Believing is Seeing

In his important new book, “The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths,” prominent skeptic Michael Shermer makes a strong, science-informed case that the human brain is a “belief engine.” By which he means that our gelatinous CPU of 100 billion neurons and a thousand trillion connections virtually compels us to believe all manner of things – some true, many false; some banal, many bizarre. According to Shermer’s persuasive analysis, we have evolved into compulsive pattern-seekers, adept at finding patterns in all kinds of sensory input. He has labeled this brain process “patternicity,” the first stage in the formation of beliefs. Unfortunately, the intelligent designer who guided evolution (just kidding) forgot to calibrate the processing unit, so, like a sorcerer’s apprentice, it compulsively finds patterns everywhere, even when they are absent from the real-world data. This innate response no doubt served us well during the era of evolutionary adaptation, but the resulting mischief and harm are incalculable in today’s world: we are inundated with toxic, false beliefs. It takes more than pattern-recognition to make a belief. In the second stage, after we have found, or constructed, a pattern, we infuse it with meaning, or intention, through a process Shermer calls “agenticity” (i.e., attributing intentional agency to natural events). These meaningful patterns, both real and constructed, form our beliefs about the nature of reality; and once they are formed, we cling to them tenaciously. In other words, beliefs come first, then we find reasons to support them and to reject arguments and evidence that contradict them. And, somewhat ironically, the smarter we are, the better we are likely to be at coming up with elaborate rationalizations to support our faulty beliefs. We can’t pass off all deluded true believers as ignoramuses.

I am inclined to accept the great majority of Shermer’s analysis, in part because he makes a good case and also because he reinforces points I have been making in my columns about the conflicts between various ideologies and scientific rationality. In one column I characterized humans as natural-born ideologues, citing recent studies showing that disconfirming facts actually strengthened subjects’ false, ideologically-based beliefs!

If Shermer’s synthesis of research and cultural observations is correct, then there is no anchor in reality for many widely held, influential beliefs and belief systems, which means they are free to drift off into ever greater absurdities. True believers, individually and collectively, follow the dictates of their ideologies, ignore contradictory evidence, and cherry-pick what passes for supporting evidence. (Remember: they are motivated to continue to believe what they already believe for emotional and social reasons.)

With several ideologies approaching critical mass, we are now experiencing in this country a veritable epidemic of science/reality denial. I sense growing hordes of ideologues rejecting reason and evidence in favor of spin, propaganda, dogma, and lies. And why not lie? After all, if you not only believe in your ideology but feel certain that it is the one, true way to save humanity, then deception becomes a justifiable tactic, as it is in warfare. Which is precisely how so many of them view their role – as warriors in the great culture war.

In the U.S., leading ideologies are well financed and well organized and able to employ effective techniques of mass persuasion. On the other side, the reality-based community and concerned scientists are at a huge disadvantage trying to combat opponents who hold no respect for the constraints of reason and evidence. Ironically, the disadvantage stems from what were once considered virtues – i.e., rigor and integrity. Scientists eschew oversimplification, sensationalism, distortion, character assassination, and all the other methods so successfully employed by ideologues. Lamentably, those are the very techniques that have proven so effective in advancing right-wing causes. I offer Fox News as exhibit number one.

By comparison, scientific explanations are often complex and difficult, and understanding requires concentration and effort. This is not a level playing field in a country dominated by slogans and populist drivel.

And yet, as Shermer says, science remains our best hope of counteracting our innate, faulty-thinking mechanisms. Dr. Shermer, who may be the world’s best known skeptic, defines his skepticism as follows: “When I call myself a skeptic I simply mean that I take a scientific approach to the evaluation of claims.” And early in “The Believing Mind” he writes, “I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.”

To bolster his point, he quotes the great theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman:

“If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any differenced how beautiful your guess is, how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

(If I may be so presumptuous, I would add “observation” to Feynman’s “experiment.” After all, advanced sciences like astronomy and paleontology are observational rather than experimental. And there’s nothing wrong with that as long as the observations meet high standards of scientific inquiry.)

Anyway, as one reviewer put it, “[Shermer] is . . . aware of the fallibility of intuitions, and willing to take steps to minimize them.” Those steps – the skeptical, scientific approach – demand a disciplined frame of mind that runs contrary to the compulsive “belief engine” in our brain.

Realistically, what is the alternative to skepticism? It’s certainly not believing everything we’re told: just about everyone thinks their false beliefs are true, and we are all skeptical to some degree; but most of us do not have the training to see through faulty logic and spurious claims. After all, there is a highly sophisticated, well-financed persuasion industry out there devoted to exploiting our vulnerabilities in order to promote points of view. Meanwhile, no one seems to be teaching disciplined, critical thinking. As Dr. Harriet Hall says in her review of “The Believing Brain” at Science-Based Medicine, “Our schools tend to teach what science knows rather than how science works.” They teach the content of science but not the method. And we shouldn’t be surprised that even the few students who receive extensive science education are not very good at generalizing the methods of science to real-world problems. Shermer puts it best:

“Our most deeply held beliefs are immune to attack by direct educational tools, especially for those who are not ready to hear contradictory evidence.”

That, I think, is the challenge: to persuade people to listen to contradictory evidence and evaluate their own beliefs accordingly. I would argue that in a nation that respected evidence and reason (unfortunately now receding faster than the most distant galaxies) those whose minds couldn’t be changed by evidence would not have a credible platform in the marketplace of ideas. I mean what is the point of participating in discussion or debate with intransigent ideologues who are essentially salespersons for their respective dogmas? (Mr. President?)

As Dr. Shermer says, the answer to so many of our problems has to lie in education, teaching people how to recognize and thus resist the tactics of often-malevolent snake-oil salesmen who are poisoning our cultural and political atmosphere.

Finally, I would like to recommend several organizations that are doing excellent work in the promotion of science, reason, skepticism, and critical thinking. I urge you to visit these web sites and make use of their information and materials. Most of all, support them so they can take their work to the next level of public awareness. I will list additional sites in future columns.

http://www.randi.org/site/

http://ncse.com/

http://www.theness.com/

http://richarddawkins.net/

http://www.project-reason.org/

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

http://www.skepdic.com/

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

Are Science and Reason Losing the Battle With Ideology?

