I wrote in my previous post about the creeping spread of fundamentalism in Israel and how ultra-Orthodox Jews are constantly pressing for special privileges and greater political power, even though they're not willing to contribute to the upkeep of the state. The ultra-Orthodox are exempt from Israel's mandatory military service, and as many as two-thirds of ultra-Orthodox men don't work at all; they do nothing with their lives but study scripture, and get welfare payments from the state to do it.

In ultra-Orthodox communities, every waking moment of daily life is governed by a maze of rules invented by rabbis over the millennia. To better isolate themselves from the modern world, the haredim are forbidden to watch TV or movies, read secular newspapers, or use the Internet. As always, women suffer the most - they have no real autonomy or decision-making power, and are kept silent, segregated and invisible. (In one infamous incident, several ultra-Orthodox newspapers digitally altered photographs of the Israeli cabinet to censor out the female members.)

The accumulated weight of all that prohibition, all those centuries of dead words constricting everyday life, must be stifling. And yet, even among the suffocatingly insular world of the haredim, religious dogma and brainwashing doesn't rule the day. Even among the ultra-Orthodox, there are people who see the light of reason - such as in this amazing story:

Yaanki and his wife Miri started questioning the path of the Jewish religion some three years ago, when Miri pointed out to her husband that he would believe in Christianity if he had been born Christian, and would believe in Islam if he had been born Muslim. "If so," she asked him, "Why do we believe in Judaism without examining it?"

For months, Yaanki tried to answer this question. He looked through books, and corresponded with rabbis who specialize in bringing people back to the faith. When they stopped answering him, he connected his home computer to the Internet in hopes of finding answers. "Suddenly I discovered many contradictions. If up until then I had blind faith in the Bible and the Talmud, I suddenly realized it was a lie. I was completely shocked. I felt like a fool for wasting 25 years of my life, and until then I was considered a wise yeshiva student. I wasn't one of those guys whose relationship with religion was by chance."

Although in-the-closet atheists are a familiar phenomenon, the closet for these people is especially deep and secretive. Their religion literally is their life, far more so than is true even in America's Bible Belt. The feeling of loss and dislocation must be enormous, yet some of them seem to have adapted surprisingly well.

"It was a crazy shock. After years of preparing to leave the faith, it happened abruptly. One minute I was religious, and the next, I wasn't. Suddenly I came to the conclusion that there is no proof that religion is truth, while there is endless evidence that it is not truth. I remember the exact moment it hit me. It was when I found a pile of archaeological evidence on the Internet claiming that the description of the Exodus from Egypt was a lie. Then I realized that they were simply selling me lies...

Today I am sure that there is no God. And I don't observe the mitzvoth anymore. I haven't laid tefillin in a year now. I drink and turn on the light on Yom Kippur and use the internet on Shabbat. All in secret, of course."

The article interviews several deconverts, and at least one of these stories ended in tragedy: one of the interviewees committed suicide because he felt so trapped and helpless, unable to tell anyone in his life the truth about himself. Considering that secular and humanistic versions of Judaism have a far more established place than in most other religions, I'm surprised by this. Then again, we shouldn't underestimate the power of peer pressure to make a dissenter feel lonely and isolated, especially when they have to go to such lengths to hide their true selves from others:

At first, they would light candles to warm food on Shabbat, then they turned on lights. Later, they started to watch movies on the computer after the children went to sleep. "We didn't have a television at home, so we watched movies on the computer with headphones, in case, heaven forbid, one of the neighbors would hear. We closed the windows, shut the blinds, and locked the children in their room so they wouldn't wake up and find out," Yaanki says.

What these people need more than anything is a safe place to land, a secular community where they can be their true selves without fear of reprisal. They need, too, to be made aware that they have kindred spirits out in the world, that there's a life outside ultra-Orthodox Judaism. If the worldwide atheist community continues to grow, we may soon be able to offer that to them.

Israel, like America, is a modern secular democracy with a noisy religious minority that desires the creation of a theocracy. And as in America, religious fundamentalists in Israel exert political influence disproportionate to their numbers. But Israel's fundamentalist minority, the ultra-Orthodox or haredi Jews, have had some worrying successes lately in imposing their vision on the country.

