Category Archives: Atheism

Sophisticated Arguments for Preposterous Propositions

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Intelligence does not immunize against delusion, and intelligent people can produce sophisticated sounding arguments to support their delusional claims. This has always been epidemic amongst the intelligentsia who believe in, and need to rationalize, the existence of a god that cannot and therefore does not actually exist.

The latest delusional religious reasoning comes from theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart, in a long New York Times interview (see here) where he announces that the only reason he is not an atheist is that “the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable.” It’s an impressively confident conclusion, especially given how weak the actual arguments look once you strip away the prose and the piety. Underneath the erudite-sounding facade, what we are dealing with here is just more misrepresented and logically flimsy pseudo‑intellectual religious nonsense.

Hart warms up with a casual swipe at Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, dismissing it as “decades out of date” when it first appeared and a logical failure. That isn’t just wrong, it’s the kind of wrong you get when you start from “atheists must be idiots” and work backward. Whatever you think of Dawkins’s metaphors, the 1976 book was not peddling obsolete biology; the gene‑centric view it popularized is still one of the basic perspectives in population genetics, even though it has since been supplemented by multi‑level selection and systems thinking, and that’s exactly how its serious critics treat it. Biologists like Denis Noble argue that talking as if genes are little agents oversimplifies a complex causal web, and they argue for reframing and extending, but clearly not for declaring the whole thing “decades out of date” at birth. When Hart actually engages Dawkins elsewhere he mostly attacks the cartoonish way Dawkins talks about “selfish genes” and “lumbering robots,” that is, his metaphors and metaphysics, not the math or the lab work. At no point does he demonstrate that the science was obsolete; he just sneers at a popular book written by an atheist and hopes the insult will do the work of argument. If a Christian apologist wrote a lively popularization of cosmology and an atheist waved it away as “decades out of date” with no evidence, we’d call that what it is: rhetorical BS. If you want to claim modern science has destroyed materialism, you should at least show you can accurately summarize modern science.

The heart of Hart’s case is his insistence that a “mechanistic” view of nature can never explain consciousness, that the scientific picture of the world was built precisely by excluding mental properties, and that trying to add mind back in breaks the machine. He leans toward an idealist picture where consciousness, or “mind,” is fundamental and matter is in some sense derivative. There are at least three big problems with how he plays this. First, he treats “mechanistic” science as if we were still doing physics with brass gears and clockworks. He’s right about one historical point: early modern physics modeled nature as a soulless machine and bracketed talk of purposes and minds to get a clean method going. That was sort of a brilliant move. But he then writes as though that coarse mechanical picture is still the only game in town. It isn’t. Contemporary physics is explicitly non‑mechanistic in his sense; quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, and information‑theoretic approaches do not imagine the universe as billiard balls banging around in absolute space. Contemporary biology is likewise not stuck in clockwork mode; it routinely analyzes feedback, homeostasis, regulatory networks, and even minimal forms of goal‑directedness at cellular and organismic levels without smuggling ghosts into the machine. So when Hart admits that “our sciences are not strictly mechanistic” and yet somehow uses that as a weapon against materialism, he’s trading on an equivocation. Materialism in 2026 does not mean “Descartes’s res extensa forever.” It means that whatever exists is ultimately describable in terms of physical fields, structures, and dynamics—even if those structures are richer than 17th‑century clockwork.

Second, Hart treats “no explanation yet” as if it means “requires a spooky extra force.” He is genuinely offended by the idea that a purely physical story could ever explain why there is “something it is like” to be you. Fine; lots of philosophers share that intuition. But “I don’t see how that could work” is not evidence that it cannot work. Physicalist theories of consciousness—from higher‑order thought theories to global workspace models and integrated information approaches—don’t invoke new metaphysical forces bolted onto physics; they identify consciousness with specific kinds of information‑processing and global availability in the brain. Even critics of those theories generally argue about their completeness or conceptual clarity, not about physics needing to invent some non‑mechanical pixie dust. So there is exactly zero empirical requirement for some mysterious non‑mechanistic “force” to explain consciousness; the conceptual puzzles are real, the data gaps are real, but the demand for a supernatural‑ish add‑on is not. Hart’s move is not “maybe we’ll need a modest additional ingredient.” He jumps from “current models leave an explanatory gap” to “the foundation of all reality is spiritual and mental, not material.” That’s not filling a gap with legitimate science; that’s exploiting any temporary gap to stuff an entire theology into it.