It sure looks that way to this observer of our irredeemably polarized, zero-sum, increasingly bizarre culture. More on that shortly, but first an enthusiastic endorsement for the work of a fellow columnist here at TPJmagazine. Loren Adams always informs and entertains, and in his July 10 column, “The Curse,” he forcefully captures the life-and-death seriousness of a chronic disease eating away at the constitution of the nation (capital C, too). The disease is the left-right schism, “the great divide” that has long afflicted this country but which we have more or less managed to control, at least since the Civil War. Until now.

Adams says the divide is dangerously widening again, and he lays the blame for the latest crisis in our democracy squarely on the modern Republican Party, which has become an intentional, well-coordinated agent of social destruction:

“[The Republican Party’s] political operatives made a conscious decision three decades ago to win at any cost, including compromising traditional values that moderated our political system to civility and accepted standards of discourse. No longer is there a conscience to constrain; all tactics are on-the-table. As part of the conscious decision to include the unconscionable, the GOP has embraced deceit, fear, greed, and hate as part of its fabric. The composition is damaging to the nation as a whole, not just the party, and they care not. All that matters is [the] objective; winning is the only thing that counts. The end justifies the means.”

Adams sees us decaying, and perhaps dying, as a nation because of the enormous burden the Republicans have deliberately and shamelessly imposed on our always fragile social contract (loyal opposition and all that). I urge you to read his column – or read it again. His rotting-corpse metaphor alone is worth the time.

I agree with Loren nearly a hundred percent. And if our country is not close to death, it is surely on the verge of permanent disability, no longer able to provide the opportunity for a decent standard of living and a sense of security for most of its citizens. And no longer an optimistic, cheerful nation, but a dour, resentful, suspicious, and hostile place. A Republican kind of place.

The toxic Republican Party can be imagined as a big tent bulging with delusional ideologues, not all of them ideologically compatible, except in an opportunistic sense. The point is that the tent is so full of ignorant, brainwashed true believers and opportunists that no one who respects reason and evidence will be inclined to seek admission to participate in good faith. Looking inside the Republican big top, the most prominent recognizable ideologies on display are: radical political and social conservatism, fundagelical religion, libertarianism, the strange new concoction known as the Tea Party, and an assortment of odious, far-right hate groups. All of them are extreme in their ideological certitude, and fanatically determined. Working together as they do, they constitute a formidable political army with its own ministry of propaganda, the ubiquitous right-wing broadcast media (although it looks like Faux News could be in for a bit of a rough ride – and may they suffer the torments of the damned).

Characterizing right-wing ideologues as delusional is, admittedly, borderline redundant. Ideology, by its very nature, leads to denial of reality and a tendency towards fanaticism. Here’s why: Ideologues turn science and reason upside down, starting with non-negotiable, faith-based premises and then twisting, distorting, or denying all evidence that does not conform to their preconceived “truths.” And along with the majority, including many on the left, they extol faith as a virtue, even though it is diametrically opposed to science. Last time I checked, science was the only reliable method of advancing our understanding, prediction, and control of reality. It is a fair question to ask what insights ideology has ever provided about the nature of reality?

Because they publicly proclaim speculative, non-evidence-based beliefs to be The Truth, ideologues of every stripe almost invariably end up in a position from which their only face-saving option is to double down and use every available tactic they can get away with, including: denialism; lying (and do they ever lie – to themselves and others); demonizing the opposition and those who don’t conform to their narrow, usually regressive, world view; employing every logical fallacy ever cataloged; using political power to disenfranchise the poor and the elderly; aggressively and deceitfully undermining science and science education when it contradicts their unsupported beliefs. The U.S. furnishes a prime example of a society threatened by an epidemic of toxic ideologies run amok.

It is easy to come up with prominent and familiar ideologies that exemplify all or most of the above traits: communism, fascism, U.S. conservatism, Islamism, religion and the paranormal, alternative medicine, the anti-vaccination movement, conspiracy theories, and perhaps some environmental and animal-rights movements. There are ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum; but I’m arguing that those on the political/cultural/religious right are, by far, the most dangerous at this point in time. So let me take this opportunity to once again issue my recurring warning: The right wing in the U.S. is poised to gain power – to win at any cost, as Loren Adams puts it – and the first and highest priority for all reasonable Americans must be to keep power out of their hands. This is a Paul Revere moment, but you’d never know it from the business-as-usual demeanor of the U.S. mainstream media. Or the accommodationist Obama administration. Or a great many progressives and moderates. And the rest of the world just shakes their heads as we Americans go about our lives as if things were normal, not as if we were on the brink of forfeiting all our hard-won social progress.

I predict that if the right does gain power in this election cycle, the Bush administration will look like a sunday school picnic by comparison. (Go on, try to tell me I’m wrong about that. But be sure to read the religious and political rights’ own widely available words before you do.) What we’re seeing now from the House Republican majority is just weak tea compared to the toxic brew they’ll force down our throats once they’ve consolidated power. It doesn’t take much digging to see what’s coming, including the final nail in the coffin of meaningful democracy.)

As I said, ideologues share a strong, emotional, often fanatical, devotion to a set of core beliefs that are not verified, not adequately supported by sound, real-world evidence. Their fanaticism pushes them to organize and form coalitions with compatible groups and to probe for weaknesses and push for advantages in every domain. They are often well-disciplined, well-funded, and relentless. A perfect example of discipline comes from the protestant religious right and the Catholic Church. Protestant fundamentalism has a rather notorious antipathy to Catholicism and often refers to the Church as “the great whore” and the pope as the “anti-Christ.” They say those things even with five conservative Catholics and one moderate Catholic sitting on the Supreme Court. So where is the right-wing Catholic outrage at such defamation? The point is that even with such profound animosities festering just below the surface, conservatives are still disciplined enough to keep the lid on their differences in the interest of winning the bigger political battle against hated liberalism.

So are the regressives winning? Yeah, I think so. It is hugely dispiriting to see how much power, influence and support the delusional right has and how so many Americans have been duped into voting for malevolent ideologues and against their own interests. So while I agree with Loren Adams about Republican tactics and ruthlessness, I would add that I think the root cause of conservative personality disorder lies in an innate human proclivity for ideology. We are natural-born ideologues, which may have served us well in the Stone Age but is lethal now. Reverting to pre-Enlightenment superstitions is no longer a survival option.

