There’s something amazing happening right now on Wall Street, in Chicago, Boston, and an ever increasing number of cities throughout the country, and most people are missing it.

They are missing it partly because of a grotesque lack of media coverage, but that isn’t the only problem. I would go as far as to say there are a large number of participants that are experiencing this amazing event and missing the greatest, most powerful message this movement has to offer.

When Occupy Wall Street first happened I was glued to it. I followed what was happening on twitter and their livestream as much as I possibly could. I was enthralled that such a dedicated protest movement had finally erupted against the perpetrators of the financial crisis and was boundlessly excited for its potential. Thousands like me were smitten, and the energy was palpable.

But then those raging against Wall Street were joined by others who were furious. Furious at the wars, at home foreclosures, at Troy Davis’ execution, at a corrupt system that didn’t represent their interests. The occupation at Wall Street quickly became a hodgepodge of people raging against the machine for a panoply of reasons, and no clear definable objective. The only overarching theme was: “The upper 1% owns and controls the majority of wealth and power. We are the 99%.” Not particularly bothered by this, and still unbearably excited by the fact that it was happening at all (not to mention spreading), I headed to Occupy Boston with a friend 2 days after it began.

During my time participating in person (October 2nd – October 4th) in Occupy Boston, the issue of a unified message and specific demands was debated endlessly. It drove our media working group crazy trying to talk to news outlets who wanted to know what was going on. New York issued a declaration–essentially a long list of grievances–that was passed by their General Assembly, but it offers little in terms of how to move forward. Solutions for each problem can easily be imagined, but there is only a hint at an overarching vision. When it was brought to the Boston General Assembly, it prompted an intense discussion, caused several people to be willing to leave the movement (because of its lack of clear demands focused on Wall Street), and left the facilitator in tears.

From ending corporate person-hood to providing universal health care, it seems everyone has a different demand that they think is the most pressing, but the most powerful demand we could ever dream of is staring us right in the face all day long at the occupations, and especially every night at 7pm.

When I first came down, I expected to find a lot of people camping out, marching, and holding signs–typical protest stuff. But what is happening is so much more radical and inspiring than I ever thought possible. The whole occupation is run by a self-organized, free-associating, horizontal, participatory democratic process.

Working groups are organized to handle every conceivable need–Logistics, Direct Action, Media, Arts and Culture, Medical, Food, Free School University, and more–and when a need isn’t being addressed, or some other association is required, all one needs to do is start one and get to work. The working groups coordinate with each other through rotating liaisons, and anything that affects everyone is discussed during twice-daily General Assemblies. Decisions are proposed, debated, and voted on, and the entire time the process itself is revised according to needs. If people’s voices aren’t being heard, there are mechanisms to alter the system to accommodate them. Needs are addressed as they come up, and there are no leaders. When apparent “class” divides arise [because there is no property or wealth to speak of, these power separations come up when some individuals do an excess of coordinating] new systems are proposed and implemented to further check and prevent them. Everyone can be involved in decisions to the extent that they are affected by them.

If there is to be one message, one demand from the Occupation movement from which we will never back down it should be this kind of self-governance. Certainly immediate demands to address the immediate needs of the 99%–like the cessation of home foreclosures, institution of financial transaction taxes, ending of corporate person-hood, campaign finance reform, ending our illegal wars, etc–should be enacted, but we should never lose sight of the vision that the occupation communities are exemplifying every day. Direct, participatory democracy can be the only lasting solution to these problems.

No matter what small changes we make to the existing system, necessary as they may be, we will not truly succeed until everyone is involved in shaping our destiny–until every voice is heard with truly equal weight. So occupy your school, occupy your factory, occupy your office, occupy your store, occupy your farm, occupy your home, occupy public spaces, occupy the world, and let’s govern ourselves.

You can do it. We, the 99%, can do it. I know it’s possible, because I’ve seen it in Boston.

Do we mean it when we scream, “This is what democracy looks like!”? If we do, why should we settle for anything less?

Let’s demand democracy.

A large segment of modern Christianity is bent on the idea that the Bible is the direct, inspired, literal word of God. They think it contains no mistakes or inaccuracies, and that they can consult its teachings for answers in all aspects of their life and society. Their political views, moral stances, social life, and education are informed by this view of Christianity, and they act accordingly. For many this leads to views in opposition to women’s rights to abortion, rights to LGBTQs, and even science itself (eg. evolution, global warming). Those stances hinge on the Bible being the inerrant word of God, and were there to be uncertainty in that it would mean reevaluating how they come to ethical prescriptions for behavior.

The Gutenberg Bible, the first printed bible

Unfortunately for these kinds of Christians, there are all kinds of problems with the Bible texts, something that’s been known for centuries. Biblical scholarship has long shown that the Bible, whether originally inspired or not, cannot be trusted to be free of human error and meddling. When consulting the Bible with moral, theological, and historical questions we can never be sure that the words being consulted are the original words that were written.