First, there's this article, about the construction of a light rail in Jerusalem. Yair Naveh, the CEO of the transit company, is proposing that some cars on every train should be "kosher cars", reserved for the use of the ultra-Orthodox and segregated by gender as their sexist laws demand. (There are already bus lines serving ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in which women are forced to sit at the back, but that isn't enough for haredi men who are too holy to have to come in contact with women.)

The ultra-Orthodox are fighting for segregation not just on public transportation, but everywhere else as well. Witness this story about a religious court which sentenced an Israeli singer, Erez Yechiel, to a symbolic "whipping" for performing before a mixed-gender audience. This quote from the article says it all:

Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak, who heads the Shofar organization for the distribution of Judaism, has been waging a war against religious singers who perform to an integrated audience of both men and women...

At least for now, this court had no legal authority; the singer submitted himself to its judgment voluntarily. (Why he did that, I have no idea - probably because of the widespread delusion that members of the clergy have some unique moral wisdom, when their bigoted and sexist actions show that, if anything, the opposite is true.) But history shows that religious groups which have the opportunity to enact their beliefs into law rarely pass up the opportunity - and one could be forgiven for wondering, if these rabbis had the power, whether those floggings would always be symbolic.

And the power of the ultra-Orthodox may soon be much more than symbolic, depending on this bill currently being debated in Israel's parliament. It would grant authority to Israel's ultra-Orthodox chief rabbinate to recognize or deny conversions to Judaism, effectively invalidating all conversions performed by Reform and Conservative rabbis. Since conversion to Judaism grants Israeli citizenship, this would be a very significant matter in determining who can be a citizen of Israel. It would potentially give the ultra-Orthodox a major advantage in elections, granting them the power to deny citizenship to more liberal Jews who might disagree with their views.

But as hard as they fight to gain control of the Israeli state, the fundamentalists contribute little to its upkeep. As many as two-thirds of ultra-Orthodox men don't work - they do nothing but study the Torah and get welfare payments from the government to do so. In effect, they expect liberal and moderate Jews to work to support them, even as they lobby to take away the liberals' rights. And the justification one of them offers for this is laughable:

"Some people drive a taxi, others pray," said Robert Zwirn, 63, a former doctor from Brooklyn who moved to Israel 20 years ago and gradually gave up his practice to adopt an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle. "But the Messiah won't come on the merit of you driving a taxi. It will be on the merit of our prayer."

Because of the delusion that endless prayer and scripture study will bring about the messianic age, these people have convinced themselves that their selfishness is actually a good deed - that they have the right to free-ride off society, taking its resources without giving anything back in return. It's the same delusion, that they're the future saviors of the world, that inspires all their other theocratic demands.

• Despite the good sense shown by the British Medical Association in lambasting homeopathy at their annual conference last month, the UK National Health Service has announced that it will still pay for water and sugar pills passed off as medicine.

• A court in Utah has thrown out the rape conviction of Mormon cult leader Warren Jeffs, due to a legal technicality, and ordered that the case be retried. Texas is still seeking to have him extradited to face similar charges, so it seems likely that he'll ultimately face justice.

• I was shocked to read of some ultra-Orthodox Israeli communities that are so extreme, they demand that their women wear burqas so as not to arouse the passions of men.

• A Liberty University graduate defends the separation of church and state.

• In more welcome news, the U.K. education secretary has said he's interested in proposals for atheist schools, after Richard Dawkins made such a proposal in response to a law allowing faith-based and community groups to open their own publicly funded schools. And why not? If every church in England has its own schools - the article mentions Anglican, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu - why shouldn't there be atheist schools that teach students rationality and critical thinking?

In the early chapters of Genesis, Yahweh makes a sweeping promise to Abraham, forefather of the Jewish people:

"In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates."

—Genesis 15:18

As I've mentioned in the past, this was no small matter: the land that God promised to Abraham would encompass most or all of the modern nations of Israel, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. If the Jewish people had ever controlled this much territory, they would have had an empire to rival the mightiest powers of the Ancient Near East. But now I have an inconvenient question: Did the Jewish people ever control this much territory? Did they ever get what God promised they would have?

The archaeological evidence shows clearly that the answer is no. Although the monarchy of David - described by the Bible as the most glorious era of ancient Israel - apparently did exist, it was a relatively small and insignificant kingdom even by the standards of the day. It never controlled all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. We have abundant evidence of the great empires that did exist in this region, whether Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian or Roman: the cities they built, the monuments they erected, the inscriptions they left behind. An Israelite empire would be equally easy to find in the archaeological record if it had ever existed, and the total lack of historical evidence can only imply that it never did.