Third, he leans heavily on caricaturing “illusionist” talk about consciousness. Hart loves to quote people like Daniel Dennett saying that “consciousness is an illusion” and then pointing out, correctly, that if you take that literally you’ve sawed off the branch you’re sitting on: if there is no experience whatsoever, there is no one left to be “under an illusion.” But here again he stops at the cheap false victory. Most illusionist or deflationary physicalists mean something much more specific: there is experience, but our naive model of that experience—as a private inner theater with atomic, intrinsic qualia and a simple “self” watching the show—is badly mistaken. On that view, the brain builds a simplified, user‑friendly representation of its own activity and mistakes that representation for a little inner soul; the “illusion” is the brain’s self‑description, not the existence of experience itself. That is not “we gave up on explaining consciousness.” It’s one kind of mechanistic explanation of how an evolved biological control system might misdescribe itself. Saying that consciousness is “in some sense an illusion” is not a concession that mechanistic explanations failed; it is a mechanistic explanation. Hart either does not understand that distinction or finds it more convenient not to. This is not a case where illusion talk admits defeat; it’s a case where Hart is punching a straw man and declaring victory.

Once you clear away the rhetorical fog, the “unanswerable” anti‑atheist case looks very familiar and age old. The pattern goes roughly like this: define “materialism” as a crude, outdated, 17th‑century billiard‑ball picture plus Dennett at his most provocative; show—correctly—that this caricature struggles to account for rational thought, moral value, and consciousness; then declare victory for a vaguely classical‑theist or idealist picture where “mind” or “spirit” is metaphysically basic. The trouble is that many contemporary naturalists explicitly reject the crude “mechanistic” straw man he keeps fighting. They are physicalists, not cartoon mechanists, and they work within a physics that already moved past that picture. Non‑theist philosophers like Thomas Nagel have raised similar worries about materialism’s ability to capture value and reason without concluding “therefore, theism,” and Nagel’s critics have shown in detail how you can respond to those worries from inside a broadly naturalistic framework. There is no valid path from “explaining consciousness is hard” to “the God of Eastern Orthodox Christianity exists,” any more than from “we have not yet fully explained crop circles” to “this proves that aliens created them.”

Hart’s move boils down to this: if he defines “atheism” as commitment to a simplistic metaphysics he dislikes, then his arguments against that metaphysics are “unanswerable,” and therefore atheism is irrational. Sure. And if I define “Christianity” as the belief that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that God personally scripts every toddler’s cancer, I can prove Christianity is evil before lunch. Both maneuvers are lazy. If you want to refute atheism, you have to interact with the best naturalist positions on offer today, not with the weakest airport‑paperback atheism plus your favorite 17th‑century straw man.

None of this means Hart is stupid. He’s obviously not. He’s well read, rhetorically gifted, and very good at exposing shallow, popular atheist arguments. But brilliance in one direction doesn’t inoculate you against motivated reasoning in another. What shows through in that Times piece, and in the wider body of his work, is someone starting from a deep emotional and aesthetic commitment to a Christian‑Platonic picture—beauty as a transcendental, Jesus as uniquely “uncanny,” consciousness as a window into a mental foundation of being—and then retrofitting “philosophical arguments” to protect that picture from contact with a godless universe. Along the way he mischaracterizes contemporary science, caricatures naturalist positions he doesn’t like, and leans hard on loaded definitions (“God” as necessary being; “materialism” as crude mechanism) that atheists simply do not have to grant.

From the outside, this is not a rigorous refutation of atheism; it’s a very educated, very eloquent catechism for people who already want Christianity to be true but don’t want to sound naive. As an unabashed atheist, I have no problem with people finding Christianity emotionally or aesthetically compelling. Believe whatever myths get you through the night. What I object to is pretending that this is where logic forces us to go, that atheism has somehow been rendered philosophically childish by “unanswerable” arguments that fall apart as soon as you stop being impressed by the adjectives. If you want to believe in God, own it as a choice, an intuition, a story that works for you. Just don’t try to tell the rest of us that we’re being irrational for declining to share your delusion.

The Vatican Combats Superstition

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The Church has always worked tirelessly to portray itself as scholarly, rational, and evidence-based. Going way, way back, they have tried and largely succeeded in marketing themselves as a bulwark against false gods, superstitions, and dangerous beliefs.

In “The Demon-Haunted World,” Carl Sagan told about Jean Gerson back in the 1400’s who wrote “On the Distinction Between True and False Visions.” In it, he specified that evidence was required before accepting the validity of any divine visitation. This evidence could include, among many other mundane things, a piece of silk, a magnetic stone, or even an ordinary candle. More important than physical evidence, however, was the character of the witness and the consistency of their account with accepted church doctrine. If their account was not consistent with church orthodoxy or disturbing to those in power, it was ipso facto deemed unreliable.

In other words, the church has spent thousands of years fabricating pseudo-rational logic to ensure that the supernatural bullshit they are selling is the only supernatural bullshit that is never questioned.

Their pseudo-rational campaign of manipulation is is still going on today.

Just recently, the Vatican announced their latest marketing initiative to promote themselves as the arbiters of dangerous and confusing supernatural claims (see here). They sent their salesmen out in force promoting it, and if their claims were not accepted by the media with such unquestioning deference, I would not need to write this article.

