Radical Atheist

Anti-blasphemy laws are coming, I have little doubt. And they won’t be used to only protect Muslims from offense. Defenders of religious belief seem to think they are exempt from satire and criticism. One day soon they’ll have international law on their side and freedom of speech (where protected) will have to step aside to permit imprisonment or death for those who dare disagree with the church.

Am I over-stating the situation? I don’t think so. Consider the following:

A German cartoon mocking the Catholic Church has sparked holy outrage among believers here who say it incites hatred against the Pope and the Catholic faith.

The caricature, published in the Good Friday edition of satire magazine Titanic, shows a priest apparently having oral sex with a crucifix of Jesus on the cross.
The crucifix cartoon is a barbed commentary on recent revelations that 250 people in Germany were sexual abused at Church-run schools in the past decades. The scandal has shaken the German Church. A recent poll said Germans’ trust in the Catholic Church had fallen to 17% from 29% in late January and approval ratings for Pope Benedict have dropped from 38% to 24%.

The German Press Council reported that some 100 formal complaints have been filed since the magazine came out, a level of protest not seen since 2006, when German newspaper Die Welt reprinted the infamous Danish Mohammed cartoons.

Two criminal complaints have also been filed against the cartoonist and the editors of Titanic, claiming the picture slanders their religion. The state prosecutors office in Frankfurt, where Titanic is based, said it would decide next week whether to begin an investigation against the magazine.

“We were shocked — shocked! — By the reaction to the cartoon,” Titanic editor-in-chief Leo Fischer told THR, his tongue firmly in cheek. “It shows a priest cleaning the crucifix. … I find it strange that Catholics immediately think of sex when they see it.”

I wasn’t surprised when Muslim nations attempted to outlaw blasphemy by establishing an international law exempting religious belief from criticism. After all, Islam isn’t a religion noted for its tolerance of opposing views. I confess I wasn’t expecting the next nation to enact anti-blasphemy laws to be Ireland. I fully expect Vatican City to soon pass its own anti-blasphemy law. Perhaps the Catholic Church will follow the Scientology method of eliminating criticism.

I submit there are two primary motivations behind the efforts of religious sects to have their beliefs protected by law against criticism. The first is the unprecedented exposure of the less than savory aspects and activities of these groups on the internet. Never before have critics had a vehicle like the internet with which to publish and document religion’s dark side. Even those trapped in militant theocracies can speak out in anonymity to the rest of the world. Since the defenders of the faith cannot deny the allegations they attempt to criminalize the exposures.

The second primary factor is the increasing irrelevance of religion among the world’s citizens. As more natural explanations are found for those phenomena once attributed to the gods, the less all-powerful the gods become. As we enter the 21st century, 1st century explanations are unsatisfactory and easily dismissed. In our modern world there is little reason to believe in the gods. They serve no useful purpose and offer scant comfort. As the masses cease to allow the god’s representatives here on Earth total freedom to behave as they wish, the priests and imams begin to panic. Their hold on the people who once blindly followed them and excused them for their excessive and immoral lifestyles is lessening. They are no longer able to keep their sheep in line with threats of godly displeasure and eternal damnation. So they do what, in the end, all dictators and despots do. They attempt to use the force of law to enforce their beliefs. Not satisfied to demonize their detractors, they try to criminalize them. Non-believers might not be impressed with being consigned to a non-existent hell, but they can’t deny the living hell of being imprisoned.

Religious belief does not always simply fade away without a whimper. Too many times in history we’ve seen that just before a fanatical regime disappears it fights the hardest to survive. It has no regard for the damage it inflicts on humanity in its efforts to remain powerful and relevant.

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I’m not a militant atheist, I’m certainly not a dogmatic atheist. But I am an atheist, or as I prefer, a disbeliever. I have no interest in offending the religious, it isn’t my intention to insult. But I am quite opinionated, well-read, a former believer, a spiritual non-believer. I will not back away from or disavow my opinions. If that causes someone offense, if they perceive insult, that’s their problem. They’re always free to ignore me.

I am a humanist (not an official Humanist). I share with all other humans certain traits, behaviors and aspirations. I understand the need and origin of religious belief. But I have no respect for any belief system that divides humans, any dogma that egotistically states that some humans (always humans like themselves) are better than everyone else, more deserving of an enjoyable life, more favored by some divine authority. All of us reading this are humans.