And after David and Solomon's reign, even the Bible says that things went rapidly downhill. Solomon's son was an incompetent ruler who caused the kingdom to split apart, and the divided Israelite tribes were conquered by larger powers and scattered across the face of the earth. The modern state of Israel wasn't established until the 20th century, and it still comes nowhere close to controlling all the land that God promised to Abraham.

For almost four thousand years, then, God's land promise has been unfulfilled. Considering that the land he promised is now occupied by millions of other people with a decidedly hostile outlook toward the Jews, it seems unlikely that Israel will be able to control it any time soon. (The biblical solution - military invasion and genocide - doesn't seem to be a prospect today, due to several millennia of progress in humanity's moral sentiments.) And if you believe the evangelical Christians who insist that the Rapture is due to occur very soon and the end of the world shortly thereafter, the time when this prophecy could be fulfilled is rapidly dwindling. And even if Israel did come to own all this land through some bizarre chain of circumstances, would it really count as "fulfilling" a promise if that which was promised is withheld for hundreds of generations and thousands of years? Wouldn't it, in fact, be more accurate to say that this is a failed biblical promise?

The most common Christian apologist explanation for this prophetic failure is that God's covenant with Abraham was conditional, and when the Israelites disobeyed his laws, he took away the land he had promised them as punishment. Unfortunately for them, the Bible itself forecloses this explanation. It states clearly that even though the Israelites were wicked, God still intended to give them the land, in order to keep the promise he made to Abraham:

"Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

—Deuteronomy 9:5

The only rational conclusion is that God has not "performed the word which he swore", because there is no God who shows special favor to the Israelites. This land claim, allegedly a divinely given promise, was in reality just a piece of pious self-congratulation by ancient Israelite scribes who sought to write a self-fulfilling prophecy. They thought that if they could convince their countrymen that victory was guaranteed, that would give them the determination to turn that belief into reality. But their gambit didn't succeed, and millennia later, the Bible's failed land promise stands as proof of the very human and fallible origins of that book.

You get all kinds of weird and amusing religious literature on the New York subways, and here's the latest proof:

Click to enlarge. Also see interior and back cover.

If you've attended a college with a significant Jewish population, you're probably familiar with Chabad House, an organization that runs community centers and programs for observant Jews. What you may not know is who runs these centers - or one of this group's stranger and more curious offshoots, the subject of today's post.

The Chabad Lubavitch movement was founded in the 18th century by Shneur Zalman, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, in Russia. Zalman was an adherent of Hasidism, the offshoot of Judaism that emphasizes ecstatic and mystical worship (i.e., Kabbalah), and is known for its followers' distinctive dress and use of the Yiddish language. Hasidic Jews are organized into dynastic communities each under the leadership of a single sage, a Rebbe, who's believed to enjoy God's special favor and, often, to possess miraculous powers and semi-divine insight into the workings of the world.

Including its founder, Shneur Zalman, the Chabad Lubavitch sect has had seven Rebbes. The seventh and most recent, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, took office in 1950. The Chabad Houses on college campuses and elsewhere were mainly his creation, the result of an outreach program intended to educate Americans about Hasidic Judaism and - more importantly - to urge all Jews to obey Orthodox religious law. (He also ran a secondary campaign to encourage non-Jews to obey the seven "Noahide Laws" for gentiles - probably the closest thing Judaism has ever had to explicit evangelism.)

Schneerson died in 1994 without naming a successor, and the Chabad movement has been without a Rebbe ever since. As you might have expected, this has led to fragmentation and power struggles, though the movement as a whole appears to be thriving - it has over 200,000 adherents, making it one of the single largest Hasidic groups. But it may be that the lack of clear earthly leadership has inspired some of its followers to start thinking in new directions. As you can see from my subway pamphlet, there's a small but vocal and growing faction of Lubavitchers who believe their last, deceased Rebbe was the Moshiach - i.e., the Messiah, the prophesied hero of the Bible who will unite and rule over the Jews and usher in God's kingdom on Earth.

