Daylight Atheism

Poetry Sunday: This Is Just A Place

For today's Poetry Sunday, I'm featuring the American poet A.R. Ammons, who was first showcased last year for his poem "Gravelly Run".

Born in North Carolina in 1926, Ammons grew up on his family's farm during the Great Depression and attended a Pentecostal church, whose hellfire sermons terrified the young man. He first began to write poems while serving on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, he pursued a postgraduate education and served in a variety of jobs before beginning to publish in earnest. His first collection, Ommateum, sold poorly, but his later books were critically praised and soon vaulted him from obscurity to fame. His work won him a position on the English faculty at Cornell University, where he was a much-beloved campus figure until his retirement in 1998 and death in 2001 from cancer. Over the course of his career he won countless awards, including the National Book Award, the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

As a poet, Ammons stands out for his scientific background, which is clearly visible in many of his poems. His book-length poem Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974) was inspired by a photo of the Earth from space. His verse is free, fluid, often lacking capitals and punctuation. He abhorred rigidity and dogma in all its forms, and in his transcendent view of nature's complexity, he bears a resemblance to Emerson, Whitman and other naturalist poets.

Ammons' religious views are best described as Spinozan, identifying "God" as the sum total of nature and the laws of physics, rather than as a supernatural being with a separate existence. One of his poems is titled "God Is the Sense the World Makes Without God". His freethought sympathies can also be seen in today's poem, which was read at Ammons' own memorial service. It speaks of mortality and transience, reminding us that the Earth is just one place of many in a vast and unfathomable cosmos, and that our lives are small threads in a far more immense pattern of ebb and flow. It was first published in A Coast of Trees (1981).

In Memoriam Mae Noblitt

This is just a place:
we go around, distanced,
yearly in a star's

atmosphere, turning
daily into and out of
direct light and

slanting through the
quadrant seasons: deep
space begins at our

heels, nearly rousing
us loose: we look up
or out so high, sight's

silk almost draws us away:
this is just a place:
currents worry themselves

coiled and free in airs
and oceans: water picks
up mineral shadow and

plasm into billions of
designs, frames: trees,
grains, bacteria: but

is love a reality we
made here ourselves—
and grief—did we design

that—or do these,
like currents, whine
in and out among us merely

as we arrive and go:
this is just a place:
the reality we agree with,

that agrees with us,
outbounding this, arrives
to touch, joining with

us from far away:
our home which defines
us is elsewhere but not

so far away we have
forgotten it:
this is just a place.

Other posts in this series:

Poetry Sunday

The Price of Abstinence

A much-heralded study in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics has concluded that the premarital "abstinence pledges" so beloved by evangelical Christians are ineffective. Teenagers who sign up for religious programs such as True Love Waits or Silver Ring Thing, in which participants pledge to remain abstinent until marriage, are just as likely to have premarital sex as nonpledgers, and significantly less likely to use contraception when they do. They also contract STDs at the same rates as nonpledgers, have their first sexual encounter at the same average age as nonpledgers, and have the same average number of sexual partners as nonpledgers. In short, in every way that can be measured, these programs are completely useless and may be actively harmful. (Also, note that all the "abstinence pledge" programs are specifically Christian in nature and content - which has led to First Amendment lawsuits when their advocates try to get them taught in public schools.)

However, we do have a contrary view from William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal, which has some fallacies to be dispensed with. McGurn first points out that:

...the only way the study's author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers.

He treats this as if it were a dirty trick, when in fact it's basic statistics: to eliminate confounding factors from your results, the best method is to compare two populations that are similar in every respect except the variable you want to study. That's exactly what Rosenbaum's study (full text online here) did, choosing two groups of teenagers with similar social and religious backgrounds, except that one group took virginity pledges and the other did not. McGurn apparently does not dispute the conclusion that the pledges made no difference in behavior. Nevertheless:

...virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general -- a fact that many media reports have missed cold.

...Let's put this another way. The real headline from this study is this: "Religious Teens Differ Little in Sexual Behavior Whether or Not They Take a Pledge."

McGurn cites no studies in support of this conclusion, and I'd very much like to see his evidence. Needless to say, most of the studies I'm aware of have found precisely the opposite: the most religiously conservative areas of the country have the highest rates of STDs and teen pregnancy, and abstinence-only sex ed does nothing to reduce these problems. A recent article in the New Yorker by Margaret Talbot, Red Sex, Blue Sex, cites a study by the sociologist Mark Regnerus:

Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical.

