The winter of 1777-1778 was a bad time for the American revolutionary army. General George Washington had encamped his army at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania - an excellent position tactically, but a source of terrible misery and suffering for his weary, poorly equipped troops. The Continental Army was assailed by bitter cold and plagued by chronic shortages of food, shelter and warm clothes. Almost a fifth of the soldiers died of frostbite and disease, and the survivors' morale sank to its lowest point in the fledgling nation's first battle, to the point where Washington himself feared that it would collapse entirely.

It was at this, the lowest point of the war, that Washington had the following passage read to his men:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

These immortal words, the opening argument of Thomas Paine's revolutionary pamphlet The Crisis, are famous to this day. In the blackest depths of despair, he offered us a way forward and a reason not to lose hope. Did Paine's words give American patriots the spirit to fight on? Did he provide the breath to kindle those dying embers of independence back into life and flame? History is rarely susceptible to such simple, unicausal explanations... but we did fight on, and in the end we won an astounding victory, the triumph of some ragtag colonial militias over one of the reigning powers of the world.

Or consider Frederick Douglass. Born a slave in antebellum Maryland, he escaped his cruel owner at a young age and made it to the North and freedom. There, he joined an anti-slavery society in Massachusetts. His inaugural address, from all accounts, was historic:

His very appearance and demeanor destroyed the then-prevalent myth of the "natural servility" of African-Americans. By all accounts his eloquent analysis of the evils of slavery was one of the most brilliant debuts in American oratorical history. William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist of the day, sat in the front row. When Douglass finished his speech, Garrison rose, turned to the stunned audience, and challenged them with a shouted question: "Have we been listening to a thing, a chattel personal, or a man?"

"A man! A man!" the audience roared back as one voice.

"Shall such a man be held a slave in a Christian land?" called out Garrison.

"No! No!" shouted the audience.

And even louder, Garrison asked: "Shall such a man ever be sent back to bondage from the free soil of Old Massachusetts?"

And now the crowd was on its feet, crying out "No! No! No!"

Douglass lived the rest of his life a free man, and lived to see his fellow blacks liberated as well. Again, however eloquent his oratory, his contribution may have been a small one, just one thread in a vast and tangled skein of causality... but he was there, he spoke those words, and the world they described was the one that came into being.

One remarkable fact about human history is that every tyranny, every dictatorship, every autocracy - without exception - censors speech which criticizes its rulers or otherwise upsets its preconceptions. The medieval Catholic Church - and indeed, the modern Catholic church - has its Index of Prohibited Books. In its heyday, the Soviet Union had samizdat, the underground copying and distribution of literature banned by the Communist regime. Modern China is infamous for its censorship of the Internet. And the Nazis burned books en masse.

If you think about it, this is remarkable. Why would a dictatorship bother to burn books and censor speech? Why should those rulers care what the common people think about them? If they have the guns and wield all the power in society, one would think their position is unassailable. Why not let the masses say whatever they want and stew in the knowledge of their own helplessness?

The answer is that, fragile as they seem, words are a more powerful weapon in the long run than swords or guns. Though words can be burned, they can also rebound and burn their persecutors - by exposing crimes and misdeeds, bringing the truth to light, and inspiring people to devotion in the service of a better cause. Dictators and tyrants know full well the power of words, which is why censorship has been the watchword of every autocratic society since time immemorial. They hope - and so far, in every case, this hope has proven futile - that by forbidding those words from being spoken or written, they could erase them from inside people's minds.

What person today is speaking words that burn? Whose speech is cast into the flames by vicious tyrants wishing futilely to keep the truth silent? Whose speech leaps into people's hearts to kindle a different kind of flame, one that rises and sweeps entrenched powers away? It might be Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who speaks against the repressive and barbaric Islam that has taken root across the world:

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Or, perhaps, democracy activists like Wei Jingsheng, whose manifesto The Fifth Modernization calls for freedom from the repression of Chinese autocrats:

Let me respectfully remind these gentlemen: We want to be masters of our own destiny. We need no gods or emperors. We do not believe in the existence of any savior. We want to be masters of the world and not instruments used by autocrats to carry out their wild ambitions. We want a modern lifestyle and democracy for the people. Freedom and happiness are our sole objectives in accomplishing modernization. Without this fifth modernization all others are merely another promise.

