So this is the kind of compassion and love that priests are supposed to teach us? Do what I say, believe what I tell you to believe, or God will come down from the heavens and strike you down? How can anyone possibly consider this good for any community? It’s basically bullying and death threats wrapped in hymns and a story about what happens to good kids who follow the priests’ words to justify the tyrannical nature of our organized religions. And this is far from the only time the mortality of an atheist or a skeptic has been used to threaten or rally believers who may have found themselves questioning their faith, even if their suffering was invented by a priest who was particularly intent on a fire and brimstone sermon. Just look in my local paper, for a story of an atheist who dramatically said that “if there is a God, let him fill my grave with snakes.” As soon as he died and his body was buried, the local churches deliberately started the rumor that grave robbers found a huge swarm of snakes wrapped around his coffin. But when these rumors were exposed as nothing more than the vicious gossip of would be televangelists, the priests changed their story to include a deathbed conversion.

In other words, those priests are just made of pure class, tact and compassion. Except when they glaze over the horrendous abuse that happens in the name of belief and use barbaric scare tactics to keep people who want to question their faith from doing so under the threat of a slow or painful death. There’s disturbingly little difference between Barro’s acid pen and a mugger holding up a gun to your head and demanding your wallet in exchange for your life. In fact, the only real differences I can think of is that Barro is part of a group which over millennia of indoctrination and on many occasions brute force, mandated that it’s to be held at the pinnacle of human civilization, and that his gun is a vengeful, tyrannical, petty, passive aggressive tyrant who’ll smite what amounts to an insignificant little speck of a being because that speck isn’t convinced of his existence. Truly, if there is a God out there and he heard just a small sampling of what two-faced monsters like Barro say and do in his name, he would open an Atheist Nexus account. And as for the Reverend Barros of the world, I wonder how they live with themselves after spending another day of further dividing, alienating and separating people who they’re supposed to bring together with kindness and love. My guess? By enjoying the tax-free cash they scare out of believers with their fiery sermons in order to fund their very base and Earthly needs.

[ illustration by Koren Shadmi, story idea by Jerry Coyne ]

But wait a second, how could I say that? No truly religious person would ever do something like this! Religion is all about peace, love and understanding, teaching us how to be good to our fellow humans and inspiring a whole lot of art, literature and scientific research into existential problems, right? Actually, the notion of faith as an exploratory tool rather than a rigid set of principles by which all of us must live or face dire consequences, is an idea cultures developed during their periods of learning and scientific advancements when a number of aspiring polymaths asked questions about the natural world and justified their pursuits as a God-given ability which shouldn’t be suppressed by dogmatism. But historically speaking, today’s big religions were created at a time when people who spoke the same language, worshipped the same deities, and lived in one particular area usually kept their distance from those who spoke other languages and worshipped other gods. And as a result, many religious texts talk about loving thy neighbor while at the same time preaching death to heretics, those who disobey the religious tenets, and distrust of those from foreign lands.

In today’s world, where every major city is within just a day or two of travel from each other and we have quite a few ways of communicating instantly across the globe, these ancient rules lead to a lot of tension. In Christian nations, many a pundit warn about Muslim immigrants being the first wave of anti-Western crusaders who will impose Sharia law on the world, when in reality, the vast majority of them is just looking for a better life. On the flip side, we have incendiary Muslim clerics demanding the death of anyone who looks at them the wrong way, or dares to make light of their actions, backwards laws that punish victims of rape and assault in the UAE, and a culture of brutal honor killings and violent assaults and kidnappings in the name of following an arcane rule in ancient holy books. Just consider the barbaric murder of a young couple in India whose only offense was dating across religiously dictated sub-castes, or the honor killing of a young girl for disobeying her father, or death threats to barbers for daring to cut a man’s beard in Pakistan. There are dozens of cases like this on a weekly basis all across the world, and each of them can be linked to religious ideas.

While high minded theologians complain about atheists’ lack of metaphysical sophistication, demanding that those who decided they want nothing to do with theism shed a solemn tear for God, the sad fact is that as the more tolerant and peaceful members of religious movements try to help the less fortunate, somewhere, there is a father beheading his daughter for not following a holy book closely enough, or a group of people beating a young man to death for daring to wear the wrong clothes, or read the wrong book. Even in the U.S., where this kind of behavior will easily land you in one of the most severe penitentiaries in the nation, and very possibly on death row, parents will deny medical treatment to their children because they see the child’s disease as a test of their faith, running for faith healers instead of doctors. Maybe those theologians who lament any form of secularism or non-theism as dangerously blind nihilism could at least try to explain the darker side of faith rather than sweep it under the rug? Or if they’re so interested in a tit-for-tat, can they tell us about the last time they saw a news story about a father killing one of his kids for not reading Dawkins or not visiting Pharyngula on a daily, or at least weekly basis?