...On average, white evangelical Protestants make their "sexual début" — to use the festive term of social-science researchers — shortly after turning sixteen... Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception.

The article goes on to observe that socially conservative, more religious "red" states also have higher teen pregnancy rates, higher rates of STD infection, and higher rates of divorce, the latter probably because of their lower median age of marriage. The abstinence-only programs so popular in those states have done nothing to deter this. In fact, it's made the problem worse by ensuring that teens who do have sex are ill-equipped to protect themselves. The evidence is clear that comprehensive sex ed programs which teach accurate information about contraception have proven superior every time they're put to the test. If we expect teenagers to act like adults, we need to treat them like adults.

But abstinence-only programs exact a higher price than this. Consider their impact in Africa, which is still battling a massive AIDS epidemic. In countries like Uganda, abstinence-only programs championed by Christian pastors like Martin Ssempa, who's a close friend and ally of Rick Warren, have reversed the success of comprehensive sex ed programs, leading to a rise in new HIV infection rates among the rural poor. (Ssempa followed up his success in the abstinence-only campaign by spearheading a political initiative to imprison homosexuals.)

It's unlikely that religious advocates of abstinence-only programs will be deterred by any of these facts. Pleasing their notion of God matters more to them than the lives or well-being of real people, and so in their minds, as long as we're teaching the "right" things, the results are beside the point. This makes it all the more important that we in the reality-based community, who value human welfare more highly than obedience to dogma, do not give up the push to ensure that all people have access to accurate information about sex and contraception.

Enemy of Faith

It seems that the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, which apparently exists, has released a list of the top ten instances of "Christian-bashing" in America in 2008 (HT: PZ). Taking a bold stand, this group has announced, "It is time for... Christians to no longer be treated like second-class citizens".

Perusing the list, you'll soon discover that the people who wrote it can't grasp the difference between being criticized and being persecuted. Forget that at least three-quarters of the U.S. population identifies as Christian, that Christianity enjoys unanimous acclaim and official favoritism by government, or that Christianity controls a vast multibillion-dollar empire of books, magazines, radio stations, TV channels and private universities to spread its message. Never mind all that, some evil atheists said mean things about us on the Internet, which proves what a poor, persecuted minority we Christians are! Boo hoo!

But of all the items on the list, my personal favorite is the claim that President Barack Obama says he's a Christian, but isn't a Christian according to this group's definition of the term, and that his election therefore represents persecution of Christianity. And then there's this gem of irony:

During and after the November campaign stories flooded in of pro-Prop 8 signs being taken, people verbally and physically assaulted, church property and private automobiles vandalized, and person's jobs and pastor's lives threatened simply for exercising their right to campaign and vote in support of traditional marriage.

I don't condone violence, but come on. It's pure disingenuousness to say that you're just "protecting marriage" by taking it away from people whom you don't think deserve to have it, and then acting shocked and appalled when those people get angry. This is like the way cowboy movies depict white men as the heroes, under assault by those savage Native Americans for no reason whatsoever.

But even if these specific examples are laughable, there remains the overall accusation: that atheists are die-hard enemies of faith, unwilling to live in harmony with theists, seeking to eradicate religion from the earth by any means necessary. Is that a fair characterization?

I can only answer for myself, of course, but I consider this a most unfair and insultingly inaccurate depiction of my views. For the record, here's what I think:

I have never spoken against freedom of conscience, nor will I ever. You can practice, in the privacy of your own homes and churches, any faith you want. You can even preach it in public and try to persuade others to convert. That's part of the free flow of ideas that's an essential part of any democratic society. (By the same token, just as you have the right to proselytize and to argue against other faiths, you should expect to be argued against and criticized by people who believe differently. That too is part of the flow of ideas, protected by the same free speech guarantees that secure your right to preach to others. Free speech covers every idea, not just the ones you happen to agree with.)

But what you do not have the right to do is to import your religion into public policy, to make decisions which affect all of us on the basis of a faith that we do not all share. A government that represents people of diverse religious views must be secular, showing no favoritism toward any sect, and justifying its policy decisions on the basis of facts and reasons which anyone can examine.