The only long-term antidote to cultural decay is Jefferson’s informed citizenry, a rational majority that understands the primacy of genuine evidence as the basis for belief, decision-making, and the preservation of constitutional democracy. Obviously we are a long, long way from that ideal. For the present, the goal is to keep the deluded fanatics out of power so at least we’ll have a chance to begin to work towards a nation of informed, responsible, critical thinkers. This will only occur through a vastly improved education system, an undertaking the right will continue to undermine at every stage. And right now it looks as if they will succeed before the task even gets underway.

As Dr. Michael Shermer says in his new book, “The Believing Brain,” the way forward is to embrace the spirit of scientific inquiry. Not just esoteric laboratory science, but widespread scientific thinking throughout the populace. As Shermer says,

“I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.”

Science is intrinsically skeptical and thus resists the tendency towards faith-based certitude, or ideology. Skepticism is really just applied scientific reasoning that says I won’t accept anything as even provisionally true without sufficient evidence (hence, atheism). Any other attitude towards reality opens the door to all kinds of unsupported nonsense, which is where we are now as a culture. Lamentably, that’s where intellectually undisciplined human nature takes us. The antidote is the acquired discipline of skeptical, scientific rigor.

Many right-wing opponents of science – religious, cultural, corporate, and political – love to trot out the canard that science is just another faith-based belief system. To which I say, when feeling charitable, “That’s total rubbish!” Science is not based on “faith,” but on evidence and reason. Look at it this way: All our reliable knowledge is based on evidence from observation and experiment. That isn’t “faith” in the unknown or the unverified, it’s confidence in the known based on centuries of disciplined investigation. Just look at the results that accrued once humans started using and refining the scientific method! The heart of the method is called induction, which boils down to this: if we can document and/or produce a cause-and-effect pattern repeatedly under given conditions, it is likely the pattern will occur the next time those conditions obtain, and possibly under somewhat different conditions as well (which can be the basis for a systematic replication). That’s not faith, that’s practical common sense; we rely on science because it works. I’m sure there’s no need to provide examples of the prodigious accomplishments of science.

Of course science can’t say with absolute certainty that just because something has always occurred in a certain way that it always will; that’s why scientists readily concede that their laws and theories are provisional – a disconfirming observation might occur at any time. But just because something is theoretically possible – and damn near anything is – doesn’t mean it’s real. I guess we can’t even prove beyond doubt that reality is real; but it’s pointless to let that kind of philosophical uncertainty impede us, so we go with what works. And that’s not “faith,” at least not in the sense intended by science deniers.

So we’re justified in saying the sun will rise in the east – tomorrow and every day. We COULD turn out to be wrong at some point; but what possible value is there in doubting something that has always proven to be true? Better to say that under specified observational or experimental conditions, we have ALWAYS gotten this result, so we carry on with confidence it will persist in the future. Eventually we come to know enough about various aspects of reality to make reliable predictions and to exert impressive control over real-world outcomes. That’s science: empirical, pragmatic, highly effective. It’s not absolute, and it’s not without difficulties – after all, it’s a human enterprise. Still we just keep at it and trust it because of its track record: and we keep seeing progress in our knowledge, understanding, prediction, and control. The scientific method works where nothing else comes close. Certainly not any ideology.

Wading Into the Shallows, Part 2

The shallows I’m talking about are virtual cesspools of right-wing religious dogma that pollute the cultural and political landscape of the U.S., especially in the South (where I live) and the Midwest. The outrages being committed in the name of dogmatic religious myths are growing, as the faithful and their political cohorts in God’s Own Party continue their relentless assault on vulnerable people’s lives and our democratic traditions.

True believers – those Biblical literalists who buy into the Talking Snake of Eden, the 6,000-year-old earth/universe, the idiotic Noah’s Ark story, the coexistence of dinosaurs and humans, homophobia, creationism, etc. – are no doubt offended by the term, dogma. I’m sure they would prefer something more respectful, such as beliefs, or faith. So I thought about it, briefly, but I kept seeing images of blathering fundamentalist gasbags like John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham strutting their shtick. And I thought of all the “Left Behind” rapture lunacy; and regressive “leaders” like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, recent Catholic convert Newt Gingrich, and Texas Governor Rick Perry. And religion-inspired denial of established scientific facts, coupled with intimidating pressure on school systems and teachers to present creationism alongside evolution in science classrooms. So my first thought was, “What a huge and obscene blot on the image of the world’s most prominent secular nation. Followed quickly by a second thought: It’s late in the game and those fanatics are winning! Just consider how much damage they will yet do in all those state legislatures they control.

Too bad the Constitutional separation of church and state that has been a defining feature of our nation is rapidly being relegated to a mere technicality, honored, if at all, in the breach more than the observance. The religious majority, aided by conservative courts, always seem to find ways to impose their 14th-Century values on the rest of us. And now that they’re on a roll, it seems only a matter of time until the ultra-conservative majority on the Supreme Court gets the separation-of-church-and-state issue clearly in its crosshairs. The majority of those justices are right-wing Catholic ideologues first, legal scholars second. They are of the same ilk as religious apologists who can rationalize any belief, regardless of the preponderance of disconfirming evidence. And also lawyers, whose modus operandi is finding plausible ways to cherry-pick evidence, to obfuscate, and to frame issues to support pre-determined positions. And they share the extreme political goals of the latest breed of radical conservatives. It’s enough to make us long for the good old days of the “moderate” Bush administration. So what we have here is a Supreme Court majority that’s an integral part of a well-organized right-wing movement that holds the “Holy Word of (their) God” above the Constitution. Far above. So when the chips are down, they will manufacture legal justifications for siding with the religious-right on church-state Constitutional issues. I doubt that any Republican these days can be trusted to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution.

Anyway, if the term dogma upsets the dogmatic, that’s too damn bad. When dealing with fanatics, no good can come from phony respect, especially at the expense of accuracy. And the fanatics who are bent on theocratic domination will only view any respect from the left, feigned or otherwise, as a sign of weakness to exploit to their advantage in their long-term war against all forms of enlightenment.

