In the world of Philip Pullman's fantasy series His Dark Materials, each human being is accompanied everywhere by their daemon, an intelligent animal-shaped spirit that is the outward manifestation of their soul. When Pullman's heroine, Lyra, meets a boy who's been severed from his daemon by a cruel experiment, her reaction is one of disgust and horror:

Her first impulse was to turn and run, or to be sick. A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out: something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of night-ghasts, not the waking world of sense.

There are no daemons in our world, but we atheists often face a similar situation. We have the ability to arrive at a code of ethics without the dubious help of revelation, basing our moral decisions on reason and a sense of empathy for our fellow human beings. But still, far too often, we meet believers who insist that this is impossible. They're used to following a code of rules handed down by authority - by a text, or by other religious believers - and have become so accustomed to obeying that they literally believe it's not possible to come up with an ethical code on your own. They've lost the capacity even to imagine how this might be done.

One would think the existence of the vast majority of atheists who are ordinary, decent people would force these people to reconsider, but often it doesn't. Instead, they perceive atheists the way Lyra perceives that daemonless boy: as freaks, as bizarre and unnatural aberrations - and the evidence of our manifestly moral lives does not change that.

The flip side of this coin is that people who are unquestionably evil (or ones whom the speaker merely disagrees with) are often labeled "atheist", as though the word were just a generic synonym for "wicked". I've written about this before in "The Atheist Crew", but this example from David Hankins of the Baptist Press surpasses them all:

We do have some recent examples of societies that do not believe in God nor recognize a mandated divine value on human beings. They are associated with names like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, and Saddam Hussein. Devoid of any sense of God or godliness, they created a social order of mayhem and evil that destroyed millions of lives. So much for the morality of godlessness.

Yes, you read that last one right: this apologist claims that Saddam Hussein was an atheist. That would be the same Saddam who died while reciting a Muslim prayer, the same Saddam who ordered the Muslim creed called the takbir placed on the Iraqi flag, allegedly in his own handwriting. By the standards of the Islamic world, Saddam's Iraq was a relatively secular state, but to call it a "godless" or atheist state is insanity. (I've written also about how Hitler was emphatically not an atheist. Idi Amin was also a Muslim. I should probably write some later posts on the beliefs of the other tyrants cited.)

As I said, as a purely factual claim, this would be insane. But I don't think Hankins intended it as a factual claim, but as a statement of the way he divides up the world: in his eyes, there are the good Christians, whom he agrees with, and then there's everyone else, the evil and wicked atheists. (The first Christians were accused of atheism by the Roman Empire for similar reasons. The fact that he's using the logic of the Christians' erstwhile persecutors is an irony he undoubtedly fails to appreciate.)

For people who think this way, there's probably no hope. They're clearly not concerned about what the facts say, just as racists are not concerned about the facts regarding the intellectual ability and capacity for achievement of blacks. But I think most people are not so set in their prejudices, and their minds can be changed. If they see that atheists are good people, the notion may become less unnatural to them, and in time they may come to accept it as normal and expected.

It's important to remember, therefore, that we are ambassadors for atheism. Fairly or unfairly, atheism in general will be judged by the standards of behavior that individual atheists display. Thus it's important that we be the best ambassadors possible - that we show ourselves to be moral people and present a good image of atheism to the world. This means of changing minds, in the long run, is more likely to help us than any number of rational arguments.

On May 13, 1917, three Portuguese children in the town of Fátima, a small village seventy miles north of Lisbon, claimed to have witnessed a vision of the Virgin Mary. According to the account given by Lúcia Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, Mary had appeared to them, clad in luminous white, above a holmoak tree in a pasture known as Cova da Iria. She urged the children to say the Rosary every day to bring peace to the world, and promised she would return on the 13th day of each of the next five months.

According to the legend, the children returned to the site in the following months, where the apparitions of Mary appeared on schedule as promised. Reports of the vision begans circulating in the community, drawing pilgrims to the site, although no one except the three children ever saw Mary. On July 13, the apparition granted Lúcia three prophetic visions. She also told the children that when she returned in October, she would perform a miracle so that all who were there would believe.

Prophetic fever swelled the countryside, and on the appointed day, contemporary accounts record a crowd of around 70,000 people at Fátima. What allegedly happened next has passed into Catholic legend:

"Before the astonished eyes of the crowd, whose aspect was Biblical as they stood bareheaded, eagerly searching the sky, the sun trembled, made sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws - the sun 'danced' according to the typical expression of the people..."

I'll discuss this tale in a moment, but first, the three prophecies. The first one contains no content other than the usual gruesome fantasizing about the torments of the damned. The second is more specific:

The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illuminated by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes... If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church... In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.

