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.

This is an open thread. Comments and discussion are welcome.

Is what I just wrote a contradiction? I don't think so. I find no inconsistency in saying that a depiction of some group is a stereotype, even if it is actually held by some members of that group. The purpose of a stereotype is as a misleading, derogatory depiction of some group as a whole. Even if a very few members do fit that description, it's untruthful and insulting to imply that all of them do. As I hope to show, atheists who are nihilists and Satanists do exist, but their numbers are so small that they are essentially negligible in comparison with atheists as a whole. They do not represent the views and beliefs of the larger majority of atheists any more than ranting lunatics like Fred Phelps represent all of Christianity.

I'll begin with Satanists. Most people who call themselves by that name today are devotees of a church founded in the 1960s by the eccentric occultist Anton LaVey. Satanism as such does not include the literal worship of demons. Instead, Satanists believe in the exaltation of the individual, hedonism and self-will as the supreme virtues, and the desirability of a society of Spencerian social Darwinism. (If anything, Satanism is most similar to Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, which LaVey acknowledges having been influenced by.)

Satanism is not a large movement. Self-identified Satanists were not even numerous enough to register in the 2001 ARIS study, which counted religious groups as small as 4,000 members nationwide. I know of no survey undertaken since which has come up with any greater numbers.

Nevertheless, they do exist. As with any tiny religious movement, they have a web presence - here's an excerpt from one of their essays, written by the current head of the church, Peter Gilmore.

As you can see, there are no elements of Devil worship in the Church of Satan. Such practices are looked upon as being Christian heresies; believing in the dualistic Christian world view of "God vs. the Devil" and choosing to side with the Prince of Darkness. Satanists do not believe in the supernatural, in neither God nor the Devil.

So, Satanists say that they don't literally believe in Satan; fair enough. But if that's true, why do they define themselves in terms of the language and symbology of a religious tradition which they supposedly reject? Why do they name themselves after that which they do not believe in? This inconsistent behavior indicates a seriously confused state of mind, to say the least.

My strong suspicion is that Satanism is a faith crafted to appeal to the rabble-rousers, the self-chosen outsiders, that are bound to be present in any large enough group of people. They adopt these terms because they enjoy shocking others, because they revel in the sense of excitement that comes from deliberately transgressing social norms, and because they find a shared identity with others who feel the same.

Next is a marginally more serious position: the atheists who proclaim themselves to be moral nihilists. (Regular Daylight Atheism readers may know the one or two examples who occasionally comment here.)

It seems to me, as I think it would seem to any rational person, that it's a contradiction for Satanists to draw their identity from the religion they reject. I think this point applies with even more force to the nihilists.

Religious apologists assert, continually, unendingly, and in the face of a vast amount of contrary evidence, that atheists can have no basis for morality, and that only people who believe in God have any good justification for ethical behavior. In my experience, most atheists see through this flimsy slur and recognize that morality can be based on conscience and reason. But, inevitably, some people will be taken in. If the religious say often enough that only through religion can you find morality, some people will begin to believe them; and when those people rightfully notice that the factual claims of religion are a morass of wishful thinking and fallacy unsupported by evidence, they often conclude: so much the worse for morality.

In an important sense, the nihilists are the product of religion in a way that most atheists are not. We humanist atheists find a reason to recreate morality apart from supernatural claims, based on the facts of this world. The nihilists, meanwhile, are still stuck in religious stereotypes about how the non-religious "should" think and behave. They've had the insight to see religious superstitions for what they are, but not enough to take the next step and adopt a worldview completely free from them. Instead, the religious outlook still tinges their beliefs and their thinking.

With both nihilists and Satanists, we can see how religion creates its own enemies. Rather than face our position as it truly is and try to refute it, most religious apologists spend their time exclusively thrashing at strawmen of their creation. They push these stereotypes so persistently that they end up being actually adopted by a handful of real people. Predictably, these few are then pointed out and played up to exaggerate the seriousness of the "threat", and their existence used as a broad brush with which to tar all atheists.

• The 91st Carnival of the Godless at State of Protest

• The 64th Carnival of the Liberals at Sir Robin Rides Away

• The 69th Philosophers' Carnival at Possibly Philosophy

• The 86th Skeptics' Circle at The Skepbitch

• And, last but certainly not least, the 19th Humanist Symposium at Letters from a Broad!

This passage is John 14:12-14. The context is Jesus speaking to the apostle Philip:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it."

Greater works than these shall he do. According to Jesus himself, as recorded by the divinely inspired and inerrant text of the Bible, any true Christian believer will be able not only to reproduce the miracles of Jesus, but to do better miracles.

Just to make absolutely sure we understand this, the text has Jesus promise that he will grant any miracle whatsoever which a believer prays for in his name. In fact, he promises it twice. There are no loopholes or qualifications to this pledge, none of the convenient apologetic excuses used by modern believers - "but only if your faith is great enough", "God always answers prayer, but sometimes the answer is no", "God only does miracles in front of the faithful", and so on. Jesus says plainly and clearly, "If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it."