All that said, I am happy to acknowledge that there are still a great many non-fundamentalist persons of faith in this country who are tolerant and open-minded, including some long-suffering friends who have put up with my intemperate rants for years. And let me add that I reserve the respectful term “person of faith” for those believers who, like my liberal and moderate religious friends, support our democratic traditions, value cultural diversity, and consistently strive to be tolerant, fair and compassionate. I realize that the great majority of liberals and moderates, like most readers of this column, are people of faith and, despite our differences, I don’t want to alienate them. Now If only they will join us freethinkers in vigorous condemnation of the religious right and the threat it poses to Constitutional democracy. I fear their silence has the unintended consequence of lending support to the fundamentalist theocratic fascists, who constantly boast about the Christian majority in this country. But not all Christians are cut from the same cloth – far from it; and I like to think that liberal and moderate Christians are closer, in most ways that matter, to rational, evidence-respecting non-theists like me than they are to fundamentalists who support the likes of Palin, Bachman, Perry, et al. Like their cohorts on the political right, the religious right operates from arrogant, dogmatic certainty and is perpetually in attack mode. Bipartisan fantasies like those espoused by our president simply play into their hands.So does silence.

No one disputes that organized religious groups do much good; but in the case of fundagelicals, there is abundant reason to think their primary goal is proselytizing – saving souls from eternal damnation. After all, if you were totally convinced that this life was but the briefest audition for an eternal role singing in God’s choir in the hereafter, saving your own and others‘ souls would quite sensibly be your highest priority. But if you turned out to be wrong, you might have wasted a lot of time and effort, and also done a lot of harm inculcating children and impressionable adults with fears of hellfire and damnation.

In the unlikely case it isn’t obvious, let me go on record as saying I hold the religious right in contempt. Their primitive, shallow belief system violates virtually everything I value – logic, reason, sound evidence, and good sense. They proudly promote a simplistic abdication of our legacy of knowledge and understanding, a retrograde submission to natural tendencies that evolved to enable us to cope with the rigors of physical survival during the Stone Age. They dogmatically (not rationally or evidentially) reject the powerful intellectual and problem-solving tools of science. Too bad, because we didn’t attain our current level of knowledge and technological achievement based on our natural tendencies, but in spite of them.

To use a religious cliche, I’m well aware that a lot of what I’ve said can be classified as preaching to the choir. Except for this: far too many liberals/progressives underestimate the seriousness and urgency of the threat from the religious right. We liberals have been steeped in respect for the Constitution and its clear provisions supporting religious freedom, including the freedom to reject religion. We have a long history of tolerance and respect for differences, and it goes against our nature to attack people based on their religious beliefs. But we err, I think, far too much on the side of giving the benefit of the doubt to people who vilify us without mercy, who vocally deride and distort almost every value we stand for. Like our well-meaning president, we are far too nice and far too understanding towards a group that’s at war with the Enlightenment values that shaped our Constitution. These fundamentalists are bent on nothing less than gaining control at any cost and remaking America as a Christian theocracy.

So while I hate to do it, I must chastise my liberal and moderate friends, irrespective of their religious views, for being far too tolerant of the madness of the religious right. It is very late in the game, and the well-organized religious fanatics already have a lock on one of our major political parties. So, contra President Obama, it is way past time to abandon the suicidal notion that we can reason with them or work with them constructively. Instead, we must match their determination. How about we start by dropping any pretense that they are rational people or that anything they are saying is even worth talking about? How about recognizing that our overriding goal must be to do everything in our power to prevent them from expanding their power, before it’s too late? We can start by publicly rebuking them any time they express their crazy ideas and by exposing their anti-democratic agenda at every opportunity. We need to match their determination, go into attack mode on all fronts, and make our voice heard in the timid, bought-and-paid-for mainstream media before they completely own it.

So let’s stop acting like the current crop of democrats, stop treating brainwashed fanatics like they’re worth talking to. If you doubt this advice, please read these three credible voices of reason, three former religious-right insiders who are sounding the alarm about what’s happening to us. I’m speaking of Frank Schaeffer, John Lofton, and Dan Barker. And there’s a fourth, Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who may be the most important insider voice of all.

Okay, I’ll wrap this up. As I said in my previous column, I have no interest in debating deists about the existence of a creator-god/intelligent designer who jumpstarted it all but otherwise takes no active role. However, some readers might be interested in a small sample of the kinds of questions that cause me to reject Bible-based theism as even a possibility. The theism of the Abrahamic religions (and also Mormonism) goes far beyond deism and purely logical argument, making very specific and detailed claims about the nature of an anthropomorphic, personal god, mostly based on the alleged truth of “His” Holy Books. Now in this day and age it shouldn’t be necessary to point out that a great many of those claims about creation and the nature of reality are provably false, making claims of Biblical inerrancy ludicrous.

Believers also make unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims that their god takes an active role in the world, works miracles, and even “speaks” to them. The latest prominent right-wing buffoon to put his primitive superstition on display is Texas Republican governor, Rick Perry. Can you believe that he actually expects to make an impact on real-world problems by holding a mass prayer rally in Houston? It is becoming increasingly evident that prayer rallies are among the best ideas Republicans can come up with. They sure has hell can’t govern effectively.

Anyway, here are a few questions for Biblical literalists:

Why would the omnipotent Creator of the Cosmos hide himself and go to such great lengths to make his existence seem improbable?

Why would He make it evident, based on the best science, that the earth and the universe are actually billions of years old? For example, why would He distribute the fossils in strata so as to create overwhelming evidence for gradual evolution over millions of years? Why would he create a 6000-year-old universe and give it the appearance of great age (13.75 billion years, to be precise)?

Why would such an incredibly sophisticated Being choose to hide Himself and all evidence for His existence and yet deem believing in Him to be the most important virtue? That is, why does He make “faith” in Him a condition for eternal bliss and avoiding eternal torment? (If you listen to the Southern Baptists and other fundamentalist sects, an “eternal hell” is real and is where most humans are going to end up.)

Supposedly He knows Everything that has happened or ever will happen – every thought and action, from the most sublime to the most depraved. Now that’s way beyond mere sophistication! In fact, it is so ultra-sophisticated that it makes His petty concerns “recorded” in the Old Testament seem totally absurd. Doesn’t it?

Why would the book He wrote, or inspired, make the laughable claim that the entire earth was flooded at the time the Sumerians were happily brewing beer without noticing that they were breathing under water?

Why would His most strident believers be so conspicuously ignorant and bigoted?

As I said, these are just a few questions off the top. There are many, many more.