The first major problem, especially for the New Testament, is one of language. The first century Jewish population in Palestine (the region where Jesus’ ministry is said to have begun) predominantly spoke Aramaic, yet all the gospels (accounts of Jesus’ ministry) are written in Greek — along with the rest of the NT. So already, we’re counting on first century translators. Add to that the fact that most people today read it in another language and that’s 2 language barriers from the actual words of Jesus. Most English translations show obvious signs of theological tweaking, further underscoring that you haven’t read the NT if you haven’t read it in Greek.

The Aramaic-Greek language barrier also tells us that none of the gospels are written by eyewitnesses. The gospels all agree that Jesus and his disciples were all illiterate tradesmen, yet the gospels are all written by highly-educated Greek-speaking people who use complicated literary devices of their time. The earliest, Mark, could have been written no earlier than 70 CE (it contains a reference to the destruction of the Jewish temple that occurred that year), and so we have at least 40 years of oral transmission — with a language barrier. Our confidence in these words being authentic is dashed. There may be some “original” sayings/deeds, but we can never know with certainty which ones. The other gospels are ultimately derivative of Mark (containing multiple copied stories verbatim), so we cannot treat them as independent accounts.

To make matters even worse, we don’t have the original copies of the gospels or epistles. Until 120 CE, 90 years after Jesus’ ministry, there is virtually no textual evidence of Christianity at all. From 120 – 200 CE there are manuscripts for 24 fragmented verses, and the 1st chapter of Revelation. Through 300 CE we have a few whole and partial books, and not until after that do complete New Testaments show up.

These earliest manuscripts also don’t agree with one another. They’re different all over the place, from spelling changes to whole passages missing or added. By analyzing these differences we can see how people changed the texts over the years by accident, preference, or forgery. For instance, the earliest manuscripts of the letters of Paul and other NT writings are absent any punctuation; punctuation was added by later scribes according to their interpretation. The oldest and best manuscripts of Mark end at verse 16:8 with the women fleeing the tomb and telling no one. It’s clear that the additional verses were added later (actually we have 2 different endings from the manuscripts), so either Mark originally ended at verse 8 or it had another ending that has been deleted and lost to us. Similarly, the story of Jesus and the adulteress (“Let he without sin cast the first stone.”) is absent from our oldest and best texts.

So if we know by comparing the texts that some things are not original (because they only appear in later manuscripts) then it stands to reason that there must be additions, edits, subtractions, and spelling errors in the oldest manuscripts and we just don’t have better ones to compare them to. We can find some of these changes by analyzing an author’s vocabulary, style, and doctrine to see what might be out of place. With these methods we have identified loads of scribal interpolations (ie. insertions), even books that are outright forgeries.

It was common during the early years of the church to voice your own theological opinion under the name of an apostle to give it authority, and we see evidence of that throughout the New Testament. For instance we know that Paul’s verses about women keeping silent in church are likely a later addition because earlier in the very same letter Paul gives instruction for when women should speak in church. We also know that several of Paul’s letters are pseudonymous — written by another using Paul’s name to make a point.

If we can find discrepancies like these from textual variations — and a few more from textual analysis — and we know that there’s a hundred or more years between the originals and the copies we have, then it necessarily follows that there must be many more insertions, edits, and deletions that we haven’t the ability to detect. The New Testament’s reliability is shattered. Whatever connections to the original manuscripts — let alone the original events (whatever they may be) — remain, they are almost impossible to know.

That’s not to say that the New Testament books are useless for historical inquiry. Obviously we’d prefer better sources, but you work with what you’ve got. The purpose of bursting this bubble is to open up the literalist doctrine to nuance, shades of gray, and honest critical inquiry. Opinions, morals, and policies should be based on facts and logically valid deductions, not dogmatic adherence to a modern spin on ancient words.

In the wake of the the September 11th, 2001 attacks the U.S. was — still largely is — gripped with a crippling fear of Muslims. Desperately grasping for an explanation for why anyone would commit such a crime, most people (myself included) accepted the administration’s narrative of the events. On September 20, 2001 President Bush gave a speech that spelled it out for us. He said they were “enemies of freedom,” that “freedom itself is under attack,” and Al Qaeda’s “goal is remaking the world — and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.” To his credit he attempted to temper the inevitable jingoism:

“The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics — a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.
…
I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. It’s practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them.”

Despite those kind words, religious and secular alike began to characterize Muslims as belonging to an inherently evil faith. Sam Harris, a prominent atheist and author, wrote in a chapter called “The Problem with Islam” in his book The End of Faith that “[i]t is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of hadith, which recounts the sayings and actions of the Prophet.” He characterizes suicidal jihad as an inherent aspect of Islam that cannot be ignored by a truly devout Muslim; “On almost every page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise non-believers. On almost every page, it prepares the ground for religious conflict.”

The trouble with this kind of thinking is two-fold. 1) It reduces the motivations for Islamic violence down to a single factor — religion — ignoring their own stated motivations; 2) the same criticism can be leveled at both of Islam’s sister Abrahamic faiths, yet the majority of practitioners of all three are overwhelmingly peaceful.

In Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America” he spells out his motivations clearly. To paraphrase: “You attack us and support regimes that attack and oppress us. You prop up governments that humiliate us physically and by stealing the wealth from our natural resources. Your forces occupy our countries, and holy lands. Your policies have starved the Muslims of Iraq. Etc.” There are of course heavy amounts of extreme Islamic rhetoric within — “Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge. … The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.” — but I think it’s pretty clear that his tangible grievances are the primary motivation. Real or imagined*, those motives are what should be addressed. Responding with greater force only creates more terrorists:

“The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, wrote shortly after that “bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. [He] is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world,” and largely succeeded: “U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.”

I hope it should be obvious that pointing this out does not mean that I condone Islamic terrorism. Empathizing with people is not the same as justifying them. I abhor violence in all its forms, and especially the taking of civilian lives. I believe in non-violent resistance as an effective — and the only ethical — option for standing up to oppressors. But those kinds of movements are difficult, time-consuming, and for rational people. It’s hard to stay rational in the face of decades of humiliation, however. People use violence and force as a desperate attempt to “save face.”

We saw this during the recent riots in London. For years black communities there have faced intimidation, including periodic and utterly random searches, from police and high levels of unemployment. Is it any surprise that the gunning down of a black man (widely perceived to be innocent) by police would act like a match to a drought-stricken grassland? Yes, many Muslims react to a degree that is inconceivable to Westerners over cartoons of Muhammad — ‘barbaric’ is perhaps even appropriate here — but we should bear in mind that that reaction is in the context of decades of Western humiliation.

Religiosity and fundamentalism correlate strongly with societal dysfunction. Many atheists take this to mean that if we eliminate religion with our awesome Reason the world will become a better place, but I see the arrow of causality more likely running in the other direction. Rather than religion causing societal problems, I think societies with those kinds of problems tend to more readily turn to religion for answers. Certainly religion can then perpetuate this by prescribing actions that cause more harm — thus ensuring its own survival (eg. abstinence only education actually leads to more teen pregnancies) — but the best way to help people is probably just to help them. Fight for policies that actually help people get healthier, reduce wealth inequality, minimize their life-insecurity (not dropping bombs on them with robots might be a nice place to start), and discourage jingoism. Everyone would be better off, and there would be a lot less fundamentalism.

The second point that the same criticism — “Look at what the words say! This is awful stuff!” — can be made of Christianity and Judaism should be pretty obvious. The Bible is filled with genocides commanded and committed by God, death penalties for all kinds of minor infractions (“cursing” your parents among them), how to sell your daughter into slavery, absolution for rapists if they pay the father a fine and marry the victim, and loads more cruelty and violence. It’s been used to justify hundreds of years of war and slavery. Despite the media’s anathema to the moniker, Christian terrorists exist aplenty. Just this past July, a self-described right-wing “crusader” named Anders Breivik murdered 8 people (injuring 91 more) with a bomb in Oslo while simultaneously gunning down 69 teenagers (injuring another 62) at a camp for liberal activists.

The real point here of course isn’t that we should be terrified of these religions as well because of their texts or how literally some of their members take them. The overwhelming majority of people of all faiths are nonviolent, and would cite their faith as a source of those beliefs — even though a more “correct” (to some) interpretation suggests otherwise. In fact, a recent Gallup poll of over 130 countries found that religious identity has very little correlation to a person’s views about attacking civilians. “Almost all residents surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa who reject attacks on civilians say religion is an important part of their daily lives — much like those who say attacks are sometimes justified.”

Just to drive the last little nail in this myth’s coffin, another Gallup study found that American Muslims are the least likely of any religious segment (including non-religious) to think that targeting civilians with violence is justified. Indeed, when the question is [paraphrasing] “What is your opinion of the military targeting civilians?” American Muslims are by far the highest percent in the “Never justified” camp, and every other religion — besides no religion — actually has a majority favoring “Sometimes justified.”

It is imperative that we break free from the simplistic notions we have been fed about the causes of international terrorism and recognize it for what it unmistakably is — blowback for our own foreign policies. If we wish to curb terrorism rather than feed it with more aggression we must look hard at the policies that create the conditions for its continued existence. Religion — even religious extremism — is not the root of all evil. It is a symptom that will worsen if we don’t cure the real diseases: inequality, exploitation, and the commodification of human lives.

———-

*It’s real:

“In 1958, President Eisenhower, in internal documents long since released, asked his—raised the question with his staff about why there’s a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world. He said, not from the governments, but from the people. And the National Security Council, major planning body, had just released a study on this in which they said that they concluded that there’s a perception in the Arab world that the United States supports harsh, oppressive dictatorships and that the U.S. blocks democracy and development and that we do it because we want to keep control over their energy resources. And it went on to say that this is fairly accurate, and that’s pretty much what we should be doing, as long as the populations are kept quiet.”

NASA/Science Faction/Getty Images

I’ve taken for granted several times that no modern person would attribute natural disasters to the actions of a divine entity. While short-term weather prediction is often comically inaccurate — especially here in New England — climate science is a robust field of study and we have a pretty firm grasp on how weather patterns form. They may be chaotic, and thus impossible to have absolute foreknowledge of, but they are not in principle beyond our understanding. Surely, no one could be delusional enough to think that a hurricane is a purposeful act of God. Right?