Of course, these excuses have arisen because this promise is plainly false. Christians can not do miracles like those of Jesus, much less miracles which exceed those of Jesus. They cannot heal the paralyzed, they cannot still hurricanes, they cannot stroll across seas, they cannot raise the dead. Their prayers, like the prayers of all other believers of all other religions, are empty words and nothing more. However fervent they may be, however many times they invoke Jesus' name, they produce no tangible effect greater than slightly stirring the air. The only power that a Christian or any other person has to affect the course of events in the world is what they can achieve through their own, non-supernatural effort.

This verse is just one of many in the Bible which promise, repeatedly and without qualification, that God will grant any prayer prayed by a faithful believer (see "Nothing Fails Like Prayer" for a more complete list). In the superstitious and credulous times when this book was written, perhaps that false promise was not such a great impediment. Its very extravagance may even have been a help. But in this somewhat more skeptical era, it seems likely that many believers would be shocked and upset if they knew their own text made promises it could not deliver. How many Christians might become disgruntled and realize they have been taken advantage of if they knew about this Bible verse?

Other posts in this series:

• Little-Known Bible Verses

I have many objections to communism, not least of which is last year's news that, in Russia, the Communist party is now teaming up with the Russian Orthodox Church to outlaw homosexuality - a fitting illustration of the similar dogmatic, irrational attitudes that prevail in both ideologies. But my differences go deeper than that, and this post will outline three of the most serious.

Communism lacks a good mechanism to allocate resources to where they are most needed, resulting in waste, shortages and inefficiency. In a capitalist economy, price serves as both a vital signal of demand and also the means of meeting that demand. When a product or service is demanded in excess of current supply, the price rises, attracting people to produce that product or service in order to make a greater profit. Conversely, when supply outstrips demand, the price drops and people are naturally discouraged from producing more of the excess commodity until the imbalance resolves itself. This "invisible hand" of the market, an organizational force at the macro-level emerging from thousands of independent decisions, is often an extremely efficient way of balancing supply with demand and resulting in a society where there is neither wasteful excess nor shortage.

Communism, however, has no such balancing mechanism. In a communist society, the state sets the price of all commodities, and this decision can be completely arbitrary. In theory, if a shortage occurs, the state simply orders the appropriate entities to produce more, but this decision is insufficiently sensitive to price signals and has no necessary link to supply or demand. No group of centralized bureaucrats has the information or the intelligence to make such perfect decisions affecting the price of every transaction in society. This "top-down" approach will inevitably result in inefficiency and misallocation of resources, wasting commodities that are produced in excess of demand and causing shortages of commodities that are not produced in sufficient quantity to meet demand. The "bottom-up" approach of capitalism is a far superior means of dealing with this problem.

Communism discourages productive effort and innovation. In a communist society, no one is richer than anyone else; the state allocates goods to all people based only on need. This means that there are no material rewards for invention, innovation, or greater productivity. It also means that those who are less productive than the average have no incentive to work harder or increase their output.

What this inevitably leads to, in the real world, is a vicious spiral of decreased effort and decreased production, as people slacken their efforts so as to work no harder than the least hardworking member of society (whom they'll be paid the same as anyway, so why work any harder than them?). This is the classic Prisoner's Dilemma in action, and means that such a system cannot compete against a capitalist economy that tangibly rewards good ideas and hard work.

Communism necessarily denies the freedom of the individual. Of all the shortcomings of communism, I consider this one to be the most serious. A communist economy necessarily denies people the freedom to seek happiness in whatever career they choose. In such a system, decisions regarding what job a person will take must be made by the state. When the bureaucracy perceives a shortage, their only response is to order more people to join the effort of producing the desired commodity. Thus, a communist society is intrinsically a tyranny where people's lives must be controlled in minute and exacting detail by a faceless and distant central committee. This alone should make communism repugnant to all lovers of freedom and liberty, and bring us to the realization that no such system could ever succeed in reality without massive and widespread violations of the human right to choose our own destiny and pursue happiness as we see fit.

This is an open thread. Comments and discussion are welcome.

The Learning Annex is a privately owned continuing-education school in New York. As a resident of New York City, I can testify to its success - its kiosks of free course catalogs are on nearly every street corner in Manhattan. It was founded in 1980 by Bill Zanker, who sold the company in 1991 and then repurchased it and resumed ownership in 2002. The 2007 Inc. 500, a list of the nation's fastest-growing private companies, ranked the Learning Annex at number 346 and said that it makes over $100 million in revenue in each year.

On my lunch break last week, I picked up a Learning Annex catalog and flipped through it. Some of its offered courses are about professional software, how to found a small business, how to interview for a job, or other serious topics. Others are about dating, diet, or other self-help topics. But a great many of them are straight-up pseudoscience. A large number of Learning Annex classes promise to teach students how to develop their psychic powers, how to get rich or find the perfect spouse using the "Law of Attraction" (the Law of Attraction is a very popular course topic), how to communicate with dead relatives, how to "reverse the aging process", how to heal using qi gong, how to improve your life with neurolinguistic programming (for the jaw-dropping price of $2500), and many more.