Sure, we could just blame it all on the people. After all, it’s true that there are authoritarian, anti-social humans out there just looking to justify their inhumanly cruel actions. For an “evolutionist” like me, all humans are part of the same species and we all need each other to survive and keep evolving. For most faithful, all people are God’s children and we should all treat each other with respect. But for disturbingly many, religion is used as a tool for instituting draconian order over societies, a justification for xenophobia, war, and discrimination. How long did it take most Christian nations to acknowledge that darker skin or internal reproductive organs did not make someone a lesser human being? How long will it take Muslim clerics to stop treating women as males’ personal property? There’s something very wrong when societies will obsess over Grand Theft Auto, trying to ban games like it after every crime involving a teenager, but when honor killings take the lives of young adults because their parents think it’s their divinely ordained duty to slaughter their children if they don’t obey ancient laws in the holy texts they follow, nobody seems to want to point to the holy book as a potential problem.

As people lose their lives over arcane dogmas, how can we honestly pretend that religion is, and always was, such an inspiration for everything good in life that without it we would all become savages who’ll go on killing sprees in between bloody orgies? Seems to me that following religious texts and customs literally results in a whole lot of misery, bloodshed and grief, a good deal of of which could be avoided if more people took tomes of ancient customs, traditions, and metaphysically infused punditry, far less seriously than we do…

[ photo illustration by Fredherico Silva ]

Think about it. He comes to a church every week, a place often called the House of God in Christianity, so one would think that he could at least get a sneak peek at the deity itself and be able to pass along a request. If an incredibly busy and famous celebrity visits your city, she’ll at least sign a few autographs or do an interview on the radio or a local news channel, right? Why couldn’t a deity with an army of middle managing angels do the same thing and descend to its congregations once in a while? It would strengthen their beliefs, give hope to those losing their faith, and almost immediately do away with atheism and agnosticism. In this context, the big complaint about not seeing a God in a place called the House of God makes prefect sense, while the priest’s patronizing reply seems like a flimsy excuse of a bouncer at a nightclub who’s trying to explain why two skinny, barely legal girls in skimpy clothing showing off their significant bosoms didn’t have to pay a cover charge and were whisked to the front of the line, and knows not to state the obvious as not to compromise his job.

But as the visitor asks away, the priest is forced to admit that he is not really in direct communication with God and his qualification is being able to pray and read the Bible. In other words, an employee at a book store has more sway to communicate a customer’s concerns to the company’s CEO than a priest can to God. Then, you are generally expected to fork over around 10% of your income in donations to an institution which claims that it can put you in touch with God but actually has no power to do so? The closest analogy to that in a business setting would probably be P2P networks charging you to download pirated music and movies while claiming that this fee will allow you to communicate with your favorite CGI entertainers like the Gollum, the Na’vi, or Eve and Wall-e. Why wouldn’t you want to complain about that? Maybe, instead of treating his visitor as if he’s just crazy or incompetent, then submitting the story to a site cataloguing some people’s inability to turn on a TV or their new computers, then calling tech support demanding that someone comes to fix their mysteriously blank screens, our priest in question should consider whether he’s promising people a product he can’t deliver and rethink his amused condescension since the complainant isn’t the one with the egg on his face.

[ illustration by Koren Shadmi for the Israeli daily Maariv ]

According to the First Amendment, the government simply isn’t allowed to endorse any religious movement, a notion today’s religious zealots either ignore, or pretend that it doesn’t apply to them. That’s why they vote on a candidate based on how many times he invokes the right deity, judge how well someone was raised by how religiously devout and outspoken he is, and believe that anyone not as devout as them will destroy the nation because he doesn’t live trembling in fear of God’s wrath. But why is it so hard to explain why the separation of church and state isn’t only necessary, but that it protects them as well? Why do they insist on throwing out old fallacies and outright fantasies about the United States being founded on their principles and their faith, even when every ruling on the subject for the last two centuries has unequivocally stated the exact opposite? It’s not very hard for believers to simply ignore what they don’t want to see, then run around accusing others of doing the same. To believe that you’re under constant surveillance of a wrathful, supernatural voyeur watching over you every second of every day with no proof that this is actually happening already needs an immunity to a few very basic facts. But in the debate about secularism, there’s something more going on.

First, an important thing to note is that the opinions we hear from religious fundamentalists might not be their own but rather, a recitation of talking points given to them by demagogues and pundits. Unfortunately, when a person chooses to simply rehash talking points, he generally fails to bring anything more than a quote to the debate since talking points are based for inciting a loyal base and boiling down complex issues into a catchy soundbyte, not to actually carry on a serious discussion. This isn’t limited to religious fundamentalists by any stretch of the imagination and it’s equally bad when agnostics or atheists decide to wage a quote war against fervent zealots. Since talking points are all about firing up the base, they tend to lack the kind of facts that need to underpin an argument. And since they’re usually exchanged by people who already believe pretty much the same exact thing, they serve to create an echo chamber where nuances, exceptions and evidence are thrown by the wayside in favor of ideology. This is why we get those inane repetitions of “Judeo-Christian principles enshrined in the Constitution” while those who chant it can’t even quote the right document. These aren’t the kind of well thought out and persuasive ideas we’re told they are. They’re products of echo chambers, endless repetition against the facts, and sometimes, an obvious, outright parody of a pundit’s style. The only evidence these talking point debates use is wishful thinking.