Although most of this is vague, conditional or simply false, it's true that World War II did break out during the pontificate of Pius XI. (Actually, to be precise, Pius XI died in February, while Germany invaded Poland in September of that year.) Catholic apologists have hailed this as a miraculous prediction. And yet, all are agreed that this prophecy was not revealed to the world until 1941, after the events it claimed to foretell. The mention of a future pope by name is suspicious, since prophecies hardly ever commit themselves to such specific, verifiable details. The most likely scenario is that this prediction was, in whole or in part, fabricated after the fact.

And what of the third? After being kept secret for decades, it was finally revealed to the world in 2000:

And we saw in an immense light that is God... a bishop dressed in white... we had the impression that it was the Holy Father. Other bishops, priests, religious men and women going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other bishops, priests, religious men and women, and various lay people of different ranks and positions.

No doubt you're wondering what all the fuss was about. That seems to have been the general reaction, and Catholics have struggled to find an event which fits this foretelling. Some claim this was a prophecy of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, although most of the specific details don't fit that scenario (the pope in the vision dies, which John Paul did not; he is assaulted by a small army, not by a lone gunman; and his death is accompanied by the deaths of many other clergy). Interestingly, there's a cottage industry of Catholics who claim that this isn't the real third vision, that the Church is still holding back the real prophecy in whole or in part - a tacit recognition of the fact that the prophetic content of this one is disappointingly generic.

Finally, consider the miracle of the sun. What's interesting is that, although many witnesses claimed to have witnessed a miracle, they did not all agree on what it was. Some said that the sun changed color repeatedly; some said it spun and moved around the sky; some said it became possible to look directly at the sun without harm to the eyes; some said to have seen visions of Mary's face. Some people claimed to see various combinations of these. Importantly, some people who were present at the site claimed to have seen nothing out of the ordinary at all. Most apologetic reports claim that 70,000 people witnessed the miracle, but every Catholic site I've seen reprints the same six to eight testimonies. Most likely, these apologists are simply assuming that everyone who was present saw it.

Some skeptics have suggested that some unusual weather phenomenon, such as a sundog, took place there and gave rise to the miracle claims, but I don't think any such explanation is necessary. I think human psychology alone can account for what happened. EWTN unintentionally provides a key piece of the answer, in its excerpt from the testimony of Alfredo da Silva Santo:

When Lúcia called out: "Look at the sun!" the whole multitude repeated: "Attention to the sun!" It was a day of incessant drizzle but a few moments before the miracle it stopped raining.

Consider: Who would have made the pilgrimage to a rural village of Portugal, to stand in a muddy field all day in the rain, all because three peasant children claimed there would be a miracle? Clearly, this situation would only attract the most fervent of the faithful, the people who were already strongly predisposed to believe in Marian apparitions and other miracles. To judge from similar cases, the pilgrims present that day probably worked themselves into a highly emotional state, praying, singing hymns, perhaps starving or flagellating themselves as the vision had previously suggested. And then, when the crowd had worked itself into a frenzy of expectation, one of the children dramatically points upward and cries out, "Look at the sun!"

To a crowd of eager believers in a suggestible state, this suggestion is all it would have taken. Pilgrims in a state of religious ecstasy, dazzled by looking at the sun, may have convinced themselves that they saw it move or that it changed color, or that they saw a vision of Mary's face. Any such report would have spread like wildfire among the crowd, and as is human nature, once one person reported a miracle, dozens of others would doubtless have agreed that they saw it as well. From that point, all it takes is the normal process of drift and mutation that always occurs when a rumor spreads, resulting in exaggeration of the most salient details, the addition of others that fit with the tale, and suppression of the ones that don't. Human suggestibility and eagerness to believe are the best explanation of the tale of Fátima; and lacking any tangible evidence that anything unusual occurred there, Catholic believers have no firm ground on which to claim otherwise.

On November 4, I decided that it'd be worthwhile to read the two books written by our new president Barack Obama, to get a better sense of where he intends to take the country in the next four (hopefully eight!) years. I finished the second one just before the inauguration, and here follows a brief review of both of them.

The Audacity of Hope

Summary: A cautious, middle-of-the-road book, more enlightening about the political process itself than about Obama's views on it.

One of the major attack themes that the Republicans used against Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign was "we don't know who he really is" - that he was an unknown quantity, a risky choice. That's ironic, because in this book, published two years before his presidential run, he sets out his political views clearly - he's a moderate, leaning slightly toward the progressive end - and his actions in office so far are just what you'd expect given that background.

