My first reaction to that, as an anthropologist, was this: “Hey, Imma let you say that now, but if you diss my Pygmies like that I’ll kick your ass.” In other words, I do find it rather condescending when western occidento-hetero-caucasoido-normative types take it on themselves to make blanket statements that some other group of people of which they know nothing are stupid. I understand the whole being annoyed at the bible thing, but this is where modern-day new atheists can be thoughtless when unpracticed in their philosophy and its application.

But it was only a Facebook comment.

My second thought was this: I never read the sports section of the newspaper, but last year when I came across a large fragment of a 30-year-old sports page from the local paper, hidden inside a wall, I read every word. Wouldn’t you? And the Dead Sea Scrolls are two thousand years old, and about a topic that is pretty much as interesting to me as hockey scores and basketball.

In the end, I went to see the exhibit, and I assure you, the part about the stupid shepherds is not only overwhelmingly outdone by other aspects of the scrolls, but in fact is rather inaccurate. The keepers of the scrolls were more like Moonies than shepherds, except when they were tour guides. That’s a topic I may address at another time.

So the other day I visited the Jeffers Petroglyphs site in southwestern Minnesota. That’s also a religious exhibit of sorts, if we assume (and we should) that the symbols pecked and carved into two-billion-year-old red quartzite played a role in various Native American cultural practices having to do with spirits, gods, afterlife, and so on. Jeffers has thunderbirds, lightning symbols, warriors doing battle with shamans, turtles, magic turtles, hands, bison (probably the extinct kind), atlatls, and more. The guides, polite and well informed caucasionormatives, describe various hypotheses about the symbols and who made them and why, play down the violent parts (maybe that one of the guy with the spear in his chest bleeding all over the place is all about the transition from boyhood to manhood?) and try to link the religious nature of the site to the presumed religiosity (or, at least, spirituality!) of the visitors. The prayer we make now at this site is enhanced by the thousands of years of others coming here to pray. And so on.

And both subjects have their holocaustic contexts. The Dead Sea Scrolls were probably kept by a Jewish religious sect, or at the very least, were part of a Jewish Renaissance following an exodus of sorts, and were a big deal in a Jewish world increasingly controlled and colonized by repressive and violent outsiders known today as heroes of Western Civilization. And the next two thousand years is, as they say, bloody history.

Jeffers is much older and diffuse in its cultural associations but was a sacred site to the Dakota (and others) at a time when the practice was to do war with the Indians, kill a lot of them, cut off some of their body parts to sell later in town as curios, or deflesh their bones, varnish them, keep them on display in your office, and to do all the killing in a way that maximized your votes, if you happen to be a politician. And, just to put this in perspective, I think we as a civilization came to abhor the Jewish Holocaust at the time it was revealed, in the mid 1940s. Most of the native body parts harvested, for example, during the Dakota Uprising (centered geographically near Jeffers) were returned between 1971 and 1990, and by force of law, not a sense of shame or propriety.

I recommend a visit to both. But don’t be a dick about it. Your ancestors have already pretty much taken care of that.

Once you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth (or a close approximation thereof). Almost A.C. Doyle

I have a friend who has often told me that as an atheist I rest too much on my preconceptions that God doesn’t exist for me to be open to evidence that his God does, in fact, exist.  He has told me that because of the problem of induction,  there is no way that I can “know” that God doesn’t exist, and that nothing in the scientific method can be used to support atheism.  Since no one can be justified, apparently, in drawing absolute answers from repeated observations, then it is silly to say that there is no God just because I have never experienced “Him.”

It’s the problem of induction, again.  I hesitate to discuss such a philosophical quandary among those who read this blog regularly; those who will likely school me on where my lack of formal philosophical training has failed me, but I have been thinking about the differences between science and religion as “ways of knowing.”

In order to maintain confidence that a causal relationship between natural phenomena has been established, one scientific method that I learned was to disprove a null hypothesis using statistical tools to analyze my data.  If the null hypothesis is not disproved, that means that the proposed hypothesis probably establishes a causal relationship and my investigation has yielded a good answer within a specified confidence interval. In other words, by following a scientific process, an investigator has come up with a good explanation for why something is so, or how something works.

This is only one of the methods that scientists use to discover how things work, one of the ways that people discover “how the world goes.”

Religion promises knowledge based on non-verifiable acceptance of authority, resignation to “mystery,” and the record of inscripturation.  Apologists for religion promise to provide “other ways of knowing” that aren’t limited to verifiable, positivistic methods. Religion, in general, tells people that we can know for certain that the supernatural exists and interacts in measurable ways with the natural.  Religion explains, in its “way,” the creation, miracles, interventions in personal lives and through catastrophic natural events.  The explanations are authoritative but not testable nor replicable through any reliable means.

There is a difference between the process of science and the nature of religion.  Science provides the “probable” answers, while religion promise certainty as long as the seeker will accept Mystery. ¹ Cosmologists have teased out most of the probable answers as to what happened following the Big Bang to within Planck Time and are still trying to determine how this universe came into being.  They don’t know absolutely if the current understanding of the process of expansion has been accurately described, but they have reason to acknowledge that it has been described very accurately using the process of inductive reasoning.

Inductive reasoning, as I understand it, is the process of analyzing subsets of the whole to make rational judgments of the nature of the whole.  For a common example of how inductive reasoning works, I will use political polling.  A sample of the population of likely voters is queried as to how they plan to vote in an upcoming election.  The larger the sample polled, the more likely the pollster is to obtain an accurate prediction of the eventual outcome.  Once the sample size exceeds a certain level, the returns of accuracy and confidence change little and it would be foolish and expensive and time-consuming to sample more than necessary.  A poll of all the people who will vote would be the most accurate way to predict an election, it would yield an “absolutely true” result, provided that none of those polled were deceptive or changed their minds.

The ideal sample size can be determine through some quick calculations, for example:

Determining Sample Size

((The trick to stats is designing the proper formula.  Once that has been done it is a simple matter of algebra.))

Nate Silver didn’t need to sample all of the voters in the 2008 election to predict that Obama would carry the electoral vote.  He merely needed to analyze the polls that sampled populations within the whole of the electorate.  The results he predicted were accurate to a specified confidence level, the famous “margin of error” of ±3 per cent.  There was a 5% chance that he could have predicted incorrectly.  In experimental design, a scientist will determine what margin of error will allow for the most probable and acceptable description of the causality of a natural phenomenon. Shorter:  Is this what caused that?  The  possible answers are not “yes” or “no.”  They are “probably” or “probably not,” or “that’s funny.”

