I just finished reading Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book on what we can do to improve the status of women worldwide. One of the book's major arguments is that, despite their opposition to abortion and contraception, religious groups often do more good than secular liberals give them credit for:

Religious conservatives... have also saved lives in vast numbers by underwriting and operating clinics in some of the neediest parts of Africa and Asia. When you travel in the poorest countries in Africa... the people you almost inevitably encounter are the missionary doctors and church-sponsored aid workers. [p.142]

Kristof and WuDunn write that both religious and secular groups do important work, and that liberals, moderates and conservatives from across the political spectrum should be able to cooperate to accomplish more. I agree! And so does Saad Mohammed Ali, a U.S. resident and former Iraqi refugee who's fluent in English and Arabic. He applied for a caseworker position at World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, for a job that involved helping Iraqi refugees resettle in America. On the face of it, he seemed ideally suited. And World Relief would have thought so too - except, it turns out, for one small, insignificant detail (HT: The Wall of Separation):

...a few days after he applied for the position last December, [Ali] got an unexpected call from the same manager at World Relief: She was sorry, she told him, but the agency couldn't offer him the job because he is not Christian.

Saad Mohammed Ali, you see, is a Muslim. And no matter how well qualified a Muslim might be to help the people World Relief wants to help, World Relief doesn't hire Muslims. It only hires evangelical Christians.

The opponents of atheism often accuse us of believing that no religion has ever done any good for anyone - a position that's obviously absurd and is held by no atheist that I know of. (Even Christopher Hitchens, atheist firebrand extraordinaire, says only that there's no good which a religious person could do but an atheist couldn't do.) The argument that atheists actually make is twofold. First, we assert that churches and religious groups' charitable work comes from the universal human sense of compassion, not from any specifically religious teaching. (This is most clearly shown by the fact that every religion, regardless of its beliefs, does work like this. Even Hamas builds schools, hospitals and orphanages.) Second, we assert that in spite of this, the religious beliefs of those groups often hamper their efforts by causing them to accomplish less good than they otherwise could have - even worsening the very problems they're trying to solve.

The clearest example is Roman Catholicism: the church does social work that helps the poor and AIDS victims in Africa and Asia, but by their hard-line opposition to condoms, they're making the problem worse by ensuring that there will be more poor people and more AIDS sufferers. A similar case is that of abstinence-only sex education. I don't doubt that the Christian evangelicals who support these programs genuinely want to reduce teen pregnancy and STDs. The problem is that their approach has been shown to be not nearly as effective as comprehensive programs that teach about contraception.

So too with World Relief. The problem isn't that they do no good at all, but that they artificially and arbitrarily limit the good they do by turning away perfectly qualified candidates just because they don't hold the right beliefs. And because atheism, as a movement, is relatively new and unorganized, we don't yet have the infrastructure to offer an alternative path to people who are rejected by religious charities that refuse to hire nonbelievers.

The major churches have been been running social programs for decades, have local branches all over the world, and have support from governments and wealthy, well-connected donors. They have a head start on us. We're working to organize and to catch up, but this takes time - and since they won't work with us or hire us in the meantime, it's more difficult to get our own efforts off the ground. This makes any straightforward comparison, of the "atheists don't do as much charitable work as religious people" sort, misguided and ignorant. (Another thought: How many current employees of World Relief are not evangelicals, but are afraid to disclose their beliefs lest they lose their jobs?)

One more point to highlight: according to AU, World Relief gets up to seventy percent of its funding from the U.S. government. That's your tax dollars and mine, American readers, going to underwrite jobs that we can never be hired for because we don't believe the right dogmas. This glaring constitutional violation would be excellent grounds for a lawsuit, if the right-leaning Supreme Court hadn't slammed the door in our faces by ruling that, due to legal technicalities about who exactly is spending the money, freethinkers have no power to compel the government to respect the First Amendment. We're at a double disadvantage: the government can take our money, use it to fund prejudiced, proselytizing religious charities without our consent, and then to cap it off, arrogant religious apologists demand to know why we aren't accomplishing as much good as those charities!

Lately, it seems that no matter how often I write about the ever-widening story of Roman Catholic bishops and the Pope protecting child molesters, new details keep bubbling up that demand another update. Well, I'm happy to oblige.

Here's what we know so far. Pope Benedict XVI, back in the late 1970s when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and archbishop of Munich, had authority over a priest, Rev. Peter Hullermann, who was known to be a child molester. At least three sets of parents had come to officials of the diocese to tell them that their sons had been sexually abused by Hullermann, including one case where he forced an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex on him. In response, Ratzinger assigned Hullermann to undergo therapy - without, I hasten to add, reporting him to the police for prosecution. Hullermann did finish the therapy, but to no apparent effect. A subordinate of Ratzinger's, Rev. Gerhard Gruber, approved Hullermann's return to pastoral work early in 1980. Several years later, he was convicted on molestation charges stemming from yet another such incident, and additional allegations from as recently as 1998 have come to light.