There's one other condition I would add, which is this: You have the right to bring up your children in your own faith, but you should give them a meaningful chance to choose for themselves. You should teach them, at the very least, about the existence of different religions (and atheism), give them the opportunity to learn more if they wish to, and respect their choice if they desire to join one. Any belief system that brainwashes people via physical or emotional abuse, that seeks to deny them the right to make their own choices, or that punishes them if they leave, is an evil that society should not tolerate.

If you can meet these conditions, then I am not an enemy of your faith. Truthfully, I don't care what other people do in private. It's only when theists bring their faith into the sphere of public policy and assert that their understanding of God's will entitles them to special treatment that I feel the need to speak out. If there weren't so many intolerant, militaristic believers trying to force their will on others - if religious irrationality didn't pose such a grave and continuing threat to the welfare of the human race - then I doubt I'd have this website at all.

I grant that I've expressed the desire to see all forms of religious faith fade away and be replaced by a more rational outlook, but that's only because I think it's inherent in the nature of faith to overreach. If I were proven wrong about that, I'd gladly accept it. I'd welcome the arrival of a new kind of faith whose followers were content to live and let live, and I would be happy to grant them the same courtesy in return. In any case, if religion does die out, I expect it will take place gradually through demographic changes and rational persuasion, and I absolutely would never condone any form of coercion.

On Cryonics

Last summer I wrote a post, "Why I'm Skeptical of the Singularity", which gave some reasons for doubting that godlike machine intelligences will ever come into being. Today I'll discuss another idea popular among enthusiasts of transhumanism, namely life extension through cryonics. Here, too, I intend to offer a qualified skepticism.

Overcoming Bias presents a strong case for cryonics, in a post which pleads with readers to sign up for the process. I'll use them as my foil. My own viewpoint, meanwhile, hasn't changed significantly since I first touched on the topic in "Life Is Fleeting":

While in the remote future it is a very real possibility that we will unlock the key to personal immortality, for the time being such rosy scenarios are more science fiction than science fact... The most advanced freezing technology in existence today still causes massive cellular damage, irreversible in all except the most fantastic scenarios of what future technology will be capable of. In essence, this is little more than a materialist version of Pascal's Wager.

I realize comparing cryonics to Pascal's Wager is likely to raise some hackles, but the comparison is unavoidable when advocates of cryonics so often defend the idea using Pascal's Wager-like logic: If you bet on cryonics and lose, you lose nothing, since you'd have died anyway; but if you win, you might wake up in a future where science has perfected immortality! Isn't this a potentially infinite payoff with zero risk?

But just as Pascal's argument overlooked the problem of choosing the wrong religion and ending up condemned, cryonics overlooks the possibility that the future, rather than being better, may be worse. What if the future is a 1984-style dictatorship or post-apocalyptic anarchy, or is run by malevolent superintelligences (like the vindictive supercomputer AM from Harlan Ellison's classic story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream) that take pleasure in tormenting us? What if the future revives cryonically frozen human beings only to put them on trial for the crimes of our era? (I find this last possibility the most plausible of the four.) The potential payoffs of cryonics, needless to say, become far more complicated if we do not assume that we can only wake up in a world far better than the one we left.

Second: Even disregarding this problem, why will the future want to revive us? Any plausible scheme for resurrecting frozen humans - nanotechnological repair, whole-brain uploading, cloning new bodies - is certain to be a difficult and resource-intensive process. What will they want us for? The future is not likely to be short of people, and even if it were, there are easier ways of producing new ones. And by the time revival is perfected, if it ever is, it's probable that the cryonically preserved will have no living relatives who feel any particular kinship for them.

For historical research? But if cryogenically frozen people survive into the distant future, then it's almost certain that the Internet and other records from our time will have survived as well; information is more easily preserved than entire people. The flood of news stories, blog entries, and other chronicles from our era will provide as much data as future historians could ever want and would make the existence of live people superfluous. It may be done the first few times for the sake of novelty, but I can't see it happening much beyond that, especially if there are thousands and thousands of frozen people.

Third: Even if the future is a benevolent one and is willing to revive us, will the person who's revived really be me? Even staunch cryonics advocates admit that the damage done to brain tissue by freezing is irreversible with any current technology. And the revival process, no matter how it works, is likely to cause additional damage.