But the most important issue preventing fundamentalists from grasping the need for separation of church and state is because secularism is so alien to them. Secularists see religions as a collection of beliefs which are bundled into different flavors, divided and named by tradition and cultural history. Fundamentalists divide their world into the one true belief dictated to them by God and everybody who’s wrong and whose views are totally irrelevant to the discussion because they don’t worship the right deity or don’t worship it correctly. They crave a government which will pander to them, acknowledge that their beliefs are right and true, and follow their rules in a quasi-theocratic manner, ignoring the real dangers of mixing politics and religion. But again, they ignore these dangers because they believe they’re absolutely right and that their brand of theocracy will work while a supposedly false belief will be doomed to fail. To put it bluntly, we’re arguing with people who believe they’ve been given a direct line to the creator of the universe, claim a monopoly on morality and ethics despite serious scientific evidence against their claim, and demonize those won’t obey them as amoral monsters. They’re people with strong, yet brittle beliefs in search of official affirmation so they don’t start doubting their faith. Why else do the people who pray every day for just about anything and everything need the government to bow with them and launch into a toned down Evangelical prayer in an official emulation of Sunday mass?

[ illustration by Fabricio Moraes ]

For those who’ve been watching the work on infant behavior at the Max Planck Institute, this shouldn’t be a big surprise. Over the years, researchers watched the behaviors of babies and toddlers as they played, saw a nearby adult drop things on the floor, and react to different scenarios illustrating both fair and unfair behaviors by puppets and people. They learned that little kids prefer friendly social interaction, they don’t mind picking up dropped pencils and pens for adults, and balk at behavior they find odd, such as taking a roundabout path to a toy. Not only that, but they’re alarmed when people don’t react to their attempts at communication and cry if people refuse to engage them. And should they see a fellow infant crying in distress, they cry too, and they cry louder then they would when they hear recordings of themselves crying. At about one year of age, kids comfort each other, touching their upset playmates and offering toys. We could attribute all this to modeling behaviors they see from their parents, but in reality, the babies generally studied by researchers are too young for formal education and display a surprisingly consistent range of behaviors which indicates innate abilities. In short, a baby will generally prefer to act in ways that we would describe as nice from the start.

These findings agree with the evolutionary perspective of human behavior. Being nice, social, and helpful can help the species, so of course it only makes sense that the kind of brain wiring that would push more people towards being nice and friendly is going to be favored by natural selection. Even in the case of violent criminal behavior, the matters aren’t black and white since even the most worst offenders who aren’t mentally ill could relate to others and form friendships, and it’s more likely that they’re the results of modeling terrible behavior, or became criminals because of very complex socio-economic factors which changed their moral compass in ways most of us would find abhorrent. But unfortunately, towards the end of the article, we’re forced to make a U-turn from good science and in depth explanations into the relevant research to read about the opinions of a certain pseudo-intellectual demagogue who fancies himself a social philosopher: Dinesh D’Souza. I would be vary of the advice this sophist gives about changing light bulbs, much less psychology, but nevertheless, it seems that the article’s author, Paul Bloom, wanted to indulge the religious aspects of morality…

The general argument that critics like Wallace and D’Souza put forward, however, still needs to be taken seriously. The morality of contemporary humans really does outstrip what evolution could possibly have endowed us with; moral actions are often of a sort that have no plausible relation to our reproductive success and don’t appear to be accidental byproducts of evolved adaptations. Many of us care about strangers in faraway lands, sometimes giving up resources that could be used for our friends and family; many of us care about the fates of nonhuman animals, so much so that we deprive ourselves of pleasures like rib-eye steak and veal scaloppine. We possess abstract moral notions of equality and freedom for all… Of course, our actions typically fall short, often far short, of our moral principles, but these principles do shape, in a substantial way, the world that we live in.