None of these facts are disputed. The Vatican's defense all along has been that the future Pope had no knowledge that Hullermann had been permitted to resume his duties (although the admission that he sent a child molester to therapy and then washed his hands of the matter, all by itself, paints him in a poor light). But we now know that even this flimsy defense is false: according to a report from the New York Times, Gruber copied Ratzinger's office on the memo stating that Hullermann was being allowed to resume his duties. This memo was written just five days after Hullermann had been sent to therapy.

This horrendous scandal is custom-made for the lawyer's phrase "knew or should have known". Even if Benedict ignored the memo that was sent to him - which seems unlikely, considering his reputation as a micromanager - how can it possibly be a defense to say that he didn't care enough to follow up on what had become of a known pedophile within the clergy? Hullermann was under his jurisdiction, and Hullermann's actions are therefore, inevitably, his responsibility.

As Ratzinger rose through the ranks, he continued to be involved with pedophilia cases, and the pattern of defending the predators at the expense of the children is clearly evident. In a case from America, another priest, Rev. Lawrence Murphy, was accused of molesting as many as 200 boys at a school for the deaf. Milwaukee's archbishop wrote directly to Ratzinger, who by that time was head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, requesting that his office look into the matter and consider an ecclesiastical trial. Ratzinger ignored these letters. When a different Vatican official ordered that a trial be held, the pedophile wrote to Ratzinger requesting mercy - and the trial was canceled!

Finally, there's De Delictis Gravioribus, a letter that Ratzinger wrote to all Catholic bishops in 2001 advising them how to handle pedophilia accusations. The most important point is that bishops report such cases to the Vatican in the strictest secrecy and tell no one else about them without permission from the Pope - or as Ratzinger put it, "Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret." As before, there was no instruction to the bishops to report any credible accusations of molestation to the civil authorities. (See also.)

Contrary to the Vatican's nonspecific denials, it's clear that Ratzinger is not only personally involved in the Catholic pedophilia scandal, he's as tainted as any of the bishops who kept these cases under wraps. He, too, is guilty of participating in the Catholic hierarchy's shell game that shuffled predators from parish to parish while pressuring past victims to keep silent, ensuring that more children were raped and molested. He, too, is complicit in the church's damnable crime of trying to protect its own reputation above all else, even at the expense of countless shattered lives.

Doubtless, many faithful Catholics will refuse to accept this. The threat to their self-image, to their entire worldview, would be too great if they were to accept that the Pope himself - the heir of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the man they believe to be literally infallible when making pronouncements on faith or morals - was directly involved and complicit in the systematic rape of children. (Credit goes to a few rare exceptions, like the National Catholic Reporter, which demanded that the Pope take direct questions about his responsibility in the matter.)

But for the rest of us, the evidence is damning, and the conclusion is clear. The Catholic church is a den of gilded hypocrites, and it's now being led by the worst hypocrite of them all. All their pomp and pageantry can't conceal the revolting evil which they helped to perpetuate. They are guilty, guilty, guilty - and they deserve not the smallest iota of our sympathy or our support. Those who enabled and covered up these acts ought to be prosecuted and punished like the criminals they are - and those who merely defended the guilty ought to be treated as having forever forsaken whatever credibility or moral authority they ever had.

With the historic passage of sweeping health insurance reform, Americans have reason to rejoice this week. For the first time, and despite hysterical opposition from the party of conspiracy nuts and theocrats, our government has enshrined in law the idea that every citizen has a right to affordable health care. Even if the law is far from perfect, it's still a huge advance over the alternative of doing nothing - and history shows that most major pieces of progressive social legislation, including Social Security and Medicare, started out flawed and were improved over time. With this bill now signed into law, we have a foundation to build on.

Atheists and freethinkers have another reason to celebrate (in addition to the removal of the noxious, theocratic Stupak language on abortion). Namely, one of the worst provisions of the bill - a clause mandating that health insurance companies pay for prayer - was removed in committee and didn't make it into the final legislation. This clause was originally inserted at the urging of the Christian Science church, the cult which shuns all modern medicine in favor of faith healing delusions and would rather see children suffer agonizingly and die slowly than take them to a doctor.

Or at least, that used to be the party line. In the last few decades, Christian Scientists' numbers have been in steady decline, and there are signs that the church may be giving ground on its absolute stance, as the New York Times reports:

Though officials do not provide membership statistics, scholars estimate that the church's numbers have dropped to under 100,000 from a peak of about twice that at the turn of the 20th century.... In New York City, falling membership forced the Christian Science church on Park Avenue to lease its building part time to a catering service in 2006. Another Manhattan church remains open; a third closed in 2005.

