten in on the act. Even in these "advanced" nations, we have a long way to go.

I grant that it does seem irrational for human beings to be forever divided by artificial political boundaries. They correspond to nothing intrinsic about us, and perhaps in the far future we'll be able to safely remove them. But for the moment, they are necessary. While people's attitudes still exhibit such disturbing variation on basic issues of human rights and morality, we need separate nations to ensure that freedom thrives in at least some places. Trying to persuade the whole world at once to adopt a rational ethics would be an impossible task. By splitting the world up into distinct societies, we have the easier task of establishing human rights in some places to begin with, so that they can serve as examples for - and, where need be, redoubts against - the rest.

Once all human societies are brought up to a comparable level of stability, prosperity, and most importantly moral development and outlook, then it may be time to start thinking about dissolving political boundaries. But until that day, the question is scarcely worth contemplating. Are we ready for a one-world government now? Absolutely not! Will we ever be? It depends - ask me again in a few hundred years...

For much of human history, information was a rare and precious commodity. In pre-literate societies, the collected wisdom of the tribe - when the rains come, when is the best time to plant crops, what plants are best for illness - was passed down in oral format, requiring much diligent work of recitation and memorization. If the only person who knew something died in an accident, that bit of information was lost.

When writing was invented, the situation improved somewhat. Now important facts could be written down in books, and information could be passed even between people who had never met. When a person died, their knowledge did not have to die with them. Even so, the intensive labor involved in copying books ensured that they remained rare, and mostly the property of the rich. In any case, with writing came censorship, as churches and secular authorities sought to forbid people from possessing or reading books deemed to be dangerous. The most infamous example was the Catholic church's Index of Forbidden Books, which was richly stocked with the writings of history's greatest poets, philosophers and essayists. A glimpse into one historical episode shows how far the church would go in suppressing anything suspected to lead to heresy:

Of the principals, four were condemned to imprisonment for life. Ten others, priests and clerics, who had obstinately refused to retract their errors, after being publicly degraded, were delivered to the secular authority and suffered the penalty of death by fire. Five years later (1215) the writings of Aristotle, which had been distorted by the sectaries in support of their heresy, were forbidden to be read either in public or in private.

(Even today, it's worth noting, the official Catholic position is that the Index "retains its moral force" - this according to the man who is currently pope.)

After the invention of writing, the next most significant invention was the printing press. By turning transcription into a rapid, exact process, it led to an explosion of readily accessible printed material - the first true means of mass communication. The effects on society were profound. Not only did the printing press play a major role in breaking down the censorship of the Catholic church - its role in the distribution of Martin Luther's writing was an important cause of the Protestant Reformation - but it also helped to give rise to the Scientific Revolution and the Renaissance, as natural philosophers for the first time could publish and share their work far and wide.

In our time, we have seen the rise of the Internet, the successor to Gutenberg's press. The Internet has made copying an even more rapid process - effortlessly creating thousands of copies in seconds - and has lowered the barriers to free speech even more, as any individual can now effectively broadcast a message to the entire world. Recognizing the danger they face from free speech, totalitarian states have sought to censor the Internet, but with little success. (As John Gilmore said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.")

Throughout history, the technological trend has been toward faster, more accurate and more accessible copying of information. There can be no doubt that this trend will only accelerate, and that is a good thing. Fast, easy copying takes power away from the elites and distributes it among all people. On a global scale, it is no longer realistically possible to suppress any idea. We now truly have a democratic marketplace of ideas: anyone can speak their mind to the world, and if their ideas have merit, others will be able to adopt them and put them into practice.

There's just one thing I find lamentable in all this. Although the human capacity to create information has grown exponentially, our ability to absorb information has not. We still have no tools for uptake that were not also possessed by our Stone Age ancestors (with the possible exception of reading). As the amount of accessible information grows steadily, there's an ever-greater risk that the information important to us will be lost in the crush. There's a vast world of knowledge out there, but for all our ability to comprehend it, we might as well be peering at it through a keyhole.

