No, I'm not kidding.

In August, you may recall, I wrote a post titled "Why I'm Donating to Kay Hagan". This post concerned the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina, where Democratic candidate Kay Hagan is running against the Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole. The focus of my post was a press release from the Dole campaign attacking Hagan for attending a fundraiser held by Wendy and Woody Kaminer, who are politically active atheists. In this press release, the Dole campaign pandered to religious bigotry in the most blatant and shameful way, seeking to demonize not just her opponent but all American atheists.

At the time, I had some harsh words for politicians like Dole who build their campaigns on exploiting prejudice and fear:

It's about time we saw atheists taking a greater role in American political life, and I'm not about to stand by and watch while we're dragged through the mud by self-righteous demagogues who slander us in order to appeal to the ignorant and prejudiced. If we're going to have an influence on American civic life, we need to flex our political muscles. Kay Hagan ought to be rewarded for inviting nonbelievers onto her platform...

Now, that the Dole campaign has put out a new ad attacking Hagan. Far from abandoning her earlier appeal to bigotry, this one doubles down on it, dredging up the most contemptible and pathetic lies imaginable about the goals of atheists and about Hagan's associations with us. In the ad (potentially NSFW language), Dole claims that atheists want to "remove any reference to God in the public arena, including eliminating the Christmas Holiday", and calls us "the most vile, radical liberals in America".

And on the last page of this flier, we find this:

Oh yes: the Dole campaign quotes my actual post and gives the URL to this site. I'm speechless. Apparently, Daylight Atheism has now become part of the U.S. Senate campaign for North Carolina.

I'm not upset about this. In fact, I'm thrilled. I couldn't be happier. Let the Dole campaign send traffic to my site; I regret nothing, and I stand behind everything I've written on this matter. With any luck, some of her supporters will come here, read for themselves what I've written, and see for themselves the falsehood of Dole's ugly, bigotry-baiting claims.

Frankly, I think this is a sign of desperation. Recent polls have shown Hagan with a genuine lead. Trying to mobilize the religious right by appealing to hatred of atheists may well be the only hope Elizabeth Dole has left. So, I think we should cut that hope off at the pass. Let's send the religious right a strong message that atheists are a force to be reckoned with in American politics, and that they stoop to smearing us at their peril.

I'm not saying that the Democrats are perfect, far from it. As a party, they pander to religion much more than I'd like. But at the very least, they have a greater respect for the separation of church and state and are more likely to appreciate the importance of including all Americans in their coalition. By contrast, Republicans in general, and Elizabeth Dole specifically, have perfected the art of pitching their campaigns to an increasingly narrow sliver of the electorate. They pander to the worst instincts of their would-be supporters, stirring up prejudice and fear, rather than promoting substantive and rational governance. They seek only to represent the rigid views of right-wing Christian fundamentalists, rather than building a broader coalition of Americans of all kinds.

Senator Dole, by your words and your actions, you have shown yourself unfit for elected office. You are supported to represent all the residents of your state, yet by your repeated and shameless appeals to prejudice, you have proven that you are not the representative of the 10% of your state's residents who are non-religious. I take pleasure in battling bigotry of all kinds, yours no less than others. If you want a fight, then bring it on. It's about time that American atheists, as well as all tolerant and progressive people of good will, took a stand against the venomous and divisive politics of the Christian right.

Postscript: If you want to punish anti-atheist bigotry and help Kay Hagan win, please consider donating to her campaign, and leave a comment letting us know. Let's show the religious right that they can't push us around without paying the consequences!

UPDATE (11/4): Good riddance, Elizabeth Dole... welcome, U.S. Senator Kay Hagan!

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

Summary: A quiet, thoughtful, non-polemical book. At times Comte-Sponville comes close to conceding more than he should, but his positive evocation of atheism is a much-needed effort and may be appealing to theists grappling with the first stirrings of deconversion.