It'd be easy to snark that the reason Christian Scientists' numbers are dwindling is that so many of them tend to die. But I don't think it's sheer attrition that's the cause. In the past few years, there have been more and more cases of parents prosecuted for letting their children die of completely treatable illnesses. I think it's the onslaught of bad publicity and the church's public intransigence that have been turning people off - not to mention the fact that, as scientific medicine gets better and better and its benefits become more and more apparent, there are increasingly few people willing to give it up.

Like most churches in decline, Christian Scientists have turned to the state to prop them up. The healthcare reform bill was a perfect example, where church lobbyists pleaded with the government to force insurers to pay them for praying. Christian Science practitioners charge $25 to $50 per session, but since their "treatment" of the sick consists of nothing more than babbling superstitious gibberish, anything other than zero is far too high a price to pay. And if every sect or cult under the sun could demand payment in exchange for carrying out their own magic rituals, where would it end? Why should the rest of us have to subsidize, through higher insurance premiums, the religious nonsense of modern-day witch doctors?

The American Academy of Pediatrics deserves commendation for their strong stand against treating prayer as the equivalent of medicine:

"Given the complete lack of scientific evidence of the efficacy of prayer in treating any illness or disorder in children," academy officials wrote Senate leaders in October, "mandating coverage for these services runs counter to the principles of evidence-based medicine."

But, as I said, there are signs that the Christian Scientists have started to relax their absolutist stance - the pronouncements of their lunatic founder, Mary Baker Eddy, notwithstanding. Though Eddy demanded that believers forsake medicine under all circumstances, some modern members are taking a more tolerant stance and starting to push prayer as an alternative, rather than a replacement, for conventional, evidence-based treatment.

The faith's guiding textbook forbids mixing medical care with Christian Science healing, which is a form of transcendental prayer intended to realign a patient's soul with God.... Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879 in Boston, wrote in the church's textbook, "Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures," that anyone inviting a doctor to his sickbed "invites defeat."

But faced with dwindling membership and blows to their church's reputation... Christian Science leaders have recently found a new tolerance for medical care. For more than a year, leaders say, they have been encouraging members to see a physician if they feel it is necessary.

..."In the last year, I can't tell you how many times I've been called to pray at a patient's bedside in a hospital," said Philip Davis, 59, the church's national spokesman, who has been tending to the sick for three decades as a Christian Science practitioner.

This may end up being one of the very rare cases where a religion is forced to change by the sheer weight of the evidence against it. The Christian Science church is still going through a process of smoothing out the rough edges, and as the benefits of modern medicine become increasingly obvious, their leaders may no longer be able to persuade the rest to forsake it. We may wind up with a situation like modern Roman Catholicism, where the bishops and the Pope continue to preach against contraception, but the official teaching is almost universally ignored among educated followers. And the happy fact that payment for prayer was removed from the health care law - a rare triumph of rationality in Washington - can only speed that outcome.

Editor's Note: Earlier this month, I wrote an essay encouraging atheists to join the Foundation Beyond Belief, a new charitable group doing good for human beings and the world in the name of freethought. I also offered to write a front-page post interviewing anyone who agreed to join the Foundation as a result of hearing about it on my site. This is the next in that series of interviews, which will be posted each weekend. Please welcome Steve Bowen!

Tell us a little about yourself. Who are you, where do you live, what do you do?

I'm a middle aged (although 50 is the new thirty) middle class white British male, originally from South London, but now living in Ashford, Kent. I have a bachelors degree in Biology from the University of East Anglia (a formerly obscure but now infamous establishment) where I majored in genetics.

Professionally though, I've been out of pure science for many years and have been an engineering purchasing manager since my late twenties. I'm irritatingly extrovert, which is why my hobbies are performance oriented, being into amateur dramatics and music (jazz/blues guitar mainly).

I have two daughters 19 and 10, and though divorced from both of their mothers enjoy a good relationship with them. I also became a grandfather 18 months ago which is a concept I am still getting my head around. I currently live with my partner of three years above the pub we opened last year (she runs it with her mum) where we have a great social life and feature live music regularly (check out http://theorangesashford.moonfruit.com).

If you're an atheist, when did you first become an atheist, and how long have you been one? If you're not an atheist, how would you define your beliefs?

Yes I'm definitely an atheist. I guess I've been ambivalent about religion as long as I can remember. I was politely asked to leave the cub scouts when I was nine because I refused to take part in the closing prayer session they insisted on at every meet. I wasn't always a sceptic or a materialist though as I flirted with all sorts of spiritual fruit-loopery in my teens and early twenties (though that may have been mildly chemical based :)

Do you have a blog of your own, or another site you'd like us to know about?

I'm a newbie blogger having started Atheist MC only in January this year. It's not of the philosophical quality you find on Daylight Atheism, really it's just my 20 second rant about stuff that catches my attention on the BBC news as I drive into work. Another excuse to let off steam in public.