To truly revive a person, it would be necessary to preserve the incredibly delicate, submicroscopic connections between neurons in exactly the same state as when the person was alive. If neurons die or their synapses are severed during recovery - even if only a small percentage suffer these side effects - the result would be massive brain damage. Even if future technology could repair this damage, it could only operate probabilistically in terms of restoring neural connections - after all, there's no map of the brain to tell which neurons are supposed to connect to which other neurons - with the result that the person revived might be missing memories, might have a drastically altered personality or character traits. Would it really be better to be revived in such a fragmented state? Would the person who's revived even be me, or would he more justly be considered a different person altogether?

Finally, it's worth asking whether investing on cryonics is the best use of our society's resources. While people alive today are still suffering and deprived of life's basic needs, it strikes me as selfish for a wealthy, privileged few who've already enjoyed long and happy lives to grasp after immortality. In my view, it's better to accept that we all get one chance at life, to live it to the fullest while we possess it, and when we're gone, to give away to others whatever we leave behind so that they can enjoy the same opportunity.

The Story of Atheism

In my previous post, I wrote some thoughts on the power of storytelling and how atheists can use it to our benefit. In this post, I intend to apply those principles to tell a story: the story of atheism.

Because gods are fundamentally human creations, this is also a story of humanity. It opens in the time when the human race was newborn, when we had first come of age as conscious beings who could look around and conceptualize the world. I don't know the exact nature of the beings in whose minds these ideas first appeared - they may not have been modern Homo sapiens, but they were undoubtedly our ancestors and deserve to be described as such.

The end product is somewhat similar to my atheist psalm, "The Gods", somewhat similar to treatises on the origins of religion like Dennett's Breaking the Spell. In the name of narrative convenience and brevity, some details have been omitted from this story. Nevertheless, I think it captures an adequate, if simplified, account of events in our past that actually happened. Editorial suggestions are, as always, welcome.

In the beginning, Humanity was lonely and afraid. We had tremendous potential, but we were still simple creatures, knowing only the rudiments of survival, and at the mercy of a world that was chaotic and full of danger. Like children lost in the wilderness, we knew that we existed, but not where we had come from, nor what happened to us when we died.

To ease our loneliness and fear, in our imaginations we filled the world with other people: people who lived in fire and water, in earth and trees, in sun and moon. From what we knew then, this was reasonable: after all, the only other things we knew of that reacted to us with as much complexity and inscrutability as these natural phenomena were our fellow human beings. And if the natural events that governed our lives were personified, then perhaps those people could be supplicated in times of trouble, perhaps they could be persuaded to have mercy on us. But because these other people were invisible, we called them spirits; and because we could not control the seasons or the weather, we reasoned that these spirits must be more powerful than us.

When agriculture was discovered, our population expanded and we became sedentary. But this meant we were even more dependent on nature's favor, and staying in the good graces of the spirits became even more important. Thus, in our eyes, they became more powerful still, and were elevated from spirits to gods - invisible beings who had power over our lives, and who had to be appeased above all else. This was the birth of religion, as our duties to the gods became formalized, crystallizing from folk superstitions about what had seemed to bring prosperity in the past.

These ideas stayed with us, and as our knowledge and our civilization expanded, they too began to grow in scope. As tribes merged into nations, the gods ran together, like drops of water merging. When war was kindled, the rulers sought to fill their people with courage by assuring them that the gods were on their side and would see that they prevailed over the enemy - or, at worst, that their spirits would end up in a pleasant afterlife. And as human power continued to grow and nations were forged into empires, the gods of the victors grew ever more powerful, the success of their worshippers tangible proof of their expanding dominion over the earth.

At first, the gods and the earthly ruler were one, and the voice of the king was assumed to be the voice of the divine. Through assertions of power both earthly and in the afterlife, their sway was initially absolute. But as the gods grew in power and influence, it became more advantageous to claim the right to speak for them. This was especially true when disaster struck a society, when the rulers had made bad decisions and their link to the gods could be doubted. Small wonder, then, that prophets began to appear who preached that the existing authorities were corrupt, that the gods wanted something different of us, and that they had had an insight into this new path. And small wonder, too, that the more persuasive of these prophets attracted followings of their own.

