As may be seen in the records of both the Great Convention and the state ratifying conventions, the clause was accepted with mixed feelings.  The fears of many others were expressed by a farmer at the Massachusetts convention, who “shuddered at the idea that Roman Catholics, Pagans and Papists might be introduced into office, and that Popery and the Inquisition may be established in America.”  Furthermore, at a time when State sovereignty was taken a great deal more seriously than it is now, the States did not consider the federal prohibition a barrier to their own establishment of any religion they happened to prefer.  Several of them actually had State religions at the time the Constitution was ratified.  There also existed support of the clergy by general taxation, provision for religious instruction, religious tests for office, and all the other traditional accompaniments of an established religion.

As one might expect from their strong religious tradition, Protestant Christianity was established in practically every one of the New England states.  Legally binding tithes existed in Vermont until 1808, the more “liberal” constitution of Connecticut of 1818 provided, “No preference shall be given by law to any Christian sect or mode of worship… And each and every society of denominations of Christians in this State shall have and enjoy the same and equal powers, rights and privileges.”  Maryland allowed taxation to support Christianity as long as no sect was favored, and no Jew could hold an office in the state until 1851.  It was an idiosyncrasy of that State’s law that a Negro’s testimony was admissible in court against a Jew, but not against a Christian.  Massachusetts confined the equal protection of the laws to Protestant Christians until 1833, a Pennsylvania court held that “Christianity, general Christianity, is and always has been a part of the Common Law of Pennsylvania,” and so on, and so on.  Indeed, the disabilities applied to Catholics and Jews in this land of “religious freedom” remained in force in some states long after those sects had achieved full emancipation in Great Britain in spite of its established church.

As for atheists, the idea that freedom of religion applied to them in the United States has always been a myth.  In most States they were incompetent to testify until the last decade of the 19th century.  As for the guarantee of religious liberty in the Constitution, it was intended, according to one state court, “to prevent persecution by punishing anyone for his religious opinions, however erroneous they might be.  But an atheist is without any religion, true or false.  The disbelief in the existence of any God is not a religious but an anti-religious sentiment.”

And so it is that, at least in some sense, right wing evangelicals are quite right when they declare that the United States is a “Christian nation.”  They are in fine company in that regard, as the “Christian nation” meme was also commonly found in the pamphlets of the Ku Klux Klan in its heyday.  True freedom of religion has never existed in this country, and those who are most prone to make pious speeches about defending the ideal of Liberty are typically the first to deny its substance.  It should therefore come as no surprise that atheists should still be fighting against their relegation to the status of second class citizens in the “under God” clause of the nation’s Pledge of Allegiance.

The justices of the Supreme Court used all the familiar specious arguments in upholding that blatant denial of full citizenship to atheists in 2004 that earlier courts had used to condone prayer in the public schools.  As in that earlier battle, they claimed that children who objected could choose not to recite the pledge, completely ignoring the stigma such children would bear by segregating themselves in that way.  Today we might say that, by so doing, they would publicly proclaim their adherence to an outgroup, deliberately inviting the hostility of the Christian ingroup.  In view of the Supreme Court’s ruling that there is a de facto established church in this country after all, atheists have now turned to the states for relief.  As noted in an article in The Atlantic,

So the American Humanist Association has mounted a state constitutional challenge to the pledge in Massachusetts state court. On behalf of an anonymous Godless couple (Jane and John Doe) and their three children, the AHA argues that mentioning God in the pledge violates guarantees of religious equality in the state constitution.

While I am not optimistic, I certainly hope Jane and John Doe win the day.  I would cringe with shame for my species if aliens really did visit this planet and discover that, not only do a majority of its human inhabitants still believe in imaginary magical beings, but that belief in the same is actually still enshrined in the law of many of the states into which we are organized.  Beyond that, as one who volunteered to serve this country in Vietnam at a time when it was anything but popular to do so, it would please me if soldiers of a later day, at least, could pledge their allegiance to their country according to the established formula without at the same time falsely declaring their belief in a fantasy.

One wonders why, if the big man in the sky is really so worried about the behavior of creatures infinitely further below him than amoeba are to us that he devotes his time to continually monitoring the interactions of all seven billion of us, and is so subject to human emotions that he flies into a rage and tortures them with fire for quadrillions and quintillions of years if they don’t do what he wants, in spite of their ignorance, and yet is merciful and compassionate, and genuinely wants us to do good, he doesn’t just step out from behind the curtain, manifest himself to us in a way that could leave no doubt about his existence, and explain to us all clearly what he wants.  Surely he’s capable of such an act, and, assuming he exists, it would be the obvious and reasonable thing to do.  The problem is that he doesn’t exist, and the fact that he never has stepped out from behind the curtain in the manner described is an obvious demonstration of that fact for anyone willing and able to think rationally.