Have you given to other charities before joining the Foundation Beyond Belief? If so, which ones are your favorites?

Up to now I've only given regularly to conservation and environmental charities, I've been a long time supporter of the John Aspinall Foundation for example. I've tended to only give to humanitarian charities for specific disaster appeals. The reason is, it is difficult to find humanitarian charities that do not either have some religious agenda, or support other aid agencies that do. For the recent Haiti quake I followed up on a suggestion made on DA for Partners in Health, who confirmed the secular nature of their work to me in an email before I committed funds.

What membership level did you join the Foundation at?

I went in at the $20 level as I already have standing order commitments to other charities, I will keep this under review however.

How do you plan to divide your initial donation?

I have gone for humanitarian and educational programs as a balance to my conservation donations elsewhere.

Is there anything else you'd like to say to atheists who are considering supporting the Foundation or other charitable groups?

Money can be tight, and to be honest one of the most satisfying ways to get involved with charity is not to donate but to help. My partner and I play at charity fund raisers for local causes for example. Getting directly involved is a win-win strategy because you get to meet people, have fun and make a difference. You can also have fun confounding the inevitable people who will bless you for your "Christian soul". If however you do have the free cash, Foundation Beyond Belief has got to be the best tool presented so far for channeling donations in a rational secular way.

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 9

How likely is the spontaneous origin of life? In chapter 9, Stephen Meyer likens it to one of those tornado-in-a-junkyard scenarios that creationists love so much:

"Imagine trying to generate even a simple book by throwing Scrabble letters onto the floor. Or imagine closing your eyes and picking Scrabble letters out of a bag. Are you going to produce Hamlet in anything like the time of the known universe?" [p.229]

Obviously, the answer is no. Almost as obviously, however, this is not a question that bears on the origin of life.

Let's see how Meyer's facile comparison holds up if we put some actual numbers on it. I downloaded Hamlet from Project Gutenberg and did a character count on the text file. Not counting spaces, punctuation or the copyright notice, I came up with a total of 129,839 characters. Since the alphabet has 26 letters, it takes a minimum of 5 bits to specify any single letter, which means that Hamlet has (129,839 x 5) = 649,195 bits of information.

To contrast to this, consider the smallest known genome: Carsonella ruddii, a bacterium that lives in the guts of leaf-eating insects called psyllids. It has only about 160,000 base pairs of DNA, coding for 182 proteins. But since there are only 4 base pairs in DNA, it takes only 2 bits to specify each one, which means that Carsonella's genome contains (160,000 x 2) = 320,000 bits of information: less than half of Hamlet! And Carsonella is the smallest modern genome. The very first life, which was probably little more than a self-replicating hypercycle of molecules, would have been smaller still.

Obviously, this analogy is still rigged in Meyer's favor: neither evolution nor the laws of chemistry are very much like picking Scrabble tiles out of a bag. The laws of English are such that the vast majority of possible arrangements of letters are meaningless gibberish, but this is not true of proteins and DNA. Because a protein's function is defined by its shape, virtually every possible string of amino acids potentially "means something" in a way that random combinations of English letters don't. In the primordial sea, there would have been billions of different molecules drifting around, bumping up against each other, interacting in countless ways. Until we know the smallest possible interacting set of molecules that could be called alive - and we don't know that, at least not yet - there's no basis for any claim about how likely it would have been for such a thing to arise by chance.

"There's a minimal complexity threshold... There's a certain level of folding that a protein has to have, called tertiary structure, that is necessary for it to perform a function. You don't get tertiary structure in a protein unless you have at least seventy-five amino acids or so. That may be conservative. Now consider what you'd need for a protein molecule to form by chance.

First, you need the right bonds between the amino acids. Second, amino acids come in right-handed and left-handed versions, and you've got to get only left-handed ones.

Creationists are fond of invoking this "handedness" problem (the technical term is "chirality"). It refers to the fact that certain organic molecules like sugars and amino acids naturally come in two stable configurations that are mirror images of each other, like your left and right hand. Most living things use only left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars, and creationists often suggest that no natural force could produce this bias.

But, in fact, there's a wide variety of natural mechanisms that can sort molecules by chirality. Some common crystals, such as calcite, selectively absorb molecules of one handedness on one crystal face and the other handedness on the opposing face. (The chirality of all modern life may simply be because that vital first set of chemical reactions occurred on one side of a rock rather than another.) Circularly polarized ultraviolet light also selectively destroys molecules of one handedness. (The Murchison meteorite, which contains amino acids produced in the early solar system, has an imbalance of left-handed amino acids, and some scientists feel it's for precisely this reason. See also.) There's also a chemistry principle called "majority rule" in which certain reactions that begin with a weakly chiral mixture can produce products that are strongly chiral. Some scientists even believe that the laws of physics are not completely symmetric and one chirality is energetically favored over the other. Any of these mechanisms, or several of them in combination, could plausibly be why life has one chirality and not the other. We don't know the true cause for certain - but it's not that we have no idea how it could have happened; it's that we have too many candidates and can't choose among them!