As this article explains, when Schneerson was alive, Lubavitcher belief in his messianic status was fairly strong. Schneerson never explicitly proclaimed himself the messiah, but he never denied it either; he repeatedly made wink-and-nudge references to the imminence of the messianic age and did little to quell the growing messianic enthusiasm of his followers. In one video from later in his life, he accepts a petition signed by thousands of Lubavitchers declaring him the messiah; in another, he smiles as a group of his followers sing a song called the Yechi - the Yiddish lyrics of which translate to, "May our master, teacher and rabbi, the king messiah, live forever."

Being deceased would seem to be an obvious disqualifier for messianic status - and indeed, there are non-messianic Lubavitchers who consider their messianic brethren an embarrassment and try to squelch them. Yet Schneerson's devotees, commonly referred to as "mesichists", don't see this as an obstacle. Exactly how they deal with the fact of his death varies: some insist that he's not actually dead but is merely hidden, biding his time to return. Others claim that his messiahship persists in some spiritual realm beyond the physical world. Still others believe that he'll be resurrected when the time is right. All, however, share the belief that the Rebbe will return and the messianic age will arrive when a sufficient fraction of the world's population learns about him and is convinced of his messiahhood - hence, my pamphlet from the subway.

I looked on Chabad World, the website set up by Schneerson's followers, for an explanation of how they reconcile the fact of his death with their belief in him as Moshiach. I didn't find one - it's a subject the website tends to skate around, for example by repeatedly referring to Schneerson in the present tense ("the Rebbe teaches..."), such that someone who didn't already know he was dead probably wouldn't realize it. However, I did find lots of entertaining supplementary material, such as these miracle claims attributed to Schneerson, or this highly amusing page which argues not just for creationism, but apparently for geocentrism. Also not to be missed from that page is the comical explanation of how the Rebbe knew there is no intelligent life in the universe other than humans, which I can't possibly do justice to by trying to summarize it here.

Aside from the clear documentation of Schneerson's life, it's hard not to notice the similarities between Chabad-Lubavitch messianism and early Christianity. As time passes and the Rebbe fails to return, it's inevitable that historical memory of him will grow vaguer, the stories of his life and miracles will become further exaggerated, and his absence will almost certainly be worked into apologetic arguments which claim it was the plan all along for him to bide his time. Like Christianity, this new faith may flourish and grow; or like the teachings of Sabbatai Zevi, another would-be Jewish messiah, it may lose its ardor and fade away. There seems to be a perennial tendency in Judaism to latch onto some earthly figure as the messiah, which may be because the lack of a clearly defined afterlife has led them to continually look for this-worldly deliverance.

Other posts in this series:

• Strange and Curious Sects

I've written in the past about religion's harm to women, and the way modern sexism is aided and abetted by ancient religious prejudices that still survive today. Every major holy book has sexist verses, but some of the most misogynistic and the most virulent can be found in the books referred to by Christians as the Old Testament. Since this text is the foundation for religions that comprise over half the population of the world, it's small wonder that oppressive, sexist ideas still have so much power.

This ancient misogyny is on full display in this article about a group of pious Jewish women who want to pray at the Wailing Wall, the holiest site of Judaism. They're obviously seeking to perpetuate the faith, not rebel against it, and you might think that would earn them respect from their peers. But instead, they've faced insults, taunting, and even arrest, all from ultra-Orthodox men who demand that women be kept separate, silenced, and subordinate:

Men sporting the black coats and wheel-shaped fur hats that identify ultra-Orthodox Jews shouted at the women, calling them "Nazis," and telling them to "go to church".

...Their adversaries, including the rabbi of the wall, say that the women have no business wearing such religious garments as yarmulkes and prayer shawls, or carrying the Torah, the Jewish holy book.

Such things, the ultra-Orthodox Jews say, are reserved for men.

Whatever religious blindness has afflicted these men, I trust that we as atheists can agree that this kind of sexism is unacceptable. This kind of disgusting bigotry should be intolerable in an enlightened world. We, both men and women, have every reason to cooperate in stamping it out wherever it rears its head, and to work for its total eradication.

But one of the biggest mistakes we could make would be to assume that misogyny only manifests itself in obvious ways: as ultra-Orthodox men cursing and spitting at women on the streets, or Muslims committing honor killings against female relatives, or Roman Catholics arguing that abortion should be forbidden even to women with life-threatening ectopic pregnancies. Those are the most visible manifestations, but sexism can take on more subtle forms as well, more difficult to notice and therefore to oppose.