Of course, the religious have had hundreds of years to think up all sorts of specious replies to this and all of the other obvious arguments against the existence of their magical superheroes.  You can find lots of them against the argument I’ve given above by typing in a few obvious search terms on Google.  The problem is that none of them make the slightest sense to anyone who isn’t wearing religious blinders because they’re afraid of dying, is afraid life will have no “purpose” unless they believe in a pack of lies, agree with Victor Davis Hanson that societies become “ill” unless their citizens are all delusional, or is just simply too intellectual lazy to do other than blindly accept the “truths” he was indoctrinated with as a child.

Of course, it’s particularly difficult for people on the right of the political spectrum in the US today to give up their religious illusions because, on top of the reasons cited above, those illusions also happen to be an important board in the ideological box they live in.  Sometimes the results are comical.  For example, one constantly finds them harping on the mention of God in our Declaration of Independence.  The only problem is that the God in the Declaration of  Independence isn’t their God.  It’s the God of its author, Thomas Jefferson, who was a deist, as was Voltaire, Thomas Paine and so many of the other great names of the 18th century Enlightenment.  No matter, they just strap Jefferson down on the Procrustean bed of their faith and rack him and squeeze him until he becomes the best of Christians.  I once ran into one of these worthies on another blog, who cited a bit from one of Jefferson’s letters approving of some of the teachings of Christ, rather than the faith itself, as “proof” that he was a Christian.  Here is my reply:

Allow me to also remind you of some of the other things Jefferson said.

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting “Jesus Christ,” so that it would read “A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians. (letter to Richard Price, Jan. 8, 1789. Richard Price had written to TJ on Oct. 26. about the harm done by religion and wrote “Would not Society be better without Such religions? Is Atheism less pernicious than Demonism?”)”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.”

Thomas Jefferson also said,

“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.”

Does that sound like a “Christian” doctrine to you? Even his famous quote on the Jefferson memorial was taken from an attack on the Christian clergy of Philadelphia:

“The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes, & they [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: & enough too in their opinion, & this is the cause of their printing lying pamphlets against me. . .”

He was a great man indeed.  Would that we could find leaders like him today.

Suppose, for example, that Christianity really is true.  In that case, what use is it to ascertain whether it promotes healthy societies as well or not?  After all, even if we do live in an “ill” society, in that case we will only have to endure it for a trivial amount of time.  If, however, we annoy a God who, as the Christians assure us, has in common with humans the emotional behavioral trait we refer to as vengefulness, in spite of presumably having neither an amygdala, orbital cingulate cortex, or any other of the bits of gray matter responsible for expression of the trait in mere mortals, then, unless we don’t at least make a convincing show of pretending to do what he wants, we stand to burn in hell for quadrillions and quintillions of years to satisfy the requirements of divine justice.  Under the circumstances, it would seem that the effects on society, one way or the other, are trivial to the point of irrelevance by comparison.

The essential question to answer, then, is not what effects Christianity, and all the other systems of belief in supernatural beings, for that matter, have on social wellness, but whether they are true.  It seems to me that any reasonably intelligent person who is willing to use his gray matter as something other than a convenient stuffing for his skull and undertakes to investigate the matter with diligence and an open mind instead of simply following the usual path of least resistance and blindly accepting some hand-me-down opinion on the subject and then rationalizing it after the fact will conclude that they most certainly aren’t true.  One might start by reading the recent books on the subject by the likes of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens.  However, the authors tend to go off on tangents of sanctimonious moralizing without troubling to explain to the reader what branch they happen to be sitting on to support the same that they haven’t already sawed off.  Dawkins book is also blemished by the gross anti-Americanism that was fashionable among European intellectuals at the time it was published.

I personally prefer the Testament of the brilliant French cleric, Jean Meslier, who had no such ax to grind, and thoroughly demolished any basis for belief in supernatural beings a century and a quarter before Darwin’s Origin of Species. If your tastes run to poetry, try Edward Fitzgerald’s so-called “translation” of the Rubaiyat, which is actually a deconstruction of Islam, but serves as well for other religions.  Add to that the wonderful works of Bart Ehrman, such as Jesus Interrupted, in case you seriously believe the Bible isn’t full of gross contradictions, and his Misquoting Jesus, which documents the literally tens of thousands of textual variations in the most authoritative manuscripts of the Bible if you really believe every jot, tittle, and typographical error therein is the inspired word of God, and you’ll have at least a fighting chance of coming to your senses in matters of religious belief.  (By the way, any cleric worth his salt who’s been to a reputable seminary knows that what Ehrman says is true.  They just don’t usually bother to tell their flocks, for obvious reasons.)

Do all of the above quickly, if possible.  After all, what if the UFO fanciers are right, and we are soon to experience a visit by some race of extraterrestrials?  Think of how embarrassing it will be for all of us if they discover that 90 percent of us still believe in imaginary beings with magical powers.  We’ll never live it down.

