Obama tones down National Day of Prayer observance

From CNN.COM:

(CNN) -- For the past eight years, the White House recognized the National Day of Prayer with a service in the East Room, but this year, President Obama decided against holding a public ceremony.

"Prayer is something that the president does everyday," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday, noting that Obama will sign a proclamation to recognize the day, as many administrations in the past have done.

Asked if Obama thought his predecessor's ceremonies were politicized, Gibbs said, "No, I'm not going to get into that again.

"I think the president understands, in his own life and in his family's life, the role that prayer plays."

The National Day of Prayer is an annual observance for people of all faiths.

(full article)

Bravo Mr. Obama. Prayer by public officials should always be a private matter. Even the appearance of promoting a particular religion or religion in general is a tacit violation of the separation of church and state.

Bullshit in the service of atheism?

From The Jerusalem Post:

This past Shabbat my family and I hosted Rabbi and Mrs. Nachman Holtzberg, parents of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the head of Chabad in Mumbai who was brutally murdered with his wife Rivkah. You'd think that a family that watched their son and daughter-in-law slaughtered on TV by Islamic terrorists would feel hatred and a desire for revenge. But what this saintly father asked of our many guests was simply their participation in rebuilding Chabad of Mumbai so that his son's selfless work would continue.

What a shame Christopher Hitchens did not join us. It might have dissuaded him from penning yet another ignorant and slanderous article about the murderous intent of Orthodox Jews. To read Hitchens these days is to be transported to an alternate universe where religious Jews are often terrorists inspired by racist Jewish ideology that is fomented by their rabbis. Of course, those who live in the real world and who never read about Orthodox Jews setting off bombs in Bali and Baghdad might be a trifle confused by Hitchens' regular rants against Judaism.

You should be. Most of the time he is simply fabricating, like this famous quote taken from his 2007 book God Is Not Great. "Dr. Baruch Goldstein... killed 27 worshipers... While serving as a physician in the Israeli army he had announced that he would not treat non-Jewish patients, such as Israeli Arabs, especially on the Sabbath. As it happens, he was obeying rabbinic law in declining to do this, as many Israeli religious courts have confirmed."

For this particular blood libel against Jewish courts Hitchens relied on a well-known hoax perpetrated by writer Israel Shahak, which was exposed as a fraud more than 40 years ago by Lord Immanuel Jakobovitz, chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth. This is the same Israel Shahak who once accused Jews of worshipping Satan. When I challenged Hitchens about his use of a well-known forgery, and when he could not cite a single other religious court to have ever ruled that a non-Jewish life could not be saved on the Sabbath, he wrote to me and agreed to amend the item in the next edition of his book.

He did not.

(read full article)

Mr. Hitchens:

I've read some of your writings and generally agree with most of the basic points you make; however we as atheists must hold ourselves to a higher standard of truth than our ideological opponents, lest our arguments be as easily dismissed. Quoting from dubious sources, much less sources that have been widely discredited, only serves to undermine your credibility specifically and damages the credibility of other atheists by inference.

When attacking the foundational beliefs on which most of the major religious systems are predicated, stick to the facts, check your facts, and agressively seek to correct errors you may have made in the past. That the whole premise of a supernatural being objectively makes no sense and is self-inconsistent is a position strongly supported by the facts. But if you wish to engage in comparisons between the complex belief systems built on these dubious foundations, and the actions historically and in the present of the practitioners and supporters thereof, you clearly need to get your facts straight.

While there have certainly been examples throughout history of terrible things being perpetrated in the name of virtually all major religions, an examination of the underlying reasons and of how the practitioners and leaders of each such religion grapple with these issues is instructive. In particular, and all too often lost in modern discourse, whether deliberately or through abject ignorance, it is of critical importance to distinguish honestly between conquest and defense; between violence for its own sake and efforts to contain action to what is necessary to achieve a specific military objective, minimizing "collateral damage" as much as possible; between deliberately placing civilians at risk to take advantage of the other side's revulsion at the prospect of harming "innocents" and being that other side, struggling to protect itself while doing as little harm as possible; between deliberately targeting random civilian noncombatants with the goal of harming as many as possible and earnest efforts to avoid civilian casualties despite the counter-tactics of the other side. It is also critical to distinguish the open and heated debate on one side from the widespread support of random terrorist violence on the other.

