In May, I wrote about the freethinker Giuseppe Verdi and my experience attending a performance of his operatic masterpiece, the Requiem. At the time, I had one other thought: strange as it sounds, and despite the fact that its composer was no friend of orthodoxy, Verdi's Requiem was one of the more effective arguments for Christianity I've ever heard.

I'm not a frequent attendee of sermons, but even so, I doubt few of them would match Verdi's orchestral eloquence. Even though its arias were sung in Latin, the music itself powerfully conveyed the ideas that lay behind it. In Verdi's hands, the enduring Christian concepts came to vivid life: the dreadful realization that finality has at last arrived; a terrible day of darkness, unquenchable fire descending from heaven to consume the world; the contrite sinner's realization of unbearable guilt, in the face of the divine judge's awesome majesty; the hope of mercy freely offered; and the joy of ultimate salvation, escaping doom to be numbered with the saints and the angels. Religion's forte has always been to persuade through the evocation of emotion, and nothing evokes emotion like a symphony as masterful as this one.

Of course, this doesn't constitute evidence that any of it is true. And there are still the absurdities and moral outrages that go along with believing a perfect god would create imperfect humans and then consign them to torment for being what he created them to be. But nevertheless, if you overlook all this, it's still a great story. From rising action, defining the conflict and setting up the protagonist in seemingly hopeless circumstances (and casting each one of us as the protagonist - a masterstroke!), to dramatic climax, to denouement and seemingly impossible triumph snatched from the very jaws of doom, it has all the elements shared by great fiction throughout the ages.

And atheists shouldn't find it surprising that religious belief systems have mythologies which stir the spirit. Every major world religion does. (One of my favorites is the story of the Buddha calling the earth to witness on his behalf.) This is to be expected precisely because it's the possession of these great stories that inspire human beings' allegiance and devotion. More so than any purely rational argument, most people are moved by the dramatic power of stories that appeal to the emotions.

I'm sympathetic to the story-telling impulse that underlies religion. In a way, it represents humanity's first, tentative effort to make sense of the cosmos. In the prescientific past, the world was a frightening and chaotic place, and of course people were afraid of disasters against which they were helpless. Under these circumstances, it's entirely understandable that they would grasp at any thin reed that seemed to promise safety or deliverance. It's always been part of the attraction of religion that it gives people a sense of understanding and control in an uncaring and dangerous universe, and it's completely natural and forgivable that people of the past used it for that purpose.

The problem, today, is that religious beliefs have outlived their usefulness. That desire for understanding, for control, has been distilled and expressed in a pure form: the scientific method. Now, for the first time in history, we have real answers, not just guesses, for the fundamental questions of existence. The codified dogmas of the past, the ones that touch on those same questions, are stale and outdated. We no longer need those fragile trappings of myth when we have genuine understanding to light the way.

In the light of that understanding, the superstitions that once hedged us about seem not just incorrect, but foolish. The deities, those towering shapes that seemed so imposing to our ancestors, have dwindled in stature. Up close, they are no more substantial than shadows; they waver and dissipate like smoke on the breeze. We no longer need them to direct our steps. We have something better now: the true stories of science, guided by empirical evidence, that reveal the full scope and complexity of the cosmos and our own place within it.

That's not to say that the religious stories, which still have emotional power to stir us, are entirely without value. Within those traditions, there is superb poetry, enduring parables, and some good moral lessons. But we can extract those and use them, if we wish, without pretending that the rest of it is in any way literally true, or that the people who wrote them were guided by anything more than human creativity.

The New York Times published an article last week, Tiny Voices Defy Child Marriage in Yemen, about a stunning act of courage and feminism: in the nation of Yemen, a 9-year-old girl named Arwa Abdu Muhammad Ali, on her own initiative, sought and obtained a divorce from the abusive, violent 35-year-old man she had been forcibly married to. Her success echoes that of a 10-year-old girl, Nujood Ali, who escaped a similar arranged marriage a month earlier.

Having just finished Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's gripping memoir of a childhood in cultures where female slavery is the norm, I feel I have a better appreciation now for the crushing oppression of these girls' society. Like Hirsi Ali's childhood home of Somalia, rural Yemen is a society where women are assumed, from birth onward, to be the property of a man, and systematically denied every opportunity they might ever have to choose their own course in life.

...despite a rising tide of outrage, the fight against the practice is not easy. Hard-line Islamic conservatives, whose influence has grown enormously in the past two decades, defend it, pointing to the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a 9-year-old. Child marriage is deeply rooted in local custom here, and even enshrined in an old tribal expression: "Give me a girl of 8, and I can give you a guarantee" for a good marriage. (Shades of the Jesuits: "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man" —Ebonmuse)

Inequality imbues the very air of this society, which makes it all the more noteworthy that some women have begun to fight back. In interviews, the article hints at the amazing maturity of these girls - children thrust into a situation that seemed far beyond their ken, far beyond any possibility of resistance, who nevertheless fought back and won.