While I will give credit to Bloom of countering D’Souza’s pseudo-theological blathering in the article itself, I just can’t help but feel that this passage was a conciliatory nod towards religious groups who like to portray basic abilities to tell right from wrong as a gift from a deity. And as a conciliatory gesture, it makes statements which are highly debatable. Sure we care about strangers in faraway lands and give them money and aid, but at the same time, we give what we can afford to give and still feed our families to our standards, and there are quite a few extremely selfish people who scoff at the notion of giving anything to anyone, period. There are plenty of animal rights activists who become full blown vegans, and some reset their moral constructs to terrorize and take violent action against animal researchers with no regard for the well being of other humans, but they’re in the small minority. Finally, far from all of us possess the notion that all people should be free and equal. It’s been less than a few centuries since the West abandoned slavery, and racial and religious discrimination still goes on to this day with absolutely no end in sight. Just witness how nations like Saudi Arabia treat women or the sectarian wars of Iraq, as well as the hatred towards, well… everyone from white supremacists.

Ironically, the same religious institutions which go ballistic the moment anyone dares to say that morality isn’t solely the realm of religion and which tolerate horrific moral abuses, actually play a very significant part in hampering our notions of equality for all. Many of them are focused on their own communities and helping other faithful, asking those with different beliefs to convert after receiving aid, or as a precondition for their help if not just giving out their holy texts and saying they’ve given “the most important aid of all.” Organized faiths, far from bucking the evolutionary trends they decry, actually follow them to a tee. Yes, even babies have some ideas about morality, but when they grow up, their ideas of right, wrong, compassion, and inclusion produce a wide spectrum of responses to situations where human morality is put to the test. We still prioritize those who we see on a daily basis over strangers in distant lands and the specter of racism, sexism and discrimination heavily weighs on societies across the world. Sadly, even Western notions of freedom and equality for all are more of an ideal than practice. But at the same time, the good news is that evolution has been pushing us to be nicer and better to each other for millions of years. We’re social animals and we need each other to stay a strong species. If all of us were just kind enough to a small group around us, we would’ve never spread as far and wide as we have across this planet, and it’s likely that our technology would still be sticks and stones.

So in other words, the Vatican has done pretty much nothing for nearly a millennium to deal with reports of out of control priests and sexual abuse, and now blames modern society for its inability to do what’s right by those who were victimized by their priests. This is what happens when someone is blinded by dogma and cares far more about the organization being served than about the welfare of its constituency. If Ratzinger simply put his foot down and said that all priests found guilty of pedophilia or other sexual improprieties by a court of law are to be defrocked and face whatever punishments their home nation’s courts will assign them, I’d have nothing to say about the matter and neither would many of the other skeptics and atheists ridiculing the Vatican. But to uphold the seeming infallibility of the church and those who serve it, the Pope and his advisors chose to stick to a Medieval manuscript on the issue and hide crimes from the law. Need another reason why theocracy is a bad idea? How about this highly selective enforcement of laws and regulations for an example?

However, while we’re piling on the Vatican, Ratzinger, and his predecessors, one highly influential skeptic has a different take on how skeptics and atheists should be handling the issue. A little while go, Phil Plait wrote a rather interesting post saying that Catholic sex abuses are not a skeptical issue, and that skeptics should get really involved only if the Pope proclaims that God has allowed his immoral, illegal and unethical behavior since we don’t want to alienate the enraged faithful who are just as upset about what’s going on. And to some point he’s right. This isn’t so much a skeptical matter as much as it is a human matter. If we were to take faith out of the equation, we’d be dealing with a straightforward political problem: an abuse of power in which a top member of an organization put PR and appearances before the people he serves and did illegal things in the process. Whether you’re a faithful Catholic or a staunch atheist, your blood should boil equally intensely since we’re talking about basic human ethics here. To use this issue to stomp on people’s heartfelt beliefs and say you told them so is like kicking them in the stomach after someone they trusted hit them over the head with a rock and robbed them. Making people even more miserable by being tone deaf is not how you win fans.

Still, while in this case we do need diplomats more than warriors and the focus must be on helping victims to bring their abusers to justice, we can’t simply ignore the role religion plays in all this. Why did all the cover-ups begin nearly a thousand years ago? To protect the Vatican’s supposed holiness and infallibility. Why didn’t the priests get punished to show how the church had zero tolerance for immoral behavior? To avoid showing that it was and is still ran by fallible humans who think they have a divine mandate to issue moral edicts to others, and that those fallible humans can do very immoral and unbecoming things. Were Ratzinger the leader of just another powerful political group or a massive, secular corporation, he would be quickly summoned before the Italian Parliament to explain himself and his staff before furious lawmakers. But in Italy, the Vatican is its own city state which functions under its own vague and intentionally overcomplicated Byzantine rules and because of its long history and religious power, it holds enormous sway over the Italian government. The diplomats we need have very little power to actually bring anyone actually responsible to justice. And hence we see a fair bit of frustration from the warriors who really want to see some kind of restitution to their fellow humans.