I bring this up because of an appalling editorial published on Comment is Free by Nancy Graham Holm, writing about the ax attack on Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard by a Muslim fanatic. The title of her article was - no joke - "Prejudiced Danes provoke fanaticism", and its argument was that Danish writers and artists are to blame for any violence they suffer as a result of offending the religious sensibilities of Muslims, who demand the right to be exempt from criticism or satire.

This cowardly nonsense was capably dissected by Ophelia Benson, the author of Butterflies and Wheels (and also a columnist for Comment is Free). Holm's article also caught the attention of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, and there, too, most of the commenters on the site's forum responded with appropriate criticism. But there were a few who couldn't stop there - including one whose reaction was to attack Holm as a "stupid bitch".

Ophelia stopped by to point out the inappropriateness of this, and she was met by several commenters who insisted that this was a perfectly acceptable way to criticize a woman, that it wasn't at all sexist, and even if it was, women are just as sexist as men so it's hypocritical to complain about it. Here are a few shining examples:

If you really want to cast a gender in the role of servants or slaves, then a case could be made that MEN have been the servants...

One half of humanity [that would be the male half —Ebonmuse] does not get a say in whether language is sexist?

Ophelia needs to recognize not only that "words change" in general, but that these particular words -- slang terms like bitch -- have changed and acquired a non-sexist sense.

These commenters argued that the word "bitch" is defensible as long as it's being used only against one specific person and not a slur against all women, and if it wasn't meant as sexist by the person who said it, then it wasn't sexist.

While I don't think this kind of attitude poses a threat to the atheist movement as a whole, I do think it's extremely important to ensure that everyone feels welcome among us, regardless of race or gender. That's a goal that the atheist movement still needs to devote more effort to accomplishing, and comments like these don't help. (Several commenters referred to the "locker-room atmosphere" of the comments at the largely unmoderated RD.net forums - although to his credit, Richard Dawkins himself did step in to put a stop to the flame war.)

To begin, let me pose a question to anyone who thinks that "bitch" is an appropriate term to use in reference to any woman. If you strongly disagreed with an essay written by a gay person, would you write a critique calling them a faggot? If it was a black person, would you express your disapproval by calling them a nigger? If these slurs are unacceptable, as they obviously are, then why is it any different to criticize a woman with an epithet that implicitly demeans all members of her gender? The word, after all, has historically been used to insult any tough, confident or assertive woman by implying that she doesn't "know her place".

To assume that any word can be used in a vacuum, stripped of all its past connotations, simply by willing it to be so is ludicrous. A word's meaning is not wholly determined by context - individual speakers can use words in new and unique ways - but neither is it wholly determined by individual intent - else we wouldn't ever be able to communicate with each other. Even if you use that word with no sexist intent whatsoever - a highly dubious proposition, considering the way we're all influenced by culture - it's hardly reasonable to expect the recipient of your message to understand your pure heart. They're much more likely to see that word as coming with all the sexist and misogynist context that has always been attached to it, understandably so. And condescendingly telling a person that they should just ignore all that and let you decide for them when they should be offended is only going to make things worse.

There are plenty of bad ideas out there that deserve criticism. But when we criticize them, we shouldn't do it in a way that cedes the moral high ground, or that insults or alienates people whose sympathies were already with us. Nor should we tolerate others who do these things. Even the gentlest declaration of atheism is going to anger many irrational people, which is unavoidable and is no reason for us not to speak out. But we shouldn't compound that offense unnecessarily if we want atheism as a movement to flourish and succeed.

A couple of noteworthy articles from this week that I didn't have time to write more about:

• To begin with, there's this excellent and in-depth profile of the FFRF's Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, from a local alternative paper in Madison.

• Archaeologists have discovered a genuine burial shroud from the first century CE. Unlike the Shroud of Turin, its radiocarbon date fixes it to the correct time period; it also has a very different weave than the more famous Turin hoax.

• Churches in Malaysia are being attacked by Muslims, who are angry over a court ruling that struck down a government ban on the use of the word "Allah" by Christians. Perhaps we should get Nancy Graham Holm over there to explain to the Christians that it's their own fault they're getting firebombed, because they rudely persist in using a word of which Muslims are the rightful owners.

• A muckraking blogger named Failed Messiah exposes the scandals of the Orthodox Jewish world. (HT: New York Times).

• The Telegraph tells us that heroic behavior among animals is more common than previously thought. Who was it that said only human beings have a sense of morality?