What this led to was a decoupling of religion from the state apparatus and a flowering of religious creativity as new sects of every kind arose, expressing all the creativity of which the human mind is capable. Wherever there was a human need unmet by the existing society, new religions sprang up promising to fill it. Of course, the state-run religions still existed and often lashed out harshly at their competitors. In other places, new religions grew in power until they became the established authority, or were coopted by an existing state whose rulers found their tenets to be useful. And old religions that had become bureaucratic and impersonal were often outcompeted by younger, more vibrant faiths and dwindled away, their gods' voices fading to nothingness as their followers died out and their temples crumbled.

All this was the pattern of human society for millennia. Belief in differing gods led to bloody wars between societies, but also sustained a shared cultural identity within a society, leading to a stable equilibrium. Every era had skeptics and doubters of the established faith, but few of them gained any great following, since they had no alternative religion to offer on which they could build a power base. But in one society in particular, there came an era of enlightenment, when great thinkers dared to ask questions of the world... and in at least one time, at least one place, there were enough skeptical minds put together to fan the embers that had been smoldering throughout human history into flame. The scientific age had dawned.

At its essence, the scientific era was underlain by a simple, revolutionary idea: statements about the world should not be accepted on the basis of faith, but proven by open and systematic testing. But simple as it sounds, the advances it brought us were immense. Fired by the thrill of discovery, the heralds of the scientific age sent their new paradigm sweeping out over the world like a universal acid, dissolving the superstitions and dogmas that had for so long impeded our thinking.

In the light of science, the natural phenomena that had once seemed so inscrutable, so humanlike, lost their mystery as the hidden rules underlying them were laid bare in all their grand, mechanical glory. We peered into the dark and discovered that the cosmos was not a place of thundering spirits or leering devils, but a vast machine, one whose guiding principles meshed with all the harmonious elegance and regularity of great gears. Even life itself, so long thought to be supernatural, was revealed to be another machine, albeit a particularly complex and subtle kind. The deities and demons that had once dwelled the interstices of our ignorance washed away like sand in water, as we learned about the origins of the world, of the human species, of the mind. At least in part measure, we have grasped the truth, and learned that it was far more intricate, more satisfying, and more wondrous than the imaginings of our youth. Science does not have every answer, nor does it offer guidance for every aspect of life, but when it comes to finding out how the world works, it has no equal.

The reverberations of this era of change are still with us. We live in a time, one ongoing since the Enlightenment, when the old certainties of faith are shifting underfoot. Every sect has dealt differently with these changes, but none have entirely avoided them. Some people are moving their gods into ever more rarefied realms to escape the relentless probing, crafting deities whose existence is indistinguishable from their nonexistence. Others, more militant, are reaffirming the old creeds with fiery zealotry, denouncing scientists for their godlessness, and boasting and cheering one another for their stubborn clinging to faiths that are childlike in their ignorant simplicity. Still others, probably the majority, have come to a reluctant accommodation with the scientific outlook, but banking their hope on finding tangible traces of the gods in the shrinking areas we haven't investigated - an unsustainable compromise, whether they know it or not.

And now, into this new world, come those who did not grow up in the shadow of gods, and who have taken the simple, revolutionary step of asking why we should believe any proposition for which there is no evidence. The crude fundamentalisms of humanity are all alike in their falsehood; the unfalsifiable beliefs are all alike in their irrelevance. In place of chasing these shadows and clutching at these mirages, this new generation of free thinkers has come to the realization that we should turn our attention to the things that are real, that are verifiable - the only important things. In place of trying to appease phantoms of our imagination, we should turn our attention to bringing goodness into this world and easing the burden of our fellow creatures.

The atheist view can seem cold and comfortless to novices, for it does not promise that all our hurts will be succored. Nor does it give us guardians hovering above to guide our steps. But where atheism requires us to abandon the consolations of childhood, it brings in their place the maturity of adulthood. Instead of clouded sight, it brings clear vision. Instead of gods and angels to watch out for us, it brings the realization that we must look out for each other. We live in a vast and uncaring cosmos, but we have each other to depend on, and the freedom to succeed or fail by our own efforts.

This is our story, and we are all characters in it, as well as the storytellers. But unlike any other character, we see the story we are in, and our choices will write the next chapter. In spite of everything, the darkness of our past may come sweeping back, and our future may be a fall back into the same precipice we have been painfully climbing out of. Or the slow, frustrating, yet upward trajectory of history may continue, into a bright future that surpasses our imagination as far as the truth surpasses the imaginings of the past.