A person who reads at the extraordinary pace of one book each week might be able to read three thousand books in a lifetime. By contrast, 375,000 new books were published in English in 2004 alone. And that's not even to consider all the journals, periodicals, and everything on the Internet.

There was a memorable scene in Carl Sagan's Cosmos set in the New York Public Library. In it, the camera pans around the interior of the library, showing the multitude of shelves full of books. Sagan, standing on an upper gallery, then walks the few steps from one end of one bookshelf to the other. That comparatively small shelf, he says, holds as many books as a person could read in a lifetime. Yet the library has so many more. Clearly, we have to know which are the right books to read.

The frustration caused by our inability to know everything is understandable. But while the crush makes it ever harder to find the right books, it also means that there are more good books to be found, ever more jewels in the rough that contain crucial insights about our world. Only a trickle of knowledge may flow through the keyhole - but if we know where to look, even that small trickle can enlighten us far more than any of our ancestors ever dreamed.

A few weeks back, I was looking through my traffic logs and found someone who came across my article "The Power of Christ Compels You" via the following Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=applying+the+blood+of+jesus+against+evil+people

I'm guessing my article wasn't what this person was looking for, so I ran the search myself and found the following essay: How to Plead the Blood of Jesus for Deliverance and Protection.

This remarkable essay is founded on a deep belief in what I can only call Christian magic. It claims that "pleading the blood of Jesus", a specific type of prayer which it explains precisely how to conduct, will create supernatural protection for the life and possessions of the claimant against real-world disasters. It helpfully lists the basic things that a Christian can invoke the blood of Jesus to magically protect: your house ("will help protect you against fires, break-ins, burglaries, natural catastrophes or any type of bad accidents"), your car ("will help prevent you from getting into any serious auto accidents, along with helping to prevent any break-ins or theft of your car"), your finances ("will help protect you from all of the scammers and con artists that are out there trying to scam and steal all of your hard earned money"), your children ("will help protect them from any possible abductions, serious accidents or life-threatening illnesses"), and yourself, to personally protect you against all of these catastrophes. Unbelievably, the site even claims that this spell will protect against earthquakes, tornadoes, lawsuits, and plane crashes!

The site insists that, like any good magic spell, the words must be spoken precisely and specifically:

You will have to Plead the Blood on each of the above six items to get God's full protection on it. You have to be very specific on the things that you will want covered and protected under His Blood.

Evidently, despite being omniscient and presumably knowing what people need, God parses all prayers like a lawyer does a contract, only granting the exact boons the believer asks for.

It even adds the specific magical gestures that help the believer's spell work most effectively:

The other thing that you can do is to hold out your right hand, palm facing forward when actually Pleading the Blood. The Bible tells us that the right hand of God is His hand of power and deliverance. When you Plead the Blood, you are going on the offensive. By holding out your right hand when Pleading the Blood on the basics, you are showing God that you mean serious business with Him, and that you have every intention of pulling down His divine supernatural protection to cover you on all of the basics that you are Pleading the Blood of His Son on.

as well as how long the magical protection lasts:

I have personally found out the hard way that if I want God's full protection on all of the above items – that I have to Plead the Blood on the night before the beginning of the next month. In other words, if I want God's protection for the month of May, then I have to Plead the Blood on all of the above on the last day of April.

I'd suggest to the authors of this site that they try testing their magical powers in a controlled fashion to see if they have any effect whatsoever distinguishable from chance, but I suspect few theists' beliefs are as blissfully uncontaminated by evidence as the writer of this essay. As with all believers in magic, Christians who use these spells will remember the hits and forget the misses, attributing the inevitable failures of prayer to some sin in their lives or simply to a change in God's unknowable will. The terminally superstitious may use these magical beliefs as a crutch to help them get through their daily lives, but it is a crutch that is only hobbling them further, when they would do far better to stand and walk on their own two feet.

"The Son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him: but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! Good were it for that man if he had never been born."