Just as did Jean Gerson in 1400, the modern Vatican has again published revised “rules” for distinguishing false from legitimate supernatural claims. But unlike most of the media, let’s examine a few of these supposedly new rules (or tests) through a somewhat less credulous lens.

The first requirement, according to Vatican “scholars,” is whether the person or persons reporting the visitation or supernatural event possess a high moral character. The first obvious problem is that anyone, even those of low moral character, can have supernatural encounters. So what is this really about? The real reason they include this is because it’s so fuzzy. It gives them the latitude to dismiss reports inconsistent with their doctrine based on a character judgement, and it ensures that if they are going to anoint a new brand-ambassador, that person will not reflect poorly on the Church.

They include a similar criterion involving financial motivation. Again, while a financial interest should make one skeptical, it is not disqualifying. And the real reason this is included, I suspect, is to provide the same benefit as a moral character assessment. It provides further fuzziness to allow them to cherry-pick what sources they want to support, and which they want to disavow.

But the most important self-perpetuating rule is the next one. The Vatican explicitly gives credence to any claims that support church theology and the church hierarchy, and expressly discounts any claims that are not in keeping with Church doctrine as ipso facto bogus.

In other words, since Church doctrine is the only true superstition, any claim that is not in keeping with Church doctrine is logically and necessarily false. This is the exact same specious logic put forth by Jean Gerson in 1400. The Vatican clearly knows that a thriving business must keep reintroducing the same old marketing schemes to every new generation.

Rather than dwell further on the points the Vatican wishes us to focus on, let’s think one moment about what they did not include. Nowhere in their considered treatise on fact-based thinking do they ever mention anything remotely like scientific or judicial rules of evidence. Nowhere do they mention scientific-style investigation, scientific standards of proof, or any establishment of fact for that matter. They emphasize consistency with Church doctrine, but nowhere do they even mention consistency with known universal laws. And certainty nowhere do they suggest a sliver of a possibility that any of their existing beliefs could possibly be proven to be incorrect by some legitimate new supernatural phenomenon.

I won’t go on further as I like to keep these blog posts short, but I hope this is enough to help you see that everything in this current Vatican media campaign is more of their same old, “we are the only source for truth” claim. It’s the same strategy designed to hold an audience that has been adopted successfully by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and any number of cults.

The Church is essentially a money-making big-business like Disneyland, selling a fantasy experience built around their cast of trademarked characters with costumes and theme parks, and big budget entertainment events. Imagine if Disney spent thousands of years trying to retain market share by assuring people that they are the only real theme park and that all the rest of them are just fake. Then further imagine that Disney went on to promote scholarly articles about how they are the only reliable judges of which theme park characters are real. That’s the Church.

Disneyland and Universal Studios are just a feel-good entertainment businesses and they admit it. Disney doesn’t insist that Micky Mouse is real and Universal Studios doesn’t claim that only the Autobots can save us from the Decepticons. What makes the arbiters of truth at the Vatican either liars or delusional or both is that they never stop working to convince everyone that their divine mission is to protect us from – all those other – false beliefs.

Speaking for All Atheists…

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So speaking for all atheists in America, I’d like to say we get it and we are on board. We understand the principles that the Supreme Court has made clear and we will abide by them. These include the principle that no one should be made to do anything that might conflict with their deeply help religious beliefs, that they should be given every accommodation of their religious beliefs, and that they should not be required to produce any written or other work product that even hypothetically might conflict with their religious beliefs or 1st Amendment rights.

We won’t fight you any longer regarding the utter silliness and complete folly of these positions.

We also admit that leading religious thinkers like Ken Ham (see here) have been right all along in their insistence that atheism is just another religion. As Ham points out:

“Atheists have an active belief system with views concerning origins (that the universe and life arose by natural processes); no life after death; the existence of God; how to behave while alive; and so much more. Honest atheists will admit their worldview is a faith. Atheism is a religion!”

Atheism is Religion, Answers in Genesis

Well, we do want to be completely honest, Ken Ham, so we agree to abide by your inestimable logic and admit that atheism is a religion. We do admittedly hold a devout, sincere, deeply felt belief in objective reality. And given that we are then a religion, we expect the same rights as you. For example, we atheists will no longer produce any work content of any kind that contains religious iconography, messages, or suggestions. To do so would violate our deeply held beliefs and would be a violation of our 1st Amendment rights. If you wish to have some writing or video work produced, edited, polished or published, we cannot assist you in these or any other creative activities – and all forms of work are creative self-expression in one way or another.

For example, if you wish to have a wedding cake made it must clearly depict a civil marriage or else we cannot in good conscience decorate it. Similarly, we cannot in good conscience produce a web site for your church or charity if it has religious associations. For that matter, under our 1st Amendment rights, we cannot in good conscience perform any action or service which propagates delusional ideas in direct contradiction to our deeply held faith that delusional thinking is bad for sanity.

This is particularly true when religious activities affect children. How can we atheists be forced to even implicitly and indirectly condone and support activities that our devout faith in objective reality tells us are forms of child abuse?