As she told her story, Nujood gradually gained confidence, smiling shyly as if she were struggling to hold back laughter. Later, she removed her veil, revealing her shoulder-length brown hair.

...It was the first time she had traveled anywhere alone, Nujood recalled, and she was frightened. On arriving at the courthouse, she was told the judge was busy, so she sat on a bench and waited. Suddenly he was standing over her, imposing in his dark robes. "You're married?" he said, with shock in his voice.

...When Nujood's case was called the next Sunday, the courtroom was crowded with reporters and photographers, alerted by her lawyer. Her father and husband were also there; the judge had jailed them the night before to ensure that they would appear in court. (Both were released the next day.) "Do you want a separation, or a permanent divorce?" the judge, Muhammad al-Qadhi, asked the girl, after hearing her testimony and that of her father and her husband.

"I want a permanent divorce," she replied, without hesitation. The judge granted it.

Asked what made her flee her husband after so many months, Arwa gazed up, an intense, defiant expression in her eyes.

"I thought about it," she said in a very quiet but firm voice. "I thought about it."

For their age, their courage and determination is astounding. It may well be that these girls succeeded because they are children, and haven't yet internalized the ideas of female oppression and inequality that are pervasive in their culture. Of course, they also had a major stroke of good fortune: both of them found sympathetic judges, rather than Islamic conservatives whose minds were warped by dogma and who probably would have sent them back to their abusive husbands.

Child marriage, like female genital mutilation, cannot be blamed solely on Islam. It's a custom common to many tribes in this area of the world, and most likely predates the spread of that religion. On the other hand, Islam has done little or nothing to stamp it out, and as the above quotes show, is now acting as a major obstacle in the fight to put a stop to it. Like most religions historically, Islam has tended to endorse, rather than oppose, the immoral practices of its culture of origin. Worse, it makes those practices that much harder to end by putting the stamp of God's approval on them.

If we're ever to stop this practice, almost certainly the best way is through the education of women. When family planning is unknown and women are uneducated, they tend to have many more children, which makes it impossible for impoverished parents to care for them all and encourages the practice of marrying daughters off at an early age. Education and contraception, more than anything else, will loosen the grip of the misogynist superstitions and appalling poverty that conspire to force women into this fate.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made a famous observation: that the speed of computer hardware (to be precise, the number of transistors that can be packed onto an integrated circuit) tends to double every two years. In the four decades since, Moore's law has held true with remarkable accuracy. The technology to fabricate ever-smaller logic elements has steadily improved, leading to astounding increases in computer speed. The memory, bandwidth, and processing power available today in even an ordinary desktop machine surpasses the most powerful computers used by the government and industry of yesterday.

Some sci-fi writers and futurists have foreseen a truly strange consequence of this progress. They anticipate that, assuming the trend of exponential growth continues, we will eventually - perhaps soon - reach the point where we can create machines with more computing power than a human brain. This innovation will lead to true artificial intelligence, machines with the same kind of self-consciousness as human beings. And reaching this point, it is believed, will trigger a technological explosion, as these intelligent machines design their own, even more intelligent successors just as we designed them. Those successors will in turn design yet more intelligent successors, and so on, in an explosive process of positive feedback that will result in the creation of truly godlike intelligences whose understanding far surpasses anything that ordinary human minds can even conceive of. This event is dubbed "the Singularity" by those who imagine it, for like the singularity of a black hole, it is a point where all current understanding breaks down. Some prognosticators, such as Ray Kurzweil (author of The Age of Spiritual Machines) think the Singularity is not only inevitable, but will occur within our lifetimes.

As you might have guessed from the title of this post, I'm not so optimistic. The Singularity, like more than a few other transhumanist ideas, has more than a whiff of religious faith about it: the messianic and the apocalyptic, made possible by technology. History has a way of foiling our expectations. The number of people who have confidently predicted the future and have been proven completely wrong is too great to count, and so far the only consistently true prediction about the future is that it won't be like anything that any of us have imagined.

The largest immediate obstacle I see to Singularity scenarios is that we don't yet understand the underlying basis of intelligence in anything close to the level of detail necessary to recreate it in silicon. Some of the more hopeful believers predict a Singularity within thirty years, but I think such forecasts are wildly over-optimistic. The brain is a vast and extremely intricate system, far more complex than anything else we have ever studied, and our understanding of how it functions is embryonic at best. Before we can reproduce consciousness, we need to reverse-engineer it, and that endeavor will dwarf any other scientific inquiry ever undertaken by humanity. So far we haven't even grasped the full scope of the problem, much less outlined the principles a solution would have to take. Depending on progress in the neurological sciences, I could see it happening in a hundred years - I doubt much before that.

But that, after all, is just an engineering problem. Even discounting it, there's a more profound reason I doubt a Singularity will ever occur. The largest unexamined assumption of Singularity believers is that faster hardware will necessarily lead to more intelligent machines, so that all that's required to create a godlike intelligence is to fit more and more transistors on a chip. In response, I ask a simple question: What makes you believe the mere accumulation of processing power will produce greater understanding of the world?