Freethinkers and rebels of ages past fought against tyranny imposed on people from without. But many of those old dictatorships have fallen, and though some remain, the tide of history and technology is turning against them. I believe the battles of the future will be against a more subtle and pervasive foe: the ideologies that slip into people's minds and imprison them from within, turning them into willing participants in their own subjugation. This fight will be a more difficult one, but in the long run, victory may well be the last moral advance we need ever make. And in the end, it is always words that turn the tide. Let us hope we can kindle some worthy ones.

In 1999, Time magazine named Albert Einstein its "Person of the Century". The choice was understandable: In a global society increasingly underpinned by science and technology, perhaps no one person has had a greater individual impact on humanity's understanding of the cosmos. Among his many scientific contributions, he discovered the special and general theories of relativity, proved light's quantized nature by means of the photoelectric effect, and offered important support to atomic theory with his study of Brownian motion. Later in his career, he led the effort to construct a grand unified theory of physics, an endeavor that is ongoing to this day.

Aside from his scientific contributions, Einstein's political and humanitarian work was no less important. He was a diplomat and peacemaker who warned of the dangers of Nazism, lobbied against the nuclear arms race, participated in civil rights causes, and promoted the goal of peace and disarmament worldwide. Later in life, he was offered the presidency of the state of Israel but turned it down, claiming that he was not qualified for the post.

He was also, in every practical sense, an atheist. This is still a controversial claim in some people's eyes. Christian apologists like Ray Comfort claim that the great Einstein believed in God, and snidely ask if we atheists consider ourselves smarter than him. Here's our answer to that, Ray:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

On another occasion, he also wrote:

...the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

Despite occasional metaphorical remarks (such as the famous "God does not play dice with the universe" saying that's confused many wishful-thinking believers), Einstein himself made it clear that his beliefs followed those of Spinoza's: not belief in God as a supernatural or conscious entity, but rather "God" construed as the sum total of all there is, a poetic name for a purely natural phenomenon.

These views were not secret: Einstein often expressed them in public. Like many famous freethinkers, he was reviled by his apologist contemporaries as being anti-religious and atheistic, only for apologists of later generations to grab at his mantle and claim he was on their side all along. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes a Christian pastor who was one of many to write to Einstein in outrage after he made similar freethinking remarks on another occasion:

Professor Einstein, every Christian in America will immediately reply to you, "Take your crazy, fallacious theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you came from, or stop trying to break down the faith of a people who gave you a welcome when you were forced to flee your native land."

and even more shocking, from a Catholic lawyer:

We deeply regret that you made your statement... in which you ridicule the idea of a personal God. In the past ten years nothing has been so calculated as to make people think that Hitler had some reason to expel the Jews from Germany as your statement.

For the record, Einstein was not expelled from Germany. Though he was born there, he renounced his citizenship and left of his own volition when the Nazis began their political ascent, correctly sensing the gathering mood of the country. Later, the Nazis would denounce relativity as fanciful, useless "Jewish science" (as opposed to solid, practical "Aryan science") and publish a pamphlet titled "100 Scientists Against Einstein". Ironically, the Nazis' rejection of Einstein's theories on ideological grounds was probably a major reason why they never developed an atomic bomb. Einstein's ignorant critics had more reason than they knew to be grateful for his coming to America - whether he was a crazy, insensitive atheist or not.

Recognizing the potential of his work, Einstein was one of the signers of a letter to President Roosevelt urging research into nuclear fission, which ultimately led to the Manhattan Project. Later in life, however, he came to regret this and became a champion of nuclear disarmament, working with his fellow humanist Bertrand Russell. During the Cold War, he spoke out against paranoia and blacklisting, openly advising targets of Joseph McCarthy to refuse to cooperate with his investigations. He also fought for civil rights issues, including joining a national campaign to end lynching and appearing as a character witness for W.E.B. DuBois when the famous black activist (and fellow freethinker) was accused of being a Communist spy.

In both his scientific genius and his political conscience, Albert Einstein stands without peer. The next time an apologist asserts that lack of religious belief either impedes scientific inquiry or devalues human conscience, this great freethinker can stand as a refutation of either argument.