Each chapter of the book concerns a different idea - cynicism and partisanship in politics, the culture wars, the media, economic opportunity, religion, race and foreign policy. As I said, most of Obama's positions are moderate to progressive, and should be uncontroversial to everyone except the far right wing that dominated our politics during the Bush era. More interesting, I found, were Obama's musings on the process - the sausage-making that dominates politics - such as how senators rarely, if ever, actually stand on the floor of Congress (most deals are worked out in private before a bill ever comes up for a vote), or the exhausting, demeaning work of campaigning and fund-raising, and its selective pressure favoring candidates who simply fall in line with the desires of all their disparate interest groups.

One of the major themes of this book was its cautiousness. Rarely does Obama admit to any personal flaw without couching it in qualifications ("In me, one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness... It's a flaw that is endemic to modern life, I think - endemic, too, to the American character" [p.5]). And while he does state his support for progressive positions, these statements are often followed by saying that his party also has flaws, or that he thinks the Republicans can be good people too. ("I am angry about policies that consistently favor the wealthy and powerful over average Americans... I believe in evolution, scientific inquiry, and global warming... [but] I also think my party can be smug, detached, and dogmatic at times" [p.14]).

I don't find this surprising. The career of politician doesn't often reward people who speak their mind freely, and most successful candidates take pains to be as inoffensive as possible. The image that emerges from the book is of a cautious, deliberative man, one who holds progressive views but doesn't have the fiery passion of other politicians, and who values building consensus over bashing his opponents for short-term political gain. So far, his campaign has largely followed that ethic. We will see if his presidency does the same.

Dreams From My Father

Summary: A memoir of the author's search for belonging in a racially divided world. Less political, but far more personal and genuine.

Dreams from My Father is Barack Obama's autobiographical memoir, written before he ever came to hold political office, and is about his search for personal identity and his quest to follow the footsteps of a father he met only briefly and never truly knew. The child of a mixed-race marriage, with roots as diverse and far-flung as Kansas, Hawaii, Indonesia and Kenya, he grew up with an understandable uncertainty of his place in the world. This book chronicles his struggle to figure out which society was truly his, and how he could fit into it when he found it.

Retracing the course of Obama's life, the book begins with his childhood - in Hawaii, where he met his father for the first and only time, and Indonesia, where his mother remarried but ultimately decided that life there was not for her. He discusses his work as a community organizer in impoverished communities in Chicago, and later his odyssey to Kenya, where he meets his extended family and learns more about the life's journey of his father, a larger-than-life figure whose memory still looms large in the eyes of all his sons and daughters. (I especially liked Obama's sister Auma, an educated and independent free spirit who shares many of his frustrations with the endemic corruption and tribalism in Kenya.)

This memoir was written before Barack Obama was seeking political office, and it shows. He speaks about things like his own drug use, or his encounters with black nationalism and anger, far more candidly and openly than in The Audacity of Hope. While this is not a political book, I think it gives a much more complete and revealing picture of his character.

The most inspiring thing about this book, one which I don't think Obama intended, is that it demonstrates the extraordinary mobility and potential for transformation possible in American society. From a childhood in rural Indonesia, from an agricultural family in the backwaters of Africa, he's risen in a single generation to become the de facto leader of the free world. His journey, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali's, shows what is possible - that race and class are not insurmountable barriers, even in a world riven by anxiety and division over both.

• I've posted a new revision of the comment policy. The first version of this policy was too short; the second one, I think, was too long, and misguidedly tried to enumerate every forbidden behavior while eliminating every possible loophole. I think that was a mistake, and this newest revision is intended to be more concise and readable. As always, use common sense. The earlier revisions will remain for historical purposes.

• This will be the last I have to say on this subject, but I have to say something about the commenter "cl". I don't punish people just for being theists, as several regular commenters can attest. But in the time he's been here, he's shown a consistent pattern of antagonizing everyone he comes in contact with, monopolizing threads, derailing discussions with perpetual complaints, quibbles and demands for attention, and generally making arguments that display a lack of good faith and responsiveness. In the past I've let it be, but it's become intolerable. I'm not banning him, but I'm putting in place some restrictions on how often he can comment. Further measures will be taken if they become necessary.

A popular notion in traditional Asian cultures, as well as the garbled versions of Asian culture imported into the West by the New Age movement, is the idea of qi (or chi), the vital energy that permeates the universe and flows through living things. A wide variety of pseudoscientific beliefs are based on qi, and today's post will examine some of them, through the lens of an article in a local alternative newspaper I picked up touting qi's uses in interpersonal relations and healing.

The author, Deborah Davis, starts out by defining her terms:

Qi is the life force energy that animates all living things including humans, plants and animals.