Fast thinking may be a great way to generate hypotheses, but that's the less important half of the scientific method. No matter how quickly it can think, no intelligence can truly learn anything about the world without empirical data to winnow and refine its hypotheses. And the process of collecting data about the world cannot be accelerated to arbitrary rates.

The pro-Singularity writings that I've read all contain the implicit and unexamined assumption that a machine intelligence with faster processors would be not just quantitatively but qualitatively better, able to deduce facts about the world through sheer mental processing power. Obviously, this is not the case. Even supercomputers like Blue Gene are only as good as the models they're programmed with, and those models depend upon our preexisting understanding of how the world works. The old computer programmer's maxim - "garbage in, garbage out" - succinctly sums up this problem. The fastest number-cruncher imaginable, if given faulty data, will produce nothing of meaningful application to the real world. And it follows that the dreamed-of Singularity machines will never exist, or at least will never be the godlike omnisciences they're envisioned as. Even they would have to engage in the same process of slow, painstaking investigation that mere human scientists carry out.

This isn't to say that artificial intelligence, if we ever create it, will be entirely useless. In virtual-reality software worlds, which are precisely defined and completely knowable, they might be able to create wonderful things. In the real world, I foresee them flourishing in the niche of expert systems, able to search and correlate all the data known on a topic and to suggest connections that might have escaped human beings. But I reject the notion that, as general-purpose intelligences, they will ever be able to far surpass the kind of understanding that any educated person already possesses.

To commemorate the Fourth of July, here's this month's Poetry Sunday. American readers will likely recognize today's poem immediately, as well they should: it's engraved on a plaque mounted on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. But what may not be as widely known are the freethought sympathies of the poet.

Emma Lazarus was born in 1849 in New York City, the daughter of parents who were descended from generations of Sephardic Judaism. But according to the Jewish Virtual Library, "the Lazarus family relegated their Jewish religious life to the formal, occasional expression that good manners required." Emma, the fourth of seven children, displayed poetic talent from an early age, and her proud father published her first volume of poetry when she was sixteen. Her work attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who befriended her and to whom she dedicated a later work, Admetus and Other Poems.

It was nationality and heritage that moved Lazarus, not religion. After personally meeting some of the Jewish immigrants who fled to America after a series of brutal pogroms in Russia, she became a passionate advocate of the nascent Zionist movement. In books and letters, she argued that only the establishment of a Jewish homeland would put a stop to then-rampant anti-Semitism and persecution. But when a local rabbi invited her to use her poetic talent to contribute to a hymn book, she responded, "I will gladly assist you as far as I am able; but that will not be much. I shall always be loyal to my race, but I feel no religious fervor in my soul."

After a brief but impassioned life, Emma Lazarus died in 1887 at the age of 38. The following poem, her most famous work, was written in 1883 to assist a fund-raising endeavor to build the pedestal upon which the statue now sits. In the poem's title and opening lines, she contrasts the Statue of Liberty against the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the wonders of the ancient world, describing it as a monument to freedom rather than conquest. Her enduring conception of the Statue as a beacon shining out to oppressed and disenfranchised people everywhere has resounded through America's history and given voice to the ideals our country stands for. Though America has not always lived up to its founding principle of liberty, when we have honored this principle, we have given hope and courage to the downtrodden throughout the world.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

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• Poetry Sunday

To mark the tenth installment of Popular Delusions, I'm turning my attention to one of the most common and enduring superstitions among the New Age set: the belief that naturally occurring crystals have some sort of special power to store, concentrate, or focus vaguely defined "energies".

A web search readily brings up hundreds of sites discussing the magical potencies of various crystals, most of which have to do with their supposed healing powers. Here's an entirely typical example:

Bloodstones are believed to have mystical and magickal powers, thought to be able to control the weather and have the ability to banish evil and negativity and to direct spiritual energy. It heightens the intuition and stimulates dreaming. It is a powerful revitalizer of your body and your mind. Bloodstone calms the mind, dispels confusion and aids in the decision making process. As the name suggests, they are very good at cleansing the blood and are known to be a powerful healer. It is used for an energy cleanser and immune stimulator for acute infections. It aids the circulation and reduces the formation of pus, neutralizing over acidification. It cleanses the lower chakras and realigns their energies.

All that in one stone! Others even discuss the supposed side effects or dangers of improper crystal use:

If a woman is trying to get pregnant or is in the first two trimesters of pregnancy, she should avoid any direct contact with Green Tourmaline.... Manipulating a woman's male energies by wearing Green Tourmaline could upset her endocrine system and could compromise the pregnancy or possibly harm the fetus.

Who knew ordinary crystals could be so dangerous? If this was true, one would think the many sites that sell green tourmaline should come with warnings. They might be exposing themselves to serious legal liability by selling those stones to just anyone! (I have to admit, I would just love to see that lawsuit...)