—Mark 14:21

C.S. Lewis' book The Screwtape Letters takes the form of a series of letters, exchanged between a senior and a junior devil, on the topic of how best to tempt human beings. One of the letters in this book contains an incredible admission, the only time I've ever seen such a point made by a Christian apologist:

How valuable time is to us may be gauged by the fact that [God] allows us so little of it. The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth. It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life. We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a "normal life" is the exception. Apparently He wants some — but only a very few — of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years.

Lewis has it exactly right here. The rate of spontaneous abortion (i.e., miscarriage) is difficult to measure precisely, because it often occurs so early that the woman never even realizes she was pregnant. However, by some estimates, between 50% and 75% of all conceptions end in spontaneous abortion. (Other estimates put the rate lower.) If we accept this number, then add the number of elective abortions, plus the people who die in infancy or early childhood, then it's indeed clear that what we adult humans call a "normal life" is the exception and not the rule.

By Christian theology, even a single-celled embryo possesses an immortal soul, and if the body dies before the age of accountability, that soul proceeds directly to Heaven. Thus, the bizarre implication is that the overwhelming majority of Heaven's residents will be souls who were spontaneously aborted in the womb and never had a human life at all. This blessed legion will far outnumber the relative few who were born, grew up, resisted sin, and attained salvation.

What this means is that, by Christian logic, being born is a terrible misfortune. The majority of those who are unlucky enough to be born will end up eternally damned. (This follows directly from the fact that Christianity comprises a minority of the world's population - even assuming that every self-described Christian sect is acceptable to God, an assumption which many denominations do not make. The more restrictive the requirements for salvation are, the more that pool of the saved shrinks.) By contrast, every single one of the spontaneously or artificially aborted embryos has a soul that goes directly to Heaven, with no opportunity to sin and no danger of going astray.

Granted, we could mitigate this problem by loosening up the rules. Maybe it's too strict to assume that only believing Christians can be saved; maybe God will accept anyone who lives an honest and moral life. Even so, if there is any act or belief or lifestyle that leads to damnation, the warped conclusion remains: it's still better to die in the womb and have salvation assured, rather than be born into a mortal life and run a risk, however slight, of ending up in perdition.

Given this, why wouldn't God just create a race of humans that all die in the womb and have their salvation assured? (The question of who would be the mothers of such a race need not pose a problem. An omnipotent god could, for example, create a planet full of artificial incubators that continuously bring forth new conceptuses, all of which die before completing their development.) To those who say that such a scenario would be absurd, I agree completely - it is absurd. But the absurdity is not my invention; it springs from the warped logic of the Christian salvation system, in which early death is preferable to a long and full life. Like all other heavens, belief in this one inevitably degrades this life by comparison.

It would alleviate the unfairness of this system to imagine that every soul which dies before birth (or in early childhood) must be sent back to "try again", and that only those who live a full mortal life and pass the age of accountability are eligible for judgment. But I know of no Christian or other monotheist sect which teaches this view.

Religious beliefs, as a general rule, aren't based on evidence.

I have little doubt that my fellow nonbelievers will agree without reservation, and equally little doubt that religious believers will call me arrogant and uninformed for so sweepingly dismissing the basis of their beliefs. But that's not what I'm trying to say. By this statement, I'm not referring to the question of whether solid evidence underlies the tenets of religion (although I trust I've made my views on that issue known). I'm referring to something different: the question of how people become theists in the first place.

It may be that there are people who became believers after dispassionately examining a variety of world religions, deciding which one was best supported by the evidence, and choosing to join that one. It may be that there are such people; I've never met them. Instead, the vast majority of believers of my acquaintance had their beliefs chosen for them at a very early age, and were taught to follow those beliefs without skepticism or doubt. (My college friend John, whom I wrote about in 2006 in "A Seriously Warped Moral Compass", told me with pride that he became a Christian at the age of five.) A relatively smaller number converted later in life, but again, I find that in the overwhelming majority of cases that decision was made for reasons other than a critical comparison of the options.