Devout atheists, for example, cannot sell a car to a known Christian. It would violate our deeply held, sincere ethical belief that you might even hypothetically use that car to transport others, maybe even minors, to a church service which would do them clear harm. In fact, we reserve the right to sue any Uber driver or family member who facilitates those activities. The same goes for any other type of sales or service work which we might otherwise be forced to perform for religious customers in violation of our faith.

Further, as employers we atheists cannot in good faith allow Catholics to have Sundays off of work or time off to perform any religious observation. To do so would force us atheists to implicitly express tangible support for those activities that we find morally offensive. This applies also to any company-sponsored benefits or activities that include, directly or indirectly, religious associations.

Atheist doctors and pharmacists, like their Christian counterparts, will, of course, be permitted to withhold medicines or services if they feel that their atheist religious rights would be infringed upon to offer such goods or services as they deem in conflict based upon their personal interpretation of their religious freedom.

In schools, we require that all bibles and other religious reading materials be removed from libraries and from the curriculum in all fields of study. We insist that any history of religion be purged and that any influence of religion in secular matters be expunged from the historical record. We expect that atheist observances at sporting and other events will be protected by our Supreme Court as well. Any school plays with religious themes or references should clearly be prohibited.

Of course, our religious freedom demands that references to god be removed from all coins and any other materials we atheists may be forced use, and we refuse to take any oath that makes reference to god or the bible as those are clearly violations to both our religious freedom and our freedom of speech.

Of course, we atheists stand by our religious brothers and sisters from all religions, no matter how dubious and fringe and crazy their beliefs may be, in their assertions of the same fundamental rights. We trust that our Supreme Court is not simply making up the rules as they go to rationalize and empower an emerging Christian theocracy.

No, given the dedication of our wise Supreme Court to abide by precedent, particularly the intentionally vague and broad precedents they have just recently set, and knowing their profound dedication to intellectual consistency, we are confident that they will rule in support of protecting the religious and 1st Amendment freedom of atheists.

Pandemic of Delusion

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Pandemic of Delusion can be found on Amazon (see here).

You may have heard that March Madness is upon us. But never fear, March Sanity is on the way!

My new book, Pandemic of Delusion, will be released on March 23rd, 2023 and it’s not arriving a moment too early. The challenges we face both individually and as a society in distinguishing fact from fiction, rationality from delusion, are more powerful and pervasive than ever and the need for deeper insight and understanding to navigate those challenges has never been more dire and profound.

Ensuring sane and rational decision making, both as individuals and as a society, requires that we fully understand our cognitive limitations and vulnerabilities. Pandemic of Delusion helps us to appreciate how we perceive and process information so that we can better recognize and correct our thinking when it starts to drift away from a firm foundation of verified facts and sound logic.

Pandemic of Delusion covers a lot of ground. It delves deeply into a wide range of topics related to facts and belief, but it’s as easy to read as falling off a log. It is frank, informal, and sometimes irreverent. Most importantly, while it starts by helping us understand the challenges we face, it goes on to offer practical insights and methods to keep our brains healthy. Finally, it ends on an inspirational note that will leave you with an almost spiritual appreciation of a worldview based upon science, facts, and reason.

If only to prove that you can still consume more than 200 characters at a time, preorder Pandemic of Delusion from the publisher, Interlink Publishing, or from your favorite bookseller like Amazon. And after you read it two or three times, you can promote fact-based thinking by placing it ever so casually on the bookshelf behind your video desk. It has a really stand-out binding. And don’t just order one. Do your part to make the world a more rational place by sending copies to all your friends, family, and associates.

Seriously, I hope you enjoy reading Pandemic of Delusion half as much as I enjoyed writing it.

But What Would We Do Without Religion?

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As an author who focuses primarily on science, fact-based thinking, and atheism, I find that many of my conversations end up stuck in religion. Even those who share a clear and open-eyed view of the completely delusional belief pattern of religion, as well as the real social harm that it causes, still end up at stuck at “yea, but we need religion.”

Their suggestion is that, despite the obvious insanity of it, we’re stuck with religion. After all, some people clearly just need religion to better cope with life. They need the support that religion provides, whether real or fantasy. Implicit in this acceptance is the assumption that there is and can be no secular alternative. We have become co-dependent upon our mass delusions.

To those folks I say, look, we’d be completely fine without religion. In fact, if a miracle actually happened and religion disappeared from the planet, it would be quickly replaced with far more healthy fact-based alternatives. The disappearance of religion would open the space at least for rational secular alternatives to blossom and grow to fill any sane, legitimate need. All the money going to churches would be available to them to grow and flourish.

We have plenty of secular support systems already. We have an arguably helpful and supportive secular government, charities, clubs and associations of all sorts, NGO and volunteer organizations, and familial and interpersonal relationships. If religion were to disappear, I am fully confident that there are plenty of fact-based support and comfort systems that would expand and blossom to provide socially healthy alternatives to provide any legitimate benefits that religion may offer.