On the other hand, other crystal-boosting sites seem to shrug off these dangers. For example:

RULE NO. 1 - There are no rules for use of crystals or minerals in healing.

Now how could this be? If crystals do anything at all, there must be correct and incorrect ways to use them. If all methods of using crystals work equally well, the only possible explanation for this is that crystals are completely useless.

As with the green tourmaline example, one of the most ironic things is that different crystal-hawking sites often disagree about what the crystals they sell are supposed to do. One site says, "Fluorite's ordered crystalline structure brings stability and order into the wearer's life." But a different site advertising purple fluorite explains that it is for "Change. Helps one get out of ruts."

And how exactly do crystals work their magic? Do they have their own power? Apparently not:

There are a lot of people who think that crystals have power. They don't... Crystals are only tools which extend the power of intent of the healer and a medium.

On the other hand:

...we have proof that all crystals have power. The Power of love, from deep in the earth.

This flood of conflicting claims presents the sincere believer with a variety of serious dilemmas. Is there a right way or a wrong way to use crystal power? Which crystals are most effective for a given aim? Can crystals be dangerous? Is it possible that some crystals are dangerous in ways not yet recognized? Plainly, all of these are important questions, especially the last two. But how is the crystal enthusiast to go about answering them? There are a multitude of conflicting answers. What answer should we believe, and why?

As with all cases of religious confusion, these conflicting claims have come about because there is no evidence whatsoever that crystals have any supernatural or magical abilities. As one pseudoscience site puts it:

...no instruments can pick up these vibrations or record any difference in energy around a crystal as crystals are things of Mother Earth not of man.

But if this alleged energy can't be measured or recorded, then how does anyone know it exists in the first place? What is the basis for all these grandiose and fanciful claims about the ailments and maladies that specific types of crystals can solve? The above mentioned site calls it a "hard and fast intuitive fact", which is just another way of saying that all of this is made up. Crystal use can be rescued from danger and chaos, but only by consigning it to irrelevance.

As often happens, New Age misunderstandings are built on a kernel of genuine scientific fact. Some crystals, such as quartz, display a useful property called the piezoelectric effect: they generate an electric voltage when stretched or compressed. This property has led to their use in a wide variety of industrial applications, including sensors that measure pressure, vibration and frequency. They're also used to build miniaturized motors, record player needles, radio transmitters and receivers, and even loudspeakers. The piezoelectric effect is a well-understood and precisely measurable phenomenon, however, and has nothing to do with meaningless handwaving about healing powers, chakra points or positive energies.

There's no doubt that crystals are an elegant example of the beauty that arises from the laws of physics. Fantastic formations like those of New Mexico's Lechuguilla Cave prove the point. But we don't need to believe crystals have any kind of magical power to appreciate their beauty. Such superstitions cheapen and undermine what there is of genuine wonder in the world. We need no supernatural add-ons to place between us and nature.

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• Popular Delusions

Much head-scratching has been occasioned by the Pew Forum's latest report from its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, which found, among other things, that 21% of atheists claim to believe in some sort of god. I've linked to a press release from the Secular Coalition for America on this finding, and I'd like to add some comments of my own.

To explain this, one could make a sarcastic quip that 21% of atheists either didn't hear the pollster correctly or else need to consult a dictionary for the correct meaning of "atheist". Less frivolously, we could also postulate that some self-described atheists are actually still theists, but are choosing to identify themselves this way to cast a vote of protest against organized religion. It's also possible that these people hold a non-standard definition of "God", such as the human potential to do good or Spinoza's sum total of the laws of physics, that permits them to give an affirmative answer to this question even though they still consider themselves atheist. The real answer is probably some combination of all of these.

There are other findings from this study I also want to discuss, however. Judging by its results, it's not just atheists who hold views divergent from the commonly accepted definition:

For example, 70 percent of Americans affiliated with a religion or denomination said they agreed that "many religions can lead to eternal life," including majorities among Protestants and Catholics. Among evangelical Christians, 57 percent agreed with the statement, and among Catholics, 79 percent did.

Catch that? A majority of Christians said that religions other than Christianity can lead to salvation. Even a majority of Christian evangelicals said this, even though, as Steven Waldman of Beliefnet observed, "one of the most important teachings of evangelical Christianity is that salvation comes ONLY through Christ".

What this shows, and this is very good news for religious liberty, is that in America, religious tolerance is still the norm. Although the intolerant, exclusivist religious right is overrepresented in the media, they do not speak for a majority of Americans or even a majority of believing Americans. Their attempts to weld all American Christians together into a homogeneous, controllable voting bloc have been a failure.

It's not just the Pew Forum that's found this. A similar study by Barna Research found that only half of Christian pastors (!) held a "biblical worldview", which Barna essentially defines as agreement with their own, fundamentalist version of the faith. Among the population in general, only 9% of all born-again Christians held such a worldview.