I bring this up because I recently came across an astonishing debate, one that clearly outlines what I think are the two major strands of thought competing in modern theism. This debate took place on a now-defunct evangelical Christian blog, Evangelutionist, in a thread titled "The YEC-Christianity Conflation" [link fixed --Ebonmuse]. "YEC" is an acronym for "young-earth creationism", and the debate was over the issue of whether belief in a literal six-day creation and a 6,000-year-old cosmos is theologically necessary to be a Christian. The author, Touchstone, took the negative, but mattpowell, a commenter holding an opposite view, soon showed up.

I really recommend reading the whole comment thread, but to get a flavor of it, here are some highlights:

I don't hold YEC doctrine in high esteem at all. I was raised in a YEC home, taught in a YEC church, and pushed to the limits of my faith when I finally reached the real world and discovered how misleading and dishonest the PR campaign for young earth creationism is.

It's not YEC per se that's being conflated with orthodox Christianity. It is obedience to Scripture that is.

...when you take theories of the age of things, interpretations of physical data that you have never seen, and use that to interpret Genesis 1, now you're letting the ideas of men interpret Scripture instead of letting Scripture interpret Scripture. There isn't a shred of evidence anywhere in Scripture that Genesis 1 ought to be regarded as anything other than a straightforward historical account, and rather a lot to the contrary.

Exegetically, I understand Genesis 1 to be a theological treatise, the written account of an oral tradition, an inspired co-opting of ancient cosmological myths. God is asserting his sovereignty over all of creation as the Creator, and relating the moral history of man as a context for His relationship with mankind. The length of a solar day versus billions of years has *zero* bearing on the message — the moral of the story, the theology attached to the history.

Most of what we know we accept on authority, like the phases of Venus and the rings of Saturn. I accept those things on authority. None of these things affect my worldview at all. None of these things contradict anything in Scripture.

...Genesis 1 is something entirely different. Genesis 1 is presented as a historical account, an account of how God created the universe. It's not intended to answer every detail, but it is presented as historical truth, how God actually did it.

...If it is not historical truth, what else can safely be dispensed with? Adam and Eve? Modern science denies them. The flood? Modern science says it's impossible. Tower of Babel? The exodus? ...Where does it stop?

...None of you have direct knowledge at all of the origins, age, or nature of the universe. What you have, on the one hand, are the speculations of people who hate God and His Son. Is it surprising that their arguments seem very compelling? Jesus said they would be, doing signs and wonders that would deceive, if possible, even the elect. And on the other hand, you have the testimony of the One who made the heavens and the earth. It's by faith that you know that God made all things (Hebrews 11). And it's also by faith (belief in authority) that you accept the speculations of modern scientists. Presented that way, I think it should be obvious which faith is superior. Let God be true, and every man a liar. I will stick to the plain teaching of Scripture.

And finally, the money quote. Here's Matt's closing argument:

If someone came to me with actual evidence, went back in a time machine and videotaped the disciples stealing the body, gave me DNA evidence from a crucified man in a tomb outside Jerusalem with the inscription, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, and matched that DNA evidence to the ossuary of James proving it was his brother, I would still believe the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I'll tell you why- because when I read the book of John, when I read the book of James, when I read the book of Philippians or Matthew or Revelation, I hear the voice of my savior, my God. It is spiritually discerned (1 Cor 2). No evidence of man can ever change that. I hear, and I believe. I would reject the testimony of every man on earth, including my own understanding, rather than reject the testimony of God. I believe it because Scripture says it, and Scripture is the word of God.

This is a jaw-dropping quote, but there's a crucial point buried in there. Did you catch it?

Matt Powell proclaims that he believes in the absolute inerrancy of the Bible, including a 6,000-year-old universe, because to do anything less is to submit the Bible to tests of verification by non-Christian scientists, who are fallen and sinful, who hate God and are motivated by Satan. To allow this, he says, would be the first step in a process that would steadily chip away at the doctrines of Christianity until its central doctrine, the resurrection of Jesus, went up in smoke. To prevent this, we must trust in God and believe that every word of the Bible, from start to finish, is literally true. Only this firm stand can give rise to a solid rock of faith, rather than one that will steadily be eroded by every new wave of secular thought until it's eroded away altogether.