As any skeptic should recognize, this is one of the oldest superstititions known to humanity: vitalism, the belief that there's something irreducible and magical about life. This belief has persisted for millennia, even as the progressive workings of science reveal more and more about how life works and leave increasingly less room for magic. We've studied bacteria, we've investigated the cell: at the bottom everything happens through the interplay of genes and chemical reactions. There is no part left over for qi or the soul or vital forces to play.

Next, she describes how to detect qi:

Stand or sit in a relaxed manner and take a few deep belly breaths... Now rub your palms together vigorously until they're warm. Hold your palms about six inches away from one another. Close your eyes and attune to any sensations between your hands (if you don't feel anything, bring your hands closer together).

...I usually begin my Qigong classes with this exercise and most people discover a magnetic pulse, as if there's a pressure between the palms.

What this passage describes is an excellent way of invoking the ideomotor effect, a phenomenon that's also exploited by pseudosciences such as dowsing and Ouija boards. Simply thinking about moving your hands in one direction creates subconscious muscle movements, which a sensitively balanced instrument such as a dowsing rod can reveal. Without an instrument, this is harder to notice, which is why Davis helpfully advises that the sensation may be almost indiscernible and that you should move your hands around until you feel something.

It's also noteworthy that what Davis describes is a standard technique used by hypnotists to gauge how suggestible a person is. More suggestible people are more likely to feel an imaginary force pulling their hands together in response to the hypnotist's prompting, which has interesting implications for people who believe in the power of qi.

Others feel tingling or heat. This is an entertaining exercise to share with your family and everyone will have a different experience, which may vary each time.

What Davis apparently forgets is that one paragraph above, she advised starting by rubbing one's palms together vigorously, which could produce sensations of heat or tingling for entirely non-supernatural reasons. But more importantly: "everyone will have a different experience, which may vary each time"?

If there is no consistency to the feelings she believes indicate the presence of qi - if everyone may feel something different each time they try it - then how does she know that everyone's feelings come from the same source? How does she know that all these infinitely variable experiences can all be attributed to one phenomenon which she calls qi? Any valid scientific theory must have a well-defined explanatory scope; a theory that can explain anything explains nothing. By contrast, being compatible with any possible evidence, real or hypothetical, is the mark of a pseudoscience.

Begin by sensing the energy field (Qi) surrounding your being; palpate the space about one to three inches away from your body with your palms. It's very subtle. Close your eyes to help you focus inward.

The above comments about ideomotor reactions and suggestibility apply here as well. But Davis, without noticing it, has given us a test for whether qi is real. If we can feel others' qi without knowing whether there's a person present, then we would have excellent evidence that this is a real phenomenon, even if we haven't found any other way to measure it.

As it happens, just such an experiment was carried out - by a nine-year-old girl. Emily Rosa, for a school science fair project, had qi-believing practitioners of "therapeutic touch" insert their hands through a hole in a screen and try to determine if another hand was present below theirs. Unsurprisingly, they did no better than chance; their results were indistinguishable from random guessing. Emily's results were published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, making her the youngest person ever to earn such an honor. If Davis or anyone else thinks they can improve on the performance of the practitioners in that study, I invite them to try it.

The article closes with this blurb about Davis' book:

This comprehensive guide includes Qigong routines for menopause, insomnia, cancer, osteoporosis, and sexual vitality.

Qigong for cancer? Breathing exercises and waving one's hands around might help with everyday stress, but to suggest this as effective treatment for a life-threatening medical condition borders on criminal irresponsibility. If there's any evidence that this technique can give any tangible benefit to cancer sufferers, we would welcome it. If there isn't, advocates of these ideas should stop offering false hope to the gravely ill.

In closing, I have one more question. Any website on qi will have elaborate charts of the "meridians" and "chakras" that track qi's flow through the body. My question is: How were these charts derived? Similar to Skeptico's astrology challenge, I want to know how the ancient people who first came up with these ideas determined all of this. What studies did they conduct, what experiments did they run? Can I see their data for myself?

These are not facetious questions; they are questions that scientists spend their careers answering. If we want to improve our understanding of some phenomenon, we need to tease apart all the threads of causation that contribute to it and test them individually to determine which ones can best be manipulated and in what proportion. If qi is not just a patchwork of anecdote and superstition, if there is something substantive to these beliefs, then there must be a body of evidence underlying it. Can skeptics of qi see this evidence for ourselves?

Other posts in this series:

• Popular Delusions

Among the band of philosophers who hold that free will is supernatural, one of the reigning ideas is called agent causation. This hypothesis states that volitional acts are a special category of event, one that is caused not by any other event but - in some deeply mysterious way - by the agent itself. Philosopher Roderick Chisholm describes this as follows:

If we are responsible... then we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing—or no one—causes us to cause those events to happen.