The truth is that religious diversity is, and always has been, rampant among humanity. The idea of a fortress-like community of believers, all of whom are of like mind, has never existed and will never exist. Conformity can be maintained for a brief time in the hothouse environment of a small, isolated sect, but when a religion begins to expand into society in general, its teachings will inevitably begin to be reinterpreted and loosened. Rather than being a brick church, with every component identical and indistinguishable, American theism is more like a diverse jungle, with huge numbers of varying individuals that are grouped as the same religious "species" only by convention.

Again, because of the outsized influence of highly placed and influential agents of intolerance, many people say they conform, to fit in and to escape social censure. But scratch the surface, and you'll see just how many things they believe differently from each other.

This riotous diversity arises, in part, because religious beliefs are based on faith rather than evidence. When theists come up with their own varying interpretations, there is no way for anyone else to prove them wrong. Is God an anthromorphic being who demands worship and dispenses miracles? Is God an impersonal, overarching cosmic force? Is God an utterly transcendent Other about which nothing can be said? Is God the sum total of the laws of physics? Is God the capacity of human beings to do good for each other? All these beliefs have been and still are held by large numbers of people. With no facts to decide among them, religious diversity will persist, and we can hope this will stand as an obstacle to any one sect seeking to impose its will on society.

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician, an elected member of that country's Parliament, infamous for his right-wing views on immigration and social policy. In 2008, he released a short film, Fitna, which criticizes Islamic radicalism by interspersing video footage of terrorist attacks with quotes from the Quran and from prominent Islamic religious authorities praising the use of violence. The film can be viewed here - caution, contains some graphic images.

Now there's some news that's incredible in its audacity: a prosecutor in the kingdom of Jordan has charged Wilders with blasphemy and demanded that he be extradited to Jordan to stand trial.

Let's be perfectly clear about this: Geert Wilders is a citizen of the Netherlands. He is not a citizen of Jordan; as far as I know, he has never set foot in Jordan. Everything he has said was spoken in the Netherlands, where the right of free speech is recognized and protected. Yet because his speech was heard in Islamic nations, and because it offended them, those nations demanded that he be extradited from his home country and sent to one of their countries, to stand trial under their primitive and repressive laws.

Whatever you may think of Wilders' personal or political views, this development ought to lay to rest any remaining doubts regarding the goals of those groups he has criticized. By far the majority of states where Islam has become dominant have become theocracies, and like all theocracies through history, they do not want intellectual diversity, freedom of thought, or open debate on a level playing field. They want enforced silence and obedience, and they do not want to meet their critics on the battlefield of ideas, but to harm and punish them regardless of the merit of their arguments.

Of course, Wilders is in little danger from this ridiculous demand. Dutch prosecutors declined to charge him with anything, understandably so as he had broken no laws. But the 56-member-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference strongly condemned that decision and said it was "deeply annoyed" by it. (The next time someone says that Islam is for the most part a moderate and peaceful religion, ask them if they can produce quotes from a 56-nation Islamic conference defending the right of free speech.)

This affair is, however, an excellent illustration of the chilling danger posed by laws which seek to ban "hate speech". Even if passed with the best intentions in the world, they are swiftly made use of by tyrants and theocrats who recognize quite well that any means of persuading the state to censor ideas can easily be used against their critics. Make no mistake - if Wilders was extradited and imprisoned, he would not be the last. Swiftly on the heels of that demand would come the next one, and the next, each one arrogantly presuming the right to punish anyone anywhere who says anything uncomplimentary about Islam. The OIC, in fact, referred to the "thin line" separating freedom of speech from what they want to be illegal. In other words, they're saying it's very easy to cross the line between what they view as permissible and impermissible criticism, which means the zone of permissible criticism must be a very small one indeed.

The OIC also says that Fitna "instigates feelings of hatred, animosity and antipathy towards Muslims". And that may well be true. But the film, from what I've seen of it, does not invent imaginary crimes or fictitious outrages to attribute to Muslims. (This in contrast to Muslim theocracies which still teach the "blood libel" idea to their children.) To the contrary, Wilders' film replays and exposes things which Muslims have actually done and actually said. If Muslim leaders feel that they're shown in a bad light by these things, then they should go after the Muslims who've advocated or committed acts of appalling bloodshed in the name of that religion. Those should be the people they seek to extradite and bring to trial. To instead attack people who point out these evils gives the impression that they do not care about the savagery and brutality committed in the name of Islam, but rather, that they want to silence the people who bring it to public attention.

Today's post on morality takes up the topic of forgiveness for wrongdoing. In superstitious times, forgiveness was obtained through magical rituals. Most of these assumed that guilt could in some fashion be transferred to an animal or other being, which was then killed or driven off to provide a symbolic expiation. Leviticus 4 explains:

Say to the people of Israel, If any one sins unwittingly in any of the things which the Lord has commanded not to be done, and does any one of them, if it is the anointed priest who sins, thus bringing guilt on the people, then let him offer for the sin which he has committed a young bull without blemish to the Lord for a sin offering. He shall bring the bull to the door of the tent of meeting before the Lord, and lay his hand on the head of the bull, and kill the bull before the Lord. And the anointed priest shall take some of the blood of the bull and bring it to the tent of meeting; and the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle part of the blood seven times before the Lord in front of the veil of the sanctuary.