So in conclusion, religious fundamentalists talk and act like they expect some special privilege to be granted to their religious beliefs; but as soldiers in the cultural and political wars, they deserve no privilege to be protected from criticism. Everyone understands that democracy is meaningless unless it permits vigorous debate. But they have no commitment to Constitutional democracy, which is an obstacle to the domination they seek.

Finally, a closing quotation from Christopher Hitchens:

“Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.”

Amen.

Wading Into the Shallows, Part 1

I don’t get it – never did, never will. On second thought, saying “never will” sounds a bit arrogant, too much like the pronouncements of the deluded religious-right ideologues I’m always criticizing. Of course I can’t predict my future with certainty; but then neither can you, or anyone. Especially not those religious fanatics who are always so spectacularly and embarrassingly wrong about everything. (Considering the preposterous claims they make, it’s hard to believe they even have the capacity to be embarrassed; but they are certainly an embarrassment to the rational citizens of this nation).

The “it” I don’t get is the whole concept of a supernatural realm – ghosts, angels, demons, gods, etc. Here I’ll focus on theism, which has the distinction of being the dominant world view in this hyper-religious country. Theism is the entirely speculative belief that there is an invisible creator-god who takes an active role in earthly affairs and maintains a close relationship with humans, whom he created from dust and ribs as the proud culmination of his work. In other words, a personal god who created us human mammals in his own image. And please note that theists make many testable claims about the nature of reality, one of the most grandiose being that their holy book is literally true in every particular. Also note that this absurd and provably false position forces theists to invent the most stupendous rationalizations, all too often with an air of pretentious, solemn piety implying that they understand something of cosmic significance that you better accept if you know what’s good for you.

Anyway, in the spirit of “Never say never,” and also in the much more important spirit of skeptical, scientific openness to new evidence, I must leave room for at least a smidgen of doubt. So I’ll just say that in all likelihood I will never get it. Of course there is always the possibility of a dementia-induced, deathbed conversion. But as Christopher Hitchens said, that wouldn’t really be me, so pay no attention if that should come to pass.

Understand that I’m not talking about deism, the belief in a creator/intelligent designer that does not intervene in the world. And while I can’t agree with them, I have no quarrel with deists, as long as they aren’t lending support to the fundamentalists/evangelicals (fundagelicals) who are trying to reverse the Enlightenment and turn our society into some kind of a non-thinking, science-denying theocracy in alliance with oppressive, right-wing politics. Jesus hates social programs, dontcha know?

From a practical standpoint, it seems to me that deism is virtually indistinguishable from agnosticism or atheism. How’s that? Well, the major point of contention between deists and nonbelievers seems to be how it all got started in the first place. Beyond that, deists are free to embrace the scientific account of nature, including evolution, in its entirety. They don’t claim to know the mind of some god or to know all the “revealed” answers to the meaning and purpose of life. And they don’t generally claim that features of living organisms (the eye; the notorious bacterial flagellum) reveal the hand of an intelligent designer who tinkered with the ongoing process of evolution. Unlike theists, they are not arrogant. And make no mistake about it: fundagelical theism is a supremely arrogant belief system. What else can be said of people who claim to know the absolute truth about all the big questions without a shred of solid evidence?

So if deists prefer to believe that a hidden and undetectable supernatural being designed and created the cosmos, I can’t prove them wrong, and I really don’t care to try. Unlike theists, their philosophical arguments and speculations are not shallow and dogmatic, but neither are they compelling. Deists have not marshaled enough real-world evidence to prove their hypotheses, and their god-in-hiding remains an inference.

To me, the only sound position is not to claim to know the answers to the big questions. In that respect I go along with Richard Dawkins, who points out that any intelligent designer would be far more complex – and therefore even more improbable – than an undesigned, natural universe. In the absence of evidence, postulating a creator doesn’t explain a thing but just pushes the origin question back to another level that itself requires explanation. Who’s to say what may have transpired in the fullness of time? The possibilities seem limitless. For example, it can be shown mathematically that in a multiverse that generates universes with different physical laws, everything that can happen eventually will happen. It is possible that a hugely powerful intelligent designer of this universe was the product of a lengthy period of evolution in another universe that itself was designed. Or that humans (or their successors) a million years from now will be designing their own universes. And so on. Who knows? It’s all speculation, isn’t it? But you’ll never hear that from a theist. They’ve got their culturally privileged, shallow little story and they’re sticking to it.

The late, great Carl Sagan took this position: Anything, however improbable, is possible, but only as long as the claims being made are general. When they start getting specific (miracles, the efficacy of prayer, prophecies), evidence must, of absolute necessity, come into play and be taken seriously. Which strongly implies that the hypothesized creator/intelligent designer of the deists bears almost no resemblance to the anthropomorphized, interventionist god who “speaks” to the Christian fundagelicals, the Mormons, and the Muslims. Of course Christians, who typically grasp at any straw that seems to support their presumptuous claims, want to include deists as their allies when it suits their purposes (example: appropriating the founders’ rhetorical term “nature’s God” as evidence they intended to establish a Christian nation, which is the exact opposite of the separation of church and state they really intended.) The idea that deism supports Christian dogma is, to put it bluntly, self-serving bullshit. Deism is much closer to a secular, naturalistic world view than it is to theism. Deism doesn’t make absurd claims about a six-thousand-year-old universe, talking snakes, virgin births, angels and demons, a Garden of Eden, heaven and hell, etc. It doesn’t deny established science. It is simply the position that, all things considered, it seems more likely to them that the universe came from conscious design rather than natural processes. I think most deists respect evidence and would agree that the evidence we have doesn’t prove the existence of a god and certainly doesn’t support the mythology of the petulant, jealous, vengeful, and fickle god of the Abrahamic religions. In contrast, theists look for any support they can dredge up to bolster their politicized claim that this is a Christian nation. It’s all a big god tent when they want something; the rest of the time they preach that all those others are going to burn in hell for worshipping the wrong gods, the wrong version of a god, or no gods. No one I know of has made this point better than Sam Harris.

Being a practical person, I’m inclined to go along with Thomas Jefferson, a deist, who said, “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Now there’s an example of the kind of tolerance that needs to be more widely practiced in this diverse culture. Unfortunately, tolerance is anathema to U.S. fundagelical leaders who are hankering to replace our Constitutional democracy with a Bible-based, oppressive, theocratic system of law.