Other posts in this series:

• The Contributions of Freethinkers

One of the defining attributes of all the world's religions through history is that they create imaginary crimes; that is, arbitrary rules the obeying of which helps no person, and the breaking of which hurts no person. In the beginning, many religions start off as simple, humble affairs; some even have the audacity to insist that our only duty is to love one another. But as time goes by, those simple faiths inevitably become complex and elaborated.

Clergy and theologians, who'd have a tough time justifying their pay if all they did was echo the words of the previous generation, come up with new laws and teachings which are claimed to purify the heart and make the path to God easier. Often, the habits of the founders are self-consciously imitated (even to the point of mimicking the way they brushed their teeth), turning simple customs into binding rules.

With time, these rules multiply and accumulate until they become overwhelming. Surveying the world's major religions, the list of prohibitions goes on and on: rules against eating meat on certain days, against eating certain kinds of animals at all, against eating food prepared without the proper rituals, against working on certain ways, against cutting - or refraining from cutting - one's hair, against speaking certain words, against unapproved forms of consensual sexual intimacy, against reading disapproved books, against marrying or befriending nonbelievers, even against participating in outside society in general. This list could be extended almost without limit, but the point is that for many religious believers, life is hedged about on every side with arbitrary and seemingly pointless rules. Virtually every commonplace activity, no matter how mundane, has been barred by the rules of some sect.

Sadly, because of the violently deluded, these imaginary crimes often result in real harm. In the Middle Ages, there was the imaginary crime of "host-nailing," where Christians imagined that Jews were stealing consecrated wafers from churches and driving nails through them in order to crucify Jesus afresh and prolong his suffering. Across Europe, Christian mobs incited to frenzy by these wild accusations regularly went on rampages where they brutally murdered hundreds of innocent Jews.

The ridiculous accusation of host-nailing finds a parallel today in the imaginary crime of depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammed. Like medieval Christians, modern Muslims have been all too willing to condone violence against anyone, even a non-Muslim, who violates the Islamic prohibition on creating images of their prophet. Again, such an act harms no one, has no relation to human needs or concerns, yet terrorist leaders and the deranged mobs who follow at their heels have been positively eager to call for destruction and bloodshed in order to avenge their hurt feelings.

Modern Christians, too, have invented the imaginary crime of gay marriage: a very real human cause that they battle against purely because they imagine it violates the will of God. Providing further evidence of how these imaginary transgressions are valued above actual, legitimate concerns, religious conservatives have steadily one-upped each other in the unhinged, literally apocalyptic rhetoric they use to warn about the disaster it would be if marriage equality came to pass. Meanwhile, the countries and U.S. states that have already legalized gay marriage have noticeably failed to crumble into chaos.

I've quoted it before, in "No Commandments", but this passage from a rabbi bears repeating:

"That most of the [kosher] laws are divine ordinances without reason given is 100 per cent the point. It is very easy not to murder people. Very easy. It is a little bit harder not to steal because one is tempted occasionally. So that is no great proof that I believe in God or am fulfilling His [sic] will. But, if He tells me not to have a cup of coffee with milk in it with my mincemeat and peaches at lunchtime, that is a test. The only reason I am doing that is because I have been told to so do. It is something difficult."

The arbitrary, reasonless nature of religious edicts is freely admitted by many of their own believers. Breaking these rules does no harm to anyone, has no effect on the world at all, but there are still millions of people who take them so seriously that any transgression, even by a non-believer, will be met with insane fury and howling threats of violence. (Warning: Link leads to a very long comment thread; loading may be slow.)

There are many good, non-arbitrary rules in religion: injunctions to care for one's fellow man, to help the poor and the needy, to promote peace and wisdom. But these rules are good precisely because they have tangible effects on human welfare, and can be justified on that basis without appealing to the supernatural. Defending them requires no divine revelation, merely the human sense of conscience and the observation that we are all better off in a world where more people are happy.

On the other hand, any rule that can only be justified by appealing to God's will is by definition pointless and arbitrary. Such rules have no connection to reality or to human concerns. Obeying these rules does not make us morally better or make anyone else better off; it merely inculcates in people the habit of obedience. Worse, it stirs a spirit of irrational hatred and antipathy to those who call these imaginary crimes what they are and refuse to be bound by them.

Is the power of the religious right declining in America? Several lines of evidence would seem to indicate so.

