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.

In my essay "Those Old Pearly Gates" on Ebon Musings, I raised what is, to my mind, one of the strongest moral arguments against the traditional monotheist conception of the afterlife:

The point is this. How can anyone enjoy Heaven, knowing that while you have eternal bliss there are people experiencing eternal suffering? Unless you belong to an insular religious community or a cult, it's almost certain that you know someone - a friend, a relative, a loved one, an idol who inspires you - whose religion of choice is different than yours, or who has no religion at all. How will you be able to enjoy Heaven in the certain knowledge that that person is, at the same moment, suffering the torments of the damned? What if it's a spouse, a parent, a best friend, a child? ...How can Heaven be any sort of reward at all if it means eternal separation from the people you care about, all the more so if those people must suffer without release while you are powerless to help them? And will you, a saved soul in Paradise, be content to kneel and worship the same god who, elsewhere at that same moment, is pouring out the flames of his wrath upon your lost loved ones?

Some religious people handle this problem by saying that Hell is not a fiery pit of torture, but a state of darkness and emptiness caused by separation from God - although I don't see how that would make things any better. Others simply dodge the question altogether.

However, the good folks at Rapture Ready have a different solution:

God's Word foretells that the Lord will wipe away all tears and sorrow for Believers --that all the things of the past, sinful world will be removed in some way. We infer from this that all memories that are painful --such as knowledge that we have family and friends who are suffering eternal damnation because of their rejection of Salvation through God's son, Jesus Christ, will be totally erased in the Heavenly dimension.

Apparently, they felt that this apologetic would soothe their worried readers. I can't speak for Rapture Ready's clientele, but it had exactly the opposite effect on me. This is horrifying. In a twisted sense, I have to give these people credit - they've managed to come up with what is possibly the only thing that could have made the idea of Hell any worse than it already is.

I'm not against the idea of Heaven. I accept the fact of death - mine and others' - but that doesn't make me enthusiastic about it. If there was another life where I could be reunited with my departed loved ones, I'd gladly welcome it. But if there was a Heaven, the existence of a Hell would be an unacceptably high price to pay for it. Even if I knew I was one of the saved, I'd rather choose nonexistence than be forced to know that people I care about were suffering eternal torment. That knowledge would be a kind of torture in itself, more than enough to turn Heaven into just another hell.

But the idea of forgetting that my loved ones were condemned? That would be even worse! What kind of happiness is it that must be purchased at the price of being ignorant of the suffering of others?

The authors of Rapture Ready never seem to think through the implications of this idea. What if it's my mother or father that's damned - will I have no knowledge of who raised me on Earth? Would a heavenly soul in that situation wonder why all his friends had their parents with them and they didn't have any? Wouldn't they be driven to investigate, to find out the great secret that's being hidden from them?

It would undeniably be a horrible thought that you were saved while your loved ones were forever damned. That grim knowledge would be enough to overwhelm whatever bliss there was to be had in the afterlife. But as in other areas, the way to fix the problem of suffering is to end suffering - not by making everyone else ignorant of it by some kind of miracle-induced amnesia. The idea that the saved should be induced to forget about the torture of their damned loved ones, so that they can enjoy their heavenly bliss in a state of dumb naivete, is intuitively revolting, and confirms what I said on an earlier occasion about how any attempt to actually explain what Heaven is like invariably reduces its inhabitants to a kind of bright machines.

I have to admit, I cringe when I read quotes like this:

Max may be a long way from his old home, but he plans on going a lot further than America. Extropianism is a "rational transhumanism", he explains. There may not be any supernatural force in the universe, but pretty soon, suggests More, once we get our brain implants and robot bodies working, we will be as gods.

The linked article is about Max More, a philosopher who advocates transhumanism - the idea that we can use technology to transcend the present limits of human biology. Like most transhumanists, More advocates a potpourri of wildly optimistic ideas: freeze ourselves through cryogenics, make our bodies immortal, digitize and upload our minds to live in virtual worlds or robot bodies.

As far as I'm concerned, most of these speculations so far outstrip the limits of what is currently possible that there's little point even thinking about them. In the very distant future, perhaps, these will be issues to seriously consider. For now, I think we should be concentrating on the many more pressing problems that can be alleviated by current technology. Once people are no longer dying from malnutrition or malaria, maybe then we can start considering how to make them immortal. In the meantime, most of this is just unconstrained fantasizing that distracts us from the things that are truly important.