Wrong, unfortunately. Here’s a few nuggets from Media Matters. Pat Robertson, a prominent figure of conservative Christianity and former presidential candidate, linked hurricane Katrina (oh, and terrorism) to legalized abortion — specifically, the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice that might not side with anti-choicers.

ROBERTSON: You know, it’s just amazing, though, that people say the litmus test for [Supreme Court nominee John G.] Roberts [Jr.] is whether or not he supports the wholesale slaughter of unborn children. We have killed over 40 million unborn babies in America. I was reading, yesterday, a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood. And he used the term that those who do this, “the land will vomit you out.” That — you look at your — you look at the book of Leviticus and see what it says there. And this author of this said, “well ‘vomit out’ means you are not able to defend yourself.” But have we found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be connected in some way? And he goes down the list of the things that God says will cause a nation to lose its possession, and to be vomited out. And the amazing thing is, a judge has now got to say, “I will support the wholesale slaughter of innocent children” in order to get confirmed to the bench. And I am sure Judge Roberts is not going to say any such thing. But nevertheless, that’s the litmus test that’s being put on, the very thing that could endanger our nation. And it’s very interesting. Read the bible, read Leviticus, see what it says there.

Hal Lindsey of Trinity Broadcasting Network, a Christian television network, said that Katrina was a sign of the ‘End Times’.

LINDSEY: It seems clear that the prophetic times I have been expecting for decades have finally arrived. And even worse, it appears that the judgment of America has begun. I warn continually that the last days lineup of world powers does not include anything resembling the United States of America. Instead, a revived Roman Empire in Europe is to rule the West, and then the world.

Christian radio personality, and former special counsel to President Nixon, Charles Colson said that God allowed Katrina to happen to show the United States how underprepared it was for a terrorist attack.

COLSON: [O]ne lesson I learned from Katrina is that we had better win the war on terror and resolve to prevent another 9-11. Katrina exposed how easy it would be to take a city out.

[... ]

COLSON: Katrina gave us a preview of what America would look like if we fail to fight the war on terror. “Did God have anything to do with Katrina?,” people ask. My answer is, he allowed it and perhaps he allowed it to get our attention so that we don’t delude ourselves into thinking that all we have to do is put things back the way they were and life will be normal again.

Presumably he thinks that a weather control device e.g. Superman III isn’t something made-up, and terrorists could get one at any moment.

And probably most famously, Pastor John Hagee claimed that Katrina was “the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans” because “New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.” The “sin” he was referring to was scheduling a gay pride parade.

Additionally, earthquakes are often targets for this kind of agenticity. Iranian cleric Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi attributed earthquakes, which have killed tens of thousands in the region, as divine punishment for immodestly dressed women. Robertson really takes the cake with this one though, blaming the disastrous quake in Haiti on a collective bargain with Satan:

“They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

But wait! Surely I am being horrendously unfair. These are the ravings of a fringe set of ideologues, and can’t possibly represent the opinions of a large segment of mainstream religious people. While opinions like these are thankfully a minority, it’s actually a terrifyingly large one.

In a March 2011 poll, the Public Religion Research Institute found that 38% of Americans agree with the statement: “Earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters are a sign from God,” and 29% agree that “God sometimes punishes nations for the sins of some of its citizens.” If we go by the 2009 Census Bureau population data, that’s over 116 million people in this country that think that natural disasters are directly attributed to divine action, and 86 million (presumably of those) who think that sometimes that action is punishment. 44% — approximately 135 million U.S. inhabitants — see the severity of recent disasters as a sign that we’re in the ‘End Times’.

For the record, earthquakes are caused by the slow shifting of gigantic, interlocking “plates” that make up the earth’s crust. They move away, towards, on top of, and bellow each other, and occasionally they like to be dramatic about the whole affair.

Hurricanes have several key factors to their genesis, the most important being warm water temperatures and low pressure areas. The warm water evaporates, cools, and condenses. If the water remains warm, more water evaporates and fuels the storm. As more water rises it creates an area of high pressure, and cooler low-pressure air sinks into the middle (what’s called the “eye”). The low pressure area draws everything into a spiral and a hurricane is born. (This is grossly simplified and I apologize to any climatologists reading this.)

So what causes hurricanes? Not gays, not abortion, not end times. Warm water. If anything, you probably could make the case that God is punishing us for making global sea temperatures rise. It’s too bad he never “inspired” anyone to write that down.

I discussed previously the power of scientific explanations over the repeated failures of religious ones. In every place that religion has offered up an attempt at understanding our world, science has stepped in and provided much better answers. Science took us to the moon. But one of the most damning ways that any religion fails in this regard are its hilarious attempts to explain its rivals, and the ludicrous special pleading required to exempt itself from the real explanations. The fact of the matter is, science can tell us why religion exists in the first place and it’s not because they’re all true.