Heading into the 2008 election, the evangelical movement is fragmented and leaderless, lacking a clear sense of enthusiasm or a preferred candidate to rally behind. Several important figures, including Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy, have recently died. Atheists and nonbelievers are growing in influence. And the religious right's public brand is badly damaged, viewed as hypocritical and overly judgmental by large majorities of non-Christians.

For me, one of the most delicious signs of the religious right's waning power came recently, when James Dobson announced that he might hold his nose and endorse John McCain for president after all, after earlier declaring he would not vote for McCain under any circumstance. It's no surprise that he's ultimately fallen in line behind the Republican nominee, but I think his about-face on this issue will reinforce the message that Republican politicians can disregard Christian fundamentalists' desires, because they will vote for them anyway.

Unlike liberal and progressive political movements, the religious right is not capable of spontaneous bottom-up organization. By design, they are a movement that follows a leader and receives their marching orders from above. In the absence of any such person this year, they've become rudderless and disorganized. Also, prominent evangelicals who recognize how their faith has been coopted for political causes are beginning to push back with declarations like the Evangelical Manifesto, encouraging believers to focus their efforts on issues other than gay rights and abortion. This is a welcome development, though it should be noted that they do not disclaim the "standard" irrational religious positions on those issues.

The influence of religious groups has always waxed and waned in the United States, and it's safe to say that it's currently at a low point. If we who support secularism and reason take advantage of this to build a coalition that unites the Americans they have driven away from their side, we can ensure that their political fragmentation will continue for some time to come.

Nevertheless, it would be foolish to count the religious right out completely. They still command millions of members who can be driven into a frenzy if they have the right cause or leader to unite behind. They are down, but not defeated. And unfortunately, even though their influence is receding, they've left behind a "high-water mark" - an assumed standard level of religiosity in politics - which is likely to persist for a while.

Even as America as a whole becomes less religious, it seems that the political arena is becoming more religious. It was barely a century ago that a famous freethinker like Robert Ingersoll was a sought-after campaign trail figure and friend to presidents. Such a thing would be unthinkable today. So yes, the religious right is on the wane - but we have a long way to go to take back the ground they gained during their years of influence.

Before the dawn of the scientific age, humankind had only its unaided senses to examine the universe. Certainly, there were awe-inspiring sights, but those alone give little insight into natural phenomena. At night we saw the stars and the planets circle overhead; each season we felt the rains fall and the wind blow; and in moments of terror, we saw lightning split the sky and the earth shake under our feet. But none of these things gave any clue to what the true nature of the heavens might be.

Uncontaminated by knowledge, the theologians of antiquity spent centuries pondering the nature of the universe in empirical isolation, speculating about what kind of cosmos God would most likely create for us to dwell in. This can be a very useful test. Now that we in the modern world have some genuine data, we can compare it against these pre-scientific cosmologies. If they show a correspondence, we may be justified in concluding that more than human understanding went into the founding of these religions.

But, among the monotheistic religions of the West, there's little correspondence to be found. The god of the Old Testament is a small god, a provincial, tribal deity; he gives no indication that he is in any way concerned with anything other than one race of people dwelling in one particular region of the Mideast. And the creation story of Genesis is laughably small-minded, treating the entire universe as if it were nothing more than a backdrop for human concerns. As I wrote in "A Much Greater God":

[T]he god of the Old Testament... was so interested in the Earth that he created it with loving care and effort during the first three days of Genesis, while the entire rest of the universe - awesome collisions and explosions, space and time twisting and warping, stars burning and dying like flares with the energy of galaxies, massive black holes, pulsars like lighthouses, vast and intricately sculpted nebulae light-years across, a cosmos of a hundred billion galaxies each containing a hundred billion stars - was created on the fourth day, as an afterthought, for no reason other than to serve as signs and portents for the residents of the aforementioned Earth.

Christianity, which arose from the blending of Jewish theism with Greek philosophy such as Plato's idea of emanation or Aristotle's cosmic Unmoved Mover, had a broader focus and thought of itself as a universal religion in a way Judaism never did. Even so, it too remained moored in those local, tribal concerns, continuing to think of the small, ancient city of Jerusalem as the axis around which all the universe revolved. Islam, too, inherited the provincial outlook that considered its own culture and tradition the apotheosis of the cosmos.