Even though the religious influence of the Vatican is hard to ignore here, we really need to focus not on the big flaws of its dogmas, but the legality and ethics of the matter instead. The issue of whether we should ever give a group of people who went to a particular institution to read and debate holy texts the power to mandate what is expected of others in their daily lives is a much bigger problem which expands well beyond Catholicism. It’s just as important when it comes to the LDS and televangelists in the U.S. and the clerics of the Middle East, or any other place where people wearing religious symbols on their clothing demand money and power. But the issue we see with Catholic sex abuse scandals is much more immediate and concerns whether leaders of a very prominent and powerful religious institution is immune from the secular laws those of us in industrialized nations must follow, laws which couldn’t care less what your religious beliefs may be, but are only concerned with your actions. Let’s start with that and dive deeper into our relationship with organized religion when we’re given a point of reference and either a factual foothold for an argument, or a reason to sound the alarm.

But then again, as scientists keep showing that the world is not a simple, isolated bubble overseen by a deity who faxes down his instructions to assorted prophets and messiahs, and that our universe is a far, far more complex than fervent believers tend to think, you may find yourself doubting your newly acquired beliefs. Not so for those who rely on you to reinforce their faith and help indoctrinate their friends and children. The more mysteries science unveils, the more they’ll dig in their heels and denigrate those who point it out, threatening the unbelievers with divine retribution for their sins in the form of Hell. So, how do go on preaching to new and lifelong theists but are yourself a non-believer like a certain someone we should call “Jack”…

OK, this God created me. It’s a perfect God that knows everything; can do anything. And somehow it got messed up, and it’s my fault. So he had to send his son to die for me to fix it. And he does. And now I’m supposed to beat myself to death the rest of my life over it. It makes no sense to me. Don’t you think a God could come up with a better plan than that? What kind of personality; what kind of being is this that had to create other beings to worship and tell him how wonderful he is? That makes no sense, if God is all-knowing and all-wise and all-wonderful. I can’t comprehend that that’s what kind of person God is.

Our pseudo-anonymous priest is one of five preachers who either lost their faith or unsure of their beliefs, but continue to give sermons every Sunday because their entire lives are attached to their religious identification. Should they come out as non-believers, their entire livelihood will be endangered. Without a job, a house, the financial assistance of their churches and with few marketable skills other than public speaking, the odds of them finding new careers aren’t all that promising. And this is why when they consented to be interviewed by Dan Dennett and Linda LaScola, they adopted generic pseudonyms. The entire study sheds a light on a side of religious ruminations that you’ll rarely hear from a church, a mosque or a synagogue: what happens when you lose your faith. For many believers it’s an emotionally costly decision, and for those whose livelihoods are tied to promoting religious dogmas, it can be financially devastating to reject their beliefs.

Contrast that to what would happen in a lab of a major university if a research associate came in one day and announced he had a revelation and was now a born again Christian. Rather than being thrown out, he would probably just be asked how his experiments were going by some of the other, probably religious scientists for whom he’s working. Contrary to the whining of the Discovery Institute and fundamentalist claims, those with a burning religious conviction aren’t being fired left and right by their evil atheists overlords. And it’s that disparity between science labs and religious organizations which tends to disturb me the most and hopefully, Dennett and LoScola keep on finding unbelieving priests willing to discuss their doubts and show the costs of having your own opinion in institutions which demand strict adherence to their dogmas for everyone on the payroll.

If you’ve furrowed your eyebrows and wonder about the validity of that statement, you’re not alone. Yes, we can argue about the nature of our predisposition to religion. However, we do need to learn the tenants of a certain faith. Otherwise, what exactly would we believe? This is one of the biggest problems with arguing that there’s an actual religion gene because so many of our beliefs are highly organized and people are indoctrinated into religion through childhood. More than that, people change their religions and some give it up altogether. So if we accept that Wade is right and there is a genetic nature to our religious belief, we would also have to find an explanation for the current rise in self-professed atheism which involves the religious genes in question being muted through natural selection.

I would even go as far as offer myself as an example against the argument of natural religious tendencies. In my childhood, there was never any emphasis on religion and I grew up without strong religious beliefs. True, there was a time when I sifted through theology because I was exposed to some esoteric ideas and wanted to get a better grip on them but it was an outside stimulus that prompted me to do so, not some innate urge that many theists love to describe. Does this mean I’m some sort of mutant? You could counter my account with a frequently used meme about how many atheists and agnostics start off as theists but you would be using a very contaminated sample because many households in which atheists are born tend to be religious and as the would-be non-theists grow up, they’re bombarded with religious messages until it becomes a part of their culture. Then, they go through a separation process and become non-theists. What happened to the genes in these cases? Did they suddenly deactivate after they made the conscious decision that their religion no longer made sense to them? Clearly, the natural religion argument is fraught with countless problems.

And there’s something rather bizarre about Wade’s column. Almost straight into it, we see what might seem to be a shot across the bow at atheists and agnostics based on the theist canard of their anti-religiosity…

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because [faith] conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.