The “problem of induction” is related to absolute knowledge.  If all knowledge is tentative, then any solution is as good as any other.  There is no certainty and there can be none, so my answer is as good as yours even if I haven’t done any serious investigation.  If you can’t state with a 0% margin of error that something is so, then you really have no useful knowledge. I can’t predict that the sun will rise tomorrow with absolute certainty, because I can’t see into the future.  I can confidently state that it will because I have an understanding that the sun doesn’t really rise, instead the earth rotates and creates an effective illusion that the sun is rising. For the Earth to stop rotating sometime in the middle of the night, events would be a bit more jarring due to the forces of momentum than I would care to deal with.  I wouldn’t then be too concerned that my prediction was wrong.

The “problem of induction” has been misused to claim that since there is no way to “know” that there is no God then God is likely to exist even if there is no direct nor indirect evidence of such an entity.  Not by any professional philosophers has this been done, mind you, but by friends of mine who think that they have stumbled onto something that “no atheist can answer.”

When it comes to the differences between religion as a “way of knowing” versus science as a way of understanding, religion offers something that science doesn’t.  Religion offers the comfort of absolute knowledge.  It offers the absolute answers, the answers that people want:  there is a creator that is watching after us and providing a way for us to experience a blissful afterlife.

The conflict between science and religion is in the means of acquiring knowledge.  Religious authority is often derived from personal revelations of prophets who have experienced something that to them is “real” and “true,” as true as the feeling of a burned hand in a fire. I have “felt” the presence of the Holy Spirit, but I have also “felt” the presence of the pagan Goddess in a drawing down of the moon. Both experiences were very emotional, uplifting, exciting and convincing. God’s presence was revealed to me, as was the Goddess’s. I should also note that both experiences were accompanied by prophecies from the respective supernatural agents.

Through these experiences, I found out how religious people “know” what they know. There could be no doubt, because the words came directly to me while I was experiencing the ecstasy. There was no induction needed, because through those experiences I had the Truth.  As Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

I could tell you the Truth of those prophecies, but you would have to take my word for it.

Religion and science are not compatible because of the illusory nature of “truth.”  We all have truths.  Religion claims to provide Truth.  Science is just a process that uses methods to get close to truth.  Religion provides other ways of knowing.  My question is in knowing what?  What does religion help us know, exactly?  And if induction can’t be used to prove an absolute, is that really a problem that religion can solve?

I don’t know.

1. Have you ever noticed that Catholic theologians pronounced the word “mystery” with the “M” capitalized? How do they do that?

Some religious people look at this supposedly “fine-tuned” universe and claim it is proof that a god exists who did the fine-tuning. Let us examine this claim.

God of the Gaps

At heart, this is a god-of-the-gaps argument. It says that since we can’t think of a natural way that the odds would have resulted in life in the universe, that “god did it.” However, we have no knowledge of what this god is, nor what mechanism it uses to accomplish anything. Therefore, “god” is not an answer to anything.

Religious people claim that we aren’t entitled to a “free lunch” when it comes to assuming a natural explanation for life in the universe, but “god” is the ultimate free lunch–no explanations are ever provided.

The Universe

The vast, vast majority of the universe is decidedly inhospitable to life. Outer space is deadly to anything other than, perhaps, microbes–and the majority of planets, moons, and asteroids aren’t much better.

Judging by what we observe now, the universe will continue expanding forever, creating a “big chill” effect. Heat energy will be so dissipated that no life will be possible. A person alive just before this happens won’t view things as so “miraculously fine-tuned” as some religious people do today.

Our Sun

While natural conditions are favorable for life on Earth now, this won’t be true in about five billion years. At that point the sun’s supply of hydrogen will run out and it will begin to fuse helium into heavier elements. The sun will expand and engulf the Earth, wiping out all life. Even a billion years from now, all water will have boiled off the Earth, making life improbable, if not impossible. Again, a person alive just before either of these events occurs won’t view things as so “miraculously fine-tuned” as some religious people do today.

The Earth

Apart from the physics constants of the universe, some religious people claim that the Earth itself is so fine-tuned for life (proper distance from the sun, the right kind of elements, etc.) that only a god could have established it. This, of course, is the same god-of-the-gaps type argument we encountered with the “fine-tuned” universe.

An obvious natural explanation is that, given the likelihood of trillions of planets existing in the universe, it would only take a tiny fraction of them to have the right kind of conditions to produce some type of life. If only one planet per galaxy had life on it, that would still amount to 100 billion planets and at least 100 billion different species.

Limited Knowledge

The fined-tuned universe argument for a god assumes that what we think we know about the universe today is accurate. But this is cutting edge physics, and what we believe to be true today is far from certain. Even now there is much dispute among physicists as to how much these constants of the universe can vary and still produce a universe capable of leading to life.

Multiple Universes

Extraordinary odds against life in one universe become a near certainty if there are many universes. If many universes exist (sometimes called a “multiverse”), or many “bubble universes” exist within a single universe, and each universe or bubble universe has its own set of random constants, then life will almost certainly arise in at least one of these universes or bubble universes. (For example, roll a set of dice long enough and you will eventually get two sixes.)

While there is, as yet, no evidence for other universes, their existence is more plausible than the existence of a god. After all, we know it’s possible for universes to exist–we live in one. We have no evidence that it is possible for gods to exist.

A Fine-Tuned God?

Those who believe a “fine-tuned” universe proves the existence of a god admit there is some slight margin for variance in these physics constants of the universe. But what about the god they believe exists? Could that god be anything other than exactly what it is? If not, then there is zero margin for variance for that god. So, as improbable as the existence of life in the universe may seem, the existence of a god would be even more improbable.

Conclusion

The track record of naturalistic science for answering questions about the natural world far exceeds the track record of supernatural “revelation.” The existence of a god seems more improbable than life arising in the universe. “God” has not provided us with any answers and has instead raised more questions.

August Berkshire is president of Minnesota Atheists.

I still think of the family stories, however, whenever someone decides to proclaim that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. The usual arguments against the idea are that the Founding Fathers were, personally, largely deist and Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli. What is less often discussed is how, and why, bringing the colonies together into a single nation required that that nation be specifically non-Christian.