You know, we are always irrationally fearful of losing anything we have, even when it is harmful to us. Yes, cigarettes are killing us but don’t you dare take them away! Perhaps gas stoves are no longer needed and are giving our kids asthma, but you can pry my gas stove from my dead burnt fingers!

Moreover, we have a tendency to put too much emphasis on what little good someone or something offers while minimizing all the negatives. At one company we had a true bad apple named Tanya. Tanya did virtually no work and spent all her time proudly fomenting dissent. Yet when I asked my boss why he didn’t fire her he said “well if I did who would do the little bit of work she does?”

Finally, we have another tendency to think of things we rely upon as indispensable, irreplaceable. I am a fan of Amazon, but many folks think it is terrible. Yet, most would not wish to do away with Amazon because, after all, we depend on it too much. Like it or not, they would say, we need it.

But I think it is safe for me to assert that you’d be just fine without your cigarettes or your gas stove. Work will go on just fine with Tanya gone, and in fact less can be more and productivity will probably increase. Someone will pick up her work with hardly a notice. And if -<horror> Amazon went out of business tomorrow? The market would quickly adjust and you’d have plenty of ways to buy whatever it is you need. Within weeks they’d be no more than a distant memory, like Montgomery Ward or Sears and Roebucks.

Similarly, we overly focus on whatever good comes from religion and we mistakenly worry that it is indispensable and irreplaceable to meet our needs. We practically imagine that civilization would crumble without it. But it would not. We’d do just fine, and, as with Tanya gone, probably much better. As much as Amazon executives or church leaders would like you to believe that they alone can sustain you, they are not truly essential and irreplaceable. No one and nothing is, including religion.

So fret not for the loss of religion in the world. The planet will keep spinning and people will end up in a much better place when we finally escape from our delusions.

Atheists Cannot Succeed in Life

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Atheists cannot hope to accomplish great success in life.

This is the expressed opinion of someone who has been nominated for the Supreme Court as presumably being one of the wisest and most learned people in America (see here).

At the very top of her nomination speech, immediately after thanking the President and the Vice President, Ketanji Brown Jackson stated:

“I must begin these very brief remarks by thanking God for delivering me to this point in my professional journey. My life has been blessed beyond measure, and I do know that one can only come this far by faith.”

There can be no misreading or misunderstanding of her words. Again, she stated clearly that “I do know that one can only come this far by faith.” Only. There is no ambiguity there. There is no modifying context. She thinks this.

Further, this is clearly extremely important and fundamental to her. She chose to put it at the very top of what was certainly the most critical, the most visible, and the most carefully considered speech of her life thus far. She clearly not only thinks this but must think it very, very profoundly.

If this is something she thinks she knows, it must make one wonder what else she thinks she knows.

This revelation must come as a great shock to the many, many highly accomplished and successful atheists to learn that their success cannot be real. They must be imagining it.

More seriously, her considered conclusion must come as a great disillusionment to the many, many children who are not deluded by religion. It is undoubtedly disheartening to hear that they cannot accomplish great success in life unless they find Jesus.

It is disappointing to have a supreme court justice who a) does not appreciate or care about the effect of her words on non-believers and b) doesn’t recognize that her assertion is simply, utterly contradicted by actual facts.

Further, her statement isn’t as much a window into her religious humility and thankfulness as much as it is a window into a self-aggrandizing Prosperity Bible worldview in which god rewards the chosen few with great worldly rewards and success. That kind of self-righteousness does not bode well for a Supreme Court Justice in a secular nation.

Lastly, I’ll point out that I had good feelings about this nominee right up to these statements. When she uttered them, I slammed off the live video and shouted “Fuck!”

Within a minute my phone rang and the first word from my associate, a fellow atheist was, “Fuck!”

I’m sure that this was the response of millions of atheists who are Americans too. That this nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was apparently blind to that response or did not care does not bode well for her ability to act as an empathetic and fair arbiter in decisions that affect ALL Americans.

If, as Justice Brown Jackson, she holds a deep conviction that success is only accessible through faith, and she wishes the best for all Americans, how can she morally do anything other than make decisions promoting religion and diminishing atheist, even simply secular activities?

As a final note, I’ll point out that the most discouraging and aggravating thing about this incident is that Ketanji Brown Jackson is, to a large degree, absolutely right. Atheists cannot reach the highest levels of success in this country. Not because god rewards the faithful, but because our nation is filled with, and critical decisions that affect us all are made by, religiously compromised people like her.

The Original Big Lie

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Many of us, far too few but many, look at the big lies that have taken hold in the Trump era and see them clearly for what they are. Delusion. Pure and utter insanity.

We ask, how is it possible? How can so many otherwise sane or at least functional people believe the big lie that Trump won the election? How can so many get caught up in the big lies being spread by QAnon conspiracy theorists? The deep and rapid entrenchment of these delusions is shocking and inexplicable to many of us.