All these people thought long and hard about what kind of universe God would probably create if such a being existed, and I see no reason to disagree with them. Therefore, the fact that the universe is unlike these ideas and like what we observe is evidence against this conception of God. To many religious groups, the idea of a vast and ancient universe was a terrible surprise. Of course, after several centuries, they've regrouped and are now claiming that this is what they expected all along, but their own predecessors' writings put the lie to that.

Furthermore, history makes clear that these were not idle speculations, ready to be altered as soon as better evidence turned up. These cosmologies were central to the various monotheisms. How else to explain stories like that of Giordano Bruno, a freethinker who believed the Earth was just one of an infinite array of worlds each with life of their own? Bruno's cosmology was not greeted as a potentially new way to understand the majesty of God's creation. Rather, he was tortured and burned at the stake by the inquisitors who plainly preferred a small god presiding over a small cosmos. Similarly, Galileo was forced to recant and confined to house arrest for the crime of studying the universe and daring to suggest that there might be aspects of it not already accounted for by theology.

These would be no more than inert facts about the past if they did not have so many parallels today. There are still millions of theists who believe in a tiny cosmos, created by God a scant few millennia ago and destined to end in the imminent future. There are still millions who believe the Earth is the only place that matters in the grand scheme of things. And there are still millions who want to make decisions that affect all of us on the basis of this medieval, hopelessly naive and arrogantly anthropocentric belief set. A deeper and more profound understanding, one that grasped the true scale of the universe and humanity's place in it, might give them a sorely needed measure of humility and a greater degree of reliance on reason.

Past editions of Strange and Curious Sects have explored religious splinter groups that came into existence relatively recently. Today's edition will focus on an older cult that still has lessons to teach us: the bizarre story of the would-be Jewish messiah, Sabbatai Zevi.

Sabbatai Zevi was born in 1626, supposedly on the anniversary of the Roman destruction of the Temple, to a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family in Smyrna, modern-day Turkey. In his youth, he studied the Talmud and especially the Kabbalah, and was later ordained as a rabbi. He was drawn to mysticism and asceticism; according to tradition, he was married twice, but both marriages ended in divorce because he refused to have sex with either of his wives.

By the age of 20, Zevi began displaying the behaviors that sowed the seeds of his messianic following. He would experience periods of deep depression and despair, withdrawing from his family to live in isolation and silence. Interspersed with these were periods of religious ecstasy during which he would deliberately and flagrantly violate Jewish law: eating non-kosher food, publicly uttering the forbidden name of God, and committing other "holy sins". He claimed that he had been inspired to do these things by divine revelation. From our modern vantage point, it's not difficult to recognize the symptoms of bipolar disorder.

Zevi also began to announce himself as the long-awaited Messiah, the legendary figure who would reunite the Jews in the Holy Land and rule over them in peace and security. He was not the only one doing so: in the first half of the 17th century, apocalyptic fervor was spreading among both Christians and Jews, perhaps linked to the significant year of 1666. Eventually, in 1656, the rabbis of Smyrna expelled Zevi, and he became a wanderer among the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire. (Troublemakers were popping up all over; Baruch Spinoza was exiled by the rabbis of Amsterdam that same year.)

During his travels, Zevi continued his earlier "holy sins", announcing, as did Jesus, that Yahweh had abrogated the laws of the Torah and permitted much that had formerly been forbidden. He also continued to proclaim himself the Messiah, and began to attract a following among mystically inclined Jews. One of them, Abraham ha-Yakini, wrote a pseudonymous epistle titled The Great Wisdom of Solomon, which presented itself as a prophetic book written by the biblical patriarch Abraham predicting Zevi's coming and messiahship. Another was the wealthy, influential Raphael Joseph Halabi of Cairo.

But Zevi's most influential follower found him in 1662, when he traveled to Palestine. In the grip of a depressive episode, he believed he was demon-possessed and sought out a famous exorcist named Nathan of Gaza. Nathan was greatly taken with Sabbatai Zevi and encouraged him in his delusions, explaining to him that his dark periods were signs that his soul was descending to the underworld to do battle with devilish powers. Sabbatai Zevi was won over by this flattery, and in 1665, at the height of a manic episode, he announced that the regathering of the Jews was imminent and the messianic age would begin in the next year.