• And finally, a story I may return to later: New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has invited atheists to the city's annual interfaith breakfast for the first time ever. Bravo, sir! It feels good to be taken seriously by politicians for once.

In the books of the Torah, Yahweh devotes entire chapters to explaining in exacting detail what kind of animal sacrifices he expects from his people. The one common thread, repeatedly emphasized, is that the animals to be slaughtered must be "without blemish":

"And this is the thing that thou shalt do unto them to hallow them, to minister unto me in the priest's office: Take one young bullock, and two rams without blemish." —Exodus 29:1

"And on the eighth day he shall take two he lambs without blemish, and one ewe lamb of the first year without blemish, and three tenth deals of fine flour for a meat offering, mingled with oil, and one log of oil." —Leviticus 14:10

"This is the ordinance of the law which the Lord hath commanded, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke." —Numbers 19:1

"And ye shall offer a burnt offering for a sweet savour unto the Lord; one young bullock, one ram, and seven lambs of the first year without blemish." —Numbers 29:2

"And he shall offer his offering unto the Lord, one he lamb of the first year without blemish for a burnt offering, and one ewe lamb of the first year without blemish for a sin offering, and one ram without blemish for peace offerings." —Numbers 6:14

Only animals that are perfect and flawless, without any physical defects, are acceptable as sacrifices to Yahweh. And this rule doesn't just apply to animals, either. The Old Testament makes it equally clear that people with physical defects are equally unacceptable as servants in the holy places.

"Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God. For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken; no man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come nigh to offer the offerings of the Lord made by fire: he hath a blemish; he shall not come nigh to offer the bread of his God.... he shall not go in unto the vail, nor come nigh unto the altar, because he hath a blemish; that he profane not my sanctuaries: for I the Lord do sanctify them."

—Leviticus 21:17-23

(By the way, if you're curious about what the text means when it bars a man who has "his stones broken", the RSV gives a more explicit translation: "a man with crushed testicles"!)

This passage says explicitly that if a person or an animal with a physical defect touched the altar or entered the sanctuary, it would "profane" them. But how can this be? Doesn't God care about the state of a person's soul, not the condition of their body?

These verses should be very disturbing to modern-day Jews and Christians. They attribute to God a primitive, superstitious and ignorant view - one in which a person's worth is tied to their outward appearance, and people with defects are considered impure and unholy. Even people with flat noses are forbidden to come near the altar of God! (All those churches with wheelchair ramps are going against the word of God, if they but knew it!)

Granted, in the New Testament, Jesus abrogates this command. In its place, he expresses the much more sensible view that holiness (if that term has any meaning) consists not of outward appearances, but of attitudes and actions: "There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man... Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: all these evil things come from within, and defile the man" (Mark 7:15,22-23).

But this hardly solves the problem. If it was never a sin to be ugly or handicapped, why did God say precisely the opposite for the many centuries of the Old Testament? Why was that rule established in the first place, ensuring hundreds of years of discrimination, ridicule and hatred directed at society's outcasts, if God never really meant it? Or did he mean it originally, and if so, what made him change his mind? Did he see the error of his ways? (Apologist site the Christian Think Tank claims hopefully that this prohibition was "perhaps a practical matter of the process of animal slaughter". I'd just love to hear why people with flat noses or crushed testicles were unable to assist in this.)

The apologetic is also sometimes heard that the OT purity laws were a foreshadowing of Jesus' sacrifice. For example:

The animals brought for the "bread of God" must be the best of their kind. They must be without physical blemish, because they were typical of him who had no blemish of sin.

The problem with this comparison is that the OT requires sacrifices and priests without physical blemish, while the NT claims that Jesus was without spiritual blemish. This is not a case of one foreshadowing the other - these are opposite concepts!

The shallow, appearance-obsessed, tribal deity of the Old Testament is just one of the many obscure corners of the Bible that modern-day believers would love to forget about. Atheists shouldn't give them the opportunity.

Religion inspires billions of people around the world today to live honest, decent, law-abiding lives. Faith-based charities of every religious tradition have brought comfort, hope, and healing to millions of people who would otherwise starve, lay homeless, and be left to fend for themselves. Religion gives comfort and consolation to so many who have faced adversity in their lives, whether it be suffering from illness, natural disaster, or the loss of someone whom they loved.