Some artifacts of this attitude recently turned up in an article by the conservative essayist, Victor Davis Hanson.  The article in question, entitled “Europe in the Rearview Mirror,” deals with the familiar theme of European malaise, and includes the following observations on religion:

Yes, I know Europe is sick, ill with loud secular agnosticism and atheism, aging and shrinking, wedded to an unworkable redistributive socialism.

and,

We seem to have forgotten that what is admirable in the U.S. is not just the result of the vast American landscape, a natural selection of the more audacious and risk-taking immigrants, frontier life, and the resulting rugged individualism, but because the Founders were nursed on the European Enlightenment, Christianity was imported from Europe, and Anglo-Saxon law was built upon in a new continent.

I wonder, what are my chances of enjoying anything like genuine liberty among people who consider my religious opinions an “illness?”  Let’s consider the implications of these statements by Davis.  The possibilities are,

a)  Mr. Hanson is a prophet.  In other words, God has fluttered down from on high and spoken to him personally, giving him detailed instructions about how all of us are to live our lives in order that our societies may not become “ill.”  Surely he would not dare presume to declare that some millions of his fellow citizens were a “sickness” on his own authority.  After all, has he not spent a good portion of his career railing against just such people – those he and the rest of the right call self-appointed “elites?”  Surely he would not willingly join such an elite himself.  After all his anathemas specifically directed at such gentry, it would be the grossest hypocrisy.  If, on the other hand, Hanson really has been endowed with the authority to declare millions of his fellow citizens a “sickness” directly from God, by all means let him announce it to the world.

b)  Hanson is not a prophet, but is merely personally convinced of the truth of Christianity.  However, rejecting the taint of elitism, he does not presume to dictate to the rest of us what we should believe in matters of religion.  In that case, it logically follows that his argument is essentially utilitarian.  In other words, he is of the opinion that we should all pretend to be Christians whether we actually are or not because otherwise our society will become ill.  If so, then we must conclude that, as far as Hanson is concerned, the question of whether what we believe, or at least pretend to believe, is true or not is irrelevant.  It is the duty of every citizen, regardless of their actual convictions, to pretend to believe that which is most conducive to the health of society.

Unfortunately, I suspect I will always be ill-suited for life in a society which requires me to base my actions on premises that are untrue.  However, if the criterion for acceptance of these premises is their promotion of the health of society, and avoidance of social “ills,” then Christianity is a most unlikely candidate.  After all, admitting that the country our forefathers left us was, indeed, admirable, are we really to attribute the fact to the coincidence that many of them happened to be Christians?  Were not the founders of the countries currently occupying central and South America Christians as well?  Would Hanson be so bold as to claim that, thanks to their Christian faith, these countries have never been sick a day in their lives?  What about two of the greatest success stories of western civilization, Greece and Rome?  Presumably, based on his writings, Hanson knows something about them.  Were the Greek city states Christian?  Was Rome Christian except in the decades of her decline and fall?  What of the Crusades?  Were the Christian states they established all free of “illness?”  Was the murder of the the citizens of Jerusalem after its conquest, not to mention 50,000 “witches,” a sign of health?  From the senile stupidity of the Papal States to the suicidal proclivity of scores of monarchs by “divine right” to hold their subjects in a state of abject ignorance, I could cite thousands of other historical data points that demonstrate that, far from promoting the “health” of society, Christianity has been the source of its most virulent diseases.

Certainly, if we are an “illness,” Hanson must question the patriotism of American atheists.  Well, I’m an American atheist.  I also attended the United States Military Academy at West Point and volunteered to serve, and actually did serve, in the armed forces of my country in Vietnam, at a time when serving ones country in that way was hardly a popular thing to do.  I was there from 1971 to 1972, at a time when Hanson was just of an age to be a soldier.  My question to him is, “Where were you?”  You, who reserve to yourself the right to decide who among us are patriots and who, on the other hand, will make our country “ill,” you, who have always been full of such fulsome and unctuous praise for our nation’s armed forces, where were you?

Moslems and some Christians use divine inspiration, or faith, to get around the argument. In the more extreme, Muslim version, God decided in advance who would have faith and who not. He created unbelievers in such a way that their minds would be hardened against faith in Him, and for the “sin” of being created that way, he intends to burn them forever. It’s all set forth very explicitly in the Koran.

However, Christians who imagine themselves more sophisticated than the rest, apparently never having read the bit in Matthew 18:3 about the impossibility of entering the kingdom of heaven except as a little child, have more “complex” arguments. One such is Paul Wallace, who set forth a version thereof at the website of Religion Dispatches.

Wallace begins with the well-worn argument that, if you don’t believe in God, you’re really just a religious horse of a different color. In his words,

The atheisms of most committed, principled atheists are often not more than mirror images—inversions—of the theisms they negate.

By that logic, if you don’t believe in fairies, you belong to the “anti-fairy cult,” and if you’ve never read Virginia’s letter, and lost faith in Santa, you’re a zealot in the “anti-Santa” religion. Winston in Orwell’s “1984,” was presumably a fundamentalist religious fanatic because he insisted he only counted four fingers instead of five when his torturer held up his hand.