"Third, the amino acids must link up in a specified sequence, like letters in a sentence.

Run the odds of these things falling into place on their own and you find that the probabilities of forming a rather short functional protein at random would be one chance in a hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That's a ten with 125 zeroes after it!" [p.229]

There's no explanation of how Meyer got these numbers (again, footnotes are absent just where they'd be most helpful). But I strongly suspect he's committing the poker player's fallacy again: assuming that only one amino acid sequence can provide the function he wants. His mention of "a specified sequence" implies as much. But in any plausible origin-of-life scenario, there wouldn't be one miracle sequence, but a large number of functionally equivalent sequences. We already know this to be true in modern life: a large percentage of mutations are neither positive nor negative but neutral, having no effect on the overall shape or functioning of the protein.

But if Meyer's numbers are right, it should be easy to prove in an experiment: just generate some organic molecules at random and see what happens. If he's correct, nothing interesting or useful will ever emerge. Well, unlike creationists comfortably ensconced in their armchairs, real scientists do run experiments like this. From a Usenet post by the biologist Howard Hershey:

Random syntheses of 50 nucleotide long RNAs generates certain specific selectable functional ribozyme (RNA enzyme) activities relevant to biological functions that would be needed for an ur-organism (RNA ligases, terminal transferases, etc.) in the range of once every 10¹⁴-10¹⁷ molecules (a mole of molecules is about 10²³, so it is a virtual certainty that you will have a number of molecules with the needed activities in a millimole of such randomly generated RNA (you would certainly be able to hold this in a thimble). Moreover, ALL these activities would be present in the SAME millimole of RNA.

For technical details, see this similar paper from the journal Science: "Structurally Complex and Highly Active RNA Ligases Derived from Random RNA Sequences". The authors say, "The fact that such a large and complex ligase emerged from a very limited sampling of sequence space implies the existence of a large number of distinct RNA structures of equivalent complexity and activity."

To put this in layman's terms: a thimbleful of randomly generated RNA sequences contains numerous enzymes with an interesting variety of biologically relevant abilities. This is a far cry from Meyer's "ten with 125 zeroes after it". Either nature is pulling a prank on us by defying the odds every single time, or else the ID advocates' calculations are based on unrealistic assumptions. Note that these RNA enzymes were only 50 nucleotides long - shorter than Meyer's "minimal complexity threshold" of 75 amino acids or more - and yet were still able to perform biologically interesting functions. And for any plausible origin-of-life scenario, we're not talking about a thimbleful of molecules, but a whole planet's worth.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

As atheists, we're well acquainted with the irrationalities of the world's religions. We've seen it all before: the absurdities in holy books, the convoluted twists of logic used by professional apologists, the self-contradictions and incoherent definitions that the faithful swallow without a qualm. All that can safely be taken for granted. Now let's see if we can do theology better.

I'm not speaking of ways that the world could be made better; we covered that ground in "Improving on God's Handiwork". It's no fair saying you'd have created a perfect, immortal paradise from the beginning, even though we all know an omnipotent deity would be capable of that. The point of this exercise is different: you must accept the world as it currently is, and craft a theology that explains it in a reasonably satisfying manner, without any fallacies of logic or divine mysteries that must simply be taken on faith, and without replicating a currently existing religion.

To start the discussion, I have an idea to propose. It's a form of pantheism that might be called "universal transmigration", and it solves a puzzle of personal identity that philosophers have long struggled with: Why am I in this body, this life, and not someone else's body and someone else's life? Why is my "camera of consciousness" in this head and nowhere else?

This theology proposes that there is a soul, but only one soul - call it the World-Soul if you like, or God if you feel more comfortable with that. This single, immortal soul lives billions of different lives, using human beings as its vessels. Each time one body dies, it transmigrates to a new body - a new person - and starts over again. These transmigrations can move it both backwards and forwards in time, even contemporaneously with other incarnations of itself: so that ultimately God, or the World-Soul, lives many lives simultaneously, like a time traveler going into the past and meeting himself. Like a shuttle weaving at a loom, turning a single thread into a complex tapestry, this process results in God becoming, in turn, every human being who ever has lived or ever will live.

This explains why there is suffering and evil, as well as great happiness and joy. God, the only real consciousness in the universe, wants to explore life in all its diversity, and living an endless string of blissful, contented lives wouldn't teach anything new. Living through short lives of pain and toil, in addition to long lives of happiness and love, is the only way to truly experience all the possibilities that existence has to offer.