—http://www.altmuslim.com/a/a/a/2837/

The good that's done by religion, the peace and comfort it gives to millions of faithful, is often cited as a reason to be a believer despite the manifest harm that it does in the world. Often, paired with this argument, the charge is made that atheists don't understand the solace people find in religion - that we seek to tear down and destroy without truly knowing what we're attacking. I have a few words to say to both of these claims.

I understand why people are Roman Catholic. I understand the comfort of tradition and ritual, the deep sense of grounding that comes from being part of the world's largest and most ancient Christian faith. I understand the attraction of participating in the sacraments as they've been practiced for millennia, the sense of treading in the footsteps where the first Christians walked. I understand the intellectual depth and heft that comes of having nearly two thousand years of theological reflection and elaboration to draw on.

The former No. 2 official of the Catholic church in Chicago admitted that he knew 25 priests broke the law by sexually abusing children but did not report them, according to depositions made public Tuesday.

..."I knew the civil law considered it a crime," Goedert said in the deposition.

—"Bishop remained silent about 25 abusive priests." The Chicago Sun-Times, 22 July 2009.

I understand why people are Jewish. I understand the comfort of heritage, of identity, of continuity with the past that's been faithfully preserved in written text and living tradition. I understand the pull of cultural memory, of remembering the thread that runs unbroken through the generations and reenacting the sacred rituals as they've always been practiced. I understand the bittersweet joy and stubborn pride that comes with the knowledge that enemies have sought to eradicate your people for millennia, whether by law, by steel or by flame, and every time, your ancestors emerged from the ashes, battered but unbowed. I understand the appeal of having a true homeland, a place in the world that is finally yours and where you can dwell in peace and security.

Plastered across Israeli TV screens for the past week have been pictures of settler youths, some as young as 13, stoning and then trying to lynch a teenage Palestinian in a Gaza village.

...That thump is the sound of a rock thrown by a teenage Jewish settler hitting an unconscious Hilal Majaida in the head. The 16-year-old Palestinian was set upon by a mob of Jewish settler youth, who'd taken over a house in Hilal Majaida's village of Mouasi in Gaza.

—"Israeli settlers attempt to lynch Palestinian teenager." The World Today (Australia), 8 July 2005.

I understand why people are Muslim. I understand the comfort that comes from belonging to a worldwide community of fellow believers, one united by faith and creed without regard to race or nation. I understand the vigor and pride of the world's youngest monotheism, the heritage rich with scientific and artistic accomplishment. I understand the bracing certainty of possessing God's actual words exactly as he intended them to be read and following the last and truest prophet he sent to the world. And I understand the appeal of simplicity, the attractiveness of stripping away all corruptions and confusions and everything unnecessary, producing a faith as clean and pure and directed in purpose as the desert lands where it was born.

Taliban insurgents in southern Afghanistan have executed a school teacher in front of his pupils for refusing to comply with warnings to stop educating girls.

..."They dragged the teacher from the classroom and shot him at the school gate," said Abdul Rahman Sabir, Helmand's police chief.

"He had received many warning letters from the Taliban to stop teaching, but he continued to do so happily and honestly - he liked to teach boys and girls."

—"Taliban execute teacher in front of his pupils for educating girls." The Telegraph, 17 December 2005.

And I understand why people are evangelical Christians. I understand the ecstasy of being born again, the sense of being unconditionally forgiven and cleansed. I understand the excitement of being on a grand spiritual mission, the sense of being a foot soldier in a quest to save the world. I understand the appeal of answered prayer, the promise of miracles all around. I understand the belief that the material world is like a thin curtain over a far more important and unseen world, and the appeal of a book which claims to be the inerrant and infallible word of God to believers, a book which pulls back that curtain and unlocks all the secrets of the future and the world to come. I understand the appeal of a personal relationship with a loving savior who promises he will never abandon nor forsake those who love him, even to the end of the world.

But an exploitative situation has now grown into something much more sinister as preachers are turning their attentions to children - naming them as witches. In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush.

Pastor Joe Ita is the preacher at Liberty Gospel Church in nearby Eket. 'We base our faith on the Bible, we are led by the holy spirit and we have a programme of exposing false religion and sorcery.... Parents don't come here with the intention of abandoning their children, but when a child is a witch then you have to say "what is that there? Not your child."'

—"Children are targets of Nigerian witch hunt." The Observer, 9 December 2007.