Wallace is just warming up, though. Citing Yale theology professor Denys Turner, he explains that, if you don’t see the fifth finger, you’re just not trying hard enough:

Turner also writes that, very often, the theisms attacked by atheists are not very interesting; therefore, the atheisms of most committed, principled atheists are not very interesting. Why this is so is not clear; perhaps it is because in many cases theism was abandoned before it was allowed time to develop into something of substance.

He then focuses on the version of the argument presented in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion -

In The God Delusion, Dawkins presents his central argument against the existence of God in the fourth chapter. His thinking goes something like this: The universe is a complex thing. Therefore the God of the Christians, who, Christians say, made the universe, must be at least as complex as the universe God made. Therefore we are left with an even bigger problem than before: Who made this ultra-complex God? A hyper-complex megaGod? It makes plain sense, according to Occam’s razor, to stop before we get to the first God. The complex universe is enough. Ergo, in all likelihood, God does not exist.

This argument, which boils down to Well, who made God, then?, assumes that God is a thing like any other thing. It assumes that God must exist in the same way the moon exists, in the same way Dawkins himself exists. As Terry Eagleton wrote in his now-infamous review of The God Delusion, Dawkins seems to think that God is “a celestial super-object or divine UFO,” a creature like other creatures, only bigger and smarter: a kind of überthing, but a thing nonetheless.

But nowhere does Dawkins get outside of himself and ask, Is my assumption that God is a thing like any other thing really necessary? On what is this assumption grounded? Where did it come from?

I’m no fan of Dawkins. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I was not enthralled by his quasi-racist anti-American ranting about the “U.S. Taliban” and overt bigotry against Christian fundamentalists in The God Delusion. Be that as it may, his argument doesn’t depend on God being a thing like other things. It only requires that God is a thing, as opposed to nothing. Nowhere does Dawkins suggest that God is a thing like other things, but merely that, whatever sort of thing he is imagined to be, if He is the creator, he must necessarily be more complex than that which he created. As a result, whatever kind of a thing believers of whatever stripe might imagine Him to be, the argument that He must exist because otherwise the remarkable physical world we see around us could not exist becomes absurd. It is assuming something more complicated to explain something less complicated. It doesn’t solve anything. Wallace, however, demures:

What is at issue here is, Dawkins refuses to examine the ground on which he stands: science itself. That is, Dawkins may change his mind about evolution, but nothing will change his mind about science. He will never question—in a serious way—the sufficiency of science as a guide to truth.

Here we see the familiar portrayal of “science” as a religious belief. In fact, it is nothing of the sort, but merely a systematic way of discovering and acquiring knowledge. There is nothing mystical about the word “science” at all. It is simply one way of reasoning about what is true. Continuing with Wallace:

He will never question—in a serious way—the sufficiency of science as a guide to truth. Perhaps he thinks the success of science makes it a self-evident choice when it comes to grounding his worldview; what he does not and will not consider is the very real possibility that science is so successful precisely because it is so limited. To reject this possibility out-of-hand is nothing but intellectual laziness. Dawkins is dogmatically rigid and fixed in place. He is a fundamentalist.

Fine. Science is limited. However, Christian fundamentalism, an “easy target,” is also limited. Dawkins just wasn’t aiming high enough. Forget the Christians as “little children” meme. If you want to “see through” his argument, it’s going to take some serious mental gymnastics. Wallace describes the process in terms of four levels of “God-talk,” with the third being the most important. Let’s let him explain:

The third level is the most difficult but the most important. This is second-order negation, or the inversion of the inversion. Here we would say, “God is not a fire, but God is not a not-fire either,” and “God is not love, but neither is God not-love.” God transcends the (human-based) distinction between love and not-love.

Also on this third level is found the insistence, made for centuries by theologians throughout Christendom, that God transcends the distinction of being and not-being. Therefore, if we use the conventional definition of existence, God does not exist. Our category of existence does not apply to God. Put another way, the word “exist” cannot be used univocally of things and God. These are artificial categories imagined and used by human beings; they are manifestly not divine attributes. In the end, to speak correctly, there are no divine attributes. Which means that God is not distinct from creation, nor is God not-distinct from creation. That is, in God there is no distinction at all, nor is there non-distinction. No affirmation or denial properly applies to God.

Or, in other words, God is neither a thing or nothing. This very convenient for believers, because it puts their God out of reach of logic. By the same token, I can say that fairies, Santa, or the Great Green Grasshopper God are neither thing or nothing, and no one can prove they don’t exist.

But atheists say that Christianity is false, that God does not exist. Asking them to defend their position in light of mature theology is doing nothing but taking them for their word and respecting their intelligence.

So atheists are wrong because, like Winston and his four fingers, they can’t imagine an entity that is neither a thing nor nothing. Wallace assigns them the task of disproving the existence of that entity, but without using language, because that would be too deceptive, and without reasoning, because that which is outside the union of “thing” and “nothing” is also outside the realm of rational argument. If they fail then, voila, the existence of God is proved! Of course, the author realizes he’s walking on thin ice. He admits as much:

Also, one may say that negative theology is content-free and useless because it nullifies the use of rational thought. In a sense this is a valid argument. But one can go beyond negative theology while bearing in mind its lessons. In fact, negative theology constitutes the central nervous system, if you will, of the entire Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Dawkins so happily and ignorantly mocks. In this work, Thomas employs analogical language in order to speak freely of God’s attributes without the possibility of confusing them with the attributes of, say, fire or kingship or love or being.