This theology also has profound personal and moral implications: namely, you are God at this moment, and so is everyone else you know, everyone else you meet. Everyone from the President in the White House to a panhandler on the subway is a different incarnation of God, and thus worthy of respect and devotion. And if you do violence to any other person, you're not only doing violence to God, but to a person whom you yourself will be someday. Such a theology could provide the basis for a very deeply felt ethic of compassion, non-violence, and concern for the future.

So, that's what I'm offering to start with. Who else has a theology to propose?

Summary: A wrenching chronicle of the injustices and preventable evils committed against women around the world. The bright spots are few and far between, but that should only instill readers with a greater sense of urgency to do something about all this. I felt intense pangs of conscience while reading this book; you probably will too.

In January, I reviewed Michelle Goldberg's book The Means of Reproduction. That was an outstanding work of consciousness-raising, one which enlightened me to the ways in which the success or failure of the atheist movement is bound up with the liberation of women from patriarchal religious traditions. Half the Sky, written by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn, follows in the same vein and is a worthy companion to Goldberg's book. Its focus is broader - not just reproductive politics, but all the ways that the world's women experience violations of human rights. That makes it less a single, sustained argument and more a collection of stories, but its narrative force is undiminished for all that.

Kristof and WuDunn address three major areas in which women throughout the developing world still suffer from horrendous, yet wholly preventable, injustices. Those three are: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence, including honor killings and rape as a weapon of war; and maternal mortality. Collectively, according to Nobel-winning economist (and atheist) Amartya Sen, these have resulted in the deaths of more than a hundred million women. As the authors write:

More girls are killed in this routine "gendercide" in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century. [p.xvii]

All these evils can be prevented or remedied, and in most cases, it would take only a small amount of attention and money from the wealthier nations of the world. Yet because the victims are poor, politically voiceless women of color, their sufferings tend to be ignored or marginalized as "women's issues" - even though, in nearly all cases, educating and empowering women is an effort that pays for itself many times over in terms of economic prosperity and social progress.

The first evil described by Kristof and WuDunn is one that readers may be surprised to learn still exists: slavery. In the past, slaves were used for labor, but many modern slaves are women coerced into work as prostitutes. Some are outright kidnapped; others are deceived by traffickers who promise to find them jobs, only to sell them to brothels. In either case, once they're there, the brothel owners use the same means to induce compliance: threats, beatings, torture, or forcing them to take meth or other drugs. In the rare cases where women escape and go to the police, the police often refuse to listen, or even send them back to the brothels. And since enslaved women obviously have no power to ask their customers to use condoms, many of them end up dying of AIDS. Estimates for the size of the modern slave trade are difficult to come by, but various sources estimate the number of slaves at between 1 and 10 million - many of them children.

Most atheists are aware of the practice of honor killing, where men in (mostly Muslim) societies murder their own wives and daughters for perceived immodesty. The following chapters discuss this as well as other forms of sexual violence: acid attacks, mass rape as a weapon of war, abduction and rape as a means of obtaining a wife, the routine abuse and beatings that women and girls suffer in many cultures, and female genital cutting, a barbaric practice disguised with the innocuous-sounding term of female circumcision. Awful as they are, many of these practices have resisted eradication because they're deeply entrenched in the culture. The authors interview women who agree that husbands have a right to beat their wives if they're disobedient, or older women who perpetuate the practice of female genital cutting on their own daughters, or girls who are rescued from slavery in brothels and then return to them willingly. None of this means that these practices can't be ended or that it's not worth the trouble to try, but, the authors argue, it does show the ineffectiveness of top-down diplomatic efforts that involve changing a country's laws and expecting all its people to follow suit. The authors argue that real social progress, for women and for everyone in developing countries, has to be done at the grassroots level by groups that have an intimate familiarity with local people and conditions on the ground.

The last of the three major issues is maternal mortality. In wealthy nations where C-sections are routine, hardly any women die in childbirth, but in countries lacking a medical infrastructure, death from obstructed labor is still a real and present danger. Even women who survive the ordeal can be scarred for life, such as in the case of fistula, a crippling injury that causes incontinence and paralysis. Fistulas are easily fixed with surgery, but if untreated, it often sentences women to a life of outcast misery. As the authors point out, however, this is not a hard problem to address. Sri Lanka, still a relatively poor country, has maternal mortality rates as low as many industrialized nations. What's needed isn't wealth per se, so much as the political will to confront the problem and to make real investments in clinics and women's health.