I am likewise shocked by the rapid spread of this mass insanity, but I am neither surprised nor perplexed by it.

I love to say I told you so as much as anyone, but it saddens me to point out that I’ve spent much of my life trying to warn that this was coming. No, I do not claim to be a modern Nostradamus. I certainly did not specifically foretell the coming of Trump or QAnon. One cannot ever predict what exact form insanity will take. But I have long warned that something like this was far too likely. That fear is what has long motivated me to write and speak about the dangers of religious and other beliefs.

The original big lie is religion. How could anyone ever have believed that raising generation after generation to accommodate and rationalize such a blatant and obvious lie as god would not leave our rational defenses fatally compromised? How could it not leave us compromised to the point that Trump and QAnon could be readily rationalized by the very same cognitive impairments put in place to accommodate religious insanity?

I ask not how so many otherwise sensible people could possibly believe in such big lies, but rather, but how could we ever have thought that people so compromised by their rationalization of religion could hope to resist other big lies?

Even a sympathetic reader might argue that religious conditioning does not enable Trumpism, but rather that both are merely symptoms of the same cognitive limitations. They might argue that not all religious believers believe in Trump and QAnon. Even so, the result is the same. In order to truly regain our sanity, we must eradicate even what we consider to be our more benign symptoms of insanity. Strengthening our rational faculties sufficiently to resist Trumpism and QAnon thinking requires that those same faculties be sufficiently sound to resist the profoundly ludicrous god delusion as well.

If we are going to fight this mass insanity we must do so comprehensively. We cannot pick and choose our sanctioned insanities and imagine that we are cured. We must finally admit that Trumpism and QAnon are no more crazy then religion. Anything less will still leave us vulnerable to the next Trump and the next Q. If we do not focus on fact-based thinking, as I have tried to do, we are simply leaving our mental doors open for the next Trumpian insanity. Until we give up our religious delusions, we cannot hope to conclude that we are safe.

Given the stark reality of what is happening all around us, will we continue to bet our future on the claim that we can pervert our rational thinking so as to believe in mythical gods without real-world consequences? Will we continue to insist that religious beliefs do not prime us to believe in other big lies? Or at the very least, that religious beliefs do not demonstrate our susceptibility to other insanely improbable and blatant lies?

Let’s begin our collective recovery by finally admitting that there is no inherent validity to the god lie. Trumpism and QAnon do in fact have far more rational plausibility than does a belief in a god or gods. Let’s admit that it is harmful and dangerous to believe in any of it.

And to those of you who continue to rationalize that religious belief must be sane and reasonable because it is so prevalent, current events should demonstrate how untrue that is. The rise of Trumpism and QAnon should prove to us how easily and quickly huge numbers of people can come to unquestionably accept dangerously crazy ideas. This should show us all how religion itself could have taken hold and become mainstream despite being clearly batshit crazy. It may be that in 1000 years, if humanity somehow still exists, the Trump legend will have morphed into a mainstream belief that Donald Trump was the true second coming of Christ. People then will tell themselves and others that it must be true or at least rational since so many have believed it for so long.

Trumpism is not the disease. It is merely the entirely predictable degradation of our rational faculties that have been chronically and profoundly compromised by our addiction to religion. Even if you believe devoutly in god, denounce that belief for the good of humanity. I guarantee you that a god worth believing in would approve.

Religious Child Maltreatment

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In her excellent book, “Breaking Their Will,” author Janet Heimlich powerfully documents the many ways that religion motivates and justifies the maltreatment of children (see here). She identifies the following general forms of religious child abuse:

  • justifying abusive physical punishment with religious texts or doctrine;
  • having children engage in dangerous religious rituals;
  • taking advantage of religious authority to abuse children and procure their silence;
  • failing to provide children needed medical care due to a belief in divine intervention;
  • terrifying children with religious concepts, such as an angry and punitive god, eternal damnation, or possession by the devil or by demons;
  • making children feel guilty and shameful by telling them they are sinful;
  • neglecting children’s safety by allowing them to spend more time with religious authorities without scrutinizing the authorities’ backgrounds;
  • inculcating children with religious ideas; and
  • failing to acknowledge or report child abuse or neglect to protect the image of a religion or a religious group.

“Breaking Their Will” goes into tremendous detail in documenting and expanding upon each of these forms of child maltreatment, with the possible exception of the one that jumps out to me like a flashing neon light. That one seems like it is far too easy to skim over and lose sight of.

I am speaking of the second to last item. I was very pleased that, in addition to all of the more specific forms of abuse, the author did include “inculcating children with religious ideas” as a form of abuse. This foundational form of abuse deserves deeper and more serious consideration.