Since it’s obviously impossible to believe in an un-thing, the author, after assuring us that God is neither thing nor nothing, is suddenly speaking of Him as an object with attributes. I, and I daresay anyone else who speaks English fluently, would call an object with attributes a thing.

This is one of the most powerful aspects of negative theology: It cleanses the mind not only of assumptions about God, but of idols (like science, say) that can so easily replace God.

Again assigning some mystical quality to “Science.”  As noted above, science is just systematic reasoning.  What the above amounts to is the claim that anyone who dares to use their brain as something other than inert stuffing for their skull is an “idolater.”

We are required to have faith in no thing at all; only then will our faith have any chance of finding its true home in God.

There are, of course, different flavors of this “no thing.” The author should take care that he has faith in the right “no thing.” If it turns out that the Moslem “no thing” is the real one, he’ll be spending quadrillions and quintillions of years sizzling in hell, and that’s just for starters. I will leave that to the competing “no things” to sort out among themselves. Poor, deluded atheist that I am, I am left by all these arguments in direr straights than before. I will certainly end up frying in the afterlife regardless unless, without relying on logic or language, I somehow manage to figure out what “no thing” is, and that with alacrity, I being no longer the youngest. I gather from what the author is telling me that this will only be possible by virtue of reading Thomas Aquinas and a voluminous stack of other religious tomes. I suspect that such fare may not really be the path to divine enlightenment. Rather, it seems more likely that the author has been left in more or less the same condition by reading his own pile of books about religion as Don Quixote was left by reading a pile of books about knight errantry. Miguel de Cervantes provides a detailed psychological description in the first chapter of his famous account of that gentleman.

While I strongly suspect that Wallace is as deluded in matters of religion as Don Quixote was touching knights in shining armor, I am content to let him believe whatever he chooses as long as he accords the same right to me, and does not conclude, as so many others have done in the past, that his “no thing” requires him to burn people, or launch wars against those who believe in other “no things,” or fly airplanes into buildings on behalf of the “no thing”, or that the state should serve as an interpreter of the will of the “no thing.” As long as we’re clear about those things we should be able to coexist.

…we should be careful of accepting the continual and continued accrual of transgressions against our bourgeois (i.e., Judeo-Christian) morality; at some point, just as termites can destroy a house by eroding its foundation in silence right until the moment, without warning, the house collapses, each small piece torn out of our moral fabric makes the collapse of our consensual culture more likely.

and (from a different post),

Our modern Western Culture and Civilization are emergent structures that rest upon a Judeo-Christian G-d; while religion may not be necessary for any one individual to behave in a moral manner, it has not yet been shown that any society can behave morally without religion.

Such ideas are common, but I have never heard them expressed by anyone who isn’t a Jew or a Christian. There is good reason for that. What the author is actually suggesting is that it’s necessary for us all to pretend we believe in one of those two religions, regardless of whether they are actually true. That’s something that all discussions of such issues as whether civilizations need a particular religion to survive, or whether religion is a force for good, or whether human behavior will be negatively or positively affected by the absence of one religion or another have in common. They all beg the question (and routinely ignore it) of whether or not the religion in question is actually true. What the author is really suggesting is that truth doesn’t matter. We must allow him and his co-religionists to force their religious beliefs on the rest of us, not because they are true, but because they are useful. I beg to differ. It seems to me more reasonable to base our actions on the truth than on falsehoods.

Proponents of the author’s idea are usually aware of this apparent absurdity in their argument at some level, but it’s a minor difficulty to them because, after all, they believe in the religion themselves. They commonly deal with dissenters by simply declaring that they are immoral. For example, again quoting the author (referring to the recent debate between Tony Blair and Chris Hitchens about whether religion is a force for good),

Finally these kinds of debates will always predispose to the victory by the Atheists for a few relatively simple, and therefore unacknowledged, reasons. First, the believer in G-d must, of necessity, admit to himself that such a belief can never be fully grounded in reason; the connection of faith to the irrational parts of our minds are implicit when not made explicit. We use terms like ineffable to make such a connection more acceptable to our reason but ultimately our belief is fueled and preserved by our awareness that it is based upon a mystery at the heart of existence. The Atheist has no such handicap. He is able, using his reason, to convince himself that Atheism has nothing to do with his irrationality. This exhibits, more than anything else, how adept homo rationalis has become at the grand arts of self deception, rationalization and intellectualization. By doing away with G-d, the Atheist has effectively replaced Him with man, without having to countenance his own arrogance.