Zevi's followers had grown quite numerous by this time, and waves of excitement spread through Europe at the announcement. Palestinian Jews flocked to Zevi's banner (he chose twelve of them to judge the soon-to-be-reassembled tribes of Israel), and Jewish communities as far abroad as Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands swelled with anticipation. As Karen Armstrong writes in A History of God:

His supporters came from all classes of Jewish society: rich and poor, learned and uneducated. Pamphlets and broadsheets spread the glad tidings in English, Dutch, German and Italian. In Poland and Lithuania there were public processions in his honor. In the Ottoman empire, prophets wandered through the streets describing visions in which they had seen Shabbetai seated upon a throne.

But there was a snag in the messianic plan. At the beginning of 1666, Zevi traveled to Istanbul, where he was arrested and imprisoned by the Ottoman authorities. At first, he was treated leniently and continued to lead his movement from prison. But after several months, the sultan grew fed up and issued him an ultimatum: either convert to Islam, or prove his messiahship in a trial by ordeal, where archers would fire arrows at him and the court would observe whether God protected him.

No doubt wisely, Sabbatai Zevi chose Islam. Pleased, the sultan released him and gave him a pension; Zevi remained a faithful Muslim until his death in 1676.

Zevi's apostasy was devastating to his followers, who had been driven to desperation by a series of brutal pogroms and were feverish with anticipation for the coming of the Messiah. Many of them abandoned his movement, and humiliated followers across Europe destroyed much of the material that had been written about him. But incredibly, a substantial number - including Nathan of Gaza - hung on. In a final attempt to salvage something from the ruin of Sabbateanism, they concocted a mythology which claimed that Zevi's apostasy was actually the crowning act of his messianic mission. As one of them, Abraham Cardozo, put it:

...because of their sins all Jews had been destined to become apostates. This was to have been their punishment. But God had saved his people from this terrible fate by allowing the Messiah to make the supreme sacrifice on their behalf.

Like Jesus on the cross, Zevi was viewed as having symbolically humbled himself for the redemption of all of Judaism.

Remarkably, although Zevi's following dwindled after his death, it did not completely die out. Even today, some of his adherents live on and call themselves the Donmeh - supposedly, they are Muslims who continue practicing Jewish religious rituals in secret. Their existence seems semi-mythical, like the Illuminati, but then again there are those who openly profess allegiance to Sabbateanism.

The story of Sabbatai Zevi, more than anything else, demonstrates the limitless human capacity for self-delusion. Though explicitly denounced by their own messiah, Zevi's followers continued to believe in him and to craft a mythology that explained his acts within the framework of their beliefs. Like many others who have invested their lives in cult leaders, their belief in him had become a deeply rooted part of their own identity, one that they clung to even in the face of all external evidence.

Other posts in this series:

• Strange and Curious Sects

In the first chapter of her autobiography Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali recounts some of the Somali folktales her grandmother taught her when she was a child. One was a story of a nomad, searching for a home for his wife and child, who mysteriously finds an oasis with a fine grass hut already built in the middle of the desert, and a smiling, friendly stranger who invites them to live there. Alas for the trusting nomad, the stranger was really "He Who Rubs Himself with a Stick," a monstrous werewolf-like being who stalks the desert in the shape of a hyena, and who returns that night while they lie sleeping and devours their infant son. Another example:

There were stories about an ugly old witch woman whose name was People Slayer or People Butcher, who had the power to transform herself, to adopt the face of someone you liked and respected, and who at the last minute lunged at you, laughing in your face, HAHAHAHAHA, before she slaughtered you with a long sharp knife that she had been hiding under the folds of her robe all along and then ate you up.

Every culture has stories like this, of course, stories of the monsters that lurk at the fringes of civilization and fall upon those who stray from the prescribed rules of conduct. There's almost always a moral lesson to be drawn from these bloody folktales: whether to be chaste, or pious, or suspicious of strangers, or obedient to one's parents, the main character almost always transgresses in some way that leads to disaster.