Ironically, although Judaism no longer practices animal sacrifice, its primitive scapegoat theology has been adopted by its theological successor, Christianity. The Christian theologians did add the clever twist that Jesus' divine blood, shed once and for all, makes a more perfect sacrifice than an animal's and does not need to be repeated. Still, at the heart of Christianity lies the same ancient superstition: that one person's guilt can be transferred to another and then absolved by punishing that other.

All these beliefs commit the fallacy of reification, treating moral responsibility as if it were a substance that has an independent existence and can be moved from person to person. In reality, an act and the responsibility for that act are necessarily linked; the person who commits the act bears the responsibility. By definition, one cannot be divorced from the other.

If a person has done wrong, what good does it do to punish someone else? It does not deter the offender from repeating the harmful act, nor does it make them understand why what they did was wrong. If anything, it sends the exact wrong message: that you can do as you wish, and someone else will bear the weight of your transgressions.

This is the problem I have with the Christian belief in grace: it emphasizes undeserved forgiveness. To dispense forgiveness indiscriminately, with no regard to whether it is deserved and no need for the offender to make restitution, threatens to make forgiveness a meaningless concept. The same holds true for any religion which teaches that absolution can be obtained by performing some empty ritual - chanting a prayer, performing ablutions, confessing to a clergy member, making a pilgrimage - that has nothing to do with understanding why the act was wrong or making up the injury to the one who was harmed.

In the secular morality of universal utilitarianism, forgiveness has a place, but a different place than the magic rituals of organized religion. UU teaches that human happiness is paramount, and refraining from causing others to suffer is our highest duty. When we violate that duty, we incur reponsibility - the responsibility of undoing that hurt if possible and restoring the lost happiness; and the responsibility of reforming ourselves so we don't perform similar wrong acts in the future.

If an offender meets this burden, then forgiveness should be given, but it must be deserved. To deserve forgiveness, a person who does wrong must recognize and acknowledge the wrong they have done; must express contrition and a sincere desire not to repeat that act; and must express willingness to make restitution as far as it is possible. If any of these conditions are not met, then forgiveness is not merited.

When an act, such as murder, is of such a magnitude that no true restitution is possible, then it's up to the people who were made to suffer whether they wish to grant forgiveness. If the offender is sincere in his contrition and is willing to make restitution as far as possible, then the people who are wronged may choose to accept that. But - an important corollary which I want to make note of - in this view, there can be no deathbed conversions.

A person who finds remorse only at the very end of life, when there's no further chance of repairing the harm they caused, has come to their senses too late to find forgiveness. Words alone, without action, do little or nothing to alleviate suffering. This is a major break with religious traditions, most of which believe that a last-minute repentance can make up for a lifetime of evil. That view has always struck me as outrageous, and any worthwhile secular morality would do right to discard it.

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• On the Morality Of...

The number of different religions on this planet is vast, and all their associated arguments and apologetics form a library that's vaster still. No matter how well-read or well-traveled any atheist is, they're bound to run into claims every so often that they've never heard before. It happens to me at least once a month, on average. And I have to admit, when I first hear a religious apologetic or miracle claim that's new to me, often my initial response is to feel a little tremor, as I wonder, "Could that really be true?"

You would think I'd know better by now. Invariably, in the cases I've looked into, the fact being claimed is either false, unverifiable, or doesn't prove what the claimant thinks it does. And even if one such fact were to bear out, it would have to overcome a considerable weight of contrary evidence. Still, I'm glad of that momentary tremor of doubt. To my thinking, it's a reliable sign of open-mindedness.

Not everyone shares this trait. On more than one occasion, I've run into theists who are so arrogantly certain their beliefs are supported by the facts that they feel they don't even need to check what the facts actually are. When these smug and ignorant assertions are in conflict with reality, the results are always hilarious. Culled from the responses I've received on this blog and other sites, here are some of my favorite examples of arrogant apologists who don't let their ignorance get in the way of a good talking point:

Was Tyre destroyed and left barren as the Bible predicts? A commenter at Greta Christina's by the name of Rev. Cawley asserted, in contradiction to my essay "The Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists", that the Bible contains many miraculously fulfilled prophecies. Here was one of his examples regarding the ancient city of Tyre:

Of Tyre, God said through the prophet Ezekiel in Ezekiel 26: 4, 5, "And they shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her towers: I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the top of a rock. It shall be a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord God: and it shall become a spoil to the nations." Today, fisherman mend their nets on the barren rock where Tyre once stood. God also said in Ezekiel 26:14, "And I will make thee like the top of a rock: thou shalt be a place to spread nets upon; thou shalt be built no more: for I the Lord have spoken it, saith the Lord God." The site of ancient Tyre is quite suitable for habitation, but the prophecy has stood fulfilled now for over 2, 000 years, and Tyre has never been rebuilt.