Matt isn't the only one who holds this viewpoint. Some very prominent Christian intellectuals say exactly the same; some of them are quoted in my essay "Thoughts in Captivity". Among them is one of the most prolific and highly-regarded apologists for modern Christianity, William Lane Craig - who, if this account is true, asserted that he, too, would continue to believe in Christianity even in the time machine scenario discussed above. Craig has stated that he knows Christianity to be true via the "self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit".

So what is the crucial point in Matt's argument? What is the flaw in the foundation upon which his entire theology rests? It's this:

...when I read the book of John, when I read the book of James, when I read the book of Philippians or Matthew or Revelation, I hear the voice of my savior, my God. It is spiritually discerned (1 Cor 2). No evidence of man can ever change that. I hear, and I believe.

I hear - the key pronoun being "I". Matt says that he believes the Bible is infallible, but in fact, what he really believes is that he himself is infallible. He has decided that his interpretations, his opinions, his beliefs are the ones that are perfect and immune to error. The same can be said of William Lane Craig and of every other theist who uses this argument.

Let's say for the sake of argument that the Bible was the infallible word of God. Even if that were the case, how could we recognize it as such? There is no way to answer this question that does not also assume the speaker's own infallibility. Even if we believe a book to be infallible, rationally we must always recognize the possibility that we are not infallible, and that we could be mistaken about that belief. You may believe a text is infallible and be mistaken; you may believe you hear the word of God and be wrong. We are inextricably enmeshed in the fact of our own fallibility, and we cannot rise above that. We have no way to view the world that is immune to making mistakes.

That is why all knowledge is, and must be, provisional. That isn't to say that we can never know anything, or that we cannot have a great deal of confidence in our beliefs. But we must always grant the possibility, no matter how small it is, that we might be mistaken about what we believe. Theists who refuse to grant this assume that the strength of their conviction is a completely reliable guide to the true nature of objective reality. This is a self-pleasing delusion - it always has been and always will be. What's more, it's monstrously arrogant. Who are you, a human being, to claim that your feelings define reality? Who are you to claim you understand the true nature of the universe so completely that you will not countenance even the possibility of error?

Touchstone's original post quotes a believer who worries, once we start questioning, where the slippery slope will end:

Yet, how can one know anything for sure about Jesus if the Bible that reveals him is wrong often or even from time to time. Is the Virgin Birth wrong? Is Jesus both God and man, or is that wrong? What about the Trinity? All such doctrines are attacked by secularists and non-believers as much as the Young Earth doctrine, why not jettison those as well? And if not, why not? How can you know what is right and what is wrong in the Bible?

Doubtless that is a serious problem for Christians. But deciding to abandon those doubts and trust in inerrancy is not a solution to the problem: it is a refusal to face the problem. Proclaiming yourself and your beliefs to be perfectly free of error is a doomed and desperate rear-guard action against a pattern of critical inquiry that has toppled one ancient superstition after another. The theologians of past ages, too, sought to proclaim themselves infallible, as Carl Sagan reminds us in The Demon-Haunted World:

"The giving up of witchcraft," said John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, "is in effect the giving up of the Bible." (p.119)

But Wesley's pretensions of infallibility did not stop the world from marching on and revealing his beliefs, with the passage of time, to be ridiculous and pernicious superstition. We have no reason to believe that our own future has any kinder a fate in store for those who follow the latest iteration of this strategy.

Greta Christina recently wrote a wonderful review of the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), an analysis of the unconscious defense mechanisms people use to rationalize their bad decisions. She's absolutely right that this is a book everyone ought to read (I need to find a copy myself), and her review makes some points that I think are important enough to justify shining a spotlight on.

I'm no anthropologist or psychologist, but I like to think of myself as at least an amateur observer of human nature. And one of the facts of human nature which looms the largest is our incredible moral duality. Human beings, as a species, present an astonishing paradox. On the one hand, human beings are capable of tremendous compassion, altruism and generosity. There are countless people who selflessly give their effort, their resources, even their lives to bring about the good of others, asking no repayment except the knowledge that they've worked for a worthy cause. It would be unnecessary for me to cite examples; we all know people who are like this.