However, it was something else about this article that bothered me more - the throwaway line about how "we will be as gods". Nothing could appeal to me less. Frankly, I don't want to be like the gods.

Consult just about any piece of mythology you wish, and you'll find that gods are generally not very nice creatures. They're jealous, sadistic, manipulative, capricious, petty, possessing overdeveloped egos and hair-trigger tempers, and hateful toward those who are different. They're swift to anger, slow to forgive, and perpetually obsessed with whether people are groveling enough or paying them sufficient tribute. When it comes to dealing with those who disobey, violence is typically their first, last, and only resort. In short, they exemplify all the worst traits of the humans that created them, and few if any of our best traits. Why on earth would we want to be like them?

We are human beings. No matter how much knowledge we gain, no matter how much power we gain, we will always be human beings. We should not aspire to be gods, or anything else that we are not. We should aspire, instead, to be the best human beings we possibly can be - to cultivate what is best in our nature and encourage it to flourish. For all the evil that we have done, human beings are also capable of astonishing acts of mercy and benevolence. These are traits that are conspicuously absent in most of the stories of gods we read. We do not need to be forever aping our old mythologies; we have the ability to transcend their narrow perspective, and in many ways, we already have.

"What if she doesn't flip? How long do you give it?"
"If you can't get to 'em somehow in the first forty-eight hours, more of the same isn't going to be any more effective."
"Starvation isn't a motivator?"
"Would be for me, but I guess they've proved it with prisoners of war. The ones who can survive that first round of psychological and physical torture aren't likely to ever break, no matter how long you keep it up."

—from Armageddon, book 11 of the Left Behind series, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins

One of the tenets of faith of Christian end-times believers is that, in the tribulation period after the rapture, the world will be taken over by a planetary government ultimately run by the Antichrist. True Christians will be a tiny, hounded minority in this totalitarian vision, forced to live underground and always on the run from the forces of evil, and those who are captured can expect torture and execution.

If you happen to be reading this site in an apocalyptic, post-rapture world, there's one piece of advice you should probably keep in mind, as given in this list of 14 things to do for those who miss the rapture:

Endure to the end, Saint. Don't give up no matter what happens to you. Do not denounce Jesus. Give your life if you have to, but do not denounce Jesus in any way!

No doubt, this warning stems from Jesus' words in Matthew 10:33:

But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.

Given that rapture-believing Christians tend to interpret every verse of the Bible with blunt literalism, this warning must be terrifying. If believers give in, even under torture, and deny Jesus, they will lose their eternal salvation. To protect themselves against this disturbing possibility, many of them imagine that people who truly wish to can withstand torture no matter how bad it is. The excerpt quoted above from the Left Behind series makes this claim.

But this statement, like much else in the LB series, displays a total ignorance of human psychology. In reality, no person can withstand torture indefinitely, and it is quite possible to use it to force people to say or do anything.

Consider the torture technique called waterboarding. In this technique, the prisoner is strapped to an inclined board, head downwards. Plastic or cloth is wrapped over his face, and buckets of water are then poured over his nose and mouth. This treatment triggers choking and the gag reflex and gives the victim the terrifying sensation of drowning. This technique was used by the Spanish Inquisition against suspected heretics and by Japanese soldiers against prisoners of war in World War II. It is also now being used by the American government against known or suspected members of Al Qaeda.

Waterboarding is a far more terrifying and effective method of torture than it might at first appear. Consider what happened when CIA agents, to rehearse the tactic for use on detainees, first tried it on each other to see how it felt. Keep in mind that these were the CIA agents chosen for field interrogation, the toughest of the tough. They knew they were in no danger and that they could stop what was happening at any time. Bearing all this in mind, how long did they last?

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in.

Fourteen seconds. And when the technique was tried on the actual detainees, similar results were obtained:

They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess.

(If you have any remaining doubts about the effectiveness of waterboarding as a torture technique, consider this post from the Straight Dope Message Board, where a poster tried it on himself to see what it felt like. Not recommended for the faint of heart.)

As an interrogation technique, waterboarding and other forms of torture are worse than useless; they will soon produce a prisoner eager to say anything he thinks his questioners want to hear. But in the end-times scenario, this is precisely the outcome desired. A Satanic one-world government, with no compunction about using these or other torture methods on prisoners, could easily coerce any Christians it captured to deny Jesus in public and seal their eternal fate.