In other words, the author is telling me that, if I don’t accept his irrational faith in the “mystery at the heart of existence,” and dare to use my brain, which his G-d has presumably given me to serve as something other than a convenient stuffing for my skull, to actually think about whether a God exists or not, I am guilty of the sin of “arrogance” if I come to the “wrong” conclusion, and decide that there is none. Again, the question of whether God really exists or not doesn’t matter. To avoid the charge of “arrogance,” I must somehow find a way to force myself to believe in something that I am perfectly convinced is a fantasy, more or less in the same way that Christian clinics “convert” homosexuals into heterosexuals. What could actually be more arrogant than the claim that anyone who dares to think is “arrogant” if they come to conclusions that happen to differ from those of the author?

There are many instances of similar silliness in the rest of the article. For example,

Yet if we do not privilege the Judeo-Christian ethics that are the underpinnings of our unconscious morality, we have no answer for cultures that take a very different, zero sum, approach to morality, i.e. I take what is yours and do what I want because I can and my god sanctions such behavior. In other words, once we have jettisoned our G-d, we have disarmed intellectually in the war with another’s god.

Where to begin? By arguing that we should “privilege Judeo-Christian ethics,” the author argues for the elimination of any wall of separation between church and state and in favor of a theocracy. That may be where the “progress of civilization” has been heading in Iran, but the same is most definitely not true of the United States and the western democracies, to our great good fortune. I, for one, have no desire to return to the days of Metternich and the Holy Alliance. We can count ourselves lucky if those days are behind us for good.

Judeo-Christian ethics are hardly the underpinnings of our unconscious morality. Rather, our unconscious morality, an evolved trait in our species, is the underpinning of Judeo-Christian ethics, which are merely one example among many of how an innate behavioral trait can be expressed in creatures with large brains. What does the author mean by “Judeo-Christian ethics?” That we should not suffer a witch to live? (Exodus 22:18) That homosexuality is an abomination? (Corinthians 6:9-10) That a man has an obligation to produce a child with his brother’s widow, and, if he refuses, his sister-in-law is to spit in his face in front of the elders. (Deuteronomy 25:5-9)? What about the killing of heretics, approved by St. Augustine, or the innumerable holy wars approved by a long line of popes? If not, what, exactly, are we to understand by the term “Judeo-Christian ethics?” Presumably they are only those bits and pieces of the morality set forth in the Bible or Torah that the author, inspired by his “ineffable awareness guided by a mystery at the heart of creation” agrees with.

How is it that, without Judeo-Christian ethics, “we have no answer for cultures that take a very different, zero sum, approach to morality,” if they seek to take what is ours or otherwise molest us? How about the answer of nuclear weapons? How is it that we are prohibited from defending ourselves unless we can answer one bogus belief with another? There is no better “intellectual armament in the war with another’s god” than to simply point out the obvious; that their god and their transcendental morality are both fantasies.

Again quoting from the article,

Once we have, as a culture, fully adopted an ethic of Just Do It as the apotheosis of our morality, we are helpless against those who wish to Just Do It in ways which are inimical to us.

In other words, unless we allow the author’s version of Judeo-Christian morality to be stuffed down our throats, we somehow implicitly accept “an ethic of Just Do It.” How odd that, somehow, other primates exhibit moral behavior in spite of the fact that no rabbis or priests have ever been found among them. Most of us, including myself, will not follow an ethic of Just Do It because, like other primates, the predispositions that give rise to morality are hard-wired in our brains. If it ever occurs to me that I need some logical reason not to adopt an ethic of Just Do It, I need only recall that creatures who practiced that ethic in eons long past failed to survive. We atheists have the same emotional attachment to survival as everyone else.

Again, the author has so bamboozled himself with morality that he believes that one is somehow prohibited from defending himself unless he can give a moral reason for doing so. If we cannot point out some moral reason for our attackers to avoid such behavior, we are “helpless,” and apparently constrained to stand idly by as they slaughter us. He doesn’t realize that morality preceded both religion and reason, not the other way around. His reasons are mere after the fact rationalizations. It’s as if one couldn’t enjoy sex without first having a reason. Continuing from the article,

The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger.

Yes, the wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to a danger, but not the one the author thinks. The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger of trying to apply morality to the governing of large states, or to the relationships between them, period. What would he have us believe? That the zealots of secular religions like Communism or Nazism were any less puritanical than the past and current zealots of the traditional spiritual ones? Is it really credible that they had a Just Do It ethic? Please! Look at the history of Stalin’s great purge trials, or the fate of the dissident generals in Germany after the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, or read a few accounts of the Great Cultural Revolution in China. These were all quintessentially moral phenomena, and the mayhem they caused was entirely akin to the Christian slaughter of witches, or their countless wars over trivial differences in religious doctrine, or their repeated mass murders of Jews. No, my friend, what we should have learned from the wreckage of the last century is the absurdity and destructiveness of our continued attempts to apply human morality in situations for which, given its real origins, there can be no reasonable expectation that it would be in the least applicable, or result in any other outcome than more wreckage.