On the other hand, human beings are also capable of incredible cruelty, depravity and viciousness. We wage wars, inquisitions, pogroms, witch hunts. We are all too easily led by malignant demagogues, all too easily whipped up into frenzies of savagery and hate, and all too easily persuaded to treat strangers and outsiders as subhuman and to visit the most horrific atrocities on them. Again, I trust there's no need to cite examples; anyone versed in history can come up with far too many.

It seems unbelievable that two such contradictory impulses could exist within the same human nature, but this is undeniably the case. Our selflessness, our lovingkindness, our sense of justice is deeply rooted in mind and instinct. So is our hatred, our chaos and our evil.

Both these impulses, no doubt, come from the evolutionary process that created us. Throughout human prehistory, our ability to be kind and giving was a necessary part of living in groups. Human beings are ill-equipped to survive alone, and the better aspects of our nature are what made it possible for tribes and societies to hold together. But just as true, there were those who were our enemies and would have destroyed us. Our impulses toward violence, aggression and tribalism protected us in those between-group conflicts, even as they perpetuated them.

Until the true story of our origin was known, religions throughout history have noticed the strange amalgam of human nature and sought to explain it. Christianity's explanation, in particular, was a peculiar stroke of theological genius: by postulating an originally good human nature tainted by sin, they invented a structure that let them claim credit for the good acts of their followers while disavowing the bad ones. When Christians perform generous and selfless deeds, as many of them do, the apologists claim that their saving belief in Jesus was what made that goodness possible. When Christians do evil, again as many of them do, those apologists seek to rationalize it away as the result of sin. In reality, people of all belief systems perform acts of tremendous good, as well as acts of terrible evil. They both arise from our nature, they are both part of our heritage. No special theological explanation is needed for either one.

In the past, both these impulses were necessary for survival; either one, if untempered by the other, would have led to humanity's downfall. But in the present day, as societies have run together and merged into a global community, as our technology has magnified our impulses both for good and for ill, we can no longer afford for our loyalties to be divided between light and dark. The consequences of unchecked aggression, of letting the worse side of our nature get the upper hand, are too serious.

And just as bad is the misguided attempt of some people to deny that this problem even exists - which we have an unfortunate tendency to do. Greta Christina's post describes this common rationalization:

We have a tendency to think that bad people know they're bad. Our popular culture is full of villains cackling over their beautiful wickedness, or trying to lure their children to The Dark Side. It's a very convenient way of positioning evil outside ourselves, as something we could never do ourselves. Evil is Out There, something done by The Other.

It's fully understandable why we have this defense mechanism. Who wants to think of themself as capable of evil? But at the same time, this tendency is extremely dangerous - because it leads us to believe that we aren't the kind of people who could do such things. And the people who really and truly believe that are the ones who are most likely to end up committing the blackest evils - because they never consider the possibility that they've gone astray. Since they're the good ones, whatever they do must be in the service of Good and Right. (This dynamic is all too visible in the presidency of George W. Bush, which is thankfully drawing to a close...)

The writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who experienced firsthand the terrors of the Soviet Union, was well acquainted with the evil that can be done by people who are infallibly convinced that they're laboring in the service of good. In his work The Gulag Archipelago, he laid his finger on the central problem:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?

And yet, as impossible as this seems, it is what we must do if humanity is to survive in the long term. How can we excise part of our own nature? I don't claim to have the answer, but there's one thing I can suggest.

As I wrote all the way back near the beginning of this blog, we can't fight influences on our behavior that we're not aware of. This applies with added force when it comes to the dark side of our nature: people who deny that they possess such a capability often turn out to be the ones in which it does the most damage. Recognizing that we all have this capability, that the potential for evil is not an aberration but a universal human trait, might make people better at recognizing the warning signs when it threatens to emerge within themselves and others, and using that awareness to avert the worst-case scenario from coming to pass.