Think about it — even if you’re a religious person who accepts the broad scientific consensus for most things, and aren’t inclined to think that Satan (or another antagonistic force) falsely imbues supernatural legitimacy to religions outside your own — it must be so. Religion has been around as long as people, so either Satan got going really early or there’s something about the way that our brains evolved that has the effect of making people believe in the supernatural.

So what makes people religious? Well the answer is far from complete, but we have a pretty good idea.

Because of the ways our brains developed intelligence, and natural selection’s “easiest solution at the time” style, we are left with minds that are hyper-active pattern-seekers and agency-detectors. Michael Shermer discusses these at length in his latest book, The Believing Brain. From an article in Scientific American on what he calls “patternicity”:

I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not. When it is, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the ancestors of those most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning, and it is fundamental to all animal behavior, from the humble worm C. elegans to H. sapiens.

Unfortunately, we did not evolve a Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus, the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.) But such erroneous cognition is not likely to remove us from the gene pool and would therefore not have been selected against by evolution.

Why observing and recognizing patterns in nature is beneficial should be obvious. Knowing that rain follows clouds, winter follows fall, certain arrangements of disrupted grass implies certain animals nearby, etc would all be extremely useful. As our brains became more able to detect more complicated patterns however, we also suffer from more complicated false positives. Detecting a “pattern” between certain ritual dances and rain, for instance — not unlike B. F. Skinner’s superstitious pigeons.

Agency detection, or “agenticity” as Shermer calls it, is the tendency to infer that another mind is behind some observable effect. The way we can empathize with people is through the knowledge that they have minds (and consequently, emotions) just like ours. It’s also very useful if one is tracking prey to put yourself in their mind, and be able to “empathize” with their movements. Of course, as Shermer again points out, along with it comes all kinds of false positives:

There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them, well documented in the new book SuperSense (HarperOne, 2009) by University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood. Examples: children believe that the sun can think and follows them around; because of such beliefs, they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer’s sweater, believing that “evil” is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers’s cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. Subjects watching geometric shapes with eye spots interacting on a computer screen conclude that they represent agents with moral intentions.

These two cognitive capacities help to explain the origins of superstitious thinking. Add to them the great fears of death, disease, disaster, and suffering; a yearning to explain the world with limited knowledge of it; cultural transmission, embellishment, and loyalty to ideas; along with a host of other natural phenomena that give personal legitimacy to the superstition (frontal lobe stimulation leading to religious “experience” for one) and you have a recipe for religion.

With science able to account for the very existence of religion in natural terms, it becomes nearly impossible for the believer to meet the burden of proof. It’s like trying to say, “Yes, gravity explains how everything else falls to the ground, but my holy object is pulled downward by angels.” Trying to prove that your religion is right over all the others is impossible, because they all have the same evidence. None have tangible, physical evidence, and the personal attestation that it “changed your life” and that you “feel God’s presence” is identical to the experience of anyone of another faith.

If science can explain why you believe and where religion comes from, it radically decreases the likelihood that your religion is true. If you get personal satisfaction from it, or you really think that having it improves your life, then just stick to those reasons. They’re not bad ones. Just have the intellectual honesty to recognize that there’s no objective way to prove you’re right, and quit trying. You just look silly.

In any setting where parties interact for a common purpose it is necessary to set aside certain differences for the sake of that purpose. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever attempted to work in a group towards just about any end. Hackneyed sitcoms are rife with wacky roommates unable to accomplish such mutualism. Even Bert and Ernie can’t escape this strife. Secularism is a special case of this setting aside of differences, and it has dramatic consequences when it is ignored or openly attacked.

Secularism, in the political sense, is the exclusion of religion from state decision-making and endorsement. It is essential to protecting everyone’s freedom to believe whatever they like.

When the state endorses a particular religion, or even religion over non-religion, it creates a climate of distrust of non-adherents. Suddenly religion becomes a tool of nationalism. Anyone not of the favored belief is “unpatriotic.” The United States witnessed this during the Red Scare, and common perceptions haven’t much changed since. There was such a fear of “godless communists” that the nation as a whole went into a dissociative frenzy to identify ourselves in as stark a contrast as possible. 1954 saw the inclusion of the phrase “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance (itself only adopted 12 years prior) and in 1956 “In God We Trust” became our national motto.

Not surprisingly, a 2007 Gallup poll found that 53% of people would not vote for an atheist. In fact, atheists were ranked lowest of every group the poll included — lower even than homosexuals* by 10%. Muslims weren’t even included.

The greatest danger of religious intrusion into the public sphere comes from the legitimization of religious reasoning in policy making. In a House Energy Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing Rep. John Shikmus, to make a case against taking meaningful action against anthropogenic global warming, literally quoted Genesis:

” ‘As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.’ … I believe that is the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it is going to be for his creation. … The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”

Obviously, he has the right to think that. It’s unbelievably silly but if that’s what he wants to think that’s fine. But in a public debate over an extremely important issue, private beliefs should never be taken seriously as evidence. We see a similar invasion of religious reasoning put forth in public debates surrounding women’s rights, scientific research, and education.