There are consequences to basing our actions on lies, religious or otherwise. The wreckage will continue until we learn that.

UPDATE:  The author of Shrink Wrapped immediately deleted a comment I left on his site challenging his post.  Interestingly, intolerance of dissent is a traditional characteristic of both Christians and psychoanalysts.

And perhaps, if we should with attention mind the lives and discourses of people not so far off, we should have too much reason to fear, that many, in more civilized countries, have no very strong and clear impressions of a Deity upon their minds, and that the complaints of atheism made from the pulpit are not without reason. And though only some profligate wretches own it too barefacedly now; yet perhaps we should hear more than we do of it from others, did not the fear of the magistrate’s sword, or their neighbor’s censure, tie up people’s tongues; which, were the apprehensions of punishment or shame taken away, would as openly proclaim their atheism as their lives do.

Atheists have generally been a minority with “different” beliefs, and, as such, a predictable outgroup in a species, such as our own, with an innate tendency to hate, ostracize and despise outgroups. Specious “good-sounding” reasons have always been invented to justify that hate, and Locke had his own, but the Amity-Enmity Complex has always been the real reason. Fortunately, we have been making encouraging progress towards gaining an understanding of human nature in recent years. There is some hope that society at large will finally grasp the significance of the Complex and its disastrous role in promoting the war and violence against minorities that has been so ubiquitous in human history. Perhaps the day will come when most of us will be able to immediately recognize irrational manifestations of ingroup-outgroup behavior, and ostracize and condemn those who fail to control that most destructive aspect of our nature instead of their victims. However, that day has not yet come, and so we remain on the treadmill of trying to stamp out each of the potentially infinite ways in which the Complex can manifest itself as if it were something new under the sun. We invent new names for each of them as the evil they cause becomes intolerable, whether racism, or anti-Semitism, or xenophobia, or homophobia, never seeming to realize that they all have the same root cause, and new isms and phobias will always be waiting just around the corner to take their place until we finally tear up the root itself.

So it is with atheists. Things being as they are, we too must fight our own little piece of the battle in detail. Billboards are one recent manifestation of that struggle. The Friendly Atheist notes a typical reaction to them, in this case from Marcia Segelstein at OneNewsNow:

I guess I just don’t understand. Christians (along with Jews and Muslims) gather in groups to worship. Atheists don’t gather not to worship, so why seek out members? What’s there to be a member of? And why should atheists care about stopping worshippers who are just “going through the motions”? Do they think they might get their hands on money once pledged to churches?

Trying to tear down the belief system of the world’s foremost religion — Christianity — is what seems intolerant to me. Placing prominent ads declaring the birth of Christ to be a myth seems downright hostile. To my mind, these campaigns feel defensive, as though atheists are weighted down with chips on their shoulders, or feel left out of some club.

Well, Marcia, atheists gather in groups for the same reason other people with like interests gather in groups; because we are by nature social animals.   The billboard campaigns certainly are defensive, and rightly so.  If you still don’t understand why, read Locke’s remark above about the “magistrate’s sword,” or peruse the history of Spain under the Inquisition.  If you think “it can’t happen here,” Sinclair Lewis wrote a book with that title that might interest you.  There is nothing hostile about disputing Christian or any other religious beliefs.  Is it really unimportant whether we base our lives and actions on the truth or not?  If the truth is important, how are we ever to approach it unless we are allowed to think about and discuss it?

(Hitchens) appeared to win over the audience, which voted two-to-one in his favour following the debate, which argued the motion “be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world”.

With all due respect to the former Prime Minister, this one must have been like shooting fish in a barrel for the likes of Hitchens. It’s hard to argue that Christianity has been “a force for good in the world” in light of the tens of millions who lost their lives in the religious wars it inspired, or the institutionalized intolerance and bigotry it has been responsible for, or the hundreds of thousands of innocent women hung or burned as “witches” in Europe during the Middle Ages, or its promotion of the mass torture of “heretics,” or its repeated massacres of Jews and other religious minorities. As for Islam, it is not the predominant religion in North Africa, or Syria, or Turkey, or parts of Europe because it is a “religion of peace,” but because it was imposed by force. Anyone with any doubt about whether it is a “force for good in the world” in spite of its bloody history, its institutionalized oppression of women, and its rejection of the separation of mosque and state must have been asleep since 911.

It doesn’t really matter, though. What does matter is whether these religions are true or not. If one of them is true (and they can’t both be true at the same time because they are mutually exclusive), then the question of whether it’s a “force for good” becomes moot. We then become the subjects of an absolute tyrant with a smiley face, and we can like it or burn in hell for billions and trillions of years, just for starters. As Hitchens puts it, “Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.” Edward Fitzgerald summed up our situation in similar, but more poetic terms, in his fanciful “translation” of the Rubaiyat. Don’t let the prospect depress you, though. For reasons set forth by a simple French priest named Jean Meslier in his Testament more than two and a half centuries ago, and improved on very little in the intervening years, the chances that we will sizzle in hell forever for the pleasure and edification of the elect are rather slim.