Let us not overlook Mormonism, a newer (circa 1830) theistic faith that makes specific, testable claims. Among other provably false claims, their scripture says that three groups of immigrants sailed to the new world from the near east, starting with refugees from the Tower of Babel in 2200 BC, followed much later by two other groups from Jerusalem, around 600 BC. After a series of wars, so the tale goes, the unbelievers in Christ (never mind that he had not yet been born on the other side of the world) prevailed to become the ancestors of today’s native Americans. Now get this: Shortly after his crucifixion in Jerusalem, Jesus came to America, ministered to and converted the inhabitants. (Bet you didn’t know that!) And the whole crazy story goes on and on from there. Of course those clean-cut young men in the white shirts and ties who come to your door with the Mormon message won't be telling you all that. They probably won't mention magic underwear, either, or the Mormons’ pivotal role in bankrolling the successful opposition to gay marriage in California.

But of course in the U.S. we’re supposed to respect others' religious beliefs. Which leads me to ask just what is meant by respect? And why do prominent religious leaders keep saying and doing things that are impossible to respect? What the term seems to mean in the U.S. is something like this: “Keep your big freethinker mouth shut so we can continue to enjoy our privileged status and pursue our theocratic agenda without having to justify our unsupported beliefs.” In the case of the Mormons and Scientologists, it's also so they don't have to publicly reveal much of the weirdness that conflicts with comfortable, traditional beliefs. That unfamiliar stuff might drive away prospective converts before they have been softened up. Better to suck them in first with feel-good appeals until they've made a commitment, then let them in on the bizarre secrets of the inner sanctum.

Anyway, if I had lived in the 1800’s, 1700’s, or earlier, I probably would have been a deist, along with Jefferson, Madison, and other enlightened figures of the time. The world and the life on it certainly have the “appearance of design,” as Richard Dawkins has said; and before Darwin, there were few, if any, plausible naturalistic hypotheses to explain the bewildering complexity and intricate organization of the natural world. It really does look like it was designed. Charles Darwin certainly thought so before his painstaking observations and research led him to the idea of evolution by natural selection, which has been called the greatest idea anyone ever had. What a remarkable man; what an intellectual giant! Naturally, the ignorant, contemptible fundies demonize him along with what has become the established fact of evolution.

Now that I’m all worked up again over the ignorance and arrogance of the toxic religious right, I’m really looking forward to writing Part 2, in which I’ll refute the provably false claim that religion is the foundation of morality. That column will also deal with the slanderous religious-right meme that atheists and agnostics cannot be moral. Which leads me to reprise the following quotation from “Unknown”:

“Morality is doing what’s right regardless of what you’ve been told; religion is doing what you’ve been told regardless of what is right.”

The Rationalizing Animal, Part I

Yep, that’s us, Homo sapiens, the much vaunted human race, “the paragon of animals,” widely believed to have been fashioned from dust and ribs by the omnipotent and benevolent Creator of the Cosmos – and in His own image, no less. That’s us, the only earthly species capable of rationalizing, a capacity we constantly push to delusional, self-aggrandizing extremes, especially here in the U.S. in recent years.

Webster defines rationalize as follows: (to) “attempt to explain or justify (one's own or another's behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate.” My own working definition goes along these lines: making up plausible, often elaborate and ingenious explanations to support ideologically mandated beliefs or to defend the perceived integrity of one’s self concept.

The use of rationalization as a “defense mechanism” has been studied extensively by psychologists and is one of the key elements of cognitive dissonance theory. This venerable theory posits that conflicting ideas held simultaneously create an uncomfortable emotional feeling (dissonance) that motivates efforts to relieve it. The most intense dissonance results from information that threatens to undermine strongly held beliefs that are integral to one’s self-concept or public identity. Whatever motivates it on any particular occasion, rationalization is the self-serving opposite of objectivity, the opposite of basing one’s beliefs and opinions on evidence and reason. It’s what we humans naturally do, something we’re really good at, at least when playing to a sympathetic audience or to ourselves in the theater of our own mind.

Rationalization is by no means the only mechanism for reducing dissonance: other time-honored, universal techniques include confirmation bias, denial, blame, and changing one’s actions or beliefs. The last is admirable when done with the intention of bringing behavior and beliefs in line with evidence and sound reasoning. Call it scientific thinking, which seems comparatively rare outside of scientific circles. And as I have argued in earlier columns, it does not come naturally, but requires training and discipline. Even many scientists appear to abandon it as soon as they step outside their science milieu.

So once again I am compelled to return to my recurring, doomsday theme of the fatal flaws of human nature. Now, more than ever, it’s essential we get things right. Now, more than ever, too many of us are denying and rejecting science and reason.

“How’s that?” someone might ask. “Isn’t that very human nature you decry the reason for our survival? Didn’t it see us through much more difficult challenges in our distant past?”

To which I must unequivocally answer, “Yes and maybe.” If our evolved nature, in all its stupendous complexity, had not been adapted to the conditions of the ancient environment, we wouldn’t be here to argue about it. So evolution clearly worked for the human species, to such a degree that, for better or for worse, we now dominate a small planet – except, of course, for the things that are beyond our control. What’s discouraging is how many of those things appear to be self-inflicted and wholly preventable.

But the real question is about our future, and whether we even have one. As I understand evolution, it is, by our standards of reckoning time, gradual. As in very, very slow, except at the microscopic level. Evolution is also local, which is to say that species gradually evolve to survive in their local habitats. If the habitat changes too quickly, the glacially slow process of natural selection cannot keep pace and the species may go extinct.

Now consider humanity’s contemporary habitat, planet earth, that has changed so rapidly in the past few hundred years (which, of course, is a tiny blip in evolutionary time). Biologically we are not significantly different from the people who founded this nation. Yet some of the planetary physical and social changes we have wrought since then are so ominous that it’s difficult even to be cautiously optimistic. But I remain optimistic in this limited sense: We have the knowledge and the intellectual tools to cope, even at this late hour; but we must choose to use them. Unfortunately, there are formidable obstacles of our own making standing in the way, foremost of which are primitive belief systems that have gained alarming traction in this country. I’m speaking of right-wing political and religious dogmas, which I view as dangerous, collective mental illnesses.