Andre Comte-Sponville's The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality is a unique book. Though written by an unabashed atheist, it shows considerable sympathy for religion. It also expresses a view of spirituality that I suspect many atheists will find strange, though I personally see much to recommend in it. Comte-Sponville describes himself as a "Christian atheist", which sounds paradoxical but which he explains is meant as a parallel to "atheistic Jew". Like secular Jews, he sees himself as coming from a particular religious heritage, one in which he no longer believes but which nevertheless shapes his cultural associations and his outlook on life.

The book has three sections, of which the first is titled "Can We Do Without Religion?" In both the individual and the societal case, the author asserts, the answer is an obvious yes. What we cannot do without, he explains, are communion and fidelity: in order, our sense of connection to others and our moral obligations toward them, and our sense of connection with the past and our respect for the traditions and institutions that have come down to us. I appreciated that he goes to great lengths to explain why an atheist can be a moral person, and that in fact there is no reason why an atheist would not be.

The second section, "Does God Exist?", considers and refutes several classical arguments for the existence of God, and provides several reasons to believe the opposite. Though Comte-Sponville doesn't go for the jugular, he presents these arguments fairly and competently. He says that these arguments "by no means constitute a proof of God's nonexistence" (p.131), but that he personally finds them convincing, and insists "on the right to express them publicly and submit them to others for discussion, as is only natural" (p.132).

The final section, "Can There Be An Atheist Spirituality?" will probably be the most controversial among atheists. Comte-Sponville argues that the answer to the title question is yes, there can be a genuine spirituality without belief in God. He describes the characteristics of mystical, transcendent experience - the sense of oceanic bliss, of interconnection with the universe, and a sense of serenity and acceptance in which nothing is lacking or refused - and says that there is nothing necessarily supernatural about any of them, and that atheists, including himself, can and do have these experiences. "All religions involve spirituality... but all forms of spirituality are not religious" (p.136).

There were a few things I didn't like about this book. One is that Comte-Sponville, at times, gives religion too much credit. For instance, he says that "there are more saintly people among believers than among atheists" (p.22), and that he wishes God did exist (p.124). In most cases, he goes on to qualify these statements with fuller explanations (for instance, he says the fact that God fulfills so many human longings is good reason to be skeptical, not to believe), but the fact remains that these passages are likely to be quoted by religious apologists as "evidence" that even atheists endorse some of their claims. It would have been better if he had worded these passages in ways not as susceptible to misinterpretation.

That said, I did like this book's defense of atheist spirituality. I've said myself that atheism is compatible with a genuine sense of spirituality, one that recognizes the awe and wonder of life and the mystery of existence without the baggage of supernaturalism. Like Comte-Sponville, I believe that transcendent moments of joy are not the property of religion, but the common trust of humanity.

The other good thing about this book was its approachable, open tone. Comte-Sponville defends atheism firmly, but gently. At times, as I said, I found him almost too conciliatory; but I think a believer would find this book very non-threatening, and might be led to read it and gain a better understanding of the atheist viewpoint. For stirring a rousing sense of atheist pride, or issuing a call to arms against the dangers of fundamentalism, this isn't the book you want. But for believers feeling the first stirrings of deconversion and seeking a gentle introduction to atheism, or for new atheists who want to know if atheism can provide the positive things they're used to getting from religion, it just may be the right book for the job.

The other day, I got this piece of mail soliciting donations for a "Thanksgiving meal ticket" for New York City's homeless, from an organization calling itself the Bowery Mission:

I skimmed the letter, which looked like a run-of-the-mill charity solicitation. (I normally give to America's Second Harvest for this sort of thing.) I was about to throw it away when a thought occurred to me: The name "The Bowery Mission" sounds distinctly religious, but I hadn't noticed anything in the letter to indicate that this was anything other than a secular organization.

I went back and read more closely, and this time I found it, buried in small print on the back of the donation form:

We are committed to:
• Using your contributions faithfully and wisely, in accordance with our mission to minister in New York City to men, women and children caught in cycles of poverty, hopelessness and dependencies of many kinds, and to see their lives transformed to hope, joy, lasting productivity and eternal life through the power of Jesus.