On Storytelling

Back in November, Greta Christina wrote about how to overcome religious influence in politics, specifically in relation to Prop 8 and gay rights. At the time, I left some thoughts in a comment, which I think is worth developing into a full post.

I wrote back in 2006 about The Da Vinci Code, noting that although the movie was a bit of fantasy fluff that took major liberties with historical fact, it drew incensed reactions and paranoid denunciations from Christian religious leaders all around the world - a far larger backlash than most atheist critiques provoke. I offered an explanation for why this is:

Our society does not value critical thinking and skepticism highly, but rather steadfast faith and decisions based on emotion. In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising that rational arguments against Christianity or any other religion have made relatively little headway.

On the other hand, what can and does flourish in such an environment is another story, one that appeals to people on the same emotional level as Christianity and taps the same feelings: the emotional appeal of the triumphant underdog, the sense of being part of something greater than oneself, the idea of great and sacred mysteries that will be revealed to the initiate. The Da Vinci Code competes with Christianity on its own turf, so to speak...

This same dynamic was visible in California last year with Prop 8. If you look at what successful political campaigns have in common, the answer is almost always the narrative - their success at depicting the world in terms of a story that's favorable to their goals. Campaigns that have a strong, compelling narrative are usually the ones that triumph, and that's what most politics is about nowadays, the ability to tell a better story than your opponent. It needs to be a story that's simple, memorable, and speaks strongly to its listeners' hopes or fears (or both). It needs to be a story that people identify with, one that they can readily see themselves as participants in.

In the battle over Prop 8, it's widely agreed, advocates of marriage equality failed at this task. We let our opponents define the terms of the debate, spreading fear and misinformation about the consequences of the vote, and failed to put forward a strong narrative of our own that presented the case for equality in simple, persuasive terms. We should have blanketed the state with advertisements that showed gay couples as they are, going about their daily lives, explaining why they wanted to be married and what they stood to lose if Prop 8 passed.

This realization is the key to how freethinkers can outcompete the deleterious impacts of religious voting blocs on politics. Some apologists say that people are innately programmed to be believers, that religion's influence on humanity can never be overcome, but we should know better. What people respond to is not primarily logic and reason, but stories. We've always been storytellers and story-listeners, ever since we were hunter-gatherers sitting in the dark around our fires. Religion is a particularly grand and elaborate form of story - the story of why we're here, why the world is the way it is, and why we occupy this place in it - the story crafted to explain the biggest and most important questions that exist. Religion dominates because it's had millennia to practice and perfect its stories under the selective pressures of memetic evolution.

So, how do you defeat a story? Not with logic and reason. If you ask how the giant got up into the sky before the beanstalk was there, or why animals and weather hadn't destroyed the gingerbread house long ago, people will laugh and think you're missing the point. No, the way to defeat a story is with a better story.

This isn't an impossible task. We have the raw material we need: the fruits of several centuries of patient scientific exploration, which has yielded an impressive amount of detail about how the cosmos came to be and how we fit into it. And these details aren't dull and pedestrian, either, but awe-inspiring in the truest sense of the word. The only problem is that science is a relative newcomer to this game, and though its stories have the virtue of being true, the storytellers of science haven't perfected their ability to present an equally good narrative.

Here, too, we know what goes into crafting a compelling narrative. A good story will present a likable and sympathetic main character with whom the reader can emphasize; it will present the character with a dilemma which he has the ability to solve; it will explain the character's backstory and show how he got into that dilemma; and it will tie together established character traits with elements from his past to create an explanation for how he can triumph. These are the basic components of any narrative arc.

With these elements in hand, can we tell the story of atheism, and can we present it more compellingly than past efforts have done? An upcoming post will attempt to answer these questions.

No Holy Ground

The world's attention has been riveted these past few days by Israel's assault on Gaza, in an attempt to oust the Hamas-run government and put a stop to rocket attacks on southern Israel. Hundreds of Palestinians were reported killed in a wave of airstrikes, over a thousand wounded, and as of this writing, a ground invasion looms as a continuing possibility. Although the conflict began after a six-month ceasefire expired and Hamas refused to renew it, it's now Israel that's rejecting calls for a temporary truce to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.