The consequence of agent causation is that free will is not a process but some sort of irreducible substance: one that spontaneously originates acts and decisions, unconnected to the causal chain that binds together all other causes and effects. The usual apologetic corollary is that even God cannot intervene in or influence this process short of destroying free will altogether. It's plain that this is just the religious doctrine of the soul, the supernatural "ghost in the machine", portrayed in technical philosophers' language.

Agent causation depicts human free will as a binary state - a quantity which can either be present or not present, but which has no internal structure and cannot be subdivided. However, this is obviously false, which makes this entire view unsustainable. Free will is not a mathematical point; free will is a complex bundle of contingent desires, habits, and predispositions, which can be added to, altered or removed.

You can determine this by empirical studies of human behavior. There are countless things that human beings could do that we do not do and do not feel any desire to do. On the other hand, the vast majority of us do experience desires to have sex with an attractive partner, to consume foods high in fat and sugar, or to form tight emotional bonds with parents and relatives. Human free will, then, is not just an irreducible point source that bubbles up actions at random; it operates within a defined set of parameters, giving rise to a predictable variety of behaviors (anthropologists call them cultural universals).

You can also determine it by the evidence of the human brain: it's well known that certain, specific kinds of brain damage alter desires and behavior in predictable ways. Dementias such as Alzheimer's disease often cause loss of interest in religion, while epileptic seizures in the temporal lobes can induce religious experiences. Damage to the frontal lobes leaves people unable to control their behavior or ignore sudden impulses; injuries localized to the left hemisphere often cause depression, while injuries to the right can leave people constantly and inappropriately euphoric. And of course, drugs and intoxicants also have reliable, predictable effects on behavior.

If free will was an irreducible, nonphysical substance, producing actions free from external causation, then we should not see brain damage affect desires or behavior - much less change them in the predictable ways that neurologists observe. That we do see this shows beyond a reasonable doubt that it is false that "nothing... causes us" to make the decisions we do. Our decisions manifestly are caused.

Of course, there are other varieties of supernatural dualism that are not as clumsy as agent causation. But what these other varieties have in common is that they must give up the line in the sand. They cannot declare, as agent causation does, that we are purely supernatural beings whose decisions ultimately arise from the soul and nowhere else. Instead, these other dualisms must acknowledge that we are, at least in part, material beings, and that changes to the physical composition of body and brain can affect and alter our selves. Whether they realize it or not, advocates of these beliefs are drawing closer to atheism, as they implicitly grant that we are not spirits whose choices arrive from outside the world, but physical beings whose acts are an inextricable part of the fabric of cause and effect.

Slacktivist, a progressive Christian blogger whom I read regularly, has some words of advice for the new atheists on how best to win converts. You'd wonder why a Christian would want to give advice to atheists about how to do this - indeed, such "advice" is usually just concern trolling when it comes from the religious right - but Slacktivist is a different kind of Christian, emphatically not a member of that political group, and his advice is doubtless in good faith and worth considering. In this post, I'll say a few words by way of reply.

According to these Dawkins- and Hitchens-style arguments... religious belief arises from a core emotion of fear -- fear of death, fear of the unknown, fear that the universe might be an unjust and meaningless place.

I'm sure that there are some believers and some forms of religious belief -- particularly those unsatisfying, white-knuckled varieties -- that are in large part motivated by fear. But not all forms or all believers. And not most. And never entirely.

I think there's ample reason to believe that many forms of religious belief are motivated by fear - not necessarily metaphysical fears about death or meaning, but more tangible phobias. Consider the evidence I cited, in posts like "Groundhog Day", that many who call themselves Christian consider legalized gay marriage the worst disaster that could possibly strike a society, worse than Hurricane Katrina, worse than 9/11. They say this because the god they believe in is a psychopath, and they consider themselves hostage to his whims; if they don't succeed in ordering society the way he wants it, he will strike that society indiscriminately with disaster and catastrophe, causing them to suffer as well as many others. This dynamic of vicarious punishment, of causing the innocent to suffer for the sins of the guilty, is prominent throughout the Bible, as Slacktivist surely knows.

Or take the many charismatic churches, popular in Africa but also some of high prominence in the West, that see daily life as a continual struggle against demonic attack and worldly culture as an ever-present source of temptation to sin, and believe that putting even one foot wrong can lead to an eternity of damnation. Fear pervades every aspect of their belief system and forms the background of their daily lives. And what is the point of books about the Rapture if not to evoke terror in people at the thought of being left behind?