I’ve never been embarrassed to admit that I am a product of evolution, that I share the same origins as every other human on the planet. We should feel no pride or shame for what we are due to nature; we had no choice in our race, our sex, our hair natural hair color or lack of hair. What fairly brings us pride or shame is what we’ve made of ourselves with what nature gave us. We are judged by our attitudes, our beliefs, our statements, our behaviors. Those are what divide and unite us. It’s not our fault I’m white and you’re Black. We can’t help that you’re a woman and I’m a man. But once I’ve formed an opinion about Blacks and women I am fully responsible for those opinions. I don’t accept the excuse that “God made me this way”. You’re perception of god is not to blame for your racism, your smug superiority, your callous disregard for your fellow human. We choose our beliefs, they are our responsibility for better or worse. To own your attitudes and beliefs is to be fully human. To realize that natural handicaps come in all shapes and sizes, aren’t always obvious and say nothing of the human inside is to be fully human.

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Religious belief encourages shifting the blame, avoidance of responsibility. You can pray for the president to die and blame it all on god, or the Book, or the god’s evil twin/nemesis. Superstitious beliefs encourage putting the blame for our shortcomings on the alignment of the stars, our karma, crystal vibrations or breaking a mirror. It’s a common human tendency to think more highly of ourselves and when forced to acknowledge a failure to live up to our self-image, to find something to blame that on. In others words, to avoid responsibility. Religious belief offers lots of scapegoats. Sacrificial lambs, if you will. They pay for your sins so you don’t have to. How convenient, how irresponsible.

When you strip away the supernatural and superstitious you are left with the inescapable conclusion that each of us is responsible for ourselves. We ought to own both the positive and negative within us.

Gods don’t ask people to kill other people people kill people and blame it on their god. God doesn’t hate anything, people hate things and claim that their god shares their opinions.

It’s pathetic to use religion as an excuse for inhumane behavior. We who do not believe hold every person responsible for their own words, thoughts and actions.

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I despair when I encounter people like this in RL and on the net. They should be the punchlines of jokes, they ought to be caricatures. But they’re real, they really exist, really vote, really have kids and most likely an active sex life. THAT RIGHT THERE PROVES THERE’S NO JUSTICE IN THIS LIFE!!

I feel so sad for humanity knowing people who “think” like this are still around. These are the guys who fly planes into buildings, or would if they could and if Christian fanatics had as big a pair of balls as the Muslims. Instead they kill doctors and innocents, justifying it by blaming it on god, using an idea to excuse their inhumanity.

Beliefs like these stifle human progress, they retard our evolution. Religious belief is essentially retarded (note: I’m not calling believers retarded, not explicitly anyway). It can never advance in understanding past its origin 2000 years ago (or less depending on the religion). At the time Christianity was invented, for example, it proclaimed itself to be the ultimate truth, the zenith of knowledge. Implicit in that belief is the sad fact that nothing more could be added to the “wisdom” in the Bible. Access to further knowledge and understanding of our universe was closed. Everything you needed to know, would ever need to know, was in the Bible. Of course not just anyone could read and interpret the holy writings. We needed a priest class to act as intermediaries between just the words claimed to be god’s and humanity. Others claimed to be intermediaries between the god itself and humanity. Lay people, ministers and theologians have been at each other’s throats ever since.

Humanists and atheists don’t accept limitations on knowledge. We confess our ignorance of so much. But we, like everyone else, have a standard that has to be met when it comes to what we’ll accept as truth. Not absolute truth, conditional truth is as good as it gets. Our standards are high, our tolerance for bullshit low. If we’ve listened to what you have to say (and I don’t know an American who hasn’t heard what Christians have to say), and we’ve dismissed it as inadequate, don’t be obnoxious and try to imply there’s any aspect to your religion we haven’t already considered and discarded. It’s a done deal. Unlike Christians, we don’t want to answer 21st century questions with 2000 year old answers. Humans have developed tools and techniques unknown to ancient goat herders that allow us to answer questions we didn’t even have 5 years ago.

Yet humanity, by and large, prefers to embrace superstitions rather than face realities.

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At some point in the (near, I hope) future the psychiatric community is going to have to admit that religious belief is a potentially harmful delusion.

Religious belief has caused parents to turn against children and children against their parents. Differing religious beliefs have caused some of the most violent and deadly wars humanity has suffered. Religious belief has produced as much or more damage to humanity as it has good deeds.

Too often we try to soft peddle our attitude toward religious belief, we don’t want to offend. We’ve had too many people blaming their religious beliefs for their inhumanity recently. It’s unacceptable. We shouldn’t accept religious belief as an excuse for inhumane acts.

The church can judge its own by its own standards, I don’t care. But its affect on people is a contributing factor of the crime, not an excuse for it.

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All across the world wide web are comments from theists of every stripe denouncing science as an attempt by the ungodly to disprove their god or gods. In their never-quenched thirst to be seen as persecuted victims of a world-gone-wild (without taking any responsibility for it, even though they brag about the universality of their beliefs), they try to convince the uncritical and uncertain that science is determined to prove gods do not exist. They make it sound like a holy quest, though we know only believers can enjoy those. Religious believers refuse to acknowledge that the best evidence against the possible existence of any particular god is the gross lack of any evidence for one. We have yet to discover any credible, physical evidence that can only be explained by the existence of a certain god and that god’s intervention in our natural world. Science isn’t trying to disprove god, science simply hasn’t found any evidence that irrefutably proves there is one.