If given the opportunity, I like to take note of the fact that I’m just the latest in a long line of heretics. The English side of my family came to the colonies around the time when one’s status as a heretic–or not–was determined by who was queen and that status was likely to change at any moment. The Scottish side is said to have relocated first to Ireland, then to the colonies, after supporting the wrong king, at a time when that meant the same as being the wrong religion. (As opposed to my husband’s family, who are said to have left the auld sod “over a dispute over the ownership of a horse.”)

And then there’s the story about the U.S. westward migration being helped out by the family becoming unwelcome in one community for being the wrong sort of Quaker. Don’t ask me how that worked. I know Quakers, and I can’t imagine how you’d get them that riled up over differences of doctrine. All I can tell you is that my family may be special that way.

My favorite dead relatives, however, are the ones who were kicked out of the Colony of Massachusetts for being the wrong kind of Puritan, which means, as long as we’re clearing up matters of religious misconception, pure in matters of doctrine, not without sin. They’d come to the colonies, as many had, because they couldn’t practice their brand of religion in a land where the state was the head of the church. What they found (or perhaps helped to found, as the records aren’t very clear) was a colony where the church was the head of the state, just as many would like the situation to be today.

What they found was the colony that would eventually produce the Salem witch trials. Of course, they left before that happened. They left following Anne Hutchinson, who had some minor disagreements on theological matters with those in charge but seems to have been banned from the colony largely for being a successfully uppity woman. She was successful enough that my relatives weren’t the only people who left with her. (Mary Dyer, another of the uppity women banished at this point, later returned to the colony as a Quaker, becoming one of the Boston martyrs.)

The group was persuaded to move to the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations by Roger Williams, one of the founders of the Baptist church in America. The other founder of the American Baptist church was John Clarke, one of those relatives (assuming attribution of parentage is correct, my many, many times great-uncle) who had just been kicked out of Massachusetts.

Yes, the history of the Baptist church in America starts with a flight from religious intolerance. The church of the majority of those who want an American theocracy would never have made it to these shores had the laws of the Massachusetts Bay Colony been the law of all the land. And the other colonies of the time weren’t much different.

But…but not Baptist doesn’t mean not Christian, so the colonies were still Christian, right? Well, not exactly. Here is where the story of Rhode Island gets interesting. It was there that the “wall of separation” between state and church was born, and its father was none other than Roger Williams, co-founder of the American Baptists. He insisted on freedom of religious conscience and expression for the colony. Nor did he limit his tolerance to Christians. Rhode Island was one of the few colonies with a good track record of treating the indigenous peoples as people, rather than heathens who were clearly not part of God’s plan for this new world.

The colony was run on majority vote, but votes were only permitted on secular matters. This limitation was reaffirmed multiple times, and John Clarke had it incorporated in the colony’s charter, asking:

…it is much on their hearts (if they may be permitted) to hold forth a lively experiment, that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained, and that among our English subjects, with a full liberty in religious concernments…

The request was granted by Charles II:

…because some of the people and inhabitants of the same colony cannot, in their private opinions, conform to the public exercise of religion, according to the liturgy, forms and ceremonies of the Church of England, or take or subscribe the oaths and articles made and established in that behalf; and for that the same, by reason of the remote distances of those places, will (as we hope) be no breach of the unity and uniformity established in this nation: Have therefore thought fit, and do hereby publish, grant, ordain and declare, that our royal will and pleasure is, that no person within the said colony, at any time hereafter shall be any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion, and do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said colony; but that all and every person and persons may, from time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments, throughout the tract of land hereafter mentioned…

No other colony matched Rhode Island’s stance on religious freedom. Pennsylvania came close, but the rights were only granted to monotheists. Maryland started as a place where Catholics could freely live and worship, but they ended up being persecuted there. Jews were allowed to settle in New York and New Jersey, but the history of their rights there is spotty. So how is it that the U.S. came to adopt Rhode Island’s incredibly liberal model of religious rights instead of some compromise?

The answer is that full religious freedom is the compromise between the competing rights of the followers of all the different sects that have fled to our land. Anything short of that is choosing sides, as the people of the time well knew, as the Baptists of the time well knew.

Our sentiments are uniformly on the side of religious liberty–that religion is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals–that no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religious opinions–that the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbors; But, sir, our constitution of government is not specific. Our ancient charter together with the law made coincident therewith, were adopted as the basis of our government, at the time of our revolution; and such had been our laws and usages, and such still are; that religion is considered as the first object of legislation; and therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the state) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights; and these favors we receive at the expense of such degrading acknowledgements as are inconsistent with the rights of freemen.

The “sir” in question was President Thomas Jefferson, and the Danbury Baptists wrote to him as a religious minority concerned that their country’s new Constitution and even its Bill of Rights did nothing to protect them from the persecution as long as their state was still free to impose religion from above (the idea that the states couldn’t infringe on the rights in the Bill came later).

Jefferson’s response to the Danbury Baptists is famous for the statements that “he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions” and invocation of the “wall of separation.” However, it is his response to yet more Baptists, these in Virginia, that most clearly draws the connection to Rhode Island’s charter.

We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries.

And thus it is that, while many of the original colonies were founded as Christian colonies, not all of them were. More importantly, when the time came to model our country’s religious character on all of the colonial experiments that had taken place, we chose the experiment that had worked.

We chose to not become a Christian nation.

There is no possible way to discuss deeply held beliefs without offending someone who either holds or doesn’t hold those beliefs. As a blanket statement laid on with a broad brush and as a generalization to boot, I have not been able to find a way for everyone to be happy when it comes to discussing atheism and religion. I have read and listened; I have spoken and watched. I have said nice things to people about themselves, followed with a critique of religion and then bookended with a nice thing about that person again, only to be told I am a hateful bigot and arrogant.

While I know that the plural of anecdote isn’t data, I wonder how positive “positive atheists” should continue to be, with the awareness that somewhere along the line, no matter how we try, someone is going to be offended. If I were to criticize the Catholic Church for not doing enough to root out the pedophiles in the priesthood, or the Mormon Church for putting time and effort into denying the rights of gays and lesbians to marry their partner-of-choice, or Scientologists for sending a team of volunteer ministers to Haiti to provide victims with “touch assists,” or even to complain that my daughter was told by a fellow little girl that she was “going to Hell” for sticking up her middle finger, then someone would decide that I was being intolerant of others’ religious beliefs and just another example of a militant atheist.