Not everyone holds those beliefs, so in matters of public policy you have to appeal to reasons that can be investigated and accepted by anyone regardless of their beliefs. This means secular justification. If you can successfully defend your religious beliefs with secular reasoning such that anyone could accept your case without belief in your religion then by all means do so. If you can’t, then keep it to yourself.

This is true also for moral questions. You can believe it is morally wrong to be gay, and therefore that gay people shouldn’t marry, but if your only basis for your moral opinion is religion then you have no right to oppose same-sex marriage equality. If you decide to make an effort to use secular reasoning for your position by claiming that children raised by gay parents are drastically worse off, the rest of us can investigate the claim to see if it is actually true (it’s not). Theft, murder, abuse, etc are also seen by the vast majority of religious people to be wrong for religious reasons, but there are obvious secular justifications for those morals.

Why should religious people defend secularism? Because you have the right to practice your religion your way. When the state endorses a particular brand of religion it makes it more difficult for everyone to practice how they want. There are thousands of religions in the United States, even thousands of Christianities. Millions of Christians would disagree with Rep. Shikmus, and believe God gives us a responsibility to protect and cherish the Earth. Because religious convictions aren’t founded on evidence, allowing them in public discourse means that whatever persuasion that is popular is “right.” Are you willing to bet your religious freedom on the chance that your brand will be victorious?

The best, and only proven, way to arrive at useful, moral public policy is through a firm separation between church and state. Without that separation we lose the ability to steer our ship by reason and evidence and succumb to the winds of blowhards.

*Just to be clear, I’m including this fact because homosexuals face a lot of public prejudice. I don’t think that they should be considered less trustworthy than atheists. In my ideal world, all of the groups asked about would have equal percentages.

Integration and expansion of endogenous retroviruses in Primates © 2011 Helmholtz Zentrum München

Atheism, at its most basic, is simply the assertion that we will not accept claims without sufficient evidence and that no religion has yet provided it. Moreover, wherever religion has offered explanations of observable phenomena we have discovered that those explanations are wildly incongruent with the facts at hand. It becomes increasingly difficult to wrestle divine creation into anything approaching plausibility while mountains of evidence scream for common descent. Even harder to square with the inherent ad hoc nature of natural selection is that Humans were somehow an intended result.

So today I arm you with one of evolution’s most powerful pieces of evidence. If we had no fossils, no bizarre anatomical vestiges, no biogeographical similarities, or virtually any other means of discerning that species share common ancestry, the evidence from endogenous retroviruses would be enough to establish its truth.

A virus is basically just a little protein shell filled with a viral genome (either DNA or RNA). They attach themselves to a cell where they co-opt the cell’s built-in machinery to execute and copy the viral genome. Basically turning the cell into a virus factory until it dies, and all the new viruses float around looking for new cells to repeat the process. A retrovirus is a special kind of RNA virus that works by translating the RNA into DNA and inserting that DNA into its host cell’s genome where it stays for the rest of that cell’s life.

Occasionally a retrovirus will infect a germ cell, the cells that produce reproductive cells like sperm and eggs. When that happens the retroviral DNA is passed onto those reproductive cells, and if one of those is lucky enough to be the progenitor of a full-fledged offspring then the entire genome of that offspring will include the retroviral DNA — this is when they are called “endogenous.” If that offspring by chance becomes a common ancestor of his or her species, the endogenous retrovirus becomes fixed in that species’ genome. The retroviral DNA can still be active and infectious, but mutations will accrue at a steady rate — eventually rendering it defunct — because there’s no pressure on the host species to preserve it.

I hope you’re still with me. To sum up so far: endogenous retroviruses are viral DNA that gets stuck in a genome, becomes ubiquitous in a species, and gathers mutations at a regular rate.

So, if we find an ERV in a species and we find it in another species in the same place on their genomes, the only plausible explanation is that those species shared a common ancestor whose germ cells were infected by that retrovirus.

This is exactly what we find! There are at least seven common retroviral insertions between humans and chimpanzees. The tree at the top of this post shows six different retroviral insertions among the primates — every branch after an insertion shares that ERV. As we sequence more genomes we find more of these commonalities. Humans and mice have common ERVs. (If these sequences were to not be found in other mammals sharing the same branches as humans and mice it would invalidate its support for evolution. It’s supremely unlikely, but this is why we test our ideas.)

This evidence is devastating to creationism. The more we study our genes and our cousins’, the more we find in common. We find that humans aren’t the product of design, intention, or a labor of love. We are the result of cumulative attempts at problem solving thrown up by blind natural forces in a chaotic, self-organizing universe. Repeated trial and error gave rise to brains that can design, love, laugh, despair, and fight for what we hold dear. Let’s not squander that by settling for comforting myths.

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This article owes a huge debt to this podcast by Zachary Moore.

Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest heavens; from Gustave Doré's illustrations to the Divine Comedy.

But, evidence aside, do we really want there to be a Heaven and a Hell?