The Israeli invasion has drawn a chorus of condemnation from around the world, except in the U.S., where politicians from both parties march in a virtual pro-Israel lockstep. (This despite the fact, as Glenn Greenwald notes, that opinions on the matter among the American public are far more similar to those elsewhere in the world.) The confluence of a hawkish, politically influential pro-Israel lobby and the influence of a major voting bloc of right-wing Christians probably has a lot to do with this.

The Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed is something I've never seen the sense of taking sides in. To all except mindless hyper-partisans, it should be obvious that neither Israel nor Palestine is wholly at fault, and as far as I'm concerned, there are plenty of good reasons for blame on both sides. Hamas is deliberately provoking Israel with attacks on civilians, counting on massive Israeli retaliation to cause death and destruction among the Palestinians so that they'll rise up in anger and rally to Hamas' banner - callously using the suffering of its own people to shore up its own support. Israel, for its part, is suffocating Gaza with military barricades - preventing even necessities like food and medicine from reaching innocent Palestinians - and using its much greater military power in overwhelming reprisals against defenseless targets, spilling far more blood among Palestinians than any terrorist attack ever did for Israelis. Neither side has made any serious, sustained effort to lower the tension level or restrain itself in the service of a lasting peace.

As in almost all of the world's lasting trouble spots, this conflict has its origins in religion. Both sides are poisoned by a toxic mixture of beliefs about "promised lands" and "chosen people", which inevitably inspire hatred and xenophobia against members of the out-group. Two thousand years and more of bloodshed have grown from that bitter seed.

On the Israeli side, these beliefs manifest in the hardcore settlers who believe that controlling the entire occupied territories is their God-given right. In one especially horrifying incident, a mob of settlers tried to lynch a Palestinian family (page has sound), whose lives were only saved by a group of journalists on the scene. These settlements need to be rolled back for there to be any lasting peace, but Israel lacks the political will.

On the Palestinian side and throughout the Muslim world, these beliefs manifest in rampant and vicious anti-Semitism, including teaching schoolchildren the ancient blood libels handed down from medieval Christianity. (See also articles 22 and 32 of the Hamas Covenant.)

Christianity also plays a major, if indirect, role in this conflict. Mostly this is due to right-wing evangelicals, who see the Jews as pawns that need to be moved into place so that they can play their part in the apocalypse by being sacrificed. (This view was most infamously expounded by Pat Robertson when he said that Ariel Sharon's stroke was because God struck him down as punishment for trying to trade land for peace.) Not only have these groups prevented the American government from applying any significant political pressure to Israel, they themselves have inflamed the conflict by actively encouraging further Israeli settlement in the occupied territories, even getting churches to "adopt" particular settlements.

It's often stated, as if it were greatly ironic, that the so-called Holy Land is the site of the most enduring and deeply felt hatred on earth. But in truth, that's exactly what we should expect. The whole point of a "holy land" is that said land is valued irrationally highly, much higher than any material concern would ever justify. Such belief is bound to clash violently with the lives and well-being of humans; that is what always happens when things are valued more highly than people. And the danger is far greater in this case since it's not just one, but all the world's major monotheistic faiths that place this insane importance on a tiny and inconsequential strip of ground.

When fanatics of opposing sects go to battle, with each side convinced of its own righteousness and inevitable victory, the only possible outcome is never-ending bloodshed and chaos. In truth, I see only one way out of the destruction that holy-land mythology has wrought on humanity, and that's for all sides to hear the call of reason and turn away from their suicidal mutual destruction. But with the combatants blinded by self-righteousness and zealotry, I see little prospect of that happening any time in the near future. The fertile crescent that birthed destructive fundamentalism may well be the one place on Earth where it survives the longest.

Rebutting Reasonable Faith: Is There Non-Culpable Unbelief?

Early on in Daylight Atheism's tenure, I wrote several critical reviews of the CAP Alert site, but I later gave that up as providing insufficient sport. However, I've set my sights on a new and worthier target: the Christian apologist William Lane Craig and his weekly Q&A Archive from his Reasonable Faith website. I'll begin today with question #88:

I would like to know from you if I, as an atheist, am going to be punished by God for not believing in him. If I, after looking objectively at all the evidence, come to the conclusion that I have not arrived here as the result of a divine plan but merely as a consequence of merely materialistic processes, do I deserve to be denied the gift of eternal life? If when coming face to face with God after death, I reveal that this was a position that I honestly came to after much investigation and really trying to understand nature?