Fantasy is wonderful for kids. But saturating a developing mind in fantasy presented as fact does fundamental harm to their rational capacity and compromises their ability to distinguish fact from fantasy more generally. It diminishes their ability to evaluate evidence and to recognize sound logic. It necessarily trains their neural networks to falsely rationalize irrational beliefs. And it thereby does real harm their ability to make fact-based decisions as children and throughout their lives.

While none of the many of the abuses documented in “Breaking Their Will” can be excused or dismissed or minimized as merely misguided aberrations of otherwise benign religious practices, some would try to do so. This particular abuse, however, is inherent in all religious inculcation, however benign or even beneficial it may be in other ways. It is so inherent to religious inculcation that it cannot be dismissed as aberrational.

Further, as difficult as it can be to “get over” or “move beyond” other forms of religious abuse, the compromising of the developing rational faculties of a child during their most formative years has long term implications that are particularly difficult to overcome, insidious in their expression, and impacts practically every aspect of a child’s future life.

Most of us grew up with religion and we think we are just fine. That makes it very difficult for most of us to see the harm in religious training. Many people feel the same way about corporal punishment. My dad beat me and I turned out fine. Our upbringing and continued exposure to religion creates a bias to accept religious inculcation as normal.

In order to “control for” our bias, substitute religious beliefs with some other comparable belief. What if we were teaching our children that aliens are present on Earth and that they can body-snatch us if we are bad. If we are good, the aliens will take us on board their ship to their home planet where we will live in in eternal happiness. Imagine further that this idea was mainstreamed such that huge numbers of people not only believed this, but they used this belief to guide their lives and insisted that we implement public policies based on this belief.

Certainly, you would find this unacceptable. Even if you held that adults should be free to believe whatever nonsense they like, you would probably still argue that they should not be allowed to inculcate their children with this set of crazy beliefs. You would undoubtedly argue that this does real long term harm and that parents should be prevented from “messing with” their children’s impressionable minds in such a detrimental manner.

How is the inculcation of religious nonsense any different? It is not, except for the fact that we have been inculcated to accept it as reasonable.

Perhaps our own ability to rationalize away the harm caused by religious inculcation is the best proof of the harmful effect of the religious maltreatment we suffered as children.

You can learn more about religious child maltreatment and ways that you can join the fight in stopping it at the Child-Friendly Faith Project (see here).

America Without God?

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I don’t often rebut other articles, but on occasion I feel that I would be intellectually negligent not to do so. One such article that requires a response is entitled “America Without God” (see here). It was recently published in The Atlantic by contributing writer Shadi Hamid, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute. This article is so bloated with egregiously specious arguments that it is a real challenge to rebut it concisely.

The tl;dr that is being put forth by Mr. Hamid boils down to the following fallacious assertions…

  1. Religiosity, or religious-like conviction, is a universal and unavoidable human condition that must inevitably manifest itself in some fashion.
  2. This “religiosity” is nebulous, but seems to be defined by Hamid as an innate human compulsion to embrace an “ultimate loyalty” expressed through “strongly held ideological convictions.”
  3. As religion has declined, the resulting “God-shaped hole” has been filled by a similarly fervent set of political convictions.
  4. This “sublimation” of religion into politics has not resulted in a more rational world as promised and expected. Therefore, secularism is disproven as better set of beliefs.
  5. Religiosity cannot be “effectively channeled into political belief without the structures of actual religion to temper and postpone judgment.”
  6. Christianity is superior since it motivates people to be forgiving and to “withhold final judgements for another time – perhaps until eternity.“
  7. Without a religious reawakening, we are left with either “world-weary resignation,” “violence,” or a “divisive wokeism.”
  8. Therefore, we should give up on secularism and re-embrace Christianity as our best hope for a better world. If we do not, dire consequences will result.

Sigh, where do I start?

First, like many articles in The Atlantic, this one is bloated and convoluted and loaded with gratuitous and irrelevant references and quotes. I don’t know if this is simply to fill space, or to argue by quantity, or to argue by creating the perception of authority, but one should not be misled into thinking that because it is hard to follow that it must be really smart.

By way of contrast I will quickly and clearly list some of the problems with this article…

  1. There is no evidence that “religiosity” is a necessary or unavoidable condition. It may be difficult to stop drinking whisky without dipping into the cooking sherry, but this does not disprove sobriety.
  2. The vast majority of Trump supporters are also the most gullibly religious believers in our population. They did not turn to Trump to fill any “God-shaped void.” They embrace Trumpism because their religious rationalizations have conditioned their brains to accept nonsense.
  3. The Left has not embraced “wokeism” to fill any void left by secularism just as atheists in general have not felt compelled to turn to anything beyond sound rational thinking.
  4. To assert that “secularism has failed” as a given is a ridiculous claim. First, we are still hugely religious as a nation. Second, secularism HAS succeeded dramatically in making our nation a saner and more inclusive place for all and has protected us from the worst extremes of religious zealotry.
  5. To claim that Christianity “tempers” our worst impulses is again asserted as a given without any serious credibility. There are countless burned, tortured, and lynched spirits that can attest to Christian forgiveness.
  6. And why is an eternal deferral of judgement and punishment a good thing? Justice must be timely to be fair and must be exacted in the real world.
  7. Lastly, but hardly the last flaw, is the fear-mongering that forms the final argument. Embrace Christianity or all the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah will be befall you!