As I do not believe in supernatural beings myself, what surprised me about all this was not the fact that there are many contradictions in the Bible, but Ehrman’s claim that this historical-critical approach to it has been taught to most of the graduates of our religious seminaries for the better part of the last century.  Most of our clerics are well aware of the facts, accept them, but, for one reason or another, have decided not to pass the word along to their flocks.  In Ehrman’s words,

…the basic views that I’ve sketched here are widely known, widely taught, and widely accepted among New Testament scholars and their students, including the students who graduate from seminaries and go on to paster churches. Why do these students so rarely teach their congregations this information, but insist on approaching the Bible devotionally rather than historical-critically, not just in the pulpit (where a devotional approach would be expected) but also in their adult education classes? That has been one of my leading questions since I started writing this book.

Ehrman is a refreshing author to read.  He comes from an evangelical Christian background, but eventually became an agnostic, although not, as he claims because of any doubts about the divine authorship of the Bible.  Unlike some of the “new atheist” authors, he doesn’t write with his Amity/Enmity Complex on his sleeve.  In reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, for example, one often gets the impression spittle is literally flying off the pages as he rants about the “American Taliban” of evangelical Christians, getting so carried away in the process that he repeats an urban legend about how James Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, had  told the U.S. Congress that protecting the environment was not important because Jesus would come back soon.  Ehrman, on the other hand, not only does not condemn Christian belief, but claims that the realization that the authorship of the Bible is human rather than divine need not undermine those beliefs.  In his words,

Some readers will find it surprising that I do not see the material in the preceding chapters as an attack on Christianity or an agnostic’s attempt to show that faith, even Christian faith, is meaningless and absurd. That is not what I think, and it is not what I have been trying to accomplish.

I have been trying, instead, to make serious scholarship on the Bible and earliest Christianity accessible and available to people who may be interested in the New Testament but who, for one reason or another, have never heard what scholars have long known and thought about it.

I suspect many evangelical Christians will agree with my own conclusion that this is rather an understatement of the degree to which the conclusion that the Bible is not only not divinely inspired, but full of contradictions, undermines Christian faith.  To believe that is to believe that, for more than a thousand years, God stood idly by and did nothing in particular to prevent generations of clerical charlatans from bamboozling his moral flock regarding matters that would have a critical bearing on their fate in the hereafter.  It is to believe that, 2000 years after the time of Christ, one can be a Christian, independently of any reliable information about what the man actually said and what his appearance on earth actually meant, just by making things up as you go along. 

I personally prefer to apply Occam’s razor.  The simplest explanation for all these Biblical contradictions is the conclusion that Christ was just another Middle Eastern soothsayer, like legions of others who flourished in the region for hundreds of years before and after his death, differing from them only in the fact that he was the most successful of them all.  It’s unsettling and a little scary to think that the great majority of the human beings on the planet actually believe in imaginary super beings. It’s more or less equivalent to the realization that we’re inmates in a giant asylum. 

It didn’t take Darwin to reveal all these religious impostures for what they are.  Meslier did a perfectly adequate job of it in his Testament more than 250 years ago.  The writings of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and the rest are really just afterthoughts.  In spite of all their repetition of the obvious, our religious disconnect with reality continues unabated.  If we set any value on our own survival as a species, apparently it will be necessary for us to somehow find a way to become more intelligent.

It’s been interesting to watch the reactions of the secular true believers as the evidence for innate human behavior, including moral behavior, accumulated over the years until continued denial became untenable. At first, like the old behaviorists, they reacted with rage and fury, demonizing such ideas as heresies associated with racism, fascism, etc. When the intellectual dams finally began to break, acceptance of innate behavior was led by “liberal” clergymen of the secular religion, who assured the flock that it really didn’t challenge their most cherished beliefs at all. Why, the whole idea had been “invented” by E. O. Wilson and, after all, he was one of them.

Their rationalizations have been entirely similar to those of the liberal clergy of traditional religions, who have, for example, rationalized the contradiction between the Book of Genesis and scientific fact by claiming that the book is allegorical. According to their apologetics, the days in Genesis are really “eons” of time, the firmament is really the “sky,” etc. Similarly, the secular clergy hold forth about the exemplary behavior of bonobos and assure the flock that belief in “the good” isn’t threatened at all by the fact that morality is a manifestation of traits that evolved in the distant past.

In their way, the fundamentalist clergy are more rational than their liberal brethren. There can be no accommodation between scientific fact and religious faith. If there is a God, he would not have bamboozled his children with obscure allegories. If the Bible is not literally true and the inspired word of God, the basis for faith disappears. And in their way, the old behaviorists who fulminated against the original sin of innate morality were right, too. It is the iceberg against which the Titanic of secular religion has foundered. The academic apologists of the Steven Pinker school are merely rearranging the deck chairs. Like Christianity and Islam, the secular religion will continue to be with us as a force for obscurantism into the indefinite future. However, it has become every bit as irrational to believe in “the good” as it is to believe in “the god.”