The only other explanation rapture-believing Christians could give is that their faith will give believers some magical, supernatural power to withstand torture. This belief, like rapture belief in general, is an example of how many end-times believers fantasize that their faith makes them special and exempts them from the rules and principles that apply to everyone else.

Back in March, I commented on a Beliefnet debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. In part 4 of that debate, Andrew Sullivan made what I thought was an astonishing concession:

But I can say that [this experience] represented for me a revelation of God's love and forgiveness, the improbable notion that the force behind all of this actually loved us, and even loved me. The calm I felt then; and the voice with no words I heard: this was truer than any proof I have ever conceded, any substance I have ever felt with my hands, any object I have seen with my eyes.

You will ask: how do I know this was Jesus? Could it not be that it was a force beyond one, specific Jewish rabbi who lived two millennia ago and was executed by the Roman authorities? Yes, and no. I have lived with the voice of Jesus read to me, read by me, and spoken all around me my entire life - and I heard it that day. If I had been born before Jesus' birth, would I have realized this? Of course not. If I had been born in Thailand and raised a Buddhist, would I have interpreted this experience as a function of my Buddhist faith rather than Jesus? If I were a pilgrim right now in Iraq, would I attribute this epiphany to Allah? An honest answer has to be: almost certainly.

I couldn't agree more, and we should remember this lesson when faced with stories of religious experiences told by other believers. Take this post, which I found through a comment in the thread "Instruction Manual or Chronicle?"

What happened instead was that I slowly became aware that someone else was in my room. I couldn't see anyone, but I could sense a presence. The intensity of the presence began to grow, until it was so overwhelming that I was aware of nothing else, not even myself. I knew I was in the presence of God.

...Tonight is the 20th anniversary of that experience, and the memory is still as fresh in my mind as if it happened yesterday.

There's no doubt that experiences like this are real, and that they often have a profound and lasting effect on the lives of people who have them. But at the same time, there are some important features of religious experience which the passage above exemplifies, and to which I'd like to call attention.

First: These experiences, while rich in emotional color and texture, are typically light on actual content. (Sullivan revealingly refers to "the voice with no words"). In the many accounts like this that I've read, there's hardly ever an audible voice or a clear message. Instead, the believer experiences a variety of sensations: an oceanic feeling of transcendent bliss, a vivid sense of heightened significance and interconnection, a perception of being swept away from oneself or unified with the infinite.

Second: These experiences virtually never cause a person to convert to a completely different religion, one which they were unfamiliar with prior to the experience. Instead, the religious experience is almost always interpreted as confirmation of a belief set which the person either already belonged to or was seriously considering converting to. Look for a lifelong Christian who had such an experience and felt it as the presence of Vishnu (or a lifelong Hindu who felt the presence of Jesus) - I can all but guarantee your search will be in vain. As Sullivan says, these experiences are shaped and interpreted in light of the believer's upbringing and culture. Whenever and wherever they occur, they are almost invariably believed to be manifestations of the local god, whichever one that is.

These facts add up to an important conclusion for atheists. In many cases I've encountered, the life-altering power of religious experience is put forth as the first reason for belief in God. The people who have these experiences rationalize that no other power could have moved them so deeply. Yet this is an argument that assumes its own conclusion: people consider it as proof of their particular god because that is the only thing they have been taught to interpret it as. That is the conventional wisdom, the default interpretation, in our society. And since it's widely claimed that these epiphanies are experiences of God, people who have them naturally fall into believing and proclaiming that this is what they were, thus setting up the next generation of self-supporting circular interpretation.

In reality, the sense of rapture is like many other things: not a religious phenomenon, but simply a human phenomenon common to all people. If it were more widely known that believers of all sects have equally persuasive experiences of this kind - and if it were more widely known that atheists have them as well (yes, atheists also have moments of transcendent joy) - then we might develop a more realistic view of their cause.

Rather than leaping to interpret them as divine visitations, we should recognize them for what they are: natural products of human neural wiring. They emerge from the structure of the brain; they are precipitated by the right kinds of events, either internal or external; and when they occur simultaneously with the making of a decision that had been coalescing in the believer's mind, they're viewed as powerful confirmation of that decision and can inspire people to restructure their life around it. These experiences are real, yes, and they can certainly be meaningful, but they do not point to anything outside the self.