...Our meals are the primary reason many people come to The Bowery Mission. Once they're here, we introduce them to the full services of our Mission and to the power of God to change lives.

From researching this group on their website, I found that they are and have always been a religious organization - one that, in their own words, "strive[s] to achieve a balance between preaching the need for personal salvation and translating faith into action via the social Gospel". But, aside from that easily overlooked small-print disclaimer, there is nothing in their letter that says this.

It would be eminently possible for a non-Christian to read this letter and decide to donate under the mistaken assumption that this is a secular charity - and this, I suspect, is precisely what the Bowery Mission intends. By avoiding upfront disclosure of their religious intent, they're more likely to receive donations from people who would not give if they knew their money would be used for Christian evangelizing. Their religious nature is made more apparent on their website, but even there it is far from prominent.

To be clear, I don't object to religious groups providing charity for the needy. I don't even object to those groups engaging in proselytism as part of the bargain, so long as their funding comes only from private sources. What I do object to is misleading solicitation that phrases a group's mission in secular terms, when in fact sectarian preaching and evangelism are part and parcel of that mission. When I donate to charity, I want 100% of my donation to be spent on providing aid to those who need it. I don't want any of that money to be spent on promoting religious ideologies that are untrue and that accomplish nothing toward the goal at hand.

If any other atheists are solicited this holiday season by the Bowery Mission, beware! Your gift may not be put towards the ends you expect. There are many worthwhile secular charities, ones that simply seek to aid human beings in need without spreading false and divisive religious ideologies. We should seek to aid them instead.

In "The Rapture and the Fig Tree", I wrote about how end-times believers are always looking to reconstruct the past, seeking to force-fit the present into a framework of scripture written to apply to events in long-gone times. Given that many of these verses apply to people and places that no longer exist, a major part of this contrived exegesis is what I call "selective literalism": interpreting one verse literally and another one metaphorically, or even interpreting different parts of the same verse as literal or metaphor, in any way needed to make the passage apply to current or future events.

The first book of the Left Behind series shows how this works. The book's opening pages tell of a massive Russian surprise attack on Israel, which is LaHaye and Jenkins' interpretation of the "Battle of Gog and Magog" in the book of Ezekiel. Here's how they describe it, as reported by the protagonist Buck Williams:

"Frustrated at their inability to profit from Israel's fortune and determined to dominate and occupy the Holy Land, the Russians had launched an attack against Israel in the middle of the night... The Russians sent intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear-equipped MiG fighter-bombers into the region. The number of aircraft and warheads made it clear their mission was annihilation."

    "[Buck] stood in stark terror and amazement as the great machines of war plummeted to the earth all over the city, crashing and burning."

    "Miraculously, not one casualty was reported in all of Israel. Otherwise Buck might have believed some mysterious malfunction had caused missile and plane to destroy each other. But witnesses reported that it had been a firestorm, along with rain and hail and an earthquake, that consumed the entire offensive effort."

    "Among the ruins, the Israelis found combustible material that would serve as fuel and preserve their natural resources for more than six years."

    "Buck was stunned when he read Ezekiel 38 and 39 about a great enemy from the north invading Israel with the help of Persia, Libya, and Ethiopia. More stark was that the Scriptures foretold of weapons of war used as fire fuel and enemy soldiers eaten by birds or buried in a common grave."

Note very carefully that LaHaye and Jenkins only summarize the supposed prophecy from Ezekiel, and do not quote the text directly. Now, compare their description to the actual text of the book:

"And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords: Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet."

—Ezekiel 38:4-5

"And they that dwell in the cities of Israel shall go forth, and shall set on fire and burn the weapons, both the shields and the bucklers, the bows and the arrows, and the handstaves, and the spears, and they shall burn them with fire seven years. So that they shall take no wood out of the field, neither cut down any out of the forests; for they shall burn the weapons with fire: and they shall spoil those that spoiled them, and rob those that robbed them, saith the Lord God."