Despite 15% of Americans who believe in Heaven but not Hell, the two usually go hand-in-hand. Heaven is a place of wondrous bliss — eternal joy with God and all in his kingdom. The ultimate reward for faith and/or good deeds. Meanwhile those who wound up in the wrong faith (or no faith) and/or sinned one too many times are condemned to suffer forever in Hell, a fiery abyss of torture and torment.

Ignoring the obvious injustice of eternal damnation for anyone, this column centers on the even more unimaginable torment of finding yourself among the “lucky” who make it to Heaven.

Take for example the quite common occurrence of multiple faiths within a family. My own relatively small extended family has Episcopalians, two kinds of evangelicals, and a variety of non-practicing and non-religious members. For the sake of argument, let’s just say that everyone except me gets to go to Heaven. They all arrive and discover that they have a sweet family plot on a particularly exquisite cloud; revelry ensues. Everyone is laughing, joking around, and trying out that sweet new set of wings. Eventually, as is custom at my family gatherings, a group photo will be proposed to commemorate everyone’s first day in paradise. They gather up and realize someone — me — is missing.* It won’t take long to dawn on everyone where I am, along with billions more.

This is the utter agony that would be experienced by anyone in Heaven. How could anyone with even a modicum of empathy be able to enjoy all that Heaven has to offer with the knowledge that some of your friends and family, or even just other people, are being tortured and burned at every second and there is nothing you can do about it? Telling yourself “they deserve it” would be cold comfort to anyone who isn’t a sociopath. For this reason, Heaven — if it is defined as a place of eternal happiness — cannot exist if Hell does as well.

Can Heaven be saved without erasing Hell? Perhaps people in Heaven could be so overloaded with joy that they literally can’t experience the pain that should be felt from reflecting on loved ones and fellow people being tormented, or that capacity is shut off by some other means. Or instead, occupants of Heaven could have their memories of those they cared for, along with the knowledge of Hell, completely erased.

It should be obvious to anyone with a moral compass that either of these options would make God reprehensible. I welcome alternatives, as I can think of no way to preserve the goodness of God, the goodness of people, and the existence of both Heaven and Hell. As it is presently conceived, no one who deserves to be in Heaven would be capable of enjoying it.

Perhaps it is those 15% that have come to the best solution. After all, what kind of loving, forgiving God would be content to allow people to be in that kind of unending pain in the first place?

*Honestly, I’m doing a massive disservice to my family by presuming it would even take this long to acknowledge a members’ absence, but I felt like telling the story.

Light continues to echo three years after stellar outburst, NASA

I’ve so far laid out the worst and best reasons, in my opinion, to disbelieve in god(s). In this post, I’ll address what I think is probably the only remotely defensible reason to think there might be a supernatural “prime mover” and why it ultimately fails to satisfy rationally and emotionally.

Our understanding of the natural world is such that we have rapidly pushed God into the margins — the “God of the Gaps.” Phenomena that were once attributed to divine will (disease, cosmic motions, the origin of species, gravity, natural disasters, life circumstances, more or less everything) are now widely understood to have their origins in physical laws and their complex interactions. This leaves little room for evidence of an interventionist deity, but what about the physical laws themselves? Couldn’t they have come from a creator?

The fine-tuning argument asserts just this. In fact it states that the physical laws (constants such as the speed of light, the strength of the weak and strong nuclear forces, the cosmological constant, etc) are such that even the slightest change to any of them would make life in our universe impossible. Our universe is fine-tuned, so the argument goes, for life and this is evidence of a creator.

Rationally Unsatisfactory

This fails on multiple fronts. First, because there are simply better explanations. Multiverse theory and it’s sister Bubble Universe theory suggest that we naturally find ourselves in a region (a universe among many, or a section of the universe among a diversity) that has constants that can produce our kind of life, while others may differ wildly. There’s also the mind-bending top-down cosmology recently proposed by Stephen Hawking and others:

[T]he universe’s initial conditions consisted of a superposition of many possible initial conditions, only a small fraction of which contributed to the conditions we see today. According to their theory, it is inevitable that we find our universe’s “fine-tuned” physical constants, as the current universe “selects” only those past histories that led to the present conditions. In this way, top-down cosmology provides an anthropic explanation for why we find ourselves in a universe that allows matter and life, without invoking the current existence of a multiverse.

These explanations, while superficially unsatisfying due to their current lack of evidence, are vastly more probable than supernatural design (which, remember, also lacks any evidence). Even if they all turn out to be false, it’s still much more likely that the constants have some natural explanation as that has been the case with everything else we’ve ever sought to understand.

The second scientific failing of the fine-tuning argument is that it simply asserts that which we do not know. We don’t know that if the constants were different any kind of life would be impossible; we cannot observe, let alone model, what a universe with different constants would look like; we don’t know how interdependent the constants may be or how much they could vary; and we don’t know how many possible configurations there are, nor the proportion that could produce something like self-replicating organisms. To simply assert that no life would be possible under differing circumstances is completely baseless.

The third way in which this argument falls by the wayside is it’s life-centrism. You could well make the argument that the universe is so finely crafted and conditions were set up just right for the existence of toothpaste — or black holes. There’s not really an objective place to delineate exactly what the supposed fine-tuning was for. Life, and specifically humans, are the obvious choice for those who want to believe in a creator that had them in mind, but this is just wishful thinking.