I don't mean to give the impression that Half the Sky is one long chronicle of misery. In every chapter there are bright spots, examples of women who've heroically defied religious and cultural oppression to fight for human rights and equality, as well as innovative charities and NGOs working to advance the cause of human equality in the poorest and most downtrodden corners of the world. One of the best examples was the story of Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman who was gang-raped as the result of a tribal dispute, and rather than commit suicide to cleanse her honor (the expected response of a woman in that situation) defied her attackers and her government and now runs a school for women and girls. Another is Zainab Salbi, who grew up in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and now runs a charity called Women for Women International which aids survivors of civil war and ethnic cleansing worldwide. Another cause for optimism is the fading of female genital cutting, which the authors confidently predict will be eradicated in the near future, just as the once-widespread Chinese practice of foot binding has all but disappeared. And one point I especially appreciated was that the closing chapter lists several immediate steps readers can take (I was happy to see that joining Kiva is one of them!).

If I have one major complaint, it's that the authors pull their punches when discussing religion. They repeatedly emphasize the good that religious charities have done in poor and rural areas (not an unfair point, I acknowledge). Yet they pass up countless opportunities to explain how religion contributes to these very problems: African evangelicals who burn condoms for Jesus, monasteries which teach that AIDS can be cured by drinking magical water, religions that encourage witch hunts and teach that the role of women is to be subservient to their husbands, American conservatives whose votes have resulted in the shutdown of life-saving family planning clinics and the teaching of ineffective abstinence programs throughout the Third World. Even the Vatican's deadly opposition to birth control is only mentioned in passing (they spend more space discussing a few brave Catholic priests who hand out condoms in defiance of Rome's orders).

To an extent I understand this decision, since they're clearly trying to build a coalition between left and right to address these issues and don't want to drive off any potential allies. But I think their argument is hampered by their refusal to face up to the real cause of the problems they're battling. I don't expect this book to be an atheist tract, yet it would be much stronger if the authors would clearly state even that some forms of religion are oppressive and brutal to women and should be abolished.

That said, Half the Sky is a powerful work of consciousness-raising. We citizens of the First World have by no means abolished sexism, yet women and girls here enjoy a level of freedom and autonomy that's light-years beyond the status of millions throughout the world. This is a huge accomplishment, but we can't forget how much remains to be done. There's a truly huge gulf that remains to be bridged, and this book gives a glimpse of how deep it runs - and, with luck, what we have to do to get to the other side.

Editor's Note: Earlier this month, I wrote an essay encouraging atheists to join the Foundation Beyond Belief, a new charitable group doing good for human beings and the world in the name of freethought. I also offered to write a front-page post interviewing anyone who agreed to join the Foundation as a result of hearing about it on my site. This is the next in that series of interviews, which will be posted each weekend. Please welcome ANTLink!

Tell us a little about yourself. Who are you, where do you live, what do you do?

My name is Gabe, and I'm a 28-year-old freelance Japanese to English video game translator living in Japan.

If you're an atheist, when did you first become an atheist, and how long have you been one? If you're not an atheist, how would you define your beliefs?

I was born into a Jewish family, and was more or less agnostic for most of my life (though I never liked going to synagogue, and would have forgone my Bar Mitzvah had my parents given me a choice). At times, I would lean towards the atheist side, and at others towards the "Maybe there really is a God after all" side. In 2006, like many others, I read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, which convinced me of the rationale for the atheist position and helped me to realize that it was what made the most sense. I have been an atheist ever since.

Do you have a blog of your own, or another site you'd like us to know about?

I have my own site, but it is still essentially 99% content-free. Currently the only place I update regularly is Twitter, although I rarely touch on atheistic topics there; most of my tweets tend to be about Apple or gaming. If that interests anyone here, you can find me at http://twitter.com/GGlick.

Have you given to other charities before joining the Foundation Beyond Belief? If so, which ones are your favorites?

I have given to other charities before, but I can't say that I have any favorites. Being a freelancer, my income is very irregular, so I've tended to give on special occasions or where there is an obvious need; the most recent example being Chile.

What membership level did you join the Foundation at?

For now, I have joined the Foundation at the most basic level (see above about irregular income), but I plan to upgrade to higher levels in the future as circumstances allow.

How do you plan to divide your initial donation?

I was unable to choose between all the worthy causes, so I elected to go with the "greatest need" one and have them distribute my donation as they see fit. A great option for the indecisive activist!

Is there anything else you'd like to say to atheists who are considering supporting the Foundation or other charitable groups?

Man, this is a difficult question... All right, this may sound kind of corny and/or be overly obvious, but I guess my message would be: even if you don't have the money to contribute to charity, I would encourage you to think about the kind of world you want to live in, and do what you can do to help bring it about, even if it's just a tiny bit at a time. This is almost certainly the only time we will get in this world, so let's all do our best to do what we can to make it that much better for ourselves and everyone else sharing it with us.

P.S. Adam, I've been wanting to tell you this for a while: you're a wonderful writer, appear to be amazingly knowledgeable on a number of subjects, and explain every imaginable aspect of what I consider to be the ideal freethinking position in ways I can only dream about. Thank you for making Daylight Atheism and Ebon Musings, and for all the ways you help, and help others, contribute to making atheism a positive force for good.