In any military conflict, no side has completely clean hands. This is just an unavoidable reality of war. But holding one side to unrealistic standards, tying their hands from doing what any of other country would consider its right and responsibility in its defense, while tolerating, ignoring and even denying the egregious behavior of the other only serves to deepen the divide and prolong and exacerbate the conflict.

So, Mr. Hitchens, I would hope that you could publicly acknowledge your errors and in the future, stick to the facts. Argue the fallacy of the foundational beliefs underlying all these religious systems. Argue against the blood spilled in defense of these beliefs. Argue against acetic practices and denial of our nature and our most basic needs. Argue the obsolescence of using supernatural explanations as a substitute for legitimate scientific inquiry and learning. Argue against religious dogma. Argue against nonsense like "intelligent design", and efforts to undermine our educational system by injecting such garbage into our curriculum. But when taking on the details of the more complex ethical systems bult upon these clearly faulty foundations, don't start with a premise and seek "evidence" however weak, to support your conclusions. Instead examine the facts and draw conclusions from those facts. And when something worthwhile has arisen from a religious context despite its foundational fallacies, acknowledge that too, and move on.

Above all, please don't rely on bullshit in support of your arguments. Let's leave that to the religious.

America becoming less Christian, survey finds

From CNN.COM:

(CNN) -- America is a less Christian nation than it was 20 years ago, and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to a rejection of religion altogether, a survey published Monday found.

Three out of four Americans call themselves Christian, according to the American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1990, the figure was closer to nine out of 10 -- 86 percent.

At the same time there has been an increase in the number of people expressing no religious affiliation.

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The rise in evangelical Christianity is contributing to the rejection of religion altogether by some Americans, said Mark Silk of Trinity College.

(full article)

Well, it's not much ... yet ... but it's progress. Someday perhaps a majority of Americans can remove the blinders and look at the world as it actually is instead of through the filter of fairy tales.

God is Hate

From Living the Scientific Life:

Even if I was stupid enough to be religious, this one letter to the editor would challenge everything I held dear because it openly advocates hatred of anyone who doesn't believe in gawd -- in the name of gawd. I was always raught that "god is love" but after reading this letter, I realize I am not ready for this sort of love, nor for the other sorts of love that all you so-called "religious people" embrace, including pedophilia, female genital mutilation and genocide, just to name a few of the aacts you have engaged in. Even though I don't believe in gawd or any of the cruel and hateful actions that a "supreme being" represents, I will say this: I hope all you so-called religious wingnuts burn in hellfire for all eternity.

Bush Administration Tries to Redefine Contraception as Abortion

From The Gavel:

The New York Times reports that the Bush Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services is drafting a rule that would place new restrictions on domestic family planning programs. While current law allows health care providers and professionals to refuse to provide abortions based on their religious beliefs, this provision would threaten the funding of organizations and health facilities if they do not hire people who would refuse to provide birth control and defines abortion so broadly that it would include many types of birth control, including oral contraception.

Speaker Pelosi released the following statement on the Administration’s draft proposal:

If the Administration goes through with this draft proposal, it will launch a dangerous assault on women’s health.

The majority of Americans oppose this out of touch position that redefines contraception as abortion and represents a sustained pattern of the Bush Administration to reject medical and sound science in favor of a misguided ideology that has no place in our government.

I urge the President to reject this policy and join with Democrats to focus on preventing unintended pregnancies and reducing the need for abortion through increasing access to family planning services and access to affordable birth control.

From Congresswoman Lois Capps, Chair of the Democratic Women’s Working Group:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today Congresswoman Lois Capps called on the Bush Administration to stop its misguided effort to restrict access to basic family planning services. According to press reports, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is drafting new rules that would severely restrict women’s health care options while undermining the ability of health care providers to secure funding and provide essential services. It would require all recipients of federal health care funding to sign a written certification that they will not “discriminate” against health care entities who refuse to provide patients with abortions or even birth control.

“Once again, the Bush Administration is carelessly playing partisan politics with women’s health care,” said Capps, a nurse and Vice-Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health. “Time and again this Administration has jeopardized women’s access to essential family planning services for purely ideological reasons. Sound science and responsible public health practices should never be trumped by political ideology. This proposal is unnecessary and would be harmful to women’s health.”

Federal law already protects individuals who prefer to not participate in abortion services and many states have refusal clauses for either individuals or institutions that object to providing or participating in abortions. The Bush Administration proposal goes far beyond those measures and attempts to define abortion services so broadly that it would include many types of birth control, including oral contraception and emergency contraception. Capps and several of her House colleagues will be sending a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services objecting to the draft rule and urging the Administration to reconsider its position.