In response to Mr. Cawley's claim that Tyre has never been rebuilt, I posted satellite photos of the city today. No doubt, the 115,000 or so inhabitants of Tyre would be quite surprised to learn that they're living in a city that has never been rebuilt.

In reality, although Tyre was fought over and conquered many times in antiquity, it has been inhabited almost continuously since 1300 BCE, and was an important commercial site and trading post for much of that time. Evidently, Mr. Cawley could not be bothered to check whether the city actually existed before asserting that it no longer does, because the Bible says so. His blithe willingness to erase whole cities from history in the name of an apologetic talking point is a superb example of invincible ignorance.

Did PBS put words in the mouths of creationists to make them look bad? Another of my favorite examples from Greta Christina's: a post where she discussed "Judgment Day," the PBS special about the Dover, Pennsylvania intelligent-design trial in which the IDers were decisively defeated.

In her post, she quoted an exchange from the show in which plaintiffs' lawyer Robert Muise got the ID proponent Scott Minnich to admit he had never bothered to do any of the experiments that would have tested his ideas about ID. An offended creationist commenter named "blilley" huffily asserted that an exchange which paints ID in such a poor light couldn't possibly have been real, and must have been made up by PBS to make proponents of ID look bad:

I guess in instances where PBS doesn't have any real evidence to back up certain propoganda objectives they can always resort to using imaginary, made-up evidence confident that people like you will call it "overwhelming".

In fact, the reenactments in "Judgment Day" were taken directly from trial transcripts, and this "imaginary, made-up" exchange between Muise and Minnich actually happened in the courtroom. Clearly, blilley thought that Minnich came away from the cross-examination looking foolish. In the future, I suggested to him, he should consider why that is, rather than leaping to accuse scientists of inventing arguments to attribute to creationists that make them look bad.

Were the original twelve apostles "Earth shakers"? In my post from last year "How Did the Apostles Die?", I pointed out the curious fact that there are no contemporary historical records of the twelve apostles, neither of their lives, nor of their deeds, nor of their deaths. They vanish into obscurity almost immediately after being named in the Bible - a fact which fits with the conclusion that Christianity began with a belief in mythical figures that only gradually transmuted into belief about real people in history. A commenter took issue with this conclusion:

What you are forgetting here is that these 11 men, who were previously fishermen, carpenters and tax collectors, suddenly became Earth shakers. This group of nobodies were somehow able to convince thousands upon thousands that there is one true God and that his son Jesus came so that we may know the one who created this Earth and everything on it, in it, above and below it, on a personal level.

If the apostles were indeed "Earth shakers", then one would think that it would be trivial to list some of their mighty, earth-shaking deeds. Was this commenter up to the challenge? Manifestly not, because when challenged, he vanished without ever elaborating on this comment. Apparently, he felt no compunction in grandiosely claiming that the apostles were men of tremendous influence even though he didn't know of a single specific thing that any of them said or did. His blustery assertion only served to confirm the point that there are no contemporary historical records of how the apostles lived or died.

Did interracial marriage ever need to be affirmed by court order? This last howler comes from the apologetics website CrossExamined, whose author Frank Turek set up a post about same-sex marriage and the danger it poses to our society. It seems this danger is that allowing gay marriage will cause everyone to turn gay and cease reproducing, thus spelling the doom of civilization - clearly the conclusion Turek was putting forward, even if he didn't explicitly spell it out. But this isn't the howler I was referring to. In the comments, I and several others pointed out the similarity between arguments of anti-gay-marriage advocates now and anti-interracial-marriage arguments a generation earlier, and asked if this reasoning could also be used to prove that anti-miscegenation laws should have been allowed to stand. A commenter named "Plumb Bob" seemed bewildered by this point:

In response to:
"For Pete's sake, if we left all civil-rights decisions up to "the people" interracial marriage would probably still be illegal. This is one of the reasons the Supreme Court and the Judicial Branch in general exists in the first place."

This is simply and completely false. I don't know of a single instance where a high court ruling was required in order to allow interracial marriage.

This is slightly less ignorant than trying to erase the city of Tyre from history, but not by much. For someone who cares so deeply about marriage, Plumb Bob evidently had never heard of the landmark 1967 civil rights case Loving v. Virginia, in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down all state laws against interracial marriage.

Obviously, a person is not required to have a comprehensive knowledge of American history before being allowed to argue against gay marriage. But one would think, at the very least, that a person lacking such knowledge would have the humility to approach the topic with caution - rather than pronouncing, as in this case, that assertions made by more knowledgeable people are "simply and completely false". Like many of the invincibly ignorant, he never even considered that the facts might not line up with what he preferred to be true, nor that others with whom he disagreed might know more than he himself.

I leave you with this gem of a classic - a creationist using one of the most hilariously inept variations of the second-law-of-thermodynamics argument against evolution ever seen:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

This passage has been widely reproduced on the internet under the title "Creationist Almost Discovers the Sun".