—Ezekiel 39:9-10

The Book of Ezekiel does predict a battle, but it says clearly that the attackers will be horsemen wielding swords and shields - not jet fighters and ICBMs. That this is not just a metaphor is confirmed by the second passage, which says that the victorious Israelites will burn their enemies' weapons for firewood, and will not have to gather dead wood from the fields or cut down trees from the forest. There is no indication from the text that any of this is meant metaphorically. Needless to say, this is not at all the same thing as extracting oil or gasoline from wrecked war machines.

LaHaye and Jenkins, by not quoting the passage directly, are practicing the most deceitful kind of selective literalism: claiming that Ezekiel's prophecy refers to a real event in the future, yet freely changing and rewriting sections of that prophecy to make it fit with the details of what they believe will happen. By so doing, they are attempting to cover up the fact that this prophecy could only refer to past events, and that any possibility for its future fulfillment has long since disappeared.

As reported by Americans United, thirty-three religious right churches endorsed Republican politicians from the pulpit on Sunday. This event was planned and orchestrated by the Alliance Defense Fund, a religious right legal group, which hopes to use it as a test case to have laws against church politicking declared unconstitutional.

Let's emphasize at the outset something that religious-right spokesmen, in the coming weeks, will be working their hardest to deceive everyone about. There are no laws forbidding churches from endorsing political candidates. What we do have are laws forbidding churches from endorsing candidates if they want to retain their tax exemption.

This is not a unique and onerous burden placed only on religious groups; rather, it is the same generally applicable law that applies to all bona fide non-profit organizations. In exchange for the privilege of tax exemption, such groups are expected to abstain from explicitly partisan political activity. The churches that endorsed candidates are not protesting an unjust law designed to oppress them. Rather, they are arrogantly and greedily trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want the privilege of tax exemption without having to play by the rules that apply to tax-exempt groups.

In reality, the ban on church politicking is little more than a formality. The IRS code permits discussion of "issues", which means that even churches that obey the letter of the law can very easily convey to their followers which candidate they are expected to vote for. I have little doubt that most of these churches' members were already planning to vote for John McCain. After all, white evangelicals are one of the most consistently Republican voting blocs in the country. But this latest stunt is a demonstration that they don't feel themselves obligated to obey even the minimal restrictions set by the law.

If churches truly wish to endorse candidates from the pulpit, then they should relinquish their tax exemption. AU has helpfully aided them in this by reporting six of the violators to the IRS. (One was the church run by Wiley Drake, whom you may remember was last seen urging his followers to pray God to kill advocates of church-state separation.) AU has said it will report the remaining churches if it acquires sufficient evidence, although the people behind this effort have said that they intend to submit the text of their sermons to the IRS themselves, which will be a nice saving of time.

Although the IRS has in the past been cautious to sanction violators, a sign of the undue respect paid to religion in this country, we can hope that they'll recognize this deliberate attempt to undermine their authority for what it is and take appropriate action. This is likely to be an expensive and embarrassing lesson for these churches in the meaning of the First Amendment - and, hopefully, a disincentive for others to listen to schemers like the Alliance Defense Fund in the future. Given America's financial chaos and the budget deficits that are certain to result, the taxes that I hope these churches will soon be paying are much-needed. That money can be put to more appropriate use, like funding public schools or repairing our decaying infrastructure, rather than supporting wasteful sectarianism.

Other posts in this series:

• Theocracy Watch

The other week, I received an excellent suggestion from a Daylight Atheism commenter via e-mail. He suggested I write a post on the following topic: How can a former believer overcome the vestigial fear of Hell?

I suspect this is a common problem. Many religions go to great effort to inculcate in their followers an instinctive terror of breaking the rules, and this irrational fear can often linger and continue to traumatize a person even after they have consciously and rationally decided that those religious beliefs are false. No blame attaches for this; it's just an intrinsic part of human psychology. Cold fear, unfortunately, is often a more powerful force than dispassionate reasoning.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes one victim of this psychological abuse who wrote to him seeking help:

I went to a Catholic school from the age of five, and was indoctrinated by nuns who wielded straps, sticks and canes. During my teens I read Darwin, and what he said about evolution made such a lot of sense to the logical part of my mind. However, I've gone through life suffering much conflict and a deep down fear of hell fire which gets triggered quite frequently. I've had some psychotherapy which has enabled me to work through some of my earlier problems but can't seem to overcome this deep fear.