Emotionally Unsatisfactory

Apart from it’s scientific failings, proponents of the fine-tuning argument often fail to see how little it affords them were it to even be valid. A skeptically-minded person who accepts naturalism generally but wants to believe in a benevolent, prayer-answering God who’s prepared a blissful afterlife can find no comfort in the fine-tuning argument. The most it relinquishes is a deistic creator. One that has been completely uninvolved for 13.7 billion years and who is indifferent to human lives. If the choice is that, or the awe-inspiring possibilities offered by physicists — or the very likely prospect that the real explanation is something wholly unimagined or unimaginable — I’ll take the physicists.

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The one remaining argument, after fine-tuning is dismissed, is the ever-fundamental “Why is there something, rather than nothing at all?” The assumption implicit in the question is that “nothing” is more probable than “something,” but there’s no reason to think that’s the case. It could be that “something” is a more probable state than “nothing,” but I don’t know of any method or existing evidence that could discern between the possibilities. We don’t even have anything that could remotely translate to an experience or understanding of “nothing,” so it’s not clear to me that this is even a scientific question.

In my last post I discussed some of the poorer arguments offered in favor of atheism, and you may have noticed a particular commonality among them. A feature of bad arguments against the existence of God or gods is that they often are actually very good arguments against specific gods. The Problem of Evil is a resounding refutation of the Judeo-Christian conception of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God, but replace just one “all” in the trio with a “semi” and your new god isn’t subject to the inconsistency. (I’ll dedicate a post on the Problem of Evil sometime in the near future.) But critiquing existing ideas of the supernatural can only take you so far. Can we go beyond the “soft” atheism of lacking belief into affirmative rejection of any gods?

I think we can. Or at least as far as is possible.

Put bluntly: there is nowhere near enough evidence for any proposed deity. Furthermore, the onus isn’t on the skeptic to refute every claim made by believers. The burden of proof lies squarely on the shoulders of those making the claims, and not only has the threshold not been met, it continually rises with every new scientific discovery. With the state of our knowledge, for even the more banal claims of religions to be true–such as the efficacy of intercessory prayer–we would have to fundamentally revolutionize our understandings of physics and biology just to hypothesize a plausible mechanism.

This wasn’t always the case. In the ancient world it was perfectly reasonable to understand the universe as containing or being influenced by supernatural actors, given the state of their knowledge (though this wasn’t ubiquitous). But as scientific methodology has progressed, the role of the gods has been squeezed as we have found that natural causes and laws govern our universe wherever we are capable of looking for them. Demons don’t cause disease anymore; the sky is no longer held up by a firmament; natural disasters used to be called heavenly wrath.

The theistic rejoinder is that we are discovering that God created things more intricately and beautifully than we could have imagined and doesn’t this show how wonderful and mysterious he is?! It’s a paltry justification. It seems undeniable to me that under the hypothesis of theism we should expect the universe to look and act a certain way.

If souls existed in a supernatural sense, singular entities pulling the strings of our corporeal bodies, they should be immune to physical damage. Instead we find that brain injuries can radically change people’s personalities or even split them in two. If organisms were intelligently designed we should expect them to have, well, intelligent designs. Instead we find a plethora of kluges like backwards retinas and blind spots, problematic urethras, and dna sequences that were inserted into our genome by ancient viruses, and so many more. If humans were the central focus of creation, why wait 11 billion years just to get life going and another 3 until humans? Why even have a cosmos? There are countless examples. To quote philosopher, historian, and author Richard Carrier–from this interview:

If God has some weird reason to do this, then it means that God had some weird reason to make the universe look exactly like it would have to look if God did not exist.

It’s true that gaps remain in our knowledge, such as the origin of our universe, a unifying theory of quantum gravity, how neurons and synapses manifest memories and consciousness, whether the Standard Model of particle physics is correct, etc. But, to paraphrase Carrier, assuming God is going to emerge as the best explanation in these cases is like betting against a horse that has run a million races against the same opponent and never lost.

It is with the knowledge that the hypothesis of theism (or supernaturalism) has in every instance failed in it’s predictions, and the hypothesis of naturalism has had stunning predictive and practical success, that we can affirmatively say that there almost certainly is no god. “Almost” because you can never really prove a negative, but is there a difference between .9999999… and 1? Of course, should new evidence emerge that unequivocally called for the radical upheaval of naturalism we should welcome it, but don’t count on it.

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A footnote to this discussion is what could constitute evidence for God, the afterlife, or other religion-specific dogmas. I have to admit it’s difficult to imagine, but I want to address something that definitely does not qualify. Traditionally, the tangible evidence offered from religions comes in the form of miracles, but–taking Christianity as an example–even if we had compelling evidence that Jesus performed every one of his described miracles, including the resurrection, it would not prove there was a God, he was his son, heaven and hell existed, people needed forgiveness from sin, etc. Successfully demonstrating genuine magical powers does not constitute proof of any claim other than a claim to possess magical powers.