In all likelihood, these cautionary tales are as old as humanity itself. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a world full of very real dangers, and it's no surprise that they gave some of them a supernatural gloss. Natural disasters like drought and flood became the handiwork of angry nature spirits. Members of other, possibly hostile, rival tribes became shape-changing demons, utterly other, utterly alien, ready to drop their guise and strike at any moment. And our fellow predators, those who hunted the night beyond the light of our huddled fires, became monsters of every description. Fanciful though they were, these imaginings served a real purpose - giving our predecessors a way to deal with their fear, by constructing elaborate rituals intended to ward off misfortune. Like all religions, they imparted a sense of security and control in a hostile and uncaring cosmos.

With the passage of time, as our societies became more complex and the borders of our knowledge advanced, our myths and our monsters became more abstract. Nevertheless, their basic purpose stayed very much the same. Take a more recent example from human cultural history, William Blake's poem "Auguries of Innocence":

He who shall teach the Child to Doubt
The rotting Grave shall ne'er get out.
He who respects the Infant's Faith
Triumphs over Hell and Death.

This clumsy, unsubtle threat delivers the same fundamental message as Ayaan Hirsi Ali's childhood folktales: stay within the bounds of your culture, believe your elders, or suffer a terrible fate. With the Somali folktales, it's more obvious where they originate - the childhood fears we felt on moonless nights, when we heard monsters roaring beyond the light of our fires. But both they and Blake's poem are descendants of that same ancient, superstitious terror. Both paint pictures of unseen evils waiting to strike down those who stray from the straight and narrow path.

Ironically, these primitive fears still guide our steps, even though we have long since acquired enough knowledge to tell that they are substanceless. Our ancestors cowered from noises in the night, but we no longer need to. We have a better option: just go and look. More than enough brave thinkers have gone before us to make it abundantly clear that there are no supernatural dangers lurking in the dark, no monsters hiding in the bushes. We do have dangers to confront, but we can respond to them more proportionately and effectively if we cease embellishing them with fanciful mythology.

Presented without further comment:

Last night, when I got on the subway, I noticed an older, balding white man wearing a white T-shirt. The front of his shirt read, in multicolored block letters, "I'm so happy I'm saved," and the back read, over a backdrop of flames, "I won't have to spend eternity in the lake of fire. P.S.: There won't be a drink of water there!"

As the train pulled away from the station, a young black man entered the car. He announced that he was down on his luck, was trying to collect money for food, and would rather get it by begging than by robbing or mugging. He said he would sing for us in exchange for donations, and launched into an a cappella rendition of "Lean on Me".

Mr. Evangelical, who was standing right next to the young man, responded by hunching over, grimacing, and sticking his fingers in his ears.

I first came across today's little-known Bible verse while reading The Pilgrim's Progress, and it was so amazing to me that I had to set the book aside and look it up on the spot. Search on the internet, and you'll find volumes of Christian apologetics seeking to justify the author's belief in God by claiming that they just know he exists because they can feel his presence in their heart:

The imagination knows God and the heart knows God, but the conscience silences the whole person because of a mysterious presence—total depravity. (source)

I feel God in my heart and I know is is always there.I read my Bible everyday and I pray amd meditate everyday, I have a heart of gold, I give to the uttermost(even when I dont have it to give)I pay my tithes and I have a lot of faith. (source)

If you are a person of faith who has always known in your heart that Darwin was wrong, the revelations on this website will help you to know with certainty that you were right all along, and that Darwin was wrong all along. (source)

I feel God in my heart, and I love the Lord so much. And when I feel him in my heart and when he's touching me, I just -- it just rolls over. (source)

The heart feels God, not the reason. This is what constitutes faith: God experienced by the heart, not by the reason. (source)

All these professions of faith, especially the last one by Blaise Pascal, express the belief that God's existence is not a matter of empirical knowledge, but is felt intuitively through a different and more profound inward knowing. This faith is often summed up by the statement "I feel God in my heart". And that's why it's so shocking that the Bible says this:

"He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool: but whoso walketh wisely, he shall be delivered."

—Proverbs 28:26

Since the book of Proverbs is just a collection of pithy sayings, it doesn't offer any context by which we could decide the meaning of this quote. It could mean, if you're feeling charitable, that we should not walk by faith and blind belief in our own infallibility, but should rely on facts and evidence to back up our decisions. This interpretation is remarkably similar to the secular humanist view.