Dr. Dawkins suggested a therapist, Jill Mytton, who herself escaped a cult called the Exclusive Brethren and now counsels people in similar situations. Yet even she still bears the traces of her former indoctrination:

"If I think back to my childhood, it's one dominated by fear. And it was the fear of disapproval while in the present, but also of eternal damnation. And for a child, images of hell-fire and gnashing of teeth are actually very real. They are not metaphorical at all." I then asked her to spell out what she had actually been told about hell, as a child, and her eventual reply was as moving as her expressive face during the long hesitation before she answered: "It's strange, isn't it? After all this time it still has the power to... affect me... when you... when you ask me that question. Hell is a fearful place. It's complete rejection by God. It's complete judgement, there is real fire, there is real torment, real torture, and it goes on for ever so there is no respite from it."

Reading about the horrible suffering that so many believers experience, anyone with a conscience would want to help. I'm well aware that there's no quick fix for a psychological trauma like this, and not having had a cult upbringing to break away from, I don't claim to be an expert on this. But I do have two suggestions, so I'll give them out in the hopes that they may do some good. Anyone who has more experience than me and can improve on them is invited to do so.

First: Most religious groups, for understandable reasons, try to instill into their followers the belief that their particular teachings are the only ones that are real or worth caring about. To counteract this, I suggest it may help to put those teachings into their proper context in the pantheon of world mythology. What I'd recommend for a struggling ex-believer is to read about all the afterlives that have been proposed - Greek, Egyptian, Buddhist, Hindu, and everything else that's out there. Once you can compare them side by side and are used to seeing them just as stories, it will be easier to do the same with the religion you were brought up in.

Second: The best way to conquer the phobia of Hell, as with any other phobia, is to induce extinction. Expose yourself to whatever idea or image triggers the fear - in small doses at first - and prove to yourself that no harmful consequences follow. Repeat this often enough, and the mental link between the stimulus and the fear is eventually broken. Of course, rationally speaking, this wouldn't disprove a punishment that's claimed to only arrive after death - but because we're dealing with an irrational fear and not a reasoned belief, I think it may be effective.

So, readers, what do you say? Can anyone improve on these suggestions?

One of the most common complaints leveled against Richard Dawkins (and other atheist writers) is that his understanding of religion isn't sufficiently sophisticated - that he dismisses religion without delving into all its intricacies of doctrine. For instance, Terry Eagleton:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins's views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?

What any of this has to do with the basic question of whether God exists is left unexplained. So common is this attack that P.Z. Myers gave it its own, very appropriate name - The Courtier's Reply - a reference to the famous fable of the Emperor's New Clothes. The analogy behind the Courtier's Reply is that no one has the right to claim the Emperor is naked unless they've first engaged in a detailed study of all the latest fashions in imaginary fabrics.

The use of this argument shows how religious apologists set the bar at a different height for atheists than they do for their own fellow believers. Why is it that that atheists are expected to be fluent in every last detail and nuance of theology, while no similar qualifications are needed to be a churchgoer?

Millions of theists pray, worship and attend church each week despite possessing pathetically shallow levels of knowledge and familiarity with their own religion. If atheists criticized Christianity despite possessing such shoddy knowledge of its teachings, they'd be lambasted - and rightly so. But no one seems to be demanding that the ill-informed faithful clear out of the pews until they've brought their theological knowledge up to code.

In fact, some of the world's major religions have commitment ceremonies where children as young as 12 or 13 are expected to pledge their lifelong devotion. Clearly, these faiths believe that even a child can understand their teachings well enough to make a meaningful vow of allegiance to them. How, then, can those same faiths turn around and say that atheists need to have a postgraduate education in theology to even think about objecting? This is just an attempt to create a double standard where detailed understanding is required to deny, but not to assent.