It seems not to matter how civil we are when we complain about religion; we atheists become “bashers” and “nasty” and “militant” for being non-believers. We are out to evangelize the believers to be non-believers, and the only way we can win is to shame other atheists.

To me, there seems to be a growing number of atheists who want to see religion destroyed. I think these people, who may have always been around, are the ones who can make the community suffer. It is difficult to form a community around what you don’t believe in and that is what atheists do. Atheists are an incredibly diverse community, however, those who participate in organizations seem to be overwhelmingly liberal politically, don’t have kids, or their kids are out of the house. Most seem to have been raised with a religion and have sought out a community because it can be difficult to, in some cases, be rejected from friends and family because you don’t happen to share the same views on theology.

I consider the writer to be a friend but I think he is wrong in this post. There is good reason that many of us would like to see religion gone, and it is religion itself, not the people who are religious, that we want to see wither and die. Religion is given too much leeway and power when determining policy in our “secular society.” Religion is used to justify prejudices, to justify destruction of childrens’ bodies in order to “protect them” from having sexual desire, to keep women hidden and out of society in order to protect society from chaos and earthquakes, to opt out of filling prescriptions by pharmacists who object to the particular treatment because of their religion’s teachings and to urge prayer when other work can and should be done.

It’s a sweeping generalization to say that dissing religion is bigotry against religious people. Are atheists actively engaged in not hiring religious people? Are we trying to prevent them from holding public office? Are we censoring them or telling them that they can’t depict our heroes in a bad light (or any light at all for that matter)? Are we telling them that they have no place in politics, nor should they even be considered citizens, let alone patriots? I don’t think so, at least not in the United States and Canada. We are telling them that they don’t have the right to use their religion’s rules as the basis of secular laws. We are telling them that it is a violation of the concept of a secular government, and that the National Day of Prayer is inconsistent with the Constitution as written and interpreted. We are telling them that they shouldn’t pretend that their religion is as valid a way of “knowing” as the scientific process of discovery and interpretation.

No matter how carefully I tread on subjects I will find myself accused of being a meanie for violating somebody’s rules, and I will be subject to some “concern” about the way that the overall atheist community is perceived by me. When I was the host of the Minnesota Atheists’ radio show “Atheists Talk,” I invited someone to listen to the show one Sunday because I was personally excited to be on the airways, but his response was not be excited for me. Instead he simply said “Well good for you but I have no interest in spending an hour listening to you bash religion.” He never listened to the show, because he had predetermined that he wouldn’t be interested in it. I cajoled and explained that this was not what the show was about, but was told to change the subject and I was disappointed that as a friend he wouldn’t even give my show a chance.

My dismay comes from an observation that those who don’t like the New Atheists are behaving in the same manner towards them as they accuse the New Atheists of behaving towards the religious, and as the Grassroots Skeptic puts it:

Almost nobody is going to be able to respond to a perceived attack in any positive way. They’re bound to get defensive, or to respond with an attack of their own. If you’ve ever made the argument that some institution or individual was in some way bad for the skeptical movement, ask yourself honestly: did you phrase your assertion in a way that had any hope of persuading your newfound nemesis to take a step back and consider adjusting his or her methods? Or did you grow a big ol’ pair of Internet cojones, call him or her something awful that you’d never say in real life, and enjoy the momentary adrenalin rush you got from stirring the pot with the bitchy stick?

Last November PZ Myers agreed to “debate” Jerry Bergman on whether or not Intelligent Design should be taught in school. During the “debate” Bergman frequently used his own slides to counter a point that Myers was making while Myers was speaking. I found that action to be very rude. I wasn’t as upset over the content of Bergman’s slides, I was angry that while the other person was speaking Bergman was trying to distract the audience from what Myers was saying. During the debate Myers respected the time limits, attacked his opponents presentation methods and conclusions and expressed dismay that Bergman had not even approached the subject of the debate. At no time was Myers rude to Bergman personally, but only to his ideas. And yet, in the comments submitted following the debate people wrote that Myers was the rude and dismissive one. For people who have a set idea that is not gained by reason, any sort of approach that attacks that set idea no matter how nicely done may be considered “rude.”

There are rules we must follow in order to have civil debate, and violating those rules raises concern.

Someone expressed concern that at Minnesota Atheist meetings there was too much religion-bashing going on, and because of that as, she told a friend of mine, she wasn’t going to go back to any more meetings. What I have a hard time with is understanding why someone would go to a meeting at which atheists gather under a banner of atheism and not expect there to be any sort of talk against religion. I think it would be similar to objecting to people bashing Miller Beer at the Surly Brewery, or Apple at a Microsoft Picnic, or contact lenses at a gathering of Lasik Surgeons or Democrats at a Republican Convention. As in “I am for lower taxes and squashing education but those Republicans are so anti-Democrat that I can’t stand to be around them.” I need to ask, “What do you expect?”

There are so many secular groups and organizations to join and have fun and never even discuss religion in any context, positive or negative. Perhaps a bowling league, or a weekly cribbage club may suit you instead of an atheist group. Our community includes people who have been religious and are now disgusted at the effects that an overriding religious tenor to society has on our daily lives and want to be part of a group that recognizes that disgust and gives them an outlet to vent their frustration in a friendly environment. If, as atheists, our only desire and goal should be to be accepted as part of the larger community then our best strategy is perhaps to return to the closet and never say nothin’ about not believing.

Yes, that would be the best way for all of us to “just get along.”

Or we could also stop trying to shame vocal atheists and recognize that some people have a reason to be angry at religion.

John W. Loftus was our guest on Atheists Talk on May 24, 2009, and he said something very interesting about religious people and their level of intelligence.  He said that they are not wrong nor stupid for being religious and even discussed the skeptical nature of the most intelligent of the apologists.  We can wipe from this list of intelligent apologists the creationists, of course, because they choose to ignore or diminish any factual data that contradict their dearly held notions that the Earth and its resident life are a special creation barely 6,000 years old.

Loftus made the case that, in fact, people such as William Lane Craig are probably more intelligent than he is.  I can name some religious thinkers far more intelligent than I am.  The issue with religion is not intelligence. The issue is that of core values, and presupposition.  (These are not Loftus’ direct words, they are my own interpretation.)