Capps has worked in the past to stop other efforts by the Bush Administration to restrict access to family planning services and contraception. She was part of the successful efforts to allow over-the-counter sales of Plan B emergency contraception and also to prevent attempts to restrict funding from certain health providers who provide comprehensive family planning services.

Once again the Bush Administration panders to the Christian "right" at the expense of freedom in America. This is truly obscene.

Think about it ... think about it...

From International Herald Tribune:

JIBLA, Yemen: One morning last month, Arwa Abdu Muhammad Ali walked out of her husband's house here and ran to a local hospital, where she complained that he had been beating and sexually abusing her for eight months.

That alone would be surprising in Yemen, a deeply conservative Arab society where family disputes tend to be solved privately. What made it even more unusual was that Arwa was 9 years old.

Within days, Arwa - a tiny, delicate-featured girl - had become a celebrity in Yemen, where child marriage is common but has rarely been exposed in public. She was the second child bride to come forward in less than a month; in April, a 10-year-old named Nujood Ali had gone by herself to a courthouse to demand a divorce, generating a landmark legal case.

(please read the full article)

George Carlin - Religion is Bullshit

George Carlin, dead at 71 - he will be missed.

(originally posted 12/15/2007)

“When it comes to bullshit, big time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do every minute of the day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever ’til the end of time!”

... and here's another one ...

Einstein letter dismissing 'childish' religion sells for 200,000 pounds

From AP via HaAretz.com:

A letter in which Albert Einstein dismissed the idea of God as the product of human weakness and the Bible as "pretty childish" has sold at auction for more than 200,000 pounds ($400,000).

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This extraordinary letter seemed to strike a chord, and it gave a deep personal insight one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, Powell said.

The letter was written to philosopher Eric Gutkind in January 1954, a year before Einstein's death. In it, the Einstein said that "the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

Einstein also said he saw nothing "chosen" about the Jews, and that they were no better than other peoples "although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power."

(full article)

Ummm. yup.

Florida lawmakers debate offering a Christian license plate

From The Associated Press:

MIAMI (AP) -- Florida drivers can order more than 100 specialty license plates celebrating everything from manatees to the Miami Heat, but one now under consideration would be the first in the nation to explicitly promote a specific religion.

The Florida Legislature is considering a specialty plate with a design that includes a Christian cross, a stained-glass window and the words "I Believe."

Rep. Edward Bullard, the plate's sponsor, said people who "believe in their college or university" or "believe in their football team" already have license plates they can buy. The new design is a chance for others to put a tag on their cars with "something they believe in," he said.

If the plate is approved, Florida would become the first state to have a license plate featuring a religious symbol that's not part of a college logo. Approval would almost certainly face a court challenge.

(read full article)

This clearly violates the separation of church and state. If drivers want to advertise to the world that they're brainwashed, they already have the freedom to place stickers and other emblems on their vehicles. There is nothing for lawmakers to debate. The state government has no role in the support and promotion of any religion for any reason. Period.

Update: It appears that this is unlikely to come to pass in Florida; however a similar measure in South Carolina may have a chance (more from Atheist Revolution).

Clinton, Obama put politics aside to discuss faith

From CNN.COM:

(CNN) -- On Sunday, after a tumultuous campaign season where religion -- both rumor and reality -- has had a starring role, the two remaining Democratic White House hopefuls, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, again ventured onto terrain that has been dominated by Republican candidates.

It was a risk-filled journey for both: social issues like abortion and gay marriage have long been sticking points for Democrats in their efforts to reach some religious voters.

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On a day when her campaign released a new ad talking about her struggles to "climb the mountain," Clinton told CNN's Campbell Brown and Newsweek's Jon Meacham. "I don't think that I could have made my life's journey without being anchored in God's grace and without having that, you know, sense of forgiveness and unconditional love.

"And I am not going to point to one or another matter. I mean, some of my struggles and challenges have been extremely public," Clinton said. "And I have talked about how I have been both guided and supported through those, trying to find my own way through, because, for me, my faith has given me the confidence to make decisions that were right for me, whether anybody else agreed with me or not."

Obama said that to him, "religion is a bulwark, a foundation when other things aren't going well. That's true in my own life, through trials and tribulations. ..."