I’m not qualified by training or knowledge to describe and explain biological human nature, a fascinating topic that is under active and fruitful scientific investigation. But I am persuaded that it has been shown to be a real and meaningful concept, that we are not blank slates inscribed only by our respective environments. Any more than we are special creations implanted with immaterial minds, supernatural souls, and free will, whatever that incoherent concept can possibly mean.

We are the same species that has been on this planet for something on the order of 200,000 years; and it’s beginning to look as if our technological success has dangerously exceeded our scientific self-understanding and collective maturity. That’s why I think it’s of utmost importance to help sound the alarm that a worthwhile future depends upon accepting the fact that we ourselves are fully natural creatures and not the quasi-mystical beings of ancient mythologies. The latter viewpoint is where our human nature has taken us over the eons, and it is simply no longer viable – the world is just too dangerous. I worry along with Sam Harris “that religion is one of the forces that has balkanized our world” and we won’t be able to survive our religious differences indefinitely. I’m also on board with Richard Dawkins, who concluded his classic book “The Selfish Gene” with these stirring words:

"The point I am making now is that, even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight – our capacity to simulate the future in imagination – could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term ones …We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We ... have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."

Which brings me back to religion in this country, specifically the fundamentalist/evangelical strains that are major sources of “the selfish memes of our indoctrination.” These religions aggressively assert that virtually all the important moral, ethical, and political answers are contained in a particular ancient holy book. Never mind that it’s filled with brutality, misogyny, and all manner of bizarre and inhumane ideas. According to believers, it was directly inspired by a supernatural, all-powerful Creator and therefore it is the Absolute Truth. The faith-heads who are guided by the words in this book are well organized and constitute an alarming cultural and political force. There seems to be no limit to their use of rationalization, denial, blame – all the mechanisms discussed above – to defend their primitive world view against the dissonance of the modern world, especially scientific evidence and reason.

My next installment, “The Rationalizing Animal, Part II,” will present chapter and verse – a generous sample of the horrors found in the Bible as well as the bizarre words of some of the most prominent fundagelical leaders. It is important to hear what these aspiring theocrats actually believe, because they are deadly serious; and if their ideas prevail we are all in for some real-life horrors. With the Republican majority in the House and in state houses across the nation, we’re already getting a sense of what could be in store. In the abortion wars, for example, they’re proposing to force women to carry the fetuses of rapists to term. And that’s just one example in a nationwide onslaught of irrationality based on primitive religion.

One of the accusations leveled against the so-called new atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, et al.) is that they caricature religion. But as Harris writes, “We do no such thing. We simply . . . take the specific claims of religion seriously.” And all of us need to be aware of what those claims are, because many of them are egregiously incompatible with the Constitution and our democratic traditions.

Another accusation is that the new atheists either don’t understand or else ignore more sophisticated theology. It must be conceded that Dawkins has made many provocative comments, including “What makes anyone think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?” So in fairness, let me conclude with recent words from Dr. William Lane Craig, arguably the most sophisticated fundamentalist theologian in the country. He is talking about the genocide and infanticide the Old Testament God ordered the Israelites to carry out against the Canaanites:

“So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. . . . the death of these children was actually their salvation.”

Now there’s some of that old time “sophisticated theology” for you. Genocide and infanticide are just hunky-dory as long as God commands it. Makes you wonder how widespread that kind of thinking is in our democracy?

The wonderful non-theist writer Greta Christina asks why statements like Craig’s don’t get more press, why he hasn’t been widely condemned from Christian pulpits and in church publications across the land?

“Because the things he said are not that unusual. . . . Because lots of people share his views. . . . Because these kinds of contortions are far too common in religious morality. Because all too often, religion twists even the most fundamental human morality into positions that, in any other circumstance, most people would see as repulsive, monstrous, and entirely indefensible.”

Rationalize, deny, blame – anything to maintain their depraved belief that every word in their Holy Bible is literally true. So I’m also asking, where are the moderate Christian voices? Why aren’t they forcefully repudiating the hatred and lunacy being promulgated in the name of their god? Back in my Catholic youth we used to pity and/or ridicule these Holy Roller religious nuts. Now they have vast political power and everyone’s afraid of them. Well, fear is one thing; but totally misplaced respect is something else. Why can’t moderates stand up and say that what the religious right espouses is nonsense?

In the meantime the fundies’ political influence keeps growing, with potentially devastating consequences for women, children, education, freedom of expression, world peace . . .

With All Due Respect

With characteristic wit and sarcasm, H.L. Mencken had this comment on the prevailing social norm granting respect to religion:

“We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

Like so many of Mencken’s cynical bon mots – and you’ll thank me for this link – this one was the product of much careful thought. He barely concedes a grudging, limited respect to religious faith and only for the implied, pragmatic reason that it’s good to try to get along with others when discussing emotion-laden subjects where argument is pointless.

It sounds like Mencken was advocating toleration rather than respect. He certainly did not favor anything like genuine and sincere respect for religion based on admiration, honor, or deference. He was, in fact, a staunch atheist who often skewered creationism, fundamentalism, organized religion, and theism.

I certainly agree with the notion that we should as a rule try to refrain from expressing opinions that may cause offense or hurt others’ feelings. Keeping quiet about certain topics is generally the way to go in any normal, mutually respectful society.

Ah, but there’s the rub: I hate to tell you we no longer live in that kind of society (not that we ever did). These days we’re deep in the throes of a destructive culture war that was started by ignorant, arrogant, and aggressively intolerant people on the religious and political right. Given this nasty, menacing reality, a more apt analogy for our times would sound more like this:

Those other fellows on the religious and political right not only believe that their wives are beautiful and their children smart, but they openly complain that we and our wives and children are ugly and dumb, and moreover we brought it on ourselves and we’re a threat to all decent, respectable people. At least to my ear that’s how the Beckian melodrama comes across from bigoted, repressive, right-wing religious and political leaders and their media shills. (This time I won’t even discuss their endemic hypocrisy.)

So Does Religion Deserve Respect?

In a word, no. And here I’ll begin to explain why. In this country religion has a huge and, in my view, generally negative influence on culture and politics and is undeserving of sincere and genuine respect. However, in the interest of not offending more people than necessary, I want to make a few important distinctions – call it a disclaimer, if you will:

First, I have lost interest in debating the existence of a god or gods. I paid my dues long ago and made up my mind about supernatural entities, and I have not encountered any arguments worth thinking about in a very long time. So on that subject I’ll go along with Thomas Jefferson, who famously said, “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” With so many strongly held beliefs and shades of belief out there in the teeming marketplace of U.S.culture, religious tolerance is essential to the maintenance of a peaceful society. But it goes without saying that tolerance must be mutual, and in this country it’s not.