After leaving the station, I was listening to the occasionally entertaining “Speaking of Faith,” by Krista Tippett.  Her guest was Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American with Shia Muslim roots.  He was explaining the source of conflict between the Shia of Iran and the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq.  Yes, it’s a mess and the American war in Iraq has complicated things.  But that isn’t why I bring it up.  I came in at this spot, and when I listened, it helped illuminate what Loftus had been saying on the show:

Mr. Nasr: And therefore, you know, things don’t matter enough here for people to be killing one another but many, many years ago when Boston was dominated by Protestant English establishment and you gradually had an influx of Irish Catholics who came to Boston, you had a very clear sense of a difference, that the Catholic Church belonged to the Irish and belonged to the poor and the Protestant churches represented the Anglo-Saxon establishment in the city. Now, the differences were not so much theological as they reflected the fundamental identity division in Boston.

Ms. Tippett: Socioeconomic and ethnic.

Mr. Nasr: It’s socioeconomic. If we go to Northern Ireland today, you know, IRA fighters may go to church, may not go to church. I don’t think they’re really concerned with liturgy and what the Vatican says.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Nasr: Catholicism is not faith; it’s who they are. It defines what side of the tracks they were born.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Nasr: You know, who they are, what share of the wealth they get. And you have that in the Muslim world as well. I mean, in Lebanon or Iraq or in Pakistan, the Shia-Sunni difference is not necessarily theological. It is who you are. So the Shia in Pakistan are like the Catholic Irish of Boston.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Nasr: Or in Iraq, they were like the Catholic Irish of Boston. They were not the “in” crowd. They were the “out” crowd. And then above this, you obviously have the theological difference and the major difference is the following: that the Shias believed that when the Prophet Mohammed died that his legitimate successors were his son-in-law and cousin Ali who’s buried in the shrine in Najaf and that God had willed that the charisma of the Prophet would run through his bloodline, and his bloodline would be the legitimate leaders of the community. So you could only have true Islamic leadership if the family of the Prophet ruled.

The Sunnis, essentially, who became the majority and whose writ ultimately carried, believed that the most suitable of the companions of the Prophet would be chosen by the early Muslim community, and he would be the leader. And from that disagreement over succession, over the years the two faiths evolved very differently.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Nasr: They have a different historical experience, and then the two communities developed a very different ethos of Islam and they practice the faith differently.

I am good at math.  It comes naturally to me when someone shows me how to do it.  I have a natural proficiency when tutored in those concepts, and usually I catch on with just a few practice equations.  I learned from having kids with math problems that I am not a very good math teacher.  I do better teaching subjects at which I struggle, because I can better empathize with their struggle.

Having been a Christian, myself, I can certainly empathize with them when it comes to their difficulties in understanding a life without the “presence of God.”  It is part of them, part of their roots and part of their community.  Catholics brought up in the faith take the basic tenets as self-evident, much as do the Irish of Boston or the Irish Catholics of Northern Ireland.  The Proddies were simply quite wrong, and their lack of understanding of the true nature of the Catholic faith led them to oppress the Catholics financially (and with the aid of the Anglican English, militarily).

Loftus mentioned that the atheists brought up without any sort of religion have a hard time emphasizing with the intellectual struggle of doubt that the religious face.  It is easy to see that religion is false if one is not brought up with it as one’s cultural miasma.  Leaving religion when I no longer believed was a struggle, because I thought that if everyone I trusted and loved was enjoying a relationship while I was not, then there had to be something wrong with me.  I kept trying to find my faith and read the Bible and helpful works, but ended up deciding that the struggle was over and became an atheist.

Because it was tough for me, I can empathize with those who are still struggling with the doubt.  The faith that they have is one of their core values. It is not an easy matter of learning that religion is wrong on natural explanations and from there concluding that religion is wrong (or inadequate at best) in dealing with other matters.  Religion has “worked” for them and made the world whole in relation to their cultural experience.  The Irish in Northern Europe, the Shia in Iran, the Sunni in Iraq, the Wahabi in Saudi Arabia, the Hindu in India, the Buddhist in China, the Shinto in Japan and the Native Americans didn’t grow up skeptically responding to the lessons their parents and their societies taught them.  They are skeptical of all other religions, because they don’t make sense.  Their own does, and it is self-evident.

For the atheists who don’t go through this the process is confusing and, like the problems that I have in explaining math to my kids, the non-Godness of the Universe is too obvious.  So, for them religion is just kind of, stupid.  It’s not stupid, it’s just wrong. 

Debates between atheists and religious scholars are entertainment, but ultimately few minds are changed.  People can only come to the atheist conclusion on their own and, until then, will rely on intellectual justifications to support their faith.  I am well aware that the same can be said by a believer about my atheism, and that it is foolish.  But then there is a story of a person risking his family relationships.  Here’s an example from RichardDawkins.net:

At age 18, despite my homeschooling, I managed to get into a university to pursue a higher education and a better life, a pursuit I was able to continue through attaining a Masters degree. After finishing graduate school, I joined the military and went on to fly jets from the flight decks of one of the most spectacular displays of scientific and technological innovation, U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. My parents were very proud of my accomplishments and even made reference to me as their “self-made man.” This reference has a special kind of irony for me.

I actually went more than a decade calling myself an agnostic. One reason for that was the process by which I came to my non-belief in faith-based assertions of truth. More than that was a need to prevent division between my family and me. Agnosticism provided philosophical blinders to allow my family to view me as a “backsliding Christian” instead of a “traitor.” Eventually, I accepted that I am an atheist (under Dawkins’ scale, I am a 6 out of 7) and thus began my fall from grace. All of the taboos of thinking, formally part of my programming, have slowly eroded to a basic understanding of what we know versus what we don’t know – and this has helped shape my cultural and personal values. Now I have become, in the eyes of a few, one of the aforementioned “savage wolves.”

As Marshall woke up, he was aware that people around him were unwilling to accept his new-found realization. It’s a hard thing to give up, those core values, even when they are based on mistaken beliefs that there is an eternal “giver” of values.

(Originally posted at Tangled Up in Blue Guy on May 24, 2009)

My roommate is a Christian.  His mother is a clergywoman, his stepdad a clergyman and his aunt a preacher as well.  He invariably interrupts me whenever I open a conversation on something cool I learned regarding evolution with the standard disclaimer that he is religious.  Yesterday, I told him that he should really think about how it is weird that if I were to explain to him that the sky is blue because of light ray refraction, or that the reason that lakes turn over just before freezing in winter because of the unusual crystalline properties of water ice and its density, that he wouldn’t interrupt me about his religion.