Or, again, take the Muslim world. What motivates so many Islamic states to force their women to veil and shroud themselves, to forbid them to drive or get an education? What is behind this if not fear - fear of women's sexual power, of their autonomy, of their independent thought?

The first problem with this diagnosis is that these arguments don't follow through on it. They're not providing a prescription to match their diagnosis. It does little good to argue that religious believers are responding to a core emotion of fear unless you're also willing to address that fear.

Very much to the contrary, I think atheists do offer an antidote to the irrational fears described above. Our solution is the simplest imaginable: the recognition that there are no gods, no demons, no hells, that there are no divine overseers standing over your shoulder with whips at the ready, that society will not be punished if we recognize the equal rights of gays, and that you will not be boiled in oil for eternity if you vote Democrat, have premarital sex, or learn about evolution in school. For people afflicted with these superstitious terrors, atheism is a release and a source of peace and contentment, as many former believers have testified.

To disabuse us of belief in the transcendent, you will need to convince us that we are seeking the wrong thing or that we are seeking in the wrong place.

But again, this is a major part of the new atheists' campaign. Sam Harris, for instance, extensively discusses mindfulness meditation, Richard Dawkins the awe and wonder of knowledge gained through science. Though we lack belief in supernatural beings, we do find ample reason to believe in the transcendent, and say so; we just believe it's found in different places than traditionally conceived. And why do atheists continually cite the absence of evidence for the existence of God, the contradictions and flaws within all the major holy books, the lack of clear answers to prayer, if not in an effort to persuade theists that they are seeking in the wrong place?

Although the success of the feminist movement has secured equal legal rights for women virtually everywhere in the West - a guarantee de jure, if not always de facto - there are still pockets of institutionalized sexism that survive. The Catholic church is the most obvious example, but other Christian denominations also deny the equality of women, such as when over 100 Southern Baptist bookstores refused to display a magazine about female pastors.

By contrast, the freethought movement has always respected the equality and talents of women. One example of this is the story of the influential female freethinker and social reformer, Frances Wright.

Frances Wright was born in Scotland in 1795. Her parents died when she was very young, and she was raised in England by relatives who gave her a classical and liberal education. At the time this was unusual for women, but her guardians' efforts bore fruit: When she turned 18, she moved to Glasgow, where the Scottish Enlightenment was in full swing. Wright flourished in this thriving intellectual community, which opposed slavery and encouraged the participation of women, and began to speak and write. One of her first books, A Few Days in Athens, outlined her utopian vision in the form of a dialogue between students at Epicurus' school.

In 1818, Wright traveled to the United States of America for the first time. She was enthralled by the possibilities that the new nation offered, writing that the system of representative government "has been carried to perfection in America". She found only one black mark on America's name: the continuing existence of slavery, which she called "odious beyond all that the imagination can conceive". Her book on the experience, Views of Society and Manners in America, was well received in both European and American circles (Jeremy Bentham was said to have praised it) and established her place as one of the leading lights of the day's intellectuals. She also corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

In 1825, she became an American citizen. It was there that she met a fellow Scot, Robert Owen, who was addressing Congress on the topic of improving working conditions for laborers (as he had done in his own mills). Inspired by Owen's utopian ideas, Wright bought a plot of land on the Tennessee frontier and named it Nashoba, initially populating it with thirty former black slaves and several white overseers. Wright intended to create an egalitarian community where the former slaves would work to repay the cost of their emancipation, while receiving an education that would enable them to become independent members of society. It was a noble experiment, but it never managed to become economically self-sufficient; this, as well as public outrage over rumors of interracial sex at Nashoba, was enough to cause the unraveling of the community.

After the collapse of Nashoba, Wright was discouraged but not defeated. She rejoined Robert Owen and became joint editor, and later sole editor, of his newspaper, the New Harmony Gazette. Later, she and Owen cofounded the paper's successor, the Free Inquirer. In these papers and on the lecture circuit, she put forth a vigorous and wide-ranging call for social reform. She advocated a national system of free and secular public schools; she demanded equal rights and entry into the workforce for women; she called for the availability of birth control, the creation of a social safety net, and a more equitable distribution of wealth - and, true to her freethinking heritage, she argued for a rational world free of oppressive clericalism and religious superstition. Predictably, the press began referring to her with epithets such as "The Red Harlot of Infidelity". She ended each lecture by calling for the creation of a Hall of Science in every community, to be dedicated to the cause of "universal knowledge".