If anything, this is a bar that's not just uneven, it's perpetually moving. A lifetime of study would not be enough to learn every last detail about even a single religion. No one, atheist or theologian, could possibly know everything about the history and culture of a large faith. And again, while this is not viewed as a liability in believers, it serves as a convenient cudgel for apologists to use against us. When challenged, they can always demand that the atheist go away and study another long-dead theologian before questioning the existence of God.

But as Eagleton's excerpt shows, this is just a smokescreen. It rarely if ever has any bearing on the key question of whether theism is true. If God does not exist, of what possible relevance is the epistemological difference between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? We seek to respond to religious beliefs as they are actually held and practiced by a vast majority of the faithful, not to the rarefied views held by a tiny minority of theologians. We have no interest in debating how many angels can dance on a pinhead; we want to know whether there's any reason to believe in angels in the first place.

And, it should be noted, this argument is almost never applied in the reverse direction. That is to say, most of the believers who reject atheism know little, if anything, about it, and I'd bet that only a vanishing minority have ever read anything written by us in our own words. Greta Christina, as always, shines a clear light on the double standard being applied here. If we're expected to possess expertise on theism, why aren't theists expected to read up on atheism before rejecting it? Why aren't they expected to be experts on all the other faiths which they don't belong to?

It's often been observed that atheism, or at least outspoken atheism, seems rarer among America's black community than among American society in general. Although I don't know why that's true, I suspect that it may stem from the tendency of a minority group, especially one that's often discriminated against by wider society, to seek to preserve its heritage and uphold its distinctiveness by emphasizing a shared cultural identity.

Regardless, it would be unfortunate if the black community in America spurned the message of atheism. They, as much as any other group, have been a part of the proud history of American freethought and secularism, as we'll see in today's post on the contributions of a famous black freethinker.

W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most influential civil-rights activists of the twentieth century. He was the first black man to get a Ph.D. from Harvard, one of the founders of the NAACP, and a prolific writer, educator, historian and sociologist. His body of work included scholarly publications on history and sociology, novels, poetry, political columns, and collections of his essays such as his outstanding The Souls of Black Folk. For 25 years, he served as editor of the NAACP journal The Crisis, which published withering essays against racism and inequality and gave a voice to some major artists of the Harlem Renaissance.

Raised in a liberal Christian congregation in Boston, Du Bois attended an orthodox missionary college and then studied in Europe. By his own account, it was there that his initial doubts blossomed and he became a full-fledged freethinker. In Freethinkers, Susan Jacoby quotes a passage from his autobiography:

Religion helped and hindered my artistic sense. I know the old English and German hymns by heart. I loved their music but ignored their silly words with studied inattention. I worshipped cathedral and ceremony, which I saw in Europe, but I knew what I was looking at when in New York a Cardinal became a strike-breaker and the Church of Christ fought the Communism of Christianity.

After his return from Europe, Du Bois took up teaching at a black Methodist college, Wilberforce University. While there, he refused to lead students in prayer, drawing the wrath of school administrators. His views on religion were hardened by this treatment, and grew increasingly radical:

I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.

Du Bois' attacks on the church continued throughout his career. He wrote that World War I "spells Christianity's failure" in promoting peace among men, and in 1912 called for reforms "to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds."

Later in life, Du Bois would become engaged in bitter public dispute with some of his fellow civil-rights activists. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington argued over whether social equality for blacks could come before they achieved economic equality (Washington's position was that economic equality had to come first, while Du Bois, though he greatly valued education, argued that blacks were entitled to seek and demand the equal protection of the law in every area of life), while he and Marcus Garvey argued over whether blacks should seek to assimilate into American society as equals, or to promote the cause of black separatism (Garvey advocated the latter).