Even if we could somehow learn to a 99% certainty that the universe began this way or that, that knowledge will not kill off the idea of god.

Science will never make an absolute declaration that it knows how the universe came into being. Definitive, absolute proof doesn’t exist. Science is not religion. It can only draw tentative conclusions from what evidence we can collect. Scientific conclusions are only as valid as the data. As we come across more information, science has to adjust its conclusions. Religions pretend to know absolute truths, yet they require us to accept these truths on faith.
If science were to state that all the evidence leads us to believe that the universe started in this or that manner, there will always be room to squeeze in religious belief. We’ve already seen in history how religions adapt to current reality in an effort to stay relevant and retain their power over people. In all probability science can’t and won’t put an end to superstitious belief. With our complex brains otherwise intelligent people believe in luck and fate. Beliefs can exist beside knowledge without being eradicated by that knowledge. No matter how smart we become about reality, superstition will survive. There are many theories as to why humans develop and believe in superstitions, but history leads me to accept that every human has them. Religious belief will no doubt change subtlety, as it has before, to accommodate secular knowledge, but it will unfortunately be with us for a long time yet. It is, after all, just another superstitious belief.

Already there are Christian groups that have managed to incorporate scientific conclusions into their dogma. They accept the Big Bang as the best explanation for the beginning of the universe that can currently be drawn from available evidence and still credit their god with having set it all in motion. They give reverence to the Bible, but as an allegorical work rather than literal truth. Scientology is another example of a religion that has incorporated some science into their otherwise wildly fantastical belief system.

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I keep seeing reports from researchers in neuroscience that suggest we humans might be “hard-wired” for belief in gods. Recently another such report raised interest on the internet.

A belief in God is deeply embedded in the human brain, which is programmed for religious experiences, according to a United States study.

Scientists searching for the neural “God spot”, which is supposed to control religious belief, believe several areas of the brain form the biological foundations of religious belief.

The researchers said their findings supported the idea that the brain had evolved to be sensitive to any form of belief that improved the chances of survival, which could explain why a belief in God and the supernatural became so widespread in human evolutionary history.

“Religious belief and behaviour are a hallmark of human life, with no accepted animal equivalent, and found in all cultures,” said Professor Jordan Grafman, from the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, near Washington.

“Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks and they support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary-adaptive cognitive functions.”

Scientists are divided on whether religious belief has a biological basis.Some evolutionary theorists have suggested that Darwinian natural selection may have put a premium on individuals if they were able to use religious belief to survive hardships that may have overwhelmed those with no religious convictions.

Others have suggested that religious belief is a side effect of a wider trait in the human brain to search for coherent beliefs about the outside world. Religion and belief in God, they argue, are just a manifestation of this intrinsic, biological phenomenon that makes the human brain so intelligent and adaptable. (Source-NZHerald)

I’m with the latter group, those who are willing to accept that we might be “hard-wired” for wonder and the desire to find explanations, but considering the plethora of gods worshiped throughout human history I see no reason to suppose nature imbues us with religious belief. When our attempts to understand nature and reality are thwarted by a lack of technology or an inability to comprehend natural processes, humans are quick to suppose any number of superstitious and supernatural explanations that try to account for our lack of concrete knowledge.

Science may as well search for the part of our brain that makes humans so unsatisfied with relative answers. Our desire to find absolute answers to life’s questions is as much a cause for imagining gods as any other. The belief in gods doesn’t answer any of our current answers about the origin of the universe or life on Earth, nor does it provide guidance for many of the modern issues facing society. All it does is act as a salve, a balm for the unknown. It’s a band-aid that covers over the gaps in our understanding and does nothing to actually heal those gaps.

The predisposition that gods exist lead researchers to conclude we are “hard-wired” for supernatural belief. Looking at the evidence without that precondition in place allows us to see this human characteristic in more general terms which I consider closer to reality. If we are “hard-wired” as they suggest, it’s a propensity for questioning and wonder. That propensity can be beneficial when it motivates us to study nature and reality and draw conclusions from the evidence. It can be abused when it’s perverted into accepting the unproven and untestable as a reasonable answer to our questions about the universe and life.

Are we “hard-wired” for god? No, I see no research that substantiates that presumption. Are we coded by evolution and genetics to question and wonder about what lies beyond our current body of knowledge? I see no reason to suppose we aren’t. The gods is an inadequate answer to the questions we have regarding reality and the physical universe, answers we may indeed be “programmed” by nature and evolution to seek.

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