The author is clearly motivated by a revulsion of Trumpism, a movement only rational-sounding to religious magical thinkers, then makes a false equivalence with wokeism, and concludes that the problem is secularism and that the cure is yet more religion. He attempts to maneuver us into an intellectual false choice between a secular dystopia and acceptance of organized religion as the only possible alternative. This is, quite simply, nonsense.

Look, I know I am being harsh. But this is a high-profile article that is receiving a lot of publicity. The author is out on the interview circuit spreading this nonsense of pro-religious manipulation and fear-mongering on talk-shows all across the country.

The truth is that we have not yet given secularism a chance to show us a saner world free from religion. The truth is that many of us are atheists and quite comfortable. We will not recant on our death bed nor will we ever pray in a foxhole, and we do not need to fill any God-shaped hole with Trumpism or Wokeism or any other *ism.

Now, that is not to say there is no problem. I have always emphasized that as an atheist I would not want to simply “do away with religion.” Religion has trained our brains to accept nonsense. We must fix that first or else we’ll simply adopt other nonsense, yes like Trumpism.

Reason can be our rock. Our best hope as a species is not merely the least destructive catechism of nonsense. We can learn to be rational. That is why my focus has always been on teaching fact-based thinking rather than attacking religion. My book (see here) was based on the premise that we must eliminate magical thinking, religious or non, by teaching rational thinking.

So I have still not given up on the vision of a rational, ethical, and healthy secular world and I assume John Lennon would not take back his words either…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

The Greatest Failure of Science

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Before I call out the biggest, most egregious failure of science, let me pay science some due credit. Science routinely accomplishes miracles that make Biblical miracles seem laughably mundane and trivial by comparison. Water into wine? Science has turned air into food. Virgin birth? A routine medical procedure. Angels on the head of a pin? Engineers can fit upwards of 250 million transistors in that space. Healing a leper? Bah, medicine has eradicated leprosy. Raising the dead? Clear, zap, next. Create life? Been there, done that. It’s not even newsworthy anymore.

And let’s compare the record of science to the much vaunted omniscience of God himself. Science has figured out the universe in sufficient detail to reduce it to practically one small Standard Equation. It turns out to actually be kind of trivial, some would say. Like God, we can not only listen in on every person on the planet, but no mystery of the universe is hidden to us. We have looked back in time to the first tick of the cosmic clock, down inside atoms to quarks themselves, and up to view objects at very edge of our “incomprehensively” large universe.

Science routinely makes the most “unimaginable” predictions about the universe that are shortly after proven to be true. Everything from Special Relativity to the Higgs Boson to Dark Matter to Gravity Waves and so many other phenomena. Nothing is too rare or too subtle or too complex to escape science for long.

Take the neutrino as just one representative example among so many others. These subatomic particles were hypothesized in 1931 by Wolfgang Pauli. They are so tiny that they cannot be said to have any size at all. They have virtually no mass and are essentially unaffected by anything. Even gravity has only an infinitesimal effect on neutrinos. They move at nearly the speed of light and pass right through the densest matter as if it were not there at all. It seems impossible that humans could ever actually observe anything so tiny and elusive.

Yet, in 1956 scientists at the University of California at Irvine detected neutrinos. Today we routinely observe neutrinos using gigantic detectors like the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. Similarly we now routinely observe what are essentially infinitesimally tiny vibrations in time-space itself using gravity wave detectors like the LIGO Observatory.

The point is, when talking about anything and everything from infinitesimally small neutrinos to massive gravitational waves spread so infinitesimally thin as to encompass galaxies, science can find it. If it exists, no matter how well hidden, not matter how rare, no matter how deeply buried in noise, no matter how negligible it may be… if it exists it will be found.

Which brings us to the greatest failure of science.

Given the astounding (astounding is far too weak a word) success of science in predicting and then detecting the effects of even the most unimaginably weak forces at work in the world around us, it is baffling that it has failed so miserably to detect any evidence of the almighty hand of God at work.

I mean, we know that God is the most powerful force in the universe, that God is constantly at work shaping and acting upon our world. We know that God responds to prayers and intervenes in ways both subtle and miraculous. So how is it that science has never been able to detect His influence? Not even in the smallest possible way?

Even if one adopts that view that God restricts himself rigorously to the role of “prime mover,” how is it that science has found nothing, not one neutrino-scale effect which points back to, let alone requires, divine influence?

It is mind-boggling when you think about it. I can certainly think of no possible explanation for this complete and utter failure of science to find any shred of evidence to support the existence of God when so many of us are certain that He is the most powerful force at work in the universe!

Can you?