This is an excellent question, and Craig's answer is illuminative of his theology and the rational faults in it. He begins by claiming that we're all condemned by default, regardless of our honesty or lack thereof:

...biblical Christianity teaches that no one is good enough to merit heaven. To be judged on the basis of our deeds would be the worst possible thing that could happen to us, for none of us measures up to God's moral law (perfection).... Hence, salvation can only be received as a gift of God's grace; there's nothing we can do to earn it.

...I remember when as a non-Christian I first heard the Gospel. I was leading a pretty morally upright life—externally, at least—, and yet when I learned that according to the Bible, I was guilty before God and therefore on my way to hell, I had absolutely no problem believing that. When I looked into my own heart, I saw the blackness within, how everything I did was tainted by selfishness. I knew how wretched I was really was [sic].

The first point to observe here is how Christianity exaggerates the badness of human nature. Starting with the reasonable premise that everyone puts a foot wrong from time to time, theologians distort this almost beyond recognition into the belief that we are all completely depraved and vile and that everything we do stems from evil motives. As Craig's reply shows, this serves their evangelistic purpose by giving Christians a justification to say that everyone is deserving of damnation and therefore everyone needs their salvation. But the psychological harm and suffering caused by this vicious false belief is incalculable. A belief system which taught that human beings are capable of goodness would not only result in less individual misery, but would very likely give rise to more actual good in the world.

The second thing worth noting is that, by divorcing salvation from good deeds or even the intent to do good deeds, evangelical Christians have made getting to Heaven an entirely arbitrary reward. In essence, they believe that there's a secret password to heaven - one that's hidden among thousands of indistinguishable alternatives - and the only thing that matters about your time on Earth is whether you can discover it. Raising a family, falling in love, showing compassion to your fellow humans, creating beauty, working to advance the knowledge or the common good of humanity - all these activities, in Craig's worldview, are meaningless and merit nothing. Finding the hidden password is the only thing that matters, and if you fail to find it, you're consigned to eternal torment. This view reduces our existence to the level of a lab rat running the experimenter's maze.

Against the self-evident and appalling injustice of this theology, Craig falls back on his second assertion. Incredibly, he claims that there is no such thing as honest unbelief: that all human beings are aware not just of the existence of God but of the truth of his specific set of religious doctrines. Here's how he puts it:

My view is that, ultimately speaking, there is no such thing as non-culpable unbelief. For, first, there is good evidence for theism which is readily accessible to all, such as I share in Reasonable Faith (3rd ed.), and no comparably good argument for atheism...

Second, and more importantly, God has not abandoned us to work out by our own ingenuity and cleverness whether or not He exists. Rather His Holy Spirit speaks to the heart of every man, convicting him of sin and drawing him to God.

Craig's claim that there is "no comparably good argument" for atheism is obviously just rhetorical cheerleading. Even he's acknowledged the strength of atheist arguments on other occasions, such as when he called the problem of evil a "killer argument" for atheism (see reference).

But as he admits, in his theology rational arguments are irrelevant. No matter what the evidence shows or what conclusion reason supports, Craig maintains that all human beings know the truth of his form of Christianity and only deliberate rebellion causes any of us to deny this. Is this not an astoundingly arrogant claim?

This culminating absurdity does give Craig a response to the argument from religious confusion, but only at the cost of adding a wholly new and far more irrational belief to his faith: the belief that every single person in the world who is not an evangelical Christian is lying about what they know and what they believe. This view requires him to impute deliberate dishonesty and malevolence to the vast majority of his fellow human beings. And this is what he calls "reasonable faith"?

We atheists know full well that our conclusions are sincere, our position honestly arrived at and based on our best evaluation of the evidence. Of course, we can never prove that to Craig and other apologists who are driven to claim that we are all liars in deliberate rebellion, so that they may avoid having to face the unjust implications of their theology. It may well imply that William Lane Craig lacks confidence in his own beliefs, if he cannot abide the idea of sincere dissent and must instead assert that we all secretly agree with him, whether we admit it or not.