• It's about time! The SEC has charged a psychic with securities fraud for claiming to be able to supernaturally foretell the direction of the market.

• The staff of IslamOnline, a Cairo-based journalism website that offers a platform for liberal and reformist views, have gone on strike over plans by the Qatari owners to impose stricter editorial controls and force a more conservative viewpoint.

• I'm very glad to report that Ireland's government is now backtracking on the ludicrous blasphemy law it passed several months ago. The government plans to hold a referendum later this year on whether the law should be repealed. Now it's just up to the people of Ireland to do the right thing.

• Less positively, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld religious language in the Pledge of Allegiance, ruling against a new lawsuit brought by Michael Newdow, and reaching the ridiculous conclusion that "one nation under God" is not religious language. One of the judges who took part in the original decision (which Newdow won before his first case was thrown out by the Supreme Court for lack of standing) wrote a scathing dissent. Newdow plans to ask for an en banc rehearing.

• Also, there's a truly outstanding article by Johann Hari interviewing the Ethiopian women fighting back against bride abduction, the brutal practice of men finding wives by kidnapping and raping them (at which point, in agreement with biblical law, they're expected to marry their rapist - since they've been "ruined" and no other man will have them). In the shadow of a vicious dictatorship, there are heroic women, and men, fighting to change a culture where this is accepted and common.

I've written on the meanings of freethought and secularism, and in the third entry of this series, I want to discuss humanism. More so than the other two, humanism is a complex and fully formed life philosophy, so it'll take the most effort to adequately define.

Most concisely stated, humanism is the worldview which treats human beings - our lives, our needs, and our concerns - as of supreme importance. Humanism recognizes our deep and profound interconnection with the natural world and with all living things on Earth, yet it values human beings above all else - not because of unjustified bias, but because that humans are the only living beings who are moral agents: the only ones who are able to reason out the consequences of their actions and choose to act based on that evaluation. Other animals lack that moral competence, and so regardless of what considerations we owe them, they are not of equal importance with us.

On the other side of the scale, humanism gives greater weight to human concerns than to matters of faith or dogma. To a humanist, the decree of a religious authority, scripture, or creed can never take precedence over the life and well-being of a conscious, feeling person. This doesn't mean that a humanist must be an atheist; there are theistic humanists, although in my experience, the secular kind is more common.

Statements like the Amsterdam Declaration and the Humanist Manifesto have defined in detail what humanists believe. My interpretation of the tenets of humanism would add the following:

Humanism is strongly ethical. The most fundamental principle of humanism is that all human beings are equal in moral worth and dignity. By virtue of being conscious, reasoning, foresightful beings, we gain the privileged status of personhood that confers us with rights; and we likewise incur a responsibility to treat others in accordance with this principle. Thus, we should refrain from doing harm or oppressing others, and to the greatest degree possible, we should respect their freedom to make their own choices and lead their own lives as they see fit. Humanists believe that morality is not a matter of following the decrees of authority, but of the sense of conscience that every person possesses, guided and informed by reason.

Humanism is rational and undogmatic. Humanists hold that no belief is too sacred to question, and are always willing to engage in self-examination, to revise our prior beliefs in the light of new evidence, and to accept newly discovered truths. More fundamentally, humanism supports free inquiry in all its forms and opposes censorship in all its forms. Humanists recognize the scientific method as the most reliable and effective method of gaining knowledge about the world, though we don't discount the value of art, music, literature and other modes of cultural expression to bring people to recognition of truths they had overlooked.

Humanism is both individual and collective. Although people's freedom to choose their own course is of paramount importance, humanists also recognize that we are social creatures, and that we find the greatest fulfillment by interacting with others and joining communities based on a shared identity or common interests. Although solitary geniuses and entrepreneurs have contributed to human progress, the greatest works of artistic creativity and intellectual achievement have come about only through connection in a shared culture.

Humanism encourages us to turn our attention to this world. As part of respecting the freedom and dignity of individuals, humanists seek to build a society where all people can flourish to their greatest extent. In addition to ethical behavior on the level of individual interactions, then, humanists are willing to contribute to the greater good, to devote their efforts toward creating a freer, more rational, more just civilization. Where we see injustice, we seek to correct it; where we see evil and tyranny, we battle against it; where we see senseless waste and destruction, we work to put a stop to it.

Humanism encourages the full development of human potential. It states that human nature is neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil, but that we have instincts that tend in both directions. Through education and training, we can learn to encourage the better instincts and rechannel the worse ones. Although the project of moral education is a difficult undertaking, it's a worthy and important one. Humanists recognize that the improvement of society's attitudes benefits all people who live in it, and only through this means can we end poverty, war, climate change and other global threats that demand collective effort to solve.