He equates evolution with atheism. No matter how many times we go through that whole thing about “This is what we find out through science, and this is how they do it, and religion really shouldn’t interfere with your interest in it,” the conversation gets stuck there. To me it seems as though his religious belief is blocking him from an area of understanding of nature that is really fucking cool.  It saddens me, and makes me think that the main purpose of religion is the preparation for death and making sure that one is going to the right place for eternity.  What else we can do in the meantime is meaningless in the long run when eternity is at stake.

This is the nihilism that is religion. (I find it extremely odd that there is so much ethical resistance to euthanasia.  The idea that the extremely sick should have their suffering prolonged indefinitely so that they can experience the “dignity of suffering” is an incredibly cruel interpretation of “God’s Will.” If you believe they will be in Heaven when they go, let them go.)  Death is inevitable, and we should spend our lives prepping for it and not offend God by questioning the world around us.  It is why we must deal with the idiocy of theodicy and let theologians justify the reasons that nature plays horrendously cruel tricks on us; “Suffering is God’s way of letting us know that he has a Plan that we can’t fathom.”  But, to find alternative explanations to the God hypothesis is ludicrous.  For every answer that scientists propose that coincides with the observations of the natural world and how it works, the response is “Silly Atheist, you are not as learned as Kierkegaard.”

Spreading enthusiasm for evolution, such as I experience, and the extreme wonder that the intellectually curious find in teasing out the details is not easy when faced by such resistance. I don’t think anyone who is also enthusiastic about science has the answer, either.  If they did, then we wouldn’t be seeing the acceptance of evolution stall and continually have to face resistance from so many quarters.  We  wouldn’t see so many polls that place a public acceptance of evolution below that of creationism.

The strategy of groups such as the NCSE will work with some people, I think. But I don’t know.  There seems to be this underlying assumption that they know how to do it, by being assuring and enlisting the help of theologians and by saying that many scientists believe in God and see no conflict.  It may work for some people, but for others it won’t matter.  They know that death can come at any time and that if they are not solid enough in their faith when it comes, then they go through the coal chute to Hell and eternal agony and fire.  It’s not likely when faced with that sort of fear they are going to accept such assurances, and certainly not from someone who doesn’t interpret the Bible the Right Way. Creationism is not an intellectual conclusion.  It is an emotional conclusion.  It backfills data to agree with their foregone conclusion (which is what makes it ridiculous).

No one really knows the strategies that will work to help break the barriers that place religion in front of intellectual curiosity about evolution.  What we do know is that there are many people who are making assumptions that it should only be done in calm, assuring and moderating tones and that the straightforward approach of the New Atheists is going to set everyone else back a hunnert years so that the Friendly Atheists have to start all over again. ¹

The insistence that atheists be quiet about what we think are the implications of evolution and cosmology are very religious in nature, in the sense that the accommodationists want to use “shaming” to influence the behavior of a subset of their own group.  They are also using a “sense” of what is the absolute right way to develop a strategy of what they seek to achieve.  To those of us who are serious about atheism, and especially for those of us who left religions that place a high value on using guilt as a means to modify behavior, it is a reminder of what we are trying to get away from when we finally declare our atheism publicly.

The conciliatory approach that has been tried for years has not done much to change the situation, and the New Atheists, no matter how gentle and careful we are to stick to the details on why we hold the positions that we do, seem to offend people just by our very existence.  And yes, we lash out angrily at this often and return the offense with ridicule and bile.  We have our reasons and we have human emotions, so no one should be too surprised.  We expect to be shamed by our religious friends and relatives, so it doesn’t bother us as much as it does from other atheists and agnostics.  They should know better.

It’s the assumption part that makes me angry. It is what made me so angry about the book Unscientific America, and it is what makes me so angry about the idea of “Framing Science” when it comes to the interplay between science and religion.  It is what makes me so angry about the comfortable atheism that Michael Ruse insists on, when he says that Dawkins makes him embarrassed to be an atheist.  I will tell you now that I am more interested in having a beer with a creationist than I am with someone who insists that he or she knows the “right approach” to build enthusiasm for evolution.  I get to the point where I can’t stand to be around people who know this answer, but can’t see the irony in the idea that they have come to this conclusion on how to increase the acceptance of science without using science to find out.

Sociology may be a young science, and like economics it is not a “hard science” in comparison to chemistry, physics, biology and the other fields.  But it does provide tools for understanding what can and should be done to help people see the excitement that discovery of the natural world and its workings brings to us no matter what their religion says about the natural world.

The sociologists should be the ones to help us figure out how to do this.  What needs to be done before people like Massimo Pigliucci, Matthew Nisbet, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Josh Rosenau, Chris Mooney and hundreds of others (who I admire greatly on so many fronts but with whom I disagree on this issue,) is to ask people clarifying questions before deciding whether or not there is a one-size-fits-all approach.

My bet is that there is not. However,  I don’t know for sure.  I am basing this on my impressions and a rational decision using incomplete data that have not been seriously analyzed.  I would like for the friends of science and religion to prove that they are really friends of science in order to find out how to help people see the wonder that is the natural world without continually placing philosophical roadblocks in place.

If the data conclusively show that in order for Johnny and Susie to grow up to be good scientists, I should shut up about atheism, then I will consider it. Until then, don’t shame the New Atheists.²  We get enough of it from the religious and self-righteous.

And I just want to share info about cnidarian opsins and the evolution of vision with my roommate without having to get sidetracked into this same discussion about atheism every single time.

1. I am a very friendly person.  I am also very honest about my atheism; the whys and wheres and hows are not something I hide when I try to explain myself to people who have a hard time comprehending.  I smile while not conceding, and it is the “not conceding” that makes me a New Atheist.  The smiling part keeps me connected as a person to a non-atheist.
2. It’s a silly term but we appear to be stuck with it.

The headline is mine, so if you find it disrespectful, facetious, obnoxious, and judgmental, blame me, not the local news outlet. The story and what I took from it pushed so many of my buttons that every one of those adjectives fits what’s behind the headline. And I will confess right up front I’m reacting to very few facts.