Thanks to Daylight Atheism commenter Robert Madewell for the photo in this post.

The other day while browsing in the library, I found out that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, authors of the Left Behind series, have also written a trilogy of prequels. (As long as Christians continue to purchase these awful books, it seems, they intend to keep churning them out.) The final installment of this trilogy is called The Rapture, and it's about just that, written from the point of view of the faithful Christians who are miraculously transported to Heaven.

Much of the book is taken up by a long roll call in which the raptured "saints" and saved dead are called before God's white throne and praised for the good works they did. This litany is very revealing, because essentially the only thing they have in common is that they in some way contributed to the spread of Christianity. Famous evangelists, missionaries, translators of the Bible, and historical preachers are all listed for their great "achievement". In LaHaye's conception, the only deed that merits honor or remembrance is converting others to Christianity. In fact, the saved are made to pass through a fire that "burns away" everything else that they did in their lives.

This is religion in its most purely viral form, its only purpose consisting of self-propagation. As Slacktivist says, their version of Christianity is the "contentless gospel": "The good news is that now you can tell others the good news."

This cold and sterile heaven doesn't seem like any kind of paradise I'd want to live in. Why would I want to share eternity with these boring, repetitive, dogmatic preachers, those whose greatest achievement in life was the unvarying repetition of words written by others? It's as if people were selected specifically for their lack of independent thought or creativity. What a tiresome, monotonous place that heaven would be!

Even worse, the book makes it clear that access to this heaven is limited to those mindless believers who mouthed the proper words of submission to the creed of one particular small and narrow sect. Everyone else, in this conception of Christianity, no matter what else they achieved or what good they did, is condemned to the torment of eternal immolation. Again - this is a heaven we should want to go to? To spend eternity praising a cruel tyrant in the company of his fellow slaves, and to miss out on the company of the bright and lively minds of history's most famous nonbelievers?

Just think of who'd be missing from the rapture-fanatics' heaven. Or, if you prefer, consider an alternative: a humanist heaven in which people were rewarded not for their allegiance to dogma, but for their contributions to humanity's intellectual and cultural history, and for the good they did in the lives of those who came after them. Imagine who would be there, and imagine what a joy it would be to dwell among them!

Imagine a salon where you could discuss politics and statecraft with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Paine, as well as their precursors of the Enlightenment such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham. From feminists and reformers such as Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman and Vashti McCollum, these early giants could learn how their work had laid the ground for later flowerings of liberty. Or, if you preferred to talk about science and the glories of the natural world, there'd be symposia attended by Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Galileo Galilei, Pierre and Marie Curie, and many more besides.

In airier realms of thought, most of history's great philosophers would be there: Lucretius and Epicurus from ancient Greece, Giordano Bruno, David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Bertrand Russell, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. One could pass many pleasurable hours lying in the shade and listening to these great thinkers holding forth on the beautiful abstractions of the mind.

The music, too, would be magnificent. One could enjoy the symphonies of Giuseppe Verdi, Ludwig von Beethoven, Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss - or, for a more modern bent, the stylings of Irving Berlin, John Lennon, Cole Porter, and Yip Harburg. For oratory, poetry and literature, it would boast Robert Ingersoll, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Omar Khayyam, Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, H.G. Wells, Robert Frost - and that's just for starters. And this imaginary humanist heaven would not lack for laughter. You can hear the roaring of the crowds being entertained by Mark Twain, by Voltaire, by H.L. Mencken, by Douglas Adams, by George Carlin (alas), and by many more proud subversives who've used the weapon of humor to expose the absurdities of earthly society.

The roll call of famous names that would be present in a humanist's heaven shows, by comparison, just how empty and impoverished the dogmatist's heaven would be. All the illustrious thinkers and critics I listed above would be missing from any afterlife that sorts admission based solely on adherence to an orthodox creed. Such a place would hardly be paradise at all, but merely an echo chamber resounding through eternity with the monotonous chants of fossilized minds. How could Heaven be Heaven if it did not pay tribute to the fullest and grandest flowerings of the human creative spirit?

The dogmatist's nightmarish hallucination of heaven, fortunately for us, does not exist. Like a nightmare that dissipates in the dawn, it fades away in the light of reason. Alas, the humanist's heaven is also a dream, albeit a more pleasant one. I'd give almost anything to be witness to such a meeting of the minds, but there's no rational reason to believe it will ever happen. Those who have passed on have left the world to us, and though ripples of their influence live on in the books they wrote and the lives they changed, the essence of the individual is gone and cannot be reclaimed. We mourn them, we honor them, but ultimately we must move on. The responsibility of guiding the future now lies with we who live - so rather than spend our time dreaming of another life, let's turn our attention fully to this one. Our predecessors have left us an abundance of good lessons; let's keep them in mind, so that we may write the next chapter for the good of those who, in turn, will succeed us.

(For a fuller listing of the names in this essay as well as others, see FFRF's Freethought of the Day list.)