Second, I have no quarrel with moderate believers who uphold Jefferson’s dictum regarding the absolute necessity of maintaining a strict wall of separation between church and state. I just wish those moderate religious folks could join us infidels in denouncing the menacing theocratic trend in one of our two major political parties. Or one and a half, if you count the loony Tea Party. (Just because they’re ignorant lunatics doesn’t mean they won’t prevail. I’m starting to think almost anything is possible in this crazy-quilt nation. Anything, that is, except rational, evidence-based decision-making.)

Third, it distresses me that my conclusions about the religion of Islam are at odds with the position taken by so many Western liberals, truly progressive people whom I admire and consider to be comrades in the great culture war raging across this country. I’m sorry, but contrary to disingenuous Muslim propaganda and conventional progressive wisdom, Islam is not a religion of peace whose reputation has been sullied by a minority of violent extremists. In his book, The End of Faith, Sam Harris provided five pages of quotations from the Qur’an that he called “a litany of sacred hatred.” He added that those quotations were far from exhaustive and far from the worst.

The bottom-line point of my lengthy disclaimer is simply this: It would never occur to me to write a column like this if religion were a benign matter of individual conscience accompanied by genuine tolerance across the broad spectrum of belief and non belief. Believe me, I don’t want to be in this place. But the problem is that a politically powerful religious faction – the religious right – is trying to break my leg. They are exploiting the social norm of respect for religion to their own advantage while using their scary political power to undermine virtually everything I value about this country. And in that matter I think I speak for the great majority of progressives. We understand the corrosive nature of the army of fanatics who place their Bible-based religious certainty far above their respect for the laws and democratic traditions of this country.

Most believers – notably Muslims worldwide and their fundagelical counterparts here on the religious right – think their religions deserve special treatment. Call it a sacredness exemption – not only from taxes and other legal requirements, but from any form of criticism. This immunity is lethally enforced by law in Islamic nations; it is aided and abetted by discriminatory customs, laws, and court decisions in the U.S. Christianity is unquestionably privileged in this country in a great many ways that strain or violate the First Amendment. But as I said, they put their version of “God’s word” above their loyalty to the Constitution.

In the view of Muslim and Christian fundamentalists – and Muslim is tantamount to fundamentalist – their faiths come directly from the creator of the universe and deserve to be placed on a higher plane than mere mundane considerations like reason, evidence, and constitutional law. Their highest loyalty, under threat of everlasting punishment, is to their version of the all-knowing and all-seeing creator-god as interpreted by their chosen religious leaders. The perfect word of God (or Allah) as recorded in the Bible (or the Qur’an) trumps everything. Given that mindset, they demand respectfor their ridiculous superstitions, respect in the sense of honor and deference. In Islamic countries this is enforced in the form of harsh blasphemy laws that favor Islam and keep other religions in check. In the U.S. Christianity is privileged by virtue of its majority status and through prejudicial laws and court decisions. And it almost certainly will get worse.

I’m running out of allotted words for this column, so I’ll focus on Islam, which is depressingly in the news once again following the murderous rampage that took place in what has been called one of the most peaceful areas of Afghanistan. Why did enraged Muslim hordes overrun a United Nations compound and murder guards and workers? Apparently those infantile lunatics were frustrated because they couldn’t find Americans to murder, so they went after anyone associated with the hated U.S.

And why the sudden spike in hatred? They learned via their corrupt President Karzai that the infamous Reverend Terry Jones burned a copy of the Qur’an in Gainesville Florida (which, FYI, was my home for nine years). Islamic government and religious leaders are now calling for the arrest, conviction, and punishment of Jones, never mind that he committed no crime, that his act was protected free speech. And just as in the case of the infamous Danish cartoonists, I’m sure that many influential Western liberals will focus their condemnation on Jones while making excuses for the rampaging, murderous, Muslim religious idiots.

And what about those moderate American Muslims? Do they even exist?

Sam Harris gets to the nub of it when he asks if “moderate Muslims” will defend Jones’s right to burn a Qur’an. And make no mistake about it, that is the issue, an issue that has long been settled in the U.S. When I say settled, I mean this: Jones, or any U.S. citizen, has the right to burn a Qur’an. Or a bible. Or any other damn book they please. Jones is an asshole, but that’s beside the point – it’s a free-speech issue. Free speech, which is nothing less than the foundation of all our other freedoms.

Muslims could care less about free speech. As Harris points out, "A recent poll showed that thirty-six percent of British Muslims (ages 16-24) believe that a person should be killed for leaving the faith. Sixty-eight percent of British Muslims feel that their neighbors who insult Islam should be arrested and prosecuted, and seventy-eight percent think that the Danish cartoonists should have been brought to justice. And these are British Muslims."

That’s right, British – i.e., Western – Muslims! How do you think that poll would turn out in the U.S.? Just where are all those moderate Muslims we keep hearing about? What I’ve been hearing from Western Muslims sounds more like a public-relations conspiracy to downplay the prominent, hate-filled themes that appear throughout the Qur’an, themes that regularly become manifest in violence and abuses of fundamental human rights around the world. And it is a conspiracy that far too many Westerners are happy to promote.   

Just last week, under strong diplomatic opposition from the U.S. and other Western nations, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) agreed to suspend its twelve-year campaign in the United Nations that was aimed at criminalizing “defamation” of religion. For more than a decade the OIC had consistently won majority approval in both the U.N. Council on Human Rights and in the General Assembly for a series of resolutions condemning defamation of religion. While those resolutions did not have the force of law outside of Muslim countries, they were clearly intended as a step in the direction of a worldwide ban on speech critical of religion.

So for now, anyway, the U.N. has restored a measure of sanity in the form of an alternative resolution calling on member nations to protect the individual human rights of believers. But the whole episode makes me wonder why Islamic nations are even members of the U.N., considering that their actions in their own countries and elsewhere routinely fail to comply with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Let me wrap this one up with two quotes, the first from Sam Harris:

“There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for ‘racism’ and ‘Islamophobia.’ “

And this from H.L. Mencken:

"Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right."