Obama later added: "I am a devout Christian ... I started my work working with churches in the shadow of steel plants that had closed on the south side of Chicago ..."

(more)

Sad that in this modern time of supposed enlightenment, it's still necessary for candidates for public office to declare their faith and allegiance to an imaginary super-being and the archaic superstitions surrounding that idea in order to garner the trust of an electorate riddled with such beliefs. Frightening that these candidates may in fact hold these beliefs and may be influenced by them into making critical decisions perhaps less rationally. Frightening indeed.

Survey: US religious landscape in flux

From The Associated Press:

The U.S. religious marketplace is extremely volatile, with nearly half of American adults leaving the faith tradition of their upbringing to either switch allegiances or abandon religious affiliation altogether, a new survey finds.

(more)

Science vs. Religion

Science begins with a question and the foundation of the accumulated knowledge of past scientific work, always aware that future work may call any of that past knowledge into question. Answers are sought through contemplation and experiment, examining what can be observed and devising ways to test and clarify our understanding. It is by nature a process of successive approximation, gradually, continually improving and refining what we understand. While it may never lead to a complete understanding of everything, it is the only path we know to revealing reality, tantalizing glimpse by tantalizing glimpse.

Religion, on the other hand, begins with the premise that all answers can be found in an ancient book. This premise stands in contradiction to the whole enterprise of scientific investigation and ultimately of meaningful education. Without the external pressures of modern society, religious “education” consists mainly of rote memorization of the scriptures and some limited exploration of their interpretation according to whichever leaders were involved. This can be seen today in areas dominated by fundamentalists. Religion actively impedes the learning process, even going so far as to declare some ideas as heretical, off limits to even private thought.

Religion is an insult to the individual and collective intelligence not only of our own species but all species. Even as it purports to hallow nature as creations of its god or gods, it denies the magnificence of nature and the processes underlying it, seeking instead to project the notion that it all is the product of the grand design of some mythical, mystical consciousness, the origin of which remains obscure, but, despite its putative ability to create the entire universe, somehow it is unfulfilled without human worship.

Believing the Unbelievable

Believing the Unvelievable: The Clash Between Faith and Reason in the Modern World
Sam Harris [wikipedia] speaks at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Religion Dictates

Religion Dictates. I could just stop there. Perhaps this is the main problem with Religion. It dictates. It leaves little or no room for intelligent contemplation and debate of its core propositions. Some religious endlessly debate the minutia – details of whether the interpretation of this passage or that implies that a certain food is or is not fit to eat, for example, or that a particular activity is or is not appropriate during this holiday or that. But the core propositions are pretty much off limits in all of them. To promote debate reaching into the core would inevitably result in the widespread recognition of the fallacy of these foundational ideas, causing the collapse of whatever had been built upon them.

Religion dictates how its followers should think (or not think), how they should behave, what they should feel, and how they should interpret the world around them. It places blinders in critical areas ("pay no attention to the man behind that curtain") and penalties, often to be manifested in some supposed afterlife (so of course they cannot be disproved), for those who would take a critical look. Religion is a primitive way of explaining the world, largely devoid of any truth whatsoever, even as it hijacks the very word "truth" for its own misuse. Religion demands of its followers that they set aside what their own senses tell them in favor of a variety of stories ranging from vaguely plausible at least metaphorically, to preposterous, downright silly ideas that, but for having been told for millennia, would immediately be dismissed as the nonsense that they are.

In our efforts to shake off the bonds of thousands of years of religious dictation, we need to think for ourselves, experience and observe the world for ourselves, and critically examine our own thoughts and beliefs as well as those of others; not blindly accept them. We should actively reach out to others to encourage them to do the same, to examine their own thoughts critically, as well as those of others. Together we should work to contribute to the growing body of human accomplishment and knowledge.

Religious ideas should be subject to no less rigorous standards than any scientific hypothesis or theory, and just as in scientific investigation, when an idea is demonstrated to be wrong, it must be discarded.

Science Must Destroy Religion

I really struggled with the title of this item originally published by Sam Harris in the Huffington Post, coming to us via Machines Like Us. While essentially correct, it strikes me as unnecessarily inflammatory toward the large body of our population who still accept religion at some level, extreme or not, in their lives. Inflaming people who cling irrationally to any idea may get their attention but it's perhaps not the most effective way to open their minds; to help them to examine those ideas closely in order to evaluate honestly whether they're really believable.