Pardon me Mr. Wade, but what in the FSM’s noodly appendage are you talking about? Are you trying to do an eye-opening, legitimate scientific exploration of religion or just trying to stick it to the atheists? We know that a society based around the same beliefs would have more social cohesion. We know that civilizations wielding religion as a tool for inspiration and social unity did very well. But we also know that any belief would do that, as long as it’s shared. Religion wasn’t useless when it appeared. This was never an argument advanced by the most prominent atheists out there. Instead, the argument was that today, with a decent grip on the basics of science, we’re hitting the point of diminishing returns when it comes to religion. Antibiotics cure diseases, faith healing offers solace. Holy texts offer navel-gazing ruminations, science offers the chance to find the real answers. And while religions probably won’t go anywhere, the ones we have now are outdated, being slowly replaced by New Age spin-offs and science fiction-esque transhumanism just like Christianity and Islam took their sweet time in replacing pagan traditions over the course of centuries.

Expect Wade’s book to be widely used by anti-atheist crusaders who love to mention how religion has to be a human trait and all atheists do is suppress their originally godly nature. Since the press loves to stir up some sort of big nature vs. nurture debate on religion, even if it has to make one up, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the hypothesis being advocated here to get plenty of time in the spotlight.

[ shaman illustration by Maria Trepalina ]

Case in point, after the Washington D.C. city council wanted to get organizations receiving government finds to run charity programs for the poor to provide benefits to same-sex partners they employ, Catholic groups said they wouldn’t observe the rule out of their moral opposition to gay marriage. Of course to hear the spin on this story, you’d think that the evil city councilors were taking away money and the upstanding moral citizens of the church would love to provide services to the poor but they just couldn’t because that would require them to take the stance that all relationships are equal and ignore the millions of dollars spent on trying to sway laws in the states of Massachusetts, Maine and California to deny rights to gays…

The archdiocese says that it cannot [meet the requirements] because of its moral opposition to gay marriage. This is not new. The Archdiocese to San Francisco had the same fight with its city council, and adoption programs of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts were shut down because the state legislature insisted that they sponsor adoptions to gay couples while bishops insisted they would not.

It should be clear from this review of the facts that the church is not threatening to withdraw its money from the poor. It is simply pointing out that it cannot observe these new requirements and therefore the city will cancel its contracts. It is in fact the city council that is closing down these programs, not the archdiocese.

Maybe I missed something here, but how exactly is the archdiocese not taking away money from the poor with their stance of letting their contract with the city be canceled due to their willful refusal to follow the rules? Will the organization pump its own money into helping the poor? Doesn’t seem so since they’re content to end the churches’ role in the programs just so they can boast how moral they are, so while hundreds of impoverished Washingtonians face starvation or sleep in the street, at least they didn’t let Adam and Steve register under the same insurance plan. The homeless and the poor will understand of course. Their plight is nothing when we consider the theological implications of letting gay people have the same benefits as straight people. And just think of the impact on other charities. They will face a flood in domestic partners applying for benefits and may have to provide healthcare to as many as 3% more people. Oh the horror…

Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t churches enjoy a tax exempt status and all the money they’re given gets a free pass form the IRS as long as they stay out of politics? Then why are the Catholic Church and the LDS allowed to spend millions upon millions of dollars to sway actual elections of a secular government? What a sweet scam. Take in tax free cash and use it to sway laws and regulations to your own favor while getting ever more tax free funds. And should the government actually try to do something you don’t like, threaten to pull out of helping charity programs and play the victim card. So where is that morality that comes with religious belief and is proof of the existence of a deity? Sounds more like blatant exploitation to me.

Considering that Bill is getting up there in age, getting so worked up is probably not good for his heart. In fact, prolonged stress can shave years off your life. But he’s still at it, taking every possible opportunity to make his paranoid fantasies and indignation heard. To give you an idea of what a Bill Donohue rant sounds like, try to imagine an apoplectic banshee howling into the wind. And just to make it more accurate, think of the banshee as a cross between Rush Limbaugh and a toddler having a temper tantrum. Or Glenn Beck. Either way, you’ll get a very similar result. But I digress a little here. What I really wanted to note was the way Bill truly outdid his own rabid demagoguery in the above mentioned column with the following quote…

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

Holy FSM on a pasta box! Did he perchance want to walk by a college campus and spit in someone’s face as well, just to put the icing on the cake? Or maybe crash a secularist meeting with his wife and have her praise his virility as lewdly as possible in public? Oh, wait a second… That’s right. Our paragon of morals and values is divorced, so ladies, if you’re in the market for a 61 year old with no control over his emotions and most likely to see you as nothing more than a method of boosting the population of people like him, he’s available. And at this point, it’s hard to know how to best mock his inane ramblings because he does a pretty good job of it with no help from me, or anyone else. That quote is just such a perfect combination of cheap, false piety, paranoia and vicious hatred, you want to slide it into a holster and use it like a bludgeon for future debates.