By all contemporary accounts, she was a superb speaker. The author Frances Trollope, after witnessing a lecture by Wright, said, "I knew her extraordinary gift of eloquence, her almost unequaled command of words, and the wonderful power of her rich and thrilling voice... [but] all my expectations fell far short of the splendor, the brilliance, the overwhelming eloquence of this extraordinary orator". Another observer wrote, "A prodigy in learning, in intellect and in courage, she awes into deference the most refractory bigot". (These quotes come from Randy Best's two-part post series, a treasure trove of information on Wright's life.)

More shocking than Wright's views was the composition of her audience. She was the first woman to lecture in public before mixed audiences of men and women, and was roundly criticized for this "promiscuous assembly". As opposition grew more intense, some of her audience members were assaulted; critics tried to disrupt her speeches by setting off smoke bombs or, on one occasion, by turning off the gas lines that kept the lamps in her lecture hall lit. (She finished the lecture anyway - by candlelight - to thunderous applause.) The press criticized her for fomenting "riot and revolution".

Sadly, Wright's radicalism may have been too advanced for her day. In 1829 she left America to take the former slaves of Nashoba to Haiti. She was gone for six months, and when she returned, she found that her political adversaries had vilified her in the press to such an extent that she felt she could no longer effectively get her message across; also, she had become pregnant by her companion Philippe D'Arusmont. She left America for a time to live in the relative peace and quiet of Europe. She returned for one final lecture series in 1838, but when her favored political faction, the Jacksonian Democrats, were defeated, she withdrew for the last time from public life. She spent the rest of her life in seclusion until her death in 1852.

Although Frances Wright never saw most of her favored causes succeed, the torch she lit did not go out. Later pioneers of the feminist movement, including Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, all praised Wright as an inspiration and a pioneer in the cause of women's rights. And many of the social reforms she championed - the abolition of slavery, free and secular public schools, the creation of a social safety net - did eventually come to pass. Without her trailblazing advocacy, these reforms might never have happened. Frances Wright's life is a lesson for reformers: even if the causes we support are not realized in our own lifetimes, we can still do the vital job of laying the groundwork for our future successors.

Other posts in this series:

• The Contributions of Freethinkers

Following up on my earlier post about Obama's choice of the disgraceful bigot Rick Warren to preside at the inauguration, this news: In a response to progressive anger, the transition team has announced that V. Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal bishop, has agreed to appear as well. (Obama's spokespeople said this was not a new decision but had been in the works all along. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.)

On one level, this is a good thing. It shows that progressives had an impact, that our outrage was heard. For the past eight years and more, too many Democrats were willing to offend their own allies by blatantly pandering to the religious right - ultimately a counterproductive and futile gesture, since it infuriates the Democrats' natural political allies and Christian fundamentalists inevitably vote for the Republican anyway.

Obama's selection of Warren shows he was not above trying to play this game, but the addition of Robinson shows that the progressive pushback was intense enough to make them realize their miscalculation. Whether this means that liberals have regained a measure of political influence, or Obama's team will be more responsive to our concerns, or both, it's a hopeful sign. That said, regardless of whether Robinson or another gay Christian is present, Warren's inclusion is still a mistake. It still conveys the view that his viciously anti-gay views occupy a legitimate place on the spectrum of respectability, and adding an opposing view does nothing to change that. However, I do confess to feeling some schadenfreude at the wailing and teeth-gnashing of the bigots:

When someone who confesses to be a christian and allows an openly gay minister to be part of this event, one must wonder about the his/her faith. No doubt God loves people but He hates sin. One must repent and turn away from sin including homosexuality. As others wrote previously, God hates homosexuality. Bible is very clear on this.

This is sick. How can he be a man of God if he contradicts what God teaches. It clearly speaks out in the bible against homosexualality.... Stop saying that being gay is fine because it is not.

It seems Rick Warren prays to the God of the Holy Bible who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah and Robinson prays to a god who approves of any kind of lifestyle as long as we are "loving".

in Leviticus chapter 20, verse 13, GOD CALLS THIS LIFE STYLE AN ABOMINATION, God will be your judge just like he will all of us. God Bless America.

But I do have to register a further objection. Progressive though Robinson may be, he's still a Christian - and between him, Warren, and Joseph Lowery, it seems that only Christian voices are to play any significant role at the inaugural ceremony. If this is a message of inclusion, it's an insensitive and poorly tailored one. Obama can certainly claim he's covered every flavor of Christianity, but millions of Americans are non-Christians, including the 15% of the populace that identifies as nonreligious. What recognition will there be for us and for the role we played in electing Obama? Or are inaugural invocations a job for which only members of the majority faith need apply?

I realize the day when a humanist will give a secular invocation at the inauguration is still far off. But the more we push for it, the more we can bring that day nearer. It is never too early to seek after social progress, and the effect of the larger population's knowing that we exist can only be a beneficial one.