As he aged, Du Bois' sympathies drifted toward Communism, and he was investigated (though inconclusively) by the FBI and Joseph McCarthy's HUAC commission, where Albert Einstein testified as a character witness to defend him. He died in Ghana in August 1963, at the age of 95, one day before Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic "I Have a Dream" speech.

Other posts in this series:

• The Contributions of Freethinkers

The growth of atheism is coming at the expense of religion. As freethought makes gains in society, it will inevitably start by appealing to those who are religious only by default - the people who go to church because they've never known an alternative, those who are receptive to our message and easily persuaded. And as their members join us or simply drift away, the larger, established churches are bound to begin feeling the sting of declining membership. There are encouraging signs that this process is already underway, especially with the single largest Christian denomination, the Roman Catholic church.

The decline of the Catholic church in Europe has long been noted by many observers - even Catholic observers, as in this article from the Catholic magazine America. As a 2005 USA Today article said:

Every major religion except Islam is declining in Western Europe, according to the Center for the Study on Global Christianity at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass. The drop is most evident in France, Sweden and the Netherlands, where church attendance is less than 10% in some areas.

Last month, Pope Benedict XVI lamented the weakening of churches in Europe, Australia and the USA. "There's no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ," he told Italian priests. "The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying."

Even in traditionally Catholic countries like France, Spain and Ireland, the decline is apparent:

In Spain, where 81 percent of the population is Catholic, two-thirds of respondents in a 2002 survey said they rarely or never attend services. (source)

In the 1970s, more than 90% of Irish Catholics said they went to Mass once a week. Now the number is 44%, according to a recent survey.

...Last year, 15 men were ordained as Catholic priests for the entire island, with 5.6 million people. (source)

In 2006, 39 percent of babies were baptized, according to figures from state statistics institute Insee and the Conference of French Bishops. In 1996, it was 55 percent.

About a third of marriages were celebrated with a Catholic Mass in 2006, down from 44 percent 10 years earlier. (source)

America, too, has seen its Catholic population dropping steadily. As many as 10% of Americans are ex-Catholics, and churches and parishes are closing across the country because there are neither enough priests to run them nor people to attend them:

The "most damaging change in Catholic life is the precipitous decline in Mass attendance. It's the sign of a church collapsing," says Catholic University sociologist William D'Antonio, co-author of statistical studies of American Catholics.

Nationally, attendance slid from 44% in 1987 to 37% in 1999.

..."Each generation starts with a lower attendance rating. People don't grow into attending Mass," he says. (source)

Hispanic immigrants are one of the church's few bright spots, but even they tend to secularize after one or two generations.

There are several reasons for the steadily dwindling attendance and influence of the Catholic church. One of them, I feel certain, is that young Catholics feel increasingly disconnected from a church that continues to bash gays, exclude women from the priesthood, and preach against contraception. As society becomes increasingly liberal and tolerant, the Catholic church continues to cling obstinately to its irrational rules, and is accordingly being left in the dust. Another is the devastating sex-abuse scandal which has severely damaged the church's reputation and weakened people's trust in its hierarchy. A third is probably that people in increasingly prosperous and educated societies see less need for the consolations of religion. And all these factors operate in a positive-feedback loop, making people less willing to attend church or become priests, which contributes to further declines in the church's wealth and power.

Similar to what's happened with Judaism, we're seeing more and more evidence of "cultural Catholicism," where people identify with the church as part of their heritage and culture, not out of a sense of religious obligation. As the West becomes more secular, Catholicism and other churches are likely to shift their focus to the Third World to survive - yet even that can be at most a temporary refuge. As humanity as a whole makes progress, the churches fade, and freethought grows.

What will become of a post-church world? Articles like this one, "From a Divine Order to the Public Good", give a hopeful glimpse: as religious orders die out, their land is being bought up for conservation and public use, turned into nature preserves or acquired by schools and nonprofits. I have to say that it echoes a passage of mine from the Ebon Musings essay "Looking Ahead":

I see a world where the churches have become libraries and schools and museums, institutions dedicated to the preservation and expansion of knowledge, where reason is enshrined rather than faith.