Look, it’s one thing to defend people who have to bear the brunt of real hate speech. But to offend people who you loathe simply because they’re not like you because you can, because you want to, and because you want to use your religion as an excuse to do that? That’s pathetically low and disgustingly exploitative of your faith in the kind of base, earthly way that pretty much every high brow message of the Bible warns you not to do. Then, just to top his already ridiculous antics, Bill wants to boil down the entire idea of how a civilization will proceed in its social development to breeding, in the most offensive method possible. So is that all it is? Pump out an extra couple of babies, the GOP needs all the votes it can get? Does he not realize that he’s using his fans as nothing more than human canon fodder in a bandwagon fallacy?

Maybe, one day, Bill will realize that when someone calls you hateful, offensive and exploitative, you don’t jump up and proceed to spew out the most hateful, offensive and exploitative thing you can. Frankly, it’s amazing to me why there are people who want to be defended by someone with the ability to make them look worse with pretty much every attempt to advance their interests in the press. It has to take an impressive level of denial or a total lack of self-awareness to use Bill Donohue as your face to the outside world.

[ illustration of a dark soul by Neil Blevins ]

As pointed out by Dr. Bruce Hood, one of the scientists who’s work is being mangled to stir up an instant controversy, people do have a predisposition to accept the religious indoctrinations to which they have the most exposure and it’s thought to be an evolutionary trait to help us work together in large groups and maintain social order. But it’s not the mythical God gene sought by theologists. Rather, it’s the result of our brains looking for causality and logical patterns even if the system we’re trying to logically examine is totally chaotic.

As much as the defenders of the “God is in our nature” idea hate to admit it, the purpose of religious indoctrination is to take advantage of that susceptibility to accepting supernatural causality and frame it in the way the organization says is correct. We could explain why we have so many faiths by the variation in how our “God genes” would work, but if they really affect us enough to shape our worldview and give us so many different answers to the same questions, it seems that the entire construct is useless because it doesn’t achieve any particular goal other than a feeling of something being there. What deity would benefit from crafting a the desire to believe and give us all different instructions as to what to believe and how?

So what really happens is that religious orders propagate by getting to new members as soon as possible, trying to convince anyone in earshot that they’re right. After its members and priests dedicate an entire lifetime to their beliefs, they have a very deep-seeded need to keep new generations adhering to theirs. Otherwise, if they’re wrong and the future generations reject all their teachings in favor of another way to explain complex, existential causality, to what did they devote their whole lives? We’re locked into theistic faiths not just because we need to explain the why’s and how’s we don’t know yet, but because of our need to validate our ideas.

Need proof? Take this example of a religious acolyte saying to Richard Dawkins that he can’t afford to live a lie and demanding that his beliefs are at least given some compassion by the professor. And how about all those constant appeals to the popularity of religion and mentions of how our perfectly sane ancestors were all believers too, summoned by religious writers and bloggers? The longer religious movements exist, the more power they gain, the more they need to remain in charge and the more they need to indoctrinate as soon as possible and for as long as possible. If they’re rejected, all that work and all that effort seems wasted and the believers become angry that they based their lives on something that wasn’t real in the end.

Not too long ago, I found myself reading a blog post which called for skepticism in sex. How skeptical do you have to be to advocate the scientific method in the bedroom? Well, according to Greta Christina, the author of the post and a full column on the subject, even when people see sex as something natural, healthy and very important in life, there’s still a tendency to inject a large dose of the supernatural into it. To find out a little more about spirituality in sex and the culture which embraces it, I asked Greta for some insights…

Q: What prompted you to write an article about acknowledging materialism in sexuality?

A: I’ve been in the sex-positive community, the community of people who write about sex or who are activists promoting sexual liberation and sexual civil rights for a long time and one of the things that I’ve been noticing in that community since I’ve been identifying myself as an atheist, is how much the community views sex in a very spiritual light. It’s not the same as a traditional religious attitude. The sex-positive community rejects the traditional religious view since it tends to be hostile towards sexuality. Instead they view it in a New Age way, with chakras and goddess worship and so on, and so I just wanted to write a piece which presented another view on sex. Something to say that you can be very positive about sex and embrace all the wonderful things in sexuality, but in a way that doesn’t frame it as a metaphysical experience.

Q: Why do you think so many people in this community view sex with a spiritual, New Age reverence?

A: First off, I want to preface this by saying that it’s just speculation on my part. I think it’s reasonably informed speculation though. There are basically three things going on. First is that the idea that spirituality is good and that the spiritual world is the more important world is very pervasive in our culture. It’s taught to us early in our childhoods and even when you reject the traditional version and embrace sexuality as something positive, it’s natural for people to create their own spirituality to frame sex as good.