I understand, but I do not believe. No matter how comforting these faiths may be to their followers, they are still based on supernatural claims for which I see no good evidence. Worse, most of them make assertions that are plainly based on the superstitious ideas of primitive people, and are flatly contradicted by everything we've learned about human history and the laws by which the cosmos works. I understand the appeal of culture and tradition, but these are not good enough reasons for belief when these religions make factual claims that are so plainly untrue.

If these factual falsehoods were all that was wrong with religion, one might still argue that it's worth believing for the sake of the comfort that belief brings. But religion has also wrought terrible evil in the world. And the unnecessary pain, suffering, and destruction that faith has caused is too high a price to pay for comfort. A total catalogue of these harms would be impossibly long, but I can list a few of the major ones: the terror of children who are taught they'll be tortured eternally if they stray; the monstrous crimes of predatory clergy that were long concealed and abetted by their superiors; the suffering and degradation of women whose faith teaches them that they are inferior; the bloody holy wars waged in the name of God; the violent censorship of free speech and free minds; morality based on fear and obedience rather than reason and conscience; the opposition to the advance of human rights; the opposition to science and knowledge; the propping up of kings and theocracies; and most grievous, the stifling of curiosity, teaching people to be satisfied with ignorance.

Whatever comfort religion brings, whatever solace it brings, it isn't worth it if this is the price we must pay. There are other, better ways to find comfort, ways that have just as much potential for good without so much potential for evil. There are countless philosophies that, like religion, accentuate the positive traits of humanity, but that, unlike religion, don't intensify the negative ones.

This week is the holiday of Passover, one of Judaism's high holy days which commemorates the ancient Israelites' deliverance from slavery in Egypt. Although the archaeological evidence for captivity and exodus is lacking, this story has become a fundamental part of Jewish cultural consciousness, as well as a symbol and an inspiration to others. In pre-Civil War America, for example, the Exodus mythology played a role in the abolitionist movement, as African slaves and their allies looked to these passages to craft a narrative opposing the pro-slavery Bible verses so often preached on by pious Southern slaveholders.

But for all its cultural resilience, the true moral of the Passover story is more disturbing than it is uplifting. To see why, let's consider what scripture says about the origins of the holiday.

Despite all the inspiring morals and ethical lessons that have been added on, what the Passover festival actually celebrates is the last and most terrible of the ten plagues: God's sparing the Israelites' children when he slaughtered the firstborn sons of Egypt. In fact, that's where the name comes from: the English name "Passover" derives from the Hebrew name, Pesach, which means "to pass over, to exempt, to spare". The reference is to chapter 12 of Exodus, where God instructs the Israelites to mark their houses with lamb's blood:

"And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt." (12:13)

That night, God strikes Egypt with the tenth and final plague - the death of the firstborn - and spares only the Israelite houses painted with the blood, slaying man and beast in all the others:

"And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead." (12:29-30)

As I wrote in "A Book of Blood":

The next morning in Egypt must have been a black dawn indeed. How many mothers and fathers were there, stumbling dead-eyed out of their homes? How many wails of grief and funeral songs could be heard? How many graves had to be dug? One can only imagine the horror, grief and despair that would ensue if anything comparable happened in a modern nation.

This is the twisted and bloody moral of the Passover story - it's a holiday founded to commemorate a mass murder. Even if we take the Bible at its word, the Israelites' freedom was purchased by the deaths of thousands of innocent Egyptian children. Let us not forget, ancient Egypt was not a democracy! Regardless of their feelings on the matter, the Egyptian people had no say in whether the Israelites were set free. The only person who had the power to make that decision was the pharaoh. What purpose did it serve for God to torment and massacre his subjects? Truth, why not just kill the pharaoh and ensure that the next person to come to the throne was more sympathetic to the Israelites' plight?

The Passover story, like most of the Old Testament, dates back to an era where religion was a matter of savagery and bloodshed, not love and forgiveness. Its uplifting, modern message of freedom and redemption is a secondary derivation, created by carefully stepping around the unsavory parts of the tale. And therein lies an important lesson: For all that atheists are accused by apologists of taking the Bible out of context, it's actually theists who often fail to appreciate the importance of context. Not just Passover, but many biblical tales - Abraham and Isaac, Noah's flood, the crucifixion of Jesus - are treated as beautiful stories only by suppressing their ugly side.