I refer to her as a religion hunter. It’s not exactly a compliment. To me it’s more of a sickness, and it’s endemic in this society, perhaps throughout our species. I do understand the need to find something outside of one’s self, something bigger, hopefully wiser, something to fix whatever is ailing, whether in me, loved ones, or the world. We seek something to be worthy of our awe. Religions fill this need for most of us, offering answers to those questions. Sometimes the answers are easy, sometimes impossibly hard.

What bugs me most about religions lately is that religiosity itself has become sacred. It’s the same way nationalism has become sacred to some people. To me, as I understand sacred, that concept should be reserved for God, or Allah, or whatever higher being or ideal. To make the trappings that surround the group-think teaching, that describe the divine and set down rules to follow, as themselves sacred just succeeds in driving us a step farther away from the divine. Admittedly, they can be helpful, but so can a vacuum cleaner. While cleanliness is next to godliness, I’ll never call a vacuum cleaner divine.

Possibly one of the better arguments against making religiosity itself sacred is the number of people who are driven away from whatever the religion espouses in search of some new, different religion. I’m not talking about those turned off completely from the concept of religion. I’m talking about those actively hunting a new religion. This woman apparently was one of those, participating in some very minor (“fringe”) sect, adopting a Native American ceremony in search of meaning. If the Native American religion had been adopted (i.e., a context given to the ceremony to supply meaning) I’d have expected different skin tones and facial features on the group’s leader, and perhaps a name like Yazzie or Two Bears. But apparently they took the quickie route, not bothering to learn about harmony and beauty–or sensible, safe precautions–but going for the gimmick: the sweat lodge. I have to believe that’s as offensive to Native Americans as someone coming into a Catholic church, dispensing with reading the Bible or going through confession, and presenting themselves at the altar for confession. Voila–quickie Catholic on the half shell.

Since religiosity itself has become sacred, nobody questions what others do to “find” religion, or what they do in order to serve their particular brand of religion. So folks go along with the stupid, the selfish, the dangerous, as long as somebody tags it with “religion.” Another recent story points this out. A teenager with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was denied standard medical treatment by his parents in the name of religion, until the courts stepped in to order treatment. Nobody questioned the sincerity of the parents religious beliefs, even though these beliefs didn’t manifest themselves until AFTER the kid’s first course of chemotherapy, when the kid quite understandably hated the pain and discomfort of the treatment’s side effects and protested having to go through with round two. So is it still religion when the prime precept seems to be keep my kid comfortable even if it kills him?

Being a religion hunter says a couple of things about you. First, you are likely sincerely seeking that something outside yourself. Unfortunately, the longer you look without finding, the more you are likely to become prey to the grifters, the charlatans, the greedy, and the idiots who just might kill you. Second, it says you are looking to others to give you what you are unable to give yourself. If you hunt out religions, you must carry the belief that other people know something, hold some secret, that you haven’t found yet–and that it’s something that they can share.

I’ve long since had a problem with that. Being around groups of other people works against growing religious feelings in me. Partly it’s a trust issue–too few of them have earned it. Partly they’re a distraction from whatever I’m trying to achieve. We are such a gregarious species that it’s difficult to be in the presence of other people and ignore them, but that’s what I’d need to do in order to find something I’d call divine. I’ve concluded that religious groups are enforcers of the group-think necessary to keep the leaders in power and control the masses. That idea alone is a further turn-off for me. Finally, I’m simply not convinced that others know some mysterious secret, or that they can share it. I’ve had the distinct displeasure of working with somebody who KNEW that he knew exactly the right words to ensure his own salvation. He also KNEW that knowledge of those words was limited, and he was one of the select few and I wasn’t. Others haven’t been so obnoxious about it but still cling to the firm belief that there is only one way, and theirs is it. It apparently comforts them.

So, personally, I have to get away from other people to explore my own spirituality, to examine my conscience, find my values, discover whatever is worthy of awe. A quiet couple hours in the woods, watching waves pound the shore, watching storms build and pass, letting my eyes devour the mountains, or really listening to a Beethoven symphony–these are things that help. I don’t expect to find all the answers, nor even most of the questions. I doubt I’ll ever be a religion hunter, though I can manage a smidgen of sympathy for those who are.

And a part of me appreciates the irony that our local religion hunter already has found out the answer to the question all of the rest of us have: what happens after death? While I’m really, really interested in that answer, I’ll wait for it.

Additional Links
Much, much more on the tragedy and the magical thinking behind it.

What is the meaning of life?  Where is our purpose?  Why are we here and what are we supposed to do?  Where did we come from and what will follow us when we are gone?  Why am I such a lowly worm and a sinner?

In my favorite episode of My Three Sons, Chip Douglas wants to join a club that his friends have started.  They cook up a series of tasks for him to complete for his initiation, and when he completes his tasks they will teach him the “dirty little secret.”  He is dying of curiosity, so no matter how absurd the tasks, his dogged determination carries him through so that he can reach the Holy Grail of the “dirty little secret.”

Chip finally completes the last task and goes to his friends and says “Okay, I’m in.  What’s the dirty little secret?”  They laugh and tell him that “The dirty little secret is that there is no dirty little secret.”

Giordano Bruno

And that, my friends, is the mystical meaning of life.  There is no dirty little secret, no hidden answer “42.”  It rains on the just and the unjust alike. I am not a sinner, nor a lowly worm.  The purpose of “purpose” is to puzzle us, to urge us to try to discern the secrets as a great pastime, inspiring wonder at the world around us.  A deep desire to understand the “why” of the cruelties of fate (or the blessings of good fortune) is born of a curiosity that drives us on through our tasks.  If we just keep on searching for answers to our questions, eventually our gods will give us the 411 on life.  Or something will.

I was out having a conversation with a guy who calls himself an “atheist, mostly” because he doesn’t accept the Christian/Jewish/Muslim concept of God.  Nor does he accept the gods of mythology.  He does, however, think that there is more out there that we don’t yet perceive through our physical senses.  He bases his belief on the shared experiences of humanity encountering ghosts and other unexplainable phenomena.  He has decided that if so many people have reported supernatural phenomena for centuries, there must be some basis in fact.   I didn’t laugh at him, but I did explain to him that I had experienced some weird things myself.  I explained to him that when I looked back at them, I could find a plausible and natural explanation for each.