The second thing is that the sex positive culture is overwhelmingly a progressive culture which tends to reject mainstream institutions. And we see this in the way that this community accepts alternative medicine despite the fact that conventional medicine has been very rigorously tested. But to them, science is The Man and they are pretty much throwing the baby out with the bathwater and embracing alternative medicine. They embrace intuition and feeling and personal experiences, values they want to uphold over “establishment” ideas.

The third thing has to do with the nature of sex. When sex is good, especially when it’s very, very good, I think it can feel a lot like what people describe as a spiritual experience. It transports you in an extraordinary way out of your normal experience. Again, even if we reject traditional religion, we tend to frame these experiences as metaphysical. But at the same time, they’re still physical experiences. We’re just shifting the way the brain is processing information. So I think that when people start embracing sex and sexuality as something positive, they tend to frame it in this mystical, spiritual way.

Q: What exactly do you mean by a sex-positive community? Is there a sex-negative community?

A: I would say that the Religious Right is a very sex-negative community which actively promotes the idea that sex is bad, sex is trivial, sex is something that has to be prescribed in a certain way and there’s a very small number of cases where you’re allowed to have it. And that can extend to any community where sex is seen as just a trivial thing that can only happen in certain cases. By contrast, sex-positive communities are people who through writing, through art and activism try to promote the idea that sex is an important part of our lives.

Q: How do you think religious communities reconcile their religious commandment to be fruitful and have sex with their attempts to control sexuality and inject legality into sex?

A: I think the answer they would give is that they don’t think sex is bad. On the contrary, they think sex is great and wonderful but God only wants you to have sex under these very specific circumstances. You have to get married, it has to be an opposite sex marriage, obviously, and you have to be willing to have children so birth control is out. But the reality is that they promote a lot of fear and hostility towards sex, telling women that men are just horny wolves and telling men that women are temptresses who will lead them astray. So what really ends up happening is that they promote a very mixed view of sex, that sex is bad and evil but then, when you’re married, it’s wonderful. And of course it doesn’t work that way.

You get couples having really bad sex and unhappy sex lives because there’s this barrier to talking about sex, getting information about it and absolutely no mention of female satisfaction. But then you also have a culture of teenagers not using birth control. They grow up thinking they’ll reject sex but since they have hormones as we all do, they end up having sex and they don’t use birth control. There are a lot of statistics which show that in states where right wing religion is very prominent, teen pregnancy is very prominent. So I think the upshot is very mixed messages and a very conflicted, messed up culture about sex.

Q: Imagine your ideal world in terms of sexual culture. What would it be like?

A: I thought about that a lot and the best metaphor I came up with for treating sex and sexual preferences is to treat them the way we treat music. Different people have different musical tastes. Some like opera, some like rap, some like country, some people like a wide variety of music. To some people, music just doesn’t matter a whole lot and to some people it’s central to their lives and we pretty much accept that. We might have our own negative opinions about certain musical types but we generally accept their right to enjoy their music as long as they’re not forcing others to listen to it against their will. And in fact we celebrate the diversity in music, that musical tastes change over time and that we have the right to choose the music we like for ourselves.

And I would like people to treat sex the same way. I would like to see people treat sex as something important in life and something that’s powerful and shouldn’t be trivialized. We should acknowledge the fact that it could potentially do some harm, but that basically, it’s a central part of life that we should accept, and that we should accept others’ sexualities even if they’re different from ours.

Our daughter started college a year ago, and weve noticed during her visits home that shes not the sweet, innocent girl we sent away for higher learning. We raised her with strong Christian beliefs, but lately shes saying that shes joined an atheist club on campus and is questioning everything we taught her.

Now my husband refuses to let her in the house and is threatening to turn her in to the FBI. Ive tried to cure our daughter and reconcile with her, but nothing seems to work. Ive prayed over her at night while she sleeps, enlisted friends in a phone prayer tree and even spoken to my priest about the possibility of an exorcism.

Im at my wits end. How can I recover my daughter and keep her from hell?

As an old Russian saying goes, I have no words for this. Only expressions. And none of those are decent. So just to make sure I got this straight, this woman’s husband wants to report his atheist daughter to the FBI for being an atheist? Can you imagine how that call would go? And how many times FBI employees would play a recording at office parties while they laugh hysterically at the sheer, unabridged lunacy unfolding before them? In my opinion, the columnist was far too kind in her reply. When you’re trying to cast demons out of your own daughter for having a different worldview and threaten to report her as a criminal for questioning her childhood beliefs, you’re not at your wits’ end. You’ve lost your wits a very long time ago.

The only thing that would make me feel better about this request for advice would be some sort of proof that it was just a prank. Unfortunately I think we all know full well that people who’s faith has turned into a toxic and all-consuming drive to assimilate all those around them, are really out there. One of them is on trial for letting her daughter slowly die of diabetes and refusing to seek real medical attention despite being urged to do so time and time again. Why? She was expecting her prayers to do a better job than doctors.