The substance of the article, however, is well written and right on target.

"We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require the abject embrace of the preposterous"

Maher on Religion

From: Scarborough Country via EvolutionBlog:

"The Bush administration has 150 graduates of Pat Robertson's law school. That's right, Pat Robertson, the man who believes that hurricanes are caused by gay people."

Maher on Religion

Know Them By Their Deeds: Southern Baptist Abuse Cases Getting Attention

From Athiest Revolution:

According to The Christian Post, sex scandals involving Southern Baptist clergy are receiving increased attention, with some fearing that we are looking at a similar pattern as the widely known epidemic facing Catholicism. I find this fitting because my experience has been that Southern Baptists are among the first to condemn other denominations as not being "real Christians."

(more)

Look Inside

Do you know what you believe?

It sounds almost silly. Your initial reaction may be an emphatic "Of course!", but have you ever taken a moment to examine any of the ideas in your head up close? Have you ever considered the assumptions on which are predicated your whole understanding of the world as you know it? Where did you get these ideas? On close examination, do you even agree with them?

Or perhaps they were just there in your environment as you grew from an infant to an adult. Assumptions absorbed early in life and reinforced through continued exposure to the people around you, who themselves held those assumptions, very likely also without ever examining or questioning them or their origins in their own minds.

Folk wisdom? Some. Folk folly? Some. The point is not that these ideas are inherently good or bad, right or wrong, but that we are generally unaware of their influence on our lives. Recognizing ideas for which we cannot account is the first step toward taking control of this situation and of our thoughts.

Once we identify one of these "unexamined assumptions", the next step is to examine it up close and in detail; to consider what it means and whether it makes any sense. For any such assumption, this process can result in rejecting that assumption entirely, in which case it becomes necessary to begin to reexamine ideas we may hold that are in some way predicated on that assumption. That can take quite a while but the good news is that it usually happens subsconciously, in the background. It can be unsettling, as it may require certain assumptions to be discarded, undermining whole sections of our understanding of fundamental aspects of our world-model, rather like the realization, usually during our adolescence, that our parents are just regular people. In other cases, this close examination can result in a greater understanding of the assumption and why it's valid, transforming a previously unexamined assumption into a stronger, well supported one. In either case, this process is very empowering.

Religious assumptions rarely survive this process. In fact, religious assumptions generally don't stand up to even minimal scrutiny. They are imprinted on most of us early and often, sometimes reinforced by vehement and urgent admonition; something we are pre-programmed to respond to in our early childhood and many of us never completely outgrow.

The religious establishment asks-- no, demands that we accept their stories basically "because they said so", or because it is written in books that they hold as sacred or insist were written by whichever deity they identify as their one true god. What does that mean? It means shut up and don't ask questions. This alone should set off our bullshit detectors, but so early and often subtly we are indoctrinated to these influences that they are in us before our bullshit detectors develop.

It's not too difficult to understand how ancient people could have come to accept the notion of gods in the first place and later of a single omnipotent god. If that progression had continued, that too should by now have passed. Instead, we now have a huge portion of the population that accept an absurd story involving a whole "new" pantheon.

When questioned, many very religious people resort to formulaic responses drummed into their heads by whatever clergy they've been listening to or reading; responses that often miss the point of the questions presented. They often counter by insisting that the nonexistence of their gods cannot be proven. But when presented with the reality that not only is there no evidence to support or prove that their gods do exist, but there's nothing even to suggest it, they often resort to making dismissive and hostile remarks.

The one thing most cannot be inspired to do is to think for themselves, examine their assumptions, ideas, beliefs, and see how they look in the light of day. Somewhere deep inside, they must know that to do so would destroy this fragile, often self-contradictory web of acceptance on which they rest their lives. But if this is so, then their professed belief is disingenuous. Do they think they are fooling their omniscient, omnipotent god?

The various religious establishments all claim to be the source of morality. Each faction within each religion has its own interpretation of what this moral behavior is. Most of them involve a considerable amount of denial of our basic nature. This is a recipe for repression that may be responsible for squeezing out some of the most abhorrent human behaviors that otherwise might not develop.

Moral behavior does not arise out of religion; it arises out of humble introspection. This should be a moral imperative for each and every one of us.

Look inside. Really, honestly look. You will find a whole lot of unexamined assumptions just waiting to be investigated. It's scary at first. Don't let that stop you. The fear will pass as you realize how empowering it is.