That’s how it is with the appearance of design in nature, and it’s the appearance of design that leads to the illusion of purpose.  The biological cell is incredibly complex, with multitudes of cooperating organelles and structures.  The process of creating copies of DNA and from there, mapping out the structure of proteins (which then fold in the most efficient structure possible to carry out their tasks), well it’s all just too complex to develop without the guidance of a planner.

If the Planner is capable of such wondrous processes as meisosis and mitosis (and sex), then the Planner must be in control of Purpose and our lives thus have meaning beyond that which we can see, touch, taste, smell and hear.  Religion, in this context, makes a great deal of sense.  It provides answers to the question of purpose.  Follow a path and gain enlightenment and/or eternal life in the Planner’s Presence.

Unfortunately, the answers provided by religion aren’t all that satisfactory, because they don’t provide any means to verify or test the answers.  The answers are based on authoritative declarations from the writings and thoughts of learned people who have analyzed the works of other learned people. The answers are based on the pronouncements of a priestly class who lay claim to a source that we can’t access (unless we have a faith strong enough to believe them despite contrary evidence).

Science steps in and looks at the processes of nature and shows us how to tease apart the secrets of their workings, slowly and carefully and with missteps along the way.  The missteps are readily acknowledged and re-examined.  The successes are retested to make sure they closely approximate (within a high confidence interval) the truth.  Then they are once again examined as new questions arise that cast doubt on the answers.

The problem with science is that it doesn’t provide comforting authority.  It never promises the “truth” of anything, just progressively more useful descriptions.  The result of scientific methodology is often more uncertainty, and that is not comforting to those of us who believe in absolute answers.  This will never do, and from this uncertainty comes for some faith that we can still practice the ritual and pray and get the answer we have been promised.  Science and religion are in a pas de deux, but they are constantly stepping on each other’s toes.

If science can’t produce comforting authority then what is it good for?  It is good for disproving assumptions, is what it is good for.  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that race is a valid biological construct.  It has been good at disproving the the “certain knowledge” that complex structures such as avian vision can’t develop in stages (half an eye).  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that there was a global flood 4,500 years ago.  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that the universe and all of its contents can only have been produced by an intelligent actor.

If, then, religion depends on a creator in order to provide a purpose to life, what happens when that creator is no longer a necessary function in the life equation?  Religion steps back in and says it can still help find purpose because science is limited to a natural methodology, whereas through faith there are “other ways of knowing” and science can’t approach those other ways.

Of course, as an atheist, I can look at the pathetic claims to “other ways of knowing” and scoff.  I acknowledge that I have been using very general terms and examples, and in my examples I allow religion to be relatively harmless.  It is a concept that claims an authority it cannot have.  I could simply sit back and say “Well, if some people want to believe, then that’s their business” and I could leave it at that.  With that, I could be just as accommodating as Josh Rosenau or Chris Mooney or Chad Orzel, and then I could whistle on my way nonchalantly.

My problem is that I am not content to leave it at that.  I didn’t become an atheist because of science; it was a slow realization that I was not born a lowly worm.  I was not born dependent on the sacrifice of a man-god and his resurrection in order to gain “salvation.”  I realized that I had no overriding purpose to uncover; I was not born to any certain fate.

I learned that as religion lost its explanatory power on the workings of nature, it clung to its power of redemption and salvation, and these are problems that it created so that it could provide the solution.  I’ll drop the generality of religion and address my specific objection to Christianity.  I was taught that at birth I carried the sin of Adam and Eve and that I needed to practice certain rituals or pray certain prayers to be cleansed of the sin that I never committed.  I needed baptism, confession and contrition to access the creator. In another version of Christianity I needed to be “born again.”  I could never be good enough for the creator on my own, being human.  And being human, I was condemned to be separate from the creator unless I chose the right way to accept redemption.

I am not a sinner.  I have done bad things, but I am not a sinner.  The sin for which I am supposed to be supplicating forgiveness was a sin committed by someone else.  I just couldn’t buy into the idea that I was born evil and unable to become good on my own.

I dropped Christianity.  That was when I ran into the objection that I couldn’t explain origins without God, and therefore I am foolish to be an atheist.  What I find humorous is that when I explain that scientific methodology has disproven the notion of a necessary supernatural designer, or planner, then I am also told that God is “not an explanation for origins, God is inseparable from Creation.”  The goalposts are continually shifted.

And finally, I arrive at my point.  The organizations fighting (thanks to all of you!) to achieve acceptance of solid education in subjects scientific, are bowing first to the demands of religion to say, “But this shouldn’t harm your faith.”  They are granting privilege to religion that it doesn’t deserve, while the defenders of religion are demanding that science conform to faith.   By giving in to this demand, the defenders of science forget that the process of science is an interloper into the security blanket of cherished, certain knowledge.  Science is a dirty bastard, because it doesn’t confirm the answers we want.

In advancing science education, scientists should not accede to such demands to accommodate religious fear of becoming less and less relevant.  What they should instead do is explain the science and let religion and the religious deal with their own issues regarding the implications of the discovery of how nature works.

They’re grownups. they can handle it.

So it’s fitting that the three of us will be on the air together for the last live radio show, Sunday, June 28.

Missionaries tell us that they are saving the world, traveling to foreign lands to help the natives. Of course, “saving the world” means something a little different to those of us who don’t believe there’s a Satan who needs to be battled at every turn. We usually mean saving lives and bettering standards of living, actions that have meaning in the here and now. How do missionaries do in that regard?

Biological anthropologist Greg Laden joins Stephanie Zvan to talk about his experiences with missionaries in the remotest parts of Africa and answer questions about what missions really offer the indigenous populations. He’ll tell us about the good and the bad and let us know where we need to step up to provide secular help uncomplicated by the religion of the missionaries.

This will be the final live Atheists Talk on the radio and the last podcast for a while, until we get the details of the ongoing podcast worked out. If you’re not attending the Pride Parade with the Minnesota Atheists delegation, please consider joining us at Q.Cumbers after the show to celebrate our long and successful radio run.

All three of us will be at Q.Cumbers for the post-show brunch. Mmm, bacon.

We hope to continue Atheists Talk soon in a podcast-only format. We’ll keep you up to date. In the meantime, you can stream our last show and call or email us to participate. Details are here. (Note, you’ll need a Minnesota zip code to stream the show. If you don’t have your own, use 55404.)

We hope to hear from you.