As a private business, the Learning Annex profits by people signing up to take its courses, so they have little reason to turn away anyone who offers to teach a class. This no doubt accounts for much of the bottom-feeding superstition in these pages. There are many self-deluded people who are eager to share their credulity with the world, and of course it's much easier to claim to be a teacher of psychic powers than to be a teacher of Photoshop. One requires actual skill and education, while the other thrives on a lack of any discernible qualifications or results. The mantle of "psychic teacher" can be worn by any charlatan; if they've published a book or run a website, so much the better.

But it goes far beyond that. The Learning Annex, far from passively putting up with these miracle-mongers, actively works to promote them and boasts about their presence. The first page of its catalogue, as well as a later full-page ad, prominently advertises a webcast by noted psychic failure and free-speech enemy Sylvia Browne. The Browne webcast is presented as a tie-in for the launch of their own new pseudoscience-themed site, SpiritNow.com, whose index page is a gleeful mishmash of astrology, angels, psychics and feng shui. The back page of the catalogue, meanwhile, advertises a course taught by TV psychic Char Margolis.

Purely on an economic level, it's hard to fault the Learning Annex. No doubt they, like much of the media, have found that peddling pseudoscience is a great way to rake in the bucks. Marketing to skeptics is an endeavor that some might say suffers from an intrinsic contradiction. But the credulous are huge in number and eager to be exploited.

But the problem with pandering to superstition is that, inevitably, it degrades one's seriousness and credibility. The more this nonsense infects its pages, the more the Learning Annex will lose what real educators it has. After all, if you're a genuine, credible expert on some important topic, why make yourself a laughingstock by sharing space with fly-by-night psychics, people who talk to angels, and hawkers of the latest get-rich-quick scams? Pseudoscience, like water, seeks its own level. Before long, if they continue at this pace, this is all the Learning Annex will have left - just one more outlet for every brand of nonsense our society has to offer.

Every educational institution has to confront the fact, at some point, that real teaching is a difficult, expensive business. It's certainly possible to succeed doing it legitimately, but the temptation will always be there to lower the standards, throw open the gates, and make the easy money from people who flock to have their superstitions catered to and their prejudices reinforced. "What's the harm?" is the usual rationalization - a rhetorical question which can be answered by noting that the harm, though subtle at first, is very real indeed. It consists in sending the message that pseudoscience is a legitimate area of study, worthy of being put on a par with genuine science. Inevitably, science suffers from that equation.

"And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it."

—Matthew 16:18 (RSV)

The biblical metaphor of the church built on rock is interwoven throughout Christianity, used as a metaphor for the presumed stability and eternality of the faith. The Catholic church points to two thousand years of continuous tradition as proof that they are the rock in question, while other denominations cite their alleged correct interpretation of scripture, the belief that God is on their side, their anticipation of end-times vindication, or other details.

I say, let them have their analogy. We have a better one.

I wrote in "Belaboring the Obvious" that there are many pundits who confidently assert the futility of debating religion, claiming that no one ever changes their mind. I was very happy to see a substantial number of commenters step up to count themselves among that allegedly non-existent multitude. And, as I've pointed out, our numbers are growing generation by generation and even year by year. We're still nowhere near a majority, but our growth is ongoing.

If reason seems futile, that's only because it doesn't produce dramatic changes of opinion in every case, or even in most cases. Human psychology just isn't that malleable. The persuasive power of reason is less like a great torrent that sweeps away houses, more like the gentle dripping of water on stone. It may seem like a weak force, a tiny, imperceptible thing against the massed strength of rock. What could a few drips of water ever do to the hardness of stone?

But be not deceived: gentle as it may seem, weak as it may seem, water is the stronger of the two. It may work at a rate too slow for humans to perceive, but it has been one of the major forces shaping the surface of our planet. Given a million years, the soft, ceaseless pounding of waves can pulverize rock into soft sand. Given ten million years, it can erase impact craters or carve vast canyons through stone. Given a hundred million years, it can wear away mountains to nothing.

Over the span of a human lifetime, stone seems invulnerable. But if we could see with the eyes of geological time, it would be ephemeral as mist. We could see mountains upthrust, sharp and craggy, and then sink again as they were gentled by the scouring of erosion and carried piece by piece to the sea. We could see roots split stone, acid dissolve it, and lichen eat it away, transforming it into soil. We could see frost wedge itself into cracks and expand, pushing apart solid rock. We could see stone of all kinds crushed, metamorphosed, and ultimately subducted and melted.

The mightiest mountain is inevitably worn down to nothing by erosion, and in like manner, even the most powerful religion can be undercut by reason and fade away, brought low by forces it once scorned as beneath notice. So, let them have their rock - we are wind and water. We are a million falling drops, a million wind-blown particles, slowly wearing away at their supposedly solid foundation one grain at a time. And given enough time, we are the stronger. They may not notice the spreading cracks, but they are there nonetheless. We have seen what the future brings, and we know the trend is on our side.