For the good of humanity, I hope that the churches continue to fade, so that a new enlightenment may arise in their place.

Of all the major faiths in the world today, few surpass the bizarreness of Mormonism. The church was founded in the 1830s by Joseph Smith, Jr., who claimed to have been guided by an angel to a set of buried golden plates which he miraculously gained the ability to translate. These plates, supposedly, were the records of a lost American civilization, descended from a family of ancient Jews who had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and founded a large, advanced society in the New World. After disobeying the word of God, this civilization eventually tore itself apart in warfare and fell into ruin; the Native Americans are believed by Mormons to be their descendants.

This fantastic story, unsupported by archaeological or genetic evidence and contradicted by much of what archaeologists do know about pre-Columbian America, would provide material for many installments in this series all by itself. But today, I want to talk about something different: the process by which the Book of Mormon came into existence, and one of the most embarrassing events in the course of its composition.

One of Joseph Smith's earliest converts was a farmer named Martin Harris. Harris gave money to Smith to finance his translation of the golden plates (he would later mortgage his farm to pay for the first translation of the Book of Mormon, and lost it when the book was not a success). Harris also acted as Smith's scribe while the book was being written. With the two of them separated by a curtain, Smith would peer into a hat, which supposedly contained "seer stones" that gave him visions of the translated text, and dictate what he saw. (The physical presence of the golden plates was apparently not necessary.)

The incident in question came several months into the "translation," when Smith had produced about 116 pages of text. Harris' wife Lucy had grown skeptical of Smith and suspected that he was a con man seeking to defraud her husband. In an attempt to reassure her, Harris asked Smith for permission to take the pages home to show to her and other close friends. After several demurrals, Smith finally gave in and gave the pages to Harris.

Both skeptical historians and Mormon believers agree on the events so far. And they also agree on what happened next: when Joseph Smith finally asked for the pages back, Martin Harris confessed that he had lost them.

What exactly happened to those pages is not clear. In her definitive biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, the skeptical historian of Mormonism Fawn Brodie argues that Lucy Harris stole and destroyed the pages. According to Brodie, she also taunted Smith: "If this be a divine communication, the same being who revealed it to you can easily replace it."

And indeed, she had a point. After all, Mormon theology is adamant that Smith was not inventing, but merely translating by the gift of God. What would be so difficult about returning to the same place in the tablets and retranslating the parts that had been lost? A word-for-word reproduction of the 116 missing pages would have been powerful verification that Smith was actually receiving divine guidance and basing his work off of an actual text. He should have viewed the loss of the pages as, at most, a minor setback.

But this is not what happened. Instead, according to skeptical and believing histories alike, Joseph Smith went into an inconsolable frenzy, moaning that he had brought disaster on himself. Finally, sorrowfully, he announced that he had sinned by giving away the pages, and that God was going to punish him - although, according to the church's own history, it was God who granted Smith permission to give them to Harris. What was to be Smith's punishment? He would, he said, be forbidden to translate that section of the text again. Instead, he would translate a different section of the plates - one that chronicled the same events but was written by a different author, so the basic storyline would be the same but the wording would be different.

If you've just fallen over laughing, believe me, you're not alone. That was my reaction the first time I heard about this as well. What clearer proof could be imagined that Smith was just making up the Book of Mormon out of his own head? Possessed of only a normal human memory, he was unable to reproduce the story exactly as he first dictated it. Instead, he resorted to re-writing it from scratch and coming up with a contrived excuse for why it was different the second time.

Mormons who reject this most obvious of explanations are forced to believe that, regardless of whether Smith sinned or not, God passed up a perfect opportunity to prove his involvement with this new religion to the world, and instead forced his prophet to do the exact thing a fraud would be forced to do in that situation. That convoluted and contrived story is far less parsimonious than the alternative - that Smith was a swindler, and the Book of Mormon his own invention - which is why I ask Mormons: Do you really believe that?

Other posts in this series:

• Do You Really Believe That?