However, it could also mean, and I suspect it was intended to mean, that religious faith is only acceptable insofar as it agrees with the Bible. The text is assumed to be infallible, and our religious beliefs are judged by how closely they agree with it. (This is how it was used in the Pilgrim's Progress, where this text is cited to justify condemning a character to eternal torture because he, though he claimed to be a Christian, did not believe that human beings are completely evil and depraved.)

In either case, however, it offers a ready counterargument to theists who claim to "just know" that God exists, or any other religious claim supported solely by personal intuition. The Bible itself states that the human heart is unreliable and that such claims are not to be believed. This verse is unlikely to set any believer on the road to atheism by itself, but it may help lead them to the realization that there are other, better ways of knowing by which we can learn about the world.

Other posts in this series:

• Little-Known Bible Verses

In 1967, Mildred Loving and her husband Richard, an interracial couple, were arrested at their Virginia home for violating that state's anti-miscegenation law. At trial, Judge Leon Bazile offered his explanation for why the state of Virginia had chosen to ban interracial marriage:

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

The Lovings pled guilty and were sentenced to a year in prison, which sentence Bazile suspended on the condition that they not return to Virginia for 25 years. The Lovings later appealed, and the case finally worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1967, that Court issued a unanimous ruling in the case of Loving v. Virginia that struck down all bans on interracial marriage. (This reversed earlier decisions, such as the 1883 case Pace v. Alabama, that upheld such laws.) Justice Earl Warren delivered the opinion:

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

We should bear in mind these bold words today, where an almost identical controversy is playing itself out all over again. This time, the victims of prejudice are gays and lesbians, rather than blacks or people of mixed race. Just like the civil rights campaigners of yesterday, they seek nothing more than the freedom to marry the people they love; just like the civil rights campaigners of yesterday, they face hatred and prejudice from bigots who seek to impose their own set of ugly and irrational beliefs on everyone. And just like the civil rights campaigners of yesterday, these irrational beliefs are often justified by appealing to the supposed will of God.

Religious conservatives argue that laws forbidding gay marriage do not discriminate unfairly against homosexuals, because they possess the same right as everyone else: to marry someone of the opposite gender. Virtually identical reasoning was once employed by religious conservatives to argue for anti-miscegenation laws: that they are not discriminatory because they limit the freedom of whites and blacks alike. Most of those who oppose gay marriage do their best to steer away from this parallel, or to draw the obvious lesson it implies.

I've always supported marriage equality, but in light of my own recent engagement, I've had an epiphany that's made me feel its importance more keenly than ever before. My question is this: Why hasn't anyone ever suggested that atheists should be forbidden to marry Christians?

If you're going to make laws based on the majority's religious beliefs, this one is a no-brainer. The Bible explicitly says, "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?" (2 Corinthians 6:14). And surely, if one believes that America is a "Christian nation", then we should be protecting marriage for its ability to bring about more Christian babies. Encouraging atheists to procreate would mean "changing the definition" of what marriage has always been about, and would be an insult to America's fictitious religious heritage!

Of course, there is no organized movement demanding this. But under different historical circumstances, I could readily see it happening, driven by the same forces that are driving opposition to gay marriage now. And just contemplating the idea, even knowing that no one is advocating it, is like feeling a hand clamping on my throat.

I'm an atheist, and my fiancee is not, but it's never come between us. If the two of us have decided together that our love outweighs whatever differences we have, that we're willing to commit to spending our lives together - then that is our decision to make. How could anyone else ever have the knowledge or the right to push that decision aside and overrule us?

I can all too easily imagine how I would feel if some bigot who's never met either of us started slandering the genuineness and legitimacy of our relationship, demanding that we be prevented from marrying because we do not fit his blinkered conception of what an ideal relationship should be. I can imagine the sheer paralyzing shock, like being plunged into an icy pool, at the idea of a perfect stranger who is nevertheless deeply opposed to our being together and hates us for nothing more than who we are.

Jonathan Rauch's article on why gay marriage is good for America aptly describes this legal netherworld in which most American gay couples are forced to exist. We atheists should always bear in mind that it's only a quirk of history that we're not in their place. And that knowledge, in turn, should inspire in us the empathy to stand by them in their struggle. Struggles for liberty and equality have been won in the past, and we can win this one as well, if people of conscience and principle are willing to join the battle for what is right.