On one further note, I have some additional thoughts on Michael Newdow's lawsuit against the use of "so help me God" in the inaugural oath. Having listened to an interview with Newdow on Freethought Radio, I understand his position better now. It's not a lawsuit against religious language at the inauguration in general. The presidential oath as given in the Constitution has no religious language. Newdow's lawsuit seeks to enjoin Chief Justice John Roberts from adding that phrase when he administers the oath. And this, I have to admit, makes a great deal of sense. Newdow's position is not that Obama is forbidden to say it himself if he wants to, but that Roberts, acting as an agent of the government to swear him in, may not officially make a religious affirmation part of the secular oath of office. I still think it will be swiftly thrown out by the courts using their all-purpose "standing" excuse, but now that I see the reasoning behind it, this suit looks more meritorious to me than it did before.

With the American presidential inauguration soon to arrive, this seems like an opportune time to say some words on patriotism. Is love of country an emotion that can be felt by a freethinker? Is this an allegiance as irrational as the tribalisms of human prehistory, or can there be something about one's country that makes it worth loving, even fighting or dying for?

I've written in the past about tribalism, the irrational loyalty to arbitrarily defined groups of people, and the havoc and destruction this tendency has wrought in human society. At first glance, patriotism might seem to be an emotion rooted strongly in tribalism. It's hard to deny that this is at least partly true. After all, one's home country is - for most of us, though not all of us - determined arbitrarily by place of birth. People from every corner of the world exalt their own nation and praise it as the ideal society, and clearly not all of them can be right. And patriotism, like the worst kinds of tribalism, often inspires extreme partisanship, hatred, demonization of outsiders as Other, and open warfare over disagreements that, ultimately, are about very little. Not for nothing did John Lennon sketch out utopia by inviting us to "imagine there's no countries".

And yet, there's an opposing consideration, which I mentioned in my post on one-world government. As bad as excessive patriotism is, the alternative is worse.

Ultimately, countries are not patches of ground, but structures of ideas. What most defines a country is not its geographical borders: after all, we don't consider ancient Rome and modern Italy to be the same nation, even though they occupied much of the same ground. What defines a country is its system of law and government, its way of organizing its people. The existence of separate countries allows the human race to test out a diversity of ideas on how best to govern ourselves, and when one succeeds, it stands as an example to all the rest. Just such an example was the American Revolution, which reawakened the spirit of democracy in the world and marked the beginning of the end for kings and tyrants. Lovers of liberty throughout the world can cite similar inspiring examples from their own histories.

Patriotism is what moved these revolutionaries to action, what gave them a vision to strive for. Their connection to their own land and their own people gave them a sense of resolve that, so far, the amorphous cause of "humanity in general" has failed to evoke. That is too vague a banner to rally behind - to move us, we need something more concrete and more definite.

The existence of countries aids moral progress in another way: it makes it possible to advance one step at a time. At this point in human history, if we were to try to unite the human race under one banner, the sure result would be either crippling stagnation or brutal autocracy. No other kind of government would be able to accommodate (or, in the case of autocracy, to trample over) the impossibly broad and complex range of desires and concerns among different groups of people. Having separate countries allows some issues to be tabled so that we can focus on the rest. (For an example of what happens when you try to take everyone's wants into account at once, consider the United Nations, which is well-intentioned but mired in diplomatic gridlock on virtually every issue of importance.) As well, it limits the power of despots and demagogues, however successful they may be at home, by creating boundaries beyond which they hold no sway.

As I've said before, in the far distant future - when humanity's moral outlook is more unified, and many of our sacred cows dispensed with - we might be able to think about dissolving political boundaries. But in the near term, we need separate countries so that moral progress can be achieved one region at a time, rather than having to change everything to change anything. With a free flow of immigration, the competition among nations rewards those that are freest, most prosperous, and have the strongest and fairest institutions, and sends an example to the rest of the world to do likewise. When those facts are considered, I believe it is justifiable even for atheists to be patriotic about their country, to want to improve it, and to be proud of its achievements.

Of course, like any other institution, patriotism can spin out of control and become blind, destructive partisanship. The ethic of "my country, right or wrong" has led to terrible evils - corruption and graft, secrecy, unjustified war, erosion of the rule of law, and loss of faith in the self-correcting nature of democracy. Rather than worship our home country unconditionally, we should favor it with a mature and responsible patriotism, one that does not overlook its flaws but rather seeks to correct them. With this realization in hand, we should bear in mind that those who criticize a country are not always its enemies, but can in the long run be its truest patriots and friends.

Other posts in this series:

• On the Morality Of...